It was always loud in the house of Bear and Caesar. It took a couple of days for Heinrich to get used to it. At night the women danced, sang, giggled, played, and the men wrestled with them and drank. Men came to the door and knocked and hollered—they always seemed happy to see Caesar and a little afraid of Bear, who spent most of his time at the front door, talking quietly and smoking.
Heinrich couldn’t sleep for the nightmares about the French Man and for Sunday kicking him in her sleep, so he wandered the house and watched and listened. Everyone seemed to want to feed him as soon as they saw him. He’d never eaten so well in his life. The women, some of them naked all night long and some of them clad in tiny underpants and corsets, patted his head and kissed him and brought him bags of sweets. His first year there, Heinrich hoarded some of what he received under the bed and in his cupboard in case he got no more, in case someday Bear took him by the collar and put him out on the street as quickly as he had welcomed him in. Heinrich knew never to get comfortable.
During the day while all the women were asleep, the men workers came. They were skinny and dry and dark-eyed creatures, sorting cash into bags, organizing it into packages and tying it with string, talking, and swearing. These men ignored Heinrich. He followed Bear around and tried to make sense of the conversations he heard. He could never predict when the Silence would come over Bear. One minute he would be talking softly, gently, slowly, and then Caesar would give him a look and he would grab someone by the neck and drag them out of the house. Heinrich watched the violence with fascination. Bear’s face was calm, his lips parted, his eyes downcast, as his hands crunched bones and spattered blood up onto his cheeks.
Some nights Bear took Heinrich down the garden path and into the greenhouse, where they sat on wooden stools at the huge wooden table and worked. They potted tiny seedlings for hours together, saying nothing, pinching the little white lives into the rich black soil and lining them up in trays. Sometimes Bear talked and Heinrich listened. The big man got out his heavy, glossy books and pointed out plants he was growing. Heinrich learned their Latin names and when he got them wrong Bear made him say them over and over. Sometimes they sat together and read other books—mechanical manuals and sports magazines and books of poetry. They dived into books about Greek mythology in the summer and Heinrich tried to follow their strange, winding tales, to remember names and gods of things.
Their most important work was harvesting the plants. Some of it was marijuana, which was fairly easy to dry, chop, and package and could be done with careless hands. But Bear’s special plants, the plants no one but him was allowed to touch, took a lot of training to handle correctly. All of them were deadly. They harvested cassava root for concentrated cyanide, Abrusprecatorius for abrin poison, Ageratinaaltissima for milk poison.
Heinrich didn’t know what Bear did with the hundreds of tiny bottles of deadly potions but he loved the exacting art of dissecting the root bulbs, milking the seeds, boiling Cerberaodollam down into a dry powder and mixing it into spices. In the early days, when Heinrich’s hand and wrist were still strained from the killing of the French Man, the boy merely watched and marveled at how such huge coarse fingers could reap such meticulous work. As the weeks passed, Bear began to give him assignments. Later he often left his apprentice alone to work while he smoked and chatted in the garden.
The only thing Heinrich didn’t like about the house of Caesar and Bear was the girl named Sunday, who was always within arm’s reach. She would wander in the garden behind the house, pouting and sighing and yelling abuse at them. But Bear never gave in, never let her so much as watch their business in the greenhouse. He said that a woman with Sunday’s kind of temper let loose with the means to kill could bring the very world to its knees.
Heinrich didn’t know what that meant, nor did he really consider Sunday a woman, but he followed Bear’s rules and didn’t tell Sunday anything about their lessons, even the ones that weren’t about the plants. At night when he tried to sleep, curled at the very edge of the thin mattress they shared, she was constantly whispering, half teasing him and half pleading for some crumb of information on Bear and what he’d talked about that night. Heinrich didn’t like Sunday, but sometimes he felt sorry for her. Most nights she cried in her sleep, called out for her mother, and he did his best to ignore it.
Whenever Bear and Heinrich would go on a “trip,” Sunday would want to come along. Today was no different. Bear was there, standing over the bed the two children shared before the sun had risen, as he had done dozens of times before, his enormous frame outlined in the pale silver of the dawn waking outside the windows. Heinrich jolted awake. Sunday sat up beside him and rubbed her eyes.
“Five minutes,” Bear said, cocking his head. Heinrich rolled out of bed as the big man disappeared.
“Tell him to take me,” Sunday said.
“No.”
“I’m coming.” She grabbed her dress, a yellow and white floral frock that was far too big for her, and wriggled into it. Heinrich tugged on his shirt. “I’ll be ready in just five seconds.”
“No,” Heinrich repeated. “It’s too scary for you. You’re only a girl.”
“I’m ten times braver than you are.”
“Forget about it.”
“I’m coming.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Will you guys shut the hell up?” someone yelled from the shadows. Groans and the creaking of bedsprings. Sunday slapped his arm. It stung.
“Yeah, Heinrich. Shut up.”
Bear passed the doorway, eclipsing it for an instant. Heinrich ran after him. Sunday weaved her hand with his, squeezed his fingers.
“Come on,” she begged.
“Sunday, get back to bed before I clobber you,” Bear grunted.
They walked out to the car. The unmown grass at the front of the house was wet with dew. The moon hung, a white eye, over the terrace rooftops of Darlinghurst. The car door opening was like a gunshot in the crisp silence.
The man and the boy drove off, leaving the girl standing on the lawn. Bear lit a cigarette, steering with his knees.
“Women,” he said.
They drove to a house in Surry Hills. It was a small brick hovel set back from the street and hidden at the front by unflowering bottle brushes and weeds as tall as Heinrich’s shoulders.
“Got your whomping stick?” Bear asked. Heinrich lifted the short wooden club Bear had made him from the lower half of a piano leg and waved it in the air. The man took a step back and kicked in the door.
Bear didn’t usually carry a gun. He said they made him nervous. When they entered the little house the Bear Man simply stood in the doorway to the living room with his hands by his side and hollered. A woman began screaming, gripping her hair. Her robe had fallen open and her breasts oozed out like deflated balloons. Heinrich felt his heart pumping in his neck.
“Samuel Pritchard!” Bear yelled.
“Oh Jesus, Bear, please. I was coming round today,” said a wide-eyed, skinny man in the corner of the room. The man reminded Heinrich of a frilled-neck lizard. His shoulders were all bone and skin, his jaw wide and flat and flapping with desperation.
“Today is here,” Bear said. “I want Caesar’s money.”
“I was going to come today and talk to Caesar, Bear, I swear to God . . .’
“Caesar’s done talking. Pay me.”
“I swear to God!”
“Pay . . . me . . .’
“Bear, please!”
Bear looked down at Heinrich. The boy had been waiting for the look. He took his whomping stick to the nearest window and lifted it high over his shoulder. The window exploded in a shower of glass. The woman screamed again and another man got to his feet.
“Hey! This is my house!”
“Pay me, Samuel,” Bear said.
“I can’t pay today. Bear, please listen to me?”
Bear nodded to the boy again. He went to another window and obliterated it. The glorious, glittery, smashy noises awakened something in the boy. He felt his limbs twitching. It was hard to breathe. He giggled a little, felt rage burning behind his eyes.
“Pay me,” Bear said.
“Now, wait just a minute. He doesn’t own this place. Get him out of here.”
“Help!” the woman screamed. “Help!”
“I can’t . . . I don’t have . . .”
Bear nodded at the boy. He went to a wall hutch that was littered with dirty plates, cups, mugs. Heinrich smashed everything, whomping and whomping, glass and porcelain chips spraying on his shoulders and neck and hair. Fragments of china scattered at his feet. Shelves came down with a crash. He laughed, and the sound was unfamiliar to him. It was a guttural sound, like a cough.
“You’re next, Sam,” Bear said.
“I don’t have anything to give you, Bear. I don’t have anything!”
“One last chance.”
“Please, just . . .”
Bear nodded at the boy and the Silence came over him. It was a warm and soft enveloping silence, like a hug—although it had been years since anyone had hugged the boy. The boy floated in it, his head lolling and eyes rolling, drifting on a summery wind. He was breathing in and out, and the whomping stick was rising and falling, and that was all he knew. The thing that broke the Silence was Bear’s hand gathering up a handful of his shirt back and dragging him into the present.
The air was cold in his lungs, and he was heading toward the door of the house, and dozens of people were staring at him from the couch, the walls, the stairs, the street outside.
“Did I do good, Bear?” the boy gasped. The whomping stick was wet with blood.
“Maybe too good, little soldier,” Bear said. “Man can’t pay us if he’s dead.”
They went to the car, got in, and the big man tore away from the curb.
“Boy,” he said after a time. Heinrich lay the whomping stick on his thighs and looked up at the big man beside him. “Boy, I want to ask you a question. And it’s important, okay? You’re not in trouble, I just, I want to know. You know?”
“Sure, Bear.”
“Before that night when I found you,” Bear said, looking at the windscreen. “That night when the French Man came. Did you . . . ? Have you ever killed anyone before?”
Heinrich settled in his seat, looked at the dashboard.
He could remember some things, but not all. The Night of Fire and Screaming flashed around him, yellow and white, and he saw again the faces of the man and the woman in the windows. He remembered tears on his face—could feel them with the fingers of one hand. In the other hand he felt a small paper box, shook it inside the dream and felt the matchsticks rattle.
Bear watched the boy as he sat dreaming.
“I was only playing,” the boy said.
I
t was sunset before Eden got to the road. Or Eadie, as she would now be known. Only the gold of a forgotten day lit the horizon, but the dirt beneath her feet was still warm. As she trudged along, huge brown lizards slid away warily from the sound of her into the long grass. The pack on her back had been messily stuffed with clothes and felt lopsided, and high into the rib bones in her back a drink bottle or deodorant can protruded, rubbing up and down. She’d walked for five kilometers in the setting sun and a healthy stink was rising from her, which was good. It would all add to the story of the lonely woman feeling lost.
Frank had stopped, stared, and then laughed when he saw her undercover getup that morning. The team had shopped at the local thrift shop, buying flannel shirts and cotton tank tops, faded jeans, and cargo pants, and some of the female staff had gone for a jog in the station gym wearing the collection to produce a bag of unwashed, scrappy clothes. A makeup artist had been hired to bleach her long black hair badly, leaving a good four or five centimeters of regrowth, and she’d dried the ends until they frayed and split. Her eyelashes were taken down a couple of shades to dull down Eden’s dark, exotic look, her eyebrows were dyed, her long nails were clipped, and she was encouraged to chew a couple so they wouldn’t look so deliberate.
Eden didn’t mind this treatment. She was thinking about the kind of person Eadie Lea would be. She stood in her flip-flops and shorts and her moth-eaten tank top and let them admire their work while her mind wandered. Finally, they swapped her BlackBerry for an old scratched-up Nokia, gave her a used wallet with her new identity cards and receipts and coffee vouchers, bought her a packet of Winnie Blues and a lighter. They told her she had been born again.
When she was about to leave, Captain James asked if she was going to give Frank a good-bye hug. It would be a while before she would see him again. The team, nervous and fearful around her at the best of times, paused with measured awkwardness. Frank didn’t look overly enthused, either. When she wrapped an arm around his neck he squeezed her close, and laughed a little in her ear.
“We’ll be watching,” he said.
She supposed Frank was watching now as she walked, but she couldn’t know that for certain. Over the coming week, there would be no way of telling when he was watching and when he wasn’t—there would be no earpieces, no radio or phone contact, no secret meetings the way there were in the movies. Eden was equipped with five different cameras. She wore one as a short pendant around her neck, a pinhole device disguised in a patterned teardrop made from silver. The other four—hidden in a tin drink bottle, in a deodorant can, a book, a pair of sunglasses—were to be set up somewhere in her new life. On Monday morning she’d get the train back into the city under the pretense of attending to some business and change all the batteries. Until then, she was on her own. She wouldn’t know if she was doing well, if she’d uncovered something connected to the missing girls, if she was heading down the wrong road. She’d only know when she met the team on Monday.
Eden walked, her head down. There was a lot of pressure on her.
She reached the gates of Jackie Rye’s farm just as the skin on the sides of her feet gave up and white and pink blisters emerged. Eden hadn’t owned any flip-flops in her other life. She bent down, took the flip-flops off, and hooked them on her fingers, walking carefully on the rocky clay.
Almost as soon as she breached the rickety wooden boundary three huge mixed-breed dogs bounded toward her, emerging on the horizon as wavering shapes hovering above the land with their speed. They surrounded her, a rabble of howling, growling mongrels, dancing in the dirt. She walked on. At the crest of a soft hill she came into the view of a group of men standing by an open-bed SUV. Big men. They watched, emotionless, as she approached, like hairy mannequins hung with filthy rags. They were near a shed with a leaning bar that was lined with brown beer bottles.
Eadie stopped.
“Jackie here?”
One of the men flicked his head toward a group of caravans clustered at the bottom of the hill. Eadie walked on. The men’s eyes followed her.
Lamps were lit and moths and mosquitoes were gathering in the gloomy light. When she reached the first caravan she listened but there was no sound. Eadie heard laughter from the next van. She stood outside it for a minute or so and tried to think about the sort of things normal people said and did, the way they looked at each other and the way they moved. Because that was what frightened her most in the end—constructing Eadie Lea as a believable human first and the kind of person who would fit in around Jackie and his friends. She knew she came off a little strange in real life, because she was different, because her true nature, the killer, the monster, was rarely far from the surface.
Eadie stood in the dark outside Jackie Rye’s caravan and listened to
The Simpsons
playing on a television inside, people laughing and talking, and forks scraping on cheap china plates. She breathed, then reached forward, knocked, and pulled open the screen door.
The room was full of smoke. That was the first thing that hit her—lots of people wedged into the half-dark smoking cigarettes, which created a coiling ceiling blanket in hues of royal blue and sunflower yellow lit by the television in the corner. Her eyes wandered over two creatures sharing a tiny foam and crushed-velvet couch by the kitchen counter, one lying in the lap of the other, hairy and thin and pig-eyed in a way that left them sexless to the casual observer. Eadie noticed other sets of eyes in the dark, bodies stretched on the floor in the space between the couch and the wall, crammed in and around a plastic deck chair in a corner, lying on the bunk bed in the tiny annex bedroom. The last pair of eyes she found belonged to Jackie Rye, who was sitting in a green velvet recliner by the sink, looking back at her through the smoke he exhaled.
Jackie gave Eadie the impression of an emaciated king, the way he was lounging with one leg up over the arm of the chair and the other flopped on the floor, leaving his tiny worn shorts draping open, the darkness in the thigh holes blessedly impenetrable. Everything about him suggested dark hair and wet skin, spent bodily needs and unwashed crevices. His saggy upper lip stretched as she made eye contact and he lifted and adjusted a sweat-stained cap on his head.
“What’s this? A visitor?”
“Jackie?”
“Who’s asking?”
“I’m Eadie.” Eadie shifted her weight from one foot to the other, scratched her scalp. “Some guys sent me down here looking for you?”
“You found me,” Jackie said. “You must be after a bed.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, baby, this ain’t no fucking hotel.”
Everyone in the room laughed. The impression was alarming. Nine or ten sets of almost identical hacking laughter, forced laughter, going off like two-stroke motors all around her. Eadie held her ground. The laughter drained away and Jackie began again, relishing, it seemed, every minute chuckle. Eadie got the impression that people around here laughed at Jackie’s jokes a lot.
“All right, everybody get out.”
They left, one by one, uncurling themselves, rolling, sliding, extracting limbs that had been wedged between milk crates, out from under shelves, from between the limbs of others. Eadie stood aside and watched them go. On their way out, one of the sexless twins stopped and stared and licked his or her teeth as he or she looked over Eadie’s backpack, even reaching out once and grabbing the bag and shaking it to hear if it rattled. They all smelled. Soap and water couldn’t combat the endless stink of their lives—sheets that never saw a washing machine, animals that left their smells on couches and pillows, sex that was had haphazardly up against things, the reek ignored, blended in, absorbed. Eadie thought she was alone with Jackie until a tiny voice called from the dark beside his recliner and she saw the shape of a young girl sitting there.
“You’re pretty, aye,” the girl said. Eadie followed the words with the exact same thought about the girl, so for a moment she felt as though her thoughts had been laid bare. The girl was swimming somewhere in that glorious period between puberty and late teens, everything about her milky and soft, with an impish pointy nose that she probably hated and elf ears that curved forward a little too much, the big round eyes of a newborn rabbit. She was wearing what looked like a cotton shift in royal blue, braless and pantyless, flushed from the heat.
“Thanks.” Eadie cleared her throat.
“Siddown,” Jackie said. Eadie shifted some sheets and pillows aside and sat on the couch where the twins had been. It was damp. “How’d you hear about this place?”
“I been staying with some girls I know in Wauchope. I was in Cronulla before that with my husband. I’m just trying to get away for a bit, maybe get some money behind me before going up north. I’m kind of... laying low, you know?”
“Laying low? From him?”
“Yeah.”
“Punched on, were ya?”
“Little bit.”
“Got any sprogs?”
“Nup.”
“Lucky.”
“Yeah.”
Jackie sucked in that flappy lip and chewed it, let his eyes wander until they settled on her breasts. Eadie scratched her upper arm, covering them, then let her arm fall.
“Well, look, it’s pretty crowded round here right now.”
“Aww please, Jackie, let her stay,” the girl whined. The small man reached out and shoved her head the way a man might shove away a dog.
“No one fucken asked you.”
“I’m a hard worker. I’ve done some track work in the city. I’m best with horses but I can do other things. I learn fast.”
“Most of the girls here don’t work that way,” Jackie said.
Eadie could feel Frank watching, his presence in the room like a heat hanging about her shoulders and the back of her neck. She reached up and fondled the pendant camera, remembered what it was, and dropped it.
“My girlfriends told me sometimes you make an exception.”
“Hey,” Jackie laughed, throwing open his hands. “Doesn’t bother me how you make your living. But you decide you’re gonna work for me and then you start sharing that pussy around, you understand those boys who employ you gotta pay me for the labor I’m losing. You either work for me on whatever I put you to, whether it’s horses or whatever I got going, or you work for them boys and they pay me for the privilege. Most likely, you won’t get a day into straight work before one of these boys puts you in his bed. But I find out you’re freelancing that tight round ass and I’m not getting what’s owed and I’ll have you out on it before you can spit.”
“I’m good for my word.”
“Word’s as good as shit round here.”
The girl leaped from where she was crouched, onto the couch beside Eadie. She was all arms and hands and cold fingers, hugging and molesting Eadie’s hair and neck in a flurry of affection. Eadie felt sick.
“Oh, I can’t wait for us to be friends,” the girl said, gathering Eadie’s ponytail and curling it around her fingers. “Jackie, baby, can she live here with us?”
“No. I got enough mess here as it is. Take her to the empty van near Pea’s, and tell Pea to take her out in the morning. And don’t you fucken come back ’til my show’s over. Sick of your noise.”
Eadie tried to pick up her bag but the girl had it.
The Biggest Loser
’s opening credits had begun and Jackie turned up the volume until it was painful. It was a relief to be out in the night, despite the heat, which met Eadie’s face like a hot breath.
“I’m Skylar,” the girl said, letting her hand trail down Eadie’s arm and into her hand. “I’ll show you everything.”