Bleak Spring

by Jon Cleary

  “Well, you said it was on the cards. That you’d wanna ask more questions, I mean.”

  “Better come inside, love.” Sugar jerked her head to the left and the right. In the neighbouring windows curtains had fluttered. “They’re all getting their ears ready.”

  George Rockne smiled. “Sugar lived up the Cross for so long, everybody up there minded their own business. She forgot what it’s like to live in the suburbs. Personally, I couldn’t care a bugger.” As they went into the house he said, “Still, I think we done the wrong thing, coming way out here. It was a matter of finance, but. I bought this place for a song from a Wog, he couldn’t stand the neighbours.”

  “It’s fulla Asiatics,” said Sugar, ushering them into the small living room.

  “Every one of ’em a bloody capitalist.” Rockne grinned again. “Them that know I’m a commo, they won’t talk to me. They think I’m spying for Pol Pot.”

  There was small talk till Sugar brought them coffee and home-made rock cakes; Malone wondered if the cakes were baked each day in expectation of the visitors who never called. The room was crowded with cheap furniture, all of it spotless. A bookcase stood against one wall, its shelves heavy with political volumes; the only title that Malone recognized was Ten Days That Shook the World, once upon a long time ago Con Malone’s bible. On the opposite wall was a row of shelves crowded with plaster figurines; Malone looked for Lenin or Marx, but then recognized that the shelves were Sugar’s. A tiny Mae West lounged between a fan dancer (Sugar herself?) and a bust of the Queen; half a dozen small kookaburras, more hilarious than their big brother outside, had their beaks open in silent laughter. But Malone didn’t laugh, not even silently. He had been in too many homes like this one to miss the significance of the security of what furnished them

  “George, do you know a Mr. Jones?”

  It was a brutal first delivery, but Rockne didn’t blink or duck. He just frowned and amidst all those wrinkles it was impossible to tell whether the question had surprised him or frightened him. “I suppose I’ve known a dozen Joneses over the years. Which one are you referring to?”

  “We think he’s a foreigner, he has an accent of some sort. Tall feller, well dressed, looks like he sells Rolls-Royces.”

  The wrinkles turned into another smile. “You expect me to know what a Rolls-Royce salesman looks like?”

  “I knew a man owned a Rolls,” said Sugar. “Before your time, sweetheart.”

  Rockne smiled affectionately at her. “One of her capitalist boyfriends . . . What gives you the idea I might know a Mr. Jones?”

  “Just a wild guess,” said Malone. “There was a note about him in Will’s diary.”

  “Mentioning me?”

  “Yes.” The way to the truth is often through lying: old police proverb.

  But George Rockne wasn’t going to fall for that one. “I don’t think so, Inspector. I never took anyone, Mr. Jones or anyone else, to see Will.”

  “You could’ve sent Mr. Jones to see him,” said Clements around a mouthful of rock cake.

  “This is getting nasty,” said Sugar and sounded disappointed in the two detectives.

  “We’re not meaning to be,” Malone reassured her. “We’ve got nothing against George. It’s Mr. Jones we’re after.”

  “What’s he done?”

  “Well, for one thing he’s been to Will’s office in the last coupla days and threatened Will’s secretary, a nice harmless girl, for not giving him his files. She couldn’t do it because we, the police, had a warrant on them.”

  “What did the files say?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t tell you that, George.” Which was true.

  Rockne looked round the room, bouncing a cake from one hand to the other as if it were indeed a piece of rock and he might throw it at something or someone. Then he looked back at Malone, his eyes almost lost amidst the wrinkles; he looked suddenly worried and tired and old. “Has he been to see Olive and the kids?”

  “I don’t know. We’re going there next. Who is he, George?”

  Rockne put out his hand to Sugar; it still held the rock cake. “You wanna go outside for a while, love?”

  “No,” she said, clutching his wrist as if he might run away. “I don’t. Definitely. I’m staying, sweetheart. If you’re in trouble . . . Is he?”

  “I don’t think so, Mrs. Rockne. I don’t think he’d have anything to do with the murder of his own son.”

  She gasped at the brutality of what he had said. In the caves of Kings Cross she had seen more than enough violence: stand-over men with knives, crazed junkies running amok with smashed bottles, pimps belting their girls. But this was her own home, this was her husband, her sweetheart, sitting beside her. She still held his wrist, her grip tightening now.

  “George,” said Malone quietly, “tell us what you know.”

  Rockne said nothing for a long moment; all his life had been devoted to keeping secrets. Living in a country where Special Branch and ASIO and the CIA and even, so he had heard, a certain Prime Minister had kept files on him, he had learned never to trust anyone; not even some members of the Party, not since the break-up post-Stalin. Matters had eased over the past few years, with the Party dwindling away till it was only a faint, mocking shadow of what it had been in the Thirties, when he had first joined as a very young man. As a youth of seventeen he had volunteered to join the fight against fascism, to go to Spain and fight Franco; but then they had asked him to pay his own fare and that had been the end of that. He remembered his reply, an old joke: “Mate, if it cost only a quid to go round the world, I couldn’t get out of sight.” Those had been the days, when there had been something to fight for; though there had been shock and disbelief when Joe Stalin had signed the pact with Hitler. But he and the Party had weathered that, as they had weathered the invasion years later of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. He had somehow kept his idealism alive, like a fragile plant, and only in the last couple of years had he admitted, only to himself, not even to Sugar, that idealism was not enough, that human nature would always defeat it. But you couldn’t give it away entirely, not even when you saw the Wall come tumbling down, Lenin pulled by a crane from his pedestal: all you could do was pray (pray? Hail Marx, full of grace . . .) that human nature would see the light. He was a communist, once, now and forever.

  “His name’s Dostoyevsky.”

  “Like the writer? You’re kidding.”

  “You ever read Crime and Punishment? I’d have thought it was required reading for cops.”

  Malone shook his head. Lisa had tried to introduce him to nineteenth-century writers, but they had proved too turgid for him; the only ones he had liked were Jane Austen and Mark Twain, a choice that had puzzled Lisa but not himself. He liked anyone who took the mickey out of pretension.

  “Igor Dostoyevsky. He used to be a Second Secretary at the Soviet embassy in Canberra. I’m not sure, but I think he was the KGB boss, what the CIA calls its station chief.”

  “He used to be at the embassy?”

  “Yeah, but he resigned a year ago when things started to fall apart in Moscow. The same time as I retired.”

  Sugar said to the two detectives, “I still dunno whether he’s happy or not.”

  Rockne smiled gently at her. “Love, everything I believed in went down the gurgler. You can’t expect me to start singing ’Happy Days Are Here Again.’”

  “Did the commos ever sing that?” But she, too, smiled. Maybe, thought Malone, she, too, had had her dreams that had collapsed about her. He had seen enough to know the world was littered with fallen icons.

  “Did our government give him permission to stay here?” said Clements.

  Rockne nodded. “They had no proof he wasn’t what he said he was—a disillusioned communist who wanted to start a new life out here. Personally, I think Special Branch and ASIO are still watching him, but what else have they got to do now? I don’t think it worries him.”

  “What does he do for a crust?”

  Rockne’s fa
ce was an abstract etching of amusement. “He sells cars. Mercedes, not Rolls-Royces.”

  “Then where did he get five and a quarter million dollars?”

  Rockne sighed, sat back in his deep chair. “He’ll have me killed if he finds out I’ve blown the whistle on him.” Sugar gasped again and he glanced at her with concern. “I told you to go outside, love. But I’ve gotta tell ’em. If he’s been threatening the girl who worked for Will, next thing he could be doing the same to Olive and the kids. I don’t care about Olive, she can look after herself. Or let that old bat of a mother loose on him.” He tried for humour, but it fell flat, too loaded with bitterness. Malone, a father, recognized how much the older man had missed his son and his grandchildren. “I care about the kids, but. I don’t want Igor going anywhere near them.”

  “We’ll see he doesn’t know who put us on to him,” said Malone. “And we’ll see Olive and the kids are protected. But what about the money?”

  Rockne hesitated again; he was pouring part of himself, his principles, down the gurgler by blowing the whistle. “It’s money the hard-liners smuggled out a Moscow. He told me they’ve sent money all over the world, anywhere where there’s a stable currency and there’s a bank willing to take the money with no questions asked. I dunno what they’re gunna do with it—maybe they’re hoping for Lenin to come back from the dead, I dunno. But there’s millions, hundreds of millions, all around the world. It belongs to the Party and it should of stayed in Moscow, but the hard-liners weren’t having any of that, they say they still believe in the dream, that perestroika and glasnost are bullshit.”

  “Are they, George?”

  He sighed once more. “I dunno. It’s all history now. anyway.”

  “So what did Dostoyevsky want with you?”

  “He thought the Party, our party, had money salted away out here—he was like the CIA in that regard. I hadn’t the heart to tell him the truth, that if it cost a thousand bucks for a revolution, we couldn’t have bought a demonstration.” He smiled, remembering his old joke of over fifty years ago. “When I retired, there wasn’t enough cash in the kitty to give me a farewell do. Last year we celebrated May Day with a BYO—bring your own grog, your own snags for the barbecue. I dunno what they did this year, maybe held a wake. He told me how much money he was dealing with, and I thought Will might be able to help. I knew he handled a bookmaker or two and I knew some of them had to bury money they didn’t want the taxman to know about. He was a bit surprised when I called him, we hadn’t spoken in years, but he said yes, he could arrange something. After I’d sent Dostoyevsky to see him, I had nothing to do with what went on from there. When Olive and Jason told me last Monday how much was in that bank—which bank was it?”

  “Shahriver Credit International. Its headquarters are in Abadan, in Iran. I don’t think it takes Bankcard.”

  “Five million, or whatever it is. Though I thought there was more . . .”

  “Maybe there is, maybe there’s another account we haven’t traced yet.”

  “Whatever, Dostoyevsky and the men behind him aren’t gunna let it go without a fight.”

  “They’ll have a job proving it’s theirs, legally,” said Clements. “What will Moscow say? Gorbachev and Yeltsin and the others, whoever finishes up in charge? What’ll the Party here say? Especially if Dostoyevsky spreads the word that you and your son were in cahoots?”

  Sugar gasped a third time and Rockne said, “Jesus, I never thought of that!” He pondered a moment, then looked from one detective to the other. “Do you have to do anything? I mean, why have you gotta let him know you’re on to him?”

  “Because,” said Malone, “he could’ve known that Will had stolen the money. He might’ve followed Will and Olive out to Maroubra last Saturday night, waited till Olive got out of the car, gone up to Will and threatened him with the gun.”

  “What would he of gained by killing Will? That wasn’t gunna get him back the money.”

  “Maybe something went wrong, the gun went off accidentally.”

  “Maybe.” But Rockne didn’t sound convinced. And Malone himself, having spelt it out, was also unconvinced.

  “Where do we find him, George?”

  Rockne demurred. “No, I’m not gunna get any more involved—”

  “George, don’t make it any harder for us. We want to pick him up, question him, before he starts playing the heavy with Olive and the kids. Where can we find him?”

  “Tell them, sweetheart.” Sugar had grabbed Rockne’s wrist again.

  He glanced at her: his love was plain, not hidden at all by all the wrinkles. “If you say so, love . . . You’ll find him at—” He gave an address closer to the city. “It’s on Canterbury Road. He’s not known as Dostoyevsky or Jones there. It’s Boris Collins. It’s a Mercedes dealer. Just don’t tell him who sent you, OK?”

  “You’re safe, George.” Malone looked at Sugar. “I promise you that, Mrs. Rockne.”

  “We’d like to move, go up north,” she said. “But we can’t afford it. This is where we finished up, the workers’ paradise.” She looked out of the window, seeing nothing; then she looked back at Rockne. “I don’t blame you, sweetheart.”

  “You should’ve taken some commission on the five million, George,” said Clements.

  “Ah, I thought I was doing it for the cause. I was living in the past.”

  Malone stood up, nodded at the bookshelves. “Ten Days That Shook the World. That was once my father’s favourite book.”

  “Once? What changed his mind?”

  “He was never a commo, George, just anti-boss. On top of that he’s never recovered from the shame of me joining the police force. He now reads biographies of crims who get away with it.”

  “So many of ’em do, don’t they? Especially the white-collar ones. Ah, it could of been a different world. What went wrong, Scobie?”

  “If I knew that, George, do you think I’d still be just a cop?”

  Outside in the street a purple Fairlane was drawn up behind the Commodore, its bonnet up as three youths made a pretence of working on the engine. It was the sort of car that highway patrol cops referred to as night-cars: they came out mostly after dark, prowling the streets, open exhausts rumbling, their occupants looking for easy pickings among the girls outside the hotels and games parlours. The three youths’ heads came out from under the car’s bonnet as Malone and Clements approached the Commodore.

  “You troubling our friend George?”

  Malone recognized the cop-baiting; it was an old ploy. The three youths were remarkably similar, Greek or Italian or Lebanese triplets. They wore their black hair the same way, high over their foreheads and long at the back; Malone had a quick memory flash of a late-night movie, the Andrews Sisters singing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” He waited for the three youths to burst into song, but they just glared insolently at him and Clements.

  “Not at all,” he said. “We’re old Party mates of his.”

  “Bullshit. You’re pigs.”

  Malone looked at Clements, who was champing at the bit. “Don’t, Russ. You’ll only muss up their hair.”

  The two detectives got into the Commodore and Clements pulled it away from the kerb. Malone clipped on his seat-belt and sat back. “Why do we bother even taking any notice of them?”

  “They give me the shits, most of ’em, but then I sometimes wonder how I’d of finished up if I had grown up out here. It’s bloody barren and depressing.”

  Though Clements’s parents were now living in a country town, he had been born and brought up in Rockdale, a comfortable bayside suburb close to beaches. In his youth he had driven souped-up FJ Holdens and Valiant Chargers, but he had always had respect for the law and its officers and had certainly never called any of them pigs. But he had come from another time, almost another country. There had been no unemployment then, the plum tree fruited every year and all year round, everyone knew the good times would last forever. It had been only just over twenty years ago, an anc
ient era.

  Canterbury Road is an eighteen-kilometre main artery heading south-west out of Sydney. It passes through several suburban shopping sections and then, further out, its length is dotted with new and used car lots, all of them festooned with the trade’s universal theme of pennants and banners hailing the Sale of the Century. These strips have also become the beat for the cheaper prostitutes, many of them part-timers, housewives earning a bit on the side or any position you asked for. The used cars and the used women often share the same customers, the cars glossier than the women and higher priced and guaranteed.

  As the two detectives got out of their car at the kerb, two women approached them. Their looks were mostly paint-jobs, but they had good figures and they were not the stripteasers who worked the beat in the inner city.

  “Hi. You gentlemen looking for some company?”

  “We’ve got each other,” said Malone, taking Clements’s hand. “We’re also police.”

  “Oh shit! We thought you were a coupla Canterbury footballers, the size of you.”

  “Footballers at our age? Golden oldies? Relax, girls. We’re not from the Vice Squad. Just move away from our car, we don’t want the Vice fellers driving along here and thinking we’ve moved in on them.”

  Kangaroo Mercedes, a name that couldn’t have brought too many cheers back in Stuttgart, was a wide lot packed with cars, a glare of glass and paintwork.

  “Look at ’em,” said Clements as he and Malone walked on to the lot. “I wonder how many bankruptcies produced this many trade-ins? My heart bleeds for all those executives who have to catch the bus now or go to work in a Hyundai.”

  “Stop gloating, you sound like a real commo. You’re loaded enough to buy any one of these, even a couple, one for you and one for Romy.”

  “Could you see me turning up at Homicide in a Merc? Internal Affairs would be on to me before I’d turned the motor off.”

  A salesman in a pink cashmere pullover and a corporate tie marked with tiny three-pointed stars fell on them out of the glare. “Morning, gentlemen! I’m Chris Dooligan, manager here. You thinking of trading up?” He glanced out at the Commodore at the kerb, managing not to sneer. “A good car, the Holden, but we always hope to do better, don’t we? What were you looking for?”