The Tribute

by John Byron

  Murphy drove to the Domain at noon, where he stood for a while in front of his father’s name on the Police Wall of Remembrance. He grabbed a bagel at Paradise Lox across from the station then tidied up some paperwork in the office. Around six, he headed to the Glenmore for beers and a counter meal ahead of the night shift. The New Year’s Eve gig in The Rocks was the state’s largest single police patrol operation after the Bathurst touring car race in October. In these politically correct times it presented a rare legal opportunity to let off steam, old-school, upon the city’s most deserving. Murphy hadn’t missed it in years.

  Sylvia went to Jo’s place late in the morning to water the plants and ran into Jade from next door, the apartment block’s resident green thumb. The women ate lunch at Industry Beans then considered swimming some laps at Wylie’s, but the conditions were ominous, so instead they took the low road and retreated to Jade’s balcony with a bottle of sav blanc and a wedge of French cheese. Sylvia just had the one glass of wine, since she would be heading in later for Emergency’s biggest night of the year.

  Mid-morning, Jo and Amy hiked over the saddle in the Hazards, the granite spine of the Freycinet Peninsula, and spent a few hours at Wineglass Bay, swimming and dozing under a clear blue sky. After lunch they crossed the low isthmus to a long, deserted beach on Promise Bay. They skinny-dipped for a while until a yacht came over for a look, then quickly dressed and hiked back to Amy’s brother’s car, which they drove to their hotel in Swansea. They ate in the front bar and kicked on with the locals, until a pair of Bicheno boys commenced their spade-work in earnest. Jo and Amy excused themselves to the bathroom and ran laughing up the back stairs to the sanctuary of their room.

  In the late afternoon Matthijs returned from Adelaide, where he’d spent Christmas with old family friends. He changed into a uniform and strolled down to Bondi Beach for his crowd-control shift.

  Porter drove to the art gallery at midday to admire François Sallé’s Anatomy Class at the École des Beaux-Arts. He paused before The Sons of Clovis on his way out, then went home for a short run and a light supper. He listened to Die Walküre over a glass of Roederer, to mark the birthday he shared with his ancestor, Andreas Vesalius. Then he drove beneath churning clouds to the Denison Bank computer centre. He always volunteered to cover the New Year’s Eve shift so his colleagues could go out and celebrate. The festivities held no attraction for him.

  He wasn’t really a people person.

  VOLUME VI

  THE HEART AND ASSOCIATED ORGANS

  esalius was the victim of a vicious slander at the Imperial Court, circulated after his embarkation on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The gossip held that Vesalius had been compelled by Philip II of Spain to undertake the pilgrimage in lieu of a death sentence, imposed by the Inquisition for dissecting the body of a Spanish nobleman before the heart had ceased beating. Historians have long since discredited this slur as a fiction. The story is now considered an invention of the diplomat Hubert Languet, created for tactical advantage in court politics.

  In his magisterial Volume VI, the Master penetrates the chest in an orderly progression, proceeding methodically through the diaphragm, the membranes of the thorax and the lungs. Not until Chapter X does the Master address ‘the substance of the heart’, spending four chapters enumerating its constituent parts. The penultimate chapter, on the function of the vascular-pulmonary complex and its relation to structure, is a mighty corrective to centuries of intellectual error.

  After extensive investigation, Vesalius broke with Galen over the question of the interventricular septum. Galen had asserted the existence of apertures in the ventricles’ common wall to account for the blood flow, but in his second edition of the Fabrica in 1555, Vesalius demonstrated conclusively that the wall was impermeable. Searching for an alternative explanation for the flow, he described and named the mitral valve that regulates the current between the left atrium and ventricle.

  But it is the final chapter, on the ‘method of dissecting the heart, lungs, and other organs serving respiration’, that is most revealing of Vesalius’s temperament. For thoracic dissection is a messy business, and a brutal one. It is impossible to divide the thoracic cage without assuming the bearing of a common butcher.

  Vesalius understands that while his readers are scientists, we are also human beings, all too aware of the hearts beating within our own timid bosoms. He guides his dissection in disinterested but never indifferent scientific objectivity. His detachment is neither sentimental nor callous: he is true to his method and his intellectual commitments, without alienating his new audience for anatomical knowledge.

  Vesalius famously proposed the brain as the seat of intelligence and sentiment, rather than the heart. Asked to nominate the seat of the human soul, Vesalius contemplated the merits, but found the matter beyond empirical observation. Under the theocratic conditions then prevailing, he found it politic to leave the question open.

  Sunday 6 January – afternoon

  Sylvia looked up to find the concrete wall rushing at her, too fast and too close. She pulled out of the stroke and feathered her hands, bleeding off speed then rolling into a flying tumble. She kicked off the rough concrete and powered through the salt water on another lap. She’d lost count after twenty-four. That was a while ago.

  She caught a glimpse of the lap clock. She was still averaging just under her old record after smashing it in the first lap. She was in good shape, but not that good – it was all agitation driving her today. She glided to the wall and pulled up, panting hard. This wasn’t working.

  She left the pool and rubbed down briskly, catching a few men eyeing her off without any attempt at subtlety. Was a little discretion so much to ask? She decided to leave before someone really ticked her off.

  Wrapping the Turkish towel around her waist, she climbed the stairs and left the baths, heading down the hill for Jo’s place. She’d take a shower, water the plants – Jo and Amy were still in Tassie – and have a glass of wine on the balcony. Oh – no, not wine. Tea, then. And she’d figure out what the fuck to do.

  But when she came to the Ladies’ Baths, she turned in there on impulse instead. Still pissed off with the pervs at Wylie’s, she wanted to reclaim her right to enjoy sun and salt water without male evaluation. She settled on a slope of lawn she and Jo called the grassy knoll, which sat above the wooden steps leading down to the western side of the pool. A deep sorrow welled within her as she surveyed Wedding Cake Island, a view that had sustained her for years. She blinked away tears and put aside her grief for what was lost. It was time now to focus on what was to come.

  Sylvia had been slow to identify the gusts of nausea, the weird corporeality, the tenderness in her breasts. Her period was a bit late, but that was not unusual under stress, and feeling ordinary around Christmas-time was no rarity. The plain facts were that her husband had been sterilised years ago, and she had been faithful: the possibility had simply not occurred to her.

  But early on New Year’s Day a distraught teenager had fronted Emergency with the familiar syndrome, and Sylvia had reeled under the vertigo of recognition. Two red lines in the staff toilets confirmed it.

  Her husband’s vas deferens must have recanalised. It only happened rarely – she’d looked it up after doing the test – about once in every two thousand vasectomies. It tended to be triggered by an injury, like the kick to the groin he’d suffered in a football game last winter. The possibility hadn’t occurred to her at the time, but it was the only explanation.

  Fuck, this was complicated. She’d put it all off during the week, but her condition could no longer be ignored, and not much longer hidden.

  The immediate problem was telling Murphy without starting a blazing row. Any discussion was a minefield these days, let alone this one. In the first place, Murphy would not believe he was the father. Proper testing would be conclusive, obviously, but her concern was not with how things might resolve in the long run: she was worried about the first hour, the first day
. He would instantly assume she’d been with another man. He’d always been utterly clear about his expectations on that score, and who knew what form his initial response might take, in his present state. A shiver ran through her, her skin all goosebumps and cold sweat.

  Then, even if he accepted the fact of his paternity, Murphy would never allow her to keep the baby. He’d insisted their last discussion was final, and she had every reason to take him at his word. She knew without testing him that he would be utterly unyielding.

  The third problem was the most serious. She’d been in denial for months about Murphy’s descent into a cruel, seething anger. He was like a peat fire now, smouldering underground all the time, waiting to flare on contact with dry fuel and oxygen. His spiralling alcoholism only fed the beast. Driven by the pressure of the Fabrica case, his withdrawal from her had accelerated, his aggression becoming more frequent and more frightening, his exercise of control and dominance more unhinged. She’d tried to ask him whether it was something she was doing wrong, something they could work through together, but he’d put up a barrier and fended off her attempts to reach him. Whatever the cause, it all pointed in the same direction.

  She wiped away her tears, realising she’d been sitting with one hand on her belly as though she was eight months along. She laughed at herself, surprised by a swell of optimism about this life within her body, despite her situation. Their situation.

  She looked beyond Wedding Cake Island to the open water. At that moment, the rhythmical undulation of the Pacific Ocean felt powerfully maternal: the rolling swell, the fluid motion, the briny amnion, the teeming life beneath, the birth and death and rebirth, all connected. She turned towards the beach, full of people enjoying the sun and the sea: young women and men; couples; families. She watched a tall, thin, tattooed man dunking a toddler in the shallow waves. Even from a distance she could see the child’s joy – fancied she could hear the squeals. She looked at the sand and knew for certain which of the women there was the mother. The bond between the woman and her child was like a steel cable: there was no mistaking it.

  Sylvia straightened, breathing deeply and cyclically, closing her eyes to focus on the gentle sea breeze across her skin. A clear, level calm enveloped her as she realised her situation was actually very simple. She finally admitted the truth that she’d denied every day for months: the only change in her marriage would be for worse, not for better. Murphy was liable to do anything. While the shift had been gradual she’d ignored it, even hoped for a reversal, but now she no longer could.

  She felt more powerful than she had since entering Murphy’s orbit. More powerful than when she’d been a teenager, full of piss and vinegar, escaping her toxic family then putting herself through uni and crossing the continent to start her own life. She felt restored to herself, centred and calm.

  She was going to safeguard this pregnancy and raise this child. She was not going to be denied the chance to be a mother. She was not going to be punished, for sins actual or imagined. Murphy’s pathology put it all in perspective, and the baby raised the stakes beyond negotiation or self-deception.

  She was going to leave. There was no point telling him about the baby, no point managing his wrath while they did the DNA test, no point reasoning, pleading, begging, cajoling. He would not believe she’d become pregnant by him; even if he believed her, he would not permit the birth of their child; and even if he permitted it, she realised, she would not bring a child into a home such as theirs had become.

  She would no longer sacrifice her own wellbeing; she would not submit that of her unborn child to the furies and frailties of this degraded man. She had left before, when she was just a teenager: she could do it again now.

  She was going to escape once more, into life.

  Monday 7 January – afternoon

  A double-rap on the hollow door was followed by Tom Adams, Murphy’s former partner on the Armed Robbery Squad, now chief of security for Denison Bank. ‘Ah, Spud. Thought you might be here.’

  ‘What are you doing all the way out here?’ Murphy was in a crappy abandoned, unairconditioned office on a remote corridor in the Fort’s anonymous western-suburbs logistics warehouse. It was not a glamorous place, a far cry from the dazzling corporate tower in the city where Adams worked, or even the shiny new computer centre in the inner suburbs.

  ‘Routine visit,’ Adams said. ‘Thought I’d drop in, see how it’s going.’

  Murphy was slouched in a decrepit office chair, surrounded by computer terminals and reams of paper, with a half-empty bottle of whisky by his coffee mug. He knew he looked shithouse: unshaven, hair awry, his shirt soaked through with sweat, streaks of highlighter and pen ink on his hands and face. He’d been back and forth out here over the last few weeks scouring data and cross-referencing everything he could about his six victims, looking for any correlation. Nothing so far.

  Murphy had been astonished at the volume of private commercial data the bank could access. Adams had told him all about it but he hadn’t been prepared for the sheer scale of the transgression. It made the paranoid fantasies of civil liberty types look benign. Best of all, technically and legally the vast database didn’t even exist: it was purely an effect of a universal unspoken agreement between organisations to leave a back door open and look the other way. There were oceans of information out there about absolutely everybody.

  All strictly off-limits for law enforcement, of course – which was why he was doing this alone, and in secret. People would tolerate invasions of privacy by these corporations that they would never permit their governments. Even confirming known facts by these means would not be allowed, let alone a fishing expedition like this. Murphy was definitely not meant to be here.

  ‘He’s fucken in here somewhere, Tom. He’s gotta be.’

  ‘Yeah, mate. I hope you get him soon.’

  Murphy looked up. ‘Why, am I making you nervous?’

  Adams laughed his shaky little pissant laugh. ‘Mate, the bosses would shit bricks if they knew you were here.’

  ‘I’m not going to fuck you up, Tom.’

  ‘Yeah I know, mate, just … don’t get caught, all right?’

  ‘Don’t worry, nobody will ever know I was here.’

  ‘It’s just, I can’t explain all this searching.’ Adams waved at an old orange-on-amber mainframe terminal. ‘You’re logged in as someone who doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Why, do they keep track of your searches?’

  ‘Mate, they keep track of fucken everything.’

  Murphy pushed his chair back and indicated the orange screen. ‘Show me.’

  Adams came around and pulled out the keyboard tray. He found the security operations login screen and entered a username and password. ‘I’ve got spook access to the whole system,’ said Adams as he navigated through the menus. ‘I can read any customer file I like without opening a contact report. I can see building entry and exits, the trades of the securities cowboys, the cash load of any ATM, how much your house is worth today. I can see what lingerie the CEO bought for his secretary this morning.’ He selected an item from an obscure menu. ‘And in here is the staff search activity monitoring system. I can see exactly what any user has been looking at, inside the bank’s network, on the internet, out in the swamp.’

  ‘What’s the swamp?’

  ‘What you’ve been trawling through. It’s what we call all the back-door stuff that companies share about the punters. Look.’

  Adams keyed in the fake user ID he’d assigned to Murphy, and all his activity inside the Fort’s systems appeared: every bank file for each of the six victims and their families, his day’s work scrolling past line by line. ‘You’ve been busy,’ said Adams. ‘I can search on date ranges or data type, set up an automated report, even.’ Murphy was impressed: this was a lot more access than his fake ID had granted.

  ‘It works for the internet, too,’ continued Adams, typing. Murphy hadn’t spent much time online while searching through the system, but he saw the
cricket commentary he’d looked up earlier scroll by. A chill ran through him as he realised how exposed he was.

  ‘See?’ Adams saw Murphy’s reaction. ‘It’s not just the metadata: I can see your exact query, the results, what links you followed – everything you’ve looked at while you were logged in. And if I can see it, so can the bosses.’

  ‘Fuck. Will this report to anyone?’

  ‘Not unless there’s a red flag.’ Adams logged out. ‘But you getting caught on our system would be one hell of a red flag, Spud.’

  Murphy leaned back. ‘Okay, I can see why you’re edgy. But you’ve got nothing to worry about, mate. I’m like a ghost.’

  ‘Famous last words. And if you do find him, you’re going to need a whole nother story for the court about how you worked it out. You can’t breathe a word of this.’

  ‘I know, Tom. Leave it to me: you’ll be amazed.’

  Adams hesitated. ‘Look, Spud. Could you wrap it up in a day or two, eh?’

  Murphy sighed. It hadn’t been easy to convince Adams to give him access in the first place. Murphy had been forced to remind his old partner of a certain debt he owed from their time together in Armed Rob: one of those owe-you-for-life obligations. Adams had given in, but now he was nervous.

  Murphy sat still and held Adams’s eyes, saying nothing. At first Adams returned his impassive gaze, then his eyes started to waver, then his will collapsed and he looked down at the floor. Murphy waited until the ex-cop glanced back up at him, defeated.

  Murphy spoke quietly. ‘I will be discreet. I will be careful. I will be here as long as it takes.’

  ‘I didn’t mean —’

  ‘Yeah, you did mean,’ Murphy cut him off. He leaned forward and spoke, low and vicious. ‘Listen, cunt. You owe me. And I fucken own you. You are never off the hook, you hear me? Not until I say. One word from me and they will put you away for life. And you won’t last long inside.’