THURSDAY'S ORCHID (7 page)

Then I had it! The answer to the problem!

How bloody simple.

Four

Crash!!

The open palm slashed across my face, bringing me back to reality with a jolt as Gerry’s fiery eyes fixed on mine.

“Are you bloody drunk, bloody impotent or bloody what?” she shrieked as she squeezed out from under me and bounced off the bed. “You men are all the same! All talk and no balls!”

Gerry was fighting mad. “Stuff you, you bastard!” she shrilled.

I pitied the husband, and I pitied whoever was trying to get to sleep on the other side of the wall
. I just lay there, a stupid grin on my face, and started to laugh. She wasn’t needed any more. I had what I wanted, although probably not what I needed.

“You bastard!” she snapped, looking down at my limp member. “You can play with yourself for the rest of the goddamned night. I’m leaving!”

The clothes went on faster than they had come off. She stormed out of the room, nearly slamming the door off its hinges, and I could hear mutterings as she stomped down the corridor. It was so tragic it was almost hilarious.

I poured myself a small whisky and reached for the phone.

Nick’s voice answered on the tenth ring: blurred and slow. He had been asleep, which wasn’t surprising considering the time.

“Who is it?” he asked. I told him. “What time is it?” I told him that as well.

He was having trouble focussing. Either that or he had finished off the second bottle of Metaxa and consumed a few more of those potent liqueurs after I had left. I could hear Angeline mumbling in the background.

“Wake up, Nick,” I whispered down the phone. “It’s Father Christmas come to give you a present
.” I was just drunk enough to be playful.

“Are you drunk?” the groggy voice asked. “What the hell are you ringing me in the middle of the night for? Go to bed for Christ’s sake!”

I could sense he was getting ready to slam the receiver down in my ear.

“Wait!” I yelled. “I’ve got the answer to our problem. I’ve got the goddamned solution!” There was silence. “Nick!”
I yelled again, hoping that he could hear me and not hang up. He came back a moment later. But for those few long seconds I thought I had lost him.

“Did I hear you say what I thought you said?” he asked, the voice now wide awake. “Or are you just dreaming through the bottom of a glass?”

“No, Nick. I mean, yes, I’ve got the answer. And it’s perfect. Of course I’ve been drinking. What else is there to do in this town at night? But I know what I’m talking about. This scheme can’t fail.”

He grunted once or twice. I shouldn’t have admitted I had been out drinking. Who wants to listen to a drunk at one o’clock in the morning?

“What time’s breakfast?” I asked. “We’ll go over it then.”

He mumbled that he usually ate at seven-thirty, and that I had better not be playing around.

I let the phone drop back on the cradle, frustrated. I had wanted to tell him, wanted him to hear the brilliance of the scheme, but he wouldn’t listen. I lay on the bed, cursing Nick, and cursing like hell that I had laughed at Gerry. I needed her now.

The phone rang at six-thirty the following morning – Nick.

He was wide awake this time, which was more than could be said for me. For a few moments I was cursing the hospitality shelf in the small refrigerator. I must have gone through at least three of the tiny bottles of hard liquor after I had got off the phone, mixing drinks with no thought for the morning. My head didn’t feel too bright at all. But there was no mistaking the brightness and excitement in Nick’s voice. “What was that all about last night? Have you really worked it out?”

I told him that I had, but that he would have to wait until I got there. It wasn’t something to be discussed over the
telephone. I also told him I was hungry.

I had come up with the simplest solution to what had appeared to be a complex problem. Who was the idiot who said that nothing ever gets done when you start screwing around?

It was still too early for the commuter traffic. I was headed the opposite way in any case. So, with nothing to slow the progress of my rental car, it was a pleasant ride to Nick’s tree-lined suburb, and I made good time, arriving about fifteen minutes early.

“It’s so bloody simple, Nick!” I burst out as he opened the front door. “I don’t know why the hell I never thought of using the idea before.”

“Okay, Jeff,” he said, motioning me to quieten down. “Hold your horses for a moment. Come on through to the study. Jessie’s laid on some eggs and things. We can have a little privacy.”

Normally with Nick it was food first and then business, but not this time. He went
on into the study and I followed. I stood in the doorway and drank it in, the richness taking me by surprise. The far wall, the one facing me as I entered, was of tinted glass and opened out on to the front lawn, stretching away to the boundary wall, giving the impression of garden reaching into the room, increasing the area ten-fold.

The wall on the left was completely hidden by bookshelve
s, with row upon row of leather-bound volumes, a collection built up over a great number of years. The opposite wall, constructed of rough-hewn stone, surrounded an enormous fireplace surmounted by a great solid timber mantelpiece that must have been thirty centimetres thick. I stepped into the room, sinking into the deep carpet, and turned to the wall behind me, again a contrast: panelling from floor to ceiling: rich, dark wood; with Nick’s collection of antique rifles magnificently displayed – polished brass and oiled steel gleaming against the mahogany. But his flintlock pistols took pride of place, mounted on the rough stone on either side of the chimney.

The furniture: sev
eral armchairs, a desk and its swivel chair, all antiques – leather and polished wood. It all fitted together, even the tiger skin on the floor. A man’s room.

He shut the door.

“Now, my boy,” he said quietly, thumbs hooked into his waistcoat like an American defence attorney ready to crucify some prosecution witness. “What’s this fine idea that woke me up at some ungodly hour of the night?”

I n
early replied that although it might have got him up in the middle of the night, it had certainly let me down. But I didn’t think it was the right time for levity.

“Wool,” I replied. “Bales of wool. We pack the
marijuana into strong plastic bags. Then we compress the bags, bind them up and insert each bag into the middle of a bale of wool. Simple.”

He stood and thought it over for a minute or two.

“What about the weight factor?” he asked. “Surely if we compress grass into a small block, it’s going to be much heavier than the fleeces we’ll have to take out to make room for the grass?” It showed how little he knew about wool. “Wouldn’t the stevedores become suspicious if they handled bales of wool that were heavier than they should be?”

“Nick,” I replied. “It’s easy to see that your old man was just a dirt farmer.”

He shot forward, his colour rising.

“Hold on there,” I said, taking a fast step backwards. “I’m not insulting your father. I’m only saying that he might have taught you a lot about cabbages and carrots, but he didn’t teach you much about wool.”

He sat back in his chair, waiting for me to continue.

“F
or your information,” I went on. “A bale of wool is one of the heaviest non-solids you’ll ever come across. A single bale can weigh anything between say, one hundred, and one hundred and thirty five kilograms. They measure about seventy-five centimetres along each side. So, weight for size, it’s not too light. If anything, the grass might even be a shade lighter.”

“How come a bale weighs so much?” he asked. “A hundred kilos is a fair weight. You’d need a hell of a lot of fleeces. And how the hell do you cram them in?”

“Quite right,” I replied. “You do need quite a few and, as for cramming them in, well, every shearing shed is equipped with a piece of machinery known as a wool-press. It’s shaped something like a large wooden crate: open at the top. To operate it, you hang an empty bag – the bale – inside the box, and then start stuffing fleeces into the bag. When you can’t cram any more in, and they’re piled up over the top, you crank down a bloody great screw-operated press, forcing the fleeces into a compact cube, and there’s your bale. The wool’s been compressed. You sew up the top of the bag and it’s finished. Simple, but hard work.”

“Fine,” he said. “So where does that take us?”

Did I have to plan the whole scheme?

“Well, Nick. The way I see it is for the Singapore people to set up a bogus corporation over there. That corporation will purchase a quantity of wool here in Adelaide. We arrange the purchase, as agents, and store the wool for them whilst it’s waiting for a suitable ship. Once we’ve got it in storage, we unpack the bales, stuff
in the bags of grass, and press them up again. The whole lot can then be shipped to Singapore as a perfectly legitimate cargo.”

He nodded his head backwards and forwards slowly, finally appreciating the simplicity of the process. “I like it, Jeff
.” He smiled. “In fact it’s brilliant. But what about Customs? What about dogs?”

He was referring to the drug dogs, the sniffers.

“No problem,” I replied. “There’s so much lanolin in a bale of wool, not forgetting the smell of sheep and sheep-shit, that you could stuff a dead rat in there and the dogs wouldn’t sniff it out in a hundred years. Apart from which, we’ll pack the grass into airtight plastic bags.”

The more I worked on it the better it became.

“What about random sampling?” he asked.

“Again no
t a problem, Nick. At least I don’t think so. The only way to take a sample would be to slit a small hole at the top of the bale and draw out a piece of wool. There’s no way a probe could be pushed right into the centre. It’s packed too tight. Opening up a bale couldn’t be done either, because the whole thing would explode all over the place. It would make a hell of a mess. I doubt very much whether they’d try it. There’s no way a bale could be repacked without using a press.”

So that took care of the Customs angle. The only reason Customs would open a bale would be if they had received a tip-off. And if that were the case we would be gone, no matter how clever we had been.

We moved over to the unlit fireplace and sat down in the big deep chairs, with the low table between us. I perched on the edge of the chair and lifted the lid from one of the platters on the table and felt the glands at the back of my mouth begin to draw saliva. The aroma of tomatoes, bacon, eggs and sausages filled the room. I heaped my plate and reached for the toast.

“How do you reckon we should go about acting as their agents?” he asked. “Maybe it would be better if we arranged for someone else to handle that side of it.”

“No,” I replied. “Nobody else. We keep it close to the chest. All we need is another bogus corporation, or business name; it doesn’t really matter, as long as nothing can be traced back to us once the deal has been completed.” He finished a mouthful of egg and then pointed the fork in my direction, but I beat him to it. “And before you start asking where we get the wool from, I’ll fill you in on that as well. We buy it at the wool-sales through an agent. The shearing season would have finished a couple of weeks ago, so there should be sales in progress at the moment. They’ll continue for the next couple of months. They’re just like a big auction.”

I sat back against the soft leather, a cup of coffee in my hand, and beamed at him. “Told you I was as good as I ever was, Nick!”

He raised his cup to me. “Three cheers to Saturday race meetings – and coincidences.” He winked. Had he had me followed, knowing that I was in town; or had it really been a coincidence? I would probably never know.

“Of course,” I w
ent on, sticking to the matter in hand. “There’s still a lot of details to be organized. We need warehouse space, and men to operate the press and sew up the bales. Supervision of that shouldn’t be any problem. I’ve had some experience. We’ll also need the extra cash to purchase the wool, but then,” and I looked around the room, “I’m sure that won’t pose a problem. Oh yes, we’ll also need a press.” I sank back into the supple leather and added: “Nick, we can’t fail.”

And I was sure that we wouldn’t. We went over every detail we could think of. We tried to pick holes in the idea, but could find none. We would merely be another
one of the hundreds of export companies acting as an agent for some obscure Singaporean corporation.

One point I would have to check on was whether Singapore did import wool from Australia and, if so, of what quality. Sending the wrong type of wool could be
a give-away. I was certain they did buy our wool. I seemed to recall having purchased a suit in Singapore years ago and being told by the Chinese tailor that only the best Australian merino wool had been used in the making of the cloth: woven in his uncle’s mill. If this was true – not the part about his uncle – then we were home free.

If the
y imported large quantities we might even be able to hide our consignment along with several others on the same vessel.

We sat in his study for the rest of
the morning. He gave me the estimates he had received from his associates the previous evening concerning the amount of marijuana that would be available in South Australia, and how soon he could expect the first shipment from New Guinea. He had spoken by telephone to Singapore. They were prepared to go along with the extension we wanted; although they required details of our scheme before they would give final approval