For what seemed like the hundredth time, I told them the reasons. And for what seemed like the hundredth time Mandy said, ‘That’s rubbish!’
We really weren’t getting very far here, and if it wasn’t for the gun I would’ve made a run for it. But was Dr Chakrabarty capable of firing it, of actually shooting me? Dr Chakrabarty who’d taught at my old school, the bumbling one with the shaggy eyebrows, wasn’t. But Dr E? I wasn’t so sure. We sat there in silence, the four of them looking at the one of me.
Until finally Dr Chakrabarty lowered the gun and said, ‘Let him go.’
‘But he will go straight to the police, tell them who you are,’ said Mandy.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said in a calm, level voice.
‘And you believe this ridiculous story of his?’ said Alpha.
Dr Chakrabarty nodded.
‘Of course I believe it,’ he said. ‘And exactly for that reason: nobody is going to make up a story as farfetched as that.’ He smiled a cold smile. ‘Nobody who lacks an education in the Classics, anyway.’ He stared at me, and I suddenly had an insight into what it was like to be a fish and to be speared, flapping on a shaft of steel.
‘Do you still have the last message in Latin?’ he said.
It wasn’t at all what I expected to come out of his mouth, and in reply I ummed and I ahhed even more than usual.
‘Well, do you or not?’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘But Mandy has my phone, remember?’
Mandy just glared at me, making no effort to return it. Dr Chakrabarty threw her a look, and she tossed the phone at me. I scrolled through until I came to the text message and handed it to Dr Chakrabarty. He sat there looking at it for what seemed ages.
Finally he said, ‘And you say you’re sure it came from this town?’
‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘In this immediate vicinity.’
He looked over at Thor, raising his considerable eyebrows. Thor shook his head: It wasn’t me.
Dr Chakrabarty handed me back the phone. ‘Dom, we are a peaceful organisation, but our aims are lofty. And we can’t afford somebody getting in our way, compromising our work. Do you understand me?’
I nodded, thinking of the maimed logger. If I ratted, Dr Chakrabarty would get me – I had no doubt of that.
‘Now get the hell out of my house,’ he said.
I didn’t need any further invitation than that; I stood up and started walking towards the door, mentally crossing Dr Chakrabarty off the list as I did.
Next name: Rocco Taverniti. Already my brain was onto it – what did I know about Rocco Taverniti?
I went to put my iPhone in my pocket when something occurred to me. I stopped.
No, Dom, you’re not – he’s just told you, while holding a gun, to get the hell out of his house. But I was.
‘Dr Chakrabarty?’ I found myself saying.
‘What now?’ he said.
‘I just wanted to ask a favour.’
‘You’ve got to be joking!’ said Mandy.
Thor and Alpha, the eco-ninjas, moved towards me, ready to fast-track my exit.
‘What is it?’ said Dr Chakrabarty.
‘I know how good you are with languages and I just wondered if you could translate something else for me. It’s a recording I made.’
‘You’ve got to be joking!’ said Mandy. She really needed to come up with some new material.
But the appeal to Dr Chakrabarty’s intellectual vanity worked. ‘What language is it?’ he asked.
‘Calabrian,’ I said.
‘As you well know, my Italian is faultless, but I do also have a passing acquaintance with Calabrian. Let’s hear it.’
I went to Voice Memos, found the recording and hit the play icon. Even with the volume up to full, with all the background noise it was very difficult to hear and I felt like a sizeable idiot. I looked over at Mandy – she had the smuggest of smiles.
‘Alpha?’ said Dr Chakrabarty. ‘Can you do anything with that?’
‘I can try,’ he said, taking a laptop out of his bag. ‘Your Bluetooth on?’ he asked me. I nodded.
After about five minutes of frenetic keyboard and mouse work, he said, ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’
His laptop started playing my recording. It was about a million times better; he’d got rid of almost all the background noise. It made me realise what a formidable team the Fiends of the Earth were and what a shame it was that we’d spent all this time being enemies.
Dr Chakrabarty listened intently, scribbling in the margins of a newspaper as he did so. ‘And again?’
After it had finished for the second time, he scribbled some more. When he spoke, it was with a concerned look on his face. ‘Tell me, who is this man?’
I told him.
‘I think I remember him,’ he said. ‘A few of us teachers used to go to Taverniti’s in the old days.’
‘He’s dead now,’ I said.
‘Anyway, this is what I make of it. So you asked him about Mr Havilland, and he replies “the politician”. But you obviously understood that?’
‘I did,’ I said.
‘He then says “Ha avuto troppo avidi, quello” which I translate as “He got too greedy, that one.” And then, “Stava per rovinare tutto per tutti” which I translate as “He was going to spoil it for everybody.”’ Dr Chakrabarty looked up from the newspaper and at me. ‘This is Graham Havilland, of course.’
I nodded. Graham Havilland the anti-drugs campaigner. But if Dr Chakrabarty was right, he was also Graham Havilland the corrupt politician.
Poor, poor Imogen.
‘What about the final bit?’ I said. ‘He said one more thing.’
Dr Chakrabarty looked down at the newspaper. ‘“I got the boys to look after him,”’ he read, and then his voice seemed to drop in pitch. ‘“They gave him another mouth.”’
As if that wasn’t clear enough, Mandy made a slit-your-throat gesture with her hand.
‘But doesn’t he say some names as well?’ I said. ‘I thought I heard him say some names.’
‘You have a good ear, Pheidippides,’ he said, and suddenly bumbling Dr Chakrabarty with the sheep for eyebrows was back. ‘He said three names: Rocco and Ron and Gnocchi.’
Rocco as in Rocco Taverniti, Ron as in Ron Gatto, but who was the third person? ‘But gnocchi is a food.’
‘In this case I’m sure he’s referring to a person; it’s probably their nickname.’ Dr Chakrabarty looked to be deep in thought. Finally he said, ‘Sun Tzu said that all war is deception. If you need help, contact us. We just can’t be involved, if you know what I mean.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Now get the hell out of my house,’ he said, but there was the faintest hint of a smile on his face.
This time I did get the hell out of his house, hurrying back along the street, turning into the mall. I passed the Fiends of the Earth office; I was totally convinced now that the text message hadn’t come from there.
Ahead of the mall were the Coast Home Loans offices. Why Rent When You Can Buy? Loan Approval within the Hour! yelled the sign outside.
I was becoming more and more convinced that somewhere inside those garish offices were at least some of the answers to the countless questions that were cartwheeling through my head.
But I’d already broken into the building – well, sort of broken in, because I’d managed to copy the office keys and had just let myself in – and I’d found nothing suss. I did remember, however, that I’d had one key left over. One key that didn’t fit a lock. At the time I’d explained it away: locks are changed, doors are demolished, people don’t remove the orphaned keys from their rings.
But now I wasn’t so sure.
I looked around – nobody was within sight, so I started a circuit of the building. Just as I’d hoped, there was a door on the other side.
No writing, no nameplate, just an anonymous unpainted door.
I tried the handle – it was locked.
To
think that I’d once had the key for this very door but had tossed it into a drain, worried that it would incriminate me.
So what to do now?
The answer didn’t take long to come: visit the hardware shop, buy some stuff, go to the library, find a comfortable beanbag, wait for dark, and then return to this place. That’s exactly what I did.
Remembering my encounter with the security guard the last time I’d broken into this building, I took everything very slowly, very carefully. The last thing I needed was some knucklehead mucking up my plans.
Eventually me and my pocketful of hardware were in front of the mysterious door. Without The Debt I would never have become proficient at lock-picking. And that was one irony I actually liked – they had taught me something that might help cause their downfall.
I set to work, remembering what I had read in the lock-picking manual: Project your senses into the lock to receive a full picture of how it is responding to your manipulations.
This particular lock responded very quickly to my manipulations. With the tiniest of clicks, I was away.
I quickly pushed the door open and immediately saw the flashing light on the alarm box on the far wall. My guess was that I had thirty seconds to feed it a code.
I turned on the light, scanned the room.
There on the desk was a framed photo of me, Toby and Miranda.
This was so my dad’s office!
There were bookshelves full of books.
This was so not my dad’s office!
There on the desk was a framed photo of Mom.
This was so my dad’s office.
I hurried over to the console and punched in Dad’s code, the one he used for everything: credit cards, Apple account, PayPal, everything. It worked – the light stopped flashing. I was in.
This office was such a contrast to his generic office at home with its handful of management texts, or his office in the city, Cobweb Enterprises. This was a real office, and I was gobsmacked.
Firstly there was hardware galore: screens and servers and printers and scanners. There was the art on the walls, moody black-and-white photos, stuff I had no idea that Dad liked. But what I couldn’t take my eyes off were the books. There were hundreds of them. I moved over for a closer look. Books on anything and everything arranged in what looked like a crazy jumble. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand was next to a book called The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith which was next to a book called Metamorphoses by Ovid.
There was something about that last book that seemed familiar. I took it off the shelf and opened it.
One of the pages had the corner turned over, the laziest of bookmarks. An appalling habit, Mom called it. I went to this page. Some text was underlined in pencil: atque ita semineces partim ferventibus artus mollit aquis, partim subiecto torruit igni.
I took out my iPhone and swiped through the messages until I came to the one I was looking for: atque ita semineces partim ferventibus artus mollit aquis, partim subiecto torruit igni.
The logical part of me got it immediately: it was my father who had been sending those scary messages. But every other part of me didn’t get it at all: how could he?
I mean, HOW COULD HE?
The door opened and my dad was standing there.
I wasn’t that surprised to see him: it was his office, after all, and there were a number of ways he could’ve found out that I was here: SkyFast, the biochip.
But just because I’d been sprung in his office didn’t mean that I was going to back off. ‘You sent those messages!’ I said, my logical part winning the battle.
‘Okay, Dom,’ said Dad in his lifestyle-program-presenter voice. ‘Let’s you and I have a civil discussion about this. Father to son.’
What freaking father? What freaking son? I fumed for as long as I needed to fume and then I thought – why not?
Dad indicated that I should sit in a chair. Then he fetched two bottles of fancy mineral water from the fridge, handing one to me. Switching off the room light, turning on a desk lamp, he sat down in the other chair. I drank the water in one swig, the fancy bubbles running up my nostrils.
Finally he spoke. ‘I had to keep you on your toes, Dom. Stop you from getting complacent.’
Complacent? What the hell was he talking about? But when I gave it some further thought, I realised that those messages had definitely kept me on edge, had definitely kept me guessing. Hell, maybe my old man was right. Definitely right.
‘We believed in you, we all did,’ he said. ‘But I just had to throw something extra in.’
We?
And then I got it, the biggest got-it of them all.
I guess there had been signs, and lots of them, but I’d refused to go in the direction they’d pointed me in. But that ‘we’ had done it. I got it. Hell’s bells and buckets of blood, did I get it.
I looked around this office, at this side of him I didn’t have a clue about.
‘You’re The Debt?’
Dad smiled. ‘It’s not that simple, nothing ever is.’
‘You’re The Debt,’ I said. ‘You would’ve taken a pound of my flesh. Your own son’s flesh!’
‘That was never going to happen, Dom. Not to somebody as capable as you.’
‘But you and the Tavernitis?’
‘If it wasn’t for the Taverniti family I wouldn’t have made it, Dom.’ He must’ve read the doubt in my expression, because he said, much more forcefully, ‘If it wasn’t for the Tavernitis, I would’ve ended up a useless peg-legged drunk like your grandfather.’
My instinct was to jump to Gus’s defence, but I held my tongue; Dad was in a talkative mood and I wanted more answers.
‘When you were in San Luca, you killed somebody,’ I said; it was a statement, not a question.
I could see the surprise in Dad’s face – how did I know that?
‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘But yes, a man died.’
‘It was his father, the boy who tried to kill you.’
Dad nodded. ‘That would add up.’
‘And in San Luca, they caught you and kept you underground in a cell.’
‘Eight months in that hellhole,’ he said.
‘“Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole,”’ I said.
‘“I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul,”’ said Dad. ‘That poem was about the only thing your grandfather gave me that was any bloody good.’
He stood up, his eyes scanning the bookshelves. ‘Ah, there it is,’ he said, reaching for a book. He handed it to me.
The cover was blank. I opened it and read the first page. Book of Verses by William Ernest Henley 1893.
‘The first time the poem appeared in print. It didn’t even have a name then,’ he said.
I wasn’t about to get sidetracked. ‘In San Luca, why did they let you go?’
Dad smiled ruefully. ‘A deal was done, a very complicated deal.’
‘And Mom, was she part of that deal?’
The colour rose in Dad’s face. ‘Your mother and I fell in love the first time we laid eyes on each other,’ he said. ‘Don’t you ever forget that, okay?’
‘Okay,’ I said, and I had absolutely no doubt that Dad was telling the truth, and it made me feel good – at least their love wasn’t some sort of lie.
‘And Roberto?’
Dad sighed and said, ‘I need a drink.’
He took a bottle of single malt whisky from the bookshelf, splashed some into a glass and took a gulp. ‘Roberto is from the old country – he’s family, Dom.’
‘Family?’
‘He’s your mother’s brother,’ said Dad. ‘Your uncle.’ And another piece of the puzzle fell into place – Seb’s surname was Baresi.
‘Our gardener?’
‘They wanted to be near each other,’ said Dad. ‘That just seemed to be the simplest way.’
More pieces fell into place: that closeness I’d noticed between Mum and Roberto, how they’d stopped Seb and Miranda da
ting. ‘And Seb is Roberto’s son?’
Dad nodded.
‘So Seb’s my cousin?’
Again Dad nodded.
‘Does he know?’
‘He does now.’
My guts felt like mush, like ugali; I collapsed into myself. The office was swirling. The whole world was swirling.
‘You need some more water, son?’
I nodded, and Dad took off, returning with more fancy mineral water again. I finished the contents in one gulp. He got me another bottle. This one I took much more slowly. Dad looked on approvingly.
When I had finished he said, ‘Better?’
I nodded. ‘Better.’
The light from the desk lamp was now falling on his face in a way that made him look sort of, I don’t know, magnificent, or mythical. And when he spoke again his voice had this tone, this resonance that was deep and commanding. ‘Dom, you did incredibly well. Better than anybody expected. Now you’re pagato, you can do absolutely anything you like. Stay working where you are if you like. Go back to school if you want, any school you wish. If you want to keep going with your running, then why not go to the States and train there? Or Kenya, even? Anything you want, you can do.’
‘I can?’ I asked, imagining myself running in the thin air of the Rift Valley of Kenya, home to more champions than anywhere else in the world.
‘You’re pagato,’ he repeated. ‘The world is yours.’
The world is yours – it was an intoxicating thought, even more intoxicating than the whisky I had drunk that day on the Hispaniola.
‘And Toby?’
‘Toby will be tested, like you were tested.’
‘But … but … but he’s not capable.’
‘You don’t know that, you don’t know what he’s capable of. You didn’t even know what you could do yourself until you did it.’
He was right – I didn’t have a clue. ‘But Dad, he’s your son.’
‘Exactly!’ he said. ‘That’s why I have to let him have the opportunities that I had, and that you had.’
‘Opportunities?’ I said. ‘You mean the instalments?’
‘Of course, opportunities to show what you are capable of.’ Dad looked off towards the wall, and then back at me. ‘Our culture has gone soft, Dom. We don’t allow boys to become men any more. We mollycoddle them. Pack them in cottonwool. And then we wonder why they never grow up.’
Take a Life Page 25
