Evil Genius

by Catherine Jinks

  For a few seconds, Gazo didn’t move. Then slowly, reluctantly, he pulled away from the kerb. With a rattle and cough, the old Ford veered onto the road again. Cadel watched it disappear around a corner. When he was sure that it had gone, he trudged up the driveway between walls of camellia bushes, towards the house. He noticed that Mrs Ang’s car was parked near the front door. Good, he thought. Maybe she’ll get me a hot lunch.

  ‘Mrs Ang!’ he called, wiping his feet on the mat. There was no reply. He unlocked the front door and pushed it open, his eyes adjusting to the dimness beyond. He could smell something funny.

  ‘Mrs Ang?’

  The hand came out of nowhere. Cadel didn’t have time to scream.

  He felt as if he was about to suffocate.

  And then he fell.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Cadel woke up vomiting.

  He hadn’t fully regained consciousness, and already he was retching and heaving, hanging over the edge of whatever he was lying on. A bed, perhaps? No – a mattress on the floor. He felt horribly sick. And his head ached.

  ‘Ah, Jesus,’ said a disgusted voice.

  ‘Clean him up,’ said another.

  ‘He’s puked all over the sheets –’ ‘Then get some more! Chrissake, whassa matter wit you?’

  Cadel drifted off again. He was vaguely aware of being moved and wiped. He groaned because his head was hurting. But it seemed like a long while later that he finally became conscious of a smell like disinfectant, and then a scratchy feeling beneath his cheek, and a weight on his legs . . .

  He opened his sticky eyes. The pain in his head, which had been lying dormant, abruptly sprang to life; it was like having an ice-pick thrust through his skull. He rolled over, moaning, and realised that he still felt nauseous. Yes, he was going to throw up. When he raised himself on one elbow, the feeling grew worse. But there was a bucket. Someone had put a bucket beside the mattress.

  He almost burst a blood vessel, bringing up what was left in his stomach. There wasn’t much. As he hawked and strained, a large person appeared beside him. Cadel saw two shiny black shoes. A pair of trouser cuffs. A hairy hand, reaching down.

  ‘You finished?’ the man asked.

  Cadel nodded, and was pulled back onto the bed. Through a haze of pain he saw a broad, dark back and a bald head, retreating.

  ‘My head hurts,’ he croaked. ‘Please . . .’

  ‘I’ll get you some aspirin.’

  The aspirin arrived some time later. Cadel had dropped off to sleep again, and was roused by someone flicking his cheek.

  ‘Here.’ The same, hairy hand offered him a glass of cloudy water. ‘I dissolved ’em.’

  Cadel sat up. He drank the contents of the glass, which the man beside him held to his lips. The man was vaguely familiar. Cadel tried to remember where he had seen that broken nose before.

  ‘What happened?’ he said faintly. ‘I feel so sick . . .’

  ‘Drugs,’ came the blunt reply. Before Cadel could properly absorb this information, his companion had disappeared. A door slammed. Cadel fell back onto his pillow, holding his head.

  Every heartbeat was hammering a bolt of pain into his temples. But beneath that steady rhythm, his brain was beginning to work. He knew that face. Of course he did.

  It belonged to one of Max’s bodyguards.

  A pang of fear shot through him. He uncovered his eyes and surveyed his surroundings anxiously. He was lying in a concrete room. There was a toilet in the room, and a basin. Also a mattress and a heater. Exposed pipes. The glass of water had been taken away.

  There was no window. The walls were streaked with rusty stains, and the door was made of metal.

  Cadel closed his eyes again, massaging his forehead. He tried to think. He had walked into his house, and – what? Someone had jumped him. Stuck something over his face. A rag soaked in chloroform? But that wouldn’t have knocked him out for very long. And where had Adolf’s Grunts been? Why hadn’t they saved him?

  Cautiously, Cadel opened his eyes again. The light was on. He slowly sat up, wincing with every movement. He mouth was dry, and he smelled of vomit. Some of his hair was plastered to his cheek. He was examining his arms for needle marks when the door creaked open.

  Maestro Max stood on the threshold, wearing a silk suit under his beautifully tailored overcoat. He closed the door softly behind him and walked with a heavy tread to the toilet. The lid was down. Removing a laundered handkerchief from his breast pocket, he gave the lid a bit of a wipe before lowering his bulk onto it.

  He sat with a hand on each knee, his smooth jaw shining in the electric light.

  For a long while, he and Cadel simply stared at each other. At last the Maestro sighed.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘You ain’t gonna ask me nuttin?’

  Cadel remained silent. He couldn’t have spoken; his voice wouldn’t have worked.

  ‘No questions?’ the Maestro continued. ‘No? Okay. What about I ask you some questions?’ His morose brown gaze held Cadel’s. ‘Like, for instance – you tink I’m stoopid? You and your papa?’

  Swallowing, Cadel shook his head.

  ‘You didn’t tink I’d work it out, huh?’ said Max, and leaned forward. ‘Listen to me – I always knew. Right from the start, I was wondering: what’s dis all about? Uh? You get all your competitors, dey come together in the same place. What for? To raise an army? I don’t tink so. To wipe ’em out? Maybe. To get ’em to wipe each udder out? Even better.’ The Maestro settled back again. Every movement was slow and deliberate, almost as if he was tired. ‘At foist I figured: Okay, Carla’s dead, big deal. Coulda happened to anyone. Then I get ripped off. No problem. One little asswipe, what’s it matter? So I go after’im. What happens? My guy ends up dead. A little boid in the police department tells me de gun was bought yesterday, by someone called Paul Souvry. I’m tinking: what de hell? I’m looking for Art, and Alias bought de gun? Den I hear Tracey’s been wiped. Barry Watson’s turned himself in. My guys are checking Art’s office, middla last night, and dey see Terry loading up a van. Dey see one of Adolf’s teams jump’im. Haul’im off to Yarramundi. Next ting I hear, dat whole place has gone up. Luther’s been fighting wit Adolf, and dey’ve brought the whole goddamn building down. Now Adolf’s gone. Luther too. Might be dead, might be on the run. Who knows? Carla’s dead. Tracey’s dead. And Terry – he was in dere with the rest of ’em. So where is he now? Deal’s as good as dead. Art’s disappeared. What am I supposed to believe? It was all self-inflicted? I don’t tink so.’

  Cadel simply stared, his arms wrapped around his chest. He was hardly breathing.

  ‘I’m starting to tink: Someting’s going on,’ the Maestro observed, wearily. ‘I’m starting to tink: Who’s left? I am, but, hey, it’s nuttin to do with me, right?’

  Cadel wondered what the time was. He glanced at his wrist but his watch wasn’t there any more.

  ‘I figured it was probably all wired up,’ said Max, following the direction of Cadel’s gaze. ‘So I trew it under a train. If you wanna know, it’s six-fifteen. Sunday night.’

  While Cadel kept his expression blank, his heart missed a beat. Sunday night! But he had promised Sonja. He had summoned her to the pool.

  She would think that he had stood her up!

  ‘Den I talked to Vee,’ Max went on. ‘Tracked him down dis evening. Turns out, he’s as confused as I am. Says you’ve been hacking into all de computers for months, but when he told Thaddeus, Thaddeus didn’t do a goddamn ting about it.’ Watching Cadel, Max must have seen his colour change, or his breathing alter. A mournful smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. ‘Didn’t know dat, uh? Guess not. Anyway, I let Vee go. It was a trade-off. He gave me his information, I gave him back his pinky finger. Man like dat – he’s too useful to waste. Bit like you, Cadel.’

  All at once, Max rose. He began to walk towards the mattress. Cadel shied away, his heart pounding furiously.

  ‘See, I figured it all out,’ the Maestro declared in a conversation
al tone. ‘Like I said, I’m not stoopid. You’re Darkkon’s son. You’re Roth’s blue-eyed boy. You’re part of de whole set-up. Somehow, you and your papa – and dat asshole Roth – you’ve been setting us all up. Getting us to do each udder in, while you sit back and let it happen.’

  ‘No,’ Cadel squeaked, shaking his head. ‘No, you’re wrong.’

  ‘I don’t tink so.’ Max loomed over the bed, blinking lazily down at Cadel in a way that terrified him. ‘I tink they sent you in because you’re such a goddamn little choirboy. Who’s gonna suspect you? Nobody. Nobody except me.’

  ‘No!’ Cadel cried. ‘You’re making a mistake! It’s all been a mistake! This has nothing to do with you –’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ Max bent down, until his grave and tranquil eyes were level with Cadel’s. He smelled of cigars. ‘Kid, you might be able to fool everyone else, batting dose baby blues, but you’re not fooling me. I know what dis is all about. And I know how to cover my back.’ He straightened. ‘As long as I got you, I’m safe. Because if Darkkon lifts one finger against me, he’s gonna start getting little bits of you in de mail.’

  Cadel pressed his lips together, trying to stop them from shaking. Max must have seen this, because he smiled suddenly. It was the most blood-curdling smile that Cadel had ever seen.

  ‘Enjoy batting dose eyes while you can,’ he said, and turned towards the door. ‘Eh! Tommy!’

  Immediately, the door opened. Baldie looked in.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Kid’s probably hungry,’ said Max. ‘Get’im a drink – someting to eat.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The bald head withdrew. Max regarded Cadel in a melancholy fashion.

  ‘Kid like you – you gotta lotta potential,’ he sighed. ‘Why’d you trow it all away?’

  He shook his head sadly. Then he left the room.

  Clank! Clunk!

  The door swung shut and the locks clamped down.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Cadel couldn’t believe it.

  He couldn’t believe that this was happening. He couldn’t believe that he had never even remotely anticipated anything so awful. Where had he gone wrong? Why hadn’t he calculated the probabilities?

  Because he hadn’t collected enough data – that was why. The institute was a big and complicated place. He had tried to cobble together estimates without mastering the raw facts. He had rushed into things because he was desperate to leave. And now? Now he was paying for sloppy preparation.

  He hadn’t meant to bring down the whole institute. His intentions had been far more modest. If his plan had been successful – if only a handful of staff had been affected – then Max would never have panicked. And Cadel would never have ended up locked in this . . . this dungeon.

  He looked around, wondering where he was. Underground, almost certainly. The whole place had a musty, underground smell to it. And he had caught a brief glimpse of the area outside the door, had seen a flight of stairs, going up. Some of the plumbing that ran around the walls was old and disconnected; it looked as if there had been a shower, or something similar, to match the toilet and basin still huddled against one wall. Could he be lying in an old bathroom? Or in an old locker room, perhaps?

  Click! Clunk! As Cadel looked around, the door swung open. In came the bald man with the broken nose (Tommy, Max had called him) carrying a packet of crisps and a small carton of fruit juice. He threw them on the floor and left, before Cadel could say anything. Cadel didn’t feel like eating. But he drank the juice, wondering if he could use the small, plastic straw that came with it. One end of the straw had been sharpened, so that he could poke it through the foil seal in the top of the box. Poking it through a seal, however, was different from poking it into somebody’s eye – the only place where it would do any damage.

  Cadel doubted that he would ever get anywhere near Tommy’s eye. For one thing, he was about half the man’s height. He doubted that he would be able to reach that far before being batted away like a pesky mosquito. And if he did poke Tommy in the eye, what then? It was hardly the kind of injury that would prevent Tommy from using his large, hairy fists or his enormous feet.

  No, he would have to think of something else.

  His headache had dulled a little, thanks to the aspirin, so he was able to study his surroundings without hurting his eyes, noting every little feature. The ceiling was high; he would never be able to reach that light bulb, even if he stood on the mattress. The taps on the basin had been removed. The heater was an electric oil heater, plugged into the wall. Hmm. If he was to dismantle that heater . . .

  But he didn’t have anything to dismantle it with. That was the problem. They had taken everything: his bag, his keys, his watch – even his shoes. The mattress was made of foam rubber, so it didn’t have any inner springs. The old-fashioned toilet cistern was placed high on the wall, out of Cadel’s reach, and it didn’t have a chain hanging from it – just a frayed piece of string.

  Max had obviously been very careful.

  Cadel fell back onto his pillow. He felt ill and tired. His brain wasn’t working as well as usual. Think, he chided himself. Think, think, think! You’re supposed to be a genius, so prove it!

  But his mind kept wandering. Even as he scanned the pipes, he found himself wondering why Thaddeus hadn’t come to his rescue. Why, for example, hadn’t Adolf’s surveillance Grunts stopped Max? Because they had been pulled off Cadel’s tail when things started happening at Yarramundi? Because Max had killed them? Because they had been keeping an eye on Cadel, not his house, and didn’t realise that Max had been waiting for him in there?

  Perhaps Thaddeus didn’t even know that Cadel was missing yet. He’d know soon, though. Max was using Cadel to protect himself. Leave me alone, or the boy gets it.

  Would Max decide to send Thaddeus a little piece of proof? A finger, perhaps? A toe? To show that he was serious?

  As soon as this possibility occurred to Cadel, he leapt off the mattress and hurried over to the exposed plumbing. Several pipes emerged from the wall, wandered along it a little way (dividing several times as they did so) and then plunged back into the concrete, vanishing from sight. All of them had been painted over, like the rest of the room, but the paint was flaking. When Cadel tried to pull one of them off the wall, bits of dry paint fluttered onto his jumper and caked under his fingernails.

  He tugged and jerked, but nothing much happened. While the pipe did rattle and move slightly, parts of it seemed fused to the wall. Perhaps the layers of old paint were acting like a weld. Or perhaps there were brackets, rusting into the concrete, which held the pipe in place.

  If only he had something hard, like a hammer. But then, if he had a hammer, he wouldn’t need a piece of pipe. He could hit Tommy with the hammer.

  Cadel wrenched at the pipe as hard as he could, and managed only to hurt himself. When he sucked the injured finger, he got a mouthful of dry paint. Knowing that the paint was probably full of poisonous lead, he quickly spat it out. And then he noticed something.

  Where he’d scraped the paint away, the exposed metal wasn’t greyish galvanised iron. It was greenish copper.

  Copper.

  From that point on, Cadel ceased to notice his headache. His mind began to work; his gaze hopped from the pipe to the heater and back again. He made a mental list of what was available in the room: a crisp packet, a pillow, a duvet, a mattress, a small juice carton. And there were his clothes, of course. His jumper was made of wool (curse it), and his pants of cotton, but his shirt was polyester. And his socks were mostly nylon.

  Glancing at the door, he wondered if anyone was watching him. He couldn’t see a window, or even a peep-hole. Nor could he see any evidence of cameras – no wiring, no cable ducts. There was just the one electrical socket, with a heater plugged into it.

  The heater’s cord was a long one. Moreover, it was insulated, not by plastic, but by old-fashioned textile, which was frayed in some places. Of course, the wires inside would be plastic-coated, but Cad
el was still pleased. He ticked a mental box before returning to the mattress and making a feeble attempt to pull it towards the heater. Having dragged it across the floor a short distance, he pretended to give up. Instead, he went back to the heater, which he turned off at the power point. Then he pushed the heater closer to the mattress and untangled its knotted electric cord, surreptitiously wrapping the cord around a copper pipe. By digging his fingernails into the fabric insulation wrapped around the cord, he managed to tear some of it away, exposing the multicoloured wires underneath. But that wouldn’t be enough.

  The trick was to wind the cord as tightly as possible, stretching it dangerously and damaging the plastic insulation, to ensure that every wire was clamped against metal. He had to act quickly, too, because someone might be watching. With a final tug, he dropped the cord and turned the heater back on. Then he scrambled back under his duvet, where, concealed by its heavy folds, he picked away at its stitching – and at the stitching of his pillow. He wanted to get at the stuffing, which was probably made of polyester. Fluffy, flammable polyester. There was his mattress, as well: the foam might burn, or at least melt.

  He didn’t know how long it took him to rip open the duvet. Without a watch, he couldn’t be sure. Fifteen minutes? Twenty minutes? The pillow took longer, because the workmanship was better. As for the mattress, that was a real test. He yanked and gnawed away at it for ages. At last, having done as much as he dared, he opened the crisp packet, and ate about a third of its contents. He didn’t want to eat it all, though by now he was quite hungry. He couldn’t afford to waste all that oil by stuffing it down his throat.

  Not once did he allow his gaze to linger on the power cord. Sometimes he would glance around the room, and on these occasions he would check the spot where the cord was coiled around the copper pipe. He made sure, however, that he paid more attention to the toilet, or the door, or the light fitting. Anywhere but that nasty little time-bomb, which didn’t have a fuse.