Immediately the reflected librarian had a look of shock and outrage on his reflected face.
It was him!
I logged off immediately and left the library, returning the librarian’s if-looks-could-kill glare with a grateful smile. Without knowing it he’d taught me a lesson: Be careful, Stormtrooper, because you never know who in the universe is watching you.
SNIFFING OUT THE HOUND
After school I hurried home; at least there, in my bedroom, on my computer, on my network, there was much less chance of being cyber-snooped.
It didn’t take me very long to realise that I had to find Hound de Villiers, PI.
Because, let’s face it, the local cops hadn’t been able to track down the Zolt. Neither had the Queensland police. Not even the television networks had been able to find him. There was only person who’d done that. And even though he’d ended up, according to some reports, floating around the harbour naked and handcuffed to his boat, that didn’t take away from the fact that he, and he alone, had managed to find the Zolt.
Finding him wasn’t actually that difficult, because Hound de Villiers, PI, had a considerable web presence. From his Wikipedia entry I learnt that he’d been born Hansie de Villiers in Capetown in South Africa and had served ‘with distinction’ in the South African Army, attaining the rank of lieutenant. That he’d worked as a mercenary in a number of conflicts in Africa and South America. That he’d settled in San Diego in 1984 and had subsequently worked as a bounty hunter. That he’d left the USA two years ago under mysterious circumstances and moved to Australia, setting up business on the Gold Coast. I also learnt that he’d been married three times, had seven children, and in his spare time enjoyed hunting pigs and reading the novels of Matthew Reilly. Further investigation revealed that he worked for a company called Coast Surveillance.
I rang them up.
‘Hello, my name is Dom Silvagni and I’d like to talk to Mr de Villiers if I could, please.’
‘Rack off, kid!’ said the less-than-polite man at the other end before hanging up.
Houston, we have a problem. And that problem was: me. More specifically, my lack of adult status. Not only did I look like a kid, I sounded like one too. Unfortunately, kids aren’t always taken seriously, especially not in the very non-kidlike world of private investigating.
I spent about an hour on Google researching voice modulators, devices attached to your phone that changed your voice so you could sound like somebody else. Donald Duck. Darth Vader. Even Darth Duck. Or, in my case, an adult. But then I suddenly realised that I was wasting my time.
Hound de Villiers had been a mercenary: he’d risked his life for money. Hound de Villiers was now a PI. Was he driven by a sense of social justice, a need to put bad guys behind bars? Maybe, but I didn’t think so. It must be the money. I had to look at myself differently. I wasn’t just a fifteen-year-old kid, I was a fifteen-year-old kid who had money. Money that Hound de Villiers wanted.
I composed an email: I would like to purchase an hour of Mr de Villiers’s time. How much?
And sent it to the email address on the Coast Surveillance website.
It took only half an hour to get a reply.
$400 cash.
I felt both excited – my plan had worked – and outraged – four hundred dollars for an hour, who did he think he was?
I composed a reply.
Okay. When?
And got one back immediately.
Tomorrow. Ten. Bring cash.
Tomorrow at ten I had school, but I wasn’t going to tell him that: I was an entity with money, not a schoolkid.
My email: Can we make it 4, instead?
Their email: Okay. But cost is $500.
Five hundred! If I was outraged before, I was outraged to the power of two now! But I also felt like a bit of a sucker – I should’ve questioned the four hundred dollars, not just accepted it like that. Too late, though.
Okay, I wrote, and hit send.
So that was it: tomorrow at four I was meeting Hound de Villiers, the only person in the whole of the country who’d managed to track down the Zolt.
All I had to do now was get five hundred bucks. Here was the irony: my parents were filthy rich, and to them five hundred dollars was nothing. If I went to them and said: ‘Could I have five hundred dollars to pay renowned private investigator Hound de Villiers for an hour of his time in order to help me catch the notorious fugitive Otto Zolton-Bander and so avoid losing my leg,’ then they’d give it to me.
But I couldn’t. Cardinal rule of The Debt: no help allowed. I logged into my savings account: I only had two hundred dollars.
I hesitated, then I knocked on the door to Toby’s room.
Once upon a time, and it did seem like a fairytale ago, my little brother and I had been pretty good mates.
We’d played together, got into trouble together, but then something had happened. It hadn’t been anything major, we’d just sort of drifted apart.
And I think we’d both decided that we didn’t like each other, so those were the roles we played now.
I knocked and said, ‘Tobes, it’s me.’
‘Rack off,’ came the voice from inside.
See what I mean?
‘Don’t be like that,’ I said, opening the door.
Most kids Tobe’s age would have posters of movie stars, sports stars, rock stars on their walls. Toby had chefs. Heston Blumenthal. Ferran Adrià. The one with the potty mouth. They were all up there.
As for Toby, he was on his computer, looking at porn.
His sort of porn, anyway.
A photo of a naked, voluptuous … orange cake.
Gastronomic porn.
‘Wow, that looks so delicious,’ I said. ‘You going to make it?’
‘I thought I told you to rack off,’ he said.
‘Wow!’ I said, quickly scanning the recipe. ‘So you actually boil an orange for a whole hour. That’s pretty wild.’
Toby looked at me, and I knew this whole thing was in the balance, that he could go either way.
Eventually, when he said, ‘It is wild!’ I knew I’d managed to pull it off.
We discussed the cake for quite a while longer, and I have to admit, it actually was quite interesting. For example, the cake had no flour – only something called almond meal.
Eventually, when I thought the moment was right, when some of that uncomplicated brotherly affection we used to freely bestow on each other when we were little had been restored, I said, ‘Toby, how would you feel about lending me three hundred dollars?’
I knew Toby had money in the bank, and plenty of it. I knew this because I saw it come in – pocket money, birthday and Christmas presents – but I didn’t see it go out. You see, if I needed some new running shoes, I had to pay for them. But if Toby wanted something – a new mixing bowl, a new, improved type of whisk – he was able to persuade Mom that she was the one who needed it and she’d end up shelling out for it.
‘You want me to lend you three hundred?’ said Toby.
‘That’s right,’ I said.
Toby pondered this for a while before he said in an American accent, ‘Okay, I’ll lend you three C but the vig’s twenty.’
‘The vig?’
‘Didn’t you ever watch The Sopranos? The vig, the juice.’
‘You mean the interest?’
Toby nodded. ‘The vig.’
‘So I pay you back three twenty?’
Toby scoffed at that, and Toby, like Miranda, did good scoff.
‘Twenty per cent, not twenty dollars!’
Twenty per cent was outrageous, but I didn’t have any choice.
We shook hands, Toby logged into his account and transferred the money into mine.
As I left his room it was with a mixture of feelings: I was relieved that I’d managed to procure the money I’d needed, but I was also aware that my own brother had just ripped me off. Still, what choice had I had?
SNIFFING WITH THE HOUND
After school the next day I made my way past the bus stops and out onto the main road. I put out my hand to hail a taxi and one appeared within seconds.
‘Where we going today?’ the driver said with an accent.
He was older than Dad, younger than Gus, with olive skin and a bushy grey moustache.
I glanced at his licence on the windscreen. Under a faded photo was the name Luiz Antonio DaSilva.
Was he Spanish? I wondered. Or Portuguese?
‘The Block,’ I said.
‘The Block is no place for a nice kid like you.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, though I wasn’t too sure that I would be – the Block had a reputation as the roughest, toughest area in the whole Gold Coast.
Luiz Antonio shook his head.
‘I come from the streets of Rio, I know what these places are like,’ he said. ‘The people take one look at you and think carne fresca.’
‘Carne fresca?’
‘Fresh meat,’ he said.
‘The address is 542 Russell Street,’ I said.
He practically exploded.
‘Russell Street! You’ve got to be kidding me! What you want to go there for? You’re not trying to score drugs or anything, are you?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ I said. ‘I have a meeting with a private investigator.’
‘Yeah, well, plenty of them on Russell Street. And do you know why? Because the place is dirty with criminal scum. Come on, let me take you back home.’
‘You can do that if you like,’ I said, ‘but I’ll just get another taxi who will do what taxis are supposed to do and drop me off at my requested destination.’
Luiz Antonio thought about this for a while before he said, ‘What number was it again?’
‘Five forty-two.’
It didn’t take long to get to the Block, only about fifteen minutes, but it really was a long way from Halcyon Grove.
Dad had said that when he was a kid the Block had been the place to hang out, their version of Robina Mall. But now most of the shops were boarded up and the few people on the streets didn’t look like they were the shopping types.
We pulled up outside a rundown building, two-storeyed, with Cash Converters on the bottom floor and the words Coast Surveillance in faded gold lettering on the double-paned window upstairs. When I went to pay, Luiz Antonio said, ‘We can settle at the end.’
‘This is the end.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ he said. ‘You’re my passenger, you’re my responsibility. I’m staying here until you come out. Besides, you think it’s easy to catch a taxi in this area? Take it from me, it isn’t.’
‘Suit yourself,’ I said, thinking he was being overdramatic.
There were people loitering outside the Cash Converters, mostly men, mostly smoking. At first I thought this was cool, like I’d walked into a movie, the badass scene with all the badass guys. It didn’t take me long to change my mind, however. Not after a man in a red bandana who was blocking the entrance made no effort to move, even though it was pretty obvious that I wanted to go in. Now I was doubly aware of the five hundred dollars in my pocket, of what I must’ve looked like to him: ‘fresh meat’, to use Luiz Antonio’s phrase. I looked at my watch. It was already four, time for my appointment.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, appalled at how puny my voice sounded.
The man didn’t move.
A horn sounded.
Luiz Antonio, leaning across, yelled through the window, ‘Hey bro, let the kid through, can you? He’s hocking his mother’s wedding ring so his old man can have some drinking money.’
There was a murmur of approval – it was every son’s duty to hock his mother’s wedding ring so his old man could have some drinking money.
I went straight upstairs to find two people waiting inside the Coast Surveillance office. They had that same bored, frustrated look that people have in the emergency room of hospitals.
‘I have a meeting with Mr de Villiers,’ I said to the bulgy woman behind the counter.
She consulted a computer screen.
‘You’re Mr Silvagni?’ she said.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘My meeting’s at four.’
‘Wait a moment, can you?’ she said, before she picked up a phone and said something softly into the receiver.
Eventually she put the receiver down and said, ‘And you brought the cash?’
‘That’s right,’ I said, keeping my voice down.
‘Okay, down that corridor, second door on the left.’
I knocked on the door and got a gruff ‘Enter’ as a response.
Hound de Villiers’s office was much less shabby than the building had suggested. The floor was carpeted and the walls were covered in framed photos. Immediately I was reminded of Gus’s office. These weren’t photos of runners, though; these were photos of one man: Hound de Villiers.
And they all seemed to be a variation of the same theme: Hound de Villiers in a bicep-baring T-shirt holding – fondling? – a large gun. I’d already deduced one fact about Hound de Villiers: he liked money. A lot. But I was pretty sure I now had another fact to add: Hound de Villiers liked Hound de Villiers. A lot.
Although the version of Hound de Villiers sitting behind an expansive desk was older than the one in the photos – his features were craggier, his long blond hair was thinner – it was unmistakeably him. He was wearing another bicep-baring T-shirt and I noticed, under the desk, faded jeans and cowboy boots.
‘Sit down,’ he said, waving at a chair.
I did as he asked.
‘The money?’ he said.
I took the wad from my pocket and handed it over to him. He counted it, thumbing through the notes with practised ease.
‘Okay, what do you want?’ he said.
‘I want to talk about the Zolt.’
At the mention of that name, there was a dramatic, almost theatrical, change in his expression. I had a third fact to add to my rapidly expanding list: Hound de Villiers hated the Zolt.
Hated him as much as those people on Facebook who hated him hated him.
‘He a friend of yours, is he?’ he said, his eyes boring great smoking holes in me. Immediately I needed to get out of there. I didn’t care about the five hundred dollars, I just needed to get out, to do what I did best: run like the wind.
Hound de Villiers was scary. Very, very scary.
And when he stood up, I almost crapped myself. I knew from his Wikipedia entry that he was six foot three tall, but there’s six foot three and there’s six foot three.
I mean, the Obi-Wan-Kenobi-loving librarian was probably six three, but who was scared of him?
This six foot three, however, could snap off my head.
This six foot three could squash me like a cockroach.
‘When all else fails,’ Gus always says, ‘you gotta find your form. Form is the bedrock.’
I took his advice and tried to find my form: relaxing my shoulders, slowing my breathing, I said, articulating carefully, ‘No, he’s definitely no friend of mine.’
All six foot three of head-snapping, cockroach-squashing Hound de Villiers sat back down.
And I did some quick thinking.
The first thing I knew about Hound de Villiers was that Hound de Villiers liked money. But unfortunately Hound de Villiers already had my money.
The second thing I knew about Hound de Villiers was that Hound de Villiers liked Hound de Villiers. A lot.
If the government ever passed same-sex marriage and then moved on to same-person marriage, I reckon he’d be the first one up.
Do you, Hound de Villiers, take Hound de Villiers as your legally wedded spouse?
Ya!
You may now kiss yourself.
‘Mr de Villiers?’ I said.
‘The name’s Hound,’ he said.
‘Hound, I was just wondering why nobody else could find him but you could.’
‘Cops,’ he said dismissively. ‘Cops think like cops, they can’t help themselves. Bu
t when you’re dealing with a punk, you’ve gotta think like a punk.’ His accent was all over the place: part South African, part American, with a touch of fair-dinkum Aussie.
I felt like I should be taking notes: When dealing with punk, think like punk.
‘He’s a smart punk, I’ll give him that, but he’s got something else going for him, something much more valuable.’
Virtual pencil poised to make another note, I waited for Hound de Villiers to tell me what this was, but he didn’t.
Instead he looked at me and said, ‘You got some balls on you, kid.’
I responded to this compliment with a little shrug of my shoulders.
‘Hey, but that probably comes with the territory, eh? Old man as rich as yours. Probably think you’re bulletproof. Probably think that money’s going to get you out of any trouble you get into.’
He knows who I am!
‘Don’t look so surprised, I like to do some research on my clients. Besides, your dad and me, we’ve got history.’
My dad and Hound de Villiers – surely not. He was making this up.
‘You done your research on our punk, Dom?’
‘Just what I’ve read online.’
‘Then you know his old man died when he was eight? His stepfather took off when he was eleven? You know that after that he spent more time with foster parents than with his useless mother?’
I nodded. Yes, I knew all that. Except the ‘useless’ bit.
‘So what do you reckon that’s done to him?’
‘I guess he probably doesn’t trust many people.’
‘You’re dead right: the punk doesn’t trust anybody. And that’s his greatest asset. Because if you’re on the run, the less people you trust, the better.’
Again I felt like I should be taking notes: If on the run, the less people you trust, the better.
Hound de Villiers leant back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head, and said, ‘You know how I catch most fugitives?’
‘By tracking them down?’
Hound de Villiers unclasped his hands and shook his head.
‘Because people talk, that’s how.’
Hound de Villiers looked at his watch.
Catch the Zolt Page 8