Peter Temple - Black Tide

I declined.

He took a bite of apple and worked at it for a while. ‘Assets were a lot of ageing trucks and a couple of warehouses. Income about three-quarters of a million. Prospects not bad, but, Jesus, this is ’84, transport not fucking information technology.’

The phone on the desk rang. ‘Tell him I’m in conference,’ said Tony. ‘I know he wants to talk to me. He always wants to talk to me. I don’t want to talk to him. Louise, I know the pressure you’re under. Tell him to tell them everything is being taken care of. Nothing to worry about. I expect to hear today. I’ll ring him tomorrow. Yes, I’ll get there. Do me a favour, ring Wilkes, tell him I’ll talk to him from the airport.’

He looked at his watch, looked at me and shook his head. ‘You think having crims for clients is bad? You don’t know bad until you have solicitors for clients.’

More apple. Most of apple. ‘Well, speed this up. Excuse my mouth full. The deal offer comes through a solicitor in Sydney. His name is Rick Shelburne, two-person practice in Randwick. I rang around. Rather odd practice, they say. Nothing off the street. He pops up now and again for white-shoe boys in Queensland, developers, wheeler-dealers, suchlike. Said to have a talent for changing councillors’ votes. He’s also acted for a person in Darwin of major interest to the Feds. Been up there?’

I shook my head.

‘I did my time,’ Tony said. ‘Thought lawyers could change things. Hah hah. The Territory’s where you hear a little plane buzzing on a pitchblack night, you don’t automatically think it’s the Flying Doctor back from another mercy mission. Get me?’

‘Roughly.’

‘Well Shelburne was cause for concern. But we go to the next stage. This bloke flies in from Europe. Suite at the Windsor. He’s called Carlos Siebold, a Paraguayan based in Hamburg, he says. Speaks English with a Spanish accent. But there’s German in there, hard to explain. Smoothest thing I’ve ever met. Ruby ring on the right pinky.’

Tony rolled an invisible ring on the little finger of his right hand. It looked relaxing.

‘Could be a cardinal, could be a fucking hitman,’ he said. ‘Anyway, Shelburne’s there too, he doesn’t say much. Siebold says he represents, this is the point, something called Klostermann Gardier of Luxembourg. A private bank. The price for the forty per cent turns out to be $4 million. That’s still over the odds, but never mind. Siebold says, deal done, Klostermann will provide a facility of $20 million for expansion, principal repayable as share of after-tax profits over ten years.’

I said, ‘Without having a Harvard MBA, that sounds like Christmas.’

‘Many Christmases at once. And Klostermann is not the investor. It acts for the investor. Conduit. Siebold gives us the names of other freight companies the investor has money in. One in Manila, one in Hong Kong, one somewhere else, I can’t remember. I took Lousada and his offsider, nodding twerp called Giddy, we went into the other room. I said to them, put simply, nobody offers deals like this. Let me check these people out. Well, Lousada’s no fool, so we go back in and say we need a few days. Siebold says he’s got other business, he’ll be back in Melbourne on the Friday, wants an answer then.’

Tony examined the apple, gnawed around the core, threw the fruit’s spine into the bin. ‘I got in touch with the companies. Not wildly forthcoming but, yes, they said, Klostermann’s kosher, the investor’s passive, he’s put business their way through other companies he’s involved with. I still didn’t like it. The Manila company had two directors. One was called Gerardo Vega. I rang a bloke I knew in Canberra in Foreign Affairs. You’d know him. Jeremy Powers? Did law around our time.’

‘The name,’ I said.

‘Anyway, I gave him the Manila names and he faxed back a cutting from the Economist which said Gerardo Vega was a Marcos crony who had been in Europe offering to sell large quantities of gold on Marcos’s behalf. So I ring the Economist and get hold of the writer. He says it’s a team effort, the person I should talk to is based in Melbourne. How about that? Five minutes later, I’m talking to him.’

He got up and went over to a wall of doors, slid one, revealing a wardrobe full of clothes. The dark jacket for his dark trousers was hard to find because all garments in the closet were dark. But he appeared to know what he was looking for.

‘Cagey bloke,’ said Tony. ‘Called Stuart Wardle. Says he can’t tell me any more than’s in the story. Then he asks me for some names so he can check me out. I gave him the president of the Bar Council and the Dean of Law at uni.’

Tony found his jacket. ‘Ten minutes later,’ he said, ‘Wardle rings back. What exactly do I want to know? I tell him about the Klostermann offer. He says all he can do is give me a question to ask Siebold. He says, ask him to explain the relationship between Klostermann, Arcaro Transport-that’s the Manila company-and two people: Major-General Gordon Ibell and someone called Charles deFoster Winter.’

‘Can I write those down?’

‘Sure, this is all history. Well, it wasn’t much but it was all we had. We go back to the Windsor. Siebold’s got Shelburne with him. Siebold is very charming. Came in the night before, off to America in a few hours. What’s our decision? I ask him the question. He looks at me, twirling the ring, he says, “I can’t answer that question, Mr Rinaldi, because I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.’’ And he says to Shelburne, “See these gentlemen to the door. I’ve wasted quite enough time on dealings with them.’’ Goodbye, we’re in the corridor. Five minutes, start to finish.’

‘How’d TransQuik take it?’

‘Well. The offsider, Giddy, he got all excited, wanted to go back to Shelburne and start again. Lousada says to me, “What’s that question mean?’’ I said, “I don’t know but Siebold didn’t like it.’’ Lousada thinks about this for a while, then he says, “Probably just as well. Only free lunch is at the Salvos.’’’

‘Ever find out what the question meant?’

Tony shook his head.

‘And TransQuik stayed a client?’

‘For a while. Until Levesque took them over. Didn’t matter much by then, I’d decided to go to the Bar.’

I searched my pockets and found the printout of Gary’s other clients. ‘These others mean anything to you?’

His eyes went down the list. ‘No. What did Drew say about my reasons for leaving the DPP’s office?’

‘Something to do with Levesque. That’s all he remembered.’

Tony nodded and picked up the telephone. ‘Louise, ask Alan at the carpark to get the kid to bring the car around the front. Without denting it.’

He began putting files together. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘about eighteen months ago, a bloke called Novikov was shot dead in his garage in Doncaster, found by his wife. He’d been at the junior soccer club meeting. Not long after, the cops stop a car with a dud tail-light, hire car. Driver’s clever with them so they get him to open the boot. In the toolkit, they find a silenced.22. The one cop, a farm boy, he sniffs the thing and he knows, silencer notwithstanding, it’s been recently fired. To the station, make some inquiries, then the Novikov murder call comes through. They reckon they’ve got the culprit. Ballistics later find the.22 is the weapon that killed Novikov. Bryce, that’s the man with the gun, he’s tough for a long time, then he says he’s just the driver, the bloke who did the job is a man he knows only as Eric. Met him twice. It takes a lot of hard work but the cops get lucky and eventually Bryce IDs a man by the name of Eric Koch. Koch calls himself a transport security consultant and among his clients is an outfit called Airbound Services. Freight airline.’