“Yes?”
“I’d like to look at a room.”
“Nothing available at the present moment. Which explains the ‘No Vacancy’ notice in the window,” said the landlady, pointing. “Sorry.”
She began to close the door.
Molloy put his foot on the step to stop her. “I’m not after lodgings,” he said. “I’d like to have a look at Frank O’Flynn’s old room.”
“Are you a policeman?” she asked.
“I’m a private detective,” said Molloy handing her his card.
She didn’t look at it. “Then the answer’s no,” she said. “I’ve had policemen and whatnot through here all day, traipsing their dirt. I’ve only just finished cleaning up after them. The room has been let. New boarder is moving in on Saturday. Now move your foot or I’ll ring a real detective.”
Molloy turned and walked back down the steps. Over the road, on the corner of Brown Street, he saw the Baby Austin. He crossed the street.
Caitlin wound down her window and smiled at him. “Why, if it isn’t Mr Molloy,” she said. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“You’re asking for trouble, Miss O’Carolan.”
“It’s a free world, isn’t it?” she asked. “Still?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It was ten o’clock. Molloy was parked at the top of Chamberlain Street. The porch light at number 3 had gone out half an hour earlier and the boarding house was in darkness. He took a torch from the glovebox and walked delicately down the side of the villa. The grass was uncut and at one point he stumbled over an old tyre. He went slowly up the rickety rear steps and tried the door. It was unlocked. He let himself in.
Somewhere in the house a radio was playing. A toilet flushed and he heard footsteps along the hall and a door opening and closing. His eyes adjusted to the darkness. There were four doors on each side of the hall. Room 1 was closest to the kitchen. He crept up the hallway. Room 4 was locked. He ran his hand along the top of the frame but there was nothing. Where would the landlady keep the key? he wondered. It could be anywhere.
He went outside and around the side of the villa. The windows were at least six feet off the ground. He took one of the painting ladders from in front of the house and leaned it gently against the wall beneath the window of O’Flynn’s old room. It was open a few inches, enough to air the room. He put his hands under the frame and pushed. It moved easily at first and then caught, making a shrieking sound loud enough to wake all of Grey Lynn. He waited. Silence. He lowered the window slightly so that it was square and then pushed it up, and let himself in.
The room had a single iron bedstead with a rolled-up mattress, a small table and chair, a tallboy and a chest of drawers on top of which was a flowered jug and a bowl on a freshly ironed doily. There was a mat on the wooden floorboards in the middle of the room. On the wall above the chest of drawers was a small mirror on a chain, and on the opposite wall a framed picture of Windsor Castle cut from the lid of a chocolate box.
Molloy lifted the chair and leaned it against the door, its back under the knob, locking it in place. He took the drawers from the chest and turned them over to see if there was anything taped to the bottoms. Nothing. He searched the tallboy and ran his hand around the top. Nothing. He took down the mirror and the picture and turned them over. Nothing. He unrolled the mattress and checked where it might have been cut and resewn. He ran his hand around the bed frame. He lifted the mat. He checked the floorboards for signs they had been moved. He took the chair from under the doorknob and stood on it to look at the light shade. Nada. The whole place was as clean as a whistle.
He returned the chair to its position against the door and sat on the bedstead. The springs groaned. He looked at the picture on the wall. He took it down again. Its backing was held in place by metal clips, recently folded. He straightened them and removed the cardboard. There was a folded slip of card in the corner between the illustration and the frame. He put the picture on the bed and opened the slip. It was a left-luggage ticket from the Auckland Railway Station. It was new.
There was a banging on the door. “Hey,” a voice shouted. “Who’s in there?”
“I’ve telephoned the police,” a second voice, the landlady, threatened. “They’re on their way.”
“I’ve got a cricket bat,” someone else called.
“Yes,” said the landlady. “Bring it.”
Doors opened. “What’s going on?” yet another voice said.
“Someone’s broken in,” said the first voice. “Bastard’s not going anywhere though.”
“Language!” said the landlady.
“Round the back! He’ll get out the window!”
But Molloy was already there, dropping to the ground and running along the side of the house towards the street. Lights were coming on. He could hear yelling from inside. The front door burst open. Two figures ran out onto the front porch and then stopped.
“Quick,” said the first.
“What?” said the second.
The landlady pushed her way between them. “Police,” she yelled. “There he is.”
Molloy ran across Richmond Road. He could hear footsteps behind him.
Headlights picked him out. He saw nothing but brilliant white. A car cut in front of him. Its passenger door swung open and he heard Caitlin call out, “Quick, get in.”
The car accelerated down Richmond Road.
“Well, Miss O’Carolan,” said Molloy, looking over his shoulder for signs of pursuit and seeing nothing. “You’re wasted on the Women’s Page, I’ll give you that.”
“That’s big of you, Molloy,” she said, checking the rear-vision mirror and charging along Ponsonby Road.
“Where are we going?”
“There’s someone who wants to talk to you,” she said. “Actually, he’s an old friend of yours.”
She drove down College Hill and up Victoria Street, bent over the wheel like Juan Fangio. She turned into a side street and then into another. It was lined with two-storey wooden buildings. There were shops at ground level and flats above.
“Here we are,” she said, turning off the ignition and pulling the handbrake. The motor ticked into silence.
Molloy looked around. “Where?”
There were pubs on opposite corners, the Criterion and the Shamrock. Other than the blue glow of the Criterion’s neon sign, and faint lighting from one or two of the flats, the area was in darkness. There would have been commercial travellers in the house bar of the Criterion, and after-hours customers boozing in the Shamrock, but for all the people around, they might as well have been in Wellington.
Caitlin leaned across him and pointed to a light coming from behind the curtains in a room above Progressive Books.
“There,” she said.
An unlocked door next to the bookshop opened onto a narrow stairway lit by a single bulb. Caitlin led the way. At the top of the stairs was a small landing and a plain door halfway down a corridor. Molloy could hear the rolling of a Gestetner.
Caitlin knocked.
“Who is it?” said a voice that Molloy hadn’t heard since before the war.
“Me,” said Caitlin.
“Just a tick.”
Molloy looked at Caitlin. “Well, whaddya know?” he said.
The door opened. An older man, lean and muscular, his nose bent and his ears rumpled, a big grin on his ugly mug, stood there wiping his hands with a rag. He was wearing a black beret, an ink-stained white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and high-waisted trousers tied with a worn leather belt. The metal frames of his round Health Department glasses caught the light from the bulb and his green eyes glinted from behind thick lenses.
“Fraternal greetings, Comrade Molloy!” said V.G. Parker, General Secretary of the Communist Party of New Zealand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Molloy was driving a tip-truck on the Mangakino deviation, a Public Works Department scheme for the Main Trunk Railway, when he first met Vince. It was 1934. Parker was an o
rganiser for the Drivers’ Union and recruiting for the Party on the side. Molloy was union to the core and the latter was an easy next step, especially in the middle of the Depression when it seemed the only factories in the world with their lights on were in the Soviet Union.
In 1937, on Parker’s instructions, Molloy went to Spain as a driver with the Spanish Medical Aid Committee ambulance unit. There were three nurses: René Shadbolt, Isobel Dodds and Millicent Sharples; Trevor Haysom, a school teacher and Party member from Palmerston North, there to maintain ideological discipline; and Molloy, the unit’s driver-mechanic. After a briefing from Comintern representatives in Marseilles on what to expect once they crossed the Pyrenees, Haysom had had second thoughts. He went out for tobacco and never returned. The nurses were seconded to the International Brigade hospital in Huete. Molloy was sent to the front.
During the Huesca Offensive his ambulance was hit by a bomb dropped from a Nationalist aeroplane — a Junkers trimotor which he got to know better in Crete four years later. Dorthe Scheffman, a nurse and staunch Trotskyite from Denmark, who died of TB in the French internment camp at Gurs in 1940, was riding in the back with two German casualties from the Thälmann Battalion. Dorthe was all right, just shaken. One of the Teds was killed. Molloy had a broken leg and concussion.
He was invalided to Barcelona, just as the Spanish revolution began to turn upon itself. On the 3rd of May three motor lorries of assault guards from the Karl Marx Barracks attempted to occupy the anarchist-run telephone exchange in the Plaça de Catalunya. Barricades made from sandbags and paving stones, and manned by workers armed with rifles and petrol bombs, appeared on every corner. Five days of street fighting followed. Molloy was lucky to escape with his life. A goon squad from the XV International Brigade, sent to the hospital to liquidate the patients, most of them wounded from the barricades and POUM militiamen from Huesca — George Orwell’s old mob — was commanded by an Australian, a good bloke named Richard Warren. Molloy knew him. They had knocked about a bit together in Paris while in transit to Spain. The Internacionales came into the ward with their machine pistols on automatic and worked their way down the narrow aisles, shooting methodically and without concern, their tunics soon shiny with blood and viscera, the air thick with mattress feathers and gun smoke.
Warren recognised Molloy. He put the barrel of his weapon next to Molloy’s cheek and fired into the pillow. Molloy jerked and slumped and managed to pull the canvas blanket up over his face. The shot careened round his skull for months afterwards, and he still didn’t hear as well as he should out of his left ear, but he was alive. He didn’t like to think what became of the Australian. The International Brigades were no place for sentimental blokes.
Molloy landed back in New Zealand at the end of July 1939. Parker wanted him to do a public speaking tour around the country to raise funds for Spanish refugees in France. The announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact upset that plan — Stalin and Hitler on the same side. For a few days there was silence from Vince. Then he showed up at Molloy’s to fill him in on the revised Party line. The impending European conflict was an imperialist one, Vince said, of no significance to the working class.
Molloy exploded. What about anti-fascism? What about the Popular Front? What about ¡No pasarán!?
They’d had a go, in the kitchen, out on the front lawn, along Arthur Street, neighbours egging them on. The plods had come and broken it up and both men had spent the night in the cells behind Newton Police Station, cooling off. Next day Molloy resigned from the Party and a few months later he was in Egypt with the First Echelon. He hadn’t seen Parker since.
“Well I never,” said Molloy. He turned to Caitlin. “A cadet reporter who takes her orders from a red-hot Commo.” He turned back to his host. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Vince,” he said. “This really is revolution from within.”
“Takes orders?” said Parker. “Not Cait. She bows only to the will of the proletariat, isn’t that right, Comrade?” He put out his hand. “Good to see you, you backslider. Come in.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
One wall of Parker’s room was lined with bookshelves. There was a single bed in the corner. A small postcard of Lenin unveiling a memorial to Karl Marx in Voskresenskaya Square in 1918 was pinned to the wall above the mantelpiece. An open window looked across rooftops, curtains deliberately arranged to obscure the view of Smith & Caughey’s, bourgeois emporium that it was. On the table stood a Gestetner machine and ink and wipers. Washed dishes dried on a bench next to a gas ring and there was an open bottle of milk and a half a pound of butter under a net cover on the windowsill in the breeze.
“Have a seat,” said Parker, pulling the stools out from under the table. He put the duplicating equipment on the floor and pushed aside a floral curtain under the sink.
“Let’s have some plonk,” he said, taking out a flagon. “Pass us those cups will you, dear.” He poured three nips of sherry. “This stuff’s not bad,” he said. “Old Dally out West called Farac makes it. His uncle was a Potemkin man, he reckons, although he could be pulling me leg.”
He raised his cup in salute. “Za vas! Here’s to the Great Patriotic War, eh? I heard a bit about your army exploits, Johnny. Big hero and that.”
“What do you want, Vince?” said Molloy.
“Never any beating about the bush with Comrade Molloy,” said Parker, putting the flagon on the floor. He pointed at the dried scab on Molloy’s nose. “That wasn’t from the thumping I gave you that time, was it?” He shook his head. “Those were the days, eh? When you could get an argument going? Now all they’re interested in talking about is footy and the ponies.” He straightened up. “Anyway, you want to know why we brought you here?”
Molloy shrugged. “My line of work, you end up in some odd places.”
“Work? Is that what you call it?” Parker shook his head. “One of my proudest moments,” he said to Caitlin. “When I brought this fella into the Party.” He reached for the flagon. “Now look at him. A Pinkerton man.”
“Right-o,” said Molloy, reaching for his hat.
“Comrade!” said Caitlin, looking sharply at Parker.
“Yeah, no, that was out of order,” said Parker quickly, holding up one hand. He put his cup on the table. “Sorry, Johnny. I’m not meself. Have a seat, please. It’s this waterfront business. I can’t sleep worrying about it. Will you hear me out?”
“Go ahead,” said Molloy. “But don’t take all night.”
“Good. That’s good. I appreciate it.” He pointed at the postcard of Lenin on the wall. “First of all, let me read you something that little fella wrote. For context.” He leaned over and opened a drawer in a cupboard next to the bed. He took out a booklet. It was bulging with little strips of torn newsprint denoting key passages. He opened to a bookmarked page. “This is from his On the Foreign Policy of the Soviet State.”
He began reading. “‘The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class.’” He looked up. “You see that? ‘Conscious of themselves as a single working class.’” He gazed at the hectoring Lenin and shook his head in admiration. “The acuity of the bloke.” He put the booklet back in the drawer. “Three Musketeers sorta thing. All for one and one for all. United we stand, divided we fall. The collective will. Yet there’s Barnes and them, off down the adventurist road, on their own.”
He ticked his fingers one by one. “Oh there’ll be talk of solidarity, but when it comes to the crunch? The Meat Workers won’t stick with them. Disciplined, see, they know how to take advice. The Seamen? Not a show. Drivers? Likewise. Postal Workers? Never. Magnificent, those bastards. That parasite Walsh has the Clerical Workers and the craft unions wound round his little finger, so forget them. Of course there’ll be the usual renegade elements. Carpenters spring to mind, the ungrateful swine. Miners? Possibly — who can predict which wild path thos
e West Coast Doolans will follow? But no one of significance, you get it? None of the foremost representatives.” He leaned forward. “The wharfies are walking into a trap pretty much on their own. The wharfies! The Brigade of Guards of the industrial movement! Hard bastards. Street fighters. Control the waterfront, you’ve got the country by the throat. But not these clowns. Not Barnes and them. Jock’s strutting round with his chest puffed up like flamin’ Mussolini, but he’s no Ulyanov, I think you’d agree, you know, in terms of strategic foresight. Instead of controlling the waterfront they’re giving control away! Handing it to Holland and his Yankee cobbers. So why are they doing it? Who’s pulling the levers? Who’s the controlling element?” He slammed the table. “What the fuck is going on?” He looked at Caitlin. “Pardon me French, Comrade.”
She brushed it off. Molloy sipped his sherry. He wasn’t a sherry man as a rule but Parker was right. It wasn’t bad.
“There’s an agent provocateur in the WWU,” said Parker. “We think it’s — or was — Frank O’Flynn. We know you’re poking around, asking questions about him. Can you tell us why? For old times’ sake?”
“Jock wants to know the same thing,” said Molloy.
Parker threw up his hands in disgust. “Now he does, when it’s too flippin’ late! I tried to warn that ditchdigger about O’Flynn but he didn’t want to know.”
“Can you help us?” asked Caitlin.
Molloy put his cup down on the table. “What’s in it for me?”
Parker made a growling sound. Caitlin ignored him. “We know something you might find useful,” she said.
“Try me,” said Molloy.
Parker reached for the flagon. “Ah, go ahead, tell him,” he said to Caitlin, pulling the cork.
“O’Flynn isn’t his real name,” said Caitlin. “Which you probably know. But did you know he spent time in prison in Ireland for Republican activities?”
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