St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)
Geoffrey McGeachin
For Wilma,
because not one word of this
would have been possible without her.
25 September 1967
Charlie Berlin didn’t want to die, not today and definitely not like this, jammed in the passenger seat of a Triumph TR5 sports car hurtling through Monday morning traffic on Kings Way in South Melbourne. Besides not wanting to leave Rebecca without a husband and his kids without a father, Berlin was worried that his life might flash before his eyes and there were some parts he really didn’t want to experience again.
He clutched the passenger-side windscreen frame of the Triumph, pressed his feet hard into the firewall and braced himself. When a bloke has survived twenty-nine bombing missions over Nazi-occupied Europe, a POW camp and a twenty-day forced march at gunpoint from Poland into Germany through the worst winter blizzards in a century, getting the life crushed out of you under the steel wheels of a Melbourne tram seemed pretty unfair.
Bob Roberts dropped down a gear and floored the accelerator pedal. As Berlin’s head snapped back he caught a glimpse of a white-faced conductor in the open doorway and heard the tram driver frantically ringing the bell. He winced at the screech of metal on metal from the braking wheels, saw a shudder from the back end of the tram and then they were round and past. Roberts was laughing, yelling over the wind tearing through the open-topped car, the scar on the left side of his face giving his grin an angry, maniacal edge.
‘Jesus Christ, Charlie, you don’t want to live for bloody ever, do you?’
Berlin shook his head slowly, amazed he was still alive. ‘Just till lunchtime would be nice, Bob,’ he yelled. ‘If you can manage it.’
Roberts veered right a minute or two later, off Kings Way and on to Queens Road, running a traffic light more red than amber and cutting off a tradesman’s Holden panel van. The battered blue van had a couple of ladders mounted on top and the startled driver swerved sideways, leaning on the horn. Roberts pulled a leather driving glove off his right hand with his teeth and raised two fingers over his head. Two fingers spread was the victory sign and two fingers together and slightly bent was a very definite ‘f*ck you’. There was little doubt which one Roberts meant.
Berlin heard the horn again and then the sound of the panel van’s engine straining at high revs, trying to catch up with them. The sports car easily outpaced the other vehicle on the straight run down Queens Road, which was lucky for the tradie. If he was after an apology from the Triumph’s driver he wouldn’t get one, and if he was looking to get beaten to a pulp it was London to a brick on that. Bob Roberts was trouble and he was a copper, making him doubly bad for anyone looking for a fight.
Berlin glanced at the parkland to his right, then back over his shoulder into the cramped space behind the bucket seats of the sports car. The covers of the foolscap manila folders were fluttering in the slipstream so he scooped them up, putting them down in the equally cramped space at his feet. Last thing he fancied right now was chasing missing persons paperwork all over the Albert Park Lake golf course.
‘Your mob, eh, Charlie? Wanna stop in for a beer?’ Roberts tilted his head to the left, indicating a two-storey building behind a neat hedge. A sign over the hedge read ‘Air Force Association’ and above it the pale blue RAAF ensign was flying from a white flagstaff.
Berlin shook his head. He’d had plenty of invitations to join and he was sure they did good works and were a nice bunch of blokes but he wasn’t the club type. Besides, they had a bar. He’d been a long time breaking the drinking habit and even now he did his best to avoid temptation. In any case, a lot of those ex-air force types looked back on the war as the greatest days of their lives, and that wasn’t how he saw it. Charlie Berlin didn’t want or need to be reminded of things from twenty-some years back. He counted off the years in his head. It really was twenty-two. Jesus.
Think about something else, he told himself. Down at his feet he saw the name on the top of the pile of folders: Gudrun Scheiner. A German name. There were a lot more foreign names turning up around the traps these days; even the Aussie Rules football teams were fielding blokes with names like Jesaulenko, Silvagni and Ruscuklic. Maybe if Essendon had a few more of those post-war refugee kids or kids of refugees onboard they might have finished better than sixth on the league ladder for the year. Water under the bridge now; Richmond were the 1967 VFL premiers and, as young Sarah had said too many times while trying to cheer him up, there was always next year for their team, the not-so-mighty Bombers.
Through the trees on Berlin’s right he could see the cold grey glint of Albert Park Lake. There was a restaurant on the lake, across the other side. The Carousel. He had taken Rebecca there to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary, ten years on from the unexpected pregnancy and his marriage proposal. She’d had ‘chicken in a basket’, he remembered, and he’d had a good steak. The St Kilda end of the lake was where Roberts had said they’d found the body of the seventh or eighth girl. That was two weeks back and they would get to her eventually but the most recent missing girl, fifteen-year-old Gudrun, was the priority right now.
He considered picking up the folder and reading about the Scheiner girl, but the wind blowing through the open-topped car made that impossible. And his hands were still shaking from the close call with the tram. He’d know the facts of the case soon enough – too damn soon, from the way Roberts was driving. They were headed towards Brighton, a seaside suburb like its English namesake.