An Angel In Australia

by Tom Keneally

  He felt cold. The sky was low and moist and a wind honed itself on the corner where they waited. Trumble showed a hardy indifference. He was underdressed for the night, Darragh thought, and lacked a sweater.

  He sensed the question in Darragh’s look. ‘If I put on too many jumpers I get chills. Better to defy the bloody cold.’ He seemed proud of the concept of defiance, and of how it had brought him to terms with his disease.

  Long before the man himself went to the trouble of peering about in the near dark for Darragh, Darragh could see the square and somehow confident body of Fratelli approaching up Macleay Street from the direction of the naval base. He was dressed as he had described himself in the confessional: a normal citizen in a dark blue suit. Darragh decided to advance on him, and Fratelli’s attention was jolted. Seeing Trumble waiting on the corner, he paused, lightly balanced, ready to flee.

  ‘That’s not a cop?’ he asked.

  ‘If only you knew, Sergeant,’ uttered Darragh with an immediate ferocious laugh. ‘He’s a Red revolutionary. He wants to do away with you and me, all right. But not yet. Not tonight.’

  ‘He’s a big sonofabitch.’

  ‘He’s had TB. 4F. He’ll sit across the room. He thinks we’re talking about Aspillon. But he’ll get me home safely. I thought you’d be in uniform.’

  ‘Sometimes I work out of uniform. Sometimes I’ve got to. But I’m carrying my MP identity. I can get us into this club.’ He reached into his pocket for it. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  Just short of some sort of primal grimace, Darragh said, ‘There’s only one reason I came.’

  ‘Father, contempt won’t do it for you,’ Fratelli remarked with some sadness, his vast eyes encompassing the breadth and depth of all Darragh’s compassion and ill will. ‘Introduce me to your friend.’

  So it was done, with appropriate mutual distrust between Trumble and Fratelli. ‘Okay then,’ said Fratelli, and he led them away from Macleay Street, down among browned-out flats, past a warden on the prowl for chinks of light, and into a small, darkened door which stood by steps leading down towards the waters of Elizabeth Bay.

  Fratelli pushed the street door open, and stood back to let Trumble and Darragh enter a small, crowded alcove. In here, an American sailor—what they called shore patrol—stood smartly accoutred, and an old man in a white coat sat by a table on which a visitors’ book waited.

  ‘My guests,’ said Fratelli to the old man in his authoritative, sunny manner, and signed himself in with his serial number and stood back to let Darragh and Trumble sign. Darragh, after considering the matter, signed himself as Father Francis Darragh, spelling ‘Father’ out in full so that there was no ambiguity. If he paid for it later in social odium or the disapproval of monsignors, so be it. It guaranteed he had left trace of himself. Fratelli led them through into a bar area, surprisingly cavernous. There were men and women in here, only perhaps half of them in uniform. An occasional Australian soldier or officer sat with his American hosts. Darragh turned to Trumble, who still carried Darragh’s little grip, and said, for Fratelli’s sake, ‘I just have to have a word with the sergeant.’

  Indeed, Fratelli seemed strangely sanguine about the coming interview. ‘Why don’t you sit at the bar, mate?’ he said, with a well-meaning attempt at an Australian accent. ‘Tell the barman to put your beer on my tab. And any scotch too.’

  Lugging the grip, Trumble went happily to the bar, which in the style of Sydney bars had no barstools, and leaned on the counter, observing Fratelli and Darragh make their way to a table against the far wall. As he settled, Fratelli began looking at the girls in sweaters and bright frocks who circulated around the room.

  ‘These are good girls, not whores, Father,’ Fratelli assured Darragh, pointing to the girls. ‘They volunteer to work here. To sit and talk with us. We’re under orders not to ask them for anything more.’

  Darragh shook his head and gazed full at Fratelli, from whose murderous lips these irrelevant assurances came. They were interrupted by a frizzle-haired waitress from whom Fratelli ordered scotch and a beer chaser. Darragh said he’d have a pony, the smallest available measure of beer under New South Wales licensing laws.

  ‘Come on, Frank,’ said Fratelli, discreet about Darragh’s priesthood, ‘join me in the same. We can ease up after that. This is what working men drink in America.’

  Darragh was persuaded, thinking that he could make his own pace in the drinking. But as well as that, as much as he needed to keep clear, he did desire something Lethean, something to blunt the import of the evening, something to encourage him in the silliness of this scene with blithe Fratelli, who must be rendered down to grave decisions.

  Fratelli asserted his authority again by telling the waitress to send a hit of whisky Trumble’s way as well—‘That long drink of water at the bar.’

  The waitress went.

  ‘Sorry I was late,’ said Fratelli at once, as Darragh himself opened his mouth. ‘A big Saturday night in Sydney last night—still processing some of the fights. Air-raid warnings this morning. Did you know there were two Jap reconnaissance planes over us, right over here, this morning?’

  ‘My friend told me.’

  ‘Yeah. Round about the time you were getting up to say Mass.’

  Darragh contested this glib truth. ‘I didn’t hear any sirens.’

  ‘No. It was more an alert for us. Look, let’s wait till she brings the drinks before we talk.’

  ‘You mustn’t settle yourself,’ said Darragh. ‘We’re not here to drink.’

  ‘Am I beneath talking and drinking with?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘So you say,’ Fratelli muttered with a small assuring nod, which carried its own ration of slyness. ‘I do want to do the right thing, in case grace fails me.’

  ‘In case you fail grace,’ Darragh insisted.

  ‘Easy to say, Father,’ Fratelli complained. ‘But I want to be good.’ He held up both hands. ‘I want to have a serious conversation that looks like normal talk.’

  Darragh closed his eyes and put a hand to his forehead.

  The drinks came quickly, and Fratelli paid for them with a ten-shilling note, telling the woman to keep the change. This, in a non-tipping nation, would give her a margin of shillings to take home. But she showed no special gratitude. She gave an appearance of boredom at the egregious generosity of Americans.

  As the woman left, Fratelli was aware of Darragh’s eyes on him.

  ‘I’m not going to be spending much where I’m going, Father. Not if I take your advice. But, before I take the path, why do you think God made me like this?’

  ‘He might want a special sacrifice in your case.’

  Fratelli shook his head and looked at his whisky. ‘Special sacrifice,’ he murmured, picked up the whisky, and downed it. Darragh merely moistened the bow of his own lips with his.

  ‘Look,’ said Fratelli reasonably, ‘if I was some hick in the infantry, you might tell me I can redeem myself in prison, or at the end of a rope. I might believe you, particularly as you seem to think that prisons are places where you expiate things. But that’s not the way things are. Prison is a licensed hell. It doesn’t elevate any soul. Not a guard. Not a prisoner. Yet you command me to walk out of here and martyr myself.’ He was drinking beer reflectively.

  Darragh took a small mouthful of the scotch, and as it juddered its way down the unsettled column of his body, he thought again how he could like some of this more regularly. If only there were not cautionary tales of the weaknesses for it which Australians got from Irish ancestors, from mad, alcoholic uncles, of whom Mr Darragh had told fantastic tales in Darragh’s childhood.

  ‘You know you have to do it, just the same,’ said Darragh, feeling clear and certain. ‘If I’d killed someone, I’d know I had to do it. The prison system wouldn’t be a question. My guilt would be the question.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s a theory with you. With me, it’s my nature.’ Fratelli drank a good draught of his beer, and s
ighing, told Darragh, ‘You know I’m not like this with women. I’m not argumentative. I’m not a wise-ass. I’m soft. I agree. I raise points inch by inch, ounce by ounce. I’m a noble guy with women.’

  ‘You already told me that,’ Darragh murmured under his breath.

  ‘Other guys are brutes. I know. You should hear the way they talk about women. In the camp. Their mouths are a running sewer. Their brains are savage. Normal men. Men who marry. You’d want me to be like them?’

  Darragh finished his small glass of whisky, in an effort to relieve in himself the fear that he was achieving nothing.

  ‘Good work,’ said Fratelli. ‘Join me in another of those.’ And while Darragh’s neck prickled with the heat of the liquor, Fratelli raised ten shillings to the waitress and made the sort of confident hand gestures Darragh had only seen in films, in nightclubs where men in tails and women in ball gowns waited with cigarettes and cocktails for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to appear and dance. The word ‘Copacabana’ ran through Darragh’s blood like a brilliant, alien viper.

  More drinks arrived. Fratelli waved sagely to Trumble, and Trumble solemnly waved back. He had not turned his eyes or body from them at all, and still took his role of watchdog studiously.

  Darragh considered the liquor before him: a shot glass of whisky, the tall drink of beer—double a pony, a schooner. His second schooner. In this mad place he had an appetite for it. But he must avoid it. For would he still be a wise counsellor when they were in him? In fact, was he a wise counsellor anyhow?

  ‘Look,’ said Darragh, ‘this is not a social occasion. It’s insane. This is not a party. Think for a second of Kate Heggarty. Those hands of yours …’ Fratelli was persuaded to look at his massive hands for a while, and the experience made him reach for his second whisky and down it at a gulp.

  ‘For most of the time,’ Fratelli said, ‘I was the best guy she ever met.’

  ‘It’s either to the police with me,’ Darragh urged. ‘Or we go to your own commanding officer.’

  ‘They won’t be happy, the brass. They like to pretend we’re all nice boys.’

  ‘You must come with me.’

  Again Fratelli considered his hands. ‘I guess I will.’ But he reached out and drank a third of his schooner of beer. ‘I guess I will,’ he repeated, belching softly. ‘Why don’t you call me Gene?’ he asked.

  ‘Anthony said he called you John. A misunderstanding of vowels, perhaps. He heard your name as John, the orphan you made.’

  ‘If I’d asked you here and you hadn’t had my confession, you would have called me Gene. You would have said “Gene, mate”. You would have said “cobber”.’

  ‘God help us, Gene,’ said Darragh. ‘Stop delaying.’

  Fratelli murmured, ‘I see that your big guy over there is keeping pace with me on the liquor.’

  And again there were the hand signals to the barman, the calling of the wire-headed waitress, the furnishing of another ten-bob note. Looking with lowered eyes at Darragh’s bewilderment, Fratelli asked, ‘We don’t have to go just now, do we?’

  ‘Yes. I can’t physically make you, but I would if I could. We should go now.’

  ‘But I’ll be a damn long time without the taste of John Barleycorn,’ Fratelli muttered. ‘Give me a moment.’ He toasted Darragh. The weight of unreason and fear in the room caused Darragh to join him in a sip. Outside, an air-raid siren sounded, and the barman checked some curtained windows giving onto the laneway.

  ‘I have to make a phone call,’ said Fratelli, beginning to stand with a sigh. Darragh grabbed his left wrist as he rose.

  ‘And then you’ll come back and tell me that you are needed for duty, won’t you?’

  ‘I just want to check what’s happening, Father. I won’t leave. For God’s sake, let’s not have any fiasco with the big guy.’

  And he walked away, decisively, and disappeared through the curtain to the entrance lobby. Left sitting, Darragh looked at the bar. Trumble was leaning there, glass in hand but still vigilant.

  As Fratelli vanished from the room, a sailor entered, carrying phone messages to this or that officer, each of whom rose, apologised to their guests, and left—not without telling everyone to drink up and relax. In Fratelli’s absence, Trumble came over and asked if everything was okay. Darragh reassured him.

  ‘That’s good whisky they’re serving,’ said Trumble, admiringly. ‘Johnnie Walker Black.’

  ‘He can afford it,’ said Darragh.

  Trumble nodded, winked and returned to his place at the bar.

  ‘Sweet Mother of Christ, help me,’ Darragh prayed, and sipped more whisky. Could he and Trumble make a citizen’s arrest? Of course not. It would make Trumble privy to what only Darragh and Fratelli were permitted to know.

  Fratelli came hustling back into the bar, his shoulders forward, a brave bull in appearance.

  ‘Frank, sorry, we’ve got to go,’ he said with new gravity. The presence of the sailor-courier added weight to his command. ‘There’s an emergency. We’re better outside.’

  He could see the doubt in Darragh’s eyes. ‘Bring your pal, too.’ He gestured Trumble over from the bar. ‘The Japanese are in the Harbour, gentlemen,’ Fratelli told Darragh and Trumble. ‘We are about to see the enemy face to face.’

  The American knew, Darragh could see, how to confuse a person—to appeal at the one time to a man’s sense of peril and to his core curiosity. Trumble was already moving, and Darragh, a little distanced from himself by unaccustomed liquor, moved too. Out past the old man in the white coat, the tender of the visitors’ book, who seemed unfussed about this moment of haste and history, and then beyond the door, into a sudden wall of dark.

  HERE IN THE night, Darragh could tell at once, Fratelli was the prince. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Down the steps.’ They descended among dim white mansions and harbourside flats towards a pool of light arising from the naval graving yard down on the shore, by which sat a huge battleship, moored.

  ‘This is nothing to do with us,’ said Darragh. ‘Come with me now!’

  ‘The Chicago,’ Fratelli explained. And then, at his word, and as if he were conjuring events, the dockyard lights switched off, and so did all the lights aboard the battleship, and Darragh and Trumble were blind pilgrims again. As Darragh stumbled, feeling but not seeing the radiant heat of his fellow-drinkers, a set of dull but profound explosions from up the harbour became the chief sensory clue in their approach to the water. Suddenly an MP was shining a torch on them. A massive noise of firing broke out nearby, and in its pauses voices could be heard yelling in some heightened way, officers seeking information, the man on whatever trigger it was, something big, an artillery piece, at least an anti-aircraft gun, answering at the shout. The military policeman was shining the cautious ray of his torch over Fratelli’s identification.

  ‘These two gentlemen are from the New South Wales police,’ Fratelli glibly told him. It was obvious to Darragh that Fratelli had the power to walk through any gate tonight. Fratelli seemed superior even to whatever was proceeding on the harbour, transcending both the friend and the enemy.

  ‘Jap subs,’ said the military policeman in an earnest, flat accent Darragh identified with the American South. ‘Indefinite number. Right in the bay here. We got orders to look out for paratroopers. You seen any, Sergeant?’

  ‘We’ve been drinking,’ said Fratelli, a wink in his voice.

  The MP’s voice trembled. ‘Wish I’d been.’

  ‘You’ll be fine, son,’ Fratelli told him, a comforting captain in the darkness.

  Trumble was grinning by torchlight, tickled to be cast as a cop, an oppressor of the workers, but keeping an eye on Darragh.

  As they walked down a cement path, in spite of the overcast night Darragh could see palm fronds around him, promising themselves future botanical summers, admirably permanent in their expectations. In a corner between the parkland and the Elizabeth Bay jetty, an American anti-aircraft crew had their gun bent towards the water. Ther
e was heat from the gun platform, its breech, its long barrel. The entire crew of five men and an officer seemed to be talking at once, profaning under the weight of uncertainty. Their panic reached out to Darragh as he thought: These aren’t warriors. Their uniforms are a masquerade. They asked each other if they’d seen something or other. Jesus Christ, they said, they weren’t sure. They’d seen the hull, black as sin. ‘I saw,’ said one gunner, glimmering with certainty. ‘We got it, Lieutenant.’

  ‘No, you fucking didn’t,’ his young officer told him. And the debate went on. They could not leave it alone. It itched in them. As their dialogue eased a little, Fratelli introduced himself and said he’d been sent down in case of need for crowd control and other issues arising. He repeated, without naming names, his easy lie about Trumble and Darragh. The commander of the gun crew, the boy lieutenant, welcomed them. He seemed pleased to have them there. They could be his Dutch uncles, you could see him thinking. ‘I’d say,’ he announced respectfully, ‘we should keep an eye for paratroopers. There’s a crew at the end of the jetty with a Browning automatic. They’re watching for that too.’

  The harbour itself had become still now. No more booming. Yet shouts could be heard from the direction of the Chicago and the other ships moored by Garden Island, but every cry Darragh heard seemed more confused and informed by panic. Fratelli asked Darragh, confidentially, ‘Can you see any paratroopers, Frank?’ It was a jovial enquiry, as if Fratelli had some secret knowledge which made the possibility of paratroopers laughable. Frank peered up into the dark, low, inscrutable cloud. No threat that he could see was blossoming up there. Ten minutes passed quickly as Darragh and Trumble remained vigilant. But there were no sudden paratroopers nor any particular noise. The lieutenant told them that the bastards in the submarine he’d seen earlier and fired upon must have cleared out to the other side of the harbour, Neutral Bay maybe. No one knew how many subs there might be in the deep anchorages tonight. ‘Hey, Lieutenant,’ yelled the gun-trainer from his little seat, his hands still on the wheels which elevated and lowered the barrel. ‘If we got that sonofabitch, we saved the Chicago.’