Chapter 21
The night of Monday 21th November, 1988
Dana Roberts is Sally Brown
Firebrand
I almost fell into the room as the door flew open. I was greeted by the sight of Kristina Ruslen, wearing lycra, exercise gear, and sweating profusely. In the background, I could hear a Jane Fonda exercise video playing.
‘What do you mean by this intrusion, girl?’ she hissed, looking like a snake wearing a wig.
I blurted out, ‘you need to call an ambulance……I think Peter has overdosed. There is an empty bottle of whiskey and some pills next to him and he is snoring really loudly…..I couldn’t rouse him. I tried’.
She didn’t move, but I could see in her eyes that she was calculating and weighing things up. Then she grumbled, ‘very well’, and shut the door in my face.
I stood there in a kind of shock, wondering what I should do next. Should I go back and see how Peter Ruslen was faring? Or, should I thump on the door and try to barge in and see if June Roze really was in that room?
Whilst I was deciding, I walked further down the windowless corridor and entered the piano bar kind-of-room, where Liz and Effie had been the other night; those two women from the ladies toilets at Julianna’s.
I switched on the light and walked a little way into the room; it was silent and empty and somehow forbidding. I looked about and thought that I would not want to spend too much time lounging about in here, as there was a sterile coldness and lack a personality about the place. But there was no one here; I had thought that I might find Liz or Effie here, but no, the room was quiet and empty.
A slamming door broke the silence and I quickly walked to the door and stuck my head out; I could see Kristina Ruslen walking quickly down the hallway, with her back to me, toward the lift.
Quickly ducking back into the room, I pushed the door so that it was almost closed, and then, I waited. After a few minutes in that cold and lifeless room, I crept out the door and nipped along the hallway. When I came to the room that Mrs Ruslen had just left, I turned the handle and found that the door was open, and in I went.
I felt like I had stepped into another world. There was no kitsch decoration here; it was grand and gracious with wonderful paintings of pastoral scenes and of idealised people dressed in old fashioned clothes, set in scenes of myth. Soft polished timbers glowed, set amongst tapestries and velvets and everything looked old, but well cared for and treasured. And then, I noticed the thin, skeletal frame of Philip Ruslen, propped up in a hospital bed; a piece of furniture which jarred with the elegant room. His eyes were open, but there was a lack of expression; an emptiness. He was a shell of a man with a 1,000 yard stare.
‘Who are you’, barked a brittle voice to my right, and as my head rocketed in that direction, I saw a short, but wide woman, in a nurse’s uniform, bending over the prostrate form of June Roze.
‘…..I was looking for Mrs Ruslen’, I stuttered. ‘Did she call the ambulance for her son?’
I looked from the toad-like face of the nurse, with her eyes narrowed to slits, trained upon me and then to June Roze, whose eyes were also fixed upon me, with awareness; her arm reaching out to touch my arm.
‘What is the matter with her?’ I asked.
‘She’s is in a minimally conscious state’ the nurse replied curtly, dropping her eyes and then looking toward the door.
‘How did it happen? I persisted.
The nurse’s eyes seemed to drill right through me and she did not answer.
I didn’t give up, but asked, ‘is Mr Ruslen also in a minimally conscious state?’
‘No’, she barked, ‘he is in a persistent vegetative state…..he has little brain function’. As she said this, her face softened and I could see that the nurse was not an unkind woman; she simply had a tough and tiring job to do, caring for two profoundly disabled people.
‘Can they get better?’ I persisted with my questioning.
The nurse looked over to Mr Ruslen and her eyes expressed sadness, but she did not speak. She merely shuffled about checking the comfort of her two patients. June Roze, however, was still looking intently at me and reaching out as though to attract my attention. Her mouth was moving as if she wanted to speak….Then she said the word ‘cat’ a number of times, with a question mark at the end. She is wondering about the welfare of those poor forgotten cats, in her flat, I thought. And I was overcome with a terrible feeling of wretchedness, as I thought of those poor, dead animals.
The door flew open. Kristina Ruslen had returned. ‘What are you doing in here?’ she shrilled at me after she turned around from fiddling with the door. I noticed that her posh accent had slipped, with her surprise, and she sounded more Russian.
I opened my mouth to say something, any excuse that popped into my head, but she had already dismissed me from her thoughts. So instead, I called after her as she strode purposely across the room, ‘has the ambulance arrived? Is Peter OK?’
Kristina Ruslen stopped mid stride and walked back toward me. ‘No my dear, he is not OK. He has stopped breathing, the stupid fool’.
She smiled as I recoiled from her, shocked as I was by her callous words; I had imagined that she loved her son, as he loved her.
‘These fools have destroyed everything’, she said, annunciating her words very clearly and looking me right in the eye. But I have planned. I knew this day was coming’.
‘What do you mean? …….where is the telephone?…..The ambulance must be notified’, I cried.
‘No I don’t think so. I am leaving here today and I will not be returning. Everything is mortgaged to the hilt, but we have been putting on a good show, don’t you think?’
I simply bit my lip and shook my head. Then I said in puzzlement, as I looked about, ‘this place must be worth an absolute fortune, surely……’
‘You don’t understand. My husband here’, she flicked her long, red painted fingers toward the incapacitated Philip Ruslen, ‘was more interested in giving his money away than ensuring the future of his family. This house, impressive as it is….. which I designed and put my heart and soul into….except this atrocious room….this was his hidey hole’, she said, curling her lip with distain. ‘This place is only mine to live in while my husband lives. The fool has left it to a homeless charity. He arranged his money so long ago, before he even met me. Can you imagine, a load of dirty homeless people living here? It’s outrageous!’ She looked truly ugly as she said this.
‘Also, he has children, of his own blood.’ Kristen Ruslen said sneeringly. ‘He gave up that foxy haired servant for me……He did go back to her, some years later’, she added. ‘He couldn’t help himself, he said, because she was so sweet; if you can believe it! But later I had her taken care of.’ She smiled a poisonous smile. ‘Those people were not stupid; they knew what I was about. The brats had their names changed and they disappeared with their family into the stews of the western suburbs. He didn’t acknowledge them, so I wasn’t worried. I only found out recently that he had put money away for their future and he had plans for them’.
I glanced over at the still living body of Philip Ruslen and I thought how a person’s life can be impacted by the people whose path they cross. Imagine if Philip Ruslen had got involved with an equally charitable person, instead of this psychopath. Imagine the good they could have wrought in the world.. …..Although, he had treated the other women, the mother of his biological children, pretty shabbily, I had to admit. And Kristina Ruslen had revealed that this other woman did not have a bad nature. Hell! people are complicated.
‘How was your husband injured?….I heard that he had a polo accident’, I said, as she turned around to walk away.
She whipped around and laughed. ‘Well, he was hurt on the polo field. I struck him in the carotid artery. Though, I blamed the horse, of course. Those hooves can be very dangerous.’ She laughed, as though very pleased with herself. ‘I thought he might die, but he hung around to haunt me’. But it was bette
r that he lived, as I have been able to live here and have access to his money. I should mention that we never actually married, as I was already married and pregnant when we met. I simply changed my name by deed poll. A clever trick. No?’
I was very surprised by these revelations but I simply said, ‘I thought you said that you were ruined?’
‘Yes well, my son was a fool. I had to keep digging him out of trouble; he wouldn’t stay away from the women who were supposed to work for him. Then, when I find him a wife, my own niece, in fact, he attacks her because she liked the seedy side of life as much as he did.’
‘I heard that she fancied women, actually’, I added boldly.
‘That was the least of it, my dear’, she hissed acidly. And I thought about Lee Lin’s lost shoe in the basement of the abandoned orphanage and what Harry had told me of the chair, with straps, and the doll swinging from the beam. I shuddered.
‘But weren’t you in business together, selling swimwear’. I pushed.
‘My son really told you too much, but yes, we were. However, the swimwear was only a cover for certain drug imports. I let her imagine that she was the great designer and model’ she said, pointing a scarlet nail at the helpless, June Roze. ‘But, in reality, while it looked like I was helping my brother’s daughter, I was really helping my useless son to make his own fortune. I took care of cleaning the money though. That is a complicated business and it requires brains.’
I wanted to ask the suddenly chatty Kristina Ruslen about her connection with Tabra Hayden and the Cosmos restaurant and brothel at Bondi beach, but I sensed that doing that would be pushing things too far. However, it occurred to me that Kristina Ruslen’s first husband’s, Shanghai Russian connections, may provide an explanation.
The nurse, who had been standing in a darkened part of the room, carrying a towel, which she must have collected from a cupboard, looked like she was frozen to the spot. I’m sure that she had never, in all her life heard such a conversation and such cold-blooded and reprehensible talk from an employer. She dropped the towel on the floor and said from the shadows ‘That’s evil, what you’ve done. I’m leaving here and I’m going to the police.’
Kristina Ruslen laughed; a happy tinkling sound, and said, ‘I don’t think so. You won’t get off this floor, as it has been locked down, and unfortunately, there is a small fire in nurse’s little kitchen’ she added, looking at me, and flicking her red tipped talons at nearby door. ‘It is right at this moment, burning toward you.’ She turned her body toward the nurse and said spitefully, shaking her finger mockingly, ‘It is very silly to put chips into the deep fryer, and then, allow the tea towel to get too close.’
The nurse looked like she could not move or talk, like her brain had temporarily shut down. Perhaps these events did not tally with her previous experience and beliefs about the world, or the people that she had met in her life, and so, she was floundering in a great existential roaring void.
I walked toward Kristina Ruslen, intending to fight her if need be, but she whipped out a pistol from the back of her exercise pants and pointed it at me.
‘I’ll’ be going now girls, toodle oo’.
‘But what about your son?’ I yelled after her, my voice sounding strange and separate to me.
‘His goose is cooked, my dear’, and she continued walking away toward a door on the other side of the room.
‘But won’t it look very suspicious when the police find you gone, your house burnt down, and your son dead?
‘This house is so designed that only this floor should burn. And, you my dear are very similar to me in your height and weight, but your body will be so charred beyond recognition that, your DNA, fingerprints and teeth will be unusable as evidence. However, when they find my son dead from an overdose, I am sure the police will assume that he caused the fire and then killed himself. Such things happen, you know’.
Her hand was on the door knob now, but her other hand was still pointing the pistol toward us. ‘Besides’, she said, ‘my yacht comes and goes all the time. My dear husbands here also arranged in his will that it must be used for charity purposes; this is well known down at the yacht club. Only this time, the yacht won’t return. It will appear to be lost at sea, and, as it is worth a few million, I am sure that I can quickly sell it. ‘
Then she was gone, and the door snapped shut, with a sound like a lid closing on a coffin.
In that vacuum of silence, I became aware of the smell of smoke and I how my breathing was becoming more difficult. The nurse began to cough. ‘Is there a phone around anywhere’, I wheezed in her direction.
Philip Ruslen was simply staring ahead vacantly, but June Roze looked like she was doing a slow motion dog paddle, as her mouth worked, trying to form words. The nurse pointed to the door, under which smoke was now curling. ‘The phone in in there….in the kitchen……the sound disturbed Mrs Ruslen’.
Running toward the door, she pulled it open, only to be met by a wall of flames. ‘Close it, close it’, I screeched, as we both almost collapsed with coughing and trying to breathe. But it was like she was frozen again, and so, I threw myself toward the door to close it, and then, got down on the floor, where there was less smoke. I started to move toward the other door at the end of the room, from which Kristina Ruslen had exited, only to find that it was very solid, and very locked.
There were no windows in this room, only three doors, as it was in the centre of the house. This had made it feel cozy before, but now it felt claustrophobic.
Pulling my shirt over my nose and scuttling along the floor like a rodent, I charged back across the room, braving the swirling smoke and grabbed a large bolster cushion from the lounge chair and placed it along the bottom of the door to the kitchen, in a feeble attempt to block the smoke from coming in. Then, I scrambled over to the door from which I had entered the room, from the corridor and pulled hard at the handle. It was locked.
‘It locks with a keypad’, gasped the nurse, between coughs. ‘……she’s probably changed the code. She does this frequently’, she continued.
Sure enough there was a square keypad on the door. My brain was ticking…….I recently had to open a keypad lock during another job and I recalled that there was a factory-default password that could be used, which would generally open a locked keypad. I racked my brain and then typed in ### 00000099#*. The door popped open. Thankfully, I drew fresh air into my tortured lungs.
Turning, I saw that the nurse had fallen onto her knees; she looked ready to pass out. The room was getting very hot, like a furnace.
I dashed back into the room where fire was licking around the door and smoke swarming from around the bolster cushion. I pulled the nurse to her feet and propelled her into the hallway, where she collapsed wheezing loudly. Then I returned and seeing a vase of flowers, I pulled the flowers out and poured the water onto one of the tapestries, which covered a nearby table and put this over my face. I stumbled over to Phillip Ruslin and pushed his hospital bed into the hallway and then dived back in for June Roze, who seemed to be unconscious. Throwing her over my shoulder, as best I could, I fled the room and slammed the door. And there we were, like a bedraggled bunch of refugees. But for the moment the air was clear.
I had to lay June Roze down on the carpet of the hallway, I had no other choice. She was breathing but her skin looked bluish despite her cherry, red blush from the room’s heat. But I had no real time to think about anything other than getting out of this expensive tomb.
Limping over to the lift, I pressed the button, but as expected, it was not working. Then like an inflating balloon in my mind, the memory bloomed of the cool room that I had entered with Peter Ruslen.
The door to the cool room that was disguised as a painting was at the other end of this hallway. It also occurred to me that it would be almost impossible to get the two invalids through that narrow door, and down the stairs, into the champagne storage room, near the kitchen. But we had to do it; we didn’t have time
to scout out other options.
I explained to the nurse, who belatedly introduced herself as Beryl, about the hidden door at the end of the corridor, and she nodded slowly, but I don’t think that her brain was functioning properly yet. We moved Philip Ruslen over to one side, and then, we both helped to lift June Roze up next to him; soon we were rocketing down that long hallway.
Stopping in front of the very ugly painting, which consisted of brown and yellow splatters of paint, which reminded me very strongly of animal droppings, we stopped and I swung the painting open, but it was soon very obvious that the hospital bed wouldn’t get through the opening.
‘Look, I’ll go by myself and see if we can get outside from the lifts near the kitchen’, I said. I didn’t like to leave the nurse alone with two vulnerable and helpless people, but it would be quicker for me to go by myself first, and see if the lifts were working, or, if I could find a telephone to call the ambulance and the fire brigade. So off I zoomed through the cool room, with its boxes of vegetables and large cheese wheels on display and I clattered down the metal stairs into the smaller room which was packed with expensive champagne. If the Ruslen’s were ‘ruined’ financially, as Kristen Ruslen had said, then they had decided to go out in style, as there appeared to be no sign they were economising.
Dashing out the door, I came out near the kitchens, as I had done on Saturday night, when there had also been the threat of fire. That time though, had been a false alarm. I turned around and noted that the door to the champagne cool room was disguised as a silver papered panel in the wall, opposite the kitchen.
The kitchen was deserted. But perhaps these commercial kitchens were only used for parties and other occasions. I ran toward the lift and pressed the button, but it did not make a sound. Wildly I looked around and thought that surely, there must be some fire stairs somewhere?
I started to run up and down the hallway and it suddenly occurred to me that this house had a lot of hallways which were sealed off from any view of the outside world. It was though I was a rat running in a maze. I shuddered and remembered that time was running out, as the fire would be spreading. How fast I did not know.
I stopped for a moment to think what I should do. As the silence expanded, I became aware of crying, which seemed to be coming from behind another silver panel in the hallway, near the lift.
‘Hello!’ I yelled. The crying stopped. ‘Please help me’ I screamed. ‘There’s a fire’.
A silver panel in the wall right next to the lift flew open and a petite, red head popped her head out. ‘W…w…what’s the matter?’ she stuttered.
‘The house is on fire and there are three people who need to be saved back upstairs’ I pointed upwards. ‘Do you know if there are any fire stairs which can take us outside?’
‘Yes. I am sitting on the fire stairs’, she said, in her curiously low voice, as she wiped her eyes and pointed to the open panel in the wall. I then noticed a reflective silver sign, with the words, FIRE EXCAPE.
‘But first, we must go back for the others’, she said, straightening her spine and the pink apron of her uniform, at the same time.
So back through the first silver panel we went, into the champagne cool room, up the stairs and through the larger cool room. But as we were passing a large box of carrots, we found Beryl the nurse had somehow dragged Philip Ruslen and June Roze in there by herself; she had them propped them up on some large boxes, next to a wall. I was pleased to see that June Roze was looking better.
‘There was too much smoke’, she said simply. ‘I knew I had to get them in here, or we would die’.
Without a word, I hefted June Roze into my arms and carefully began to carry her down the rattling metal stairs. Beryl and the red headed teenager, without a word, each grabbed one end of Phillip Ruslen and followed.
We had to stop and rest many times, as we carried and pulled the invalids from the burning building. Eventually we came out into the cool night air and found the place swarming with police and fire engines.
After Philip Ruslen and June Roze were loaded into ambulances, I collapsed in a heap on the wet grass. It must have rained lightly sometime that evening. But before I hit the ground, I saw a stretcher carried past. I could tell it contained the body of Peter Ruslen, and then, for some strange reason, I wept.