First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  He calls me at home. Says he wants to talk about the book but says nothing.

  The black liquid seeped upwards into the sugar cube.

  What would you do? she asked.

  I didn’t know. I felt too embarrassed to say that I had been warned by Ray, how I had told Heidl nothing even when it went against my nature. I asked her what Heidl said, saying maybe it didn’t really matter.

  She held the sugar cube in front of her, watching the black fluid wick through its entirety.

  No, Pia said, I guess it doesn’t matter.

  She looked away, and when she turned back she leant in, face looking down, eyes up. So close, I could smell her fragrance.

  It’s just—he knows things, Kif. It’s odd.

  I asked Pia what she meant.

  Things he shouldn’t know, he knows, Pia said. I had a cat. It was very old. It, well, lost control. Started pissing everywhere. Poor little thing. I mean I couldn’t stand it, but what could I do? And I mentioned it to Siegfried a few weeks ago. And the day after we spoke the cat disappeared.

  The sugar cube she held had turned black and was beginning to dissolve into syrup. She dropped it into her coffee.

  Cats do that, don’t they?

  I didn’t know.

  I guess so, I said. They wander off.

  They wander off, Pia said. Yes. But then the next night Heidl rang me and—

  Heidl rang?

  He asked if it was better now the cat was gone.

  Pia made small circles on the table top with her coffee spoon as if searching for something.

  The thing is, no one knew. And then another night he calls just after a friend had left my place. He says, did you have a nice evening with your visitor? in that weird fucking accent. Did you have a nice evening? No, not now you’ve rung, I wanted to say.

  I said something which she ignored. Her gaze drifted for a few moments and then she looked back at me. She put her coffee spoon down, and pushed her cup away.

  What do you make of it? she said, before quickly adding: I don’t want to make anything of it.

  I asked if she had told Gene Paley.

  I can’t, Kif. Heidl’s worth a lot of money to the company. There’s big numbers against this book.

  I tried to suggest that it might not mean anything, that someone may have told Heidl.

  Even if it’s creepy, I said, it doesn’t make him a cat-killer.

  No, Pia said. I’m not suggesting anything like that.

  There was a long silence. Finally, I said that I was lost with Heidl too. I felt I could trust Pia with my own despair. I told her how I’d only taken the job—a job I thought would be easy—to get money to finish my novel. But having to date been unable to write a real novel, I now worried I might not even have the ability to ghost write a third-rate celebrity memoir.

  Pia Carnevale laughed. She reassured me that I would, how it would all come together, that it would be first rate, and all this was normal. Don’t fight him, she advised, go with him. And then Pia came back to her cat, how strange it was, where could it be?

  I couldn’t say that my confidence was beginning to crumble. I said that I was sure her cat would come back, that it was fine. And as my mouth continued making words without consequence, Pia tilted her head back and blinked.

  2

  Once back from the lunch I used the time I was Heidl-less to what advantage I could. I set to work structuring the outline Gene Paley wanted from a confusion of notes, half-formed gobbets of prose, and research. But whenever I tried to get to the nub of Heidl I had nothing. Growing within me was the fear that he had nothing to give. Like a dementia sufferer, like a Californian feel-good poster, today was always the first day of the rest of Ziggy Heidl’s life, and there were no yesterdays.

  Characteristically, Heidl failed to keep his word and was back in the office not long after my return.

  Gene Paley, I said, wants this outline sorted by—

  I know what Paley fucking wants, Heidl snapped, walking over to the windows. He looked out, and shook his head. You’re worse than my lawyers, he said without turning around, as if addressing the world outside.

  For some time he stared into nothing.

  My lawyers were confident we could get at least a six-month’s postponement, he said quietly. At worst—at worst!—they said three months. And now the judge won’t give us even a week.

  Meaning? I asked.

  Meaning? he said.

  But he was distracted. It was as if he was seeing everything from a great distance, that he had already left where we were and would not be coming back, as though some final fateful decision had been made.

  Well, he said, no postponement, that’s what it means. And that means I’ll have to start trial preparations in two weeks’ time.

  Not three?

  Not three. Not twenty-four either. Just two. Maybe a little less. Then I’ll have to work with my lawyers full time for a week before the trial begins. Excuse me, he said. Picking up the phone he rang a journalist from, of all things, Vogue. When that call was finished, he said he had a late lunch appointment and left.

  The moment the door shut I rang Gene Paley’s secretary, asking that she take an urgent message to her boss. I said Heidl had miscalculated and we now only had two weeks left with him on the book.

  I worked for an hour or more alone, then walked to a nearby café for a coffee. On the way back I spotted Heidl down an unfinished side street. He was leaning against a concrete water main pipe that was waiting to be laid. He seemed lost in thought and never saw me. When later he returned to the office I asked how the lunch had gone.

  Wonderful, but TV people! They bang on! I had to make it very clear I will be auctioning the rights for any mini-series based on the book.

  I pointed out he had grey concrete dust all over the back of his jacket. He ran a hand across a shoulderblade, and when he saw his dusty palm, he laughed.

  Can you believe it? The restaurant had been polishing their concrete floors before they opened and they sat me in a chair that was still covered in dust!

  I was overcome with a sudden rage—with his lies, with him, and worse, the ease with which lying came to him, with me, with the folly of having agreed to write an unwritable book. Above all things in the universe, I wanted to tell Ziggy Heidl to go fuck himself.

  Ray told me the containers were empty, I said.

  The shipping containers? Heidl asked.

  Yes.

  Heidl shook his head sadly as if I were the greatest fool he had ever met.

  Of course they were empty, he said.

  3

  The shipping containers were known in ASO parlance as Critical Incident Response and Inter-Liaison Support Units—or CIRILs for short. These were the much-publicised heart of ASO’s disaster and emergency response capability. The clippings file bulged with stories of how each CIRIL contained the technology and equipment needed for any particular catastrophe. The CIRILs were, inevitably, called not steel boxes but a system—you could have as few or as many as you needed for a crisis—one, two, a dozen, and alone or together they became the nerve centre for the rescue of trapped mineworkers or crashed jet airliners. Being housed in shipping containers meant they could be easily freighted to wherever—trucked and shipped when time didn’t matter; and when it did, they could be flown in ASO’s own Hercules aircraft to the natural disaster—the flood, the fire, the tsunami—and be operational there both as a store and an operations command centre within thirty minutes of arrival. Or such was the stuff of the puff pieces. With the parachute jumpers who manned them, CIRILs formed the vaunted nexus that was ASO’s promise and creed: After disaster, before anyone else: we are there for you.

  After Heidl’s confession, I couldn’t stop staring at him.

  If the containers were empty, I said, then they couldn’t be used on any jobs?

  Roger that.

  Then the ASO couldn’t earn any money—is that right?

  Obviously, Heidl said. We didn’t hav
e the resources to do half those things people thought we did.

  Or that you said you did, I said.

  Heidl laughed.

  Or even a hundredth. That would have cost millions.

  I pointed out that they had millions.

  But not for those things.

  But you said you did those things.

  I just told you—people thought we did. People wanted to believe we did those things.

  I asked how he persuaded the banks to give him so much when they wouldn’t even give Suzy and me our tiny mortgage, and we had to go begging to a slimy solicitor who demanded an extra 2 percent interest on top of the going rate.

  A small mortgage is hard, Heidl said. A thirty-million-dollar business loan is easy. When I’d run out of cash, I’d call a bank saying I wanted to expand.

  It seemed impossible that he had scammed so much with only empty boxes. I began to see Heidl as a magician, a sorcerer.

  I’m sorry, I said. I still don’t get how it worked.

  Trust, Heidl said.

  I could feel the gritty dust of the car seats as I put my hand between them searching for lost change, the long walk across town to save petrol, the solicitor’s dank dun-coloured room, grimed with greed. And listening to Heidl, thinking of where honesty and trust had got me, I couldn’t fathom what he was on about.

  That doesn’t explain anything, I said, as I saw before me the solicitor’s weary receptionist reach for the sad shoebox of indexed despair and hope, pull up our thumbed mortgage repayment card before checking every dollar, every cent I passed over in case I tried to cheat her employer of a single penny.

  Trust me, Kif: trust explains most things, Heidl said. Trust is the oil that greases the machine of the world. Even people we hate we trust. That’s how it is. And, amazingly, mostly it works. The bankers trusted that the CIRILs were real, that ASO was real, until finally it was real. Like you trust the mechanic did service the car or that the bank is honest; like you trust that the people who run the world know what they’re doing. But what if you discovered that they didn’t? What if their theatre is just a far bigger farce than my empty shipping containers? What if they—and here Heidl looked up and around, laughed, his cheek pitter-pattering, and in a mock-conspiratorial voice said—if they are the real con men?

  And with that he leaned back, performance done, puddles of arguments drowned in a sea of nonsense. To somehow segue from his own crime to suggesting the people he defrauded were actually the real criminals was a marvel. These days I’m less sure, and any certainty simply waits, as Tebbe says, for uncertain times to prove it wrong.

  I am looking at my notes from that time as I type this. I never used them for the book. Even then I understood it was a revelation beyond what his memoir could contain. Perhaps it was too much the truth and the world can only stand a little of such things, and a memoir, if it is to work, none. I needed only revelation, another matter altogether, and that was the empty containers. And that was enough.

  4

  I returned to the mechanics of his scam, asking again how he actually did it.

  I’m telling you how, Heidl said. Say I owe Bank A seven million and Bank B three million dollars each in interest repayments. So, I ask Bank C for a loan of, say, twenty million. And they give me the twenty million.

  But how does going into more debt help?

  Stay with me, Kif! Next I create invoices: BP for fighting a fire on an oil rig in the Mexico Gulf. Department of Defence for training SAS troops in deepwater rescue techniques. And, let’s say, the Queensland Department of National Parks, I bill them for firefighting. Until I have invoiced out twenty million dollars.

  And they pay?

  Why would they pay? They never get the bill. Because—

  Because?

  —because we never did the work.

  You never fought any fires?

  Just enough to have a few newspaper clippings.

  Never saved lost sailors in the southern oceans?

  We saved one yachtsman. One! And we had a media field day with it.

  Heidl drew a circle on his desk with a finger and sighed.

  I just drip the latest loan into our main account from a hidden account as if it is paying those invoices.

  Not as debt but as income?

  He pointed a finger at me.

  Now you’re getting it. And with that twenty million income now ours, we can pay off the interest we have to pay, maybe even a bit off the principal debt. We were honourable.

  I asked if the banks were happy with this.

  Sure. They give; they receive. That’s what banks do. Legally we were a charity. The auditing rules were a lot looser. Our books looked good as long as you were willing to believe. The banks wanted to believe, and there was plenty to believe in. Like God, they just needed you to supplicate. I was an altar boy, you know. And I was good at getting down on my knees, offering up the mystery of the magic circle—invoice made out, copy kept, original destroyed, income received, income receipted, income spent paying back the banks’ ten million interest, plus four million off the principal. And ASO is left with six million to keep going on with—salaries, expenses, training. A few more shipping containers. Our training, he added proudly, was second to none.

  That was your plan?

  Plan? Heidl laughed. There was no plan.

  It couldn’t last, though, I said.

  Why not? So much does.

  Your plan was to borrow more to pay for your borrowings?

  Roger that.

  That’s like paying off your mortgage with your credit card.

  Except after I had maxxed out the last credit card the banks would give me a new one.

  It’s pure greed.

  Is there any other kind?

  In the end, though, wouldn’t you owe more than you can borrow?

  Roger that.

  I tried to drag him back to the details of the scam.

  Finally, the banks started going broke because of your debts, I said. Questnoc bankrupt. Tantalus in receivership.

  We did theatre. They did due negligence. We only had one shipping container.

  You had hundreds of CIRILs, I said.

  One—only one CIRIL. And that was our star.

  5

  Well, it was that sort of time, I guess, Ray had told me that dawn after Pink and Purple left us, as we stood in the rain trying to hail a cab in front of Mr. Moon’s mouth. Heidl would tell me he was running low on cash and we had to get the bankers back to tidy things up. The suits’d fly in, and there’d be this whole big show we’d have to put on—fly them down to Geelong in one of our planes, he’d take them out on our helicopter ship, show them our sub—that fuckn sub, I never knew what the point of that was other than taking bankers on a jolly.

  You had three subs, I said, holding a shopping bag over my head as the rain grew heavier.

  We had a fuckn navy. It was fun, I guess. I liked it. Heidl liked it. He’d buy more and more of this shit—boats, ships, planes, choppers—then he’d maybe show them a few letters for big new contracts with government agencies and big companies—oil, mining, you name it. There was a bloke he had here in Melbourne—Geordie something—anyway, he was good at knocking up that sort of stuff. His title was “corporate communications consultant”—I always remember that—but forging was his job. Anyway, after the port, they’d fly back to HQ in Bendigo, a couple of hundred PJs would do a march past, a few of us jump out of one of our planes with dogs strapped to us, or some stunt like that.

  And then there was the moment Heidl would always love. He’d show them the one CIRIL he had jam-packed with all the most amazing search-and-rescue gear. State-of-the-art stuff. Worth millions—high tech, incredible. That container was always getting new and better gear put into it. It was fuckn something. And as they came out of the CIRIL a chopper would land. And the suits just loved that chopper. Ziggy would tell them how it had been Idi Amin’s helicopter and how he had survived several assassination attempts in it. And as ev
idence he’d point to the bullet holes I’d shot in it for him. Then the suits would curl up like fuckn tacos ready to be eaten as they scrambled into that chopper.

  A taxi pulled up, and as we got in I turned and saw staring at us through the sheets of rain the strange dead eyes of Mr. Moon keeping patient sentry on the collapsing night.

  10

  1

  ARE YOU with me still, Kif? Heidl said.

  And trying to avoid Heidl’s terrible eyes I said I was, coming back to the office, to my senses, trying to jettison my vivid memory of Mr. Moon as Heidl talked.

  So we’d bank to the north in the helicopter, still staying low, fly over a small clump of bush and there, on an old football oval, there they would be. All of them.

  All of what? I asked.

  The shipping containers, what else? Dozens and dozens of them in the end, stacked up like Lego blocks. Like Singapore harbour! As we started circling I explained to the bankers how the CIRIL they’d just seen was worth in excess of a million dollars—which was true—and how what they were looking at now below them was the very backbone of the ASO, a spectacular investment that was generating great returns. Which was also true. And they’d be staring down at those containers painted in ASO colours, orange and blue—

  But the CIRILs were empty, I interrupted.

  Roger that, Heidl said, as if I had pointed out air is invisible, or that water is wet.

  The whole two hundred of them?

  Two hundred and seven, I think. I had a Croatian down Geelong welding them up for me. Otto. Not a very Croatian name, really, but Otto used to knock them up for us, two grand a pop. They weren’t CIRILs, they weren’t even real shipping containers, much too flimsy, just cheap copies for set dressing.

  And you told the bankers each container was full of the same gear as the CIRIL you took them through?