Port Vila Blues w-5 Read online

  Springett cruised past, U-turned, parked the bike and waited. He had a fair idea of what the building looked like inside: windows and doors fitted with sensors and alarms; a couple of security guards patrolling the corridors; the guard on the front desk taking a while to get with the flow of the midnight-to-dawn shift, holding a half-full mug of coffee just beneath his chin, yawning in Niekirk’s face, stretching and swallowing a few times as he checked Niekirk into the warren of lockers beyond the security door, camera monitors flickering silently behind him.

  A few minutes later, Niekirk emerged without the suitcase. Springett watched him get into the taxi and pull away from the kerb. Bye bye, Niekirk, he thought, and settled back to see who would come for the money.

  But Niekirk surprised him. He steered the taxi into the Spencer Street bus terminal, which was just a block away and on the opposite side of the street. Interesting. Maybe Niekirk and the courier were working the skim.

  They were muted hours in the city, between 2 a.m. and 6.30. A couple of taxis, slow between the lights, their drivers shoulder-slumped inside, dreaming over the wheel; delivery vans stacked with the midnight print run of the Age; lone cars using Spencer Street as a conduit between west and east of the river. Dew dampened everything and Springett got cold sitting there, watching for the hand that would walk out of the U-Store, carrying a distinctive tartan suitcase.

  By 6.30 the station was starting to breathe again. Springett imagined the echoing chambers underground, the shoe snap of early commuters streaming from the trains, walking stunned and staring into the grey light above. He saw them bunch at the pedestrian crossings and choke the Bourke Street trams. A pub opened its doors to the men hawking phlegm into the gutter outside.

  A man was stacking newspapers and magazines on the footpath outside the station. Springett saw him stand a box on its side, wrap himself in a blanket, and sit there morosely, scarcely acknowledging the commuters who bought their morning papers and pressed money into his hand, held palm up like a dead creature. But the man did have a styrofoam cup in his other hand and steam was rising from it and Springett felt a hollowness in his gut.

  He was curious to see a parking officer rap on the window of Niekirk’s car. She exchanged words with Niekirk, all the while looking toward the rear of the car. An interstate coach was heaving off Spencer Street and into the parking station, road-grimed, snarling, top-heavy with surly, fatigued passengers. Then exhaust smoke from another big motor shot into the air and an airport transit bus rattled into life. The terminal was waking up and Niekirk was getting in the way.

  Springett watched Niekirk head the taxi toward the street. He grinned to himself. Niekirk didn’t want to miss connecting with the courier, but at the same time he didn’t want a ticket for parking illegally. A ticket started a paper trail, placing a driver and a vehicle at a particular place at a particular time.

  Springett saw him judge a break in the traffic, swing onto Spencer Street and head two blocks away from the station, to an unoccupied parking meter diagonally opposite the U-Store. He reversed in, shunted a few times until the car was angled for a quick exit, and settled back to wait again.

  It was 7 a.m. Springett was buffeted as a number of big trucks gusted past him. It was a convoy, cranes, boilers and massive preformed cement slabs and pipes heading for a building site somewhere across the city. They filled the air and Springett might not have seen the tartan suitcase knocking against a blue-uniformed knee if he hadn’t trained himself in twenty years to ignore the things that had nothing to do with the job.

  Fortunately the lights changed and the crosstown traffic was stalled long enough for him to watch the progress of the man carrying the tartan suitcase. He was about thirty-five, medium-sized with a forgettable, smooth-cheeked face that might never have been scraped by a razor. The only hair on his head was an inadequate scrape of brown, blending at the edges with pink skin. A pilot or a cabin steward, Springett guessed, judging by the blue peaked cap under the man’s other arm.

  That made sense, if the money was going straight to De Lisle in Sydney. It was easy for flight crews to avoid baggage checks, and no one questioned their right to be in an airport or on a plane.

  The man walked back along the footpath opposite Niekirk. Springett watched, expecting him to make contact with Niekirk, but he darted across the street and boarded the airport transit bus.

  That made sense, too. The courier wouldn’t risk using his own car for this job, and he wouldn’t risk letting a taxi driver log the journey, one fact among the many that map who we are, where we’ve been, that can be used against us one day. The driver of the transit bus, driving this route many times a week, wouldn’t remember the courier.

  It all helped to give Springett a better fix on De Lisle, a man who ensured that everyone who worked for him took pains and covered himself and muddied any trail that might lead back to the top. Which probably explained why Niekirk had stopped behind to see who was coming for the money. Working on a need-to-know basis didn’t suit Springett, either. Knowledge was power.

  But now Springett knew that he was no closer to knowing who might have pocketed the Tiffany brooch after the Brighton bank job in February. Time for a bit of push and shove. Niekirk was staying at a motel in St Kilda. He’ll keep, Springett thought. First I need to know from Lillecrapp if Riggs and Mansell pulled anything after they left Niekirk in the car yard.

  ****

  Six

  After leaving Niekirk and the money, Riggs and Mansell had driven north, Mansell winding the Range Rover through farming land beyond the hills of the Yarra Valley, Riggs hunting through the FM bands on the radio, filling the vehicle with gulps of sound. Where 3UY should have been there was nothing, only a faint scratching. He switched off and settled back in his seat. ‘Done the locals a favour tonight, no more golden oldies.’

  Mansell slowed for a hairpin bend. ‘What’d you do to him?’

  ‘Clobbered him, tied him to his chair.’

  Mansell shook his head. ‘Jesus, Riggsy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It looks bad. It’s the sort of thing that gets the local boys bent out of shape.’

  Riggs could feel anger rising in him. ‘You weren’t there, pal. He was going for the microphone.’

  ‘What if you’d killed him?’

  ‘That crap he was playing,’ Riggs replied, ‘I should’ve finished the job.’

  Despite himself, Mansell sniggered. He said what Niekirk was always telling them, mimicking Niekirk’s flat tones: ‘Quick, clean, that’s our trademark. We appear out of nowhere, pull the job, disappear without a trace.’

  Riggs laughed harshly. ‘Niekirk, writing headlines in his head.’

  Mansell said soberly, ‘If he falls, we fall with him, and for blokes like us that’s a bloody long drop.’

  Riggs snaked his hand out, clamping his fingers around Mansell’s lower jaw. ‘But it’s not going to happen, is it, old son? Eh? It’s not going to happen.’

  He stared at the side of Mansell’s head. After a while he released him. Mansell jerked away, hunching his shoulders. For the next hour, neither man spoke. Riggs gazed sourly out at the blackness beyond the shapes at the road’s edge and Mansell concentrated on throwing the Range Rover through the switchback curves of the road.

  They had far to go. The airport was closed for the night and they knew that morning flights, and bus and train departures, could be monitored. The best option they had was to drive-not all the way back to Sydney but as far as Benalla. Here they would dump the Range Rover, change into casual clothes and catch a coach to Sydney. ‘No jobs on our own turf,’ as Niekirk put it. Mansell could see the sense in that. Three times now they’d slipped down into Victoria, robbed a bank, slipped back again, netting themselves $25,000 each time. He only wished he felt free to pick and choose, come and go, like your average holdup man.

  They drove for three hours in silence. Mansell broke it first. They were far north now, the Hume Highway stretching across the sodden plain
s of central Victoria. Feeling he could relax a little, he said: ‘What do you make of Niekirk?’

  Riggs stirred in his seat. ‘Arsehole.’

  Mansell grunted his assent. ‘What do you think he does with the stuff?’

  ‘Spends it for all I know.’

  ‘Come on, be serious. Someone’s behind him, right?’

  ‘Like a cracked record, this conversation. We get paid.’

  ‘Yeah, twenty-five grand a job. Not much considering the risks involved. You can bet Niekirk’s getting more.’

  They lapsed into silence again. There were a couple of traffic lights in Benalla, an oddly comforting sign of civilisation after the high country where Ned Kelly had once ranged and stolen horses and eluded the troopers.

  Mansell parked the Range Rover behind a block of flats in a side street and they changed into casual clothing. The street lights were far apart. There were no clouds this far north. The river had flooded and receded again a few weeks earlier, leaving the little city mud-smeared and damp, smelling of wet carpets and rotting, fecund spring weed growth. Mosquitoes attacked them.

  They set out along the broad, flat back streets. “The thing is, Manse,’ Riggs said, ‘where’s he getting his information? Shit, this time last year all Niekirk had us pulling was the odd burglary.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Mansell flung back over his shoulder, ‘how much are we dipping out?’

  Riggs nodded. ‘That, too.’

  They continued in silence. When they reached the lighted part of town they watched for a while from the shadows. No uniforms, no patrol cars, no unmarked cars bristling with aerials. When the bus pulled in, thirty minutes later, Riggs and Mansell were stationed several metres apart and could have been mistaken for strangers.

  ****

  Seven

  Wyatt looked at his watch: she was early. He made room for her on the bench.

  She sat, shifted a little, looking for an opening. Finally she said: ‘I spoke to Frank on the phone. He sounded stronger.’

  Wyatt nodded. But he had to make an effort, so he said, ‘Liz, I want to thank you for helping him yesterday.’

  ‘It was nothing.’ She said it mildly, looking away at the river.

  They talked, growing easier with one another. Most people couldn’t read Wyatt and it rattled some of them. There were others, like Jardine from the old days, who had long since adjusted themselves to the fact of his stillness. To them, Wyatt was constructed of silence, a single unadorned look for all emotions and a suspicious mind. But he could be trusted, so they accepted that it was not necessary to know anything more about him. Along the way Wyatt had also run into some who found his self-containment an affront and a challenge. Men got cocksure and women tried to draw him out. Wyatt would do nothing to encourage it, but he might show a faint irritation finally, and act swiftly, irritated because he could not see the point of anyone’s interest in him.

  That’s why he began to experience a forgotten pleasure, the uncomplicated company of a quirkily attractive woman, as the sun warmed his bones and broke into shards of light on the river behind a cruising pleasure boat. Liz Redding wasn’t questioning him, wasn’t wanting to know him better, wasn’t playing any games that he could detect. He relaxed marginally, crossed his legs at the ankle, tipped his face to the sun.

  They were on Southbank, the stretch of the Yarra that had been reclaimed from the old industrial grime for the sake of tourists and postcard photographers. A bike path, plenty of close-cropped grass, flagpoles, cafйs, Cinzano umbrellas, the Melbourne central mile growling across the water.

  Wyatt was starting to like the sun and the view and the company of the woman next to him, but he also liked the fact that he had all the exits he’d need if this were a trap. He could even swim away if he had to, and he’d toss the Tiffany butterfly into the river rather than allow cops to tie him to it.

  ‘No motel this time?’

  ‘I don’t like to repeat myself,’ Wyatt said, then clammed up a little, not wanting to talk about himself, not wanting to sound self-satisfied.

  Liz Redding smiled. It wasn’t an issue. He saw her look away. Her eyes were drawn to the river as if it were a flame. His, too, though he was also drawn to Liz Redding, an unaccustomed fascination with her body and quizzical face. And he seemed to want to breathe her in, as if her skin and hair were reacting to the sun, maybe even to him.

  She said, ‘Have you got it?’

  Wyatt had a small gift box nestled in tissue paper on the bench between them. He was conscious of her long thigh, sheathed in a skirt this time, as he leaned to open the box. She seemed to watch his hands, big hands snarled by veins, as he prised off the lid. To anyone walking by, he might have been opening a gift from his lover.

  He watched her. He would not have registered the brief intensity and concentration that passed across her face if he’d not been looking for it. ‘Lovely,’ she murmured at last.

  But that wasn’t it, the loveliness of the brooch. She hadn’t responded like this yesterday. There was something else, and he’d have to wait for it.

  She glanced left and right along the bicycle path and then behind her. They were alone for the moment. He saw her move the Tiffany to her lap and turn it over twice. Then she checked the path a second time, put her jeweller’s eyepiece to her right eye and bent her head over it. Wings of straight black hair swung about her cheeks, concealing her scrutiny of the diamonds. The movement also bared the back of her neck and Wyatt found himself touching her there.

  She took it for a warning. Within a second she had whipped out the eyepiece and crammed it and the Tiffany into the gift box. She turned to him, smiling, getting close, part of a charade of lovers on a park bench. But Wyatt went tense at her touch so she looked around, saw that they were alone, and moved until she was a fraction apart from him again. She looked at him oddly, and Wyatt shrugged, to give himself time and something to do.

  In the end, she behaved as though nothing had happened. Wyatt felt his edge of embarrassment recede. Suddenly the world seemed to be full of possibilities. But he said nothing, did nothing.

  Liz Redding drew in air. ‘We won’t be cutting this up, by the way. It’ll remain intact.’

  Good. She’d found a buyer. Wyatt wondered if he wanted her because she was like him or because he wanted her to be like him. The moment he met someone, he could spot the flaw in them, which was often the same thing as the trait that defined them. It was a blessing and a curse and had rarely let him down. Beneath the professionalism, Liz Redding was excited by the Tiffany and all the risks involved, his risks and hers.

  Some kids went by arm in arm bawling out: ‘Rolling, rolling, rolling down the river.’ The year Wyatt had served in Vietnam, refining skills he’d learned on the street, every American GI he’d encountered had been singing that song. The Americans had terrified him. They blundered across the landscape, doped to the eyeballs, inviting an ambush. Wyatt made it a rule to stay well clear of them. The only good thing about the dope was that they all seemed to use it, including security guards at the US bases, and it made them slack and careless. Wyatt had snatched his first payroll in Vietnam. It bought him a year’s travelling in Europe when he finally quit the army.

  Then Liz Redding said, half to herself, ‘Yep. This is the one. I’d been wondering when this little beauty would show up again.’

  At once Wyatt went cold. His face was mostly flat cheeks, bones, unimpressed eyes and a mouth that could look prohibitive if it didn’t occasionally turn up in a smile. There was no smile now and he saw her flinch. His voice was tense and quiet: ‘Turn up? I’ve only just acquired it.’

  ‘I mean-’

  Wyatt was hard and certain. He made each word sound like a slap. ‘You mean the Tiffany’s got a history. When you saw it yesterday you recognised its description from a stolen valuables list.’

  She winced, angry with herself. Wyatt had seen women cure themselves of him quickly, and expected that of Liz Redding now that he’d caught her out, but
she didn’t do that. Instead, a certain defiance came back into her face. ‘So what? I assumed you’d been hanging onto it, that’s all.’

  ‘I haven’t, so tell me about it.’

  She cocked her head and watched his face carefully. ‘Are you on the level? You only just got your hands on it?’

  ‘Just give me the history.’

  ‘You’ve heard of the so-called magnetic drill gang, right? Some time ago they hit the safety-deposit boxes of a bank in Brighton. The Tiffany was among the stuff reported stolen.’

  That was an irrelevancy. Wyatt brushed it aside. ‘The thing is, how do you know?’ He stared at her. ‘You’re no fence.’

  He stood, pocketing the Tiffany, and began to walk away from her, not hurrying it, but not wasting time either. His nerve endings were wide open, expecting clamping hands on his shoulders, his arms, but no one called out or stopped him. In a minute or two he would be an anonymous face in the crowd and a minute or two was all Wyatt ever needed.

  Then she was swiftly and silently matching him step for step. ‘There’s a reward.’

  He walked on. ‘Forget you ever met me.’ He said it quietly, not bothering to look at her.

  ‘I mean it, Wyatt, there’s a reward. That’s my job, I negotiate rewards on behalf of the insurance company, okay?’

  She grabbed his arm angrily, jerking him to a stop. ‘Twenty-five thousand, all right? No questions asked. But it will take a couple of weeks to line up.’

  Wyatt considered the odds. It takes a very heavy, very professional team to hit the safety-deposit boxes of a bank successfully. Who were they? And who had given-or sold-the Tiffany to Cassandra Wintergreen, the woman he’d stolen it from? Wyatt felt that he was on the edge of something better left alone, a sixth sense he relied upon to keep the odds working his way, but Liz Redding was also very close and alive in front of him. If he set the rules he would be all right. He stayed long enough to tell her how to get in touch with him, then faded away among the strollers thronging Princes Bridge.