Читать книгу Pike's Pyramid - Michael Tatlow - Страница 16

The party dispersed with the arrival of Blarney’s fellow fly fisher for trout, Sergeant Samuel Bond. He carried a plate of pikelets from his wife Sadie. Tall, broad and looking official in his police sergeant’s uniform, he took off his cap and joined the couple at the backyard table over a glass of beer. Bond’s fair hair was greying at the temples. His blue eyes were alert.

Bond detected in Pike the stale odour of a man who at least last night had consumed booze. Not again, he hoped gravely. One more trip down that boozy road for you, my friend, hero of the Sumato affair, will wreck your marriage, your business, your very soul. He hoped this robbery drama would not afflict Blarney’s feisty but once-brittle bride.

The Pikes’ two moggies, black and white Jack and Siamese multi-cross Jill, now appeared, plundering scraps left by the guests and Tasman. Alex had brought the cats from her parents’ home when she moved in a few months before the wedding, to the initial consternation of Tasman.

Pike knew that Sam ‘Plodder’ Bond was no plodder. He had been lenient during Pike’s former drunken antics. Bondy would be personally affronted by this robbery in his sacred patch.

The policeman placed his notebook on the table. ‘Constable Noel Atkins and I couldn’t find any fresh fingerprints, I’m afraid, so I won’t need yours. There are a few smears, indicating that the intruder wore gloves.’

‘Intruder? Singular?’

‘I think so now, Hells. It was a pretty neat job. There’s part of a boot print in the garden, near the window, but there’s too much grass and shrubbery, and then the rain beat me to it.

‘However, there’s soft soil by the gap in the back fence to the Nut, where you illegally take Tasman for walks,’ he smiled. ‘I’ve got casts of two fresh boot prints, size eleven. And there’s another couple, less distinct ones and a few sizes smaller, which may or may not be related. They’re not good enough to cast. There are tracks consistent with a man carrying one load to this side of the gap, going back to the house for more, and perhaps an accomplice taking a load or two up to the chair-lift car park.

‘Can you think of anyone who might have done this?’ Bond looked searchingly at his two hosts.

Pike frowned. ‘I’ve thought about it all the way from Hobart, Sam. No, I’m stumped.’ Alex shook her head in similar puzzlement.

Bond wrote in his book. ‘It’s probably related to your network business.’

‘I’d say so,’ Pike said.

‘There are some rivalries and jealousies in the business here and there,’ Alex admitted.

‘Tell me about them,’ Sam asked keenly.

‘They’re rivalries like you get in any sort of competitive business, I’d say,’ she continued. ‘There’s no one really I could point to.’

‘Okay then,’ the policeman said easily. ‘I’ll come back to that. There’s big money involved in this network?’

‘Yes,’ Pike responded with automatic pride.

‘Hmm,’ Bond pondered over his beer. ‘This is the first house robbery in Stanley for more than two years, and the last one was by a drug-addict tourist. I don’t like the smell of this one.’

The policeman looked at Alex, then up at the face of the Nut. Grey, blue and mossy basalt radiated heat from the late sun. Patches of gold shone from rampant, flowering gorse. The chair-lift was returning visitors down to the Nut Rock Cafe. The Pikes waited.

‘No one could get in that window in daylight without being seen. Your neighbours saw nothing, so it must have been a night job.’

Bond drank some beer. ‘It must have been someone who’d sat up by the side of the Nut getting the lay of the land. A professional, who evidently knew when you’d be back home. And all for something of no street value… Well, not much, I suppose.’

Alex nodded. ‘I’ve checked in every room, Sam. The robber took only things to do with Argo, as if he was working to instructions.’

Bond said, ‘Did the files contain any personal information, say, sensitive material, about anyone or any business that someone would want to suppress? Or use for blackmail? Or could someone think you have information like that?’

Pike and Alex pondered. ‘Jeez, Sam,’ Pike said. ‘I don’t think so.’

Alex leaned forward and said quietly, ‘Blarn, you’d better tell him about Prague.’

‘Prague?’ Bond frowned.

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Pike said to his wife. De Groote would be aghast about the revelations to come. He picked up Alex’s glass and drank its remaining few centimetres of red wine.

‘This might sound like chasing phantoms, mate, but in Prague it seems that Argo is corrupted. Peddling narcotics, money laundering of billions, yes billions of dollars a year for a gang of world crooks, we’ve been told.’ Bond listened bleakly.

Pike looked at the empty glass. ‘A friend of ours in Prague, an American veteran and high ranker in Argo, was going to blow the whistle on them. He wanted me to help him and told Alex and me about it. I think I was the last to speak to him before he was murdered. Tortured and his throat cut in his hotel room a week ago. And the killers took his written evidence of the racketeering.’

Blarney told his friend about the theft of his Argo organiser book the next morning. ‘Also in it,’ he added, ‘were a few pages of info Jack had given me about the racketeering. Yeah, our Stanley address was in there.’

The sergeant slowly looked back at the Nut. ‘Holy, sweet Jesus,’ he declared quietly. ‘This robbery might be related to that.’ He filled several pages of his pad with notes.

Blarney remembered the policeman’s combat skills becoming legendary in Stanley when Bondy single-handedly broke up a fight at the wharf, felling in minutes two tree-fellers, a wharfie and a fisherman.

He asked, ‘Was your Stanley address also in Jack Sussoms’ papers?’

The Pikes looked up apprehensively. ‘It was,’ Alex said in little more than a whisper. ‘Also the flat we rented in the suburb of Palmovka.’

The policeman said he would seek the police reports from Prague. He took Pike up through the garden to the back fence, ostensibly to illustrate where the robber had gone. Bond’s real reason was to speculate without unduly worrying Alex, who began clearing the scene of the barbecue. Tasman followed the men.

Blarney was pleased that the gooseberries and raspberries were ripe. He picked a few raspberries on the way. The potatoes he had planted in October sprouted bright green tops. A good crop was coming.

At the back fence, under an old apple tree, Bond ventured, ‘The Prague police might now have evidence that it was a random robbery that went wrong. Perhaps they’ve already made an arrest. However, my priority is to protect you two.

‘If Sussoms was killed to silence him, we might have to contend with a ruthless individual or gang who would take extreme action again. You being a journalist and maybe making public the evident reason for your friend’s death; that’d worry the killers.’

‘Yeah,’ Pike said quietly. ‘I hope it was a random slaying by a thief. An old Yankee millionaire up there alone. That was the official line from the cops, despite me telling them about Jack’s allegations up beside his gory corpse, when I was their suspect.’

‘That’s what they claimed they believe.’ Bond grinned at his pad. ‘I’ll have the Czech authorities informed about your break-in through my Hobart HQ. I’m also going to deliberately over-react to this lot, Blarney. Maybe, mate, the villains think you got documentary evidence from Sussoms and mailed it home for safe keeping.’

‘If they think you are a threat…’ he contemplated the garden, frowning. He began walking back down the path towards the house. Pike kicked at a sod of earth and followed, squinting into the sunset.

‘Struth!’ Blarney called out and stopped. ‘It might be Jack’s killer or killers who robbed our Prague flat. I’ve just remembered, bugger it.’

Bond swung around and faced him. Pike related the scene at Palmovka. He added that, wanting to leave the republic soon, he had not bothered telling the Prague police about it.

Nor did he report, he confessed, the attack on him and the near attack on Alex at Prague’s airport.

Bond frowned incredulously. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Sure.’ He told the astonished policeman all about it, adding that Harbek’s office had been told when they would be at the airport. ‘They could have been muggers who thought we were loaded with money,’ he concluded. ‘But, at least for now Sam, I don’t want Alex to find out about it. Nor the Prague cops.’

Bond said, ‘It sounds like two attempted murders. You two are, or were, marked for termination, mate. I’ll report that and the Palmovka robbery to the Prague cops. I’ll include your stolen organiser book. They’ll be interested in what’s happened in Stanley.’

Seated at the kitchen table, Blarney said, ‘I’d feel easier if I could get another motive for someone to go to the considerable trouble of reconnoitring and then robbing a house in Stanley. And not a mansion likely to be loaded with valuables.

Bond wondered to them if that Argo stuff would be valuable to anyone. ‘Might someone want to sabotage your thriving little business? Did you have stuff you mailed to yourself from Prague, for instance, about Jack Sussoms’ claims?’

‘Absolutely no to all of that,’ Alex told him. ‘Come on, Sam. Do you really think they’d send someone all the way from Prague to find out?’

‘Such a job is nothing if the stakes are high enough,’ the policeman said carefully. ‘And our thieves just might figure now that you’ve brought what they’re after back with you. Stuff you could publish, Blarns.

‘You be watchful, my man,’ Bond advised. ‘You’ve got my mobile phone number. The slightest thing that’s suspect, or you remember, call me straight away. Any time. Right?’

‘Okay,’ said Blarney. ‘I’d better recharge our damned mobile phone.’

Alex silently drank her coffee as the men ate cake from the party. Bond told them he had heard of two Stanley residents with reasons to damage their business. One was Lotsa Pride, Janet’s husband. ‘He says Argo is fucking up his marriage. Pardon, Alex, but that’s what he says at the pub.’

‘You’ve been talking to Hava-chat, eh?’ Pike grinned. Eddie, aka Hava-chat, Corcoran was the wizened barman at the Stanley Hotel, that Pike’s father once ran. Hava had been the town gossip for thirty years; a continual, uncensored news service.

Bond said, ‘The other one is the young wife of another keen member of your team. Her husband egged her into joining Argo with him against her wishes. She’s shy.

‘He pestered her until she rang some of her friends to invite them to an Argo meeting at their home. She messed it up time and again. She mentioned Argo to one of them. When she heard that name, the friend turned her down. You train them to avoid mentioning the name Argo, I gather?’

The couple looked uncomfortable. ‘Sort of,’ Pike admitted, glancing at Alex. ‘I think I know who you’re talking about. I’ll deal with it.’

‘Good,’ said the policeman. ‘The husband is Harry, er, Clucker, Duckworth. You’ll know there’s a ruder version of that. Now Harry is trying to force her to show the, ah, the pitch, is it?’

‘That’s terrible!’ Alex said, looking questioningly at her husband. ‘Sam, you and Sadie must be the only ones in town who haven’t been invited to hear a pitch.’

‘I’d like to hear one. Purely as part of my investigations, mind.’

‘Well, how about seeing the pitch in Irishtown, Monday night?’ Alex said brightly. ‘Blarn is showing it at Sean and Mary O’Hallorans’ farm.’

Bond agreed to attend. He departed with muted cheerfulness In the light of Janet Pride’s disturbing gossip, Pike wryly wondered to himself if he should recommend that the policeman wear combat gear. He anxiously wanted to free Alex from any possible danger. He wondered how he could induce her to leave Stanley for a while.

He took her in his arms. Smouldering Alex asked him, ‘What can we say to the O’Hallorans about Plodder attending? That he’s a candidate for joining Argo?’

‘That’s for tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The Pike Argo network is now in recess, my sexy darling.’

They made love, hungrily, on a rug in the lounge room. Afterwards they clung together as one. The cats and the spaniel fussed over them as he told her how he had missed her last night.

He told her more about the dinner at Wrest Point, Richard’s demands for tedious reports. They retired hand in hand to the bed and made love again, slowly. The angst and tiredness vanished from Pike’s body. He idolised his wife in a lyrically grateful way he had never dreamed was possible. She wanted to have a child with him.

He marvelled that lovely, brilliant Alex had chosen him, so ravaged and virtually unemployed then. Incredibly, somehow she loved him now more completely than ever.

Alex said the Stanley robbery had made her more angry than fearful as she nuzzled into his neck. ‘Are you going to tell me what Sam said up at the back fence?’

Pike swallowed. ‘He showed me the footprints, of course.’

‘You’re a frightful liar, Blarn. Don’t tell me you spent all that time looking at footprints. Or organising a fishing trip.’

He partly relented and told her Plodder now knew about the Palmovka robbery.

His right arm cradled her head. He recalled balefully the pair of them joining Sussoms for a chat at the hotel bar a couple of days before his death. Jack, ever expansive, had branded her the belle of the whole goddam team.

‘Blarney, I’m frightened,’ she declared. ‘And bloody, bloody furious. I want you to get out your gun. Load it and keep it handy. I can shoot, too, you know.’

‘There’s no need—’

‘Now!’ she demanded.

He tumbled from the bed, heading for the locked cabinet where he stored his .22 Remington magnum hunting rifle, with a ’scope. And the Purdy shotgun, a prized inheritance from his father.

Pike stopped and turned to his wife. ‘The rifle or the shot gun? We’re out of armalites, Kalashnikovs and bazookas at the moment, madam.’

‘Don’t be a smart arse. The shotgun.’

His wife was right, the gun was the better weapon for close-quarters combat. Like a naked butler, he loaded the gun, broke the breach and placed it on the floor on his side of the bed beside a box of 12-bore cartridges.

He saw tears in Alex’s eyes. He embraced her. ‘They can’t hurt us, my darling. I love you so much.’

‘I love you so much—you big, scarred hero—so much that it hurts,’ Alex replied; calmer now. ‘That gun stays there at the ready. Get the rifle.’

He loaded the semi-automatic, which he propped on Alex’s side of the bed. His habit of composing headlines struck again: Hotshot Housewife Massacres Mafiosi.

If ever they were threatened here, he swore to himself, he would attack, maybe kill, the attackers with practised efficiency. With or without a gun. He knew a lot more now about close combat than when he was a kid in the boxing ring. More than Alex would ever know, he hoped.

Blarney returned to the bed, to be joined soon after by the cats. He had, he thought, a flash of timely inspiration. He pressed her head to his neck, no longer having to contend with her inquisitorial eyes. Alex purred, and he pounced.

‘Now hear me out, darling. There are a lot of good reasons for you to go away from Stanley for a while. If the thugs fear exposure, they’d have to get both of us. And two targets, in different places, are harder than one. I’d have more peace of mind, too. School can wait… I know you’ll want to ignore this bit, but you, my love, would be safe.’

He removed a strand of her hair which had caught on his tongue. ‘Take Magda and Josef to the East Coast. I know you’re dying to see Wineglass Bay.’ He paused for breath. ‘Please say yes, love.’

‘Finished?’ said a gentle voice from under his chin. He nodded. ‘Absobloodylutely, no,’ she said. ‘Forget it. No way.’

‘Well, think about it.’

Alex kissed his neck. ‘I have. I don’t want to discuss that any more.’

Pike lay in dashed silence.

By unspoken agreement, they talked no more about the robbery. Alex had smelled cigarettes and the gentle stench of rum from his pores. She assumed he had had a few drinks at Ross. She knew fearfully that her husband’s demon, Ned, was always lurking. Sometimes Blarn would groan in his sleep and rant like a drunk, then quieten in her arms. She was proud that he was trying hard to kick the demon drink. His hands no longer trembled in the mornings.

Their Argo business was his achievement and focus through which he had his best chance of forgiving himself and beating relentless Ned. Fear of her husband being at home alone and stressed, and retreating to the bottle, ensured she would not go away to hide.

Pike phoned Pru and Peter in Sydney. He bathed in the joy of talking with his children again. Pru, turning twelve soon, was born in Sydney two months after Pike’s twenty-first birthday. Peter was nine last month. Peter said he was ‘going terrific’ now on the surf board Pike and Alex had bought him for his birthday. Terrific ally, Pike laughingly corrected. No, they had not yet received the parcel of gifts Alex had mailed from Petrov on Christmas Eve. He asked Pru to let her mum know a cheque was in the parcel.

‘Must be a big parcel, Dad,’ she said. ‘Do they let you mail away Czech people like that?’

Blarney chuckled. ‘No more than I can mail myself in a box to get to you in Sydney!’

Alex would wrap more gifts tomorrow, ready for mailing on Monday. A few jazz, rock and light classical CDs each, bought in Prague, a camera they knew Pru wanted, a leather wallet for Peter.

Blarney’s long guilt gnawed anew. He knew about growing up without a father.

The cellphone in his pocket rang. It was Bond. ‘I rang Prague’s Inspector Gelber directly. He rang me back, to make sure it was definitely me he was talking to. He was jolted to find out about the airport attack, the theft of your book, the theft of the papers at Palmovka, the robbery here.

‘Gelber said you two might be in danger. He reckons there’s something dodgy about Argo in Prague. Interpol’s notifying the FBI.’