The Bat (22 page)

Birgitta undid her blouse, not consciously or sensually lingering over it, but slowly. She just undressed.

For me, Harry thought.

He had seen her naked before, but this evening it was different. She was so beautiful that he felt his throat constrict. Before, he hadn’t understood her bashfulness, why she didn’t take off her T-shirt and panties until she was under the blanket and why she covered herself with a towel when she went from the bed to the bathroom. But gradually he had realized that it wasn’t about being embarrassed or ashamed of her body, but about revealing herself. It was about first building up time and feelings, building a little nest of security, it was the only way that would give him the
right
. That was why things were different tonight. There was something ritualistic about the undressing, as though with her nakedness she wanted to show him how vulnerable she was. Show him that she dared because she trusted him.

Harry could feel his heart pounding, partly because he was proud and happy that this strong, beautiful woman was giving him her proof of trust, and partly because he was terrified that he might not be worthy of it. But most of all because he felt that all he thought and felt was on the outside, for all to see in the glow of the neon sign, red then blue and then green. By undressing she was also undressing him.

When she was naked she stood still and all her white skin seemed to illuminate the room.

“Come on,” he said in a voice that was thicker than he had intended, and folded the sheet to the side, but she didn’t move.

“Look,” she whispered. “Look.”

It was eight o’clock in the morning, and Genghis Khan was still asleep as the nurse let Harry into the single hospital room. He opened his eyes as Harry scraped the chair moving it close to the bed.

“Morning,” Harry said. “I hope you slept well. Do you remember me? I was the one on the table with breathing difficulties.”

Genghis Khan groaned. He had a broad white bandage around his head and looked a great deal less dangerous than when he had been leaning over Harry at the Cricket.

Harry took a cricket ball from his pocket.

“I’ve just been talking to your solicitor. He said you’re not going to report my colleague.”

Harry tossed the ball from his right hand to his left.

“Considering you were on the point of killing me, I would have taken it very amiss if you’d reported the guy who saved my bacon. But this solicitor of yours clearly thinks you have a case. First of all, he says you did
not
assault me, you just
removed
me from the vicinity of your friend on whom I was in the process of inflicting
serious
injury. Secondly, he asserts it was chance that allowed you to escape with no more than a fractured skull instead of death from this cricket ball.”

He threw the ball into the air and caught it again in front of the pale Warrior Prince’s face.

“And do you know what? I agree. A ball slung straight in the face from a distance of four meters—it was a sheer, utter miracle you survived. Your solicitor rang me at work today wanting to know the precise course of events. He thinks there are grounds for compensation, at least if you have long-term damage. Your solicitor belongs to that breed of vulture that allocates itself a third of the reparations, but he’s probably told you that, hasn’t he? I asked him why he hadn’t managed to persuade you to sue. He thought it was just a question of time. So now I’m wondering: is it just a question of time, Genghis?”

Genghis shook his head warily. “No. Please go now,” came a weak gurgle.

“But why not? What have you got to lose? If you were to become incapacitated there are big bucks in a case like this. Remember, you’re not suing a poor, private individual, you’re suing the state. I’ve checked and seen that you’ve even managed to keep your nose more or less clean. So who knows, a jury might uphold your claim and make you a millionaire. But you don’t even want to try?”

Genghis didn’t answer, just stared at Harry with his slanting, sorrowful eyes beneath the white bandage.

“I’m getting sick of sitting in this hospital, Genghis, so I’ll make this brief. Your assault on me resulted in two broken ribs and a punctured lung. Since I was not in uniform, did not show ID and wasn’t working under the auspices of the police department, and Australia is beyond my area of jurisdiction, the authorities have declared that from a legal point of view I was acting as a private person and not as a civil servant. In other words, I can decide whether I report you for violent assault or not. Which brings us back to your
relatively
clean record. You see, there is a matter of a conditional sentence for grievous bodily harm hanging over your
head, is that not correct? Add six months to this and we’re up to a year. A year, or you could tell me …” he went up to the ear that was sticking out from Genghis Khan’s bandaged head like a pink mushroom and shouted, “… WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON!”

Harry dropped back on his chair.

“So what do you say?”

McCormack stood with his back to Harry, his arms crossed and a hand propping up his chin while staring out of the window. The thick mist had erased the colors and frozen movement so that the view was more like a blurred black-and-white picture of the town. The silence was broken by a tapping noise. Harry eventually realized it was McCormack’s fingernails drumming on the teeth in his upper jaw.

“So Kensington knew Otto Rechtnagel. And you were aware of that all along.”

Harry shrugged. “I know I should have said before, sir. But I didn’t feel—”

“—it was your business to say who Andrew Kensington knew or didn’t know. Fair enough. But now Kensington’s done a runner, no one knows where he is and you suspect mischief?”

Harry nodded confirmation to his back.

McCormack watched him in the window reflection. Then he swiveled round in a semi-pirouette to stand face-to-face with Harry.

“You seem a bit …” he completed the pirouette and had his back to him again, “… restless, Holy. Is something
bothering you? Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”

Harry shook his head.

Otto Rechtnagel’s flat was in Surry Hills; to be exact, on the road between the Albury and Inger Holter’s room in Glebe. A mountain of a woman was blocking their way up the stairs when they arrived.

“I saw the car. Are you the police?” she asked in a high-pitched, shrill voice, and continued without waiting for an answer. “You can hear the dog yourselves. It’s been like that since this morning.”

They heard the hoarse barking from behind the door marked
Otto Rechtnagel
.

“It’s sad about Mr. Rechtnagel, it is, but now you’ve got to take his dog. It’s been barking non-stop and it’s driving us all out of our minds. You shouldn’t be allowed to keep dogs here. Unless you do something we’ll be forced to … er, well, you know what I mean.”

The woman rolled her eyes and thrust out two podgy arms. There was an immediate tang of sweat and compensatory perfume. Harry disliked her intensely.

“Dogs know,” Lebie said, running two fingers over the balustrade and examining his forefinger with disapproval.

“What do you mean by that, young man?” the fat woman asked, dropping her arms to her sides and still looking as if she had no intention of moving.

“It knows its master is dead, ma’am,” Harry said. “Dogs have a sixth sense about things like that. It’s grieving.”

“Grieving?” She eyed them suspiciously. “A dog? What rubbish.”

“What would you do if someone cut off the arms and legs of your master, ma’am?” Lebie looked at the woman. Her jaw dropped.

After the landlady had made way they took out the various keys they had found in Otto’s trouser pockets in the dressing room. The barking had changed to growling; Otto Rechtnagel’s dog had probably heard the approach of strangers.

The bull terrier was standing in the hall as the door opened, its legs positioned ready for action. Lebie and Harry stood motionless, signaling to the comical white dog that the ball was in its court. The growling changed to halfhearted barking, then it gave up the whole idea and slunk into the living room. Harry followed.

Daylight flooded in through the large windows in the living room which was lavishly over-furnished: a solid red sofa covered with huge colorful cushions, sizable paintings on the walls and a low but vibrant green glass table. In the corners of the room there were two china leopards.

On the table was a lampshade which did not belong there.

The dog had its nose in a wet patch in the middle of the floor. A pair of men’s shoes were hanging above it in the air. There was a stench of urine and excrement. Harry followed the shoe and sock up the foot and saw the black skin between where the sock stopped and the trousers began. He let his gaze wander further up the trousers, to the enormous hands limply hanging down and had to force his eyes upward to the white shirt. Not because he hadn’t seen a man hanging before, but because he had recognized the shoes.

The head rested against one shoulder, and the end of the cable with a gray lightbulb dangled from his chest. The cable had been tied around a solid hook in the ceiling—perhaps a chandelier had hung from there at some point—and wound round Andrew’s neck three times. His head was almost touching the ceiling. Dreamy, dimmed eyes stared out and a bluish-black tongue protruded from his mouth as though he had made a defiant gesture at death. Or life. An overturned chair lay on the floor.

“Fuck,” Harry muttered under his breath. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He fell into a chair, the energy knocked out of him. Lebie entered and a short cry escaped his lips.

“Find a knife,” Harry whispered. “And ring for an ambulance. Or whatever it is you usually ring for.”

From where Harry was sitting daylight was behind Andrew’s back, and the swaying body was just an alien, black silhouette against the window. Harry begged his Maker to put another man at the end of the cable before he got to his feet again. He promised not to say a word to anyone about the miracle. He would even pray, if it would help.

He heard steps in the hallway and Lebie screaming from the kitchen: “Get out, you fat cow!”

After they had buried Harry’s mother he had gone five days without feeling anything, other than that he ought to have felt something. He was therefore surprised when he slumped back among the cushions on the sofa and his eyes filled and sobs forced their way up his throat.

Not that he hadn’t cried at other times. He had felt a lump in his throat as he sat alone in the room at the Bardufoss barracks reading the letter from Kristin that said “this is the best thing that has happened to me in the whole of my life.” It was not clear from the context whether she meant leaving him or meeting the English musician she would be traveling with. He had only known it was one of the worst things that had happened to him in the whole of his life. Yet the sobs had stopped there, some way up his throat. Like nausea and
almost
vomiting.

He got to his feet and looked up. Andrew had not been replaced. Harry went to take a few steps across the floor, to pull up a chair to have something to stand on when they cut him down, but was unable to move. He remained motionless until Lebie came in with a kitchen knife. When Lebie
started sending him strange looks Harry realized that hot tears were running down his cheeks.

Jeez, is that all? Harry thought, perplexed.

Without saying a word, they cut Andrew down, laid him on the floor and searched his pockets. There were two bunches of keys, one big and one small, as well as a loose key Lebie immediately confirmed fitted in the front-door lock.

“No signs of external violence,” Lebie said, after a quick inspection.

Harry unbuttoned Andrew’s shirt. He had a crocodile tattooed on his chest. Harry also pulled up Andrew’s trouser legs and checked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not a thing.”

“We’ll have to wait and see what the doctor says,” Lebie said.

Harry felt tears coming again and barely managed to shrug his shoulders.

As Harry had suspected, there was feverish activity at the office.

“It’s on Reuters,” Yong said. “Associated Press’s sending over a photographer, and they’ve rung from the mayor’s office saying NBC’s going to fly in a TV crew to do a story.”

Watkins shook his head. “Six thousand people die in a tidal wave in India and are mentioned in a single newsflash. One homosexual clown has a few limbs cut off and it’s a world event.”

Harry asked them to come into the conference room. He closed the door.

“Andrew Kensington’s dead,” he said.

Watkins and Yong stared at him in disbelief. In brief, direct terms Harry told them how they had found Andrew hanging from the ceiling in Otto Rechtnagel’s flat.

He looked them straight in the eye and his voice was unwavering. “We didn’t ring you because we wanted to be sure there wouldn’t be any leaks. Perhaps we ought to keep a lid on this for the time being.”

It struck him that it was easier to speak about this as a police matter. He could be objective and he knew how to deal with it. A body, a cause of death and a course of
events, which they would try to keep under wraps. It kept Death—the stranger he didn’t know how to confront—at arm’s length for the moment.

“OK,” Watkins said, flustered. “Careful now. Let’s not jump to any hasty conclusions.”

He wiped the sweat off his top lip. “I’ll get McCormack. Shit, shit, shit. What have you done, Kensington? If the press gets a sniff of this …” And Watkins was gone.

The three left behind sat listening to the fan’s lament.

“He worked with us here in Homicide now and then,” Lebie said. “He wasn’t really one of us, I suppose, nevertheless he was …”

“A kind man,” Yong said, studying the floor. “A kind man. He helped me when I was new here. He was … a kind man.”

McCormack agreed they should keep it under their hats. He was not at all happy, pacing up and down, heavier on his feet than usual, and his bushy eyebrows gathered like a gray trough of low pressure above his nose.