A face turned. Louis XVI looked less majestic with make-up smeared over his face and without his wig. ‘Well, hello, it’s Tuka the Indian!’
‘Harry, this is Otto Rechtnagel.’
Otto proffered his hand elegantly with a kink in the wrist and looked indignant when Harry, slightly perplexed, made do with a light press.
‘No kiss, handsome?’
‘Otto thinks he’s a woman. A woman of noble descent,’ Andrew said, to illuminate.
‘Stuff and nonsense, Tuka. Otto knows very well she’s a man. You look confused, handsome. Perhaps you’d like to check for yourself?’ Otto emitted a high-pitched chuckle.
Harry felt his earlobes go warm. Two false eyelashes fluttered accusingly at Andrew.
‘Your friend, does he talk?’
‘Sorry. My name’s Harry . . . er . . . Holy. Clever number out there. Nice costumes. Very . . . lifelike. And unusual.’
‘The Louise Seize number? Unusual? On the contrary. It’s an old classic. The first time it was done was by the Jandaschewsky clown family just two weeks after the real execution in January 1793. People loved it. People have always loved public executions. Do you know how many reruns there are of the Kennedy assassination on American TV stations every year?’
Harry shook his head.
Otto looked up at the ceiling pensively. ‘Quite a lot.’
‘Otto sees himself as the heir of the great Jandy Jandaschewsky,’ Andrew added.
‘Is that so?’ Famous clown families were not Harry’s area of expertise.
‘I don’t think your friend here is quite with us, Tuka. The Jandaschewsky family, you see, was a travelling troupe of musical clowns who came to Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century and settled here. They ran the circus until Jandy died in 1971. I saw Jandy for the first time when I was six. From that moment I knew what I wanted to be. And now that’s what I am.’
Otto smiled a sad clown smile through the make-up.
‘How do you two know each other?’ Harry asked. Andrew and Otto exchanged glances. Harry saw their mouths twitch and knew he had committed a gaffe.
‘I mean . . . a policeman and a clown . . . that’s not exactly . . .’
‘It’s a long story,’ Andrew said. ‘I suppose you could say we grew up together. Otto would have sold his mother for a piece of my arse of course, but even at a young age I felt a strange attraction to girls and all those awful hetero things. It must have been something to do with genes and environment. What do you think, Otto?’
Andrew chuckled as he ducked away from Otto’s slap.
‘You have no style, you have no money and your arse is overrated,’ Otto squealed. Harry gazed round at the others in the troupe; they seemed quite unfazed by the performance. One of the well-built trapeze artists sent him an encouraging wink.
‘Harry and I are going up to the Albury tonight. Would you like to join us?’
‘You know very well I don’t go there any more, Tuka.’
‘You should be over that by now, Otto. Life goes on, you know.’
‘Everyone else’s life goes on, you mean. Mine stops here, right here. When love dies, I die.’
‘As you wish.’
‘Besides, I have to go home and feed Waldorf. You go, and I may come a bit later.’
‘See you soon,’ Harry said, putting his lips dutifully to Otto’s outstretched hand.
‘Looking forward to that, Handsome Harry.’
5
A Swede
THE SUN HAD gone down as they drove along Oxford Street in Paddington and pulled up by a small open space. ‘Green Park’ the sign said, but the grass was scorched brown, and the only green was a pavilion in the middle of the park. A man with Aboriginal blood in his veins lay on the grass between the trees. His clothes were in tatters and he was so dirty that he was more grey than black. On seeing Andrew, he raised his hand in a kind of greeting, but Andrew ignored him.
The Albury was so full they had to squeeze their way inside the glass doors. Harry stood still for a few seconds taking in the scene before him. The clientele was a motley collection, mostly young men: rockers in faded denim, suit-clad yuppies with slicked hair, arty types with goatees and champagne, blond and good-looking surfers with bleached smiles, and bikers – or bikies as Andrew called them – in black leathers. At the centre of the room, in the very bar itself, the show was in full swing with long-legged, semi-naked women wearing purple, plunging tops. They were cavorting about and miming with wide, red-painted mouths to Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’. The girls took turns so that those who were not performing served the customers with winks and outrageous flirting.