TUNA LIFE (15 page)

“No problem, Andrew. Trust me. We’ll fix all this.”

Richard Smith stared out the window as Andrew left his office. Was this what his job now included; getting drugs for his employees? He couldn’t help smiling though. Things had played out exactly as he had thought they would, and he had just placed his first chips on the table.

33

The dim lighting forced Mark to squint. He secretly acknowledged that he probably needed glasses. He was too nearsighted to drive a car at night time, but he had learnt to somehow function in the daytime. Too much sun and surf as a teenager had damaged his retinas and made contact lenses not an option. But he was too vain to wear daytime glasses, and laser treatment was definitely not in his budget, so he accepted the squinting. Right now, though, he wished he had some glasses. He was attempting to get a better view of the woman dancing on the stage in front of him. It was evident that the quality of the day shift was not as good as the evening shift. The heavily tattooed woman in her early thirties winked at Mark before he managed to avert his look. Then she started to move towards him, on all fours, as a cat hungry for a meal. A feral cat, Mark thought. He glanced helplessly over at Scott Davis, who was over at the bar, chatting with the bartender.

“So you never saw her with a regular customer or a friend?” Scott asked.

“We have strict rules,” the bartender said. “The girls are not allowed to get physical with any of our clients. No touching – only looking.”

“My colleague over there…” Scott pointed to Mark, who suddenly had turned pale as a ghost as the MILF was climbing his lap, “went home with one of your girls the other night. So I don’t think this rule of yours is absolute.”

The bartender shot a quick look at Mark. “Are you sure?” she asked.

Scott understood what she meant. Mark didn’t actually look like the best catch in his pink shirt and white pants, struggling to avoid the tattooed dancer putting her arse in his face.

“I’m not from the police or the liquor licensing office. What you tell me stays between us. I only want to know what happened to Marissa,” he continued.

The bartender looked like she considered her reply, as she filled up the schooner of beer he had just ordered. She quickly glanced up at the camera in the ceiling. “Not here,” she said. “We can talk after work. I finish half past seven. Wait for me at the McDonald’s in Cavill Avenue.”

Scott nodded, and paid. He turned around and treasured the view in front of him for a moment; the tattooed woman dry-humping poor Mark Moss. She had most likely gotten it into her head that she should convert what she thought was a gay guy. Mark’s stressed-out face revealed that she was doing a pretty bad job. But the other patrons in the club seemed to enjoy the show. They clapped as she touched her toes in front of Mark.

The time was almost eight when the bartender from Crazy Kangaroo finally arrived at the McDonald’s restaurant. Scott Davis waved her over to his table. He had bought her a quarter pounder meal, but it was now cold after having been sitting on the table for the last half hour. She sat down, took a sip of the Coke and grabbed a couple of fries. “Where are the candle lights?” she laughed.

Scott smiled. “So why did you want to meet here? Isn’t it safe to talk at work?”

“It’s not that. It’s just that there are cameras everywhere. You always feel like someone is watching.”

“A bit paranoid, this Roman Bezhrev?” Scott asked, with reference to Crazy Kangaroo’s Russian owner.

“I don’t know,” she almost snapped back. “I don’t want to talk about him. I can tell you what I know about Marissa, but that’s all. I can’t afford to lose my job.”

“Fair enough,” Scott replied. “I visited Marissa’s mum earlier today. She mentioned that Marissa had recently met a new man. Not long before she disappeared. Do you have any idea who this person might be?”

“No, but she told me the same thing. Something about everything was going to get well. That she thought she finally had met someone good. Someone right.”

“Someone right?” Like in marriage material?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t say much more. But she was obviously in love.”

“Had she told him what she did for a living? That she was a stripper?”

The bartender shrugged. “I’ve got no idea what she told him. But I’m pretty sure she didn’t meet him at Crazy Kangaroo. It’s more likely she met him at one of those tech-parties.”

“Tech-parties? You mean like raves? I thought they stopped doing those in the nineties,” Scott said.

“No, not raves, stupid. Tech-parties. It’s the latest thing for the gold-diggers; parties for the heroes of the new economy.”

“The new economy?” he repeated.

“Are you sure you are a reporter?” she asked. “Or have you just been sleeping under a rock the last six months? Everybody is talking about it. People are making millions making mobile phone apps. I’m saving up so I can invest in a friend’s idea. He says it’s brilliant. I don’t want to waste my life working in a bar until die. I want to do something with my life.”

Scott didn’t know whether he should laugh or cry. ‘The New Economy’ was an expression he had come up with, something he had casually phrased in an insignificant article, something his boss, Vesna Connor, had picked up and asked him to repeat relentlessly, in article after article. Her plan, whatever it was, had evidently worked. The expression had now become part of the limited vocabulary of a strip-club bartender. A bartender, sitting at a McDonald’s restaurant, giving Scott investment advice. If this wasn’t the very definition of a bubble in the brooming then he had no idea what was. He needed to be more careful with what he wrote in the paper going forward. He could easily become the scapegoat if and when the bubble burst.

“So how do you get invited to these techno-parties?” he asked.

She studied him. “You? I’ve got no idea how you can get an invitation. For girls like Marissa it’s easier. Girls like her just have to smile, shake her titties. They like to surround themselves with good-looking girls, these rich guys.” She laughed a bitter laugh. “Girls like Marissa have an easy life. They don’t have to work for anything. It all just falls into their lap.”

“I don’t think Marissa had a particularly easy life. There was more to her than you know. She did what she had to do to get by.”

The bartender took a large drink of the Coke, before grabbing her handbag. “You know, I see them every single night. They stand up there on stage. Smiling, shaking their boobs and wriggling their hips. Doing the most of what God and plastic surgery have given them. But as soon as the curtain falls, they whine and complain. How disgusting and clingy their clients are, how stingy they are. When you spend most of your working day being false, it’s easy to forget who you really are. I didn’t know Marissa. I don’t even think her own parents knew her when she disappeared.” The bartender rose from the table. She put the unopened quarter pounder in her hand bag. “I hope you find whoever it was that killed Marissa,” she said, and left.

Scott Davis was left with more questions than answers. Who was Marissa Soo? Did she commit suicide? Did she accidentally drown during a late night swim? Or was Mark Moss right? Had she been murdered? And if so, was there a connection between all these missing women? Scott Davis had no idea. The only thing he was certain of was that he needed to become more critical of these new technology companies he was writing about. It was ok as long as they only took money from professional investors. Scott Davis couldn’t care less if one of the big banks or a wealthy investor lost a couple of millions. They knew what risks they took. They could afford to lose. If these technology companies started to seek money from normal people, however, then it was a totally different kinda ball game. The Gold Coast had always been an Eldorado for scoundrels. There was a lot of money on the coast, but hardly any of it had actually been made there. People worked their arse off in busy jobs in Sydney or Melbourne, they built up companies in Perth and Brisbane, and then they moved, with their pockets lined with cash, to the sunny Gold Coast, planning to spend their retirement on the golf course and the beach. All these naïve retirees were tempting targets for swindlers who specialised in offering guaranteed high returns on low-risk investments. Three-percent return on term deposits were unappealing to most people who had just retired and were used to a good life. You didn’t need the gift of the gab to convince most people to take some risk when the promised return was high enough. People were greedy by nature. Pensioners were no exception.

Scott Davis peeked over at a blonde girl in the line at the McDonald’s counter. Probably around nineteen, happy and smiling. She held on to the hand of the boy next to her.

In love.

Scott couldn’t envision Marissa killing herself. Not if she was in love.

Something else must have happened.

Scott Davis needed to find her boyfriend.

He was the key to the mystery.

34

Andrew Engels gazed at the long legs in front of him. He was sitting in front of a big mirror, getting prepared for Channel 5’s morning broadcast. The beautiful make-up girl had praised him continuously for the last five minutes – told him how good the Tuna Life app was, how she used it up to twenty times a day, how it had totally changed her life. Andrew almost felt embarrassed. They had developed a mobile app that made it easy to check how you looked in an outfit. They hadn’t exactly cured cancer. But he enjoyed the feeling. The feeling of being looked up to. He almost looked forward to being interviewed by Carrie and Horne, the program hosts he had woken up to for the last ten years. To his utter surprise he was devoid of nerves, devoid of anxiety. The training sessions with Richard Smith, and his hired consultants, had worked wonders. He had been drilled in so many situations that he should be able to come up with an answer to whatever they asked him. Richard Smith had devised a very simple system to ensure that Andrew stuck to the script. He was told to cross his left thumb underneath his left index finger during interviews. This to remind him that he wasn’t there to tell the truth; he was there to tell a story, he was there to sell a story. Nobody cared about the truth. The truth was boring. People wanted a fairy tale. So he would give them a fairy tale. It felt comforting to have an answer for any question the reporters could come up with. But the biggest difference was the pills Richard had acquired for him. Andrew had no idea what they were. But they worked, that was for sure. He had never slept so well at night, and the pills had made him realise how incredibly clever he was, how superior his mental capacity was compared to all these people slaving through life in jobs that didn’t even cover their living costs. He shot the make-up girl a smile. “Would you like to go for a coffee later?” he asked.

She nodded frantically.

“Give me your number. I’ll give you a call later,” he said. He wasn’t sure he was going to, but he had a couple of hours to kill before the next interview with Kyle Sandilands from the radio station, 2Day FM. Depending on her conversational value – if she proved to have capacity to talk about other things than how good the Tuna Life app was – she could join him for a charity dinner later in the evening. He needed a partner. But first he would have to get the interviews out of the way. And after that he had a golf tournament to attend with Horne from the breakfast show.

“You’re on in five minutes.” One of the production team had just popped his head into the wardrobe and warned Andrew to be ready on short notice.

Horne slouched in a couch with an iPad on his lap. He had just finished his finance segment; a dumbed-down version of what had happened in the international markets overnight. The many red arrows on his iPad indicated it hadn’t been the best day for investors around the world.

Tuna Life wasn’t listed on any stock exchange though. Tuna Life was still privately owned. And it had been a great week for the three co-founders of Tuna Life. They had just closed their first round of funding from external investors. And Roman had kept his promise and raised the funds at a much higher valuation. The company had raised five million at a before-money valuation of sixty million. The founders had also been offered the opportunity to cash out some of their shares. Both Ken and Andrew had taken the opportunity to cash out two hundred thousand each, whereas Roman had done the opposite and invested even more. Frank hadn’t bothered selling any shares. He seemed indifferent. Roman was now the largest single shareholder in Tuna Life, with just over forty percent of the company. Andrew didn’t worry too much though. He liked Roman. Roman had taken Andrew under his wings, and provided support when he needed it the most.

And now he was the boss of a successful company with almost five million in the bank.

Life could hardly have been any better.

“Today we have a very special guest,” Horne started. “Some call him the poster boy for the revolution that is happening in Australian technology at the moment. He is the CEO of a company that in a short couple of months has established itself as a household name with the likes of Facebook and Apple. Please welcome Andrew Engels.”

The audience clapped as Andrew, with confidence, strutted into the studio.

35

“Sold.” The auctioneer pointed at Andrew Engels with his small wooden gavel. SBA Lawyers, one of Sydney’s largest and most prestigious law firms, was hosting a charity auction and black tie event, after the golf tournament Andrew had just finished. He had played in the same group as Horne, a partner from SBA Lawyers and the CEO of Commonwealth Bank, one of the top four banks in Australia. Luckily they had played an Ambrose best ball tournament, a tournament where all players teed off but only the best shot was used, because Andrew had had a shocking day at the course. Accordingly, he had been served his share of golf jokes – Hasselhoff as the other members of his group had started to call him – because he seemed to like landing in the sand. Inside the auction he was determined to make up for his poor golfing, and had bid and won a range of items. He had no idea what use he would have of signed photographs of forgotten cricket-heroes or other sports memorabilia. He didn't even have a proper office to hang any pictures in. Tuna Life still operated from Frank’s basement, but that would soon change now that they had five million in the bank. Truth be told, he didn’t even like cricket, but none of the other guests would even consider that thought after having witnessed his aggressive bidding. To them he looked like a seasoned collector.