Hades (22 page)

Eden seemed to watch my face more carefully for a moment, as though trying to decide on something. In time she forgot it and fumbled in the bowl and picked out a wedding ring. She dropped it and pinched at something on her arm.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Flea.”

“Aww, Jesus.” I dropped the bowl and brushed off my arms.

“You got one on your neck.”

I swiped at my neck and throat. Smiled and walked away.

I
went for a drive at around 2
AM
. I’d been in and out of light sleep dreaming about Beck’s apartment and had become frustrated with it. I felt as though my eyes were pressing against the bones in my eye sockets and that electricity was buzzing between my temples. Wired. I let my fingers dance on the wheel, taking a tour through the city to look at the lights on St. Mary’s Cathedral, warm and bright as they curled into the intricate nooks and crannies of the building. Shadows of the homeless wandered and warped over the sides of the church, giant men lumbering. I stopped at the traffic lights and watched a group of drunk naval officers walking home across the park and muttering to each other, sullen-faced.

Martina had shaken my life. Picked it up and dropped it. Things were leaning in, broken, out of their place. The air tasted different. I found myself strangely repelled by her, by the power that she could have over me, by the changes she could make to my belief system. She was like a flame. I had to get away in order to understand how I really felt about her, what I wanted from this helpless attraction. You have to do that, get away from women in order to think about them. Close up, all you are is a slave to their rich fresh skin, to their honey voices, to the irresistible safety of their company.

I was driving towards Eden’s apartment before I knew where I was going. In some way I suppose I wanted to talk to her about Martina. I wanted another being to confirm that this was happening, that it was all right, that Martina could love or want a man like me. Eden knew I’d been out the night before and I supposed it was only a small leap to tell her who I had been with. Dating victims of crime was something that occurred now and then in police ranks, and though it was probably written somewhere in a manual on a shelf that it wasn’t supposed to happen, you share something with each victim, a mutual trauma at the crime, a united desire to put things right. This had happened to me at other times. I’d chased a burglar out of an elderly man’s house in Coogee in my early days as a street cop and had visited him every Friday night afterwards on my patrol to talk football with him until he died. We’d faced a common enemy, the two of us, and something like that is never forgotten.

I pulled into Eden’s street and slowed the car to a stop outside the loading dock coffee shop. No lights were on. Unsure what I had intended in the first place, I was about to pull out when I saw two dark figures moving rapidly across the street.

Eden and Eric.

My senses sharpened, like an animal on point, though I couldn’t have known at first what it was about their appearances that seemed strange. I was accustomed to seeing them dressed in black—it suited the two of them with their sharp features and dark eyes—but Eric was wearing a watch cap turned up over his ears. He glanced around the street and pulled the door open for Eden. I watched as he got in and opened the engine up immediately, barely checking the street before he pulled out.

It was the sharpness of their movements, their determined strides, I suppose, that helped me decide that I was going to follow them. I could believe that Eric would wear a watch cap despite the mildness of the weather, and I’d known Eden not to carry a purse but rather to keep her essential items in her pockets like a man. But there was no joviality to the way they walked, none of that comfortable swagger they both had now. It was a walk of pure focus, which made me believe they were on their way to something that was important, something I should bear witness to. In a flash I thought of the photographs of Doyle with his tortured victims, the names of the missing men on the list in Eden’s wallet, the murmured words, stolen over Eden’s desk, that were meant for no one but her blood brother.

Was it still too soon?

I kept at a distance, pulling onto the southbound highway a good four or five cars behind. There seemed an inordinate amount of street lamps flickering and blinking, as though the electrical current running through the city had been disturbed somehow or was overloaded. I told myself it had probably always been this way. My exhaustion seemed to give a sharp edge to everything, to create extra shadows and give added brightness to the reflections of light in the water on the road. I risked edging closer and noticed that Eric had rolled down his window, his elbow resting on the sill, fingers drumming. As we pulled off the highway into the streets behind Mortdale, Eric wound his window back up and seemed to hunch over the wheel.

The distance between us stretched. The car ahead rolled slowly down the main street, past a Chinese restaurant with tables and chairs on the footpath by the street, fairy lights strung between the trees, empty and dark inside. I let the distance creep as far as I could until I could barely catch them turning each corner. When I pulled into Pickering Avenue, Eric was switching off his headlights. I parked behind a blue sedan and switched the engine and lights off.

Through the windows of the sedan, I could see Eden and Eric’s silhouettes in the car. Both pointed, angular faces were in profile. I followed their glance to the house across the street, where a single light burned in what looked like a kitchen window hung with curtains. Aside from a flowering Christmas bush, there was no vegetation around the place. A beaten-up prefab dump, similar to hundreds of others that littered the western suburbs. There was a small truck in the driveway but I could not make out the company logo on the side panels of the cab.

Eden and Eric didn’t move. I squinted, trying to decide if they were talking, but both seemed as inanimate as statues, watching the house. I looked back at it and tried to understand what they were watching, what they hoped to see. Nothing moved.

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.

A
s 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 workmen 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.”