Devil-Devil (17 page)

Within seconds Sister Conchita was applying her brakes vigorously, bringing the vehicle to a shuddering halt on the edge of the wharf itself. Kella's heart leapt at the sight before him. Instead of the area being dark and deserted, as he had expected, it was bustling with activity. Searchlights, powered by humming generators, lit the whole area harshly. Deacon's cutter was tethered between one of the Banks Line cargo vessels from Britain, and the smaller
Papuan Chief
, which regularly brought goods from Australia to the Solomons. Both vessels were being unloaded preparatory to a quick turnaround the following morning. Melanesian labourers were hurrying up and down the gangplanks of both vessels, carrying sacks and boxes of cargo on to waiting trucks. With relief Kella noted that there was a highly satisfactory element of exiled Lau men toiling at their tasks. They had already recognized him and were whispering to one another.

Farther along the crowded wharf was yet another vessel in the process of berthing, dwarfing the two cargo ships. This was a huge, modern American cruise liner, one of the types that were taking wealthy American tourists with increasing regularity around the South Pacific islands. Hundreds of them were even now on the decks of the vessel, rubbernecking at the cargoes being unloaded. As Kella stepped out of the Ford, the first of many gangplanks was lowered with impressive efficiency from the liner by its crew of tough-looking American seamen.

Cho's minions had also noticed the activity and the proliferation of labourers and seamen of all races who presumably would come to the aid of anyone threatened on the illuminated wharf. They hesitated amid the shadows at the far end, reluctant to advance in the face of so many potential foes.

‘Are you going to spend all night here, Kella?' It was Sister Conchita, caustic and impatient.

‘You're safe enough on the wharf,' Kella told her. ‘I'll arrange for someone to escort you all back to the mission house.'

‘When I need your help, sergeant,' said the nun, ‘I shall ask for it. Kindly leave this to me.'

As the stupefied sergeant looked on, Sister Conchita descended from the van and walked round to the rear. ‘Come along, sisters,' she said briskly, banging on the side. ‘I've got a little treat for you. We're going to look round this lovely cruise ship. Would you like that?'

Chirping their assents gamely, the elderly sisters scrambled down from the van and excitedly followed Sister Conchita along the wharf to the gangplank of the liner. Before the tolerant eyes of the surprised and unresisting officers and crew members she led the nuns up to the lower deck of the luxurious vessel.

‘I'm sure that one of these handsome gentlemen will give us a guided tour,' Sister Conchita informed her charges, bearing down on a transfixed, large and uniformed master-at-arms, who stood hastily to one side to allow the sisters to board the ship.

‘And do you know what I'm going to do while we're on board?' went on Sister Conchita, raising her voice to clarion strength, ensuring that any of Cho's hired hands still in the area could hear her. ‘I'm going to ask the kind radio operator to send a message to Honiara police station to dispatch an armed escort to take us back to the mission house when we've had our tour. Won't that be fun?'

The sisters cheered enthusiastically and disappeared from sight among the entrails of the vessel. Shaking his head in disbelief and wonderment Kella walked across to Deacon's cutter.

‘What the hell was that all about?' asked Deacon, who was on deck staring blankly across the wharf in the direction of the cruise ship and its sudden influx of white-robed sisters.

‘Don't ask,' said Kella. ‘I'm not sure that I know myself.'

Suddenly he felt tired. Gratefully he subsided on to the warped and ancient planks of the cutter.

‘What happened to you?' asked Deacon. ‘You look as if you've been in a fight.'

‘I think I've just been warned to mind my own business.'

‘Not a bad policy,' Deacon agreed. ‘Bit hard to enforce if you're a cop though. You look really crook. I'll send one of the boys to fetch you a taxi to take you to the hospital.'

‘No,' said Kella, using the rail as a support to haul himself back on to his feet. ‘I'm coming back with you to Malaita.'

‘Suit yourself, mate,' said Deacon, raising an eyebrow. ‘It's not like you to run away from trouble, though.'

‘I'm not running away from it, believe me,' Kella assured the plantation manager. He winced as bolts of pain shuddered through his body. ‘I'm going back into it.'

A Guadalcanal girl emerged shyly from the cabin. Deacon reached into his pocket and gave her some notes. The girl hurried down the gangplank and scuttled away in the direction of the cargo sheds. Deacon gave brusque orders in pidgin for his two crew members to continue casting off.

One of the deck hands prepared to untie the final rope binding the cutter to the wharf. He looked silently at the
aofia
for permission to embark upon this new voyage. Kella nodded imperceptibly, hoping that John Deacon had not noticed the subtle transfer of authority on the vessel.

‘Take me home,
wantok
,' he said quietly.

He waited until the vessel was chugging out of the harbour before approaching Deacon and asked the question which had been troubling him for some time.

‘What happened between you and Sister Conchita when you brought her over from Malaita?' he asked.

Deacon did not pause in his task of rewinding a rope as he glanced up briefly at Kella. Quickly he returned his attention to the swelling coil, working with mechanical expertise, the hemp spinning between his callused hands.

‘What did she say happened?' he grunted.

‘Nothing, but it was obvious that you're not her favourite plantation manager.' Kella strolled over to the other man at the wheel. ‘You didn't threaten her, did you?'

‘Why would I do that?'

‘You tell me.' Deacon worked on in silence. Kella jerked his head at the two Melanesian seamen, who were watching the scene with open interest. ‘You know that if I ask them they'll tell me. Better I heard it from you.'

‘Oh, for Christ's sake!' erupted the Australian, throwing the rope down on to the deck. ‘It was nothing. The woman got on my nerves. You've had nothing but trouble since you met her. I tried to warn her off, for your sake.'

‘No,' said Kella quietly, shaking his head. ‘It wasn't that. There's nobody I'd want more by my side in a fight than you, but you're no Good Samaritan. You've never done anything for anybody in your whole self-centred life, unless there was something in it for you.'

Kella left Deacon at the wheel, walked to the stern of the vessel and looked at the dark outline of the slowly receding shoreline of Guadalcanal. The lights of the fishing vessels danced on the port side several miles away. A light breeze whispered across the deck. He tried to work out what had caused the Australian to become so angry with Sister Conchita. He remembered that in all his time with Deacon there had always been one trait guaranteed to drive the white man to the edge.

It had first manifested itself near Sege in the Western Solomons towards the end of 1942. Deacon had been the coastwatcher in the district, reporting back by radio to the Americans on local Japanese movements. By this time he had also formed his own private navy, launching sudden raids on Japanese shore positions, creating the maximum damage and then withdrawing as quickly as they had arrived.

On that December morning Deacon had skippered a captured Japanese 57-foot diesel barge across the Marovo Lagoon as dawn was breaking. Their destination was a Japanese scouting party, which had been landed on one of the small uninhabited islands in the lagoon. The Japanese were plainly engaged in one of their periodic unsuccessful attempts to find Deacon's headquarters. It was a chance too good to be missed by the coastwatcher. He had taken half a dozen with him on his mission, including his second-in-command Pazabosi and the fourteen-year-old Kella.

They had travelled in the half-light, with Mount Mahimba and Mount Hungu rising in the distance above the crocodile-infested swamps. Stopping the engine in a bay, Pazabosi and three other islanders had swum ashore and destroyed the moored Japanese transport vessel, an old whaler, with hand grenades. By this time Deacon and the others, including a thrilled Kella, had concealed themselves in the undergrowth. As the main Japanese force, attracted by the explosions, had rushed out of the jungle into the ambush they had been cut down with fire from a .50-calibre Browning machine gun.

It had been a textbook operation, except in one respect. Among the handful of Japanese survivors Pazabosi had discovered a Roviana youth, not much older than Kella, who had been guiding the soldiers across the island. Deacon's fury had been monumental. He had ordered the terrified, screaming youth to be strapped across an oil drum and had administered a bloody thrashing with a belt to the frightened boy in front of the others.

Afterwards, as the others collected rifles and grenades from the fallen Japanese, Kella had cut the sobbing boy down and did what he could to stem the bleeding from a dozen wounds on his back, until Deacon had called him away roughly and ordered him to return to the barge.

‘Betrayal,' said Kella, returning to Deacon. ‘That's one thing you can't stand. You never could. You react to it by punishing people. What did Sister Conchita do to you that you construed as betrayal?'

‘It was nothing,' said Deacon, staring straight ahead.

‘It's not nothing to me,' said Kella. ‘She may have broken your code, but Sister Conchita was a
neena.
I promised her my protection and you threatened her. I can't have that.'

It was over a minute before Deacon spoke. The tough former war hero suddenly looked tired and defeated. ‘I'm finished on Malaita now, aren't I?' he asked, still not meeting Kella's gaze.

22

TRAILING SPEARS

Pazabosi luxuriated in the heat of the afternoon sun on his old and aching bones and wished fervently that he could lie like this on the mat outside his hut for all the time left to him by the spirits.

He knew there were too many things to do for that to become a possibility. Word had reached him that earlier that day Kella had arrived back on Malaita. The police sergeant's notorious obsession with order and justice meant that he would soon be coming up into the bush to look for Pazabosi and seek an explanation for all that had been going on lately in the mountain area controlled by the old chief.

On the far side of his village compound a bunch of young warriors set out noisily on a pig-hunting expedition. In deference to the presence of the old magic man, most of them carried their spears trailing behind them as a sign of respect. Only one of the men deliberately carried his over his shoulder, glancing defiantly across at Pazabosi, to make sure that the other man had noted his gesture of rebellion.

Pazabosi made no sign that he had even seen the insubordinate villager. He was aware that for some time Hita had been planning a challenge to his authority, and that the young man was only waiting for the right moment to carry it out.

It was only to be expected. Decades before, Pazabosi had made his own reputation by challenging and killing the chiefs in his area. He had set out on his ruthless campaign soon after he had returned from Australia in the early years of the twentieth century.

The labour-recruiting vessel had landed the young Pazabosi and a hundred other islanders in northern Australia. For the next three years he had spent twelve hours a day, six days a week, cutting sugar cane beneath the grilling sun. In all that time he never once saw a town.

Pazabosi was no stranger to hard work, and he had been particularly impressed by the standard of the food supplied to the labourers. The meat, rice, biscuits and tea far exceeded in quality and quantity anything he had known on Malaita, and did much to build up his ever-developing physique and strength.

Early on during his indentured time he had come to the attention of his white field supervisors, after he had won several vicious all-in fights with Melanesians from other islands. As a result he had been appointed a boss-boy, in charge of fifty other labourers.

At the end of his period of service, Pazabosi, who now spoke fluent English, as well as pidgin, was asked to renew his contract. He had refused curtly, as he now had his own agenda. He had taken his accumulated wages of half a crown a week and used part of the total to fill a tool chest with knives and axes, at a cost of a shilling each. Eventually, another labour vessel had taken him back to the same bay from which he had embarked from Malaita.

As he had expected, upon his return Pazabosi found himself a ‘big man', someone of wealth and substance. In Queensland he had learned how to plant and cultivate coconut palms, which had been practically unknown until then in the high bush. Within a few years he had established one of the first plantations in the interior of Malaita.

He had also returned, with relish and ambition, to pursue the unrelenting warfare between the bushmen and the saltwater villages. Over the next two decades, he had led many successful and bloody raids on the fertile gardens of the coastal dwellers, taking away many saltwater men and women to work as slaves on his plantation.

He soon became so famous that he was able to marry the daughter of another powerful bush chieftain. As the girl was both a hard worker and a virgin he had been forced to pay a high bride price of twenty-four strings of shell money and a thousand porpoise teeth. The girl had proved to be good value, providing him, in addition, with four sons and two daughters.

Later, when he owned too much land for one woman to maintain, he had taken a second wife. By then Pazabosi was a rich man and was openly contemptuous of the awed family, which allowed the new girl to come to him for a bride price of ten strings of shell money and five gold sovereigns.

By the end of the 1920s, British administrators were beginning to enter Malaita, in the shape of occasional touring officers. These officials had been delighted to discover a respected and influential bushman able to speak English. It had taken little effort on their part to persuade the wily Pazabosi to become a headman.

In this capacity he was charged to maintain law and order in his district. Pazabosi had accepted the position when he heard that it carried with it a wage of two pounds a month, a rifle, and a uniform consisting of a khaki
lap-lap
and a wide red sash, with a purse attached.

If Pazabosi had been important before, now that he had the backing of the white men from faraway Tulagi, the first administrative centre, his new position in the bush was virtually that of a paramount chief. He secured the approbation of his white employers by settling land disputes at local courts, arresting and fining malefactors, and driving a number of professional murderers out of North Malaita.

At the same time he had employed his power and the implicit backing of the absent but feared white men by using his rifle to dispose of the three bushmen most likely to challenge his growing authority.

Those had been good days, thought Pazabosi regretfully. It would be satisfying to dispose of his young rival Hita now with a single shot, but he knew that he would never get away with it as long as Kella was on the island.

Never mind, he thought complacently, stretching out in the calming sun again. There were other ways of dealing with his problems. He might even be able to involve the unwitting police sergeant, now on his way to the high bush, in their solution.