The Case of the Chinese Boxes

by Marele Day

  Carefully I uncurled my fingers. Thin crescents of blood were forming where my nails had dug into the palm. I opened my hand further and saw that a fortune cookie had been pressed into it. I separated the broken pieces and picked up the strip of paper on which the message was written.

  If you chase the dragon beware the sting of its tail.

  Instinctively I gathered my children to me.

  ‘What’s yours say, Mum?’ asked Amy.

  ‘The holidays are over. It’s time for you to go home.’

  The waiter brought slices of square brown bread with equally square pats of butter, and a large Greek salad. The seafood restaurant in Erskine Street was rapidly filling up with business people who provided the bulk of the lunchtime clientele. The service was fast, the fish fresh and the price right.

  I speared a baby octopus while Carol watched the manoeuvre suspiciously.

  ‘A good vet would have that swimming in half an hour,’ she said.

  I looked twice at the little creature but ate it anyway, biting decisively so the tentacles wouldn’t choke me on their way down.

  ‘You think that octopus has more right to life than the lettuce you’re munching on?’ I said to Carol, who had recently begun a stint of vegetarianism. ‘Look at those pale little leaves, that’s probably its heart you have in your mouth right this minute.’

  ‘You’ve always got an answer for everything, haven’t you, Claudia?’ she replied coolly.

  ‘Only the easy ones, I come to you for the hard ones.’

  ‘Well the National Bank job is a hard one for us as well. The biggest bank haul in Australian history, the most professional job since the Great Bookie Robbery, and the trail’s gone cold. The cash is untraceable and the valuables are probably melted down now or in Hong Kong. You don’t fancy a little trip there, do you?’

  ‘Not if I can help it. Sydney’s my patch and I’m sticking to it. Better the devil you know.’

  Carol’s eyebrows swam together under her thick bangs of hair. ‘There might be some devils here you don’t know. That bank job doesn’t have any signatures on it that we can decipher. I wish you luck. Better luck than we’ve had anyway.’

  Carol was often cagey about police information but on this one it was full co-operation. The police hadn’t been able to get anywhere on it. And if a private investigator with ways and means could uncover something that the police, tied by legalities, couldn’t, so much the better.

  As we stood up to leave she handed me a list of those who had come forward to declare their losses. The Chens weren’t on it. The bank had refused to give the cops a full list of their safety deposit box holders. I was pleased to know that some institutions still stuck by their guarantee of the individual’s right to privacy.

  At the cash register the cashier knew precisely what we had ordered and we paid accordingly. There was a long line of office girls and boys waiting impatiently for take-aways beside the grill plates and vats of boiling oil where chips sizzled. Fast chefs with dirty white aprons worked away at the vats as if they were conducting orchestras. I didn’t know how they could do it in that heat.

  ‘Jim Campbell of the Breaking Squad might be of help,’ Carol said when we were out in the street. ‘I’ll let him know to expect you, shall I?’

  ‘Thanks Carol, you’re a gem.’

  She looked at me suspiciously. Carol was never one to accept compliments graciously.

  ‘This communication channel is two-way. Any leads that you come across you’ll pass on to us of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ I repeated.

  ‘You wouldn’t like to start by telling us who your client is?’

  ‘That’s right Carol, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Even as an act of faith?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘Faith we have in abundance. It’s facts that are a bit thin on the ground. Besides, knowing who my client is won’t lead us to the robbers. It’s fairly routine: they’ve lost something, I’ve got to find it.’

  ‘Where are you off to?’ asked Carol when we got to the corner of Erskine and York.

  ‘Ultimo. What about you?’

  ‘Back to work. You remember work, don’t you? You must have seen it on TV.’

  ‘Feeling nostalgic? Still wish you were out in the streets, Carol?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said abruptly. ‘I like the feel of my padded leather chair, and the huge desk keeping the sleazebags at bay. I need to know there’s money coming in every week now that I have a mortgage as well as a leaky roof over my head. What are you going to do when you get too old for this game?’

  ‘I’m fit, I’m not going to grow old. Don’t have a mid-life crisis on my behalf.’

  The lights changed and Carol started to cross. ‘Don’t forget Jim Campbell.’

  ‘Thanks, Carol, see you later.’

  I knew why Carol was so keen for me to use her contacts—so she could keep an eye on me. But I had a few contacts of my own.

  The air hung low and heavy. It was one of those late January days from childhood. It was always like this on the first day of the new school year, back in school uniform with white blouses that Mina bleached to get out the rings of sweat. The heat sat on you like a fat furry bear.

  It was the bear that influenced my decision to take a cab. I rarely brought my car into the city these days. Any more carbon monoxide and you could commit suicide by just sitting at the traffic lights and breathing.

  When I arrived in Ultimo, journos back from long lunches were making their way into the newspaper building like worker bees re-entering the hive. They had an intensity about them, frayed at the edges, of those who write for a living and to a deadline, hoping to God the city would throw up a new story each day so they wouldn’t have to make a lost dog sound like a major political event.

  I followed them in, past the bays that in the early hours of the morning would be loading their stories into trucks bound for the country, but which now lay idle and empty.

  I took the lift to the sixth floor and asked for Brian Collier. There was nothing to fan myself with in the reception area so I just sat and quietly sweated.

  It wasn’t long before I saw Brian making his way towards me. For once he had taken off the tweed jacket that seemed to have been stitched on surgically. He was wearing a beige coloured shirt that may have once been white, and a wool tie. The shirt sleeves were rolled up to just below the elbows and revealed age spots on the hefty forearms.

  I stood up and we shook hands. He wasn’t the sort of man you kissed every time you saw him and I wasn’t the kind of woman who gave them out lightly. I always imagined there was a transfer of information in that handshake, that I was taking in years of the city’s stories through the whorls and lines of the palms.

  And of course there was the connection with Guy, too. Those hands had been around my father’s shoulders, propped him up, maybe wrestled a bottle or two from him.

  ‘Air-conditioning broken down again, has it?’ I asked, as we wandered down the maze of corridors.

  ‘Yes, and we’ll all be following suit if they don’t fix the damn thing soon.’

  We stopped outside an office with his name on the door.

  ‘Very impressive,’ I said, ‘they’ve moved you out of the classroom into the principal’s office.’

  ‘About bloody time too. I’ve nursed this building through three coats of paint and as you can see they don’t do it very often.’

  Becoming senior features writer hadn’t made Brian any tidier. I removed a pile of papers from a chair and sat down.

  ‘How’s your mother?’

  I wasn’t really convinced by his light-hearted tone of voice. I’d always wondered about Brian and Mina. I had a sneaking suspicion that long ago, when I had been too young to notice, he had fallen victim to the charms of those Betty Grable legs and never quite got over it. All my mother had to say on the matter was that Brian Collier was a ‘family friend’, and that he’d been a great source of comfort to her through ‘all that busine
ss with your father’.

  ‘She’s fine. Still smoking like her life depends on it, but otherwise fine.’

  Brian eyed me suspiciously. ‘You haven’t become one of those born-again non-smokers, have you?’

  ‘I never smoked in the first place, and no, it doesn’t worry me if other people do. It’s just that Mina . . . well, sometimes she sounds like a steam-engine chugging up a hill.’

  A shadow of concern passed across Brian’s face then he laughed it away. ‘Talking about chugging up hills, you didn’t come all the way up to the sixth floor just to see my office, did you?’

  ‘Not entirely. What’s the word on the National Bank robbery?’

  ‘The Great Chinese Take-Away? It wasn’t my story. I can take you to our library files, then if you have any questions I might be able to direct you to the appropriate source. What are you looking for, the gold or the drugs?’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Yeah. Word has it that as well as gold, there was heroin stored in them there boxes. Mind you, it’s worth more than its weight in gold. Word also has it that certain parties held a summit meeting.’

  ‘Certain parties?’

  ‘Some of the big boys round town—white and yellow. The upshot of it was—get the bastards. The word is out. They can’t go the police and they can’t go to their own kind. Whoever did it has as much protection as a sparrow in a windstorm. If they’re still in the country, that is.’

  ‘They have to be,’ I said determinedly.

  ‘You know, or you want?’

  ‘Got a feeling about it. They’re still here.’

  ‘You after the breakers or an item?’

  ‘Item. But one thing may lead to the other.’

  ‘And you can succeed where the cops have not?’

  I smiled at Collier and let the question answer itself.

  I expected to have to search through back copies in the library looking for news of the robbery, but the librarian had beaten me to it. Collier introduced me to her and told her what I was after. She looked like a nice woman, efficient but friendly. She got out a file headed 1988, Crimes, Australia, and flicked through it. A slim file, but the year had only just started. She came to Robberies and lifted out the folder that said National Bank, Haymarket, and handed it to me.

  ‘The photocopier’s over there if you need to use it.’

  It was something of a bonus on this hot afternoon in this hot stuffy building, to have some of the material already predigested. At least I’d been saved the trouble of flicking through trees of newspapers looking for the meaty bits.

  Fifteen minutes was enough to photocopy the lot.

  I returned the folder to the librarian and renegotiated the labyrinth back to Collier’s office.

  He was on the phone, or rather the phone was on him, nestled on his shoulder, the way they do it in the movies. I’d never been able to manage it myself, it kept slipping under my chin.

  It didn’t really suit Collier, the phone looked too toy-like, but it did allow the hand that wasn’t taking notes to offer me a seat.

  I sat. And started reading through the photocopies.

  The bank had been broken into over the New Year weekend, the sound of the revels covering the explosions as the strongroom door was blasted. This was 1988 and two hundred years of white man’s history were being celebrated with particularly loud bangs. It was estimated the breakers spent up to forty-eight hours in the bank and came out at regular intervals to drink in nearby hotels and establish alibis. Did the cops know this or was it just the media spicing up the story? I think I would have taken in a thermos and a couple of sandwiches and stayed there for the duration.

  As soon as Collier put down the phone it started ringing again. He picked it up and made a thin-lipped smile at me. It was one of those afternoons. One of those afternoons when more civilised countries have siestas.

  There were photos and diagrams of the bank. The facade facing George Street looked unassuming in one photograph, but another, an aerial view, revealed that the bank extended the width of the block back to Sussex Street. The photo was taken in daylight and there were cars in the street. The same cars that had been there when the break was going on? Positioned across the cars in the photo was the caption: HOW THEY DID IT.

  Step by step.

  1 Entered through construction site.

  The site could only be seen from the aerial view, a pit hidden by facades.

  2 Climbed scaffolding.

  3 Used ladder to reach window.

  In another of the clippings, where a diagram took the place of the aerial photo, these two steps were reversed.

  I was aware of Collier’s phone ringing again and a soft curse. An office of one’s own was not without drawbacks. I mimed departure and left.

  By the time I hit Broadway the traffic, never a pleasure along that particular stretch, was a sea of hot gleaming metal. Everything shimmered in a brown haze. The faces in the cars were tight, silent and closed. They had their minds set on automatic and were thinking of the cold beers waiting at home.

  I’d nearly walked to Glebe Point Road by the time a vacant cab came along. The driver wasn’t impressed with having to cross the lines of traffic to turn right and he wasn’t much of a talker. That suited me fine. All I wanted to do was follow the breakers into the bank, carrying the oxy-acetylene equipment, wondering about the security guard. No. They’d have known when he did his rounds, would have timed it for that.

  4 Walked downstairs. Gang member used extension ladder to enter fourth floor window. He then ran down two flights of stairs to force a second floor window to allow the gear to be brought in.

  5 Breaking tools taken to basement vault.

  6 Broke through security doors.

  7 Blasted way into safety deposit box strongroom.

  8 Rifled boxes.

  9 Attempted to blow cash-safe but triggered off alarm.

  Therein the drawings and steps ended. More of the story was constructed based on paraphernalia the thieves left behind.

  There was a photo of the vault door with the metal pulled back like paper to reveal the lock. There was also a photo of a safety deposit box. It looked like a crumpled shoebox. It had been photographed in the street; there were out of focus cars behind it. There was a sticker on the side of the box with writing on it. Through the black and white dots of the newspaper photo the words were indistinguishable.

  ‘Bloody good job that one.’

  I looked up. We’d rounded the Crescent, passed the timber mill, and were grinding on to meet the White Bay traffic. The inevitable Bush Dance sign hung on the wire fence, shot through with bullet holes so that the wind wouldn’t lift it and sail it away. Beatrice, the lady who sells newspapers in her Balmain football socks, was slipping a paper out of her bundle and in through a car window. A good way to supplement the pension if you didn’t mind weaving in and out of the fast lane.

  ‘Pardon?’

  He turned around and leered at my lap where the photocopies were nestling. My skirt suddenly felt very short.

  ‘That bank job. They’ll never get ’em, you know. They’d be out of the country by now, living it up in Rio.’

  ‘That was the Great Train Robbery,’ I said coolly.

  ‘Must be the place to go then,’ he said, winking.

  I got out two blocks from the pub and walked the rest of the way.

  I got a couple of bottles of Cascade from Jack and took them up to my room. I opened the french doors to let some of the heat out, and with Vince Jones crooning to me from the cassette player, had a more careful look at the clippings.

  The estimates of the haul ranged from ten to a hundred million dollars worth. I’d never seen a million anything except for grains of sand.

  My old university training got the better of me and I found myself taking notes. There was just one story but a million ways of telling it. Maybe rearranging the pieces might show up a pattern hitherto unrevealed.

  eighty safety deposits boxes rifled />
  cash, gold, securities, jewellery, family heirlooms (heroin? gold keys?)

  gang may have received inside help—gang member may have posed as customer to get bank layout

  oxy-acetylene equipment and gelignite, other equipment left behind—theft of explosive previous month from Batemans Bay

  highly skilled and very professional

  former safecracker: ‘It’s been an easy go for years and I don’t think that much planning would have gone into it.’

  fair chance most of the haul will end up overseas—Hong Kong, Singapore, but ‘there are people who collect these sorts of things here, maybe the offenders had these contacts. Don’t think criminals are fellows with scars on their cheeks with one eye looking this way and the other looking that.’ (Det. Chief Inspector Kevin Parsons)

  alarm set off but security guard found ‘nothing untoward’ in the bank’s main cash-vault on ground floor, reset alarm, if he had gone down a single flight of stairs he may have caught them red-handed, ‘brazen robbers bypassed guard . . . by using the lift to travel from basement to first floor’

  victims not declaring context of boxes

  a group of Sydney criminals ‘discussed in a Darlinghurst hotel a plan to find the bank robbers and use torture to persuade them to part with the proceeds of the robbery—a bizarre twist’ (summit meeting Collier referred to?)

  Mr Henry Ming Lai, who replaced the murdered Mr Stanley Wong as chairman of the Dixon Street, Chinatown Chinese Committee said ‘We have no information or knowledge of how many Chinese had boxes or the contents that were in them.’

  several of the ‘valuable items’ had been listed. A jade Buddha and phoenix, numerous gold and platinum bracelets inscribed with dragons, birds and Chinese characters, several 1937 Australian pennies worth at least $50,000, unset stones including diamonds, rubies and emeralds.

  They didn’t mention any heroin.

  Nor did they mention a gold key with a fire-breathing dragon.

  After two bottles of Cascade and both sides of Vince Jones, I had several pages of notes but little else. Nothing much happens in the underworld without someone getting a whiff of it. But as time went by the trail was getting colder. The gang might not be part of the underworld at all. Maybe they were guys who had nine to five jobs and only robbed banks on weekends. They were smart, organised and tight-lipped. Agile enough to climb scaffolding, strong enough to carry heavy equipment. I wasn’t ruling out the possibility that the guys were women.