Wyatt - 05 - Port Vila Blues by Garry Disher

to you when they find out. They hate guys like you even worse than they
hate cops. All those hard men, sexually abused by blokes like you when they
were little kids. Theyll cut off your cock and make you eat it.

    The senator gasped. Crystal said, You
cant prove anything.

    Yeah? The Fed leaned down, fumbled
in a briefcase, came up with a videotape. We found this in your ceiling this morning.
You seem to be having more fun than the kid. What is he, Thai? About eight
years old?

    Crystal had let a sob rip from his
throat. Children seduce too. Its not only the adults.

    But theyre still children, the
senator said. He grimaced. People like you, you give Australia a bad name in
Asia.

    There was silence. To fill it,
Crystal found himself saying, I want to make a deal.

    A deal? De Lisle said. You havent
been charged with anything. This is an inquiry, thats all, a fact-finding exercise.

    An hour later, Crystal had been out
on the street, sweating, drained, pale, but a free man. Free until De Lisle got
in touch with him that evening with a proposition.

    Unvarying red tiles and powerlines
were slipping by now as the taxi jockeyed for a clear run along the freeway.
When the airport came into view, Crystal leaned forward and said, International
terminal.

    Oh, International terminal,
whoopy doo, the woman said.

    Crystal gave her the exact fare,
told her to keep the change, and got out. Inside the terminal he reported for
duty, stashed the tartan suitcase in his staffroom locker and helped get the
airbus ready. It was a day like any other.

    So far.

    But knowledge was power and forty
minutes before takeoff Crystal made his way to the airlines supply room. Among
the airsickness bags, spare pillows and blankets, plastic suit covers and
aircrew badges and caps there was a bunch of keys. Hed once counted them:
forty. Suitcase keys, hanging on a brass ring like ranks of tiny flattened people.
The airline had collected the keys over many years. There was always a
passenger whod lost the keys to his luggage. There was always one key that
would fit.

    He waited until he was alone in the
locker room and went to work on the tartan suitcase. The sixteenth key sprang
the lock and he found neatly packed but cheap shirts, underwear and socks.
Disappointed, he began to rummage, and thats when he found the stuff. He
gaped, felt the surface of his skin tingle: brooches, necklaces, earrings,
pendants, rings. Something about the weight and density of the metal, the way
the stones caught the light, told him that De Lisle was no traveller in costume
jewellery.

    * * * *

    Fifteen

    In
the way that he obsessively aligned the edges of knives and forks with the
weave pattern in a tablecloth, or stacked firewood according to size, Wyatt
walked once a day, every day. This walk took him in a loop around the high
streets of Battery Point, then down onto Salamanca Place and past the yacht
basin, and finally up again into the steep slopes of North Hobart. If he ever
varied his route it was to cut down the Kelly Steps instead of through the
park, or circle the moorings clockwise instead of anticlockwise.

    Two weeks since the Double Bay job
and this morning there was blossom on the fruit trees in the Battery Point
gardens. Wyatt paused to stare at a house on the park overlooking the water. A
climbing rose clung to the verandah posts and there was old glass in the
windows, thick and irregular, so that the massive sideboard and silver
candlesticks in the room behind the glass seemed to swim in and out of shape. A
widows walk went right around the house and Wyatt could imagine sitting up
there, watching the big ocean-going yachts tacking up the Derwent. He wondered
if a woman had ever paced the boards of that widows walk a hundred and fifty
years ago, watching for returning sails or waiting for a knock on the door.

    Wyatt decided to go by way of Kelly
Street. He plunged down the Kelly Steps, hearing the clack of a typewriter in
the tiny whalers cottage at the head