Wyatt - 05 - Port Vila Blues (2 page)

He was out of the house and easing
down the driveway five minutes after hed gone in. He paused for a moment at
the gate, then eased the Mazda onto the street. There were more people about
now: children walking to bus stops, men and women heading to work in glossy
foreign cars. They looked scrubbed clean and well fed, thats all Wyatt knew or
cared about them.

* * * *

Two

Wyatts
tooth was giving him hell by the time Ansetts early breakfast flight from
Sydney touched down in Melbourne on Wednesday morning. He always travelled
light, knowing that if anyone intended to grab him it would be while he waited
around for his luggage to tumble onto the carousel. He had an overnight bag
with a change of clothing in it, wrapped around the Tiffany and the fifty
thousand dollars. And where possible he avoided leaving a paper trail, even
with fake ID, so he walked past the hire-car booths and caught a taxi.

Thirty minutes to Brunswick Road,
and even on the exit ramp it was bumper to bumper. He checked the time: 8 a.m.
They should be awake in the Coburg house.

The cab driver turned left off the
exit ramp and headed east along Brunswick Road.

Id like to give Sydney Road a
miss, he said, if thats okay by you? Wyatt nodded his assent. Sydney Road
was the most direct route into Coburg but he knew that it would be bad, locked
with peak-hour trams and heavy transports. The driver turned left a couple of
streets before Sydney Road and wound his way deep into Coburg, a region of hot
little streets and weatherboard houses, finally delivering Wyatt at the entrance
to a dead-end strip of asphalt ten houses long. Wyatt got out, paid the man,
let his senses register that he was safe, then headed for the white
weatherboard where Jardine was maybe slowly dying.

Jardines sister opened the door.
She was careworn, thin, a spasm of emotion pulling her mouth down at one corner
when she saw it was Wyatt at the door. It was a look Wyatt knew well, so he
said her name carefully, softly, barely murmuring it: Nettie.

Sourness became exasperation and she
said, Why dont you leave us alone? Were managing. Youre just bringing back
bad memories.

Did he say that?

She looked away stubbornly. It
doesnt do him any good, seeing you.

Let him be the judge of that,
Nettie.

Jardines sister bit her lower lip.
Then she shrugged, closed the screen door in Wyatts face and disappeared down
the gloomy hallway to a room at the back. The house was in need of restumping
and the interior smelt of cooped-up humans and dampness. The house was rented.
The wallpaper, carpets, light fittings and laminex benches were left over from
the dismal end of the 1950s, and Wyatt looked forward to the day when he could
rescue Jardine and the sister and place them somewhere better.

Nettie materialised from the
shadows, hooking limp strands of hair behind her ears. She resembled an
Oklahoma dustbowl survivor, etched cheekbones and eyes wide, dark and
long-suffering. I just want you to know, she said, opening the screen door to
admit Wyatt into the house, he doesnt blame you but the rest of us do.

Wyatt stopped and stared at her. His
voice was cold, factual and remote, with no detectable emotion in it: Nettie,
he knew the risks.

Jardine came from a family of
half-bent secondhand dealers and back-of-a-truck merchants. They were careful
and stayed out of trouble. Jardines getting head-shot six months ago on a job
with Wyatt had been unaccountable, the kind of thing that could have happened
to anyone, but it was a first for Jardines family and Jardine was the only one
who wasnt blaming Wyatt for it.

He knew the risks, Wyatt repeated.

What Wyatt wasnt admitting was that
he did feel some responsibilitynot for the fact that hed put Jardine at risk,
but for what had happened since. When hed first seen Jardine again after the
job, Wyatt had been shocked by the change in the man with whom hed pulled a
dozen successful jobs over the years, a man he liked and trustedas much as
Wyatt liked and trusted anyone. Six months earlier, Jardine had come out of
retirement as backup on the hit on the Mesic compound looking fit and alert, a
man with a slow-burning good humour, but theyd been ambushed after the Mesic
job and Jardine had been head-shot, a graze above one ear. Wyatt had paid
Jardine his fee, taken him to a doctor who didnt ask questions, and gone to
ground in Tasmania, a base where the wrong people would never find him.

Hed assumed that Jardine had gone
back into peaceful retirement, but the Jardine hed seen in Sydney a few weeks
later was partly paralysed along one side, kilos lighter, a few IQ points
slower and duller. Jardine tended to forget things. He owed two months rent.
Pizza cartons and styrofoam coffee cups littered his pair of rooms at the
Dorset Hotel in Newtown, and it was clear that he wore the same clothing for
days at a time.

Wyatt had hauled his old partner off
to a 24-hour clinic, fabricating a cover story to account for the wound which
still showed as a raw slice in Jardines scalp. Stroke, the doctor diagnosed.
Probably brought on by the injury. Jardine needed professional care. Was there
someone who could look after him for the next few months? A friend? Family? A
live-in nurse, if that could be afforded?

Wyatt contacted the family in
Melbourne. For two days he let himself be tongue-lashed by them. Finally Nettie
said shed take Jardine in. Wyatt had known someone would. All hed wanted was
for them to say so. Ill pay the bills, he told them.

Nettie had never married. Shed had
a job in the Kodak factory but lost it a year ago and didnt like her chances
of getting another. She found the Coburg house, a dump with enough room for two
adults at a monthly rent that wouldnt cripple Wyatt, and Jardine moved in with
her. All their needsmedical, domesticWyatt paid for.

He knew it was temporary and he
looked forward to the time when he could score big and set Jardine and Nettie
up for life.

Get that unwanted weight off his
mind, his back.

I promise not to upset him, he
told Nettie now.

Nettie had made her point. She
turned away from Wyatt in the hallway and opened the door to one of the front
rooms. She jerked her head: Hes out the back.

Wyatt clasped her arm gently and
gave her a package. To keep you going, he said. Twenty-five thousand.

Nettie didnt look at the money,
didnt count it. The money disappeared with her into the front room and Wyatts
final contact with her that morning was the sensation of her thin arm in his
fingers and a sound that might have been a muttered thanks hanging in the air
between them.

He walked through to me back of the
house, a fibro extension with a low, buckled ceiling and dust-clogged louvred
windows. The only good thing about it was the morning sun striking it through a
fig tree in the yard outside. The air was warm, a little streaked and blurry
owing to the dust motes stirring in the angled sunlight, and smelling only
faintly of illness, privation and cut-short dreams.

Jardine clawed a hand over the old
bakelite smoking stand next to his lumpish armchair. His mouth worked: Mate,
he said at last, smiling lopsidedly. Where did you spring from?

The Double Bay job, remember?

Wyatt spoke harshly. He hated to see
the weakness in Jardine. Jardine seemed to exist in a fog a lot of the time now
and he wanted to cut through it. The MP on the take, Wintergreen.

Jardine looked across at him,
wavering, trying to draw back the spittle glistening on his lips. His left hand
rested palm up in the threadbare brown blanket in his lap. The left half of his
face was immobile. A strange, inappropriate expression formed on his face and Wyatt
realised that his old friend was frowning, trying to recall the briefing
session, the job itself. Then Jardines face cleared. A smile of great
sweetness settled on it, and his voice was clear: Got you now. No hassles?

Wyatt shook his head. I gave your
share to Nettie.

Jardine shook his head. Mate, I dont
know how to thank you. Me and Net

A lashing quality entered Wyatts
voice. Forget it.

Jardine straightened in the
armchair. His right hand fished a handkerchief from the pocket of his cardigan
and he wiped his chin defiantly. Okay, okay, suit yourself.

Wyatt unbuckled his overnight bag. I
found a piece of jewellery hidden with the money. Valuable, Tiffany butterfly.

Nice.

We need someone who can offload it
for us.

Jardine laboured to his feet and
shuffled into the adjoining kitchen. A short time later, Wyatt heard his voice,
a low murmur on the telephone.

He stared across the room at the
little computer perched mute on a card table. Jardine used it to
cross-reference jockey weights, track conditions, blood-line and other
horse-racing factors. In five years he claimed to have won $475,000 and lost
$450,000 using his system. What people didnt know was that Jardine had also
spent the past few years selling burglary and armed holdup plans to
professionals like Wyatt. Wyatt didnt know how many jobs Jardine had on file,
but he did know that they were all in New South Wales and that all would grow
rapidly out of date the longer Jardine stayed in Melbourne with his sister.

Jardine came back. A sheila called
Liz Redding, eleven this morning, a motel on St Georges Road.

Wyatt watched Jardine carefully.
Jardines face had grown more elastic in the past few minutes, as if his mind
worked well if he had something to stimulate it. Wyatt even recognised an old
expression on Jardines face, a mixture of alertness and absorption as he
calculated the odds of a problem.

Fine.

* * * *

Three

They
took a taxi to meet Jardines fence. Wyatt wound down his window and leaned
into the wind. Every after-hours lapse and misery the car had ever seen was
leaking from the seats into the confined space behind the driver. Jardine,
foggy in the head again, leaned back into the corner and appeared to sleep. It
irritated Wyatt. First the vicious, jabbing pain in his upper jaw, and now
this, his friend well under par when he needed him to be sharp with the woman
who would be fencing the Tiffany for them.

Whats she like? Wyatt had asked,
before the taxi arrived.

Never met her.

A chilling kind of dispassion was
Wyatts style, but this time hed given in to his impatience and his throbbing
tooth. Mate, how do you know shes any good?

I checked around. Mack Delaney
trained her.

Macks dead.

Yeah, but he was one of the best.

Wyatt conceded that. Hed used
Delaney once in the old days to move stolen gear. Delaney had specialised in
ransoming silverware, paintings, watches and coin and stamp collections back to
the owners or to the insurance companies, but now and then hed forge the
provenance of a painting and sell it at auction overseas. As hed explained it
to Wyatt, art thieves had it good in Australia. Insurance premiums were
prohibitive, meaning galleries and private owners were often not insured,
relying on cheap security systems to protect their paintings. They also tended
not to keep good photographs of the items in their collections, or at best only
kept handwritten descriptions. An international magazine called
Trace
tackled
art theft by maintaining a computerised recording system, but subscription
costs were high and there were on-line compatibility problems, and, as a
result, few of the Australian galleries, dealers, auctioneers or private
collectors had joined. Many paintings stolen in Australia were shipped overseas
to private buyers. Mack had explained that in Japan it was possible to gain
legal title to a stolen art work after only two years; in Switzerland, after
five years. Then there were the buyers who had no interest in aesthetics. They
used the paintings to finance drug deals. In Wyatts eyes, everything boiled
down to that, these days.

Wyatt peered at the motel as they
passed in the taxi. There always was a motel, in Wyatts game. He hid in
motels, outlined hits in motels, divided the take in motels. Motels made sense.
The other guests left you alone, coming and going just as you did. If the truth
be known, half of them were probably up to something illicit or illegal anyhow.
Unfortunately motels were also easy to stake out and potential traps. They were
stamped from the same mould: layout, carpet, paintwork, bedding, decor, prints
above the fat beds.

They got out of the taxi a block
past the motel and walked back. It was called the TravelWay and it faced St
Georges Road. One lane of cracked and buckled asphalt had been cordoned off by
plastic ribbon and witchs hats, and boggy holes had been carved out under the
tramtracks in the centre of the road. In the late morning light the street was
a wasteland, still and lifeless.

Wyatt viewed it sourly: this wasnt
a place with a quick exit. The motel itself was a simple building, a one-storey
block parallel to the street, with rooms facing St Georges Road and an
identical number of rooms backing on to them, facing suburban back yards at the
rear. Most of the cars in the lot were Falcons and Commodores, commercial
travellers cars, white station wagons with sample cases and cardboard displays
stacked behind the front seats. Wyatt automatically examined the interior of
every car in the lot and on the street outside, then watched the door to room
14 for a few minutes while Jardine sat on a bluestone block in the sun.