Autumn Maze

by Jon Cleary

  “Inspector—” He was having difficulty getting his words together. “How much of what I tell you goes into your report?”

  “That depends.” Malone was as cautious as any banker approached for a loan; or as cautious as a banker should be. The city’s banks were riddled with executives who had shown no judgement. But Casement Trust had never figured in the bad news of the boom time. “Tell us what you have to say. No notes, Russ,” he said to Clements, who had his biro at the ready. “Not yet.”

  “The police make deals with criminals, I understand,” said Casement. “It’s happening right now in ICAC.”

  “Are you a criminal?”

  “God, what a question!” Ophelia reached across the desk towards the silver paperweight; then thought better of whatever she had in mind. “My husband is trying to help you, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Go ahead, Mr. Casement. We could do with some help.”

  Casement heaved a sigh; it seemed to come from his toes, it took so long. As chairman he had never had to deliver a report like this: “Kunishima bought into Casement Trust just over two years ago, when money was still flowing out of Japan. They had the necessary government approval, but we didn’t make any public announcement—we’re a privately owned bank. And two years ago there was so much going on in the headlines, the newspapers took no notice of us. We’ve always worked on the principle that what is our business is nobody else’s business.”

  “Get to the point, darling.” Ophelia was leaning forward, pressed against the desk. She was more on edge than her husband, who now appeared listlessly resigned.

  Casement glanced at her with irritation, but made no comment. Instead he looked back at Malone and said, “We had checked on Kunishima, naturally, the usual due diligence. They were a new bank, they’d been going on only eight years, but their capital was solid and so was their reputation. We were not diligent enough, it turned out. We never traced their capital back to its source. Kunishima Bank is owned by one of Tokyo’s yakuza gangs. In other words, the yakuza own twenty-five per cent of Casement Trust.”

  The confession exhausted him. He put out a hand for the glass and jug of water on the silver tray behind him, but seemed unable to raise himself to reach it. Ophelia poured him a glass of water, handed it to him and stroked his arm. Her concern for him was genuine, not an act put on for the two detectives.

  “Are Kushida and Isogai yakuza men?”

  “You mean are they gangsters? I don’t know.” Casement sat up, tried to re-gather some strength. “Obviously they are employed by the yakuza. But they are bankers, they understand the business.”

  “Why are they here?”

  “Ostensibly for the bankers’ convention that starts tomorrow. Tonight, actually—there’s a cocktail reception. The real reason is the twenty-five million. The yakuza, it seems, don’t like that much money being stolen from it.”

  “Did the yakuza kill Rob Sweden and Terry Kornsey?”

  Casement again put on his glasses, took his time about setting them straight, as if they were a new pair. “I wouldn’t know. We only talked about banking matters. Including the stolen money, of course.”

  “They know where the money is?”

  Casement nodded. “In Hong Kong, they say it’s still there. They’re applying pressure on Shahriver International.”

  Malone looked at Clements. “I’d enjoy watching that . . . Do you think the money will be returned?”

  “I think so. The yakuza seems to have more influence than any bank or even the banking system.” Casement’s cynicism sounded more despairing than weary.

  “We didn’t ask you the other night—” The omission had not been deliberate. This case had more questions than he could remember in any other investigation; his mind was like a too-full sack, questions were lost in the corners of it. “Did you know before Rob Sweden was murdered that he was the thief? I mean, did you personally know?”

  “No.” The answer was direct, but Malone did not miss the stiffening of Casement’s arm under his wife’s hand.

  “Did you know about Terry Kornsey?”

  “I’d never heard of him.”

  “Have your yakuza friends told you anything about him?”

  “That’s going too far!” Casement jerked his arm from under Ophelia’s grasp, sat up straight, leaned forward aggressively.

  “What else would you call them, Mr. Casement? Business associates? Acquaintances? Your yakuza acquaintances, have they told you anything about Mr. Kornsey?”

  The battle lines faced each other across the desk. Then Ophelia said, “You’ll be off this case by this evening, Inspector, I promise you. We’ve had more than enough!”

  Rain suddenly beat against the window, like soft bullets.

  III

  “No,” said Derek Sweden.

  They were at lunch, the three Bruna sisters and their husbands. It was a monthly ritual, something that Sweden only attended because of his devotion to Rosalind. Each of the sisters took it in turn to be hostess; this month it was Rosalind’s turn. He had waited for her to suggest that it be cancelled; it was too soon after Rob’s burial. But she hadn’t and when he had broached the idea, she had said no.

  “No, my darling. I believe in routine, that it keeps one’s life together. I’m no gypsy, like „Phelia and Julie—” He had once, only half in jest, called all Roumanians gypsies; she had taken him seriously, which in a voter is sufferable but not in a wife. “We go on with our life as before. I know how much you miss Rob—”

  “I don’t,” he said truthfully, surprised that it was the truth. “I will, in time, I suppose. We never loved each other, not the way a father and son are supposed to. Not the way you love Adam,” he said flatteringly, though Adam Bruna gave him a pain in the arse. “Or he loves you. No, what I hate, what kills me, is the way he died. Jesus, no parent expects his kid to be murdered! Murdered and then thrown—like the cops said, tossed—off our balcony! Christ, every morning I get up, since that night, I pull back the curtains in our bedroom and there’s the balcony . . .”

  “We’ll move into one of the other bedrooms—”

  “Which one? The police say he was actually killed in the second bedroom. Maybe it all started in one of the other bedrooms, in the living room—who fucking knows?”

  She had walked round behind him, put her arms round his neck as he sat in his chair in the study. “My darling, do you want to move out of here?”

  He stroked her arm absently. “You’d hate that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll stay.” He lifted his face, kissed her as she bent her head. “Okay, we’ll have the lunch. We’ll stick to routine.”

  And now halfway through the luncheon, served by the temporary cook Rosalind had found to replace the missing Luisa, Ophelia had asked him to have Inspector Malone and Sergeant Clements taken off the investigation. “No,” he said emphatically. “I can’t do that. I’ve been a Minister of three other departments and I’ve been able to interfere—Ministers do that, if they’re doing their job properly. But not with the Police—you interfere there and you’re up against a culture you can’t beat, you can’t win. You pull your head in and you work with your Commissioner and the Deputy Commissioner and the seven Assistant Commissioners and you get along, you get things done. Bill Zanuch tells me Malone is the best man in Homicide and if anyone is going to find out who murdered Rob it’ll be him. And I’m sure you, and all of you here, are like me—you want to find out who killed him. So, no. Malone stays, I won’t interfere.” He looked down the table at Cormac Casement. “You agree, Cormac?”

  “Of course,” said the older man, intent on his food.

  “You haven’t asked me,” said Jack Aldwych Junior, “but I agree with you. Dad thinks Malone is tops.”

  “He’d know,” said Juliet, but said it sweetly.

  “But he’s hounding Cormac!” Ophelia had pushed her plate away untouched.

  “Is he, old chap?” said Sweden. “Hounding you? I can
have that stopped.”

  “No, let it lie. I think things are coming to a head.”

  “Tell us!” Juliet leaned forward. “What are luncheons for, except gossip?”

  “Easy, love,” said Jack Junior. “This is too serious for gossip.”

  Sweden looked at the younger man. He had not made up his mind about Jack Junior; perhaps there was more shrewdness there than he suspected. Or perhaps it came of comparing him to his old man, which was unfair. He had the sudden crazy thought that, when it came to Hans Vanderberg and his threat, he should turn to Jack Senior for advice.

  “Nothing will come to a head,” he said, “till we find out who murdered Rob.”

  “And the others?” said Rosalind, who kept count.

  Sweden nodded almost absently. “Yes, and the others.”

  “Let’s hope there are not still more,” said Casement, thinking of the phone call he had received just before coming to the luncheon.

  IV

  “We shall have to eliminate him,” said Tajiri. “He is weakening. If the police keep coming back to him, he is going to tell them too much.”

  “If he hasn’t already told them too much,” said Belgarda. “How did he sound when you called?”

  “Upset. He said something about conscience, but I didn’t catch it and he wouldn’t repeat it.”

  They were speaking English because neither knew anything of the other’s language. They were in the living room of the house Tajiri had rented on a short-term lease in a quiet street in Roseville. The Japanese community in Sydney lived mostly on the North Shore because of the proximity of the school for Japanese children in Terrey Hills; another Japanese man, even one without a family, moving into the neighbourhood would not cause comment amongst the native residents. Of course, were it known that he was a member of the yakuza, he would have been asked, as with any of the native crims, to move south of the harbour, where tolerance was looser.

  “I want to go home,” said Teresita Romero in Spanish.

  Tajiri did not like women, though he was not homosexual. He was a man of strong prejudices, of contradictions, too; but most of the time he managed to keep both under control. He had not been born into a life of crime; his father, a hardware merchant in Osaka, had been primly honest. Wanting a son who would sell more than nuts and bolts, he had sent him to Tokyo University to study economics and perhaps get a job for life with Mitsubishi or Nomura Securities. But at university Kenji Tajiri had discovered that honesty might be the best policy but was not always the best-paying proposition. He knew that in the Japanese social system one had to climb the ladder a rung at a time, a lengthy ascent that did not appeal to him. He was young and ambitious and he had looked around for a milieu that would appreciate his talents. Crime is a profession in which, like all systems, there are ladders; but on its ladders not all rungs have to be climbed. Tajiri joined the yakuza, after arranging a proper invitation.

  He liked the companionship of men, but his intelligence and education had taken him out of the gang environment, out of the bath-house camaraderie, and left him high and dry and lonely, a treasured tool of the bosses. Unlike some of his yakuza brethren, he had never developed a samurai mentality. He had read the Hagakure, but had never thought much of that bible’s precepts. He had never seen any dignity in “clenched teeth and flashing eyes.” He did not believe that it was wrong to have strong personal convictions. He did not have a strong belief that death was preferable to dishonour. He did, however, believe that murder was often necessary; so long as someone else committed the murder. But he had not been happy when his bosses in Tokyo, sensing a growing mess in their investment here in Australia, had sent him out to clear it up. Too often left to work alone, his grasp was slipping on that staff of the Japanese male, loyalty. He had only one tattoo on his body, a pair of clasped hands on his chest, and even that, it seemed to him, was beginning to fade.

  He had arrived in Sydney after Lava Investments had already been established in its offices. By then it was known that there was a leak between Casement Trust and Kunishima Bank; driblets had been transferred to Hong Kong, testing the water, as it were. It had taken Tajiri some weeks to discover the mastermind behind the scheme; it had not taken much effort to mark Rob Sweden and then trace back to his control, Terry Kornsey. After that, the task had been turned over to Belgarda. The man was a natural-born killer.

  “I want to go home,” Teresita repeated.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she wants to go home,” said Belgarda. “To Manila, she means.”

  Tajiri, too, wanted to go home, to the small apartment in Akasaka, where he wore a mask of respectability that the other tenants in the building accepted. But it would be a weakness to confess that he was homesick, even though every day here in Sydney amongst the barbarians was a small purgatory, a Christian concept he had read about and which he now understood, here amongst the so-called Christians.

  He had rented this house for a month from a Japanese family which had gone home on leave. It was furnished Australian style, with wall-to-wall carpet, heavy chairs and a couch that smelled of dog, and dark-flowered wallpaper; his countryman had explained, apologetically, that the owners were an elderly couple who had built and furnished the house right after World War Two—“when, as they explained to me, we were still enemies,” his countryman had further explained. “You will find that Australians think they are diplomatic.”

  Whatever pictures had been on the walls had been removed and been replaced by classical prints by Sanraku and others. Around the prints were the oblong patches on the wallpaper where the owners’ pictures had hung, like a ghostly reprimand for having interfered with the local atmosphere. Tajiri, a meticulous man, wondered why his countryman had not bought frames large enough to cover the patches.

  “Is she afraid?”

  Belgarda looked at Teresita. He had shaved off his moustache and, thought Teresita, looked weak and not as handsome. She had come to Sydney as the bride of a local ocker, a term she had not understood until she had had to live with it. When she had met Jaime Belgarda at a Spanish club she had immediately left her gross, vulgar, beer-swilling husband and moved in with him, soon becoming the secretary at Lava Investments, a job that required no qualifications other than to look pretty and ask no questions. Her husband had come looking for her, but Belgarda, without arguing with him, had killed him with a knife. It had shocked her to see that Jaime could kill without compunction, but by then she had been in love with him.

  “Are you afraid?” Belgarda said now, and in Spanish.

  “Speak English!” snapped Tajiri.

  “I asked her if she is afraid. Are you?”

  Teresita shook her head, too afraid now to say yes. Home, the bar in Ermita where the Aussie ocker had found her, all at once looked appealing. “No, just homesick.”

  Belgarda nodded and smiled at her. He did not love her, but he always treated her gently; when he eventually tired of her, as he would, he would not get rid of her by killing her. His own mother, Lily, had been a bar-girl, not in Ermita but out by Subic Bay. He had inherited his politeness from her. She had invariably been polite, even when on her back or in a dozen other positions; she had re-written the Kama Sutra according to Emily Post. The sailors from Subic Bay, being American and naturally polite, had flocked to her for instruction. With the money she earned she had sent her son to university to study medicine. He had lasted one semester, being expelled when he had threatened a professor with a scalpel when he had been disturbed in bed with the professor’s wife.

  Armed with a little medical knowledge and faked papers, he had then been taken on as an assistant at the morgue in Makati in Manila. He had left there after a year, seeing no future amongst the dead. He had then started as a salesman for Pinatubo Engineering. He had soon established himself as a successful salesman: in a land where bribery, under President Marcos, was endemic, he had become a specialist in the greased palm. Two years ago he had been transferred to Sydney to take charg
e of Pinatubo’s Australian operations. Six months ago his Manila boss, on a visit to Sydney, his tongue loosened by the local shiraz, had told him that Pinatubo was owned and controlled by the yakuza. The information had not frightened him: he was supremely confident that, no matter who his bosses were, he was his own man. When Tajiri had arrived and told him some murder might be necessary, he had laid down only one condition: that he be paid more. Tajiri had agreed without reference to Tokyo. Against the missing twenty-five million dollars, a few thousand dollars in blood money was only petty cash.

  “Just homesick,” said Teresita.

  Tajiri gave her a smile, a concession. “So am I. I think we can all go home soon. But first, we have to get rid of Mr. Casement.”

  “How do we do it?” asked Belgarda, the journeyman killer. “When?”

  “As soon as possible. Could you kill him in a crowd?”

  Teresita sat staring at the wallpaper, shutting her ears against the men’s voices. She had been here at the house for four days and only now did she remark that the flowers on the wallpaper were lilies, the flowers of death.

  15

  I

  “JACK, DO it as a favour,” said Malone.

  “Scobie, I’ve never pointed the finger at anyone in my life. I wanted something done, I did it m’self or had someone do it for me.”

  “Jack, you’re retired. You keep telling me. All I want you to do is come to this cocktail reception this evening at the Congress and, if he’s there, pick out Tajiri for me. We’ll do the rest.”

  “I’m no banker, they’ll never let me in—”

  “Jack, you look like the governor of the Reserve Bank. You’ve got it all—the three-piece suit, the silver hair, the look of knowing all the answers that the rest of us don’t. Come on, Jack. You owe me.”

  “Owe you? What for?”

  “I’ve never pinched you, have I?”

  Aldwych laughed. “Okay, you win. I’ll be there, I’ll come with Jack Junior and the daughter-in-law. They’ve been invited, all the clan. I gather Ophelia arranged it, never misses a social occasion. Will you be there? How’re you gunna pass as a banker?”