The Holiday Murders (9 page)

Margaret and Arthur nodded, and Magill said, ‘It’s my belief that art is more important than politics. Indeed, Herr Goebbels has pointed out that art is a fine way, the best way, to lift the hearts and spirits of people in times of great sorrow and duress. Art is the measure of a culture’s strength. Do you know about the Great German Art Exhibitions, Ptolemy?’

Jones shook his head. He wasn’t sure how the conversation had taken this turn, and what it might mean.

‘They continue in spite of the war, and they continue because the creative force of the brush and chisel is as important to the German leadership as the destructive force of its weapons. It’s really what the weapons are for — to protect the integrity of a great culture.’

Jones looked at the paintings on Magill’s walls, and wondered what the hell Magill was talking about. Magill stood up, his face flushed with alcohol, and his enthusiasm unleashed.

‘All these pictures,’ he said, ‘are mine. I mean, I painted them. They’re copies, of course, but I’m rather proud of them. They might be merely competent, but it’s the closest I can get to the originals.’

He crossed to a sideboard, opened a drawer, and withdrew a glossy, expensively produced magazine. He placed it in front of Jones.

‘
Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich
,’ he said. ‘This is where I find the originals. I can’t get the latest editions, of course, and, yes, they’re still producing them. Art, you see, Ptolemy, is as vital as bullets.’

Jones flicked through the pages of the magazine, and was surprised by the preponderance of nudes. He said nothing, though. Magill stood by one of his landscapes and said, ‘I take no credit for the nobility of this picture. But look at it, Ptolemy, and tell me what you see.’

Jones was reluctant to speak. Peggy came to his rescue.

‘Don’t embarrass Mr Jones, Mitchell. Not everyone is as crazy as you are about that stuff.’

Magill was undaunted by Peggy’s attempt to curtail his enthusiasm.

‘It’s called
The Haybearer
. The original is by Heinrich Berran. Look at it.’

‘I see a man,’ Margaret said, ‘carrying a great load of hay on his shoulders. He’s like Atlas: courageous, determined, strong.’

‘Noble,’ said Magill. ‘Noble.’

‘Yes,’ Margaret said. ‘Noble.’

‘What about that one?’ Jones asked, more in the spirit of maintaining a veneer of politeness than out of real interest. He pointed to a painting of what looked to him like a drab family portrait. Half-a-dozen people sat close together in a room, dressed soberly in clothes that seemed oddly old fashioned. The viewer’s eye was drawn to the figure of a blonde-haired woman with a child in her lap. Magill said, ‘Ah, interesting,’ and Jones silently challenged that assertion.

‘There’s a clue to its meaning that I’ve left out of the picture. If you turn to page thirty of that magazine, you’ll see what I mean.’

Jones did so and saw there a photograph of the original painting. To his untutored eye, it looked as though Magill had done a first-rate job of copying it.

‘What am I looking for?’

‘There’s a radio in the top right. Look to the left of the radio.’

In the photograph of the painting, on the wall next to the radio, was an image of Adolf Hitler. There was no such feature in Magill’s painting.

‘We have to be discreet, don’t we? Now look at the title of the painting.’

‘
Der Führer Spricht,
by Paul Mathias Padua.’

‘
The Führer Speaks
. And suddenly the painting comes alive.’

‘All right, Mitchell, that’s enough,’ Peggy said. ‘Mr Jones didn’t come here for an art lecture.’

Magill returned to the table and was pleased when Arthur turned to Jones and said, ‘Mitchell is right about this, you know. He knows his onions. Margaret and I have learned an awful lot, haven’t we, Margaret?’

‘Yes, we have, and it’s so much more interesting than guff about the bloody war.’

‘I’m sorry, Mitchell,’ Peggy said. ‘I didn’t mean to imply that you were boring us.’ She turned to Jones. ‘Mitchell really is a great painter. He’s even painted me.’ She giggled. ‘You’ll see it in the other room. I hope you won’t be shocked.’

‘Of course Ptolemy won’t be shocked,’ Magill said. ‘There’s nothing to be shocked by. Herr Hitler himself supports the celebration of the healthy body. It has moral force, sociological force. The body is Nature.’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Arthur, and raised his glass. The others did the same, and Jones followed suit, uncertain what it was he was raising his glass to, but now curious about a painting in another room. Despite the unpromising talent before him, Jones buoyed himself with the thought that Hitler himself had begun with only a handful of men. He suspected that these four would outlive their usefulness soon enough. By that time, he’d have gathered enough lieutenants to dispose of them for him. He wouldn’t have to get involved. He might miss that, though — he rather liked getting his hands dirty.

After lunch, Mitchell
led his guests into the front room for more drinks. There were no landscapes on the walls in this room. Instead, there were three paintings, all of them of nudes. Above the mantelpiece and dominating the room was a large picture of three women, two of them naked, standing before a seated, naked man. Jones walked up to it.

‘
The Judgement of Paris
,’ Magill said.

‘That’s me,’ Peggy said, pointing unnecessarily to the brazenly full-frontal figure standing closest to the male. One arm was raised above her head while the other supported the cloth she’d obviously just removed in order to reveal herself to Paris. The face — and, Jones supposed, the body — was Peggy’s.

‘It’s a copy from Adolf Ziegler,’ Magill said.

The unclothed Paris was clearly Magill, but Jones doubted that his suit covered quite so heroic a body.

‘The body is pure beauty,’ Magill said. ‘It has been traduced by degenerate artists who think art happens when you hold a mirror up to nature. Art, Ptolemy, has nothing to do with reality. The job of art is to transcend what is real, to create something that’s eternal.’

Jones looked at
The Judgement of Paris
again and tried to make sense of what Magill had said, but he couldn’t relate it to what sat above the mantelpiece. All he felt was a familiar, resentful uncertainty about his own intellect. He hated Magill for arousing this in him, and to demonstrate that he was unintimidated, leaned on the mantel and faced the room. It was an assertion of his physical presence.

‘How many members have you got?’ he asked.

Startled by this sudden digression from his fascinating exposition of fascist aesthetics, Magill said, ‘None, officially.’

As soon as these words had been uttered, an astonishing shift occurred in the room. The polite, almost deferential, but somehow frightening stranger seemed to have taken charge. It was perhaps an illusion, and only momentary, but Jones was now at the heart of what remained of the Victorian branch of Australia First, and there would be no getting rid of him. If there was to be any getting rid of anybody, he would be the one to do it. After a brief conversation over brandy — a conversation that made him feel confident he’d got the measure of these dilettantes — Jones announced that he had to leave. Margaret, Arthur, and Peggy feigned regret that he needed to leave so soon, and Mitchell went with him into the hallway.

‘There’s a great deal we haven’t touched on,’ he said. ‘We’re committed to expressing, to living, ideal lives, Ptolemy, and we … well, there are aspects of how we realise those ideals that we don’t expect everyone to follow, but we encourage people to join us.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Jones asked, his manners now abandoned, and his tone abrupt and expressing frank irritation.

Magill handed Jones a book in brown wrapping.

‘This should explain it. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting. Do you read German?’

‘A little. Enough.’

‘I think you’ll get the drift. It’s our philosophy, or one aspect of it. It’ll help you understand us better, and that’s important if we’re to work together.’ Jones took the book without any show of gratitude. He hoped it wasn’t
Mein Kampf
. He already had a copy of it.

Magill escorted Jones to the front gate.

‘I can see that you’re very interested in Australia First,’ he said. Jones nodded. He’d achieved something if Magill really thought that Jones was keen on Australia First. What he had faith in was Magill’s money; and when he managed to get his hands on that, he’d give Australia First something proper to believe in. He put his hands in his pockets and headed towards Riversdale Road.

When Magill re-entered the house, he found Arthur and Margaret in the hallway.

‘I don’t like that Jones character,’ Arthur said. ‘There’s something wrong with him.’

‘He frightens me, Mitchell,’ Margaret said. ‘There’s something brutish about him.’

‘I agree. I think Ptolemy Jones might be a very dangerous man,’ Magill said. ‘And yet he’s exactly what we need. He frightens me, too, Margaret, but he’s with us, not against us. He’s a follower, not a leader. He’ll know others just like him. He’s perfect.’

‘You think you can control him?’ Arthur asked.

‘Oh, yes. He’s what I’ve been looking for. He’s got the force we need to silence opposition. We know that there are people out there who agree with us. Remember our last public meeting, Arthur? It was crowded, and people were listening until a few troublemakers disrupted it. Mr Jones could put an end to such disruptions.’

Neither Margaret nor Arthur seemed convinced, but they could see that Mitchell had suddenly regained some of the fire that had driven him to form a Victorian branch of Australia First back in 1941. They returned to the front room.

‘We’ll do it differently this time,’ Mitchell said. ‘We’ll recruit discreetly, build slowly, and change our name. Australia First as a name is damaged goods. We’ll be sweetness and light. We’ll appear the flower, but be the serpent under it, or however that goes. We know who our enemies are, and soon we’ll be in a position to do something about them.’

‘Australian Patriots,’ Margaret said. ‘How does that sound?’

Mitchell smiled at her. ‘That sounds fine. I think we’re back in business.
Wucht und Willenhaftigkeit
.’

‘You know I don’t know any German, Mitchell.’

‘Mighty momentum and willpower, Margaret. Someone said that about Arno Breker’s sculptures. I think it should become our motto — “Momentum and willpower”.’

‘I like it,’ Arthur said. ‘It’s got a real ring to it.’

Ptolemy Jones was
feeling pleased with himself. He wasn’t quite sure how to proceed, but he was sure that the first steps he’d taken were the right ones. He had before him the ruthless example of the great Adolf Hitler. Courage was everything. Sympathy was weakness.

It was late Christmas afternoon as he walked the streets of central Melbourne, filling in time before he set about completing his business. He would wait until dark before returning to East Melbourne, where two members of the Quinn family had already felt the unforgiving truth of his calling.

For now, though, he was thirsty. There were a few cafés open, but they weren’t the sort of places he wanted to be seen in — they were full of American servicemen busily seducing silly girls who’d open their legs for a square of chocolate. Their laughter filled him with rage. And the rage felt good.

He found himself outside the smeared and grubby window of an uninviting café called Clarry’s, in Russell Street, and entered its dark interior, where the air was stale with cigarette smoke and the smell of rank dripping. A woman in her twenties was sitting morosely at a table, a cigarette smouldering in her fingers. Jones was sure she was a prostitute, and he assumed from her demeanour that she was at the end of a long shift. He despised her. The apparent proprietor of the café, presumably Clarry himself, was leaning on the counter, turning the pages of a copy of
Truth
— a scurrilous newspaper that specialised in squalid murders and ugly divorces. He raised his dull eyes and opened them widely in lieu of asking what Jones wanted.

‘Cup of tea,’ Jones said. ‘Black is fine.’

‘Black’s all we got,’ Clarry said, and took his squat body into the back of the shop. Jones turned the
Truth
around to see what sordid stories the boss had been reading. As part of the general war effort, its front pages had been given over to what was happening in New Guinea. The real story had been bumped to page four. The headline,
Wife Killed Our Baby, So I Shot Her
,
sat above the guilty man’s own words: ‘As God’s my judge, I didn’t kill my baby. My wife belted the kid with a waddy. I shot her. Her eyes moved. I shot her a second time. I didn’t want to leave her in agony.’

They’d all be better off dead
, Jones thought. They offered nothing. Further down the page, Jones was surprised to read a diatribe against John Dedman, the government minister who’d become the grim face of austerity.
Truth
’s correspondent was silly with indignation, calling Dedman ‘Deddy Christmas’, and mocking his regulations regarding pink icing, Daddy Christmas, short-tailed shirts, victory suits, and domestic servants. ‘This country just won’t stand for it. You really must be drunk with power, or totally deaf, dumb and blind if you can’t sense the signs of rising public indignation.’ Jones read these words twice over, and noted the name of the journalist who’d penned them. Someone who wasn’t afraid to attack the government in print might be useful.