Authors: Jonothan Cullinane
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary Fiction
“Early political enthusiasms proving a bit of an embarrassment, are they, Arch?” said Molloy, offering him a smoke.
“There’s a witch hunt here too, you know,” said Green, leaning in to the match. His voice was a little steadier. Molloy smelt gin. “The
Americans are supplying lists. Names of known Communists and fellow travellers. Full of mistakes, apparently. Not that that would bother them.” He drew on the cigarette. “It’s not fair. Three years in the thick of it. Alamein, Cassino.” He hooked a bitter thumb in the direction of the Clock Tower. “Means nothing.” He rubbed his forehead, pushing his hat back on his head with the tips of his fingers. “If the College hears I was a Party member, I’m finished.”
“Well, they won’t hear it from me.”
“On one condition, no doubt.”
“Not a condition. A favour.”
“Ah yes, a favour,” said Green, feeling immensely sorry for himself. “And so it begins.”
Molloy took an envelope from his pocket and put it on the bench. “There’s an Irishman who was arrested last year for drunk and disorderly and one or two other things, and found to be in the country without papers. He should have been given the boot but he wasn’t. I want to find out if someone pulled strings for him, and if so, who.” He nodded at the envelope. “The details are in there. Not that there’s much.”
“And if I refuse?”
Molloy looked at him and said nothing. Actually, bugger all, he thought, but Archie didn’t need to know that.
“I do some work with Industries and Commerce,” said Green, putting the envelope in the pocket of his sports coat. “There’s a chap there who . . .” He shrugged. “I could talk to him.”
“That’d be good.”
Green’s shoulders slumped. “My God, I was hardly a
Communist.
I joined the YCL as a way to meet fast girls, if the truth be known.” He looked at Molloy. “Remember? ‘The redder the bedder’? Fat lot of good that did me either.”
He stood without a word and walked off, hands in pockets, head down.
Molloy gave him a minute. On the grass by the floral clock the boy’s walking fingers had made it to the girl’s shoulder, and they were kissing. He had subtly altered his angle of attack so that it was awkward for her to find his hand with her eyes closed. Molloy got up and watched as Green crossed Princes Street, and saw, beyond him, Miss Cotterill’s brown Baby Austin parked on the other side of the road.
Molloy drove to the Newton Police Station in Ponsonby Road and asked for Pat Toomey. He took a seat in the waiting room and read the race results from Saturday’s
8 O’Clock.
It was shortly after two. The station was busy. Telephones rang, doors opened and closed, policemen came and went.
A boy about twelve with a black eye and grass stains on his knees sat sniffling on a bench next to his furious mother.
“I just don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” she said, her worn hands strangling the strap on her shopping bag. “God knows I’ve tried.”
“They started it,” said the boy, bottom lip poking out like a plate.
“Oh yes,” said his mother. “It’s always
they
with you. Just like your useless father.”
Toomey leaned out of an interview room and hooked a finger at Molloy. “Johnny,” he said.
There was a cardboard box on a table in the middle of the room with a typed label which read
O’Flynn, F. X. personal effects of
, and the address —
Room 4, 3 Chamberlain Street, Grey Lynn
— and a reference number. Toomey closed the door.
“Make it snappy,” he said.
Molloy emptied the contents of the box onto the table. A worn toothbrush, a shaving strop, a cutthroat razor, two combs, some coins,
rosary beads, a Western — A.B. Guthrie Jr’s
The Way West
— which Molloy had heard somewhere was pretty good.
“Is this the lot?” Molloy asked.
“What were you expecting, Johnny?” said Toomey. “A trousseau?”
“I dunno,” said Molloy, flicking through the novel. “More than this though. Didn’t he have any clothes? What about his work gear? He was a wharfie. He’d have had boots and a raincoat surely?”
“Perhaps he kept his work duds on the back porch?”
“Could be, I suppose,” said Molloy. “What about personal stuff? Letters, that sort of thing?”
“Landlady probably threw them out,” said Toomey. “Said she didn’t but you know what they’re like.”
“I do,” said Molloy, returning the items to the box and closing it. “Thanks, Pat.”
Molloy drove to Grey Lynn and parked in Chamberlain Street. He climbed the steps at number 3 and knocked on the door. He heard someone shuffling up the hallway. The door opened. The landlady, a woman in her fifties with flaming red hair, glared at him.
“Yes?”
“I’d like to look at a room.”
“Nothing available at the present moment. Which explains the ‘No Vacancy’ notice in the window,” said the landlady, pointing. “Sorry.”
She began to close the door.
Molloy put his foot on the step to stop her. “I’m not after lodgings,” he said. “I’d like to have a look at Frank O’Flynn’s old room.”
“Are you a policeman?” she asked.
“I’m a private detective,” said Molloy handing her his card.
She didn’t look at it. “Then the answer’s no,” she said. “I’ve had policemen and whatnot through here all day, traipsing their dirt. I’ve only just finished cleaning up after them. The room has been let. New boarder is moving in on Saturday. Now move your foot or I’ll ring a real detective.”
Molloy turned and walked back down the steps. Over the road, on the corner of Brown Street, he saw the Baby Austin. He crossed the street.
Caitlin wound down her window and smiled at him. “Why, if it isn’t Mr Molloy,” she said. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“You’re asking for trouble, Miss O’Carolan.”
“It’s a free world, isn’t it?” she asked. “Still?”
It was ten o’clock. Molloy was parked at the top of Chamberlain Street. The porch light at number 3 had gone out half an hour earlier and the boarding house was in darkness. He took a torch from the glovebox and walked delicately down the side of the villa. The grass was uncut and at one point he stumbled over an old tyre. He went slowly up the rickety rear steps and tried the door. It was unlocked. He let himself in.
Somewhere in the house a radio was playing. A toilet flushed and he heard footsteps along the hall and a door opening and closing. His eyes adjusted to the darkness. There were four doors on each side of the hall. Room 1 was closest to the kitchen. He crept up the hallway. Room 4 was locked. He ran his hand along the top of the frame but there was nothing. Where would the landlady keep the key? he wondered. It could be anywhere.
He went outside and around the side of the villa. The windows were at least six feet off the ground. He took one of the painting ladders from in front of the house and leaned it gently against the wall beneath the window of O’Flynn’s old room. It was open a few inches, enough to air the room. He put his hands under the frame and pushed. It moved easily at first and then caught, making a shrieking sound loud enough to wake all of Grey Lynn. He
waited. Silence. He lowered the window slightly so that it was square and then pushed it up, and let himself in.
The room had a single iron bedstead with a rolled-up mattress, a small table and chair, a tallboy and a chest of drawers on top of which was a flowered jug and a bowl on a freshly ironed doily. There was a mat on the wooden floorboards in the middle of the room. On the wall above the chest of drawers was a small mirror on a chain, and on the opposite wall a framed picture of Windsor Castle cut from the lid of a chocolate box.
Molloy lifted the chair and leaned it against the door, its back under the knob, locking it in place. He took the drawers from the chest and turned them over to see if there was anything taped to the bottoms. Nothing. He searched the tallboy and ran his hand around the top. Nothing. He took down the mirror and the picture and turned them over. Nothing. He unrolled the mattress and checked where it might have been cut and resewn. He ran his hand around the bed frame. He lifted the mat. He checked the floorboards for signs they had been moved. He took the chair from under the doorknob and stood on it to look at the light shade.
Nada.
The whole place was as clean as a whistle.
He returned the chair to its position against the door and sat on the bedstead. The springs groaned. He looked at the picture on the wall. He took it down again. Its backing was held in place by metal clips, recently folded. He straightened them and removed the cardboard. There was a folded slip of card in the corner between the illustration and the frame. He put the picture on the bed and opened the slip. It was a left-luggage ticket from the Auckland Railway Station. It was new.
There was a banging on the door. “Hey,” a voice shouted. “Who’s in there?”
“I’ve telephoned the police,” a second voice, the landlady, threatened. “They’re on their way.”
“I’ve got a cricket bat,” someone else called.
“Yes,” said the landlady. “Bring it.”
Doors opened. “What’s going on?” yet another voice said.
“Someone’s broken in,” said the first voice. “Bastard’s not going anywhere though.”
“Language!” said the landlady.
“Round the back! He’ll get out the window!”
But Molloy was already there, dropping to the ground and running along the side of the house towards the street. Lights were coming on. He could hear yelling from inside. The front door burst open. Two figures ran out onto the front porch and then stopped.
“Quick,” said the first.
“What?” said the second.
The landlady pushed her way between them. “Police,” she yelled. “There he is.”
Molloy ran across Richmond Road. He could hear footsteps behind him.
Headlights picked him out. He saw nothing but brilliant white. A car cut in front of him. Its passenger door swung open and he heard Caitlin call out, “Quick, get in.”
The car accelerated down Richmond Road.
“Well, Miss O’Carolan,” said Molloy, looking over his shoulder for signs of pursuit and seeing nothing. “You’re wasted on the Women’s Page, I’ll give you that.”
“That’s big of you, Molloy,” she said, checking the rear-vision mirror and charging along Ponsonby Road.
“Where are we going?”
“There’s someone who wants to talk to you,” she said. “Actually, he’s an old friend of yours.”
She drove down College Hill and up Victoria Street, bent over the wheel like Juan Fangio. She turned into a side street and then into another. It was lined with two-storey wooden buildings. There were shops at ground level and flats above.
“Here we are,” she said, turning off the ignition and pulling the handbrake. The motor ticked into silence.
Molloy looked around. “Where?”
There were pubs on opposite corners, the Criterion and the Shamrock. Other than the blue glow of the Criterion’s neon sign, and faint lighting from one or two of the flats, the area was in darkness. There would have been commercial travellers in the house bar of the Criterion, and after-hours customers boozing in the Shamrock, but for all the people around, they might as well have been in Wellington.
Caitlin leaned across him and pointed to a light coming from behind the curtains in a room above Progressive Books.
“There,” she said.
An unlocked door next to the bookshop opened onto a narrow stairway lit by a single bulb. Caitlin led the way. At the top of the stairs was a small landing and a plain door halfway down a corridor. Molloy could hear the rolling of a Gestetner.
Caitlin knocked.
“Who is it?” said a voice that Molloy hadn’t heard since before the war.
“Me,” said Caitlin.
“Just a tick.”
Molloy looked at Caitlin. “Well, whaddya know?” he said.
The door opened. An older man, lean and muscular, his nose
bent and his ears rumpled, a big grin on his ugly mug, stood there wiping his hands with a rag. He was wearing a black beret, an ink-stained white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and high-waisted trousers tied with a worn leather belt. The metal frames of his round Health Department glasses caught the light from the bulb and his green eyes glinted from behind thick lenses.
“Fraternal greetings, Comrade Molloy!” said V.G. Parker, General Secretary of the Communist Party of New Zealand.
Molloy was driving a tip-truck on the Mangakino deviation, a Public Works Department scheme for the Main Trunk Railway, when he first met Vince. It was 1934. Parker was an organiser for the Drivers’ Union and recruiting for the Party on the side. Molloy was union to the core and the latter was an easy next step, especially in the middle of the Depression when it seemed the only factories in the world with their lights on were in the Soviet Union.
In 1937, on Parker’s instructions, Molloy went to Spain as a driver with the Spanish Medical Aid Committee ambulance unit. There were three nurses: René Shadbolt, Isobel Dodds and Millicent Sharples; Trevor Haysom, a school teacher and Party member from Palmerston North, there to maintain ideological discipline; and Molloy, the unit’s driver-mechanic. After a briefing from Comintern representatives in Marseilles on what to expect once they crossed the Pyrenees, Haysom had had second thoughts. He went out for tobacco and never returned. The nurses were seconded to the International Brigade hospital in Huete. Molloy was sent to the front.
During the Huesca Offensive his ambulance was hit by a bomb dropped from a Nationalist aeroplane — a Junkers trimotor which he got to know better in Crete four years later. Dorthe Scheffman, a nurse and staunch Trotskyite from Denmark, who died of TB in the
French internment camp at Gurs in 1940, was riding in the back with two German casualties from the Thälmann Battalion. Dorthe was all right, just shaken. One of the Teds was killed. Molloy had a broken leg and concussion.
He was invalided to Barcelona, just as the Spanish revolution began to turn upon itself. On the 3rd of May three motor lorries of assault guards from the Karl Marx Barracks attempted to occupy the anarchist-run telephone exchange in the Plaça de Catalunya. Barricades made from sandbags and paving stones, and manned by workers armed with rifles and petrol bombs, appeared on every corner. Five days of street fighting followed. Molloy was lucky to escape with his life. A goon squad from the XV International Brigade, sent to the hospital to liquidate the patients, most of them wounded from the barricades and POUM militiamen from Huesca — George Orwell’s old mob — was commanded by an Australian, a good bloke named Richard Warren. Molloy knew him. They had knocked about a bit together in Paris while in transit to Spain. The
Internacionales
came into the ward with their machine pistols on automatic and worked their way down the narrow aisles, shooting methodically and without concern, their tunics soon shiny with blood and viscera, the air thick with mattress feathers and gun smoke.