by Garry Disher
And so they used a messenger who looked like a banker. And the messenger was selling them out.
Next, Le Page did a deep background on the man, learning he’d been a messenger for two years and hired because he was an ex-soldier. Not a bonehead but someone who could look after himself and pass muster in a suit, overcoat and briefcase. The work was easy; the pay poorish, but his nerves were too badly shot for anything more demanding. He’d been in Iraq and seen men die in terrible ways and had believed that he’d be next. He’d survived but hadn’t come back a hero. He hadn’t even gone there a hero. Only the Prime Minister of the time had thought that.
Le Page put it together. For two years the messenger had endured shitty pay and the condescension of soft, plump men. One day, seeing with perfect clarity that he was going nowhere, he’d put out feelers. When the Russian, Aleksandr, got wind of it, he sent Le Page.
That was a week ago. Le Page reported back, got the go-ahead from Aleksandr, and made contact. The Gwynn’s courier didn’t want to know who, didn’t want to know the details. All he knew was, his end would be £25,000 and maybe a few cuts and bruises, to make it look good to the cops.
Le Page intended to make it look very good to the cops.
He idled next to a newspaper kiosk and watched the target enter Gwynn’s. He waited, indifferent to the miserable clacking of office workers on their way to work. Then the messenger reappeared, his body taut, anticipating the handover. It was a crisp morning in autumn and Le Page knifed him and left him to die among the rubbish sacks behind a Waterstones with get-rich-quick books in its windows.
* * * *
4
Ma Gadd sold guns to men like Wyatt.
She operated out of a flower stall at Victoria Market. Hers wasn’t one of the many makeshift stalls in the market’s huge open area, where vendors displayed their fruit, vegetables, boxes of socks, cheap jewellery or T-shirts on trestle tables, and kept their supplies stocked in the rear of a Toyota van. Too open, too dangerous. Ma was an old-timer, one of the lucky ones with an indoor stall, a tiny sealed room among similar stalls along a narrow corridor. On her left was a man who sold second-hand books; on her right a woman who sold pet rabbits, kittens and budgerigars. If people wanted Ma Gadd’s flowers, they fronted up to her fold-down counter and pointed to the blooms crammed in the buckets at their feet or in the space behind Ma. If they wanted a handgun and ammunition, they came to the door at the back. If she didn’t know you, or you didn’t know the right people or say the right thing, that was as far as you got.
It wasn’t Ma who answered Wyatt’s knock but a guy of about thirty, who looked lean, wiry and cunning rather than bright. His tattooed forearms tensed. ‘Yeah?’
‘Is Ma in?’
‘Who wants to know?’
‘Is Ma in?’ Wyatt said.
The guy blinked. Wyatt read him in an instant: jail time— adult and probably juvenile—and now his natural habits were suspicion and belligerence. Wondering if Ma was under surveillance, Wyatt began to back away.
‘I see you’ve met me nephew,’ said a crone’s voice. ‘Don’t let him put you off.’
A large shape materialised behind the nephew, whiskery, overalled and built like a storage tank. Ma wore a Collingwood Football Club scarf summer and winter, together with a general air of derision. Her breath wheezed around a bobbing cigarette and her eyes were like small cracked buttons above her ballooning cheeks. She looked as nasty and close to death as ever. Wyatt had bought from her only once, a Glock pistol, but that was twelve years ago and he had those years on him now. She’d had plenty of other customers in the meantime, and yet she knew him at once. ‘Ma.’
‘Heard you were back. Working with Eddie Oberin, right?’
Wyatt cursed inwardly. He didn’t like anyone knowing anything about him. But in this game someone was always impressed or offended, couldn’t keep his trap shut. Wyatt could never be entirely invisible. Not yet, anyway. All he wanted was to pull one big job and disappear again.
‘You buying?’ Ma asked.
Meanwhile the nephew was stepping from foot to foot, as if ready to punch somebody, an impression encouraged by hair that stood up in tufts and knots. Probably sculpted by a hairdresser, but looking to Wyatt as if he’d been trying to pull it out. ‘Ty,’ Ma said, ‘look after the shop. I got business with Wyatt.’
Wyatt closed and opened his eyes, but it was too late. The man named Ty went on full alert, his jaw dropping. ‘This is Wyatt?’
‘Tyler,’ said Ma, seeing Wyatt’s face shut down.
‘Yeah, yeah, whatever,’ Ty said, trying for indifference now, not awe.
‘Me nephew, what can you do?’ said Ma.
Wyatt had no interest in Ma or her family or anyone else just then. ‘What can you show me?’
‘I’m just closing up.’
The whole market was closing. Spruikers were shouting out bargains, trying to offload their last tomatoes and cabbages. Metal shutters were clanging down. The throngs of shoppers—inner-city students, academics, yuppies, artists, young professionals and immigrants—were beginning to wander home. Wyatt said, ‘I can go to a thousand.’
Ma gleamed and moved her bulk away from the door. ‘Come in.’
Her storeroom was small and dark, a place of perfumed air and flowers bunched in buckets. ‘Here,’ she said, snapping off a rose head. Its petals were curling and Wyatt caught a whiff of decay.
Which could have come from Ma. There was a mess of other odours in that cramped space. ‘Let’s see,’ she wheezed, shifting cardboard boxes and a stack of limp wrapping paper to reveal a metal trunk. Her vast upper body broke Wyatt’s view as she fiddled with a combination lock and lifted the lid.
‘Take your pick,’ she said, stepping aside.
Tyler came in and there was no room to move. ‘You locked up?’ said Ma.
‘Yep.’
‘Emptied the till?’
‘Yep.’
‘You can go home now if you like, love.’
But Tyler was watching Wyatt. The nephew was unlovely, driven by impulses and grievances that he probably couldn’t name but which Wyatt recognised: envy, rivalry, paranoia, hate. Low self-regard kicking against a huge, unwarranted ego.
‘Not yet,’ Tyler told his aunt.
‘Suit yourself, love.’
Ma grunted as she retrieved a tray of pistols and revolvers. Wyatt watched her, wondering why on earth she’d let her nephew know about her sideline business. He put it down to the blindness of familial love. He’d never experienced it, but knew it existed.
‘You’re pulling a job,’ said Tyler with a challenge, as if he’d heard of the legendary scores and wasn’t impressed.
Wyatt ignored him and looked at the guns. Ma had kept them oiled and sealed in Glad bags: two .38 snub-nosed revolvers, a .357 Magnum, a .32 automatic like the one he’d abandoned in Frankston, and a sleek pistol that drew a second look.
Ma nodded. ‘Nice,’ she purred in her smoke-and-whisky voice. ‘Good stopping power.’
Tyler was hopping from foot to foot again. ‘What job? Bank? Armoured car? I know this credit union in Geelong, fuck all security, we could be in and out in two minutes, tops.’
‘May I?’ Wyatt asked Ma.
‘Be my guest.’
There were many things to like about the pistol, a Steyr GB 9mm. Wyatt removed it from the bag and hefted it experimentally. Unloaded, it weighed little more than a kilogram, and the 18-round clip, plus one bullet in the chamber, would not add much to that. He peered at it, noting the magazine catch behind the trigger, the absence of wear.
‘Never used,’ Ma said.
Wyatt said nothing. He wasn’t buying a car. He wasn’t after a bargain. He knew and liked the Steyr, that’s all. Other automatics lacked the Steyr’s efficiency, were liable to misfire, jam or fail to cycle. You could also take a Steyr GB apart and reassemble it in less than twenty seconds, and Wyatt did that now.
‘How much?’ he said.
‘Two th
ousand,’ Tyler said.
‘Shut up, Ty,’ Ma said. ‘One thousand.’
‘Okay, a grand—including a box of shells,’
‘Done.’
Tyler flicked his fingers. ‘Dough.’
‘Ty, love.’
‘Well, I don’t fucken trust him.’
Wyatt counted out notes from the harbourmaster’s ransom. Ma placed the Steyr back in its Glad bag and then into a fat wedge of red tissue paper around a bunch of leafy rose stems. Wyatt walked away like a man going home to his sweetheart. He left behind a fat old woman with a fat old purse and a wannabe gangster boiling with resentment.
Somewhere along Elizabeth Street he ducked into a McDonald’s, dumped the roses in a restroom bin and tucked the Steyr into the waistband at his back, under his jacket. Then he went home. He needed to secure the pistol before he did anything else.
Wyatt lived on the Southbank side of the Yarra, in a region of newish apartment buildings behind the riverbank cafés, specialty shops and pedestrian tracks. Westlake Towers consisted of four blocks around a courtyard, walking distance to the river and the Melbourne GBD. Each block offered six apartments per floor, its own underground parking, a rooftop swimming pool, a basement gym and no view of the water at all. Wyatt owned two of the apartments. One was a bolthole, on the top floor. His day-to-day apartment was on the first floor, at the end of a dim corridor where no one but he had any reason to be. He went straight in and locked the Steyr in a floor safe.
A prickling sensation took him to the main window. He looked out. Sometime later, he walked back across the river, into the thick of Friday afternoon, glancing at reflective surfaces and putting the next stage together in his head. Tyler Gadd was a chancer, but would he come looking for a confrontation?
Elizabeth Street was hectic, crammed with shoppers, school kids and office workers hurrying to buses and trams, anxious to get home. Cars idled bumper to bumper, trams sounded warnings, horns tooted and toxins hung in the air. No one minded the little drama when, outside a crowded camera shop, Wyatt whirled around and drew Gadd into a headlock. It might have been the roughhouse greeting of two old friends.
‘Urrgh,’ Gadd said.
Wyatt’s forearm was squeezing the guy’s life away. He released the pressure, squeezed again, released again. His eyes cold but his voice mild, he said, ‘You followed me home.’
‘Didn’t know I was there, did you, hotshot?’ said Gadd, gasping, rubbing his neck.
That was true. Wyatt didn’t excuse it: he’d failed to spot the tail. But his senses hadn’t let him down entirely, and he compressed Gadd’s windpipe again. ‘Stay away from me.’
‘Look, I got ideas, good ideas.’
Wyatt turned away. ‘Not interested.’
‘How about I buy you a beer? Coffee?’
‘I’m going. Don’t follow,’ Wyatt said.
‘Wait!’
Wyatt walked. He didn’t look back. He walked until his skin relaxed, then retraced his steps and veered right into Collins Street. Near the brow of the hill he turned left along a lane behind the headquarters of a bank, and finally down some piss-stained concrete steps to a watchmaker’s grimy basement, where he paid rent on a locker. The same proprietor was there, looking a little older, more short-sighted and stooped, his glasses scratched and filmed with grease, his hands cobbled together from cuts, scratches, bones and leathery flesh. He remembered Wyatt, even though it had been years.
Wyatt walked away from there with his last $5000 in cash.
* * * *
5
Le Page took the next available Paris train from Waterloo, carrying shopping bags from Harrods, the bonds inside a cardboard cylinder from the National Gallery gift shop. He hated the trip, hemmed in under the English Channel.
At noon that Friday he checked into a small pension near the Tuileries Garden. One of Aleksandr’s goons came for the bonds. Grunted, ‘He will see you tomorrow,’ but in Aleksandr’s kind of business the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, so Le Page followed the goon and staked out Aleksandr’s apartment. During the afternoon he watched a man and three women arrive and leave separately, carrying briefcases. Le Page tailed the last courier to the airport, all the way to the departure gate, and saw her board a flight to Toronto. He guessed the others had flown to destinations such as the United States, southern Africa, South or Latin America.
Le Page returned to his pension with time to kill. He fired up his laptop and checked for on-line news updates. One video clip showed a Gwynn’s spokeswoman expressing well-oiled sorrow for the dead, man—and bemusement, since the messenger had only been delivering mortgage papers. One of those unaccountable tragedies, she said, an opportunistic mugging that went terribly wrong.
The story might have fizzled out, remained a three-liner at the bottom of page five of the Evening Standard, except that the ex-soldier had been stealing kisses from an accountant in Gwynn’s securities division and she knew when things were being swept under the rug. Outraged that her dead boyfriend was about to become a statistic, she leaked to the press that he’d been carrying £260 million in bearer bonds made up of certificates of deposit and Bank of England Treasury bills.
Gwynn’s huffed and puffed and refused to confirm or deny. Le Page curled his lip. He knew how it would go. The firm would stay in business. Gwynn’s dated from 1785, after all, and you don’t kick a chap when he’s down.
Aleksandr sent a car for him at ten the next morning. The Russian was glitteringly cold and urbane, his apartment hot and crammed with icons and samovars. Coffee, some bored conversation, and Aleksandr handed him a wad of bonds in a business envelope. ‘Next week you will deliver these to my people in Mexico City.’
‘Not now?’
‘Go home. Rest. You deserve it.’
Le Page took a taxi to Charles de Gaulle and counted the bonds in the men’s room. They amounted to £25 million, in denominations ranging from £100,000 to £5 million. A pittance, he assumed, compared to what the other couriers were carrying. Le Page thought about that as he flew out. Home was near Toulouse, a short hop to the south, but he got there via Frankfurt. He collected his BMW and drove to the mountain village of Boussac, two hours southwest, where finally a winding road climbed through mountain shadows and drenching sunlight. This was a world of terraced fields, stone walls, hikers, the tinkling of sheep bells, village hens pecking at roadside verges.
And solitary houses like the converted eighteenth-century barn that was Le Page’s home, situated on an elevated fold, with views across to all of the approach roads. A rutted track, barred by a steel gate with an intercom, led to the main building. He’d also fixed security cameras to the gate and at each corner of the house. Alarms and lights. Four handguns and a shotgun stowed away at crucial vantage points. Assuming a stranger or untrusted acquaintance made it that far: any visitor was obliged to pass through the village, itself part of Le Page’s early-warning system. He’d paid good money to the taxi driver, the stationmaster, the gendarme, the mechanic, the postmaster and a handful of the kids who wheeled around the village on their bicycles and knew everyone’s business.
Le Page parked his car, unpacked, mixed a drink and sat in the waning light, looking at the white-capped Pyrenees on the Spanish side of the border. The wall at his back was one metre thick and held the warmth of the sun. He closed his eyes and thought about Aleksandr.
It worked like this:
One of Aleksandr’s legitimate occupations was dealer in high-end gemstones and jewellery, and Le Page was his legitimate international courier. Amsterdam diamonds, Swiss watches, Australian opals, Thai emeralds, French and Italian rings, brooches and necklaces. Given that a man carrying these items in a titanium case handcuffed to his wrist is liable to have his hand chopped off by a thief wielding a machete, Le Page always wore a corset with Velcroed compartments. He’d remove it while on the plane to New York, Quebec, Cape Town, Auckland or Melbourne, then strap it on again before walking through customs, waving the required
paperwork.
He’d started life as a thief. Le Page grew up in the suburbs of Marseilles, the son of an accountant who was later jailed for embezzlement. Shame, penury and chaos forced Le Page and his mother and sisters to a tough part of the old port city, where the boy learned how to use a knife and climb a wall to a second-storey window. Thieve or die—or, to cut back on the melodrama, serve time in a lowly job somewhere.
Le Page would take his second-storey pickings to his local fence (an alleyway barber who sat the long hours in one of his chairs, reading and smoking), earning fifteen to twenty per cent of their value. A €500 gold Heuer Chronograph would net him around €100, depending on how generous the barber was feeling that day, and once, gloriously, he’d pocketed a €20,000 Rolex. But the suburbs in which he operated were generally modest and he hadn’t the skills to rob a highly-secured chalet or mansion in one of the better locations.