‘So? Here’s your drink. Have a seat.’
We sat opposite each other at a low table with a glass top. The drink was excellent. ‘What about school?’
‘Neither of us was big on school.’
‘Her mother-’
She almost snorted and stopped herself because it didn’t fit her sophisticated image, an image I was sure she was working at constantly. ‘Her mother didn’t know shit. Anyway, she’s nuts.’
‘Why d’you say that?’
She shrugged, reached for a packet of cigarettes on a ledge under the table and lit one. She took a long drag and expelled the smoke theatrically. ‘Look, Mr Hardy, I’ll come clean with you. I agreed to talk to you because I thought it’d be interesting to meet a private eye. I’m an aspiring actress, presently working as a barmaid, sort of.’
I worked on the drink. A refurbished two or three bedroom flat in Five Dock, however plain the building, wouldn’t come cheap these days. Karen Bach, even with a flatmate, wasn’t just pulling beers.
She reached to the ledge for an ashtray and butted the two-drag cigarette. ‘Topless,’ she said. ‘Lap dancing.’
‘Someone has to do it. Kristina… and her mother.’
‘Kris talked her way into the course, fake ID and that, but she couldn’t get a job. All the makeup and come-on in the world didn’t help. Just too fucking young. I did. She freaked. She ripped off my first pay. I told her to fuck off.’
‘You said something about her mother.’
‘You’re working for her, right? Don’t. She’s a monster.’
‘Come on.’
‘True. She used Kris to attract blokes. Started when Kris was just a kid. You’ve seen that place she lives in. How d’you reckon she got that?’
‘You tell me.’
She emptied her glass. ‘Jesus, I shouldn’t be talking about this. I dunno…But it’s hard stuff to know and hold in.’
I could feel something like a chill starting in my spine and spreading out. ‘Tell me.’
‘I’ll deny I said anything about this if the law gets involved.’
‘Right.’
‘As I say, she used Kris as bait for blokes to get her jobs and then…to blackmail them. She’d be using you the same way, I reckon.’
I sat back and let it hit me hard. Then I thought about it. I was alert, keyed-up. A little alcohol doing no harm to the synapses. ‘Her mother steered me to someone named Lucy Kline. Who’s she?’
‘Fucking hell,’ she said. ‘A nerd who happened to get caught smoking a joint. Probably her first and last. Kris’s mother only ever saw me in school uniform. Kris never let her fucking mother know she knew what was going on. She got all she could out of it herself. She’s a better actress than Meryl Streep. Come to think of it, they both are- her and her mother.’
12
As I’d expected, Kristina had talked to Karen Bach about Stefan Parnevik. She hadn’t met him but had seen him from a distance. ‘Big, fair-haired bloke. Lots older than her, but that never worried Kris.’
‘Do you know what he did for a living?’
She thought, or tried to look as though she was thinking. Maybe practising her acting. ‘Skiing,’ she said. ‘Something to do with skiing.’
‘No idea where he lived or where his business was?’
She shook her head. ‘Sorry. Look, I’ve got to get to work.’
‘Give you a lift?’
‘Thanks. No, I’ve got a car. Hey, that’s something. I saw his car. I know cars-silver grey Saab, beautiful.’
I thanked her and got to my feet with my head hurting a little, but whether from the injury or what I’d been told I didn’t know. ‘Say goodbye to Becky for me.’
‘Goodbye from me as well. I don’t want to see you again. Hey, you think I’m a dyke?’
I shrugged. ‘No opinion.’
‘Becky’s going to be my manager when I get into movies. She’s a fucking genius.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘We need a few of them the way things are going.’
Karen didn’t quite know what to make of that. Tasha was spread out on the imitation leather couch. She lifted her head and watched me all the way to the door.
It was dark by the time I got back to the car. I sat there for a while trying to tell myself that Karen, the wannabe actress, was acting, and that everything she’d told me about Kristina and Marisha was bullshit. Maybe the two young women were still friends, working some kind of rip-off of vulnerable older men. I couldn’t convince myself, and when I followed her Honda Civic to a pub in Erskineville that advertised ‘topless and titty’, I gave the idea away. She wouldn’t be working there if she had anything else going.
I drove home in a very confused state. Easy enough to get angry about being taken for a mug if that’s what had happened. I tried to keep the anger in check to permit clear thinking. If everything Karen Bach had said was true, then Marisha Karatsky was still playing some sort of game to do with Stefan Parnevik. Had she lost him and wanted him back? Had she suspected already that Kristina was with him and all I had done was confirm it? Was my job just to locate him with evidence of his association with an underage female to allow Marisha to…?
My mood deteriorated as I thought about it. It had been a longish and confusing day, not arduous physically, but taxing just the same. I made myself a meal by defrosting meat I had in the freezer, chopping up some onions and subjecting the mixture to a dose of Clive of India curry powder. I still had a couple of bottles of chardonnay left from my one wine club purchase, since the literature had gone in the bin for its patronising and pretentious tone. I microwaved some pappadums and sat down to it with a big glass of wine and a few more paracetamols. My head was hurting again. I was supposed to see Marisha that evening. How the hell was I going to do that?
Confrontation. Nothing else for it. I finished the meal off with a cup of strong coffee, showered and headed for Dulwich Hill. I wasn’t looking forward to the meeting and took the drive slower than I needed to. I buzzed her flat and got no response. Buzzed again, and again. Nothing. I called her number on my mobile and the phone rang and rang. No answering machine. I stood outside the building with frustration and anger mounting inside me.
The parking spaces for the building were unnumbered so I had no way of telling whether she had a car or if it was there or not. I walked along the adjacent street, staring up at the windows. Hers were curtained and dark. I could’ve hung around, tried to get myself buzzed in by another resident, or maybe slipped in when someone was going in or out. Once in, I could’ve picked her lock and snooped. Instead, I consigned her and her daughter to hell and drove home. I knocked off the rest of the bottle of white and went to bed.
I don’t often dream and when I do I usually forget the content straight off. I remember some though, and the ones I remember have two themes. One is that I’m in danger in a high place. These dreams usually end with me falling or jumping and then I wake up. In others, my father is present. I didn’t get on well with him or admire him, and in the dreams he reproaches me the way he did in life. I try to find some common ground with him but it doesn’t happen. What Freud or Jung would make of all this I don’t know and don’t care. So the dream I had where my father criticised me for fucking Marisha Karatsky (though that was a word I never heard him use) didn’t surprise me, but it hung disturbingly around through the early part of the morning.
I rang her number several times with no result. Kristina’s mobile number had registered on my mobile when she’d rung me after taking the car. I rang it and got the message that the number was no longer in operation. So the Karatskys had quit the stage. I was out a day’s pay and a few expenses. No big deal. But being used and deceived, if that’s what had happened, rankled. I tried to recapture the quality of the time with Marisha-the sex, the talk, the laughs. It had seemed pretty good, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like an act. That intense, that quickly?
