Garry Disher - Port Vila Blues

‘I mean-’

Wyatt was hard and certain. He made each word sound like a slap. ‘You mean the Tiffany’s got a history. When you saw it yesterday you recognised its description from a stolen valuables list.’

She winced, angry with herself. Wyatt had seen women cure themselves of him quickly, and expected that of Liz Redding now that he’d caught her out, but she didn’t do that. Instead, a certain defiance came back into her face. ‘So what? I assumed you’d been hanging onto it, that’s all.’

‘I haven’t, so tell me about it.’

She cocked her head and watched his face carefully. ‘Are you on the level? You only just got your hands on it?’

‘Just give me the history.’

‘You’ve heard of the so-called magnetic drill gang, right? Some time ago they hit the safety-deposit boxes of a bank in Brighton. The Tiffany was among the stuff reported stolen.’

That was an irrelevancy. Wyatt brushed it aside. ‘The thing is, how do you know?’ He stared at her. ‘You’re no fence.’

He stood, pocketing the Tiffany, and began to walk away from her, not hurrying it, but not wasting time either. His nerve endings were wide open, expecting clamping hands on his shoulders, his arms, but no one called out or stopped him. In a minute or two he would be an anonymous face in the crowd and a minute or two was all Wyatt ever needed.

Then she was swiftly and silently matching him step for step. ‘There’s a reward.’

He walked on. ‘Forget you ever met me.’ He said it quietly, not bothering to look at her.

‘I mean it, Wyatt, there’s a reward. That’s my job, I negotiate rewards on behalf of the insurance company, okay?’

She grabbed his arm angrily, jerking him to a stop. ‘Twenty-five thousand, all right? No questions asked. But it will take a couple of weeks to line up.’

Wyatt considered the odds. It takes a very heavy, very professional team to hit the safety-deposit boxes of a bank successfully. Who were they? And who had given-or sold-the Tiffany to Cassandra Wintergreen, the woman he’d stolen it from? Wyatt felt that he was on the edge of something better left alone, a sixth sense he relied upon to keep the odds working his way, but Liz Redding was also very close and alive in front of him. If he set the rules he would be all right. He stayed long enough to tell her how to get in touch with him, then faded away among the strollers thronging Princes Bridge.

Pacific Rim flight 39 from Melbourne and Sydney touched down at Port Vila International Airport a few minutes past the scheduled arrival time. Late Thursday morning and Lou Crystal unbuttoned his uniform jacket and went down the steps to the tarmac. The tropical air seemed to sneak up on him, warm, humid, smelling of aviation fuel and ripe, rich fruit, so that he was perspiring before he reached the terminal building. Over one shoulder he carried his usual stopover bag; in the other hand he carried the tartan suitcase that had been stashed in the U-Store locker in Melbourne. Crystal’s instructions were clear each time: attach an address label reading ‘Mr Huntsman, Reriki Island Resort’ to the tartan suitcase and lodge it with the driver of the Reriki Island Resort minibus.

The passengers from flight 39 were lining up at the immigration counters. Crystal eyed them as he walked through, wondering if one of them was Huntsman, but all he could see were backpackers, honeymooners and middle-aged Australians and New Zealanders spending their superannuation payouts. They looked tired and pasty-white, impatient to get to their resort hotels and try on neon yellow and green shorts, T-shirts and sunblock. Crystal despised them. He loathed their noisiness and ignorance and simple pleasures.

Pacific Rim Airlines had been flying in and out of Vanuatu since Independence in 1980. Crystal himself had been stopping over in Port Vila for five years. Everyone knew him and he nodded left and right as he slipped through immigration and customs and onto the main concourse. Here, clones of flight 39’s passengers were queuing up to pay their departure tax. They were noisier, a little more sunburnt, overburdened with cheap local handicrafts, but essentially no different. Crystal walked past them, still carrying the suitcase and his weekender bag, out to the taxi and minibus ranks outside die terminal building.

A misty rain was drifting in, obscuring the tops of the mountains, leaching brightness from the green of the lower slopes. Banyans, coconut palms, pandanus and a handful of tree ferns and milk trees bordered the airfield and lined the nearby roads. Creepers and orchids choked some of them. There were leaves like shields and swords everywhere in Vanuatu and in the rainy season they dripped water on to Crystal’s head. In the mornings sometimes he’d see spiders the size of his hand waiting motionless at the centre of huge webs strung between glossy trees.

There were half a dozen people waiting in the Reriki Island minibus. The driver was leaning against the canopied luggage trailer, smoking a cigarette. He smirked at Crystal, took the proffered suitcase and stored it on the covered trailer. Then he went back to smoking and waiting and forgot about Crystal. For his part, Crystal was glad to be rid of the case. He was guessing drugs, and drugs were bad news, even in this backwater.

Pacific Rim pilots and cabin crew on stopover were obliged to stay at the Palmtree Lodge, a small collection of motel units on a crabbed, featureless lagoon south-east of Port Vila. Fifteen minutes by car, a fare of eleven hundred vatu, and that’s where Lou Crystal should have been going when he climbed into the dented Toyota taxi.

‘Yu go wea? Palmtree Lodge?’ the driver asked, recognising Crystal as a regular and addressing him in Bislama.

Crystal shook his head. ‘Malapoa Restaurant.’

The driver started the engine. He nodded cannily. ‘Good coconut crab.’

‘That’s right,’ Crystal said.

The drive took ten minutes, past small houses and flat-roofed cement-walled shops set amongst cyclone-stripped palm trees. Crystal had been on Vanuatu when the last cyclone had hit the islands. He’d been unnerved by it, a ceaseless wind that bent palm trees almost to the horizontal, tore apart coral reefs and dumped ships hundreds of metres in from the water’s edge. He’d seen flying tin cut a woman’s arm off and his balcony furniture at the Palmtree Lodge had cartwheeled across the coarse cropped lawns between the motel units and the coral beach.

The taxi pulled off the road and stopped. ‘Nine hundred vatu,’ the driver said.

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 hadn’t been for the patrons-idle yachting types from all over the world, shouting at one another-he 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 he’d 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 that’s 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 that’s what Crystal was banking on now.