Five-Ring Circus

by Jon Cleary

  “Wonderful!” Madame Tzu looked almost young.

  “—a company will be set up in Beijing and will take over General Huang’s—Mr. Shan’s—share of the partnership in Olympic Tower, with other investment of capital as it is needed.”

  There was a gasp from Madame Tzu; she looked suddenly aged. “Where does that leave me?”

  “That will depend on your partners,” said Wang-Te.

  They don’t even tell each other anything, thought Ladbroke.

  She turned on Aldwych and Chung. “Well?”

  “You’ll need more money,” said Chung; he abruptly relaxed, back in his depth again. “Can you raise it?”

  “Yes, yes.” It was twenty years or more since she had showed such eagerness. Unfortunately it made her look older rather than younger. “I’ll leave for Hong Kong tomorrow—now everything is settled again—”

  As if the murders hadn’t happened, thought Ladbroke. And wondered at life in China, where amongst a billion people maybe murders dropped out of sight like a stone in a vast quicksand.

  “So what happens?” Amberton was very much out of his depth. The usual shenanigans in council at the Town Hall suddenly looked like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic. He couldn’t get back there fast enough. He’d blow-dry his hair and clear his brain.

  Agaroff spoke for the first time, rubbing the top of his bald head. The recent fashion craze for bald skulls had given him confidence in his looks; he looked in mirrors now almost as often as Amberton, the hairy one. “If Mr. Aldwych and Mr. Chung agree to the new arrangements, we’ll put everything of the past week behind us. The sole objective is that the Olympics—” he refrained from making the sign of the cross—“go ahead without any hitches. Particularly in the accommodation area—we’re having trouble there.”

  “Five murders?” said Brode. “You’re going to hush all that up?”

  “No,” said Commissioner Zanuch, and moved his chair further to one side.

  “Bill—” The Premier gave him the basilisk eye. “Least said, you don’t have to mend anything.”

  “Mr. Premier—” Zanuch was no stranger to political chicanery, but he could see himself and his men carrying the can here. “The police don’t run the Justice system. We have a man in custody, Guo Yi, he will be charged and after that the Director of Public Prosecutions takes over—”

  “I’ve talked with the Attorney-General,” said The Dutchman, which meant he had talked at the A-G. “That young feller will be remanded till all the fuss has died down—say about six months’ time—”

  “You can keep him in custody all that time?” Amberton was the most innocent of all those in the room.

  “There are ways and means,” said Aldwych, who knew from experience. “Right, Mr. Vanderberg?”

  The old honest crook acknowledged another wise man. “Like you say, Mr. Aldwych, there are ways and means.”

  “Won’t his lawyer make a fuss?” asked Brode.

  “He’s a Welshman,” said Ladbroke. “They know a roadblock when they see one—they live next door to the English. If he does protest, we just send Mr. Guo back to China. What would happen to him there, General? You’d execute him, wouldn’t you?”

  Wang-Te shrugged, but said nothing. Nothing was enough.

  The Premier looked at Ladbroke. “Well, Roger, looks like we’ve cleaned up the mess.”

  “You don’t want a statement put out, do you?”

  The Dutchman tried to look demure, but failed miserably. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  IV

  Last night Malone had driven out to Camden to the safe house and picked up Lisa and the family. He had felt light-hearted, almost light-headed. It was a long time since he had been so glad to see the end of a case. For the second time on this road he passed a police chase of a stolen car. Both cars went by him like comets, the police car with siren blaring and the blue and red lights a swivelling glare. He had blown his horn in encouragement, on the side of law and order.

  When he knocked on the front door of the house and announced himself over the intercom, Constable Sherrard, in a pinafore, opened the door. “So it’s all over?”

  He nodded. “They can come home.”

  Which they did. They drove back to Randwick through a night that seemed to him to have music in it. I am light-headed, he thought. The suburbs lay on either side of them, tiled roofs covering a thousand agonies; but those were other people’s and tonight he couldn’t care less for other people. All he cared for and about were the four people here in the Fairlane with him. Nobody asked how the case had been wound up; they knew he would tell them in his own time. They just knew he was safe, they were all safe.

  In bed, in the capital city of the country of marriage, as Lisa called it, he wrapped himself in her limbs, felt the warmth and comfort of her that only she could generate. She said, “You want to tell me about it?”

  “No, not now. It’ll keep.” He kissed her. “I love you.”

  “I know. Where’s your loving hand?”

  “On its way.”

  Then this morning a uniformed Harold Boston, brand new sergeant’s stripes bright as neon on his shoulder, came to collect him at Homicide. “The Commissioner wants to see you. Now.”

  “How come he sent you?”

  “I volunteered.”

  “Why did I ask?”

  Boston looked sideways at him as they got into the Headquarters car. “He’s going to kick you up the arse.”

  “It was worth it, Harold. That’s something you’ll never understand.”

  And now he and Greg Random were in the Commissioner’s office and Zanuch was reading the riot act. “The SPG were on their way—why the hell couldn’t you have waited? Have you blasted him about this, Greg?”

  “Not yet, sir. I was going to, but you got in first.”

  Zanuch eyed him; then looked back at Malone. “I don’t know why I’m letting you sit. You should be standing at attention with a poker up your bum. Why didn’t you bloody well wait for the SPG?”

  Malone had never seen the usually imperturbable Commissioner so irate. It didn’t worry him, however; if Zanuch had been going to sack him, he would have been cold and distant. “There were two shots, sir. I assumed Li Ping had shot Tong Haifeng and then committed suicide. The site manager had told us she was berserk, off her head—”

  “She might have been. But that was no reason for you to risk your own life and that of Sergeant Clements and the Chinese woman, whatshername—”

  “Madame Tzu. She wasn’t up there on the fifth floor at my invitation. She slipped into the building and came up of her own accord—I’m not sure what she thought she could do—”

  “I’ve had her up to my office,” said Random. “She had some influence over Miss Li—or so she thought. She had some idea she could run those three youngsters and all the time they were laughing at her.”

  “She told you that?” Malone was incredulous.

  “No, that’s my own guess. Chinese kids, some of them, don’t respect the old the way they used to—she as much as told me so. Sir, this case has been a helluva mess—”

  “You’re telling me? I’ve been in political swill up to my neck. What did you get out of this young bloke, Guo Yi? Has he confessed to anything?”

  “Scobie talked to him yesterday afternoon—” Random looked at Malone.

  “He committed the first three murders, at the Golden Gate. He was the hitman in the stocking mask, the feller I saw. Li Ping had been told by General Huang that the money would be coming into her account. That was why she had been going to the bank for several days before it arrived. She was going to transfer five million of it to another bank as soon as it arrived in her account. Then she was going to do a bunk to the United States, lose herself over there under another name. She promised to take Guo with her if he would kill General Huang—she hated the general’s guts. She just didn’t know about the Cash Transactions Reporting Act. Neither, it seems, did General Huang or the Hong Kong bank executive who a
rranged the transfer. Li Ping found out, too late, that the man in Hong Kong had come from Beijing, he was new and he didn’t really know what went on in the rest of the world. I guess there are rules and regulations in Hong Kong, but it seems money still passes in and out of there like it did in the old days. Except that the old Hong Kong hands are wiser than the Communists who have come in.”

  “Where did Guo get that Chinese army gun?” asked the Commissioner.

  “It was General Huang’s—maybe he’d used it on some of his mates. Li Ping stole it from him. She shot her adopted brother, Zhang, because he squealed to his father what she had intended to do—take that five million. The general was going to take her back to China with him when he went. I don’t know where she got the gun that killed Zhang, but she knew how to use it. She used it on Jason Nidop, too. And she tried to drop me.”

  “How did Nidop get into the act?”

  “Because he was the first one she approached to do the hit on General Huang. She had some idea that because he was so tough about the union business, he could be bought. He couldn’t but he made the mistake of trying to blackmail her. In the end it was Guo who did the Golden Gate murders.”

  “But why kill Mr. Sun and Mr. Feng?” asked Random.

  “Les Chung was on the list, too. The idea was that if all four of them were done in, we’d cast a wider net of suspicion. At one time we were thinking it might have had something to do with the Triads. If it had been only General Huang, the first two we’d have looked at would have been his son and adopted daughter.”

  “Jesus!” Zanuch looked at the ceiling, as if Himself might have been hovering there. “How callous can these Chinese be?”

  “Sir—” Malone put his neck out. “Li Ping thought she had been done out of five million dollars. She wanted to escape China, get away . . . I’ve arrested Aussie women—and men—who’ve killed for much less than that, a few dollars and cents.”

  “Are you telling me I’m prejudiced?”

  “No, sir. I’ve got enough of my own—I’ve been battling them all through this case—”

  “I think, sir,” said Random, coming to the rescue, “Scobie had more to put up with in this case than in ordinary circumstances. We all have.”

  Zanuch didn’t forgive easily; but he was not a vindictive man. He nodded. “All right, you’ve made your point. I was at a meeting this morning with the Premier—” He didn’t elaborate; he still had the sour taste of the meeting in his mouth. “From now on we all salute the Olympic flag. You understand?”

  Malone’s tongue, true to form, got away from him. “What if someone takes pot shots at the flag, sir?”

  “Look the other way,” said Commissioner Zanuch, and actually smiled.

  12

  I

  WHILE MALONE had been caught up in the five-ring circus, stock markets around the world had put on their own act; stocks melted in the sweaty hands of panicky investors. On exchange floors everywhere dealers shouted, gibbered and flung up their arms like drowning swimmers. Apes at Taronga Park zoo, watching the scenes on the TV sets in their cages, looked at each other and shrugged. “That’s evolution? You think we oughta send ‘em some bananas?” Tom listened to the gurus, all of whom had a different opinion; then he decided he would be an airline pilot, where going up and down was an everyday affair. Malone, a man of the long view, just hoped that the day he drew his superannuation, the market would be airborne.

  Guo Yi was charged and remanded in custody. His trial somehow keep slipping back on court schedules; six months passed before he went to trial, was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. He is now in a top security prison, keeping abreast of advances in engineering in the prison library and through magazine subscription; he is waiting stoically for his release in his early forties. On the wall of his cell the prison governor has allowed him to do a coloured chalk vista, pale as a Chinese scroll, of the Great Wall of China. In the distance, a visual anachronism, is the outline of a skyscraper that bears a resemblance to the Olympic Tower: a mockery or a dream? He doesn’t know, or has chosen to ignore, that fifteen to twenty in prison doesn’t qualify one for Australian citizenship.

  General Wang-Te retired from the army and now makes regular trips to Sydney as a director of the Chinese company that is a partner in the Olympic Tower consortium. He always comes without his wife and is a regular visitor to the Quality Couch, a top brothel where they accept his American Express card and in the interests of international relations, give him frequent bonus points. He has discovered the pleasures of sin and other positions besides the missionary one.

  Camilla Feng collected her father’s insurance payment and paid off his debts and was accepted as a minor shareholder in the Tower consortium. Ron Fadiman asked her out to dinner and she went, but the date came to nothing. She kissed him good night and goodbye. She has bigger fish to hook.

  Madame Tzu still flies back and forth between Hong Kong and Sydney, bringing more and more money each time she arrives. She appears regularly in the Sunday social pages, cool and dignified amongst all the inane smiles, still seeing herself as an empress amongst barbarians.

  Jack Aldwych and Leslie Chung, pillars of respectability, go their own quiet way. They have been invited to visit Beijing as guests of the Chinese government and will probably go. Jack Aldwych, retired gangster, only regrets that he has been too late to meet the Gang of Four. He could have taught them a lot.

  II

  “I hope it’s going to be quieter than last time,” said Claire.

  “Don’t even mention it,” said Lisa.

  “We never did get that French champagne,” said Maureen. “How about it, Dad?”

  “I think I might try some,” said Tom.

  Malone felt his credit card beginning to curl. Then looked up as Les Chung appeared beside their booth. “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Malone. And, of course—” He bowed to the family. “I’m glad you decided to honour us again. Dinner is on us. I can recommend the Peking Duck.” He smiled at Claire; he had a Chinese memory: “The champagne is on its way.”

  He went away and Malone looked after him. He paused by the back booth, which was empty, a red rope across it. Nice touch, Les, thought Malone. But you can’t put a rope round memory.

  Lisa put her hand on his, said softly, “Forget it. It’s all over.”

  Kirribilli, August 1996-August 1997

  THE END

  FREE PREVIEW OF THE NEXT SCOBIE MALONE MYSTERY:

  DILEMMA

  Part 1

  March 1994

  1

  I

  MALONE PULLED up his car in the Erskineville street where he had been born, got out and waited for the memories to flood back. He had been doing this for the past six months, but now the memories were only a trickle; drought, the bane of farmers and sentimentalists, had set in. One side of the street had lost its row of workmen’s cottages; they had been replaced by a row of town houses or, as the estate agents now called them, villas. On the side where Malone stood, his side, the terrace houses had been gentrified. All had been painted: pale cream but with different-coloured doors: red, yellow, blue, green; all with ornate knockers, like suddenly proclaimed coats of arms. Some of the narrow verandahs that opened right on to the pavement had planter boxes behind their painted iron railings. All of them had security grilles on the windows; some had security doors. Only on the very end of the terrace was the rebel, the memory anchor.

  Painted cream like the others, yes; but the door was brown, the plain knocker was black, there was no security grille. A youth had broken into the house a couple of years ago and Con Malone had met him with one of Malone’s old cricket bats and beaten him senseless. The kid had wanted to charge Con with assault and the two young cops who had been called by Brigid Malone had had to hold Con back from assaulting him further.

  Con Malone was sitting on a kitchen chair on the verandah, soaking up the hour’s sun that the front of the house managed. He was reading the morning’s newspaper, a ritual
that took him from the front pages, through the obituaries to the sports pages, read in sequence like a book. Malone paused a few steps from the front gate and looked at his father. The old man, like the memories, was fading. The tree-trunk body was thinner and smaller, there was now a hunch to the once-straight back. He suddenly felt an immense affection for his father.

  Con looked up as Malone stepped in the front gate. “G’day.”

  “G’day. You’re still reading the Herald.”

  “Nothing but bloody opinionated columnists.”

  “The Daily Worker was all opinion.”

  “It was an honest paper, knew what was going on.” He folded the paper carefully. If he had believed in butlers and could have afforded one, he would have had the butler iron the paper before bringing it to him. He had read that British aristocrats did that, the only thing he admired them for. “Bloody country’s going to the dogs.”

  The bloody world, which didn’t really interest Con, was going to the dogs. The IRA had just attacked Heathrow airport in London; Bosnia was trying to go back to pre-1914; in the US the Whitewater scandal was overflowing its banks. At home things were slightly better: the economy was breaking into a gallop, condoms were being urged in schools to protect sexually rabid teenagers against HIV. The Chippendales were on tour, always promising but never actually doing the full monty, whatever that was. And down in Canberra, the Prime Minister, as all PMs before him and to come after him, was attacking those who criticized him and his politics. The world spun in monotonous circles.

  “Look at “em!” said Con in disgust. Two women had passed by on the other side of the road: Arab women in chadors, though their faces were uncovered. “Wogs, slant-eyes . . . When you were a kid growing up, this street was ours.”

  “Grow up, Dad. That was the nineteenth century. Mum inside?”

  “She’s down at the church. Putting the holy water in the fridge, case it goes off. You know what she’s like. Bloody churches, they’ve gone to the dogs, too. You been away?”