How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling by Martin Chambers Read Free Book Online

out at the pit and I began to get an inkling of what was happening. After that van, after that trouble, Palmenter must have flipped. Fromsometime around then it became only about the money. Palmenter had a way of telling you what you wanted to hear, but once, in my first weeks, he said to me that these people had no one and it was a moral thing to help them, and I believed him. Then that day standing on the edge of the pit with the flames below he said no one was going to miss them. Funny how Palmenter was now under the sand with them.
    â€˜What if Palmenter’s family come looking for him?’
    â€˜He’s got no one.’
    â€˜You sure? No one?’
    â€˜Even if they do – what? We just gotta not say anything. I don’t think anyone’s gunna come looking. Not before we do this import and then we get outta here.’
    It was true. About the only people who ever visited the station arrived with Palmenter, rough men who kept to themselves. Particularly around muster time it was a place that shunned outsiders and we would be long gone by the time anyone else came visiting.
    â€˜What will you do?’
    He didn’t answer me. Why hadn’t he left years ago? He had access to the vans and the fuel. Palmenter seemed to trust him, at least as much as Palmenter trusted anybody. Which was not in the slightest.
    We set to filling out the forms. Spanner produced a mix of pens and we used different ones on each document. As he finished a page he might scuff it on the floor, or fold it a few times, things to produce some random wear marks on the paper. We had six vans, so we filled two as transfers from some other address, one in Melbourne and one in Darwin. We made hire documents for three. Three different hire companies, in Adelaide, Brisbane and Alice Springs. The last van we made licence papers for an address in Perth.
    â€˜If they get stopped out here, cops can’t check any of this, so they just look at it. Lazy buggers, they just ignore it. Too much work for ’em to do much else. In New South Wales cops have computers in their cars but they can’t check details across the border, so none of these are in New South Wales,’ Spanner explained to me.
    â€˜You seem proud of it.’
    He sighed. ‘I guess it was my idea.’
    I waited for him to elaborate.
    â€˜I was like you when you first came. Keen to help, show that youwere smart, worthwhile to have around.’
    I was going to object, like you do when people say things about you that are true, and the more true they are the more you want to object. He was right, but then I think we are all like that, it’s natural to want to impress when you first start a new job. Not just a job. Any new place where you want to fit in.
    What had led him to this place? Why hadn’t he left? Why did he seem, at the same time, so content to spend his days pottering with the various cars and machinery in the shed and yet so discontented, drinking beer steadily from midmorning until by early evening he was grumpy and drunk and best left alone? Obviously he had been, still was, a great mechanic. He would grumble and mutter and sip his beer while he worked some assembly he had dismantled down to dust back up to a complex and wonderful machine. That was when he was proudest, just then when whatever it was came back to life. It lasted about ten minutes, then he would be on to the next thing, pulling it apart, talking in equal measure to us both, idly to me and coaxingly to the machine. Later in the afternoon he would leave his bench and I would follow him out under the trees behind the shed and we’d sit, drinking beer and leafing through his tired magazines until by nightfall I had to leave him. He had girly magazines too but they just made you horny. The better ones, the ones we both enjoyed, were of outback adventure with stories of escape and fishing and camping up the coast.
    In all our conversations I had never asked him why he