The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  ‘She’s a friend of Peta’s, yes.’

  ‘How well do you know Robert Laing?’

  ‘He was very good to me.’

  It was clear the detective was feeling a good deal of frustration. He blew out his cheeks, consulted his notes and lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘Listen son, we’ve had information which we’re obliged to act on. You understand?’

  ‘What information?’

  ‘Anonymous information — at least as far as you’re concerned. But from a very reliable source. Very. Someone I’d trust with my life.’

  Joe had said nothing.

  ‘From what our anonymous informant says, you’re the expert,’ said the detective.

  ‘At what?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Blowing up bridges. Our information is that you’re the gun. That in the war, up in northern Italy, you made your own dynamite and blew up pylons, railway point systems and bridges. Railway bridges. Is that true?’

  No one had asked him that question before. He was still conditioned to deny it, but there was no point in doing that any more. ‘It’s true,’ he said.

  ‘According to our informant, the way the charges were set down in Huntly, it was your modus operandi.’

  These words were new to Joe. Modus, he thought, might mean the same as moda in Italian, and operandi surely had something to do with operating, doing, but he wasn’t sure. He was sure about one thing. ‘If I’d set the charges the bridge wouldn’t be still standing.’

  ‘Smart little cunt.’ The sergeant tried to kick the chair out from under Joe, but he was already rising when the policeman’s boot hit the back legs. The chair crashed across the room into the wall. Before Joe could turn the sergeant whacked the baton into the back of his knee and his leg gave way. When he hit the floor the sergeant booted him in the back just underneath the ribs.

  ‘Enough!’ shouted the detective.

  That was the end of the first interview. Joe was ordered to his feet. He couldn’t stand straight for the pain in his kidney, but the sergeant pushed him, bent double, along the corridor back to his cell.

  ‘You’re gonna swing for this, you little commie shit,’ he said as he pulled the iron door shut.

  Joe couldn’t sit because the pressure went straight down to his kidney and he couldn’t lie straight because it seemed to stretch it. On the bunk, he lay on his back with the pillow pushed up under his shoulders to lift them a bit. He found if he kept his feet flat and his knees bent the pain was bearable until he had to piss. He wanted to go, but couldn’t, then when it came it was red.

  It wasn’t just the kidney that kept Joe awake all night. He’d spoken to no one about the detail of what he did in Gemona, not even to Captain Foley of N Section or to Robert Laing or Peta. Nobody else in New Zealand could possibly know that he’d made the dynamite they’d used in Gemona. Nobody but Harry Spence.

  By morning he had convinced himself he must be wrong, even though something else the detective had said was troubling him. He’d called the informant a very reliable source. ‘Someone I’d trust with my life.’ That was Harry, he thought: someone he’d trust with his life. He remembered that warm dry hand holding his as they crawled on their bellies in the dead of night through Nazi lines. Why would the man who’d saved his life countless times want to see him hanged? Had he been like Charlie and done something unforgivable? Joe couldn’t think what that could have been, but if Harry the predator had him in his sights, he was dead meat.

  * * *

  Next morning, the detective had come to his cell. The sergeant had let him in but stayed outside. ‘We’ve spoken again to Daisy Purdue,’ he said. ‘I’m prepared to concede that it’s most unlikely you could have got down to Huntly, laid the explosive and got back to Auckland between the time Ted Gartner went to sleep and the time Daisy Purdue got back from work. Not impossible, but unlikely, given when the explosives were set. But you could have been an accessory.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘You didn’t contribute advice or expertise to those who carried out this crime?’

  ‘Lots of miners know about dynamite. They don’t need me.’

  ‘That’s also true,’ said the detective. He read through his notes again, then stood up. ‘Might have to come back to you, son,’ he said. ‘But in the meantime, let me shake your hand. I saw action in Italy with the 22nd and what you did with the partisans was brilliant and brave.’

  He shook Joe’s hand and walked out of the cell, leaving the door open. Joe was unsure what he was supposed to do.

  ‘Get a move on,’ said the sergeant. ‘Fuck off.’

  The relief Joe felt to be hobbling along the streets of Auckland again quickly turned to anguish, then rage.

  Daisy had left for work by the time he got back to Freemans Bay. When Ted drove up that evening in another shiny car, Joe was waiting for him on the verandah. He told Ted he wanted to talk to his friend with the watch and the gift of prophecy.

  69

  In the early morning darkness, Joe waited with a couple of other men up at Three Lamps. Joe thought he might have recognised them from the sawmill, but couldn’t be sure. Their eyes didn’t meet and they said nothing to one another. They didn’t have to wait long. A truck with a big canopy over its tray pulled up. The tailgate was lowered and the canopy pulled aside enough for the men to climb on and join others already sitting on benches along either side of the tray.

  They sat in silence, avoiding each other’s gaze as the truck ground down the hill and eventually slowed and they heard the chants of a crowd — Joe couldn’t make out many of the words being yelled, except ‘fucking’ and ‘scabs’. A little further on, the truck stopped. The back flap was pulled apart and a policeman peered into the back briefly, then let the flap fall back. Joe glimpsed a tall wrought iron fence with a cordon of police holding back a surging crowd of wharfie pickets.

  * * *

  The Doncaster Star out of Southampton was already heading north up the Rangitoto stream that evening when the man with the watch found a mistake. One of the scabs who’d registered this morning with the new waterfront union hadn’t been checked back out in the evening. It was the kind of mistake easily made under the pressure of getting the scabs safely through the picket lines without revealing their identities. He was confident that this Joseph Lamont character would be up there at Three Lamps with the others come morning.

  At least that’s what Joe was hoping would happen. There was no search of the hold that first night, or the second, so presumably no hue and cry raised by ship’s radio. Maybe his name had been quietly expunged from the scab roster: the cookhouse wallah wouldn’t have wanted any grief in his new venture. One lost soul more or less wouldn’t make any difference.

  Down among the wool bales and the smell of lanolin, Joe had three days’ food and water. He made it last five and then made his wobbly way to the deck and asked for the captain.

  George Hardwicke had the kind of what-oh English accent Kiwi soldiers had made fun of, usually attempting impersonations of General Auchinleck, but there was no levity in the anger Hardwicke directed at Joe. ‘What on earth possessed you?’

  The story Joe told Hardwicke wasn’t about strikes and betrayals and death. It was a story of fighting with the partisans, of falling in love with an Italian woman he’d wanted to marry, but had been forced by the army to leave behind at the end of the war. He told Hardwicke he’d just found out by letter that she’d borne him a child, now six. He wanted to go back and assume his responsibilities as a husband and father.

  Joe’s story wasn’t the whole truth, but it turned out to be the best truth for Captain Hardwicke, who had run the North Atlantic U-boat gauntlet during the war and seen many of his merchant seamen mates perish. He’d been forced into long absences from his young family, and he was a romantic.

  When the Doncaster Star stopped for refuelling at Cape Town, Joe was told t
o keep his head down and out of sight. Similarly at Accra, where a load of copra was swung on board. Hardwicke told Joe he’d better get off before they reached British customs at Southampton, so when the ship berthed at Lisbon to take on cork, Joe thanked Hardwicke and walked down the gangway into a warm Portuguese night.

  * * *

  On the ship, between long days scrubbing rust off iron with a wire brush, and spot painting, Joe had a surfeit of time to run back through exactly what the detective had said. His service with the 22nd, Harry’s battalion, had confirmed the identity of the informant. Joe had been close to vomiting on the detective as he shook his hand.

  Before Harry assassinated Il Pazzo, Joe had wanted to run, but knew Harry would have killed him with a bullet to the back of the neck, just like Charlie. Now he realised he’d made a terrible mistake in Trieste, that it must have been Harry at that party. Joe hadn’t been accusatory exactly when he told Harry that Leo and Luca were dead, and that Donatella was still waiting for him, but just as Harry was the only person in New Zealand who knew about Joe’s expertise with explosives, Joe was the only one who knew about Harry’s shame.

  Harry had always said that you didn’t need an ideology, that it was enough to be against Jerry. You didn’t have to be for anything, except freedom. His bid to have Joe hanged for treason painted a different picture of what he’d meant. Joe saw the empty canvas of the new world being smeared with the prejudices and divisions of the old: Malachy Lamont had broken his own family in two by dredging up the orange and the green, and Harry had now proven that post-war New Zealand was the same mess of red blood and black intent that had drowned Europe.

  When he’d asked drunken Ted to take him to the cookhouse wallah that night after he’d been released from jail, he’d felt more isolated and alone in his own country than he’d ever felt in Gemona, and just as vulnerable. Back then, Harry was hunting Germans, not Joe.

  70

  Joe could remember every detail of the end of his journey, but not much of the journey itself. There were still transients wandering post-war Europe and the story of Gianni Lamonza, an Italian who’d emigrated to Australia, and was desperate to get back to see his mother before she died, was different in detail but not in kind from many others. He’d stayed off the main roads and been fed and watered by the people of the land, who seemed the same in Portugal and Spain and France as the contadini had been in the Veneto and Friuli. It had been a long trek that took him six weeks, though he hadn’t walked much of it: he’d been driven in trucks and donkey carts and on the back of motorbikes. He’d slept occasionally in beds but more often in haylofts or out in the maize, and although the surroundings had given rise to bad dreams or memories, he mostly slept well in the knowledge that this time the sky was safe and there was no one looking for him.

  The borders were problematic and he had to circumvent the customs posts: he had no passport and his Gianni Lamonza carta d’identità was no more likely to survive careful examination now than it had during the war. But that was easy: the walking tracks were well established and he crossed the alps from France in high summer on a track that might have been built by the Romans and came down the Tende River valley to Ventimiglia, where he boarded a train.

  All the way he’d prepared himself for disappointment. Donatella might have married, she might not want him. When he’d seen from the train window the mountainous spine running along the Yugoslav border and dropping down to Gemona, far from feeling he’d come home he had to suppress a desire to flee.

  And that feeling hadn’t been helped by the burnt-out ruins of the Bonazzon and Zanardi houses. Not one stone or piece of timber had been repaired. There were labourers in Bepi and Gigi’s campi: the owner had reclaimed the land. The mezzadria system seemed to have died with the war.

  He’d followed one worker’s directions to a much older Nina in a tiny flat at the bottom of the climb into town. She’d fallen on him and cried, then taken him to the hospital to see Bepi, who had succumbed to phlebitis in his legs. Propped up in the hospital bed he didn’t look any smaller, but when he hugged Joe there was a strange lack of substance in that big frame, as if he’d been punctured. There were tears to be shed and news about Gigi and Marisa and Nonna Isabella before he could ask the question he’d come for.

  If Nina and Bepi felt that he shouldn’t contact Donatella, he didn’t know what he would do. He wanted to be able to respect their decision but wasn’t sure that he could. He thought he could probably count on Bepi’s support but Nina could be more difficult. She’d been an increasingly isolated and forlorn figure towards the end of the war, watching her daughter fall in love with the man she never trusted. She’d always sensed, Joe thought, that he loved her daughter but in the face of Harry’s confidence, Joe had done nothing to fight for her. Would that condemn him in Nina’s eyes?

  ‘Should I go to her?’ he’d asked.

  There was no hesitation from Nina. Donatella had had her baby in Venice where no one knew her and was teaching at a nursery school run by the Canossian Daughters of Charity. Her daughter, Cinzia, was at their primary school.

  A daughter, thought Joe, as Bepi pulled a half-empty bottle of grappa from the bedside cabinet, put one finger to his lips and whispered: ‘Un po’ di riscaldamento?’

  * * *

  He’d taken the train back south with Bepi and Nina’s blessing, but no certainty about what would happen. They had thought it better not to telephone Donatella in advance as she might try to avoid old painful thoughts, ‘But,’ said Bepi, ‘there is no life without pain.’

  From the station, he’d followed Bepi’s directions to the vaporetto for Accademia. He’d never seen Venice before: he’d heard it sat on stilts in the middle of the sea and was surprised and reassured, as he looked out at the maze of tiny canals and streets, that it was built on land, in stone. Stone coursed by rivers, rivers of salt water.

  He’d been over and over in his mind what he would say to Donatella when he saw her again. Why he loved her. How much he’d loved her even when she’d loved someone else. Every time he practised the words they sounded false to him and he hoped he’d have sufficient control not to say them. Or that she would say something to him that would help him to say the right thing to her.

  About three in the afternoon, he alighted at the Accademia stop, walked past the grand wooden bridge and round to the right flanking a smaller canal. There stood the large convent school Bepi had described, with its own campanile and garden courtyard on the other side of a wrought iron gate, where some mothers had already begun gathering.

  Then he saw her. She was walking across the courtyard garden towards the gate, surrounded by a bevy of little girls, too young to be her daughter. Other girls, older, were flowing out of classrooms on the other side of the courtyard. When Donatella’s group reached the gate the small children dispersed to their mothers and she stood there, waving them goodbye and watching them go, until her eyes found him.

  There was a moment when she looked stricken. Her hand went to her mouth and Joe didn’t know whether she was appalled or simply stunned. As he moved towards her Joe remembered her last words to him as she left the blackened ruins of the family home with Leo’s body in the cart.

  ‘M’hai detto di tornare dai miei,’ he managed. You told me to go back to my own. ‘Eccomi.’ Here I am. ‘Sono tornato dai miei.’ Come back to my own.

  She said nothing.

  He hadn’t seen the child. There was a little girl standing a couple of yards behind Donatella, a still centre in a swirl of girls, considering him with her mother’s serious eyes.

  She was wearing a white dress and patent leather shoes with buckles. Her dark hair was short, urchin style, as if someone had held an upturned basin over her head and cut around the edges, so short you couldn’t see any wave or curl or red in it. A fringe, though, under which those eyes were looking at him, searching for meaning, just as her mouth searched for a smile. He’d
wondered how he would react to Harry’s child. She must have sensed something in the way he was looking at her.

  ‘Papà?’ she asked.

  Donatella turned towards the child. She said nothing that Joe could hear, but must have given her some signal. Perhaps it was just the absence of denial. The little girl suddenly ran forward and jumped into his arms. He’d hugged Cinzia and cried over her before he’d even embraced her mother.

  Venice/San Pietro di Livenza 2014

  71

  Cinzia had asked to meet them in Campo Santo Stefano. The first wind of winter was flowing east off the Adriatic but they found her at an outside table. When they took their seats beside her, Clare realised it was the same cafe her father had brought her to that first morning in Venice. This was where they met, she thought. This was their place. This is where I should begin.

  It wasn’t that easy. Suor Isabella had come straight from teaching, a black coat over her grey smock. She looked severe and drawn. Clare knew she had to give her some context. This time she couldn’t just dump the file and run, as she had with Renzo.

  He’d confessed at the Osteria senza Oste that the white-haired nun who had visited her father on his deathbed, Suor Isabella, was in fact his aunt, Cinzia. Clare had been dismayed, not so much by Renzo agreeing to do his aunt’s bidding but that La Testa Calda of her father’s diary, the redhead who had sworn and blasphemed and wanted so much from life and love, had betrothed herself to Christ. ‘How long after Bruce left did that happen?’ she’d asked Renzo.

  Within a year, he thought.

  Clare couldn’t tell Renzo how indescribably disappointing it was that the woman she’d so identified with had succumbed to religion, had given up on her aspirations, had been defeated by love.

  For Renzo, Cinzia’s vocation had the benefit of logic: she’d spent her formative years in the Canossian school in Dorsoduro, had been educated by the sisters there, it was where her mother Donatella had taught. It made sense to him that, if Cinzia wanted to serve, that’s where she would go. The order was a very pragmatic one, he said, with a big emphasis on serving the poor, women and children particularly.