‘He tried to bargain with me.’ Now he did put his palms together. He rubbed them as if he liked the feeling, or maybe he liked bargains.
‘What did he have to bargain with?’
The rubbing went on with a surprisingly dry sound, considering how moist his hands had felt. ‘He seemed to think that I preyed on people, particularly old people. The Movement cares for a number of old people, of course.’
‘Naturally, but I don’t see what you’re getting at.’
‘He told me about a place where I could get recruits-victims, I think he called them. He was very agitated about it.’
‘You said he was drunk?’
‘He was drunk when he started, or so I thought. I don’t have a lot of experience of the condition. But he seemed to want to talk about this place, although he must have seen that I was not able to give him money. He was calmer after I had talked to him. How did he die?’
‘He was murdered,’ I said, roughly. ‘What was this place he talked about? D’you remember?’
‘Of course.’ He looked surprised at the suggestion that people forgot things. ‘A house in Monk Lane, Clovelly. Number ten. I gathered there were a lot of old people there, damaged people like himself.’
‘Have you checked the place? Send anyone out?’
He stopped the rubbing and opened his hands up in a gesture of innocence. ‘He was mistaken Mr Hardy. I do not recruit people. They come to me, to the Movement, that is.’
I nodded. A house full of damaged old people that had shaken Leon Bronowski up. He’d mentioned it to Bruce Henneberry, maybe in response to a question about Singer. It felt solid, more than the fantasy of a booze-clouded brain, and there were two dead men, two men removed from the possibility of unhappiness, to give it solidity.
I reached back for my money. ‘Do you accept donations?’ I couldn’t call him anything. The embarrassment I felt at the thought of calling him ‘Brother’ or ‘Brother Gentle’ reminded me of the years I’d spent not calling my wife’s father anything. Come to think of it, this guy looked a bit like him-Cyn had got her looks from her mother. He inclined his head graciously and I put twenty bucks on the floor between us. I was suddenly aware of how quiet it was. The silence was like the reverse side of a shriek.
‘Why is it so quiet?’ I asked.
‘One of our principles,’ he said. ‘We believe that excessive noise disturbs the harmonies of mind, body and soul. There is a vow of silence in operation here and we try to do everything quietly.’
He was certainly doing well at that. As I put my money away, I touched the pictures of Singer. What the hell, I thought, I pulled them out and showed them to him, asking him if he’d ever seen the subject.
He didn’t hesitate. ‘Never. An interesting face.’
‘You read faces?’
‘You are a cynic, Mr Hardy. Yes I can read faces. I could tell you a great deal about yourself from yours.’
I rubbed my hand over what he was talking about. ‘Not so hard,’ I said. ‘Broken nose-boxing; missing teeth-enemies; lines and wrinkles-I used to smoke a lot.’
‘There’s a lot more, but you wouldn’t listen.’ He handed the pictures back. ‘This man is highly intelligent. He is capable of great violence, perhaps to himself.’
‘Thanks.’ I could always serve that up to Mrs Singer and explain that a man dressed like a canary had told me so. ‘What’s the significance of the yellow?’ I asked.
‘You would have to join us to find that out, Mr Hardy.’
I stood up. I hadn’t seen him move, but the twenty dollars had gone away somewhere very quietly. He conducted me back to the reception room and pressed my hand again.
‘I hope you don’t have to use the gun, Mr Hardy. Guns make a lot of noise.’
‘So they do,’ I said. ‘And blood is red.’
‘You are a poet. I will repeat that to our spiritual leader when he visits us next year.’
The comment had the soft phoniness peculiar to the religious conman. On the whole, I prefer the spiel of the oil share sellers and real estate crooks.
‘Feel free,’ I said.
15
It was late in the afternoon and the rain had eased to a drizzle that looked like settling in for the night. I gave the street a careful once over before going across to my car. Freddy Ward didn’t seem like the sort of man to call it all square, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if Rex decided to go freelance for a night. I deeply suspected Rex of being vindictive. But I couldn’t see any watchers and cruisers and they stand out plainly in the rain when honest folk are inside or going about their business fast.
My Gregorys showed Monk Lane to be a little trickle of a thoroughfare in Clovelly near the boundary with Randwick. Leon had had a long beat. I drove down to the beach and sat and sorted out my thoughts on the matter or matters before me. It was smoking time again, moody time with the light rain rinsing the air and turning the sand grey. My first impulse was to front up to the house and compare my photographs with the faces of all the old jokers there. Against that were Henneberry’s guts on the carpet and all Leon’s broken bones. Maybe I needed reinforcements. More than that, I needed information; walking up to that house to knock on the front door could be like walking up to the Lubianka. The only person I could think of with the kind of street knowledge I needed was Ann Winter. A flock of seagulls landed on the sand and began to walk down towards the water as if they knew what they were doing. I started the car and drove to Manny’s.
There was a sprinkle of people in the coffee bar but no sign of the proprietor. A thin blonde was doing the honours in a lackadaisical way, as if her body was somewhere else as well as her mind. I bought a coffee and asked if Ann had been in recently.
‘Yeah, she was. Said she’d be back later.’
‘When?’
She shrugged.
‘Mind if I use the tape machine?’
She shrugged again.
I picked out a blank tape, slipped it into the slot and recited: ‘Ann, Cliff Hardy. I’m sorry about the other night. I didn’t dump you. I ran into some trouble, very heavy stuff. Now I’m going to number ten Monk Lane, Clovelly. Looks like the lead Bruce and Leon had. I’m going for a look-see but maybe you know something about the place. I’ll wait outside for an hour. It’s six-fifteen now. If you hear this before seven-thirty come on over. I’ll pay for the cab. Thought you’d want to see this through’. I wrote ‘For Ann Winter’ on the cassette label and asked the girl to give it to Ann if she came in.
‘You haven’t drunk your coffee,’ she said.
I swilled it down, wishing it had a touch of Manny’s grappa in it and went back out into the rain. The roads were greasy and treacherous as I wound up through the cutting to Clovelly. It was steep going and I wondered how many times Leon had hoofed it in all the years he’d bummed around this district. With some derelicts, the walking is what keeps them alive. It strikes a balance with the sugar and alcohol in their systems and they stay thin and hard like a tree that’s rotting inside but still standing. Eventually the rot wins.
Clovelly is a headland tucked in south of Bronte and east of Randwick. It’s a bit like those two suburbs, but down market on both of them. The flats are a bit meaner, the house fronts and the streets narrower. Monk Lane was thin, twisted and a dead end. It held a mixture of faded, tired-looking flats and houses. Number ten was at the end of the street with a vacant block on one side and a crumbling, roofless cottage on the other. A sheer rock wall with some creeper clinging to it rose up behind the house, which was three storeys high, heavy and ungracious. It had the unmistakable look of a building divided into flats and single rooms.
It was a forbidding pile. There was a narrow cement walkway down one side and it was a fair bet that the skimpy backyard would be a jungle of privet and castor oil trees. It differed from most other places in that the backyard had privacy; around here the terrain is such that every block is fully visible from some higher elevation. Not here, but there was a good chance of getting rubbish thrown down into the back from the top of the rock.