Game Theory

by Barry Jonsberg

  ‘Hey, Jamie, man,’ he said. ‘How are you, dude?’

  I tried to say something. I opened my mouth, but there weren’t any words there, so I closed it again. He put a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Jesus, man. You look like shit,’ he said. ‘Any news?’

  I might have shaken my head. I’m not sure. Suddenly, I was spent. Whatever energy store I was functioning on had suddenly run dry. My left leg started to tremble and I felt the world move away from me.

  ‘Say something, man,’ said Gutless. ‘You’re starting to freak me out.’

  I tried again, but my mouth wasn’t obeying instructions. It twisted and the muscles in my face twitched and jumped. My skin was slick, with sweat or tears or both. There was a thudding in my ears.

  ‘I’m scared, Gutless,’ I whispered. ‘I’m so scared.’

  And he hugged me. He put his arms around me and drew me into his chest. I imagine we were the focus of everyone’s stares, but I was beyond caring. I sobbed and it all came out, the hurt, the fear, the guilt. It washed through me and Gutless hugged me, there in the schoolyard. He hugged me.

  The call came half an hour later.

  Gutless had wanted me to come into the school, maybe see the nurse or, at the very least, get someone to take me home, but I couldn’t bear it. So I’d gone to Phoebe’s school. The kids were in class by then, so I had the yard to myself. I sat on the low-slung swing and didn’t care if I looked like a paedophile. The grounds had been recently mown and the air smelled of freshness and innocence. My ringtone dispelled all of that.

  ‘Listen carefully, Jamie,’ said the voice. ‘In twenty-four hours you will have Phoebe back. I want you to arrange for the money to be delivered to your home today. Two million dollars in cash, in one-hundred-dollar bills. I also want you to buy a backpack large enough and strong enough to carry the money, which will weigh in excess of twenty kilos. Keep the money in the backpack at all times and wait for my call arranging the drop-off, the exchange. I will ring again at six o’clock. I strongly suggest you do not let the police listen to our conversation then, since what I have to say is for your ears only. Tell me you understand.’

  ‘I understand.’

  The phone went dead.

  Here is something remarkable, something powerful. All of my tension, my tiredness and my fear drifted away on the grass-scented breeze. Maybe living in a kind of suspended animation had leached my spirit, dissolved my spine, but I had things to do now. I rang Gardner and told him the call had come. He wanted to talk but I hung up. Then I rang Mum and gave her the same information. She wanted to know when I would be home, but I couldn’t tell her. Later, was all I said before cutting her off, too.

  I pushed up from the swing and my legs were solid. I walked back to the city and found a camping store. I went for a top-of-the-range backpack. The assistant assured me it could easily cope with a weight in excess of twenty kilos.

  ‘This is a serious piece of equipment,’ he said. ‘Check the stitching and the zips. Built for a lifetime of heavy use. The lightweight frame is designed to spread the weight and . . .’

  ‘I’ll take two,’ I said. ‘As long as they’re identical.’

  They cost a fortune and I worried for a moment that there wouldn’t be enough in my account, and I’d have to call Summerlee. But the eftpos machine gave a large green tick. Then I went to a cafe and bought myself the special breakfast with my last twenty-dollar note. Sausages, bacon, hash browns and two fried eggs with doorstop slices of toast. I finished all of it. I looked at my watch. Ten-thirty. Time to get to Summer’s place.

  Gardner rang me a couple of times on the way, but I didn’t pick up. I’d decided that the only use he could be to me now was to arrange for the money delivery, and he didn’t need to talk to me to do that. But I did ring Summer. She told me a number of things. First, there was no sign of the media; second, Gardner was coming round immediately to take her to the bank, and she wouldn’t be there when I arrived. Finally, she said that Spider had made some phone calls and was ready to go. I asked her not to mention this call to Gardner and she agreed without asking why.

  I picked up my pace. It was a beautiful day and I almost felt good.

  CHAPTER 22

  Spider took me to see his Spider.

  To be strictly accurate, his Ferrari Testarossa Spider. It was a monument to rampant consumerism – low-slung, all streamlined contours and bright red. An engorged penis on wheels. I tried to look impressed, but I’m not sure I succeeded.

  ‘Wow. Cool wheels,’ I said, but only because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. A few alternatives sprang to mind. Awesome, was one. What are you, some kind of dick? was another, but I needed this favour, so I kept quiet. Of one thing I was sure, however. It was a cast-iron certainty he was about to tell me how much it cost.

  ‘Any idea how much this baby cost?’ he said.

  ‘A lot?’ I hazarded.

  He told me. I whistled.

  ‘I was thinking of just getting a Ferrari, you know? But then I saw this Spider and I thought, hey, that’s my name. It was kinda fate, man, you know what I’m saying? Calling to me. Like it literally had my name on it. Cool, huh?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I lied.

  ‘Some bastard pissed in it,’ he informed me, mournfully. I adopted an expression of horror. ‘Yeah,’ he continued. ‘Me and Summer parked up at the local mall and when we come back, the seats are wringing wet. The stench was fuckin’ disgusting, man. Can you believe that? It’s just jealousy. I know that. But to stand there, in a car park and whip out your trouser snake to piss in someone’s Ferrari Testarossa Spider. I mean, what’s the world coming to?’

  ‘It’s the downfall of western civilisation,’ I replied.

  ‘Too right. Cost me four thousand bucks to get it cleaned and detailed.’

  ‘Well, you can afford it,’ I said. ‘Or should I say, Summer can afford it.’

  Spider shook his head, lost in despair at the evil in the world. I felt cheated. If I’d known they were going to park up at the local mall, I would have pissed in it first. Well, probably not, but the concept was really appealing.

  ‘Did they put that huge scrape along the side at the same time?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah,’ said Spider. ‘I did that. Took a bend too fast. I was doin’ about a hundred and eighty and it slid a tad. Hit these fuckin’ barriers. Tellya, man. You should’ve seen the sparks.’

  I thought that if I had hit barriers at a hundred and eighty I would have pissed in the car with no help from jealous passersby at local shopping malls. Time was moving on, however, so I opened the door and slid into the passenger seat. The man himself strolled around and vaulted into the driver’s side, one hand on the windscreen, the other on the plush leather headrest.

  I hate Spider. Despite Summer’s heartfelt testimonial, I can’t express how much I hate Spider.

  He turned the ignition key and the car growled into life. Whatever the engine was – I couldn’t say, I’m not into cars – it exuded an air of being unhappy in a state of rest. The whole car shook with pent-up energy, a validation of Newton’s laws of physics. Potential momentum demanded conversion into actual momentum. Spider slipped the car into first and took off with a wail of wheels and the smell of burning rubber. My back pressed into the seat.

  ‘You might want to slow down, Spider,’ I suggested.

  ‘This car doesn’t do slow, man,’ he yelled against the wind. He was probably right. It didn’t matter, anyway. We couldn’t hear each other even when we shouted. I didn’t relax until we left the city, which took about half an hour. Under other circumstances, I might have appreciated the looks of admiration we received driving along the highway, but I had too much on my mind. Particularly since I was concentrating on keeping the car away from any crash barriers by sheer force of will. Only when the traffic eased slightly did I force my fingers to relax and stop digging gouges into my palms. I took the opportunity to breathe as well.

  Spider reached down into
the glove compartment, pulled out a joint and lit it. Even with the wind rushing around our ears, the smell was pervasive, cloying and instantly recognisable.

  ‘Spider,’ I said. ‘You think it’s a good idea to be smoking pot while driving a car like this well above the speed limit?’ I might have gone on to mention that he was a barely post-adolescent bogan and, therefore, a prime target for the police even if he was driving a Corolla, but I’m not sure he would have taken the point.

  ‘WHAT?’ he yelled.

  I repeated the question with a higher decibel count.

  ‘No worries, man,’ he replied. ‘I don’t have a baggie in the car, just some pre-rolled joints. The cops pull me over, I ditch the smokes into the slipstream.’

  I shook my head. It wasn’t the police I was worried about, really. In fact, I probably would have welcomed the sound of pursuing sirens, if only to minimise the chances of some stoned dickhead driving me into a wall at one hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. I reminded myself why I was here in the first place.

  ‘You’re sure this guy can get me a gun?’ I screamed, then regretted it. It wasn’t a question that should be yelled.

  Spider inhaled deeply. He even did the pinched cheeks bit and held the roach between the middle finger and the thumb, glowing end against his palm. I couldn’t bear to watch.

  ‘No problem, man,’ he replied. ‘There is nothing this guy cannot get. But it’ll cost.’

  ‘I know that, Spider. I’m taking it you brought along enough cash.’

  ‘Well, yeah, but you need to pay me back, man.’

  I pinched the bridge of my nose with a couple of fingers. Summer was worth an obscene amount of money. Spider, by association, was scarcely hard up. The car was a subtle clue.

  ‘Are you serious, Spider?’ I asked. ‘You’ve got seven million big ones in the bank.’

  ‘Down to four and a half now, what with the house and the car.’

  ‘Still sounds more than enough to me.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s the principle, man.’ He glanced over at me, tossed the roach out of the car. ‘Everyone should pay their debts.’

  ‘Summer won that money,’ I said. ‘Have you paid her back for the car yet? And half the house?’

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘We do things together, me and Summer. She bought the tickets but I paid half. So half the winnings are mine. That’s the law, dude.’

  ‘You paid her . . . what, six bucks? When?’

  ‘Soon as I heard we’d won.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. There seemed little point in pursuing this. ‘I’ll pay you back out of my pocket money. How does two dollars a week sound?’

  He shrugged and reached down for another spliff.

  ‘Look. When we get there, let me do the talking, man. This dude . . . he’s kinda . . . well, unpredictable, if you catch my drift.’

  ‘How unpredictable?’

  ‘Like, may gut you with a boning knife if you look at him the wrong way kind of unpredictable.’

  ‘Jesus, Spider,’ I said. ‘Who is this guy?’

  Spider took both hands off the wheel to light his joint. We were only doing a hundred and forty now. Maybe I wouldn’t have to worry about a maniac gutting me with a boning knife.

  ‘You’re buying an illegal gun,’ Spider pointed out. ‘What were you expectin’, Jamie, a freakin’ nun? Nah, man. He’s a big cheese in a local bikie gang. But he’s all right. Generally.’

  ‘Oh, fuck, Spider,’ I said. I didn’t feel like talking anymore.

  I spent most of the journey going through my plans, such as they were. Did it really make sense to buy a gun? There were so many things that could go wrong. I could blow my own head off for one thing. Or I could hurt Phoebe, which didn’t bear thinking about. Summer had made this point; it had shaken me then and it shook me now. And there was no sense in buying a gun if I wasn’t prepared to use it, which presented further problems. I had never fired anything in my life and I probably couldn’t hit a barn door at five paces. Was it physically possible for me to level a firearm at another person and then pull the trigger? Even if it was, if I could stop shaking long enough, was it psychologically possible? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to find out.

  Ultimately I had to face the real reason I was on this journey with Spider. Oh, I could fool myself by saying it was a move consistent with game theory, the argument I’d used with Summer. The kidnapper had researched me, he appeared to know my physical movements and my personality. If that was true, then he would also know that it was exceptionally unlikely I would come armed to any meeting. I was middle-class, I was a mathematician. People like me did not carry guns. People like me wouldn’t have a clue how to get a gun in the first place. So I needed an advantage, an edge in this game. That was the theory and it sounded fine. It was logical.

  But, fundamentally, there was another, much darker, reason.

  Phoebe had seen this man’s face. She would be able to identify him. Maybe if she’d been snatched on the street, bundled into a car and whisked away before anyone could witness anything, it might be different. He could have hidden his face, or put something over her head. But she knew who he was. You can’t walk up to someone in a supermarket wearing a stocking or a latex mask. So was it reasonable to expect him to let her go when he’d got the money? Wouldn’t it be more logical, safer for him, to kill her so she could never testify? It was this underlying suspicion that gnawed at me. I couldn’t afford to adopt a position based on wishful thinking. I had to look at it from his viewpoint. And his viewpoint led to only one conclusion.

  I knew the odds were against Phoebe coming out of this alive. And that was the reason I wanted the gun, because if she died, then he would too. Under those circumstances, there would be no psychological problems about pointing a gun at another human being. I would level a gun at this man’s face, look him in the eyes and pull the trigger. I wouldn’t hesitate and I wouldn’t care. I’d even reload and do it all again.

  Maybe keep one bullet for myself.

  The countryside became drab and featureless. We had left the main road many kilometres behind. Farmers’ fields flanked us, but if they were growing anything it was difficult to tell. Most seemed given over to grass and they didn’t even house any livestock. An occasional barn appeared on the horizon and once or twice I caught sight of distant farm buildings, but other than that, we were far removed from civilisation. Spider appeared to know where he was going, however, which raised another question. Why would Spider be in contact with a bikie gang? The guy was a hopeless stoner and an even more hopeless bass player. I thought I knew the answer. What does a hopeless stoner do when he comes into money? He imagines himself a businessman with an empire to build. And his specialist commodity, his area of expertise? Drugs. Who runs drugs? Bikie gangs.

  The way I figured it, Spider would be dead within a year. He’d either choke on his own vomit, have one too many brushes with crash barriers or find himself on the wrong side of a boning knife. I wasn’t convinced the world would be a poorer place.

  Spider turned off the road onto a dirt track. There were no signs that I could see. At least he was forced to slow down to about sixty. Even then, I could hear the car’s undercarriage scraping the ground when we went over ruts, which was nearly all the time. A Ferrari Testarossa Spider with a resale value plummeting by the second. I checked out the countryside, but only because there was nothing else to do. The land was still dry and featureless, the odd scrawny gumtree providing the only relief from terminal monotony. It was difficult to believe anyone would want to live out here. Apart from a member of a bikie gang, I guessed, who was not necessarily keen on being close to good restaurants and nationally recognised operatic performance centres.

  Ten minutes later, we passed through a ramshackle gate that clearly marked the entrance to a property. There was a sign next to it, but it was impossible to read because it was completely pockmarked with dents. Someone had been discharging a shotgun, repeatedly. Despite the purpose of my mission, I did
not find this encouraging. Nonetheless, we drove on for another two minutes, before rounding a bend and stopping. We stopped because we couldn’t go any further. A small, low-set shack sat in our way. Its roof was completely oxidised, window frames rotted. Two things adorned the small, weed-riddled yard fronting the property. One was a large motorcycle. The other was a large dog.

  I didn’t like the look of either.

  At least the motorcycle wasn’t snarling.

  The dog was something like a German Shepherd or a Rottweiler. I’m not great at recognising breeds. But I knew enough to realise this wasn’t a canine bred to curl up at your feet, fetch tennis balls or beg to have its belly rubbed. This dog had only one thing on its mind: death. As I got out of Spider’s car, it eyed me with interest, as if I had suddenly been promoted to number one on its desirability list. Black lips curled, revealing large yellow incisors. A froth of drool gathered at one side of its mouth. A low growl built and then erupted into a frenzy of barking. It lunged towards me and came up short, only because of the chain that kept it tethered to a post. The chain snapped violently, but held. I eyed the post. It seemed secure enough, but this beast was all muscle, and it appeared . . . motivated. I backed against the car. Pity it was a convertible.

  ‘It’s all right, man,’ said Spider. ‘He won’t bother you.’

  ‘He is bothering me, Spider,’ I muttered.