Ecstasy Lake Read online

  ‘Who the hell is Bert?’

  Tasso just smiled.

  The marina boardwalk was gated and the gate was locked. Tasso opened it with his security card and led me to a motor launch.

  ‘You always have to have the biggest, don’t you?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I have the biggest?’

  We boarded the ship and I followed him as he climbed the stairs to the cockpit above the main cabin, and watched as he flicked switches and started the engines with a push of a button.

  ‘She’s fuelled up,’ he said. ‘We’re good to go. Get the moorings, will you?’

  I’m no seaman, but with Tasso calling instructions I managed to unhitch the ropes from their posts. We cleared the berth and throbbed our way out of the marina, a line of moored boats bobbing in our wake. We motored northward along the hemmed-in estuary known as the Port River past the North Arm, a strip of water that ran through mangroves to the east of Garden Island and Torrens Island. We passed the Torrens Island power station, threaded the stone breakwater and headed into the Gulf. In the day’s new light, the smooth, amber water looked like whisky. We swung right—northwards—as Tasso opened the throttle. When we reached cruising speed he pushed a couple more buttons and sat back.

  ‘This is what you do when you’re rich, Steve. You play with things. You own things. Big things. The biggest. You own things you never thought you could ever own and you play with them because you fucken well can.’

  ‘It must be boring.’

  ‘It never gets boring.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Nowhere in particular. We’ll blow out a few cobwebs first.’

  According to the speedo, or whatever they’re called on big motor launches, we were doing about thirty knots.

  ‘You know the best thing about being rich, Steve?’ said Tasso.

  ‘You can solve world poverty?’

  ‘Besides that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t have to swallow.’ He made a gesture with his hand towards his mouth and then towards me. ‘You’ve always been an employee, Steve. If your boss tells you to swallow, you swallow, right?’

  ‘I guess so. Or I spit.’

  ‘But most people can’t spit. They’ve got commitments, family to look after; they need the money, the security. They swallow. Me, I don’t swallow anything for anyone. That’s the beauty of being rich.’

  I left him enjoying being rich and went downstairs. In the galley I found the ingredients for a cooked breakfast, so I cooked them and brewed two cups of coffee. I took the results upstairs and we ate, drank and swallowed as we watched the Gulf come to life. The thin line of mangroves to the east was a rich, glistening green. I had once been told they were the southernmost mangroves in the world; clinging grimly to the mud, they certainly looked marginal to me. A pelican flew in low for an inelegant touchdown, and terns and seagulls keened along the edge of the water. There was almost no wind. Tasso turned the ship’s wheel and we chiselled a wide arc in the now-blue, passive sea until we were heading almost due south. We were a couple of kilometres out and I could see two sea-kayakers straining their shoulders in our direction, perhaps in some sort of race out from the shore. Soon they were far behind us. The city sat in the shadow of the hills. The bow of our boat was cutting clean through the sparkling sea, but the city looked dirty and stagnant.

  We cruised for a couple of hours, running southward along the fat phallic stub of the Fleurieu Peninsula, Kangaroo Island in the distance ahead and the patterned green vineyards of McLaren Vale to the east. The vineyards gave way to the bald hills of Willunga, where the tree-plantings of enthusiasts looked like hair plugs on the scalp of the land. We anchored about half a kilometre off shore, well out from the Rapid Bay jetty. Tasso checked that the anchor held in the sand and looked at me. He was wearing a hideous pair of wraparound sunglasses.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

  ‘Soon.’

  I followed him into the galley, where we loaded an esky with ice, beer and bait and carried it to the back deck. Tasso handed me a fishing rod and a beer and grabbed one of each for himself. We put our beers in stubby-holders to keep them cold.

  ‘It’s early in the morning, I know, but who cares?’

  ‘You’re rich. You can do what you like.’

  ‘You bet I can.’

  We twisted the tops off the beer, baited our hooks, cast our lines and sat back. Judging by the rigs and bait, we were after whiting, a tasty, modest-sized fish that was rare in the Gulf these days. Tasso sipped his beer. ‘Now we can talk,’ he said.

  He stowed his rod in a holder and fetched the map case from the cockpit. He pulled a sheet of paper from it and handed it to me. It was grubby, and it had fold marks on it from time spent in someone’s shirt pocket. It bore the letterhead of a Perth-based metallurgical assay company and was dated about eighteen months earlier. Under the heading ‘Results of requested assay’ was a small table. It had two lines. The first read ‘Au: 16.4 g/t’ and the second ‘Ag: 3.22 g/t’. There was a sentence at the bottom to the effect that these values were correct but the company that produced them wouldn’t be held responsible if it turned out they’d ballsed up. I looked on the reverse, but it was blank. Tasso was watching me.

  ‘This is all?’

  He leaned towards me. ‘There’s more. What do you think so far?’

  ‘It’s a pretty high assay for gold, about as high as they get these days, but on its own it doesn’t mean much.’

  I handed the paper back to him. There was a lull; the boat sat still on the quiet sea. A seagull flew over us, mewing. Tasso withdrew another sheet of paper from his folder and handed it to me. It was on the same letterhead but dated about six months after the first. It too was grubby and it too contained the results of an assay: 16.7 grams per tonne of gold and 2.11 grams per tonne of silver.

  ‘They belonged to Mick Hiskey, those two bits of paper,’ said Tasso. ‘A few months ago, when I was still living in Perth, he called me out of the blue and said he wanted to meet up. I was coming to Adelaide a bit and next time I was in town we arranged to have a drink. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years and, to be honest, Steve, he didn’t look too good. He was thin, his face was lined, he had sores, he smelt like shit. He was sweating and sniffing the whole time and generally he wasn’t nice to be near.’

  ‘Alcoholic?’

  ‘Addict. Heroin.’

  ‘Hiskey was a smackhead?’

  ‘He was. Had been for years. He kept it hidden for a long time, but I knew. He used to hit me for money.’

  ‘And you paid up?’

  ‘For a while I did. Until I found out he was using my money to feed his drug habit.’

  ‘He was getting you to pay for his habit? What a dick.’

  ‘Addicts are not honest people.’ Tasso picked up his rod and spun the reel a few times. ‘So, for a long time I had nothing to do with him, but you never completely get rid of someone like Hiskey. He was a mate. When we met up, he was excited about something. He pulled those two bits of paper out of his pocket.’ I was still clutching the second one. ‘We were at a bar. He’d had a bit to drink by then but he was coherent. He said he’d discovered a massive gold deposit and wanted my help to develop it.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘The first thing I said was, how massive? And he said thirteen million tonnes. Minimum.’

  ‘That’s something.’

  ‘It is. Given that gold is worth fifteen hundred bucks an ounce at the moment, what you are holding in your hand, my friend, is ten billion dollars. Minimum.’ He watched me to see the effect. I pretended to let the paper flutter over the side of the boat. He laughed. ‘Only you would do that, Steve.’

  I said, ‘Okay, you’ve got my attention. Ten billion dollars is big money, even for you.’

  ‘Yeah, he had my attention by then, too. But you know what prospectors are like. They’re the world’s biggest optimists; they exaggerate; they always reckon they
’ve found the big one. I told him to start at the beginning, so he did. He was part-owner of an exploration and development company; it’s called Black Hill Exploration. They’d found a few ore bodies in the past, enough to keep the operation afloat, but things had flattened out. Mick was working several exploration licences and turning up nothing. They’d been drilling left, right and centre and all they got was shit. But one day he was wandering the bush on one of the exploration leases when he stumbled on an outcrop of rock that he said just had a look about it. He thought it might contain mineralised gold, so he took a few samples and got an assay done. That was the first sheet I showed you. Things had been going downhill for Hiskey in the real world. Black Hill wasn’t the best-run company in the business and they were always having cash-flow problems. Mick was a heroin addict, and being a heroin addict is expensive, very expensive. And, perhaps worst of all, he had a personal problem with the co-owner of Black Hill, a guy called Hardcastle.’

  ‘A personal problem?’

  ‘Yeah. Hardcastle was fucking Mick’s wife. Sonia. Remember her?’

  ‘Vaguely, yes. Pretty; I remember that. Too pretty for Hiskey.’

  ‘Evidently. So that’s why Mick wanted to do what he wanted to do. Hardcastle was doing the dirty with his wife, so Mick decided to keep the find to himself.’

  ‘Even though Black Hill owned the exploration licence.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So we’re talking fraud.’

  ‘Yes.’ Tasso unpeeled his sunglasses and looked at me. He squinted in the glare but I guessed he wanted me to see his eyes. They were as energised as they ever were. ‘But who would be the victim, Steve? Just some dick who was porking Hiskey’s wife on the sly.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Tasso’s squinting black eyes were scrutinising, moving back and forth. ‘Keep going.’

  He re-donned his sunnies. ‘Well, Mick had a theory about the deposit. It’s on a low-lying hill, one of hundreds, probably thousands out there. He reckoned that when he stood on the hill he could trace the line of the ore down the hill and onto the plain. Now, Hardcastle was too busy screwing Sonia to take any notice of what Mick was up to in Woop Woop. So Mick brought in his rig and told Hardcastle he was going to drill water bores for a station owner; it’s a courtesy most drillers do to keep on the good side of the locals.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘He put his offsider on a bus to Adelaide and headed out to the site. You can operate one of those hammer drills on your own if you know what you’re doing, and Mick did. He chose a place nearly two kilometres from the original rocky outcrop, and in a day he’d drilled down three hundred metres. And the sucker hit the mother lode.’

  ‘He nailed it with one hole?’

  ‘Correct. After three hundred metres the colour of the rock turned green and there was quartz in it. That’s the second assay I showed you. He kept drilling and the rock was the same colour for another hundred and ten metres.’

  ‘So he’s established the depth of the seam at the drill site, extrapolated to his rocky outcrop and guessed he’s got thirteen million tonnes.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘A fair bit of wishful thinking involved, then. And probably a fair bit of smack, too.’

  ‘Sure.’ Tasso’s gaze had shifted to the shoreline; the fishers on the Rapid Bay jetty were leaving as the day warmed up. The white arc of the beach was a bleached splinter of bone. He gestured to my beer bottle, which I had managed to empty. ‘Another one?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘But I think Hiskey was actually being conservative in his guesswork,’ said Tasso, handing me a new beer. ‘He assumed the seam stops where he drilled, that it’s only so wide, and that it tapers towards the top. My view is that he’s probably not far off the mark.’

  I felt a nibble on my line and gave it a tug. I could still feel movement so I reeled it in. It didn’t feel like much, and it wasn’t. It was a King George whiting, but barely legal. I grabbed it round the belly and tried to remove the hook. It was a pretty, spotty, silvery fish with translucent fins, thin lips and a questioning look on its face. I didn’t have any answers for it. It wriggled in my hand. I unhooked it and threw it back into the water.

  ‘Tasso, you’ve got the biggest boat in South Australia.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘So why are we fishing for such pissy little fish?’

  He laughed. ‘I don’t even like fishing.’

  I stowed the rod. ‘Alright. So what did Hiskey want from you?’

  ‘He wanted me to go partners with him in developing the find. He didn’t want to sell it, he wanted to mine it. It was going to be his life’s work. But there were a few obstacles in the way.’

  ‘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 beyo
nd 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.