Smithy's Cupboard (7 page)

‘So what's the stuff you want me to read?'

I reached down in between the chair and the cushion where I put stuff (Mum did not like the habit) and pulled it out. I filled him in with a few words which raised his expectations. ‘This follows on from when I went to Vietnam a few years back with some shipmates. You remember I was in that area on leave in mid-'65 before you joined up?'

‘The postcard you sent is still in my bedside drawer.'

I continued on about the trip in old Saigon I remembered when the war was hotting up with advisers and other troops and started the story when we were on a bus trip.

Dave settled in comfortably with the several pages which I had typed (which I am proud of now that I have embraced computers). He read and re-read some parts of the story.

‘Stop! stop!' I yelled to the tour bus driver in old Saigon as we drove along some familiar streets. I leapt to my feet and said to Billy my old sea chum, ‘I'll give you a ring soon, mate. OK?'

He waved me away and later told me he imagined there was a face in the crowd which I had recognised…someone way back in '65 when our ship had granted us liberty leave.

I watched the old bus rumble off dodging scooters, bikes and hundreds of people checking out the market stalls. I was busy dodging the traffic as well.

I remember thinking about Bogey in
Casablanca
and wondering what clever thing I would say to the person whose face I saw in the crowd. There she was standing at the corner, holding a billboard and in a time warp which I hoped we might be in together soon. I stopped and stared at her just to be sure. I yanked out of my wallet a forty-year-old photo nearly in bits which had been my close friend
for many years. My hands shook and I dropped the dog-eared sepia photo on the footpath. I put my sandal on it so I would not blow away. There was a dusty swirling wind blowing. She glanced in my direction while I was bending down picking up the photo.

I looked at the photo and there I was in 1965 with my coloured shirt, short back and sides and a fresh tanned face and wearing a pair of those Bombay bloomer navy white shorts. A young Asian woman looked up at me with a beaming face, her five-foot slim figure standing with raised toes and sandals falling off the heels. Here was Loan from long ago a few yards away.

I walked towards her and sensed some recognition forming on her face. Her almond eyes gazed at me and were open wide, taking my form in from head to toe. The black shoulder-length hair, still glossy, cascaded in the old fashion. She was more gaunt than I recalled. Still, we had all changed in that space of time.

‘It's me, Adam…Loan.' She gasped and held her mouth with the tiny yet strong hands which had bewitched me when I was young.

I held out my arms and she folded into them like two spoons in a cutlery drawer. Her body was as I remembered it.

My recurring dream had cast a sign which I had not considered and the synchronicity (yes, I read lots of New Age books now) of it all was coming into focus. A dream which had foretold a meeting and its intensity in vivid colour, with her small hands massaging my lumbar region, sliding towards my groin, led us into a dynamic act of copulation. I woke up still imagining she was there and that we still held each other, snuggled up cosy and happy. I saw the illusion soon with the fluid from my wet dream flooding the sheets, smelling like a mushroom cellar. The dream was an illusion leading to a delusion. However, on the street years later, it was not an illusion as she clung tightly to my body.

‘You come back, Adam.' She dragged me towards the shop and called inside in an excited voice, ‘Look after the shop for the day.' She led me to a door two shopfronts away and we entered. There we were in moments of raging lust tearing off our clothes with a lot of
lost ground to recover. She murmured low and the lamp was glowing blue, casting an esoteric haze over the little room. It was like I never left in '65.

We consummated our love in seconds, which closed the gap of those years apart. We took a breather while I showed her the old snapshot. She nodded and smiled with the fine opaque skin stretched over her high cheekbones. She reached over and pulled in a shell-frame photo of her holding a child of about four years of age. The child had fair hair and skin. The penny dropped.

‘My daughter.' Nothing else would come out.

‘Yes. She die when she was ten with malaria.' Loan wiped a tear from her eyes and mine were moist.

I didn't ask stupid questions like ‘Why didn't you write?' I did not interrupt as she explained the situation. I let her talk on and by now tears were ploughing down my face with the salt invading my open mouth.

‘The war, Adam. I not blame you.'

‘After the war, what then?'

‘Bar girls not popular because I have a fair white child with an Aussie dad, though they like you better than Americans.'

‘Go on,' I said.

She had found a Buddhist convent. ‘They were kind. Soldiers left me alone,' she added.

‘Your brother the South Vietnamese soldier – what of him?'

‘He in your country with boat people. In Melbourne…St Kilda. Got a restaurant.'

‘Bloody hell, Loan, that's in my state. I'll look him up.'

Loan had started cooking by then.

I organised a transfer of money for her to draw on. I did not wish her to ever again be in poverty. She had married an older man who cared for her; he had died some years ago She would not accept my offer to immigrate to Australia but I am still trying. I made a pact with her to visit at least once a year. I boarded a plane and watched as her small hands waved goodbye.

I knocked on the door of the restaurant in St Kilda on my return. ‘Is Fung about?'

The man entered and we spoke. I had not met him, only seen his photo. A big smile caressed his lips and we sat while I rambled through my history and he his.

‘How's the business going?'

‘Slowly,' he said.

I reached in my pocket, pulled out my cheque book and wrote his name on one, and entered an amount of $10,000. I gave him the cheque.

He looked at it, incredulous. His lips started to tremble and he touched the back of his head. Then it came out. ‘Why, Adam?'

‘A debt to you and to honour your family and the daughter I never knew. I love your sister.'

I walked away.

We spoke later on the phone and Fung kept repeating how grateful he was. In my replies I always explained my sadness at not meeting my daughter. My donation to the two folk from the war-torn land was helpful to us all.

Smithy folded the paper and then blew his nose. He realised I also a had a love in his life which no one ever thought I would have. He knew I had something else to add.

He spoke first. ‘Adam, it's a beautiful love story. I am so happy for you. What's next?'

‘I'd like to marry her. She won't leave her country but she will stay here a few months of the year. Would you have any objections?'

‘As long as I can be best man… Take love while you can. Don't I know that? Shouldn't have been away so much.'

‘Do you think it would have stopped Joan from working?'

‘I guess not.'

‘Would it have prevented the cancer?'

‘I suppose not. Hell, let's change the subject. Get me a VB.'

13

Detective Senior Sergeant Stephen James Ireland adjusted his new glasses. Though they had cost him a lot of money, he often absent-mindedly left them in odd places and was not able to find them when required. Eyes were an essential part of his career, he thought, as he glanced at the pile of manilla folders sitting on his right. One of his family suffered from macular degeneration and was rapidly going blind. She was an accomplished piano teacher and now faced the prospect of her beloved music vanishing. She was left on her own – her husband had moved away before the onset of the blindness. Stephen's parents had cataracts, which also disturbed him. He had black spots and sparks in his vision at night when he drove home.

At age fifty-two his prospects of rising higher to commissioned rank with the extra paperwork involved were fading, despite the high marks he scored in all the exams which he needed to pass to improve his qualifications. And here he was shuffling through the cold case files hoping for a breakthrough – if only to satisfy the grieving. Some of the folders spoke to him because he was fond of getting inside of the head of the perpetrators as well as the poor victims. He cared for the victims, and the loved ones, and the information was frequently updated, in the hope of leads.

He took a gulp from the cup of coffee with the Hawthorn football club stickers plastered all over it and thought about his team, hoping they would do well in the finals coming up. The buff-coloured manilla folder he had opened seemed to invite him in, even though he had had no hand in the original investigation of the killing of Paul Thomson, a bikie gang member murdered in a
shack in the south-east of Victoria. A large crop of drug plants was growing in the bush nearby.

He read the neatly prepared text of recent enquiries inside the file. Detective Graham Johns, a new member, bursting with an overabundance of ego and always ready to please, sat opposite, speaking only when asked. Everyone in the squad room knew Graham was going places.

The report was well constructed and easy to read either by a judicial officer or an assistant commissioner. Stephen read the summary, as he had much to deal with. Let the squad read the details, he thought

‘Graham, we all guessed it was gang-related or vengeance as you have reiterated.' He studied the photos of the dead bikie. He reminded himself of the gory details flashed about by a press seeking high drama. ‘Jeez, shot with a crossbow - in the chest.'

‘Went straight through, skewered him to the door of the shack. The body was just swinging in the wind till it was found by hikers – who also found the crop.'

‘The bolt was scrubbed clean at the time…no DNA, you say? You believe the killer was a trained assassin?'

Graham nodded and replied, ‘Well, it's not the usual method of gangs is it, sarge?'

‘You checked the victim's time in gaol. Raping kids, I see.'

‘Bloody mongrel. Yes, sarge.'

‘Why do we bother, Graham, I have to ask. Justice has been done. Still it is unsolved—the law requires us to put in an effort.'

‘Payback from gaol, I reckon. I checked gaol staff but there were no reports made about attacks there.'

‘Well, that's a blind.'

‘He had mates who were concerned where his black Labrador dog went, though he used to kick it a lot.'

‘Any suspects?'

‘No, just a clue. A former SAS man, thirty years a vet. A sniper – best in the country. Employed from time to time by friendly forces. He was released two months before Thomson. Funny, he has no record on file.'

‘What are you telling me? Where are you going with this?'

Alarm circled the air.

‘This is a man capable of planning and executing the killing. The clean record is a puzzle unless there's some higher conspiracy beyond us.'

‘Leave that alone. No point in speculation. Right?'

‘Yes, sarge. He's undercover, I believe, probably CIA.'

‘Why do you say that?' Stephen was starting to get nervous.

‘Been in a lot of hot spots with the Brits in Belfast. Then I came into the no-go area and was politely told to mind my own business. Wife died after being bullied and getting cancer later. He did time for threatening the life of the bully. He pleaded guilty.'

Stephen leaned back in his chair. ‘Anything else?'

‘Got a lad in the job who applied for CIB – Shane Smith.'

‘Yes, he's been accepted. Now I know… I met his dad – your suspect. A real-life war hero.'

Graham was anxious to get his last point in. He noted that Stephen was in a speculative mood. ‘I checked out his house and saw a black Labrador inside.'

‘How many black Labs are there?'

‘It was registered two weeks after the killing. What do you reckon, sarge?'

‘Any cellmates with this man?'

‘Yes, one. Died of lung cancer a while back. Bill Newman, a Vietnam vet.'

‘You might be stepping into a very big black hole, Graham. He would have powerful friends, I imagine. Look, bring him in for the sake of completeness.'

Smithy was interviewed about his connections and he explained that Ted had wandered in off the streets. The fruitless exercise came to an abrupt end after a phone call two hours after the interview had terminated, and the suspect was driven home.

Stephen answered the phone and the voice on the other end spoke in his usual coached manner; he was the main spokesman for federal government matters.

‘Jeff Jones, sergeant.'

‘Yes, superintendent.'

‘Well, what have you been up to, laddie?'

The condescending tone with the know-it-all voice that displeased most members of the force. Probably came down from his club where he spent most of the time hobnobbing, Stephen surmised.

‘What do you mean, sir?' Stephen replied in an agitated voice.

‘Don't take that tone with me, sergeant.'

Stephen calmed down.

‘I have just had the Minister of Defence breathing down my neck, enquiring on behalf of his US counterpart why you chose to interview one of our two countries' best agents.'

‘Just routine, sir. Clearing up an old case.'

‘The bikie shot with a crossbow, right? Bloody good riddance. Unless you have any more than a wandering dog to support the allegations, put it to sleep, right.'

The sergeant did not reply.

‘No DNA, no tyre marks, no weapon. Am I making myself perfectly clear on this matter, laddie?'

‘Yes, sir'

The phone hung up and Stephen realised the case would go no further. There might be a lone vigilante about but he would make sure there would be no further enquiries. He took the file from the cabinet once again and, with a red stamp, marked broadly on the
face of the first page and the folder CLOSED. But Stephen was a careful man and was taught from a young age in the police to cover his arse. He wrote in his own hand in brackets alongside the red letters ‘On order of Supt Jeff Jones'. He added day, date and time and shoved the file back in the cabinet.