Harboil: Part II

The thing is: if you stand here long enough you’ll eventually be cordoned off.

There’s a private investigator, Jason Lemon, sleeping beneath his desk in a basement-level work/live apartment. He has been going through one of his bouts of paranoia and this is the first rest he has had in four days. He spent most of last night in his underwear, standing guard in the middle of his kitchen, baseball-stance, wielding a table leg, expecting any number of people, for any number of reasons, to kick down his front door and cut him in to a specific number of pieces. In the vegetable tray of his fridge, he keeps a list of the names and motivations of the people who might want to kill him. It’s not a ring binder – it’s a dossier.

Jason rents his apartment from Gill “The Beak” – a Norse warrior with a grand, broken nose and a city-wide investment portfolio. Jason has been watching Gill’s mistress, for which he receives a hefty reduction to his rent. Gill’s mistress, Isobel, is extravagantly faithful. Jason has watched her for days at a time. She often reads Russian novels in the park. Gill is a very anxious man. He does not read books at all.

He has every private investigator in the city following Isobel. Sometimes, if Isobel looks over her shoulder, four or five private dicks have to pretend to do up their shoelaces at the same time.

One time, a drunk man sat down beside her on a park bench and put his arm round her. All at once, sniper fire hissed from across the park, three different investigators: one shot from the roof of the tennis club, one from a tree house and one from a pedalo on the lake.

The drunk slumped to the ground – a hole in his forehead like a bindi, a hole in his throat like a tracheotomy and a space where his left eye used to be.

Gill Frisson’s wife, Moira Cifuentes, is a talented jewellery maker. She sells necklaces made from girls’ diary keys, brooches made from fragments of urns and stolen diamond rings that have the name of the previous owner inscribed on the inside.

There’s a certain set, in West Bay, who have taken to paying a great deal of money for Cifuentes’ jewellery. This group of people are almost unknown to the rest of Harboil. Taxi drivers have shared silences with them. Tailors have taken on their unusual requests.

When Jason Lemon’s off-duty, he likes to follow his interests. He is a naturally inquisitive man. This has lead him, on more than one occasion, to the roof of a mansion house in the blue forest, gazing through one of the many skylights, his penis in his hand, watching Harboil’s avant-garde set, the tallest citizens, dressed up like Nosferatu at the opera, as they drift from room to room, cocaine in a spiral on the grand piano, Moira Cifuentes in only a girdle, a deer hanging in the kitchen, blood in a bucket and seven-inch swing records, like “Jump in the line” by Harry Belafonte.

~

Jason Lemon

There is a man – more likely a group of men. One standing beneath my window, one in my garden, one on my roof, one making spooky noises with an electric keyboard. One man has an accordion that sounds like the wind and also a cat in a bag. One man has got a car that he is driving in menacingly unpredictable laps. One man is laughing like a drunk. One man is on the roof, sat totally still, waiting for ‘the word’.

They are not going to kill me – they just want to make me nervous.

I have got to be at the Coal Cellar tonight. Isobel’s performing and Gill wants me to watch the crowd to see who she’s making eyes at. This is, in itself, a problem: Isobel’s eyes, I mean. I defy any man to see her perform and not come away thinking that they’ve got a one in four shot.

But I’ve camped out in her walk-in wardrobe. After her show, she pours herself a cranberry juice. She drinks it standing up. There is the sound of married men calling her name from the stage door. She reads a Russian book.

Isobel has hair the colour of cinema reels. She has a body like the woman on the front of a Rolls Royce. She’s pale as a corpse but not in a bad way.

When she performs, I always make sure to get a table right at the front. You’d think that, up close, you might be able to make out a hint of duplicity at the corners of the eyes, a wince in the smile, a pearl of sweat. But nothing. Isobel's a ghost in a mirror.

Jack Orange, another P.I., has got himself a gig where he operates Isobel’s spotlight. I get a feel for the rhythm of her movements, he says. I know what she is thinking before she thinks it, he says.

So I asked him, so what’s she thinking then, big dick?

She’s thinking about Gill; she’s thinking about Tolstoy; and she’s thinking about dying alone.

I used to think that I was in love with Isobel. That she’s the sort of girl you’d want to marry. A girl that only has eyes for you – and such eyes. So, I always wondered why Gill didn’t make a good woman of her. I’m sure he could of. Instead, he married Moira. I always wondered: what is it about Moira that could have made him choose her over Isobel? They are both beautiful. They are both talented.

If I’m at work, it’s called investigating. If I’m off-duty, it’s called snooping.

And on this occasion, following Moira to a party in the hills, I was snooping. At the door, Gill had kissed her on the cheek and paid her a compliment of some kind, I assumed, by the pu-shaw of Moira’s wrist.

I’d already paid off her taxi driver. After taking Moira, he came back and took me to the same place: a mansion in the Blue Forest. He told me I’d have to say a password to the man at the gates. I asked him if he overheard the password. He said, his hearing weren’t so good these days. He could hear me okay with twenty dollars in his shirt pocket.

The password was Eva.