The Bat (12 page)

“What do you mean by justice prevailing?”

“Haven’t you heard about Terra Nullius? Eddy Mabo?”

Harry shook his head twice. Otto pursed his lips and out came two thick smoke rings, slowly ascending into the air.

“Terra Nullius is a funny little concept. The English hit upon it when they came here and saw that there wasn’t much cultivated land in Australia. And just because the Aboriginal people didn’t stand over potato fields half the day, the English considered them to be of lower status. However, the Aboriginal tribes knew a thing or two about nature; they went wherever there was food, in whichever season, and lived a life of apparent plenty. But because they weren’t settlers, the English determined that no one owned the land. It was Terra Nullius. And according to the Terra Nullius principle the English could just issue property deeds to the new settlers without taking any account of what the Aboriginal people might have to say. They hadn’t laid claim to their own land.”

Birgitta placed a large margarita in front of Otto.

“A few years back, Eddy Mabo, a bloke from the Torres Strait Islands, challenged the Establishment by disputing the Terra Nullius principle and asserting that the land at that time had been illegally taken from the Aboriginals. In 1992 the High Court accepted his view and stated that Australia had belonged to the Aboriginal people. The court ruling determined that where Indigenous inhabitants had lived or occupied an area before the whites came and still did today, they could demand these areas back. Naturally, that created a terrible hoo-ha with loads of whites screaming blue murder because they were afraid they would lose their land.”

“And what’s the situation now?”

Otto took a deep swig from the salt-rimmed cocktail glass, pulled a face as if he had been served vinegar and wiped his mouth carefully with a slighted expression.

“Well, the ruling’s there. And the Native Title laws
exist. But they’re interpreted in a way that doesn’t seem to be too despotic. It’s not the case that some poor farmer suddenly finds his property is being confiscated. So the worst panic has gradually passed.”

Here I am sitting in a bar, Harry thought, listening to a transvestite lecturing on Australian politics. He felt at home, a bit like Harrison Ford in the bar scene in
Star Wars
.

The news was interrupted by a commercial break with smiling Australians in flannel shirts and leather hats. They were advertising a brand of beer whose greatest quality was that apparently it was “proudly Australian.”

“Well, here’s to Terra Nullius,” Harry said.

“Cheers, Handsome. Oh, I almost forgot. Our new performance will be at St. George’s Theatre on Bondi Beach. I
urge
you and Andrew to come and see it. Bring a friend if you like. OK with me if you save all your applause for my numbers.”

Harry bowed his head and thanked Otto for the three tickets he was holding with his little finger outstretched.

Crossing Green Park on his way from the Albury to King’s Cross, Harry involuntarily looked for the gray Aboriginal man, but this evening there were just a couple of white drunks sitting on the bench in the pale light from the park lamps. The clouds from earlier in the day had drifted away and the sky was high and starry. In the road he passed two men who were clearly having an argument—they stood on opposite sides of the pavement shouting at each other, so Harry had to walk through the middle. “You didn’t say you were going to stay out all night!” screeched one in a reedy, tear-filled voice.

Outside a Vietnamese restaurant a waiter stood leaning against the doorframe smoking. He looked as if he’d had a long day already. The queue of cars and people slowly oozed along Darlinghurst Road in King’s Cross.

On the corner of Bayswater Road Andrew stood chewing a bratwurst.

“There you are,” he said. “On the dot. Germanic to the core.”

“Germany’s—”

“Germans are Teutons. You come from a northern Germanic tribe. You even look it. You’re not denying your own tribe, are you?”

Harry was tempted to reply with the same question, but refrained.

Andrew was in a bubbly mood. “Let’s kick off with someone I know,” he said.

They agreed to start the search for the proverbial needle as close to the middle of the haystack as they could get—among the prostitutes in Darlinghurst Road. They were not hard to find. Harry already recognized a few of them.

“Mongabi, my man, how’s business?” Andrew stopped and warmly greeted a dark-skinned man wearing a tight suit and bulky jewelery. A gold tooth glistened when he opened his mouth.

“Tuka, you raging stallion! Can’t complain, you know.”

He looks like a pimp, if anyone does, Harry thought.

“Harry, say hello to Teddy Mongabi, the baddest pimp in Sydney. He’s been doing this for twenty years and still stands with his girls on the street. Aren’t you getting a bit long in the tooth for this now, Teddy?”

Teddy threw up his arms and grinned. “I like it down here, Tuka. This is where it’s happening, you know. If you sit in an office it isn’t long before you lose your perspective and control. And control is everything in this game, you know. Control of the girls and control of the punters. People are like dogs, you know. A dog you don’t have under control is an unhappy dog. And unhappy dogs bite, you know.”

“If you say so, Teddy. Listen, I’d like to have a word with one of your girls. We’re on the lookout for a bad boy. He could have been up to some of his tricks here, too.”

“Fine, who’d you like to talk to?”

“Is Sandra here?”

“Sandra’ll be here any moment. Sure you don’t want anything else? Apart from a chat, I mean.”

“No thanks, Teddy. We’ll be at the Palladium. Can you tell her to drop by?”

Outside the Palladium there was a doorman encouraging the crowd to enter with salacious enticements. He
brightened up when he saw Andrew, who exchanged two words with the doorman and they were waved past the ticket office. A narrow staircase led down into the cellar of the dimly lit strip club where a handful of men sat round tables waiting for the next performance. They found a table some way back in the room.

“Seems like you know everyone round here,” Harry said.

“Everyone who needs to know me. And I need to know. Surely you have this weird symbiosis between police and the underworld in Oslo, too, don’t you?”

“Course. But you seem to have a warmer relationship with your contacts than we do.”

Andrew laughed. “I guess I feel a certain affinity. If I hadn’t been in the police force I might have been in this business, who knows.”

A black miniskirt teetered down the stairs on high stilettos. Beneath the short fringe she peered around with heavy, glazed eyes. Then she came over to their table. Andrew pushed out a chair for her.

“Sandra, this is Harry Holy.”

“Really?” she said, with broad, red lips held in a crooked smile. One canine was missing. Harry shook a cold, corpse-like hand. There was something familiar about her. Had he seen her in Darlinghurst Road one night? Perhaps she had been wearing different makeup or different clothes?

“So what’s this about? Are you after some villains, Kensington?”

“We’re looking for one villain in particular, Sandra. He likes to choke girls. Using his hands. Ring a bell?”

“A bell? Sounds like fifty percent of our customers. Has he hurt anyone?”

“Probably only those who were able to identify him,” Harry said. “Have you seen this guy?” He held up the photo of Evans White.

“No,” she answered without looking, and turned to Andrew. “Who’s this then, Kensington?”

“He’s from Norway,” Andrew said. “He’s a policeman and his sister was working at the Albury. She was raped and murdered last week. Twenty-three years old. Harry’s taken compassionate leave and come here to find the man who did it.”

“I’m sorry.” Sandra looked at the photo. “Yes,” she said. Nothing else.

Harry got excited. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, yes, I’ve seen him.”

“Have you, er … met him?”

“No, but he’s been in Darlinghurst Road several times. I have no idea what he was doing here, but his face is familiar. I can ask around a bit.”

“Thank you … Sandra,” Harry said. She sent him a quick smile.

“I have to go to work now, boys. See you, I guess.” With that, the miniskirt went the same way it had come.

“Yes!” Harry shouted.

“Yes? Because someone’s seen the bloke in King’s Cross? Making an appearance in Darlinghurst Road is not forbidden. Nor is shagging prostitutes, if that’s what he did. Not very forbidden, anyway.”

“Don’t you feel it, Andrew? There are four million inhabitants in Sydney, and she’s seen the one person we’re looking for. Of course, it doesn’t prove anything, but it’s a sign, isn’t it? Can’t you feel we’re getting warmer?”

The muzak was switched off and the lights were lowered. The customers in the establishment directed their attention to the stage.

“You’re pretty sure about this Evans White, aren’t you.”

Harry nodded. “Every fiber in my body tells me it’s Evans White. I’ve got a gut instinct, yes.”

“Gut instinct?”

“Intuition isn’t hocus-pocus when you think about it, Andrew.”

“I’m thinking about it now, Harry. And I can’t feel anything
in my gut. Explain to me how this gut of yours works, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Well …” Harry looked at Andrew to check he wasn’t pulling his leg. Andrew returned the gaze with a genuinely interested expression. “Intuition is just the sum of all your experience. The way I see it, everything you’ve experienced, everything you know, you think you know and didn’t know you knew is there in your subconscious lying dormant, as it were. As a rule you don’t notice the sleeping creature, it’s just there, snoring and absorbing new things, right. But now and then it blinks, stretches and tells you, hey, I’ve seen this picture before. And tells you where in the picture things belong.”

“Wonderful, Holy. But are you sure your sleeping creature sees all the details in this picture? What you see depends on where you’re standing and the angle you’re looking from.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take the sky. The sky you see in Norway is just the same as the one you see in Australia. But because now you’re down under, you’re standing on your head compared with being at home, aren’t you. So you see the stars upside down. If you don’t know you’re standing upside down you get confused and make mistakes.”

Harry looked at Andrew. “Upside down, eh?”

“Yep.” Andrew puffed on his cigar.

“At school I learned that the sky you see is quite different from the one we see. If you’re in Australia the globe covers the view of the stars we see at night in Norway.”

“OK then,” Andrew said, unruffled. “Nevertheless, it’s a question of where you view things from. The point is that everything is relative, isn’t it. And that’s what makes it so bloody complicated.”

From the stage came a hissing sound and white smoke. The next moment it changed to red and violins were
heard from the speakers. A woman wearing a plain dress and a man in trousers and a white shirt stepped out of the smoke.

Harry had heard the music before. It was the same as the drone he had heard in his neighbor’s headphones on the plane, all the way from London. But it was only now he understood the text. A woman’s voice was singing that they called her the wild rose and she didn’t know why.

The girlish timbre was in sharp contrast to the man’s deep, somber voice:

Harry was dreaming about stars and yellow-and-brown snakes when he was awoken by a light click of his hotel-room door. For a moment he lay still, aware only of how contented he was. It had started raining again, and the drainpipes outside his window were singing. He got up, naked, opened the door wide and hoped his incipient erection would be noticed. Birgitta laughed with surprise and leapt into his arms. Her hair was soaking wet.

“I thought you said three,” Harry said, pretending to be offended.

“The customers wouldn’t leave,” she said, lifting her freckly face to him.

“I’m wildly, uncontrollably, head over heels in love with you,” he whispered, gripping her face between his hands.

“I know,” she said.

Harry stood by the window, drinking orange juice from the minibar and examining the sky. The clouds had drifted
away again, and someone had stuck a fork in the velvet sky several times so that the divine light behind shone through the holes.

“What do you think of transvestites?” Birgitta asked from the bed.

“You mean, what do I think of Otto?”

“As well.”

Harry thought. “I think I like his arrogant style. The lowered eyelids, the displeased expression. The world-weariness. What should I call it? It’s like a melancholy cabaret in which he flirts with all and sundry. A superficial, self-parodying flirtation.”

“And you like that?”

“I like his couldn’t-give-a-stuff attitude. And that he stands for everything the majority hates.”

“And what is it that the majority hates?”

“Weakness. Vulnerability. Australians boast that they’re a liberal nation. Perhaps they are as well. But my understanding is that their ideal is the honest, uncomplicated, hard-working Australian with a good sense of humor and a touch of patriotism.”

“True blue.”

“What?”

“They call it being true blue. Or fair dinkum. It means someone or something is genuine, decent.”

“And behind the facade of jovial decency it’s easy to hide so much bloody crap. Otto, on the other hand, with all his outlandish garb, representing seduction, illusion and falsity, strikes me as the best example of sincerity I’ve met here. Naked, vulnerable and genuine.”

“That sounds very PC, if you ask me. Harry Holy, the gay man’s best friend.” Birgitta was in teasing mode.

“I argued the point well though, didn’t I?”

He lay down on the bed, looked at her and blinked his innocent, blue eyes. “I’m bloody glad I’m not in the mood
for another round with you, frøken. As we’ve got to get up so early in the morning, I mean.”