Authors: Jonothan Cullinane
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary Fiction
“Then force the Government’s hand how, exactly?” said Solomon.
Walsh looked at him. “You can leave that to me,” he said.
The others paused.
Oh?
These were not men used to leaving things to someone else, especially to a roughneck like Walsh who deliberately threw such coarse locutions as “gonads” and “piss-up” and “bastards” into formal conversation.
“I see. We can leave that to you, can we?” said Solomon. He looked at the others and back at Walsh. “What’s your game, Walsh? It’s common knowledge you were a Red once yourself.”
“I used to wear short pants,” said Walsh. “But I grew out of them, too.”
“Well put,” said Henderson. “Now—”
“One moment please, David,” said Hall, refusing to be intimidated. “But Bruce has a point. Walsh’s position is, to say the least, unorthodox for someone with his background.” He turned to Walsh. “What do you want out of this, sir, if you’ll allow me to speak directly?”
“What’s in it for me, do you mean?” said Walsh. He held up three stubby fingers and began ticking them off. “Firstly,” he said. “Concessions in the area of wages and conditions from you people for my people. Nothing drastic. Just something that looks like progress to the rank and file.”
There were no objections.
“Secondly,” he said. “A guarantee that from now on the organisations you blokes represent will deal only with unions affiliated to the Federation of Labour. None of this Trade Union Congress malarkey.”
No objections there either. The Federation of Labour was responsible and pragmatic. Its leadership, although it engaged in pro forma tub-thumping on occasion, could be relied on to agree that
the interests of the working class were almost invariably in happy and coincidental alignment with the interests of the employing class. The Trade Union Congress, by contrast, was a recent breakaway body of bomb throwers and Reds. Let it burn.
“And thirdly.” Walsh picked up his glass. “A thousand guineas, in cash, delivered to me, details to be worked out with Henderson.”
He swirled the whisky round in his glass and knocked it back with a quick jerk, an epiglottal gulp the only sound in the now deathly silent room.
“Did I hear that correctly?” said Solomon, resting his pipe on the edge of his ashtray.
“A thousand guineas?” said Marsh. “Is that what he said?”
“What’s he mean by cash?” said Hall. “Unmarked notes in non-sequential order, that sort of thing?”
“As though we’re, what, negotiating on behalf of the
Lindbergh baby
?” said Newton.
“In the
Northern Club
?” said Petrie.
“Were you
aware
of this, David?” said Hoar.
Henderson brought his fist smashing down on the table, startling the men into silence.
“You’re
damned right
I was aware of it!” He got to his feet and leaned forward, his hands on the table. “It’s a
fee
for a
service.
Entirely proper too, given what’s at stake. Business and destiny have converged in this room, gentlemen. It’s no place for sissies.”
The boarding house at 3 Chamberlain Street was a large white villa built in 1910. The roots of an old pohutukawa had cracked the concrete base of the iron railing that ran along the road frontage. Children were playing bullrush in the middle of the street. An elderly woman carrying shopping in two string bags got off the Ponsonby tram and began walking stiffly up Richmond Road. There were two other vehicles parked in the street: a red snub-nosed panel van with “G. Heap Esq. Butcher. Meat, Poultry, & Fresh Game” painted on the side, and a brown Baby Austin.
Molloy sat in his car watching the house. The sky was a royal blue and full of stars. The light above the outline of the Waitakeres was a faint lemon. It reminded Molloy of North Africa. Three people had arrived at the boarding house and two had left in the hour or so he had been there. None of them was O’Flynn, unless he had aged thirty years or put on a lot of weight. Molloy looked at his watch. He would give it another twenty minutes before declaring.
A match flared in the Austin. The driver’s side window wound down a few inches and a waft of smoke caught the last of the evening light. Molloy waited. No movement other than the occasional glow of the cigarette. He got out of his car and walked quickly down Chamberlain Street, along Rose Road, up Dickens Street, past the shops in Richmond Road, and back down
Chamberlain Street, approaching the Austin from behind, keeping close to an overgrown hedge. He glanced at the number plate as he passed: J328. The occupant was female, her hair in a scarf. He returned to his car and wrote the number down in his notebook.
Molloy drove to Arch Hill and parked outside Sergeant Pat Toomey’s cottage. The policeman’s house was set close to the road in Home Street with the backyard dropping down to the Kingsland gully. Molloy kept a crate of Waitemata in the boot for emergencies. He carried it round to the back porch and knocked. Toomey opened the door. He was wearing his uniform trousers, braces unclipped, white shirt open at the throat. Molloy could see the remains of tea on the kitchen table. Chops and mashed potatoes and string beans. Toomey’s wife, Brigid, was doing the dishes.
“I think you met my wife at the Christmas do,” said Toomey.
“That’s right,” said Molloy, raising his hat. “How are you, Mrs Toomey?”
“Well, thank you,” she said, into the sink, her voice a soft brogue.
Molloy and Brigid had danced together at a social at the Irish Hall in Great North Road a few weeks earlier. Toomey had spent most of the evening drinking whisky with his cobbers from the Hibernians, police and firemen mostly, while their bored wives partnered each other or sat around the walls, talking and waiting to go home. Brigid loved the reels. After a frenetic round of “The Walls of Limerick” and “The High Cauled Cap”, and finally, “Mairi’s Wedding”, she said she was boiling and needed to go outside for some fresh air.
They had leaned against his car in the darkness and looked at the moon. Molloy offered her a flask. She took a sip and passed it back to him.
Their hips brushed.
A look passed between them of such intensity that two strong men could have carried a double bed across it.
Toomey came out of the hall and called for her from the steps.
“I have to go,” she said.
“All right,” said Molloy. Toomey was on the gaming squad and knew the bookies and the hard men who did their dirty work. He could be a nasty bastard.
The policeman turned on the porch light and closed the kitchen door. He knocked his pipe on a verandah post and pushed the ashes onto the path with his slippered feet. “What can I do for you, Johnny?” he said.
Molloy indicated the crate of beer. “I dropped something round for the Social Club,” he said.
“Very good,” said Toomey.
“Could you have a look and see if there’s anything on a wharfie called Frank O’Flynn? Irishman. He lives in a boarding house in Grey Lynn. 3 Chamberlain Street,” said Molloy. “Don’t know much else about him.”
Toomey took a notebook from his back pocket. “Any other names?” he asked.
“O’Phelan, possibly,” said Molloy. He spelt it out. “Same Christian name.”
“Anything in particular you’re looking for?” asked Toomey.
“Nothing in particular,” said Molloy.
“I’ll let you know,” said Toomey.
“One other thing,” said Molloy. “I’ve got a number plate for a 1937 Baby Austin. J328. Can you look that up for me?”
Molloy called in to Furst’s hotel, wrote a note for him, asked the night man to put it in the American’s pigeon-hole, and drove home.
Molloy lived in a whare on the back section of a boarding house in Williamson Avenue. It was one of two ex-army huts. There was a single bed and a chest of drawers. He had a radio on a bookshelf, and an electric ring on the windowsill for cooking. There was a calendar on the wall and a mirror above the basin. He got his water from a tap in the washhouse and used the long drop behind the tool shed. The bath was inside the house. He had the use of the garage, and grew beans and tomatoes along the fence in the summer.
He had been there for three years and thought of moving from time to time, but the set-up was convenient. Mrs Philpott, the landlady, ran a tight ship, and the other tenants were pleasant and kept largely to themselves. There were the McGill sisters, two spinsters who shared what would have been the living room when the boarding house was a private home. They worked in the haberdashery department at Farmers, catching the tram to work each day. They were inseparable. The Misses McGill’s familial resemblance was slight. Mrs Philpott did sometimes wonder about the exact nature of their relationship but was unable to get to grips with the physics. There was Jim, Mrs Philpott’s nephew, a post office cadet. There was a shy Dutchman named Albert who lived in the other whare. He worked as a mechanic at Alder & Co in Ponsonby Road and was saving his money to go share-milking. There was
always a copy of the
Weekly News,
turned to the farming pages, on the shelf in the long drop. He listened to the Dutch language broadcast of the BBC World Service on a shortwave radio at night. On payday he would buy a flagon and drink it in his room, occasionally asking Molloy to join him, an invitation Molloy did his best to avoid. The Dutchman’s English, barely intelligible when he was sober, turned to mush by the time the flagon was at the halfway point, but that didn’t stop him from talking. He would get worked up, reliving the war, reliving
something,
sitting on the edge of his bed, making a point with a stiff accusing finger, beer slopping, hands gesturing, tears running down his face, occasionally holding an imaginary tommy gun and firing into — what? Germans? Javanese?
Untermenschen
? There was Brian, a compositor at the
Herald
who had been a conchie and spent the war years in a prison camp in National Park. There was Mrs Baker, a widow whose husband was killed in Trieste in the last week of the war. She taught the piano to disinterested local children after school and cried in her room at night. There was Miss Perkins, a senior typist at Russell McVeagh & Co, a law firm in town.
Molloy filled a pot with water from the outside tap and lit the gas ring. He removed his shirt and singlet and gave himself a sponge bath. Old army habit. There was a gentle knock on the door. He opened it. Miss Perkins. She stepped out of her slippers and took off her dressing gown. She got into his bed, pulling the blankets up to her neck. Molloy turned out the light and took off his trousers and shoes in the dark, hung his greys on the back of a chair, and got in next to her. It was a narrow bed, but they made do.
Miss Perkins had grown up on a sheep station in the foothills of the Ruahines — 12,000 acres and a twenty-stand woolshed built in the days of blade shearing. There were six full-time
shepherds, one of them a young Englishman named Cavendish, good with horses, a remittance man, third in line to something. Miss Perkins found herself pregnant, she couldn’t remember the circumstances exactly — sixteen, home from Nga Tawa for the May school holidays, a party, a Western swing band from Ohakune, games, gin, the devilish Cavendish charm, morning sickness. Miss Perkins’ family sent her to Auckland to stay with an aunt in Parnell. The last time she saw her father was from the platform of the railway station in Taihape. She was standing with her mother, both staring straight ahead, a suitcase at her feet, in her purse five ten-pound notes and a letter of introduction to the matron of St Helen’s written by the family doctor. Her father waited in the car. She wanted him to get out and come over and put his arms around her, to tell her that things would be all right and not to be scared. But he didn’t. He drowned two months later, fishing in the Rangitikei River. It was impossible for her to come home for the funeral in her condition. Still, years later, she would think she saw a flash of him in the distance, standing on the footpath looking at her, or driving past in a car.
Cavendish moved to Mt Peregrine, a South Island property owned by the Borthwick family, who were big in the frozen mutton trade and had Home connections. In 1940 he returned to England, took up a commission with the Tank Regiment, and was killed in a training accident.
Miss Perkins had the baby, a boy, whom the nurses let her hold briefly. She signed something but the line where the name of the adoptive parents was supposed to go was blank. A South Island couple, was all she knew. It was the best for everyone.
She became something of a remittee herself, her mother thinking it would be best for her to remain in Auckland under the
circumstances, sending five pounds a week for board and lodgings and paying for her enrolment in a clerical college. She had a room in Mrs Philpott’s boarding house, with good light and a bay window. She had brothers, Molloy knew that. He’d met one of them once, a big, gruff, sunburnt bloke named Richard, who ran the farm. He’d come to Auckland for the Easter Show and called round to see Miss Perkins and take her out to tea. He called her Gee. He’d been a navigator in 75 Squadron and had a burn mark up one side of his face and a chewed ear.
From time to time she would knock on Molloy’s door and, without saying anything, get into his bed. She never stayed the night.
In April 1940, the body of the late Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage arrived at Auckland Railway Station after a twenty-eight hour journey from Wellington. The casket, covered with feathered cloaks and the New Zealand ensign which had flown from the cruiser HMS
Achilles
during the Battle of the River Plate, was loaded onto a gun carriage. The cortège made its slow way up Queen Street, along Karangahape Road, across Grafton Bridge, down past the Captain Cook Brewery where Savage had worked as a cellarman when he first arrived in New Zealand in 1907, up Broadway and along the length of Remuera Road to the site of a never-completed artillery battery at Bastion Point overlooking the Waitemata. The procession was watched in silence by 200,000 people, half of the city’s population at the time. In the harbour hundreds of pleasure craft rode at anchor, sails furled and pennants at half mast.