I'm Dying Here Read online

  §

  I pulled into the small parking space, next to Juliet’s old Holden ute, tossed Mauricio’s phone in the glove box, grabbed Cookie’s laptop by the serviceable handle of its faux-leather case. I went through the decorative metal fence’s more conventional chain link gate to the foundry’s heavy sliding timber side door at the back, which stood half-open in its ancient worn runners. Hot white stuff spattered in the loud dimness. During the week the place rang with the shouts of her workers, often yelling in Sicilian. Today Juliet was working by herself. Seemed hazardous to me.

  She wore a pair of wrap-around safety glasses, a baseball cap backwards to hold her long dark hair in place, and a shapeless blue overall almost black with iron dust. Large gloves, surely not asbestos but something developed by NASA, covered her delicate publisher’s fingers as she wrestled runny metal into a frame. Those fingers had once danced nimbly on computer keyboards. Jules was no hacker, but she knew a damned sight more about programming and de-programming computers than I ever will. And I could trust her not to run to the cops, or to the bad guys for that matter.

  She noticed me. “Hi, sweetie. With you in a mo.”

  I tilted my head in greeting, knowing better than to distract her. Liquid light cooled to red, to an orange glow, faded slowly to dull­ness as she carefully completed her madly dangerous if routine task. Couldn’t be good for the skin, you’d think, but when she joined me and we walked side by side to the Cimino Iron Works office, it was far from obvious. The blush of youth still lay on her cheek, unless it was heat from the furnace. I clicked the door shut behind us and Juliet shucked her coverall and baseball hat.

  “Art or commerce?” I asked.

  “Nothing fancy this time,” she told me. Her black hair, a touch moist from well-earned sweat, nuzzled her shoulders, and who could blame it? “A set of angels for a tomb in the Fawkner cemetery.”

  “Now there’s a coincidence,” I said, and we leaned toward each other, not embracing, and did that air kiss thing. My bristles scrapped her cheek.

  “Hey!”

  “Sorry, on a case. No time to shave this morning.”

  “It’s afternoon, Tom.” She rubbed her cheek lightly without knowing it. “I assume you’re not here for a few meters of verandah iron? Not that it would go terribly convincingly with your porch.”

  “We’d have to throw it on the rubble heap. Your mad brother wrecked the place night before last.”

  She stared. “Mauricio wrecked your—Oh, yes, he owns that Parkville place doesn’t he?” Juliet burst into appalled laughter, and moved behind her desk. I put the laptop on top of some bills, pulled up a wooden chair and sat down with my elbows propped and fists under my bristly chin. “An insurance scam, I take it?”

  “Urban renewal,” I said. “There’s nothing déclassé about Mau­ricio. How have you been, love?”

  “Bonzer, cobber. Have you seen the horrible child lately?”

  They had not got on, Annabelle and her stepmother. What had Share called that sort of thing? “Trophy wife syndrome”. Unfair, of course. In those days I was wildly in love with Juliet and she with me, and she’d never treated my daughter like Cinderella, but there you are. The thuddingly recurrent Freudian mysteries of the family romance. Or so Juliet had explained to me once.

  “Animal is why I’m here, Jules.”

  “I’m not going to give her a part-time job if that’s what you’re thinking. She’d have the whole place up in flames.”

  “A friend of hers was kidnapped.”

  “Oh.” When she squeezed her eyes shut the lashes meshed like a dark Cloud of Unknowing, suitably enough given her religious background. They opened instantly on eyes dark as a computer monitor screen. “Hence the whiskers. Have you found the friend?”

  “Yep. But she’s still in danger, I think.”

  “Okay.” Her computer monitor eyes flicked to the computer. “So there’s a clue in the machine. She was getting threatening emails. You can’t get in because it’s password protected. And you can’t just ask her for it because she’s—”

  “In hospital, and probably wouldn’t tell me.”

  You can see why I fell in love with Jules, even while I was still grieving for Patty. She is simply dazzling, and then there’s that black hair and eyelashes, too, and the eyes themselves, and the delightful breasts, and some more good stuff.

  “Can you get it open, do you think?” I asked.

  “Worth a burl, cobber. Push it over.”

  To my surprise, Juliet reached first into a drawer and drew out a pair of stylish narrow glasses and perched them on her nose as I opened the case and rotated the machine for her, flicking the power button. Surprisingly light, these current models. She started tapping immediately, thumb easy on the touch pad. “We’re both getting older, Mr. Purdue,” she said, and sent me a look over the top rim of the specs.

  “We are indeed, Ms. Cimino.”

  “Okay, you’re right, there’s no simple way past the security.” Juliet pushed the machine aside and steepled her fingers, which naturally bore no ring of marriage or other commitment. Well, you would hardly wear jewelry while pouring molten metal in any case. “ It won’t be her name or birthday or anything obvious, unless she’s really stupid. I don’t suppose she’s really stupid?” she said hopefully.

  “Smart as a whip, far as I can make out,” I said. “The cat’s called Sappho.” I got up and went around the desk, hovered over her shoulder. Usually she gets very quiet and freezes up when I do that, but it made sense this time, I wasn’t spying or being fond or invading her space. Fingers flashed:

  SAPPHO

  Password error. Re-enter.

  Juliet hummed. “She’s a kid, right, same age as Annabelle?” “Near enough.”

  SAPPH0

  I looked at the screen, puzzled. “Oh, zero instead of Oh.” “Yeah. Leetspeak.”

  I didn’t get it, but okay. However, when Jules pushed Enter she was told sternly to try again.

  “Shit, these programs usually only allow three or four bloopers and then they lock up. Is this really critical?”

  “Well, there’s a guy with his head blown apart, and a girl who was buried in a lightless crypt for several days.”

  Another flashing glance. “The Fawkner cemetery coincidence. Good god, the poor child. Let’s get this sucker right. I want some­thing mnemonic, a household gag, maybe, a nickname hardly anyone knows, come on, use your feng shui, man.”

  So she knew about that, she’d been keeping up. I sat in si­lence, searching my memory. “Jonquil’s a Goth who calls herself Cookie,” I said. “Like Animal and Cookie’s sister Grime Grrl.” I suspected Juliet wanted to snigger, but the gravity of the moment and her intentness kept her quiet. “She’s been involved with start­ing price bookies or whatever the computer age equivalent is. Peer to peer, I think Grime said. She’s shockingly overweight, severely limited mobility. I think she’s a lesbian like the other two, or going through a phase, but then again maybe she’s never had a chance to try either side of the road. Or the motivation. Except for cybersex of some kind, which is how they trapped her, the bastards.” I took a breath. “And her father fucked her when she was a kid.”

  “Jesus.” Juliet eyes closed again behind glass. I was watching her face from the side. They stayed closed for a long moment. “I don’t think she’d use the word ‘incest’ or one of its cognates, too raw and wounding. But something connected....”

  I saw light in darkness. “They have a sign on the door of their squat, no punctuation: Well cut your balls off.”

  Jules scribbled it on a sheet of paper, showed it to me.

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  She considered it. “Worth a try.” In it went with the words jammed together.

  Password error. Re-enter.

  “Shit! Hang on, she’s definitely a hacker, you reckon? Not a n00b?”

  A noobie? Good Christ, where does she get this stuff. “I sup­pose.”

  Juliet’s fingers danced. W3
11CUTURB@1150FF. Her right pinky paused above the Enter key, and she backspaced two letters, retyped one.

  W311CUTURB@1150V. Enter.

  The screen opened with a thudding racket of hip-hop. A black grrl group was snarling, “We’ll cut yo balls off, motherfucker, cut your balls off, your balls off, balls off.” And above their posturing image the menu lay open for rifling.

  §

  “How the fuck did you know that?”

  “Edited a book for Pen Inc on leetspeak. ‘Elite’ to you, you piti­ful newbie. That’s enn-zero-zero-bee. The contractions are quite witty, actually, in a puerile sort—”

  “I’m sure they are, sweetie. Could you whack your cursor over to....” I stuck my finger on the screen, which deformed away from my fingernail. “Yep. Right, down and...PURDUE, as I expected.”

  Juliet opened the directory with a deft click, and four icons popped on to the screen. She opened the first, which was an image that loaded into some sort of graphics program. It was a rap sheet from the Seattle Police Department, dated 1989, scanned from paper presumably. I don’t think they’d computerized their files that long ago. The picture was not fetching but by God I looked a damned sight fresher-faced in those days, not to say gaunt and long-haired and as poetical as Emily Dickinson.

  “Darling! How charming!”

  I was embarrassed. “Close the bloody thing and get on with the search, Madame Sherlock.” Short of reaching over her shoulder and dashing the machine to death against the edge of her desk, which would be both rude and wasteful since it contained my only clues, I could only stand there and prevail upon my wife’s better angels. Fat chance. She scrolled down, sniggering.

  “Six foot two, well, I knew that, but good grief, Tom, a hundred and forty-two pounds? I have no idea what that is in real metric weights and measures, but—”

  “Sixty-five kilos, give or take. Americans didn’t use metric, still don’t. Better than the celebrated ninety-pound weakling, Juliet, you’ve got to give me that.”

  “The one who was always getting sand kicked in his face by the beach bully in the Charles...Charles what was it? Oh yes, Charles Atlas isometric projection ads.”

  “Not exactly,” I said. I looked away from the mug shots. “I ate a lot in prison.”

  “And built up those big arms,” she told me, batting her eyes. “My hero! While you were paying your debt to society or rather to the people of the State of Washington and of the United States for the shocking crime of—”

  “Jeez, give a man a break, willyuh?” I reached over her shoulder and instead of smashing the computer I hit the Back button, then clicked down to the next file.

  It was a list of the naughty goodies I had been smuggling into the USA, along with color photos of my right and left arms, then full and side shots of the way I’d been dressed when the Custom guys nobbled me.

  “You were a spindly fellow.”

  “I had a late growth spurt.”

  “Not inside these garments, I trust,” Juliet said, as her voice went up an octave or two. She clicked the mouse and the images doubled in size. By God I made an ugly girl. Even in flat heels and makeup, I looked like someone escaping from a circus of freaks. The silk blouse with its high neck, and long loose sleeves gathered tightly at the wrists to hide the contraband, the calf-length Mexican skirt in vivid hues hanging from my bony hips, the heavy bulges on my chest, the excruciatingly uncomfortable and smelly panty hose....

  “How did you disguise your manly voice, Marilyn?” Jules gasped, falling about in her chair. “Oh, officer, I’m sure there’s been a terrible mistake,” she squeaked in falsetto.

  “I coughed pitifully and pointed to my throat,” I said, “and of­fered them a Strepsil cold lozenge.”

  “Twenty six jingle-jangle hollow plastic bangles,” Juliet said ad­miringly. “Plugged with top grade super strength hash seeds from the bloody fields of Cambodia.”

  “Laos,” I said. “Sepon. They upped their output of cannabis sativa that year.”

  “Very attractive,” Juliet told me. “Bangles stretched from your skinny wrists to your bony elbows. Hey, and what’s this?” She was hoarse with laughter. “More reefer madness tucked into your natty padded bra.”

  “Shut up.”

  “And for this disgraceful impersonation and attempted viola­tion of your host nation’s righteous import prohibitions,” Juliet wheezed, slapping weakly at my reaching hands, “they sent you up to the big house, where I understand the principal currency is—”

  “Narcotics. Yeah, yeah, I was a dope,” I said, surly but starting to grin too, despite myself, at the bleak horrid absurdity of it all. “I was a stone criminal, man.”

  §

  After she got control of herself again, Juliet squeezed past me and let me into her chair. I sank into its padding, feeling the burn of a man who has made truly stupid mistakes for love. The bitter com­edy of a life ill-spent. It was supposed to be Patty who carried the premium dope seeds into Seattle, not me. But by the date of the run she was sick, tired to exhaustion, with what we thought was mono­nucleosis. Both of us knew with sweaty fright that the thugs who’d paid our mules’ fee would not look kindly upon us if we failed to get the stuff into the States. I was barely 21, and not what anyone would call worldly, despite my swagger. What could we do?

  Her passport got me through. They didn’t care that much, back in those innocent days.

  Innocent? Ignorant! If I’d known then that my nineteen-year-old wife was pregnant, and not only carrying our daughter but slowly be­ing eaten by carcinomas in her lymph glands, I’d have taken my chances with the drug-dealing bikers at the Croxton Bloodhouse. But you don’t know these things, how can you? So I blundered into prison on the eager nostrils of a hash puppy in SeaTac’s luggage carousel, attended by the raucous laughter and bruising thumps of the cops. I was dressed like a fool, on a fool’s mission. By the time I got out and they extradited me home at the Australian Embassy’s expense, my wife was two years from death. I didn’t know that, either, until I stepped off the plane, because she’d refused to tell me in her twice-weekly letters, the stupid, beloved bitch. Of course she couldn’t come to see me in the States because I’d been using her passport, which had been seized. And so I’d stayed in jail, of my own free will, pumping iron, eating protein and consolidating my bad boy education and contacts, for six fucking extra months. I could have been a good boy instead, God damn it to hell, and brown-nosed the system and gone home to nurse Patty and seen my daughter through her first years.

  “Careful,” Juliet said in a slightly alarmed tone. “You don’t want to smash the keyboard.”

  “I do, but I won’t.” I closed the PURDUE directory and started trawling through the rest of the directories, sampling files. We were silent for a time, with keys clicking.

  “Sorry,” Juliet said. “Patty. I know. I just never realized—” Through gritted teeth, I said on her behalf, in the new silence, “—how tawdry the whole fucking thing was.”

  I felt her hand touch my back softly, and a little jolt went through me. Equally softly she said, “No. You did it for love, you great lovable fool.”

  My throat felt swollen, suddenly. I cleared it. “Yeah, actually.”

  “Yeah, sweetie, I know. And shit happens.”

  I looked up at her. She was professorial in her reading glasses. I chose to be wry. “You’ve been studying philosophy with your brother.”

  Juliet threw her head back and laughed, that wonderful spon­taneous peal of hers. “Mauricio makes shit happen. Par example, your house. Do you have anywhere to sleep?”

  I shook my head, sighed. It came from deep inside me, and said more than I wanted it to. I shut down the machine, closed the lid, got out of her chair.

  “Let’s go for a swim, Jules. I need to stretch my legs. I’m turning into a wreck of a man. It’s been days since I’ve got to the gym.”

  “Okay. Williamstown beach sounds good to me. Listen.” She hesitated, switched off the office lights, closed th
e door. We made our way through the hot dimness of the foundry. “You can stay at my place for a couple of days if you need to.”

  “Jules, that’s not— Okay, thank you.”

  We went out into the brighter daylight, and I rolled the great door shut with one arm while holding the laptop in my left hand, and Juliet keyed the electronic lock. She blinked at me in the sun.

  “I trust you realize that—”

  I shrugged, tried to smile. “Yeah, yeah, Juliet, I realize. A fuck’s entirely out of the question.”

  My wife grinned up at me and took my arm in hers, companion­ably, and we went through the chain link gate to admire the paint job on the Cobra.

  The phone was playing an Abba medley in the glove box. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

  “It’s your brother’s cell phone.”

  “What are you doing with Mauricio’s phone? Won’t he be rather...cross?”

  “Long story. Here’s my plan. You pick up your bikini, I’ll saun­ter about the sand in my Speedos, we’ll catch the day’s last rays and then have a bite to eat at Pelicans Landing. Then back to John Street and you get your beauty sleep in perfect celibacy and I wrestle with the laptop.”

  The phone stopped ringing. Juliet opened the door of her Hold­en ute and hopped in. The interior was clean as a hound’s tooth, no food wrappers, no Dr. Pepper cans rolling under foot, no half empty McDonald’s Styrofoam packages. Certainly no evil poly­urethane Esky of the kind hidden in the back of my Cobra. That’s the kind of human my wife is. Pure in mind and body. Damn it. “No need for swimsuits,” she said, starting the motor. “There’s a nude beach at the top end of the Strand now. Free Willie, the wags call it.” She grinned. “You really have had your head down.”