Audi 2008 Annual Report Download - page 133

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Sydney
The Secret Heart
It came in an internal envelope, the kind that’s scrawled with names and depart-
ments, everywhere it’s been. Someone brought it from reception to my office
on the top floor. This is the newest tower in the city, and one of the tallest: if I
look out I can see the sparkling puzzle of the harbour, its bays and beaches, all
the way to the Heads and the ocean beyond. But I’m not looking out. I’m looking
at the note.
We have your wife. She is hidden deep in the city’s most secret heart; you
cannot find her. You have until dawn to come up with the money. Now, I’m
not the kind of person you would expect to receive a ransom note. I have some
money, but I didn’t make it in any flashy way. I made it slowly and assiduously,
month by month. I’m not prepared for this at all. And there are a number of
things about the note that strike me as peculiar. It asks for money but not for any
particular amount. It’s worded very strangely. The city’s most secret heart? It’s
almost poetic. I don’t know who would write a ransom note like that. It threatens
my wife, but I don’t have a wife. I used to have one, but I haven’t seen her or spo-
ken to her in almost ten years. And the note’s in her handwriting.
It’s a shock to see her careful script after all this time, but there’s no mis-
taking it. She copied it from a typewriter, you can tell by the ‘g’. And it’s eerie to
read these threats that she’s been forced to write about herself, as if she were
someone else. The whole thing feels like a dream.
From up here I can see the currents in the harbour, marked by the reflec-
tions of the light. I can see where the surface has been smoothed by a tanker or
a cruise ship. The sailboats scattered like breadcrumbs on the water, and the
proud spires stretching skyward. This is a city that has risen from the landscape,
its greens and blues, its sand fused to glass. It’s a city without a secret heart.
Aggie knew that better than anybody.
She was always trying to find out what the city was hiding. She wasn’t hap-
py with its dazzling surfaces, its natural and invented beauty: she wanted to go
deeper. But beneath the surface there was only another surface. So she would
have laughed when they made her write those words. Or she would have de-
spaired, knowing they were holding her in a place that didn’t exist. And it’s the
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Sydney
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