Another thing The Debt had taught me – cover your bases. Okay, two things – cover your bases, and make full use of sporting analogies. Unlike YouTube, it’s very, very easy to remain completely anonymous on Pirate Bay. It’s also very easy to fudge the time. Otherwise all those dudes who put up movies before they’ve been commercially released would have the dogs of Hollywood unleashed on them.
‘Have I done anything illegal?’ I asked, all faux innocence. ‘I probably shouldn’t have used that James Bond song, but it seemed so perfect.’
Detective Westaway was giving his colleagues some major smile action, and it occurred to me that he hadn’t been so convinced about this little trip behind the high stone walls of Halcyon Grove. I sort of guessed that he wouldn’t be buying next time they went to the pub.
‘Sorry to have bothered you, Dominic,’ said Detective Westaway. ‘Looks like we’re barking up the wrong tree.’
Right tree, wrong branch – I almost felt sorry for them, especially when Detective Westaway indicated the magazine and said, ‘You fellas into running?’
‘Gus is a coach,’ I said. ‘And I run middle distance.’
‘Fifteen hundred metres?’ he said. I nodded. ‘So what’s your PB, if you don’t mind me asking?’
I thought about lying, telling him something a bit pedestrian, but then I thought why bother? I told him my Rome time. ‘Four minutes flat.’
He whistled. ‘I’ll be watching out for you in the next Olympics,’ he said, smiling.
With those retro sidies, he didn’t look much like cop, more like the guitarist in a rockabilly band. He brought out a business card from his pocket and placed it lightly on the table.
‘Rent-a-Cop,’ he said. ‘I do weddings, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, but I draw the line at pet funerals.’
As he joined his colleagues and the three detectives left, I watched him carefully. He had the loose springy walk of an athlete; was he a runner too? I looked at the card, half-expecting it to say Rent-a-Cop, but of course it was an official Queensland Police card. He was definitely a cool cop, though, and I slotted the card into my wallet.
Gus said, ‘I don’t even want to know what that was about.’
‘You’re right, you don’t,’ I said, getting online on my iPhone, going to YouTube: 89,111 plays! But why hadn’t they contacted me yet?
The visit from the cops had proven one thing, though: I was hot as, and the Zolton-Banders had every right to be careful contacting me. I just hoped they weren’t going to be so careful that I wasn’t going to notice.
I scrolled through the comments to my YouTube video, but apart from my masterpiece there didn’t seem to be any sort of coded message.
A lot of people were questioning the authenticity of the video now – cynics!
Gus turned on the radio, and the news was all about the housing crisis – apparently some mortgage provider in Brisbane called You Beaut Mortgages had gone bust and people had been picketing outside its head office. But what had started off as a peaceful protest had become violent, with doors being broken and windows smashed; the police had been called in.
As I ate my ugali, I received the usual barrage of messages from the pesky neighbours.
Mom reminding me once again about the dentist appointment. Miranda asking if I knew where the Twilight DVD was. She was obviously going through a vampire phase. Again. And from Toby, this:
Nothing from Dad, though, and I remembered what Gus had said about him last night. The more I thought about it – mother who committed suicide, father who was a drunk, living in that dump – I realised what an extraordinary effort it had been to get through that. Was disposing of Bag Lady just more of the same, a matter of survival? A gazelle wakes up in the morning knowing …
Just as I finished the ugali I heard my phone ding as it received yet another message.
Yes, Mom, I know, dentist at 3.45.
Yes, Miranda, the DVD is in the drawer where it always is.
Yes, Toby:
I opened the message. It wasn’t from the pesky neighbours; it was from The Debt.
you have until 7pm or tonight you take a life
Ice. Spine. You know the drill. I read it again and then it was gone. How in the hell do you do that, make a text message disappear?
But the ice was still there. What more could I do?
My video was now the eighth most watched on the whole of YouTube for the last twenty-four hours. Three more plays and it would catch up with the seventh most watched – a bride going a-over-t at her wedding. What more could I do?
I’d already decided that I would still go to work, that there were way more resources there. I also wanted to get my bike from where I’d chained it to a post. But after last night I was feeling a bit edgy, so when Gus offered to give me a lift I said, ‘Sure.’
As we approached the gates, Samsoni appeared. We exchanged good mornings before he got down to business.
‘Everything okay at your place?’ he said. I wondered if somehow he was referring to this morning’s visit from the detectives.
‘Sure,’ said Gus. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘We’ve had some small issues with the perimeter security. We’ve called the technician and they should be sorted out very quickly, but I was just making sure.’
‘No, everything’s fine, Samsoni,’ said Gus.
We continued on our way, Gus making his usual progress – if that’s the right word – through the traffic. After the revelations of last night, I had questions fighting each other to be asked, but I decided to ignore them. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have enough going on in my head.
We pulled up at Cash Converters and my bike had gone from the post I’d chained it to – I wasn’t surprised, but I was still angry. Why did Hound have to have his office in this godforsaken – thanks, Father Antonio – place!
Although I was an hour late for work, Hound didn’t seem to mind that much.
‘Swings and roundabouts,’ he said. ‘Swings and roundabouts.’
‘Sure,’ I said, unsure what the hell he was talking about.
‘Did you see the YouTube clip, the one that went viral?’ he said. ‘The two kids taking off with that gold. Priceless!’
Did I see it? I was the one who’d put it there, but obviously Hound wasn’t enough of a cyber-sleuth to have worked that out. Thank god.
‘So something to work with there,’ said Hound.
‘Sorry?’
‘Look, you’ve had a bit to do with these kids, this family. So you’ve really got a leg-up on this thing. The gold has to be somewhere, and my bet is that it’s still in the country. My contacts in South Africa tell me that none of it has found its way onto the market. So it’s very simple – where would they hide it?’
Very simple? Really, Hound?
He continued, ‘So what I’d like you to do today is just see what you can come up with. Don’t beat yourself up too much. But just have a think about where they would put it.’
I’d already had plenty of thinks about where they would put it, and quite a few places had come to mind. But something told me that these were too obvious, that somebody as clever as Zoe was going to come up with the mother of all hiding places.
No, there was absolutely no way I would work out where they’d hidden that gold, which is why I needed them to tell me where they’d hidden that gold. Which is why I needed them to contact me. And now!
After Hound had gone off to do Hound things, I got back onto YouTube. They’d taken my clip down! Okay, it was a complete phoney, but still: how dare they?
There was a message that said, We have been advised by legal authorities that this video violates certain … blah blah blah. Just when I was on my way to YouTube immortality.
I checked out the Zolt’s Facebook fan page. There was nothing that looked like a message, coded or otherwise.
Of course, it occurred to me that the Zolton-Banders couldn’t communicate with me for the usual reasons people can’t communicate with you. Except by oui
ja board.
Because they were dead.
Or they might be held captive somewhere, which wouldn’t be a novel experience for the elder Zolton-Bander.
But somehow I didn’t think so. They were testing me: was I clever enough, devious enough, to help them take the gold back to where it belonged?
For the rest of the day I banged my head against the wall. Well, that’s what it felt like, anyway.
My dentist appointment was at three forty-five and I’d pretty much decided to give it a miss. But at three the text came from Mom – don’t forget dentist. Okay, maybe she wasn’t an American, but she sure was American about teeth! And by the time three fifteen came around, I was pretty happy for an excuse to get out of the office. Besides, I still had four hours until the Debt’s deadline. Plenty of time.
Away from the toilet, which for some reason had been in high rotation today.
I was still a bit nervous about walking the streets of the Block, even in broad daylight like this, so I asked Ratface Ponytail if I could borrow one of his bikes. He was a bit reluctant at first, in fact he told me to ‘rack off’, but I persisted.
Eventually he said that if I left a deposit of fifty bucks I could take the ‘treadly’ as he called it. But of course Treadly turned out to be the most beat-up machine, which somebody had given a homemade paint job.
But Treadly was actually a nice ride, and the gears worked really well. I reckon that happens sometimes – you hop on a bike, you get into a kayak, you collapse into a couch, and it just seems perfect for you. Well, it was like that with Treadly.
I got to the dentist’s office, which was actually an old-style Queenslander house, probably the only one left in this area. The receptionist said I could put my bike out the back, in the shed. Then it was straight in to see the dentist.
Dr Miller once told me that he had two passions in his life: kids’ teeth and fishing, but I’m pretty sure he had that in the wrong order. There were framed pictures of fish adorning all the walls of his surgery, and instead of playing soothing Enya-type music while he drilled away, he played podcasts of fishing programs that had names like ‘Tales from the Tinny’.
‘Ah, Dom,’ he said. ‘Now weren’t we talking about barramundi when last we met?’
Actually, Dr Miller, you were the one talking about barramundi and I was making the usual ‘ah’ and ‘ur’ noises you come up with when your gob is full of hardware.
I got to hear about his recent heli-fishing excursion to Australia’s Top End where he caught the biggest barra of his career.
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘Ur,’ I said.
Apparently I had one cavity, which needed some anaesthetic.
‘Would you like some happy gas beforehand?’ asked the doctor.
Does a barra live in the Top End?
The nurse placed the thing over my nose and mouth and said, ‘Breathe deeply.’ I didn’t need any more encouragement than that – happy gas poured into my lungs, found its way into my bloodstream and from there into my brain, where it caused the synapses of my nerves to fire in pleasing ways.
Then the doctor a stuck needle into my gum, which took away from the happiness quite a bit. But my brain was still dancing its happy little jig.
And suddenly, a turtle.
And not just any turtle, but one of those large ponderous ones that are native, I believe, to the Galapagos Islands. Large ponderous turtle, what the Galapagos are you doing in my thoughts? Especially front and centre like that. Dr Miller was grinding away now, the soothing tones of ‘Tales from the Tinny’ playing in the background.
Why a turtle?
What was my subconscious telling me?
Then I got why. I’d once met Zoe at the Galapagos turtle enclosure at the zoo. ‘Crn wo fur tor urt?’
Which is what ‘Can we finish this another day?’ sounds like when your mouth is partially anaesthetised.
‘Sorry,’ said Dr Miller.
‘I go now,’ I managed to articulate.
‘Only a few minutes more,’ he said, and he was only a few minutes more.
I jumped out of the chair and was about to rush through reception when the receptionist said, ‘Mr Silvagni?’
‘Yes?’ I said.
‘Today’s bill?’
‘My mum pays that,’ I said.
‘She informs me that because you are working you are no longer covered by her health insurance.’
‘She expects me to pay the bill?’
‘Actually, we all do.’
So I paid the bill, something I’d never done before. As I did, I understood how Dr Miller got to go heli-fishing in the Top End. Then I got on Treadly and made for the zoo.
But ‘made for the zoo’ doesn’t give any indication of the crazy speed I went, the ridiculous shortcuts I took, the risks I risked, because I knew it closed at five.
I got there at quarter to five, out of breath.
‘One kid’s ticket,’ I said.
The ticket dude looked at his watch and said, ‘I’m afraid the zoo’s closed for today.’
‘But it closes at five.’
‘That’s when everybody has to be out of the zoo; we don’t let anybody in after four forty-five.’
‘But when I asked for the ticket it was four forty-five, you just took ages to answer.’
The ticket dude, who wasn’t a dude at all, just some no-chin comb-over loser, said, ‘Come back tomorrow and you can have the whole day to get to know our exciting array of animals.’
I could tell it was no good; he wasn’t going to budge. A man in khaki walked past. A keeper, I thought. I’ll just sneak in behind him.
But when the keeper came to the gate he used a keycard to get access; there was no sneaking in after him.
A one-tonne ute pulled up on the road behind me, on its door the amusing logo for the Zoo Poo Company. I casually walked beside the ute, and when I was at the back and hopefully out of sight, I crouched right down. As the ute took off, I hoisted myself up and dived under the canopy.
There may not have been any zoo poo in the back, but that didn’t mean it didn’t smell like it. I could smell chimp poo, I could smell zebra poo, I could smell giraffe poo, and was that the delectable aroma of flamingo poo terrorising my nostril membranes? But I was inside the zoo. I’d achieved my aim, and now all I had to do was get out of this poo-mobile. Easier said than done.
There just wasn’t a suitable opportunity, until the one-tonner pulled up to a stop and backed up. But in no time at all there were men’s voices.
‘This lot still looks a bit ripe, eh?’
‘Well, you heard what the boss said: demand’s outstripping supply. Let’s just get it on board.’
The tarpaulin that I was hiding under started to roll back and I got ready to make a run for it if they saw me. But it stopped, and I was still hidden. They started working, shovelling zoo poo.
No doubt there are much worse experiences in life then getting bombarded with poo – that electric shock to my testicle, for example, wasn’t great, and waterboarding can’t be much fun – but it was still pretty horrendous, especially since a lot of the poo was, as the man had said, ‘a bit ripe’.
Eventually it finished and the ute took off.
Now I didn’t care how unsubtle I was, I wanted out. I fought my way through the poo to the back of the ute. And I jumped out, managing to hit the ground running.
If the Zoo Poo employees saw me, they certainly didn’t bother to do anything about it. Or maybe they thought I was a rogue poo, making its escape, unwilling to spend its last years fertilising Aunt Tillie’s carnations.
Fortunately for me, I picked a pretty good place get off, in the Great Cats section.
They were especially vociferous, and I wondered if me and my pungent aroma had anything to do with that.
Lion: Jesus, who did that?
Tiger: Whoever smelt it, dealt it.
Lion (with a roar): No way.
Panther: Whoever denied it, supplied it.
It took me hardly any time to get to the Galapagos turtle enclosure. And when I did they were doing much the same as when I was last here: nothing. It was a scene of such lethargy, so lacking in any sort of action, that my immediate thought was that I’d got it very, very wrong.
I’m not sure what I’d expected – a flashing neon sign on the turtles’ shell, maybe – but I’d thought there would be at least something.
The only sound I could hear was The Debt’s deadline tick-tock-ticking away.
I sat on the bench and I looked out on this dismal scene and I started to feel really, really sorry for myself. I’d thought I’d been so clever to come up with this deal, but I didn’t even have the brains/balls/ whatever it took to pull it off.
My eyes fell on the sign that was affixed to the fence: The Galápagos turtle (Chelonoidis nigra) is the largest living species of turtle and reaches weights of over 400 kilograms and lengths of over 1.8 metres. With a life span in the wild of over 100 years, it is one of the longest-lived vertebrates …
I would be long-lived, too, I thought, if I just stood around and did nothing like them. But then I noticed something. Some of the letters seemed to have a tiny dot under them. I moved closer, so that the sign was a few centimetres from my face.
Yes, there was no doubt about it, somebody had used a texta to put a dot under certain letters.
Excitement mounting, I took out my iPhone, opened Notes and started entering these dotted letters. I was maybe three-quarters of the way through when I heard footsteps from behind – somebody was coming.
It was the same keeper I’d seen before. ‘Hey, zoo’s closed!’ he said.
I returned to the sign, copying the letters.
‘Hey, mate, did you hear what I said? The zoo’s closed.’ He walked closer, then stopped, bringing his hands up to his nose. ‘What is that smell?’
I thought professional zookeepers would be accustomed to strong animal smells, but apparently not – he appeared to be quite distressed.
I put in the last letter and shoved my iPhone into my pocket.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m out of here.’
I ran back to the keepers’ entrance and followed one of the workers out. She also gave me a none-too-subtle mate-you-stink look.
Take a Life Page 17
