The Easy Sin

by Jon Cleary

  “Yes. And I'm not holding hands, nor am I an Aussie geisha.” She gave Paula Decker a look meant to slice her; but Paula just smiled. “And I don't think it's any of your business.”

  She was not flustered, she was cold and defiant. In the company of Caroline Magee and Daniela Bonicelli she had been quiet, just background to their defiance. Now she was throwing up her own barricades. She was smartly dressed today, in a black slimline dress with a silver belt and high-heeled shoes. Her hair was loose but neat and she was remarkably attractive. Errol Magee knew how to pick his women.

  “Oh, you're wrong there, Louise,” said Malone. “You'd be surprised just how wide police business can spread. The civil rights know-alls will give you chapter and verse.” He wondered how he sounded to Paula Decker, but she showed no expression. “You're all deserting Mr. Cragg?”

  “He's already deserted us. You're okay in the police service, but out in the real world we have to look after ourselves.”

  “So we're being told, all the time.” Malone turned to Nakasone, who had been almost rigid since Louise Cobcroft had come through the bedroom doorway. “Is Kunishima taking over I-Saw from the receivers?”

  Nakasone hesitated, then nodded. “If the price is right, yes.”

  “Five cents on the dollar?” Clements might get back a few bucks.

  Nakasone unexpectedly smiled; he had good teeth, expensive ones. “More than that, Inspector. We would hope to get all the money that Mr. Magee has stolen.”

  “And where is Mr. Tajiri now? Out looking for it?”

  “No. He is away on business.”

  “Bank business or yakuza business?” Malone knew he was being reckless, but recklessness sometimes paid off. Be a samurai, he told himself as he stared at the Japanese, wield the sword or whatever it was they used.

  Nakasone was unimpressed: “You are very foolish with those sort of remarks.”

  But Malone had seen Louise Cobcroft raise her chin and frown, as if she knew what the yakuza was. It was time to leave, now the pot had been stirred, if by a sword instead of a spoon.

  “I'd think twice about taking the job, Louise. Goodbye, Mr. Nakasone. Tell Mr. Tajiri that we still want to talk to him.”

  Teagarden showed them out. He, too, was frowning, as if suddenly wondering what extra duties a butler might be called upon to do.

  Out in the street Paula Decker said, “You put the wind up Miss Cobcroft.”

  “I think we put the wind up Mr. Nakasone, too. But we still have to find Miss Doolan.”

  As they went to get into their car Paula said, “Who is Jack Teagarden?”

  “Was, not is,” said Malone. “One of the best jazz trombonists ever, if not the best.”

  She opened the car door and got in. He slid in beside her, anticipating her next remark: “Never heard of him.”

  Ah, he thought, lyrical and Celtic all at once, the small horizons of the young. “You disappoint me, Paula. Your generation thinks that the Big Bang of Creation was in the 1960s, that Woodstock was the Garden of Eden. Back in prehistoric times we had music and movies and sex, all the things your generation thinks it invented. Some day I'll bring in my LPs of Bix Beiderbecke and Benny Goodman—”

  “LPs?” She was all innocence. “What are they?”

  “Pull your head in,” he said, put the car in Drive and drove back through the present: clogged traffic, road rage, middle-finger salutes and some girl on the car radio screaming (not singing, like Doris Day or Kay Starr) lyrics that sounded like Yah, yah, yah. He was getting old, no samurai mob would take a second look at him.

  IV

  Kylie Doolan was being held prisoner in a deserted warehouse in Chippendale. The warehouse had been taken over by Kunishima Bank as part of a failed mortgage, that of another IT company that had disappeared into the outer space of cyberspace. The building, one-storied and the lone commercial property on the block, was empty while the bank decided whether it should be sold or leased. With the economy going downhill banks, for the first time in a long time, were having to entertain second thoughts.

  Chippendale is an old working-class area that is now becoming gentrified, like so many of the inner-city quarters. The old-time residents never went in for up-market crime such as kidnapping; thuggery was more in their line when they decided to break the law. There had been brothels catering to randy students from Sydney University up the road; there was still a brothel close to the university which, with its higher prices and wider variety of service, was only affordable by graduates. For the most part the area was now respectable, if not genteel, with just a few remaining warehouses and small businesses. It would not have condoned Kylie Doolan's kidnapping if it had known of it.

  Kylie knew who her kidnapper was. Tajiri had been waiting for her in the lobby of Kunishima. He had introduced himself as Chojoro Ikura, head of security for Kunishima and she had accepted him without query; she liked men's attention and he had been very attentive. He had told her they had got word where Errol Magee was and he was taking her to him. She had never met Tajiri, but he was Japanese and gentlemanly and an executive of the Kunishima Bank and she was delighted that Errol had been located and she was being taken to him. Only when they got down to the garage and the two men, coming out from behind a black van, put a pad over her face did she realize how dumb and stupid she had been. Errol had told her that, several times, and she had just laughed and told him he didn't understand women . . .

  When she had woken last night, sick from the chloroform, she had found herself in a small glass-walled office that looked out on a dark, empty floor. The office had a cheap table, on which she lay, and four canvas-backed chairs; it was lit by a standard lamp almost at floor level. Two men, both wearing ski-masks, sat watching her.

  As soon as she sat up she wanted to be sick. One of the men, gruff but solicitous, took her out to a toilet and she threw up in the bowl. He produced a paper napkin from somewhere and she wiped her mouth; he was awkward, as if not used to kidnapping women. He took her back to the office, sat her down in a chair and from one of two portable ice-boxes took a bottle of spring water and handed it to her.

  “Unless you'd like a beer?”

  She gagged at the thought. “I don't drink beer. Why am I here? Where's Mr. What'shisname? Ikura?”

  Both men were burly with beer-belly profiles; they had rough Australian accents. The man who had given her the drink looked at the other, who said, “Just relax, love. You'll get all the info you want tomorrow morning. We're just your minders. Like politicians have.” Both men laughed inside their masks.

  “Who'll give me information? Mr. Ikura?”

  “Yeah, him. He's the boss. You want a sandwich?” The first man produced a plastic-wrapped sandwich from the ice-box. “Ham salad? Or—” He ferreted around in the ice-box. “Or some sushi?”

  “No, thanks.” She was afraid, but she had the feeling that these two men would not hurt her unless she was—dumb and stupid. All at once she knew she was here because of bloody Errol and all at once she began hating him. He was a jerk, a rat . . . “Do you know where my boyfriend, Mr. Magee, is?”

  “Save the questions till the morning, love. We're gunna have to tie you up in that chair, so you're gunna be a bit uncomfortable. If you promise not to be silly and yell, we won't gag you. But you try yelling and we gunna have to belt you, y'know what I mean? So okay, no yelling or screaming and we don't gag you, okay?”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  “You wanna go to the toilet? A bedtime pee?”

  “I'd better. You're not going to rape me or anything?”

  “Us? We're gay.” Both bellies shook with laughter. “No, love, you're safe. Me and me mate don't go in for rape. Only mongrels do that.”

  She went to the toilet, came back and sat down in the chair while they tied her up. “Why are you doing this?”

  “For the money, love,” said the second man. “What else?”

  She had never spent a more uncomfortable night; nor a more fearful one. She
fell asleep after a long time and dreamed, not of the life she had led for the past four years but of Minto, which, for some strange reason, was vague in a golden light.

  In the morning when Tajiri (or Ikura, as she knew him) came she felt like a limp doll, everything drained out of her. He stood facing her, bare-faced, no mask.

  “You have been treated well, Miss Doolan?” She nodded, her mouth dry, and he jerked a hand at the two men: “Untie her.”

  She massaged her wrists and her ankles; he waited patiently. At last he said, “This room is stuffy. We'll go outside.”

  The two masked men carried two chairs out into the wide empty floor. Tajiri gestured to Kylie to take a seat and he sat down opposite her. The two men went back into the office, began breakfasting from the ice-box.

  “Miss Doolan,” said Tajiri, “we want to know where Mr. Magee is.”

  Sitting still and stiff in her chair she looked at him blankly, as if he had spoken Japanese. “What?”

  “We know you and Mr. Magee planned his kidnapping. The five-million dollar ransom was just to put us off the scent. You and he planned to disappear with the forty million dollars he has stolen and we were supposed to believe that the kidnappers, whoever they were, had killed him. That, as they say, would be the end of the story. But it isn't. . .” He stopped and waited.

  She had difficulty keeping her voice steady. “Mr. Ikura, you are out of your head. No, really. I have no idea where Errol is—I know nothing about the kidnapping—”

  He held up a hand for her to be quiet; then he gestured to the two masked men to come out of the office. “Would you gentlemen go for a walk, please? Without your masks.” He said it with a smile, a genial boss.

  “Sure,” they said. “Ten minutes enough?”

  “Enough,” said Tajiri. He waited till the two men had gone, then he turned back to Kylie. “I don't like hurting women, Miss Doolan, but I do it if it's necessary.”

  Kylie looked around her. The windows of the warehouse were high in the walls, all of them barred. In one corner of the big space she saw a computer, its window smashed, on a small table. She was suddenly very afraid; but still she managed not to show it. She was fearful of physical abuse; Errol had never hit her nor had any of her previous boyfriends. She would have retaliated, anger overcoming her fear; but she knew she would not do that with Mr. Ikura. There was a menace to him that she had never met before.

  “Is that how you Japanese men treat your women?” She was working for time.

  “Not necessarily.” He seemed prepared to talk with her, as if putting her at her ease; but the threat was still there: “A long time ago one of our scholars, who had studied Confucius, said a woman's duty is obedience. He said the five worst things about a woman are for her not to be docile, to be discontented, to slander, to be jealous and to be silly. Seven out of ten women have all those faults. I hope you haven't, Miss Doolan.”

  “I'm telling you, Mr. Ikura, I know nothing about the kidnapping of Errol.” Her voice was shaky, but she managed to get the words out without stumbling. “I was the one who called the police, for God's sake! Why would I have done that?”

  “Because Mr. Magee made a mistake and killed your maid.” Tajiri was drawing on a black leather glove, just the one. “You knew her body would be discovered eventually. You had to change your plans. That was why you had to stay behind.”

  “He killed no one! Jesus, he couldn't even kick a dog or throw a stone at a cat! He hated violence—” Then she stopped and looked at his gloved hand. “Are you going to hit me?”

  “I think so. Unless you stop telling lies.”

  Then she found courage, or bravado: something found at the bottom of a barrel that she had never searched before: “Then you'll have to kill me, too.”

  “I can do that,” he said, but all at once sounded less sure of himself and what he intended to do.

  “That's your job as head of security for the bank, to kill women?” The bravado, or whatever it was, was increasing; she had noticed his hesitancy. “Does the bank know that?”

  He was unsure of himself with women. Kaibara Ekken had been writing of women's faults in the seventeenth century; he might be confounded with Japanese women in the twenty-first century. For himself, Australian women, the ones in the offices of Kunishima, puzzled him with their independence; the younger women back in Tokyo and Osaka were going the same way. His father, a garbage collector in Osaka, had picked up bits of wisdom besides garbage: never trust a woman was part of his collection. But that had been because Tajiri's own mother had been a woman of independent mind. Here in Sydney it sometimes seemed that he was surrounded by independent women, chewing away at their men as at a meal.

  He put the gloved hand in his lap, as if laying away a tool for a moment. “Let's be reasonable, Miss Doolan. The bank is never going to pay the ransom you are asking—”

  She shook her head, growing confident by the moment: “Mr. Ikura, I had nothing to do with that ransom. Why would Errol bother about a lousy five million—” She paused, not believing her own tongue. “Why would he bother when you say he has forty million salted away somewhere? Don't you think I'd be over there now, wherever it is, trying to get at it instead of hanging around in Sydney? You don't understand women, Mr. Ikura, not practical women. And I'm practical.”

  He was almost convinced she was telling the truth; and hated himself for his weakness. “Then he arranged his own kidnapping and you had nothing to do with it?”

  “Yes,” she said flatly. “Errol could be a real bastard. Always looking out only for himself. I dunno what I saw in him,” she said, but Tajiri was unimpressed.

  He had taken a risk in meeting Miss Doolan yesterday and coming here this morning. But he was returning to Osaka in two days' time and Nakasone would deny that a Mr. Ikura had ever worked for Kunishima. Okada might prove a problem, but then honest bankers could never be relied upon. His father, the collector of wisdom, had told him that. Only the gods and garbage collectors knew what secrets were found in the waste bins of banks.

  “Can you tell us where we might find him? A hideaway, some place in the country?”

  She knew she was on top of him now. “If I knew, don't you think I'd have already found him? I think you and the police have all made a mistake, Mr. Ikura. Someone else arranged the kidnapping. I don't know whether Errol had anything to do with it, but I'm sure there's someone else in on it.”

  “Who?”

  Sometimes she wondered at the intelligence of men, though she had not worked her way through too many nationalities. An American, an Italian, a Brazilian; but no Asians. “Mr. Ikura, if I knew who, I'd have been on their back as soon as I saw those stupid bloody messages on the computers.”

  He didn't ask what computers. He had seen them two nights ago when he had gone to the apartment to kill, or torture, Magee.

  He said nothing and she knew now she had him by the balls, a woman's cruellest hold: “Take the glove off, Mr. Ikura. You may not appreciate it, but we're on the same side.”

  Tajiri stared at her. He was not accustomed to decision-making; the comfort of the yakuza was its committee-like resolutions. Yamamoto Jocho had taught that it was wrong to have personal convictions. Kunishima Bank should be here making this decision.

  He was taking off the glove when the two men, pulling their ski-masks back on, appeared at the far door of the warehouse. “Finished, mate?”

  These two men wouldn't have lasted a day in the yakuza. They had their own discipline, take it or leave it, mate.

  “Just a moment,” said Tajiri, putting up the ungloved hand and holding them at room's length. Then he turned to Kylie: “If Mr. Magee came back to you, would you kill him?”

  She had lost her grip on him. “What? No—no, of course not!”

  Tajiri put the glove in his pocket, stood up. “I would—after he'd told us where he has the forty million dollars. He's caused far too much trouble.”

  7

  I

  MALONE DROPPED Paula Decke
r off at the Magee apartment to resume her watch.

  “I looked through some of Mr. Magee's and Miss Doolan's tapes,” she said. “Great stuff. The Doors and Pink Floyd.”

  “Never heard of ‘em.”

  He drove on up Macquarie Street. There was a demonstration outside Parliament House and traffic was being let through at a crawl. The sergeant in charge of the police detail recognized him and saluted. The demonstrators, not recognizing him, booed him: he must be the enemy. He saluted them and, changing mood, they cheered him. It was a demonstration without fire in its belly, a march in the sun. Democracy at work, he thought; or at play. He drove on. He passed St. Mary's Cathedral; a bishop was out on the front steps, feeding the pigeons. An ordinary day, too good for murder and chasing greedy bastards.

  He saw a bicycle courier who looked like Vassily Todorov. He tooted his horn, but the cyclist, if it was Todorov, was too intent on delivery. Head down and arse up he disappeared into the traffic ahead like a fish into a current.

  When Malone got back to Homicide, Sheryl Dallen was waiting for him. “You look pleased with yourself,” she told him.

  “I've just had fifteen minutes of looking at a normal world. What's new?”

  “That South Coast murder—Constable Haywood. They've been on to us, asking us to make a few enquiries.”

  “Where's Russ?”

  “He said to tell you he was taking his wife to lunch at Leichhardt. The chill has lessened, he said.”

  “And that didn't intrigue you? What he said?”

  “I've learned to mind my own business about married men.”

  “We're no different from single men, only tamer.”

  “Yeah,” she said, unimpressed. “The enquiries. Seems there's a family down that way—” She looked at the note in her hand: “The Briskin family. Constable Haywood said he was gunna look in on them, they have a weekender on a back road just past Minnamurra. The local cops went out to see them, they said they hadn't seen Haywood. The locals accepted that. Then someone remembered the name, got on the computer and it turns out the father of the family had form as long as your arm.”