Port Vila Blues Page 9

  The man reading the Hobart Mercury in the barber’s chair wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a fat paisley tie tugged free of the collar. He had plenty of slick black hair combed back from his forehead as if pasted there with grease. The face he turned to Wyatt was tired, worn and grubby, like his business. He recognised Wyatt and said at once: ‘Just the one item.’

  The barber climbed down from his chair and walked half-bent to a room at the rear of the shop. He came back with a large padded envelope. The address on it was a box number and the name was Carew, another name Wyatt was using at the moment.

  Wyatt handed the man twenty dollars and wordlessly left the shop. The envelope had been inexpertly prised open and sealed again. That wouldn’t have helped the barber, for Jardine had simply passed on a message from Liz Redding, but any level of curiosity on the part of the barber was intolerable and so Wyatt went back into the shop.

  The man knew and backed away, stammering, ‘Something else, mate?’

  Wyatt’s eyes locked on him dispassionately. There were several ways he might play this. The most obvious involved a degree of risk. If he were to hurt the barber, damage his property, or take back the twenty, the little man would notch up another injustice and look for a way to collect on it—the police, some minor thug mate with ambitions.

  Some sort of physical payback was what the barber expected, he was born and bred to it, so Wyatt’s stillness baffled him. Then he grew aware of Wyatt’s cold gaze. He began to splutter, close to tears: ‘I didn’t mean to. The flap was—’

  A mistake. If the barber had admitted opening the envelope and stopped there, Wyatt would have nodded and left him in the jelly of his fear. But the little man was trying for an excuse.

  Very slowly then, with chill deliberation, Wyatt raised the bony forefinger of his right hand. It was a slender, sunbrowned finger and the barber shut his mouth and stared, fascinated, as it seemed to float across the gap between them. His eyes tracked the finger. Wyatt stopped when it made contact. It was no more than a whispering brush against the tip of the man’s nose, but the effect was dramatic. The little barber seemed to spasm and smoke like a man in an electric chair.

  Wyatt left. He still hadn’t spoken, and by the time he was out of the door and crossing the street he was thinking only of the next day, meeting Liz Redding in the ranges east of Melbourne and exchanging the Tiffany for twenty-five thousand dollars cash.

  16

  This time they drove through the night, dumped the van on the outskirts of Sydney, and collected Mansell’s Toyota. They entered the fuming traffic again, the spine of the Harbour Bridge an impossible distance ahead of them.

  Mansell yawned. They’d been on the road for ten hours. He needed a shave. They both needed a wash and a change of clothing. He felt constipated and his eyes were prickly. They sat there in the creeping lanes of cars and buses, approaching the city in short, weak spurts between traffic lights.

  After a while Mansell said, ‘What are you working on at the moment?’

  ‘Me? Same old shit,’ Riggs said indifferently, as though the night behind him had never happened. ‘Solicitors milking their trust funds, bank clerks ripping off cheques. There’s this one case, a bloke sets up a dummy company, gets his mates to invest in it, promising them it’s going to merge with a bigger company, meaning the shares will rise, only it’s all bullshit and his mates lose the lot. He’s into them for five million.’

  Mansell shrugged. ‘Throw the book at him.’

  ‘Not that simple—he disappeared swimming off Palm Beach last month.’

  Mansell looked at him briefly. ‘Faked it?’

  ‘A gut feeling.’

  ‘Follow the paper trail.’

  ‘Yeah. Piece of cake.’

  For a while then they stared ahead. They were tired, their necks stiff with tension and hours of sitting. Riggs said, ‘What about you?’

  ‘Glebe doctor runs a hose from the exhaust pipe of the family car parked in the garage at the side of the house into the spare room where his wife’s sleeping—a room the size of a shoebox, the door and window easily sealed—then when she’s dead he carts her out to the car, runs a shorter hose into the car itself. Bingo. Verdict suicide.’

  ‘Will you get him?’

  ‘He left her too long on the bed. Her blood settled where it wouldn’t have settled if she’d died sitting upright, like we found her. We’re pulling him in this morning.’ He rolled his shoulders. ‘Shit I wish I’d rostered myself two days off instead of one.’

  Riggs grunted.

  They reached the harbour tunnel and the white car slipped like an oiled pellet past the slick tiles, drawn by the curving lights. Mansell tried to picture the metres of sludge above their heads, composed of mud, plastic bags, hubcaps, guns and skeletons, then metres of harbour water, all of it pressing down, down.

  The light quality began to alter and the car climbed toward the sunlight. The sun was weak in the grey sky but Mansell was glad to see it. He took the North Sydney exit, winding automatically through the little streets. They had nothing to say to each other.

  Until Riggs stiffened in the seat next to him. ‘Did you see that? Pull over, back up. Something’s going down in that side street.’

  ‘Riggsy—’

  ‘Just do it. There’s a punk down there about to get the shock of his life.’

  17

  ‘The weather in Sydney today will be fair and mild, light winds, with an expected top of twenty degrees. All you peak-hour crawlers out there in radio land, stay tuned for today’s Rego Reward. If your plates are announced, you could win one thousand dollars.’

  Baker stayed tuned, but they didn’t call his rego number so he slid in a cassette of Jimmy Barnes and lit a smoke. Then he took his foot off the brake, moved one car length along with everyone else, braked again. Judging by the scream-scrape whenever he braked, it was metal against metal on all four wheels. Still, it wasn’t his car. The cow had a job—let her fix her own car. He helped in plenty of other ways.

  Baker twisted around on the collapsed springs of the driver’s seat. The brat was standing on the back seat, bumping his skinny rear against the torn vinyl of the seat upright, the same movement over and over again. Mouth open, shoelaces already trailing, vacant look on his pinched face. Baker’s arm, thick and gingery, shot out and grabbed a pitiful wrist. Skin and bone. ‘What’d I tell you? Eh? What’d I tell you?’

  The brat seemed to wake out of a trance, showing confusion and fear. He stopped the bumping motion but wouldn’t look at Baker.

  ‘Fucking can’t keep still. I told you. What’d I say?’

  Troy wouldn’t meet his gaze, just looked down at the UDL cans, parking infringement notices and McDonalds cartons on the seat and the floor. The cow was on early shift this week, so Baker had had to dress the brat himself: jeans, skivvy to hide a couple of fresh bruises, cornflaked windcheater, runners that wouldn’t stay tied. Baker stabbed a finger into the boy’s collarbone. He did it again. He hated the way the kid’s face would just shut him out. Never any gratitude, never acknowledgement of any kind. Like his flaming mother that way. Seven years old and Troy screened Baker out of his life as though Baker didn’t exist, was no part of the family at all.

  Then the cars moved again and Baker turned back to the wheel. Why couldn’t the brat walk to school? He’d done that at that age. Hadn’t hurt him either. No geezer ever tried to snatch him off the footpath and play with his dick, and he’d grown up knowing how to look after himself. But oh no, not our precious Troysie Woysie.

  Baker wondered who the father was. He bet Carol didn’t even know herself. Claimed he was an American naval officer, but that was more of her bullshit. Liked to say how she’d struggled for seven years, not easy bringing up a kid by yourself, blah, blah, blah. Which meant that Baker had a dream run when he first showed on the scene. She was starved for sex, just crying for it.

  Now the rot was setting in. Wanted to know his job history, like she was his fucking
dole officer or something. Kept looking in the employment pages, circling jobs for him in red biro. Told him it wouldn’t hurt to get out there and look, no job was going to come knocking on the door. Just lately she’d get pissed off over little things, like if he hadn’t cleared up or done any shopping by the time she got home. And she was really getting on his back about his addiction, as she called it, to dope and booze. Said he had a problem. Said he was getting worse, more unpredictable, his fuse shorter. Fucking bitch. Baker’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, as he thought of her scrawny neck.

  He turned around. ‘Fucking keep still, will ya?’

  Turned back to the wheel again. She was starting to get prune-mouthed about the brat, too. It was okay at first, told him she knew Troy could be a handful, encouraged him to use a bit of discipline, but now she’d turned a hundred and eighty degrees and last weekend she’d ordered Baker into the bathroom and pointed a quivering finger at the brat: ‘Those marks weren’t there yesterday, he’s my son and I’ll deal with him,’ etcetera, etcetera.

  The traffic was stalled again. Baker cranked down his window, letting in a blast of Sydney traffic fumes. It cleared his head but he badly needed a hit of something, speed for preference. He could try that bloke in the side bar of the Edinburgh Castle; he was generally holding.

  That’s if Carol had put forty bucks in the kitty, like she’d promised. He’d check when he got home.

  Which would mean doing the shopping at some no-frills supermarket, generic tins of spaghetti and meat sauce for dinner, and another tirade when she got off work this arvo.

  Baker flicked the turning indicator as he approached the next set of lights, signalling a left turn. He had to hold the lever in place or it would jump out. He couldn’t actually hear the ticking sound so he had no way of knowing if the thing was working or not. Just another item in the list of little helpful things Carol thought he might get around to doing for her one day, along with taking Troy to school all this week.

  Something made Baker glance in the rear-view mirror. Some bitch in a Volvo was behind him, flashing her headlights. She had a pointing finger pressed to her windscreen and she was mouthing things at him.

  ‘So, the turning light doesn’t work,’ he muttered. ‘So fucking what?’

  Still she kept shaking her finger at him. ‘Well, what?’ Baker said, talking to her image in his mirror. He shrugged elaborately, lifting empty hands in the air, signalling what? to her. Fucked if he knew what she was on about. As for Troy, he’d turned around and was looking out through the rear window at the woman in the Volvo.

  ‘Hey, Troy, whyn’t you give her the old finger?’ Baker said, little puffs of amusement escaping him as he accelerated toward the corner, yanked on the wheel, and steered the barrelly Kingswood into the street where Troy went to school.

  The thing was, the Volvo woman stayed with him. Now the bitch was tooting her horn, stabbing her finger at him, flashing her lights. Her face was twisted with outrage and after only a few seconds of that Baker thought: Right, slag, I’ll fucking have you.

  There was no one about. This part of the street had a deserted factory on one side and a wrecker’s yard the size of a football ground on the other. The school was another kilometre away. Baker pulled over to the kerb. The Volvo pulled in behind him. He stayed where he was: let her make the first move.

  In the wing mirror he saw the woman get out, close her door carefully, stand watching him. After a while she seemed to make up her mind. She walked toward him, her image growing in the mirror: plenty of bouncy hair, Reeboks, red tracksuit. Baker knew her type. Young mother, plenty of money, full of fucking opinions.

  He got out and leaned on his door. ‘Got a problem?’

  She actually stamped one foot and stood there shaking in the grip of a powerful emotion, bent forward at the waist. ‘That child should be properly restrained.’

  Restrained? ‘Speak English, lady. What are you on about?’

  She pointed. ‘Your son—’

  ‘Not my son.’

  ‘Your ward, then. He should be strapped into a seatbelt.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What if you have an accident? What if you have to stop suddenly? He could be seriously hurt.’

  Baker uncoiled from the door. ‘Any of your fucking business?’

  That got to her. Her little fists were clenched and her eyes were fiery. ‘Yes, if you like, it is my business. When a child is at risk it’s everybody’s business.’

  Baker closed the distance a metre or two. ‘Listen, slag.’

  The woman retreated a couple of steps but wasn’t backing down. ‘It’s against the law for a child to be unrestrained like that.’

  ‘I’ll give you unrestrained,’ Baker said, and he hit her hard, just once, dropping her like a stone.

  He watched her. She shook her head as if to clear it. When she touched her mouth and saw blood on her fingers, she yowled and scrabbled away from him, dragging her backside along the street. Baker imagined that she wasn’t wearing much under the tracksuit. He caught up with her. Surprisingly, she curled into a tight ball. He hesitated, weighing it up.

  ‘Who gives a shit,’ he said.

  He stepped over her. Yeah, he knew it. There was a little kid in the Volvo, strapped in the back seat, singing to herself. Little satchel, dinky little dress and socks and shoes. ‘Precious koochy koo,’ Baker said. ‘Daddy’s princess.’

  He opened the driver’s door of the Volvo and grabbed the woman’s purse. Eighty bucks, wacky doo. Enough for a hit, plus he could treat Carol and the brat to Pizza Hut tonight.

  He folded the money into his back pocket and that’s when a car came out of nowhere and two guys in plain clothes pinned him against the flank of the Volvo. One of them, a blocky character in need of a shave and a mouthwash, got in a few punches before cuffing him. ‘You’re nicked,’ he said.

  18

  Wyatt walked down through the mall, heading back to Battery Point. He glanced about him as he went, automatically looking for the face, the gait, the conjunction of person, place and body language that would tell him he’d been found. But the little downtown streets were benign in the sun, so he went on half-alert and did what he sometimes liked doing, visited the place as if for the first time.

  He noticed the school-leavers in the mall, kicking their heels and shifting place constantly but never going anywhere. They had nowhere to go. There were no jobs for them. Wyatt looked beyond them to the pedestrian traffic. No Asian or Indian faces; no blacks, no Pacific Islanders. It was a mono-featured city.

  He saw plenty of young men wearing beards, jeans, walking boots and red, green and blue check shirts, and guessed that they had a four-wheel-drive or a utility parked nearby. And there was another kind of male, stamped with old money and long breeding. They walked tall along the streets, braying and impervious, fathers and sons with straight backs, costly English tweeds and an air of entitlement radiating from them. They would have been out of place and out of joint anywhere but on the streets of Hobart.

  But, more than anything, the city breathed wholesomeness and conviction. Perhaps that was the central factor—everyone here knew their place, except the kids in the mall.

  He kept walking. The dental clinic was in a lane off Elizabeth Street. He was five minutes early and was kept waiting for twenty. At eleven o’clock he walked out with a new filling in his jaw.

  That afternoon he was on a bus to Devonport, and by evening he was on the overnight car ferry to Melbourne. He slept badly: a bunk bed in a steel tomb below the waterline; young men, intoxicated to desperation point, stumbling in from the discotheque; all the unknowns ahead of him.

  At dawn he showered, got dressed and climbed the stairs to an upper deck. He ate breakfast in a dining room in which the carpet, curtains and fittings were the colour of the vomit that streaked the iron steps outside. Toast and coffee, as bad as any he’d ever had. After that he stood in the open air, choosing a point near the bow where he could watch the ferry’s prog
ress toward the narrow entrance to Port Phillip Bay. He could see land on either side: hills, flat country, white beaches and a couple of fishing towns. Then a lighthouse and the ferry was pitching through The Rip.

  Wyatt remained on deck, breathing the cool air, as the ferry skirted the Bellarine Peninsula and cut up the centre of the bay. A year ago he’d travelled these waters alone in a stolen motorboat. Having shot a man who’d sold him out, he’d been on the run. He usually was, in those days.

  The ferry berthed at 8:30 A.M. and Wyatt filed off with the passengers. As usual, he swept the docks, looking for men standing featureless and still in the background. There were men like that in every port in the world, waiting to nab someone in particular or simply watching to see who was new in town, intelligence they might later tie in to a robbery or a killing.

  There was no one, but Wyatt had altered his appearance again anyway, this time with a wad of chewing gum in his cheek, a baseball cap on his head and a football-club scarf trailing from his neck. Not that Wyatt knew or cared about football. Everything about football was collective, and Wyatt had never joined or wanted to join or feel part of the herd—a trait that had kept him free and more or less unknown, unreachable and uncorrupted for all of his life.

  He caught a taxi. Thirty minutes later he was at the Budget car rental place in the centre of the city, mapping out a route to the little town of Emerald in the hills.

  19

  The day began badly with a female duty lawyer at the Magistrate’s Court calling him Terry. Not ‘Mr. Baker’, ‘Terry’, as if he didn’t deserve the respect of Mister. Then again, in Baker’s experience of the court system, the only people ever to call him Mr. Baker had been the beaks who’d sat in judgement of him.