by Marele Day
Hartronics. Harry Lavender.
‘Thanks Steve, that’s all I wanted to know. And Steve: you can stop bugging me. You’re not going to hear anything more on this phone.’
I slammed the phone down and cradled my head in my hands. How could he do it? How could he do it? How could . . . how could . . . I squeezed my eyes tightly shut to stop the wave welling up inside me. But the tears leaked out just the same. Leaked out and ran down my cheeks just as his light feathery touch had done a million years ago. The phone was ringing. And ringing. How could you do it, Steve, how could you do it? The phone rang on and on. But I didn’t hear it till it stopped.
‘WHAT happened to you? I thought you’d walked out on me as well.’
‘What do you mean “as well”?’
‘Oh,’ Otto began airily, ‘I met someone last night, he was supposed to call in on his way home from work. That was two hours ago.’ He tsked and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. It all sounded so depressingly familiar.
‘Yeah, well there’s a lot of heart breaking going around,’ I said glumly. ‘Here, this will cheer you up.’ And I handed him a bag of croissants.
Otto started nibbling the nuts off a particularly large and sickly-looking almond croissant.
‘Aren’t you having any?’
‘No, I ate something at the pub.’ Something hard and indigestible.
‘Why do you insist on living at that pub? It must be so . . . unsavoury.’
‘It’s a nice pub, good clientele. Safety in numbers.’
‘You just like it because there are lots of young men around.’
I smiled wryly and sighed. ‘C’mon Otto, let’s get on with it. This is going to be a long night.’
‘Maybe not, Claudia. It depends how long it takes you to find the password.’
‘What do you mean: how long it takes me to find the password? You said you got a positive result on that number I gave you.’
‘All that told us was that it’s a data transmission number. To open communication you also need a password.’
‘Well program your computer to randomly combine letters.’
‘My dear Claudia,’ he said wearily. ‘That could take weeks. Much as I hate to admit it—and I do not want you spreading this around my shop,’ he said, putting his hands over the disc drive so that the computer could not hear, ‘There are times when the human brain is more efficient. My computer knows nothing about your Mr Lavender. You have the advantage there. Operators choose a password that has significance for them—the name of their dog, the name of their lover—they don’t want something so complicated that they might forget the combination of letters. They want something of significance to them but of little importance to anyone else, something that protects their system from easy access. So you put yourself in the shoes of the person who chose the password. You are an actor playing a character. You walk and talk and breathe that character. Then you’ll find the password. It’s very simple.’
All very easy for him to say. It was me who had to do it. But I had been preparing for this. Every breath I took reeked of Lavender.
‘So I have to randomly select passwords and try them against the numbers.’
‘Haven’t you been listening? Not randomly select, just try passwords that the operator might think of.’
‘That’s what I mean.’ Knowing the deviousness of Harry Lavender I might as well have been randomly selecting.
There were obvious names. Mark, Sally, perhaps even Harry.
I shuddered. Stared at the blank computer, the door into a dark, labyrinthine, subterranean maze, a purgatory you wandered through forever trying to find the way out—and the only way out was death. Human names were too obvious for Lavender. It would be secret, something known only to him. And Mark. A dead man.
But Harry Lavender was the double negative. The negative that became positive. Naming one thing invokes its opposite. Harry Lavender was the extreme of deviousness. And when you went to the extreme of deviousness there was nowhere left to go but the obvious.
When I gained entry, pressed the final key, would lightning bolt up my arm and attack my heart too?
‘This is the first step of a descent into hell. Are you ready, Otto?’
Otto was in the passenger’s seat now, swallowing the last of the croissant.
I keyed in the number and waited. The brain started ticking, then meaningful dots of light stretched across the screen:
system ready enter password
I was in. Not quite in but I was knocking on the door.
I tried names, every name I could think of. Dog’s names, people’s names. Mark, Sally, Harry.
Nothing.
I tried the dollar sign, asterisks, exclamation marks, plus and minus signs.
‘More coffee?’
‘Thanks,’ I said. I rubbed my eyes temples and stared into the coffee. It was awfully black, like staring into a hole in the road. But a lot better than cops’ coffee.
‘Don’t forget this,’ said Otto, lightly touching a key to the left. ‘It alters the keyboard completely.’
The paranoid makes connections between signs that the normal person doesn’t see. A quantum leap from one matrix to another. Or perhaps an element common to both sets.
I thought of Koestler and The Act of Creation. Koestler who, with his wife, had committed suicide rather than die of terminal illness.
The overlapping of matrices. The act of creation occurs when two matrices overlap in the mind. Koestler pushed the theory through puns, the arts, philosophy, science. Archimedes for example—the water level in the bath must have risen a thousand times. It was only when he had a problem to solve, the weight of silver in that filigreed crown, that his mind started scanning the myriad of phenomena of the world and noticed the rising level of bath water. Not only noticed but Eureka! it gelled. There was an added incentive. Archimedes’ head would be on the block if he didn’t come up with an answer—a great stimulus for making quantum leaps.
The brain takes in everything and records indiscriminately. It is the rational mind that sorts and sifts. Sends the garbage to the subconscious till the dream man comes along and takes it away. But the mind makes mistakes. Sometimes a perfectly good item is relegated to the dump, and wells up again from subterranean depths. Subterranean, subconscious, subliminal, sub. Lower position, covertness, secrecy, under, under the surface. I had only been trying the overt, the visible letters of the keyboard but underneath each of them was a secret symbol, a subtext. The obvious and the devious.
Alter: change in characteristics, position, change
in character.
Altar: a flat-topped box for offerings to deity, Communion table, communication table.
I held my finger on the flat-topped box of the ALT key and tried all the names again. I got some nice looking hieroglyphs but none of them opened the door.
No entry into the sub-world haunted by the shadow of Harry Lavender.
But I hadn’t tried everything. I hadn’t tried the one word that would gain me entry. The name important to Harry Lavender but of no significance to anyone trying to break into his system. Alter. Reverse the positions, rearrange the words. The positive becomes negative and the negative, positive. The name unimportant to Harry but of full significance to the person trying to break into his system.
In the reflection of the computer screen what I’d been looking for was staring me in the face.
It was my name, my name that was Harry Lavender’s password.
I played a symphony. The sinister left hand holding down the ALT chord while the dextrous right keyed in the melody.
It flashed on the screen, the cursor winking furiously.
My palms were sweating. I sat back exhausted with concentration. I looked at Otto and swallowed hard. No words were spoken in that electrifying atmosphere. This is how it must be for bomb disposal squads, tracing the maze of wires leading to the timer, where any false move, a minuscule uncoordination could shatter you into a million pieces. You h
ave to go on, the clock is ticking, you have to touch the next piece, though every instinct in your body is screaming not to, the fingers resisting like magnetic repulsion.
‘Open the file, Claudia.’
I didn’t move.
‘Open the file, Claudia . . . Claudia?’
I shot out of the chair. Reeling from the cattle prod on the back of the neck.
‘Claudia! For God’s sake!’
It was Otto, only Otto putting his hand on my shoulder.
I stared at the screen.
‘There’s something wrong. Why is it my name? Why is it my name that opens the door? The book was written before I was even born. Why is my secret name on that screen and that cursor winking, winking, winking at me?’
‘People change passwords all the time, to protect themselves. You know that.’
Who is protecting me?
‘Yes. I know.’ I had nothing to do with the writing of the book but I had everything to do with it now.
The rush was subsiding, the pulse back to normal. The pulse, the electronic pulse of the cursed cursor waiting for me to make the next move.
‘Return, Claudia, return.’
The subterranean river of no return.
‘I’m too far in now to return.’
‘Press RETURN to open the file. How can you sit there staring, Claudia? Aren’t you just dying of curiosity?’
Curiosity might kill me.
‘This is no ordinary computer game, Otto. I’m about as curious as a bomb disposal squad.’
‘What? What’s wrong, Claudia? Do you want me to do it?’
‘No, Otto, I’ll do it.’
Ki energy breathed into the abdomen, the body’s centre of gravity.
I RETURNed to open the file, the file of my secret name.
TO MY VALENTINE
Lavender had been guiding me down this path all along. I had been caught up in his maze, looking for the piece of cheese.
The screen filled with red light, red light that finally settled into the shape of a heart. A blood red heart.
Then my heart stopped.
Lavender-coloured crabs crawled down the screen, and where they went nothing was left. TO MY VALENTINE disappeared letter by letter, then the crabs went to work on the heart, eating it bit by bit.
I had stopped breathing. My whole body had stopped. All that was left were eyes. Eyes riveted to the screen.
There were words, far away. ‘. . . some sophisticated sort of Trojan . . .’
I must have asked what that was because more words floated into my ears.
‘. . . Trojan Horse . . . a built-in deleting program . . . normally used to protect copyright . . .’
‘What?’
‘It usually just wipes everything out. I’ve never seen crabs before, well, not on a computer screen.’
‘What star sign are you Otto?’
‘Capricorn. The goat,’ he said.
‘Do you know what the symbol for Cancer is?’
‘Oh,’ he said, his voice deflated.
‘Yes, the crab. That symbol for cancer has eaten my heart. And has been eating it away right from the beginning!’
The screen now was blank except for the winking cursor.
Everything that ever was or ever could be had been deleted. My past and future obliterated. My heart.
‘Playing cat and mouse with my heart,’ I said, more to myself than Otto.
‘You know what a mouse is in computer jargon?’ he said. ‘It’s the thing that moves the cursor around the screen.’
curse: utterance of deity consigning person or thing to destruction.
curse: excommunication.
cursive: writing done with joined characters.
cursorial: having limbs adapted for running.
cursory: hasty, hurried, going rapidly over something without noticing details.
cursor: a movable reference point, movable to the part of the display where measurements are computed.
The cursor gives your position on the screen. Tells you where you are. You are the cursed mouse running round in my maze. Recognise this, my child, you are in my maze, in the very heart of it. All the exits have been blocked off, your little nose is quivering, soon you will be gasping for air. But it will be too late, I have cut off all the life support systems and you will suffocate in my embrace.
But there was still the piece of cheese and Lavender wanted that cheese as much as the mouse. He wasn’t playing dead men’s games for the fun of it. I was looking for something that he wanted. Something that he’d obliterated, deleted from his life but hadn’t been able to obliterate from Mark’s.
Once again I was standing on the edge of the blue light. I had to draw the cat out of his hidey-hole. I wanted him to know I knew what he was looking for. And wanted so badly he would go to any lengths to get it. Including keeping me alive till I had found it.
I played my hunch and entered into that blank file THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF HARRY LAVENDER.
Returned his service. All I had to do now was keep the volley going and never let the ball fall on the ground. If the ball fell to the ground I’d be dead.
Otto looked at me aghast. ‘What did you do that for? We could have quietly switched off and no-one would be any the wiser.’
The words queued up and filed out of my mouth like strangers. ‘I want him to know that I have cracked his system. That I have played his deathly game and am not afraid.’
Like the suicide is not afraid of death.
‘Well then,’ said Otto with the flippancy of mania, ‘anything else you’d like to say while we’re at it?’
‘No,’ I said coldly.
I walked out of the shop. It was night and the lights were on in Harry Lavender’s city, neon signs winking like the cursed cursor. It was not a late night shopping night and the city was dead. The lights were on but all the doors were closed.
I could not go home. Not follow a path that Harry Lavender knew. He was not the omnipotent eye of God, just a smart, devious fellow. Dying of cancer, the brain addled, he would make mistakes.
Mrs Levack. No message on the Ansafone. An unwittingly smart move. On a bugged phone no news is good news.
I was itchy. Ran my fingers through my hair. Felt under my arms, examined my clothes for bugs. I was clean. I knew I was clean. Clean and just a little bit paranoid. I turned it into an advantage. The adrenalin of paranoia became alertness, super-awareness. Harry Lavender was just a man.
I was about to hail a cab then thought better of it. The ghost of Ronny O’Toole could be driving a cab that just happened by.
I caught the bus to Bondi. Right to the Esplanade. Far away enough to sniff out a tail as I walked the dark streets to the Levacks’, blending into the shadows.
SHE’D taken the rollers out of her hair. Blonde hair that was grey at the roots.
‘Miss Valentine!’
Mr Levack was sitting with his head in the paper but he managed a small sign of recognition.
‘You rang me, Mrs Levack. Sorry I wasn’t there to take the message personally.’
A frown manifested from the wrinkles of Mrs Levack’s forehead. ‘Your secretary seemed such a quiet girl, not very talkative at all. I asked if I could talk to you but she didn’t say anything.’
‘It’s my Ansafone, Mrs Levack, you just leave messages on it. Like a tape recorder.’
Mr Levack put the paper down on the coffee table. ‘I told her it was one of them answering services but she insisted that someone had spoken to her. Sometimes I think Mavis lives in another century.’
I was in no mood for small talk.
‘What did you ring about, Mrs Levack?’
‘This, dear.’ She handed me a letter addressed to Mark Bannister. A letter from America. ‘I know I shouldn’t of done it, taking mail out of letter boxes, but it was sticking out. See it’s one of them long envelopes and . . . if I knew his next of kin I would of given it to them but you were the only one I could think of.’
‘It was
all I could do to stop her steaming it open,’ threw in Mr Levack.
‘It might be important, dear. Aren’t you going to open it?’
It was a toss up who was more curious: Mrs Levack or me.
On the top left hand corner of the envelope was the name Grosz, Grosz and Epstein and a New York address.
I opened it.
Dear Mark Bannister,
Thank you for sending us ‘The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender’. You are a talented writer but I’m afraid this one’s not for us. There were some good touches here and there but the writing is, we think, slightly overdone and there doesn’t seem to be any plot. I am sure that you will find somebody to take it but I don’t think that we are the people.
Awaiting your further instructions re return of disk.
Yours
Nancy Grosz
Too late and too early to ring the States, so near and yet so far.
‘When did you pick this up, Mrs Levack?’
‘Just today, dear. I rang you as soon as possible.’
‘Ever since you came here the first time she’s been snooping around. Thinks she’s Angela Lansbury,’ scoffed Mr Levack.
I could have kissed her. A nice normal nosy parker, the sort of person a man like Harry Lavender in his world of manipulators and manipulatees doesn’t take into account.
‘You’re a jewel, Mrs Levack. I don’t know how to thank you.’
She went all fluffy, like a little girl in her first party dress.
‘Don’t go telling her things like that,’ said the voice of reason. ‘She’ll never get her hat on the way her head’s swelling out.’
‘Oh shut up, Eddy! Just go back to reading the paper,’ she said, heady with power. ‘Claudia,’ she said confidentially, ‘that letter, ahem, is it important?’
‘It’s just a letter from a publisher. Would you like to read it?’
Would she like to read it! Is the Pope Polish?
Her eagle eyes moved along the lines, her mouth shaping the words.
‘Oh, the poor thing, all that writing and they didn’t want it. Oh, the poor thing. I knew he was a writer, though. Didn’t I say he was a writer?’
‘You thought he was a student,’ said Mr Levack. ‘It’s not the same thing.’