Читать книгу Pike's Pyramid - Michael Tatlow - Страница 15

A shaft of sun beaming through the window woke him at 8.30. Last night’s thunder claps had metamorphosed into a team of drummers beating resolutely in his skull. Even to the alcoholic smoker, the stink of cigarettes and rum pervaded the room. He left the bed and opened the room’s two windows.

A shower of cold water drove out the demons as he contemplated his idiocy with the rum. To the west through a window he saw a sky of blue. White cumulus was bunched over the mountains like a flock of spring lambs.

He made a quick and chirpy phone call to Alex. He would be home before two.

Pike savoured eggs and bacon for breakfast. He smiled two hours later as the Ford passed little Elizabeth Town and crossed the creek that grew as it flowed north to the coast to become the majestic Rubicon River. ‘Don’t cross the Rubicon,’ Richard had counselled.

He kept on a steady 110 kph past the horror spot at the floor of a grassy valley where his parents had died. It was called Devil’s Elbow. He drove up a small hill of trees and radiant green pasture that reminded him of Ireland. The panorama of farmland brought a wave of excited anticipation, banishing his bleakness from last night.

At the Stanley turn-off, he stopped at the isolated service station, filled the petrol tank and tossed his remaining cigarettes into a bin. The highway continued west to Smithton and a score of settlements like Irishtown. And beyond to Cape Grim on the island’s far north-western tip.

He drove past the Green Hills to his left, where Liam Pike and Ninginny had raised their children and died. Bits of the stone chimney were the only remnants of their shanty. To the right was the long and shallow curve of Stanley’s bottom beach.

The odometer clicked to four hundred and ten kilometres from Hobart at the scenic lookout and information plaque facing the bay. A sign announced: STANLEY. AUSTRALIA’S TIDIEST TOWN 1996. The win had given the town a swagger. Summer tourists, at least, lifted the population of six hundred to more than a thousand.

Blarney’s Irish eyes were smiling as he anticipated being called Hellsbells. He had earned the sobriquet as he stood, aged sixteen, with blood streaming from the deep gash curving from the brow to his chin, on the boat Victor, long-lining for shark way out west in the Great Southern Ocean, a deep swell surging from Antarctica. It was the birth of his big G.

No one else on board knew if the injury was caused by the enraged wandering albatross he was freeing from a hook or a two-metre great white shark on the deck in the mayhem after Pike’s skipper Victor Harding’s wrist was nearly severed by the boat’s line hauler. A thunderstruck Pike had cried, ‘Hellsbells!’

When the boat returned to Stanley, the two other crew members had embroidered the drama at the pub. Young Blarney’s cry of Hellsbells was always an amusing sidelight. The name had stuck. The pub was the birthplace of most of Stanley’s notorious nicknames.

He opened his front door, to be greeted by their female golden cocker spaniel Tasman, and a chorus of cheers.

‘Surprise! Welcome home. Good on ya, Hells,’ from forty members of the Pike downline, plus his parents-in-law and Eva. Those who drove had hidden their cars around the corner by the path to the Nut.

Embracing Alex, he had a flash of regret at missing that doorstop sex.

‘Tonight, lover,’ she murmured, seeing and feeling his lust.

The welcoming party was a tonic he needed. He drew deeply of the familiar smell of old timber and carpets of wool. Alex’s parents Josef and Magda had made the place gleam. Alex led Pike to the small courtyard out the back door. The barbecue fire was grilling thick, marbled steaks. Lamb chops sizzled on the iron plate near a tub of new potatoes, boiled and golden in butter with fresh chives.

His neighbour and modest beginner in the Argo business, Dicky Allcock, was a contented victim of the town’s nicknaming mania. Few knew his real first name was Stanley. He clapped his leader on the back and cried, ‘G’day, mate. ’Ow ya goin’?’ The classic Aussie greeting was like a favourite song not heard for too long.

Everyone wondered about the robbery. Who could have done such a thing? Why? Pike made a quick inspection of the study. The computer seemed to be as he had left it. No, he assured the gathering when he returned to the courtyard, smiling. No real damage was done. It was an inconvenience, though. ‘And such a bloody puzzle.’

Alex held a glass of red wine. ‘Maybe it’s some grump we wouldn’t show the pitch to!’ she joked.

‘That rules out everyone in town,’ someone observed.

Their leader was back in charge, consolidating his posture. The local hero, now global. He and Alex faced a hectic immediate program, he announced, with the police investigation into the robbery, a stack of mail, phone and email messages galore. The couple exchanged smiles, thinking of bed. A family returning to Smithton undertook to deliver the Ford to Hertz.

Janet Pride, mid-thirties, buxomly sexy, sidled up to Pike. ‘Hells, the pitch you’re showing on Monday,’ she began. ‘At the O’Hallorans’ in Irishtown?’

‘I’m looking forward to it,’ he enthused. She was the town’s real estate agent. Pike stopped when he saw that she looked less than thrilled. ‘What’s up?’

‘You know that shrewd old coot, Rocky Shaw?’

Blarney nodded.

‘Rocky was in my office this morning. He said Sean rang him two nights ago and invited him and his wife to a meeting on Monday about some clever, easy way they could make a lot of money. He thanked Sean for his confidence in them. They’d be there. Rocky knows nothing about our business and I played dumb.’

Blarney gently ushered her to the fringe of the crowd.

She said, ‘An hour or so later, Mary O’Halloran rang Rocky’s wife Dulcie. Mary swore they shouldn’t have anything to do with Sean’s meeting. And please don’t go, sort of. What a peculiar business, if Rocky’s got it right.’

Pike looked into his soda water. ‘That doesn’t sound like Mary.’

‘I know,’ Janet declared. ‘Marvellous prospects, they are. She’s President of the Irishtown CWA.’ The Country Womens Association was a real power in the municipality of Circular Head, which was named after the circular Nut. Political parties were cream puffs in comparison.

‘Rocky says his Dulcie was pretty cut up. They were going to stay at home on Monday. Dulcie was still sounding off about it when the phone rang again. It was Sean. He told Rocky not to take any notice of Mary. He said he’d feel bad about it if the Shaws missed a chance to make some real money. He reckoned Mary was trying to keep them away from a fortune. He likes his money, does Rocky,’ Janet laughed.

That liking, Pike admitted to himself, was what Argo was all about. ‘Who doesn’t?’ he asked dispassionately. Bending to pat Tasman, now the best-fed dog in town, he caught an interested glance from Alex. ‘Well,’ he asked Janet, ‘are the Shaws going to Irishtown?’

‘Sean said they deserved the opportunity. So Rocky says bloody oath, they’d go. They want to see a brawl between Mary and Sean, maybe involving you.’

‘I’ll check it out tonight,’ Pike replied thoughtfully. That sort of flak, he knew, would get around like a plague.

He gave the assemblage a stirring account of the launch in the republic, peppered with some personal colour and photographs. ‘We’ve recruited Stanley’s first foreign legion!’ he announced.

He felt his lack of detail about the republic would be attributed to his modesty. It was a rendition De Groote would be proud of. He saw that Alex also felt guilty. It was like writing a news story with a slant. There was no point now in unsettling them, he figured.

He was asked when the professor was going to Prague to further the Pikes’ gains. ‘Pretty soon,’ he said. ‘Richard told me last night how thrilled he is.’

That, at least, was not a lie. Argo’s heavies said the sort of propaganda he was sprouting was not lying. It was simply a recitation of successes, presented in advance.

‘A fruitful mission, a holiday with Alex’s family in a glorious old country, and all tax deductible,’ he summarised expansively. ‘The seeds have been planted, ready for cultivation.’ A pathetic little patch, and no damned cultivator.

The Pikes, the achievers, stood hand in hand as their team sang For they are jolly good fellows. Dicky Allcock led the hip hip hoorays. Magda and Josef Dvorak were near bursting with pride.

To her husband’s astonishment, Alex announced that she would soon get tickets for an exciting Argo seminar at Burnie, four Sundays away. Everyone had to go. National leader Jerry Bell himself was coming from Sydney.

De Groote had been on the phone to her, Pike guessed. The event was unavoidable. ‘Take lots of people with you. All your new recruits,’ he contributed. ‘It will be a great team-building experience and you’ll hear more about the Czech Republic.’

‘It’ll cost only thirty dollars a ticket,’ Alex added. She and Blarney knew De Groote and Bell would pocket most of the proceeds. Some would flow to Harbek.

Pike took their six front-line couples aside, one at a time, for reports on their progress while the others enjoyed the unusually windless sunshine.

The operators of the big Stanley Cabin and Tourist Park down the hill at the bottom beach oozed confidence. Pike managed to cover his amusement at a particular cruelty of Stanley’s nick-naming mania. It was bad enough that Maurice White’s young wife, a sultry little Filipino he had met and married in Manila, was named Lily. Maurice was a large Maori with ebony hair that curled to his shoulders. It was probably inevitable that, soon after he’d arrived from New Zealand two years back, the locals had named him Snow. He seemed to like it, however.

‘We got four new ones while yous was away,’ Snow White reported proudly. His big right hand covered a can of beer. ‘They was all customers at the park. They’s gone back to the mainland now. Lily got three of ’em.’

The system provided for people who joined Argo while away on holidays to be contacted back home by an agent in their patch. The agent who collared the new networkers shared the loot, usually half and half.

‘That makes our downline twenty-six people!’ Lily chimed in. ‘But we missed two families, probably because we’re shitty presenters of the pitch. You help us next time, Hells?’

Pike told them it was a terrific result. ‘Let me know when you’ve got another one lined up,’ he said, ‘and we’ll do a double act.’

Less ebullient were Mildred and Tractor Ferguson. In their late fifties, they had been Argo networkers for nine months. Three married daughters with children were their best customers. Mildred declared that they were sorry, they had no new members. Her customary surprised-looking eyes of blue, above a nose like a button mushroom, looked troubled. Three couples had accepted their invitation to the pitch at home two weeks back, she reported anxiously, and not one of them had fronted.

‘What did you do about that?’ Pike asked, businesslike.

‘Got pissed orf,’ said Tractor, whose real first name was Horace. His dairy farm was on the Green Hills across the bay. His weather-worn face creased. ‘Then I attacked the bloody cream cake Mildred made to feed the coots.’

‘Okay, don’t worry about it,’ said Pike. ‘It’s their loss. But you’ve got to remember, Mildred, feed them only Argo tea or coffee and Argo biscuits and chocolate bars. People will think they have to lay on a spread like that, too, if they join you in Argo. This business works on duplication, remember. Keep it simple.’

Mildred flushed. ‘If you’d been home, I’d ’ave brought the cake here.’

‘Crikey, Hells,’ Tractor observed defensively. ‘Her sponges and bread won at the Stanley Agricultural Show, you know!’

Their leader grinned to himself as he remembered the Great Cake Fight at the Stanley Show a year back. Furious woman cooks, the losers, accusing the judges of favouring Mildred and some others, had yelled abuse and hurled cakes and cream puffs and custard at the judges and winners.

Pike had rescued Mildred and another winner from the hilarious melee. He had set the town giggling when, a mess of yellow custard, he’d sat singing, There’s no business like show business…