his sausage-shaped fingers, Sulaiman and I are barely holding off the lunchtime rush.
‘But where is Cecilia?’ Mr Dymovsky wails in his heavily accented English into my ear as he clocks his customers’ unhappy faces. ‘Reggie?’
Between orders for sandwiches toasted, untoasted, crusts cut off, cut into triangles, cut into rectangles, with tomato, without salad, on rye bread, on white bread hold the butter, on wholemeal with extra mayo, no cheese, I fill the portly Russian in on what went down in the cafe before noon.
‘But I can’t believe this!’ he says, taking over the till, wrapping the sandwich orders expertly and dishing them out faster than I can make them. ‘I shall ask Sulaiman. Sulaiman, he is always straight- talking.’
During a lull in trade, he intercepts Sulaiman heading out of the kitchen with another tray of warmed-up lasagne.
‘Can this be true?’ Mr Dymovsky asks, looking up into the taller man’s face. ‘There was a gun? Shooting?’
‘It is true,’ Sulaiman answers gravely, pointing at the ceiling where a little tag of plaster can be seen hanging down. ‘You see, there is the bullet hole, sir.’
Dmitri Dymovsky did not make his tenacious way in a new world by relying on the word of others. While I deal with the tail end of the lunchtime crowd on my own, turning out a succession of coffees that are possibly the worst in recorded history — too cold, too hot, not enough froth, too much of the damned stuff and not enough liquid — the Russian ascends a folding A-frame ladder and picks at the ceiling with a steak knife. When he comes back down, he’s holding the knife in his right hand and the bullet in his left palm, its cone crumpled from impact with a ceiling beam. His expression is a little shaken.
‘We shall close early today,’ he says, patting Sulaiman absently on the back as the cook passes us with another tray of hot, fried snacks that will grow sodden and unappealing inside the display cabinet. ‘You are both good and hard-working children.’
At two thirty, when there’s no one left in the cafe except us three, Mr Dymovsky locks the front door and hands me a mop. He wipes down the flat surfaces and puts all of the chairs upside down on the tables. Sulaiman, paying neithof us any mind, cleans up in the kitchen at his own stately pace, the faint sound of Arabic music weaving its way out of the radio he’s placed on a bench top.
Someone pushes the plastic curtain aside and taps on the glass door just after three o’clock. Mr Dymovsky squints at the dark figure with the halo of wavy hair and mutters something that sounds to my ears like ‘Likha beda nachalo!’, but I have no idea what that means.
When the person continues tapping and pointing inwards, he shouts, ‘We’re closed! Closed! Crazy Aussies, read the sign why doncha?’
I move closer with my mop and realise that it’s Justine Hennessy.
‘It’s all right, Mr Dymovsky,’ I say as the old man makes shooing motions with his plump hands, his gold pinkie ring catching the light. ‘I know her, she gets her coffee here. I think she wants to speak to me.’
He throws his hands in the air, shouts, ‘What you like!’ and moves away with his sponge and spray bottle of cleaning fluid.
I let Justine in and close the door behind her.
‘You’re finishing up early today,’ she says in surprise, peering over my shoulder at the abandoned coffee machine. ‘I was hoping for an afternoon pick- me-up.’
‘It wouldn’t be much of one,’ I laugh. ‘Because I’d be making it for you. So it’s lucky the machine’s been turned off.’
‘Cecilia’s not here?’ Justine looks around curiously.
I shake my head. ‘Neither is Reggie.’
I tell her that we had a sort of armed hold-up earlier and her face crumples in dismay. ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,’ she says, clearly no stranger to random acts of violence. ‘I hope no one was hurt.’
‘Not in any way you could actually see,’ I say. ‘But we’re down on numbers as a consequence. Was there anything else you wanted?’
Justine hitches the strap of her black leather handbag higher on one shoulder. ‘Not unless it’s a winning lottery ticket.’ She laughs at her little joke.
Today she’s wearing a checked linen shirt over the same baggy white maxi dress. Her brown eyes sparkle beneath the purple eyeliner and green and pink eye shadow, but there’s a new bruise on her cheek, just under her right eye. The thick, stagy make-up can’t hide the fact that it’s beginning to go green around the edges.
‘I’ll walk you out,’ I say, frowning, and I shake the mop in Mr Dymovsky’s direction to indicate that I’m stepping outside for a minute. He throws his hands up in the air again in resignation then resumes wiping down the bench tops.
‘You have to stop this,’ I say. ‘It will kill you.’
‘What? Drinking coffee?’ she says brightly, deliberately misunderstanding me. ‘Everything will kill you in the end.’
I frown harder and she says quietly, ‘It’s okay, I can handle it. I know what I’m doing.’ And she walks away with a wave. She’s good at putting up a front. The best.
I walk slowly back inside, troubled. Sulaiman is hanging up his white cook’s cap and black apron in a narrow built-in closet behind the serving counter. My mop is nowhere to be seen, neither is Mr Dymovsky.
‘I have completed the cleaning,’ Sulaiman says dismissively as he shoulders a small nylon backpack. ‘Mr Dymovsky has taken the rubbish out to the laneway. He says you may go, if you wish.’
He holds the closet door open for me and I pick up Lela’s rucksack, paw through it for her bright red, patent-leather wallet, which holds a selection of notes and coins. I realise from a quick scan of the denominations that there’s more than enough there for me to head to that internet place Justine told me about before I go back to Lela’s house.
I shouldn’t get ahead of myself — there may be nothing there. Still, there’s a feeling in the pit of my stomach that’s more than nerves. Maybe it’s hope flowering there. I’m beginning to feel like I’m not floundering any more, but have to keep reminding myself that I’m just keeping to the plan.
Outside the cafe, Sulaiman pauses.
‘Go home to your sick mother,’ he warns me. ‘When night falls you must be away from this place. Do not get involved in the world of men. I say this as . . . as your friend.’
I parry his comment with a question of my own. ‘And when night falls, where will you be?’
‘At evening prayer, where else? I have many things to give thanks for. That I am alive,’ he reminds me pointedly. ‘That I am at peace with my place in the world.’
I raise one hand to acknowledge his words, but I’m already walking away. Towards the cafe with the grinning bowl of noodles sporting arms and legs painted on its front window, towards the bright theatre lights and the ceremonial arch in its elemental colours.
Chapter 11
When I make a left turn into the Chinatown precinct, I look back over my shoulder briefly, but Sulaiman is already gone. Contrary to what he believes of me, I do want to hurry home to Lela’s sick mother. She’s not long for this earth, as the saying goes, and I don’t want her to die alone.
To face Azraeil alone.
The thought pops into my head, but the name does not come with a face or form. I worry at the edges of it as I walk down the hill towards the internet cafe, then push it out of my mind as I enter the narrow, air- conditioned chamber filled with machines and wiring. Put it down to just another of the weird lacunae in my memory.
I consult the lurid signage on the walls and hand the man behind the bulletproof booth a fiver. He hands me a token and jerks his head at the room full of computers. ‘It’ll warn you when your time’s almost up,’ he says.
There are only two other people here. A sour- smelling gent near the door, who glances up at me shiftily before dropping his shoulders and turning back to face his screen; and an Asian kid in the far corner who looks about fifteen but is probably in his twenties.
