‘Could have been clearing his throat. Said it fast?
‘Since your departure,’ said Berglin, ‘we find ourselves bereft of ideas. But we stumble on. He’s Turkish, old man’s a Turk. We’ve run Algie by umpteen Turks. More Turks than Gallipoli. Doesn’t make sense in Turkish.’
‘But it’s come up before.’
‘What?’ He was studying the beer bottle again.
‘Algie. Algie-the word in question.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s been around.’
‘Around? Well, familiar word. Algie. Since when? Since before Lefroy?’
‘No. That’s why I’m here. Asking you.’
‘So when’s it come up? How long after Lefroy?’
‘Not long. Soon. On some drug bug, these spiders are talking. Appears to be about Lefroy. The one says, heard it was Algie.’
‘I’ve never heard that,’ I said. ‘How come I don’t know that?’
‘Mac, no-one needs to know everything.’
‘What does that mean? Exactly?’ I said.
‘What it says.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Soon after Lefroy I had a definite need to know about anything like that, Berg,’ I said. ‘But moving on, you’re here because you’re in some kind of shit, second Lefroy-style run-through, new boys in Canberra think it’s time you kicked on to that block at Batemans Bay. That it?’
‘Third,’ said Berglin.
‘Third?’
‘Third Lefroy-style run-through. There’s lots of them go on but not killing. Three years ago, we had two Chinese blokes, property investment advisors for Hong Kong syndicates, that’s the story. Rent a flat in St Kilda, ground floor, beachfront, big flat, four bedrooms, gold taps, that sort of thing. They come and go, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Bangkok, Hawaii, Sydney, Brisbane. Never stop for more than a few days, real estate people show them around buildings. Hong Kong clears them, Scully’s people give them a clean bill. Operation terminated. I had a bad feeling, but we couldn’t go on without the local jacks.’
Berglin lit his cigarette. ‘About eighteen months ago, the lady lives upstairs looks down from her balcony, sees a pool of blood on the balcony below. From under the door. It’s all tiles, inside and out. Blood runs free. She calls jacks. Chinese bloke’s taped up, throat cut.’
He looked at me in silence for a while.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Woman there too. A hooker. In the bathroom. Same treatment as the bloke. And worse. Much worse. We kept the details quiet.’
I swallowed. ‘This means what?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Stuff, money, probably money. Pick-up, pay off. Someone knew.’
‘Algie?’
‘Yesterday was a big day for shit floating up. There was another hooker these Chinese blokes liked. Hired by the day on other visits. Woman called Lurleen. We couldn’t ever find her. Yesterday she rings a number we gave this other hooker, her friend, back then. Lurleen’s back in town and she’s scared. I had a little walk and talk with her. Guess what?’
‘No.’
‘She’s in the flat too on the night. She’s got a key, been there all afternoon. Now she’s in the kitchen, hears the doorbell, hears the Chinese open the door, he says something and then she hears him scream. She doesn’t fuck around, knows shit when she hears it coming, out the door to the garage, gone. Next day she reads the bit in the paper, moves interstate. Wollongong. She reckons anyone looking for her, they won’t look there. I reckon she’s right.’
‘How does she help?’
‘Algie,’ Berglin said, ‘That’s what the Chinese said at the front door. He said, “You are Algie?” A question.’
‘She heard that from the kitchen?’
‘He had a high voice, the Chinese, she says. Clear voice. And there was a half-open door to the hallway and the sitting room. Open-plan place.’
‘You give her the name before she told you what she heard?’
‘Don’t be a dork. This woman’s kosher. Lefroy and the Chinese, same visitors. And if this Algie in Bulleen is Lefroy’s Algie…’
I finished my beer, fetched two more. ‘So that would just about get you to the second thing that brings you here,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Berglin. ‘Bianchi and Mance at the pub in Deer Park. You need to tell me who told you that.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘My telling days are over. Anyway, person can’t take it any further. Just heard it.’
Berglin nodded, drank some beer, scratched his head. ‘Need a pee,’ he said. ‘Let’s go outside. I like an open- air pee when I’m in the country. Pee, a cigarette and a look around. The stockman’s breakfast.’
We went into the night, over to the paddock fence and pissed on the weeds.
‘Wouldn’t want to expose the pork out here too long,’ Berglin said. ‘Lose it to frostbite. Listen, should be clear to you if Mance was playing both you and Bianchi, the idea came from Scully. Bianchi was just a cockbrain, messenger, fetch the hamburgers, get us a pie.’
‘And then,’ I said, ‘you have to begin to think the unthinkable.’
He zipped his fly. ‘A possibility, no more.’
‘Here’s another possibility. Three separate surveillance operations, three targets dead, stuff gone. And it’s all got nothing to do with the surveillance.’
‘Odds higher there,’ Berglin said. ‘It gives me the same worry you had and that makes doing anything very difficult.’
‘And I hear the surveillance records vaporised.’
Berglin looked at me, head tilted. ‘For a bloke way out of the loop, you hear a lot.’
‘What about the spring cleaning after I left?’
‘Did that, but houses get dirty again. Christ, let’s get inside.’
At the back door Berglin stopped, tapped my arm, took out a cigarette. ‘Mrs Bianchi, she went on protection, new name, new everything, new tits even if I read the expenses right. Got a bloke looking for her now, reliable bloke, one hundred percent, reports only to me. He says he’s warm. We find her, you want to talk to her?’
‘You know an expression I always hated in the old days?’ I said. ‘The loop. Well, I don’t want to be back in the loop.’
Berglin lit the cigarette, flame cupped, eyes narrow in the flare. ‘This loop is you and me, Mac,’ he said. ‘You don’t come into it, you want to think about sending that nice young fella away, put the dog in the kennels, sleep under the bed with the big gun. The old days aren’t over yet.’
Alex Rickard was a creature of habit and that is not a wise thing to be when people you may not want to see want to see you. The habit meant he would be at Flemington Racecourse on Wednesday afternoon. On another day, it might have been Moonee Valley or Caulfield. What was certain was that on a Wednesday afternoon Alex would be at the city races.
I got there early and found a place where I could watch the turnstiles. It wasn’t going to be hard to spot Alex in the crowd. There wasn’t a crowd, just a trickle of depressed-looking men in jail-release clothes. Ten minutes before the first race, Alex and a short, bald man in a raincoat who looked like Elmer Fudd came through. Alex raised the standard of dress by a few hundred points. He was very Members’ Enclosure: grey flannels, a grey tweed sports jacket, blue shirt, red tie.
The pair stopped off for a quick hot dog and read their race books. Elmer Fudd had two quick hot dogs. He talked a lot, waving the race book and the hot dogs around. Alex found him amusing, smiling as he ate, and then carefully wiped his lips and hands on the little paper napkin.
I kept a good distance from them in the betting ring. They favoured different bookies. Alex knew his firm well:
