Port Vila Blues

Two

Wyatt’s tooth was giving him hell by the time Ansett’s early breakfast flight from Sydney touched down in Melbourne on Wednesday morning. He always travelled light, knowing that if anyone intended to grab him it would be while he waited around for his luggage to tumble onto the carousel. He had an overnight bag with a change of clothing in it, wrapped around the Tiffany and the fifty thousand dollars. And where possible he avoided leaving a paper trail, even with fake ID, so he walked past the hire-car booths and caught a taxi.

Thirty minutes to Brunswick Road, and even on the exit ramp it was bumper to bumper. He checked the time: 8 a.m. They should be awake in the Coburg house.

The cab driver turned left off the exit ramp and headed east along Brunswick Road.

‘I’d like to give Sydney Road a miss,’ he said, ‘if that’s okay by you?’ Wyatt nodded his assent. Sydney Road was the most direct route into Coburg but he knew that it would be bad, locked with peak-hour trams and heavy transports. The driver turned left a couple of streets before Sydney Road and wound his way deep into Coburg, a region of hot little streets and weatherboard houses, finally delivering Wyatt at the entrance to a dead-end strip of asphalt ten houses long. Wyatt got out, paid the man, let his senses register that he was safe, then headed for the white weatherboard where Jardine was maybe slowly dying.

Jardine’s sister opened the door. She was careworn, thin, a spasm of emotion pulling her mouth down at one corner when she saw it was Wyatt at the door. It was a look Wyatt knew well, so he said her name carefully, softly, barely murmuring it: ‘Nettie.’

Sourness became exasperation and she said, ‘Why don’t you leave us alone? We’re managing. You’re just bringing back bad memories.’

‘Did he say that?’

She looked away stubbornly. ‘It doesn’t do him any good, seeing you.’

‘Let him be the judge of that, Nettie.’

Jardine’s sister bit her lower lip. Then she shrugged, closed the screen door in Wyatt’s face and disappeared down the gloomy hallway to a room at the back. The house was in need of restumping and the interior smelt of cooped-up humans and dampness. The house was rented. The wallpaper, carpets, light fittings and laminex benches were left over from the dismal end of the 1950s, and Wyatt looked forward to the day when he could rescue Jardine and the sister and place them somewhere better.

Nettie materialised from the shadows, hooking limp strands of hair behind her ears. She resembled an Oklahoma dustbowl survivor, etched cheekbones and eyes wide, dark and long-suffering. ‘I just want you to know,’ she said, opening the screen door to admit Wyatt into the house, ‘he doesn’t blame you but the rest of us do.’

Wyatt stopped and stared at her. His voice was cold, factual and remote, with no detectable emotion in it: ‘Nettie, he knew the risks.’

Jardine came from a family of half-bent secondhand dealers and back-of-a-truck merchants. They were careful and stayed out of trouble. Jardine’s getting head-shot six months ago on a job with Wyatt had been unaccountable, the kind of thing that could have happened to anyone, but it was a first for Jardine’s family and Jardine was the only one who wasn’t blaming Wyatt for it.

‘He knew the risks,’ Wyatt repeated.

What Wyatt wasn’t admitting was that he did feel some responsibility-not for the fact that he’d put Jardine at risk, but for what had happened since. When he’d first seen Jardine again after the job, Wyatt had been shocked by the change in the man with whom he’d pulled a dozen successful jobs over the years, a man he liked and trusted-as much as Wyatt liked and trusted anyone. Six months earlier, Jardine had come out of retirement as backup on the hit on the Mesic compound looking fit and alert, a man with a slow-burning good humour, but they’d been ambushed after the Mesic job and Jardine had been head-shot, a graze above one ear. Wyatt had paid Jardine his fee, taken him to a doctor who didn’t ask questions, and gone to ground in Tasmania, a base where the wrong people would never find him.

He’d assumed that Jardine had gone back into peaceful retirement, but the Jardine he’d seen in Sydney a few weeks later was partly paralysed along one side, kilos lighter, a few IQ points slower and duller. Jardine tended to forget things. He owed two months rent. Pizza cartons and styrofoam coffee cups littered his pair of rooms at the Dorset Hotel in Newtown, and it was clear that he wore the same clothing for days at a time.

Wyatt had hauled his old partner off to a 24-hour clinic, fabricating a cover story to account for the wound which still showed as a raw slice in Jardine’s scalp. ‘Stroke,’ the doctor diagnosed. Probably brought on by the injury. Jardine needed professional care. Was there someone who could look after him for the next few months? A friend? Family? A live-in nurse, if that could be afforded?

Wyatt contacted the family in Melbourne. For two days he let himself be tongue-lashed by them. Finally Nettie said she’d take Jardine in. Wyatt had known someone would. All he’d wanted was for them to say so. ‘I’ll pay the bills,’ he told them.

Nettie had never married. She’d had a job in the Kodak factory but lost it a year ago and didn’t like her chances of getting another. She found the Coburg house, a dump with enough room for two adults at a monthly rent that wouldn’t cripple Wyatt, and Jardine moved in with her. All their needs-medical, domestic-Wyatt paid for.

He knew it was temporary and he looked forward to the time when he could score big and set Jardine and Nettie up for life.

Get that unwanted weight off his mind, his back.

‘I promise not to upset him,’ he told Nettie now.

Nettie had made her point. She turned away from Wyatt in the hallway and opened the door to one of the front rooms. She jerked her head: ‘He’s out the back.’

Wyatt clasped her arm gently and gave her a package. ‘To keep you going,’ he said. ‘Twenty-five thousand.’

Nettie didn’t look at the money, didn’t count it. The money disappeared with her into the front room and Wyatt’s final contact with her that morning was the sensation of her thin arm in his fingers and a sound that might have been a muttered ‘thanks’ hanging in the air between them.

He walked through to me back of the house, a fibro extension with a low, buckled ceiling and dust-clogged louvred windows. The only good thing about it was the morning sun striking it through a fig tree in the yard outside. The air was warm, a little streaked and blurry owing to the dust motes stirring in the angled sunlight, and smelling only faintly of illness, privation and cut-short dreams.

Jardine clawed a hand over the old bakelite smoking stand next to his lumpish armchair. His mouth worked: ‘Mate,’ he said at last, smiling lopsidedly. ‘Where did you spring from?’

‘The Double Bay job, remember?’

Wyatt spoke harshly. He hated to see the weakness in Jardine. Jardine seemed to exist in a fog a lot of the time now and he wanted to cut through it. ‘The MP on the take, Wintergreen.’

Jardine looked across at him, wavering, trying to draw back the spittle glistening on his lips. His left hand rested palm up in the threadbare brown blanket in his lap. The left half of his face was immobile. A strange, inappropriate expression formed on his face and Wyatt realised that his old friend was frowning, trying to recall the briefing session, the job itself. Then Jardine’s face cleared. A smile of great sweetness settled on it, and his voice was clear: ‘Got you now. No hassles?’

Wyatt shook his head. ‘I gave your share to Nettie.’

Jardine shook his head. ‘Mate, I don’t know how to thank you. Me and Net-’

A lashing quality entered Wyatt’s voice. ‘Forget it.’

Jardine straightened in the armchair. His right hand fished a handkerchief from the pocket of his cardigan and he wiped his chin defiantly. ‘Okay, okay, suit yourself.’

Wyatt unbuckled his overnight bag. ‘I found a piece of jewellery hidden with the money. Valuable, Tiffany butterfly.’

‘Nice.’

‘We need someone who can offload it for us.’

Jardine laboured to his feet and shuffled into the adjoining kitchen. A short time later, Wyatt heard his voice, a low murmur on the telephone.

He stared across the room at the little computer perched mute on a card table. Jardine used it to cross-reference jockey weights, track conditions, blood-line and other horse-racing factors. In five years he claimed to have won $475,000 and lost $450,000 using his system. What people didn’t know was that Jardine had also spent the past few years selling burglary and armed holdup plans to professionals like Wyatt. Wyatt didn’t know how many jobs Jardine had on file, but he did know that they were all in New South Wales and that all would grow rapidly out of date the longer Jardine stayed in Melbourne with his sister.

Jardine came back. ‘A sheila called Liz Redding, eleven this morning, a motel on St Georges Road.’

Wyatt watched Jardine carefully. Jardine’s face had grown more elastic in the past few minutes, as if his mind worked well if he had something to stimulate it. Wyatt even recognised an old expression on Jardine’s face, a mixture of alertness and absorption as he calculated the odds of a problem.

‘Fine.’