The Bat (3 page)

Harry looked at him. Andrew cleared his throat.

“That’s the official version, anyway. There is one thing they thought you could help us with though.”

There was a letter in Norwegian. “Dear Elisabeth,” it started and obviously wasn’t finished. Harry skimmed through it.

The letter stopped there.

“Where are we going now?” Harry asked.

“To the circus! I promised a friend I would pop by one day. And today is one day, isn’t it.”

At the Powerhouse a small circus troupe had already started the free afternoon performance for a sparse but young and enthusiastic audience. The building had been a power station and a tram hall when Sydney had trams, Andrew elucidated. Now it was functioning as a kind of contemporary museum. A couple of well-built girls had just completed a not very spectacular trapeze number, but had reaped a great round of friendly applause.

An enormous guillotine was rolled in as a clown entered the stage. He was wearing a brightly colored uniform and a striped hat, obviously inspired by the French Revolution. He tripped and got up to all sorts of pranks to the huge amusement of the children. Then another clown came onto the stage wearing a long white wig, and it gradually dawned on Harry that he was meant to be Louis XVI.

“By unanimous vote, sentenced to death,” announced the clown with the striped hat.

Soon the condemned man was led to the scaffold where he—still to the amusement of the children—laid his head, after much screaming and yelling, on the block below the blade. There was a brief roll of the drums, the blade fell and to everyone’s amazement, Harry’s included, it cut off the monarch’s head with a sound reminiscent of an ax blow in the forest on a bright winter’s morning. The head, still bearing the wig, fell and rolled into a basket. The lights went out, and when they were switched back on, the headless king stood in the spotlight with his head under his arm. Now the children’s cheering knew no bounds. Then the lights went out again, and when they came back on for the second time, the whole troupe was assembled and bowing, and the performance was over.

As people poured toward the exit, Andrew and Harry went backstage. In the makeshift dressing room the performers were already removing their costumes and makeup.

“Otto, say hi to a friend from Norway,” Andrew shouted.

A face turned. Louis XVI looked less majestic with makeup smeared over his face and without his wig. “Well, hello, it’s Tuka the Indian!”

“Harry, this is Otto Rechtnagel.”

Otto proffered his hand elegantly with a kink in the wrist and looked indignant when Harry, slightly perplexed, made do with a light press.

“No kiss, handsome?”

“Otto thinks he’s a woman. A woman of noble descent,” Andrew said, to illuminate.

“Stuff and nonsense, Tuka. Otto knows very well she’s a man. You look confused, handsome. Perhaps you’d like to check for yourself?” Otto emitted a high-pitched chuckle.

Harry felt his earlobes go warm. Two false eyelashes fluttered accusingly at Andrew.

“Your friend, does he talk?”

“Sorry. My name’s Harry … er … Holy. Clever number out there. Nice costumes. Very … lifelike. And unusual.”

“The Louise Seize number? Unusual? On the contrary. It’s an old classic. The first time it was done was by the Jandaschewsky clown family just two weeks after the real execution in January 1793. People loved it. People have always loved public executions. Do you know how many reruns there are of the Kennedy assassination on American TV stations every year?”

Harry shook his head.

Otto looked up at the ceiling pensively. “Quite a lot.”

“Otto sees himself as the heir of the great Jandy Jandaschewsky,” Andrew added.

“Is that so?” Famous clown families were not Harry’s area of expertise.

“I don’t think your friend here is quite with us, Tuka. The Jandaschewsky family, you see, was a traveling troupe of musical clowns who came to Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century and settled here. They ran the circus until Jandy died in 1971. I saw Jandy for the first time when I was six. From that moment I knew what I wanted to be. And now that’s what I am.”

Otto smiled a sad clown smile through the makeup.

“How do you two know each other?” Harry asked. Andrew and Otto exchanged glances. Harry saw their mouths twitch and knew he had committed a gaffe.

“I mean … a policeman and a clown … that’s not exactly …”

“It’s a long story,” Andrew said. “I suppose you could say we grew up together. Otto would have sold his mother for a piece of my arse of course, but even at a young age I felt a strange attraction to girls and all those awful hetero things. It must have been something to do with genes and environment. What do you think, Otto?”

Andrew chuckled as he ducked away from Otto’s slap.

“You have no style, you have no money and your arse is overrated,” Otto squealed. Harry gazed round at the others in the troupe; they seemed quite unfazed by the performance. One of the well-built trapeze artists sent him an encouraging wink.

“Harry and I are going up to the Albury tonight. Would you like to join us?”

“You know very well I don’t go there anymore, Tuka.”

“You should be over that by now, Otto. Life goes on, you know.”

“Everyone else’s life goes on, you mean. Mine stops here, right here. When love dies, I die.”

“As you wish.”

“Besides, I have to go home and feed Waldorf. You go, and I may come a bit later.”

“See you soon,” Harry said, putting his lips dutifully to Otto’s outstretched hand.

“Looking forward to that, Handsome Harry.”

The sun had gone down as they drove along Oxford Street in Paddington and pulled up by a small open space. “Green Park” the sign said, but the grass was scorched brown, and the only green was a pavilion in the middle of the park. A man with Aboriginal blood in his veins lay on the grass between the trees. His clothes were in tatters and he was so dirty that he was more gray than black. On seeing Andrew, he raised his hand in a kind of greeting, but Andrew ignored him.

The Albury was so full they had to squeeze their way inside the glass doors. Harry stood still for a few seconds taking in the scene before him. The clientele was a motley collection, mostly young men: rockers in faded denim, suit-clad yuppies with slicked hair, arty types with goatees and champagne, blond and good-looking surfers with bleached smiles, and bikers—or
bikies
as Andrew called them—in black leathers. At the center of the room, in the very bar itself, the show was in full swing with long-legged, semi-naked women wearing purple, plunging tops. They were cavorting about and miming with wide, red-painted mouths
to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” The girls took turns so that those who were not performing served the customers with winks and outrageous flirting.

Harry elbowed his way to the bar and ordered.

“Coming up right away, blondie,” said the barmaid in the Roman helmet with a deep voice and a mischievous smile.

“Tell me, are you and I the only straight guys in this town?” Harry asked, returning with a beer and a glass of juice.

“After San Francisco, Sydney has the biggest gay population in the world,” Andrew said. “The Australian outback is not exactly known for its tolerance of sexual diversity, so it’s not surprising that all the queer farmer boys in Australia want to come to Sydney. Not just from Australia, by the way, there are gay people from all over the world pouring into town every day.”

They went to another bar at the back of the room where Andrew called a girl behind the counter. She was standing with her back to them and had the reddest hair Harry had ever seen. It hung down to the rear pocket of her tight blue jeans, but was unable to conceal the willowy back and pleasingly rounded hips. She turned and a row of pearly-white teeth smiled from a slim, radiant face with two azure eyes and innumerable freckles. What a waste, if this isn’t a woman, Harry thought.

“Remember me?” Andrew shouted above the noise of seventies disco music. “I was here asking about Inger. Can we have a word?”

The redhead became serious. She nodded, passed on a message to one of the other girls and led the way to a little smoking room behind the kitchen.

“Any news?” she asked, and Harry needed no more to be able to determine with some certainty that she spoke better Swedish than English.

“I met an old man once,” Harry said in Norwegian. She
glanced at him in surprise. “He was the captain of a boat on the Amazon River. Three words from him in Portuguese and I knew he was Swedish. He had lived there for thirty years. And I can’t speak a word of Portuguese.”

At first the redhead looked perplexed, but then she laughed. A trill of cheery laughter that reminded Harry of some rare forest bird.

“Is it really so obvious?” she said in Swedish. She had a deep, calm voice and softly rolled
rrr
s.

“Intonation,” Harry said. “You never completely get rid of intonation.”

“Do you know each other?” Andrew scrutinized them skeptically.

Harry looked at the redhead.

“Nope,” she answered.

And isn’t that a pity, Harry thought to himself.

The redhead’s name was Birgitta Enquist. She had been in Australia for four years and working at the Albury for one.

“Of course we talked when we were working, but I didn’t really have any close contact with Inger. She kept herself to herself mostly. There’s a gang of us who go out together and she occasionally tagged along, but I didn’t know her that well. She had just left some guy in Newtown when she started here. The most personal detail I know about her is that the relationship became too intense for her in the long run. I suppose she needed a fresh start.”

“Do you know who she hung out with?” Andrew asked.

“Not really. As I said, we talked, but she never gave me a full rundown of her life. Not that I asked her to. In October she went up north to Queensland and apparently fell in with a crowd from Sydney there who she stayed in contact with afterward. I think she met a guy up there—he came by here one night. I’ve told you all this before though, haven’t I?” she said with an inquiring glance.

“I know, my dear Miss Enquist, I just wanted my Norwegian colleague here to have a firsthand report and see where Inger worked. Harry Holy is regarded as Norway’s best investigator after all and he may be able to put his finger on things we Sydney police have overlooked.”

Harry was overcome by a sudden fit of coughing.

“Who’s Mr. Bean?” he asked in a strange, constricted voice.

“Mr. Bean?” Birgitta eyed them in bewilderment.

“Someone who looked like the English comedian … er, Rowan Atkinson, isn’t that his name?”

“Oh, him!” Birgitta said with the same forest-bird laughter.

I like it, Harry thought. More.

“That’s Alex, the bar manager. He won’t be here till later.”

“We have reason to believe he was interested in Inger.”

“Alex had his eye on Inger, yes, he did. And not just Inger, most girls in this bar have at one time or another been subjected to his desperate efforts. Or Fiddler Ray, as we call him. It was Inger who came up with Mr. Bean. He doesn’t have an easy time of it, poor thing. Over thirty, lives at home with his mum and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. But he’s perfectly OK as a boss. And quite harmless, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“How do you know?”

Birgitta patted the side of her nose. “He hasn’t got it in him.”

Harry pretended to jot notes down on his pad.

“Do you know if she knew or met someone who … er, had it in him?”

“Well, there are so many types of guy that drop in here. Not all of them are gay, and there were quite a few who noticed Inger—she’s so attractive. Was. But off the top of my head I can’t think of anyone. There was …”

“Yes?”

“No, nothing.”

“I read in the report that Inger was working here the night we assume she was killed. Do you know if she had a date after work or did she go straight home?”

“She took a few scraps from the kitchen, said they were for the mutt. I knew she didn’t have a dog, so I asked her where she was going. She said home. That’s all I know.”

“The Tasmanian Devil,” Harry muttered. She sent him a curious look. “Her landlord has a dog,” he said. “I suppose it had to be bribed so she could enter the house in one piece.”

Harry thanked her for talking to them. As they were about to leave, Birgitta said, “We’re really upset at the Albury about what happened. How are her parents taking it?”

“Not too well, I’m afraid,” Harry said. “They’re in shock, of course. And blame themselves for letting her come here. The coffin’s being sent to Norway tomorrow. I can get hold of the address if you want to send flowers for the funeral.”

“Thank you. That would be very kind of you.”

Harry was on the verge of asking something else, but couldn’t bring himself to do it with all the talk about death and funerals. On the way out her farewell smile was burning on his retina. He knew it was going to be there for a while.