Port Vila Blues

Thirty-one

Wyatt had spent all of Tuesday night staking out De Lisle’s apartment in Woollahra. By dawn it was clear that the man wasn’t coming back. That left the house on the coast.

As the first Coffs Harbour flight on Wednesday afternoon banked over the sea, wing tip angling at a thread of white sand between the breakers and the green hinterland, then levelling for the touchdown, Wyatt swallowed, and swallowed again, to clear his ears. He ran an internal gauge over himself, alighting again on the tooth. There was no pain there but his tongue would not let the jagged edges alone, automatically testing for sharpness and further erosion. He’d eaten fruitcake twenty minutes out of Sydney. The fleshy remnants of a raisin were lodged in the crevice and he knew he should take Liz Redding’s advice and have the stump pulled.

These obsessions got him onto the ground and through the terminal building and into a taxi. Coffs Harbour straggled over the ranks of coastal hillocks that rose to the mountains behind, the buildings predominantly white in the sun. White stucco, with terracotta tiles, he noticed, as the taxi weaved through the outskirts of the town. Then the houses gave way to ochred-brick shopping precincts, flashy takeaway places, car yards and pylons, with only palms and spreading overblown tropical flowers to suggest that he was in a holiday paradise. The place had a swagger born of sun-dazed greed and hedonism, not intellect. It was all desperation underneath, as superannuated retirees from the south struggled to keep small businesses alive during the off-season. If you had money and sense you’d build yourself a gangster’s fortress back in the hills. Exactly what De Lisle’s house looked like, according to Cassandra Wintergreen.

Wyatt got out at a small rental car concession, no more than a transportable hut in the back corner of a Caltex station. He’d reserved the car by phone from Sydney and had documents and cash ready, giving the rental man the name of a motel on the Esplanade. He bought a map in the Caltex shop, drove half a kilometre to a shopping mall, checked De Lisle’s address in a call-box phone book. The time was midday and the town was gearing up for the afternoon trade, cars and vans adding to the endless burden of the heavy traffic on the Pacific Highway which split the town from the hills.

On impulse then, Wyatt dialled De Lisle’s number. He counted ten rings. He was wondering if that meant that De Lisle was still on his way to Coffs Harbour or had already left when a voice grunted, ‘Yeah?’

Wyatt tried to read the voice. Someone unused to the phone? A driver, gardener, bodyguard? He didn’t want to alarm the man by hanging up, so loaded breeziness into his tone and said, ‘How are you today? My name’s Jason, I’m calling from the Pacific Spa Fitness Centre and this month we’re featuring-’

‘The boss isn’t here. Call back another day.’

The phone went dead. Wyatt replaced the receiver and returned to the car. The road he took inland from the coast passed steeply banked banana plantations, crossed a river and skirted a rainforest. There were roadside stalls around every bend, signalled by misspelt blackboards advertising marigoe’s, pineapple’s, tomatoe’s.

After twenty minutes on the blacktop he turned onto a dirt road. Here the forest had been cleared a century ago, leaving stands of tall gums along the roadside and pockets of jacaranda and native pine along the creeks and gullies-the only vegetation apart from rich, close-cropped grass, cattle growing fat on it. Here and there Wyatt spotted big houses set into the hillsides, overlooking the Pacific.

The grounds of De Lisle’s property suggested broad, cultivated parkland. The house itself sat far back from the road gate, a vast, softly gleaming slate roof showing above glossy trees and tangled, white-flowered creepers. It suggested new money and De Lisle clearly didn’t want strangers coming in: a three-metre security fence topped with barbed wire ran around the property and the driveway was barred by a massive locked gate. It was an incongruous structure there in De Lisle’s vulgarian landscape-thick twin wooden doors higher than the security fence and shaped to fit an archway. Very old and worn but sturdy enough to withstand a battering ram, they had probably come from a seventeenth-century Italian courtyard, admitting carriages, men on horseback.

Wyatt drove back to Coffs Harbour. In what remained of the afternoon he went shopping, paying over the odds for some items because he couldn’t produce the necessary forms and authorisations. Then he slept.

By 5 a.m., one hour before dawn, he was back on De Lisle’s hillside, concealing the rental car behind an abandoned tin hut in the gully below the house, where the looping road forked.

He got out and began to climb the slope to De Lisle’s perimeter fence. Dressed entirely in black, he’d also blackened his cheeks and forehead and the backs of his hands with greasepaint from a theatrical suppliers. He’d washed in plain water before leaving Coffs Harbour: no soap, shampoo or deodorant, no chemical odours or perfumes that might betray him. He carried twin oxyacetylene tanks strapped to his back and a knapsack in one hand. When he reached the fence he stared up at the lumpy shadows that defined the house and the trees around it. A faint light was showing. It didn’t mean anything. People burn lights in their garages and on verandahs every night of the year.

Power to the property came from a branch line that finished at a steel and cement pole adjacent to the fence. A smaller line ran from a transformer at the top of the pole to the house itself. If Wyatt could cut the power he’d throw De Lisle’s house and grounds into darkness and cancel any alarms or traps the man might have set for someone like him. The dawn hour gave him an extra edge, for it was the hour when people were blurry with sleep. If there were guards, one would be coming off duty tired, his replacement coming on tired.

Wyatt used a thermite charge to destroy the transformer. Thermite burns, it doesn’t explode, and he contained the fuse inside half a metre of two-centimetre PVC pipe to conceal the sparks. De Lisle would only know that his defences were being breached if he happened to be standing under the transformer. Nothing would be seen or heard from the house. For a while, at least, they’d assume there was a legitimate power cut.

It was a fifteen-minute fuse. Wyatt heard the transformer blow and saw De Lisle’s light blink off among the black trees.

He was ready to cut through the steel fence now, the torch head attached to the tanks, welding glasses over his eyes, heavy gloves on his hands. As soon as the transformer blew he lit the torch head with a sparking tool, opened the valves on the tanks, and turned the petcock on the torch head, keeping the sparking tool in the thin stream of gas until with a whump he had a flame on the torch, cobalt blue in colour, tinged at the edges with yellow. He adjusted the valve on the oxygen slowly until the yellow disappeared. The flame was at its hottest now, and he applied it to the steel. One by one the bars turned orange, then cherry red, parting finally with a spray of molten sparks. Wyatt cut himself a hole big enough to escape through without having to duck or crawl, and went in.

For two minutes then, he rested his eyes. The goggles had protected them from damage but, until his vision cleared, the dawn seemed to consist of fiery red bars across the dark slopes and the darker trees beyond.

His breath, he realised, was wreathing around his head like smoke on each exhalation in the low dawn temperature. He got out a handkerchief, masked his nose and mouth with it, shrugged the knapsack onto his back and began to make his way across the grass to the outer edge of the trees.

Wyatt reached the house unchallenged. He climbed a set of steps to a broad verandah and heard only the softly rising wind clacking the palm fronds against the roof of the house. Then a sudden gaseous stench reached his nostrils and he heard the first heavy rush of urination. A man was standing where the verandah was darkest. In that same instant, he seemed to register that Wyatt was there. He cried out, fumbling at his crotch.

Wyatt head-butted the smear of face in the darkness and disappeared down the steps. Behind him, the man bellowed. Ahead of him were the trees. That’s where he’d be expected to run. Instead, he ducked under the verandah and, when two men clattered like horses down the steps and into the trees after him, torches probing, Wyatt slipped back onto the verandah and in through the open door.