Five-Ring Circus (31 page)

“What about the two fellers down there, the foundation members?” Malone pointed at the ground.

“Before my time, mate. Look somewhere else, Scobie.”

“
Where, for instance?”

Bremmer shook his head again; this time he took off his helmet. “What's that about the monkeys? Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil. Or whatever it is.”

Malone looked at Kagal. “Another philosopher.”

“Confuckingfucious,” said Bremner, and walked off. “Give my regards to your old man.”

Malone looked after him, then switched his gaze to Guo Yi, who had just come out of the administration hut. He paused by three men sitting on saw-horses having a smoke. He said something, then raised his hand and pointed a finger at them. Malone shut his eyes, then opened them again. Guo left the men and walked across to the work-lift. He got in, closed the gate and pressed the start button. The lift rose, crawling up past the floors that had already been clad by the outer walls, up until it was rising past the skeleton of the upper floors. Guo Yi looked down on the two detectives till the lift reached a height, still travelling, where the floor of it obscured him.

“He's the one,” said Malone.

“The one what?” said Kagal.

“The hitman. He did the Golden Gate job.”

“And Jason and Mr. Zhang?”

“Probably.”

“So do we go up there and tell him what you think?”

Malone began to walk back towards their car. “What hard evidence have we got? We take him in and hold him and he just sits there, says bugger-all, and at the end of it what've we got to pass on to the DPP? They'd tell us we haven't got a leg to stand on when it comes to prosecution.” He got into the car, slammed the door with more force than was necessary. “But we'll get him. If he's the bugger who threatened Lisa this morning, I'll get him!”

Kagal paused before getting into the car, stood back and looked up. High on an upper floor, there on a girder, someone in helmet and white shirt stood looking down at them.

“Jump, you bastard,” said Kagal.

IV

Malone drove Lisa and the children out to Camden in the family Fairlane. The small town lies in the middle of what was the beginning of the nation's wealth, the wool trade. Now the city is reaching out to engulf it; soon it will be just another suburb and wool will only be something that politicians and used-car salesmen pull over people's eyes. It is a pleasant town, clustered around a central hill, and the safe house was halfway up the hill, on the street leading to the town graveyard.

“Very appropriate,” said Lisa.

“We'll never forgive you for this,” said Maureen. “How long are we going to be stuck out here?”

“Don't let the locals hear you talking like that,” said Malone.

“Well, how long?” asked Tom. “Geez, we're just about to start our holidays. It'd better be all over by Christmas. I start my work experience again the Monday after New Year's Day—”

“We'll have it all wrapped up by then. Come on, let's see what the house is like.”

“Who's here with us?”

“A policewoman disguised as a cook-housekeeper.”

“Can she cook?” asked Lisa.

“I don't know. If she can't, you can teach her.”

“Does she carry a gun?” said Tom.

“In the pocket of her pinny. For God's sake, I've never met the woman—” Then he calmed himself as they reached the front door of the old stone house. He noticed its windows were barred and there was a security door; just your normal abode in a sleepy country town. “Look, I'll get you out of here as soon as it's safe. I don't like this any more than you do—”

“It's okay, Dad,” said Claire, and kissed his cheek. “Relax. We'll do the same. Are we allowed visitors?”

“No.”

“Shit!” said Maureen, then looked at her mother. “Sorry. I hope we're not going to spend
Christmas
here, that'll be jolly. The Commissioner playing Daddy Christmas.”

The front door opened. Constable Barbara Sherrard, in a pale blue sundress, no pinafore and no gun, stood there. She was tall and pleasant-looking; Malone immediately felt confidence in her. “Constable Sherrard? My family.”

“Let's get off on the right foot,” said Lisa, putting out her hand. “Lisa, Claire, Maureen and Tom. And I'm sure none of us is going to call you Constable.”

“Come in.” She appeared genuinely pleased to see them; keeping a safe house was evidently not a chore for her. She had a smile that seemed to take up the whole of her wide face. “I'm just preparing dinner.”

“You like to cook?” said Lisa.

“Love it! I did a Cordon Bleu course once when I was running a safe house up in the Blue Mountains. I was minding a French canary—” She looked at Malone.

“I remember him. Sang like an aviary of canaries. He put away half a dozen heroin smugglers.”

“What are you cooking?” asking Lisa, keeping her priorities.

“I thought
coquillettes en pâté sauce Janik
might be a good introduction?”

“Go home, Dad,” said Claire. “You won't be needed.”

V

Malone, however, stayed for dinner. Barbara Sherrard was unashamedly showing off; she confessed it. The
coquillettes whatever
was, to his taste, perfect; the
crème brûlée
that followed was as good as Lisa's. The safe house even ran to bottles of Hunter reds and whites.

“Is it always like this?” Lisa asked.

“I try to make it so,” said Barbara; then looked at Malone. “Don't worry, sir. I've been ten years with the Service. I've been in three siege situations.”

“Inside looking out or outside looking in?” said Claire.

“Outside. But there's not going to be any siege situation here. I promise you.”

Malone
kissed his girls good night, squeezed Tom's shoulder and took Lisa out to the car with him. “I'll call every morning and night.”

“Every morning and night? How long is it going to be? Never mind.” She held him to her, kissed him passionately. “Be careful.”

“Don't you or the kids answer the phone. Let Barbara do it every time.”

She looked at him carefully. “You're afraid they may have followed us here.”

“No, I'm not. I went almost cross-eyed looking in the rear-vision mirror coming up here. It's just standard procedure—the protected personnel never touch a phone.”

“The protected personnel. Do we wear labels?”

He kissed her again. “Stop joking.”

He drove back to the city through a night filled with stars and a scimitar of moon. Once a car, going the other way, passed him at high speed; a moment later a police car, lights flashing, siren wailing, went by with a whoosh that he felt through his open window. In Homicide, he comforted himself, you never had to risk your life in a high-speed chase after some hoons in a stolen car.

It was almost eleven o'clock before he pulled the Fairlane in before his house. He got out, opened the gates and pressed the remote control to open the garage door. He drove the car in, closed the door, then moved down the short driveway to close the gates.

At that moment the car, dark-coloured and without lights, pulled up opposite him. He saw the hand come out of the front window holding a gun; he dropped flat as the two shots hit the ironwork of the gates and zinged away. Then the car accelerated, went at speed up the street, disappeared round the corner with a screech of tyres.

He stood up, shivering with reaction. The shots had made little sound; the gun had been fitted with a silencer. Nobody came to any of the front doors; no lights went on in bedroom windows. Malone stood leaning on the half-closed gates, waiting for the bones to come back into his legs. Then he closed the gates and went into the house: the unsafe house.

10

I

THE PREMIER
liked to call early-morning conferences; it gave him an advantage over those whose minds didn't function till an hour or so after breakfast. This eight o'clock meeting had some very sullen people sitting in the Premier's office. Sports Minister Agaroff and Police Commissioner Zanuch were the two unhappiest-looking. Lord Mayor Amberton's smile might have been forced, but it was second nature to him.

“Give ‘em the score, Roger,” said the Premier, hunched in his chair, enjoying his malevolence as if it were a second breakfast. Summer and winter, Gert, his wife, fed him the same breakfast: porridge with milk and sugar, two sausages and an egg, two slices of toast with her home-made strawberry jam. This second meal, of his visitors' discomfiture, tasted just as good.

Ladbroke would have been wide awake for a 6 a.m. meeting; he was long experienced in The Dutchman's ploys. “You all read the papers this morning or listened to the radio. That guy who was shot at Kirribilli night before last worked on the Olympic Tower site. John Laws called it the Jinx Site—he gave all his listeners a reminder of what happened there in the previous abortive development. Alan Jones did the same on his show. The talkback nuts started calling in right away. Is this to be a jinx on our Olympics, they wanted to know. Is it a warning from God—I dunno how He got into sports or hotel development—that we should never have bid for the Olympics?”

Amberton looked around, as if he had only just come awake. “Why isn't anyone from SOCOG here? They're the organizers of the Games.”

“We don't need ‘em,” said Vanderberg, who never felt the need of anyone who got more space than he did in the media. “We handle this ourselves. How's the investigation going, Bill, on this latest
murder?”

“It's in hand,” said the Commissioner.

The Premier wobbled his head, cackled softly. “You oughta come into Parliament, Bill. You know how to look all dressed up and doing nothing. You mean the police haven't got a clue?”

Zanuch managed to look unruffled, but a
tsunami
was going on under the bespoke uniform. “Not a clue, but a connection, something we haven't told the media. The gun that killed Mr. Nidop, the corpse at Kirribilli, also killed the young Chinese, Mr. Zhang, out at Bondi last Friday night.”

“So what does that prove?” asked Agaroff, bald head shining in a streak of morning sun coming through the window behind the Premier.

“Nothing. But links in clues are like links in a chain. Eventually they lead somewhere.”

“Rupert wears a chain round his neck when he's all dressed up as Lord Mayor,” said the Premier. “Does one link lead to another? Like in a circle?” He looked back at Zanuch. “We don't want the police running around in circles, Bill. You better tell ‘em to get their finger out. You're making haste in slow motion.”

That's a new one, thought Ladbroke, and I don't need to translate it.

Zanuch gritted his teeth. “One of my men was fired on last night at his home—I got the report just before I came here. Detective-Inspector Malone, who's in charge of the case.”

“Holy Christ,” said Agaroff, and rubbed the top of his head, as if wiping off the sunlight. “Do the media know about this?”

“No,” said Zanuch, “and they won't. Not from my men.”

Your men? thought the Premier. My men, he thought, as Police Minister. He hated the idea of 13,000 police officers running around loose under someone else's command. “There's another thing. Tell ‘em, Roger.”

“I dunno,” said Ladbroke, “whether you saw an item some weeks ago about millions of dollars being lodged in the bank accounts of two Chinese students—it was in a Cabinet report—”

“Then I wouldn't have seen it,” said Amberton, aggrieved, and looked at Zanuch and Agaroff.

“
I saw it,” said Agaroff.

“I got it in a secret police report,” said Zanuch.

Amberton was all at once the odd man out. His fairy wand as Lord Mayor of the biggest city in the nation was just a candy stick. He couldn't help the petulance in his voice: “So what's the importance of it?”

“We thought someone at Town Hall might've explained it to you,” said Ladbroke. “Councillor Brode, for instance.”

Amberton grimaced, waited while Ladbroke explained the situation. Then he said, “What's happened to the students? Where are they, if everything's been kept so quiet?”

“One of them is dead,” said Ladbroke, and named Zhang. “The other is a girl, Li Ping. She's to be picked up and deported.”

Zanuch raised an eyebrow and his ire. “Who gave that order? We're investigating her—”

“The order came from Canberra,” said The Dutchman.

“What business is it of theirs?” Amberton was as jealous of parish power as the Premier, though he knew that here in this room he had no power at all. Sometimes in bed at night, his fabulous hair in a net (his dream cap, as his wife called it), he dreamed of Sydney becoming a Down Under Monaco, separate from and independent of the rest of the country, himself not as Lord Mayor Amberton but as Prince Rupert. Free of Premiers and Prime Ministers, ruler of the Emerald City, complete with its own casino just like Monaco. Monte Carlo no longer a biscuit but his domain. The hairnet sometimes shook like a stringbag full of sparrows. “Who invited them in?”

“It's at a higher level,” said Ladbroke.

The others looked at the Premier, at this
faux pas
by his minder. They knew he recognized no higher level than himself; even the Pope, on his last visit, had found himself on a lower step than his greeter.

But, to their surprise, Vanderberg nodded and said, the words coming out of his thin mouth as if they were spiked, as if they were killing him, “It's between Canberra and Beijing. Chinese politics.”

“
China is all politics, isn't it? It's Communism.” Zanuch had thought Margaret Thatcher a neo- socialist.