The Tribute

by John Byron

  Then you return to the central pages and begin again, now working towards the back, this time with veins and arteries and nerves, the viscera and organs of life and thought and promulgation, again moving from superficial to deep.

  Thus are acquired the two crucial aspects of anatomical knowledge: the principles of organ functionality, and the precise location of every tissue relative to the surface, the bones and the other organs.

  De Humani Corporis Fabrica Epitome was published by Johannes Oporinus in 1543, immediately after the Fabrica’s first print run, and sold to students at a much cheaper price than the fabulously expensive magnum opus. It is the workbook to the Fabrica’s magisterial text, and includes cut-outs that can be assembled into three-dimensional models. It features many of the original’s plates, its production values every bit as impressive as those of the Fabrica.

  The Epitome echoes, distils and completes the Fabrica. It takes the Master’s empirical knowledge out of the library and into the field. While the Fabrica is for study by candlelight, the Epitome is for use at the dissecting table, scalpel in hand, among the blood and meat and fluids of the body.

  The Epitome brought the new Anatomy to a far broader audience than the Fabrica could have done alone, and this dissemination ensured that Vesalius’s radical movement was not only momentous in intellectual essence, but also revolutionary in effect. Vesalius foresaw the democratisation of knowledge – he facilitated a German translation of the Epitome in Basel by Alban Thorer, published immediately after the Latin version – and anticipated the evolution of mechanical reproduction. He understood that while a work’s integrity is absolutely crucial, so too is its reach.

  The publication of the Fabrica secured Vesalius’s reputation among his illustrious peers and the mighty elite of his day, but it was the mass publication of the Epitome that saw Vesalius immortalised in the annals of intellectual history.

  Thursday 17 January – early hours

  ‘Lower your weapon,’ growled Murphy, his pistol aimed straight at the fugitive, but Porter stood frozen in place. ‘Fucking now,’ Murphy shouted, and that did the trick. Porter pointed his pistol at the ground between them. Murphy dropped his own revolver down by his hip, in a show of good faith, then tilted it back up imperceptibly as he stepped forward. Jo kept her Glock trained on the serial killer, her trigger finger a hair’s breadth from the break.

  As the detective advanced, Porter retreated slowly until his back bumped against the fence high above the ocean pool. The detective following him, stopping about five metres from his quarry, watching him through narrowed eyes.

  Murphy was in command, comfortable and at ease. Porter was edgy, desperate and dangerous. Jo was the novice, hiding unseen in the bushes, just barely holding her nerve. She had no field experience, but she’d seen the movie. She was about to find out what that was worth.

  Porter recovered some composure, visibly calculating his options. They can’t have looked good. He relaxed into a fatalistic stance, all reckless and unpredictable, and broke into a deranged, malevolent smile. He looked down at the ground then back up through an exaggerated pan-and-tilt towards Murphy, like some fugitive lunatic gone feral in a Stephen King fun house, Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth with a dash of Heath Ledger’s Joker. It scared the shit out of Jo in her hiding place, but her brother practically yawned.

  Murphy raised his revolver a touch. Porter responded in kind. Porter’s lips began moving, sub-audibly.

  ‘What’s that, retard?’ called Murphy. ‘Speak up.’

  ‘You imagine you have me at a disadvantage, detective.’

  ‘Yeah, I reckon I do, dickhead.’

  ‘You’re wrong, so wrong.’ Porter chuckled. ‘You can never take from me what I have taken from you.’

  ‘I’m gunna take everything from you, Porter. I’m gunna make you fucken burn.’

  ‘You have thwarted my Tribute, Murphy, but I invaded your very home. Your sister’s home. They are lost to you now. I win.’

  ‘I don’t think so, fuckwit.’

  Porter sighed. ‘Are you really so stupid that you don’t understand? The worse you treat me, Murphy, the sweeter it becomes.’

  ‘I’m happy to test that theory.’

  ‘I stole your manhood, detective,’ Porter said with a snarl, suddenly animated and vicious. ‘I stole your progeny. I stole your wife’s baby and any respect she could have for you. Where was her protector, while I was pounding her head onto your front path? I put her in a coma, Murphy, while you were waking up with a hangover in Melbourne beside some spangled whore.’

  ‘Enough,’ barked Murphy. ‘Put the gun on the ground.’

  But Porter raised his weapon instead. ‘You’re not going to arrest me, you pitiful little policeman.’

  ‘Suits me, arsehole.’ Murphy raised his own gun further.

  Porter laughed aloud at the tension. ‘It was your elderly neighbour who did your man’s work for you, detective. She has spirit. But you? You’re a lightweight.’ Porter spat on the ground. ‘A wretched, pathetic excuse for a man.’

  ‘Shut it!’

  ‘Actually, you’re no man at all, Murphy. You’re just a grub, an insignificant, disgusting, foetid little grub.’

  Then Murphy went utterly calm, his edgy tension yielding to an ominous supple poise, his anger morphing from a hot, animal temper into an icy, ethereal rage. Jo stifled a gasp: she had seen this once or twice before, but not for years. It had never ended well.

  Murphy smiled then, warm as a shark. ‘You could not be more wrong, Porter.’

  ‘Wrong about what?’

  ‘About who fucked who.’ Murphy’s eyes gleamed even as they narrowed.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend,’ said Murphy with lethal composure. ‘The players, and the pawns.’

  Porter cocked his head quizzically.

  ‘SP07M378,’ recited Murphy.

  This meant nothing to Jo, but Porter reeled. ‘My staff number?’

  Murphy smirked while Porter’s arrogance dissolved, his mind apparently turning until some dark knowledge emerged, the killer stumbling back in appalled comprehension.

  ‘You knew!’ Porter accused. ‘You knew all along!’

  ‘Yes I did.’ The detective nodded, encouraging the killer to put the final piece in place. ‘But more than that.’

  Porter’s eyes widened further and he cried, ‘You set her up!’

  Murphy’s face broke with a vicious sneer. ‘You think you’re so fucken smart, Porter; all your meticulous planning. But you never had a fucken clue. I hunted you down and smoked you out and pointed you in the direction I chose.’

  ‘You sent me to kill her!’

  ‘That’s right, cunt. You were never in charge. It was always me.’

  Jo staggered, taking the blow in the centre of her chest as she understood what her brother had done to Sylvia: what he had tried to do. She cried out in anguish and rage, her wail shocking both men from their death stare, turning them towards the screen of banksia that hid her from their view.

  Murphy started to speak, but Jo shrieked over his words, refusing to permit him any single word. And in his alarm he nearly missed the glint of moonlight on gunmetal in his peripheral vision, as Porter’s weapon came up and around.

  Nearly.

  Thursday 17 January – early hours

  Then it was on, finally, and it was the old state of flow, adrenaline surging and focus snapping in, sharp and sure, like a warrior, like a predator. Murphy had been here a hundred times, his motion like mercury: all fluid grace and cruel intent. He was clarity, precision; he was perfect Vengeance, with all the time in the world.

  Murphy lifted his Smith & Wesson through a smooth vertical arc to sight between the dead man’s eyes, his trigger finger moving through the takeup to the very edge of the break. He exhaled and held steady while Porter levelled his Browning and opened his mouth to curse.

  Then Murphy squeezed a fraction more and it was all t
hunder and lightning, the barrel kicking up in his fist through his sightline. He lowered his revolver and saw the corona of scarlet mist hang for a moment in the bright moonlight, before the light breeze snatched it away.

  The body careened into the wooden fence behind, firing the pistol once into space in some final convulsion before fracturing the top rail and tumbling out into air; a suspended moment of silence, then a crash into the water below.

  Murphy swivelled towards Jo, who had come around the screen of bushes above the platform, her Glock – his Glock – aimed at the centre of his chest. He motioned her down the steps with his Magnum, and she descended warily to the concrete, her aim never wavering.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Jo, why didn’t you stay at home, like I told you?’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘You weren’t supposed to hear all that. See it.’

  His sister just stood there, silently pointing her empty weapon at his sternum, waiting for him to act. He thought his next move had to be pretty obvious, in the circumstances, but she’d always avoided the harsher facts of reality.

  ‘What a fucken mess.’ Murphy shook his head ruefully. ‘I don’t suppose we can sort this out at all?’

  Jo said nothing and did not waver, holding his gaze with coldsteel fury.

  ‘No, I didn’t think so,’ muttered Murphy. ‘Why are you so fucking unreasonable, Jo?’ He lifted his pistol and took his aim at her. ‘Do you see what you made me do? I never wanted —’

  She squeezed her trigger then, and a ten-gram bullet fled the chamber at well over a thousand kilometres per hour.

  Murphy recoiled in surprise at the impossible flash from the unloaded Glock, then a tremendous blow to his chest propelled him backwards and he was overwhelmed by searing pain. He stumbled, then crumpled, his legs collapsing beneath him. He fell heavily to a seated position, then listed to his right, the side of his head striking the concrete. A huge crimson tropical flower bloomed in time-lapse across his white shirt-front.

  Jo moved across to him and stood firmly on his revolver, still grasped in his right hand. He couldn’t let it go, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. He looked up at her, his lips quivering. The dark glistening pool grew beneath him, bubbling out of a gaping crater where the back of his ribcage used to be.

  ‘When it’s time to shoot, just shoot,’ she said. ‘Don’t talk.’

  Jo looked out into the bay at Wedding Cake Island shining brightly in the vivid moonlight. With a sudden bellowing crash, a great plume of white shot up out of the sea and inundated the island. There was another boom two beats later as the same wave hurled itself onto the rocks beneath them, then the sizzling hiss of the water running off and home.

  Thursday 17 January – early hours

  Jo didn’t look down until the gurgling stopped. It was worse than she’d thought. Vacant eyes staring into the night sky. Trickles of blood leaking from his ears, nose, mouth; his face a twisted sneer of pain. Features so familiar to her, now entirely alien. No living face could look like this. Murphy was gone.

  The shirt was entirely soaked, a deep velvet burgundy. Only the left sleeve was still white. He lay in a wide pool of clotting blood and spongy flesh, with flecks of white here and there that must have been fragments of bone. She retched.

  Yeah, it really was time to go.

  Jo heard a siren in the distance and felt her adrenaline kick up a notch. Fuck, she had just shot a cop. She needed to focus and keep moving. There would be time later for grief, guilt and nausea. Right now she had to think and act.

  She crossed to the shattered fence and peered down at the ocean pool, where Porter floated serenely face-down, arms and legs spread wide. His head was a shiny blackness at one end of a slick running across to the landward steps. She spotted his handgun in clear water, midway between his body and the seawall.

  She ran down to the steps leading into the southern end of the pool, then waded over to Porter’s pistol. Jo ejected the magazine from her Glock, scrubbing it all over with her T-shirt before reinserting it. She scrubbed the rest of the pistol as well, taking particular care around the trigger, mindful of the round in the chamber. She placed the Glock on the floor of the pool and picked up Porter’s weapon. She inspected it in the moonlight, found the safety lever and flicked it on. She untied the knot of her trackpants, threaded the cord through the trigger guard and retied it, then slid the Browning inside her trackies while pulling the right pocket inside out, pushing the gun into the makeshift pouch.

  She climbed over the seawall and onto the rocks. The water was a little rough, but she had no real choice. Shots had been fired, people had been killed, and this was the only other way out of the baths. She eased herself into the waves, scrambling ahead when she could and holding her ground when they broke around her. Eventually she pushed off from the rocks between sets and moved quickly into open water.

  She swam towards the leeward side of Wedding Cake Island until she found a suitable satellite rock she could stabilise against as she untied the knot and let the pistol fall away into the water. She took off her ballet flats and crammed them into her pocket, pushed off from the rock and swam north. She couldn’t help thinking about that movie, all alone in the open sea at night, but she ignored it as best she could and set a strong, steady rhythm across the back of the bay.

  Twenty minutes later, Jo climbed the steps near Our Lady of Coogee fence and slipped on her ruined shoes. She legged it to Sylvia’s house, pausing only to let a cruising taxi disappear down Coogee Bay Road. She had the shakes something fierce and was still dripping wet, but she didn’t think she’d been noticed.

  It took her three attempts to pull her keys from their zip pocket, and she immediately dropped them, then she couldn’t hold still enough to get the key in the lock. She eventually managed to let herself in and moved quickly to the back of the house, closing the hallway door before turning on the lights. The clock on the oven said 3.28. She poured a decent measure of vodka into an old-fashioned glass and downed it in two good throws, the warmth spreading across her chest and up her neck. Her eye found Sylvia’s guitar across the room, but she clamped down hard on her emotions. Any momentum lost now would not easily be recovered.

  Clean up first. Jo stripped and shoved her T-shirt, trackies and undies into the washing machine, setting it on the fast sport cycle, then put her damp shoes into the tumble dryer and started it on warm. She showered in the main bathroom, running it hard and hot for a long time, until she felt almost human again. The washing machine still had six minutes left to run, so she made buttery toast with a thick smear of Vegemite. She groaned aloud at the indecent pleasure of it: it was that fucking good.

  Once the washer was done, she added her wet clothes to her still-damp shoes and set the dryer to run for another hour. She poured another glass of vodka, switched off the lights and went to bed in the spare room.

  Thursday 17 January – dawn

  Jo was wrenched from the deep by an insistent pounding on a door. She sat up, clutching the damp sheet while the remnants of an unpleasant dream receded. She oriented herself: Sylvia’s spare room.

  Sylvia. Murphy. Fuck.

  The urgent knocking resumed.

  ‘Hold your horses,’ she called out as she pulled herself upright and wrapped the bath towel around herself. She unlocked the front door to find two uniformed police she didn’t recognise wearing serious expressions that she had no trouble emulating.

  ‘Hi,’ she croaked, before trying again. ‘Hi.’ The cops looked at one another.

  ‘Good morning, Dr King,’ said the senior one. ‘Sorry to disturb you at this hour.’

  ‘It’s okay. What time is it?’

  ‘Quarter past six.’

  Just over two hours’ sleep: no wonder she felt like shit. ‘I’m sorry, it doesn’t look like Dave’s home.’

  ‘Yes, we know. We need to speak with you, ma’am. It’s urgent.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘It would be better if we could come in, please.’

 
; ‘Of course. Give me a sec?’

  ‘Certainly, Dr King. We’ll wait here.’

  She closed the door and ran to the laundry, where she retrieved her clothes from the dryer and raided Sylvia’s laundry basket for a bra. Close enough. She dressed quickly, dropping her ravaged shoes in the spare room on the way back to the door.

  ‘I’m Senior Constable Carroll,’ said the policewoman as they entered. ‘This is Constable Moody. We’re from Eastern Beaches Local Area Command.’

  Once inside they looked around, trying not to be obvious about it, though they clearly knew what had happened here. Jo gestured down the hall and followed them into the living room. Carroll was about Jo’s build, although she was encumbered by a lot of gear, but the young policeman filled the entire available volume. Where did they get these boys? Beef country.

  ‘Please, sit down,’ said Jo, realising she was delirious with exhaustion. She needed to be very careful with what she said. ‘Would you like some tea?’ She headed around the kitchen bench, while the cops sat on the couch.

  ‘Yes please, if you’re making some.’

  Jo filled the kettle. ‘How can I help you?’

  Carroll spoke without preamble. ‘Dr King, I’m very sorry to inform you that your brother has been shot and killed in the early hours of this morning, in the course of apprehending Stephen Porter.’

  ‘Oh, fuck.’ Jo groaned, slumping against the kitchen bench, glad of the support as her face drained of colour. She tried to speak, failed. Tried again. ‘Where?’

  ‘At the Ladies’ Baths in Coogee. Across the road from your flat.’

  ‘What on earth was he doing there?’

  ‘We were hoping you could tell us,’ said Moody.

  Jo shook her head. ‘What happened?’