Calliope leaned forward, keeping her voice casual. "You know something about it?"
He shrugged. "Saw it on the net."
"We just want to know if you heard anything about Johnny Dread connected with that crime. Anything at all."
"Not going to roll on nobody, me."
Stan Chan leaned in. "How can you be rolling on anyone if he's dead, you little shit? Talk some sense."
3Big gave Calliope a look of wounded dignity. "This your dog? Because if he don't stop biting my knackers, you might as well put me back in the box."
Calliope waved Stan back into his chair. "Just tell me what you remember about John Dread."
The prisoner smirked. "Nothing. I forgot everything. And if I ever hear anything about him after today, I forget that too. He was one sayee lo bastard. Wouldn't talk slice to him for hard money."
Calliope kept asking questions, augmented by suggestions about 3Big's heritage and social life from Stan that were occasionally rather surreal. If it was a fencing match, the prisoner was not playing to win, but simply not to be scored upon, an unsatisfying experience that went on so long that the last of the caffeine rush finally wore off, leaving Calliope tired and irritable.
"So he's dead, and you haven't seen him for years anyway. That's what you're telling me, right?"
He nodded. "For true."
"Then why do I get the feeling you're holding out? You're facing a long stretch, Mr. Pike. Eddie. Three Bug, or whatever bullshit you want to call yourself. If I were where you are, I'd be climbing across this table right now, trying hard to kiss my big Greek backside, because there aren't going to be many people offering you anything in the next little while. Unless it's someone in the shower when you go back to Silverwater, handing you a chocolate bar to bend over." He was clearly a little surprised by how abruptly she had abandoned the pretense of helpfulness, but he maintained his smirk. "So why won't you talk?
"I'm talking."
"Talk about something real, I mean. We could scrape three to five years off your sentence if you told us something useful about John Dread."
He looked at her for a strangely long time. Stan Chan started to say something, but Calliope touched his knee under the table, asking for patience. 3Big fidgeted with his scars again, sighed, then dropped his hands to the tabletop.
"Look, woman," he said slowly. "I tell you something for free. I don't know nothing about Dread. But even if I did know something, I wouldn't tell you shit. Not for good behavior time, not for reduction, not for nothing."
"But if he's dead. . . !"
He shook his head, his gaze hidden now, curtained behind those long lashes like a panther in a canebrake. "Don't matter. You don't know Dread, you never met him. You cross him, he come back out of the ground and kill you three ways. If there was ever someone be a mopaditi, come back and six you in the dark, Dread do it."
"Mopaditi. What does that mean?"
He had retreated far back now, surveying them as though from the depths of a cave. "Ghost. When you dead, but you don't go away. I'll go back to the box now."
"Well, that was useless." Stan Chan waited expectantly.
"Hang on." Calliope took out her hearplug and popped it into its padded slot in her pad. She wondered again if it was time to invest in a can. It was tedious lugging the pad around, even the new, wafer-thin Krittapong she had bought herself as a birthday present. "Doctor Jigalong is out of town. I've left her messages at work and home."
"About 'mopaditi'?"
"Yeah, I haven't heard that in street slang before, have you?"
"No." He put his feet up on the desk. "That's what, eight, nine of these people we've rousted? Not getting much."
"We got something there."
Stan gave her the eyebrow. "You mean because he used an aboriginal word? In case you didn't notice, Skouros, the man was indeed of aboriginal heritage himself. Don't you say 'hopa!' or 'retsina' or even 'acropolis' every now and then? I've been known to use the occasional ethnic expression myself—I think I called you 'round-eye' just the other day. . . ."
"He reacted when I asked him about Johnny Dread. He was surprised." Something else was bothering her too, some detail, maddeningly out of reach.
"Well, the man is officially dead. Might be reason for surprise, being questioned about someone you thought was dead."
"Might be. But there was something weird about his reaction. Maybe he's heard something on the street."
"Maybe won't get us over the hump, Skouros. What next? Charming as it may be, we're running out of street culture to investigate."
Calliope shook her head, perplexed and distressed and, with the caffeine finally drained out of her system and nothing gone in to replace it, feeling generally pretty godawful.
Sleeplessly out of skew, she sat on the couch and accessed the interview from the department system to run it on her wallscreen. She had decided for her own good to stay away from Bondi Baby. It wasn't even so much the near-obsessive interest in the waitress Elisabetta, but the fact that she had realized she was actually beginning to look forward to the gooey desserts the place served.
Not going to lose any weight that way, Skouros, she told herself. Better to stay home. She hadn't shopped in days, so there was little except crispbread to imperil her determination. She watched the questioning all the way through, then jumped back to the spot where she had first mentioned their quarry's name.
"You talking about John More Dread?" 3Big said, then said it yet again as Calliope backed up and played it over ". . . Talking about Dread?"
That's it, she thought. John More Dread. Haven't heard that one before. But why should one more alias—for a suspect who already had many—catch in her thoughts this way, like a splinter working its way under the skin? More Dread. More Dread. Where have I heard that before?
The thought of the photo taken at Feverbrook Hospital drifted back to her, the blur of dark presence, the formless, smoky face.
3Big Pike said a ghost. If there's anyone who'd come back as a ghost. . . .
She closed her eyes and opened them, trying to use the familiarity of her apartment to push back the feeling of being watched. Of being haunted.
She was back on the balcony again. The tower drew her as though she were a moth and its black immensity some kind of inverse light. Even now, with the voices gone, when she was somehow farther from it than she'd been even back in Juniper Bay, she could not ignore it.
A sparkle of red signal lights ringed the top like a crown of embers, and on the uppermost floors a few windows glowed, illuminated singly or in small clusters. Otherwise, it was only visible against the night sky because of the searchlights that swept across the empty parking lot, glancing off the shiny, irregular exterior as they tracked across the rows of painted stalls.
The voices were gone. The children were gone. Were they one and the same? Olga Pirofsky had been immersed in the dreamy unreality of her southward journey for so long that she could not quite remember. She was exhausted, too. The nights when the children had pulled her and hurried her, whispering their lives into her dreaming ear, had somehow been far more restful than the dead black hours she had experienced after they had fallen silent. Now she woke each day slow-thinking and hollow, feeling like a helium balloon that had finally leaked the last of its buoyancy and could only roll along the carpet, sagging, useless.