Dark Summer (11 page)

“It's part of the perks,” said Malone coolly, while beside him he could feel Clements shifting like a water buffalo getting ready to charge. “So you're on the dole?”

“No, I'm living on capital. I'm independent, I don't believe in the welfare state.”

“Does Tuesday contribute towards your independence?”

Lugos finished his Coke, pushed the glass away from him and sat back. Above his head was a poster inviting you to the Greek isles; they belonged to the past, which is becoming increasingly like everyone's idea of heaven. But Lugos didn't belong there, he belonged here in Sydney, in the present of the quick buck for sex and anything else that could be traded. Malone decided that he would check as soon as they got back to Homicide on whether Lugos had a record. Whether he had one or not, he was not an honest citizen, independent or otherwise.

“Look, what's the point of all this? Are you trying to pick me up for pimping? No way, mate. I'm just a friend of Tuesday's and that's all.”

“Were you a friend of Mrs. Kissen's?” said Clements, voice thick with iced coffee and suppressed anger. “You offer her protection or anything?”

Lugos succeeded in looking bored; he ran the hand with the gold manacle over his thick hair.
“
Look, you're wasting your time. I know nothing and I got nothing to hide. Now excuse me, I gotta go.”

“Just another question or two,” said Malone. “Do you supply Tuesday and Ava with heroin?”

Lugos looked at him with feigned amusement; but his acting wasn't quite good enough. “You don't expect me to answer that, do you?”

“You just have.”

The feigned amusement turned to real anger; abruptly he said, “Get stuffed!”

He slid out of the booth, but he was a little slow; Clements stood on his instep as he, too, got up. “Geez, I'm sorry. My feet are always getting me into trouble.”

Lugos winced and his face darkened; he kept his temper, but only just. “What's next? Your fist gunna slip into my face?”

“We're subtler than that,” said Malone. “We'd like your home address.”

“You can always find me here. That's my uncle, the owner.”

“Some time, we might like to see you in private. If we had to arrest you, you wouldn't want us to do it in public, would you?”

“Arrest me? What for?” Lugos' voice cracked.

“Murder. How'd you like that one?” It was bluff, but that is not a legal offence.

“You're fucking crazy!” Then Lugos became aware that the crowded café was an interested audience. In the next booth were four rock musicians; they turned their dark glasses towards Lugos and the two detectives, like four fake blind men who'd heard coins rolling down the aisle. Lugos dropped his voice and gave an address, a block of flats at the southern end of the beach. “I tell you, you're picking on me because I'm a wog, right? You're all the fucking same—”

“Try your luck with the Discrimination Board,” said Malone. “Here's my card.”

Lugos snatched the card, turned abruptly and went limping up through the café and out into the bright glare of the street. Clements looked at the black stare of the four pairs of dark glasses.

“Who's your lead singer? A seeing-eye dog?”

He was in a mood to wreck the place. He followed Malone out of the café in time to see Lugos
get
into a bright red Porsche and screech away from the kerb.

“You think he might drive off a cliff?” said Clements hopefully.

3

I

THE KELLER
flat was the upper half of a two-storeyed Edwardian house in Glebe. The area had once been called The Glebe: a year after the establishment of the colony of Sydney four hundred acres of harbourside land had been granted to a clergyman as part of his benefice. Now it was mostly populated by academics and students from the nearby university, a godless lot; long neglected and run-down, it had over the past twenty years become gentrified. Its narrow main street was lined with tiny art galleries, bookshops, health stores and cafés where it was possible to order everything but a good old Aussie pie or sausage roll. The locals sat in the cafés and discussed the latest Almodovar or Bertolucci film, then donned dark glasses and turned up their coat collars and drove out to the suburbs to see fluff like
Pretty Woman.
It took courage, or to have been born there, to be a low-brow in Glebe.

The Kellers' street was pleasant and tree-lined. The house was decorated with ornate brickwork and iron lace; a jacaranda stood to one side, a green carport for Romy's Toyota. The front lawn was neatly trimmed and hydrangeas were a purple wave breaking against the base of the house.

“I look after the garden,” said Peter Keller. “The owner thinks grass cuts itself. Knows nothing of Nature, doesn't care.”

“He teaches history at Sydney,” said Romy from the kitchen doorway.

“An associate professor of Australian history,” said Keller. “A joke. How much history has Australia had?”

“More than enough for me,” said Clements, wondering if the older man had a sense of humour but doubting it. “I never got better than fifty per cent in exams in history.”

“I wanted to go to university to study history, but I never had the opportunity.” Keller's English
was
good but stilted; which was surprising, since he had told Clements he had first learned it from US Occupation troops in Germany after World War Two. He never used any of the slang, no matter how dated, that Clements had expected. “I was very happy when Romy went to university. Even though it was here in Sydney.” He made it sound as if she had studied in Addis Ababa.

Clements, a generous man, had brought lobster and king prawns and Romy was preparing them and a salad while he and her father sat in the high-ceilinged living room and drank German pilsner. The walls were decorated with steel engravings of nineteenth-century villages and landscapes, with operatic clouds boiling up in the grey skies and giving the impression that if a gramophone needle were applied to the scratchings, a Wagnerian piece would boom out. The furniture was heavy and dark and seemed to be sprouting wooden grapes at every corner. There was no wall-to-wall carpet, but a huge thick rug was laid on polished floorboards, a rug decorated with a lush pastoral scene; Clements' heel rested in the ample navel of a dryad. The Kellers had brought all their furniture with them when they had emigrated to Australia ten years ago and it seemed that Romy had had no opportunity to add any decorative notes of her own. Unless she, too, was homesick for Bavaria.

“It was Romy's mother's idea we should come to Australia. She was Austrian, not German, from the Tyrol. She wanted sunshine all the time. She went once to Spain for a holiday and fell in love with sunshine. She read about Australia, sunshine all the time, so we came. She died two years after we got here. Heat stroke.” He said it without irony or bitterness. Clements didn't know how to respond, so sat silent. “I wanted to go back to Germany, but Romy was at university, she insisted we stay. I was cursed with strong-willed women.”

“Aren't we all?” said Clements, who had managed to avoid them all his life but felt he had to say something.

Keller didn't smile: Clements could only imagine that Romy had inherited
her
sense of humour from her mother. “Do you like women?”

“Yes.” Clements saw, through the kitchen doorway, that Romy had paused to listen to his answer. Then she smiled and went back to slicing a red pepper into the salad.

“
What do you feel when you have to arrest a woman for a crime?”

Out of the corner of his eye Clements saw that Romy had paused again; he took his time before saying, “I don't enjoy it. How did you feel?”

Keller, too, took his time, “I once arrested a woman who killed her three children. I did not sleep for three nights.” He abruptly stood up. “I think it is time to eat.”

The dining table was at the end of the big living room. Keller opened a bottle of German Riesling, which Clements found too sweet for his taste but at which he smacked his lips and nodded in approval. “Romy tells me you are working together on two murders?”

“Father, do we have to talk shop at dinner?”

“Do you mind talking shop, Sergeant?”

“Not so long as we don't go into details,” said Clements, mouth full of lobster, memory full of dead humans. “And call me Russ, I'm off-duty.”

“I grew up talking shop, as you call it. I was ten years old when the war,
our
war, ended. Too young to be in the Hitler Youth, thank God.” It came out as
Gott,
as if his tongue had slipped back all those years. His voice had a defensive note to it, but Clements wasn't sure if he had picked it correctly; Keller had his head bent over his plate, “I ran messages for the Americans. I was born in Garmisch- Partenkirchen and we were in the American Occupation zone.”

He had told all this to Clements before; but those years were a blank in history's pages for the Australian. He had been born in the Dark Ages, the late 1940s, and nobody he knew, not even his parents in the country, ever seemed to talk about those years.

“I ran messages mostly for an MP, a military policeman. He came from Chicago, he had been a police sergeant before the war. He knew all the gangsters, Al Capone, all of them. I wanted to be a policeman from the day I met Sergeant Lemke. But I never met any gangsters.” He looked up and smiled, the first time he had smiled all evening. “Just ordinary people.”

Clements wondered how ordinary the woman had been who had murdered her three children.

“Who do you think committed the murders you are investigating? Ordinary people or
gangsters?”

Clements drank some of the too-fruity wine. “I dunno. I don't think it was an ordinary person.”

“The lab has established it was alcuronium chloride,” said Romy. “I was going to tell you officially tomorrow.”

“What's that?” said her father.

“An artificial derivative of curare.”

“Very clever. Or are you looking for an Amazonian Indian who has emigrated to Australia?” Keller smiled again. “You see? I know where it comes from. They use a blowpipe to shoot darts—” He pursed his lips and blew out. “I saw it in a movie. We learn so much about killing from movies and television. Sometimes I think film directors are frustrated murderers.”

“Perhaps it has to do with working with actors.” Romy also smiled, all at once looking like her father's daughter, a resemblance Clements had not noticed up till now.

“We had a poison murder once in Starnheim,” said Keller.

Clements looked enquiringly at Romy, who said, “That was where I was born, where we lived. It's not far from München. Munich,” she translated for his benefit. “It had about twenty thousand people in it when we left. It was famous for its brewery and that was about all. Oh, we had our share of zealous Nazis. My grandfather was one.” She appeared to have to concentrate all her attention on drawing the sweet meat out of a lobster claw.

“This is not the time to discuss such things.” Keller's voice was abrupt, harsh, quashing what was obviously a taboo subject; Clements wondered why Romy had raised it. Keller, after a moment's awkward silence, went on, the harshness only slowly dying out of his voice: “Our poison murder baffled us for months. The man died of what the local doctor said was cerebral haemorrhage. In Starnheim we did not have coroner's doctors as smart as Romy.” He smiled at her, forgiving her for mentioning Nazis. “Months afterwards, we dug up the body and found the man had died of strychnine poisoning. We suspected the wife all along, but the doctor did not support our case, he insisted the husband had died from cerebral haemorrhage. The wife left Starnheim and went to live in München. Then we found out
that
the doctor, the coroner's doctor, was visiting her every weekend. After that . . .” He raised his wine glass. “I was just a uniformed policeman, but I solved that one. I became a detective for a while, an unofficial one.”

“What happened to the wife and the doctor?”

“The wife went to jail and the doctor, unfortunately, committed suicide. He was charged, but acquitted. But, of course, he confessed by committing suicide. It is very satisfying, to solve a crime. You must be pleased when that happens?”

“If the solution is the right one, yes,” said Clements, thinking of cases where he and Malone had settled for second best. “Are you pleased, Romy, when you help us solve a case?”

She surprised him: “I really don't care one way or the other. Are you ready for dessert?”

When dinner was finished Keller rose from the table, excused himself almost formally and went off to work, changing into his spotless white overalls before he left, “I am on late shift tonight. Don't wait up for me, Romy.”

She went to the front door with him, kissed him, then came back into the living room. “He's not happy here, he's homesick. Bavarians, more than most Germans, get that way.”

“Are you homesick?”

“No,” She began to clear the table, Clements helping her carry the dishes out to the kitchen. “I'm like Mother, I love the sunshine.”

“But—?” Clements could be clumsy in his relationships, but sometimes he read women better than the women themselves suspected. Twenty-three years of listening to lies, excuses and threats, the lot of a cop, does not necessarily turn an eardrum to rubber.

Romy looked at him curiously, as if with new interest; she was still getting to know him, attracted to him though still undecided why. “You think there is something else? Yes, there is,” she added after a moment, “I wouldn't go back to Germany because I'm not sure how Father would fit into the new Germany, now it's been reunified. He hates Communism, he thought Reagan was the real Pope. He was never a Nazi, because by the time he'd grown up there was no Nazi party. When he talks about my
grandfather,
which is rarely, he never condemns him. He says that both Hitler and my grandfather were right in what they believed.”