Office of Innocence (30 page)

“In case you fail grace,” Darragh insisted.

“Easy to say, Father,” Fratelli complained. “But I want to be good.” He held up both hands. “I want to have a serious conversation that looks like normal talk.”

Darragh closed his eyes and put a hand to his forehead.

The drinks came quickly, and Fratelli paid for them with a ten-shilling note, telling the woman to keep the change. This, in a nontipping nation, would give her a margin of shillings to take home. But she showed no special gratitude. She gave an appearance of boredom at the egregious generosity of Americans.

As the woman left, Fratelli was aware of Darragh's eyes on him.

“I'm not going to be spending much where I'm going, Father. Not if I take your advice. But, before I take the path, why do you think God made me like this?”

“He might want a special sacrifice in your case.”

Fratelli shook his head and looked at his whisky. “Special sacrifice,” he murmured, picked up the whisky, and downed it. Darragh merely moistened the bow of his own lips with his.

“Look,” said Fratelli reasonably, “if I was some hick in the infantry, you might tell me I can redeem myself in prison, or at the end of a rope. I might believe you, particularly as you seem to think that prisons are places where you expiate things. But that's not the way it is. Prison is a licensed hell. It doesn't elevate any soul. Not a guard. Not a prisoner. Yet you command me to walk out of here and martyr myself.” He was drinking beer reflectively.

Darragh took a small mouthful of the scotch, and as it juddered its way down the unsettled column of his body, he thought again how he could like some of this more regularly. If only there were not cautionary tales of the weaknesses for it which Australians got from Irish ancestors, from mad, alcoholic uncles, of whom Mr. Darragh had told fantastic tales in Darragh's childhood.

“You know you have to do it, just the same,” said Darragh, feeling clear and certain. “If
I'd
killed someone, I'd know I had to do it. The prison system wouldn't be a question. My guilt would be the question.”

“Yeah, but it's a theory with you. With me, it's my nature.” Fratelli drank a good draft of his beer, and sighing, told Darragh, “You know I'm not like this with women. I'm not argumentative. I'm not a wise-ass. I'm soft. I agree. I raise points inch by inch, ounce by ounce. I'm a noble guy with women.”

“You already told me that,” Darragh murmured under his breath.

“Other guys are brutes. I know. You should hear the way they talk about women. In the camp. Their mouths are a running sewer. Their brains are savage. Normal men. Men who marry. You'd want me to be like them?”

Darragh finished his small glass of whisky, in an effort to relieve in himself the fear that he was achieving nothing.

“Good work,” said Fratelli. “Join me in another of those.” And while Darragh's neck prickled with the heat of the liquor, Fratelli raised ten shillings to the waitress and made the sort of confident hand gestures Darragh had only seen in films, in nightclubs where men in tails and women in ball gowns waited with cigarettes and cocktails for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to appear and dance. The name Copacabana ran through Darragh's blood like a brilliant, alien viper.

More drinks arrived. Fratelli waved sagely to Trumble, and Trumble solemnly waved back. He had not turned his eyes or body from them at all, and still took his role of watchdog studiously.

Darragh considered the liquor before him: a shot glass of whisky, the tall drink of beer—double a pony, a schooner. His second schooner. In this mad place he had an appetite for it. But he must avoid it. For would he still be a wise counselor when it was in him? In fact, was he a wise counselor anyhow?

“Look,” said Darragh. “this is not a social occasion. It's insane. This is not a party. Think for a second of Kate Heggarty. Those hands of yours . . .” Fratelli was persuaded to look at his massive hands for a while, and the experience made him reach for his second whisky and down it at a gulp.

“For most of the time,” Fratelli said, “I was the best guy she ever met.”

“It's either to the police with me,” Darragh urged. “Or we go to your own commanding officer.”

“They won't be happy, the brass. They like to pretend we're all nice boys.”

“You must come with me.”

Again Fratelli considered his hands. “I guess I will.” But he reached out and drank a third of his schooner of beer. “I guess I will,” he repeated, belching softly. “Why don't you call me Gene?” he asked.

“Anthony said he called you John. A misunderstanding of vowels. He heard your name as John, the orphan you made.”

“If I'd asked you here and you hadn't had my confession, you would have called me Gene. You would have said ‘Gene, mate.' You would have said ‘cobber.' ”

“God help us, Gene,” said Darragh. “Stop delaying.”

Fratelli murmured, “I see that your big guy over there is keeping pace with me on the liquor.”

And again there were the hand signals to the barman, the calling of the wire-headed waitress, the furnishing of another ten-bob note. Looking with lowered eyes at Darragh's bewilderment, Fratelli asked, “We don't have to go just now, do we?”

“Yes. I can't physically make you, but I would if I could. We should go
now
.”

“But I'll be a damn long time without the taste of John Barleycorn,” Fratelli muttered. “Give me a moment.” He toasted Darragh. The weight of unreason and fear in the room caused Darragh to join him in a sip. Outside, an air-raid siren sounded, and the barman checked some curtained windows giving onto the laneway.

“I have to make a phone call,” said Fratelli, beginning to stand with a sigh. Darragh grabbed his left wrist as he rose.

“And then you'll come back and tell me that you are needed for duty, won't you?”

“I just want to check what's happening, Father. I won't leave. For God's sake, let's not have any fiasco with the big guy.”

And he walked away, decisively, and disappeared through the curtain to the entrance lobby. Left sitting, Darragh looked at the bar. Trumble was leaning there, glass in hand but still vigilant.

As Fratelli vanished from the room, a sailor entered, carrying phone messages to this or that officer, each of whom rose, apologized to their guests, and left—not without telling everyone to drink up and relax. In Fratelli's absence, Trumble came over and asked if everything was okay. Darragh reassured him.

“That's good whisky they're serving,” said Trumble admiringly. “Johnnie Walker Black.”

“He can afford it,” said Darragh.

Trumble nodded, winked, and returned to his place at the bar.

“Sweet Mother of Christ, help me,” Darragh prayed, and sipped more whisky. Could he and Trumble make a citizen's arrest? Of course not. It would make Trumble privy to what only Darragh and Fratelli were permitted to know.

Fratelli came hustling back into the bar, his shoulders forward, a brave bull in appearance.

“Frank, sorry, we've got to go,” he said with new gravity. The presence of the sailor-courier added weight to his command. “There's an emergency. We're better outside.”

He could see the doubt in Darragh's eyes. “Bring your pal, too.” He gestured Trumble over from the bar. “The Japanese are in the harbor, gentlemen,” Fratelli told Darragh and Trumble. “We are about to see the enemy face to face.”

He knew, Darragh could see, how to confuse a person—to appeal at the one time to a man's sense of peril and to his core curiosity. Trumble was already moving, and Darragh, a little distanced from himself by unaccustomed liquor, moved too. Out past the old man in the white coat, the tender of the visitors' book, who seemed unfussed about this moment of haste and history, and then beyond the door, into a sudden wall of dark.

XXIV

Here in the night, Darragh could tell at once, Fratelli was the prince. “Come on,” he said. “Down the steps.” They descended amongst dim white mansions and harborside flats towards a pool of light arising from some source—yes, sudden light from the naval graving yard down there on the shore, and from a huge battleship, anchored off it.

“This is nothing,” said Darragh. “Come with me now!”

“The
Chicago
,” Fratelli explained. And then, at his word, and as if he were conjuring events, the dockyard lights switched off, and so did all the lights aboard the battleship, and Darragh and Trumble were blind pilgrims again. As Darragh stumbled, feeling but not seeing the radiant heat of his fellow drinkers, a set of dull but profound explosions from up the harbor became the chief sensory clues in their approach to the water. Suddenly an MP was shining a torch on them. A massive noise of firing broke out nearby, and in its pauses voices could be heard yelling in some heightened way, officers seeking information, the men on whatever trigger it was, something big, an artillery piece, at least an antiaircraft gun, answering at the shout. The military policeman was shining the cautious ray of his torch over Fratelli's identification.

“These two gentlemen are from the New South Wales police,” Fratelli glibly told him. It was obvious to Darragh that Fratelli had the power to walk through any gate tonight. Fratelli seemed superior even to whatever was proceeding in the harbor, transcending both the friend and the enemy.

“Jap subs,” said the military policeman in an earnest, flat accent Darragh identified with the American South. “Indefinite number. Right in the bay here. We got orders to look out for paratroopers. You seen any, Sergeant?”

“We've been drinking,” said Fratelli, a wink in his voice.

The MP's voice trembled. “Wish I'd been.”

“You'll be fine, son,” Fratelli told him, a comforting captain in the darkness.

Trumble was grinning by torchlight, tickled to be cast as a cop, an oppressor of the workers, but keeping an eye on Darragh.

As they walked down a cement path, in spite of the overcast night Darragh could see palm fronds around him, promising themselves future botanical summers, admirably permanent in their expectations. In a corner between the parkland and the Elizabeth Bay jetty, an American antiaircraft crew had their gun bent towards the water. There was heat from the gun platform, its breech, its long barrel. The entire crew of five men and an officer seemed to be talking at once, profaning under the weight of uncertainty. Their panic reached out to Darragh as he thought: These aren't warriors. Their uniforms are a masquerade. They asked each other if they'd seen something or other. Jesus Christ, they said, they weren't sure. They'd seen the hull, black as sin. “I
saw
,” said one gunner, glimmering with certainty. “We got it, Lieutenant.”

“No, you fucking didn't,” his young officer told him. And the debate went on. They could not leave it alone. It itched in them. As their dialogue eased a little, Fratelli introduced himself and said he'd been sent down in case of need for crowd control and other issues arising. He repeated, without naming names, his easy lie about Trumble and Darragh. The commander of the gun crew, the boy lieutenant, welcomed them. He seemed pleased to have them there. They could be his Dutch uncles, you could see him thinking. “I'd say,” he announced respectfully, “we should keep an eye out for paratroopers. There's a crew at the end of the jetty with a Browning automatic. They're watching for that too.”

The harbor itself had become still now. No more booming. Yet shouts could be heard from the direction of the
Chicago
and the other ships moored by Garden Island, but every cry Darragh heard seemed more confused and informed by panic. Fratelli asked Darragh, confidentially, “Can you see any paratroopers, Frank?” It was a jovial inquiry, as if Fratelli had some secret knowledge which made the possibility of paratroopers laughable. Frank peered up into the dark, low, inscrutable cloud. No threat that he could see was blossoming up there. Ten minutes passed quickly as Darragh and Trumble remained vigilant. But there were no sudden paratroopers nor any particular noise. The lieutenant told them that the bastards in the submarine he'd seen earlier and fired upon must have cleared out to the other side of the harbor, Neutral Bay maybe. No one knew how many subs there might be in the deep anchorages tonight. “Hey, Lieutenant,” yelled the gun trainer from his little seat, his hand still on the wheels which elevated and lowered the barrel. “If we got that sonofabitch, we saved the
Chicago
.”

“Stop dreaming,” yelled the officer and shook his head, as if he were not a boy, nor claimed by boyish fantasies himself. And then a succession of profound thumps from further up-harbor—one, two, three, four, five! Each release of explosives echoed brutally in Darragh's spinal cord. He thought, Oh, God, the power . . . At once, there was a frantic conversation about these profound noises amongst the members of the gun crew, and the young officer took the sights as the gun swiveled towards Rushcutters Bay. “Fire!” he screamed, and the gun pumped out a thunderous rack of antiaircraft shells into the water.

In hollow stillness afterwards, while Trumble's eyes darted around the clouds, Darragh heard a roar across the water. “For Christ's sake, you Yanks. This is the cutter from HMAS
Geelong
.” The gunners looked at each other in amazement. Had they failed twice—in firing upon a friend, as well as in sinking nothing? “You nearly sunk us, you stupid pricks!” roared the voice. Fratelli began laughing, and went so far as to dig Darragh in the ribs.

“Give us a fucking go!” cried a second voice from the Australian cutter.

“Godspeed,” called the lieutenant.

“Go to buggery!” called a sailor aboard the cutter as it increased speed to leave the bay.

Thus absurdity, doubt, horror were all overlaid in the air. “There aren't any bloody paratroopers,” Trumble announced beside Darragh. He still loyally held Darragh's grip with his black overcoat in it.

“No, there aren't,” said Fratelli with satisfaction.

“We should go,” Darragh told him, trying to find his eye in the dimness. But would he be obeyed in this darkness in which Fratelli reigned with such composure?

Fratelli thought, and pulled a half bottle of scotch from his suit pocket. Clearly he had bought it while making his phone call. He offered it to Darragh.

“No,” said Darragh. Now to Trumble, who was both willing to drink and could hardly be told not to—that the flask came from a murderous hand. This was a sort of triumph for Fratelli, who took the small bottle back and looked at Darragh by the remaining light shed by hooded lamps still undoused beneath the eaves of workshops and barracks and messes in the dockyard area.

“Father Darragh,” he said, in a voice so even Trumble could not have detected slyness in it, “your friend drank. But you treat me as if you know something about me that keeps you from sharing a crock with me. Do you?” Darragh would not answer that serpentine question. “Do you, Father?” Fratelli insisted.

“No,” said Darragh. He took the flask, and began to sip. Then he found that he drank hungrily, in the conventional desire of drinkers that the heat of the liquor would fuse a night, in which there were too many elements, to one reality. The mouthful tasted anciently familiar, as if Darragh had been drinking it from childhood. To drink it standing in the dark was appealing, even in the dominant presence of Fratelli. What would Kate think of this men's ritual? But you are not forgotten, he promised. Not by a long way. Yet this is how it happens, thought Darragh, habituation to evil. Dangerous men do not wear horns. They carry a kindly whisky flask in their pocket. A shipyard siren wailed for no particular reason, and Fratelli accepted the whisky back from Darragh.

Did time still exist down here on the water? He had no certainty that it hadn't been blown out of the harbor by detonations. Ten past eleven. Searchlights sprang up from warships beyond the huge black bulk of
Chicago
. They danced towards Bradleys Head and swept back again towards the Sydney foreshore, illuminating islands in midstream. Guns of ships at Garden Island began to fire into the mouth of Elizabeth Bay, and Darragh could feel rather than see the gravity of the displaced water, and a presence out there. There was energetic turning of wheels and grinding of ratchets on the gun to which Fratelli, Darragh, and Trumble were loosely attached. “Hold fire,” said the lieutenant, at the sights himself.

“No, I see it!” cried the soldier in the little metal seat who had charge of training the gun, and—after a few orders from the officer—the gun, calibrated more in hope than certainty, howled and thumped again, and recoiled on its tires, firing directly north. Three deafening racks of shells were shot off before there was silence.

Would my father, in his boyhood, have suffered this day after day, months at a time, in France? Darragh, dealing with the echo-speckled quietness after cannon, asked himself. Did I respect him sufficiently for it? But of course, no son did. The stories as related were hollow. The intimate shock even of one gun could not be rendered in words.

Into the pool of light thrown by warships moved a substantial silhouette. One of the gunners cried, “That's
Perkins
putting to sea.” Across the molten light the ship edged, disappearing only by inches at a time into the darkness and shifting lights. For some reason, seeing the ship depart the scene of peril, Darragh began to breathe again and noticed the gun crew did too.

“One away,” said the lieutenant exultantly. In the past seconds, Darragh had all but forgotten Fratelli. He looked around, adverting to his presence, to Trumble's. The two men stood together, equally serious witnesses in the dark.

“I was sure that big bugger was going to blow up,” Trumble told him reverently.

The lieutenant and one of his men were peering across the water through binoculars, while a searchlight came from the great battleship,
Chicago
, and gun crews aboard it began firing across the harbor with scarlet tracer bullets. Thus a spine of periscope beyond Garden Island became clear to Darragh's vision and to others, for Trumble yelled in Darragh's ear, “They're all round it.” He sounded an enthusiastic participant in the battle. “All round it, but not on it!” The peculiarities of light and tracer and shadow which had enabled them all to see the tip of the submarine had passed and been replaced by raw, unregulated sound. So simultaneously did machine-gun fire and rifle shots and shells and depth-charge explosions occur, including here, with the gun crew and the men with the automatic rifle at the end of the ferry jetty all adding their foreground quotient to the body of sound, there was not room for a breath. Darragh was reminded of his loud day in Lidcombe with Gervaise, and found it hard amid the chaos to hold for much time at all to the bruised image of Kate Heggarty, still dear to him as the chief victim of this war and all its noise and lunacy.

He had just retrieved Kate's memory from the wreckage of noise when a new, dominant explosion occupied all his senses, searing his eyes, tearing at his eardrums, taking air from his mouth, bouncing his lungs off their accustomed walls and threatening their collapse. It lasted and lasted, and he had no rationality left as it passed—indeed, even as he knew it had ceased, it still ran crazily round the pan of his brain.

Darragh found himself senselessly running away from Trumble and Fratelli towards this recent explosion-in-chief. The earth took the vibrations from beyond the seawall, so that he ran like a peasant running in an earthquake, yet heading perversely towards the source, the volcano, the central unrest of the earth. There was a gate with an Australian sailor on it. He tried to block Darragh. But Fratelli was running too, to keep up with Darragh, and called, “He's a priest, he's a priest,” and the sailor stepped back.

Darragh ran on at his frantic young man's pace through the darting searchlights of the high, moored
Chicago
, its sounds of bells and commands and its individual voices of bewilderment audible across the water. He saw a crowd of Australian sailors were gathered, formlessly and without power, by a seawall. No, not utterly without power—some were leaning through a hole in the seawall and lifting drenched, bloodied men out of water which was nearly solid with the wrack and ruin of something not yet defined. A Dutch submarine with the name
K9
on its conning tower stood undamaged offshore a little, but between it and the seawall lay, smashed and sunken, a bow of wood and a crowded wreckage of fragmented steel and timber. A black disembodied funnel emerged from the water and gave a dominant clue to what all this meant. A drenched sailor with a cut cheek and blood at his waist grasped Darragh.