Wyatt - 05 - Port Vila Blues by Garry Disher Page A

graffiti hed seen
on railway underpasses in Melbourne.

    One person got off. Three got on
with Crystal. He eyed them briefly: two kids with slim brown legs and a local
man dressed in a white shirt and a black cotton wrap-around garment like a
skirt. The words Reriki Island Resort were stencilled on the top pocket of
his shirt.

    The ferry drew away from the wharf.
Crystal looked back at the receding harbour shoreline, the mixture of
waterfront businesses, rusting warehouses and tattered inter-island cargo
ships. At the midway point he saw the resorts minibus pull into the carpark. Hed
beaten it by only a few minutes. The driver and passengers got out and he saw
the driver begin to stack the luggage next to the ferry landing.

    The ferry docked at the island and
Crystal alighted with the other passengers. Steep paths led up to the main
buildings. The grounds were carefully landscaped: neat palms, pandanus, small
banyans, orchids, coral-edged walking tracks, close-cropped grass in between.

    Crystal sat on a bench at the centre
of a patch of grass. The clouds cleared suddenly and he was drenched in late
afternoon sunlight. There were several tourists nearby, doing what he was
doing, enjoying the sun. He half closed his eyes, waited, and saw a Reriki
Island bellboy wheel a trolley-load of suitcases up to the main office. The
tartan suitcase was unmistakeable among them.

    A few minutes later, Crystal
followed. There were plenty of people about: visitors, people staying at the
resort, resort staff. No one looked twice at him.

    The main building was constructed to
resemble an oversized jungle village meeting place: a high-ceilinged roof,
exposed beams, open sides, a suggestion of bamboo fronds and rattan. It housed
a bar, a dining room and the reservations desk. Crystal sat at a small cane
table in a shadowy far corner of the vast room. He had 20-20 vision. The sky
remained clear and he could see every detail of the harbour, the yachts and the
distant rocky beaches smudged with mangroves and casuarinas. He could also see
the bar clearly, and the reservations counter where the new arrivals luggage
was being stacked by a porter.

    Half an hour later the tartan
suitcase was the only one not claimed or delivered to any of the cabins.
Nursing a beer, Crystal maintained his watch over it. He grew drowsy. A small
drama at the bar woke him, shouts of bon jour as a middle-aged white
man came into the bar and clasped several of the black staff. He seemed to be a
great hit with them. Bon jour, they said, and he beamed, and asked
after their kids.

    Crystal headed for the cover of a
cane screen, fear and hate hammering in his heart. The man himself, centre of
all his recent misery. Crystal peered around the screen. There was no mistaking
De Lisle: aged about fifty, starting to go plump and soft, wearing a white
shirt, white trousers, and a straw hat with a red band around it. The humidity
seemed to be affecting him. He was pink in the face and mopped his forehead and
neck with a blue handkerchief. He twinkled a lot, a hot, damp man in the
tropics, surrounded by admirers. At one point he took an asthma spray from his
pocket and sucked on it frantically, closing his eyes for a moment afterwards,
his fleshy chin tipped back, rising to the tips of his neat tasselled shoes as
though preparing to levitate, then returning with a smile to the people
circling him, calling bon jour to the bartenders, who were all
grinning.

    Lou Crystal took in every hated
detail about the man. Then he took in how De Lisle left with the tartan
suitcase, carrying it down to the jetty, where a waiting water taxi took him to
a little dock under a cliff-top mansion on the other side of the harbour.

    * * * *

    Nine

    The
house was on a cliff top two kilometres from the post office in the centre of
Port Vila. It had been built for the director of a French bank a couple of
years before Independence in 1980, and that fact accounted for the two features
that De Lisle had been