The Whole Business with Kiffo and the Pitbull

by Barry Jonsberg

  ‘Any idea of her whereabouts?’

  ‘We have a deep throat in Mossad. The word is that she’ll stake out the pre-Assembly shindig taking place at the Hilton tonight.’

  That made sense. The trouble was that the Pitbull was an expert in disguise. Calma remembered the assassination of an African leader the previous year. It bore all the hallmarks of the Pitbull’s work. Yet one eyewitness swore that the killer was actually a small bull-mastiff.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ she said, ‘but I want full back-up. I’ll need an OP35 with an APB, complete tactical support, a digitised micro-cam with satellite link-up, solar-powered Kevlar vest with drop sides and EVA capability. Is that clear?’

  ‘Well . . . not entirely affirmative, now you come to mention it.’

  ‘Just do it, Kiffing. We are not dealing with amateurs here.’

  Later that evening Calma Harrison, disguised as a balding oriental dwarf, surveyed the exterior of the Hilton. She was pressed up against a tree in the extensive grounds and her camouflage make-up ensured that from a distance she merely looked like a piece of flaking bark.Patting the bulge of the Walther PPK, she settled down to wait, the trunk of the tree pressing a little uncomfortably into her back . . .

  ‘Wake up, for God’s sake, Calma.’

  The voice seemed to be coming from a long way off. I opened my eyes slowly. Surely it wasn’t morning already? The first thing I saw was Kiffo’s face about two centimetres from mine. Imagine waking up and finding yourself staring at the Phantom of the Opera without his mask at close range, and you’ll have some idea of the kind of shock I got.

  ‘Bloody hell, Kiffo,’ I yelled. ‘Don’t do that to me!’

  ‘Shut up!’

  I raised my head and it all came back. Kiffo’s stupid idea of staking out the Pitbull’s house again, on the off chance that she’d be doing another of her early morning assignations. A real stab in the dark. Which is exactly what I felt like giving Kiffo at that precise moment. Obviously I had dozed off. My shoulder was hurting from where I had been pressing up against a knot in the tree. My right leg had pins and needles. That bloody casuarina tree again. The same one I had waited under for Kiffo on the night of my declaration of undying love. I was beginning to bond with that tree, I can tell you. Maybe the Drama lessons hadn’t been a complete waste of time, after all. ‘Feel yourself becoming the tree, Calma. Feel the sap rising.’

  I struggled to my feet, catching at a cramp in my left thigh where the sap was obviously having difficulty getting through.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘About three-thirty.’

  It took a moment to register.

  ‘Are you out of your tiny mind? But of course you are. Stupid question. Three-thirty? Three-thirty? If I’d known we were going to be out this late I’d have brought a camping stove and a portable TV.’

  ‘Oh, stop moaning, Calma. There’s no point going home at ten o’clock, is there? I mean, when she goes out on one of these meetings, it’s in the early hours of the morning, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hang on, Kiffo. You’re talking as if this is some sort of regular occurrence, like the orbit of Uranus or something. You’ve only seen her go out once. Doesn’t mean she makes a habit of it or anything.’

  ‘I’ve got a feeling about tonight, okay?’

  ‘So you’re clairvoyant now, are you?’

  ‘Give it a break, willya?’

  ‘I can tell you exactly what is going to happen, Kiffo,’ I said. ‘Absolutely bugger all, that’s what. We are going to sit here under this stupid casuarina until dawn and then we are going to go home, get dressed for school, go into her class and prop our eyelids open with matchsticks. And she is going to be even more horrible to us than normal on the grounds that sleeping through her lesson is absolutely forbidden, on pain of death, and then—’

  But I never got to finish. The Pitbull’s front door opened and that familiar, threatening bulk was now approaching the front gate. I pressed myself further back into the tree. Would I ever get the imprint of bark out of my back? There was a snuffling sound and I could just make out the heaving mass of Slasher. The night was profoundly dark. Just as well, I suppose. The Pitbull and Slasher made odd lumps of darker blackness against the night, grisly silhouettes that moved like one being. It was creepy. Kiffo leaned closer to me and we watched silently as Miss Payne made a right turn out of the gate and moved silently down the road. I became aware that I was holding my breath. Kiffo leaned in closer and whispered into my ear.

  ‘You were saying, Calma smarty pants?’

  ‘Where the hell is she going at three-thirty in the morning?’ I gasped.

  To be perfectly honest, I had taken Kiffo’s story with a small pinch of salt. Well, a bloody great handful, in fact. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, exactly. I just thought that maybe he had embroidered things a little. You know, the mysterious phone conversation, leaving the house. I’d figured that maybe she had got up in the night and he had taken the opportunity to get the hell out of there while the going was good. And the rest would have been just a bit of macho stuff. Making a big deal out of what had been a humiliating experience. I wanted to apologise to Kiffo but now didn’t seem the right time.

  ‘I told you, Calma,’ he said, a note of triumph in his voice. ‘Maybe once you could explain away. But who in their right mind keeps on going out in the middle of the night, particularly when they’ve got a job to go to? I tell you, she is up to no good. And we have to find out what it is. Come on.’

  Now I know I have given the impression that I was getting a little tired of that casuarina tree. But I can tell you, when the time came to leave, it had never seemed more attractive. It’s one thing to hang around outside someone’s house, but quite another to follow them down deserted streets at some godforsaken time in the morning. But I had no opportunity to voice my misgivings to Kiffo. He was off like a rat up a drainpipe and I had no option but to follow him. I didn’t fancy trailing the Pitbull, but neither did I fancy hiding under a tree, alone, at that time of night.

  Let me tell you something. In the movies, following a person looks like the easiest thing in the world. All you do is walk a discreet distance behind. When they turn around you feign interest in the shop window of an oriental emporium or something. It isn’t like that in real life. Okay, I know the circumstances were somewhat different. For one thing, there wasn’t an oriental emporium within ten kilometres. But the main thing was that there was very little cover. I mean, if the Pitbull turned around, there we’d be, frozen under a street-lamp. Difficult to explain away as a casual late night jog. Kiffo and I zigzagged from one side of the road to the other, moving from bush to bush, crouching behind the odd parked car. But for a lot of the time we were out in the open. It’s a horrible feeling to know that just one backwards glance would be enough to pin you in a metaphorical spotlight.

  Problem number two. It’s quiet at night. Unbelievably quiet. Even the night insects seemed to have taken a vow of silence. So we couldn’t stay too close on her heels for fear that either she or the evil hound, Slasher, would hear our footsteps. That didn’t bother me, mind. I’d have been happy with a fair distance. Something like twenty-five kilometres, for example. But it did make it difficult to keep her in view. When she turned a corner, we’d run like hell, keeping on the nature strip to deaden the sound. It was okay for Kiffo – he didn’t have to keep a protective arm across his boobs. I was running flat out, and mine threatened to knock my glasses off.

  Problem three. When we reached a corner, we had to peer round very carefully. For all we knew, she could have been a metre or two away and a couple of peering, sweaty, disembodied faces might just conceivably have drawn a little unwanted attention. This meant that all the time we made up on the mad sprint was lost on gingerly peering around the next corner. God, it was a nightmare. Once, we turned a corner and there was no sign of her at all. A couple of roads radiated off and she could have taken any one of them. So we had to take a chance and run to the
point where we could get a good view in every direction. As luck would have it, we spotted the pooch’s backside as it turned yet another corner.

  Finally, we came to a large intersection. This time, though, we could hear voices. Kiffo and I crouched down and very carefully looked around the corner. About ten metres down the road, the Pitbull was talking to a man. They were standing under a streetlight and we had a clear view of them. The man was small, thin-lipped and bloodless. Like a ferret. He reminded me of the little guy you used to see in gangster movies. You know, the one who was always next to Robert De Niro, the one who was completely off his head and liable to shoot someone in the groin if he didn’t like the look of them. The runt of the litter, but mean as anything.

  They were having an animated conversation, two sets of arms flapping all over the place, though we couldn’t make out the actual words. It was a residential street, but they were outside a large hall, a likely meeting place for Scouts or other paramilitary organisations. You know the sort of thing. The man was jangling a bunch of keys. After a few more moments of semaphore practice, he unlocked the door of the hall and they disappeared inside. A few seconds later, a light came on. I glanced at Kiffo, raised my eyebrows and he gave me a quick nod. Having come this far, there was no way we were prepared to give up now.

  Kiffo and I padded around the side of the building, looking for a convenient window, the kind that in movies are invariably positioned to afford maximum spying potential. It soon became obvious that the builder of this place had wilfully ignored this architectural necessity. The only window likely to offer any view was impractically positioned about two and a half metres above the ground. A possibility if you were a member of the Australian basketball team, but not a great deal of use to us. Fortunately, a quick exploration of the grounds revealed a number of milk crates and we piled these up in a rough pyramid underneath the window. It didn’t look particularly safe but unless we stumbled across a cherry picker in the undergrowth it was going to have to do. Kiffo and I climbed gingerly up the crates, stopping every few moments to sway gently as the whole arrangement shifted under our weight. Finally we were able to grab hold of the windowsill and peer into the room.

  I’m not the most house-proud person in the world, but that window was a disgrace. The accumulated filth of two millennia seemed ingrained into its surface. Nonetheless, we could just about see the runt and the Pitbull sitting at a table. Or rather, we could see the Pitbull pretty clearly, old Slasher sitting at her side, but only the disembodied arms of the runt. There was a document case on the table in front of them.

  I had to admit that it all looked like very funny business. Why would you need to meet someone at that time of night? What could possibly be so important that the telephone wouldn’t do? Why would a small spider choose just this moment to go for a pre-dawn amble across my cheek? Weighty questions, indeed. And then, just as the tickling on my cheek was reaching unbearable proportions, the runt reached across the table and undid the document case. He pulled out a small bag and dropped it in front of the Pitbull. I felt Kiffo’s hand tighten on my arm. The Pitbull reached out and for one fleeting moment I caught a glimpse of white powder before she took the bag and shoved it in her coat pocket. Yet more questions raced through my mind. Could the contents of the bag really be drugs? Could we really be witnessing what is known in all the best movies as a ‘drop’? Could this really be a sneeze building at the back of my nose?

  At least I got the answer to the last question. It was. And it was one of those unstoppable ones, the kind that if you try to contain it with your hand or something, it’ll blow the back of your head off. I have to confess that when it arrived, it did so with maximum decibels. I don’t know who was most surprised: me, Kiffo, the spider or the trio inside the hall. At least I had about one tenth of a second warning. For Kiffo, it must have been like a shotgun going off in his ear. He leaped about three metres in the air, his face twisted into an expression that, under other circumstances, would have been quite comical, and the whole flimsy structure we were standing on collapsed in a crash of cascading plastic.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, after we had landed in a tangle on the ground. Kiffo turned a disbelieving face in my direction.

  ‘Better out than in,’ I added.

  Maybe he would have hit me. I wouldn’t have blamed him. There wasn’t a chance, though. We heard a startled gasp, the unmistakable sound of a door being opened hurriedly, a large dog tearing at the ground with its claws and the rattle of a chain clasp being released. Slasher had been building up a fair bit of momentum while on the leash. Like one of those old wind-up cars. You’d rev the wheels against the floor and when you released it, the car would zoom off at about two hundred kilometres an hour and smash your mum’s prize vase in the corner of the living room. Well, old Slash was clearly a bit like that. We could hear the thud of giant paws crashing against the ground. It sounded like a Sherman tank was coming towards us.

  ‘Run!’ yelled Kiffo, a little unnecessarily. I already had a twenty metre head start on him.

  Have you ever seen those films where they use a hand-held camera during action sequences? Everything jumps around and all you can hear is the sound of heavy breathing? Think of that and you will get some idea of the next few minutes. I had never run so fast. The only thing that crossed my mind was whether it was possible to get whiplash in the mammaries. Head up, arms and legs pumping. I’d have amazed my Phys. Ed. teacher. If an athletics scout had been around, I’d probably have made the national squad for the one hundred metres. But whatever I did, I couldn’t shake the dog. I could hear it pounding along behind me, the sound of its harsh breathing getting closer by the second. I had no idea what had happened to Kiffo. Under the circumstances, I could only worry about myself.

  Just when I felt that the damn thing was about to clasp its yellowing teeth around my ankle I did a sort of sideways leap over a low fence bordering someone’s property. The dog attempted to change direction too, and I heard it smash into the metal chain link. I had an image of its face being squeezed into about six separate diamond shapes – you know, like in those cartoons where the cat gets sliced up into segments. It gave me a few precious seconds though. I ran straight across the yard, dodging the odd palm tree that suddenly loomed up at me in the dark. It wasn’t enough. Old Slasher had obviously had lessons in fence hurdling because all too soon I could hear the sound of his breathing closing in again. He sounded pissed off as well. Trust me, you can tell these things when you are being pursued by a creature whose sole raison d’être is to supplement its normal diet with human rump steak.

  Even a massive burst of adrenaline wears off pretty quickly. I was tiring and I knew it. Just when I felt that it was all over, that, frankly, I couldn’t be bothered anymore, a sort of miracle happened. One moment I was running over grass and the next a dark mass appeared at my feet. Before I had time to even think about it, I jumped and cleared an in-ground spa by about two metres. Slasher wasn’t quite so lucky, though. I could hear a huge splash as he dived straight in. Must have been quite a surprise. One moment he’s got the scent of blood in his nostrils and the next he’s doing the breaststroke. Mind you, the size and sheer bulk of the hound might have drained the pool for all I knew.

  For a while, though, I had clear space behind me. I summoned the last of my fading strength and made for the fence at the rear of the yard. This fence was much higher. Perhaps the security-conscious owners had decided that if they could only afford decent perimeter fencing on one side, they’d put it at the back. This was one serious fence.

  I threw myself at it and scrambled up the chain link. Even with my momentum I was still a way from the top and I had to scrabble with my feet for purchase. Then I heard it. The unmistakable sound of a very wet, seriously pissed off dog making a final lunge for its quarry. I guess it thought that it was game over. There I was with my arse wriggling at a tempting and achievable height. I could feel it launching itself like an Exocet missile.

  It was then that
I felt a strong hand grip my wrist and pull me forcefully up the fence. I had no time to register what was going on before a sharp pain shot through my left foot. Slasher had finally made contact. Bear in mind that this was one heavy dog. Remember also that I’m hanging from a chain link fence with this dog attached to me like a plumb line. Looking up, I could see Kiffo’s face, red with strain as he tried to lift me to safety. I knew what it was like to be the rope in the middle of a tug of war. For a while, I thought Slasher would win. The veins were standing out in Kiffo’s neck like hot dog sausages. The next moment my shoe came loose and the dog plummeted to the ground with a satisfying thud. The weight gone from my leg, I soared over the top of the fence, adding high jump expertise to my new-found sprinting talent.

  Kiffo and I lay in a heap on the other side of the fence. Slasher, enraged beyond endurance, threw himself at the links. I took a good look into his eyes. Believe me, he was not in a charitable mood. This was not a dog that was inclined to forgive and forget. But he was also a powerless dog. The fence was too high.

  Kiffo and I scrambled to our feet and took off into the darkness. We had no idea if there was a hole somewhere that Slasher could slink through, or if the owners of the property, woken by the hellish racket that the dog was now making, would not appear with sawn-off shotguns. Anyway, we needed to be as far away from there as possible.

  Twenty minutes later we arrived at my house. It was only then that I realised how badly my foot was hurting. Kiffo and I didn’t talk much. We were both too exhausted to spend any time with words. He just loped off into the darkness and I let myself in. Luckily, the Fridge was asleep. I had left the house via my bedroom window at about nine-thirty that evening and she had obviously found no reason to disturb what she must have thought was her sleeping daughter.