Port Vila Blues Hardcover - 2012

Excerpt

1

Carlyle Street, Double Bay, 7 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, the
air clean and cool. Behind closed doors in the big houses set
back far from the street, people were beginning to stir, brewing
coffee or standing dazed under showers. Wyatt imagined the
smell of the coffee, the sound of the water gurgling in the
pipes.

But not at 29 Carlyle Street. According to Jardine’s briefing
notes, the house would be empty for the next few days. It was the
home of Cassandra Wintergreen, MP, Labor member for the seat
of Broughton, currently in Dili on a fact-finding mission.

‘Champagne Marxist and ALP head-kicker from way back,’
Jardine had scrawled in his covering note. That meant nothing
to Wyatt. He’d never voted. If he read the newspapers at all it was
with an eye for a possible heist, not news about political tussles.
His only interest in Wintergreen lay in the fact that she had
$50,000 in a floor safe in her bedroom: a kickback, according to
Jardine, from a grateful developer who’d asked her to intervene
in a planning dispute regarding access to a strip of shops he was
building in her electorate.

Wyatt continued his surveillance. Whenever he staked out a
place he noticed everything, no matter how trivial, knowing that
something insignificant one day can be crucial the next; noticing
in stages, first the general picture, then the finer details; noticing
routes out, and obstacles like a rubbish bin or a crack in a footpath
that could bring an escape undone.

There were two gateways in the long street frontage,
indicating a driveway that curved up to the front door then back
down to the street. Shrubs and small trees screened the front of
the house from the footpath and from the houses on either side.
It all spelt money and conviction.

Conviction. Wyatt had grown up in narrow back streets. His
mother had never spoken about his father and Wyatt had no
memories of the man. Wyatt had earned himself broad convictions
on those narrow streets. Later he’d read books, and looked and
listened and acted, refining his convictions.

Jardine’s floor plans revealed a hallway at number 29, two
large front rooms on either side of it, and a range of other rooms
at the back and on the upper level. Jardine had marked three
possible hitches for Wyatt’s attention. One, the house was patrolled
by HomeSecure once a day, usually around midnight; two, the
alarm system was wired to the local cop shop; three, he’d not
been able to supply the cancel codes for the alarm system but the
combination for Wintergreen’s safe was her birth date: 27–03–48.

Jardine built his jobs on information supplied by claims assessors
in insurance companies, the tradesmen who installed security
systems, surveillance reports and bugged conversations collected
by bent private detectives. A word dropped here and there by
real estate agents, chauffeurs, taxi drivers, bank clerks, casino
croupiers, clubland boasters.

Wyatt watched for another five minutes. It was the variable
in any situation that kept him on his toes. Without the habit of
permanent vigilance he knew that he’d lose the edge, and that
might mean a final bullet or blade or at the least steel bands
manacling his wrists. There was always the unexpected change
in layout or routine, the traffic jam, the flat battery, the empty
safe. But these were things you could never fully prepare for, so
you hoped they’d never happen. If they did, you tried to absorb
them as you encountered them and hoped they wouldn’t trip you
up. The innocent bystander was often the worst that could
happen. Man, woman or child, they were unpredictable. Would
they panic? Stand dumbly in the line of fire? Try to be a hero?
Wyatt hated it if they got hurt or killed—not because he cared
personally but because it upset people, particularly the police.
Satisfied that the house was empty, Wyatt crossed the street
to number 29, a brisk shoe-leather snap to his footsteps. Dressed
in a dark, double-breasted coat over a collar and tie, swinging a
black briefcase, he might have been the first businessman up
that morning. Soon cars would be backing out of driveways,
white exhaust gases drifting in the air, but for the moment Wyatt
was the only figure abroad on the long, prosperous streets of
Double Bay.

He paused at the driveway. A rolled-up newspaper was lying
in the gutter nearby. Wyatt had dropped it there unseen in the
dark hours of the morning, but anyone watching from a nearby
window now would have seen him bend down, pick up the
newspaper and stand there for a while, looking indecisively up
the driveway at the house as if he were asking himself whether or
not he should take the paper in or leave it there where it could be
damaged or stolen. They would have seen him decide. They
would have seen him set off up the driveway, a kindly passerby,
banging the paper against his knee.

The front windows could not be seen from the street or the
houses on either side. Wyatt swung the briefcase, smashing the
sitting room window. At once the blue light above the front door
began to flash and Wyatt knew that bells would be ringing at the
local police station. He had a few minutes. He wouldn’t rush it.
The newspaper was tightly rolled in shrink-wrapped plastic.
It had the stiffness and density of a small branch. Wyatt dropped
it under the window and walked unhurriedly back down the
driveway and onto the footpath again.

In the next street he took off the coat and tie, revealing a
navy blue reversible jacket. There was a cap in the pocket. He put
that on and immediately looked as though he belonged to the
little Mazda parked near the corner. Dark, slanting letters on
each side spelled out ‘Rapido Couriers’ and he’d stolen it from a
service depot the night before. Couriers were as common now as
milk vans in the old days, so he wasn’t expecting questions and
he wasn’t expecting anyone to be looking for the car in Double
Bay. He climbed in and settled back to wait, a street directory
propped on the steering wheel—an old ploy, one that worked.

He fine-tuned the police-band radio on the seat next to him
in time to hear the call go out. He heard the dispatcher spell the
address slowly and give street references.
‘Neighbour call it in?’ a voice wanted to know.
‘Negative. The alarm system at the premises is wired to the
station.’
‘A falling leaf,’ the patrol-car cop predicted. ‘Dew. Electrical
fault. What do you bet me?’
Another voice cut in: ‘Get to it, you two.’
It was as though the patrol-car cop had snapped to attention.
Wyatt heard the man say, ‘Right away, sarge, over and out,’ and
a minute later he saw the patrol car pass, lights flashing behind
him on Carlyle Street.

The toothache didn’t creep into his consciousness, it arrived
in full, lancing savagery. Nerves twitched and Wyatt felt his
left eye flutter. He couldn’t bear to move his head. It was the
worst attack yet, arriving unannounced, arriving when the job
demanded his full attention. He tapped the teeth on his upper left
jaw, searching for the bad one as though finding it would give
him some comfort. It was there, all right.

He snapped two paracetamol tablets out of a foil strip and
washed them down with a bottle of apple juice. Then he took out
a tiny jar of clove oil, shook a drop on his finger, rubbed it into
his jaw and gently over the tooth. He’d been doing this for five
days now. He didn’t know if the painkillers or the clove oil did
much good. They didn’t make things worse, so that was something
in their favour.

Wyatt blocked out the pain and concentrated on the radio. It
was good to be working alone, the appeal of the planning and the
execution—and, if he cared to admit it, of the anticipated and
actual danger. He thought for a moment about these jobs Jardine
was blueprinting for him. In one instance, three months earlier,
a millionaire had hired them to get back the silverware collection
he’d lost to his ex-wife in the divorce settlement. In another, a
finance company had paid to have a bankrupt property developer
who owed them two million dollars relieved of two undeclared
Nolans and a Renoir.

The radio crackled. The patrol car came on the line: ‘False
alarm.’
‘Explain, please,’ the dispatcher said.
The voice might have been writing a formal report. ‘Constable
Wright and I approached the premises. We observed that a front
window had been broken. On closer examination, we discovered
a rolled-up newspaper lying on the ground under the window.
Constable Wright obtained entry to the premises through the
broken window. The premises are furnished but empty and
intact. We await further instructions.’
The sergeant came on the line. ‘Knock off the fancy talk.
You reckon the paper boy got a bit vigorous?’
‘Looks like it, sarge.’
‘Okay, go back in, turn off the alarm, and shoot over to the
highway. There’s been a pile-up.’
‘Right, sarge.’
‘Meanwhile I’ll give the security firm a bell and get them
over to seal the window.’
‘Right, sarge.’

Wyatt continued to wait. When he saw the patrol car leave
along Carlyle Street, he reversed into an alleyway, got out, and
pasted HomeSecure transfers over the Rapido name. Finally he
pulled on overalls stencilled with the name HomeSecure and
drove around to number 29, spinning into the driveway with a
convincing show of urgency. Pulling up at the front door, he got
out, cleared the remaining shards of glass from the window frame
with his gloved hand and climbed over the sill and into the
house.

He made straight for the main bedroom. It was a curiously
flattened room: a futon bed base and mattress at ankle height,
low chest of drawers, squat cane chair in one corner, built-in
closet, no pictures on the walls. Only curtains existed above waist
level and they admitted the blurry light of early morning onto the
bed. It was also an asexual room, as though Wintergreen spent
all of her passion brokering deals somewhere else, for her profit
or for the profit of those who might one day help advance her
career.

The safe was under a heavy Nepalese rug at the foot of the
bed. Wyatt lifted the floorboard panel, keyed in the combination,
heard a hum as the electronic lock disengaged.
He opened the door and looked in on a cavity the size of a
small television set. There were papers and files stacked in there,
but not the fifty grand that Jardine had promised. Wyatt emptied
the safe and knocked against the sides and base with his knuckles.
He snorted. The bottom was false.

Wyatt pushed experimentally at the corners. The base lock
was a simple push-pull, spring-loaded catch. He swung it open.
The fifty thousand was there all right, bundled in twenties,
fifties and hundreds. Wyatt stacked them into slits in the lining of
his overalls. Twenty-five for Jardine, twenty-five for himself.
He paused. There was something else down there in the
darkness: a small, soft, black velvet bag. Wyatt reached down,
pulled it out.

The object that tumbled into his palm gleamed softly in the
light of his torch. It was a butterfly, 1930s Deco style, with an
eight-centimetre wingspan. The body consisted of 2-carat
diamonds set in gold. The wings were also gold, set with flowing
rows of baguette diamonds in channels alternating with rows of
round diamonds. He turned it over. A thin line stamped in the
gold read Tiffany & Co.

Wyatt added the butterfly to the fifty thousand dollars.
Jardine would know someone who’d know what to do with it—sell
it overseas as it was or melt the gold setting and sell the stones
separately. A local buyer was out: the larger stones could be
identified and traced too easily—they’d be on record somewhere,
able to be matched to an X-ray or a photograph.

He was out of the house and easing down the driveway five
minutes after he’d gone in. He paused for a moment at the gate,
then eased the Mazda onto the street. There were more people
about now: children walking to bus stops, men and women
heading to work in glossy foreign cars. They looked scrubbed
clean and well fed, that’s all Wyatt knew or cared about them.
 
2

Wyatt’s tooth was giving him hell by the time Ansett’s early
breakfast flight from Sydney touched down in Melbourne on
Wednesday morning. He always travelled light, knowing that if
anyone intended to grab him it would be while he waited around
for his luggage to tumble onto the carousel. He had an overnight
bag with a change of clothing in it, wrapped around the Tiffany
and the fifty thousand dollars. And where possible he avoided
leaving a paper trail, even with fake ID, so he walked past the
hire-car booths and caught a taxi.

Thirty minutes to Brunswick Road, and even on the exit
ramp it was bumper to bumper. He checked the time: 8 a.m.
They should be awake in the Coburg house.

The cab driver turned left off the exit ramp and headed east
along Brunswick Road.
‘I’d like to give Sydney Road a miss,’ he said, ‘if that’s okay
by you?’ Wyatt nodded his assent. Sydney Road was the most
direct route into Coburg but he knew that it would be bad, locked
with peak-hour trams and heavy transports. The driver turned
left a couple of streets before Sydney Road and wound his way
deep into Coburg, a region of hot little streets and weatherboard
houses, finally delivering Wyatt at the entrance to a dead-end
strip of asphalt ten houses long. Wyatt got out, paid the man, let
his senses register that he was safe, then headed for the white
weatherboard where Jardine was maybe slowly dying.

Jardine’s sister opened the door. She was careworn, thin, a
spasm of emotion pulling her mouth down at one corner when
she saw it was Wyatt at the door. It was a look Wyatt knew well,
so he said her name carefully, softly, barely murmuring it:
‘Nettie.’
Sourness became exasperation and she said, ‘Why don’t you
leave us alone? We’re managing. You’re just bringing back bad
memories.’
‘Did he say that?’
She looked away stubbornly. ‘It doesn’t do him any good,
seeing you.’
‘Let him be the judge of that, Nettie.’
Jardine’s sister bit her lower lip. Then she shrugged, closed
the screen door in Wyatt’s face and disappeared down the gloomy
hallway to a room at the back. The house was in need of
restumping and the interior smelt of cooped-up humans and
dampness. The house was rented. The wallpaper, carpets,
light fittings and laminex benches were left over from the dismal
end of the 1950s, and Wyatt looked forward to the day when he
could rescue Jardine and the sister and place them somewhere
better.

Nettie materialised from the shadows, hooking limp strands
of hair behind her ears. She resembled an Oklahoma dustbowl
survivor, etched cheekbones and eyes wide, dark and longsuffering.
‘I just want you to know,’ she said, opening the screen
door to admit Wyatt into the house, ‘he doesn’t blame you but
the rest of us do.’
Wyatt stopped and stared at her. His voice was cold, factual
and remote, with no detectable emotion in it: ‘Nettie, he knew
the risks.’

Jardine came from a family of half-bent secondhand dealers
and back-of-a-truck merchants. They were careful and stayed out
of trouble. Jardine’s getting head-shot six months ago on a job
with Wyatt had been unaccountable, the kind of thing that could
have happened to anyone, but it was a first for Jardine’s family
and Jardine was the only one who wasn’t blaming Wyatt for it.
‘He knew the risks,’ Wyatt repeated.

What Wyatt wasn’t admitting was that he did feel some
responsibility—not for the fact that he’d put Jardine at risk, but
for what had happened since. When he’d first seen Jardine again
after the job, Wyatt had been shocked by the change in the man
with whom he’d pulled a dozen successful jobs over the years, a
man he liked and trusted—as much as Wyatt liked and trusted
anyone. Six months earlier, Jardine had come out of retirement as
backup on the hit on the Mesic compound looking fit and alert, a
man with a slow-burning good humour, but they’d been ambushed
after the Mesic job and Jardine had been head-shot, a graze above
one ear. Wyatt had paid Jardine his fee, taken him to a doctor
who didn’t ask questions, and gone to ground in Tasmania, a base
where the wrong people would never find him.

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 the 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.’
 

Media reviews

Praise for Port Vila Blues

Voted one of Deadly Pleasures Magazine’s “Best Mystery-Crime Novels of 2012.”

“To Disher’s usual brisk pacing, add heaps of noir...a banquet for those who like it uncut and unsparing.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

"The scheming that goes into [Wyatt's] heists is outstanding in its originality."
—Toronto Star

"Folks who are fans of Richard Stark's Parker will find much to like in Wyatt."
—Reviewing the Evidence

“Recommended.”
—Spinetingler Magazine

Praise for the Wyatt series

"Like an Australian Bob le Flambeur, Disher's titular robber is smooth, calm and planning a big heist."
—Entertainment Weekly