by Graeme Kent
The Gammon Man frowned. ‘That was a bit strange,’ he admitted. ‘Of course I had heard that the celebration was going to include a choir of virgins from the main island singing “Japani Ha Ha!”. People passing through the lagoon were talking of nothing else but the church choir practising the tue tue dance and then singing that stupid little pidgin song, but it never occurred to me to pass on the information to Dr Maddy.’
‘Probably that was because you couldn’t think of a way of making a profit out of the transaction. Go on, who did take her to the celebration?’
‘It was the Tikopian called Shem, the one who claims to be Papa Noah’s spiritual heir. Somehow he contacted her and invited her to the feast. I don’t know why. I told Dr Maddy that it would be an unprecedented opportunity for her to record “Japani Ha Ha!” and maybe other songs relating to the war. On the day of the ceremony, I took her over by canoe to the saltwater village and delivered her to Shem, who was waiting on the beach. I left them and he accompanied her up to the plateau. The next thing I know, a couple of women from Sulufou brought her back here late that same night. Dr Maddy was in a considerable state of shock, but all she would tell me was that there had been a dreadful accident at the feast. I imagine that she was referring to the death of Papa Noah.’
‘And then you washed your hands of her?’
‘She had no more call upon my services. I had fulfilled my contractual obligations to the letter,’ said Wainoni with dignity.
‘But you still did nothing to look after her in her distressed state?’
‘It’s not my job to protect her,’ said Wainoni indignantly. ‘I’m not her father!’ A spasm of genuine alarm fluttered his jowls. He put a beseeching hand on the other man’s arm. ‘Whatever you do, don’t frighten her away, Sergeant Kella. That woman is a humble businessman’s dream. She’s got half the dollars from her scholarship grant and weeks of trusting innocence left in her yet.’
‘Stop it!’ said Kella, rising. ‘If I listen to any more of your fraudulence, you’ll have me believing that you’re as pure as a Sikaiana maiden. Take me to this island for which you are probably charging Dr Maddy an extortionate rent.’
The Gammon Man leered at him. ‘It’s only fifty yards away,’ he said mischievously. ‘Why do you need me?’
Kella hoped that his face was expressionless. ‘The last time Dr Maddy and I met, it was under slightly unfortunate circumstances.’
Wainoni grinned lasciviously. ‘Yes, she told me about that,’ he chuckled. ‘It’s all right, Sergeant Kella. I assured her that to the best of my knowledge you were not a peeping Tom. Indeed, I know for a fact that you have always adopted a more hands-on approach with the ladies. When it comes to sexual encounters, you waste more chances than I’ve ever had.’
‘Are you going to take me over or not?’ asked Kella, standing up.
Wainoni looked at his watch. ‘She won’t be there,’ he said triumphantly. ‘She said that she was going to Tabuna village at first light this morning to record some pidgin songs from a man who worked for the Americans unloading cargo during the war.’ He saw the expression on Kella’s face. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Don’t you know anything?’ asked Kella, heading for the door. ‘The men of Tabuna are the laziest on Malaita and a bunch of thieving villains into the bargain. None of them would risk breaking into a sweat unloading cargo, and as sure as your corrupt soul is bound to rot in the deepest pit of hell at Ano Gwou, where it will be condemned eternally to eat the ghosts of your ancestors, not one of them ever went near the war!’
‘Is that so?’ sighed Wainoni smugly. ‘There is so much duplicity around these days. My trouble is that I’m too trusting. Why, sometimes in my darker moments I fancy that some of my informants even lie to me.’
Kella walked back to his canoe, shaking his head resignedly. Think what you liked of Wainoni, you had to admit that he was good at what he did. As he untied his dugout, the sergeant noticed that a small lean-to hut on the island was full of green bananas. For some reason Wainoni had recently started ploughing some of his profits into this usually unprofitable trading venture. He was buying bananas from the bush people and transporting them to the market in Honiara. It was a shrewd enough move, thought Kella. After rice, wheat and corn, bananas provided the most lucrative cash crop in the South Pacific. The only problem lay in the fact that it was proving difficult to export them to overseas markets before they ripened. Perhaps the Gammon Man was planning for the future, the sergeant thought. One day, when Lau had become sated with academics and finally there were no more abstruse subjects to be twisted out of shape and put into books, the venal Wainoni might have to look for a real job.
13
DIFFICULT TIMES FOR THE CHURCH
Later Sister Conchita assured herself vehemently that she had not meant to eavesdrop on Father Kuyper’s conversation with the recumbent Father Pierre in the latter’s bedroom that morning. She would have done better to stay well away. As it turned out, events were to be even more frightening than the visiting priest’s predictions.
She had been about to enter the room to take the old priest’s temperature when she heard the august visitor to the mission conversing with the invalid in an unhurried undertone. She paused in the half-open doorway. Father Kuyper was sitting by the side of the bed, talking as much to himself as to the elderly man lying there. Father Pierre’s eyes were closed and he was breathing regularly but shallowly.
Sister Conchita was concerned. As far as she could tell, from the occasional snatch of conversation she had caught, for the past few days the Dutch priest had been telling Father Pierre everything about the troubles forming like storm clouds outside the mission. Several times she had heard him discussing the unexplained killings in the district. How much of it Father Pierre was taking in, the nun could not be sure.
‘Difficult times, old friend,’ murmured Kuyper, his hand clasped over that of the veteran priest. ‘There are big changes in store. Pope John says he wants to open the windows of the church to allow in fresh air. Let us hope that he does not throw them open too wide and admit a tempest! They’re already forming commissions to prepare for the Second Vatican Council. How that will affect us in these islands, so far from the centre of things, heaven only knows – literally. One thing is certain, Father Pierre. Whatever happens at these meetings, the Catholic faith as we know it will never be the same again. We must guard the pass – if only we can ascertain where it is situated and with what weapons we have been issued.’
The bishop’s inspector looked up to see the nun hovering uncertainly in the doorway. His face betrayed no feeling, although Conchita suspected that he was disconcerted to have displayed such uncharacteristic vulnerability in his recently concluded monologue.
‘Come in, Sister,’ he said, rising, in control of his emotions again. ‘You have your duties to carry out. Don’t let me stop you.’
He walked out without looking back. Sister Conchita took the old priest’s temperature and smoothed his pillow before leaving. Father Kuyper was standing at the lounge window when she entered the room. ‘What is your diagnosis?’ he asked.
‘Father Pierre has a temperature and is tired, that’s all,’ said the nun.
‘I hope so,’ said Father Kuyper abstractedly, without turning round. ‘He’s not a young man any more.’
‘He’s fine,’ said Sister Conchita in a tone that brooked no contradiction. ‘He will soon be ready to resume charge of the mission again, I assure you, Father.’
Father Kuyper almost smiled at the spirited response. He was a slight, silent man in his forties, with a head of cropped yellow hair. He was not given to shows of emotion and maintained a watchful, almost disapproving air to those few aspects of the world that seemed to interest him. He was the principal of a small teacher-training college a few miles outside Honiara. Every six months, forty or fifty students would arrive from rural senior primary schools to undergo a rudimentary course intended to send them back to their home areas as u
nqualified grade-four teachers. Officially his educational establishment was called Bethlehem, but conditions there were so bleak that it was known as Bush College. Only Father Kuyper’s sheer determination and force of will had kept it struggling along for the past few years.
‘If you say so, Sister,’ he murmured, returning his attention to the compound. He seemed reluctant to leave his vantage point at the window, as if he was waiting for someone. Sister Conchita had noticed the priest operating the mission’s two-way radio on several occasions since his arrival.
‘This is getting out of hand,’ Kuyper said, staring out of the window at the rain sweeping across the ground. Several hundred islanders were huddling for shelter in makeshift windbreaks and hastily constructed canvas tents. Inside the mission house, women and children were camping in every available recess. The noise was indescribable. In the kitchen, half a dozen local sisters were working relentlessly around the clock to provide a steady supply of food for the hordes of visitors now descending in increasing numbers upon Ruvabi. Only this lounge, at Father Kuyper’s insistence, had been set aside as a final refuge for the staff of the mission.
‘We can hardly turn people away,’ said Sister Conchita, again speaking with more emphasis than she had intended. ‘They’ve come here to seek the protection of the church.’
‘They’ve come here because they’ve been scared by this spate of senseless killings,’ said the slight priest. ‘Perhaps that’s what the deaths are intended to do.’
‘Do you mean that someone is murdering people just to frighten everyone?’ asked the nun with a shudder. ‘That’s a horrible thought.’
‘It could be worse than that,’ said Father Kuyper, knocking the dottle out of his pipe on the lounge table. ‘Have you thought that this could be part of a plan to make your parishioners lose faith in the church itself? Indeed, could the murder of Papa Noah have been intended as some sort of a catalyst?’
For once Sister Conchita did not know what to say. In the few days he had been at the station, the bishop’s inspector had not conformed to her expectations in any way. For a start, the notoriously direct and energetic Father Kuyper had seemed distracted, as if his mind was on something else. Almost automatically he had collected in her housekeeping accounts and started to study the daily timetable of the mission, but his heart had not seemed to be in either investigation.
Sometimes Father Kuyper had engaged in long, rambling discussions with the older priest, but more often, as Conchita had just witnessed, he seemed to welcome the opportunity to put his own thoughts in order as he talked quietly and insistently to himself in the comatose Father Pierre’s presence. She wondered if he had hoped for some sort of assistance or interjection from the older man, and whether she should pass on Father Pierre’s cryptic remark about the island of Tikopia being central to what was going on around them. She decided to wait until she had had a chance to talk to Father Pierre again.
‘You can’t mean that,’ she said weakly. ‘The church has been preaching the faith on Malaita for a century.’
‘And have we done more than scratch the surface?’ asked the priest, still looking out of the window. ‘Have any of the missions? Most islanders practise the Christian faith only in tandem with their old pagan beliefs. You have cause to know that better than most, Sister Conchita.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked the nun,
‘It is well known within the faith that Father Pierre thinks so highly of your potential that he even encouraged you on one occasion to encounter the so-called Lau gods, to see how you would cope with the concept of many faiths in these islands. Whether he should have introduced someone so young in years and in the doctrine to such a complicated matter is another matter. However, it is certainly a sign of the regard in which he holds you.’
Sister Conchita thought back to the day many months before when Father Pierre had sent her on her own to the remote mountainous Lau settlement outside Honiara. Here she had encountered the girl known as the dream-maker who had enabled her to help Sergeant Kella. She had not known that any other expatriate was aware of that story. However, it was commonly acknowledged that Father Kuyper knew everything that happened relating to the Catholic Church in the Solomons, among its chain of a thousand islands.
‘Sergeant Kella is back on Malaita,’ she said. ‘He’ll be looking into the matter, I’m sure.’
‘Ben Kella is a very interesting man,’ said the priest. ‘He was head boy here at Ruvabi mission school some years ago, you know. He is a good detective and a dedicated pagan priest. But we must always remember that he no longer owes any duty to our faith. There is no reason for him to extend us any latitude in the course of his work. In that case he can hardly expect us to bother him with our doubts and fears at this stage. As you intimate, with his track record, Kella will probably discover everything that there is to know soon enough. Still, you’re aware of that. You know him better than I do.’ He paused. ‘Tell me, Sister, is it true that once in order to allow Sergeant Kella to escape from Point Cruz wharf, you created a diversion by taking a group of elderly nuns on to an American cruise ship?’
‘The story has grown in the telling,’ Conchita said.
‘Anyway,’ said the priest unexpectedly, ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Sister Conchita. Although from your name I was expecting, if I may say so, someone perhaps a little more . . . sultry.’
Sister Conchita felt herself blushing. Could the remote Father Kuyper actually be teasing her? Surely not! ‘An error of geography,’ she said stiffly. ‘When I finished my training I thought I was going to be sent to South America, so I selected a name that I thought would be more in keeping with my calling in that part of the world.’
‘But they sent you to the South Pacific instead,’ said Father Kuyper. ‘Fate can be cruel. Not that there’s anything wrong with the name Conchita,’ he added.
‘It’s just that you don’t expect it on an irascible Boston-Irish girl only three generations away from her shanty-town antecedents, I know,’ said Conchita, walking towards the door.
‘There is one thing,’ said the priest. ‘If it is decided that matters here are becoming unsafe, it might be necessary to send you back to Honiara, until the situation eases. I’m just giving you advance notice. Don’t worry. Something miraculous might occur and the trouble will all blow over.’
Sister Conchita resisted the impulse to argue. Was this the thin end of the wedge? Obedience, she told herself; obedience and humility.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, Father, while we’re on the subject of miracles, I must attempt to see to the feeding of the five thousand.’
14
WHICHWAY NOW?
After he left Wainoni, the Gammon Man, it took Kella over an hour to reach the saltwater village of Tabuna. He paddled several miles down the Lau Lagoon, between the artificial islands, then made a detour and dragged his canoe up on to the beach a mile to the north of his destination. He hurried into the coastal fringe of trees, so that he would not be observed from the open sea.
As soon as he had rounded the headland in his canoe, he had noticed the government vessel at anchor outside the reef. From a distance it looked like the Commissioner, forty feet long, with six cabins and space for eighty deck passengers. Every three months it made a heavily subsidized seven-day trip to the tiny remote island of Tikopia, carrying essential supplies for the Polynesian inhabitants there. Throughout the Solomons, government vessels competed with commercial ones for freight cargoes, generally a source of dismay to the Chinese traders. However, no private vessels wanted the dangerous and unproductive Tikopian run.
A small dinghy, rowed by two Melanesian seamen and containing four bulky lighter-skinned Polynesians perched on top of a pile of casks, was nosing its way into the lagoon through a gap in the jagged coral wall of the reef. Presumably the six men were going to gather water for their long sea voyage, filling their casks from the river skirting the village of Tabuna. The Tikopians were p
robably passengers going home on holiday after a stint working as labourers on one of the logging plantations in the western islands.
Kella hurried bent double into the trees skirting the beach, hoping that he had not been seen from the rowing boat. He was wearing the red beret of his police uniform, and that was not always a symbol universally accepted by the notoriously rebellious and feckless Tikopians. He found and followed a trampled strand of track leading through the bush towards the collection of thatched huts.
It was strangely quiet among the trees. A narrow overgrown path had been worn away between the haphazard riot of coconut palms, banana plants, canarium and iron trees and the thousands of different weeds and brambles clutching haphazardly at one another and almost blotting out the sun in a great colourful dappled tapestry. Scarlet and yellow orchids sprayed from the branches. Fallen trees littered the path, lying across carpets of scarlet hibiscus flowers, their rotting wood almost obscured by thousands of disciplined marching red and black ants.
Dominating this part of the jungle were the mighty hardwood evergreen banyan trees with their red berries and drooping branches. When these branches touched the ground, they would often take root and form additional reinforcing trunks, so that the trees were growing horizontally as well as vertically in a series of great moss-covered hoops. Because of this constant renewal, the banyan trees were regarded as signs of eternal life. Wherever possible villagers would hold their meetings in their shadows, to guarantee wisdom for their deliberations. Today, however, there were none of the usual urgent hunting parties of men looking for wild pigs, no groups of cheerfully chattering women on the way to their gardens in the clearings along the jungle tracks. Even the birds and animals seemed subdued.
Closer to the houses he encountered a thick curtain of creepers hanging from the upper reaches of the trees. They fell to the mossy ground in great accumulations of green, brown and black. Something among the living trellis looked wrong. Kella stopped for a few moments and tugged thoughtfully at some of the long fronds, gazing up at the higher branches of the trees. After a few minutes he realized what was out of synchronization. Then he continued through the jungle.