'You're not so simple, Simon,' Jack quipped.
Hannah had been listening intently, but at this she turned her back and flounced out of the room, shaking her long black hair. Jack thought she was magnificent, a marvellous filly with a very pale face, huge brown eyes and a full red mouth. Nice bum. He bit back on the thought, seeing himself as an old perve past his use-by date. His daughter would have him on toast for his sexism. His mind wandered back to his old girlfriend, Tracey, then further back, to the beautiful long-lost Lily, and he felt very worn and old; a relic of the sixties stranded on this bank and shoal of time, flapping uselessly, all but invisible to the young in their unthinking and naive arrogance.
'So I'm afraid I really can't help you, Inspector,' Calvert was saying, breaking into Jack's reverie. 'Whatever you might think, we certainly would not approve.' He lowered his voice. 'Hannah is the granddaughter of the president of the Jewish congregation, you realise?'
'Mr Rosenberg?' Calvert nodded. 'That's interesting.' Jack actually believed Calvert's avowal of innocence but he never took anything at face value. He'd been fooled by a few plausible liars in his early days and had sworn never to be taken in again. In his book, it was educated middle-class types like Calvert who cloaked dark secrets the best. Calvert apologised that he had to leave soon for a lecture, so Jack jerked his head at Bishop and the young officer snapped shut his notebook. The young women didn't look up as they left, but Calvert bid the policemen a polite good day at the door.
There was a misty drizzle floating off the river, barely perceptible but soon coating them in a fine sheen of water. The two officers went along the road and sat a while in the plastic and vinyl-smelling car, fogging up the windows with their damp exhalations. A wan sun peered through the clouds over the river, decided it wasn't the day and retreated, plunging everything back into gloom.
Five minutes later, Calvert and the young women came out of the house, joking and laughing, and walked towards King Street, snapping up umbrellas against what had become a heavy fall of rain, oblivious of - or perhaps ignoring - the watching cops. Jack waited until they rounded the corner, then jumped out of the car and nipped along the footpath behind them. When he saw them turn right into Marieville Esplanade towards the university, he slipped down the lane behind the block and found the gate to Calvert's back yard. It smelled of rain and old ashes. A broken-down old Cortina was parked forlornly at Calvert's back gate, one tyre flat and all four of them bald, its blue paint cracked and faded, with rust eating away at the boot, although it was still registered. It was covered in stickers: everything from the prosaic and predictable stop uranium mining to the more intriguing we gave fraser the razor, now give hawke the fork.
Jack wondered if Calvert had anything to do with the famous graffiti on a boatshed just round the corner where the Sandy Bay Rivulet drained into the estuary. keep menzies in the ground was its surreal exhortation, conjuring up visions of the deceased conservative 'Ming' as a political vampire in need of a stake through the heart and a silver bullet in the temple. Another graffito had proclaimed that fraser is a distended rectum and yet another had declared that the police are the agents of fascism. Jack doubted that had been the Marxist boy; Calvert was too serious for that kind of irreverent anarchism. He was the sort who would plough through Plekhanov and Lenin's Volume 38 or Volume III of Capital, then reach for Brecht for light reading.
The half-rotten back gate was unlocked so Jack walked in, noting the faded enamel sign warning about the resident canine that had been altered to read beware of the ogre. Back in Tracey Devine's day, a blond behemoth of a student radical nicknamed the Ogre had lived in the block, notorious for his bouts of drink and ill-humour and his run-ins with the constabulary. Jack hadn't seen or heard of him in decades. There were weeds sprouting everywhere in Calvert's yard and an old ginger tomcat hissed at him from the fence. Jack pulled a face at it and it turned its back on him disdainfully. Was it the same one as the Ogre's orange beast, an animal as malign as Fat Freddie's Cat that had crept into Tracey's house during parties and clawed the bums of the revellers? It was quite possibly the offspring, thought Jack. This one was no doubt responsible for the acrid stench of cat's piss that no amount of rain could wash away. There was a tumbledown brick shed behind the Hill's Hoist which sported an assembly of greyish y-fronts and holey socks, and Jack made a beeline for that edifice, dragging the reluctant Bishop in his wake. ('Jeez, sir, oughtn't we get a warrant?') The door was half off its hinges and junk was spilling out: old papers, brushes, an old mattress, a broken Hoover twin tub washing machine, a roll of undyed calico, the end of a painted banner that read SMASH something or other, a small antique offset press that looked surprisingly well cared for, and some aerosol spray paint cans. Some rusty iron tools that looked as if they had belonged to a shipwright who'd come out on the First Fleet hung haphazardly on a board nailed up at the back. ('Worth a fortune,' calculated Bishop.) It all smelt musty from the recent rain, but Calvert's mates had been as busy as cats burying shit, cranking out propaganda for their cause on the ancient press.
'Yes,' Jack hissed, pouncing on the aerosol cans. 'I'll give those smart arses a bit of direct action alright.' Three or four of the cans had blue paint in them. 'Now that might be evidence,' he told Bishop, though a little voice at the back of his mind told him he was only doing it to be a bastard and to annoy his daughter and that these Marxist boys and girls had as much contempt as he had for Nazis and their daubing of swastikas. But he'd come back with a warrant and annoy that little green-eyed clever dick with the Rubens hairstyle.
Really? said the voice. You've no evidence and what about the beautiful Hannah? Can you really see her daubing her own grandfather's synagogue?
I dunno, said the copper side of him. Scratch half of these things and there was a neurosis lurking at the bottom of it. All very Freudian; they probably didn't even know it themselves. He settled the debate by telling himself that it was all a matter of following up leads, taking no one's word for anything. And he actually liked the boy, Calvert. When he looked up, Bishop was eying him quizzically. No doubt the pimply little Northwest Coast sheep-shagger would entertain his mates after work in the pub with tales of his eccentric boss, Jack Martin, who spoke little yet seemed always to be debating with himself.
Two days later, Calvert sat in Jack Martin's office. DC Bishop was lounging against the back wall worrying his zits, and the Inspector was seated in his swivel chair, his square jaw cradled in his hands, his blue eyes full of ironic amusement. The spray cans, bagged in clear plastic and labelled, sat upright on the desk between them. He was staring out of the window behind Calvert, a faint smile playing over his lips. Night was falling, with the last rays of a weak sun playing on the TV towers at the top of the Mountain. He was rather enjoying himself, despite the disapproval of his inner voice. Calvert had come in voluntarily to 'help with enquiries', but Jack was out to give him a hard time despite that. Yet from somewhere in the building, they'd rustled up a cup of camomile tea for their guest. Gordon Paisley had grinned malevolently when he saw Bishop brewing it. 'For goodness sake/I've got the hippy-hippy shake,' he sneered when he saw it going into Jack's office with the label hanging out of the mug. 'Jack Martin, a real 1960s love child.'
Calvert sipped at the camomile and made a face. 'Vintage 1945?' he asked, raising an eyebrow in what seemed to be his defining gesture, but softening it immediately with 'Sorry, I do appreciate the trouble you've gone to.' He was a cool fellow all right, thought Jack grudgingly. There was something almost aristocratic about this revolutionary; he might pass as a Prince Kropotkin of the Antipodes except that his father stripped ingots in the Cell Room at the Risdon zinc works for a crust; Bishop had rung round all the Calverts in the phone book and found that out. The grandfather was an orchardist from down past the Huon but had too many kids for them all to continue on the farm. Calvert had probably taken elocution lessons; thanks to Bishop's enthusiastic sleuthing, Jack already knew that he'd been to the private Hutchins School on a scholarship. His old man was mighty proud of that, Bishop said.
'Just answer the questions, Mr Calvert,' Jack said, turning back to face his victim, albeit with an almost avuncular smile on his face. 'The sooner you clear things up for us,
