by Garry Disher
In the three years that he’d been making the diamond run, Phelps had evolved a body language to suit the role. He wore dark glasses. He looked somehow unapproachable. In the Kimberley, where grown men wore shorts and long socks to the office, Phelps wore long trousers and a tie. On the flight to Darwin and then on to Sydney, people would glance at the unsmiling man with the briefcase manacled to his wrist and wonder about him. He never acknowledged them. In public places he tended to hang back, checking faces, watching for danger without appearing to do so. He held himself like a spring ready to uncoil, a man fine-tuned to danger. He imagined movie cameras tracking his movements, isolating him, cinema audiences grabbing at their armrests.
‘That’s him,’ Jardine said.
Wyatt saw a short, edgy, self-conscious individual, dressed in trousers and a shirt ten years out of date, collect a suitcase from the Ansett carousel. ‘Bundle of nerves,’ he said.
Jardine nodded. ‘If he had to go through customs they’d be onto him like a shot.’
Jardine and Wyatt were waiting with an empty trolley at the next carousel. They waited while Phelps crossed to the exit doors, then abandoned the trolley and followed fifty metres behind him. Outside the building, the air smelt of aviation fuel and idling taxis. Someone yelled, ‘Share a cab to the city?’ Air erupted from the brakes of a waiting bus, stale and metallic.
Phelps turned around and went back into the terminal. The two men followed. Phelps looked about nervously, sometimes stopping dead, turning around accusingly, going on again. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Wyatt said.
Phelps finally stopped at a bank of lockers. They saw him take a small parcel from the briefcase, place it in one of the lockers, and lock the door. Then he walked away in great agitation.
His next stop was a men’s on the first floor. A short time later, Wyatt went in, just as Phelps was coming out of a cubicle. Wyatt stood at the urinal. He waited until Phelps had gone out again then went into the cubicle Phelps had used. The air was foul with Phelps’s fear. Wyatt found the locker key taped under the cistern lid. He pocketed it and went out. Phelps was going through the exit door at the far end of the terminal, Jardine a few metres behind him.
Wyatt had about thirty minutes for the next stage. He hurried back to the lockers. He didn’t open Phelps’s locker immediately but watched it for five minutes. Satisfied that no one was around who shouldn’t be, he put the key in the lock, took out the packet and taped a page torn from a notebook to the back wall of the locker. On the note were the words ‘Have a nice day’ and a grinning face.
Wyatt shut the locker again, inserted money, turned the key and returned to the men’s. He went into the same cubicle again, lifted the cistern lid and taped the key to it. His part of the job was running smoothly. Jardine meanwhile was watching Phelps. Phelps was expecting to collect the fee left for him by the Outfit in a locker at the other end of the terminal building. They had followed an Outfit courier to the airport a couple of hours earlier, had seen him deposit Phelps’s fee and leave the key in a slot under a gold phone outside a pharmacy, and had helped themselves to it. Phelps’s ten thousand dollars was now in Jardine’s pocket. The grinning face in the first locker was Wyatt’s idea. He thought it might make the bad news harder to swallow.
He found Jardine leaning on a column outside. The big man looked as though he owned the place. There was a trace of amusement on his face. Wyatt didn’t say anything until they were in the car park, crawling in Jardine’s car toward the pay booths.
‘How did he react?’
‘A caricature of disbelief and outrage,’ Jardine said. ‘He went white, bolted outside and jumped in the first cab.’
‘What will he do?’
‘He’ll shit himself for a while. He can’t go back to check on the diamonds in case it’s an outside job and he finds an angry foreigner there. He’ll want his money from the Outfit but he doesn’t know if it’s a cruel joke on their part or it really is an outside job, in which case he’ll be scared they’ll think he did it.’
Jardine had nothing else to say and that suited Wyatt. Jardine had no use for small talk either. They rode in silence back to the Dorset Hotel. Wyatt thought about the kind of phone call the Outfit was getting from its diamond buyer about now. He imagined the soured relations and the Outfit’s hundred thousand dollar loss. He imagined the other damage he had lined up for them.
****
Nineteen
Max Heneker’s wife was oddly proud of her husband’s unusual job. He spent weekdays at home with her in their place at Palm Beach, playing the stock market, gardening, walking with her along the beach. Quality time, she called it, and that was why she didn’t mind his flying interstate every weekend. ‘He’s a troubleshooter,’ she explained to her friends. ‘Company computers are always tied up Mondays to Fridays so he goes in at weekends to check for viruses, hackers, unauthorised use, etcetera, etcetera.’ Her friends seemed envious. They had husbands who got in the way on weekends and were distant and cranky with them the rest of the time.
Max’s story to his wife was an approximation of the truth. Yes, he worked every weekend but he didn’t go interstate and his knowledge of computers was limited to doing simple accounting on his Toshiba laptop. In fact, Max went no further than a first floor hotel suite in Kings Cross and he was what the police would call a distributor.
The system worked like this.
While the authorities were stirring themselves every time flights from South-East Asia and South America came in, high quality Columbian cocaine was making its way by yacht and light plane to isolated beaches or abandoned airstrips in northern Australia. Here it was weighed, paid for and sent south packed in concealed compartments in dusty campervans driven by middle-aged and retired couples. These people were never pulled over, never searched. Campervans are slow, benign, innocent, and no highway cop is going to hassle elderly folk enjoying their declining years on inflation-eroded retirement packages. You’d have to be a bastard to do that.
Campervans making the Sydney run were required to branch off along Pennant Hills Road to Parramatta Road, then make for a certain twenty-four hour service station and check in for a grease and oil change. Here Outfit mechanics removed the cocaine, weighed it again, baked twenty per cent of it to make crack, cut the rest with glucose, and repackaged it. The elderly geezers were paid off and the load was sent by a Datsun utility marked ‘Spare Parts’ to the basement car park of the hotel in Kings Cross where Max Heneker stayed in a suite that was on permanent hold for the Outfit.
Max’s Thursday afternoon to Monday morning job started when he weighed the cocaine again and took it upstairs to be separated into 50, 100, 250 and 500 gram packets of cocaine and smaller quantities of crack. Crack hadn’t taken off yet, but the Outfit was confident that it soon would. Max spent most of Thursday afternoon doing this. Lester, an Outfit goon built like a bull, watched him do it. Then Lester weighed the cocaine again, just in case. Who knows, maybe Max was siphoning off the odd gram or two when Lester had his back turned. The Outfit was obsessed with being ripped off somewhere along the line. Max knew that, and made sure the buck would never stop at him. He disliked Lester. Max was small, precise, neat; he resembled an accountant. Lester liked to sprawl in a tracksuit, carelessly shaven, crushing beer cans while he watched videos of the World Cup. He also seemed to believe that soap washed away his natural oils. By midnight on Sunday the air in the suite was ripe and Max worked with a scented handkerchief in his fist.
Between about five o’clock on Thursday afternoon and late Sunday evening, Max received clients. Some were buying for themselves, but most were regulars, the street dealers, stocking up for the busy period, the weekend. The cocaine flowed out, the money flowed in. Max kept strict records, entering every transaction into a code-named document on his Toshiba laptop. At midnight on Sunday he handed over the takings and the floppy disc to Lester, who left the hotel, first handing Max four thousand dollars in an envelope. Max would go to bed then, returning to his wife
and his Palm Beach house at lunchtime on Monday. More often than not, he was exhausted and went straight to bed again.
Max had scarcely got out the scales and sandwich bags that Thursday afternoon when there was a knock on the door. He glanced at his watch. Four o’clock. The first clients were not expected before five. He looked across at Lester, nodded, tossed a quilt over the evidence and stepped across the thick carpet to the door.
Meanwhile Lester positioned himself with his back to the wall on the other side of the door. Max waited while Lester fastened a suppressor to an automatic pistol and squeezed the fat fingers of his left hand through a knuckleduster. Lester nodded and Max said, ‘Who is it?’
‘I need some crack,’ a voice said.
For Christ’s sake, Max thought. Tourists and respectable people stayed in this hotel from time to time. ‘Come back later,’ he said, his voice low and hoarse, his mouth pressed to the door.
‘What?’ the voice cried.
‘Come back after five,’ Max whispered.
‘Can’t bloody hear ya,’ the voice shouted. ‘Look, I got cash, look at the floor.’
Max and Lester watched as a hundred dollar note slid into view. It was snatched back again. The voice went on: ‘Give us some crack and I’ll be off.’
Max put his eye to the spyhole. He saw an untidy male wearing a black windcheater over a check flannelette shirt. The guy’s hair was a mess and he had his arm in a sling. He was waving hundred dollar notes in the air with his free hand. There was a professional-looking bandage around his head. Max had noted that it was the yuppies who used coke, the deros who used crack. So far, so good, but to double check he said, ‘Who said to come here?’
‘Stooge,’ the man said, naming a Bondi Beach street dealer who sometimes bought from Max.
Max nodded okay to Lester, unlocked the door and drew back the chain. Then he moved to the centre of the room and called, ‘The door’s unlocked.’
The man entered slowly, edgy and defeated looking. He glanced worriedly at Lester, who by now had tucked the pistol into his waistband and had his arms folded, and advanced to where Max was waiting in the centre of the room.
There was a second knock. Lester whirled around, his hand digging for the automatic. Even if the folds of his tracksuit hadn’t got in the way, he would have been too late. He didn’t see the quick, neat spin behind him. He didn’t see Max go down, disabled by a kick to the knee. He heard it, but by then it was too late, for the dero was grinding a gun into the base of his spine and a masked man was coming through the door.
What unnerved Max and Lester during the three minutes that followed was that the two men didn’t speak and they didn’t want the cocaine. The man in the mask trained a gun on them, the man with the bandaged head carried the cocaine into the bathroom and flushed it away. He seemed to smile. There was no sense of loss or regret about him.
When it was over, Max risked raising his head from the carpet. ‘Have you any idea, the faintest trace of an idea, whose toes you’re stepping on here?’
The man with the bandage looked at him appraisingly. The face was almost pleasant now, animated by intelligence and irony, the bandage rakish looking on the narrow head. Maybe he’s some kind of anti-drugs vigilante, Max thought. Someone who’d welcome the chance to have his say. ‘If you could tell us where you’re coming from,’ Max said reasonably, ‘maybe we could work something out.’
But the face grew hard by degrees, and a chill crept along Max’s spine. The voice when it came was flat and distinct. ‘Tell Kepler it could happen any time, any place.’
****
Twenty
At least half of the men milling around in Prestige Auto Auctions on Friday knew that Bax was working motor vehicle theft, so he couldn’t very well do his own bidding. He was spotting. He strolled through the place twice, glancing idly at the ranks of glossy, top of the range Hondas, BMWs, Saabs, Audis, Toyotas, for all the world as if he’d dropped in especially to be a pain in the neck to the men there who knew he was a cop.
It amused him the way four bent dealers slipped out through the side doors and another handful stopped muttering into mobile phones or to each other in the shadowy corners of the vast auction hall. It amused him to saunter past them, sharp as a tack in his iron-grey tailored suit, as out of place among the stretch jeans and blow-waved heads as a Piaget watch in a tray of Pizza Hut giveaways. The remaining men in the place were your ordinary suburban punters after a bargain and they paid Bax no attention at all. He circled the hall a third time, listened to some half-hearted bidding for a late sixties E-Type in need of a complete restoration, and went out onto the street.
Axle was waiting for him in a Japanese rustbucket. The body was canary yellow, the driver’s door white, the boot lid pale green. Not for the first time did Bax wonder how it was that a professional car thief like Axle, who specialised in lifting Porsches from South Yarra driveways in the time it took you to blow your nose, would want to drive around in a heap of shit.
He slid into the passenger seat. Axle was listening to a cassette, a world-weary American voice filling the car with a string of one-liners. Bax opened his mouth to speak but Axle chopped the air with the flat of his hand. ‘Check this.’
Bax listened. The comedian’s voice wound on, utterly tired of life: ‘I went to a restaurant, it said “breakfast any time”, so I ordered French toast in the Renaissance.’ Despite himself, Bax sniggered.
Axle shut off the tape machine. His ravaged face was pink with appreciation, his eyes moist. ‘Steve Wright. Kills me every time. Well, what you got?’
‘Lot nineteen,’ Bax said. ‘White Honda Prelude with bad rear-end damage.’ He took an envelope from his pocket and gave it to Axle. ‘There’s five grand. The car might go above five, but I very much doubt it.’
Axle tucked the envelope inside the denim jacket he wore over a black T-shirt, summer and winter. ‘No worries.’
‘Get a receipt, do all the paperwork, and arrange to have it delivered to that body shop the Mesics run in Flemington.’
Axle was surprised. ‘Not their Richmond place?’
Bax shared some of the irritation he’d been feeling lately. ‘No, fuck it all. The older brother’s back in town and he’s decided to sell the Richmond place.’
‘Huh,’ Axle said.
‘So, arrange delivery, then you and I go looking for a another white Prelude.’
‘No worries,’ Axle said, and he left Bax there. After a while, Bax turned on Axle’s sound system and heard the cassette through to the end, snuffles of laughter escaping from him every few seconds. Outside the car, a gritty wind was hassling the pedestrians and inside his head the Mesic problem and the problem of the money he owed his SP bookie were never far away, but for a time at least, the world didn’t feel such a bad place.
Forty minutes later Axle was there with the envelope. ‘Three seven fifty,’ he said.
‘Good one.’
Axle started the car. The motor backfired once, settling into a surging idle. ‘White Prelude,’ he said.
‘Car park at the Prahran market?’
Axle shook his head violently. ‘No way known. They’ve got this lookout tower, some guy on the PA spotting parking spaces for people. We’ll try Chaddie.’
The drive to Chadstone shopping centre took them thirty minutes. They searched the immense parking areas for a further ten minutes until Axle stopped the car and beamed. ‘There.’
A young woman had just locked a white Prelude and now she was snapping on stiletto heels across the asphalt toward the side entrance of Myer. Bax watched her limbs moving inside the power dresser’s pencil-line skirt and padded shoulders. He liked the way her calves flexed and he looked for the line of her knickers, an image of Stella Mesic filling his head.
‘Wakey, wakey,’ Axle said, passing a hand across Bax’s face.
‘We wait till she’s inside,’ Bax said, ‘then we wait another couple of minutes in case she’s forgotten something.’
‘
Fair enough.’
They saw the woman veer toward an ANZ automatic teller machine and join the queue. There were four people waiting and the line moved slowly. Both men sighed simultaneously and settled in their seats. After a while, Bax, encouraged into intimacy by their shared liking of the comedy tape, said, ‘They call you Axle because you steal cars, right?’
Axle was affronted. ‘Shit no. It’s my real name. Axel. A-x-e-l. Danish.’
Bax nodded. ‘Axel,’ he said, stressing the second syllable.
‘You got it.’
They waited, and two minutes after the woman had disappeared into Myer, Axel reached into the back seat and retrieved a black metal box fitted with switches, a dial and a telescopic aerial. He extended the aerial and tilted the box toward the woman’s car. Bax made no comment. The device was a radio scanner and he’d seen Axel use it before. According to a manufacturer’s sticker on the rear window, the woman’s Prelude had been fitted with a car alarm, and Axel was about to disarm it. His box of tricks would transmit a signal matching the signal the woman transmitted from the gadget on her keyring when she wanted to unlock the car.