Prophets and Loss (A Johnny Ravine Mystery) Read online

  Chapter Five

  I once killed an Indonesian militia assailant with a sword, ripping it across his neck - such was the force that a gusher of blood drenched my hands - and then stabbing him in the heart. I was still a teen and quite without fear. It was the first time I had killed at close quarters, and it was a liberating experience. I felt that I had become a man. It took me many years to learn that I had simply become a killer.

  It was a short sword, old and rusted, more like a dagger. The rubies that formerly embellished it had long since been sold. An elderly friend in our neighborhood had presented it to me when he learned I had joined the freedom fighters.

  I’d encountered the militia fighter when I was hiking along a dusty road from our camp, not far from the old Portuguese Governor’s leafy mountain retreat at Maubessi, to a neighboring village to buy food. Normally we got warnings of enemy movements, from our network of informant friends at all the villages, but this time the system somehow failed.

  He stepped from behind a tall gum tree, pointing a long rifle. He was dark and terribly skinny, with a face like a frog. He looked about as young as me, and as full of bravado, which was no doubt why he was operating alone. He was dressed in military fatigues, but without any army insignia, so I knew he was from one of the militia. These groups were supposedly formed to protect the local people, but in fact terrorized them as Indonesian army proxies.

  He asked what I was doing, and I said that I was walking to buy food from the village, and that I had money on me. It was the truth, and it had the desired effect. He immediately demanded that I pass over the cash. I slowly pulled from my pocket a handful of rupiah - notes and coins - and threw them towards him. They landed on the ground, as I intended, and in his greed he took his eyes off me as he leant forward to scoop them up.

  I went for him with my sword. It all happened far more quickly than I could have expected. I knocked him to the ground, rammed a knee into his stomach and sliced his throat and then stabbed him. He didn’t have a chance to get off a single gunshot or resist in any way.

  I retrieved my money, then went through the youth’s pockets and his pack. I found a portable tape recorder and some dangdut pop music cassettes. I took them back to our camp and I was hooked. I couldn’t listen enough. Every night I would lie in my sleeping bag in our cave listening to Rhoma Irama and Elvy Sukaesih and Herlina Effendy and many others, until the batteries in the cassette player went flat.

  Not everyone at the camp appreciated the rhythmic but strident and clanging dangdut music, which merged electric guitars with mandolins, keyboard and drums. Despite many compositions that talked of the plight of the poor and the greed of the rich, the songs were also sometimes infused with a strong Muslim moral ethic that reminded us of the Javanese oppressors.

  I’d brought a few dangdut cassettes with me when I came to Melbourne. Grant used to joke that he couldn’t tell the difference between my music and the noise from the smash repair’s, though even he eventually came to enjoy them.

  The day after my encounter with Rohan and Briony, I was absorbed in Elvy Sukaesih singing of love lost and found, her sensual, lilting voice rising and falling with the insistent dang dang dang of the gendang drums, when the phone rang.

  “I’m with Melissa,” growled Pastor Thomas. “You might have a few minutes free. Can you pop over and tell me how it went yesterday at La Rue.”

  Yes, I had a few minutes free. Hours even. How about days?

  I walked through a rain shower to find Melissa sitting on her sofa with the pastor’s wife Esther, deep in conversation. Esther was a gracious lady with a youthful face and blue-tinted white hair. She matched her husband in intellect and in her passion for justice, but otherwise was his exact counter-point: quietly spoken, patient, soft in temperament and slow to anger. Once a month she traveled into the city with a friend for a hair trim at her favorite hairdresser’s in one of the Collins Street arcades, followed by afternoon tea at the Windsor Hotel. It was her only indulgence. Much of the pastor’s achievement was surely due to her passionate devotion to his work.

  Pastor Thomas emerged from the kitchen and beckoned to me with a long finger to join him. I glanced at Melissa as I walked past. She was dressed all in purple – flaming violet trousers that seemed to highlight her long, chorus-line legs and a chunky woolen sweater. Hardly the color of grief. But her face was drawn and she looked tired. She did not acknowledge me.

  The pastor too seemed weary. He poured me some instant coffee and we sat together at a small polished-wood table. I put some sugar into the coffee and told him of my encounters the previous day at La Rue. “That woman Briony said Grant had been trying to convert her. He’d given her a Bible. She said he used to be a kind of a boss of the place.”

  The pastor raised his bushy eyebrows. “Convert her?” he muttered.

  “And that was about it. She’d left the room for a while when it happened. She doesn’t know any more than we do. So she says. I also bumped into the journalist you said you’d talked to. The guy from The Age. He wants to meet me.”

  The pastor picked up his coffee mug, found it empty and put it down again. “Of course he does.” He seemed unsure about something. Perhaps he was wondering if he’d exceeded his caffeine quota for the day. “You believe that he just went to convert her?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m not sure what to believe. I can’t say I really trusted that girl. But it’s a strange thing for her to say if it’s not true.”

  “That it is. Though I’ve heard stranger. Unfortunately, Grant had so many entanglements in his old life...” He was silent for a while. “But who’s going to believe that he went to a place like that just for a chat?”

  “I just went for a chat.”

  “Yes, but I sent you. I certainly didn’t send Grant.”

  I waited. The pastor had nothing more to ask.

  “How is she?” I pointed with my thumb towards Melissa, in the other room.

  Melissa was as well as could be expected, which meant she was alternately crying and cursing, between lengthening periods of calm. Pastor Thomas had organized a roster of church ladies to sit with her, to try to keep her from reverting to the heavy doses of pills that had been her lifeblood for many years.

  The funeral was to be the next day.

  “She’s going to be at the hating stage for a while,” said Pastor Thomas. “She needs lots of people around her. Go and talk to her. And don’t be surprised when she takes out her anger on you. She’s still feeling vengeful.”

  I walked into the living room. The pastor’s wife stood and replaced me in the kitchen.

  I smiled at Melissa and touched her shoulder. “Well?” she demanded in accusatory fashion, as if I had killed her husband myself, or at the very least had helped chop the body into little pieces for disposal in the Yarra River.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked softly. I pulled up a chair and sat near her. She just looked at me with hard brown eyes. “I went to where they found Grant,” I continued. “But I didn’t learn much, I’m afraid.”

  “And what you did learn was all lies. What did they tell you?”

  “I met the woman who found Grant. Briony her name was.”

  “Briony,” she said with disgust.

  “Look, Mel. I have to be honest. I...”

  “Yes, of course you do. You’re a nice little Christian boy who goes to church. You have to be honest.”

  “Mel. I really don’t know why Grant went to that place, but...”

  “Of course you know.” The venom in Melissa’s voice was palpable. “You’re a man. Aren’t you? Though I do have to wonder at times. You’re sometimes just so - so antiseptic.”

  In my twelve months in Melbourne, I had never felt completely at ease with Melissa. At times she clearly resented my closeness to Grant. At other times she seemed to be flirting with me. Occasionally she treated me like a family pet. But barbed aggression? No, never. Was this her true nature coming to the fore?

  �
�I really don’t think it was for what you think. He was a good husband. He...”

  “Johnny. Johnny.” The words were so drawn out it was as if she were singing. “You are so naïve. So naïve. How well did you know Grant? Really. How well do you think you knew him?”

  “He was my best friend. You two. My only real friends in Australia. You became my family. He brought me over here. I stayed at your house for a while. You both meant everything to me.”

  “Well, that just shows how much you understand. Why do you think he went to that ‘place’ as you call it? The brothel. The whorehouse. The cathouse. Why do men go to a place like that?”

  “No, really, I think there was some other reason. I don’t know exactly what it was, but I’m sure he didn’t go there for sex, or anything like that.”

  “‘Anything like that,’” she parroted. “One day I’ll explain the facts of life. It’s time you learned.”

  “The girl Briony said something strange about him wanting to be forgiven. And he wanted to talk to her about being a Christian.”

  A look of hopeless disgust flashed across her face. She stood up and strode to her bedroom. She was gone for a couple of minutes, then returned with a large white envelope. She waved it in the air with a flourish. “My hidden treasure,” she said.

  Then she sat on the sofa again. I watched in silence as she pulled out a wad of photographs.

  “Here,” she exclaimed as she handed them to me. “Recognize the top one.”

  What could I say? Of course I recognized it. I had been there just the previous day. It was La Rue, obviously taken from over the road. A large man was pushing open the front door. He had his back to the camera, but was turning his head. It looked a heck of a lot like Grant. On the bottom of the photo were imprinted a date - about two months previously - and a time, mid-morning.

  “Look at the next one,” said Melissa.

  I looked. This time it was clearly Grant, emerging from the brothel. The date at the bottom was the same as in the first photo, the time forty-five minutes later.

  There were more, all of Grant entering and leaving the brothel, or walking nearby; all taken within the past two months. I was stunned.

  “I hired a private detective,” said Melissa. “Sorry, I should have hired you, shouldn’t I? After all, you’re a private detective.” Her voice was full of sarcasm. She didn’t need to raise her fingers like the pastor to insert quotation marks. The tone said it all.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Of course you don’t. You thought we were such a lovely couple. Well you were wrong.” And she started to cry, deep heaving sobs, the sound of a woman for whom nothing remains but an immeasurable number of yesterdays.

  Mrs Thomas ran into the room with alarming speed. I wondered if she had been listening to it all.

  “Why don’t you lie down, dear?” she said to Melissa. She gave me a patronizing smile and with her chin and raised eyebrows she indicated the front door, clearly intending me to understand the direction in which I should be heading.

  “I still don’t believe it,” I said, though the evidence seemed pretty plain. “Anyway, we still don’t know who murdered him, or why.”

  Melissa, engrossed in her crying turn, didn’t try to answer.

  Mrs Thomas clearly wanted me to leave. But I was determined to try one more tack. “Melissa, have you heard of the Dili Tigers? Their full name is the Dili Tigers of Truth.”

  She was still sobbing. I wasn’t even sure if she had heard me. Mrs Thomas’s face had turned hard as once again she indicated with her eyes the front door.

  “The Dili Tigers, Mel. Did Grant ever mention them?”

  To my surprise she looked up, brushed away some tears and fell silent.

  Then the simple question: “Why?”

  “Because I think they may hold the key to his death. It’s a guess right now, but I have some evidence.”

  She looked at me. “Do you?” she asked softly. She paused. “I think Grant mentioned them once. He seemed scared.” She paused some more. “He said something about how they were his worst nightmare.” She looked up at me in quizzical fashion, and I knew that even she didn’t quite trust the evidence of all those photos. “Do you think that means something?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  As I walked back home, shoulders hunched against the drizzle, to resume my dangdut interlude with Elvy Sukaesih, I knew that I needed to talk to Rohan from The Age.