by Steve Toltz
“How do you know how to pick them? Who tells you?” Dave asked me once.
I explained that there was a line. “If you read Dostoyevsky, he mentions Pushkin, and so you go and read Pushkin and he mentions Dante, and so you go and read Dante and-”
“All right!”
“All books are in some way about other books.”
“I get it!”
It was an endless search, and endlessly fruitful; the dead sent me hurtling through time, through the centuries, and while Bruno seethed at my wide-eyed reverence for something as inert and unmanly as a book, Dave was intrigued. Sometimes he’d flop down beside me after a fight, and with blood streaming down his face he’d say, “Tell me what you’re reading about.” And I’d tell him, keeping an eye on Bruno, who burned with white-hot ignorant hate. More than once he tore my books into shreds. More than once I sat horrified as one of them flew off the edge of a cliff. There goes Crime and Punishment! There goes Plato’s Republic! The pages may have spread like wings as they fell, but they wouldn’t fly.
The boys demanded that while reading, I keep one eye out for police and tourists. Terry nudged me in a way that said, “Do this one small thing to keep the peace,” so I acquiesced, though as a lookout I was terrible. I was too busy observing the gang and coming to conclusions that I was burning to share. Bruno, Dave, and Terry had smashed their way into supremacy of the district and now were undefeated and bored. They had big plans for themselves; they wanted to climb the underworld ladder- which I suppose is a descent- but they were aimless and drowning in the tedium and didn’t know why. I knew why, and I couldn’t stand it that nobody asked me. After raiding my father’s shed, I had even worked out the solution.
One day, despite myself, I spoke up, and pushed my brother in a new terrible direction.
“I know why you’re bored,” I said.
“He speaks!” Dave shouted.
“Yeah,” Bruno said. “Now shut up!”
“Hang on,” Dave said, “I want to hear what he has to say. Go on, you sorry sack of shit, tell us why we’re bored.”
“You’ve stopped learning,” I said. No one responded, so I braved the silence and sliced right through it. “You’ve peaked. You know how to fight. You know how to steal. You keep doing the same thing day in and day out. You’re no longer stimulated. What you need is a mentor. You need someone in the crime scene to tell you how to get to the next level.”
Everyone absorbed my advice. I returned to my book, but I was only pretending to read. I was too excited! There was a warm river trickling through my veins. What was this feeling all about? It was brand-new.
Bruno threw a stone so it hit the tree inches above my head.
“Look around, dickhead. This isn’t the city. Where the fuck do we find someone like that?”
Without looking up from my book, and concealing my inner fire, I pointed up to my father’s proudest achievement- the prison on the hill.
Creation
“So how are we supposed to know who to ask to mentor us?” Dave asked.
“I already know,” I said.
My father’s shed was furnished with every conceivable detail about the prison and prison life, including, thanks to his whipping the warden at pool, files on the prisoners themselves. After coming up with my idea, I had studied every file on the whole menagerie of scum up there and had stolen the file of the clear winner.
“First I ruled out white-collar criminals, domestic abusers, and anyone who’d committed a single act of passion,” I said.
“And?”
“And I also excluded rapists.”
“Why?”
“Because there really isn’t any money in it.”
“Have you bloody picked one or not?” Bruno shouted.
I put down my book and reached into my bag for the file. My heart was beating so wildly I could feel it against my chest. I slid the file across a grassy patch of ground to Bruno and with my mouth dry as a new towel said, “This is your man.”
Bruno took a look. The others crowded around. The inmate’s name was Harry West; he was doing life. If there was a crime, he’d committed it: shoplifting, assault and battery, breaking and entering, possession of an illegal firearm, malicious wounding, grievous bodily harm, drug possession, drug dealing, drug making, attempting to bribe an officer of the court, successfully bribing an officer of the court, tax evasion, receiving stolen goods, selling stolen goods, arson, larceny, manslaughter, murder- the whole shebang. He’d set fire to brothels. He shot a man on the dance floor of a bar for doing a fox-trot during a waltz. He stabbed a horse at the racetrack. He’d broken arms, legs, feet, toes, broken ligaments, fragments, particles, matter; his charge sheet stretched back fifty years.
“Why him?”
I sprang to my feet. “The criminal underworld runs the industries of gambling and prostitution. Brothels, strip clubs, bars- these are the venues where the action takes place. You need to find someone who has links to all these things. And someone who’s a career criminal. You don’t want some fly-by-nighter.”
You had to hand it to me, I knew what I was talking about. The boys were impressed. They took another look at the life and times of Harry West. It looked like he’d spent more than half his life in a cell. That’s a life without a lot of running.
I went on: “It’s impossible to know how high up he is in the criminal underworld, but even if he was just answering phones, he’s been in it for long enough to know how the whole system operates. I’m telling you, this is the guy!”
I was electrified. No one had ever seen me like that. Their eyes scrutinized me. A little voice in my head tut-tutted me for encouraging them, but I had spent nearly my entire waking life hatching quirky ideas, and no one other than Caroline had ever heard a single one, until now.
“Let’s do it,” Bruno said, and immediately my stomach tightened. Why? A strange physical reaction was going on inside me. As soon as my idea was embraced, I no longer liked it. It now seemed to be a stupid idea, really awful. I liked it much better when it was in my head all alone. Now that it was going out in the world, I would be responsible for something I no longer had any control over.
This was my first of a lifetime of battles with ideas: the battle of which ones to air and which ones to bury, burn, destroy.
***
It was decided that because Bruno and Dave had juvenile records, it would be safer if Terry went to meet Harry West and report his findings back to the gang. One early morning in the middle of winter, before school, I accompanied Terry up to the prison. I was keen to go, not only because it was my idea, but because I had never been to the Palace (as it was often referred to in our home) that my father built.
You couldn’t see it from the town that day. A heavy layer of gray fog swallowed half the hill, including the jail, and snaked down to meet us as we fought our way up toward it. When we reached the halfway mark, we could see the shifting wall of fog in front of us. It curled into knots. We walked right into it, right into the soup. For a good twenty minutes we couldn’t get a fix on anything. To make the ascent harder, it had been raining and the winding dirt road that led up to the peak was a river of mud. I was cursing my own head the whole way up. What a big mouth!
When we saw the heavy gates of the prison emerge out of the fog, a long shiver swept over my body. Terry smiled optimistically. Why wasn’t he worried? How can the same situation make one person garrote himself with nerves and another person bright and cheery?
On the other side of the gate, a solitary guard was standing erect. He peered curiously at us as we leaned up against the bars.
“We’d like to see Harry West,” I said.
“Who shall I say is calling?”
“Martin and Terry Dean.”
The guard eyed us suspiciously. “Are you family?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want to see him for?”
“School project,” Terry said, giving me a surreptitious wink. Behind the gate a gust
of wind blew the fog around, and for the first time we saw up close the prison that made a weekend magazine call our town “ Least Desirable Place to Live in New South Wales.” It didn’t look as much like a fortified castle as it did from the town. In fact, it was not one but four large red brick buildings of the same dimensions, as innocuous and ugly as our own school, and without the wire fence in the foreground, it appeared as ordinary as a government office block.
The guard leaned forward, pressing his head against the cold gate. “School project, eh? What subject?”
“Geography,” Terry said.
The guard scratched his head listlessly. I supposed the friction on his scalp started his brain like an outboard motor.
“All right, then.”
He unlocked the gate and it made a shuddering sound as it opened. I made a shuddering sound too as Terry and I walked into the prison compound.
“Follow the path until you reach the next station,” the guard said behind us.
We moved slowly. Two high wire fences ornamented with barbed wire lined the pathway on either side. Behind the fence to the right was a concrete yard where prisoners moved around, swiping at the fog lethargically. Their denim uniforms made them look like blue ghosts floating in a netherworld.
We reached the second guard station. “We’re here to see Harry West.”
The bearded guard had a sad, weary expression that told us he was underpaid, unappreciated, and hadn’t had a hug in over a decade. He plunged his hands into my pockets and rummaged around without so much as a how-do-you-do. His hands went into Terry’s pockets too. Terry giggled.
When the guard finished, he said, “All right, Jim, take them in.”
A man stepped out of the fog. Jim. We followed him inside the prison. The fog came inside too. It was everywhere, floating through the barred windows and crawling in thin trails along the narrow corridors. We were led through an open doorway into the visiting room.
“Wait in here.”
Other than a long table with chairs on either side, the room was bare. We sat down next to each other, expect that Harry West would take a chair on the opposite side, but I started to worry. What if he defied expectation and sat down beside us so we all sat staring at the wall?
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
Before Terry could answer, Harry West entered and stood glaring at us from the doorway. His nose looked like it had been squashed, then yanked, then squashed again. This was a face that had a story to tell, a story of fists. As he moved closer, I noted that like Terry (and as I used to), Harry had a terrible limp. He carried his leg like luggage. You know how some animals drag their anuses along the ground to mark it? Well, it seemed to me that Harry was onto the same trick, digging grooves in the dusty floor with that leg. Thankfully, he took a chair opposite, and when I got a front view of him, I realized that his was a terribly misshapen head, like an apple with a bite taken out of it.
“What can I do for you fellas?” he asked cheerily.
Terry took a long time to speak, but when he did he said, “Well, sir, me and my friends, we have this gang in town, and we’ve been doing a little breaking and entering, and some street fighting, although sometimes it’s in the bush, and uh…” He drifted off.
I said, “The gang are young. They’re inexperienced. They need guidance. They need to hear from someone who’s been in the game awhile. In a nutshell, they’re looking for a mentor.”
Harry sat for a while, thinking. He scratched his tattoo. It wouldn’t come off. He stood and walked to the window.
“Damned fog. Can’t see a thing. It’s a pretty shitty little town you got here, isn’t it? Still, I wouldn’t mind looking at it.”
Before we could say anything, Harry turned and smiled at us, revealing a mouth missing every second tooth.
“Anyone who says the young don’t have any initiative has his head up his own arse! You boys restore my faith! I’ve come across legions of up-and-comers over the decades, and none of them have ever asked me for advice. Not one. I never heard of anyone with the guts to say, ‘I want knowledge. Gimme some.’ No, those bastards out there, they’re loafers. They breeze through life taking orders. They know how to break a leg, sure! But you have to tell them which one. They know how to dig a grave too, but if you’re not standing over them, they’d dig it right in the middle of a city park, two blocks from the cop shop. Hell, they’d do it in broad daylight if you weren’t standing over them shouting, ‘Night, you idiots! Do it at night!’ They’re the worst kind of drones. And disloyal! Like you wouldn’t believe! How many of my former colleagues have visited me since I’ve been locked up in this miserable place? Not one! Not a letter! Not a word! And you should have seen them before they met me! They were stealing change out of the cups of beggars! I took them in, tried to show them the ropes. But they don’t want to know the ropes. They want to drink and gamble and lie all day with whores. An hour or two is enough, isn’t it? Hey, have you got guns?”
Terry shook his head. It looked like Harry was warming to his task; he’d had a lot bottled up. The stopper was out.
“Well, that there’s your first mission. Get guns! You need guns! You need lots of guns! And here’s your first lesson. Once you’ve got the guns, find hiding places all over town and stash them- in the back of pubs, up trees, down manholes, in mailboxes. Because if you’re embarking on a life of crime, you never know when your enemies are going to attack. You’re never going to be able to walk through life without glancing over your shoulder. Are you up for that? Your neck gets a lot of exercise, take it from me. Any place you go- the pub, the cinema, the bank, the dentist- as soon as you walk into a room, you better find a wall and stand with your back to it. Get ready. Be aware. Don’t let anyone get behind you, you hear me? Even when you’re getting a haircut: always make the barber do it from in front.”
Harry slammed his hands on the table and bore down on us.
“That’s the way of life for us boys. It would shake the foundations of common folk, but we have to be tough and prepared to live against the wall with our eyes blazing and our fingers twitching. After a while it becomes an unconscious act, you know. You develop a sixth sense. It’s true. Paranoia makes a man evolve. Bet they don’t teach you that in the classroom! Precognition, ESP, telepathy- we criminals have prophetic souls. We know what’s coming even before it happens. You have to. It’s a survival mechanism. Knives, bullets, fists, they come out of the woodwork. Everyone wants your name on a headstone, so on your toes, boys! It’s a cunt of a life! But there are rewards. You don’t want to be a regular Joe. You just have to look out a window and see. I’ll tell you what’s out there: a bunch of slaves in love with the freedom they think they have. But they’ve chained themselves to some job or another, or to a squad of rug rats. They’re prisoners too, only they don’t know it. And that’s what the criminal world is turning into. A routine! A grind! The whole ball of wax lacks spark! Imagination! Chaos! It’s sealed from the inside. It’s chained to the wheel. Nothing unexpected happens. That’s why, if you follow my advice, you’ll have an edge. They won’t be prepared for it. The smartest thing you can do is surprise them- that’s the ticket. Smarts, brawn, courage, bloodlust, greed: all fine, necessary characteristics. But imagination! That’s what the criminal world lacks! Just look at the staples: larceny, theft, breaking and entering, gambling, drugs, prostitution. You call that innovation?”
Terry and I looked at each other helplessly. There was nothing stopping this eruption of words.
“God, it’s good to see you two boys. You’ve really pumped me full of piss! And vinegar! And just when things were tasting so stale, you’ve given me hope! The organization is in ruins. No one wants new ideas. All they want is more of the same. They’re their own worst enemies. It’s their appetites- insatiable! That leads me to my next tip. Keep your appetites down and you’ll live to be a thousand. Accumulate what you need to be comfortable and then go enjoy life awhile. Blaze like a furnace, then hide your light from t
he world. Have the strength to smother your own flame. You understand? Retreat and attack! Retreat and attack! That’s the key! And keep your crew small, that’s another tip. Bigger your crew, the more chance one of them will double-cross you and leave you for dead in some shallow ditch. You know why? Because everyone wants to be on top! Everyone! Well, here’s your next lesson: don’t be on top. Be on the side! That’s right. You heard me correctly. Let the others chew through their days charging each other like bulls. You put your heads down and get on with it. There’s nothing, you gorgeous unlawful children, nothing I can tell you more important than what I’ve already said: avoid the treacherous ladder! That’s the best advice I can give you. I wish someone had said as much to me when I was your age. I wouldn’t be in here. If only I’d known it was the ladder that would get me in the end. That ladder has blades for rungs!”
I struggled to keep up. What was I doing talking to this madman when I should be in school?
“Look. Take it from me, don’t make a name for yourself, be as anonymous as possible. Everyone will tell you it’s all about reputation- that’s the trap! Everyone wants to be Capone or Netti or Squizzy Taylor. They want their names to echo through eternity, like Ned Kelly. Well, I’ll tell you, the only way to get your name echoing like that is to be massacred in a hail of bullets. Is that what you want? Of course not. Here’s a new one: are you ready for it? Don’t let the world know who’s boss. That will throw them! They’ll be eating their hearts out. Be a leaderless gang. Give the impression that you belong to a democratic cooperative of crime! That’ll spin their heads. They won’t know who to come gunning for. This is irrefutable advice, boys. Don’t be showy! Be a faceless entity! Hell, be a nonentity. You’ll show those clowns. Let them speculate, but don’t let them know. The paradox of the crime world is that you need a reputation to get things done, but having a reputation gets you killed. But if your reputation is mysterious, if you’re in a secret society, like the Templars…do you know who the Templars were? Of course you don’t. Well-”
