by Zane Lovitt
‘And I’m saying to you, our focus right now is on the trial that begins next week.’
Then there was a long pause while Demetri stared back at the reporter, and the reporter loved it. He let it linger as long as he could. Then: ‘Demetri Sfakiakopoulos, thanks for your time.’
Now, when Demetri stares back at me with that same face, I say, ‘You only want me for this because I’ve got less to lose if I get done for hiding a witness.’
He scowls, incredulous. ‘That’s not true—’
‘You are worried about your certificate, and since my licence is gone, you think I’ll be more manageable than a real private investigator—’
‘You’re the best. That’s why I want you to do it.’
‘Bullshit. You want me because if it goes sour, you’ve got a patsy—’
‘Oh, just spare me the scattergun hatred, will you, John? Who do you think you’re talking to?’
The jag of pain, this time it isn’t in my forehead. I feel it even before he points out the obvious, his voice a scratching whisper. ‘We worked together for, what, eight years? Did I ever fuck you over? Ever once? I’ve been paying your rent and keeping you alive while you have your little breakdown. What have I been doing that for? So I could rip you off? Jesus…’
I put away my fucking-lawyers face. I think I even hear Leo sigh on the other side of that curtain.
Demetri shakes his head, staring across at the window, the dark clouds beyond it. He exhales silently. ‘You’re so fucked up, you can’t even see when…’ He pushes a thumb and forefinger into his eyes. When he looks at me they’re slightly red—part angry, part imploring.
‘Try to imagine what this kid has been through. Those two boys are the legends of St Ninian’s. The rest of the school treats them like movie stars. You should hear some of the jokes the kids are making—’
‘I don’t need the sob story,’ I say, scratching into my bald head. ‘One more confused teen runaway isn’t enough to get me up from this gurney. If I do it, it will be to repay my debt to you. And that’s the only reason.’
‘Repay your debt to me? This is one missing kid. You owe me for a bloody sight more than that.’
‘I’m the best, remember? My rates just went up.’
Bustling footsteps enter the room and both Demetri and I turn to see a nurse, muscular and businesslike, oblivious to us. She makes for the bed directly opposite mine and pulls back the sheets, presses a button on a small remote control. The bed rises hydraulically.
Floating in silently behind her is a man so pale and so gaunt that there’s a tinge of blue in his face and his hospital gown hangs off his body like it would hang off a wire coathanger. You can tell that the hollows of his cheeks are echoed in his stomach and hips. He senses the two of us and snaps his head around, eyes so bloodshot they’re really two perfect pools of red. There’s a small nose ring in one nostril and around his neck are ligature marks. Where the rope burned into his throat is now a purple line, neat and undeniable.
He locks eyes with me, knows what I’m looking at. He stands there and waits for the nurse to finish making up the bed and he stares right back at the scar on my forehead.
I wonder if I look as shattered as he does.
The woman sing-songs, ‘In you go.’ He climbs into the bed and the nurse shuffles away, leaving him weakly arranging his pillows.
Demetri interprets this activity as his cue to leave. There’s a finality in his voice as he lowers it so the new patient can’t hear.
‘This place is like the Addams Family. You should have been out of here days ago. Come by the office this afternoon and meet Belinda and Paul. You’ll like them. They’re drinkers.’
He rises off the bed, steps back to the window for one more look outside. His face tells me the Valiant is still there.
‘I had a client once who thought Leo Spaske was after him for some unpaid invoices, so he booby-trapped his front door and all his windows. He actually had a nail bomb hidden inside his porch light. Leo Spaske can do that to you.’
The new patient lies in his bed, unmoving. A rock under a sheet.
Demetri turns to face me again, his hands thrust back in his pockets. ‘One more thing. The nature of a Victorian subpoena is that it’s considered to have been served if the person in question has actual knowledge of its contents. Troy doesn’t know they’re trying to get him to take the stand and if he finds out, then arguably, technically, he’s been served.’
My throat burns from all this talking. ‘What does he think he was doing in Colac?’
‘Just that his parents thought he needed a break. Because school was tough for him.’
‘So if I find him I shouldn’t tell him?’
‘That’s not your job. You’re just the delivery man.’
I nod. I’d happily do this job as Marcel Marceau. If I’m lucky, Troy will be the silent type too and the whole thing will be over in a few quiet hours.
‘After this, we’re square, right?’
‘Yeah,’ he says, disapproval written across his face like toilet graffiti. ‘After this you can go looking for all the closure you want.’
He doesn’t do the bunny ears this time. Instead he bows his head, makes a theatrical shrug and turns to leave, then stops.
‘So long, Leo,’ he calls into the curtain.
From inside there comes silence. Demetri pivots to grin at me. ‘Always was a rude bastard.’
Then he disappears. I hear his footsteps pad out the door, the door swing shut. The moment he’s gone I hear a creak and a thud from behind the curtain. Someone shifting, perhaps sitting up. The rustling continues and I realise they’re standing now, whoever they are. I watch, waiting to see if Leo shows himself or if he sneaks off the other side, out of sight.
But no. The curtain yanks open right in front of me.
She’s in her early twenties, shockingly thin, with long brittle hair and bags under her eyes. The beady sternness of her gaze has nothing to do with me; it seems to be just her natural disposition. She hovers there in front of a metal bed and a tall table with nothing on it, then gingerly reaches to a cabinet this side of the curtain and opens a door, takes out a book I can’t see the title of. Just before she draws the curtain shut she falls back onto the bed and looks at me with only a shade of curiosity.
I glimpse her wrists, thickly bandaged from the base of each hand to halfway up her forearms. Then she’s gone from view.
The man in the bed across from me hasn’t moved.
Maybe the idea is to put us all in here together.
3
Some guy gets on at the first floor and stares at me. I don’t look back. It’s just the two of us in here and, compared to the buttons and the marble-pattern floor, I’m probably the most interesting thing. My head is shaved. I’ve got a scar on my brow the shape of a question mark and it’s big and recent enough to look like I came straight from the asylum, freshly lobotomised. I won’t grow hair in that spot for at least twelve months, is what the surgeon said. I’d stare at me too.
He’s a tourist, wealthy, maybe Korean. Like I’d know. There must be a pool on level one because that’s where he’s come from, cloaked in a hotel robe and squeaky with chlorine. When the doors opened and he saw me, he didn’t hide his revulsion. He wore it right there on his face and hobbled into the elevator and pushed the button for the eighth floor and then turned back to me to stock up on more revulsion and maybe that’s how it goes in Korea. Maybe, in Korea, people are honest about how you make them feel.
Though I doubt it.
At the third floor the doors open again and I step out and walk straight down the corridor. The man in the elevator probably came to Sydney for the koalas and the sunbeams. Probably he doesn’t speak English and would feel no obligation to contact the front desk and tell them that a strange man with a messed-up face and a dusty black coat is wandering the halls, looking furtive. Still, and maybe only from habit, I walk with a purpose, not glancing at the room numbers, not appearing to
be on this floor for the first time in my life.
When the elevator rattles closed I glance casually over my shoulder to be sure the Korean man didn’t alight here too, but I’m alone in a narrow, sky-blue hallway lit by halogens and a window at the far end with a view of Sydney tower. Quiet. There are no sounds of voices or television and no shoes or trays laid out on the carpet. A couple of DO NOT DISTURB flyers are about the only indication there’s anyone occupying the rooms. Following the trail of numbers, I reach 302 and open my jacket pocket.
The last time I picked a lock was so long ago it appears in my mind as the action of someone else. Someone reliable, non-threatening. Someone who doesn’t even drink. A car alarm was wailing outside my home one night. This was back when I lived in what you’d call a home, which is how long ago this was.
I got the car door open, killed the alarm and was walking back to my flat when someone, a neighbour, appeared on the other side of the panelled fence that lined our driveway. In the dark I heard the man’s voice say approvingly: ‘About fucking time.’
Then he said, ‘Cunt.’ And I realised he thought it was my car.
At least, that’s how I remember it. For the first couple of days after I got this scar on my head, I was remembering things wrong.
‘Your memory,’ the surgeon said, ‘will improve.’
‘That,’ I told him, ‘is a shame.’
Finally the plug rotates and the lock snaps open. Inside the room is black: the blinds are drawn tight and the day is getting dark. I flick the light switch but no light comes. I flick it twice more, then push the door all the way open to at least illuminate the nearby parts—a short corridor with a door to the toilet and, immediately to the right, a wardrobe. I open it, hoping for a torch or even a matchbook, but all that’s there is a lonely wire coathanger, swaying at me. I pull it out and fold it in half, flatten off the shape where the two points meet and mould it into something vaguely similar to an oblong tile. The slot above the light switch, where you’d usually insert your oblong tile to give power to your room, that’s where I jam in the coathanger.
The lights come on and I close the door behind me, lock it.
Past the bathroom and the wardrobe is a room not much bigger than the massive bed set against the wall. The sheets are twisted up and a blue backpack sits open like a massive hatched egg. Socks and underwear and a t-shirt are piled near the window, and on the bench next to the television are the remains of last night’s dinner, maybe today’s lunch. It’s a plate smeared with tomato sauce, decorated with charred fat, a fork and a steak knife. Also there are two beer cans, both of them crushed by hand and balanced side by side, bowing to greet me.
I lurch forward to the bar fridge. Inside there are juices and soft drinks, no beers. There are no mixed drinks and no miniatures of liquor to be seen and even if there once were, it looks like the kid would have drunk them. I kick the fridge door shut. A shade of daylight borders the heavy curtains so I yank them open, but that only seems to make the room darker. The view from here is of grey cloud and the grey roof of the warehouse next door. Nothing to drink and nothing even to look at. Between now and whenever it’s just me and what’s in my head.
So I pack Troy’s things.
There isn’t much. A crumpled shirt, a pair of new sneakers dug in under the bed. I stuff all of it into the backpack, realise this is his school bag. There’s a pencil case in here and an exercise book with Troy’s name on it. There’s a toilet bag with a toothbrush, toothpaste, an old-fashioned razor, shaving cream and moisturiser. There’s a handheld game device, but I’m not so desperate that I’m going to play it. I slump down onto the bed, look up at the roof for a while then over at the opposite wall and there I am in the mirror. Me with my hair shorn off, strange stitches in my forehead, numbness in my eyes. I have crows feet. I look old. This is you now, John. Soak it up.
What’s merciful is I don’t have to soak it up for long. There’s a scratching noise outside the door, a key fitting into the lock, and I get up and position myself this side of the bathroom. It’s possible that the kid will see the coathanger, wonder why the lights are on in here, maybe run for it and then this whole game will start over. But he doesn’t. He shuts the door and strolls right in, doesn’t see me, doesn’t notice his bag is packed and zipped up. The room key drops onto the bench and he pulls his jacket off. His headphones must be playing something irritating, judging by his face. Or maybe that’s just his face.
Pimples are stippled across his brow, down his temples to his neck, seemingly enormous against the pale of his skin, a lot of which is hidden by the long hair you grow when you want to hide your acne and your face. He’s got a pronounced lower jaw like a prehistoric fish and eyes set deep in his skull like his father. He didn’t get his mother’s looks.
I sidle into position between him and the door.
He senses the movement, sees me and whinnies like a startled horse. It’s an instinctive response, summarising the shock of finding someone in your room who looks like me. His palms come up, the international symbol for ‘Stop’, but I can’t stop because I’m not doing anything. He takes two steps back and trips, whinnies again as he goes down and his body hammers shoulder-first onto the carpet.
I say, ‘Relax. Your parents sent me.’
He’s back on his feet, wrenching away the earphones, his face transformed from an irritated child’s to a terrified one’s.
‘Fucking what do you want?’ he screeches, his hands up to stop me again.
‘I’m going to take you back to Melbourne.’
‘What?’
‘My name’s John. I’ve got your things ready. Let’s go.’
He pulls the hair from his eyes, shows his teeth, seething.
‘I don’t fucking want to. Get the fuck out or I’ll call the fucking police.’
He’s well dressed for a hate machine. Shiny blue denim and a hooded sweatshirt where the hood is a different colour from the shirt. Beneath it his limbs and torso are so thin they may not even be there. But some kind of muscle makes his arms hack and gesture at me.
‘You can’t make me go…’
‘Yes, I can.’
‘You fucking can’t. I’ll call the fucking police…’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I’ll…’
Helplessness crashes over him and his clenched face scans the room for options. What he sees is the steak knife on the dinner plate. He snatches at it, but rather than threaten me he whisks the blade to his own chest, over his heart, clutched in both hands. He bugs out his eyes.
‘Get the fuck out or I’ll fucking stick it in. I’ll fucking kill myself.’
‘That’s your breast plate,’ I say, tapping the same point on my chest. ‘You don’t have the strength to break through that. Not with a blunt knife.’ He seems to choke on the words as I say them.
Someone claiming they were going to kill themselves was, back when I did this sort of thing more often, an invitation for me to sit and read the newspaper, let them blow themselves out like Cyclone Bertha. They were already missing persons, so they probably had a dramatic streak long before I came along. I thought of it as a cry for attention: what you did instead of an Oscars speech. And despite their wailing and their threats and their warnings for me to keep away, none of them was ever not bluffing.
But now, Troy starts to drag on that knife, drawing the point millimetres into his shirt. His face becomes an angry ball and he presses the blade harder, perhaps enough to pierce the skin; his teeth grind against each other, all of him vibrating. If he doesn’t have the strength, he wants me to believe he does.
So I step across the room and clutch at the knife, pull it from Troy’s body and with the back of my other hand I strike his face, not hard, mostly across his forehead. It’s more gravity that sends him to the bed but he falls theatrically, screeches an unintelligible word and ends with his face pushing into his hands and his hands pushing into the bunched bedsheets. I put the knife back on the plate and wipe beef grease
off my fingers onto the pillow.
‘I wanna do it,’ he cries into his palms. ‘I wanna do it…Let me do it…’
‘All right,’ I say. ‘Change of plan. We’re going downstairs. Leave your bag.’
We take the elevator to the ground floor. He rubs at his chest and there’s a smear of blood on his shirt the size of a gooseberry. I guess the blade did break his skin. His face is the kind I make right before I vomit: pale, pained. He’s rubbing that too, where I slapped him.
We come out to the reception desk which is opposite the bar. It’s exactly the kind of bland hotel that makes a mint out of people who don’t mind blandness, who demand it and pay outrageous prices for it. I scan the bland tables and the bland lobby and the quiet city street beyond the sliding bland doors, my hand held up to indicate Troy should stop and wait while I do this.
I’m looking for Leo Spaske.
Not that I need to. Since Demetri’s moment at the hospital back in Melbourne I’ve not had so much as a whiff of Leo’s Scandinavian musk. I’d think the story of Leo and Troy’s subpoena was entirely made up if it weren’t for how it feels true. Threatening to put a teenager through a teenager’s worst nightmare—public, predatory humiliation—is about as evil as I’ve known plaintiff law to get. And it’s a surefire winner. I’m surprised they don’t do it all the time.
After ten seconds of analysing everything I lead Troy into the bar. It’s not big, not crowded. There are prints by Matisse decorating the place, with Matisse’s name in big letters underneath them, like it’s really important you know that it’s Matisse they’ve got on the walls. I’d say it’s very Sydney except that there’s a million of these pictures hanging on walls in hotels in Melbourne. A single barman stacks the fridge and outside dusk is slowly drawing down. The plate-glass wall is lined with tables and ordinarily I wouldn’t sit anywhere so open, but there are only five tables in the place and I don’t want to sit where we can be overheard. I direct Troy to a chair and he slumps towards it. I go to the bar.