Bring Back Cerberus

by Phillip Gwynne

  ‘That’s crazy,’ I said, readying myself for some more involuntary movement from my bodily parts.

  But they remained where they were.

  ‘I was running in a race on Reverie Island when all that happened,’ I said, this lie sliding easily off my tongue.

  It occurred to me that, if nothing else, The Debt had taught me how to lie. Hey, if my running career came to nothing, maybe I could tell porkies for Australia instead.

  ‘You were?’ said Mr Ryan, his eyes searching mine. ‘So you’ve got yourself a pretty good alibi, then?’

  So-so, I thought. But I did have a grandfather who’d probably be willing to stretch the truth just a bit.

  ‘An excellent alibi,’ I said.

  ‘That’s great news,’ said Mr Ryan, slapping me on the back.

  ‘So have you got an invoice or anything?’ I said. ‘So my dad can pay you for all this work you’ve done?’

  Mr Ryan threw up his arms. ‘Don’t be silly, Dom. It’s actually quite fun being involved with the law again. Much more fun than when I actually was a lawyer.’

  We said our goodbyes, I got changed, and as I made my way home I couldn’t help thinking about Mr Ryan.

  He was obviously a really good lawyer who got a big kick out of the law. Seriously, would you give that up for chinos and a classroom of smart-alec kids?

  As I walked past a park where a couple of ducks, wings spread, were sunning themselves by a pond, a black Hummer pulled up onto the footpath right in front of me. The window wound down, and I was looking into the scary blue eyes of Hound de Villiers, Private Investigator.

  I could’ve made a run for it across the park, and I probably had a good chance of getting away, but I figured that was the dumb option. Hound would find me again for sure. Because finding people is what Hound does for a living.

  And Hummers weren’t cheap: he obviously made a very good living.

  Hound kept staring at me with those scary blue eyes.

  Say something, I told myself.

  Anything to break the ice, I told myself.

  ‘That’s come up really well,’ I said, pointing to the side of the Hummer.

  The last time I’d seen it, it’d just been rammed by a Mercedes driven by Otto Zolton-Bander and hadn’t looked so straight.

  ‘Tell me this: if I wasted you right now, who would actually care?’ said Hound.

  Was Hound capable of wasting somebody in broad daylight like this?

  No, probably not, but he was still a seriously big, seriously scary dude. His office was full of all these photos of him with all these guns and he’d whacked me once, right across the head, and my ears had rung for hours after.

  ‘I mean, who would care?’ said Hound.

  ‘Quite a few people, actually,’ I said, sliding my iPhone out of my pocket and snapping a photo of Hound. ‘The person I just sent that photo to, for example,’ I continued. ‘They’d care. Probably care enough to take it to the cops if I didn’t get home tonight.’

  Hound stared at me for a while longer with his scary blue eyes, before he said, ‘So where is he?’

  ‘By he, I assume you are referring to Otto Zolton-Bander?’ I said.

  ‘You are really starting to get on my nerves, punk,’ said Hound.

  ‘He’s dead,’ I said quickly. ‘Don’t you watch Fox News?’

  I could tell from the look on Hound’s face that he didn’t believe the Zolt was dead. And I didn’t really blame him, because I was pretty sure he wasn’t dead either. Unless somebody else had taken it upon themselves to fly over Halcyon Grove in a light plane and deposit a fake Double Eagle coin into our pool.

  ‘Where is he?’ he repeated.

  ‘I seriously don’t know,’ I said.

  Hound thought about this for a while before he said, ‘You willing to take a polygraph?’

  ‘A lie-detector test?’ I said

  ‘Exactly,’ said Hound. ‘My office, tomorrow, five.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll be there,’ I said, though I had absolutely no intention of turning up at his office tomorrow at five. Firstly I had training, and secondly this had to be some sort of trap.

  The window wound up and the Hummer reversed off the footpath, and bullied its way back into the stream of traffic.

  MONDAY

  VIRTUALLY IMOGEN

  I knew it was wrong. I knew it was immoral. I knew it was unethical. I knew it was … Okay, you name it, I knew it.

  But I couldn’t help myself, because I was desperate to see her, even if that ‘her’ was the digital ‘her’.

  Ever since I’d confessed to Imogen that it was me who had set fire to the Jazys’ pool she hadn’t talked to me. Hadn’t even acknowledged me.

  It was like I was invisible, like I was made of air, a total non-being.

  So after I locked my bedroom door, I sat in front of ClamTop.

  ‘Open,’ I said, and it immediately opened.

  ‘Networks,’ I commanded, and again it responded, bringing up all the networks in the area.

  I knew she was home because earlier, when I’d walked past, I’d seen her shape at her bedroom window.

  But that still didn’t mean their network would be up.

  It was, though.

  My excitement increasing exponentially, I opened HAVILLAND and cloned SYLVIA, Imogen’s computer.

  There was nothing open, not an application, not a program, not a widget. All the icons were lined up on her desktop, perfect rows and perfect columns.

  She wasn’t there, and that excitement I’d generated became disappointment.

  ‘Come on, you little turds!’ I yelled at the motionless icons. ‘Do something!’

  But the little turds did absolutely nothing.

  I did notice something, however: she’d changed her wallpaper; it was now a picture of her missing father. Taken from a newspaper, it showed him, arms thrust triumphantly into the air, celebrating a win in some sort of election. Mrs Havilland was by his side, looking very beautiful, very sophisticated. And she was holding the hand of a little girl who had huge eyes and lots of curly blonde hair. Imogen.

  Behind these three were a whole lot of other happy-looking people who I guessed were members of Mr Havilland’s election campaign. Although they weren’t quite in focus, one of them looked familiar somehow.

  My eyes flicked between the person in the photo – who in the hell was it? – and the motionless icons.

  Come on, you little turds, do something.

  The real Imogen wouldn’t talk to me and now it seemed the virtual one wouldn’t either.

  I waited for five, ten, twenty minutes and nothing changed, the icons remaining motionless, the person in the photo unrecognised.

  Thirty minutes, forty minutes.

  Where could she be?

  And immediately a whole lot of explanations presented themselves, each one seemingly more plausible than the one before: Imogen was with Tristan, Imogen was with somebody else even more not-okay than Tristan, Imogen had choked on a Chupa Chup and was now lying dead on her bedroom floor.

  After an hour I decided that enough was enough, that I should de-clone Imogen’s computer, that I should log off and go do something more useful with my life.

  Okay, that’s what I decided to do, but that’s not what I did.

  I opened Windows Mail. Yes, it was wrong, it was immoral, it was unethical, but it’s what I did. Because I was opening a clone of her program and not the real thing I thought it wouldn’t download any new mail.

  I was wrong.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four new messages.

  I started to panic. What if Imogen found out that I’d been tampering with her email? But again I remembered what Dr Chakrabarty had told me: panic was just something invented by the god Pan to scare a few soldiers.

  I stopped panicking.

  And when I did I soon realised that there was really nothing to worry about, because computers do screwy stuff all the time. There are viruses, there’s malware, there are software bugs, t
here are so many excuses for them when they go mental. And there was no way Imogen would know it was me anyway, because ClamTop was the stealthiest of stealth bombers.

  Now that was out of the way, I couldn’t help but look at these newly arrived emails. Especially since the first one was from Fiends of the Earth.

  Fiends of the Earth!

  Immediately my brain started playing ‘Construct the Conspiracy’.

  Imogen had tipped off Fiends of the Earth about me, Imogen was on their payroll, Imogen was the infamous Dr E!

  But then I remembered that it was Imogen who had told me about Fiends of the Earth in the first place. And, committed greenie that she was, it wouldn’t be surprising if she received regular emails from them. The same way she received regular emails from Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd and Save the Whales.

  When I opened it, I soon realised that I was right, because it was a pretty generic sort of correspondence thanking the recipient for their continued support, without which they wouldn’t be able to blah blah blah.

  I was just about to stop reading but two words – Diablo and Bay – further on in the email grabbed my eye, so I skipped to that bit.

  The ongoing campaign to have the Diablo Bay Nuclear Power Station decommissioned has been giving a boost after an internal document aired on internet site Wikileaks indicated that the recent total blackout on the Gold Coast during Earth Hour was caused by a cyber attack on their computer system.

  Wow, Diablo Bay Nuclear Power Station decommissioned because of me!

  I had this power rush, like I’d just knocked back several Red Bulls.

  I kept reading.

  The campaign has recently received a generous donation from an anonymous source.

  Then there was more blah blah blah, which I skimmed through.

  Right at the end Max Denton of the Scuba Divers Association said that decommissioning Diablo Bay and opening up the riches of the adjacent coastline once again for recreational use would be welcomed by all in the diving community.

  The next email was from Tristan.

  I opened it thinking the worst, that all the sympathy Imogen had stored for the comatose Tristan had caused her to throw herself at the noncomatose Tristan, that Tristan and Imogen were an item.

  But I wasn’t just thinking the worst, it was almost as if I was hoping the worst, because then I could be angry, I could be outraged, I could be aggrieved.

  dear im, the email began and already I was angry – who the hell said he could call Imogen that? It was my name for her.

  The email continued, the dr said that because I’m not getting better I can’t go to school until next term so tks so much for all the dvds.

  Okay, that wasn’t so bad – in fact, I almost felt sorry for Tristan, a) because he had to stay home, and b) because Imogen had some really crap DVDs.

  I kept reading.

  I reckon you’re being a bit hard on dom. it wasn’t his fault i spent so much time in la-la-land just a couple of boys mucking about in boats.

  Geez – what was happening here?

  Could this be the same Tristan who had punched me in the guts?

  Instead of outraged, I was sort of touched. Instead of angry, I was grateful. And ‘aggrieved’ could go back into the online thesaurus where I’d found it.

  talk to you soon im tristan

  Even the im didn’t rile me as much second time around.

  I closed Windows Mail and there it was again, the photo taken after the election win.

  And then it occurred to me: how to get Imogen back onside. How to build that bridge over the abyss between us.

  If I found out who these people were, then hopefully she would start talking to me. Hopefully.

  And something else occurred to me: finding who these people were was Private Investigating 101.

  So maybe I would turn up at the meeting/trap with Hound de Villiers tomorrow, after all.

  TUESDAY

  LIES

  ‘I have to go now,’ I said to Coach Sheeds in the middle of training after school on Tuesday.

  ‘Now?’ she said.

  ‘That’s right, now,’ I said.

  ‘You are kidding me!’

  ‘No.’

  Coach Sheeds looked up and down the track as if to make sure no other runner could hear what she was about to say.

  Then she looked me in the eye and said, ‘You could go to Rome, Dom.’

  I knew exactly what that meant: if I placed in the top four runners at the nationals and made the Australian team, then I would go to the World Youth Games in Rome later in the year.

  This was a very un-Coach-Sheeds-like thing to say because she didn’t play favourites, treating all her runners equally. We were all gazelles. All lions.

  She continued, ‘Now that you’ve got your mind back on the job, you could do it.’

  I’m pretty sure I blushed. Ohmigod, Coach Sheeds thinks I can do it!

  ‘But only if you keep your bloody mind on the job,’ she said.

  Maybe I should keep to my original plan and blow Hound de Villiers off, I thought. But that image popped up in my mind again, the one that had been popping up all day: Hound helping me build a bridge across the abyss that separated me from Imogen.

  ‘I’m sorry, Coach,’ I said, and I really was sorry.

  Okay, Gus was probably right: she wasn’t exactly the best coach in the business, but she was officially my coach at school. The last thing I wanted to do was let her down.

  ‘But I really have to go,’ I said, and I really did have to go.

  Again that look from Coach Sheeds, up and down the track, before she leant in closer.

  ‘This is in the vault, okay?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I was once in exactly the same situation as you, Dom. The same age as you. Had the world at my feet. Everybody said I was cert to go to Helsinki for the World Youth Games.’

  ‘What happened?’ I said.

  I knew Coach Sheeds had been an elite runner but I didn’t know this.

  ‘I got distracted. You don’t have to know the details, but I got distracted. And that, really, was the end of my career. Sure, I kept on running, but it wasn’t the same after that because nobody took me seriously as an athlete.’ Coach paused as if something had just occurred to her before she said, ‘Not even me.’

  She smiled at me. ‘And do you know what, there’s not a day that passes when I don’t think about it, when I don’t imagine what I could’ve bloody well been.’

  ‘But you’re our coach!’ I said, and as soon as I did I realised it was exactly the wrong thing to say.

  Because everybody knows that saying: Those who can, do. And those who can’t, coach.

  And now it was like both of us were standing in a knee-deep puddle of failure, of disappointment, of what-could’ve-bloody-well-been.

  Again that image: me and Hound building a bridge, and I said, ‘I have to go.’

  I left Coach standing there by herself, in the puddle.

  The first three taxis I hailed refused to take me to the Block.

  ‘Too dangerous,’ said the first.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ said the second.

  ‘God help you,’ said the third, even when I offered to double the fare.

  So I had no choice: I found Luiz Antonio’s card in my wallet, rang his mobile number.

  ‘I’m on another call,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  Twenty minutes later he pulled up and I got into the front seat.

  ‘Guess who was sitting right where you’re sitting?’ said Luiz Antonio, and the excitement emanating from him was almost palpable.

  ‘Um, Hicham El Gerrouj?’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I give up, who was sitting right where I’m sitting?’

  ‘Silva da Silva!’ he said, a note of triumph in his voice. ‘In my taxi!’

  ‘The UFC fighter?’ I said, and I had this brush-with-fame fee
ling, like that time when I bodysurfed the same wave as Ian Thorpe and his ginormous feet at Burleigh Heads.

  ‘So you know him?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, though the truth was that I hardly knew anything about him. It was just that a lot of kids at school were into UFC, especially Bevan Milne, and when they talked about the fighters, Silva da Silva was the one who seemed to get mentioned the most.

  ‘He’s from Rio, he’s a Carioca like me,’ said Luiz Antonio. ‘And next week he fights for the world championship, here in the Gold Coast!’

  I’d seen UFC a few times on television, and though I could appreciate that they were incredibly fit athletes, that was about as far as my appreciation went. The biffing and banging wasn’t too bad, but when they started wrestling, getting close and sweaty on the mat, my hand reached for the remote.

  As we drove on, weaving through the afternoon traffic, Luiz Antonio continued talking about Silva da Silva and the UFC. It was pretty obvious that he knew a lot about both, and I was starting to buy into his enthusiasm. When we pulled up outside the Cash Converters, I didn’t really want to get out. I wanted Luiz Antonio to keep driving around and around, talking in his lilting voice, but I knew I had no choice but to meet Hound de Villiers.

  When I went to pay the fare Luiz Antonio said, ‘Fix me up at the end.’

  ‘So you’re going to wait?’

  Luiz Antonio held out his hands out as if to say, What do you expect?

  It felt pretty reassuring to know that he’d be here, waiting. Especially when I saw the same bunch of desperadoes as last time hanging outside the front of Cash Converters, including the one in the red bandana, the one who’d used me and Tristan for target practice at Reverie Island.

  But I also couldn’t help wondering who Luiz Antonio was.

  Obviously, he was on somebody’s payroll, but whose exactly?

  I thanked him and made my way to the entrance, to the desperadoes. Head down, I pushed through them, dispensing with the usual ‘Excuse me’, keen to get inside in case Red Bandana recognised me.