Dr Kangri hit the button on the slide projector and the image flashed up on the metre-square screen.
‘Beautiful, is it not?’ he said.
It was an oriental drawing showing a couple making love. They were both wearing robes and had painted faces and their hair tied back in severe knots. They were smiling; the man had a big erection and the woman had small, pointed breasts. The erection was between the breasts and they both seemed pretty pleased about it. The colours were brilliant blues, reds and yellows and the lovers were on a thin mat in a sparsely furnished room that seemed to be full of sunlight.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Beautiful’s the word.’
He showed the next slide and the next, and half a dozen more. They were all in the same mood and communicated the same feeling: extreme pleasure in leisurely, inventive sex. My mouth was a bit dry when he turned the projector off; I could have managed to look at a few more without too much trouble.
He tidied the slides away and moved the projector aside. Then he sat down behind the big desk in the study crammed with books and paintings and scrolls and I turned my chair around away from the screen and faced him.
‘They are very fine,’ he said, ‘but nothing compared to the impact of the scroll itself.’
‘The subject’s the same all through?’
He smiled. Dr Kangri was a small, smooth-faced man in his late fifties. To judge from his house in Vaucluse, the Jaguar in the garage, the furnishings and the art work, his assets would have been in the early millions. ‘Erotic, you mean? Yes, very, Splendidly so and a very rare scroll. Unique.’
‘Worth?’
He shrugged, moving his shoulders fluidly inside his silk shirt. He seemed to have the movements of a much younger man. Yoga?. I thought.
‘Who can say? Priceless.’
‘I’m sorry to be crude about it, doctor. But I need a price, so will the insurance people. You must have paid…’
A few lines of annoyance appeared on the smooth, brown skin and then vanished as if dismissed by an act of will. ‘It is not insured, Mr Hardy. I paid; yes, indeed I paid, but in favours you understand. Services, not cash.’
I got out a notebook because it looks efficient and can sometimes be useful. I wrote ‘Chinese scroll’ and put a question mark beside a dollar sign. Then I scratched the words out because Kangri proceeded to tell me that it wasn’t a Chinese scroll but a Tibetan scroll in a Mongol style. The scroll was about two metres long and forty centimetres wide; and had thirty-seven sections, each showing an erotic scene. Apparently the scroll was like the Chinese ‘Pillow books’ which were presented to newly weds to give them the right idea and put them in the mood. ‘Almost all Tibetan art is religious,’ Kangri told me. ‘This scroll is a rare exception.’
It sounded like a nice exception to me. ‘Old?’
‘Fifteenth century. Never before reproduced, hardly known. My edition will make big waves.’
It was an oddly contemporary expression to come from such a traditional-seeming man. I doubted whether he knew that it was contemporary. I nodded and listened while he told me that he was planning a lavish book, reproducing the scroll along with a scholarly essay and notes by himself. The slides had come his way ten years before, and the work of acquiring the scroll itself and doing the scholarly investigation and occupied him for twenty years.
‘When did you get the scroll?’ I asked.
‘One month ago. I thought about it for twenty years and had it for a mere thirty days.’
Unique or not, the procedure’s much the same when investigating the nicking of something. Where was it kept? When did you last see it? Who knew it was there? Kangri told me he’d kept the scroll in a locked cupboard in the study and he showed me the broken lock. He’d last looked at his treasure four days before and only his daughter, his housekeeper and an academic named Dr Susan Caswell knew where it was kept. I looked around the over-stocked but tidy room, noted the labels on pots and the classification numbers on the spines of the books.
‘Was anything else taken?’
‘Yes, many things-other scrolls, books, ornaments. Some of value, others not. All insured. A few things were broken, but I have had the study cleaned. I ruminated for several days before taking this action.’
‘I’ll have to talk to these people.’
He nodded. ‘Certainly, but Dr Caswell left Australia for Tibet a week ago on sabbatical leave. Mrs Tsang, my housekeeper, is at your disposal. My daughter may be a little hard to locate, but I assume you have ways of doing that.’
Yes. Before we get into that, could you tell me why you called me in on this? I mean, I haven’t got lot; any connections with the…’
He smiled again and the skin hardly crinkled. ‘You were going to say “Chinese community” although you know that I am a Tibetan. It’s very difficult for you. Well, Mr Hardy. I made some enquiries when this matter arose. I needed someone discreet, of course, and you come highly commended on that score. But I also learned that you fought against the Chinese communists in Malaya.’
‘Yes, well…’
‘The only successful anti-guerilla campaign in history. I wish my poor country had had such allies. You know of the subjugation of Tibet by China?’
I knew that the Dalai Lama wasn’t top dog there anymore and that the Chinese didn’t have any trouble going up mountains from the Tibetan side, but my knowledge ended about there. Kangri took silence for assent and went on, ‘I left my country in 1950 when the conquest began. I went to the United States to study and to go into business.’
‘What business was that?’ I had the notebook at the ready.
‘Importing art objects from my country and India. I prospered, then I came here where I have continued to prosper. My country has been forgotten, overlooked. It is an anachronism, an irrelevance. My edition of the scroll will perhaps correct that. It will show that Tibet had a rich, humanistic culture, that it was not just a society of peasants and priests.’
I had already classified the good doctor as a pretty shrewd number. I had the feeling that his business might have involved some corner-cutting and I’d have bet that his doctorate wasn’t from Harvard. But all the signs were that he could write a good cheque; and if he wanted to think I’d idealistically thrown my young body into the fray against the communistic menace, instead of just wanting to get out of Australia and having the sense to do what I was told for a while, who was I to disillusion him?
‘Does anyone else know you have the scroll? I mean, other Tibetans, scholars?’
‘No. Only the people I have mentioned. My daughter would not be interested enough to tell anyone. Mrs Tsang is totally discreet. Dr Caswell would realise the penalties of any publicity.’
‘Penalties?’
‘Obvious, surely. This is a highly erotic work. The newspapers would fall on it as a spicy story. My edition would be seen in the worst possible light. I shudder at the thought.’
I could see his point; headlines like ‘Sex Scroll Stolen’ wouldn’t strike the right scholarly note. I had a lot of questions, but some of them I could put to other people. I closed the notebook and stood up.
‘Just one question, Dr Kangri; don’t be insulted. As your agent I’m protected if I get hold of the scroll only if it’s your property. Is it?’
‘Yes, in every sense.’
‘Good. Perhaps you could give me a list of places that would be interested in such things-dealers, collectors.’
‘I’m afraid not. You’re slipping into the same mistake, Mr Hardy, assuming I am part of some sort of community in this city. There is no Tibetan community in Sydney. I know of no… shop that would have any knowledge of such a scroll as this.’
‘If some dealer in oriental things got hold of it would its value be immediately apparent?’
‘Not necessarily. I can’t bear to think of such a thing.’
‘I’ll have to think of it then. Could I see your housekeeper?’
‘Of course.’ He opened a drawer in the desk, took out a cheque book and looked at me enquiringly.
‘A hundred and twenty-five dollars a day and expenses,’ I said. ‘Two days fee in advance if that’s convenient.’
He wrote and handed me the cheque. He stood up with another of those easy, youthful movements and went around the desk. ‘I’ll send Mrs Tsang in here. I’m afraid I have an appointment now, so I will hope to get a report from you soon, Mr Hardy. You appreciate that I am very distressed over this, and I am placing all my hopes in you.’
It was just as well he told me. For all the emotion he displayed we could have been talking about a lost sock. We nodded inscrutably at each other and he went out. I wondered if I should go behind the desk but I decided not to. I perched on the edge of it instead. Nice desk, good wood, carved. Nice carpet; good bookshelves; nice cupboard, pity about the smashed lock. Pity about the priceless scroll too.
The woman who knocked at the door was medium-sized with black hair drawn tightly back and a very erect carriage. She stood straight and still with her knuckles just an inch from the door jamb. I felt awkward in the oppressively scholarly room and even more so now summoning forward someone who lived in the house. I tried a smile and a wave.
‘Come in, Mrs Tsang, come in.’ I sounded like a housemaster or what I imagined a housemaster sounded like-we didn’t have them at Maroubra High. She walked in and stood in front of me. I was going to have to go the whole hog.
‘Please sit down.’ She sat in the chair I’d vacated, still stiff and straight in her dark plain dress and sensible shoes. Like Dr Kangri she had a smooth brown face and she gave off an air of having lived on this earth for a good spell rather than looking old. Her mouth was thin and straight, her slanted black eyes were still; as Kangri had seemed to minimise emotion she minimised movement.
‘You know why I’m here, Mrs Tsang?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Sir, maybe I’d got the housemaster note right after all.
‘Can you help me?’
She shook her head.
‘Were you in the house when the study was… disturbed?’
‘Some of the time, not all. I went shopping. The house was not always attended.’
‘Did you set the alarm system?’ As a matter of professional habit I’d noticed that the house had a thorough, if not very modern, set of door and window alarms.
‘Yes, sir; but the alarm, it does not always work. Dr Kangri has said that the system provides a deterrent and that is enough.’
She said this, one of the dopiest things it’s possible to say in Sydney where there’s a burglary every five minutes, as if it was a revered, unquestionable statement.
‘Did you come into this room that day?’
‘No, sir. I dust the room once a week, that is all. I did not come in here until Dr Kangri cried out that the scroll had gone.’ She paused as if for breath. ‘And I have not been in since, until this time.’ It sounded pat, rehearsed, but she had a strange lilt in her voice and it was hard to tell-she might have sounded like that when buying cabbages.
I ran through the usual questions: see anything unusual that day? No. Any deliveries to the house? No. Gas, phone, electricity men? No. Then I gave her one that made her blink.
‘Where is Dr Kangri’s wife?’
Blink. ‘She died several years ago.’
I felt that I was getting better at reading her and I guessed that Kangri’s widowhood didn’t displease her. Then the stillness came over her again and she didn’t blink when I asked her where I might find the good doctor’s daughter and what her name was.
‘May Kangri,’ she said evenly. ‘She left an address recently for her cheques to be sent to.’
‘Cheques?’
‘Her father sends her a cheque each month-it is almost their only form of communication.’
Something about the way she spoke made me feel as if I’d been dismissed. I got off the desk and put the trusty notebook in my jacket pocket. I was wearing a cord jacket with patch pockets. For once, I even had leather shoes on and pants with a crease. Mrs Tsang ushered me out of the study and closed the door firmly behind us. We went down a passage decked out with things that looked Chinese to me but probably weren’t. The decor of the sitting room she left me in while she got the address looked Indian but it was probably Nepalese.
She came back quickly and handed me a folded piece of paper. I left the house through one of the doors guarded by a burglar alarm that didn’t work. The Jag had gone. I wondered if its alarm worked.
I couldn’t say I felt very hopeful as I went down the path towards the street where I’d left my car. Dr Kangri was like a cryptic crossword with not enough clues, and Mrs Tsang, even if she hadn’t told me all she knew, looked like she could stand a few weeks of torture without squealing. At the gate, I turned and looked back at the house; it was one of those big, solid places with two or three different levels and interesting angles. There were vines growing over some of the white painted brickwork and a big, curved window was reflecting the late afternoon sun. There was not a single Oriental touch on the outside and hardly an Occidental one inside.
With a thick-tipped pen Mrs Tsang had written 48 Royal Street, Darlinghurst. It was a long step from the Kangri mansion with the vines and the park just across the way, and the glittering water beyond the trees and grass. As always when I drive around Sydney, I left the water with some reluctance. There’s nothing much to be said for driving into Darlinghurst at 5 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, especially since they’ve blocked off all the streets so that you can’t get within three blocks of where you want to go. I parked near one of the barriers and walked through a set of narrow lanes to Royal Street. Number 48 was in the middle of a narrow terrace presenting a flat, blank face to the street. It had the standard bars on the windows and the standard bluestone front step worn concave by more than a hundred years of feet.
I knocked and waited. After a while a young girl in a man’s singlet came to the door and stood there, blinking at the fading light and rubbing her eyes.
‘I’m looking for May Kangri.’
‘Who the fuck is it?’ A man’s voice rumbled in the hall behind her. She didn’t look at me or turn to answer; she just spoke into the void above my head.
‘Some straight lookin’ for May.’
‘Tell him to piss off.’
‘Piss…’ she began, but I shouldered her aside and went through the door. The passage was dark but I could see a large shape at the end of it; as I came closer to the shape I began to smell it.
‘You tell me to piss off,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you try being polite? You might like it.’
He was short and burly with massive stubby arms-not someone to wrestle with. ‘May Kangri; this is the last address I’ve got for her and it’s recent.’
He grunted and tried to kick me in the stomach, I leaned against the wall to make him miss and then felt the breath go out of me and a pain begin in my foot and travel up my leg. He’d turned the missed kick into a stomp faster than the eye could see. I backed off and kept by the wall. He came after me in a fast shuffle and I didn’t know whether to watch his hands or his feet. He lowered his head as if he might try some butting as well and that was a mistake; I used my much longer reach to get a fistful of his thick greasy hair. I yanked it like pulling weeds and he squealed and flailed his clublike arms. I kept clear and bore down hard; it would have scalped him if he hadn’t gone down with the pressure. I got behind him, laced my fingers into the hair and bent him back in a kneeling position so that my knee dug in half way down his spine. I dug in hard and he screamed.
‘Come here!’ The girl jumped as I snapped at her: she looked as if she’d been about to run out the door. ‘Your friend’s in pain,’ I said. ‘Where’s May Kangri?’
‘Heavy,’ she said.
The man on his knees spoke in a voice that sounded like heart-broken sobbing. ‘She’s at Rush-cutters Bay, on a fuckin’ boat. Let the fuck go.’
‘Where at Rushcutters Bay?’
‘Marina, next to the fuckin’ yacht squadron.’
‘Name of boat?’ I eased back on the knee.
‘Poppie, Pansy, somethin’ like that. Shit!’
‘When did she go aboard, Captain?’
‘Yes’d’day.’
I let go the hair and pushed him down flat on his face. He lay there gasping and I stepped over him and round the girl. She was still blinking as if she’d stepped out into the noon sun.
‘Excuse me,’ I opened the door. ‘Polite, see? I’m sure your friend could get the hang of it if he tried.’
‘Piss off,’ she said.
‘What’s the matter with you people? Why’re you so bloody aggressive?’
She sniggered. ‘Wait’ll you meet May.’ Then she slammed the door in my face.
Back to the water I need never have left had I only known. That’s the story of a private eye’s life; as often as not the trail ends where it began, that’s when there turns out to be a trail at all. This sort of thinking occupied me on the trip to Rushcutters Bay and it either made me tired or made me realise that I was tired already. It had been a week of long drives and late nights on matters personal and professional, and if I’d been Nero Wolf or Whimsey or someone like that I wouldn’t have taken Kangri’s job on grounds of exhaustion. But I needed the money.
It was close to 7 o’clock when I arrived, the butt end of a mild March day, and the light was almost spent. Beyond the water the city skyscape rose up, jagged-shaped and erratically lit. A half-turn and I could see clear across the water to North Sydney.
It’s a wonder there isn’t more theft, vandalism and arson on tied-up boats because the security at the average marina is lousy. There was virtually none at Rushcutters Bay. The marina was flanked by closed shops that sold nautical gear, a clubhouse and a slipway with boats drawn up high and dry for servicing or whatever they call it. A weatherbeaten old pipe-smoker leaning against the timber office at the end of the wharf took an uninterested look at me as I stepped over the loose chain and headed for the boats. Maybe it was the patch-pocket jacket that did the trick.
There was only just enough light to read names by; some I had to squint at, a few I had to guess at. There was no Pansy but a Tall Poppy was bobbing near the end of the better lit stretch of wharf-the part which provided light, water, power and would get cable TV when it came.
It was a sleek white boat with two masts, furled sails and a lot of glass and brass and pale yellow rope scattered about. I went to the edge of the planking and called down, feeling slightly silly at talking loudly to a boat. A light came on near the stern and I heard a scuffling noise and a few muffled giggles. A woman’s head appeared through a hole in the deck followed by her upper body and legs. She stood up against the night sky and looked to be about seven feet tall. It was an illusion; as she moved closer I could see that she was only six feet tall-long and willowy with cropped dark hair. She was naked apart from a few gold chains around her neck; the chains glinted in the marina lights and her skin, which was about the same colour, gleamed.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘Are you May Kangri?’
‘Yes. Who’re you?’
‘My name’s Hardy, I’m a private detective, working for your father.’
She was close now, just a few feet below me on the deck; her body was about perfect as six foot, golden female bodies go. She had the slightly flat face of her father but I wouldn’t have taken many points off for that.
‘Who told you I was here?’ Her voice was without warmth, almost hostile.
‘The guy at Royal Street.’
‘Fuck him.’
‘Don’t blame him. He didn’t want to tell me, I had to persuade him.’
That seemed to interest her; she looked up and her breasts moved and the movement rippled down her body. I tried to keep from gaping.
‘You persuaded him. Did you use a gun?’
‘No. I pulled his hair a little.’
She laughed, again without warmth but even she couldn’t manage to laugh with hostility. A voice called from behind her, a female voice, American.
‘May, who is it, honey?’
‘A man,’ May Kangri said.
Another head poked up, a blonde one this time, and it was followed by a body wrapped in a towelling dressing gown. The woman was about twice May Kangri’s age-which I guessed to be middle-twenties-and what she lacked in beauty she made up in aggression. She marched forward, elbowed the girl aside and glared up at me.
‘What d’you want, mister?’
The naked, golden body moved, swivelled and one hand came crashing against the side of the blonde woman’s head; she staggered and the combination followed-a sweeping leg that scythed her down like wheat and crashed her to the deck. She lay in a crumpled heap and May Kangri delivered a modest kick to her exposed backside.
‘Don’t be bossy with me, Candy. I won’t take it.’
Candy got up stiffly; tears were running down her swollen face and she limped off towards the hatch. The action had put a light film of sweat on the golden skin and I was finding it hard to keep my professional detachment. She smiled up at me, white teeth in a flat, brown face. I’d rather have gone up against the guy in Royal Street again.
‘What’s Daddy’s problem?’
‘Why don’t you put some clothes on and we can have a talk?’
‘I’m not wearing any clothes today. Talk quick, I’m easily bored.’
‘Something valuable’s been stolen from your father’s house-a scroll. Do you know anything about it?’
‘That ancient, creepy shit? No, what would I know about it?’
The interview wasn’t turning out to be one of my best. I felt like a combination of perv and head-shrinker. I went direct. ‘You seem to be a forthright young woman, Miss Kangri. You didn’t pinch your father’s scroll either for money or to rub his nose in the shit?’
She gave the laugh again, this time with a bit of contempt in it. I felt pretty sure she’d be good at contempt. ‘No, I didn’t. I don’t need money. Candy’s loaded and I’m going for a trip around the world with her on the yacht. We’re off tomorrow. Wanna come?’
I grinned, shook my head and backed off. She turned around and sauntered off towards the stern; she moved well, like her Dad. Somehow I didn’t think that stealing the scroll would be her style of spite-she’d be more likely to burn the house down.
That left me with no obvious leads and the slightly defeated feeling that goes with that situation. My hand was greasy from contact with the Darlinghurst stomper and I walked down a few steps from one of the stagings on the marina and had a wash. My face was hot and I dabbed it with the cool salt water. It was dark now and cool with a nice breeze coming off the water, but the park at Rushcutters Bay is no place for a clean living man to hang around in at night. I drove down New South Head Road, ate some fish somewhere, drank a fair bit of white wine and went home to sleep on it.
In the morning the memory of May Kangri’s exotic body had faded and the need to earn the figures written on Dr Kangri’s cheque asserted itself. The job looked routine again; I rang a few people and found out the names and addresses of some establishments that dealt in rare Oriental items. Most of these places had spotless reputations, but a few didn’t. I drove and walked, heard eastern chimes ring when I pushed open doors and looked into black slanted eyes until I was sick of them. I encountered universal politeness and universal ignorance.
After two full days on the job I’d earned the advance fee but not a cent more and didn’t look like earning it. I was sitting at home reading Unreliable Memoirs when the phone rang. It was Mrs Tsang inviting me out to Vaucluse to tell me things about the Mongol scroll that she hadn’t told me before.
She was waiting for me by the front gate. I pulled up outside the house next door which gave me a fair walk back to where she stood. She was wearing the same dark dress and had a light shawl around her shoulders.
‘Come this way,’ she whispered, ‘to my flat.’
We walked on the grass towards a narrow path leading to the dark side of the house.
‘Is the doctor home, Mrs Tsang?’
‘Yes, perhaps you will want to see him but I must speak to you first.’
The path ended at a set of wooden steps with a glass panelled door at the top. She went ahead of me into a narrow kitchen that faced the wall of the next house; that left space for a nice patch of garden and a good glimpse of the night sky. Through the kitchen and into a sitting room with cane furniture. The eastern look was dominant as in the main part of Kangri’s house but there were counter-influences-framed photographs with Western faces in them and Australian books and magazines.
‘Please sit down, Mr Hardy. Would you care for tea?’
‘No thank you, Mrs Tsang. What do you have to tell me?’
It came out hesitantly, but coherently. Mrs Tsang had taken the scroll herself and faked the disturbance of the study. She spoke very softly and I had to lean forward from my chair to hear her.
‘Like Dr Kangri, I am Tibetan,’ she said. ‘But unlike him I am a religious person. Do you know anything of the religion of my country, Mr Hardy?’
I had to admit that I didn’t.
‘It is very ancient and beautiful. It is a Buddhist religion but with many influences from the old religion of Tibet-many wonderful rituals and prayers.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘You are a non-believer, like most Australians. A materialist. It is very sad. Tibetan culture and religion are synomymous, Mr Hardy.’
‘What about the scroll?’
‘It cannot possibly be genuine,’ she said fiercely. ‘It is impossible that the monks can have produced such a thing. It is counter to all teachings, all beliefs.’
‘Dr Kangri believes it to be genuine.’
‘He is mistaken.’ She drew a breath. ‘I took the scroll when I could see what he was planning-a book that would bring my religion into the greatest questioning, the greatest disrepute. There are scholars who could prove that it is a fake. Dr Kangri would not consult them.’ She leaned back on her chair, took a handkerchief from her sleeve and patted her moist forehead.
‘It’s his property, Mrs Tsang, you must return it.’
Her brown face was composed again but there was a look of fatigue in the composure. ‘It is not his property,’ she said softly. ‘He acquired it by underhand means. But that is not important. I cannot return it, Mr Hardy. It has been stolen from me in turn.’
‘Who by?’
‘My son, my only child.’
Children again, only children, tearing at their parents as if to punish them for something. Mrs Tsang showed me the photograph of Henry, her son, and his father. The father was Australian-long faced and jawed, squint-eyed, sandy-haired, strong on character, short on sense of humour perhaps. The son favoured him; the dark eyes hardly slanted and the jutting Scots physiognomy dominated over the Tibetan flatness.
Mrs Tsang has met and married Kevin Anderson in Burma after the war. Anderson had served in the country, and had gone back there after demobilisation to work as a plantation manager. He was killed in an accident on the plantation not long after Henry was born. She heard of Dr Kangri’s researches through her contacts with Tibetan priests and joined his household in the United States. The Immigration Department had put no obstacles in her way when Kangri had transplanted to Australia.
‘Henry is not a good man. He has had a lot of trouble with the police.’
‘What name does he go by?’
‘I hardly know. I do not use my married name because it does not please me. Henry would use whatever name suited him, for whatever his purpose might be.’
‘What purposes does he have?’
She closed her eyes and didn’t answer. I was about to ask the question again when she opened her eyes and sat up straight.
‘Evil ones. I had the scroll here. He came, looking for money as he often did. He took it. I went to see him to ask for it back and he laughed at me. I stole, and he thought it funny.’
‘Did he say why he took it?’
She shook her head. ‘I was not sure of this when you were here before. I suspected. But now I know it. Dr Kangri is blind to the truth but he is a clever man. He chose you because he believed you could be trusted. I am following him. Will you go to Henry and recover the scroll… and not harm my son?’
‘It was a tallish order, but Mrs Tsang was a shrewdie too. She’d worked it out that Kangri wouldn’t prosecute Henry for the same reasons as he didn’t want the theft publicised. She wanted Henry in the clear to go on making her life a misery. II Kangri gave her the sack, so be it. In the face of such calculation and forbearance, what could I do? I gave my word not to hurt Henry if it was humanly possible and she told me where to find him.
I left her in her kitchen making tea and possibly thinking how far off Nirvana was for Henry. The address she’d given me was in Petersham. I went there via home where I picked up some burglary tools and my. 38 police special. I hadn’t promised not to hurt Henry if he was trying to hurt me.
Terminal Street runs along the railway line and if you had one of the houses that sat right on the street with no front garden you had trouble, with or without double glazing. The house Mrs Tsang had nominated was one of those, a shabby building at the wrong end of the terrace-the end where the railway was closest and the factory threw the longest shadow. The house was dark in the front rooms and hall; I went around to the lane at the back, hoisted myself up on the fence and peered into a pocket-handkerchief backyard and at the crumbling back of what looked to be a totally dark, empty house.
I was contemplating the crime of break and enter when a light came on inside. I dropped back into the lane and raced around to the street. The front door of the house stood open and there was a station wagon outside on the wrong side of the street with the kerbside door open and the motor running. I heard feet pounding the stairs inside the house and saw more lights go on inside. Then a shouted curse. I scooted across to my car on the other side of the street, climbed in and hunched down to steering wheel level.
The man who ran out of the house slamming the door and hurling himself into the car was Henry Tsang-Anderson. He was taller than I thought he’d be and pretty fit to judge by his flowing movements. He was carrying a briefcase which he tossed over the back before slamming the car into gear. He roared off towards Lewisham and I started my motor and followed, not putting on my lights until he’d made his first turn.
The station wagon was an old Holden, not a good road holder and not hard to keep in sight. I kept my Falcon in the classical position, one back and not trapped on either side, and tooled along behind him. He picked up the Hume Highway and followed it for long enough to make me worry about going to Melbourne, but he swung off in Chullora and drove into the tight web of streets near the railway workshops. The traffic was almost non-existent and I had to keep well back. He stopped and I drove past keeping my head to the front and nearly displacing my eyeballs with sideways looks.
The Holden was parked outside a low, iron roofed, concrete workshop carrying a sign, hand-painted on n sheet of tin, that read TOP SPOT PRINTING. I parked fifty metres up the street and came back with the. 38 in my waistband and a slowly dawning idea of what was happening. It seemed to be my night for creeping around buildings; I stayed in the shadows and worked my way to the back of the workshop. It was a run-down place with grass sprouting from the foundations and broken windows sealed up with wood and tin. At the back I stacked a couple of boxes on top of a pile of pallets and looked through a high window.
There were three men in the single room, one working at an offset press, another at a heavy-duty guillotine and stapler and Henry was unfolding boxes, stacking the product into them and sealing them with heavy tape. The briefcase he’d brought from Petersham was standing on the floor near him-he glanced down at it from time to time and so did the tall, skinny guy at the press.
The trimmer and stapler was a freckled redhead, young and nervous-looking. He worked fast until he’d got ahead of the pages being fed to him, stopped, and lit a cigarette. Henry shouted something and the kid snarled back and marched over to the rear door about a metre from where I was standing. I dropped down and went around the nearest corner. Light flooded out through the open door and the kid puffed his cigarette angrily. He flipped the butt out and I heard a voice say ‘Leave it open.’
He did and that suited me because I sneaked back to the doorway and could hear most of what was said inside. After the noise of printing and packing stopped, they fell to arguing about money. The youthful voice I took to be the redhead’s; it must have been Henry who spoke next because he said he’d gone and got the bloody money, hadn’t he?
The skinny guy said what was going to happen to the fuckin’ painting and Henry said that was his business and he was taking the risks by keeping it at his place.
The redhead said: ‘Well, let’s have some bloody cash now and you’d better come up with some more.’
Henry said not to threaten him and the other guy told them both to shut up. I heard the sound of money slapping down on a table and some quiet counting.
‘That’s for starters,’ Henry said. ‘There’s plenty more to come. We’ll make the first delivery tomorrow. I want you both here at 10 o’clock with your cars. And don’t get on the piss tonight.’
There was some grumbling and I had to nick around the corner again as one of them slammed and locked the back door. The lights went out and I heard three motors start and the cars drive away. The street was quiet and not particularly well lit. There were a number of small factories, vacant lots and only a few houses some distance from the print shop. A light, curiosity-deterring rain started to fall. Boldness seemed to be indicated; I put my car in front of the building, got out the tools and broke in at the back. I turned on the lights and opened the front door. Nothing stirred in the street.
The photographic plates were set up on the press. They showed the thirty-seven sections of the scroll in full colour and slightly muzzy detail. A drawer in a desk contained slides and other photographic preparations that preceded the making of the plates. I broke open one of the eight boxes and took a look at the result of all this activity. It was a fifty-page stapled book, printed on rough paper and entitled Tibetan Love Positions. The colour was variable; the most explicit of the sections had been crudely reproduced and touched up to form the cover of the book. Even in this shoddy form the beauty of the drawings was remarkable and the sexual acts shown were varied without being perverse or contorted. The pleasure on the faces of the participants hit you in the eye and made the crude captions lettered in underneath all the more offensive.
I took the plates out of the press, collected all the stuff from the drawer-including a copy of the book that hadn’t had the captions stripped in-and the eight boxes and stowed the lot in the car. I turned off the lights, closed the front door and drove away.
On the drive back to Petersham I went carefully on the wet roads and wondered if Henry had taken his own advice and settled down for a quiet, sober night. It looked that way. The Holden was parked neatly in front of the house and all the lights were out bar one in the toilet at the back. No music, no dogs, no television. I climbed over the back fence and went in through the back door which had a light lock that took me less than a minute to open.
The house was shabby inside and very untidy. It looked as if renovations had started and stopped; the bedroom downstairs was crammed with timber and had no floorboards. The other rooms weren’t much better. The stairs were sound though, and I picked my way up them using a thin torch beam to negotiate the bends. Henry was in the front room asleep all alone in a double bed. He lay on his back and snored; lank dark hair fell forward on his face which was fatter than in the photograph I had seen.
I sat on the edge of the bed, put the muzzle of the. 38 in his mouth and rapped hard against one of his back teeth. He jerked awake and I dug the gun in between his front teeth and upper lip. His eyes were wide in shock. I kept the gun wedged firmly in and worked the slide to cock it. The sound in the quiet room was like a door falling in. It must have sounded even worse to Henry.
‘Where’s the scroll, Henry? I’ll take this out to let you tell me. If you don’t I’ll put it back and when the first train goes by you get a bullet going upwards.’ A train rumbled past; the house shook and rattled. I grinned at Henry. ‘You get the idea?’
He nodded and terror shone from his eyes.
‘Okay. Make it quick, you get one chance.’ I took the gun out and saliva ran down from his mouth. I held the small dark hole level with his right eye.
‘Under the bed,’ he said shakily, ‘Box…’
‘Get it!’
I eased back, and he came up trembling and having difficulty moving his limbs in the right sequence. I followed him with the gun like a movie camera panning as he rolled forward and scrabbled under the bed. He pulled up with a heavy metal box with a hinged lid. I gestured for him to open it; he put his hand inside the neck of his T-shirt and drew up a small key on a chain. The fingers holding the key shook and he scratched around the lock before he got it open and took out the scroll. It looked like the real thing-right dimensions, light fabric rolled around a slender piece of wood. I nodded and he put it back in the box which I tucked under my arm.
‘Who’re you? You want bread?’
I shook my head. ‘No questions, Henry. No answers.’
He lay back on the bed and didn’t show any signs of getting braver. Maybe he could reconcile himself to losing the scroll so I thought I should tell him just how bad things were.
‘I’ve got the books too,’ I said, ‘and the plates and the negs.’
There was a new level of fright in the dark eyes now. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘I’ve been paid… I paid out…’
I smiled at him. ‘I know you did, mate. I was there. I was sorry to see you do that.’
‘They’ll kill me.’
‘I suggest you take a trip, Henry. No one’s going to miss you.’ I levelled the gun at his chest and got off the bed. ‘Roll over on your front and stay there until you hear the next train. That way you can think about your next move and I won’t have to shoot you.’
Down the stairs and out the front door. A train rushed past as I made the turn out of Terminal Street. It was well after midnight but it’s never too late for good news. I rang Kangri’s number and he answered, sounding strained and tired.
‘I’m sorry to call so late.’
‘It’s all right, Mr Hardy. I cannot sleep.’
‘You can now, I’ve got the scroll.’
He made a yipping sound and I would have liked to have seen his face. There might even have been a smile on it. I drove out to Vaucluse through the drizzle and ran the Falcon up the drive and in beside the Jag. Kangri was there waiting for me, wearing his suit. Mrs Tsang was there too, in a dressing gown. I managed to give her an encouraging nod when Kangri was examining the scroll.
‘Wonderful, Mr Hardy. Undamaged. Wonderful. Thank you. A bonus, most certainly.’
I said a bonus would be nice and dragged out the box I’d opened. I handed him one of the books.
‘My God,’ he said, ‘Appalling. Who…?’
I shook my head. ‘Sources, Dr Kangri. Don’t ask.’ I gave him the plates and other stuff.
‘The boil is lanced, then?’ he said.
‘Yeah.’ I got out the other boxes and stacked them by a wall.
‘I will get you a cheque.’ He rushed off towards the house.
Mrs Tsang wrapped her elaborately embroidered dressing gown tightly around her and looked up at me.
‘Henry?’
I nodded. ‘He’s okay, untouched. But he’s in big trouble with his partners. I think he’ll be going away for a while.’
Kangri came back and handed me a cheque. He was almost bubbling and he forgot himself enough to put his arm around Mrs Tsang as he spoke to her.
‘We will burn this rubbish, eh, Mrs Tsang?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
I said goodnight and backed out leaving them standing close together, caught in my headlights. A gilt dragon coiled around Mrs Tsang’s slim body.
Dr Kangri’s bonus was pretty quickly spent and when his book came out it was in a limited edition and cost a thousand bucks a copy. But I’ve still got the uncaptioned copy of Tibetan Love Positions — it’s one of my more stimulating souvenirs.
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