Papua

by Peter Watt

  ‘It would be good to see the old country one more time,’ Paul reflected. ‘Good for the boys too. I have read that there are great changes in Germany today. It seems that Germany has once again taken its rightful place with the other western nations of the world.’

  ‘What about this Hitler bloke in Berlin and his Nazi party?’ Jack asked.

  Paul frowned. He had followed the former German corporal’s rise to power with some interest. ‘He and his ideas concern me a bit,’ Paul said. ‘I met him once when I was just back from the war. He came to my place and we sat one evening discussing the future of Germany. I got the impression that the man was a very disturbed individual. But possibly I was wrong. He seems to have the people on his side. I read that his party took a lot of seats in the Reichstag in the July elections this year. He must be giving the people what they want.’

  ‘From what I have read about him, the bloke worries me a lot,’ Jack said.

  Paul looked away. He did not totally agree with his friend. How could he know what it had been like for ordinary German citizens at the end of the war? The world did not care about the starvation and humiliation at the hands of the arrogant French, British and Americans. Despite his personal misgivings about Hitler, Paul conceded that the man had returned pride to the German people. And if he did eventually gain power but failed to deliver on his promised slogan of ‘Germany Awake!’ then the people would vote him out. After all, no German would ever allow a man to rule as a despot again, not after the bitter experiences of the Great War at the Kaiser’s hands.

  Jack realised that he had touched a raw nerve. It was a subject he and Paul had never broached before. He dropped it and sat quietly in his alcohol-induced pain. Christmas was just around the corner and he looked forward to being with the only people who he could call family – the Manns.

  Christmas 1932 came and went. In true festive tropical style a suckling pig was roasted on a spit and the tender white meat served up with baked yams, pumpkin and a spinach-like vegetable known as abika. It was all washed down with beer and schnapps to the blaring of the gramophone. Karin danced the foxtrot and tango with both Jack and Paul until she was exhausted. The boys disappeared after the gargantuan lunch to visit a neighbouring plantation that had as its main attraction two very pretty sisters about their own age.

  Ten days later Jack and Lukas stood on the deck of a coastal steamer to travel to the port town of Salamaua in the Huon Gulf. There Jack had arranged a meeting with one of his trusted employees who was returning from Christmas leave in the north Queensland town of Cairns. Jack was reflective on the journey, knowing this was a meeting of such importance that his – and his son’s – futures may be decided by its outcome.

  Lukas was impressed by the town of Salamaua on its sandy finger of land flanked by Bayern and Samoa bays. Stately palms and colourful but prickly bougainvillea added colour to the tropical jungles backing the township. Since the establishment of the gold fields inland, the little coastal hamlet had provided both comforts and necessities for the miners returning from the inland fields. It even sported a hotel: a long tin roofed building with a comfortable verandah to take in the cooling tropical breezes of an afternoon. Salamaua was an oasis of European tropical culture providing facilities not common in this new land.

  After docking, Jack booked into the hotel and got settled. Sitting on the verandah that evening with Lukas, he could not help thinking how much gold had changed this part of the world. Years earlier he and George had made their landing nearby on the Morobe coast to trek inland in search of George’s fabled Orangwoks and Jack’s real gold. Then the coast had been without any established signs of western civilisation, just the occasional isolated police outpost or missionary station. But amongst many things, gold had brought a meat freezer and cold beer to the coast – welcome fixtures at the Salamaua Hotel.

  Lukas badgered his father for a beer.

  ‘You have hardly started shaving,’ his father growled gently. ‘I don’t think that gives you the right to start drinking.’

  ‘How old were you when you started?’ his son shot back with a cheeky grin.

  Jack shifted uncomfortably. His father had been a heavy drinker and Jack had well and truly acquired a taste for beer by fifteen. ‘Go and order a beer for me and you can have a shandy.’

  Lukas leapt to his feet and went off to the bar. Returning with his lemonade and an added dash of beer for flavouring, he was not about to admit that he and Karl had indulged in a bout of drinking at a friend’s house during a break from school just before the final examinations. The result had been two very sick boys who had looked with some newfound respect upon the sermons concerning the evils of alcohol.

  ‘Ah, Dougal has arrived,’ Jack said as a stocky red haired man in his forties walked down the verandah towards them. ‘How was your Christmas leave, Mr MacTavish?’ he asked as he held his hand out to the Scottish engineer.

  ‘Canna get a good drop of malt whisky in Cairns,’ he snorted in his thick Glaswegian burr as he gripped Jack’s hand. ‘But it’s good to see you, mon. And who would this wee lad be then?’ he said with a grin.

  Lukas stood straight and took the Scot’s hand as it was offered. ‘Lukas Kelly, sir,’ he replied and felt the crushing strength of the Scot’s powerful clasp. ‘I am Jack’s son.’

  ‘Thought as much,’ MacTavish said when he let go Lukas’s hand. ‘Has the same blarney as his old man.’

  ‘Got you something when I was down in Sydney,’ Jack said, producing a bottle of expensive aged whisky from beside his chair. ‘Knew you might want a drink for what you have to tell me.’

  Dougal accepted the gift with a grateful sigh. It was his boss’s way to know what his employees’ needs were. ‘Is it all right to talk in front of the lad?’ he asked as he lovingly turned the bottle over in his hands to read the label.

  ‘Said he wanted to work his way down in my companies,’ Jack replied with a wry grin. ‘Sounds like from your reports last year that’s what we might all be doing if it is as bad as you say.’

  ‘It’s that bad,’ Dougal said as he took a seat and Lukas was sent to fetch an appropriate glass so the Scot could partake of his country’s traditional drink. ‘To put it in a nutshell, the gold has run out on the company’s leases and we are dredging mud and nothing else.’

  Jack felt as though the weight of that same mud was bearing down on him. When the New Guinea administration had finally granted mining leases Jack was quick to stake his claims along the stretch of river he and Paul had originally panned illegally. It was a rich stretch, promising many years of production with the right equipment. He had not expected the gold to run out so early and had invested a lot of money back in 1925 in purchasing the expensive heavy dredging plant required to exploit the type of gold field he had leased. The machinery had to be flown in bit by bit by aircraft, technology which had opened up island transport like nothing else before.

  At first the assembled dredge had produced gold in payable amounts, but each year since MacTavish’s reports had been more pessimistic, until the one just before Christmas that said he needed to brief his boss personally. Dougal understood loyalty and knew that if the news got out that the gold lease was drowning investors’ money in the mud of the jungle, Jack might go under. He would not trust his report to paper but instead wanted to speak to Jack in person before any decisions were made.

  Lukas returned with a glass and Dougal immediately poured himself a generous tot then leaned over to pour one into Jack’s empty beer glass. ‘To the good ship Hindenburg and all who sail with her,’ he said as he raised his glass.

  Jack responded accordingly. They had named the dredge the Hindenburg to honour the men who had died fighting on that part of the frontline in 1918. ‘To better times.’

  ‘What are you going to do, Jack?’ the Scot asked bluntly when he had refilled his empty glass.

  ‘You don’t think there is any chance of coming good?’

  ‘None. It’s been played out.’<
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  Lukas was not aware of the course of the meeting but he could see the stricken expression on his father’s face. He had never seen such barely concealed anguish before and wanted to ask what was wrong. But he knew it was not his place to do so for the moment.

  ‘We continue mining for at least another couple of months,’ Jack said quietly. ‘By then I hope to be able to transfer funds to pay out the operations up here. I have something going down in Sydney and all going well it will get us out of trouble. Just so long as the investors don’t get a whiff of anything wrong I will be able to keep up the supposed returns for their money. Then at the right moment, close down and sell off the equipment.’

  ‘Do you think you are in a position to pull it off?’ Dougal asked.

  ‘Like I said, so long as the word does not get out that the mining operations have gone belly up.’

  ‘I’m your boss man up here and I swear on the Cross of St Andrew, and the finest breweries in Scotland, that not a word will come from me.’

  ‘Thanks, Dougal,’ Jack said, as he slapped his mining manager on the shoulder. ‘I can promise that you will be well looked after when we get clear of this mess.’

  Dougal nodded and the three sat on the verandah as the heavy rain clouds overhead opened, drowning out conversation.

  The next day Jack and Lukas checked out of the hotel and sailed south for Australia. Jack well knew the fortune that had its basis in the gold of New Guinea now relied on his skills as a businessman rather than those of a prospector. Just so long as there was no leak. Otherwise how easily it could all come tumbling down around him.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Gerhardt Stahl closed the door against the bitter winds of a Munich winter and slumped in the big leather chair that smelt strongly of tobacco. He badly wanted a drink but was too tired to go to the cabinet to pour one. The January elections of 1933 had secured yet more seats in the Reichstag for Adolf. And yet his friend of their earlier days would not even see him anymore!

  The rebuffs he had received made Gerhardt seethe with anger. He and Adolf had shared the hardest times over the last decade before his so-called former comrade in the struggle had risen to his present powerful position in German politics. Had he not been a friend and devoted follower of Adolf’s from the day they had met, just after the war? On the streets back in ’23, had they not faced the bullets together, and had fled for their lives? And had he not visited Adolf in his cell after his arrest, and listened to his tedious dictation of his book Mein Kampf to that odd and colourless man Rudolf Hess? But over the years he had been quietly shuffled off to low ranked jobs in the party. His current job in the SA’s Intelligence Unit amounted to little more than procuring homosexual partners from the Gisela high school for Adolf ’s good friend Ernst Rohm. Gerhardt did not like Rohm one bit but he feared him greatly too. He was a coarse, brutal, battle scarred man whose desire for young boys was well known to all. He even openly boasted of his wickedness and yet Adolf not only tolerated him but also took him into his inner circle.

  It was as if Adolf wanted Gerhardt out of his life altogether. He shuddered, although a coal fire warmed the room. Was it possible that he may end up with a bullet in the head, that he knew too much about the party’s leader should Adolf acquire total control of Germany? The former German soldier who had fought for his country in the GreatWar was now in his mid thirties and at the prime of his life. For it to end now was not an option he wanted to entertain.

  He had another good reason to fear the future too. Although Ilsa was not his daughter by blood, he had grown to love her as if she were. She was twelve now, and so different in temperament to her mother, who had made it plain from the day she was born that she wanted nothing to do with the girl. And it had been so since. The young girl grew up in the care of nannies whilst her mother – his wife – had lived a wild life of parties and picnics with high ranking party members.

  Gerhardt rued the day that he had married Erika but she had appeared so vulnerable and desperate when she stepped off the boat in Hamburg. She told him about the baby and he had kindly sworn that it would never come between them. They had married in a quiet civil service in Munich and Ilsa was born three months later. At first he had to force himself to accept the child. All he knew about her heritage on her paternal side was that she was the daughter of some former Australian soldier who had raped Erika when she had been in Sydney. When she had recovered from the birth his wife was constantly out at night and had a steady supply of expensive presents from men she met as a result of the services she provided. It was well beyond his humble means to purchase the jewellery and new dresses she required to present herself at the lavish parties where, on behalf of the party, she solicited support from the industrialists to finance Nazi coffers. Gerhardt now doubted that his wife’s story about being raped was true. She was a born liar. But her striking beauty and innate sensuality had carried her further up the party ladder than his own loyalty to his friend Adolf.

  Gerhardt had long desisted from becoming enraged and engaging in shouting matches over his wife’s obvious infidelities. He tolerated her now merely for the fact that she had contacts and if he continued as her husband she would ensure that he was at least employed by the party. This she had promised him during a truce a few years earlier. It had in fact been Erika who suggested that the job in the Intelligence Unit of the SA would be a good place to be when Adolf finally came to power. Now it seemed to be proving the opposite and sometimes Gerhardt wondered if his wife was actually setting him up for his own execution, horrifying as the thought was. It was time to consider a plan to ensure his very survival.

  ‘Papa, are you home?’ he heard Ilsa call from the bedroom upstairs in their modest detached house in the city.

  ‘Yes, my little love,’ he replied in a tired voice. ‘I am downstairs.’

  He heard the patter of feet on the stairs and then Ilsa entered the room. She always took his breath away with her beauty, a physical replica of her mother but with a gentle soul and loving nature.

  ‘You look tired, Papa,’ she said and hugged him where he sat in his big comfortable chair. ‘I don’t suppose Mama will be home tonight,’ she sighed.

  Gerhardt felt her gentle love momentarily wash away his brooding thoughts. ‘Is she ever?’ he answered with a weak smile.

  Ilsa sighed again in sympathy for her father who had always been there for her whenever he could spare time from his important duties. ‘I don’t suppose so.’

  But Erika did return later that evening. Gerhardt had revived himself with a half bottle of schnapps, providing him with enough belligerence to confront her as she stood by the fire in a body clinging black sequined dress, her hand glittering with diamonds and rubies. In one hand she held a slender cigarette holder, in the other a flute of champagne.

  ‘There has been talk that your loyalty is in question,’ she said coldly as she sipped the bubbling wine.

  Gerhardt could see that she was in one of her moods where he would be belittled. ‘Who is questioning my loyalty?’ he asked in a tired voice. ‘One of your many lovers during some pillow talk?’

  ‘Don’t be so coarse,’ Erika flared, as he knew she would. ‘I was only telling you for your own good.’

  ‘Why don’t you just divorce me?’ Gerhardt said, quickly regretting his question. Despite all her faults he still desired her above all other women.

  ‘It suits us both that I am your wife,’ she retorted. ‘Until otherwise I will remain so. I will decide when that will be,’ she added in an icy, cruel tone.

  Gerhardt did not know what happened next except that a red rage came over him. Too many years of his wife’s contempt and infidelity had accumulated. She was on the floor and he was standing over her as she held her hand to her face, red and swollen from the savage backhanded slap. The champagne glass had shattered into a thousand crystal shards against the fireplace. ‘You want a lover? You can have me,’ he snarled as he bent to haul her to her feet, ripping the front of her dress to reveal
her small but perfectly formed breasts.

  The sudden explosion of Gerhardt’s temper had come as a complete surprise to Erika. For years he had been the butt of her scorn as a man she recognised as having no real future in the new Germany of Adolf. He had often expressed the opinion that what they had set out to achieve was going terribly wrong. There was no place in her life for an idealist. She was hungry for the trappings of power and had realised that it was through her links with the rising star of Adolf and his party that she would receive them. But Gerhardt was becoming a burden to her ambitions and she had often thought about how he could be removed.

  Gerhardt hurled Erika’s dress across the room and gripped her by the throat. She was gasping from lack of air and shock. He was not surprised to see that she only wore long silk stockings and a suspender belt under the dress. He could see the fear in her eyes and felt a savage elation. Where was the scorn now? He thrust his hand between her legs and felt a wetness that was not hers alone.

  ‘Papa! Papa! What are you doing?’

  He heard his daughter’s cry and felt the anger replaced by shame. As he released his grip Erika slumped to the floor. ‘You are an animal and I will see you dead if you ever touch me again,’ she gasped.

  ‘No more of an animal than most of the men you sleep with,’ Gerhardt said, rubbing his forehead to ease the throbbing. ‘I know the corruption, deceit and cruelty that has got your precious Adolf this far. I know that if we gain power Germany will not know peace in the next generation, that my daughter will become just like you and all the rest of the thugs who call themselves patriots.’

  ‘She’s not even your daughter,’ Erika said as she stood unsteadily. ‘She’s the daughter of a man twelve thousand miles from here.’

  Ilsa had remained in the doorway and her mother’s statement now hit her. With a stricken expression she turned to her father. ‘What does Mama mean?’

  ‘Your mother is trying to hurt you,’ he pleaded. ‘She doesn’t mean what she has said.’