His feelings are in turmoil; perhaps he should rush after her and, say, arrange to meet again. What about next Saturday? He could come early and drive her to Garigo – just for the day, of course; he would have to bring her back that night.
No, it’s madness to consider it. They’ve said goodbye. What’s done is done.
*
As Brandt drives into Island Bend Camp, the sun is already dipping behind the western slopes. He manages to avoid Cooma altogether by taking the back road through Adaminaby, but those Scandinavians will still be looking out for his Land Rover. Milo had warned him to avoid a big cream Studebaker with dents on all the panels and a hunter’s spotlight mounted on the roof. According to Milo, you can always recognise a Studebaker because the front looks just like the back. Thank God the attackers are not based at Island Bend. Milo found out they’re at some other camp near Lob’s Hole, which is miles away. Nevertheless, even after all these weeks, he’s still keeping the Lüger stashed away in his ute.
But being ambushed by vengeful Scandinavians is not the most alarming thing on his mind. It was that evangelist at the river spruiking from Dante’s Inferno, for, like Himmler, Brandt easily lapses into superstition. His state of mind is worsened by thoughts of Magdalena, of touching her hand and sensing her fear as she kissed him before she left, and, on his part, for the first time in twelve years experiencing an arousal of desire, half-forgotten and terrifying.
It’s early evening when he enters his cabin, but it’s been closed up all day, and, because it’s so hot, he takes a towel and goes down to one of the deep waterholes where he hears jovial shouting and wild splashing. Five men are throwing a somewhat-deflated red rubber ball to each other.
“Otto, come on in. Take the plunge, mate.”
Brandt has no wish to endure the splashing meted out to hesitant swimmers. He strips naked and rushes head on into the pool, its icy mountain water embracing his body and closing over his head. A shoal of small fish splinter into manic shadows on the white sand twenty feet below him.
In the water, his mood lifts. Magdalena’s decision to take up the American offer has wounded him, but at least he has played some part in her future. From what she said, she’ll probably be doing something important to help mend a broken world.
He calls out to the big Texan physicist holding the ball. “Hey Paul, why do you Americans want heavy water?”
“Hell, man. You don’t know? We use the stuff to make atom bombs.”
Brandt gets out, grabs his towel and returns to his cabin. He no longer wants to swim today.
*
They use the stuff to make atom bombs.
He’s at Tumbledown, it’s a whole week later and he still cannot get it out of his mind. If everything had gone to plan, Magdalena would have provided Hitler with nuclear weapons to rain on London, Moscow, possibly even New York, and now she tells him she’s going to America to do ‘a bit of good for the world’. God help us; and he – damned fool that he is, and always has been – he actually believed every word she uttered. No, never again.
He trudges through the bush following Milo. They are trekking up one of Milo’s dried up creeks until they find a place where the quartz bottom is scored by deep fissures. Milo squats down and takes out a chisel and hammer from his haversack.
“As you know, gold is very heavy,” says Milo in a schoolmasterly voice. “The gold dust sinks to the bottom of the creek and most of it gets hidden away in vertical cracks like this one. Your traditional prospector muddies the water by panning a few tailings from the loose gravel. The poor bugger doesn’t realise that the pay dirt is wedged in the rock bed itself – right under his boots. Just watch.”
Milo sets the blade of the cold chisel in a tiny cleft in one of the cracks, strikes it hard with the hammer and splits away a flat shard. He picks it up and licks the quartz face. The effect on Brandt makes the older man laugh. Brandt looks as though he can hardly believe his eyes. The shard has a sheet of gold leaf stuck to it like wall paper.
“But, of course, you can’t do this unless the creek bed is bone dry,” says Milo. “Most creeks around here are perennial.. This one’s an exception; it’s only got a miserable catchment and a piddly wellspring. To get results you need some wisdom. Come on. I’ll find us a proper creek.”
Following Milo down a steep track to a grove of tree ferns, Brandt hears the lilting swirl of running water and the gleam of a little aqueduct, which diverts the original creek to a retainer dam, leaving a dry rock bed.
“After I’ve fossicked in the crannies, I let the creek flow again and build another dam further upstream. I think you should be doing this on Garigo. Your own place has enough alluvial gold to make you rich, Otto; I swear it.”
*
When Brandt returns to Garigo, he suddenly remembers that he hasn’t checked the mail he brought back from Island Bend in the morning. It’s still tied up as a bundle on the front seat of the ute. But he’s hasn’t totally forgotten his mail; far from it. The prospect of opening a letter, any letter, fills him with such apprehension that he always leaves it to the last moment.
He takes the post to his front veranda. One envelope stands out right away, not only because it is dirty but because it is marked ‘URGENT’ in big capitals and addressed like this:
‘Mr Otto,
German Engineer on the Snowy Mountains Scheme,
New South Wales (I think)’
Brandt takes out his penknife and slits the envelope with care. The folded sheet falling at his feet looks as though it’s been torn from a school exercise book. He stoops down, picks it up and reads:
‘St Edmund’s Mission of the Holy Cross
Wait-a-Minute, New South Wales
Thursday
Dear Jerry,
Do you still remember me? I’m your old swimming friend. I need your help. It is important. Can you come as soon as you can. PLEASE.
Yours sincerely,
Alan Gilbert’
14
The baking highway rolls on in slow motion with Brandt half listening to the soft growl of the big V8 engine, the bursting blisters of melting tarmac under the tyres and the cowboy songs on the crackling radio. The road has no vanishing point, it is lost in the mirages of shimmering heat as the dust devils swirl in the paddocks.
Milo had practically forced him to take his fast American sedan. “Look, Otto,” he’d said, “I’d fly you up there if I could, but it’s mustering time and I can’t get away. However, you should take the Buick; I hardly use it these days – prefer the Rolls. You’d be doing me a favour. A big car is like a big horse, it needs a long run sometimes. Wait-a-Minute is about five hundred miles north of here, somewhere out the back of Walgett, so, just for once, take the bloody Buick and my proper road map, and don’t stop to count the daisies. That little tyke sounds as though he needs you.”
We’ll meet up again you and me. Brandt even recalls the intonation in his voice when he made that promise to Alan. Now is his time to keep it.
The scrubby homesteads blur past, but Brandt’s eyes are fixed on that endless bitumen strewn with flayed off retreads, beer bottles, rabbits crushed so flat that they look like miniature rugs and kangaroos smashed dead by fast steel.
An obese insect with translucent flickering wings smacks the windscreen and splodges it with greasy yellow entrails, which make the wipers squeak. Brandt yawns and turns the radio volume knob up high just to keep himself awake. Patti Page’s voice echoes from the twin speakers, and ‘Tennessee Waltz’ fills the car and spills through the open window, its lament borne by the hot wind across the dry plains. That is until Brandt shuts the radio off because the lyrics bring back thoughts of Michaela Haas and her dancing Dane – and, much more powerfully, Magdalena.
He is becoming drowsy, so he shouldn’t be driving at all. What wouldn’t he now give for the Pervitin that Himmler issued to all units of the S
S. One tablet was enough to keep you awake for twelve hours and it made you feel so euphoric you could conquer the world.
His speed is mesmeric. When he glances at the milometer, he is shocked to see he’s doing eighty-five miles an hour on a cracked-up highway. Gingerly, he eases his foot off the accelerator.
Seventy-five… seventy… sixty-five… sixty… fifty… and now a town’s coming up, Coonamble, only five miles off, and its speed limit will be thirty miles an hour. By the time he reaches the outskirts, he’s down to forty-five. The car appears to be moving so slowly that he feels he might as well get out and walk. Forty… thirty-five… thirty.
In minutes, the weary Brandt is back on the open highway and it’s already night. He yawns, but, as he starts nodding off, the rear of a truck looms up in front of him like a pillar of darkness. Adrenaline floods his brain, the brakes are squealing and Brandt curses the driver for not having a tail light. He overtakes the truck and accelerates to race clear of its high beam because the bastard hasn’t dipped.
Now he is wide awake, his mind has free rein and he feels the hairs at the back of his neck rise with dread because he has convinced himself that there is someone behind him in the back seat. He’s so sure it’s the fox woman that he glances in the rear-view mirror – he sees nothing, but then she wouldn’t have a reflection anyway. He drops his speed back to seventy-five miles an hour, yet he is still tempted to turn his head to look – only tempted, thank God. He pulls himself together and drives on, tightly clenching the steering wheel and watching the road signs with relief as they tell him the distance to Walgett is now less than forty miles.
Brandt stays the night at the Exchange Hotel and leaves next morning at seven o’clock. From the map, he sees he has to take a rough dirt road to the west. Here, the land looks even drier with tumbleweeds snared along the fences and thin dust hanging like brown smoke over the plains.
One thing is for sure: he needs to keep a grip on himself – what with nearly hitting that lorry last night and the mental tomfoolery about the ghost in the back seat. Damn it, he was trained as an officer of the Reich, so he has to do better than this if he is to be of any use to Alan.
He rattles across a timber-beam bridge spanning a dry river bed, but, as he reaches the other side, he runs over a sleeping snake. In the rear-view mirror, he can see it is still alive, writhing and thrashing, its spine broken and its black mouth open like a panting dog.
“Can’t leave it like that,” says Brandt aloud, “I’ll get a stone.” The snake is about four feet long, smoky black with a deep-red belly. Keeping his distance, Brandt hurls a chunk of quartz the size of a brick at its head and it’s all over. He grabs the end of the tail and drags the snake into the scrub.
In the boot is his spare water supply and he splashes some on his right hand, not only because he’d handled the dead snake, but because he’d scorched his palm on the sun-heated quartz.
*
Hours later, he comes to a rusting metal sign and, though the flaking paint is hard to read, he can make out it says this:
‘St Edmund’s Mission of the Holy Cross’
The high iron gates are hinged onto a pair of ostentatious red stone pillars, beyond which there are no continuing walls, just endless barbed wire marking off hundreds of acres of drought-cursed paddocks without a single tree. The drive is only discernible from the paddocks because it is fenced on either side by two strands of cattle wire threaded through a line of steel posts. Every few hundred yards Brandt has to alight and step nimbly over a cattle grid to open a gate with a sign beside it painted in black on a hammered-out kerosene tin:
‘Shut the Gate’
After he has dutifully closed the fourth gate, Brandt sees the first signs of life. On the flat tray of a Bedford truck, two boys of about fourteen years old are mixing lime and sand with spades and laundry poles. Two more are doling out the wet cement to other boys on the ground, who are queuing up with empty buckets. Others are dragging a cart loaded with small boulders towards a narrow wooden cage about five feet high. A large man with a white shirt and a wide felt hat sits smoking in the shade of the truck. He gives an indifferent wave as Brandt drives past.
Further along the road, more youths are hauling stones towards a line of buckets, shovels and battered drums of water. After he drives past them, Brandt sees two older youths trudging along the road by themselves. As Brandt approaches through the dust they both thumb a lift.
“Thanks, Brother,” says one of the boys as he jumps in the front seat.
“Thanks, Brother,” says a voice from the back.
Brandt is relieved when they both wind down their windows. The reek of unwashed clothes and stale sweat is overpowering.
“A smashing car, Brother,” says the youth in front. Brandt supposes that post-war Buick Eight Supers must be a rare sight at Wait-a-Minute.
“I’m not a brother,” says Brandt. “Call me Otto. What are you blokes building back there?”
“Stations of the Cross,” says the voice from the back. “We’re not usually on that job, but we volunteered this morning to get out of Mass. But we’ve also gotta get back for refectory duty.”
Brandt stops at the next barrier, and the boy in the front leaps out to open and shut the gate.
“So, building the Stations of the Cross gets you out of Mass,” says Brandt as they drive on.
“Yeah, the brothers think it’s a good enough reason, but we’re normally on scaffolding at the Mission House.”
“Scaffolding, up high? What, young blokes like you?”
“Yeah, we’re building the big extension.”
Brandt knows now why the knees and toes of the boy in front are burnt and torn. Lime cement. It reminds him of the hands of Soviet slave labourers in the Ukraine. “Do you know a boy called Alan Gilbert?” he asks them.
“Gilbert? Yeah, the little bloke with glasses. Didn’t know he was called Alan, though. We only use surnames here. Are you his uncle or summat?”
“No, I’m a friend. I’ve just driven up to see him.”
“Do they know you’re coming?”
“No, should they?”
The youth sounds hesitant. “Gilbert’s upset the brothers, so he’s off work. He’s in isolation, so he should be glad to get a visitor. Thanks for the lift, sir, much appreciated.”
Brandt lets them out of the car by the refectory door and drives around towards the main entrance.
Though hedged in scaffolding, St Edmund’s is impressive. Standing in this featureless waste, it looks like a grand Victorian hotel except for the Celtic cross presiding over its high-pitched iron roof. Set apart from the main buildings, Brandt notices two lofty ‘windmills’ pumping artesian water into round iron tanks.
He parks in front of a three-storey brick façade with blue, red and green stained-glass windows. As he glances through a wide arch, he sees a well- kept quadrangle surrounding a statue of St Edmund the Martyr reading a marble prayer book. The statue is set in a rose garden sprayed by a rotating sprinkler.
Brandt leaves the car and enters the quadrangle, where he hears dull, regular thuds and sees two older youths with mattocks, stripped to their waists, hoeing the weeds around a clump of tired geraniums. They both straighten up to stare at the stranger wearing a jacket and tie, and highly shined brogues.
“Where are all the other boys?” asks Brandt.
“At Mass, Brother – I mean sir.”
“Why aren’t you there?”
“We forgot to go to Confession.”
“Deliberately?”
Both boys look at each other and then notice the barest suggestion of a smile on Brandt’s face. “Yes, sir.”
“Mmm.” Brandt is relieved when he remembers that Alan was the only boy from the Syrenia sent to St. Edmund’s Mission. B To be greeted by all his former swimming pupils doesn’t bear thinking about..
He
enters the building, inhaling the sulphureted aroma of boiling cabbage. It reminds him of Treblinka. All the camps had reeked of boiling cabbage, but it was worse at Treblinka.
The monk behind a reception desk marking a pile of grubby exercise books with a red pencil stands up as Brandt approaches. “I am Brother Kostka. Can I help you?” he asks.
“I wish to see Alan Gilbert, please.”
“Are you a relative?”
“I am a friend of the family and have just driven five hundred miles to see him.”
Brother Kostka shuffles some papers about on the desk. His finger nails are filthy, and Brandt can’t help noticing that the front of his habit is specked with dried food. Sensing Brandt’s stare, he closes his hands, and, as he looks up, Brandt sees that the monk’s face is pocked with small skin cancers.
“Gilbert is in isolation because he says he’s not a Catholic and therefore he shouldn’t have to attend Confession. I know that all of us are infected with Original Sin, but you have to understand that Gilbert is infected more than most. He is an exceptionally difficult boy. In fact, Father Walsh himself has taken an especial interest him – he takes him aside on many occasions to give him instruction in the faith. We do our best; we are trying.”
Brandt forces a smile. “I’m sure you are, Brother Kostka. It is fortuitous that I am here at the right moment to deal with him myself; I know him only too well. I assure you, brother, you will have no further trouble from Alan Gilbert. Take me to the boy now or bring him here to me.”
“I need to get permission from—”
“My time is valuable, Brother. Please oblige me.”
“He’s in the library. We can—”
“I’ll find it.”
“The key’s in the door. It’s locked from the outside.”
The library is set in a small wing on the ground floor. Only the word ‘Library’ painted in white on the door indicates that it is anything more than a storage room. Brandt unlocks the door and peers into the semi-darkness.
Orphaned Leaves Page 14
