Then he went downstairs and into the office, ignoring the Mesics cuffed to the radiator. Jardine had turned the desk on its side to shield the room from the blast. He had finished drilling and was packing the holes. He didn’t acknowledge Wyatt.
Wyatt opened the front door and stepped outside. Silence was his element so he kept to the lawn, skirting the gravel drive. The house that was now Victor’s and had been the old man’s was cluttered, every flat surface crowded with vases and figurines, the pictures on the walls mostly Sunday market bush-hut scenes. The sofas and chairs were made of pinewood and red- and green-stained leather. Clunky, box-like pine dressers jutted into most of the free space. Every other surface was dazzling white enamel.
He didn’t spend more than ten minutes going through the rooms. He discovered a second watch, a gold lighter, three hundred dollars in cash, things he could carry in his pockets.
Outside again, Wyatt watched and waited in the darkness. He heard traffic in the distance, a car accelerating along a nearby street, random noises in the houses opposite the compound. There was no wind. He seemed to hear his blood flowing. He began to feel better. He liked risk, liked being alone, found the tension addictive.
Back at the first house, Jardine said, ‘Ready to blow.’ They waited in the hall with the Mesics. The nitro blast created noise and smoke but Jardine had contained the effects to the door of the safe. When the smoke cleared Wyatt could see it hanging open on one hinge. There was money stacked inside, untouched by the explosion.
‘All yours,’ Jardine said.
Wyatt made an approximate count of the money. There was over two hundred thousand there, that’s all he was interested in knowing. He began to stack it into a nylon bag, wanting to feel secure but knowing he wouldn’t be until he was well clear of this place. Two hundred thousand dollars was peanuts compared to the millions the Mesic operation would earn for the Outfit, but that didn’t mean the Outfit intended to part with it. He zippered the bag closed and joined Jardine in the hall. ‘We’ll find you,’ one or other of the Mesics began, but Wyatt closed the door on their voices.
Leo had recognised the drunk from the Volvo, only this time it was no act the man was putting on. He didn’t recognise the second man, only his style-economical, a flat expression on the runnelled river-stone face. The men weren’t gentle but they weren’t rough either. They didn’t apologise, raise their voices, speak unnecessarily, say who they were or what they were doing. They were entirely mechanical and disinterested and Leo went along with it. What Bax had said made sense. Tackling them would have been a mistake.
Then the men split up. Leo heard a drill bite into metal and he knew it was the safe. He didn’t say anything, got comfortable on the floor, turned his wrists so that the handcuff bracelets didn’t cut off his circulation. Victor and Stella were doing it too.
Then Victor said, turning his head to look at Stella, ‘See? We’re wide open. They just walked in. No security at all.’
‘Get lost, Victor.’
‘The Mesics are a pushover, that’s what this will look like.’
‘Just shut up.’
Victor’s voice was low and insistent. ‘Think about it. It’s time to get out of this Mickey Mouse business, into something where the people you meet don’t have records, don’t wear greasy overalls, where your money’s secure in some Cayman Islands bank, not sitting around in a safe waiting to be picked up by a couple of hoods, where you’re paying off the bloody police commissioner, not some sleazy plainclothes cop like Bax.’
Leo heard his wife say venemously, ‘You’ll be paid off, Victor. Just shut up.’
‘I don’t want to be paid off. I want to put my money where it’s going to quadruple itself every few months.’
Leo listened. Victor had been saying things like this to him all week when Stella wasn’t around, drawing flow charts, jabbing his finger at columns of figures. Toward the end, it seemed to make sense. Victor had also said, ‘See if you can convince the bitch-no offence, old son.’ Leo had tried. He wasn’t sure that she’d listened, though. Now, chained up while their house was being robbed, Leo tried again. ‘He’s got a point, Stel.’
But then the man with the flat look of a killer came back from his search of the property, and shortly after that Leo heard the safe blow open. He was silent, and it was a strain on him. He watched the men leave. When they were gone he jerked the handcuffs, but it was useless and suddenly every clock in the place chose that moment to chime eight o’clock.
Thirty-four
They worked the signal using cellular phones provided by Rossiter. While Jardine opened the gate, Wyatt called Towns. The ringing tone sounded once and when Towns answered he said, ‘All clear.’ He listened for Towns’s ‘okay’, broke the connection, climbed behind the wheel of Victor Mesic’s Saab and followed Jardine’s Telecom van through the gate and onto the street.
Wyatt wasn’t carrying the money. The money was in the Telecom van, giving it a second margin of security. Wyatt was allowing for the bored or nosy patrol cop who might just decide to give a Saab driver a hard time but who wouldn’t look twice at a Telecom van. The first margin was Wyatt himself. He drove several hundred metres behind Jardine and he watched the traffic ahead of the van, behind it, next to it. If the Outfit wanted the two hundred thousand badly enough they might try a snatch in the open. Wyatt knew what to look for: he’d pulled stunts like it himself, running courier vans off the road to snatch bullion, furs, Scotch, oil paintings. ‘When you’re on the freeway,’ he’d told Jardine, ‘don’t let yourself get boxed in by heavy trucks working in pairs; stay in the far lane; don’t let yourself get forced onto an exit ramp or the dividing strip.’
‘And off the freeway?’
‘Off the freeway look out for roadworks, broken-down cars, any sort of emergency where you’re asked to slow down or stop or detour. If they put a car across the road, don’t stop, ram the rear of it at an angle.’
‘And fly through the windscreen.’
‘I doubt it. With most cars there’s no engine and not much structural reinforcement at the back. If you hit it in the right place you’ll shift it sideways and get through.’
Nothing like that happened on the roads out of Templestowe. They joined the freeway at Doncaster Road. There was very little traffic going into the city. The space-age lights floated high above the broad dreaming lanes and Wyatt followed Jardine at a steady 90 kph along a shallow valley that gave no sense of the city’s tiled roofs and street grids and three million people.
They got off the freeway at Hoddle Street, leaving the Saab and the Telecom van in a side street and switching to rented Mazdas left there earlier in the day. Jardine had rented the cars from separate firms using fake ID. Again Wyatt tailed Jardine. They kept to the speed limit, obeyed the traffic laws, still wore the gloves.
They made a final switch in Spring Street, knowing there were always taxis waiting outside the Windsor. Avoiding a bag snatch, Jardine parked opposite, cut across the road on foot, and got into the back seat of the first taxi on the rank. The taxi pulled away and Wyatt stayed with it, three car-lengths behind, through Fitzroy, Carlton and Clifton Hill. The time was 8.30 pm.
By 8.45 they were in Northcote. Wyatt double-parked well back from the taxi, lights out, and watched as Jardine paid off the driver and entered the corner milk bar. The taxi driver was there for a minute or so, writing up his log, answering a radio call. When he was gone, Wyatt drove up to the milk bar, collected Jardine and drove out of the street.