Calvin's Contract

TWENTY-FOUR

ONE

This is what happened on that afternoon.

I was outside the bookshop. I’d just unlocked the chain securing my bike to the veranda post, and I heard the sirens. In my right hand were the two magazines I’d bought: a Motor, an English one featuring a back to back comparison between a Jaguar XF and a BMW 535, and a local Autocar with a pullout supplement listing best buys for under five thousand dollars.

The off-ramp from the motorway divided into two roads – one led to the suburban shopping malls and the other one went past a row of decaying shops and into a maze of small factories that made things like kitchen units. I was standing beside the shop at the end of the row, a second-hand book shop stocked with magazines and books about cooking or gardens or the royal family or sex. Then I heard the noise and looked up. It wasn’t just one siren (which wouldn’t be unusual), there was a wailing chorus of them. At the same time I saw that there were no cars, no traffic at all, coming down the off-ramp. They must have closed the motorway entrances further south and they’d only have done that if there was something major happening, something that I ought to see.

I ran across the uneven ground and waist high grass between the shops and the off-ramp. It was edged with an armco barrier strip and dropped quite steeply before it divided into the city roads. I positioned myself behind the armco – it wasn’t an ideal vantage point because it was too low to see everything, but it was probably as good as I’d get.

When it happened, it took only a few seconds. A silver Mercedes, an old 500 SEL I thought, appeared at the top of the off-ramp, its engine screaming. The inside rear wheel had lifted clear of the road surface and I could see the driver’s white face as he fought the understeer. The car lurched back onto four wheels and seemed to regain some balance before hurtling towards the barrier strip where I was watching, frozen. As it spun into the armco the driver pushed something out of his open window. It hit the ground, bounced, and thudded into the grass no more than five metres away from me. Perhaps the man saw me at the last minute, because as the object flew through the air his mouth opened in surprise, or maybe a hopeless attempt to shout something.

The Mercedes rebounded off the barrier towards the other side of the ramp. It clipped the armco, then its nose seemed to bury itself in the road and the back end rose into the air, high enough for me to see the exhaust system snaking its way from the engine bay to the rear. The car landed on its roof and slid another fifty metres along the ramp towards the junction of the two roads, leaving a shower of sparks behind it. The doors on the driver’s side popped open and a figure catapulted onto the road where it rolled over a few times, and lay still. The car continued to slide, then slammed into the wall at the junction with a huge echoing thump. Flames appeared around the engine and in less than a moment the whole car was on fire. It looked as if a huge flower with crimson petals had suddenly opened. The windscreen shattered and there was a series of muffled explosions.

Then the police cars appeared. I crouched in the grass as they approached, howling like a wolf pack. There were five Holdens painted in police colours and two unmarked Fords with blue lights stuck on their roofs. At least one was airborne as it cleared the top of the ramp, then I heard the screaming of brakes and tyres as they slithered to a halt on the road, rows of blue and red lights pulsing. There was a moment of near silence as the sirens were turned off, and a lot of cops in uniforms or plain clothes jumped out of the cars. Some of them stood and stared at the fireball around the Mercedes and three of them knelt beside the man on the road. I wondered why they didn’t do something but then I saw another man in one of the squad cars shouting into his radio and it seemed there was nothing the others could do.

It felt as if I’d been paralysed for those fifteen seconds but when I looked down I could see my hands shaking. In the grass a few metres away was a sports bag with an Adidas logo. I crawled over to it and stared for a moment. It looked like an ordinary bag. I stretched my hand out to touch it. It felt ordinary as well. I knelt in the grass, hardly aware now of the blazing car a hundred metres away, and cautiously slid the zip open. It didn’t need to open very far for me to see what was inside. It was money – more money than I’d ever seen in my life.

Much later I remembered reading news stories about people who gave money they’d found to the police. They got rewarded with editorials about the wonders of honesty or sometimes with small amounts of cash. No-one at my school believed these stories, or if they did they thought the people who gave the money away were stupid. Isaac Johnstone said if these things happened it’s because God meant them to. If you gave the money away you were obviously trying to defeat divine will and purpose, and you’d probably go to hell. I told him once I didn’t know much about divine purpose and he said this was ironic, given my name.

You know who Calvin was, don’t you? he said.

He’s a designer. He makes jeans.

What?

Calvin Klein. He’s a designer. Jeans and sunglasses, that kind of stuff.

No, the other Calvin. The sixteenth century one.

I stared blankly at him and walked away.

None of this occurred to me as I knelt in the grass beside the partly opened bag. I only remembered the driver with his wide, red mouth in his white face and I wondered if he was dead. He looked as if he ought to be dead. Even if he was alive, the money was probably the last thing on his mind. Then I heard a new set of approaching sirens and something very strange happened, something difficult to explain. I realised suddenly that something fundamental had changed.

Nothing exciting or even interesting had ever happened in my life, and now, in the space of a few seconds, it had turned into something like reality television. I could see a pixelated image of myself on the screen, poised to become someone significant. The chase scene was over, the next phase was starting and if I didn’t take this chance, I’d be out of the programme. I lifted my head and looked around, blinking. There were fire engines on the road now, pumping foam over the Mercedes. There was an ambulance as well but I thought they were wasting their time. No-one was looking in my direction.

My heart thudded unevenly inside my chest and my hand reached down and closed around the straps on the bag. I got to my feet and picked it up. It was heavier than I expected but I walked with the straps clasped in my hand back through the long grass towards my bike. There was still no-one around. I allowed myself a glance into the window of the book shop. The man who owned it was sitting in a chair reading. He didn’t seem to have noticed anything. No-one was visible in the other shops, but this wasn’t surprising. They never had many customers anyway and two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon wasn’t going to be their busy time. I turned the bike around, pushed my magazines into the bag, and slung it over my shoulder. I started riding away, waiting for someone to shout at me to stop, or for the sound of a siren behind me. There was nothing.

I rode past a collection of warehouses and small engineering workshops, feeling the weight of the bag on my shoulder. There were people walking along footpaths or crossing the road – someone had to be be watching me or making notes about what I looked like. I thought maybe I should have dark glasses on but I didn’t own any. Maybe I should try to seem older, or younger, or just different.

But as I got further from the motorway, I started to feel calm instead. I was just an average sixteen year old, in a school uniform, with a sports bag over my shoulder. No-one would give me a second glance.

It usually took no more than ten minutes to bike from the shop to the flat but I ended up taking a roundabout route while I tried to make a decision about the bag. I couldn’t just keep it at home, because Angela (my mother) or Paul (her boyfriend) would find it, or maybe the police could turn up with a search warrant. When I realised I’d pedalled around the same streets three times, I stopped and forced myself to think.

Angela would be at work or at lectures, and Paul would be somewhere else, assuming he was still living with us. I could afford to take the money to the flat for an hour or two at the most while I worked out what to do with it. Then I’d need to hide it somewhere else. I should get something different to put it in I decided, maybe some of those thick black polythene bags, and then I could divide the money into bundles, so I turned towards the supermarket and start chaining the bike to the railings outside when I realise I couldn’t go in with the bag. They’d want to search it and then they’d call the police. I’d have to go home first, hide the bag there, and go back to the supermarket. Then I could buy the polythene bags, divide the money and find places to hide it. My stomach was tightening. This was going to be much more trouble than I’d thought, except that, as I was beginning to understand, I hadn’t really thought at all.

I pushed open the gate to the courtyard at the flat. Paul’s Mustang was parked outside but that didn’t mean he was in the flat – he often got a ride somewhere with his mates. I dragged my bike inside the gate and pulled it shut behind me. I dropped the bike against the wall and pushed cautiously at the door of the flat. It was locked so I found my key and opened it. Paul, I called softly, are you there? There was no answer but I could hear the sound of a radio. I picked up the bag and went carefully inside, into the lounge. Paul’s barbells were on the floor and a pile of Angela’s books sat at one end of the table.

I put the bag carefully on the floor and opened the hall door. The music got louder so I called out again, then went down to Angela’s room and pushed my head carefully around the door. The bed was empty. I breathed deeply and turned off the radio, then went back to the lounge. I sat at the table and placed the bag in front of me. I started to slide the zip open.

What did I really want to find?

Somewhere in my mind I’m sure I believed that with a lot of money Angela and I could have a proper life, a life in a big house, with a desirable European sports car in the garage and without a parasite like Paul pretending to be my friend and making Angela unhappy. Somewhere else I was starting to panic, and wishing I’d been anywhere but the off-ramp at two o’clock, even at the athletic sports. Then I wondered if I’d made a mistake as I crouched beside the off-ramp. Maybe what I saw was bundles of papers or something. I close my eyes and unzipped the bag, then emptied it onto the table.

I hadn’t made a mistake. The banknotes were in small bundles with rubber bands around them as if they’d been counted out by cashiers in a bank. The man in the Mercedes must have robbed a bank. And now I was involved as well. I had become a major criminal. A layer of sweat formed on my forehead and spread across my face.

I glanced down at the money again. There were blue and green bundles – a mixture of ten and twenty dollar bills. I picked up one of the green twenty dollar bundles, peeled the rubber band off it and counted the notes. There were fifty. I replaced the rubber band and tried one of the ten dollar bundles. Each bundle contained a thousand dollars. I pushed them all to one side of the table and carefully shifted them, one at a time, to the other side, then did it again so I could be sure. There were a hundred and eighty bundles.

I pushed them quickly back into the bag and closed the zip, then went to the fridge to look for some Coke. There wasn’t any so I filled a glass with water and sat down again to think. What could I do with a hundred and eighty thousand dollars? The more I thought, the more I realised I was asking the wrong question. I knew what I could do with a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. I could save it for the education Angela kept insisting I needed. I could buy a car, buy a new laptop or maybe even a house for us out in the country somewhere. It wouldn’t be hard to spend a hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

But it would be a completely different thing to spend a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in cash, especially cash I shouldn’t have. You can’t go and buy a good car with a bundle of banknotes. You need a cheque or a bank transfer and that means you’ve got to have money in the bank. If a sixteen year old boy, or even anyone else, walked into a bank with a bag full of cash the staff would be suspicious, they’d call the police and then there’d be visits and interrogations and checks made at school and soon they’d find the truth. What I had to do was find a way to make the money seem legal. I knew what the process was called. It’s money laundering and it’s what organised crime does, and drug dealers, and it involves corrupt governments in small, backward countries in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

I reached over and pick up the phonebook to check out the financial services section in the Yellow Pages, but before I even opened it I knew the sort of service I was looking for wouldn’t be advertised. Maybe, if I could invent a legitimate way of having got the money, I could feed it gradually into my bank account. For instance I could pretend to work double my hours at the gas station. I calculated quickly in my head. Another twelve hours at eleven dollars an hour would give me a hundred and thirty-two dollars a week or more than six thousand dollars a year, but even without tax it would take about twenty-seven years to make the stash of notes sitting in front of me seem legal. Perhaps I could say I won it gambling, but sixteen year olds don’t win this sort of money.

Suddenly it seemed that it would be much easier to just give the money away to someone. I could leave the bag somewhere and ring the police with an anonymous message. I’d have to use a payphone so they couldn’t trace the call and I didn’t think I’d be in line for any sort of reward.

Then I looked around the flat, at the faded curtains, the unwashed plates that Paul had left on the bench top and the underwear he’d thrown in a heap beside the washing machine. There must be a way to make our lives better with a hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

Besides, I didn’t know if it was from a bank robbery. That was just a wild guess I made in the middle of an adrenalin rush. Maybe it was stolen from drug dealers or child pornographers. And the cops wouldn’t need it for evidence because they’d already got the man in the Mercedes, who might be dead anyway. They probably didn’t even know he had it. If I gave it away to them it wouldn’t do anyone any good.

I took three twenty dollar notes from the bag, stuck it under my bed, and biked to the supermarket. I bought a packet of ten black polythene bags and a roll of duct tape. Obviously I couldn’t leave the money in the flat but I wanted to be able to get at it quickly, so burying it in a forest wasn’t an option, even if I could find one. I pulled the bag out from under the bed again and divided the money into three piles, then stacked each pile in a polythene bag, taping up the top before pulling another bag over the top.

At the back of the flats was a service lane covered in concrete pavers. It was only ever used when the rubbish bins got emptied which was probably why no-one had bothered to paint out the tags on the wall. I took the first black bundle out the back gate along with Angela’s garden trowel. I levered up two pavers directly under a swastika with sieg painted on either side and scooped out the earth underneath. I put the package into the cavity I’d created and replaced some of the earth and the two pavers, then scuffed the remaining dirt along the pathway. When I looked back along the lane from the gateway there was no sign of what I’d done.

A block away from the flats was a patch of waste ground between two disused factories. When the council replaced the drainage system in the industrial estate the contractors left two or three of the old pipes pushed against one of the factory firewalls and they were almost invisible in the long grass. I put the second package into a supermarket bag and walked casually past the first building. A dog ambling past eyed me suspiciously but there were no people around. I tied a piece of twine around the top of the outer bag and pushed the package as far as I could into the pipe lying closest to the wall, leaving the end of the twine in easy reach.

The Adidas bag would have to go too. I took some scissors from the kitchen drawer and cut around the zip, then ripped it half way along its length, enough to make the bag useless. I took it down to the building site at the corner and threw it in a skip. I thought about covering it up but if anyone was looking it would seem suspicious so I left it on top of the rubbish that was already there and walked away.

I puzzled over the third package until I remembered the gas station. I found a shoe box in my closet, tipped the bundles of notes out of the polythene bag and put them in the box instead. Then I got a sheet of old birthday