by Toni Jordan
My Aunt Ava and Uncle Syd sit next to me. Syd looks like a younger version of my father but without his dapper charm; instead Syd is earthy, stocky. He always wears a waistcoat, winter or summer. When not working or helping around the house he tends the orchids that are taking over the conservatory on the western side of the house, cajoling their twisted dry stems to produce lyrical flowers. My Aunt Ava is crumpled and small with worry lines on her face that belie her mischievous nature. Many marks have been fooled by her kindly little old lady persona.
My brother Sam is at the foot of the table, opposite my father. His hair is not as red as mine, more a dark blond, and he’s wearing jeans so creased he might have just crawled out of bed. His hair is messy to match his clothes. Sam looks relaxed, as though he’s daydreaming, but I know underneath he is sharp as a blade, focused on our work, thinking of our future. One day all of us, and this house, will be his responsibility but for now he dresses like a hobo, rebellion forcing its way to the surface like an underground stream.
On the other side of the table, next to Ruby, my four cousins sit together. They are Aunt Ava’s and Uncle Syd’s children. First there is Beau, the youngest, crossing and uncrossing his legs, wriggling in his seat. It is hard for him to sit still for any length of time but he forces himself to concentrate the way he forces himself to read the great stacks of self-help books that tower beside his bed. My cousin Beau is only interested in small stings. This is a mistake, we always tell him. It is just as difficult to convince a mark to part with a small sum as a large one; sometimes more so. The only benefit to these baby pickings is that they are safer. With police resources stretched and the community outraged by violent crime, Beau’s stings are unlikely to be investigated even if he is discovered.
Next to him is Greta. She is doodling on a pad. She is bored, I can tell. We have not spoken about her at all tonight. She is going out after the meeting, and her skirt is slightly shorter than I would wear, her cleavage just a little lower.
Then there is her twin, Anders, who has come straight from the gym in T-shirt and sweats. Even in these baggy clothes the curves of his muscles are visible: the rounded forearms that rest on the table, the line from his shoulders to the base of his skull. He is smart, but in our line of work his strength often comes in handy.
Finally there is Julius, in his grey, fine wool suit and open-necked white shirt. The shirt is stark against his skin because it is black, instead of pale like ours. Julius has been my closest ally, as usual, and success in this job is shared equally by him. When I say Daniel Metcalf asked for my number, Julius gives me a grin and a wink.
The chair on my father’s right is still empty. This was my mother’s chair.
It is rare for us all to be together around the dining table like this; our work necessitates much travel, domestic and international. This is more difficult now than when my father and mother were young and passports easy to obtain, identity checks less thorough. My father had the foresight to set up many names for the six of us when we were babies, so our identities rotate between the names he chose then. New identities can still be created. We have done it in special circumstances, but it is expensive and we are forced to deal with traders in forged documents, an evil we try to avoid. My father abhors these people the way he does drug dealers. He would disown any of us, I’m sure, if we became drug dealers.
‘They think they’re the cat’s pyjamas,’ he sometimes says, pursing his lips. ‘These glorified shopkeepers, with their scales and their little baggies. “Can I gift wrap that for you, sir?” “Would you like a pint of milk with that?” Where’s the finesse? The creativity?’
‘Metcalf won’t stand a chance,’ Julius is saying.
‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter if he is interested or not,’ I say. ‘This is a good sting. He’d fall for it if I looked like a troll.’
Anders tenses his square jaw but says nothing. Quite a few wealthy older women around the city have invested in his landscaping business. Sam once joked that if Anders added up every twenty per cent share he had sold, it would come to about ten thousand per cent. Greta smirks and admires her new bracelet, twists it in the light to watch it gleam. She is the beauty of the family. She has long golden hair and a movie-star smile which she deploys strategically every few months selling time-share units on the Gold Coast.
‘Don’t play it too cool,’ she says.
‘I can understand that Della doesn’t want to play up to Metcalf,’ Sam says. ‘She’s already got a boyfriend.’
‘Sam,’ I say. ‘What is that lump on your neck? An extraordinarily large pimple?’
‘Methinks she complainth a lot, or whatever,’ he says.
‘I hope you’re not losing your nerve Della,’ my father says. ‘Now that you’re in a relationship.’
‘Timothy is not a relationship,’ I say.
‘He’s a good catch, Tim is,’ says Greta.
‘You shouldn’t pander to any irrational jealousy on Timothy’s part,’ my father says. ‘Flirting is part of the job description. If you were born with the voice of Melba you’d be singing in Carnegie Hall by now. There’s no shame in making the most of your gifts, but they’re only the bait. You still need a hook, line and sinker.’
‘They could have the reception here, couldn’t they Dad?’ says Sam.
‘Samson,’ says Ruby.
‘Ah, well. He has to ask her first, you know. Properly. Then nothing will be too good for my little girl.’
‘Sam,’ I say. ‘Shut it.’
‘Laurence,’ says Ruby. ‘The job at hand.’
‘Yes, yes.’ My father frowns, and limps over to the blackboard, where the top line reads: Metcalf Trust. He adjusts the total hours of work that we have done for this job, adds up my time at the interview today. On the other half of the blackboard is a figure in a circle. The projected return.
‘It’s not a lot of money, but it hasn’t been a lot of work.’ He tosses the chalk in the air and catches it, then he turns back to the board and calculates as he speaks, adding lines and multiplying by our daily and hourly rates, adding expenses. ‘Julius. Your times?’
Julius flips open his small black notebook. ‘Two days for the grant application, a day and a half on Della’s webpage, half a day on the PhD. Just under four total.’
‘Good job, Julius,’ my father says. ‘It’s a nice little return. Good job, Della.’
‘My bit’s easy,’ says Julius. ‘Sitting in front of the screen, feet up, eating Cheezels. Playing computer games between attacks of technological genius.’
My father assigns the roles. It is usual for the person who first had the idea to be the mechanic, as I am in the Metcalf job. I am the one who must drive it, who must actually perform the sting. The other roles will vary depending on the job, but often we have a wall man for lookout and perhaps a chiller, to calm things down if they get overheated and to help the mechanic escape. On this job, Julius was in support. I could not have done it without him.
‘Maybe Della’ll buy Timmy an engagement ring with her share,’ says Sam.
‘Maybe you could rent a girlfriend with your share,’ I say.
‘You do make a very handsome couple,’ my father says. ‘I know Timothy’s parents are very fond of you, Della.’
‘I thought we had a rule,’ says Ruby. ‘No congratulations until the cheque is cashed.’
‘And me, Della?’ says Beau. ‘How did I go? What did he say about me?’
Beau was my other referee, the one that wasn’t the Nobel laureate. ‘He said you were young. That’s all.’
‘Too young? Did he think I wasn’t convincing?’
I sigh. ‘He’s hardly going to say that, is he? You were fine, just fine.’
‘Can we return to the job at hand?’ says Ruby. ‘Does anything still need to be done?’ She twirls her pen around her thumb.
This job began on a rainy night almost two years ago. Julius had just received a bank deposit for his biggest job yet, which involved an oil company keen to a
void publicity about a spill near a remote colony of endangered birds. There had been no spill near the rare bird colony, of course, but the site was difficult to reach and the company knew itself well enough to think the story was likely, and besides, in circumstances like this it’s imperative that the company does not visit the sites. If there were travel records to show they had inspected the leak, their plausible deniability was shot.
So they did not question Julius’s cover: a corrupt wildlife worker, or his Photoshopped evidence and fake WWF press releases. They just arranged the transfer of funds from their standard blackmail account. Julius promised the company reps the problem would go away if they paid him. It did. Julius gave a generous gratitude payment to the executive who approved the fee, but this was merely insurance. Large companies are usually safe to sting. They are unlikely to beef because the staff aren’t harmed individually, and the damage to their share price if the truth came out would be a greater loss than the money that had been scammed. To the oil company, it was money well spent.
This was not really new, but a modern spin on a charity scam my father might have run in his teens or twenties: a team of earnest youngsters knocking on doors, holding collecting buckets for some widows’ home or an orphans’ trip to the seaside. My father and his colleagues would have carried an oversized money thermometer with them from town to town. They would have tacked it to the wall of a public building in the town square and watched their money rise.
These days we have no giant thermometers but Julius has watched his takings rise just the same. He now makes more than my father and almost as much as Sam. Because we all grew up together my four cousins are like siblings to Sam and me but I am closest to Julius, who is only a few months my senior.
I was just learning to crawl when Uncle Syd and Aunt Ava first brought him home from Nigeria. Julius’s father had been a business associate whose success was too conspicuous and who had not paid the right money to the right people. He feared for his family. Julius, wrapped in a red cotton sack with only his false adoption papers and passport, was presented to my aunt and uncle just as they were leaving Lagos to come home and, despite their three children already waiting back in Australia, Ava could not resist him.
Now it seems like he has always been here. Skinny and quiet at first, he is now the star among us, the one I know will succeed with his technology when the face-to-face stings of the rest of us are dead like dodos.
We all went out to celebrate on the night Julius received the oil company payment. A new place: we never go to the same bar twice, and we travel a long way from home. As we toasted Julius and the rare birds, in the booth behind us was a drunk man of about fifty with his arm around a much-younger, giggling girl. The man was balding, with a shiny patch near the top of his brow where a skin cancer had been removed by laser. He was buying expensive champagne and making sure the whole bar knew. I know now it was Dr Eng, the snowflake researcher, with one of his assistants. It’s not just me: we all eavesdrop, the whole family. It’s amazing what you hear. Stock tips, horse tips, juicy bits of gossip that come in handy. I leaned my head back against the booth.
What a rort. So rich they don’t even care where the money goes…the administrator is rubbish…no procedures. Just a tiny notice in a few journals that no one reads…hardly any applications…no progress reports or reconciliations. Then he said, Metcalf.
Metcalf is a famous name in this city. Straight away I became interested. Unlike my cousins, I am more at home in high-society stings. I can and do play almost any role, but times like that in the Metcalf mansion seem the closest I can manage to being myself. Perhaps it is Ruby’s influence, the way I find myself drawn to the beautiful things of life. Expensive things. Whatever the cause of this feeling, I know the one defence we have against the sordidness of life, the dirt, the base animal nature of humankind, is beauty.
The next day I walked down to a distant corner of our property, where my father kept his filing system in a shed that had been used for packing apples since the last century. The shed still has a clean smell that seeps from the old wood. The musty paper has not taken over yet. My father has files on hundreds of the world’s wealthiest families and individuals and companies. These days my Aunt Ava is responsible but when we were children it was our job to update them, liberate old Newsweeks and Financial Reviews from cafes and dentists’ surgeries using sad smiles and stories of late assignments, then cut out anything on everyone who was anyone. It was our favourite job, this cutting and filing, the way other children make scrap books of pop singers and soap stars.
Yet the filing system was also my greatest worry when I was a child. It seemed so incriminating. It kept me up nights. When I couldn’t sleep I would creep down to the shed at first light to test the lock, check the windows. Once, in a blind moment of fear after waking from a nightmare, I took matches from the kitchen and sat shivering for an hour in the half-light next to a pile of apple leaves I’d heaped against the side wall of the shed. I wanted to dispose of this evidence forever but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. When I told my father, he only laughed. ‘Circumstantial, my dear’, he said. ‘People collect the strangest things. Teddy bears and teaspoons and cola cans. Would never stand up in a court of law’.
The day after I overheard Dr Eng, I found the hanging file labelled Metcalf. It was bulging with the history of the mining company and the family. Arnold and Frances Metcalf, both deceased in a car accident on the way to a skiing holiday. Two of their three children had fat files: business and fashion magazine articles and interviews on Celeste’s move to Sydney and the international success of her swimwear company; women’s and gossip magazine stories and photo spreads on Gabrielle’s marriage to a media heir and her three adorable children.
At the back of the file was one slim folder on Daniel, the baby of the family. It held nothing but torn sheets of social pages, Daniel with his arm around one pretty girl after another. At first glance he is not quite handsome. His nose is too big and bends to one side like it’s been broken. His eyes are too deep set and his jaw is too prominent. I have met many men like him in the course of my work, wealthy and idle, and at heart they are all the same. The folder contained only one page of words, ripped from a weekend newspaper. It was one of those ‘Sixty seconds with…’ pieces, the kind that became popular when editors realised they could fill a page by printing verbatim answers received by email instead of despatching a journalist to spend an entire day interviewing a subject.
There was no clue as to why this piece was written. Daniel had no book coming out, no show that needed tickets sold. Among the lame questions, like ‘My best trait is…’ and ‘I am happiest when…’, and the witty replies was one that caught my eye. ‘The strangest thing that has ever happened to me was…’
Daniel’s answer was: ‘The time I saw a Tasmanian tiger in Wilsons Promontory National Park when I was eight years old.’
That was just the beginning. It took some time, still, for the two ideas to gel in my mind. To find the details of the trust by looking through the university archive, to speak to past winners and entice them to say more than they should. To devise an application he would find impossible to resist. At the beginning I thought it impossible. Ridiculous. Then slowly I became intrigued, and that’s always a good sign. If I can intrigue myself, it’s also possible to intrigue a mark.
Tasmanian tigers are remnants of a bygone age. They were marsupials: related to kangaroos and koalas rather than tabby cats, although they did have stripes on their lower back, hind legs and tail, and they did hunt smaller, weaker animals. And, as every Australian school child knows, in 1936 the Tasmanian tiger went the way of the passenger pigeon and the dodo. There is a grainy black and white film of the last of them in Hobart zoo, pacing in her small wire enclosure as if she knows the end is near. The film was taken in 1933 and in 1936 she died and that was that. Her species had been hunted to extinction and her home destroyed. The Tasmanian government had, at one time, paid £1 for each head brought
in.
In a stunning example of efficiency, the government declared the tiger a protected species a full fifty-nine days before the last one died in captivity, of neglect. Her full name was Thylacine, or Thylacinus cynocephalus. Although she lived in Tasmania until the 1930s, she had been extinct in the rest of the country for perhaps two thousand years.
At the beginning of my planning I almost gave up on the idea. I thought it was impossible that anyone would believe something so ridiculous. Then I remembered my father’s favourite quote, from H. L. Mencken. ‘The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.’
I’ve always suspected that Mencken was sad about this, but my father certainly wasn’t. He taught me that this applies not just to Americans but to us too, and to people everywhere. It is ridiculous to claim that this animal may be alive, I thought, but I will dare.
There will be no ceremony for the awarding of the cheque. It will be handed over in a plain envelope by Carmichael alone in the room where I sat today. My bank account, in the name of a two-dollar company called the Victorian Tasmanian Tiger Research Trust, is ready. By this time on Monday I will have deposited the money. By Friday next week I will have withdrawn it and closed the account. It will be like Dr Ella Canfield never existed. I will never see Daniel Metcalf again.
The Metcalf job is the last on the agenda for discussion tonight. We have already talked over an upcoming job of Beau’s involving fictitious invoices for internet advertising to be sent to large disorganised companies, and briefly, a job of my father’s. This one took little planning: it is one more in the series of counterfeit emerald scams that he has run since he was a young man. This time he is selling a pair of antique earrings that are, I imagine, exquisite green tourmaline or cubic zirconia. The jewels themselves have not arrived yet but my father has a glossy photo of them, and an unscrupulous purchaser already lined up. I have never asked him where the stones come from and he would not tell me if I did. Need to know basis, he would say. He might wink. Can’t have my little girl in the firing line if it all goes pear-shaped.
