by Peter Corris
Aftershock
( Cliff Hardy - 14 )
Peter Corris
Peter Corris
Aftershock
1
Horrie Jacobs was one of the smallest adults ever to walk into my office. With his shoes on his feet and his hat on his head he still wouldn’t have topped five feet by more than an inch. He was a compactly built, neat old man in a grey suit, no tie and with the Newcastle Herald under his arm.. He made the office look big, which it isn’t.
‘My name’s Horrie Jacobs, Mr Hardy. I’m from Newcastle.’
I shook his hand and waved him into the client’s chair, thinking that Novocastrians do that. You don’t find Wollongongites saying ‘I’m from Wollongong’. I have a feeling they might do it a bit in Queensland-’I’m from Rocky’- that kind of thing. I sat behind my desk, which is from Darlinghurst Office Disposals, and asked Mr Jacobs what I could do for him.
He sat, put his newspaper on the floor by his chair, took off his hat and said, ‘You’ve heard of the Newcastle earthquake?’
I nodded. Who hadn’t? It rocked Sydney and parts south, east and west, caused a lot of damage in Newcastle and killed about a dozen people up there.
‘I lived in Newcastle all my life, never saw anything like it.’ Horrie Jacobs fiddled with his hat. ‘Bricks flying around in the air. I missed out on the war but I reckon it must’ve been something like that. One of them bricks hit you and you were a goner.’
I’d taken out a notepad and written down the date and the client’s name the way the regulations governing the private enquiry agent’s trade say to do, but I wasn’t too hopeful of getting any business here. I judged his age to be about seventy. He looked like a man who’d worked hard all his life. His skin was weatherbeaten and his hands had the enlargement that goes with manual work. You don’t see it much anymore; I couldn’t remember ever having a client with wrists and hands like Horrie’s-not a paying client. And natural disasters bring them out of the woodwork- compensation nuts, litigation freaks.
I doodled on the pad-120, 150, 175-the sliding scale of per diem dollar rate I daydreamed about charging clients according to their problems and means. The trouble was, I hadn’t had any clients since I’d come up with the idea. If the Treasurer wanted the economy to slow I could show him what snail’s pace was, right here. I decided to be kind. ‘I don’t handle insurance matters, Mr Jacobs. I don’t know if you’ve dealt with any of the big insurance companies lately, but they’re not too unreasonable and you can get legal help with…’
Jacobs leaned forward in the uncomfortable chair. ‘I don’t need legal help, mate. I’m not after insurance. I live at Dudley, fifteen miles out of Newcastle. I felt the bloody quake but I didn’t lose anything. Not so much as a bloody glass.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Well, what’s the problem?’ As he leaned forward I noticed that his suit was well cut and that his pale blue shirt was medium expensive. I cursed the Treasurer and circled 150 on the pad.
He looked around the room, taking in the basic furnishings and low level of maintenance. I’d never heard of Dudley. Maybe it was a place for rich, retired jockeys and horse trainers or film stunt men. With his looks and build Horrie could have been any of these. In any case he seemed to be used to a better standard of accommodation. ‘What do you charge?’ he said.
I improvised. ‘A hundred and twenty a day, plus expenses. Seven day retainer, fifty per cent returnable if nothing works out after three days. I have to tell you that private enquiry agents’ fees are seldom tax deductable.’
‘I don’t have to worry about tax,’ Horrie said. ‘You stack the odds a bit your way, eh?’
‘How’s that?’ I said.
‘You get three and a half days’ pay guaranteed out of seven. By rights, it should be three. Not that it matters a bugger to me. I can afford it.’
I was starting to appreciate Mr Jacobs. I like Newcastle and if his business took me there so much the better. Good for the expense sheet and with summer coming on it d be good to get out of Sydney. I saw myself surfing at Stockton Beach while earning 120 dollars a day for… doing what? Surely nothing risky or dirty, not for a nice old guy like Horrie? His suit wasn’t that good. ‘Better give me your full name and address, Mr Jacobs, also your occupation.’
Horrie tossed his hat on to the desk, took out a packet of Senior Service and slid it open. ‘You mind? Got to say that these days.’
‘Go ahead,’ I said, and just stopped myself commenting that at his age what would be the harm. I pushed the glass ashtray that had had nothing in it but dust for a few weeks towards him and got ready to write and fight the tobacco craving. I stopped years ago, but it never goes away.
Horrie lit up with a disposable lighter, puffed luxuriously and flicked ash expertly into the glass jigger. A smoker’s smoker.
‘Horace Reginald Jacobs, sixty-nine, 7 Bombala Street, Dudley. Retired miner. Married forty years, four kids, fourteen grandchildren.’
‘Congratulations,’ I said.
He puffed angrily. ‘That supposed to be smart?’
‘No, I meant it. Especially about being married that long. That’s getting rare these days. About the kids, I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had any’
He stubbed out the less than half-smoked cigarette and took a good look at me. His pale blue eyes were surrounded by wrinkles and his face had started to cave in but not into those disapproving lines you often see. Horrie had the look of a man more interested in life than critical of it. He was looking at a face well past forty with a broken nose and a few scars from fists and bad habits. Like him I had a full head of hair but whereas his was white with a bit of dark still in it mine was the reverse. ‘You’re no spring chicken but it wouldn’t be too late to start.’
I smiled and shook my head. In one marriage and three or four serious relationships the subject had never come up. That had to mean something. ‘Perhaps you can tell me why you’re here, Mr Jacobs.’
‘Don’t you want to know how I can afford to pay you?’
I shrugged, ‘Your suit says you can. My guess is you got a good redundancy package. Good luck to you.’
He snorted. ‘You’d be wrong. I worked till the day I turned sixty-five. I got a decent super but nothing special. No, mate, the reason I can sit here with my cheque book in the pocket of a tailored suit and listen to you talk about a hundred and twenty bucks a day is that I won the Lotto a couple of weeks after I retired. Over a million.’
‘That’s terrific,’ I said. ‘You look to be in good health, your family sounds OK. I can’t see that you should have a problem in the world.’
‘I wouldn’t, if the bloody coppers and other pen pushers’d do their jobs. But they just reckon I’m old and rich and crazy and tell me to piss off.’
We were getting to it now. Some kind of bureaucratic bungle to do with the earthquake. Horrie was a miner. Maybe he knew there was a shaft under the Workers’ Club that had collapsed and killed ten or so pensioners. That’d be interesting but a bit out of my line. Ombudsman territory.
I must have looked dubious because Horrie’s voice took on a pleading note. ‘I need your help, Mr Hardy. I was put onto you by someone from the radio in Kempsey’
I was getting ready to doodle again but what he said made me grip the pencil so hard I almost snapped it. ‘Who?’
‘Woman named Helen Broadway. See, I got desperate when no-one in Newcastle’d listen to me and I started ringing the radio stations trying to get on air. Well, I got nowhere. But this Broadway woman gave me the time of day. She said she couldn’t put me on the air but she advised me to get in touch with you. I told her that I wasn’t short of a bob, see?’
Helen Broadway. I hadn’t seen her for three years but sometimes I dreamed that we were
still together and laughing at something, walking somewhere, making love in one of the many ways. I never knew whether to call these good dreams or bad. They left me feeling thinned out and desperate. The antidote was to think of our last fight, over commitment and priorities and how hopeless it had all been. It was a jolt to hear her name being spoken by a stranger. I wrote ‘referred by H. Broadway’ in block capitals on the pad and tried to switch the past off and tune in to the present. ‘Tell me what you told her, Mr Jacobs.’
As a story-teller, Horrie Jacobs was a good miner. He started well back from the work-face with an account of how he met his mate, Oscar Bach. ‘He was a funny bloke, Oscar. I met him on Dudley beach, fishing. I’m a keen beach fisherman, see? Oscar was a new chum but he got the hang of it pretty quick. We caught some bloody huge bream and flathead, me and Oscar. He was a bit impatient, wouldn’t look for the gutter, properly. Couldn’t wait to get his line in. I showed him a few things. He loved catching fish.’
I felt I had to steer things a little. ‘Was he a miner, too?’
‘Oscar? No fear. I tried to take him down the pit once, just to show him how it was. He stepped into the cage and stepped straight out again. Couldn’t face it. No, Oscar had his own business. He was in the pest control game. You know, spraying and laying down poison for cockroaches and that. He was in it in a small way, but he did all right. Just rented a cottage in Dudley, nothing flash. He didn’t like the work much, especially getting under houses, but he was his own boss and he liked that.’
Horrie Jacobs lit another cigarette and gazed in the direction of my single window. As it happened, he was looking north and that was where his thoughts were. ‘We were good mates, me and Oscar, for going on five years. I’d been a bit short of friends ever since I gave up the grog. Miners, you know, they all drink like crazy. When you stop, you lose your mates.’
I nodded. I could easily imagine it happening. One of the reasons I’ve never stopped.
‘I had to stop. I was getting a belly, couldn’t work properly. The wife hated it. So, I stopped. Oscar didn’t touch it. Never had. Said he didn’t like the taste. He was a bit of a fitness fanatic, too. Walked everywhere. I don’t suppose you know Dudley?’
‘No. What’s it near?’
‘Redhead.’
‘I’ve surfed there. Years ago.’
‘Yeah, big surfing beach. Dudley’s different. Couldn’t even drive to it till a couple of years ago when they put a dirt road in. Still doesn’t get a lot of use. It’s all recreation reserve around there, the foreshore and that. You can stand on parts of Dudley beach and not see anything man-made. Anyway, I’d drive down to where the track starts and walk to the beach. Fifteen minutes down the track. Oscar’d walk from home every time. Put another fifteen minutes on the time to get there. And he’d always walk back, wouldn’t accept a lift. Big bloke, very strong. Twenty years younger than me.’
I had a picture of the two men, old and middle-aged, tiny and large, the quintessential Australian and the man with the European name. Bach. What was that? What nationality was the composer? German? And Jacobs? Was that Jewish? Was the picture even more bizarre than I first thought? ‘Are you having some sort of dispute with Mr Bach, Mr Jacobs?’
His eyebrows shot up and he almost choked on the cigarette. ‘Me and Oscar? Never. Best of mates. Never had a blue. Not once. ‘Course the wife didn’t altogether take to him. She’s a bit on the old-fashioned side, May. Oscar being a German was a bit of a trouble to her. She lost some family in the war.’
I could see that Horrie was going to tell the story in his own way at his own pace. I wrote May Jacobs on the pad and put German alongside Bach’s name. Johann Sebastian. Of course, what else could he be. ‘But that didn’t worry you?’
Horrie butted the cigarette only half-smoked, as before. ‘Me? No. I worked on the Snowy River scheme with blokes from all over the world-Germans, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs, you name it. Good blokes and bastards, same as us. Oscar was a good bloke.’
He reached into the breast pocket of his suit coat and took out a leather wallet. From the wallet he extracted a newspaper clipping. He unfolded it and pushed it across the desk to me. The clipping was from the Newcastle Herald of 3 July. It was a report on the opening of the inquest into the deaths caused by the Newcastle earthquake. The bulk of the report focussed on those killed within seconds of 10.27 a.m., when the quake hit, in the collapse of the Workers’ Club in the city centre. Also under enquiry were the deaths of two men and a woman caused by falling glass and masonry in Hamilton and that of Oscar Bach, forty-eight, who had died when part of a church had fallen on him Mr Bach had been treating the church’s foundations for pest infestation at the time. The bit about Bach had been underlined.
I scanned the clipping quickly. It looked as if a lot of the blame was going to fall on the city fathers who’d put in unstable land fills in the Newcastle area. Safe target. I’d followed the inquest in a random way at the time and remembered these findings. I hadn’t remembered the name of Oscar Bach. If I’d been running a modern, high-tech operation I’d have passed the clipping over to a secretary to run through the Nashua. Not here in St Peters Lane, Darlinghurst. I returned the clipping and was encouraged to see that Horrie had put a cheque book on the desk beside his wallet. ‘That must have been a shock,’ I said. ‘To lose a friend like that.’
‘That’s the point, mate. I didn’t lose him like that. I saw Oscar Bach alive and well at 10.32. That’s five minutes after the bloody earthquake.’
2
I sat up straight in my chair and took a new look at Horrie Jacobs. An ex-miner with a weatherbeaten face. What did that mean? Nothing. He was a fisherman as well as a miner. What sort of a miner forms a friendship with a German pest controller? I brushed that one aside immediately. One of the few Australian historians I’d ever read was Manning Clark and his remark that ‘life was immense’ had always struck me as true. Friendships could be as various as anything else. Horrie Jacobs’ old, pale eyes bored steadily into me. ‘That’s the problem, Mr Hardy. My mate Oscar didn’t die in the earthquake. Someone killed him and put him down in all that busted up brick and mortar under the church. But no-one’ll listen to me.’
‘Let’s tackle it from the official angle first,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying this is the right angle. Just that it’s best to see how the system’s dealt with it.’
‘The system’s shoved it under the bloody carpet,’ Horrie muttered.
‘What did the inquest find?’
He opened the wallet again and took out another clipping. He looked at it and shook his head. ‘Death by misadventure. Want to see?’
‘Not now. Did you give evidence, Mr Jacobs?’
‘No. That’s the snag. I rushed off to see that May was all right. Some silly bugger ran into me and I finished up in hospital with cuts and concussion. I was out of it for a few days. When I came around I was worried about May more than myself. But she was okay. I’m not as young as I used to be and I’ve got plenty of money. They cotton-woolled me for a while. It was a week or more before I heard that Oscar had been killed in the quake. I tried to tell them that was bullshit, but they wouldn’t listen. Not even May believed me. They reckoned the car accident had scrambled my brains. Do I sound confused to you?’
I shook my head. ‘No.’
‘Bloody right I’m not. I saw Oscar in the street outside that church a couple of minutes after the whole bloody place had stopped shaking. What’s more, he saw me.’
‘He waved or something?’
‘No, but I could tell he saw me. Then he moved towards the back of the church. That’s when I took off for home.’
‘The clipping says the church was in Hamilton.’
‘That’s right, Holy Cross in Beaumont Street. I own a little house near there, place May and me raised our family in. I rent it out to an old miner I worked with. Don’t charge him much, just enough so’s he can keep his pride, understand?’ I nodded, I was beginning to like Horrie Jacobs more and more,
and not just for his cheque book.
‘Look, Mr Hardy, they’ve got it all stacked against me. I’m not young and my eyesight’s not a hundred per cent. Also it was a bloody madhouse in the street, like I said. Glass flying, bricks… I didn’t stand there with a pair of binoculars trained on Oscar’s face. But I saw him!’
Horrie wasn’t the sort of man you’d call a fool or a liar. He obviously believed that what he was saying was true, which didn’t mean it was, but meant it’d take some kind of proof to make him think otherwise. An investigation, in other words. I was convincing myself that there was a job here, but Horrie had bowled up one formidable obstacle.
‘You say they’ve stacked the cards against you. Who’s they?’
He seemed to be considering another cigarette. He rejected the idea and pushed the packet away. That was an interesting sign- refusing the props when the tough time came. ‘You name ‘em,’ he said.
‘What does your wife think?’
‘She didn’t like Oscar. That buggers up her judgement. She doesn’t believe me. Thinks the concussion made me muddle up things that happened before the quake and after. I can’t talk to her about it anymore. It upsets us too much. Ralph’s even worse.’
‘Ralph?’
‘My son. Told you I had four kids-one son, three daughters. Ralph’s been more trouble than the three girls put together, but he’s all right. Doesn’t want to hear about me seeing Oscar, but.’
‘You talked to the police?’
‘Too right. Soon as I heard what they were saying about Oscar. They didn’t want to know. You hear anything about the stink over the emergency services and so on?’
I tried to remember. ‘There was some criticism-the ambulance men against the police, or the police against the fire brigade. I didn’t really follow it. I remember the stuff about developers knocking down buildings that didn’t need to go.’