“What on earth are you doing here?”
“Oh, I just turn up where I’m needed.”
The police outside the arcade shepherded Paul and Wedelkind through the crowd.
“You see that bloke behind the bar in the wine saloon?” Wedelkind said, pointing to a large fellow with gold teeth. “He’s the one who’ll hang for that girl’s death.”
“How the hell do you know that?” asked Paul.
“It’s my job to know these things.” He stopped outside a shopfront. “Oscar Kismet – Phrenologist” was painted in red letters on the door.
Wedelkind dangled some keys, fiddled with the lock, and led Paul into an office where he slung himself into an old chair and lit a cigarette. There were astrological charts on the wall, weird symbols from Eastern mysticism and some ornately illustrated tarot cards, one of which depicted the grim reaper as a skeleton concealed behind the mask of a smiling young woman.
Wedelkind noticed Paul’s eyes resting on the card.
“You show them death, let them think you can see death, and they’ll believe anything. It’s the oldest trick in the book. That’s how I know about poor Ross down there in the wine saloon. He’s a bit simple, really. He watched his mates mangled in the trenches. Now he sleeps in the same room as his brother and screams at night. Maybe even pisses himself and could have a touch of the syph as well. All those country brothels in France, you know. I told him he might do someone in if he couldn’t control his urges and sure enough the bloke has been true to my word. There are half-a-dozen whores here who’ll see him hang sure as the sun will rise.”
Paul stared in amazement at the aged impostor in front of him. For a moment it was all too fantastic to be real.
“And now you’re a phrenologist? What on earth is that?”
“It’s nothing really. An ambiguous kind of calling I’ll admit, a hangover from last century, though I’ve always had a bit of a talent with other people’s heads.” Wedelkind smiled mischievously. “Now, I suppose you’d like me to tell you your future, wouldn’t you?”
“No, not at all,” Paul said, aghast.
“Well, what else are you doing here?”
Paul looked stunned. Had the man really forgotten that he had almost single-handedly moulded Paul’s fate?
“Who are you?” Paul said.
“Who am I? Didn’t you read the door?”
“Kismet. Fate. What nonsense. I must be dreaming.”
“Dreaming? Oh, I like that.” Wedelkind looked thoughtful for a moment. “You know,” he said, pointing his smouldering cigarette at Paul, “I bet you could do a good job with poor old Ross down in the wine saloon. Was there ever a better subject for one of your horrible little plays? And think of the controversy. You’ll probably burn in hell for it, to use a dated metaphor, but your name will burn much brighter than that in the inflamed imagination of posterity.”
Paul was on the verge of wringing his neck or dragging him out into the arcade and unmasking him, but felt sufficiently light-headed that he let the moment pass and simply sat there breathing in the pungent, scented smoke of Wedelkind’s cigarette.
“You know,” Wedelkind continued, “these are the last days of the Eastern Arcade. We can all read the writing on the wall. Soon they’ll raze the place and turn it into some sterile department store or office block. A shame really. The last little bit of devilry will be gone. That will be a sad day, my friend. You, who have been such a part of it all, should appreciate that. There’ll be nothing left for the likes of you or me when places like this are gone. There’ll be horror, to be sure. But of a blander, less appealing variety. So make the most of it, that’s what I say. Make the most of it, Paul Walters. You come from a famous literary family, after all.”
He leant back in his chair, cigarette in hand, and pulled a book down from the shelf behind him. It was the English version of
Romanze zur Nacht.
Wedelkind opened a marked page and read, “‘In the Eastern Arcade I met a man who said that I would sell myself, or reap profit from the dead.’You see,” he added, “this is such a wonderful book because everything is in it. Everything is written. What ever did become of my young friend Klessmann? Never mind.” He closed the book and gestured to the door. “Good day then, Mr Walters. May Kismet smile on you.”
Paul stood up, stunned. When he re-entered the arcade the light had turned a murky green. The crowd was still gathered at the Little Collins Street end, but was thinning. Amongst the women emerging from Gun Alley, where the floral tribute to the dead girl now covered the ground, he noticed his own mother, looking pale and tired in the steady movement of pedestrians up and down the narrow street. He turned away from her, confident she hadn’t seen him, and walked the other way.
Wedelkind’s voice echoed in his ears. It was as if the old charlatan were still speaking to him, insinuating himself into his consciousness until Paul couldn’t quite distinguish his own thoughts from the words that drifted about him on clouds of clove-scented smoke. As the fumes overwhelmed him, he felt himself go dizzy and then a bit blank. The nauseating fog rushed to his brain. He had to grip the wall beside him.
“Who wouldn’t be moved to tears?” a voice whispered.
He looked around, but there was no one there. He regained his composure and it occurred to him then and there that he would write a play about the murder, and shock the city to its very foundations. Why not? What did he have to lose? The audacity of it. It was brilliant.
He had visions of a madman with gold teeth, a shell–shocked veteran shaking with fear as he stalked the child, watching her innocent movements as she looked with wonder at the sights of the arcade and the subterranean figures emerging from its depths. He saw the old rag-picker stumbling over her body, falling in love with the corpse as the whole city had done, and the vengeful mob prowling the arcade for the killer. The play would slice through the consciousness of the city like a burning knife, etching his own bleeding initials indelibly in its memory.
When he got back to St Vincent Place Laura and Ondine were seated opposite each other in the sitting room, each nursing a different volume of Balzac’s
Human Comedy.
It was hot outside, and when Paul entered he was sweating. He flew to Laura and dropped himself down beside her. “I’ve had a wonderful idea,” he said. He was already clutching his wife’s hands. “We can perform the Alma Tirtschke murder. Call it ‘The Gun Alley Atrocity’. It will send the place into convulsions.”
Ondine stood up, book in hand, glanced at Laura and left the room. Paul, in his fervour, barely noticed her exit. Laura looked down into the folds of her dress.
“You don’t think it’s a good idea?’ he asked. “It will make us here. It will put us on the map and show up those prudes for the idiots they are.”
“I think it’s touching something too raw,” Laura said gently.
“Nonsense. It’s merely topical.”
“Won’t it be construed as bad taste? What about the relatives of that poor girl?”
“What do we care if we stir up a bit of controversy? It’s all good publicity.”
“You’ve turned into quite a pragmatist, haven’t you?”
“That sounds like my sister talking. Since when have you worried about that?”
Laura looked back into her lap, trying to avoid eye contact. “I don’t think it’s decent, Paul,” she said without looking up. “A little girl being murdered like that is a terrible, terrible thing.”
“My sister has hypnotised you with all her high moral seriousness,” he accused.
“I am capable of thinking for myself, you know.”
“Since when?”
“Since always. Since now. Since you’ve hit upon the idea of turning your silly theatre into a source of such callous disregard. It’s awful.”
“Oh, please.” Paul stood up.”If you’re not interested I’ll do it alone. I’ll find my own Alma Tirtschke to strangle and we’ll be the talk of the town.” He laughed to himself.
“Where will you find your Alma Tirtschke? They’ll all keep clear of you after the last debacle.”
“Oh, I know my way around Melbourne pretty well.”
Paul threw himself down on the couch opposite her, looking like a limp rag doll.
“My sister is a devil in her own right, you know. Where do you think she is going to lead you?”
“Oh, shut up, Paul. You’re being moronic.”
Laura took her book, stood up abruptly and left him alone in the room. She walked upstairs to Ondine’s room. The door was ajar. She pushed it open and entered without knocking.
Ondine was sitting at one end of her canopy bed reading. She looked up from her book and met Laura’s eyes as the latter calmly sat down at the other end of the bed and opened her book as well. The two women were cross-legged, backs against opposite ends of the bedstead, necks craned over Balzac like a couple of bookends turned around the wrong way.
“I wonder if Paul will finish up mad as well,” Ondine said without raising her eyes.”Like our father, I mean.”
“It would be awkward, wouldn’t it?” Laura replied.
Ondine smiled to herself. She loved her sister-in-law’s capacity for such miscalculated remarks.
Laura lowered her eyes again and resumed her reading. Ondine raised hers, ever so slightly, fixing on the waves of jet–black hair tumbling over Laura’s white shoulders, and her mouth narrowing into a pout of concentration which seemed to be speaking the words she read as if she were trying to memorise a part in a play.
Neither Ondine nor Laura attended the opening of
The Gun Alley Atrocity.
That afternoon the two of them had played tennis on the courts at the far end of St Vincent Place. When they returned to the house they were both pleasantly flushed from their exertions as the cool, dark air of the old stone house greeted them. Paul was waiting for them in the downstairs sitting room. He had been frantic for the last few weeks writing, casting and refurbishing the set of
The Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities.
He hadn’t grown thinner in that time, as one might expect with all that nervous exertion. On the contrary, his stomach had become softer and rounder and his face had begun to sag. He seemed more anxious than he had ever been and looked tired and haggard. He knew Ondine wouldn’t go to the premiere, but still imagined that his wife would be loyal to him even though she, too, clearly disapproved of the play.
“Laura, darling,” he said, taking her arm as he emerged from the sitting room. “You will be coming tonight, won’t you? Hamish will take you if you like.”
“Paul, you know I’m not going to come. I don’t think it’s right, this play.”
He gripped her arm tighter. “Laura, darling, you must come. It would mean so much to me.”
He spoke with a staged irony that she found repugnant. She could smell the back rooms of the theatre on his tattered suit. She imagined old posters of chorus girls peeling off the walls and traces of cat piss stained into the floorboards.
“Don’t,” she said angrily, wriggling out of his sweaty grip. “I’m going to shower.”
Ondine had already mounted the stairs. Paul cast a glance at her. She had turned and was watching the scene below with what seemed to him a smile curled into the wrinkle of a lip.
“You’re in love with my sister, aren’t you?” he said under his breath.
“Don’t be silly.” Laura blushed as she spoke. She abruptly followed Ondine up the stairs, hoping that she hadn’t heard Paul’s accusation.
Paul followed a few paces behind, the feeling of betrayal mounting in him. When he and Laura were in their own room he seized her arm again and shook her.
“What?” she implored.
The smell of her perspiration aroused him and he sniffed her neck like an animal. For a moment she stood there in the middle of the room, motionless, listening to his heavy breathing, imagining his nostrils dilating.
“Have you kissed her?” he hissed.
She turned away from him.
Suddenly enraged, he twisted her slender wrists behind her back and pushed her onto the bed. He pulled her tennis skirt up over her back, yanked her drawers down around her knees and pushed his fingers in between her buttocks, touching the edge of her anus. The stunned terror in her silence as she clung to the counterpane returned him to himself. He stood back. She pulled her skirt down, staring at him in horror as she pushed past him through the hallway into Ondine’s room. Paul choked back his anger, rearranged himself, and followed her out. He listened at his sister’s door for a moment before going back downstairs. A few minutes later he was out in the street, driving towards the city, cursing the two women with such vehemence that his body shook.
I
t was late February and Melbourne felt as if a sirocco had been blowing its hot breath along the city’s dusty streets for the best part of a week. The place was parched, withering in the heat of the country’s vast, interior deserts. The police had arrested the bartender at the Australian Wine Shop for the murder of Alma Tirtschke. Within a week of the trial beginning a cast of prostitutes and spiritualists from the arcade had come out in force to testify against Colin Ross, who gaped at the court with his glistening gold teeth and pleaded his innocence with a sad, hang-dog look on his rough, unshaven face. Paul didn’t need to wait for the verdict to finish his play. He could already divine its end and envisioned Ross going to the gallows haunted by his satanic prompter, Wedelkind, whom he imagined rubbing his hands with glee at the fulfilment of his prognostication.
As evening fell, the play looked as if it would be well attended despite the soaring temperature. Still angry at his wife, Paul stood in the vestibule of the Bijou under the whirling blades of a ceiling fan as patrons, befuddled by the heat, stumbled in from the brutal clamour of Bourke Street.
“I think that man will certainly hang,” one woman said shrilly.
“But who would trust the likes of a Madam Gurkha?” said another.
“What about the father? Shot in a hunting accident just the other week. Doesn’t that make you suspicious?”
Paul hadn’t noticed Hamish standing beside him.
“Truth of it is,” Hamish said,”that poor fool from the wine bar is probably innocent.”
“How do you know that?” asked Paul. “In this play he’s as guilty as hell. I’ll stake my reputation on it.”