The canvas satchel under Harry’s arm is empty but it makes him look as if he has business with the lockers. It is cavernously quiet down here now, just the buzz of a fluorescent tube. As he rounds the corner of the aisle in which they left the painting he pulls up abruptly, seeing a policeman sitting on a bench. The policeman stands.
‘Hi,’ Harry says. The policeman nods hello. Two two seven is open and has been dusted for fingerprints. The cop steps closer to it, between the locker and Harry. ‘Can I do for you?’
‘Nothing. Just dropping this off. I’m going out, clubbing. I don’t want to lose it.’
‘This aisle is closed to the public tonight, unless you’re picking something up. It’s a crime scene. Put your bag in another aisle.’
‘Okay.’ Harry steps backwards, rounds the end of the lockers into the third aisle and wanders its length, whispering, ‘Turton, Turton?’ He gets down on his knees to look under the lockers. Then he stands on a bench to look on top of them. ‘Turton.’
‘You looking for someone?’ The cop has appeared at the end of Harry’s aisle.
‘No. A cat. A cat lives down here. Probably out hunting.’ Harry nods.
‘What’s your name?’
‘My name? I’m feeding a cat.’
‘Feeding it what?’
The chirp and squeal of his gym boots on the painted cement tells Harry he is running, he has made a break for it. Feeding it what? That cop was closing in on him. He drops his canvas satchel halfway up the ramp. Out on the street, sucking the night air cold on his teeth, he keeps running in the dark, the light, the dark, until he ducks down an alley and steps into a black doorway, breathing hard, covering his sensitive teeth with his lips. The satchel can’t be traced to him. Maybe to Laszlo Berg, but not to him.
‘Jesus, Turton,’ he whispers. ‘Don’t you be dead, man. Please.’ He slaps his open hands against the cold brickwork twice, the noise echoing in the alley.
The policeman stops at Harry’s satchel, bends and picks it up and looks inside. Nothing. He had bet fifty-fifty on cat food or drugs. He pokes his face inside and sniffs an indeterminate smell of stuff. Maybe he was some kid from a student news paper, some nosy prick trying to make his journalism name.
Back in the locker room the policeman sits himself down again, in front of 228, and is entertained by watching a slow drip of clear liquid. Extraordinary what is in these lockers – this being an affluent society, and people being easy come, easy go about redeeming their personal items.
Harry waits in the alley longer than he needs to because he doesn’t like what he is going to have to do. When he leaves he crosses Spencer Street and turns into Collins Street, dawdling, stopping to look at gold fountain pens and watches in shop windows, objects that don’t interest him at all. His steps are small, reluctant, like a child called out front of the class.
It is nearly midnight and there are not many people around now – some drunks out of bars, bewildered as to time and direction; young people clinging to each other, laughing, plenty of the night still ahead. He walks up the street with his head high, trying to be brave. Near the mouth of Centre Way a homeless man is asleep in a shop doorway on a square of flattened cardboard, his legs protruding onto the footpath. Harry sees him too late and stumbles over him. The man groans but doesn’t wake. Instead a small red terrier leaps from where it is nesting in the crook of his groin and gives off a string of urgent barks that meld together and become a howl. Harry is taken by the tiny dog’s defence of its master. He holds his hand out towards the dog and says, ‘Hey, good boy. It’s all right.’ The dog growls and barks and shows its teeth. ‘All right, all right. I’m going.’ The man reaches out, patting the air blindly, feeling for his dog. When he touches its tail he takes hold of it and hauls the dog back to its nest, from where it continues to growl.
Harry, still dawdling, reluctant, turns off Collins Street into Centre Way. He is on a covered walkway three storeys high with a glass directory board at its mouth listing its shops, and a flight of stairs leading down to a foreign language bookshop advertised by a red and green florescent sign. Furnished with potted palms and dimly lit from either side by the nightlights in shop windows: Birkenstock, Ladies’ Fashions, Mel’s Hair, Shag Second-hand Glad Rags, Sandwich Bar, Converse Sneakers, Sushi Counter – he stops at each window. The grind and crackle of his footsteps in here echoes at him, giving him the urge to creep like some sinister from a pantomime.
From Centre Way, five steps lead down into an old herringbone-pattern bluestone alley, a cleft in two cliffs of dark stone, and a strip of starlit sky high above. To his right is an alcove filled with dumpsters. In this dark cul-de-sac scented with decay the walls are covered, as high as a man can reach while standing on a dumpster, with a graffiti as primitive as cave art. A wild rant of stencils and sprays: cat faces, multi-coloured Barbarellas with their hands on their hearts. Bulls and chickens. Dick-Tracy-type gangsters. Revolutionaries holding rifles. Some lost story, this. Some language Harry feels sad about not speaking.
He enters the cul-de-sac and turns a circle looking at the graffiti. He wonders if anyone can paint here. Is this someone’s gallery? Would it be sacrilege to paint over this, or is it a continuing dialogue? Before stepping back out into the alley he tells himself he will work here. He’ll bring cans and stencils to this lost alcove and lay down his own caveman art, where it will be drowned out a week later by some other caveman in a cool conversation, all done while balancing on dumpsters. It’s about all he wants of art now.
Above the alley, wrought-iron tendrils reach out from either wall, holding saucers of light. All but two of the thin shopfronts have iron shutters pulled down over them. The two that haven’t are bars. On the left is the Lustre Lounge with small cast-iron tables outside and people sitting on tiny stools. Further along the alley on the right is the Barbica Café with a few people at tables talking. There is a faint smell of licorice-flavoured schnapps and coffee on the air, and Tom Waits is growling.
Large windows overlook the alley on either side, all dark save for the yellow light coming from Hell’s Kitchen. Steel beer barrels are stacked at the foot of the stairway leading up there. Harry stops and lays his forehead on one. The smell of stale beer is on the steel.
‘Coward,’ he whispers. ‘Ask her. Who is she? You didn’t just bump into her, boy, by chance – a chance meeting. She chose you. For this. You’re not going to wreck anything by asking. There’s nothing to wreck. Ask her what this is. Ask her, straight up. Am I just a guy you needed?’ He takes five long breaths, before lifting his head, looking about, and nodding.
A flight of cement stairs, painted red, doubles back on itself. Wires and pipes run along the walls, snaking over and under posters from the world of music announcing upcoming gigs, newly released albums, visiting artists. In Hell’s Kitchen, The Rolling Stones are playing some old song, ‘Stray Cat Blues’. A dimly lit room is divided into two by the doorway. The decor is a sixties mélange of bright plastics, vinyl couches, a kidney-shaped fake wood coffee table, swirling wallpaper that has inspired someone to paint snakes on the wood panelling. Large dirty windows overlook the alley. On the wall across the alley are coloured boxlit signs above cafés and shops. To the left is a bar, ranks of bottles stacked on shelves behind it. On the end of the bar by the window overlooking the alley sits a lamp with a red shade. Mireille sits on a stool beneath it, in the fall of red light.
Seeing Harry, she stands and puts her arms around him but, feeling his disappointment in his lack of response, releases him and shakes her head at him, asking, ‘No?’
He loves her. A love he sees as so complete, so sublime, it makes him angry that it might have been used as a weapon against him. ‘I don’t know where he is. There’s a cop there, so I couldn’t search.’
‘Maybe he is back at home.’ Harry ignores her invitation to optimism and orders himself a Glenlivet. He takes the drink, sits on the stool next to hers and, looking past her out of the window, asks her, ‘Who are you?’
She shakes her head and frowns, asking him not to.
‘He’s probably dead. I can only think he’s in one of those lockers. And I’m in this and I volunteered and I’ve got no excuse and I thought it was a big fucking adventure … which shows how silly I am.’ Harry sniffs his whisky, drinks it and raises the glass to the barman. He reaches out and touches her hair, trying to make this easier for her. ‘I know you chose me because I was an in to the gallery. I think you probably even trapped me into a debt by buying my paintings, so I would help you steal the Weeping Woman. But even now, with Turton up in smoke like a genie, I wouldn’t care, if you could say to me that during the course of this you’d fallen in love with me. That, despite your cunning, you’d got tangled up, head over heels in love with your baby-faced stooge, and things had become impossibly complicated because … because … big matters of the heart had overtaken little matters of Picasso.’
Mireille shakes her head, knitting her brow to ask him to stop.
Harry smiles. ‘That would be the thing to say. I’d be in your lap like that.’ He snaps his fingers.
She smiles, a denial of her sadness, her eyes brimming tears. ‘But you have said it. And now there is no possibility for me to say it. You did that on purpose.’
Harry tilts his head to indicate maybe that was his reasoning and maybe it wasn’t.
‘You should not have. You should have let me say it.’ Her mouth is quivering.
‘Who are you?’ Harry asks gently.
For a moment Mireille is silent, staring down at the floor. There are just the noises of the bar – chair legs scraping on the floorboards behind them as people stand quickly, a chair falling over. A woman saying, ‘Oh …’ None of this distracts them.
‘Turton’s dead, Mireille.’
Her lips tighten and she looks up at Harry and whispers, ‘She is my mother.’
‘What? Who’s your …’
A woman screams. A horrified noise. Glasses smash as a table upends, and Harry and Mireille turn to see the last bar patrons backing fast down the stairs, stumbling, keeping their horrified eyes fixed on two men at the head of the stairs looking down at them. One is a large man, hunched in a knee-length trench coat. The other is younger, athletic, but with his head lolling madly to one side. He is holding something out to the fleeing patrons, offering something. ‘Want a pat?’ he is asking. ‘He don’t bite. He don’t. Not no more.’
Winston Bloomfield follows Harry from Spencer Street station up Collins Street, walking like a fighter, bouncing his hips and dipping his shoulders. His gait is a boast, not really suitable for surveillance. But Winston, known as Winnie Blue, is not well chosen for anonymity, he tends to invite attention with his ostentatious hostility. Even now, while on a clandestine operation, he sneers at people passing in the street, spits close to their feet as they walk past. A wiry, athletic man, he has cropped black hair fronted by a widow’s peak and is littered with scars. The streetlights reflect on this scar tissue as he walks beneath them, making it appear as if stars are orbiting his skull.
He is impatient. He curses out loud every time Harry stops to look in a window or leans on a shopfront smoking, not bothering to pretend to be window-shopping or otherwise occupied. Showily waiting. Almost daring Harry to discover him. Because all this creeping and sneaking is beneath him, really. He is a man for the confrontation. A man to be called in for the endgame.
But Harry doesn’t discover Winnie Blue following him. Up Collins and into Centre Way and Centre Place. When Harry enters Hell’s Kitchen, Winnie Blue retreats to the payphone at the mouth of Centre Way and calls Laszlo Berg, who is taking a nightcap of sloe gin in the Savage Club barely a block away.
Laszlo arrives on foot, dressed against the night in a long coat. The drunk’s dog growls at him as he passes.
‘He’s in there. In a bar,’ Winnie Blue tells him.
Laszlo wanders the length of Centre Way, peering down into Centre Place, up at Hell’s Kitchen, frowning at the people sitting at cafés in the lower alley. ‘Night owls,’ he says. ‘Witnesses.’
‘You want me to kick ’em out?’
‘No. We don’t want the police here.’ He walks out of Centre Way with Winnie Blue behind him and takes few steps down Collins Street, to where the drunk is asleep in the doorway. Laszlo makes a rasping noise in his throat, which wakes the small red terrier and draws him growling from his nest in the hollow of the drunk’s crotch. Laszlo rasps his throat noise. The dog advances, barking now, and Laszlo swings a club down onto its head, crushing its skull. He peers at it in the dim light. It looks like a dog in a peaceful slumber. He hits it again. Some teeth break and an eye pops from its skull. Its nose is bloodied. The drunk sits upright, a man grown old too early, dressed in rags, whiskered whitely. ‘What’s going on?’
‘We’re borrowing your dog. Don’t worry, we’ll bring him back.’
The drunk tries to stand, but Winnie Blue steps forwards and punches him, sending him sprawling back into his doorway unconscious. ‘You kill his dog?’ Winnie asks.
‘It was either that, or you walk around with your cock out.’
Going back into Centre Way, Laszlo reaches above his head and pulls down the mesh roller-shutter and slides its bolts into its frame, sealing it off from Collins Street. He and Winnie Blue descend into Centre Place. Nearing Lustre Lounge, Laszlo says, ‘Now the pooch earns his keep.’ He begins to stagger. Winnie almost leaps forwards to catch him, but Laszlo frowns him away and begins to snicker like a CBD lunatic, one of those lost men who live crab-like in doorways, troll-like under bridges, shouting at ghosts with whom they disagree. He staggers towards the patrons sitting in the alley outside Lustre Lounge, holding the dead dog at arm’s length before him, its bloodied tongue lolling and an eye swinging pendulously on a tendon with each step he takes. He offers it to the bar patrons, who look up, one by one, dread dawning on their faces.
‘Kiss Timmy,’ Laszlo offers. ‘Timmy’s broken. Kiss him, lady. Kiss him better.’
He thrusts the dog at a woman, who reels backwards, one hand flat on her belly and one across her mouth, denying the urge to vomit. Laszlo then thrusts the dog at her man as he intervenes.
‘Please, you kiss him,’ he begs in a voice from childhood or lunacy.
He proffers the dog to another man, who backs away, snatching his jacket off a chair. ‘Who’ll kiss Timmy better?’ In the middle of the bar he pirouettes unsteadily, holding out the dead dog. The bar empties, patrons wearing various expressions of pity or dread as they leave.
In this way, using the dead animal and his own unfortunate state, he clears the night owls from Lustre Lounge, before staggering down to Barbica Café and repeating the performance. When the alley is deserted, Laszlo returns to the doorway of Hell’s Kitchen and hands the dog to Winnie Blue. ‘Your turn,’ he says.
In Hell’s Kitchen Winnie Blue tilts his head to one side and, with the ceiling lights flaring on his scar tissue, he quietly offers the punters a chance to breathe life into his soulmate. Benji, he names the dog. Who’ll kiss Benji better? Behind Harry and Mireille’s backs people flee to nightspots where they won’t be required to resuscitate canines for madmen. Winnie touches the dog’s wet, cold nose to one woman’s neck and she screams.
Harry and Mireille turn to face the scream. There stands Laszlo Berg holding a black club. Beside him is a thug with his head craned sideways, his right ear touching his shoulder and a dead dog lying astride his left forearm with its head cradled in his hand. With his other hand the thug pulls a revolver from his belt. Both the thug and the dog have their tongues lolling, the one in imitation of the other.
But now the bar is cleared Winnie Blue lifts his head and retracts his tongue and flicks his eyebrows up and down twice to comment on the strange things a bloke is required to do.
‘Go and sit on the floor in the kitchen until I tell you to come out,’ he tells the bar owner. ‘You do that and you’re safe. Middle of the floor.’
Laszlo pouts and looks Harry up and down, as if there might be some clue as to where the lad went wrong. ‘Greenface has resurfaced, the repercussions of which eventuality we have discussed.’
He pauses to give Harry a chance to explain. When he doesn’t say anything Laszlo goes on. ‘We’re all worse off. Don’t think I walk away without my own share of troubles. I’m in the soup as well. True, you’re about to become an artifact, as promised, but the difference between you and me is you’re a stupid bastard who deserves it.’
Laszlo rests the club on his shoulder. ‘You really couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me you don’t deserve this, could you?’ Without looking away from Harry he says, ‘Winston, do your bit for the evolution of mankind by killing these dumb bastards before they have a chance to propagate their dangerously stupid genes.’
Mireille stands, staring at Laszlo, her nostrils flaring. ‘Leave him alone. He’s just a young man I hired. I have done this to you. Snuff out my genes. They are worthless. Better off gone. They are yours, after all.’
‘What? What are mine?’ Laszlo asks, shaking his head, slightly annoyed.
‘My genes are yours. I am your daughter.’
Laszlo rolls his eyes at this absurdity. ‘Voilà. Like a rabbit from a hat – a daughter. Go ahead and kill me, but you should know I am your … daughter. Oh, that’s good. That’s Shakespeare. That’s Oedipus Rex. You’ve studied the classics, haven’t you?’
‘I am, you know.’ She smiles wistfully, nods.
‘Oh, you are? Does your mother know?’
‘She does.’
‘Well, let’s get acquainted. Does she have a name?’
‘She does.’
‘And it is?’
‘You refer to her as “Greenface”, I notice.’
At this, a shade of confusion crosses Laszlo’s face. ‘I was talking about a painting.’
‘A portrait.’ Mireille nods.
As she says this, a window breaks down in the alley. They stop to listen. Some moments later another window breaks, louder this time. In the diminuendo rain of glass there is laughter. They wait. This destruction, getting closer, seems to portend a visitor – a giant, wending his way towards them through the flimsy walls of the city.
The Stinking Pariahs have followed Laszlo from the Savage Club. Bam Hecker, wearing his helmet and leathers, hooks his fingers through the mesh of the roller-shutter beside his head and groans thoughtfully and rattles the shutter. Adjacent to the roller-shutter, on the corner of Centre Way and Collins Street, is a luggage shop. He stands in front of its window and headbutts the glass and walks through it, laughing amid the splash and flow of the thousand triangulations, as if this were some showground experience he’d paid a buck to play. Kicking through the luggage he steps up to the shop window that looks on to Centre Way, before headbutting it and stepping through it, laughing again in the shower of glass. Once in the alley he removes his helmet and shakes the slivers of glass from his long hair. The other Stinking Pariahs follow him through the luggage shop into the alley.
Winnie Blue assumes a killer’s face – a sneer of white, false teeth amid sallow skin, eyebrows glowered low over his eyes. He moves to the door of Hell’s Kitchen to greet whoever the hell these pissants might turn out to be. When he sees it is the Stinking Pariahs he moves back into the room and lays his gun on a table. There are six of them. Giants in this delicately furnished space.
Bam blinks at Winnie Blue. ‘That dog a dead dog?’ he asks. Winnie Blue gives a barely perceptible nod.
‘That your party trick, is it? A dead dog?’
‘It’s not mine.’
‘You don’t have much spirituality, do you? Squiring a dead dog round town. What’s your name?’
‘Winnie Blue.’
‘Winnie Blue? Like the smoke? Bad for your health?’
‘That’s right.’
Two Stinking Pariahs are holding handguns. Another has a shotgun pointed at Winnie Blue.
‘You ever been avenged by a dead dog, Winnie Blue?’ Bam asks. Winnie Blue doesn’t respond. ‘Avenge the dead dog, Low Billy.’ Gently, with utmost respect for the deceased, Low Billy Low takes the dead dog from Winnie Blue. He pats its head and tells it ‘Good boy,’ and tickles its throat. Then he holds its mouth to Winnie Blue’s ear and clamps down on it with both hands. The yellowed canines click audibly as they meet through the flesh. Winnie Blue sucks a breath while Low Billy Low continues to clamp the dog’s jaws on his ear. Holding its head in both his hands he begins shaking it like a dog shakes itself to tear its prey, the dog’s torso swinging like a pendulous adornment. Low Billy Low begins to growl, Winnie Blue to moan softly – even in this pain he’s aware he’s at the mercy of the Stinking Pariahs and he’d better mind his manners. He tries to move his head in time with the thrashing dog, but it comes away holding a ragged chunk of ear in its mouth.
‘Yow,’ Bam says.
‘Terriers,’ Low Billy Low smiles. ‘Manic.’ He plucks the chunk of ear from the dog’s mouth and stuffs it in Winnie Blue’s shirt pocket.
Winnie Blue is panting, cradling his ear, blood dripping into his palm.
‘Ever been privately bit by a dead dog?’ Bam asks him.
‘Privately?’
‘On your privates.’
‘Man, I don’t know anything about this, apart from getting paid to whack these dudes,’ he points to Harry and Mireille. ‘By him.’ He points to Laszlo. ‘I didn’t know the Pariahs were involved, man. I wouldn’t have taken the job.’
Bam turns to Laszlo. ‘You ripped off a mate of mine.’
‘No.’ He nods at Harry and Mireille. ‘It was these two.’
‘Down the line is down the line, man. I can’t track every insult back to Adam.’
‘They ripped us all off. I’m in the process of redressing the problem now. Everything will be straightened out, all debts paid, all damages made good.’ Laszlo flicks his fingers at Bam, at the inconsequentiality of the problem before them.
Anger crosses Bam’s face. He doesn’t like this man making judgements on the importance of these matters. He looks to Harry and Mireille and back at Laszlo. ‘She makes no mention of those dudes and redressing them. But you … Well, she’s got that Prussian blood, you know, warlike and miffed and prone to episodes of vengeance. Insults washed away in gore. It’s their culture – bloody revenge. The Italians make grappa and salami. The Prussians make restitution. So, here we are. The Stinking Pariahs. Instruments of that Prussian girl’s traditional ways.’ He steps forwards and gently unwraps Laszlo’s fingers from the shaft of his club.
‘What if she sold that painting to the Hell’s Angels, man? Or the Bandidos, or some bad fucker, instead of drooling over it like an art fan? She’d be getting killed herself now, wouldn’t she? You didn’t worry about that, did you?’ Bam shakes his head in admonishment. He hefts the club once, twice, impressed.
Mireille seems to know what is about to happen before anyone else. She leaps between them, backing up against Laszlo, reaching behind herself to take hold of him. ‘Do not hurt him. I have the money. I will pay his debt.’ Behind her, Laszlo’s face, until now replete with scorn, is marked with the lines of a deep bewilderment.
‘You didn’t hear all that about blood revenge?’ Bam asks.
‘But surely you would want the money in preference? We have it,’ she implores, her eyes blinking, blaring desperation. ‘It is close. We will get it.’
‘Okay,’ Bam nods, ‘Yes. You go and get it. We’ll wait here. You have an hour.’
Mireille starts towards the door. Harry knows this isn’t how it’s going to work. The Stinking Pariahs are not going to wait here for money and risk the cops showing up. Laszlo knows it, too. He sits heavily in a chair, resigned to what is to come.
‘Come on,’ she takes Harry’s hand and pulls him with her.
When they reach the top of the stairs Laszlo calls to her, ‘Greenface? Dora Maar?’
She stops and turns and looks at him, and a smile starts wonkily on her face before she contains it and simply nods. Bam, in a magnanimous attempt not to intrude on this apparently private moment, looks down at a table beside him.
As they emerge into the alley they hear Bam’s voice from the open windows of Hell’s Kitchen above, echoing out into the alleyway. ‘Why paint a chick with a green face? No one has a green face. Looks like a crocodile or a snake.’
Laszlo’s voice answers tiredly. ‘Well, there you are. It tells us something of ourselves. Crocodiles … snakes.’
‘Yeah? Well, I’m not an art connoisseur, so I missed the message. But you are an art connoisseur who understood the message, and you’re more crocodile and snake than the rest of us. So I say her lesson is wasted on you, and probably wasted on everybody. I doubt I’ll even go to the gallery to see her. No point.’
Laszlo is uninterested. ‘The gallery director will be crestfallen to have missed the subhuman detritus demographic.’
Harry and Mireille hear three rapid, muffled shots. Then a fourth, loud and sharp. Harry has a vision of Bam standing over Laszlo’s prone body shooting down at him, delivering the coup de grâce. Mireille blinks up at the window of Hell’s Kitchen, shocked. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. Harry links his arm through hers and pulls her walking, then running, out of the alley.