Babylon South

by Jon Cleary

“Even when you were married to—” All at once she couldn’t say Father; for who was he?

  Venetia smiled, though it was only camouflage. “Are you just going to call him Walter from now on? Darling, I’m sorry this had to happen. You’d never have known it if it hadn’t been for that bitch Emma. Yes, there were other men while I was married to Walter. But only in that last year when he spent five days a week down in Melbourne. It might have been different if I’d been a stay-at-home housewife—” She knew in her heart that it would not have been different; she’d have found a lover or two, perhaps even amongst the tradesmen calling at the house. Her sex drive in those days had exhausted Walter and she guessed he had realized the dangers of it. “But I was working at the studio—there were plenty of attractive men who wanted to take me out . . . So long as Walter didn’t know, I didn’t see any harm in it. I’ve never thought much about sin. Neither have you.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Justine, suddenly prim.

  “Well, all right, if that’s the way you feel . . . I’m sorry Emma had to be such a bitch towards you. It was no way for you to learn . . .”

  “Would you have told me some day?”

  Venetia thought about that for a moment. “Probably not. It might have been a pretence, but I’ve always thought of Walter as your father. Perhaps because that was the easiest thing to do.” She could be remarkably honest with herself at times; but it hurt her now to be honest with her daughter. “It never really mattered to me who your father was. You were mine.”

  “Like everything else.”

  “You really are being a bastard, aren’t you?” She had never before quarrelled with Justine. Her life had been full of enemies, but never one so close to her as this; for she could sense Justine turning into an enemy. So she softened her tone, put out a hand to take Justine’s, but the latter drew hers away. “Don’t let’s fight. I love you, I really do. Isn’t that enough?”

  Justine looked at her, not coldly but with no warmth. She felt abandoned, a bastard left on a doorstep. There had always been a streak of romanticism in her: inherited, she now wondered, from whom? “I don’t really know, Mother. I’d like to go home and think about it.”

  “Stay here—this is home. I’ll get rid of the crowd—”

  “No.” She had her own apartment in a luxury block overlooking Circular Quay, a million-dollar twenty-first birthday gift from a loving mother. “I’d like to be on my own for a while. Everything’s all of a sudden, I don’t know, changed.”

  Venetia said fiercely, “I could kill Emma!”

  “We’re going,” said Ruth Springfellow right behind them. She and Edwin had come silently across the thick buffalo grass, moving in that quiet way that some elderly people have, as if afraid of disturbing the air about them. “Thank you for asking us to come.” She spoke as if they had come a great distance instead of from just across the street. “It was nice to meet all of Walter’s old friends.”

  “Like old times.” Edwin had an old man’s habit of repeating himself. “Goodbye, Justine. Black suits you. It doesn’t always suit a young person.”

  “I’m going, too. I’ll walk out with you.” She hadn’t the panache of her mother; she was afraid of exits. “Goodbye, Mother.”

  “I thought you two would want to stay together on a day like this?” said Ruth, an arranger of other people’s moods.

  “No,” said Venetia. “I think it’s a day for each of us to be alone with our thoughts.”

  “I shouldn’t worry too much about Emma,” said Edwin as if listening to another conversation.

  Ruth gave him a sharp glance. “You all worry too much about her. Walter was the only one who kept her in check.”

  Venetia watched the three of them go round the corner of the house, avoiding those guests still up on the verandah. She turned and looked out at the harbour. Rain was coming up from the south: it would be a good day for misery. Over in the city fortunes were crashing, greed had given way to fear. For once, however, she was not thinking of the making or losing of money.

  She had felt like this only once before, the day they had come to tell her Walter had disappeared. She had always liked to think that since then her character had been based on rock; some might have thought it flint. Now she could feel fissures in herself, a crumbling to sand.

  “You all right, sweetheart?” Alice Magee had come down from the house. She was dressed in black like her daughter and somehow looked more at home in it. She was of an age when funerals could be regular events, though she did not go to many; her old friends, the ones who were dying, were too far away, in Cobar and points west. “I saw you and Justy—what was going on?”

  “Did you hear what Emma said to her?”

  Alice nodded. “I won’t ask if it was true. That Justy’s father could be someone else. I’m just glad Walter couldn’t hear her say it. He was looking forward to being a father.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me, once. He never confided in me much, but he told me that. You cheated on him, sweetheart.”

  “Don’t rub it in, Alice. You’ve never been the Mother Superior.”

  “I couldn’t be if I tried. I wonder what they think of you in the convent back at Cobar? Where you are now. What you are. Poor Justy. Someone should hit that Emma bitch on the head.” She was talking to herself, her thoughts jumping around like fleas. “Walter would have hit her. He could’ve been a violent man, I think.”

  Venetia turned to her. “How did you know that?”

  “I didn’t miss much, sweetheart. He was something like your Dad, only he never got drunk like Dad did. Did he ever hit you?”

  “No, I still remember what Dad did to you, even though I was so young. Walter knew I’d have left him if he’d hit me.”

  “Strange, how most people didn’t know him. He was nice, but. I liked him.”

  “You loved him.” She didn’t say it accusingly, but her gaze was steady, a kindly prosecutor’s.

  “Yes,” said Alice. “But he didn’t know. And I’d never of tried to cheat on my own daughter.”

  IV

  “It’ll mean a new sort of garage sale,” said Lisa. “Porsches and Ferraris will be going like old washtubs.”

  “Serves „em right,” said Con Malone, bugle voice of the workers. “Greedy buggers.”

  “Wash your mouth out,” said Brigid Malone, who would have protected her grandchildren from even a nun’s mild imprecations.

  “I said beggars. Me teeth slipped.”

  “It sounded like buggers to me,” said Tom, whose ears would have been worth a fortune in industrial espionage.

  “Don’t listen to him, Tom,” said Brigid and stroked the head of her youngest saint.

  She never stroked my head, thought Malone, not even when I was Tom’s age. But his mother had softened in her latter years, affection was beginning to peep out like a tiny flower between old bricks.

  “The papers will be full of it for the next week,” said Lisa. “At least we shan’t have to keep looking at photos of Jonno and Danno and Jenny Kee.”

  “Who are they?” said Con, who read only the political and sports pages and wasn’t interested in ordinary celebrities.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Lisa airily; she could tell small lies with the smoothness of the best of them, but a big lie would tie her tongue in a painful knot. “I suppose the Springfellows lost a packet?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Malone, tucking into the apple cake and whipped cream, the dessert Lisa made for Con every time he and Brigid came to dinner. “Russ will fill me in tomorrow. He’s the stock market expert.”

  “What’s your homework, Claire?” said Lisa.

  “The Depression of the 1930s.” Claire wrinkled her nose. “Sister Catherine whipped that one in on us this afternoon, after she’d heard the news. I think she’s a sadist.”

  “She believes in capital punishment,” said Maureen.

  “So do I,” said her grandfather.

  “Ca
ning?”

  “No, hanging.”

  “They don’t go in for that at Holy Spirit Convent,” said Malone.

  “Pity,” said Con Malone and grinned mock-evilly at his three grandchildren, who reacted with mock horror. All three were older in the head than he thought: they knew that the wrinklies had to be humoured.

  Con was shorter and broader than his son; he was sixty-six years old and it seemed that every year had made its mark on his long-lipped, broad face. He and Brigid came every second week for dinner; in the other week Lisa’s parents, Jan and Elisabeth Pretorius, took their turn. Malone welcomed the visits, if for no more than to see the effect on his own children, who adored being adored by all four grandparents. He was often at odds with his father, a cloth-cap Labour man; not because he himself had become anti-Labour, which Jan Pretorius was, but because experience had made him apolitical. Sometimes, however, he envied his father’s simple outlook on the world and its evils. If prejudice was the child of ignorance, as he had once read, then he was not his father’s only child.

  “The Yanks are to blame,” said Con.

  “What for? Capital punishment?”

  “No, the stock market crash.”

  “You blame the Americans for everything,” said Lisa amiably. She tried to have a fair opinion of the world, but sometimes found it difficult.

  Con nodded in complete agreement with her and Brigid said, “He’ll never forgive President Reagan for being part-Irish.”

  Brigid was the one who had given Malone what looks he had. She was plump and always plainly dressed, a chaser after bargains; but there were hints in her plump face of the pretty girl who had gone to the altar with young Cornelius Malone. She had a narrow view of life, believed in the efficacy of prayer and thought holy water was an elixir. She loved everyone to whom she was related, but had great difficulty in showing it.

  Later Malone drove his parents home to Erskineville in his five-year-old Holden Commodore. The older Malones had never owned a car and, when not being driven by their son, still went everywhere by public transport, flashing their pensioners’ concession cards like gold badges.

  “I was at a funeral this morning,” Malone said out of the blue, trying to stop the flood of his father’s diatribe against the greed of capitalist bludgers. “Walter Springfellow’s.”

  “His missus is another of them capitalist bludgers.” Con Malone could sidestep a subject like a rugby league winger.

  “She’s a widow,” said Brigid from the middle of the back seat. “I always feel sorry for widows, no matter how much money they’ve got. Money doesn’t make you happy, does it, Scobie?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Mum. You and Dad never made me rich.”

  “Are you trying to find out who killed Springfellow?” said Con, executing another sidestep.

  “Trying.”

  Con looked almost sympathetic; it had taken him a long time to accept his son as a mug copper. He was the unrecognized grandfather to the cast and crew of Sydney Beat. “Why don’t you give up on it? He’s been dead for years.”

  “We have to tie up the loose ends.”

  “He was never much good, not to the unions. He always had them spooks of his spying on us in the union.” Con had worked for years on the wharves and in the construction trade, where union politics had always been Far Left. Malone sometimes wondered if his father had been a Communist, but had never dared ask him. If he had been, it would have killed Brigid; or anyway had her on her knees for a month, praying for his soul. “Give up.”

  “Did you ever give up on anything? You’ve been fifty years trying to resurrect Keir Hardie and Karl Marx.”

  “I’d shoot him if ever he brought back that Karl Marx,” said Brigid from the back seat, sitting back there like the poor man’s Queen Mary, hat on head, hands folded over her handbag as if it held the crown jewels.

  “That’s the only thing you’ve ever given me,” Malone told his father. “Bloody-mindedness.”

  “I’ve always said that,” said Brigid. “He was bloody-minded the day I married him. He wanted to knock the priest down on the altar. I’ve forgotten why.”

  “He wanted to lecture me,” said Con, who would knock God down if He tried to lecture him. “So you’re gunna keep on with the case? What good will it do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Malone. “A cop only gives himself a headache when he asks a question like that.”

  “That only proves what I’ve always said about coppers,” said Con, satisfied.

  They drew up outside the narrow house in the narrow street in Erskineville. There were no front gardens here, no vacuumed lawns, no blazing banks of azaleas. Behind the narrow terrace houses were tiny back yards backing on to other back yards; the biggest blooms there were the washing on the lines. Malone looked out at the house where he had been born and grown up and tried to be sentimental about it. But sentiment becomes a dry fruit when squeezed.

  “I wish you’d move away from here.”

  The elder Malones got out of the car. Con looked up and down the terrace. “They’re all strangers. The street’s full of Wogs, we even got some of the bloody yellow peril here, too. But it’d be just as bad, no matter where we went.”

  “One thing,” grinned Malone, “you’ve got no capitalist bludgers down here.”

  “Give „em time, give „em time. The Wogs and the Chinks will always make money. Thanks for bringing us home.”

  “Good-night, Scobie.” Brigid half-raised a hand as if she might pat his shoulder, then let it drop. “Don’t take no notice of Dad. I actually seen him talking to Mrs. Van Trong the other day.”

  “I was only asking her wasn’t there any boats going back to Vietnam,” said Con, never giving up.

  Malone laughed and drove off before he embarrassed both of them by getting out of the car and kissing them.

  On the way home to Randwick he thought about Walter Springfellow. By the time he had turned into his garage he had made up his mind. He would be bloody-minded, he would not give up.

  4

  I

  HE GOT nowhere in the next two weeks. He sent Andy Graham, one of the junior detectives in Homicide, up to the State Library to ferret his way through newspapers for the period March-April 1966.

  “Find out if anyone else went missing at that time. If they did, check Missing Persons here and ask the Victorians if they’d check theirs—maybe someone from Melbourne, a crim or a radical, was gunning for him.”

  While Graham lost himself in the State Library, Malone and Clements kept losing themselves in dead ends. Malone rang ASIO, but was told Mr. Fortague had been called down to Canberra to headquarters; no, they didn’t know when he would be back. He tried to make an appointment with Venetia, but, one of her secretaries said, Lady Springfellow was interstate. He rang Edwin Springfellow at Springfellow and Company, but met a blank wall—“We have nothing more to say, Inspector,” said Edwin politely and, impolitely, hung up in his ear. Twice he called at the Springfellow apartment in The Vanderbilt in Macquarie Street and twice the doorman told him that Miss Emma Springfellow was away.

  Trying to take his mind off the case, he went one night with Lisa to see Les Misérables, a booking Lisa had made months in advance. He sat there depressed by the whole show, sympathizing not with Valjean but with Inspector Javert; thirty-nine dollars a ticket to see a cop give up and jump off a bridge. He had noticed several of the more respectable crims in the audience and they all clapped at the death of Javert. He went to work the next morning wondering if he should give up, though he would not jump off any bridge.

  “I feel like trying for a warrant and bringing them all in here and keeping „em here till they tell us something.” He and Clements were sitting facing each other across their adjoining desks in the big room at Homicide, lunching on pizza. “That’s what they’d do in Woolloomooloo Vice.”

  “What about the daughter?”

  “What would be the point with her? She wasn’t born when her old man disappeared. How are s
he and her mother going on their takeover bid?”

  “I dunno. There’s been nothing in the papers and nobody’s talking at the brokers. I gather they’re all running around like headless chooks since the Crash. The young guy who sold my shares for me says he wishes he’d followed my example. That made me feel good, coming from someone I pay commission to for advice. Do I look smug and self-satisfied?”

  “Every inch of you. My old man would hate you as a capitalist bludger.”

  Clements grinned, reached for his phone. “I think I’ll call my bookie. I’ve made up my mind for the Cup.”

  It was the first Tuesday in November, Melbourne Cup Day, the country’s holiest day of the year; down in Melbourne, south of the border, it was a public holiday. Elsewhere in the nation, at 2.40 this afternoon, everything would come to a standstill. Right-wing bosses and left-wing shop stewards would stand arm-in-arm in front of television sets; patients on operating tables would be left wide open while doctors and nurses turned up their transistors; bank hold-ups would go into freeze-frame while robbers and staff watched the horse race. If Judgement Day arrived on the first Tuesday in November, the Lord Almighty would have to wait. Unless He, too, was a punter. Which, when one looked at some of those He had created, He might very well be.

  “What’s your tip?”

  “I think I’ll go for Kensei. You want me to put a bet on for you?”

  “The last time I backed a horse he bit his jockey and raped the mare in front of him. It was like being back on the beat in Newtown.”

  Then Chief Inspector Random came down towards them. Clements put down the phone. Random was a tall bony man, with hair that had started to turn grey when he was twenty-one and eyes that had been middle-aged all his life. He had a slow way of moving, as if sleep-walking, but his mind was always a street ahead of his appearance. He was chief of the thirty-six detectives in Homicide, but soon, with the Department’s reorganization into regions, he was ticketed for transfer. Malone, as the next senior man, already holding a rank that should have taken him off day-to-day investigation, was tipped to succeed him here in this office. A prospect that Malone was not looking forward to.