The Knife Sharpener (20)

20.

That name, Rudiger Otwey, hung between them. Doused the interior of the Toyota panel van in silence. Conway Twitty on cassette turned right down. More a distant warbling than actual sonic presence. The cars around them droned. There was some frost in the air. The night was arctic wind cold Melbourne in July. Frost flittered in street halogen lights.

While he drove, calm returned to him through the filters of his Champion cigarettes. Helmut played out the options

He could get rid of her. But they would still find him. A number plate is not that hard to trace. A lot of eyes for the right price. What then? What good was he besides being a source of information. Too much of information for his and any other’s own good.

If she was with him, though. There were options. Some distasteful. Some not. Helmut’s pragmatism weighed them out. Trying to find his way back to sound and mostly safe routine. Driving. Sharpening.

Rudiger made it complicated. His child.

Helmut glanced at Nichola. She was still. Knife in her grip. Slowly rotating it. Looking for some clue. Some guide to its use. Its future.

            They steered deeper into Chadstone City. Closer to the centre, the stores became more crowded. The apartment complexes weren’t built here. Shadowed the lowly inner quarter. People walked closely. Hands on pockets and phones. Checked down alleys. Especially at this time of night. Shopkeepers watched warily from behind counters. Signs of degradation in stripped paint and crudely hung signs. A leather tanning aroma and sun beds with little ladies ready to manicure. Pharmacy warehouses with security handling tasers. Rundown groceries. Microwaved fish and boiled broccoli. Busy dumpling restaurants. And brightly lit pubs spruiking parma nights and pokies. The motoboys were less prevalent. Most of them stopping to eat bowls of noodles. Cheap curry. Souvlakis with garlic sauce dripping down their chests.

            The spotlights still blazed into the air near the white walls of the original Chadstone. Helmut could see fairies drawn to the light flittering up there. They crawled from their day hibernation in the alleys and took to the air. Screeching and cursing. Exterminators were only hired to handle them near the residences on the outskirts. Here, people dealt with the racket. The gravel throwing. The gnawing at structural supports. The crude giggling. They set clever traps filled with sugar and spring-loaded hammers.

            Helmut felt a pang of hunger and thirst. He was way past his usual dining time. Messer would be mewling and complaining at his flat. The pilsners in his fridge would be icy delicious. The news already over. Books unread. Bed still made.

            The van rolled into the parking lot of a pub. The Chaddy Tavern.

            ‘Are we stopping here?’ asked Nichola.

            ‘Yes,’ said Helmut. ‘I’m hungry.’

            ‘Pasta night,’ said Nichola, pointing to a large sign running through the nightly specials.

            Helmut parked the van and exited. Threw away his finished cigarette. Nichola followed him. Tucking the knife under her arm.

            ‘I need a sheath,’ she said.

            Helmut paused. Turned and yanked open the rear door. Reached in and pulled out an old, empty chef’s knife bag.

            ‘There,’ he said. Handed it to her.

            ‘Cheers,’ she said. Tucked the knife into the bag. Rolled it up.

He wasn’t sure if Nichola knew what kind of trouble she was in. If the knife had driven those people in the Church to instant coffee and blood cult devotion … Helmut knew there were others in Melbourne quicker to the trigger over less. Word would get out. It always did. Through loose lips. Maybe the lookouts – if Oscar hadn’t disposed of them. Or the Church itself. They were not the types to do the work of tracking. Easier to contract it out.

Either way, Helmut knew that the knife’s story would gather its own excesses. He doubted the veracity of someone like Oscar de Valle to control the narrative. Keep their artefact tied to the Church of Violentiam Movetur Sidus. Melbournians loved a rumour.  Loved making it theirs. All that status. Keeping to the Australian dream. Ownership.

And, when they found out that it was Rudiger Otwey’s girl who committed the crime. The focus of the manhunt. It didn’t matter whether they were Ministry, Waste gang runner, semi-cognizant northside Delinquent with reverb in their veins, or any other monster craving celebrity, they would come hard. Revenge and fury. Make a statement. The city hadn’t forgotten how many sides Rudiger had played. His savagery. His speeches. His cricket bat and words in cruel concert. The trail of bloody suppression and rebellion he laid.

It didn’t matter Nichola wasn’t him. Rudiger had never cared either way when it came to his own missions. His sense of importance. Always put it simply: the only truth, is the one which protects us; all means to reach this truth, justify their ends. Long, twisted speeches on the topic to families innocent of their fathers or mothers apparent crimes.

They entered the pub. A light bustle. Smoked bacon, cream, and yeast. Age old smell of cigarette ash. TVs in every corner switched to muted talking heads discussing footy and politics. Bells and whistles from the pokies out the back. An empty stage used for trivia, cover bands, and storytellers. Mostly middle-aged patrons. Raggedly dressed. In groups around bowls of cheap carbonara with pints frothing in front of them. They paid the two new arrivals no mind as they donned orange stackhats from the community bin and went to the bar.

            Ordered a couple of bowls of pasta. A pint of Carlton Draught for Helmut. A pint of cider for Nichola. Went to a table in the corner with their number and waited.

            ‘He’s not that bad,’ said Nichola. ‘My dad.’

            Helmut sipped at his beer.

            ‘He only wants what’s best.’

            ‘I heard,’ said Helmut.

            ‘I guess his philosophies were always pretty well known.’

            Helmut played with his napkin wrapped cutlery.

            ‘But he was really quite a good dad, you know? Always there for me when he could be. Loving. Compassionate. Everything a daughter could ask for. Even showed me a few things. Like how to defend myself. I mean, who better to learn from?’

            ‘Not many I’ve heard of.’

            ‘Exactly. And as I got older, he never forced me, you know, to see things like he did. To act as he did. Not that I didn’t know who he was. What he was doing. He was all over the news and Medias. You couldn’t hide from the exploits of Rudiger Otwey. Ministry or otherwise. Hero, villain, icon. I don’t even know. And, despite all that, he was still there for me. Raised me,’ said Nichola. She picked up her cider then placed it down. ‘It was just he had this completely compulsive need for action, always competing with his conflicting responsibilities. To his missions. To his own complicated sense of moral duty. To me. He was always trying to figure out where to head next. Where to focus his energies.’

            Helmut stared and listened. Keeping to his comfortable quiet. Not sure if she was even talking to him directly anymore. Sounding rehearsed. A stream of dialogue direct from her long-mused thoughts.

            ‘He was always arguing with himself. Writing. Burning what he wrote. Asking himself whether he believed himself anymore. Examining the nature of the facts he had always held as inarguably true. And the ones he ignored. All of them tenuously slipping into a kind of relief. Never quite knowing where to turn. He was too clever. Too analytical. Thinking himself down every winding road to another fork, then having the dilemma of choosing where to go next. I was the only stable thing he had.’ Nichola sipped and laughed. ‘He’d hide the bruises on his knuckles from me, as if I was too naïve to notice. Put the blood-stained rags he used to clean his cricket bat straight in the wash. But he’d never turn it on. I always found them. Ran them through the machine. He had this ridiculous hiding spot for the bat, too. Stashed behind the vacuum cleaner in the hallway cupboard. It would fall out anytime anyone walked past it too heavy. I acted like I never saw it. He’d put it back.’

            ‘He is your father. He cared,’ said Helmut. He mulled and drank off half his pint.

            ‘He is. He does. I think. And he tried to hide the, I guess you’d say, “distressing” things from me. At times, literally. The problem, though, is that he couldn’t hide himself from me. Stash his whole, like, being in a cupboard. Dad is everything he is made out to be. Maybe, more.’

            ‘Yes,’ said Helmut.

            ‘He told me about the knife right before the Ministry got him. He told me, “This world is unfair, Nicky. Always tilting one way. Few can feel the vertigo. Even with the floor about to drop out from under us. And those who do feel the displacement, they are the ones who should be least concerned about any question of fairness. They’re on the right side of the see-saw, so to speak. High up. Keeping watch. Weightless at the expense of someone else.”’ She sipped her cider. ‘Cryptic, fuck. But this knife, I think, is the balancer. His ridiculous metaphorical see-saw’s pivot point. I just have no idea how.’

            ‘I heard nothing about Rudiger getting arrested,’ said Helmut.

            ‘No one did. He’d been quiet the last few years. In hiding. Looking into that Church and this knife, I think,’ said Nichola. ‘The Ministry found him, though. They’ve been looking since he defected. He must’ve been clumsy. Or someone gave him away. Anyway, he called me when they were coming for him. Told me to find the “knife” and to “watch the Church on Chapel.” Gave me his little speech about fairness. Then the line cut out.’

            ‘Mmmm,’ said Helmut. He looked around for their pasta. Three motoboys entered the pub. A storyteller mounted the stage. He was robust. Dressed in too tight black jeans and a sleeveless leather jacket. Artisan beard with beads. Sipping at a red wine.

            ‘I need to find him, Helmut. When I went to his hiding spot – the Ministry left nothing but scraps of paper. I couldn’t make sense of them. There was only the address of the Church. Some crude pictures of the knife. No history. Nothing. But … his voice when he called – desperate. Like I said, he never dragged me into anything.’

            The storyteller cleared his voice on the stage. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Chaddy Tavern. I am Calvary Ndjima. Tonight, let me take you to the foreboding east of our city before they were riven by the Wastes …’

            Helmut leaned over to Nichola. ‘Do you know anyone in Ministry?’

            ‘No,’ said Nichola.

            ‘… and tell the tragic love story at the heart of the infamous Ringwood Toll Booth War …’

            ‘How do you plan to find him?’ asked Helmut.

            ‘Maybe, break into New Parliament?’ asked Nichola.

            ‘No,’ said Helmut. ‘I have sharpened there. Too hard.’

            ‘How, then?’

            Helmut reached a conclusion. Best to stick and work together. He didn’t know when the Church would catch up with them. Or how. Aiding might expediate an eventual escape. If there was nothing he had to help or hinder, no knife or Nichola, he had no value anymore.

‘Maybe, Geoff,’ said Helmut. He pulled his cracked Samsung flip phone from his pocket.

            ‘Who?’

            ‘Geoff, private chef,’ said Helmut. He began a text to Geoff: You around? Need to –

            ‘… it all began with a simple misunderstanding between the great clans of the Maroondah Highway …’

            The three motoboys fell into the seats either side of Helmut and Nichola. They dropped two oversize bowls of carbonara in front of them.

            ‘Eat up,’ said one of them. The largest, whose eyes were covered by his helmet visor.

            Nichola went to rise. The other two motoboys reached over and pushed her down.

            ‘Nah, nah, not so fast, Nicky. I wanna hear this. One of me favourites tales, see.’ The big motoboy looked off to the storyteller. Settled in. ‘So ya got some time to munch. Then we’re off to see ol’ Chance who’s curious about who youse gone and pissed off.’