by Garry Disher
Henri grunted. Joe’s last car was a heap of shit. He dug a street directory out from the bottom drawer of his desk, snatched it back when Joe tried to take it from him. ‘I can do it.’
‘Only trying to help,’ Joe said.
‘Well don’t.’
Henri scanned the index, opened the pages to Jacaranda Park. ‘Here.’ He shook his head. ‘Seven o’clock: the traffic will still be heavy.’
Le Page’s expressionless gaze swung from the map to Henri. ‘Heavy for the thieves also.’
Furneaux glanced involuntarily at his office safe. He kept thirty grand there on a daily basis, but this morning he’d added another ninety grand, all in hundreds, scrounged from various accounts as soon as the banks opened. He still couldn’t see the reason for putting the ransom together. ‘I don’t understand why we have to pay these people. Can’t we just ambush them?’
‘Yeah,’ Joe said.
Le Page gave them his pitiless look. ‘And if they do not have the bonds with them? Or only some—as proof? Or photocopies? And if they do not appear but send an agent in their place? And if there are many of them, all armed? We first wait and listen.’
‘We risk losing the bonds and my cash,’ Henri said.
Pouring coffee only for himself, Le Page said, ‘Forget about the cash. If necessary, I will cover you—but it will not come to that.’
Joe had been scratching his head, raining dandruff. ‘How about me and Henri put a GPS thingy with the money? Different frequency, so it won’t stuff up your signal?’
That made sense to Le Page. He would monitor the bonds, the brothers their precious cash. ‘As you wish.’
‘That way,’ said Joe, warming to his plan, ‘we can coordinate with each other if they try to rip us off.’
‘Either way,’ Le Page said, ‘I will follow and eliminate.’
A short while later, he headed downtown and used fake ID to rent a Subaru Impreza from an agency that specialised in sports and high-performance cars. Mounting the GPS tracker, he returned to his hotel and paid a valet $50 to keep the car close by. Back in his room he examined the Subaru’s street directory until he knew the main and minor streets adjacent to Jacaranda Park. His head ached. He stood, stretched and walked to the window. Everything about the country affronted him. The Australian suburbanite had no aesthetic sense; the middle class was aspirant, vulgar and ignorant. No wonder the cities were bland. He vowed never to visit the place again; there would be no need to once he’d retrieved the bonds.
Le Page returned to the hire car, started the engine, and decided to delay his examination of Jacaranda Park. Instead, he drove to Danielle’s poky flat in Highett, then to the house with the white door. He didn’t expect to find Danielle, or the men named Oberin and Wyatt, but knew that neglecting to look would eat at him all day. Danielle was gone but maybe the others would return when they received the cash this evening.
Finally Le Page drove to Jacaranda Park. He spent an hour walking and driving around the area. The layout—narrow paths, narrow footbridge—would oblige both parties to approach the exchange point on foot. The nearest car parking was fifty metres away from the bridge, which was open to view from all sides. It was that fifty metres that bothered Le Page. Henri would be vulnerable as he walked across to the bridge. On the other hand, so would the thieves—that’s if Le Page were to hit them at the time of the exchange instead of following them to whatever burrow they had been hiding in. He was pleased to have the Subaru. Speed and manoeuvrability would be the deciding factors this evening. He finished scouting around. He would return to the park at 5 p.m. and claim a secluded area behind a hedge on the other side of the road. When the light faded from the sky and the shadows blurred, he would use night-vision binoculars.
* * * *
27
Wyatt spent the rest of Thursday in fruitless pursuit of Eddie Oberin. He could be frightening and persuasive, but mostly relied on reading faces and body tics for evasions and lies, and realised that no one was protecting Eddie, no one knew where he’d go to ground. The guy’s parents were dead. He tracked down the Perth sister, but she cut him off in mid call, saying she no longer had anything to do with her brother, and wanted nothing to do with Wyatt. Also, many of Wyatt’s old contacts had died or moved or regretted ever knowing Eddie Oberin.
But he did arrive at a short list of names, single names: Sherry, Blinda, Lexus, Chelsee, Aymee, Mindi and Khandi. Made-up names and spellings of the kind that hookers and strippers had always used but now also given to little girls destined to become respectable wives and mothers. Wyatt began to hit the lunch-hour strip clubs and lap-dancing joints, armed with Eddie’s photograph and the last of his cash.
As the long day progressed he learned that Chelsee was in jail, attempted armed robbery. Aymee and Blinda were tagging along behind workers building a natural-gas pipeline in central Australia. Lexus had died of an overdose six months earlier.
The matchbook connection was Mindi, a dancer at Blue Poles, in Flinders Lane. ‘That bastard,’ she told Wyatt, giving Eddie’s photo back to him.
She’d taken a five-minute break to wander among the punters. They were mostly $5 and $10 punters, so Wyatt’s $50 encouraged her to linger a while at his table. The club was dimly lit, the air hazy as if everything had vaporised: the promise of sex, the different hungers, the disappointments. Mindi’s G-string, makeup and plastic breasts meant nothing to Wyatt, and after a while she stopped twitching them at him. ‘A real prick,’ she said. ‘You going to drink that?’
He’d been obliged to buy drinks. ‘It’s mostly water,’ he said.
‘What did you expect?’ said Mindi, draining her own glass and then his, and chewing the oily ice cube. ‘You get dehydrated in this job,’ she explained.
‘My fifty bucks hasn’t got me very far,’ Wyatt said. His voice was low and dangerous. It wasn’t an act. Wyatt could watch a bank for several days without complaint, but there were other kinds of waiting for which he had no patience.
‘Don’t get your undies in a twist.’
‘How well did you know Eddie?’
‘Well enough.’
‘Meaning?’
‘I lived with him for a few weeks at the beginning of the year, then he went off me and someone said he’d hooked up with his ex-wife. Then a couple of months ago he starts hanging out here again. I tried to rekindle things but he was all over one of the other girls, suggesting threesomes. Prick.’
Wyatt glanced around, staring through the tired lights, fighting the haze to locate the tables distributed close to the stage and in the dark corners, where single men and raucous tables of men and women were entertaining the dancers. ‘Which girl?’
‘Khandi.’
‘She here?’
‘Hasn’t shown up this evening.’
Wyatt gave his brief nod; it was scarcely there.
‘Come to think of it,’ added Mindi, ‘I haven’t seen her for a few days.’
‘Know where she lives?’
Mindi examined her nails. Wyatt peeled off another $50.
‘Upstairs.’
He glanced at the ceiling involuntarily. ‘What’s up there?’
‘Offices. Storeroom. One apartment.’
‘Khandi’s?’
‘That’s what I said, isn’t it?’
‘Does she live there with anyone?’
Mindi shook her head, jetting a stream of cigarette smoke towards the stage, where a Thai woman was gyrating to an old Stones song. ‘Nobody in their right mind would live with that bitch.’
‘Why?’
Mindi shrugged and her breasts lifted. ‘Unpredictable. Filthy temper. She took a knife to me when I complained about Eddie getting off with her.’
She flipped a wing of hair away from her neck. The scar was small but purplish and cruelly stitched together.
‘Nasty,’ he said.
‘You can say that again,’ said Mindi, stabbing out her cigarette. ‘Listen, I have to get back to work.’
Wyatt said, ‘I need you to be quiet about this conversation.’
She shrugged.
Wyatt gave her another $50. ‘How do I get upstairs?’
Mindi said nothing but cast her gaze briefly toward a far corner, which was like a black hole, sucking in all light and anything that moved.
‘Thanks,’ Wyatt said.
‘If you’re not doing anything later...’ Mindi said, and, for just a moment, her life story showed through, the need for some ordinary affection.
Wyatt gave her a nod and a kind smile but no hope at all.
* * * *
Slipping around a dusty velvet curtain beside a stifling men’s room, Wyatt found a set of concrete steps. These led up to a corridor lit by flyspecked bulbs, and a door with a peephole and a plain white business card taped beneath it. He’d found the residence of Khandi Cane. The door was dead bolted, and Wyatt did what he always did, and searched for the key before trying anything else. He found it behind an adjacent door, which housed a hot water service, inside a magnetised box stuck behind a tangle of pipes.
He didn’t know what to expect. Sex-shop underwear, candles, New Age crystals, pink stationery and a favourite overcoat? In fact, he did find those things, but he also found a collection of knives, a packet of 9mm cartridges, and a laptop. In the shower cubicle he found Chanel No. 5. Her tiny bar fridge was stocked with French champagne and smoked salmon. Three wigs: red, blonde, brunette. A dozen pairs of shoes. Many magazines and two books: Own Your Life and Own the World and God Loves a Winner. Some CDs: waterfall music, and Emmylou Harris. Two DVDs: 2007 AFL Grand Final and Pirates of the Caribbean. Wyatt couldn’t quite work her out. Khandi had hopes and dreams, apparently, but none that would soften a heart.
He fired up her laptop and discovered that she’d been searching the Internet for anything she could find on Henri Furneaux, the jewellery trade and the resale value of antique watches, rings, brooches and necklaces.
Nothing on where she was hiding, however. He tried her answering machine. One message, from someone called Stefan: ‘Get your arse down here now or you’re fired.’
Wyatt spent another five minutes in the miserable room and had barely stepped out when he sensed a shift in the quality of the air. His nerve endings tingled as he registered the presence of a bulky shape in the shadowed reaches of the grimy corridor, the dully hostile workings of a man’s chest and lungs, and the layered odours of hired muscle: sweat, cheap alcohol, cigarettes and methamphetamine. Next he noticed the stance: the guy had been a boxer and he favoured his right arm.
The first rule is to get close. Wyatt surprised the Blue Poles bouncer by not hesitating.
‘The fuck you doing up here?’
Wyatt said nothing. The bouncer had spoken because he thought the circumstances demanded it, even though his intention was to beat Wyatt into unconsciousness and toss him into the alley behind the club. Suddenly Wyatt was in his face, so he swung his right arm, his face lit with pleasure now, his bald head gleaming in the weak light, his shirt and trousers straining as his huge limbs and torso began to move.
Wyatt acted in that millisecond before the punch connected, slapping both hands around the bouncer’s wrist, turning clockwise and yanking downwards, spinning the man around and driving him nose first into the wall.
He let go, stepped back, but stayed close. He was almost face to face when the bouncer turned to him again. Wyatt could have gone for the man’s broken nose, but chose to punish the right arm again, chopping at the clavicle area, where the nerves are close to the bone. He knew how crippling the pain could be. That arm would be numb and useless for several days.
Now he stepped clear of the bouncer. He saw the guy weighing it up, eyebrows knotted with pain but far from finished, and beginning to advance edgeways, clenching his left fist.
Wyatt feinted. He dropped his right shoulder as if readying himself to swing a haymaker, and when the bouncer shifted in anticipation, shielding his upper body, Wyatt pivoted and kicked the man’s unguarded lower body, catching him at the side of the knee.
The bouncer hobbled in retreat, almost falling to the floor. By now he was drooling, wheezing, soaked with sweat and shaking his head in bafflement. Wyatt also felt early signs of exertion but knew how to control them. He took shallow, even breaths through his nose. The bouncer was gulping air, taking in too much of it, hyperventilation turning to panic. Wyatt saw it and moved in. He kicked again, the other knee this time. Now the bouncer couldn’t run, only hobble. Then, feet spread apart, Wyatt began to punch the man. Using his whole body, visualising a target on the other side of the man’s body, he punched through the bouncer, the power coming from his hips and thighs, landing hard. In that way a slight man can defeat a heavy one. The bouncer hit back but didn’t know how to move, his trunk static, his right arm useless, his left lacking force and accuracy.
Wyatt wasn’t interested in punishment. He was dealing with an obstacle. When the moment presented itself he punched the occipital bulge at the back of the man’s head and walked off down the stairs, hearing behind him the smack of heavy limbs on linoleum.
Wyatt didn’t acknowledge Mindi as he walked out through the front door of Blue Poles. He returned to his apartment in Southbank and found Lydia asleep in front of the TV. The air was stale and so he opened a window and watched the ribbons of light along the river, the bridges and the streets. The city projected an immense glow onto the clouds. There was no real blackness out there, even though night had fallen.
* * * *
28
Henri and Joseph were in position by 6.30. Leaving Henri’s Mercedes in the public car park, they made a swift reconnaissance of the exchange location on foot, careful not to linger on the footbridge. The sun had recently settled but there was plenty of artificial light in the park. Plenty of people, too: kids mucking around on bikes and skateboards before going home for dinner, joggers, couples, some activity at the scout hall on the far side of the railway tracks. Even a few young families frying sausages on a coin-operated barbecue, clinking plastic cups of champagne, celebrating something.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Joe as they passed a set of playground swings. ‘Too open. Too many ways out. Too many people around.’
Henri shook his head. ‘It’s a good place, from their point of view and ours. We can’t afford to try anything and nor can they.’
‘Where’s Alain?’
‘He’s here somewhere, don’t worry.’
Joe shook his head. ‘What’s he got us into, bro?’
‘Don’t call me bro.’
‘What do we know about treasury bonds and shit?’
Henri didn’t say They returned to the car, where Joe fiddled with the CD player and Henri sat with the money in a briefcase on his lap. Then it was five minutes to seven and Henri said, ‘It’s time.’
Joe made to get out. Henri said, ‘You stay here.’
‘Why?’
‘If it goes wrong I need you in the car, ready to roll.’
Joe didn’t like it. ‘Don’t challenge them Henri, okay? Don’t piss them off. Don’t let on we know their names.’
‘What do you take me for?’
Joe ground his teeth. Henri crossed in the dim light to the little bridge and stood in the middle of it, trying to keep from looking around for Le Page. A young woman ran past him, ponytail bouncing, trailed by a dog. Then nothing, then a middle-aged man crossed briskly, not meeting his gaze. The traffic was a constant muted roar on Whitehorse Road. A breeze picked up and swayed the trees all around and Henri felt a little exposed.
He heard it before he saw it, a powerful bike. He glanced around wildly. The bike was on the western approach path to the footbridge, implacably black, rider and helmet. Henri swallowed and wondered if everything had gone to shit. A bike? No way had Le Page anticipated this.
With a little exhaust snarl, the bike rolled onto the bridge. Nothing was said. The rider stopped a metre from Henri, who opened the briefcase, revealing the money. The rider handed ove
r a gym bag and waited, gun in hand, while Henri opened the document wallets and confirmed that the bonds were genuine. There was the suggestion of breasts under the leather jacket; shapely thighs. So this was the woman. Where was her partner?
Henri nodded, then handed over the briefcase. ‘It’s all there.’
The woman laughed. She rippled each of the bundles with her thumb, as if checking for dummy notes, found the transponder, and crushed it under her boot. Then, instead of taking the briefcase, she removed the cash bundles, crammed them into the pannier and shot past him off the bridge, a sexy black shape on her howling machine. A flare of brake lights at the highway, then she accelerated east, away from the city. Furneaux shook the empty briefcase absently.