Special Smashwords Edition
Prophets and Loss
by
Martin Roth
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is purely coincidental.
PROPHETS AND LOSS
Special Smashwords Edition
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Copyright © 2012 by Martin Roth
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.
Prophets and Loss was first published in 2009 by Ark House Press.
Visit the author website: http://www.military-orders.com.
Chapter One
Forgiveness is the most attractive of the virtues. Until you actually have someone to forgive.
When a young detective with bad breath and acne told Melissa Stonelea that her born-again Christian husband Grant had been found strangled in the bondage room of the city’s classiest brothel, his hands trussed with S & M leathers and a page of the Bible stuffed in his mouth, she didn’t need to hear any more of the pastor’s sermons on the healing powers of forgiveness and reconciliation.
She needed revenge.
“I’ll kill them,” she was sobbing as I let myself into her house, the only brick veneer in a tree-fringed lane of aging weatherboards in Melbourne’s east. “I’ll kill them.”
From the hallway I could see her standing in the living room, her back to me. Marriage to Grant had gotten her off the pills and into eating at least two good meals a day, but she was still as skinny as an Olympics high jumper. A red floral blouse was half-tucked into a pair of tight blue jeans. Her silky brown hair, normally fashion-model smooth, looked as if it had been trapped in a Qantas 747 downdraft.
She half-turned, and I saw that her long, oval face was etched with dark lines, like wavy creek-bed patterns on parched soil. Her brown eyes were bloodshot. “I’ll kill them,” she cried again.
Killing solves nothing, Mel, I wanted to say. You just end up filled with hate and bitterness and snake-like demons, and wanting to kill more. I knew that from my own experience.
But I couldn’t tell her. Right now Melissa was in no state to listen to a homily. She hadn’t even noticed me. She seemed to be seeking solace in the living room wall, trying to bury her face in the golden houndstooth patterning.
I hesitated. Should I wait until she was all cried out? No. Melissa was a woman capable of a lot of crying.
As I walked into the living room the sobs turned into a plaintive kitteny whimper. Then without warning she spiraled to the floor with a slow-motion crash, her arms flailing, like a ballerina enacting the dying of a flower.
I hadn’t noticed the uniformed policewoman on guard by the kitchen door. She strode over to help. She was a towering, broad-shouldered woman, taller even than Melissa, a blonde Xena Warrior Princess.
“Doctor’s on the way, sweetheart,” said the policewoman, as she manipulated Melissa into a sitting posture on the carpet. “Just a few more minutes.”
A wiry young man in a trim blue suit walked out from the kitchen, a cell phone clutched to his ear. He surveyed the scene.
“She’s okay,” muttered the woman. Without a word the man slipped back through the doorway.
The policewoman abruptly looked up at me, her eyes glowing with the affection normally reserved for those garden slugs that have crawled up the drainpipe into your shower cabinet on cold mornings, seeking warmth. “You’re her friend?”
I nodded.
Melissa lifted her head, and for the first time she realized that I had arrived.
“Johnny!” she called. “Johnny!” Her voice was raspy and choked. It sounded as if she were trying to cry some more, but couldn’t. I knelt down beside her and we embraced. I held her tight, and it seemed to put a little energy into her.
“It was him, Johnny,” she said.
It was who? I had no idea what she meant. I waited.
“It was him.”
The policewoman spoke: “We’ve just been to the morgue to identify her husband.”
“It was Grant,” said Melissa. “It was him. He’s dead.”
Now she really was sobbing again. I stroked her hair.
“They wanted to take me to the police station to answer lots of questions,” she cried. “But I told them to bring me here.” Even in her grief she instinctively reacted against authority.
She stood up unaided, walked to the wall, banged on it twice with a fist and then slumped on the sofa. New torrents of tears arrived. The policewoman sat beside her and held her hand.
I wished I could be anywhere but in this house with an Amazonian policewoman and the pimply-faced young man in the kitchen who was almost certainly a detective. But Melissa had distressingly few friends left after Grant did his time in prison. She needed me.
I made a big pretence of examining all the pictures in the living room. They were everywhere. The place looked like a gallery. I’d seen them many times of course, but until now hadn’t fully grasped that I featured in so many. Another indication of how few friends had remained.
Melissa had arranged everything into neat, thematic groups. That was typical. She was always putting everything into categories. Apparently all part of her attempt to gain some control over her existence. So why did everything in her life keep falling apart?
I knew little about her past. She’d been a revue dancer once. Long legs don’t hinder your progress in that profession. I’d even spotted her one time in a high-kicking line-up of girls, in a late-night TV rerun of Countdown with Molly Meldrum. She was still a teenager, and she was great: tall, energetic, full of natural rhythm and a winning smile. Trouble was, so were all the other girls.
So she spent a lot of time between jobs.
As far as I could see, the only thing that had gone right for her was marriage to Grant. And now he was lying in the police morgue, his organs about to be prodded and dissected by the coroner.
In pride of place above the unused fireplace were framed snaps of Grant and Melissa, from their wedding a few years earlier. Big beefy Grant, his round, expectant eyes sparkling, like a kid just offered the newest Nintendo game, and a grin so wide you were almost blinded by the dazzle from his teeth. And Melissa, nearly as tall, clutching Grant’s muscular arm, a smile of defiance on her face only slightly undermined by a pair of nervous eyes.
On a side wall was a collection of photos she’d found in an envelope in my apartment one day. There I was, more than two decades earlier, looking so young and small, standing in my battle fatigues in the mountains and waving aloft my M16 semi-automatic. And there I was once more, ten years later, still optimistic, smiling and linking arms with a group of compatriots, not one of whom had escaped the brutal Indonesian army death squads.
“I think it’s very romantic that you used to be an East Timorese freedom fighter,” Melissa once told me.
Mel, if only you knew.
I gazed at the ripped Fretilin rebel flag - a present from me - over on the other wall by the kitchen. I’d carried that flag through scores of confrontations with the Indonesian invaders. The colors were faded, and it looked more like a cleaning rag than a battle standard. For some reason it was part of the religious theme zone, next to a gaudy picture of Jesus dying on the cross, that Mel had hung there after Grant’s dramatic prison conversion. Melissa, in her stop-start manner, might have followed Grant into church, but often it seemed that for her religion was little more than a design motif.
I glanced at her. The crying jag had subsided and she was sipping from a glass of water.
The slender young man in the kitchen had apparently finished his conversation. He emerged, slipping the cell phone into one pocket and, from another pocket, substituting a notebook and pen. He came straight to me.
“Gotta ask some questions,” he said. “I have your name from Mrs Stonelea as Johnny Raveen. That correct?” He was short for a cop, no bigger than me. I wondered if the force had lowered their height requirements. His black hair was neatly slicked back. His thin eyes were earnest and enquiring. He could have been working at the local bank branch, taking details of my mortgage application.
He was looking intently at his notebook, as if it were the stationery itself that was required to answer. I noticed he had the spelling wrong. It was Ravine, not Raveen. “Yeah, sounds right,” I answered. That wasn’t a lie.
“You’re not a relative of Mrs Stonelea?”
“No.”
“Mrs Stonelea asked us to call you. You’re a friend of her and her late husband?”
“Yeah. Both of them.” I walked around the room a little and looked at my watch. “When the policewoman phoned me she said it looked like someone killed Grant?”
He scribbled something, then looked at me with his lean eyes. “I don’t have further detail. There’ll be an autopsy. But my information is that a girl at the establishment, a working girl, was together in the room with him, went away and came back to find him dead.”
“Hands tied behind his back.”
“As far as I know.”
“Kinky games?” I tilted my head in a knowing fashion, but the cop was all business.
“There’ll be an autopsy. Can I have your occupation please.”
I handed the guy my card.
Father & Son Investigations
Johnny Ravine
Private Investigator
“Missing Persons a Specialty”
He looked at it and smirked. Idealistic young detectives regarded PIs like me in the same way journalism school graduates thought of PR consultants: worn-out hacks who had taken the money and done the hundred-meter dash. They didn’t know that some of their older colleagues were asking if I knew of any job vacancies.
“Ravine with an ‘i’,” he said and altered his notes. He was quick. A lot of the young ones are. “Chasing ambulances, are we?” He lowered his voice so Melissa wouldn’t hear. “You won’t have much trouble finding this missing person. He’s in the morgue.” He grinned like a hyena at his own joke, his eyes narrowing to the point where they almost disappeared.
I tried to restrain my annoyance. And I certainly wasn’t going to let on that it was actually a pleasant change to live in a country where policemen made jokes. “I’m a family friend.”
He was still smiling. “How long have you known Mr and Mrs Stonelea?”
Another leading question. BC or AD? Before the clink, or after deliverance?
It was his time behind bars that helped turn Grant into a tub-thumping, born-again Christian. Until then he had been shadier than an Amazon rainforest.
He had been notorious. Want some money laundered? Ask Grant Stonelea. A bit of dodgy share trading? Grant again. Visiting businessman requests a woman escort or two for “personal services.” Grant will fix you up. Indonesians need smuggling into Australia? Done, complete with elaborate sets of phony identification papers.
All accomplished with a slap on the back and that trademark grin. Life was a game for Grant. One victimless crime after another. So his murder had to be related to those days.
“I met Grant in Indonesia,” I answered. “In Jakarta. About a year ago.”
The interrogation was halted by a ring of the doorbell. The policewoman opened the door and let in a middle-aged man with gristly white hair and weary eyes. He was clutching one of those black, crinkled, box-like leather cases that only doctors are allowed to carry.
The two police officers held a whispered consultation with the medico in the center of the room, and then he sat beside Melissa on the sofa. He took her pulse and blood pressure, asked her some quiet questions and administered an injection.
I could do nothing more. The sedative would soon take effect. It was time to leave, before the police questions became too probing. I needed to think. They could catch up with me later.
But Melissa wasn’t asleep yet. She still had fight in her. In front of our nervous gaze she stood. Her hands were trembling, her face was taut. She walked slowly to the fireplace. On the mantelpiece was a shiny Jesus statuette, the size of my hand. I recognized it as a present to Grant from a local group of Timorese refugees. She grasped the figurine, raised it high in the air and then hurled it against the wall. We all ducked as chips of porcelain splintered about the room.
And then with a fury that seemed unreal Melissa let loose a piercing scream: “I hate you God.” The policewoman caught her as she fell.
As I slipped out the front door I thought to myself: I know how you feel, Mel. I know how you feel.
Chapter Two
A mild early-autumn breeze had changed to a sullen southerly. It was cold and gloomy, even at 6:30 in the evening.
From Grant and Melissa’s house to my apartment was just an eight-minute hobble, back down the lane, onto the Maroondah Highway and then a short cut through the smash repair’s. Actually, it wasn’t really a hobble. More a gentle swaying movement. Shrapnel does that to a foot.
Hulking green garbage bins were lined up along the footpath like rows of miniature bathing sheds, waiting for the next morning’s rubbish collection. The wind had blown a bag of food scraps from one of the bins onto the street, and a couple of stray crows were pecking at these. Under the flat glare of the streetlamps they seemed as big as hens. I paused, then made a mock lunge, but they held their ground. In the mountains of East Timor a pair of plump, sluggish birds like these would quickly become dinner for four.
What was going to happen to Melissa? I’d known her for only the year that I’d been living in Australia, but I had heard the stories. The pills, the men, the abortions, the drugs. She was as fragile as a supermodel’s ego. Only marriage to Grant held her life together.
And Grant. It occurred to me that I had been so concerned with Melissa that I had hardly thought about him.
Dead.
He had been so full of life. So on fire. The lovable larrikin. Everybody’s best mate. Mine, and Melissa’s too. Yet not with a lot of true friends.
It was Grant who smuggled me into Australia, with sixty other Indonesians, in a converted minesweeper that was meant to accommodate ten. Grant, ever hands-on, actually captained the boat himself, rather than hiring a cheap crew. We landed somewhere in a remote part of Northern Queensland - “don’t mind crocodiles, I hope, hah, hah, hah” - and when he discovered I spoke fluent English he urged me to join him in his business ventures.
I reflected on death. I had lost virtually all my friends in the mountains of East Timor, shot, napalmed and tortured by the Indonesian army death squads. They had murdered my mother, and my wife as well. Death was a constant of my life.
Now, an illegal refugee in Melbourne, I was mourning the death of my only real friend in the bondage room of a local whorehouse. I had come to Australia seeking a new life. Was it any wonder I sometimes felt dazed and confused?
* * *
My home was what the posh Southbank real estate agents would call a studio suite. But you wouldn’t get away with that in Box Hill, so it was just a one-room apartment. It was enough. A living room with a sofa and a bed, and a small kitchen that overlooked the smash repair’s. All day long I could hear the banging of the panel beating hammers, the hissing of the spray-painting hoses and the noisy arguments over price.
I unlocked the front door and went back to the dinner that I had been eating when the policewoman phoned with the news about Grant. Leftover rice didn’t taste much different from having been left on the plate for another hour.
I was nearly done when someone knocked at the door. Who was coming to my place unannounced at night? I had fewer friends than Grant and Melissa. Surely it wasn’t the police already? I took a nervous glance out the kitchen window, and was relieved to see the shuffling figure of Pastor Ron Thomas, no doubt here to talk about Grant.
The pastor was a tall, angular man of seventy or more. He reminded me of an illustration in one of the picture books the nuns used for teaching basic English back home in Dili, antique volumes from Portugal, probably recycled from Angola, via Mozambique, via Goa. It was a book of nursery rhymes.
“There was a crooked man, and he had a crooked dog.” The cartoon next to the text portrayed an elderly man, his body twisted at all angles like a contortionist. That was the image that came back every time I encountered the pastor. If you saw him standing in the distance in the mist you’d wonder if you were looking at a person or at one of those stark, denuded trees in a Sidney Nolan painting of the Australian outback.
Though of course he hadn’t been too happy when I told him he reminded me of a crooked man. In English, as in life in modern-day Melbourne, nuance is everything,
I opened the door. He nodded and then wordlessly walked in and subsided into my sofa. He was wearing a baggy blue suit, probably purchased from the local charity shop, and a thin green tie. Even seated he couldn’t keep straight. He looked at me with his shoulders slumped and his head jutting out, like an eagle on a cliff ledge surveying its territory. It seemed he might at any moment soar into the kitchen and start pecking at the remains of my rice.
“Grant; dead in a brothel,” he said in his gravely voice.
I waited.
“Not good,” he pronounced. “Not good at all.”
There were two reasons why I appreciated Pastor Thomas. The first was that he always got straight to the point.
The other reason, ironically, was that he sometimes scared me.
After I came to Australia, bored and lonely and bitter, I’d started tentatively attending church. Most of the reverends I met - even a couple of women ministers - were far too matey. They’d say “G’day” and slap you on the back and ask after your relatives, and each Sunday after church when they engaged you in small talk they always seemed to remember precisely three things about you.
Pastor Thomas wasn’t like that. He didn’t care about your relatives. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. He cared about them, but they came about number eighteen on any list of things that concerned him. Right at the top was your spiritual progress.
“Life is a journey,” he sometimes growled at me. “It’s all about your spiritual growth.”
“So where does torture by the Indonesian military fit?” I had asked him.
“Read your Bible. Look at Saint Paul. He was tortured. Didn’t do his spiritual development any harm.”
“My wife. Jacinta. They murdered her. Not to mention my mother.”
“And that’s why you hate God? Think what would have happened if you didn’t believe in God at all. You’d have gone crazy.”
“I did go crazy. After Jacinta died I shot up every Indonesian soldier I could find.”
“You’d have shot yourself if you hadn’t had God to blame.”
And so he worked on me, always keeping me off-guard, always one step ahead, always leaving me not quite sure whether it was the pastor or God Himself who was speaking to me.
Occasionally I even believed him. Often enough at least to be an irregular member of his congregation. And when Grant went to prison I asked the pastor to visit him there and counsel him. He did and won his conversion with his power and sincerity.
In technical parlance, Grant had been saved. And it really was a three-octave, multi-syllabled sa-a-a-a-a-a-ved hallelu-u-u-u-jah, just like one of those performances by the American televangelists, with flowing tears and heaps of repentance. Then, newly released from prison, and not being one to let pass a chance for the dramatic gesture, Grant had insisted on being baptized in the Yarra River, with the church choir standing on the riverbank singing Amazing Grace.
“He was a model for our church,” Pastor Thomas was saying. “He was a new man.” He paused. “I’ve just been to the house. Mel’s out cold. The doctor reckons she’ll sleep until tomorrow. The police said a private investigator named Johnny Ravine was the first to visit her, but suddenly disappeared.”
I shrugged my shoulders and waited for him to speak again.
With his twisted, tramp-like appearance, his growling voice and the long pauses he employed between sentences, Pastor Thomas sometimes appeared senile.
It was an effective disguise - whether deliberate or not I never knew - for the fact that he had graduated more than forty-five years earlier with a brilliant double degree in philosophy and theology. He had then done his doctorate at Oxford before discerning God’s call to spend thirty years in the outback ministering to the poorest of the Aboriginal communities. An experience like that either turned you into a taxi driver or gave you a burning passion for social justice, and with the pastor it was the latter. Now, well past normal retirement age, he was as fired up as a new seminary graduate.
He was supported by our small congregation, but it was known that he gave away most of his income. Once someone discovered that he had taken a temporary job as a night-cleaner - walking around local office buildings in a white uniform with a vacuum cleaner on his back - to raise funds for a group of Somali refugees.
“We all knew Grant had a past,” resumed Pastor Thomas. “But what the heck was he doing in a seedy brothel?”
Seedy? When it came to levels of seediness, Melbourne’s legal brothels were way more presentable than most local churches. In my brief stint as a private investigator I’d had occasion to visit a few. I’d seen rooms with soaring Roman columns, with indoor spa baths that could (and possibly did, at times) accommodate a football team, with lighting that could illuminate an outdoor sound and light show, with gyrating beds that might have been designed by NASA.
People kept telling me that religion in Australia was in decline. No, it was surely just that people – men, at least – had simply switched faiths. These were our new cathedrals, holy ground for the devotees of the religion of instant gratification. Who needed church?
But I didn’t tell that to the pastor.
“The police don’t seem to know,” I ventured.
“Do you think it was some kind of gang killing? What sort of gang was Grant involved with? I thought all that was behind him.”
“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
“He went to prison for smuggling Indonesians into Australia. Maybe there was a payback involved. What else was he involved with?”
What else? What wasn’t he involved with? “There was his stock market business,” I said. “That was his main interest. But I never worked out what they did.”
The pastor walked to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water, then rejoined me in the living room. “The Prophetic Edge,” he said. “That was the name of the company. He told me they developed stock market software. Stuff that tells you which stocks to buy. Not my cup of tea. But he said he gave the company away to some employees after he went to jail.”
“Who’d be out for revenge if he gave the company away?”
“He was involved with one scam after another. He told me about them all when he was in prison. Women. Smuggling. You name it. Thankfully he’d kept clear of dealing in drugs. But I do know that he had well and truly repented. Johnny, he was a new man.”
I shrugged my shoulders again. I was as much in the dark.
Pastor Thomas looked tired. His eyes moved around the room. There wasn’t much for him to see. More than two decades in the jungle had taught me the simple life. Stay ready to move on at any time. The room was virtually bare: a desk with an old computer, a television set in one corner, a couple of posters on the walls. Unlike Melissa, I had no need for ornaments.
“The press is onto it,” said the pastor. “You know how I heard about the death? The body’s still warm and I get a call from Rohan someone-or-other, a reporter at The Age. This is right up their sordid little alley. A devout new Christian, regular church attender, lovely wife, dead in a brothel. Could be a gang murder.” He raised his rangy arms high in the air, as if he were Moses - or Charlton Heston - about to be handed the Ten Commandments. “Johnny, what was he doing there?”
I wished I could say something constructive.
“Johnny, I want you to find out what happened. Papers like The Age are always trying to dig up muck on the church. Make it look like every pastor’s about to run off with the choir mistress. Or the choirboys. I know it’s the nature of the world we live in today that the church gets attacked all the time. So just keep all this low-key. But at least let’s have some answers ready when the press attacks us.”
He paused and looked me in the eyes. “You’re a...” He spread his arms like an albatross about to take off, and with bony fore and middle fingers painted imaginary quotation marks around the next words: “private detective.”
I nodded, and ignored the implied insult.
The pastor continued: “I want you to find out what really happened. We have to stop the papers from publishing anything bad. We owe it to our congregation. We’ll lose half our members if there’s a scandal. I know that Grant has been paying you a salary. I reckon the church can cough up a bit to support you until you sort out your future.”
“I don’t need the church helping me,” I said quickly. “I can easily find work.”
Actually, I wasn’t sure at all. Virtually all my assignments had come to me through Grant. They had pretty much dried up after he went to prison, but he had continued to support me. “Anyway, I don’t see that we should care what the papers print. The police will find out what happened, in their own time.”
Pastor Thomas fixed his gaze on me, and immediately I knew I had let him down. Before I could say anything more he was in sermon mode: “Johnny, I reckon you used to be a firebrand. You were a freedom fighter. Then you come to Australia and what happens? You seem to spend all your time playing on the internet and looking for your father.”
That hurt. “Everyone needs a father.”
“I know that. But you have spent I don’t know how many hours and days and weeks and months looking without the slightest bit of evidence that he is alive, or that he is Australian...”
“My mother always said he was an Australian,” I interrupted.
“There is no evidence that if he’s alive he’s in Australia,” the pastor corrected himself. “I know you would dearly love to find him. That’s why I’ve done all I can to help. God willing you will find him. But hours a day on the internet and at public libraries looking through genealogies and newspapers and phone books all over the shop won’t do it. I know all about your murdered mother and your murdered wife, but other people have deaths in the family too. Melissa for a start. After a period of grieving they get on with their lives.”
I pondered over the pastor’s words. Deep down I knew he was right. “I guess I do owe it to Mel,” I conceded.
It was at that moment that the telephone rang. It was on a low table, right next to the pastor. I answered.
“Johnny Ravine?” said a man I didn’t recognize.
“Yes.”
“Johnny Ravine, listen me good,” said the heavily accented voice. “You go away. You know?”
“What?” I blurted out. “What is this?”
“Go away,” continued the voice. “Or big killing. First Mr Grant Stonelea. And you next, Little Australian. You know? You next.”
“Who is that?” I shouted. But he had already hung up.
Pastor Thomas was eyeing me. And suddenly I knew that I had no choice.
“Yes, I’ll help you,” I said quietly. “I’ll find out what happened.”
Yes, I would find out what happened. Possibly my very life depended on it.
It all had to do with revenge.
Chapter Three
Mornings are a good time for brooding. So are afternoons. Not to mention nights. With plenty of time on my hands, and with my best friend murdered in a brothel, I was broodier than a battery hen.
I boiled some water and poured myself a cup of instant coffee. Then I lay back on my bed and gazed upwards, towards the mud-colored water stain that had been etched onto the ceiling during some long-ago downpour. I reflected that if that phone call was what it seemed to be, then Grant had gotten himself mixed up in something particularly dangerous.
Happy-go-lucky Grant. Life’s-a-big-game Grant. Let’s-see-how-many-adventures-we-can-have-today-and-not-get-caught Grant. Flirting with the deadly. And now dead.
No kinky games, according to the latest information Pastor Thomas had learned from the police. It had been a violent strangulation, possibly carried out by another client of the establishment, who had fled without trace. Someone pretty strong. Grant was a fit man, and had put up a struggle.
Yet there was no obvious motive. There’d been no attempt to steal anything from Grant. Was it a gang murder? Revenge for some past misdeed? Some kind of payback?
And, of course, the big question: why was he there?
A series of hissing noises erupted from the smash repair’s, followed by some abrasive squeaks. It sounded like a dragon chasing a possum. I looked at my watch. Pastor Thomas had demonstrated again his abilities to achieve the miraculous, by getting me the cell phone number of the girl who was with Grant just before he died. Briony was her name. She said she could fit me in for a thirty-minute interview at 1:00 pm. That was in a couple of hours.
“Just a quickie, lover,” she’d murmured in a throaty, coquettish whisper. “Don’t be late. I’ll get the Roman Room ready.”
I was in no hurry to meet her at all. It was costing me $120 - the standard rate. I didn’t have a credit card and I didn’t usually have that kind of ready cash at hand. I could hardly ask the pastor to pay for a brothel visit out of church funds, so I had little choice but to borrow it from my swag.
More than twenty years as a guerrilla fighter had taught me that life was little more than a series of near misses and lucky escapes. He who hesitated was dog fodder. Always keep a few basic supplies at hand. So under my bed was a small leather rucksack I called my swag, containing the documents that Grant had somehow procured for me - passport, driver’s license, Medicare card and the other lucky charms that were needed for life in this country - together with a dagger and cash.
Briony worked at La Rue, one of many licensed brothels in Melbourne and sometimes said to be the grandest. I’d never been there, though I recalled a recent visit to a similar establishment. A lawyer from Mildura had phoned and asked me to look for the two daughters of one of his clients - a well-respected dairy farmer - who were alleged to be working at a particular business in North Carlton.
I quickly located them there, two bulky young ladies named Bronwyn and Sally. Issued with red and purple negligee they had been magically transformed into busty belles called Amber and Jade, catering for aging libidos from a society that flaunts youth.
They were having the times of their lives, making big money, and not minding the rough treatment, which was pretty similar to what they got at home. They resented my appearance, and told me so in spicy cow-paddock language, but at least I could report back home that they were in good shape.
It wasn’t the sort of work I envisaged doing when I came to Melbourne, but somehow I was quite good at it. It was all Grant’s idea. “Your background in ‘bodyguard and security services,’ nudge, nudge, wink, wink” - arm around my shoulder - “and you’re looking for your father. Let’s set you up as a private investigator. ‘Missing persons a specialty.’”
He’d arranged a room for me in the Box Hill office building where he ran a couple of his other businesses, posted a sign on the door, and said he’d see me right. He’d even somehow obtained the necessary papers, verifying that I’d done all the required training, to get me through the police check and licensed by the Private Agents Registry.
He procured assignments through various solicitor mates. I served court orders and divorce notices and I located missing persons. Often it was no more difficult than running a search on a CD-ROM directory. It was fifteen minutes work. He even knew a couple of PIs who sometimes sub-contracted to me some tail jobs for insurance companies.
But it had all pretty much dried up with Grant’s imprisonment. He abandoned his contacts with shady solicitors, and suddenly my work went AWOL. I checked the office mail and answering machine every day or so, but it was a forlorn task. Fortunately, Grant was always bubbling over with ideas. He planned a new import-export business with Indonesia, and he put me on salary as translator and office manager.
And now, three months after his release, he was dead.
I took a long swig of coffee. It was far too sweet. Sugar was cheap and plentiful in Australia, and I invariably put in too much. Perhaps the pastor was right: I was losing my fire. Becoming soft. But wasn’t that why I came to Australia – to flee my wild life?
I moved to the desk and booted up my computer. Like just about everything else I owned it was a Grant hand-me-down. Windows 95, an antique 140-megabyte hard drive and software that could detect any computer virus created before 2006. But sufficient for me.
I logged onto the internet. Time to search anew for my father.
Who was I kidding? I wasn’t even sure about his name. It was only shortly before my mother died, when I was fourteen, that I started asking her about him, and even she didn’t know much. He was an Australian, she said, called John. John Ravine, or something like that. Hence the name I had given myself. But perhaps it was Raven. Or Rabin, or Levin, or Levine. (Was I part Jewish?) She thought he looked around twenty when they met. Or maybe twenty-five. Perhaps older.
He was tall. Yes, but any Australian man would seem tall to my mother. And he was so handsome and charming. And there wasn’t much more she could tell me.
Since arriving in Australia I had spent months at the State Library in the city. I had sought out old newspapers to try to find reports of Australians in East Timor. I had looked through old telephone directories to find names similar to my own. I had phoned or written to just about everyone in Australia with a name like mine.
I got dozens of sympathetic replies, not one of which led me to believe I was any nearer to an answer. One old lady replied from Brisbane that she felt sure she was my mother. An elderly couple in Perth offered to adopt me. Several families told me to come and visit any time.
Now I stared into the computer screen and clicked onto the Mormons’ huge FamilySearch.org site. Four hundred million names. Surely my dad’s ancestors were among them.
I typed in my name, and was directed to John Ravin, christened at St Bride Church in Fleet Street, London, in 1623, and to John Raven, christened at Saint Martin in the Fields Church in London in 1841. Then to Jean Rabin of Meuse, France, to Juan Labin of Santander, Spain, and to Juan Lavin of Cuba. The possibilities were endless. I’d been there many times before. Why did I persist?
And then I glanced - as usually seemed to happen - at the photo of Jacinta, in a cheap plastic frame next to the computer. This was the plump girl with the sad smile I had loved with all my heart. The girl with flowing black hair and a mole at the back of her neck. I’d called her my little goldfish. Jacinta. We were only together for three months. We’d gotten married just a few weeks after we met. When you’re on active service you don’t waste time.
And I entered brood mode once more. Jacinta. Why did I leave you at that farmhouse? Why couldn’t I have saved you?
Somehow I had expected my move to Australia to mark a major change. A step forward. At the very least I assumed I would find my father.
But instead I found myself spending half my life in gloomy contemplation. I missed the passion and intensity of survival in the mountains. The commitment. The sense of purpose. Life in Australia was far too easy. Maybe Grant’s death was, in some twisted way, for the best. I’d be forced to fend for myself more. That could be a challenge.
* * *
The cream-colored Datsun Bluebird - another gift from Grant - started on the third attempt. In moderate lunch-hour traffic I drove slowly past the Chinese takeaways on Station Street, then into the Maroondah Highway and towards South Melbourne, to La Rue.
I swerved to avoid a postman in a bright yellow uniform who abruptly drove his motorcycle into my path, and then I banged my fist on the radio to get it working. As I drove down Cotham Road and past the St George public hospital I listened to the 3AW news.
A house fire had injured an elderly lady in Footscray, a rottweiler had mauled a toddler in Kilsyth and researchers in Brisbane had announced the discovery of a new herbal diet preparation. Australians were among the healthiest people I had ever met, living in the safest environment imaginable. It was a mystery why they allowed their media to torture them ceaselessly about their security, when around the world so much real evil existed. It sometimes seemed that, for Australians, evil was represented by a jellyfish sting at the beach.
I envied them.
La Rue held court in a narrow street of office buildings, next to a small publishing house and right around the corner from the South Melbourne shopping center. I parked at the local supermarket and then walked back past a fruit shop and a Turkish café, pursued by the pungent, fruity fragrance of fresh Turkish bread. Then I paused outside the publisher’s and pretended to examine the row of business books in the display window. The street was empty.
I looked at La Rue. It was a large, grey, ferro-concrete building pierced with a line of tiny oblong windows that somehow resembled gun emplacements. A tall wooden door with a giant ring-handle, like the entrance to an Italian cathedral, provided the only decorative touch. But little indicated the nature of the premises. The name La Rue was in black Times New Roman on a shiny bronze plaque. If it were not for the sign under the plaque, restricting admission to those aged over eighteen, you could easily enter expecting to find the Melbourne headquarters of some elite European corporation.
I reflected on the brilliance of the local state government. It had concocted an amazing solution to the perpetual riddle of human sinfulness: abolish it. With brothels in the state legal, prostitutes were no longer fallen women. The Baptists and the Salvos were out of a job. Prostitution became another career option.
And yet, somehow, it was not an option that school careers’ advisers placed before teenage girls, or one that parents cared to recommend to their daughters.
I recalled one of the pastor’s sermons. “Take a bully who’s trying to ride roughshod over you. If you do the same to him he’ll start screaming blue murder about what’s right and wrong. He knows the difference. He’s got a conscience, that’s why. He may not display it in his actions, but in his heart he knows. God has given everyone a conscience. In their hearts, people know what’s right and what’s wrong.”
I pushed at the door, half-expecting it to creak and groan. But despite its bulk it swung smoothly open. Inside was a tiny, carpeted lobby, with a couple of simple grey chairs and a reception desk enclosed in glass, just like in the cinema. A tanned, middle-aged lady with wavy blonde hair and a pointed chin sat behind the glass. As I entered she raised her eyebrows and flashed a smile.
But before she could speak, a door beside the reception desk opened and a tall, skinny man emerged. He was wearing thick-lensed glasses, and he was staring straight at me. His light brown hair was flecked with grey, and his eyes looked like blue marbles. He was dressed in rumpled brown trousers and a dark, tartan sweater.
“Johnny Ravine,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulder and pulling me towards him with considerable strength. “This is good timing. Mate, I want a word. Let’s step outside for a moment.”
With one leg weaker than the other I found myself off-balance. I shifted my weight to my good leg and braced. I was now in a position to elbow him in the jaw if necessary, and then smash his head into the receptionist’s glass panel. I recalled the threatening phone call of two days earlier. But this guy was an Aussie. His deep voice was nothing like the phone caller’s.
In any case, if I was going to have to hit him I could do it better outside than in the confined space of the lobby. I let him guide me back out through the doorway.
On the footpath he pulled a card from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. “Rohan Gillbit from The Age,” he intoned. “At your service, m’lud. I’d reckon you’re here for the same purpose as me.”
I looked at him carefully. He had the lean, pimply, emaciated look of someone who subsisted on a diet of sprouts and late-night television.
“What purpose is that?”
“Your compadré Grant. Not good. Church member and all that. Strangled in a whorehouse. This particular whorehouse to be precise. You must be pretty shocked.” His eyes were gleaming. He looked happy. I recalled Pastor Thomas’s words that he had learned of Grant’s death from an Age journalist.
“How do you know who I am?”
“I’m a journo. It’s my job. The police told me about you. Who did you reckon?”
The police had been round the previous day. Homicide squad. Young guys who were very professional and weren’t out to make trouble. They asked lots of questions but didn’t query whether I was a legal immigrant.
“You get on well with the police.”
“Like I said, I’m a journo. You must be a bit shaken up by all this?”
In East Timor we regarded all journalists as spies. They were spies for us or spies for the enemy. It was that simple. But here in Australia I wasn’t so sure. I’d had no experience with newspaper people. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Same as you. Coming to see the scene of the crime. Meet the main witness.”
“What did she have to tell you?”
“Not a lot. Not a lot. Look, I know your time’s tight. She said she was giving you half an hour. The same as she gave me. Just a quickie. Give me your phone number and I reckon we need to have a chat.”
I paused. There was no reason to withhold my phone number. But more than twenty years of guerrilla fighting had taught me not to give away the initiative. “I’ve got your card,” I said. “I’ll contact you.”
He gave a breezy shrug. “Suit yourself. I reckon you might want to talk. Like, about Grant. Maybe about the Dili Tigers of Truth as well.”
I froze. What was going on? How could an Australian journalist know about the Tigers? “What about them?” I demanded.
But already Rohan was walking away. With his back to me he gave a cheery wave. Should I follow? No, he had given me his card. I needed to meet Briony. I walked back inside.
Chapter Four
Back in the lobby the receptionist gave the same raised-eyebrow smile of greeting, as if she had flung a switch that controlled her facial muscles. But this time she added some words. “The Roman Room. Down the end of the corridor on the left. Briony’s waiting for you, Johnny.”
My first visit to Melbourne’s most famous brothel, and everyone I met knew who I was.
I slipped over the fee, then opened the same door that Rohan had emerged from, and found myself in a much larger reception lounge, with a plush green carpet and pale pink walls adorned with nineteenth-century French art prints of ladies in their underwear. The place was empty. A faint musk smell permeated the air. In one corner was a small bar, with a line of spirit bottles hanging upside down. Half-a-dozen armchairs and some bar stools were arranged in groups. Frank Sinatra crooned from surround-sound speakers.
How different from the dark-alley bars of Kramat Tunggak in Jakarta. There you seldom felt anything but dirty as you tried to enjoy a furtive coupling with a frightened teenage girl - probably sold to the establishment by her parents - to the din of barking dogs and the smell of the street vendors’ grilled satay chicken. By contrast, this place was almost sanitized.
Leading off from La Rue’s bar was a long corridor. I walked down it, past more nudie art prints and several closed doors, each with a name painted in bright, flowery writing: New Orleans Room, Madame Trousseau’s House of Bondage, Paper Moon, The Can-Cantina.
Near the end of the corridor a door was open, and right inside the doorway a lady was standing. She smiled at me.
“What’s cookin’ good lookin’?” she asked in a raspy voice.
I paused and looked at her. She was of medium height, which meant a little taller than me, and with a hard angular body which made her look like a triathlon competitor. Her tanned face was dotted with freckles. Little lines were appearing around her mouth and her blue eyes. She did not have on a trace of make-up. Yet she was fearsomely beautiful. Back in Jakarta she’d be reserved for the police chiefs and top military officers.
She wasn’t young: probably in her mid-thirties, like Melissa. Only the smart ones lasted that long, the ones who stayed off drugs, cared for their bodies and knew how to manage their money.
She was wearing a blue denim skirt that showed a muscular pair of legs, and a tight white blouse with lacy frills on the front. Her long, wavy, honey-colored hair seemed to reflect the light. I thought that she would look equally good on my towel at the beach or on my arm at the opera.
“Are you Briony?” I asked.
“Yep. Are you Johnny?”
I nodded.
“Briony and Johnny. We’ll get along good.” She looked me straight in the eye as she spoke. Her hoarse laugh was almost a cackle.
“Entrez pardner,” she said, as she made way for me. I walked inside, and she closed and bolted the door behind me.
My eyes quickly took in the scene. The place was surprisingly small, not a lot larger than my living room. Much of it was occupied with a giant four-poster bed, covered in a bright red cotton spread. A couple of fake columns against the near wall framed a mural of raven-haired nubile beauties dressed in see-through togas. They were cavorting around an apple tree. A blue-upholstered armchair, a small bar fridge and a dressing table with a giant mirror were against the side wall. Colored lights created an effect like a high school disco.
“Pay for an hour and you get the real Roman Room,” said Briony. “With the spa pool.” She sat with delicacy on the bed, her legs crossed and an expectant look on her face, as if she were about to take dictation. “Wow, look at that tan,” she said. “Which beach have you been lying on?”
“I’m from East Timor. Next to Indonesia.”
“Book me to Bali. Are they all hunks like you?”
I eased into the armchair. “Briony, I’ve come about...”
“I know why you’ve come, lover. How do you want it?”
“I’ve come about Grant.”
“Just teasing. Sad isn’t it? Such a good man. Killed. In the other room.” She pointed next door with one thumb. “Do you want to see the bondage room? Whips. Manacles. The lot. That’s where he was. On the ground. Like this.”
She lay back on the bed, thrust her arms behind her back and flung her head back. She opened her mouth wide and rolled her eyes. Then she giggled and sat back up on the bed. “Do I give good corpse?”
“You should see a talent agent.”
“But honey,” she drawled in a kind of Mae West style. “I see them all the time.” She crossed her legs again in a deliberate movement, and raised her eyebrows in a “who wants to know” gesture. “He gave me a Bible. Not every customer does that.”
“Grant did? He was a customer?”
She smiled. “He was a man of many talents. Customer? Bible teacher? Whatever. They ripped out a page from the Bible and stuck it in his mouth. Is that what you call blasphemy?”
The refrigerator was next to my chair. I opened it and pulled out a bottle of mineral water. “Tell me...”
“It was a page from the Old Testament,” interrupted Briony. “About an eye for an eye. Revenge. The police have taken the Bible away. Forensic.” She tapped the side of her nose to emphasize that she had said something weighty. Then she realized that I was looking for a bottle opener. She sprang off the bed, took my bottle and uncapped it on an opener attached to the dressing table.
She sat back on the bed. “I know the Bible. I read it a lot. But I’m not a Christian. I’m spiritual. My Uncle Tony in Albury was a Christian. He was always praying. When his fishing dinghy sank he prayed that Jesus would help him find a new one. He told me once he was praying for my salvation. I said Jesus was too busy finding him a new dinghy to have time for me.”
I took a slow swig of the water. My task was difficult. The girl was doing all she could to control the conversation. How easy it would have been in East Timor. A revolver or knife held to the throat was sufficient to loosen the tongues of all but the most hardened.
“You want to know about my religion?” she said. “I work on Christmas and Easter. That’s when we get really busy. Lonely men at Christmas and bored men at Easter. And the other way round. But I always take a holiday on Anzac Day. That’s a sacred day. I don’t let any man touch me. Even returned servicemen.” She giggled again. “You’re from Indonesia. Do you know about Anzac Day?”
“It’s the Australian war memorial day. One of the most important days in Australia.”
“Full marks to the competitor from Indonesia. Still hasn’t used his lifeline. And for ten thousand dollars, your next question…”
“Do you make fun of all your clients like this Briony?” I asked her softly. “Stuff them about? Keep them off guard? Stop them asking questions? Generally make them…?”
Her face turned hard, as if it had suddenly been snap-frozen. “Oh, yes, you’re a client,” she interrupted. “I forgot. The client who doesn’t try to touch me. The client who looks harder at his mineral water than he does at me.”
I was silent for a time, then I spoke slowly. “Briony, I’ve done things to girls like you that I can’t even talk about. You don’t want me touching you.”
“Sounds exciting.”
But I knew the initiative was mine. “When Grant was here why did he want the bondage room?”
“He didn’t care which room we used. That’s all that was available. Are you married?”
I shook my head.
“Gay?”
“No. My wife died.”
“Lonely, huh?”
“Sometimes.” I pulled out my card and gave it to her. She examined it.
“‘Father and Son Investigations.’ Are you the father or the son?”
“That man who was in here just before me. What did he want?”
“What do all men want?”
“You know what I mean. Didn’t he come here for something special?”
“Of course he did. Whenever men want something special they come to me.” She unleashed her throaty laugh.
“He’s a journalist. He was here for a story, wasn’t he?”
“Let’s say that he’ll have fun trying to justify his expenses.”
“Have the police said anything about how Grant was killed?”
“Lots of policemen. Lots of questions.”
“Briony. You’re making me pay for this visit. You said you’re just giving me thirty minutes. I need you to answer a few questions.”
“Just answer a few questions for the nice gentleman,” she mimicked. “The nice gentleman whose wife’s dead but who still doesn’t even try to touch me.”
“I’ll tell you something, Briony. My mother worked in a place like this.”
That did the trick. She had no response.
“She got raped and killed by Indonesian soldiers when they invaded East Timor. When I was fourteen.”
She was mute for a little while. I waited. “My best friend Melanie got killed by a client,” she said at last. “At another place, where I used to work. He drowned her in the spa bath. Then he told the police he was drunk and didn’t remember what had happened. He said it was all an accident. That both of them were having too much fun. He didn’t even get charged. But I know he murdered her.” She paused. “The police just said that someone strangled Grant when I went away from the room.”
“Why did you go away from the room? Is that normal with customers?”
“He wasn’t a customer,” she said softly.
“So why did he come here? You knew him from before, didn’t you? He used to be mixed up in owning places like this.”
“He wanted me to forgive him.”
“Forgive him?” That wasn’t an answer I expected. “What on earth for? What had he done to you?”
“He said he’d used me. When I worked for him. He used to be one of the owners of this place. And now he was a Christian he wanted me to forgive him. And he wanted to talk. Some men want that.”
“Talk about what?”
“He told me he was a changed man. He wanted to talk to me about that. And about the Bible.”
“Did he pay the usual fee to come here?
“Doesn’t everyone?” Then her old nature returned. She giggled. “How is Mrs Melissa Stonelea?” She injected as much haughtiness as possible into the name. “Mrs High-and-Mighty. How’s she feeling now that her husband’s been killed? In La Rue.”