Port Vila Blues

Eleven

The tortoiseshell frame was fitted with broad, elliptical lenses which lightened the dark cast of Wyatt’s face and softened its hard edges. He wore grey trousers, black shoes, a sports coat over a white shirt and a tweedy, out-of-date tie. The ID card clipped to his belt suggested that he spent his life shuffling forms or drafting regulations that said no to everything.

So no one was looking twice at Wyatt, but Wyatt, pretematurally wary, was going home the long way. After leaving Liz Redding he had driven to Moorabbin Airport, on the flat lands south-east of the city. Cessnas, Pipers, a couple of helicopters and one Lear Jet were parked near the hangars, fuselages and wings reflecting the late-morning sun. There was a handful of student pilots in the air, circling the field, touch landing and taking off again. Wyatt watched for a couple of minutes then entered the terminal building.

Island Air was a desk front three metres long, staffed by a young woman wearing a polka-dot dress. According to her name tag she was called Nicole and she smiled at Wyatt. ‘I hope you’re Mr White.’

Wyatt agreed that he was.

‘We thought you weren’t going to make it. The others are just boarding now.’

Wyatt looked at his watch, then at the clock on the wall behind her. The difference in time was twenty minutes and that meant his watch was faulty.

Nicole was all smiles. ‘Battery?’

‘Must be,’ Wyatt agreed.

It wasn’t the kind of mistake he could afford to make. It wasn’t the kind of mistake he’d normally anticipate, either. He gave Nicole his ticket and watched her fingers on the VDU keyboard. Island Air flew to King Island twice a day, at 11.30 a.m. and 3.30 p.m. He was booked on the eleven-thirty, timed to connect with a TasAir flight from King Island to Wynyard. It was a long way home, costly and tedious, but Wyatt liked to avoid showing his face in the terminal building of major airports. He had a car at Wynyard. From there to the flat he rented in Hobart was a three or four hour drive.

Nicole’s smile was a wide seam of white teeth. She leaned on the counter and pointed to double-glass doors at the side of the terminal. ‘Through there, Mr White.’

Island Air flew twin-engine, ten-seater Chieftains on the King Island route. The flight took fifty minutes and Wyatt ignored the other passengers and read about the magnetic drill gang’s raid on a bank in the Upper Yarra region outside Melbourne. The Age gave it a bare, three-sentence outline. The Herald-Sun police reporter gave it ten sentences and was inclined to be hysterical. She finished the story with a quote from a man in the street: ‘It certainly makes you think.’ If that’s a gauge of the ordinary Australian’s powers of reflection, Wyatt thought, then he deserves everything he gets.

King Island looked green and hilly in the water below, dairy farms stitched together in irregular patterns by narrow roads. The Chieftain touched down at twelve-twenty; ten minutes later, Wyatt was aboard a fifteen-seater Heron. He was offered sandwiches and coffee but his first hesitant bite of the sandwich fired up his bad tooth and his first sip of the coffee made it worse. He swallowed two paracetamol tablets and closed his eyes, the thin planes of his face drawn together in strain and exhaustion.

He awoke, senses dulled, when the Heron bounced down at Wynyard. On the drive south, Wyatt judged that he had about another twelve months with Jardine. They wouldn’t have a falling out, they wouldn’t get caught- Jardine would simply run out of good jobs for him. What then? Wyatt couldn’t see any big scores on the horizon, he couldn’t see himself doing contract work for organised people like the Sydney Outfit, he couldn’t see himself putting teams of unknowns together again. The old ways were gone, it seemed. Men like him-private, professional, meticulous-were anachronistic in a world given over to impulse and display.

A great deal was at stake. Ten, fifteen years ago, Wyatt had been able to pull just a few big jobs each year, living on the proceeds, spending weeks or months at a time in places where no one knew him. He liked having a safe haven, a place where he was unknown and overlooked, a place he could slip home to between jobs. He’d had it once, a comfortable old farmhouse on fifty hectares on the Victorian coast south-east of Melbourne, bought with the proceeds of a bullion heist at Melbourne airport. His windows had looked out over the sea and Phillip Island, and for Wyatt living there was like a rest from running.

Then everything had gone wrong and he’d been forced into a life of mistakes and betrayals and looking over his shoulder for the man carrying a gun or a knife or a badge. For three years he’d felt hunted, on edge. But now he had a chance to regain the things he’d lost and control the strings that had pulled him into risks he should never have taken. He had sufficient money to live on, no one in Tasmania knew who he was and, once he’d paid his debt to Jardine, he would buy an end to his running.

He crossed the Derwent at five o’clock. Traffic was mounting up but that didn’t mean anything in Hobart. He followed a minibus past the Government House lawns and looped down through the streets of the city. Tomorrow he’d go back there and find himself a small downtown dentist who ran a busy practice and get his tooth filled. The old sandstone buildings looked soft-edged and warm, glowing softly in the last hour before the sun settled behind the mountain. Below him, on the left, there were the same masts in the yacht basin, the same timber workers’ vigil outside the Parliament building. Then he was climbing again, curving up and left into Battery Point.

The apartment block was a squared-off, three-storey beige brick construction from the 1960s, set into a steeply pitched part of the Battery Point hillside overlooking the Derwent. According to tourists, environmentalists and people living on the hill behind it, the building was a blight on the landscape, but it suited the tenants, who could see the water and the mountain. Wyatt had a one-year lease on a street-level flat-street level to cut down on his escape time if anyone with arrest or death in mind for him came snooping around. The rent was low, he could walk everywhere, the neighbours left him alone. There was no one to notice or care if he should slip away for a day, a week, a month. No letters came, the phone never rang, no one looked at him with interest or emotion.

In fact, if any of those things were to happen, Wyatt would hit the ground running.