It was eight o’clock on Thursday morning before Niekirk got back to his motel. He crawled into bed, exhausted from the bank job and the long hours staking out the U-Store building.
He slept long into the day, then showered in scalding water, needles of heat easing the strain in his neck and shoulders. He dressed, caught a tram into the city, walked the arcades. ‘The Asahi Collection, on show from Monday 9’ said the discreet card in the window of the Soreki 5 department store. Niekirk mapped the area in his mind, then sat in a coffee shop opposite, watching the security men change shifts. Groundwork. He would spend another day doing this, then fly back to Sydney, wait for word from De Lisle.
Late in the afternoon he returned to his motel. He was turning the key and pushing the door open when a man came through the door behind him, crowding his back. Another was already in the room, smiling humourlessly at him from the edge of the bed. If Niekirk hadn’t been exhausted he might not have been bushwacked. They wore suits and he knew that was bad news.
He turned to the suit behind him, half inclined to fight his way free, but stopped when he saw the gun, a police issue .38 revolver, stopped when he heard the giggle, high and mad.
‘I wouldn’t if I were you.’
The guy leaned back against the door, a gun-happy light in his eyes, tongue tip sliding once over his upper lip. ‘Don’t make me,’ he said, giggling again, jerking his head in a nervy spasm, tossing hair away from his eyes. It was a ragged fringe of hair, cut haphazardly by someone once a month—wife or girlfriend, but maybe even mother for all Niekirk knew—over an eager killer’s face.
So Niekirk turned to the suit on the bed, who said immediately, smiling all the while: ‘A few matters to discuss, Sergeant Niekirk.’
So they had his name. Niekirk forgot about offering his fake ID. He reassessed the smile of the man on the bed. It was a reflexive, all-purpose smile, the kind used to express rage, pain, pleasure, hope, bonhomie to the media, ingratiation to the men upstairs who outranked him, and often nothing at all. The other guy had the .38 but this was the one Niekirk had to watch.
‘What matters?’
The smile. ‘This and that. Missing items.’
The voice was deep-chested, a sonorous baritone that liked to listen to itself. Niekirk said, ‘I’m entitled to a phone call.’
The senior man got to his feet. He was tall, a little stiff. He made a flowery gesture at the bedside telephone with one long, well-shaped hand. ‘Be my guest.’
Niekirk had memorised the number he was to call if the local boys in blue nabbed him. He stood rather than sat, and faced the room, the telephone cord clumsily draped across his chest. He waited for the dial tone and punched in the number. At once he heard the ringing tone on the line and a soft burr in the room. Smiling one of his smiles, the elegant senior man fished a small black fold-up phone from his pocket.
Niekirk replaced the handset. ‘You’re our green-light cop.’
The austere face kept smiling. ‘I suppose I must be.’
‘Got a name?’
The smile faded a little, deciding. ‘Springett.’
‘You’d have rank,’ Niekirk observed.
The smile came back. ‘Inspector.’
‘Who’s the cowboy on the door?’
‘Lillecrapp.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘It is a mouthful. Sit down. The bed.’
Niekirk complied. Springett remained standing, every hair in place, a neat, perfect knot in the bright, chaotically patterned tie at his throat. The suit itself was sombre, the shirt crisply white.
Niekirk said, ‘What missing items?’
‘Cast your mind back to your first hit, that bank job in February.’
‘What about it?’
‘You’ll recall there was a small gold butterfly encrusted with diamonds?’
‘Think I’m a philistine? I know what it was, a Tiffany.’
‘A Tiffany, exactly. Well, it’s turned up again.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I got word yesterday afternoon that a small-time character here in Melbourne is trying to fence it.’
Niekirk raced through the possibilities. He knew that Riggs and Mansell hadn’t pocketed anything from the safety-deposit boxes, for he’d packed everything himself. They couldn’t have dropped it in the alley behind the building. There couldn’t have been two Tiffanies. De Lisle wasn’t stupid enough to offload it to a small-time fence. ‘The courier,’ he said.
‘Now I wonder how come I knew you were going to say that?’ Springett said.
‘I handled the transfer. My men didn’t take the Tiffany. I didn’t take the Tiffany.’
Springett was watching him. Behind the smile he was guarded, sceptical. ‘You sound very sure of yourself.’
‘Fuck I’m sure. I’d check out the courier.’
Springett said nothing for a while, as if weighing up possibilities. ‘I take it that you know a man called De Lisle?’
Niekirk grinned. ‘Now we come down to the nitty-gritty. Yes, I know him.’
‘I thought so. De Lisle’s setup works in theory, separating your side of things from mine, separating the courier from both of us, like a circuit-breaker arrangement in case one of us takes a fall. But what happens when one of us starts acting solo, know what I mean?’
Niekirk watched him carefully. ‘You don’t like it that the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing. Nor do I. I especially don’t like it that you knew my name but I didn’t know yours. Did De Lisle give it to you?’
‘I insisted on knowing. I had to be ready to cover up if anything happened, like your name appearing on an arrest report.’
‘Fucking lovely. An imbalance of power between us right from the start. So, if I pull the jobs for him, what do you do?’
Reluctantly, Springett said: ‘I put the jobs together—identify the target, supply photos, floor plans, maps of the alarm system.’
Niekirk looked at him cannily. ‘For a fee?’
‘Now that’s the nitty-gritty,’ Springett said. ‘I get a cut of the action. Exactly a third.’
‘Same here. It’s my blokes who get a set fee.’
‘But have you been paid your third yet?’
‘A retainer.’
Springett nodded. ‘Sounds familiar.’
‘The rest when the heat’s off and De Lisle’s moved the stuff.’
‘Trusting pair, aren’t we? A retainer to keep us sweet. Not many men would put up with that.’
‘Fucking spit it out, Springett. He’s got you over a barrel, same as he’s got me. If we don’t play ball he puts us away. If we do his dirty work, we stay out of jail and pocket a few hundred thou. Am I right or am I right?’
Both men relaxed, feeling a common ground between them. Lillecrapp continued to loll against the door, bored, too absorbed in cracking his knuckles to feel envy or interest in what they were saying.
Niekirk said suddenly: ‘What’s De Lisle got on you?’
Springett’s face shut down. ‘Now you’re stepping over the line.’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘It’s no longer a factor.’
‘Sure.’
‘It’s strictly business now.’
‘Sure. So you’ve told him the Tiffany’s shown up?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Meaning no. Going to tell him?’
‘What’s your feeling?’
‘Don’t. If there’s been a fuck up, a rip off from our end of the operation, I say we deal with it ourselves. We don’t want him pissed off. Or there’s another possibility: he’s moved all the stuff and is conveniently not paying us what he owes us.’
‘Using small-time fences? Unlikely,’ Springett said. ‘Plus he said he’d wait a few months.’
‘De Lisle hasn’t said anything about the Tiffany not showing up in the original haul?’
‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ Springett said. ‘He didn’t know what was going to be in those safety-deposit boxes in the first place, so why would he be worried if it didn’t show up in the stuff the courier delivered? I didn’t know about the Tiffany myself until the owner and the insurance company provided my people with photos and a description. Either it was ripped off by the courier before Di Lisle took delivery, or De Lisle’s sold it already to someone who’s trying to sell it again. I like the first scenario, myself, and I say we deal with it ourselves. I’m not ready for De Lisle to get an attack of the nerves and shut us down. I can’t afford it.’
‘The mortgage,’ Niekirk said. ‘School fees.’
‘Exactly.’ Springett rubbed his jaw. ‘So I say we lean on the courier.’
‘You’ve convinced me.’
They were silent for a moment. Springett said: ‘I watched you watching him.’
Niekirk snorted. ‘And the rest, arsehole. You knew what the job was, and when, so you watched me and my blokes pull it and then you followed me, right? So much for De Lisle’s fail-safe method.’
Springett shrugged. ‘If the stolen Tiffany hadn’t shown up I wouldn’t have had to shadow you last night. You were watching the courier, don’t forget.’
‘So we’re all suspicious of one another. So what?’
Springett stretched tiredly. ‘Keep your shirt on. I’d’ve watched him in your shoes. What did you make of him?’
‘He probably works for an airline.’
Springett began to nod his narrow, well-tended head. ‘Travel all over the country, no questions asked.’
‘There’s another job going down in a couple of weeks’ time,’ Niekirk said.
‘The Asahi Collection. What of it?’
‘We grab the courier before he delivers to De Lisle. Put the hard word on him, see what he admits to.’ Niekirk paused, looking hard at Springett. ‘How did the Tiffany turn up, anyway?’
In reply, Springett took out a photograph. ‘This is from the files. This guy and another guy we know nothing about recently had a meeting with a local fence.’
‘Frank Jardine,’ Niekirk said at once.
Springett let some surprise show through the smiles. ‘You know him?’
‘He was never active and we never had anything on him in Sydney,’ Niekirk said, ‘but the whisper was he blueprinted the odd payroll snatch or townhouse burglary.’ He looked up. ‘He’s in Melbourne now?’
‘Turned up six months ago. Not a well man, from all accounts.’
‘But still working.’
‘A few weeks ago he handled some paintings stolen from a house in Sydney. The insurance company paid to get them back.’
Niekirk snorted. ‘Always do, piss-weak cunts. If they’d let us do our job…’
‘Same thing’s likely to happen with the Tiffany.’
‘So, lean on Jardine, find out who gave him the Tiffany. Save a lot of running around.’
Springett glanced away at a point on the wall. ‘Can’t do that. The Tiffany’s only just shown up, and I’d rather sniff around than risk scaring these people off.’
‘No pictures of this other guy?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You’re letting the deal go through?’
‘Yes.’
‘No questions asked.’
‘That’s right. We can’t risk an official investigation. We don’t want the Tiffany being traced back to its source, because that could turn up your name, my name, De Lisle’s name. De Lisle would shop us to save his neck, count on it. I don’t fancy ending up in Pentridge. I put too many hard cases in there who’d love to have a crack at me. We need to let the Tiffany fall out of sight again but meanwhile ascertain how and why it showed up, and make sure we fill the hole in De Lisle’s operation, if there is one. That way, if there ever is an investigation it will come to a dead end.’
Niekirk grinned. ‘If you were to delete one or two of these characters, you’d have your dead end, no problem.’
‘Worth keeping in mind,’ Springett agreed.