St Kilda Blues (13 page)

‘What can you tell me about the SS, Laz?'

The question was totally unexpected. Berlin watched Lazlo watching him as he tried to make sense of the sudden change of direction in the conversation.

‘Their uniforms were nicely tailored, yes, but for my taste the colour was a little sombre. Total black is hard to carry off, Charlie, unless you carry a gun too. The presence of a gun definitely tends to stifle any sartorial criticisms. And they are not good guests at parties, from what I hear. You want to take all the joy out of a Bar Mitzvah, Charlie, you invite the SS.'

‘I'm serious, Laz.'

‘I'm serious too. Bad bastards. They enjoyed their work too much.'

There was a tall wooden pepper grinder on the table and Lazlo picked it up and looked at it for a moment. ‘Some things never change, eh? That was what you said, correct? You get straight to the point.'

‘I'm looking for a missing girl, some missing girls and I don't have a lot of time.'

‘These girls, these are the girls you told me of last time we spoke?'

‘Some of them. I got taken off that case but now it seems that I'm involved again.'

‘So tell me, how is this to do with the SS?'

‘It isn't, it doesn't – I mean, it hasn't got anything to do with that investigation, it's just something that came up. And you're are the only person I know with . . .with direct experience.'

Lazlo put the pepper grinder back on the table. ‘Auschwitz was an experience, it must be said. Some people have all the luck, eh, Charlie?'

‘Suppose I met someone, Laz, a German, who claimed to have been an anti-aircraft gunner in the war but I thought perhaps he was actually in the SS. Is there any way I could go about confirming it, seeing if I was right?'

‘Not easy, I should say. Can you maybe get his shirt off?'

‘Whose shirt?'

‘Your SS man, who may or may not be.'

Berlin was struggling to follow the direction of the conversation. ‘Why should I get his shirt off?'

‘Because, Charlie my friend, many of the most dedicated members of the SS had a tattoo under the arm.' Lazlo lifted up his left arm and indicated a spot just under his armpit. ‘Here is where you look.'

‘What sort of tattoo? What did it say?'

‘Property of Heinrich Himmler. If found, return to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. No reward.'

‘Lazlo.'

‘Okay. Charlie, you yourself should keep your shirt on. I just find it interesting that the Nazis tattooed just two groups: prisoners in Auschwitz – the
Untermenschen
, the inferiors – and the SS, the cream of the Aryan race. We Jews got a number, like a commodity, while in the case of the SS it was just a letter – their blood type, you know, for the doctors if they were wounded. A, B, that kind of thing.'

‘Wouldn't all German soldiers have that sort of tattoo?'

‘Apparently not, and for them a good thing too. Lots of captured Krauts were made to strip off and if the partisans or some pissed-off GI or Tommy or Ivan spotted a tattoo it was a quick trip behind the nearest barn and . . .' He drew his index finger quickly across his throat and made a nasty gurgling sound. ‘I tell you a story, Charlie, one I hear up in the Snowy. You hear a lot of stories up there, many funny people working on the Snowy and not a lot to do at nights apart from playing cards and talking.'

Berlin waited.

‘This bloke, a Pole, I think, is coming out on a refugee boat in '52 or '53. Pretty crowded with DPs and by no means the Queen Mary, as he tells me. There are two women who stay to their cabin, take their meals there and only go walking at night, always wearing hats, or scarves on their heads. Strange, perhaps, but there was a war not long finished and strange behaviour wasn't so uncommon.'

Berlin recalled that a lot of his own behaviour after the war was pretty strange.

‘So off Perth one afternoon it gets hot as hell and these two come out on deck around noon. Their cabin is on the sunny side of the ship and must be like an oven and on deck there is a breeze. The wind blows the hat off one of them and another passenger starts screaming and pointing. There is now more screaming in a half-dozen languages and a mob surrounds the two women. They start beating on them, tearing at their clothes. The screaming woman says she recognises this pair as guards from the camp where she was held. SS guards, you understand.'

‘I saw some women SS, towards the end of the war. That was something I really found very hard to understand.'

‘How so? Trust me on this, Charlie, when a government, any government, starts handing out licences to do evil without consequences and a nice uniform to go with it, there will never be any shortage of takers, male and female both.'

Berlin remembered poor old Pete Whitmore saying something similar once in the bar of the Diggers Rest Hotel. Give someone a licence to kill and they'll use it.

‘So what happened? With these women, I mean.'

‘They strip them down to the waist and there they find it, under the arm of each of them – the tattoo. The mob goes crazy and the crew just manage to stop them tossing the ladies over the side. They have a lot of sharks in the sea around there, I hear, Charlie. Big ones.'

‘Then what?'

‘They lock them in their cabin, with a sailor on guard outside. When the ship docks in Adelaide the police come onboard and take the ladies away, but only with the crew holding the passengers back can it be done. After that, who knows what happens to them?'

‘So getting these tattoos wasn't the smartest move, not when you're on the losing side.'

Lazlo smiled. ‘But you're never on the losing side, Charlie, not at the beginning. Everyone is going to win because everyone has God on their side. Even the Nazis said,
Gott mit uns
, God is with us. This God is a very strange fellow, I have to say.'

‘Okay, but you do lose and now you have a tattoo that gives the game away. What can you do?'

‘I've heard stories of people trying to burn the tattoo off with a hot iron or using acid or sometimes trying to disguise it to look like a scar from a bullet wound.'

Berlin wasn't sure how he could go about getting Gudrun's father to take his shirt off. In any case, if the Russian flamethrower burn went right down his left side as he suspected, any evidence might be gone.

‘Would there be records of SS membership in Germany?'

‘You bombed the shit out of Germany, remember? Did I ever say thank you, by the way?'

‘Some records might have survived.'

Lazlo shrugged. ‘That's very true, and you know how the Germans are with records. In fact, I myself have made several successful inquiries on such matters through contacts I have, but it takes time, you understand. For you, a good place to perhaps start might be the Deutsche Dienststelle in West Berlin.'

‘What's that?'

‘It is the Wehrmacht Information Office for War Losses and POWs. They still hold extensive records on people who served in the armed forces from '39 to '45. You may have some success there but for the SS, this is a more tricky area. When they saw which way the war was going the Shutzstaffel made a priority of destroying everything incriminating.'

‘So you think it's not possible?'

Lazlo shook his head slowly. ‘Not impossible, Charlie, but very, very difficult.'

‘I think I still have to try.'

‘Of course, but you need to remember that names can be changed. And in the confusion after the war, many were. People who had nothing to go back to or a past they wanted to avoid found it very easy to create a new identity. If you go to Hungary and search for Lazlo Horvay, journalist, for instance, you will find no records that pre-date 1946, and yet here I am in all my glory.'

Berlin stared into his drink. He could feel Lazlo's eyes studying him.

‘Give me a name, Charlie. I'll see what I can do.'

Berlin shook his head. ‘It's just a hunch and I'm probably wrong. Any chance you can tell me exactly who to approach and how to go about it? I can say it's police business.'

‘That I can do, Charlie, but official channels can take a long time on this sort of thing. Unofficial is sometimes better.'

‘This bloke's not going anywhere.'

‘Perhaps not but in matters such as this some, shall we say, distance can be useful. Sometimes such inquiries as these can set events in motion, producing unexpected outcomes. Sometimes such inquiries can be like lighting a fuse.' Lazlo leaned across the table and put his hand on top of Berlin's. ‘You always want to make your fuse long enough, Charlie, you want to keep some separation. Too short a fuse, too close a connection and a man can sometimes be caught up in whatever follows after he lights it.'

Berlin smiled. ‘You sound like me talking to Peter about fireworks on cracker night, Lazlo, trying to stop him blowing a finger off or burning down someone's back shed. I think I can handle this.'

Lazlo sat back in his chair. ‘As you wish then. I'll have my secretary put the address details together first thing. They can be dropped off at Russell Street or, if you prefer, at Rebecca's studio tomorrow by noon.' The steaks were put in front of them and Lazlo smiled. The plates were large and needed to be. Besides glistening steaks charred with a crisscross pattern from the grill, there were mounds of red cabbage, potato salad and bright green creamed spinach.

Lazlo picked up his knife and fork. ‘One last thing, Charlie, about your SS man.'

Berlin looked up from his plate. ‘I said I wasn't certain, Lazlo, remember?'

‘Sure, okay, about your possible SS man, who may or may not be. In the Snowy I met a lot of people who like me hold no love for the Nazis, and amongst them people with certain skills should they be needed.'

Berlin waited. Lazlo leaned towards him across the table and lowered his voice.

‘I know a man, a Czechoslovak who the British SOE trained to blow up trains and bridges and is now using his talents blasting nice, neat holes into mountains. A man like that has always access to certain useful items, items that would also be very hard to trace.'

Berlin didn't much care for the direction their conversation was taking. ‘I don't have any proof and I might be dead wrong about my suspicions. And I'm a policeman, I can't go around having people blown up even if I wanted to.'

Lazlo nodded and sat back. ‘I take your point. But if things are confirmed by your investigations and certain steps need to be taken you can always call on me. But for right now, Charlie, I have my suspicions that this steak will be the most tender piece of meat that you have ever tasted. I think perhaps we should investigate that.'

Lazlo was right about the steak. But Berlin remembered the photograph of Melinda Marquet's scrawny body in the morgue and thought about young Gudrun Scheiner missing for almost two days now. He surprised Lazlo and himself by pushing the plate away with his dinner only half finished.

He rummaged through the pile of supplies in the back of the Dodge until he found a silver one-gallon metal container with a screw top. The label indicated that the tin contained methylated spirits and there was also a warning that the contents were highly flammable. He unscrewed the cap and lay the container on its side so the contents poured out over the back of the car and over the hemp tow rope. He was about to toss the match into the vehicle when he remembered he would need a hat. His was already soaked with the methylated spirits so he took Brother Brian's.

At first he thought the fire hadn't taken and then he realised that the methylated spirits produced almost invisible flames. When the tow rope caught and then the cardboard packaging on the film supplies, smoke began to form. Wanting to watch what happened next from a safe distance, he found a small patch of soft dirt under some spinifex about a hundred yards from the burning vehicle. Squatting on his haunches, naked, with his kitbag and water bottles beside him he waited.

He began to worry the fire was going to burn itself out without doing the amount of damage he needed, but then the jerry can of petrol ignited and after that the vehicle's half-full fuel tank. The smell was quite disgusting. He wondered what would have happened if he had put the Abo into the vehicle still alive. The heat radiating from the conflagration was hot on his skin and then he realised there was something hotter than the burning car, something lower down on his body.

The fire mostly burned itself out after thirty minutes, though the rubber tyres took longer. The plume of black smoke had been broken up quickly by the wind and fortunately didn't seem to attract any attention. The shell of the vehicle was still red hot, too hot to approach, but even from a distance he could see the shrivelled and blackened corpses in the front seat and knew that identification would be impossible.

He got dressed and ate another of his sandwiches, ignoring the smell from the vehicle. He would sleep here tonight under the spinifex with the dagger in his hand. In the morning he would cut some brush and use it to remove his footprints from around the vehicle just in case they brought in black trackers after he and Brother Brian were reported missing and the vehicle was discovered. He would drag the brush behind him on his way back to the road and, if there was wind, any sign of him would soon be gone. But just in case, he decided he would walk in a wide circle through the bush, coming out at least a mile further down the road in the direction of Adelaide.

He had enough water for a couple days as long as he didn't exert himself too much. The remaining sandwiches were already shrivelling up in the heat but should last him through breakfast tomorrow, then lunch and tea. After that he might have to look for snakes or a goanna. He probably should have kept the spear, he realised. If a truck or a car didn't come by within two or three days he would die. But of course he was dead already, burned up in a car that had somehow wandered from the track. It would be dark soon and in the fading light he looked at his new life. He had Fatso's birth certificate, Brother Brian's wristwatch and six pounds, five shillings and sixpence. And he had his lovely, lovely dagger.

He sat under the shelter of the spinifex and methodically sharpened the dagger. As he worked the blade back and forth across the stone he decided that he and the blade were brothers. They were about to start on a journey together and the thought both cheered and warmed him. The memory of Brother Brian's blood washing hot and wet over his hand on the dagger and the metallic taste and sticky feel of it on his tongue warmed him even more.