Notorious (20 page)

Devlin’s words spiral into the grey air. He shouts from the doorway, ‘My responsibility.’

‘Your custody, Devlin.’

He flinches but stands his ground. ‘They’re just words – ’

‘I’ve seen how you use words, Devlin.’

He turns his back on me.

Hail falls and warmth flares. I touch the back of my head; my fingers come away flecked with blood. On the railing, I draw another face with the smile turned upside down. Almost before I finish adding the rosy cheeks, the lines smear into pink and slip over the side.

I shout, ‘They’re not just words to me.’

I pull myself along the railing, closer to the dark mirror. Water slaps against the concrete wall and the wind whines up the side of the house, whistling as it crosses the terrace. The Polish flag flaps wildly, the silver buckles hitting the rattling pole. Now I am closer to the end of the terrace I see ripples spilling over the edge.

I go on.

Drops of water rise from the surface; the lightning freezes them in mid-air. When the flashes stop, there is nothing but blackness curdling overhead. My hand is a blur; my skirt so wet that even the wind can’t lift it anymore.

I am near the dark mirror. It is moving back and forth – I wonder whether the building is shaking but the railing feels firm enough. Chips of ice jab into my face. I smell sulfur.

‘I know you,’ I shout.

I wonder what I will find when I look down. Who will I see? Myself? Anna? My brother? Someone else?

Rain runs down my spine. I am the coldest I have been since I was told my brother was missing. There are odd spots of warmth in the chill encasing me. I imagine it is the blood from my cut scalp. I welcome it. I want more.

I go on.

Now I see what the dark mirror is. It is an infinity pool, built to extend past the building, so it seems to topple into nothingness. The blackness is the water, reflecting the dark clouds overhead. Without a barrier to stop it, the wind rakes the surface, plucking up small waves into white peaks, hurling fine white spray, creating water structures which hang for long moments twisting in the grey air. The hard waves rock back and forth, higher and higher, spilling over the edge. The sulfurous smell is chlorine.

I lean over the dark shadows in the waves. I take a deep breath. I must go on, I think. I lean further.

A shout behind me. Not Devlin’s voice. A tall man with silver platinum hair walks, fast and sure-footed, to me. He catches my wrist just as the wind knocks me into the pool. I see myself hovering over the dark water, reflected endlessly in the reflections in the eyes of the figure in the dark water.

The man pulls me back, against him.

He says, ‘Not today, my little Ophelia.’

I rest my cheek on his sleeve and look to the shock on Devlin’s face. I sympathise with him. Nothing in the photos prepared you for the colour of Pietr’s hair.

Pietr helps me inside and tells Stefano to bring tea and blankets. The room is warm; piped water under all the floors, says Pietr. He sits beside me, holds my hand in both of his in a peculiarly European gesture and looks down at me without blinking. He is immaculately dressed, in dark suit and silk tie.

‘I was so sorry,’ he says in precise English, ‘about your loss.’

It takes me a moment to realise that he is talking about my father.

‘Thank you,’ I say in a rush to make up for my pause.

‘You look very well,’ he says, still holding my hand. He has the measured neutral tone of the internationally educated, of someone who is thinking carefully about his words but only because he can choose from four languages.

‘Better rested than the reports indicated,’ he says. There is the slight, heavier emphasis on the last letter that would always mark him as Central European.

I wait for a comment about my hair but his gaze doesn’t waver.

‘The last time I saw you,’ I say, ‘was Anna’s funeral.’

For a moment there is a sheen like glass over his face.

‘I don’t think she wanted to go on,’ I say. ‘After my brother.’

‘No.’ He presses my hand and stands.

I say, ‘This is John Devlin.’

Devlin comes across the room.

There is a notable silence before Pietr puts out his hand. ‘From the Embassy?’

‘My fame precedes me,’ says Devlin, shaking hands briefly.

‘Italy is small, signor.’ Pietr looks down at me. ‘We all saw the photographs of your arrest. Naturally, even though we were sure the authorities would not be stupid for very long . . . ’ He stares at Devlin. ‘We were a little concerned.’ That clipping of the final letter, almost a “t” in the final “d”, makes him sound angry; even “little” has an ominous ring, the “t”s turned to compressed explosions. ‘We saw you in those photographs, Mr Devlin.’

‘I had passport difficulties,’ I say. ‘Mr Devlin was kind enough to help me with them.’

‘Yeah,’ says Devlin. ‘Don’t shoot me. I’m only the babysitter.’

They stare at each other.

‘Who should I shoot, Mr Devlin?’ says Pietr. ‘To treat a woman this way. And so soon after the death of her father. If you wish to punish someone for the father’s sins, Mr Devlin, you should punish me. I was his partner.’

‘All I was told,’ says Devlin, raising a palm, ‘was that an Italian citizen offered to vouch for her while her passport problems were sorted out. My job is to sit tight and wait further instructions.’

Pietr presses his lips together.

I say, ‘Pietr, it’s okay, really. It’s some bureaucratic bungle. If you can put me up for a few days . . . ’

As I touch his arm, the bracelet shows beneath my cuff. His eyes narrow, he is about to speak when I whisper ‘No’. He raises an eyebrow, his glance flicking up and down Devlin.

The door to the terrace springs back. As Devlin closes it, a fine grey spray drops like a curtain over the terrace. Cold shivers in.

‘The snow is coming,’ says Pietr, going to the drinks table.

Devlin raps his knuckles on the glass. ‘You’ve got bad cracking here.’ He bends. ‘And mould.’

‘Stefano will replace the panes,’ says Pietr without turning his head. ‘My mother thinks this is a folly.’ He smiles at me. ‘Like those imitation Greek villas on top of Californian cliffs. Swiss chalets in Argentine jungle. Green squares cut into land the colour of vultures.’

I smile back at him. ‘I’m sure Mr Devlin would like a drink.’

‘You’re charitable,’ says Pietr under his breath. He raises the decanter to Devlin.

‘No,’ says Devlin.

A gust of wind hits the house and the windows rattle.

I sip my tea. ‘There are – irregularities with my father’s business. I’m about to be subpoenaed again. So Mr Devlin says.’

‘My lawyers got one, too,’ says Pietr. ‘Even though your father is dead.’
Deadt
. The word reverberates across the marble. He says to Devlin, ‘Your government doesn’t seem to be accepting that I severed all business relations with Australia.’

‘Really?’ says Devlin.

The lights go off. Dark seeps into the room like a tide. Outside, the clouds are backlit by lightning; their constantly convulsing outlines sidle past the wet balcony.

‘The generator should come on in a minute,’ says Pietr.

‘You’re quite self-sufficient,’ says Devlin, staying by the door.

‘We have to be,’ says Pietr. ‘In heavy weather, we’re completely cut off.’

He turns to me. ‘Of course you can stay as long as you need. You were Anna’s best friend. I’ll never forget that.’

‘Your mother?’

His hair is an aura in the gloom. ‘She would welcome you too.’

The lights come on slowly, the bulbs seeming to grow into radiance. Devlin has a file in his hand. ‘You’ll want details – ’

‘No,’ Pietr says, not looking at him. ‘Leave the paperwork with Stefano.’

‘I’m a criminal, Pietr,’ I say.

‘Don’t say anything in front of . . . ’ Devlin’s name hangs in the air. Pietr sits and again holds my hand gently between his.

‘There are things,’ I whisper, ‘I could have done . . . ’

His thumb presses into my wrist so I feel his pulse beating against mine.

‘You were your father’s daughter so there was nothing you could say,’ he tells me. ‘It is impossible to speak out against a parent.’

I shudder against his arm. ‘My brother.’

‘I was your father’s partner,’ says Pietr. ‘I chose my relationship with him. Just as Mr Devlin chose his job. You could not choose.’ He touches my shoulder. ‘You have to forgive yourself. Otherwise, every day your heart is a graveyard.’

There is the clink of glass. Devlin has a drink in his hand.

‘Forgiveness.’ I bite my lip.

As he puts his arm around me, Pietr says, casually, ‘I don’t think we need you, Mr Devlin.’

An hour later, I am in a sea of books. The rain is beating in all the corners of the day and I am swimming in books in Pietr’s library in the glass tower. Books rise to the ceiling on three sides. The fourth wall is given over to a wide window which faces the sea. The mist drifts past in sheets. A small triangular buoy is rocking on the purple sea. Beyond, tankers are at rest, a grey plane nosing the hard horizon. I think I see the red outline of a country, like a woman lying on her side, under the far-falling curtain of iron sky.

‘Tunisia,’ says Pietr. ‘Africa.’

A faint sweet sound reaches the tower. ‘I hear bells.’

‘It’s the buoy,’ he says, pointing. ‘Just a platform with struts for a light. But my grandfather added an old brass bell. For the sailors to swim to, to ring for help.’

‘Your grandfather sounds like a community-minded man.’

‘Some would say so.’

The library is on the second level in the glass tower. The third level is taken up by the darkroom where, he explains, he develops his photographs. ‘Another hobby,’ he says, ‘I don’t have enough time for.’

His bedroom is on the first level. It is accessed by the external spiral stairs which also join the walkway running past the back bedrooms. The walls here are broad: thick frosted-glass bricks slotted into steel frames. He opens the steel door to show me a big plain room dominated by a four-poster bed with velvet drapes; an alcove of shelves makes a dressing room. The light struggles against the thick glass. Beyond the steel walkway are dark, bent lines; the outside world as a blur.

‘It’s like being inside an ice cube,’ I say to Pietr. The ceiling is made of glass, too, except for a circle of small lights set around a large steel fitting which bulges from the pale centre.

We climb the stairs to the library. This door is locked and Pietr uses a small steel key. We go in, skirting the large globe of the world which sits on a big round dais in the middle of the room. It is an odd ugly feature, the kind of thing the pre-war Fascists would have loved but which I find incongruous in Pietr’s home.

The floor is warm beneath my feet.

I drift along the shelves, past the rows of books rising to the ceiling: novels, anthologies, bound volumes of magazines, encyclopaedias, biographies – many of them military – all arranged alphabetically, categorised by subject. The poetry alone takes up an entire wall. I run my hands gently over the red spines, the cracked gold lettering. The bracelet chafes me; Pietr stares at it but he stays silent. I walk along the bookshelves. I almost see the words glittering like crystals, taking flight.

‘I sensed haulers were no longer guiding me,’ I say.

‘Rimbaud,’ says Pietr.

I stop at R. I search the shelves. ‘No Rimbaud?’

He hesitates. ‘No.’

I say, ‘My father told me your family had a special connection with Rimbaud. That your mother said her father-in-law, your grandfather, met Rimbaud in the Moroccan desert. You don’t know how transfixed I was, imagining that meeting.’

‘My mother knows nothing about poetry,’ he says easily.
Nothingk
. The Polish returning, despite the years away. ‘Families always exaggerate their famous connections.’

He reaches over me to a row of tall thin books with pale cardboard covers tied with red ribbon.

‘Maps,’ he says. ‘The family accounts from my grandfather’s estate at Koloshnovar.’

I stare at the dates. I see years stretching back to the end of the 1970s, then a big gap for that entire decade, then more years going back through the 1950s, with the years 1953 and 1954 missing, then books all the way to the 1920s, a gap for the war years, then more, the years sporadic now, back to the turn of the century, into the previous century.

I point to the books marked through the 1890s.

‘My grandfather’s journals,’ says Pietr. ‘He went to Africa to make his fortune, barely an adult. Koloshnovar, his family estate, was failing. He needed money.’

‘No personal diaries?’ I say.

‘My family doesn’t believe in reflection.’

I say, ‘I call my diary my little book of subversions. The secret map of my life.’

Pietr nods. ‘A diary contains all the clues to decode the country of the self, the inner landscape. The problem is that if you don’t know how to read the map, the symbols are useless.’

I say, ‘Beyond here lie dragons.’

‘Imagine maps with the face of God inscribed over the capital city of your country,’ says Pietr. ‘What does that do to the sense of the self?’

‘We have the upside-down map,’ I say, ‘with Australia at the centre of the world.’

‘I have no sense of you Australians,’ he says. ‘You look so easygoing, so simplistic, but there’s a ferocity there.’

‘The colonials went mad when they first saw the landscape,’ I say, ‘and we’ve never recovered.’

He takes down a book with pages so thin they could be seen through. Pages shaded and drawn in spidery ink. ‘The maps of the French explorers,’ he says. ‘From before the First War.’

He unbuttons his cuff and rolls back his sleeve, turning the pages carefully, revealing charts of desolation: endless pages of desert with a name here and there inscribed in the wilderness. No roads, no train lines, no airports.

‘Every clue is useable in a map,’ says Pietr. ‘Even absence is a clue. Look at the maps of Poland during World War II: whole towns disappeared, whole communities vanished, new unnamed enclaves of gas ovens. Look at America’s map of the world now. No mention of the secret prisons, the hastily made airports for the rendition flights. No mention of villages razed to the ground, the mass graves of civilians killed in the cross-fire. Nuclear sites are never mentioned on the map. You’ll never find the nuclear mines and American bases labelled on your tourist maps of Australia.’