sooner we can all go home.' He sucked noisily at his own tea - Bushells, strong, black, with three sugars - and lit a cigarette, totally forgetting the new regulations and the fact that he had given up. 'Tell you what though, do you like a riddle?'
'Maybe,' said Calvert, exhaling audibly and gesturing to Jack to continue.
'Well, now,' Jack asked, leaning forward. 'Why do Proudhon and other anarchists prefer herbal tea?'
'I dunno,' replied Calvert, looking sharply at Jack. 'Did he? Why do they?'
'Because proper tea is theft.' Jack said it with a straight face. Calvert groaned; it was so bad that it was good, and Jack could see that he was wondering how this old porker had even heard of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. As far as Bishop went, the ball had gone straight through to the wicket keeper: Proudhon wasn't on the syllabus at Hellyer College, or anywhere else under the auspices of the Tasmanian Education Department. Most of the coppers wouldn't have known their Marx from their elbow for that matter and for some of them the sports pages in the Herald Sun were the pinnacles of intellectual stimulation. Jack recalled his time as a junior constable. Once long ago as young constables, Jack and Damien Mazengarb had been assigned to keep the peace at a demonstration against the war in Vietnam. A gaunt Communist waterside union official from Melbourne - some kind of relative of Frank Bull's, he heard - was speaking. 'Why do the police always travel in threes?' the orator had asked, then answered his own question: 'Because one can read, one can write, and the other likes the company of intellectuals.' Jack had bridled at the time, but he had to admit that with some of them, the orator had a point. Calvert was disconcerted to know that a policeman had even heard of Proudhon, as Jack had intended. Jack suddenly pounced again, changing the subject back to Calvert's alleged anti-Semitism.
'This is ridiculous,' said the young man, savouring Jack's smoke, though he dispensed advice about it. 'You should give that up, take it from me.' Jack stared at the cigarette that had jumped, unbidden, into his hand and stubbed it out. Calvert continued: 'Now, would you please tell me why you choose to drag me round here because I have a couple of spray cans in my shed. God, half the town must have them.'
'Yes but not these particular spray cans, Mr Calvert,' Bishop broke in. 'It just so happens that the paint matches that from the walls of the synagogue.' Jack frowned at the upstart's interruption. This was his investigation now, and he didn't want this pimply greenhorn stuffing things up. Worse still, Bishop was smoking. Jack told him to put it out, but Calvert deliberately lit up a rolly cigarette, with a look that said plainly, what's sauce for the goose '
'Yes, not these particular cans, Mr Calvert,' Jack said, reclaiming his patch, disconcerted by the fumes of White Ox. 'Moreover, you just happen to have a motive. You're angry, are you not, about what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians? Your friend, Hannah, perhaps she's angry with her own grandfather. A family dispute?'
'The paint is for my car,' said Calvert, clearly annoyed for having to mount a defence against what he saw as absurd allegations, brushing a hand through his shock of red hair and exhaling a thin stream of smoke. 'If you found the paint, you would have seen the car. You're trying to frame me. As for Hannah, why would she want to hurt her own family? I've seen the graffiti, Inspector, and I agree that it is quite vile; so vile that I find it insulting that anyone could think we could have done such a thing.'
And so it went. As Calvert said, the paint could be found in any one of half a dozen hardware shops and in possibly thousands of houses round the city. Jack walked with him to the side lane into Liverpool Street, where the paddy wagons docked with their cargoes of drunks and domestic brawlers. 'Thanks for your time, sir,' Jack said, nodding affably, as if they had just shared a pleasant half hour. It was freezing and rain was starting to fall in great thick drops that thudded down on the footpath and left blobs as big as twenty-cent pieces. 'I'll run you home if you like.' Calvert was shivering in a thin cotton tee shirt - typical of young blokes, thought Jack - but he shook his head and muttered something about not having far to go.
'Suit yourself, mate,' said Jack, involuntarily turning up his collar against the wind and rain. 'Nothing personal. You do realise that we have to follow all leads?'
Calvert just shrugged and walked out into the street, almost colliding with a group of pretty young nurses who had just come off shift at the Royal Hobart opposite. Exactly how Jack Martin had met Helen over twenty years ago. The Inspector smiled at the memory as Calvert turned aside to let the young women walk past. They smiled broadly when they saw it was Calvert, but they stared straight through Jack as if he didn't exist. Shit, thought, Jack, they're all over this weedy bugger. What's he got that I don't? Youth and good looks, said a dark voice at the back of his mind. You old bugger, you invisible man, you wrinkly codger - Calvert waited until the nurses were past and was just about to walk off in the rain when he hesitated, stopped, and came back to the mouth of the laneway. 'Listen,' he said. 'I don't know if you'd be interested, but a couple of weeks back, some pretty dodgy characters turned up at one of our PHRG meetings - that's the Palestinian meetings.'
Jack was interested. They finished the conversation along the road in the lounge bar of the Alabama Hotel. Over a few ten-ounce beers - Jack's shout - the story came out. Calvert had never seen the men before and they weren't the typical kind you see around the solidarity movements. They were old for a start, long past the time when most people have passion and time to spare for radical politics. No, they weren't wharfies either. Calvert knew the old waterside workers; a different breed of tough old-timers whose years under the hook had taught them solidarity that extended beyond narrow national confines. No, these old blokes had never turned up at any left-wing events before. One of them was in dowdy down-market clothes, sporting a baggy old grey cardigan of the kind that might have been fashionable thirty years ago in Dunedin, an ancient trilby upon his head; the ensemble completed with shapeless grey Oxford bags and a pair of polished black shoes that looked as though they had belonged to a rural Tasmanian school principal in the 1950s. The other man, well, he was more dapper, in a well-cut suit. A ladies' man, Calvert reckoned, with a real charm about him, and an intellect that he tried to suppress and which didn't jell with the moronic pamphlet he later proffered. Both of them had thin faces, deeply lined from life, with thin grey hair and grey eyes that peered out sadly at the world. Greyish-brown, sort of dusty eyes actually. Grey all over in fact, with soft hands that had never known the hard manual labour that had been the lot of the waterside workers. But Calvert reckoned they'd done it hard nevertheless. They could almost have been twins and they had funny accents, eastern European, Calvert thought. Not German, kind of hard to explain. Maybe Polish. Maybe Russian, something like that. There was a kind of sing-song edge to their guttural vowels.
They'd just walked into the meeting up at the old university buildings on the Domain and sat down, looking nervous in the corner. One of them - the downmarket guy -had carried a battered old Gladstone doctor's bag, as if he was on his way home from work. People were polite and friendly to them, but they were reserved, their grey eyes wary, and they listened very carefully to everything people were saying. Finally, one of them had leaned down and pulled some pamphlets and books from his bag. He coughed and cleared his throat, asked if anyone had ever seen his literature before. Although some of the people sitting nearby had been politely non-committal, Calvert had been infuriated by what he saw, for the man was touting a copy of the notorious anti-Semitic pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The pamphlet, which purported to be proof of a Jewish-Marxist conspiracy for world domination, had long ago been exposed as a Tsarist police forgery, but here were these old fossils hawking it round like dirty postcards. They'd been asked to leave the meeting for their pains, much to the dismay of an intense young Greek Maoist who squirmed angrily on his bum in his chair before storming out of the room in protest, seeing them as backward workers more in need of education than expulsion. Somehow, though, the old men looked almost pleased and one of them - the more dapper of the pair - had whispered a name to Calvert. 'Jean Amery,' it sounded like. 'You read Jean Amery and you'll see where I'm coming from.'
The tale told, Calvert stood up, thanking
