Dark Clouds on the Mountain. John Tully
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