Rachael's Gift (21 page)

Are you sure? You wouldn’t lie?
Francine’s stare pierces into her and the girl feels currents of panic rise up through her core.
Because it would be very bad.

The girl shakes her head vigorously.

After a moment Francine releases her hand and the girl escapes to the sanctuary of her bedroom. She strips off, forgoing brushing her teeth, and climbs into bed in only the t-shirt she had been wearing. That had been close.

The old man used to say, ‘You can’t save anyone but yourself, so don’t even try.’ He’d say these things with his fingers full – sometimes with a glass of whisky or a cigar or a cigarette; it didn’t matter, they were always in one pie or another. There finally came a time when I stopped listening.

Terry raised his fist and banged on the bar top. ‘Another round, champ.’ The old man’s best mate held up the bar, regaling the other patrons with cop stories of the good ol’ days, the stories getting taller every time he told them. I liked to come down and listen. He was in full swing, a fair few sheets to the wind, when I pulled up a stool beside him. Since the old man had croaked it, Terry had taken it upon himself to replace him. I didn’t mind. The old guy was as hard as they came and wore the skin on his face like a warning, but at his core – and not many people knew this – he was as soft as a seedless prune.

After wrapping up a yarn about Ray ‘Gunner’ Kelly – a notorious New South Wales police officer from the 1960s and Terry’s mentor – he saw me beside him and grinned. ‘You look like shit.’

‘I’ve heard that.’

I’d been coming here for years. An old scungy pub, the Eagle was open till late and even later if you were ‘locked-in’. It was filled with pool tables, pokies and drug deals, its reputation as ugly and as rough as the hairy bikers who haunted it – men who drank hard and often and preferred the smell of alcohol to their wives. We could all hide in here. Even Terry.

I looked into Terry’s hound dog eyes. ‘Gotta ask ya something without your cop hat on.’

He nodded. ‘You know we’re family, mate.’

I could trust Terry. I’d had to in the past. I took a swig of my beer and swallowed. ‘What happens when a teacher is accused of fiddling with his students?’

He ran his hands through his hair, narrowing his eyes, ‘Cop hat off?’

I nodded.

‘We can do a number of things – depends what you want.’

I shook my head. ‘Jesus, Ter, no – nothing like that. Just off the record. I want to know the process, that’s all. What do you do to the guy?’

‘Okay. Speaking hypothetical then . . .’

‘Yep.’

‘We’ll get the call from the school and send some people in – specialists. They’ll do an investigation. There’s got to be enough evidence. Witnesses. No evidence – no charges. If we can lay charges, he’ll be hauled into court.’

‘And?’

‘He –’ he paused ‘– or she, let’s not be sexist here. Plenty of women get into trouble too, you know. Anyway, if they’re convicted they’d be strung up. Crucified by the papers and tortured on the inside. Those blokes hate a kiddy fiddler. Nothing we can do about it. The nature of the thing.’

‘What if he’s innocent?’

‘That mud sticks. He’s fucked either way.’

The bar got rowdier.

‘Something you wanna tell me, mate?’

Shaven-headed blokes in truckie’s singlets bumped shoulders and raised scarred knuckles, looking for a fight. I turned back to Terry. I wanted to tell him how they’d left me, how they’d fucked off without as much as a hooroo, and how all this teacher stuff was getting seriously out of hand, but all I managed was: ‘Cam’s taken off with Rach. I’m on my own.’

‘Great.’ Terry missed it completely and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Let’s get shitfaced.’ He ordered more drinks and we drank, and Terry banged on some more about how things at the cop shop had changed for the worse. ‘Not like when your old man ran the joint.’ And we drank some more and the sods in the bar came and went and the noise grew louder and the air grew stickier and the smell grew thicker and the heaviness in my chest grew less.

‘So all that mess with Clippo cleared up?’

‘Yeah. Nah.’

‘You shoulda let us take care of it.’

‘Yeah, shoulda.’

The music got louder and my brain went numb. I watched a ring of young girls dancing round their handbags to Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sanh’, their faces red with heat and booze, their clothes falling off their shoulders and riding up their hips. One of them smiled at me. She came over and took my hand, pulling me onto their makeshift dance floor. I fell towards her, floppy and harmless, lurching into their circle and tripping on a leather strap. I muttered, ‘Sorry’, unable to find my balance, and then felt Terry’s grip pulling me back and pushing me outside. Fresh air hit me. ‘You piss-ant excuse for an old mate,’ he said. ‘Can’t hold yer bloody booze. Yer a fuckin’ embarrassment.’ He shoved me into the back of a taxi and slammed the door and it sailed off up the hill towards home.

*

Clippo. Bloody Clippo.

That night I’d seen only red. She’d been lying there, naked – not even his greasy sheets covering her. She was limp. With sleep, with sex, with drink, with drugs. I didn’t know. Rach had taken to sneaking out at night, saying she was staying at Becca’s, but it wasn’t long before we found out that was a crock of shit. We’d confronted her about it and were met with the silent treatment. Then she began blatantly disappearing, not even bothering to lie about it. We hadn’t seen or heard from her for two nights when a surfing mate, Shane, called. He had some bad news and thought we should know: Rach was shacked up with Clippo.

We all knew Clippo – violent, volatile, already familiar with the inside of the clink at age twenty-four. Shane said he’d seen her at his place.

Clippo lived a few streets back from the beach. The Ford’s tyres skidded round the bend and mounted the kerb outside a run-down fibro. I banged on the front door and it opened a sliver before I rammed it all the way and barged in. I found myself in a shithole, with empty beer cans, a bong and the stink of dope, but no sign of Rach.

‘What the fuck?’ Clippo picked himself up off the floor, where he’d fallen when I forced the door open. The famous snake tattoo climbed up his naked chest. I left him and prowled through the rest of the house.

I found her in a bedroom out the back, sprawled across a bare mattress. I sank to my knees and took her head in my hands. ‘Rachey, love.’ There was drool on her chin. ‘Baby,’ I said. I picked up a t-shirt from the floor and draped it across her backside. ‘Rachey.’ I gently shook her shoulder.

‘Oi! What the fuck are you doing?’ Clippo shoved me in the back.

I ignored him. ‘Come on, honey, I’m taking you out of here.’ Rachael groaned in her coma-like state. There was my baby, my angel, defiled and degraded. Adrenalin bolted through me. I stood up and pushed him back. ‘What the fuck have you done to her?’

‘She’s with me, old man. Fuck off.’ He ground his fist into my collarbone.

I slammed him back against the wall. ‘She’s fourteen, you fucker. You’re raping her. You should be in jail.’

Suddenly Clippo spitfired his skull into mine. Bones smashed. I spun backwards, my head splitting, my vision blurred. I cradled my head on the floor when he came at me but I managed to jump out of the way and sprang up, my fist flying into his eye, splitting the flesh right open. Blood spurted out. He gripped his face. I smashed him again. One-two, one-two, just like I’d been taught. But he got me around the waist in a vice-like grip, tripping me up. I fell to the floor. He kicked me hard in the guts, hurling a string of foul-mouthed abuse. I doubled over, clutching my stomach, my eyes clouding and my mouth full of spit. It came again. I jackknifed, gasping for air. My ears rang with a high-pitched noise. I heard screaming. The kicks kept coming. I hid my head with my arms, burrowing into the carpet. A small voice: ‘You’re hurting him. Stop it! Clippo – please!’ The kicks slowed, one, Mississippi, two . . .

‘Dad? . . . Dad?’

I opened my eyes and saw my daughter’s face hovering over mine. ‘Baby,’ I murmured, reaching for her hand.

She shook her head angrily. ‘Jesus, Dad, what you doing here?’ She looked up at her lover. ‘Clippo, you arsehole.’

He glared at her, holding out a bloodied cloth. ‘Gonna fuck you up, old man.’

I was covered in blood, sticky and dark. I tried to get up but my insides ached in places I didn’t know existed. Leaning on Rach, I got unsteadily to my feet. ‘You’re coming with me,’ I told her in a hoarse whisper, gripping her hand.

She looked from me to Clippo and then back to me again. I felt her hand slip from mine.

‘You should go, Dad.’

‘Rach . . .’

But she went and stood beside Clippo.

‘So this is where you’ve been,’ I said, my voice cracking. ‘And you wanna stay.’ I shook my head. The flesh under my ribs swelled. Something else throbbed. I was afraid if I said anything else I would be all undone. There was my kid, wrapped in a dirty towel, underage and standing beside this creep. My knees went weak and my sides growled with pain. Cam would be heartbroken.

Clippo wiped blood from his jaw, clocked me, and a smile spread.

I looked at Rachael again and she looked away.

‘Rach, come on.’

She kept staring at the floor. ‘I’m not leaving.’

Her t-shirt – the yellow one with a poster of
Endless Summer
printed on it – lay bunched up on the floor. I picked it up and held it out to her. For a long moment she didn’t move. Then, finally, she reached out and took it. She slipped it on, gathered her stuff and pushed past me out the door. I limped after her to the car.

Back in Paris after the weekend, I visited the Blakes’ lawyer at his offices in the Marais. Samuel Florins was a young French guy who specialised in intellectual property. With his three-piece suits and shoulder-length hair, he looked like someone out of an Oscar Wilde play. We were meeting for an update on the case.

‘I’ve found one potential owner, which unfortunately also implies that the painting might have been illegally appropriated: the Frey-Duval Gallery. Frey-Duval was indicted for collaboration after the war. But I’m yet to find proof of any ownership. His son says all their records were destroyed in a fire. However, he called me on the weekend and said his father wants to meet me – I’m seeing him tomorrow.’

He seemed unmoved. ‘Hmmm.’

‘Sorry. That’s all I’ve got. So what are the possible outcomes? Do they have a case?’

He tapped the end of his pencil on his knee. ‘So it wasn’t confiscated by the Nazis?’

‘Not officially. There’s no record of it in the ERR documents.’

‘And we have no receipt to say that Bernard sold it?’

I shook my head. ‘Could he have asked someone to mind it for him? And then they sold it on when he didn’t return?’

‘Possibly – or he could have sold it himself. The claimants will argue that it was sold under duress – a common scenario.’

‘What does that mean for the Blakes?’

‘If they have no proof, then the Blakes don’t have to do anything. If, on the other hand, they do have proof, then the best outcome will be a sale and a settlement to both families. Let me know how you go with the art dealer.’

We said goodbye and I walked out of the building towards the metro.

The temperature had dropped; I pulled my collar up around my neck. I hadn’t heard from Wolfe for a while. Funny how his silence now made me feel uneasy – now that I wanted to hear from him. There was no word on what was happening with the investigation. I didn’t know why I was worried. They couldn’t do anything to Rachael.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and a deep voice said, ‘We should not meet like this.’

I jumped in fright and felt a wave of relief and then embarrassment when I saw Lucien. We greeted each other in the usual manner with three pecks on either cheek and the obligatory small talk.

‘I’m going towards your neck of the woods,’ I said, thinking that wasn’t quite true but not wanting to leave him.

‘Good, I’ll walk with you.’

We fell into step. The footpath was crowded in the morning rush hour and our hands brushed against each other. Seeing him again made my breathing shallow. Looking for distraction, I began to tell him about
La Baigneuse
. ‘I suppose it’s okay if I tell you. You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?’

A look of confusion passed over his face, as if it would never occur to him to repeat our conversation.

When I’d finished telling him about the case, he asked, ‘And what do you believe?’

‘My gut feeling is that it was stolen, but we haven’t found any proof. So until that happens, the Blakes will continue with the sale of the painting.’

‘Sounds unfair.’

‘Yes, I suppose it does. Anyway, I’m running out of leads. It’s incredible how a work develops its own life once the artist has finished with it. I wonder what will happen to your pieces?’

‘They will hang in museums and on rich people’s walls to be stolen by the less rich.’

I laughed. ‘Is a painting still a part of you once you have finished it? Do you feel like you own it?’

He considered this. ‘It’s more like I’m a conduit,’ he said. ‘That is all. What happens after I finish doesn’t concern me. It’s a relief.’

‘I think I knew that.’

We walked beside a high sandstone wall and came to a small square with a cafe, its terrace enclosed in bistro blinds. Above the cafe was a mural, stretching three storeys high. It was a cartoon rendered in bright blue, yellow and purple. There were three separate images, one above the other: the first showed an outdoor scene with windmills and a man on a donkey; in the second, a man was seated in his living room beside a burning candle; and in the third an older man was reading by the light of a lamp that was in the shape of a nude female, her head covered by a lampshade.

‘It’s Robert Combas,’ Lucien said.

‘You know him?’

‘Of course.
La femme, lumière de l’homme
.’

‘Really? “The woman, light of man.”’ I laughed. ‘I like it. I’ve seen his stuff before. We’d have missed it if we’d been staring at the ground.’