St Kilda Blues

by Geoffrey McGeachin

  ‘You got your wits about you, buddy, that’s for sure. The name is Karl. Nice to meet you Charlie.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘I’m with the Police Intelligence Section, Provost Marshals Office. We like to keep an eye on visitors and potential troublemakers. Young West Germans can avoid the draft if they decide to live in West Berlin so we get a lot of the anti-war hippy types. This your first time in our beautiful city?’

  ‘At ground level, yes.’ Berlin wondered how much his earlier visits might have contributed to the beautification of the city. ‘You been here long, Karl?’

  ‘Long enough. But I’m not complaining, it ain’t South Korea and it sure as hell ain’t the goddamn Nam.

  Berlin stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Nice meeting you, Karl, but I need to find a telephone.’

  Karl gestured towards the cafe counter. ‘You can call from here.’ He said something to the owner in German and the man reached under the counter and pulled out a black telephone.

  Berlin dialled the Hilton using a card he had taken from their room with the number. The female receptionist swapped from German to English without missing a beat and read him a message from the Wehrmacht records office. He hung up and put some money on the counter for the call and the coffee. The cafe owner didn’t offer any change so he must have been happy with the amount.

  Karl was finishing off his beer when Berlin walked back to the table and started putting on his coat.

  ‘Need a ride anywhere, buddy? Call it professional courtesy.’

  ‘Not if you’re in a Military Police jeep. I think my ears are going to snap off so I want something a bit less draughty.’

  Karl grinned. ‘You do have your wits about you.’ He tossed Berlin his knitted cap. ‘Here, take this, it’s getting colder out there. I’ve got a spare in the jeep.’ He put out his hand. ‘Just doing my job earlier, Charlie, no offence meant. You should be able to grab a cab down the end of the street.’

  The knitted cap made all the difference when he walked back out of the cafe and past the MP jeep parked on the next block. He hailed a taxi with a young English-speaking driver and more importantly a very efficient heater. It was getting dark when the taxi dropped him off outside Eichborndamm 179. Inside the reception area the clerk was waiting with a grey envelope on the counter in front of him.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Rebecca turned around from the window when he opened the door.

  ‘I was starting to get worried. The snow is really coming down.’

  In the mirror over the desk he saw himself: a tired man in a heavy overcoat with the last remnants of snow caught in the folds of the khaki watch cap. He had shaken most of the snow off himself before entering the hotel lobby and what remained on his shoulders had melted on the ride up in the hotel elevator.

  He tossed the envelope onto the bed along with the cap and his gloves before taking off his overcoat and scarf and hanging them in the small cupboard in the hallway. He walked across the room and gave Rebecca a soft kiss.

  ‘Sorry I had you worried. I decided it was quicker to just take a taxi than try to call. Do you think we can order some coffee from room service? And a sandwich. I missed lunch and I’m starving. And right now I really need to take a shower to warm up.’

  Rebecca picked up the telephone as he walked into the bathroom and he heard her asking for coffee and chicken sandwiches for two. He smiled when she added a slice of chocolate cake to the order. There were several hand towels on the rack over the bath and he used one to carefully wipe his shoes dry. He felt a pang of guilt for getting dirt on the fresh white towel. Should he hang his suit up in here and let the steam from the shower smooth out the wrinkles? he wondered as he undressed and turned on the shower. As the hot water hit him he decided to stop worrying and wondering about things until he was warm again.

  There was clean underwear neatly folded on the washbasin when he turned off the shower and pulled back the plastic curtain. He dried himself, combed his hair and dressed. The room service waiter had set up their coffee and sandwiches on the small table by the window. The carpet was soft under his bare feet, the room warm enough for him not to shiver even though he was wearing just his suit trousers and a singlet. Rebecca poured coffee out of an insulated silver pot and he sat at the table, picking up the coffee cup with both hands, letting the warmth seep into his palms. He took a sandwich and bit into it. The filling was small pieces of celery and chunks of diced chicken breast bound together with mayonnaise. Rebecca hated celery. She put the plate with her sandwich to one side and cut the large slice of chocolate cake into two pieces.

  He stared out into the black Berlin night as he ate. After eating his sandwich he finished off Rebecca’s. The coffee pot was empty and all the chocolate cake had disappeared before he finally told her what he had discovered at the records office.

  ‘Their files show Scheiner is exactly who he says. They have him serving in the Luftwaffe as an anti-aircraft gunner in Berlin. He was stationed at the Flaktürme Tiergarten, the Zoo flak tower, from early 1943. His rank at the end of the war was Obergefreiter, a sort of Lance Corporal, I think. He was admitted to a Lazarette, that’s a military hospital, right before the Germans surrendered, with extensive burns to the left side of his body from a Russian flamethrower.’

  Berlin crossed to the bed and opened the envelope. ‘It’s all here, the record-keeping is quite meticulous.’ He put a dozen photocopied pages on the bed.

  Rebecca leafed through the copies. ‘I suppose this is one ghost put to bed then, Charlie.’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  He put the room service tray with their cups and plates out in the hallway while Rebecca booked them two airline seats out of West Berlin. They would fly back to Frankfurt in the morning, stay overnight in a hotel there and then they had two seats on a Qantas flight home. The Pan Am flight to Frankfurt was an early departure so Rebecca started packing their suitcase and then took a shower. Berlin looked at the overcoat and scarf on the hanger in the hallway cupboard. He would need it over the next few days and after that they would be back in a Melbourne summer, or what was left of it.

  He was in bed when Rebecca came out of the bathroom. She spent ten minutes tidying up a few remaining items then took off the white hotel bathrobe, turned out the light and slipped into bed next to him. She was warm and smelled of talcum and soap and toothpaste and then of desire, and the tip of her tongue on his lips told him she wanted love and the tips of her fingers on the buttons of his pyjama top confirmed it. He had started wearing pyjamas when Sarah was born in case the child ever needed him in the night and now he realised that would never ever happen again.

  Afterwards he didn’t want to sleep, to dream again, even if he dreamt of Sarah, because when he woke up he knew she would still be gone. The second cup of coffee he’d had with the chocolate cake helped with that. He felt for his dressing gown, got out of bed slowly so as not to disturb Rebecca but she was sleeping soundly. A notice on the desk in the room said shoes left outside in the corridor would be taken away and returned polished but that wasn’t Berlin’s way, not with brushes and a tin of Kiwi black nugget tucked away in a corner of his suitcase.

  How many pairs of shoes had he actually polished in his lifetime? he wondered. He sat under a lamp near the window, working the nugget carefully into the leather with a small piece of cloth torn from an old singlet. Would the sound of his brush buffing the leather wake Rebecca? He decided to gently shine the surface of his shoes with more of the old singlet just in case. As he worked the folded fabric over the leather his mind went back over the past few months, over the people he had met and the horror and the pain.

  He looked out through the curtains, into the darkness. Out there was Gerhardt Scheiner’s city. He and Scheiner had been on opposite sides but now they shared the same pain, the pain of war and of a daughter lost, or in Scheiner’s case not lost but gone all the same. They had both escaped their wars almost unscathed too, until the very end at least.

&nb
sp; Berlin stopped polishing, the folded scrap of cloth in his right hand poised just above the toe of the shoe. Scheiner had said that, he remembered, said it out by the woodpile on that Monday morning, said that he had made it to the very last days of the war unscathed, until the bunker and the Russian flamethrower and his admission to a Lazarette, a military hospital. Berlin put the shoe down on the carpet. He had seen that word, Lazarette, in Scheiner’s records and he suddenly recalled he had seen it on more than one page.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  The grey envelope from the military records office was in a zippered section in the front of his suitcase. Shoe polish on Berlin’s thumb left a black mark on the front of the envelope as he pulled it out. Back under the lamp he carefully looked through the photocopied pages. The hinges of the hall cupboard squeaked as he opened the door. He fumbled in the dark to find the overcoat pocket with the German–English dictionary and left the cupboard door ajar.

  It took an hour and while the translation wasn’t anywhere near perfect it was good enough. Obergefreiter Gerhardt Scheiner had been admitted to a military hospital on 25 April 1945 with extensive burns to the face and upper body but there was an earlier record of him being taken to hospital. That was on 23 November 1943, with Scheiner suffering from blast injuries during a night bombing raid. Had his Lancaster been flying that night? Berlin wondered. The injuries listed were severe and included a badly fractured right hip and thigh. They sounded like the kind of injuries that would most definitely leave a man with a limp, but probably still able to perform his duties as an anti-aircraft gunner. Back in Melbourne Gerhardt Scheiner had shown no evidence of a limp, or any injuries to his legs as he paced his living room. He’d said the scarring from the flamethrower was his only wartime injury but being blown up in an RAF air raid definitely wasn’t the kind of thing a man might forget.

  Berlin opened the curtains wide and stood and stared at the still-scarred city laid out below him. What must it have been like down there in 1945, in the last days of April as the victorious Red Army closed in for the kill? As he’d wandered the streets that afternoon still-visible bullet holes and craters gouged out of the stone buildings by shellfire had told a small part of the story but the rest was unimaginable. Or could he imagine it? Did it happen at night, perhaps during a Red Army artillery bombardment or the aftermath? A limping man in the uniform of an anti-aircraft gunner encountering a man in the black uniform of the SS, a uniform that would mean summery execution if the wearer was captured by Russian soldiers bent on vengeance for what had been done to their motherland.

  Did the SS man make Obergefreiter Scheiner undress first? That would be easiest. Did they exchange uniforms, perhaps? After that, one more gunshot and one more corpse in that blazing hell of death and destruction wouldn’t be noticed. Did he use the same pistol, the one he used on the snow-covered road in Poland? He would have taken Scheiner’s Soldbuch, his paybook, from the body along with his ID tags and any other identification or personal items. Did he leave his own papers with the body? Berlin wondered.

  But now a man out of his SS uniform, a man dressed as a low-ranking anti-aircraft gunner, would have no authority, no power to resist the Feldgendarmerie, the military police. No power to stop being forced at gunpoint to join a scratch combat company, to be handed a rifle, herded into a makeshift bunker to fight to the last against the Russian tanks and flamethrowers.

  Berlin slipped the photocopies back into the envelope. What did he really know for certain, what could he prove and what good would it do in any case? Would he tell Rebecca, or just leave this particular ghost at rest? Should he tell Lazlo perhaps? Lazlo who had friends with special talents and access to certain items that would be hard to trace. He dropped the envelope into the waste paper bin by the desk, then changed his mind and put it back into his suitcase.

  Charlie Berlin stood by the hotel window in the darkness, imagining the wail of air-raid sirens and the lights of the city blinking out one by one. The clouds had gone and he looked up at the night sky. Were there ghosts up there too, he wondered, twenty thousand feet above him? Ghosts of the great fleets of bombers, of Lancasters and Halifaxes and Wellingtons and the ghosts of thousands of frightened young men and boys. Were they up there still, circling above the Big City? Circling high above Berlin, up there forever and ever in a bomber stream without end.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to Ben Ball and Kirsten Abbott at Penguin for their continued and much appreciated support, to Jo Rosenberg for her clear and insightful suggestions at the editing stage, and to the Penguin design team for a series of striking and evocative new covers.

  Thanks also to my agent, the always-there Selwa Anthony and to Ed and Estelle Adamek whose advice and long-term friendship is greatly appreciated.

  Thanks also to those great and sometimes forgotten photographers who left us a treasure trove of images of a vibrant, exciting and rapidly changing late 1960s Melbourne. These images helped inspire me in my creation and re-creation of a time and a place that some of us may remember, and which possibly never was.

  ALSO IN THE CHARLIE BERLIN SERIES

  Two years after witnessing the murder of a young Jewish woman in Poland, Charlie Berlin, ex-bomber pilot and former POW, has rejoined the police force a different man. While he is investigating a spate of robberies in rural Victoria the body of a young girl is discovered and Berlin’s pursuit of her killer reveals that the war has changed even the most ordinary of people and places.

  ‘A feisty, beautifully researched thriller . . . shot through with brilliant insights and great dialogue. The best new Aussie entrant in the crime stakes since Peter Temple.’

  THE MERCURY

  ‘A bottler of a book . . . superbly crafted. A terrific book in all respects.’

  WEEKLY TIMES

  ‘Charlie Berlin [is] a wonderfully flawed human being doing his duty, falling apart and picking himself back up again.’

  AUSTCRIMEFICTION.ORG

  ‘McGeachin’s reconstruction of post-war Australia has an air of authenticity . . . there is a depth to the characters that is characteristic of the better modern detective fiction.’

  DAILY TELEGRAPH

  ALSO IN THE CHARLIE BERLIN SERIES

  When a recently widowed friend asks a favour, ex-bomber pilot and former POW Detective Charlie Berlin is dropped into something much bigger than he bargained for. What starts with body parts disappearing from funeral parlours leads to Blackwattle Creek, once an asylum for the criminally insane and now home to even darker evils. If Berlin thought government machinations during World War II were devious, those of the Cold War leave them for dead.

  ‘A flawless novel that offers everything one could wish for in crime fiction.’

  NED KELLY JUDGES’ COMMENTS

  ‘A well-written, compelling crime novel that delves into some very dark places . . . A very impressive novel, and Berlin, a complex, intriguing character.’

  CANBERRA TIMES

  ‘Intelligent, historically well informed and moves at a cracking pace. A great read on many levels.’

  GOOD READING

  ‘With his intricate plotting, his sharp eye for detail, skilful characterisation and brilliantly believable dialogue, there is not much this marvellous writer can’t do.’

  SUNDAY TASMANIAN

  VIKING

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  First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2014

  Text copyright © Geoffrey McGeachin 2014

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Cover design by Adam Lasczuk © Penguin Group (Australia)

  Cover photograph: Parliament House: Carl Hartmann / State Library of Victoria;

  Man running: Yolande de Kort / Trevillion Images

  Text design © Penguin Group (Australia)

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  ISBN: 978-1-74253-778-8

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