by Jon Cleary
Malone glanced at Clements. “Anyone we know?”
“Nobody’s been named so far,” said Clements. “Madame Tzu was the friend who’s finding him a lawyer.”
“Aren’t you the lucky one, Mr. Guo, to have such a friend? Almost like a mother to you, I suppose.” Malone could taste the bile on his tongue. “What other advice does she give you?”
“Only professional advice,” said Guo, elbows now on the table, fingers steepled together. He looked like someone about to give advice. “After all, she and her partners pay my wages.”
Plus bonuses? But Malone kept the question to himself.
III
“Look, Charlie—”
Jack Aldwych would not have called the du Barry woman Madame, nor Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek; madames were the women who had run his brothels and he had called them Ruby or Flo. He had had difficulty with the pronunciation of Tzu Chao and so, after their initial meeting, he had called her Charlie. She had accepted it with pained, amused tolerance, convinced yet again that the world was not yet free of barbarians.
“—we can’t keep putting this off any longer. You’ve gotta come up with the money, that’s final.”
He and Les Chung had come to the Vanderbilt for this meeting with Madame Tzu and General Wang-Te. They sat sipping tea, biscuits on the coffee table between them: Iced Vo-Vos this time. Aldwych had offended by asking for milk in his tea; Madame Tzu had instructed the maid to bring the milk in much the same sour voice that she might have used to call for yak butter. The atmosphere in the room was equally sour.
“A few more days,” she said defensively. She was not accustomed to being defensive and it hurt. She looked at Wang-Te, who had sat silent so far. “The general has been down to our embassy in Canberra—”
“What did they say?” Les Chung was as irritated as Aldwych, but showing it less. “Once things get to Canberra, they get lost. Things down there go round and round, like their streets.”
Wang-Te nodded. “A strange place. Full of ivory towers, someone at our embassy told me.”
“Like Beijing,” said Madame Tzu, and Wang-Te winced.
“Never mind the politics.” Aldwych belonged to a privileged class, the criminals who were above politics. “What did you get out of your embassy?”
Wang-Te put down his cup, looked at Madame Tzu. “We have to tell them.”
She wrapped her hand round her own cup, looked as if she might throw it at him. Les Chung said, “Tell us, what?”
“The money is going back to China,” said Wang-Te. “All of it. Nothing more will be said about it. The embassy told me it will become what you call an urban myth.”
“Fifty-one million dollars in solid cash?” said Aldwych. “Some myth.”
“General Huang’s son is dead,” said Chung. “But his daughter is still alive. What if she talks?”
“She is to be taken back to China. She won’t talk.”
“What if she won’t go?” said Aldwych.
“Oh, she will go,” said Wang-Te. “Your Federal Police have already picked her up, I believe. There is nothing to worry about,” he said with all the assurance of a man who knew how a mouth could be kept shut. It had shocked him to hear the clamour of mouths in a democracy.
Madame Tzu could contain herself no longer. “Damn the embassy and its politics! Why can’t the money stay here, be invested? Take the girl back, keep her mouth shut, but leave the money here. It will go back and what will happen to it?”
Aldwych sat back, studying her. He had had a certain morality as a criminal, forced on him by his wife, Shirl. She had known what he was, but she had turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the bank hold-ups, the prostitution racket and the gold smuggling; they were honest, almost decent crimes, so long as no one was killed or hurt. She had known nothing of the murders he had ordered, believing him when he had told her he had been framed each time he had been charged, welcoming him back with open arms and legs when he had been acquitted. He had never gone into drug dealing, knowing that Shirl would have left him if he had.
He looked at Charlie Tzu now and decided she had no moral values at all.
“The money will be invested in Hong Kong,” said Wang-Te. “Or Shanghai,” he added with a certain quiet relish, knowing the latter destination for the money would be like sending it to Moscow, as far as she was concerned.
He had met her only twelve months ago when she had invited him and two of his fellow generals to lunch in Shanghai. There had been no direct blatant approach on that occasion; she was just there, she had said, to give them her experience of the wider world. She had talked of the advantages of foreign investment, but always obliquely, never openly suggesting that they should consider the thought. She had spoken of the United States, where Wall Street money flew ever and ever upwards. But her real enthusiasm had been for Australia, where the locals had the long-range vision of bats and Chinese patience would reap a fortune. He had seen her only twice after that, at a reception in Shanghai and at another in Hong Kong after the British had left. They had been perfunctorily polite towards each other, but each knew what the other was: he an honest man, she totally corrupt. The other two generals, aided by book-keepers of lower rank, had fallen for the dreams she had painted. They were now in prison awaiting trial before an army court. Execution faced them, an act that would shorten their long-range vision.
“That’s the end of your road then,” said Aldwych. “Sorry, Charlie.”
It took a moment for her to get her fury under control. These barbarians, these men . . . “What happens to what I’ve already invested? I have ten million in the project.”
“Your own or borrowed money?” asked Les Chung.
Hesitancy looked out of place on her; but it was there. “Some of it mine, some of it borrowed.”
“How much?” said Aldwych. “Borrowed?”
Her words were slow, as if for the moment she had forgotten her English. “Six million. From a Hong Kong bank that trusts me.”
Aldwych shook his head; it might have been mistaken for pity, except that he had never felt that emotion towards anyone but Shirl. “Not enough, Charlie. If the bank forecloses on you, we get first crack at taking over the loan. We don’t want any more outsiders in with us.”
“I’m an outsider?” She was affronted; the knuckles showed white on the hand that still held her cup. “Me?”
“You’ve always been an outsider, Charlie. Les and me are the natives. Don’t get het up—” He held up a hand as she started to rise. “You’d of always got your fair share if you’d kept on bringing money in. But you didn’t. You and General Huang got ideas of your own—”
“I had nothing to do with Huang’s schemes!” There is a certain fire when an essentially dishonest person can be honest: it adds sincerity to them that they otherwise find difficult. “The man was stupid—I don’t know what he intended to do with that money—I know nothing about it—”
“He was going to push you out,” said Chung. “He felt you were no longer needed.”
Even Aldwych looked at him at that. “Where’d you get that from?”
“He told me last Friday night. Me and Sun and Feng, just before the three of them were shot.”
Aldwych sighed; it could have been a mixture of disgust and sadness, but no one would ever know. “When I was in the game, before I retired, I never had any partners, I was on me own. That way I was never screwed by mugs I was supposed to trust—”
“Jack—” Les Chung was uncomfortable, but it barely showed. He had made two mistakes: one in divulging what Huang had said; two, in telling Madame Tzu. He rarely made mistakes; to make two at once was totally out of character. “I’d have told you eventually—”
“Eventually? What the fuck does that mean?” The old cruel hardness was coming out in him.
The two outsiders watched this in stiff silence, Madame Tzu leaning slightly forward as if she might intervene at any moment. Wang-Te, the real outsider, sat back in his chair, content to be no more than a specta
tor. He took off his glasses, breathed on them, cleaned them with a handkerchief; none of this argument was going to touch him. He had been tempted, just for a very short time, by Madame Tzu’s pleas somehow to keep the stolen money in Australia; he knew that temptation is an itch that everyone suffers from. To invest the money and maybe some day be rich, to never go back to Shanghai and the wife and her mission morality. The Baptists had been expelled by Mao, but they had left their corruption behind in her. Sin, which he had never known till she had educated him in it, had for the moment tempted him. A minor sin, of course, just theft: it was almost fashionable these days in China. But the temptation had not lasted. His honesty was a rope that bound him.
Madame Tzu, who had spent almost all her life watching and escaping from warring factions, was not impressed by the argument between—her partners? That was what she had thought they were; but now it seemed she had been only a means to their ends. Her own intended end had been to settle here in Australia, to sever her connections with Shanghai and Hong Kong, to become the Empress of Developers in this country of semi-barbarians and latent racists. She had met Les Chung two years ago in Hong Kong and after several subsequent meetings had made enquiries about him and found him sufficiently venal for her needs. He had introduced her to Jack Aldwych and she had instantly recognized that he had the same regal contempt as she had towards the suckers of the world, of whom there were billions. Everything, she had thought, was set for the future, her future. And now . . .
“You are not getting rid of me!” There was no mistaking her fierceness. “I’ll blow you all right out of the ground if you try—”
“How?” Aldwych had been threatened by women before, but they had been drunken whores who had rung him the next day to tell him they hadn’t meant it, that they loved him and wanted to go on working for him. But this woman . . . “How?”
Then the phone rang. She looked at it as if willing it to stop; then she stood up quickly, crossed to it and snapped into it, “Yes?”
The three men watched her, all of them impassive, each with his own reaction to her threat to blow them out of the ground. Wang-Te had no ruthlessness in him, but he had seen so much of it over the past thirty years; he saw it now in the faces of these two silent men sitting opposite him. Madame Tzu had woven the rope for her own neck.
“How did you get yourself into this mess?” she said in Mandarin. Only Wang-Te understood what she had said. “The best lawyer you can get for that situation is a man named Caradoc Evans.”
The name was all that Aldwych and Chung understood. They looked at each other like men who had heard a secret password; then Aldwych said, “Caradoc Evans? How did you get on to him?”
“He’s a lawyer,” said Madame Tzu, putting down the phone.
“He’s a criminal lawyer. What do you want a criminal lawyer for?”
“I don’t want him.” She was annoyed at the intrusion by the phone call. “It’s Guo Yi, one of our engineers. He is being held for questioning by that nuisance Inspector Malone.”
“Why’s he being questioned?”
“Someone tried to kill Inspector Malone last night.” Her tone couldn’t have been more casual; she wanted to get back to real concerns.
“Stupid!” Les Ching shook his head in disgust. “When are you people going to recognize we’re not in the backblocks of China?”
IV
Cronulla is the bastardization of an Aborginal word meaning “the place of pink seashells.” Aborigines lived and fished on the beach and the land back of it for several thousand years before the white men arrived; the seashells are gone, but a few Aborigines play in the local rugby league team, called the Sharks. They have been heard to remark that their ancestors had a much easier time fighting amongst themselves, though the pay was less. The beach lies 26 kilometres south of Sydney, at the end of a railway line, and the gunyahs of centuries ago have been replaced by restaurants, shops and apartment buildings.
“Li Ping doesn’t do too badly for a Communist,” said Sheryl Dallen, looking up at the block of apartments; it was the sort of block where estate agents would never have used the words flats or units. “I thought Communists were supposed to share the wealth? I wouldn’t mind sharing a flat here with her.”
“I think the last thing Li Ping is is a Communist,” said Gail Lee. “I doubt very much if she would have shared a toy at kindergarten.”
They went into the building and climbed the stairs to the first floor. The door to Li Ping’s apartment was slightly ajar. Gail pressed the bell and the door was immediately swung back. A bulky man in a double-breasted suit stood there.
“You friends of Miss Li?”
“Not exactly,” said Gail and produced her badge. “Who are you?”
The man produced his own badge. “Agent Hurlstone, Federal Police.”
“Is Miss Li here?”
“Come on in.” He stood back to let them pass, then closed the door. “In the living room.”
Gail and Sheryl went down the short hall and into the living room. A wall of glass looked out across a wide verandah to the beach. A second man, medium height and slim, turned back from a small desk he was searching, raised enquiring eyebrows at the bulky man.
“I think they’re here for the same reason as us,” said Hurlstone. “Agent Graveney.”
Gail introduced herself and Sheryl. “We’re from Homicide, we were to take Miss Li in for questioning. Why did you want her?”
Graveney closed the drawer of the desk, sat down on a chair and waved to the two women to sit. The furnishings of the room were standard rental, though of good quality: quality prints of beach scenes hung on the walls; shag rugs lay like pelts on the good-quality carpet. All that was missing was the suggestion that anyone had ever called the apartment home.
“I’m afraid you’re out of luck.” Graveney had a soft voice, that of a man sure of his authority. “Our bird has flown.”
“Back to China?” said Sheryl.
Whether Graveney was from the Sydney or the Canberra office of the Federal Police, he had the Canberra approach: he took his time. His speech was not only soft but slow and deliberate: one could almost hear the punctuation.
“If she attempts that, she will be picked up by Immigration. They have been alerted.”
“When was she last seen?”
“She was here in the flat last night.” He looked around the room, as if double-checking that she wasn’t present. “We checked with the people next door. They heard her go out about nine-thirty, but whether she came back they couldn’t say.”
“You still haven’t said why you want her,” said Gail.
Graveney looked at Hurlstone, who was sitting on a chair by the door that led out on to the verandah. “They don’t like us interfering, do they?”
“States’ rights.” Hurlstone grinned and shrugged. His double-breasted jacket was still done up, stretched tight across his belly; the buttons looked as if they might fly off at any moment. “They’d secede, if they could.”
“Yes,” said Sheryl, “we would. But a little co-operation might make us change our minds. We were here first, a coupla days ago—”
“Ladies—” said Graveney, and didn’t appear to notice the stiffening of the ladies’ spines. “You will have to ask Canberra why we’re here. The Department of Foreign Affairs, I think. This is no longer a police matter, we’re into politics.”
“Bugger,” said Sheryl, and glanced at Gail. “Say something shitty in Mandarin.”
Gail resisted the invitation. “As my colleague said, we were here a few days ago. Li Ping and her boyfriend disappeared for a day or two, but then we found them.”
“We heard about it,” said Hurlstone. “The cock-up at that block of flats in Chinatown.”
“You follow us in the media?” said Sheryl.
“All the time.” Hurlstone laughed, his belly expanded and a button flew off his jacket. It was his turn to say Bugger! as he bent down and searched for it in the shag rug.
“We
found nothing when we searched the flat,” said Gail, “nothing that helped us very much. Have you come up with anything?”
“Such as?” said Graveney.
“Such as a gun.”
Hurlstone had found his button. He sat back in his chair, then dipped into his pocket and pulled out a plastic envelope. “We found these, they were under the bed in the main bedroom. Looked like someone had dropped them and didn’t notice, as if they might of been leaving in a hurry.”
Gail took the envelope and looked at the pistol magazine loaded with five bullets; then handed it to Sheryl. “Thirty-twos?”
“Yes,” said Sheryl. “A seven-round magazine. I wonder what happened to the two that are missing.”
“Any significance?” asked Graveney.
“Two Thirty-twos were fired at our boss, Inspector Malone, last night,” said Gail. “May we have these?”
“Why not?” said Graveney after a glance at Hurlstone. “Since we’re now into politics, what do bullets matter?”
“Are you kidding?” said Sheryl.
11
I
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ago Caradoc Evans had alternated between playing scrum half and front row for the toughest, roughest club in Welsh rugby. He had learned how to head butt an opponent, to protect his balls from the groping hand in the opposing second row, to bite an ear that presented itself when the rucking got rough. Sundays he had sung in the chapel choir, his soul dark but his voice as light as a lark’s; Monday to Friday he had gone to Cardiff University, where he had laid plans as well as girls. Graduating with a Law degree he had seen no future for a criminal lawyer in the valleys; the mines were closing and so was the soul, too embittered and exhausted to consider a life of crime. He had set out for Australia, where they played open rugby and where open slather was the credo of businessmen. He had fitted in amongst the con men and the rascally lawyers of the times like an indigene. Years later he had met Scobie Malone, recognized another Celt and introduced him to Gwyn Thomas, the sour Welsh humorist who wrote of the ills of the world and what it did to the voters. It was the one bond between them.
