“You really don’t know where I can find him?”
Walking back up the road, Osborne had rung at the first house, two hundred yards farther up around a bend. From the crestfallen face of the woman who had opened, it was clear that she didn’t know anymore than he did.
“No, really, you’d have to ask my husband. Ah, there he is!” She turned to look along the road. “Why don’t you ask him?”
An old man in a tartan shirt was calmly strolling up the hill, carrying an opossum. Its round head shook as he walked, its eyes protruding.
“This piece of filth got caught in my trap!” the man said, lifting his trophy.
The opossum seemed to be looking at them with its empty pupils, its teddy-bear body like a wet rag. A dog was yapping at its master’s feet, constantly jumping up and trying to get a bite of the dead animal. Declared a national scourge since some crank had imported them from Australia, opossums didn’t just eat leaves from the trees, they killed the trees themselves, destroying whole forests. Since they had no natural predators—another idiot had tried to populate the forests with foxes, but the foxes had found it easier to hunt for birds—killing an opossum had inevitably become a patriotic duty.
The man threw the corpse down next to the kennel. “Are you looking for something?”
“Pita Witkaire,” Osborne replied.
“Oh,” he said. “Haven’t seen him for weeks.” He turned to his wife. “How long? Five, six weeks?”
“Yes, at least!” his wife confirmed.
“The marae looks deserted. Do you know how long it’s been like that?”
“Couldn’t tell you that,” the man said. “We saw a bit of Pita last winter, and then in the spring, though I couldn’t say exactly when, he just stopped being around.”
“Did he say anything?” Osborne asked. “Any mention of what he was up to?”
“No, nothing like that. He’s never been all that talkative.”
“Maybe he’s on vacation,” the woman suggested. “Or maybe he’s retired. Are you a relative?”
In front of the kennel, the mongrel was devouring the opossum with gusto. Osborne also felt a desire to bite. He was starting to go off the rails again.
“I’m with the Auckland police,” he said, showing them his card. “Call me if Pita comes back to the marae. You’d be doing both of us a great service.”
He attempted a smile—not a very successful one, but the couple nodded anyway.
“You can count on us!”
They were good citizens.
Unlike him.
* * *
A dull sun hovered over the north of the city. This was the hour when the office workers left for home, but the traffic was moving freely—because there were no offices here.
A long way from the prosperous streets of the Central Business District, the Red Hill neighborhood had swelled with successive waves of migration. Sheep farmers hit by the cutting off of subsidies, exiled Tongans and Samoans and Fijians, small Asian shopkeepers willing to risk their meager savings here in the remotest corner of the West, Maoris marginalized by the great switch to neo-liberal economics: all of them had ended up in these more or less identical houses where innocence soon evaporated.
Osborne hadn’t set foot here for years, but the neighborhood where they had grown up hadn’t changed much. Nor had Hana’s parents’ house. Feeling somewhat nervous, he slammed the car door. He didn’t see any vehicle in the open garage, just some gardening tools and a few pails filled with stagnant water: Glenn must have gone into town. Osborne opened the worm-eaten gate. He recognized the hedge, the flowering jacaranda, the window of the room where Hana had once undressed for him.
“Susan, are you there?”
Hana’s mother was turning over a patch of sweet potatoes at the bottom of the garden. When she saw him, she dropped her spade on her plastic boots.
“I’d like to talk to you,” he said. “Just for a minute or two.”
Surprised, Susan took a step back. Her hair was disheveled under her straw hat, and her face looked ghostly. She glanced at her watch, as if it was all just a matter of time. “I don’t know, Glenn will be back any minute now and—”
“A minute or two and you’ll never see me again.”
Susan hesitated. A minute or two against eternity was worth a gamble. Glenn wouldn’t know, she wouldn’t even tell him, it was all ancient history anyway. “What do you want?”
“Information about a lawyer who died a while back,” he said. “Samuel Tukao. He practiced in Mangonui, and Tukao had links with the Tainui tribe.”
Hana’s mother forgot her fallow vegetable garden. “I don’t know him,” she said.
Susan was a pakeha. She might have married Glenn, the son of Pita and Wira Witkaire, but she wasn’t interested in all that Maori stuff. That was what she was trying to tell him. The search for cultural identity, or rather the lack of it as far as Glenn was concerned, had never caused her anything but grief. Susan had had enough. She was a tired woman.
“What about your husband?” Osborne went on.
“You know how stubborn he is,” she replied. “Even if he knew this lawyer of yours, I don’t think he’d tell you.”
The air was heavy with innuendo. Osborne could feel the tension rising, as if his blood was running faster in his veins. “What about Pita?”
“He should be at the marae,” Susan replied, evasively.
