I wondered whose initiative that had been to put that up, Aus-Police or Neigbourhood Watch? The Watch had developed teeth as the police force’s recruiting dropped off in the last ten years. Suddenly no one wanted to be paid to enforce the law s of the country in general, everyone just wanted to join the Watch group and take care of their own small community.
Dad had seen it coming and been appalled. It was one of the rare issues we disagreed upon. I figured it was better when each community took responsibility for itself, rather than relying on the government to make everything better for the whole. Dad said it led to bad decisions and persecution. I told him I thought there was plenty of that the way things were – how could this be worse?
I still think I was right, only Dad wasn’t here to argue it with me.
My phone rang then. It was Caro.
“Leo Teng used to be a contractor working out of Indonesia and Japan but he disappeared off the grid a while back. Seems like most people thought he was feeding fish in the Pacific, but now they’re saying he was off finding a new religion. He’s been out of town. Came in from North America a few days before your Marshall friend.”
“He’s not my friend,” I said automatically.
“Colleague.”
“So you mean Teng’s a…contractor as in…”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean?”
“Then someone hired him to abduct me?”
“Maybe? If he’s supposed to have found religion, it could’ve been a belief-based act.”
“How could my beliefs offend anyone? I don’t share them around?”
“Maybe it’s what you stand for… Honestly, Ginny, I don’t know. I’ll keep digging but that’s all I got at the moment.”
“Thanks, Caro. That’s more than the police would’ve shared.”
“They may not even know some of it. I had to go pretty deep to get this.”
“Hope you’re not racking up too many favours on my account?”
“Hope in vain,” she said.
“In the name of friendship?”
“Whatever.” She hung up.
I climbed through a hole in the chicken wire, ran up the stairs and checked the line. No train lights either way, so I jumped down and scrambled across the tracks to the other side.
It would have been easier to go the tourist route through the Coast bus route, but longer, and fraught with drunks and excited tourists. My way was quick and quiet.
A ditch, an embankment, another falling-down-fence and a long walk in the dark through an abandoned industrial site and I was standing on one edge of Divine.
In all directions lights blinked, glared and haloed. Behind me, across the Western Quarter, those halos bled into a yellow-white aurora. In front though, Divine shimmered like a bleeding rainbow.
I walked on, hand on my pistol, heading west according to my phone compass, towards Mystere, a dense plot of the Divine Province squeezed in to the lopsided triangle of Gilgul Street, Seer Parade and Mason Way. Not the real designated street names but those corrupted by the weight of local reference.
Common myth was an authoritative reality around here.
Dad had so much to say on the matter of common myths. He believed they were more powerful than any specific spiritualism or religion and that one day someone would realize that, stop waging wars on economic premises, and fight the real fight–the one about belief.
I could get arcane too when I had a half dozen beers in me, but I was still young enough to think that that kind of talk was also just a mask over bitterness and disillusionment.
Bitterness did bad things to people. Turned them into twisted up versions of themselves. Or husks, sloughed off and left behind to blow away in the wind.
I never liked to think of Dad as bitter. But maybe he was, a little. Uncompromising, for sure.
Plenty of local and foreign tourists came to visit to Mystere on a daily basis. It wasn’t exactly in the tour guide brochures but you only had to ask a cabbie where to get a palm reading, or a rental car dealer where to find the more offbeat local colour and you’d get the same instructions. Go to Mystere but make sure you stay inside the triangle.
The long side of the triangle was Gilgul Street where every shop front had a layer of stalls in front of it like barnacles clinging to a jetty, hoping not to be swept away by the current (in this case the waves of people rolling past).
One end of Gilgul intersected Seer Parade, the other, Mason’s Way. In the middle sat a wedge of hi-rise shopping, once glitzy, now gaudy and reeking of hashish and incense sticks. Clairvoyants and mediums competed like grocers, and the combined scents of street cooking and smoldering herbs slammed the back of my throat.
I’d been there dozens of times over the years and each visit had me swallowing and sweating hard within minutes. The sweating was all about the way people looked at you in Mystere. Those who were selling wanted a piece of your mind-space. The rest were just wild eyed, either pushing to get in somewhere or pushing to get out. Whichever way you turned, once inside Mystere’s triangle, humanity became avaricious and urgent.
I stood by a hydrant, using it as a buffer against the tide of foot traffic while I decided where to go. Vehicles weaved along the road, slowed to a crawl. You didn’t drive the streets of the triangle unless you were Delivery or Emergency; like Times Square without the homage to entertainment, or the wholesomeness. Instead of thirty-foot screens blinking and yowling, the landscape was bright with glow sticks and fairy lights and plain old fashioned wire-basket fires.
I knew a clairvoyant halfway along Gilgul who knew people, so I stepped out into the throng and let it propel me in her direction. The difficulty was cutting across to the right doorway at the right time. The normal rules of engagement people observed in crowded places didn’t hold in Mystere. If you knocked into someone, they were likely to knife you, or kick you down so that you got trampled in the undertow. If you didn’t knock into them, you’d never make it across. Damned either way.
I edged sideways, minimizing contact and then made a lunge when I saw the tiniest space appear the way I needed to go. I collided with someone trying to take the same gap and a hand seized my elbow and pinched so hard I stopped in my tracks. The owner of the hand rode up hard against me and for a moment I thought we’d both be trampled. But suddenly the tide of people parted, as if dividing around a pylon.
I swiveled, fist raised, and saw that the man who had hold of me was the same size.
“Sorry.”Then the tattoo on the side of his thick neck drew my attention. A crow in a circle.
Without hesitation I hoiked my knee hard into where it hurts a guy and threw myself sideways back into the people tide. Despite his size, my vision of him was swallowed in an instantas I scrambled to keep up the traffic pace.
Moments later, my clairvoyant’s sign flashed over my head and I made a second lunge shop-side behind a cluster of visitors all clothed in white robes and sequined animal masks.
That got me to the talisman stall outside the shop front where I held fast to a pole covered in dream-catchers and let my pounding heart recover.
“Crosses, Missy. Wands! Blessed teeth! Cat knuckles! Dung lockets! Best prices in Mystere,” the vendor bleated in my direction.
“I want to see Corah,” I called to him.
He kept his head averted, exchanging cash for trinkets with the precision of a factory machine. “Madame Corah has a price, Missy.”
“Tell her it’s Ranger Jackson.”
He slanted a lopsided, unhinged grin my way and pulled an old-style microphone down from the folds of the stained silk drapery that served as a ceiling to the stall. I couldn’t understand his dialect but there was no mistaking my name in among the swallowed utterances.
With the other hand, he got busy wrapping a collection of animal bones in brown paper. A buyer handed him their One Card and he passed the bag over.
“Corah be coming soon,” he said shoving the microphone back into its hidey hole, and jiggling the chimes above his head.
“You sell bones feathers?” I asked suddenly.
He stopped everything and looked at me hard. “What you say?”
The intensity of his stare made me uncomfortable. The stall vendors in Mystere belonged to an elaborate network of black market racketeers who gossiped like entertainment bloggers. Maybe I’d been indiscrete.
“Forget it,” I said.
“Virgin?”
I heard Corah’s husky accent behind me and turned to her with relief. She peered out from under the half doorway entrance of her boudoir. A lot of the footings in Mystere had begun to subside, due to dodgy earthworks on top and a mains water pipe malfunction up the line. Some buildings had flat out collapsed when the water seeped through, others just kind of sank.
Local government had tried to slap OH&S demolition edicts on them, but trying to stop or change anything in Mystere was like trying to ban Akubras in the Western Quarter. Never. Gonna. Happen. Not. Worth. The. Hassle.
And so, premises like Corah’s fell deeper into the ground, which made room for more buildings atop. On my rare visits, I always felt nervous in her place in case my visit coincided with another sink or collapse. Corah on the other hand, seemed totally at peace with her surroundings, as if it was totally natural to work in a room where the floor sloped downward and the wall had a crack so large and full of dirt you could watch the earthworms getting busy.
I let go of the pole and ducked in after her.
She shut the heavy, iron-hinged door behind me and we were alone in relative quiet.
“What would you be needing, that brings you here at night?” she asked me with her charming Irish lilt.
She was a beautiful woman with a sheen of long hair and plump, upturned lips. I’m pretty sure that the beauty spot just below her nose was an affectation but it added a kind of pouty glamour to her gypsy clothes and jewelry.
Her traditional beauty seemed out of place in a district famed for its weirdness and obsession with dangerous rituals, but Corah belonged here more than most.
She placed a tiny brass hash pipe in my hand. “Chill-axe, Ranger.”
I handed it back. “Any more chilled and I’d be in a coma.”
She sighed at that. “Still so lawful. Don’t you ever get tired of yourself?”
“No more or less than you do, I expect,” I said.
“Well, I guess it’s good to know that some things in the universe are immutable.”
Corah and I went way back to when we’d “hot-shared” lockers and a desk in staggered school classes. In our district, classrooms were on a roster system like beds on mining rigs.
Corah always left our desk smelling of patchouli and sandalwood, and spattered with sticky spills from whatever brew she’d been mixing. By the end of our graduation year, I’d regularly find joints and loaded pipes in there as well.
I never gave her up to the teacher but it made me mad – her inconsiderate carelessness. She wasn’t the only one on scholarship. As payback, I’d sprinkle them into the palm pots that lined the corridors outside.
Our relationship had always been uneasy, but at the core there was something honest. We knew each other for exactly what we were.
“I need your help.”
She faked horror, arching her penciled eyebrows and rolling her eyes. I thought how much she and Caro would detest each other.
“What would I know about law-making, Virgin?” she mocked.
“Law breaking is what I’m asking you about.”
She laughed at that. Almost spontaneously.
I glanced at the door. “Prefer not to be interrupted.”
The mockery vanished and she moved past me to deadbolt the doors. “I have a client soon. Get too it.”
I reached in to my pocket, got my phone out and brought up the photo. “I’m guessing this is vodun but what does it mean exactly?”
Corah made no attempt to disguise her interest. She opened a drawer in her reading desk, pulled a sheet of film from a dispenser and slipped one hand into the sock shape. In a few seconds, the film melted onto her skin, no visible signs of a glove.
“Didn’t pick you for having OCD,” I said.
“No offence, darling, but you’re in law enforcement. I don’t leave my fingerprints on anything official.”
I snorted. “Thought only the police could get hold of dissolvable gloves?”
“That’s where you’ve got it arse-about, Virgin. The police can’t afford anything after the last round of cutbacks. Hell, they don’t even have a policy for managing Mystere anymore. They’ve always had that.”
“You got sources inside, eh?”
“Of course,” she nodded. With her protected hand she took my phone and studied it.
I waited, giving her time to study it, watching her face for reactions.
“Strange. Which is rather delectable,” she said.
I didn’t comment.
It doesn’t look strictly African vodun,” she went on. “See the carvings on the knuckle ends… they’re native Australian, and the beads where the bone and feather joins, I’d guess they’re Native American. And then there’s this… the stone with the hole through it at the bottom of the beads...”
“What about it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“And the feather?”
She shook her head. “I know someone who could identify it.”
“OK,” I said slowly. “So… no clue what it means.”
“No. But how intriguing,” she replied. “Where did you find it?”
“Around.”
She sighed. “You really are infuriating, Virgin. Coming here, demanding my opinion then you’re not even prepared to share.”
“I don’t know anything, Corah. This here…” I pointed to where we stood “…is me starting from scratch.”
“So the guy that got wasted in your apartment has nothing to do with it?”
Now she had my attention. “How do you know about that?”
Her smile spread into heavy-duty smug. “I see things.”
“Yeah. Right. You paying someone to watch me?”
She lifted her hand to my forehead and gently pushed my hair back out of my eyes. “Such paranoia is not healthy, my dear and oldest friend.”
Her fingers were cool and dry against my skin. She used to do that at school, to annoy me. Feign tenderness and lace it with a large whack of patronizing.
That was my read on it anyway.
“Who can tell me about the feather?”
“Still wanting something for nothing?”
“What’s your price then?”
“I hear that Chef Dabrowski is having an opening night for his new menu. I wish to go.”
“What? Why?”I stared suspiciously at her. Corah and I knew Chef both independently and together. For a while there, we worked the counter –a job-share arrangement – at his first burger bar. Chef sacked her for selling miscellaneous illegal substances from the kitchen door. To my knowledge, they hadn’t seen each other since.
“Let’s just say that there’ll be some interesting people there.”
I vacillated for a moment. Chef wouldn’t like it – he’d warned me off Corah many times when we were younger, but on the face of it, the request seemed harmless enough. It made me curious though. Who could she possibly want to meet Uptown? “Fine. I’ll message you the details but make sure you come to it clean.”
Corah walked over to the side table where her incense holder rested. Fishing in her pockets she retrieved the brass pipe from her pocket and lit it from a smoking incense stick. The sweet hashish stench smoked through the room in a couple of puffs.
“Of course. Like a virgin.”
I gave her a withering look. “Who can help me with the feather?”
“Papa Brise runs Mystere these days, and a spiritualist called Kadee Matari has control of the rest of Divine over Moonee side. All the gangs answer to them, commercially and for permissions.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Permissions?”
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“Just like it sounds… who can go where in safety, what they can deal, what they have to pay for immunity. Brise or Matari will know who’s importing the feathers, if you can get past their gatekeepers.”
“I could just ask around the stall holders.”
“Asking questions in Mystere is more dangerous than drinking the water.”
She was right. “So how do I get to them?”
“Do I have your word on the invitation?”
“Sure.”
She turned and went over to a sideboard that rested under a 3D image of the rising sun. Taking a ring from her index finger she keyed open a drawer and retrieved a flat box.
Then she came back to me. “Roll up your sleeve.”
“What’s in the box?”
“You want to talk to Papa Brise or not?”
“Yes.”
“Then give me your forearm.”
Warily, I did what she asked.
She removed the lid of the box, took out a small black square and placed it on the sensitive flesh inside of my wrist, just above my pulse.
The instant it touched my skin it began to burn, in the way boiling water would.
I wrenched my arm away from her. “What the–”
“DON’T TOUCH IT!” she barked. “Pain won’t last.”
I bit my lips and glared at her through tear-blurred eyes.
Then as quickly as the scalding sensation started, it went.
My muscles relaxed and I glanced down expecting to see burn marks. Instead a tattoo undulated on my skin.
“Corah!”
“Relax Virgin. It’s a temp. Be gone in a few hours. That’s how long you’ve got to find Papa Brise and talk to him.”
“You’ve given me a gang tattoo!”
“Technically incorrect on two counts. First, it will vanish like you never had it. Second, it is a parlay tattoo, not a gang marking. It means you’ve been screened to make contact.”
“Screened?”
“Divine has its systems of checks and balances, just like you got laws uptown.”
“You seem to know a lot.”
“That’s why you came to me, isn’t it?” she said.
I guess it should be no surprise to me that Corah had questionable affiliations.
ARC: Peacemaker Page 7