The Broken Ones

by Stephen M Irwin

  Oscar knew how those cracks were greased. Another reason Haig liked to arrive in person.

  “You gave Bazley pause for thought,” Haig said.

  “No respect for rank.”

  Haig looked Oscar up and down. “Coming from you, that’s quite rich.” He took one more puff, then threw the hardly smoked cigarillo into the fast-flowing gutter water. Oscar couldn’t help but watch longingly as the precious cylinder fizzed and floated away.

  “Bazley is young,” Haig continued. “He doesn’t understand why an officer would poison his own career to save a criminal.”

  Oscar met Haig’s stare. “But I’m sure he’s learning how to fast-track his career by becoming one.”

  Haig’s eyes were chips of blue ice. The soles of Oscar’s feet prickled, like he’d just stepped to the edge of a chasm. Then Haig turned, unlocked his cruiser, and slid into the driver’s seat. He took off his spotless cap, revealing a healthy pink scalp under closely cropped slate-gray hair. “Poor Mariani. Trying to lead the lost to safety with his little broken compass.” Haig’s car started with a purr, nothing like the asthmatic wheeze of Oscar’s sedan. He looked again at Oscar and smiled. “Touch one of my officers again, you might just disappear.”

  Haig closed his door. A moment later, the white cruiser slipped like a pale shark up the narrow street. Oscar felt eyes watching him and turned. The female detective with the scarred chin stood beside the metal gate. Kace was her name, Oscar remembered. She watched him with mild curiosity. He wasn’t flattered; she’d regarded the stabbed corpse of Darryl Tambassis wearing the same expression.

  “I hear they’re shutting you down,” she said.

  “I heard that, too,” he replied. He’d been hearing it for two years. He nodded at the graffitied fence. “What about the dogs?”

  “We’ll find someone to take care of them.”

  As if her curiosity were now satisfied, Kace looked away. Oscar noticed a graffito on the fence. It had been spray-painted through a stencil: it showed a cartoon ghost wearing a crown at a jaunty angle. Its grin was friendly, but instead of eyes it had dark, empty sockets. The jolly spirit was in intimate congress between the legs of a buxom woman whose own eyes were wide either in heavenly ecstasy or abject terror. The caption read, “Ghosts Fucking Rule.”

  Suddenly, from behind the fence came four cracker snaps of gunshots. Oscar jumped. Kace watched him, smiling coolly. The dogs had finally stopped barking.

  Neve was waiting near his car, her arms shoved deep into her pockets. Rain slicked her hair down onto the shoulders of her jacket. She was trying not to shiver.

  “We need to buy you an umbrella,” Oscar said.

  “I have an umbrella.” Her jaw was tight. “What we need is a prosecution.”

  Oscar unlocked the passenger door, then his own. The air inside the car was cold now, and their breaths condensed into fragile drifts of fog.

  “We had her, Oscar. Neatly painted into a corner.” He’d expected Neve to have calmed; instead, her words were clipped razor sharp. “She couldn’t afford a lawyer. Ten more seconds, she’d have cracked. We had her.”

  Oscar looked down the alley. The last police cruiser’s red taillights came on, and they disappeared down the narrow thoroughfare. He threw his hat on the backseat. “What good would it have done? We prosecute her for murder, she ends up in a cell with six other women, and that little girl loses her mother.”

  Neve nodded impatiently, as if she’d heard it all before. “Yeah, yeah. One less victim clogging up an overloaded system. But she stabbed him in the eye. She did murder him.”

  “I thought you Catholics didn’t believe in divorce.”

  It was a bad joke, and badly timed. Neve stared out the windshield, almost vibrating with tension. Oscar couldn’t recall ever seeing her quite so wound up. In the street, shadows were detaching from shadows. More rough trade coming out now: hookers and rent boys, black marketeers and thieves. Oscar put the key in the ignition; the starter motor ground dismally before the engine coughed and caught. “We’re fine. When did they convict Dixon? Week and a half back?”

  Neve looked at him. “Dixon was five weeks ago.”

  Oscar covered his surprise by pretending to adjust his seat belt. Had it really been five weeks?

  He felt Neve still watching him. “I know why you do it,” she said.

  “That’s enough,” he said quietly.

  “Letting these fucking criminals walk won’t undo what you did three years ago.”

  “Enough.”

  Neve wrapped her arms tighter around herself and stared at nothing. Oscar put the exhausted sedan into gear and eased out into the street. As he turned the wheel, his headlights picked out the young man who’d been watching him when he arrived. As Oscar drove closer, the boy took a shy half step back into the alcove. Ignore the dismal shit, Oscar thought. But he couldn’t help himself. After he’d passed the doorway, he glanced through the smeared window at the boy. Reflections of Oscar’s headlights fluttered over the youth’s pale face like white wings: a brief touch, then gone.

  Oscar pressed hard on the accelerator, keen to flee the whores, junkies, scarred children, and the dead.

  How nice not to smell smoke. No matter how much he hated returning to headquarters, there was always the one upside of filtered air. Coming here was like a respite in a clean-scrubbed oasis. Even the hospitals suffered rolling blackouts, but here in City Station the air was warm and cleansed of the harsh smoke tang that, over the past three years, had burrowed its way into almost every room, every brick, every piece of clothing, every pore. People burned anything to cook and heat, although most didn’t have a proper wood-burning stove, so many ended up accidentally torching their houses and themselves.

  He tried to engage Neve in small talk as they wended between the empty cubicles of the Industrial Relations Branch to his so-called department’s so-called office, but she remained silent. They reached a tiny corner desk adjacent to the emergency exit: two chairs, one old computer, a cluster of cell-phone chargers, and a hat stand Oscar had brought from home. There had once been a laminated sign that proclaimed the cubicle the Nine-Ten Investigation Unit, but one day the sign had simply vanished, leaving only four blue gobbets of Blu-Tack. The next day, even the Blu-Tack had disappeared. He hung his wet hat on the stand and switched on the computer. Its cooling fans clattered dispiritedly.

  He turned to Neve. “Listen—”

  “Back in a minute.”

  He watched her walk toward the far corridor, which led to the toilets. He sat. His in-tray held his payslip and an interoffice envelope, the kind scrawled with the names of previous recipients and sealed with string looped between two buttons. Oscar ignored them and typed a brief report of the Tambassis interview. With every word, he grew angrier. Haig and Neve were both right: Tambassis had strong motive, a piss-weak story, no lawyer. An easy conviction. There were few people whose minds had not been twisted when the ghosts appeared on Gray Wednesday. Many couldn’t cope with their new, ghastly shadows; hospitalizations for self-harm erupted, and psychiatrists and telephone helplines were overwhelmed. In the short time it took to understand that the ghosts weren’t leaving, suicide rates skyrocketed. And many began taking others’ lives. Violence and murder cases soared, and courtrooms became jammed with perpetrators who claimed that their ghosts “drove them to it.” There were stories of ghosts leading people to lost brooches and buried tins of money, so why not to murder? Clause Seventeen had been included in the Personal Sightings Act to exonerate people whose mental health had been genuinely fried by the appearance of the dead. At first, the courts had loved the clause: it was the perfect pressure valve for a justice system on the brink of explosion. But there lay the curse of Clause Seventeen—since nobody can see any ghost but the one that haunts him, if a suspect stuck firm to his story, who could argue that his specter didn’t drive him to kill? Courts and cops alike soon realized that blaming the dead was becoming the blanket excuse for murder and units like the Ba
relies were hastily created. It was Oscar’s job to sort the psychologically traumatized from the rat cunning. Yet here he was, signing another get-out-of-jail-free card. Not doing his job. He clicked Print.

  As the old Epson in the middle of the office wheezed into life, he felt eyes on the back of his neck and turned. The shadows near the stationery cabinets were deep; the outer corridor was dark. He was alone. The printer clacked loudly and paper began to hum through the machine. Oscar turned again to his desk, and leaned back in his chair. He had discovered that if he angled and twisted just so, he got a glimpse of buildings, and so could tell his father without lying that his office had city views. True, there wasn’t much to see; the skyscrapers were almost all dark spires, and only the occasional streetlamp worked. In the distance, near the Captain Cook Bridge, the glass flanks of a distant high-rise flickered an angry, wasp-wound red. Fire. Oscar waited for his cell phone to ring, but it slumbered in his pocket. Nine-Ten calls were becoming rare. Some uniformed cops simply skipped the protocol of calling the Barelies to a crime scene even if the suspect pleaded Clause Seventeen, and received no reprimand. Oscar wondered if he should have removed himself the day the sign disappeared.

  “On your feet, Mariani!”

  The thunderous yell at his shoulder made Oscar jump.

  Jon Gest was as big as his voice was deep. He was like some huge Victorian-era engine made flesh: a heavily cast machine of wide catenaries and lumpen mass, capable of grinding rock or pistoning tonnage without fatigue. Unstoppable. He was grinning.

  “Jumpy bastard. Guilty thoughts?”

  “About why your wife keeps calling, begging to be satisfied by a real man.”

  Jon’s grin faltered, and he sat heavily in Neve’s chair—it sagged precariously under his nineteen stone. “It’s true. Leonie knows.” He shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair. “My heart hasn’t been in the marriage since my true love rejected me.” He grabbed Oscar with hands the size of hams and planted a wet kiss on his cheek. “Love me, Oscar! Love me back!”

  Oscar pushed his friend away and wiped his face. “Idiot.”

  “No woman wants you. You’re wound up tighter than an eight-day clock. I’d be surprised if you could convince your one-eyed baldie to puke, let alone make a kitty shriek.” Jon chuckled and began hunting through Oscar’s desk drawer, flipping aside bulldog clips and spent batteries. “Where are they?”

  Oscar reached into the lowest drawer, pulled out a half roll of peppermints, and threw them to Jon. “So why the visit? Bored? DCP burning the midnight oil?”

  Jon worked for the Department of Civic Prosecutions. When he and Oscar had been reassigned from Ethical Standards, they’d been split up: Jon—with a law degree—was slid down and across to DCP. Oscar—with half an undergraduate degree in philosophy and three semesters in horticultural studies—slid even further to this tiny desk without a sign. Judging by Jon’s unpatched jacket and reasonably new shoes, he was doing okay.

  “Nope.” Jon chewed. “Looking for you.”

  “Aren’t you lucky?”

  “Au contraire, mon ami. Detective work. I detected that you were here. And speaking of here: here.”

  He handed Oscar a folded sheet of paper.

  “What is it?”

  Jon suppressed a smile and nodded for Oscar to open it. In Jon’s handwriting were a name and two phone numbers.

  “And this is?”

  “A job.” Jon smiled openly. “Friend of a friend told me. Cushy position, ranger service in the state forests up north. Decent super, sick pay, no stress, simple. Applications have closed, but my mate’s mate reckons they’re still open to hearing from the right person.” He nudged Oscar with a prodigious shoulder.

  Oscar stared at the paper as if it were a curiosity from another century, the purpose of which wasn’t quite clear.

  Jon leaned forward, excited. “It’s plant shit, your kind of stuff. You know, like your precious damn fruit trees but on a big scale. Easy work. I mean, the pay’s not great, but nothing runs on money anymore anyway, right?”

  Oscar nodded. “What about Neve?”

  “Neve’s smart. She’ll be fine.”

  Oscar looked at the phone numbers a moment longer, then up at Jon.

  “Couldn’t get me anything in DCP?”

  Jon’s expression faltered.

  “Oscar.” He sat back in his chair. “Man, sometimes … I just don’t know.”

  “Haig threatened me tonight,” Oscar said.

  Jon sighed. “Here we go.”

  “Oh, come on, Jon. Haig. Would you want to leave the service with him still here?” Even to his own ears, Oscar’s voice sounded childish and petulant, but he couldn’t stop himself. “We had him.”

  “We didn’t have him,” Jon said. His voice gained a hard edge. “We half-had him. Maybe quarter-had him. Then we totally lost him. I don’t want to go over all this again. Good Christ. He’s an inspector. He won.”

  “He tried to have you killed.”

  Jon shook his head, exasperated by a subject that had long ago become boring. “Look, one: I don’t believe that—”

  “Stabbed.”

  “—and two: so what? I’m here. If he did try, he failed. And now we’re out of Ethical Standards and we’re no threat to him. We’re safe. Isn’t that enough? I’m not saying the slate’s clean, but Christ, does it matter anymore? It’s a whole new world now. Everything’s different, everyone’s got grief. You especially, man, I know. But, seriously, you gotta move on.” He tapped the note with one solid finger and stood. To Oscar it felt like a wave lifting beside him. “I thought this was a way to help with that.”

  The door at the far side of the silent office opened. Neve entered, adjusting her holster and straightening her shirt. She saw Oscar and Jon, lifted her chin, and headed over.

  Jon looked down at Oscar unhappily. “Leonie’s birthday party. Sunday. Sevenish.” Before Oscar could speak, the big man was on his way out, greeting Neve in passing. “Detective de Rossa, looking beautiful.”

  “Sergeant Gest, looking married.”

  Jon grinned and ambled out of the office.

  Neve arrived at the desk. Her face was dry, but she’d missed a tiny patch where her mascara had run. The lights in the bathrooms weren’t good. Oscar congratulated himself: he’d let a murderer walk free, physically assaulted one of Haig’s detectives, pissed off his best friend, and made his partner cry. As Mrs. Tambassis had said: some detective.

  “It’s late, and we don’t get overtime.” Neve’s words were clipped.

  “We’re done,” Oscar said. “Could you just grab that from the printer?”

  While she was gone, he opened the interoffice envelope. Inside was a memo from the deputy commissioner. The budget review of State Crime Command, scheduled for next quarter, was being brought forward to next week. One telling sentence was highlighted in yellow: “All units must provide a two-page (max) summary of operations during the last financial year (i.e., arrests, charges laid, prosecutions), including person hours per.”

  Oscar felt his mouth go dry. Unemployment was running at twenty-five percent; state-funded institutions were acting like desperate field surgeons, cutting off useless limbs, and the police service was hacking with fervor. Budgets ran on statistics, and the Barelies’ statistics were less than favorable. As Neve had pointed out, they hadn’t brought in a prosecution in weeks.

  And whose fault was that?

  Jon must have caught wind of the advance review and had begun hunting about for a safety net for his former partner. Instead of gratitude, another flurry of dumb anger sloshed about inside Oscar. He didn’t need saving.

  “What’s that?” Neve nodded at the memo.

  Oscar folded the paper. “Reminder not to use the east elevators after nine.”

  She held out his printed report on the Tambassis interview. Oscar could see that her hand was trembling. “I don’t feel comfortable signing this.”

  He nodded wearily. “I didn’t ask y
ou to.”

  Oscar signed it, put it in the interoffice envelope, addressed it to the attention of Inspector Moechtar, and put it in the out-tray.

  “I’ll drive you home,” he said. “And, listen—”

  He looked around. She’d already left.

  It was payday, so Oscar found a working ATM watched over by a uniformed security guard who wore a new pistol in a polished leather holster. Oscar keyed in his PIN, did a quick calculation, then emptied all but the fortnightly mortgage repayment from the account.

  The traffic was thin, so it took only half an hour to reach his destination. At red lights on the way, he riffled through the banknotes, setting aside enough for gas, food, and the small tips and tiny bribes that kept this new world spinning. He put the remaining cash in a plain envelope.

  He pulled into a street lined with bare-limbed liquidambar trees, their twigged fingers poking at the rain. He parked in front of an unremarkable, boxlike house on stilts; the glow from a kerosene lamp warmed one window, but it was not inviting. Oscar left the engine running, went to the mailbox, and slid the envelope in—it made a pitiful slap as it hit the bottom. As he turned, he saw movement in the yellow-lit window. A dark figure stood there looking down at him. Oscar felt his heart beat a bit faster. The figure watched him a moment longer, then slid the curtain shut.

  Oscar felt relieved to drive away. As he did every time.

  A quarter of an hour later, he stopped the car in front of a metal shutter door that was rusted and covered with graffiti. The garage was at the side of what was once a tapas restaurant but was now—like so many thousands of buildings—a boarded-up shell. Oscar rented the garage from the former restaurateur because his own tiny house a few hundred yards away had no off-street parking. He unlocked and lifted the shutter. The metallic clatter was loud in the empty street, and he looked around to see if the noise had attracted anyone. The street remained still, no movement other than the steady tumble of drops and the slosh of black water in gutters. He drove the car inside, dropped the shutter, and clicked the brass padlock shut. He pulled his hat hard over his head, shoved his hands into his pockets, and strode out onto a footpath that was cracked and overgrown with lush weeds.