Port Vila Blues

Five

Springett and Lillecrapp worked the surveillance using a pair of Honda 750s, not cars, wanting speed, ease and concealment on the tight mountain roads. They maintained contact on a little-used emergency band, restricting themselves to clipped commands that might almost have been static, and kept well back, lights off, when they tailed the Telecom van from the bank to the car yard.

Lillecrapp went on ahead to an unlit service station with instructions to tail the Range Rover. Springett watched Niekirk, Riggs and Mansell make the transfer with night binoculars, stationing himself on rising ground behind the car yard.

So far, he’d seen nothing iffy-but that didn’t mean anything. Niekirk and his men could easily have been skimming off some of the money while they were in the bank itself, let alone in the van. Surely the temptation was there. No one had known to the last dollar how big the take would be, after all. As soon as Springett had got word that the money would be in the bank he’d briefed De Lisle in Sydney, and De Lisle had arranged the hit. Niekirk, Riggs and Mansell were De Lisle’s men, not his.

If they were crooked-and someone had to be, given that the Tiffany brooch had suddenly shown up again- then Springett wanted to be sure of his facts.

He took the glasses away from his face, blinked and rubbed his eyes, focused on the yard again. The Range Rover was leaving. Lillecrapp would pick it up farther along the road and tail it. Springett’s instructions had been clear: ‘Stay with the vehicle until you get an idea of where it’s headed. There’s no need to follow it all the way to Sydney. What I’m interested in is if they stash something somewhere along the way, meet with someone, unaccountably double back, that kind of thing.’

Lillecrapp had blinked uncertainly, brushing his ill-cut fringe away from his forehead. ‘You don’t want me to stop them? Heavy them?’

‘Christ, no. Just do what you’re told.’

Niekirk stayed behind after the Range Rover left. Springett watched him. The man was thorough, giving the van a final check. Springett knew there’d be no joy there for forensic technicians. The three men had worn gloves, so there’d be no prints to give them away. They hadn’t smoked; they hadn’t had anything to eat or drink. They might have left clothing fibres or shoe grit behind at the bank, but soon there wouldn’t be any clothing or shoes available for a match, only ash somewhere. These guys were pros.

Finally Niekirk wheeled out a big motorcycle that had been stashed behind a rubbish skip and packed the gym bags into the panniers. It was one-thirty in the morning when he left the yard. Springett stayed well behind him. The roads out of the hills and down onto the coastal plain were fast and quiet, yet Niekirk kept to the speed limit all the way.

There was probably half a million dollars strapped to the bike. As Springett had informed De Lisle, it would be in new bills, consecutive serial numbers, therefore easy to trace. But that was De Lisle’s problem. Springett had no intention of ripping off the money himself. There were fences around who would give him twenty cents in the dollar, but that would take time and effort and leave him exposed. It was better to take the one-third cut De Lisle was offering him to identify the hits. Only De Lisle was in a position to get the full return on half a million, a haul that would be like hot potatoes to anyone else.

Springett tailed Niekirk down to the Doncaster freeway and along it to the Burke Road exit. The traffic was sparse, the lights in their favour. A sweet setup, he thought. De Lisle sends in a contract team from across the border, men who aren’t known to the local boys in blue and who can fade back to Sydney after every hit. The foot soldiers like Riggs and Mansell get paid a decent flat rate. I get a retainer plus the promise of a one-third share of the take once the heat has died down and De Lisle has laundered everything. Ditto Niekirk. And if Niekirk and his men get arrested, there’s a number they can call, a green light to get them out of that kind of trouble.

Sweet, Springett thought, except De Lisle has some serious dirt on us, we have to wait for our money, and already someone has fucked up with that Tiffany.

Springett followed Niekirk onto the south-eastern freeway and toward Carlton, keeping below the speed limit, the heavy bike burbling under him. At Faraday Street he stopped and got off the bike, watching Niekirk make two sweeps of the street and finally make for a taxi parked halfway along. There were a dozen taxis just like it nearby, all operated by Red Stripe, a small suburban outfit housed in a narrow tyre-change and service depot on the next corner. Taxis moved in and out of Faraday Street twenty-four hours a day, shift drivers clocking on and off at irregular intervals.

Springett nodded to himself. No one was going to look twice at a man wheeling up on a bike and transferring his gear to a taxi. He guessed that the taxi light, meter, radio and Red Stripe decals were authentic but that the car itself, a Falcon, was simply Niekirk’s transport when he was in Melbourne to pull a job or do the groundwork for one. He could go anywhere in it and no one would question his right to be there.

Springett watched from the shadows. The boot lid up, his body screening the bootwell, Niekirk transferred the money from the bike’s panniers to the car. Two-thirty. He got in and started the taxi. Springett kicked the Honda into life and tailed him again, out of the parking space and across Carlton toward the southern edge of the city, eventually rolling down La Trobe Street and turning left into Spencer Street.

As far as he knew, this was the final stage for Niekirk. A courier would be coming to collect the money and take it to De Lisle. The operation was protected in part by safeguards and circuit breakers. De Lisle remained as far as possible in the background, activating the members of his team separately and by message drop. In turn, Niekirk and his men met only when they were planning and pulling a hit. Springett and De Lisle stayed in touch via a couple of post office boxes.

It worked, but still, De Lisle had a hold over each of them and Springett hated it. He liked to stay on top of things when he could. So far he trusted De Lisle. He had to. But he had no reason to trust Niekirk, Riggs, Mansell or the courier, who’d all been hired by De Lisle.

He braked the Honda. Niekirk parked the taxi and fetched a tartan suitcase from the boot. He was outside a place called U-Store, a self-storage warehouse a few hundred metres west of the big rail terminal on Spencer Street. It was a long, single-storey building with a roof and a verandah of red corrugated iron like a colonial style farmhouse. It looked no more or less out of place than anything else in that part of the city.

Springett cruised past, U-turned, parked the bike and waited. He had a fair idea of what the building looked like inside: windows and doors fitted with sensors and alarms; a couple of security guards patrolling the corridors; the guard on the front desk taking a while to get with the flow of the midnight-to-dawn shift, holding a half-full mug of coffee just beneath his chin, yawning in Niekirk’s face, stretching and swallowing a few times as he checked Niekirk into the warren of lockers beyond the security door, camera monitors flickering silently behind him.

A few minutes later, Niekirk emerged without the suitcase. Springett watched him get into the taxi and pull away from the kerb. Bye bye, Niekirk, he thought, and settled back to see who would come for the money.

But Niekirk surprised him. He steered the taxi into the Spencer Street bus terminal, which was just a block away and on the opposite side of the street. Interesting. Maybe Niekirk and the courier were working the skim.

They were muted hours in the city, between 2 a.m. and 6.30. A couple of taxis, slow between the lights, their drivers shoulder-slumped inside, dreaming over the wheel; delivery vans stacked with the midnight print run of the Age; lone cars using Spencer Street as a conduit between west and east of the river. Dew dampened everything and Springett got cold sitting there, watching for the hand that would walk out of the U-Store, carrying a distinctive tartan suitcase.

By 6.30 the station was starting to breathe again. Springett imagined the echoing chambers underground, the shoe snap of early commuters streaming from the trains, walking stunned and staring into the grey light above. He saw them bunch at the pedestrian crossings and choke the Bourke Street trams. A pub opened its doors to the men hawking phlegm into the gutter outside.

A man was stacking newspapers and magazines on the footpath outside the station. Springett saw him stand a box on its side, wrap himself in a blanket, and sit there morosely, scarcely acknowledging the commuters who bought their morning papers and pressed money into his hand, held palm up like a dead creature. But the man did have a styrofoam cup in his other hand and steam was rising from it and Springett felt a hollowness in his gut.

He was curious to see a parking officer rap on the window of Niekirk’s car. She exchanged words with Niekirk, all the while looking toward the rear of the car. An interstate coach was heaving off Spencer Street and into the parking station, road-grimed, snarling, top-heavy with surly, fatigued passengers. Then exhaust smoke from another big motor shot into the air and an airport transit bus rattled into life. The terminal was waking up and Niekirk was getting in the way.

Springett watched Niekirk head the taxi toward the street. He grinned to himself. Niekirk didn’t want to miss connecting with the courier, but at the same time he didn’t want a ticket for parking illegally. A ticket started a paper trail, placing a driver and a vehicle at a particular place at a particular time.

Springett saw him judge a break in the traffic, swing onto Spencer Street and head two blocks away from the station, to an unoccupied parking meter diagonally opposite the U-Store. He reversed in, shunted a few times until the car was angled for a quick exit, and settled back to wait again.

It was 7 a.m. Springett was buffeted as a number of big trucks gusted past him. It was a convoy, cranes, boilers and massive preformed cement slabs and pipes heading for a building site somewhere across the city. They filled the air and Springett might not have seen the tartan suitcase knocking against a blue-uniformed knee if he hadn’t trained himself in twenty years to ignore the things that had nothing to do with the job.

Fortunately the lights changed and the crosstown traffic was stalled long enough for him to watch the progress of the man carrying the tartan suitcase. He was about thirty-five, medium-sized with a forgettable, smooth-cheeked face that might never have been scraped by a razor. The only hair on his head was an inadequate scrape of brown, blending at the edges with pink skin. A pilot or a cabin steward, Springett guessed, judging by the blue peaked cap under the man’s other arm.

That made sense, if the money was going straight to De Lisle in Sydney. It was easy for flight crews to avoid baggage checks, and no one questioned their right to be in an airport or on a plane.

The man walked back along the footpath opposite Niekirk. Springett watched, expecting him to make contact with Niekirk, but he darted across the street and boarded the airport transit bus.

That made sense, too. The courier wouldn’t risk using his own car for this job, and he wouldn’t risk letting a taxi driver log the journey, one fact among the many that map who we are, where we’ve been, that can be used against us one day. The driver of the transit bus, driving this route many times a week, wouldn’t remember the courier.

It all helped to give Springett a better fix on De Lisle, a man who ensured that everyone who worked for him took pains and covered himself and muddied any trail that might lead back to the top. Which probably explained why Niekirk had stopped behind to see who was coming for the money. Working on a need-to-know basis didn’t suit Springett, either. Knowledge was power.

But now Springett knew that he was no closer to knowing who might have pocketed the Tiffany brooch after the Brighton bank job in February. Time for a bit of push and shove. Niekirk was staying at a motel in St Kilda. He’ll keep, Springett thought. First I need to know from Lillecrapp if Riggs and Mansell pulled anything after they left Niekirk in the car yard.