St Kilda Blues Page 11

  FOURTEEN

  The house was quiet, too quiet for Berlin. Rebecca had said she might be late home that evening and he was missing her. He walked to the back door and looked out into the yard. The back lawn would definitely need mowing on the weekend, and the vegetable garden needed work too. There was rubbish to burn as well, stacked up by the brick incinerator he had built in the far rear corner of the yard. No fires on Monday, though; Monday was wash day. Every Hills hoist in the neighbourhood would be weighed down with white sheets, pillowcases, shirts and underwear. The wooden kennel he had built for Pip was waiting by the backyard incinerator too, broken up and ready for the flames. With Sarah away it was a good time to get rid of it.

  The dog, Pip, had been dead five or six years now. He was buried under the paperbark tree by the back shed. Sarah had brought that tree home as a seedling from primary school one Arbour Day years back and now it was about 12 feet high. Pip had burrowed his way out under the side fence, as terriers will, and Berlin figured he had been clipped by a car somewhere out on the main road. But the tough little bugger had managed to crawl almost all the way home before he died.

  Sarah had been devastated, and his heart ached when he remembered the tears on her face and the bunch of jonquils clutched in her hand as he’d dug the little grave. She’d wanted a new dog after a time but they hadn’t ever got around to buying one and now the girl had other things on her mind. Didn’t they all.

  He turned and walked back into the house and looked into the boy’s bedroom. It was neat and tidy but that was always Rebecca’s doing, never Peter’s. Peter had been a mess for as long as Berlin could remember. In his clothes, in his thoughts and in his life. He was always dark and morose, and Berlin had once confessed to Rebecca that while he loved his son he wasn’t all that sure that he liked him. She’d smiled and said, ‘He’s like his dad, Charlie, that’s his only problem. We made him at a bad time in your life. You grew out of it and so will he.’ Berlin couldn’t recall any other time when Rebecca had been so wrong.

  He hated going into Sarah’s empty bedroom but he couldn’t stay away. The neatness in this room was all her doing, as were the framed sketches and photographs on the pale yellow walls. They had painted those walls together, though she had chosen the colour. It was a grown-up girl’s room and Sarah had been grown-up since she was six or seven, maybe even younger. He loved her with all his heart, so much that it sometimes hurt.

  He had built the bookcase that held her trophies and winners’ ribbons for netball and running and the javelin throw. Framed certificates of academic achievement on the wall sat above the collection of Famous Five and Secret Seven books and more recently published scholarly works on what was starting to be called the Holocaust. When she was eight, the Secret Seven books had made her yearn for shiny black court shoes to wear on adventures, and at age eleven the television and newspaper coverage of the capture of the Nazi Adolph Eichmann in Argentina and his trial and subsequent execution in Israel in 1962 had led her to ask her mother questions about her grandparents and to explain what it meant to be Jewish.

  Rebecca’s parents had died in a car crash on the notorious Pretty Sally Hill outside Melbourne on a lovely Sunday afternoon just after Christmas in 1960. They were secular German Jews living in Stuttgart before the war, and Rebecca had been born there. Her father was a successful commercial photographer but the growing influence of Hitler and the Nazis had concerned him enough to make him sell his share of the business to his gentile partner. The family immigrated to Australia in 1934, settling in the country town of Ballarat. Her father made a decent living there, doing wedding photographs and studio portraits, assisted by his daughter. Rebecca attended the local Catholic school until the war came and she had joined the women’s auxiliary air force when she was old enough. The family’s religion, while not a secret, was not something they made a lot of, even though the town had a substantial Jewish community and had built a synagogue decades earlier. The rapid rise to power of the Nazis and their institutionalised anti-Semitism had made Rebecca’s father a very wary man even before the war.

  The discovery that she was Jewish because her mother was had sparked something in Sarah, a need to find out more. Always a voracious reader, she’d borrowed books on the subject, and consulted with a rabbi. At sixteen she had joined a Jewish youth group to learn more about Judaism, and in December of the previous year she’d announced she was saving up to go to Israel when she turned eighteen.

  Growing tension in the Middle East in early 1967 and talk of the possibility of war between Israel and the neighbouring Arab states had started discussions in her youth group about volunteers travelling to Israel. In February while Berlin fought with his bosses over the case of the three missing girls Sarah compounded his problems by announcing she had brought forward her decision about going to Israel. She carefully laid out her reasons for wanting to be a volunteer, saying it was partly as a tribute to her late grandparents and also partly a way of learning more about her Jewish heritage. She also explained she could pay her own way with part of the inheritance her grandparents had left her. In return for her parents’ permission, Sarah promised she would come back after a year abroad and do her very best to get into Medicine at Melbourne University when she finished high school.

  It was totally out of the question, of course, and Sarah was too young to get a passport without parental approval, so that was that. But Sarah was her mother’s daughter and she gradually wore them down with historical precedents, logic and well-reasoned argument. They finally capitulated after Rebecca’s discovery through friends that the Australian government, at the urging of leaders of the Jewish community, had agreed to withhold permission for members of volunteer groups to leave the country for the Middle East. The plan went awry when the Arab/Israeli war was over and won in just six days. The government decided that the waiting Australian volunteers could go to Israel to assist with rebuilding and recovery. They would also temporarily replace the men and women still away serving in the armed forces. Sarah held her parents to their word and, with the danger of fighting now passed, they finally gave permission.

  Both Berlin’s wristwatch and stomach told him it was well past lunchtime so he walked into the kitchen. He always cooked dinner on Sunday evenings to give Rebecca at least one night off, and last night he’d made Kai Si Ming, Sarah’s favourite – forgetting or choosing to forget that she was halfway around the world. With just the two of them for dinner there was plenty left over for lunch. Kai Si Ming was supposed to be a Chinese dish but he’d never seen anything like it in the local takeaway.

  All the neighbourhood women made their own version of the dish because it was easy, cheap and filling: beef mince and cabbage and curry powder or soy sauce and spices, with a stock cube and rice and water mixed in. Berlin liked to add diced carrot, dried chilli and red capsicum when Joe next door had some to spare from his garden. Amongst the neighbours his version was considered to be quite exotic, though Peter didn’t care for it.

  He filled a saucepan with the leftovers and put it on the stove over a low flame. While it warmed through, he used a paring knife to cut the twine holding the pile of newspapers together. He rifled through them, looking at the titles: Gas, Music Times, Beat, Teenybopper, Go-Set. He knew Go-Set because Sarah had brought it home several times. He was more interested in the photographs than the stories, most of which he knew would make no sense to him. If Sarah was here she could explain them to him, since it was definitely more her world than his. The missing persons folders were his world, and the things that were in them he knew he could never explain to Sarah, or to anyone else.

  There was the smell of something burning and he quickly lifted the saucepan off the heat. He should have added some water, he realised. He ate his lunch straight from the pot with a spoon, leaning back against the kitchen sink. Rebecca would have been appalled. But Charlie Berlin ate whatever was on offer and a dish of partly burned mince and cabbage was still food.

  After washing t
he dishes and putting the kettle on he found a number in the red plastic teledex next to the phone in the hallway. The telephone was answered, as always, on the second ring. Berlin knew the owner insisted on it.

  ‘Cafe Budapest, good afternoon.’

  Once it had been grumpy men with thick foreign accents who answered but now it was a woman with a warm, friendly voice.

  ‘Good afternoon, can you tell me if Mr Horvay will be at his usual table at the usual time this evening?’

  ‘Mr Horvay will be in, yes.’

  ‘Would you be so kind as to tell Mr Horvay that Mr Berlin will be in to see him this evening between 6:30 and 7:00. Thank you.’

  Berlin hung up and made another pot of tea. While it brewed he cleared space on the table and on the kitchen bench tops. He needed to lay out the papers and the files, to begin a methodical page-by-page search. Page by page or point by point. Berlin remembered Gary, the shy young Canadian navigator who, at barely twenty, had plotted their courses nightly through the darkness, from point to point and on to the glowing coloured target markers dropped by the pathfinder force.

  Remembering Gary brought all the others back to him. On the ground they were a tight-knit group like most bomber crews, though Berlin had tried to keep a distance. Once their Lancaster was airborne they became just voices crackling in his headphones from their stations throughout the aircraft: Wilf the flight engineer at his instrument panels, Mick with his radios, Lou the rear gunner and Jock in the mid-upper turret sweeping the blackness with their Browning machine guns, and Harry in the nose, an air gunner too until he took the bomb-aimer’s perch as they approached the target.

  The navigator’s station was a cramped, black-curtained hidey-hole behind Berlin’s cockpit and the flight engineer’s position. Young Gary worked at his chart table there, calculating headwinds and drift and no doubt constantly dreaming of marrying Gwen, the pretty English WAAF who drove one of the big Dodge buses that took aircrew out to the bombers. Berlin struggled to remember Gwen’s face. Was she a redhead? Was there a photograph of her pinned under Gary’s Gee receiver, or had he imagined that? The Gee unit, a flickering, black and white oscilloscope screen, displayed radio pulses that Gary carefully plotted on a lattice grid over his maps to fix their exact position, point by point.

  Gwen was probably long married, with children, maybe grandchildren. Gary, not much older then than Peter was now, had become, like the other boys, windblown ash in the night sky over the docks at Kiel on their thirtieth mission. He was just a memory now, one more name on a memorial back home, somewhere out on the bleak Canadian prairie.

  Berlin began on the pile of music papers. Point by point: that was how you made it to the target, to the solution, to the answer. Berlin’s target was Gudrun Scheiner and whoever was holding her captive. He began scanning through the photographs. Were these pictures the link? Gudrun and Rosemary had been photographed at a dance but so had a lot of other girls. Photographers came and went as they pleased, several discotheque managers had told him. Pictures in the music press were vital to building or maintaining a reputation as a hotspot, a cool venue, a happening place for the hip and the groovy to see and be seen. Almost any bloke carrying a black Nikon camera with a flash attached was allowed to jump the queues and bypass the cashier, whether he was known to them or not.

  The music papers were all on cheap newsprint stock with the black and white printing rough and inconsistent in quality. Most of the photographs were dark and contrasty, some of the girls in them looking too damned young to be out by themselves at night. While a couple of the bands were nicely dressed by Berlin’s standards, many more were scruffy, wearing caftans or old military band jackets or shirts open to the waist with wide sleeves, and they almost always had flowing long hair and beards. What was wrong with dressing up in suits and ties like The Seekers? he wondered. They’d made it big in the UK without looking like a bunch of ruffians and their songs regularly topped the hit parade.

  The clipping from Gudrun Scheiner’s corkboard had the number nineteen under it so Berlin turned immediately to page nineteen in each paper. He found the photograph in the third he opened, a publication called GEAR. The editorial details inside the front page gave an office address in Brunswick and listed seven contributing photographers. Perhaps Rebecca might know of some of them.

  He moved on to the other missing girls. The files on the first three to disappear were at the bottom of the box. Not the originals, he noticed, but very ordinary photocopies. The notes and reports on the rest of the girls were also photocopies, jumbled and out of order as if the copying had been done in haste. There were pictures of the girls but the copying process had lost most of the details and the images were either too dark or too light. He tried to put all the information into some sort of order before he started reading.

  The missing person files didn’t give a lot to go on, apart from the fact the girls had all disappeared from inner-city dances on Saturday nights – all except the girl found in the lake, who was listed as missing from her home in a rural outer suburb. This discrepancy caught Berlin’s attention.

  Melinda Marquet had been reported missing two weeks before her naked body was pulled from Albert Park Lake. The police report indicated that the girl had first been notified as missing around ten o’clock on a Sunday morning. The report had gone into Melton police and the parents had been interviewed. The girl’s father, Clive Marquet, was the owner of a local furniture store. The family lived on a dozen acres outside Melton and the victim had four younger sisters. Berlin studied the photographs in the file, including one that showed a pretty teenager in school uniform. She was smiling in the photograph and even though the image quality was poor, there was something about the look in the girl’s eyes that Berlin found unsettling.

  A handwritten note was attached to the back cover of the folder with a paper clip. After reading the note twice Berlin decided that the Marquet family in Melton seemed as good a place as any to start the investigation. He walked into the hallway and telephoned police headquarters at Russell Street, leaving a message for Bob Roberts to call him back. There was no response by five o’clock so he left a second message for Roberts to pick him up at eight the next morning and to make sure he had a full tank of petrol.

  ESCAPE

  The trip by car down to Adelaide made a change from daily life on the mission but failed to provide an opportunity for the boy to put his plan into action. Just going missing was not going to be enough, he understood; bringing Fatso back to life had to be coupled with bringing his own life to an end. The price for joining Brother Brian on this journey had been extracted weekly on a mildew smelling couch in the locked photo studio. As with his under the robe activities in the darkroom the boy simply let his mind go elsewhere until it was over. Where his mind went most often was to the top of a set of hot metal stairs on a grubby passenger liner drawing close to the equator.

  He spoke very little on the long drive but Brother Brian was used to the silence by now. The boy sometimes pretended he was dozing but in reality he was watching, concentrating on the technique for driving a motor car – the use of the clutch, accelerator and brake pedals. The noisy gear changes baffled him, though he discerned when they were made according to the speedometer on the dashboard and the noise of the engine. He decided that when the time was right he could at least get the car moving and travel a short distance. If things went to plan, that should be all he would need.

  A puncture put them well behind schedule so they spent the night in a country pub. The woman behind the counter appeared to have no problem with a man of the cloth and a young boy taking a room together. Brother Brian was exhausted from the driving and tyre-changing, so though they shared the sagging double bed he was quickly asleep and the boy was left to his own devices. A blowfly was trapped between the battered holland blind and the room’s single dirty window and he listened as it buzzed angrily, bumping against the glass again and again in its attempts to find a way to freedom.

  He
was thinking about the Aborigines they had passed on their way down, wandering along the roadside, sometimes in groups, sometimes singly. He went over in his mind what he needed to do when the right moment came. Fatso’s papers were in the lining of his kitbag, though he had torn up the death certificate and dropped it in pieces into the stinking mess of the privy. The glass-plate negatives made for the mission records had been left in a bath of potassium ferricyanide to bleach away all the information and then crushed to powder. He poured the powdered glass out on the playground during one of the violent dust storms that regularly swept over the mission, and watched it blow away. It seemed a waste, as he had really wanted to visit the kitchen and slip the powder into one of the dishes meant for the top table. The thought brought the familiar heat to his loins and for relief he climbed out of bed and slowly crushed the life out of the buzzing blowfly against the dirty windowpane.

  After an early breakfast of porridge and milk in the hotel’s dining room, they finished the trip into Adelaide. The morning was spent at the church’s headquarters, delivering the records of the mission’s activities over the past six months. With the paperwork completed, they took a convivial lunch in the dining room with a dozen other brothers. The food was similar to what was eaten at the high table back at the mission and though it was much better than what he was used to, he ate it just because it was there. He smiled once and Brother Brian asked if he was enjoying lunch. He nodded, though what he had really been enjoying was imagining the results if ground glass had been mixed through the cauliflower in white sauce.

  After lunch Brother Brian drove them to the Kodak warehouse. They filled the back of the station wagon with chemicals and photographic paper and film, enough to last them for the next six months. The final stop was a Golden Fleece service station to fill the car with petrol and top up the jerry can of spare fuel. They also refilled the large water jugs that were essential for the long drive back through the desert.