The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  In the end I got the nods. But I didn’t want to leave the room. I would become a Buddhist. I wanted to be connected to all of nature and its beauty and be kind to animals and fill my person full of peace, tight as a helium balloon.

  I watched the CityCats glide past like colourful, buoyant moments from my life as a heathen, carouser and all-round larrikin. I got lost in thoughts of the great Brisbane River itself, forming in the Stanley Ranges, meandering down to the city and pushing out into Moreton Bay, and felt I was hovering over it — a curious passage it has, curling and folding back on itself, as if resistant to dissipate and join the salted bay — and viewing my life in its entirety.

  Then a single noise dropped me out of my reverie. A small clink. I turned, and there, sitting on one of the wooden benches near the back of the empty room, was a tiny bonsai tree in a jade-green glazed pot.

  It had not been there when I entered. I stood, my wounds suddenly dull with pain, and approached the little tree. I sat beside it. Studied it. I’m no botanist, but it looked like the perfect, miniature facsimile of the grand fig trees you see around Brisbane. Under the pot was a gold envelope.

  I retrieved the envelope and opened it, and inside was a single photograph.

  It was a mistake, of course. To sit beside that beautiful tree, and to open the gold envelope. I knew it as I slid out the photograph. I could hear the 10 x 15 cm sheet chafe against the envelope as loud as the rumble of thunder in that peaceful room.

  In the picture was a corpse, the likes of which I had never before seen. Partially mummified, the skin around the teeth stretched back, the eye sockets black as eternity, the body dressed in some sort of military uniform, the feet still shod in heavy boots, and in the exact centre of the forehead was a hole as big as a fifty-cent piece.

  On the back of the picture was a mobile-phone number written in pencil. And one word, in capitals: LOGAN.

  The room was a frenzy of reflected light. I thought only one thing — here we go again.

  ~ * ~

  3

  A long time ago, when I was a young firebrand cop in Sydney’s notorious 21 Division, I saw a man killed by my partner, Greaves, during an ambush in the basement of a Kings Cross nightclub.

  I didn’t know, at the time, that Greaves had killed him. The victim was just a dark shape on the other side of his own blue muzzle flash, and I had closed my eyes and fired into the roof while Greaves’ gun discharged with more accuracy. In that dank, mouldy space below the street, my partner had put a bullet through a stranger’s heart.

  Eventually, in the silence that followed, with the cordite burning the backs of our throats, we found a light and cautiously made our way over to the body. He was still breathing (gurgling, to be accurate), and Greaves applied what first aid he knew, but the man died right there before our eyes.

  There was no question of taking time off work, just because you’d executed your duty. The deceased’s own bullet had grazed my temple and carved a neat divot above my left ear, but I was at the station the next morning. Greaves, too, punched the clock for his regular shift.

  We were both ordered to visit someone who was then new to the force — a police psychologist — and we twiddled our thumbs and grunted a few answers to satisfy the young man on the other side of the desk. He looked barely out of high school. He did, ultimately, become my friend, and years later he offered some analysis of my proclivity for finding trouble. Or mischief, in Peg’s words.

  ‘To put it very simply, it’s your face and manner,’ the psychologist told me. ‘You have the sort of demeanour that encourages people to tell you their stories. They don’t need to, they’re compelled to.’

  ‘I have a compelling face,’ I said.

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t already know,’ I told him.

  This all came back to me as I carried the bonsai tree and the mysterious gold envelope into the family-history area of the State Library. I felt a right goose with the tree, and I attracted some strange looks. But libraries are places where peculiar things happen, for some reason, and where the whole gamut of human eccentricity is on display. If you’re at a party and you want to hear some curly stories about human nature, and there’s a librarian present, stick to them like glue. They’ll entertain you all night.

  So my tree was at the low level of strange that day, as I secured a computer terminal and popped the little bonsai at my feet. I was, of course, tempted to telephone the number on the card. It was that old craving, the need to know. But I resisted, for all of a few hours.

  I made no headway finding the family bushranger. Genealogy was a complex art, and I had no idea how to enter the labyrinth. I typed names and dates I thought I’d remembered from the tales that had been handed down through generations of my family, but nothing seemed to compute.

  A kindly librarian remained patient with me and did all she could to put a little foot ladder at the base of my family tree, but for the life of me I could secure no solid footing.

  The elderly Martian next to me with the whistling hearing aids smiled the smile of someone who feels superior in the vicinity of a novice. That smug smirk creased the whole right side of his wrinkly face. He shook his head and winked at me. I noticed that the black hairs on his ears were as long as the antennae poking from his ear pieces.

  ‘You right there?’ I finally said, miffed.

  ‘Bit of trouble?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘You got your ships right?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Got to make sure you get your ships right. The names of your ships. You get the ships wrong and you could be hunting down the wrong trail for years. It’s all about the ships.’

  I wanted to tell him he was giving me the absolute ships, but I desisted. He was right about one thing. One slip on the genealogical treasure hunt and you’re off the track – gone, lost in the thickets of history.

  I knew my relatives had come off a ship in Sydney, then made the long overland trek north to Brisbane and on to Gympie and Dalby. It may have been the lure of gold in the former, and of cattle in the latter. These, I guess, were the major currencies in the early to mid-1800s. I simply couldn’t remember the name of the ship. I checked birth and death records for Dalby and still nothing.

  I had one of those existential moments when I wondered if these relatives had ever lived at all; if the stories on which I’d constructed my life were in fact fairytales. Who knows, maybe there was no big, burly bushranger firing guns through my proud heritage, but instead a latrine cleaner or dried-cow-pat merchant flogging his wares and trailing the permanent scent of animal effluent. A true nobody who did nothing and died forgotten. It wasn’t something you bragged about at the pub, and Lord knows I’d been crowing about the bushranger for close to fifty years.

  I sat facing a blank computer terminal in the library, unsure of where to go next with this project, when I impulsively Googled the name on the back of the envelope. Logan + history + Brisbane.

  And there it was, first cab off the rank — Captain Patrick Logan.

  I quietly opened the gold envelope and slipped the picture out. The Martian to my left was leaning right in close to his screen and the white light of it smeared his thick spectacles. I had an empty seat to my right. I snatched glances at the corpse in the picture, and the rust-brown jacket in which it was swathed, and the wrap-across flap of the coat secured with a line of elaborate gold buttons, and the clods at each shoulder that once could have been epaulettes.

  I went straight to the ‘images’ search engine, and typed in Logan again, and what I saw sent goosebumps down to the base of my spine. There he was. Captain Logan. Hard as flint. Eyes dark and cold. I had seen many pairs of such eyes. They belonged to men who were not only not afraid to kill at the slightest opportunity, but who enjoyed the act. He had a long, narrow, aquiline nose. Back straight. The evil of the world swirling about him.

  I returned to the State Library website’
s archives page. I couldn’t type properly, such was my haste, and I kept having to go back to the search boxes. I finally managed to tap in Logan’s name correctly, along with ‘death’, and I was directed to several items that hinted at a very, very old murder — namely, Logan’s.

  On the first highlighted line I clicked, the computer froze and a box instantly appeared in the centre of the screen. ACCESS DENIED. SEE STAFF.

  I could see the sun lowering itself on to the skyscrapers across the river. I hadn’t even noticed that the Martian had packed up and left. I had accidentally tipped over the bonsai fig at my feet and was under the desk, scraping the loose soil off the carpet and back into the pot, when I noticed someone approach the desk.

  I re-emerged, red-faced.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Could you come with me, please?’

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘Just come with me, please.’

  ‘The tree, it’s a gift, for my wife. I accidentally knocked it ...’

  ‘Just follow me, please.’

  She was an elderly lady in a floral shift. She wore large spectacles attached to a white plastic chain that dangled down each side of her powdered face. She scared the hell out of me.

  So I followed, too terrified to contradict her. She was the stern teacher from primary school we all had — the one who could make your bladder tingle with fear, and who never seemed to stop haunting your dreams.

  We entered the elevator, me with my shoulder bag over one arm and a shivering bonsai in one hand, as I trailed behind her and the neat and affirmative clack of her Minnie Mouse-style white shoes. We entered a long, well-lit corridor, then turned left and into a dark corridor, until we finally came to the John Oxley Library.

  She opened the door for me and I quietly walked inside.

  It was empty, except for a man standing in front of the far windows with his hands clasped behind his back. He wore black, and when he turned towards me, I noticed his coat had a familiar wrap-over flap, held by a sequence of brilliantly shiny gold buttons.

  And he had a long, narrow, aquiline nose, sharp enough to cut butter.

  ~ * ~

  4

  What was it about Queensland that kept tangling me up in the lives of strangers and lunatics? I had a very powerful sense of déjà vu in the chilly air of the John Oxley Library, and the man in the black uniform joined a long line of megalomaniacs I had encountered over the years.

  He was short, almost Napoleonic in stature and manner, and he reeked of some deep-seated hatred that would take more than a human lifetime to source. In short (quite literally), he would go to God with the kernel of his psychosis intact and unharmed.

  I took my standard line, and attacked first.

  ‘So, you’re a Johnny Cash fan, then?’ I said.

  In the air-conditioned hush of the library, I could almost hear his teeth grind.

  I plonked the bonsai down heavily on a nearby desk. I had, en route to meeting Mr Cash, stuffed the golden envelope down the back of my pants. As long as I didn’t sit down, all was good.

  ‘You like bonsai?’ he said, nodding to the fig.

  ‘Yeah, me like bonsai.’

  ‘A curious art. I imagine it would involve much patience, of which I have short supply.’ He had an unusual accent, a gruel perhaps of having lived in other countries, with an old-fashioned Australian boarding-school toffiness behind it. In the darkening library, he could have been twenty years old, or sixty. His hair was cut in an early-sixties-style Beatles bob. It was, quite possibly, the first style he had adopted as a young adult, then maintained all his life: some men’s hair remains frozen in the period when they were most vital and exciting and a vibrant part of the world around them. I have always found this extraordinary — how for some, hairstyles are harder to let go than anything else. Mine? It let go on its own.

  ‘I’m new to bonsai,’ I said, ‘but it does seem to have a cruel appeal to it.’

  ‘Cruel?’

  ‘The dwarfing and managing of nature. The conceit that we can control the world. Play God.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘The human race produces many little kings, you know.’

  ‘Oh yes, I know.’

  ‘I thought you might.’

  ‘There are some bonsai trees that are close to eight hundred years old, did you know that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Well, now you do.’

  ‘What a little font of trivia you are.’

  ‘Can I make an assumption?’

  ‘Be my guest,’ I said.

  ‘Your interest in family trees is possibly linked to your new passion for bonsai. To care for bonsai you must tend the roots very carefully. If I were an amateur psychologist, I would hazard a guess that your search for your family roots, and that little fig of yours, are somehow related.’

  ‘How dare you make an assumption about my little fig,’ I said. ‘I would hazard a guess that you would make a terrible psychologist.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  The library lights suddenly flickered on, and he moved away from the window without taking his hands from behind his back. It was truly cold in the room now, yet I felt a bead of sweat trickle towards the gold envelope stuffed down my trousers.

  He looked at me with a smirk. I could see now, in the neon light, that he was, in fact, well into his sixties. The dyed bob looked preposterous on his ageing head, like a very bad beret without the cloth sprig in the centre.

  ‘My interest in my family tree, by the way, is none of your goddamn business. Do you make it a habit to monitor the activities of people using the library computers? You’re the library detective, are you? Chasing down overdue books?’

  ‘Hardly,’ he said.

  ‘Or just a garden-variety busybody without a decent hobby. Am I getting warm?’

  The smirk had disappeared and been replaced by a thin, mean line of mouth. His eyes were dark and vicious, as some dogs’ eyes are.

  ‘So you have an interest in Captain Patrick Logan ...’

  ‘You have a mad scientist-style office, do you, monitoring peoples’ computer activities? A wall of television screens and a big, high-backed chair and a large red button on the desk to destroy the world? I bet you have a big, mean laugh, too, that echoes through the room when you get all girly and giggly with power.’

  ‘What an imagination you have. I seem to remember you from somewhere.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Though I was a member of a Beatles fan club in the sixties. Perhaps we met there. Traded some forty-fives.’

  ‘You were that fellow who made a spectacle of himself last year. Something to do with the illegal sale of some fake Fairweathers.’

  ‘That was my twin brother,’ I said. ‘He’s one of your artsy-fartsy types.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘That is so. So?’

  ‘So Captain Logan, commandant of the great convict colony of Brisbane, Queensland, is part of your own ancestry?’

  ‘I think you must be mistaken,’ I said. ‘I Googled him by accident, if you must know. I meant to type in Johnny Cash look-alikes, and up he came. Simple slip of the typing fingers. Though it does fascinate me, your Logan fetish. I wouldn’t know the bloke if I fell over him, to be honest. May I politely ask something?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Who the hell are you and why the hell are you wasting my time with this?’

  He sat on the corner of a desk with some difficulty, a short left leg dangling above the carpet, and cradled his square chin with his right hand.

  ‘To understand Brisbane, you must understand Captain Logan,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t have to understand diddly-squat.’

  ‘I’m afraid you do. Especially people like you.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘You ignore history at your peril. If you’d ever read a book, you might see that.’

  ‘Oh, thank you for that, sir. I apologise. Do I get detention now? I might make life hell for you and
come here every day and study your Captain Logan. What do you say to that?’

  I was losing patience with this annoying little man. It was dark outside and the peak-hour traffic was at a standstill on the riverside expressway.

  ‘Can I go home now?’ I said, turning to leave.

  ‘Patrick Logan was the most notorious sadist of any penal settlement in this country,’ he went on. ‘The Old Windmill, up on Wickham Terrace. People view that as a quaint reminder of our humble origins. To anyone who knows, it is in fact a citadel to cruelty and murder. What happened there shaped Queensland society. Made us who we are. We owe it all to Logan.’