Peter Corris - Taking Care of Business

‘Peasant,’ Frank said, but he grinned. Kerry had told them who I was and what I was about and they tolerated me.

The night after the packing was over I found out what Kerry had meant about me being welcome. Four men invaded the place. They were armed with bike chains. Vince had been keeping watch and his shrill whistle sent Kerry and Frank into action. They broke out some hard hats and axe handles and switched on a floodlight. The invaders, probably expecting to work in the dark against three men, found themselves up against four under strong light. Pike could always fight like a threshing machine and Vince and Frank were very willing. A bike chain is scary but not very effective. We waded into them and whacked them around the knees and the head. Pike went berserk and I had to dig my axe handle into his balls to stop him killing one of the attackers. Two of them ended up stunned and bleeding and we let the other two drag them away. Frank had a nasty gash on his arm. I had a bruised shoulder where a chain had caught me.

‘Good stoush,’ Vince said. ‘You pulled your weight, Cliff.’

Kerry glowered at me, clutching his groin. ‘Why the fuck did you do that?’

I chucked the axe handle away. ‘I want you in court in Sydney testifying, not in the dock up here for murder.’

The buyer came late the next day and he and Kerry settled their business very quickly. The buyer sampled the buds and sniffed at the kif. Money changed hands but no hands were shaken. Kerry paid off Vince, who agreed to look after the dog, and Frank, and that left him and me and a bundle of notes the size of half a brick. I used my mobile to book a flight to Sydney from Lismore at 6.30 am.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Pike said. ‘Why so early?’

‘Bird and worm,’ I said.

It hadn’t escaped my notice that he’d left his ute parked at the top of a slope that ran down to pick up the track into his property a hundred metres away from the house. He went to a shed and pulled out a big tarp.

‘Better cover ‘er up. Can’t tell how long I’ll be gone.’

I nodded and offered to help but he waved me away. ‘Go and have a swim in the creek. Be beaut about now.’

I grabbed a ratty towel from the outhouse bathroom and jogged away in the direction of the creek. As soon as I was out of sight I worked my way back close enough to watch Kerry make his plans.

We microwaved a pizza and had a few drinks to celebrate the closure of business and I pretended to be sleepy drunk.

Pike said, ‘I’ll set an alarm.’

I settled down fully clothed under a light blanket and got into a good snoring rhythm. At 2 am Pike checked on me and crept out of the house. I followed him and saw him retrieve something from the dog kennel. He moved quietly for such a big bloke working in the dark. He stripped the tarp from the ute and got in the cab, leaving the door open. Careful man-he’d killed the interior light.

I hit the floodlight switch and walked towards the ute with an axe handle in my fist.

Pike jumped down with a bike chain. ‘I’m going, Hardy.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘I warned you.’ He swung the chain. ‘Don’t try to stop me.’

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got the money.’

He scrambled back into the ute, fumbled around and swore as he scattered newspaper on the ground. ‘You bastard.’

I moved closer. ‘We can go at it if you like. You might win but that won’t get you the money. Come along quietly and do what you have to do and I’ll hand it all over to you as soon as you’ve said your piece.’

Pike wasn’t stupid and it was a fair bet that he’d made enough to pay his debts and have something over. He threw the bike chain away and collected his bag from the ute.

‘That’s two to you, Hardy. How d’you reckon round three’ll turn out?’

‘I wonder,’ I said.

Do you know much about the art world, Mr Hardy?’

‘Less than nothing,’ I said.

I was talking with Mr Charles Stevenson in his Vaucluse house. Mr Stevenson had had something stolen and wanted it back. Getting stolen items back is something I do know about. He led me through a few big rooms which let in views of the water at a million dollars a square metre, to a softly lit chamber near the back of the big house. Paintings hung on the walls, lots of paintings. Too many.

‘I’m a collector,’ he said. ‘Occasionally I sell in order to buy something I want more than that I’m selling. You understand?’

‘I guess so. I once traded up from a single fin to a thruster.’

Stevenson raised an enquiring eyebrow. He was in his fifties, tall and slender with a mane of white hair and a nifty little white goatee. He wore a dark suit with a tie and appeared to be as comfortable dressed that way as I was in drill slacks, an open-neck shirt and a linen jacket. The jacket was advertised as ‘unstructured’-read crumpled.

‘Surfboards,’ I said.

‘Ah, yes. Now if you’ll come over here.’ He drifted across the parquet floor to a wall that was less cluttered than the others. In fact it held only one painting. Beside the painting was a mounting where something else had been hung but it wasn’t there now. Painting to me means Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, a bit of Streeton and Tom Roberts, and the odd Brett Whiteley, so that initially I paid more attention to the vacant space than the painting.

‘It’s a Galliard,’ he said, ‘perhaps his best.’

It was my turn to say, ‘Ah.’ The painting was of a woman wearing a black velvet dress. She was pale and beautiful with dark hair, sitting very straight in an upholstered chair. The neckline of the dress came to just above her nipples and sitting there against her glowing skin was a pearl suspended on a black ribbon. The woman was glancing down at the pearl and her right hand was positioned as if about to reach up and touch it. The effect was amazingly erotic and Stevenson smiled when he saw its impact on me.

‘Powerful,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘But I’ve tired of it I’m afraid, and have my eye on something else altogether. Now you’ve noticed the empty space. That’s where the pearl was, the very same pearl that Galliard painted. It took me a great deal of effort and money to acquire it but I finally did. Needless to say, the value of the painting goes up immeasurably when accompanied by the pearl. It’s vulgar, I suppose, but I felt the same way myself, I have to confess.’

‘What sort of money are we talking about?’

‘Oh, say one point five million for the painting itself.’

‘And with the pearl?’

‘Three million, possibly more, depending on the buyer.’

‘What’s the pearl worth on its own?’

‘I’m not sure. It’s not extraordinary in any way. Perhaps a hundred thousand. It’s insured for a little less.’

‘So the thief got the wrong thing?’

Stevenson shrugged. ‘I have to assume he didn’t know what he was doing.’

I stared at the painting for a while. I liked it a lot and thought it’d take me a long while to tire of it, but I could find much better uses for a million five. Most recovery of stolen property work is done through insurance companies and the recoverer gets a percentage of the insured value. Nice enough most times, but Stevenson was talking about a different situation altogether and the payoff had to be big. Tempting, but a bell named caution rang not too far distant.

‘There are specialists in this sort of thing, Mr Stevenson. Why me?’

‘For a very good reason,’ Stevenson said as we moved away from the painting. ‘I’m planning to auction the picture and the pearl in a few weeks. That information is abroad, but not widely. Sufficiently, shall we say. Subtlety is of the essence in these matters. People like to think they’ve acquired the knowledge through their own cleverness, or that it’s held by a few. You understand?’