Bleak Spring (18 page)

“What's working for you? Intuition or suspicion?”

“They're the same thing with me, but maybe that's a cop's dirty thinking. I think we oughta have another talk with George Rockne.”

“Righto, first thing tomorrow. In the meantime I've asked Ellsworth to put Olive under surveillance. If Will Rockne didn't pay someone to bump him off, then Olive is next on my list of suspects. You agree?”

“Either her or Mr. Jones.”

III

The Motor Squad carried out their operation that night. Next morning Sergeant Bassano called Malone. “We did over Hamill's last night. We got nothing out of the Newtown set-up—that was just a legitimate front, all the cars in there belonged to reputable clients. But they had another workshop, no signs, nothing, out at Tempe—when we raided it, they had fourteen stolen cars in there. Your mate Kelpie Dunne was working there, but we let him get away. Was that what you wanted?”

“Just so long as you frightened him.”

“Oh, I think we did that all right. He fell over the back fence getting away and one of my men said he went hobbling off as if he'd been kneecapped or something.”

“We'll keep an eye on him, we know where he lives. Thanks, Ric. And thanks to the Ninja Turtles, all of them.”

“We changed the code name. It was Operation Peanuts.”

IV

George and Sugar Rockne lived out in Cabramatta, one of the far south-western suburbs. Malone and Clements drove out through another cloudless sky, the air as dry as that a thousand kilometres inland. They drove through the main shopping centre, past stores that suggested they were in the suburbs of Saigon or Phnom Penh. There were as many signs in Indo-Chinese characters as in English; a McDonalds stood alone, like a last outpost. Asian faces seemed to outnumber European; two elderly women in black pyjamas stood gazing into a Jeans West boutique; they looked at each other, smiled, shook their heads and walked on. As Malone and Clements turned into a side street, half a dozen Asian youths on the corner turned to look after the unmarked Commodore, their faces as impassive as plates.

“They smell cop,” said Clements. “I'd hate to work out here. A foreigner in my own country.”

“You sound just like my dad.”

“You don't feel the same way?”

Malone shrugged. “I might if I had to work out here. But it's the future, mate, like it or not.”

He was, indeed, glad he did not have to work out here. Local gangs had most of the Vietnamese and Cambodian citizens intimidated and more than half the crimes committed were never reported to the police by the victims. The Force, pressured by ethnic groups who complained that there was not enough ethnic representation among the police, had recruited two young Vietnamese for enrolment at the police academy; one of them had resigned on graduation and the other had lasted only two months in the Force. Malone had never heard the reasons for the resignations, but he could make an educated guess that the two young men or their families had been threatened. He sometimes felt like telling the pressure groups that they should solve the problems themselves in their communities before asking the police to do it. But to make a remark like that would only have him, and the Force, branded racist or anti-immigrant.

The Rocknes' house was small and unpretentious, built of fibro and with a corrugated-iron roof; but it was neat and well cared for. Malone noted at once that every window was barred and there was a strong security grille on the front door; George Rockne, for all his beliefs, didn't trust the proletariat.
The
street was a mixture of similar small houses, some brick, some fibro, one or two very old weatherboards, and half a dozen two-and three-storeyed flats. There were also three small factories: one sign announced
Pork & Duck Roasting.
Several of the houses and flats had For Sale signs on them; Malone guessed they were enforced mortgage sales. Cars, all of them inexpensive models, some of them only an accident short of being wrecks, were parked along both sides of the street. Unemployment was high out here; only a year or two ago these cars would have been missing during the day, with their owners at wherever their owners had worked. The street was quiet, soulless in the bright glare, as if all those within the houses and flats were dead or dying.

The two detectives walked up a concrete path between beds of marigolds, yellow nuggets on stalks; the two strips of lawn on either side of the path looked more like brown rush mats. Two large metal butterflies were attached to the grille security door; a ceramic kookaburra sat on a perch to one side, not laughing, morose as a crow. Sugar Rockne opened the front door behind the grille.

“Oh, Mr. Malone and Mr. Clements!” Professionally she had always called men by their first names; it is difficult to be formal when wearing only a feather or two. This morning she was wearing a bright yellow track-suit, her hair fluffed up, her make-up, ready, it seemed, for any visitors who might call. Though Malone wondered how many visitors she and George would get way out here in the boondocks of Little Asia. She smiled broadly, as if delighted to see them. “George is out in the back yard.”

She led them through the house, which appeared to be furnished with more knick-knacks than a tourist trap. George Rockne, in a neatly pressed shirt and shorts and long socks, was fitting a new nozzle to a length of plastic hose. He did not seem surprised to see Malone and Clements. His face crinkled into a wry, rather than a welcoming, smile.

“Well, you said it was on the cards. That you'd wanna ask more questions, I mean.”

“Better come inside, love.” Sugar jerked her head to the left and the right. In the neighbouring windows curtains had fluttered. “They're all getting their ears ready.”

George Rockne smiled. “Sugar lived up the Cross for so long, everybody up there minded their own business. She forgot what it's like to live in the suburbs. Personally, I couldn't care a bugger.” As they
went
into the house he said, “Still, I think we done the wrong thing, coming way out here. It was a matter of finance, but. I bought this place for a song from a Wog, he couldn't stand the neighbours.”

“It's fulla Asiatics,” said Sugar, ushering them into the small living room.

“Every one of 'em a bloody capitalist.” Rockne grinned again. “Them that know I'm a commo, they won't talk to me. They think I'm spying for Pol Pot.”

There was small talk till Sugar brought them coffee and home-made rock cakes; Malone wondered if the cakes were baked each day in expectation of the visitors who never called. The room was crowded with cheap furniture, all of it spotless. A bookcase stood against one wall, its shelves heavy with political volumes; the only title that Malone recognized was
Ten Days That Shook the World,
once upon a long time ago Con Malone's bible. On the opposite wall was a row of shelves crowded with plaster figurines; Malone looked for Lenin or Marx, but then recognized that the shelves were Sugar's. A tiny Mae West lounged between a fan dancer (Sugar herself?) and a bust of the Queen; half a dozen small kookaburras, more hilarious than their big brother outside, had their beaks open in silent laughter. But Malone didn't laugh, not even silently. He had been in too many homes like this one to miss the significance of the security of what furnished them

“George, do you know a Mr. Jones?”

It was a brutal first delivery, but Rockne didn't blink or duck. He just frowned and amidst all those wrinkles it was impossible to tell whether the question had surprised him or frightened him. “I suppose I've known a dozen Joneses over the years. Which one are you referring to?”

“We think he's a foreigner, he has an accent of some sort. Tall feller, well dressed, looks like he sells Rolls-Royces.”

The wrinkles turned into another smile. “You expect me to know what a Rolls-Royce salesman looks like?”

“I knew a man owned a Rolls,” said Sugar. “Before your time, sweetheart.”

Rockne smiled affectionately at her. “One of her capitalist boyfriends . . . What gives you the idea I might know a Mr. Jones?”

“
Just a wild guess,” said Malone. “There was a note about him in Will's diary.”

“Mentioning me?”

“Yes.” The way to the truth is often through lying: old police proverb.

But George Rockne wasn't going to fall for that one. “I don't think so, Inspector. I never took anyone, Mr. Jones or anyone else, to see Will.”

“You could've
sent
Mr. Jones to see him,” said Clements around a mouthful of rock cake.

“This is getting nasty,” said Sugar and sounded disappointed in the two detectives.

“We're not meaning to be,” Malone reassured her. “We've got nothing against George. It's Mr. Jones we're after.”

“What's he done?”

“Well, for one thing he's been to Will's office in the last coupla days and threatened Will's secretary, a nice harmless girl, for not giving him his files. She couldn't do it because we, the police, had a warrant on them.”

“What did the files say?”

“Oh, I couldn't tell you that, George.” Which was true.

Rockne looked round the room, bouncing a cake from one hand to the other as if it were indeed a piece of rock and he might throw it at something or someone. Then he looked back at Malone, his eyes almost lost amidst the wrinkles; he looked suddenly worried and tired and old. “Has he been to see Olive and the kids?”

“I don't know. We're going there next. Who is he, George?”

Rockne put out his hand to Sugar; it still held the rock cake. “You wanna go outside for a while, love?”

“No,” she said, clutching his wrist as if he might run away. “I don't. Definitely. I'm staying, sweetheart. If you're in trouble . . . Is he?”

“I don't think so, Mrs. Rockne. I don't think he'd have anything to do with the murder of his own son.”

She
gasped at the brutality of what he had said. In the caves of Kings Cross she had seen more than enough violence: stand-over men with knives, crazed junkies running amok with smashed bottles, pimps belting their girls. But this was her own home, this was her husband, her sweetheart, sitting beside her. She still held his wrist, her grip tightening now.

“George,” said Malone quietly, “tell us what you know.”

Rockne said nothing for a long moment; all his life had been devoted to keeping secrets. Living in a country where Special Branch and ASIO and the CIA and even, so he had heard, a certain Prime Minister had kept files on
him,
he had learned never to trust anyone; not even some members of the Party, not since the break-up post-Stalin. Matters had eased over the past few years, with the Party dwindling away till it was only a faint, mocking shadow of what it had been in the Thirties, when he had first joined as a very young man. As a youth of seventeen he had volunteered to join the fight against fascism, to go to Spain and fight Franco; but then they had asked him to pay his own fare and that had been the end of that. He remembered his reply, an old joke: “Mate, if it cost only a quid to go round the world, I couldn't get out of sight.” Those had been the days, when there had been something to fight for; though there had been shock and disbelief when Joe Stalin had signed the pact with Hitler. But he and the Party had weathered that, as they had weathered the invasion years later of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. He had somehow kept his idealism alive, like a fragile plant, and only in the last couple of years had he admitted, only to himself, not even to Sugar, that idealism was not enough, that human nature would always defeat it. But you couldn't give it away entirely, not even when you saw the Wall come tumbling down, Lenin pulled by a crane from his pedestal: all you could do was pray (pray? Hail Marx, full of grace . . .) that human nature would see the light. He was a communist, once, now and forever.

“His name's Dostoyevsky.”

“Like the writer? You're kidding.”

“You ever read
Crime and Punishment?
I'd have thought it was required reading for cops.”

Malone shook his head. Lisa had tried to introduce him to nineteenth-century writers, but they had proved too turgid for him; the only ones he had liked were Jane Austen and Mark Twain, a choice
that
had puzzled Lisa but not himself. He liked anyone who took the mickey out of pretension.

“Igor Dostoyevsky. He used to be a Second Secretary at the Soviet embassy in Canberra. I'm not sure, but I think he was the KGB boss, what the CIA calls its station chief.”

“He used to be at the embassy?”

“Yeah, but he resigned a year ago when things started to fall apart in Moscow. The same time as I retired.”

Sugar said to the two detectives, “I still dunno whether he's happy or not.”

Rockne smiled gently at her. “Love, everything I believed in went down the gurgler. You can't expect me to start singing 'Happy Days Are Here Again.'”

“Did the commos ever sing that?” But she, too, smiled. Maybe, thought Malone, she, too, had had her dreams that had collapsed about her. He had seen enough to know the world was littered with fallen icons.

“Did our government give him permission to stay here?” said Clements.

Rockne nodded. “They had no proof he wasn't what he said he was—a disillusioned communist who wanted to start a new life out here. Personally, I think Special Branch and ASIO are still watching him, but what else have they got to do now? I don't think it worries him.”

“What does he do for a crust?”

Rockne's face was an abstract etching of amusement. “He sells cars. Mercedes, not Rolls-Royces.”

“Then where did he get five and a quarter million dollars?”

Rockne sighed, sat back in his deep chair. “He'll have me killed if he finds out I've blown the whistle on him.” Sugar gasped again and he glanced at her with concern. “I told you to go outside, love. But I've gotta tell 'em. If he's been threatening the girl who worked for Will, next thing he could be doing the same to Olive and the kids. I don't care about Olive, she can look after herself. Or let that old bat of a mother loose on him.” He tried for humour, but it fell flat, too loaded with bitterness. Malone, a father, recognized how much the older man had missed his son and his grandchildren. “I care about the kids,
but.
I don't want Igor going anywhere near them.”