St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(26)
The front of the bluestone building was painted with garishly coloured images, like some of those he’d seen in the music papers. He knew the style was called psychedelic and had something to do with the drug LSD. The centrepiece illustration was a 10-foot-high image of a seated, rotund, smiling Asian bloke, who had to be the Buddha. The entrance doorway was in the middle of his belly.
‘Kids call it the smiling Chink,’ Roberts said. ‘The picture is probably offensive to Buddhists but it’s not as though they’re going to do anything about it.’
‘Why not?’
Roberts looked at Berlin and smiled. ‘Because they’re non-violent, Charlie.’
The tone in his voice suggested that Berlin was supposed to know this. He didn’t, but he was pleased to hear it anyway. If Melbourne could up its percentage of Buddhists amongst the town’s hard men it would be a good thing all round.
The warehouse doors were locked tight but after a couple of minutes of vigorous hammering by Roberts, they heard the rasping sound of bolts being slid open. There was an outrush of a brownish haze when the door opened and Berlin’s nose picked up the scent of incense, patchouli, marijuana and stale toasted cheese. It was dark inside the building and the girl in the doorway squinted and blinked at the two men standing outside in the daylight.
‘We’re closed, and you’re both too bloody old for it anyway.’
She looked to be about sixteen, with dirty scraggly hair and a face devoid of make-up. Her lips were bruised and puffy and she had a reddish rash on her cheeks and neck. Full breasts and hard nipples poked out against the tie-dyed cotton blouse she was wearing and a pair of unlaced and too-big tan buckskin boots covered her feet. There was nothing between the bottom of her shirt and the sagging top of the boots. She might have been wearing underpants but Berlin had his doubts.
‘Interrupted something, have we, love?’
The girl blinked hard at Roberts but didn’t answer. Berlin judged from her bruised and puffy lips and slightly dilated pupils that Bob was probably right on the money.
Roberts pushed the door open with his right hand. ‘We’re police, we want to talk to whoever runs this little ... establishment. We don’t have time to piss about, love, so can you whistle him up for us?’
The girl had blinked harder at the word ‘police’ then she stepped back as Berlin and Roberts brushed past.
‘Hey Jim, it’s the wallopers. They want a word.’
Berlin’s eyes were still becoming accustomed to the darkness, though he very clearly heard someone say ‘shit’ from somewhere above him. There were scuffling noises and then the squeak of rusted window hinges. A narrow shaft of light from upstairs lit up one wall, illuminating a staircase with a wooden banister. From somewhere outside the building they heard the sound of tin and glass hitting the pavement.
‘Wouldn’t be able to find a light switch for us, would you, sweetheart?’ Roberts asked.
The girl swung the heavy entrance door closed and then felt her away along one wall. There was a click and a single fluorescent tube flickered to life on the ceiling. The place was bigger than Berlin had imagined, though the black-painted walls gave it a closed-in, gloomy feeling. The ceiling was only nine or ten feet high and the nylon parachutes that covered it had most likely come from the army disposals store round on Russell Street. The parachutes must have been white at some point, but cigarette smoke and burning incense had stained the fabric the colour of weak tea.
Berlin suddenly wondered what had become of his parachute after they had cut him down from the pine tree after the raid on Kiel. He had been too busy getting beaten senseless by angry German soldiers to pay much attention. Captured airmen were Terrorfliegers, Terror Flyers, to the relentlessly bombed German people and if a beating was all you got you were lucky. Not a lot of Buddhists in Germany at that point in time, he supposed. Did they have discotheques in Berlin? With military surplus parachutes stapled to the ceilings? Of course, it was West Berlin now, a city occupied by British, French and American soldiers, the victors, and ringed by landmines and a wall of concrete and barbed wire. The other part of the city, East Berlin, was occupied by the Russians who had built that wall to stop East Germans from defecting, and he was damn sure there would be no discotheques behind it.
There was a raised stage at the far end of the room but it was only a foot or so higher than the dance floor. Battered, black-painted speaker boxes were set up on each side of the stage and there were spotlights mounted on steel poles with bits of coloured plastic taped over the front of some. Apart from the front door, the only obvious exits were doors at the rear with a sign indicating the way to the toilets, and the flight of wooden stairs running up one wall. Berlin walked towards the stairs but the girl got there before him.
‘They’re coming up, Jim.’
Berlin heard more scuffling. ‘Keep your shirt on, Jim, we’re not from the drug squad.’ He glanced at Roberts. ‘Have a bit of a poke around down here first, will you? I’ll get started up there.’
He turned back to the girl. ‘What do you say to leading the way, so we can all have a nice chat together.’
Berlin followed the girl up the steep staircase. He was right about her having no underpants on.
Upstairs appeared to be a cross between a café and a club. Walls painted brown this time and a bar arrangement with a big urn for hot water, a fridge and shelves full of mismatched mugs and plates. There were tables and chairs spread about the place as well as a number of battered sofas. Cheap tapestries showing scenes of pyramids and camels and palm trees took up the spaces not occupied by framed photographs and engravings. The engravings featured fairies and knights and maidens, King Arthur and Guinevere and exotic Indian dancers. The photographs, mostly shot with very wide-angle lenses, showed long-haired, naked hippy women and children posing in forests or by cliffs and waterfalls. He recognised some of the photographs as coming from an American counter-culture magazine called Evergreen Review. Rebecca got copies of the magazine on a regular basis from overseas, though the government sometimes cracked down on importation when the articles were deemed too politically controversial or the illustrations pushed things a bit far in terms of explicit nudity. In those cases Berlin got copies for Rebecca through the vice squad, who always had plenty to share.