According to Maori myths, it was here that the spirits of the dead threw themselves in the ocean to join Pô, goddess of the underworld.
Haere: mou tai ata, moku tai ahiahi,” she murmured.
“We shall leave: you on the morning tide, I on the evening.”
An old Maori proverb, learned by heart in the Red Hill days.
“I forgot you spoke Maori,” she said.
“Not in the last two years.” Paul leaned toward the abyss, as if his soul lay down there at the foot of the rocks. Now wasn’t the moment, but he took advantage of the void to come out with it. “By the way, I wanted to say . . . ”
“What?”
“About that day . . . ”
“That day?” she repeated as if the spittle from the waste ground couldn’t reach her anymore. “Don’t waste your time. I didn’t come here to receive your apologies.”
A gust of wind made him draw back—her eyes were spitting stones at him.
The void was there, immense. Trampled by the foam, the dead souls drowned in shovel loads. Paul wanted to disappear. He wanted to kill, starting with himself.
Hana took him by the hands. “Ka tata te po: haere.”18
The warmth of her skin brought him back to life. She set off at a run down the coast path. Paul followed her dress all the way to the ocean roaring there beneath the wind. He thought he was dreaming. He was dreaming.
Apart from the birds, the inlet below was deserted. He walked on the sand. Hana was waiting for him, leaning back against the rock face, barefoot, out of breath from her run to the sea. The wind beat against her dress, hugged her breasts, revealed her thighs, and her eyes were shining for him, two knives of jade. He tried to speak but she pressed herself against him.
“Taipa.”19
For an instant, Paul was aware of the unseen. The trajectory of the stone, the noise of her gestures, her smell beyond the hedge: everything flew away in the wind. Hana took his face and stuck her tongue in his mouth. A cloud went past without seeing them.
“Ki a koe,”20 she whispered.
The world toppled at the foot of the cliff.
Disturbing a few cormorants, they made love against the rocks, standing up. The waves thundered on the inlet, Hana gave him her buttocks like hands catching him, sucking him in. Secured between her fabulous breasts, he let himself be guided by the warmth of her belly and moved deep inside her. Her ass in the twilight was as soft as sand. Paul came first and the world turned upside down and ran aground in silence. The girl he had thrown stones at was a river.
Time passed, barely disturbed by the cheeping of the birds. At last, her breathing regular now, Hana went off to swim naked. In the grip of emotions he had never felt before, Paul watched her confront the rollers. The waves seethed around her, she was an Amazon in the twilight. The moment was magical, nothing could spoil it . . .
Hana soon came back, dripping wet. Drops formed on her brown fleece of pubic hair. She said nothing but there was a different look in her eyes. She put on her dress without even drying herself, and only then started speaking, very fast. She told him she too had never set foot again in Red Hill, not since the neighborhood boys had caught her one night and thrown her in a cellar where they had had their way with her. She added that she hadn’t said a word, not one word, either during or after. At the time, one of the Douglas sisters was going out with the leader of the pack, and the next day at the bus stop they had told everyone that she had enjoyed it. Up until today, he’d been the only boy from the neighborhood who hadn’t fucked her, but now it was done, and she, like him, didn’t give a damn about what happened to her.
Paul was looking at her, dumbfounded.
Hana picked up her shoes from where they were lying on the sand. “I’m leaving for Europe tomorrow,” she said in a toneless voice. “Good-bye.”
Hana disappeared into the twilight, leaving a strong smell of skin in her wake.
Cop.
He had joined the police the way some people enter politics: because he hated it.
Twilight was scalping the skyscrapers of the Central Business District. Balancing on the window sill, Osborne was smoking an explosive mixture. His gun, a .38 Special, lay on the coffee table. A drastic solution. Fitzgerald must have thought the same thing before he blew his brains out.
The most tragic hypotheses were going through his head. In pursuing his own ghosts, he was becoming like Fitzgerald: obsessed, paranoid, violent, desperate. The specter of Hana was dying in the bubbles of atoms, and the copies of her that so often accompanied his nights certainly weren’t going to help him find a foothold again.
Globule, who was lying in front of the minibar, risked a miaow. Thanks to open doors and drafts, she had ended up imposing her presence, and he couldn’t be bothered to put her out.
“Get out, I said.”
But, from the dazed look she gave him, it was clear she didn’t understand.
The evening breeze was lifting the curtains, but not his despair. Deaf to Globule’s demands to be stroked, Osborne got down off his perch and opened the overnight case. He took out a few pills and a handful of bullets, which he rolled onto the coffee table.
At his feet, Globule was watching him as if he had just invented a game. She timidly moved her nose closer and started sniffing the bullets.
“Haven’t got a clue, have you, girl?”
Amelia Prescott’s report was lying on the bed, but Osborne had forgotten all about it. In the corridor, some of the guests passed on their way down to the bar. He grabbed the revolver, more ugly than fascinating, lodged a bullet in the cylinder, and waited, in a daze, for a nudge from fate. A simple pressure on the trigger. The big sleep. But nothing came. His mind had clouded over, caught in an opaque fog that left him without prospects. Hana was missing. Witkaire was missing. The world was full of missing people.
Giving in, he bent to look in the minibar. Apart from a drop of gin—he didn’t like gin—it was empty. Everything was leaving him.
Osborne was breathing in the dregs in the little bottle when the telephone rang on the night table. Several times. He finally came down off his black cloud, his mouth full of ashes.
“Hello, Paul? It’s Tom!”
“ . . . ”
