Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher (15 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘Do you approve of clubs for women, Uncle?’ ‘Yes, but only after every other method of quieting them has failed.’

Punch
cartoon, 1928

There was a keyed-up aimlessness in the fuggy air of Little Lonsdale Street which affected Phryne like a drug. Several women were within her view as she perched on a grimy stool outside Mother James’s drinking her revolting tea as though she enjoyed it.

The street was quiet, but sordid during the day, and really only came into its own towards midnight. The small, squalid shops were lit up, the street was filled with a crowd, and voices and music bounced off the canyon-like walls of the few taller buildings which backed onto that mangy thoroughfare. It smelt strongly of fish and chips, dust, burning rubbish and unwashed humans, with an overlay of Californian Poppy, of which the coiffures of the young men seemed to be chiefly composed.

Phryne had been watching trade in the pharmacy for an hour, and was fairly sure that this was, indeed, the drug distribution centre she had been seeking.

The shop was an open front with a counter, on which were perched the two great glass jars of green and red liquid which marked it in the popular mind as a chemist’s. Behind the counter stood a small, fat man, and an assistant with bottle-blonde hair in a fringed dress of viridian green, who handed out plasters and powders to the passing trade. Some clients, quite well-dressed, and one a real gentleman in evening dress, came to the counter and asked for their needs in a whisper. For them the small man dispensed a pink packet of powder, and accepted five pounds for it. Lesser clientele for the same powders bought a leaf that might hold a saltspoon for ten shillings. Strain her ears as she might, Phryne could not hear what it was these customers were saying.

‘Time for a saunter, chaps,’ she murmured to Bert, who gulped down his tea and stood up. Cec remained where he was. Phryne teetered a little in the abominable shoes, took Bert’s arm, and tiptoed to the door of the pharmacy. She patted Bert and spoke in a slurred Australian accent.

‘You wait here, love, and I’ll get us something,’ she promised and approached the counter, taking a little time.

The small fat man turned his attention to this half-cut floozy. He hadn’t seen her before, but as he often said, ‘You couldn’t know every tart on Little Lon.’.

Phryne beckoned him. ‘Some of them pink powders,’ she slurred. The chemist hesitated, as if waiting for her to complete a slogan. Phryne’s mind, working overtime, provided her with an idea. Seen on every railway siding was the legend ‘
Dr
Parkinson’s pink pills for pale people’.

‘Those pink powders for pale people,’ she finished, and held out her ten shilling note. The man nodded, and exchanged her note for a slip of pink paper, embossed with the title ‘Peterson’s pink powders for pale people’ and containing a small quantity of the requisite stuff. Phryne nodded woozily at him and found her way back to Bert.

‘Come on, sailor,’ she said, leaning on him heavily. ‘Let’s go back to my place.’

Bert put an arm around her and led her away, back to where the Morris squatted in the gutter, sagging a little as was its wont. Cec had followed them, soft-footed.

‘Cec, you take this to Dr MacMillan at the Royal Women’s Hospital and come back. Bert and I will continue our carouse,’ ordered Phryne, putting the paper into Cec’s pocket. ‘Back to Mother James’s, my old darling.’

‘Ain’t you got what you want?’ hissed Bert. He was finding the proceedings nerve-wracking, though holding Phryne close was some compensation.

‘Not yet. I want to see who else visits here,’ answered Phryne, and conducted Bert back down the street again.

They found other seats at Mother James’s. The hostelry was unique in Phryne’s experience. It was the front of an old house, the verandah open to the street. Mother James herself, a monstrous Irishwoman around three hundred years old, with a face that would curdle milk and an arm of iron, served her noxious beverages to customers sitting on the pavement or on the verandah. The house was noisome, stinking of old excrement and new frying, and Phryne reflected that nothing, not even advanced starvation, would induce her to eat anything out of a kitchen into whose depths no health inspector would dare to step.

There were three or four ladies of the night supping gin or beer on the verandah, under the curling galvanised iron, and they surveyed Phryne closely. She reflected that she was surrounded with dangers. Not only was she investigating a cocaine ring, but one of these girls might take exception to her presence on their beat and cause a scene, or call their pimp. A nasty thought. She said loudly to Bert, ‘I reckon that we ought be going home, love. I got to get back to the factory termorra.’

The women’s gaze wavered and turned away. An amateur, they thought, out for a good time and a little extra in the pay packet. No threat. Phryne breathed easy.

‘This is like waiting to go over the top,’ commented Bert.

‘I thought you said war was a capitalist plot,’ murmured Phryne.

‘Yair, it is. But we was in it, me and Cec. I first met Cec on a rock face at Gallipoli,’ continued Bert. ‘He saved me life by shoving me head down behind a trench wall when a Turk had drawn a bead on me bonce. We got out of it alive, and many didn’t. We was lucky,’ he concluded. ‘And waiting is always like this.’

More customers for the coke merchant. Phryne calculated that, in three hours, he had taken close on a hundred pounds. She congratulated herself on her clothes. The garish dress and the holed stockings matched the milieu perfectly. Nothing interesting seemed to be happening, and she was about to nudge Bert and suggest that they call it a night when a cloaked figure paused for a moment under a street light and she caught her breath.

‘Oh, Gawd!’ she whispered and cocked her head. Bert saw a tall, theatrical figure who stalked into the chemist’s and demanded: ‘Cocaine.’

‘It’s Sasha,’ whispered Phryne, aghast. ‘That’s torn it!’

‘That the bloke we picked up with a shiv in his side?’ Bert whispered, putting his mouth to Phryne’s ear. She nodded.

‘Do we have to rescue him?’ asked Bert, wearily. He did not like foreigners, except comrades. And this was a counter-revolutionary.

Phryne produced a high-pitched giggle and slapped his hand, which she had placed on her knee.

The chemist had paled to an interesting shade of tallow, and his assistant had prudently vanished. Mother James’s regulars had all sat up and were taking notice. Three men, with unusual precision for Little Lon., had begun to move towards Sasha. Phryne ground her teeth. Only an artist or an idiot could behave like this!

‘Cec should be back by now,’ worried Bert. ‘Not like him to be late for a stoush.’

‘Do you know them?’ asked Phryne. Bert nodded, and Phryne belatedly recognised Thugs One and Two.

‘Cokey, the Gentleman, and the one at the back is the Bull,’ he commented.

Phryne stared, awed, at the Bull. He must have been six-and-a-half feet high, with shoulders three axehandles across and hands like shovels. While they homed in on Sasha, the Bull took his cigarette out of the corner of his mouth and ground it out in the palm of his hand.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Phryne.

‘Yair. Used to be a bricklayer,’ said Bert, unimpressed.

‘There doesn’t seem any help for it. We’ll have to rescue Sasha,’ sighed Phryne. Bert held her back as she began to rise.

‘You want to find out who’s behind all this? They’ll take him to the boss, and we’ll follow.’

‘What if they just kill him here?’

Nah, they’ll want to know what he knows,’ said Bert out of the corner of his mouth, and began to roll a smoke.

‘Won’t the cops come?’

‘In Little Lon.? They only come here in force. You just watch the fight and then we’ll see. There’ll be hundreds of blokes here in a jiff, a fight attracts ’em like flies to a honeypot—you watch!’

The first attacker had reached Sasha, and thrown a punch. Sasha ducked, and the Bull’s fist hit the wall, slogged through the flimsy plaster and lath, and stuck. Gentleman Jim slid under his companion’s arm and feinted with his right, and as Sasha swayed away connected with a wicked left to the chest. Sasha staggered, recovered, kicked hard for the knee, missed, and got the Gentleman in the shins. His language was most ungentlemanly as Cokey Billings, obviously well-primed, seized Sasha from behind and threw a weighted scarf around his neck.

‘Fight, fight!’ chanted the regulars at Mother James’s, several of them stumbling out into the street to join in. Punches were thrown indiscriminately, one landing with some force on Phryne’s shoulder. She kicked her attacker in the shins and followed Bert into the street. Shrieks and groans abounded, together with the monotonous thud of fist hitting flesh and body hitting road. Bert ducked and weaved through the mill, tripping over feet and the occasional body until he had fought his way to the chemist’s doorway.

They were just in time to see the Bull, bellowing like his namesake, extract his hand from the wall with a rending of timbers and stumble after the Gentleman and Cokey, who had Sasha slung over one shoulder. The small fat chemist was attempting to pull down his shutters, but there were too many people in the way. A door opened at the end of the counter, and shut behind the procession.

‘Out, Bert!’ shrieked Phryne, and they pummelled their way out of the mob into the comparative quietness of the side street.

‘Where are we?’

‘This is the Synagogue. The alley leads into the grounds. I wonder where Cec is? Spare me days, a man can’t rely on anyone!’

Phryne pulled down her dress and ran her hands through her hair. Then she suddenly seized Bert in a close embrace.

Bert’s mouth came down upon hers, and she kissed him hungrily. His mouth was soft and strong, and her arms, tightening around his waist, felt his muscular body. He pulled her close against him and she tottered on the broken heels.

A light flashed on them. Bert raised his head, continuing his embrace. ‘Can’t you see a man’s busy?’ he snarled, and the bearer of the light apologised and walked away. It was Cokey Billings.

‘They ain’t onto us yet,’ he whispered.

‘No, not yet. Where does this house finish? And you needn’t hold me quite so close.’

Bert released her at once.

‘I reckon it butts onto that Bath House,’ he said slowly.

‘Madame Breda’s?’ asked Phryne. She lit a cigarette, a cheap local brand which fitted her part, and leaned back against the alley wall. ‘Fight seems to be dying down.’

Bert peeped around the corner. ‘Yair, they don’t last long. There’s Cec. Hey, mate! I got just the tart for us!’ he yelled, and Cec approached, unperturbed. He rounded the corner without attracting attention.

‘She says it’s kosher,’ commented Cec. Now what?’

‘Problems,’ said Phryne, outlining the position briefly.

‘Here we are, with this wall between us and Sasha. I reckon that the chemist is the back of Madame Breda’s. What shall we do?’

‘You’re the boss,’ said Cec, unhelpfully. Phryne con- centrated. At that moment came a loud scream of outrage and pain, and a stream of Russian oaths.

‘Well, he ain’t dead,’ said Bert. They both looked at her. Phryne was galvanised by that scream. Sasha was undoubtedly an idiot and one who would take the prize at any competition of morons of the Western world, but Phryne had lain next to him and had conceived a deep affection for that flesh now being maltreated behind the high brick wall.

‘I’m going to climb,’ she decided. ‘Can you give me a boost?’ Cec looked at Bert, who shrugged. The wall was only eight feet high. Bert went to cup his hands.

‘Stay around,’ whispered Phryne, flashing them a smile through her over-roughed face. ‘Things might get interesting.’

‘Is that all?’ demanded Bert.

‘Get the cops,’ she added, inserting one foot in Bert’s hands, and springing lightly up. She straddled the wall in a flash of stockings, and let herself down on the other side, hanging to the full stretch of her arms and dropping as silently as possible.

The yard behind the chemist’s shop was dank, slimy and very dark. Phryne had to feel her way along the wall until she found the further house, stopping only to disentangle herself from yards and yards of what felt like wet washing-line. She could not imagine anyone in that house doing any washing. The yard was full of old tins and bottles, and she finally dropped to her hands and feet and crawled through the rubbish. She thus made closer acquaintance than she would have liked with the disgusting ground, and she was delighted when she found the house wall and, feeling along it, located the door.

There was a light under it, and she pressed her ear against the wood. The murmur of voices was impossible to distinguish. She felt further along and found a window, high up and dirty, but a better conductor of sound than the door.

Her heart was beating appreciably faster, and she took more rapid breaths, but she was enjoying herself. Adventuresses are born, not made.

‘Take me to your King, then,’ Sasha was yelling hoarsely. ‘I want to meet him before I die!’

‘Oh, you’ll meet him, dago, he’s dying to meet you! You and your family have been a considerable nuisance to him,’ said the Gentleman. ‘Where are those meddlesome women? We should present His Highness with a complete bag.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Sasha, sullenly. There was a silent interval, during which someone struck a match. Then there was that scream again. The noise was fraying at Phryne’s nerves. She could not try the door while someone might be looking at it; so she felt along the house again, around the corner and out of ear-shot. On one side, the house shared a wall with another house; that was no good. Slowly, and without noise, she moved back to the right-hand side and found that a narrow alley, two feet wide, had been left between the house and the brick wall. Along this she slid, hoping for an unguarded window.

The back door was flung open with a crash, and Phryne froze with her mouth against the stone. A light from an electric torch illuminated the area, blinding her. Then the door slammed.

‘Nah, no one,’ she heard the Bull say as the door closed. ‘You’re getting the jumps, Cokey.’