Five-Ring Circus

by Jon Cleary

  All four detectives looked at each other: at their rank you learned practically nothing at a conference with the Police Commissioner. Clements said, “Okay, then tell us about General Huang Piao. How much money did he bring out to Australia?”

  Deng took his time; then: “We are still checking that—he had so many sources. Our guess is ninety million dollars. Australian dollars, that is.”

  “Including the fifty-one million deposited in the accounts of the students Zhang Yong and Li Ping?” asked Gail.

  “You are very thorough,” said Deng admiringly, and seemed to see Gail for the first time. “You are the financial expert in this case?”

  “No,” said Gail, “just an all-round expert.”

  Smiles flitted around the four males like white butterflies. Women! the smiles said.

  “Tell us how General Huang managed to get that much money out of China,” said Malone. “Did it come out of Hong Kong, all of it, or Shanghai or where?”

  Deng took his time again; it seemed that he had all the patience in the world. Clements was the only one of the four detectives who stirred impatiently: “Come on, Mr. Deng, for Crissakes. We’re trying to solve the murder of four men, including one of your ex-generals—”

  “I don’t think General Huang will be missed,” Deng said at last. “But the others—” He turned over a hand in what could have been a gesture of sympathy. “Yes, we owe you some information . . .” Another pause before the plunge: “China, as you may know, is going through a difficult period. We have problems that you have never experienced here in Australia. And Shanghai, where General Huang came from, is the centre of our problems. Shanghai citizens have always been famous for their financial sense. It was once our most advanced city—it still is. But don’t quote me to Beijing.” He managed a smile. “Last year foreign investors poured over a hundred billion dollars, US dollars, into China. The major part of it went to Shanghai or what Shanghai controls. General Huang was one of those who decided some of those dollars should be siphoned off.”

  “One of those?” said Malone. “Who are the others?”

  Deng undid another button of his jacket, like a bound man trying to loosen a knot. “They are being attended to in China.”

  “Other generals?” said Clements. “Or ex-generals?”

  “Some of them.”

  “The money for Zhang Yong and Li Ping came through a Hong Kong bank,” said Gail Lee. “Did the original money that went into Olympic Tower come through the same bank?”

  Deng was beginning to look unhappy. “Unfortunately when we took back control of Hong Kong we allowed them too much latitude. Hong Kong still leaks like a sieve.”

  “The capitalists are still running loose?” asked Clements.

  “Are you anti-capitalist?”

  “Are you kidding?” said Malone. “Let’s talk about someone else—Madame Tzu. She is a partner in Bund Corporation?”

  “A formidable lady.”

  “So we gather. But does her capital in Olympic Tower come from the same source as General Huang’s?”

  Deng shook his head. “We don’t think so. As far as we can make out, her capital is her own.”

  “How much?” asked the capitalist on the couch.

  “Ten million,” said Gail, and all the men looked at her. “Sheryl has been back to see our nice young man at the Securities Commission. He gave her a breakdown on the partners.” She smiled at the men. “He’s not supposed to do that, but when you’re all sweaty and up close and personal in the gym, things slip out. He leaks like a sieve when he’s around Sheryl.”

  “Where does she get her money, then?” asked Malone. “Ten million? Is there that sort of capital lying around for individuals in China?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.” Deng took off his glasses, wiped them with a silk handkerchief, looked suddenly careless of what he was paid to defend. What, perhaps, he no longer believed in. Malone suddenly recognized that most personal of possessions: his tone of voice. “It is very difficult these days to defend a lot of our people. You went through your greed decade, we are going through ours. Madame Tzu is a very rich lady by our standards.”

  “There are a coupla other characters in this who have disappeared,” said Clements. “Tong and Guo. What do you know about them?”

  “They were once army cadets. They were protégés of General Huang. Incidentally, is anything to be released to the media about Huang?”

  “No, he’s still on our books as Mr. Shan.”

  “Can we keep it that way? At least for the time being?”

  Malone was always willing to keep sensation out of the headlines. “I’ll talk to my superiors, suggest it to them. The dead student Zhang and the girl Li Ping. All that money in their bank accounts—were they protégés of General Huang?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “What?”

  “They are—were—General Huang’s son and daughter.”

  IV

  “The crotch of the matter,” said the Premier, “is it does bugger-all for Sydney’s image.”

  He’s at it again, thought Ladbroke, his press minder. He had been with Hans Vanderberg almost twenty years now and still the Old Man managed to surprise him with yet another mangled metaphor. Yet The Dutchman, despite what he did to the English language, never failed to get across the gist of his message. He might send junketing MPs to the Parthenon to see the Acropolis or advise backbenchers not to put the horse behind the cart or tell Ladbroke himself to turn a blind ear to criticism. But no one ever missed the point.

  The Premier had called this meeting in his office this morning to read the Riot Act to several of the councillors from Town Hall. There were three of them, two men and a woman, plus Lisa.

  “Who’re you?” Vanderberg had asked her when she entered his office.

  “Lisa Malone. I’m handling the Olympics PR for the council.”

  Ladbroke had leaned forward and whispered in the Premier’s ear. Vanderberg had twisted his mouth, shifting his dental plate as if he were about to spit dice. His hooded eyes, like those of an eagle that had spent years picking at bones, stared at Lisa. Then he nodded, but said nothing further to her.

  “I been hearing about what’s going on at that building site,” he told the councillors. “Union strife, extra floors that weren’t okayed—”

  “Where do you get all this information?” said Councillor Brode, who knew his question was only rhetorical. There was nothing that went on anywhere in the State that The Dutchman didn’t know. Every breeze that blew carried whispers into this office.

  The old man gave him a grin that had more malevolence than humour in it. “Mr. Brode, you’re a politician, you know better than to ask a question like that. I hear things about Town Hall before you do.”

  “With all due respect, Mr. Premier—” Pascal, bouffant hair rising like froth: his hair seemed to rise with his blood pressure—“you have no right to interfere in council’s affairs.”

  “Simmer down, Mr. Pascal. Don’t trot out the Local Government Act—I been too long in this game to worry about what the rules say. All I gotta do to pull you people into line is cut off the State’s contribution to Olympics funds.”

  “You can’t do that!” Mrs. Harrity bared her teeth, but not in a smile.

  “You wanna try me?” Hans Vanderberg, like Jack Aldwych, had no fear of sharks. “What d’you reckon, Nick?”

  He looked sideways at Agaroff, his Sports Minister and the man responsible for overseeing the State’s part in the Olympics. He was a youngish man, prematurely bald, with a long face that looked permanently mournful. As well it might, since he had had nothing but trouble since he had been appointed to his job. He had gone to the Atlanta Games and been carried away by the atmosphere. He had been thrilled by the closing ceremony in which Sydney had accepted the honour of handling the next Games. Aboriginal musicians had cavorted; little boys had cycled madly away from paedophilic kangaroos; Sydney had been put on the map and he was the pin holding it there. Then,
on his return, the reality of organizing a modern Olympics had hit him. He had begun to think of himself as the shuttlecock in a badminton game of anagrams. IOC, AOC, SOCOG: he was battered and bruised by the alphabet. And all the time the coach, the cranky old man now looking at him, was there on the sidelines offering advice. Advice that was never to be ignored.

  “What worries me most,” he said after some thought, “is the racial angle to all this. I mean the murders.”

  “The murders have got nothing to do with the Olympics,” said Brode. “For Crissake, stop stretching this—”

  “Keep talking, Nick,” said the Premier, not even looking at Brode.

  “Only Chinese have been bumped off. That’s going to do nothing for our image in Asia.”

  “Especially since Beijing wanted these particular Olympics,” said Mrs. Harrity. She was a large lady who liked bright colours; this morning she was in vivid red and yellow, a human bushfire. Lisa, sitting behind her in beige, looked like a smudge. “They’ll make hay out of this, mark my words.”

  Lisa raised a hand. “May I say something?”

  Vanderberg examined her again, then nodded. “Go ahead.”

  “I think the Chinese authorities will be doing their best not to make a big thing of this. So far it hasn’t been released to the media, but the mainland Chinese gentleman who was murdered was an ex- army general.”

  “Where’d you get this?” said Vanderberg. “Your husband?”

  Lisa hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. But I’d rather that wasn’t mentioned.”

  The Premier looked around, threat in the hooded eyes. “You all get that? We don’t get Mrs. Malone into trouble with her husband.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” protested Lisa.

  He gave her a grin that was meant to be friendly and sympathetic but could have sent an infant into shock. “I know that, Mrs. Malone. Maybe the councillors didn’t know what you’ve just told us, but I got that information from the Police Commissioner yesterday.”

  “Why weren’t we told?” demanded Mrs. Harrity, all ablaze.

  “I think Councillor Brode knew who he was, didn’t you, Councillor?”

  “Well—” Brode was too brash and arrogant to look uncomfortable, but he did look as if he would rather be elsewhere. “Yes, I knew. But I thought it was irrelevant. He’s been out of the army five years. I took him to be a perfectly respectable private investor.”

  “If you did, you’re naïve. Or a liar.” The Dutchman never mangled his insults.

  Brode flushed and half rose from his chair. “I don’t have to take that from you—”

  The Dutchman pushed him back in his chair from ten feet away. “Siddown. Getting high on your horse isn’t gunna solve this problem. We’ve gotta put our heads together and mix some thoughts. Would you leave us alone for a while, Mrs. Malone?”

  “Perhaps I can make a suggestion or two, Mr. Premier. I’m sworn not to divulge any decisions at a meeting—”

  His grin looked like a slit in a sack of wheat. “Ain’t we all? But what you dunno, Mrs. Malone, won’t harm us. Outside—please?”

  Lisa got up, took her time about collecting her handbag and notebook, and went out of the room. Ladbroke followed her, led her to a window away from the two secretaries at their desks in the outer office. Beyond the windows was the Domain, the city common, where at weekends free speech burned the air like cordite and nobody was excluded from hearing it.

  “Don’t be offended by him, Mrs. Malone.”

  Ladbroke had spent years apologizing for his boss; sometimes it was no more than political spin, sometimes out of pure sympathy. He was in his mid-forties, lunch-plump and cynically relaxed about life in general and life in politics in particular. He had once been a junior political roundsman for the Herald, getting high on what he learned each day, and he had been like a deprived addict each time he had to go back to the office, and the sub-editors, wearing rubber gloves against libel, had pulled out the needle. When Vanderberg had offered him the job as press officer he had stepped into it as if into a bath of drug. He would never be cured and he had no desire to be. He had a wife and three children, but he was married to the Premier and this life.

  “I don’t know what they’ll hatch up in there, but you’ll be happier for not knowing.”

  “This is the second time in a couple of days I’ve been asked to leave the room,” said Lisa. “I’m beginning to feel like a ten-year-old.”

  “There’ll be some skullbuggery, as the Old Man calls it, and you and I will be told to write a press release that says nothing, not even between the lines. And in five, ten years’ time, no one will care a damn about what’s been cooked up. That’s the nature of the voter, Mrs. Malone, his conditioned nature, and no one knows it better than my boss. We’re breeding them to have short memories. When television came along, politicians greeted it like it was manna from heaven. If the voters look at pollies at all on TV, they see only the faces, they don’t hear a word that’s said.”

  “Does your cynicism keep you awake at night?”

  He looked out the window. The big lake of green grass bordered by its shore of trees was almost deserted; an elderly couple limped along the path leading to the art gallery beyond the trees and two youths threw a frisbee back and forth with the lazy grace of slow-motion athletes. Ladbroke knew the history of the Domain and wished he had been born early enough to have witnessed more of it. In his historical eye he saw a regimental band playing while carriages rolled and ladies strolled under parasols. He was there in spirit a hundred and fifty years ago when a French balloonist, after weeks of hoop-la and hot air, failed to get his balloon off the ground and an angry crowd had set fire to the balloon. There had been another crowd sixty-six years ago that had gathered out there on the sward to yell defiance at the British governor who had sacked a premier. Now, as he gazed out the window, a crocodile of small children crossed the park, heading for the art gallery, all in orderly line like a string of rosary beads. The Domain was no longer a battleground.

  “I sometimes lie awake, but only because I wonder at the apathy of the voters. They get stirred up occasionally, like they did after the Port Arthur massacre, but do you think political skullbuggery keeps them awake at night?” He shook his head. “If it’s not wearing football boots or cricket boots or basketball shoes, it ain’t happening. I’ll write a press release and the Old Man will go out there under the trees and after the TV cameramen have finished photographing each other, they’ll turn the cameras on him and he’ll make a fifteen-second soundbite and it’ll be on TV tonight and that’s when Mr. and Mrs. Sydney will go to the toilet or the fridge or the stove and the charade will be the same as last night and tomorrow night and every night till Parliament goes into recess. Ninety per cent of the voters will be in the toilet or at the fridge when it’s announced that tomorrow is Judgement Day.”

  Lisa looked out at the Domain. A few more people were appearing: the lunchtime netball players, half a dozen joggers, a street musician playing empty tunes to the empty air, the passers-by ignoring him as if he were no more than a treestump. At last she turned back to Ladbroke. “Do you think they’ll tell the police to stop looking for the murderers?”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised. Not tell them to stop looking, just not to look so hard. The Old Man wouldn’t know a javelin-thrower from a pole-vaulter, but he doesn’t want his Olympics spoiled.”

  “His Olympics?”

  Ladbroke smiled. “You don’t think he’s going to let the Lord Mayor or the IOC or the AOC or SOCOG claim the Games as theirs? He’ll be eighty-four in Olympics year. If his prayers are answered, he’ll drop dead in the VIP seats just as the Olympic flame is lit. He’ll get a posthumous gold medal for timing.”

  6

  I

  THE SUN family had been visited by Phil Truach and Sheryl Dallen on Saturday morning; the two detectives had come back to report that the family, devastated by the tragedy, could offer no help at all. When Deng, the consul-general, had left,
Malone called Gail Lee back into his office.

  “We’re going over to see the Sun family, Gail. I’ve looked up Phil’s notes—there are two sons in the family about the same age as General Huang’s son and daughter. Maybe the Sun boys knew them.”

  “What about Camilla Feng? Maybe she knew them, too.”

  “We’ll try her, too. But first . . .”

  “Phil showed me his notes. The two sons work in the father’s office—it might be better to try there first.”

  “Do you know where the office is?” Why do I bother to ask?

  She looked at her own notebook. “In the Optus building in North Sydney.”

  “Gail, are Chinese women all as thorough as you?” He said it with a smile to make it politically correct.

  “Of course. The most efficient rulers of China have always been women.”

  “I thought you said those two women, Tzu and the other one, were cruel and brutal?”

  “So?” she said with her own smile.

  “I’m going to have to watch out for you.”

  “No,” she said without a smile. “I have too much respect for you.”

  He could accept praise and respect; he had just not expected her to offer it. “Thank you.”

  On the way out of the main office he spoke to Sheryl Dallen. “Ask Immigration for a list of all arrivals in the past two weeks travelling on Chinese passports. Eliminate the women and old men. I’m guessing, but we’re looking for a man in the twenty-five-to-forty-five age group. It’s a long shot, but try it. How are we going on the mobile phone trace?”

  “Nothing so far. The media may have stuffed it up for us. There’s a piece in the paper this morning about how Telephone Intercepts was used to trace a rapist. If our missing guys read it, they could be shrewd enough to stay off their mobiles.”

  He said nothing, frustration choking him.

  He and Gail drove through the city and over the Harbour Bridge through a humid day that threatened a late afternoon storm. Haze hung like the thinnest of veils and already out west, towards the mountains, clouds were piling on top of each other like another, higher range. Up ahead an illuminated sign on top of an office building said the temperature was 34°C, but that was up where the pigeons flew. Down in the narrow streets of North Sydney Malone knew it would be much more uncomfortable.