by Peter Corris
I nodded. A house full of damaged old people that had shaken Leon Bronowski up. He’d mentioned it to Bruce Henneberry, maybe in response to a question about Singer. It felt solid, more than the fantasy of a booze-clouded brain, and there were two dead men, two men removed from the possibility of unhappiness, to give it solidity.
I reached back for my money. ‘Do you accept donations?’ I couldn’t call him anything. The embarrassment I felt at the thought of calling him ‘Brother’ or ‘Brother Gentle’ reminded me of the years I’d spent not calling my wife’s father anything. Come to think of it, this guy looked a bit like him-Cyn had got her looks from her mother. He inclined his head graciously and I put twenty bucks on the floor between us. I was suddenly aware of how quiet it was. The silence was like the reverse side of a shriek.
‘Why is it so quiet?’ I asked.
‘One of our principles,’ he said. ‘We believe that excessive noise disturbs the harmonies of mind, body and soul. There is a vow of silence in operation here and we try to do everything quietly.’
He was certainly doing well at that. As I put my money away, I touched the pictures of Singer. What the hell, I thought, I pulled them out and showed them to him, asking him if he’d ever seen the subject.
He didn’t hesitate. ‘Never. An interesting face.’
‘You read faces?’
‘You are a cynic, Mr Hardy. Yes I can read faces. I could tell you a great deal about yourself from yours.’
I rubbed my hand over what he was talking about. ‘Not so hard,’ I said. ‘Broken nose-boxing; missing teeth-enemies; lines and wrinkles-I used to smoke a lot.’
‘There’s a lot more, but you wouldn’t listen.’ He handed the pictures back. ‘This man is highly intelligent. He is capable of great violence, perhaps to himself.’
‘Thanks.’ I could always serve that up to Mrs Singer and explain that a man dressed like a canary had told me so. ‘What’s the significance of the yellow?’ I asked.
‘You would have to join us to find that out, Mr Hardy.’
I stood up. I hadn’t seen him move, but the twenty dollars had gone away somewhere very quietly. He conducted me back to the reception room and pressed my hand again.
‘I hope you don’t have to use the gun, Mr Hardy. Guns make a lot of noise.’
‘So they do,’ I said. ‘And blood is red.’
‘You are a poet. I will repeat that to our spiritual leader when he visits us next year.’
The comment had the soft phoniness peculiar to the religious conman. On the whole, I prefer the spiel of the oil share sellers and real estate crooks.
‘Feel free,’ I said.
15
It was late in the afternoon and the rain had eased to a drizzle that looked like settling in for the night. I gave the street a careful once over before going across to my car. Freddy Ward didn’t seem like the sort of man to call it all square, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if Rex decided to go freelance for a night. I deeply suspected Rex of being vindictive. But I couldn’t see any watchers and cruisers and they stand out plainly in the rain when honest folk are inside or going about their business fast.
My Gregorys showed Monk Lane to be a little trickle of a thoroughfare in Clovelly near the boundary with Randwick. Leon had had a long beat. I drove down to the beach and sat and sorted out my thoughts on the matter or matters before me. It was smoking time again, moody time with the light rain rinsing the air and turning the sand grey. My first impulse was to front up to the house and compare my photographs with the faces of all the old jokers there. Against that were Henneberry’s guts on the carpet and all Leon’s broken bones. Maybe I needed reinforcements. More than that, I needed information; walking up to that house to knock on the front door could be like walking up to the Lubianka. The only person I could think of with the kind of street knowledge I needed was Ann Winter. A flock of seagulls landed on the sand and began to walk down towards the water as if they knew what they were doing. I started the car and drove to Manny’s.
There was a sprinkle of people in the coffee bar but no sign of the proprietor. A thin blonde was doing the honours in a lackadaisical way, as if her body was somewhere else as well as her mind. I bought a coffee and asked if Ann had been in recently.
‘Yeah, she was. Said she’d be back later.’
‘When?’
She shrugged.
‘Mind if I use the tape machine?’
She shrugged again.
I picked out a blank tape, slipped it into the slot and recited: ‘Ann, Cliff Hardy. I’m sorry about the other night. I didn’t dump you. I ran into some trouble, very heavy stuff. Now I’m going to number ten Monk Lane, Clovelly. Looks like the lead Bruce and Leon had. I’m going for a look-see but maybe you know something about the place. I’ll wait outside for an hour. It’s six-fifteen now. If you hear this before seven-thirty come on over. I’ll pay for the cab. Thought you’d want to see this through’. I wrote ‘For Ann Winter’ on the cassette label and asked the girl to give it to Ann if she came in.
‘You haven’t drunk your coffee,’ she said.
I swilled it down, wishing it had a touch of Manny’s grappa in it and went back out into the rain. The roads were greasy and treacherous as I wound up through the cutting to Clovelly. It was steep going and I wondered how many times Leon had hoofed it in all the years he’d bummed around this district. With some derelicts, the walking is what keeps them alive. It strikes a balance with the sugar and alcohol in their systems and they stay thin and hard like a tree that’s rotting inside but still standing. Eventually the rot wins.
Clovelly is a headland tucked in south of Bronte and east of Randwick. It’s a bit like those two suburbs, but down market on both of them. The flats are a bit meaner, the house fronts and the streets narrower. Monk Lane was thin, twisted and a dead end. It held a mixture of faded, tired-looking flats and houses. Number ten was at the end of the street with a vacant block on one side and a crumbling, roofless cottage on the other. A sheer rock wall with some creeper clinging to it rose up behind the house, which was three storeys high, heavy and ungracious. It had the unmistakable look of a building divided into flats and single rooms.
It was a forbidding pile. There was a narrow cement walkway down one side and it was a fair bet that the skimpy backyard would be a jungle of privet and castor oil trees. It differed from most other places in that the backyard had privacy; around here the terrain is such that every block is fully visible from some higher elevation. Not here, but there was a good chance of getting rubbish thrown down into the back from the top of the rock.
I sat in the car and looked at it, giving Ann time to show up. She didn’t. I had no good ideas on how to tackle the place, so I got my gun out again and stuck it in my belt. That sometimes helps, as I get to thinking of ways to avoid having to use it, but this time nothing helpful came. I hunted out the most anonymous card in my collection, which read, ‘Brian Harrison-independent systems’. It had been left under my door and I never found out who Brian was or what an independent system might be. I put the card in my pocket and stuck my hand out of the window. The rain had stopped; no excuses. There was no activity in the street. One of the lights had blown and it was dark so I took a torch with me.
I walked down the side of the building, scouting. There were a couple of broken windows boarded up at the back where the outside plumbing rusted and dripped. I skidded or. some rubbish on the path and crashed into a couple of battered garbage bins. One went over and spilled a cascade of pet food tins that bounced and rattled over the concrete to meet a pile of flagons, some broken.
I scooted back up the path to the building’s entrance, which was a sort of porch with a low rail stuck to the side like an afterthought. There were buttons numbered one to ten beside the door; I pushed number one and heard it ring inside, close by. While I waited, I pressed a few other buttons and heard nothing.
The door in front of me opened inwards, and from long habit I moved forward and put my
foot up on the step.
‘Yes?’ He looked as if he got more practice at saying no, although not necessarily in English. He was small and dark with a sallow, pocked complexion and a mouth that turned down sourly. His forehead was high and deeply creased with frown marks. He wore dirty boots, jeans and a loose sports shirt outside the jeans. I’d have put his age at around thirty. His forearms were sinewy with dark, downy hair; his biceps looked as if they would bunch up like cricket balls. He pulled a grubby handkerchief from a back pocket and wiped his nose.
‘Er, Mr…?’ He didn’t say anything and I had to take the plunge. I handed him the card. ‘I have to check the foundations-main roads and council job. They’ll be working in the area soon, blasting and tunnelling, so we need to know how sound the buildings in the area are.’ I took two steps back and glanced around. ‘Looks okay, but I’ve got to check.’
He came forward and put the card on the railing. I couldn’t tell whether he’d read it or not, or whether he could read it.
‘Very late,’ he said. The voice was light, almost singsong. There was an accent, not Greek, but like it.
‘I’m sorry, but I must look.’
‘Inside or outside?’
‘Oh, outside, mostly, have to look at any basements or cellars. Just that, unless there’s any major cracks.’ I’d already noticed a big crack that ran raggedly up at the back.
‘Council?’
‘And the Department of Main Roads.’ I tried to give the words all the weight I could, and thought some jargon might help. ‘There’s the flight path to consider, too. Decibels. I won’t be long, it’s miserable out.’
He tapped the breast pocket of his shirt. Keys clinked and there seemed to be some muscular development up there too. He pulled the door closed behind him.
‘I will take you.’
We walked along the path to the back and I bent down to flash the torch at the foundations from time to time. Some of the bricks were crumbling.
‘Damp course trouble?’
He shrugged. At the back he pulled out his keys and we went down a set of steps that the vines and weeds were threatening. He unlocked the padlock on a heavy door; it. swung in and he clicked on the light. It was a small, airless cave, dark despite the bulb. There was another door a few feet into the shadows. It had a strange smell, but how are old cellars supposed to smell? I took a perfunctory look around, said ‘Okay’, and went up the steps. He locked the door and I pointed to the crack running up the bricks. It had fractured a heavy window ledge on the second floor and looked as if it might run up behind a drainpipe to the roof.
‘I’ll have to check that,’ I said. ‘Inside, sorry.’
He looked dubious but I bustled back along the path. ‘Got two other places to see tonight,’ I said. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
He unlocked the front door and we went into a small lobby with a door on the left and a staircase on the right.
‘You go up,’ he said.
The passage looked as if it hadn’t been swept that year or last. The carpet strip was ragged and there was a coating of dust on the dry, flaky boards on either side of it. There were several doors down one side. It was hard to tell in the gloom, but I thought I saw fittings for outside locking. He padded softly along behind me, the keys clinking in his pocket.
At the end of the passage he quickened his pace, stepped in front of me and unlocked the door.
‘No-one in here,’ he said.
But someone had been in there and pretty recently. The room had two distinct smells-old, stale alcohol and the one that comes from handwashed socks and underwear.
It was completely dark outside now. He turned on the light and blew his nose at the same time. The bulb was fly-spotted, like most of the surfaces in the room. On the floor was the inevitable lino, worn through to the newspaper strata in some places and through to the boards in others. Although the night was mild, the room was cold. Plaster had fallen off the wall in lumps above the skirting board and the stuff that hung on glistened wetly. There was some junky furniture, wood-veneered and peeling. The bed was narrow and the mattress was an ancient, sweat-stained ruin. Cobwebs hung in the corners like thick skeins of grey wool.
I heard movements above me, footsteps and something being dropped. The thought of someone living in conditions like these sickened me. I tensed up, my ribs hurt and I moved angrily across to examine the broken window ledge and to give myself a moment to think. It didn’t take much thinking-the place was a gaol of some kind and I had the turnkey right there with me. It looked just like the sort of place that a damaged or deranged person such as Singer had been reported to be could end up in. I took the. 45 from my belt, cocked it and turned. I pointed the gun at his nose.
‘I’m searching this dump from top to bottom. You’re opening the doors.’
He was incredibly quick. One minute his eyes were registering surprise and the next he was in a crouch and scuttling forward to swing a stiff arm at me like a scythe. He wasn’t balanced quite right, though, and the light wasn’t good for that sort of action. The arm missed and I slammed the side of his head with the butt of the automatic. It got him just above the temple and he grunted and went down. I put the muzzle hard in his ear and felt in his shirt pocket for the keys. I hooked a finger round them but then I felt the soft, loose movement under my hand and pulled away as if I’d touched a snake. The contours of the chest weren’t muscular. With my well-placed gun butt, I’d just floored a woman.
It was obvious now; the short, dark hair curling around the ears was softer than a man’s hair, and with the shirt pushed up I could see the roundness of her hips. It didn’t mean that she wasn’t a nasty, dangerous bit of work. I kept the gun pressed close while she shook her head and hurt herself.
‘You’re not a lady,’ I said. ‘Get on the bed.’ She didn’t move. With an amateur I’d have delivered a boot to the bum for emphasis, but she was no amateur. Her eyes were shining with anticipation of more fighting. My side was hurting and I’d done something to the knuckle that had popped when I’d hit Rex. I wouldn’t have backed myself in a fair return fight. A swinging foot would give her all the chance she’d need. I stepped back and pointed the gun at her knee.
‘Get on the bed or I’ll cripple you.’
She said something unpleasant-sounding in a language I didn’t understand and got on the bed.
‘Turn to the wall.’
She turned and I checked the window. It was nailed shut. If she kicked it in she’d have a twenty-five-foot drop in the dark onto the garbage bins, the cans and the broken bottles. I wouldn’t have risked it.
‘Take off your shoes, easy.’
She bent her legs up, unzipped the boots and kicked them off onto the floor. I slung them into the passage, smashed the light bulb with the gun barrel and went through the door in three strides. I pinned the door closed with my shoulder and ran around the key ring until I found the one that locked it. It seemed unlikely that she’d have a spare key, but I waited outside for a while to be sure. I heard the bed creak and scratching noises as she felt her way around and that was all.
Going through that house was one of the most depressing things I’ve ever done. I did it methodically, starting at the top back and working through to bottom front. There were thirteen single rooms and five flatettes with twenty-three occupants. Without exception they were middle-aged or older, and defeated. The ones doubling up in the flatettes were the worst off. A few of them got abusive when I barged in, youngish, healthy and carrying a gun. One old man made a pathetic attempt to take me and I had to gentle him back into a chair.
The squalor of the rooms was profound. They smelled, were dirt-encrusted and there were signs of the depredations of vermin everywhere. The people were living on bread, pet food and cheap wine. There were three toilets in the building, cracked, creaking affairs that flushed about a pint of water. I looked at one chamber pot in one room. Only one.
Most of the occupants wore pyjamas or nightgowns and dressing-gow
ns. I had to look closely at some of the sunken-in, hopeless faces to determine their sex. They were so far gone it didn’t matter, but some of those who looked like women wore pyjamas and some of those who looked like men wore night- gowns, pathetic nylon affairs with filthy, phony lace.
I forced myself to do the whole round. In one single room a woman tottered towards me, holding out a photograph. I took the picture, which was of a young woman wearing a bathing suit and high heels in a cheesecake pose.
‘Is this you?’ I said.
She cackled at me. She was skeletally thin and she scratched at her groin with fleshless, bony hands. When she stopped scratching there, she moved the hand up to her head. I stepped back.
‘What’s your name?’
Scratch, scratch. Hair and flakes of skin fell onto her shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ she said hoarsely. ‘What’s yours, dear?’
There were no radios in the rooms, a few magazines, no books. I only glanced into a few drawers and cupboards but there were no pens or pencils. Spoons, bowls and cups were made of plastic.
The smell was bad everywhere, but in one room I nearly vomited from the stench. The floor was a sea of cockroaches and a man was sitting on the bed watching them with a rapt, engrossed smile on his face.
I locked all the occupants in as they were, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. They mumbled at me and each other in slow, toneless voices that were curiously alike. They dribbled and spat. None of them was John Singer.
16
The only habitable part of the place was the flatette in front where the turnkey lived. The four rooms were only moderately clean but their toilet and bathroom, small kitchen and functioning furniture put them in the luxury department. There was food for humans in the cupboards and refrigerator and a decent flagon of red wine on the kitchen table. I rinsed a glass, filled it with wine, drank it down and poured again. I thought very seriously about the packet of cigarettes on the table beside the flagon, but decided on more wine instead. I drank more of it than I wanted to and was feeling the effect pretty soon. I was drinking to get the stink and taste of those foul rooms out of my head.