by Alex Focus
Chapter 12
Sydney - Sunday: September 26
We needed a weekday for the plan to work. So, on Sunday we just relaxed. Anyway, we needed a bit of R&R before going against Robyn. We had to outsmart her, and that was not going to be easy. Worse still, we would have to bluff - like going against two aces when you are holding seven/deuce, the worst hand in Texas Hold'em.
We went to have breakfast, which over a few hours morphed into a liquid lunch at the Coogee Bay Hotel. This pub has a great beer-garden facing Coogee Beach: the beer, the sun, the view, the bikinis ? Could there be anything more relaxing?
The name 'Coogee' comes from the local Aboriginal word, Koojah, which means "smelly place". No doubt, this is a reference to the smell of decaying kelp, which washed seasonally up onto the beach. These days, it is removed before it starts to smell and converted to liquid fertilizer for plants. The beach is a beautiful, little cove, full of sunning bodies that ignore the damaging sun's rays, as Aussies have done for two hundred years.
Coogee Beach used to sport an old Aquarium, which opened in 1887 and closed a hundred years later: The Coogee Palace Aquarium. It became famous for featuring the shark-arm murder case. In 1935, a captured tiger shark was placed into the aquarium. Within a week of its captivity, the hapless shark became ill and vomited a human arm. It did this in full view of a small crowd, consisting of family groups out for stroll.
Some people get all the excitement! The kids would have loved it. The arm was identified by a tattoo and fingerprints as formerly belonging to James Smith a boxer and small time criminal. Smith had been missing for over two weeks. It was also found that the arm had not been bitten off by the innocent shark, but had been cut off with a sharp knife. This led to the murder investigation, known as the shark-arm murder case, and a subsequent arrest. The shark? It did not even get a medal.
Perhaps just as interesting was the apparition dubbed as "Our lady of the fence Post" or just simply, if not a lot more irreverently, as "Rail Mary" .In 2003, it was noticed that one of the fence rails north of Coogee Beach, when viewed from a particular angle and distance, resembled a veiled woman. This was interpreted by some as being the image of the Virgin Mary. Others were not of the same opinion: the section of fence that created the image was destroyed by vandals within a few days, and that was that. The vandals? They did not receive a medal either; perhaps their reward is coming a little later. Amen!
We spent a couple of hours in the afternoon snorkelling off the rocks and confirmed the widely held view that most of the coastline off Sydney has been largely fished out. I did manage to see a couple of small Cuttle fish, which are very inquisitive and are fun to play with. As a general rule, tentacled molluscs, like the Cuttle fish, the squid and the octopus are a lot smarter than they should be when the ratio of their body to brain size is calculated. They also have very short lives of a year or two. Maybe all that thinking burns them out. It's something to think about next time you are enjoying a nice plate of crumbed calamari or barbequed octopus.
Later on in the day, we did end up at Mum and Dad's for dinner. First, we made sure to stop at one of Leichardt's best patisseries to buy a range of Italian cakes. My parents and bros love them, but they seldom get to eat them as they live a fair way out: before any of us were born, Mum and Dad bought a three bedroom fibro home on a five acre lot in a suburb of Sydney called Dural.
Dural is located approximately thirty five kilometres northwest of the CBD. For many years, the area supplied much of Sydney's veggies. The original inhabitants of the Dural area were the Darug people (these guys sure got around). The name Dural was derived from a Darug word "Dooral Dooral", which means 'a smoking tree'. A word believed to have been used to describe the actions of the early European settlers: burning up the countryside in the process of running Darug people out of the area and clearing it for farming.
My dad was and is the local vet for a community of mostly market gardeners and horse studs. In the 1990's Dural was discovered by the rich and famous. As a result, my parent's five acres increased in value from about $70,000 to over $600,000 in just over a year. This unplanned-for increase in value allowed them to demolish their small three bedder, in which they had struggled to raise seven boys, and build a much larger and stately country home, complete with an attached Veterinary hospital. Three of my six brothers worked with my dad in the practice, one was certified accountant somewhere in Parramatta, another was a local GP and Pip, the oldest, was a physicist/lecturer at Sydney Uni.
I guess I was my parent's disappointment by not using my degree in law and criminology and by just becoming a cop, then a detective and then just a PI. Every family needs a black sheep, and I guess I was it. But I did end up publishing my PhD thesis as a book. It was about crime scene investigations. I called the book "Crime Scene Investigation", which was pretty creative of me. My having a book published on criminology and having a PhD was the reason that Steve started calling me, in his half-sarcastic manner, 'Master'. Unfortunately, it stuck.
It was Pip who opened the door for us; a worried look was painted on his face.
"Have you found Maria?" He asked as soon as he saw us.
"Not yet, bro?but we are working on it. Don't worry, there was nothing else you could have done," I reassured him.
"Hey, Pip," Steve said, extending his hand.
"Steve! It's great to see you, mate. You need to come over more often, man. Mum really misses you. You know that she thinks of you as one of us," Pip said smiling broadly to Steve and ignoring the extended hand gave him a hearty hug. See? Some men do hug, but you have to be Italian to get away with it.
When we walked into the kitchen, we were greeted by screams of delight from Mum and properly hugged and kissed and told that we both looked undernourished.
The other males of the family were soon outside practicing? their soccer skills, what else?It must be the one Italian gene that completely bi-passed me, but is doubly dominant in the rest of the boys including dad. It jumped over me and somehow landed on Steve. He was just as mad as the rest of them about that game. My Dad often wandered, in a semi-joking way, if they had picked up the wrong baby at the hospital. Unfortunately, for his theory, you only had look at us two side by side: we were like two brothers; the rest of the boys looked more like Mum's side of the family.
Dudring a lull in the game, Dad came over for a chat. I gave Dad a hug, and he asked me about Maria. From a very early age, I have kept nothing from my Dad, and not once have I had reason to regret it. I could always talk to him, he was a good listener, and he never judged and never criticized. He always had a helping suggestion or two. It was largely through his help and understanding that I had been able to snap out of my loss of Sonia. It was his understanding now that enabled him to know how I really felt about Maria.
He listened to the story and what we had done and what we proposed to do, nodding and looking at me with his kind brown eyes. When I finished, he nodded a final time and said, "Louie, you know that me and the boys are behind you 100%, if you need our help you just need to call," he smiled in his own special way. Then added with a twinkle in his eyes, "but don't tell your mother, she drives me crazy with her worrying about you,"
"No worries, Pop?mum is the word," I answered him smiling back.
"Always the little jokes, my Louie," he said, sort of proudly.
Then it was dinnertime: antipasto, homemade gnocchi in ragout sauce and fresh parmesan from Italy, veal cooked in Marsala, mashed potatoes veggies galore, homemade cassata ice cream and short blacks for everyone.
I would have left shortly after the meal, but there was a big soccer game from Italy being broadcast on Foxtel, so while the soccer fanatics watched the game, I helped Mum clean up and then we had along chat, mostly about Maria, whom she had liked almost more than I did. After the soccer game, there was the obligatory game of cards. Once upon a time, we always played the Italian 'Scopa". Now everyone in the universe plays Texas Hold' em, and my family has succumbed to it as w
ell.
As usual, Steve won everyone's money. Those laser eyes of his can promote and detect a 'tell' in almost any player. I often try to drag him to the casino, but he refuses to go. He feels that it would give him an unfair advantage. Man, he so straight sometimes it scares me!
It was a late night, and we hankered down in my old room to sleep and get an early start in the morning.
Chapter 13
