by Garry Disher
Then the road levelled again and ran parallel to a strip of costly cliff-top mansions overlooking the bay. The taxi drew into the kerb a minute later. The driver pointed. ‘We are here, sir. One thousand vatu please.’
There was no footpath, only a track in the dirt. Wyatt saw high fences and hedges, tiled roofs squatting low behind them. He paid the driver, got out, and walked back to De Lisle’s house, narrowing his eyes against the glare.
Three metres high, toughened steel, looped with razor wire, protected by alarms and sweep cameras, just like De Lisle’s place in the hills behind Coffs Harbour. Wyatt checked both corners at the front of the property: the fence plunged downhill to the water on each side of the house. Midway along the road edge was a locked gate that led directly to a short driveway that looped past the front door.
There were three ways in: scale a ladder and throw a bag over the razor wire, assuming he could find a ladder and a bag; cut his way through the steel mesh, assuming he could buy what he needed in Port Vila and do the cutting without being seen from the street; break open the lock on the gate, assuming he could get his hands on something like a tyre iron. And assuming he could evade alarms and cameras when he did get in. Wyatt prowled along the fenceline again, whistling softly, checking for dogs. There didn’t appear to be any.
He crossed to the other side of the road to a bench along the main wall of a tiny market. Judging by the Suva harbour master’s estimation, De Lisle wouldn’t be arriving for another twenty-four hours. A quick check of this part of the Kumul Highway told Wyatt that there were no hotels or motels nearby, so where could he station himself to watch and wait?
The island. It faced across to Port Vila and the cliff-top mansions on the Kumul Highway. Wyatt hailed a passing taxi and two minutes later he was in a small dirt parking area near the wharves at the bottom of the hill.
He could see the island clearly, a humped shape in the centre of the harbour, fringed with tropical trees, cabins on stilts just above the waterline. Two more rows of cabins were set further back and there was a large complex at the centre which Wyatt guessed housed offices, bars and dining rooms. There was also a roof among the trees at the peak of the hump. He’d read in Pacific Rim’s in-flight magazine that it had been the British Commissioner’s residence during the period of Condominium Government.
The Reriki Resort minibus had already delivered its load of passengers from the airport. Wyatt joined them under the shelter at the edge of the wharf. One or two looked at him curiously. He nodded and half smiled, not because he wanted to and they had shared a flight together but because it was expected of him and he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Then the ferry drew in and they filed aboard.
The turnaround took thirty seconds, the crossing to the island two minutes. Wyatt examined the moored yachts keenly. Sydney, Southampton, Vancouver, Catalina Island. T-shirts, towels, shorts and underwear were pegged to dry on the rigging of the smaller yachts. One man was repairing a sail. Two couples were playing cards on a fast-looking red trimaran. The men wore shorts and beards, the women bikini tops and sarongs. There was an idle, easy assumption of privilege in the way they were indifferent to the ferry and the lives being led beyond the nearby harbour front.
Wyatt’s case was collected and he climbed the steep path to the main building. There were a dozen people waiting to be checked in. Wyatt pushed through to the desk, smiling apologetically. ‘I haven’t booked. Are you full?’
The clerk smiled at him. ‘Off season, sir. No problem.’
Wyatt slipped to the back of the line. A woman wearing a flower in her hair came out from behind the desk and showed him to a small waiting area. A minute later a waitress came by with a tray of drinks. It was the way things were done here, so Wyatt took a tall frosted glass of something and thanked her. He didn’t drink it. His case, he noticed, sat with a stack of luggage at the porter’s station, a tiny wooden stand like a pulpit in an impoverished church. Then he was called to the desk and he handed over his false passport and filled out the registration form and collected his key.
The porter showed him to number five, in the first row of cabins behind those at the waterline. Wyatt liked what he saw. The door opened onto a small alcove consisting of a wardrobe, refrigerator and handbasin. There was a bathroom off to the left. A doorway ahead of him led to a large main room furnished with a queen-size bed, cane lounge chairs and glass-topped coffee table, desk, television set, bedside phone and reading lamps, prints on the walls. The airconditioning hummed softly. A ceiling fan hung motionless above the bed. Wyatt turned the fan on, the air conditioning off, and checked under the bed, inside the wardrobe and behind the shower curtain.
Then he called room service and ordered a gin and tonic. He took it out to the balcony. A purple evening light was beginning to soften the edges of things. He eased his long trunk and legs into a cane chair and watched the ships’ and harbour lights wink on, the water darken and finally go black. At De Lisle’s house across the harbour there were no lights burning and the private dock was empty.
35
The resort was deceptive. When dawn broke the next morning, Wyatt set out along the paths that stitched the parts of the island together, and found orderly rows of cabins stretching back up the hillside, concealed from sight by coconut palms, canopies of flowering vines, and small, almost comical trees which resembled stick insects, their rows of exposed roots like flexing legs.
Then the path gave way to a walking track which led through dense tropical growth as high as houses on either side of him. The soil felt springy under his feet and Wyatt enjoyed the sensation of his solitary state, the only man alive to see the sky brighten and smell the air grow steadily warmer and sweeter. There were spiders the size of his hands spread in ambush in dewy webs along the smaller corridors between the trees. Wyatt was reminded by their patience of his chosen life and reminded by their task that he could not afford to sit and wait, he was here to attack.
It took him only thirty minutes to map the island in his mind. He wound his way back by the stony beach and up a crumbling cliff path to the dining room and ordered breakfast. He ate muesli for its bulk and energy, grinding only with the teeth on the right side of his face. But chips of nuts and grain caught in his broken tooth, the gum surrounding it seemed hot and swollen to his flickering tongue, and he resolved to have the tooth yanked.
Wyatt returned to his cabin with a handful of old newspapers and magazines. He sat in a cane chair, his feet on the rail, and read, and watched De Lisle’s dock across the water. A rustbucket coastal steamer glided past at the midpoint of the morning. One of the island-hopping yachts put out to sea. The ferry ploughed unvaryingly between the island and the mainland, water taxis crisscrossed the harbour, directed by the random needs of their passengers, and tourists heaved back and forth in the water adjacent to the island’s only strip of sand, skinny legs dipping and rising as they worked the paddleboats.
But no De Lisle. His house remained shut up, his dock empty.
A sensation of vulnerability crept through Wyatt. His tooth. He became convinced that pain existed and was growing worse. That and the helpless need of his tongue to explore the contours of the tooth stump and his engorged gum were dangerous distractions. He felt that he was not concentrating effectively. He told himself that even if the yacht were to dock now, De Lisle was unlikely to turn around and leave within minutes of arriving.
Wyatt sealed his cabin against the rising heat and walked down to the ferry. What he disliked about going up against an individual like De Lisle, for reasons of revenge as much as for gain, was a sense of slippery control over events. Wyatt never attempted anything that wasn’t workable, but everything about this—from the foreign location to his lack of background intelligence on the man, his house and his habits—was too loosely assembled. On the other hand, Wyatt wanted some of De Lisle’s accumulated cash, and he badly wanted to even the score for Jardine’s death and the attempted shooting in the cafe in the hills. And, if he
cared to admit it, even the most workable plans contained within them an addictive element of craziness.
The ferry docked. Wyatt clambered over the aluminium bow and onto the concrete steps of the wharf. A man rang a bell on the handlebars of a rental scooter. Wyatt smiled briefly, shook his head. He reached the main road and looked along it to the downtown shops. On the harbour side was a narrow tattered strip of parkland set with market stalls. On the opposite side a cracked footpath ran past dozens of small shops and cafes. Wyatt crossed the road. He knew he’d feel oddly exposed yet herd-like if he were to walk past the market stalls to get to where he was going.
It had been halfway acceptable, his arrangement with Jardine. His main doubt had been that it had a robbery-on-consignment aspect to it. Unless the take was hard cash, they both had to wait on someone else to get a cash return for them. In the old days, Wyatt had liked to use a ‘banker’ for his hits. The banker knew nothing about the job, who was pulling it, or how his money would be spent. Wyatt had absolute control of the investment, finding the best professionals each time, outfitting them, dividing the take afterwards, then paying back the banker twice what he’d invested. Wyatt had liked the security of that arrangement. But he was increasingly unable to control the quality of the men he worked with and the banker was eventually named in a Royal Commission and fled the country.
Wyatt glanced into each shop as he passed it. Behind the glass and neon and the global brand names the shelves were sparse, the goods costly, shopkeepers and shoppers a little defeated looking. The air trapped between the buildings was heavy with diesel fumes.
Wyatt thought that if he could build up his fortunes again he should construct a new identity to go with it, paper by paper until it had the texture of reality—tax records, bank accounts, passport, income documents, property deeds, investment certificates. If he had genuine investments he could live off the income.
‘And do what for the rest of the time?’ he muttered, his eye caught by a sun-faded molar depicted on a dentist’s sign down a narrow alley behind a cafe. An arrow pointed up a flight of rickety steps.
Wyatt took the stairs carefully. He’d been taught, and he believed, that a man is at his most vulnerable on stairs. The terrain is awkward, you’re an easy target from above and below, the banister hems you in.
But it was only an ordinary staircase to a suite of small, airy rooms above a fishing tackle shop. The dentist was alone at a reception desk and she greeted Wyatt with a keen smile that went straight to his jaw. ‘Poor, poor man,’ she said, in softly accented English. She was round and sympathetic and took him by the arm.
‘You can do me now?’
She gestured at the empty rooms, the open doors. ‘Of course.’
She pushed him into the reclining chair and clicked on the silvery light above their heads. Then she drew on latex gloves. Wyatt told himself that he needed latex gloves for what was ahead of him.
‘Open wide, mister.’
Her hands were swift with the pick and mirror. She smelt of coffee and mango; his shoulder merged with her pliant thigh. She stepped back, almost reluctantly. ‘It must come out.’
‘Yes.’
‘I will inject you. You will have numbness for several hours afterwards, maybe a little swelling to spoil your beauty, but very little pain.’ She touched his jaw lightly, grinning at him. ‘I would not want to see you in pain, mister.’
His smile came easily. She was a balm to his risky life. Laughter bubbled from somewhere deep inside her. The University of Adelaide, according to a framed degree on the wall. Wyatt wondered what those dour Europeans had made of her.
At one point her telephone rang and she went into the other room. He pocketed a pair of latex gloves and returned to the seat, hearing her cajoling someone to come in and see her, don’t delay.
When he left her twenty minutes later, Wyatt needed a hand on each banister to get down the steps. There was no pain and no real disorientation, only the sense that there should be. He started out for Reriki. After five minutes he doubled back and went into the tackle shop beneath the dental surgery. He pointed to a long, slender knife, not trusting himself to speak, and laid out money on the counter. He didn’t touch the knife himself, but carried it out with him in a paper sack.
He was back in his cabin by four o’clock. De Lisle’s yacht had berthed while he’d been away. Everything about the tiny fat figure going up and down the steps between the dock and the house on the cliff top suggested panic.
36
When De Lisle returned to the house after collecting the tartan suitcase on Reriki, Grace, his hi-Vanuatuan servant, was waiting for him at the top of the steps, holding a silver tray. She’d placed a white calling card in the centre of the tray. De Lisle had trained her in a thousand little rituals and courtesies. Today she was staring at him and something about it made him uneasy. For two years she’d refused to meet his eye, as though he were an unknown guest in the house, not the man who came into her room in the servants’ quarters night after night. So why the sudden confidence?
De Lisle opened the card. It was from Walter Erakor and said simply, ‘Meet me in Ma Kincaid’s Eating House at five this afternoon’.
De Lisle dismissed Grace and fixed himself a drink. He wondered what Erakor wanted. Walter was a jungle bunny—born on the island, a law graduate of the Sorbonne, but still a jungle bunny. De Lisle worked with the man whenever he was in Vanuatu, mainly routine circuit court cases, but he’d also called on Walter Erakor’s help in getting around the kinds of legal loophole matters that required a greased palm in the local judiciary. Erakor had saved De Lisle time and trouble in setting up holding companies, bank accounts and real estate transfers. Did the man want a bigger slice of the pie? De Lisle hated dealing with the blacks. He wished he’d been in Vanuatu before Independence, when there’d been plenty of decent Frenchmen in the public service.
De Lisle checked his watch: almost five. Too late to deposit the Asahi Collection jewels in a safety-deposit box. He stashed the tartan suitcase temporarily in the safe in his bedroom and decided to walk to Ma Kincaid’s. It was downhill all the way and it would help keep him fit. He could get a taxi back.
A ceaseless stream of badly tuned cars and vans passed him on the way down the hill, Port Vila’s version of rush hour at the end of the working day. De Lisle felt safer at the bottom of the hill. The road began to level out at the diving school and soon he was walking on a proper footpath. Today was market day. One or two stallkeepers were selling cowrie shells, fresh coconuts and bright, flimsy, cotton dresses in the parking lot for the Reriki Island ferry. Most of the small businesses had shut their doors but the Vietnamese supermarket was still open, run by the descendants of plantation workers brought to Vanuatu by French planters in the 1920s.
De Lisle trudged through the humid late afternoon. There were more market stalls now, crowding the footpath. No one was buying and the only people looking were elderly tourists from a cruise ship moored in the harbour. De Lisle saw them picking over dyed coral, shell necklaces, carved animals. He supposed they’d buy something. They generally did. They would tip, despite what the guidebooks advised. Some of the locals would accept it, too, as though they hadn’t read the guidebooks that claimed they’d be offended and embarrassed to be offered a tip.
It was dim and cool inside Ma Kincaid’s. Ceiling fans stirred the air, a couple of tourists and sailors sat at the bar, some local Europeans ate at the tables. De Lisle nodded at one or two of them. They were French and had stayed on after Independence. A table of yachting types in the far corner were speaking English. De Lisle listened: Kiwis and Australians, five men and a woman. De Lisle was betting that they were on the run from something shady. They might stay here for a few months before moving on. One or two of them might even stay permanently and open the kind of import–export business that helped to launder cash and offered ways of smuggling anything from coconut soap to arms or New Guinea cannabis and pink rock heroin from Thailand.
Walt
er Erakor was waiting for him in a back room. De Lisle didn’t like the look on the man’s face. Erakor seemed to be suppressing glee at bad tidings and doing a poor job of it.
‘Well?’ De Lisle demanded.
It bubbled out of Erakor. ‘Bonjour, my friend. I’m afraid you must flee the island. Tonight, tomorrow, you must leave.’
De Lisle went still. He decided to play it straight. ‘Leave? Why? I just got here. There’s work to do.’
Walter tapped the side of his nose. ‘A little bird tells me.’
‘Tells you what?’
‘You are under investigation.’
De Lisle didn’t reply immediately. He continued to stare at Erakor. Surely the Australian authorities weren’t onto him, requesting his extradition? Not so soon. And certainly not when the island was riddled with Australian con-men, thieves and dealers straight out of ‘Australia’s Most Wanted’ on TV. He looked at his watch. He had time. Wheels would be turning slowly back home.
He said at last, ‘Who’s investigating me?’
‘Vice police.’
‘Vice police?’
‘Your servant, Grace—her father has lodged a complaint against you.’
‘She’s an adult, for Christ’s sake. She knows what she’s doing.’
Walter Erakor leaned over the table and said very quietly, ‘But she was under age when she first went to work for you.’
‘I didn’t know that. Besides, it’s her word against mine.’
‘Maybe so, my friend, but her father is a chief, you know.’
Chief, De Lisle thought. A man who ran a rusty Mazda minibus, that’s all he was.
‘A certain zeal has entered the investigation,’ Erakor continued. ‘The police have asked for warrants to search your bank records and other business dealings.’