The Library of Forgotten Books (5 page)

Faulkner needs to find Laurence, who has gone underground since the police busted his opium den. Laurence will have a little hole, hidden on the other side of Chinatown, where the alleyways are even narrower, where there aren’t even posters on the wall. But Faulkner doesn’t know where it is. To find him, he’ll have to go to Shorty Cheng’s shop. Shorty will know.

Faulkner moves through a labyrinth of streets until he comes to the opulent façade of a shop filled with paraphernalia. Along the walls of the shop are shelves packed with mortar and pestles, kites and tea-sets with intricately carved patterns. Smoke roils out of a golden incense bowl, ever so slowly before hovering in a soft haze.

At the back of the shop stands a small and squat Asian man, Shorty Cheng. Faulkner pulls open the door and steps inside.

“What do you want, Faulkner?” asks the man, his moustache ridiculously curled, a red hat on his head. He smokes a cigarette and gently taps it against an ashtray.

“I need to know where Laurence is, Shorty.” Faulkner peruses the shop, picking up a fierce looking dragon hand-puppet and pointing it at the man.

“What, Lucy never told you?”

“You know she kicked me out.”

Shorty takes a drag on his cigarette. Faulkner has known him since before the war. Even then Shorty was filled with crazed business schemes: a rickshaw company, lizard-skin coat venture.

Faulkner mouths the puppet at Shorty, and says in a gruff accent, “She would have taken him back you know, she always took him back.”

“I never knew what she saw in you,” said Shorty.

Faulkner puts down the puppet and picks up a copy of Mao’s little red book, turning it over in his hands. He opens it and begins to read. “‘A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous...’ Since when have you been selling these?”

“There’s plenty of wisdom in Mao, you know. Listen to this.” Shorty reaches over and takes the book in his hand. “‘Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution.’ Who are your real friends Faulkner? Huh? You’ve never known, really, have you?”

“Christ, that shit could mean anything. Anyway, I wouldn’t trust Mao as far as I could throw him. He’s a dictator in waiting.”

“Well, it sells,” says Shorty and laughs. “Especially since they’re talking about the new anti-sedition bill—they’re threatening to round people up, send them to camps. People are coming in to read that shit hand over fist.”

“You sure found your calling Shorty. Where’s Laurence? I know you still supply him with the Dust.”

“This is just for old time’s sake, Faulkner. And because, despite everything, I’m your friend—don’t ask me why.” Shorty puts his cigarette in the ashtray and starts writing down an address. Faulkner picks up the ashtray and the filter-less cigarettes that slide around as he examines it.

“Beautiful piece of work this,” says Faulkner before putting it down, taking the address and saying, “I’ll be seeing you Shorty.”

As Faulkner leaves, Shorty yells out after him, “Remember Faulkner, unite with your real friends!” A moment later he turns and nods towards the darkened archway at the back of the shop. A thick-set man steps out and Shorty gestures after Faulkner with a quick turn of the head. In the background smoke curls from the incense bowl like eddies in a river, now fast, now slow, here overlapping on itself, there elongating, finally merging with the hovering haze.

Faulkner slips through Chinatown again. He tries to avoid a group of Asian men loitering around the crossroads, swinging clubs in their hands or standing cross-armed and menacing.

“Hey you,” one calls.

“Just leave me out of it,” says Faulkner. “It’s not my war.”

“It’s gonna be,” says another, but they let him pass.

Behind him, the short, thick-set man is stopped by the group. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, his movements jittery and quick. He whispers something to the gang and they let him pass also.

Faulkner continues on, down another alleyway, and the man follows him at a distance. Faulkner stops for a moment, mid-stride, as if listening. He knows you never see the tail first. No. You feel them: a presence, hovering at the edge of your mind. A shadow. It is a world of shadows.

He slips into an opening in the crumbling wall. The staircase is dank, once-cream paint peeling from the walls, damp rising from the stone stairs. Faulkner stops and lights a cigarette and his hat casts darkness across his face. He takes some time to think. He feels like a rat in a maze, with the cheese lying on a slab back at the morgue. But before he can follow the smell, he has to see Lucy’s father. He doesn’t want to do it but, hey, you do these things for the ones you love, right? Wrong, he thinks. You do it for yourself.

Faulkner takes another deep drag on his cigarette and starts up the stairs again. He knocks on a door, waits as footsteps approach. The door opens and Laurence looks blankly at him and then runs his hands through his wispy colourless hair.

“Still chasing the dragon, huh?” says Faulkner.

“Goddamn Faulkner, I was having such nice dreams.”

“I remember those.”

Laurence shuffles ahead of Faulkner, his long red and gold robe gently shifting around him, into a run-down old apartment. A Chinese lantern glows in the corner, red curtains cut the room in half; on a coffee table stand a couple of bottles of red powder, a bowl with red smudges beside them. The room has exactly the same feel as the opium den, but underneath there’s a sense of decay. The curtains don’t quite cover the peeling paint on the walls. The lantern looks battered and worn.

“Nice place,” says Faulkner, ashing his cigarette into a glass.

“All I got left after the cops busted me.”

“I know.”

“How’s Lucy?”

Faulkner tries to think of the words, but nothing will come to him.

“She kick you out finally?” Laurence walks to the cabinet, pours himself a drink.

“Jesus, Laurence. Just let me speak will you?”

“Testy. Spit it out then.”

“She’s dead,” Faulkner says and he reaches into his coat, looking for something. “Murdered.”

Laurence looks at Faulkner as if he doesn’t understand, then nods his head and says, “At her apartment?” When Faulkner remains silent, Laurence nods again, slowly, like a horse searching the ground for grass. He turns back to the cabinet, takes another glass and fills it. “Looks like you could do with one of these.” He turns back and freezes.

Faulkner has a gun on him.

“Easy, tiger,” says Laurence.

“It had to be about you, didn’t it? I mean, no one sells dream-dust, gets caught, and stays out of jail. There’s got to be a reason, doesn’t there, Laurence? There are shadows behind all of us.”

“I guess you don’t want your drink then?”

“She was your daughter and you haven’t even broken a sweat.”

“Listen, I gotta get out of here. I gotta get across the bay, outta Melbourne.”

“What do they want from you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know.”

Faulkner steps forward and, with a quick crack, hits Laurence on the forehead with the butt of his gun. Laurence drops to his knees, places his hand on his forehead, but blood still flows in rivulets between his fingers.

Faulkner places the gun against Laurence’s head. “Now she’s gone, I ain’t got nothin’ to lose.”

“I worked for the secret service. The secret service.”

“That’s why you weren’t sent to jail, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“So someone wants you dead from the old days.”

“I swear, I don’t know who.”

“What were you working on?”

“The Chinese. We knew Mao was gonna take power, so we were working on plans to stop them.”

“Plans for the war.”

“Yeah.”

“So now Allied troops have landed across southern China, and the communists think you got information on the Allied strategy. So they’re coming for you. How did they know you were working for the secret service? Let me guess, you ran an opium den, and when you got busted, you didn’t go to jail—right?”

“Right.”

“So where do I find them?”

“Who?”

“The rats who killed Lucy. The communists.”

“Dunno. Everywhere.”

Faulkner turns and takes one of the bottles of powder from the table.

“I’m takin’ this dream-powder. Used my last tonight on some cop,” says Faulkner. “Get back to those nice dreams.”

Laurence calls back to him: “She was my girl, too, you know.”

Faulkner descends the stairs, stops halfway, lights a cigarette. The smoke drifts ever so slowly up the stairwell as he examines the bottle. Dream-dust. He wants to use it. He has always loved the stuff. But since Lucy’s death, it has become as necessary as water to him. Dream-dust—the most valuable of the opiates. Dream-dust—a snort of it and it projects you back into the world of memory so that you are actually
there
, so that you can see and hear and feel and smell the very moments of the past, as clearly as the experience itself. Faulkner wants to immerse himself into that world of memory, to
relive
. But he can’t, because there is still a rat to catch, work to do. And work like this, well, it has to be done at night, when the slop in the gutter looks like silver and you don’t notice the stains on your clothes.

In 1947, after the discussion with Victor Jackson in the Opium Den, Faulkner stepped out of the grotto, back into the main room with its billowing roof and Chinese lanterns. Lucy was waiting for him.

“Shall I show you the door?” she said.

“I think I’ve seen it.”

“Well, perhaps you’d prefer the rubbish chute.”

“Hey, my suit isn’t
that
cheap, you know.”

“We could take it off before we sent you down.”

“I know you’d like nothing more than to take my suit off, but maybe we should get to know each other first.”

“Really honey, I wouldn’t think that’d take too long. I mean, you seem a simple man—I can see which buttons to press from here—all four of them.”

“You don’t fool me with this hard-hearted front.”

“Neither do you.”

“What’s your real name?”

“Lucy. What’s yours?”

“That’s a dangerous thing to just give out.”

From the grotto came a thump and the two of them turned towards it. From behind the curtain came muffled voices, full of tension and strain.

Faulkner furrowed his brow and stepped back towards the grotto.

Victor Jackson’s voice now became audible. “There’s only one way out of this for you, old man, and that’s when Mao is finished. Got it? Until then you’re working for us.”

Laurence burst from behind the curtains and hurried past Faulkner and Lucy.

“You right?” said Faulkner, but Laurence was already through the double-doors. Faulkner turned to Lucy and stepped close, whispering in her ear, “Maybe we could slip out somewhere quieter. Then you’ll be able to hear my name.”

They danced to jazz in one of those smoky clubs with the big windows that overlooked the alleyways. It was one of those moments when Faulkner looked at someone and saw within her a glimpse of himself. As they carved their way across the wooden floor in careful steps, the band playing
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
, Faulkner felt for the first time that perhaps there was a future beyond the late-night bars, and the hard grey mornings when his head pounded and his mouth was dry.

Along the alleyway, under Laurence’s run-down apartment, the thickset man waits in a doorway for Faulkner to reappear. His eyes, set slightly too close together, dart around; he licks his dry lips; he shifts from one foot to the other.

Faulkner passes by, oblivious to him, and heads down the street, turns a corner.

The man follows, his thick legs swaying. He turns the corner, but the street is empty. Faulkner is gone. The man, his head darting to and fro, rushes down the street. But when he reaches the end, he comes to a group of people celebrating some kind of festival.

A gigantic golden Buddha sits impassively as people offer it incense. Others pray before a bell, which they each ring with a small hammer. In the background, music rises and falls in strange modal scales.

The man looks left, right, runs past the Buddha to the front of a temple where two stone Chinese dragons sit impassively, the size of lions; one of them has its jaws open, tongue lolling ominously. He steps backwards as a child runs past him towards the temple. She stops by one of the dragons, gives it a pat and laughs before running up the stairs and into the temple.

The thickset man turns and runs along the street. He doesn’t notice the figure of Faulkner emerge from behind one of the lions, his face grim and set. Faulkner slips over to the side of the street and follows the man.

Later, the thickset man sits in the first floor carriage of a gothic four-storey steam-train. He stares off into the distance, his nervousness gone, as it rattles across the industrial landscape of western Melbourne, where factories climb upon each other like mile-high anthills, lights and fires scattered across them like constellations.

Sitting directly above the man, on the fourth floor of the carriage, is Faulkner, looking grimly into the distance. Faulkner thinks of the years ahead of him, and the years behind. There’s not much to him. After the orphanage, odd jobs: the wharves, riding the rails into the centre where the inland sea shimmered under the brilliant red sun, a running-boy for the white-haired PI, Sammy Watson, who was worn down by the streets, and then Faulkner had decided to go it alone. Days of smoking, and observing infidelities, and taking photos, and whiskey in late night bars with Shorty Cheng, Lucky Macrae and Eliza Henderson with the horse-face that made her look constantly sad. And then Lucy: Lucy who is now dead.

What does he have? A murderer who knew her. A murderer prepared to act like an animal. Probably a communist who wanted to get to Laurence—to get information about the Allied strategy in China. The war has started, the Allies landed on the Chinese mainland. The communists know Laurence. He ran an Opium Den in Chinatown. They probably realise Laurence was pumping
them
for information. But Laurence has gone missing, absent without leave, and Lucy was their first port of call to track him down. But something doesn’t ring right. There is something itching at the back of Faulkner’s head, and it isn’t lice. No sir. Lucy already got rid of those.