Port Vila Blues w-5

by Garry Disher

  ****

  Eight

  Pacific Rim flight 39 from Melbourne and Sydney touched down at Port Vila International Airport a few minutes past the scheduled arrival time. Late Thursday morning and Lou Crystal unbuttoned his uniform jacket and went down the steps to the tarmac. The tropical air seemed to sneak up on him, warm, humid, smelling of aviation fuel and ripe, rich fruit, so that he was perspiring before he reached the terminal building. Over one shoulder he carried his usual stopover bag; in the other hand he carried the tartan suitcase that had been stashed in the U-Store locker in Melbourne. Crystal’s instructions were clear each time: attach an address label reading ‘Mr Huntsman, Reriki Island Resort’ to the tartan suitcase and lodge it with the driver of the Reriki Island Resort minibus.

  The passengers from flight 39 were lining up at the immigration counters. Crystal eyed them as he walked through, wondering if one of them was Huntsman, but all he could see were backpackers, honeymooners and middle-aged Australians and New Zealanders spending their superannuation payouts. They looked tired and pasty-white, impatient to get to their resort hotels and try on neon yellow and green shorts, T-shirts and sunblock. Crystal despised them. He loathed their noisiness and ignorance and simple pleasures.

  Pacific Rim Airlines had been flying in and out of Vanuatu since Independence in 1980. Crystal himself had been stopping over in Port Vila for five years. Everyone knew him and he nodded left and right as he slipped through immigration and customs and onto the main concourse. Here, clones of flight 39’s passengers were queuing up to pay their departure tax. They were noisier, a little more sunburnt, overburdened with cheap local handicrafts, but essentially no different. Crystal walked past them, still carrying the suitcase and his weekender bag, out to the taxi and minibus ranks outside die terminal building.

  A misty rain was drifting in, obscuring the tops of the mountains, leaching brightness from the green of the lower slopes. Banyans, coconut palms, pandanus and a handful of tree ferns and milk trees bordered the airfield and lined the nearby roads. Creepers and orchids choked some of them. There were leaves like shields and swords everywhere in Vanuatu and in the rainy season they dripped water on to Crystal’s head. In the mornings sometimes he’d see spiders the size of his hand waiting motionless at the centre of huge webs strung between glossy trees.

  There were half a dozen people waiting in the Reriki Island minibus. The driver was leaning against the canopied luggage trailer, smoking a cigarette. He smirked at Crystal, took the proffered suitcase and stored it on the covered trailer. Then he went back to smoking and waiting and forgot about Crystal. For his part, Crystal was glad to be rid of the case. He was guessing drugs, and drugs were bad news, even in this backwater.

  Pacific Rim pilots and cabin crew on stopover were obliged to stay at the Palmtree Lodge, a small collection of motel units on a crabbed, featureless lagoon south-east of Port Vila. Fifteen minutes by car, a fare of eleven hundred vatu, and that’s where Lou Crystal should have been going when he climbed into the dented Toyota taxi.

  ‘Yu go wea? Palmtree Lodge?’ the driver asked, recognising Crystal as a regular and addressing him in Bislama.

  Crystal shook his head. ‘Malapoa Restaurant.’

  The driver started the engine. He nodded cannily. ‘Good coconut crab.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Crystal said.

  The drive took ten minutes, past small houses and flat-roofed cement-walled shops set amongst cyclone-stripped palm trees. Crystal had been on Vanuatu when the last cyclone had hit the islands. He’d been unnerved by it, a ceaseless wind that bent palm trees almost to the horizontal, tore apart coral reefs and dumped ships hundreds of metres in from the water’s edge. He’d seen flying tin cut a woman’s arm off and his balcony furniture at the Palmtree Lodge had cartwheeled across the coarse cropped lawns between the motel units and the coral beach.

  The taxi pulled off the road and stopped. ‘Nine hundred vatu,’ the driver said.

  Crystal paid him and got out. The Malapoa Restaurant was on a tiny spit of land jutting into Port Vila harbour. Crystal had eaten excellent coconut crab there. If it hadn’t been for the patrons-idle yachting types from all over the world, shouting at one another-he would have eaten there more often.

  He let the driver see him walk into the Malapoa courtyard. When the taxi was gone, Crystal re-emerged and walked fifty metres to a public toilet block. He went into one of the cubicles, his head reeling from the urine-thick atmosphere, and stripped off his uniform, exchanging it for shorts, T-shirt and sandals that he’d packed in the top of his weekender bag.

  The toilet block was set on the edge of a narrow carpark attached to a small concrete wharf. Water taxis and harbour-cruise boats used the wharf. So did the Reriki Island ferry, and that’s all Crystal was interested in.

  He stood under a corrugated iron shelter to wait. Reriki Island dominated Port Vila harbour. It was a humped, jungly lump of land in a small bay, the shore lined with airconditioned, balconied huts on stilts. It was a resort island; the manager lived in a red-roofed house among palm trees on the highest point of the island. There were three restaurants, a swimming pool, boats for hire and a tiny wharf. You did not have to be a resident to visit the place, and that’s what Crystal was banking on now.

  He saw the ferry leave the island. It made the harbourside run every few minutes, twenty-four hours a day, a two-minute trip each way. Crystal watched the ferry skirt around a couple of two-masted yachts. One looked worn and hard-working. A bearded man was pegging towels and T-shirts to a rope above the galley. The words ‘Miami Florida’ were painted across the stern. The other yacht was tidier and more seaworthy by about a quarter of a million dollars. It came from Portsmouth and Crystal was betting the owner was one of the loudmouths in the Malapoa Restaurant.

  The ferry docked and Crystal got ready to board. It was a long, low, flat-bottomed aluminium craft fitted with a canopy roof. The sides were painted in bright splashes of colour: words, symbols and shapes that reminded Crystal of the sanctioned graffiti he’d seen on railway underpasses in Melbourne.

  One person got off. Three got on with Crystal. He eyed them briefly: two kids with slim brown legs and a local man dressed in a white shirt and a black cotton wrap-around garment like a skirt. The words ‘Reriki Island Resort’ were stencilled on the top pocket of his shirt.

  The ferry drew away from the wharf. Crystal looked back at the receding harbour shoreline, the mixture of waterfront businesses, rusting warehouses and tattered inter-island cargo ships. At the midway point he saw the resort’s minibus pull into the carpark. He’d beaten it by only a few minutes. The driver and passengers got out and he saw the driver begin to stack the luggage next to the ferry landing.

  The ferry docked at the island and Crystal alighted with the other passengers. Steep paths led up to the main buildings. The grounds were carefully landscaped: neat palms, pandanus, small banyans, orchids, coral-edged walking tracks, close-cropped grass in between.

  Crystal sat on a bench at the centre of a patch of grass. The clouds cleared suddenly and he was drenched in late afternoon sunlight. There were several tourists nearby, doing what he was doing, enjoying the sun. He half closed his eyes, waited, and saw a Reriki Island bellboy wheel a trolley-load of suitcases up to the main office. The tartan suitcase was unmistakeable among them.

  A few minutes later, Crystal followed. There were plenty of people about: visitors, people staying at the resort, resort staff. No one looked twice at him.

  The main building was constructed to resemble an oversized jungle village meeting place: a high-ceilinged roof, exposed beams, open sides, a suggestion of bamboo fronds and rattan. It housed a bar, a dining room and the reservations desk. Crystal sat at a small cane table in a shadowy far corner of the vast room. He had 20-20 vision. The sky remained clear and he could see every detail of the harbour, the yachts and the distant rocky beaches smudged with mangroves and casuarinas. He could also see the bar clearly, and the reservations counter w
here the new arrivals’ luggage was being stacked by a porter.

  Half an hour later the tartan suitcase was the only one not claimed or delivered to any of the cabins. Nursing a beer, Crystal maintained his watch over it. He grew drowsy. A small drama at the bar woke him, shouts of ‘bon jour’ as a middle-aged white man came into the bar and clasped several of the black staff. He seemed to be a great hit with them. ‘Bon jour,’ they said, and he beamed, and asked after their kids.

  Crystal headed for the cover of a cane screen, fear and hate hammering in his heart. The man himself, centre of all his recent misery. Crystal peered around the screen. There was no mistaking De Lisle: aged about fifty, starting to go plump and soft, wearing a white shirt, white trousers, and a straw hat with a red band around it. The humidity seemed to be affecting him. He was pink in the face and mopped his forehead and neck with a blue handkerchief. He twinkled a lot, a hot, damp man in the tropics, surrounded by admirers. At one point he took an asthma spray from his pocket and sucked on it frantically, closing his eyes for a moment afterwards, his fleshy chin tipped back, rising to the tips of his neat tasselled shoes as though preparing to levitate, then returning with a smile to the people circling him, calling ‘bon jour’ to the bartenders, who were all grinning.

  Lou Crystal took in every hated detail about the man. Then he took in how De Lisle left with the tartan suitcase, carrying it down to the jetty, where a waiting water taxi took him to a little dock under a cliff-top mansion on the other side of the harbour.

  ****

  Nine

  The house was on a cliff top two kilometres from the post office in the centre of Port Vila. It had been built for the director of a French bank a couple of years before Independence in 1980, and that fact accounted for the two features that De Lisle had been looking for when he bought the place. One, the house was luxurious, the plunging grounds beautifully terraced, with harbour frontage and views across the blue water to Reriki, the island resort in the bay; two, the nervous French colonist had erected a steel-mesh security fence around the perimeter to keep the rebels out. Now Vanuatu was a republic but the fence was still there. In fact, De Lisle had also upgraded the alarm system inside the house. All that cash and jewellery coming in was making him nervous.

  De Lisle stepped off the broad verandah and climbed down the steep steps to the little concrete dock at the bottom of the property. He’d once thought of putting in a small funicular to run between the house and the water’s edge-the climb back up the steps was a killer- but that would have been inviting trouble. He pictured thieves beaching silent canoes and swarming up the cable and into his house and cutting his throat.

  At the bottom he checked that no one was lying in wait on the other side of the perimeter fence and unlocked the steel gate. He’d bought the house three years ago, soon after the first of his tours through the Pacific as a circuit magistrate. Now he had an oceangoing yacht as well, the Pegasus, a two-master gently bumping against the truck tyres along the edge of the little dock. De Lisle had crewed in a couple of Sydney to Hobarts a few years back and knew he could sail the Pegasus around the world if he wanted to. Depending upon his work schedule, he often sailed it between Port Vila and Suva. He kept the yacht fully stocked with food and equipment. In fact it was his way out of Port Vila if anything should go wrong. He had a second set of papers: in five minutes the Pegasus, Coffs Harbour, could be transformed into the Stiletto, registered to a company in Panama.

  De Lisle’s various bank accounts were also in company names. It was all a smokescreen, and as necessary as food and water, now that he was moving large amounts of money into and out of Vanuatu. Being a tax shelter, the country offered security provisions and confidentiality agreements protecting his banking and other activities. No income tax, no capital gains tax, no double taxation agreements with Australia. No exchange controls or reporting of fund movements. And he was able to deposit money in whatever amounts he liked, in any currency, no questions asked.

  There was nothing to excite the attention of the police in his apartment in Sydney or his house in bushland behind Coffs Harbour. He kept anything like that here in Port Vila, in safes and safety-deposit boxes.

  He stepped onto the yacht, removed the security shutters, unlocked the cabin door and went below. The interior was teak-lined and when he opened the curtains it glowed a rich and satisfying colour in the morning sun.

  The safe was concealed behind a small bulkhead wall oven. De Lisle unlocked the oven, pulled until it slid forward on rollers, and reached in. There were documents stacked on the bottom shelf, duplicates of the information he’d passed on to Niekirk for the next heist, the Asahi Collection of precious stones: floor plans, a map of the alarm system, staffing level, the size of the take, the best time to hit, the expected delay before the cops would respond to an alarm, what number to call in the event of an arrest. De Lisle took out everything from yesterday’s Upper Yarra job now, and fed it to the garbage compactor under the galley sink.

  He leafed through the material he had on Riggs, Mansell, Niekirk, Crystal, Springett-as far as he was concerned, the only useful outcome of all those inquiries and royal commissions he’d sat on over the years. All those names: paedophiles, bagmen, cops running protection rackets or moonlighting as burglars and receivers, perjurers, officials with their fingers in the till. It was pervasive and as natural to the running of the world as mothers’ milk.

  The thing was, all those names had something to hide and all were potentially useful to De Lisle. In some instances he’d had to wait. He hadn’t had a courier until Lou Crystal’s name had cropped up during an investigation into Australian sex tours to Asia, for example.

  After the Asahi job he would quit. He would retire from the bar and come here to Vila to live. He’d had retirement in mind for the past year, but he was also prompted by the fact that he couldn’t count on Springett and Niekirk remaining patient forever about getting their cut of the action. And they could see with their own eyes what each hit was worth. They didn’t have the resources De Lisle had for moving the stuff, but they were men, they’d get greedy sooner or later, despite knowing that De Lisle had dirt on them that could put them away for a very long time. How serious was he about using that dirt, anyhow? They’d name him for sure, if he did. That option would be at the backs of their minds. So, time to quit while he was ahead, finish liquidating the cash and jewels from the bank raids, pay them off.

  De Lisle locked the safe, secured the yacht and started up the steps to his house. He took them slowly. Only 27 degrees but 90 per cent humidity and his breathing was ragged, his shirt and underwear soaked, before he’d reached the halfway point.

  He paused to catch his breath. Work tomorrow. Vanuatu lacked lawyers and judges, particularly in the north. The Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Public Solicitor’s Office were there to get cases ready for court, but they were understaffed and the day-to-day court staff were overwhelmed with demands from jungle bunnies and expatriates wanting help with forms and claims. So, several times a year, De Lisle sat on the Supreme Court of Vanuatu to help ease the strain. He was funded by the Australian Government’s Staffing Assistance Scheme, and he loved it. He got to hear evidence in open-air courts half the time, just bamboo and palm tree fronds between him and the blue sky above. Mainly British law, with a bit of French and a bit of jungle bunny thrown in. Last time he was in the little republic he’d been obliged to turn a blind eye to a spot of police brutality. The police had been called in by a council of chiefs to warn off a man believed to be practising witchcraft, but things got out of hand and the man had died of injuries. Still, no loss to anyone.

  And the trips to Vanuatu provided the perfect cover for moving the stuff that Niekirk and his crew had liberated from those Victorian bank jobs. The world was going to blow one day-corruption, erosion of values, mobs in the street-and De Lisle wasn’t about to be caught without a hedge against that kind of collapse.

  He put one foot after the other again and continued up
the steps. Deep breathing, that was the answer, deep breathing to control the heart, deep breathing to concentrate and clarify the mind. To centre himself, in the jargon of a fuckwit who’d insisted on making a statement to the court back in Sydney last week.

  Deep breath. If he didn’t watch it he’d die of a heart attack on the job. He snorted-’on the job’ was right. The last time he’d been in the cot with Cassandra Wintergreen she’d leaned on one elbow and grabbed the spare tyre around his waist, pinching tightly, grinning cruelly: ‘Here’s a little fellow who loves his tucker.’ De Lisle had batted her hand away: ‘Quit that, Cass,’ he’d said, wishing now that he hadn’t given her that tasty Tiffany brooch from the safety-deposit hit Niekirk had pulled for him in February.

  He put Wintergreen out of his mind. Half a week’s work here in Vanuatu, then spend two or three days sailing the Pegasus to Suva. A spot of Supreme Court work in Fiji, then fly back to Sydney, leaving the Pegasus moored in Suva. A quick turnaround in Sydney this time. He’d arranged his workload so that he could be in Vila to collect the Asahi stones.

  Grace, De Lisle’s hi-Vanuatan servant, was waiting for him on the verandah. White cloth on the cane table, martini in a steel jug beaded with condensation, chilled glass, a plate of oysters. De Lisle stood close to her, rotated his bulk a quarter turn, fitting his groin against her thigh. Her brown skin felt cool beneath the hairline. Then cotton, a series of bumps along her spine, then her wonderful arse.