The Undertow Read online

  Another name I had a question mark beside was Pixie Padrone. I was still curious about what had happened to the alleged fee for the hit. I added a question mark beside the twenty grand. Wain had said that Pixie was on the street, meaning that she was in the lower echelon of sex workers—the least paid, the most exploited, the most vulnerable. In that shadowy world people disappear, change their names, change their sex and are hard to track.

  I had a source of information though—Ruby Gentle is the proprietor of the House of Ruby, a massage parlour and relaxation centre in Kings Cross. I’d located her lost daughter some years back, got a protection racketeer off her back, and we’ve remained on friendly terms. I hadn’t seen her since I’d left Darlinghurst for Newtown, but this was definitely the time to renew the acquaintance.

  The House of Ruby is open twenty-four hours a day and Ruby herself is in attendance until the early hours in a supervisory and occasionally participatory capacity. It was mid-afternoon on a Friday and I knew she’d be there.

  I hit the buzzer beside the gate in Darlinghurst Road and the voice spoke softly just above my right ear.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘You can tell Ruby that Cliff Hardy is here to see her, thank you.’

  After a few minutes the gate swung open and I went through the scrap of garden to the front door, which clicked open as I approached. The woman behind the desk was typical of Ruby’s receptionists—thirty plus, smartly turned out, expertly made up and with a pleasant voice and manner. ‘She said to go upstairs, Mr Hardy, and that you know your way.’

  ‘I do, thanks.’

  Your two-storey Victorian terraces all follow much the same pattern on the upper level, with a large room in front, usually with a balcony, and other smaller rooms off a corridor going towards the back. The design is ideal for a brothel and a good many of them have served that purpose. Ruby, naturally, occupied the front room where she’d installed an ensuite and partitioned off a cubbyhole for her office. The remaining space isn’t subtle in decor—a big four-poster bed with silk and satin trappings, two padded, velvet covered chairs, a wall mirror, a cabinet for professional equipment and a television with VCR and DVD players.

  The door was standing open and I walked in. Ruby rose from a chair and sailed towards me like a galleon in a strong wind. She stands close to 180 centimetres in her stilettos and weighs close to 100 kilos. Wrapped in flowing draperies—‘Rubensesque’ is how she describes herself— that description about does it. She has black hair, pale skin and heavy, handsome features all owing a great deal to art.

  ‘Cliff, darling,’ she said as we embraced. ‘I’ve longed for this day.’

  ‘Come off it, Rube.’ I slapped her ample rump. ‘This is a business call.’

  She laughed. ‘What else, you old bastard. There was a time when I thought you might take off your trench coat and have a little fun.’

  ‘I’ve never worn a trench coat in my life, and just now I’m having all the fun I need, thanks very much.’

  ‘Amateurs,’ she said as she subsided into a chair. ‘Okay, waste some of my time.’

  I sat and felt the soft padding ooze around me. I could almost sense the many gentlemen’s trousers that had been draped over the chair.

  ‘I’m looking for a working girl, Rube, but my last piece of information goes back over twenty years.’

  While she’s no saint and has played very rough in her time, Ruby has genuine concern for the people she employs and others in the sex business. She shook her head sadly.

  ‘Not many survive that long, mate.’

  ‘I know it’s a long shot. This woman’s name was Pixie Padrone. I thought you—’ Ruby sat bolt upright, her upholstered breasts heaving.

  ‘Pixie, that bitch!’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘I should. She was on the street like you say, a real lowlife. Asked me for a spot but she was a hopeless junkie and she’d had more claps than a symphony orchestra. Then all of a sudden she’s cleaned up her act. She’s off the shit and working out of a flash flat in Point Piper. She took away some of my business for a while and didn’t she rub my nose in it.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Like you say, at least twenty years ago.’

  ‘I mean specifically.’

  ‘Shit, Cliff, it’s a long time ago.’

  ‘I’m talking about 1983.’

  She thought, then shook her head. ‘No, must’ve been a year or so later. I was in Enzed for most of eighty-three— avoiding a couple of warrants. I put in a manager here.’

  ‘You didn’t know her brother killed a doctor in Darlinghurst?’

  ‘I might’ve heard something about it when I got back, but I didn’t pay it much attention. There was a lot going on thereabouts, what with the AIDS thing hitting and all that.’

  ‘When you say she’d cleaned up her act, what d’you mean exactly, Rube?’

  ‘Jesus, you’re really into exactly and specifically and precisely, aren’t you?’

  ‘’fraid so, it’s like that.’

  ‘I mean that she must’ve gone to some detox place and got herself cleaned out. Takes time and money, that. Plus, she’d had her teeth fixed, boob job, the works.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. She took off somewhere with her pimp.

  Funny, you saying her brother killed a doctor. Pixie’s bloke was supposed to be a doctor. Probably an abortionist.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Can’t remember. Adolf, Boris—something German like.’

  9

  I pressed Ruby for more information about Pixie Padrone but she’d run dry. According to her, Pixie vanished from the Sydney sex scene ‘sometime around when Australia won the America’s Cup’, which was as close as she could pin it down.

  ‘That was a boom time, if you like,’ she said. ‘I wish they’d bung on stuff like that permanently.’

  She said she’d ask around about Pixie, but she didn’t hold out much hope.

  ‘She must have had parents, family of some kind apart from her brother?’

  ‘If Pixie had parents,’ Ruby said, ‘they probably kicked her out before she got her first period. She was a grade one troublemaking bitch.’

  In a perverse way, that was a ringing endorsement from Ruby, who has a low opinion of humankind in general, and women in particular. For Pixie to be worthy of such an assessment, she had to be a person of some force. I thanked Ruby and promised to introduce her after I’d told her about Lily.

  ‘I need someone to write my autobiography, Cliff,’ Ruby said. ‘Journalists do that sort of thing, don’t they?’

  ‘They do. Not sure Lily would. She’s more on the financial side.’

  ‘Shit, you think I’m not financial? I get all sorts of tips from the market high-flyers and do bloody well out of them. Your girlfriend’d be surprised about the financial stuff that goes on here, and the money side of this business.’

  ‘I’ll talk to her,’ I said. ‘What about dinner at the Bourbon and Beefsteak? On me?’

  ‘You’re on. I could go a chateaubriand. Make it a night early in the week.’

  My day’s work had given me plenty to think about— connections that could be important, possible survivors to seek out, questions needing answers. I drove to my office in Newtown to do the thinking and the computer work if that seemed likely to be helpful. The office is two floors up in a building at the non-trendy end of King Street. The creeping gentrification that has transformed Newtown seems to have stalled at the moment, but no doubt it’ll get on the move again, like the cane toad up north.

  Before going to the office I collected my mail from the post office box and, as usual, was able to dispose of a good deal of it in a street bin. The bills were accumulating as they do, but there was a decent cheque as well to help things along. Bpay had taken some of the nuisance and expense out of paying accounts, but the equation was just the same. What was coming in versus what was going out. So far this y
ear, with about a third of it gone, I was holding my own. That was good going, because summer and spring are bad for business generally. Things pick up in winter when people tend to have darker, more suspicious thoughts.

  The office is conducive to thinking—spartan, functional, with the coffee maker as the only comfort item since the bar fridge went on the blink. I booted up the computer and wrote down as many of the words spoken by all parties in the interviews as I could remember. This is a new technique for me, as advised by Lily. She says that exact, direct quotes can sometimes get you to the heart of the matter. Hasn’t happened yet, but it might. For Lil, the words on the screen are totally real. Me, I need to print things out to get the feel.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon going over what I’d written together with Frank’s extensive notes, trying to piece things together. If Dr Karl Lubeck was associated with Rafael Padrone’s sister, then the removal of his medical file was unlikely to be an accident—incidental to the removal of incriminating material—as Roma Brown had thought. If Pixie Padrone had pulled herself out of addiction through expensive detoxification treatment and had had some bodywork, again expensive, that suggested she’d got her hands on some money. Maybe some of her brother’s twenty thousand?

  But what light, if any, did this throw on the possibility of Gregory Heysen being innocent of conspiracy to murder Peter Bellamy? My one thought to date was that Heysen could have been framed as a consequence of something going wrong in the clandestine makeover racket. Not easy to investigate, let alone prove. But there was another connection, confirming Ruby’s linking of Pixie with someone with a German name said to be a doctor and, therefore, possibly Lubeck—plastic surgery.

  It felt like progress, but of a very cobwebbed kind, not something to report back to Frank on. I checked on the America’s Cup victory—1983—with Hawkie calling any employer who’d docked a worker’s wages for taking a day off ‘a bum’. Hawke and Bond, two fallen heroes. Give or take a bit, that date fitted in with Karl Lubeck, having dropped Roma Brown, operating as Pixie Padrone’s pimp. And it firmed up the likelihood that she had got her hands on a useful sum of money for her rehabilitation.

  Not wanting to get distracted from the Heysen matter, I’d left checking my email until I got home. The rain had stopped but I wasn’t in the mood to deal with the fallen branch, and aluminium ladders don’t rust. I made myself a gin and tonic and hit the keys. There was a scattering of spam as usual—offers to lengthen my penis, harden it and make it more responsive. Delete, delete, delete, though the day may come.

  My accountant wanted me to send in my quarterly tax stuff, and my annual dues for the Balmain Rugby League Club, my one such membership, were overdue. The only message of interest was from my daughter, Megan, who was on a cruise ship in the Pacific providing nightly entertainment in the form of a two-hander song and dance show. Her partner was one Daniel Wilson-Fox and they were apparently an item:

  Hi Cliff. Danny and I are wowing ’em here on the boat. It’s a good gig and we’re saving money. Did you know that old women dye their hair blue because it looks yellow to them because their eyesight is shot? Thought that might be helpful professionally.

  Love

  Megan

  I couldn’t see how, but it was nice to get the message. I sent a quick reply and felt glad that Megan had life by the scruff. I’d been lucky; all her major troubles happened before I even knew she existed. And ever since I’d helped her out of the aftermath of them we’d got on well. That returned me to thoughts of William Heysen, who may or may not have been Frank Parker’s son, and who I was supposed to find. Hadn’t put in any time on that as yet.

  I went up to the Toxteth Hotel for a meal, a few drinks and a couple of games of pool. I teamed up with Daphne Rowley, a regular, and we held the table for a while against a succession of young bloods. Always a good feeling.

  On Saturday morning I got up early and bought the papers, skimmed them, and went to the gym. I sometimes get good ideas on the treadmill where the activity is so boring the brain is forced to make a contribution to help the time pass. I set it at the moderate pace for the first ten minutes and then lifted it for the next twenty. The machine is set to stop after thirty minutes to prevent people from hogging it, simulating a City to Surf run. I built the grade up gradually but not too far, out of consideration for my hamstrings.

  An aerobics class was going on in an adjoining room with the appropriate music pumping out at high decibels. Preferable to the inane commercial radio station that occasionally pollutes the air until someone complains. I blank the music out and concentrate on finding a rhythm. I broke into a light sweat, which is about the time the ideas come. It’s nothing to do with endorphins because by then I’m feeling the pain.

  I ran the case over in my mind, recalling the conversations as I’d written them up and the connections and associations. I sweated, but nothing came except the renewed conviction that Pixie Padrone and Karl Lubeck felt like the keys to the whole affair. Neither of them was old. To judge by Roma Brown’s account, Lubeck was in good health, and when last heard of Pixie was in the pink. They should both still be alive, but where? With sweat running into my eyes I looked up at the bank of television sets I usually ignore. One was tuned to CNN and George W Bush was stumbling through a speech. I hoped to hell they hadn’t gone to America.

  I got home with that depressing thought in mind but my mood lifted immediately when I found that Lil was back. We had a shower together and went to bed for the afternoon—sex, sleep, more sex and more sleep. Come evening and we went to the Taste of India in Glebe Point Road for dinner. A pleasant stroll, well rugged up against the cool night air, wine from the Ancient Briton across the road, Glebe at its best.

  The waiters know us and know we don’t like fuss and dislike having our wine poured for us. We were both hungry and ate steadily for a while before talking about our work. I filled Lily in on what I’d done and how things looked.

  ‘Early days,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, but the longer it takes the more it costs Frank.’

  ‘He can afford it, can’t he?’

  ‘I suppose so, but he had to conceal it from Hilde, which he hates doing, and I feel the same. Anyway, that’s me. How’s the MFP?’

  She snapped a pappadum in half. ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘Worse. I’ll be battling to get any juice into it.’

  ‘You will.’

  We ate and drank a bit more and I was thinking about asking for our second bottle—we were walking home, after all—when Lily said, ‘I’ve been considering what you’ve told me, Cliff. I know you, you’re a bit stymied, right?’

  I told her about the treadmill session, making a joke of it.

  ‘Masochist,’ she said, putting her fork down. ‘But it sounds as though this Lubeck could be a plastic surgeon, right?’

  ‘Could be, but probably a fly-by-nighter.’

  ‘Exactly. I did a piece on dodgy plastic surgeons a year or so ago. Before I met you.’

  ‘I wonder that you could have any memory of such a desolate time in your life.’

  ‘Piss off. This bloke was full bottle on that scene. He’s a real sleaze. I could hardly bear to talk to him and the thought of him touching me made my skin crawl. But if your bloke’s working in that area anywhere in Australia, Norman Belfrage will know about him.’

  ‘Doctor Belfrage?’

  Lil picked up her fork. ‘Was once,’ she said. ‘Don’t open the other bottle, Cliff. I have to work tomorrow.’

  10

  Lil spent Sunday on the computer and the phone. I went for a long morning walk through Glebe and Annandale and rewarded myself with a beer at the Toxteth. I flicked through the papers without reading anything of interest and did a couple of crosswords, trying to tell myself this was valuable down time, restorative. I wasn’t convinced; I wanted to be up and running.

  Around 7 pm I took a glass of wine up to Lil and told her I was putting together one of my cul
inary specialities— a mixed grill.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll be down in a few minutes. Don’t burn the bangers.’

  Over the meal she told me she’d contacted the man she called Nasty Norman and that he’d agreed to meet me.

  ‘For a consideration, I assume?’

  ‘Right. I got him down to five hundred dollars for an hour, plus a bottle of brandy.’

  ‘Thanks, Lil. When?’

  ‘Tomorrow, eleven o’clock, at the Newport Workers Club. He’s a ratty little number with a bad comb-over. He’s got emphysema but he’ll be smoking. Sometimes it takes him five minutes to get enough breath for a sentence.’

  ‘Sounds lovely. Good way to start the week.’

  ‘At least you’ll be out and about. I’ll still be trying to pump some life into this turkey of a story.’

  I poured us both some more wine and used the bit of sausage I’d kept aside to mop up the Rosella. ‘Do you have a copy of the piece you wrote on dicey plastic surgery?’

  ‘It’s on the thumb drive. I’ll print you a copy. The subs butchered it, of course. Won’t tell you much.’

  ‘Anything’ll be a lot compared to what I know now.’

  Lil went back to work. Before starting she printed out her article. I stacked the dishes—very few from a minimalist cook like me—and settled down with the article and the last of the red we’d had with dinner. If Lil was having difficulty getting the MFP story up and running, she’d had no trouble with this one. She captured the rapacious, unscrupulous character of the doctors who did plastic surgery on the cheap and without proper referrals or investigation of the backgrounds of their ‘clients’.

  Their usual habit was to get people going under the knife to sign waivers exempting the surgeons from responsibility for outcomes. It was amazing how many desperate people –some young and seeking to change their fortunes, some older, trying to recapture their youth—were prepared to do this. Lil implied that some of the surgery was to change appearance to avoid arrest, or re-arrest. No names, no pack drill, but at least one of the dodgy doctors had been tied in with a passport-forging enterprise that had gone wrong and put all parties behind bars. The doctor in question, who carried the nickname ‘the cutter’, had received the lightest sentence for his cooperation with the authorities, but he hadn’t survived six months inside the gaol.