Black Wattle Creek (Charlie Berlin #2)(14)

Outside, the surly bloke was finishing off the last panel of the freshly washed vehicle. There was something about him that told Berlin the man wasn’t a local.

‘Nice hearse.’

‘It’s new, recent, just a few months. A Weber company conversion of a DeSoto.’ He stood back and looked proudly at the vehicle. ‘This is a very popular car I might tell you. People are dying to ride in it.’

‘Funny bugger, eh?’ The bloke’s English was good enough but there was something odd about the speech pattern. Reffo for sure. Nothing unusual in that these days, the packed migrant ships from Europe were still tying up regularly at Station Pier down at Port Melbourne. Berlin shook a cigarette out of his pack of Lucky Strikes and put it in his mouth. ‘Cigarette?’

The man studied Berlin for a moment before replying. ‘Why not?’ He tossed his wrinkled chamois into the galvanised-iron bucket on the driveway.

Berlin shook a second cigarette loose and passed it to the man. He tossed him his box of matches after lighting up. Middle thirties, around his own age, he estimated. Similar height and build. He’d shaved this morning but a heavy shadow said his beard was already fighting back. Looked after his shoes, Berlin noticed. Berlin always noticed shoes.

He looked up, into his eyes. The other man stared back, holding his gaze. He finally broke away, to strike a match and light his cigarette, not because he had anything to hide. He’d held Berlin’s gaze exactly long enough to make that point very clear.

‘I can’t pick the accent but I reckon you’re not from around here.’

The man passed the matches back after drawing deeply on his cigarette. There was a tattoo on his forearm.

‘I’m Hungarian, I’m a New Australian funny bugger.’

‘You speak pretty good English.’

‘And bad Australian. I’m bemused by a country where to suggest that a man practises some form of humorous anal intercourse, a funny bugger, is a compliment. And where to call him illegitimate is more often than not a term of endearment.’

‘You’re a Jew?’

The man looked down at the numbers tattooed on his forearm. ‘Ah yes. For a moment I thought perhaps you could see inside my trousers.’

Berlin smiled. ‘Now, that’s pretty funny. My wife’s Jewish.’

The comment seemed to pique the man’s interest.

‘Really? From Europe? She was in the camps?’

‘Nope, family got out of Germany before the war, came down here in the mid-thirties:

‘Fortunate for them. Most did not have such luck as this.’ He drew on the cigarette, holding it deep between his middle fingers, his hand momentarily covering his face. He held the smoke in for ten or fifteen seconds, finally exhaling before he spoke. ‘You surprise me, an Australian policeman with a German Jewish wife.’

‘How did you know I was a policeman?’

The man shrugged. ‘A Jew in Eastern Europe learns how to spot a plainclothes policeman very early in life. Or he lives a very short life.’

‘Fair enough. I was in Eastern Europe, Poland for a bit, during the war. And God, I wouldn’t wish that hell on anyone.’

The man seemed to be studying Berlin’s face more closely. ‘You were in Poland? You are a man of very many surprises, Mr … ?’

‘Berlin. But you can call me Charlie.’

‘Berlin, eh? Like the city. Did you visit there also, perhaps?’

Berlin felt his left eye twitch at a sudden flash of memory and he wondered if the other man had noticed. ‘I went there once or twice, but it was on business and I didn’t hang around.’

For Berlin and his crew, and all Bomber Command men like them, Berlin – the Big City, as they called it – was a hated and feared destination. The crews groaned in the briefing room when the maps were revealed and Berlin announced as the target for the night. The German capital was a nightmare, savagely defended by massed anti-aircraft artillery and searchlight batteries. Worse still, the bomber stream was relentlessly harried by radar-controlled night fighters on the way in and then afterwards, as the surviving aircraft fled for home through the cold black night, bomb bays empty and the city flaming in their wake.

The other man put out his hand. ‘Very pleased to meet you, Mr Berlin, Charlie. My name is Lazlo, Lazlo Horvay.’

They shook hands. Lazlo leaned back on the hearse, lifting his face up to the weak sun. ‘You are not visiting us about a bereavement I can assume, Charlie, yes? You have a somewhat morose and even melancholy air about you, one might say, but I judge this is not from a painful event in the too recent past.’

Berlin finished his smoke. He dropped the butt into the puddle of soapy water on the driveway.

‘You get into a lot of fights in pubs, Lazlo? Talking like that, I mean.’

‘Charlie, I can talk my way out of a fight even more easily than I can talk my way in. This is a talent I find most useful in this wide brown land of yours. So what I ascertain is that you are here visiting our esteemed Mr Callahan on business, but yours rather than his.’

‘Somewhere in the middle. I had a few questions about one of the funerals you did yesterday.’

‘Ah yes, the old soldier, was it? Or the Irish lady?’

‘The soldier. His widow reckons something was taken from the coffin, so I’m looking into it. As a personal favour. The widow’s an acquaintance of my wife’s. My wife was at the funeral.’