ADAM GARRETT WAS attending the Brisbane stamp expo to ‘intercept’ a Red King—Edward VIII in his naval uniform. Of the millions printed by the Postmaster-General in late 1936, all but a handful were destroyed when the King abdicated a few weeks later. A very valuable stamp now: one example had fetched $120,000 at Mossgreens as far back as 2017—not that Garrett expected to get anything like that kind of money for this one. He couldn’t sell it himself. All he could expect for his trouble was a small percentage of the commission that Melodie, his boss, was getting.
Apparently an Adelaide collector named Casdorff wanted to sell his Red King, and had lined up half-a-dozen appointments with dealers and fellow collectors while he was in Brisbane. Garrett had followed the man up to Queensland—even booked the same flight—on the off-chance there’d be an opportunity to lift the stamp along the way. No such luck, but he was there at the Hinze Plaza on Thursday afternoon when Casdorff—sweaty, balding, wheezy—checked in and handed his briefcase to the receptionist for deposit in the hotel’s main safe. The briefcase was a tan R. M. Williams, and Garrett had immediately left the hotel after completing his own check-in and bought an identical briefcase at Myer on Queen Street. On special—but $450 even so. This job was getting expensive. Then back to the hotel in time to change for the evening event. He planned to make his move on Friday or the weekend, when Casdorff was circulating or meeting prospective buyers. He wasn’t sure how he’d do it: a briefcase switch would be ideal now that he was nearly five hundred bucks down. But if that didn’t work, should he snatch and run? Pose as a buyer? Wait for the sale then do a snatch and run on the actual buyer?
Those questions had gone out the window when, two hours later, he clocked Anita across the room, and she clocked him, and they both bolted through different exits. Instinct. Then, as he was looking both ways along the alleyway behind the hotel, sense took over. He could understand why she’d run from him: guilt and fear. She’d dumped him for Galt; she’d stood by while Galt had him beaten up; she’d stolen his Jaeger-LeCoultre. He shouldn’t be running from her, he should be running at her.
He returned to the function room, wondering where she’d go to ground. And why had she been at the expo? For him, to serve him up to someone he’d ripped off in the past? But how had she even known he’d be here? Years since they’d had anything to do with each other. He’d once heard a rumour that she’d shot Galt, but nothing else, and he’d been keeping his own activities way under the radar since those days.
He thought about that last time he’d seen her, behind the watchmaker’s shop, when she’d lied about the watch. There’d been a glow on her that night, something radiant and hungry about her looks; probably cocaine. She didn’t look like that now, but that wasn’t the point—had she also come here for the Red King? Better fucking not have. The stamp was his. Or rather, his on behalf of Melodie the Malady, who’d make his life extremely difficult if he didn’t fly back to Adelaide with it.
The celebrations were winding down. Seeing Casdorff stagger into a lift, shirt untucked, bowtie askew and comb-over fighting the stuff he used to paste it to his watermelon head, Garrett decided to call it a night, too. It was possible the Red King was in Casdorff’s jacket pocket or room safe, but pickpocketing and hotel-room break-ins were risky in these high-end places. He’d stick with his original plan and improvise.
Before going to bed, he logged on to Telegram. He had a network of men and women who operated in the shadier corners of his world. Stamps, coins, art and antiques. Dealers and collectors who didn’t operate through normal channels; art-theft detectives with debts or habits; conservators, forgers…Most just usernames, but he knew a handful of them. He skim-read for a bit then, using his own user-name—bricabrac—posted a be-on-the-lookout for Anita. Age, appearance, names she was known to use, how she operated, where and when she was last seen. He posted an old photo, too, stressing that although she customarily altered her hairstyle and clothing, her face had barely aged. Some chat members responded immediately with ticks and thumbs-ups. There was no chance that outsiders would see any of this: all posts were protected by end-to-end encryption and would later be deleted.
On Friday morning he dressed in a sports coat, chinos and plain brown shoes, feeling so square he thought his corners would chip, and took his briefcase down to breakfast. Sat where he could watch the room, and saw Casdorff come in late, looking bleary and badly shaven. Excellent: easier to steal from an inattentive mark. Even better, Casdorff had evidently retrieved his briefcase from the main hotel safe before entering the dining room. Garrett watched him tuck it under a window table then trudge like a zombie towards the coffee machine and peer at the touchscreen, hovering a baffled forefinger. Garrett sympathised: you’d need an engineering degree. He didn’t follow through with this thought, however. Simply rose from his table and strolled to Casdorff’s, knelt as if to retie a shoelace and switched briefcases, his fingers wrapped in a handkerchief.
Then up and out past a line of steaming bain maries to the foyer and the door to the men’s room. Into a stall, where he found the Red King in a glassine bag inside a padded envelope. Not the best way to treat a delicate scrap of paper worth around $200,000, but that was another thought he didn’t pursue. Instead, he observed a stillness in himself. Measured heart rate; mild adrenal tingle. Pocketing the stamp, he returned to the dining area where Casdorff was feeding slices of bread onto a moving toaster rack. Garrett switched briefcases again and went upstairs and showered, washing the product out of his hair and changing into his costume for the day, a sleeves-rolled black linen shirt over designer jeans and Camper shoes, blue-framed glasses and soft, flyaway hair.
Then downstairs and out into the park, where he sat for a while on a bench. After messaging Melodie that he had the Red King—See you Monday—he returned to the hotel, leaving his empty briefcase for anyone who wanted it. Then he passed the day at the expo: having stolen a valuable stamp, he didn’t want to attract attention with a sudden departure. At one point he saw Casdorff in a panic on the other side of the room, hauling papers and catalogues out of his briefcase and shaking out the padded envelope. He managed to lip-read a little and imagined the rest: I could have sworn…Has anyone seen…?
Garrett stayed on for most of Sunday, too. By the afternoon Casdorff was looking frankly haggard. As far as Garrett could tell, the police hadn’t yet been called—perhaps Casdorff continued to think he’d simply misplaced the stamp. Nevertheless, Garrett knew he ought to behave as if the police might turn up to question everyone, so he reinforced his bona fides by forking out $300 for a set of six 1963 pre-decimal Navigators—Captain Cook, Matthew Flinders, Abel Tasman and so on. Then, late afternoon, he took a cab to the airport. He logged on to Telegram as he waited for his flight to Adelaide. No news about Anita.
Next, he looked at flats to rent. At the moment he was stuck in a run-down two-storey boarding house in North Adelaide with a bunch of overseas students. It was cheap, and the landlord, Mr Saggio, was okay, but Garrett wanted a place of his own. Maybe with the fee from Melodie…? Unless she did what she usually did, paid him peanuts and told him the rest was interest on the money he still owed her.
Funny how that amount never decreased. He needed a big score of his own.