Port Vila Blues

by Garry Disher

  ‘You’re saying De Lisle’s been converting the stuff all this time, right? He should have paid us by now?’

  ‘Think about it. Vanuatu’s one of those places, no tax, no-questions-asked banking. He’s even got a house there. I mean, what a set-up. We can’t touch him.’

  ‘Yeah, but he is a circuit judge in the area.’

  ‘Perfect cover, right? Bastard.’

  ‘Okay, you’ve made your point. So what do we do?’

  ‘Tread very carefully,’ Springett said. ‘He could put me away for ten years, don’t know about you.’

  ‘Me, too,’ Niekirk said.

  ‘What’s he got on you, out of interest?’

  ‘About three years ago he came to see me during an inquiry into police corruption, waving a deposition in my face.’

  ‘And you were mentioned.’

  Niekirk nodded. He could almost remember the text of that deposition word for word:

  ‘My name is Bratton, I’m a senior constable with the New South Wales Police and I work with Sergeant Niekirk. During the past three years we have used the police radio network and code names to mount and coordinate break-and-enter operations against private homes and small businesses around Sydney. We often use department equipment to force entry. If necessary we manipulate fellow officers and the courts to our advantage. A number of known burglars have owned up to our burglaries in return for sentence consideration. The extent of our burglaries has therefore been concealed, and at the same time the force appeared to have a good clear-up rate. The system worked because we were eager to prove our loyalty and toughness to one another.’

  And Niekirk could remember what De Lisle had said:

  ‘Looks like the culture of secrecy and protection in the force doesn’t extend to you, eh, my little mate?’

  Then De Lisle’s face had sobered. ‘Okay, you don’t need to be an Einstein to know you’re fucked if I decide to table this before the Commission.’ He cocked his head. ‘Come on, Niekirk. This is the point where you’re supposed to ask: “What do you want?” ’

  Niekirk had said it flatly: ‘What do you want.’

  ‘That’s better,’ De Lisle had said. ‘In return for my not tabling this document, I want you to do the occasional little favour for me.’

  And that’s how Niekirk explained it to Springett. ‘I did bugger-all for him, really,’ he concluded. ‘Couple of small jobs. Information about a few people. Until now.’

  ‘He paid well?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘In effect, you never felt threatened. It felt like a working relationship, not blackmail.’

  Niekirk curled his lip. ‘Springett, the psychiatrist. Yeah, that’s how it worked.’

  Springett turned one of his smiles into a rare laugh. ‘What happened to Bratton?’

  Niekirk shook his head. He’d sent Riggs after Bratton, a nasty accident, but he wasn’t about to tell Springett that. ‘Your turn.’

  ‘Same kind of thing. I was working Vice. A fair number of the Melbourne brothels are run by the Sydney Outfit. You could say I was on a retainer and De Lisle found out about it.’

  ‘What did you do for him?’

  ‘Like you, information, leaned on a couple of people, that type of thing.’

  ‘He must have creamed his pants when you joined the Armed Robbers. His very own green-light cop.’

  Springett’s smile widened. ‘Steering my team away from your team.’

  Lillecrapp giggled. He was so stolid and obliging that Niekirk had forgotten he was there.

  ‘Okay, so we don’t tackle De Lisle. What do we do?’ He picked up the surveillance photographs of Wyatt and Jardine. ‘What if these characters shoot their mouths off about where they got the brooch? What if they’re arrested and start making deals? I don’t want to wake up one morning to find the toecutters on my doorstep. I don’t want to wake up knowing I’ve been ripped off.’

  ‘You go on back to Sydney, keep an eye on De Lisle,’ Springett said easily. He glanced at Lillecrapp. ‘Meanwhile I’ll plug a few holes down here.’

  14

  Shaken by his encounter with the men outside the U-Store, Crystal said stuff it to De Lisle’s stipulation about no cabs. He collected the tartan suitcase from the U-Store, walked back to the station and hailed the first taxi on the rank.

  The driver was a woman and she sniffed slowly, deliberately, when he got into the back seat, not the front. Barrel-shaped, a sparse pelt of carroty hair on her fleshy head, no one was going to take her for granted. ‘Plenty of room up front.’

  ‘I’m tired.’

  Her voice was a nicotine-riddled croak. ‘So am I, Sunshine, so am I, but I say we’re only on this earth once.’

  Crystal tuned her out. He stared at the dewy cars streaming both ways along Spencer Street, his arm protectively around De Lisle’s suitcase against his thigh on the seat beside him. He itched to open it, but it had been locked and he didn’t have a key.

  ‘What are ya? Pilot? Cabin steward? You know what they say about cabin stewards,’ and she began to wheeze, a version of a laugh.

  Crystal focused on the driver. Her head was a hazy balloon shape spotlit by the low morning sun. He held the suitcase closer to his hip.

  ‘I asked what you did,’ she said.

  Crystal looked away from her. She hadn’t washed recently. He opened the window a couple of centimetres.

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  The taxi had stopped for the King Street lights. There was a luggage tag attached to the tartan suitcase: black leather with a clear cellophane window. Crystal fished a name card from his pocket, reversed it and printed the words ‘Mr. Huntsman, Reriki Resort’ on it, then slipped the card into the leather tag.

  Huntsman. What crap. Crystal was tempted to remove the card and write De Lisle down instead. But that would let De Lisle know he was onto him.

  ‘I’ll say it again—cat got your tongue?’

  Crystal didn’t know why he had to be subjected to this and he told the woman so.

  ‘Some people, they think their shit doesn’t stink.’

  Crystal admonished himself. Don’t say anything, don’t give her an edge of encouragement. He felt the cab’s tyres slap over tram tracks. A few minutes later he lurched gently against his door. The woman had turned left with a faint tyre squeal and was accelerating along William Street. He mentally plotted their route: skirt the Vic Market, merge right onto Flemington Road, right again onto the Tullamarine Freeway.

  He stared at the cars and buildings without seeing them. All of Crystal’s grief led back to De Lisle, starting with an interview room that was like any interview room anywhere: functional, sparse, close and sour, as though every falsehood, craven emotion and confession ever heard in it had become a permanent part of the air and the fittings.

  There had been others there in the room with De Lisle: a senior federal policeman, a senator, a shorthand typist, a couple of sour faces in suits. De Lisle had started the questioning: ‘Like the tropics, do you, Louis?’

  At once Crystal had known what this was about. He looked at De Lisle, looked him full in the eyes, small eyes behind a protective squint. ‘My job takes me there.’

  The Fed leaned forward. He was a charmer, full of smiles, only they were the professional smiles of a cadaverous undertaker. ‘We’re not talking about your crappy job. We’re talking about other sorts of trips. Holidays, kind of thing.’

  Crystal said: ‘Sorry, was that a question?’

  The Fed ignored him. He flipped through a file on the desk in front of him. ‘You’re single?’

  Crystal said nothing.

  ‘I beg your pardon—I see here that you were married once but divorced several years ago. No kids, I take it?’

  Crystal shook his head imperceptibly.

  De Lisle said, ‘You’ve got a girlfriend though.’

  Crystal shrugged. ‘Is that a crime?’

  ‘A single mother, I believe. Two boys, six and eight.’

  The Fed l
eaned back, folded his arms across his chest. ‘Some blokes have trouble relating to women. I’m not saying they’re queer or anything—they switch their attention to little kiddies.’

  ‘By befriending single mothers,’ said one of the suits.

  ‘Look, if you lot are going to charge me with anything, charge me.’

  ‘This is only an inquiry, Mr. Crystal,’ the senator said.

  De Lisle cut in: ‘Some men seek attention in other ways, like hanging around in public lavatories, slipping porn under the door to kids,’ shrugging as if all this were regrettable but understandable. ‘Kids are curious. I know I was at that age. They want to find out more, so it’s only natural some of them will follow through.’

  The senator had looked on, appalled and fascinated. The nameless faces in suits smiled a little. De Lisle and the Fed watched Crystal shift in his seat. There was a cast in one of the Fed’s eyes, giving him a look of permanent scepticism. ‘But you’d think the toilet block approach would be pretty dicey. There’d have to be easier ways of getting kids to come across for you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘So you just amble your way through life, not thinking about sordid things like that,’ De Lisle said.

  Crystal stiffened. He had caught the man’s word stress.

  ‘Funny you should say that, your worship,’ the Fed said. ‘AMBL is an acronym.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Association for Man-Boy Love.’

  ‘Huh,’ De Lisle said, full of wonder. ‘Better than Australian Paedophile Support Group. You can’t get an acronym out of that.’

  The seconds ticked by. De Lisle turned the pages in Crystal’s file. ‘Well there’s a coincidence.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Our friend here has been to Thailand and the Philippines six times in the past three years.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Yep. I asked him just now if he liked the tropics but I don’t think I caught his answer.’ De Lisle bent forward, trying to look up into Crystal’s face. ‘Where do you like best? Thailand? Maybe Jontien? I hear it’s got a fantastic white beach. Or maybe you prefer the Philippines? I hear Batangas is nice.’

  One of the suits said: ‘A bloke who was so inclined could pick himself up a kid for ten bucks in one of them places.’

  ‘Those places,’ De Lisle corrected automatically. ‘You know what they say, Lou: “Sex before eight, or it’s too late”. Would you say that, Lou, old son, old pal, old sport?’

  Crystal remembered turning on De Lisle, snarling: ‘I don’t know what you’re on about. Whatever it is, you’re barking up the wrong tree.’

  The Fed said coldly, ‘Quit the bulldust, Crystal. You’re a rock spider. Think what the hard boys in Pentridge will do to you when they find out. They hate guys like you even worse than they hate cops. All those hard men, sexually abused by blokes like you when they were little kids. They’ll cut off your cock and make you eat it.’

  The senator gasped. Crystal said, ‘You can’t prove anything.’

  ‘Yeah?’ The Fed leaned down, fumbled in a briefcase, came up with a videotape. ‘We found this in your ceiling this morning. You seem to be having more fun than the kid. What is he, Thai? About eight years old?’

  Crystal had let a sob rip from his throat. ‘Children seduce, too. It’s not only the adults.’

  ‘But they’re still children,’ the senator said. He grimaced. ‘People like you, you give Australia a bad name in Asia.’

  There was silence. To fill it, Crystal found himself saying, ‘I want to make a deal.’

  ‘A deal?’ De Lisle said. ‘You haven’t been charged with anything. This is an inquiry, that’s all, a fact-finding exercise.’

  An hour later, Crystal had been out on the street, sweating, drained, pale, but a free man. Free until De Lisle got in touch with him that evening with a proposition.

  Unvarying red tiles and powerlines were slipping by now as the taxi jockeyed for a clear run along the freeway. When the airport came into view, Crystal leaned forward and said, ‘International terminal.’

  ‘Oh, International terminal, whoopy doo,’ the woman said.

  Crystal gave her the exact fare, told her to keep the change, and got out. Inside the terminal he reported for duty, stashed the tartan suitcase in his staffroom locker and helped get the airbus ready. It was a day like any other.

  So far.

  But knowledge was power and forty minutes before takeoff Crystal made his way to the airline’s supply room. Among the airsickness bags, spare pillows and blankets, plastic suit covers and aircrew badges and caps there was a bunch of keys. He’d once counted them: forty. Suitcase keys, hanging on a brass ring like ranks of tiny flattened people. The airline had collected the keys over many years. There was always a passenger who’d lost the keys to his luggage. There was always one key that would fit.

  He waited until he was alone in the locker room and went to work on the tartan suitcase. The sixteenth key sprang the lock and he found neatly packed but cheap shirts, underwear and socks. Disappointed, he began to rummage, and that’s when he found the stuff. He gaped, felt the surface of his skin tingle: brooches, necklaces, earrings, pendants, rings. Something about the weight and density of the metal, the way the stones caught the light, told him that De Lisle was no traveller in costume jewellery.

  15

  In the way that he obsessively aligned the edges of knives and forks with the weave pattern in a tablecloth, or stacked firewood according to size, Wyatt walked once a day, every day. This walk took him in a loop around the high streets of Battery Point, then down onto Salamanca Place and past the yacht basin, and finally up again into the steep slopes of North Hobart. If he ever varied his route it was to cut down the Kelly Steps instead of through the park, or circle the moorings clockwise instead of anticlockwise.

  Two weeks since the Double Bay job and this morning there was blossom on the fruit trees in the Battery Point gardens. Wyatt paused to stare at a house on the park overlooking the water. A climbing rose clung to the verandah posts and there was old glass in the windows, thick and irregular, so that the massive sideboard and silver candlesticks in the room behind the glass seemed to swim in and out of shape. A widow’s walk went right around the house and Wyatt could imagine sitting up there, watching the big ocean-going yachts tacking up the Derwent. He wondered if a woman had ever paced the boards of that widow’s walk a hundred and fifty years ago, watching for returning sails or waiting for a knock on the door.

  Wyatt decided to go by way of Kelly Street. He plunged down the Kelly Steps, hearing the clack of a typewriter in the tiny whaler’s cottage at the head of the steps, then slowed. There was a man below him, mounting the steps, and at the bend he stopped and looked up. Wyatt tensed, gauging the danger in front of him, listening for footsteps behind him. When he was putting a hit together he made it a point to avoid lifts, undercover carparks, stairwells. He never let himself get boxed in. Instinct and caution had got him through forty years on the planet but this time he’d allowed his guard to relax.

  He stopped and began to crouch, as though to tie his shoelace. At the same time he turned his head and glanced back toward the head of the steps. Clear. He glanced down again and relaxed. There was fury on the man’s face, directed at a daydreaming child, a small boy trailing his fingers on the stone and singing softly to himself. ‘Jesus Christ, get a move on,’ the man snarled, reaching down to yank the boy’s arm.

  Wyatt straightened and continued on down the steps. Who would come for him here, anyway? All the old scores had been settled.

  He strolled the length of Salamanca Place, keeping to the grass islands, avoiding the spill of tourists and drinkers outside the cafes and bars. After a moment’s confusion about traffic flow at the end of the walk, he circled around to the right, past a restored ketch and on to the main dock area. More tourists, queuing for ferry rides, reading menus outside one of the restaurants, gawking at the yachts.

  Wyatt gawked, too, but wi
th a more critical eye. For the past six weeks he’d been paying an old yachtsman to take him out in the man’s two-master and teach him how to work the sails, navigate, look after himself at sea. When he had the money, when he had cleared his obligation to Frank Jardine, he would buy a boat and live on it. A boat made sense, given the life Wyatt had chosen to lead, was forced to lead. He didn’t think that fate would let him live in one place year after year again, and he didn’t want to stake everything on a house and land if the police or some death-dealer from the past managed to find him and force him to abandon it all and run again. If he lived on a boat he’d be mobile. He could follow the big jobs around, or move on whenever the local heat got too much for him. Plenty of people lived on boats. There were globetrotters moored in every marina and yacht basin in the world. No one would ask him to justify himself, no one would notice him. And although he wouldn’t have the rolling open hills of the place on the coast he’d been forced to abandon three years ago, he’d at least have the vast sea and sky.

  Wyatt left the waterfront and headed inland along Argyle Street, the climb steep and steady toward the top of the mountain behind the city. He was tempted to buy a boat now and live on it here—until something went wrong and he was forced to run again. Something would go wrong, that he didn’t doubt. If he were to rely only on himself, Wyatt would be wealthy, known to no one, bothered by no one, as close to a perfect life as he could want. But he never could rely only on himself. There was always someone to please, bully, coax or manage, and inevitably one of them let him down. They made mistakes or got greedy or didn’t like the way he wouldn’t have a beer with them afterwards. Their life stories padded the daily newspapers, notable usually for some act of viciousness or stupidity that ended in a remand cell or on a slab at the morgue.

  Wyatt stopped at a flyspecked barbershop half a block west of Argyle Street. The sun-bleached ads inside the glass were fifteen years out of date and dust clogged an old pair of clippers set alone on a crepe-papered hatbox in the centre of the window. Wyatt had never seen any customers in the chairs or waiting along the wall inside, but he’d learned that the place had been there since the 1950s and the sort of men Wyatt had to deal with from time to time swore that it had been a successful maildrop for all of that time.