St Kilda Blues by Geoffrey McGeachin

sweet sherry and a couple of Valium tablets in a mother’s-little-helper morning cocktail.
    It was on the ride back to the city that the image of Gerhardt Scheiner and the right hand with its missing finger had forced itself back into his head. Could he even remember exactly what the SS officer had looked like? Had he even seen his face on that freezing, snow-covered Polish roadway? He had been watching the pistol held at the girl’s temple, seeing her eyes and the gentle smile on her beautiful, gaunt face as she chose her time to die, found Berlin’s eyes and held them with her own, picked him out of the line of miserable, shivering, starving POWs to be her witness.
    He remembered the SS man’s hand with its missing finger, saw the index finger tighten on the trigger, and at that moment a truck in front of the Triumph backfired. Charlie Berlin’s head snapped back, he saw the puff of blue smoke from the truck’s exhaust pipe, his stomach heaved and he yelled for Roberts to pull over. It was just good fortune the wide-open space of the marina car park had been right beside them.
    Berlin spat and straightened up. He used the side of his left shoe to kick gravel over the remains of his breakfast tea and toast and Vera’s excellent coffee. He hated using his shoes for anything other than walking and hoped he hadn’t scuffed the leather. He spat again. The taste of acid and bile in his mouth refused to go and the muscles of his lower abdomen ached from retching. Across the empty car park a caravan with a serving window cut into the side advertised coffee and doughnuts. As he walked across the parking area, shoes crunching in the gravel, Berlin saw Roberts watching him from the Triumph.
    The man in the doughnut caravan didn’t seem offended when Berlin swirled the first mouthful of instant coffee around in his mouth and spat it out. He looked towards the waiting car and raised the waxed paper cup. Roberts shook his head. Berlin briefly considered a jam doughnut to go with the coffee but his stomach immediately let him know it wasn’t a good idea. The caravan was parked with the serving hatch towards the roadway and its back to the water. An ocean liner was making a its way across Port Phillip Bay towards Station Pier, a thin trail of white smoke pencilled into the blue sky behind it. Just round to his right, past the new marina, was St Kilda, and the lake where the body of the seventh or eighth missing girl had been found.
    He swirled more coffee around in his mouth, spat again, then tossed the cup into a rubbish bin. He didn’t want to talk to any more fathers with missing daughters and he really didn’t want to see the spot where the body of some other bloke’s missing daughter had been found. God, he wondered, was there anything about this fucking job he had ever liked? It was a little like war, just a lot less bloody and final. It left strong men bent low under the weight of the things they had been forced to witness and broke weaker men, broke them sometimes into such tiny piece that they could never be put back together again.
    It was ten years since the beating that had scarred Roberts’ face and broken his body, and broken something else deep inside the man. Constable Bob Roberts had earned the beating by doing Berlin a favour, tracking down a licence plate missing from a truck. The brutal attack was meant as a warning to Berlin, to stop him nosing around in areas that didn’t concern him, and Roberts had almost died from it. His recovery had been slow, and while the physical damage had mostly healed, there was other damage, damage that only Berlin could see. It was there in the eyes if you knew what to look for and Charlie Berlin did. It was in his own eyes, and the reason he didn’t like seeing his face in mirrors. His eyes constantly reminded him that there was only and always a split second between life and death, between being here and being gone forever.