They followed him out to a courtyard where two cars were parked, their gleam and burnish enhanced by the extraordinary clarity of the day. A man wearing a fluoro vest was polishing a pink Cadillac sporting the number plate COCK. Parked beside it was a black Humvee, whose number plate read: KILL.
‘My babies,’ Hartmann said. ‘In fact these are the only two not yet taken by the court. I had a fleet of sixteen classic cars, as you probably know, all taken after the police raided my house. It was here,’ he pointed at a gap between the manicured hedges, ‘that the squad came through. They landed their choppers out on the green, and burst through. All armed to the teeth. They took my staff at gunpoint. Nearly shot brave Chad on the lawn. I had made my way to the panic room; they smashed their way in. They put boots on my neck.’ He gestured for them to follow and went on formally, ‘All this at the behest of the United States Government, who had spied on me, who requested the New Zealand Government to spy on me illegally. All because I run a file-sharing website that Hollywood says rips the studios off.’
‘Absolutely,’ Scott said.
‘The People decided what material they stored on my site. I played no part in their choices. I was merely the host. The People are going to retake the internet. Do you know that?’
‘For sure,’ Scott said. ‘Where would it suit you to sit down so we can set things up and discuss all this properly …’
‘First we do the nice thing.’
‘Oh yes?’
Hartmann clapped his hands. ‘Chad, if you please.’
Loafer now whirred up behind them on a golf cart. He dismounted respectfully, and indicated that Eloise and Scott should get on.
‘All aboard,’ Hartmann said, hefting himself behind the wheel. ‘We are going to feed the chickens.’
They trundled slowly across the estate, driven by Hartmann.
Scott leaned close to Eloise and whispered, ‘Feed the chickens. Think it’s some sort of code?’
They got off beside a wooden shed with a silver iron roof, and Hartmann produced a paper bag, into which he plunged his hand. He took Scott’s hand, gently turning it. Holding his own great fist above Scott’s upturned palm, he allowed a stream of small pellets to trickle into it.
Hartmann opened a wooden gate, and they followed him into the yard, wading through straw. Scents of wood chip and pine mingled with the big man’s smell: spearmint, peppermint, cherry.
‘Chook chook,’ he said softly, and folded Eloise’s hand in his own. She felt the heat of his huge soft palm, looked into his small eyes and saw, or thought she saw, behind the ageing effect of the bulk and the camp and the Bond-villain persona, someone intelligent, gauche, amoral, young.
‘This,’ Hartmann said, ‘is my Zen.’
On the toy grass, in the implausible brightness, they fed the crowding chickens. Nearby towered Hartmann’s giant statue of a grazing giraffe, its black shadow crossing the gentle hills. Eloise found herself looking at the internet mogul’s trousers, which were black cotton and necessarily stretchy, due to his height and bulk. They were poignant, unfashionable, slightly too short, revealing black socks and soft orthopaedic shoes; they pointed to the sartorial trials of the oversized. Movie villain, hacker, fugitive from US justice and struggling fat guy: condemned to wear uncool pants.
Eloise had done the research: since the raid on his property, Hartmann had been out on bail, fighting extradition by the US Government. His file-sharing website, on which his customers had stored copyrighted material, had allegedly deprived artists and studios of five hundred million dollars’ worth of intellectual property.
Depending on who you asked, Hartmann was hero, maverick, hacker, pirate, internet freedom-fighter, crook. He was undeniably a philistine. He played computer games all night and slept half the day. Books, according to Hartmann, were today’s equivalent of cave drawings. Books were over. His interests included gaming, girls, cars, lollies, bling, bad art, his Narnian castle, Twitter and, more lately, bringing down the government of Jack Dance, which had collaborated with the Americans first to spy on him illegally, then to arrest him.
It had been leaked, although denied and not proven, that Jack Dance, as minister in charge of security services, had known personally about the illegal spying, and this had caused Dance political difficulties. The Dance Government was keen to grant Hartmann’s extradition and speed him out of the country with a swift boot to the arse. As far as Dance was concerned, Hartmann had caused him so much grief he could rot in an American supermax jail for the next fifty years.
‘Chook chook,’ Hartmann called, throwing the last of the feed in the air. Out near the stone battlements, Loafer patrolled in his own golf cart. Hartmann looked over at him fondly.
‘Chad was Special Forces. He can kill with his bare hands.’
Scott brushed his suit sleeve. ‘Do you feel threatened?’
‘The US wants to extradite me, but it’s a hassle. It takes time. Wouldn’t it be easier for them to kill me?’
‘But, here? Surely not?’
‘One day I might be found dead. They will say, Heart attack. They will announce, Stroke. Who would know? A big guy like me. I got it coming,’ he said ambiguously. ‘Climb on board. I will show you around my house.’
He led them on a tour: the ballroom with giant black chandelier, a dining room decorated with suits of armour and mounted deers’ heads, more luxurious gaming parlours, a succession of brothelly bedrooms decorated with gilt and fur. In one grand, pink-lit bathroom, bathers could swim towards a giant photograph of Hartmann’s face.
After inspecting a huge kitchen, in which women in Orwellian smocks were working in silence, they arrived in a room that looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. There was a half-circle of screens, as if Hartmann was in the habit of making conference calls to high places: White House, Kremlin, International Space Station. Eloise wandered about the room, hands behind her back. She kept glancing at Hartmann, studying his face, his bland, inscrutable smile. The house was unbelievable. To what extent was Hartmann’s life, for him, a vast, camp joke?
Hartmann gestured to a large black-and-gold throne.
‘What a perfect spot, my friends. Let’s do the interview here!’
They came away with a decent amount of material to edit and a bag of promotional odds and ends: a miniature giraffe sculpture, a pink toy Cadillac and DVDs of Hartmann performing hip hop and rap songs with a troupe of girls in hot pants.
In the mansion’s forecourt Hartmann rested his big hand on the car door.
‘Don’t forget, my friends, now you’ve interviewed me, the security services will be watching you. Every communication will be monitored. Just because they got caught spying on me illegally doesn’t mean they stopped. They changed the rules to suit themselves, and they went right on spying. And you should look into leaks. Who leaked that Jack Dance knew I was being spied on illegally? Dance denies he knew, and he’s got away with it — but he will want to know who dropped him in it. Was it his opponents, or one of his own team?’
He turned away from Scott and said, ‘It was nice to meet you, Ms Eloise Hay. You have enjoyed feeding my chickens?’
‘Yes. Thanks. They were lovely.’
‘You know Eloise, when I was young, I was the best hacker in Europe. I was caught a few times, jailed even. I made some mistakes! And then, you know, my country’s government gave me money, they paid me, to break into security systems, to test their vulnerability.’
She nodded, mesmerised by his giant head and tiny little teeth.
‘And so, Eloise, I can hack into systems that exist now. But did you know data can be mined from the past as well as the present? Emails, calls, texts, you name it. Information is power. It can be used to expose, but it can also be used to bargain. As currency. In that case, when information is used as cold hard currency, it is nothing personal, Eloise. It’s just business.’
It’s chust business.
‘Goodbye, Eloise. Goodbye, my friends.’
He r
aised his hand and the car moved slowly down the gravel drive, towards the mock portcullis.
As they crossed the dinky bridge over the moat, Scott looked at the bobbing ducks and said, ‘You know what else? Now we’ve interviewed him he’ll be monitoring everything we do, too.’
‘Really?’
‘In fact, he’s probably been doing it since we contacted him. He’s the master hacker, remember. He’ll be into our emails, texts, everything. So no fat jokes. Show respect. We don’t want to piss him off.’
There was a short silence, Eloise mentally reviewing her communications thus far. No sharing about Hartmann’s poignant pants, then.
‘Is there any actual evidence for who leaked against Dance?’
‘Not yet. But I bet it was Ed Miles — backed by the Hallwright faction. Hallwright wants Dance out and Miles in. Dance’s denied he knew about illegal spying, but having to deny it made him look bad, right. So the fight’s on.’
‘The Opposition are saying there’s going to be proof that Dance knew, that he acted illegally. Someone’s armed Bradley Kirk with some dirt.’
‘So Dance will be looking for ways to shaft Miles in return. Any dirt on Miles.’
‘Presumably,’ Scott said. ‘And there’s something else, too. Last night my friend Mrs Twitcher told me to stand by for information about Baby O’Keefe.’
‘The father? Is someone going to leak that as well?’
‘There’s not much else to the story other than who’s the daddy. We can only hope he’s not a civilian.’
‘Cos we want the fall-out.’
‘Yeah, the hoped-for fall-out.’
Eloise said slowly, ‘With everyone talking about it, the fact that she hasn’t named the father suggests …’
‘That it’s someone who doesn’t want to admit it. Or maybe she just quite rightly thinks it’s no one’s bloody business.’
‘Maybe it’s a sperm donor.’
‘She’s a workaholic. The whole thing about her is that she’s sexy as hell but she’s married to the job. Lives and breathes policy. Mad for select committees and late-night debates. She only hangs out with politicians. If it’s not a sperm donor, it’ll be one of them.’
Scott stared out the window. After a long pause he clenched his fists and said, ‘Children need a father.’
‘Oh. Right …’
‘I, I love my children so much, it’s crazy. You’ll find out, Eloise. If, when, you and Sean decide to have kids, it’s the most wonderful, the most marvellous thing you can do. You find yourself immersed, just surrounded by love. Just the other day Thee and I …’
Eloise half-listened. She was remembering the person hidden behind Kurt Hartmann’s eyes. How many of us are living so deep below the surface, no one knows who we are?
Out on the northwestern, the gridlocked traffic queued and slowed. By the time they got back, Mariel Hartfield was up on the big screen at reception, sleepily gorgeous in a tight black jacket, and halfway through reading the evening news.
Anita O’Keefe wasn’t telling. Satan Dance wasn’t commenting. Ed Miles, the Minister of Justice, was available and was commenting: ‘I will not review my decision to deny Andrew Newgate compensation for the ten years he spent in prison.’
And later in the bulletin, Ed Miles appeared again: ‘The Opposition,’ he said, ‘should put up or shut up. As far as I can see, there is no truth to the allegation that Prime Minster Dance acted outside his powers by allowing illegal spying on citizens. I do not, and never have had, leadership ambitions. I am one hundred per cent behind our current leader, Jack Dance.’
And now came the weather. The Sinister Doormat was predicting weather that would surprise us. It would surprise us by not changing. By going on day after day, giving us worryingly more of the same.
NINE
Along the peninsula, the air was hot and still. The iron roofs blazed with reflected evening sun, and the boardwalk was busy, a steady procession of dogs and owners making their way across the bridge to the dog park. Eloise was walking on the edge of the estuary. She shaded her eyes and squinted at the gulf, where the water lay silver and flat. Heading home for the first time in two days, she was thinking: Make a plan. It would be good to make a plan. But there was so much, so very much, that needed fixing.
Drink less. Find a hobby. Join a club. Meet a nice man. She passed one of the neighbours who’d tried to stamp out the fire on her lawn. The look he now gave her was scandalised, reproachful. Look at that glare. Go on, get your staring done. Whatevs.
She frowned. See, I love living by myself. Living alone: what a thrill. The freedom. You can do what you. No need to answer to. When the impulse takes you, you can …
The migraine had gone but its effect had lingered — rawness, dizziness, a feeling of teetering at the edge of a cliff. At one point during the night at Carina’s a shaft of darkness had split her vision, as if a door had opened, and she’d seen the shape of a man, blacker than the darkness, at the end of the bed. She lay watching the black figure, her whole body poisoned with adrenaline, until he passed across the room and was gone. She dreamed that behind the fabric of the night there was a deeper blackness, only glimpsed when the night had frayed. When she woke in Carina’s spare room she was wired, exhausted, with a yearning for touch so strong she would even have hugged smelly Silvio, if he’d snuffled his way onto the bed.
She had woken with a memory, of a story in a book Arthur had given her a long time ago. But who was the author?
Now, just off the bus, she was carrying a DVD of Kurt Hartmann’s hip hop tracks, a vegetable curry hot pot, a box of Panadol Extra, a memory stick of interview notes, and a bottle of chardonnay. She passed two boys hauling up a bait-catcher on the edge of the creek, the plastic cylinder filled with writhing sprats. She thought: Yoga. Meditation. The whole mindfulness thing. Or Nick’s hobby: search and rescue. Finding lost kids, bewildered oldies. Camaraderie. The satisfaction of it. Their relief and gratitude.
Book clubs. Karate?
Now she came up against the singed bushes, the new line of black at the boundary of her property. Nick, at least, had taken the fire calmly. She summoned up his face: strong jaw, clear blue eyes, slightly rough skin. A tall, lean figure, thin even. Ruggedness mixed with a gentle manner: that was an appealing combination.
She looked up at the blank windows of the stucco house. A layer of the world was hidden from her. She’d thought her marriage was solid, that Andrew Newgate was an innocent man, that Mariel Hartfield and Jack Anthony hated each other. That there was no sense in wondering about the death of Arthur Weeks. Was it her own fault that she was lost? Had she been wilfully blind?
The evening light shone on the blackened bushes and the sooty base of the toe toe; the air was full of shining dust. Beyond the line of gardens the estuary stretched away to the horizon, crossed by ripples as the tide turned. Eloise walked on under the high light sky, hearing the cries of seagulls, the shouts of children on the playing field along the peninsula road, melancholy sounds, distant in the summer evening. The air still smelled of fire.
Nick came down the side of his house, dragging a load of cut ponga fern fronds. He was in jeans, sunburnt, his eyes bloodshot from the dust and sun, his hair messy. The light was turning golden behind him, dust and fern fibres floating in the air, and he stood scratching his head and looking at her with a slightly dopey smile.
‘Where you been? You been away?’
‘No. Oh yes, I stayed a night at … a friend’s.’
She went on, awkward, ‘I nearly knocked on your door the other night, after you’d gone home. But you had someone with you.’
He dumped his load on the ground. ‘Oh?’
‘A tall guy, black hair. I came across the lawn and saw you, and thought I’d better leave you to it.’
‘You should have come over. Did you interview the mogul?’
‘We did. The house is incredible. We fed his chickens.’
‘Chickens?’
A pause. Stupid grin
on her face. She tried to frown.
He said, ‘Why don’t you come over tonight and tell me all about it?’
‘I’ve got work to do.’
‘Come over when you’ve finished.’
‘Well, thanks.’ She turned to go. ‘The man in your house …’
‘Which evening was it? A man did come over. He was a cop, asking about the stucco house. I said I’d never noticed anything untoward.’
‘Did he have a tattoo on his hand?’
‘A tattoo? I didn’t notice. Why?’
‘I thought I’d seen him somewhere, I can’t remember where.’
Nick shrugged.
She shouldered her bag.
‘Might see you later then?’ he called after her.
The door was deadlocked. She used both keys and entered the cool, dim hallway, closing the door behind her, and passed into the sitting room, where the evening light was casting a rhombus of tangerine light on the wall. She set out her shopping on the bench, turned on the television, then changed her mind and switched it off again.
She listened: the ticking of an art deco clock Sean’s mother had given them. The fridge motor. A car driving up the peninsula road. She turned the television on again. The Sinister Doormat, her face rendered more sepulchral by a tight ponytail, was standing in front of the weather map, predicting the usual: no rain.
Listening, she walked through the hallway to the internal garage door, checking rooms, behind doors, even, with a flustered shake of her head, how stupid, opening cupboards and looking behind beds.
Outside, the low sun picked out bare branches along the fence. From the estuary there was a flash off a boat, glass catching the last rays. The Doormat was now addressing a chart decorated with rows of little yellow suns. Eloise drifted to the windows and watched the children out on the path. One boy had his bait-catcher slung over his shoulder, the other carried a stalk of toe toe, like a spear against the blue sky.
She poured herself a glass of wine and walked around the rest of the ground floor, noticing a trail of Silvio’s and the Sparkler’s black footprints in the hall, the Sparkler’s handprints on a glass door, on a coffee table. The Sparkler’s drawings on scraps of paper in the sitting room. Evidence of a crime: Silvio had, in an idle moment, gnawed a wooden edge of the steps.
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