Pride's Harvest (29 page)

“Ida, who's the pretty girl with Wally Mungle?” He now recognized that she was the girl he had seen this afternoon at the racecourse. “You know him, don't you?”

“Of course.” He should have known that: everyone in Collamundra would know the only Abo cop. “That's his wife Ruby.”

“How would Mrs. Nothling know her? Is she chairwoman of some welfare committee for the blacks?”

Ida laughed. “Old Chess Hardstaff would never allow that. There is a welfare committee for them—but
he's
boss of that. Not that it ever seems to do much for them. No, Ruby grew up out at Noongulli station. Her mother was the Hardstaffs' cook.”

“Where's the mother now?”

“
Dead, I think. Chess has a white housekeeper now. Why?”

“Nothing.”

“He's just interested in pretty girls, any colour,” said Lisa, and she and Malone danced on. “What was that all about? You don't have to tell Ida.”

“But I have to tell you?”

“Please yourself. But you said the other night the case was going round in circles.”

The music had slowed: the band was playing a golden oldie, “Memories Are Made Of This.” Malone looked across the drifting dancers, some young, some middle-aged, some elderly, all of them giving themselves up to the sentiment of the song. Even the band's drummer, a stick-thin young man with a bald scalp and long hair hanging from the sides of his head as if to protect his ears, looked as if he had just discovered that nostalgia wasn't as hard to bear as he had thought. Malone wondered who he was, one of the Five Drovers or Their Dog; he looked more like the latter, a human anorexic basset-hound. Even the band's name had a touch of nostalgia to it, though of course it should have been Five Dogs and Their Drover.

“This is beginning to look like one of those old Cecil B. De Mille movies we sometimes see on Bill Collins's TV programme. With a Cast of Thousands.”

“And who are you? The Hero, that actor with the rock face? Henry Wilcock?”

“Wilcoxon,” he said with his pedantic memory for names. “No, I'm the poor bugger running around picking up the camel dung. Akim Tamiroff.”

“That's all you've got so far? Camel dung?”

“There's a more local word for it.”

“Keep it to yourself.” She pressed herself against him, imprinting her faith in him. “It'll all come together in the end. I don't know anyone who knows more about camel dung than you do.”

“Thanks.” He kissed her on the lips, right out there in the open.

She opened her mouth and he could feel her tongue forcing his lips apart. Then she gurgled with laughter and drew back. “You wanna go out in the scrub, sailor?”

He
laughed, holding her to him; she was a tonic, his very own Medicare. “When we get back to Sydney, we're going to bed for a week.”

“What'll we do with the kids?”

“I'll charge „em with something and get them remanded to reform school.”

The dance finished and they stepped down off the floor and walked into the hall to the drinks' table. Wally Mungle and his wife were standing there, each holding a soft drink, both still looking as if not sure that they should have come. Malone introduced himself and Lisa to Ruby Mungle, got himself a glass of red wine and some cheddar and, leaving Lisa with Ruby, eased Wally Mungle outside again. They stood at the corner of the hall watching the young men, at least half of them now staggering-drunk, wrestling with each other like young dehorned bulls. Some were rolling in the dust, locked together, and their girlfriends, many of them flushed with drink, were urging them on.

“We get as pissed as that,” said Mungle, “and they lock us up. For our own good, they say.”

“Why'd you come tonight, Wally?”

“Ruby insisted. She made that dress she's wearing special for the occasion, she said she wasn't gunna waste it.”

“Did you come to last year's ball?”

“No.” He sipped his Coke. “We didn't pick the best night to start, did we? But, like I said, Ruby insisted. She said she's a policeman's wife, not some gin from out at the settlement.”

“She said that?”

“Well, no. Not
gin.
But sometimes . . .” His voice trailed off.

When you're halfway between, most of the time you got nothing but quicksand to stand
on . . . “I understand she grew up out on Noongulli station?”

“Yeah.” Mungle gave him a sharp glance, but didn't ask how he knew. “She was sixteen before she had to move into town and live in the settlement.”

“Who made her do that?”

“Her mother died and Chess Hardstaff brought in the housekeeper he's got now, Dorothy
Pijade.
She's Yugoslav, she doesn't understand blacks, she says. Why they don't work, get their own business, be successful.”

“What does she think of you?”

“Oh, I'm okay. I'm a policeman, that's successful. She even has time for Ruby now. But not back then, not when she asked Chess Hardstaff to sack her.”

“And Chess did?”

Mungle nodded. “Ruby will never talk about it, so I don't press it. I've never been much good at understanding women.”

“Who is?”

They stood there, the Koori and the white man, self-pitying in their ignorance of women. Malone looked across the wrestling youths, through the mist of the dust rising from around them, and saw two young girls, cold sober, standing gazing at the drunken, roistering brawl, their faces frozen in a mixture of puzzlement, sadness and a bleak hopelessness, gins in the white settlement. Somewhere in the tangle of drunks were their future husbands.

He felt his own sadness, for them. Then he snapped himself out of it; they would survive and so would the drunks. This district, rich as it was but still hard on the men who worked it, had not been built by hopeless louts.

He changed the subject: “Where's Curly tonight?”

“He's riding herd on the Japs, wherever they are.”

“They're out at Noongulli.”

“Then Curly is probably sitting out on the main road in his car, listening to one of the country- and-western sessions.”

“On his own?”

“He thought he'd better do it himself in case some of those galahs . . .” He nodded at the youths who had finished their wrestling and were now sitting in the dust, grinning like gargoyles at each other and yelling at their girls to get more beers; the white gins ran off to do what they had been told.
Malone,
for the first time, noticed that neither young Phil Chakiros nor any of his mates were here at the ball. “They might get it into their heads to go out and start something.”

“That's not a detective's job.”

“Inspector—” Mungle looked at him as if he were a raw recruit. “Out here you do whatever has to be done. All the uniformed guys are in town waiting for the Kooris to come in from the settlement to start a riot.”

“Are they going to?”

Mungle shook his head, finished his Coke. “This afternoon scared the shit outa them. My mum told me they didn't really know what they were getting themselves into.”

“What about the two city Kooris they've got locked up?”

“Fuck „em!” He said it quietly but with as much venom as any white racist might have. “We'll solve our own problems. It's the only way. They think different to us.”

Then Lisa and Ruby Mungle came out of the hall as the band struck up again. As they did so, Malone saw a light-coloured Mercedes draw up beside the parked cars at the side of the hall. Narelle Potter got out, followed by a tall, good-looking man in a dinner jacket. They walked by Malone and the others without looking at them and stepped up on to the dance floor and moved into each other's arms.

“Who's the man?” Malone said.

Mungle grinned. “Bert Truman, the district playboy.”

“He plays the field, just like Narelle?”

“Birds of a feather,” said Ida, coming up behind them with Clements.

Malone turned to Ruby Mungle, who stood shyly on the edge of the small group. She wore a simply cut cream dress that looked more expensive than, he guessed, it really was; it complemented her café-au-lait complexion. Her black hair had only the slightest wave in it and was cut short in what he, no fashion expert, always thought of as the French style, though for all he knew it could have been Spanish or Italian or even Japanese. Only her shyness spoiled her from being striking, and he wondered how she had managed to screw up the courage to insist on coming to the ball tonight, especially after this afternoon's
demonstration.

“Ruby, would you care to dance?”

She looked at her husband, as if seeking his approval to dance with a senior officer. He nodded, smiling; then he looked in surprise at Lisa, who said, “I take it you dance, Mr. Mungle? I'm a great admirer of the Aboriginal Dance Company.” Then she realized how condescending that sounded. “Sorry.”

His beautiful smile forgave her. “The last time I danced in a corroboree, they threw me out for jitterbugging.”

“Well, I don't know that I can jitterbug, that was before my time. Let's try something more sedate. Coming up again, Ida?”

“Why not?” said Ida and took Clements's arm as if she had decided he was her partner for the night. Watch it, Russ, thought Malone; and wondered if Lisa was as over-sensitive as he was. Don't start adding to the camel dung, he advised himself.

The band was either exhausted, had discovered that an old beat was music after all, or had spied an uncle or aunt amongst the dancers who would perhaps remember them in their wills. A fantastically ancient number, “Three Coins in the Fountain,” sprayed the night air.

“Who wrote that?” Malone heard a young girl ask her father as they danced by. “Mozart? It's almost
fab
. I could grow to like it if, you know, I lived long enough.”

Malone looked down at Ruby Mungle, seemingly as fragile in his arms as if her bones were dried sticks. “Is this your sort of music?”

“Do you mean do I—?”

“Do I mean do you prefer didgeridoo music? No, I don't. Ruby, get the chip off your shoulder. I've already had to tell Wally that.”

“Sorry, Inspector. Yes, I do like it. I'm a romantic.”

He didn't ask whether her Dreamtime was in the past or the future. Those sort of questions were taboo. Tonight she was a policeman's wife, she wanted to be more white than black. He remembered something an old Chinese in Sydney's Chinatown had told him:
Same bed, different dreams.
It hadn't
changed
since Adam and Eve had started sleeping together.

Someone bumped into his back and he looked over his shoulder. It was Ray Chakiros, dancing with a slim, dark-haired woman who looked as if she would rather have been dancing with someone else.

“Sorry,” said Chakiros, obviously not sorry at all. “I didn't see you.”

He looked down at the woman in his arms and smirked, but she just rolled her eyes and looked away.

Malone had been bumped by Sydney's best and he wasn't going to let this dumb bumpkin get his goat. “It must happen a lot, Mr. Chakiros. You've got such a narrow view.”

The woman threw back her head and laughed. Malone could feel the laughter start in Ruby's body and he danced her quickly away. “Don't,” he said. “Who's the woman with him?”

“Mrs. Chakiros.” She stifled her laugh, danced a few steps, then said soberly, “You can get away with a remark like that.”

“Why?”

“You're an outsider.”

And a white,
“I have the rank, too. That makes a difference.”

“Inspector Narvo would never say that.” Then she looked as if she wished she had not said
that.

“I think you underestimate Hugh Narvo. This afternoon he even told Chess Hardstaff to mind his own business.”

She missed a step and he almost trod on her foot. “You mean he actually stood up to Mr. Hardstaff? Good on him!”

“Would you stand up to him?”

“Why?” She looked at him slyly this time, not shyly.

“I saw you over there at the track this afternoon. You looked for a moment as if you were going to jump the fence and join the demo.”

She hesitated, then said, “I almost did. He acted as if he owned all those people in the demo, as if they had no right to be on
his
racecourse—”

“
Ruby,” he said gently, “they went about it in the wrong way. People might have been killed, including themselves.”

“Well, maybe they did! But—” Then she realized whom she was talking to and where she was; her body, which had become taut in his arms, relaxed. “I'm sorry, Inspector. It's just—”

“Just what? Something that's been building up for years?”

She looked at him puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Ruby, if I had to call you as a witness . . .”

She went stiff again; for a moment he thought she was going to break away from him. He was aware of other couples glancing at them as they danced past; there seemed no apparent disapproval on their faces, just a curious blankness. Then he realized they were not looking at him but at Ruby. It was almost as if they had never seen her before, had never realized that she was so attractive.

“What sort of witness?”

“In a murder trial, for instance.”

He had taken a chance there; she stumbled again and this time he trod on her toe and she winced. “You'd never do that! What murder?”

They were close to two other couples; all four heads turned sharply. He stared at them; after a moment they turned away and danced on, out of rhythm with the music. He looked down at Ruby.

“I'd like to talk to you about Mrs. Hardstaff's murder.”

“No!”

She stepped away from him, pulling out of his arms; but he went after her, taking her by the elbow. “Relax, Ruby. Don't make a scene. We're the outsiders, remember—both of us.” It was cruel to say it and it stung his tongue; but it made her pause, relax her arm in his grip. She turned and looked up at him and he saw the pain in her face. “I'm sorry, Ruby.”