for the beer. 'Thank you, Mr Calvert,' Jack replied. It could be something. It could be nothing though personally he was inclined against thinking old blokes would run around in the dead of night daubing slogans on walls. As for the Amery business, he hadn't a clue what it might mean.
Calvert suddenly remembered something and turned on his heel. 'Oh, Inspector, 'he asked. 'How do you know about Proudhon? I mean...' Jack tapped the side of his nose. 'I'm not just a pretty face, son.' The young man smiled and was gone, leaving the faint hospital smell in his wake. He'd given Jack a lead of sorts and Jack knew he'd been a bastard for persecuting him. Was it the job that had done it to him, or did he do the job because of what it did for him? He didn't like to think that one through.
III
Three-thirty in the morning: the dead hour when you start to see things and even atheists might start to believe in ghosts. Jack had polished off a stale ham and cheese sandwich from Gobble-and-Go and it lay like cardboard in his stomach, repeating like the catechism he'd been forced to learn as a child. A sheet of iron tap-tapped loosely in the wind atop a nearby building, cats prowled and mewled and spat among the garbage cans in the alleys and the sky was full of moving clouds and the dust of stars. 'Mud and stars,' mused Jack, 'that was what life was all about.' There would be a frost tonight and the cats would huddle in hidden corners under the splendour of the heavens.
Jack and DC Bishop were cooped up, sitting at a side window on the first floor of the hotel at the corner of Bathurst and Argyle Streets. There was a clear view of the synagogue over the road. Inside it was dreary: a faded 1960s 'feature wall' that was once a dark mauve, a Gideons' Bible, a double bed that sagged sadly under a bobbled blue cover from the weight of generations of guests, and a romantic scene from Tahiti in a fake gilt frame on the opposite wall. The carpet begged to be retired and the cold tap in the sink in the corner dribbled like a hungry schoolboy smelling fish and chips and vinegar. Some ancient copies of Australasian Post with cover girls who must now be in nursing homes completed the world inside this travelling salesman's temporary lodging. Three nights now they'd sat there without catching sight of the dauber, or of any other miscreant, bar the odd speeding hoon and furtive lurker.
Time seemed frozen. A taxi driver parked outside for a while, picking his nose so obsessively that Jack thought of leaning out the window and warning him that the ancient Egyptians used to draw the brain out through the nasal passage during their funerary rites. Finally, the man drove off. He would get slim pickings tonight, Jack thought with a wry smile; the pubs were shut and the Casino merely ticking over at midweek.
A solitary drunk wove his way slowly northwards as if he were putting into practice the message of Lenin's pamphlet, 'One Step Forward, Two Steps Back'. (Jack had read it once long ago in the Ogre's lounge room when he was at a loose end during a wet Sunday afternoon when Tracey was studying for exams, just before he joined the cops. Why he had bothered, he couldn't really say.) The drunk wasn't happy, from the way he cursed the cars and muttered to himself. 'Fuckin' pub's shut,' he raged, hammering on the doors under the window before rolling off disconsolately northwards.
The cigarette fumes were so thick in the room that their eyes were smarting. Jack looked at his watch. Three-fifty. Bugger it, he thought, time for a half decent coffee instead of the instant slop the management had provided. It might also dislodge the excuse for a sandwich from where it clung to his stomach lining. He'd buy a packet of fags too: full-strength Marlboro despite the old cowboys who now inhaled through holes in their throats. Suppressing the thought with a shudder, he slipped downstairs and outside into the chill. Winter was definitely coming, with the wind gusting up from the river with the smell of salt, fish and diesel on its breath, setting the loose piece of iron tapping again. He walked stiffly round the corner to his own car and drove out via Elizabeth Street to the Renown Milk Bar in North Hobart.
The Renown was an institution that went way back. It had always stayed open late, serving coffee and chocolate to late-night taxi drivers, insomniacs, marijuana-affected teenagers with what Jack still thought of as the munchies in 1970s argot, back-door-men, police, roisterers, thirsty tarts and the nocturnal desperates found in any city. The drunk they'd seen earlier was just leaving, spilling cigarettes and matches behind him. Jack had often called here in the small hours when Wendy had been a baby and he had driven her round in the car to try to get her to go off to sleep. Tonight, the streets were almost empty and he only just caught the tired proprietor as she was about to close up for the night.
There was only one other customer; an eccentric night owl they called Hilary. Hilary Green. The name - or nickname - was suitably androgynous; Hilary was dressed in almost feminine clothing with an enormous sprig of lavender in his buttonhole. He smiled in greeting, the faded almost feminine beauty of his face a mass of old acne scars, as he looked up from a plateful of Turkish delight and a cup of hot chocolate, his version of a balanced meal. Harmless, chronically workless, garrulous when given a chance, Hilary had scarcely seen the sun in fifteen years, spending his days sleeping in a lonely room at the top of an old house in Swan Street, going out in daylight only when he needed to put his dole forms in. Most nights he padded silent as a cat under the stars, out as far as Nutgrove Beach or the New Town rivulet, mourning his lost youth and hoping against hope to find some man as desperate and chronically insomniac as himself.
Occasionally, he had been able to pass on a snippet of very good intelligence to Jack. At the weekends he stayed indoors even at night out of fear of the packs who hunted his kind after closing time. He wasn't afraid of Jack for, unlike some other coppers in less PC days, Jack had never been a poofter basher and didn't judge him or dismiss him with a sneer. Hilary gratefully returned Jack's nod. The proprietor frothed up the milk for Jack's coffees, smiling thinly, too tired to talk. Hilary stood up to leave, anxious to be home before dawn. Halfway out the door, he asked Jack if he'd caught the synagogue graffitist yet. Jack shrugged and drew on his cigarette. 'Why, do you know something, Mr Green?' Jack asked.
Hilary smiled archly. 'Oh, nothing, officer. I just hear that they are swanning around, so to speak. I do wish you'd wear a uniform, though.' He winked and was gone.
Jack finished his cigarette and lit another. Swanning around, Hilary had said. What the hell was that supposed to mean? He dismissed it. Hilary would do anything to talk to a halfway handsome man, even one going to seed like himself. Jack's eyes idly flicked over the windows and he did a double take. He had caught a glimpse of a face in the window. It was there only for a second, and then it was gone. He could have sworn it was the moon face of Gordon Paisley, but when he looked outside the street was deserted, except for a young man and woman emerging from a red Sandman panel van at the kerb. don't laugh, it could be your daughter and if it's rockin', don't bother knockin', proclaimed a pair of stickers on the back doors of the 'shaggin'wagon'. The sides were adorned with what the van fraternity called 'murals'; airbrushed decals of sunsets on desert islands or science fiction scenes of androids and asteroids. This always amused Jack. The boy racers seemed to have no insight into the strangeness of their own habitat. An island is by definition a place apart and Tasmania was impossibly remote and exotic even for mainlanders but for these descendants of convicts and Currency Boys and Girls it was just home. Years ago, Jack and Helen had visited her cousins in America. The smokestacks and sulphur smells of Akron, a city built on the last folds of the Alleghenies just south of the Great Lakes, had seemed strange to Jack, but the cousins had marvelled at meeting people from outlandish Tasmania. The van throbbed off up the street but of Paisley, there was not a trace. Sleep deprivation did funny things to the brain, Jack knew. No doubt it was a memory that had printed itself on his retina and, besides, Paisley was too lazy to be out at this hour, wasn't he, although he lived not all that far away up the hill in West Hobart.
When Jack got back to Argyle Street, he saw movement in the shadows in front of the synagogue. Good Christ! Jack looked up at the hotel window, but it was empty. What was that fool Bishop doing? A huge newly painted swastika crouched like an evil insect on the synagogue wall. Jack tossed the coffees aside and sprinted towards the figure with a surprising turn of speed, his belly
