Gus sighed, and not just a normal sigh; this was the sort of sigh that only somebody who had seventy-four years of living under their belt – and a seventy-five kilo bench press – had the right to muster.
‘You know what, neither do I,’ he said, closing the door. ‘It was a fricking dumb idea to come here.’
‘What about the Preacher?’ I said, indicating the Milo tin.
Gus’s eyes flicked between the tin and me. Eventually he said, ‘We better do the right thing by him.’
He dropped the clutch and we followed the dirt road deeper into the valley until we came to a small church. Or the shell of a church, because all that was left were broken stone walls. I hadn’t thought of churches going out of business, but I guessed it had to happen. And for the same reason other places close down: lack of customers.
‘This is actually starting to freak me out a bit,’ I said.
Gus took the Milo can from me and said, ‘You can stay here, no problem.’
Which was what I intended to do.
Even when he got out of the ute, Milo tin in his hands, it was what I intended to do. But as he walked towards what was left of the church, the engine of the ute tick-tick-ticking as it cooled down, I changed my mind.
Not sure why – maybe the same thing that had killed that cat.
But by the time I got out of the ute Gus had disappeared from view.
The day had become very still, very humid, the air so thick you could poke holes in it with your finger.
‘Gus!’ I yelled as I hurried towards the church.
There was a loud fluttering sound from within its ruined walls. Were there ghosts? Spirits? Other things that didn’t even have names? The appearance of pigeons, at least twenty of them, taking for the sky, put paid to these possibilities.
My heart, I noticed, was fluttering too.
‘Gus, you there?’ I yelled.
‘Over here,’ came his voice from behind the church.
I walked quickly – okay, I ran – in that direction. After I rounded the corner of the church I could see him, standing, staring.
‘You okay?’ I said as I approached.
Gus turned and there was an expression on his face I hadn’t seen before. I pretty much thought nothing scared Gus – after you’ve had your leg taken away at fifteen, what’s going to faze you? But right then he looked scared, really scared.
‘You okay?’ I said again.
‘Memories,’ he said. ‘Too many for an old codger.’
Don’t rock the boat.
No more digging.
But I really couldn’t help myself – this was my family, my history. In a way it was my inheritance.
‘Was your father a canefarmer?’ I blurted.
‘For all of his working life,’ said Gus.
‘So you used to come to this church?’
‘All the time,’ he said. ‘My parents were great believers.’
Great believers – it was a strange choice of phrase, but I guess Gus was about as atheist as an atheist could get. From great believers to a great non-believer in only one generation – that was something worth considering.
‘Is that where the Preacher got all that stuff from?’
Gus nodded. ‘He was a strange kid – the Bible was pretty much the only book he ever read.’
I thought about this for a while: okay, he’d been a strange kid, but lots of kids were strange – it didn’t mean they ended up like the Preacher.
‘And he, like, just got stranger?’ I said.
Gus responded with that sigh, the one he earned by being around for seventy or so years and bench pressing seventy-five kilos.
‘The death of his twin sent him over the edge.’
I thought of two photos: the family portrait in the drawer of Gus’s desk and the photo in the Tabori crypt.
‘How did his twin die?’
Gus hesitated before he answered, a sure sign that he was lying. ‘He got sick. Lots of kids died in those days.’
With that, Gus marched off. I followed him. By that time we were right at the back of the church, surrounded by that now-familiar tangle of lawyer vine.
It was only when I saw a lopsided gravestone that I realised we were in a graveyard.
I stopped, waiting for the coimetrophobia to hit.
But it didn’t; the only thing I felt was a slight wobble.
Have I been cured? I recalled what Dr Juratowitch had said, that my phobia was about being reminded of my mortality. When I thought about it, it seemed pretty obvious: I didn’t need graveyards to remind me of my mortality because The Debt was doing an even better job of it.
Gus stopped in front of another gravestone.
Luigi Silvagni, it said. 1915 – 1956.
Gus’s father, my great-grandfather. I quickly did the maths.
‘He was only forty-one when he died,’ I said.
‘Dodgy ticker,’ said Gus, bringing his hand up to his own heart. But then it dropped down again. ‘Actually, he died a long time before that.’
I sort of knew what was coming next, and I wanted to hear it but didn’t want to hear it.
Gus continued, ‘They took his arm.’
‘When he was my age?’ I asked, though I already knew the answer. Gus nodded and I waited for it to come – a Tristanesque pile-driver to the guts – but it didn’t. Maybe it was because I’d already seen that photo in Gus’s drawer – the hidden arm, or hidden lack of arm.
‘A one-handed canefarmer?’ I said.
‘About as useful as a one-legged track coach,’ said Gus, sounding sorry for himself.
‘Almost,’ I said, not buying into it.
‘A one-armed canefarmer could get by, but a one-armed piano player was never going to cut the mustard.’
‘Sorry?’ I said.
‘Your great-grandfather was a gifted musician. Completely self-taught, mind you, but when he was a kid he could play just about anything, especially piano. That Jelly Roll Morton stuff.’
Jelly Roll who?
‘And then they took off his arm and he never played again.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Occasionally he’d blow some mouth organ. But never in public. I’d go down the back of the block and he’d be playing to himself. If he knew anybody was listening he’d stop.’
It was about the saddest thing I’d ever heard, and tears were welling in my eyes.
‘Can we go back home?’ I said.
‘Just one thing to do,’ said Gus, taking the lid off the Milo tin.
‘You’re going to just toss them out here?’
‘It’s what he wanted,’ said Gus, and he launched into a pretty good impression of his strange Bible-obsessed brother: ‘That I may die in mine own city, and be buried by the grave of my father and of my mother.’
‘Buried, not just tossed out,’ I said.
‘You’re getting pedantic now,’ said Gus, tipping the Milo tin over.
At first there was just a puff of dust, but then the ashes themselves started tumbling out. I knew that Gus was right: what I was seeing was what was left of the vessel the Preacher had inhabited during his time on earth. But I couldn’t help but think it was more than that, that what had made the Preacher the Preacher was also coming out of that Milo tin, turning the wait-a-while ash grey.
And it was freaking me out.
I started walking away, but some lawyer vine attached itself to my sock – now I totally got the wait-a-while thing. As I removed it another gravestone caught my eye.
Elizabeth Pandolfini. 1943 – 1955.
‘Didn’t anybody in this stupid valley live to a proper age?’ I said.
Gus looked at the gravestone and shook his head slowly, tears forming in the corners of his eyes.
Dom, stop digging! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!
‘I’ll wait for you in the ute,’ I told him.
Once inside I switched on the radio and turned up the volume as loud as it went; I needed to drown out all these questions that were whi
zzing around my head, demanding answers.
Gus returned a couple of minutes later, still holding the Milo tin.
‘What the hell are you going to do with that?’ I said.
He looked at it, as if he wasn’t quite sure what the answer was, and then he walked over to the church and placed it somewhere inside.
‘At last, a proper preacher,’ he said when he returned.
The pigeons were returning to their roosts.
‘With a congregation of pigeons.’
Gus didn’t seem to be in a talking mood as we wound back out of the valley. Which was fine with me – neither was I.
By the time he dropped me back home it was midday. Time for a swim. Or maybe take in a movie. Open those emails from Imogen.
Or time to turn the aircon to arctic and crawl back into bed.
Which, as you may have guessed, was exactly what I did.
FRIDAY
JRLO, HWKP AND HRLP
My phone beeped.
So what? I thought. I’ve got about a million unopened emails and you think I’m going to stress about a piddling SMS?
It beeped again, seemingly more insistently.
Phone, didn’t you hear me last time?
A third beep.
Obviously not.
And then, nothing.
I’m not sure why leaving an email unopened is sort of okay but not reading a SMS is unbearable. Maybe Dr Juratowitch or some other expert on adolescent behaviour could explain that. I grabbed my stupid phone and I read the stupid texts.
jrlo, said the first one.
hwkp, said the second one.
hrlp, said the third one.
They were all from the same person: PJ.
I checked the keypad on my iPhone – it was just as I thought: ‘jrlo’, ‘hwkp’ and ‘hrlp’ were all what you might come up with if you were trying to type ‘help’ but couldn’t see the keyboard.
So, basically, PJ was saying ‘help’. Three times.
So what? I thought.
What’s it got to do with me? I thought.
I went with this for maybe five minutes before the hard reality kicked in: it had everything to do with me!
Somebody as tough and resourceful, as streetwise, as PJ wasn’t going to ask for help unless she really needed it. And I kind of felt flattered that she’d asked me and not some other street kid. So I texted her back.
Although I waited for ten minutes I got no answer. I thought about ringing her, but decided against it. The three misspelled ‘helps’ suggested that her phone was hidden somewhere, in a pocket maybe. If I rang it maybe I would give the game away.
So the conventional methods of finding PJ weren’t going to work. Fortunately for me, and thanks mainly to The Debt, I had some other less conventional means at my disposal. Like triangulating her phone. Which is what I did. ClamTop came up with this address: 45 Frank Condon Drive, Mermaid Waters. I’d been to Mermaid Waters once before and I remembered it as a typical Gold Coast suburb, crisscrossed with canals.
I shoved ClamTop into a shoulder bag and made my way downstairs.
It wasn’t far to Mermaid Waters – a short taxi ride and I was there. I wasn’t sure who Frank Condon was, but the street named after him was a pretty ordinary-looking one full of pretty ordinary-looking houses.
I walked, eyes flicking from one letterbox to the next until I came to number 45. There was nothing about this house that disrupted the pattern – yes, it was also very ordinary. Nothing about the exterior gave any indication as to who its occupants might be.
So what to do?
It took me all of a second to arrive at the answer to that – I had to get inside. But if I was going to just rock up and knock on the door to 45 Frank Condon Drive, I needed to have a story.
So what sort of random people knock on random doors?
Because I lived in a gated community, pretty much nobody knocked unexpectedly on our door. Occasionally Samsoni would ring on the intercom and say something like, ‘There’s a couple of young men from the Mormon Church who are interested in discussing Jesus Christ and the state of your eternal soul.’
Funny, they never seemed to get any further than the front gate.
And then it came to me: I was knocking on the wrong door! I’d met this girl on the bus and we’d got to talking and found we had a lot in common. She’d given me her address and I’d put it in my iPhone. So here I was.
Okay, this story had several thousand holes in it – for a start, why would a girl give you her street address in this day and age and not her email address? – but it was all I had, so I decided to go with it.
I approached the front door. All very suburban. All very normal.
But when I got close enough to knock, I noticed something that wasn’t quite so suburban, quite so normal: a CCTV camera. Thanks to the visits I’d made to Hanley’s shop I knew what model it was: a wireless Boscan 165Y, the same as those seriously cashed-up bikies had bought that day.
Although my knocking wasn’t getting any response, I had this feeling there was somebody inside the house and right now they were looking right at me.
Okay, it was only a feeling, a hunch, but that’s yet another thing I’d learnt from The Debt; sometimes that’s what you go with. I made my retreat, but already a plan was forming in my head.
There weren’t many hiding places on Frank Condon Drive, so I sat in the gutter, took ClamTop out of my bag and opened it. It was just as I’d expected: there was a wireless network within range. I set ClamTop to work, the little red devil waving his trident about. It took much longer than it normally did and it occurred to me that this particular wireless network had more security than usual for a suburban home. I’d been suspicious before, but now I was pretty certain there was something nasty going on in 45 Frank Condon Drive. And maybe that something nasty was happening right now.
Hurry up, Dom!
Eventually the network was hacked, and I had a cloned desktop to look at. Again it was just as I’d expected: the CCTV feeds were open.
I’d been right – somebody had been looking at me when I’d knocked on the door, because the first feed was the view from the camera I’d seen. I couldn’t help noticing how clear the image was. Hanley was right: quality hardware. The second feed was from the back door, giving a view of a nondescript backyard: a patch of lawn, a Hills Hoist, not much more. But the third feed caught my attention immediately – it was a brightly lit room. There didn’t seem to be any furniture, but in the corner I could make out a figure, wearing jeans and a face-concealing hoodie.
Is that PJ?
The figure moved closer to the camera – yes, it was PJ!
A cold shiver moved up my spine, jumping from vertebra to vertebra.
One word popped into my head: police. This was pretty creepy, pretty serious, no job for some fifteen-year-old kid with a jumped-up idea of his own capabilities. I even took out my phone, ready to give the cops a call.
But I stopped. I was so close to the final instalment; could I afford to have the cops snooping around in my life? And I knew that PJ was certainly no fan of the constabulary.
Cops or no cops?
If I went with the no-cops option I needed a plan; how to get inside that house?
It seemed logical to me that somebody who had that much CCTV, who was that paranoid, would most probably have other hardware as well, like a gun.
I couldn’t risk just breaking in.
I remembered the work I’d done for Hound during the third instalment. How, as he had put it, we’d flushed the rat out. We’d tricked Nitmick into leaving his apartment and then we’d nabbed him.
I needed to flush the rat out.
But how?
How?
And then it came to me.
As far as plans went it wasn’t my best work, not by a long shot, and already I could see that it had lots of problems. But it was the only one I had.
First I had to get onto YouTube, find some footage. That wasn’t as easy as I thoug
ht it would be. Yes, there were a lot of clips of cops, but mostly they were from films, and the cops were film cops, doing very spectacular film stuff – definitely not what I wanted.
But eventually I found this program called The Force. It was actually shot in Victoria, and the cops wore Victorian cops’ uniforms. They were different, but not that different. I fast-forwarded through several clips until I found what I was looking for: cops bashing on a door. I saved a few minutes of this clip to an AVI file.
It took me a while to find out how to do what the next part of my plan needed. But, as with most things in life, the answer was on Google. Now I was ready to go.
Seriously, is this going to work? I asked myself again. The plan had so many holes you could strain spaghetti with it.
But I had no choice – I had to go with it.
So I did.
I got as close to the house as I could without being captured by the CCTV. And then, ClamTop in my hands, I switched the feed from the first CCTV to the AVI file I’d created.
I put ClamTop back in my bag, raced up to the door and started thumping on it, channelling every beefy, burly cop on every cop show I’d ever seen.
My theory was that the combination of the knocking and the footage would cause whoever was inside to panic and exit via the back door. Just like, so Dr Chakrabarty reckoned, the god Pan had caused the Persians to panic in the Battle of Marathon.
It worked – Dom Silvagni, you are a genius!
I watched as a figure hurried out the back, through the backyard and then out of sight.
But I didn’t watch for long, because when I tried the front door it was locked! I hurried along the side of the house, to the back.
The back door, as I’d hoped, had been left open. I slipped inside.
‘PJ!’ I yelled over and over again as I raced from room to room to room.
But none of them was the brightly lit room I’d seen on the CCTV.
How could that be? Was the feed from another house close by?
But as soon as I’d posed that question I knew what the answer must be: the feed was from a hidden room. I retraced my steps through the rooms, looking more carefully this time. In the third room, the lounge room, I found what I was looking for: the rug, some hideous gold and blue thing, didn’t seem to be lying completely flat. Again, this was nothing more than a feeling.
Take a Life Page 2
