Black Tide

by Peter Temple

  The phone rang. Looking at me, Tony said Yes three times, put it down. ‘They pick up Koch, he makes a call, half an hour later, he’s got guns from Apsley Kerr Woodward and a hotshot barrister from Sydney called Mitcham representing him.’

  ‘Who owns Airbound Services?’

  Tony smiled. ‘Airbound is owned by another airline called Fincham Air.’

  I said, ‘Which is partly owned by CrossTrice Holdings. Which owns twenty-five per cent of TransQuik.’

  He nodded. ‘You’ve been doing your homework. Well, the cops managed to avoid this pair of lovelies getting bail and a cop called Jarman, Detective Shane Jarman, he’s the one first talked to Bryce, he’s now obsessed with Bryce and Koch. When it came to me in the DPP’s office, I encouraged him, said to him, let’s go for it, doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger, these two conspired to kill Novikov. Novikov, he’s a mystery. Looks like an ordinary travel agent. Could be mistaken identity. This prick Bryce could shoot but it didn’t follow that he could read a Melbourne street directory.’

  ‘Travel agent? For a travel agency?’

  The phone rang again. Tony picked it up and said, ‘On my way.’ He closed his briefcase and went to the cupboard for a small black leather suitcase. ‘Novikov, yes. Travel agency, yes. Called Jason’s Travel. Walk down with me.’

  The worried Louise saw us to the head of the stairs, giving Tony instructions all the way. I took his briefcase and we began the descent.

  ‘Lifts are no more for me,’ said Tony. ‘Lifts are for wimps. Anyway, I’m pushing Shane Jarman to follow the trail, see where it goes. Everything says Bryce is telling the truth, that he was hired by Koch. The big question is obviously who hired Koch. Bryce is from Sydney, got early minor form, then he’s clean. In fact, his putative source of income is as a cleaner. Almost certainly a hitman. Koch, he’s American, ex-army, migrated in the eighties, first job with TransQuik in security, now he’s some kind of Mr Fixit for Airbound and Fincham and others. He’s even got international clients.’

  Tony paused on a landing, looking at me. I waited.

  ‘One’s Klostermann Gardier.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  He nodded. ‘Next development is Koch asks to see Shane Jarman. He wants to deal. He says he can make this Novikov business look like shoplifting ballpoint pens. Wants to go on witness protection straight away, out of the slammer, reckons he’s in danger. Shane rings me, I tell the DPP. It’s exciting stuff, Shane can smell something, I can smell something. We start the process. Make the calls. Do the paperwork. It’s in train.’

  Footsteps behind us. We both looked over our shoulders. A young woman in black, files clutched to her chest. We parted to allow her through.

  ‘Two days later, the DPP calls me in,’ said Tony. ‘He says we won’t be prosecuting anyone for Novikov, they’ve redone the ballistics and the two bullets didn’t come from Bryce’s gun.’

  ‘How’d that happen?’ I said.

  Tony shrugged. ‘Guess. I felt like I’d been shot between the eyes. I asked: who ordered the ballistics redone? The DPP doesn’t look me in the eye, this is the man I regarded as a close friend, right? He fucking headhunted me from the Bar. No, the director looks out of the window and he says, “Don’t be tiresome, Tony. Matter’s closed. That’ll be all.’’ I thought about it, thought about going public, asked some quiet questions around the place, quit the next day. Same day, they find the murder weapon in Sydney. Tip-off.’

  We crossed the lobby, reached the street. A red Alfa Romeo was double-parked opposite the front door. The driver was shifting into the passenger seat.

  I said, ‘I’m slow without lunch. Slow generally. You’re saying this goes back to Levesque?’

  Tony took his briefcase from me. ‘Bryce and Koch are both dead. Bryce had an accident. Koch shot himself. Jarman’s running a one-cop station in the Mallee. Day I got back to the Bar, Apsley Kerr Woodward offered me a brief worth maybe a hundred grand a year. What do you think I’m saying?’

  ‘I wish I could be sure. And this Wardle, the journalist, that was the only contact you had?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Thanks. Buy you a drink some time. Not mineral water.’

  He nodded. ‘Pleasure. Got your number.’ I watched him go to the car, open a back door, put his bags on the seat. He looked back at me, said, ‘Jack, I’m not getting it over to you. There’s stuff I can’t talk about. Klostermann Gardier don’t give up. If your bloke’s mixed up with them, walk away. That’s the only reason I told you all this.’

  I nodded. ‘I tend towards the obtuse. Sounds like good advice.’

  At the driver’s door, he said, ‘It was for me and it is for you. These people can Mortein anything. You might buzz around for a while but eventually you’ll be dead. I’ll call you. Get together with Greer. Have a meal. Nights are long these days.’

  They were indeed.

  16

  I went to the office and found Simone Bendsten’s card. The address was about six blocks away. I knew the place. It had been a tea-packing plant, red-brick building empty for years. Then part of it burnt down in the seventies, and it served as dero accommodation until two speculators bought the roofless shell in the early eighties. They turned it into four barnlike apartments with a shared courtyard in the middle. Probably the first lofts in Fitzroy, possibly even Melbourne. The building was a tombstone for a working-class suburb.

  Entry was through the courtyard door, admission by buzzer. I stood in the damp and buzzed.

  ‘Bendsten Research,’ Simone said.

  ‘Jack Irish. Simone, I’ve got a few jobs.’

  She unlocked the door from on high. The courtyard had a glass roof and was full of greenery in huge pots. Her apartment was up iron stairs to the right. She was waiting in the doorway.

  ‘Come in.’

  She was in jeans and a big cotton shirt, socks, no shoes. Today, her dark hair was loose.

  ‘Not dressed for business today,’ she said.

  Down a short passage into a room the size of two double garages, kitchen bench against the righthand wall, the rest of the space furnished for eating, lounging, working. In the middle, a fire burned low in an elegant black enamel woodheater. Simone’s work table held a formidable battery of electronic equipment. Two monitors glowed blue in the low light.

  We sat in Morris chairs with leather cushions. I told her about looking for Gary. ‘I’m getting the feeling I should be careful on the phone. I’ve got some more names. People this time. One is Carlos Siebold. He’s a Paraguayan lawyer based in Hamburg who acts for Klostermann Gardier. You looked them up.’

  I spelled Siebold. ‘Two others. Major-General Gordon Ibell. And Charles deFoster Winter.’

  Simone said, ‘I’ll have to try a lot of databases, European, American. It’ll cost a bit.’

  ‘Stop when you get to three hundred bucks,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing like that. I’ll call you tomorrow. At home?’

  ‘Keep it cryptic. I’ll come around.’ I gave her the number.

  I put in a few hours at Taub’s, building the framework for the first of six mahogany mantelpieces Charlie was making to go into a mansion at Mount Macedon being rebuilt after a fire. Then I went home for a shower and a change of clothes and caught a tram into the city.

  Only one Pom was on the cutting floor of UpperCut, a tall, elegant man with thick grey hair running back from his brow in waves. He was all in black.

  ‘Chrissy, Chrissy Donato,’ the man said. ‘That’s an awfully long time ago. I was just a boy then. She married the scrumptious Gary and went off to live happily ever after. Which in this case was about two years, I think. She popped in every now and again. Not for years now, though. What’s she done?’

  I was looking at the women in the chairs. The one nearest was leaning back, getting a hairwash and scalp massage. Her eyes were closed in what looked like sexual pleasure. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Her ex-father-in-law wants to get in touch.’

  He gave me a loo
k of total disbelief. ‘She married again,’ he said. ‘The dears never learn, do they? Why they can’t be happy just doing whatever it is they do with men, I’ll never know.’

  ‘Would you know her new name? If she took on a new name.’

  ‘Of course she took on a new name. What’s the point of taking on a new husband if you don’t take the name? Might as well be married to the old one.’

  He cocked his head, put a fingertip to the middle of his mouth. ‘George might know. George knows everything. He actually listens to what people are saying. I gave that up years ago. No-one’s told me anything remotely interesting since I was doing a certain Royal’s hair in London. And that’s a while ago, although you wouldn’t think it to look at me, would you? Absolute bitch of course, but the gossip? She’d just given the man she married for his impressive equipment the heave-ho. Anyway, she couldn’t bear being vertical for more than short periods. No-one was safe. I can tell you, I’ve felt that jewelled claw on my thigh. Rippling thigh.’

  ‘George?’

  He looked around and shouted, ‘Linda, darling, get George to come out here, will you?’ To me, he said, ‘The old thing’s in there fiddling the books.’

  A man who could have been his slighter, shorter brother came out of a door at the back of the room. He was holding black-rimmed glasses at mouth level.

  ‘What?’ he said, not happy at being summoned.

  ‘Chrissy Donato. She married Gary Connors. That didn’t last. What then?’

  ‘Married a man called Sargent. He owns all those ghastly wedding reception places. They bought the Mendels’ mansion in Macedon.’

  ‘Thank you, George. You may return to your culinary accounting chore.’

  ‘Very fucking kind of you,’ said George, pivoting.

  On the tram, I thought about Gary. He might have more than one residence. People earning $350,000 a year could afford holiday houses. Perhaps the case of beer and the six bottles of wine were for his holiday house. Not a long holiday. The Mornington Peninsula perhaps? Somewhere along the Great Ocean Road? It wasn’t a promising line of inquiry. Nothing about Gary said holiday house. And if he’d gone away for a holiday, he would be using his cards.

  I rang Des from the office.

  ‘Des, should have asked you. Gary have a holiday place? Somewhere he might go that you know of?’

  Des sucked his teeth. ‘Wouldn’t know, Jack. The second wife might know.’

  17

  Chrissy Donato-Connors-Sargent had travelled some distance from a Housing Commission house in Broadmeadows. She now lived on the slopes of Mount Macedon, down a country lane behind high stone walls. I switched off and listened. Birdsong, the faraway buzz of a ride-on mower, the whop of a tennis ball being hit hard.

  Chrissy received me in a conservatory full of jungle plants looking out onto a broad brick-paved terrace, beyond which was a thirty-metre pool, azure in a moment of sunshine. The tennis sound was coming from behind a creeper-covered fence.

  ‘Mr Irish, Mrs Sargent,’ said the large brown man in a dark suit who’d allowed me in.

  She was sitting upright in a white metal-framed chair. There were at least ten other chairs in groups around two glass-topped tables.

  I shook a long-fingered hand. Somewhere in her forties, Chrissy was taut-skinned, with short, shiny brown hair, strong cheekbones, big pale eyes. She was wearing grey flannels with turn-ups, brown brogues and a man’s business shirt, striped.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Tea? Something else?’

  I said neither, thank you.

  The manservant nodded, departed.

  ‘So Gary’s missing,’ she said, turned her mouth down. ‘I can’t find it in my heart to regard that as bad news.’

  ‘That’s a widespread attitude. But his father would like him found.’

  Chrissy had a steady gaze. ‘Even bastards have fathers, I suppose, but isn’t it a bit late for him to be interested in Gary?’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Well, they kicked him out when he was a little kid. Fostered him or something. He was sent to this chook farm in Tasmania. It was like a prison farm, he said. They took all the fosters they could get. He used to talk about how he had to get up in the dark, do four hours’ work before school, four hours afterwards. I thought the experience had helped make him the shit he is.’

  Fostered? On a chook farm in Tasmania? That didn’t sound right to me. I’d have to ask Des about this. ‘His father’s major concern is the $60,000 he lent Gary.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Chrissy, ‘now you’re talking Gary.’

  A gate beyond the pool opened and a man appeared, a tall man, no visible hair on his head, wearing only small, loose running shorts, white socks, tennis shoes. His thin, sinewy torso shone with sweat. He wasn’t so much tanned as burnt the colour of a goldfish.

  ‘Tennis machine’s chucked in the towel,’ Chrissy said.

  The man walked to the pool’s edge, bent down, untied his shoelaces, pulled off his shoes, ripped off his socks. Then he turned to face us, looked up, gave a hip-high wave, took off his shorts and underpants, kicked them away. He stood looking in our direction for a few moments, turned, bent his knees, did a flat racing dive. Jet aircraft with its undercarriage down. His arms were moving before he hit the water and he settled into an effortless killer crawl punctuated by racing turns.

  ‘Be a bit cold in there, wouldn’t it?’ I asked.

  ‘Alan’s got a thing about fitness,’ said Chrissy, wry expression. ‘Helps him sleep. Asleep long before I get to bed.’

  ‘I’ve really only got one question, Mrs Sargent. Sounds silly. Where would Gary go if he was scared, desperate, thought someone was trying to kill him?’

  Chrissy didn’t treat the question seriously. ‘Someone like me, you mean? Have you got any idea how many people would like to kill Gary? It’d be like the Myer sale after Christmas. Push doors down to kill Gary. People killed in the crush.’

  ‘No idea then?’

  She watched Alan churning the water. ‘Men are mad,’ she said. ‘In love for about sixty seconds, it’s just the way you look, your tits. Can’t love you for anything else.’

  Alan did another duck-dive turn, emerged, ferocious head. Lean arms cleaved the water.

  ‘Cept my dad,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t like that. Loved mum. She was fat. He used to touch her ear, give it a little pull, always remember that. Walk with me to school, holding my hand. Remember that. Died when he was forty-eight.’

  We sat in the huge fenestrated space, the house expensive beyond dreams, servants waiting somewhere, a beautiful woman, dresser of hair, a hardness to her mouth, fibro house in Broadmeadows floating out there in her past, sweet, sad memories of a patch of dying lawn, a father and a mother and a little girl. Arms around each other.

  Below us, a rich man, thin, all body fat dissolved, was pushing himself: against water, against age, against the inability to sleep unless exhausted.

  I tried again. ‘Gary didn’t have a holiday place that you know of? Anything like that? Somewhere he might go?’

  Chrissy laughed. ‘No. Not in my time. And not ever, I’d say. Gary wouldn’t know how to take a holiday. Not a normal holiday. Sex tour, gambling junket, yes, holiday no.’

  ‘There is one more thing. Personal thing.’

  ‘Ask,’ Chrissy said.

  ‘When you broke up with Gary, was that for any particular reason?’

  ‘Particular? Well…’ She looked at me and smiled her wry smile. ‘Gary couldn’t leave women alone. It’s a sort of insecurity thing. He couldn’t stand to think that someone didn’t care about him. He wanted women to fall in love with him. That was one problem. Then there was the violence. And the coke. He was just barely in control. The gambling, that was out of control. He was making big money at TransQuik in ’85, ’86, ’87, and there’d be Sundays when all we had was loose change. And I had the bruises.’

  ‘What was his job at TransQuik?’

  ‘I never quite worked it out. He us
ed to go to business meetings a lot. All over. Europe, Asia, America.’

  ‘On his own?’

  ‘Mostly. Brent Rupert, he was one of the bosses, he used to go to Manila and to America with Gary.’

  She came to the front door with me. As we left the conservatory, I looked back. The thin man was emerging from another turn, water streaming from his head.

  In the broad passage, Chrissy said, ‘Something wrong about TransQuik. Always felt that from Gary’s behaviour. Alan says someone told him there’s funny money in the company. They had this American manager, Paul Scanga. He’d been in the American army. Dead eyes and these thick, short fingers. Creepy. Gary and I weren’t sleeping together by then. Don’t know why I was hanging on, beats me now. One night, Gary’s off his face, he says Scanga wants to sleep with me, it’s okay with him. I was packed and out of there in fifteen minutes. Less. He was lying on the sofa laughing at the television. Gave me a wave like this.’

  She made a twirling gesture with her left hand. It spoke of profound indifference.

  Beauty and manual dexterity do not of themselves bring happiness, I thought as I drove down the road towards the freeway. In the side mirror, I saw a car two behind me shift out for a better view. A green Jeep Cherokee. The driver was wearing dark glasses. He shifted the car back in.

  Just another impatient driver on a busy road?

  Down the freeway. The Lark liked freeways, a compact cat of a cop car bred to chase perps in sloppy oversprung V8s with big fins along Los Angeles freeways. Beyond the airport, an arrogant, paperweight Porsche came along, drew abreast, a hummingbird really. The driver, a bald man wearing thin dark glasses, back from a business trip to Sydney no doubt, heard the sound of the Stud’s eight, the music of a serious piston ensemble, looked at the short, squat body, looked at me and decided to try it on. Generally, you let them go. That was sensible. And sometimes you didn’t. And that was silly. But it was nice, silly but nice, simply to drop down a notch, get the growl, feel the torque bunched like a bicep. Then tread the button and, with one smooth kick of power, leave the other person behind. What more innocent pleasure has the century produced?