St Kilda Blues (8 page)

Brother Brian's table was nearer to the front. Beyond it another half-dozen tables were occupied by men in the same brown robes, and a raised stage at the far end of the room held two smaller tables with tablecloths and chairs rather than benches. The brothers at the tables up on the stage were older and they were laughing amongst themselves. The boy saw wine bottles on the table and there were glasses and plates – real glasses and plates rather than the chipped enamel mugs and rough wooden bowls that sat in front of each occupant of the lower tables.

There were two empty spaces at Brother Brian's table. Brother Brian took one and the boy took the space next to him. The other boys at the table were all about the same age. The greetings were sombre, mostly nods from the others as he was introduced. They all seemed very tired, and though they must have washed their hands at the sinks outside the dining room, there was dirt in most of the creases of their knuckles and under their fingernails. Several boys were fidgeting and rubbing their bottoms against the hard wood of the benches.

Brother Brian smiled at him and patted his hand. ‘You will be at my table here for meals from now on and I feel we are going to be the best of pals. At least, I hope so.'

There was a murmur as the doors to the kitchen opened and a voice from the top table ordered silence. A line of dark-skinned girls came out of the kitchen, each with a galvanised iron bucket in either hand. They were wearing short shift dresses and their feet were bare. A girl stopped at the end of each table and one of the older boys helped lift the buckets up and place them in front of the brother who was supervising. Steam was coming from one of the buckets on his table and water lapped over the edge of the other when it was bumped. He followed the example of the other boys, passing his mug to be filled with water by Brother Brian and then passed his wooden bowl to have some sort of stew ladled into it.

When the bowl was returned to him he reached for his spoon but put it down again when his eye caught the shaking head of the boy opposite him. It was some hours since they had last stopped on the road for sandwiches and he was hungry. So were those around him, judging from the stomachs he could hear rumbling and the mouths that hung open with tongues flicking or tracing their way around flaky, dried lips. All eyes at the table were on the stew in the bowls – chunks of grey meat in a runny gravy that already seemed to be congealing despite the heat of the dining room.

At the head table up on the stage several somewhat older Aboriginal girls had brought in covered bowls that were placed on the table, and then a larger platter holding a roasted leg of lamb. The boy knew what a leg of lamb looked like and how it tasted. When the farmer's paratrooper son had come home on leave after Arnhem the two men had slaughtered a sheep, breaking the rationing regulations. They'd kept the leg for a homecoming dinner and sold the rest of the carcass on the black market. The sheep was hung upside down from a tree branch and there had been a lot of blood, the boy remembered, smiling. The sheep didn't seem to enjoy dying more than any other animal.

One of the brothers was called upon to say grace and Brother Brian showed the boy how to fold his hands and lower his head. At the end of the prayer everyone in the dining room said ‘amen' and the boy followed their example.

‘You may begin.'

The order came from the head table and the room was suddenly alive with the sound of spoons scraping against the bottom of wooden bowls, slurping and strange growling noises. The boy began to eat. The meat had a strange taste and the gravy was cloying and thick on his tongue.

‘I don't suppose you've ever eaten kangaroo before, have you?' Brother Brian said.

The boy shook his head and took a drink of water from his mug. The water had a strange taste and smelled like the cordial Bother Brian had given him on the trip out to the mission. When he put his water down and went back to his stew he saw that the others at the table had already finished theirs and were staring at what remained in his bowl. He finished it off quickly. If they eat fast you eat fast. Don't do anything they don't do, don't do anything that makes you stand out, don't be different, that's the rule to live by.

When his bowl was empty he glanced up at the head table. One of the brothers was spooning out the last of the contents of the now uncovered bowls and he could see potatoes and peas and cauliflower. There was a large loaf of crusty brown bread at one end the table and the brother nearest to it was cutting off thick slices and coating them with butter. He looked around the dining room. Every boy at every table had his eyes fixed on the bowls at the head table, on the bread and on the lamb. The lamb had been reduced to just a bone by this stage. So that was what you found if you cut a sheep's leg open. There must be something similar inside a human leg, he realised.

The Buddha's Belly was located in a two-storey stone building at the western end of Little La Trobe Street. They left the Triumph in a no-standing zone opposite the entrance. Berlin locked the missing persons files in the boot, along with the bundle of music papers. The two men crossed the narrow roadway, working their way between trucks loaded with bolts of fabric or racks of finished garments on hangers. The building had heavy double wooden doors, which Berlin guessed were left over from the days when the place was either a factory or warehouse.

The front of the bluestone building was painted with garishly coloured images, like some of those he'd seen in the music papers. He knew the style was called psychedelic and had something to do with the drug LSD. The centrepiece illustration was a 20-foot-high image of a seated, rotund, smiling Asian bloke, who had to be the Buddha. The entrance doorway was in the middle of his belly.

‘Kids call it the smiling Chink,' Roberts said. ‘The picture is probably offensive to Buddhists but it's not as though they're going to do anything about it.'

‘Why not?'

Roberts looked at Berlin and smiled. ‘Because they're non-violent, Charlie.'

The tone in his voice suggested that Berlin was supposed to know this. He didn't, but he was pleased to hear it anyway. If Melbourne could up its percentage of Buddhists amongst the town's hard men it would be a good thing all round.

The warehouse doors were locked tight but after a couple of minutes of vigorous hammering by Roberts, they heard the rasping sound of bolts being slid open. There was an outrush of a brownish haze when the door opened and Berlin's nose picked up the scent of incense, patchouli, marijuana and stale toasted cheese. It was dark inside the building and the girl in the doorway squinted and blinked at the two men standing outside in the daylight.

‘We're closed, and you're both too bloody old for it anyway.'

She looked to be about sixteen, with dirty scraggly hair and a face devoid of make-up. Her lips were bruised and puffy and she had a reddish rash on her cheeks and neck. Full breasts and hard nipples poked out against the tie-dyed cotton blouse she was wearing and a pair of unlaced and too-big tan buckskin boots covered her feet. There was nothing between the bottom of her shirt and the sagging top of the boots. She might have been wearing underpants but Berlin had his doubts.

‘Interrupted something, have we, love?'

The girl blinked hard at Roberts but didn't answer. Berlin judged from her bruised and puffy lips and slightly dilated pupils that Bob was probably right on the money.

Roberts pushed the door open with his right hand. ‘We're police, we want to talk to whoever runs this little . . . establishment. We don't have time to piss about, love, so can you whistle him up for us?'

The girl had blinked harder at the word ‘police' then she stepped back as Berlin and Roberts brushed past.

‘Hey Jim, it's the wallopers. They want a word.'

Berlin's eyes were still becoming accustomed to the darkness, though he very clearly heard someone say ‘shit' from somewhere above him. There were scuffling noises and then the squeak of rusted window hinges. A narrow shaft of light from upstairs lit up one wall, illuminating a staircase with a wooden banister. From somewhere outside the building they heard the sound of tin and glass hitting the pavement.

‘Wouldn't be able to find a light switch for us, would you, sweetheart?' Roberts asked.

The girl swung the heavy entrance door closed and then felt her away along one wall. There was a click and a single fluorescent tube flickered to life on the ceiling. The place was bigger than Berlin had imagined, though the black-painted walls gave it a closed-in, gloomy feeling. The ceiling was only nine or ten feet high and the nylon parachutes that covered it had most likely come from the army disposals store round on Russell Street. The parachutes must have been white at some point, but cigarette smoke and burning incense had stained the fabric the colour of weak tea.

Berlin suddenly wondered what had become of his parachute after they had cut him down from the pine tree after the raid on Kiel. He had been too busy getting beaten senseless by angry German soldiers to pay much attention. Captured airmen were
Terrorfliegers
, Terror Flyers, to the relentlessly bombed German people and if a beating was all you got you were lucky. Not a lot of Buddhists in Germany at that point in time, he supposed. Did they have discotheques in Berlin? With military surplus parachutes stapled to the ceilings? Of course, it was West Berlin now, a city occupied by British, French and American soldiers, the victors, and ringed by landmines and a wall of concrete and barbed wire. The other part of the city, East Berlin, was occupied by the Russians who had built that wall to stop East Germans from defecting, and he was damn sure there would be no discotheques behind it.

There was a raised stage at the far end of the room but it was only a foot or so higher than the dance floor. Battered, black-painted speaker boxes were set up on each side of the stage and there were spotlights mounted on steel poles with bits of coloured plastic taped over the front of some. Apart from the front door, the only obvious exits were doors at the rear with a sign indicating the way to the toilets, and the flight of wooden stairs running up one wall. Berlin walked towards the stairs but the girl got there before him.

‘They're coming up, Jim.'

Berlin heard more scuffling. ‘Keep your shirt on, Jim, we're not from the drug squad.' He glanced at Roberts. ‘Have a bit of a poke around down here first, will you? I'll get started up there.'

He turned back to the girl. ‘What do you say to leading the way, so we can all have a nice chat together.'

Berlin followed the girl up the steep staircase. He was right about her having no underpants on.

Upstairs appeared to be a cross between a cafe and a club. Walls painted brown this time and a bar arrangement with a big urn for hot water, a fridge and shelves full of mismatched mugs and plates. There were tables and chairs spread about the place as well as a number of battered sofas. Cheap tapestries showing scenes of pyramids and camels and palm trees took up the spaces not occupied by framed photographs and engravings. The engravings featured fairies and knights and maidens, King Arthur and Guinevere and exotic Indian dancers. The photographs, mostly shot with very wide-angle lenses, showed long-haired, naked hippy women and children posing in forests or by cliffs and waterfalls. He recognised some of the photographs as coming from an American counter-culture magazine called
Evergreen Review
. Rebecca got copies of the magazine on a regular basis from overseas, though the government sometimes cracked down on importation when the articles were deemed too politically controversial or the illustrations pushed things a bit far in terms of explicit nudity. In those cases Berlin got copies for Rebecca through the vice squad, who always had plenty to share.

A man with a beard and a mop of black curly hair was sitting on one of the couches. He had obviously dressed himself quickly, mismatching the buttons and buttonholes on his shirt so it didn't line up at the collar. He was wearing jeans but was barefoot. A pair of lime green underpants were draped over one arm of a couch along with a pink bra and a leather miniskirt. A tie-dyed cloth shoulder bag was on the floor near the couch. The room had the same overpowering stink of incense and patchouli and marijuana, though up here the stale toasted cheese smell was stronger. So was the smell of recent sex.

Berlin walked over to the open window. The window frame and glass were both painted over with brown, as were all the other windows in the place. Berlin leaned out. Roberts was down in the cobblestone-paved laneway. That downstairs stage area was somewhere underneath him, Berlin judged and he could see the top edge of an open door. Probably how the bands got their instruments into the building.

He gave a whistle. Roberts looked up. ‘Someone up there has been a very bad boy, Charlie.'

He held up his hands. Berlin could see a tobacco tin, rolling papers, matches and the fag-end of a joint held in a roach clip. He turned back into the room. The girl had put on her skirt and underpants. She was barefoot and struggling back into her bra under the tie-dyed shirt.

‘What's your name?'

The girl finished wriggling inside the shirt. ‘It's Dee, you know, like A, B, C, D.'

‘Yeah, D, like the bra cup size too,' the man on the couch added.

Berlin glanced over at him. He was wearing the buckskin boots now. It was always good to know first up you were dealing with a smart-arse, it made things easier. Berlin put his age at about thirty. He kept looking towards the couch, holding the man's gaze. There were several fresh-looking love bites on his neck, though Berlin was certain love had nothing to do with it.

‘So tell me, Dee, how old are you?' He asked the question without taking his eyes off the other man's face. The man's eyes flicked away from Berlin and towards the girl standing behind him.

‘I'm eighteen.'

She sounded like a kid answering a question on a school test. Berlin turned back towards her and smiled. ‘That's a nice age. Gemini, I reckon, June '49? Am I right?'

The girl shook her head. ‘No, it's Scorpio, November second, 1953.'

‘Jesus, fuck, Dee!'

Berlin and the girl both looked towards the couch. The man had his head in his hands.

‘Sorry, Jim,' the girl said, ‘he confused me.' She turned to Berlin. ‘That wasn't fair, you tricked me.'

It sounded almost sweet, the way she said it, and Berlin felt a little sorry for her. ‘You're right, Dee, but it's my job. Now why don't you pop downstairs and give your details to my friend Detective Roberts. He's got a daughter about your age. I'm pretty sure she's in school today, which is where you should be.'

The girl turned towards the couch. ‘What should I do, Jim?'

Jim looked up and shook his head. ‘Oh, just piss off, you stupid fat cow, who bloody needs you?'

Dee took a sudden step back. She looked like she was about to start crying. Berlin knew words could sometimes do as much damage as a fist, especially when you were young. The man on the couch had just given the girl a good, hard smack without touching her. Berlin really felt sorry for her now.

‘You run downstairs now, Dee, and tell my friend I said he should put you in a taxi after he gets your details. I'm going to have a little chat with Jim. I'm sorry he's got such bad manners.'

The look of shock was gone from the girl's face and now she was just angry. She grabbed her cloth shoulder bag from the floor and ran down the stairs without looking back.