St Kilda Blues Page 17

  Brother Brian had taught him a long time ago that a photographic filter lightens colours nearest to it in the spectrum and darkens those furthest away. Brother Brian had also taught him how to easily remember the order of the colour spectrum: just remember the name ‘Roy G Biv’. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. A red filter makes red lips appear paler but makes the blue sky in a photograph much darker and more dramatic. A blue filter or blue light, on the other hand, made anything red appear much darker, more dramatic, especially against a pale background.

  He floated the blade of the dagger gently across the edge of his left palm, barely touching callused skin already marked with a delicate, almost invisible crosshatching of old scars. A thin line of blood welled up, dark in the soft blue light, almost black against his pale skin. He licked it away. Tonight he would iron his clothes and polish his shoes and practise his smile and his conversation in the mirror and tomorrow it would begin. His guests were waiting out there for him, the shy ones, the awkward ones, the ones who only wanted someone to be nice to them, even just for a moment. And he knew a moment was all that it would take to persuade them, to win their trust, to win them over. All most people wanted was for someone to like them.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Bob Roberts glanced at his wristwatch for the third time in ten minutes. He was driving faster than was probably safe for the conditions but Berlin had decided a few miles back to keep his mouth shut. Roberts was a good driver and the police pursuit training he’d had was obvious, but the silly bugger was still taking some risks. Five minutes later he overtook a sputtering Volkswagen blowing blue smoke from its exhausts and just managed to tuck back in on their side of the road ahead of an oncoming truck that was flashing its lights.

  ‘Got some place you need to be, Bob?’

  Roberts didn’t take his eyes off the road. ‘You said you wanted to talk to those newspaper people.’

  ‘I did, but I would have taken a left about ten streets back to put us on Sydney Road.’

  ‘This way is quicker and besides, the trams would have slowed us up. Anyway, I need to take a slash, all that bloody tea at the Marquets’ place.’

  ‘There’s a pub up ahead.’

  ‘I’m not bloody blind, Charlie.’

  Berlin counted around a dozen pubs before they pulled up opposite the Collingwood Arms. Roberts rolled the car into a no-standing zone and left the motor running.

  ‘Just be a tick, move it if you have to.’

  Berlin watched Roberts sprint across the road, checking his wristwatch once more as he walked into the public bar. Over the years Berlin had known a lot of coppers who needed to stop by the nearest pub midmorning just to make it through to lunchtime. They were the moody ones, the ones with short tempers and foul mouths and constant headaches who were suddenly all sweetness and light after they had just ‘popped out for a couple of minutes to grab something’, and come back smelling of peppermint or salted peanuts.

  Berlin knew the signs from personal experience, though it was a long time since he had popped into a public bar and fallen into the deep dark hole that was always waiting inside those doors. But as far as he knew Bob Roberts wasn’t one of those men.

  He glanced down at his own wristwatch. He wanted to get to the GEAR offices before lunchtime if possible, or just on lunchtime. Sometimes people anxious to get away from work blurted out the odd fact that they might not have mentioned in a more measured interview.

  Berlin’s hips were starting to ache in the cramped confines of the sports car. Jesus, was he getting that old? How many hours had he spent sitting all alone at the controls of the Lancaster as it droned on through the darkness? Had his hips ached then, or had the fear and the responsibility blocked out the pain? Shifting position didn’t seem to help any.

  The Triumph was parked outside a record store. He could hear music from inside and there were bargain bins on the street out in front of the shop. The bins were full of 12-inch LP albums with the cheap, nasty covers bargain albums always seemed to have. He decided to stretch his legs and have a look. Reaching over, he turned off the sports car’s engine but left the keys in the ignition. About to open the passenger-side door he saw his reflection in the lacquered wood-grain dashboard and stopped and pushed the bright chrome button that opened the glove box instead. The cover swung out and down on its hinges. The packets of Craven A cigarettes were still there but the thick brown envelope was gone.

  He closed the glove box and climbed out of the car to have a rummage through the record store bargain bins. None of the albums featured singers or groups or orchestras that were familiar to him. The more popular albums were inside the shop and he knew he would recognise the music from hearing the kids play it.

  There were posters in the shop window for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Rebecca and Sarah both loved the album. He didn’t know what to make of it and Peter, once a Beatles fan, hated it. It still rankled Berlin that back in 1964 he’d bet Peter ten shillings that a year after ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ had first topped the hit parade no one would even remember the name of the band. Losing the bet hadn’t been as bad as seeing the look of triumph on the boy’s face as he snatched the money from his father’s hand. Peter had moved on from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones but he’d always been smart enough not to play their music when his father was around to hear it.

  Berlin gave up on the bargain bins. He leaned on a lamppost and waited. The street was quiet, just a few housewives pulling two-wheeled shopping jeeps, deliverymen, a postie with his leather satchel full of letters and a bloke walking along, holding the hand of a six-year-old. The girl was skipping, her dark ponytail swinging from side to side. Was there anything as lovely as a six-year-old girl skipping along and holding her dad’s hand? It was funny how life goes on, but it wasn’t really funny at all. The Marquet girl was dead and buried, others were still missing, including Gudrun Scheiner, and her old man was at home chopping wood and waiting.

  What to do about the Scheiner situation? That was the thing that was bothering him. He could have left it in Lazlo’s hands but what if he was wrong? If those contact addresses from Lazlo arrived home with Rebecca he would write the letter tonight and send it in the morning, paying the hefty extra slug for airmail. With that done he could concentrate on the still-missing girls. What would he do if it was Sarah? He pushed the thought away. He didn’t know how Scheiner could cope.

  A sudden gust of wind hit him, and he made his way back to the car. It was chilly. Summer was coming but it was still weeks away. Right now in Poland it was autumn, and winter there was still weeks away too. He tried to picture Scheiner as a younger man, a man in an SS uniform with a shiny silver skull, a Totenkopf, death’s head, as a cap badge and the SS flashes on his lapel. A man with a finger missing on his right hand holding a pistol to the temple of a starving and beaten but still-defiant woman, a woman who had decided it was her time to make a stand.

  Berlin saw the snowdrifts and the lines of freezing, starving POWs and their guards. He saw crows circling in the dead, grey overcast that kept them all safe from the terrifying Russian ground-attack fighter-bombers with their cannon and rockets. And for one terrible moment, just as the SS man pulled the trigger, he saw Sarah’s face looking back at him instead of the girl’s, smiling peacefully. He blinked and made the awful image go away. Berlin was good at forcing the images and memories back down into the dark place where he kept them so he could go on with his life. He tried to think nice thoughts about Sarah, remember her skipping along and singing as she held his hand.

  Across the street a tall man carrying a briefcase left the hotel bar, quickly looked left and right, then turned left and walked away. Berlin waited for Roberts to appear. It wasn’t a long wait.

  ‘I would have given it a couple more minutes,’ Berlin said when Roberts got into the car.

  Roberts was reaching for the ignition and he paused. ‘What?’

  ‘If it was me, Bob, I would have given it
a couple more minutes before I came out. Let the other bloke get well clear first.’

  Roberts sat back in his seat. ‘Okay, Charlie, so I was meeting with a fizz. The bloke said he had some information on the missing girls, but you know what informants are like; half of what they say is total bullshit and the other half is mostly bullshit.’

  ‘Okay, if you say so.’

  ‘You don’t believe me, Charlie?’

  ‘All I’m asking is, whatever’s going on, just keep me out of it. Even just sitting and waiting for you across the other side of the road is too much involvement.’

  ‘It was just a meeting with a fizz, Charlie. Anyone ever tell you you’re bloody crazy, paranoid?’

  ‘Experts, Bob, doctors with stethoscopes and white coats and university degrees, so just do me a favour and leave me out of it, please.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  ‘Come in, dear chaps, pull up a pew. Shall I have one of my girlies make us all a nice cup of tea?’

  Berlin knew an interview was off to a bad start when the first words out of the interviewee’s mouth made you want to punch them in the face. He put Lance Meuwissen at maybe twenty-five, but with his drawling speech pattern he sounded like a fifty-year-old polite society patriarch. Meuwissen had his desert boot–shod feet up on an old wooden desk and was leaning back in a captain’s chair. Neatly pressed slacks and a white shirt with a paisley print cravat at the open neck finished off the outfit.

  Berlin thought Meuwissen’s long, mousy-brown hair made him look like one of his ‘girlies’. There were three females in the office, none over twenty, all slender with long, straight hair and all wearing a variation on the theme of peasant blouses in white cotton and floor-length, flower-patterned skirts. Berlin guessed Bob Roberts must have been in his element, since it was obvious none of the three were wearing bras. Berlin hadn’t much cared one way or the other about what young girls chose to wear or not wear, but having a pretty teenage daughter had changed that.

  The editorial offices of GEAR were located above a Greek cafe on Sydney Road, on the first floor of a run-down three-storey brick terrace. The place might have been a family home at one stage but now the entrance stairway at the side of the cafe was stacked with string-bound piles of the music newspaper. There were a number of second-hand furniture dealers located along Sydney Road and it looked like GEAR had taken advantage of that fact for their office furnishings. A large room at the top of the stairs was crammed with desks and tables in multiple shades of scratched and fading French polish and in various stages of collapsing under piles of paper and heavy IBM Selectric typewriters.

  An artiscope copying camera was set against a back wall next to an alcove draped with a heavy black floor-length curtain. A printed sign pinned over the alcove read, ‘Darkroom – do not enter or all the dark leaks out!’ Someone had added in bold marker pen, ‘This means you, Derek, you nasty little fucker!’

  Yellow boxes of Kodak Tri-X Pan film were stacked on a mantelpiece next to three empty Jim Beam bourbon bottles and a small Bakelite radio which was tuned to 3XY. The room smelled of patchouli and sweat and hot wax. A girl at a tilted drafting table positioned near a window was pasting lines of type onto a layout. The tall, double-hung sash windows facing Sydney Road had no blinds so the already warm place must have been an oven in summer. Berlin’s nose also picked up the aroma of hot fat and oregano from the cafe downstairs, and an underlying smell of marijuana.

  He put the newspaper clipping down on the desk in front of Meuwissen.

  ‘We’ll say no to the cup of tea if it’s all the same to you, Mr Meuwissen, we’re in a bit of a rush this morning. I need to know who took this photo so I can have a friendly chat with them. It’s important, really important.’

  He put the newspaper clipping down on the desk in front of Meuwissen. The desktop was strewn with photographs of rock bands, rumpled sheets of Letraset type, paste-up layouts and several open packets of Tally-Ho rolling papers. An overfull ashtray was spilling its contents into the mess. Amongst the ashes and filter-tipped cigarette butts there were the spit-stained, twisted, brownish ends of several joints, one still locked in the grasp of a roach holder made from a paperclip. Meuwissen’s eyed flicked down to the ashtray and back up to Berlin’s face. ‘And just so we’re clear, Mr Meuwissen, we’re not from the drug squad.’

  Meuwissen smiled. ‘Always happy to cooperate with the police.’ he picked up the clipping. ‘Not really my area but I’m sure Lauren can help us out. Lauren, darling, be a dear and come over and look at this, we need to know who took this snap. It’s important.’

  The girl at the drafting table straightened up and looked around. She was tall, very tall, maybe five ten or eleven, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Berlin could see in those blue eyes that she wasn’t happy at being interrupted but she didn’t say anything. As she crossed the room towards them, the sway of her breasts and the bulge of nipples against the white top confirmed her lack of a bra. The cotton blouse had a drawstring at the neck and some colourful flowers embroidered on the right sleeve. She stopped next to Meuwissen and leaned over the desk to study the clipping. Her blouse top gaped open and Berlin knew Roberts would really be enjoying this now.

  ‘The lovely Lauren here puts the paper together for us every week so she knows everything that’s in it, don’t you, lovey? She’s a treasure. A photographic memory and a very photogenic figure, don’t you think? I think she should do modelling. I’m sure she looks absolutely stunning in the nude, natural blondes always do. You are a natural blonde, aren’t you, darling girl? Collar and cuffs match, as they say.’

  Meuwissen put his hand on her backside and smiled at Berlin who felt his fist tighten as the urge to punch the man in the face came back. It must have been the morning spent out at the house in Melton that had set him off, he decided. He noticed a brief twitch in the girl’s eye when Meuwissen’s hand had touched her backside. She moved round to the side of the desk and towards the grubby windows.

  ‘Let me get a better look at this in the light.’

  It was a nicely done move that extricated her from Meuwissen’s grasp. The grime on the windows softened the light coming in and gave her blonde hair a sort of halo. It also made the thin cotton blouse almost transparent. She did have a nice body, and Berlin studied her face. Rebecca had taught him about the structure of the face as it related to the camera and this girl had good bones, as his wife would put it. He liked having the opportunity just to study a pretty face for a brief moment. Too much of his life was spent looking for a lie in the eyes of someone calculating just how much they could get away with and not get caught.

  The girl handed him back the clipping. ‘Derek Jones shot this series at Opus a couple of weeks back. I used this image mainly because the girl on the right looked so happy. I can’t help you with a name, since Derek is too bloody lazy to write anything down. Apart from their home addresses if they’re extra good-looking, of course. He arranges to stop by later for private photo sessions, I’ve heard, and we don’t get to see those photographs. Lucky us.’

  ‘Nasty little fucker, is he?’

  Lauren smiled at Berlin. She really was a looker. He knew a lot of blokes would find it easy to misinterpret that smile. She was thinking he was a nice older gentleman, and with a sense of humour too. And not too uptight to say ‘fuck’ out loud.

  ‘He’s a smooth-talker, comes off as a nice enough bloke when you first meet him but let’s just say I went out with him once and once was enough. My dad took me to see the professional wrestlers at Festival Hall a few times when I was a kid and Gorgeous George and Killer Kowalski had nothing on Derek. When we got into his car it was like being attacked by an octopus, one who didn’t understand the word “no”.’

  ‘Do you know where we can contact him for a chat? Maybe someplace he might be right now.’

  She wrote an address down on a notepad and tore the page off. ‘This is the studio where he works. He’s there most days.’

  Berlin handed the page to
Roberts, who put it into his folder without taking his eyes off the girl.

  Berlin extended his hand. ‘Thanks for your help, Lauren.’

  The girl shook his hand and smiled. ‘Don’t mention it. And when you track Derek down don’t say I said hello.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Berlin glanced at his watch then looked up and down the street. ‘See anywhere we can grab a pie or some fish and chips for lunch? Something fast, I don’t want to waste time.’

  Roberts indicated the cafe under the GEAR office. ‘What about Greek? I reckon we can be in and out in ten minutes, fifteen tops. Just as quick as fish and chips, and tastier.’

  The cafe was dark after the brightness of the street and it took a minute for Berlin’s eyes to adjust. The only other customers he could see were several elderly men playing dominos at a laminex-topped table towards the back. They looked around when the two men came in and then went back to playing and drinking black coffee out of tiny cups. The music from the jukebox was unusual and there were travel posters on the wall showing ancient temples. Some of the tattered and grease-stained posters looked to be almost as old as the temples.

  The bloke behind the counter who took the orders was wearing a dirty apron over a dirty singlet. Berlin didn’t have a clue about Greek food but Roberts appeared to know what it was all about, probably from hanging out with his girlfriend’s uni mates. Roberts ordered two souvlakis with everything and promised Berlin he would enjoy the taste. Cubes of meat impaled on metal skewers went into a puddle of oil on the hotplate. They sizzled and the smell told Berlin it was lamb.