Port Vila Blues

by Garry Disher

  Deep breath. If he didn’t watch it he’d die of a heart attack on the job. He snorted—‘on the job’ was right. The last time he’d been in the cot with Cassandra Wintergreen she’d leaned on one elbow and grabbed the spare tyre around his waist, pinching tightly, grinning cruelly: ‘Here’s a little fellow who loves his tucker.’ De Lisle had batted her hand away: ‘Quit that, Cass,’ he’d said, wishing now that he hadn’t given her that tasty Tiffany brooch from the safety-deposit hit Niekirk had pulled for him in February.

  He put Wintergreen out of his mind. Half a week’s work here in Vanuatu, then spend two or three days sailing the Pegasus to Suva. A spot of Supreme Court work in Fiji, then fly back to Sydney, leaving the Pegasus moored in Suva. A quick turnaround in Sydney this time. He’d arranged his workload so that he could be in Vila to collect the Asahi stones.

  Grace, De Lisle’s hi-Vanuatan servant, was waiting for him on the verandah. White cloth on the cane table, martini in a steel jug beaded with condensation, chilled glass, a plate of oysters. De Lisle stood close to her, rotated his bulk a quarter turn, fitting his groin against her thigh. Her brown skin felt cool beneath the hairline. Then cotton, a series of bumps along her spine, then her wonderful arse.

  De Lisle rested the folds of his chin on her bare shoulder. He watched her stare out across the water, very still except as he began minutely to move against her.

  10

  It was eight o’clock on Thursday morning before Niekirk got back to his motel. He crawled into bed, exhausted from the bank job and the long hours staking out the U-Store building.

  He slept long into the day, then showered in scalding water, needles of heat easing the strain in his neck and shoulders. He dressed, caught a tram into the city, walked the arcades. ‘The Asahi Collection, on show from Monday 9’ said the discreet card in the window of the Soreki 5 department store. Niekirk mapped the area in his mind, then sat in a coffee shop opposite, watching the security men change shifts. Groundwork. He would spend another day doing this, then fly back to Sydney, wait for word from De Lisle.

  Late in the afternoon he returned to his motel. He was turning the key and pushing the door open when a man came through the door behind him, crowding his back. Another was already in the room, smiling humourlessly at him from the edge of the bed. If Niekirk hadn’t been exhausted he might not have been bushwacked. They wore suits and he knew that was bad news.

  He turned to the suit behind him, half inclined to fight his way free, but stopped when he saw the gun, a police issue .38 revolver, stopped when he heard the giggle, high and mad.

  ‘I wouldn’t if I were you.’

  The guy leaned back against the door, a gun-happy light in his eyes, tongue tip sliding once over his upper lip. ‘Don’t make me,’ he said, giggling again, jerking his head in a nervy spasm, tossing hair away from his eyes. It was a ragged fringe of hair, cut haphazardly by someone once a month—wife or girlfriend, but maybe even mother for all Niekirk knew—over an eager killer’s face.

  So Niekirk turned to the suit on the bed, who said immediately, smiling all the while: ‘A few matters to discuss, Sergeant Niekirk.’

  So they had his name. Niekirk forgot about offering his fake ID. He reassessed the smile of the man on the bed. It was a reflexive, all-purpose smile, the kind used to express rage, pain, pleasure, hope, bonhomie to the media, ingratiation to the men upstairs who outranked him, and often nothing at all. The other guy had the .38 but this was the one Niekirk had to watch.

  ‘What matters?’

  The smile. ‘This and that. Missing items.’

  The voice was deep-chested, a sonorous baritone that liked to listen to itself. Niekirk said, ‘I’m entitled to a phone call.’

  The senior man got to his feet. He was tall, a little stiff. He made a flowery gesture at the bedside telephone with one long, well-shaped hand. ‘Be my guest.’

  Niekirk had memorised the number he was to call if the local boys in blue nabbed him. He stood rather than sat, and faced the room, the telephone cord clumsily draped across his chest. He waited for the dial tone and punched in the number. At once he heard the ringing tone on the line and a soft burr in the room. Smiling one of his smiles, the elegant senior man fished a small black fold-up phone from his pocket.

  Niekirk replaced the handset. ‘You’re our green-light cop.’

  The austere face kept smiling. ‘I suppose I must be.’

  ‘Got a name?’

  The smile faded a little, deciding. ‘Springett.’

  ‘You’d have rank,’ Niekirk observed.

  The smile came back. ‘Inspector.’

  ‘Who’s the cowboy on the door?’

  ‘Lillecrapp.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘It is a mouthful. Sit down. The bed.’

  Niekirk complied. Springett remained standing, every hair in place, a neat, perfect knot in the bright, chaotically patterned tie at his throat. The suit itself was sombre, the shirt crisply white.

  Niekirk said, ‘What missing items?’

  ‘Cast your mind back to your first hit, that bank job in February.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You’ll recall there was a small gold butterfly encrusted with diamonds?’

  ‘Think I’m a philistine? I know what it was, a Tiffany.’

  ‘A Tiffany, exactly. Well, it’s turned up again.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I got word yesterday afternoon that a small-time character here in Melbourne is trying to fence it.’

  Niekirk raced through the possibilities. He knew that Riggs and Mansell hadn’t pocketed anything from the safety-deposit boxes, for he’d packed everything himself. They couldn’t have dropped it in the alley behind the building. There couldn’t have been two Tiffanies. De Lisle wasn’t stupid enough to offload it to a small-time fence. ‘The courier,’ he said.

  ‘Now I wonder how come I knew you were going to say that?’ Springett said.

  ‘I handled the transfer. My men didn’t take the Tiffany. I didn’t take the Tiffany.’

  Springett was watching him. Behind the smile he was guarded, sceptical. ‘You sound very sure of yourself.’

  ‘Fuck I’m sure. I’d check out the courier.’

  Springett said nothing for a while, as if weighing up possibilities. ‘I take it that you know a man called De Lisle?’

  Niekirk grinned. ‘Now we come down to the nitty-gritty. Yes, I know him.’

  ‘I thought so. De Lisle’s setup works in theory, separating your side of things from mine, separating the courier from both of us, like a circuit-breaker arrangement in case one of us takes a fall. But what happens when one of us starts acting solo, know what I mean?’

  Niekirk watched him carefully. ‘You don’t like it that the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing. Nor do I. I especially don’t like it that you knew my name but I didn’t know yours. Did De Lisle give it to you?’

  ‘I insisted on knowing. I had to be ready to cover up if anything happened, like your name appearing on an arrest report.’

  ‘Fucking lovely. An imbalance of power between us right from the start. So, if I pull the jobs for him, what do you do?’

  Reluctantly, Springett said: ‘I put the jobs together—identify the target, supply photos, floor plans, maps of the alarm system.’

  Niekirk looked at him cannily. ‘For a fee?’

  ‘Now that’s the nitty-gritty,’ Springett said. ‘I get a cut of the action. Exactly a third.’

  ‘Same here. It’s my blokes who get a set fee.’

  ‘But have you been paid your third yet?’

  ‘A retainer.’

  Springett nodded. ‘Sounds familiar.’

  ‘The rest when the heat’s off and De Lisle’s moved the stuff.’

  ‘Trusting pair, aren’t we? A retainer to keep us sweet. Not many men would put up with that.’

  ‘Fucking spit it out, Springett. He’s got you over a barrel, same as he’s got me. If we don’
t play ball he puts us away. If we do his dirty work, we stay out of jail and pocket a few hundred thou. Am I right or am I right?’

  Both men relaxed, feeling a common ground between them. Lillecrapp continued to loll against the door, bored, too absorbed in cracking his knuckles to feel envy or interest in what they were saying.

  Niekirk said suddenly: ‘What’s De Lisle got on you?’

  Springett’s face shut down. ‘Now you’re stepping over the line.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘It’s no longer a factor.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It’s strictly business now.’

  ‘Sure. So you’ve told him the Tiffany’s shown up?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Meaning no. Going to tell him?’

  ‘What’s your feeling?’

  ‘Don’t. If there’s been a fuck up, a rip off from our end of the operation, I say we deal with it ourselves. We don’t want him pissed off. Or there’s another possibility: he’s moved all the stuff and is conveniently not paying us what he owes us.’

  ‘Using small-time fences? Unlikely,’ Springett said. ‘Plus he said he’d wait a few months.’

  ‘De Lisle hasn’t said anything about the Tiffany not showing up in the original haul?’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ Springett said. ‘He didn’t know what was going to be in those safety-deposit boxes in the first place, so why would he be worried if it didn’t show up in the stuff the courier delivered? I didn’t know about the Tiffany myself until the owner and the insurance company provided my people with photos and a description. Either it was ripped off by the courier before De Lisle took delivery, or De Lisle’s sold it already to someone who’s trying to sell it again. I like the first scenario, myself, and I say we deal with it ourselves. I’m not ready for De Lisle to get an attack of the nerves and shut us down. I can’t afford it.’

  ‘The mortgage,’ Niekirk said. ‘School fees.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Springett rubbed his jaw. ‘So I say we lean on the courier.’

  ‘You’ve convinced me.’

  They were silent for a moment. Springett said: ‘I watched you watching him.’

  Niekirk snorted. ‘And the rest, arsehole. You knew what the job was, and when, so you watched me and my blokes pull it and then you followed me, right? So much for De Lisle’s fail-safe method.’

  Springett shrugged. ‘If the stolen Tiffany hadn’t shown up I wouldn’t have had to shadow you last night. You were watching the courier, don’t forget.’

  ‘So we’re all suspicious of one another. So what?’

  Springett stretched tiredly. ‘Keep your shirt on. I’d’ve watched him in your shoes. What did you make of him?’

  ‘He probably works for an airline.’

  Springett began to nod his narrow, well-tended head. ‘Travel all over the country, no questions asked.’

  ‘There’s another job going down in a couple of weeks’ time,’ Niekirk said.

  ‘The Asahi Collection. What of it?’

  ‘We grab the courier before he delivers to De Lisle. Put the hard word on him, see what he admits to.’ Niekirk paused, looking hard at Springett. ‘How did the Tiffany turn up, anyway?’

  In reply, Springett took out a photograph. ‘This is from the files. This guy and another guy we know nothing about recently had a meeting with a local fence.’

  ‘Frank Jardine,’ Niekirk said at once.

  Springett let some surprise show through the smiles. ‘You know him?’

  ‘He was never active and we never had anything on him in Sydney,’ Niekirk said, ‘but the whisper was he blueprinted the odd payroll snatch or townhouse burglary.’ He looked up. ‘He’s in Melbourne now?’

  ‘Turned up six months ago. Not a well man, from all accounts.’

  ‘But still working.’

  ‘A few weeks ago he handled some paintings stolen from a house in Sydney. The insurance company paid to get them back.’

  Niekirk snorted. ‘Always do, piss-weak cunts. If they’d let us do our job …’

  ‘Same thing’s likely to happen with the Tiffany.’

  ‘So, lean on Jardine, find out who gave him the Tiffany. Save a lot of running around.’

  Springett glanced away at a point on the wall. ‘Can’t do that. The Tiffany’s only just shown up, and I’d rather sniff around than risk scaring these people off.’

  ‘No pictures of this other guy?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You’re letting the deal go through?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No questions asked.’

  ‘That’s right. We can’t risk an official investigation. We don’t want the Tiffany being traced back to its source, because that could turn up your name, my name, De Lisle’s name. De Lisle would shop us to save his neck, count on it. I don’t fancy ending up in Pentridge. I put too many hard cases in there who’d love to have a crack at me. We need to let the Tiffany fall out of sight again but meanwhile ascertain how and why it showed up, and make sure we fill the hole in De Lisle’s operation, if there is one. That way, if there ever is an investigation it will come to a dead end.’

  Niekirk grinned. ‘If you were to delete one or two of these characters, you’d have your dead end, no problem.’

  ‘Worth keeping in mind,’ Springett agreed.

  11

  The tortoiseshell frame was fitted with broad, elliptical lenses which lightened the dark cast of Wyatt’s face and softened its hard edges. He wore grey trousers, black shoes, a sports coat over a white shirt and a tweedy, out-of-date tie. The ID card clipped to his belt suggested that he spent his life shuffling forms or drafting regulations that said no to everything.

  So no one was looking twice at Wyatt, but Wyatt, preternaturally wary, was going home the long way. After leaving Liz Redding he had driven to Moorabbin Airport, on the flat lands south-east of the city. Cessnas, Pipers, a couple of helicopters and one Lear Jet were parked near the hangars, fuselages and wings reflecting the late-morning sun. There was a handful of student pilots in the air, circling the field, touch landing and taking off again. Wyatt watched for a couple of minutes then entered the terminal building.

  Island Air was a desk front three metres long, staffed by a young woman wearing a polka-dot dress. According to her name tag she was called Nicole and she smiled at Wyatt. ‘I hope you’re Mr. White.’

  Wyatt agreed that he was.

  ‘We thought you weren’t going to make it. The others are just boarding now.’

  Wyatt looked at his watch, then at the clock on the wall behind her. The difference in time was twenty minutes and that meant his watch was faulty.

  Nicole was all smiles. ‘Battery?’

  ‘Must be,’ Wyatt agreed.

  It wasn’t the kind of mistake he could afford to make. It wasn’t the kind of mistake he’d normally anticipate, either. He gave Nicole his ticket and watched her fingers on the VDU keyboard. Island Air flew to King Island twice a day, at 11:30 A.M. and 3:30 P.M. He was booked on the eleven-thirty, timed to connect with a TasAir flight from King Island to Wynyard. It was a long way home, costly and tedious, but Wyatt liked to avoid showing his face in the terminal building of major airports. He had a car at Wynyard. From there to the flat he rented in Hobart was a three or four hour drive.

  Nicole’s smile was a wide seam of white teeth. She leaned on the counter and pointed to double-glass doors at the side of the terminal. ‘Through there, Mr. White.’

  Island Air flew twin-engine, ten-seater Chieftains on the King Island route. The flight took fifty minutes and Wyatt ignored the other passengers and read about the magnetic drill gang’s raid on a bank in the Upper Yarra region outside Melbourne. The Age gave it a bare, three-sentence outline. The Herald Sun police reporter gave it ten sentences and was inclined to be hysterical. She finished the story with a quote from a man in the street: ‘It certainly makes you think.’ If that’s a gauge of the ordinary Australian’s powers of reflection, Wyatt t
hought, then he deserves everything he gets.

  King Island looked green and hilly in the water below, dairy farms stitched together in irregular patterns by narrow roads. The Chieftain touched down at twelve-twenty; ten minutes later, Wyatt was aboard a fifteen-seater Heron. He was offered sandwiches and coffee but his first hesitant bite of the sandwich fired up his bad tooth and his first sip of the coffee made it worse. He swallowed two paracetamol tablets and closed his eyes, the thin planes of his face drawn together in strain and exhaustion.

  He awoke, senses dulled, when the Heron bounced down at Wynyard. On the drive south, Wyatt judged that he had about another twelve months with Jardine. They wouldn’t have a falling out, they wouldn’t get caught—Jardine would simply run out of good jobs for him. What then? Wyatt couldn’t see any big scores on the horizon, he couldn’t see himself doing contract work for organised people like the Sydney Outfit, he couldn’t see himself putting teams of unknowns together again. The old ways were gone, it seemed. Men like him—private, professional, meticulous—were anachronistic in a world given over to impulse and display.

  A great deal was at stake. Ten, fifteen years ago, Wyatt had been able to pull just a few big jobs each year, living on the proceeds, spending weeks or months at a time in places where no one knew him. He liked having a safe haven, a place where he was unknown and overlooked, a place he could slip home to between jobs. He’d had it once, a comfortable old farmhouse on fifty hectares on the Victorian coast south-east of Melbourne, bought with the proceeds of a bullion heist at Melbourne airport. His windows had looked out over the sea and Phillip Island, and for Wyatt living there was like a rest from running.

  Then everything had gone wrong and he’d been forced into a life of mistakes and betrayals and looking over his shoulder for the man carrying a gun or a knife or a badge. For three years he’d felt hunted, on edge. But now he had a chance to regain the things he’d lost and control the strings that had pulled him into risks he should never have taken. He had sufficient money to live on, no one in Tasmania knew who he was and, once he’d paid his debt to Jardine, he would buy an end to his running.