Pike's Pyramid. Michael Tatlow

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ