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  ‘Did he leave any message for me?’

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘His driver, name’s Jacobi.’

  The receptionist tapped a couple of keys on his computer.

  ‘No, nothing here.’

  Chance went back outside, stood by the car and rolled his first cigarette of the day. The mid-morning sky was clear, the chill slowly being replaced by the sun’s warmth. With nothing to do, Chance figured he might as well wait for Gao to make an appearance.

  He was on his third smoke when he saw the Filipino’s white-haired associate, Tavener, walk toward him. Tavener was dressed in suit pants and a blue business shirt. He had a high forehead, dark eyes set deep in his craggy face. His skin, like his general demeanour, had a battered, weather-beaten look.

  ‘Nice day,’ said Tavener. He spoke in an easy American drawl.

  Chance glanced at his cigarette, unsure whether he was supposed to be smoking in front of the people he was driving.

  Tavener picked up his unease. ‘Relax, don’t make no difference either way to me whether you smoke.’

  Chance took the pouch of tobacco from his pocket, offered it to the American.

  ‘Gave them up, five years, six months, eight days ago, but who’s counting.’ Tavener smiled. ‘What are you doing here? No one asked you to swing by this morning.’

  ‘I thought you might want me on hand to drive.’

  ‘Conscientious. I like that.’ Tavener nodded slowly to himself. ‘How long you been driving for Curry?’

  Chance was supposed to be ingratiating himself with Gao and his people, knew this was a good opportunity, but suddenly felt suspicious of Tavener, where his questions were headed.

  ‘A while.’

  ‘Before that?’

  ‘Various jobs, drove trucks in the army.’

  ‘Well, that explains the work ethic. Ain’t nothing like the military to instil a sense of conscientiousness in a man. Where’d you serve?’

  ‘East Timor, then Afghanistan.’

  ‘Afghanistan? Meet any of our boys over there?’

  ‘A few.’ The truth, he’d avoided American servicemen wherever he could. Word was they attracted enemy activity like flies on shit.

  ‘Curry’s a lucky man to have a good driver like you.’

  ‘What about yourself, been working for Mister Gao long?’ Chance dropped his cigarette butt on the footpath, stepped on it, met Tavener’s gaze, aware he was crossing a line.

  ‘Not so long.’

  ‘What exactly is it you do for him?’

  ‘This and that, you know how it is.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Smart fella like yourself, reckon so.’ Tavener stifled a yawn, bored with the conversation. ‘You stick with what you do well and I’ll do the same.’

  Tavener made to go, stopped, turned.

  ‘By the way, you can go, Mister Gao doesn’t need you this morning.’

  ‘I can wait. See if he changes his mind?’

  ‘No, run along, go practice your golf swing or whatever. We’ll ring when we need you.’

  Chance drove to his hotel. He changed into casual clothes, swapped the Volvo for his red Corolla, returned to Gao’s hotel, parked on the opposite side of the street to the half circle driveway, sat in the car, waited.

  He couldn’t explain what he was doing, just a gut feeling something wasn’t right. He was no clearer two hours later, as he tailed a white rental car containing Tavener and the Filipino bodyguard, Nelson, along the Gold Coast Highway to Coolangatta.

  The last Queensland town before the New South Wales border, Coolangatta had a quieter feel. There were fewer people on the street, the buildings were older and there was less high-rise development.

  The hire car slid into a gap alongside a strip of restaurants. Tavener got out, greeted two men sitting in the outside section of one of the restaurants. Chance looked for a place to stop, couldn’t find one, had to go around the block twice before a space appeared half a dozen cars up from where the hire car sat. By the time he’d parked, Tavener was sitting with the two men, deep in conversation. Chance tried to get a better look at the American’s lunch companions. Two men with bad suits and bad haircuts. Cops or ex-cops, Chance could pick them a mile away.

  Perhaps Tavener had a little side business he needed to conduct. Or maybe he’d just stepped out for lunch with old friends. Except no one around the table looked friendly. And why had Tavener gone to all the trouble of hiring a car when he could have asked Chance to drive him?

  The nagging feeling in Chance’s gut went up a notch as the three men stood without ordering anything. Tavener got back into his hire car, the two men into another vehicle parked close by. Chance followed them back to Surfers, watched as they turned into the car park of an aging motel, the cream stucco chipped and faded, garden overgrown.

  Chance hastily changed lanes, narrowly avoided colliding with another car, parked on the roadside a hundred metres or so up from the motel. He sat there, watched the entrance in the rearview mirror.

  The vehicle containing Tavener’s unknown lunch companions was the first to leave, followed five minutes later by the white hire car. Chance fingered the phone on the seat next to him, thought about ringing Dormer or Curry, dismissed the idea.

  What they didn’t know might help him.

  EIGHT

  Tavener said nothing to Chance on the drive to the side game, and apart from a brief greeting and instructions to bring Amber around midnight, Gao looked straight through him.

  Kerrigan answered the door at Curry’s house, the usual sullen bulldog look on his face. He grunted, escorted Chance to the back room.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, and left.

  As Kerrigan shut the door behind him, Chance examined the pictures on the wall. Curry posing next a large marlin, hamming it up with a group of Japanese Sumo wrestlers, handing a giant cardboard check to a group of gaunt-looking children in pyjamas and their smiling nurse.

  One photograph was different from the others, a colour shot of Curry standing on a beach with a young male. The old man looked uncharacteristically stiff and uncomfortable, a blank expression on his craggy face. His young companion had a wild look in his dark eyes and a mane of long unkempt dark hair.

  Interspersed with the images were framed newspaper clippings, tight newsprint on yellowed paper. Chance read the nearest article, “Waterside war claims another life.” It was an account of the shooting of a dockworker called Les ‘The Ferret’ Newman in a Melbourne pub nicknamed the ‘Blood House.’ Although the place had been packed with drinkers, no one had seen a thing. An anonymous police detective said the slaying was part of an ongoing feud between rival factions of the Ship Painters and Dockers. The article was dated June 1970. A grainy photo of the crime scene accompanied it, beefy cops admiring a pool of blood on the floor.

  Chance had heard of the Painters and Dockers, a trade union active on Melbourne’s waterfront in the sixties and seventies, a front for sly groggers, gunmen, pimps, armed robbers, and standover men. So great had been the spoils from the union’s illegal activities that factions had waged a prolonged and bloody battle for control. When civilians started dying in the crossfire, police launched a campaign to smash the union, sent its members fleeing across Australia.

  ‘The good old, bad old days.’ Curry stood in the doorway, a maroon dressing gown wrapped tightly around his frame, hands deep in its pockets.

  ‘The cops ever find out who killed Newman?’

  ‘That sly little cunt?’ Curry stood next to Chance, squinted at the framed article. ‘Nah, don’t believe they did.’

  He grinned, walked toward the bar. ‘Amber will be ready in a few shakes. Did Mal offer you a beer?’

  ‘No, not the friendliest chap.’

  ‘Just wary of strangers.’ Curry threw a can of beer to Chance, popped one for himself, drank deep. ‘How’s our Filipino mate?’

  ‘I dropped him at the side game earlier this evening.’

  ‘The rate h
e’s losing, we won’t need to rob the bastard.’ Curry belched. ‘Manage to pick up anything else of interest?’

  A slight tremor of panic rippled through Chance at the possibility Curry knew about the morning’s activities. He looked at the old man, detected nothing behind the statement.

  ‘No.’

  Curry nodded slowly.

  ‘I’ve known your boss, Mister Long, for a long time. Had to count every penny when I dealt with him. He still like that?’

  ‘He’d find a way to skin a maggot if there was a margin in it.’

  Curry chuckled and drained his beer.

  ‘Spent much time in Surfers, Peter?’

  ‘Not since I was a boy.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Chance hesitated.

  ‘Don’t give yourself an aneurism, son, just making conversation.’

  ‘It’s changed a lot.’

  ‘Surfers may be having a few problems, but it’ll bounce back, always does. Best city in Australia, despite what those Mexicans down south say. A city built by men of vision, men who were prepared to put their money where their mouths were.’

  Curry ducked behind the bar, emerged with another beer.

  ‘I remember the first time I visited. Wasn’t much older than you are now. There was something about the place. It felt wide open, like anything was possible. No one gave a fuck where you went to school, where you were born, the only thing that talked was money. And the weather, compared to the shitty winters in Melbourne, sunshine all year around. Like the name says, it was a paradise. Still is.’

  Amber entered, stood next to Curry. ‘You finished reminiscing?’ she said as she took the old man’s beer, sipped from the can.

  ‘You ready?’ Her blue eyes regarded Chance from under her blonde fringe. Her manner was clear of any tension from the exchange in the car earlier that morning.

  When Chance nodded, she pecked the old man on the cheek.

  ‘Have her back safely and no funny business,’ said Curry, a broad smile on his face.

  Chance couldn’t tell whether it was a joke or a threat.

  NINE

  Chance tried not to look at Amber, who watched him from the back seat, but instead focused on the music on the car stereo, one of Gao’s CDs, a high-pitched female singer accompanied by a piano.

  ‘Take that crap off will you,’ Amber said. ‘It’s bad enough I have to listen to it when I’m with Freddie.’

  Chance ejected the CD, turned on the radio, found a commercial station playing eighties music.

  ‘That’s not much better. Don’t you have any real music?’

  ‘Define “real music?”’

  ‘Springsteen, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, any kind of blues, jazz.’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  ‘Just turn it off then.’

  As they neared the Villa Costa Brava, Amber told Chance to stop a block from the entrance. They got out of the car and stood on the nature strip. She held onto his shoulder with one hand to steady herself while she changed her sandals for black pumps that made her slightly taller.

  ‘Sorry about the other night,’ she said.

  ‘Pre-game nerves?’

  ‘Something like that. You got those rollies on you?’

  Chance handed over the pack, watched her roll a smoke with surprising dexterity.

  ‘Where did you get those big hands, holding onto a pole where you danced?

  ‘Very fucking funny.’ She leaned forward, accepted a light from him. ‘No, from stroking the egos of insecure men.’ Amber exhaled a stream of smoke into the night air. ‘How the hell do you smoke these things? They taste like shit.’

  ‘Each to their own.’

  She leant against the bonnet of the car, held her cigarette smouldering next to her ear. ‘Curry says you were in the army. Were you one of those super soldiers, a Green Beret or whatever they’re called, same as Dormer?’

  ‘Green Berets are American.’

  ‘Interesting,’ she said, making it sound anything but. ‘But you were in the army?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I drove trucks.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘So that missing little finger, you didn’t get it on some dangerous secret mission?’ She smiled, taking the piss now.

  Chance laughed in spite of himself. ‘No, somewhere much more dangerous.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’ll tell you about it some time. What else do you know about Dormer?’

  ‘Not much. I don’t know him or what his connection is to Dennis. He just sort of appeared one day. Dennis has a lot of business associates. They come and go.’

  ‘What about Sophia? She doesn’t seem like the criminal type. How did she get involved?’

  ‘Dormer brought her in. Apparently she’s got money problems, something to do with her family in Greece.’

  Amber flicked the cigarette butt into a nearby hedge, shivered, her voice no longer playful. ‘Okay, Mister Mystery Man, here’s the drill. You’re going to come in with me tonight. When we get inside, let Gao and his people scope you out, see that you’re just doing a job.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘There’s usually a few spectators. Sit with them and watch until Gao gives you the signal to leave. Got it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Let’s go, it’s bloody freezing out here.’

  All the apartments at Villa Costa Brava were dark except for the windows on the ground floor. Two men stood outside the door. Both were solidly built. They smiled at Amber but looked at Chance with studied belligerence, before ushering them into a large, dimly lit room that smelled of cigarette smoke and sweat.

  Poker was the game of choice, three large, green felt-lined tables, each one occupied by a female dealer and half a dozen or so people hunched over multi-coloured piles of playing chips. There was a smattering of females, including several elderly Asian women, but the punters were mainly male, a combination of men in flashy clothes and others who looked like they’d just walked off building sites and factory floors.

  Two women tended a bar at the far end of the room. A thickset man in a black suit, the de-facto pit boss, constantly swept the room for any sign of trouble.

  Gao beamed, put down his cards and stood when he saw Amber. She walked straight up to him, kissed his cheek. He signalled for another chair. Amber helped herself to a cigarette from a packet at Gao’s side. He lit it with a gold lighter, said something that made her laugh, and returned his attention to the game. A couple of the other players at Gao’s table looked at Amber blackly but said nothing.

  Chance found a seat, watched the other spectators. They were mostly female, girlfriends and wives of men playing, tired looking brunettes and dishwater blondes with too much make-up and tight-fitting clothes. Tavener and Nelson sat in the row in front of Chance. Nelson sat stiffly in the chair, his face straight ahead, the aluminium briefcase Gao had picked up at the bank the previous day on the floor next to him. Tavener made no pretence of following the game, chewed on a matchstick as he read a newspaper. Neither man acknowledged Chance.

  Gao lost solidly for four hours, the pile of chips in front of him getting smaller with each hand. Despite this, he maintained a jovial demeanour. Chance didn’t know a lot about poker but even he could see what a careless player Gao was. He folded when he shouldn’t have, raised when it was clear to everyone else around the table he had nothing. Amber sat beside him the whole time, allowed him to light her cigarettes, laughed in all the right places. Only when Gao was engrossed in the game did her eyes drift, but she never looked at Chance.

  Curry appeared around midnight, swept into the room in a powder blue dinner suit, a red cummerbund and bow tie. He oozed an old school roguish charm, the smile on his face evidence he enjoyed his behaviour as much as the person receiving it, stopped by each table, backslaps and handshakes for the men, a gentle touch on the shoulder and a wink for the women.
When he’d finished, he sat at the bar, sipped a highball and watched.

  Just after two, Gao stood up, signalled his entourage it was time to leave. He shook the hand of the other players at his table, tossed one of his few remaining chips to the dealer. Chance followed the Filipino and the others out of the room.

  TEN

  Chance dozed in the front seat until he was roused by the sound of the text message saying Amber was on her way.

  ‘Don’t take me home yet,’ she said as Chance started the car.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Wherever.’

  Careful not to repeat the mistake of the previous night, he avoided eye contact in the rearview mirror, concentrated on the road.

  He drove aimlessly for thirty minutes.

  ‘Can you pull over somewhere?’

  He swung into the car park of a strip mall, a dozen or so shops, takeaway food, laser hair removal, a vet. She let herself out.

  ‘Roll me a cigarette, would you?’

  Chance rolled two cigarettes, lit both, passed one to her. It started to drizzle.

  They listened to the sound of surf beyond the houses on the other side of the highway.

  ‘Rough night, Jacobi?’

  ‘Not nearly as rough as yours, I imagine.’

  Dark clouds moved across the sky, the drizzle turned to rain. The black cocktail dress clung to her like wet tissue paper, exposed the contours of her body.

  ‘I can look after myself,’ she said, taking shelter under the awning of one of the shops. ‘Besides, you won’t have to play driver for much longer.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Gao’s in town for another few days.’

  ‘Change of plans, he told me tonight. He’s leaving the day after tomorrow, going to stop off in Sydney for a few days before he heads to Melbourne.’

  ‘Christ, you understand what that means?’

  ‘We have to move the job up. Tonight.’

  ‘We’re not ready.’

  ‘Don’t be a bloody idiot, Jacobi.’ Her heart-shaped face contorted in anger. ‘You may have only walked in a couple of days ago, but Curry’s been planning this for nearly a year.’