‘Just something you said. I wonder if he was letting himself be set up for the drug bust. Say a minor one, for some reason, and they double-crossed him like you say.’
‘You’ve lost me. Look, I’m going to take a nap. About four we can go to the place where Fay’s working. They’ll be rehearsing and we can talk to her about all this. You’ve got a car?’
‘Yeah. Okay. Suppose this all goes well and I get the photo and you and Fay get the money, how would you get out? I’ve got the feeling Rivages could… intercept you.’
Montefiore stretched and yawned, obviously enjoying being free of the sling and cast. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe on Reg’s yacht.’
‘All the way to Australia?’
‘Nah. Vanuatu maybe. Money talks there, they tell me.’
Jarrod Montefiore was bouncing back, I judged-a player again.
We drove to the Salon de Fun. It was on the ground floor of a building that housed a restaurant on the first level and apartments above that. It wasn’t far from the fie de France and the racetrack. Late afternoon shadows and overgrown bushes all but concealed the pathway to the joint, which looked as if it had once seen better days. The large windows were stained and mottled and a poor attempt had been made to blot out an old insignia and replace it with the new name. The old one still showed through and the replacement was amateurishly done. We stopped before reaching the doorway.
‘Give me some money,’ Montefiore said.
‘How much?’
‘As many ones as you can dig up.’
I fumbled among the cash in my pockets and couldn’t help patting the money belt around my middle where I kept the serious stuff. I located seven or eight one thousand franc notes and handed them over. ‘Comes off the top,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘Cheap bastard.’ He was enjoying himself more by the minute.
The man standing by the door had a boxer’s nose and a boozer’s build. Montefiore spoke to him in rapid French, handed over a few notes and we were waved in. Inside, the place wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. The floor was clean and the tables and chairs looked as if they got a regular wipe. The lighting wasn’t bad and the stage wasn’t the beer and sweat stained mess I’d seen in other strip joints. There were some of the standard props-the crotch pole, the tigerskin rug, the swing, the backboard with the manacles-all in reasonable condition. But no girls.
Montefiore walked across to the bar where a woman in a see-through blouse was wiping glasses. More fast French. She looked at her watch. ‘Un moment,’ she said and I understood that. Montefiore bought two beers and gave her a tip, something that wasn’t usual in Noumea. She said something I couldn’t catch but the name Fay was part of it.
The lights dimmed and the Kiwi Kuties trouped onto the stage. Unusual, I thought. One by one, getting hotter as they come on deck is the standard thing. We were standing well back from the lit-up stage and if the performers could see us they made no sign. Stripper music started blaring out and I saw right off that this was something different. The three women were all tall, leggy blondes with light tans. They wore satin blouses and loose silk trousers with very high heels. Red, white and blue with the odd star and stripe. As the music got going they began to gyrate, all keeping good time with some intricate steps, and to strip each other. They weaved around the stage, well choreographed, undoing buttons, sliding blouses off shoulders, letting silk pants whisper half down and toying with g-string ties and the fastenings of front-opening bras.
Suddenly, with an abrupt change in the rhythm of the music, this all changed and the performers went into their own routines, although they only mimed the actions so far- all that was needed, I supposed, in rehearsal.
‘Good, aren’t they?’ Montefiore said and I fancied he was struggling to hold his heavy breathing in check.
‘They are.’
‘The one on the end’s a bloke.’
‘Which end?’
Montefiore snorted. ‘Yeah, you’d never tell. Fay’s in the middle. She’s the best of them in my book.’
Fay certainly had all the attributes for the job and she seemed to be enjoying it. Montefiore moved forward into a patch of light and she stopped dead in the middle of a slither when she saw him.
‘Jesus Christ, Jay.’
‘Hi, babe.’
‘What is this?’ one of the others complained.
‘I’m taking five.’ Fay jumped down from the stage, landing with perfect balance on her high heels, and ran into Montefiore’s waiting arms.
They hugged and kissed for a minute or two and then Montefiore introduced me. Dropping his voice, he said, ‘He’s got our ticket out of here-twenty-five grand. Right, Cliff?’
What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her until it wouldn’t hurt me. I nodded and she gave me a hard look. ‘For what?’
‘Remember that creep who was hanging around and you got a snap of him?’
A yell came from the stage. ‘Hey, Faysie, are we gonna do this or what?’
‘Keep your gaff on, Rox. I’ll be there in a minute. That much for the photo?’
‘And information. You’ve still got it, haven’t you? I told you it was insurance.’
‘I think so.’
‘Think! Jesus!’
‘Don’t fuckun’ come uht wuth me, Jay.’ Her accent thickened with anger. ‘You got into this mess all on your own.’
‘Twenty-five grand and out of this shithole,’ Montefiore said. ‘Sandy beaches and beer at three bucks a pop. A chance at some real money.’
‘Yeah, with you puhmping me.’
‘C’mon, babe.’
Montefiore was good. He had that quality a lot of women like, the quality that presumably attracted Lorraine to Stewart Master. Glen Withers, who’d shared the taste, told me about it once after we’d watched a video of Chinatown. Nicholson had it, she said, a bad twinkle in the eye.
‘I’m pretty sure I know where it is. Have you seen the colour of his money?’
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I’m right here.’
‘Yeah, sorry. You’ve got it.’
‘I hand it over the minute I get the picture and a few details.’
She looked puzzled. ‘Details?’
I looked at Montefiore, who made a gesture of resignation. ‘I know you fucked him, Fay. Things were crook at the time.’
She was back doing it. ‘So he wants to know how big his cock is?’
‘I want a name and a close-up description of everything about him you can remember. Any paper you might have seen, phone call you might have heard. Anything.’
‘Fay!’
‘Coming. Right, we’ll shoot over after the rehearsal. Three-quarters of an hour tops. Stay and watch the show.’ She pecked Montefiore quickly on the cheek and danced back and up onto the stage, giving us a good look at her moving assets. We’d hardly touched our drinks and we both now took deep swigs.
‘You think I’m nuts, don’t you?’
‘Mate,’ I said, ‘I don’t know and I don’t care. I’ll just do my business with you both and then you can do as you please. You’re not getting twenty-five though.’
He shrugged. ‘Sweetening the pot. It’s a habit. There’s a public phone out front. Think I’ll give the old Reg a call and see if I can set something up.’
‘I’ll take a walk on the beach.’
‘It’ll cost you to get back in.’
I shrugged. ‘It’s not my money, and it’s not yours yet either.’
You don’t leave Australia for beaches. The Ansa Vata beach was stony and gritty and the sand, what there was of it, was mud-coloured. The water looked good and the evening breeze had got up so that it wasn’t such a bad place to be if only I hadn’t been anxious about a number of things. Was Montefiore on the level? Would he have trouble dealing with Fay if he was? Could I stay out of their travel plans and how would I arrange my own? I sucked in the clean Pacific air and tried to tell myself that I’d done well and that everything was going to be all right. It never is.
Fay wore Montefiore’s jacket over her stripper’s outfit and she glided into the back seat of the car, pulling him in after her. She told me where to go and then they started whispering. I was surprised to hear her speaking French. There was more to Fay than I’d thought. Half a kilometre short of where we were heading she told me to pull up.