crawled to the corner again and used the bottle. It fell from his hand onto the apron of the ring and off to the floor. He pitched forward, rested his head on his arms and went to sleep. I came across to look at him; the ear showing was cauliflowered and his body was pear-shaped and dumpy inside the formless coat. I’d never seen him fight but I’d heard about him. It wasn’t that long ago.
I doused the light and left the gym.
16
It was after midnight when I got home. The house next door was dark and quiet; no-one around to spot Raffles sneaking back with His Lordship’s silver. I’d forgotten to check the mailbox earlier and I reached into it now and pulled out an airletter. I read it over a cigarette and a glass of wine. Ailsa was in Samoa and missing me; I was in Sydney and missing her and Samoa. I distributed the papers I’d taken from Trueman’s office among the pages of the three volumes of Bertrand Russell’s autobiography. Cyn had bought me the books, one by one, as they’d come out, and written inscriptions in them. I didn’t read the inscriptions. There was dust on the books and I opened and closed them hard, blew on them and put them back on the shelves. I didn’t spend enough time at home to get around to dusting bookshelves. There were probably silverfish too, maybe mice. It would be a good house for mice, nice and quiet with just the occasional scrap of food around. I went upstairs to bed, quietly, so as not to disturb my mice.
The city morgue is in the basement of a low, long building the colour of dried blood. The building houses the Coroner’s Court and the Forensic Medicine division; the live people go in the front off Parramatta Road, the dead ones go in the back off Arundel Street.
The desk attendant was thin and hatchet-faced. He wore a narrow black tie, a brilliantly white shirt and an even whiter coat. I showed him my licence and told him my business and he didn’t like any of it. His voice was a thin bleat: “I haven’t the requisite authority to show cadavers to members of the public.”
“I don’t want to see your whole collection – just one.”
“The rule applies.”
“I’m investigating his death.”
“Not officially, and you have no proof of that.”
I needed a name. Not Evans. He wouldn’t bail me out of this. I reached around in my mind and came up with it.
“Dr Foster, the police forensic man will OK it,” I said. “Call him and see.”
It was bluff and weak as a politician’s promise but it did the trick. He didn’t want to bother the brass.
“Very well. Take this down those stairs and show the man at the door.” He scribbled the time, date and three initials on a card and pointed to a set of stairs descending into the bowels of the earth. I went down three flights. It got cooler and the tiles got bleaker and my steps rang sharply in the still, clinical air.
The man at the door was the exact opposite of his counterpart upstairs. He was red-faced and cheerful, over-weight and scruffy around the neck and lapels. He took the card and stuffed it into the torn pocket of his coat.
“Through here mate,” he chirped. “Keep your breakfast down won’t you.”
I said I would and followed him through a set of heavy perspex doors. The room reminded me of a changing room at a swimming pool. It had a concrete floor and mirrors at either end. It was white-riled with a green strip around it at shoulder height for a touch of gaiety. The fluorescent light was harsh and instead of the swimming pool’s smell of chlorine and sweat this place reeked of formaldehyde. There were steel handles sticking out of the walls, waist high at six-foot intervals. We stood in the centre of the room by a bench that had straps attached to it and a shallow basin mounted beside it. A gutter ran from the basin to a channel in the floor. The attendant asked me who I wanted to see as if he was in charge of a theatre dressing room. I told him.
“Ah yes,” he crooned, “black beauty.” His voice was still chirpy and his step was jaunty. I expected him to break into a dance routine.
He went over to the far wall, pulled on a handle and a seven-foot long, three-foot wide tray slid out soundlessly.
The attendant twitched the calico sheet aside. The naked body was pale under the harsh light, scarcely darker than a suntanned European, but it was the same colour all over. I looked down at the corpse but it wasn’t like looking at a person. There was no face. The mangled head had been sprayed with something which had made it a dark, featureless blob. I leaned over and looked closely at the left side of the chest. The flesh had been burned and shattered by the shotgun blast. Bone and other matter obtruded from the hundreds of small wounds which added up to a massive injury. The attendant looked at me oddly.
“Something?” he asked.
I straightened up. “I wanted to see whether he had a scar on his chest, here.”
“It should be on the report. Oh, I see what you mean. I’ll get the report anyway. Finished?”
I said I was. He slid the tray back and we left the room. In the cubicle at the foot of the stairs a couple of rows of clipboards with papers affixed hung on hooks. He reached one down and scanned the top page.
“Male Aboriginal, aged… about twenty-five years… ah… no,… scar on leg…” He flipped the page. “Autopsy… massive haemorrhage…”
“Any mention of an old chest wound?”
“Ah… no, but then you wouldn’t expect it, would you, not with that lot.”
I said I supposed not and thanked him for his help. He gave me a cheery smile and ducked back into his cubicle. I had my foot on the first step when he stuck his head out.
“Here, take your card back. The old chap who came to see him nearly left his here too.”
I went back and took the card.
“What old chap?”
“Old Abo. Down here… let’s see… yesterday. Had a police pass. Relative of some kind. He just took one quick look and left. They’re superstitious about the dead aren’t they?”
“Yeah. So am I. About this man.” I described Rupert Sharkey to the attendant but he shook his head.
“No, nothing like that. This man was short and stocky… an’ older than what you’re saying.”
“What was the name on the card?”
“I don’t remember. He’ll have it up at the desk.”
I thanked him again and went up. Hatchet-face looked displeased to see me but showed off his efficiency by producing the black man’s police pass within seconds. It carried the name Percy White and an address in Redfern. I handed my card in and left the place puzzled, unenlightened – but alive.
I celebrated my condition with a beer in the Forest Lodge hotel up the street from the house of the dead. I bought tobacco and smoked a few cigarettes and let the fumes of liquor and weed take away the stink of death.
Half-way through the second beer I called Sharkeys’ number in La Perouse. Sunday was there and I filled him in with what I had on Moody’s contract with Trueman. He said Williams had seen Moody and warned him not to sign anything further and the fighter had agreed. Nothing more had been heard from Penny. I asked Sunday about Percy White but he’d never heard of him. As far as he knew, and that was pretty far, Simmonds had no such relative. The description I had could fit a hundred men in La Perouse alone. I asked him if Ricky Simmonds had a scar on his left leg. He laughed.
“I never knew an Aborigine who didn’t – falls, burns, sores, insect bites, you should see me.”
I grunted something and rang off. I finished the beer, left the pub and walked across to the university library. A quick check of an old city directory told me that the address “Percy White” had given in Redfern didn’t exist.
This heavy detecting took me until midday. I bought some Vogel bread sandwiches outside the library and stretched out on the lawn that overlooks Victoria park. The buildings around the quadrangle loomed up behind me, solid and gothic and echoing to the footsteps of the learned. The neophytes gathered on the lawn giving me, an outsider, a wide berth. Almost to a man and a woman they wore jeans, forbidden dress at university back in the days when I’d played briefly at the experience. Otherwise nothing much had changed; the sexes basically grouped
