Prophets and Loss (A Johnny Ravine Mystery)

by Martin Roth

My home was what the posh Southbank real estate agents would call a studio suite. But you wouldn’t get away with that in Box Hill, so it was just a one-room apartment. It was enough. A living room with a sofa and a bed, and a small kitchen that overlooked the smash repair’s. All day long I could hear the banging of the panel beating hammers, the hissing of the spray-painting hoses and the noisy arguments over price.

  I unlocked the front door and went back to the dinner that I had been eating when the policewoman phoned with the news about Grant. Leftover rice didn’t taste much different from having been left on the plate for another hour.

  I was nearly done when someone knocked at the door. Who was coming to my place unannounced at night? I had fewer friends than Grant and Melissa. Surely it wasn’t the police already? I took a nervous glance out the kitchen window, and was relieved to see the shuffling figure of Pastor Ron Thomas, no doubt here to talk about Grant.

  The pastor was a tall, angular man of seventy or more. He reminded me of an illustration in one of the picture books the nuns used for teaching basic English back home in Dili, antique volumes from Portugal, probably recycled from Angola, via Mozambique, via Goa. It was a book of nursery rhymes.

  “There was a crooked man, and he had a crooked dog.” The cartoon next to the text portrayed an elderly man, his body twisted at all angles like a contortionist. That was the image that came back every time I encountered the pastor. If you saw him standing in the distance in the mist you’d wonder if you were looking at a person or at one of those stark, denuded trees in a Sidney Nolan painting of the Australian outback.

  Though of course he hadn’t been too happy when I told him he reminded me of a crooked man. In English, as in life in modern-day Melbourne, nuance is everything,

  I opened the door. He nodded and then wordlessly walked in and subsided into my sofa. He was wearing a baggy blue suit, probably purchased from the local charity shop, and a thin green tie. Even seated he couldn’t keep straight. He looked at me with his shoulders slumped and his head jutting out, like an eagle on a cliff ledge surveying its territory. It seemed he might at any moment soar into the kitchen and start pecking at the remains of my rice.

  “Grant; dead in a brothel,” he said in his gravely voice.

  I waited.

  “Not good,” he pronounced. “Not good at all.”

  There were two reasons why I appreciated Pastor Thomas. The first was that he always got straight to the point.

  The other reason, ironically, was that he sometimes scared me.

  After I came to Australia, bored and lonely and bitter, I’d started tentatively attending church. Most of the reverends I met - even a couple of women ministers - were far too matey. They’d say “G’day” and slap you on the back and ask after your relatives, and each Sunday after church when they engaged you in small talk they always seemed to remember precisely three things about you.

  Pastor Thomas wasn’t like that. He didn’t care about your relatives. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. He cared about them, but they came about number eighteen on any list of things that concerned him. Right at the top was your spiritual progress.

  “Life is a journey,” he sometimes growled at me. “It’s all about your spiritual growth.”

  “So where does torture by the Indonesian military fit?” I had asked him.

  “Read your Bible. Look at Saint Paul. He was tortured. Didn’t do his spiritual development any harm.”

  “My wife. Jacinta. They murdered her. Not to mention my mother.”

  “And that’s why you hate God? Think what would have happened if you didn’t believe in God at all. You’d have gone crazy.”

  “I did go crazy. After Jacinta died I shot up every Indonesian soldier I could find.”

  “You’d have shot yourself if you hadn’t had God to blame.”

  And so he worked on me, always keeping me off-guard, always one step ahead, always leaving me not quite sure whether it was the pastor or God Himself who was speaking to me.

  Occasionally I even believed him. Often enough at least to be an irregular member of his congregation. And when Grant went to prison I asked the pastor to visit him there and counsel him. He did and won his conversion with his power and sincerity.

  In technical parlance, Grant had been saved. And it really was a three-octave, multi-syllabled sa-a-a-a-a-a-ved hallelu-u-u-u-jah, just like one of those performances by the American televangelists, with flowing tears and heaps of repentance. Then, newly released from prison, and not being one to let pass a chance for the dramatic gesture, Grant had insisted on being baptized in the Yarra River, with the church choir standing on the riverbank singing Amazing Grace.

  “He was a model for our church,” Pastor Thomas was saying. “He was a new man.” He paused. “I’ve just been to the house. Mel’s out cold. The doctor reckons she’ll sleep until tomorrow. The police said a private investigator named Johnny Ravine was the first to visit her, but suddenly disappeared.”

  I shrugged my shoulders and waited for him to speak again.

  With his twisted, tramp-like appearance, his growling voice and the long pauses he employed between sentences, Pastor Thomas sometimes appeared senile.

  It was an effective disguise - whether deliberate or not I never knew - for the fact that he had graduated more than forty-five years earlier with a brilliant double degree in philosophy and theology. He had then done his doctorate at Oxford before discerning God’s call to spend thirty years in the outback ministering to the poorest of the Aboriginal communities. An experience like that either turned you into a taxi driver or gave you a burning passion for social justice, and with the pastor it was the latter. Now, well past normal retirement age, he was as fired up as a new seminary graduate.

  He was supported by our small congregation, but it was known that he gave away most of his income. Once someone discovered that he had taken a temporary job as a night-cleaner - walking around local office buildings in a white uniform with a vacuum cleaner on his back - to raise funds for a group of Somali refugees.

  “We all knew Grant had a past,” resumed Pastor Thomas. “But what the heck was he doing in a seedy brothel?”

  Seedy? When it came to levels of seediness, Melbourne’s legal brothels were way more presentable than most local churches. In my brief stint as a private investigator I’d had occasion to visit a few. I’d seen rooms with soaring Roman columns, with indoor spa baths that could (and possibly did, at times) accommodate a football team, with lighting that could illuminate an outdoor sound and light show, with gyrating beds that might have been designed by NASA.

  People kept telling me that religion in Australia was in decline. No, it was surely just that people – men, at least – had simply switched faiths. These were our new cathedrals, holy ground for the devotees of the religion of instant gratification. Who needed church?

  But I didn’t tell that to the pastor.

  “The police don’t seem to know,” I ventured.

  “Do you think it was some kind of gang killing? What sort of gang was Grant involved with? I thought all that was behind him.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

  “He went to prison for smuggling Indonesians into Australia. Maybe there was a payback involved. What else was he involved with?”

  What else? What wasn’t he involved with? “There was his stock market business,” I said. “That was his main interest. But I never worked out what they did.”

  The pastor walked to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water, then rejoined me in the living room. “The Prophetic Edge,” he said. “That was the name of the company. He told me they developed stock market software. Stuff that tells you which stocks to buy. Not my cup of tea. But he said he gave the company away to some employees after he went to jail.”

  “Who’d be out for revenge if he gave the company away?”

  “He was involved with one scam after another. He told me about them all when he was in prison. Women. Smuggling. You
name it. Thankfully he’d kept clear of dealing in drugs. But I do know that he had well and truly repented. Johnny, he was a new man.”

  I shrugged my shoulders again. I was as much in the dark.

  Pastor Thomas looked tired. His eyes moved around the room. There wasn’t much for him to see. More than two decades in the jungle had taught me the simple life. Stay ready to move on at any time. The room was virtually bare: a desk with an old computer, a television set in one corner, a couple of posters on the walls. Unlike Melissa, I had no need for ornaments.

  “The press is onto it,” said the pastor. “You know how I heard about the death? The body’s still warm and I get a call from Rohan someone-or-other, a reporter at The Age. This is right up their sordid little alley. A devout new Christian, regular church attender, lovely wife, dead in a brothel. Could be a gang murder.” He raised his rangy arms high in the air, as if he were Moses - or Charlton Heston - about to be handed the Ten Commandments. “Johnny, what was he doing there?”

  I wished I could say something constructive.

  “Johnny, I want you to find out what happened. Papers like The Age are always trying to dig up muck on the church. Make it look like every pastor’s about to run off with the choir mistress. Or the choirboys. I know it’s the nature of the world we live in today that the church gets attacked all the time. So just keep all this low-key. But at least let’s have some answers ready when the press attacks us.”

  He paused and looked me in the eyes. “You’re a...” He spread his arms like an albatross about to take off, and with bony fore and middle fingers painted imaginary quotation marks around the next words: “private detective.”

  I nodded, and ignored the implied insult.

  The pastor continued: “I want you to find out what really happened. We have to stop the papers from publishing anything bad. We owe it to our congregation. We’ll lose half our members if there’s a scandal. I know that Grant has been paying you a salary. I reckon the church can cough up a bit to support you until you sort out your future.”

  “I don’t need the church helping me,” I said quickly. “I can easily find work.”

  Actually, I wasn’t sure at all. Virtually all my assignments had come to me through Grant. They had pretty much dried up after he went to prison, but he had continued to support me. “Anyway, I don’t see that we should care what the papers print. The police will find out what happened, in their own time.”

  Pastor Thomas fixed his gaze on me, and immediately I knew I had let him down. Before I could say anything more he was in sermon mode: “Johnny, I reckon you used to be a firebrand. You were a freedom fighter. Then you come to Australia and what happens? You seem to spend all your time playing on the internet and looking for your father.”

  That hurt. “Everyone needs a father.”

  “I know that. But you have spent I don’t know how many hours and days and weeks and months looking without the slightest bit of evidence that he is alive, or that he is Australian...”

  “My mother always said he was an Australian,” I interrupted.

  “There is no evidence that if he’s alive he’s in Australia,” the pastor corrected himself. “I know you would dearly love to find him. That’s why I’ve done all I can to help. God willing you will find him. But hours a day on the internet and at public libraries looking through genealogies and newspapers and phone books all over the shop won’t do it. I know all about your murdered mother and your murdered wife, but other people have deaths in the family too. Melissa for a start. After a period of grieving they get on with their lives.”

  I pondered over the pastor’s words. Deep down I knew he was right. “I guess I do owe it to Mel,” I conceded.

  It was at that moment that the telephone rang. It was on a low table, right next to the pastor. I answered.

  “Johnny Ravine?” said a man I didn’t recognize.

  “Yes.”

  “Johnny Ravine, listen me good,” said the heavily accented voice. “You go away. You know?”

  “What?” I blurted out. “What is this?”

  “Go away,” continued the voice. “Or big killing. First Mr Grant Stonelea. And you next, Little Australian. You know? You next.”

  “Who is that?” I shouted. But he had already hung up.

  Pastor Thomas was eyeing me. And suddenly I knew that I had no choice.

  “Yes, I’ll help you,” I said quietly. “I’ll find out what happened.”

  Yes, I would find out what happened. Possibly my very life depended on it.

  It all had to do with revenge.