Nowhere Man E-Book

John M. Green

• Herausgeber: Pantera Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 440

Beschreibung

A WHITE-KNUCKLED RIDE THROUGH CHAOS – A SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE, A MARRIAGE ENDED, CRIPPLING DEBT – A LOVE-TRIANGLE MURDER AND SOME STRANGE FILES IMAGINE YOU HELD THE KEY TO AVOIDING FINANCIAL DISASTER… WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO KNOW WHAT'S COMING NEXT? Wealthy, secretive stock trader Michael Hunt suddenly vanishes without a trace leaving his wife Sonya with millions in debt. As the global financial crisis erupts soon after Sonya's world gets even bleaker. Until she stumbles on some strange computer files… the key to repaying her debts and to finding Michael… at least to why he left… and why he lied. Using the files, Sonya risks everything. Her journey takes her from Sydney to Princeton University to ask a famous physicist to help unlock the mystery. Sonya's hunt for Michael becomes a search for himself. "...IF ONLY SHE KNEW WHAT HE KNEW…"

Leseprobe

NOWHERE MAN

A notes from the publisher

Dear Reader,

If you enjoy riveting stories with engaging characters and strong writing, as I do, you’ll love Nowhere Man. It’s a gripping, edge-of-your-seat financial thriller, packed with surprising twists. I couldn’t put it down… And that’s not because John’s my father or because when I was much younger I named the novel’s main character after my favourite video game character! Nowhere Man is a great read.

Did you know that big-name authors, John Grisham and J.K. Rowling, got rejected many times by publishers? John Green’s own experience of this was one of the many factors that inspired Pantera Press, and our aim to become a great new home for Australia’s next generation of best-loved authors. We think we’re well on the way.

But there’s even more to us… Simply by enjoying our books, you’ll also be contributing to our unique approach: good books doing good thingsTM. We have a strong ‘profits for philanthropy’ foundation, focussed on literacy, quality writing, the joys of reading and fostering debate.

So let me mention one program we’re thrilled to support: Let’s Read. It’s already helping 100,000 pre-schoolers across Australia develop a love of books and the building blocks for learning how to read and write. We’re excited that Let’s Read now also operates in remote Indigenous communities in Far North Queensland, Cape York, and Torres Strait. Let’s Read was developed by the Centre for Community Child Health and it’s being implemented in partnership with The Smith Family.

Simply buying this book will help us support these kids. Thank you.

Want to do more? If you visit www.PanteraPress.com/Donate you can personally donate to help The Smith Family expand Let’s Read, find out more about this great program, and also more on the other programs Pantera Press supports.

Please enjoy Nowhere Man.

And for news about our other books, sample chapters, author interviews and much more, please visit our website: www.PanteraPress.com

Happy reading,

Alison Green

First published in 2010 by Pantera Press Pty Limited Reprinted in 2010 Second edition published in 2011www.PanteraPress.com

Text Copyright © John M Green, 2011 John M Green has asserted his moral rights to be identified as the author of this work.

Design and Typography Copyright © Pantera Press Pty Limited, 2011 PanteraPress, the three-slashed colophon device, good books doing good things, a great new home for Australia’s best-loved authors, WHY vs WHY, and making sense of everything are trademarks of Pantera Press Pty Limited.

This book is copyright, and all rights are reserved.

We welcome your support of the author’s rights, so please only buy authorised editions.

This is a work of fiction, though it is based on some real events. Names, characters, organizations, dialogue and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, firms, events or locales is coincidental.

Without the publisher’s prior written permission, and without limiting the rights reserved under copyright, none of this book may be scanned, reproduced, stored in, uploaded to or introduced into a retrieval or distribution system, including the internet, or transmitted, copied or made available in any form or by any means (including digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, sound or audio recording, or text-to-voice). This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent recipient. This edition of this book is not for sale in Europe.

Please send all permission queries to: Pantera Press, P.O. Box 1989 Neutral Bay. NSW Australia 2089 or [email protected]

A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

ISBN 978-0-9870685-0-7 eBook ISBN 978-0-9870685-8-3

Editor: Bill Thompson Cover and internal design: Luke Causby, Blue Cork Cover Image: Shutterstock Author Photo: Courtesy, Phil Carrick, The Australian Financial Review Typesetting by Kirby Jones Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

Pantera Press policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

For Jenny, Alison & Martin

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like bananas.”

— Groucho Marx (1890–1977)

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient.”

— John Stuart Mill (1862)

The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”

— Hamm, in Samuel Beckett’s one-act play, Endgame (1958)

CONTENTS

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1

THIS CITY DOESN’T grow on you, it grows in you. It snatches your breath. It scratches its scarlet nails down your back so you squirm for more. Sydney is heaven without dying. But in eight minutes, for Sonya, it would become hell.

The bush track clung alongside the foreshore, a seductive stretch of dirt and rocks and water views. Professor Sonya Wheen pounded it daily so, even without checking her watch, she knew she’d been running fifty minutes. But after last night, who cared about time?

Dribbles of sweat kept filling her smile lines. It had been their first sex in three weeks, true, but what did she expect after nine, no, ten years. As Sonya was convincing herself once again that Michael wasn’t a lousy lover, the lace frond of a fern camouflaged a sandstone outcrop and she almost tripped. Regathering her balance and her pace, she reminded herself that in the long spaces between the sex Michael was still, well, a gentleman; most at ease sniffing a vintage red or cradling a tumbler of good scotch—no ice, no water—and drawing back on one of his antique smoking pipes. And considerate. The word “companion” didn’t endear itself to her, so she pushed it away.

She leapt, almost flew, over a tree root that caught her eye just in time but her shoulder swiped against a split branch of a eucalypt.

To her, Michael was a Mr Cool in a gallant, nineteenth-century kind of way, yet “cold fish” was the epithet more often whispered round their circle of friends; these days more a semi-circle, and mostly hers. To them, Michael soaked himself in solitude. “Reserve” was a word conceived for him, or so a friend had said once in Sonya’s earshot. It was true he rarely sought friendships and when on odd occasions they were offered, he seldom accepted them.

For him, familiarity bred contentment, albeit one focused on few people and fewer things. Mostly, Michael was a self-contained, tight-lipped man who brushed off the prevailing fondness for approval or intimacy. Cool… yes. Detached at times… oh, yes. But for Sonya, also thoughtful… decent. Integrity and a quiet generosity gently shimmered from him, in soft beats.

He stuck to his guns in most things, even in his business affairs. His work since she’d known him was as a stocks and bonds trader operating from home, a perfect cocoon for his temperament. He’d chosen it well, she decided. Intellectual stimulation, the adrenaline of the markets, and no people. Plus, keeping yourself away from the daily hub-bub helped you filter out the noise and maintain perspective, a lesson he said he had gleaned from his earlier days freelancing as a journalist.

He claimed it was a useful tool in trading on the markets as well as in everyday life but Sonya was never as convinced about the virtues of isolation. It did have its moments, like when she powered her motor bike down after a day’s lecturing and she’d find him at their grey sliver of fence that overlooked the beach, ready for their ritual chat over a freshly-poured wine or whisky. She never knew if it was his first drink since alcohol didn’t affect him as much her. Sonya was tall and slim so her vulnerability was a metabolism and fitness thing, nothing to do with her being a blonde as a friend once joked. As she’d head through the house to join Michael at the back fence, she’d try to guess from the wafting aroma what he had cooking. As well as a journalist, he’d also worked as a chef. What jobs hadn’t he done? She’d pass by the dining table, usually set for two, often with a spray of fresh tulips. Like last night.

For Sonya tulips went with everything, even her job lecturing in business studies. It wasn’t just their cheeky cup shape or their splashes of vivid colour. It was also the history of the manic speculation they’d fired up four centuries ago. Every year, she got a kick out of telling her students how Rembrandt earned less for his 1640s masterpiece, The Nightwatch, than the hammer price a single Viceroy tulip bulb got knocked down for at auction.

There were other kindnesses: gifts, and especially conversations. But Michael kept that side of him to their private world; the modern fetish for public displays of affection, even warmth, repelled him.

Where would she have been without him? Living comfortably on a university salary, for sure, but not in their beach house… well, hers actually… but that was another story. One she had certainly rationalised but never quite worked out.

A barbed sapling brushed against her but she palmed it off, just as she’d done for years to the gibes and gossip. Like Michael she didn’t care for the sneering but, truth be told, she yearned that he would occasionally display his emotions so others could see him as she did. Her late mother had always stereotyped him. That he was so reticent, so uptight, because he was British. It wasn’t that, Sonya was sure, but there was something. An itch she couldn’t scratch.

Sonya knew she should speak to him about it, and she would.

Today.

Six minutes…

Heck, did she really care if he was reserved? Live for the moment! And with him, there were great moments. She brushed back some loose strands of hair, for a change blasé that the whole world could see she had one ear with a lobe and one without. It was an oddity she normally covered up with longer hair, even though Michael claimed he found it endearing.

How often had she engaged in these same arguments with herself? She would definitely raise it all with him today. For sure. What better time, now that he’d agreed, finally, to a baby? Thirty-five on her last birthday, she had certainly been hearing her body. Tick… tick…

The early morning sun slanted through the treetops, leaping from branch to branch like flames. She stopped at the viewing platform, drawing in the crisp sea-spray of the sou’-easterly and watching the wind-shadow skip across the water. An augury perhaps.

Her thoughts lingered, imagining that the rhythmic swell of the water was Michael, his chest rising and falling just as it had been when she’d slipped out of their bed that morning.

Their relationship had always had its edges. Until last night, Michael’s stand-off against children, though always gracious, had been as hard as flint. Despite that, compared to the ditch her first marriage had careened into, her decade with Michael was a yellow brick road. There were the unexpected things. Like last night: “Let’s go barging on a French canal,” he’d said, “before our baby.” Before our baby, a phrase lightly tossed in like a vinaigrette, and without any fanfare despite her years of badgering.

Surprisingly, she’d almost not registered it; the mere mention of an overseas trip had thrown her completely off-guard. After they’d quit New York for Sydney nearly nine years ago and despite their, or rather, his money, they’d only ever flown together within Australia. Never internationally. He, on the other hand. God! she thought, as she turned back onto the track, Michael was such a frequent flyer the airport security people probably knew his shoe size. He must have a trillion international frequent flyer miles but, she reminded herself, she had never enjoyed a single one.

His many, too many, business trips were fleeting, always rushed. Inevitably he returned dishevelled, as if he’d just been trekking for thirty days in Nepal rather than on a three-day flit to Los Angeles or some other business capital. In the beginning, she’d stressed herself about these trips—what wife wouldn’t?—but time wore her down and tolerating them simplified her life, despite her mother’s finger-wagging: one failed marriage was enough, she’d repeatedly warned.

Four minutes…

A child. Sonya hurtled off the end of the track and her shoes dug into the white sand, so fine and clean it squeaked as it stopped her short. She slipped off her sweatshirt and wrapped it round her waist for her cool-down. Her red leotard top was crimson with sweat and her heartbeat was even outpacing her mind.

She’d come round the headland and this end of the beach was tapped in behind, sheltered from the south. Here the palms and eucalypts stood motionless. The barnacled boats moored in close were rocking imperceptibly from the rising tide and there was scarcely a jangle from their glinting halyards. The sun continued to chin itself above the horizon and paint colour onto the eastern cliffs, giving the final crescent of moon a razzle of gold.

She watched the water nudge against the beach, up and back. It hissed up the sand leaving a froth of lace for the seagulls to trample. As her breath slowed she watched the grey scavengers fluffing up their wings and poking their beaks underneath, picking out lice for their breakfast appetisers. A fledgling with a pink-grey beak and legs and spotted wings scrabbled to the water’s edge and dipped its head in and out several times, shaking it in between.

Apart from a drifting foam of cloud, it was a still winter’s morning. Sonya strode over the sand for her final stretch, certain this would be a good day… a good year.

But in three minutes, she’d discover how wrong she was.

At the far end of the beach, the familiarity, the odd ordinariness of their grey slatted fence sandwiched between much grander walls caused her to question Michael’s sudden new leaf and by the time she reached the boardwalk, she was stamping the sand out of her soles as well as her scepticism.

Once again she questioned how she’d lasted so long with a man so guarded, so private. Obscurity and vagueness about his past hovered around Michael like a cloud of summer sand flies but though it was irritating, years of practice had taught Sonya to swat it off as yet another tolerable eccentricity. No longer. Not from today. Today the itch would be scratched.

She recalled how weeks after she’d moved into his New York apartment on Central Park West, she’d knocked his passport from his desk and two strange dried flowers fluttered out of it to the floor. They were shrivelled, brittle and brown though she guessed they’d once been white. Daisies perhaps. As she slid a page of the passport underneath the wilted blooms, carefully so they wouldn’t disintegrate, she’d wondered if they were a memento. But of what? Or whom? She’d never asked. Flipping through the tattered passport that day, she saw some pages were ripped. The corner with his birth-date was gone. Cut or torn, she couldn’t tell. But for the first time she saw his full name: Michael Will Hunt. His name was a sentence.

One minute…

She unlatched her gate smack on what she assumed was 7 AM. Courtesy of Ralph their pitch-black Labrador, the time seemed obvious. Ralph was not normally a barker but what usually got him yapping at this time was the racket from the builders a few doors up. Six days a week it was always the same. On the dot of seven the noise dam from the construction site legally sluiced open.

But wait. Apart from Ralph and the squawk of a seagull, and the hiss of the tide, there was no sound. No builders. Not yet. Sonya checked her watch: five before seven.

Something caught her eye and she jerked her head up at the house to see that the glass double-doors of their attic bedroom were ajar, swinging out onto their balcony.

Michael must be up but, at anything before 7:30, that was almost unheard of.

A lorikeet flashed past her, so close the green wingtip brushed her cheek. The bird perched on top of the left-hand balcony door and cocked its head, a scatter of sunlight fluorescing its blues and mauves.

As Sonya unconsciously wiped her cheek, the bird gave a raucous squawk and shot a repulsive stream of grey shit down the glass door panel. Sonya was not religious, yet the smear roused in her an ancient echo of parents daubing blood on their doors to ward away the angel of death.

A scatter of sand flew off her shoe as she kicked open the back gate but Sonya’s eyes, puzzled, stayed fixed on the swinging doors upstairs. She almost tumbled over Ralph, needing to stabilise herself against the gate post. She started to reward the big lump of a dog with a scratch under his black muzzle but strangely he didn’t roll over and offer his belly as he usually did. He simply pulled away from her and loped back toward the house.

Why was Michael up so early? She bent over, still huffing a little, her hands on her hips, and noticed her toe had jabbed into a small brown mound on the grass. Damn Ralph! She snapped her foot back from it, but on eyeing it closely she saw it was a knock of Michael’s pipe tobacco. She squatted to test if he’d already been out here this morning but it was soggy, the same as the grass, and she also noticed how the lone track of her footprints leaving the house an hour earlier still lingered on the dew. No, Michael had not been outside. It was the same with Ralph’s paw prints though she could see they were mostly in a crazy circle directly below the bedroom balcony, as if he had been chasing his tail. She tugged her ear, the one with no lobe. Something wasn’t right.

Ralph came back to her and snatched at her sleeve, tugging her toward the house. A little jittery, Sonya shook him off, her eyes focused back up at the swaying doors. Even if Michael had opened them and come outside, why would such a stickler for neatness leave them unlatched like this? Maybe the phone had rung or he’d suddenly remembered something inside? She wiped the sudden clamminess of her palms on her sweatshirt.

Every morning when Sonya returned from her run, Ralph would feign sneaking inside under her guard, knowing that inside the house was off-limits—one of Michael’s many exasperating rules. But today Ralph showed no sign of playfulness and simply plonked himself at the stoop, covering his head with his paws.

As Sonya headed upstairs, a low growl rumbled from deep in Ralph’s throat. Halfway up, her nostrils flared into question as a faint, almost odourless smell insinuated the air. Old socks? Sweat? She ran her fingers through her hair and also over her tights to check if the parrot had deposited anything when it flashed past, but no. She pulled the shoulder of her sweatshirt to her nose, but it wasn’t that either. Ralph? She sniffed again and turned her head back to see if he’d snuck in behind her but he was still at the door, watching her through his paws.

She padded up the stairs. At the turn-back, she started to make out murmurings from the bedroom TV. But with the breeze outside picking up, the balcony doors started to bang and the hallway door slammed shut.

“Hey!” she called. “Are you trying to bust the glass?”

There was no response. It must be that the TV was too loud, she decided.

Something held back her hand from turning the door knob. Eventually she turned it and slowly pushed open the door.

But Michael wasn’t there. Guessing he’d be in the bathroom, she switched off the TV. But instead of silence or his radio blaring from the bathroom, all she heard were Ralph’s growls drifting up from the garden.

Sonya slid open the bathroom door expecting to find Michael semi-dozed and with his undershorts splayed around his ankles. There was no Michael. “This isn’t funny,” she called out, her cry ricocheting uselessly off the tiles.

The lingering airlessness she’d felt on the stairs was now invading the bedroom as if it was stalking her. Her heartbeats hammered into her ears and her legs felt weak. She twisted round to Michael’s dressing room and yanked its door open so hard it banged against the wall, gouging out a chunk of white plaster which crumbled onto the floor.

Her stomach compressed into a fist that squeezed the air up and out of her lungs. Had Ralph seen something… had he been warning her?

She spun round like a drunk and ran downstairs. The door to Michael’s office was wide open. He never left it like that. And that odour… it was stronger, mustier, like the mouldy crust of an overripe brie cheese that’s been left out in the air too long. Or truffles… Michael loved black truffles, she remembered. He said he’d spent a season in France once sniffing them out with his own pig. Or maybe it was a dog. Either way, she didn’t care. Not now.

Confused and panicked, Sonya stood framed in the doorway. It was more like an office furniture catalogue than Michael’s office. His beechwood desk was almost bare, scattered only with a few loose papers. His leather chair was swivelled to face toward the window, as if he had turned his back on her. Even his beloved ashtray was empty. She walked over and lifted it to her nose for a whiff of him but it was cold antiseptic metal.

All that was left was an unplugged computer screen and his music player. She pulled open a desk drawer. Empty. She leant under the desk. A depression in the carpet marked where his computer console had been and a grey power cable snaked itself uselessly from nowhere to nowhere else, neither rearing nor ready to go.

How to explain it, other than the obvious? Maybe her mother had been right all along.

She stared blankly past his chair and out the window, frantic for a flash of inspiration. The edge of a cloud blocked the sun just for a moment and when the gloom passed, a brassy glint sparked up from the floor just between the wall and the desk. In a daze, she stooped for the gold-coloured disk and without thinking slid it into the slot in Michael’s sound system as if tidiness were a substitute for action.

Suddenly she tore out to the garage. But both the car and the bike were still there. Unsure if she was pleased or disappointed she circled round the ancient SAAB, its grey enamel absorbing her despair. She unlocked the trunk but it weighed on her fingers. She’d read stories… seen movies… Eventually she lifted it. Apart from an umbrella, an old theatre program and a credit card slip from the supermarket, the space was empty.

She exhaled with a force as if she hadn’t taken a new breath since she’d been upstairs in the bedroom. She slapped her side. Of course the vehicles would be here. Michael didn’t drive. She drove the SAAB when the two of them were out together or if it was raining. The bike was her work horse, to weave her through peak hour traffic to and from campus. Actually, it was more than that. A twin-cylinder Ducati MH900 evoluzione, it was a tomato-red speed machine. But the three hundred kilograms of grunt she loved so much were as cold as she now felt.

As she lumbered back upstairs to their bedroom, she checked her watch. Again. An hour. She’d only been gone an hour.

She stood at the door rocking on the balls of her feet, indecisive, and finally crossed the room to stop the doors banging. Was she imagining it or were they waving farewell? She pushed them open to engage the latches, maybe to let fresh air in to flush the room. She was tempted to clean off the lorikeet shit with a tissue from the box beside the bed but left it there. As a marker.

She turned back into the room and spotted something on the bed, half-tucked under her pillow. It was a note.

Her eyes closed for a moment to calm her raging, thumping pulse but it was futile.

She dragged in her breaths. Her legs had barely the strength to carry her to the edge of the bed. She sat and, pointlessly, one hand tried steadying the other as she read it.

My darling Sonya,

Sorry our bliss had to end like this—with a scratched note—but I could hardly face you.

We were a great couple. You know that.

And though you’ll always have the memory of our last May Day together and our walk to Calvary, without you I’ll be knowhere.

Your love,

Mike

Blinking back sudden tears, denial scratched at her eyes and her heart. Last night, finally, he’d relented about a child. And a trip. Hardly actions if he was planning an exit, she argued with herself. He had to be in trouble. Kidnapped, perhaps. But by whom? And why? And why this note but no ransom demand?

Last night. Had it been just a decoy? A cruel lure. To lull her? “The bastard!” she spat out aloud.

Her mother had been right. She had seen through him just like she’d sussed out Charles, Sonya’s first husband. Yet now it seemed, she had wasted all those years by staunchly defending shit number two.

“We were a great couple,” said the note.

Were… The word slapped her hard.

Her life had already shifted into the past tense.

What would she tell their friends? Her friends, she corrected herself.

She edged herself off the bed. This, she thought, clenching the note in front of her face… this was not Michael. She gripped it harder to prevent her hands trembling but that made it worse.

Her bank loan. What about that? Surely Michael wouldn’t just walk out and leave her in the…

She inched to the window and looked out across the water but tears blurred her vision and her mind struggled to focus.

There was something… She stepped back and again lowered herself onto the rim of the bed. She pulled up a corner of the blue bed sheet to wipe her eyes but it was still laced with last night… instead, she crumpled it in her hand and drew it up to her nose.

“My darling Sonya…” Her breath caught but knew she had to read on. “My…” Her eyes welled up but she pushed herself through the blur. It wasn’t his usual old-style copperplate but it was still Michael’s handwriting. Yet the words… they weren’t his. Michael did not write this.

The maelstrom roiled around her and she fell back on the bed, clawing at the sheet.

He didn’t write this…

A baby… The house… He wouldn’t leave her.

But he had.

2

SONYA TRIED TO quell the sobs as she snatched for the phone, knocking her charm bracelet and the red tulip from last night to the floor. Even the coppery tang of blood didn’t signal how sharply she was biting her lip. The sourness was no longer content down the back of her throat and it started its jolting, revolting, convulsing journey up.

She dropped the phone to the floor as she tore into the bathroom and tossed her head down into the toilet bowl, heaving and hacking her uncertainties.

She kept her head down, as if hiding from the truth. It was a good thing she’d had her hair cut short.

SONYA had no idea how long she’d been kneeling in the white-tiled room but it was enough for the sun to have shifted behind a tree and for a hairline crack in the designer porcelain to have caught her attention and enough to learn how to spell Villeroy & Boch, as if she cared.

She gripped the sides of the toilet and pushed herself up from her cold, numb knees, wary that a cramp could crash her back down.

Light-headed but steady enough, she grabbed a washcloth, wetted it and pressed it to her mouth as she stumbled back to re-read Michael’s note. She took it from the pillow where only an hour earlier his head had been and after poring over it twice more, line by line and word by word, she crumpled the page in a confused act of anger and despair and tossed it to the floor, shouting as if to convince herself, “He was forced to write this.”

She knew she should call the police but worried about what pigeon-hole they’d slot her into. The deluded ranting of deserted wives? What if they were right?

Cautiously she re-entered Michael’s dressing room, worried about what she might find there or, more particularly, not find there. Slowly her finger pulled the closet open. His pipe rack was still on top of the shelf unit with four of his six pipes. Michael running off without his treasured pipe collection? Not if his life…

She couldn’t finish the thought but while it dangled above her like a blade twisting on a thread, she checked beside the bed. The pipe he’d tapped out last night in the ashtray, before they’d made love—his mahogany Calabash—yes, it was still there, lying next to where she’d rested the tulip and her bracelet. It was a contemplative sweep of a pipe, like a gourd, with a frothy white meerschaum bowl insert, the style Sherlock Holmes drooped out the side of his mouth when he wasn’t jabbing himself with cocaine. It was J-curved, like an economy described by spin-doctor politicians, or a saxophone, and she reminisced how this pipe often brought out a soulful mood in Michael. It tended to be the one he reached for when he was relaxed and open, expansive, something which happened so rarely it was a welcome event. Just like last night or so she had thought.

She held the pipe to her nose, closing her eyes as she drew in a last sweet smell of his breath.

She wondered where his sixth pipe was, trying to picture it. It had a round-stem with a squat bowl like two truncated cones joined at their bases. According to Michael who as well as food and wine was a pipe connoisseur, it was a Straight Rhodesian Shell Briar.

So where was it?

“Damn the pipe,” she swore as she slumped onto the bed, her head in her hands as she tried to make sense of this. He hadn’t taken the other pipes so he was either coming back—yeah, right!—or someone had grabbed him and he’d left them behind as a sign for her.

Unconsciously she picked up the tulip, red as a stripper’s lips, and brushed it under her chin, across her bare neck as he had, the aroma faintly waxy and green like cut flower stems. Tulips got into her soul. They compacted their glory for the eyes, their shocking colours leaving little energy for a bouquet. Her eyes clamped shut as if to hang on to only agreeable thoughts but her fingers showed otherwise as they closed around the flower head and crushed it.

Could he have phoned someone? Dropping the petals and the mutilated stem she leant over to the bedside phone, pressed redial and watched the screen flash up a number, but it was the restaurant she’d dialled last night to make their reservation for tonight. To celebrate. If Michael had made a call it wasn’t from the house phone. Perhaps from her mobile? Hers, since he didn’t have one. She leant back to her own bedside table to get it, scrolled down its calls log and crossed each one off in her mind—all calls she’d made herself.

Repeatedly wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she kept asking herself questions. If it wasn’t a kidnapping—if he’d chosen to go—how did he go? The car and bike were still there and he hadn’t phoned for a cab. So someone—a woman?—must have been lurking in a vehicle outside waiting for Sonya to head off on her morning run. Her nails dug into her palms.

Another woman would explain his business trips and why he’d never asked Sonya along… and why he always lurched home like a wreck. “You big fuck!” she shouted, then shot a quick glance round, mortified by her swearing.

This morning had he really been asleep or was he playacting? Did he sneak the balcony doors open to check when he was leaving? But why bother, since he could’ve just as easily peeked through the glass. Maybe it was to listen for the gate slamming shut when she returned? Did he wait for her to leave then let his “friend” in? The woman?

No, regardless of what her mother might have said if she’d still been alive, that was not Michael. He must have been taken. Kidnapped. But why? By whom? Michael had no enemies, not a single one so far as she knew. They’d been together for almost a decade so she’d know, right? In any case, apart from her, who on the entire planet did he engage with enough for them to learn to hate him? Dislike him? Easy. But hate him? She shook her head.

Was it his money? He’d certainly done well out of his stocks and bonds trading, amazingly so, as he’d told her, given the depressed bear market the world had suffered the last year or so. Maybe they… somehow they’d fooled him into opening the front door and swept him into a vehicle outside?

But why waste time taking his computer? Was something on it?

Whether he was kidnapped or just a deserting bastard, someone with transport was involved. At least that much was clear.

She ran out front onto the street, but there was no puddle of fresh-leaked sump oil on the drive. There were no tracks or tyre marks where they might have burned rubber speeding off. No telltale computer cables that had fallen out of laden arms. No dropped pipe. Just the morning newspapers rolled up in their tight plastic wrap, like fallen relay batons. Something moved near the bushes. A lizard. An eastern water dragon with its long tail curved round and pointing directly at her. The reptile stared at her, unblinking as if warning her, the black stripes running back from its eyes like eye-liner smudged by tears.

Sonya blinked first, and her eyes started scouring the road surface and the gutters for any clues. She glanced across the road to Tito and Naomi’s. She’d have gone over to check if he was there, but she knew the couple were overseas. Naomi, a senior airline cabin attendant, was winging her way to Europe. Tito, a corporate chief executive, had jumped into a cab for the airport last night, on a trip to visit investors.

She knocked at the door of another neighbour. As Jack threw open the door her head was hung so low she noticed his bare feet, but not that he was pulling on a white singlet.

“No ‘Good morning, Jack?’ ” he joked, tucking the top into his pants, but the smile dropped from his face when she lifted her head and he saw her eyes. He turned to call for his wife but Marion’s “Who is it?” sang out from the depths of the house beating him to it. “Sonya,” he yelled over his shoulder.

“It’s Michael. He’s gone.”

HE chocks his bare ankles into the concrete corner of the cell, wedging his aching back into its cold embrace, habitual, familiar but hardly welcoming. Michael pounds a bug that isn’t there into the floor. There is little there at all, except the small silver charm he conceals in his pocket. And memories…

She quivers as the tulip strokes her and closes her eyes letting her lips brush against his. His delusion licks at them too, unaware they have become parched and cracked.

3

“HE WROTE IT, but they’re not his words?” said Jack, repeating to Marion what Sonya had just told them. “I don’t get your meaning.”

He wasn’t deriding her but that’s how Sonya heard it. “They’re not his normal words,” she snapped, thrusting the note at him. “See?” she finger-punched the page. “It’s a clue, a code. He was forced to write this.” At last she’d told someone else, and relief flooded over her.

“A code?” asked Marion, retying her white terry towel robe and looking down over Jack’s shoulder at the crumpled sheet. She was trying to be more soothing than her just-give-me-the-facts husband, but the tactic didn’t work. Sonya snatched the paper from Jack and pointed again, jabbing at the last sentence: You’ll always have the memory of our last May Day together and our walk to Calvary. “May Day! What the hell is that? It’s help, that’s what.”

Jack’s emptied fingers tapped his pock-marked cheek just above one of his teenage acne scars. “It’s also a, you know, a date,” he countered.

“Who does May Day these days? And it’s no date that’s special for us. I was with you two, remember? And he was in Paris? Not in bloody Calvary, for damn sakes, wherever that is these days.”

Jack and Marion did remember. They’d invited Sonya to join them to celebrate their wedding anniversary on May Day, the evening before their big day. Michael was originally supposed to have come too but ended up on an urgent flit to Paris, another of his famous sudden business trips.

“Isn’t Calvary where Jesus was crucified?” Jack looked toward Marion since she was the church-goer.

“It means someone’s got him,” Sonya interrupted. “It’s not the Bible thing. It’s from the song in Les Misérables.”

That musical was Michael’s bible, thought Jack. He and Marion knew how much Michael loved it judging just by how many times they’d heard the soundtrack blaring out of Michael and Sonya’s house, usually when she was out teaching at university. Once in exasperation Jack had even asked Michael if he owned any other music.

Sonya continued, “God, I know it by heart…”

Marian stared Jack down, killing off his predicted retort that anyone within hearing distance of their house would also know it by heart.

Jack cleared his throat. “It’s something about a never-ending road to Calvary and, ah, men who know my crime, ah, coming a second time.”

Sonya nodded. “There! Maybe he knows these people from before? You know, today could be the second time.”

She looked up at Jack. “Well,” she challenged his raised eyebrow. “What about this… his signature… ‘Mike’. When did you ever—ever!—hear him call himself that?”

Sonya knew she didn’t need to be delicate with this couple. Jack had joked about it often enough. “If your name was Michael Hunt,” he’d pose with his thumbs thrust into his jacket pockets as Michael often did, “would you seriously call yourself Mike?” To Marion, it was funny even on the first repeat but she soon got bored with it and now always cringed as she waited for Jack’s inevitable follow-up lines: “Just say it out loud,” he would laugh. “Mike Hunt! Way smart parents, huh?” But he said none of it today, keeping a solemn face, though Marion had kicked him under the table to be certain.

“And that?” he asked, wincing but pointing to the symbols Michael had written in above his shortened name. “What’s that? Two eyes and a nose? He normally signs letters like that?”

“No idea,” said Sonya.

4

SONYA KNEW FROM the start that Michael was unique, though a much better version of it than the slime-ball of a first husband she had washed her hands of just before they met.

Ten years ago, once her divorce papers were filed, she’d applied for every post-doctoral fellowship anywhere that bastard couldn’t get to her without money. In other words, as far away from Australia as possible. Which was how she got to teach at the business school at Columbia in New York City.

Four years before that when she was twenty-two, her mother had begged her not to marry Charles. Not just because of her age or because she was in line for a university medal—a landmark achievement in their blue-collar family—but because mothers, Sonya later discovered, had a good nose for sniffing out parasitic shits, even if they’d never use such bad language themselves.

AFTER Sonya had been at Columbia only two months, the dean was impressed enough with her work on stock markets to line her up with a public lecture in the auditorium at the New York Stock Exchange: “It’ll look good on your résumé,” he’d said. But when she got to the top of Broad Street to gaze down on the pale stone castle of capitalism, a seething moat of people blocked her path. After asking a few bystanders, she learned that a nearby building had just had a bomb scare and its occupants were milling around until they were permitted back up. It was a couple of years before the infamous 9/11 attacks and the prevailing mood of the crowd was no more than casual inconvenience, annoyance without fear. People were checking their watches, not each other’s faces.

Sonya was scanning over the throng trying to guess which tiny handful, if any, might actually be heading for her talk when a swift tug on her satchel pulled down her shoulder and a tee-shirted kid in battered white sneakers and a red baseball cap ripped off with it. This was her second mugging in three weeks! What was she, she wondered, a shit magnet? Wasn’t Mayor Rudy Giuliani boasting only on yesterday’s nightly news how he’d already single-handedly eradicated crime from New York City?

The kid cut through the mob using her bag as a knife. Sonya’s face contorted in panic and her mouth formed a yell but she couldn’t get out a sound. She felt as empty and useless as the godless figure in Munch’s painting, The Scream. She tried to lunge after the thief but the crowd had closed up behind him. Too late.

Her notes for her talk were in the bag. Her résumé wasn’t looking so good now. Her wallet—her new one—was inside too. Pointlessly her head swivelled round searching for help. Surely someone had seen the crime? But all the gazes were transfixed elsewhere: on the wall-mounted ticker flashing up stock prices, at their watches, to the sky, at their shoes, anywhere but on her, or on him. No eye contact. Not in New York City.

Stretching up on her toes, she spotted the red cap bobbing toward an elderly man in his sixties, maybe seventies, she couldn’t tell. The distance plus his speckled grey beard and dark glasses made an intelligent guess impossible. She guessed the thief would go right through him, either shoving him aside or knocking the old fellow down. But the man had witnessed the snatch; somehow she was confident of that. He was a little stooped with a knit jacket, tweed perhaps, draped over his shoulders. She imagined he’d once been tall… decisive… gallant… a decent man who would do something. As the bag-snatcher pushed through, the man withdrew his pipe from his mouth and… he stepped back… He let the creep pass right by without lifting a finger. He even bowed him a civil Hola! like a matador flourishing his cape but letting the bull charge right through. Damn New Yorkers!

A woman close by Sonya with shiny black hair, wearing a warm Mediterranean complexion and a rank-smelling rayon floral blouse smiled back at her flashing her gap-toothed mouth and lifting Sonya’s heart a little. But instead of offering down-to-earth practical help or local advice, the woman simply shrugged and turned her eyes away like almost everyone else.

When Sonya looked back, the red cap—forty, fifty people away—was no longer bobbing and weaving. He’d stopped, his escape blocked by a serious-looking man who strangely also smoked a pipe, his thumbs jammed into his jacket pockets, like a trial lawyer. Probably the only two men in New York still smoking pipes and she got both of them. But this one was younger. A little taller. The thief’s confident escape faltered and he attempted small sideways movements, testing his challenger, sizing him up. Sonya gripped herself. Would the gentleman hold firm? She saw him fix a smile on the kid: it was a tranquil, almost carefree gesture. Michael gazed deep into the boy’s jumpy eyes and held a hand out for the spoils.

A queer sensation welled up in Sonya… what was it? This man’s calm intensity was unnatural. He seemed unfazed, as though he had been watching, waiting for this. It was a feeling that often lingered round Michael. One she would become accustomed to.

Michael forced himself through the crowd to her, holding the recaptured booty above his head in his left hand as if to prevent another marauder’s attempt. He passed the bag over to Sonya and politely dipped his head. The woman who’d earlier shrugged resignation cackled though the gaps in her teeth and slapped him on the back. The elderly bearded gentleman waving his own pipe at them as if to say “Job well done” smiled and slowly turned on his heels to melt into the crowd.

“I’m so relieved,” she said. “I don’t know how…”

“I’m thinking you could use a coffee. A strong one,” Michael smiled. “May I?”

“After what you’ve done?” She caught her watch out of the corner of her eye. “Please… let me.”

Worrying about time, Sonya ordered for both of them as Michael held her chair out for her. Before he sat, he formally offered her his hand across the table, and as she took it she noticed that even if his knurled pipe hadn’t been peeking out of the pocket of his tweed jacket, his bearing would still have seemed a bit provincial. Her dad was the last of the pipe smokers she’d known, yet today she’d come across two.

Though superficially his eyes were the colour of cold steel, they twinkled at her from their otherwise serene setting in his broad, pale face. She liked the calm strength of that. There was something vaguely academic about him—maybe it was the leather elbow patches—and she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d once had a beard to conceal the small scar on his chin. The harsh, jagged scar oddly emphasised the waviness of his hair, blond on the cusp of grey and his nose with its hawkish thrust added to the impression he was distinguished if not scholarly. He combed front to back with not a single strand out of place. He was clearly particular. Probably mid-thirties, she guessed, ten years on her.

When he stirred his coffee, she noticed the scarred knuckles on his left hand, silently speculating about their cause and wondering if his chin got its scar at the same time.

As they talked, his accent intrigued her. It was elegant and crisp yet nondescript, heading toward an upper Boston lilt, neither American nor British. More Kennedy than Kennedy. She’d have loved to ask where he was from but she wasn’t New York enough to ask straight out so she poked her spoon at her coffee. Later she did ask and, yes he was from Britain but it was “way back”. His lack of a definitive accent, when she did probe him, was apparently from his years spent in so many countries.

“How long have you been travelling?” she asked.

He looked up at the sky and smiled, “It seems like centuries,” he said, then passed her the small plate of cookies the waiter had brought for them.

From the start Michael was an eloquent raconteur although she bristled at his tendency to skip details and shrug off her attempts to probe. She did manage to extract out of him that as well as Europe and North America, he’d travelled in South America—in Colombia, Cuba, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina—and in Africa, it had been Kenya and Tanganyika.

“Isn’t that part of Tanzania?” she asked, a little confused by his use of a long defunct country name.

He grinned and slapped his wrist in mock rebuke.

Asia, he said, had taken him to Cambodia, Japan and Malaya, which he quickly corrected before she did, to Malaysia.

Once, years later, she thought she’d even caught him referring to Siam the pre-1949 name for Thailand, famous for cats and twins and, according to him, a gentle people but unrelenting mosquitoes. His occasional lapses into using outdated names for countries perplexed her.

They’d been talking so long they’d mostly ignored their coffees apart from using them as props to stir and poke. Michael glanced up at the clock on a nearby building and pushed back his chair. “Dr Wheen,” he said, acknowledging the recently-awarded doctorate she’d managed to slip into their conversation. It would be another few days before his manners, despite her insistence, licensed him to use her first name. “I have no idea of time,” he said, with a lop-sided, wry smile. But she couldn’t see the joke.

Not then.

As they stood, Michael asked permission to attend her lecture and Sonya guessed—or rather hoped—that it wasn’t just civility or even her topic, a controversial one she hoped back in 1999: “Market Bubbles… When the dot.com will dot.bomb and why.”

At the auditorium door with only minutes to go, a distraught official breathed relief. With a firm hand at the small of Sonya’s back he marshalled her to the lectern and waved Michael towards one of the many empty seats.

It was a good thing thought Sonya as she stepped up to the lectern that résumés only listed your papers, and not the level of interest they attracted.

5

“HOW MUCH?” SONYA asked Detective Inspector Sorden.

The inspector, a thickset man with wiry salt and pepper hair, looked down at his notepad and repeated the amount. “One hundred and sixty-three million.” He’d been on the case only two days but he’d already tracked that down. His forensic team had delivered the goods as far as he was concerned, especially considering Michael’s computer was missing and they had to piece everything together through his internet provider.

According to these records, Michael had dispatched his money—an astonishing $163 million—on an electronic trip to a tax haven, and all done just minutes before Sonya returned home to find him gone, “A one-way trip I’m afraid, ma’am.”

She noticed him eyeing her warily. If only a fraction of that amount had gone missing, added to Michael’s single-mindedness about privacy, most cops would automatically suspect that he, and maybe Sonya, could be perpetrating some insurance mega-scam.

The police work had been impressive. After Sonya had first called them they’d moved fast, checking exchanges, brokers and other finance houses for details of Michael’s accounts and trading—and hers she suspected, though she’d done very little of that despite being an associate professor at the business school.