Dark Clouds on the Mountain. John Tully

from the printers. Jack had seen the paper, Workers Action, sold on street corners by earnest young men and women in all weathers. He had to give it to them for dedication. When he was on the beat, he'd watched one of them once - a tallish, well-built young man with thinning hair and a goatee - outside the ANZ bank. Patrick Banning, or something, they called him. Banning would have been lucky to sell half a dozen copies in an hour. Must have been due to the 'false consciousness' of the Hobartian proletariat, Jack had sneered. His daughter sometimes brought copies of the paper home and left them lying round, perhaps deliberately to annoy him. (She didn't know that he read them secretly and would have been surprised at his knowledge of the arcane world of the Australian revolutionary left.)

      There was a large poster of Che Guevara on one wall with the slogan, smash capitalism emblazoned across the bottom in flaring red letters. A bust of Karl Marx peeped from behind the papers on the table. Another poster proclaimed that israel is occupied palestine. Bishop saw it and raised his eyebrows; he probably thought he'd jackpotted. Calvert sat facing them, crossing one blue-jeaned leg over the other fastidiously, an ironic smile tugging the corner of his mouth, his green eyes level. There was a faint smell, a hospital kind of smell, about him. Chloroform? Strong disinfectant, something like that, Jack mused. Maybe he was one of those obsessive-compulsive types; he certainly looked pretty scrubbed and pink; perhaps he was a chemistry student? If so, Jack hoped he didn't have a penchant for the 'TNT' -Transnational Terrorism' - that Bob Santamaria was always wittering on about in that 'Point of View' program on television. But the young man also smelled of strong tobacco, Drum, thought Jack, with a sudden deep craving; but no, the boy had gone one better, it was that lung-busting White Ox!

      'I'd offer you tea, but I doubt you'd like camomile or golden lemon and honey,'Calvert said, raising a mocking eyebrow. 'Am I right, Inspector?'

      'Yeah, you'd be right,' Jack conceded, 'but thanks anyway.'

      Bishop, too, waved away the offer (did they have herbal tea at The Nut? Jack wondered) and Calvert shrugged, picking up a cup from the table and sipping with every appearance of relish. The bugger's at least got some manners, thought Jack. Not a total smart-arse; brought up a good middle-class boy to say please and thank you and offer drinks to his guests. He didn't look or act much like a revolutionary should - all wild-eyed and dishevelled, with the spit flecking the corner of his mouth as he gave out with some incomprehensible harangue - this Marxist boy was neat and tidy, except for the burst of hair. Calvert relit a roll-your-own cigarette that had gone out in an ashtray. Definitely White Ox.

      'We're here,' said Jack, eyeing Calvert's cigarette hungrily, 'as part of an investigation into vandalism at the Hobart Synagogue. Somebody has been daubing anti-Semitic slogans on the walls, Mr Calvert. I was wondering if you could help us.'He nodded towards the poster behind Calvert's head. 'Perhaps someone from your group has decided to up the ante from just handing out anti-Semitic leaflets.'

      'Bollocks.' The voice hissed from behind his ear, preceded by a zephyr of subtle perfume. 'Do we look like we'd go in for 'the socialism of fools', officer?' One of the young women was standing at the connecting door, her hands on her hips, a sour expression distorting her features. 'We don't like bacon, thanks. And that's not just because I happen to be Jewish ... Inspector.' She made the title sound like an insult.

      The pause was that of an accomplished actress, er, actor, thought Jack. (Maybe she was in the Old Nick Society with Wendy?) Her eyes were full of sardonic intelligence and Jack was afraid she could read his mind. The silver cat had come in too and was regarding Jack with disapproval, flicking her tail this way and that. Her familiar, thought Jack with a slight smile.

      'What Hannah means, Inspector, is that we don't distribute anti-Semitic leaflets,'explained Calvert. 'We don't like what is being done to the Palestinian people, but that doesn't make us anti-Semites. In fact, that's a pretty stupid thing to say, given that the Palestinians are a Semitic people themselves. And yes, Hannah is Jewish. Do you find that so surprising? Or would you classify her as a "self-hating Jew"?'

      'I don't know, would you?' Jack replied, leaning back in his chair.

      'Tell me, Inspector, have you heard of Isaac Deutscher?' Calvert asked.

      'Can't say I have. What's he got to do with anything?'

      'Deutscher was a Polish Jew and an anti-Stalinist Communist,' said Calvert, butting out his cigarette. 'He was the biographer of both Stalin and Trotsky. He escaped to London before the outbreak of the war and enlisted in the British Army. If he thought he'd escaped the racist crap he was mistaken, although it was obviously milder than under the Nazis. I imagine he despaired when anti-Semitic officers and men rode him for being Jewish. So, while he was a good Marxist from a party that had originally been staunchly anti-nationalist - that was the influence of another great Jewish Marxist, Rosa Luxemburg - he was ambivalent when the state of Israel was created after the war. He knew as well as anyone what had happened to his fellow Polish Jews. So he once said that the Jews were like a man jumping from a burning building. He landed on someone else, but instead of apologising and making redress to him, he jumped up and down on him like he was a trampoline.'

      'Here endeth the lesson,' said Jack, pretending to yawn. 'I suppose you mean that the man he jumped on was Palestinian?'

      'Yeah, that's what he meant. He was torn and for me that sums it all up. There is no simple, easy explanation or solution and I get pissed off when people on either side try to say it's all simple.'

      'You're not so simple, Simon,' Jack quipped.

      Hannah had been listening intently, but at this she turned her back and flounced out of the room, shaking her long black hair. Jack thought she was magnificent, a marvellous filly with a very pale face, huge brown eyes and a full red mouth. Nice bum. He bit back on the thought, seeing himself as an old perve past his use-by date. His daughter would have him on toast for his sexism. His mind wandered back to his old girlfriend, Tracey, then further back, to the beautiful long-lost Lily, and he felt very worn and old; a relic of the sixties stranded on this bank and shoal of time, flapping uselessly, all but invisible to the young in their unthinking and naive arrogance.

      'So I'm afraid I really can't help you, Inspector,' Calvert was saying, breaking into Jack's reverie. 'Whatever you might think, we certainly would not approve.' He lowered his voice. 'Hannah is the granddaughter of the president of the Jewish congregation, you realise?'

      'Mr Rosenberg?' Calvert nodded. 'That's interesting.' Jack actually believed Calvert's avowal of innocence but he never took anything at face value. He'd been fooled by a few plausible liars in his early days and had sworn never to be taken in again. In his book, it was educated middle-class types like Calvert who cloaked dark secrets the best. Calvert apologised that he had to leave soon for a lecture, so Jack jerked his head at Bishop and the young officer snapped shut his notebook. The young women didn't look up as they left, but Calvert bid the policemen a polite good day at the door.

      There was a misty drizzle floating off the river, barely perceptible but soon coating them in a fine sheen of water. The two officers went along the road and sat a while in the plastic and vinyl-smelling car, fogging up the windows with their damp exhalations. A wan sun peered through the clouds over the river, decided it wasn't the day and retreated, plunging everything back into gloom.

      Five minutes later, Calvert and the young women came out of the house, joking and laughing, and walked towards King Street, snapping up umbrellas against what had become a heavy fall of rain, oblivious of - or perhaps ignoring - the watching cops. Jack waited until they rounded the corner, then jumped out of the car and nipped along the footpath behind them. When he saw them turn right into Marieville Esplanade towards the university, he slipped down the lane behind the block and found the gate to Calvert's back yard. It smelled of rain and old ashes. A broken-down old Cortina was parked forlornly at Calvert's back gate, one tyre flat and all four of them bald, its blue paint cracked and faded, with rust eating away at the boot, although it was still registered. It was covered in stickers: everything from the prosaic and predictable stop uranium mining to the more intriguing we gave fraser the razor, now give hawke the fork.

      Jack wondered if Calvert had anything to do with the famous graffiti on a boatshed just round the corner where the Sandy Bay Rivulet drained into the estuary.