The Broken Ones (38 page)

“I never tried again,” Oscar said quietly.

Sandro’s eyes opened a little. They hunted for a moment, then found Oscar’s. Oscar could see they were exhausted.

“You’re ashamed,” Sandro whispered.

“What?”

Sandro grunted. “I’ve … heard you. Say you’re not … Italian. Ashamed.” Sandro swiveled his eye to Oscar. “Of me.”

Oscar was stunned. Yes, he had said that, but he hadn’t meant … and he realized that he wasn’t sure
what
he’d meant. With those words he had been trying to hold tight to something intangible, to some sense of self that had no foundation and no currency. Oscar felt water drop on his hand. His cheeks were wet.

“No, Dad.”

Sandro’s breath shuffled, caught. He looked away from Oscar, and his eyes began to flutter closed.

“Dad.” Oscar wiped his face and reached into a pocket; he unfolded the old clipping of Sandro and the laughing man. He squeezed Sandro’s wrist. “Dad? Who’s this?”

Sandro blinked, and his eye took a long time to focus on the newsprint. But when it did, a hard glint appeared there.

“Naville. Bert … Naville.” Sandro’s eyes narrowed, and they shifted to Oscar’s face. “Dead. A jail fire.”

Oscar frowned. Burned. He remembered Sandro and his empty bottle of grappa and Sandro’s toast to a dead man.

“When was that?” Oscar asked. “Dad?” Sandro’s eyes were drifting shut. Oscar squeezed his hand. “Dad? Where did they send him up?”

“Road.” Sandro’s voice was an arid whisper. “Boggo.”

Then his old mouth was ajar, and the breaths came shallow and even.

Boggo Road. Maximum Security.

Chapter
27

Y
es, they sent Mr. Naville here when they began winding down The Road.”

The deputy manager’s name was Hamblin, and considering his girth he set a fast pace. Oscar kept up as Hamblin strode along the wire-shrouded walkway between concrete yards. He had apologized to Oscar for the rush, but he was about to head a weekly management-team meeting; their boardroom was being remodeled, so they had to use a garage on the far side of the compound. A uniformed correctional officer trailed ten paces behind. Dark, jade-hued clouds prowled the horizons like a dog pack, but right now the jail was in sunlight, and a thousand tinier suns sparkled off chain-link fencing and the sharp blades of the razor wire. Cell blocks were low affairs with silvery roofs. The place glittered like a town woven from metal. This was the maximum-security complex built more than twenty years ago to replace the nineteenth-century Boggo Road Gaol.

Hamblin chuckled and his large body jiggled. “Yes, coming here after The Road, Naville musta thought he’d landed in Club Med. Cunning little rock spider.”

Naville had earned the title of “rock spider” after being convicted of the deprivation of liberty and murder of a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. Her dismembered body had been found in a weighted suitcase at the bottom of a dam. Naville’s molestation of the girl included carving what the prosecution described as “occult markings” into her breasts, buttocks, and inner thighs. At trial, Naville had not said a word.

“I had to hand it to him. He survived thirty years in max. Not bad.”

“More like a cockroach than a spider,” Oscar observed.

“Touché.” The deputy manager pointed a fat finger pistol at Oscar and clicked his tongue.

They passed a yard overlooked by watchtowers where two hundred or more inmates moved in bored discontent. There was barely room for each to sit or stand, yet they’d somehow made space in the middle of the yard for a compressed game of football. Those not in the game played cards or chess; or smoked; or watched Oscar, the deputy manager, and the screw stride past.

“So, Naville’s dead?” Oscar asked.

“I’m afraid so.” Hamblin’s tone became somber. “A good six weeks ago—right, Tom?” He glanced behind at the stone-faced officer, who nodded once.

Hamblin explained that Albert Naville was working in the prison laundry when one of the industrial dryers caught fire; no doubt the prisoner’s own fault: he should have been checking the machines’ filters for dangerous buildup of flammable lint. “The fool had managed to hand-truck a bag of soiled linen in front of the fire doors. A bag so-high.” The man’s fat fingers hovered at his shoulder. “No one could get in, and he couldn’t get out.”

“He was in there alone?”

“Naville was a longtime man. Earned the right to work alone.”

They passed another yard as empty as the first was full. In the middle, a gang of three prisoners was constructing a podium from which struck tall posts supporting a stout crossbeam.

“A gallows?” Oscar asked.

The fat man wagged his head and laughed. “I know, I know. Legislation’s not even through Parliament yet. But we both know it will be, right?” He winked at Oscar. “And it doesn’t hurt to keep the boys busy. Busy with their hands, and busy with their heads. Sight like that gets them thinking about behaving.”

“May I see the laundry room?” Oscar asked.

“Of course.” Hamblin slowed like a liner coming in to dock. “That’s it right there. Or it was.”

They were at a bend in the walkway, and dead ahead was a section of yard enclosed in temporary fencing lined with green shade cloth stenciled with an oval logo:
THATCH CONSTRUCTION
. Behind, it was easy for Oscar to see the yellow arm of a back-end loader knocking
down the last part of a brick wall, its inner face black with soot. Burned brothel. Burned butchery. Burned prison laundry. Coincidences? He felt Hamblin’s attention turned on him like a radar dish, listening in, waiting.

Oscar asked, “What happened to his body?”

“Seared, then baked.” Hamblin chuckled. “I don’t know what they do with the ashes. I’m sure you can find out.”

“Was there an investigation into Naville’s death?”

“Naturally.”

“And?”

“And the tribunal decided we shouldn’t leave men, even longtimers, to work alone in any prison industry. Rap on the knuckles, my bad.” He tapped one fat hand with another and grinned.

“Were there any other deaths on the same day Naville died?”

Hamblin looked back. Despite the jolly grin, Oscar could see careful intelligence in the narrow eyes. “You know, I’d have to look into that.”

“Could you?”

“It will take time. Leave me your contact details; I’ll call you when I’ve dug through the records.”

Time was one thing Oscar could not afford, but he pulled out his business card and handed it over.

“One last thing and I’ll get out of your hair,” Oscar said. “I need a photograph of Albert Naville. Right away, if I could.”

The deputy manager watched him, smiling. Oscar could almost see the scales in the man’s mind shifting, finding their level.

“Yes, sir, we can manage that,” he said carefully. “Might be a few years old. We only snap them when they shift complex or get themselves injured.” He looked over Oscar’s shoulder at the correctional officer. “Tom, would you be a treasure and zip to the office, fetch a copy of the latest photograph of the late inmate Naville? Get Detective Marino here what he needs?”

Oscar watched the officer retreat along the walkway. Alone, the officer collected a hailstorm of catcalls from the prisoners. Oscar glanced at the sky. Heavy, greenish clouds rolled over the sun, painting the prison with a palette of gray. Even above the hydraulic digger, Oscar could hear the hammering of men working on the gallows. He saw Hamblin watching the timber construction with a sparkle in his eye.

“They worry about overcrowding here. Don’t know why they do. Everything’s going to work out fine.”

At the correction center’s reception, Oscar stared at the color photograph of Albert John Naville. The inmate was looking at the camera. Although he was smiling, not laughing as he’d been in the photograph with Sandro, Oscar could see the same gleam of mad delight. His hair was gray, and a profile shot showed a red rubber band holding it back in a ponytail.

“That all?” asked the correctional officer; the man’s face was stone.

“Naville’s belongings, from his cell,” Oscar said. “Did anyone claim them?”

“I don’t know.” The officer didn’t move.

“Could you check?”

The officer gave Oscar a stare as cold and dangerous as a ski jump, then retreated into the back office. He returned a few minutes later and dropped a small plastic bag onto the counter.

Inside were half a dozen items. A safety razor. A plastic comb. Roll-on deodorant. A toothbrush. A stub of a pencil, and a small spiral notepad—just the front and back cards: every page in between had been torn out, leaving just their confetti remainders trapped in the spiral spring. Oscar held the gray-brown cardboard of the back card on an angle to the light. The ghostly impressions of words intersected and blurred; only three were legible: “charcoal” and “cinnamon incense.”

Oscar looked up to thank the officer, but he was gone.

Oscar’s car accelerated onto the highway. The clouds were now rolling over the sky like Titan’s chariots, as green as a storm sea and dropping hailstones that clanged on the hood and shattered on the asphalt like tiny bombs. Cars and motorcycles began to race for the cover of underpasses and bridges. An ice stone the size of a golf ball smashed onto Oscar’s windscreen.

He was determined to get back to the city, though what his next step would be he didn’t know. Oscar was leaning forward as he drove,
his left foot tapping with nervous energy. Naville hadn’t died in that laundry fire. He’d escaped. He’d found a way out and was killing again.

Sandro had arrested Naville in 1983 for homicide. Now Naville was out again, and young people were dying once more. Someone had spirited the killer out of prison, leaving another inmate to burn in the prison laundry in Naville’s place. Once out, Naville had found Florica at the markets, commissioned her to make him an idol, and then incinerated her. Naville had been jailed for mutilating and murdering a teenage girl. Penny Roth had been mutilated and murdered.

Symbols. Rituals. Murder.

Burn, burn, burn.

The hailstorm crescendoed to a cannonade, smashing down on the car and dimpling the metal. Oscar slowed to thirty miles per hour, then twenty. His view of the highway was now more white than black. He could see no cars in front or behind.

The image of Naville’s belongings stuck in his mind. The pencil. The notepad.
Charcoal. Cinnamon incense
. The latter was unusual, and tugged at a hidden, recent memory … but it eluded him.

The car’s engine hiccuped, and Oscar frowned. It coughed again, then sputtered and fell silent. The car coasted, decelerating. He looked at the fuel gauge. Empty. It had been half-full when he drove into the jail.

He rolled to the side of the highway, parking as tightly as he could against the high concrete barrier, and flicked on the hazard lights. Hailstones smashed on the roof, blows sounding like a madman with a hammer. A tiny crack appeared in the windscreen. Oscar pulled out his phone to call the police breakdown service, wondering if they still regarded this vehicle as breaking down or broken. Before he dialed, he noticed a sedan pull up behind him. He leaned back and waved through the rear glass, hoping the good Samaritan had the sense to stay in his car; going out in this weather could result in a broken skull.

Then Oscar’s car rocked as a third vehicle hit it and scraped hard up its side, smashing off the driver’s side mirror before halting directly alongside. Oscar jumped reflexively; through the smeared glass, he could just make out a man in the other vehicle’s driver’s seat pulling on what looked like a white hat. The man got out of his car and hurried around in front of Oscar’s hood. Despite the downpour of hail, Oscar could see that he wore a heavy jacket, a construction hard hat and,
underneath it, a balaclava. Something shimmered in his hand. A bottle with a flaming neck. The man threw the Molotov cocktail hard at Oscar’s hood, which erupted into a sheet of flame. The man reappeared in the corner of Oscar’s side mirror and threw a second flaming bottle at the asphalt near the rear wheel of his car. A crash of glass, and more flames erupted with a mighty gush of hot gas. Over the hail, Oscar heard a car door open and close, and the vehicle behind him reversed a few feet, then sped away, vanishing in the storm.