Riverslake Read online

  He looked down at the wad of notes in his hand. Novikowsky picked up the last few and held out a similar wad. He opened his mouth to speak, but Murdoch got in before him.

  “I’ve got one-eighty-five quid here. How much’ve you got?”

  “One-twenty-five, I think. Kerry, you speak me———”

  “Over three hundred quid.” Murdoch took the Pole’s empty hand. He pressed the money he had counted against the palm and closed Novikowsky’s unresisting fingers about it. “You’ve saved a bit in the last eighteen months, haven’t you, Stefan? Three hundred?”

  Novikowsky nodded silently.

  “Well, five hundred’ll buy you a bit of land, somewhere. Away from this flaming dump. Australia’s a big place, Stefan, and the people are kind, most of ’em. That’s the shot—buy a bit of land, and grow things. It’s the good people that do that. Only the drips settle in dumps like this, and in Sydney and Melbourne—they don’t know any better, God help them. Nobody ever told them.”

  “Drips?”

  “Drongos—oh hell, forget it! Remember, you buy a bit of land somewhere, and you’ll never look back.”

  Novikowsky held out his two hands, heavy with the money.

  “Half of this is yours, Kerry. We go to Ainslie together.”

  Murdoch looked at him obliquely, about to say, “Oh, don’t be so bloody silly!” But the man looked pathetic, slightly ridiculous, standing uncertainly with the money held out in front of him. He’s offering me a couple of acres of good land, Murdoch thought, and he knows it, too. The idea softened him and bridled his tongue.

  “No, Stefan,” he said firmly, “we don’t do things that way here. It’s yours, you won it. Thank you just the same. Hide it well until you can get it into the tin-tank.”

  “Tin-tank?” Novikowsky said. He was about to question Murdoch about the slang when they both heard footsteps approaching along the corridor. Someone stopped outside Murdoch’s door and knocked.

  “Who’s there?” Murdoch demanded. He motioned Novikowsky to hide the money he still held in his hands.

  “Me—Randolph,” the answer came muffled through the door. “What’s all the secrecy?”

  “Oh, you.” Murdoch opened the door, and Randolph walked in, peering round him.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded. “I just got back. I saw the light and thought I’d look in. What are you two cooking up?”

  Murdoch laughed. “We went up to the game at Ainslie tonight, and Stefan made a killing. Show the man, Stefan.”

  Novikowsky pulled the notes from his pockets, and Randolph whistled.

  “I’ll say a killing! How much?”

  “About three hundred. He did a trot until they couldn’t set the guts, then he snatched it and copped what was left on the tails.”

  “Don’t see why you work, Stefan.” Randolph grinned. “What are you going to do with all that?”

  Novikowsky said nothing, casting a curiously shy glance at Murdoch.

  “Oh, I see—you’re going to get engaged?” Randolph suggested coyly. “Let me be the first to congratulate you!”

  “Always the humorist,” Murdoch said. “Stefan’s going to put it to what he’s got in the bank———”

  “Ah—bank!” Novikowsky nodded his comprehension.

  “Yeah, in the bank. And when he gets out of his contract, he’s going to buy some land somewhere and grow things. It’s the best shot.”

  “Couldn’t do better,” Randolph agreed. “A good night’s work, eh?”

  “Uh-huh. How did you go?”

  “O.K.”

  “How’s Madame?”

  “You know—rarin’ to go.”

  Murdoch winked significantly, and Randolph laughed.

  “Rarin’ to go to the dance next week, you animal!”

  “Which reminds me,” Murdoch said, “Felix came in after tea and said that his sort could come. He said that the old lady wants you to go up and see her before Wednesday. Check up on us, I suppose. Felix says she’s hard to get round where the girl’s concerned.”

  “I’ll go up tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Yeah—something else, while I’m on the job. The Bastard was looking for you this afternoon, Slim told me. He wants you to go and see him first thing tomorrow.”

  “Curse my good looks!” Randolph said. “Everybody’s choice!”

  “Get off yourself.” Murdoch sat down on his bed and kicked off his shoes. “I’m going to bed—good-bye.”

  “Thanks for the house-brick. Come on, Stefan—don’t forget to hide that dough.”

  Outside the soft darkness was thinned in the open by the starlight. When Randolph had left him, Novikowsky stood in the shadow of a full-leafed tree and stared out over the valley below.

  At that hour it was a pool of darkness threaded tenuously by isolated strings of pale-gold street-lights. The road to Duntroon was pin-pointed by dots of blue and the ridges of Mount Ainslie were scattered with red. A cooling wind that had something of the fragrance of the lucerne flats below him brushed across his face and rustled in the leaves above his head.

  His sight blurred suddenly, so that each speck of light before him, the gold and the red and the blue, and above them the chips of stars, found a companion and swam unsteadily. To buy some land! His hands clenched in his pockets round the bundles of notes they held. Not the rich black soil of Poland, that had been farmed and loved for hundreds of years by his father and his father’s fathers, but the wild soil of this wild place, that would have to be tamed and coerced, and then, with love and care, brought to yield. For me, and for my sons and for my sons’ sons, he said passionately to the darkness and the silence and the stars. And here, in my hands, I hold it, the red soil.

  He forgot that he had ever wanted to go back to Germany. Not the people or the food or the safety, but the soil would hold him.

  Chapter Eight

  In the middle of the morning, with the first rush over, Riverslake was like a city of the dead. Only the ceaseless fretting activity of the sparrows and starlings, and the melodious quarrelling of some currawongs in a berry hedge, disturbed the warm, under-water quality of the sunny air. When the men trooped in again for lunch, swarming like bees at the office for the curiously-stamped mail they received from a score of places in Europe, it would liven up again—they came on bicycles and motor-cycles, cars and trucks and on foot, batches of them dawdling in the sunshine, shouting to each other in a score of tongues, skylarking and throwing stones at the birds. After lunch it would die again, a little death until they returned at tea-time. The camp would once more belong to the yardmen, the birds and the cats that stalked them.

  Randolph met Carmichael on the veranda of the office midway through the morning.

  “You want to see me?” he inquired.

  “Yes—nothing much.” Carmichael waved a hand out towards the camp and the valley beyond. “Looking nice, eh?”

  “Uh-huh. Planting more trees down the slope?”

  “Some oaks.” Carmichael’s glance followed Randolph’s to where, half-way down the hillside towards the road, a group of men were digging round holes in the iron-red earth. “I asked for gums, so naturally I got oaks. I got Bellairs, too.”

  “Got Bellairs?”

  “Yes, he’s in charge of the Balts doing the work. He got the bullet from the job on the House—came to work rotten once too often—and got in with Parks and Gardens. He’s a ganger or something, though the only thing he ever planted wasn’t a blasted petunia!”

  They both laughed. The manager said thoughtfully, “I’m not keen on having that animal around the camp during the day when the blokes are not in their rooms. It’s bad enough having him here at night, but he’ll take watching while the men are away at work.”

  “What—light fingers?”

  “That and murder, rape, arson—I wouldn’t put anything
past him,” Carmichael said grimly. “However … what do you know about this bloke Radinski?”

  “What should I know?” Randolph looked at the manager, steadily meeting his quizzical glance. “And—why me?”

  “You know most of them better than anyone else does—you go further than their names and if they’re a good bite. You know that. There’s a rumour going round that he’s a spy.”

  “A spy? For God’s sake!” Randolph swore angrily. “Who the hell started that?”

  “I don’t know—that’s what I’d like to find out, and what there is in it. With the team we’ve got here, you can understand that we’ve got to be careful. It’s like sitting on a flaming powder-keg.”

  “Huh!”

  “You might be surprised to know,” Carmichael volunteered with a grin, “that you were pretty thoroughly investigated before you came here.”

  “Me—investigated? In God’s name, why, and by whom?”

  “Security mob. When a teacher with your degrees travels round from camp to camp working as a slushie, a lot of people want to know why. You’d be surprised.”

  Randolph looked at him closely. “Did I pass muster?”

  “You got by. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t. You can rely on that. Had you heard this furphy about Radinski?”

  “No, I hadn’t—and you can treat it with a grain of salt, too, whatever you’ve been told. He’s a good little bloke. Anyway, who did tell you?”

  Carmichael pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, and handed it to Randolph. “I get quite a few of those,” he explained while Randolph was reading, “but usually about myself. It’s quite a change to have one about someone else. They’re writing Radinski’s name in the lavatories, too, almost as much as they do mine—it’s a straw in the wind. Our mate down the slope———” with a nod he indicated Bellairs and his party—“is quite a regular correspondent, and I think he organizes the bulk of the art and literature on the walls of the lavatories. It’s about his style. If this had come from him, I would have torn it up immediately. But since it came from someone else, I thought there might be something in it—stranger things have happened.”

  “Nothing as damned screwy or rotten as this,” Randolph said savagely, handing the note back to the manager. “Whoever did that ought to be horse-whipped.”

  Carmichael shrugged. He folded the sheet of paper and put it back in his pocket. They stood side by side and looked down at the working party. Four figures worked on the holes, noiselessly at that distance and with the curiously jerky motions of puppets. The fifth stood in the shade of a tree, smoking a cigarette and scratching comfortably. The morning was still and warm. Randolph found himself thinking, surprised, Soon it will be summer.

  “I’m going down to the kitchen,” Carmichael announced, interrupting his thoughts. “I want to see Verity about old Hughie Mancin. He’s a problem.”

  He descended the steps from the veranda and Randolph followed him. They began to pick their way along the slope towards the kitchen. Between them and it Bellairs’s party had ceased to work, and were standing round leaning on their picks.

  “How, a problem?” Randolph demanded.

  “Always drunk. He does his work, in a way—enough to get by in a brothel like this. But in normal times he wouldn’t be tolerated in a boong’s kitchen. The thing is, if I let him be, one of these days he’ll come on stung and tip a dixie of fat over himself or someone else and there’ll be hell to pay. If the kitchen’s going to be run on an even keel, he should be sacked—but just listen to the hullabaloo if he was! And yet he should be, for safety. And efficiency.”

  “Efficiency comes easy, when you’re dealing with figures,” Randolph said, “but not with people.”

  “God, cooks aren’t people!” Carmichael retorted with grim humour. “If you could have seen a few of the specimens I’ve had through my hands—even since I’ve been here! They’re all mad. They go in three places—in the feet, from paddling round in hot ashes, in the guts, from drink, and in the head from poking it into hot ovens. I’m going to write a book about greasies one day!”

  They had stopped a few yards from where the raw red earth was heaped in rings round the newly sunken holes. Carmichael’s eyes roved over the work party, from the half-completed holes at their feet to those they had dug farther up the slope. He was calculating the amount of work they had done.

  “Bellairs,” he said briskly, “have these men had their morning smoke-oh?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Bellairs stared back at him with heavy-lidded truculence. The men of the party, three Maltese and a fair, nuggety man who might have been a Balt of any description, or even an Australian, were smoking, their eyes fixed on him. He was not going to back down to the Bastard in front of them, even if they were only Balts.

  “Then what are they doing now?”

  “Having another.”

  “So I see. Get them to work straight away and see that they finish this row by lunch-time. If they want to smoke they can do it while they’re working.”

  “They’re employed by Parks ’n’ Gardens,” Bellairs said sullenly. The inference was not lost on Carmichael.

  “I know who they’re employed by,” he retorted tartly, “and if they were employed by Jesus Christ Himself they’d still do as much work as I expect of them while they’re working at Riverslake. Start them now, or pack up.”

  Bellairs’s eyes bulged. An ugly flush mottled his face, but he said nothing. Between leaving his job on the additions to Parliament House and starting with the Parks and Gardens he had had a week or more on the beer. He was short of money and could not afford another change of work just at present.

  “All right,” he said sourly to the watching men. He made digging motions. “Get going!” They could easily stop again the moment Carmichael was out of sight. He ran his glance insolently over the manager and then slid it onto Randolph, who returned it impassively.

  “Come on, Randolph,” Carmichael said, “let’s get down to the kitchen.”

  When they were far enough away, Bellairs spat at the manager’s back.

  “The Bastard!” he swore bitterly.

  “He has no father?” the fair man asked. He laughed, appeasing Bellairs. The three Maltese, small brown men with troubled eyes, were new arrivals. They looked uncomprehendingly at each other, muttered softly, and then looked at the Australian. He jerked his thumbs in the direction of Carmichael’s retreating back.

  “——!” he said, one of the few words the Maltese had learned. They laughed nervously, and then with more confidence and bravado, sneering down the slope at Randolph and the manager.

  “A nice animal to have charge of those blokes,” Carmichael muttered testily. “He’ll make good Australians out of them!”

  “They’re not kids,” Randolph replied. “If they’ve got any sense, they’ll be able to pick him in one. A sot’s a sot in any language. If they’re any good at all, they won’t let him lead them by the nose, and if they’re no good, then they’d go bad anyway. We can’t do much about it.”

  “You’ve said it! We’ve got two chances of making this immigration business work—our own and Buckley’s!”

  “America did,” Randolph suggested.

  “Oh, cripes—America!” Carmichael snorted. “America went about it the right way—she let ’em all in, black, brown and brindle. No selection teams galloping round Europe on paid holidays, no politicians kissing every ten-thousandth to arrive, or whatever they do. And no blasted unions telling the Government how many would work here and how many could work there—if they were allowed to work at all! America’s immigrants didn’t waste their time in dumps like this, either—they got out onto the land and into the factories and the forests and worked. If they made good, they made good, and if they went under, they went under. Only the best survived. There wasn’t any going back, either. They came to stay.”<
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  They were at the end of the kitchen buildings. Carmichael stopped and turned to Randolph.

  “I don’t make prophecies as a rule,” he said seriously, “but I bet that ninety per cent of these blokes go back to Europe as soon as their contracts are finished. See if I’m right.”

  A cold doubt assailed Randolph. Carmichael was not a man who would talk for the sake of talking. He was in a position to make observations, and he had the sense to make the right ones. And Felix Radinski had said it in his room, that day—bodies not happy, maybe not stay long. If Felix felt like that about it, how many more did, too? Ninety per cent, as Carmichael said?

  “Then what the hell did they come out here for?” he demanded angrily.

  “For a holiday,” Carmichael said readily. He laughed shortly. “Do you blame ’em? If some bloke came up to you and offered you two years’ holiday, all exes paid, while things quietened down in Europe, wouldn’t you snap it up? That’s what they’ve done. And when their time’s up, they’ve seen the world and saved their return fares, so back they’ll go. It’d be funny, if it wasn’t so damned serious——for us. Apart from the pile of money that’s been laid out in the scheme.”

  As he finished speaking Charlesworth’s long thin form bounced round the end of the kitchen. He carried a small wireless under his arm. Seeing the two standing talking together, he hesitated for a moment and made as if to return the way he had come.

  “You want me, Slim?” Carmichael called out.

  “Well, no,” Charlesworth said, turning round again. “I wanted to see Bob.”

  “What is it, Slim?” Randolph asked.