Devil-Devil (10 page)

Pazabosi sat cross-legged in the village clearing, under the shade of a banyan tree. He was thinking seriously about the past and the future. With so little time left it was important to get both into balance. He knew that the most important period of his long life still lay before him, and that what had happened in the past would have a great bearing on what was to come.

He was finding it hard to walk the long distances he had once covered with ease, and his sight and hearing were declining. But, thank the spirits, he still had his reputation as a tribal leader; he retained his
mana
. He knew that it was rumoured among his people that he had gained much of his power through eating the hearts of the enemies he had killed in battle. In addition to his wealth in land and possessions, it was also widely acknowledged that he even possessed the ultimate gift of being able to stop the sun in its passage to allow travellers to reach home in the light.

Images of the past unfolded in his mind as he waited for what was to come. Sometimes it seemed to him as if his whole life had been one long bloody pageant of plotting and fighting. He had been born into a pagan family in the most mountainous area of the bush, more than seventy years ago, and his earliest memory was of being hidden in the long grass by his parents as his father went off to fight the saltwater men.

While he was still a young man, Pazabosi had met some time-expired labourers returned from working on the Australian sugar plantations. He had admired their tall stories of life in the cane fields and had coveted the strong iron chests full of iron tools they had brought back with them. As a result, after much thought, he had undertaken the perilous three-day walk down to the coast. None of the saltwater men had attempted to stop him. They were pleased to see the departure from Malaita of such a dangerous foe.

At the end of his journey down from the mountains, he had made his mark with the captain of a three-masted
labour-recruiting
vessel at anchor in a bay. The blackbirder who had signed him on had been the first white man Pazabosi had seen.

It had all been a long time ago, he decided. Now the future was important to him. The old chieftain went over in his mind the arrangements he had made for the important few weeks to come. With one exception everything was now in place.

Pazabosi pondered over the one possible weakness in his plans. Sergeant Kella, the
aofia
, still stood in his way. Despite the bush chieftain’s efforts to discredit the policeman, Kella was once again on Malaita. And Kella always represented a threat.

Pazabosi knew that he had the high inland bush region and much of the coastal strip, except for the artificial islands of the Lau Lagoon, under his control. He was aware also that the white administrators, remote and ineffectual in far-off Honiara, would never have the local knowledge or the manpower to forestall him.

But Kella was different. He was neither wholly a Lau man nor yet a white lackey. He occupied a strange, undefinable middle area and so was unpredictable. If Kella decided to come looking for Pazabosi, he would surely find him. So be it. Pazabosi was ready for him.

Two ancient bushwomen emerged from one of the larger huts in the village, shepherding before them three beautiful young Sikaiana women in their late teens. The girls were naked, except for brief thongs of banana fibre between their legs. True to the traditions of their island they were lovely almost beyond belief – high-breasted and slim-legged.

They were Polynesians, their smooth skins a burnished dark gold. Their lustrous dark hair had been brushed to a high sheen and fell luxuriantly to their shoulders. When they smiled respectfully at the old chieftain, they revealed perfect, gleaming white teeth.

All the torments of sexual passion had long since departed Pazabosi but he returned the smiles of the young women. Sikaiana girls from their outlying atoll north-east of Malaita were reputed second in comeliness only to the extroverted women of New Georgia in the Western Solomons. For Pazabosi, the Sikaianans possessed the additional advantage of belonging to a clan committed to his movement. Their island leader had been perfectly happy to send three of his most prized practitioners in the art of love on the long voyage across the seas, to the Malaitan bush.

Pazabosi nodded his satisfaction and stood up. ‘Come.’ He instructed the giggling and acquiescent women. ‘I will show you where you must go.’ He paused and added drily, ‘I’m sure you already know what to do!’

As the sun appeared over the horizon, Kella beached his canoe on the shore of the bay of John Deacon’s copra plantation. He dragged the canoe up the sand and then walked along the footpath between the coconut palms towards the Australian’s house.

Green-grey clover, planted to keep down quick-growing weeds, spread densely between the palms. Kella flexed his shoulder gingerly. It was still sore but mobile enough for his needs.

He noticed with approval that the plantation was still well maintained. Deacon was a harsh and unforgiving man but a good coconut boss. Hundreds of acres of straight grey trunks, thirty feet apart, admitted the same amount of sun everywhere.

At the tops of the trees, attaining a height of sixty feet, were the massive coconuts, half-hidden among great palm fronds. The large leaves that had fallen to the ground had already been swept into piles, ready for burning.

Hearing the approach of the police sergeant, Deacon came limping out of his wooden bungalow in a clearing.

‘No appointment,’ he chided. ‘Jeez, you’re growing slack, Kella.’

The sergeant grinned, aware of the whisky on the other man’s breath. It was widely known that visitors to the plantation were discouraged. Even touring government officers had to use the radio network in advance if they wanted to drop by.

‘How do you know I’m not here to take my land back?’ he inquired softly.

‘You wouldn’t know what to do with it,’ said Deacon. ‘It takes magic bilong whitefella to run a place as inherently crook as this. Want some breakfast?’

‘I’ve eaten,’ Kella told him. ‘I’m here to ask a favour.’

‘So what else is new? Tell me as we walk. I haven’t made my morning rounds yet.’

The two men fell into step. Deacon was short and stocky, in his mid-fifties, with a florid complexion and an irascible manner. He limped as he kept up with the islander. One leg was shorter than the other as the result of taking a raft of Japanese tracer bullets in his leg when he and Kella had raided an enemy ammunition depot on Guadalcanal eighteen years before.

The Australian had lived in the Solomons for almost thirty years, following a variety of nomadic occupations, including gold miner, trading-boat skipper, and bêche-de-mer fisherman. None of these ventures had paid off and it was generally assumed that Deacon also engaged in less legal practices on the side. Soon after the war had ended, unexpectedly he had produced enough money to take out a long lease on the copra plantation from Kella’s father.

‘How’s it going?’ asked the policeman.

‘With first-grade copra falling to less than seventy dollars Australian a ton? Don’t ask, mate!’

Deacon was always overly pessimistic. On this plantation he was able to produce three-quarters of a ton of copra to the acre, compared with the half ton grown by most. Kella also knew that, strictly against the terms of his contract, the Australian was also earning another couple of thousand dollars a year from the seashells he was taking clandestinely from the beach and lagoon.

The labourers, all Lau men, were beginning to emerge from their dormitories to start their day’s work. They recognized Kella and waved cheerfully at him. Deacon shouted at them in pidgin, ordering them to get to work. Philosophically the men spread out among the trees in groups of four. Each labourer carried three sacks, which had to be filled with fallen coconuts and carried to the processing plant. Tractors began to cough to life and head for the passages between the trees.

Outside the drying sheds more islanders sat cutting coconuts into halves with machetes and gouging out the white meat in two movements. The raw meat was being carried by other labourers into the sheds, where it would be raked out and dried on wire racks above rows of wood-burning ovens.

Kella inhaled the familiar sickly-sweet odour of burning wood and roasting copra. One day several of his brothers would want to take over the plantation. So far Kella had persuaded them to wait. Deacon was aware of this. Kella could not be sure whether the Australian was grateful or not.

‘So what do you want me to do?’ asked Deacon.

‘I want you to take someone to Honiara for me in your cutter boat,’ said Kella. ‘Today, if possible.’

‘Sure,’ said Deacon sardonically. ‘Bring me a bucket of sand and I’ll sing you the Desert Song.’ He saw Kella’s expression. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ he asked. ‘What’s the game?’

‘Somebody’s trying to kill a sister from the mission,’ said Kella. ‘She’s not safe on Malaita. I don’t know anyone I can trust to do this, except you.’

He told Deacon about the attempts on Sister Conchita’s life at the mission station and in the swamp. When he had finished the Australian nodded thoughtfully.

‘You were lucky in that swamp, mate. Four shots fired at you, and all you end up with is a flesh wound. Either the other bloke’s a bad shot, or he liked you too much to want to hurt you badly. I wish I’d been that lucky in the war. That female God-botherer goes around asking for trouble, if you ask me.’

‘I heard that she reported you to Customs for trying to smuggle shells out of the country,’ said Kella. ‘What are you worrying about? I bet you had them well stashed away before they searched you.’

‘That’s not the point. She reported me.’

‘I was going to do the same thing myself one day, when I got round to it.’

‘You’re different. You’re …’

‘Black?’ suggested Kella.

‘I didn’t say that, mate.’

‘You meant it though. I can report you because I’m a copper and Melanesian. But the sister’s white. She broke the code, didn’t she? Whities stick together.’

‘By God, we’ve had to in this place!’ burst out Deacon. ‘If we didn’t we’d all have had our throats slit by now.’

‘Thanks,’ said Kella.

‘I didn’t mean you, Ben; you know that. You and me have always got on all right, but us expats have always been in a small minority in the Solomons. I’ve been in the islands for thirty years. We’ve only survived because we’ve looked out for each other. Anybody who didn’t help his oppos didn’t last long. And this kid comes out and starts reporting me. It ain’t right.’

‘If it’s going to be a problem I’ll get someone else to take her to the capital.’

‘No, you’re all right, mate. I’ll take her. Screw her. I owe you big-time. She’ll be right.’

‘All right,’ said Kella, unconvinced. ‘But if you do take her, behave. Once you hold a grudge against someone—’

‘I told you, she’ll be right.’

They rounded a corner and the plantation manager let out a bellow of wrath. One of the labourers was throwing stones at the green young coconuts in an effort to dislodge them. The islanders were paid by the number of sacks they filled in a day. If there were not enough fallen ripe nuts some of them would surreptitiously try to increase their rate by shaking the immature fruit from the trees. Cursing vigorously, Deacon hobbled in the direction of the offending young islander.

Kella walked back towards the beach. He wondered how much longer Deacon would last on Malaita. The crude, blasphemous courage which had made him such an effective guerrilla leader against the Japanese was not endearing him to the new brands of islanders, who had at least a junior primary education and were well enough aware of the increasing drift to get rid of expatriates from the islands. The days of the old colonial taskmasters were almost over. That was probably the main reason why Deacon was hitting the bottle so hard.

An old and rusted American landing barge was
half-submerged
out near the reef. Kella’s mind went back to the days in 1942, when he and Pazabosi and half a dozen others had served under Deacon on a whaleboat equipped with several machine guns, in which they had made a number of raids on Japanese coastal positions.

It had been a close thing as to which of the pair had been the most bloodthirsty, thought Kella. Deacon had fought with a cold, controlled anger, while Pazabosi had been the more frenzied and volatile in their bloody skirmishes in the war, which lasted a little more than six months before the Japanese had been driven out of the Solomons.

Deacon hobbled up behind him. He seemed to know what Kella was thinking about as the islander stared out at the wreck of the landing barge.

‘How old were you when you joined us on the
Wantok
?’ he asked.

‘Fourteen,’ said Kella.

‘Christ! As young as that? I suppose you must have been. I remember when they brought you back from secondary school in Fiji to act as an interpreter between the Yanks and the natives. You stuck it for about a month and then got yourself back here and asked if you could do some real fighting with us on the whaler.’

‘I soon got enough of that.’

‘You were bloody good at it, mate. So was that old bastard Pazabosi. Sometimes I thought you were both going to heave me over the side and fight your own war against the Japs, because I wasn’t tough enough for you.’

There had been little chance of that, thought Kella,
remembering
the iron discipline imposed by the Australian skipper on malcontents, supplemented by vicious floggings over an oil drum with a rattan cane.

‘Have you heard anything of Pazabosi lately?’ he asked.

‘Haven’t seen him for years. We were never mates. He went to ground and lay pretty low when the Marching Rule uprising collapsed after the war. I did hear lately that he was recruiting the natives for another go at the Brits, but there are always stories like that going the rounds. Why are you interested?’