Besides, if it wasn’t The Debt, who in the hell was it?
‘So what does it mean?’ I said.
‘It’s from Ovid’s Metamorphoses,’ said Dr Chakrabarty. ‘The myth of Lycaon.’
Typical teacher’s response, I thought. One that answered a question, just not the one you’d asked.
‘And what exactly is the myth of Lycaon?’ I asked.
‘Lycaon, who was a king of Arcadia, came up with this idea of testing whether Zeus was truly omniscient by feeding him a dish of his dismembered son.’
‘Charming,’ I said.
‘As a reward Zeus transformed Lycaon into a wolf and killed his fifty useless sons with lightning bolts. Except Nyctimus, the son he served up, who instead was restored to life.’
I couldn’t even manage a ‘Charming’ now – this was getting too freaky.
Dr Chakrabarty handed me the phone and said, with an urgency in his voice I had not heard before, ‘Just delete the damn thing and find out who is sending them and demand that they stop!’
‘Why do you want me to delete it?’ I said, looking at the message again. ‘What does it mean?’
Dr Chakrabarty sighed before he declaimed – and declaimed was the right word because there was something theatrical in his delivery – ‘And thus partly he softened the half-dead limbs in boiling waters, partly he roasted in an open fire.’
‘Jesus!’ I said.
‘Jesus, indeed,’ said Dr Chakrabarty. ‘But of course these myths predate Judeo-Christian beliefs. Which is perhaps why they are so powerful. And why it would be in your best interests to delete this and find out who is sending the damned things.’
There was something in both his voice and his face that was making me quite scared.
‘And you can’t think of anybody who is versed in the Classics?’ he said.
Of course not, I thought, looking at Dr Chakrabarty. The only person I know who takes one of your crazy mad subjects is Peter Eisinger. And he is so not the type to send freaky messages about half-dead limbs in boiling waters.
Finger hovering over the delete icon, I looked again at the text message.
I hit a button, but it wasn’t delete.
Then I looked at my watch and said, ‘I better get going.’
‘Of course,’ said Dr Chakrabarty.
I thanked him and his shaggy eyebrows and hurried back down the Seaway.
Friday
Spy vs Spy
From outside I could see that the spy shop was crowded, that there was at least five bikies in there. In full leathers.
There were a lot of bikies on the Gold Coast – you saw them around all the time, and the local paper loved to publicise their exploits.
Bikie War Erupts in Suburban Shopping Centre.
That sort of thing.
Okay, every year they did do a fluffy toy run to the public hospital, but apart from that it was pretty much murder, mayhem and the manufacture of illicit substances.
I hesitated at the door – did I really want to get this close to them?
I could feel the urgency waning, the urgency that had chewed at me through the night, had propelled me up and into town early that morning.
This wasn’t a good thing – I needed to track the sender of that text – so I set my shoulders, pushed open the door and walked in.
Hanley, the Kiwi owner, acknowledged me with a nod, before he turned his attention to his customers.
Now that I was in the small shop with five large bikies in full leathers, I sort of wished I wasn’t.
They weren’t aggressive, or threatening, but they were still bikies, and that part of my brain, the be-scared-of-bikies part, was firing up big-time.
It wanted me out of there, running down the street.
‘So this digital CCTV, what’s the difference in picture quality with analogue?’ asked one of the bikies in his scary bikie voice.
‘Sixty, seventy per cent,’ said Hanley. ‘I can give you a demo if you like.’
‘But you’re paying, what, three times as much?’ said another bikie, maybe the organisation’s financial officer, who sported a spectacular handlebar moustache.
The discussion went on and on while I pretended to be engrossed in a pair of night-vision binoculars.
Hanley knew his stuff, but it was pretty obvious that he was no salesman.
In the end I couldn’t help myself.
‘Do you mind if I say something?’ I said.
Instantly five sets of bikie eyes were on me.
‘The problem with analogue is that it’s yesterday’s technology. And what happens with yesterday’s technology is that it ceases to be supported. I mean, have any of you tried to get a VCR fixed lately?’
There were a couple of murmurs of bikie approval – the kid’s on to something here.
‘So even if you pay a bit more now, you know that in the future you will have full support. And like any new technology, you have to jump in somewhere. It doesn’t really make sense to wait until the prices come down, because the prices are always coming down.’
More murmurs of bikie approval.
Hanley smiled, ‘Dom’s absolutely right there.’
The head bikie said, ‘So what is this, a setup? How much you paying this kid, bru?’
Hanley shrugged. ‘Kid knows his stuff.’
Again I couldn’t help myself. ‘He actually doesn’t like the “bru” thing that much,’ I said to the bikie.
He glared at me, and then said, ‘Fair enough.’
Turning back to Hanley, he said, ‘Let’s have us some of this new technology.’
Hanley’s eyes opened wide. ‘You want to buy the whole system?’
‘It’s what you’ve been selling us, isn’t it?’ said the bikie, looking at me and winking: we’re together on this now, what a crap salesman Hanley is.
‘So I assume you’d like to put that on card?’ said Hanley.
The bikie pulled out a bulging wallet and extracted a selection of hundred-dollar bills, which he proceeded to count out on the counter.
I figured I’d played my part, so I turned my attention back to the night binoculars while they finalised the transaction.
When the bikies had left Hanley said, ‘Owe you one, Dom.’
Which, funnily enough, was exactly what I’d been thinking too.
‘Do you know much about text messages?’ I said.
‘They were invented in the late eighties by a Finnish engineer named Matti Makkonen,’ said Hanley. ‘The very first one was sent in 1992 in the UK from a PC to a mobile phone.’
‘Okay, so perhaps you do,’ I said, though I knew Hanley wasn’t showing off – he just knew stuff, a helluva lot of it.
‘So if you get a call from an unknown sender, is that the end of it, you can never know what the sender’s number is?’
Hanley smiled at this.
‘Not necessarily,’ he said, or the Kiwi version of ‘Not necessarily’.
‘As you probably know, a text message has a limit of a hundred and forty characters for users,’ said Hanley.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘But there are also another twenty characters reserved for more technical information like package heading and routing stuff.’
I didn’t even bother with an ‘Of course’ because I was sure there was nothing ‘Of course’ about the look of absolute pig-ignorance on my face.
‘So even though the sender has requested that their information not end up on your phone, it doesn’t mean that it’s not somewhere on the system.’
That, I got. And that got me excited.
‘So you can find the number?’
‘Me?’ said Hanley, pointing at himself. ‘I was under the impression that this was a theoretical discussion.’
One of the cardinal rules of The Debt was that nobody was supposed to help you, but I’d been wondering about that for a while now.
A lot of people had helped me repay the first four instalments. Maybe they hadn’t realised it, but
surely that didn’t matter, they had still helped.
And nothing had happened to me or to them, had it?
So was The Debt omniscient like Dad and Gus seemed to think it was?
I didn’t think so. Yes, The Debt was powerful; you didn’t mess with The Debt. But omniscient like Google is omniscient?
I took out my phone, scrolled to the text message and showed it to Hanley.
He studied it for a while and said, ‘It’s something about hot water and roasting fire, but that’s about all I can get.’
‘You know Latin?’ I said.
‘Did it at school, but like most things I did at school, I’ve forgotten more than I remember,’ he said. ‘So let me guess: you want to know who sent you this?’
‘Exactly,’ I said.
‘So what we’d have to do is forward this to a VOIP phone, which will let me have a closer look at those twenty characters I was talking about. I doubt the number would be stored there, but the name of the SMS centre would.’
‘The SMS centre?’ I said.
‘Yeah, you know how when you send a text to somebody when their phone is off, they get it when they turn it back on?’
‘Sure,’ I said, thinking how exciting that noise is: the beep, beep, beep of text messages downloading, each one of them a reminder that you are somebody in the world, that you matter. Unless, of course, they are from Telstra or Optus.
‘Well, that’s because the text is stored at an SMS centre.’
I pictured this SMS centre, like one of those battery hen places that Fiends of the Earth hate so much, cages full of squawky SMS messages just dying to get out.
‘Can I have your phone?’ said Hanley.
I handed it to him.
As Hanley set about his business, swapping between my phone and a laptop, he kept up a running commentary on what he was doing.
I knew exactly when he lost me, however: when he started using terms like ‘SS7 connectivity’ and ‘international termination models’.
My attention wandered, taking in all the other stuff on the counter.
There were bits and pieces of hardware, lots of fine-precision tools, a soldering iron and a few well-thumbed technical papers.
The title of one of them caught my eye: ‘The Use of Multi-Sensor Data Fusion in Marine Archaeology’.
Hanley sure was into a lot of weird stuff.
‘Not an easy nut to crack, this one,’ said Hanley.
‘So it can’t be done?’ I said.
‘I didn’t say that, I said it wasn’t an easy nut to crack.’
Hanley was so engrossed in his work that when some customers entered the shop he didn’t even seem to notice them.
A woman wanted some sort of hidden device to record the supervisor at the pub where she worked because he had been ‘hitting on her’ and her boss didn’t believe her.
I showed her what was available and she ended up choosing a pen recorder with a four-gig memory.
‘You’ll be very happy with that,’ I told her before she left.
Two kids also came in but, being a kid myself, I knew they were time-wasters so I didn’t encourage them to hang around.
Eventually Hanley said, ‘I reckon we might be there.’
‘You have a number?’ I said.
‘I’m pretty sure this is it,’ he said, pointing to the screen of his laptop.
Two shivers, one starting at my head, the other starting at my feet, travelled through my body and met with a shudder in my guts.
I had The Debt’s number!
I could ring them, text them, but I knew that wasn’t the way to go about it.
‘If only I could get an address,’ I said, thinking aloud, staring at the number.
‘Why didn’t you say?’ said Hanley.
He tapped at his keyboard. He clicked his mouse. Like Miranda, and Imogen for that matter, he seemed to be able to have a dozen things on the go at the same time.
After a while he pointed at the screen, at Google Maps.
‘For some reason it’s not being that specific, but the call originated from this general area,’ he said. ‘You know anybody from there?’
I followed his finger.
Nimbin!
Suddenly I got it. Well, half got it. It wasn’t The Debt, after all. But I had to make sure.
I thanked Hanley for his help. He thanked me for my help. It was pretty much one big thankfest. But once we’d managed to get away from each other, once I was on the footpath outside, I figured it wasn’t far from the spy shop to Coast Grammar so I might as well run it.
It didn’t take long before it started to hurt, though.
When I told Coach Sheeds that I’d retired from running, amongst the many things she’d said was that without constant training I’d get very unfit very quickly.
She was right, even though I didn’t think I was that unfit – my swimming had improved dramatically – but I guess it was just a different sort of fitness.
Usually, during school holidays, I gave Coast Grammar the finger when I passed by it.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.
I reckon they should employ somebody to sit there, at the entrance, one of those clickers in their hand, to see how many fingers it received in one day.
At least a hundred was my guess.
Today, however, as I reached the main gates, my finger remained where it was.
Just because it was holidays didn’t mean the school wasn’t in use – no way.
Coast Grammar was totally into ‘brokering cost-effective and proactive resource-utilisation strategies via co-payment arrangements’.
In other words, they rented the joint out.
This week, according to the sign, it was some sort of seminar.
The security guard at the gate stopped me as I went to go inside.
‘Your pass, please?’
‘I’m a student here,’ I said. ‘I need to look something up in the library.’
‘What, internet broken?’ he said.
‘Look, not everything’s available online,’ I said, feeling very Miranda-esque as I did so.
‘I’m sorry, but you need a pass.’
‘So I can’t even come into my own school?’
He folded his arms across his considerable chest – security-guard language for ‘no’.
‘Then I would like to speak to your manager,’ I said, channelling my mother.
‘The principal, you mean?’
‘Yes, if he’s available.’
‘What’s your name?’ he said.
I told him my name, he looked unimpressed, so I quickly added, ‘My father is David Silvagni.’
‘Well, my dad’s name is Trevor Jones, and that hasn’t got me very far,’ he said.
‘Could you please just contact the principal?’ I said.
The security guard took a couple of steps away and spoke into his walkie-talkie.
As he talked he shot a couple of looks in my direction.
When he came back he said through gritted teeth, ‘Okay, you can go on through.’
I felt bad now, dropping my dad’s name like that.
So as I walked past the security guard and into the school I said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why? I wouldn’t be,’ he said.
Now, as I made my way past Hogwarts, I was worried that the library would be closed. I needn’t have been, however, as it was being used as a lecture room.
According to the sign, Dr Patrick Wundita was talking about ‘Contextualising Actuarial Solutions’. Obviously a hot topic, because the room was crowded; all the seats were taken and there were many people standing.
I could’ve waited, I guess, but an hour and a half is a very long time.
So, standing at the door, I plotted a route to the other side of the library to where the reference section was.
One. Two. Three. Go.
As soon as I stepped into the library proper I knew I wasn’t going to be as invisible as I hoped.
People smiled at
me – Isn’t it wonderful to see a young person interested in contextualising actuarial solutions! their faces said. They shuffled aside to let me past.
When one man dropped the pad he was holding Dr Wundita said, ‘Maybe I should stop talking while our latecomer finds himself a spot.’
Now all eyes, and there were a lot of eyes, were on me.
A man with a bowtie stood up and indicated his now-empty seat.
I didn’t feel as if I had a choice: I sat down.
The talk went for an hour – it made Waiting for Godot seem like a Tarantino movie. When at last, finally, eventually, it ended and people started leaving, I was stuck to my seat, shell-shocked.
How could life possibly be this boring?
How did these people let that happen?
It was only when I heard somebody say, ‘Look sir, droids!’ that I snapped out of it.
It could only be one person – Mr Kotzur, the head librarian, vice-president of the Gold Coast Star Wars Society.
‘Don’t you have holidays too?’ I asked.
‘No rest for the wicked,’ he said.
I wondered what his definition of wicked would actually be: somebody who watched the Star Wars movies out of order?
‘To what do we owe the pleasure of your extracurricular visit?’ he said.
‘Could you tell me where we keep the yearbooks?’ I said.
‘Certainly, walk this way,’ he said and then started to walk with an exaggerated limp.
If not the oldest joke in the book, it was pretty close to it, but I thought what the hell, and I copied Mr Kotzur’s limp.
But when we’d reached the reference section he said, ‘I don’t think it’s particularly funny mocking somebody who’s had a bike accident.’
‘You fell off your recumbent?’ I said.
‘I didn’t fall off, I was knocked off!’ Mr Kotzur waved his hand at some books. ‘There they are.’
‘Great,’ I said, and I wished my knowledge of Star Wars trivia was better so I could hit him with some appropriate quote.
Nice tomes, Storm Trooper – something like that.
‘By the way, they’re all digitised, you know.’
‘They’re online?’
‘Of course.’
D’oh!
But I figured that since I was here I might as well do it the old way.
I guessed that Thor was in his mid to late thirties, that he’d been at this school around twenty years ago. The 1994 and 1993 yearbooks yielded nothing, but with the next book I struck gold.
Yamashita's Gold Page 3
