Fall Girl (15 page)

I must figure this out, I must. I won't be made the fall girl if this operation goes south. I have leafed through the pages of my memory for everything he has said, every expression I have seen on his face. There are times his face becomes set, determined, in response to some inner thought, but these are rare. At these times he rolls his shoulders and rubs them, like the weight on them is more than he can bear. Other times his face is soft: he is an innocent and this is all a lark.
Surely we'll have to take our pants off
. Sweet as a schoolboy. Mostly he is cynical, sarcastic, wry.

Yet he did not turn around when I told him not to. Did he not want to see me in my underpants? Perhaps he does not find me attractive? Nah. Perhaps he is gay? That would explain this feeling that he is lying. No; I know this is not true. Even if I missed this, it is not a mistake that Greta would make.

I should have realised earlier that something was not right. My father said it first when I told him that Daniel had asked me a technical question in our first interview.
It's a rare millionaire who will
reveal his ignorance on any topic
. And here he is, our rare millionaire. He swims in freezing water without hesitation when we three professional con artists shiver in our bathers. He carries a heavy pack for ten steep kilometres, not only without complaint, but with solicitous care. He offers me his hand to climb over rocks and considers my welfare at all times but is also sarcastic and cynical. There is clearly something wrong.

I have known many millionaires and there are two types. The first are those who have made their own money, whether by hard work or luck or talent. These are a varied mix of people and their behaviour cannot be predicted. The second group are those, like Daniel Metcalf, who received their money without a drop of sweat from their brow and are proceeding, quickly or slowly, to lose it. And they do not behave like this, that much I know. They were born to wealth; they know no other life and they consider those who are not wealthy to be somehow flawed. They do not have his flippant air.

But the most telling thing was this: the twenty-five thousand dollar cheque he offered me and said I could keep unless I wanted to try for the quarter of a million.
You can keep it, if you like. Or you
can hand it back to me.

I cannot believe I fell for this old trick, one my father taught me when I was not ten years old. Sharp gamblers use it often, allowing their mark to win the first few hands convincingly when the pot is small. My father would have used it in a slightly different fashion: perhaps he sold a mark a hundred shares and offered to buy them back for double the price in just a few weeks. The mark pockets a large profit on a small investment. Then Dad would sell the mark ten thousand shares under the same arrangement and when the time came to buy them back he would have disappeared. This is a variation on what we call ‘bait and switch'.

The conclusion is simple. Either Daniel has no money or he is trying to con me. But con me out of what? He is no longer just another good-looking mark. Now I find Daniel Metcalf very, very interesting.

Today the three of us run through the science stuff we have practised all week. I am alert, engaged. I watch Daniel Metcalf 's every action, mark his every word. When I look at him my pulse races. He is an eagle after all, not a chicken. I cannot confess this to Julius and Greta, whom I have dragged here. I have no evidence and I am culpable.

Now I see all the things I neglected to do, like obtain a recent estimate of the Metcalf wealth. I took the Metcalf name as all I needed to know, like any foolish mark, when Daniel could be a gambler or an addict or could have spent the fortune a thousand ways. He has a fine house and expensive car and clothes but I of all people should know that these things count for nothing. I did not ask for any proof that he could pay the money he has promised. My father has a friend in the city, a financial journalist, who keeps up with things like this yet I never asked him.

The science itself progresses well. Despite Sam's fears, this is not as difficult as it sounds. One must exude confidence, that is all. As you must if you're being anyone, even yourself. All movements must be sure and dextrous. There can be no hesitation. The work itself is of less consequence than its appearance. Daniel Metcalf will have no idea if we are doing these things correctly.

We do not wander far from camp. This is not the research project itself after all, just a small taste of what we will do when we are properly funded. We pass stands of impenetrable rainforest, tall open forests, woodlands, ancient Aboriginal middens. We find likely spots, some just off the main track, some at the bottom of the hill near the creek.

Daniel stands back and patiently observes us working. Julius and Greta squat on a path or kneel on squares of foam rubber as they measure and photograph tracks and collect droppings, a skill we practised with the help of a ranger in the closest national park to our home. In real life, even finding the tracks was harder than I expected: the walking trails are mostly small rocks and hard to distinguish from the bush itself, the forest floor overlain with leaves. Sometimes I think I am pointing at nothing and sometimes I fear I am diligently measuring my own boot-print, but I do it with such authority that anyone would believe.

Yet after a few hours I begin to see things I could not see before. The smallest pad print set in dust along a dry creek bed, the finest scratches near the base of a scraggly eucalypt. It takes surprisingly little practice to make these things come alive. As I kneel to pick up small white bones I would not even have noticed last week, I instinctively hold my breath so they do not gust away. Once I find a tooth from some kind of animal lying in a pile of dead leaves and peeled bark. It is white and pure and smooth like porcelain and if I did not know it was only an old tooth I would have thought it remarkable. In the palm of my hand it could be an oddly shaped jewel.

‘Look at that,' Daniel says. ‘That might be a tooth from a Tasmanian tiger. You never know.'

He is right. You never know. I had never thought of science as gambling before but now I see it is a roulette wheel. It is two-up. Gambling is, as they say, a tax on people who do not understand probability theory, but now I see that winning is not the point. The point is that divine moment when the coin hovers in mid-air or the silver ball speeds around the outside of the wheel or just the merest hint of bone is visible above the ground. In that shining moment before anything is decided, everything is possible.

I could have managed this, if I had gone to school and then to university. This might have been my career. Science, at least this kind of science, is more like a country craft; it is a manual skill, a dextrous one, where the clever hands of clever people make a story from bits of bone and photos of tracks and scratches on trees. Like making a quilt from squares of coloured fabric.

I feel light, energised, focused. Julius and Greta work in unison as if they had laboured together for months, as though they were in the Olympic synchronised evidence-collecting team. They show Daniel how to gauge the weight of an animal by how far the tracks sink into wet sand, how to make a plaster cast of a small paw print, how to place a ruler near a burrow so a photo shows its size. They are professionals and I am grateful as I watch them work. I also say a silent prayer for libraries and librarians. Perhaps I will make a small donation to the library nearest our home if I ever get my hands on the cheque.

And it is working. He is buying it. I am pleased, and something more. The thrill of this contest is making my skin feel alive and every sense is alert. I sometimes stand at the back and watch Daniel watching Greta and Julius and he frowns in concentration and asks sensible questions, and I wonder over every one. This is like playing chess with my father. I cannot help but smile. Julius jumps into the silences to insert little-known biology facts he has cribbed from textbooks.

‘Did you know, Mr Daniel, that biologists do not call their field work sites digs? This is a common misconception caused by the seepage of archaeological terms into popular culture. Neither living animals nor fossils are found in a single, manageable site like a small buried village that can be roped off and excavated. Either they roamed free over a considerable distance, or they belong in a single geological stratum and can be found over miles of terrain,' he says.

‘Is that so, Joshua?' says Daniel. He is endlessly polite, annoyingly courteous, only slightly sarcastic.
Is that so, Joshua?
could mean he is genuinely interested, or he disagrees, or he realises that Julius is talking half-digested rubbish. Or he could be thinking of something else entirely. I try to match each possibility to the expression on his face, without being caught observing him. Which turns out, even with my years of practice at reading faces, to be an impossible task.

At noon we stop for a light lunch and as we sit under the shade of a stand of trees, he asks me how we would spend the money. His money. I smile and it crosses my mind to tell him the truth: some new furniture, fix the gutters, a small fund to cushion the old age of my father and Ruby and Ava and Syd.

Instead I smile ethereally like I am glimpsing heaven through a shining portal, and say all the things I have rehearsed. I tell him about the army of researchers, and the command tent with a map and coloured pins: pink to show the location of sightings, and blue to show the traps I would spread through the park. I tell him about the pheromones, the special blend I intend to develop from marsupial species genetically closest to the tiger, and how I'd spray them on a dead chicken. This would be the perfect temptation for a carnivore like the tiger but repugnant to herbivores like wombats or wallabies.

I kneel down, pick up a stick and draw patterns in the dirt that represent a long tube attached to a square. I keep talking as I wave the stick across the ground. This is the camouflaged wire trap I'd build. It has a trick hatch leading to a long tunnel
here
then finally a holding cage
here
. This hatch wouldn't catch smaller animals like rodents or possums. I'd place the bait carefully in the kind of habitat that tigers were known to prefer when they were observed in Tasmania. I'd choose spots far away from tracks and campsites. The whole area would be surrounded by a network of movement-sensitive night vision video cameras. By the end even I am enthusiastic. Daniel looks positively transported.

‘Sounds irresistible.'

‘But this is where researchers have gone wrong in the past: I'd spray everything with a fine mist of diluted tea tree oil to cover any human scent. The tiger was famous for its sense of smell.'

‘You've got it all worked out.' Daniel kneels to get a better look at my trap drawing.

I sigh and shake my head; part hopelessness, part yearning. ‘I've had years to think about it.'

I tell him more, on a roll in both fiction and reality. ‘I'd also have a couple of researchers set up a stand in the main street of town, asking locals if they had ever seen an animal they couldn't identify and recording each interview for posterity.'

‘And I would like to see some money put aside for DNA testing,' says Julius. He is just off the track, peering to look at small white fragments scattered at the base of a tree. ‘DNA technology is the key to the identity of all animals and will prove the future of our work, I'm sure. Some things are in our genes.'

Daniel walks over to look at Julius's pieces of bone. I walk behind him, he does not look back. As Julius points out the bone fragments and speculates about the kind of animals they might have come from, Daniel idly picks up some small stones from the edge of the path and begins arranging them in groups and piles. I watch his long fingers, the nails clipped short. His hands are larger than I would have expected, the knuckles angular and defined and dusted with fine hairs. As he turns his hand I see the scar on his palm, fine and even as though an artist had drawn it in white enamel. His wrists pivot by the most ingenious mechanism every time he turns his hand to the side. It takes me a moment to look down at my own hand and realise it moves the same way. I had never noticed before.

I look at Daniel again. It is tiredness and stress, I know, but for a moment I cannot look away: the way he casually sorts the stones by some means unknowable to me—perhaps by size or shape, or is it colour?—suddenly seems the most interesting thing I have ever seen.

Before long it's almost evening and time to head back to camp. Julius goes ahead with Daniel. Greta holds me back by my arm until they are out of sight.

‘What the hell do you think you're doing?' She lifts her sunglasses and squints at me, although her tight hair makes it difficult for her to close her eyes.

‘Nothing. I'm not doing anything.' This is true, but it's what we planned. My role is mainly to supervise my students. Daniel has been trying to assist, fetching things from the camp sometimes: different lenses for the camera Greta hadn't realised she would need, the right size of envelope to hold the samples. I walk with him to different sites, show him the correct forceps, which horsehair brush is best, or at least those that feel the best to me. We breathe the air, we walk on the beach. Everything is going according to plan. I cannot think what she means.

‘Exactly,' she says. ‘You're doing nothing. You're just standing back and watching him with this strange smile on your face.'

I shake my arm free of hers. ‘Greta. Don't.'

‘“Don't”? Is that all you can say, “Don't”? We've all put a lot of work into this, Della. Hours and hours. I am dressed like an Amish man and this hairstyle hurts my brain. I am not pretty. I hate not being pretty. I'm looking like this, as directed, so as to not take the focus off you.'

‘Yes,' I say, and I try to walk around her. ‘Thanks for that.'

She holds me by the shoulders and moves us behind a tree. ‘Della. I have dirt under my fingernails. If you don't close this deal I will undo these buttons and cut these trousers into short shorts and let my hair down and I will close it for you. I swear to you Della I will.'