by Martin Roth
Chapter Fourteen
“You’ll like this place,” said Rohan. “Chose it just for you.”
The Mandheling coffee bar occupied part of a converted warehouse in an alleyway behind The Age office, at the bottom of the city.
Right inside the entrance at least twenty varieties of coffee bean were artfully arranged in wicker baskets on top of upturned wooden barrels. White cards bore the name of each bean in a wavy calligraphy hand – Nicaraguan Maragogype, Sumatran Mandheling, Brazilian Cerrado, New Guinean Peaberry, and numerous others I had never heard of. Until I came to Melbourne, I thought coffee was just coffee.
Along one wall were giant silver canisters of teas from around the globe. On the other side were casks of a dozen varieties of nuts, and at the back, next to a shiny black espresso machine, were shelves of gourmet chocolates.
It seemed a shame that Rohan and I were the only customers.
We sat at a small glass-topped table painted with black and white squares, like a chess board.
“Look.” Rohan pointed to a hand-pointed sign on the side wall:
Support the people of East Timor
Please try our organic coffee from East Timor
I thought of Nicolau, a young Timorese guy so handsome he passed as Italian, who had found work as a barista at a trendy South Yarra café. He once told me how little of the money that customers paid for their coffee actually went back to the coffee farmers.
“How much is a coffee here?” I asked Rohan.
“About $2.50.”
“You know how much of that goes to the coffee growers of East Timor? Probably a couple of cents.”
Rohan shrugged his shoulders. “Adds up. A lot of coffee gets drunk here. Right by a newspaper office, you know.”
He called out an order for two cappuccinos. “Okay?” he checked with me.
“Sure. I love a coffee-flavored hot milkshake.”
“So tell me. How’d it go with Matt? Friendly, right?”
“Like a puppy.”
“But helpful?”
“No.”
“Me neither. Still, we keep trying. We keep trying. You told me you’d met someone else.”
I told him about my visit the previous day with Papa Guzman.
Rohan pulled a pen from his jacket pocket and tapped it on the table. “He suspects something could be going on, but he doesn’t know what it might be. So what’s new? We’re not exactly making progress here.”
A tall, balding waiter with a goatee beard and a T-shirt saying “24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case – coincidence?” brought our coffees. I scooped up a spoonful of frothy milk and powdered chocolate and sucked at it.
In East Timor, we shoved ground coffee into a chipped mug and poured boiling water over it. But Australians paid three dollars or more for a trained barista to pulverize the beans in a five-hundred-dollar grinder and then extract the coffee in a two-thousand-dollar machine and then blend it with frothy milk. Good heavens, how could Papa Guzman and the pastor not be surprised if I was going soft?
I told Rohan all about Melissa, and my conversation with the pastor.
“And your pastor thinks she knows more than she’s letting on?”
“Maybe.”
“Mate, last time we met we were complaining that all we had were too many probablies. Now we’re down to maybes. We’re heading backwards at a rate of knots.” He tapped his pen on the table again. “Any chance of tying down the less-than-grieving widow Melissa and forcing the truth from her? No need for electric shock treatment. Some basic toenail extraction should suffice.”
“Personally, I doubt that she’s got much more to tell. I think the pastor’s point is that she engages in fantasies. She can’t always distinguish truth from fiction. We have to weigh up carefully anything she tells us.”
“Doesn’t seem she’s telling us much, anyway. So where’s our next port of call?”
“I’m still trying to contact more of the Prophets. But most don’t want to see me.”
“Most don’t have anything to say. I’ve established that.”
“And I’m meeting someone named Tom Traherne. Boss of the Prophets. Tomorrow at his office.”
“Tom Traherne. Old British army chappie. He wouldn’t see me at all. Told me what he thought of the press, and where he’d stick his bayonet if any journo came near. Anything more?”
I shook my head, and then downed my coffee.
“So that’s it. A probably futile meeting with the boss of the Prophets, and a widow who might or might not know more than she is, or possibly isn’t, telling.”
“And all the time so many hints that something big is going on.”
“I’d say your Papa comrade is our best bet. Johnny, if I were you I’d be getting onto him smartly and saying we want to tag along when he’s visiting your Timorese compatriots.”
He stood, peering into my coffee cup to ensure it was empty. “Let’s head back to the office, so you can have a squint at our clippings library.”
* * *
