“Where’s the blood?” he asked.
She pointed to a couple of large ethanol containers standing on the floor near the freezer, filled with dark-red liquid. How did she know how to do it? he wondered, then reflected that she had seen him bleeding a chimp before dissecting it for the autoclave. It wasn’t difficult.
“That autoclave bag is too full,” he said. From what he could see, it contained a leg, or perhaps two legs (minus one foot), and an arm.
“How will I cut the head?” Sonja asked.
She had positioned Lek’s torso, which was all that remained intact, so that it lay straight on the table. The head was covered by the plastic tent. Parker peered through it, intending to take just an analytical look, but he found himself mesmerized, as he had been by the corpse in the zoo.
“Fantastic,” he murmured. The small dark-brown eyes were open and stared up at him with an obedient expression, quite flat now, due to postmortem loss of fluid. I am powerful, he thought with a thrill. “Would you like me to do it?” he asked. It would take only another ten minutes to get the carcass broken down and packed into four separate autoclave bags. He would call Somchai in to help them clean up at the end.
As he worked, he questioned Sonja. “Where did she die?” he asked.
“In the cabin,” his wife replied brightly. “I used my bike to carry her through the garden. What a lump!” She giggled. “Then I dragged her in here on the blanket.”
He nodded attentively.
“I bled it, and when it was stiff enough—that was about six o’clock this morning—I came downstairs and put it in the freezer. It was easy to maneuver by then.”
Parker was moving his head from side to side in admiration.
The bone saw worked on a foot pedal, which he pressed as he pushed the skull toward the whining blade. He wanted to ask how she had killed Lek, but a certain delicacy silenced him. He concentrated on the head, which fell neatly into two parts like a halved fruit: squishy pale flesh and a complex endocarp of pons, thalamus, cerebellum, and medulla. He turned to smile at Sonja. “You’re quite a gal,” he said.
She gave him a coy look above the edge of the blue cotton mask. “It’s not the first time.”
“Carolyn?”
She nodded. “I gave her a lift home from town one night—you were away, and I’d had dinner with Jason. She’d been out drinking and fucking, by the smell of her—seemed in a reckless sort of mood. She said, ‘John’s got chimps in U-1, hasn’t he?’ I said, ‘Come down and see for yourself.’ And she did.”
Parker chuckled. “Anyone else?”
“I shouldn’t tell.” Then she giggled. “Jason. But I forgot he was left-handed!”
“Tsk-tsk,” Parker said.
He unzipped the front flap of the plastic tent and lifted it back to remove the sawn fragments. “You’ll be pleased to know that in thirty-six hours we’re all leaving for Thailand. You, me, the boys, Sailor, and Lucy …” He glanced at the autoclave bags. “—And this too.”
Sonja sighed. “You’ve no idea what I’ve been through in the past four weeks,” she said. “But shouldn’t we do something about the Pembridge woman before we leave?”
“What do you suggest?” Parker asked.
Chapter Twenty
That night, a message flashed onto the computer screens of domestic airline booking offices around the country, announcing that due to the unserviceability of its aircraft, Kalair would not be able to provide its Good Friday and Easter Saturday flights between Kalunga and Sydney. Passengers were asked to make other arrangements, while being assured that the company’s service would return to normal on Sunday. Most Easter holiday travel was on Thursday, so the cancellation affected fewer than sixty people. Some managed to squeeze onto other flights, some hired cars, some booked to go by train, and others decided to stay at home.
Michael Romanus slept for twelve hours at the Airport Hilton and woke early on Thursday, feeling as if he had just alighted on earth. Outside his window, the sky was as blue as a butterfly’s wing.
In Kalunga, soon after dawn, Diana took the eagle to the flying ground and for half an hour made her glide from the fence post to her hand. Then she rested the bird while from inside the van she scrutinized Sonja’s house with binoculars. People were arriving for work in the underground lab.
She flew the wedgetail for another half hour, feeling all her anxieties loosen as she worked, aware only of the movements of her dark companion. When, finally, she held her arm rigid for the huge feet, the hood in her other hand ready to slip over the eagle’s head, she realized that a plan of action had formed in her mind: in the evening, she would return to the flying ground, walk over to Sonja’s house, and see if she could get inside the lab, as Billy had, and take photographs of the chimps.
Back in Fig Tree Gully Road, she had to spend the rest of the morning organizing flat-bottomed boats for the lake tour the following day. Grace knew the lake even better than Diana, and although she was no longer agile, they decided they would both go as guides. Diana told Grace her plan for the evening.
“I’ll leave the flying ground at dawn at the latest, so I’ll be home by six-thirty or seven,” she said.
Grace was silent. There was sorrow and alarm in her eyes.
“I’ve got to, Gracie. I can’t turn my back on what they’re doing out there. Eh?”
Grace heaved herself to her feet. “Let me come with you.”
“No! Absolutely not. Who’s going to look after the bird-watching people? They’ve paid to stay here.”
“Tell you what, then,” Grace said. “You take Billy and Tom and them night binoculars they stole. You tell ’em to stay back behind the fence and watch. Any trouble, they honk the horn, shoot in the air, make a noise, get them security guards running.” She sighed. “Wish I could still run. I’d come with you. Use t’ run like a wallaby when I was a girl.”
Diana put her arms around Grace. “Ah, you fat old thing,” she murmured.
At lunchtime, the boys arrived from school. Grace and Diana told them the plan, then calmed them down so that the van could be packed quickly.
At the flying ground, the sky was still bright but the sun’s heat was fading. Diana pulled up behind the low hill that obscured the Research buildings, and while Tom kept watch on Sonja’s house, she and Billy knocked over a section of the old fence so the van could be parked closer to the mountain, under the cover of the pines. “We’ve got to be invisible from the air,” Diana said.
They covered the roof and sides with a green tarpaulin to make the van less conspicuous. All through their preparations, Diana hoped Morrie might show himself and give the boys a thrill, but there was no sign of him.
• • •
Michael Romanus arrived with all his camera gear in Eddy Avenue, opposite Central Railway Station, at 10:00 A.M., ready to catch the special bus to Kalunga. He was not sure where it would pull up, but he recognized the group waiting for it. There were half a dozen young women with crew cuts and nose jewels, and some older ones carrying thermos flasks and novels. In a group apart, three men with beards were talking to a pair of lithe, tattooed boys. Another man was entertaining them by walking on his hands. I’ve been too long in Asia, he thought. He felt burdened, worldly, and sharpened—or was it blunted?—by ancient cultures and vices, and too full of anger about Raoul to share the high spirits of his traveling companions. Around the corner came a gaudy vehicle with SABOTAGE! painted along both sides. Underneath, it said SAVE AUSTRALIA’S BIRDS, OUR TREES, ANIMALS, AND GREAT ENVIRONMENT. There were paintings of animals, flowers, and birds around the message.
The driver had a clipboard with a list of names, which he called out in a loud, cheerful voice. When Romanus approached, he said, “Michael, right? Rang yest’dee?”
The bus rattled like a tambourine, jostling passengers against each other. It had no air-conditioning, and as it labored through the traffic on Paramatta Road, gusts of diesel exhaust blew through its open windows. Romanus covered his nose wit
h a handkerchief. A girl came to sit beside him. She had seen the figure on the gold chain around his neck. “Is that your star sign? Are you a Scorpio?” she asked. She had translucent skin, through which, at the temples, a vein pulsed softly. When he said, “No—it’s a Thai good-luck charm,” she was disappointed. He asked, “Do you know the woman who’s taking us out on the lake tomorrow? What’s she like?”
The girl glanced behind before answering. “Some people don’t like her. She shoots rabbits and foxes.”
And blokes, if she can, Romanus thought.
“Do you shoot?” she asked suddenly.
“Only with a camera.” She smiled serenely and from time to time touched his arm with long, pale fingers. He began to imagine how she would look naked: too thin, too delicate.
By late afternoon the bus was passing broad fields of green wheat that stretched to the horizon; some were interspersed with paddocks of ewes, their sides bulging with unborn lambs. “See the beautiful curve as she turns,” Romanus said to the girl. He got a camera out and focused on a pregnant ewe, but the bus shook too much for him to take a photograph.
When they arrived in Fig Tree Gully Road, the deep blue of the inland sky had faded and orange light was filtering in from farther west.
Romanus wondered how batty Diana Pembridge was and how he should tell her about the Siam chimps and Raoul. He was not sure what to expect. The Spaniard had called her “attractive,” but his taste in women was both catholic and bizarre. Romanus imagined a raw-boned country girl with a big voice and heavy thighs.
An old black woman opened the front door. Behind her was a large room with a wooden floor and Aboriginal paintings on its walls.
Everyone but him seemed to have organized an accommodation. Some were sleeping at the house; others were camping, and a few were booked into the motel. There was turmoil for twenty minutes while sleeping bags were unloaded and positions on the gallery floor staked out. The pale girl questioned Romanus with her lovely grave eyes, but he pretended not to notice. Until he had met the PRO rep, there was nothing he could decide. He followed Grace into the kitchen, where rows of scones were cooling on a rack.
“Been baking?” he said.
She gave a glum nod. The change from yesterday, when she had been so chatty on the phone, was strange.
She was shuffling between the refrigerator and the kitchen table with dishes of butter and jars of jam. “Diana and my boys, they go out after school,” she said.
“Where’d they go?”
She raised her chin, pointing. “Research.”
“Has Diana got a telephone with her?”
Grace shook her head and busied herself with serving the late-afternoon tea. Romanus found the back door and went out onto the terrace.
The sky was as red as fire beyond the tops of the tall trees in the garden. He pulled the phone from his shirt pocket and dialed. The android answered. “Good evening,” it said. “You have called the Exotic Feral Species and Microbiology Research Centre. If you wish to speak to someone in the residential complex, please press 1 now.” He pressed 1, and when a human voice answered, “Condos,” Romanus replied, “Dr. John Parker, please.”
At first there was no answer. Then the human returned to say, “I’ll try his wife’s place.” After a longish wait, during which the phone switched automatically from one line to another, a deep, melodious voice said, “Parker here.”
Here goes, Romanus thought. “John—Michael Romanus. We met a few weeks ago in Saraburi,” he said. “I’ve come to take some photographs on the lake.”
On the other end of the line, Parker’s tone changed to surprise.
“Good to hear from you so soon. Where are you?”
They chatted back and forth for a few minutes, until Parker said, “Why don’t you come out and stay with us tonight? I’m afraid I can’t offer to drive in and pick you up, but there’s an air taxi service. The pilot happens to be here with us. Wait a moment.” His hand muffled the receiver. “I’ve just had a word with him. He’ll whiz in to the airfield and pick you up. You’re in town, are you? It’ll only take you ten minutes to drive to the airfield. Then it’s another ten minutes to fly out here. No charge for the flight. It’s on me.”
Romanus returned to the gallery and from his gear removed the negatives of Somchai. He printed a note saying: “These are photographs taken by Raoul Sabea on 6 April showing Sila Somchai, a Thai chauffeur at Siam Enterprises, entering Raoul’s room in the New Dawn guesthouse, Khao Sahn, Bangkok. I believe Somchai subsequently murdered Sabea on orders from Otto Grossmann.” He signed his name and wrote the date, then scribbled a P.S.: “Going to meet Dr. John Parker at the Research.” When no one seemed to be looking, he went up the flight of stairs between the gallery and the kitchen and found a room set up as an office. The desk had a stationery drawer, with envelopes of various sizes. He addressed one “Diana Pembridge, Personal, Confidential, by hand,” slipped the negs and the note inside, and left it on the desk.
Downstairs, people were fretting that Diana was not home yet. The plan for the weekend was that they would leave early for the lake, and after spending the morning paddling through the lignum islands in flat-bottomed boats, they would have lunch and rest on the shore, then go on a second bird-watching expedition in the late afternoon. Diana had been organizing lake tours for several years, and some of the people had taken them before. “She’ll turn up,” they reassured the others. Romanus left quietly, under the reproachful gaze of the pale girl.
For ten dollars the bus driver took him to the airfield, one hand on the wheel while the other fed scones into his mouth. A very small Cessna was standing near the terminal shed, just as Parker had described. “Lotta gear,” Kerry Larnach remarked as he heaved a camera bag into the cabin.
A full yellow moon floated above them. Kerry made no effort at conversation, except to shout over the noise of the engine, “That’s The Research,” pointing at the lights of a miniature city shining out of the blackness. As the Cessna, bucking and waggling, dropped down toward the airstrip, Romanus saw the headlight of a vehicle coming to meet it.
John Parker was standing in front of a blue perimeter light, his long shadow stretched across the field almost to the wheels of the plane.
Larnach handed out Romanus’s bags. “I gotta get goin’. Got a lotta work to do,” he said. As soon as Romanus was clear of the propeller, Kerry turned the plane and began to taxi for takeoff. Parker came forward, hand outstretched, his shadow aping his movements. The light had turned one side of his face eerily blue, while the other side was in darkness. “And how’s our Bavarian friend?” he asked, taking one of Romanus’s bags.
“Ball of muscle, as usual.”
Parker opened the front passenger door of the Land Cruiser for Romanus to climb inside.
Three hundred meters away, on the edge of the flying ground, Diana turned to Tom. “Let me look at him,” she said. Tom handed her the night-sight binoculars, which she fastened on Parker. “Is he the man who arrived in his pajamas the other night?”
“I think so.”
“Billy?”
“Dunno,” Billy said. “Why don’t we go closer?”
Diana looked back through the dark to where she knew the van was parked. They had left a hurricane lamp burning inside it, turned down low, but its glow was hidden by the tarpaulin. She got her bearings from the dark mass of the mountain, outlined against the sky by moonlight.
“Okay, we’ll move forward,” she said, “but you tell me first: where’s the van?” They looked back, squinting, expecting to be able to see it. “What did I warn you?” she asked. “You’ve got to remember exactly, from the top of the mountain—”
“I know! I know where it is!” Billy said. He was pointing at the right place.
There was just enough light to walk to the Cyclone-wire fence without using a flashlight. A new lock had been put on the gate, but Diana now had a key. She decided to leave this gate open.
When they came out on the other sid
e of the small hill, they saw Parker and dashed forward, trying to get a closer look at the person he was waiting to meet.
“Quick!” Diana said, handing the binoculars to Tom. “Who is he?” Tom passed them to Billy, who shrugged. “Let me have another look,” she said. The airfield illumination interfered with the night sights, and she had only a blurred image.
Romanus climbed in beside Parker, who seemed to be in an expansive mood. He pointed out that just over there, on the higher ground, was where they were going. His voice and the sound of the engine covered the slippery noise Somchai made when he sat up suddenly behind the front passenger seat. He made two fast, precise movements: his left hand grabbed Romanus by the hair, while his right pushed the point of the knife into his jugular vein.
Chapter Twenty-One
Romanus felt an electric shock of terror, then suddenly he was calm. The knife was pressed so hard against his throat that moving was impossible.
“Great hospitality,” he muttered. The words came out half-strangled, but Parker had understood, all the same.
“I spoke to our friend Otto a few minutes ago. He’s keen to talk to you about money you owe him, Michael. He wants you to return to Bangkok with us tomorrow.”
By pushing air into the top of his lungs, Romanus found he could ease the pressure from his neck a little. He tried to answer, but only a gasp came out.
“Let him speak, dear boy,” Parker said to Somchai.
Somchai let go of the strong, dark hair and eased his knife back, but with his left hand he grasped his prisoner on the carotid sheath on either side of his throat. Romanus felt woozy from the diminished flow of blood. He took a deep breath, but as he did so he felt a sharp sting. This time Somchai had cut him deliberately.
“Listen, mate,” he panted, “the seam’s up. We’ve got photographs, we’ve got bills of lading, we’ve got enough evidence to close down Siam’s breeding farm and put Otto in jail. It’s all with the police.”
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