by Jon Cleary
“You shouldn’t be asking me about Rob. I took as little notice of him as I could. I tolerated him because of his father and because of my wife. I didn’t like him at all.”
“That’s an honest opinion, Mr. Casement.”
“You make it sound as if you haven’t heard too many honest opinions this morning.”
“You could say that. But we’re used to them, aren’t we, Russ?”
Clements had been taking notes in his peculiar shorthand; he looked up and smiled. “It’s the other opinions that help us more than the honest ones.”
The shrewd eyes abruptly showed amusement as Casement remembered the Eighties. “I wish there had been more honest opinions a few years ago.”
“Did you have a visitor at home last night?” said Clements.
“Why do you ask?”
“We’re trying to find out how the murderer got into the building. The security is said to be pretty tight.”
“It is. Or it has been up till now. Except—” He stopped, “I haven’t thought about it before. It could be better down in the basement, in the garage. The service lift comes up from there. Yes, Alice?”
Mrs. Pallister had silently opened the door from her office without knocking, stood there like a headmistress. “Time to leave for your luncheon. Your ten minutes are up, Inspector.”
Malone had an elaborate look at his watch. “Doesn’t time fly! Well, thank you, Mr. Casement. Maybe we can come back when you have more time.”
“Telephone first,” said the Wicked Witch.
“No, no, Alice. Let them come whenever they wish. I’m interested in how Inspector Malone and Sergeant Clements will proceed from here. Anything for a change,” said Casement and sounded wistful.
At the door Malone paused. “Are you related at all to Roger Casement?”
“The traitor? Or the patriot, depending on your point of view? You know something of Irish history?” Casement seemed surprised that a cop should know anything of history outside of police files.
“A little. My mother was Irish-born and my father likes to think he was. At least he says he was conceived in Ireland.”
Casement smiled. “No, I’m not related to Sir Roger, although I’ve always admired him. Honour is always to be admired, don’t you think?”
“Honour and justice don’t always mix. Any cop will tell you that. The British hanged Sir Roger, they said that was justice.”
“Well, let’s hope justice is done when you find young Rob’s murderer.”
When the two detectives had gone, Casement said, “Cancel that lunch, Alice. I have no appetite, for food or those dreary people I was going to lunch with.”
“You’re upset by those two policemen coming in here, aren’t you?”
“Don’t start guessing my feelings, Alice. You sound like my wife.”
“I’ve been guessing your feelings for ten years. That’s what private secretaries are for, isn’t it?”
“Alice, Alice—” He shook his head, spun his chair slowly and looked out the window, at nothing. “Make me some tea and a sandwich. And cancel the rest of the day. I think I’ll go home and hold my wife’s hand.” He swung his chair back again. “What are you smiling at?”
“You haven’t needed to have your hand held since you were two years old.”
He smiled, humouring her. “That wasn’t what I said. I’m going home to hold my wife’s hand, not she hold mine.”
Going down in the lift Malone said, “How much would he be worth?”
Clements shrugged. “It’d be anybody’s guess. Even the so-called experts, when they put him on that Rich List in that financial magazine, they’re only guessing. Could be half-a-billion, a billion, maybe more. People like the Casements hide what they’re worth. Not to dodge taxes, but just because they think it’s vulgar to let anyone know. I’d be the same,” he said with a grin.
“So one of the Bruna sisters did all right for herself?”
“All three of them have. She’s just done better than the others.”
They came out into the sunlight; the earlier clouds had disappeared. Three or four smokers, the new lepers, stood near the entrance, snatching a few puffs of cancer before they went back to their non-smoking offices; butts lay about them like scraps of fossilized lung. That, of course, was the impression of Malone, a non-smoker.
He paused, looking across at the lunchtime crowd moving towards the cafes along the Quay. Along the waterfront itself parents with children, tourist groups and loafers drifted with slow movements, as if responding to the harbour’s gentle tide. Buskers sang or played instruments; with the recession, busking had become a new form of self-employment. Malone remembered stories his father had told him of the Depression: Con Malone had sung in the streets, “Mother Mchree” torn limb from limb by a tuneless baritone. The Good Old Days: they were coming back, dark as ever. But at least here the sun shone, nobody starved, there was music instead of machine-gun fire. Europe was crumbling, Russia was falling apart, the Serbs and the Croats and the Muslims of Bosnia were making their own hell.
Malone crossed the road, Clements hurrying to catch up with him, and dropped a dollar in the violin-case of a young girl playing some country-and-western number. He looked at Clements, who reluctantly took out a fifty-cent piece and dropped it in the violin-case. “I hate that sorta music,” he said as they walked away. “Where do we go from here?”
“I’m having lunch first. Or luncheon. Over a meat pie, you can tell me whether you think someone in the family killed young Sweden. Or had him killed.”
“And what about Frank Minto and the stiff stolen from the morgue?”
“You’ve just spoiled lunch.”
III
At Casement & Co., Stockbrokers, the general manager was not available. “He’s up at the Futures Exchange, that’s in Grosvenor Street.”
“Did you know Rob Sweden?” said Malone.
The pretty girl, an Indian, behind the reception desk closed her big dark eyes for a moment, opened them again, then nodded. “We’re all—” She gestured with a graceful hand, looked for a moment as if she might weep. Then she recovered: “Yes, I knew him.”
“Did you ever meet him outside the office?”
“You mean, did I go out with him?” Her father had been a Bombay lawyer; but she was more direct. Circumlocution never got you anywhere with Australians, they didn’t understand the uses of it. “No, he never went out with any of the girls from the office. He was—discreet?—that way. He always treated us politely. No, you know, harassment.”
“A gentleman?”
“Oh yes. They’re scarce today.” She sounded as if she might show them her bruises.
“Not amongst us older types,” said Malone, thanked her and he and Clements left.
The Futures Exchange was hidden behind the facade of a building that belonged to another age, when a future had no value to anyone but the person whose dream it was. The building had been gutted and turned into a temple owned and run by the money-changers: Jesus Christ would never have got past the security guards at the entrance.
Malone and Clements, being police and not messiahs, were admitted. They found Jim Ondelli, Casement’s general manager, in the ten-year-bond pit. He was in his early forties, thin-faced and curly-haired, his trader’s vest of purple-and-pink stripes worn over what looked to Malone like a very expensive shirt. He handed his clipboard to a younger man, a mere boy, and came towards Malone and Clements.
“You’re from the police? They rang me from the office.”
Malone introduced himself and Clements. “Is this a good time to talk?”
“Oh sure, no worries. The bond market, especially the ten-year-one, is pretty slack at the moment, everyone’s waiting to see what the Japanese are going to do. What can I do for you? I mean about Rob Sweden. Poor bugger.”
It was like being in an aviary; or, as Clements, a chauvinist, would have described it, at a women’s luncheon party. Chatter chipped the air, shouts bounced like invisible
rubber balls. Ondelli led the two detectives under a balcony where, somehow, the noise was less overwhelming.
“Are you doing what young Sweden did?”
“Yeah. He was one of our traders, not the best but good enough. He might’ve developed, I dunno. I tried him on several of the pits, they all handle a different commodity. He wasn’t quite quick enough for the really volatile pit, say the share-index one over there.”
“Was that why you transferred him to the bank?”
“That was his own idea, not mine.”
“What would he have earned?” said Clements, a punter.
“Here? It varied. He’d have earned less at the bank. The clerks here, the young ones hoping to be traders, they’re usually on around forty thousand a year. A trader like Rob would get sixty to a hundred thousand, depending on how good he is. The „gun’ trader—that kid over there, for instance—” Ondelli pointed to the share-index pit, where a group of traders, most of them young, stood in a semi-circle facing another young man in a green-and-white jacket. “That kid is as good as anyone on the floor. He’s with—” He named one of the major banks. “He has the money to play with. When he bids, the others jump in— that’s why they’re watching him as if he’s some sort of orchestra leader. He’d be on a hundred and fifty thousand, probably plus bonuses.”
The two detectives looked at each other and Ondelli grinned. “It’s bloody obscene, is that what you’re thinking?”
In these times, yes. But all Malone said was, “We’re in the wrong game.”
Ondelli went on, “This is, in effect, no more than a gambling den, a legitimate one. It has its uses, though. It can guarantee a price for a farmer, for instance, for his produce, say six months down the track. It can protect him against a poor harvest or a glut harvest—up to a point, that is. We can do nothing about the low prices right now for wool and wheat. As for the rest of it—” He shrugged. “It’s gambling, a casino.”
“How much money passes through here each day?” Clements, the bookies’ friend, was hooked: this was one form of gambling he had never examined. It also opened up the possibility that, somewhere on this crowded, noisy floor, lay the reason for Rob Sweden’s murder.
“The transactions? We’re the ninth largest futures exchange in the world. We handle about seventy thousand transactions a day, about thirty billion dollars’ worth.”
The two detectives, feeling more poverty stricken by the moment, looked at each other again. Then Malone said, “What would the largest do?”
“That’s the Chicago Board of Trade. It does a million transactions a day. There’s also the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Between them they do just on sixty-five trillion dollars a year in contracts. That’s sixty times the value of all the shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange.”
Malone looked at Clements. “You going to leave the bookies and try your luck here? He’s the scourge of the bookies,” he explained to Ondelli.
“Can anyone make money on the side here?” asked Clements.
“You mean trade for themselves? No, that’s a no-no. The Exchange is very strict on that. Rob Sweden wouldn’t have been into that.”
“What about scams?” Ondelli frowned as if offended and Clements added, “I’m not suggesting young Sweden was in any scam. But can they work them?”
“Sure,” Ondelli admitted. “Any business where money is traded, there’s always the opportunity for a scam. Cornering the market in something, for instance. That’s been tried everywhere. The Japanese invented the first futures market, in Osaka back in 1650, and they invented the first corner about the same time.”
“What about other scams?”
Ondelli looked dubious. “I dunno whether I should be telling you all this, I’m putting a bad odour on the Exchange. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of what goes on here every day is honest trading. But there’s the exception, there always is. A futures exchange is a convenient place for laundering money, you know what I mean?”
“We know what you mean,” said Malone. “Go on.”
“Say someone wants to launder a million dollars, some drug dealer or some guy who’s wondering how he can avoid tax. He picks some trader who’s got a blind eye, gives him the million and tells him to trade in some futures that are never going to move, something like New Zealand wool futures or North American lumber. They’re not volatile, they go up or down only a few cents, but they’re nothing to get excited about. The guy leaves his money with the trader for, say, a month, three weeks. Then he comes back, says he’s decided to get out of the market. The trader writes him a cheque for a million dollars, less commission, a clean cheque, and the guy walks away with his money all nicely laundered.”
“Who polices something like that?”
“The Exchange itself. It has an audit staff, they keep an eye on everything going on. See those screens up there above each of the pits? That young girl in the middle of each pit, they’re kids virtually straight out of high school, she records every transaction that takes place in her pit. She speaks into that mike she’s wearing and the computer translates her voice into those figures you see on the screen. That information goes around the world simultaneously, to every major futures exchange—a guy in Chicago or Tokyo or London knows at once what’s happening down here in Sydney. Everything on those screens comes before the audit staff and over a week or a month they pick up any blips in what should be normal trading. They inform the trading broker in question and he has twenty-one days to reply. If he can give no satisfactory answer, he goes before a tribunal of the Exchange’s chief executive and two outside members of the board. They can fine the broker up to a quarter of a million dollars and take away his licence. At the same time he might be investigated by the Securities Commission, that’s a separate thing. They can prosecute the broker and he can get up to five years in jail. The Exchange is self-regulating, but it’s tough. Not like some of these other self-regulating bodies.”
“Has anyone been caught laundering money?”
“Not as far as I know. But that’s not to say it hasn’t happened.” He looked at them shrewdly. “You’re not telling me Rob Sweden might’ve been into something like that?”
“So far we’re not suggesting anything. Why did he transfer to the Casement bank?”
“That puzzled me. He wasn’t the banking type—he wouldn’t get the excitement in the bank’s foreign currency department that he got here. He just sprung the news on me.”
“You know he was murdered?”
There was one of those inexplicable moments when the world is suddenly silent: the noise in the pits abruptly stopped, as if everyone on the floor had heard what Malone had just said. Ondelli gave an audible gasp and his eyes almost disappeared as his thick brows came down. Then the noise started up again and his voice was only a whisper: “Murdered?”
“Yes, he was murdered before he was tossed off that balcony.”
“Jesus!” Ondelli shook his head; his curls bounced. “It’ll be the talk in the pub this evening. So does that alter the picture on Rob? Do you mean something here—” he waved a hand around him “— maybe had something to do with his death?”
“Could be,” said Malone. “Here’s my card. If a blip, as you call it, comes up on those screens in the next week or two, a scam or something that Rob Sweden might’ve been connected with, let me know.”
Malone and Clements went back to Homicide in Surry Hills. Homicide, Major Crime Squad, South Region was in a refurbished commercial building that had once been a hat factory; Sydney, the oldest of the colonies, had long ago given up trying to keep all its services in government buildings. One advantage to working in the Hat Factory was that big heads from Administration rarely ventured there.
Malone rang Lisa to see if he was still in the doghouse. Her voice was cool: Tom says he understands, there’s duty and all that.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s in his room listening to the radio. They’re playing that Ice-T song about killing cops
. He’s dancing to it, seems to be enjoying himself.”
He sighed. “You should’ve married someone on the dole, they’re home all the time.”
“Oh, now we’ve joined the New Right, have we?”
“I dunno why, but I still love you.”
But when he hung up he knew he had been forgiven; seventeen years of marriage had inured Lisa to the vagaries of a cop’s wife’s life. The children sometimes had trouble adjusting to his abrupt coming and going, the broken promises on outings; but Lisa, despite her own occasional annoyance, acted his advocate with them. He was well aware and grateful that she was the rock on which the family stood.
He called Peta Smith in to his small corner office. She came in, briskly cool but with an understated deference to him. She was twenty-nine, a year older than John Kagal, attractive without being either pretty or beautiful, with thick blonde hair cut short, a wide jaw and alert blue eyes. She always wore, no matter what the season, a suit and a blouse; she was neat. She had been with Homicide six months and had proved as efficient as any of the men; yet Malone, aware of the chauvinism amongst the majority of the men under him, was protective of her and so hindered her chances to show how good she was. He was uncertain of her feelings towards him, whether she resented his protection of her.
“Peta—” He explained that there now might be a connection between the Sweden murder and that of the missing corpse from the morgue. “The Rocks station will run the day-to-day stuff on the Sweden murder and Campsie will do the same on this feller they picked up out at Canterbury. But I want you to keep a flow chart, bringing in the bits and pieces from The Rocks and Campsie.”
She nodded. “The media are starting to ask questions—”
“Check with Russ, then you handle „em.” She got up to go, but he checked her: “Down at The Wharf, did you have a look at the service entrance to the apartments?”