by Neven Carr
“Reckon you’re right. But it’ll happen without your help. The man’s dying. Lung cancer.”
Good old-fashioned karma. How Reardon loved it. “So, where’s the bastard now?”
“In custody. Thought Cruickshank would be safer.”
Reardon cast Ethan a questioning look. “If I want to get to Cruickshank, whether he’s in custody or not….”
“You could, I know. But I’m thinking more about our anonymous Mr. Smith and what a very unhappy camper he’ll be once he learns that Cruickshank has bailed out on him.”
For just one, single pleasurable moment, Reardon visualized Smith with Cruikshank. His lips curled.
“Know that look only too well, buddy. Remind me never to get on your bad side.” Ethan studied the next section of apple attack. “Cruickshank is bloody scared. Trust me, when the coppers finally arrived, he just about dragged them to the police car. Whoever this Charles Smith is, he must be one scary man.”
Reardon thought of some of the worst criminals he and Ethan had stumbled across. Outwardly, many appeared your typical, everyday nice guy. Inwardly lurked an entirely different story. “So what else did Cruikshank tell you?”
“What we first thought. Cruikshank’s job was to make Claudia appear unstable if she ever remembered. He has no idea of Smith’s identity only that a couple of weeks back, Smith told him he’d be required to take Claudia on again. Cruikshank refused.”
Reardon sensed fresh anger bubble in his throat. “What, he thinks that all will be forgiven now that he’s too sick to carry his illegal shit on?”
“Not sure and don’t care. I’m not the religious type, as you well know. But he is seriously looking to make amends. And I used that to my advantage.”
Reardon rubbed the back of his aching neck. “I need a bloody run.”
“First sensible thing you’ve said. And throw in some of that artsy-fartsy meditation shit you do, preferably before tonight.”
Reardon pictured the magnificent Himalayas where he had trained, its unbelievably precious and pristine beauty. As he saw himself run through its virginal territory, he took in its rugged, snow-capped mountains, smelt the first sprinkles of spring, sensed the still, harsh cold pelt his face. Beneath his thudding feet was the challenging, softening sludge stressing his muscles to the max; in his overstretched lungs an intense, burning pain.
The training had been brutal.
But Reardon had never felt more alive.
He raked his hair and fell back to reality. A continuous but subtle clatter sounded to his right. Annie was busily packing away dishes.
“Know who encouraged Claudia to see Cruikshank?” Ethan asked.
“Her father,” Reardon said.
“That couldn’t have gone down well.”
It hadn’t. Afterwards, Claudia appeared totally defeated. “Everything keeps leading back to that bloody family of hers.”
“And one very huge, very colorful family it is.”
Reardon thought the comment curious. He studied Ethan as he headed to the kitchen and binned the apple, as he whispered something in Annie’s ear. Annie nodded.
“I’m thinking you went to Cabriati’s today,” Reardon said after Ethan returned.
“Yep.”
“And I’m guessing the place was packed with relatives.”
“Packed is an understatement.”
“And they were all there because?” Reardon paused, and then shook his head. “Of course, they were all there because that’s what the Cabriati clan do… look after their own.”
“A relief to see your instincts are still alive and functional.”
Reardon ignored him. “Did you speak to Vincent Cabriati?”
“Nope.”
“But you obviously found out something important.”
“Ooo… yes. But let’s just say it’s not a good something.”
Could this day get any worse? Reardon quickly reprimanded himself. Of course, it could. “Am I going to need a drink?”
“Perhaps several, my good man.”
“Fuck this, Ethan.” The whole case was making Reardon’s gut tangle in ways he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. Annie appeared from nowhere with two half-filled glasses of bourbon. Reardon caught her kindly eyes. “You know?”
Her downturned mouth was his answer. She left an almost full bourbon bottle on the coffee table then disappeared down the hall.
“That bad,” Reardon whispered. He emptied his glass and then gave Ethan the green light.
“I recognized someone.” Ethan pulled out two folded bits of paper from his shirt pocket. “At first, I thought it impossible. Got out my mobile and quickly snapped a photo. Luckily I did, because within minutes, Cabriati was onto me, and I was escorted out of there by some pretty buffed-up guys.”
Reardon wondered what someone built like Ethan would term a buffed-up guy but he let the disturbing image pass. “And?”
“I fiddled with the photo on my computer; you know all that photo-shop shit – a black leather jacket, matching hood and so on.”
Reardon instantly saw where this was going and prayed he was wrong.
“You asked me if I would ever recognize the person watching Claudia at The Local the day Alice Polinski was killed. I didn’t think I could but….”
He handed Reardon one of the folded papers. It was a colored printout of a person in the photo-shopped apparel and sunglasses. Reardon detected something familiar beneath the masquerade. At first, he couldn’t quite pin it but then it smacked him like an imaginary ten-ton fist. His throat automatically dried. “Can’t be,” he scarcely whispered.
“Sorry, mate, but it is.” He handed Reardon the original photo.
Reardon held it for a few bare moments, watched it slip from his shaky hands and flutter onto the shag-pile rug. A cold, hard face stared back at him, almost in a mocking way and he thought how truly warped the world could be.
He slugged the rest of his second drink. It slid down smoothly, comfortably. His head felt almost vacant, free for a short time. And it felt bloody good. “This is really fucked.”
“That it is, my friend.” Ethan paused and then, “I’ve been playing around with a few theories.”
Reardon welcomed the theories, mainly because he was still too dazed to come up with his own. They were good, some better than others. But like a dogged spark of electricity, they eventually generated Reardon’s own idea.
And the more he thought about it, the more it made sense.
And the more it made sense, the more he hated it.
“Are we still going through with tonight?” Ethan asked.
“Of course.”
“Does Claudia know of the plans?”
“Only that we are leaving Nankari.” Something Reardon hoped wouldn’t eventuate if all went well.
“You haven’t told her?”
It was almost accusatory. He side-glanced Ethan. “No.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t think she’s been through enough already?”
“Everyone you help has been through enough already but you always keep them up to date.”
Reardon began rubbing his brow.
“Saul, even with how you feel about her, you know deep down you have to tell her, if for no other reason, for her own safety.”
“When she’s with me, she is safe.” But whom was Reardon really trying to convince?
Ethan flapped the photo in his face. “And this,” he said, in a not too convivial tone. “Are you going to tell her about this?”
Reardon visualized Claudia’s sad, crumpled body on the kitchen floor. One memory had caused it, one solitary, bloody memory. How would she deal with something of this magnitude? “Eventually.”
“She needs to know, Saul, like right now. She needs to know who she can and cannot trust.”
“Yes, she does,” he hissed, a little too forcibly. “But not now.”
Ethan’s eyes rolled skyward. “Can’t believe this of you, mate. And I know women;
you’ll be making a huge mistake not telling her.”
“Then that’ll be my mistake to make. And what suddenly made you the all-round expert on women, you who change them more times than your bloody jocks.”
Had Reardon just said that? He gritted his teeth and silently cursed. With all their jovial banter about Ethan’s womanizing, Reardon knew that once upon a flawless world, Ethan was anything but. All people had their coping mechanisms after traumatic events.
Ethan’s women were his.
“I’m sorry,” Reardon whispered. “I don’t know where that came from.”
“I know exactly where it came from. You’re feeling torn and not in control. I just happen to be the poor sod available.” Ethan stood. “One more piece of Ethan Sloane advice. Don’t become like one of her over-protective junkie family. As much as you care about her, she doesn’t need that from you.”
And he left Reardon to dwell on his own thoughts.
***
Reardon ran at least three miles non-stop, performed his meditation shit as Ethan called it, and ran the three miles back. Short in comparison to what he normally did but it brought fresh blood pumping through his veins. Feeling semi-back in control, he showered, changed and then searched for Claudia.
He heard her well before he found her, heard the rhythmic squeal of the outdoors swinging seat.
The blistering red sky was signaling a near-end to another day. Reardon wondered where they would be on its next cycle. Crickets welcomed the cooling evening. A frivolous gecko scurried along the patio’s timber railing, stopped, stared and scurried right back off.
Reardon snuggled next to Claudia, the swinging seat creaking a little louder, longer than normal. “Hey you,” he murmured.
Claudia smiled. Shit, how he loved that smile, how her entire face simply smiled along with it. “Hey you back,” she said.
“Been here the whole time?”
She shrugged. “For the most part. Had lots to think about. And a good, long chat with Ethan helped. He feels so bad about Cruikshank.” She was staring towards the roaring, incoming waves. “It hurt him.”
It hurt me, he wanted to say.
“I told him that I appreciated his honesty, that I would’ve hated it more if he hadn’t told me.”
Reardon rolled his eyes. Ethan’s ego would be intolerable after that. Couldn’t he, just once, be wrong? Reardon buried his nose into her thick, windswept hair, inhaled the familiar smells that came with her and wallowed.
She reminded him of a young injured horse that his father once had, lost, frightened but highly spirited. All it wanted to do was run away. Just like her. Until his father taught the mare irrevocable trust.
As he needed to do with Claudia.
“Baby?” Reardon whispered.
He heard her soft, seductive hmmm tantalize every living, hungry nerve cell he possessed. He winced and battled, looked forward to the day he would battle no longer and simply have her. Somewhere special… not a place soaked in the blood of dead people. “I have something to tell you.”
Her half-hooded eyes swung up to him.
“Tonight, when we leave Nankari….”
Annie rushed in, halting mere feet from them. She was twisting her long, beaded necklace, gazing directly at Claudia. “It’s your father,” she mumbled. “He’s… he’s… oh damn it, Claudia, he’s just been rushed to hospital. They think a heart attack.”
Chapter 35
Araneya Estate
1989
“I WANT TO tell you a story, my Carino.”
He appeared genial, more than he had in some time and hence the girl, with the trusting innocence that came only to the young, snuggled beneath the security of her father’s arm. “Is it a good story, Papa?”
But her only answer came in the swift stillness of his body. The little girl stilled also and waited. Hoped and waited. For the waiting to end.
They were in her special place, beneath her watchful guardian angel. Her own bubble of magic. Here, she would listen to the sweet, mysterious voices, the ones that soothed her with comforting words and hopeful promises and the belief that if she wished hard enough, long enough, and was patient in her waiting, then in time her wish would come true.
And the girl did believe.
She believed with all her might.
Moonlight shivered across the stone statue, melting its frozen lips and mutating its cold, grey eyes into something golden and warm. It was smiling at her. She smiled back. And then she made her wish, as she had done so many times before.
When her wish making was over and her hope strengthened by the magic, she asked her Papa to tell his story.
His body stiffened further. “It is not a good story. I wish it was.”
The little girl felt heartened that her Papa believed in wishes too. “If you wish hard enough, long enough and just wait,” she said, proudly espousing what she believed, what the magic had taught her, “then the bad story will become a good story.”
Her Papa cupped her chin and looked at her with sad, squinting eyes and a lop-sided, downturned mouth. “Then I wish I didn’t have to tell you. But it is a story that you must know. Do you understand?”
The girl wasn’t sure if she did but she nodded eagerly. “Of course, Papa. I’m very smart, remember.”
He smiled a brief, delicate smile and then pulled away. With his forearms on his knees, his hands clasped firmly together, he stared into the muted shadows beyond and began his story. “Once upon a time, there was a young man, a very happy man with a wonderful future ahead of him. Everybody loved him, his family, his friends. Oh, he had many friends.” Her father closed his eyes. “But that was soon to all disappear.”
“Why, Papa, what happened?”
“The war happened,” he said, in that unnatural pitch she knew so well, the one that never failed to make tight, nasty knots in her tummy. She huddled her knees close to her chest. “A ludicrous, senseless war.”
The girl didn’t know what ‘ludicrous’ meant, but she wasn’t about to ask.
“The man didn’t know that. He thought it was a good war, one that he could be proud to fight in, be brave for his country. And so he willingly and very foolishly took part, only never to return.”
“Did he die, Papa?”
“Oh, yes, Carino, he died all right, but not in the way you think. His body was alive, it moved, spoke, ate, slept, but the rest of him, his core, his heart… his soul… was dead.”
“I don’t understand. How can he be dead but not dead?”
He glared at her with wild, burning eyes, “Because, that is what war does. It kills who you are, who you once were. It annihilates your very essence. And all that returns is an empty shell.”
The girl, fearful of his worsening mood, remained silent.
“A vast empty shell,” he repeated to the empty space before him. “This man had to do things in that war that he never imagined. Do you know what some of those things were?”
The girl didn’t think she wanted to know.
“He would kill people, sometimes brutally, not just men, but woman, even children. He would look in their wet, frightened eyes, hear their continual screams for mercy. But he gave none. They were the enemy, after all.”
The little girl’s former hope, her strength, the wondrous magic, was fast diminishing. She trembled. “Papa, I… I don’t like this story.”
But her Papa simply ignored her. “The delusional man did many terrible things, things that lodged themselves permanently in his already sad, pathetic mind. But he accepted it, because he knew he was doing it for the good of his country.”
His lips curled and he laughed a short, wicked laugh. “For his country. What a joke… what a cruel, cruel joke. Do you know what he found out about his country, the country he fought for so loyally? They didn’t even want him in the war; wouldn’t even acknowledge or honor him for being there. Everything he had suffered had been for nothing.” He shook his head. “And all that remained were the horrific memories o
f what he had done.”
He moaned, buried his head into his trembling hands and fell unusually silent, unusually still.
The girl moistened her small forefinger with her mouth, slicked back a long, wayward lock as she so often did when she was anxious. What should she do? Should she say something to her Papa? Perhaps, give him a hug like Alice did when the girl felt as sad as her father appeared.
She looked to her guardian angel, listened to her wise words. “Papa?” she whispered in a quivery voice. “Are you all right?”
His shoulders began shuddering and he whimpered, not once but several times. She sensed a swift, throbbing ache near her heart as she saw tears glistening on his reddened cheeks.
“Why are you crying?”
He took a few more moments before tipping his head sideways and looking at her. “Because,” he rasped, “because that man is your Papa.”
The girl immediately clutched her chest and inhaled sharply. Her Papa killing people? Could he do something like that? She didn’t understand what war was. She didn’t understand much of what he was saying, but she did understand that he had killed people… children. She felt scared, scared for herself and for her Papa.
The girl looked to the left, mapped out the cobblestone path to Alice’s cottage… to safety. Should she run there? Now? Hide from her Papa? A nearby owl hooted and she jumped, her eyes wide, her heart thundering. Something gripped her wrist. It was her Papa’s large hand. “Please don’t ever be afraid of me,” his voice now gentler. “I couldn’t bear it if you were. Trust me.”
She wanted to, she wanted to very much.
“Your Papa is not a well man.”
“But you will get better, you said so.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I may have to go away for a while.”
“And when you come back, will you be my Papa again?”
He gently placed his warm, moist hands on either side of her face. “Look at me,” he whispered.
And what she saw were remnants of her old Papa, with his sweet, loving eyes and his warm, hopeful smile. “I promise you, Carino, I promise you I will get better. And then I will come for you, and I will be your Papa once more.”