The grim-eyed crowd cheered her.
Osborne was searching these drunken faces for anyone who looked like one of the people in the photograph, but there was no one who seemed to bear any resemblance to any of the brothers. The music was ear-splittingly loud. The old female rocker was urging the crowd on, waving an imaginary lasso and yelling, “Yahoo!” Going wild now, she stepped down off the stage and started moving between the tables, shaking her rump and winking greedily at the burly men surrounding her. Osborne stubbed out his cigarette in the plastic ashtray. All he needed now was for her to dedicate a song to him . . .
He had nearly finished his drink, but abruptly put it down. Sitting alone at a nearby table, his chest squeezed into a tight-fitting T-shirt, was a Maori with a face like a reef, who was looking at him as if he was a goat tied to a post. His massive neck was covered in tattoos. Tattoos of extraordinary refinement. The same tattoos as the doorman at the Phoenix, if his memory served him well. Osborne stood up, glass in hand, walked to the man’s table and sat down facing him.
“What do you want?” the giant asked above the din, two small brown little triangular eyes staring at him.
Osborne leaned across the table. “I’m looking for the Tagaloa brothers.”
The man was slightly cross-eyed, which somehow increased Osborner’s sense of unease. “There’s no one called Tagaloa here,” he replied gesturing with his hand. “Get out.”
There was a break in the guitar hero’s solo, and people applauded. Yahoo!
“The brothers have the same tattoos as you do,” Osborne said. “Tell me about them.”
“There’s no one called Tagaloa here,” the man said, cracking his big knuckles. “Didn’t you hear me? You’d do best to get out of here, pakeha. Can’t you see this isn’t the place for you?” A devious smile playing over his lips, he raised his almost empty glass in a toast and, sure of his victory, finished his drink in a single gulp, as if chasing away the white man.
On the stage, Jacky Beelight was stepping on the gas again, supported by the female rocker in her cowboy hat.
The giant with the tattoos was smiling with his yellow teeth when a .38 caliber bullet demolished his foot. Osborne had screwed on the silencer under the table and fired two shots blindly.
The Maori let out a cry, which was drowned by the guitar hero’s solo. A smell of powder rose in the air.
“The next one in the face,” Osborne grunted. “At least two of the Tagaloa brothers were at Julian Long’s party the night Ann Brook was murdered. Were you there, too?”
But all he got by way of reply was a bloodthirsty snarl. Already the closest customers had started to scatter, blood was spreading across the floor, and the barman was making a sign to the stage manager to cut the sound.
“You supply the jet set with drugs,” Osborne continued, keeping an eye on the blind spots. “Ann Brook too. Was it you who killed her, just like you killed Tukao and Griffith? Why?”
“Fuck off.”
“And who did those mokos? Eh? What do they mean? Is it the mark of a new gang?”
Osborne sensed a threat looming up on his left. Acting quickly, he aimed his revolver a few inches from the stomach of the man rushing at him, stopping him dead in his tracks. The sound was cut off, leaving the female rocker in mid-note. It was too late now to extract a confession. The big Maori wasn’t afraid. In fact, in spite of the pain, he seemed to be mocking him. Osborne aimed the digital camera he’d been carrying in his pocket and took a photograph. Other men were closing in behind him, the barman was threatening to call the cops, a doorman had come running: it was time to get out. Osborne pushed back the table and, with his gun in front of him, pushed his way through the hostile crowd. United now, the Maoris were muttering angrily. He could feel their drunken breaths on his neck, and knew the danger was quite real. One person spat at him, then another. He went through the doors of the Backstreet as quickly as if he’d been sucked out.
Outside on the sidewalk, even his friend Pamela had disappeared. For a moment, he stood there in front of the grimy window, dazed. The tar seemed to be sticking to his soles, night was falling over the area, and his hands were shaking like leaves. Yes, he was genuinely scared.
* * *
Putting the pieces together. Ever since they had tried to blow his brains out, that was all Osborne could think about. There was a link between all these cases, and the jigsaw was slowly taking shape. On the one side, the bigwigs of the country’s financial capital, O’Brian, Long, Melrose, Timu, on the other the corpses pulled from the mass grave, hostile Maoris and a host of missing people, including his prime suspect, Zinzan Bee. Samuel Tukao was the connection, but what about Ann Brook? Had she also had a bone removed?
Midnight was sounding somewhere, far from the silvery bay trees shimmering faintly in the moonlight. He parked the Chevrolet by the wall of the cemetery.
The wind was carrying the rustle of the leaves away toward the lights of the city down below. Osborne peered into the darkness of Mount Roskill and, not spotting any human presence, opened the trunk. He took out the tool bag and climbed on the roof of the car. On the other side of the wall, the crosses stood out in the darkness. He threw the tool bag over the wall, and then went over the wall himself.
All these gymnastics were making him dizzy. Back on his feet, Osborne picked the bag up from the ground. The paths of the cemetery were lined with Monterrey cypresses, partly chosen for their evergreen foliage. Orienting himself by following the most recent bouquets, he found his way to Ann Brook’s grave. This was no time to stand and contemplate mortality. He cleared the stone of the biggest bouquets, opened the bag, wedged the crowbar against the stone and used it as a lever. The marble was as heavy as death but the slab came loose in a sinister scraping noise.
By sheer effort, Osborne cleared sufficient space. Below him, the hole was black. He grabbed the shovel, threw down the bag and slid down into the grave.
It was strangely cold in the pit. The earth was loose. He swallowed a few pills with the help of the mineral water he kept in the bag and started digging. It was an exhausting operation, which, although it didn’t do much for his head, at least gave his muscles a workout. Breathing at the rhythm of the shovelfuls he cleared, Osborne plunged into the bowels of the earth.
“Keria!32” he said, to encourage himself, his cheeks burning. “Keria!” His shirt was soaked in sweat, and his nausea was returning. At last, the shovel hit something hard: the coffin.
His arms paralyzed by the effort, his mind devoid of thought, he cleared away the earth covering the cherrywood box and, still armed with his crowbar, forced open the coffin. The wood cracked, then yielded all at once.
He pushed back the lid, and a foul smell immediately hit him. He put his handkerchief over his nose and aimed the torch at the corpse. The mixture of monoethylamine gas and putrid liquid made him retch, but he held back on seeing the face of the dead girl.
Ann.
Ann Brook.
He didn’t recognize her immediately. The head had taken a lot of punishment, and the features of her face had been horribly flattened. In contrast with her dark dress, her skin looked curiously diaphanous, and she lay there surrounded by personal effects, her mouth fixed in a ghastly grin. With trembling hands, Osborne put on a pair of plastic gloves. He placed one hand on Ann’s broken skull and stroked her hair, trying to remember something—he was thinking of the ditch, and that sticky thing deep inside it . . . Time passed, holding its breath. He raised the skirt and, just to be sure, felt her thighs. He shuddered in spite of himself. Ann Brook still had both femurs, right where they should be.
3.
Although remaining as professionally impassive on the outside as he could, Captain Timu was furious. His best man was reduced to inactivity in Park Road Hospital. His fractured knee had been operated on urgently after a .38 bullet from Osborne—fired “reluctantly in order to save Lieutenant Gallagher’s life,” according to the report by the party concerned—had almost shattered it.
Timu rolled his cigarillo in his thick fingers, his eyes heavy with reprimand. Clearly that stray bullet had stuck in his throat.
“You say you’re not a good shot, that there was smoke, that Lieutenant Gallagher was in grave danger and those young people were very edgy. Young people?” he repeated, relighting his cigarillo. “Your ‘young people,’ as you call them, are unscrupulous killers, who are blighting the city, godless criminals the citizens of this city can well do without!”
His face was swollen with anger. The killers were Maoris, like him.
Osborne, who had been staring at the tips of his shoes—there was still blood on the edges of the soles—looked up. “I’m sure they are,” he said.
