The Serpent's Sting

by Robert Gott

  ‘Are you confessing to the murder of John Gilbert?’

  ‘I don’t know anyone of that name. I do know the name of the man I killed.’

  I had no option but to play along.

  ‘Will you tell me his name?’

  ‘Private Anthony Dervian.’

  ‘You murdered an American soldier?’

  ‘Not murdered — killed.’

  Her eyes welled with tears. I couldn’t keep up with the cavalcade of emotions she was playing out before me. Were these tears real? She seemed embarrassed by them, in that she turned her face way from me, and straightened her shoulders as if to suggest that she was determined to keep tears at bay, determined to maintain the impression that she was in control. I’d seen Bette Davis do this in a picture. I hadn’t seen enough of Geraldine Buchanan on stage to gauge whether or not she was capable of this subtlety of performance. To keep my sympathy in check, I recalled her sketch of John Gilbert, languid, spread-eagled, and naked among Geraldine’s sheets.

  ‘I don’t think I can trust a single thing you do or say.’

  She sniffed bravely, and marshalled her emotions.

  ‘That isn’t fair, Will. You have to be betrayed by someone before you lose trust. I’ve never betrayed you.’

  ‘That might just be because we barely know one another. What were you planning to do with those pornographic sketches you made of me?’

  She looked genuinely shocked.

  ‘You’ve seen those?’

  ‘The police have them.’

  I don’t think you can consciously make blood drain away from the face. Geraldine became a few shades lighter, but she rallied.

  ‘I was planning to blackmail you.’

  I actually gasped. I thought people only gasped in movies.

  ‘I had an inkling as soon as I saw you that management might try to do something with you. I thought those drawings might be a sort of insurance. I could use them against you if you ever became famous. Now you know what sort of person I am.’

  ‘You have an unusual way of building trust.’

  ‘At least you know I’m not trying to deceive you. That should encourage a level of trust in me.’

  ‘I suppose you’d call that a kind of dark logic.’

  ‘You make me sound like a witch. I’m just an actress who’s in a bit of a jam. There’s a dead American soldier in the front room of Mrs Ferrell’s boarding house.’

  ‘The front room is Mrs Ferrell’s room — the termagant, the one who doesn’t like gentlemen callers.’

  ‘She likes them even less when they’re dead. Will you come with me to Fitzgibbon Street?’

  This was so astonishingly bold that I said, ‘Yes, but I can’t miss this afternoon’s performance.’ It was as if we were discussing an inconveniently positioned piano or chaise longue. It was something in Geraldine’s demeanour that muted the ghastly truth of what she was saying. I fell for it, and I think I did so because a naïve part of me can’t quite accept that women are capable of great criminality. The ugliest parts of human nature are the preserve of men. I still find this notion difficult to shake off, despite personal knowledge to the contrary. Whatever had happened, had happened to Geraldine. Somehow her confession that she’d intended to blackmail me became lost in the more immediate crisis of the dead American.

  ‘You know the Americans will want to see me hanged, Will.’ Her eyes opened wide to underline the seriousness of this. ‘That Eddie Leonski business has made everyone jumpy.’

  For those of you reading this at some distance from the events described, I should perhaps briefly outline the facts about Private Eddie Leonski. It might help you understand why Geraldine’s concerns about the Americans were compelling. Not many months prior to this meeting with Geraldine, there had been a series of murders in Melbourne, and they had created hysteria among the public. This was largely the fault of the press, of course, which printed headlines that screamed ‘Ripper on the loose!’ Three women had been brutally, savagely dispatched in inner Melbourne, and the city had never had its complacency so comprehensively disturbed.

  It turned out that the killer was an American soldier named Eddie Leonski. He emerged from Camp Pell to commit his hideous crimes, and then retreated to the safe anonymity of his 30,000 companions. When he was exposed, tensions began to surface between civilians and their American visitors. This was thought to be an unhelpful turn of events. A long investigation and trial were out of the question. The matter had to be swept away as swiftly and cleanly as possible. Private Leonski, who may have been mentally incompetent, was given no opportunity to demonstrate this. He was hanged with unseemly dispatch on 9 November. Very little fanfare attended his execution. It was done. It was over.

  Now Geraldine, as she said, found herself in the reverse position. The Americans would, as she pointed out, expect a sort of efficient quid pro quo from Australian authorities. They’d dealt with the Leonski problem; now it would be our turn to deal with the Buchanan problem.

  ‘So you do see, Will, that Private Dervian needs to be conjured into thin air.’

  ‘Geraldine, you say you killed him, but you seem strangely unaffected by this extraordinary thing. I mean, you killed him.’

  ‘I can’t expect you to understand, but I’m managing this in the only way I know how. I’m treating it as if it isn’t real. I’m simply not allowing myself to consider what it means.’

  I was about to protest the absurdity of this when Geraldine reached out and took my hand. I made no move to withdraw it.

  ‘I’m ashamed of how I’ve treated you, Will. Or I’m ashamed of how I intended to treat you. I haven’t known many decent men in my life. In fact, I haven’t known any decent men, so I’ve learned to work from the principle that I need to manage them, rather than have them manage me. Now you’ve come along, and I applied that principle to you. And Will, I am sorry, because I believe you are a decent man.’

  I was suspicious of this flattery, of course.

  ‘And what makes you think I’m a decent man? You hardly know me.’

  ‘Precisely. We barely know each other, and yet when I told you that I’d killed a man, you didn’t ask how, or why, or even who. You waited. Isn’t that the test of true friendship? You must be curious. You must be. But your discretion is greater than your curiosity.’

  This wasn’t actually true. I hadn’t asked any questions because I hadn’t wanted to become entangled, and also because I simply hadn’t had time to ask them.

  ‘Would it confound your idea of me if I asked those questions now?’

  ‘No, no it wouldn’t.’

  ‘Let’s start with why.’

  ‘He tried to rape me.’

  ‘Anthony Dervian — that nice, Jewish boy, tried to rape you?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have stopped at rape. He would have killed me. That nice, Jewish boy would have killed me.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Last night. That’s why I came to see you, but I heard a policeman downstairs, and lost my nerve.’

  ‘Had you taken a drug last night?’

  ‘Mrs Ferrell gave me something to calm my nerves.’

  I decided not to cross-examine her about any of her answers until I’d heard them all.

  ‘How did you, er, kill him?’

  ‘I hit him on the head with a baseball bat. There wasn’t even any blood, or not much. His scalp bled a little, but it didn’t go everywhere.’

  ‘And where did this happen?’

  With no change in the tone of her voice, she said, ‘In my room. I was drawing him, which is why there was a baseball bat. I asked him to bring one to the sitting. Of course, he doesn’t have any clothes on, which is also why we need you. Mrs Ferrell and I don’t seem to be able to wrestle him back into his uniform.’

  I let this go as if it were just one more in a series
of unremarkable details.

  ‘You said he was downstairs, in Mrs Ferrell’s room?’

  ‘Yes. That was awful. We had to carry him down. Fortunately, Caroline was on night shift.’

  ‘Why did you have to move him?’

  She looked at me then as if I was dim.

  ‘He couldn’t stay in my room. I mean, a naked, dead American soldier, in my bed? What would that do to my reputation?’

  I wanted to say, ‘Secure it’, but opted for discreet silence.

  ‘So you see the mess I’m in, Will. If you don’t help me, the Americans will hang me out to dry. And that’s not right, because I’m the injured party here.’

  ‘I don’t think we should be quantifying injuries when one of the people is actually dead.’

  ‘It was self-defence.’

  I put up my hands in frustration.

  ‘All right. Before we go any further, why was Private Dervian naked?’

  She reacted as if she thought this was an absurd question.

  ‘I was doing his portrait.’

  ‘That really doesn’t explain it.’

  She shrugged as if the problem here was my inability to understand something that was very simple.

  ‘All I need to know, Will, is whether you’ll help me or not. I’ve told you that I’ve killed a man, so I’ve put you in a rather difficult position. You will either have to report me to the police and condemn me to the gallows, or help me shift the body of a rapist to somewhere less incriminating.’

  This seemed to me to be a stark analysis of my options, but there was some truth in it. I could of course just keep quiet, but that would make me an accessory, which was an ignominious position for me to be in. It looked as if I’d be guilty of the same crime, whether I lifted a finger or not. In retrospect, I can see that this was woolly thinking, but Geraldine’s proximity and my reluctant attraction to her confused my thoughts and clouded my judgement. Here was a woman who was prepared to blackmail me, who was free to the point of generosity with her sexual favours, and who had killed a man — and yet I agreed to help her. I don’t expect that this decision will arouse sympathy in many. I’m not looking for sympathy. I am trying to tell the story of an actor’s life. How it is received — well, I have no control over that whatsoever.

  My notions of Mrs Ferrell had been formed by Geraldine’s description of her as a harridan, and by the screams she’d produced when I was inside the house. I was expecting her to be small, thin, and elderly, withered and desiccated by miserable widowhood and probably, earlier, by an even more miserable marriage — there must have been a Mr Ferrell, given the ‘Mrs’ before her name.

  I met her in the corridor outside her front room. She apologised rather brusquely for accusing me of having murdered Geraldine. Mrs Ferrell herself was more surprising than her apology. She was, to put it mildly, rather manly. I wasn’t entirely convinced that I wasn’t, in fact, talking to a man. She was wearing trousers, admittedly a sight that had become less remarkable as the war dragged on. And Katherine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich had made the wearing of trousers almost respectable. Mrs Ferrell’s attire, though, wasn’t a tailored version of a man’s suit. It was simply a man’s suit. She was also much younger than I’d imagined — she couldn’t have been more than forty. Her auburn hair was cut short, and combed in the manner of the principal boy in a pantomime. Good lord, I thought, all that was missing was a monocle and a cigarette holder. However, the illusion of pre-war Viennese sophistication was shattered when she spoke. Her voice was high, but there its resemblance to femininity ended. Her vowels and general cadences were those a bloody-minded navvy. Her voice could strip paint from the hull of a gunboat.

  ‘We’ve got a dead Jew,’ she said. ‘I never thought a dead Jew would be more trouble than a live one.’

  It’s astonishing how a single sentence can give you the full, grim measure of a person. I now knew all that was worth knowing about Mrs Ferrell. And here I was, woven suddenly into the fabric of this frightful woman’s life.

  ‘I want him out of my house before he starts to smell, and the first thing I want you to do is put some pants on him. He’s sitting in my best chair, with nothing between his hairy arse and my Liberty print seat cover.’

  Clearly we’d come so far so quickly that my role in the removal of Private Dervian was non-negotiable. Geraldine hung back, deferring to Mrs Ferrell. As Mrs Ferrell put the key in the door to the front room, I felt compelled to ask what was perhaps an irrelevant question, or at any rate a question irrelevant to the matter at hand.

  ‘Why did you scream so loudly yesterday, when I was here?’

  ‘I didn’t know who you were, and in my business that’s a dangerous situation.’

  ‘Your business?’

  She ignored this.

  ‘Men panic when a woman screams,’ she said. ‘It disorders their brains. It’s an evolutionary thing. It gives women time to escape.’

  There was no time to consider whether or not this made any sense. Mrs Ferrell threw open the door, stood back, and indicated that I should enter. I swallowed, and did so. Private Dervian was seated in a large armchair, placed in the room where it would take best advantage of the light from the front window. No vile smell came off him — only the faint sweetness of his cologne. He was naked, but a folded pair of trousers had been placed in his lap, perhaps to protect his modesty, or perhaps to protect Mrs Ferrell from the ugly fact of his maleness. He didn’t look dead, and I thought for a moment that Geraldine and Mrs Ferrell had mistaken deep unconsciousness for death. When I touched his arm, however, he was cold. I lifted his wrist to feel for a pulse. There was none. His arm was pliant, so rigor mortis had already waned. I knew enough about this to know that this meant that he’d died the previous night.

  ‘How did you get him downstairs?’ I asked.

  Mrs Ferrell came and stood beside me.

  ‘We took a leg each and lugged him. His head hit every step on the way down. It made an awful bloody noise.’

  She leaned towards Private Dervian and sniffed.

  ‘He still smells all right.’

  ‘This is someone’s son, Mrs Ferrell, not a slab of dicey beef from the butcher.’

  ‘Sure, but whoever raised him raised a rapist, so I can’t get sentimental. He was a good-looking boy. They’re the worst, of course. They feel entitled.’

  Geraldine came and stood beside us.

  ‘I tried to reason with him, Will. I really did. I know he looks like he wouldn’t hurt a fly, but his face was all contorted with rage, and he would have killed me. He would have killed me and gone back to Camp Pell, and he would never have been found out.’

  ‘Unless he had an extended leave pass, his unit will have already raised the alarm.’

  ‘Oh, they’ll just think he’s drunk somewhere. I’m sure those Yank soldiers get back late all the time.’

  ‘Their MPs are pretty rough,’ I said, ‘and, as you said, Leonski has made everybody jumpy.’

  ‘Get him dressed,’ Mrs Ferrell said.

  I’ll spare you the ghastly details of how Geraldine and I wrangled Private Dervian into his clothes. Needless to say, it was awkward and outraged his dignity, and didn’t do much for mine. When he was dressed and propped in the chair, he looked for all the world as though he was just dozing after a heavy lunch.

  ‘What now?’ I asked, having caught my breath. Dressing Private Dervian had required gymnastic movements I was unused to performing.

  ‘We were hoping you might have a plan,’ Geraldine said. ‘I mean, as a private-inquiry agent, I’m sure you’ve had more experience of this sort of thing than we’ve had.’

  ‘Corpse disposal hasn’t been a big part of my professional life.’

  Oddly, this statement wasn’t entirely true. One of the great shames of my life, and an action whose discovery would expose me to criminal charges, was th
e burial of a body in the Melbourne General Cemetery. The full horror of this incident is detailed in the second volume of my memoirs, A Thing of Blood. In brief, I found myself, earlier this year, on the horns of a dilemma. I’d been manipulated into helping with the burial of a young woman’s body. I’ll concede that the plan was a clever one. It wasn’t conceived by me — although that hardly excuses it. It involved the finding of a freshly dug grave, which isn’t difficult to do in a large cemetery. The earth was piled and covered with a tarpaulin, preparatory to the laying of the marble or granite slab. This earth was lightly packed, and gave way easily to the shovel. It was removed, the new corpse laid on top of the recently deceased, and the earth re-piled into a neat mound. When the monument was completed, no one would think to look for an extra corpse beneath the gleaming marble. This would doubtless also be the best way to dispose of Private Dervian. I couldn’t bring myself to suggest it, because to repeat this act would be unthinkable. Yet here I was, embroiled in a hideously similar drama.

  ‘I have no idea what you should do,’ I said. ‘Interfering with a corpse is a very serious crime. You’re asking me to expose myself to the possibility of twenty years in jail.’

  ‘You’re already an accessory, so in for a penny, in for a pound,’ Mrs Ferrell said.

  ‘Whatever you do,’ I said, ‘it will have to wait until this evening. Moving a body in daylight would be far too risky.’

  ‘By “you”, you mean “we”,’ Geraldine said.

  ‘Actually, no. I am not, I think, in blood stepped in so far that to return were as tedious as to go o’er.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Mrs Ferrell snapped.

  ‘It’s Shakespeare,’ Geraldine said. ‘You don’t understand, Will. You are stepped in so far. You really are, and I’m afraid that Mrs Ferrell and I will implicate you as deeply as we can.’

  I looked at her, expecting to see regret, or reluctance, in her face. I saw only determination and an ugly absence of sympathy. I looked at Private Dervian. I had to believe that he was a rapist, although Geraldine’s demeanour didn’t encourage any sense of outraged innocence.