his brother disappeared,’ Darren says. ‘His older brother was a bloke named Magnar and, you know, even his name meant “tough cunt” in Polish or somethin’ like that. Toughest bastard in Darra. Real sadistic prick. He picked on Iwan constantly. Burnt him and shit, tied him to railways and whipped him with jumper leads. So apparently one day Magnar is drinking some Polish whisky, fifty per cent rocket fuel, and passes out in the family shed where the two brothers were working on some smash repairs. Iwan grabs his brother by the arms and drags him down to the back of the family paddock, a hundred metres away, and leaves him there. Then, cool as a cucumber, he hooks up two power leads running to the back of the paddock and then he grabs a circular power saw and lights it up and he saws off his brother’s head as calmly as he’d cut the roof off a Ford Falcon.’
We stare at Iwan Krol. He looks up, like he senses us staring at him. He wipes his mouth with a napkin from his lap.
‘That shit true?’ I whisper.
‘Mum says rumours about Iwan Krol aren’t always accurate,’ Darren says.
‘Thought so,’ I say.
‘Nah, man,’ Darren says. ‘You’re not gettin’ me. She means the rumours about Iwan Krol never tell the full truth because the full truth is shit most sane people can’t even wrap their heads around.’
‘So what did he do with Magnar, or what was left of Magnar?’
‘Nobody knows,’ Darren says. ‘Magnar just disappeared. Vanished. Never seen again. All the rest is just whispers. And that’s his genius. That’s why he’s so brilliant at what he does today. One day his mark is walking the streets some place. The next day his mark is not walking any place at all.’
I keep staring at Iwan Krol.
‘Does your mum know?’ I ask.
‘Know what?’
‘What Iwan did with his brother’s body?’
‘Nah, Mum doesn’t know shit,’ he says. ‘But I know.’
‘What did he do with it?’
‘The same thing he does with all his marks.’
‘What’s that?’
Darren spins the lazy Susan, stops it at a plate filled with chilli crab. He takes a whole cooked sand crab and drops it on his plate.
‘Watch closely,’ he says.
He grips the crab’s right claw, wrenches it off violently and sucks its insides. He grips the crab’s left claw, rips it from the body carapace as easy as a stick pulled from the shoulder socket of a snowman.
‘The arms,’ he says. ‘Then the legs.’
He tears off three legs on the right of the shell. Three legs off the left.
‘All them marks just disappear, Tink. Snitches, blabbermouths, enemies, competitors, clients who can’t pay their debts.’
Then Darren removes the crab’s rear swimmer legs, four jointed leg segments each shaped like a small flat sinker. He sucks the meat out of all these legs and places the intact leg shells back beside the carapace, exactly where they’re supposed to be anatomically, but not actually touching the shell. He puts the crab claws back in place, like the legs, a millimetre from the crab’s chilli-sauced body.
‘Dismemberment, Eli,’ Darren whispers.
Darren looks across at me to see the dumb look on my dumb face. Then he piles up all the crab’s legs and claws and drops them into the upturned shell of the crab’s carapace. ‘Much easier to transport a body in six pieces,’ he says, dropping the piled carapace in a bowl already filled with a mountain of sucked and discarded crab shells.
‘Transport where?’
Darren smiles. He nods his head towards Tytus Broz.
‘To a good home,’ he says.
To the Lord of Limbs.
Tytus stands at that moment and taps his wineglass with a fork.
‘Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, but I believe it’s time to mark this extraordinary evening with a brief note of thanks.’
*
On the walk home, a thick cloud has covered up Orion. August and Mum walk ahead of Lyle and me. We watch them balancing on the green log fences that border Ducie Street Park. These log fences – each made of one long light green treated pine log resting on two stumps – have acted as our Olympic Games gymnastics balance beams for roughly six years now.
Mum bounces up gracefully and sticks a two-foot landing on a balance pole.
She nails a daring midair scissor kick and lands it too. August claps enthusiastically.
‘Now the great Comăneci prepares for the dismount,’ she says, cautiously approaching the edge of the pole. She makes a flurry of straight-arm peacock-hand waves for effect and acknowledges her imaginary crowd of Montreal judges