Draft first chapter
I am a film maker, not a detective. I don’t solve crimes, I tell stories; though crime has a way of sneaking into stories through the back door. So, let’s start at the beginning and see what happens.
I only agreed to shoot this wedding movie as a favour to my accountant, Eddie Wong.
“Don’t worry, Co-lin.” Eddie said. “Only two or three setups, free access to the five-star buffet and unlimited booze.”
As usual with Eddie, it wasn’t quite so simple.
The bride was Pixie Wong, granddaughter of Eddie’s uncle, Mr Washington Wong, CEO of Wong & Way Constructions — a name that flutters on the jibs of the cranes that cluster like bin chickens around Canberra building sites. The groom was Rambo Putin, son of Genghis Putin, the gambling czar whose inane advertisements infect every medium from YouTube to children’s TV. The wedding banquet took place in a three-ring circus tent erected on the tennis courts of Mr Wong’s Red Hill mansion. Thirty circular tables for ten, ordered on the principles of fengsui, sparkled with monogrammed crockery, hand-forged cutlery, crystal glasses, and gold-tipped chopsticks. The guest list included the cream of Canberra money and politics: Chinese and Russian millionaires—each with his own security detail, a dozen faces I recognised from the latest National Crime Commission hearings, a politician whose lawyer was sending me Cease and desist letters, and a swarm of blowflies from the Murdoch Press.
I was on my knees on the dance floor, balancing a half-erect tripod while untangling the mic cable from the power lead, when a pair of Doc Martens and mesh stockings appeared in my peripheral vision and asked if I needed help. The waitress was holding a full tray of champagne glasses, but she reached out with her free hand and unclipped the leg extender, allowing me to lock the feet into the spreader, level up the ball and socket head and save the camera from toppling into the ice sculpture.
“Manfrotto?” she asked.
“Miller,” I replied. (A secret Masonic greeting we videographers use to identify fellow initiates.)
My eyes followed the fishnets up to a pink Playboy Bunny uniform with the words Wong Way Construction in a circle embroidered around the cottontail. A pink surgical mask obscured her face, so that green eyes and blue-streaked hair were her only identifying features.
“Champagne?” she held out a tray of crystal flutes. “Or aren’t you allowed to drink on duty?”
“I’m not a cop,” I growled, helping myself to two glasses. “Booze is the only thing that will get me through this wedding.”
She inspected me closely as I drained the first glass.
“Aren’t you Colin Stone?”
I nodded and started on the second.
“We studied you in Film History. I wrote an essay on Master Shen’s Academy.”
“Oh yes? How did that go?”
“Dr. Artemesia only gave it a B+ because she says you are a sell-out.”
It is hard to know how to react when a pretty girl sees you as a chapter in a textbook and reminds you of a relationship you are trying to forget.
“Dr Artemesia?” I replied. “Can’t say I know her.”
The waitress told me she had just graduated in Media Studies but wished she had chosen Hospitality instead. “Passing out drinks at posh weddings is better paid than pitching movie scripts to tax accountants.”
“If you want a job, I’m short-handed here.”
She laughed and told me she was waitressing today as a favour for the bride.
“Maybe you should pitch her grandfather your script,” I suggested.
“Pixie said he’s not interested in vegan feminist slasher movies; he prefers John Wayne westerns.”
I could not tell whether she was serious or having a go at me.
“Is the groom’s name really Rambo?”
She shrugged. “He was christened Rimbaud, but he changed the spelling.”
“Preferred an action hero than a French poet,” I suggested.
“He says the family name used to be Ras-putin.”
“Rather a ruthless dictator than a sex-mad monk.”
“How do you mean?” she asked, cocking one eyebrow above the mask.
I didn’t feel like bringing her up to date on the history of 20th century Russia.
“Property development and on-line casinos — it sounds like an alliance made in heaven.”
“There’s no love lost between the Wongs and the Putins, according to Pixie,” Fishnet stockings confided.
“Like the Montagues and the Capulets?”
This time both eyebrows puckered with incomprehension — obviously Shakespeare was not on the reading list for a Media degree either. On the other hand, my mood lightened at the prospect of a punch-up between in-laws to enliven a boring afternoon.
The waitress picked up her tray. “Just wave if you need more booze.”
I set up the tripod on a riser that gave me a clear view of the VIP tables. I filmed Mr Wong greeting the wedding guests as they arrived and panned to follow his octogenarian business partner Henry Way and his pearl-encrusted wife as they found their seats at the top table and Mrs Way slipped a handful of Belgian chocolates from the adjoining table into her very large handbag.
One wedding guest I was not eager to meet popped up in the viewfinder: crumpled suit, red face, tinted glasses, oily comb-over, and already three sheets to the wind. Senator Joe Blake was headed in my direction.
“Well blow me down if it isn’t Mr Colin Cast-The-First-Stone. They must have left he cat flap open.”
“Nice to see you too, Senator.”
He leant in close and exhaled a cloud of alcohol, cheap cigar and halitosis. “Some motorbike-loving friends of mine asked me to say that the next time you bring your camera within a mile of the clubhouse, they’ll string you up by your wrinkled scrotum and treat you to the ancient Chinese art of lichee.”
“I think you’ll find that lichee is a delicious tropical fruit, Senator, often paired with ice cream. Unfortunately, death by a thousand cuts, known as lingchi, is no longer a sentencing option for corrupt politicians.”
He bared his brown teeth at me in what he imagined to be a smile. “You think you are a smart bastard, don’t you?” He tapped a wing of his glasses, and a pinpoint of red light came to life above his nose. “Watch what you say, or I’ll beam this recording to my lawyer.”
“Video glasses. How high-tech of you Senator.”
“AI will soon render people like you extinct, Stone.”
Uninvited, he came around behind the camera and peered into the viewfinder screen, which showed the Putin family arriving in a tight group, shepherded by a platoon of large, bald men in identical black suits with tailored bulges under one arm.
Blake tapped the screen. “This Wong-Putin alliance is bloody shonky, don’t you think? The Chinese criminal diaspora in league with the Russian oligarchs?” He waved at the drinks waitress, but she appeared not to see him. “I assume there’s a juicy reason for you sticking your lens in where it’s not wanted.”
“Since you ask, I’m doing a favour for the bride. And if your parents ever decide to marry, Senator, it will be my pleasure to do the same for you.”
Senator Blake hung around for the next ten minutes like a bad smell: insisting I try out his video glasses, hinting at scandals I might like to turn into movie scripts, his eyes forever roaming the room for more important guests to annoy. When the drinks waitress finally waved back, he filled my ear with spittle.
“Whoah! I wouldn’t say no to those fishnets wrapped around my pulsing thighs. Get me her phone number and I’ll erase the incriminating evidence.”
Just then, a posse of social media infliencers made a noisy entrance and the Palmer Party senator for Tasmania lost interest in me. Which was fortunate because given another few minutes in his malodorous presence I might have thrown up on his shoes — brown suede desert boots with a blue suit. I kid you not.
Eddie swung past to point out the celebrities, rich uncles and jewel-encrusted tai-tais who, for reasons of face, must be shown in the video. I snapped their photos on my phone and added their names to the list.
“Make sure they are chatting and smiling, not cursing and smoking,” he warned me.
I zoomed in on a glamorous Chinese woman with a bottle-blonde bouffant perm, scarlet elbow-length gloves, and matching stilettos, who was paying a lot of attention to Mr Way. I pulled focus to Mrs Way, whose expression could have curdled the jug of piña colada on their table.
“Who’s the cougar?” I asked Eddie.
“Ignore her. Uncle Wash especially wants you to film Mr Putin. Everything he does, who he talks to, when he leaves the room.”
“Is your uncle worried he’ll steal the table decorations?”
“He thinks worse,” said Eddie cryptically. He pointed out the young Asian bodybuilders lounging against the tentpoles, puffing clouds of vape smoke, their thick necks decorated with lizard tattoos and gold chains, their shiny white tuxedos also bulging below the armpits. Eddie whispered: “They are… what is the word, body-soldiers?”
“In ancient Rome they were called bucellarii,” I informed him, seizing the chance to go one-up in our never-ending game of movie trivia. “It is Latin for biscuit-eaters, because they had better food than the ordinary soldiers.”
“Better not film them, no matter what they eat,” Eddie warned. “By the way, the groom asked can you upload the video to Tik-Tok?”
“I wouldn’t know how to upload anything to Tik-Tok. You’ll need a millennial for that. Ask the drinks waitress — she has a degree in Tik-Tok.”
At the end of the speeches, Fishnets dropped by with plastic glasses of whisky sour, garnished with a mint leaf and a cherry. “I thought you might need something stronger than Lake George Prosecco.”
I said, “Eddie wants a word with you…” but was drowned out by the throaty roar of a turbo-charged V12 Daytona engine. Two of the biscuit-eaters pulled aside the tent flaps and a gold sports car poppled and gurgled its way onto the dance floor. Rambo Putin waved imperiously from the driver’s seat and his pimply face glowed like a paper lantern as he gunned the motor, to whistles and applause from the younger guests.
Fishnets shouted over the noise: “The Ferrari is his wedding present from Rambo’s parents.”
“I thought wedding presents were for both the bride and groom,” I shouted back.
“Don’t get me started,” she frowned, and disappeared back into the crowd.
When the sound of the engine died and was replaced by admiring chatter, Eddie said to me, “Uncle Wash says thank you and asks if you still want to make that movie about the burglar with the lizard name.”
Five years ago, the ABC had greenlighted a series of six documentaries about colourful, reformed criminals. The pilot episode featured a cat burglar named Kevin Dervish, but when the cops caught him red-handed pulling off a five-million-dollar heist, the national broadcaster had second thoughts and cancelled the series.
“We had to give the money back, remember?”
“Uncle Wash says now is a propitious time to make it,” Eddie persisted.
“There’s nothing I’d like better, mate. Dervish was a charming little crim and the camera loved his face, but right now he’s in the slammer and not taking calls from casting agents.”
“Mr Dervish will get medical parole,” said Eddie. “Stomach cancer. Uncle Washington is very enthusiastic.”
A grunge band kept the kids dancing for another few hours. Mr Wong made a speech apologising for the absence of the bride’s father who had been detained in China. Senator Blake proposed a toast to “all the pretty ladies” then threw up on the ice sculpture. A tai-tai fight broke out when Mrs Way accused a woman at the next table of trying to steal her handbag. The best man — high on whatever he and the groom had been sniffing — climbed up to the trapeze platform in the circus tent and had to be talked down by the priest. And old Mr Way had to be given first aid when his dance partner trod on his foot with a stiletto heel. Finally, at 5 pm, the golden Ferrari bearing the bride and groom, exited the tent with the ear-splitting POP of a potato up the exhaust pipe, that had all the bucellarii reaching compulsively inside their jackets. The Putin family departed in a group, escorted by their praetorian guard of Bulgarian bouncers, who engaged in a half-hearted shoving match with the gum-chewing Asian bouncers. As I panned the camera to follow them, I paused on the image of a surprisingly sober-looking Senator Blake whispering urgently in the ear of the blonde cougar who was not to be filmed. “Good luck riding that tiger,” I whispered to myself.
A team of waiters rolled away the circular table tops and converted the wedding banquet into a casino of square, baize-covered mahjong tables — a signal for the serious gamblers to roll up their sleeves and rattle the tiles at $500 a game. As I was coiling up the last of the mic cables, Eddie tapped me on the shoulder.
“Uncle Wash wants to see us.”
“Give me a minute,” I said.
“Now. I told the waitress to keep an eye on the film gear.”
At the tent flap, two muscle-bound identical twins with bleached hair exhaled clouds of vape smoke over our heads and checked us out with their x-ray vision. At the mansion door we met a majordomo in a while silk suit and the scarred face of a kungfu villain in a chop-socky movie. His voice was hoarse, as though he had been kicked in the larynx too many times.
“Wong sīnsāng is in the Whisky Room,” he croaked.
As we followed the butler, Eddie filled me in. He had convinced his uncle that the reformed criminal series was a guaranteed hit, with killer scripts, and Uncle Washington had offered to underwrite the pilot episode when Mr Dervish “becomes available”.
“The money is already in the bank,” Eddie smiled triumphantly.
“What makes him think Dervish will cooperate?”
“Uncle Wash knows some people who spoke to Mr Dervish in prison. They made him an offer.”
“You said he has cancer.”
“That’s the reason we start shooting as soon as he gets out.”
“What’s in it for Uncle Wash?” I asked.
“I did not ask. Perhaps he wants to be a patron of the Arts.”
The kungfu butler lead us down a set of carpeted stairs to the basement and opened an ornately carved oak door. Wellington Wong’s Whisky Room had the discrete charm of a Scottish Highlands hunting lodge remodelled by the Trump family. The centrepiece was an immense fireplace surmounted by an impossibly large rack of deer antlers; the roaring blaze on the 65 inch video screen in the hearth radiated no heat at all. The framed oil paintings on the tartan wallpaper depicted crumbling castles, shaggy cattle and bearded men in kilts. An Indian tiger had been sacrificed to cover the parquet floor between a leather chesterfield and two matching armchairs. The onyx coffee table between them, lit by a concealed spotlight, featured a single whisky bottle that I instinctively knew was more valuable than my car.
I recognised the two men in the armchairs: Mr Washington Wong on the left, grey-haired, short and stocky; and the thin, bald scarecrow figure of Mr Henry Way.
They both appeared to be dead.
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