How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling

by Martin Chambers

  ‘We are all trapped on planet Earth. Do you check out if you don’t like it?’ he asked.

  ‘I notice you check out most of the time.’ I couldn’t help myself, but then added, to make it less of an accusation, ‘Philosophers trapped in their mortal coils.’

  ‘That’s deep shit that is,’ he said.

  He passed the joint to me again and I drew on it slowly and deeply. Bloody drug-addled, brain-dead idiot, I thought. Me too, I wished. You had to like Cookie. He was harmless and kind-hearted and he had a good laugh, always saw the funny side of things. He had brought me food. But he would never amount to anything. Why did that matter?

  ‘So how come you stay here? What was it like here before?’

  ‘It was a proper cattle station. Called Wingate. Went broke. Run by the McArthur family, you woulda read about it. South Pacific Pastoral Company. They went belly-up and all the stations were sold off and Palmenter bought this one. This is the last cattle station in this area, all the rest been turned into national park or private nature reserves. Run tourists instead of cattle.’

  I began to laugh. Something about that seemed funny. He relit the joint and we passed it between us a few more times.

  ‘We sort of run tourists,’ I said.

  He laughed.

  ‘Yeah. Tourists. You have to admire them. Their guts. To leave their home and all their friends, all that is familiar. To make a better life. Meanwhile...’ he waved his arms to encompass the room, the homestead, the station and himself.

  He leaned back and closed his eyes as if exhausted by the effort of speaking and I thought how some of our most lucid thoughts are immediately before we go to sleep. He was right and had obviously thought about this before, and I wanted him to keep going but I couldn’t think what to say. The dope was strong and it might have been some time before we began talking again. We might have both dozed for a while and someone coming into the room would have seen two grinning dimwits incapable of clear thought.

  ‘I stayed on as cook,’ he said, answering my question from a while ago. ‘Spanner too, although his missus didn’t last too long, she took off after a year or so.’

  ‘Spanner is married?’

  He considered the question slowly. Was it his speech or my hearing that was slurring?

  ‘I guess so. No, I don’t think they was married. They was just travelling around together, picking up work here and there. They had been over on the mines, decided it was time to see something else. He and his missus came only about six months before the place was sold. I guess he likes it. He’s all right, is Spanner.’

  I suppose it shouldn’t have come as such a shock that there would have been a woman in Spanner’s life. He was self-contained and content in a way and I had only ever known him like this, but why not? As Cookie spoke I pictured Spanner and his woman, the two of them. She would have the same laconic outlook. Whatever happened to her probably didn’t involve Palmenter because Spanner didn’t seem to hold any strong hatred for Palmenter. He drank, all day and slowly, not the fast and fall-down drinking of the muster crew. It was the same as Cookie who smoked and drugged himself daily as if to avoid thinking about his discontent. Cookie smoked to escape and Spanner drank to escape. I need a hobby, I thought.

  Cookie told me about how the place was under the former owners and how when Palmenter first arrived nothing much changed. There were a lot more workers, all the muster and cattle crew were on staff and lived at the homestead. Often the dongas were full because as well as the staff there were frequent visits from other stations, or they would all have a few days off and go the few hundred kilometres to have a rodeo with the neighbouring station. One by one they closed down and were taken over by Parks and Wildlife and let back to nature. Now, apart from the rare lost tourist, no one ever came out this way.

  ‘Do you think Palmenter bought it with what he is doing in mind?’

  ‘Who knows? I think we all, him included, just little by little get into things. Like boiling frogs, you know.’

  I knew what he was referring to, about that thing that they say if you put frogs into cold water and then slowly heat it they won’t get out because they don’t notice the temperature rising and eventually you boil them alive. The way he said it was as if he had done it, as if he was talking about how to make hard-boiled eggs and I couldn’t get the thought out of my head of Cookie boiling up some frogs and serving them to us for dinner. I thought he was capable of it when he was all herbed up. Then I thought instead of frogs he’d boil up cane toads and serve us and we’d all die like one of those strange religious cults. At least it would get rid of vermin, I thought, and couldn’t decide if toads or humans were the vermin. I started laughing again and soon we were both lying back on the bed giggling. None of it was important.

  ‘Sometimes I feel sorry for Palmenter,’ he said after a long silence.

  ‘He’s an arsehole.’

  Cookie laughed. ‘You’re right. He’s an arsehole.’

  And we were both laughing as if that was riotously funny. Palmenter had driven me out to the road and left me. He knew no one would come along, he knew I would walk back to camp or if I didn’t, I would perish out there. How did he know I wouldn’t decide to walk, struggle for a few days along the road until I had gone too far to turn back, was too far gone? I would have died out there and he didn’t care. No one but he knew I was out there. Would he have come to get me in a few days? How many days would he wait? I’d spent two days hiding under a spindly tree near the road and there had been no cars. He hadn’t come back. No, he was prepared to have me die out there and I was sure he would not even come to get my body. I wouldn’t even get the careless burial those five blokes got. Birds and dingoes and insects would gnaw at me until I was nothing but sun-bleached scattered bones or, if my body were found, he would say I was some foolish city boy who knew no better. By walking back I had accepted the inevitable, his ultimatum, my entrapment. I didn’t want to die and so I had agreed to his conditions. He held total power over me. And here were Cookie and I laughing ourselves silly over it.

  Simms was given the job of the bore runs permanently and these were done far less often. At muster time, I was put with one of the truck crew, someone I was sure was a spy for Palmenter. Other times, I was left to my duties around the camp, the garden and my small room on the verandah.

  I kept my head down and got back to work. It must have been weeks later that Palmenter said something to me, it might even have been the first thing he said to me after that time. He said I seemed to be getting on a bit better, and that maybe I could start to play a more important role.

  ‘I need people I can trust around here, Son, because I can’t be here all the time. There is a lot to organise in the business. Perhaps you could think about taking on a bit more responsibility.’

  I said yes, I was ready for that. I agreed, but not so enthusiastically as to arouse suspicion, because not only did I have the sense it was in fact a sort of threat in the same way that he had said I was free to leave when he left me out at the road, I was also thinking that here was my chance to find another way out. I would have to be careful. He had shot Arif in front of me in cold blood and I knew that I would be next if I got caught a second time.

  As it turned out it was a year later that I left the station for the first time, and that was when I drove down to visit Lucy.

  10

  I decided I would go to Melbourne in one of the campervans. I could easily hitch a ride with one of the last groups and by the time they were ready to go it would be ten days since the previous one and that was long enough to wait. When I was in Melbourne I would abandon the van and there would be nothing to link me to Palmenter Station. Except the million dollars in my backpack. If we departed early then Simms and Charles would be less likely to see me go, Spanner could take his half and head his own way and I’d go mine and we’d be well away by the time anyone started looking for us.

  The idea came that first day, when Spanner and I were in the
office doing the false papers and I found the file on Lucy. But I didn’t say anything then. The idea grew, however, as we were loading that first lot into their vans and sending them south. Why wasn’t I going too? They were so happy. Well, not happy: relieved, thankful. We had forgotten this part of it because recently, well for at least the last year, Palmenter had been meeting the imports somewhere in the bush and we never got to see them at the homestead. Now, as I handed them false documents with a new identity and explained as best I could that this was now who they were, I had two thoughts. The first was that Palmenter had not been doing this and that any of them who arrived in the cities would have to start with nothing. And secondly, that Lucy was one of those. She would have nothing. I had seen Palmenter’s handwritten note on her file: Handed to Trent. Sent to Maribyrnong.

  Palmenter had kept me away from this part of the operation, at first by sending me out on bore runs and then by keeping me busy with accounts. Their faces and smiles of gratitude were new to me. Whatever your politics or religion, whatever you think about what we were doing, it felt great to be helping people. Finally they had made it: survived floods or famine or religious persecution, they had crossed war zones or deserts or mountains and at least one ocean to get this far. Now, they faced a whole new life in a new land and we were the ones who were sending them off on the final leg of their journey.

  I determined I would go too, find Lucy, find out what happened. Until I read her file I hadn’t realised that Lucy was a refugee, that she was one of them, that all the girls were. I thought Margaret and the girls came up from Melbourne to work with the muster.

  I didn’t tell anyone my plan. First, we had to finalise what we thought would be the final muster and import.

  Normally we would spread out the departure of the vans but, without discussing it, Spanner and I had understood we wanted to get everyone away as quickly as possible. Charles and Simms, Cookie, they all accepted it as going back to the old way and agreed it was a good idea. None of us had liked the new way. Spanner and I watched as Charles led the last of the imports to their van. I was thinking that this was it, it was over. There would be no more ‘musters’ or imports. I would lie low for a while, then take the money and run. It didn’t occur to me that we might have to cancel anything, that there might be something like a standing order, a regularity to the whole system. We were the end point of something that began far away and if at the station we said ‘no more’, it would be someone else’s problem. We – I – never dreamed the entire outfit was not Palmenter’s brainchild. But it was like a massive pipeline of people flowing towards us. Now they came twice a month, twenty or thirty a time, with boats and choppers and other businesses and people all relying on it and we were the main point in that pipeline. We couldn’t just stop. Perhaps Spanner knew this. I never asked. It became a moot point.

  I was thinking of this and nothing much, waiting with Spanner in the shade, watching Charles teaching the last lot to drive. The van spluttered and jolted down the driveway and stalled. I didn’t think they would get far and that suited me because my plan was to grab my half of the money and leave with them.

  ‘Beer tonight to celebrate,’ I said.

  ‘Not waiting till tonight,’ answered Spanner. He walked across to refuel Charles’s truck.

  The chopper crew came over to me and the one I knew as Newman spoke.

  ‘Where’s Palmenter?’

  My heart jumped. ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Whaddya mean? Where is he? He didn’t come to the collection.’

  ‘He’s not here. He left. Yesterday.’

  ‘Is he coming back? What about the money? We can’t wait around for him.’

  It had been too easy. I knew it. Of course, that was what all the cash was for, and I remembered now that after every import Palmenter would disappear into the house with Newman and Rob. I had assumed they had a beer or something, that Palmenter would overcome his grumpy nature for long enough to have a drink with them to keep them happy. Station country runs on a beer at the end of a job. Wouldn’t matter how good a deal you made outta someone, if they didn’t share a beer with you after you wouldn’t want to work with them again.

  ‘Sure. He’s left me in charge. I’m the station manager now.’

  The chopper crew looked at me quizzically but I didn’t introduce myself. Newman had met me, they had all seen me over the last few musters taking a more pivotal role in the running of the place. Still, I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could spit, so I didn’t want them to know my name.

  ‘You want a beer?’ I asked.

  ‘Jeez, fuck, we just gotta sort the fuckin’ cash so we can get outta here.’

  ‘Okay. Wait a minute.’

  He looked at me funny as I walked off to the office.

  Was it the whole amount, two million? Surely not, but I could hardly ask them how much. Did they even count it? Perhaps I should give them the suitcase? They hadn’t followed me so I thought that meant it was either not that much or they took the payment without counting. That would be the stuff of movies where the payoff is a high-tension stand-off and the cash expert sniffs and counts and hold samples up to the light while trigger-happy bodyguards face off across the room. I went through the desk. Perhaps Palmenter had a bundle of cash ready for them. He wouldn’t open the safe and count out a lesser amount from the suitcase in front of the crew. But of course, there was nothing. I had interrupted his day.

  I wondered if Spanner knew. He had been here for years, from the beginning, and I was finding out he knew more than he let on. How could I talk to him without the chopper crew seeing me?

  I stood at the window and saw several things as if in a dream. I saw Spanner had finished refuelling Charles’s truck and he looked up and saw me. I signalled him to come over and as I did, I was realising I was free to go anytime because we had unlimited access to the fuel. I saw the last van bunny-hopping away down the drive and I calmly thought, not ‘there goes my lift’, but that the driver had several thousand kilometres to learn to drive before he got to the city. I saw Charles climb up into his cab and follow the last van down the road and I knew I would not see him again – by the time he returned with a load of vans we would be gone, because for us it was all over.

  Spanner and I talked through the open window.

  ‘Newman wants to be paid. I don’t know how much. They’re all waiting out the front.’

  ‘Ask ’im.’

  ‘Can’t do that, they might smell a rat. They wanted Palmenter. I told them I was station manager now.’ He raised his eyebrows at that. ‘He did offer that. That was why, y’know, it happened.’ I didn’t want to say ‘I shot him’.

  Spanner was looking at me funny, like I had made some monumental fuck-up.

  ‘Is it the whole lot? Do you know?’ I asked.

  Spanner hadn’t even looked at me like that when I ran over to get him after I shot Palmenter. He simply looked at me and asked if he was dead. Then he asked if I was all right like you might ask if someone was okay after a minor car accident. Then he said, ‘We’d better get rid of the body before any of the crew gets here.’

  ‘Manager?’

  ‘Yeah. He said I was the only one he could trust. He wanted to get rid of Newman. He told me to shoot him, take him out to the pit and bury his body.’

  ‘Arsehole.’ Who did he mean? Me, Palmenter or Newman?

  ‘He said Newman was not happy about things. Had been complaining about the way we’ve been doing things and was going to set up a rival operation. I was to go with him after the last chopper load and then I was supposed to kill him and bury his body out there. Palmenter said Newman was demanding money,’ I added, realising as I spoke it that none of it made sense.

  Exactly what Newman thought was wrong with the way we had being doing things, I wasn’t sure. The old way, the way Spanner and I were doing it now, made the homestead a very busy and chaotic place and all of us were frantically at work until the last of the vans left.

  We didn’t kno
w the exact reason for the change but sometime – it was about the time of Arif – Palmenter did all the handovers. He would drive out with them on the first part of the trip and we began waiting up to a week between departures. Although the homestead was crowded while they waited, it was altogether more relaxed for us. We were supposed to have nothing to do with the imports, but sometimes they would give little gifts of gold or jewellery or buy food and clothing off us. I presumed that Palmenter thought if we got our hands on cash or some of these gifts that we could sell, it would be a way of escape, so eventually the imports didn’t even come to the homestead. I couldn’t think where they went instead. Probably someplace in the scrub where the chopper would land. A variety of places. Maybe that was what Newman objected to, although I thought it made good sense to mix it up a bit.

  Newman came and went with the chopper and normally had nothing to do with anything at this end. If Palmenter was supposed to be paying him, that proved Palmenter was in charge of the whole thing. But the way Newman had asked to be paid didn’t seem like extortion. He simply said we had to sort out the money. Like a contractor wants to be paid. As usual, Palmenter had fed me bullshit. It was only much later, when I understood more about the real nature of it, did I realise that Palmenter had set up Newman and I, that both of us were expendable. For now, I thought Newman must have realised what was going on and objected, and that was when Palmenter came to me and called Newman a double-crossing bastard. He gave me a test; if I passed I would be manager.

  I think everyone thought I knew a whole lot more than I did, that working from my little office I talked with Palmenter more than I did and that I helped plan things. But in reality, after I had tried to escape, Palmenter didn’t trust me and I spent my days sorting the paperwork and files and handwriting neat labels on everything.

  ‘He said I was the only one he could trust to do the job and that then I would be station manager.’

  Spanner continued to look at me as if he couldn’t decide whether he was pissed because I was offered the opportunity to be manager over the top of him who had been there so much longer, or at Palmenter for wanting me to do his dirty work and kill someone, or at Newman for threatening the whole operation, or himself at being so stupid and being stuck in this backwater when all he had to do was demand cash for silence but do it in a smarter way than Newman.