The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘For year after year they come to me, the bigwigs from the city. You got EE-arn’s money? Where the money? How about the pictures, you must have the pictures? When he die — the pictures, they just disappear, whoof. Like that. Whoof. His place picked clean overnight. Whoof. All gone.’

  Manya startled sizzling onions in a pan. The smell filled the small house. I felt nauseous.

  ‘You think the man with the shovel was looking for some lost Fairweathers?’

  ‘Maybe. But what’s lost to some people is not lost to others. You see?’

  ‘I’m not sure I do.’

  ‘Sometime EE-arn, he drunk, you know. We sit around the fire at the huts. He say, Igor, here, you have this picture, I know you like. Igor, take this one for Manya, she like. When he get drunk he don’t care, he like good communist, everything that his belong to everyone. He would be national treasure in Russia, but not in Australia, with the mosquitoes and toad fishes. He would have been a great man.’

  He thumped the cane on the floor. The statue of Lenin stared in on us. I gently touched the new foothill on the back of my head.

  He continued. ‘Before the man with the spade, there was other man. At least he not come in the night time, like a thief.’

  ‘The other man?’

  ‘I tell him, there nothing. But he insist. He say I must have seen them, I must have seen them.’

  ‘Seen what, exactly?’

  ‘The great pictures of the lepers.’

  ‘The lepers?’

  ‘The lepers.’

  ‘THE LEPERS.’

  I was about to be sick. The onion aroma swirled around the room. Something else joined them in the pan. I recognised it from my childhood. Liver.

  Then the old man rose and went to a small cane basket on the kitchen bench. He retrieved a business card and came back and handed it to me.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘The man who wanted the lepers.’

  It was a business card, all right. For James Fenton Browne.

  ~ * ~

  9

  I woke the next morning with a headache that could drop a herd of wildebeest. I felt it before I’d even opened my eyes. When I did, my problems were only compounded.

  I had slept on a small fold-out mattress with its net of lumpy, rusted springs imprinted across my back and buttocks, despite a wafer-thin mattress and sheets thick with patterns of African violets provided by my hosts, Igor and Manya. On the wall opposite me was a photograph from what looked like the fifties of Russian peasants stacking sheaves of wheat.

  And standing at the door, with his Lenin-esque shaved head, ratty grey goatee and wolf s head cane was Igor.

  ‘You sleep good?’

  ‘Good,’ I said. I was too weary to debate.

  ‘Good. Come eat.’

  The house still smelled of the liver and onions, and when I stumbled out to the kitchenette there was a huge plate of it waiting for me.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. I found the bathroom at the end of the hall and threw up.

  I returned to the kitchen. The offensive plate had been removed.

  ‘CUP OF TEA?’ Manya asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  I took the chipped enamel mug full of sweet, steaming tea and nursed it in my hands. I wondered how Peg was going with the packing in Sydney. I wondered if, in her wildest dreams, she would have believed I was sipping tea in a fibro bungalow with two Bribie Island pensioners, with a bruise on the back of my head the size of a halved breakfast grapefruit, and being stared at by an effigy of the leader of the Russian Revolution, dust caught in the lines of his face and the folds of his suit collar.

  ‘You come,’ Igor said, and I followed him out to the front of the house, down the side to a bleached timber garage with a corrugated iron roof the colour of faded ox blood.

  There was an ancient Humber parked inside the shed. It was partially covered in a grey tarpaulin. Past a bench covered in curlings of wood and a lathe and a wall of haphazardly arranged tools hanging on nails, we entered a separate room at the back.

  ‘You look,’ said Igor. He was panting a little from the effort of the walk from the house. He pulled back a curtain of cloth and revealed several shelves of junk.

  ‘This,’ he said, almost ceremonially, ‘is all I have left of EE-arn.’

  There, stacked loosely on the shelves, were billy cans and old flame-scarred kettles, a handful of small, hardened paint brushes, some rust-edged tins of house paint with the labels obscured by veils of drip, a couple of stone wine bottles wrapped in rotting wicker, candles down to the stub sitting in pitted kipper cans, some coils of rope, a single leather sandal that look like it was dated from the time of Christ, a few empty glass jars, a ball-headed hammer and a cardboard box full of old magazines, curled paperbacks and sheaves of yellowed paper.

  I delicately touched one of the covers of the paperbacks. Ellery Queen.

  ‘Poor EE-arn,’ the old man said. His eyes were moist through the thick and enormous lenses of his spectacles.

  Later, we sat together on two garden chairs beneath the canopy of a spectacular frangipani tree.

  ‘Igor,’ I said, ‘what do you remember of James Fenton Browne?’

  He blew his nose and tucked the checked handkerchief into his trouser pocket.

  ‘I told you already,’ he said. ‘This man Browne, he want what all the other want. The pictures of EE-arn. I say I no have pictures. He say that’s okay, what you got of EE-arns? I say I got some stuff from the camp after he die. Just the pots and pans. He say, Igor, let me have a look. Maybe we buy for a museum.’

  ‘A museum?’

  ‘A museum of EE-am. He famous artist now. He have own museum. I say it all I got left of my good friend EE-am.’ He removed the handkerchief again, took off his glasses, and dabbed at his eyes. I knew Fairweather had not just been Igor’s good friend. He had perhaps been his last friend.

  ‘Did you show him?’

  ‘Yes, I show him. Just like I show you now. I say I don’t want to sell. EE-arn not for sale. He say just let me look through in private. He say he a big art dealer. He look at picture and can tell you how much money is worth picture. He say let me look in private. That he a big EE-arn friend too. I let him, in private. When I come back he looking through the papers in the box. He did what you did, touch the books. Then he say thank you and go away.’

  ‘Did he take anything with him?’

  ‘What there to take? Just junk. But special because it belong to my friend EE-arn.’

  ‘Did you ever take a close look at the papers in the box?’

  ‘Is just papers, you understand? This EE-arn, he a strange man. He like to write things down all the time. He write on anything he can find. He write on leaves and jam tins. He write on backs of envelopes and bus tickets. He write over the prescriptions he get from the doctor, for his sickness, you know?’

  ‘Did he keep a journal? A diary?’

  Igor raised his hand and pointed at me with an index finger. A smile had appeared on his face. ‘He say — Igor, everything a diary. The whole world a diary. That I never forget.’

  I was beginning to suspect that James Fenton Browne had found something more interesting than an old Ellery Queen novel in Igor’s dusty shed. I was beginning to feel I was in an Ellery Queen novel.

  ‘How did he seem, this Mr Browne, when he left you?’

  ‘How he seem? Very happy. He give Manya a kiss. He try to give me one too but I know his type, this Mr Browne. I was in Russian navy.’

  ‘Have you seen him since?’

  ‘I no see Mr Browne since then. Whoof, he vanish.’

  Whoof, indeed. More like bang, bang. A little birdy had told me our kissy kissy art appraiser had gone bye bye with one bullet to the back of the head. The Moreton Bay crabs did the rest of the damage.

  I didn’t want to tell Igor. I didn’t think he could handle, let alone comprehend, the dark machinery of the criminal world. That quite possibly a piece of forgot
ten paper, some jottings on an envelope, a few scrawled notes on a bus ticket that had sat innocuously in his back shed for three decades had spread their tentacles and led to the delicate Mr Browne’s brains rendered fish food in the bay. Russian navy or not, he was still an old man.

  ‘Last night, you mentioned lepers.’

  ‘Leopards?’

  ‘LEPERS.’

  I could see Manya in the kitchen window. ‘WHAT?’ she shouted.

  ‘NOTHING.’ I said, waving to her.

  ‘Lepers,’ Igor said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mr Browne was looking for the pictures of the lepers.’

  ‘That’s right. That’s what you said.’

  ‘The man with the shovel, who I thought was you, he too I think looks for the pictures of the lepers.’

  ‘Igor, what did you mean by the lepers?’

  ‘They the ones at Peel Island.’

  ‘Peel Island?’

  ‘They had the lepers on that island. EE-arn, he was fascinated with the lepers. For EE-arn, he was like the leper. And those other lepers on the island, they were like the brothers and sisters of EE-arn. He say that. Igor, he say, the lepers is my family. They my only family, Igor, except you and Manya.’

  When was this, Igor?’

  ‘Not long after he come here, you know. In fifties. He learn about the lepers. He build a raft from drums and wood on the beach. Manya give him sheet for the sail. I say, EE-arn, that raft, she won’t make out of the passage. He say, Igor, I sail to the lepers, my brothers and sisters. He go make pictures of them. He say God is with the lepers, and he want to go paint God. Ha! Poor EE-arn.’

  I had never read of any paintings of the lepers of Peel Island by Ian Fairweather. I had never seen any. I had never come across any type of reference to them whatsoever. My cunning little mind told me that an unknown and unseen series of paintings of God and his children by Fairweather might be very valuable indeed.

  ‘He say, no use to stop me, EE-arn, I go,’ Igor said. He had dabbed his eyes with the handkerchief again. I didn’t know if he was laughing or crying. ‘Then he vanish, whoof, for two week, and when he come back I say, where you been, EE-arn, you find God? And he say even better, he find a girlfriend on Peel Island.’

  ‘A girlfriend?’

  ‘I say, good on you EE-arn, but I know it not true. I know EE-arn was like the Mr Browne. He the type I saw in the Russian navy. He never tell me. I just know, you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But I see her picture. He did picture of his girlfriend. Her name Rosemary. I seen it. Then he never talk about her again.’

  It was getting hot under the frangipani tree. Igor stared silently into a mass of rotting white and yellow flowers.

  I swallowed with a dry throat. My head throbbed.

  It looked like I was heading to Peel Island in search of God.

  ~ * ~

  10

  ‘YOU GOT A bit of mail.’

  I returned to the van park at Main Beach with, I might say, a measure of relief. Verne the proprietor had displayed two substantial bundles of letters and packages on the front counter.

  ‘What did you say you did again, before you retired?’

  ‘Alpaca breeder.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Verne nudged the mail in my direction.

  If ever I wanted to effectively disappear from the world, I’d head straight for a caravan park. They’re deliciously anonymous, egalitarian, private. Everybody wants to know your business but no one would be rude enough not to take you on your word. They’re remote islands unto themselves. Refuges. Little Petri dishes of lives, lost dreams, spoiled marriages, family conflicts, flight and homecoming. They are places open to the world, exposed to the elements, vulnerable, yet they discourage prying and invasion of personal space.

  You are a sheet of canvas or a slice of aluminium away from the elements, from the great unpredictable force of nature and — permit me to be dramatic — a skein stands between life and death; between you and a deadly storm, or a predator. Yet you feel safe. We are like members of an exclusive club with a secret handshake, we van-park dwellers. We are all accidental families.

  Peg had puzzled about why I had not taken a motel during my solo sabbatical on the Gold Coast. But how could I explain to her the peccadilloes of men of a certain age? Would she understand the yearning for simplicity? The desire to replicate an unbridled happiness that the busyness of life had somehow buried under layers of responsibility, menial tasks, useless diversions, triviality and the junkyard of material possessions, ambitions, one-upmanship, fake friendships and webs of behaviour so foreign to our actual selves that even the smallest critical distance would induce horror at what we’d become?

  Would you get it, Peg? A lifetime of thinking you’re important, only to be dropped into a civilian life where your epaulettes, literally and figuratively, no longer matter, are even a source of amusement? To one day be young and strong of limb and doing something that matters, and the next, emerge into some strange, uncharted place where your back permanently aches, hair grows from your ears, your belly keeps getting bigger but your legs become thin, your arms have no strength, and it takes an hour a day after rising for the twinges to disappear? To see a thick shock of black hair in the mirror, only to wipe away the steam on the glass and see a stranger with grey tufts and an ashen pallor looking back at you?

  Oh, it hits us men hard, dear Peg. It’s a low blow. It explained, at least to me, why I had become involved in this crazy case.

  A young constable once asked me what it was like to spend your days head to head with heartless killers and standover men and street toughs who would extinguish a life as unthinkingly as cracking their morning egg with a teaspoon. I told him not to be hypnotised by the myth of death. Death is not always delivered at the end of a gun or the blade of a knife or at the hands of a giant. I told him a story an old copper told me when I was a young constable. The lion can always chase down and slaughter the nimble-footed impala. But never forget that an impala can accidentally break one of its delicate legs, and be killed by ants. Death can come in many ways, I told him. And often in the most benign fashion.

  He was dead himself seven months later, impaled on a cast-iron fence in pursuit, while off-duty, of a smack-addicted bag-snatcher in one of Sydney’s most salubrious suburbs. I have often thought of that fresh-faced officer and, strangely, the fence, waiting there for more than a century, painted and repainted over time, almost made for its unforeseen victim from the future. Watch for the lion, I’ve always said, but also keep an eye out for the ants.

  I went straight across to the surf club with my mail. I had come to view the club, with its lovely vista of the Pacific Ocean out front and the sounds of squealing children and the crash of surf and the sad music of the poker machines out the back, as my own proxy office. It beat my old HQ in Parramatta.

  There, at a table buffeted by sea gusts, I could peruse my mail, inspect my little system cards and puzzle over the case. I could do this nibbling on salt-and-pepper calamari and a bitterly cold bitter.

  On this day, though, I was beginning to feel a familiar malaise. It had happened many times before, but not for a long while. It was a cloying feeling, a palpable discomfort when I found myself deep inside something I didn’t fully understand.

  I used to believe that you could learn a lot about a place by the types of murders it had hosted. I have never been fond of Adelaide, for example, with all its church spires and pretty boulevards, because I know from its history of deeply perverse killings that the city has a disturbing undercurrent, another dark Adelaide that operates concurrently with the pious, floral, prettily dressed one.

  Melbourne. European in architecture and attitude, and European in its way of murder. Trench coats. Hand guns in alleys. Mafioso. And Sydney. All rude and loud and bluff and bluster. Impatient and cruel. A magnet for glamour, which also made it a magnet for grit.

  Then there was Queensland. The Gold Coast was to my eyes Las Veg
as on trainer wheels. A single, glowing strip of cash and bad perfume. Of vice and teenage angst. Of ceaseless deals on and under the table. The Gold Coast was a twenty-four-hour crap shoot, and its deaths reflected that too.

  But what of Brisbane? It was fresh. In transition. On the make. The shadows it cast were hardly black. They were grey. Opaque. They were the type of shadows caught at twilight. This was a twilight city. A part of it held on to the past, and another moved inexorably into a future. Brisbane was a flux metropolis.