Five-Ring Circus

by Jon Cleary

  Why do I get into these smartarse exchanges with the Chinese! They’re not all sons and daughters of Confucius.

  He went out and into the next interview room, where Tong Haifeng sat with Phil Truach. “Things okay, Phil?”

  “We’re both dying for a smoke. Mr. Tong smokes fifty a day, he tells me.”

  “Nerves, Mr. Tong?” Malone looked at the young Chinese, who was cigarette-thin and tobacco-sallow. “I’m a non-smoker and heartless. No smoking till you’re out of this building.”

  Tong coughed, then smiled, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Why are we here?”

  “I told him,” said Truach, “but he thinks it’s a joke.”

  “Why would we waste our time joking, Mr. Tong, when we have four murders on our hands? Do you speak Mandarin?” Gail Lee had told him about the threat to Camilla Feng.

  Tong frowned. “Of course. And Cantonese.”

  “And Mr. Guo—does he speak Mandarin?”

  “Yes. Am I going to be questioned in Mandarin?”

  “Hardly, Mr. Tong.” Malone sat down opposite him. Truach looked imploringly at him (can’t I just step outside for a smoke?), but it was standard procedure that when questioning anyone two detectives had to be present. “If you give quick answers to our questions, you and Sergeant Truach can soon be out on the street having a smoke. Who suggested the three of you should disappear Saturday morning? Or was it Friday night?”

  Tong coughed again, but didn’t smile this time. He appeared to be all skin and bone under the white shirt and tan trousers he wore; but he had big, strong-looking hands that kept moving one within the other like coupling crabs. “Li Ping was the frightened one. Women always are, aren’t they?”

  “What would Madame Tzu say to that?”

  Tong wrinkled his thin nose. “She’s different.”

  “Did you know her before you came to Australia?”

  Tong coughed again; it was a stalling ploy. “Yes.” He took his time before going on: “General Huang introduced us to her, recommended we be brought out here for Bund Corporation.”

  “You were one of the general’s protégés?”

  He hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”

  “Did you know Zhang Yong?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t know he was Li Ping’s brother?”

  “Well, yes.” Again the cough. “But I never met him.”

  “Do you own a gun, Mr. Tong?”

  Once more the cough: it was too obvious a ploy now and Malone was irritated. “Why should I own a gun? I’m an engineer.”

  These bastards have rehearsed their answers. “You were in the army with Guo. Do you know what a Type 67 is?”

  “There is a Type 67 theodolite, an old model. Some surveyors still use it.”

  Malone looked at Truach, who had remained expressionless during the questioning. “Never lost for an answer . . . Righto, Mr. Tong, you can go. Don’t smoke till you’re outside the building—you might be arrested.”

  “For smoking?” He had stood up, was taller than Malone had thought.

  Malone just grinned. “See them out, Phil, right down to the front door.” Where Phil Truach could have his own smoke. “Go back to the apartment in The Mount, Mr. Guo, not back to Bondi. We want the three of you to stay together. We’ll be in touch again.”

  “What have we done?” Now he was on his feet he sounded more confident; or just closer to a smoke. “Have we done something wrong by being afraid?”

  “We just want to keep an eye on you. We don’t want three more murders. Bullets kill you quicker than cigarettes.”

  He grinned at Phil Truach, then went out of the room and crossed to his office. Clements got up from his desk and followed him. “We’re letting them go?”

  “We’ve got nothing to hold them on. But I want them kept under surveillance. Ring Day Street, let them do the legwork.”

  “Do you think the girl and these two young guys know something?”

  “They know more than we do, but we’re not going to get it out of them today. We’ll try the Chinese water torture. We’ll have ‘em in again.”

  Clements nodded appreciatively. “You’re getting more and more Oriental by the day.”

  “Most of my life I found trouble with three things. Plastic kitchen wrap, putting a ribbon into a typewriter and passionate virgins who wanted to remain virgins. But these bloody Orientals . . .” He shook his head in frustration.

  “What are we gunna do about Councillor Brode? Try some water torture on him?”

  Malone looked at his watch. “We’ll talk to him tomorrow. I’m going home.”

  Then his phone rang. It was Phil Truach on his mobile. “I’m downstairs, Scobie. The kids have just been picked up by a woman who was waiting in the car park for them. In a Mercedes.”

  “What did she look like?” But he knew.

  “Chinese. Middle-aged. Well dressed.”

  “Madame Tzu.” He hung up and looked at Clements. “I think I’m beginning to feel the water torture myself.”

  II

  “Are you awake?”

  “Yes. But I’ve got a headache.”

  Lisa dug him in the ribs. “I’m serious—that’s the last thing on my mind.”

  He rolled over on his back, switched on the bedside lamp. “Righto, what is on your mind?”

  “Ray Brode went home sick today. Suddenly.”

  He had not discussed the case with her this evening. He had come home, glad as always to walk in the front door. He had paused by the two camellia bushes: no, trees. He had planted them when they had moved into the house in Randwick North, as the locals called it, as if the extra designation gave it some sort of cachet. The camellias had been bushes then, but now they were trees. He was not a dedicated gardener (Lisa was that) and occasionally he was surprised at the growth of what had been planted: the azaleas, the roses, the gardenias: somehow Lisa managed to get them all to flourish in the same soil. But he did remember planting the camellias; somehow it was almost as if he had forgotten to watch their growth. And now they hung over him, an awning that led to his house, his home. He wondered how many men marked their own years by the growth of the bushes they planted.

  He had stopped and looked to the west, above the houses on the opposite side of the street. The setting sun had exposed a gold reef in a cliff of cloud, promising a better tomorrow. But his mood was low, he knew it was fool’s gold, tomorrow would be no better. So tonight he had not discussed the case, had kept it to himself like a disease he didn’t want to spread.

  “Why did you have to wait till now to tell me?”

  “You told me at lunch to mind my own business.”

  He felt for her hand. “Darl, don’t get involved—”

  “I’m not. I didn’t go asking Rosalie why Brode had left so suddenly—I didn’t know he’d gone. She came into my office to give me some papers and she just remarked on it. Said it wasn’t like him, he was always boasting how fit he was . . . He’s not, he’s overweight—”

  “Go on,” he said patiently.

  She dug him in the ribs again. “Brode comes in two days a week to Town Hall. He was dictating to Rosalie today when he got a phone call. He listened to it, evidently it was quite short, then he hung up and told Rosalie he suddenly felt unwell and he was going home. He was gone before she could ask if she could help him.”

  “I think I know where the phone call came from.” He told her about Brode’s owning the apartment in The Mount. “Tomorrow you go in and you mind your own business, okay?”

  “I’m not going to act all girlish and stupid like the girl in that stupid Woody Allen murder film. But if I hear things—”

  “Darl—” He turned his head on the pillow to look at her. “This is my case. I’ll do my own investigating.”

  She turned her head. “Do you have any idea how it’s going to end up?”

  “No. I’m having so much pressure put on me—” He had been almost on the point of sleep when she had first spoken. Now he
was wide awake. He put his hand on her belly, felt the warmth of her. “Now I’m awake, my headache’s gone.”

  She lay a moment, then she raised herself and kissed him. “You know where it is . . .”

  In the morning at breakfast Claire said, “You had the State Protection Group out yesterday. You didn’t tell us.”

  “There was nothing to tell. Where’d you hear it?”

  “It was on 2UE this morning, half an hour ago. They said it was some sort of balls-up.”

  “They use that sort of language on 2UE?”

  “Was it a balls-up?”

  “It was just an exercise. You don’t want to believe everything you hear on radio.”

  “So it was a balls-up?” said Maureen, the student in Communications.

  Malone looked at Lisa. “Let’s buy a flat and move out. We don’t need this lot.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Tom. “You can teach me how to organize a balls-up.”

  “Better still, you all move out.” But he would hate the day they did.

  III

  Madame Tzu was furious with the man. She had never had any time for army officers; even the corrupt ones had no imagination. “You have to move! The other two, Chung and Aldwych, are waiting to take us over!”

  General Wang-Te was unmoved by her fury. He sat sipping the tea that Tzu’s maid had brought in when he had arrived. He was not staying at the Vanderbilt, but had booked into a three-star hotel as Mr. Wang-Te, a lecturer from Shanghai University. The less advertisement for himself, the army and the current problem the better.

  “You will have to be patient—”

  “Patience be damned!” Anger made her look older. As it always does with women, thought Wang-Te, a misogynist.

  He took another sip of tea, the very image of patience. “We can do nothing about your project—”

  “Not my project! Not just mine—there are others in this—”

  “Were in it,” he corrected her. “Your two friends in Shanghai are in jail awaiting trial. They may be executed. As Huang would have been if he had come back to China.” He sipped his tea. “The thinking in Beijing is that a lesson must be taught. There is enough corruption at home—soon we’ll be as bad as the Russians—” He shook his head at the prospect. “The worst of it is that I knew your partners. All good officers till—”

  “Till I what? Seduced them?”

  He smiled at her. “Is that how you persuaded them?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” For a moment she looked as if she might throw her own cup of tea at him.

  “There are too many irons in the fire.” He was not an aphorist, but he had a fondness for clichés, which in many cases started life as aphorisms. “Some will have to be taken out.”

  “Who? What?”

  “Huang’s daughter and your two young engineers.”

  “Taken out? You mean killed?” She was a devotee of American films, especially Scorsese’s gangster films. They showed the uses of ruthlessness.

  They were speaking Mandarin and he had used the phrase taken out in its literal meaning. “Killed? Do you want that?”

  The idea seemed to cool her; her anger died down. “Another three killings here in Sydney? No, that would be too much.”

  But the idea hasn’t repelled her, he thought. He was a married man, but he had spent all his life since his youth amongst men. Ruthless women were as unfamiliar to him as nymphomaniacs; his wife, educated by American missionaries, had kept him protected from both. “I want to take them back to China.”

  “All three?”

  “No, but the girl must be taken back. Our embassy in Canberra is working on that.”

  “How?”

  He ignored the question; as he had, for sake of peace and quiet, learned to ignore his wife. “The main problem has to do with the money.”

  “Of course the problem is the money!” She had little patience with him. He was an accountant, despite his rank: General Profit-and-Loss. Her partners had been generals, but they had never thought of loss, being generals of the old school. They had been stupid about the outside world, but stupid partners were always more manageable than smart ones. Till General Huang had tried to be smart . . . “Are the Australians going to release it?”

  “Who knows what Australians will do? Often, they don’t know themselves. But our embassy is working on them.”

  “The embassy! Don’t you know that diplomatic channels are streams that run uphill?” She was an aphorist, though her wit and wisdom were often borrowed. “We need the money now! Tell your army friends in Shanghai the money will be returned double in five years. It’s here—leave it here and use it!”

  He knew she was probably the smartest woman he had ever met, but greed had made her naïve. “How do we tell that story to the Australians? They are not interested in our profits.”

  “You find the right men to talk to—”

  “Our embassy are doing that. But whatever understanding is arrived at, it won’t be between Canberra and Shanghai. It will be between Canberra and Beijing.”

  “Beijing!” The scorn in her voice would have curdled milk, if any had been served with the tea. “What do they know?”

  Wang-Te had been born in Shanghai and raised there. His father had worked for a foreign bank and had stood and watched the night Chiang Kai-shek’s men had come to the bank and removed all the gold in the vaults. Mr. Wang-Te had stayed on and survived; the Communists had needed his expertise in international banking; those had been the pragmatic days before the mass stupidity of the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Wang’s son had been brought up not to question Communism, though not necessarily to believe in it. The Wang-Te family had had their own pragmatism.

  “They know nothing. When it was Peking they knew nothing. The same now it is Beijing. When London ruled half the globe, do you think it understood those it ruled? Do you think Washington understands us Chinese or the Arabs or even the Jews? Capitals are the same everywhere. They are just halls of mirrors.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Why, I did,” he said and looked surprised; an aphorism had crept up on him.

  “Things are getting desperate,” she said; and he knew she meant she was getting desperate. “Without the money . . .”

  “Fifty-one million dollars,” he said with an accountant’s wistfulness, a rare state of mind; then he said in English, “Just lying there in limbo.”

  She wasn’t mission-educated, but she knew a non-interest paying bank when she heard it. “It’s Bund Corporation money—if Huang hadn’t stolen it—”

  “It was already stolen money,” he said, “It was army money.”

  “If we hadn’t used it, someone else would have.” She had the simple logic of the thief. “Don’t preach morality to me. That money has to stay here in Sydney. Somehow . . .”

  “I’ll see what I can do. But no more killings.”

  “Not unless necessary,” she said.

  IV

  Annandale is no more than five or six kilometres from the heart of the city, once a workers’ suburb, now on its way to gentrification. It is part of the larger municipality of Leichhardt, whose town hall has seen more battles than the Western Front in World War One. Raymond Brode began his local government career there and the scars still showed.

  Like so many inner areas in the early colony, Annandale was a land grant, in this case to a Colonel Johnston. He distinguished himself and temporarily lost the grant, by assembling his troops and marching into Government House and arresting William Bligh, the Governor. Bligh was not the first nor the last to make the mistake of angering the citizens by thinking that tyranny was an acceptable form of administration. He was held in jail, then placed on board a ship and told to get out of town. Some time later Johnston himself was placed aboard ship, under arrest, and sent back to England. He eventually returned to the colony and his land grant was restored. Offering further proof that in those days anything, if you weren’t a convict, was forgivable.

  Raymond Bro
de lived in Johnston Street, the extremely wide thoroughfare that is the spine of Annandale. The street still has several of the Gothic Revival houses built in the 1880s and Brode lived in the grandest of them. It was a four-storeyed mansion that, like several of the other survivors, had a steeple on its roof, suggesting the original owner had had churchly ambitions. Under the Brode roof, however, no choirs sang and if the plate was passed around it was for the resident sinner.

  The house looked top-heavy, as if at any moment it might topple over on to the modest one-storey houses on either side. It had been built by a wool merchant who thought he was looking ahead but somehow didn’t see the Great Depression of the 1890s. It had originally stood in three acres of garden; now a bank of hydrangeas and a square of lawn that wouldn’t have fed two sheep were its only complement. Those and a fence of six-foot ornamental spikes. A large mail-box just inside the spiked gate said in large letters: “NO JUNK MAIL.”

  “You think that’s a warning to his Town Hall mates?” said Clements.

  Malone had phoned Lisa at her office to find out if Brode had reported for council duty this morning. No, he was still at home, still supposedly unwell.

  “Would he be at his offices?” Malone had asked.

  “He works from home, Rosalie tells me. He’s a wheeler-dealer, he doesn’t need offices.”

  “You’ve been too long at Town Hall, you’re starting to sound cynical.”

  “It’s educational, if nothing else. It beats doing the laundry.”

  Now he and Clements pushed open the ornamental gate and went up the half a dozen marble steps that led up to the thick security door guarding the ornamental front door. The windows on either side of the door, fronting on to the wide marbled verandah, were heavily barred. A hundred years ago the wool merchant, unprotected, had felt safe even in those depressed times.

  The front door was opened; a slim-figured woman stood behind the security door. “Yes?”

  Malone introduced himself and Clements, showed his badge. “We’d like a word with Mr. Brode.”

  “My husband is not well. He’s not seeing anyone this morning.”

  “I think he’ll see us, Mrs. Brode.”

  She continued to stare at them through the wire screen that covered the grille of the door. Malone, staring back at her, had the sudden image that they were two faces on a computer screen. All that was missing was the text below the faces; neither knew anything of the other. But at last Mrs. Brode seemed prepared to take a chance: “Wait there.”