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

by Michael Smith

  Tilly clicked her tongue on her teeth in disappointment, “Rumours.”

  “Photographs actually,” Elsa corrected. “Photographs that will bring his skeletons tap-dancing out of his closet.”

  Chapter 41

  “How do you live out here?” Lescott asked Charlie as he scanned the dry red sea that enveloped them more and more as they left the town behind. It was beautiful in its desolation but it looked incredibly unforgiving.

  “It’s good country. Trees for shelter, big rocks for shade, creeks and billabongs for water. There’s normally plenty of food. Been Arrernte country a long, long time. My mob came later, from the west. From in the shadow of the rock. When the piranpa took our land, he tried to send us up Pamayu way. You people call it Newcastle Waters round there. Mowan said no. The Arrernte took us in. That’s how we live here.”

  “Newcastle Waters?” Harris, who had been quietly looking out of the window at the otherworldly landscape, jumped into the conversation. He’d heard that name before.

  “We’ll speak about it later.” Lescott decisively put a pin in his partner’s inquiry. Clearly that was a larger conversation than they had time for at that moment. “Charlie… You walk this distance into town every day, to work?”

  “Nah…” Charlie laughed. “I walk it twice. No good doing it once, is there? Then I’d be stuck in town.” They had travelled at least nine or 10 miles from the station and out into the outback. That would be at very least five hours trekking under the sun, just to go with Hawke’s bad breath and ugly racism. Charlie pointed off into the desert to the side of the road. “We’re here.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  Charlie had been doing this the entire trip. They’d pass something in the desert and he would point out to it with a chuckle or a sigh. Lescott and Harris would follow his gaze only to see another patch of desert that looked much like all those that surrounded it. This time, Lescott was confused. Was he supposed to turn off the road and drive straight through the dunes and into the emptiness?

  “You’re not supposed to,” Charlie smiled as he opened the door and hopped out the slowing, but still moving car.

  Harris placed a firm hand on Lescott’s shoulder to stop him exiting the car as it came to a standstill. “Newcastle Waters?”

  “It used to be a cattle station up by Elliot, a little town between here and Darwin, they opened up a medical institute up there sometime around the start of the century. It’s run by one of the old Universities. Medical testing on human patients, that sort of thing.” Lescott grabbed his fedora from the backseat of the car and fanned himself. There was bite in this day’s heat.

  “Aboriginals?” Harris asked, knowing the answer before it came.

  “B-I-N-G-O… They used to pump them full of toxic materials, mercury and such, to cure syphilis or whatever else it was that they’d given the subjects in the first place. It happened in a few locations around Australia. All in the name of progress.”

  “I saw something about this in the paper. I’m sure of it.”

  “There’s always fundraisers back home. The Beaumont Institute wrangles together the rich and powerful, in their tuxedos they sit down on the finest chairs, eating the finest foods, while they discuss how best to make the finest mess of society that they can.”

  When Harris and Lescott did exit the car, they couldn’t see Charlie. He’d disappeared amongst the dunes, the shrubs and the spindly bush fire ravaged trees of black and silver. “Are you starting to get the feeling that maybe this is a bit bigger than us?” Harris asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just wanted to stop a bad man doing evil things. Everywhere we turn we find a new sign that it transcends that. It’s like the entire course of this country’s history and future is hell bent on the destruction of a people.”

  Lescott nodded his head and he began to walk through the sands and away from the road. “You’re right. It’s bigger than us. That’s why we’re doing this. There are people of every colour who would die to see it stop. We’re doing this for them. So, we need to be bigger than ourselves.”

  The desert that lay ahead of them appeared empty, still and devoid of life. The untouched ancientness of the place was overwhelming. It looked like a postcard from Mars. They could neither see nor hear any sign of the man who was leading them away from the familiar comfort of the road and into the unknown dangers of the bush. With every click and rattle from a cicada underfoot, both men panicked about snake bites. They were a long way from medical help.

  Having walked for several hundred metres, they realised the desert wasn’t as flat as it had appeared from the roadside. Its soft, rolling undulations had tricked them. They could now no longer see the road, it could no longer see them. When they had just started thinking that perhaps Charlie was playing some trick on them, leaving them in the desert and stealing the car, they saw it. An encampment ahead. The uneven nature of the land provided a shelter in the form of an optical illusion. They understood what Charlie had meant. They weren’t supposed to see it. The mob were using their geography to protect themselves from outside influence.

  The settlement consisted of perhaps 20-30 shelters of varying sizes. The shelters were made from bark, twine and the branches of trees. Then there were larger structures which seemed built to house various functions of life, one for cooking, a school, a rest area etc. The structures were all disposable, but they looked strong and the shade they provided was staggering. The day’s heat dropped considerably in their shadow. Regardless, out there, it looked like a hot, dry existence.

  Evidently, Charlie had walked ahead and left his white companions behind deliberately. When Harris and Lescott approached, they were met by a wall of distrusting eyes. They found the young man arguing with a group of men in the middle of the township. The two men didn’t understand a word of the language, so they couldn’t follow the heated conversion with any manner of accuracy. But they could see it was not going Charlie’s way.

  The tribe was missing a young boy. The police had been separating children from families for decades. It made sense that they would not be warmly welcomed. But this felt wrong. Harris and Lescott, regardless of their good intentions, had entered country without permission. It was a dangerous situation. The men were angry. They were in possession of their clubs and spears. “This is a bad idea,” Lescott said quietly. “We should go.”

  “No,” Harris argued, “We need to see it through. They deserve help, or at least to tell us to fuck off in no uncertain terms. If nothing else, we can do that for them.”

  Charlie’s arguments were now falling on deaf ears. The group of men had begun to move away from the boy and towards a campfire nearby. But Charlie was in full possession of the courage of his convictions. He simply wouldn’t let it drop. He followed. He shouted. He shoved. The latter was a mistake. It seemed the man he had shoved was the leader of the group. He spun on his heels and he gave Charlie a shove of his own. Charlie was sent sprawling to the floor. When the aggressor saw his kin fall to the ground in a heap, he became all the more frustrated. He wasn’t a bad man, he wasn’t a violent man. But the situation was fraught with a bitterness born of helplessness.

  Now he looked at Harris and Lescott. They could see he felt bad about harming young Charlie. He knew his anger was misplaced. It was better aimed at them. They could see that he blamed their outside influence, simply the latest in a long line of intrusions. He dropped his club and his spear. He charged upon them with a furious roar. As he moved closer, they saw his anger came from a place of hurt. Tears fell from his face as he covered the ground. Before he could reach his target and barrel into them, he was tackled by several of his tribe. There, on the ground, amongst the blood red dirt, he struggled with those who held him back until there was no more struggle left in him. At last, tired and spent he let out a blood curdling wail from the pit of his stomach. It rang through the desert, disturbing fauna and flora alike.

  It was then that Harris and Lescott saw
that this man was the missing boy’s father. There was nothing that they could do to help. Some wounds are too deep to mend. White Australians, and the English colonists before them, had been offering “help” and “protection” to Aboriginals in one form or another for around two hundred years; it hadn’t done them any good to this point.

  When they got back to their car, they were met there by the sight of one of the tribe waiting for them. They didn’t recognise this man. He hadn’t been back at the encampment. Not as far as they could tell. This was an elder. A greying man of lean and sinewy build. His beard dropped down to his sternum. His face was weathered and left with deep crags. The whites of his eyes were yellow. This man had lived a long life in the dirt and under the sun. He didn’t move as they approached. He was quite still.

  “My nephew tells me you two fellas have come to help. I have no reason to doubt that. Nor do I have call to trust you.”

  “Listen, Mr…” Lescott went to speak.

  “No. Boy. Between the mother’s sobbing, the father’s wailing, and Charlie’s desperate denials, I have heard quite enough. So, you listen to me. And you listen well.”

  “We just want to help you find Jarrah,” Harris pleaded.

  The elder sighed. “This is not your place. This is not your problem to fix. Indeed, there is no fixing it at all. The boy is gone. He’s with the ones who came before. In the place we all go. During the day, we hear his voice on the desert breeze. At night, we see his laughter in the stars as he plays with the seven. You seem like good men, if a little broken, so I believe when I say to you… Go now. Do not come back. You will do what’s right.”

  Chapter 42

  George Watson was bored. That was just like George. He’d been pushed into something he didn’t fully understand by people with a far better vision of the bigger picture than him. He’d ended Ronnie Prince’s life thinking someone would turn up to his door, they’d hand him all of the riches in the world, and give him carte blanche to do just about anything he wanted. But that wasn’t the way things worked. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. The underworld didn’t believe in Third Reich-era totalitarian dictatorship, it relied upon the brand of democracy they favoured in the Golden Age of Piracy. It was the captain’s privilege to lead until he was no longer deemed worthy. But then you couldn’t take leadership from him at the point of a cutlass. There would be a vote.

  George had managed to secure several of Ronnie’s smaller businesses, but the rest remained in the limbo of escrow while a power struggle ensued. He’d been in meetings ever since he’d put a bullet from Prince’s brain. He wouldn’t have uttered it out loud, but he was beginning to regret his actions. He wanted to be drinking the finest whisky, smoking the most expensive cigars, surrounded by the country’s most beautiful celebrities and influential politicians. Instead he was having to humour every tin-pot gangster and washed-up has-been the city had to offer. Demanding an audience was every man, woman and their dog who owned a two-room brothel or felt they had a crooked policeman in his or her pocket.

  Behind the desk in the office of the Darlinghurst Hippodrome, he was making his way through stacks and stacks of paperwork. Fucking paperwork. He’d been told not to kill Ned. He’d been warned that all of this damned bureaucratic administration was his meat and drink. But he had done it anyway. Watson’s brother-in-law, a probate lawyer, was overseeing his empire’s aggressive expansion. A short, balding chap who said things like “Sign this; here, here and here. Initial and date this. Sign this. Sign and date this and sign this here and here and there.”

  Watson looked up at the man. His words were as nails across a chalkboard. “Tell you what. Why don’t you learn how to sign for me? And then you can take care of this.”

  “Well. That would be forgery,” his brother-in-law protested. “That’s illegal.”

  “Do it. Or the police will find your sister in a ditch next week.” Watson smiled as the square gathered up the paperwork and left the office as quickly as he possibly could. George Watson’s problem was that he was a man born in the fires of cruelty. Like the Samurai lords of 15th century feudal Japan, he’d fought his way, tooth and nail, to a bloody peace. But in times of peace, he knew not what to do with himself.

  Lenny and Stan, his meathead accomplices, were sitting across from him on a sofa. It was a two-man sofa at best. And they were both bigger than your average man. They were two of the biggest meanest Painters and Dockers to have ever darkened Sydney’s harbourside. In such close proximity, they were, quite literally, rubbing each other up the wrong way.

  Watson looked up at a portrait of Ronnie Prince that he had placed upon the wall. So sacrilegious was Watson that he’d put the man in the ground and put his picture up on the wall in tribute. The picture had been taken in the late 30’s when Prince was in his prime and leading the city. Watson had never noticed it before, but there was a sadness on Prince’s face. “Heavy is the head…” Watson muttered.

  “Need a paracetamol, boss?”

  Watson looked down at Lenny and Stan, he couldn’t tell which of them had asked, they sounded equally gruff and dim-witted. “Just be better than you are, you fucking idiots. And bring me James Harris. Why hasn’t he turned up with his tail between his legs?”

  “No one’s seen hide nor hair of him. Skipped town I heard.” Lenny shrugged.

  Stan shook his head. “Spotted in Adelaide a couple of days ago. Nothing since.”

  “Get him back here. I want him on his knees, grovelling. What’s next?” Watson asked, making no attempt to hide his boredom or contempt for the situation.

  “Matilda Devine and Elsa Markle are waiting outside, boss.”

  “Fucking hags.” Watson slammed his fist on the table. “Send them in.”

  Watson stared at Devine and Markle. He could see they’d been scheming. He didn’t like it. Not one bit. But he was operating under the misapprehension that anyone without a scrotum was no threat whatsoever. That said, he didn’t like the way Tilly was looking at him. She’d been more than handy with a razor back in the 1920’s; it seemed the tendency hadn’t quite left her and she kept staring hungrily at his neck.

  She was quite a sight. All peroxide hair and a mouth filled with lipstick-smeared teeth.

  Every time she took a sip of her drink it sounded like a bath being emptied. When she laughed her cackling laugh, it filled the air and trailed off before ending with a short sharp snort that shook the room. She was a really repulsive woman. But she did still have some influence. He wasn’t a fool; he knew that Tilly Devine was a powerful woman; he knew she still had many friends in Sydney. She’d be a powerful ally if he could bring her under his control.

  “Let me get to the point, Mr Watson.” Tilly’s respect was dripping in sarcasm. Watson didn’t care, the fact that she felt the need to show respect, sarcastically or not, spoke volumes. He was in control; he knew it, she knew it. Now if they could just get the negotiations over with, he’d be happy.

  “Please do.” Watson’s eyes darted between Tilly and Elsa.

  “I’ve come to reclaim my rightful place as the queen of prostitution in Sydney.”

  “The 1920’s are long gone. I’m in charge now.” Watson smiled, the words sounded like a life’s work of cruelty coming to fruition.

  “You can’t do it all, George.” Tilly smiled as she began her manoeuvring.

  “Yes. I can, Matilda.”

  “You’ll spread yourself too thin and you’ll lose control of it all,” Elsa jumped in. “What you need is people you trust running your businesses for you. Someone with experience. No one has more experience in whoring than Tilly.”

  “I agree with that. What I can’t understand is why I would listen to a singer’s opinion on the matter.”

  Elsa smiled as the put down came; she was well-armed with an answer, “Because only Tilly understands whoring better than a female singer.”

  George nodded his head. He’d seen Elsa’s star rising. He knew what that had entailed. “And what is it you
two want?”

  “I’ll be generous. I’ll give you eighty percent of the take. I’m not in it for the money. I just love the life.”

  Watson laughed. “Oh yeah? What part of it is it you love? Is it the smell of semen? The stubborn stains? The back-alley abortions?”

  Tilly’s eyes twinkled as she shrugged innocently. “You’ll also get my backing in the vote to come. It will be valuable. It could make all the difference.

  “Eighty percent?” Watson thought for a moment. It sounded too good to be true. It was. But he was sick of all the conversations he was having to be a part of, and so he extended his hand to shake on it.

  Tilly smiled as she shook her foe’s hand with her own withered appendage. It was time to press home her advantage. “This calls for a celebration.”

  George’s eyes lit up. He’d been cooped up in that damn office too long. He needed to have some fun. “What do you want to do? Take some cocaine and maybe kill a vagrant? I’ve got the powder here, we just need the vagrant. Lenny! Stan!” George called out to his bodyguards, “Go find me a tramp.”

  “Oh.” Tilly shuddered. “I was actually suggesting that we head to my establishment on Palmer Street. I’ve got some new girls over from the USSR. They’re very nice. Very clean.”

  “Last time I ended up with one of your girls, she had a bigger…” Watson paused, “Adam’s Apple than I do.” George peered distrustingly at the old crone.

  “Didn’t stop you having a grand old time, did it?” Tilly roared with her uniquely mischievous laughter, again punctuated by an almightily piggish snort.

  “What can I say, I like a girl with big… Hands.” Watson smirked thinking back to the seedy things he’d enjoyed that night. Then, after a moment, he realised just what it was they were talking about. And that they were talking about it aloud. It was a matter best left untouched. He pounded his fist on the table. “You keep that to yourself.”

  As they threw on their coats and readied to leave, Stan and Lenny entered, “Still need that tramp, boss?”