by Zane Lovitt
‘Was Rudy Alamein ever in Severington?’
‘Nope.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘He doesn’t have a record.’
‘What about an alias?’
‘I’m not sure an alias would be his thing.’
‘His father died in Severington, right? Last month?’
‘That’s right.’
Tyan looks back to the window. This time he’s not looking for anyone.
‘That crown. If you looked at it upside down, what would it look like?’
‘I don’t know.’ I rotate my hand as if the tattoo is there.
‘It’s not a crown, you dill. It’s teeth.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Something they do in Severington. Blokes get the black teeth tattooed on their right hand so that people know the bloke is owned. Comes from the days when the Dingos owned half the fucking prison. Pack of bikie deadshits. They’re gone, long gone, but that symbol’s still used. It means he belongs to someone. As if he’s property. And everyone knows it.’
‘That doesn’t sound cool.’
‘Hey?’
‘I mean, it doesn’t sound pleasant.’
‘Why do you talk like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like that. Like fucking…Seinfeld.’
‘No, I just…’ I make a face, shake my head to refocus. ‘So why does Rudy have it? The teeth.’
‘Maybe his old man had it.’
‘So it’s, like, a sympathy tattoo?’
Tyan doesn’t know. We ponder the silence. Then he says:
‘How did Piers Alamein die?’
‘Don’t know.’
A car motors past the window. Tyan watches. His eyes follow it all the way around the corner and lingers to be sure it isn’t coming back. I trace a line on the carpet with my toe and ask:
‘You ever feel guilty? Sending people to a place like that?’
Tyan doesn’t hesitate. ‘Nope.’
He hesitates now, long enough to sip his tea. But the heaving effort of his mouth and throat relay that it’s something stronger than tea. ‘Poor woman was killed in her own home. Still young. No other family. When you’re dead you don’t get a lot of justice. It’s Severington or nothing.’
I’m about to rephrase my question but Tyan has slipped into contemplation, appears to be silently solving a riddle. Finally he blinks up afresh.
‘I suppose you want your money?’
‘Sure.’
‘What was it? Two-fifty?’
‘Two-fifty plus twenty-five for petrol. Plus a dollar for the print. Plus a trip to Fawkner Cemetery on Sunday.’
‘I’ve got my hands full right now, if you can’t tell. The cemetery might have to wait. How much did you say?’
‘Two-seventy-six. But let’s call it two-seventy-five.’
‘That’s big of you.’ He rises delicately and waddles back to the door, says, ‘Stay here.’
I stay here.
It’s about half what I would have billed a typical client, given the time spent. But pointing that out would be screaming into the abyss.
A hinge squeals somewhere in the house. I wonder if I can open the window to breathe. Glancing over there I see a black handgun on the floor.
The sight of it, plus the heat…I’m giddy. I rub at my face. Now that I think about the stale air, I can’t stop thinking. Am I breathing right? Is oxygen getting to my brain? I look around the room for a solution, find nothing. My eyes come back to the firearm. It wasn’t there when I came in. Tyan must have taken it with him to answer the door.
My agitation pours out the moment Tyan returns.
‘You’re sitting around your house with a gun? Is it loaded?’
He cringes like I told an inappropriate joke. A set of bills thrusts out as he moves back to his station, surveys the outside world.
‘You can’t live like this.’ I pocket the money. ‘We have to tell the police.’
‘Yeah.’ Still it’s half-hearted. Tyan’s big toe blindly nudges the firearm on the floor. He nods, but his thoughts are someplace else. I want something more definite.
‘Rudy Alamein is obviously deranged. He’s transferred all his grief about his parents onto you. So you’ve got friends we can go to, right? Guys who can get the ball rolling?’
Tyan stares out the window like the star of a TV soap. I realise I’m peering out there too, searching the street for whatever.
‘Tyan.’
He looks to me. I make a point of holding his attention and I say, ‘That’s what we’re going to do, right?’
Tyan nods yes. Like, all things considered, we should probably do that.
Then he’s like:
‘I don’t want to go to the police. I want him to have a go. I want him to try it.’
26
Tyan lights a cigarette.
‘You hungry?’
I rub at my cheek. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I can make you a sandwich.’ Tyan’s second inhale brings on a single raucous cough, confronting like a lion’s roar would be confronting if he did it right in your face and trailed off with a phlegmy hum.
‘I don’t understand what you mean when you say you want him to try it.’
‘Catch him at it. If he comes for me. I mean, if someone’s got it in for me, why should I run to the cops? I am a cop. Anyway…’
He drags again, lets the nicotine fuel his concern.
‘Right now, we don’t even have stalking. He has to do it more than once for it to be stalking, and we can’t prove that. And if we could, no one gets put away for fucking stalking. He’d get off with a warning and then here I am, a sixty-year-old sitting duck.’
‘Then, like, an intervention order. Something like that.’
Blue smoke rolls from his mouth. His face doesn’t move, just holds on me like he can’t believe what a dingus I am.
‘You think he’ll care about an intervention order? Intervention orders don’t mean fuck all. They don’t mean fuck all when the cunt’s taking out life insurance.’
And with that, Tyan picks up his handgun and leaves the room.
He didn’t tell me to stay this time so I follow. My shoes are loud against the floorboards after Tyan’s pink feet. We file down a pale passageway broken up by closed wooden doors and ending in a kitchen. On the right is a formica table, braced by a strip of aluminium and scorched by a million hot mugs. Above it there’s a large window facing the neighbour’s house and a venetian blind crimping the daylight. Tyan moves to a refrigerator and a small green counter.
‘You want a ham sandwich?’ Before I can answer he hassles me: ‘Sit down.’
‘Sure.’ I sit in one of four chairs placed around the dining table—sixties vintage, upholstered with dimpled leather. The kind that might be really valuable, might be really not. It’s furniture people like Beth who decide.
‘Cheese? Lettuce? Mayo?’
‘Yeah…’ Just these food words make my stomach rumble. ‘Whatever you’re having.’
Tyan pulls on the fridge door. It rocks back and forth like an excited robot and I can see that one of its front feet is missing. He’s got a rolled-up newspaper wedged under there but it’s not stabilising much. Inside the fridge it’s pretty bare. At least three tin cans are open and uncovered, their lids poking up like thumbs. His cigarette smoulders in an ashtray beside the gun he’s placed on the benchtop, within reach.
On top of the fridge stands a framed photograph of Tyan, dressed the way Australians dress in South-East Asia, his arm around a small Thai woman. Both are smiling, but her smile might be a wince because of how he’s clutching her.
‘I guess…’ I say, easing back into the discussion. ‘I guess I think that if we go to the police, then it’s over. Don’t you want it to be over?’
‘Absolutely I do.’ He finds bread in a bread bin and lays it out on plates. ‘That’s what I’m talking about. We bring in law enforcement and it’s just the beginning. He’ll have lawyers, you know? Rights. Then
it all bloody drags on and the best we can hope for is we finish up right where we are now, only he knows we’re onto him. But if he tries it, actually has a go at me, we’ve got him. Attempted murder. Maybe assault. Then he’s fucked.’
A tickle of smoke in my nose—I sneeze. Tyan doesn’t seem to notice, butters bread with needless vigour, continues:
‘He goes to prison, gets the bejesus scared out of him, gets counselling, and his parole conditions are way tougher than any AVO would be.’ His face implores me to understand. ‘That’s how we end it.’
‘So you’re just going to sit around and wait, like, every day? Wait for him to jump out from behind a tree, or…?’
‘You don’t think I can take him?’
‘That’s not the point—’
‘Christ, I’m not as old as all that. I was a copper, for fuck’s sake. And anyway, I’m not saying we should sit and wait. Want mayonnaise?’
‘Yes please.’
Tyan takes a jar of mayonnaise from the fridge, grips the lid and strains. It doesn’t give. He tries again, whole body trembling, face scarlet; I feign an interest in my shoes so as not to embarrass him by watching. Perhaps he’s about to ask me to have a try. But no. He places it back in the fridge.
I poke at the smoky sting in my eyes.
‘So if you’re not going to wait then…what?’
‘Basically…’ he says, unwrapping a block of cheese slices, ‘we’ve got to find out what his plan is.’
You can see the cop in him pining for one last arrest, scratching to prove he’s still got it. That’s why he abandoned the mayonnaise. To hide that maybe he doesn’t.
He’s like, ‘Know what I mean?’
What distracts me now is the air I’m breathing. The room smells like a funeral pyre. The ceiling and the upper walls are faded yellow from decades of cigarettes. Past the rickety fridge stands a second door which I assume leads to a backyard and I rise and move to it, reach for the handle—
‘Leave it!’
I startle back.
Tyan glares, knife held in suspended animation.
‘I just wanted to let in some air,’ I blurt. ‘The smoke…’
Tyan sucks the last moments of life from his cigarette, stabs it into the ashtray.
‘Step aside.’
He comes to the door, turns the handle, pushes it away. It creaks into a small vestibule where the carpet is frayed and matted and smells of wet dog despite how there’s no dog. Another room to the left is closed off and straight ahead a thin door with a window allows a view to an exterior court crammed with pot plants.
‘Down here,’ Tyan says, points at our ankles. ‘See that?’
I don’t at first. But as I move my head I make out a length of taut fishing line running the width of the doorway, about a foot off the ground.
‘Is that…is that a trip wire?’
To my right the line is tied to a nail in the frame; to my left it runs across the entryway and into a flaky shoeshine box on the lino, wedged between the kitchen cabinet and the wall.
The lid is open.
‘Have a look,’ Tyan says, amused.
I edge closer, look down, can’t see. Step closer.
A revolver points at my face.
I rear back. ‘Jesus!’
Tyan lols outright. It might be the first laugh I’ve heard from him, a long string of hehs like an engine that won’t turn over.
‘Don’t worry. It’s only blanks.’
He goes back to chopping canned ham.
‘What’s it for?’
‘It’s an alarm, obviously. Someone comes in while I’m sleeping, trips the wire, the gun fires.’
I’m not sure how obvious that is, quickly return to my chair.
‘And I know what you’re thinking.’ Tyan throws me another proud smirk. ‘It’s a hair trigger. Fucking blow on that string and it’ll discharge. Did the adjustment myself.’
‘Do you have one on the front door too?’
‘Nah. But mate, thirty years on the force right here. Scumbags don’t break in the front door.’
I survey the room for more weapons, check between the counter and the oven, the oldest oven unit I’ve ever seen. Look behind me, under the seat…
‘It’s still pretty dangerous, isn’t it? Hooking up, like, a booby-trap?’
In Tyan’s hand is a salt shaker. He’s about to sprinkle it on the sandwiches he’s made but half-turns to me and says, ‘Could have been live rounds, you know. Blank cartridges are more expensive than live rounds. But I didn’t use them, did I?’
He shakes the salt.
‘What about an electronic alarm? Like, a motion sensor.’
‘Nah. Always going off at wrong times. Or not going off. I had a smoke alarm that kept going off. No fucking reason. This works, I know it works, that means I can sleep.’
Tyan and technology. I’d forgotten.
Finally he stops the onslaught of salt and reaches for the powdered pepper.
He’s like, ‘What do you think?’
‘I guess, if it’s just blanks…’
‘No.’ He comes to the table with two small plates, barely large enough to hold the sandwich each is laden with. One gets placed in front of me and Tyan sits. ‘I mean, what do you think about trying to get a handle on when this prick is going to come have a crack at me?’
‘He might not come here. He might ambush you at a traffic light.’
‘He’ll come here. That’s why he’s been outside. This is the place. He’s getting to know it.’
Tyan picks up his lunch and sinks into it while I lower my eyes, face to face with dry white bread and wet lettuce and canned ham that smells like play-doh. The least appetising meal I’ve seen in a while, and I’m a mid-twenties male who lives alone.
But the appalled face on my face is not about the food.
‘If you’re asking what I think, I think it’s crazy town. It’s playing with fire.’
‘He doesn’t know your face, right?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘We’ve got to find out somehow.’
‘You want me to do it?’
‘Yeah, in return for, you know…whatever. I could take you to the footy.’
He hasn’t finished his first bite but launches into a second. What he says next is tortured but distinct.
‘But first of all…’ He gestures with his soggy sandwich. ‘We agree that, no matter what, we don’t bring in law enforcement until I say.’
‘I can’t promise that,’ I reply, righteous. ‘I can’t predict what he’s going to—’
‘Second,’ Tyan continues. ‘We agree on a fee upfront.’
‘I don’t want more of your money.’
‘All right, football it is then. Who do you barrack for?’
‘I want to help you, really. But I mean, finding out what Rudy’s planning isn’t doable. I mean, unless you want me to knock on his door and ask him, I’m all out of ideas.’
‘Well, I was thinking…’ Tyan puts down the sandwich and, because he’s got nowhere else to do it, wipes his hands on his shorts. ‘There is one thing you could do.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You could knock on his door and ask him.’
27
The engine is running. I haven’t shut it off for fear I’d sit here all night, my circumstances dancing around the car like douchebags, taunting me and pointing and making no sense.
The dead tree works tirelessly in the wind, the one I’m lighting up with my headlights. Perhaps the wind killed it, scraping and haranguing until its long silver leaves just said fuck it and died. Every tree in Carlton has been dead for a month. You want me to feel sorry for you?
I turn on the blinker, add that metronome to the running of the car engine, a ticking reminder that I’m supposed to leave and be somewhere. What holds me in place is that whirling-dervish question Glen Tyan cannot answer. So motoring obediently back to him, as I’d promised to do, seems at best counterprodu
ctive, at worst an outright betrayal of the question itself:
Is it wrong to feel sorry for Rudy Alamein?
When Tyan and I plotted it out over lunch, when I forced down the sandwich that he called lunch, when I researched Fortunate Insurance, when I printed the contract off their website, it never occurred to me that that was possible.
I find myself U-turning, an awkward six-pointer, aiming my headlights back at the city and checking for sure that the black teeth have been wiped clean from my skin.
Marnie Smurtch works in a pub that used to be called the Deptford before some dealer scrote got shot there and it closed down and reopened as the Cornucopia, where they give you four choices of water when they seat you—count ’em, four—and which, IMHO, is gapingly too cool for school. I ate there once but was out the door quick because Marnie was too busy to come and chat and the other waitstaff kind of freaked me out and I ordered the pigs trotter to seem sophisticated but I couldn’t stomach much of it and also I was eating alone.
I’m hoping Marnie isn’t too busy tonight.
No parks on a Friday in the city so I leave the car in a permit zone because I won’t be long. It turns out I’m not even as long as that.
Rather than run the very public gauntlet of asking to speak with her among the diners and the sommeliers, I trip my way along the bluestone laneway at the rear, with its corrugated eaves and a full offering of shadowy corners for serial killers to lie in wait. The only light is a dirty bulb above the kitchen door and that’s where I loiter until it’s pulled opened by a teenager in an apron, cigarette almost to his mouth, startled by this sudden stranger.
‘Is Marnie inside?’
The pale little face doesn’t manage a word or a grunt or even eye contact but merely disappears, leaves me with the smell of grilled bacon, the sound of a woman hollering something by rote. I worry that it’s Marnie’s voice, that she’s too busy to come to the door but then suddenly here she is, half-smiling.
The hollering continues somewhere behind her.
‘Hi.’ She wears a waist-high apron, quickly removes it.
‘How are you?’
‘I’m good. It’s fucking freezing.’
‘I was walking past, thought I’d drop in. How are you?’
She laughs at me. ‘I’m still good. Where you headed?’
