Five-Ring Circus

by Jon Cleary

  “I’ll tell my old man you haven’t changed. He’d love to be here with you.”

  Bremner shook his head again; his helmet fell off this time and he held it to his chest like a knight who knew the battle was over. “No, he wouldn’t, mate. The old days are gone, forever. He’s just lucky he’s retired.”

  I’ll never be able to tell him that.

  Bremner was about to walk away when Clements said, “Have you had a detective named Boston down here talking to you?”

  Bremner turned back. “Yeah. Why?”

  “What did he want?”

  “He’s got a bee in his bonnet that it’s union in-fighting that caused these murders. He used to work outa Day Street station, I remember him when I was on the wharves. He’s always been anti-union.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “To get stuffed and piss off.”

  “What’d he say to that?” said Malone with malice towards Boston.

  “Nothing. He just walked over and talked to our mate over there.” Another nod towards the Allied Trades man. “Look, forget we had anything to do with these murders. Talk to the Chinese, all of ‘em.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “There’s nobody hates like brothers. That’s one of the things you learn in union politics. We all call each other Brother This and Brother That, but Christ, when we fall out it’s the old Cain and Abel thing. Look at the Chinese, Scobie, don’t waste your time with us.”

  He walked away into the depths of the concrete honeycomb. The two detectives looked at each other. “Maybe he has a point,” said Clements.

  “If he’s right, then I don’t fancy our chances.”

  They walked across to the administration hut, asked for the site manager and he came to the door, looking as irritated as before.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “We’d like to talk to the two Chinese gentlemen, the engineers, on your staff.”

  “They’re not here. They phoned in and said they were going to the funeral of their boss.”

  “Their boss being Mr. Shan Yang?” said Malone, and the site manager nodded. “There’s no funeral today. Mr. Shan’s body hasn’t been released from the morgue yet. Have these two fellers ever discussed Mr. Shan with you?”

  “Look—”

  “No, you look, Mr. . . ?”

  The site manager hesitated, then stepped back. “Come inside. I’m Ron Fadiman. I’m sorry—things are in a mess this morning—I’ve got shit on the liver—”

  “Join the club,” said Malone.

  Fadiman looked over his shoulder at them and Clements said, “Every second day. He’s getting worse as he gets older.”

  Fadiman grinned and led them down the long narrow room to his desk. All along one wall were slanting desk-tops holding drawings; half a dozen men sat at or leaned on the desks. They looked curiously at the two detectives, but just nodded and said nothing. Malone was abruptly aware of the atmosphere, a familiar one: the unease of people who found themselves, unexpectedly, on the outskirts of murder.

  The site manager was showing the same unease. He gestured to the two detectives to sit down on a couple of folding metal chairs, sat down on a swivel chair and leaned forward with his elbows on his flat-top desk. “What happened Friday night, those murders—it’s shaken this place from top to bottom. I tried to get in touch with Tong and Guo first thing Saturday morning, but there was no answer. Same thing Sunday. I was beginning to wonder if they’d been done in, too—”

  “Why’d you think that?” said Clements.

  “I dunno. I dunno why the other three guys were killed . . . Then Guo Yi called in this morning, said they were going to the funeral and hung up.”

  “What were their names?” Clements had his notebook out.

  “Tong Haifeng and Guo Yi. We called them Harry and Joe.”

  “Where did they live?”

  “Tong lived at Bondi and Guo at Cronulla.”

  The two detectives looked at each other; then Malone said, “They have families?”

  “Not as far as I know, not here anyway. Guo sometimes mentioned a girlfriend, but we never saw her. He was always more outgoing than his mate, at least as far as we were concerned. They never really told us anything about themselves.”

  “Did they like being here? In Sydney, I mean.”

  “Oh sure. But even then they were cautious, as if they were afraid of someone telling them to pull their heads in.”

  “So they weren’t dissidents? Political, I mean.”

  “I wouldn’t say so. They were both engineers, up to the mark in technical knowledge, but lacking practical experience, I’d say. This was their first time abroad. They didn’t know how to deal with the guys on the job, that was their main trouble.”

  “So Roley Bremner’s told us,” said Clements. “We understand there are three partners in the consortium building Olympic Tower. Has there been a dominant partner?”

  Fadiman looked beyond the two detectives. Malone half-turned and saw that the other men in the long hut had stopped work; one could almost see their ears standing out from their heads like pink antennae. “Any comment, fellers?” he said. “Whatever you say doesn’t go out of this room.”

  The man nearest, a curly-haired man in his fifties with a beer belly and tired rheumy eyes, looked at his colleagues, then back at Malone. “No, Ron can say it all.”

  “Thanks,” said Ron drily.

  Malone turned back to him. “Say it, Ron.”

  “Well—” Fadiman picked with one finger at the paper on his desk, as if pecking out his words on an invisible word processor: “Well, yes. Bund, the Hong Kong people, have tried to run things. Right from the jump they’ve acted as if they’re the senior partner.”

  “Are they?” asked Clements.

  “Forty per cent. The others own thirty per cent each. Darrel—” he nodded at the beer-bellied man—“Darrel looked them up when things got stroppy once. They were pushing us, wanting us to get ahead of schedule.”

  “Did you get any support from the other partners or did they just sit back?”

  Fadiman nodded. “I dunno who organized it, but one day half a dozen heavies came down here. They just walked on the site, said they represented Kelly Investments and there was to be no more pressure and we were to stick to schedule and to budget. Mr. Shan and Madame Tzu were here that day. They just stood off and watched, said nothing. I don’t think they understood how capitalism works.” He grinned and some of the men laughed.

  “Madame Tzu,” said Malone, “had she been interfering much?”

  Fadiman looked along at his colleagues, then back at Malone and Clements. “Who knows? She’d come out from China or Hong Kong, we were never sure where she came from—she’d come out maybe once a month, sometimes twice, her and Shan, and every time that was when the pressure started. She was the Dragon Lady, as far as we were concerned. Women are always a pain on projects like this, but she was worse than most.”

  All the other chauvinists in the hut nodded.

  “Have you had a visit from any of the partners this morning?”

  “Yeah, Madame Tzu was here. I guess she’s taking over from Mr. Shan—she said she would be here for a month.”

  “What about the other partners? They come down here?”

  “Not so far. I got the impression the Tzu woman was speaking for all of them. Maybe she wasn’t, but you don’t question Madame Tzu.”

  “Okay,” said Clements, “let’s have the addresses of Mr. Tong and Mr. Guo.”

  Fadiman flipped open a notebook, wrote the addresses on a slip of drawing paper and handed it to Clements. “If you contact them, tell ‘em I want them here tomorrow morning seven sharp. They’ve left some work undone.”

  “Righto,” said Malone. “That’ll do for now. If Madame Tzu or anyone from Lotus or Kelly comes down here, let ‘em know we’ve been here.”

  Fadiman stood up. “At the moment we’re all wondering if this site is jinxed. It was a hole in the gro
und for seven years, now this.”

  “I think you’re safe. Kelly Investments and their heavies aren’t going to let murder get in their way.”

  Fadiman looked at them quizzically. “You seem to know them.”

  “We’re old friends,” said Malone.

  Outside the administration hut Malone and Clements went looking for the muscleman from Allied Trades.

  “Jason?” said a workman. “Nah, he’s gone. Said he had to go down to Union Hall on business. He left in a hurry.”

  II

  The gilt lettering said the door led to the offices of seven companies. Top of the list was Landfall Holdings Proprietary Limited, the sort of title that could own half a continent and still tell the casual enquirer to mind his own business. At the bottom of the list was Kelly Investments Pty Ltd, the gilt fresher than that above it. The Aldwych companies did not encourage shareholders it didn’t know or control. Jack Aldwych had run his gangs the same way. He had never believed in democracy, which only held up progress and company meetings.

  The suite of offices was a long way from the seedy room above a delicatessen in Darlinghurst from which Aldwych had run his old empire. They were on an upper floor of the AMP Tower, a fifty-storey fortess owned by one of the biggest insurance companies in the nation; rock-solid conservatism surrounded the Aldwyches, father and son, and the only hint of blood sport, an occupational hazard with gang leaders, were the old English hunting prints on the dark green walls. The attractive brunette on the reception desk, soft-spoken and genteel, at least on the surface, was a distant reminder of Aldwych’s past: she was the granddaughter of a brothel madam who had worked for him. The four other girls and the two men who worked for Landfall were all products of private schools and strangers to commercial sex, not needing the money and keeping their amateur status. The legal and stockbroking firms in the building were raffish compared to Jack Aldwych in his corporation identity.

  He, his son and Les Chung sat in the main office that looked out to the harbour, the Opera House and the Bridge. Jack Junior, seated behind the big leather-topped desk, was as distinguished-looking as his father; there was none, however, of the soiled edges that occasionally showed in his father. As were showing now.

  “Les, if any of your Hong Kong friends are thinking of muscling in on us, tell ‘em to forget it. I haven’t forgotten how to play dirty—”

  “Dad—” Jack Junior could still feel afraid when the gangster side of his father broke through the veneer of the recent years.

  “It’s all right, Jack,” said Les Chung, addressing Junior. Like Jack Senior he looked like a banker: dark suit, wide-spread collar, a dark blue tie decorated with tiny shields. He had learned long ago how attention had to be paid to understatement. The tie suggested a university or an exclusive club; but he wore it with such modesty that nobody ever asked its connection. He had a dozen of them, made for him by a tailor in a back street of Hong Kong who had a talent for design but thought Oxford was a type of cloth. Chung had learned, too, the value of a quiet voice; he would never have been heard in the clamour of the back streets of Kunming and Hong Kong; but here in Sydney he was heard and listened to. Now he was addressing Jack Senior.

  “My Hong Kong friends, as you call them, had nothing to do with what happened Friday night—”

  “How d’you know?” The rough edges were still showing.

  “I made some calls as soon as I got home Friday night. It worries people if you call them in the middle of the night, it sharpens their perceptions. They called me back Saturday morning. What happened Friday night didn’t originate in Hong Kong. Take my word for it, Jack.”

  “Then who? You think it’s our Bund mates?”

  “I don’t know.” Les Chung sounded chagrined; his whole life had been built on knowing the next step, whether forwards or backwards, and the next and the next. He felt at the moment that he was in iron boots and calf-deep in thick mud. “The unions, for instance, wouldn’t go in for this sort of thing.”

  “I’d soon straighten ‘em out if they did. Anyhow, it ain’t—isn’t their method, killing bosses. They used to do each other, but not the bosses. The thing is—they were after you too, Les. If they’d got you, Jack and I would of been next on the list.”

  “You think I hadn’t thought of that? But we still don’t know why.”

  “Have you talked to your Triad mates? They know anything?”

  “They know nothing nor do they want to know. Or if they do, they’re not telling me.” Les Chung knew it was useless denying to Aldwych that he had contacts with the Triads. He never did business with them, but he paid his compliments to the network. “They would never get involved in a messy business like this one.”

  Aldwych stared out the window. A helicopter, like a huge fly, swooped by; a cameraman hung out of its open door, photographing—what? Aldwych turned back into the room, as if dodging the camera. He had hated photographers as much as rival gang leaders.

  “There’s a lot of opposition,” said Jack Junior, “to overseas investors. Selling off the farm, that sort of thing.”

  “I’m not an overseas investor,” said Les Chung, digging out some national pride, though he wondered where it came from. “Neither were Sam Feng and Norman Sun. We are—were—all homegrown.”

  “I didn’t mean you. As soon as we announced the consortium, when we bought up Olympic, there were a couple of Town Hall councillors who got up on their hind legs and did the usual barking. And there were some MPs in parliament, here and down in Canberra. They all know it’s good for some votes with the usual xenophobes.”

  “I was one of them once,” said Aldwych.

  Les Chung smiled at him. “What changed your mind?”

  “Money. What else? It’s always more bankable than patriotism.”

  Jack Junior smiled weakly. He was every bit as commercial-minded as his father, but the blood of his mother still flowed in him, sometimes uncomfortably. Shirl Aldwych had always had a little weep on Anzac Day and often stopped in mid-stride when the radio played “Advance Australia Fair.”

  “The feller who did these murders,” said Les Chung, “wasn’t a nutter issuing a warning to overseas investors. I saw it, the whole thing. It was—calculated. The nuts with causes—greenies, the anti-immigration lot, the anti-abortionists—they make a song and dance about their protests—but they always make sure there are cameras present, otherwise what’s the point of a demonstration? This feller didn’t want anything like that. He fired six shots, as calmly and deliberately as I’m talking to you now, then just walked out through the kitchen and disappeared.”

  “Didn’t any of your staff try to stop him?” said Jack Junior.

  The two older men looked at each other. Aldwych shrugged: the boy doesn’t know any better.

  Chung said, “You don’t have to be a hero to be a chef or a kitchenhand. The killer just nodded to them, walked straight through the kitchen and out the back door. Wally Smith, our head chef, said he didn’t even hurry.”

  “Jesus!”

  Aldwych rarely sounded exasperated, but he was losing patience with this situation. In the past members of his gang had been murdered and there had been three attempts on his own life; but he had always known who the killers or would-be killers were and had dealt with them. He had never been the meticulous planner that Les Chung was, but he would not have been out of place on any military staff, except for his one-time lack of polish. He had always had a professional grasp of strategy and tactics. In twenty-five years only one of his planned hold-ups had been bungled and that because one of the gang members had turned up high on cocaine; a week later the man had disappeared, never to be seen again, victim of another strategy, one that had no time for fools who believed you had to be on a high to rob a bank. Aldwych had always been a down-to-earth, no-fuss leader. Sometimes, in thoughts he would never have confessed to anyone, he had visions of himself as Prime Minister.

  He looked out again at the harbour. The helicopter was now on the other side
of the water, cruising past Kirribilli. There, under the eastern shadow of the Harbour Bridge, Asian money had come in and begun buying up the waterfront, building luxury apartments that had been bought up by Asian buyers. He did not resent them, neither the developers nor the residents. Now that he had given up robbing it, he had come to love Sydney. Anything that enhanced its value got no objection from him. He had had no reservations when Les Chung had first come to him with the suggestion that they should go into partnership with the Shanghai lot. Jack Junior had done due diligence and the Bund Corporation, at first, had come through with solid credentials. Only later had the Aldwyches come to realize that every breeze that blew out of China brought another smokescreen. It was no wonder, said Jack Junior, who had done a quick course in Chinese history, that Confucius had died a disappointed old man.

  Aldwych turned back to look at his son and Les Chung. “We get this thing under control. We see the Olympic delegation don’t cancel—that would be throwing shit at us. You better see your mate at Town Hall, Les, tell him to get his finger out and see this doesn’t spoil our picture with the Olympic mob.”

  Chung nodded. “We may have to oil his palm a bit more, but he’ll do it.”

  Aldwych went on: “We take control now. Between us we’ve got the whip-handle.” Or, in past terms, the iron bar. “Our sixty per cent says we run things from now on. Nobody does nothing—” the old rough edges were showing again “—without our say-so. Everybody—the architects, the engineers, the union blokes—they’re all gunna be responsible to Jack here. Okay?”

  Les Chung came from a land of emperors; he knew one when he saw one. He just nodded.

  “What about Madame Tzu?” asked Jack Junior.

  “We get rid of her.”

  Jack Junior said nothing, afraid to ask the next question.

  III

  When Malone and Clements returned to Homicide, Clarrie Binyan was waiting for them. As always he looked serene, as if while waiting he had taken a trip back through the Dreamtime and found it to be everything he had been told. He had once remarked to Malone that there was more comfort in myth and legend than in religion. Tribal elders were less trouble than priests.