“Oi!”
Startled, Tamsin rolled over, brought her arms in, cradling her camera, protecting her head, an instinct born of war zones.
“Wouldn’t git any closer, luv.”
He stood above her, back to the sun. Quickly, Tamsin rolled onto her feet, brushed aside the dust, and circled around—another habit born of war zones—put the sun behind her instead. Let him squint.
Sun-bleached stubble, a face so tanned his lips looked white. Aussie shorts and heavy boots. Khaki for the most part, even his hair.
Behind him, in the heat-distorted distance, she saw an all-terrain vehicle parked on the side of a hillock. Leaning against the ATV was another lanky man, similarly attired. Beyond that, hazy in the heat, her own vehicle looked far away indeed.
“Gotta watch out for those ones,” he said with a jawed gesture to the caterpillars that Tamsin had been photographing. They were moving elegantly across the sand, a ghostly procession, wispy and pale.
“The hairs on them ones can cause blisters. Worse’n nettles, irritates the skin, burns like a farker. Those ones there? Going home, back to their nest. Night prowlers, generally. Rain brought ’em out. Caterpillars, very active after a rain.” He grinned. A mouth full of broken crockery. “They’re so stupid, sometimes they’ll circle a tree by mistake, accidently link up with the last one in line, form a ring, will keep turning and turning till they exhaust themselves. You can see their nests hanging off branches, easily mistaken for bird nests, so be careful. Toxic.”
She put her camera away. “Thanks for the tip.” But he wasn’t done.
“Those wildflowers, over there, little purple ones the caterpillars were curling around? The cattle eat those. Chomp ’em up. Roos, too. Good bush tuck, that. The Abos will tell you—sorry, I mean Blackfellas. This whole region, it’s like a supermarket for them ones. My name’s Frank. Where’s my manners? Frank Hann, that’s my name. My mate over there, that’s Jack Watson.”
“You live out here?” Hard to imagine.
“Lost Creek cattle station. It’s up Luritja Road a ways.”
“Well, it was nice meeting you.” Tamsin tried to step past but he blocked her way, stepped in, uncomfortably close.
“Don’t get a lot’a Sheilas out here. Not many anyways.” He stepped closer still, studied her. She could feel his breath on her. “Got’a bit of Chinese in you, do ya? And what’s with the scar?”
“A knife fight.”
“Yer joking.”
“Should see the other guy.” She looked to her Land Rover, impossibly far away. A torment of flies and heat. Tamsin felt light-headed, brushed at the midges that were clotting her eyes and nostrils. She was already past the Curtin Springs Roadhouse. Next gas station was two hours away. Her hat and netting were in the car, along with her water, and her cell phone. She couldn’t dial 911, and was it even 911 out here? She seemed to think it was triple zero. Or maybe 112? And how long would it take for anyone to reach her, even if she could get to her phone, throw a distress signal into space, a cry wanting an echo?
“Haf’ta git used to them, the flies. Youse need to learn the Aussie salute.” He waved his hand in front of him, scattering them, midair. “Problem is, y’kill one of the buggers, six more come to the funeral.” Another grin, more broken crockery. “They like the eyes, lips, where the tears and saliva gathers. Any wet spots, really. They love wet spots. You have any of those? Wet spots I should know about?”
The glare. The flies. The empty stomach and the parched throat. The growing headache of the heat. He told me his name. I know where he lives. He told me their names. They can’t let me go after they’re done. They would drive her vehicle into the Outback, would have to burn it probably. After that, a shallow grave, but any resourceful dingo would find her soon enough. Tamsin had photographed enough shallow graves in her day to know that the dead never stayed hidden for long, and she realized, with a certain sadness, that no one on earth knew where she was at that very moment, not even Raff. The weight in her chest turned to a sigh.
“This isn’t going to end well, is it?” she said.
“That depends, luv, on how much resistance you put up.”
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t mean for me.”
* * *
THE ATV, HITTING EVERY GODDAMN rock, bouncing wildly, Frank shrieking, voice hoarse, hands wedged deep into his crotch, and his mate Jack yelling, “Hang on, Frank! Hang on!” He would be airlifted to Alice Springs, where the doctors would spend three hours retracting his left testicle from its pelvic cavity, pumping him full of opiates and performing an emergency intubation, inserting an inflated tube down his windpipe to prevent his throat from closing due to the secondary trauma of his windpipe, the doctors asking his friend afterward, “How did this happen? How?”
“Jest fell, like.”
“Fell?”
“On a fencepost. Repeatedly.”
And Tamsin on her own, freewheeling down a highway, her Land Rover all but taking flight, the fun-loving larrikin lad grappling with the front of her shirt, not realizing that this wasn’t an ambush but a dance, a tango in the sands with Tamsin taking the lead, stepping forward, then sweeping her leg inside, a countermove followed by a simple wrist lock that took him down, then a boot to the balls, once, twice, followed by a straight-legged stomp to the throat, with buddy there spurting up mucous and bile, a spastic reflex, eyes rolling back into his head, nary a whimper escaping as Tamsin stepped back, blew away the hair that had fallen across her face, and then teeing up again, delivering another, final, heavy-toed boot, full force between the legs, and now a whimper did escape, “No more. Please.” Tamsin, leaning in on a whispered snarl, “I was in Beirut, motherfucker. You think I’m scared of you?” She would have spit on him as well, but her mouth was dry and he wasn’t worth the wasting of water. Instead, she left him there, writhing on the red sands of the Outback like a see-no-evil monkey poorly aligned, hands cupping his crushed manhood, and Tamsin striding directly toward his friend now, angry at having lost the light, and the other chawbacon yokel gape-mouthed and agog as she approached, saying nothing, and Tamsin, as she passed. “I think your friend could use a little help.”
And now, here she was, skimming across a landscape like a flat stone on a still lake, the windows down, one hand out, riding the updraft, and the other on the wheel, fingers tapping out a rhythm of her own design. Tamsin Greene is a cool machine.
THE CURATOR OF LOST SOULS
A TRAIN ENGINE WAS BEING shunted onto a sidetrack in the railyard. Moths and listless louts, both of them hovering under streetlights. Dusk, falling. The day, ending.
He’d left her with her tea, cold in the cup, and his chiko roll, half-eaten, had walked back up to his second-floor room, had the usual drunkard’s difficulty in getting the key into the door, getting the handle to turn, the light to stay on. In the dimly pooled light—and hotel rooms are always caught in the twilight—Thomas Rafferty stopped to consider his domain: a bed so lumpy it could have hidden a corpse and no one would have been the wiser, an open veranda facing the train yards, curtains billowing like slow sails on the faintest of winds. Life was a series of indifferently decorated hotel rooms.
Had he left the veranda open like that? He couldn’t remember.
In some far room, a radio was muttering to itself, and in the tavern below, the music was thumping. Could feel it in the floor. A party of cattle station ranch hands had arrived just as Rafferty was leaving, had found a jukebox he didn’t even know was there. AC/DC and Banjo Peterson, alternating. Wild bush horses and highways to hell. No need for a reason, no need for a rhyme. Jaysus.
Gaddy Rhodes and the dead man, under his slab of wall, and Rafferty wondered if any of it was real. Maybe they’d dreamed him into existence, Rhodes and Rafferty together.
He reeled back, steadied himself. Stepped onto the veranda. Entire balcony seemed to be leaning one side, though that might have been the gin. In the railyards, the heave and lurch of another train departing, like an old
man woken, who grumbles himself back to sleep. The air was surprisingly cool, almost cold, raised gooseflesh across his forearms. Was she ever coming back? She has something of mine. Not lost, stolen. Not stolen, never returned.
When Rafferty stepped back into the room, the dead man was waiting for him. Sitting in a chair, calmly, and very much alive. Hard to kill, this guy.
“There is a ship,” the small man said, as though in midconversation, “that surfaces from the sands in southern Australia every, oh, thirty or forty years. No one knows where it came from or what its name is, but it was first spotted off a distant shoal in 1836. A mahogany ship, variously described as either the ruins of a Spanish galleon or a Dutch man-o’-war, or even a Portuguese vessel that had disappeared during an unknown earlier mission. It sounds like a ghost story, but I assure you it is quite real. Imagine finding such a vessel! The value, the excitement, and yet, the ship itself is little more than a jumble of dry-rot timber by this point. No treasure has ever been reported onboard the mahogany ship or, if there ever was any, it is long gone. No rubies or relics. It is a wreck, plain and simple, valuable only because it was lost. Like a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, it is the absence that provides its worth. Kidnappers, crude though they may be, operate on much the same principle. It is a desire for return, for equilibrium as it were, that imbues such objects, such people, with value. What do I do for a living? I find mahogany ships, Mr. Rafferty. This is what I do.” He gestured to the seat across from him as though it were his room, and Rafferty the guest. “Please, sit down. You look as though you’ve seen a ghost yourself. But I assure you, like a ship that surfaces from the sand, I am quite real.” He smiled. “A rear window. A torn curtain. The smallest glimpse can reveal so much. Don’t you agree?”
Figures on a landscape, far away but near at hand. Rwanda. The Congo. The eroded shoreline between memory and myth. Rafferty swallowed, throat dry. “You’re looking well,” he said.
“Thank you.” The small man was receding into the shadows as the day slowly died, was gradually becoming a silhouette again.
Rafferty took the seat across from him. “Friend, I don’t know who you are, but I know exactly what you do.”
“And what do I do exactly, Mr. Rafferty?”
“Like you said, you find things.” You kill people and find things.
A glimmer of teeth in what might have been a smile, catching the last of the light. “It’s the strangest thing,” said the small man. “On the way over here, as I was crossing the street, I heard a rooster crowing, like a dusty cough. It’s not true, of course, that they only crow at dawn. I was once hired to find the missing page of a paperback novel, long thought lost forever, The Rooster Crows at Midnight. Based on a misunderstanding, you see. A clue that wasn’t there. Roosters crow whenever they wish. A man died for that. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Dying for a single page from a dime-store novel.”
“People die for all sorts of reasons.”
“The sound of a rooster crowing, I hadn’t heard that in years, and with it, I was hurtled back in time to South America, other towns, other roads. You were in Ecuador, Mr. Rafferty, you will know of what I am speaking. The sound of a rooster. And I thought to myself, what we need is a Museum of Lost Sounds, ones that need to be preserved before they are lost forever. The clickety-clack of a rotary dial. The oof of a maid-assisted corset being tightened. A passenger pigeon’s evening coo—wouldn’t you love to hear that? The phosphorous flash of an old camera. The swish-tide of an X-ray being developed in a chemical bath, the smell of the same. Perhaps we need a Catalog of Lost Scents, as well. Did you know that the moon smells of gunpowder? It’s true. Or so I am told. I once retrieved an exorbitantly rare sample of lunar rock for a wealthy client. The samples were sealed, so I wasn’t able to confirm it firsthand, but I am told that the moon smells of gunpowder and blood. The rarest smell on earth, I would imagine, the smell of the moon. Would take prime spot in my catalog. Hard to capture, though, isn’t it? Sounds and scents and the like. They lack a certain… tangibility.”
There was nothing to stop Rafferty from getting up and walking out, nothing to keep him there except for a soft voice and a thickening silhouette. Nothing at all, but he was pinned in place nonetheless. “Listen,” he said. “I’m bushed. I appreciate you dropping by, it’s been swell. But I gotta say, I’ve had a very long day.” His back was beginning to throb.
“What did you tell her?”
“Tell who?”
The smile disappeared. “You know full well who. I ask you again: What did you tell her?”
What could he tell her? That the person she’d been chasing down corridors all these years, a man of indeterminate age, lost somewhere between semen-marche and senility, unnervingly nondescript, was right here? What was there to tell? “I told her you were dead.”
“But she didn’t believe you, did she?”
“Not sure. She seemed to know more about you than I did, trying to glean what I knew, impressions, that sort of thing. I didn’t have much to give. I said, I don’t think people interest him, only things.”
The smallest sliver of a smile reappeared. “Not things. Artifacts.”
“She seems to think you’re the anti-Christ.”
And for a moment he almost seemed hurt. “I’m not anti-anything,” he said. “You must understand, Mr. Rafferty, that I come from slender means. I have always lived by my wits.”
“Is there any other way?”
“Most other ways, in fact. You’d be surprised how few people do employ their wits, relying instead on luck, inheritance, a plodding routine. The world is full of sheep, Mr. Rafferty. But we are not sheep, are we? Chance has brought us together, here in the deadest of ends, the backest of waters. So little rain out here. A shame. I like the rain, it so nicely covers up one’s tracks, though I imagine the wind does the same thing out here, erases footprints—buries evidence. Deuteronomy 33:2. The Lord came out of the desert. Our mistake is to assume He is still there. The silence is deafening, isn’t it? One can hardly think due to His echoing absence.”
Rafferty shifted in his seat. His back was knotting up again. Fight or flee? He could hardly move, tried to keep the pain out of his voice, but the pain gave him away. It always does. “The emptiness you describe may be more a self-diagnosis than anything,” he said.
“Perhaps.” The small man stared at the sky outside. The day was almost done, the setting of the sun cast a glow, and in these final moments, the silhouette became a man again. “Tell me something, Mr. Rafferty. Have you ever heard about the legend of the three-legged toad? An emblem of the unattainable.” A world reduced to a curio cabinet. “I collect them, in a manner of speaking.”
Three-legged toads and mahogany ships.
A silly knickknack from a holiday shop in Portrush. Ceramic, and Chinese, which is very far indeed. “Don’t lose it. This lucky figurine will bring you good fortune.” But, of course, he had lost it. He was only a child, after all. Children lose things all the time, knickknacks and lottery tickets, parents. And later, when he set off from home for the first time, another warning. “It’s a too-big world, so you take care.” A church-bought medallion to protect travelers from woe. “Don’t lose this one, like you lost the last.” Saint Christopher, she said. But it wasn’t Saint Christopher.
“You have something that belongs to me, Mr. Rafferty. A medallion, lost in a tussle. I will give you until darkness to return it to me.”
Don’t look. Don’t. Do not look, not even a glance in the direction of the desk, not even the hint of glance. Rafferty took a slow breath. He probably thinks it’s in a hotel safe somewhere, but there is no safe, only a desk, only a drawer. Do not look. If you look, he will kill you, and he will take it anyway. Do. Not. Look.
“Valuable, is it?” asked Rafferty.
“To me, yes. To anyone else, no.” He leaned in, face lit in orange. “I won’t ask again. My medallion. Where is it?”
“Have you checked your sphincter?”
A
sigh. The small man leaned back. “Ah yes, the homespun wit of the humble rube. Winterset, am I right?”
A chill.
First Ecuador, now this. “Congratulations, you’ve read my wiki bio.” But Rafferty knew there was more to it than that. I outweigh him by at least twenty pounds. I’m taller by a foot. But still he knew he would lose. Don’t look. Keep your eyes locked on his. Don’t look. Once he has that medallion, there is no reason for him to let you live. The afterglow of orange began to seep away and the finder slipped back into silhouette. Darkness had arrived and Thomas Rafferty understood now what he was finally facing, as terrifying and banal as he always expected it would be.
If I can get to the door…
Rafferty leapt to his feet, or tried to, but his back had locked, and he couldn’t get up, was knotted with pain.
When the finder spoke, there was a certain tenderness in his voice, there—just for a moment—and then gone. “Rapid-onset ankylosing spondylitis,” the small man said. “An autoimmune disorder, begins in the pelvis, works its way up the spine, one vertebra at a time. They fuse like bamboo, become rigid. Eventually reaches the rib cage, until you’re trapped inside yourself, unable to move. There is no cure. True, there are biologic treatments that might slow it down, but only if one hasn’t been exposed to TB or any variant of hepatitis, and I imagine in your field of endeavor, you have encountered both, more than once. Which would make such treatment all but impossible. A philosophical question, Mr. Rafferty: If someone defines himself by motion, and is no longer able to move, does he still exist?”
Rafferty felt his chest constrict, his voice become scratchy. “How?”
“Oh, it’s not that complicated. Whisper into the void, and eventually the void whispers back. Medical records, readily available online, protected only by the flimsiest of firewalls. It’s all there, the blood tests and grim prognoses. So on and so forth. One needs to be familiar with one’s foe, after all.”
The Finder Page 29