Peter Corris - Aftershock

‘OK now?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Gina’s brothers would kill you if they found out-what?’

He smoked and drank some more coffee before replying. I took a sip myself. The milk had been just about to turn. I sipped again. It had turned. I put the mug down. Roper didn’t seem to notice. He sucked down coffee and smoke as if they’d give him the courage he wanted. Maybe they did. When he’d almost finished the coffee he sniffed and said, ‘They’d kill me if they found out that Oscar Bach raped Gina and I didn’t do anything about it.’

Once he started talking it was easy to keep him at it. All he needed was a little prompting from time to time. He told me that he’d begun working for Oscar Bach on a casual basis about a year before. He didn’t much care for his boss but he liked the work. To him, poking around under buildings was interesting. He was a bit of a snoop, he admitted, and also a hoarder. He found things-coins, tools, bits of machinery- and kept them. Sometimes he cleaned and mended these items and sold them.

‘I made a bit of extra money that way’

‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

Gina Costi answered the telephone at Bach’s house for a couple of hours each week and typed out his invoices. He handled all the money himself. It wasn’t much of a job for Gina but she was an unqualified high school dropout and she was glad of it. Roper hinted that Gina didn’t always use Bach’s phone for business purposes. She called her friends, made enquiries for other jobs, tried to win prizes on the radio. Harmless stuff. Roper looked a bit shifty at this point. He was on his sixth or seventh cigarette and second cup of coffee.

‘What else?’ I said.

‘Want a beer?’

‘No. Go on. You’ll feel better when you’ve said it all.’

‘Well, that’s how I met Gina. I used to go to Mr Bach’s house sometimes to get the details on jobs and that? And she’d be there sometimes. Sometimes I went around to pick up chemicals and stuff.’

I was getting the picture. Sometimes they made love, on Oscar Bach’s time and in his bed. I recalled the dark little cottage and thought how it must have been-hasty, furtive, afraid the phone would ring or Bach would return. Still, there was no telling. It might’ve been exciting. Roper seemed to think so. He butted a cigarette with new resolution and got up to open the fridge. I didn’t try to stop him. There’s a time in every story for beer and this was it. He took out two cans of Foster’s and looked up at me enquiringly. I was still standing which seemed ridiculous now. He needed to talk. I nodded, took the can and sat down at the table. We popped the cans.

‘I’ll show you a picture of Gina.’ He almost ran out of the kitchen into the next room and I could hear him opening and closing drawers. When he came back he handed me a large colour photograph, the kind they take in restaurants. It showed three people sitting around a table with wine bottles and glasses and plates-Roper, looking uncomfortable in shirt and tie, another dark young man with hooded, intense eyes and a teenage girl-fluffed up dark curly hair, round face, big eyes, as stupid looking as a sheep.

‘Me and Gina and Ronny’ Roper said.

I nodded and returned the picture. ‘You and Gina went to bed in Bach’s house,’ I said. ‘One day he came home and caught you.’

He had the can almost to his mouth. He was about to drink, wanted badly to drink, but he stopped. ‘How d’you know?’ The fear in his voice was like electronic distortion; the sounds trembled and warped. ‘How d’you know?’

‘Drink up, son,’ I said. ‘It’s an old, old story. You’re not the first young dickhead it’s happened to and you won’t be the last. Bach caught you. What happened then?’

Roper drank some beer and put the can down. It rattled as it touched the table. ‘He… he said he would tell Gina’s brothers unless she let him do it to her, too. He said he’d tell them he caught me raping her. But it was him! He raped her! She didn’t want him to do it, she fought him. She hated it. I was so scared I just stood there.’

Foster’s isn’t my favourite beer and right then the mouthful I took didn’t taste of anything. I swallowed it just to be doing something. Roper’s head slumped forward and he banged it on the table three times, hard.

‘I just stood there,’ he sobbed. ‘I just stood there.’

What was there to say? A hero would’ve stopped Bach, a villain would’ve helped him. Like most of us, Mark Roper was something in between and paying the price for it. Guilt and remorse. Heroes and villains don’t have to worry about either. I reached over and patted his heaving shoulders.

‘Take it easy, son. Is the girl all right?’

His lowered head bobbed and he snuffled. ‘Yes. But she doesn’t see me anymore. And her brothers…’

‘Tell me about them.’

He lifted his head and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his overall. The close-set eyes made him look almost defective and the snuffling didn’t help. I decided he was younger than I’d at first thought-nineteen, tops. He drank some beer and got another cigarette going. ‘Gina’s got three brothers, all older than her.’

‘How old’s she?’

He dragged in smoke and sniffed. “Bout sixteen.’

Great. Say he’s stretching it by a year. That put her underage at the time he was screwing her. Still, this is the nineties. I said, ‘Go on about the brothers.’

‘Mario, Bruno and Ronny.’

‘Ronny? The guy in the photo.’

‘Yeah. Renato, but he’s called Ronny. He’s the youngest and the toughest. He’s crazy. He’s a bikie and if he found out…’

‘Don’t get into that again. They haven’t found out so far, why should they now?’

‘ You’ve found out.’

‘That’s my job. What do these blokes do? Locals, are they?’

He nodded. ‘Kahiba. Their father did real well around there after the war, bought a lot of land and built houses and stuff. Shops, you know. Mario had his own real estate business and Bruno works for his father. Ronny doesn’t do anything much except bludge money off Mr Costi and scare people.’

I’d finished the beer and I took out my notebook and starting jotting down names just to give him some confidence. I got addresses for Mario and Bruno; Gina and Ronny lived at home, so I got an address for Costi senior as well. ‘Why did you say Mario had his own business? What went wrong?’

‘Nothing went wrong. He got hurt in the earthquake. They found him wandering around Hamilton. He got hit by a sign or something. He was in a coma for a long time. I think he still is. I’m not worried about him, or Bruno. Bruno’s a bit of a wimp, just does what his father tells him. It’s Ronny, really’

He looked at me as if he was seeing me for the first time. Something like hope appeared in his puckered face. ‘Maybe you could go and talk to Ronny. See if he knows anything. I’m scared stiff that he’s just waiting for the right time to get me.’

I put the notebook away. ‘I might have to talk to him. I can’t tell yet. If I do, I’ll let you know what I think.’

‘You won’t tell him, will you?’

‘I can’t see why I would.’ I tried to say it as firmly as possible, but this was very shaky ground. I’d found out something about Oscar Bach that my employer wouldn’t want to hear. Always tricky. But Roper’s statements would need corroboration and Gina Costi was the only other possible source. Even trickier. One thing I was sure of, Mark Roper was no kind of a suspect. I fished out the two keys I’d found in Bach’s leather jacket and showed them to him. ‘Recognise these?’

He fingered them briefly. ‘That’s the key to the van. Are you going to take it? Is Mr Jacobs going to stop me from…’