by Garry Disher
Le Page had thought about this and decided that the answer lay in volume, not value. He knew people. Soon he had a network of burglars in place, committing the robberies for him in and around Marseilles. He moved rings, necklaces, a few Rolex Princes, a Queen Victoria Gothic crown, now and then a 1652 Philip IV eight-reales coin worth €1500. He paid 12.5 per cent; the barber paid him 15 per cent.
But some of his burglars were addicts. They got caught. The old barber began to baulk at having to move so many items for Le Page. Householders and the police were more vigilant. So Le Page searched further, making contact with burglars, pawnbrokers, second-hand dealers and gym rats in nearby cities.
One day he walked into the back room of a jewellery store in Toulouse with an Omega Speedmaster, knowing the owner would want it for the deceased-estate section of his front window, and saw the jeweller had company. The stranger pointed a Glock automatic at Le Page and said, in a foreign accent, ‘You are trespassing on my territory.’
The Russian mafia, Le Page thought, closing his eyes, expecting to die. When nothing happened, he opened them again. The jeweller smirked. ‘Mr Davidoff has a—’
‘Aleksandr,’ the Russian said.
‘Aleksandr has a proposition to make.’
Le Page waited, still trembling inwardly.
‘Stealing an Omega Speedmaster in Nice and displaying it in a Toulouse shop window is stupid,’ Aleksandr said.
Le Page tried not to pout. He was here to learn. ‘Why?’
‘The police in one city talk to the police in another. They talk to the insurance companies. This watch,’ the Russian said, waving the Speedmaster at Le Page, ‘appears on a database somewhere—its appearance and its serial number.’
‘So?’
‘So we will sell it in Berlin or Amsterdam or Melbourne or Cape Town,’ Aleksandr said.
Aleksandr knew a lot about Le Page. ‘I admire your abilities. You have nerve, intelligence.’ He looked the lithe, fleshless thief up and down. ‘You have presence.’
He trained Le Page as a courier. Most of the work was legitimate. Le Page would fly into a city like Chicago with a corsetful of rings, necklaces, chains and watches, and make prearranged deliveries to various jewellers and jewellery manufacturers. All above board, except that one of these jewellers might also take delivery of a stolen Tiffany brooch, another a Patek Philippe watch. The money was already taken care of; all Le Page had to do was fly in, deliver, fly out again. What would it matter if descriptions of the stolen goods were posted on police and insurance company databases? How likely was it that a Berlin detective, holidaying in San Francisco, would recognise a shopwindow Rolex as one stolen from a house in Kreuzberg? Or that a Melbourne detective would browse a Toulouse database?
Le Page made an extra €50,000 a year doing this, but he started to brood. On one trip he delivered a choker of graduated Broome pearls worth €200,000, and on another an 1847 Blue Mauritius stamp. He’d wondered, at the time, what was so special about the charmless little scrap of paper; when he discovered the stamp was worth a couple of million, he started to dream. Resentment set in, too. He felt cheated.
And so for the past eighteen months Le Page had been taking his own Omega Speedmasters and Rolex Oysters on these international trips, selling them to his own network of buyers, all carefully cultivated.
His cousins in Australia, for example.
Henri and Joseph Furneaux were children when they emigrated to Melbourne with their parents. Now aged in their forties, the brothers were manufacturing jewellers who owned a high-end store in the eastern suburbs and sold their designs to other jewellers. Each year they made sales trips to buyers in and around Melbourne itself and then out to towns to the east and the north, so it was a simple matter for them to arrange under-the-counter sales of Le Page’s gold Heuer Chronographs and Queen Victoria Gothic crowns at the same time.
But still Le Page was dissatisfied. Henri and Joseph always found reasons why they couldn’t pay him what he wanted. By the time he’d bought a Rolex Oyster from his pawnbroker contact in Lyon and sold it to his cousins on the other side of the world, his take was only a couple of hundred euros.
Now, as the sun settled, Le Page sipped his drink and brooded about the London job. He knew what the bonds were worth. His standard fee didn’t begin to approach their value.
He could maybe remove one of the bonds, see if Henri could get him a good price for it. The face value of a £5 million bond was around $12 million Australian. If Henri found the right person, someone willing to pay twenty cents in the dollar...
Better still, sell all of the bonds. Cut Aleksandr out of the loop. Le Page had already taken measures to separate himself from the Russian. He’d been living in the shadow of the Pyrenees for the past year, but Aleksandr continued to believe he commuted from Marseilles. Ironically, Aleksandr’s own protective measures helped Le Page: the Russian would only use e-mail, disposable cell phones and newspaper classifieds to make contact. He can’t find me, Le Page realised, and if he’s arrested, he can’t point the police in my direction.
Sunday passed. Le Page gave all of his attention to two questions: Why did the Russian want him to sit still for a week, and why so few bonds?
This is Aleksandr’s big score, he concluded. He intends to disappear, sacrificing a small percentage of the bonds and leaving behind a fall guy.
Le Page made a few phone calls. He packed the bonds with his laptop and a change of clothes and flew to the Canary Islands. He monitored the news.
On Monday, he smiled. According to reports from Rio, New Delhi, Cape Town and Los Angeles, Aleksandr’s couriers had been arrested.
On Tuesday he grinned: Aleksandr was dead, shot by police in Paris.
A profound peace settled in Le Page. He felt wonderfully free. Still, he telephoned one of his neighbours, an old shepherd, who assured him, ‘No strangers have been to your house, monsieur.’
Le Page didn’t go home. Asking the shepherd to keep an eye on his cottage, he fired off an encrypted e-mail to a corner of the world that might not have heard about the bonds, the couriers or Aleksandr.
* * * *
6
While Le Page schemed, Wyatt spent his days in stillness, thinking, walking and sitting.
He rarely spoke. A simple request to shop or café staff, a nod hello to a fellow tenant, that’s all. Wyatt wasn’t a typical Southbank resident, but nor was he unusual. There were some Asian students, and a handful of vigorous retirees aged in their sixties, but most of his neighbours were young, tertiary educated and interested in making a lot of money fast. They forked out to attend wealth creation and grow-your-own-money seminars, worked in brokerage firms, retail and IT companies, liked to go clubbing and cycling in designer clothes, and snorted cocaine, believing it gave them a dangerous edge. They were successful and felt entitled. They would move into a swanky apartment, stay for a while and go somewhere else. They didn’t talk to one another. They didn’t notice Wyatt. They were too self-absorbed to notice that he was older and didn’t use the gym or drive a BMW. He was just some guy.
The week passed. Sometimes Wyatt cooked for himself, but mostly he walked to Southbank to eat. Then he’d stroll back to the apartment and sit, sometimes listening to jazz, concentrating on the rhythms of the music, his body and his life. He’d been away for a number of years, after things got too hot for him, and he hadn’t known what to expect when he came back. What he found was that there was still money around, despite the recession, and most of his old acquaintances were dead or in jail.
Sometimes he’d pour a drink and stand at the window. A view of other apartment buildings, and beyond them, on the other side of the river, construction cranes stencilled against the sky. He wondered if he’d have to walk away from it all. He needed money. He needed anonymity. Both were in short supply, and he began to feel that he’d lost the swiftness and clarity of his life.
He didn’t seek company. The women he liked to spend time with after a job didn’t know wh
o he was or what he did. He knew they’d find him emotionally invisible in the end; he stopped seeing them well before that happened. His was a life of few intimacies, with strangers.
As he thought about all of these things every day, he attended to the new pistol. He drew comfort from the routine of cleaning it. First breaking it down into its main components: barrel, frame, slide, slide stop, magazine, bushing, recoil spring plug, recoil spring and its guide. Then he swabbed the barrel with solvent, turning his head slightly away from the odour. He dipped a fresh cotton swab into the solvent and used it to clean the frame, repeating the action with the slide and the breech face, working it liberally over each surface and into every groove. He cleaned away the excess solvent and finished with the barrel interior, running a brass wire brush in each direction, followed by a final run through with a clean swab. When he was satisfied, Wyatt reassembled the pistol, a deep part of himself finding satisfaction in the hard efficiency of the weapon’s design and action.
He thought about Eddie Oberin and the harbourmaster job. Clearly Eddie’s intelligence had been good: it was too bad that one of the shipping companies had balked and gone to the police. Eddie hadn’t said who’d told him about the harbourmaster and Wyatt hadn’t asked. Eddie knew people, that’s all, including lawyers who with one face carried out their duties as officers of the court and with another stockpiled information and passed it on for a flat fee or a percentage of the action. They got their tips from bank tellers, casino croupiers, taxi drivers, personal trainers, bent cops, pawnbrokers, street girls, private detectives, insurance assessors, real estate agents and the installers of alarm and surveillance systems—anyone at all who wanted a favour, cash, credit, a name dropped, a nod in the right direction.
No doubt a lot of it was worthless, pie in the sky. Some, like the harbourmaster’s scam, was sweet.
Or like the accountant and her gambling stake. According to Eddie’s intelligence, a city accountant liked to follow the country races with a $10,000 float in her car. Wyatt followed the accountant to the Balnarring races one day, watched her park, open the boot, fiddle near the spare tyre—an inbuilt safe, he guessed—and remove an envelope. She made her way to the bookies and began to bet. She was a cautious gambler. She won steadily. At three in the afternoon she returned to the car parked among the gumtrees, unlocked it by remote, and stowed her winnings. Wyatt waited until she was at her most vulnerable, sliding behind the wheel, before he slipped into the back seat and let her feel his pistol at the hinge of her jaw and hear the low, dangerous rasp of his voice.
He let her out on a nearby dirt road, vineyards on one side, alpacas on the other, and dumped the car in Frankston. There was $35,000 in the safe. Wyatt gave Eddie 5 per cent. Eddie grumbled, but since Wyatt had taken all of the risks, he didn’t push the matter.
‘Mate,’ he said instead, ‘what you want to do is hijack a drug deal. That’s where the real money is.’
Then he saw the coldness in Wyatt and shut up. Wyatt refused to handle drugs or drug money. In Wyatt’s experience, dealers and suppliers took stupid risks because there was so much money at stake, and they could be vicious and unpredictable if they were also users. He was an old-style hold-up man: cash, jewellery, paintings.
Wyatt thought about that as he cleaned his pistol, or stood at a window and watched the twilight leak away. The trouble was, technology had outstripped him. He no longer had the skills to bypass high-tech security systems or intercept electronic transfers and was preternaturally wary of going into partnership with anyone who did. So here he was, obliged to carry out small-scale hold-ups and burglaries.
And it was more than advances in technology. To Wyatt, one of the main qualifying factors in any robbery was the merchandise itself—not only its value, and how that might be realised, but also its size and weight. Cash was bulky, gold and silver jewellery settings were heavy, and you couldn’t exactly slip a painting into your pocket. Besides, precious stones didn’t always hold their value, most paintings of any worth were listed on national and international registers, and the police knew how to track the serial numbers on stolen currency.
And there were the problems of finding, funding and outfitting a good team, dealing with aggrieved and unpredictable personalities, and offloading the gear without being shortchanged.
Another man might say to himself, ‘Time I had some good luck,’ but Wyatt didn’t believe in luck, only in recognising opportunities.
Like that time in Tasmania.
He’d been casing a rural bank from the front window of a local-history museum on the other side of the street when an old farmer had walked in and plonked a charred, smoke-stained cash box on the curator’s desk. ‘I was pulling down a stone ruin and found this stuck inside the chimney,’ the farmer began. ‘Thought you might like to—’
‘I’m sorry,’ the curator said, ‘but we have several similar boxes in fine condition.’
‘Not the box, what’s inside the box.’
Wyatt drifted closer, peering at a glass case of decorated hatpins and thimbles, silver pillboxes, carved emu eggs and Boer War medals. He watched from the corner of his eye as the farmer tipped out the contents of the cash box.
The curator peered. ‘Are they certificates of some kind?’
‘Bank notes,’ the farmer said. ‘Fifteen of them.’
The curator lifted one to the light. Even from some distance away, Wyatt could appreciate the unfaded green colour tone and black scrollwork.
‘Bank of Van Diemen’s Land,’ read the curator, ‘one pound sterling...’
‘Dated 1881,’ the farmer said. ‘Interested?’
‘Well, yes, yes I am,’ the curator said, showing some cautious excitement. ‘I wouldn’t mind putting them on permanent display. We have colonial-era coins, and some pre-decimal currency, but no notes from the period before federation.’
They shook hands on it. Wyatt forgot about the bank. He returned to the museum after dark. There was no security: the curator, a retired primary school teacher, had locked the notes in a drawer. The curator wasn’t Wyatt, or he’d have known that the notes were worth up to $25,000 each. Wyatt stole all fifteen of them, together with knick-knacks that he later tossed into a dump bin. As the years went by he sold them off, always in one of the mainland cities, sometimes using the old farmer’s story, sometimes posing as a collector. He was never doubted or questioned, so he assumed that any report from the museum break-in was gathering dust in the local police station.
Wyatt still owned a couple of the bank notes. They sat in a safe-deposit box in Darwin. He’d like to ‘find’ another cache like that. In fact, what’d he’d really like to do was find an 1817 Bank of New South Wales ten shilling note in fine condition. One of those would net him a cool million and not weigh his pockets down as he climbed out of a window.
But that was unlikely. People were cannier now and he couldn’t go around looking inside old stone chimneys.
* * * *
There were few public phones left in the city, but Wyatt knew of one in Elizabeth Street and Eddie Oberin of another in the student union at the university. On Friday afternoon, seven days after escaping the law in Frankston, Wyatt walked back across the river to the central business district. A mild spring day and he was ready to work again.
He found his phone, dialled Eddie Oberin’s number, said ‘Call me’ and hung up. He waited, picturing Eddie leaving his North Melbourne house and walking to the campus. Both men had stolen mobile phones that were good for a few days, but mobiles can be pinpointed and intercepted. Public phones were better suited for the calls they had to make. Next month they’d move on to another pair of phones.
Wyatt’s phone rang and Eddie said, ‘Heard the harbourmaster went pear-shaped.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sorry, pal.’
Wyatt said, ‘Anything else for me?’
There was a pause. He could hear indistinct background voices on Eddie’s end of the line, probably students grabbing coffee before an
evening in the library. Now there was a scraping sound as if Eddie had cupped his hand around the mouthpiece. ‘There is something,’ Eddie murmured. ‘Jewellery. But not much of a window, only a few days.’
Wyatt thought about it. ‘Okay.’
‘Free Sunday morning? Someone I want you to meet.’
Wyatt went still. He’d come to value the quality of Eddie’s information, but was wary of meeting the people who supplied it. Wyatt preferred to work alone; he trusted only his own plans. But the big scores always involved others: those he could rely on, those he’d never met before, those who could finger him, those who might cross him.
He said, ‘Neutral territory, you know the drill. Don’t bring him to my place.’
‘Botanical Gardens. And it’s a she,’ Eddie said.
* * * *
7
