Pike's Pyramid

By Michael Tatlow

Blarney and Alex Pike, husband and wife network marketers for American-based Argo, become embroiled in a menacing predicament when their American friend and fellow networker Jack Sussoms is murdered in the Czech Republic. The situation quickly escalates into a melting pot of murder, graft, corruption and terrorism, the scale of which Blarney and Alex have only just begun to uncover... Can Blarney and his skilful friends save the day?

The first novel in a series of four gripping crime thrillers that feature heroic crime buster and family man, Blarney Pike, and his talented companions in the remote but extraordinary town of Stanley, Tasmania.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Woodslane Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780992590116

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

‘A triangle of treachery is polluting our network,’ Jack Sussoms, nearly seventy, growled like a gorilla with a sore throat. ‘There’s Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, controlled by the greedy crooks in my United States, godammit. We’re gonna bust their balls, Blarney.’

From across the small table in the saloon bar of the Norvoski Hotel in Prague, Blarney Pike was fascinated by his buddy from Lafayette, New Jersey. Sussoms had done some checking on the two Australians soon after Blarney and his bride Alexandra arrived in Prague six weeks ago. He knew about Blarney’s impressive boxing career. He was excited that his colleague from the land down under was a journalist with connections in newspapers and television in the US and Britain. An intimacy had flowered.

Pike sipped at his glass of beer. ‘I want to know all about this, Jack,’ he said. ‘If you’re right, people will want to silence you.’ He playfully pointed an index finger, like a pistol, at Jack’s belly as the old man took another gulp of bourbon.

Jack laughed. ‘Those cock sucker crooks are polluters, like piss in fine whiskey,’ he drawled. ‘Let ’em try. I’ve got a 32 mill revolver upstairs. Bought it cheap here in Prague. I keep it under a newspaper, on the table beside the bed. When the evidence is ready, I’m gonna go tell our master, Abe Harbek.’ If fellow American Harbek’s legendary team of heavies failed to fix the rot, Jack said, some stirring in the media by Pike would spur them to prune it. Bad publicity was the number one evil for Harbeck, the revered owner of Argo.

The dangled promise of serious money and Alex’s fair command of the Czech language, picked up at home from her Czech migrant parents, had lured the Pikes like honey bees to Argo’s assault on the Czechs.

With two hundred others from twenty countries, they had helped launch there the Czech branch of the world’s biggest network marketer. Czechs had been recruited to set up their own networks of people to buy from Argo for themselves and to retail two hundred products ranging from soap to suits to dresses and cosmetics to computers, television sets and jewellery, sometimes even cars. But, Jack had told them, Argo had become an ogre; to fight or flee from.

Sussoms tapped his right nostril. ‘I’ve got a tight lip,’ he said. ‘There are more things about this criminality than I’ve talked about. Things that would scream off the front pages and put a lot of unlikely people in jail. Drugs, weapons, bombs. It’s the horror of the world.’

Sussoms left about 9pm for his suite to make some phone calls and note down more evidence. He muttered, ‘You’ll have it all in the morning, Blarney. My completed papers’. He swaggered to the elevators like a prize fighter charging to the ring.

Pike remained in the lounge, drinking low alcohol Pilsen ale and writing postcards, so Alex could get needed sleep in their room upstairs. He called the correspondence gloat cards. The standard Argo stuff made him feel guilty. The cards would go to his and Alex’s marketing team home in Stanley, in Australia’s southern island state of Tasmania. On them were rapturous lies, mostly about Argo’s presence in the Czech Republic.

After an hour and a half he had drunk only three glasses of ale. The demander in his head, gullet and gut, who Pike had named Ned, craved more. Pike reckoned he was not a real alcoholic. He was just a bit dependent on it, like cigarettes. He did not wake in the morning with Ned insisting on more grog. More likely, he woke with sore regret over last night’s intake. He could stop any time now, couldn’t he? Grog had ruined his first marriage. It was not going to harm this one.

He and Alex had taken a room in the hotel for the night after an afternoon of Argo meetings, with more tomorrow, rather than take a taxi across the Vitava River and a train on the long trip to their modest rented apartment in suburban Palmovka. Staying at the hotel all the time would have shattered their budget.

chap

Two hours after Jack Summons left the lounge, a barman told an inquiring man in a shabby suit that the man sitting alone over there had been drinking with the American.

The short and rotund man strolled from the bar and introduced himself as Captain Schmidt. In remarkably good English he said, ‘Please accompany me to the suite of your friend, Mr Sussoms’.

‘Sure. But why?’

The detective said nothing.

Slipping his postcards in the mail box by the elevators on the way, Pike had a rush of anxiety. What’s wrong with Jack? A robbery?

chap

Schmidt opened the door to Sussoms’ suite and waved him inside. To be confronted by a bloody corpse on the floor. Old Jack’s mouth was open as if in a roar of protest. A blue eye stared accusingly above his slashed throat. Where the other had been was a socket of gore.

Jack was on his back, arms stretched as if crucified. He wore only a Cartier watch and green socks. A jelly of scarlet had set obscenely under grey hair on a carpet of golden silk. More blood stained a white towel draped over the corpse’s waist.

CHAPTER 2

Murder! Pike was stunned with horror. The insensitivity of two suits casually standing there added anger. One was a big barrel chest of a man. A mop of red hair, greying around the ears, made him look like a Scots warrior. Gimlet blue eyes studied Pike from a florid face. The redhead was nearly as tall and heavy as muscled 95 kilo Pike.

‘This is Inspector Gelber,’ Schmidt announced.

Schmidt motioned to his other colleague. He was wiry and blond, a foot shorter than Pike. He looked no more than twenty, and blank. The collar of a white shirt bit into his neck.

Schmidt blurted an introduction to his junior. Officer Fuckoff? Pike coughed to stop a laugh. Fuckoff? Bloody surely not! The young detective blanched. It wasn’t the first time that name had thrown a foreigner, Pike decided.

Schmidt read his intrigue. ‘The name does not do well in English,’ he said unhelpfully. ‘Mr Pike, we think you were the last to see the deceased.’

‘At least the second last, Captain,’ he retorted, reeling at the horror at his feet. Who the hell would do that to Jack? He wondered what other injuries were hidden under the towel.

‘You knew him well?’

‘Jack Sussoms was my friend and colleague. As you seem to know, I was with him a couple of hours ago.’

Robbery was not the likely motive, Schmidt said. The deceased still wore his valuable watch. His billfold on the floor contained credit cards.

‘Jack was an American citizen, a millionaire,’ Pike interrupted. ‘Have you contacted the American embassy?’ His mind was a windmill in a gale.

‘In good time, sir. We have Mr Sussoms’ passport.’

‘He was an Argo Double Platinum, if you know what that is,’ Pike ventured, looking down painfully again at the cadaver.

‘He’s… Sorry, he was a pioneer in our Argo marketing network. That’s the American-based multi-level marketing empire. You must have read about it.’

He looked again at dead Jack’s accusing eye, the gaping mouth. A rising stench galled his nostrils. Pike took a deep breath and tried to pull himself together as the policemen studied him. Alex will be devastated!

‘I’ve been in this room often with Jack,’ he continued. ‘My wife, too. He had a lot of money in his wallet tonight. In US notes, German marks and a wad of Czech korunas. He didn’t trust hotel security safes. He keeps… kept more cash between the spare towels in the bathroom cabinet.’

That grabbed their attention. ‘His billfold is empty of money, Mr Pike,’ fat Captain Schmidt intoned. Fuckoff strode to the bathroom. He returned shaking his head and said something in Czech.

‘No money, but a fresh towel is on the floor,’ Schmidt translated. ‘We removed another from the rack for decency, to cover ah, mutilations.’

Pike wondered to himself, would these cops nick the cash? Inspector Gelber glared at him, seemingly reading his mind. Pike felt his scar flush. Ragged and pink on his dark skin, it was, with eighteen rough stitch marks. The scar curved from the corner of his right eye like the blade of a scimitar. From mid-arc, near the ear lobe, it curled to a florid splash on his chin. The scar gave Pike a knocked-about guise that made some men wary, some women randy and children loudly inquisitive. Hundreds of people had observed that it was shaped like a G.

‘G for grog,’ his former mother-in-law had declared. After finding out once about Pike thrashing a couple of thugs bullying an old bloke, she had branded him a time bomb.

‘That scar’s a barometer,’ she had added. ‘Pink for booze. Red, beware.’

‘Do we have to stand here?’ Pike testily asked the police.

The four of them moved stiffly to the bedroom. ‘You’ve got the research notes he was writing?’ he asked. ‘They’re in green ink on a lined, quarto pad. He’s made some serious allegations about criminality in Argo. Jack left me tonight to come here and write some more about it.’

‘No note pad has been found, Mr Pike,’ Schmidt responded promptly. ‘Serious allegations, you say?’ Schmidt did not translate it, but Gelber’s demeanor turned to interest. The inspector evidently did not speak English but at least he understood it.

Pike remorsefully told them about Jack’s claims of corruption. Of his own limited collaboration.

The policemen exchanged doubtful glances. ‘We have found no such evidence,’ said Schmidt. ‘Was Mr Sussoms sober this evening? Was he a…a man of sanity. Ah, rational?’

‘He was a clever old man; sober and sane. Do you have a killer suspect?’

‘For now, Mr Pike,’ Schmidt replied, ‘we have you.’

Blarney saw himself being slung in a jail cell in this suddenly alien land. ‘Bloody well check at the bar!’ he protested. ‘I’ve been there since Jack left me more than two hours ago. Writing cards and having a few beers. All the time.’

‘All the time?’ asked Schmidt.

‘That’s what I bloody well said.’ The scar reddened again.

‘You know Czech, Mr Pike?’

‘The language?’ he grimaced. ‘No.’

The three detectives conferred in Czech, glancing warily at their suspect. Schmidt frisked Pike, seeking a weapon or something stolen from the suite. Pike emptied the contents of his pockets on the bed: his brown leather-covered book of Argo business, his wallet, passport, pen, loose change, handkerchief and unused postcards, envelopes and stamps. The captain checked that there were no bloodstains on the Australian’s clothing. He also examined the contents of the book and wallet. He said nothing.

Pike asked him how the police had found the body.

‘A phone call from the woman staying next door,’ said Schmidt. ‘She had heard a, a commotion.

‘This crime was done quick,’ the policeman informed him evenly. ‘A killer from the bar where you were, sir, would not have to be away for long. You drank all that beer for two hours and no visit to the, ah, facilities?’

‘Well, no,’ Pike conceded warily. ‘I did go for a piss. In the toilet near the…’ Shit. ‘Near the mail box.’

‘And nearer the elevators, Mr. Pike,’ Schmidt declared, glancing at Gelber.

Pike remembered the toilet and brightened. ‘Look, when I went to the lavatory one of the waiters who’d been bringing me drinks followed me in there. We washed hands at the same time. He’s a little bloke with black hair, slicked back. And a silver stud is in his left ear. He speaks good English and he asked me what I thought of Czech beer.

‘I told him Czech beer is as good as Australian. A real compliment, that is. That waiter’s a bit poofy, I think.’ He found a smile. ‘We left the lavatory together. He’ll remember that.’

‘Poofy?’ asked Schmidt.

‘Sorry, I meant gay. Homosexual.’

‘Kindly wait as we inquire,’ Schmidt directed. The junior cop left the suite. Surely not to ask the waiter if he was queer, Pike thought.

He sat tensely in a lounge chair, trying not to look at Jack’s body through the open door. A fly had got in. It settled on the bloodied eye socket. Pike ran to the body and waved it away as Schmidt hurtled towards him, thinking an escape was on.

A forensic team in green coats arrived. A photographer took a couple of shots of their grim suspect. Gelber and Schmidt were absorbed in searching the premises.

Pike remembered Jack’s weapon. ‘Did you find a gun in here?’ he called.

Gelber trotted into the bedroom. ‘A gun, you say?’

Ah, so the big cop talks English. ‘Jack had a 32 mill revolver. He told me about it only tonight. He kept it by this bed. Under a newspaper, he said. On the table.’

Gelber nearly leaped at the table and lifted a copy of USA Today. ‘No gun,’ he reported. ‘We’d have found it before. Are you sure of this?’

‘That’s what he told me, Inspector.’

‘Why did he have a gun?’

‘For his own protection, the poor bloke.’

‘Protection from what, Mr Pike?’

‘The Argo heavies he was accusing.’

‘Do you know the brand of revolver?’

‘No. If it’s gone, you’ve got an armed killer somewhere.’

‘Where did Mr Sussoms get this gun?’ Gelber demanded.

‘Search me. Ah, sorry. He said he bought it in Prague.’

‘We require a mouth swab, Mr Pike, and your fingerprints.’

‘Sure.’

The inspector left the bedroom and made a phone call, sounding as if he was giving instructions. Pike checked his watch. Ten after midnight.

‘Excuse me,’ he called to Gelber. ‘Can I use the phone to ring my wife? We’re guests in the hotel. She might be worried.’

‘Kindly wait, sir. If your alibi is right, you may leave.’

Fuckoff returned, not looking pleased. He conferred with his seniors. Schmidt found a thin smile. ‘Your story is confirmed, Mr Pike. You may go but do not leave the hotel without us knowing. An officer is stationed near the exit.’

Pike grabbed his possessions and handed Schmidt one of his Argo cards: Czech on one side, English on the other. It contained the address and phone number of their apartment in Palmovka. He had not told them about that.

He returned to the bar, which seemed never to close. He drank a neat brandy in one toss. He hurried to the toilet where, remembering the corpse, he vomited.

Alex was asleep in bed when he arrived in their room at one in the morning. He sat at the writing desk and noted in his book of contacts and Argo affairs the names of the three detectives. He stared out at the wakening city, gazed lovingly at his green-eyed beauty, her honey-blonde hair spread over a blue pillow. She woke soon after dawn and held up her arms to cuddle and kiss him.

He waited until after breakfast in the hotel dining room before telling Alex about the murder and gruesome injuries. The news jolted her into shocked anguish for Jack Sussoms; indignation about her husband being suspected of murder.

Inspector Gelber visited the couple’s room soon after with instructions not to tell anyone about what Pike had seen in Jack’s suite or about Jack’s claims of criminality in Argo.

When the news spread during the day, the networkers at the Norvoski were agog. Three fellow Argo agents badgered Pike for details, which he declined to give them.

chap

The Pikes were summoned to the hotel’s top-floor penthouse, a plush sanctum, for their first-ever private audience with Argo’s owner, Abraham Harbek. The short and slender man was in a dark suit, a tie of orange silk over a white shirt. Greying and closely cropped brown hair, darting eyes of blue.

To Harbek’s first question, the couple said they were sorry. They could not tell him much, they said, as directed by the police. They did not mention the gun; the missing pad of Jack’s notes. Regardless, Blarney did not want to talk any more about last night’s horror. Evidently suspecting that the Pikes were playing dumb, genial but grave Harbek did not press them.

Three men sat in Harbek’s suite’s lounge chairs by the windows. As if part of the furnishings, they did not speak and were not introduced. All were in suits. The two younger men looked northern European, the Pikes later agreed. They would be minders. Both had short brown hair, like their boss.

An older man, about fifty-five and stout, had longer, black hair, perhaps dyed. Eyes of pale brown. Harbek and the minders had looked to this man several times, as if in silent consultation.

‘A tragic loss of a dear friend and a network legend,’ Harbek mourned in a Texan accent. ‘A pity, however, about old Jack’s silly obsession with gangsters.’

Yes, Pike agreed, intrigued that Harbek knew, and knew the Pikes knew. The newlyweds left the suite feeling uneasy about the man they had been conditioned to edify. The police had put it about that the killer was probably a casual mugger, long gone from the building. It was a story to put the killers off guard, Pike figured.

No random mugger was going to take Jack’s pad of notes and any other evidence against the alleged Argo racketeers and leave the travellers cheques. Or torture him so.

Without those notes in Jack’s green ink, nearly devoid of punctuation, there was nothing remaining other than memories of the dear old bloke’s claims to the Pikes and a few other colleagues. As the killer or killers probably knew.

Accomplished combatant Blarney craved for a personal reckoning with the sadistic thugs who had killed genial Jack. If they came to get him, too, Pike was confident and ready. But he feared that Alex, too, was a target.

chap

A tragic loss, Harbek intoned at a hurriedly convened meeting, high-ranking networkers only, in the hotel conference room. The Prague newspapers briefly reported on inner pages that an un-named American tourist had been found dead in his hotel room. No suggestion of murder. It read like a suicide. Well done, Abraham Harbek, you brute.

Three numbed sons, all Argo agents, came and took Jack’s body home to Lafayette. Pike and Alex met them, gave their sympathy, and told them how Jack had become their friend. It was the one time angry, mourning Alex cried.

chap

That evening Pike was sitting alone in the hotel’s foyer, drinking coffee, when he was paged, surprisingly in English, to take a phone call at the reception desk. He placed on a chair under the table his leather-bound book that listed Argo contacts, prospects and planned and past activities.

At the reception desk, the line was dead. When he returned to the table, the book was gone. A girl sitting nearby, in a mini-skirt, said a man in a black jacket had collected something at the table. Pike looked around the foyer and asked the receptionist if she had seen a man carrying a leather book. No joy.

He reported the theft to the uniformed policeman stationed at the Norvoski’s front door. The officer was asked to report it to Inspector Gelber. The man seemed little concerned in that city of thieves.

Back in their upstairs room, Pike told Alex about it. ‘I reckon that girl who was at the nearby table is one of the Norvoski’s gang of prostitutes,’ he said. ‘That’s why I didn’t prospect her for Argo. She could have been working with the thief, come to think of it, and given me a wrong description. At least I walked over to her and made sure she didn’t have the book.

‘The big list of our contacts would be useful to other networkers, like the Hungarians. But there could be more to it. If Jack was killed to silence him, the killer or his bosses would want to find out what Jack’s journalist buddy knows, or has on paper.

‘You know a few pages in the book relate what Jack told me about the rot in Argo. Plus, of course, it’s got our Czech and Tasmanian addresses.

‘The book looks like a big wallet, but the thief wasn’t a casual wallet snatcher. He or she knew my name, what I look like, where I was sitting, and phoned me. The thief or an accomplice was near enough to see me put the book on the chair, then grab it in the minute or two that I was at the reception desk. I think it’s connected with Jack’s murder. Oh, the receptionist said the caller sounded American.’

Alex frowned anxiously. ‘Blarn, it’s time for us to leave this country. We might be in danger. We’ve driven all around the republic, worked day and night, and got nowhere near the booming business Richard De Groote and his top confederates promised us. I’ve enjoyed the time here, spending Christmas with Mum and Dad’s families but, from a work point of view, this trip is a costly disaster. I dearly want Argo to deliver us a comfortable living in two more years, when you turn thirty-five and I turn twenty-eight. So, assuming Argo’s not really corrupted, let’s go on with the job at home.’

Her limited ability to speak and write in Czech, to interpret Blarney’s pitchings of Argo to the Czechs, had prompted their visit. She was a mathematics and science teacher at the primary school at Stanley, where her parents had lived since migrating as refugees a year after World War II.

‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I’m a bit homesick. And in a few weeks I’ll have to begin the next school year.

‘We’re supposed to stay here until Richard arrives. So ring him please, and make sure he’s coming soon to encourage and further skill our pathetic twenty-one recruits.’

Professor Doctor Richard De Groote was their Tasmanian Argo leader and mentor. The consultant psychologist, former Professor of Psychology in New York, and before then a lecturer in psyche in his native Amsterdam, was a gifted salesman and task-master. De Groote’s psyche clients included an advertising agency and a corporation of money lenders. Pike was sure that the professor received considerably more income from Argo than from mind-doctoring. His medical practice was an impressive stage for Argo.

‘We’d better get back to the flat in Palmovka,’ Blarney said. ‘From there, I’ll try again to get Richard on the phone.’

He rang Inspector Gelber and was given permission to leave the hotel. There was no mention of the theft of the book.

CHAPTER 3

It was late at night, windy and snowing lightly, when they arrived from the train at the three-storey stone block of apartments. As Blarney felt about for the light switch in the small foyer, his feet crunched on glass. The globe up there had been smashed. They slowly went up the stairs and felt their way along the narrow hallway to their apartment. All the lights were out. The apartment door was a little ajar. Its basic old lock evidently had been cracked.

Inside, the lights worked. They saw no evidence of a robbery. Still upset about Jack’s death, they sat over coffee talking about it and the theft of the organiser book. Pike opened a drawer in the lounge room. All of the scores of papers he had kept in there were gone.

He went to his main suitcase, which locked automatically by the pressing of a button after the case was closed. Pike had not done that when he left with a smaller bag to stay at the hotel. But the suitcase was now locked. He used a key from his ring of them to open it. Clothing in it had been moved about. No documents.

Alex saw his consternation. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Papers. Anything with info that I had in the stolen book. Dammit, they’re all gone. We’ve been robbed. Go and tell Liba.’

Minutes later, Alex returned with old Liba Prochazka, skinny as a broom stick and deaf. She was the building’s sort-of cleaner and manager. It was her job to lock the front door at midnight after hours of watching television on full volume.

Alex told Liba in Czech about the robbery, the smashed globes, the broken lock on their apartment door.

‘She says the building hasn’t been broken into in years. She reported it to the police this morning. But they haven’t arrived yet. Apparently we’re the only tenants who’ve been robbed.

‘Only the globe in the foyer and those on the way to this flat have been knocked out. Liba cleaned this flat the day after we went to the hotel. She didn’t touch your suitcase, which she thinks was open.’

When Liba had gone, Alex urged Blarney to hurry up with arrangements to leave the republic. ‘Struth, our robber or robbers might be the same horrors who killed Jack,’ she moaned. ‘You can thrash nearly any brute, my love, but if we’d been here when they broke in…if they had guns…’

Pike shrugged. He said nothing. With no police response to the book theft, he did not bother reporting this robbery. He realised that there had to be a reason for the torture of their dead friend, who had invited them to visit his home in New Jersey on their way back to Australia. The torturers might have wanted to know the names of everyone to whom Summons had related his evidence. A particular target would be an anonymous American who, Jack had inferred, was his important investigator.

Blarney reflected on his writing in Stanley of six freelance articles for American and British magazines to help pay for this Czech adventure.

He had got $US4000 for yet another version of THE REAL STORY OF THE TASMANIAN DEVIL. Then a useful cheque came from the Brits for a piece about the demise of the