‘Tell me about the men.’
‘How they do this to AN OLD MAN? One he dresses in a suit the colour of the banana. YELLOW LIKE BANANA. He have the gun. The other a hood, like a street kid. I never seen him. But I know the YELLOW MAN. I seen him before a long time ago. I could NEVER FORGET such a man.’
It had to be the Boltcutter, Dapper Dan himself, with one of his disposable, drugged-up street urchins as sidekick. Igor was lucky to be alive and with all his fingers and toes intact, let alone his brains. As was Manya.
‘What do you mean, you’d met him before? Manya? MANYA. Think clearly for me.’
‘Long time ago. We sell him EE-arn pictures. One every now and then. When we need the money.’
‘You did? When?’
‘Before EE-arn die.’
‘Before?’
‘BEFORE. Then after EE-arn die, too. Igor say NEVER TELL ANYONE. But now I tell. Igor not want to go to jail. He say EE-arn gave him pictures, but there were SO MANY. Ohhhh, IGOR. Then we go to island for the other pictures. The SECRET pictures of the LEPERS. And Igor, he think he get smart. He bring back one but the rest he bury on island. For the FUTURE Manya, he say. This EE-arn, he be BIG one day. We finally sell the one LEPER picture not long ago, see, to this man in the yellow suit. He pay us cash. Then I see this PICTURE, it go for ONE MILLION DOLLARS. They say this EE-arn’s MASTERPIECE. Can you believe? And Igor, he FURIOUS. He say we got ripped OFF by this man. So they talk on the phone and Igor say he got plenty more where that came from and he going to SELL TO SOMEONE ELSE, goodbye. Then we get tap on the door. Now Igor DYING.’
‘Manya, do you have relatives you could stay with for a while?’
‘Yes. In D’yakovskoye.’
‘In Russia.’
‘OF COURSE IN BLOODY RUSSIA.’
‘Listen, Manya. Listen to me carefully. This is what we’re going to do.’
Which is how I found myself casting off from Cleveland in Pig Pen with an agitated, at times hysterical seventy-seven-year-old Russian immigrant with a shouting problem, and heading for Peel Island.
She had protested LOUDLY when I failed to take the off-ramp to the hospital where poor Igor lay, tubed up and semi-comatose. She’d threatened to jump from the car and we’d had a minor wrestling match in the front seat of the Peugeot for a few anxious moments, sending it drunkenly across three lanes of highway at the car’s top speed, with Pig Pen swaying and bobbing dangerously behind.
But eventually I calmed her down with direct threats of calls to the police and immigration officials — even to the estate of EE-arn.
I would find out later that for a long time the lives of these Russians of Bribie Island had been unwittingly intersecting with major Sydney, London and Paris gangsters and even a profoundly corrupt former New South Wales magistrate, and they had been, on more than one occasion, within a whisker of being deprived of their breezy Bribie idyll on Red Emperor Drive (where else would a former communist sympathiser live on Bribie Island?).
An industry had also grown around people like Igor and Manya — a shadow-cabinet world of price-jacking contemporary art, fake bidders, press manipulation, forgeries, bogus auctions and corrupt appraisers. I had no doubt James Fenton Browne and Anton Johns had been guilty of the same crime in the art world. They were both genuinely interested in the art itself. Silly, deluded souls.
I had very little experience with boats, both on the trailer and in the water. Especially in the water. What do you expect from a cop whose beat was the most heavily populated urbanised postcode in Australia? My job did not include membership of the CYC.
I ordered Manya into the bow and with great exertion pushed the dinghy from the ramp and struggled into the back of the boat. The motor started first go, thank goodness, filling me with the false music of hope, along with a generous burst of outboard fumes.
It was mid-afternoon. I knew nothing of the nautical logistics of Moreton Bay. And there were dark clouds on the horizon.
What could possibly go wrong?
~ * ~
14
DO YOU KNOW what it feels like when a bullet passes through your hair? Well, let me tell you, you don’t want to know. Especially if you sport a short-back-and-sides.
I had thrown out the anchor of Pig Pen just offshore at Peel Island. Manya was sobbing quietly at the front of the boat. We were bobbing in just a metre or so of water. It was twilight, my most loathed time of day.
‘You wait here,’ I said to her, making a pronounced ‘stop’ sign with my right palm. ‘Poor IGOR,’ she blubbered. I stepped into cold, slimy mud.
On the perilous trip from Cleveland she had told me where Igor had stashed his cache of Fairweather canvasses. Buried in an old meat safe Igor had lined himself with fibro sheeting and canvas. Behind the last hut in the row of female quarters.
I squelched through the mud with great difficulty and a measure of fear. Queenslanders may be used to wandering around barefooted and wading into wild water with nothing to protect their hooves, but not so a kid from South Sydney.
I wished Peg could see me. What am I doing? Well, darling, I’m retrieving millions of dollars’ worth of lost art from a former leper colony on an island in the gathering dark with nothing on my feet, no shovel to help recover the buried treasure, and with an old killer of my acquaintance brandishing a loaded weapon, and likely to pop out from behind a groundsel bush at any second. Oh yes, and it’s possible I’m being pursued by a French gallery director; a tall, Albino former Anglican priest impersonating a long-deceased art dealer; and our real-estate agent Geraldo for not returning his calls about a spectacular canal-front home with lap pool and jukebox.
Instead, someone shouted at me from the island’s shore. ‘You — stop!’ It was the voice of a jockey. Or an adolescent boy. ‘You — stop, now!’
‘What?’ I asked. I was pretty sure I didn’t know anyone on Peel Island. Then I saw the muzzle flash and felt the heat of a bullet singe the hairs on my right ear.
Before I even realised what was happening, I let out a feeble ‘Who?’ — like some stunned, ageing owl caught in unfamiliar surrounds. And that’s when another bullet went clean through the left side of my torso.
I stood in shock. I suddenly felt very heavy. The mud was rising up to my ankles. My mouth was open in a perfect black ‘O’, or at least that’s how I saw myself, for as the ferocious heat from the wound began slamming through my body, I did have what could only have been a nanosecond-long out-of-body experience. And the ‘O’ of my mouth was like a giant full stop. Perhaps that’s how life ended. With punctuation.
Then my assassin stepped forward onto the grey sand and for a moment I thought I recognised his outline. Where had I seen it? I knew that shape. At that second, the tall, ghostly figure of Anton Johns appeared from the row of old Lazaret buildings that were now just black geometric objects in the gloom.
Keep moving, I told myself. Keep stepping forward. I stopped just a few metres from land, for the whole area was suddenly lit up with gun flashes that were not directed at me. The bones of trees and the pale timbers of ancient buildings were X-rayed by the weapon flashes. Then everything turned black again.