The Japanese Gardens

My brother Noah is a drug dealer.

At 2:00 am last night, the cops barged down our door and took him away. I’m a deep sleeper, so it took me a while to realise it wasn’t just Dad coming in late from work again.

I suppose some copper steaming in, eyes bulging, sweat pouring, and screaming Bloody Mary with a gun pointed straight at you will wake most folks up.

Unlike most people, or maybe to a larger extent than others, I’ve always considered myself to be cool under pressure. Now, this is weird, but I will often gratuitously picture myself in extremely stressful (and naturally, unrealistic) situations - the type you see in B-grade action blockbuster films. I’ll sit there watching and think: I could handle that. No. I want to handle that.

This psychological projection of mine was shot to shit last night on the police’s entry. The latent feeling of safety I had unconsciously held to so dearly - my wooden shield - crumbled, just like our front door. I guess that’s why the cops enter like that. The problem was it just worked on the wrong audience is all.

Noah, looking resolute, was hauled off shortly after, along with much of the contents of his room.

* * * *

Next was Detective Paul Field, a bloke on the wrong side of 50 who clearly had that stereotypical ‘man-in-power’ mentality. You know the kind? The kind that the shifty bouncer has, who won’t let you into a bar because there’s no correct answer to ‘how many drinks ya had’, or the cab driver you get in a new city, who takes an incredibly suspect route, or, the airport attendant who charges you $50 for a carry-on bag that is 1kg overweight. Those people. Well, Paul was one.

Over the course of the next two hours, Paul conducted his sadist-like interview (neigh, interrogation) with me, as he grilled me six ways to Sunday over Noah’s movements and lifestyle, particularly focussing on where Noah’s stash may be. Both the alleged drugs, and the proceeds of Noah’s dealings, were apparently nowhere to be found. Paul was convinced I was holding back on their whereabouts.

He sat there, with his beady little eyes honing into me, looking for, I presume, any form of weakness or evasiveness in my responses. Paul was a bloodhound, and only complete acquiescence would satiate him. Unfortunately, the more I spoke with Paul, the angrier he got. He did seem to hate it when I called him Paul, snapping at me: ‘It’s Detective Field, or, Sir’.

On the whole, it probably could have been a smoother affair, but some form of familial dogma, coupled with Paul’s nasty attitude, triggered a misguided allegiance toward Noah in me. This presented itself in the form of me being an esoteric little shit to Paul. It also felt good to be aloof and unhelpful; to exert what little power I had over Paul.

Over the two hours, the blood vessels on Paul’s face slowly upgraded from red to violet, and his jaw became tighter than the handcuffs that were slapped on Noah earlier in the evening. It may have been the repressed stress I was feeling, me being sleep deprived, or the absurdity of the situation, but it was as though Paul was evolving into a caricature of himself as the interview progressed.

With an ominous ‘come by the station tomorrow’, Paul and the chorus of cops abruptly left, finally leaving me alone.

* * * *

Ever since we were young kids, I have always rubbed Noah the wrong way. That’s why I have not been able to step foot in his room for years. It’s tragic, as Noah’s 19 now, yet the entrance still has the cliche 'DO NOT ENTER', offensively splattered across his door. What a jerk.

I remember I once snuck in when I thought he was out, to have a little snoop around. I had no real purpose, just a young kid who was curious. Maybe I thought I would find myself a neglected book, or vinyl record, that I could lay hands to. Needless to say, I have not done that since. The scar on my hand, inflicted by the mother of all ‘twisties’ (à la: pinch skin, twist hard), is a burning reminder of Noah’s obsessive need for privacy. I suppose that makes a bit more sense after tonight’s events.

With that in mind, I’m not sure how I came to the decision to have a look around. It is almost as if Noah’s debasement acted as a catalyst for my bravado. Or maybe I was seeking some form of catharsis from my prior attempt at a break-in. In either case, it was with some trepidation that I let myself in.

Noah’s room was nothing like I had pictured. Gone were the images I had concocted of faded 80s posters, dim lighting, a beanbag, and a record table; replaced with what can simply be described as a featureless, austere environment. It’s as if Noah had been watching one too many episodes of Grand Designs, yet had somehow only watched a season where the theme was ‘contemporary, minimalist and boring’.

That said, the room was a bombshell. The cops had somehow managed to fling nearly every possession of Noah’s into the home of another, resulting in a life-sized, badly scrambled, jigsaw puzzle. Strangely, Noah’s bible was sitting on his bed, engulfed by the surrounding chaos. I was curious over - yet pleasantly surprised by - why the police hadn’t taken it in their haul.

The bible isn’t really Noah’s Bible; that was just one of the things I would say to piss him off. This worked especially well, as Noah considered himself Hitchens incarnate, steadfastly believing in the toxicity of religion. In reality, it is just a little black notebook that he hauled around, religiously. Oh, the irony.

I picked it up, and immediately sneezed from the dust on its cover, which was strange. While the room was messy, with Noah’s crap strewn everywhere, it was still extremely clean: no dirt, dust, or grime to be seen. Noah was a clean freak it seemed, so where did all that dust come from?

For no conscious reason, I looked up, and saw, adjacent to where the bedroom wall met the ceiling, a slight gap. One of the ceiling’s rafters appeared to have moved slightly, creating a space not much wider than the spine of the bible. Later, on reflection, the only explanation I could think of, and boy did I dwell on this ever since that moment, is that the police must have slammed the door on the way out, knocking the rafter to the side, exposing the bible’s lair.

I flicked through the bible with a feverish fascination, reviewing Noah’s scribbles and comments, that ranged from flat out mundane - ‘meeting at 7pm’ - to those of a scarily intimate nature that I won’t go to the trouble - or perhaps am too scared - of repeating. Some pages of the bible were married to certain people’s names, with each name matched to an accompanying list summing that individual’s debt owed to Noah. I could not believe the figures. I quickly summed the debts and was lost for words. Paul was onto something - where was the money?

Strangely, I noticed that a selection of the bible’s pages had seemingly random numbers etched on them, down on the bottom right of each impugned page. While the numbers were somewhat camouflaged, shrouded by the mess of Noah’s thoughts and endless debt tables, there was no mistaking that they didn’t belong.

Not having much faith in what came next, I decided to write the numbers down and order them from the first appearing to the last.

Confirming the weakest of suspicions I had, there were 16 numbers.

Noah and I used to geek out over cryptography. It began when we were just 11 and 9, and Dad gave us some money one day to pop down to the corner store. Probably just to get us out of the house for a bit. On the way, we passed a garage sale, and as if almost crying out to us, a battered old book on codebreaking caught our attention. We bought it and raced home. We poured over that book for weeks on end, loving every puzzle and challenge it contained. From there, we used to spend hours honing the net for new techniques and strategies to develop codes that were unbreakable, that is, of course, unless you knew the key. At some point, this hobby ended, as most do.

Unless I was very much mistaken, that is what I was looking at - a code.

And I knew which type.

In theory, the first number represented a page in the book, with the second number being the number of lines down on that page, you’d then select the first word from that line. That sequence would repeat until you were finished. Only, the words I uncovered weren’t words at all, but more numbers: ‘-42.8652147.3304’.

I couldn’t believe it. My heart started racing at breakneck speed, giving barely any time for my mind to catch up - I knew what these numbers meant!

At that stage, three questions came to mind. Have I located the stash? Should I go and get the stash? Why did Noah hide the clue to his stash in his bible? It didn’t take me long to decide: yes, yes and who cares.

I quickly googled the numbers, and ran out to our car, keys in hand.

* * * *

10 minutes later I was there - the highway entrance to the Royal Hobart Botanical Gardens. The numbers Noah had coded were GPS coordinates. It clicked immediately. Thankfully, any true Hobartian knows we are 42 degrees south. Or maybe I just drink too much.

I scaled the fence and started walking toward the Japanese Garden section, guided by my phone. Of all places, it made sense. We used to play hide and seek in these gardens as kids for hours.

The Japanese Gardens were harrowingly beautiful under the moonlight, reminding me of Aokigahara Forest from a documentary I had watched the previous week. The abnormal eery silence pervaded my thoughts and magnified the gravity of my mission. Should I really be doing this?

Just when this doubt was taking over, my phone beeped, signifying that I was close to the correct location. I suddenly saw why Noah had written the GPS coordinates down, and not memorised the location - he had buried his bloody stash in the lake.

Having come that far, I decided to commit, swallowing my remaining reservations.

I began to wade out, using my phone as a beacon and light. My phone told me I had a 3x3m area to surveil, or thereabouts. Beginning on the north side, and using my feet as my eyes, I slowly set about canvassing the area.

Almost immediately, my foot came into contact with what felt like a large toolkit. Bracing myself, I reached down to retrieve it and shimmied back to the lake’s perimeter.

I used a nearby rock to smash the lock, and reached inside to find a ziplock bag containing a wad of cash. If Noah’s bible was telling the truth, there was 20 grand here at least!

Absolutely beaming, I chucked the toolkit back into the lake and turned to set off, when I heard someone deliberately cough behind me.

I turned around, and there was Paul.

His face said it all: gotcha.