Dark Clouds on the Mountain. John Tully
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.
III
Three-thirty in the morning: the dead hour when you start to see things and even atheists might start to believe in ghosts. Jack had polished off a stale ham and cheese sandwich from Gobble-and-Go and it lay like cardboard in his stomach, repeating like the catechism he'd been forced to learn as a child. A sheet of iron tap-tapped loosely in the wind atop a nearby building, cats prowled and mewled and spat among the garbage cans in the alleys and the sky was full of moving clouds and the dust of stars. 'Mud and stars,' mused Jack, 'that was what life was all about.' There would be a frost tonight and the cats would huddle in hidden corners under the splendour of the heavens.
Jack and DC Bishop were cooped up, sitting at a side window on the first floor of the hotel at the corner of Bathurst and Argyle Streets. There was a clear view of the synagogue over the road. Inside it was dreary: a faded 1960s 'feature wall' that was once a dark mauve, a Gideons' Bible, a double bed that sagged sadly under a bobbled blue cover from the weight of generations of guests, and a romantic scene from Tahiti in a fake gilt frame on the opposite wall. The carpet begged to be retired and the cold tap in the sink in the corner dribbled like a hungry schoolboy smelling fish and chips and vinegar. Some ancient copies of Australasian Post with cover girls who must now be in nursing homes completed the world inside this travelling salesman's temporary lodging. Three nights now they'd sat there without catching sight of the dauber, or of any other miscreant, bar the odd speeding hoon and furtive lurker.
Time seemed frozen. A taxi driver parked outside for a while, picking his nose so obsessively that Jack thought of leaning out the window and warning him that the ancient Egyptians used to draw the brain out through the nasal passage during their funerary rites. Finally, the man drove off. He would get slim pickings tonight, Jack thought with a wry smile; the pubs were shut and the Casino merely ticking over at midweek.
A solitary drunk wove his way slowly northwards as if he were putting into practice the message of Lenin's pamphlet, 'One Step Forward, Two Steps Back'. (Jack had read it once long ago in the Ogre's lounge room when he was at a loose end during a wet Sunday afternoon when Tracey was studying for exams, just before he joined the cops. Why he had bothered, he couldn't really say.) The drunk wasn't happy, from the way he cursed the cars and muttered to himself. 'Fuckin' pub's shut,' he raged, hammering on the doors under the window before rolling off disconsolately northwards.
The cigarette fumes were so thick in the room that their eyes were smarting. Jack looked at his watch. Three-fifty. Bugger it, he thought, time for a half decent coffee instead of the instant slop the management had provided. It might also dislodge the excuse for a sandwich from where