Читать книгу Dark Clouds on the Mountain - John Tully - Страница 7

The latest argument with Wendy had started a few weeks back. One sullen morning, dark with approaching winter and with a nasty wind off the Derwent, Jack had arrived at the Liverpool Street station early, intending to catch up on some paperwork. The sight of a new-looking manila folder on his desk did not improve his digestion; Graffiti On Synagogue, someone had written across it in a neat, slanting hand. The fried eggs and bacon kept repeating on him and that song about the kid who didn't like Mondays was going round and round inside his head, even though he hated it. He was craving for a cigarette, too, it being one of his periodic attempts to kick the weed, and he was more than usually savage tempered as a result.

A junior constable, so nervous that his voice shook, told Jack that 'B-Booker Sahib' wanted to see him 's-s-straight away'.

'It's Chief Superintendent Ray Booker to you, son!' Jack barked, sending the young man scurrying before him along the corridor, stammering apologies.

It was about the graffiti, Jack knew. He would plead with Booker, stating, truthfully, that he already had more work than he could poke a stick at, what with the Adams murder inquiry and a rash of break-and-enters among the silvertails in Lower Sandy Bay. But he didn't rate his chances very highly, for the Boss was a determined man.

Booker Sahib was a big, heavy-set man with a sad round face and a frizz of iron-grey hair. Lately he'd taken to wearing spectacles which gave him the appearance of an overweight vicar crossed with a roundhouse pug. He'd acquired the nickname years back when word went round that he was travelling to India for his holidays. And he did have a dark complexion too; there had been whispers of Aboriginal blood years back at a time when it wasn't meant as a compliment in waspish Tasmania.

Ray Booker had been in the Force for over forty years; Jack had known him long ago in the West Coast mining town of Queenstown, when he was just a kid and Booker was a country sergeant. He'd been hard but fair. Although they said 'Booker by name and booker by nature,' he was more likely to give you a boot up the bum and send you on your way if he caught you up to no good or looking like you might be. He hadn't changed much, except that he was heavier and sadder, redder about the nose from the drink and fatter after a lifetime of old fashioned high cholesterol, high GI, distinctly non-PC Tasmanian breakfasts.

He was slurping on a cup of tea and scratching his ear when Jack came in. Chances were he'd be hung over and dirty on the world. Yes, it was the synagogue, he snapped, shoving a packet of Panadol out of sight into his desk drawer. Whisky was his preferred tipple, Jack knew. He'd once had a session with him and the hangover had lasted for almost a week. The higher-ups had requested CIB take over the case, given the lack of progress. That fella Gordon Paisley had been on the case, but he was useless as tits on a bull, Booker snorted.

Jack tried hard to weasel his way out, but Booker held up his great paw when he judged Jack had run out of steam, conciliatory now, his voice almost a purr. 'Yes Giacomo, er, Jack, I know you're flat out like a lizard drinking,' he wheedled, falling back on an Aussie cliche as ever when he wanted something, 'but I need you on this case.' Booker sometimes forgot all the years that had passed since Jack had been a mining town brat, and called him by the name on his birth certificate. 'Half the buggers round here wouldn't know their arse from their elbow. I need a proper copper, Jack.'

'Jeez, sir. There's always Fuller or Langdale. Or Liz Flakemore, she's a good officer. They could...

Booker cut him off. 'Yeah, look, er, Jack, the fact is that Upstairs' - here he paused and pointed at the ceiling with an index finger the size of a sugar banana - 'Upstairs are very concerned about this graffiti. Just between you and me, Boss O'Flaherty himself told me that the Local Member has been on the phone, demanding results. It's all the worse because the synagogue is right next door to the bloody cop shop, practically in the grounds. O'Flaherty wants you, Jack. Fuller and Langdale are good at what they do, so is Liz, but you're the better detective.' He slurped at his cold tea, grimaced, and continued his monologue.

'It's bad news, Giacomo,' Booker continued, tensing his forehead against the headache that Jack knew was jack-hammering away inside his skull, regardless of the paracetamol. 'Times have changed. We just can't let this kind of thing go unchecked. Not these days. There's even dog shit through the letterbox. I'm sure you in particular would agree with me there.' He stared at Jack through bloodshot eyes.

'With all due respect, sir,' Jack replied, 'we're hardly dealing with Fantomas.'

'The world's gone PC, Giacomo,' said Booker, shaking his head as much as he could without causing pain. 'Maybe it's not such a bad idea. Nazi graffiti like that will give this city a bad name. So, I'm taking you off everything else until we find out who's behind it. You can have young Bob Bishop for company; he's got the makings of a good copper, they tell me.'

Booker checked his watch and stood up to indicate that the interview was over. It was a measure of his respect for Jack that he'd argued with him about it. Anyone else, he would have just ordered to do it. There was an enormous stack of paperwork on his desk. 'I'll do my best, sir,' Jack said, shrugging his shoulders and moving to the door, not wanting to annoy the man any more. 'Oh, and sir - I do wish you'd call me Jack.' Booker didn't respond. He'd had already forgotten Jack was there and was absorbed in a file, his massive head nodding as he let his hangover wash over him. He'd even forgotten about Fantomas, although he would dearly have loved to know who or what that was.2 Jack made a note to tell him one day about the famous French police books. Booker would have lots of spare time when he retired.

Booker hadn't laboured the racism point, but it had struck home. Jack had copped a lifetime of racist abuse, learning early on that he was a 'wog', a 'dago', and even a 'greaser' when the kids at school had felt particularly nasty. His Mum was as Aussie as they come, from an old Queenstown family, the Johnstones, but his father was Italian. Had been Italian. Jack had grown up in the raw streets of Queenie with a name so Italian that you could advertise spaghetti with it - although most people thought all spaghetti came out of cans in those days in Tasmania. But for all that, Jack looked more Anglo than the Anglos. He scarcely remembered his father, Aldo, but knew from photographs that he'd been a slim Triestino, with light-brown hair and his own sky-blue eyes, a pale northerner rather than someone from the swarthy South. His father had been murdered when Jack was a baby, the killer never caught. The Italian connection was almost severed, Jack thought, wincing at the choice of words in his internal monologue. His Mum had always called him Jack and when he was old enough, he'd dropped the 'uzzi' ending of his name to be just plain Martin. Changed it by deed poll after he became a cop. As far as he knew, though, his mother was buried as a Martinuzzi when she died in lonely squalor on the West Coast after a life of alcoholic excess.

After he left Booker Sahib's lair, Jack stuck his head into the open plan office that the lowlier ranks of CIB shared. It smelled of floor polish, cheap coffee and some old bloke's Brylcreem. That and sweat and fear perhaps from the interview rooms where they grilled a sad concatenation of the city's criminals. Hobart's crims, heads on them like mice, he thought, catching sight of a senior constable leading a 'valued customer' named 'Burgers' O'Shea by the arm. Burgers banged along on crutches, grinning, his mouth almost toothless, his eyes mad brown orbs in a brown monkey face. Thirty years old but looking like fifty. He smiled and wished Jack good day, but Jack pretended not to have seen or heard the serial mugger. O'Shea was so dedicated to his calling that he had recently climbed a tree in St David's Park and leapt out onto an unlucky passer-by, flailing his crutches to pound his victim into submission. God only knew how he'd broken his ankle, but Jack guessed it was the result of something unsavoury. Christened Leslie by his doting parents, the miscreant had gained his nickname when he was found drunk and incapable in the McDonald's joint he was burgling, with half-eaten Big Macs in a pile at his side.

Nor did Jack see the dope dealers, the kerb crawlers shifting from foot to foot, the chicken thieves and break-and-enter men still tooled up, the serial flashers, shoplifters, mainliners with collapsed veins, chisellers and sneak thieves, wife-beaters, gropers, dips, illegal users of cars, broken-down old boozers, pimps, brothel creepers, snowdroppers and tavern brawlers, enforcers and phizgigs who were staples at this nick; a desperate parade of no-hopers, misfits, dead-shits, bunglers, sociopaths and nutcases - the rejects of the industrial age and sometimes the direct descendants of the old convicts of the British Empire. While he realised that there was a kind of commonality between the crims and some cops, Jack had never identified with any of them, had always wondered what could be done to prevent people from becoming criminals. Still, lie down with a dog and you get fleas, he thought with a shudder and he was all too familiar with the adage that you set a thief to catch a thief.

A great wave of dark hopelessness washed over him like the tide off Betsey Island. Jesus, he wanted a cigarette; he'd murder for one. The little junior constable who'd committed lese-majesty cowered by the coffee machine, but Jack ignored him too, and all the other faces that had spun round at their desks when he arrived. That boofhead Sergeant Gordon Paisley ruled the roost in here, but Jack ignored him too. Especially him. Jack hated him, sourly taking in the fat head he always compared to a boarding house pudding, the flat, hard eyes and the mouth permanently set in a sneer or a leer. Paisley had already done five or six years in the Force when Jack joined, and he had been one of the worst racists, constantly riding him for being an Eye-tie, even once wiping imaginary grease off a chair after Jack had sat in it. Jack spoke to him only when absolutely necessary.

Jack found who he was looking for: a gangly young man in the corner with sticking-out ears, a white face mottled with acne and a spray of wiry ginger hair with the texture of swarf from a lathe. It looked unbrushable.

'DC Bishop,' he said. 'My office, now. Oh, and make mine white. Coffee with three sugars. Yes, three, son.'

The young man stood up and nodded, trying not to seem too keen in front of his peers, but clearly delighted that a Great One had deigned to notice him. Jack had already read his file: Bob 'Bluey' Bishop had only recently arrived from the industrial town of Burnie, where he'd been on the beat. He'd grown up as a farm boy from up on the remote slopes of The Nut at Stanley before that. He'd been transferred over to the CIB because of some good work he'd done in catching a gang of crims who'd done over Tucker's supermarket in Burnie's main drag. That, and on account being somehow related to Ray Booker, Jack had heard on the grapevine, although the fruit was probably sour.

Bishop had a great yellow whopper of a pimple smack in the middle of his forehead, Jack was horrified to see. It seemed to throb. He had 'Tasmanian' teeth too - the off-white ones alternating with black stumps, rather giving the effect of an ancient piano keyboard - below a ridiculous little ginger moustache. Paisley watched them leave, his lip curling under his equally absurd moustache but careful not to do anything that Jack could have him for. One day, Jack thought savagely, I will punch his lights out, I really will.

The synagogue was just round the corner from the cop shop, so they walked, Jack wheezing slightly up the slight incline of Argyle Street, vowing for the trillionth time to either give up or cut down on the gaspers, forgetting that he actually had stopped. Few Hobartians noticed the synagogue, which was a great pity. Jack had often admired it. He knew that it had been built in 1845 in the Regency-Egyptian style, that it was probably the third oldest synagogue in the southern hemisphere, and that it was modelled on the Temple of Herod. Surprisingly large - it could seat 200 people on its polished wooden pews - it was built on land that once formed the front garden of Judah Solomon's mansion, now used by the police and known as Temple House. The entranceway was between two carved pillars, surmounted by an architrave on which was the Hebrew inscription, In all places where I shall cause My Name to be recorded I will come unto thee and bless thee. The windows, Jack noticed, were not rectangular, but narrowed towards the top, giving the place a distinctly Egyptian feel.

It was a handsome building, but one little noticed by the people of the city. Few people walked by; it was situated in a windy and uninviting precinct, although the boozer on the corner diagonally opposite did a good trade with off-duty coppers, snouts and car salesmen. Most people drove by on their way to somewhere else.

A squall blew up from the river, sending leaves and paper bags scuttling before it. Summer had definitely gone and a few spits of rain fell from the louring sky. The Mountain, visible over the rooftops, was surly today. Like all Hobartians, Jack was an avid watcher of Mt Wellington and its moods. He pushed through the gate and examined the graffiti. There were five or six specimens of the dauber's art, all in the same blue paint. It appeared from a number of other hasty touch-up jobs that earlier examples had been obliterated. Bob Bishop's face was puckered with disgust - 'Jeez, a bit rough, sir' - but Jack's features remained impassive: venality, brutality, criminality, stupidity, dishonesty, infidelity and vice had long ago lost their power to shock him and the same would happen to Bishop with time. Still, it was sick stuff. gas the jews, screamed one message; hitler had the right idear [sic] declared another. oshwitz now [sic] and death to the yids were some others. The morons couldn't even spell properly and their swastikas were back to front, thought Jack, dabbing at the paint with his finger. It was still sticky to the touch. Jack exhaled and shook his head; the sound and the gesture more expressive than any words.

The President of the Congregation was there, as arranged, to meet them, the city's Jewish population being too small to support a full-time rabbi. The President was a tall, austere man, with white hair and beard and the slight stoop of a scholar. Jack liked him from the start. He peered at the policemen with sad grey eyes over gold half-frames and extended his hand.

'Rosenberg is my name, Inspector. Gregor Rosenberg,' he said, his voice pleasant, educated, but with an elusive foreign intonation. 'I'm very pleased to meet you. If you will come this way, we can talk in the office down the back.' No skullcap, Martin noted. The President could be a professor, a lawyer, a respectable businessman. He wore a well-cut blue suit and a tasteful shirt and tie: nothing like the wrinkly off-the-peg bag of fruit that Bishop was sporting. Jack himself favoured suede jackets or Harris Tweed, reserving his dark suit for court appearances and the like.

It was cool inside, the atmosphere somehow brown, like inside an old library, redolent of old paper and incense, but very clean and cool. There was an abundance of dark cedar, polished to a high sheen by the hands of almost 150 years, and a beautiful golden chandelier hung from the ceiling. The thick walls cut out the traffic noise. Rosenberg pointed out the congregation's most treasured possession, a torah scroll in a glass case near the entrance. The Nazis had once stolen it from a desecrated synagogue in Czechoslovakia, Rosenberg told them. He did not have to labour the sad irony of this shrine to the victims of the Final Solution so close to the vicious graffiti on the exterior of the building. In the centre of the synagogue was a platform on which the Torah was read, and close by, an ornate ark covered in red velvet - the bimah, Rosenberg called it - in which the scrolls were kept.

When he had shown his guests around the temple, Rosenberg insisted on taking his guests to his flat, situated close by, locking the heavy door behind him as they went. He had, of course, already told all that he knew to the uniformed officers, but Jack got him to go through the story again. Bishop hovered discreetly in the background, his pen poised over his notebook, his pimple throbbing red and angry. Jack wished he would squeeze it, wondering vaguely if there was anything in what the Freudians said about it. Rosenberg was talking again and Jack bent forward, concentrating on what he was saying.

The attacks had begun a fortnight or so earlier. A passing motorist had noticed the daubs first and rung in when she got to work. Then there was the dog excrement smeared on the doors and shoved through the letterbox. Human too, Rosenberg observed with a shudder of revulsion.

Were there any other unusual incidents? Jack wanted to know, but Rosenberg insisted on giving them coffee before he would talk further. A heavy-set, silent woman with white hair and a slightly oriental cast of features handed them their coffee and it was good; thick and sweet, the kind you'd get in Vienna or Budapest. She had served it in fine white bone china, each cup accompanied by a tiny plate of sweet pastry. Mrs Gellhorn, the housekeeper, as she was introduced, had learned her trade in Vienna before the Nazis had come in 1938, in a vanished world. She bowed slightly, and withdrew.

'Unusual incidents, Inspector?' said Rosenberg, pushing his empty cup to one side and polishing his glasses on his napkin. 'Well, there were the telephone calls: five or six of them a day, although they've tapered off. Perhaps they suspect you've got a tap on my phone? We've had them on and off for years, you know, but nothing like this. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, quite vile, Inspector.'

Jack nodded. Booker had said they were pretty disgusting and they were when Rosenberg played the tape; a grating, ranting, self-righteous, barely educated voice spewing out a putrid stream of abuse straight from Julius Streicher's Die Sturmer but in Strine-accented English. Jack sighed at a hatred that knew no reason and it confirmed his private belief that a large slice of humanity was very little removed from the other Great Apes on the evolutionary ladder. But were apes racist, he wondered. Probably not. That was reserved for the greatest apes of the lot, though he'd heard chimpanzees went in for territorial feuding.

And that was it, really, Rosenberg concluded, dusting icing sugar from his hands. The city's Jewish population was very small - no more than thirty active families of both the Orthodox and Reform persuasions - and there hadn't been anything like this before except for the odd telephone call and that was most likely just cranks.

'We keep a low profile,' said Rosenberg. 'We're a mostly liberal congregation, so we scarcely stand out. Most people in this city probably don't even know we exist. Ask them where the synagogue is, and most would scratch their heads. There's never been any real trouble at all. There has probably always been a fair amount of low-grade anti-Semitism - calling tight people Jews and that kind of thing - but it's never led to anything before this. Jews had a hard time here in the old days under Governor Franklin, but not even ten thousand miles of ocean could keep out the Enlightenment forever.' He finished his coffee and poured out more for his guests.

Someone, however, was determined to change all that. A lone crank, or something more organised - a neo-Nazi gang perhaps - that was the question. Mr Rosenberg was clearly worried. He had, he said over a fresh cup of coffee, survived the war years in Europe. Born in what had been Polish Galicia in the 1930s, he had been studying in Warsaw when the Germans invaded. He fled to the countryside and was hidden by righteous Gentiles. When the fighting stopped there was nothing for him to return to. His shtetl had simply ceased to exist, it had been burned off the face of the earth and where he was sure his parents' house had stood, there was a Ukrainian farm, the people surly and unresponsive. He never saw any member of his family again. His world had been annihilated. It all came back, he said, it all came flooding back when the graffiti started. It was the same with Mrs Gellhorn. Her old nightmares had returned.

Jack was in a foul mood when he returned to the station. He'd kill for a fag and a bilious rage surged up with reflux into his oesophagus; he wanted to catch the Nazi graffiti artists and wring their necks. He was still irritated at being taken off the Adams murder inquiry, too. He contented himself with bawling out some junior constables, his blue eyes flashing, and sloped off to his office and set Bluey Bishop to work trawling through the files. Paisley took the opportunity to come and gloat in the doorway, but Jack didn't even acknowledge his presence. Eventually, Paisley moved on, idly scratching his testicles, muttering something about 'Big Noses', but Jack restrained himself.

Paisley was biding his time until the earliest possible opportunity for retirement. He was a bludger, a time-server detested by most of his colleagues, and a closed-minded bigot with a limitless and dangerous capacity for mischief and malevolence. He wasn't without brains and, had he been so inclined, he could have been a good policeman. But he was lazier than a sloth when it came to work. Fuller said in his usual crude way that Paisley would be in everything bar a shit sandwich and that, only because he didn't like bread. He had a patron Higher Up - his father-in-law in Launceston - how else could you explain how the man managed to survive despite his manifest laziness and incompetence? Jack also suspected he was bent and had his own file on the man, but lacked any hard evidence. The file Paisley had left on the case was useless, like just about everything that he got his hands on.

Jack's mind was working as he tapped the end of his spoon on his teeth - a habit that drove Helen to distraction. They'd have to stake the place out, even if it was an all-night job. The landlord of the 'Duke of York' would oblige them with a room; after all, coppers provided a significant part of his income. Bishop would love the overtime. In the meantime, there was one lead he wanted to chase up. A day or so before, he'd been accosted in the Elizabeth Street mall by a beautiful dark-haired young woman handing out leaflets. He took the leaflet from the inside pocket of his jacket and smoothed it out on his desk. Yeah, that was it. Smudgy, badly roneoed on blue paper with a picture of a man in a keffiyah wielding an assault rifle, the flyer exhorted the reader to support human rights for palestinians! and denounced what it called 'Zionist murder gangs' operating on the West Bank and in Gaza. The leaflet was authorised by an S. J. Calvert for a 'Palestinian Human Rights Group'. Those interested were encouraged to write to a post office box in Sandy Bay, or to ring one of a couple of local phone numbers. Jack Martin reached over and dialled the first one. After a while a voice - young, male, educated, slightly wary - answered. Jack said that he was interested in the group.

Half an hour later, Jack's unmarked white Holden police car was parked outside a block of double-storey red-brick terrace houses in Nixon Street, Sandy Bay. He knew the block well: two up and two down, with a single-storey kitchen and bathroom out the back. It was one of only a handful of such types of housing in the whole city; most of the houses here were single-storey weatherboards or brick bungalows. An old girlfriend had lived here long ago: Tracey Devine, dark-haired, petite and always ready to rock and roll. She'd had the face of a Celtic angel and even now the memory stabbed Jack's heart. She was bright too, and had been awarded a PhD for a thesis on something to do with ancient Rome. Last he heard, she was behind a kitchen sink in Burnie and married to an accountant, breeding Afghan hounds for a hobby, with a herd of ankle-biters and an eagle-eyed Dutch Calvinist mother-inlaw to keep her on the straight and narrow, her PhD testamur presumably forgotten in a dark cupboard among old towels and stocks of nappies. Bob Bishop coughed discreetly and Jack swam back to the present.

A wind had blown up and they could hear the sound of steel cables flapping against the hollow masts of the yachts moored in the river off the beach at Marieville Esplanade. The estuary was the colour of gunmetal and looked like it had the consistency of syrup. Jack lifted the heavy cast-iron doorknocker - it was the same one as twenty years before - and let it fall on its metal plate. A thin young man opened the door almost immediately. He had what could only be described as a starburst of reddish-blond hair. He was in his early twenties, with a wispy blond goatee and rather thick lips from which a smile was rapidly ebbing. His green eyes narrowed and his nose twitched as if he could really smell 'pork' on the doorstep. Jack held his badge under the young man's nose. 'Mind if we have a talk, Mr Calvert? I'm Inspector Martin and this is DC Bishop.'

'What about?' the young man asked, his composure regained. 'As far as I'm aware, I haven't broken any laws, at least not lately.' He had folded his arms and was contemplating his visitor with a level green gaze.

A smart-arse, Jack decided. 'Better if we come inside, Mr Calvert,' he said. 'The neighbours might start to talk. It wouldn't do in a respectable neighbourhood like this.' It hadn't been too respectable twenty something years before, when Jack had been round at Tracey's place, boozing with a fast crowd from the Traveller's Rest Hotel: students, artists, waterside workers and escapees from Smithton anxious to make it in what they perceived to be the Big Smoke. There was a German bloke from round the corner who played classical music on the piano and was into S & M, and his seedy-looking friends from the Brazil coffee house and the basement bar of the Ship Hotel. Jeez, there had been Jack's best mate, too, another young copper called Damien Mazengarb. Christ knows how they were accepted by that crowd. Mascots and oddballs maybe? The neighbours had threatened to call the police, so Jack, then a young constable, had had to placate them. It had earned him a bollocking from the legendary Chief Superintendent Frank Bull, no less, and must still be on his record sheet, mouldering in some back room of the cop shop files.

Calvert's mouth was opening and closing. 'Let 'em talk,' he scoffed, but he jerked his head to the side to indicate that the policemen could follow and Jack resurfaced from his dreams. The door opened straight into the lounge room, just as Jack remembered. A couple of dark-haired young women were seated on a tattered couch, talking in low voices over what looked like an art book, and a silver tabby cat was washing behind its ears. Bishop's jaw had actually dropped at the sight of the women, and he blushed up to his springy red hair. Didn't they have pulchritude in Burnie? Jack thought, but he too was impressed. They were stunners. One of them had handed him the leaflet in the Mall. Women come and go, talking of Michelangelo, Jack thought, the words springing up unbidden almost into his mouth. Calvert didn't introduce them but walked straight through to a back room where he invited the policemen to sit on hard-backed chairs round a linoleum-topped table. (Could it be the same table? Jack wasn't sure, knowing that memory was easily distorted by nostalgia.)

The back room was Spartan, with a clutter of papers strewn over an ancient couch with the springs poking out. They spilled off the table too and out of a tall writing case that stood next to the stairs leading to the first floor. The white paint on the walls had faded to a dull grey and there was old lino on the floor. That had been there all those years before, Jack was sure. There were mounds of newspapers too, some still tied up in string from the printers. Jack had seen the paper, Workers Action, sold on street corners by earnest young men and women in all weathers. He had to give it to them for dedication. When he was on the beat, he'd watched one of them once - a tallish, well-built young man with thinning hair and a goatee - outside the ANZ bank. Patrick Banning, or something, they called him. Banning would have been lucky to sell half a dozen copies in an hour. Must have been due to the 'false consciousness' of the Hobartian proletariat, Jack had sneered. His daughter sometimes brought copies of the paper home and left them lying round, perhaps deliberately to annoy him. (She didn't know that he read them secretly and would have been surprised at his knowledge of the arcane world of the Australian revolutionary left.)

There was a large poster of Che Guevara on one wall with the slogan, smash capitalism emblazoned across the bottom in flaring red letters. A bust of Karl Marx peeped from behind the papers on the table. Another poster proclaimed that israel is occupied palestine. Bishop saw it and raised his eyebrows; he probably thought he'd jackpotted. Calvert sat facing them, crossing one blue-jeaned leg over the other fastidiously, an ironic smile tugging the corner of his mouth, his green eyes level. There was a faint smell, a hospital kind of smell, about him. Chloroform? Strong disinfectant, something like that, Jack mused. Maybe he was one of those obsessive-compulsive types; he certainly looked pretty scrubbed and pink; perhaps he was a chemistry student? If so, Jack hoped he didn't have a penchant for the 'TNT' -Transnational Terrorism' - that Bob Santamaria was always wittering on about in that 'Point of View' program on television. But the young man also smelled of strong tobacco, Drum, thought Jack, with a sudden deep craving; but no, the boy had gone one better, it was that lung-busting White Ox!

'I'd offer you tea, but I doubt you'd like camomile or golden lemon and honey,'Calvert said, raising a mocking eyebrow. 'Am I right, Inspector?'

'Yeah, you'd be right,' Jack conceded, 'but thanks anyway.'

Bishop, too, waved away the offer (did they have herbal tea at The Nut? Jack wondered) and Calvert shrugged, picking up a cup from the table and sipping with every appearance of relish. The bugger's at least got some manners, thought Jack. Not a total smart-arse; brought up a good middle-class boy to say please and thank you and offer drinks to his guests. He didn't look or act much like a revolutionary should - all wild-eyed and dishevelled, with the spit flecking the corner of his mouth as he gave out with some incomprehensible harangue - this Marxist boy was neat and tidy, except for the burst of hair. Calvert relit a roll-your-own cigarette that had gone out in an ashtray. Definitely White Ox.

'We're here,' said Jack, eyeing Calvert's cigarette hungrily, 'as part of an investigation into vandalism at the Hobart Synagogue. Somebody has been daubing anti-Semitic slogans on the walls, Mr Calvert. I was wondering if you could help us.'He nodded towards the poster behind Calvert's head. 'Perhaps someone from your group has decided to up the ante from just handing out anti-Semitic leaflets.'

'Bollocks.' The voice hissed from behind his ear, preceded by a zephyr of subtle perfume. 'Do we look like we'd go in for 'the socialism of fools', officer?' One of the young women was standing at the connecting door, her hands on her hips, a sour expression distorting her features. 'We don't like bacon, thanks. And that's not just because I happen to be Jewish ... Inspector.' She made the title sound like an insult.

The pause was that of an accomplished actress, er, actor, thought Jack. (Maybe she was in the Old Nick Society with Wendy?) Her eyes were full of sardonic intelligence and Jack was afraid she could read his mind. The silver cat had come in too and was regarding Jack with disapproval, flicking her tail this way and that. Her familiar, thought Jack with a slight smile.

'What Hannah means, Inspector, is that we don't distribute anti-Semitic leaflets,'explained Calvert. 'We don't like what is being done to the Palestinian people, but that doesn't make us anti-Semites. In fact, that's a pretty stupid thing to say, given that the Palestinians are a Semitic people themselves. And yes, Hannah is Jewish. Do you find that so surprising? Or would you classify her as a "self-hating Jew"?'

'I don't know, would you?' Jack replied, leaning back in his chair.

'Tell me, Inspector, have you heard of Isaac Deutscher?' Calvert asked.

'Can't say I have. What's he got to do with anything?'

'Deutscher was a Polish Jew and an anti-Stalinist Communist,' said Calvert, butting out his cigarette. 'He was the biographer of both Stalin and Trotsky. He escaped to London before the outbreak of the war and enlisted in the British Army. If he thought he'd escaped the racist crap he was mistaken, although it was obviously milder than under the Nazis. I imagine he despaired when anti-Semitic officers and men rode him for being Jewish. So, while he was a good Marxist from a party that had originally been staunchly anti-nationalist - that was the influence of another great Jewish Marxist, Rosa Luxemburg - he was ambivalent when the state of Israel was created after the war. He knew as well as anyone what had happened to his fellow Polish Jews. So he once said that the Jews were like a man jumping from a burning building. He landed on someone else, but instead of apologising and making redress to him, he jumped up and down on him like he was a trampoline.'

'Here endeth the lesson,' said Jack, pretending to yawn. 'I suppose you mean that the man he jumped on was Palestinian?'

'Yeah, that's what he meant. He was torn and for me that sums it all up. There is no simple, easy explanation or solution and I get pissed off when people on either side try to say it's all simple.'

'You're not so simple, Simon,' Jack quipped.

Hannah had been listening intently, but at this she turned her back and flounced out of the room, shaking her long black hair. Jack thought she was magnificent, a marvellous filly with a very pale face, huge brown eyes and a full red mouth. Nice bum. He bit back on the thought, seeing himself as an old perve past his use-by date. His daughter would have him on toast for his sexism. His mind wandered back to his old girlfriend, Tracey, then further back, to the beautiful long-lost Lily, and he felt very worn and old; a relic of the sixties stranded on this bank and shoal of time, flapping uselessly, all but invisible to the young in their unthinking and naive arrogance.

'So I'm afraid I really can't help you, Inspector,' Calvert was saying, breaking into Jack's reverie. 'Whatever you might think, we certainly would not approve.' He lowered his voice. 'Hannah is the granddaughter of the president of the Jewish congregation, you realise?'

'Mr Rosenberg?' Calvert nodded. 'That's interesting.' Jack actually believed Calvert's avowal of innocence but he never took anything at face value. He'd been fooled by a few plausible liars in his early days and had sworn never to be taken in again. In his book, it was educated middle-class types like Calvert who cloaked dark secrets the best. Calvert apologised that he had to leave soon for a lecture, so Jack jerked his head at Bishop and the young officer snapped shut his notebook. The young women didn't look up as they left, but Calvert bid the policemen a polite good day at the door.

There was a misty drizzle floating off the river, barely perceptible but soon coating them in a fine sheen of water. The two officers went along the road and sat a while in the plastic and vinyl-smelling car, fogging up the windows with their damp exhalations. A wan sun peered through the clouds over the river, decided it wasn't the day and retreated, plunging everything back into gloom.

Five minutes later, Calvert and the young women came out of the house, joking and laughing, and walked towards King Street, snapping up umbrellas against what had become a heavy fall of rain, oblivious of - or perhaps ignoring - the watching cops. Jack waited until they rounded the corner, then jumped out of the car and nipped along the footpath behind them. When he saw them turn right into Marieville Esplanade towards the university, he slipped down the lane behind the block and found the gate to Calvert's back yard. It smelled of rain and old ashes. A broken-down old Cortina was parked forlornly at Calvert's back gate, one tyre flat and all four of them bald, its blue paint cracked and faded, with rust eating away at the boot, although it was still registered. It was covered in stickers: everything from the prosaic and predictable stop uranium mining to the more intriguing we gave fraser the razor, now give hawke the fork.

Jack wondered if Calvert had anything to do with the famous graffiti on a boatshed just round the corner where the Sandy Bay Rivulet drained into the estuary. keep menzies in the ground was its surreal exhortation, conjuring up visions of the deceased conservative 'Ming' as a political vampire in need of a stake through the heart and a silver bullet in the temple. Another graffito had proclaimed that fraser is a distended rectum and yet another had declared that the police are the agents of fascism. Jack doubted that had been the Marxist boy; Calvert was too serious for that kind of irreverent anarchism. He was the sort who would plough through Plekhanov and Lenin's Volume 38 or Volume III of Capital, then reach for Brecht for light reading.

The half-rotten back gate was unlocked so Jack walked in, noting the faded enamel sign warning about the resident canine that had been altered to read beware of the ogre. Back in Tracey Devine's day, a blond behemoth of a student radical nicknamed the Ogre had lived in the block, notorious for his bouts of drink and ill-humour and his run-ins with the constabulary. Jack hadn't seen or heard of him in decades. There were weeds sprouting everywhere in Calvert's yard and an old ginger tomcat hissed at him from the fence. Jack pulled a face at it and it turned its back on him disdainfully. Was it the same one as the Ogre's orange beast, an animal as malign as Fat Freddie's Cat that had crept into Tracey's house during parties and clawed the bums of the revellers? It was quite possibly the offspring, thought Jack. This one was no doubt responsible for the acrid stench of cat's piss that no amount of rain could wash away. There was a tumbledown brick shed behind the Hill's Hoist which sported an assembly of greyish y-fronts and holey socks, and Jack made a beeline for that edifice, dragging the reluctant Bishop in his wake. ('Jeez, sir, oughtn't we get a warrant?') The door was half off its hinges and junk was spilling out: old papers, brushes, an old mattress, a broken Hoover twin tub washing machine, a roll of undyed calico, the end of a painted banner that read SMASH something or other, a small antique offset press that looked surprisingly well cared for, and some aerosol spray paint cans. Some rusty iron tools that looked as if they had belonged to a shipwright who'd come out on the First Fleet hung haphazardly on a board nailed up at the back. ('Worth a fortune,' calculated Bishop.) It all smelt musty from the recent rain, but Calvert's mates had been as busy as cats burying shit, cranking out propaganda for their cause on the ancient press.

'Yes,' Jack hissed, pouncing on the aerosol cans. 'I'll give those smart arses a bit of direct action alright.' Three or four of the cans had blue paint in them. 'Now that might be evidence,' he told Bishop, though a little voice at the back of his mind told him he was only doing it to be a bastard and to annoy his daughter and that these Marxist boys and girls had as much contempt as he had for Nazis and their daubing of swastikas. But he'd come back with a warrant and annoy that little green-eyed clever dick with the Rubens hairstyle.

Really? said the voice. You've no evidence and what about the beautiful Hannah? Can you really see her daubing her own grandfather's synagogue?

I dunno, said the copper side of him. Scratch half of these things and there was a neurosis lurking at the bottom of it. All very Freudian; they probably didn't even know it themselves. He settled the debate by telling himself that it was all a matter of following up leads, taking no one's word for anything. And he actually liked the boy, Calvert. When he looked up, Bishop was eying him quizzically. No doubt the pimply little Northwest Coast sheep-shagger would entertain his mates after work in the pub with tales of his eccentric boss, Jack Martin, who spoke little yet seemed always to be debating with himself.

Two days later, Calvert sat in Jack Martin's office. DC Bishop was lounging against the back wall worrying his zits, and the Inspector was seated in his swivel chair, his square jaw cradled in his hands, his blue eyes full of ironic amusement. The spray cans, bagged in clear plastic and labelled, sat upright on the desk between them. He was staring out of the window behind Calvert, a faint smile playing over his lips. Night was falling, with the last rays of a weak sun playing on the TV towers at the top of the Mountain. He was rather enjoying himself, despite the disapproval of his inner voice. Calvert had come in voluntarily to 'help with enquiries', but Jack was out to give him a hard time despite that. Yet from somewhere in the building, they'd rustled up a cup of camomile tea for their guest. Gordon Paisley had grinned malevolently when he saw Bishop brewing it. 'For goodness sake/I've got the hippy-hippy shake,' he sneered when he saw it going into Jack's office with the label hanging out of the mug. 'Jack Martin, a real 1960s love child.'

Calvert sipped at the camomile and made a face. 'Vintage 1945?' he asked, raising an eyebrow in what seemed to be his defining gesture, but softening it immediately with 'Sorry, I do appreciate the trouble you've gone to.' He was a cool fellow all right, thought Jack grudgingly. There was something almost aristocratic about this revolutionary; he might pass as a Prince Kropotkin of the Antipodes except that his father stripped ingots in the Cell Room at the Risdon zinc works for a crust; Bishop had rung round all the Calverts in the phone book and found that out. The grandfather was an orchardist from down past the Huon but had too many kids for them all to continue on the farm. Calvert had probably taken elocution lessons; thanks to Bishop's enthusiastic sleuthing, Jack already knew that he'd been to the private Hutchins School on a scholarship. His old man was mighty proud of that, Bishop said.

'Just answer the questions, Mr Calvert,' Jack said, turning back to face his victim, albeit with an almost avuncular smile on his face. 'The sooner you clear things up for us, the sooner we can all go home.' He sucked noisily at his own tea - Bushells, strong, black, with three sugars - and lit a cigarette, totally forgetting the new regulations and the fact that he had given up. 'Tell you what though, do you like a riddle?'

'Maybe,' said Calvert, exhaling audibly and gesturing to Jack to continue.

'Well, now,' Jack asked, leaning forward. 'Why do Proudhon and other anarchists prefer herbal tea?'

'I dunno,' replied Calvert, looking sharply at Jack. 'Did he? Why do they?'

'Because proper tea is theft.' Jack said it with a straight face. Calvert groaned; it was so bad that it was good, and Jack could see that he was wondering how this old porker had even heard of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. As far as Bishop went, the ball had gone straight through to the wicket keeper: Proudhon wasn't on the syllabus at Hellyer College, or anywhere else under the auspices of the Tasmanian Education Department. Most of the coppers wouldn't have known their Marx from their elbow for that matter and for some of them the sports pages in the Herald Sun were the pinnacles of intellectual stimulation. Jack recalled his time as a junior constable. Once long ago as young constables, Jack and Damien Mazengarb had been assigned to keep the peace at a demonstration against the war in Vietnam. A gaunt Communist waterside union official from Melbourne - some kind of relative of Frank Bull's, he heard - was speaking. 'Why do the police always travel in threes?' the orator had asked, then answered his own question: 'Because one can read, one can write, and the other likes the company of intellectuals.' Jack had bridled at the time, but he had to admit that with some of them, the orator had a point. Calvert was disconcerted to know that a policeman had even heard of Proudhon, as Jack had intended. Jack suddenly pounced again, changing the subject back to Calvert's alleged anti-Semitism.

'This is ridiculous,' said the young man, savouring Jack's smoke, though he dispensed advice about it. 'You should give that up, take it from me.' Jack stared at the cigarette that had jumped, unbidden, into his hand and stubbed it out. Calvert continued: 'Now, would you please tell me why you choose to drag me round here because I have a couple of spray cans in my shed. God, half the town must have them.'

'Yes but not these particular spray cans, Mr Calvert,' Bishop broke in. 'It just so happens that the paint matches that from the walls of the synagogue.' Jack frowned at the upstart's interruption. This was his investigation now, and he didn't want this pimply greenhorn stuffing things up. Worse still, Bishop was smoking. Jack told him to put it out, but Calvert deliberately lit up a rolly cigarette, with a look that said plainly, what's sauce for the goose '

'Yes, not these particular cans, Mr Calvert,' Jack said, reclaiming his patch, disconcerted by the fumes of White Ox. 'Moreover, you just happen to have a motive. You're angry, are you not, about what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians? Your friend, Hannah, perhaps she's angry with her own grandfather. A family dispute?'

'The paint is for my car,' said Calvert, clearly annoyed for having to mount a defence against what he saw as absurd allegations, brushing a hand through his shock of red hair and exhaling a thin stream of smoke. 'If you found the paint, you would have seen the car. You're trying to frame me. As for Hannah, why would she want to hurt her own family? I've seen the graffiti, Inspector, and I agree that it is quite vile; so vile that I find it insulting that anyone could think we could have done such a thing.'

And so it went. As Calvert said, the paint could be found in any one of half a dozen hardware shops and in possibly thousands of houses round the city. Jack walked with him to the side lane into Liverpool Street, where the paddy wagons docked with their cargoes of drunks and domestic brawlers. 'Thanks for your time, sir,' Jack said, nodding affably, as if they had just shared a pleasant half hour. It was freezing and rain was starting to fall in great thick drops that thudded down on the footpath and left blobs as big as twenty-cent pieces. 'I'll run you home if you like.' Calvert was shivering in a thin cotton tee shirt - typical of young blokes, thought Jack - but he shook his head and muttered something about not having far to go.

'Suit yourself, mate,' said Jack, involuntarily turning up his collar against the wind and rain. 'Nothing personal. You do realise that we have to follow all leads?'

Calvert just shrugged and walked out into the street, almost colliding with a group of pretty young nurses who had just come off shift at the Royal Hobart opposite. Exactly how Jack Martin had met Helen over twenty years ago. The Inspector smiled at the memory as Calvert turned aside to let the young women walk past. They smiled broadly when they saw it was Calvert, but they stared straight through Jack as if he didn't exist. Shit, thought, Jack, they're all over this weedy bugger. What's he got that I don't? Youth and good looks, said a dark voice at the back of his mind. You old bugger, you invisible man, you wrinkly codger - Calvert waited until the nurses were past and was just about to walk off in the rain when he hesitated, stopped, and came back to the mouth of the laneway. 'Listen,' he said. 'I don't know if you'd be interested, but a couple of weeks back, some pretty dodgy characters turned up at one of our PHRG meetings - that's the Palestinian meetings.'

Jack was interested. They finished the conversation along the road in the lounge bar of the Alabama Hotel. Over a few ten-ounce beers - Jack's shout - the story came out. Calvert had never seen the men before and they weren't the typical kind you see around the solidarity movements. They were old for a start, long past the time when most people have passion and time to spare for radical politics. No, they weren't wharfies either. Calvert knew the old waterside workers; a different breed of tough old-timers whose years under the hook had taught them solidarity that extended beyond narrow national confines. No, these old blokes had never turned up at any left-wing events before. One of them was in dowdy down-market clothes, sporting a baggy old grey cardigan of the kind that might have been fashionable thirty years ago in Dunedin, an ancient trilby upon his head; the ensemble completed with shapeless grey Oxford bags and a pair of polished black shoes that looked as though they had belonged to a rural Tasmanian school principal in the 1950s. The other man, well, he was more dapper, in a well-cut suit. A ladies' man, Calvert reckoned, with a real charm about him, and an intellect that he tried to suppress and which didn't jell with the moronic pamphlet he later proffered. Both of them had thin faces, deeply lined from life, with thin grey hair and grey eyes that peered out sadly at the world. Greyish-brown, sort of dusty eyes actually. Grey all over in fact, with soft hands that had never known the hard manual labour that had been the lot of the waterside workers. But Calvert reckoned they'd done it hard nevertheless. They could almost have been twins and they had funny accents, eastern European, Calvert thought. Not German, kind of hard to explain. Maybe Polish. Maybe Russian, something like that. There was a kind of sing-song edge to their guttural vowels.

They'd just walked into the meeting up at the old university buildings on the Domain and sat down, looking nervous in the corner. One of them - the downmarket guy -had carried a battered old Gladstone doctor's bag, as if he was on his way home from work. People were polite and friendly to them, but they were reserved, their grey eyes wary, and they listened very carefully to everything people were saying. Finally, one of them had leaned down and pulled some pamphlets and books from his bag. He coughed and cleared his throat, asked if anyone had ever seen his literature before. Although some of the people sitting nearby had been politely non-committal, Calvert had been infuriated by what he saw, for the man was touting a copy of the notorious anti-Semitic pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The pamphlet, which purported to be proof of a Jewish-Marxist conspiracy for world domination, had long ago been exposed as a Tsarist police forgery, but here were these old fossils hawking it round like dirty postcards. They'd been asked to leave the meeting for their pains, much to the dismay of an intense young Greek Maoist who squirmed angrily on his bum in his chair before storming out of the room in protest, seeing them as backward workers more in need of education than expulsion. Somehow, though, the old men looked almost pleased and one of them - the more dapper of the pair - had whispered a name to Calvert. 'Jean Amery,' it sounded like. 'You read Jean Amery and you'll see where I'm coming from.'

The tale told, Calvert stood up, thanking Jack for the beer. 'Thank you, Mr Calvert,' Jack replied. It could be something. It could be nothing though personally he was inclined against thinking old blokes would run around in the dead of night daubing slogans on walls. As for the Amery business, he hadn't a clue what it might mean.

Calvert suddenly remembered something and turned on his heel. 'Oh, Inspector, 'he asked. 'How do you know about Proudhon? I mean...' Jack tapped the side of his nose. 'I'm not just a pretty face, son.' The young man smiled and was gone, leaving the faint hospital smell in his wake. He'd given Jack a lead of sorts and Jack knew he'd been a bastard for persecuting him. Was it the job that had done it to him, or did he do the job because of what it did for him? He didn't like to think that one through.