St Kilda Blues

by Geoffrey McGeachin

  The hostess pulled out a chair and he sat down. ‘Everyone’s good, Lazlo, but I can’t stay, there’s something big on.’

  ‘Then a big meal is called for, Charlie. Napoleon said an army marches on its stomach and you are a detective sergeant and the police are like an army, yes? And hunger clouds the judgement; a man thinks better with a full belly.’

  Lazlo turned to the girl and waved away the menu she had opened. ‘We start with the bean soup, I think, Maya. Then two of the steaks, the big ones, and tell Victor my guest is a friend.’

  ‘And what if I wasn’t a friend, Lazlo?’

  Lazlo grinned and winked. ‘What can I say? I’m in business, Charlie, and in business the more a guest at my table has to chew the less time he has to argue with me. And cooked rare, I think, is that good for you, Charlie? Victor will do medium but only under protest and to ask him for a steak well done is to wave the red rag at the bull.’

  The hostess closed the menu. ‘And wine?’

  Lazlo shook his head. ‘No alcohol, not for my friend, he is a policeman of some impeccable reputation and is always on duty. We have cider, I think, Charlie, or perhaps ginger beer? No, just water for now, I think, yes.’

  The hostess walked behind the counter by the grill to talk to the chef.

  ‘Some changes around here since I last stopped by, Lazlo, and pretty busy for a Monday night. I’m surprised.’

  Lazlo looked around the restaurant. ‘Business is good. We close for six weeks to make the renovations and already my outlay is recouped. We open seven nights a week because I have to take my dinner somewhere. And many Australians join me, as you can see. The adventurous ones. Steak is a good way to start; you Australians always like steak. When I show people how good steak can be when it’s aged properly and not burned to a crisp then they will trust me to show them other things, things more exotic.’

  A waiter put a basket of bread rolls in the centre of the table and this was followed immediately by two large bowls of soup. To Berlin it looked more like a bean stew, with an almost gravy-like consistency and small chunks of tender meat amongst the beans. He was done before Lazlo was even halfway through his. Lazlo put his spoon down and gestured to a waiter, who removed both soup bowls. He sat back, a contented look on his face.

  ‘So our Rebecca is well, Charlie?’

  Berlin nodded. ‘Fighting fit.’

  ‘And becoming more famous every day. I’m considering hiring her to photograph myself and my businesses.’

  ‘I read you had a number of things on the boil, Laz. I’d have thought running this place would keep you busy enough.’

  ‘The cafe is a hobby and a place to eat without having to make a booking. And now with Victor and my little Maya there, it runs itself. My time in the mountains opened up many entrepreneurial opportunities. Motels, Charlie, that is the growing business.’

  ‘Motels? Aren’t there a lot out there already?’

  ‘Sure, of course, since people have many cars now and they travel more. And where you have travellers, you have customers and you build your motel and wait.’

  ‘Sounds fair enough.’

  ‘Sure, Charlie, but the smart man builds his motel before the customers are there, if he knows they will be coming.’

  ‘I’ll bite, Lazlo. How do you know they’ll be coming?’

  Lazlo smiled. ‘Oil, Charlie, oil. They find it in the Bass Strait off Gippsland, you may have heard – lots of oil, and gas too. Enough oil so soon we can run our cars for just a few cents a week and we shall cook our food and heat our water for free. So of course they will want to get it out, and quickly too.’

  ‘And you want to go back to getting up at dawn and swinging a pick or driving a bulldozer or doing some blasting?’

  ‘You joke with me, Charlie my friend, but in the Snowy I saw a big enterprise happening, the building of dams and tunnels and hydro-electric plants and I learned a lesson.’ He tapped his temple with an index finger. ‘A man can work hard but he can also work smart. Food and shelter, Charlie – we are men who have both been without these things at one time so we know their value more than most. I have already my people buying up properties in Gippsland, motels, hotels, cafes. Soon there will be men arriving who will dig for the oil, men who will work hard and be well paid for their efforts. They will be tired and hungry and dirty from this digging, but with money in their pockets. I will feed them well and give them hot showers and beds with good mattresses and clean sheets.’

  ‘I think they’ll most probably drill, Lazlo. It’s all under water, remember?’

  Lazlo grinned. ‘Then I give them extra towels along with their dinners and their soft pillows. But enough business talk, tell me of Sarah. Have you spoken yet by telephone?’

  ‘Just the once, from Athens airport, but it was a bad line. She missed you at the airport, you know, she said you were invited.’

  Even amongst the dozen volunteers in her group and a crowd of friends and relatives and well-wishers crowding around the group at check-in, Berlin knew Sarah had been keeping an eye out for her Uncle Laz. There were sleeping bags and rucksacks and suitcases all neatly tagged and Berlin fought back images of troopships and stacks of canvas kitbags stencilled with names of young men whose only return home to Australia would be in the form of a telegram that regretted to inform a waiting mother or father or sister or brother.

  ‘I’m not a big one for farewells, Charlie, you know that of me. And I might have made it awkward by once more trying to dissuade her.’

  ‘We couldn’t do that even working together, could we, Laz? And once she talked Rebecca round, that was that.’

  Lazlo reached across the table and put his hand on top of Berlin’s. ‘I worry for her, Charlie, I have concerns.’

  ‘You and me both. I suppose the only good thing is the fighting is over and she’s on the winning side.’

  ‘But Charlie, Israel didn’t win, have you not heard?’

  Berlin stared at his friend. ‘The Israelis crushed the Arabs in just six days, Lazlo, remember? It was in all the papers and on the TV news. I don’t think you could have missed it.’

  ‘Joke with me again if you like, Charlie, but you know what a Pyrrhic victory is, yes? I looked it up. That’s a victory that can actually be in the long run a defeat.’

  Berlin heard the note of real concern in Lazlo’s voice. ‘I’m sorry but I’m not following.’

  ‘I sit in this cafe in June and listen and with my sleeves rolled down no one knows I’m a Jew. For the first few days all I hear is how the poor Jews are suffering, how they are outnumbered and boohoo, it is so sad for them. And then unexpectedly it’s over and the Arabs armies are smashed to bits and their air forces destroyed. Israel is victorious, she has beaten her enemies and expanded her borders and suddenly it all changes. The talk is quickly all about how pushy these damned Jews are, and who do they think they are to be so aggressive? You mark my words, Charlie; in the long run no good will come of any of this.’

  THE DESERT

  Late afternoon

  Timing was important now. It would be safest if it was done just on dusk. Brother Brian had told him trucks usually avoided travelling at night because of the danger of a collision with a big kangaroo in the darkness. Night driving was also dangerous because of the generally poor condition of the roads, which were hard enough to navigate safely in daylight. There was nothing he could do about the flames; they were necessary and should pass quickly enough. As for the smoke, the sunset breezes would dissipate that quickly, blending it into the darkening sky and then hiding it completely in the night-time blackness.

  He waited, sitting in the relative coolness of the lengthening shadow on the eastern side of the car. The dagger was in his right hand. He twisted it around, watching the play of light on the blade and the tip, feeling both comforted by its presence and also excited by its potential. He ran the index finger of his left hand along the flat of the blade, along the blood groove and over the words engraved on the blade: Meine E
hre Heißt Treue.

  A few months earlier he had carefully copied the words onto a scrap of paper and taken them to Brother Frederick. Brother Frederick was German, with a thick accent and thicker arms and a propensity for sudden outbursts of anger. The man was in charge of the blacksmith’s shop with its fiery forge and anvils and heavy hammers, and he cared for the half-dozen draft horses that pulled the farm machinery. These were the only living creatures on the mission that he treated with any kindness, and it was only fear of their keeper that kept the boy from contemplating the possibilities of his dagger and a full-grown horse.

  The boy warily explained to Brother Frederick that he had found the words in a book in the mission library and wondered what they meant. Brother Frederic had run his thick, callused fingers almost reverently over the paper, over the words. He’d whispered, ‘Meine Ehre Heißt Treue,’ then held the scrap of paper gently to his chest, over his heart.

  The boy pressed him. ‘But what does it mean?’

  The response in Brother Frederick’s heavily accented English was a little difficult for the boy to follow.

  ‘It means “My Honour is Loyalty”, child. It’s all about brotherhood and a glorious, wonderful time now gone, a time of great men and an even greater leader.’ Brother Frederick was smiling, which was something the boy had never seen him do.

  ‘You mean like King Arthur?’

  Brother Frederick was suddenly red-faced, angry, screwing up the piece of paper and tossing it onto the floor. He leaned over the boy, screaming, flecks of spittle spraying from his lips and hitting the boy in the face

  ‘King Arthur? King Arthur? You talk to me of King Arthur? King Arthur was a Gott verdammt Britisher. I spit on the British and I piss on the stinking Americans dogs and their masters, the Jews.’

  The boy had turned and fled and he tried to steer well clear of Brother Frederick after that.

  He stood up and stretched. He’d dozed for a good while and now the sky was a darker blue and the shadow of the car reached out almost to the edge of the clearing. Brother Brian’s wristwatch told him it was close to five, close to the moment. A constant buzzing noise from inside the car told him even the approach of night hadn’t slowed the activities of the flies. The boy smiled, knowing they had a surprise coming very soon.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘What can you tell me about the SS, Laz?’

  The question was totally unexpected. Berlin watched Lazlo watching him as he tried to make sense of the sudden change of direction in the conversation.

  ‘Their uniforms were nicely tailored, yes, but for my taste the colour was a little sombre. Total black is hard to carry off, Charlie, unless you carry a gun too. The presence of a gun definitely tends to stifle any sartorial criticisms. And they are not good guests at parties, from what I hear. You want to take all the joy out of a Bar Mitzvah, Charlie, you invite the SS.’

  ‘I’m serious, Laz.’

  ‘I’m serious too. Bad bastards. They enjoyed their work too much.’

  There was a tall wooden pepper grinder on the table and Lazlo picked it up and looked at it for a moment. ‘Some things never change, eh? That was what you said, correct? You get straight to the point.’

  ‘I’m looking for a missing girl, some missing girls and I don’t have a lot of time.’

  ‘These girls, these are the girls you told me of last time we spoke?’

  ‘Some of them. I got taken off that case but now it seems that I’m involved again.’

  ‘So tell me, how is this to do with the SS?’

  ‘It isn’t, it doesn’t – I mean, it hasn’t got anything to do with that investigation, it’s just something that came up. And you’re are the only person I know with . . .with direct experience.’

  Lazlo put the pepper grinder back on the table. ‘Auschwitz was an experience, it must be said. Some people have all the luck, eh, Charlie?’

  ‘Suppose I met someone, Laz, a German, who claimed to have been an anti-aircraft gunner in the war but I thought perhaps he was actually in the SS. Is there any way I could go about confirming it, seeing if I was right?’

  ‘Not easy, I should say. Can you maybe get his shirt off?’

  ‘Whose shirt?’

  ‘Your SS man, who may or may not be.’

  Berlin was struggling to follow the direction of the conversation. ‘Why should I get his shirt off?’

  ‘Because, Charlie my friend, many of the most dedicated members of the SS had a tattoo under the arm.’ Lazlo lifted up his left arm and indicated a spot just under his armpit. ‘Here is where you look.’

  ‘What sort of tattoo? What did it say?’

  ‘Property of Heinrich Himmler. If found, return to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. No reward.’

  ‘Lazlo.’

  ‘Okay. Charlie, you yourself should keep your shirt on. I just find it interesting that the Nazis tattooed just two groups: prisoners in Auschwitz – the Untermenschen, the inferiors – and the SS, the cream of the Aryan race. We Jews got a number, like a commodity, while in the case of the SS it was just a letter – their blood type, you know, for the doctors if they were wounded. A, B, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Wouldn’t all German soldiers have that sort of tattoo?’

  ‘Apparently not, and for them a good thing too. Lots of captured Krauts were made to strip off and if the partisans or some pissed-off GI or Tommy or Ivan spotted a tattoo it was a quick trip behind the nearest barn and . . .’ He drew his index finger quickly across his throat and made a nasty gurgling sound. ‘I tell you a story, Charlie, one I hear up in the Snowy. You hear a lot of stories up there, many funny people working on the Snowy and not a lot to do at nights apart from playing cards and talking.’

  Berlin waited.

  ‘This bloke, a Pole, I think, is coming out on a refugee boat in ’52 or ’53. Pretty crowded with DPs and by no means the Queen Mary, as he tells me. There are two women who stay to their cabin, take their meals there and only go walking at night, always wearing hats, or scarves on their heads. Strange, perhaps, but there was a war not long finished and strange behaviour wasn’t so uncommon.’

  Berlin recalled that a lot of his own behaviour after the war was pretty strange.

  ‘So off Perth one afternoon it gets hot as hell and these two come out on deck around noon. Their cabin is on the sunny side of the ship and must be like an oven and on deck there is a breeze. The wind blows the hat off one of them and another passenger starts screaming and pointing. There is now more screaming in a half-dozen languages and a mob surrounds the two women. They start beating on them, tearing at their clothes. The screaming woman says she recognises this pair as guards from the camp where she was held. SS guards, you understand.’

  ‘I saw some women SS, towards the end of the war. That was something I really found very hard to understand.’

  ‘How so? Trust me on this, Charlie, when a government, any government, starts handing out licences to do evil without consequences and a nice uniform to go with it, there will never be any shortage of takers, male and female both.’

  Berlin remembered poor old Pete Whitmore saying something similar once in the bar of the Diggers Rest Hotel. Give someone a licence to kill and they’ll use it.

  ‘So what happened? With these women, I mean.’

  ‘They strip them down to the waist and there they find it, under the arm of each of them – the tattoo. The mob goes crazy and the crew just manage to stop them tossing the ladies over the side. They have a lot of sharks in the sea around there, I hear, Charlie. Big ones.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘They lock them in their cabin, with a sailor on guard outside. When the ship docks in Adelaide the police come onboard and take the ladies away, but only with the crew holding the passengers back can it be done. After that, who knows what happens to them?’

  ‘So getting these tattoos wasn’t the smartest move, not when you’re on the losing side.’

  Lazlo smiled. ‘But you’re never on the losing side, Charlie,
not at the beginning. Everyone is going to win because everyone has God on their side. Even the Nazis said, Gott mit uns, God is with us. This God is a very strange fellow, I have to say.’

  ‘Okay, but you do lose and now you have a tattoo that gives the game away. What can you do?’

  ‘I’ve heard stories of people trying to burn the tattoo off with a hot iron or using acid or sometimes trying to disguise it to look like a scar from a bullet wound.’

  Berlin wasn’t sure how he could go about getting Gudrun’s father to take his shirt off. In any case, if the Russian flamethrower burn went right down his left side as he suspected, any evidence might be gone.

  ‘Would there be records of SS membership in Germany?’

  ‘You bombed the shit out of Germany, remember? Did I ever say thank you, by the way?’

  ‘Some records might have survived.’

  Lazlo shrugged. ‘That’s very true, and you know how the Germans are with records. In fact, I myself have made several successful inquiries on such matters through contacts I have, but it takes time, you understand. For you, a good place to perhaps start might be the Deutsche Dienststelle in West Berlin.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It is the Wehrmacht Information Office for War Losses and POWs. They still hold extensive records on people who served in the armed forces from ’39 to ’45. You may have some success there but for the SS, this is a more tricky area. When they saw which way the war was going the Shutzstaffel made a priority of destroying everything incriminating.’

  ‘So you think it’s not possible?’

  Lazlo shook his head slowly. ‘Not impossible, Charlie, but very, very difficult.’

  ‘I think I still have to try.’

  ‘Of course, but you need to remember that names can be changed. And in the confusion after the war, many were. People who had nothing to go back to or a past they wanted to avoid found it very easy to create a new identity. If you go to Hungary and search for Lazlo Horvay, journalist, for instance, you will find no records that pre-date 1946, and yet here I am in all my glory.’