“What sort of activities?”
“He was part of an IRA bomb squad,” she said.
“What the Fenians call the Chemical Wing,” said Parker, putting the flagon back on the floor. “He tried to assassinate the Earl of Galway at the opening of the Cork Town Hall in 1938, amongst other things.”
“He was caught but he escaped,” said Caitlin.
“From Mountjoy Gaol.” Parker shook his head. “In the heart of Dublin! More people have escaped from blimmin’ Alcatraz than the Joy.”
“What are you saying?”
“That he ratted on his cobbers,” said Parker. “So the authorities let him go. See, this is a bloke with a history of informing.”
“How do you know all this?” said Molloy.
“It’s the Party’s business to know. He was given a new name and passage to America. Perfect place for a rat.”
“How did he end up here?”
“Bugger off,” said Parker. “It’s your turn.”
Molloy paused for a moment. “Well, Miss O’Carolan saved my bacon tonight. So I’ll tell you what I know.”
“Jolly good,” said Parker. He tapped the flagon. “Touch more?”
Molloy shook his head. “There’s a Frank O’Phelan wanted in California for insurance fraud,” he said. “Swept off a boat and drowned, supposedly. The insurance company thinks that O’Phelan might be this O’Flynn.”
“The same one as supposedly drowned at Piha?”
Molloy nodded.
“Bloody right!” said Parker, holding up his sherry. “More likely to have drowned in this. Johnny, look,” he said, getting serious again. “We can work together. Let Caitlin help you. She’s as smart as a whip. Time is running out.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Someone’s paying this stooge. We find out who we find out why.”
Molloy finished his drink and put the cup on the table. “I think your offsider’s going to stick to me whether I want her to or not. And I owe her one for tonight.” He stood. “I’ll be in front of the Auckland Railway Station tomorrow morning at nine. There’s something I want to check. Caitlin, if I see you there, I see you there.”
“I’ll be there,” said Caitlin.
Molloy put on his hat.
“Would you like a lift back to your car?”
“No thanks,” said Molloy. “I need some fresh air. See ya, Vic.”
“Das vedanya, Comrade,” said Parker. “When this blows over we’ll have a beer and a proper natter, eh, what do you reckon?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sunny Day stopped the Plymouth on a gravel road and switched off the motor. A hand-painted sign — PRIVATE PROPERTY! NO ADMITTANCE! — was nailed to a padlocked wooden gate. A dirt track led down to a hydro site. The track was steep and rutted. At the bottom, a narrow river widened out in front of a small concrete dam with a race on either side.
In a cleared area next to the dam was a green corrugated iron Ministry of Works shed with a flat roof. The site was deserted. One side of the valley was gorse. From the river up the bank on the other side was steep, dense bush.
Sunny had two keys, one for the padlock on the gate and the other for the shed. He thought he would probably rip the sump out of the Plymouth going down the track, and even if he didn’t, he doubted he’d be able to get her back up.
He took off his jacket and left it in the front seat of the car. He took a hammer and a torch from the boot. He unlocked the gate and made his way delicately down the track, dancing over ruts and cowpats, his leather-soled shoes sliding on the wet grass. He walked around the shed. No windows, strictly for storage. The padlock was sound. There was a sign on the door warning KEEP OUT! and one below it saying DANGEROUS GOODS. NO SMOKING! He put down his tools and walked over to the dam, shaded his eyes and checked for trout, but the morning sun was on the water and he could only see himself looking back.
He unlocked the padlock and opened the door, switching on his torch. There were some tools in the corner, a metal drum with a lid, a pile of empty sugar bags. There was a shape against the wall covered with a tarpaulin. Sunny removed the tarp. There were five wooden boxes, one smaller than the others. He took the smaller box and one of the larger ones outside and opened the lid of the larger with the claw of his hammer. He peeled back the waterproof paper.
Beautiful. Red Diamond tunnel gelatin, made by the Austin Powder Company of Cleveland, Ohio. Gelignite. Sunny loved gelly. Stable, dependable, deadly. Rhymed with jelly, smelt like marzipan, safe-crackers called it soup. When he was a kid he’d worked as a second-storey man for a safe-cracker named John Newman, blowing strongboxes in provincial picture theatres in the Lower North Island. Newman began by tying the office typewriter to the bolt work handle. He then wrapped a tiny amount of gelly around a detonator and poked it into a French letter, pushed the Frenchie, through the keyhole with the detonator hanging out, stuck the shebang in place with chewing gum, and lit the fuse. The resulting explosion, no louder than an empty cake tin dropping on a kitchen floor, shifted the levers holding the bolt for an instant, just long enough for the falling weight of the typewriter to turn the handle, opening the safe. The first time Sunny had seen the operation he had laughed out loud at its simplicity. You’d be a mug not to be a crook. All right, you ended up back in the jug eventually. But then you learned a new skill.
Sunny opened the other box. Hunkin T Series detonators. He kept one stick of gelly aside, closed the lid and tapped the nails gently back into place. One never knows, do one? He untwisted the bottom of the stick and poked a detonator a couple of inches or so into the base. He walked over to the bank, lit the fuse, threw the stick into the dam, dropped to the ground and covered his ears. The explosion rocked up the valley and water rained down all around him. At least twenty fat brown trout and as many eels floated to the surface.
He took off his shoes and socks and trousers, waded into the river, and made a considered selection — three hens, each at least four pounds. He gutted the fish on the bank, using his pocketknife. He washed the blood and slime off the knife and off his hands and wiped them on the grass. There was watercress growing in the shallows. He cut an armful.
He got dressed, put the trout and watercress in a sugar bag from the shed, lifted the box of gelly and the detonators under his arm, and walked back up the hill to the Plymouth. It was nine o’clock in the morning and just starting to get hot.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Sunny Day was known as Sunny for the same reason the Governor-General, the tall and rotund Lord Freyberg, was known as Tiny. There was nothing sunny about him. He was trouble from the word go. He was darker than his Ngati Porou cousins and self-conscious about it. His maternal line was Ngapuhi, a legacy of the war parties that raided up and down the East Coast during the Musket Wars. There may have been some African in there too. The crews of the American whaling ships that called into Kororareka in the 1820s often included Cape Verde Islanders, expert harpoonists and boatmen from the west coast of Africa. His green eyes were anyone’s guess.
He was sentenced to a year in a Delinquents’ Home when he was twelve for breaking and entering, and then two years in a Borstal for assault. By seventeen he was bare-knuckle boxing at carnivals and A&P shows throughout Taranaki and the Waikato, and a ringie for a two-up promoter. If a game was going against the house he had the presence to call a foul toss and the size to silence any objections. At eighteen he was back-up man for the Ohakune sly-grogger, J.R. Rowley, making regular trips into the dry King Country, the back seat and boot of Rowley’s Austin Twelve loaded with whisky, a sawn-off .22 under his seat. He had a reputation for reliability and lack of compunction. He was a master of the left hook and the king hit. In 1939 he was sentenced to nine months for burglary following an attempt on the strongbox of the Hastings Laundry Company after a day spent drinking in the Public Bar of the Albert Hotel with three steam-iron operators, one of whom, a girl named Wilhelmina, knew where the office key was hidden.
He was
released from Napier Prison in January 1940. His father, a fine-looking man with a thick black moustache and a long Maori name, but known in the Pakeha world as Tom, was waiting for him outside, leaning against his truck, smoking a pipe. The old man took the pipe from his mouth and checked the bowl, patted his shirt pocket for a box of matches, struck one, held it over the tobacco, and took several gentle draws — his lips making a lopsided popping sound that Sunny remembered — while he kept his eyes on his son, expression neutral. Eventually the pipe took.
“You all right?” he said.
“Oh, y’know,” said Sunny. “What do you want?”
“A fulla from Gisborne was around asking about you,” said Tom. “Neville? Some name like that? Pakeha fulla? And a few of those bad Gisborne Maoris. Didn’t say why.”
Sunny knew why.
“You need to pull your head in for a bit,” said Tom.
“I was thinking of the South Island,” said Sunny. “Got a cobber in Christchurch.”
“No,” said Tom. “Further than that. Hop in.”
They made the two-hour drive over pot-holed gravel roads up the coast and inland towards Ruatahuna, where Sunny had grown up, stopping at Tikitiki, outside the Post Office.
There was a poster on the wall. A column of soldiers, rifles shouldered, marching in formation towards the words,
YOUR PAL
IS IN THE
FIRST ECHELON
DO YOUR SHARE!
ENLIST TODAY
“Wants to join up,” said Tom to the postmaster. “For King and country.”
“He’s not twenty-one though is he, Tom?” said the postmaster. “Has to be twenty-one, see.”
“He’s twenty-one enough,” said Tom. “Just get the form.”
“Right you are,” said the postmaster, after a pause. He was small and Tom was big. And Tom had mana. “No skin off my nose.” He pointed to the poster. “Second Echelon now. Made the quota for the first before Christmas.” He took a form from a drawer and squared it on the counter.
“Use Eru’s name,” said Tom. “Twenty-eighth of the seventh 1917 where it says ‘date of birth’.”
“What will Eru say?”
“You let me worry about what Eru says,” said Tom. “You get writing.”
Sunny filled in the details. Say one thing for the penal system, it gave a young man a chance at the things that count in life — how to give and take a hiding, how to stare down a challenge, how to read and write at a rudimentary level.
“Sign there,” said the postmaster, pointing.
Sunny signed.
“And if you’d witness the signature,” the postmaster said to Tom.
Tom wrote his full name and underlined it, as florid as John Hancock’s on the Declaration of Independence.
“Very good,” said the postmaster. He stamped the bottom of the form, tapped the impression with blotting paper, and added his initials. Two weeks later Sunny was in camp at the Palmerston North Showgrounds, part of the Main Body, allocated to C Company, (28) Maori Battalion.
He took to the training, less so to the discipline. If nothing else, it was better than prison and fighting was in his blood. Firing a rifle. Stripping a Bren. Twisting a 14-inch bayonet into a sugar sack filled with sand.
He was punished for minor infractions on a number of occasions and charged with assault following a mêlée in the Soldiers Club in Russell Street, just off the Square. Someone from C Company threw a penny into a group of recruits from B Company. B Company was drawn largely from the area around Rotorua and the Bay of Plenty, and was nick-named “the Penny Divers” after the children who dived off bridges for tourists’ coins at Wharewakawaka. The coin spun high into the air, not feathering in any way, thrown by someone who knew how to throw. The B Company boys took exception to this slight. The brawl wrecked the Public Bar of the Soldiers Club and spilled outside before being broken up by provosts and police.
Sunny, who had been in the thick of it, was brought before a magistrate. Inconsistencies in his recruitment details were discovered — his prison record, for example. Sunny thought the game was up. But the beak said that society was better off with him “over there” rather than “back here”. He was fined seven days’ pay and Confined to Barracks for ten days, the latter timed to coincide with the battalion’s embarkation from Wellington on the troopship Aquitania, in convoy with the Empress of Britain and the Empress of Japan, and the destroyer HMS Leander, part of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force. They were joined in Cook Strait by the Andes, carrying soldiers from Burnham Camp, and its escort HMAS Canberra — and, briefly, a humpback whale, which C Company in particular saw as a providential kaitiaki, Paikea’s mythological saviour from Hawaiki-nui. The convoy was heading for Egypt to join the 2nd Division but diverted to Britain en route, crossing the Irish Sea a few weeks later past wreckage from a sunken liner and another vessel burning fiercely, the water slick with oil, arriving in time to learn of the death of Cobber Kain and the evacuation from Dunkirk and the capitulation of France, in time to hear Winston Churchill say on a radio broadcast, “The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.”
He was in the army now.
The Maori Battalion spent six months in England waiting for the Germans to invade. It was based at Doddington — or, as the censors insisted, “somewhere in England” — fifteen miles from the Kent coast, directly below the flight path that German bombers followed to London. The Battalion suffered its first casualty of the war, Private Tokena Pokai, a despatch rider from the East Coast, struck and killed while leading a blacked-out convoy on the Folkestone Road at night. There were artillery exchanges between Calais and Dover, the distance from Te Kaha to White Island. There were dogfights overhead on summer afternoons. King George VI made an inspection, as did his brother, the Duke of Gloucester. Winston Churchill took the salute. A Battalion rugby team, wearing white jerseys and black socks, played Wales and lost, 12-3. The men impressed with their manners. No domestic chicken was safe.
But the expected invasion didn’t happen. The New Zealanders transferred to Egypt to join the first echelon at the beginning of January 1941. Three months later Sunny was in Greece, separated from his platoon during the withdrawal from Mt Olympus, making his way to the evacuation point at Porto Rafti in an endless column of New Zealand and Australian and Greek soldiers, Palestinians and Cypriots from labour battalions, Albanian and Bulgarian and Yugoslav refugees, civilian and military vehicles.
An empty 6th Australian Division ammunition truck gave him a lift. The driver and the passenger were sappers from 2/3 Field Regiment. The ragged convoy stopped near Thermopylae while a tank was brought up to push the wreck of a petrol tanker off the road. The three men got out of the truck and under the cover of a tree.
“You’re a Maori, I suppose,” said the driver.
“He thought you was a blackfella at first,” said the passenger. “No offence.”
“I did! I said jeez, they’re getting desperate!” said the driver. “Y’know?”
“But I seen your shoulder flashes. I said, nah — he’s a New Zealander, mate. He’s a Maori!”
Sunny wasn’t offended. Besides, the Australian had a submachine pistol strung across his chest. Plus Sunny needed a ride. Being offended could wait.
“Never met a Maori before.”
“What about that little fella played for Wests?” said the passenger. “Whatsaname, Albert Herewini? He was a Maori.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know him. Knew he was a Kiwi, that’s all. That’s different.” The driver turned to Sunny. “You heard of him?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” said Sunny.
“Nuggety little bugger. Tough? Jeez he was tough. Ran like a rabbit too.”
They shook hands. Mick. Red. Sunny.
“What happened to your outfit?” said Mick.
“Got separated coming off the line.”
“Yeah? Us too. Jerr
ies just smashed through. CO gave us forty-eight hours to get to Kalamata, every bastard for himself. He said, ‘We’ve got to hook it tonight, men. Whether we get through or not is just chance.’” Mick shook his head. “Just chance! What a bloody shambles. We’re going to lose this flamin’ war.”
“What’ll happen then, you reckon?” said Red.
“To us? Not much. Follow orders. Same as usual.”
“You haven’t got any grub I suppose, Sunny? Anything tucked away?” said Mick.
“I’ve got some booze and a tin of gyppo pickles, I think they are,” said Sunny. “If you’ve got something to open it.”
Sunny’s canteen was filled with Greek brandy, which he’d found in an abandoned hut, along with a tin, rusted around the seal, Greek script and a faded illustration of what appeared to be a member of the cucumber family on the label, his first food in two days if he could work out how to get into it. He had no weapons, having abandoned them during the pitch-black night climb over Mt Brusti following the German break-through along the Aliakmon Line. He’d attacked the tin with a rock but just succeeded in changing its shape. He’d thrown the tin away in anger and then gone looking for it.
“I’ll open it with me teeth if I have to,” said Red. “Let’s see.” There was a pack at his feet. “Look at me swag.” He opened the flap and took out a pistol in a leather holster. “I’ve got a Luger. Nine millimetre Parabellum. Put a bullet through a tank this bastard they reckon. I’ve got two bayonets. This is a motorcycle pennant. Sort of a bush hat. Belt with a swastika on it. Smokes. Pills for staying awake.” He held up a small canister and rattled it. “The Italians had these in Libya. Supposed to make them want to fight.” He looked at Mick. “Remember that, Mick? Italians fighting?” The Australians laughed. “How long have we been awake? About four days? You want to try one?” he said to Sunny.
“I’ll give it a go,” said Sunny. “Where’d you get this stuff?”
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