by Jon Cleary
“Sure, it’s just the day for it. Where’ll we go?”
“Not too far. How about somewhere out the back of Camden? I can do some bird-watching.”
10
I
“A LOT of owners look on their horses as toys,” said O’Brien. “Though they’d never admit it. But they’re like kids with their dolls—they get them out and play with them.”
Malone, seated on the verandah beside O’Brien, looked out on the visitors, thirty or forty of them, who had come up to Cossack Lodge for Sunday brunch and the weekly opportunity to look at their profligacy on the hoof. A non-racing man, he had never understood the gambling urge or the desire to splurge money on anything so unreliable as a thoroughbred horse. Once, during the boring hours of a stake-out, Clements had tried to explain to him that the odds were not as bad as he supposed, but he had remained unconvinced. There were a hundred horses here on the stud, plus those on short-term agistment, and O’Brien had admitted that only one in ten might prove a worthwhile investment. Malone, a cautious man with a penny, liked better odds than that.
But he was not really concerned with the fortunes of the horses’ owners. “I wish you could have put off this brunch.”
“It’s a regular thing, Scobie. They expect it. They like to come up here and talk to the stud-master and show how knowledgeable they are and how shrewd they’ve been in their buying. Besides, after what was in this morning’s papers about the hit list, they’d have come anyway. Look at them—they’re giving you and me as much attention as their horses and mares.”
“Well, I guess that’s something, an Aussie cop getting as much attention as a racehorse. You think they’ll ask for my autograph?” He looked down again at the well-dressed crowd moving between the stables and the white railings of the paddocks. “Have you considered the possibility that one of them could be Frank Blizzard?”
O’Brien turned his head. “Yes, I considered that. They’ve all been checked at the gate, they’re all regulars plus a few of their own friends who they had to name. But yes, one of „em could be Blizzard. But I don’t think he’s going to try his luck in front of so many witnesses. I’ve known all these people ever since I got into the racing game three or four years ago. Before I started the stud. If one of them was Blizzard, he’d have killed me before this.” He was surprised at his own coolness as he said it.
Malone said nothing for a while, then: “If you go down the drain, will you lose the stud?”
For a moment or two it looked as if O’Brien would not answer that. He stared out at the landscape, where patches of spring green were beginning to appear on the brown hills in the distance. A black horse stood alone on the far side of a distant paddock, as still as if carved from rock; it drew the eye away from the chatter and movement down by the paddock railings. He would regret losing this property; not because it was another possession but because here he had begun to find a certain peace. Something he had come to realize only this weekend.
At last he nodded. “It’s going to be bought, everything at rock-bottom prices, just enough for the ordinary shareholders to get their money back. I’ll come out with bugger-all.”
“Bugger-all?”
O’Brien smiled wryly. “Well, maybe not all. I’ve got a little stashed away that they can’t touch.”
“In the Cook Islands or the Caymans?”
O’Brien raised an amused eyebrow. “You know the hideaways. No, not there, but somewhere.”
Malone felt an itch of sympathy for the man beside him and wondered why. O’Brien was representative of everything he despised in today’s society, the entrepreneur who used every promotion and tax dodge that presented themselves, for whom conscience was like an appendix, excisable. Malone did not envy him his wealth, whatever was left of it, nor his life style; nor did he himself suffer from the national harvester’s disease, the cutting down of tall poppies. His contempt went deeper than that, he was afflicted with an old-fashioned morality that allowed no qualifications. Yet, and he was troubled by the feeling, he did not want to see O’Brien completely destroyed. Somewhere within the man a spark of unselfishness had begun to glow.
“Do you have enough to take care of you and Anita for the rest of your lives?”
O’Brien smiled again at that, but it was a sad not a wry smile. He spread his big hands in a who-knows? gesture.
Anita had called him yesterday afternoon from Canberra and they had talked for an hour. Malone had been out in the living room watching a rugby league telecast. The sound had been turned up, as if Malone had wanted the roar of the crowd and the galloping clichés of the commentators (“a shock try adjacent to the uprights!”) to drown out any remarks by O’Brien on the bedroom phone. He had been glad that Malone could not hear him: he and Anita had come closer to outright argument than they ever had before.
She had said, “I’m going to leave Philip. He can divorce me if he wishes, but I don’t think he will, not till after the next election, anyway.” As if the voters were some sort of marriage counselling service. “We’ll just announce an amicable separation, I think that’s what they call it.”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“No, you’re not going to throw your life away on me—”
“What life? I haven’t had a life of my own since Philip came into politics. I’ve been married to a man I haven’t loved for, I don’t know, for four or five years. I’ve been the patroness of committees that think of me as no more than a figurehead, always on show—”
“You’re more than that and you know it. Countries need a First Lady—”
“I’m not the First Lady, the Governor-General’s wife is that. I’m just the first reserve.”
“Australia’s women think you’re the First Lady.” He was sounding like a patriot, a guise that fitted him like a clown’s baggy trousers; even in his own ears he sounded comically pompous. “Sweetheart, stop putting yourself down—”
“Darling—” She had made up her mind, though a woman’s resolution is never set in concrete: she is too intelligent for that and concrete, anyway, is a man’s medium. “I’m not going on with Philip the way things are at the moment—”
“Have you told him about us?”
“No. But he’s guessed there’s someone else—I’ve moved out of our bedroom—”
“What do The Lodge staff think of that?”
“It’s none of their business. In any case, I think they’re all Labour voters—”
“So it must be all around Parliament House by now.” All at once he was too weary to continue trying to protect her. He relaxed, smiling to himself, lay back on the bed with the phone still propped against his ear.
“Are you still there? What are you thinking?”
“I’m just smiling at the thought of the cook and the maids and the butler being Labour voters. I once had a butler—he was the biggest right-wing conservative you could ever meet, he thought Churchill was a pinko—”
“Then why did he work for you?”
“He lasted a week.”
“You fired him?”
“He fired me. I was „way below his class.’”
She was too shrewd for him. “You’re trying to change the subject. I’m leaving Philip, whatever you say. I want to come up to the stud to talk it over with you—”
“No!” He sat up, no longer smiling, desperate again to protect her.
“I’ll wear my wig and my tinted glasses—”
“Anita, the place is crawling with cops and security men—Inspector Malone is here for the weekend—”
“You didn’t tell me!” Now she was fearful for him. “What’s happening, for God’s sake? When you called me this morning about Sebastian Waldorf’s murder—” She was silent for a moment, as if all at once she realized the horror of what she was saying. Then she went on, her voice unsteady, “You didn’t say anything about all of you—and the police, too?—all of you going up to the stud. You just said you were going up there for the weekend. Darling, w
hat’s happening?”
“We’re just playing safe,” he lied. She wouldn’t understand what they did to lure tigers out of the jungle in Sumatra or wherever the hell it was.
“Playing safe? God, why do men always have to talk in game terms? This—this murderer Blizzard isn’t playing! He’s trying to kill you!”
The argument had gone on; like all lovers’ arguments, when they are truly in love, it had gone round in circles. Finally, angrily, she had seen his point: she could not come to the stud where she would be surely recognized. She said, laughing sourly, “Think of the jokes. The Prime Minister’s mare visiting a stud—”
“Don’t,” he said, stricken for her.
She relented, began to weep, something he had never seen her do and, indeed, did not see now. “Are you crying?” he said.
“No,” she said after a moment; but women have never learned to stop weeping without sniffling, just as men have never learned to turn a deaf ear to it. He heard her blow her nose, then she said, “I’ll be up in Sydney on Wednesday. We’ll meet at Joanna’s again. You and I have to sit down and talk. Seriously.”
“Yes,” he promised, lying again. Whatever plans she would propose, he had no counter-plans. Under a death sentence or two, it was difficult to plan a future. Especially if one also had to go to jail first.
He came back to today, Sunday, saw Malone leaning forward and peering down towards the stables. “What’s the matter?”
“Those Chinese, are they clients of yours?”
O’Brien sat forward. “Yes. The little round man is Sir Keye Chai—he’s a big wheel in Hong Kong. He comes down once a month on business, then he comes up here—he has half a dozen horses here—” Then he stopped as he saw the familiar figure amongst the other three Chinese. He looked at Malone. “You know the guy in the suede jacket and the checked cap?”
“So do you,” said Malone matter-of-factly. “Leslie Chung. Does he have any horses here?”
O’Brien hesitated; but he no longer wanted to lie to Malone. “No.”
“So what’s he doing here? Give me the truth, Brian, no bullshit.”
What’s the point of hiding it any longer? I’ll be telling it all in front of the NCSC on Tuesday. “He’s one of the guys I was telling you about. Laundered money.”
“Anything else?”
“We-ell, yes. He feels I did him out of a profit on some shares.”
“You pick some beauts to fool around with. Is he one of those who tried to have you bumped off?”
O’Brien shrugged, looking down again at the four Chinese as they came out from the stables and moved towards the linen-clad tables and the chairs set out on the wide lawn in front of the house. “Probably. But you could never prove anything against him. Has he got a record?”
“None that I know of. Half a dozen squads—Fraud, Homicide, the Drug Squad, you name it—we’ve been trying to nail him for years. But no go. He’s lily-white. How much did he put through your bank?”
“I wouldn’t know—George Bousakis could tell you that. Several million at least. He never came to see us personally, it was always handled through a go-between.”
“Who else is in cahoots with him?” O’Brien hesitated and Malone said impatiently, “Come on, Brian—quit stalling! You owe me. You said you were going to open up everything on Tuesday—you owe it to me to tell me first!”
“What’ll you do if I give you their names?”
“I don’t know,” Malone confessed. “If we manage to get Blizzard first, maybe I’ll go after them then.”
“What for?”
“Conspiracy to murder.”
“You’d have Buckley’s chance of proving it.”
“Maybe. But we’ve already traced Gotti to one crim, a cove named Tony Lango. Was Lango one of your depositors?”
O’Brien hesitated again; then he nodded. “Yes. There were two others, Dennis Pelong and Jack Aldwych.”
Malone pursed his lips, but did not whistle. “Christ, why didn’t you dig up Al Capone and invite him in, too? Do you have a death wish?”
“I really didn’t know that much about them when I first started with them. Remember, I’d been away for years.”
“Did you diddle them on the shares, too?” O’Brien nodded; and Malone shook his head at another of the fools who made his job harder. “Anyone else?”
“Like who? Aren’t those four enough?”
“Like Arnold Debbs.”
“No. Scobie, Arnold is shifty and has his hand out for anything you’ll put into it, he’s the most up-market panhandler I’ve ever met. But he wouldn’t be in any conspiracy to murder. He’s gutless.”
“Gotti went to see him in Canberra. It’s the gutless ones who go in for conspiracy. They hire someone else to do the job.”
“Are you saying Chung and the other three crims are gutless?” But he knew it was a frivolous question. “No, I know you’re not. They gave up doing their own dirty work years ago. They’re like generals in a war.”
“Righto, we’ll strike Debbs off the list for the time being. But the other four . . . If you name them on Tuesday, there’s going to be more flying off the fan than the Sewerage Board has ever had to clean up.”
“I’ll be naming Debbs and his missus, too, about insider trading.”
“You’re really going to spread it, aren’t you? Are you doing it for the good of your soul, as my mum would say?”
“You don’t sound impressed.”
“Would you be if you heard me saying what you’ve just said? You’re pointing the finger in every direction, trying to cop a plea.”
“You fellers put it to villains every day in the week, if you want to catch the big fry.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to like the principle.” Then Malone looked at him carefully. “Brian, are you after my approval?”
“Yes,” said O’Brien quietly. “It would help.”
Malone sat back in his chair, stared down at the four Chinese now seated at one of the tables where a waiter from the hired catering staff was bringing them their brunch. All the other tables had a woman, sometimes two or three, at them, and the four Chinese looked like a small funeral group amidst the chatter and gaiety. Champagne glasses were being raised around them, but the men from Hong Kong were drinking only tea. They knew better, Malone guessed, than to be stirred by the sight of one of their horses galloping around a paddock where there was nothing to beat. The Chinese were one of the great gambling races of the world, but they still listened to a bookie called Confucius.
“Brian, you’ve been a bastard most of your life. You’ve tried to take the mickey out of everything I’ve believed in. Decency, a fair go for the other bloke—well, never mind . . .” He didn’t want to lecture O’Brien. One can wear a clerical collar and sound pious; turn the collar round and one sounds sanctimonious. “Now it’s like watching a leopard peeling off his coat.”
“Maybe that’s why I feel so bloody cold,” said O’Brien, trying for a smile. “We’re getting literary.”
“What else would you expect of two Irishmen? My old man’s never read a book in his life, but pour half a dozen beers down him and he thinks he’s James Joyce. What about your old man?” As soon as he said it, it sounded like a brutal question.
O’Brien’s face went flat. “I called him the other day. I don’t know why—I just thought . . . It was no use. He just said I was where I deserved to be. Then he hung up.”
“Your mum?”
“She’s dead.”
Malone turned his face away, stared off into the distance, seeing nothing. He was infected with charity; the panhandlers of the world would always make him think twice. O’Brien had his hand out and he couldn’t refuse him; he looked: “All right, I approve. But you let me down, Brian, and so help me Christ . . .” He tried to sound threatening, but how could you threaten a man who might be dead before the week was out? He stood up. “Let’s go down and say hullo to your guests.”
O’Brien rose. “Which ones?”
“Les Chung and company.”
They walked down across the lawn, between the two kurrajongs trimmed like English ornamental trees, and out to the tables. Owners and their wives and girl-friends, the women distinguishable from each other by their self-assured possessiveness, as if they were owners of their menfolk, greeted O’Brien with wide smiles and offers of a glass of his own champagne. He was persona grata here on his own property, he was as pure-bred as one of his own stallions, no one would admit to knowing what graft was. O’Brien returned the greetings, but did not stop. He led Malone to the table where Sir Keye Chai presided with all the confidence that comes with great wealth and a certain Oriental sense of superiority. These visits to the barbarians Down Under made the British in Hong Kong more bearable.
“Mr. Malone—” he said, putting out a hand as smooth as silk; O’Brien had not introduced the detective with his rank. “You are interested in horses?”
“Not really, Sir Keye. I’m just a friend of Mr. O’Brien’s. An old schoolmate.”
“Mr. Malone is a detective-inspector,” said Leslie Chung, who had risen, like all the others, and shaken Malone’s hand with a formal politeness. “He is one of our State’s finest.”
Malone gave him a sharp look, but Chung’s mile was bland. “Do you race horses, Mr. Chung?”
“Never. I have tried to tell Sir Keye there are too many imponderables in the racing game—corrupt jockeys, corrupt trainers, horses that break down without warning—”
“Mr. Chung has no faith,” said Sir Keye, whose only faith was in himself. “I was educated in Hong Kong, he went to school in Shanghai. He was taught all the wrong things. They gave him Hsun Tzu to read. Too bad. Hsun Tzu once wrote, „If a man is clever, he will surely be a robber; if he is brave, he will be a bandit . . .’ You read the wrong books, Leslie.”
He looked at Chung and the two men smiled at each other with all the innocence of born-again infants. He knows how Chung makes his money, Malone thought; and wondered how Sir Keye made his. But the British in Hong Kong had not only given him the right books to read, whatever they were, they had given him a knighthood and a place in their own society. Malone, who had inherited a little of his father’s rabid anti-British feeling, suspected that the British knew there were more ways to trap a tiger than by shooting it. But maybe Sir Keye Chai was a totally honest man; why was he so suspicious of him? That was Con in him again, the racism he tried so hard to smother.