The Library of Forgotten Books

by Rjurik Davidson

  “She was your daughter and you haven’t even broken a sweat.”

  “Listen, I gotta get out of here. I gotta get across the bay, outta Melbourne.”

  “What do they want from you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Faulkner steps forward and, with a quick crack, hits Laurence on the forehead with the butt of his gun. Laurence drops to his knees, places his hand on his forehead, but blood still flows in rivulets between his fingers.

  Faulkner places the gun against Laurence’s head. “Now she’s gone, I ain’t got nothin’ to lose.”

  “I worked for the secret service. The secret service.”

  “That’s why you weren’t sent to jail, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So someone wants you dead from the old days.”

  “I swear, I don’t know who.”

  “What were you working on?”

  “The Chinese. We knew Mao was gonna take power, so we were working on plans to stop them.”

  “Plans for the war.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So now Allied troops have landed across southern China, and the communists think you got information on the Allied strategy. So they’re coming for you. How did they know you were working for the secret service? Let me guess, you ran an opium den, and when you got busted, you didn’t go to jail—right?”

  “Right.”

  “So where do I find them?”

  “Who?”

  “The rats who killed Lucy. The communists.”

  “Dunno. Everywhere.”

  Faulkner turns and takes one of the bottles of powder from the table.

  “I’m takin’ this dream-powder. Used my last tonight on some cop,” says Faulkner. “Get back to those nice dreams.”

  Laurence calls back to him: “She was my girl, too, you know.”

  Faulkner descends the stairs, stops halfway, lights a cigarette. The smoke drifts ever so slowly up the stairwell as he examines the bottle. Dream-dust. He wants to use it. He has always loved the stuff. But since Lucy’s death, it has become as necessary as water to him. Dream-dust—the most valuable of the opiates. Dream-dust—a snort of it and it projects you back into the world of memory so that you are actually there, so that you can see and hear and feel and smell the very moments of the past, as clearly as the experience itself. Faulkner wants to immerse himself into that world of memory, to relive. But he can’t, because there is still a rat to catch, work to do. And work like this, well, it has to be done at night, when the slop in the gutter looks like silver and you don’t notice the stains on your clothes.

  In 1947, after the discussion with Victor Jackson in the Opium Den, Faulkner stepped out of the grotto, back into the main room with its billowing roof and Chinese lanterns. Lucy was waiting for him.

  “Shall I show you the door?” she said.

  “I think I’ve seen it.”

  “Well, perhaps you’d prefer the rubbish chute.”

  “Hey, my suit isn’t that cheap, you know.”

  “We could take it off before we sent you down.”

  “I know you’d like nothing more than to take my suit off, but maybe we should get to know each other first.”

  “Really honey, I wouldn’t think that’d take too long. I mean, you seem a simple man—I can see which buttons to press from here—all four of them.”

  “You don’t fool me with this hard-hearted front.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Lucy. What’s yours?”

  “That’s a dangerous thing to just give out.”

  From the grotto came a thump and the two of them turned towards it. From behind the curtain came muffled voices, full of tension and strain.

  Faulkner furrowed his brow and stepped back towards the grotto.

  Victor Jackson’s voice now became audible. “There’s only one way out of this for you, old man, and that’s when Mao is finished. Got it? Until then you’re working for us.”

  Laurence burst from behind the curtains and hurried past Faulkner and Lucy.

  “You right?” said Faulkner, but Laurence was already through the double-doors. Faulkner turned to Lucy and stepped close, whispering in her ear, “Maybe we could slip out somewhere quieter. Then you’ll be able to hear my name.”

  They danced to jazz in one of those smoky clubs with the big windows that overlooked the alleyways. It was one of those moments when Faulkner looked at someone and saw within her a glimpse of himself. As they carved their way across the wooden floor in careful steps, the band playing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Faulkner felt for the first time that perhaps there was a future beyond the late-night bars, and the hard grey mornings when his head pounded and his mouth was dry.

  Along the alleyway, under Laurence’s run-down apartment, the thickset man waits in a doorway for Faulkner to reappear. His eyes, set slightly too close together, dart around; he licks his dry lips; he shifts from one foot to the other.

  Faulkner passes by, oblivious to him, and heads down the street, turns a corner.

  The man follows, his thick legs swaying. He turns the corner, but the street is empty. Faulkner is gone. The man, his head darting to and fro, rushes down the street. But when he reaches the end, he comes to a group of people celebrating some kind of festival.

  A gigantic golden Buddha sits impassively as people offer it incense. Others pray before a bell, which they each ring with a small hammer. In the background, music rises and falls in strange modal scales.

  The man looks left, right, runs past the Buddha to the front of a temple where two stone Chinese dragons sit impassively, the size of lions; one of them has its jaws open, tongue lolling ominously. He steps backwards as a child runs past him towards the temple. She stops by one of the dragons, gives it a pat and laughs before running up the stairs and into the temple.

  The thickset man turns and runs along the street. He doesn’t notice the figure of Faulkner emerge from behind one of the lions, his face grim and set. Faulkner slips over to the side of the street and follows the man.

  Later, the thickset man sits in the first floor carriage of a gothic four-storey steam-train. He stares off into the distance, his nervousness gone, as it rattles across the industrial landscape of western Melbourne, where factories climb upon each other like mile-high anthills, lights and fires scattered across them like constellations.

  Sitting directly above the man, on the fourth floor of the carriage, is Faulkner, looking grimly into the distance. Faulkner thinks of the years ahead of him, and the years behind. There’s not much to him. After the orphanage, odd jobs: the wharves, riding the rails into the centre where the inland sea shimmered under the brilliant red sun, a running-boy for the white-haired PI, Sammy Watson, who was worn down by the streets, and then Faulkner had decided to go it alone. Days of smoking, and observing infidelities, and taking photos, and whiskey in late night bars with Shorty Cheng, Lucky Macrae and Eliza Henderson with the horse-face that made her look constantly sad. And then Lucy: Lucy who is now dead.

  What does he have? A murderer who knew her. A murderer prepared to act like an animal. Probably a communist who wanted to get to Laurence—to get information about the Allied strategy in China. The war has started, the Allies landed on the Chinese mainland. The communists know Laurence. He ran an Opium Den in Chinatown. They probably realise Laurence was pumping them for information. But Laurence has gone missing, absent without leave, and Lucy was their first port of call to track him down. But something doesn’t ring right. There is something itching at the back of Faulkner’s head, and it isn’t lice. No sir. Lucy already got rid of those.

  Faulkner remembers the conversation with Lucy, the one he thought had changed him. For some time after he first met her he’d felt his defences crumbling like a sand castle being battered by the waves. They met in the tea-houses and ended up at her apartment and she had been wary of hi
m and his weathered face and his tired eyes. He hadn’t expected to have a chance, and at each meeting expected her to call it off. But they slowly saw more of each other until almost without notice it was every day. And then that night Lucy smoked a cigarette that emerged from a long cigarette holder as she lay in bed, great white pillows around her. The smoke drifted slowly in the air, long billowing lines like ribbons, refusing to disperse. Faulkner lay beside her, staring off into the distance.

  “I’m a private eye,” he said. “I can’t move in.”

  “Sure you can,” said Lucy.

  “I’ve lived on my own for how long?”

  “It’s not physical proximity you’re talking about.”

  “What do you mean?” Faulkner looked sharply at her.

  Lucy turned her head away, looked up to the roof as if there might be something of interest up there. “I’m not explaining it to you.” For a while they sat in silence, and then Lucy said, “My mother moved from China for a better life. There were all those stories of gold and spacious houses, and the inland sea filled with fish, and she came out here by herself. Thousands flooded in from China. She ended up here, met my father, and then the sickness took her when I was a child. She found a better life, of sorts, but in her heart I think she always longed to see Shanghai one more time. He didn’t understand.” Lucy hummed to herself for a while and then added, “We make our decision to be alone quite young, and we hold to it, don’t we, through thick and thin, we hold to it?”

  Faulkner looked around and thought of his childhood in the orphanage with the Catholic fathers and their canes. He thought of the sound of those canes and the cries of the other orphans. So many fathers, so many canes—they had all merged into one in his mind. He looked at Lucy and said, “I drink, I gamble, I snort dream-dust...”

  Lucy took a drag of the cigarette, looked back towards him.

  “I’ve always been a private eye,” he continued. “What else can I do? What am I qualified to do? I’ve always worked alone. I’ve always been alone.”

  “But we’re not alone now, are we? Either of us?”

  Faulkner looked down like a little boy, as if he was embarrassed.

  “Are we?” said Lucy, this time with a hint of anger.

  “I think I’ll move in,” said Faulkner. “I think I’d like that.”

  Later, Faulkner dreamed of the great inland sea, crystal under the sun. He and Lucy were sun-bathing, the cities like clusters of jewels running along the beaches around them. He had always hoped to retire to those beaches. Now he had—and Lucy was beside him. He looked out over the sea and something huge shifted beneath the waters. He leapt up. It seemed big as a train, or bigger perhaps. “Lucy! Lucy!” he’d screamed. But she only rolled over and began tanning her back. “Lucy!” But she still hadn’t heard. He had woken and the room was silent and dark, but he could smell the shampoo in her raven-black hair and feel the soft rise and fall of her breath.

  Faulkner comes out of his reverie as the train grinds to a halt out in some dark industrial wasteland.

  Lines of three-storey trams sit on tracks: driver’s booths sticking out like enclosed balconies on the second floor, darkened lamps swinging from high up on their sides, little spiral staircases leading up inside them. Faulkner leaps from the train and ducks between the trams. His breath is loud. His feet crunch on the gravel, despite his best efforts to tread lightly. But the thickset man keeps walking, oblivious to his presence, and enters a huge shed. In the distance the ant-hill factories pile upon each other like tangled mountains of concrete and steel.

  Faulkner waits a moment as the man disappears. There’s a time for waiting and there’s a time for doing. Faulkner never really knows how to tell which is which. Or when is when—or the right grammar, for that matter. Faulkner sneaks after the man, through the gaping doors, into the warehouse, its roof disappearing above him in the darkness.

  To Faulkner’s right, the thickset man makes his way into a corner office, built out of ramshackle wood, and looking very temporary. Above the door is a painted sign in red: Communist Party of Australia, Tramworkers. Faulkner slinks along the wall so that he can see through the windows, into the yellowy light of the office, where a suited man, his fingers yellow from cigarettes, his hair slicked back with some unnatural sheen, sits with a series of newspapers on his desk. One of them, The Tribune, has a headline that reads: Say No to War. Defend Communist China!

  “Yep, they’re after Laurence. And then they’ll come for us,” says the thickset man, shifting on his feet, nervous again. His accent is broad, from the country perhaps, or northern Australia.

  The man behind the desk looks up and speaks in more subtle tones: “They can’t drive us underground, we’re too big for that. But we’ll call a Central Committee meeting: we’d better make a decision.”

  “There’s some guy who’s tracked him down,” says the thickset man. “Followed him to Laurence’s place but lost him.”

  “Yeah? Secret service.”

  “No—too ratty for that. Shorty says he’s a PI, related to Laurence. Wears a suit, but looks like it hasn’t been pressed in ages. Like the guy doesn’t care about it.”

  Faulkner takes a step forward. “Well, at last someone who truly understands me.” Faulkner lights a cigarette as he leans against the doorway, one leg crossed over the other. He doesn’t look at the two men, but his face takes on a red-orange glow from the light of the match.

  The two men stare at him.

  “So you communists didn’t kill the Chinese Princess,” says Faulkner.

  “That’s ‘im!” says the thickset man excitedly, as if he’s just found the solution to some impenetrable puzzle.

  “It’s all right, Jake, this here doesn’t work for the State.” He looks at Faulkner. “I’m Hooks, Sam Hooks, Mr...?”

  “Faulkner.”

  “Ahh, Laurence told me about you. I was just on the phone to him.”

  “That’s not too bright.”

  “We know what we’re doing, Faulkner. And in response to your first question, no, we didn’t kill Laurence’s daughter. Why would we? We’re communists.”

  “Ah...what is it they always say about the means to an end?”

  “What end would murder serve?”

  “So Laurence is a communist.”

  “Hardly.”

  “But he’s in touch with you.”

  “Listen Faulkner, what do you want from us?”

  “I want God-damn, nothing you can give me.” Faulkner inhales deeply; his cigarette crackles and burns red.

  “Look, I’m sorry about the sheila.”

  “She was a doll.”

  “But that’s what it’s all about, don’t you see, Faulkner. It’s politics. It’s them against us. The rich against the working man. Capital and labour.”

  “I don’t have the strength for that...comrade.”

  “You might not care for it, but it cares for you.”

  “Where’s Laurence going?”

  “Inland, maybe. How would we know?”

  “Because he’s your source, isn’t he? He was how the Chinese knew about the war. He leaked you the information. He wasn’t working for the secret service. He was working for you. He’s the reason that my china...Look, you aren’t gonna look after him. Someone’s gotta help him get out of here.”

  Hooks leans back in his chair, looks over to Jake, then back to Faulkner. “I can only guess. But he’s got friends across the bay. There’s a steamer that leaves in the morning.”

  Faulkner knows that the man has just told him the truth, but he is already away in his thoughts. The secret service used her to get to her father. But she wouldn’t tell. Of course she wouldn’t. You ever try to get a doll to speak?

  Faulkner runs through the entranceway of Flinders St Station, its facade golden in the light. The fifty clocks on its corner face read the times for the next trains, as always, while the large clock beneath them reads four a.m. Giant fruit bats, big as children, circle above in the dark
morning and head across the river towards the botanic gardens. He rushes back through the streets of the city, the spire of the Town Hall hovering above him to his right, piercing high into the sky like a knife. Faulkner has only a few hours. Return to their apartment, hidden in Chinatown, like a clue nestled away and surrounded by the turbulence of a city that never sleeps; and then to Port Melbourne, to Laurence, if he’s still alive. He needs that last clue, that final confirmation.

  He returns to the alleyway, and the stairs, and there he sees the same policeman standing guard.

  Faulkner takes out his dream-dust.

  “Hey, you–”

  Faulkner starts to climb the rickety stairs.

  “Hey, stop. I’ll shoot.”

  Faulkner looks at the dream-dust. He thinks for a moment and puts it away, taking hold, beneath his suit, of his pistol. One step at a time, one foot at a time, he climbs.

  “I’ll shoot, you mongrel.”

  Faulkner is almost there. He chances a look, and five, four, three steps before him the policeman stands, his revolver pointed at Faulkner. Faulkner doesn’t care. Faulkner has only one thing left to live for anyway. Two, One.

  “I’ll goddamn–”

  Like a snake, Faulkner strikes, his arm just a whir in the darkness. There’s a crack as the butt of the pistol hits the policeman’s head and a thump as the body goes down.

  “You should have told me that would have worked before,” says Faulkner. “I wouldn’t have wasted the dust.”

  Faulkner slips past the policeman into Lucy’s apartment. Everything is as it was before: the blood on the couch, the glasses on the coffee table, the book face down. The book, he thinks. He steps across to the table. The front of the book shows a sea-creature, rising from the water. Faulkner looks at the Leviathan, thrashing in the water with tentacles waving, as it emerges and fills our view. Life is nasty, brutish, short, he thinks. All the clues have fallen into place. Faulkner knows only one man who would read such a book. The Leviathan has emerged from the sea.