Weirdly enough, his people seemed to refer to their boss simply as Mr T, which made Honen expect a spot of Chinese tea with a big black guy dripping in gold. No other details were forthcoming, of course, but there was no way he’d be showing his face anyway.

The sumtotal of their communication had been three emails to a Hotmail address that read like someone had punched a keyboard. The bikies had trusted him with the email address so he could contact the buyers and set up the meets himself. It was another layer of insulation in case the authorities came sniffing around, they’d trusted he wouldn’t fuck them over because they knew where he lived. The last employers he would ever have clearly were gullible pricks.

This time he’d set up the meeting in a French restaurant in central Hong Kong. Café Des Artistes was on the ground floor of the incongruous California Tower in the central Hong Kong district of Lan Kwai Fong. The weather was fine and warm and the restaurant’s bank of large windows had been opened to create a terrace for viewing the street. As Honen walked past the restaurant’s scripted sign, he scanned the street, looking for - anything dodgy. Lookouts, traps, large men with facial scars flipping coins on street corners… There was nothing, but since this was only his fifth time doing this, it was little wonder he’d seen nothing. It was 9.58am.

Inside, the place was more a restaurant than café - the walls popped with impressionist colours and were lit like artworks themselves. Breakfasters sat at their white linen islands, leaning into tall wicker chairs enjoying expensive breakfasts or French coffees. All seemed to be otherwise engaged… ah, the trio in the back corner.

Honen was wearing sunglasses, but it was bright enough for them to not look unusual. He blended right in in the back corner, with the two suits who looked like trainee sumos - both in designer shades - but not the oriental woman sipping tea between them. She looked dressed for the races and wore a white floral print dress with a wide-brimmed hat, pinned at an angle. They all could have all been Chinese, or Korean, maybe Japanese at a pinch. Hello - the Eurotrash guy sitting alone a few tables away looked like he was in on this too. He was slimmer than most of the help he’d seen before but had locked onto him quickly.

The rose between the thorns took another sip of her latte as Honen approached. They all seemed to keep their hands in their laps a lot.”I’m looking for my cousin Bart,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

The sun rose on Hong Kong Harbour and its usual chaos in slow-motion. Vessels of every size, vintage, and condition were cutting across the dull blue expanse; tugs muscling supertankers around, pleasurecraft cutting across the bows of ferries, tiny junks clustered against impossibly fragile docks.

From 32 stories up, it had the disconnected, surreal look of a video game controlled by a child sleepy after a Ritalin sandwich.

Paul Honen had opened his curtains just after sunrise, but hadn’t glanced out the hotel’s floor-to-ceiling windows in an hour. He was struggling with the piece-of-shit laptop he’d bought duty free three days ago, trying to convince it to connect to the web. Now he was re-checking the connection and jabbing the keyboard and mouse, as if to emphasise his point. “Fucker. Come on!”

Finally the glorified paperweight made an abracadabra sound and he found his way to the Australian news websites.

He’d already heard that the Blues had stuck in to the Pura Cup final and was looking for news stories on the repercussions of his absence back home. Trouble was, the few cricket sites not totally devoted to World Cup euphoria, hand-wringing, or pernickety analysis revealed precious little about Paul Morris Honen. One did mention that he’d been omitted from New South Wales’s 13-man squad to travel down to Hobart for the final, but it implied it was part of a selection decision to go with a younger team.

He snapped the notebook closed hard enough to crack the screen, and had to pace around to calm down. Stiff shit, eh? He was getting out anyway. He’d dropped cricket before it dropped him, so why get his jocks in a twist? He made a cup of tea and started to simmer down. There were bigger fish to fry, by a long shot. Read the rest of this entry »

They met in shed B as usual. Normally they arranged it for first light, when the market was at its most frenetic, but this was an emergency.  

By 9.30 there were still quality vegies to be bought, deals to be done, but the serious buyers had already picked the eyes out of the towers of waxed boxes. The stacks at Paddy’s started shrinking from 5am, the floor space divided by the owner’s numbered areas. By mid-morning, there was plenty of bare concrete to hose off, men pushing stray vegetable mush towards drain grilles, the buyers now the suburban small-timers, buying for a party, or a family.    

Swarthy men in Stubbies and boots chatted in groups, discussing the drought or the wet or the footy in any one of half a dozen languages. Others hurried past pushing hand trolleys or sped around the outskirts of the shed smoking in forklifts, stacking, loading, shouting.

A Slavic slab of a man called Mikailovic stood just outside the huge structure near a pile of pallets. He was dressed in his usual dark tracksuit, and was fondled an avocado and watching Dimmick park his Harley and hustle over.  

Under his severe buzzcut he squinted at the bikie. “Not a great week for you…”  

“Don’t worry, it’s under control.”  

“But I do worry. First, the job is not done and our friend just runs away like a girl; second, you call me on a mobile phone for another meeting. Not controlled.”  

“I didn’t say anything on the phone.”  

“The call can be enough. Why do you think I separate myself and my clients from that side of things. If things go bad, risk is minimised. Now some computer has your number next to my number on its hard drive.” He’d stopped with the fruit pretence.   Read the rest of this entry »

The pricks made me wait 45 minutes in the world’s greyest room, so I set about inspecting my nose hairs at close range in what was obviously a two-way mirror. By getting really agricultural up there I found I could make the female cop scurry in to check on me, which was amusing for a while.

By the third visit, it was starting to get tired when the chick cop - sorry - female detective (McManus? McTavish?) stood by the door and tried to look menacing, then Kessler - there was no forgetting him - waltzed in and was content to take his considerable load off and offer me a seat at the table. Detective sexypants left us to it and Kessler stared at me until I was forced to break the silence.

“Soooo, it’s a shame. I thought it was going to be the three of us bouncing around in a locked room, talking about our feelings. Kinda like The Breakfast Club, without the dope smoking scene. I assume.”

Not a flicker from Kessler. Then: “She had to go - she’s got your fat mate with the odour problem in the next room.” He smirked. “What do you think about that?”

“I think he smells fine if you breathe through your nose. You’d be right. I can see you’re a mouthbreather.”

“You are a fucking idiot, aren’t you. Like all cricketers.”

“You’re a lawn bowls man, then?”

“What I am not is on a squillion-dollar contract for running around a field chasing a little red ball. Girls, cars, the rules don’t apply to me - don’t worry, I know how you lot work.”

I nearly jettisoned a goodly portion of laugh-snot. Wiping the tears away, I said, “Detective, I get paid by the game - no contract - and it doesn’t look like I’ll be seeing one, I’m locked out of my flat by the woman you met, hot, but a psycho who won’t leave, and I drive an EH Holden that’s been clocked three times.” Read the rest of this entry »