Port Vila Blues

Fifteen

In the way that he obsessively aligned the edges of knives and forks with the weave pattern in a tablecloth, or stacked firewood according to size, Wyatt walked once a day, every day. This walk took him in a loop around the high streets of Battery Point, then down onto Salamanca Place and past the yacht basin, and finally up again into the steep slopes of North Hobart. If he ever varied his route it was to cut down the Kelly Steps instead of through the park, or circle the moorings clockwise instead of anticlockwise.

Two weeks since the Double Bay job and this morning there was blossom on the fruit trees in the Battery Point gardens. Wyatt paused to stare at a house on the park overlooking the water. A climbing rose clung to the verandah posts and there was old glass in the windows, thick and irregular, so that the massive sideboard and silver candlesticks in the room behind the glass seemed to swim in and out of shape. A widow’s walk went right around the house and Wyatt could imagine sitting up there, watching the big ocean-going yachts tacking up the Derwent. He wondered if a woman had ever paced the boards of that widow’s walk a hundred and fifty years ago, watching for returning sails or waiting for a knock on the door.

Wyatt decided to go by way of Kelly Street. He plunged down the Kelly Steps, hearing the clack of a typewriter in the tiny whaler’s cottage at the head of the steps, then slowed. There was a man below him, mounting the steps, and at the bend he stopped and looked up. Wyatt tensed, gauging the danger in front of him, listening for footsteps behind him. When he was putting a hit together he made it a point to avoid lifts, undercover carparks, stairwells. He never let himself get boxed in. Instinct and caution had got him through forty years on the planet but this time he’d allowed his guard to relax.

He stopped and began to crouch, as though to tie his shoelace. At the same time he turned his head and glanced back toward the head of the steps. Clear. He glanced down again and relaxed. There was fury on the man’s face, directed at a daydreaming child, a small boy trailing his fingers on the stone and singing softly to himself. ‘Jesus Christ, get a move on,’ the man snarled, reaching down to yank the boy’s arm.

Wyatt straightened and continued on down the steps. Who would come for him here, anyway? All the old scores had been settled.

He strolled the length of Salamanca Place, keeping to the grass islands, avoiding the spill of tourists and drinkers outside the cafйs and bars. After a moment’s confusion about traffic flow at the end of the walk, he circled around to the right, past a restored ketch and on to the main dock area. More tourists, queuing for ferry rides, reading menus outside one of the restaurants, gawking at the yachts.

Wyatt gawked, too, but with a more critical eye. For the past six weeks he’d been paying an old yachtsman to take him out in the man’s two-master and teach him how to work the sails, navigate, look after himself at sea. When he had the money, when he had cleared his obligation to Frank Jardine, he would buy a boat and live on it. A boat made sense, given the life Wyatt had chosen to lead, was forced to lead. He didn’t think that fate would let him live in one place year after year again, and he didn’t want to stake everything on a house and land if the police or some death-dealer from the past managed to find him and force him to abandon it all and run again. If he lived on a boat he’d be mobile. He could follow the big jobs around, or move on whenever the local heat got too much for him. Plenty of people lived on boats. There were globetrotters moored in every marina and yacht basin in the world. No one would ask him to justify himself, no one would notice him. And although he wouldn’t have the rolling open hills of the place on the coast he’d been forced to abandon three years ago, he’d at least have the vast sea and sky.

Wyatt left the waterfront and headed inland along Argyle Street, the climb steep and steady toward the top of the mountain behind the city. He was tempted to buy a boat now and live on it here-until something went wrong and he was forced to run again. Something would go wrong, that he didn’t doubt. If he were to rely only on himself, Wyatt would be wealthy, known to no one, bothered by no one, as close to a perfect life as he could want. But he never could rely only on himself. There was always someone to please, bully, coax or manage, and inevitably one of them let him down. They made mistakes or got greedy or didn’t like the way he wouldn’t have a beer with them afterwards. Their life stories padded the daily newspapers, notable usually for some act of viciousness or stupidity that ended in a remand cell or on a slab at the morgue.

Wyatt stopped at a flyspecked barbershop half a block west of Argyle Street. The sun-bleached ads inside the glass were fifteen years out of date and dust clogged an old pair of clippers set alone on a crepe-papered hatbox in die centre of the window. Wyatt had never seen any customers in the chairs or waiting along the wall inside, but he’d learned that the place had been there since the 1950s and the sort of men Wyatt had to deal with from time to time swore that it had been a successful maildrop for all of that time.

The man reading the Hobart Mercury in the barber’s chair wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a fat paisley tie tugged free of the collar. He had plenty of slick black hair combed back from his forehead as if pasted there with grease. The face he turned to Wyatt was tired, worn and grubby, like his business. He recognised Wyatt and said at once: ‘Just the one item.’

The barber climbed down from his chair and walked half-bent to a room at the rear of the shop. He came back with a large padded envelope. The address on it was a box number and the name was Carew, another name Wyatt was using at the moment.

Wyatt handed the man twenty dollars and wordlessly left the shop. The envelope had been inexpertly prised open and sealed again. That wouldn’t have helped the barber, for Jardine had simply passed on a message from Liz Redding, but any level of curiosity on the part of the barber was intolerable and so Wyatt went back into the shop.

The man knew and backed away, stammering, ‘Something else, mate?’

Wyatt’s eyes locked on him dispassionately. There were several ways he might play this. The most obvious involved a degree of risk. If he were to hurt the barber, damage his property, or take back the twenty, the little man would notch up another injustice and look for a way to collect on it-the police, some minor thug mate with ambitions.

Some sort of physical payback was what the barber expected, he was born and bred to it, so Wyatt’s stillness baffled him. Then he grew aware of Wyatt’s cold gaze. He began to splutter, close to tears: ‘I didn’t mean to. The flap was-’

A mistake. If the barber had admitted opening the envelope and stopped there, Wyatt would have nodded and left him in the jelly of his fear. But the little man was trying for an excuse.

Very slowly then, with chill deliberation, Wyatt raised the bony forefinger of his right hand. It was a slender, sunbrowned finger and the barber shut his mouth and stared, fascinated, as it seemed to float across the gap between them. His eyes tracked the finger. Wyatt stopped when it made contact. It was no more than a whispering brush against the tip of the man’s nose, but the effect was dramatic. The little barber seemed to spasm and smoke like a man in an electric chair.

Wyatt left. He still hadn’t spoken, and by the time he was out of the door and crossing the street he was thinking only of the next day, meeting Liz Redding in the ranges east of Melbourne and exchanging the Tiffany for twenty-five thousand dollars cash.