She laughed, a short, uncomfortable bark, but what Bax had said was calculated to stir her blood and he saw her go tense, then settle back and breathe deeply. After a moment she lifted her rump and there was the unmistakeable scrape of cotton on her skin and the soft snap of elastic. Neither of them said anything until a few kilometres had passed and Bax had the taste of her flooding in his mouth. She trembled more than once. He felt her fingers on his neck, tangled in his hair. The car was scarcely moving. ‘How did you know I’d go for that?’ she said, pulling him upright.
‘I just knew.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ she said. ‘It’s probably a common fantasy.’
‘No way. It’s you and me, Stella. Everything starts with us.’
They no longer met at his place, he couldn’t chance the compound again, and she said motels were tacky, so she’d taken out a short lease on a flat in South Yarra. They could scarcely stand up when they got out of the car, and in the flat they were at each other before they reached the bed.
When they were resting Stella said, ‘Let’s see what this has done for your face.’ She turned his chin right and left. She frowned. ‘Slightly more relaxed, maybe.’ She touched her fingers under each eye. ‘A bit less strained? Maybe.’
Bax felt bands loosening inside him. It only happened when he was with her. He began to feel slowed down, looser, valued, inclined to lovers’ talk. He murmured some things against her neck. She flexed sleepily. The slow, stretching quality of her movements reminded Bax of a cat. She had rounded arms, swollen lips and legs the colour of honey, and it all paced like a restless creature in his groin.
‘So what’s Victor up to?’
‘Not now.’
‘Now, Stella.’
She groaned and sat up. ‘He’s still arguing with us. Nothing gets resolved. He wants to go one way, we want to go another. Same old story.’
Bax turned his lean trunk around. He stroked her stomach absently, then something about the conjunction of his well-shaped hand and her gleaming flank caught his attention. They both watched the hand, saw it flex, the fingerbones articulating with style and intent. ‘Can he carry it out, though, that’s the question.’
Stella arrested his hand with hers. ‘You know the old man was grooming him? I mean, not just sending him to the States but paving the way so he could step into his shoes?’
‘How does Leo feel about that?’
‘That’s the whole point. Leo gets some cash and a couple of flats from the estate, but Victor gets all the rest, giving him all the power. As for me, I’m just a woman, Leo’s wife, old Karl didn’t give two hoots about me. Called me a hooker once.’
Bax rolled away and hoisted his rump up the bed until he was looking down at her. ‘You think Leo might fold, give in to Victor?’
‘I’m sure of it. He’s always half looked up to him, half resented him.’
‘Well, you’ll just have to keep working on him.’
‘I’ve been working on him ever since we got married. Before we got married. He would’ve caved in to his father if I hadn’t kept pushing him. Often it works, but he also tends to go with the flow. I can’t be with him twenty-four hours a day. Victor thinks big, and Leo’s listening to some of it’
Bax turned the pillow onto its narrow edge, rested it against the wall, sank his back into it. ‘How big is this big talk?’
Stella curled two fingers together. ‘He claims he’s like that with the casino people in Las Vegas. Says they’ve paid off bent officials here in Australia, meaning if our family invests with them, we’ll make a killing from legalised gambling.’
Bax turned her chin toward him. He didn’t blink, didn’t give anything away, just stared at one cat’s eye and then the other. ‘How do you feel about that?’
The slightest flinch, the slightest hesitation, and he would have jacked the whole thing in. But her hand clasped his wrist, then slipped around his neck. ‘It’s all hot air.’ She kissed him. ‘If it isn’t, then he’s subjecting our assets to an unacceptable degree of risk.’ She kissed him again and pushed his head down. He found the hollow inside her thigh joint, the area he’d told her he liked most. It was fairly stubbly today. He burrowed, lapping at her.
Later, when they were rocking together, she stopped him sharply, clamping the hair above his ears in her fists. ‘Think, Nick. Think.’
Eighteen
On Thursday morning Lloyd Phelps flew into Sydney with a pocketful of the diamonds that netted the Outfit a hundred thousand dollars four times a year. The diamonds were rough-cut pink Argyle diamonds from a mine in the Kimberley area of Western Australia. The mine’s owners paid Phelps good money to secure customers in Sydney four times a year. They didn’t know that the Outfit paid Phelps good money to steal a pocketful of pink diamonds from them four times a year.
The Outfit required Phelps to leave the stolen diamonds in an airport locker, complete his legitimate company business in the city and fly back to the Kimberley. Phelps didn’t know what happened to the diamonds after he’d left them at the airport but he guessed that a buyer flew in from Hong Kong or Amsterdam, collected them and flew out again, leaving payment behind. Phelps often thought about that payment-cash, maybe? US dollars? Yen? Bearer bonds? Phelps himself collected a cash payment left for him at the airport-ten thousand smackers, four times a year. By the time he’d sweetened a security officer and a computer records clerk at the mine, however, only six of the ten thousand was left. He sometimes thought about hanging on to the diamonds, intercepting the buyer, then disappearing with diamonds and payment. He didn’t think about it for long, though. He didn’t have that kind of nerve. The Outfit would find him. Somewhere, some day, they’d find him, and the result would be painful and permanent.
In the three years that he’d been making the diamond run, Phelps had evolved a body language to suit the role. He wore dark glasses. He looked somehow unapproachable. In the Kimberley, where grown men wore shorts and long socks to the office, Phelps wore long trousers and a tie. On the flight to Darwin and then on to Sydney, people would glance at the unsmiling man with the briefcase manacled to his wrist and wonder about him. He never acknowledged them. In public places he tended to hang back, checking faces, watching for danger without appearing to do so. He held himself like a spring ready to uncoil, a man fine-tuned to danger. He imagined movie cameras tracking his movements, isolating him, cinema audiences grabbing at their armrests.
‘That’s him,’ Jardine said.
Wyatt saw a short, edgy, self-conscious individual, dressed in trousers and a shirt ten years out of date, collect a suitcase from the Ansett carousel. ‘Bundle of nerves,’ he said.
Jardine nodded. ‘If he had to go through customs they’d be onto him like a shot.’
Jardine and Wyatt were waiting with an empty trolley at the next carousel. They waited while Phelps crossed to the exit doors, then abandoned the trolley and followed fifty metres behind him. Outside the building, the air smelt of aviation fuel and idling taxis. Someone yelled, ‘Share a cab to the city?’ Air erupted from the brakes of a waiting bus, stale and metallic.
Phelps turned around and went back into the terminal. The two men followed. Phelps looked about nervously, sometimes stopping dead, turning around accusingly, going on again. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Wyatt said.
Phelps finally stopped at a bank of lockers. They saw him take a small parcel from the briefcase, place it in one of the lockers, and lock the door. Then he walked away in great agitation.
His next stop was a men’s on the first floor. A short time later, Wyatt went in, just as Phelps was coming out of a cubicle. Wyatt stood at the urinal. He waited until Phelps had gone out again then went into the cubicle Phelps had used. The air was foul with Phelps’s fear. Wyatt found the locker key taped under the cistern lid. He pocketed it and went out. Phelps was going through the exit door at the far end of the terminal, Jardine a few metres behind him.