by Andres Kabel
Peter screamed and arched.
His assailants stood up. Hoarse chuckled. The two of them loomed over Peter, black shadows of death, one thin, the other thick, faint light framing their silhouettes.
The thin man bowed, hands behind his back.
“Lesson number one,” he said. “Lesson number two, I cut out your eyes.”
The hissed words penetrated into the deepest recesses of Peter’s mind. He jerked in terror and writhed away on his back.
Then Hoarse and the thin man were strolling away. As Hoarse turned at the car, a patch of light caught the left side of his face, smooth except for a depression where the ear should have been.
“Fuckin’ weed,” Peter heard Hoarse say to the thin man. They both laughed. Doors slammed. The engine revved, tires spun, and then they were gone.
Peter lay on his back, soaked, sobbing at the black roily sky. A drop of rain hit his face, then another, then the heavens opened. He sat up in the pouring rain, gasping at pain from his back and neck and knees. The broken little finger throbbed, though with less pain now. He felt it, loose as a bird’s wing, already puffing up.
“Help,” he cried as he struggled to his feet.
He was in the parking lot of a warehouse, two lampposts casting a feeble light onto uneven gravel. Utter emptiness and blackness otherwise, no sounds other than dull traffic somewhere far off. His Palm Pilot lay in a pool of water.
“Help!” he roared, standing hunched in the rain, cradling his left hand, snot and tears and water slicking his face.
No one answered. He pushed back his sodden hair and wept.
CHAPTER 17
Mick Tusk yawned over his mug of coffee. Eleven o’clock at night, already falling asleep. Another song started up over the speakers. That familiar organ-led riff, the precision drums, then Ian Gillan began singing, his voice moving from deep to screech with ease. At last a newie from Deep Purple, the icon rock band—“Abandon,” their first genuine release in years. Old men now, but as full of life as ever. Pity Ritchie Blackmore, the magical guitarist, had thrown another tantrum and left the band for the thirty-fifth time.
“Mikey, phone,” Dana called. “It’s Peter Gentle.”
The kitchen was full of the aroma of biscuits baking for a kindergarten stall. What did Einstein want that couldn’t wait until tomorrow?
“Mick.” The voice sounded strained. “Someone attacked me.”
“What?” Tusk’s tone drew a worried look from Dana. “What happened?”
“On the way home. A couple of them. They pushed me into a car and took me to a parking lot and… hurt me.”
“You’re fucking joking.”
“No joke, Mick.”
“You okay?”
“Yes. No.”
“Where are you? At the police station?”
“No, at home. I…I don’t want to go to the police. I’m quarreling with my father right now.”
Tusk could remember Trevor Gentle’s insistent style. “Hang on. I’ll be right there.”
Dana had hands on hips and a knowing look in her eyes. “Where are you going?”
Tusk rubbed Bully’s head as a farewell. “Just to Gentle’s place. Box Hill. The useless sod’s been beaten up.”
“It’s this case, isn’t it?”
“Could be, could be just local toughs.”
She kept that you-can’t-fool-me look on him as he kissed her cheek. The smell of cinnamon lingered in his nostrils as he drove through bucketing rain. Traffic was light, by 11:30 he was pulling into the Gentle driveway. Instant deja vu, though the clinker brick house was recognizably more careworn than he recalled from fifteen years ago. Front door open, presumably for him. Voices in the kitchen, the aroma of instant coffee disturbed by antiseptic. Gentle’s old man, Trevor, and his wife—what was her name?—in pajamas.
Gentle’s face shocked him. Pale and so thin. The brown eyes wide, not hooded as usual, a stunned look Tusk recognized as shock. A tangled mess of hair. Striped pajamas and a shiny bathrobe. Reedy body slumped in a chair, no sign of the usual manic twitching, glass of wine in his hand. Christ, a splint on the two smallest fingers of the left hand.
“Tusk.” Trevor rose to shake Tusk’s hand. “This lunacy has to stop. Can you talk my son into seeing reason?”
Tusk read the appeal in Gentle’s eyes, and signaled with his head: Out of here.
Gentle winced as he stood up.
“Hey.” Imperious Trevor. The wife wringing her hands. “Sit down and talk to me.”
“We’ll be back,” Tusk said.
Gentle led them down a dark hall to his poky bedroom, crowded with books and a computer. To Tusk it seemed unchanged from his teenage memories. Christ, he could recall pushing Gentle to try a smoke here.
“Big guy, am I glad you came,” Gentle said, after they sat down on the bed. “They’ve been at me for an hour.”
“They’re probably right.”
Tusk took Gentle’s injured hand, raised his eyebrows.
“A broken finger. The little one.”
Tusk heard out Gentle’s story. The poor dork angrily brushed away tears as he described the kicks and the finger-breaking. For a moment, Tusk felt like hugging him.
“When I saw no one would come to help, I walked out and found myself down Maroondah Highway a bit. I ended up walking home. Dad rang the family doctor, who set the splint. Mick, why?”
“Nothing else broken?”
“No, but my body and neck feel like they are. Answer me—who’s done this and why?”
Tusk felt calmer. Minimal damage, although Gentle wouldn’t see it that way.
“Someone wants to stop you from asking questions,” he said. “Someone with enough money to hire muscle. There’s a positive side to this. You must have done a good job today and really got up somebody’s arse.”
“Thanks a lot. I’ll try to get beaten up some more. The whole thing is so barbaric.”
“That’s one way to describe it. How’d they find you?”
“Easy. Telstra White Pages on their website. I checked a month ago, it has my change of address.”
“Now tell me again why we shouldn’t let the cops handle this.”
Gentle’s right hand gripped into a fist. “Don’t you see? We haven’t even got our licenses yet. The police will tear us apart. We could lose days.”
“What if they have another go at you? Doesn’t that worry you?”
“Of course it does.” Gentle shuddered. “The thin one said he’d cut my eyes out.”
“Calm down. That’s just a drama queen at work.”
But Tusk’s disquiet was rising again as he absorbed the events of the night. These hoods had been so businesslike…
“I’m scared, okay?” Gentle’s voice caught. He stuck his jaw out. “But we’re not going to stop. I won’t go to the police. Got that?”
Stubborn cunt. No budging him. Tusk held up a hand. “Okay, okay. It’s borderline. I’d hate to front up to the cops either. Now, Doctor Tusk prescribes sleeping in tom—”
“No can do. I’ve appointments at Scientific Money from nine, and Straw wants to see me at eight. Can you pick me up at 7:30?”
“Guess so. Two last things. One, tomorrow we work together, not apart. Two—tell me again, you reckon they were Italian?”
“Yes. At least, the first man was. Definitely.”
Tusk’s unease grew. He rose. “Get that beauty sleep, okay?”
“Mick? Thanks.”
“No worries.” Incongruously, a smile bubbled inside Tusk. “Didn’t I—”
“—say it would be dangerous? You’re so predictable.”
Gentle’s fleeting smile stayed with Tusk as he headed down the hall. A babe in the woods, he thought. And guess who’s got the baby-sitting job?
“Hey. One thing…” Gentle had come to the door. “There was something strange about the first man. I can’t be sure, they both did a good job in keeping their faces hidden, but he had something wrong with his ear. His left ear.”
Tusk’s gut tightened. Christ, who would have believed it?
“What do you mean, wrong?”
“As if the ear was really tiny. You know him?”
Something must have shown in his body language. Tusk felt a gamut of emotions. Triumph, for his memory was as good as ever. Rage, because right now he wanted to smash the bastard. And fear…
“Yeah, I may know the guy,” he said. “Something to talk about tomorrow.”
He headed straight out the front door.
“Did you persuade him to ring the police?”
Trevor was waiting on the small front porch. It was still pouring, water cascading off the porch roof. Trevor had been Assistant Commissioner of Police when he’d retired in June of the previous year. Tusk had wondered more than once whether he might have kept his job if “Rough” Gentle had still been there on that fucking day in November. Now Trevor seemed diminished, in the way that long-time cops went when they left the brotherhood. Tusk towered over him.
“No cops.” Tusk longed to be away, because the man was right, especially with this new info.
“I don’t approve of this gumshoe fantasy of Peter’s.” Rough Gentle’s voice rose. “For God’s sake, he’s an academic. No idea what the real world is like. And on his first day, he’s assaulted! This one’s for the coppers, Tusk, and you know it.”
Tusk bristled. He liked Rough, but the ex-boss was treating him like a cadet.
“He’s an adult now.” Tusk took a step back, rain plastered his head. “Most of it’s just scratches. What he needs from you is support, not bloody nagging.”
In the Peugeot, he dredged up an image of the one-eared scumbag’s face. Con Marcantonio, a beefy stand-up man with a record as long as his attention span was short. Problem was, Marcantonio wasn’t a contract man, he was a company man. Tusk smashed a hand on the dashboard. If he’d guessed right, and he knew he had, he knew the other assailant as well. Hatred and alarm welled up. Marcantonio frightened only the weak, like Gentle, but Pasquale Bertoli frightened even coppers. Tusk had interviewed him once, still remembered the hatchet face and cold eye-slits.
Thing was, Bertoli could only be described as a hit man, one of the smart ones who’d never been convicted. And Bertoli worked for Sergio Scaffidi, a crime boss in the north of the city. Scaffidi was very different from a couple of hoods roughing Gentle up. Scaffidi was organized crime, the full weight of it.
The oily, wet streets gleamed as he drove home. Gentle, he thought, what have you got us into?
CHAPTER 18
Sleep refused to come. Peter’s heart was a thick jungle beat, equal parts righteous anger and fear. The fear was easy to spot; he only had to hold out his hand and watch it flutter.
He heard voices over the ever-present television. Even without distinguishing words, he recognized the sounds of argument. Every part of his body ached in a concert of torment dulled by painkillers. He rose from bed and listened from the hallway.
“I won’t have it,” his mother was saying.
Peter sighed. He loved Mum, always had, but living with her these past two months had been hellish. He pictured her lean face and fiery eyes. No doubt she was pacing backward and forward in front of his father.
Peter had resisted moving back into brick veneer heartland, even as the months passed after losing his job. But after Christmas disappeared without a sniff of work, he had finally ceased pretending he could keep up the hefty mortgage on his city apartment. Egged on by his mother, he’d leased out the apartment and returned to his gloomy bedroom. He’d regretted it ever since, and registered his distaste by rarely staying home, other than to sleep.
“How many of our police friends are still married, Trev?” he heard his mother ask. “Tell me that. I’m one of the precious few who have stuck with it. Now I’m expected to start the whole cycle again with my son?”
Harvey Jopling had a theory that everybody needed one parent to hate. In Peter’s case, it was his father. He’d never grown to hate him, actually. But sometime in his teens Peter had crossed a line and disavowed everything about Dad: the police force, the disdain for pencil-pushers as Dad called them, the reverence for austerity, the hard line on nonconformity. It was never a policy decision as such, just a gradual and near-complete withdrawal of communication.
Peter had especially dreaded returning home and having to put up with his father in retirement. But retirement hadn’t suited Trevor Gentle at all, to Peter’s advantage. Dad was still sturdy, only a little thicker about the waist, and his black cropped hair had held most of its color. No, the only thing that had changed since he’d left the police force was his attitude. While at work he’d been a dynamo, always rushing off, always declaiming in public. Now he was silent, sipping whisky in the living room as he watched television with flat eyes, rarely moved by anything except his weekly get-togethers at the Retired Police Association. Which suited Peter fine.
There was a pause in the living room. Peter pictured his father preparing to agree. Considering how well Dad had done in his career, it always amazed Peter how his mother dominated the family. And just half an hour earlier, Dad had harangued Peter in concert with Mum.
But his father surprised him. “Emily, he’s grown now.” The gravelly voice sounded as firm as Peter had heard for months. “If he wants to mess with things he’s not born for, let him. I never could get him to change his ways, and I guess I never will.”
Well, well, well, Peter thought.
He went back into his God-awful bedroom and lay down on his sagging bed, under faded pictures of Fermat, Laplace, and other famous mathematicians which his parents had insisted on not removing.
I should have grabbed the wine bottle, he thought.
He drifted toward sleep, into a dream-memory he hadn’t experienced for years.
***
He was a boy, a skipping boy. The sky shone white and blue. Dad’s hand encased his, and the deep voice hummed as Peter skipped along a footpath lined with cars. His only thoughts concerned the ice cream he’d just shared over a plastic table and the jerky rhythm of his skipping. A joy to be here, right now, with his dad. Big, gruff Dad, chocolate smeared on his upper lip.
A bang punctuated the air. Dad wrenched his arm down. He saw Dad’s face right next to his, crouched behind a car.
“Dad, what—”
Another bang. A clang nearby and Dad’s grip was steel. Fear rose in Peter like motion sickness.
“Listen, Peter.” Dad’s voice was all hot breath, and Peter grabbed an arm covered with soft hairs. Dad pried him loose. “Just stay here. Low. Don’t make a single move. Can you do that for me?”
He shook his head, but was already alone, pressed against the warm car door. A rusty blemish scraped his cheek. He trembled and waited.
Then he heard voices running, heavy steps not at all like Dad’s. He curled into the smallest ball he could achieve, shaking. He’d wet himself.
“Bugger me, what have we got here?” A high whisper through panting.
Peter crushed himself lower. A hand grabbed his shirt. He whimpered. Smelled cigarette. The hand twisted and lifted him, and his writhing meant nothing. He screwed his eyes shut. This was a nightmare he’d never wake from, everything in him was braced for…
After that the dream was blurry, as if it was a dream after all. A harsh bang filled his ears, and the hand released him with a grunt and what Peter later recalled as a sigh.
Dad’s footsteps, Dad bellowing. Horrid smells. His body shaking so fiercely it filled his mind.
***
“Peter.”
“Jesus, Dad. You scared me.”
His father, straight-backed in his blue bathrobe and old brown slippers, held a wine bottle and two glasses. He’d always had the ability to move stealthily, to suddenly appear and disappear. Only the red spots on his cheeks signaled the quarrel with Mum. He sat down on the edge of the bed, idly fingering Peter’s latest Ruth Rendell paperback. Peter marveled at how his spotted hands were the only p
art of him to show his fifty-eight years.
The dream, Peter thought. Maybe that’s why I rejected Dad’s occupation. Ever since that episode, he’s represented violence and fear to me. Jesus, no wonder I was so scared tonight.
“Sorry about the fuss Mum and I made.” His father’s voice rasped. “This was just so unexpected. And Mum… well, she was thrilled when I quit the Force, and now this…”
“But—”
“No, I didn’t come to argue.”
Dad filled the glasses, handed one to Peter, and took a mouthful.
“All I came to say was good luck with the venture. Odd choice, but you always went your own way. All of you children did, it seems. Just remember, if you need any help, I’m the one who knows where all the skeletons are hidden in the Force. Just ask.”
“Thanks, Dad.” Peter was stunned. “Thanks a lot.”
When his father reached the door, Peter remembered Mick’s easy familiarity earlier.
“Dad? How well do you know Mick?”
A smile tugged at Dad’s mouth. “Well enough. A fine copper. I was the one who hired him. He came to the force late, but I knew a good man when I saw one. Became a homicide star. Pity about all the troubles.”
“Troubles?”
“No doubt he’s told you. Internal Investigations nabbed him on the shooting of a suspect. He got off, but they ended up retiring him soon after. He’d become obsessive, involved with the victims. Like I said, Peter, he’s a good man. Just watch that temper of his.”
Trust Mick not to tell me he’d shot someone, Peter thought. His eyes watered with fatigue, but his mind had begun to whir. He hunched over the computer on the corner desk, piled with investment and wine magazines, research papers, business bios, science fiction and crime novels. He logged onto the Internet, found his latest game of Diplomacy, checked out the battle situation.
Games felt trivial. He mentally reviewed what he’d gleaned in the State Library, certain of his instincts. How could he understand, really understand, why someone would want to kill Kantor, unless he understood the man’s mind? But he needed more general theory.
Surging with energy, he knelt on aching knees to pull out cardboard boxes of files and books from under the bed. He found the actuarial journals and quickly tracked down three papers explaining modern investment theory.