by John Byron
John Byron grew up in Sydney, where he studied medicine for a time before leaving in the interest of the public safety. He has worked as a barman, a factory hand, a help-desk operator and a federal ministerial adviser, and now works in the university sector. His writing has appeared in The Australian, Meanjin, The Australian Book Review, The Conversation, Time Out and Rip It Up. The Tribute is his first novel and was shortlisted for the prestigious Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2019. He lives and works on Wurundjeri country, in Melbourne.
Published by Affirm Press in 2021
28 Thistlethwaite Street, South Melbourne,
Boon Wurrung Country, VIC 3205
affirmpress.com.au
Text and copyright © John Byron, 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
without prior permission of the publisher.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
Title: The Tribute / John Byron, author
ISBN: 9781922419859 (paperback)
Cover design by Sandy Cull, sandycull.com
Cover images: human figure from Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, artists Stephen van Calcar and the Workshop of Titian, US National Library of Medicine, nlm.nih.gov; beach image from Anton Gorlin, Westend61 GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo
Author photo by Rebecca Taylor Photography
Illustration on p. 379 from Andreae Vesalii [Andreas Vesalius], Suorum de humani corporis fabrica librorum epitome, reproduced by permission of Wellcome Collection, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Other internal illustrations and historiated initials from Andreas Vesalius, The Fabric of the Human Body: An Annotated Translation of the 1543 and 1555 Editions of ‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem’, DH Garrison and MH Hast (trans), reproduced by permission of S. Karger AG, Basel
Typeset in Granjon by J&M Typesetting
For Julienne van Loon:
there you are.
__
He felt his power swell within him, and he loved it as a pregnant
woman loves her unborn child.
Elizabeth Harrower
Down in the City
CONTENTS
Frontispiece
Volume I – The Bones and Cartilages
Volume II – The Ligaments and Muscles
Volume III – The Veins and Arteries
Volume IIII – The Nerves
Volume V – The Organs of Nutrition and Generation
Volume VI – The Heart and Associated Organs
Volume VII – The Brain
The Epitome of Andreas Vesalius
Sunday 8 April – morning
Over the PA came the Midnight Oil surf tune ‘Wedding Cake Island’, calling the swimmers to order at the northern end of Coogee Beach. The nervous chatter dropped as the guitars swelled on the mild Sydney autumn breeze; then the starting gun fired, and the annual Coogee Island Cool Water Challenge was underway. Jo ran in fast, dived cleanly under a breaker, then surfaced and steamed towards New Zealand.
She swam out past Wedding Cake Island and fought the lurching open ocean swell beyond it for a hundred hard metres, then turned into the channel between the island and the blocky base of the South Coogee headland, the surge behind her now. After passing the Ladies’ Baths, the swimmers swam parallel to the beach behind the breakers, and Jo hit the gas. She powered past the tiring field before turning in and catching a rearing wave that propelled her inshore. Exhilarated and breathing hard, she crossed the finish line on burning legs at a shade over forty-six minutes, a personal best.
Jo towelled off, feeling better than she had in ages. She was fit and strong, ready to be in the world again after a long period of emotional retreat. Her small family was thriving, her career nicely on track. Mellowed by a mild, pleasant summer unmarred by fire or flood, Sydney felt vibrant and optimistic. The year had started well, and Jo felt it was shaping to be a good one.
She could not have been more wrong.
Because eleven kilometres away, a strange and intense man was finalising his plan to execute a macabre tribute to the object of his overwhelming intellectual obsession.
His work would begin in three weeks’ time, and Sydney Town would be never be the same again.
FRONTISPIECE
eath presides.
The Anatomist has forsaken the professorial chair, and come down onto the floor beside the corruptible flesh. This very stance is a declaration: of war, of science. One hand is inside the ventilated abdomen, the other making a subtle point, but not for the benefit of the noisy crowd around him. He is gazing calmly out of the page, looking straight at the future. He is speaking to us. Speaking to me.
All around him bustle the chattering primates of his time: men of commerce and of politics; men of the book and of the cloth; worthies, voyeurs and hacks. The monkey and the dog of his predecessors’ dissections play innocently, displaced by the human corpse; the barbers and butchers stand idly by, banished by this impudent scholar, his own learned hands applied to the physical task. All have been deposed from their ancient roles of brokering ignorance, in favour of the Master’s determination to craft a new Anatomy: unmediated, palpable, empirical. They understand no more of this moment than does the cadaver.
A field of calm around the dissection excludes the commotion of the pedestrian and the drone of the self-important. There is only the candidate and the Master.
And the Protégé. Hemmed in by the crowd, above and to the left, near the naked man and his admirer. Peering between two fools debating anatomy without reference to the body. Who might he be?
Above them all, above even Death, a banner unfurled bears the legend:
Andreas Vesalius of Brussels,
Professor in the School of Medicine at Padua,
On the Fabric of the Human Body in Seven Volumes.
This is the frontispiece to the incomparable De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, the foundation text of modern anatomy, published at Basel in 1543 when Vesalius was only twenty-eight years of age. It not only secured the Master’s future – it immortalised him. Along with De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium of Copernicus, published that same year at Nuremburg, it is one of the most influential books in history.
The Fabrica’s break with the past is absolute. Its significance is not in its findings, impressive as they are: its revolutionary contribution is its method. Long before the Enlightenment, Vesalius abjures tradition and received doctrine, looking instead and only to the evidence before him. With this masterpiece, the Master ushers in the empiricism of the scientific age.
His approach is the very model of the new enquiry. He disdains theory and theology. He finds out for himself, learns from the source. He is calm, logical, unsentimental.
He is not afraid to get his hands wet.
His Protégé learns, and emulates.
Monday 30 April – morning
Detective Senior Sergeant David Murphy turned off Parramatta Road and drove up Glebe Point Road, past the fancy cafes and the old Valhalla Cinema, and up onto the butte of hard rock over sandstone that loomed above the surrounding lowlands. He turned into a dignified residential street and parked at the end, overlooking the awful redevelopment below that covered the old Harold Park harness-racing track.
He had to sit for a moment composing himself. He hated this place. The property developers were bastards, but they weren’t the problem. What lay directly beneath him through the rock was the problem.
His father had died down there, in the old metropolitan goods railway tunnel, back in the late seventies when Murphy was just a boy. The tunnel was half a mile of sheer determination dug by veterans of Gallipoli and the Somme to take freight off the passenger lines. It was now a ligh
t-rail commuter line for inner-west hipsters.
Murphy had heard a bit over the years about the murder of his old man, and a copy of the file had found its way to him soon after he’d joined the Force. Diarmaid Murphy had been an influential detective at a time when the New South Wales Police had been filthy all the way through, the genuine descendant of the colonial Rum Corps. Murphy didn’t know whether his father had been bent or straight, but either way it was crooked cops who’d got him.
Diarmaid Murphy had gone into the goods tunnel late one night – after the freight trains had stopped running for the day – to meet a fellow cop for whatever reason and taken a brace of police-issue bullets for his trouble. A train driver found the body early next morning; an investigation was launched but went nowhere, and media interest soon moved on. The Wood Royal Commission put the broom through the Force in the mid-nineties, but many of the sleeping dogs were allowed to lie. The case was open, technically, but cold as the morgue.
So all his life, Murphy couldn’t even drive over the Anzac Bridge without glancing across Blackwattle Bay and thinking of his old man. Of dirty cops on the take, selling out their brothers for coin. Brown paper bags full of cash and nylon sports bags full of heroin. Free roots and free booze; cheap TVs off the back of a truck. Dead hookers and dead addicts; dead civilians and dead police.
Of his mother bereft and grieving, and a five-year-old boy with no father.
So yeah, Murphy tended to avoid this end of Glebe.
Up top today, though, it was your perfect bright, crisp Sydney autumn day. Leaves on the turn and filling the gutters in auburn piles, but a clear blue sky and a warm sun tempered by a faint cool breeze. Murphy pulled himself together, got out of his car and walked past the forensics truck to his crime scene. He ducked under the crime-scene tape and passed a large sign on his way in that said KEEP OUT – CONSTRUCTION SITE.
He took his bearings inside the front entrance of the terrace house while slipping on a pair of disposable nitrile gloves. He was standing in a large, open room, inner walls completely stripped back to studwork and brick, floorboards exposed and recently sanded. A clear sheet of heavy plastic hung down from the ceiling in front of the studwork of the room’s former back wall. Straight ahead, a steep, narrow flight of stairs hugged the right-hand wall, its balustrade and a couple of steps missing.
Murphy grunted. Fucken home renovation: the latest great Australian obsession, along with cooking like an English wanker. People watched too much crap on television these days. What was wrong with footy?
‘Homicide!’ he yelled.
‘Come through, Spud,’ came back from beyond the thick plastic curtain. He knew the voice – it belonged to Dr Michael Kenworth, the most experienced scenes-of-crime officer in the state. He was a medically trained civilian attached to forensic services, working out of police headquarters at Parramatta. Naturally, everybody called him Mack.
A white shape approached the thick plastic veil from behind, which proved to be another SOCO in a paper crime-scene suit. ‘Morning, detective,’ she said, holding the curtain open for him.
‘Morning, Ange. I hear it’s a beauty.’
‘This one you’ve got to see for yourself. Unbelievable.’
Murphy raised his eyebrows: SOCOs rarely talked like that, and Angela had seen a fair bit. He crossed the former dining room, empty apart from a bar fridge with a kettle on top, through to a clapped-out kitchen: a mid-century bolt-on that had been last updated thirty years ago. This time, the owner was not mucking around. An internal door at the far end revealed a sparkly bathroom all tricked out in the latest gear. The kitchen itself was still a mess, but it was a mess with intent. The old cupboards had been ripped out, and work was underway on schmick new cabinetry. Murphy shook his head. Fucken madness.
‘G’day, Mack. What have you got for me?’
Mack was standing at the sink, his hands out of sight in the basin. He lifted his gaze over his glasses to meet Murphy’s eyes.
‘Afternoon, Spud.’ It being 10.47am, this was Mack’s way of giving Murphy shit for being late: since Mack was almost always at a crime scene before him, it was a familiar sledge. ‘Male, whitish, forty-odd, in good shape until the weekend.’
‘Any ID?’
‘Probably the owner, Anthony Williams, but it’ll take dental to confirm it. He’s not particularly intact.’
‘How so?’
‘Most of him is upstairs in the back room,’ said Mack, indicating the mottled ceiling directly above them, ‘but there’s bits of him everywhere, poor bastard.’ He lifted his hands towards Murphy, presenting the specimen they held like an offering.
Murphy recoiled. It was half a human arm, sawn off just above the elbow and pared right back, all gristle and bone with strips of meat hanging off here and there. ‘Christ, Mack.’
‘I know. Gets worse.’ Mack placed the forearm gently in the sink and nodded towards the draining board, where a tech was taking photos.
Murphy leaned in for a better look at the knuckled segment. ‘Jesus fuck, what’s that?’
‘Cervical spine,’ said Mack. ‘Neckbones. I don’t know what our man was looking for, but he was thorough.’
A voice came through from the front. ‘Mack, Tori found the skull-cap, in the upstairs bathroom. Picked clean.’ It was Detective Senior Constable Amy Chartier, who’d been on call overnight as Homicide’s first responder. ‘Wait till you see upstairs, boss,’ she said to Murphy as she entered the kitchen. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ Her appearance testified in favour – usually bronzed, vibrant and athletic, she looked wan, clammy and deflated by comparison. Chartier was maintaining her professional demeanour but it clearly wasn’t easy.
‘Who found him?’ Murphy asked her.
‘Day labourer named Greg Something, just before seven this morning. He’s been helping with the renovation; showed up as normal, but the door was locked and there was no answer. He jimmied the front window and went upstairs where he’d left off on Friday afternoon.’
‘Alibi?’
‘Avoca with the girlfriend’s family, all weekend. Unconfirmed at this point, but it’d be a lousy lie.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Harris took him for interview, if he can handle it. He’s not doing too well.’
‘No shit,’ said Murphy. He turned to Mack. ‘So, all this from the one body, you reckon?’
‘Yes. One of everything so far; no remainders.’
‘That’s something. But still, fucken butchery or what?’
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ said Mack. ‘It’s a charnel house up there. Soft tissue everywhere, and all the bones chopped up.’
Murphy watched Chartier step to the open window and take a deep breath of fresh air. Must be bad up there to unsettle her, he thought: she was one of his best, not easily rattled.
‘I tell you this,’ continued Mack, ‘he’s not an orthodox Jew or a devout Muslim.’
‘The vic or the perp?’
‘The perp.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘He underestimated drainage, big time. Five litres of blood goes a long way.’
They all looked up at the old brown patch on the ancient kitchen ceiling and shuffled out from beneath it. No point taking chances. ‘What about tissue samples?’
‘Nothing obvious so far,’ said Mack. ‘We’ve bagged a hell of a lot of material, as you’d expect on a construction site. We’ll do another full sweep and then go over it all in the lab. But it looks like he was careful. Nothing’s leaped out yet.’
‘Just one perp, you reckon? Or a team?’
‘Hard to say. The autopsy might tell us, based on the incisions. It’s a lot of work for one cutter, though.’
‘And what do you make of that?’ Murphy asked, gesturing to the forearm in the sink. It was stripped back so far you could see between the bones. The words ulna and radius floated into Murphy’s mind, unbidden.
‘I dunno, Spud. He’s cut all the muscle away very
carefully with a sharp knife, sturdier than a scalpel. He’s left some tendon attachments intact and cut others completely away, but it’s pretty delicate work. Then he’s sawn through the humerus to get the joint out so he can go even finer. Looks like he’s used the victim’s own circular saw, although it’s an extremely fine blade. Not quite surgical, but close. Harris tells me you wouldn’t normally see one like it on a building site. Our boy brought it with him.’
Murphy waved towards the chain of vertebrae sitting on the draining board. ‘Same for the other bits? Neck and skull?’
‘Looks like it. After he’s cut the bits out, he’s spent a lot of time on them in good light on a stable working surface. He’s worked over the lower cranium in incredible detail, after taking the lid off and clearing out the soft tissue.’ Mack turned to Chartier. ‘And apparently he’s taken his time with the top of the cranium, too?’
She nodded. ‘Same deal, in the bathroom sink.’
‘What about the rest of the body?’
‘He’s done the torso in situ, after he’s removed all the viscera, but you can see the fine cutting,’ said Mack.
‘Fuck me.’ Murphy shook his head.
‘Yeah, it doesn’t make a lot of sense,’ said Mack.
‘It’s homicide, Mack, it’s not meant to make sense,’ said Murphy. ‘If this shit ever starts making sense to you, let me know.’
‘You’d lock me up.’
‘Only to protect the community, mate,’ said Murphy. ‘So how long do you think it would have taken him, all up?’
‘A good while. It’s a pretty systematic operation.’
‘Could it be done in a day, say?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Mack. ‘More like all weekend.’
‘Bloody hell, that’s quite a risk, taking that much time.’
‘For sure, although the neighbours would be used to all the building noise.’