Prophets and Loss (A Johnny Ravine Mystery)

by Martin Roth

The Box Hill Community Church occupied the premises of a small clothing factory that had closed down when the new faith of economic rationalism sent the operations offshore. Pastor Thomas had turned the main workshop area into a chapel, and the adjoining rooms into a church hall and office.

  The chapel was a large square room with grey concrete walls, a ceiling as tall as a basketball court’s and windows placed way up high to stop the workers from gazing outside. The pastor had furnished it with long rows of creaky seating that a country cinema was going to take to the rubbish tip. Bright lights hung from long wires, and swayed in the breeze when the windows were opened. An ancient piano and a lectern bearing a massive old Bible were at the front.

  The pastor and his wife had worked to soften the harsh appearance with pot plants and some colored streamers, but it was pretty much only the large white wooden cross on the front wall that assured newcomers they were actually in church.

  I walked up a short flight of stairs and into the entrance foyer, and there received such a start that I almost cried out. For right in front of me was none other than - Grant. A huge grin on his face.

  Well, no, of course it wasn’t really Grant himself. He was dead. It was just a large photo, framed in black and placed upright on a table to greet mourners. But it was the perfect image, almost cartoon-like in the manner in which it displayed his attributes. His eyes sparkled, his lantern jaw hung loose and his teeth looked so well formed that he could have been advertising Colgate. His broad smile was bubbly and infectious. You wanted to join in with whatever he was doing. You felt happy just to look at him.

  I walked slowly past the photo into the chapel. It accommodated around eighty people, yet it seemed only about half that number were in attendance. Grant’s BC friends weren’t likely to turn up, and he had made few friends in his AD days. There were only a few mourners I didn’t recognize - relatives probably.

  The remainder were regulars from the church, most of them Asian. Perhaps they were bored with life in this country - like me - and were making up numbers. Most of the growth in the church came from Asians. It continually struck me as one of the ironies of life in Australia that as more and more Australians turned to disciplines like Zen Buddhism and feng shui in the hope of giving some meaning to their lives, a fast-growing number of Asian migrants were becoming Christians.

  I was hoping that Rohan might arrive. I had a lot to ask him. But no, he was absent. Perhaps that showed a certain sensitivity on his part. If he were planning some kind of exposé of Grant and the church then maybe he at least had the decency not to come to Grant’s funeral.

  Pastor Thomas had his office at one side of the chapel. I knocked and walked in. He was sitting at his desk, writing. He glanced at me. He was clearly busy.

  “Nothing more to report, I’m afraid,” I said.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Latest news from the police is no news. They don’t have a clue. The only person who was anywhere near what happened was that girl, and they don’t think she could have done it.” He returned to his writing.

  I walked back out. Melissa was sitting at the front, next to the pastor’s wife, wearing a simple black lacy skirt and black blouse. She looked calm and composed. I took her hand and leant over to give her a kiss. She looked me in the eye and gave a soft smile. There was no hint of her nastiness of the day before. She indicated some space near her on the front seat. I shook my head. I preferred to dwell in anonymity at the back.

  As I sat, the pastor walked in and took a seat next to his wife. One of the church ladies, wearing a set of large red earrings that looked like baby lobsters clinging to her earlobes, walked to the piano and began playing Amazing Grace. It struck me as inappropriate for a funeral. This was one of the great Christian hymns, celebrating the amazing love and mercy of God. It was more suitable for a baptism, like Grant’s at the Yarra River. Where was God’s grace in Grant’s life? From rebirth to death in less than half a year, leaving Melissa bereft.

  Pastor Thomas stood and walked slowly to the lectern. He looked steadily around the mourners. His body was bent in several angles. You could almost hear the creaking. It was as if he needed an oil change. He tapped the microphone, then he started to speak in a low guttural growl, with lengthy pauses between sentences.

  “Six months ago Grant Stonelea felt he had lost everything.” Pause. “He went to prison for smuggling illegal immigrants into Australia.” Pause. “He lost his businesses.” Pause. “He lost most of his friends.” Pause.

  A couple of latecomers - an elderly couple - tip-toed in and sat near me at the back.

  “And then in prison he was touched in a mighty way by God’s spirit. And he came to feel, in the words of Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians, in the Bible, that ‘whatever I thought was profit I now think of as loss, because of what Jesus has done.’ In other words, what he had lost was nothing compared to the gain from knowing Jesus.”

  Pastor Thomas found it hard to keep still. Now he plodded up and down between the piano and his lectern like an elderly caged animal, as if trying to escape some imaginary bars. He didn’t need the microphone.

  “Grant was a new creation,” he continued. “And you know one reason. It is because he had a conscience. A God-given conscience. Deep inside he felt guilt. He knew he had done wrong. All humans are moral beings. It is part of our nature to know - at some level - the difference between right and wrong. And to feel guilt when we don’t do right. This is something that cuts across all societies. It is part of our God-given natures. It is written on our hearts.”

  He walked up to the front row of seating, near Melissa, and looked across the mourners.

  “After his conviction Grant Stonelea was sent to Barwon Prison, out near Geelong. It is not a pleasant place. I have been there many times, visiting prisoners. They have a high-security section. It is called the Acacia Unit, but everyone knows it as The Slot.” He surveyed the mourners. “The Slot. It is where they place the most violent prisoners. It is a brutal place. Inmates are sometimes missing an ear, and their bodies are lined with scars, because of the violence that occurs there. Yet talk to prisoners in The Slot and even they know the difference between right and wrong. They know why they are there. And they tell you they would do almost anything to make sure their own kids go straight.”

  Then the pastor changed the subject, and I knew he was addressing Melissa, though he did not look at her. I even caught him looking sometimes at me.

  “It is at times of tragedy, like this, that we need God,” he said. “We need Him to comfort us. We need Him to give us hope. We need Him to reassure us that there is an ultimate purpose to life and death. But for many bereaved people the most crucial need is help to forgive. For without forgiveness we enter an endless cycle of hate and bitterness and vengeance. Without forgiveness we cannot experience true inner healing. But without the help of God it is so terribly hard to forgive.”

  Pastor Thomas spoke simply and clearly. Often I had left the church on a Sunday feeling a sense of deep, inner peace. But that feeling eluded me now. I remained depressed.

  I waited until the choir started singing the modern Aussie classic Shout to the Lord. That had been one of Grant’s favorites. Then I eased myself out of my seat and quietly slipped away.

  The short walk to my office was hardly the tonic that I needed – I knew it would only make me more depressed - but I hadn’t been there in a couple of days. It was on the second floor of a three-storey blue concrete building, behind the ten-pin bowls center and just down the road from the government’s migrant education offices.

  The ground-level floor housed one of those after-school tutorial businesses where the local Asian parents send their kids, to help them boost their exam averages from the high nineties to the even-higher nineties. I’d spotted Ming, the elfin-like, over-achieving Vietnamese manager, at the funeral. I peered through the window. The place was in darkness with the door bolted. Grant hadn’t tried to close down this business - or sell it, or give it awa
y - after he became a Christian, so I presumed that it was legitimate.

  I unlocked my mailbox, at the building entrance. Only two items were waiting for me, an advertising circular for computer supplies and an invitation to join a local health club. I screwed up both missives and shoved them in my pocket.

  There was little point in trudging upstairs. I could check the office phone answering machine from home. I considered the five-minute stroll to Dumpling King for a bowl of noodles. It sometimes seemed my life had been filtered down to this cozy circuit of home, office, Grant’s place, church and Dumpling King. I needed to get out more. Was God trying to tell me something with that health studio invite? Possibly, but I wasn’t in the mood to be listening to God right at that moment.

  I opted for my flat and a packet of instant ramen. I stuck some Rhoma Irama on the cassette player. What had Melissa called me the day before? A nice little Christian boy who goes to church? So what was I doing listening to the king of dangdut music, a longhaired rebellious working-class boy who’d gone on the Haj to Mecca and become a regenerated Muslim? Well, as I once told the pastor, you do get a little confused when you’re raised by Southern Baptist missionaries in a fiercely Catholic enclave of the biggest Islamic country on earth.

  Rhoma was singing one of his political protests in support of the slum dwellers of Jakarta. The insistent gendang drum clanging was probably giving headaches to my neighbors, but somehow it seemed to clear my brain and help me think.

  There wasn’t much to ponder. From the phone call I had received four nights earlier it was possible the Dili Tigers were in Melbourne, possibly involved in Grant’s death. For what purpose I could not surmise. But they were dangerous and if they were here they needed to be stopped. I could be in danger, and so could others. But I had little hard evidence. It was too early to talk to the pastor about this, let alone go to the police.

  The music reached a crescendo, so loud that I barely heard the sharp crack outside, simultaneous with my kitchen window shattering into pieces. I threw myself to the ground.

  I slithered along the floor and reached under the bed for my swag. I pulled out the long knife that I kept there. I would have preferred a Smith and Wesson, but I felt the local authorities would hardly look kindly on an illegal immigrant with a gun. I waited. There were no further gunshots. I reached up to the cassette player on the table and switched it off. I could not hear any movement outside.

  Then the phone rang. Still lying on the floor I groped for the receiver.

  “Hello Little Australian,” said the accented voice I recognized from four nights earlier. “That is warning. Grant dead. Get out Melbourne now. Help refugees. Help yourself. This our business. Not your business. You understand?”

  “Listen to me. I’m going to...”

  He didn’t care what I was going to do.

  “Hati hati macan mengaum,” he shouted in Bahasa Indonesian, and the line went dead. Beware the roar of the tiger. It was the slogan of the Dili Tigers.