The Story of Danny Dunn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Distribution?’

  Billy grinned. ‘You’re right, it could mean anything. In fact we’re in entertainment machinery and equipment as well as cash registers. Before the war, William “Billy” du Bois Entertainment was the biggest distributor in the south of pinball and slot machines, gaming machinery, roulette wheels and the like, as well as cash registers. I guess you couldn’t go into a Bourbon Street jazz or illicit gaming joint, cathouse or speakeasy during prohibition without seeing at least one machine supplied by William “Billy” du Bois. That’s where it all started. Now the boys in Chicago and New York are beginning to talk about Las Vegas in Nevada. Gambling’s always been legal in Nevada and William “Billy” du Bois has always been there, but it’s been penny-anti, wayside casinos and clip joints. If the mafia – the New York and Chicago mobs – get interested, I guess I’ll need to go speak to them. We can bring in all the I-talian machines they want, of course, but we’d prefer to source them here. Nobody has better knowhow, or rather, used to have better knowhow, than William “Billy” du Bois. It’s a business that goes beyond supply and demand – after-care protection is an important element.’

  It was a long explanation and Helen hadn’t wanted to interrupt, but now she asked, ‘William “Billy” du Bois – is that the actual name of your distribution company?’

  Billy grinned. ‘Sure is, ma’am. My uncle was very well known around these parts, and for a period he was even mayor of N’awlins, but with his name on so much “entertainment” machinery found in places that never should’ve been there in the first place, he was eventually obliged to step down from his civic responsibilities. There’s lots of folk said it was a pity – William “Billy” du Bois had a good vision for this city and he was a great friend of Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana, and between the two of them they got a lot done for poor folk.’

  Billy paused. ‘Enough about me. We’ll visit all the N’awlins sites in the next day or two, if y’all are up to it, but then I have to go to the East Coast on business. You’re welcome to stay here at La Trianon, but, I warn you, my daddy will want to show you everything, and if you need a rest to recover from your operation the plantation would be ideal. Either way y’all stay as long as you like, you hear?’

  And so Helen and Danny stayed at La Fonteine for nearly two months, coming up to New Orleans from time to time, where Helen and Heloise du Bois got on like a house on fire. The plantation was run much as it always had been, the workers regarded almost as family, most of them having adopted the du Bois surname as their own. Many of the coloured folks’ forebears had been on the plantation well before the Louisiana Purchase.

  Marcel was inordinately proud of the fact that the plantation had its own school and clinic, and ten coloured families had children who attended the all-coloured college in St Louis, paid for by the du Bois family. ‘Many folk round these parts don’t hold with the notion that people of colour have the brains to be educated to book learning, but I intend, most assuredly, to prove them wrong,’ he chuckled. ‘They say to me, “Marcel, they’ll take your good name and drag it through the mud,” but I tell them, “I think y’all misconceived what happened, sir. It was people of colour who dragged a horse and plough through the spring mud in the name of du Bois, and planted and harvested the sugarcane that gave my family its good standing in the great state of Louisiana. It is these folk who earned the good life for us white folk, and I am most grateful and rightly proud that they would want to use du Bois as their family name.’ He sucked on his pipe, discovered it had gone out, struck a match and reignited it, then, blowing blue smoke towards the ceiling, said quietly, ‘White folk, they don’t like that much, but I cain’t see how we got much reason for pride. The du Bois family is one of the very few old southern families round these parts that can truthfully say there never was a Negro lynched that they had the personal responsibility for.’

  ‘Lynched?’ Helen said, shocked. ‘You mean the Ku Klux Klan?’

  ‘Hell no, ma’am. The Klan is white trash and reason enough today for all southerners to be rightfully shamed. But in the old days before the war, a troublesome slave was a possession a plantation owner could dispose of any way he damn well liked.’

  ‘It wasn’t any better with our Aborigines and the white squatters in the early days in Australia. They referred to murdering blacks as “duck hunting” and notched the butts of their rifles after a kill,’ Danny said.

  When Danny started to feel better, he and Helen borrowed Billy’s 1939 Chevy two-seater with the dicky seat. It had been on blocks in one of the garages at La Fonteine, and with the help of Jimmy Sugar, the mechanic on the plantation, they got it going sweetly again. It was the car Billy had used while at university and with it they toured the south, calling this their proper honeymoon.

  The three months’ recuperation soon passed and they returned to St Louis and Barnes Hospital, where the great Vilray Blair and a delighted John Glicks removed Danny’s plaster cast and pronounced his nose job excellent, beyond expectations. While Danny was still somewhat discoloured and blotchy, Helen was delighted with the result. ‘Darling, it’s a face that looks well used and not, as before, abused. You were far too handsome as a young lad. Now most men would like to have your face; it has a life that, like a well-told tale, is full of interest. I simply can’t wait for Brenda to see you.’

  Danny, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror at the hotel, could see that if you compared his new face to the old, there was a definite improvement: this one could have belonged to a prize fighter who’d fought half a dozen fights against heavier opponents he should never have taken on. If it wasn’t pretty, at least it could pass in public with perhaps only a second glance.

  It was time to go home.

  Danny began his Law degree, and Helen went looking for a flat that was small enough and cheap enough for them to afford, finding one at the top end of Darling Street almost next door to the Callan Park Mental Hospital. It wasn’t at all bad and the real estate agent confided in her that the rent was low because ‘people don’t want to live close to a loony bin’.

  Helen laughed. ‘I think we’re going to be right at home here. We’ll take it. Is there any key money?’ She had landed a job at the university tutoring in ancient history, and was able to supplement her small salary by taking private students, while Danny worked two afternoons and Saturdays at the pub, where she also occasionally helped out. To Danny’s surprise Helen enjoyed working on the bar at the Hero. ‘It’s social anthropology,’ she’d once explained.

  ‘What? Watching men getting pissed?’ Danny snorted.

  ‘Well, yes, in a way that’s true, but there hasn’t been a period in the evolution of mankind where humans haven’t performed rituals using a mind-altering substance of some sort. For us, going to the pub is a social ritual and alcohol is the substance. I’m sure it wasn’t very different in ancient Egypt,’ she replied.

  Danny’s time at Law School seemed to pass very quickly – he struck up a friendship with another Law student who, though considerably younger and fresh out of Scots College, one of Sydney’s elite private schools, was in his own way also something of a loner. Franz was Jewish, and had left Austria with his parents in 1932 when he was two years old. Once they had arrived in Australia, they almost immediately started one of Sydney’s first genuine delicatessens in Bondi Road – Landsman’s Delicatessen and Continental Smallgoods. They were smart enough not to make it kosher and almost from the day it opened it had prospered, being frequented by the wealthy, sophisticated and more widely travelled customers from nearby Bellevue Hill, Double Bay, Rose Bay and Vaucluse.

  With the advent of the Second World War, they were no longer able to import smallgoods from Europe. This was followed by the blow of Josef, an Austrian Jew, being sent to Hay Internment Camp. Hester, his wife, a capable and enterprising woman, had immediately set to work establishing a smallgoods factory, initially in a rented double garage, as well as
sourcing private outlets. Using the knowhow and skills of other migrants from the Continent, she developed the techniques to make or source from these various families the sausages, cheeses and smallgoods she’d formerly imported.

  After a year in the local primary school Franz had been recommended for Woollahra Opportunity School, a primary school for bright kids, and at the age of thirteen had been given a scholarship to Sydney Boys High, the state school in the Eastern Suburbs that catered for gifted boys.

  However, each year the various private schools in the Eastern Suburbs kept an eye out for a truly bright student whose parents couldn’t afford the fees for a private school. It was their social-conscience scholarship. Scots College in Bellevue Hill offered Franz their scholarship in 1941. His mother had been in a quandary. The selective high school had the better academic reputation and normally this was all that would have counted with Franz’s parents, but with her husband away she’d listened to the advice of one of their wealthy Vaucluse customers, Bryan Penman, himself a fifth-generation Australian Jew, who came from a well-connected family who had several vineyards in the Hunter Valley and a distillery that produced fortified wines. ‘He’s a clever boy,’ he’d advised Mrs Landsman, ‘so it doesn’t much matter where he goes, he’ll do well. But there’s one thing you ought to consider.’ He paused, so as to add weight to his next words. ‘Connections. In this country it’s called “the old-boy network”. You say your boy wants to go into the law? Believe me, Mrs Landsman. I’m a trained lawyer, though I don’t practise. It will come in more than a little useful in his career if he goes to Scots. In fact, I’d venture to say it would be foolish not to avail yourself of this opportunity for your lad to have a private-school education. In this city, and particularly in the law, it is less about what you know and more about who you know.’

  Hester had written to her husband in the Hay camp and he’d replied, It’s good advice, in Austria it was the same. So Franz’s parents had taken Bryan Penman’s advice and enrolled their son at Scots College. While Franz was indistinguishable from any native Australian, with his father in an internment camp he was immediately regarded as a ‘bloody Kraut’, not a good thing to be in the midst of the war, so he copped a fair amount of schoolboy shit from the sons of the privileged minority in the exclusive Eastern-Suburbs private school. He soon became known as a swot and, while he wasn’t exactly a sissy, he was the next best thing – good at chess and debating, and hopeless at sport – and so was rewarded with the double status of being referred to as ‘unco’ (uncoordinated) and nicknamed ‘Snake Mouth’, quickly shortened to Snake because of his so-called poisonous tongue. He could more than match his persecutors in sharp, sometimes cruel quips. Thus, he effortlessly gained the reputation for having a dangerous tongue and for being essentially a loner.

  Franz Landsman completed his final-year exams in 1946 and achieved the third highest pass in the state, by far the best Scots College had ever achieved in the state-wide exam. As his ultimate revenge, his name was transcribed in perpetuity in gold letters on the honours board in the school assembly hall. Franz Landsman had improbably joined the list of the school’s immortals.

  In the tradition of Scots, and to the delight of the headmaster, Franz Landsman elected to study law, although he didn’t meet Danny until partway into his first year, shortly after Danny had instigated what was to become a famous incident among his fellow students.

  Danny had avidly followed news of the War Crimes Tribunal, set up to try the officers and guards who had murdered and tortured his fellow prisoners of war. During one lecture, his Law professor, discussing the universal rule of law, had claimed that the War Crimes Tribunal was an excellent example of international justice finally administered fairly and impartially. Danny could feel himself becoming agitated and tried in vain to control the fury building inside him. Jumping to his feet, he signalled to the lecturer that he wished to speak, then, barely waiting for permission, he called, ‘With the greatest respect, Professor Dodds, that’s simply not true. It seems you can starve prisoners, punish them with indiscriminate beatings, lock them into a small wire cage so that they cannot move in the blazing tropical sun without water for three days, force them to eat salted rice until eventually they die of thirst or sunstroke, deny them fundamental medical treatment so that they die of preventable tropical diseases, and finally, with impunity, work them to death. Provided you don’t actually line them up and shoot them in cold blood, you’ve acted according to the rules of warfare and so go unpunished. My Japanese commandant, Colonel Mori, spent six months in a military prison in Singapore before his case was summarily dismissed. His incarceration in Changi was very different from my own; the food was good and plentiful – in excess of 2000 calories a day, contrasting with ours, a starvation diet of 1000 calories of mouldy rice – he wasn’t required to work and every medical treatment and care was available to him. The War Crimes Tribunal then deemed the six months he’d spent awaiting trial as sufficient punishment for my three and a half years of beatings, brutality and starvation and paid for his ticket back to Japan. I believe in such cases, and they are too numerous to be exceptions, that the law has failed in its moral and legal duty. As usual, the law has been applied in a typically discriminatory manner! There is one rule for officers, and another rule for the rank and file.’

  Until this outburst Danny had kept a low profile on campus – one look at his face was enough to earn him the respect of the younger students – but this single short, eloquent speech brought him instant notoriety. When he sat down, his chest heaving, there was a spattering of applause from the braver students.

  ‘See me afterwards,’ Professor Dodds said tersely, and Danny’s heart sank. He knew what was coming.

  But he was wrong. The professor commended him on his performance. ‘You seem to have all the prerequisites for becoming an excellent barrister, Mr Dunn,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘You should consider the bar.’

  A week after what students called ‘The Great Jap Spat’, Franz Landsman had approached him in the university canteen. ‘Mind if I join you?’ he’d asked.

  ‘No, go ahead.’ Danny pointed to a vacant chair, then stuck out his hand. ‘Danny Dunn.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Franz Landsman.’ He shook Danny’s hand, adding, ‘Congratulations on the other day with Dodds.’

  ‘Oh that,’ Danny laughed. ‘You’d think at my age I would have learned to keep my big mouth shut.’

  ‘My problem precisely,’ Franz replied, ‘though I reckon we could make a bit of a splash as partners in the debating society. What say we give it a go – two Law students with big mouths and a brain or two to spare.’

  Danny liked the young guy immediately; he wasn’t sycophantic like so many of the other students who’d approached him since the confrontation with Dodds. Franz’s approach had been straightforward – he’d come with a mission and put the idea of joining the debating society without any preliminary fawning. Like a kid from Balmain – like Lachlan Brannan, Danny suddenly thought – Franz Landsman appeared to be a cheeky young bugger. But, unlike Lachlan, who, like so many Balmain kids, hadn’t been led to expect much out of life, Franz Landsman had a confident demeanour and assured grin and seemed to have a fair idea of his self-worth. As someone who’d once possessed the same easy confidence in great abundance, it was a quality Danny immediately recognised. And so began a friendship that, unbeknown to either of them at the time, would eventuate in a law partnership that was going to last into their dotage.

  ‘Debating, eh? Never thought of joining,’ Danny said.

  ‘Be good, the Wasp and the Yid – formidable!’

  ‘Wasp?’ It wasn’t an expression he’d heard in Balmain, probably because most people who lived there answered to that description. And the only Jew he knew was Pineapple Joe, who didn’t count because he was, well, just himself.

  ‘Yeah, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,’ Franz explained.

  Danny gr
inned. ‘Oh, then we’re off to a bad start, mate, because my background’s Irish Catholic.’

  ‘Shit, eh? That’s better still. A German Jew and a Tyke, two blokes with hefty chips on their shoulders who are angry at society and can think on their feet – that’s a pretty impressive combination.’

  Danny pointed to his face, which, after the plastic surgery looked almost normal, though, as he sometimes said, it was good panel beating but easy enough to tell where the prang had occurred. ‘If I’d thought on my feet, my physog wouldn’t look like this,’ Danny replied.

  ‘Okay, I’ll do the fancy footwork – the tap dancing – and you supply the emotion – the anger, the vehemence. You were bloody excellent the other day with Dodds and neither of us lacks for brains. I reckon we could debate the arse off the rest of this university.’

  ‘Careful – you haven’t met my wife, Helen.’

  ‘She in the debating society?’

  ‘No, but if I join she might, and she’ll insist on always being on the opposing team.’

  ‘She good, then?’

  ‘Yeah, and then some. She takes no prisoners.’

  ‘She a law student?’

  ‘No, archaeologist. She’s got her masters in ancient history.’

  ‘In other words, a good brain wasted,’ Franz said dismissively.

  ‘Hey, whoa . . . hold on, mate! Life’s not all about making a quid,’ Danny protested.

  ‘It isn’t? Shit, now you tell me!’ Franz quipped.

  Danny grinned. ‘What was it Henry Adams said? Oh yes. “Those who ignore the past are condemned to relive it.”’

  ‘See, you need me, Danny. Henry Adams didn’t say that and the quote is wrong. It was George Santayana who said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”’