The Whole Business with Kiffo and the Pitbull

by Barry Jonsberg

  Of course, Mum wasn’t back from work and the fridge was, as always, strong, silent and dependable, but rather weak in the empathy stakes. So I kicked it a few times, leaving a couple of decent dents, and I felt a bit better. Then I ate the last of the ice-cream. I didn’t particularly feel like it, but it was Mum’s favourite and she often had a bowl between shifts, so I forced it down. Pathetic, I know, but someone had to pay.

  Overdosed on raspberry ripple, I wandered off to Kiffo’s place. Funnily enough, I’d never actually been to his house before, but I knew where he lived. It was not the kind of neighbourhood that you tended to go into if you could avoid it. Particularly when it was getting dark. Particularly if you were a woman. Particularly if you were a woman with huge boobs. What the hell. I didn’t care. I think in my state of mind I’d have been more than a match for any roving gang of hoons.

  I knocked on the door, and after a few moments Kiffo opened it. He looked at me with surprise and then nodded for me to come in. The front room was a disgrace. I’ve seen some messes in my time – hell, I’ve created my fair share – but this took the whole packet of biscuits. Crumpled beer cans were scattered around the carpet, if anything so threadbare and filthy could be dignified with such a name. Old pizza cartons, at least three of them, were also arranged artistically on the floor. Two still contained traces of pizza, though they were clearly so old that any positive identification would have taxed the expertise of the most distinguished forensic scientist. I guessed at thin crust mould with extra botulism topping. The place stank of old socks, sweat, tobacco and despair. Kiffo noticed my expression.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘It’s the cleaning lady’s day off. Come in and sit down.’

  I looked around. There was nowhere really that I considered a safe place to sit. The couch would have been rejected by the local dump on the grounds that it would have brought down the ambience of the place. Not that I cared too much about the fact that it was held together with fishing wire, or that it sagged alarmingly in strange places, like a depressed storm cloud. But there were things living in it. I could see them moving. It created a strange effect, like those lava lamps. There was a never-ending rearrangement of the pattern. A microbiologist would have been enchanted, but I wasn’t sticking my bum anywhere near it. I found a broken bar stool in the corner. It wasn’t clean, but at least it wasn’t creating its own visible ecosystem. Kiffo slumped into the couch, which gave off a dense cloud of irritated bugs, some, undoubtedly, unknown to modern science.

  ‘Wassup, Calma?’ he said, fishing into his pocket and producing a rollie with a distinct dogleg to it.

  ‘You don’t want to know, Kiffo,’ I said.

  ‘Okay,’ he replied and lit up. There was a silence.

  ‘Well, when I say you don’t want to know, I mean that you probably do want to know. It’s kind of a rhetorical question – well, not a question, obviously, more of a rhetorical statement – but it produces a similar effect. You’re supposed to press me and then I reveal all. So not at all like a rhetorical statement, when it comes down to it.’

  Kiffo narrowed his eyes at me through the cloud of smoke and airborne bacilli.

  ‘You’re talking like an English teacher,’ he said. ‘Don’t. It makes me want to throw up. If you’ve got something to say, then say it.’

  Good advice, let’s be honest. So I told him all about what I had said to the Pitbull the night of the break-in and how she’d told the school counsellor –

  [Mrs Mills – Gemini. Your normal sense of discretion will desert you today. Beware of unfortunate slips of the tongue caused by either a momentary lapse of concentration or an innate tendency towards verbal diarrhoea. ]

  – who’d obviously said something to Rachael Spit-In-Her-Eye Smith who’d let her mouth off the leash and created havoc. As I was telling him, I could feel the tears welling. But I kept them back. Kiffo’s one of those guys who doesn’t like crying. It would embarrass him and he wouldn’t know what to do. So he’d have to get angry. Still, I tried to tell him how I felt as if my whole life had been ripped up and thrown away in the course of a single afternoon. I wanted him to know that this was important.

  And he listened. When I had done with the tale, a little breathless with the effort of keeping emotion out of it, he threw his cigarette onto the carpet and ground it out with his heel. Then he leaned back and looked at me.

  ‘You, Calma,’ he said, ‘are something else.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘You did that for me? You told the Pitbull you loved her just to give me more time? I don’t know what to say. I really don’t. No one has never done nothing like that for me. Never.’

  ‘Never done anything like that,’ I corrected.

  ‘But you did, Calma. You did.’

  ‘Listen. It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing, you know. It doesn’t mean we’re engaged or anything. Anyway, that’s all beside the point. My life has just been flushed down the toilet because of it and I don’t know what to do!’

  Kiffo fished out another cigarette.

  ‘Don’t do nothing,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Kiffo leaned forward and jabbed his cigarette at me like an accusing finger.

  ‘Christ, Calma. You’re supposed to be the big brains of the class, but you’re a dumb shit at times. What can you do? Go around saying to everyone, “Listen, I’m not a lesbo, swear to God.” You think that’ll stop people talking?’

  ‘No, but . . .’

  ‘Stuff ’em. I’ve spent my whole life dealing with people who think I’m a step below a cockroach. Do I let that worry me? Hell, I am what I am. I don’t look for people’s approval and you shouldn’t neither. What you did for me was real good, a real nice thing to do.’

  ‘Thanks, but . . .’

  ‘If it’s caused other people to think bad of you, well that’s their problem, not yours. At least two of us know the truth about you and the Pitbull. The rest can shove it.’ This was, by some considerable margin, the longest speech I had ever heard from Kiffo. I wasn’t used to being talked over by someone whose preferred mode of communication was an occasional grunt, normally accompanied by offensive body language. I felt touched that my predicament had moved him to that extent. What’s more, he was right. There wasn’t anything I could do, but just ignoring the situation didn’t seem too appealing either. For all that, what he said was important to me, particularly the bit about the two of us knowing the truth.

  ‘You don’t fancy her, do you?’ he added.

  ‘Christ, Kiffo!’

  ‘Sorry. Just checking.’

  We sat for a while, lost in our own thoughts. Talking to Kiffo had done me good, just like always. It had taken my mind off my own problems a bit, which was ironic, really, since that was all we had been talking about. Maybe it was something to do with the surroundings, the evidence of Kiffo’s bleak existence. I mean, the room was disgusting. I’ll say that for the Fridge. She might be working every waking hour, but she still has the time and the energy to keep the house pretty tidy. But Kiffo and his dad? It was a different world they lived in, a world where normal standards didn’t apply – exactly, I suppose, the kind of world that the Fridge didn’t want for me. I mulled that over for a while. I could see what she wanted to achieve. I just couldn’t tell whether it was worth the price we were paying to achieve it. Gives you a headache, thinking about stuff like that, so I stopped.

  Anyway, my eye had been caught by a framed photograph on the wall. It was of a young man in his late teens, leaning against a wall. He was smiling broadly, as if in response to something said as the shutter was clicking. Whatever that might have been was gone, the words long since evaporated, but the reaction was still there, frozen in that grin. He looked happy, full of life, energy radiating from the posture, the narrowed eyes, the red hair spiked into crazy angles. The glass of the photograph gleamed. There was not a mark on it, or on the frame, which had obviously been polished recently. It was a small oasis of clean
liness against the stained backdrop of the wall.

  I glanced over at Kiffo. He was looking at me, his expression neutral.

  ‘Kiffo, look—’

  ‘Time to go home, Calma,’ he interrupted. ‘We wouldn’t want you to catch anything life-threatening here, now would we? I’ll walk you back.’

  It doesn’t do to argue with Kiffo. I got up from the stool and checked myself for alien life-forms while Kiffo rolled another cigarette and opened the door for me. We walked for a while in silence. The street lights around his place were all out, probably smashed by those in his area who preferred darkness as a business environment. In other circumstances, I would have found it frightening, but Kiffo’s presence was reassuring. I looked up at the sky. The stars were hammered into its blackness like small, bright nails. I wanted to talk about the photograph, but didn’t know how to start. I guess I didn’t have the courage.

  ‘Kiffo?’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If I ask you something, will you answer me honestly?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘Why do you try so hard to give the impression that you’re dumb?’

  ‘I am dumb.’

  ‘No.’ I stopped. This was important and I wanted an answer. ‘You’re not. And you know it. All that stuff you were telling me back at your place, about looking for people’s approval. That’s not the kind of thing a dumb person would be saying. So why pretend?’

  He shrugged, like the topic of conversation was boring him.

  ‘I’m not pretending to be anything, Calma. I’m me, that’s all. Like I was saying earlier. Other people think it’s dumb, what I am. Who cares?’

  ‘Does it matter what I think about you?’

  Kiffo took a deep draw on his cigarette and thought for a moment.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It does. But then, you don’t think I’m dumb, do you? So no worries.’

  ‘But it is important what other people think about you, Kiffo. It is important if they think you are stupid when you’re not!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It just is.’ I was floundering and I knew it.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s important, Calma.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What we do about the Pitbull. That’s important. Where do we go from here?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ I said. ‘We do nothing about the Pitbull. I’ve already had enough trouble with that woman. I’m going to keep my head down, do the assignments she sets and hope that she’ll either leave soon or get run over by a very large road train. Preferably the latter.’

  ‘Yeah. You’re right,’ he said, scratching behind his ear. ‘It’s too dangerous. Keep your head down. That’s the way to go. You’re right.’

  That stopped me. God, he can be a real bastard at times.

  ‘Now, hang on a moment, Kiffo,’ I said. I think I even put my hands on my hips. ‘Just because I’m right, doesn’t mean I’m right, you know.’

  ‘Hey, you got me with that one, Calma. Just too smart for me, I guess.’

  ‘Cut it out, Kiffo. Don’t think, not even for one minute, that you are going to do anything about the Pitbull without me. Okay?’

  ‘But you just said . . .’

  ‘Never mind what I just said. We are in this together.’

  I meant it too. It hit me, right then, with all the force of a genuine revelation, that I only took chances verbally. Quick at shooting from the lip, but a bit of a sook when it came to anything else. Maybe old Kiffo, all action and adrenaline, would make a good partner, a Clyde to my Bonnie, a Butch Cassidy to my Sundance. I decided not to share this with Kiffo. I don’t think he would have liked it if I’d called him ‘Butch’. But what the hell? I’d come this far and like old Macbeth said: ‘I am stepped in blood so far that to go back is as tedious as to go o’er.’ Or something like that. And anyway, I was going to find out about the connection between the Pitbull and Kiffo, regardless of what he might think.

  We got back to my place and I invited him in for a cup of coffee.

  ‘Thanks, but I’d better get back,’ he said. ‘Dad’ll be home soon, full of grog and wanting dinner. If it’s not ready for him, there’ll be trouble.’

  I watched as he walked off into the dark, a slight, bandy-legged figure, hunched and curiously vulnerable. I had little first-hand knowledge of the kind of life he led, but I knew that it was loveless and full of casual cruelty. I felt even closer to him then than normal. Not the sort of closeness you feel for the underprivileged, when your own comfortable existence is held up to theirs. Not the sort that is tinged with guilt. I just felt – and I know this sounds really obvious and almost childish – that we were both here and human. That for all our differences, we were still, like the rest of humanity, ninety-nine per cent indistinguishable from each other.

  Never mind that the bastard was lying to me.

  The Fridge was in bed when I went in. I had a hot shower and snuggled under the doona, the aircon blasting above my head. It felt great, the contrast between the artificial chill in the air and the sense of womb-like security in bed. I dozed a little and thought about the day. Curiously, I didn’t feel half so bad now. What had seemed a nightmare was only a bad dream and fading with every passing moment. I thought about Kiffo’s back as he walked off into the night, and the sense of security that gave. Most of all, I curled myself around an image of someone, carefully, lovingly, cleaning a photograph of a grinning young man.

  Yes, it had been a strange day. As I slipped under the surface of sleep, I was bothered by just one thought. I felt somehow that it was important to write down everything I was feeling, to record my thoughts in case they appeared stupid in the morning. Or, even worse, cloudy and insubstantial.

  Sometimes diaries are a really good idea, you know. It was a shame I’d thrown so many away.

  MARCH: Primary School, Year 6.

  You are pinned up against the school fence. You’re scared, but try not to show it. As you look up into the boy’s face, your eyes blink nervously behind large, multicoloured glasses. He is taller than you and a lot heavier. He has a stupid face, leaden and cruel. As he leans towards you, he prods you painfully in the shoulder with a blunt, dirty finger.

  ‘You need to watch your mouth,’ he says. ‘You think you can say what you like about me, is that it? You think I won’t hit a girl?’

  He pushes his face further into yours and you can smell stale tobacco. His face buckles into anger as you say nothing. His right hand, cocked behind his shoulder, clenches into a fist. You close your eyes and wait.

  Chapter 10

  Every dog has its night

  FBI Special Agent Calma Harrison stepped from the shower. She got dressed quickly, paying no attention to the thin scar that ran down the side of her stomach. A memento of a fight in Beirut. Just before she had broken his neck, he had slashed her across the abdomen. Later, she had stitched herself with a sharpened twig and a length of twine she had fashioned from local native grasses. A neat job, even more remarkable because she had no anaesthetic. She preferred to bite on a bullet.One time, she had been sewing her ear back on in Botswana when she bit too hard and shot a passing antelope.

  Her eyes flickered as she detected a sound in the corridor outside her hotel room. Nerves on full alert, she whipped her Walther PPK semi-automatic from the holster and with cat-like grace backflipped across the room, pressing herself against the wall. There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ she breathed.

  ‘Room Service,’ came the reply.

  Calma registered the voice and instantaneously processed its accent. Despite the attempt at disguise – good, but not quite good enough – she placed it within a second. A rarely heard dialect from the East Bank of the Mezzanine Strip. A tiny village called B’Gurrup. The owner of the voice lived three streets down from the butcher’s shop. Maybe four, Calma thought. She hadn’t been to B’Gurrup in over fifteen years.

  Her mind raced. Who had connections with the Mezzanine Strip? It was a filt
hy, dangerous place, a hotbed of mercenaries, hit men and used-car salesmen.

  The answer was clear. Only one person would think of employing the specialist skills to be found in B’Gurrup.

  Her arch enemy. The Pitbull.

  Calma did a forward roll and in less than three seconds, two hundred rounds from the Walther crashed through the spy hole in the centre of the massive oak door. She opened the door and examined the bloody mess on the doorstep. The would-be assassin had a small ground-to-ground heat-seeking missile-launcher in his right hand. In his left was a Kalashnikov rifle, a cluster grenade and a Swiss Army knife. This man had come prepared for action.

  ‘Too bad, buddy,’ Calma growled as she stepped over him and headed for the elevator. Curiously, she felt a sense of relief. She still remembered that incident in Miami when she had accidentally blown away the night manager of her hotel. She had been certain that his accent was from a small Shiite community that had ordered her death through a high-level fatwa. It turned out that he had simply had a bad head cold.

  Calma stepped from the hotel onto the bustling streets. Kiffing was waiting for her at the agreed park bench, idly kicking a small Pekingese dog that was trying to attach itself to his trouser leg.

  ‘News?’ said Calma.

  ‘The Pitbull is here. We’re not sure why, but we think it might be connected to next week’s UN Assembly. The word on the street is that there is to be an assassination attempt on a major world figure. As you know, Harrison, the presence of the Pitbull can only mean one thing.

  Terror and devastation.’

  ‘That’s two things,’ said Calma.

  ‘Okay, then. Two things,’ said Kiffing.

  ‘You want me to take her out?’ asked Calma.

  ‘Won’t that make her suspicious? A date with a complete stranger?’

  ‘No. I mean, kill her.’

  ‘That’s a negative. We want her alive.’

  Calma thought quickly. She mentally replayed all the information she had gleaned about the Pitbull. Simultaneously, she analysed the Spassky/Fischer sixth game of the 1972 World Chess Championship, finding an Enigma Variation that poor Boris had overlooked in the end game. It was a form of mental gymnastics that helped her focus. She turned to Kiffing.