Gaddy Rhodes sat back. You were there. In Christchurch. Not Alaska, not the Arctic Circle, the Southern Cross.
Quickly now, she began scrolling through reports of the earthquake. Images of rain and rescue workers backlit heroically against the ruins. An eyewitness report, posted on a travel blog:
Update: It’s just Erin now. Ewan is no longer part of this. He left. The other writers have left, as well. Only Thomas Rafferty stayed on, tried to help.
That name, why was it so familiar?
And now he’s gone, too. It must have brought back too many memories of Rwanda for him.
And now the percussion grew faster, cymbals and a jag-time beat. Rwanda.
Her old boss and former friend Andrea Addario had often complained about Gaddy’s habit of forcing the evidence to fit her theories, but how could that be a coincidence? Hitchcock—Christchurch—Rwanda. They lined up like an arrow pointing to a single name: Thomas Rafferty.
Why did she know that name?
Gaddy pulled up everything she could find on him, and instantly the connections began jumping out at her: Nagasaki, Buenos Aires, Vatican City. He was in eastern Congo when the Kalinga drum was taken. She scrolled through, faster and faster, until one name came to the forefront as though embossed: Okinawa.
That’s where I know him from!
She moved a stack of files, pulled down a thick folder, the one labelled HATERUMA, rifled through, found the glossy travel magazine, flipped to the article: “Okinawa: A Land of Contrasts,” Island Views magazine, Jan/Feb 2004. Drowned mountains, coral reefs, a dragon ascending… Author: T. Rafferty.
Gaddy went back online, brought up his author photo, heavy faced and grim. Not like the single confirmed description she had of her suspect: a small, well-dressed but forgettable figure haunting the refugee camps after the fall of the Rwandan regime. So she tweaked her theory: the small man may have been a confederate, an employee even. She’d been asking herself how he had been able to slip so easily across borders. Well, here was the answer staring out at her with sullen eyes. A travel writer. She had been asking who he was, she should have been asking what he was.
With everything falling into place, Gaddy opened a new window on her desktop. Brought up The Map with its confusion of lines and far-flung connections. A travel writer. Of course.
She fired off a message to Erin, asked her to text back.
Big fan of your work, Erin! Also, of Mr. Rafferty’s. Did you actually meet him?
The answer pinged back a few moments later.
Unfortunately, yes.
What was he like?
Broken.
Gaddy took a moment to gather her thoughts before launching another sally. She considered asking: Did he throw money around? Seem wealthy? When he arrived, did he fly first-class? Have his own plane? But she knew that if Mr. Rafferty’s cover was indeed that of a working writer, he would need to be as unobtrusive and unremarkable as possible. Instead, she asked:
Broken? How?
Let me put it this way. When I first met him, I thought he was a misogynist. But now I realize, it’s not just women. He hates everyone.
A misanthrope?
Exactly. He didn’t seem interested in writing about the earthquake. Spent his entire time digging through the rubble.
A pause, and then: Didn’t save anyone, though.
Of course not. He wasn’t looking for people.
Gaddy thanked Erin, asked her if she had any idea where he might have gone, but she didn’t know. Fortunately for Gaddy Rhodes, Mr. Rafferty had left a trail in the form of travel articles, written in such a perfunctory manner they could only reinforce her opinion that his writing was, at best, a cover. It was too trite to be otherwise. His words couldn’t draw attention to himself, after all; they were merely meant to be an alibi. The feeling in her chest was growing, heart racing, face flushed, that dizzy dancing feeling. I’m coming for you. The noose, gone slack, was tightening again.
It was while she was searching flights and figuring out the unused medical leave owed her, that Erin sent a final message to Gaddy:
If you see him, can you tell him I said hi?
The author photo was still up on her screen, and perhaps it was a trick of perception, but his eyes didn’t look as sullen anymore; they looked scared. Oh, I’ll do more than say hello. And now she really was laughing, or trying to: a dry sound deep in her throat struggling to be free.
PART FIVE STRANGE MONSTERS
THEY WERE THROWING ROCKS AT cars again. Aboriginal kids in plastic flip-flops that slapped back as they rushed forward, venting their tedium on the vehicles that crawled past, slow-rolling tourists, come to see the agate mines, induced by company promos, driving through town as though on a human safari.
Visit Devil’s Spite Creek in the heart of the Australian Outback! Experience Aboriginal lifestyles firsthand! Marvel at the region’s rich agate mines!
Rental companies charged an extra premium if you were taking the vehicle out of Alice Springs. When pressed, they would explain it was because of the rocks, and visitors would assume they meant rocks on the roads, not airborne.
When one of the rented sedans slowed down so that the people inside could gawk, a barrage of rocks would pummel the hood. Eventually a police officer would be called—for a town of scarcely four hundred, it had a full contingent of constabulary on call—and the kids would scatter, only to regroup later when the officer left. As the evening wore on, they would graduate to throwing bottles. No one had thought to stuff them with rags and gasoline, not yet.
Rafferty had been pulled off buses in Ecuador and detained by Bangladeshi border guards; he wasn’t overly concerned about the Aboriginal youth in a dusty town in the kiln-baked heart of a continent. And anyway, he didn’t have a car; he’d taken the train in, a straining, bronchial beast that always seemed to be rolling uphill even when the landscape was hammered flat. At one point, the train had pulled onto a siding to let the luxury express Ghan hurtle past, the passengers in dining cars flitting by like frames in a filmstrip. Then, with a groan, his own train rolled out, back onto the tracks, heading inward.
It clattered through sun-bleached outposts—Oodnadatta, Kulgera, Dalhousie—crumbling ghost towns, defeated by distance, failed oases. Date palms grew amid the ruins of Dalhousie Springs Station; the trees had been planted a century ago by Afghan cameleers who were brought in to herd freight-car camel trains across the desert.
Two days on the train and they’d only moved a few inches on the map.
The world outside was an overexposed Polaroid, and as the terrain grew flatter and flatter still, the horizon line began to waver and eventually dissolve into pooled mirages. Lakes without water. If thirst had a shape, it was the Australian Outback.
The other passengers were strangely subdued, like soldiers being transported to the eastern front, the excitement of the departure two days earlier having long since faded into the usual hypnotic lethargy of long journeys. As the days crawled onward, miniature bottles of gin and scotch, the type usually associated with stewardesses in powder-blue pillbox hats and the airplanes of yesteryear, were lined up on his tray like chess pieces. Bishops maybe, or pawns. The trolley girl who swiped his card looked surprisingly refreshed considering the nature of her job, back and forth across the same tracks, the same plains, the same terra-cotta emptiness.
“Gittin’ off at Alice are ya?”
“Before then,” he said. “After Titjikala.” He had no idea if he was pronouncing that correctly. “I’m staying in Devil’s Spite Creek,” and the smile fell from her face.
“You be careful. Havin’ issues up there, with rowdy boys and the like.”
He knew what “rowdy boys” was code for.
Her voice became a whisper. “Vandalism. Petrol sniffing and such. If it was me? I wouldn’t go there. Was me, I’d stay on till Alice.”
He nodded, and she trolleyed off.
Miles and miles of miles and miles. That two-dimensional world. Train tracks converg
ing on the infinite, into that endless forever. Magic hours and a porous moon, its surface like a weather-scarred cinder block. The moon always seemed so much closer in places like the Outback. When he had been in the Gobi Desert, the moon had seemed to rest just above the sand dunes. In the Alberta Badlands, it practically touched the earth.
“Devil’s Spite Creek! Next stop!” the conductor cried, and Rafferty closed his laptop, gathered his things. But when he tried to stand, his back had locked up. This was happening more and more frequently, it seemed, his vertebrae like a zipper that had rusted shut, and in the end, he had to twist himself out of the seat in a corkscrew maneuver.
The town of Devil’s Spite Creek lay in the shadow of a stone pillar, a natural column, eaten away, the top stained red with sandstone. A jagged tooth, a broken finger, a tombstone. Devil’s Spite was a boomtown gone bust, the local agate mine and its proximity to Alice Springs being the only attractions. A tired-looking camel was resting on its knees beside the train station, waiting for tourists to climb on and take their picture, should any tourists show up.
Rafferty lugged his rucksack onto the platform in the falling dark, looked around with the calm elation that always comes with arrival. A dog of indeterminable breed loped by, slipping in and out of shadows.
The night was full of voices. The usual loitering louts. Teenagers performing prodigious feats of boredom watched him as he walked past with an active indifference. But Rafferty had been pulled off buses in Ecuador and detained by border guards in Bangladesh. If anything, he wanted to go over, tell his moody onlookers the one fact he knew to be indisputably true: You can always leave. A taxi puttered by, propelled by farts.
Australia is for lovers! Come to Devil’s Spite Creek in the heart of the majestic Outback!
Streetlamps, with their attendant hovering of moths. Mix-and-match cars parked at odd angles. The entire town looked like a dresser drawer that had been upturned and picked over, a garage sale at the end of the day when all the good bits are gone.
The Fairview was less a hotel than an ongoing project, with various appendages added arbitrarily. It had a faded, antebellum feel. Paint so pale it was hardly there. Two creaky floors, rooms facing the street and the railways beyond, an open veranda running down the length of the upper floor, trying in vain to catch a breeze. It reminded him of Pusan, of Loja, of Lombok, of Louisville. Same same but different, as they say in Vietnam.
A threadbare man was waiting for him at the front desk. “You’ll be Mr. Rafferty.”
“The train was late.”
“No worries, mate, train’s always late. If it was ever on time, it would be early. Let’s get you checked in.” Thus began the Ceremony of the Guestbook, a call and reply, with credit card imprints and the all-important Explanation of the Keys.
“What brings y’ta Devil’s Spite?” The way he pronounced it, it sounded like “devil spit.”
“The scenery.”
“Scenery?” The clerk balked—and then laughed. “Oh, there’s a view, all right, but you have to look for it. Stick a pin in the middle of the map, you won’t be far gone.” The town was pretty much the geographic center of Australia. “This is as far in as you can go. After that, you’re coming back.”
Rafferty tucked his walleted credit card back into his pocket. “A group of researchers were staying here, from Sydney I believe. They were with the university. Collecting folktales and artifacts. Are any of them still around?”
“From the uni? Left last week. Which reminds me”—he shuffled through some items in the drawer. “You’re Mr. Rafferty, right? One of ’em left a letter for you. A lady.”
But when Rafferty opened the envelope, all that was inside was the message: Stop following me. I don’t have it. He recognized that sharp up-and-down way of hers, like an EKG, and he turned the page over as though there might be something written on the back as well, but that was it. Just those two sentences. She hadn’t even bothered to sign her name. Didn’t need to.
“Where did they go?” he asked. “The group from the university?”
“Not sure. Some Abo community farther out, I imagine.” He’d forgotten to censor himself. “Aborigine, I mean to say. They were out in the field, the real woop-woop. Ewaninga, last I heard. The rock carvings and so on. The petroglyphs.”
“Far?”
“Over an hour, up and around. But they’re not there anymore. My nephew runs the town taxi, he ferried them about, here and there.”
“If not Ewaninga, where?”
“Could be anywhere. Not sure if you noticed, but this is a big country. Easy to get lost in.”
Rafferty nodded. “The woman who gave you this”—he was referring to the envelope—“did she leave anything else behind? For safekeeping, maybe? In the hotel safe, say?”
Eyes narrowed. “We don’t have a safe, we have a cupboard that we lock. But they took it all with them, everything they had.”
Rafferty slid a fold of bills across the table. “Are you sure?”
This had worked in Italy, but he wasn’t in Italy.
The clerk pushed the bills back. Feckin’ Yanks. Living their lives like they’re in a movie. “As I was sayin’, they took everything with them. Everything.” He assumed Rafferty was a debt collector of sorts. He didn’t like debt collectors.
“Know when they’ll be back?”
“No idea, mate. Could be weeks, could be never.”
So he waited.
MOURNING DOVES
AN ALLEYWAY IN ALICE SPRINGS. A leering larrikin with dry lips and a cracked grin.
“Highly illegal, you’se unnerstand? Highly.”
She held the gun in her hand, felt the weight of it in her palm.
“Beretta M9,” he said.
Semi-automatic, slide load, short recoil, nine-millimeter rounds, fifteen to a magazine, an official range of fifty meters, but really only effective at short range. But short range was all she needed. She wasn’t about to go up against the darkness unprotected.
* * *
THE DAYS PASSED, EACH THE same as the next, and before he knew it, Thomas Rafferty had spent a week in Devil’s Spite Creek, under a punishing sky.
He thought of the cool moisture and escaping steam of New Zealand, of the underworld ponds and boiling muds, the wet air that furred the forests, and it seemed to Rafferty that he had clawed his way out of Hell’s Gate only to land here, in this empty purgatory. Memories of Sunday catechisms, of lessons learned and warnings that went unheeded. Even as a boy, Rafferty knew that purgatory was a worse place to end up in than Hell. At least with Hell, you knew where you were, knew the trip was over, that you’d reached your destination, could finally unpack. Purgatory was an endless holding pattern; the torment of that—the not knowing when it would end—would have been much worse.
Devil’s Spite Creek, Rafferty came to realize, was just a proliferation of bars set back off the highway, an inhabited ruin, propped up, barely standing. Only the mine kept going, wheezing and diminished. The railcars rumbled into town empty, left full. Rumbled in full and left empty. It was just about the only motion there was. That, and rock-throwing youths. The day the ore runs out is the day this town closes down.
On a raised wooden sidewalk, an old man, flyblown and frayed, said, “Drought is a withered woman, jealous of life.” One of his eyes was cloudy, the other a polished marble, not unlike agate. Air as dry as wine. A rib cage that creaked like a hinge. Sweat that evaporated on the skin. Rafferty was having trouble breathing at times. Out here, the sun didn’t just scald you, it harassed and hectored, it chased you inside, into the shaded depths of taverns where the glasses were pebbled with condensation.
A cigarette eating itself. A full ashtray and an empty glass. Loud voices at the other tables. Rafferty wasn’t the only patron escaping the heat. “I told him. I said, y’have to shake your boots every time you pull ’em on, didn’t I tell’m? I told’m, didn’t I? Everything that crawls, flies, or swims in this godforsaken country wants to kill you and eat yo
u, and not necessarily in that order.” Squalor and ale (two parts squalor, one part ale). Rafferty was in his element. He lifted his empty glass in their direction. They lifted theirs in turn, went back to their recursive conversations. “I told him, didn’t I? Y’have to shake your boots every time. I told him, didn’t I tell him?” “You told him.”
Rafferty ordered a glass of murky Australian stout, watched the television above the bar as the latest headlines uncurled. Christchurch had already been pushed from the lead. They were on to Hollywood now, where a producer—Rafferty didn’t catch his name; it had already scrolled past—had unveiled the lost reel of Alfred Hitchcock’s debut film. Rafferty seemed to recall the dead man saying something about strangers on a train and realized that this had been a reference to Hitchcock. What a strange coincidence. But then, coincidences are always strange. They are strange almost by definition. Rafferty didn’t think anything of it, and Hitchcock’s reel slipped away.
One of the boys at the next table was bragging in an ill-shaven baritone about these uni twats that he’d taken out, how they’d overpaid him and that was the problem with these uni types, suckling on the public teat, not their money they’re blowing, is it? and did you not offer to refund them? fuck no, took my share, and laughter round the table.
Uni twats? Rafferty wanted to stumble over, ask “Where exactly? Where did you take ’em? Can you draw a map or drive me there?” But the other table parted ways soon after, and Rafferty wandered back to his hotel alone. He fired up his laptop. The university didn’t list the specific sites they would be visiting, only that they would be empowering Aboriginal communities by gathering their stories. Songlines and gods taking the form of pythons, of spiders. That sort of thing. Not godforsaken, god saturated. The entire Outback echoed with these dreamtime tales.
The Finder Page 24