by Iain Ryan
From there, Frith went down to Drainland. The Holy Beach Mission was founded in February the following year. He and Pauline sold off the church land and obtained some sort of tenured lease from the municipal council to occupy the site under the lighthouse. According to the tax office, the Mission hadn’t earned a dime in years. Yet here was Pastor Frith—chased off by the locals to Drainland, and broke as hell—and the place was there year after year, working alongside The Doomriders and their little tropical Amsterdam. Desperate, Romano rang Vic at Angel City and asked if the Riders kicked back to the church. He laughed and hung up.
She spent a few days chasing down the Mission’s volunteers. It was another dead end. The Mission didn’t request tithing. They didn’t ask for donations. Instead they actually paid the volunteers a small stipend, enough for a few retiree nurses down in Arthurton to pay their petrol and groceries. Where was the money coming from? The mainland church refused to comment.
For more than a few nights in a row, Romano sat and stared into her drink and turned it over in her mind. The incompleteness of it ached:
Bodies every which way.
No hope of leaving Tunnel Island.
Running on visions, mistakes probably.
No partner, no family, no career, no nothing.
What am I waiting for?
The drugs ate at her, too. High and wide-eyed, she pored over the Gold Point thing, re-reading the files over and over, night after night after night. During the worst of it, she staggered to the end of her street and into the ocean. There she let the water wash around her, like some physical manifestation of the chaos raging in her head.
30
Saturday, December 25th, 2004 to Tuesday, January 4, 2005
Christmas arrived. It was the usual nightmare. Without fail, the day was plagued with regrets and visions of his family and his sister. Harris’s phone sat silently on the bureau. To kill some time, he checked up on Romano. He rang around. She was fine. She was spending the day at the pub. He had no such luxury. There was no forgetting in recovery. Forgetting was dangerous, a type of slipping. The easiest type of misstep.
By the new year, Harris could feel himself sliding towards that relapse. Christmas fucked him every time. And the rest of it was piling up. Romano worried him. What was she digging up? Something bad. He felt it in his bones. The island felt off-kilter and as such, he barely slept, tossing and turning to the sound of ghosts in the hall. These were all signs he understood.
He had to act.
He had to go back to the club.
He wanted it.
He told Dev.
“As long as you’re sure you want to continue down that path,” said Dev. He was no believer in The Theodor Club and what it offered.
“It’s not perfect, but it works,” said Harris knowing full well that his time—his treatment—at The Theodor was never something he would or could relinquish altogether.
“Just promise me, no Lean.”
“Her and I are done.”
Dev looked at him, narrowed his eyes.
“I promise,” said Harris.
The Theodor club was housed in a four-story house built into a rock face at Point Forward. It sat on the very fringe of Arthurton’s developed areas, between the township and Silver Village. It was no easy task to get there. The road leading down to the point was unmarked, and at night the way across the outcrop proved difficult to navigate on foot. Harris knew the way by heart.
He met Lauren inside, at the bar. She led him by the arm to a booth and ordered a gin and tonic. He watched her drink it. “You look like shit, Jim,” she said. “It’s been too long between visits for you and me.”
“I’ve been—”
“You can’t just come in here after all this time and make excuses. There have to be consequences, Jim. There are always consequences and they’re pretty bad, especially for men like you. It’s going to be a lot worse this time.”
She smiled.
“Whatever you say,” said Harris.
Lauren moved fast. She grabbed him by the scalp before he realised why. “That’s right, faggot. Whatever I say,” she said.
No one in the bar seemed to notice.
An hour later, Lauren did what he paid her for:
She made him bleed.
He was dressed in a police uniform from the waist up and naked below. Lauren had him laid out on the floor of her workspace, cuffed to a steel loop in the skirting. As directed, she was especially brutal. She finished with one of the wider paddles. It was a higher-level instrument, but the woman had grown much stronger since his last visit.
“I’ve been working out,” she said.
Thwack.
“Working on this especially for you, you piece of shit,” she said, and pain riddled through Harris’s body. A hot burn rolled down his thighs and ass, his wrists grating against the leather of the cuffs.
For an ecstatic moment, Harris thought of nothing.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve—”
“Not good enough.”
Thwack.
Lauren moved on to a whip, and half an hour later he was ready. She knew her cues. She rolled him over and slid his cock into her hand. It only took a few seconds. Cum sprayed over him, reaching his neck and shoulders. He cried, tears dripping down his neck. All the while, Lauren patted his cheek, her hand in his beard. That’s my boy. That’s my brother.
After a shower and a massage, Harris walked back to bar area and settled up. He knew the girl working the register. He knew most of the girls.
“How’d you go?”
“Good.” He thumbed cash out of his wallet. “I want you to tip Lauren.”
“You sticking around?”
“I wasn’t planning on it. Lean’s not here is she? It’s quiet in here.” The bar area was empty now, bar for a solitary man at the far end of the room.
“Lean’s been and gone. It’s Jackie who’s looking for you,” said the girl. “But she’s in with a client.”
“She want me to wait?”
“She mentioned it, is all.”
The Theodor had a long, broad deck area attached, and Harris limped out there to take the breeze. An hour later, Jackie Vang joined him, stiletto heels knocking hard on the timber floor. “I was beginning to think you’d been cured,” Jackie said. She was as sleek as ever, jet-black hair styled within an inch of its life, hard dark make-up on her face, a gold necklace catching the light from inside.
“Not me,” said Harris. “What do you need?”
“Here, remember this?” She handed him the copy of Thomas Bachelard’s journal, a USB stick resting on top of the papers. Jackie looked after the club’s Chinese clientele. She spoke Canto. It all came back to him: months ago, he’d handed over the journals for translation. Then, after Drainland and Petey and Drags, he’d told her not to bother.
“I thought I told you to burn this?” he said.
“I got curious and figured I could use the practice. I wish to God I had taken your advice.”
“What’s in here?” Harris asked.
“If whoever wrote this is right, someone needs to put a stop to it, because it’s fucked up. You need to a have a look at it, Jim. And I mean you, the old you. Not O’Shea and his new goons.”
“I don’t really…Is it that bad?”
“It’s outside the rules,” she said. She walked back to the doorway.
“Did you show this to anyone?” said Harris.
“Come on, Jim,” she said.
Harris scanned the pages and felt pure dread. Connections started to fire. All dark premonitions led to this.
31
Wednesday, January 5th, 2005
The water reached Romano’s breasts before she woke. Her eyes hurt. She lifted her hand and tried to wipe her face, and felt sand gush into her mouth and nose. Then the water came again, foaming up around her. She rolled over and tried to crawl away. She was on the beach. It was morning. A murky brown tide was coming in around her. She staggered ano
ther ten metres up into the dry sand, and collapsed back down.
When she woke the second time, Jim Harris was standing above her.
“You’re scaring the families,” he said.
“Go to hell.”
She felt his hands on her and the world tilting.
“Come on.”
Romano came to in her bed. It was night. She was stripped to her underwear, dripping sweat, the room like a sauna. A wave of nausea hit as soon as she moved. She scrambled over and—by some miracle—found a bucket on the floor and puked into it. Then, she went back out.
The ceiling fan turned.
Romano sat up. Things were better, by a fraction. She dragged herself to the shower. It took a good long while, but the water sobered her up. She found her robe. It was still dark out but the living room lights were on.
Jim Harris sat upright on the couch, asleep. A small black pistol rested on his thigh. He’d moved her paperwork around.
Romano went back to her room and closed the door.
He was gone when she woke. The hangover pounded. She diced out a line of powder on the bedside table and knocked it back. The world snapped back into sharp relief. Morning, but still dark out.
Her phone rang.
“You alive?”
It was him.
Romano exhaled. “What were you doing in my house?”
“You’re welcome. Come meet me.”
“Where?”
“There’s a lookout on Point Burgess. I want to show you something.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t wear your uniform.”
“Why not?”
“Playtime’s over,” he said.
The line went dead.
32
Wednesday, January 5th, 2005
She bought a double-shot coffee and drove. Romano knew the lookout Harris had mentioned. She parked and took the gravel path down. It was early, an hour after dawn and not much of a day. A long grey bank of cloud rolled in from the ocean. The lookout reflected the island’s liberal stance on public safety: there was no barrier, no signposted warnings, just a set of stairs cut into the rock face leading down to a flat pad on the cliff’s edge. A huge rock formation sat in the water thirty metres off shore. The local fishermen had strung a wire between the edge of the lookout and this rock. They shimmied out along it to get to the better fishing. More madness.
Harris stood down by the lookout’s edge. He was dressed for a run: shorts, grey tee, trainers.
“You ever get across there?” she said.
Harris spun quickly.
“Jumpy,” she said.
“My hearing isn’t…” He raised a hand to his ear and stopped. He turned back to the water. “I’ve hauled enough bodies out of here to know better.”
“Why don’t you pull down the wire?”
“What do you think?”
Romano laughed. “Heaven forbid someone should be denied the right to kill themselves on Tunnel Island.”
“I thought we’d lost you the other night.”
Romano shrugged. She tapped out a smoke and pushed it into the corner of her mouth.
“How much do you remember?” said Harris.
“Not a whole lot. What do you want, Jim? This better not be some AA bullshit. Because you can stick that up your arse.”
There was a small canvas bag on the ground beside him. From inside, he took a pile of photocopied papers. Romano recognised them: Bachelard’s journal.
“I finally got this translated,” he said.
“So you couldn’t leave it alone either.”
“It kinda found me, I’m ashamed to say. It’s what this place is like, though. Things fester.”
“What’s it say?”
“Have a read.”
Something was really wrong. She felt it as soon as she took the journal from him. Her head started to throb. The uppers in her bloodstream raged.
"Turn to page eight,” he said.
She read it.
The Bronze Room at the Gold Point High Rollers is an impossibly private sanctum. Few have heard of it. Sitting in the shadow of the higher-league tables, the Bronze Room is something else. A long overlooked prize that eludes coverage. Yet each year, some of the world’s wealthiest gamblers descend on Turnell Island—off the coast of Tropical North Queensland, Australia—to spend their money in this exact room. These are not the best players, nor major up-and-comers. These are monied men, coming for something else, a bigger prize, and it took me months of digging to find it. Let me take you behind the curtain of one of poker’s most exclusive and, as we’ll see, most sickening games.
Island resident Sophie Marr has seen inside the Gold Point Hotel. She has lived there, worked there, and hustled there. She has known many gamblers and their appetites. With her help, I found a way into the Bronze Room. From my own investigation, from interviews collected in private ,and from records uncovered, I can now confirm that the Bronze Room offers a very particular prize. It is, in my estimation, a portal into one of the most open and monied child prostitution rings in the world—a place where innocence is exchanged for gambling chips—and it is the very tip of a long and sordid history of child exploitation, slavery, and abuse occurring just under the surface of Turnell, a place that, unsurprisingly, allows every other form of corruption and vice.
“They took my sister when she was nine and I was seven,” says Marr. She’s agreed to speak to me on the proviso that—
“Bloody hell,” said Romano.
Under those initial paragraphs, Bachelard had jotted dot points. He had more names, places. A school was listed, somewhere down near Arthurton. Whoever had translated the work had annotated a diagram. Bachelard was tracing the supply chain, trying to work back to where and how the victims were brought into the hotel. He had a lot of ideas. One branch of the diagram stretched offshore. It was crossed out.
“You know anything about this?” she said.
Harris glared. “Christ, no.”
“What, so everything else gets a pass but—”
He took a step towards her. “There’s rules,” he said. “No minors, not ever.”
Romano turned the pages. “What are we going to do, then? What are you going to do?”
“We need to make sure it’s legit. Bachelard could have been on the wrong track.”
“There’s something to it.”
“I know.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Stop making a mess. You’re on the verge of getting yourself into trouble again. People are noticing. Take this. If you can keep yourself steady, try and follow up some of the citizen stuff. Start with the school. I’ll call you tonight.”
He started up the stairs.
“Hey, Harris?” she said.
“What?”
“What are the other rules, over here? No minors and…”
“No tourists and no family members.”
“And this works?”
“We make it work.”
“You made it work?”
“For a time,” he said. He continued up. At the track, he stretched for a moment before jogging off into the bushland. He didn’t look back.
Romano drove to the station house and changed into her uniform. She speed-read Bachelard’s notebook and transcribed names, dates, and places. The school in Arthurton was in the street directory. On the way out, she printed off her copy of the photo from Pauline’s wall: the Marr girls with the parish. They were all school-age in it.
The school itself wasn’t much. She knew from Denny that most of the locals drove their kids across to the mainland every day. Arthurton State Primary was for the island’s lower tier, the children of hospitality staff, grounds people, and the original islanders. Romano felt an instant pang of nostalgia as she walked through the school grounds. The place looked like her own upbringing. Old buildings. Paint peeling. Play equipment in miniature. She made her way to a building marked Reception and asked at the front desk for the principal.
; “That’s me,” said the man behind the counter. He was an oversized child himself. Collared shirt tucked into shorts, white socks pulled to the knee. “The receptionist’s sick,” he said. “What have they done now?”
“Who?” said Romano.
“The students.”
“Oh, nothing. I need a hand with some records.”
He seemed relieved. “We don’t really hand those out. Are you looking for a particular student? It depends on which particular student. There’s a couple I’m happy to hand over.”
“How long have you worked here?”
He moved his tongue around in his mouth. “I’m working on my third batch of long-service leave so…I was back and forth for a while. I think I bought my house in seventy-one. It’s been a while now.”
“How’s your memory? You remember two students called Marr? Two sisters?” She opened her folder and handed him the photo from the Mission.
His face tightened as soon as he saw it. “You better come round,” he said.
He took her through to a small kitchen where he fixed himself a coffee and rolled a cigarette. There was a small courtyard attached. He stepped out there to light up.
“I remember Silvie and Sophie,” he said. “And the rest of that year. It’s been a long time since anyone asked about it.”
“What happened?”
"They all disappeared, or seemed to. Half the class. Left the school overnight. It was the beginning of end, really.”
“What do you mean, disappeared?”
“They stopped coming in. I saw the parents around from time to time, but their children weren’t with us, weren’t placed with anyone that I could figure. We tried to get them back in. We made all the calls. The government wouldn’t intervene. We lost more and more each year after that. It’s a bit better now but…It used to be that everyone sent their children here.”
Romano sorted through her file. She took a list of names culled from Bachelard’s notes and handed it over with the photo from Frith and Pauline’s living room wall.