The sun exploded off the chop, a thousand screaming fragments of agonising light. The Doll looked down at the ferry’s filth-etched metal floor. Her head throbbed, her stomach was watery. The truth was that even on the water she no longer felt safe.
When the ferry reached the jetty in Mosman cove, the Doll disembarked and made her way out of the searing direct light along a bitumen path that gently wound up sandstone cliffs through a lush, green tunnel of mangroves and palms. A mob of parrots rested in nearby gum trees. Even for them it seemed too hot, and for once the jagged calls with which they normally shredded the sky into colourful tatters were subdued. The birds’ resigned fatigue and the pleasant, cool walkway calmed the Doll.
Wilder was right, she told herself. It was all a crazy mistake. And besides, they hadn’t even identified her, and perhaps never would. There was only one, very bad, piece of video footage showing a blurry figure that could be any one of a million women in Sydney.
She made her way to a road that bordered the cliffs, and from there through avenues of European cars until she came to a grand refurbished Federation mansion on the top side of a street that commanded views of the harbour and city. In spite of its ornate front door being ajar, she still knocked and called hello before entering.
No matter how many times she came there, the house never failed to impress the Doll with its light and beauty, with the impeccable taste with which it was decorated. She hung her handbag, as she hung it each week, on a coat stand next to a Miró painting in the entry hall, and waited.
The Doll knew nothing about art, but she knew it was a Miró because she had liked the painting and had asked who had done it. Later she had Googled Miró and been astonished that she knew someone who might have the money to own such a work.
The Miró painting showed a bizarre little man with big bug eyes and a square for a body, no arms or legs to speak of, the torso crosshatched so it looked like both a noughts and crosses board and jail cell bars. Imprisoned in the stomach of the Miró man was a red sun and a blue sky.
The Miró and the house belonged to the man she had come to see, Frank Moretti. He lived alone, and he seemed to have a lot of money. Whatever he needed, he paid for. He paid for gardeners, cooks, cleaners. He paid for amusement and he paid for beauty.
“Beauty I prize above all things,” he would tell the Doll. He said such things not once, or even twice, but over and over, and there was little that Frank Moretti now said that the Doll had not heard many times before.
It was as if he believed he belonged to some higher race of beings who understood Beauty and Art, who took holidays in Tuscany, and made an odd noise like the rolling of snot in the back of their throat when pronouncing Italian or French words. Once, after listening to one of the Doll’s many tales about Moretti, Wilder said that he sounded like a starving man looking for food in an art gallery, and they had both burst out laughing.
Before she started coming, the Doll had never seen a house like Frank Moretti’s. It wasn’t its size that made it extraordinary, nor the way everything she looked at was not ordinary but exceptional—the way that the more she gazed at it, a chair or a floor rug became remarkable and unlike any chair or floor rug she had ever seen. Nor was it the unexpected manner in which things slowly revealed themselves as more than she had thought; such as the large rounded block rising up from a knee-high wall that turned out to be a piece of marble carved into the shape of a vulva, so purely of itself that it was not until she had looked at it for some months that she realised what the soft ellipses represented.
No; it was the way every furnishing, every decoration worked toward some greater whole, and the greater whole was an environment unlike any she had ever known: none of it brash, none of it shouting for attention, and the overriding feeling that resulted seemed one of serenity. Only after many visits did the Doll come to understand the feeling was rather that of money.
“Perhaps it is because I am Italian,” Frank Moretti would say, “that I am so full of passion. But I cannot live without beauty.”
He didn’t seem Italian to the Doll. He just seemed rich. His family, Frank Moretti said, had made a lot of money out of wine. Perhaps, thought the Doll, the rich belong only to money. For when Frank Moretti spoke, that was all the Doll heard in his voice: money. Perhaps he thought it was ideas, wisdom, beauty, taste. Perhaps he thought it was Italy. But it was just money—money he had, money he wanted, money he would get.
If, as the Doll sometimes wondered, Frank Moretti kept an account book in which his considerable expenditure was tallied up, she would have come under the column headed Beauty, along with the latest purchases of mediaeval furniture, Etruscan mosaics, Aboriginal art and New York oils. The Doll’s knowledge of art began and ended with Frank Moretti’s home: Constantin Brancusi, Rover Thomas, Sean Scully, Fred Williams, Luc Tuymans and, of course, Miró. The title of the Miró was in French, which meant, when Frank Moretti said it, the title sounded like a ball of vibrating phlegm.
“It means,” said Frank Moretti, weary at having to explain such obvious things, “the man who ate the sun.”
Much as she liked the painting, over time the man who ate the sun and Frank Moretti became for the Doll increasingly the same person.
She was running her fingers over the large decorative nail heads that studded the ornate door of a wooden cabinet that sat beneath the Miró, when she heard the low whir of an electric motor. She turned to see appearing from round a corner an electric wheelchair, in which sat a podgy little man whose emaciated legs dangled from the lambswool-lined seat. His big eyes were exaggerated by the large red-framed Porsche glasses he wore, and the fact that he had almost no hair, so that he seemed simply a pair of eyes in a constant state of surprise.
“Hello, Krystal,” said Frank Moretti.
41
“Exquisite, aren’t they?” he said, raising a stubby finger from the wheelchair’s armrest to point at the nailheads on which the Doll’s hand still rested. “Perhaps they are of no interest to you,” he said, the sort of stupid thing he always said, when it was obvious she was interested. She had passed the cabinet so many times, yet, like so much else in Moretti’s house, not until that day had she noticed its intricate charm. “I had them handmade in Morocco,” Moretti continued. “Iron nails hand-forged as they were in the Renaissance. I like them. But perhaps your eye is for the body, not the things the body makes.”
There was so much beauty in Frank Moretti’s extraordinary home, and all of it the Doll found with each visit a little more unbearable; as if every Blackman and every Nolan, every Williams and every Rover Thomas, every handmade fitting and award-winning architect-designed fixture and Chopin piano note were conspiring with the man who ate the sun to make her aware of only this: that he was more and she was less.
“To understand beauty is not so easy,” continued Moretti. “It means that when you see ugliness, it hurts you, it pains you so deeply. But maybe such things do not worry you. Perhaps you don’t feel such pain.”
As the Doll looked at the strange little man in the wheelchair, at his big insect eyes blown up in his oversized Porsche glasses, she was struck by a cruel thought: ‘If what he says is true, what must he feel each time he goes to the bathroom and sees himself in the mirror?’
“I had it specially made,” Frank Moretti said, and the Doll realised he was still talking about the cabinet. “I call it my cabinet of human comedy.” He whirred over to where the Doll was running her hands over the fine finish. “Do you want to see inside?”
She didn’t, but being there—listening, looking, not thinking—it somehow seemed a welcome respite, and so she nodded her head. In the past he had shown her other strange collections: wooden Assyrian property titles; mummified Egyptian cats; the eggs of extinct birds. They mostly bored her, but for once she felt grateful for the diversion.
On top of the cabinet sat a small carved wooden elephant. Moretti asked the Doll to pass it down to him. With his little hands, he lifted up the elephant’s tr
unk to reveal a hidden cavity in its body from which he shook out a key. He passed the elephant and the key back to the Doll and invited her to open the cabinet doors.
Inside were a dozen narrow drawers. Moretti’s wheelchair hummed and halted as he wheeled himself over to pull one open.
“Now, even you must find this comic,” Moretti said, taking out a yellowed piece of paper with foreign typing on it. “It’s an official letter from Stalin’s secret police in 1937, informing a wife that her husband has been sentenced to ten years without right of correspondence. That means he has been shot as part of the purges.” Moretti chuckled. “They were witty men, the old Chekists,” he said.
He reached to another drawer low down and took out a machete he said was from Rwanda, darkly marked along its pitted edge. From another, mid-height, he lifted up a rusty old tin can. On its label was a skull and the words Zyklon-B stencilled in fading red on yellow.
“Looks like Albanian tomato paste,” Moretti laughed again.
He was truly happy poking around his small museum of infamy. Every item seemed to amuse him one way or another. He reminded the Doll of a child rediscovering a forgotten box of old toys. There were bizarre souvenirs of massacres and genocides from around the world. From Cambodia. From Guatemala. From China. A pair of worn-out shoes he claimed were from a mass grave of Armenians marched to their death in 1916.
It somehow excited him that the world could be evil as well as beautiful, as though all the beauty he owned needed the shoes and the poison gas and the machete to truly shine. For Moretti, the cabinet was what humans did. Art, on the other hand, was what the gods gave, divine revelations allowed a select few.
After a time, the Doll realised the grand tour of the cabinet of human comedy was drawing to an end that Moretti felt would be fitting.
“That drawer there,” he said, indicating the topmost drawer. “I’ll show you one last thing. It’s the only mechanical thing I have ever collected,” Frank Moretti said. “Pick it up.”
Inside the drawer, carefully mounted on red velvet, was a modern-looking black pistol.
“It’s nothing remarkable, really,” Moretti said, “but a wonderful tale. It’s standard NATO issue, a nine-millimetre Italian Beretta. It belonged to one of the Dutch NATO troops defending a Bosnian Muslim town called Srebrenica.” Moretti gestured at the drawer. “Take it out,” he said, “try it.”
She cradled the gun in her palm as if it were a flower, not wanting her fingers to stray anywhere near the trigger. The Doll had never held a gun. It felt like nothing much.
“The Serbs demanded the Dutch give them their weapons and get out. The Dutch agreed, handed over their guns—” he reached up and with his tiny hands took the pistol from her—“this included, and left.”
The Doll looked down at Frank Moretti. He was holding the pistol as they do in movies, with both hands, aiming it at Miró’s man who ate the sun.
“I don’t give a shit, really. Unpronounceable people, ugly places, it’s what people do, these things. But I like the story and so I keep the gun.”
The Doll looked at him, at the gun, lost with Moretti’s strange attitude and stranger story.
“After, the Serbs killed eight thousand civilians left unprotected. And this Beretta,” Moretti went on, “meant to protect all those people, never used.” He was laughing. “That’s something, eh? Three thousand Americans die and it changes history. Eight and a half thousand Muslims die and it’s forgotten.”
And then, presuming her interested in guns, Moretti began instructing her in its use, his voice growing more excited and high-pitched as he spoke.
“That’s the safety lever, ambidextrous, clever. It still has all its fifteen rounds from Srebrenica in its magazine, you know, and I leave them there because I feel that’s part of its story too. See, now it’s off, now it’s on—don’t worry! Now it’s back off. It’s not overly accurate, though, and you’d have to get within a few metres of your target to be confident of hitting them.”
With his flabby little arm he once more held the gun out, and this time took aim at his reflection in the mirror. From a fanlight window above the front door the beautiful bright light of Sydney fell onto Moretti’s back and created a halo around him as he held the gun. He looked like an outline of one of Max’s toys of death: part machine, part freak.
“But then—lethal!” Moretti said. “Except when defending Muslims.” He laughed once more, let his gun arm fall to his lap, then moved out of the light and returned the gun to the Doll. She let out a long breath, relieved to put it away, lock the cabinet, and hide the key back in the elephant.
42
In the library, as always, Chopin was playing. The Doll, who knew nothing about classical music, knew it was his Nocturne in F Minor because Frank Moretti frequently told her that too.
“It is,” Frank Moretti said, “a high point of western culture. When the terrorists have destroyed everything,” he told her, “there will still be Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor, and people will marvel forever. But perhaps you have to be Italian to appreciate it fully.”
Frank Moretti said this because he believed the Doll did not like Chopin, and it annoyed him, because each Monday morning at 11 am it was her job to undress for him in his library to Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor.
“Perhaps you are simply someone who is beautiful,” he would sometimes say, “but who has no ear nor heart for beauty.”
The Doll did not dislike Chopin. But each Monday morning as she stripped for Frank Moretti while it played over and over on repeat, she found it ever sadder.
It was also hopeless music to strip to. Bad as the doof music at the club was, its amphetamine beats matched what was expected of the girls, and within its grind was for the Doll both a distance and an escape. The doof music obliterated thought of everything other than movement. The doof music did not touch her. It was a costume within which she felt safe.
The Doll knew she was not, of course, the first woman Frank Moretti had paid to strip for him. He talked of some of the other women who in the past he had paid to look at in private. He would talk of the shape of a neck, or the flow of a calf, or the relationship between thigh and buttock. Isabella had the most exquisite shoulders. Kayleen’s hips were beyond compare. Alexa’s breasts were small but perfect, and her belly was, said Moretti, irreproachable. He talked of them as though they were paintings that could be bought and sold, things that demonstrated not their own beauty but his superior taste.
So Moretti talked, and he didn’t stop talking until she began stripping, and so there was always an incentive for the Doll to begin. But little by little as she took off her Prada dress, as she so very gradually ran her hands down her arms and up between her legs, as she spun and pushed her arse out ever so slowly, then swayed it back and forth, as she stood up so that Frank Moretti might admire the shape of her shoulders and the nape of her neck as she undid her bra, as she turned back around and brought her hands up under her breasts, Chopin was telling her this was all about nothing, nothing, nothing.
Once she was naked, Moretti would come close and investigate her body like a butterfly collector examining minute markings on his latest catch. He would have the Doll turn and then stare at her from behind for several minutes. There would be occasional short dull whirs, like an electric toy being lazily played with, as he manoeuvred his wheelchair here and there to gain different perspectives on her body. Sometimes it felt to the Doll like an appointment with a gynaecologist, but then she would hear those sad piano notes intercut with his squeaky—
“Yes—yes—yes.”
And the Doll would know it was something else.
How sad the world was! Doof music lied: it told the girls and the men that they were still young, that youth was forever, death always tomorrow, energy boundless, and that life was as relentless, as insistent in its promise of momentum for the better as the one hundred and forty beats per minute of the track playing. She could strip to a lie, because it gave her a mask. But Chopin br
ought her soul rushing back into her body, no matter how she fought to keep it out. With Chopin she knew the terrible, wretched truth: she was naked and alone.
When she had finished her undressing and parading, Moretti would leave and she would not see him again. The Doll would get back into her clothes, walk out through the main lounge room, and into the hallway. There by the wall opposite the Miró painting was a Louis XV side table on which was displayed a framed photograph and a blue ceramic tray.
One day she had picked the photograph up and looked closely, trying to square it with what little he had told her: a head-on collision with a tip truck in the early morning. The black and white was of a young man with a magnificent body, muscled thighs bulging out of the tight shorts fashionable in the 1970s. The beach she recognised as the favourite of the west, Cronulla, and it always struck her as an odd place for a child of the rich to be. But it was the body that she could never reconcile with that of the hideous, mutilated remains of the car smash that she knew as Frank Moretti. For the young man was beautiful.
If the photograph intrigued the Doll, it was the three one-hundred-dollar bills lying in the blue ceramic tray waiting for her in payment as she left that compelled her weekly attention. Such was their arrangement, such was their strange ritual, as regular as morning tv and just as pointless, though, for the Doll, at least more lucrative.
But that day she had not even finished her routine when Frank Moretti’s mobile bleeped with a text message. He looked down at the phone, grunted and, without a word, disappeared into his office. The Doll waited, and when after some time he had still not returned, she dressed and went into the kitchen to get a drink of water.