Autumn Maze

by Jon Cleary

  “Why wouldn’t I trust you?” He had been interrogated by police and lawyers, the best of both breeds; he wasn’t going to be thrown by a woman less than half his age.

  “You don’t trust women at all, do you?”

  In the saloon he could see the white-haired woman responding to Bruna’s fondling hand; he was a prude when it came to sexual advances in public. “I trusted Jack’s mother.”

  “Jack’s told me about her. Hers was the only law you respected. She must have been a strong woman.”

  Shirl hadn’t been; but he said, “She had to be, to put up with me. You and your sisters are all strong women.”

  “How did you know that?” She didn’t simper or look coy, that was beyond her.

  “Observation.”

  “You ran the prostitution—” She hesitated.

  “Racket?”

  “Well—yes. Did you choose the girls?”

  He smiled; she was naive after all. “Does Derek choose the clerks in the Police Department? I was the Minister for Prostitution . . . Back in the Middle Ages did you know there were Ministers for that? It was all well organized. So it was here in Sydney when I ran it. There were no Wogs and Chinks trying to muscle in with their half a dozen girls. All the hookers up the Cross belonged to me. That was before prostitution got out to the suburbs.” He looked up as Jack Junior came down the stairs from the wheelhouse. “Jack, we’re talking about the good old days, when the economy was on the straight and narrow.”

  “Prostitution,” said Juliet. “The straight and narrow.”

  Jack Junior grimaced; then changed the subject: “They’re burying Rob on Tuesday. Are you coming to the funeral, Dad? I’ll come and pick you up.”

  “I don’t think so. Juliet, could you let me have a word with Jack?” He was more than just a guest on the boat; he was the admiral. The words were a request, but the look was an order. “Just a few minutes.”

  She squeezed his hand to show him she was doing him a favour, then went into the saloon, gently lifting her father’s hand off the white-haired woman’s buttock as she went past. Jack Junior looked after her. “You shouldn’t dismiss her like that.”

  “She and I understand each other . . . Jack, this Rob business, it’s getting dirty.”

  Jack Junior was not surprised; though he tried to go straight, there was inherited larceny in his blood. “I thought it might. What have you found out?”

  “I rang up a few old mates. Scams are going on and it’s not the local boys who are pulling „em off. The Japs and the Filipinos, they say, but they don’t have any proof. I asked what about the Triads or the Vietnamese, but they said no. Has Julie told you that the Swedens’ Filipino maid has disappeared?”

  “Yes. D’you think the Asiatics tried to do Cormac in?” Like most Australians, those of the third, fourth or fifth generation, he lumped together three billion people, of fifty-plus languages, a dozen skin tones and half a dozen cultures. He was not uneducated or ignorant, just white and prejudiced. Though to be fair, until he had married Juliet he hadn’t known there was any difference between Roumanians and Hungarians, neither of them was to be trusted.

  They were now moving up the Lane Cove river, one of the many inlets of the Harbour. Up on their left was Hunters Hill, the narrow peninsula with its narrow streets and narrower lanes, its stone houses built by French and Italian masons and its air of superior respectability. Aldwych had once thought of buying one of the grander houses, but it had been Shirl who had vetoed the idea. She knew whom respectability would and would not accept.

  “I made some enquiries about what happened to Cormac. I spoke to Les Chung. Just in case the Japs had employed a coupla local punks, to confuse the situation.” He shook his big head. “It looks like what Cormac said it was, a coupla kids trying their luck.”

  “But Jesus—trying to burn him! Even you wouldn’t have done that when you were young.”

  “Thanks. You wanna be cut outa my will? Jack, the point is, watch it. If the Japs and the Filipinos are in on this, there may be more to come. I don’t think Rob was the only one in this family involved in this mess.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Didn’t you know I had a sixth sense? I got stabbed a coupla times, but never in the back . . . Hello—Emily, isn’t it? Here, sit beside me.”

  Emily Karp, the white-haired beauty, could have been an aunt of the Bruna sisters; she had spent almost sixty years flirting with men. “You said that like a king.”

  “I used to be one,” said Aldwych, smiling at her. He felt sorry for her: all she had was her beauty and, when one looked closer, one could see that beginning to crumble around the edges. “You must have been a dazzler when you were young.”

  “Now now?” She looked up at Bruna, who was standing with legs wide apart, keeping his balance as the boat rocked in the wake of a passing speedboat. “Am I fading, Adam?”

  “Not in my eyes, my love.”

  Aldwych felt seasick, and not from the rolling of the boat. “I’ve got cataracts.”

  She gave him a smile that, in his younger days, would have swollen his balls. “You’re forgiven, Jack. We should have dinner together some time. Adam only calls me when there’s no one younger. We’re two of a kind, Jack. Over the hill—but the youngsters don’t know what the view is like from the other side.”

  All at once he was unfaithful to Shirl: he wished he had met this woman sooner.

  She went back into the saloon with Bruna and Jack Junior said, “You’re not going to fall for her line, are you?”

  What line did you fall for from Juliet? Or Janis Eden? There were more young fools than old fools. “I’m too old for that.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said. What makes you think someone in the family is mixed up in Rob’s murder?”

  “Because no one, except Rob’s father, seems really upset. Families get upset when someone who belongs to them gets murdered. I know. Even crims’ families don’t take it the way this lot has.”

  “They’re all going to the funeral Tuesday.”

  “Have you ever watched a State funeral? They bury some prominent bloke and ninety-five per cent of the mourners are there to be seen, not to weep tears over him. Rob’s funeral is gunna be a little State burial. There’ll be the family and all the pretty girls he laid and maybe one or two of his workmates. And the only one who’ll be looking really upset will be his father. No one else is gunna weep for the young shit.”

  Jack Junior was sometimes shocked by the hardness in his father; but it was that that had kept him alive, had made him successful. “The police will be there.”

  “Of course. If you see Scobie Malone or his sidekick, Russ Clements, tell „em I’d like to see „em.”

  “Are you going to tell them what you think about the family?”

  “I might.” He smiled; it was hard to tell whether it was malicious or fatherly. “I’m just gunna make sure they don’t point a finger at you.”

  III

  Kelsey Bugler and Kim Weetbix lived in a squat, one of a row of condemned terrace houses in a squalid street in Redfern. The houses had been marked for demolition by the local council four years before, but somehow each year’s budget could not find the money for the wreckers to move in. So squatters, street-kids and winos and one or two eccentrics who kept to themselves, had moved in and taken over the decrepit dwellings. There were certain sections of Redfern, no more than two kilometres from the heart of the city, that had been taken over by the Aborigines, but there were no blacks in Bulinga Street, despite its aboriginal name. The squatters and the Kooris distrusted each other with equal bigotry.

  The houses were two-storeyed, seemingly leaning against each other for support; the two end houses leaned outwards, ready to fall down at any moment. It had once been a neat terrace, but all the iron-lace, like dead vines, had been stripped from the balconies; indeed, most of the balconies themselves had gone, their floorboards torn up for firewood. None of the houses had glass in thei
r front windows; if the spaces were not boarded up, they gaped like silent mouths. All the houses had front doors of a sort: the original doors in some cases, sheets of corrugated iron in others, a truck’s rear door in the house at the far end. No electricity or gas was connected and several houses were no more than blackened shells, where the occupants had burnt themselves to a cinder with fires they had lit to cook meals or warm themselves. Kel Bugler didn’t mind his surroundings, but Kim Weetbix hated them. Even the pits of Saigon, eight years ago, had never made her feel as degraded as this house and this street did.

  Monday morning she was not at home when the killer called; she was trying to raise money at a pawnshop on Cormac Casement’s gold watch. Bugler was upstairs in the back room that he and Kim called home, whenever they thought of that word. There was a stained mattress on the floor, two stained and frayed blankets and two pillows that were an aberration: they had snow-white pillow-cases. Kim, as a twelve-year-old, had worked in a Saigon laundry; she could not lay her head on a dirty pillow. The rest of the room was bare but for a car seat, stuffing sticking out of its vinyl upholstery like weed growing out of a rock, a small spirit stove and a rickety-legged chest of drawers in which their food was stored. Their meagre wardrobe was hung on nails on the scabbed walls, like parts of cadavers who had lived here before them.

  Bugler was lying on the mattress, Casement’s briefcase on the floor beside him, reading the sports pages of a newspaper he had stolen from the local newsagency. His team, Balmain, was running second last in the season’s rugby league competition; nothing, it seemed, was going right in this fucking world. Sometimes at night he wept silently at what the world had done to him; though he had not the intelligence to analyze it, he had found that self-pity made you feel better. Once, when Kim had heard him weeping, he had tried to explain it to her, but she had just listened with that fucking Asiatic mask of hers and in the end he had belted her out of frustration. She had told him then that if he ever hit her again she would leave him.

  That was when his intelligence had for the moment burst into flame, flickering though it was: he had known then that, if she left him, his fucking world was finished.

  He looked up over the newspaper as the man, soft-footed, came into the room, closing the squeaking door behind him. He was thin, not very tall and he was pulling a black silk hood, with eye-slits, down over his face. Bugler sat up, more puzzled than, as yet, afraid.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “It’s who you are that matters.” The voice had an accent, but Bugler had never had an educated or sensitive ear. “You’re the one who tried to kill the old man by setting fire to him. Correct?”

  “Where’d you hear that shit? What old man?” He was wondering if he could dive from the mattress and bring the man down in a tackle. But the sight of the gun in the man’s right hand held him back.

  “You talked too much, young man. You shouldn’t have boasted what you and your girlfriend did.”

  That had happened Saturday night. An angry Kim, on their way home, had snapped at him for letting his mouth run on. They had been up at the Cross, sharing a joint with another couple while they looked for drunks they might roll, and Kim, searching for a handkerchief, had taken the gold watch from her jacket pocket. Where’d you get that? the other girl had asked, and Bugler, mouth loose as always, had told her. Now he couldn’t believe that this guy with the gun had got to that couple and squeezed the information out of them.

  “Who gave you that crap?”

  “Your friends, so-called. A little cash . . .” He rubbed finger and thumb of his left hand together. “It didn’t take much effort to find you, young man. The description of you fitted street-kids—it was only a matter of knowing where to look. I was a street-kid myself once, in another place.”

  “Okay, so you know I tried to burn the old guy. So what d’you want? Did he send you?”

  “A man like that?” The hood moved from side to side. Then he picked up the briefcase, saw that the two combination locks had been forced. He cursed in Spanish, though Bugler didn’t recognize the language. Then he reverted to English: “Did you understand the papers in here?”

  “What the fuck if I did?” But the defiance was paper-thin: Bugler knew the man was going to kill him.

  “You really are a nuisance. You have complicated an already complicated situation. It’s a pity your girlfriend is not here, but I cannot wait around for her. Let us hope she takes a hint from what she sees when she comes back.” He put down the briefcase, took a silencer from his pocket and fitted it to the gun with a smooth practised hand. “Sorry about this.”

  Then he shot Kelsey Bugler twice in the chest, picked up the briefcase and left, removing the silk hood as he went out the door.

  IV

  The pawnbroker’s shop was in an old, narrow arcade in the heart of the city; an arcade too old and narrow to have been taken over and rebuilt into a small cathedral by developers, as some of the other city arcades had been. The pawnbroker himself was old and narrow in build, but not in his thinking; he saw the world through a wide-angled gimlet eye. He was also old-fashioned: he offered Kim Weetbix the old fence’s going rate of fifteen per cent on stolen goods.

  “I didn’t steal it. It was my mother’s watch.”

  “This is a man’s watch.”

  “An American gave it to her. My father.” She rarely, if ever, used the word, even thought it: she said it now without shame or pride.

  The old man looked at the watch again. “Fifteen hundred dollars, take it or leave it, love.”

  “Two thousand?” She wouldn’t plead with him, there was too much pride in her to whine. He shook his head with its shock of white hair and she surrendered. “Okay, fifteen hundred. You’re a robber.”

  “So are you, love. Birds of a feather. Don’t come back to redeem it, it won’t be here.” He would wait for the usual discreet advertisement, then sell it back to the insurance company, no questions asked, no information given.

  He handed Kim the money. She took it without thanks and left the tiny shop. Ten minutes later Jack Aldwych walked in: three-piece suit, English trilby hat, custom-made shirt, Grenadier Guards tie (made in Hong Kong).

  “Jack, you look a million dollars! You back in the business?”

  “G’day, Manny. No, I just been calling on a few old friends, old mates like yourself. You’re last on my list.”

  “You gunna have a reunion? I heard you’d retired. Jack, I gotta say it, you look respectable! like a retired judge, no less.”

  “Thanks, Manny. You always had the best eye in the business for real quality, for value. I didn’t know you had any social values. I’m looking for something, Manny. A gold watch, a Piaget. And a briefcase, a Vuitton.” He pronounced it a Voo-itton. “You seen „em?”

  “It’s yours? The watch?” The pawnbroker’s voice cracked. “Holy Christ, the kid was in here not ten minutes ago, a bit of the Chink in her. A half-caste, I’d say.” They were both old enough to use the old term. “She said her father was an American.”

  “She leave her name?”

  “Jack, you know there’s no name with stolen goods. There, that it?” He had produced the watch. On the back of it was inscribed: From O. to C.

  “That’s it. How much?”

  “Two thousand.” His gaze couldn’t have been more honest.

  “Manny—” Aldwych shook his head. “You know down to a dollar what this would cost at Hardy’s. You still operate on the old fifteen per cent—my other mates told me, Manny, they all know you. What did you give the girl? Fifteen hundred?”

  “You haven’t lost your touch, Jack. Yes, fifteen hundred. You can’t blame me for trying, these are tough days.”

  “You wouldn’t have tried it in the old days, Manny, or I’d have had your neck.” He took fifteen one-hundred-dollar notes from his wallet and laid them on the counter. “What about the briefcase?”

  “The watch was all she brought me. Take my word, Jack.”

  “Have
the coppers been here yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You never saw me, Manny, okay? Nor the watch. Take care. When are you gunna retire?”

  “I can’t afford to, Jack. I got three sons and a daughter, all trying to be honest, all on the dole.”

  V

  When Kim came home and found Kelsey Bugler dead, she did not scream or faint or panic in any way. She sat down on the torn car seat and looked at him, chest bloodied, sprawled on the mattress, looking more peaceful than she had ever seen him. She had seen enough death in Vietnam as a young child not to be horrified by the sight of a corpse; but she was surprised and puzzled that someone should take the trouble to kill Kelsey in this way. She had known that he would never reach middle age, let alone ever become an old man, but she could not understand why he should die like this. This was an execution, as she understood it: she had seen such results before.

  She threw a blanket over Kelsey, leaving his face uncovered, gathered up her belongings, which were few, and put them in her cheap duffle-bag. She looked for the briefcase and for the first time noticed it was gone. That fact further puzzled her; and chilled her. Who would bother to come here to this squalid squat and kill for a briefcase?

  Then she said goodbye to Kelsey Bugler in her own language, went out of the house and down the street to the nearest phone-box. From there she called the local police station, not saying who she was, just telling them where to find a young man’s body.

  When she came out of the phone-box she stood irresolute. For the first time she realized that, in his own peculiar way, Kelsey Bugler had been some sort of signpost, even if pointing in the wrong direction. Now, she was lost.

  9

  I

  WILLIAM STREET is a broad avenue running from the centre of the city up a hill to Kings Cross. Traffic heading up it, towards the wealth and social snobbery of the eastern suburbs, goes through a tunnel under the sleaze of the Cross, as swimmers dive under a river’s pollution. On the left-hand side of the long slope are several tall office blocks, a four-star hotel and a mix of shabby shops that were to have disappeared in a grand boulevard plan that somehow kept slipping off the drawingboard. On the right-hand side the buildings are old and dilapidated, some of them looking as if they are only held together by the FOR SALE and FOR LEASE signs plastered across their fronts. There had once been a dozen or more car showrooms on this side, but now there are only three or four. At the bottom of the slope are the Rolls-Royce showrooms, outside of which at night the hookers parade in skimpy outfits that do nothing for the image of Rolls or Royce.