Papua

by Peter Watt

  Jack smiled at the look of disappointment on the boys’ faces. Still, she was pretty enough to be a movie star.

  When all was secured aboard they cast off with Lukas at the helm. Jack went below to vacate his cabin for Victoria, who protested at his chivalrous gesture. ‘You get the most privacy here,’ he simply grunted, leaving her to unpack the single bag she had brought for the voyage. Jack was impressed with her economy; it was not often, from his past experience, that a woman could make any kind of trip without packing suitcases full of shoes and dresses – just in case.

  After he was satisfied that his passengers were comfortable and settled in for the journey he went above decks. Paul sat at the bow and gazed at the gentle roll of tropical waters as the lugger cut through the water with a soft hiss. Karl was in the engine room checking that it was all working well and Lukas remained at the helm, issuing orders to the native crew. Jack sat beside Paul to take in the vista of gently rolling sea.

  ‘If the weather holds up,’ he said to Paul, ‘then it should be a good trip.’

  ‘You know, Jack,’ Paul said, without looking at his friend, ‘it’s a funny feeling to be going back to a place I never thought I would see again.’

  ‘So why did you step in and volunteer to come with us?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Paul replied. ‘Maybe I needed a bit of adventure before I grew too old on the plantation.’

  ‘Kind of hope we don’t get too much adventure,’ Jack laughed softly. ‘All I want out of the end of this trip is the Yank’s money and a cold beer at the Moresby pub.’

  ‘That’s the funny thing about life,’ Paul said philosophically. ‘We make plans and something happens out of the blue to alter our lives forever. When we look back the smallest and seemingly insignificant thing that happens to us becomes the catalyst for much bigger things. Like you and I meeting that day in September 1918. How could we have ever guessed that our lives would become so entwined?’

  Jack knew just what his friend meant. As much as you planned for the future, something always came along to make you reassess your life. He had never considered buying a boat to make his living until the idea came to his son on a ferry trip after being jilted by a young lady. Lukas had told him the story on the voyage to Papua and Jack had been bemused by his son’s approach to adversity.

  That evening Paul pleasantly surprised Jack by cooking up a very good fish curry and rice for the crew and guests. As part of his contribution to the expedition he had volunteered to relieve Jack of catering duties but Jack had no idea that his friend could cook as Karin had always prepared the meals.

  It was a calm night and they had anchored offshore not far from the fire lights of a native coastal village. The evening air had just the touch of a chill in it. Jack went above, leaving the crew and guests listening to a collection of jazz records on Lukas’s gramophone. The cameramen engaged in cards and conversation. Jack sat on the deck holding a big mug of coffee between his hands and gazed at the distant village nestled at the edge of the jungle.

  ‘I thought you might be here,’ he heard a voice say from the hatchway. Victoria climbed up to join him. She wore an oversized woollen jacket and a pair of slacks.

  ‘Plenty of room,’ Jack said. ‘Just pull up a bit of deck.’

  Victoria laughed softly as she sat down with her knees up and stared out at the landward side of the lugger. ‘I just wanted to thank you for giving up your cabin,’ she said. ‘But I have travelled rough before and would be just as happy to sleep on the deck or in the galley.’

  ‘Lady’s privilege aboard the Erika Sarah,’ Jack said. ‘It would be bad luck not to, considering the name of the good ship.’

  ‘Was that your wife’s name?’ she asked and added, ‘I heard a lot of tales about you from the old hands in Moresby. They call you the Captain. I also heard that your wife died back in ’19. I am sorry for that.’

  ‘So they call me the Captain,’ Jack chuckled and Victoria turned to look at his profile in the dark. She could not consider him dashingly handsome but he had the looks of a man with a sense of humour, despite what she had learned of his hard past.

  ‘Is that because you are the captain of the boat?’ she asked and he shook his head.

  ‘It was my rank as an officer in the army during the war,’ he replied. ‘Aussies always seem to find a name for you other than the one you were born with. Usually it has an irony, like calling a red-haired man Bluey. I like to think that my son is captain of the boat although I may own it.’

  ‘I also heard that you once went into unexplored territory with an English lord and discovered a gold mine. But then your partner was killed by the natives, and you later turned the find into a fortune, until recently when it all went bust.’

  ‘Sounds about the extent of it,’ Jack said. ‘Easy come, easy go. But since you seem to know so much about me how about you tell me something about yourself. For a start, Victoria is not a name I would consider being veryYank.’

  The young woman ducked her head and smiled. ‘My mother was a great fan of the English royal family. We republican-minded people rid ourselves of royalty but secretly yearn to have a royal family of our own. My mother admired QueenVictoria for all her virtues and named me in her honour when I was born twenty-eight years ago.’

  ‘Thought you were younger,’ Jack grunted matter of factly.

  ‘Well, thank you, sir,’ Victoria replied, laughing. ‘Any lady over twenty-one wishes to be thought of as younger than her actual years. You know, I have noticed that you Aussie men are not as prone to flattering a woman as American men are, so I accept your observation as a real compliment.’

  ‘So tell me a bit about yourself then,’ Jack said, sipping his coffee and turning back to stare at the village.

  ‘Well, there is not much to say really. I am the daughter of a lieutenant colonel in the American army and have spent most of my childhood on army bases in the Far East. I attended college in California and speak French and Japanese.’

  ‘Japanese,’ Jack mused. ‘An unusual language for a woman to speak. Not much call for it in these parts of the world unless you are trying to negotiate with old Isokihi to charter his boat. So why Japanese as a language?’

  Victoria seemed surprised at the Australian’s interest in what she had achieved – most men preferred to shower her with sweet words than engage in meaningful conversation. She knew others considered her very beautiful but she was intelligent enough to know that life soon enough took its toll on beauty alone. Travelling with her father after her mother had died of cholera in China when Victoria was still very young had given her an independent outlook as well as an insatiable taste for travel and adventure. She had come close to marrying and settling down with successful and handsome young men on two occasions but realised in the end that they considered her little more than an ornament on their arm. So it was nice to be in the company of a man who actually seemed to consider her a person first. But his question about her interest in the Japanese language went beyond an answer she was in a position to give.

  ‘Oh, it was just one of those things,’ she said lightly. ‘There are many Japanese living in California and it was easy to practise speaking the language.’ She noticed that Jack was staring at her intently and could see the slightest smile in his expression.

  ‘So you are not a girl Friday after all,’ he said bluntly and she shifted nervously. ‘And Joe Oblachinski is not really a film producer from Hollywood. My guess is that you are both here to collect a bit of information about this part of the world. I suppose you can say I am playing what you Yanks call a hunch.’

  Victoria pulled away from his steady gaze. ‘Oh, what the hell!’ she blurted. ‘I can’t see why you shouldn’t know a few facts. You are, after all, a patriot to your country from what I have learned about you, I suppose you have a right to know. Joe really is a film producer and I am acting as his secretary for this trip. But we are also taking footage for our Defense Department who want to get an idea about the terra
in in this part of the world.’

  ‘Here?’ said Jack in disbelief. ‘What the hell do they reckon is going to happen out here? I thought we’d be the bottom end of the world to youYanks.’

  Victoria continued, a little reluctantly. ‘There are some military analysts who believe that we could be at war with Japan over control of the Pacific and Papua is part of the Pacific. A kind of bottom hinge to a door that controls who gets to own the big water between you and us.’

  Jack burst into a soft laugh and raised his mug. ‘You are definitely a very interesting lady and I salute you for what you are doing.’

  ‘I am not a spy,’ Victoria quickly added. ‘I just volunteered to pick up a bit of information while I was over this way. My father works in Washington and I am doing this more as a favour for him. What I am actually doing is writing a book about this part of the world.’

  ‘Yanks don’t even know that Papua and New Guinea exist,’ Jack said in a teasing tone. ‘So why would anyone in your country be interested in your book?’

  ‘Well, it’s not exactly about Papua,’ Victoria replied. ‘I am writing a novel about people who live on the edge of life itself in exotic places. Papua is a perfect place to research. It still has lost tribes and the people are as savage as the tribes were in Africa half a century ago. I am writing a kind of adventure story like those written about Africa by Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.’

  ‘You strike me as a young woman who knows where she is going and knows what she wants,’ Jack said softly.

  ‘You got that right, buster,’ Victoria said. ‘Now how do I go about getting a cup of coffee around this joint?’

  Jack laughed and went below decks. For the next few hours as the Southern Cross wheeled slowly overhead, they talked about their lives until they were aware that the low din of voices had ceased and both passengers and crew were asleep. Victoria bid Jack a good evening and went below to the cabin whilst Jack continued to sit, wondering about the future and whether or not the lugger would make them a respectable income. But his musings were occasionally interrupted by thoughts of the woman who had sat beside him with her knees under her chin and had talked so easily about everything and nothing. He looked down at his unfinished coffee, now cold, then stood and stretched his legs to go below.

  ‘Bloody women,’ he growled softly as he tossed the contents of his mug over the side where its splash disturbed the calmness of the tropical night. It seemed that a woman was always the turning point in his life – and not always for the better. But why put Victoria in the same category, he chided himself. After all, she might be a woman of culture and with a vision of what she wanted, but he hardly knew her.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The missing file was not discovered until Gerhardt, Erika and Ilsa were somewhere in the Indian Ocean, steaming for the port of Fremantle in Western Australia. Colonel Spier sat at his desk with his head in his hands trying to puzzle out how the file had disappeared. And for some reason, his thoughts kept returning to Gerhardt Stahl. A tiny flame of suspicion was rapidly becoming a raging fire of anger at himself for falling so easily for the man’s cunning.

  ‘Neumann!’ he bellowed down the corridor. ‘Report to me immediately.’

  The information officer scrambled from his desk and was soon standing stiffly in his superior’s office.

  ‘About six weeks ago you took a report on Frau Stahl, did you not?’

  Neumann appeared puzzled. ‘No, sir,’ he replied. ‘If I had I would have remembered, considering her husband works for us.’

  Spier let out a breath of exasperation. Why hadn’t he followed up on his gut reaction at the time that something was amiss about the whole matter? A husband, no matter how dedicated to duty, does not allow such a report to pass so easily through his hands. And now he suspected that Stahl had cunningly manoeuvred him to Erika’s bed when . . . Speir instinctively touched the scrap of paper in his pocket. So that’s how he did it!

  ‘Bring me the nightwatchman’s report from . . .’ He thumbed through his diary to ascertain the night he had visited his subordinate’s house and Neumann hurried away to find the log sheets. When he returned with them, Spier scanned the spidery handwriting of the old man. There was nothing in the report about a visit from Stahl but that did not surprise Spier. The old man was probably senile and forgot to record it. If Stahl knew the contents of the missing file they were both in serious trouble, Spier for his negligence if it was ever discovered how Stahl had stolen the foolishly recorded safe combination. Fortunately he had thought to have Stahl’s movements monitored between his going on leave and departing on the ship from Hamburg. Even on a stopover in England agents had kept an eye on him but had nothing unusual to report. Stahl had not left the ship nor had any visitors.

  God in heaven, Spier thought. New Guinea was at the other end of the world. But many German citizens still worked in the country as Lutheran missionaries and gold miners – surely it was only a matter of activating one of the contacts and having him eliminate the troublesome former employee. As it was, the killing would be sanctioned at the highest level anyway. That was not a problem.

  A telephone call to the right person would identify the most appropriate agent to set up the execution in New Guinea or Papua when Stahl arrived. Ah yes, Spier thought. I remember the man who is our contact in that part of the world. Under the circumstances a rather unusual and interesting person, so trusted and apparently insignificant to the Australian administrators that they allowed him to work freely amongst them during the war. But Spier frowned when he recalled a recent report on the unreliability of their Papuan contact and the possibility that he could even be a double agent. Still, he had his own weakness – if it ever leaked out that he had been working for the Kaiser’s interests during the war he would be ruined. He would cooperate, even if it took blackmail to persuade him.

  It was time to activate him again, time to send the telegrams in the old code. He was sure that the agent would remember his briefings of just over twenty years earlier. After all, without the assistance of the former Imperial Intelligence system the man would not be as wealthy as it was reputed he was.

  And there were those sympathetic to the Nazi ideals even amongst the Australians. Another very important file in the safe had the names of such people and organisations scattered across the globe. He did have a vague recollection of a name in Australia with commercial links to German industry. He took the file from the safe and thumbed through the folder. There was the name, Quentin Arrowsmith. Yes, it was still possible to reach across the ocean to faraway Australia and eliminate a potential traitor. Stahl could not escape from the reaches of the Nazi party. There were even many non-Germans who were sympathetic to the ideals of Adolf Hitler.

  As he stood on the deck of the passenger ship, gazing at the unfamiliar night sky, Gerhardt was blissfully unaware of the telegram transmitted by the undersea cable on its way to Papua. But he was aware that his old colleague Adolf Hitler was now chancellor of Germany as the news had reached them on a stopover in Ceylon. What he had dreaded had come to pass, and he breathed a sigh of relief to have managed to leave Germany before the state apparatus was Adolf’s to use for his own ends.

  Erika was her old self again towards him and had insisted on separate cabins. Ilsa shared a cabin with her mother whilst Gerhardt was with three others. They were young British men on their way to Melbourne to take up posts with an English bank that had offices in Australia. He found them rowdy and preferred to return to the cabin after they had retired so he did not have to associate with them.

  The passenger ship was steaming towards the west of the Australian continent, a day away from soil and safety. Even as Gerhardt considered how he would pass on his information to the Americans via the Australian government, another man was being sought by a code almost forgotten to him.

  The Papuan agent had agonised over the mission, but knew that rejecting it would mean that his German controllers would somehow make it known that he had been a s
py for them. He knew he had too much to lose, and so now stood in the Port Moresby post office and handed the letter to the postmaster.

  ‘Haven’t seen you in town for a while,’ the postmaster said as he took the letter. ‘I heard a rumour that you might be leaving Papua, is that right, Mr Sen?’

  Sen nodded as the postmaster gave the address on the letter a careful look. It wasn’t such an unusual destination. And business dealings with the Dutch who controlled the territory west of the Papuan border were common enough.

  Sen prayed that he would be able to report that his mission had failed, despite his best attempts to contact the man who would be the assassin. This assignment was too close to home, involving people he personally knew and respected. But he had taken the silver as had Judas Iscariot almost two millennia before.

  The man who would receive the coded letter via a Dutch official, sympathetic to the Nazi cause, was a man the sender despised. He was a cold-blooded killer of Irish descent by the name of Tim O’Leary. Both men had worked together during the war to spy on the Australians in Papua and New Guinea and it seemed to Sen that he would never be free of this unholy alliance.

  THIRTY-THREE

  ‘There was an old canoe builder I met when I was up the Fly River years ago,’ Paul said across the small table bolted to the floor in the airy cabin. ‘He might still be alive.’

  Joe Oblachinski steadied his cup of coffee between his hands as the Erika Sarah rose and fell on the gently rolling waters of the Gulf of Papua. They were off the mouth of the mighty river and the normally blue and clear salty waters were now littered with the brown and green detritus of the jungle. ‘From what you have told me about him, he sounds like an interesting character,’ he said as he took a sip. ‘You think you could find him after all these years?’