Savages

by Shirley Conran

  “What are you getting at?” Patty asked.

  “Can any of you ladies think why anyone connected with this island should have a grudge against your husbands?” He added apologetically, “I’m sorry to ask you at a time like this. I’m only doing it because it might have some bearing on how hard those bastards will come looking for us.”

  They shook their heads and murmured that they had no idea.

  Only Carey remained silent. She remembered last Christmas. Even if Ed hadn’t talked in his sleep, it would have been obvious to her that he was hiding something important. When your husband insists on turning one of the spare bedrooms into a second study, which he equips with a paper shredder, then has the infrared burglary system checked and rechecked by security experts, who also install a second, hidden wall safe, then a wife doesn’t have to be very smart to realize that something is going on which is too secret to keep in the office.

  Carey also remembered one January morning when Ed had been late for work. He’d snatched up his briefcase from the table in the hall; there must have been something wrong with the lock, because the papers burst out all over the floor. When Carey stooped to help him pick them up, he’d yelled at her and snatched the typed sheets from her hand, but Carey couldn’t help noticing that the tag line of the top sheet read “Area 7. Chromite. Grade reports/p2.”

  Carey knew that Area 7 was Paui.

  Hesitantly Carey said, “I think that Nexus has just had an important chromite find somewhere on this island. Something really big. Ed turned green when I found out accidentally. He made me swear never to mention it.” She added, “That’s the real reason why we came here.”

  None of those mining-company wives needed to have the importance of a major chromite find spelled out for them.

  Silvana said, “Arthur went to see the President yesterday, but he told me that it was just a formality, that all important visitors leave their cards at the palace.”

  Patty said, “A few months ago I heard Charley talking on the phone. He said something like, ‘Rocky’s been taken care of.’ Then a few minutes later Charley said, ‘Rocky can’t hurt us on Paui and he can’t help us on Paui, so why should we pay him?’” She hesitated. “I can’t be sure of his exact words. I only noticed the name, because of those Sylvester Stallone films.”

  “Are you sure of that?” Jonathan asked.

  “Well, I can’t be certain that’s what Charley said, but I am certain that he talked about someone called Rocky.”

  “Not Rocky,” Jonathan said. “Raki … General Raki. Remember, I told you I thought those might be his troops. Until recently he was in charge of the army, when the Nationalists were in power. What you just said sounds like reason enough for Raki to want Payback.”

  Patty said, “If we’re talking revenge, let’s get back to the States as fast as possible and report what’s happened to Washington and the United Nations. The UN is still responsible for these islands, isn’t it?”

  Jonathan said, “Yeah, but so what?”

  Patty said, “Well! We’re all eyewitnesses, who saw a bunch of thugs deliberately line up American citizens and shoot them.”

  In the darkness there was a general stirring. Indignation, rage and fury had given the women new energy.

  Patty said, “How can we get off this place, fast?”

  “Couldn’t Jonathan get to Queenstown?” Carey asked. “He could buy a boat for us.”

  Suzy said, “How much does a boat cost?”

  “We’re wearing our engagement rings,” Carey pointed out. “Silvana’s emerald alone ought to buy us an ocean liner.”

  Silvana’s twenty-one-karat emerald, mounted on an intricate twist of square-cut diamonds, was a masterpiece by Harry Winston. Carey’s ring was an antique Roman intaglio head, set in a thin, eighteenth-century gold setting. Suzy had a heart-shaped cluster of diamonds. Annie’s ring was a sapphire surrounded by diamonds. Only Patty had left her ring, a marquise diamond, at home.

  Jonathan said thoughtfully, “If I go into Queenstown, I’m going to be seen. Everyone will know that I wasn’t blown up in the Louise, won’t they? Things get around here as fast as they would in a three-shack village.”

  Carey persisted. “Couldn’t you buy us some dugout canoes from a native village? If we pay them really good prices?”

  “A dugout takes weeks to make, and great skill,” Jonathan said. “An islander wouldn’t exchange a dugout for a green-glass ring. Even if he was told it was valuable, and even if he believed it, where would he sell the ring?”

  “Queenstown,” Patty said.

  “Exactly, so the authorities would know about it within an hour. And remember that, by now, the authorities might be the Nationalists again. That’d mean Raki would come looking for you faster than you could launch a canoe.”

  Annie said timidly, “What have we got that’s valuable to the natives? What about your gun? Would that buy us a canoe?”

  Jonathan hesitated. “Almost everything we’ve just buried is valuable to a native. But these isolated fishing villages on the southwest coast aren’t always friendly.” He hesitated again. “Why should they barter for something, when they could just take it from us for nothing?”

  Alarmed, Suzy said, “You mean they’d steal our stuff?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why have we left it unguarded, if it’s the only stuff we have of value? How do we know the natives aren’t digging it up right now?”

  “No native will touch this beach.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s itambu—taboo.”

  “So what?”

  “Nothing would happen to you while you are in the taboo area, but you would have disturbed the spirits of their ancestors.”

  “So?”

  “So they’d kill you as soon as you’d left it.”

  * * *

  For breakfast, they cupped their hands and drank gritty water from the cave, then they each took another lemon drop, which they sucked slowly, trying to make it last as long as possible.

  Jonathan said, “The air in this cave ain’t getting in through the underwater entrance, so it must be coming in farther back. Carey, come have a look with me. We’ll take the light. Patty, see that nobody moves until we get back. You can’t break a leg in the dark if you don’t move.”

  Carey started to tremble. “Why me?”

  “I reckon you’re the least tired. And, you know, you got to get over it. We may be here some time.”

  Carey said, “I don’t feel too good.”

  “None of us do. On your feet.”

  By the dim beam of the flashlight, Carey and Jonathan moved cautiously back along the tunnel. Jonathan walked ahead, first checking out the filthy floor of the cave for two strides, then pausing to play the flashlight over the pale, and strangely beautiful, formations on either side of them.

  Carey shivered. “They’re awesome, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah. Reckon that’s why the natives don’t dare come inside. These caves are powerful magic.”

  Carey felt sick. She’d had a queasy feeling since they came in here, and now it was overpowering her. And that noise didn’t help. The continual, almost painfully high-pitched sound consisted of thousands of beeps that were synchronized with the breathing of the bats overhead. It was like shrill Morse code. It was driving her crazy; she wanted to scream.

  Every few steps Jonathan had to stop and clean the flashlight, because small flying creatures kept flinging themselves at the light. “They’re mostly moths,” he said hopefully as he dodged a barrage of wings.

  He turned abruptly at a sudden gasp from Carey. She shrieked, “Something’s clawing at me!”

  Jonathan shone the flashlight on her head. The feet of a baby bat had become entangled in Carey’s hair. The body of the bat was covered with brownish-pink fuzz, like moleskin, where the fur was not fully grown. Unfortunately for Carey, baby bats that cannot yet fly properly cling instinctively to anything that feels like fur, so its little f
eet clawed repeatedly in Carey’s hair; frantically, it beat its stubby little wings, the tiny thumbs feeling tremulously for the nipple on its mother’s stomach.

  Carey screamed in terror.

  Jonathan said, “Put your hands over your eyes and don’t take them off. Don’t move!”

  With his left hand, he attempted to dislodge the baby bat, which only became more frantic.

  Hearing her baby’s calls of distress, the mother bat circled down and whizzed around Carey’s head, homing in on her baby’s piercing calls. Balefully, the mother bat dived at the flashlight.

  Realizing it was useless to try to disentangle the struggling baby bat, Jonathan now whacked at it with the flashlight. It clawed even more wildly. At every tug of her hair, Carey screamed, and Jonathan whacked again.

  Eventually the bat fell limp. The warm body dangled over Carey’s hands, which she still held over her eyes.

  Jonathan took out his Swiss army knife, wedged the flashlight under his chin and hacked at Carey’s thick, toffee-blond hair until he had cut the bat from her head.

  Carey flung herself, shaking and sobbing, against Jonathan’s chest.

  He patted her back. “There, there, girl, it was only a bat. Not even a big one. Take your shirt off and wrap it around your head so it doesn’t happen again, and we’d better warn the others. I didn’t think that could happen. I thought bats had some built-in sonic device that made them able to avoid obstacles in the dark.”

  Shivering with fright, Carey wrapped her head in her tattered blue shirt, which left her wearing a pale blue bra and her blue pants. They continued cautiously up the tunnel, weaving between the fairy-palace stalagmites and picking their feet high, above the disgusting litter that covered the floor of the tunnel.

  It had been Carey’s job to count their footsteps but, after the battle of the bat, she forgot to do so. She huddled behind Jonathan, holding one hand protectively above her eyes, as if against the sun’s glare. She had been exhausted by terror, but now she was numbed, beyond it.

  Jonathan stopped abruptly. “I can see light.” He switched off the flashlight. They both peered through the dark, their eyes adjusting to it.

  Ahead of them was a faint lightening of the darkness.

  Jonathan switched on the flashlight again, and they moved forward. As they approached, he said, “It’s a natural chimney.”

  Jonathan played the flashlight over the roof. They saw a roughly cylindrical hole in the rock, about two feet in diameter.

  Jonathan said, “It must be covered by vegetation at the top.”

  Carey shrieked again and clutched at his shoulder.

  Jonathan said, “What is it, girl, another bat?”

  “No. Look over there!”

  Jonathan turned and shone the torch where she was pointing. He said, “So we ain’t the first visitors.”

  A yard away, propped against the wall of the cave, amid the bat shit, spiders, cockroaches, woodlice and other things that they had been crunching underfoot, lay the dusty, gray bones of a human skeleton.

  Jonathan leaned forward and shone the light on the dirty rectangle that nested in the pelvic bone. “It’s a camera,” he said. It was an old, dented K2 Pentax with a 28mm lens. In the dim beam of light, brass showed where the black lacquer had rubbed off the corner points.

  “Look!” Carey pointed. Something dangled from the skeleton’s clavicle.

  Jonathan squatted and shone the flashlight on a dust-covered disc that dangled from a thin chain; he rubbed it clean.

  “It’s gold,” he said. “It’s a St. Christopher’s medal.” He turned it over. “There’s something written on it.” He peered closer. “‘To Nancy, love from Michael.’”

  “So it was a woman!” Carey said. “How horrible.”

  10

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 1984

  Harry Scott heard it on the tail end of the news broadcast. Abruptly, he stopped shaving and turned up the transistor radio. Chin still pointing to the bathroom mirror, he listened to the rapid, flat Australian twang of the announcer. “Fighting broke out last night on the island of Paui with a military attack from the sea. All communications have been cut, but reliable sources report that a military coup is taking place, and that the leader of the Democratic Party, President Obe, has been deposed. Now for the cricket news….”

  Harry switched off the radio. So that was why he hadn’t been able to get through to Arthur on the phone this morning. As always, when thinking hard, he ran his lower teeth up over his upper lip. Broad shouldered and lean, he stood naked in front of the mirror and stared unseeing into the gray eyes above high, flat cheekbones.

  He picked up the wall telephone and dialed the American diplomat with whom he occasionally played tennis.

  “Richard? There’s been a coup d’état on Paui—fighting and no radio contact. I’ve got five of the Nexus board with their wives up there at the moment; they’re all U.S. citizens…. Sure, I’m going to get up there as fast as I can…. Yes, of course, but as you know, the twenty-four hours that follow an attack are decisive in a coup, and in the chaos anything might happen. I want to keep in touch with you, Richard, in case I need government help to get them out…. Of course I’ll deal with your consulate in Moresby, but I’d like you to inform the State Department immediately that they may be in danger.”

  His next call was to the Nexus chief pilot. “Morning, Pat. Remember that group you took up to Queenstown last Saturday? Well, we’ve got to get them off, fast. There’s rebel fighting on the island….. No, not tribal fighting, this sounds like the real thing. So when do we leave, and which aircraft will you take?”

  At the other end of the line, the chief pilot rubbed sleep from his eyes. “This is one hell of a wake-up call, Harry.” He was unable to smother a yawn. “We probably won’t be able to land at Queenstown, because if there’s fighting, some of it’s bound to be going on at the airport. There might be rubble and wreckage on the airstrip.”

  “But you could land the Lear if the runway was clear?”

  “If by some miracle the runway was clear, even if the control tower had been knocked out, yes, we could overfly and then go down.”

  “Would there be any danger of flight-path collision?”

  “No. Any other aircraft would either have flown out or been burned out, they’d be unlikely to be flying around the airport. But what might easily happen, Harry, is that everything looks calm, so we land. Then rebels appear with bazookas and take the Lear from us. Maybe shoot us, Harry.”

  “What about landing up at Mount Ida on the mine airstrip.”

  “Hasn’t got sand gear, so we can’t land a jet.”

  “So what do you suggest, Pat?”

  “You could fly up to Port Moresby, then hire a seaplane. Or an amphibian would be even better. You can land on the water or the strip.”

  “Okay. We’ll fly up to Moresby in the Lear. Let’s get there before lunch. Make sure you get an amphibian that’s big enough to take them all off. We’ll be collecting at least twelve people.”

  “We’ll have to take what’s available. We might have to ferry them out in two loads or more, but it’s only seventy miles to the mainland, and the head-hunting season finished in June.”

  “The main thing is to get them out. If you have trouble hiring a plane, then buy one. I’ll phone Finance before I leave. See you at the airport.”

  “Is this a danger-rate job, Harry?”

  “Let’s hope not, but I suppose so.”

  Harry’s next call was to his bank manager, who was still tackling his breakfast grapefruit. Harry arranged to pick up one thousand five-dollar bills and $100,000 in travelers’ checks from the Barclays branch at Kingsford Smith Airport.

  “Debit it to my private account,” Harry said. “I don’t have time to route this through our Accounting Department.”

  The two men then arranged a simple oral code that Harry would use if he had to give further financial instructions. Harry was to use the phrase “salt of the earth,�
�� the manager was to repeat it and then Harry was to say it once again. If the code wasn’t used, the bank manager would not obey instructions and would immediately report the telephone conversation to Harry’s Nexus deputy, Bruce Collins.

  Harry’s third call was to Bruce, and his fourth was to his secretary, Jean. She had been just about to leave for the office, when she found herself rerouted to Harry’s high-rise bachelor apartment.

  He said, “And do some shopping on the way in, please, Jean. I’ll need two bottles of Chivas Regal, some anti-malaria pills, water-purification tablets and insect repellent. And I’ll need a hundred and fifty packs of cigarettes and twelve decks of playing cards.”

  Harry knew that no official business could be carried out on Paui without greasing the palms of any number of officials.

  The bribes would range from cigarettes to large-denomination bills. Money would also be necessary to pay for the local lawyers, who would make any necessary political connections, draw up documents, monitor all proceedings and, even more important, check everybody’s graft percentages and ensure that no exasperating double-crosses occurred.

  Harry telephoned the restaurant in his apartment building and ordered a big “stockman’s breakfast” of steak and eggs because he didn’t know when he’d next get a decent meal. After that, with great reluctance, he dialed Pittsburgh. At seven in the morning on Wednesday in Sydney it was four in the afternoon on Tuesday in Pittsburgh.

  Harry spoke to Jerry Pearce, who was not only Nexus VP Finance but also Arthur’s deputy in his absence. After he outlined his plan, there was an expensive silence.

  Finally Jerry said, “You’re sure that it’s a good idea to go up there, rather than supervise whatever’s to be done from Sydney?”

  “Believe me, Jerry, nothing will be done unless I get up there and see that it’s done.”

  “Okay, Harry. We’ll contact the State Department straight off, and I’ll make sure that you have a clear line to any funds you need. And, Harry, I’d just like to add, on a personal level, that I think you were fucking crazy to let them go in the first place.”

  “If the Minister of Tourism tells you that one of the new governmental priorities is to encourage tourism, and the President personally invites your party to a government-sponsored luxury hotel, then you assume it’s safe. And you know why Arthur was keen to go. The concession renewals should have been signed months ago.”