Garry Disher - Port Vila Blues

He’d assumed that Jardine had gone back into peaceful retirement, but the Jardine he’d 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 Jardine’s 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 she’d take Jardine in. Wyatt had known someone would. All he’d wanted was for them to say so. ‘I’ll pay the bills,’ he told them.

Nettie had never married. She’d had a job in the Kodak factory but lost it a year ago and didn’t like her chances of getting another. She found the Coburg house, a dump with enough room for two adults at a monthly rent that wouldn’t cripple Wyatt, and Jardine moved in with her. All their needs-medical, domestic-Wyatt 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: ‘He’s out the back.’

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

Nettie didn’t look at the money, didn’t count it. The money disappeared with her into the front room and Wyatt’s 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 Jardine’s 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 don’t know how to thank you. Me and Net-’

A lashing quality entered Wyatt’s 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 didn’t know was that Jardine had also spent the past few years selling burglary and armed holdup plans to professionals like Wyatt. Wyatt didn’t 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. Jardine’s 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 Jardine’s face, a mixture of alertness and absorption as he calculated the odds of a problem.

‘Fine.’

They took a taxi to meet Jardine’s 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.

‘What’s she like?’ Wyatt had asked, before the taxi arrived.

‘Never met her.’

A chilling kind of dispassion was Wyatt’s style, but this time he’d given in to his impatience and his throbbing tooth. ‘Mate, how do you know she’s any good?’

‘I checked around. Mack Delaney trained her.’

‘Mack’s dead.’

‘Yeah, but he was one of the best.’

Wyatt conceded that. He’d 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 he’d forge the provenance of a painting and sell it at auction overseas. As he’d 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 Wyatt’s 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 Wyatt’s 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.