Quota (27 page)

‘Chaff. Feeding some poddy calves for a mate.'

The cop was running his hand over the black plastic lid. He took it by the rim and gave it a sudden shake, and then tugged at the nylon rope holding it against the roll bar.

‘Long as it's secured okay.' He was down the back now, peering at the number plate. Barry knew he'd paid the rego, remembered cursing VicRoads as he wrote the cheque. The cop slid his torch back into his vest pocket. ‘Righto, have a good one.' He handed the licence back through the window and was already looking along the queue.

Barry continued up Royal Parade, past the university, until he was deep into Brunswick. The cop had unsettled him. He was sweating, his pulse still hammering in his neck. A lurid pub façade appeared on his right.
Brunswick Club
, he read to himself. His mind conjured press photos of a dead crim, the soles of his shoes visible under the pool table through the front windows, police tape blurred in the foreground. The comically overcooked missus with her huge glasses, weeping extravagantly at the funeral. A little further north he took a right, nosing down a narrow side street flanked by small factories and a handful of Victorian terraces. The street was dark in the late afternoon, the sun caught somewhere behind the airconditioning units and aerials.

Barry counted off the numbers until he came to a two-storey brown brick building that took up half a block. The lettering, in faded blue-grey across the façade read
Seafood Handlers International.
He swung the ute in under the projecting front of the building, looking up at the office windows as he passed under them. No sign of any activity.

The ute rolled to a stop in front of an unmarked door. It was reinforced with a long steel plate down the jamb. As he climbed out, he looked once at his barrel, then knocked on the door.

‘Yeah?' a voice came faintly from within. Female. Middle aged. Not friendly.

Barry had been rehearsing this moment on the drive, practising the bloody weird name. ‘Barry Egan. I'm here to see Terepai Taia.'

‘He's not here.'

‘Would you tell him I've got his barrel?'

A pause.

‘Hang on.'

There followed a series of muffled bangs, as if several heavy doors were being opened and shut sequentially down a corridor. Just like the police cells when they'd locked him up for drunk in public in '88. He looked down at the concrete step. Someone had vomited against the wall beside the door, a downward parabola from waist height. Beside the pool at the bottom of the stain was a collection of wrappers and leaves that the wind had collected in an eddy. Samboy salt and vinegar, faded to a tired mauve.

Footsteps approached the inside of the door and the locks began to rattle. The door nearly collected him as it swung outwards. A small woman stood before him, clad in a plastic apron and hairnet. She'd taken one rubber glove off to open the door. She was fifty-odd, hard faced with lined eyes and puffy jowls, lips pursed into a dog's-arsehole pucker.

‘Go through.'

Barry moved forward into lino-tiled passageway. The aproned woman led him to another door and punched a code into a keypad before they passed through. Beyond the door, a cavernous factory floor opened up. To his left, a long conveyor line was watched over by more workers in aprons. The objects rolling past them on the line were well familiar to Barry.
Haliotis rubra
—blacklip abs. At one end of the conveyor, women were gathered around deep plastic tubs, scrubbing at the shellfish with plastic brushes and flicking them onwards. Others were picking up the travelling product and transferring it onto cutting boards, trimming the entrails and irregular edges off them. They stood in gumboots, spraying water over their work from short hoses. To his right, he saw another woman with her back to him, loading abalone into a steel machine then shutting a lid on the top, before selecting from a keyboard of brightly coloured buttons. Cryovac machine. He'd seen one at a clearing sale, down at the commercial dairy. The woman at the machine was filling a plastic tub and Barry's gaze continued to her right where a small man, his eyes downcast, was transferring the tubs to a nearby bench. Here, a much larger man was stacking the plastic packages into wide, square cardboard boxes. The sides of the boxes were marked
Ocean Fresh South Seas Trevally.

Barry had stopped absentmindedly while he took all this in. Now he was conscious of someone behind him and looked around to see a man in an apron and hairnet, standing with arms folded across a chest that seemed to stretch for miles. He wore an untidy goatee round his mouth, the flat line of which was neither a smile nor a frown. The face and the body were relaxed, but at the same time immovable. Barry stood, transfixed. This place was not of his world. It didn't conform to rules he understood. He liked to cut a corner or two as much as the next bloke, but this…This all appeared to exist outside the law and in wholesale disregard of it.

The man reached under his apron and produced a gun. A revolver. He pointed the thing at the ground next to his foot, waving slightly with the muzzle, ushering him onwards. Barry was speechless with fright, yet inside he marvelled. There was a man pointing a gun at him. Near him. Deb would never have believed all this. With his hands raised in a feeble show of obedience, he backed away slowly.

His guide directed him across the factory floor and up a stairway to a small sheet-cement office with a window that overlooked the whole scene. His hip began to give him trouble about halfway up and he stopped with a hand on one knee. The woman had reached the top of the stairs and was standing with the office door held open, radiating impatience. He resumed the climb, shuffled past her on the landing and entered the office.

The bare, bright coil of a low-energy bulb caught him in the eyes. Both of his escorts had taken up positions between him and the door, the woman looking comically undersized beside the man with the gun. Barry had half-turned as he entered and was facing a plain timber desk. Papers were scattered all over it, save for one corner that was occupied by a computer and another where there was a phone. The entire wall opposite the windows was taken up by a mounted fish.
Southern bluefin tuna
, said the irrepressible voice in Barry's head. Two deep vinyl armchairs; filing cabinets in the corner of the room. None of these objects exerted any pull on Barry's attention, however. He was transfixed by the figure seated behind the desk.

The man was perhaps fifty, though he looked as though his fifty years had been spent in physical labour. He was massively constructed, cut from monumental stone. From the thick hands resting on the desk to the coiled slabs of his shoulders, to the neck that seemed impossibly wide across his earlobes. His hair was dark, thick, wiry, receding slightly and cropped close to his skull. His face was Polynesian, same as the man by the door, but the surface of this face was tattooed, lips included. Again the words formed in Barry's mind, pushing forward in the hyperactive rush of his fear.
Ta moko
. Deep among the blue-black swirls of the design, the dark, narrow eyes were watching Barry without movement. They held him there while some inscrutable assessment occurred; then the eyes seemed to relax and the face softened.

He stood up, revealing a powerful chest and a waistline that would've encircled Barry twice. And as he stretched one of those improbable hands across the desk towards him, a warm grin transformed the tattooed features. The white business shirt strained against his buttons as he took Barry's hand in a surprisingly gentle grip. ‘Mr Egan,' he chuckled deeply. ‘It's a pleasure to finally meet you. I'm Mr Taia.'

With his hand encased in this man's giant paw, all that crushing force held at bay by nothing but goodwill, Barry felt his resolve wobbling. He needed focus. He needed calm. This was not his realm and he knew it. Ordinary people didn't introduce themselves as ‘mister'. He resumed his seat while he gestured at the armchairs, so that Barry found himself sitting down, suddenly baffled as to where to put his hands.

Taia regarded him for a moment.

‘I got to say, mate, this is very unusual.'

Barry shrugged and didn't respond.

‘You're doing very well. Are you nervous?' Taia's wide face lit up with mischief.

‘I just want to do my business and I'll be on my way,' Barry said. ‘And if it's not you, I can find others.'

Taia laughed. ‘You haven't looked after your product though. Tut tut…' he waggled a finger at Barry. ‘You just walked away from it in the carpark, my friend.'

‘I know you watch your building. The only person who's going to take the barrel would be you and if you're going to rob me, you've got p-plenty of opportunity.'

Taia raised an eyebrow as he considered this. Barry knew he'd caught the stutter.

‘Fair enough.' He glanced at the man who'd led Barry across the factory floor. ‘Liam, come here.'

The man did as he was told.

‘Did you point a gun at our guest?'

‘Sort of, boss.' He swallowed hard. ‘Yes.'

His eyes were meekly lowered. Taia swung a massive blow at the man's head, raising a deep thud from his skull. His whole body jolted under the force of the impact. His hand instinctively shielded his face, but Taia clearly had no desire to hit him again.

‘Get out,' he said quietly. He turned his attention back to Barry.

‘Now tell me about this client of yours.'

‘Who?'

‘The client—you told me on the phone that you were selling for a client.'

Barry had forgotten he'd used this line. It was only now he was sitting in front of the prospective buyer that he realised how foolhardy he'd been.

‘That's none of your business.'

‘On the contrary, Mr Egan. When I move abalone, narcotics, anything of value, I like to know who I'm moving it for. Otherwise I just can't tell if I'm getting set up, eh?'

Barry tried the shrug again.

‘You're not a very likely drug dealer, are you?' Taia leaned forward across the desk then tilted his head as he squinted at Barry. The effect was more menacing than Barry thought he could bear.

‘I've told you who I am. I'm not bullshitting you. Check the ute if you want. Look, here's my wallet.' He threw it on the desk, but Taia made no movement to pick it up.

‘We've had your rego looked at already. You live in Dauphin, Victoria. Home of Gawleys Kitchen, eh. I get a lot of abalone from down your way, Mr Egan. Lots. But there's not many people there who do
this
sort of thing…'

He nodded towards the door and Barry turned to see the woman who'd led him to the office, accompanied by a smaller man, hefting the blue barrel between them into the room. They were both straining under the weight. Barry felt an inner resignation about the fact they'd simply lifted the barrel off his ute without consultation and dragged it in here.

‘In fact, there aren't many people down your way full stop, eh?' Taia sauntered around behind Barry's chair to the barrel. He squatted over it and pressed both hands to the rim of the black lid, and slowly applied pressure. Two of the largest biceps Barry had ever seen appeared in the sleeves of the business shirt. The lid began to turn, but just as the rotation became freer, Taia stood upright again.

‘Did you get this from the Murchison family?'

Barry could answer that truthfully.

‘No. No I didn't.'

The lid had come loose, and Taia lifted it off without looking inside the barrel.

‘Did you get it from—whatsisname—the Murchisons' decky. McVean. Did you get it from McVean?' Taia's tone was one of idle curiosity, but somehow it was set to terrify. There was the faintest trace of a crocodilian grin under all that ink.

‘No.' Barry held his gaze as best he could. The familiar smell had reached him from the barrel, the smell he had pondered night after night as he sat in his lock-up staring at the fucking thing, turning it over. Feeling it. It was a stench he could remember from parties in the seventies. It was dope, but it smelt richer, tarrier than the little bags of buds he knew back then. Taia reached into the barrel and produced one of the paper-wrapped bricks.

‘You know, when you told me on the phone that it was ninety kilos, that's…that's a lot of hash, my friend. In fact, I think that's more hash than I've ever seen in one place. Most unusual, you know. Most unusual.'

He pointed the corner of the hash block at Barry's temple and bored his eyes into his skull. ‘I have my suspicions about how you came across this barrel you know. Those boys are on trial for murder. Might've, might've
mislaid
something.'

Barry tried to stare back. His legs shook.

‘Doesn't worry me one bit,' Taia continued. ‘It's business, Mr Egan. But you should be lookin over your shoulder now, eh?'

‘Can we deal with the money please?' Barry's voice was small and faraway. In the months he'd obsessed about doing it, he hadn't been sure how this was going to go, but he had never imagined such a total imbalance of bargaining positions. Even the man's footfalls on the floor were overwhelming.

Taia considered him a moment longer, then stood at the window, looking out over the factory floor. He shook his head as he broke into a bemused grin. ‘You certainly do have some balls, my friend,' he eventually chuckled.

There was a knock at the door and a woman entered, this time younger and dressed in office attire. She held a black sports bag which she swung up onto the desk without a word. Taia waited until she was gone then pushed the bag across the desk. ‘There you are.'

‘Don't you need to count it?' asked Barry.

‘No, I don't.' replied Taia. ‘I know how much is there. I think it is you who should be counting.' He smiled again.

Barry looked at the bag and then looked straight over the top of it at Taia. ‘If you don't mind, I'd really rather get going.' His hands were clammy and he needed to piss so badly that he expected to be on the leak any minute.