the young man asked, his composure regained. 'As far as I'm aware, I haven't broken any laws, at least not lately.' He had folded his arms and was contemplating his visitor with a level green gaze.
A smart-arse, Jack decided. 'Better if we come inside, Mr Calvert,' he said. 'The neighbours might start to talk. It wouldn't do in a respectable neighbourhood like this.' It hadn't been too respectable twenty something years before, when Jack had been round at Tracey's place, boozing with a fast crowd from the Traveller's Rest Hotel: students, artists, waterside workers and escapees from Smithton anxious to make it in what they perceived to be the Big Smoke. There was a German bloke from round the corner who played classical music on the piano and was into S & M, and his seedy-looking friends from the Brazil coffee house and the basement bar of the Ship Hotel. Jeez, there had been Jack's best mate, too, another young copper called Damien Mazengarb. Christ knows how they were accepted by that crowd. Mascots and oddballs maybe? The neighbours had threatened to call the police, so Jack, then a young constable, had had to placate them. It had earned him a bollocking from the legendary Chief Superintendent Frank Bull, no less, and must still be on his record sheet, mouldering in some back room of the cop shop files.
Calvert's mouth was opening and closing. 'Let 'em talk,' he scoffed, but he jerked his head to the side to indicate that the policemen could follow and Jack resurfaced from his dreams. The door opened straight into the lounge room, just as Jack remembered. A couple of dark-haired young women were seated on a tattered couch, talking in low voices over what looked like an art book, and a silver tabby cat was washing behind its ears. Bishop's jaw had actually dropped at the sight of the women, and he blushed up to his springy red hair. Didn't they have pulchritude in Burnie? Jack thought, but he too was impressed. They were stunners. One of them had handed him the leaflet in the Mall. Women come and go, talking of Michelangelo, Jack thought, the words springing up unbidden almost into his mouth. Calvert didn't introduce them but walked straight through to a back room where he invited the policemen to sit on hard-backed chairs round a linoleum-topped table. (Could it be the same table? Jack wasn't sure, knowing that memory was easily distorted by nostalgia.)
The back room was Spartan, with a clutter of papers strewn over an ancient couch with the springs poking out. They spilled off the table too and out of a tall writing case that stood next to the stairs leading to the first floor. The white paint on the walls had faded to a dull grey and there was old lino on the floor. That had been there all those years before, Jack was sure. There were mounds of newspapers too, some still tied up in string from the printers. Jack had seen the paper, Workers Action, sold on street corners by earnest young men and women in all weathers. He had to give it to them for dedication. When he was on the beat, he'd watched one of them once - a tallish, well-built young man with thinning hair and a goatee - outside the ANZ bank. Patrick Banning, or something, they called him. Banning would have been lucky to sell half a dozen copies in an hour. Must have been due to the 'false consciousness' of the Hobartian proletariat, Jack had sneered. His daughter sometimes brought copies of the paper home and left them lying round, perhaps deliberately to annoy him. (She didn't know that he read them secretly and would have been surprised at his knowledge of the arcane world of the Australian revolutionary left.)
There was a large poster of Che Guevara on one wall with the slogan, smash capitalism emblazoned across the bottom in flaring red letters. A bust of Karl Marx peeped from behind the papers on the table. Another poster proclaimed that israel is occupied palestine. Bishop saw it and raised his eyebrows; he probably thought he'd jackpotted. Calvert sat facing them, crossing one blue-jeaned leg over the other fastidiously, an ironic smile tugging the corner of his mouth, his green eyes level. There was a faint smell, a hospital kind of smell, about him. Chloroform? Strong disinfectant, something like that, Jack mused. Maybe he was one of those obsessive-compulsive types; he certainly looked pretty scrubbed and pink; perhaps he was a chemistry student? If so, Jack hoped he didn't have a penchant for the 'TNT' -Transnational Terrorism' - that Bob Santamaria was always wittering on about in that 'Point of View' program on television. But the young man also smelled of strong tobacco, Drum, thought Jack, with a sudden deep craving; but no, the boy had gone one better, it was that lung-busting White Ox!
'I'd offer you tea, but I doubt you'd like camomile or golden lemon and honey,'Calvert said, raising a mocking eyebrow. 'Am I right, Inspector?'
'Yeah, you'd be right,' Jack conceded, 'but thanks anyway.'
Bishop, too, waved away the offer (did they have herbal tea at The Nut? Jack wondered) and Calvert shrugged, picking up a cup from the table and sipping with every appearance of relish. The bugger's at least got some manners, thought Jack. Not a total smart-arse; brought up a good middle-class boy to say please and thank you and offer drinks to his guests. He didn't look or act much like a revolutionary should - all wild-eyed and dishevelled, with the spit flecking the corner of his mouth as he gave out with some incomprehensible harangue - this Marxist boy was neat and tidy, except for the burst of hair. Calvert relit a roll-your-own cigarette that had gone out in an ashtray. Definitely White Ox.
'We're here,' said Jack, eyeing Calvert's cigarette hungrily, 'as part of an investigation into vandalism at the Hobart Synagogue. Somebody has been daubing anti-Semitic slogans on the walls, Mr Calvert. I was wondering if you could help us.'He nodded towards the poster behind Calvert's head. 'Perhaps someone from your group has decided to up the ante from just handing out anti-Semitic leaflets.'
'Bollocks.' The voice hissed from behind his ear, preceded by a zephyr of subtle perfume. 'Do we look like we'd go in for 'the socialism of fools', officer?' One of the young women was standing at the connecting door, her hands on her hips, a sour expression distorting her features. 'We don't like bacon, thanks. And that's not just because I happen to be Jewish ... Inspector.' She made the title sound like an insult.
The pause was that of an accomplished actress, er, actor, thought Jack. (Maybe she was in the Old Nick Society with Wendy?) Her eyes were full of sardonic intelligence and Jack was afraid she could read his mind. The silver cat had come in too and was regarding Jack with disapproval, flicking her tail this way and that. Her familiar, thought Jack with a slight smile.
'What Hannah means, Inspector, is that we don't distribute anti-Semitic leaflets,'explained Calvert. 'We don't like what is being done to the Palestinian people, but that doesn't make us anti-Semites. In fact, that's a pretty stupid thing to say, given that the Palestinians are a Semitic people themselves. And yes, Hannah is Jewish. Do you find that so surprising? Or would you classify her as a "self-hating Jew"?'
'I don't know, would you?' Jack replied, leaning back in his chair.
'Tell me, Inspector, have you heard of Isaac Deutscher?' Calvert asked.
'Can't say I have. What's he got to do with anything?'
'Deutscher was a Polish Jew and an anti-Stalinist Communist,' said Calvert, butting out his cigarette. 'He was the biographer of both Stalin and Trotsky. He escaped to London before the outbreak of the war and enlisted in the British Army. If he thought he'd escaped the racist crap he was mistaken, although it was obviously milder than under the Nazis. I imagine he despaired when anti-Semitic officers and men rode him for being Jewish. So, while he was a good Marxist from a party that had originally been staunchly anti-nationalist - that was the influence of another great Jewish Marxist, Rosa Luxemburg - he was ambivalent when the state of Israel was created after the war. He knew as well as anyone what had happened to his fellow Polish Jews. So he once said that the Jews were like a man jumping from a burning building. He landed on someone else, but instead of apologising and making redress to him, he jumped up and down on him like he was a trampoline.'
'Here endeth the lesson,' said Jack, pretending to yawn. 'I suppose you mean that the man he jumped on was Palestinian?'
'Yeah, that's what he meant. He was torn and for me that sums it all up. There is no simple, easy explanation or solution and I get pissed off when people on either side try to say it's all simple.'
