‘One or two. Nothing serious, though. A war’s not a time for getting serious. What about you?’
‘No boyfriends.’
Rebecca smiled. It was the first time her mysterious DC had cracked a joke.
‘But I did have a fiancée, for a bit.’
‘She didn’t Dear John you?’
‘First letter I opened when I got back to Australia. I was expecting to see her on the dock but she’d just left a letter for me with her mother.’
‘That’s cold.’
‘I thought so. She’d up and married some Yank army sergeant and was long gone. Bloke was a mapmaker by day and played saxophone by night at the Chevron Club on St Kilda Road. She’s living in a place called Palo Alto, outside of San Francisco, apparently.’
‘Sorry to hear that. War is a bastard on everybody.’
‘That’s the truth. A real bastard.’ Berlin sipped his whisky. Over the top of his glass he saw Rebecca was watching him.
‘Better eat your chicken before it gets cold, Charlie.’
Berlin was surprised when he looked down at his untouched dinner plate. How long had it been since food hadn’t been his number one preoccupation? And why was he looking at Rebecca’s silky blouse and wondering exactly how many of those buttons she would have to undo to get his mind off his dessert?
Rebecca watched him as he tucked into the chicken. The man opposite her was in real pain, and it was from more than just a broken relationship. He was damaged and he was trouble and nothing would ever be easy with a man like that.
After she’d made the print of the motorcycle gang in the Albury newspaper’s darkroom, she’d also made a print of the shot she’d taken of him in the railway yards pay office. As the image of his face appeared under the red light, in the swirling developer solution, she told herself she should run a mile the next time she saw him, but for better or worse she knew she wouldn’t.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Dessert was a steamed pudding with strawberry jam, and Berlin had just finished his when Sergeant Whitmore and Private Champion came in for their nightly visit.
Cec Champion was slumped in a chair at the side of the dining room with an empty beer glass in his left hand. He studied Whitmore for a long time and his jaw worked rhythmically, as if he was giving something a good chewing over.
Rebecca was watching him.
‘You might want to check your watch, DC Berlin,’ she said.
‘What?’
She indicated Champion with a nod of her head. ‘It must be a quarter to eight on the knocker because Cec Champion over there is about to blow his stack. Apparently it’s a regular occurrence when he’s had too much to drink.’
Berlin turned around at the sound of a chair being pushed back. Champion was on his feet, swaying slightly. The beer glass was at his side, with the dregs running out onto the leg of his grimy, coal-dusted overalls. He was breathing heavily, still making the chewing motion with his mouth, and his eyes were fixed on the two soldiers at the bar.
‘Whitmore, you cunt, you are a fucking dirty low fucking Jap-lover and you should be bloody ashamed of yourself.’
The words were slurred and Cec drew himself up to a semi-erect position, bracing himself on the table with his right hand. Whitmore, leaning on the bar, kept his back to the room. Kenny Champion turned around to face his father. ‘C’mon, Dad. Give it a rest, will ya.’
Cec Champion kept his eyes fixed on the back of Whitmore’s head. ‘You shut your hole, boy. The Japs cut your brother’s head off and you stand there drinking with a bloody Jap-lover. You should be ashamed of yourself, Kenny, you useless little shit.’
Whitmore turned and put a restraining hand on Kenny’s shoulder as he started towards his father. The boy looked back at him and Whitmore shook his head.
‘Let him get it out, son.’
‘Bastard goes off to Japan after the war to give those murdering yellow slanty-eyed devils what for and then he turns all lovey-dovey and gets himself a slant-eyed girlfriend. My boy is dead in a hole in the stinking jungle and Sergeant fucking Whitmore is eating rice and shacking up with his killers.’
Berlin got up from his chair, but before he could reach Champion, the man had thrown his empty beer glass towards the soldier. It was a drunk’s ineffectual throw, left-handed, and Whitmore leaned casually out of the path of the missile, which shattered on the front of the bar. Champion was off-balance from the throw, and Berlin caught him as he started to fall.
‘You might want to think about calling it a night, mate,’ he said quietly, still holding the other man up.
Champion stared at Berlin in confusion. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘I’m just a bloke saying you should go home and sleep it off.’
Champion shook himself free of Berlin’s grasp and straightened up.
‘I’ll go when I’m bloody good and ready.’
‘I think you’re ready now, mate.’
Champion fixed his gaze on Berlin, weighing up his options. After a moment he turned, set his sights on the doorway and slowly moved towards it, weaving unsteadily but determinedly through the silent patrons, bumping tables and chairs as he passed. Several of the drinkers lifted their beer glasses safely out of the way as they let him through.
As Berlin walked back to his table he glanced towards the bar. Whitmore gave him a brief nod. He sat back down opposite Rebecca. ‘Jesus wept, I think I’ve had enough excitement for one night.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
Berlin looked at her and decided to ignore the comment. ‘And he’s like that regularly?’
She nodded. ‘Gets a skinful and mouths off. Can’t say I blame him, it’s not like it’s something you’d get over.’
‘He’s not the only person in the world to lose someone they loved in the war.’
‘You must have known some people who got killed – are you over them?’
Berlin looked at her until she looked away.
‘Sorry,’ she said quietly.
There was a pot of tea on the table and Berlin poured two cups. ‘That Cec Champion’s usual performance? Going off at Whitmore, I mean.’
‘Mostly, but he also thinks the army is now full of poofters, and the railways are run by idiots and the local cops are a bunch of clowns.’ She paused and looked at him. ‘He was mouthing off earlier in the week about what fools Corrigan and the railway paymaster were, planning to sneak the payroll in a day early.’
Berlin stopped stirring sugar into his tea. He could see from the way Rebecca was looking at him she was waiting for a reaction.
‘That’s interesting.’
‘He probably overheard them planning it. Corrigan seems to conduct a lot of police business in the pub. And being the local drunk tends to make you a bit invisible to people.’
Berlin sipped his tea.
‘He was telling anyone who’d listen that it put everyone working in the loco yard at risk, even the train crews. All that cash sitting there for a whole extra day with no one looking after it would be a real temptation.’
‘Turns out he was right, eh? Funny that. Who was in the bar at the time, do you remember?’
Rebecca glanced around. ‘Pretty much the usual crowd. Maybe a couple more. I wasn’t paying that much attention.’
‘You were paying enough attention to be parked outside the loco yard’s gate Wednesday morning with a camera ready.’
‘Let’s just say I’m not as green as I’m cabbage’y-looking.’
Berlin studied the faces around the dining room. Young Kenny Champion had followed his father out of the room and there were about a dozen drinkers left. When he looked back at Rebecca she was lighting a cigarette. She took a deep drag, blew smoke into the air and stood up.
‘I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll call it a night.‘
‘Alright, sleep tight.’
She looked at him. ‘You know, Charlie, the smart move for you a minute ago might have been to tell me I’m not at all cabbage’y-lo
oking. You sleep tight, too.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
Berlin leaned on the bar next to Whitmore.
‘Buy you a drink, Pete?’
Whitmore shook his head. ‘No thanks, Charlie. I’m off the hard stuff tonight. This is just lemonade. I’m a bit crook in the guts.’
‘Still hurting from your run-in with the stockmen?’
‘Something like that. Anyway, thanks for sorting out the old bloke.’
Berlin shrugged. ‘I didn’t do much. Must be a bit hard on Kenny.’
‘Kenny’s a good kid, it’s just he’s stuck in the middle. He idolised his big brother.’
‘That stuff true, about you having a Japanese girlfriend?’
Whitmore reached into the right pocket of his battledress jacket and pulled out a wallet. He opened it and carefully took out a small, sepia-toned photograph, handing it to Berlin. ‘Her name was Hiroko.’
Whitmore, who looked a lot younger in the photo, towered over a beautiful and delicate dark-haired Japanese girl wearing a kimono with flowing sleeves and a sash round the waist. Whitmore was smiling for the camera as the girl stood demurely in front of him.
‘She had a three-year-old daughter,’ Whitmore said, ‘and a husband who was in the Nipponese navy, in submarines. When she hadn’t heard from him in two years she knew she wasn’t going to. They didn’t take many prisoners out of submarines, especially not the Japanese ones.’
‘She’s very beautiful,’ Berlin said and handed the picture back. ‘Wasn’t fraternising with the … the locals frowned on?’
Whitmore smiled. Berlin had pulled himself up just before saying ‘Japs’. Whitmore really didn’t care if people called them Nips or Japs or slanteyes, he just chose not too, and Berlin had been sharp enough to notice. The bloke might have a bit of a slightly battered mug and a funny look about the eyes every now and again but he obviously had a brain ticking away under the old cranium. Not something you found all that often, in Whitmore’s experience.
‘We might have been part of what was called the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, Charlie, but it was still the bloody army so anything entertaining, educational or just plain fun was frowned upon. Hiroko was a schoolteacher with a kid to feed, living in what was left of her house after the A-bomb went off. It started off as lessons in Japanese for me and developed into … you know.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She was killed about six months after I met her. Drunken Pommy officer in a jeep with no lights skittled her and the kid one night.’
‘Jesus! Did they get the bloke who did it?’
‘They didn’t bother looking. It was just two more dead Orientals to the powers that be, and Hiroshima was already the biggest fucking cemetery you’ve ever seen. What a bloody horror show that place was, I tell you. What sort of bastard sits twenty thousand feet up in the air and drops bombs on people he can’t even see – women and kids?’
‘A bastard like me, I suppose.’
Whitmore glanced at Berlin. ‘Sorry, Charlie, it must be the lemonade talking. I think I might hit the road, I’m feeling a bit ordinary.’
‘Think you got crook from something you ate?’
‘Who knows? Could be a bug from the jungle. Maybe amoebic dysentery, that one’s a real bugger to shake. Gives you the Gillette trots – a bloke feels like he’s shitting razorblades.’
‘Can I ask you a question before you go?’
‘In your capacity as a copper?’
Berlin nodded.
‘Fire away, then.’
‘Ever use a Tommy gun?’
‘A time or two. Bloody good gun for the jungle, but heavy as buggery. Bastard to lug about but when you needed to chop up a bunch of crazy Nipponese rushing your position, screaming Banzai, it did the business.’
‘Weren’t our Owen guns better, because they never jammed?’
‘Don’t kid yourself, Charlie, all machine guns jam at some stage. The Owen did it less than most, but even so they still only fired 9-millimetre ammo. They’d do some damage, but those .45-calibre slugs whizzing out of a Tommy could cut a bloke in half.’
Berlin looked upwards. ‘Suppose I was to fire a Tommy gun up at that ceiling. What do you reckon would happen?’
Whitmore studied the ceiling for a moment and then looked back at Berlin. ‘We speaking theoretically?’
‘Yep.’
‘Full magazine? Hundred-round drum?’
Berlin nodded.
‘On repetition?’
‘What?’
‘Fully automatic. Weapon keeps firing as long as the trigger is down.’
‘On repetition, then.’
‘Okay, we’ve got lath and plaster up there, then the floor beams and the upstairs floorboards. No carpet, just lino, since Vern is a cheap bastard. And then, unless we have a very unlucky guest in the way, we have more lath and plaster on the upstairs ceiling, rafters and after that, a slate roof. Is it raining outside, theoretically?’
‘Let’s say it is.’
‘Then in that case, Charlie, once the dust clears and your ears stop ringing you should probably move your drink a bit to the left.’
‘Because?’
‘Because there’ll be rainwater landing in it, along with some very big chunks of plaster.’
‘A pretty big hole then?’
‘At least big enough to get your head through. That answer your question?’
Berlin nodded.
Whitmore picked his slouch hat up off the bar. ‘Great. Now with my civic duty done I’m hitting the frog and toad.’
An hour later Berlin lay in his bed staring up at the roof, thinking. The ceiling of the Wodonga loco sheds pay office was half the height of the bar downstairs and, according to what Whitmore had said, should have been ripped apart by the bullets from the robbers’ Tommy-gun bursts. But it had just been buckled and scorched. This had to mean they were using blanks – but why? And right now blank ammunition was probably harder to put your hands on than the real stuff.
TWENTY-NINE
The sudden shriek of the train whistle jerked Berlin back to consciousness, and he tried to work out where he was. The shriek was followed by the clang of timber and iron railway-crossing gates slamming shut in front of him. There was a clock up in the two-storey signal box, on the wall behind the big iron wheel that operated the gates. Berlin squinted in the bright sunlight – half-past ten. He had no recollection of exercising, washing and dressing but he must have done all those things then walked from the Diggers Rest to the railway crossing in High Street. He wondered if he’d had any breakfast.
The blackouts were happening less frequently these days. The doctors had been right about that. Now it was mainly the nightmares and flashbacks he had to contend with. Berlin heard a train whistle again. The locomotive was heading back from across the river, thick black smoke pouring from its funnel.
He turned his back on the crossing gates and walked towards the water tower. The streets were lined with cars and trucks and busy with Saturday-morning shoppers. Long lines formed in the butchers’ shops, customers shuffling in and out on the sawdust-covered floors. Sweating, jolly men in blood-smeared, striped aprons swung cleavers down on carcasses spread on massive chopping blocks, or weighed out sausages and mince and fatty chump chops on their scales.
He passed a grocery store with brightly painted tin signs for Kinkara Tea, Lifebuoy and Sunlight soaps, Bovril and Keen’s Mustard nailed neatly to the outside. Hardware stores had brooms and shovels and sacks of feed stacked out on the pavement, and the cake-shop windows displayed iced finger buns, lamingtons and neenish tarts.
People moved quickly, purposefully. At noon the shop doors would be shut tight and by ten past twelve Berlin knew he could fire a shotgun down the street and not hit a soul.
He ordered tea and raisin toast in a café. There was a greengrocer across the street, where men in leather aprons spruiked the quality of their tomatoes and carrots and beans. Berlin watched from his seat in the window
and sipped his tea. When he’d finished a second pot of tea he ordered a sandwich to take with him, still not sure if he’d had breakfast.
On the walk to the police station he passed the Melba Theatre and a mob of boisterous children queuing up for the Saturday matinee. He smiled at the thought of the raucous cheering for the hero, the catcalls and foot stamping that would accompany any love scenes, and the laughter that came with the sound of Jaffas rolling down the wooden aisles. Harried usherettes with torches would battle to keep order, and at interval lines would form to buy Dixie Cups of vanilla ice-cream or sherbet bombs or chocolate frogs from the trays of the teenaged lolly girls standing in front of the screen in their short skirts and white jackets and caps.
He was tempted to join the line, figuring a newsreel, some cartoons and a cowboy serial or two might be the perfect way to spend the afternoon – but that wouldn’t get this case solved and the brass off his back. Roberts had left the Dodge parked outside the police station and inside Constable Hooper had his head down close to a radio, trying to follow a Melbourne football match through a howling gale of static.
Berlin remembered the first football match he had attended. He was about five and still confused as to where his parents had gone and why he and his older brother were now living in Flemington with their grandparents. His grandmother kept the blinds drawn winter and summer and the house had a stale smell that had crept up his nose on the day they arrived and never left.
His gran spent a lot of time crying in her room and Charlie wondered if this was because of something he had done. One Saturday morning in June she had asked him if he would like to go to the football with his granddad and brother and Berlin said yes. He actually had little interest in football, but he was trying to say yes to everything his gran asked in the hope this might somehow stop her crying.
She dressed him in his best shirt and short pants, long socks held up with elastic sewn into garters, and his best boots. His little belted overcoat came down just to his knees and Berlin’s spindly legs were blue with cold within minutes of leaving the house for the long walk to Windy Hill. As they lived in Flemington and his grandfather was a Scot, it was a moral that they would follow Essendon.
The Diggers Rest Hotel Page 11
