The lawyer called Chaffey eased forward in his chair, the heat of effort rising on his broad, soft, clean, unhealthy face. He placed both hands on his desk and push-straightened his legs. Now he towered giddily against the window and, as he buttoned the vast folds of his suit coat together and prepared to show Denise Meickle out of his office, he glanced down upon the plane trees and tram tracks of St Kilda Road, the flashing chrome and foreshortened pedestrians, the park benches and rollerblading kids, trying to muster unfelt confidence into his voice.
‘Leave it with me.’
The Meickle woman was a sorry-looking creature, small, mousy, belligerent. She was in love with a client of Chaffey’s, a hold-up man and killer called Tony Steer, who was being held in the city watchhouse. He was about to be transferred to somewhere more permanent and Denise Meickle wanted Chaffey’s help in springing him from gaol.
‘First,’ she said, reluctant to leave, though she’d been with him for an hour now and gone over everything a dozen times, ‘you’ll have to make sure he’s transferred to the remand centre in Sunshine. Sometimes they’re remanded in Pentridge, but we’ll never spring him from there.’
Chaffey had doubts that Steer could be sprung from the remand centre, let alone Pentridge. ‘Leave it with me,’ he said again.
Meickle had been a prison psychologist attached to the gaol in Ararat when she first befriended Steer. Given the complex nature of a gaol environment, in which prison staff have to offer both welfare and custodial roles, it wasn’t hard for someone like Meickle to blur or confuse these roles. It was especially hard for custodial staff who might find themselves comforting a bereaved prisoner one minute and strip-searching him the next. As a psychologist, Meickle hadn’t had that kind of relationship with Steer, but the intimacy and role-confusion were no less compelling. ‘We’ll get your man out,’ Chaffey said.
She didn’t want to go. She numbered her fingers, so that Chaffey would get it straight. ‘So this is the deal. New Zealand passports for both of us, a boat out of the country, and someone to help me spring Tony. For that we pay you fifty thousand dollars. Find someone good, someone who can drive and keep his nerve. Pay him out of your cut.’ She poked Chaffey’s huge midriff. ‘Don’t rip us off. We’ll find you if you do.’
Chaffey nodded his massive head. He was Tony Steer’s lawyer and minded Steer’s money for him. He had more sense than to rob the man. Steer was bad news, a hard, fit man of flashing confidence and intelligence. Chaffey thought of the legions of women who befriended male prisoners. Lonely women, many of them, fired by good works, God or pity. Some of them married killers, waited for them to get out, and got killed for their pains. Maybe that’s what awaited Denise Meickle.
He ushered her to the door. ‘I’ll get onto it straight away. The passports, the boat, no drama there. Finding a good man will require a bit of thought.’
‘No junkies. No mugs. No-one with form.’
‘Like I said, I’ll get straight onto it.’
‘He goes to trial in two weeks’ time. We haven’t got much time.’
When Meickle was gone, Chaffey ran through a mental checklist of names. None looked promising: dead, in gaol, feeding a habit or too narrow in their fields of expertise.
The phone rang.
‘Chafe? Raymond here. How are you placed today?’
Here was someone he hadn’t thought of. ‘Raymond, old son.’ Chaffey checked his watch. ‘Meet you in thirty?’
‘Usual place. I’ve got some paper for you.’
That could mean anything: bonds, numbered sequences of bills, cheques. ‘See you then,’ Chaffey said, cutting Raymond off before he compromised both of them on the line.
In the outer office he said, ‘Back in an hour.’
‘But you’ve got appointments.’
‘Back in ninety minutes,’ Chaffey said.
He put one foot after the other down the corridor. The lift gulped and clanked, dropping seven storeys with Chaffey braced, legs apart, at the midpoint of the floor, as though he were riding it to the ground. It hit the bottom, recovered, and Chaffey shouldered through the foyer to the street.
The ‘usual place’ was a booth in Bourke Street Mall that dispensed cheap theatre and concert tickets. Cursing, for there were no taxis in sight, Chaffey propelled himself toward the nearest tram stop.
Five minutes later he was strap-hanging in a draughty rattletrap along Swanston Street. It claimed to have the University as its destination, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t reverse direction shortly or veer into Victoria Street. The seats looked minute and insupportable to Chaffey. He didn’t trust them, or the conductor, or the other passengers. The students among them flashed their white teeth and clawed great arcs of gleaming hair away from their eyes as they spoke loudly, sub-literately, to one another. Otherwise there were pensioners, stunned and dazed, and women in suits with flying shoulders, snapping gum in their jaws.
Chaffey stood with his feet apart and tried to brace his solid legs in a counter-rhythm to the tram. His reflection in the glass revealed his bulk, a button nose, red lips, long pale lashes, damp acres of pink skin. It didn’t reveal his vicious glee, for he was dreaming, of Raymond Wyatt saying that he would help Denise Meickle spring Tony Steer out of remand.
Chaffey alighted at Bourke Street, stepping down from the tram in careful stages, his movements as slow and ponderous as he could make them, thereby doing his bit to fuck up the timetable. Traffic braked for him as he heaved toward the footpath.
He found himself face to face with the three bronze statues bolted to the footpath. They were tall, rubbery-looking caricatures of businessmen, their faces a little desperate in the swirling toxins. They were also painfully thin and Chaffey, spotting a swagger of body builders outside a nearby Sports Barn, wrapped his big arm around one of the statues and grinned. The body builders, all violet shellsuits and body hair, stopped chewing and posturing, looking about for the insult.
Chaffey steered a straight course down the mall. He did not have to dodge or weave or break his stride. As he walked his eyes darted left and right, hoping that Raymond was still unknown to the law.
Even so, Chaffey had to admit that the mall was a good place to meet. The centre mile of the city was as useful as a sieve to anyone trying to seal it off. It was made up of lanes and alleys and back streets, all leading away from the centre. Raymond could easily slip away, or hole up inside the centre mile, up in some men’s lavatory along a dim corridor on the second or third floor of a seedy side-street building where the tenants gave singing lessons, altered suits, made dentures.
Chaffey reached the ticket booth. He spent a few minutes circling it, reading the posters, then he stood facing up the mall toward Parliament House, his hands seeking purchase on his soft hips.
Raymond materialised at Chaffey’s shoulder, tall and fluid-looking in a tuxedo, very calm and still, yet clearly prepared to vanish into the shopping crowds if he felt threatened. ‘Chafe, old son.’
Chaffey beamed, his mind ticking over. Raymond was a long streak of quiet menace to look at, a man with a hard, cautious mind. Most thieves that Chaffey dealt with were full of doubt and spite and contradictions, their minds tripping them up every minute of the day. Here was a man who registered, analysed, then acted, all of it manifested in extreme alertness.
He did like to play the tables, though. ‘What’s with the tux?’
Raymond grinned. ‘Just finished an all-night session.’
‘Win?’
‘Got your five grand, plus the paper I was talking about.’
‘Not here. Let’s go.’
They walked up Bourke Street to Chaffey’s club, on the corner of King Street. It was a cloaked and sombre warren of private rooms and alcoves, where lawyers met clients and other lawyers. It was a place where Chaffey’s conversation with Raymond would go unremarked, even if it was overheard.
Raymond stretched his long legs. ‘In the briefcase.’
Chaffey opened it. Traveller’s cheques, crisp and new, and a roll of $100 bills. ‘Twenty cents in the dollar,’ he said.
Raymond shifted in his chair. The leather, old and cracked and friable, creaked under him. ‘I was hoping the five grand plus the paper would cancel the ten I owe you.’
Chaffey closed the briefcase. He gave a short laugh. ‘Fair enough, but I think you owe me in spirit, if nothing else. I can put two jobs your way, one pays fifteen grand, the other a hundred.’
Raymond watched him carefully. ‘Hundred grand? What do I have to do for that?’
‘I’ve got a client prepared to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a collection of paintings.’
‘Where are these paintings?’
‘At present they’re hanging in the University of Technology in West Heidelberg,’ Chaffey said.
For the next ten minutes, he described the job, explaining how lucrative art theft was. ‘This job,’ he concluded, ‘will be a pushover. No alarms, no cameras.’
Raymond stroked his bony jaw. ‘I don’t know. What do I know about art? I’d need a partner, someone who knows that kind of thing.’ He paused. ‘What’s the other job?’
Chaffey told him about Steer and Denise and the remand centre. ‘You get fifteen grand—up front, how’s that for a sweetener? All you have to do it spring Steer, hole up with him and his girlfriend for a couple of days, then deliver them both to a freighter anchored off Lakes Entrance.’
Raymond turned a little sulky then. It spoilt his looks. ‘Spring some guy from remand? Bit downmarket isn’t it?’
Chaffey shrugged. ‘Quick, easy money. All you have to do is drive a car and babysit for a few days.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘You do that,’ Chaffey said.
Raymond stiffened, cocked his head. ‘Sirens. Hear them?’
‘Just so long as they haven’t come for you, old son,’ Chaffey said.