A small man wearing a dust coat that flapped behind him, ran from the office between the loading bays. I took off like a sprinter from the blocks after him. He had a lead but he was no runner. I gained with every stride and the flapping coat caught on the wire that straggled from the cyclone fence where he had to make a turn. The coat ripped, he slowed down and I got my hand on his shoulder and ran him into the fence, he bounced off it and I pinned him back and held him there. We panted in each other other’s face and I realised that I was crouching and holding him up on tip toe. I felt ashamed; he was about five foot three and weighed around eight stone. I let him down and took two fistfuls of the front of his dust coat.
‘Just one question,’ I said. ‘Who told you to get a driver to lie to me?’ I shook him and his head wobbled on his thin neck. His breath smelled of cigarettes-no wind.
‘Silly bugger,’ he gasped. ‘He just hadda say it might’ve been her. He’s off to the West in a coupla days. There was fifty bucks in it for him.’
‘Who was he?’
‘I dunno his name. Met him in the pub this morning. Well, I seen him there before once.’
‘Description.’
‘Big bloke, tall as you ‘n heavier. Lot heavier. Red face, flash suit. Looked like a cop. I reckon he could be a cop.’
‘Bullshit!’ I let him go and he stayed there with his back against the wire; with his eyes and mouth open in fright and his torn coat flapping he looked like a scarecrow. I walked back to the yard. Kenny was leaning against the pallets with a cigarette in his mouth.
‘You all right?’ I said.
He nodded. I picked up the photograph and walked towards my car.
Five hours later I was in the car and parked fifty yards from the Stevenson’s house in Cammeray. Jeff Stevenson came out, got into a light-blue Holden Statesman and drove away. I followed him. He drove fast but not very well and I had to cope with some ill-tempered drivers he created around him. He ploughed through to Lane Cove West and took a turn off the Epping Road down towards the river. The street was dark and quiet and the Statesman plunged down into a car park under a block of flats that hid behind high poplar trees discreetly illuminated from ground level.
I parked in the street, got a torch from the glove box and went down into the bunker. Each resident had two parking bays-one for a visitor. The Statesman was parked next to a new Honda Civic in Bay 36A. I prowled around the block of flats until I located the right entrance. The white stones crunched under my feet; my legs were brushed by ferns. The rents would be high. Flat 36A was occupied by Ann Stevens. I went back to my car, drove to the nearest liquor store for a half bottle of whisky and took up a position opposite the flats with the radio on softly and the bottle on my lap. The Statesman roared up the ramp at a little past 2 a.m. I watched it out of sight, took one more swig on the bottle and drove carefully home.
I kept up a surveillance of the Stevensons for four days. Jeff Stevenson went to work in the mornings; Jessie slept late, moved like an automaton and went to her analyst. She drank gin in the afternoon. On the second night they went out to a restaurant; both drank a lot and Jessie almost raped him while they danced. The next night Stevenson arrived at Lane Cove West at midnight and Portia came out wearing a wig and a light coat with the collar turned up. They walked the streets, tightly locked together. She was tall and slim and her movements were graceful. She looked up at Jeff adoringly. I photographed them. I went through the rubbish bin for 36A and found a letter signed ‘Jeff’ and the foil from contraceptive pills.
Terry writhed in the bed. ‘Oh God,’ she said.
‘I wore rubber gloves, don’t worry.’
‘It’s not funny. What are you going to do?’
I thought of Jessie Stevenson’s tight, strained face as she drove her car, of the boozy, dazed look she wore at 4 o’clock as she stood, aimless in her front garden. I’d watched her do that for an hour, wondering what she was doing until I saw the two girls in the school uniform turn into the street. Then she went inside. I remembered the way she looked at her husband.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What would you do?’
‹‹Contents››
The Mongol Scroll
Dr Kangri hit the button on the slide projector and the image flashed up on the metre-square screen.
‘Beautiful, is it not?’ he said.
It was an oriental drawing showing a couple making love. They were both wearing robes and had painted faces and their hair tied back in severe knots. They were smiling; the man had a big erection and the woman had small, pointed breasts. The erection was between the breasts and they both seemed pretty pleased about it. The colours were brilliant blues, reds and yellows and the lovers were on a thin mat in a sparsely furnished room that seemed to be full of sunlight.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Beautiful’s the word.’
He showed the next slide and the next, and half a dozen more. They were all in the same mood and communicated the same feeling: extreme pleasure in leisurely, inventive sex. My mouth was a bit dry when he turned the projector off; I could have managed to look at a few more without too much trouble.
He tidied the slides away and moved the projector aside. Then he sat down behind the big desk in the study crammed with books and paintings and scrolls and I turned my chair around away from the screen and faced him.
‘They are very fine,’ he said, ‘but nothing compared to the impact of the scroll itself.’
‘The subject’s the same all through?’
He smiled. Dr Kangri was a small, smooth-faced man in his late fifties. To judge from his house in Vaucluse, the Jaguar in the garage, the furnishings and the art work, his assets would have been in the early millions. ‘Erotic, you mean? Yes, very, Splendidly so and a very rare scroll. Unique.’
‘Worth?’
He shrugged, moving his shoulders fluidly inside his silk shirt. He seemed to have the movements of a much younger man. Yoga?. I thought.
‘Who can say? Priceless.’
‘I’m sorry to be crude about it, doctor. But I need a price, so will the insurance people. You must have paid…’
A few lines of annoyance appeared on the smooth, brown skin and then vanished as if dismissed by an act of will. ‘It is not insured, Mr Hardy. I paid; yes, indeed I paid, but in favours you understand. Services, not cash.’
I got out a notebook because it looks efficient and can sometimes be useful. I wrote ‘Chinese scroll’ and put a question mark beside a dollar sign. Then I scratched the words out because Kangri proceeded to tell me that it wasn’t a Chinese scroll but a Tibetan scroll in a Mongol style. The scroll was about two metres long and forty centimetres wide; and had thirty-seven sections, each showing an erotic scene. Apparently the scroll was like the Chinese ‘Pillow books’ which were presented to newly weds to give them the right idea and put them in the mood. ‘Almost all Tibetan art is religious,’ Kangri told me. ‘This scroll is a rare exception.’
It sounded like a nice exception to me. ‘Old?’
‘Fifteenth century. Never before reproduced, hardly known. My edition will make big waves.’
It was an oddly contemporary expression to come from such a traditional-seeming man. I doubted whether he knew that it was contemporary. I nodded and listened while he told me that he was planning a lavish book, reproducing the scroll along with a scholarly essay and notes by himself. The slides had come his way ten years before, and the work of acquiring the scroll itself and doing the scholarly investigation and occupied him for twenty years.
‘When did you get the scroll?’ I asked.
‘One month ago. I thought about it for twenty years and had it for a mere thirty days.’
Unique or not, the procedure’s much the same when investigating the nicking of something. Where was it kept? When did you last see it? Who knew it was there? Kangri told me he’d kept the scroll in a locked cupboard in the study and he showed me the broken lock. He’d last looked at his treasure four days before and only his daughter, his housekeeper and an academic named Dr Susan Caswell knew where it was kept. I looked around the over-stocked but tidy room, noted the labels on pots and the classification numbers on the spines of the books.