It was still Balmoral. Technically. A little pocket of park and beach and a thin golden strip of sand washed by the tide of Sydney Harbour. Safe for toddlers and waders. Quiet. Secluded. Chinaman’s Beach.
The subbies had had a bit of fun with that. If you look on a map, Cobblers Bay is written over the blue bit, Rosherville Reserve over the green bit, but everyone knows the yellow bit in between it is Chinaman’s. There’d been market gardens back in the day, parkland now where dog walkers and fitness instructors drill their charges. A perfect little piece of paradise, where the neighbors keep their thoughts to themselves and the old man keeps himself to himself, and that’s how everyone likes it.
The old man’s security gate is metal of some kind, the color of sand, inobtrusive. A security camera looks on as I roll down the window and press the intercom. The gate melts away. A walled driveway curves to the left, trees and undergrowth block any other view. The seclusion of the rich and the dangerous. I raise my foot from the brake and the car rolls through in automatic, starts dragging itself forward over the gravel. The gates swing shut behind me. Silently.
Last chance to call someone. But I dismiss it. Call who? Say what? Hi, thought I should let you know I’ve accepted the invitation of the crook I’ve been stalking for close to twenty years?
The move to Chinaman’s hadn’t changed that, my stalking. Not once I found the ruin. Great old house caught up in family hatreds. Millions of dollars’ worth of art deco and views left to molder while relatives brawled over the estate of an old woman in a dementia unit. Chain wire around it. Graffiti on every wall. It was a top spot for young Balmoral kids to hide their bongs and dream of putting on a dance party.
For me, the climb up the once-grand, now-slimy concrete staircase to the turret provides an excellent view of the old man’s hideaway. Those walls. That driveway. The shrubs and trees lull him into sloppiness. A pair of binoculars and a nightscope borrowed from a tactical unit who’d left their kit bag unattended, and I can watch the old man shuffle around his back terrace in his slippers, hawking a night’s worth of phlegm into the gardenias. When his son visits, they sit for hours at a time beside the pool, papers and laptops spread around them. Occasionally the old man jumps in and strides up and down, performing some kind of angry aquatic tai chi. He’s built like a wiry old piece of teak, the kind of body that speaks of harder violent times. The old man’s wife is rarely more than a shadow moving behind curtains. Only the presence of the son ever draws her outside, to deliver tea, water, to rest a hand on his shoulder, to stand behind him stroking his head. I’ve never seen her touch the old man.
Magpies and currawongs call warnings and threats to each other from the trees when I get out of the car. The cedar door opens immediately and the figure behind it beckons me in. First time I’ve seen him up close without the benefit of a search warrant, a courtroom, or a commission, a wall of lawyers.
He’s older. Smaller. Bare-handed. In his thin knit sweater and light cotton trousers he looks ready for a round of golf.
“Thank you for coming so promptly, detective. Please come into the lounge room.”
First time he’s ever spoken to me, directly. Formal and polite, he ushers me into a light-filled room where a small woman sits on the edge of an antique ebony Chinese stool. She faces the door, a small automatic pistol in her hand, pointed at us. The gun looks heavy. She looks tired. I freeze in the doorway.
The old man’s voice comes over my shoulder, reassuring, soothing. It’s like the please — it doesn’t fit. “I do apologize, detective. But my wife is not feeling very well. I assure you that if you do what she asks, you — that is we — will come to no harm.”
I risk a glance back at him, the question, What do you mean we? forming. Sweat beads his upper lip and his forehead, and there is a small tremor in his hands as he smoothes down the sides of his pants.
I focus again on the woman. She’s sitting primly, neatly dressed in a suit, stockings, high heels, makeup in place, knees pressed together. She’s got the gun in both hands, which rest on her upper thighs. She sits on her stool, on either side of which sit two large suitcases.
I try for an unthreatening tone, inquiring, not interrogating: “What’s the problem, ma’am?”
The woman turns her beautifully outlined eyes on me. Behind the makeup they’re not so young and they’re filled with pain. “My son,” she says, and gestures with the gun at the suitcases.
“You’re leaving him? To go to your son?” I do my best to ignore the gun, hope she just wants a lift, but the woman looks at me uncomprehendingly.
The old man clears things up: “My son is in those two suitcases, detective. My wife found them at our front door this morning. She opened them. It has... disturbed her mind.”
What I’d taken for shadows in the pattern of the rug around each suitcase I see now as dark stains spreading across the thick silk.
“What does she want?” I whisper over my shoulder.
“My wife has been a very unhappy woman for very many years. I have caused that. She has never been,” he pauses to choose the right word, “comfortable with my business interests. This morning she tried to shoot me. She has decided that it all finishes. Now. She wants us to walk out of this house and leave it all behind. She wants me to tell you everything in return for protection and immunity. She wants us to leave with you, now.”
I disobey every instruction I was taught at the police academy and turn my back on someone with a gun.
Something green and glassy lies splintered all over the floor behind the old man. There’s a toppled wooden pedestal and a telltale hole in the white plastered wall at head height. A matching pedestal, still upright, flanks the other side of the doorway; a giant jade horse still prances on it, intact.
I wonder if the old man has thought to count the shots.
“Your wife arrested you?”
“She convinced me I have no immediate alternatives. She has not convinced me that we have a long-term chance.”
That we again. The old bastard’s casting me as his fucking Tonto.
“What do you mean?”
“Those who killed my son are powerful. You may know that. I thought I could control them but there are bigger players in the game than I assumed. A miscalculation of risk on my behalf. It is my belief that I have become irrelevant, therefore redundant. If we can make it out of this house, detective, then maybe we have a chance.”
Put like that, it sounded almost noble. But killing the son, chopping him up, and sending him home? That was just flamboyant. An MO that fit the old world and the new.
My sources had kept me briefed. The son with his plans to expand. The old man with his old world ties to triads and tongs and tradition, he was just slowing a young man down. Old-fashioned thinking. A biz needs fresh blood if it’s going to grow. A couple of paparazzi shots in the Sunday papers of the son riding a Harley, a custom number, throbbing up Campbell Parade for a lunch at Bondi Icebergs even gave it all a touch of glamour.
In reality, various deals with various devils on moving mountains of meth, and it’d all come down to a couple of suitcases bleeding on a silk rug.
Time to make a call. The crafty old bastard’s right. A bunch of cops, armed response, a heavy presence, and we just might make it out.
And then?
The return of the lawyers and the commissions and the deals and the negotiations.