by Garry Disher
At eleven o’clock on Sunday morning Lydia Stark saw the taxi again.
It first showed at 10.45 when Eddie Oberin came for her in his ageing Audi. She paid it no mind, a taxi pulling into the kerb at the end of her street, and climbed in next to Eddie. But later, when she stripped off her cotton jacket and reached around to place it on the back seat, she spotted that same taxi on their tail.
She didn’t say anything but found reasons to lean into the gap between the front seats and engage Eddie in animated conversation as he steered out of the back streets and onto Johnston and then Hoddle. The taxi was always there, in the corner of her eye, a couple of car lengths behind.
She lost it on the narrow streets around the Botanical Gardens, where the good people strolled or jogged or crawled by in their cars, looking for somewhere to park. Eddie crawled too, then steered into a side street signposted resident parking only. He switched off and the Audi died with a bark and a shudder and plenty of smoke. Lydia smiled crookedly to herself: nothing had changed. Eddie loved Audis and Mercs but could only afford the ones with too many hard miles on them.
She watched him lock the car. It was odd, visiting the gardens with him again. They’d liked to do it when they were married, but that was almost a decade ago. Four years of marriage, three years too many. But she hadn’t hated him then, didn’t hate him now. He was generous, often amusing, and sharp when he was putting a score together. At all other times, he wasn’t sharp. He liked the horses and the cards too much, and seemed genuinely astonished when she complained about the women. ‘But they don’t mean anything,’ he’d say. ‘You’re the one I love.’
And so she’d left him. And now she was here because she didn’t know anyone else who could help her rob Henri Furneaux. She glanced towards the end of the little street and the gardens beyond, and saw the taxi creep by.
There was a chill in the air so she shrugged into her jacket, then followed Eddie to the corner, where they waited for a gap in the traffic. The taxi was on a yellow line a hundred metres away. Lydia thought of a couple of explanations: Eddie owed money, or he’d pissed off someone’s husband. The little disappointments that did their marriage in. It was as if Eddie had the brains and the nerve to pull a tricky heist, but not to manage his life. Which was why, in the end, she’d walked out. She hadn’t so much grieved as suffered a wearying sense of miscalculation. But that was a long time ago. She’d scarcely thought of him in the intervening years.
They crossed the road and entered the gardens. Soon they were heading downhill through the lovely old trees and Lydia was letting her gaze sweep ahead of her and left and right, Eddie still unaware, treading lightly beside her, his face crinkled good-humouredly, as though the brisk air was a tonic. She didn’t see a man who might be Wyatt. She didn’t see the taxi driver.
Eddie clamped his arm around her shoulders, squeezed, let her go again. “Remember?’
‘Yes,’ she said, biting the word off.
But he didn’t pursue the memories and she was grateful. At the bottom of the slope, where parents and small children surrounded the pond and the angled sun barely penetrated, she shivered inside the thin cotton of her jacket and glanced uneasily back at the tree line. It was a sensation of being watched on all sides, and she said to Eddie, ‘By the way, someone followed us here.’
She told him about the taxi, and liked the way he listened and flicked his gaze all around. That was the Eddie she’d loved in the old days, not the Eddie who liked gambling and other women.
‘I can’t see anything,’ he said, his face full of hollows and doubt.
She gestured at the hidden streets above. ‘Up there somewhere.’
‘We’ll have to tell Wyatt,’ Eddie muttered, not liking it.
Lydia was taking in the pond, the approach paths and the kinds of people who like to picnic and look at trees. She was looking for the kinds of people who don’t, and locked on Wyatt immediately. He’d been standing very still and now he approached from a patch of dappled light.
He was tall and hard inside the Sunday morning shirt, trousers and polished shoes. The hardness was there in his loping stride and self-sufficiency, not his size, for he was wiry, stripped down, bones close to the surface.
Lydia waited with Eddie. The man named Wyatt was unhurried and, like her, he was aware of his surroundings, watching for the things that didn’t belong. But that didn’t mean she was ready to trust him, or trust Eddie’s judgment of him. She’d wait and see. After all, she’d never heard of the man until yesterday, when Eddie said, ‘I know a guy.’
Typical Eddie. Almost three months had passed since she’d come to him with her idea, and no mention of who or how or when. But the French courier was back in town. It was time.
‘I know a guy,’ Eddie had said, and now here he was, with the kind of eyes that take and give nothing.
* * * *
8
The agreed time was eleven but Wyatt had arrived at ten and waited where he wouldn’t be noticed. His gaze was restless, looking for traps, directional microphones, anything or anyone that didn’t belong.
He saw Eddie Oberin arrive, wearing black trousers and a charcoal grey jacket over an open-necked black shirt. Neat, elegant, his longish hair lifting in a mild, eddying wind, he might have come from one of the big houses on the hill above the gardens. He was with a slender woman wearing a skirt, sandals and a cotton jacket over a vivid white T-shirt, auburn hair loose on her shoulders. Feeling the wind a little, arms wrapped around herself. The pair stopped at the pond and while Eddie gazed at the water, the woman gestured back at the tree line. Eddie stiffened. Then the woman searched, found Wyatt, and fixed on him.
He walked down from the shelter of the trees and said, ‘Let’s walk.’
Eddie grinned at the woman. ‘What did I tell you? A warm, engaging guy.’
Wyatt waited for the nonsense to end. Oberin was about forty, with a thin-lipped, ascetic kind of arrogance that some women found appealing. Normally he was close-mouthed and wary, so the jokiness made Wyatt suspect a history with the woman. He needed to know if Eddie could separate the job from her in ways that mattered.
Eddie gestured. ‘Wyatt, Lydia. Stark. Lydia, Wyatt.’
Stark was about thirty-five, with an edgy scowl that said she wasn’t ready to trust anytime soon. Wyatt liked that: suspicion was as natural to him as breathing. ‘Somewhere quiet,’ he murmured.
She surprised him. ‘Know anyone who drives a taxi?’
He watched her, his thin face tight. ‘Tell me.’
‘I live in Abbotsford. Eddie came by to pick me up, the taxi came by. Tailed us all the way here.’
Eddie opened his arms wide. ‘If she saw it, she saw it.’
Without seeming to, Wyatt scanned the area. He didn’t see anyone who didn’t belong but somehow he trusted the woman. ‘Let’s talk.’
They found a clearing and sat on the grass and no one was around. Eddie said, ‘It’s Lydia’s score.’
‘First things first,’ Wyatt said. ‘How long have you two known each other?’
The woman watched Wyatt with cold interest, legs outstretched, arms propping up her trunk, and said in a soft growl, ‘Years. We used to be married.’
Wyatt thought about it: bitterness, jealousy, old scores to be settled. Then he tried to put Lydia Stark together with Eddie, who had the faintly flashy look of a gallery owner who liked nightclubs and gambling. Clearly she hadn’t come from that world.
‘An earlier me,’ Eddie said, reading his mind.
‘You stayed in touch?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘You’re in touch now.’
‘Look, I can vouch for her, right?’
Stark placed a slender, olive-toned hand on Eddie’s forearm. ‘It’s okay, Eddie.’ She looked at Wyatt. The scowl was gone and he guessed it had been an unselfconscious camouflage. Now he could see appealing configurations in her face and manner. He scanned the trees and grassy slopes again, and waited.
She sai
d, ‘I contacted Eddie because I need his help. I don’t want anything else from him. I don’t want to remarry him or get inside his pants or get revenge or anything else.’
She paused. ‘He has expertise. He tells me you have expertise.’
‘She came to me with an idea for a job,’ Eddie said. ‘I could see it had legs, so we scoped it out for a couple of months. All the groundwork’s done.’
Wyatt wondered if this job would prove to be no more than someone with an itch and a way in. The sun was mild on them now and Lydia Stark removed her jacket and propped herself on it by one elbow. Her bare arms were taut, her neck and shoulders shapely. Wyatt turned away and saw movement in the trees.
‘Something?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not going to do anything about it?’
‘It can wait. Tell me about the job.’
She weighed it up and said, ‘Until a year ago I worked for a jeweller in—’
Wyatt got to his feet. ‘Inside job. No thanks.’
Stark swung gracefully onto her knees and seized his arm. ‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist.’
She was laughing and Wyatt felt uncomfortable. ‘Sit,’ she said, tugging him down.
He complied. ‘Convince me.’
‘When Eddie and I got divorced—ten years ago—I moved to Mildura. Found work with a jeweller, eventually got to be chief buyer and assistant manager.’
Wyatt knew the river town, its extremes of rich and poor. His first thought was market gardens, corruption and the Calabrian Mafia, but he waited, wanting to see where she was taking him.
‘It was a good business. The locals bought from us,’ Lydia said. ‘You’ve heard the stories: some old Italian gent walks into a car showroom, holes in his pants, shoes held together with fencing wire, and plonks down eighty grand cash to buy a Mercedes? It was like that for us, sometimes.’
Wyatt didn’t like the Mafia whiff. And he wasn’t impatient, exactly—he knew people liked to spin narratives casting themselves in the central role—but he had no use for suspense right now. ‘And?’
‘We didn’t make or design our jewellery; we bought from a manufacturing jeweller, Furneaux Brothers, here in Melbourne. High end stuff.’
‘Were you sacked? If we hit this crowd, they’ll come for you.’
Stark flinched at his coldness, the dark, prohibitive cast of his face. ‘Not sacked. About fourteen months ago my boss died of a heart attack and his wife closed the business. I came down here to live. I’m not on the Furneauxs’ radar.’
‘Tell me about them.’
It was Oberin who answered: ‘Henri Furneaux’s the brains behind the outfit. His brother Joe’s the driver, the muscle.’ He paused. ‘Joe’s a beer short of a six-pack.’
Lydia snorted. ‘They’re both creeps.’
It was probably important to know these things. Wyatt raised an inquiring eyebrow and she said, ‘Touchy-feely, the old tit-grab and crotch-rub.’
Wyatt understood that at one level she wanted revenge. He didn’t think much of it as a motive for robbery. In his world, you took revenge when you were doublecrossed. You did it coolly, and you always made it final. It was business, that’s all. When emotions were involved, things could go wrong. So, had Lydia Stark made a fuss? Enough to make an impression, so that the Furneaux brothers would remember? If so, someone—the cops or Furneaux— would link her back to the robbery eventually.
She read his mind. ‘I put up with it. But at the back of my mind I was calculating how to bring the bastards down.’
Wyatt shrugged, accepting what she said. ‘You’re thinking a hit on their store or warehouse?’
She shook her head. ‘We hijack a delivery.’
‘Henri likes to deliver the gear himself,’ Eddie explained. ‘He’s notoriously tight-fisted. Won’t fork out for a security van or guards or extra insurance cover.’
Lydia leaned forward, placing her thin hand over Wyatt’s forearm, a way of saying this was her story. When she removed her hand his skin missed the contact and he was distracted. He heard her say, ‘They have clients all over Victoria and southern New South Wales. Every few weeks they make a long round trip of jewellers in Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Hamilton, Mildura, Wagga, Albury-Wodonga, places like that.’
‘Armed muscle?’
‘Only Joe.’
Wyatt turned to Oberin. ‘Why are you interested?’
Eddie shrugged. ‘Because it’s Lydia, because I need the money. Because her idea chimes in with information I already had.’
Wyatt knew that, as a fixer, an agent, a middle-man, Eddie could sit on a half-formed plan for years until the right circumstances came along. But, as Wyatt said now, ‘This time you want an active role?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Guns, Eddie. Fast cars, sirens...’
Eddie’s stone face twitched. ‘Hear us out, Wyatt.’
Wyatt turned to Lydia, who said, ‘They deliver the shipments in an Audi four-wheel-drive with secret compartments in the back. We hit it before the first drop-off
Wyatt twisted his mouth. ‘Secret compartments? Drugs.’
‘Not drugs. Jewellery.’
Wyatt went on ruthlessly, ‘We intercept a delivery, what then? You suggesting we fence it—rings and necklaces that are unique and recognisable? We’d be lucky to get twenty cents in the dollar. Ransom the gear back to this Furneaux character, maybe? Sell it back to him after he’s claimed the insurance? We’d get peanuts, and it would take too long. Even if we melted the settings down we’d only end up with a smallish puddle of gold or silver. Too much hassle for too little reward.’
Eddie showed a little heat, nostrils flaring, and Wyatt thought he might get to the heart of the score. ‘Fuck off, Wyatt. Don’t you think I’ve thought of that?’
Wyatt watched Lydia’s reaction. He liked the way she calmed Eddie with a glance and her cool fingers.
Turning to Wyatt, she said, ‘That’s where the Frenchman comes in.’
Wyatt was recognising something of himself in Eddie’s ex-wife. She was naturally wary and assessing, and silence was probably her natural state. There, under the spreading trees and coins of sunlight, he gave her a faint, assenting nod.
‘His name is Alain Le Page,’ she continued. ‘A legitimate courier of cut and uncut stones, gold chains and small ingots to Australian manufacturing jewellers. Several times a year he flies in, books into the Sofitel, spends a few days doing the rounds, flies out again.’
‘You tailed him?’ said Wyatt. A good courier would know how to spot a tail.
‘He didn’t know I was there,’ said Eddie defensively.
Lydia touched his forearm to shut him up. ‘The Furneaux brothers buy their raw materials from Le Page, make it up into fancy jewellery, and sell it to retailers. The thing is, about eighteen months ago, things changed.’
She paused. ‘The brothers arrived at our shop, as expected, but this time Le Page was with them. Until then, I hadn’t known he existed. Anyway, he was introduced as their supplier, I said hello and bought some of Henri’s designs for the shop, and then Henri and Le Page took my boss out to their car, all very secretive.’
‘Not you, the boss?’
‘That’s right. Next thing you know, we’re displaying some fabulous rings, necklaces, earrings and watches in our estate-jewellery window, some of it antique, all of it pretty scarce and expensive.’
‘What did your boss tell you?’
‘He was a nod-and-a-wink kind of guy.’
‘Mate,’ Eddie said, ‘it’sstolen gear.’
Wyatt got it. ‘Le Page smuggles it in from Europe, concealed as part of a legitimate shipment.’
Eddie grinned. ‘That’s the beauty of it—we rob a robber.’
Lydia said, ‘We’re talking Rolex, Piaget, Patek Philippe, Georg Jensen, Raymond Weil, Breitling, Tiffany, stuff like that.’
‘Not stuff you’d melt down,’ Eddie said. ‘A gold Rolex from the 1950s? Worth up to twenty or thirty grand to a
collector.’
‘The boss always had a good story to account for the stuff,’ Lydia said. ‘He’d tell people it came from the estate of a wealthy outback widow who’d liked to travel.’
Wyatt thought ahead. ‘You were not their only client.’
‘No.’
‘Homework,’ Eddie said. ‘I tailed them a couple of times, window-shopped the estate jewellery before and after delivery. They must have a dozen similar clients around the state.’
‘You weren’t seen?’
‘Count on it.’
Wyatt counted on nothing, but he followed the threads of thought. ‘It’s all stolen in Europe, so therefore doesn’t appear on stolen-property lists here.’