Читать книгу Pike's Pyramid - Michael Tatlow - Страница 11

It was late at night, windy and snowing lightly, when they arrived from the train at the three-storey stone block of apartments. As Blarney felt about for the light switch in the small foyer, his feet crunched on glass. The globe up there had been smashed. They slowly went up the stairs and felt their way along the narrow hallway to their apartment. All the lights were out. The apartment door was a little ajar. Its basic old lock evidently had been cracked.

Inside, the lights worked. They saw no evidence of a robbery. Still upset about Jack’s death, they sat over coffee talking about it and the theft of the organiser book. Pike opened a drawer in the lounge room. All of the scores of papers he had kept in there were gone.

He went to his main suitcase, which locked automatically by the pressing of a button after the case was closed. Pike had not done that when he left with a smaller bag to stay at the hotel. But the suitcase was now locked. He used a key from his ring of them to open it. Clothing in it had been moved about. No documents.

Alex saw his consternation. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Papers. Anything with info that I had in the stolen book. Dammit, they’re all gone. We’ve been robbed. Go and tell Liba.’

Minutes later, Alex returned with old Liba Prochazka, skinny as a broom stick and deaf. She was the building’s sort-of cleaner and manager. It was her job to lock the front door at midnight after hours of watching television on full volume.

Alex told Liba in Czech about the robbery, the smashed globes, the broken lock on their apartment door.

‘She says the building hasn’t been broken into in years. She reported it to the police this morning. But they haven’t arrived yet. Apparently we’re the only tenants who’ve been robbed.

‘Only the globe in the foyer and those on the way to this flat have been knocked out. Liba cleaned this flat the day after we went to the hotel. She didn’t touch your suitcase, which she thinks was open.’

When Liba had gone, Alex urged Blarney to hurry up with arrangements to leave the republic. ‘Struth, our robber or robbers might be the same horrors who killed Jack,’ she moaned. ‘You can thrash nearly any brute, my love, but if we’d been here when they broke in…if they had guns…’

Pike shrugged. He said nothing. With no police response to the book theft, he did not bother reporting this robbery. He realised that there had to be a reason for the torture of their dead friend, who had invited them to visit his home in New Jersey on their way back to Australia. The torturers might have wanted to know the names of everyone to whom Summons had related his evidence. A particular target would be an anonymous American who, Jack had inferred, was his important investigator.

Blarney reflected on his writing in Stanley of six freelance articles for American and British magazines to help pay for this Czech adventure.

He had got $US4000 for yet another version of THE REAL STORY OF THE TASMANIAN DEVIL. Then a useful cheque came from the Brits for a piece about the demise of the Thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger.

The couple had travelled around the Czech Republic in a rented car, Alex navigating and explaining the road signs to driver Blarney. He had presented the Argo sales spiel, called the pitch, to hundreds of small groups, with Alex translating. A marvellous but industrially polluted country, it was, teeming with history and friendly people. And the food and accommodation were so incredibly cheap!

The Czechs, however, years after being run by the Soviets, were wary of foreigners wanting their hard-earned cash up front in return for promised riches. The pictures of potential wealth the Pikes painted for them had looked too good to be true.

‘Give it time,’ Argo’s top man in Australia, Jerry Bell, had told him before childless divorcee Bell went home to Sydney the day after Jack’s killing. ‘We’ll sort it out, Blarney. You’re one of our very best. You’ve enlisted a good-looking group in Prague. We’ll cultivate it; sow more seeds, like good gardeners. Your crop here will flourish. Trust the system, Blarney.’

The Pikes’ twenty-one recruits were way short of the army he and Alex had gone there to enlist.

At one o’clock in the morning, after two days spent conferring with their recruits, Blarney figured it would be11am, 10 hours ahead, in Tasmania. He phoned Richard De Groote’s surgery.

He was surprised that, despite the city’s dysfunctional phone system, the number rang. He heard Richard’s long-time secretary/receptionist purr, ‘Good morning. Professor De Groote’s surgery. Sarah Williams speaking’.

Pike smiled into the handset. Sarah was a generous and sharp spinster, who knew the strengths and foibles of Argo’s every ranking member on the island. Pike knew Sarah admired Richard De Groote with an unrequited passion, and kept at her home twelve fat cats.

‘Hi, you lovely old tart… Oops, you’re sure not old, Sarah my dear. We’re still in Prague but on the way home very soon.’

She immediately recognised the deep and engaging voice. ‘Blarney, darling. Wonderful! I hear you two have been terrific in Prague.’ Nasal Australian replaced the formal English of her opening line. ‘How’s your lovely bride?’

‘Alex is fine, thanks, Sarah.’ To shorten the call, he decided to lie. ‘She’s on another phone to her parents in Stanley. I’m on a public phone with only enough coins for a few minutes. Is Richard there?’

‘You two did it, Blarney!’ De Groote declared. His modulations were warm. Touches of guttural remained from the tongue of his birth, garnished by middle-class England—where he graduated at Oxford—and his stint in the US, then a decade in Australia. ‘I knew you guys would dazzle them.’

‘Yeah, I’ve seen the deceitful reports on Argo’s website,’ said Pike. ‘Is that Jerry Bell’s opinion?’

‘He rang me last night. He says you and Alex have been great.’

Pike swallowed and levelled his voice. He realised he should have prepared a mental immunisation. ‘There hasn’t been much dazzle here, Richard. Jerry Bell must have told you that. It’s in a mess. An avoidable one. You’ve got a major—’

‘Easy, Blarney.’ The professor’s voice hardened. ‘National openings can be tough. It’ll be fine.’ He paused. ‘Why didn’t you ring me before this? A postcard last week was all I got. You and Alex should have sent scores of inspiring cards to all your downline here.’

Pike knew his leader’s smile had departed like a nun from a rough joke. The genial, cornflower-blue eyes would have narrowed. Aggression from another direction diverts attack, Richard had told him.

‘Four letters, I sent you,’ Pike declared. ‘They must still be on the way. And I don’t know how many phone calls I tried. I wanted to tell you about the mess over here. To get your advice, Richard. The phones here are often crazy. You were supposed to ring me at our apartment, Richard. Every day, you said.’

‘Couldn’t get through,’ De Groote replied flatly.

‘Mmm. Others did.’ Counter attack. ‘It’s easier to ring into the Czech Republic than bloody phoning out of it. We got a lot of calls from Tasmania.

‘It was an execution, Richard,’ Pike said earnestly, brushing his free hand across the G scar.

‘Execution?’ De Groote sounded incredulous. ‘Of what? Who?’

‘Jack Sussoms. Come on, Jerry must have told you about that horror.

Gerry was at the hotel when it happened. Jack was a friend of ours.’

‘Jack Sussoms was murdered, you say? Good Lord! I know…ah, knew old Jack. An Argo legend. He went a bit paranoid, I seem to remember hearing. He imagined a bunch of criminals were after his business.’

‘Really?’ Pike mused. ‘Jack seemed quite sane to this layman. I’ll tell you about it later.’

He was incredulous that De Groote had not known about the slaying. And now his mentor did not want details about it. When? How? Why?

Who?

‘I’ll check it out with Jerry,’ De Groote replied.

‘Did Jerry tell you they stole my organiser book?’

‘Yes. Awful luck, that.’

So Jerry had told him about the book stealing but not Jack’s murder? ‘As Jerry’s instructions are needed for you to come to Prague, I’ll ring him myself. Right now.’

‘Don’t you dare. Information for Jerry has to go through me.’

Pike enjoyed that. Bypassing upline De Groote to get to Bell would be a gross, a grossly gross, breach of Argo protocol. Fine. ‘Regardless, Alex and I are going to fly out, heading for home, in a day or two,’ he announced.

“Look, you cannot—’

‘We’re leaving this mess,’ Pike interrupted. ‘When we get to Melbourne, I’ll ring you and arrange a meeting in Hobart while Alex flies on to meet her parents at the airport at Wynyard. They’ll be in our car, and will take her to Stanley.’

‘Blarney, do not, do not tell anyone—’

‘The phone here’s run out of coins,’ Pike shouted. He hung up.

Alex erupted, angrier than he had ever seen her, at Pike’s candid report of what De Groote had said. She shared Pike’s astonishment that De Groote had not been told of Jack Sussoms’ death; that their mentor probably would not be in Prague for weeks.

‘If he doesn’t come to Prague right away,’ she declared, ‘I’ll chuck in the whole business. And I’m not going to keep quiet about Jack’s murder or lie to our people at home about the whole damned shambles in Prague.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ Pike said. Did she really mean that? Throw away our achievements in Tassie? Kiss goodbye to a life of profitable leverage? Our secure future? Mark up another failure? Back to the freelance writing grind? ‘I’ll be arguing with Richard in Hobart while you fly on to Wynyard.’

‘You’re Richard’s best agent in Tassie,’ Alex added. ‘Raise hell with him.’

After making passionate love, they left their bed at nine in the morning. Pike walked through more snow to a nearby travel agency and booked seats on a British Air flight leaving for Melbourne at three that afternoon. He booked connecting flights to Wynyard for Alex and to Hobart for himself.

He phoned his close friend and colleague Dick Street. He was the Pikes’ immediate Argo upline, based in the city of Burnie, on the coast an hour’s drive east of Stanley. Street was appalled to learn of Sussoms’ murder, the dead man’s evidence of corruption in Argo, the probably related theft of the leather book and the shambles of the Argo launch in the republic.

‘You two are in fucken danger there, Blarns,’ he said, anxiety fuming from the phone. ‘Bloody murderers with guns could beat even you. Come on home, mate. Bloody soon.’

‘We’re flying out today, Dick. I’ll see you soon. Meantime I’d like you to arrange for that pitch presentation at Sean and Mary O’Halloran’s farm in Irishtown to go ahead soon. The ideal time would be… Hang on, I’ll check for a date.’

Pike consulted the year’s calendar that was on the wall. ‘See if they can host it on the evening of Friday, January 27, a couple of weeks after we get home.’

‘I’ll ring ’em now. If I don’t call back in the next hour, Blarns, it’ll go ahead then.’

Pike phoned Harbek’s secretary and told him they would fly out in three hours.

After checking in their luggage, Blarney left Alex standing in the busy airport lounge and went to the toilet. He was washing his hands when the mirror showed him knives in the hands of two men who had followed him in. They silently came close behind him. They were in blue suits, aged about forty. Tough looking and solidly built. They could be British or American, he figured.

One raised his knife, ready to stab the hands washer. Pike quickly ducked and swung around. His wet right fist crashed into the attacker’s belly. As the man’s head jolted down, the bridge of his nose was met by a powerful thrust from the palm of Pike’s left hand. The man collapsed on the floor.

‘You stupid brutes!’ the Tasmanian roared. ‘What’s this about?’

The second man leaped forward. A long-blade swung up from his hip as he yelled, ‘You’re dead, Pike’.

The edge of karate master Pike’s right hand smashed into the attacker’s wrist. Blarney heard a bone crack as the knife clattered to the floor. The same hand edge smashed into the man’s throat. More bones were fractured as Blarney stamped on the knees of the men at his feet.

‘What’s going on?’ he yelled again. Both men, he now saw, were unconscious. He bent down to get their wallets; find out their identities.

Suddenly they looked familiar. They had been standing out there near him and Alex. With them were a third man and a dark-haired woman with a blue scarf over her chin. Those two, he feared, were after Alex.

He ran from the toilet as British Air called from loudspeakers for passengers to board the flight to Melbourne. The woman in the scarf was standing closely behind Alex. Pike saw the glint from perhaps a hypodermic needle in the brunette’s hand. He wordlessly shoved the woman away and took his wife by the arm.

‘Let’s get on board,’ he said calmly. He was pleased Alex had not known she was about to be assaulted, maybe murdered. Nor had she seen him shove off the needle-toting bitch, whose male companion was glaring.

‘I think I’ve dropped my pen,’ Pike said to Alex as he swung around. ‘Keep going, love. I’ll catch up with you.’

Fists clenched, big Blarney strode to the pair. ‘The other two in the toilet are dead,’ he lied. ‘You want to join them in the cemetery?’ The pair looked askance as Blarney enjoyed the lie.

‘Tell me. Tell me now. Who ordered you four to attack us?’ They looked sombrely at one another, then at the floor.

‘If I report the toilet attack to the police,’ he warned, ‘I’ll get you two charged with attempted murder.’ He wanted to smash them.

The two turned away and hurried towards the men’s toilet. Blarney did not want police involvement. If he reported to them there would be no flight home today from this now-perilous city. He and Alex would have to stay in Prague for dangerous weeks to testify in court. He trotted after Alex. They boarded the 747 jet in chilly and fading sunshine.