cuts across kindness and compassion. ‘Look, son,’ I said, ‘I don’t give a shit how many girlfriends or boyfriends you’ve got. I want to know everything I can find out about Oscar Bach. You know something and you’re going to tell me what.’
He glanced at the rifle. He was considerably closer to it than me but he made the right decision and looked away again. ‘I can’t,’ he muttered.
‘You don’t have a choice. You pointed a rifle at me a while ago. I took it off you without doing you any harm but it doesn’t have to stay that way’
‘You’d beat me up?’
I touched the wounds on my face. ‘It’s like this. I’ve come in for some rough treatment around here already. You can see that. My pride’s been hurt and when that happens I’m likely to get impatient and take it out on someone else.’
He squashed out his cigarette and the face he turned up to me was twisted with misery. ‘I’m not brave, you see. That’s the trouble. They’ll kill me if they find out.’
He’d at least given me a line of attack. ‘Who’s they?’
‘Gina’s brothers.’
‘Who’s Gina?’
‘Gina Costi, she’s my girlfriend-sort of.’
I’d had ‘sort of girlfriends myself, they’re the worst kind. This young’ man had a bad case of the fear and confusions. I judged it was safe to take my eye half off him and I ran water into the kettle and set it on the stove. There was a jar of instant coffee on the sink and several dirty mugs. I rinsed two mugs, made the coffee and told him to get the milk. He obeyed automatically, like a compliant child. There was almost nothing else in the refrigerator apart from beer cans and a carton of milk. There was probably a packet of cereal somewhere, some bread and a jar of peanut butter. That’d take care of breakfast and lunch. It was odds on there’d be fast food containers in the rubbish bin. Dinner. He spooned sugar into his coffee and sipped it before lighting another cigarette.
‘OK now?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Gina’s brothers would kill you if they found out-what?’
He smoked and drank some more coffee before replying. I took a sip myself. The milk had been just about to turn. I sipped again. It had turned. I put the mug down. Roper didn’t seem to notice. He sucked down coffee and smoke as if they’d give him the courage he wanted. Maybe they did. When he’d almost finished the coffee he sniffed and said, ‘They’d kill me if they found out that Oscar Bach raped Gina and I didn’t do anything about it.’
11
Once he started talking it was easy to keep him at it. All he needed was a little prompting from time to time. He told me that he’d begun working for Oscar Bach on a casual basis about a year before. He didn’t much care for his boss but he liked the work. To him, poking around under buildings was interesting. He was a bit of a snoop, he admitted, and also a hoarder. He found things-coins, tools, bits of machinery- and kept them. Sometimes he cleaned and mended these items and sold them.
‘I made a bit of extra money that way’
‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
Gina Costi answered the telephone at Bach’s house for a couple of hours each week and typed out his invoices. He handled all the money himself. It wasn’t much of a job for Gina but she was an unqualified high school dropout and she was glad of it. Roper hinted that Gina didn’t always use Bach’s phone for business purposes. She called her friends, made enquiries for other jobs, tried to win prizes on the radio. Harmless stuff. Roper looked a bit shifty at this point. He was on his sixth or seventh cigarette and second cup of coffee.
‘What else?’ I said.
‘Want a beer?’
‘No. Go on. You’ll feel better when you’ve said it all.’
‘Well, that’s how I met Gina. I used to go to Mr Bach’s house sometimes to get the details on jobs and that? And she’d be there sometimes. Sometimes I went around to pick up chemicals and stuff.’
I was getting the picture. Sometimes they made love, on Oscar Bach’s time and in his bed. I recalled the dark little cottage and thought how it must have been-hasty, furtive, afraid the phone would ring or Bach would return. Still, there was no telling. It might’ve been exciting. Roper seemed to think so. He butted a cigarette with new resolution and got up to open the fridge. I didn’t try to stop him. There’s a time in every story for beer and this was it. He took out two cans of Foster’s and looked up at me enquiringly. I was still standing which seemed ridiculous now. He needed to talk. I nodded, took the can and sat down at the table. We popped the cans.
‘I’ll show you a picture of Gina.’ He almost ran out of the kitchen into the next room and I could hear him opening and closing drawers. When he came back he handed me a large colour photograph, the kind they take in restaurants. It showed three people sitting around a table with wine bottles and glasses and plates-Roper, looking uncomfortable in shirt and tie, another dark young man with hooded, intense eyes and a teenage girl-fluffed up dark curly hair, round face, big eyes, as stupid looking as a sheep.
‘Me and Gina and Ronny’ Roper said.
I nodded and returned the picture. ‘You and Gina went to bed in Bach’s house,’ I said. ‘One day he came home and caught you.’
He had the can almost to his mouth. He was about to drink, wanted badly to drink, but he stopped. ‘How d’you know?’ The fear in his voice was like electronic distortion; the sounds trembled and warped. ‘How d’you know?’
‘Drink up, son,’ I said. ‘It’s an old, old story. You’re not the first young dickhead it’s happened to and you won’t be the last. Bach caught you. What happened then?’
Roper drank some beer and put the can down. It rattled as it touched the table. ‘He… he said he would tell Gina’s brothers unless she let him do it to her, too. He said he’d tell them he caught me raping her. But it was him! He raped her! She didn’t want him to do it, she fought him. She hated it. I was so scared I just stood there.’
Foster’s isn’t my favourite beer and right then the mouthful I took didn’t taste of anything. I swallowed it just to be doing something. Roper’s head slumped forward and he banged it on the table three times, hard.
‘I just stood there,’ he sobbed. ‘I just stood there.’
What was there to say? A hero would’ve stopped Bach, a villain would’ve helped him. Like most of us, Mark Roper was something in between and paying the price for it. Guilt and remorse. Heroes and villains don’t have to worry about either. I reached over and patted his heaving shoulders.
‘Take it easy, son. Is the girl all right?’
His lowered head bobbed and he snuffled. ‘Yes. But she doesn’t see me anymore. And her brothers…’
‘Tell me about them.’
He lifted his head and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his overall. The close-set eyes made him look almost defective and the snuffling didn’t help. I decided he was younger than I’d at first thought-nineteen, tops. He drank some beer and got another cigarette going. ‘Gina’s got three brothers, all older than her.’
‘How old’s she?’
He dragged in smoke and sniffed. “Bout sixteen.’
Great. Say he’s stretching it by a year. That put her underage at the time he was screwing her. Still, this is the nineties. I said, ‘Go on about the brothers.’
‘Mario, Bruno and Ronny.’
‘Ronny? The guy in the photo.’
‘Yeah. Renato, but he’s called Ronny. He’s the youngest and the toughest. He’s crazy. He’s a bikie and if he found out…’
‘Don’t get into that again. They haven’t found out so far, why should they now?’
‘ You’ve found out.’
