The Hess Cross (41 page)

Snow stumbled over a milkwort vine and cursed under his breath. His eyes were almost useless, confused by patches of brilliant sunlight dappling the obscure jungle floor. Despite her four-inch heels, Rose negotiated the treacherous path with far more skill than either Snow or his wife. She held her satin dress close to her knees, her purse under one arm, while using the other to brush away ferns. She was a graceful counterpoint to the murky, perilous jungle.

Connie followed Rose's path. Snow had argued against her coming, but he had known she would stubbornly insist on joining them. It was against her nature to wait in a hotel room, to be idle. She strained to push aside a vine, then stumbled to one knee. Snow helped her up, and regretted allowing her to accompany them.

"How much further?" Snow asked, struggling to pull his foot from a putrescent sinkhole.

Rose spoke in Sarawak dialect, and the guide grunted an answer without halting the mesmerizing motion of his blade. "He's not sure, but the village pĕnghulu told him it was a thousand cuts of the parang."

"How many cuts has he taken?"

Rose conversed again with the Dusun, then said, "He doesn't know. He can't count that high."

For the first time in fifteen minutes, the Dusun's blade stopped. He looked above, then pointed. The jungle had thinned and large blisters of sunlight broke through the canopy.

Rose said, "This is the camp."

Snow turned a full circle. "It's still jungle, I don't see any buildings."

The tribesman's face twisted with concentration as he stared into the foliage. His mouth broke into a golden, gapped grin as he stabbed the parang at the vines. Snow saw only vines and ferns and trunks. He screwed up his eyes, allowing them to focus on a distance not yet visible.

The Dusun was right. Barely discernible through the undergrowth was a whitewashed hut sagging under the weight of bush ropes and moss. The Malay began again with the blade, eager to confirm his find and collect his fee.

The wood-plank building was no larger than a Malay thatch home, and it had once been well tended. The whitewash had only recently begun to crack, rotted by the jungle's perpetual midsummer. The windowsills were still peacock blue, a color achingly out of place in the undergrowth. The door was solid teak, and the brass handle, once bright with the rubbings of a thousand hands, was now weathered to a dull patina. The hut was succumbing to the persistent pressure of the tropics. Banyan roots were loosening the foundation, and epiphytic ferns were eating into the roof. The footpath to the door had been completely overgrown.

"This isn't the icehouse," Rose said without entering the hut.

"They had ice here?" Connie asked, running her palm across her brow, leaving the same amount of moisture as was swept away. She was breathing with difficulty. The sulfurous, sweet air seemed to congeal about the nostrils.

Rose smiled tolerantly, "An icehouse is a camp's punishment block. A prison within a prison."

"Are there other buildings here?" Snow asked, about ready to surrender to the mosquitos. His hand slapped the back of his neck in a last, futile effort.

"At least twenty others. We just can't see them. With the blue paint and the door, this looks like my Colonel Furusawa's office. The icehouse should be thirty paces west of here."

Rose spoke to the Dusun, who began again to sweep away through the green maze. The jungle had been far less successful redeeming the icehouse. The foundation must have been buried deep, for it was still solid. Vines had grown up the side and wrapped around the bars that covered the window. The flatiron door had rusted through near the hinges. The corrugated tin roof turned the torrid Malay sun inward. Confinement in the icehouse had been a sentence of death.

"Her body is behind this building," Rose whispered, as if afraid the jungle would overhear her revealing its secrets. She high-stepped a cluster of poppy blooms at the icehouse corner, then measured ten steps into the brush. "This is it."

"You seem pretty sure of this spot," Snow said as he pulled a hand hoe from his belt.

"She was buried where she fell. Colonel Furusawa took great delight in telling me how he marched her around to the rear of the icehouse, but not far enough away so that the shot would be lost on the other prisoners. He forced a couple of Australian flyers to bury her."

Snow began gingerly swatting the ground with the hoe. "Why was Earhart moved here from Saipan, interned for most of the war, only to be shot?"

"My colonel only told stories he enjoyed. That must not have been one of them." She picked at her silk hose, then pouted, "I've ruined my stockings, and you would not believe what I had to do to earn these."

"Joseph," Connie said, kneeling to help, "you're only scratching at the ground. Let's dig them up and leave. The jungle is closing in on me."

The greenery covered the jungle floor with a thick matting. Snow borrowed the Dusun's parang to tear at the liana and the twisters. He put his back to it, aware as Connie said that the Malay jungle was silently approaching them, as it had swarmed over the camp buildings to reclaim them. He could sense the banyan roots descending from the canopy and the orchids turning their blossoms in his direction, seeking him out. The giant leeches had scented him and were inexorably inching toward him.

The earth was wet, heavy humus that crumbled before the hoe. Snow's hands were so damp he had to regrip after every few strikes. He swung fiercely, aware the jungle had made its first inroads on rationality.

The hoe struck something solid, a sharp smack that was out of place in the jungle. With only an instant's hesitation, he dug his hand into the dirt, gripped and pulled.

It was her ilium, the uppermost section of the hipbone. The jungle's accelerated decay had begun to eat into the calcium, giving the bone a chalk softness. Snow bit his lip as he pulled the ilium from the rotting cloth, what once must have been khaki shorts. Decayed strands of ligament held the thighbone in place, and when it emerged like a growing thing from the shorts, he quickly dropped it all. Swallowing rapidly against the bile rising in his throat, he murmured. "I can't handle these one by one. Open the bag and I'll rake them in."

As Connie held open the canvas sack, Snow straddled the pit and sank the hoe blade again and again into the body's remnants, shoveling them toward his wife who turned away, unable to look into the hole. Rose stood well away, covering her mouth with a white-gloved hand, eyes fixed on the body bag.

The roots were unwilling to give up their find, and several times Snow knelt into the pit to pull free a bone from the grasping tubers. They gripped the skull with tenacity, and he had to peel back roots from the eye sockets and teeth, almost gagging as he pushed the skull into the body bag. For several minutes, Snow prodded the ground with the hoe handle, then unable to disguise his urgency, he said, "I think we got it all. Let's go."

Connie hastily pulled the bag's drawstring, then twisted away from the fetid hole, gasping for fresh air, but was met by a pungent cloud of cloyingly sweet odor from the spider orchids they had uprooted. Her head wagged involuntarily, shaking off the grip of the jungle. Her knees sagged, and Snow caught her arm, pressing her close, as much to support himself as her. She whispered, "Joseph, we've got to get out of here . . . not thinking . . . I'm not thinking straight."

"Can you walk?"

"Yes, yes. It's my head. The jungle. And the rotten body."

He lifted the bag over a shoulder and turned to Rose. "Tell the Dusun to lead us out."

"Only too glad to." She spoke abruptly to the tribesman who backtracked around the icehouse and south toward the Peninsula highway.

An hour later the rented Buick stopped in front of the Bugis Street café. They had been unable to fit the canvas bag into the trunk, so it lay on the back seat. Rose opened the front door and slid out, then spoke to Snow through the window. "You be sure to tell your boss that I'm available for anything he needs in Singapore. I have lots and lots of contacts and could someday do him some favors."

"For a price," Snow smiled. "

Well, a girl must eat. Goodbye, Connie. Goodbye, Joseph." Rose waited until the Buick turned onto North Bridge Road. Then with a speed and purpose that belied her satin dress and silk hose, she sprinted across Bugis Street to a waiting automobile, muttered baritone curses until the starter caught, then drove after them.