‘I really don’t know much about him,’ she said.
But what about when Toby went missing, and we came back and there were only the two of you in the kitchen?
So much for the new policy of honesty and transparency.
I couldn’t be bothered pushing it, there were other ways to skin this particular who-the-hell-is-Roberto? cat.
I made to move off, and Mom said, ‘Dom, where are you going?’
‘To work,’ I said.
Upstairs I got changed into my work clothes: jeans and T-shirt. I sneaked downstairs and out through the back door. I’d had enough of back-to-school crap. Onto Deadly Treadly and away I went.
As I pedalled, as my legs took on a rhythm, my mind stopped swirling so much, my thoughts became more ordered.
Extinguish The Debt: wasn’t it just another instalment? Hadn’t the others seemed nigh impossible when I’d first got them?
And on this instalment, unlike the other ones, I was playing for the good guys.
Ω Ω Ω
The usual loiterers, including Red Bandana, were standing outside Cash Converters, blocking the entrance. I pushed through them.
‘An excuse-me wouldn’t go astray,’ said Red Bandana, the baddest of bad guys.
Up the stairs, and before Jodie could say anything I was knocking on Hound’s door, pushing it open.
‘Youngblood?’ he said, his hand moving under his desk.
It took me a little while to realise that he was reaching for a gun, that he thought I’d returned hell-bent on revenge.
‘Hey, it’s not like that,’ I said, holding up my arms in mock surrender.
Hound relaxed, his gunless hand reappearing on top of the desk. ‘So to what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘I’ve still got a job, haven’t I?’
‘You seemed a bit upset the other day.’
‘Oh, that!’ I said, dismissively. ‘Purely business. Let’s move on, shall we?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Hound, holding out his paw.
‘Besides, you haven’t even paid me my wages yet.’ I took his paw, he squeezed, I squeezed; we were back in business. Soon I was at my desk, listening to the tinkle of clients’ weeing.
Hound arrived with a whole lot of work for me to do, handing me a piece of paper with a long list of names – the usual credit checks on the usual scumbags.
When he’d gone, I scrunched the paper up and threw it into the bin. I opened Word, and I wrote a list of my own scumbags:
Rocco Taverniti
Ron Gatto
Art Tabori
Roberto?
Seb Baresi?
I stared at the list of names for ages, wanting one of them to jump out, to put his hand up and say, I’m the one; take me out and you extinguish The Debt. Then I got creative, and added some more names:
David Silvagni
Celia Silvagni
Dr Chakrabarty
I stared at this list for ages, too. And I thought the best way to do this was by a process of elimination, so I started with the least likely, with Dr Chakrabarty.
Under his name I typed: Against, and under that I immediately put Indian.
Let’s face it, whoever had heard of an Indian ’Ndranghetista?
Could you imagine Don Corleone sitting down to eat a chicken tandoori? Tony Soprano watching Bollywood films?
But then I thought about it a bit more; wasn’t that sort of weirdly racist?
In The Godfather, the consigliere is Irish, not Italian. And Wikipedia told me that there had been a significant Indian immigration to Italy ever since the government had offered amnesty to illegal immigrants because of a labour shortage.
What else under Against?
I couldn’t think of anything big, so I kept going; under For I typed:
speaks fluent Italian
knows heaps about Italian culture
travelled to San Luca during time of the Festival of Our Lady of Polsi
capable of composing Latin text messages
And then I added one word – well, sort of word – at the end, in capitals: SUSS. There was definitely something SUSS about Dr Chakrabarty, something about him that just didn’t add up.
Time for me and Google to get down and dirty.
But we found very little – except for some obvious stuff to do with Coast Grammar. How could you live in this modern world and not leave electronic footprints all over the place? Even the Bushmen of the Kalahari have got Facebook accounts, even the Inuit are ferocious bloggers.
SUSS, and getting SUSSer.
Google and I went around in circles for a while before I asked myself a very obvious question: why was I doing this when there was a professional in the house?
Hound was leaning back in his seat, gleaming cowboy boots up on the desk, a laptop balanced on his lap.
‘You should wear spurs,’ I said, pointing at his boots.
‘Got some at home, actually,’ he said. ‘Let me ask you a question, do you remember how many gold bars they recovered from the seabed?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘One hundred and twenty-five.’
‘Son of a gun!’ he said, and then, reading from the screen, ‘A total of a hundred and twenty gold bars were dropped into the grounds of the embassy.’
‘Hey, maybe the embassy isn’t being entirely honest.’
‘No, some bystander filmed it, of course. There’s some bystander filming everything now. Anyway, they’ve gone through it frame by frame and counted the bars that fell.’
Nerds, I thought.
‘Five bars, do you know what that’s worth?’
I shrugged.
‘About three million bucks,’ he said. ‘It ain’t chump change.’
So the Zolton-Banders had pulled yet another swiftie; I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. One thing I did know: I would never, ever trust those two again for as long as I lived.
‘Anyway, what can I do for you?’ Hound said.
‘I’ve been trying to find this person, but I can’t find much about him.’
‘One of our scumbags?’
‘No, this is, like, a personal thing,’ I said, and quickly added, ‘I’ve been doing it on my own time.’
Hound pushed a piece of paper and a pen in front of me and said, ‘Write his name.’
I did that, making sure I spelt it correctly.
‘You got a phone number?’
‘I do, but I tried the reverse directory and got nothing.
‘Write it down anyway.’
I did just that.
Hound picked up the paper and read the name out loud. ‘Chak-ra-bar-ty. You sure it’s not a yoga position?’
It wasn’t that funny, but I laughed – I was definitely starting to get the hang of this employer/employee thing.
‘Give us ten minutes,’ said Hound.
When I returned to his office there was an address and a phone number to go with the name. ‘How the hell did you do that?’ I said.
‘Before Google, we had this thing called favours,’ he said. ‘I just called one in.’
‘Great,’ I said, taking the paper.
‘So we’re sweet now, Youngblood?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘We’re sweet.’
I read at the address – oh no, it couldn’t be.
But although I read it three more times, not one letter of it changed.
It looked like, once more, I was going to the Malevolent Wonderland. To where hippies wanted to punch your lights out and your father spoke in a strange tongue.
TUESDAY
THE MALEVOLENT WONDERLAND
There was no way I was going to catch a bus to Nimbin and waste all that time sitting next to some smelly backpacker.
Luiz Antonio and his farty old taxi weren’t going to be much quicker. Any taxi, actually.
No, I needed to be there, and I needed to be there now.
So I rang up SkyFast, the company my parents always used. ‘Hello, I’d like to charter a small plane to Nimbin.’
&n
bsp; ‘For how many people?’ said the woman on the other end.
‘Just me.’
‘And for when?’
‘ASAP,’ I said.
‘And can I ask who is paying for this?’ she said, and I could now hear some doubt in her voice.
‘David Silvagni, my father,’ I said. ‘You can just put it on his account.’
‘Of course, one of our favourite customers. We’d just need a call from him, even an email would suffice, with the passenger’s details.’
‘Sure, can you call me when it’s ready to go?’ I said, and I gave her my number. It took me all of five minutes to phish an email from my dad’s email address, and a couple of minutes after that my phone rang: my plane would be ready in twenty minutes.
I called a taxi to take me to the airport and was just making my way down the stairs when from behind came Hound’s growl: ‘Hey, how’d you go with that work?’
‘I’m on it,’ I said; I could see the taxi waiting outside.
‘I need it pretty soon,’ he said.
‘I told you I’m on it,’ I said over my shoulder. I didn’t hear what else Hound said because I was already out of the door, but something told me it wasn’t that complimentary.
Into the taxi and out to the airport, and the plane was waiting for me. The pilot gave a bit of double-take when he saw how old I was, but apart from that he treated me like any other paying customer. We shook hands, swapped names, and we were up, up and away.
Luke didn’t ask any pesky questions, just did he was paid to do: fly the bird.
I’m sure the view was spectacular and all that, but I couldn’t have cared less: I was becoming more and more convinced that Dr Chakrabarty was part of The Debt, perhaps even the boss – the Godfather – and the Tavernitis were just his foot-soldiers. I’d checked the address on Google maps. It was just within the hundred-metre radius, the area that Hanley had worked out was where the last text message in Latin had come from.
The flight took no time at all, but as we were coming down to land I couldn’t resist asking a question. ‘So as a pilot yourself, what do you think of the Zolt?’
Luke took a while to answer.
‘Some of those landings have been pretty ugly,’ he said. ‘But if it’s like they say and he never took a flying lesson in his life, learnt everything from flight sim and by reading manuals, then he’s an absolute freak.’
A very rich freak, I thought. Thinking of what Hound had told me about the three million dollars.
‘So Dave is your dad, right?’ said Luke.
‘That’s right,’ I said, though I’d never really thought of my dad as a ‘Dave’.
‘He’s pretty much my favourite customer,’ said Luke.
‘So he flies a lot?’ I said, surprised, thinking my dad only took the occasional trip to Nimbin.
‘You kidding?’ said Luke. ‘I couldn’t tell you how many times we’ve done this run.’
Once we landed, I caught another taxi back in the town I had absolutely no wish to ever return to. Nimbin and San Luca – when climate change really got serious, they were the two places to wipe out first.
Mr Chakrabarty’s address was a few blocks away from the town centre, in the same direction as Coast Home Loans and the Fiends of the Earth office. I headed in that direction. A boy in a hoodie sidled up to me. ‘You want something?’
He looked familiar, and then I remembered why.
‘Seen Anna around lately?’ I said.
His face, shaded by the hoodie, was hard to see.
‘She’s gone, man.’
The sun had caught his face, and I could see his eyes now; I didn’t need to ask where she’d gone.
I quickened my pace towards Dr Chakrabarty’s house.
I was going to extinguish The Debt.
I was going to take him out.
Yes, I’d lost my nerve with Brandon, but this was different.
I charged past Coast Home Loans, into the mall, past the Fiends of the Earth office. A right turn and I was in his street, and across the road was his house.
It was an old stone house with a wide verandah and a corrugated-iron roof, but with a large modern garage alongside. Actually, it was a pretty anonymous-looking house, and I felt instantly deflated. Dr Chakrabarty was who I’d always thought he was – a wacky old guy who used to teach Classics.
But then I had another competing thought: this house was exactly The Debt’s style, wasn’t it? Lose yourself in the local community, make no waves, while you wreak murder and mayhem elsewhere.
I cased his house for half an hour or so: nobody went in, nobody came out; in fact, this street made Frank Condon Drive look like downtown New York. I crossed the street, and I quickly checked inside the mailbox – there was a letter there addressed to Dr Chakrabarty. I had the right place. ‘Favours’, Hound’s analogue version of Google, obviously had its uses.
Up to the door, and I rang the bell, my heart fluttering in my chest like a budgie in its cage.
What was I going to do if he answered? I hadn’t thought this through properly.
Or maybe this was the best way: confront him here and now.
He didn’t answer; there was no sound from inside.
I rang again. Nothing.
There was no electronic surveillance, none that I could see anyway. This was my chance: I had to go in.
I crept along the side of the house. There were no bars on the window, and again I wondered about the lack of security. But again the answer was simple; why make yourself conspicuous? The first window I tried was unlocked.
This was feeling suspiciously easy – was I walking straight into a trap?
Well, at least if it was, there would be a confrontation. Bring it on, Chakrabarty!
The room I climbed into was obviously the study. Like Dr Chakrabarty’s office at school, it was very neat, very tidy. Books lined the walls. I scanned the titles. Lots of classics, as you’d imagine, but there were also lots of books about ecology, biology, the environmental movement. I checked his desk, a huge old wooden number. Just a few bills and things on top, and the drawers were locked.
Into the next room, a sort of combined lounge and kitchen area. There were some spooky tribal masks on the walls, some Aboriginal dot paintings. I was starting to get it now: everything here was absolutely normal; the real stuff, the nasty stuff, he did elsewhere.
It was a clever strategy.
Who would ever think an Indian Classics teacher was a mafia boss, especially one who lived in a house as innocuous as this one?
I heard the sound of a garage roller door rising, then a car.
He was coming home!
I squeezed under the couch. The door opened and I saw a set of shoes, old-man brogues. Dr Chakrabarty. And then a set of wheels. Somebody in a wheelchair.
‘Are you sure nobody saw us?’ English, posh – I knew that voice, I would recognise it anywhere: Mandy.
‘Of course not, dear, not a soul,’ replied Dr Chakrabarty.
My brain refused to process the information it had just downloaded from my eyes and my ears. It was like watching The Simpsons and suddenly Kenny from South Park sits next to Homer on the couch.
Homer and Kenny, Dr Chakrabarty and Mandy, do not belong together.
‘Alpha and Thor will be here in an hour,’ said Mandy. ‘Do you think we really have time, Chak?’
Chak?
‘“She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies,”’ said Dr Chakrabarty, in that hammy way he had. ‘“And all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.”’
‘Oh, Chak,’ said Mandy, her voice melting like the cheese on a pizza ad. ‘You know how I adore my Lord Byron.’
Shoes and wheels were making towards the couch and me. Then there were wet, fleshy noises – they were kissing.
But that tiny part of my brain that wasn’t busy being appalled, disgusted and dismayed was working furiously to make sense of this. What was Kenny doing in The Simpson
s? And then all the pieces fell into place: Dr Chakrabarty spoke Italian because he was a Classic scholar, he’d been on the train that day because he had been going to the Festival of Our Lady of Polsi.
As for him being SUSS, not adding up, I was dead right about that: Dr Chakrabarty was the infamous Dr E! That did add up: the photo that he’d had in his office of the earth spinning in space, all the ecology books in his library, and now this, his relationship to the Fiends of the Earth.
I had two choices, stay here while they did whatever it was they were going to do and make my escape later.
Or make myself known.
I figured the first, as disgusting as it was, was the best option – there was too much explaining to do otherwise.
‘Oh, Chak,’ purred Mandy.
‘“Now therefore, while the youthful hue sits on thy skin like morning dew,”’ said Chak, again with that hammy voice. ‘“And while thy willing soul transpires at every pore with instant fires, now let us sport us while we –”’
‘Stop!’ I yelled. ‘It’s me, Pheidippides, under here!’
TUESDAY
FIENDS OF THE EARTH
Déjà vu all over again: me being interrogated by members of the eco-terrorist organisation Fiends of the Earth while sitting on a very uncomfortable straight-backed chair. Except this time their leader, Dr Chakrabarty aka Chak aka Dr E, was with them, and he was holding a gun, and it was pointed directly at me.
‘So let me get this straight, you thought that the doctor was some sort of mafia figure?’ said Alpha, and I could understand the look of disbelief that was all over his face.
How could you even start to explain something like The Debt to people, especially people who were as angry as these four? Though angry doesn’t go anywhere near describing the emotional state Mandy was in. I was sure she wanted to run me over in her wheelchair, and then keeping running me over until I was a human crepe.
I nodded. ‘Like I said, not without some reason.’
‘And can you tell us what those reasons are?’
All the time Thor, Alpha and Mandy had grilled me, firing question after question, Dr Chakrabarty had sat there, silent, revolver in his hands.
His face said nothing, his eyes even less; I could see now the ruthless man who had organised the sinking of the long-line tuna boats and the sabotage of logging machinery in which a logger had suffered serious injuries.
Take a Life Page 24
