Hades

by Candice Fox

  A coldness began to spread through my limbs. I waited but the two figures remained unmoving as minutes ticked by. I realized I was holding my breath. Dread, thick and tight, was flooding through my chest.

  The car doors opened. I gripped the wheel as Eden and Eric’s shadows met on the road.

  My phone went off, the high-pitched musical peal of an antique phone. I jolted and cringed as adrenaline prickled through me. I always have my phone on the highest volume, the most obnoxious sound, so I never miss it. When I had found the thing in my pocket and shut it off, I looked up and saw that Eden and Eric had paused in the middle of the road.

  They were staring in my direction. I sunk slowly behind the wheel until I was eye level with the dashboard. Like two cats, Eden and Eric had frozen at the noise, silhouetted against the light, their bodies stiller than I would have thought possible. Though I couldn’t see their eyes, I could feel them exploring the shadows around the car, the blank windscreen, the doors and windows. They couldn’t see me. I was sure of it. They wrestled with their instincts in the dark.

  Eden, in time, reached for Eric’s hand, touched it softly and wordlessly with her own. They climbed back into the car and drove off.

  26

  As usual, her call woke me. My heart raced. I was panting before I had begun to talk, sitting up in bed.

  “We’ve got a body,” Eden said. “Be there in five.”

  There was silence when I got into the car. Eric had taken the driver’s seat beside Eden. Two owls sat in the back, both gripping their lab bags with their fingernails, looking like they were bring driven to the gas chambers.

  “Where’s the party, fellas?” I asked. Neither of them moved.

  “Utulla,” Eden said as the car pulled away. “At the dump.”

  Her words sent electricity through me. At that time, I didn’t know why. There was something about the Utulla dump that rang in my ears, something that made me wary. I told myself that it was probably because Eden and Eric were from Utulla that was sparking my recognition.

  “Home country,” I said cheerfully. “We should stop by your old place, relive some childhood memories.”

  Eric’s eyes watched me in the rearview mirror. Eden shifted uncomfortably in her seat. There was a bike marathon on in the city and traffic was diverted back and forth across the Inner West. On Woodville Road a drunk stood pissing between two parked cars as we pulled up at the lights, his hips rotating slowly like a water-skier. When we finally reached the highway the tension in the car had risen to an almost painful altitude. The owl beside me sneezed and the other jolted like he’d been electrocuted. Eden leaned her elbow on the windowsill and watched the city roll by like she was leaving it and was glad.

  I fell asleep against the window and when I opened my eyes the car was rumbling down a wide unmarked road cut through dense bushland. The owls were just about eating their own hands with anxiety. I wiped drool from my lip and sat up in my seat.

  A sign made from assorted pieces of trash flew by the window. Pipes and bottles and discarded bits of wire had spelled out the words “Utulla Dump.”

  Eric parked at the bottom of the hill and began to walk up without waiting for the rest of us. Eden was a little more patient, but only just. I stood beside the car, under the shade of a huge fig tree that must have been two hundred years old. I could see flying foxes writhing and swinging in its crown. That was not what captured my attention, however. Beneath it, two massive horses grazed, their bodies made entirely from discarded pieces of junk.

  “Will you just look at this,” I gaped. Eden walked up behind me and tried to move me on. I wandered forward through the wet grass, reaching up and touching the underbelly of the huge animal. On closer inspection, an intricate welded frame of cogs, wheels, pipes and tubes made up the animal’s body. There were pieces of engines and frames of machines that I recognized from my boyhood as a failed apprentice mechanic. Eden snapped something at me and, in turning to answer her, I spied other trash animals lining the roadside—a gazelle rearing on its hind legs, two oversized possums scaling a living tree.

  By the time I got to the top of the huge hill, I was like a kid in an amusement park, my mouth hanging open, my eyes eager for each new marvel. When I arrived in a small clearing of the trees, I realized what had been agonizing Eric and Eden all the way from the city. They stood, Eden looking decidedly uncomfortable and Eric with his arms folded defiantly, on either side of the stocky grey-haired man from the picture in Eden’s wallet.

  Heinrich Archer.

  Hades. The Lord of the Underworld.

  I had been right about where I had seen his face before. In the 1970s and ’80s, Heinrich “Hades’ Archer had graced many of the city’s newspapers and evening news reports in just the manner I’d remembered, walking out of courthouses, fleeing the press, his hand up to shield his face from the cameras. Hades Archer was a “fixer,” a handler of delicate situations for some of the country’s most notorious criminals. He had defended himself in more than a dozen court cases, accused of disposing of bodies, making unclaimed shipments of drugs disappear, silencing large wars that broke out over territory or women in Western Sydney drug and biker gangs. He was never convicted of anything because he was professional, discreet, ingenious. When people had a problem, they went to Hades. When they needed a calm, knowledgeable, authoritative mediator, they went to Hades. When they made a mistake, they went to Hades. He could clean up after the most devastating messes, make profit from the most incredible gambles, salvage the most unsalvagable relationships. He left victims and perpetrators alike smiling and thinking they had come off best.

  I had heard some pretty unbelievable stories about Hades in my time as a cop. He’d killed for the first time, it was said, out of self-defense at the age of ten, a street kid preyed on by a hustler. His earliest appearance in court was at age twelve for being involved in revenge attacks against a rival drug-running crew. I’d heard he’d bitten off a man’s finger for making moves on his girlfriend. I’d heard he had shot five major crime personalities at a crowded party as part of a takeover bid for the local muscle-for-hire scene. Hades Archer had been accused, in his time, of some of the most incredible feats of criminality. None of this had ever been successfully addressed by the law. Powerful people in the upper ranks of the police department, those old box-headed chiefs and superintendents, seemed very familiar with Hades—whenever he was on television Hades referred to these dinosaurs of justice by their first names. No police corruption inquiry had ever gotten close to indicting him. Hades always conducted himself in public with the calm, quiet, fatherly authority I was seeing now, and his stoniness of character seemed to buffer even the most brazen of attacks.

  He was standing before me, his heavy body buckled, leaning on a cane. He looked ancient and lethal at the same time. The man had the thick square head and shoulders of a Bordeaux hound and the same kind of malignant potential. I glanced around at the wastelands that surrounded the hill. This place had been searched for bodies dozens and dozens of times. Nothing was ever found. Not a finger. Not an eye. Nothing. And yet everyone knew what Hades was doing. Everyone knew what he was capable of. His stories had filled my dreams in the academy.

  Heinrich Archer.

  Eden’s father. Eric’s father.

  The old man offered his hard chubby hand to me. I took it and felt my bones grind as he pumped it.

  “I’m Heinrich.” He nodded. “My associates call me Hades, as I’m sure you’re aware. It’s up to you.”

  “Frank.” I smirked at his candidness. Eden and Eric turned and began walking away, whispering rapidly to each other.

  “If you’ll follow me.” Hades motioned forward. I began walking. Ahead of us, Eric and Eden’s heads were close together. Eric glanced back. The path down the hill was well worn by heavy feet, a track that zigzagged between sandstone blocks and more of the impressive trash creations towards a workshop at the beginning of the dumping grounds. In the distance, I could see a number of workm
en and women standing around a small pit beside a large mountain of garbage. The air became stale and sour, seagulls and crows hovering overhead.

  “You built all these things yourself?” I asked Hades, gesturing to the animals. We passed a glass and wrought-iron dingo inlaid with triangles of gold and yellow glass. Hades nodded sternly.

  “I don’t like waste,” he said. “Everything has potential. You have to be forgiving of the imperfections of things and find new life for them.”

  My mind was wandering, zinging connections together. Eden’s art. Her skilled, strong hands. The darkness in her paintings. The old man I had seen there, swirling in oils, sparks glancing off his shoulders as he welded in the dark. This was the place where Eden and Eric were raised. I stared at the trucks rolling and bumping along the horizon, the black smoke curling from their exhaust pipes. They began their lives in trash, in disease, in darkness.

  “I don’t care much for the police, you know,” Hades said. “The law and I have had a checkered relationship since long before a kid like you was born. I feel it’s my civic duty to report a thing like this though. I don’t want my reputation sullied by such callousness.”

  He gestured into the pit before me. I walked forward and looked down on the body lying there. The junkie’s back was arched awkwardly over a crumpled jerry can. He had been stripped of all his clothes. In his chest a great long cavity had been carved and, though my anatomical knowledge was limited, I was willing to bet some pieces of him were missing. This wasn’t surgery though. This was rage. Blind, violent fury. Jason was coming apart. The ritual was changing. He was losing it. The junkie’s foot was still casted from the breakage at Watsons Bay. I turned away and caught my breath, pushing through the dump workers who hung about, shocked and numb. Hades stood at the back of the crowd with his hands in his pockets, his elbow resting on the cane. I watched the owls rigging up a tape barricade around the pit.

  “I got a couple of my managers together trying to figure out where the body would have been dumped,” Hades offered. “Seems to me, from experience, he would have been city trash. Lotta fast-food containers in the same pile. Too many for a suburban skip.”

  “Darlinghurst,” I shuddered. “He was staying in Darlinghurst while he completed an NA program. I gotta call Martina . . .”

  I let my voice trail off and jogged away from the gathering. Martina’s voice was sleepy. It hurt to undo all the assurances I’d given her that the killer wouldn’t come back, that the junkie being alive meant that he wasn’t interested in tying up loose ends.

  “Do you think I’m in danger, Frank?” Her voice was low, serious.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “You’ve still got a patrol car at your apartment block. Stay there,” I told her. “I’ll come around tonight.”

  My words rattled in my brain. I’ll come around tonight. Was it my intention to spend the rest of my nights protecting her, worrying about her, holding her? Days earlier I had been alone, the way I liked my life, utterly in control of everything that I cared about—my body, my career, my stupid possessions. Suddenly my concerns had doubled. There was a whole new human being to consider now. I felt shaken with fury at the idea that something might hurt her. My hands were trembling as I put my phone away. This is how husbands feel, I thought. This is how I should have felt when Louise called me all those years ago from the hospital and asked where the hell I was.

  “You should shut down the premises,” I told Hades. “The place will be crawling with press if you don’t.”

  He appreciated me silently, his eyes narrowed against the sun, causing the leathery skin at his temples to bunch. It seemed absurd, in that moment, that I was to stand there and carry on the façade that I didn’t know this man was my partner’s father, that I was to keep on pretending that the origins of Eden and Eric’s menace was not all around me, in the very ground on which I stood, in the air that I breathed. I could feel them watching me, though my back was turned. This was the game they had trained everyone to play—the captain, the owls, the headquarters staff. This was the game they had to play. Innocent until proven guilty. What good was my knowledge of a childhood guided by one of our city’s darkest men if there was no resonating effect to point to? What good was my knowledge of a man and a woman sitting in a darkened car outside a stranger’s house if no crime had been committed? What good was a list of names, scrawled on notepad paper, in a wallet I shouldn’t have been looking in? I closed my eyes and focused on Martina. You know what’s important, don’t you, Frank? What was important was finding the man who had slain the junkie in the pit, who had been responsible for so much meaningless depravity.

  Eric laughed at something, drawing my attention back to where he stood by the edge of the pit looking down at the junkie’s twisted figure. His right hand unconsciously flicked the ash off his cigarette and into the trash at his feet.

  In the end, I couldn’t help myself. I walked halfway up the hill and called my old station, standing in the shade of a giant panther made from thousands of discarded black iPhones. Anthony Charters answered. My old bull pen neighbor.

  “I need you to run an address for me,” I told him, after the mandatory chitchat. “A place in Mortdale.”

  She stood in the heat and watched the water run down her fingers, thin and glistening like streaks of lightning onto the tiles at her feet. The heat, on the edge of pain, calmed her crawling skin. It was always this way before one of their kills, before the death of a man whose injustice was their own. She didn’t eat. She didn’t sleep. Like a woman in waiting for some unknown terror. Like a soldier in the waking dawn before battle. Eden felt the moments ticking away around her as she towelled off, and the sensation of unsated power, of being able to stop time, flickered through her. She lifted her arms and pulled her long black hair into a bun, twisting the strands tightly into the elastic. A smile, rare and painful, lifted the corners of her lips. Soon it would be over. Soon the killing that was so much a part of her life would be blessedly distant and not something that played with the springs and cogs and wires in her brain.

  The last man on the list. The last time it would ever be personal.

  Eden had never enjoyed killing. What she enjoyed were the moments after the kill had been completed, the body lying still and peaceful on the table, feet bare and pointed outwards, toes that could be touched and limbs that could be squeezed. She liked the emptiness of a soulless thing. Liked to look at it as Eric put the tools away. It seemed clean. Neat. An exorcised body. A monster removed from the earth. There was a certain satisfaction in that. So very many times she had stood in the company of a corpse and felt that satisfaction wash through her, loosening the muscles around her joints, making her feel tired. The world was a little bit safer for sons and daughters, mothers and fathers sleeping and laughing and holding each other in millions of houses in millions of streets all over the world. One fiend at a time, over and over, Eden and her brother had made the world a little bit safer. The job made it so easy to find them, to pick them out and examine them like the lice they were, to choose them and crush them before they were safely bottled. Child molesters, wifebeaters, pimps and psychotics and thrill killers. Snip, snip, snip. She was cutting away the ragged edges of a neat and wholesome world. It wasn’t enjoyable but it was so easy. Tonight would be the last night her playtime, and Eric’s, would touch her heart. Eden drew a nervous breath. Oh, for it to be over. Oh, for that final satisfaction. An end to a story long overwritten, to dark chapters that seemed to drag on and on. To kill for justice and not for vengeance. She had wanted it for so long and now the end was here.

  Eden closed her eyes and let it come back to her. She would let the memory envelop her, as it had been pressing to do, just one last time.

  The pop of the trunk latch above their heads, the sudden gush of air onto their faces. The right side of the tape over her eyes had come unpeeled in the sweat on her face. The child Eden looked up through the red light
into the faces of the men who had taken her, panting and sobbing as they pulled her out of the car and threw her on the ground. “Jesus, Benny,” someone stammered. “Jesus. What have you done?”

  “Fuck off, mate, you were firing too. That bloke was gonna go at me and you knew it as much as I did.”

  “Shut up, the both of you. We need to talk about what the fuck we’re going to do now.”

  They forced her to kneel. Eric was kneeling beside her. Though she couldn’t see him, Eden could feel the warmth of his body, hear the whimpers coming from his throat. The stones under her knees were sharp. She could feel them cutting into her feet. Screams rose up in her throat, meeting her shut lips and turning into growls. She couldn’t stop the noises. They seemed to come with every breath.

  “Shut up, you little bitch.”

  Someone shoved her into the gravel. Blood filled her mouth.

  “This is not a complete loss,” one of the men said. Eden watched him pacing, a faceless shadow in the dark beside the road. “We can still ransom them. They’ve got to have aunties, uncles.”

  “We’ve been through this. You fucking idiot, you just shot up the only family they got.”

  “We’ll sell them,” a cold, calm voice said, one of the men standing by the back of the van, smoking a cigarette. “You can get ten grand for a kid in the city. The girl’s pretty. Nice long hair. A desperate pedophile might pay fifteen or more.”

  “No pedophile’s going to buy two kids of a dead millionaire. No one in the world’s that fucking dumb.”

  There was silence. Eden tried to snuggle into the safety of Eric’s body but her bound wrists and ankles wouldn’t allow the movement. Her dress was soaked, she didn’t know what from. The silence pressed on and on as the two children knelt in the dark.

  “Who’s going to do it?”