Pride's Harvest (15 page)

“He's King out here, Greg. He's told me to phone first for an interview.”

“I hope you didn't tell him what I know you're capable of telling him.” Random was as dry as a salt-caked creek-bed. “Is he involved in the case?”

“I don't know. That's the trouble—I don't know much at all at the moment. It's like trying to catch scraps of paper in the wind—”

“Very literary. Cut out the bull and tell me what you want.”

“I want to stay out here—and keep Russ with me—till I can wrap it up.”

“If you do wrap it up, is it going to make waves?”

“Crumbs, you sound just like the locals. Yeah, I guess it will. Does it matter?”

“Simmer down. It might matter. Our much-admired Police Minister has already been on to the Commissioner, who's been on to an Assistant Commissioner, who's been on to me. The gist of it all is that Mr. Dircks wants to know why you can't be sent to Tibooburra to direct traffic or arrest kangaroos or something.”

“Are you sending me there?”

“No. But just go carefully and get it over and done with as soon as you can. Things are still quiet down here, but it can't last. If it does, we'll all be out of a job.”

Malone
hung up. Murder, he knew, was like the common cold: no one had yet discovered a cure for it. He was not often philosophical, but he sometimes wondered how the world would have gone if Abel had managed to sweet-talk Cain out of killing him.

II

The Veterans Legion had for years been one of the jealously guarded domains of men who had served overseas. At one time its political clout had had the fire-power of a division of howitzers; politicians who had opposed its ultra-conservative views had been blasted off the map; only discretion from more sensible members had stopped the national committee from emblazoning these victories beside their wartime battle honours. Time passed and so did many of the old members: age did not weary them nor the years condemn, as the Legion's prayer said, but death did not listen and took them anyway, just as it did the conscientious objectors, the communists and all the other enemies. Eventually the Legion, to survive, had to open its doors to virtually all and sundry. Well, sundry, perhaps, but not all. There were still candidates for membership who found themselves blackballed and not just because they might be Aborigines. There were no blacks from the river settlement who were members of the Collamundra Veterans Legion Club.

The club was a solid red-brick building built from the proceeds of the club's poker-machines; the one-armed bandit was now a national icon, along with the long-gone two-armed bushrangers. The club's conservatism was flexible.

The car park was full and Malone had trouble finding a space for the Commodore. Once inside the club he had trouble finding space for himself; it was thronged with men and women, the latter outnumbered ten to one. The hubbub seemed to be the human equivalent of the noise he had heard out at the cotton gin; he had to shout at the top of his voice into a nearby ear when he asked where he could find Ray Chakiros. The ear leaned away from him and a fist, holding a foaming glass, came up and waved towards the back of the big main room.

Malone pushed his way through the crowd, aware that some men, recognizing him, made no
effort
to make way for him; he brushed by them, once feeling a shoulder thump against his own. Though it was only five o'clock, many of the men already looked close to being drunk, as if they had been drinking all afternoon; red faces turned towards him, mouths opened and beer fumes enveloped him as if he were swimming through a brewery vat. But he was used to it: he was a beer drinker himself and this was not the first time he had had to make his way through a crowd intent on getting a skinful. He had never been that sort of drinker, but he had learned to tolerate them. Except when they got outside and got into their cars and drove out to endanger other people. He sometimes wondered how tolerant he would be as a highway patrol officer if, after the carnage of a bad accident, he had to arrest a drunken driver. He had, occasionally, been more sympathetic towards a premeditated murderer, a wife, for instance, who had shot her brutal husband, than he might have been towards the involuntary killers.

He slipped out of the crowd, went through a doorway into a short hallway and found Ray Chakiros in his office at the end of it. There were two other men with him: all three men looked much the same, in their late sixties, plump and well-fed and prosperous-looking, businessmen and not farmers. They all looked at him with the same mixture of suspicion and puzzlement: what was he doing here in the club uninvited?

“Can I see you alone, Mr. Chakiros?” He wasn't sure which was Chakiros, but took him to be the grey-haired man with the thick moustache behind the desk, “I'm Detective-Inspector Malone.”

“As if we didn't know,” said Chakiros and smiled at the other two men, neither of whom smiled in return. “D'you mind, George? Les? We can continue our business later. Come in, Inspector, sit down.”

The two men got up and without a word went out of the office, leaving a faint chill behind them. But Malone was used to that; he had walked into as many chill winds as an Antarctic explorer.

“I'm on the Sagawa case, Mr. Chakiros. But you probably know that, as well.”

“Naturally, naturally. There's practically nothing that goes on in this town that I don't know about, Inspector—that's part of being president of such a club as ours. We're the biggest in the district—bigger than the golf club or the bowling club—” He was ready to run on, his tongue full of running, but
Malone
cut in:

“That's why I came to you, Mr. Chakiros. What did you know about Mr. Sagawa?”

The club president sobered. “All that I needed to know—which wasn't much. He was a Nip.”

“Yes, I've established that.”

But Chakiros was impregnable to irony; it bounced off him as off an anvil. He had been a handsome man in his youth and there were still hints of it under the plump cheeks and the jowly jaw-line; but his sense of humour had always been shallow, had not deepened with the years. He laughed a lot, but it was an empty sound, like canned TV laughter.

“How did you meet him?” said Malone.

“He came here, he wanted to join the Veterans Legion as an associate member. They tell me he was a great joiner—the golf club, the bowling club, he tried the lot. The bloody hide of him! A Jap, not even a veteran, wanting to join the Legion!”

The room had now started to impress itself upon Malone. It was a tiny museum to patriotism; not that he was against that sentiment, but this seemed overpowering. The walls were covered with photos of heroes, decorated men in uniform; furled flags stood in corners waiting to flutter in the breeze from unseen trumpets. Large prints of paintings of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh hung behind Chakiros; there were no photos or paintings of the Governor-General or the Prime Minister; patriotism, evidently, should not be too localized. Yet, on a level and of a size with the Queen and the Duke, there was a painting of Chester Hardstaff, Past President of the Club.

Malone said, “It would have been worse, wouldn't it, if Mr. Sagawa had been a veteran? Say he'd fought against you in New Guinea?”

Chakiros's eyebrows were not grey like his hair and moustache, but were black, almost as if they had been charcoaled; they came down now in a thick dark line that almost met across the bridge of his nose. “You're not pro-Jap, are you? Don't get me wrong—I'm not
anti
-Jap
.
” His acting was terrible; he wasn't even a good hypocrite. “I just don't think they should be buying up the country the way they are.”

“I don't believe Mr. Sagawa was buying up the country. He was just the general manager of
South
Cloud.”

“Same thing. He represented the buyers. They're gobbling up the country, buying up the farm.”

“Who's selling it to them? Selling the farm is like doing the tango—it takes two to do it.”

“I can see you're a city feller, it sticks out all over you. Everything is a business deal down there.” “Not in the Police Department.”

“Oh? You could've fooled me, from what Gus Dircks has told me. I understand he's really cleaned up the Department. I don't mean you to take that personally.”

“I'll try not to. Speaking of Mr. Dircks, I understand he's a partner in South Cloud, that he sold off part of his farm to them. Is he pro-Japanese?”

The eyebrows came down again. “You better ask him.”

“And your past president—” Malone nodded at the portrait of Hardstaff. Whoever had painted it had been inspired, or instructed, first to study the portraits of Spanish kings; all that was missing from Chester II was the breastplate and the sword on which to rest the royal hand. “Didn't he introduce the Japanese to the district?”

Now only the nose separated the eyebrows from the moustache; the dark eyes were almost hidden. “You better ask him, too.”

Malone decided it was time to change tack. “Do you own a Mercedes, Mr. Chakiros?”

The eyebrows climbed again. “Yes. I'm the local distributor—you wouldn't expect me to drive a Jaguar or something, would you? Why?”

“What colour?”

“Beige. I think there's a fancy name for it, but that's what it is, beige.”

“Seems a popular colour out here.”

“It doesn't show the dust. We do a lotta travelling on gravel roads, not like in the city. Some money spent on roads out here wouldn't go astray.”

“Maybe Mr. Dircks will be able to fix that for you, now he's a minister.” Malone chanced his arm, an old fast bowler's ploy: “I'm sure Chess Hardstaff is working on him.”

Again
the irony bounced off Chakiros; he saw the world in black and white, preferably white. “That's what governments are for, to look after the people who put them in.”

Cronyism: but Malone stopped his tongue from going too far. “Were you driving your car last Monday night?”

“I drive my car every night. I come here to the club every night, never miss. I don't always stay, the wife'd complain if I did. Women don't always appreciate the value of a club like this.”

“Where do you live, Mr. Chakiros?”

“Right here in town, in River Street, the best part of town. Why d'you want to know was I driving the car Monday night? That was the night the Nip was murdered, right? Do you think I had something to do with that?”

“Mr. Chakiros, all I'm doing is making enquiries. At the moment I've got no theories at all.”

“Well, you're making a bloody good fist of sounding like you got a theory!” Chakiros slapped a big plump hand on his desk. “Jesus Christ, you come in here, shoving your nose in—”

“We don't shove our noses in unless we're invited.”

“I didn't invite you in here to badger me like this!”

“No, that's true. Are you saying you're refusing to answer any questions I want to put to you?”

The bluster went out of Chakiros; he backed down. “No. Well, no, I'm not saying that. I'll answer your questions. Except if they get too personal.” But he didn't define what he meant by too personal; and he was not sure himself. He was a man of finite wisdom, not even approaching the boundaries of himself. He lived on dreams which had turned into false memories; he had wanted to be a hero, but had been denied the opportunity. The war had finished too soon for him: he was still fighting it, though he had never really got into it. He had cousins in Beirut, relatives in a city he had never visited, who had seen far more of war than he ever had. “Stick to Sagawa and what happened to him.”

“Did you ever go out to the cotton farm?”

Chakiros hesitated. “Yeah, I did. Once.”

“When?”

Again
the hesitation; he tugged nervously at his moustache, as if it were no more than a cheap disguise he wanted to remove. “Monday night.” Then the tongue began to roll: “He was getting—assertive. Yeah, that's the word, assertive. He'd been to Chess Hardstaff and told him I'd said he couldn't join the club. He was carrying tales.”

“Did Chess Hardstaff want him admitted to the club?”

“No. Chess is an old Digger, like m'self. Well, not a Digger, exactly. He was in the air force, a fighter. He got a DFC and bar.” He looked up at the portrait. “We wanted him painted in his uniform with decorations, but he wouldn't have that. He's modest about those sorta things.” He said it wistfully, as if he wished for those sorta things himself.

“I'm sure he's modest about other things,” said Malone; and wondered if Hardstaff would be offended if he knew that he was considered modest. “Did he tell Sagawa that he wasn't wanted in the club?”

“Yes, he did. Chess doesn't pull punches, he tells you exactly what he thinks. He's never—
ambivalent.
Yeah, that's the word, ambivalent.” Malone had always thought of ambivalence as a two-eyed stance in a one-eyed batting line-up; he would never have taken Hardstaff for anything but one-eyed. It might be the only thing on which he and Chakiros would agree. “He rang me to tell me Sagawa had been to see him. I went out there to the gin to tell
Mister
Sagawa to keep his complaints to himself, that we didn't want any discrimination talk around here.”

“But there is, isn't there?”

“What?”

“Discrimination.”

“Well, there's a bit of that everywhere, isn't there?” He had known it in his youth; and so had his father, even more so. The town's Dagoes: “Wog” hadn't yet come into fashion. But he never mentioned that now, not even to his own son. “Not least in the police force. You read about it in the papers, what the police are like towards the darkies over in West Australia or up in Queensland. It's only natural, no one's a hundred per cent bloody Christian, kissing the arses of black, brown or brindle.” He
could
taste the bile of long ago. “Sure, there's bloody discrimination, it's a fact of life.”