Port Vila Blues

Fourteen

Shaken by his encounter with the men outside the U-Store, Crystal said stuff it to De Lisle’s stipulation about no cabs. He collected the tartan suitcase from the U-Store, walked back to the station and hailed the first taxi on the rank.

The driver was a woman and she sniffed slowly, deliberately, when he got into the back seat, not the front. Barrel-shaped, a sparse pelt of carroty hair on her fleshy head, no one was going to take her for granted. ‘Plenty of room up front.’

‘I’m tired.’

Her voice was a nicotine-riddled croak. ‘So am I, Sunshine, so am I, but I say we’re only on this earth once.’

Crystal tuned her out. He stared at the dewy cars streaming both ways along Spencer Street, his arm protectively around De Lisle’s suitcase against his thigh on the seat beside him. He itched to open it, but it had been locked and he didn’t have a key.

‘What are ya? Pilot? Cabin steward? You know what they say about cabin stewards,’ and she began to wheeze, a version of a laugh.

Crystal focused on the driver. Her head was a hazy balloon shape spotlit by the low morning sun. He held the suitcase closer to his hip.

‘I asked what you did,’ she said.

Crystal looked away from her. She hadn’t washed recently. He opened the window a couple of centimetres.

‘Cat got your tongue?’

The taxi had stopped for the King Street lights. There was a luggage tag attached to the tartan suitcase: black leather with a clear cellophane window. Crystal fished a name card from his pocket, reversed it and printed the words ‘Mr Huntsman, Reriki Resort’ on it, then slipped the card into the leather tag.

Huntsman. What crap. Crystal was tempted to remove the card and write De Lisle down instead. But that would let De Lisle know he was onto him.

‘I’ll say it again-cat got your tongue?’

Crystal didn’t know why he had to be subjected to this and he told the woman so.

‘Some people, they think their shit doesn’t stink.’

Crystal admonished himself. Don’t say anything, don’t give her an edge of encouragement. He felt the cab’s tyres slap over tramtracks. A few minutes later he lurched gently against his door. The woman had turned left with a faint tyre squeal and was accelerating along William Street. He mentally plotted their route: skirt the Vic Market, merge right onto Remington Road, right again onto the Tullamarine Freeway.

He stared at the cars and buildings without seeing them. All of Crystal’s grief led back to De Lisle, starting with an interview room that was like any interview room anywhere: functional, sparse, close and sour, as though every falsehood, craven emotion and confession ever heard in it had become a permanent part of the air and the fittings.

There had been others there in the room with De Lisle: a senior federal policeman, a senator, a shorthand typist, a couple of sour faces in suits. De Lisle had started the questioning: ‘Like the tropics, do you, Louis?’

At once Crystal had known what this was about. He looked at De Lisle, looked him full in the eyes, small eyes behind a protective squint. ‘My job takes me there.’

The Fed leaned forward. He was a charmer, full of smiles, only they were the professional smiles of a cadaverous undertaker. ‘We’re not talking about your crappy job. We’re talking about other sorts of trips. Holidays, kind of thing.’

Crystal said: ‘Sorry, was that a question?’

The Fed ignored him. He flipped through a file on the desk in front of him. ‘You’re single?’

Crystal said nothing.

‘I beg your pardon-I see here that you were married once but divorced several years ago. No kids, I take it?’

Crystal shook his head imperceptibly.

De Lisle said, ‘You’ve got a girlfriend though.’

Crystal shrugged. ‘Is that a crime?’

‘A single mother, I believe. Two boys, six and eight.’

The Fed leaned back, folded his arms across his chest. ‘Some blokes have trouble relating to women. I’m not saying they’re queer or anything-they switch their attention to little kiddies.’

‘By befriending single mothers,’ said one of the suits.

‘Look, if you lot are going to charge me with anything, charge me.’

‘This is only an inquiry, Mr Crystal,’ the senator said.

De Lisle cut in: ‘Some men seek attention in other ways, like hanging around in public lavatories, slipping porn under the door to kids,’ shrugging as if all this were regrettable but understandable. ‘Kids are curious. I know I was at that age. They want to find out more, so it’s only natural some of them will follow through.’

The senator had looked on, appalled and fascinated. The nameless faces in suits smiled a little. De Lisle and the Fed watched Crystal shift in his seat. There was a cast in one of the Fed’s eyes, giving him a look of permanent scepticism. ‘But you’d think the toilet block approach would be pretty dicey. There’d have to be easier ways of getting kids to come across for you.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘So you just amble your way through life, not thinking about sordid things like that,’ De Lisle said.

Crystal stiffened. He had caught the man’s word stress.

‘Funny you should say that, your worship,’ the Fed said. ‘AMBL is an acronym.’

‘Is it?’

‘Association for Man-Boy Love.’

‘Huh,’ De Lisle said, full of wonder. ‘Better than Australian Paedophile Support Group. You can’t get an acronym out of that.’

The seconds ticked by. De Lisle turned the pages in Crystal’s file. ‘Well there’s a coincidence.’

‘What?’

‘Our friend here has been to Thailand and the Philippines six times in the past three years.’

‘Go on.’

‘Yep. I asked him just now if he liked the tropics but I don’t think I caught his answer.’ De Lisle bent forward, trying to look up into Crystal’s face. ‘Where do you like best? Thailand? Maybe Jontien? I hear it’s got a fantastic white beach. Or maybe you prefer the Philippines? I hear Batangas is nice.’

One of the suits said: ‘A bloke who was so inclined could pick himself up a kid for ten bucks in one of them places.’

‘Those places,’ De Lisle corrected automatically. ‘You know what they say, Lou: “Sex before eight, or it’s too late”. Would you say that, Lou, old son, old pal, old sport?’

Crystal remembered turning on De Lisle, snarling: ‘I don’t know what you’re on about. Whatever it is, you’re barking up the wrong tree.’

The Fed said coldly, ‘Quit the bulldust, Crystal. You’re a rock spider. Think what the hard boys in Pentridge will do to you when they find out. They hate guys like you even worse than they hate cops. All those hard men, sexually abused by blokes like you when they were little kids. They’ll cut off your cock and make you eat it.’

The senator gasped. Crystal said, ‘You can’t prove anything.’

‘Yeah?’ The Fed leaned down, fumbled in a briefcase, came up with a videotape. ‘We found this in your ceiling this morning. You seem to be having more fun than the kid. What is he, Thai? About eight years old?’

Crystal had let a sob rip from his throat. ‘Children seduce too. It’s not only the adults.’

‘But they’re still children,’ the senator said. He grimaced. ‘People like you, you give Australia a bad name in Asia.’

There was silence. To fill it, Crystal found himself saying, ‘I want to make a deal.’

‘A deal?’ De Lisle said. ‘You haven’t been charged with anything. This is an inquiry, that’s all, a fact-finding exercise.’

An hour later, Crystal had been out on the street, sweating, drained, pale, but a free man. Free until De Lisle got in touch with him that evening with a proposition.

Unvarying red tiles and powerlines were slipping by now as the taxi jockeyed for a clear run along the freeway. When the airport came into view, Crystal leaned forward and said, ‘International terminal.’

‘Oh, International terminal, whoopy doo,’ the woman said.

Crystal gave her the exact fare, told her to keep the change, and got out. Inside the terminal he reported for duty, stashed the tartan suitcase in his staffroom locker and helped get the airbus ready. It was a day like any other.

So far.

But knowledge was power and forty minutes before takeoff Crystal made his way to the airline’s supply room. Among the airsickness bags, spare pillows and blankets, plastic suit covers and aircrew badges and caps there was a bunch of keys. He’d once counted them: forty. Suitcase keys, hanging on a brass ring like ranks of tiny flattened people. The airline had collected the keys over many years. There was always a passenger who’d lost the keys to his luggage. There was always one key that would fit.

He waited until he was alone in the locker room and went to work on the tartan suitcase. The sixteenth key sprang the lock and he found neatly packed but cheap shirts, underwear and socks. Disappointed, he began to rummage, and that’s when he found the stuff. He gaped, felt the surface of his skin tingle: brooches, necklaces, earrings, pendants, rings. Something about the weight and density of the metal, the way the stones caught the light, told him that De Lisle was no traveller in costume jewellery.