The Low Road (5 page)

He drummed his fingers on the laminated tabletop. The kitchen possessed the sepia odour of last week's dinners, of cuts of meat nobody cooked anymore and beneath that, faintly, of fly spray. A transistor radio in leather casing burbled, its volume too low to discern actual words. He listened only to current affairs or Test cricket; anything else seemed too frivolous. He'd never possessed an ear for music and failed to understand the point of it. A week-old newspaper was on the table, along with the makings for a cup of tea and his packet of tobacco. Steam unfurled from the teapot. He poured himself a cup and added his customary dash of milk, his movements almost ceremonial through long years of repetition.

A tea-leaf circled on the surface of his drink. It sank and reappeared in the milky currents. He knew a tea-leaf floating on the surface of tea foretold a visitor. He also knew it was unlucky to kill a white swan or a white moth; that it was lucky to touch a hunchback; he knew not to place a hat on a bed and that a shoe on a table would only tempt death by hanging. He made sure to smash the discarded shells of hard-boiled eggs, lest witches use them to sail out to sea and drown unwary sailors.

His family were given to poring over the moist bodies of newborns, looking and feeling for signs of future career or personalities: a birthmark; a wayward blink; a caul to guard against drowning. When he was born, a grandmother shouldered into the room and held him up to her face as if preparing to devour him, before announcing he would remain a lifelong bachelor, alone and uncharmed. How she arrived at this diagnosis was unclear, but it was accepted nonetheless and woven without argument into the family fabric.

When he was a boy, the women sang songs of demons and love, of forests and oceans and blood. They were warned away from Jews, particularly at Passover when, as everyone knew, they held Christian children over vats and sliced their throats with butcher's knives to drink their blood. He believed in some vague and shifting version of hell. Thanks to his dry-fingered aunts, he also knew all about the saints. About Saint Dreux, the patron saint of those with broken bones, the owners of coffee shops and the deranged. About Saint Nicholas, who raised back to life three children who had been murdered and crammed into a vat of brine. Saint Francis, patron of those fated to die alone.

These offerings, this knowledge, was a love of sorts. Josef was never sure he trusted the signs his relatives insisted were scattered throughout the world, but he found them impossible to ignore. If nothing else, they gave shape to otherwise shapeless anxieties and were a personal bulwark against imminent disaster. After all, only those fears that remained unnamed retained their potency. Although he had not seen them in a long time, he imagined those aunts as they were twenty years ago, shuffling on slippered feet through darkened houses, forever haunted by ailments of obscure provenance.

The tea-leaf vanished beneath the surface. He wondered who the visitor could possibly be. Only on experiencing it did he realise how rare expectation had become for him.

The phone rang in the lounge room. He rose slowly and answered it, already disappointed by the growing comprehension that it would undoubtedly be Marcel.

Josef?

Yes, Marcel.

We got a problem.

Josef lowered himself into an overstuffed armchair that was here when he moved in. It was an enormous thing, almost capable of swallowing him whole. He stifled a sigh. What is it?

You heard from Lee? You seen him?

Josef sucked at his gold tooth. No.

Nothing?

No. Why?

Because. Because neither have I.

Josef adjusted the phone receiver to hear better. He cast an eye about for his cup of tea, pointlessly because he knew it was still on the kitchen table, going cold. He opened his mouth to speak, but Marcel interrupted.

He was supposed to be here this afternoon by the latest. You saw him, did you? You gave him the right instructions?

Of course.

Of course. Don't give me
of course
, Josef.

Josef blushed. Motes of dust eddied like plankton in the lamplight. Well, he said. I'm not sure what could have happened out there. It was pretty straightforward, you know.

Yeah. I know. You know. But does that fucking
kid
know?

Well. It was . . . uh, I explained it all.

Great. You explained it all.

Gave him the piece, wrote the address. Josef sucked at his tooth. If language was how the world was defined, their use of it was the inverse: a means not to describe things or pin them down, but to break them into something more haphazard. Information was not conveyed but rather whispered or scattered in unlikely places, thickly coded, freighted with ambiguity. The world was almost always approached from the side.

Marcel went on. Well, Sammy's been around today and seen Stella with some woman—

A woman?

Yes, a woman. Blonde thing. A fucking blonde woman.

Josef nodded. He needed to say something and listened to Marcel listening to his silence, imagined him screwing the phone into his ear in an effort to detect its meanings. You think . . . You think he, uh . . . What you think happened?

If I know I don't have to ring you. Tell me what you think. You're the man who brought this guy in. Said you had high hopes. Reliable, trustworthy. Write the guy a fucking—what is it?—a
reference
. This is your thing here, Josef. He's
your
guy.

And Josef felt the chill of implied threat. It was true: Josef had courted Lee upon his release from prison with the promise of easy money. Marcel gave him simple tasks for a few months to try him out before the Stella thing, the thing that the kid had obviously fucked up in a big way. Josef had assured Marcel the kid would be fine; after all, look what he did to that mate of his in prison. And besides, the kid had nowhere else to go. His family were all killed in a car accident years ago. This was the clincher. He was theirs.

Marcel was breathing furiously on the other end of the line and Josef imagined him rocking forward and back on that office chair of his, adding to the furrows already worn into the carpet.

You think he'd run off with that sort of dough? Josef said at last, trying to sound incredulous.

Why not? You tell me. You think he was OK?

Well, yes. Of course or I wouldn't have brought him in. It's only, what, eight G? Hardly worth the risk. Small change. Must be some other reason. Must be. Might be asleep or something?

Marcel harrumphed. Maybe not such small change for someone like that. Maybe for me. Maybe for you. When you spoke with him yesterday, was there anything that made you think he's not up to something like this? Anything? This job wasn't just stealing, after all.

I know it's not, Marcel.

So, was there anything made you suspicious?

No. Kid seemed fine. He's got nowhere to go. Probably at his flat. Maybe he misunderstood or something.

Maybe.

I'll go there tonight. Go there now.

Damn right you will. Go there now.

There was silence. Josef jammed the phone between his chin and shoulder and scratched his tattoo. He recalled the encounter at Lee's dingy flat with its furniture obviously found in the street and the flickering television on a milk crate. The clumsy way Lee handled the gun, like it was a dead animal. No real surprises for a kid his age.

Marcel cleared his throat and when he spoke at last, his voice was softer. I want you to sort this out. This is—how should I say? This is not the first thing that's sort of gotten away from you, you know what I mean?

Josef looked at his watch. It was getting late. Ten p.m. He badly needed a cigarette. He knew only too well what Marcel meant, could almost hear the sad shake of his old head. Foolishly, he nodded, managed a quiet
yes
.

You got to find this kid, Josef. You're losing your touch.

Yes.

You got to find him, or else.

I know.

I'll give you two days. Don't let me down on this. And take good care of him. Good care.

Marcel, it's only eight grand. Even if the kid has run off, it's hardly worth—Hey. Eight grand is eight grand. It's the whatsit—the principle. You can't escape this. You fucked up, Josef. Better make this right again. We can't have people doing this kind of thing. We just can't. You know nobody's—what's the word?—indispensable.

Normally they would talk of other, domestic things. Marcel liked to hear tips for the Saturday races or the best price for fruit at the moment. They gossiped about people they knew. Occasionally Marcel indulged Josef with a few questions about the cricket, a topic in which Marcel had only scant interest. But not tonight. They said their goodbyes and hung up.

Josef returned to the kitchen. His tea was cold. He assembled a cigarette with deft movements and lit it before returning to the chair in the lounge room. He thought about Lee. His angular face and dark eyes. His habit of insinuating himself into a room before anyone realised. He couldn't believe the little prick had let him down so soon, and after such an opportunity. And for such a petty amount of money. No. There must be a better explanation for this. The kid will show up. The kid will show up and everything will make sense and they'll laugh and even Marcel will chuckle and be embarrassed about threatening Josef on the phone like that.

But where would someone like Lee go? With no family? It amazed him that people seemed to move about all the time these days. Change jobs and houses and wives. Whole countries, just like that. Incredible behaviour. Where did these people go? Where could Lee go, assuming he had gone at all, and wasn't hiding out in his flat? Could be anywhere. The possibilities frightened him.

Smoke hung in a grey mass around Josef's head and shoulders. He felt heavy and tired. Heavy and tired and—for the first time in a very long time—in danger. An old man late at night, listening to the world going about its business outside his window. He'd known for some time he was getting too old for this whole thing, but now, unfortunately, Marcel suspected it too. He sucked at his tooth and smoked until the butt was soggy.

6

I
t was nearly 11.00 p.m. when Josef got to Lee's shabby, redbrick apartment block. He mounted the creaking stairs. The stairwell light wasn't working and the only illumination was from a streetlight filtering through the landing window. The gauzy light reminded him in an obscure way of some distant period in his life and he was briefly flooded with the disappointment peculiar to the consideration of time.

He paused on the landing with a hand on the worn banister and peered upwards into the darkness. Winter had settled into his bones over the past few years and he was aware now of an ache in his right knee. The apartment block hummed with unseen domestic activity, with the gurgle of water in pipes, the metallic swish of cutlery drawers opening and closing. The stairwell smelled of incense and boiled vegetables. Despite the late hour, someone was cooking curry. Probably bloody Pakistanis or Indians, up late on Bombay time or something. He tugged his jacket cuff down over his tattoo.

Lee's apartment was on the second floor. A box of ancient newspapers rested on the floor outside the door, the relic of an earlier tenant. Josef pressed an ear to the door but could hear nothing. No light seeped under it and there was no response when he knocked. Lee, he said. Are you in there? It's Josef.

He listened again, remaining utterly still, so that when at last he moved it was as if he were assembled from the darkness. Still nothing. He drew his gun, followed by his collection of skeleton keys. His bladder clenched. There were blokes who needed to shit in the midst of a crime and, in fact, he had once been involved in a robbery that was very nearly ruined by a young guy called Leon stopping to take a crap in an alley. But for Josef, it was different. Without fail, even after all these years, the act of breaking into a house prompted in him the urge to piss. He tried the keys one by one, until the lock gave and he nudged the door open. He waited on the landing with his gun drawn for a full minute before stepping into the apartment. Immediately he could detect, by the bony silence, that the place was abandoned, an impression confirmed when he switched on the light. The furnishings were incomplete, heavy with transience. There was the television on the milk crate, a sagging couch and an ashtray on the windowsill, each stripped of any connection to whoever had used them. The place was chilly, unloved.

The tiny bedroom and kitchen offered no clues. The bathroom showerhead dripped into the stained bathtub with a soft, rhythmic
dunk dunk dunk.
In the bedroom, just a low wooden dresser and the mattress on the floor. What meaning, if any, could be harvested from these inanimate things? A bunch of rooms that offered nothing of the person who lived here. As he patrolled the apartment, Josef felt a sort of dry pity for Lee, a sense of having interrupted him weeping or reading pornography.

As a teenager, Josef would often break into houses alone. Of course he was searching for money or jewellery and other valuables to sell, but there were other satisfactions to be gained. He would sometimes spend an entire afternoon in a new house admiring the neat and ordered rooms, sitting primly at the kitchen table eating cheese or warming his cold hands among the clothes of strangers. He would doze on couches and wonder who would buy plastic place mats bearing the images of European cathedrals and bridges. He fondled letters from mothers and photographs of lovers. Broken toys. A small globe of the entire world. Even now, more than forty years later, he was unable to detect the scent of musk without being transported, almost bodily, back to the house on Mott Street where he first encountered it on the dressing table of a beautiful widow recently home from Africa; the thin afternoon light glinting on her glassware and the distant bark of a dog. More than once, it was only upon returning to his own house that he realised he had neglected to steal anything.