The Ebola Conspiracy

by Mark Furness

  “Fuck all. He won’t talk.”

  “Because of his mouth? The wounds. Can’t talk?”

  “His lips are full of stitches, but he does all right in his sleep.”

  “So what are you hearing?”

  “From Henry? Gibberish. Goes on and on about Christ. Asking for help.”

  “What’s the talk around Silverwater?”

  “The kid’s cellmate did it.”

  “Why would Henry’s cellmate want to cut him up?”

  “No idea. You’re the journalist.”

  “Who’s visiting him?”

  “His sister and mother. Not many others,” Tyson sneered. “Great friends he’s got.”

  “Not his father?”

  “Not that I know of, but I’m mostly not there during the day. I’m doing four to midnight. Day off today.”

  “Anything else catching your attention?”

  “There’s a book he‘s got next to his bed. About a kid who turns into a cockroach. A fucking weird read.”

  “Metamorphosis? Franz Kafka?”

  “That sounds like it.”

  “Do you know who gave it to him?”

  “Naa. But there’s some words written inside the cover: Stay cool, buddy. I’m with you, Bart.

  “Bart?”

  “That’s it.”

  I gave Tyson a $20 bill and he went to the bar for another round. I checked my notebook.

  Tyson came back. “Carol likes your eyes,” he said, handing me a schooner, but no change.

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “She’s an eye reader: character analysis.”

  “So can I have your mobile phone number then?”

  “Early days,” he said. “Go through Tom. He said you won’t quote me. No prison sources or any of that crap either. I could lose my job.”

  I gave Tyson my business card. It just had my mobile number, email, and the office address.

  “Ed-gar Hart,” he said, studying my card. “Why don’t people call you Ed?”

  I told him the truth. “Apparently I was born arse-about, so my father started calling me by the arse-end of my name and it stuck.”

  As I walked home, I figured I knew who “Bart” was. But to be certain, I needed to check a file. That could wait until morning. I picked Fish up from our next door neighbour. Sue was a godsend. All that the regular doggy day-care cost me was a box of mid-priced chardonnay now and then, the occasional box of cigars, a not-too-long chat at the door, and filling an extra shopping list at the supermarket once in a while. This night, I agreed to pay her later with a marijuana joint to smoke on the occasion of her 73rd birthday in three weeks’ time.

  I scanned the street for shifty strangers before putting the key in my front door. A girl holding a lead attached to a black cat dressed in a pink waistcoat counted as strange, but not shifty. The hallway was as lively as a morgue at night, and the wall-light failed when I flicked the switch. Fish charged fearlessly into the gloomy kitchen. I started to wonder if someone had been fiddling with the fuse box, but the kitchen lights worked. On the bench, there was a note from Alice. She was staying the night at her boyfriend Fred’s. I calculated that Hugo should be wandering around Dubai Airport on his stopover to London. I tried his phone but it went to voice mail.

  I opened a beer and sat on a bench in the courtyard under the frangipani tree, enjoying the honey-salt scent of its flowers, and tossed around ideas about how to persuade Alice to move in with Fred without causing alarm. My ideas were unconvincing, whatever way I shaped them, so I took them to bed with a glass of red and turned them to mist.

  XI

  I TRACKED Hugo down the next morning from my taxi on the way to the office. He’d arrived at his grandparent’s home in Brighton without incident, or so he said, and answered every question with ‘good’.

  “I have to go. Nanna’s waiting to take me to hospital.”

  “What for?”

  “To visit grandad.”

  “Of course, mate. Sorry. Give him my love.” Hugo’s words had activated fast-moving chemistry that I wiped from my eyes, but I couldn’t wipe away my imagining of little Malcolm, hooked up to a morphine drip, his skin the colour of egg yolk. We’d known for months that the chemo for his liver cancer had failed and it was too late for a transplant because the tumours had spread. I’d dubbed it the Halliday Curse because of the melanoma that took his daughter, Charlotte, but I was keeping that piece of wit to myself.

  I hung up on Hugo and swam gladly into the shallows of my frontal lobe. My first task this morning was to find the Bart who had given Henry East the copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis to read in prison. If he was a friend, Bart had a weird sense of humour, because the ending was not happy for the protagonist.

  At my desk, I typed ‘Bartholomew Edmund Hills’ into the search bar for the East files I kept on my laptop. His name was mentioned several times in the court transcripts. He was a childhood friend of Henry’s who provided the court with a written testimonial about Henry’s fight against gambling addiction and teenage-onset depression. The testimonial was legal haute cuisine: a delicate carpaccio of logic lightly peppered with pathos. No doubt written by lawyers, and Hills was one of them.

  When I phoned Hills’ firm, Greenhill Partners, the receptionist put me through to a chirpy young man. I guess he sniffed a potential client.

  “Oh, you’re that Hart,” he sneered when I revealed I was a journalist, and that I wanted to talk about Henry East.

  “I’m hearing that someone attacked your friend - maybe his cellmate - that it wasn’t a suicide attempt.”

  “You know nothing, Mr Hart.”

  “What is there to know?”

  Hills went silent.

  “I think he’s in danger,” I said.

  Hills hung up, but I had him thinking, seed planted. My next attempt at contact might be more fruitful.

  Claire was standing in my open doorway, listening.

  “That’s an interesting twist,” she said. “If Henry wasn’t a self-harmer, what would drive his cellmate to do it?”

  “A motive.”

  Claire smiled. I felt mean.

  “Our friends at Cavalcade,” she said, stepping into my office. “I found a photo of their co-founder and chairman, a Mr John K. Baker.”

  She grinned as she put the large photo on my desk. When I looked at the picture, I saw why. Baker had wavy, shoulder-length hair parted down the middle, set off with a goatee beard and long moustache with upward curls at either end. The business-suited musketeer, whom I guessed was aged in his fifties, was standing between a smiling Henry East wearing his polo kit, and Charles East sporting a brass-buttoned navy blazer with a polka-dot cravat tucked into his white shirt. What was it about the Easts sandwiching powerful people? And a fucking cravat?

  “I found this too,” she said, handing me a printed copy of a newspaper story from The London Business Examiner. It was dated more than five years ago.

  Cavalcade Founder Lost at Sea

  Jean-Paul Marais, 52, the co-founder of the global private equity pioneer, Cavalcade Investment Group, is lost at sea, presumed dead.

  He fell from the company’s ocean yacht, Electra, during a leg of the MarcoP Classic race between Newport, Rhode Island in the US and Portsmouth, UK.

  Mr Marais disappeared during the night in calm weather about 200 nautical miles west of Portsmouth. The crew on board included Cavalcade’s other co-founder, John K. Baker.

  Cavalcade recently denied reports it is under financial stress.”

  “Talk to the London office and copy Jack in Shanghai,” I said. “See what they know about Baker and Cavalcade.”

  Claire left my office. I phoned Alice and arranged to meet her at a nearby pub. I was still tossing up whether to mention the mutilated fish, but I had become sure of one thing: I didn’t want her staying at home in Darlinghurst until I had solved the mystery of the speckled carp.

  “DAD,” ALICE SAID, LOOKING me in the eye across a table at the Ship Inn
Hotel opposite Circular Quay, gripping a beer glass with both her hands. “I want to tell you something.”

  “Fire away.” I feared she was pregnant.

  “I want to move out and live with Fred. His parents have gone overseas for a year and we can have their house.”

  I looked down at my beer to hide my face.

  “I trust your judgement,” I said, swirling the dregs. “I like Fred. I think it’s a good idea. When?”

  “As soon as we like.”

  “I’ll drive your stuff over when you’re ready.”

  Alice seemed offended that I didn’t put up more of a fight, but she was already spending most nights of the week at Fred’s. I just hoped she wasn’t already being tracked by the fish butchers. I told myself not to be paranoid as she left the bar. I used my phone to look up Bart Hills on the Greenhill Partners’ website. I found his portrait photo and made a screenshot. It was odd, I thought as I studied his features; I couldn’t recall seeing his face in the courtroom during Henry’s trial.

  Later, back at the office, as the sun was approaching the horizon, I approached Claire, who was at her desk tapping on her keyboard. I invited her for a drink at the recently opened Babel Bar. I figured I would be less conspicuous with a partner. She agreed to meet me after she’d filed a story to the London office.

  After walking a few blocks from Gunnaroo, I ascended white marble steps towards a towering sandstone building fronted by a Gothic arch over glass doors big enough to swallow a bus. The Babel Bar was housed inside a heritage-listed cathedral owned by a multi-national corporation called the Catholic Church. With their old customers dying and new recruits rarer than bleu steaks, the local cardinal and his advisers had come up with an inspired money spinner: leasing church buildings to private enterprise. As I stepped under the arch into the roaring booze hall, I wondered how much of the cash being poured into the place each night ended up in the coffers of the lawyers and PR people the church had hired to shade it from the light of a Royal Commission into institutional child abuse.

  God should have been impressed by the cheerful assembly inside his old digs, though he would have found it hard to get a word in, or find a seat. I recognised many of the preening stockbrokers and lawyers, political hacks, investment bankers and sports stars, journalists, PR flunkies and other hangers on paying $20 for drinks worth $2. But most of them were paying with corporate credit cards, passing the cost on to their shareholders, taxpayers or clients, so this mob showed no sign of pain as Babel’s owners milked them.

  I leaned against the long island bar in the middle of the room, browsing for my prey, sipping slowly on a tall glass of obscure Belgian beer. I was grateful when Claire arrived and lifted my tone. I bought her a glass of wine.

  “On the house,” I said, handing her the glass before putting the drink receipt in my wallet so I could charge it later against The Citizen’s research budget. “I’m looking for this guy.”

  I showed her the screenshot of Hills on my phone. It was a long-odds gamble coming here, but I was thirsty and figured we might kill two birds with one stone.

  “I’ll take a stroll,” said Claire.

  I was an owl on a branch. She was a hawk on the wing. I started to think we might make a team. She returned a few minutes later.

  “Up there,” she said, pointing at a babbling group of men and women on the mezzanine floor above. They were standing against a giant mural of Adam and Eve sans fig leaves. Eve was wet-nursing a golden baby with a strangely adult head. Adam had the serpent knotted around his neck like a business tie. What looked, from my distance, like a stack of French fries, encrusted with rubies and diamonds, was sitting on Adam’s shoulder.

  I arrived on the mezzanine level and leaned against a wall to study my photo. Bart Hills, in the flesh, was tall and athletic, with a lightly freckled face and plenty of straw-coloured hair. He could have been Henry East’s fair-skinned doppelganger. I tucked my phone in my jacket and stepped a few metres into the vocal range of my man.

  “Bart Hills?” I asked.

  Hills examined me quickly from feet to forehead and gave me that should-I-know-you look that important people learn at school.

  “Gar Hart,” I said, extending my hand. “We spoke earlier on the phone.”

  Hills ignored my paw. He was holding a glass of white wine by its lower stem. He ran the fingers of his free hand through his hair and nodded for me to follow him to an empty spot beside a wall.

  “Jesus,” he said. “I told you. I have nothing to say. Leave me alone. Okay?”

  “I don’t want to quote you. We’re off the record. But if someone has hurt your friend, it does him no good to hide it.”

  “The police are handling it.”

  “Do you trust the police? They’re saying it was a suicide attempt, but that’s not what I’m hearing.”

  Hills’s face drained of colour. “Fuck off,” he hissed, glancing over my shoulder.

  I felt a gentle tap on my arm and turned.

  Sandy Wallace had the same frizzy Afro hair, bee-stung lips, honey-coloured skin, and athletic build that had dazzled both sexes at high school. She was a fine fit for Babel in her three-piece business suit and dagger heels. A thick-knotted necktie, patterned with silver fishhooks on blue water, hung loose around the unbuttoned neck of her steep-collared, white shirt, its tongue tucked into her waistcoat.

  Hills used the interruption to put his drink on a table and pluck an un-ringing phone from his jacket pocket. He held it against an ear and exited Babel.

  “Sorry,” said Sandy, placing her hand on my arm. “Was that important?”

  “Just saying hello to someone.”

  “Do you know Bart Hills?” she said.

  “Not really. Seems you do, though.” She was standing so close I could smell she’d been drinking for a while.

  “Our firm does a bit of work with his.”

  Her brown eyes gleamed. She took hold of my free hand. “It’s been too long.” Her touch reminded me of Saturday nights, the rush of riding with her drunk and groping in the boot of an overcrowded car to a party with even madder teenagers at the wheel.

  Sandy resumed course. “Sorry, Gar, I have big ears. I heard you asking Hills about Henry East. That poor boy. What’s your angle?”

  I tugged my hand away from hers and pretended to zip my lips, as in no comment, then tried not to blink at my clumsy Freudian slip. There was no way I wanted to divulge Steele’s unpublished info about Henry mutilating his mouth, as opposed to simply cutting his wrists.

  I hadn’t seen Sandy for several years, but I had no doubt she remained a serial leaker who banked favours with journalists by giving them anonymous tips about business deals, as well as gossip she picked up about the private lives of the titans of industry. I didn’t want her spilling our lines of inquiry on the Easts to our media competitors. Claire arrived at my side, by chance or intuition, and helped me duck Sandy’s question. I introduced them.

  “Let’s find a seat,” said Sandy, hooking her arm around mine, leading us to a big sofa against a wall near the Adam and Eve mural. I manoeuvred Claire in between us as we sat. Sandy flagged a waiter and focussed her attention on acquiring a bottle of champagne, so I glanced at Claire and placed an index finger over my lips for a moment. Sandy could be a useful source of information, but only if carefully managed.

  While we waited for the champagne, Claire answered Sandy’s questions. I discovered Claire’s parents were divorced, that she had a younger sister with autism, and she and Carl were still on their learner plates as a married couple.

  Claire reversed the tables as the waiter filled three flutes with Dom Perignon. Sandy revealed she and I had gone to the same university, and after graduation, she had worked as a journalist in the US, Europe and Asia. To the crunching sound of the waiter tucking the bottle into an ice bucket on the table in front of us, Sandy talked as modestly as she could about her stint as press secretary to an Australian Treasurer.

  Claire dragged us all into
the moment: “So what are you doing now?”

  “Investment banking.”

  “You must be a wizard on the share markets then.”

  “It’s more algorithms than magic.”

  “Can you explain something to me?”

  “If I like the question.”

  “What was Henry East’s big mistake?”

  Sandy’s response was PR text book. “Breaking the law.”

  Claire furrowed her brow, apparently troubled. “How could he have got away with it?”

  “Are you trying to trap me?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Well, he traded in his own name and he did it onshore. A rookie’s error.” Sandy’s eyes showed more than a hint of growing irritation.

  “So how would a pro do it?”

  “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

  Claire smiled. It was a nice smile, at least from my point of view.

  “Claire, please don’t think I’m rude, but could I have a private word with Gar?”

  “Of course.” She took her glass and walked to the mezzanine railing to look down on the main room.

  Sandy shuffled along until we were thigh-to-thigh and whispered in my ear, “She’s a saucy little thing.”

  “She’s married,” I said.

  “So?” said Sandy, raising her eyebrows at me.

  I sipped champagne and thought about Sandy, the taste of her. She seemed to sense she’d flicked my switch. We looked into each other’s eyes; Sandy was shuffling her large pack of characters behind hers.

  “Gar,” she said, without warmth or humour, “be careful with Charles East. His son made a mistake. That’s it. Don’t forget what happened the last time you went after the old guy.”

  “Thank you for your concern.”

  I tried not to show it, but she had pierced me with a tiny but un-ignorable splinter.

  “Anyway,” she said, reverting to kind-and-sensitive-Sandy, patting my hand. “Do you still have that delightful terrace in Darlinghurst?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what about that place in the Blue Mountains? That old farm?”

  “That too.”