Five-Ring Circus (6 page)

“One would,” said Malone. “Wouldn't you, Russ?”

“Only up to a point,” said Clements. “But then, I take it, you did some due diligence.”

“Ye-es.” It was like a soft hiss. “Things weren't quite what I was told.”

“
We've been to see Jack Aldwych,” said Malone. “He said his son had done due diligence on Bund. Did he come up with what you discovered?”

Chung nodded.

Malone and Clements looked at each other. “Jack wasn't telling us the truth.”

“It wouldn't be the first time,” said Malone.

“Maybe he's become a Taoist,” said Chung. “They believe all truth is relative.”

“Do you?” Malone knew nothing of Taoism.

“If it suits me.”

“Let's not be relative now, Les. What did you find out about Bund that they hadn't told you? Who was Mr. Shan? Some Shanghai buccaneer?”

“Oh yes, I guess he was that, all right.” Now that he had started to open up, Chung seemed more relaxed. “But he was also a senior government official in the Central China Department of Trade. So he said.”

“So he said?”

“It took us some time to check. Communist government offices don't exactly open up to you when you ask questions.”

“The Great Wall of China approach?”

“Jack has been talking to you? Yes. Mr. Shan had been only a consultant to the department, but he'd left them more than a year ago.”

Malone switched tack: “What about Madame Tzu?”

Chung raised an eyebrow. “Jack's told you about her?”

“Just in passing. You tell us something about her.”

“Madame Tzu—she likes to be called Madame—is a throwback. I'm not sure how old she is—she looks about forty, but I think she might have been at the court of the Last Empress. She acts like that at times. She's not a government official, but she seems to know everyone in government. She lives in Hong Kong, but she comes and goes to Canton, Shanghai, Beijing. She's a remarkable woman.”

“
And you don't like her?” said Clements.

“Oh, I like her. I just don't trust her.”

“How long did it take you to find that out?” said Malone. “That you don't trust her?”

“Some time, a few months.”

“Is she in Sydney now?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Not that you know of?” said Clements. “She's your partner and she doesn't let you know when she's in town?”

Chung spread his hands, almost a Gallic gesture. “That's Madame Tzu. She might have come to Sydney with Shan—he arrived yesterday morning—but he didn't mention her.”

“Check with Immigration,” Malone said to Gail. Then to Chung: “Are you Chinese inscrutable with each other?”

“Are we?” Chung smiled at Gail.

“My father tells me I'm an open book,” she said. “That's the Australian side of me. I'll check on Madame Tzu, sir, find out if she is in town. Where does she usually stay, Mr. Chung?”

“The Bund Corporation has an apartment in the Vanderbilt.”

The three detectives looked at each other: no inscrutability there. “Do the comrades back home know about this luxury?”

“The comrades back home don't know the half of it about the Bund Corporation,” said Chung.

Out in the main room a phone rang. Sheryl Dallen turned away from her wall chart and picked it up. She listened, then hung up and came to Malone's doorway. “Excuse me, sir. That was Bondi. There's been another homicide.”

“Do they want us?” asked Malone.

“It's another Chinese. They thought we might be interested.”

Malone looked at Chung. “Do you know anyone at Bondi, Les?”

Chung shook his head. “I never go near Bondi, Inspector, even though I live only a mile or two
from
it.”

“A bit below your idea of class?” said Clements.

Chung smiled. “No, I'm afraid of sun cancers. Leave me out of this homicide. As you must occasionally say, I haven't a clue.”

II

Bondi has one of the most magnificent of Sydney's twenty-two surf beaches. It is a long shallow curve of white sand between two headlands; it has two life-saving clubs. The southern end is the topless end, where male eyeballs are as susceptible to melanomas as the bosoms they are staring at; the northern end is populated mainly by youngsters waiting to grow up and migrate to the southern end. Behind the beach is a wide esplanade, neglected for so long that it grew to look like a wasteland staked with parking meters; recently the local council had raised enough energy and money to turn it into a broad attractive plaza. In the middle was a pavilion that had started out to be a Greek temple for the surf gods and goddesses on the sands in front of it; somehow, along the way, the philosophy and plot had been lost and for years it had been no more than a columned eyesore. Behind the esplanade was a breakwater of surf shops, cafés and restaurants, a hotel that looked as if it had drifted ashore from Miami and, at the southern end, a drinkers' hotel that had been a Saturday night blood bin till the police had at last asserted their authority. Behind the shops and hotels a shallow valley sloped upwards, its streets lined with modest houses and cheap blocks of flats. Bondi had once been a suburb that had its pride, but over the years the pride had been stained and badly dented. Drugs had been freely available; New Year's Eve celebrations had turned into riots; women had been afraid to walk alone down certain streets. Now, however, with Sydney being told that it had to be an exemplary city by the time of the Olympics, like a child being dressed up for the visit of some rich relatives, Bondi had a certain shine to it, even if it was only veneer.

“Homicide sent two
women?”
The detective sergeant from the Bondi station was stocky, overweight and had the weary air of a chauvinist who knew the war between the sexes was lost.

“You have a problem with that?” Gail Lee looked at Sheryl Dallen; they nodded at each other,
they
were on familiar turf. “We're here just to do the housekeeping.”

Sergeant Napolani's smile was unexpectedly friendly. “Girls, you couldn't be more welcome. There's a pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen . . . Only kidding. Actually, the dead guy kept a very neat pad. Almost too neat. Or else someone's been through the place and tidied it up.”

Zhang Yong had lived in a one-bedroom flat in a drab block halfway up the southern hill from the valley. His body had been taken away, but Crime Scene tapes hung across the front door like an auctioneer's invitation. The Physical Evidence team were still at work, but showing no excitement, as if they had already decided that whatever they unearthed here was not going to be of much value. The flat was typical rent-stuff: cheap carpet, cheap furniture, a faded print of a bush scene on one wall, the bare essentials in the kitchen. Zhang's body, fully clothed, had been found huddled in the shower-stall, the shower drenching him like a last benediction.

“The water seeped down into the flat below,” said Napolani. “A coupla Maoris. They came up to complain, so they said—they look more like they would of beat the shit outa him. When he didn't answer the door, they kicked it in—they tell us they play rugby for Easts. They found him and, like good citizens, they phoned us.”

“What have you found?” asked Sheryl.

“Nothing. The place is so bloody neat, you wonder if he actually lived here. There's some clothes in the wardrobe and stuff in the bathroom cupboard, but nothing to identify him. It was the Maoris who gave us his name, told us he was a student.”

“No passport, no bank book, credit card?” said Gail.

“Nothing. The Maoris think he was at UTS, we're gunna check.”

“What killed him?”

“A bullet in the left temporal, another one practically dead centre in the heart. Our guess is they used a silencer—nobody heard any shots. He'd been dead eight to ten hours was the pathologist's guess—that would of been about midnight last night. They'll tell us more when they do the autopsy Monday.”

Gail
Lee looked around the small bedroom: a featureless box in which an almost anonymous man had lived and died. The bed had not been slept in, so Zhang had either been up at midnight expecting visitors or had come home with them. “I noticed there are no books or newspapers out in the living room.”

“If there were, they'd all been taken away,” said Napolani.

“What about the TV set?” asked Sheryl. “There's a VCR on top of it.”

“No videos.”

“So he was sitting up till almost midnight, looking at TV, or he'd come home with the guys who killed him?”

“Looks like it,” said Napolani.

“What made you think this homicide has anything to do with the ones last night in Chinatown?”

Napolani shrugged. He was a cop who had learned his trade the hard way: never behind a desk, always on the beat or, once he had become a detective, out doing the legwork on an investigation. He had worked his way through robbery, assault, drugs and murder. He had developed an instinct: “It was a guess, a wild one. You don't get four Chinese murders in twelve hours . . . Is that why they sent you?”

“No.” Gail gave him a thin smile. “Sheryl just drags me along to read the tea leaves.”

“You win.” Napolani's smile was wider than hers.

“Okay,” said Sheryl, “now we've got the cross-cultural bit out of the way, do you want us to hang around or do you want us out of the way?”

“Before we go,” said Gail, “I think we should talk to the Maoris.”

“They're downstairs. Kip and Keith, friendly as a coupla buffaloes.” Napolani led them out of the flat, ducking under the tapes, and down a narrow flight of stairs where their heels click-clacked on the cheap tiles. “I had a check run on them. They've both got records—assault, battery, that sorta thing. Saturday-night wreckers, probably after they've been playing rugby.”

“You're not a rugby man?” said Sheryl, who occasionally dated footballers. “Not rah-rah?”

“
Golf. A gentleman's game.” He grinned again as he knocked on the door of the flat immediately below that of the murdered man. “Don't mention we know their records.”

The door was opened by a handsome dark-skinned man who filled the doorway. “G'day. What's the problem now?”

“A few more questions, Kip.” Napolani introduced Gail and Sheryl. “They're from Homicide.”

“Women?”

“I'm afraid so,” said Gail. “We'll try to be as genderless as possible.”

Kip had a smile like a truck headlight. “Come in. Me mate handles women better'n I do.”

Sheryl and Gail exchanged looks. “Ain't we the lucky ones?”

Keith, the delicate handler of women, was slightly less dark than his flatmate and only slightly less huge. The five people seemed to push back the walls of the small living room. “Siddown,” said Keith, and cleared a couch of what looked like a month's laundry. “Sat'day's cleaning-up day.”

“When did Mr. Zhang move in upstairs?” asked Gail.

Keith looked at Kip. “I dunno—what? Six months ago?”
Six
sounded like
sex.
“He always kept to himself.”

“He ever have any visitors?”

“Occasionally,” said Kip. “Always Chinese. They were a quiet lot.”

“How do you know he was a student?” asked Sheryl.

“I asked him straight out one day what he was doing here.”

“He didn't tell you to mind your own business?”

Kip and Keith exchanged smiles, as if no one had ever been foolish enough to tell them to mind their own business. “Man, he saw I was just trying to be friendly. We're a friendly lot, us Kiwis. Right, mate?”

“Nobody friendlier,” said Keith; and you'd better believe it or else, said his smile.

“He said he was doing computers at the University of Technology, Sydney. He spelled it right out, like I was dumb or something.”

“
Friendly but dumb, that's us,” said Keith, the truck light gleaming again.

Gail looked at Napolani. “I didn't see a computer in his flat. Surely he'd have one at home to work on?”

“There was none.”

“Oh, he had one, all right,” said Keith. “I saw him carting it up there just after he moved in. What's going on up there? We've had trouble in these flats, but never a fucking murder.”

“What sort of trouble?” said Sheryl.

Both men shrugged, a major tremor of bone and muscle. “You
know,
a party getting outa hand, some guy and his girl having a fight, the usual stuff. But someone being
shot—”
Keith shook his head. He had a flat-top haircut with shaven sides and when he frowned it seemed to start up a vein, like a lizard, in his right temple. “The landlord's gunna be outa his fucking mind when he hears about it.”

“Who is the landlord?”

“We dunno. All we ever see is the agent, he comes knocking on the door, we don't pay the rent.”

“How often don't you pay the rent?” said Sheryl, but smiled.

“We miss occasionally,” said Kip. “But it's never a big deal.”

“What do you do?” said Napolani, although from their record he knew.

“We're dole bludgers. Ain't that what all Maoris are supposed to be? We only come over here to bludge on the Aussie system. You got a better class of welfare here.” For a moment Kip's broad face went a shade darker. Then he grinned. “No, we both got jobs. I work at a service station up on Bondi Road, Keith's a public relations officer at a club up the Cross.”

“A bouncer?”

“Yeah,” said Keith.

“You'd be good at it,” said Napolani.

“Yeah, I got a diploma in bouncing. From UTS.” He was all smile, it would be a pleasure to be bounced by him.