And Josef felt the chill of implied threat. It was true: Josef had courted Lee upon his release from prison with the promise of easy money. Marcel gave him simple tasks for a few months to try him out before the Stella thing, the thing that the kid had obviously fucked up in a big way. Josef had assured Marcel the kid would be fine; after all, look what he did to that mate of his in prison. And besides, the kid had nowhere else to go. His family were all killed in a car accident years ago. This was the clincher. He was theirs.
Marcel was breathing furiously on the other end of the line and Josef imagined him rocking forward and back on that office chair of his, adding to the furrows already worn into the carpet.
You think he’d run off with that sort of dough? Josef said at last, trying to sound incredulous.
Why not? You tell me. You think he was OK?
Well, yes. Of course or I wouldn’t have brought him in. It’s only, what, eight G? Hardly worth the risk. Small change. Must be some other reason. Must be. Might be asleep or something?
Marcel harrumphed. Maybe not such small change for someone like that. Maybe for me. Maybe for you. When you spoke with him yesterday, was there anything that made you think he’s not up to something like this? Anything? This job wasn’t just stealing, after all.
I know it’s not, Marcel.
So, was there anything made you suspicious?
No. Kid seemed fine. He’s got nowhere to go. Probably at his flat. Maybe he misunderstood or something.
Maybe.
I’ll go there tonight. Go there now.
Damn right you will. Go there now.
There was silence. Josef jammed the phone between his chin and shoulder and scratched his tattoo. He recalled the encounter at Lee’s dingy flat with its furniture obviously found in the street and the flickering television on a milk crate. The clumsy way Lee handled the gun, like it was a dead animal. No real surprises for a kid his age.
Marcel cleared his throat and when he spoke at last, his voice was softer. I want you to sort this out. This is—how should I say? This is not the first thing that’s sort of gotten away from you, you know what I mean?
Josef looked at his watch. It was getting late. Ten p.m. He badly needed a cigarette. He knew only too well what Marcel meant, could almost hear the sad shake of his old head. Foolishly, he nodded, managed a quiet yes.
You got to find this kid, Josef. You’re losing your touch.
Yes.
You got to find him, or else.
I know.
I’ll give you two days. Don’t let me down on this. And take good care of him. Good care.
Marcel, it’s only eight grand. Even if the kid has run off, it’s hardly worth—Hey. Eight grand is eight grand. It’s the whatsit—the principle. You can’t escape this. You fucked up, Josef. Better make this right again. We can’t have people doing this kind of thing. We just can’t. You know nobody’s—what’s the word?—indispensable.
Normally they would talk of other, domestic things. Marcel liked to hear tips for the Saturday races or the best price for fruit at the moment. They gossiped about people they knew. Occasionally Marcel indulged Josef with a few questions about the cricket, a topic in which Marcel had only scant interest. But not tonight. They said their goodbyes and hung up.
Josef returned to the kitchen. His tea was cold. He assembled a cigarette with deft movements and lit it before returning to the chair in the lounge room. He thought about Lee. His angular face and dark eyes. His habit of insinuating himself into a room before anyone realised. He couldn’t believe the little prick had let him down so soon, and after such an opportunity. And for such a petty amount of money. No. There must be a better explanation for this. The kid will show up. The kid will show up and everything will make sense and they’ll laugh and even Marcel will chuckle and be embarrassed about threatening Josef on the phone like that.
But where would someone like Lee go? With no family? It amazed him that people seemed to move about all the time these days. Change jobs and houses and wives. Whole countries, just like that. Incredible behaviour. Where did these people go? Where could Lee go, assuming he had gone at all, and wasn’t hiding out in his flat? Could be anywhere. The possibilities frightened him.
Smoke hung in a grey mass around Josef’s head and shoulders. He felt heavy and tired. Heavy and tired and—for the first time in a very long time—in danger. An old man late at night, listening to the world going about its business outside his window. He’d known for some time he was getting too old for this whole thing, but now, unfortunately, Marcel suspected it too. He sucked at his tooth and smoked until the butt was soggy.
6
It was nearly 11.00 p.m. when Josef got to Lee’s shabby, redbrick apartment block. He mounted the creaking stairs. The stairwell light wasn’t working and the only illumination was from a streetlight filtering through the landing window. The gauzy light reminded him in an obscure way of some distant period in his life and he was briefly flooded with the disappointment peculiar to the consideration of time.
He paused on the landing with a hand on the worn banister and peered upwards into the darkness. Winter had settled into his bones over the past few years and he was aware now of an ache in his right knee. The apartment block hummed with unseen domestic activity, with the gurgle of water in pipes, the metallic swish of cutlery drawers opening and closing. The stairwell smelled of incense and boiled vegetables. Despite the late hour, someone was cooking curry. Probably bloody Pakistanis or Indians, up late on Bombay time or something. He tugged his jacket cuff down over his tattoo.
Lee’s apartment was on the second floor. A box of ancient newspapers rested on the floor outside the door, the relic of an earlier tenant. Josef pressed an ear to the door but could hear nothing. No light seeped under it and there was no response when he knocked. Lee, he said. Are you in there? It’s Josef.
He listened again, remaining utterly still, so that when at last he moved it was as if he were assembled from the darkness. Still nothing. He drew his gun, followed by his collection of skeleton keys. His bladder clenched. There were blokes who needed to shit in the midst of a crime and, in fact, he had once been involved in a robbery that was very nearly ruined by a young guy called Leon stopping to take a crap in an alley. But for Josef, it was different. Without fail, even after all these years, the act of breaking into a house prompted in him the urge to piss. He tried the keys one by one, until the lock gave and he nudged the door open. He waited on the landing with his gun drawn for a full minute before stepping into the apartment. Immediately he could detect, by the bony silence, that the place was abandoned, an impression confirmed when he switched on the light. The furnishings were incomplete, heavy with transience. There was the television on the milk crate, a sagging couch and an ashtray on the windowsill, each stripped of any connection to whoever had used them. The place was chilly, unloved.
The tiny bedroom and kitchen offered no clues. The bathroom showerhead dripped into the stained bathtub with a soft, rhythmic dunk dunk dunk. In the bedroom, just a low wooden dresser and the mattress on the floor. What meaning, if any, could be harvested from these inanimate things? A bunch of rooms that offered nothing of the person who lived here. As he patrolled the apartment, Josef felt a sort of dry pity for Lee, a sense of having interrupted him weeping or reading pornography.
As a teenager, Josef would often break into houses alone. Of course he was searching for money or jewellery and other valuables to sell, but there were other satisfactions to be gained. He would sometimes spend an entire afternoon in a new house admiring the neat and ordered rooms, sitting primly at the kitchen table eating cheese or warming his cold hands among the clothes of strangers. He would doze on couches and wonder who would buy plastic place mats bearing the images of European cathedrals and bridges. He fondled letters from mothers and photographs of lovers. Broken toys. A small globe of the entire world. Even now, more than forty years later, he was unable to detect the scent of musk without being transported
, almost bodily, back to the house on Mott Street where he first encountered it on the dressing table of a beautiful widow recently home from Africa; the thin afternoon light glinting on her glassware and the distant bark of a dog. More than once, it was only upon returning to his own house that he realised he had neglected to steal anything.
He often felt more at home in the houses of strangers, but there was nothing here in Lee’s apartment; it was entirely too familiar. He stood in the bedroom with his gun still in hand. Clothes lay on the wooden floor in piles as if their owner had urgently disrobed before fleeing. The walls were grubby, dotted here and there with marks and smudges, like the thumbprints of ghosts. He was preparing to leave when the phone rang. Automatically, he raised his gun. As always, he expected the phone’s plastic form to vibrate in accompaniment to the urgent trill and was slightly disappointed when it failed to do so. It rang about ten times before falling silent. Josef scratched his tattoo. He heard people walk past in the street below. A woman chuckled. He stood still.
The phone rang again. He crouched beside the mattress and lifted the receiver to his ear. Hello.
Lee, a woman said. Where on earth are you?
Josef stood up, phone in his left hand, gun in the other. No, he said after a pause. Lee’s not here.
There was a brief silence. Sorry? Who’s this, then?
I’m a friend.
More silence. He heard the woman transfer the phone from one hand to the other, the crumpling sound so close it might have been happening in the shell of his own ear. Strange that strangers could be so close. Josef knew that people would speak almost compulsively to fill silences. He hoped she would. It might be his only lead. She would speak or just hang up. He waited, tapping the gun against his thigh, and was surprised to detect a quickening of his heart. The woman said nothing.
Maybe I can help you? he said.
Well. Do you know where he is? She was curt, suspicious.
No. I was looking for him myself.
What are you doing in his house? What’s your name?
I have a key, alright.
I see. Well, he was supposed to be here this afternoon and he hasn’t turned up. I’ve been ringing all evening.
You were expecting him?
Yeah. I’m his sister. He’s coming to stay with us for a while. Who are you?
His sister?
Yeah. Claire. Has he left yet, at least?
I thought . . .
What? Thought what?
You’re his sister? Lee’s sister?
Yes.
He told me his family were all killed in a car crash.
Oh, Jesus. Did he?
Yes.
The woman sighed. No. Not everyone.
There was a man’s voice in the background and again the phone rustled. More muffled voices. He imagined the woman, this sister of Lee’s, pressing the phone against her chest to relay their conversation to a man in a doorway.
Beside his own wan reflection, Josef could see that a large moth had attached itself to the outside of the bedroom window. Even from several feet away, Josef could discern its tiny wings, its rotating antennae and the furry bulk of its body. An aunt used to tell him that a moth attempting to enter a house was a harbinger of death and he wondered how such an apparently innocuous creature—this mute Labrador of the insect world—could signify such a thing. He always thought they looked like royalty outcast, their brown wings tattered robes fluttering about their bodies.
More rustling and it seemed the woman was back with him. He needed to force the conversation. And where are you?
So you don’t know where he is?
Why don’t you give me your telephone number and address and—
No. It’s OK . . . I think I’ll try later. He’ll show up. He promised.
Wai —
The woman hung up. Shit. He’d blown it. Josef tossed the phone receiver onto the mattress. Shit. He shrugged inside his jacket. Again he looked around the bedroom and wondered at the sheer inevitability of a life that now found him standing in this apartment. It seemed he had not travelled very far since his adolescent break-ins. The moth still hung grimly onto the windowpane, its wings ruffling in the wind. He imagined it staring at him with its black eyes, but doubted moths could even see.
So. Lee had a sister. This was interesting.
He shoved his gun back inside his jacket, unzipped his trousers and fumbled until he stood ponderously with hips jutting forward, his cock between thumb and forefinger. A chill murmured through him like a current of polite applause. How painful that one’s body eventually needed quiet urging to accomplish the most rudimentary tasks. Was old age merely an inability to complete those things that for so long have occurred naturally? He waited as his organs awakened somewhere in his abdomen and finally produced a hot, thin arc of piss. He aimed more or less at Lee’s mattress and before long a sizzling pool formed within the folds of a dirty sheet.
He was unsure what to do when he had finished. He zipped himself up and waited while the rust-coloured puddle melted into the sheet and mattress. It didn’t give him nearly as much satisfaction as he had hoped, but perhaps he had expected too much.
It was almost midnight. He needed a drink, but the only thing in the fridge was half a bottle of beer with a teaspoon dangling in its neck. He lifted the bottle out, shook it, then dropped it onto the linoleum floor. It landed with a thud but failed to break. Beer glugged out. Josef shook his head and smoothed his hair. He yawned and leaned against a bench to smoke a cigarette. The puddle of beer collected beneath the sink. His hands shook as he stroked the inside of his left wrist. He paused, stopped breathing. Yes. There it was. The hum, heard through his fingertips, of his tattoo.
7
Lee slumped against the passenger-side door with the gun in his lap. The lower half of his t-shirt and the waist of his jeans were heavy and warm with his own blood. His body was lighter, his mouth woolly with thirst. Although painful to do, every so often he swivelled in his seat to check the road behind. There was just asphalt unravelling into the darkness. Wild drove at an unthreatening pace but ever since the accident, as long as he could remember, Lee found himself pressing his foot to the floor in search of the brake whenever in a car. This despite never having learned to drive.
The car smelled of old takeaway food. Empty chip packets were jammed between the dashboard and windscreen. Soft-drink bottles lolled drunkenly about the floor. The back seat was covered in clothes and books. The door handle rattled beside him as if preparing to break loose and he moved to the middle of his seat, afraid the door would fly open under the barest pressure. The suitcase of money was on the floor. Now and again Lee tapped his foot against it, to ensure it was still there.
Without speaking, they drove through sprawling industrial suburbs, fenced in and broken. Smokestacks fingered into the sky, each topped with plumes of white steam or smoke. A girl waited alone in a bus shelter with her knees pressed together, a newspaper was flattened by the cold wind against a wire fence. The suburbs petered out as they fled. The buildings became lower and less frequent, giving way to open spaces until, finally, the city fell away altogether.
The countryside was dark, but occasionally Lee could make out an ancient shed listing in a field as if frozen mid-collapse or the bulky shapes of cows dumbly watching as they passed. There weren’t many other cars. Lee didn’t know where they were going, but was relieved to get away.
He turned to face Wild. You really a doctor? I mean, this car is pretty shitty.
Wild sighed and wiped his nose with a sleeve. Yes. More or less.
What does that mean?
Wild shrugged and stared straight ahead. His voice was ragged. It means that I studied medicine and that I worked as a doctor for a long time but that due to certain … Due to certain factors, I am what they call suspended. Meaning I’m not able to practise at the moment, if ever. So yes and no is the answer.
Lee waited for more information. He stared at Wild’s craggy profile. Wh
at sort of factors?
He didn’t answer. The road climbed and they rounded a bend. Ahead on the other side of the road, a car was parked facing away from them. The brakelights glowed red, but the car’s exact colour and shape were oily in the forest gloom. Its boot was agape. They slowed and Lee recognised the car as the one that had departed the motel earlier in the afternoon. One of its headlights continued to burn, illuminating a crowd of trees. Wild wound down his window and Lee heard the sound of their tyres crunching on the gravel shoulder. They came to a complete halt. Cold air filled the interior.
Lee shivered and adjusted his position. The bandages Wild had applied earlier pressed awkwardly into his abdomen. What are you doing?
Wild waved the question away. Beyond the sound of the idling car, Lee heard the metallic tick, tick of a cooling engine. But there was something else, a hiss of air escaping. Lee peered more closely at the parked car and saw that, in fact, it had crashed. He grimaced. The car’s front end was compacted into half its size and the windscreen was jigsawed and sagging. Liquid dripped onto the asphalt. It seemed a tableau just perfected, and Lee imagined those responsible scurrying into the shadows and crouching out of sight. Some elaborate joke.
This is how it was, a scene that might even have been assembled from his own memory. The moaning silence. The stillness. The tick, tick, tick.
It was only then, as he assembled the discrete elements, that he saw a face leering from the bottom corner of the passenger-side window like that of a drowned woman. Her bloodied mouth was slightly open and pressed against the moist glass. A wave of dark hair drifted like seaweed across one eye.
This is just how it was.
Panic spidered through him. Oh shit. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go.
Wild didn’t move.
Lee poked him in the shoulder with the gun. I don’t think this is a good idea. These people are dead. Let’s go.
The Low Road Page 4
