by Morris West
Chapter 5
THE aircraft levelled out at eight thousand feet and through the starboard port I could see its shadow darting like a bird across the green carpet of the hinterland.
Eastward was the sea and the reef and the jade islands. Westward, far beyond our view, were the parched brown plains of the cattle country. Below us was the lush coastal belt, where the monsoons watered the low hills and filled the swamps, where the ibis gathered and the brolgas made their mysterious bird-ballet on the mud-fiats.
Here were the canefields and the pineapple plantations and the groves of papaws and the spreading mango-trees. Here were the lush pastures of the milking herds. Here were the lean, slow-spoken men of the north; the canecutters, the mill-hands, the drovers who walk with the lounging roll of saddle-bred men. Here are the sad, lost people bred from the old race and the new, whose blood is tinctured with the blood of China and Japan and the Gilberts and the Spice Islands.
Here the houses were built on stilts so that the wind could blow all about them and cool them after the steaming lazy days. Here was the riot of bougainvillea over creaking veranda-posts and galvanized roofs. Here men were rich because they had time to spend. Here men were poor indeed if they could not find a friend among the open-handed people of the Queen’s own land. Here there was work for any man who cared to put his hand to it. And if he cared for nothing but to nibble a grass twig on the veranda steps, why, he might do that, too, and be damned to the rest of you.
To me, Renn Lundigan, riding high between a blue heaven and a green earth, there came a curious calm, a sense of release, as if a navel-cord had been cut and I were born into a new, free world, remote from danger, emptied of memory, beyond the ache of desire and the pain of loss.
I was headed for Bowen—a small harbour town where the tropic lushness covers the scars of the cyclones and the sudden storms. From Bowen I must travel south again, doubling back on my tracks for fifty miles. At first site this might have seemed a folly, since the aircraft would have set me down at my destination without the fatigue of three hours on the antique railway service. But this did not suit my book at all.
My town was smaller even than Bowen. A stranger arriving by air is either a tourist or a commercial traveller. As such he is an object of courteous but lively interest. His every movement is a subject of gossip among the fraternity in the bar or the lounges under the shop-front verandas.
Come in by train, dusty, crumpled, irritable, and they are prepared to take you at any value you care to set—stock inspector, commission agent, fisheries man, or a clerk from one of the sugar-mills. If you pay your score and don’t talk too loudly or spend too much and show some knowledge of the local scene, they’ll leave you to your own devices and forget the questions they meant to ask you, because it’s too hot to remember.
My knowledge of the local scene was pitifully inadequate but I was counting on Johnny to fill in the gaps for me.
His full name was Johnny Akimoto. He was the son of a Japanese trochus-diver and a Gilbertese woman. The mother’s blood was stronger, and except for a curious greyness of complexion and an Oriental tightness about the eyes and cheekbones Johnny would have passed for a full-blooded islander. Ever since the blackbirding days, when island men were shanghaied for work on the canefields, these curious racial mixtures have been found all along the Queensland coast.
Johnny himself had worked the trochus-luggers. He had sailed with the pearlers and dived on the deep beds. But when the war came and there was no more work for a skin-diver Johnny became an odd-job man. He had been houseboy to the Americans, rouseabout on a tourist island, engine-hand on a fishing-boat, truck-driver for a local contractor. Everybody knew Johnny. Everybody liked him, and when Jeannette and I had run ashore in cyclone weather it was Johnny who mended our sails and repaired our sheathing and painted the hull and read us wise lectures on the offshore weather in the bad season.
It was Johnny who had helped me trace the course of the Acapulco galleons. When I had told him of our first wild hopes of the Dona Lucia he had nodded approval and promised that one day he would dive with me round the reef of the Island of the Twin Horns. A wise, quiet man, Johnny Akimoto. A gentle, loyal man. A lonely, lost man among the friendly people of the coast.
I thought of Johnny as the plane thrust northward. I dozed and dreamt of Manny Mannix and the girl who had sold me back my coin for fifty pounds. I woke to find the hostess at my shoulder warning me to fasten my seat-belt. The plane banked sharply over a stretch of blue water. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I saw a bellying wind-sock and a huddle of iron-roofed sheds. We were coming in to land.
We sweltered in the dusty waiting-room while they unloaded our baggage. It was mid-afternoon and the sea breeze would not come for another hour. I found myself in conversation with a tubby fellow in an alpaca suit. He told me he was a retired bank manager. He told me he was going to join his wife and daughter on a luxury island offshore from Bowen. He told me how much it was going to cost him. He told me how little he was going to enjoy it. He told me how the heat gave him rashes and the cold gave him bronchitis. He told me his golf handicap and his ambition to raise prize dahlias. He told me . . .
“Mr Renn Lundigan?”
The airport clerk was at my elbow.
“That’s right.”
“Telegram for you, sir. Came in just before you landed.” He handed me a buff envelope with a red border. It was franked “Urgent”. I slit the envelope and unfolded the message form. The office of origin was Brisbane. The lodgment time was half an hour after midday. The message was brief and hearty as a handshake:
GOOD FISHING COMMANDER STOP BE SEEING YOU STOP
And it was signed “Manny Mannix”.
I crumpled the paper and thrust it into my pocket. The tubby bank manager looked at me curiously. He wanted to get on with his story. I turned away and left him gaping. I felt suddenly sick and lonelier than I had ever been since Jeannette was taken from me. I wanted very much to talk to Johnny Akimoto.
The train journey was a slow torment. I was hot, dusty, beset with flies and badgered to insanity by a pair of small boys who whined continuously for sweets and drinks while their mother nagged vainly for peace.
We stopped at every siding while the guard exchanged news with the station staff. We were shunted on to a loop and waited three-quarters of an hour for the north-bound train to go through. The green country which had seemed so rich and desirable from the air was now in the grip of a drooping misery which matched my own depression. The friendly people of the north were a drab and garrulous race. Their children were monsters. Their transport service was a primitive horror. Their greetings were an intrusion on my privacy. Their gifts of newspapers and fruit and lemonade were a presumption not to be borne. By the time the journey was over they had written me down as a cross-grained boor. Looking back, I find I agree with them.
Manny’s telegram had shocked me deeply. The first blind rage passed quickly and then fear took hold of me. I did not believe for a moment that Manny’s threat to kill me was anything more than a boast to impress a woman. But the fear remained—fear of losing something I did not yet possess, but which I had struggled and schemed and gambled to attain.
More than this, I knew the power that lay in Manny’s hands. Money-power. Power to buy a man here and a piece of information there. Power to plan his moves like a chess-game; to check me here and circumvent me there, to match any move of mine with another shrewder, swifter and more effective. I thought of the three crates of equipment in the airways office at Brisbane and wondered if he could do anything to divert them.
I remembered that Manny could pay for a charter flight and might even now be waiting to greet me at the hotel. I wondered what I would do if he were.
But he wasn’t. I was the only guest. I could have the best bedroom with the iron bedstead and the big mosquito net and the cracked ewer and basin. I could have free use of the single bathroom and walk fifty yards to the lavatory in the yard.
I could drink alone in the commercial room. I could rise at seven thirty and breakfast alone at eight. I could accept mine host’s wheezy invitation and join the mill-hands and the fishermen telling bawdy stories in the bar. They were good boys. They’d make me very welcome. But I wanted none of that. I wanted a shower and a drink and a meal—and then I wanted to see Johnny Akimoto.
I found him where I had found him the first time. In a small slab hut with the bush at its back and the sand-dunes in front. The coral paths were raked clean every day. There was a trailing of bougainvillea and a hibiscus-tree and a border of sweet gardenia, and a tall frangipanni whose naked branches thrust out like the symbols of some ancient phallic cult.
A petrol lamp hung on a nail in the door-jamb and Johnny was sitting on a packing-case splicing hooks on a trawl-line. He wore a hibiscus-flower in his frizzy hair and his only clothing was a pair of denim shorts.
He looked up sharply when he heard my footfall and his face broke into a gleaming smile of surprise and welcome.
He came to me, hand outstretched.
“Renboss!”
“That’s right, Johnny. Renboss.”
It was the old name, from the old happy time. It brought me very near to tears. Johnny pumped my hand and patted my back and made me sit down on another packing-case which he dragged out of the shadows into the small circle of light.
“What brings you here, Renboss? You staying long? How are things with you? You are well? You look tired, but that’s the travelling, eh?”
The questions came tumbling out in Johnny’s precise Mission English and all the time he was looking into my face, searching like an anxious mother for the truth about a child.
I told him the truth.
“I came to see you, Johnny.”
“Me? That’s nice, Renboss. I often thought about you . . . and the missy.”
“The missy is dead, Johnny.”
“Oh, no. When?” His mild eyes were full of sympathy.
“A long time ago, Johnny. A long, lonely time.”
“You got no other woman?”
“No other woman.”
“And you came back here to see Johnny Akimoto. That’s good, Renboss. I’ve got a boat now. A good boat. We go out on the roof, eh? You come out and fish with me, eh? We take a trip together to Thursday Island . . . Moresby, maybe.”
“We take a trip, Johnny . . . yes . . . but not to Thursday . . . to my island. . . . ”
“Your island?” He looked at me in momentary puzzlement, then he grinned happily “Oh, yes, I remember. The island of the treasure-ship, eh? You say she’s your island?”
“I’ve leased it, Johnny. It’s mine. We’re going diving for the Dona Lucia. I want you to come with me.”
Johnny was silent. He turned his hands palm upwards and seemed to study the lines and creases in the flesh. Then after a moment he fished in his pocket for a cigarette and handed one to me. We lit up. We smoked for a few moments. listening to the wash of the water and the searching voice of the wind.
Then, Johnny spoke, quietly, professionally.
“To do a thing like this, Renboss, you need a boat.”
“I’ve got money to buy one, Johnny.”
“You need a diver and equipment.”
“We skin-dive, Johnny. We use an aqualung.”
“You have dived before, Renboss?’’
“A little. A practice dive or two . . . no more.”
“Then you have to learn much before you make a working diver.’’
“That I want you to teach me, Johnny. Also, I have a list of exercises from the man who made the aqualung. He says I can train myself to work in twenty fathoms.’’
“Twenty fathoms!” Johnny was shocked. “Too deep, Renboss . . . too deep for skin-dives. . . .”
“It can be done, Johnny. This is not naked diving. A man can breathe down there. . . .”
Johnny shook his head. “This is new to me. I don’t like the sound of it.”
“Will you come with me, Johnny? Will you help me buy a boat and get stores and——”
“No need to buy a boat,” said Johnny quietly. “We use mine. She’s lugger-built. Old when I bought her, but I patched her up and she will sail you anywhere. The engine is new. She will make eight, ten knots if you want.”
“All right then, I rent the boat. I pay you wages. You come to the island and work with me. Is that the way you want it?”
Johnny nodded soberly. “That’s the way, Renboss. Easy, quick—no trouble. You try to buy a boat round here. They sell you a bad boat for a good price. Or a good boat you can’t pay for. This is the Reef, Renboss. A man who does not look after a boat finds the teredo eating it. Then he tries to sell it to someone who doesn’t know about teredo . . . you see?”
I saw. I knew the teredo, the small mollusc that bores into the timbers in the warm latitudes, eating a boat as the white ants eat a house. There is only one remedy—sheathe your boat with copper to the waterline or paint her over and over with bronze paint till she has a new skin impervious to the sea-worm. The boatmen on the Queensland coast are like the horse-copers of Kerry . . . and more than one is a lineal descendant of the same fabulous rascals.
Besides, another thought had occurred to me. Johnny’s boat was a lugger, a lolloping awkward craft if you try to sail her too close to the weather, but a deep-water boat none the less, safe as a bank and comfortable in the Trades. If we raised the treasure-chests from the Dona Lucia the whole find would be treasure-trove, the property of the Crown, and I was at the mercy of the Crown for whatever payment might be made by way of reward. But with Johnny’s lugger, with Johnny’s knowledge of the islands, we could up anchor and head north until we found a Chinese who would pay notes for minted gold, or an agent who needed gold to pay for smuggled guns. It’s flourishing business in the Celebes and in the China Straits and for gold you can name your own price and your own currency. I didn’t speak the thought to Johnny. Johnny might not approve. Besides, there would be time enough later.
Johnny smoked quietly, weighing his next question. His face was in shadow, but his eyes were intent on my face.
“Renboss, you are afraid of something. What is it?”
“I’m coming to that Johnny. It’s a long story.”
“If we are to work together, Renboss, I should know the story.”
I told him. I told him about Manny Mannix and the girl in Lennon’s Hotel. I told him about the telegram. I told him how I feared Manny Mannix and the power that money put into his hands.
Johnny blew smoke-rings and watched them drift away on the eddies of the wind.
“We should get out quickly,” he said.
“I’m ready to move whenever you are, Johnny.”
“We need stores, first.”
“When can you get those?”
“Tomorrow. Stores and a medicine-chest. Accidents can happen on the Reef and in the water.”
“I’ll make a list of them tonight. There’s a chemist in the town?”
Johnny nodded. “There is a chemist. Better, I think, you buy the medicines. I will see to the stores. If you start to buy yourself, people will ask questions.”
“When can we leave, Johnny?”
“The day after tomorrow . . . first light.”
“Not before?”
“No,” said Johnny firmly. “What good does it do? We have to make the boat ready. We have to go down to the tourist island to collect your gear. Then, we have to sail a lugger through a narrow reef passage. That is daytime work. Silly to risk a boat for no profit.”
“But what if Manny comes before we’re ready to move?”
“Why should he come?”
“Simple enough, Johnny. The one thing Manny doesn’t know is where I’m going. He knows there’s an island. He doesn’t know its name or its location.
“Don’t fool yourself, Renboss,” said Johnny gravely. “Don’t try to make yourself believe what is not true. You bought this island, didn’t you? Like I bought this hut and thi
s little piece of ground.”
“I leased it.”
“The same thing. You signed papers. The papers are registered with the Government office in Brisbane. Anyone can go in, pay two and sixpence and find out everything he wants about the transaction. You see?”
I couldn’t fail to see. It was too simple, pat and final. I was a historian. I could trace the decline of empires and the fall of heroes, but I had forgotten one of the simplest legalities of modem living.
Manny Mannix didn’t have to do anything. He just had to wait and then move in for the kill. And all it would cost him was two and sixpence.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I laughed until hysterical tears ran down my face and the birds nesting in the bush behind the hut began chattering in sudden fright.
Johnny Akimoto stood and watched me with quiet concern. The laughter spent itself in a fit of coughing. I asked him, rather foolishly, for another cigarette. He handed it to me, lit it, and then said, “You feel better now, Renboss?”
“I’m all right, Johnny.”
“Good. Tomorrow I buy the stores, you see to the medicine-chest. I meet you here at three o’clock in the afternoon. We get the stuff on board and make her shipshape before nightfall. We sleep on board, and raise anchor at first light.”
I took out my wallet and handed Johnny fifty pounds in notes.
“That see you through for the stores?”
“More than plenty, Renboss.”
“The rest of the money is in the bank, Johnny. I’ll settle with you tomorrow or later, whenever you like.”
“You settle when we finish the job, Renboss.”
Johnny smiled his rare flashing smile and clapped me on the shoulder.
“And if we don’t finish it, Johnny?”
“Then we do like I said the first time. Go north to Thursday, to New Guinea and maybe catch ourselves some trade, eh? Go home, Renboss, go home and get some sleep. Things always look better when the sun shines in the morning.”
“Good night, Johnny.”
“Good night, Renboss.”
I walked back to the hotel under a sky that was full of stars. I drank with the mill-hands in the bar. I don’t remember finding my way to bed. I don’t remember anything until the raw sun woke me at ten in the morning.