Five-Ring Circus (27 page)

“All three?”

“No, but the girl must be taken back. Our embassy in Canberra is working on that.”

“How?”

He ignored the question; as he had, for sake of peace and quiet, learned to ignore his wife. “The main problem has to do with the money.”

“Of course the problem is the money!” She had little patience with him. He was an accountant, despite his rank: General Profit-and-Loss. Her partners had been generals, but they had never thought of loss, being generals of the old school. They had been stupid about the outside world, but stupid partners were always more manageable than smart ones. Till General Huang had tried to be smart . . . “Are the Australians going to release it?”

“Who knows what Australians will do? Often, they don't know themselves. But our embassy is working on them.”

“The embassy! Don't you know that diplomatic channels are streams that run uphill?” She was an aphorist, though her wit and wisdom were often borrowed. “We need the money
now
! Tell your army friends in Shanghai the money will be returned double in five years. It's here—leave it here and use it!”

He knew she was probably the smartest woman he had ever met, but greed had made her naïve. “How do we tell that story to the Australians? They are not interested in
our
profits.”

“
You find the right men to talk to—”

“Our embassy are doing that. But whatever understanding is arrived at, it won't be between Canberra and Shanghai. It will be between Canberra and Beijing.”

“Beijing!” The scorn in her voice would have curdled milk, if any had been served with the tea. “What do they know?”

Wang-Te had been born in Shanghai and raised there. His father had worked for a foreign bank and had stood and watched the night Chiang Kai-shek's men had come to the bank and removed all the gold in the vaults. Mr. Wang-Te had stayed on and survived; the Communists had needed his expertise in international banking; those had been the pragmatic days before the mass stupidity of the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Wang's son had been brought up not to question Communism, though not necessarily to believe in it. The Wang-Te family had had their own pragmatism.

“They know nothing. When it was Peking they knew nothing. The same now it is Beijing. When London ruled half the globe, do you think it understood those it ruled? Do you think Washington understands us Chinese or the Arabs or even the Jews? Capitals are the same everywhere. They are just halls of mirrors.”

“Who said that?”

“Why, I did,” he said and looked surprised; an aphorism had crept up on him.

“Things are getting desperate,” she said; and he knew she meant she was getting desperate. “Without the money . . .”

“Fifty-one million dollars,” he said with an accountant's wistfulness, a rare state of mind; then he said in English, “Just lying there in limbo.”

She wasn't mission-educated, but she knew a non-interest paying bank when she heard it. “It's Bund Corporation money—if Huang hadn't stolen it—”

“It was already stolen money,” he said, “It was army money.”

“If we hadn't used it, someone else would have.” She had the simple logic of the thief. “Don't preach morality to me. That money has to stay here in Sydney. Somehow . . .”

“
I'll see what I can do. But no more killings.”

“Not unless necessary,” she said.

IV

Annandale is no more than five or six kilometres from the heart of the city, once a workers' suburb, now on its way to gentrification. It is part of the larger municipality of Leichhardt, whose town hall has seen more battles than the Western Front in World War One. Raymond Brode began his local government career there and the scars still showed.

Like so many inner areas in the early colony, Annandale was a land grant, in this case to a Colonel Johnston. He distinguished himself and temporarily lost the grant, by assembling his troops and marching into Government House and arresting William Bligh, the Governor. Bligh was not the first nor the last to make the mistake of angering the citizens by thinking that tyranny was an acceptable form of administration. He was held in jail, then placed on board a ship and told to get out of town. Some time later Johnston himself was placed aboard ship, under arrest, and sent back to England. He eventually returned to the colony and his land grant was restored. Offering further proof that in those days anything, if you weren't a convict, was forgivable.

Raymond Brode lived in Johnston Street, the extremely wide thoroughfare that is the spine of Annandale. The street still has several of the Gothic Revival houses built in the 1880s and Brode lived in the grandest of them. It was a four-storeyed mansion that, like several of the other survivors, had a steeple on its roof, suggesting the original owner had had churchly ambitions. Under the Brode roof, however, no choirs sang and if the plate was passed around it was for the resident sinner.

The house looked top-heavy, as if at any moment it might topple over on to the modest one-storey houses on either side. It had been built by a wool merchant who thought he was looking ahead but somehow didn't see the Great Depression of the 1890s. It had originally stood in three acres of garden; now a bank of hydrangeas and a square of lawn that wouldn't have fed two sheep were its only complement. Those and a fence of six-foot ornamental spikes. A large mail-box just inside the spiked gate
said
in large letters: “NO JUNK MAIL.”

“You think that's a warning to his Town Hall mates?” said Clements.

Malone had phoned Lisa at her office to find out if Brode had reported for council duty this morning. No, he was still at home, still supposedly unwell.

“Would he be at his offices?” Malone had asked.

“He works from home, Rosalie tells me. He's a wheeler-dealer, he doesn't need offices.”

“You've been too long at Town Hall, you're starting to sound cynical.”

“It's educational, if nothing else. It beats doing the laundry.”

Now he and Clements pushed open the ornamental gate and went up the half a dozen marble steps that led up to the thick security door guarding the ornamental front door. The windows on either side of the door, fronting on to the wide marbled verandah, were heavily barred. A hundred years ago the wool merchant, unprotected, had felt safe even in those depressed times.

The front door was opened; a slim-figured woman stood behind the security door. “Yes?”

Malone introduced himself and Clements, showed his badge. “We'd like a word with Mr. Brode.”

“My husband is not well. He's not seeing anyone this morning.”

“I think he'll see us, Mrs. Brode.”

She continued to stare at them through the wire screen that covered the grille of the door. Malone, staring back at her, had the sudden image that they were two faces on a computer screen. All that was missing was the text below the faces; neither knew anything of the other. But at last Mrs. Brode seemed prepared to take a chance: “Wait there.”

She disappeared and Clements said, “This isn't the first time she's had cops at her front door.”

The two detectives waited patiently. Out on the broad street an ambulance came along, did a U-turn and slowed in front of the Brode house. Then it moved along and pulled up half a dozen houses along.

“Shall I ask ‘em to wait?” said Clements.

Then
Mrs. Brode came back, opened the security door. “My husband will see you. But he's not well, so please don't stay too long.”

They followed her down the long wide hall. She was in her forties, Malone guessed, smaller than she had looked through the security door. But she walked with the squared shoulders and firm step of an army sergeant-major. The sort of wife, Malone thought, a man would find hard to treasure. And at once felt the ghostly crack of Lisa's hand across the back of his head.

“Here they are, Ray,” she said, as if Malone and Clements had no name, no identity.

She stood aside and the two detectives went by her through a doorway into a large room that was apparently Brode's office. As he passed her Malone caught a glimpse of her full on for the first time. Under her dark hair there was a small sharp-featured face full of intelligence; her wide brown eyes had all the shrewdness of a veteran bookmaker. For some reason Malone saw her with Madame Tzu, someone who could hold her own with that formidable lady.

Brode sat behind a desk that looked large enough to be a converted pool table. Behind him three large windows, all barred, looked out on to a garden ablaze with colour. The colour was a contrast to the drabness of the room, the bars a barrier to it. Malone wondered if Brode ever turned to look out at it.

Brode didn't rise, but waved the two detectives to two chairs opposite him. “Forgive me for not getting up—I'm not well . . . Thanks, Gwen.”

“Watch yourself,” said Gwen, and went out, leaving the door open.

Brode smiled weakly. “She's my security guard . . . Well, what can I do for you gentlemen?”

“Do you need a security guard?” Malone bowled a bumper first ball, right at the head.

Brode frowned. He didn't look in the least unwell, but he was wary. Not of viruses but of questions. “Why would I need someone like that? I was joking—”

“Mr. Brode,” said Malone, bowling a little closer to the wicket this time, “why did you lend your apartment in The Mount to Li Ping and the two young engineers from Olympic Tower?”

Brode looked at his desk as if measuring its largeness. Green folders covered most of it like sods of turf; a computer stood on one corner, its screen blank, secrets hidden. The room had a high ceiling and
one
of the light brown walls held a double row of framed certificates; Brode, it seemed, had been honoured for everything but innocence. The furniture was dark and heavy and Malone wondered if it had been left here by the original owner. The chairs in which he and Clements sat could have accommodated a Sumo wrestler.

“They told me they were scared,” Brode said at last.

“Of whom?”

Lisa always insisted on the difference between
who
and
whom
and he had fallen into the habit; or been dragooned into it. It made him sometimes sound a little prim, but there is not much difference between primness and an edge to the voice.

Brode gestured; he had big hands that moved like heavy birds. “I don't know. Li Ping's brother was shot—”

“You knew she had a brother out here? Who told you that—General Huang?”

“General Huang?” Brode made a good pretence of looking puzzled.

“Come on, Mr. Brode. Mr. Shan.”

Brode all at once began to look unwell; he leaned forward as if he had a stomach cramp. “How much do you know?”

“Enough.”

“What sort of answer is that?”

“I'm afraid it's all you're going to get.”

“Your wife works with me sometimes. Has she been telling you things?”

“Don't rile him with a question like that, Mr. Brode,” said Clements as if he were the essence of patient behaviour. “It's the Irish in him. We're gunna stay here till we get the answers we want, whether you're well or unwell. Do you have a gun?”

Brode sat back as if a gun had been presented at him. “A what? You're joking! Jesus, if it was known a city councillor had a gun . . . During the gun amnesty, after the Port Arthur massacre, I gave speeches about it, about handing in all weapons—”

“
So you did and we were glad to hear of it,” said Malone, who couldn't remember reading or hearing any word about the speeches. But at that time there had been a barrage of rhetoric and Brode wouldn't have been the only one unheard. “Did you know about the money that was deposited in the accounts of General Huang's son and daughter?”

The random questions, coming at him from all angles, or anyway two angles, didn't appear to faze Brode; but then he had been a councillor, municipal and city, for twenty years. Life on Leichhardt council had been like spending Monday night in a shooting gallery.

He took his time, then said, “Yes, I knew.”

“Who told you? General Huang?”

“Do we have to keep referring to him like that?”

“You don't like being linked with the Chinese army? Righto, if you'd prefer Mr. Shan—” Remembering Greg Random's instruction. “You'd prefer to keep the general's name out of the media. Why?”

“I think it's better that way.” But didn't say why he thought so.

“Because he was a sacked general? Did you know he was army when he first came to you?”

“Who said he came to me?”

“We understand you were the one who got the Olympic Tower project through council,” said Clements. “Were you to have had dinner with Mr. Shan and the others the night they were shot?”

Malone held on to his head, didn't turn it at this unexpected question. Where had Russ got that one from?

“You see, Mr. Brode, we've learned the booking for that particular booth in which they were killed was for five people. Les Chung was the fourth, but he was talking to Inspector Malone at the moment the gunman walked in and let fly. Were you the fifth booking?”

“No.” No hesitation.

“Do you know who it might of been? Madame Tzu? Jack Aldwych?”

“I have no idea. I never met any of them in restaurants after—” He had slipped and he knew it.

“
After what?” said Malone, taking up the bowling again. “After you and the developers had made the usual arrangements?”

“What arrangements are those?”

Malone refrained from rubbing his thumb and forefinger together; but the itch was there. “We know, Mr. Brode, that money changed hands.”

“Would you care to make that charge in public?” It sounded almost a
pro forma
answer: he had been accused many times and he knew the counter.