THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER

by Michael Smith

  “Yeah?” Harris reached into his pocket and lit a cigarette.

  “Have you ever come across an Ed Bickle?”

  “He goes by Shotgun Ed. He’s always got that fucking thing on him. He walks around in an overcoat in the height of summer. To conceal it, you know?”

  “He’s been distributing smut for a while. Disgusting filthy stuff. Recently, the models have been getting younger and younger.” Prince looked stern.

  “How young?” Harris was listening closely.

  “Too young.” Prince nodded. The subtext was clear. “Needless to say. A trip to the country won’t cut it. I came to you because I know how you feel about this sort of thing.”

  “Clean or dirty?”

  “Fire and fucking brimstone,” Prince spoke quietly, the sound of the rain falling on the roof almost drowned him out. “Scorched earth.”

  If the conversation with Prince hadn’t been sobering enough, the experience of climbing twelve flights of steps to the top of a Redfern housing commission building was. With each step he took, the enormity of the situation weighed upon James Harris. He hadn’t fired a gun in anger in fourteen years. He’d hoped he would never have to again. But child abuse was abhorrent. Lower than low. It demanded swift and decisive action.

  After climbing the stairs, he pulled the collar of his coat up and the peak of his flat cap low. He walked quickly without rushing. He didn’t know who was hiding in one of the commission block’s many shadowy nooks and crannies. He didn’t want to look out of place, he didn’t want to draw a second glance. His was a face that people didn’t quickly forget.

  The external corridor of the housing commission building seemed to go on forever. Uniformed door after uniformed door. Blocked-out window after blocked-out window. It was a well of depressing constancy, void of any manner or character. Those cheap high-rise buildings should never have been built. They were slums dreamed up by an architect who would never have moved his own family into them. But if there is one proven way of dealing with a country’s poor, disenfranchised people, it’s by cramming them into a ghetto and forgetting about them.

  It was a frosty night. As Harris stood outside Ed Bickle’s flat, he watched his breath turn to steam the moment it hit the cold air. Harris hesitated by spending a moment looking over the Sydney skyline. It was a sea of lights that heralded the interconnected nature of modern life. To Harris, it was a beautiful visage that belied the city’s uglier, and altogether truer, nature that lay beneath. It was a lonely place, filled with people, devoid of community. The building itself cast a dark shadow on the city, nothing good or pure would grow within that shade.

  Before I advance and tell you how Harris kicked the door down, and kick the door down he did, I’d like to remind you of Ronnie Prince’s words. Fire and brimstone. Scorched earth. What comes next is unpleasant. You’re clever enough to know that Harris came out of it on the other side, given that his experiences in ‘63 constitute a large part of this tale. But don’t be rash enough to assume he came out of this unscathed. The scars he gained in Bickle’s flat stayed with him for decades. For those with an understandable dislike of bloodshed, take this opportunity to avoid it.

  Harris put his large boot through the door and the cheaply manufactured piece of shit flung off its hinges. He didn’t enter the long corridor that lay within, he stood there a moment with his revolver raised. Ready to shoot Bickle if he came out blasting. It wasn’t Bickle who walked out the nearest door. It was a young girl. She couldn’t have been any older than 12, maybe 13. She walked out the door of the bedroom in nothing other than her knickers. Harris placed a finger to his lips and ushered the girl back inside the empty bedroom. She didn’t make a sound. She wasn’t there voluntarily. After she’d pointed him towards the living room at the end of the corridor, he could feel her willing him on.

  Harris moved down the corridor, checking each room he passed. He moved slowly, taking care not to make a sound. He needn’t have worried. It wasn’t floorboards he was walking on. It was wood patterned lino on slab concrete. His footsteps were as silent as the flooring was tacky and cheap. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. A TV was playing loudly in the front room.

  Upon turning the corner into the living area quickly, he was confronted by squalor. It was hard to tell the colour of the carpet given the lights were off and the blood all over it. The walls were covered in filth, and the depraved ravings of a lunatic had been scrawled in blood. Ed Bickle had fallen asleep completely naked in the armchair. The fucker’s legs were spread open revealing his nasty little pock marked cock to the world. As he saw it, Harris had to fight the urge to kill Bickle quickly just so he could get the fuck out of there as quickly as possible.

  Ronnie’s words rang around his head. Fire and brimstone. Scorched earth.

  Harris had time on his side. There was a bottle of whisky at Bickle’s feet and a needle sticking out of his arm. He wasn’t going anywhere. He likely wasn’t waking up. Harris looked around the room for something, anything that would help him send a message. There was a smear of what looked like excrement across the TV. It couldn’t obscure the huge presence of Christopher Lee’s Dracula looming in a doorway. The man’s gravitas was of such intensity that it felt like he was a third man in the room. There are very few cases of three men being in a room, and Dracula being the least scary of the three, but this room was one of them. Harris didn’t want the distraction; he leant down and turned the television off. As he got closer he noticed what looked like excrement, smelled like excrement.

  When Harris saw Ed’s prized shotgun, he saw the opportunity to send a clear and meaningful message. That double-barrelled, life-vanquishing implement had given Ed his nickname. It had helped him carve out a fierce reputation as one of New South Wales’ premier bank robbers. At one time, he’d been well respected. But he’d come out the wrong side of a spell in Long Bay Jail, a changed man.

  By 1959, he was despised by anyone with their finger on the pulse of the criminal underworld. He’d got tired of robbing banks and had started getting involved with the seediest of crimes. He’d tried to take control of prostitution in the city by threatening violence upon streetwalkers. They either joined him, or they were cut. No one likes a disfigured prostitute. He doled out plenty of career-ending wounds. This behaviour had seen him go head to head with Ronnie Prince. Prince knew which way his bread was buttered. He treated the women in his employment well. He recognised he made a lot of money from their toil, and so he kept them safe, he took a small percentage, and he punished anyone who dared to mistreat them. When Prince and Bickle had waged war earlier in the decade, it was only another spell in Long Bay Jail that had kept the madman alive.

  After another period of rehabilitation in prison, Ed’s fall from grace was complete. Upon release, he moved out of the murky grey areas in which his peers lived and jumped headlong into the downright indecent. He moved into the forbidden world of child exploitation. For all of our moral bankruptcy and our penchant for mistreating people, it was commonly accepted that children were left out of it. Word was that Ed had made the acquaintance of a vile politician who had asked an evil favour of him. Ed had obliged him by giving him access to a young lad in Darlinghurst. The first time he did it was stupid.

  It became evil the instant that Ed decided that his mistake was an opportunity to corner an untapped market. The politician had friends, friends in politics, in law, in medicine, in journalism, in television, and in the church. Well paid, well respected members of the community with an unspeakable urge, an inexcusable itch that needed scratching. That manner of behaviour couldn’t be tolerated. That degradation belonged in the Dark Ages.

  So, you should feel no sadness when you read that Harris took the double-barrelled shotgun that had made Ed a local legend and he forced it into the sleeping man’s mouth. Nor should your mind leap to the conclusion that he pulled the trigger and killed the man quickly. No, James Harris made his violent lesson quite clear that night. He wrote it in blood, bone and other
such human remains. Such was the force the standover man used to jam the dual barrels into the sleeping man’s mouth, it knocked half of Ed’s teeth out before he even woke up.

  But wake up he did. He came to and felt an excruciating pain in his mouth. A burning sensation scattered across his gums where broken teeth had crumbled and fallen into the blood pooling onto the floor of his mouth. The burning of his gums was somehow soothed and exacerbated by the feel of cold metal.

  Fear flashed across the whites of his eyes when took in the sight of a giant standing over him. Blood and saliva were rapidly pooling. If he didn’t act, he would drown or choke, he could quite tell. He grasped at the barrel, but the moment he did, Harris just pushed it further into his mouth and towards the back of his throat. This triggered the wretch’s gag reflex. Ed vomited two bottles’ worth of Wild Turkey whisky. But, given the blockage in his mouth, there was simply nowhere for the whisky and bile to go. He swallowed furiously. In panic, he breathed in.

  Harris watched as the man before him began to drown. Bickle’s eyes were filled with a furious mania. His arms swung wildly. His hands clawed at the shotgun but it was no use, Harris was too strong. Ed was inching towards death in the midst of the coughs, splutters that terrorised him. His desperate attempts to prolong his life were failing.

  Then the situation took an unexpected turn. Ed stopped fighting as he reached a state of a calm serenity. His death was inevitable. His coughing and choking became slow and gentle. Harris saw something he did not expect to see: he saw the sadness and regret in Bickle’s eyes. His work was done. Harris pulled the trigger. Shotgun Ed was no more, what remained was a splatter of fluids on the buckshot-ravaged wall.

  Chapter 32

  Ronnie Prince was tired. 1964 had all the hallmarks of a disastrous year. The cancer was back. Not that he’d told anyone. He was carrying the weight of the world upon his once broad, now aging shoulders. He had no idea how long he had left. He had told the doctor he didn’t want to know. He’d declined treatment. He’d barely survived the last bout. Another orchidectomy was out of the question. He would die as at least half a man. But he could feel his condition deteriorating quickly. His soreness was chronic and bone-deep. Every morning he woke, he felt a little weaker and more tired than when he’d turned in the night before.

  Enough was enough. He wouldn’t fight another gangland war. He had enough of murder. Regardless of the bad character of the man rising up against him, that man had a life to live. Ronnie did not. To fight would be spiteful. Of all the opponents he had faced, it was old age, nature and his own fucking withering gonad that turned out to be the enemies he could not best.

  He’d spent a couple of days holed up, surrounded by the dwindling numbers of his army. He hated it. It was no way to live. It was no way to die. He would go about his business and when he noticed a shadow approaching behind him, he would stand straight, fix his tie, and clench his fist ready for one last turf war, the conflict he would spend eternity fighting with the devil. The devil didn’t have a fucking chance.

  His mother, Emily Prince, had been living in a care home for the best part of a decade. He felt some guilt about that. He adored the woman, and he’d have done anything for her. But by God did she clash with the new Mrs Prince. The moment she’d pulled a kitchen knife on his wife while they bickered about how best to do the potatoes at Sunday lunch, she was gone.

  He was operating under no misapprehensions when he walked the cobbles to see his mother that day, he was going to say goodbye. He needed an army of bodyguards for a trip to a damn nursing home, that’s how bad it had become. Ned’s murder had been unexpected, he was a valuable asset who offered no manner of threat whatsoever, he ought simply to have transferred to the new administrator of Sydney’s underworld. His death showed that no one was off limits. Who Watson could get to, he would get to. And that rattled everyone. Prince’s men had stopped looking like the menacing force of yesteryear, they looked like scared little schoolboys. Their numbers were dropping, presumably because they’d been paid off or killed. Prince didn’t mind, he was sure that whoever killed him would be one of his own.

  When Prince stumbled on the stairs into the building, his men looked at him in disgust. He was falling to pieces. It wasn’t one of his overpaid minders who came to his aid, it was a nurse walking past the entrance. “Are you ok, Mr Prince?”

  “It’s been a long hard week at the end of a lifetime of long hard weeks,” Prince smiled at the woman and her heart melted. He’d been the most handsome man in Sydney in his youth, in his old age that translated into the kind of face you just want to be your grandfather. “I’m fine, love, thank you. Just feeling a little run-down.”

  As Ronnie hit the top step, he took a tumble and spilled to the ground. He’d fainted. His minders glared at him. He was showing himself as weak. That made them look weak. Several of the men left at that very moment. It was nurses and orderlies who rushed over to help Prince inside the building.

  Once they’d helped him into an armchair in Emily’s room, they insisted on taking his blood pressure. Clearly it was unnecessary, but he wasn’t about to tell them that. He grumbled and asked them to leave him alone. They refused. He loved the nurses who looked after his mother. His underlings in the criminal underworld were angels with sycophantic smiles to his face, behind his back they were demons who sharpened their claws while waiting to pounce. Not the nurses. They didn’t care for his reputation. They shut him up, warned him about his blood pressure, and gave him a cup of tea.

  There were two armchairs either side of a small coffee table. His was in the corner, looking out across the rest of the room. The second chair was angled towards the window that looked out over Darlinghurst. It was in this chair that Emily Prince was sitting. She was ancient, or at least she looked it, she was probably only in her eighties at the time, but she’d lived a difficult life. She’d escaped the razor wars of the 1920s by the skin of her teeth. Once she’d been the hardest bare-knuckle boxer in Sydney, but by the mid 1960s she’d vacated her body. The light behind her eyes had gone. Part of her had simply moved on to the next place. What remained was the shell of a once great human. Her son was sitting all of five feet from her. She had no idea.

  “How’s she been?” Ronnie asked a nurse as she poured a cup of tea.

  “Same as ever. Good days and bad days.” The nurse smiled sympathetically. Her bedside manner was comforting. It’s fair to say that nursing is the closest thing to God’s work you can find on this earth, and nurses are no less than a heavenly host of angels. “But she talks about you… And your father.”

  “She talks about my father?” Prince raised an eyebrow. His father had abandoned his mother some sixty years earlier.

  “She’s having a good day today. She’ll be pleased to see you.” The nurse squeezed his arm before leaving the room. Prince smiled as he watched her leave. He should have had a daughter, he thought to himself, but then would she have turned out like the girl that walked out the room? Likely not. If she’d turned out like her father, it was probably for the best that he remained childless.

  He turned his attention to his mother, “Happy birthday, Mum.” Prince looked around. “I brought you some flowers. But I think I might have lost them. I tripped on the stairs. Sorry I haven’t been around in a little while.” His mother didn’t look at him, she kept staring out of the window.

  Ronnie took out a well-worn, paperback book and flicked through the pages before finding what he was looking for. Prince looked up at his mother. Nothing.

  “And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the giant lying dead under the tree, all covered in white blossoms.” Ronnie looked up at his mother once he was finished reading.

  Throughout, she hadn’t given the appearance that she was listening at all, but a single lonely tear rolled down her cheek. Maybe on some level, inside that Alzheimer’s riddled mind within the time-ravaged body, she was still there. He put his hand on his mother’s arm. She flinched as she felt the conta
ct, she wasn’t alert enough to have identified the source of the feeling, but she’d felt it.

  “We did alright ma. A tough Brummy lady from the mean streets of Snow Hill and her Aussie son. We did alright.” Prince paused. “Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to make you proud. Because you were my Mum… And my Dad. I remember when Don Lambert stole my jumper at school. You looked me in the eye and told me if you heard he’d stolen from me again you’d kick seven shades of shit out of him… And then me.” Prince laughed. She had meant it. The best parents back then were the parents who kicked your head in to teach you a lesson, not just for fun.

  Mrs Prince continued to look out of the window. It wasn’t the idle gaze of a person with time to waste; she was searching for someone. Though her body was old, withered and well on its way to being obsolete, there was still a strange manic energy behind her vacant eyes. “He’s coming back to me.”

  “What? Me Dad?” Prince was delighted to see his mother talking. He was a little less than thrilled that it was about his waste-of-space father, a career soldier from the Northern Territory who’d fallen in love during a brief spell in Britain. But once he’d moved back home, what did he want with a young Birmingham streetwalker?

  Emily looked at Ronnie with a strange kind of expression, she couldn’t see him, she was looking through him. “When he gets here, he’ll look after us.”

  “You looked after us. I looked after us.”

  “Oh, your father always knew how to look after me. He was such a nice young man.” Mrs Prince went back to staring out of the window at the busy street.

  Ronnie slumped into the armchair, entirely deflated. “I think I’m going away for a little while, Ma. Might go up to the North. Get some sun,” Ronnie lied.

  “Ta-ra then, dear.”

  “Oo-roo, Ma.” Ronnie cleared his throat and wiped his eyes.