The Library of Forgotten Books (4 page)

Elena looked at me, her hair drifting around her like a mermaid’s and I let out a cry under the water. She shook her head, as if to say, “It’s all right. Leave me.” Air escaped from her mouth.

I found the edge of the net and, calming myself, slowly unwrapped it. Patience was the key. One turn, two turns. She held onto the net with her fingers, as if she didn’t want to be saved. As if she wanted to die there in the grotto. I prised them free. I pulled again at the net and it came away. I wrapped my arm beneath her waist and we rose through the water like sea creatures, bursting through the water’s surface as if we were bursting through the very future itself.

Guy had already dragged the body of Le Flic into our boat and he helped us aboard. Guy dived to the grotto’s floor and used his characteristic strength to drag up the net.

We took Le Flic far out into the Mediterranean and there we wrapped him in his net and threw him overboard. As I looked out over the turquoise sea with its little white caps I said, “Can we go to one of the islands? I don’t feel like going back yet.” Each of us wanted to pretend that nothing had happened, that we were just tourists like so many others. We wanted to escape the past.

We set off out into the glorious sun towards the islands which sat on the water like little promises. We dropped anchor at a little rocky beach and I stripped naked and plunged into the water.

“Come,” I said to Elena. She shook her head.

“Come on!”

She emitted a little laugh. It was the first time I’d really seen her smile and her face was radiant. She looked again to be a young woman with all the world and all time before her.

I swam back up to the boat and said, “Help me up.”

She reached down and I grabbed her hand and pulled. She didn’t even teeter but lurched forward with a little cry and plunged into the water. She laughed again. “You bastard.”

Guy jumped in carefully and had Matthieu pass him his hat which he dutifully placed on his head, and the three of us swam for a while until Guy hopped back into the boat. Elena and I swam to the little beach where she said, “You’ve ruined my dress.”

“Take it off.”

“I’m not going to take it off!”

We lay for a while in the sun and then walked along the stony beach, up over the outcrop and down into the next little inlet away out of sight of the boat. Her dress, drying in patches but still wet in others, clung to her body, and her hair hung lank and damp. She turned back to me and smiled and there was no makeup on her face. I could see her freckles and she seemed young and alive.

She looked back at me. “What?”

I stopped walking along the rocks. She stopped also and looked at me puzzled. I reached forward, took her arm clumsily, stepped close to her, almost toppled over one of the rocks.

“What, Emanuel?” she said.

I pulled her close and kissed her, and she kissed me back, powerfully. I felt the warmth of her body and the dampness of her dress and I lifted her and she wrapped her legs around my hips and laughed freely as I tottered over the rocks up the beach. We came to a sandy flat area and I lowered her down and she pulled me in, and the sunlight was burning on my back and she was beneath me burning like a little sun herself. She pulled me closer and her skirt was up her legs and my pants were down and I was inside her and all I could think of was how much I loved her. How much I needed her.

We returned to the beach and lay in the sun on the rocks until mid-afternoon when we climbed back aboard
The Tomorrow
and headed back to the town.

Standing on the pier I said to Guy and Matthieu, “It’s over. I don’t have the heart for it anymore.” I looked at Elena, who stared out into the distance. “Perhaps I’ll head south, back to my home town.”

Guy put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Of course.”

Matthieu, calmly and quietly as was his way, said, “Do that, Emanuel. Make your future for yourself. We will go on.”

The two of them turned, one quiet and unassuming, the other dressed in cowboy hat and boots and talking at the top of his voice, “There was this one time, close to Cannes, where I rode a motorbike with a German. I’d taken him out for an adventure, you know, and when we were far along the coast...”

Elena and I walked back up to the Hotel du Lac and we stood on the balcony looking over the faraway sea. She stood serenely, an image from a poster. As if illuminated by carefully placed lights on a set, the sinking sun caught her at an angle, one side of her brilliant, the other fading into softness. I stood there, looking at her as the sun sank to the west and her two sides slowly merged into one.

In the morning she stood again on the balcony. I leaned against the railing next to her and we looked out together over the sea.

“You should go and collect your things,” she said. “The train leaves at eleven.”

“I’m not coming,” I said.

“What?”

“Elena, you’re not for me. Sometimes things just don’t...fit. We’ve changed. There are things I want to learn. The world is larger than I thought. You know, for us to know where we’re going, the forces acting on us, we have to understand it. And I barely understand it at all.”

She faced back towards the sea and said, “I’m going to be terribly busy in Paris.” She added, softly, “I suppose you’re right.”

She packed up all her things and we were chauffeured to the train station. Elena and I stood on the platform with the passengers rushing around us, like two islands in the raging sea, watching each other but separated forever by a great expanse of water. Eventually she said, “I am going to make a career for myself.”

“You will,” I said. “And I will see you on the screen, lighting it up like a little...sun.”

“Goodbye,” she said.

“Goodbye.”

She held me and there was no distance between us, and as she walked away, she was more beautiful than ever, and yet she was no longer the image from posters or magazines. She was simply Elena. I watched her climb onto the train and then waited until it passed out of the station, diminished in the distance, finally turned a corner and was gone.

I headed one more time to the Cinema, this time alone. There I saw a final image of myself. The camera snaked its way over a mass of young people, running through the boulevards of Paris. Though I had never been there, I recognised it as the
Quartier
Latin
, where intellectuals and students mingled in cafés near the Sorbonne University. There were barricades there, and riot police, and there I stood, recording some demonstration with a little camera while close to me a young man scrawled graffiti on a nearby wall: “Beneath the pavement lies the beach.” Beside the graffiti were political posters. One claimed, “1968—the time of change!”

Finally, when summer wound down, the cool north-westerlies bringing clouds and light rain, the town squares began to empty out. The fat German tourists and avant-garde Swedish filmmakers headed home. And one day the Cinema packed up its projectors and reels, loaded them onto dirty trucks, and headed away, leaving us only with our memories.

Int. Morgue. Night.

Lo let the night be solitary, let no joyful cry be heard in it.

Let them curse it who curse the day who are ready to awake

the Leviathan. (Book of Job 3:8)

At first everything is black, but something is visible, emerging from the darkness, the world coming into being, like a sunken ship emerging from the depths. It’s a morgue, dank and dark, the tiles on the floor and walls grimy. We look from on high and everything has a far-away feel, even the bodies lying on their trays, arms and legs lolling from under the sheets. There are a few smudges of red on the floor, droplets of black next to one of the bodies. In between the cracked wall-tiles run rivulets of water, wearing away at everything before running down rusted grates in the floors.

Faulkner stands by one of the beds; his weathered face, having seen too many Australian summers, is turned down and away. Though he’s pushing middle-age, he’s crying like a child. The smooth-skinned orderly, just emerging into adulthood, holds up the sheet. He looks bored, as if he doesn’t have time for this crap, and he’d rather be anywhere else, just not near this so-called tough private eye who sobs and occasionally wipes his face with his arm.

Faulkner isn’t in the best of states. No, not the best of states at all, which is understandable given that Lucy is there on the slab, her cute little face like a china doll. That’s what he calls her: his little china doll. All those years of wandering and he’d found this girl, finally, and now she was dead. He was supposed to be a PI—quick on his heels, fast on the draw, one step ahead. Wild-eyed Shorty Cheng had come to him and said, “Faulkner...Faulkner...It’s Lucy.”

Faulkner pushes the thought from his mind. He has to concentrate. The killer was either a freak or a pro: cigarette burns run along her arms, her neck red from strangulation. But her face is delicate and beautiful and doll-like: a button nose, high cheek-bones, freckles flicked across her face like confetti. The orderly lets the sheet fall. It drifts down slowly, as if it is held up by a gust of air.

Faulkner climbs the stairs out of the morgue, onto the streets of a Melbourne we don’t know, a massive metropolis of eight million, its buildings rammed up against each other with little streets and alleyways in between. The buildings seem constructed in a ramshackle over-the-top extravagance, as if a child has piled blocks upon blocks, disregarding their size. Balconies hang over the streets, all iron lace-work. The stained-glass windows of churches glow an almost unnatural red and blue. It’s 1951, a hundred years after the great boom driven by the settlement of rich lands along the coasts of Australia’s great inland sea, where the Inneminkan Metropolis rises in futuristic spires over long white beaches. It’s a hundred years since the influx of immigrants from China and Malaya, Burma and French Indochina, an influx which has made Australia the great power of the south.

The lights of Chinatown reflect on the wet pavement as Faulkner wanders along the sidewalk, moving in between groups of people. Hawkers stand outside dumpling houses: “Shrimp dumplings, prawn dumplings. Steamed, fried.” The alleyways, lined with red Chinese banners, seem to lean in towards each other with cubist intent. A ragged line of emu-driven rickshaws—all red, blue and gold—rushes past him, the birds’ necks jutting forward and back as they run, their feet scrabbling on the cobblestones.

Behind Faulkner a suited man strikes another: “Bloody commie nips.”

A group of Chinese Australians moves towards the fight and the white man runs a few steps away, turns back and yells: “You can’t take us over you know. We’ll never give in.”

I’m back, thinks Faulkner. I’m back where I met you, Lucy.

Back in 1947, Faulkner threw open the ornate red doors of the opium den. A couple of men, dressed in formless clothes, hammer and sickle pins on their lapels, squeezed past him and down the stairs, nodding politely. He surveyed the large, opulent room. The roof was hidden by red and gold drapes that gave the impression of a soft, billowy world. Chinese lanterns sent light flickering across the room, while curtains obscured half-hidden grottos. Smoke billowed and roiled from these little rooms. Faulkner took a step forward, but as if from nowhere Lucy stood before him, her doll’s face hard and cold.

“Yes?” It was almost as if she hadn’t spoken at all, simply projected the words to him.

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“His name’s Jackson. Victor Jackson.”

“Well unfortunately all our guests are indisposed.”

“I’ll find him.” Faulkner stepped forward, but was stopped. Again, it was almost as if she hadn’t moved, but now stood before him, her hand flat against his chest.

“Well, well,” he said, “you’re quite a number. What’s your name?”

“Jade,” she said.

“What’s your real name?”

“That’s a dangerous thing to just hand out.”

Faulkner looked around, and, without warning, pushed past her and took a big stride towards the nearest grotto.

Before he knew it he was on his back and a foot was on his chest; he looked up into her eyes.

From behind double doors on the far side of the room an old white man, Laurence, walked out. He had a thin face and wispy, almost colourless, hair and the manner of a doddery school-master, as if he was only half-aware of the world around him. “Everything all right?” he asked in a soft English accent.

“Yes, father,” said Lucy.

She looked down at Faulkner, her face still emotionless. “You’re quite a number yourself.”

In 1951, Faulkner cuts through the streets between street-vendors selling dim sums and fried octopi on sticks. The smell of spices mixes with that of things rotting in the street. Chinese women walk in twos beneath umbrellas with picture of dragons on them. A few people ride bicycles. It begins to rain—large, slow drops that threaten to become a deluge.

Through an alleyway, narrow enough to be missed by the casual passer-by, Faulkner comes to a ramshackle wooden staircase running along the back of a building. Four flights up stands a trench-coated policeman, smoking a cigarette. An open doorway spills yellow light onto him.

Faulkner takes the stairs two at a time, conscious of the man looking down.

“Whaddya want, buddy?” the cop says.

“Come to see the scene.”

“Not open to the public, mister.”

“Not the public. I live here.” Faulkner takes a pinch of dust from the bottle hidden in his coat, and blows it quickly at the man. It billows out unnaturally, red and radiant. The man takes a surprised breath and collapses.

“Sleep, my friend, and dream of a Shanghai Princess,” Faulkner says softly. For a moment he regrets employing the dust, which he wanted to use himself.

He tiptoes inside and peeks around. There’s blood on the couch, and his face tightens. There are two glasses on the coffee table, a book lying open next to them and cigarettes in an ash-tray. Cigarettes without filters.

So she knew the rat, thinks Faulkner. They were drinking, before he went to work. She didn’t put those cigarettes out on herself, he thinks. In any case, there’s one thing you know about a rat. A rat always leaves a trail.

Almost inaudible muttering comes from behind the front door. Faulkner ducks through the back door and in a couple of deft steps disappears up the rear stairwell, standing out of sight on the landing above as the muttering becomes words.

“Could have been a thrill-kill, but something tells me there was more to it,” says a man in a police officer’s uniform, jangling the keys in his hand.

The second man, tall and cadaverous like some kind of bony bird, looks at him sharply: “What makes you say that?”

“She was tied up, right? But the cigarette burns and the cuts. They’re not excited, they’re methodical. Don’t usually see those on thrill-kills. Nope, usually they let the beast out.”

“The beast?”

“When killers give in completely to their urges, they let it out—the beast.”

“Right. Well let’s find that boyfriend of hers, Faulkner. He’s number one suspect, so bring him in. And when you have him, let me work him over.”

Christ, thinks Faulkner. Now they are after him. But pieces are coming together: the murderer wasn’t a psycho; it was a professional job. So the cigarette burns meant he wanted something from her, but what? Information?

The two men freeze and, wild-eyed, glance towards the back door. In great strides they cross the floor and step onto the landing, looking down at the unconscious policeman lying there. The officer takes a sharp intake of breath. They look around suspiciously, their heads swivelling to and fro in sudden movements, their eyes moving against the pattern of their heads.

Standing above them, a ghostly figure, is Faulkner. The two men look out at the alleyway and the rain.

“It’s a cold night,” says the policeman

“And dark,” says the cadaverous man.

Faulkner knows that voice. It crackles around his mind like firecrackers sparkling on the pavement. It takes him back to ’47, back to the opium den.
And dark
, the man had said. It was getting darker by the minute.

That night in the Opium Den, Lucy’s foot was still on Faulkner’s chest. Laurence, his hair wispy and his stance frail, had emerged from some double-doors at the back of the room. Faulkner had known Laurence for fifteen years, but never known he had children. Laurence was a constant in Chinatown—like the street-vendors, his dens appeared in different locations, selling different wares, but were nevertheless always
somewhere
there. He was gentle and vague and clumsy. Faulkner had seen him walk into a door frame—bam!—as if he’d thought the entire thing was located one foot to the left. People trusted Laurence, but Faulkner knew better.

“Let him up, Lucy,” Laurence said.

“Yeah, let me up, doll,” said Faulkner.

“Sure.” Lucy turned and ever so gracefully, in her red and gold robe, picked up some half-emptied glasses of wine on a coffee table surrounded by cushions and made her way towards the double-doors.

“Now, what would you want with Victor Jackson?” said the man.

“Jesus Laurence, definitely don’t wanna tangle with your family—you got a son?” As Faulkner spoke he edged his way onto his heels and stood.

“Yeah.”

“Warn me when he arrives, will ya? There’s only so much lying on his back a man can take.”

“Oh, he’s a pussycat.”

“Must run in the family.”

“What do you want with Victor Jackson?” Laurence wandered around the room, his eyes roving around as if looking for something.

“Well, I wanna talk to him.”

“The privacy of our members is guaranteed here.”

“I bet he’d like me to respect his...privacy also. I mean, this isn’t the most...salubrious establishment for a policeman.”

From one of the curtained-off grottos a voice called out: “Faulkner, come on in.”

“Ahh...” said Faulkner and walked towards the voice.

Behind the curtain lay the cadaverous man, the same policeman who will be on the balcony in 1951, the same man who will say, “And dark.” Victor Jackson. An opium pipe in his mouth, his eyes glazed, his eyelids heavy and drooping. On the low table before him lay smoking equipment: scales, a small box, a glass oil-lamp about the size of a hand, a tiny spatula and needle, beside them a bowl of dream-dust. Close to Jackson was a battered copy of Hobbes’
Leviathan
, a great sea creature on the front of it.

“Well, I know a crooked man and he built a crooked house,” said Faulkner. Jackson was one of the new cops on the streets, put there as tensions between the police and the people of Chinatown intensified. There was something calculated about him. He had the air of an intellectual who kept his thoughts to himself. Still, for the right price he let information slip or made “suggestions” to his superiors.

“What d’ya want?” said Jackson.

Faulkner picked up Hobbes’ book and fingered through it: “Always the reader I see.”

“Someone’s gotta think about things.”

“What’s it say?”

“Life’s short, nasty, it’s a war of all against all.”

“So he’s Australian?”

“He says we need a strong police, a strong army.”

“You’re a strange man, Jackson.”

“So whaddya want?”

“A favour, mister policeman.”

“The usual price.”

“Hey listen, given these circumstances you might give me a discount.”

“Don’t try it on, Faulkner.”

 “Why are the police cracking down on me, on all of us PIs?”

“The world’s changing Faulkner. World War Two is over and now we’ve got a new enemy, the Communists.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“You’re associated with Shorty Cheng.”

“He’s no communist. He’s Chinese.”

“Don’t you read the damn papers Faulkner?”

“Hey, I’m busy!”

“The Maoists are set to take power and the Chinese here are...considered, well, unreliable. And their associates too.”

“I ain’t no commie—tell your boys to lay off.” Faulkner thought for a moment and added, slowly, “How is it that you betray the police so easily? Not really what Mr Hobbes would want.”

“Well, maybe they’re not where my first loyalty lies.”

Faulkner picked up the book and studied the cover for a moment. “What is this creature on the front of it?”

Jackson took a drag from the pipe in his hands, noticed with annoyance that nothing came out of it, looked at the mouthpiece to see if it was blocked and sighed. “The Leviathan: a sea monster.”

“Lives in the water, huh? That thing could eat you up if you’re not careful.”

On the search for Lucy’s killer, Faulkner crosses Swanston Street, where three-storey trams rattle behind each other. Emu-driven rickshaws try to cut past them, stop suddenly as others duck in front of them. Yet more sit banked up by the sidewalk. Despite the night enclosing all around, one quarter of the city is blocked by fifty thousand people, carrying red and black banners: “Say No To War”; “Stop Australian Imperialism”; “Hands Off China”. Beneath them read, in smaller letters, “Communist Party of Australia,” and the hammer and sickle is drawn next to that. Chants rise from the crowd, “Stop the war! Stop the war!” It has been six weeks since the Allies landed in South China and died like worms in waterlogged dirt. The papers are filled with photographs of Allied troops rotting on the beaches and now the anti-war movement is growing and the Communist Party along with it.