Tony Rinaldi came trundling down the riverside path towards me, the shortest member of a group of four trundlers. He was wearing a T-shirt saying Even the Short Arm of the Law is Long and he was a lot thinner than when I’d last seen him. Losing your wife to a librarian can have that effect.
I stood up. Tony saw me, panted something to his pack and slowed to a walk.
‘Jack,’ he gasped. He didn’t shake hands, sank onto the bench next to me, short hairy legs stuck out. I sat down, let him recover, offered him the plastic bottle of mineral water he’d suggested I bring if I was going to interrupt him before he got to his watering hole.
He drank half the bottle, dribbled some onto his chest, panted for a while. Finally, he took a deep breath. ‘Thanks, mate.’ Ran his hand through dark thinning hair. ‘Jesus, worst thing I ever did getting in with that mob. Bastards wait till you’re so clapped out you can’t breathe, then they pick up the pace, start asking you questions.’
He had another large draught of expensive water, took another deep breath. ‘So, Klostermann Gardier. How’s the name come your way?’
I told him. ‘Gary calls himself a security adviser and one of his clients appears to be Klostermann Gardier. I’m clutching at straws here.’
‘Gary connected with TransQuik?’
‘He worked for them for about eight years. Left in ’88. Security. He’s an ex-cop.’
‘Let’s walk,’ Tony said, pushing his way off the bench. ‘Bit of a mystery man, weren’t you? Didn’t you marry one of the Ling girls?’
‘Very briefly. Frances. She’s married to a surgeon now. General surgeon. Cut off anything.’
He laughed, still short of breath. ‘Frances and Stephanie Ling. I used to call them the Ling Erection Company.’
We headed for Princes Bridge, talking about student days. I wondered what the older generation of barristers thought of colleagues who walked around the streets in running shorts and sweat-soaked T-shirts with undignified slogans. Not a great deal, I would imagine.
On the bridge, Tony said, ‘Drew tell you I quit the DPP’s office?’
‘I read about it.’
‘Ten years I put in and here I am starting again at the bar. Like a twenty-two-year-old. Fat and balding twenty-two-year-old. Well, less fat than I was at twenty-two, actually. Plus my fucking wife’s walked off and the bitch gets half of everything.’
We crossed Swanston Street, went down Flinders. The mild sunshine was gone, dark clouds gathering. In the shadow of the buildings, the day was cooling quickly.
I sidestepped a large couple holding hands and gazing in wonder at the bustle. Everything about them said down from Dereel for the day.
‘Christ, it’s freezing,’ said Tony. ‘I’ve got to go to Sydney in an hour, can’t catch cold. Bugger this.’
He stepped into the street and waved.
Never mind that the cab was going the wrong way.
We got in. ‘Corner William and Little Bourke,’ said Tony.
‘Have to go round,’ said the driver. ‘Can’t turn.’ He had long blond hair in a ponytail, stylish dark glasses.
‘Whatever,’ said Tony, hugging himself. ‘Go up Russell.’
‘I can do this,’ said the driver.
‘Right. Not automatic that cab drivers know the way to anywhere.’
‘Believe me,’ said the driver. ‘This is automatic.’
‘Klostermann Gardier.’ Tony looked at me, brown eyes, soft, intelligent eyes. He turned his head to the window. ‘You’re a friend of Greer’s,’ he said. ‘He’s a good bugger. My advice about these people is to walk away, Rene.’
He frowned. ‘Christ, that was Russell. What are you doing?’
‘Next one’s quicker,’ said the driver.
Tony leaned over, put his mouth behind the man’s ear. ‘How can the next one be quicker?’
‘I’m a cab driver,’ the man said. ‘I know.’
Tony sat back. ‘That logic,’ he said, ‘has become less and less compelling.’
The driver turned left into Bourke, into a jam. ‘Oh Jesus,’ Tony shouted, ‘what the fuck are you doing, there’s a fucking mall down there, go right next, right into Russell, can you grasp that, you idiot?’
‘Excited,’ said the driver, taking both hands off the wheel. ‘No need. Shortcut. Believe me, I know what I’m doing.’
Tony didn’t believe. He directed the driver every metre of the way until we were outside his chambers in William Street.
‘So,’ said the driver, not looking around. ‘Was that so bad? Here we are, no problem. Ten bucks fifty. Coupla coffees and a focaccia.’
Tony looked at me. We got out the kerbside door. I found seven dollars. Tony opened the passenger door and put the money on the seat. ‘No problem?’ he said. ‘Here’s seven bucks, no problem. Be fucking grateful I pay you anything.’
‘Have a good day,’ said the driver. ‘Cunt.’
I sat in a comfortable chair in Tony’s panelled office and read an old issue of the Australian Law Journal while he showered. My ignorance of the law was disconcerting. Could I have forgotten that much? To forget, you must first know.
Tony came out, pink, combed, dark trousers, black shoes, knotting a spotted tie over a seagull-white shirt, carrying a towel.
‘What happened to Stephanie? The younger sister, wasn’t she?’
I nodded. I didn’t like going back this far.
‘She was a spunk,’ Tony said. ‘I remember she got in with that student paper crowd, superior little up-themselves arseholes.’
‘She married an artist.’
‘Who? I’d know him?’
‘I doubt it. He killed himself.’
‘Paintings be worth more then. Well, where do I start? I go back a good way with TransQuik. Before Levesque and Co. I did a bit of work for the company, they were buying up the odd collapsing trucking business. Manny Lousada, he was the owner then, bright bloke but perverse. He had a talent for the complex. Nothing was allowed to be simple. You arrive at a fairly simple, standard arrangement whereby you’d do a deal in two, maybe three stages. You show them your thing, they show you theirs. No. Not good enough. Manny wants six stages with fiddly bits at every stage and impossible delaying and opt-out clauses of all kinds, all for no discernible reason.’
He started rubbing his hair with the towel. ‘One day, Manny rings me, he’s had an approach, a terrific approach. Foreign investor wants to buy forty per cent of the company. For five million bucks. That values TransQuik at twelve-and-a-half million, which is heading for twenty times earnings. Simply off with the fairies.’
Tony sat down behind the file-laden desk and took two red apples out of a drawer. ‘Want one? I’m on the apple and chicken soup diet. Murder but it works.’
I declined.
He took a bite of apple and worked at it for a while. ‘Assets were a lot of ageing trucks and a couple of warehouses. Income about three-quarters of a million. Prospects not bad, but, Jesus, this is ’84, transport not fucking information technology.’
The phone on the desk rang. ‘Tell him I’m in conference,’ said Tony. ‘I know he wants to talk to me. He always wants to talk to me. I don’t want to talk to him. Louise, I know the pressure you’re under. Tell him to tell them everything is being taken care of. Nothing to worry about. I expect to hear today. I’ll ring him tomorrow. Yes, I’ll get there. Do me a favour, ring Wilkes, tell him I’ll talk to him from the airport.’
He looked at his watch, looked at me and shook his head. ‘You think having crims for clients is bad? You don’t know bad until you have solicitors for clients.’
More apple. Most of apple. ‘Well, speed this up. Excuse my mouth full. The deal offer comes through a solicitor in Sydney. His name is Rick Shelburne, two-person practice in Randwick. I rang around. Rather odd practice, they say. Nothing off the street. He pops up now and again for white-shoe boys in Queensland, developers, wheeler-dealers, suchlike. Said to have a talent for changing councillors’ votes. He’s also acted for a person in Darwin of major interest to the Feds. Been up there?’
I shook my head.
‘I did my time,’ Tony said. ‘Thought lawyers could change things. Hah hah. The Territory’s where you hear a little plane buzzing on a pitchblack night, you don’t automatically think it’s the Flying Doctor back from another mercy mission. Get me?’
‘Roughly.’
‘Well Shelburne was cause for concern. But we go to the next stage. This bloke flies in from Europe. Suite at the Windsor. He’s called Carlos Siebold, a Paraguayan based in Hamburg, he says. Speaks English with a Spanish accent. But there’s German in there, hard to explain. Smoothest thing I’ve ever met. Ruby ring on the right pinky.’
Tony rolled an invisible ring on the little finger of his right hand. It looked relaxing.
‘Could be a cardinal, could be a fucking hitman,’ he said. ‘Anyway, Shelburne’s there too, he doesn’t say much. Siebold says he represents, this is the point, something called Klostermann Gardier of Luxembourg. A private bank. The price for the forty per cent turns out to be $4 million. That’s still over the odds, but never mind. Siebold says, deal done, Klostermann will provide a facility of $20 million for expansion, principal repayable as share of after-tax profits over ten years.’
I said, ‘Without having a Harvard MBA, that sounds like Christmas.’
‘Many Christmases at once. And Klostermann is not the investor. It acts for the investor. Conduit. Siebold gives us the names of other freight companies the investor has money in. One in Manila, one in Hong Kong, one somewhere else, I can’t remember. I took Lousada and his offsider, nodding twerp called Giddy, we went into the other room. I said to them, put simply, nobody offers deals like this. Let me check these people out. Well, Lousada’s no fool, so we go back in and say we need a few days. Siebold says he’s got other business, he’ll be back in Melbourne on the Friday, wants an answer then.’
Tony examined the apple, gnawed around the core, threw the fruit’s spine into the bin. ‘I got in touch with the companies. Not wildly forthcoming but, yes, they said, Klostermann’s kosher, the investor’s passive, he’s put business their way through other companies he’s involved with. I still didn’t like it. The Manila company had two directors. One was called Gerardo Vega. I rang a bloke I knew in Canberra in Foreign Affairs. You’d know him. Jeremy Powers? Did law around our time.’
‘The name,’ I said.
‘Anyway, I gave him the Manila names and he faxed back a cutting from the Economist which said Gerardo Vega was a Marcos crony who had been in Europe offering to sell large quantities of gold on Marcos’s behalf. So I ring the Economist and get hold of the writer. He says it’s a team effort, the person I should talk to is based in Melbourne. How about that? Five minutes later, I’m talking to him.’
He got up and went over to a wall of doors, slid one, revealing a wardrobe full of clothes. The dark jacket for his dark trousers was hard to find because all garments in the closet were dark. But he appeared to know what he was looking for.
‘Cagey bloke,’ said Tony. ‘Called Stuart Wardle. Says he can’t tell me any more than’s in the story. Then he asks me for some names so he can check me out. I gave him the president of the Bar Council and the Dean of Law at uni.’
Tony found his jacket. ‘Ten minutes later,’ he said, ‘Wardle rings back. What exactly do I want to know? I tell him about the Klostermann offer. He says all he can do is give me a question to ask Siebold. He says, ask him to explain the relationship between Klostermann, Arcaro Transport-that’s the Manila company-and two people: Major-General Gordon Ibell and someone called Charles deFoster Winter.’
‘Can I write those down?’
‘Sure, this is all history. Well, it wasn’t much but it was all we had. We go back to the Windsor. Siebold’s got Shelburne with him. Siebold is very charming. Came in the night before, off to America in a few hours. What’s our decision? I ask him the question. He looks at me, twirling the ring, he says, “I can’t answer that question, Mr Rinaldi, because I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.’’ And he says to Shelburne, “See these gentlemen to the door. I’ve wasted quite enough time on dealings with them.’’ Goodbye, we’re in the corridor. Five minutes, start to finish.’
‘How’d TransQuik take it?’
‘Well. The offsider, Giddy, he got all excited, wanted to go back to Shelburne and start again. Lousada says to me, “What’s that question mean?’’ I said, “I don’t know but Siebold didn’t like it.’’ Lousada thinks about this for a while, then he says, “Probably just as well. Only free lunch is at the Salvos.’’’
‘Ever find out what the question meant?’
Tony shook his head.
‘And TransQuik stayed a client?’
‘For a while. Until Levesque took them over. Didn’t matter much by then, I’d decided to go to the Bar.’
I searched my pockets and found the printout of Gary’s other clients. ‘These others mean anything to you?’
His eyes went down the list. ‘No. What did Drew say about my reasons for leaving the DPP’s office?’
‘Something to do with Levesque. That’s all he remembered.’
Tony nodded and picked up the telephone. ‘Louise, ask Alan at the carpark to get the kid to bring the car around the front. Without denting it.’
He began putting files together. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘about eighteen months ago, a bloke called Novikov was shot dead in his garage in Doncaster, found by his wife. He’d been at the junior soccer club meeting. Not long after, the cops stop a car with a dud tail-light, hire car. Driver’s clever with them so they get him to open the boot. In the toolkit, they find a silenced.22. The one cop, a farm boy, he sniffs the thing and he knows, silencer notwithstanding, it’s been recently fired. To the station, make some inquiries, then the Novikov murder call comes through. They reckon they’ve got the culprit. Ballistics later find the.22 is the weapon that killed Novikov. Bryce, that’s the man with the gun, he’s tough for a long time, then he says he’s just the driver, the bloke who did the job is a man he knows only as Eric. Met him twice. It takes a lot of hard work but the cops get lucky and eventually Bryce IDs a man by the name of Eric Koch. Koch calls himself a transport security consultant and among his clients is an outfit called Airbound Services. Freight airline.’
The phone rang. Looking at me, Tony said Yes three times, put it down. ‘They pick up Koch, he makes a call, half an hour later, he’s got guns from Apsley Kerr Woodward and a hotshot barrister from Sydney called Mitcham representing him.’
‘Who owns Airbound Services?’
Tony smiled. ‘Airbound is owned by another airline called Fincham Air.’
I said, ‘Which is partly owned by CrossTrice Holdings. Which owns twenty-five per cent of TransQuik.’
He nodded. ‘You’ve been doing your homework. Well, the cops managed to avoid this pair of lovelies getting bail and a cop called Jarman, Detective Shane Jarman, he’s the one first talked to Bryce, he’s now obsessed with Bryce and Koch. When it came to me in the DPP’s office, I encouraged him, said to him, let’s go for it, doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger, these two conspired to kill Novikov. Novikov, he’s a mystery. Looks like an ordinary travel agent. Could be mistaken identity. This prick Bryce could shoot but it didn’t follow that he could read a Melbourne street directory.’
‘Travel agent? For a travel agency?’
The phone rang again. Tony picked it up and said, ‘On my way.’ He closed his briefcase and went to the cupboard for a small black leather suitcase. ‘Novikov, yes. Travel agency, yes. Called Jason’s Travel. Walk down with me.’
The worried Louise saw us to the head of the stairs, giving Tony instructions all the way. I took his briefcase and we began the descent.
‘Lifts are no more for me,’ said Tony. ‘Lifts are for wimps. Anyway, I’m pushing Shane Jarman to follow the trail, see where it goes. Everything says Bryce is telling the truth, that he was hired by Koch. The big question is obviously who hired Koch. Bryce is from Sydney, got early minor form, then he’s clean. In fact, his putative source of income is as a cleaner. Almost certainly a hitman. Koch, he’s American, ex-army, migrated in the eighties, first job with TransQuik in security, now he’s some kind of Mr Fixit for Airbound and Fincham and others. He’s even got international clients.’
Tony paused on a landing, looking at me. I waited.
‘One’s Klostermann Gardier.’
‘Jesus.’
He nodded. ‘Next development is Koch asks to see Shane Jarman. He wants to deal. He says he can make this Novikov business look like shoplifting ballpoint pens. Wants to go on witness protection straight away, out of the slammer, reckons he’s in danger. Shane rings me, I tell the DPP. It’s exciting stuff, Shane can smell something, I can smell something. We start the process. Make the calls. Do the paperwork. It’s in train.’
Footsteps behind us. We both looked over our shoulders. A young woman in black, files clutched to her chest. We parted to allow her through.
‘Two days later, the DPP calls me in,’ said Tony. ‘He says we won’t be prosecuting anyone for Novikov, they’ve redone the ballistics and the two bullets didn’t come from Bryce’s gun.’
‘How’d that happen?’ I said.
Tony shrugged. ‘Guess. I felt like I’d been shot between the eyes. I asked: who ordered the ballistics redone? The DPP doesn’t look me in the eye, this is the man I regarded as a close friend, right? He fucking headhunted me from the Bar. No, the director looks out of the window and he says, “Don’t be tiresome, Tony. Matter’s closed. That’ll be all.’’ I thought about it, thought about going public, asked some quiet questions around the place, quit the next day. Same day, they find the murder weapon in Sydney. Tip-off.’
We crossed the lobby, reached the street. A red Alfa Romeo was double-parked opposite the front door. The driver was shifting into the passenger seat.
I said, ‘I’m slow without lunch. Slow generally. You’re saying this goes back to Levesque?’
Tony took his briefcase from me. ‘Bryce and Koch are both dead. Bryce had an accident. Koch shot himself. Jarman’s running a one-cop station in the Mallee. Day I got back to the Bar, Apsley Kerr Woodward offered me a brief worth maybe a hundred grand a year. What do you think I’m saying?’
‘I wish I could be sure. And this Wardle, the journalist, that was the only contact you had?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Thanks. Buy you a drink some time. Not mineral water.’
He nodded. ‘Pleasure. Got your number.’ I watched him go to the car, open a back door, put his bags on the seat. He looked back at me, said, ‘Jack, I’m not getting it over to you. There’s stuff I can’t talk about. Klostermann Gardier don’t give up. If your bloke’s mixed up with them, walk away. That’s the only reason I told you all this.’
I nodded. ‘I tend towards the obtuse. Sounds like good advice.’
At the driver’s door, he said, ‘It was for me and it is for you. These people can Mortein anything. You might buzz around for a while but eventually you’ll be dead. I’ll call you. Get together with Greer. Have a meal. Nights are long these days.’
They were indeed.