Fetch the Treasure Hunter

by Phillip Gwynne

  The Mercedes stayed where it was, playing the waiting game.

  Maybe they hadn’t heard the truck. Or felt it like I had.

  There was a sweep of headlights. The truck was on the straight.

  It would turn the corner and it would be upon us.

  But I needed to be going, to have momentum, when it reached me. But I also had to wait, to wait, to wait.

  Because if I went now, they, the ’Ndrangheta, would eat me.

  The rumble became louder, then deeper as the truck changed down gears. The driver must be negotiating that hairpin bend.

  Get ready!

  I threw down my skateboard. The Mercedes was still there. Still waiting.

  Then powerful headlights.

  Just as I’d hoped, the truck was coming down the straight, heading towards us.

  It changed up gears.

  My eyes flicked between the oncoming truck and the waiting Mercedes.

  Now!

  I pushed off hard with my bare foot, trying to ignore the red-hot pain that shot up my leg. Trying to ignore my burning buttock.

  Again I pushed.

  The truck was almost on me, but I’d misjudged it, I didn’t have enough momentum.

  The truck was passing.

  Passing too quickly.

  But I knew I had no choice.

  I set myself low, and I reached out and grabbed at one of the straps that held the truck’s load on.

  The strap stretched.

  The skateboard went into a wobble.

  And then it stopped stretching, springing back, jerking me forward; it felt like my arm was going to pop out of its socket.

  Back leg, front leg, whole body, working furiously, trying to keep the board stable.

  And now the truck was trying to suck me under, crunch me.

  I pushed off it hard with my elbows.

  And somehow all those forces that had been working against me came into alignment.

  The truck and I were now moving at the same speed.

  Skating. Hitching. Skitching.

  The Mercedes flashed past.

  I crouched lower, expecting a gunshot. Something.

  Nothing came.

  Hadn’t they seen me catch a ride?

  Didn’t they know I was here?

  Or having scared several different types of poo out of me, were they satisfied with that?

  Relax, I told myself. Enjoy the ride.

  Yeah, right!

  Still, I skitched the truck all the way down the mountain. Although I didn’t see the driver, I had an overwhelming love for him.

  Never again, I promised myself, would I badmouth a truckie.

  When the road levelled out and the traffic started to build up, I let go of the truck and coasted until my skateboard ran out of momentum.

  For a second I considered taking the skateboard with me, but I knew that I no longer needed it.

  It had served its purpose, I could now set it free.

  ‘Go, little skateboard! Go!’ I said as I gave it a gentle push.

  It rolled along the footpath for a while before it came to a stop against a fire hydrant.

  Now I had to find the train station.

  ‘Stazione?’ I asked a woman passing by.

  She gave me a serious once-over and pointed down the street.

  ‘Grazie,’ I said, and headed in that direction.

  The station was only ten minutes away.

  ‘Roma?’ I asked the woman in the ticket office.

  ‘Senza ntorno?’ she said. One way?

  ‘Si,’ I said.

  I handed her the money, she gave me a ticket, I gave her a ‘Grazie’ and she gave me one back.

  I had thirty minutes until the train left, so I went to the caffetteria.

  Inspired by my previous successes, I tried some more Italian on the woman serving ‘Spaghetti e Coca Cola’.

  ‘Arrivo subito,’ she said.

  The only empty table was right under the television.

  I sat down and suddenly everything hurt, and hurt a lot. I’d treated my body badly and now it was letting me know.

  The road rash on my buttock was stinging.

  One arm felt longer than the other.

  I tried to ignore the pain, focusing on the television instead.

  Any illusion that I had achieved some proficiency in the Italian language was soon dispelled – I didn’t have a clue what the newsreader was saying.

  But then a photo of an older man came up, underneath it the caption E Lee Marx.

  He had craggy weather-beaten features: an outdoors face.

  Of course, I knew who he was: the world’s most famous underwater archaeologist. There had even been that television program about him: The Treasure Hunter. And I’d seen Eva Carides, Numismatist, reading one of his books.

  And then another photo, a younger man.

  Now some shots from a funeral.

  Ohmigod! Was it the man’s funeral? Had he died in some sort of diving accident?

  The item finished with some shots taken at an Italian airport and I got the sense that E Lee Marx was now in this country.

  So what? I told myself. It was just a random piece of news.

  What! I told myself. It wasn’t random at all. The Zolt, the Double Eagle, Yamashita’s Gold, E Lee Marx – were they connected somehow?

  I finished the spaghetti and the Coke and went to stand up – but I couldn’t. My body was on strike.

  We reached an agreement – if it got me out of the cafeteria, I would find it some Panadol.

  Once on the train, in my seat, the Panadol doing exactly what it was supposed to do, I put my head back and was ready to drift off to sleep when I remembered something: Droopy Eye had bugged my phone.

  So I took it out and ran Miranda’s anti-tapping app.

  Bingo!

  Warning! Unauthorised location tracking software detected! Remove?

  I tapped ‘yes’.

  Software successfully removed!

  Great, I thought.

  But then another message came up.

  Warning! Unauthorised location tracking software detected! Remove?

  Had Droopy Eye bugged it twice?

  Surely not.

  But if he hadn’t, then the only other conclusion was that somebody else had bugged my phone.

  But who?

  I was too tired to try to grapple with this right now, so I just tapped ‘yes’ again.

  Software successfully removed!

  Now I could put my head back. Now I could drift off to sleep.

  MONDAY

  THE HEAT IS ON ...

  My slow train descended on Roma at five-thirty in the morning and I wasn’t feeling much like Alaric the Goth, ready for a day of pillage.

  My body felt so stiff, so sore; even if they let me race in today’s heat – which I doubted – I was pretty sure I would have to pull out.

  As I caught a taxi to the Olympic Village, I thought here we go; I’m going to be in more trouble than Maximus.

  But I wasn’t; apparently some shot-putters had snuck out last night and got drunk and brought disgrace upon themselves, the team and their whole nation, so the emphasis was pretty much on them.

  Nobody seemed to take any notice of a bruised and battered middle distance runner.

  After a very long, very hot shower, and some stretching exercises, I realised that I wasn’t in such bad shape after all.

  I found a first aid kit and cleaned up the cut in my heel.

  It was deep, but not deep enough to warrant stitches, and it wasn’t on a part of my heel that would make running difficult.

  Painful but not difficult.

  By the time I’d boarded the shuttle bus to Stadio Olimpico I was excited: in less than an hour I would be running!

  ‘Good luck in your heat,’ said a girl sitting in the front seat.

  She was dressed from head to toe in green and gold. She had an Australian flag painted on each cheek. And she was holding a huge Australian flag.<
br />
  Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!

  I knew that she was on the team, but I’d forgotten her name and I was too embarrassed to ask, so I just said, ‘Thanks.’

  I took out my iPhone, sent a couple of excited texts to Mom and Dad.

  I’m running!

  I’m running!

  But when I went to put my iPhone away, my mail application started downloading message after message after message.

  Weird, I thought. I’m not even connected to a wi-fi network.

  I checked the settings.

  Cellular Data was off, so it wasn’t somehow getting data from my Italian phone carrier and charging me some crazy rate.

  Eventually it stopped downloading; I had a hundred new messages.

  Exactly a hundred – it was getting even weirder.

  I scrolled through them – it seemed like I had the same message a hundred times.

  Okay, something had gone screwy with the server, I told myself.

  What was more, according to the subject line, it was a Google alert and I didn’t even have any Google alerts set up!

  I read it anyway.

  News 1 new result for E Lee Marx

  Treasure Hunter Bunkers Down

  GlobeNews

  After the recent tragic death of his nephew in a diving accident, E Lee Marx, renowned marine archaeologist, abandons search for the Portuguese wreck Las Cinque Chagas and returns to his base in Maremma in Italy.

  At once, alarms were going off everywhere. For a start, this so called ‘news’ was dated a month ago.

  I opened Safari intending to google E Lee Marx, but I didn’t have to, because E Lee Marx came up anyway.

  Eventually I managed to get an empty Google screen.

  I entered the string gold coast football team.

  I got taken to E Lee Marx.

  I entered world youth games.

  I got taken to E Lee Marx.

  It was starting to freak me out, but then the screen went black and the words Fetch The Treasure Hunter were written across it.

  They dissolved to nothing to be replaced by the words Bring him to the Gold Coast.

  The Debt had spoken: this was the fourth instalment.

  I was both surprised: it’s not often your search engine of choice gets hijacked like that. And not surprised: I’d suspected that there’d been nothing random about the news I’d seen on TV the day before.

  Still, The Debt had spoken, and that now familiar sensation – a mixture of excitement and dread – took hold of me, sunk its teeth into me and shook the hell out of me like I was the raggiest of rag dolls.

  Half an hour later I was trackside and Coach Sheeds was saying, ‘You shouldn’t have any trouble getting through this and into the final. Nobody in this group has got a PB anywhere near yours.’

  She was right: on form, I could still run at half rat-pace and come in the top four, which was what I needed in order to qualify.

  But I wasn’t going to come in the top four.

  I wasn’t even going to come in the top eight. Or the top twelve.

  I wasn’t going to even finish the race.

  Around the second lap, if all my injuries hadn’t already caused me to pull out, I was going to pull up lame, anyway.

  I was going to clutch at my calf or my hamstring – I hadn’t decided which – and roll around a bit.

  And then I was going to limp to the finishing line, a distraught look on my face, maybe even a few tears rolling down my cheeks, because my World Youth Games was over.

  I was going to do this because for the last half hour I’d been wondering how the hell I was going to fit them both in: the running and the instalment.

  But as I’d walked onto the track I’d realised what the solution to my problem was: lose the running, Dom.

  It was as simple and straightforward as that.

  Lose the running and my time was my own. Or The Debt’s.

  And more than that, if I lost my heat none of the officials would take the least bit of notice if I wasn’t around, because they would be too busy concentrating on the athletes still competing, those still in the hunt to bring back gold, and glory, to Australia.

  ‘Kick with two hundred to go, not a millimetre more, not a millimetre less,’ said Coach Sheeds.

  ‘Okay,’ I said to Coach. ‘I’ve got that. Sit and kick.’

  ‘Exactly, sit and kick.’

  ‘And, Coach,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Dom?’

  ‘Thanks for everything, for being such a cool coach.’

  Coach Sheeds looked a little perplexed.

  ‘Well, thanks, Dom. But we’ve still got lots to go here. This heat. And then the final itself.’

  It had been a dumb thing to say, but I was glad I’d said it.

  The announcer called the runners to the starting line, and Coach slapped me on the back and said, ‘Go get ’em, champ.’

  As I walked onto the track I could feel the warm Italian sun spilling onto my shoulders.

  It should’ve been one of the highlights of my running career – my very first overseas race – but all I could feel was this huge sucking emptiness.

  I looked around at the other runners, black runners, white runners, Asian, Caucasian, and I could see it on their faces: they were here to compete, to do their best.

  Except for me.

  I was here to throw the race.

  ‘All the best, mate,’ somebody said from behind me, mimicking Rashid’s Aussie–Afghani accent.

  I turned around.

  Rashid was standing there, in his running strip.

  My brain refused to believe it was him – how could it be?

  But then it started processing the visual information it was receiving: Rashid wasn’t wearing Australian colours.

  He was wearing red, black and green – Afghani colours.

  Was Rashid running for Afghanistan, was he representing the country of his birth?

  How this was possible?

  But the proof was irrefutable: Rashid was running in this race.

  And a huge feeling of relief surged through me – I hadn’t kept Rashid out of the Games after all.

  ‘On your marks,’ said the official, and I didn’t have a chance to say anything to my former teammate.

  ‘Get set.’

  ‘Go!’

  There was even more jostling than usual as we all took off, and I automatically found myself looking for Rashid’s big frame.

  He was where he usually was, striving for front position.

  So I tucked in behind him – why not?

  In the beginning I felt incredibly stiff and incredibly sore, but with each step I could feel myself loosening up and by the first lap I actually felt pretty good.

  And as Coach Sheeds had predicted, there wasn’t much pace on.

  By the end of the second lap Rashid and I were in a leading pack of six runners.

  The pace had increased considerably, but I was still feeling great.

  Characteristically Rashid was starting to falter; the locomotive that had pulled the carriages through two laps was now running out of steam.

  Why not help him? I thought.

  It wasn’t as if I needed to keep anything in the tank, because any second now I was going to fall over, clutching my leg.

  I sprinted in front of Rashid.

  That little surge was enough to drop two runners; there were only four of us left.

  Bell lap, and I had never felt so good in a race.

  Nothing to lose.

  Nothing to win.

  Now, I told myself. Do it now!

  But I couldn’t.

  I just couldn’t throw a race.

  And maybe more than that, I couldn’t waste this feeling I had, which an athlete gets maybe only once or twice in a whole career.

  I could feign injury tonight, or tomorrow at training. There was plenty of time, and opportunity, to pull out.

  I increased the pace, jumping up not one but two gears.

  Nob
ody could go with me.

  With three hundred metres to go, I had the heat done and dusted.

  All I had to do now was stroll over the line and I’d qualified.

  But this would be the last race of my meet – who knows, maybe of my career.

  I thought of yesterday, hurtling down the mountain, the ’Ndrangheta after me.

  I found some more energy.

  I increased the pace.

  I could hear the buzz from the sidelines – It’s a heat, what in the hell is this kid doing?

  I was kicking like I’d never kicked before.

  Head up, arms pumping.

  I lunged across the line like a 100 metre runner.

  It was the best race I’d ever run, and it was for nothing.

  Coach Sheeds was making towards me, stopwatch in her hand. ‘You’ve done a bloody 4.00!’ she said, with both amazement and anger in her voice.

  4.00 was 2 seconds better than my personal best. 4.00 was only 1 second outside the world record for my age group. And I’d done it in a heat.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, and I really did have to go.

  Running, world records, PBs; all of that suddenly seemed incredibly trivial now I had an instalment to repay.

  MONDAY

  PIMP MY RIDE

  When I came out of the change rooms Antonio Sini was standing there, hair over his eyes, smoking a cigarette.

  It was such a studied pose, I’m sure he’d spent hour after hour practising it in the mirror. Or maybe he even recorded himself on webcam so he could play it back, see what needed adjusting.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said.

  ‘So you can run a bit, eh?’ he said.

  ‘How would you know?’ I said, and then I threw his words right back at him: ‘Running is infantile.’

  ‘Well, my father saw you run today,’ he said. ‘And he is Scott Hurford.’

  The winner of Olympic silver and three Commonwealth gold medals. The first man to run the 1500 metres under 3 minutes and 30 seconds.

  ‘But –’ I started but he’d already anticipated my question. ‘Sini is my mother’s name,’ he said. ‘I got sick of people asking me if I was a runner just like my dad.’

  I had a thousand questions, but I couldn’t articulate one of them ‘What in the hell is this?’ said Antonio, holding up his Styxx, hitting a button.

  From it came Droopy Eye’s voice: ‘… killed my father … killed my father … killed my father.’