I was all for going back to the caravan park, where things happened, when Ros drew my attention to a brown, wiry old man sitting on a bench in the mall, holding a mirror to his face and shaving himself with a pair of nail scissors. It was an ablution – if you can have a dry ablution – which implied that he had no home to go to, but it was performed with an attention to detail not normally associated with the toilet of swagmen. He clipped his cheeks, his upper lip, the cleft of his chin, his neck, with the most painstaking precision, holding the scissors flat against his flesh so that he didn’t miss a fraction of a hair. I guessed that he was about sixty-five but he could easily have been more. I thought he was probably German too. There was a Stroheim look about him. The extremity of his emotional life having its way with his body. Even his crew cut looked German and I supposed that he had given it himself with his little portable tortoise-shell mirror angled above him. Why he wore socks over his shoes I didn’t know. To save leather, Ros reckoned; but that seemed to me a system bound in the end to be costlier in regard to socks than the conventional one is in regard to shoes. Perhaps he was simply protecting them from falling hairs. Such fastidiousness was not impossible. Once he’d finished with his face he moved down to his fingers, shaping the nails, pushing back the cuticles. He was German all right. And I became quite sure in my mind that he was one of the many Nazis who had fled Germany at the end of the war and were now living in Australia. In the case of Gypsy Les we had only his own drunken confession to go on. But with this man we had the evidence of a fanatic personal finickiness of a kind not compatible with the existence of Jews. The very reason I couldn’t take my eyes off him was that I knew it was either him or me. Quite simply there was no metaphysic which could accommodate us both. But once again I didn’t ring Simon Wiesenthal. It was much more fun having my foe in blood and spirit out there on the streets of Alice Springs than having Linda Evans.

Although they were as unalike as two men still essentially Australian could be, both Tom Winter and Bill Richards had said, ‘And when you get to Alice Springs don’t forget to go and see Ted Egan. He’s your true blue Territorian. You’ll have a great night.’