Wyatt - 05 - Port Vila Blues (7 page)

Crystal paid him and got out. The
Malapoa Restaurant was on a tiny spit of land jutting into Port Vila harbour.
Crystal had eaten excellent coconut crab there. If it hadnt been for the
patronsidle yachting types from all over the world, shouting at one anotherhe
would have eaten there more often.

He let the driver see him walk into
the Malapoa courtyard. When the taxi was gone, Crystal re-emerged and walked
fifty metres to a public toilet block. He went into one of the cubicles, his
head reeling from the urine-thick atmosphere, and stripped off his uniform,
exchanging it for shorts, T-shirt and sandals that hed packed in the top of
his weekender bag.

The toilet block was set on the edge
of a narrow carpark attached to a small concrete wharf. Water taxis and
harbour-cruise boats used the wharf. So did the Reriki Island ferry, and thats
all Crystal was interested in.

He stood under a corrugated iron
shelter to wait. Reriki Island dominated Port Vila harbour. It was a humped,
jungly lump of land in a small bay, the shore lined with airconditioned,
balconied huts on stilts. It was a resort island; the manager lived in a
red-roofed house among palm trees on the highest point of the island. There
were three restaurants, a swimming pool, boats for hire and a tiny wharf. You
did not have to be a resident to visit the place, and thats what Crystal was
banking on now.

He saw the ferry leave the island.
It made the harbourside run every few minutes, twenty-four hours a day, a
two-minute trip each way. Crystal watched the ferry skirt around a couple of
two-masted yachts. One looked worn and hard-working. A bearded man was pegging
towels and T-shirts to a rope above the galley. The words Miami Florida were
painted across the stern. The other yacht was tidier and more seaworthy by
about a quarter of a million dollars. It came from Portsmouth and Crystal was
betting the owner was one of the loudmouths in the Malapoa Restaurant.

The ferry docked and Crystal got
ready to board. It was a long, low, flat-bottomed aluminium craft fitted with a
canopy roof. The sides were painted in bright splashes of colour: words,
symbols and shapes that reminded Crystal of the sanctioned graffiti hed seen
on railway underpasses in Melbourne.

One person got off. Three got on
with Crystal. He eyed them briefly: two kids with slim brown legs and a local
man dressed in a white shirt and a black cotton wrap-around garment like a
skirt. The words Reriki Island Resort were stencilled on the top pocket of
his shirt.

The ferry drew away from the wharf.
Crystal looked back at the receding harbour shoreline, the mixture of
waterfront businesses, rusting warehouses and tattered inter-island cargo
ships. At the midway point he saw the resorts minibus pull into the carpark. Hed
beaten it by only a few minutes. The driver and passengers got out and he saw
the driver begin to stack the luggage next to the ferry landing.

The ferry docked at the island and
Crystal alighted with the other passengers. Steep paths led up to the main
buildings. The grounds were carefully landscaped: neat palms, pandanus, small
banyans, orchids, coral-edged walking tracks, close-cropped grass in between.

Crystal sat on a bench at the centre
of a patch of grass. The clouds cleared suddenly and he was drenched in late
afternoon sunlight. There were several tourists nearby, doing what he was
doing, enjoying the sun. He half closed his eyes, waited, and saw a Reriki
Island bellboy wheel a trolley-load of suitcases up to the main office. The
tartan suitcase was unmistakeable among them.

A few minutes later, Crystal
followed. There were plenty of people about: visitors, people staying at the
resort, resort staff. No one looked twice at him.

The main building was constructed to
resemble an oversized jungle village meeting place: a high-ceilinged roof,
exposed beams, open sides, a suggestion of bamboo fronds and rattan. It housed
a bar, a dining room and the reservations desk. Crystal sat at a small cane
table in a shadowy far corner of the vast room. He had 20-20 vision. The sky
remained clear and he could see every detail of the harbour, the yachts and the
distant rocky beaches smudged with mangroves and casuarinas. He could also see
the bar clearly, and the reservations counter where the new arrivals luggage
was being stacked by a porter.

Half an hour later the tartan
suitcase was the only one not claimed or delivered to any of the cabins.
Nursing a beer, Crystal maintained his watch over it. He grew drowsy. A small
drama at the bar woke him, shouts of
bon jour
as a middle-aged white
man came into the bar and clasped several of the black staff. He seemed to be a
great hit with them.
Bon jour,
they said, and he beamed, and asked
after their kids.

Crystal headed for the cover of a
cane screen, fear and hate hammering in his heart. The man himself, centre of
all his recent misery. Crystal peered around the screen. There was no mistaking
De Lisle: aged about fifty, starting to go plump and soft, wearing a white
shirt, white trousers, and a straw hat with a red band around it. The humidity
seemed to be affecting him. He was pink in the face and mopped his forehead and
neck with a blue handkerchief. He twinkled a lot, a hot, damp man in the
tropics, surrounded by admirers. At one point he took an asthma spray from his
pocket and sucked on it frantically, closing his eyes for a moment afterwards,
his fleshy chin tipped back, rising to the tips of his neat tasselled shoes as
though preparing to levitate, then returning with a smile to the people
circling him, calling
bon jour
to the bartenders, who were all
grinning.

Lou Crystal took in every hated
detail about the man. Then he took in how De Lisle left with the tartan
suitcase, carrying it down to the jetty, where a waiting water taxi took him to
a little dock under a cliff-top mansion on the other side of the harbour.

* * * *

Nine

The
house was on a cliff top two kilometres from the post office in the centre of
Port Vila. It had been built for the director of a French bank a couple of
years before Independence in 1980, and that fact accounted for the two features
that De Lisle had been looking for when he bought the place. One, the house was
luxurious, the plunging grounds beautifully terraced, with harbour frontage and
views across the blue water to Reriki, the island resort in the bay; two, the
nervous French colonist had erected a steel-mesh security fence around the
perimeter to keep the rebels out. Now Vanuatu was a republic but the fence was
still there. In fact, De Lisle had also upgraded the alarm system inside the
house. All that cash and jewellery coming in was making him nervous.

De Lisle stepped off the broad
verandah and climbed down the steep steps to the little concrete dock at the
bottom of the property. Hed once thought of putting in a small funicular to
run between the house and the waters edgethe climb back up the steps was a
killer but that would have been inviting trouble. He pictured thieves beaching
silent canoes and swarming up the cable and into his house and cutting his
throat.

At the bottom he checked that no one
was lying in wait on the other side of the perimeter fence and unlocked the
steel gate. Hed bought the house three years ago, soon after the first of his
tours through the Pacific as a circuit magistrate. Now he had an oceangoing
yacht as well, the
Pegasus,
a two-master gently bumping against the
truck tyres along the edge of the little dock. De Lisle had crewed in a couple
of Sydney to Hobarts a few years back and knew he could sail the
Pegasus
around
the world if he wanted to. Depending upon his work schedule, he often sailed it
between Port Vila and Suva. He kept the yacht fully stocked with food and
equipment. In fact it was his way out of Port Vila if anything should go wrong.
He had a second set of papers: in five minutes the
Pegasus,
Coffs
Harbour, could be transformed into the
Stiletto,
registered to a company
in Panama.

De Lisles various bank accounts
were also in company names. It was all a smokescreen, and as necessary as food
and water, now that he was moving large amounts of money into and out of
Vanuatu. Being a tax shelter, the country offered security provisions and
confidentiality agreements protecting his banking and other activities. No
income tax, no capital gains tax, no double taxation agreements with Australia.
No exchange controls or reporting of fund movements. And he was able to deposit
money in whatever amounts he liked, in any currency, no questions asked.

There was nothing to excite the
attention of the police in his apartment in Sydney or his house in bushland
behind Coffs Harbour. He kept anything like that here in Port Vila, in safes
and safety-deposit boxes.

He stepped onto the yacht, removed
the security shutters, unlocked the cabin door and went below. The interior was
teak-lined and when he opened the curtains it glowed a rich and satisfying
colour in the morning sun.

The safe was concealed behind a
small bulkhead wall oven. De Lisle unlocked the oven, pulled until it slid
forward on rollers, and reached in. There were documents stacked on the bottom
shelf, duplicates of the information hed passed on to Niekirk for the next
heist, the Asahi Collection of precious stones: floor plans, a map of the alarm
system, staffing level, the size of the take, the best time to hit, the
expected delay before the cops would respond to an alarm, what number to call
in the event of an arrest. De Lisle took out everything from yesterdays Upper
Yarra job now, and fed it to the garbage compactor under the galley sink.

He leafed through the material he had
on Riggs, Mansell, Niekirk, Crystal, Springettas far as he was concerned, the
only useful outcome of all those inquiries and royal commissions hed sat on
over the years. All those names: paedophiles, bagmen, cops running protection
rackets or moonlighting as burglars and receivers, perjurers, officials with
their fingers in the till. It was pervasive and as natural to the running of
the world as mothers milk.

The thing was, all those names had
something to hide and all were potentially useful to De Lisle. In some
instances hed had to wait. He hadnt had a courier until Lou Crystals name
had cropped up during an investigation into Australian sex tours to Asia, for
example.

After the Asahi job he would quit.
He would retire from the bar and come here to Vila to live. Hed had retirement
in mind for the past year, but he was also prompted by the fact that he couldnt
count on Springett and Niekirk remaining patient forever about getting their
cut of the action. And they could see with their own eyes what each hit was
worth. They didnt have the resources De Lisle had for moving the stuff, but
they were men, theyd get greedy sooner or later, despite knowing that De Lisle
had dirt on them that could put them away for a very long time. How serious was
he about using that dirt, anyhow? Theyd name him for sure, if he did. That
option would be at the backs of their minds. So, time to quit while he was
ahead, finish liquidating the cash and jewels from the bank raids, pay them
off.

De Lisle locked the safe, secured
the yacht and started up the steps to his house. He took them slowly. Only 27
degrees but 90 per cent humidity and his breathing was ragged, his shirt and
underwear soaked, before hed reached the halfway point.

He paused to catch his breath. Work
tomorrow. Vanuatu lacked lawyers and judges, particularly in the north. The
Public Prosecutors Office and the Public Solicitors Office were there to get
cases ready for court, but they were understaffed and the day-to-day court
staff were overwhelmed with demands from jungle bunnies and expatriates wanting
help with forms and claims. So, several times a year, De Lisle sat on the
Supreme Court of Vanuatu to help ease the strain. He was funded by the
Australian Governments Staffing Assistance Scheme, and he loved it. He got to
hear evidence in open-air courts half the time, just bamboo and palm tree
fronds between him and the blue sky above. Mainly British law, with a bit of
French and a bit of jungle bunny thrown in. Last time he was in the little
republic hed been obliged to turn a blind eye to a spot of police brutality.
The police had been called in by a council of chiefs to warn off a man believed
to be practising witchcraft, but things got out of hand and the man had died of
injuries. Still, no loss to anyone.

And the trips to Vanuatu provided
the perfect cover for moving the stuff that Niekirk and his crew had liberated
from those Victorian bank jobs. The world was going to blow one daycorruption,
erosion of values, mobs in the streetand De Lisle wasnt about to be caught
without a hedge against that kind of collapse.

He put one foot after the other
again and continued up the steps. Deep breathing, that was the answer, deep
breathing to control the heart, deep breathing to concentrate and clarify the
mind. To centre himself, in the jargon of a fuckwit whod insisted on making a
statement to the court back in Sydney last week.

Deep breath. If he didnt watch it
hed die of a heart attack on the job. He snortedon the job was right. The
last time hed been in the cot with Cassandra Wintergreen shed leaned on one
elbow and grabbed the spare tyre around his waist, pinching tightly, grinning
cruelly: Heres a little fellow who loves his tucker. De Lisle had batted her
hand away: Quit that, Cass, hed said, wishing now that he hadnt given her
that tasty Tiffany brooch from the safety-deposit hit Niekirk had pulled for
him in February.