How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling

by Martin Chambers

  By the time we got to the top of the pit we could feel the intense heat on our backs and smell blistering paint. Neither of us looked back.

  On the drive back to the station Palmenter regained control.

  ‘Good job, boys. Could have been a monumental fuck-up.’

  The tension in the car was thick. Spanner was fuming because Palmenter had accused him of not fixing the van properly. I was worried what would happen if he spoke up.

  ‘What were they doing on that road anyway?’ I asked nobody. ‘You need experience to drive on these sand tracks. In future we need to make sure they only go on the highway, give them a good map, maybe escort them to the turn-off.’

  I often came up with useful ways to improve how we did things. Later, when Palmenter and his mates changed how we ran the operation by collecting the vans themselves and driving off-site to meet the imports, I thought it was because I had suggested it.

  ‘You’re a smart boy, Son,’ said Palmenter. ‘Always thinking ahead. That’s the way to do business, think ahead, plan for things.’ He looked at me, then to Spanner and Simms. ‘Sorry I lost it back there, boys.’

  Fuckin’ arsehole, I thought. Me and him. Arseholes both.

  5

  We left Cookie to deal with the muster crew. Soon they would fall comatose at the table or struggle to their rooms to sleep it off. This was just a warm-up for them – the big party was always a day after the import, a few days following the muster. Spanner and I took our sandwiches to the station house and entered the office. No one but Palmenter and his occasional visitors ever came in here. It was like entering a holy place, not quite a tomb, but that was what I was thinking. A tomb. Like in Ancient Egypt we should have buried him with all his wealth, all his stuff, just emptied the office out so he could bribe and trade his way through the afterlife and we could get rid of every last reminder of him.

  I had been into the office only a few times and each of those had been when Palmenter was there, times when you couldn’t look around because he’d be watching your every move, seeing before you did what your eyes were taking in – and you just didn’t want to be seen noticing something you were not supposed to, like the phone on the desk that he said didn’t exist. Except once.

  One time, Palmenter and Margaret were away and there were no girls at the station and Simms was away on a bore run. Charles was in Melbourne. The place was empty except for Spanner, Cookie and me. I snuck into the house to use the phone.

  I wanted to call home but I was never allowed near the phone. I would tell them I was okay even if I wasn’t because otherwise they would worry. I was sure Palmenter was not coming back for a while but even so I rehearsed in my head my excuse for being there – I had been doing the books in my office on the back verandah and I needed to call someone. Why did I even need an excuse? But the phone in the office had a lock on it and it was a relief in a way because otherwise I would have to stay in the office for a time trying to talk to my parents. I looked around the rest of the house searching for a second phone, knowing there wouldn’t be one.

  From the outside, the house doesn’t look that big. Deep dark verandahs on three sides, a high tin roof dwarfed by the vast sky. Because the dongas are set up on stumps they look high so the stationhouse roof, although high, doesn’t seem it. Also the shed on the opposite side is enormous. It has a grader and a tractor and several vans in it. And the water tower and windmill are huge, so the building looks small even though it is quite a big house. It and the windmill were probably all that was here in the early days.

  Inside I discovered six bedrooms. I didn’t dare go into Palmenter’s bedroom. He had his own lounge and sitting area at the front. The office door was next to that. On the other side, to the left of the front entry, was another large sitting room where the girls must have spent a lot of their time. It felt feminine in some sort of way. Connected to the sitting room was a kitchen and dining area. The dining area had a long table and the kitchen looked more like a laboratory, white benches and glassware and cardboard files that I suppose held recipes. Cookie used to do their meals and send them over so I guess the kitchen here was only used to make coffee and snacks. Two corridors divided the kitchen on one side and Palmenter’s rooms on the other, from the girls’ rooms: Margaret’s room, four big dormitory rooms with eight bunks in each, and at the end, the showers and a clinic-type room with a white covered bed and medical stuff. On a remote station it was important to have some sort of place to treat people who might be sick or injured, but what with the kitchen and this room and the dormitory beds and shower room with three cubicles, the whole place felt more like an infirmary, like a convalescent home or prison rehab clinic, a feeling all the more so for the bolts on the outside of the bunkroom doors.

  It was spooky that time, but now with Spanner it seemed as if we were supposed to be there. It was only a small step from pretending to Cookie and the muster crew that Palmenter was away and had left us in charge, to fooling ourselves that we were simply doing our job. I felt like I did when I helped Spanner down at the gene pool, hunting around for what it was we were after. Now, the two of us were going to hunt around in the office for things.

  The office was cool and uncluttered and in a way, old-fashioned. A dark oasis in the outback glare. It had the same relaxing pine smell as the interior of the car. There was a bookshelf along one side, books neatly arranged as if more for show than reading. I wondered who he would want to impress. No one that I knew of had ever been into this office other than Palmenter and his heavies. Perhaps earlier he might have lived at the station, a domestic life with neighbours and friends coming for dinner or a weekend. Had there ever been a Mrs Palmenter?

  Behind the door there were three filing cabinets. Spanner opened the first and withdrew a file. He knew exactly where the forms were kept.

  ‘Start filling those out.’

  They were vehicle licence papers, transfer papers, hire documents and blank international drivers’ licences.

  ‘If they get pulled over, this is how they prove who they are and that they own the car. None of them have passports, of course. You don’t have photo ID on international licences. Technically, they should have their own ID or driver’s licence from their own country but the cops never worry about that so unless they do something stupid this gets them past random stops.’

  He came over to the desk with a second file. ‘This is their names.’

  I looked at him, questioning.

  ‘Not their real names, stupid. But foreign ones, names that are hard to pronounce. We write them in here,’ he pointed to the blank licences, ‘and some here; each car is different so if they do end up together or pulled over by the same cops they don’t see a link. This way, cops can’t pronounce their names and they don’t twig that they don’t react when you say their names. You know that old trick.’

  I hadn’t realised how well organised this end of the operation had been, or how paranoid Palmenter was. Not until we buried those five out at the pit and I began to get an inkling of what was happening. After that van, after that trouble, Palmenter must have flipped. From sometime around then it became only about the money. Palmenter had a way of telling you what you wanted to hear, but once, in my first weeks, he said to me that these people had no one and it was a moral thing to help them, and I believed him. Then that day standing on the edge of the pit with the flames below he said no one was going to miss them. Funny how Palmenter was now under the sand with them.

  ‘What if Palmenter’s family come looking for him?’

  ‘He’s got no one.’

  ‘You sure? No one?’

  ‘Even if they do – what? We just gotta not say anything. I don’t think anyone’s gunna come looking. Not before we do this import and then we get outta here.’

  It was true. About the only people who ever visited the station arrived with Palmenter, rough men who kept to themselves. Particularly around muster time it was a place that shunned outsiders and we would be long gone by the time a
nyone else came visiting.

  ‘What will you do?’

  He didn’t answer me. Why hadn’t he left years ago? He had access to the vans and the fuel. Palmenter seemed to trust him, at least as much as Palmenter trusted anybody. Which was not in the slightest.

  We set to filling out the forms. Spanner produced a mix of pens and we used different ones on each document. As he finished a page he might scuff it on the floor, or fold it a few times, things to produce some random wear marks on the paper. We had six vans, so we filled two as transfers from some other address, one in Melbourne and one in Darwin. We made hire documents for three. Three different hire companies, in Adelaide, Brisbane and Alice Springs. The last van we made licence papers for an address in Perth.

  ‘If they get stopped out here, cops can’t check any of this, so they just look at it. Lazy buggers, they just ignore it. Too much work for ’em to do much else. In New South Wales cops have computers in their cars but they can’t check details across the border, so none of these are in New South Wales,’ Spanner explained to me.

  ‘You seem proud of it.’

  He sighed. ‘I guess it was my idea.’

  I waited for him to elaborate.

  ‘I was like you when you first came. Keen to help, show that you were smart, worthwhile to have around.’

  I was going to object, like you do when people say things about you that are true, and the more true they are the more you want to object. He was right, but then I think we are all like that, it’s natural to want to impress when you first start a new job. Not just a job. Any new place where you want to fit in.

  What had led him to this place? Why hadn’t he left? Why did he seem, at the same time, so content to spend his days pottering with the various cars and machinery in the shed and yet so discontented, drinking beer steadily from midmorning until by early evening he was grumpy and drunk and best left alone? Obviously he had been, still was, a great mechanic. He would grumble and mutter and sip his beer while he worked some assembly he had dismantled down to dust back up to a complex and wonderful machine. That was when he was proudest, just then when whatever it was came back to life. It lasted about ten minutes, then he would be on to the next thing, pulling it apart, talking in equal measure to us both, idly to me and coaxingly to the machine. Later in the afternoon he would leave his bench and I would follow him out under the trees behind the shed and we’d sit, drinking beer and leafing through his tired magazines until by nightfall I had to leave him. He had girly magazines too but they just made you horny. The better ones, the ones we both enjoyed, were of outback adventure with stories of escape and fishing and camping up the coast.

  In all our conversations I had never asked him why he stayed. It seemed to be a taboo topic. Was he just as unable to leave as me? I knew that Palmenter rigged the accounts he had me collate, adjusting the price of beer and other charges so that none of us were ever much in credit but, unlike me, Spanner didn’t speak of getting away. Maybe he knew that it was an unobtainable dream.

  In that shady spot, reading his out-of-date magazines and talking about nothing became an afternoon ritual for us. The closest we ever came to discussing Spanner and his life was when he told me once, out of the blue, that he dreamed of working on a fishing camp up the Gulf.

  He showed me an ad for a wilderness fishing camp that was for sale. Fishing? Over this? I guess I was just not into fishing and being stuck at some remote camp on the coast would be for me the same as how I felt now, imprisoned here on the station.

  I had no doubt he could run a tourist lodge, but I wanted to laugh and tell him one prison was the same as another. Then I wanted to tell him he would never be able to buy it if he was thinking he was saving the money working for Palmenter. And I wanted to cry for my own unobtainable dreams, though I did not even know what they were. But instead, because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, we planned and talked of his fishing lodge and a grand free life up the coast.

  But now he was reflective. He paused between filling forms.

  ‘You just start out, and, y’know, little by little, things, y’know, and suddenly you are caught up in all sorts of shit, can’t see how to get out, then another day goes by, and so on.’

  I wanted to ask if he meant now or in the past, but I didn’t. I thought it better if I kept quiet and he might just open up, tell me things about himself. We worked in silence for a while and soon he was making his little noises like he did when he was working on an engine part.

  ‘When I first got here you told me you didn’t do paperwork,’ I said.

  He laughed.

  ‘Car parts make more sense,’ he said, then continued hunched over the desk, muttering sentences as he wrote. When we finished the paperwork he swivelled in the chair and sat gazing out the window. Normally at this time of day he would have opened a beer, but now he sat thoughtfully by the window without talking.

  I went to the filing cabinet and began looking through files. They were full of stuff for the running of the station. Catalogues, windmill service schedules, weather maps, flyers from trucking companies, stuff like that. I knew most of the company names because I had been doing the accounts in that small room off the back verandah. That was my first promotion. No phone or computer or anything, just a small room with a desk and chair and an adding machine. Palmenter called it my office.

  ‘There’s no accounts or personnel files.’

  ‘They’ll be in the safe.’ Spanner pointed to the picture on the wall. It was an aerial photograph of the station taken during the wet. Everything was lush and green and ribbons of blue traced the water courses through the burnt red ochre where the stone country was too steep for things to grow. The roads and tracks were a thin lacework unseen until you looked closely. It looked beautiful and incredibly fertile, not the dusty dry barren it could be for half the year, the half year that we knew it in. Travel was too difficult for us to ever see it in the wet like that but I thought it would have been nice to just once fly over in the chopper and see the station from the air. I didn’t see why we couldn’t do that after muster one time. Later, we did just that. Rob the pilot flew us down to the waterhole, two trips and a bit of a tour on the way. Cookie brought a picnic and some beers. By then there were eleven of us, including Ingrid and Sally the two English language teachers, and Jill who we called a governess. She looked after the children if ever there were any. You’ve got to have a certain number if you are going to create a viable community and although eleven wasn’t quite enough it was better than before. Without making up jobs I couldn’t really justify having any more on the station.

  Anyway, we flew into the creek. Spanner drove Bitsy down there. He doesn’t like flying, says he doesn’t trust machines but we think it was that he didn’t trust machines he hadn’t taken apart and reassembled himself. Rob parked the chopper in the creek, actually in the creek in ankle-deep water and we got out the sponges and soap, gave her a good wash. It was a good day. So hot. Even splashing around in the creek you couldn’t get cool but at least we got to see the station from the air. Everyone enjoyed it. You’ve got to look after your staff like that. Give them things to do, fun things. Things together.

  The picture swung open and behind was a large metal safe door.

  ‘Need a key.’

  Neither of us wanted to say what we were thinking. We had buried the keys with Palmenter and there would never be any way of opening the safe.

  ‘Might be a spare hidden someplace.’ Spanner looked around the room. Although it was neat, there was an impossible number of places a key might be hidden and we didn’t even know if there was one. I was wondering if Spanner might have some powerful tool down in his shed – whatever it was he had used to cut the barbecue plate from a grader blade would cut through anything. But cutting open the safe would throw us into a whole new level: somehow shooting Palmenter was much less than shooting Palmenter and then cutting open the safe. I was sure that was how the authorities would see it.

  ‘Is there anythin
g in there we really need?’

  ‘Guess not.’

  I was interested to read the real accounts and see what was in the safe but we were really just snooping around. We began picking out books from the shelves and looking at them, laughing that Palmenter might have such titles. Novels. I guess we didn’t know, but we didn’t think he was a reader. By now it was late, the house was quiet and everyone had long since gone to bed, and it would be best if we did too and left the office untouched, but as we were about to leave Spanner found a set of keys hidden behind a brass bookend. He opened the safe.

  On the top shelf was a bunch of documents in yellow envelopes. These turned out to be passports and personal documents, genuine drivers’ licences, birth certificates. I leafed through them. None of them meant much until I came to Arif’s. Arif. Palmenter must have taken and hidden Arif’s possessions. I wondered why he would have kept these documents hidden rather than bury them out in the pit with the clothes and whatever else Arif had. And these other passports, whose were they? Another envelope had some banknotes in it, several types of strange foreign ones neatly banded with their own type.

  The bottom half of the safe was a file cabinet on rollers that slid out to reveal a suitcase that Spanner lifted out onto the desk and opened. There were more banknotes. It was full of tightly bound American dollars, Australian dollars and Euros. Mostly it was just stacks of banknotes but there were also some folded manila envelopes with smaller denomination notes, a few thousand worth in each envelope. In the main bundles there must have been hundreds of thousands of dollars of each currency.

  Spanner whistled. ‘Jeez!’

  He picked up a bundle of fifties and leafed through them, counting.

  ‘Couple of hundred or so. That’s, um...’

  ‘Ten thousand. Ten in each stack, two rows of five, fuck! That’s half a million bucks. And there’s a bit more in American and Euros. Must be close to two million total.’

  ‘What’s he have so much cash for?’