Ecstasy Lake (3 page)

‘Such as you didn't own the exploration licence and Hiskey didn't want to cut Hardcastle in.'

‘Right. It was messy. And it was going to get even messier.'

‘And what did you tell him? When he asked you to go partners.'

‘I told him yes.' A breeze had sprung up and the boat had started undulating. Another seagull skated past, dipping its wing almost in the water. ‘Does that surprise you?'

‘Of course it surprises me. What Hiskey was proposing was illegal. You're already a rich man, Tasso. Why risk it?'

He pulled off his sunglasses again and looked at me.

‘As I said before, I had no trouble with the morality of it. Hardcastle was screwing Mick's wife. That was all I needed to know.'

I believed him; Tasso had always been protective of his friends. ‘And the legality of it?'

Tasso put his glasses back on. ‘Sure, it was a risk. But this was Mick's last chance. He was not a well person, physically or mentally. This was his shot at getting his life back on track.' He leaned toward me. ‘Plus I was somewhat attracted to the idea of a quick billion or two.'

I laughed and we clinked beers. ‘What happened then?'

‘We met several times. I lent him a few dollars. He started to get his act together. He didn't smell as bad, he looked healthier. I set a few ground rules. First, we would
not
be equal partners. I was the one who would bring the money. I was the one who had his life in order and therefore had most to lose if we were caught doing anything wrong. And I was the one who actually knew how to start up a mine and run the fucken thing. So I told him we would set up a new company and I would own ninety per cent of it and he would own ten. I told him I would put up five million dollars, just to get it started, and that he could draw a salary from it of a hundred grand a year. Once we had obtained the exploration licence and proved the ore, and if it was as rich as he said, his salary would go up to half a million a year.'

‘He agreed?'

‘Of
course
he agreed.' Tasso threw his arms up, as he always did when he was excited. The fishing rod in his left hand flicked the hull of the cabin behind his ear. ‘It was generous! He would own ten per cent of a mine that eventually would be worth ten
billion
dollars.'

‘Okay, so he agreed. What happened then?'

‘He wanted a one-off payment of five hundred thousand dollars. He said he was broke and had big debts. I agreed to pay, but cut his initial salary to fifty grand a year and his later salary to four hundred grand until he'd paid off the five hundred, plus interest. It was still generous. Don't forget I was making this deal on the basis of almost no information and knowing we somehow had to get hold of the exploration licence before we could make a cent. Plus ultimately I was the one who would finance the mine once we'd proved the ore. So he agreed and we drew up a contract and we both signed it. And then he was murdered.'

‘And took the location of his find to the grave.'

Tasso waved his index finger at me, another gesture of his. There was a knowing look on his face, one I'd seen before when he was about to tell me something I didn't know. ‘Ah, no, my friend, he did not. Do you think I would hand over five hundred thousand dollars for nothing? Do you think I'm stupid? This contract was going to make Hiskey rich beyond his filthiest dreams, which I'm sure were very fucken filthy, God rest his soul. There was no way I was going to sign without knowing everything. So he gave me the exact location of his find, and I made him take me out to it.'

‘So you've seen it?'

‘Yeah, I've seen it.'

‘Reckon there's gold there?'

‘I'm no geologist, as you know, but Hiskey was very convincing. Yes, I think there is a
shitload
of gold there.' Our second beers were almost empty now, but he held his up to me, and we clinked bottles again. The sparkle of the ocean was reflecting in his glasses. ‘And you and me, Steve, are going to dig it up.'

‘We are?'

‘Yes, if you're game.' He leaned back. ‘And why wouldn't you be? It will make you
rich
. What I'm proposing is not even illegal. It was Hiskey who hid his results, Hiskey who was being fraudulent. And Hiskey is dead.'

‘But you're connected to him by the contract. That makes you complicit. Or is it duplicit?'

‘Let's see if his copy of the contract turns up. Even if it does, what does it prove? Only that we were going to do some exploration and that if we found anything we were going to share the glory.' He leant over and slapped my shoulder. ‘Hiskey was a liar, Steve, in many ways he wasn't very smart, and he was an addict. But he was a mate. I'm not going to sell the find, I'm going to mine it. For Hiskey. You in?'

‘Jesus, Tasso, I don't know. Will you make me swallow?'

He laughed, for longer than the joke deserved. ‘I need someone with your skills. And I trust you, Steve. Always have.'

‘You've never been throwing billions of dollars around before.'

‘Steve, if I can't trust
you
I might as well give up now.' He was watching me, the boat rocking gently. He reeled in his line. ‘You don't have to decide now. Take a couple of days to think it through.'

I looked across the water to the peninsula. The grass on the gentle hills was summer-dry and the colour of dust. Wind turbines on the skyline were rotating slowly, moved by an unseen force. I watched one for a while and thought of my own unseen forces, the slow turning of pain in my guts, the cartwheeling of time. I had been on the planet for more than forty years and had little to show for it—no wife, no kids, no job, no significant dream, not even a dog. I knew Tasso well enough to know he was offering me more than a few days' work, more than a job. It was a way of life. It wasn't a way of life I particularly wanted, but I didn't have any other offers, either. I liked Tasso, and even though his scheme was crazy and probably illegal, despite what he said, it had a whiff of adventure about it. Maybe I was ready for that.

‘Sure, I'll give it a crack.'

He stowed his rod and stuck out his hand. ‘Good man.' We shook.

‘So what's your plan?'

‘First, to have another beer.' He put a fresh one in my hand. ‘We are at a great moment in history, my friend, the moment when this country gets truly rich. All we have to do is play it smart and keep feeding the big hungry dragons to the north. With just a little bit of cunning, Steve, you and me can be the lucky ones in the lucky country. You got any problems with that?'

‘Can't think of one at the moment.'

We clinked our stubbies for the third time.

‘For Hiskey,' he said. ‘The poor bastard.'

‘For Hiskey.'

3

Tasso wanted to talk contracts and offered me a sizeable slice of the new company. He said twenty per cent and that he wasn't being generous and I'd fucken well earn it, and I said that five per cent of ten billion dollars would be fine and that anyway it was hard to see how you could ‘earn' two billion dollars. Then we had a couple more beers and Tasso said I should at least aim to be a billionaire and eventually we settled on ten per cent plus a salary of a hundred and fifty grand that would escalate once the ore was proved, as per Hiskey's deal. Then he said of course the ore body might be worth ten billion dollars but most of that would be spent digging it up and even he might not end up with a billion, merely somewhere in the high hundreds of millions, and we both laughed and said what a shame. Then we had three more beers and talked about Hiskey.

‘At least I don't have to breathe in his cigarette smoke anymore,' said Tasso. ‘Although I'll probably still get lung cancer, thanks to him.' I remembered the drinking sessions we used to have at uni, back in the good old days when you could still smoke in bars. Hiskey would light up a smoke with his first beer, and he wouldn't stop until the beer stopped, which was almost never. Tasso was laughing to himself. ‘The bastard drank more than us, made us breathe his perpetual smoke and then let us pay the bill. Every time.'

‘I'm not sure why we ever drank with him.'

‘The main reason was that it was impossible to leave him behind. He had an uncanny ability to know when drinks were on. He would appear like a Saint Bernard's dog.'

Yes, that was Hiskey; smiling, seedy, slobbering, smoking. ‘There was another reason, I always thought,' I said. ‘Hiskey was a lightning rod, you know? He was someone we could all criticise because he talked too much and acted the expert on subjects he knew nothing about, and because criticism to him was like water off a duck's back. He simply didn't notice it.'

‘He enjoyed the attention.'

‘He did. You used to scold him all the time. He just laughed along with the rest of us. That's kind of what I liked about him.'

‘He never wanted the party to end,' said Tasso.
‘
“One more drink”. It was always “one more drink”.'

‘That's what we called him, wasn't it? “One-more Mick”.'

We both laughed at the memory and drank another beer.

‘He was a bloody talented geologist,' said Tasso. ‘He just sucked at everything else.' We were quiet for a while. ‘One-more' was no more, and I didn't want to think about it.

The conversation turned to how we would spend our millions or billions. I said I'd buy a planet in a nice part of the galaxy but I wouldn't live there all the time and I'd probably buy a house on Sydney Harbour, too, and an apartment in New York and a small country in the Caribbean and spend most of my time in Italy, and Tasso said he'd buy a modelling agency and a bigger boat and we laughed again, and then he surprised me by saying he'd probably live most of the time in Adelaide.

‘But we're a long way from all that,' said Tasso. ‘And we can't do anything unless we legally acquire the exploration licence. Black Hill held it, but it expired recently, which means it's fair game for anyone. It's in what the Department of Mines calls a moratorium period. Black Hill could apply to renew the licence, but given that Hiskey has reported no mineral prospects on the lease I can't see why Hardcastle would want to do that. So your first job, Steve, is to make sure we have an iron-clad application ready to go when the moratorium is over.'

‘I can do that.'

‘The main thing is, make sure the fucken Department of Mines cannot say no to us. Ironically, given the dodginess of everything about it so far, legality is the key to Hiskey's find. We have to be squeaky fucken clean.'

‘Squeaky is my middle name.' I'd had nine beers (at a guess) and been sitting in the sun for several hours. There was a lull while I wondered how drunk I was and what part of all this was real, and whether my middle name really was Squeaky.

‘You don't start a mine up overnight, you know,' I said. ‘You need a tonne of money. A hundred mill, maybe. I know you're rich, but do you want to invest a third of your fortune or whatever into something like this? And there's the bureaucracy. It's just as bad here as it is anywhere else, maybe worse. We'll need an army of lawyers. Will we process the ore on site? If not, how do we get it to wherever we process it? Build a railway? It's a massive job, Tasso.'

‘You think I don't know that, Steve? All in good time, though. First we have to get the exploration lease and prove the ore body. Then we start thinking about the mine.'

‘Sure.'

‘Anyway, we have to do something else much more important than all that.'

‘What's that?'

‘We have to find the arsehole who killed Hiskey.'

‘And
why
he killed Hiskey. Maybe it was because of the find.'

‘Maybe. I'm going to lie down. You're in charge of the boat.' Tasso lurched into the cabin. I heard him bump into a wall, curse, and disappear into the main bedroom, or whatever they're called on big motor launches. I was in charge. I made it up the steps to the cockpit, collapsed into the pilot's seat, and was asleep in seconds.

We both woke in late afternoon. Tasso looked fresh. I jumped overboard to wake myself up. There's nothing like the combination of sudden cold water and the risk of being eaten by a great white shark to make you feel alive. I was fully revived by the time I clambered back on board, heart pumping hard. Tasso started the engines and soon we were flinging up a bow wave on our way back up the coast. The westerly had strengthened and there was a chop on the water. We stood in the cockpit, Tasso at the helm. He took a hand off the ship's wheel long enough to gesture towards the city, which was ablaze with gold in the late afternoon. The rich houses of Henley Beach were glinting.

‘Look at the place, Steve,' he said, his voice raised so I could hear it above the noise of the engine and the sea. The wind was blasting his wiry hair and there were flecks of gold in his eyes. He looked like a pirate.

‘It ain't New York.'

‘No, it ain't. It ain't anything much. This is a town where the most important question you can ever be asked is which high school you went to. Well, I went to a state school in the badlands, so I'm nobody.'

‘Yet you said you plan to spend most of your time here.'

‘Sure I will. Everyone needs to make a stand, sooner or later.' He gestured again at the city. ‘This is where I'm going to make mine.'

‘Why?'

‘It's a smug, old-money, pissant little place, but it could be great. It's got the climate for it, the wineries, the food, the sea, the Island, the Gulf, the three peninsulas.'

‘The saltpans.'

He laughed. ‘Forget about the fucken saltpans. Anyway, I heard they're going to turn those into a suburb, won't that be nice? This could be a great city, I'm telling you, one of
the
great cities. Just fill it with people, they'll do the rest. The mines will bring the people. Hiskey's find is no Olympic Dam, but it's still going to be big. And the profits from it will stay here with you and me—when you're not on your other planet. I'm going to be the richest man this city has ever known. Me, a boy from the northern suburbs. We're
new
money, Steve. We'll make the place great.'

‘Alright.'

He laughed again. ‘At the very least, my friend, we are going to have some fun. We are going to shake this fucken town.'