by Jon Cleary
Lisa waited till the waitress had taken their order and gone away. Then: “I’ve been instructed to tell lies.”
He wasn’t sure whether she was joking or not. “Like the old days? That was what diplomacy was all about, wasn’t it? Still is.”
In her two years as the High Commissioner’s secretary in London, where she had first met Malone, Lisa had recognized that diplomacy and hypocrisy were partners in the trade; the honesty lay in the simultaneous recognition of the fact. She, for her part, had always tried to avoid the cynicism of the diplomatic profession. Diplomacy was the art of telling lies for one’s country. Telling lies for one’s city somehow did not have the same cachet.
“The murder of those men connected with Olympic Tower is uncovering a lot of dirt. I’ve been told I have to put a spin on it, somehow disguise it as top dressing. I’m out of practice at that sort of thing.”
“No!” With an exclamation mark. Two girls at a nearby table turned their heads.
“Keep your voice down,” said Lisa. “No what?”
“No, you don’t get involved in this.” Now that he knew she wasn’t joking, he was afraid for her. More than dirt had been uncovered in Olympic Tower; blood, a lot of it, was showing. “We don’t know how far these people will go.”
“Which people?”
He sat back in his chair, shrugged with frustration. “I wish I knew.” He glanced out of the big window, saw two Asian women come out of a boutique on the opposite gallery. He leaned forward, almost pressing his nose against the glass. Then he shook his head and sat back.
“What’s the matter? See someone you know?”
“I thought it was Madame Tzu. I’ve got her on the brain.”
Lisa stared out through the glass at the two women who had now paused outside another boutique. Each of them held three fancy shopping bags; there was always room on the arm for another. “They are Japanese.”
He nodded. “I know. But at first glance . . . Like I said, I’ve got her on the brain.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She just seems central to all this.”
Lisa waited while the waitress put the smoked salmon salad in front of her. When the waitress had gone she said, “I think she might have been over the road this morning.”
“Madame Tzu? At the Town Hall?”
“Yes. From the way you described her to me, it could have been her. Just as I was getting to work. She was coming out of Councillor Brode’s office with a Chinese man.”
“What did he look like?”
“Medium height, thin, middle-aged. With glasses, not designer ones.”
He grinned, though he felt no humour. “You can come and work at Homicide any time you like . . . Madame Tzu and General Wang-Te.”
She sipped her glass of white wine, reached for a wheatmeal roll and buttered it. He had ordered a small steak, a salad and a glass of red; anything heavier and she would have re-ordered for him. He knew that if he were not married to her, he would be as big as Russ Clements.
“I could find out what they were doing in Brode’s office.”
“No.” He was chewing on a roll, so there was no exclamation this time. He cleared his mouth. “Stay out of it. One cop in the family is enough.”
“Are you going to tell that to Claire when she graduates? She still wants to join the police.” She ate a mouthful of smoked salmon, then said, “I’m on good terms with Rosalie, who acts as Brode’s secretary. We exchange bits and pieces.”
The restaurant had filled up, chatter chipped away at any silence. Father Christmas rolled slowly by out on the gallery, this time tolling a bell; somehow it had no merry sound to it. Malone leaned forward, keeping his voice low. “Darl, this Olympic job is a bloody mess, in more ways than one.”
“I know that. I’m not going to act stupidly. I’m not going to play at Joan of Arc storming some citadel—”
“You’d be good at that.” He tried to divert her by being facetious, a frayed marital ploy.
She ignored it. “I’d forgotten there’s a girls’ network as well as a boys’ network. Private secretaries aren’t always so private when someone else has some gossip to exchange. Rosalie isn’t a private secretary to Mr. Brode, she’s just someone who attends to his council business. She works for the council, for the city. She’s a public servant, like you and me.”
“I’m a little more public than either of you. And I say stay out of this.”
She took another sip of her wine. “I’ll think about it.”
He knew there was no point in further argument. She had told him more than once that it was only Dutch stubbornness that had kept the North Sea from flooding the Lowlands.
7
I
“SOMEONE AT Town Hall is lining his pockets,” said the Premier.
He was honest as the day is long, depending on the season and daylight saving. He couldn’t be bought, but he could be rented: a favour for a favour. He had thought of changing his name from Hans to Jan, but somehow Honest Jan didn’t have the right ring to it. Neither did Honest Hans, according to his critics, who were many.
“Who, for instance?”
Since becoming Commissioner three months ago Bill Zanuch had trodden warily with the Premier and his alter ego, Police Minister. As an Assistant Commissioner he had had some contact with Vanderberg, but he had done his best to avoid him. He was an arch-conservative in his voting habits, but not naïve; he would have voted for Machiavelli, except that one couldn’t trust Italians. He knew that the Premier was Machiavellian, but one always expected that of the Labor Right.
“Ray Brode.”
“Careful,” said Ladbroke, his minder. “No names, no pack drill.”
“Who’s gunna give me any pack drill—Bill here? Police Commissioners never sack their Minister, do they, Bill? Or their Premier?” The bone-picking smile was at its widest.
“Never.” Zanuch almost tore a muscle forcing a return smile. “But what do you want me to do? It’s not a police job.”
“It’s connected. Explain it to him, Roger.”
The three of them were in the Premier’s office, the door shut against interference and passing ears. Zanuch was in his silver braid and Ladbroke in his Cutler double-breasted; the sartorial ruin was the Premier. He was in his shirtsleeves, his white shirt already wrinkled, his standard plain red tie, one that he had worn for ten years, caught sideways across his chest under his black braces. There was no doubt, though, who was Caesar.
“It’s Olympic Tower,” said Ladbroke. “Ray Brode has prospered out of it, how much we don’t know. The Tower project—”
Zanuch interrupted. “How did it get the name Olympic? I thought all Olympic logos were the property of the organizing committee.”
“Only since Sydney got the Games. There was Olympic tyres, remember? There are fifty-two Olympic this-that-and-the-other in the phone book, but none of them uses the logos. Brode was in on the original project, the one that went broke. He knew Sydney was going to bid for the 2000 Games and he got the original developers to get in early, register the name. When the present consortium took over, Brode set about taking advantage of the name. It was he who sold the accommodation in the hotel to SOCOG.”
“He got the Chinese in, too,” said The Dutchman, who always kept a foot in the door of every conversation.
“It was common knowledge,” said Ladbroke, “that several of the top guys in the IOC wanted Beijing to have the Games. Brode thought it might be a sop if he could persuade Beijing to invest money in Olympic Tower—make money out of our Games. He went to Beijing to sell the idea. But Beijing wasn’t interested, not then. All the old men up there are a lot of stiff-necked bastards.”
The old man behind the desk nodded; none knew better how to stiffen a neck.
“Now Beijing has changed its tune,” said Ladbroke.
The Premier had been quiet long enough: “The Chinese consul-general’s been to see me. Shrewd feller, got his slanty little eyes wide open.” Out on the
hustings he was every ethnic’s best friend and patron; but he never had to look for votes in his own office. “Beijing’s just discovered it’s got some corrupt generals in its army, fellers willing to use army money to make a dollar or two for themselves. Or a million or two. Beijing doesn’t like the picture and they’d rather we didn’t frame it.”
He’ll be writing his own speeches next, thought Ladbroke.
“I’m not quite with you,” said Zanuch, though he was well ahead of them. He hadn’t risen through the ranks by looking backwards.
“You know who’s involved in this. Les Chung, coupla other Chinese families, the—” He looked at Ladbroke.
“The Sun family and the Fengs.” The Dutchman would have known their names if they had been big Labor contributors. Ladbroke knew the Suns and the Fengs were Opposition backers.
“The Suns and the Fengs,” Vanderberg went on. “And a General Huang. Your fellers aren’t even close to finding who murdered Sun, Feng and Huang. Beijing couldn’t care less about Sun and Feng, they’re just locals. But they’d rather you forget about General Huang. They’d like us to forget the whole thing.”
“They’re not serious!”
“I’ve shocked you, eh?” The Premier couldn’t stand the Police Commissioner, but Cabinet, for once, had overruled him when the appointment had to be made. “They’re dead serious.”
“Are you?”
The Dutchman looked at Ladbroke. “Am I?”
“There are advantages,” Ladbroke told Zanuch. “We don’t know how big this mess is. As it is, it’s already getting us bad publicity overseas. Fleet Street, which wanted Manchester to get the Games, have gone back to their old ploy of painting us as The Land of the Long White Con. Brash Sydney, where anything goes, all that crap. They keep bringing up Bond, Connell, Skase—none of them was a Sydneysider. They forget all about the shonky deals in the City of London. So far we’ve kept the Chinese connection out of the news—”
“Police PR have done that,” Zanuch corrected him. “The media knows nothing because we’ve told them nothing.”
“Correction, Commissioner. The media does know and they’re going to blow it any minute. They know part of the Tower development capital came out of China. They know there’s been some wheeling and dealing with Town Hall. The one thing they don’t know is that Mr. Shan was General Huang.”
“Why do we have to protect the Chinese army’s good name?”
Ladbroke managed to suppress a sigh. He knew that Zanuch saw the whole picture, framed or unframed, but that he had to play dumb. Commissioners of Police were not supposed to pay lip service to political skulduggery.
Vanderberg took over again: “Bill, we couldn’t give two hooters for the Chinks and their army. But if it gets out about them, it’s all gunna spread like diarrhoea on a blanket—”
Zanuch, a fastidious man, shut his mind against the image.
“—and in no time at all Sydney’s name will be mud.”
“Shit,” said his adviser.
The Dutchman nodded. “Yes. We’ve had enough crap thrown at us already. The Greens abusing us because the Games aren’t gunna be green enough—Jesus, they think the world is gunna turn on their TV to count how many trees we’ve planted, how clean the Parramatta River is? Then there’s the Abos threatening to demonstrate if they don’t get their land claims—”
“Have you made any statement about those claims? You’d have a legitimate answer.” Zanuch knew what a storm such a statement would make.
“Nah, not worth it.” He was wise enough not to appear wise: the voters suspected wisdom, unless it came from radio talkback hosts. “I had my way, I’d take the Olympics out of the media for a while.”
Zanuch was ambivalent in his attitude towards the Games. As Commissioner he knew there would be godalmighty headaches for the police: traffic problems, just for starters. And threats from demonstrators, security against terrorists: the list was already filed in his office and would grow. Yet there was the irresistible attraction: himself in full uniform up there on the official platform with the VIPs. Standing tall and proud, even through the smoke of a terrorist’s bomb, the star of ten billion television screens. His one handicap, his wife, an iconoclast, had told him was that he would be wearing silver instead of gold. Still, better silver than bronze.
“We’d like the whole Olympic Tower business to die quietly,” said Ladbroke. “Cancel the IOC accommodation, get it out of the picture entirely. But it’s too late for that, there’s already talk we’re going to be short of accommodation. So all we can hope for is that you solve the murders quickly—or not at all. Just get them out of the media as soon as possible. From now on Sydney has to be pure as Shangri-la.”
“Or the Garden of Eden,” said the serpent behind the desk.
Zanuch stood up, ran a polishing finger along the braid on his cap. “We’ll do what we can. But these sort of things are never easy.”
When he had gone the Premier looked at Ladbroke. “Well, will he play balls with us?”
I hope not. “He will. The last thing he wants is to be known as the Commissioner of Murder City.”
“You should of been a politician, son,” said the Premier with grudging admiration.
“Every man to his last.”
“Nobody ever got anywhere, son, running last.”
Almost twenty years, thought Ladbroke, and I still don’t know when the Old Man is fair dinkum with his aphorisms.
II
“It’s official,” said Chief Superintendent Greg Random. “General Huang never came near Sydney. It was Mr. Shan. He’s the corpse, not the general.”
He and Malone were in his office at Police Centre in Surry Hills. Long and lean, he was a throwback to the disappearing laconic man from the bush; he had come out of the western plains thirty-five years ago and understatement still clung to him like plains dust. He never used words like incredible or fantastic. He had seen too much of human nature to know that nothing was incredible or fantastic, so he never wasted hyperbole the way the young did. He was sure, however, that hyperbole would burst out of this case.
“The media are going to get on to it sooner or later,” said Malone.
“Not from us, it won’t. If anyone from Homicide gives any hint to anyone from the press, they’re suspended, okay?”
“Greg, when we first learned who Mr. Shan really was, it went into the computer. I’ve since put nothing new into it and I’ve had Sheryl Dallen recall the back-ups. But nothing leaks like a computer.”
Random pondered a while; Malone was accustomed to his long pauses. He had been commander of the Major Crime Squad, South Region, but recent reorganization, a growing disease in the Police Service, had made him the officer responsible for the Homicide and Serial Offenders Unit; it was rumoured there was a secret group at Police Headquarters who did nothing but dream up new names, a ploy also rumoured to be financed by the stationery suppliers. The titles changed, but the work never.
He knew as well as anyone that secrecy in the Service, as in any bureaucracy, was an impossibility; even the corruption in certain sections, which had now been almost wiped out, had not been as secret as the corrupt had thought. He knew the truth of the old Hebrew proverb: Do not speak of secret measures in a field of little hills. Or a field of computers.
“Okay, we just play dumb. Anyone asks questions, you just refer them to the Commissioner. Let him carry the can.”
Malone looked out the window at the gathering clouds. “I’m not getting very far, Greg. I’ve got twelve people working on this, including the fellers from Day Street. I want to find the three young Chinese who are missing, but they could be back in China for all I know.”
“Why don’t you try and contact someone from the Triads?”
“You think that’s easy? I’ve had a tail on Les Chung for the past coupla days, but he’s not leading us anywhere.”
“What about Madame Whatshername? Tzu?”
The woman hovered like a shadow through the case; she wa
s on his mind all the time. “She’s being tailed, too. By my wife.” He explained what Lisa had told him at lunch. “I think she might be shaking hands with Councillor Brode.”
“Money changing hands?”
“Could be, but that’s none of our business . . . I told my wife to stay out of it and I’ve got Andy Graham tailing her and General Wang-Te. But the kids are the ones I want to talk to, they must know something or they wouldn’t have shot through. I want the girl, Huang’s adopted daughter.” He stood up, an eye on the clouds, which were black now. “Suppose we find out the three Chinatown murders were organized from China, by the army?”
Random indulged himself in another long pause; then he grinned. “Blame it on the CIA. They are always good as patsies.”
“You’re a great help, Greg.”
“Scobie, someday you’ll be sitting here in this chair. When the wind blows from the top it blows right through this chair. The thing you learn is that chief superintendents are just windbreaks. All you can do is see that inspectors and other inferior ranks aren’t bowled over by it. Our gods have suddenly become Olympian, all we can do is what they think is best. Which, more often than not, is the worst. But that’s politics, right?”
Malone drove back to Strawberry Hills through a thunderstorm, which exactly suited his mood. Lightning scratched threatening messages on a blackboard of cloud; a thick mesh of rain tried to bring him to a standstill. Pedestrians floated across the windscreen, saved from drowning by their umbrellas; a fire engine, looking for a fire, went by on a surf of dirty water. He was tempted to drive on through the rain, out into the clear weather of home.
“Get wet?” asked Clements as Malone came into the main office, his pork-pie hat dripping like a guttering, his jacket dark with water.
“Don’t ask stupid bloody questions!”
“Oh-oh, bad news?” Clements followed him into the small office. “I’ve got more bad news.”
Malone didn’t answer, just took off his sodden jacket.
“Or maybe it’s not so bad.” Clements sat down, in the visitor’s chair this time, not the couch. “It adds a bit more to our puzzle.”
