Her.
“The killers,” Osborne replied. “The first flight is at eight.”
Amelia didn’t flinch. He was leaving and they might never see each other again. As if last night had been pointless, as if their love was merely something to be tried and thrown away . . . She looked at her watch. “It’s half past six. You’ll have to hurry.”
Osborne didn’t see the tears welling in her eyes: he kissed the back of her neck, and, leaving the woman he loved quivering, disappeared without a word.
* * *
The jagged coast of Great Barrier appeared through the window of the two-engined plane. There were six of them altogether, plus the pilot, a young guy in shirtsleeves who had provided a running commentary on the flight, much to the amusement of the other passengers, all tourists. The old crate was making an almighty racket. Osborne sat bent over the window, too tired to sleep.
Filled with confusion and doubt, he had been revisiting his life and his failed encounters with Hana. He had built a house for her with money from the men who had raped her, in the hope of gaining his redemption and being forgiven for the stone he had thrown at her. He had built a house for them to live in together, but she had thrown the stone back in his face and sent him packing. It wasn’t a husband she needed but an ally. Hana had already known the cause of Wira’s death when she had joined him at the commercial port. With her grandmother dead of grief at the thought of not being buried on her ancestral lands, it was as if all her efforts had been suddenly dashed.
Hana already knew she was going to take revenge when she got on that freighter. She had followed him to Great Barrier to test him, the cop who specialized in Maori affairs, on the very ground of his utu. Would he agree to help her? And he hadn’t understood anything, anything at all. He had offered peace when it was war that she wanted. So, out of frustration or anger, Hana had turned to Nepia and his crazy sect to carry out her vengeance. Was it possible for two people to misunderstand one another so totally?
Now he had guessed, as nobody else could have, that they were hiding out on Great Barrier, in the house he had built for her. Was it a sign that Hana was sending him? A cry for help? Her grandfather hadn’t been able to get her out of this situation, but he would. He would save her.
The plane flew over the pines on the edge of the ocean and landed on the bumpy runway. The airfield at Claris was just a field with a hut in the middle. The Cessna came to a halt outside it, ruffling the tranquil palm trees. Osborne dragged his carcass from the cabin while the pilot said good-bye to the passengers, a big smile on his face.
It wasn’t yet ten in the morning and a weak sun hovered above the clouds. Smells of pine, sea, and kerosene. He went through the wooden barrier that marked the edge of the airfield and walked toward the rental-car agency. The building that housed it was little more than a shack, like something out of a Davy Crockett film, but the man certainly had his head screwed on: a hundred and fifty dollars a day.
Osborne signed the papers and took the keys of the four-by-four he had reserved by phone from Auckland.
The inside of the vehicle stank of fish and cold ash. He opened the windows wide and left the makeshift parking lot. Claris consisted of some twenty small houses scattered amid the woods. The mountain rose in the distance, ravines and impenetrable bush clinging to its sides. The blacktop petered out as as you left the village. Raising a cloud of red dust, Osborne followed the dirt road into the jungle. Rangiwhakaea Bay: the house was about twelves miles away.
Insects beat against the already filthy windshield, stones hit the bottom of the bodywork. There was lush vegetation on either side of the road. Impervious to the stink of fish, Osborne soon reached Rangiwhakaea Bay. He stopped the four-by-four at the top of the hill overlooking the bay. Hidden beyond the bush, the inlets succeeded one another all the way to Aiguilles Island. The house was somewhere down below, invisible from the road. All you could see was the bay and the breakers on the beach.
The track passed close to the shore, but there was also a path that cut through the bush. Osborne stubbed out his cigarette, drank a little water from the plastic bottle, checked his gun—he still had five bullets—and, leaving the stinking four-by-four to its natural parking space, set off along the path, beneath the giant pongas.
The insects buzzed. The vegetation was dense here: lianas, dead branches, a whole host of prickly shrubs. He advanced cautiously. Thorns clung to his jacket. The ferns almost blotted out the sun. His foot struck a root. Osborne felt a presence on his right: a brightly colored pigeon, which flew off at his approach.
He dismissed the fear that was slowing him down, and forced his way through in the shade of the tree ferns whose black fronds braved the sky. It was increasingly dark in the bush. According to his map, the house shouldn’t be much farther now. He kept moving, all his senses on the alert. Without the sea breeze, the air was stifling. Then he saw the roof of a hut, partly hidden by the fronds of a ponga. This hut hadn’t been here the previous year, when he had come with Hana. There was no sound, nothing to reveal any human activity. Osborne crept to the hut and looked through the dusty window. No one inside.
He opened the wooden door. A repulsive tannery smell hit him immediately. There was a worn table in the room, with a flyspecked lamp, pots of black ink, some compresses, and a number of sharp chisels. A tattooist’s chisels. Osborne chose one at random, and examined it carefully. Bone.
This was Nepia’s workshop.
The blood rushed to his head. It was dark in the hut, everything was impeccably neat and tidy but there was something like a smell of skin in the air. He saw a tilted armchair, and a shelf covered by a linen sheet. Osborne lifted part of the sheet. What he saw immediately made him recoil. A severed head: he had just come face to face with a severed head.
A man’s head.
His throat suddenly very dry, he forced himself to look at the head. Mokos spiralled out from the nose, thin complicated curves that covered almost the whole of the face. The eye sockets were empty, horribly empty, and the nose cut off. The lips had also been sewed up, in accordance with the old custom. In spite of the hideous grimace distorting the mouth and the two gaping holes, he recognized Zinzan Bee.
An icy shiver went down his spine. This kind of head had a name. Mokomokai.
Osborne pulled off the rest of the sheet. There were six heads carefully lined up on the shelf, all ritually prepared. Six Maoris with monstrous faces—Zinzan Bee’s accomplices.
Zinzan Bee hadn’t escaped Fitzgerald. He had indeed been killed in the forest. But the reason his body hadn’t been found, nor those of his accomplices, was because Nepia and his men had spirited them away to remove the heads. Just like the old days, before the arrival of the colonists. Mokomokai was an old warrior practice. Like other indigenous peoples, to possess the head of an enemy chief or preserve the head of one’s own grandfather was a mark of power and respect. The head was an object of worship that enhanced one’s mana. Thus tattoed and prepared—eyeballs removed, nose cut off and lips sewed up—the mokomokai became tapu, sacred, a treatment slaves did not enjoy. With the arrival of the Europeans, the trade in heads had flourished—they were much in demand, not only from sailors, but from museums in the Old World—until the British government banned this barbarous practice. Now it looked as if Nepia was reviving it.
There came a noise of footsteps from outside. Osborne turned in time to see a young Maori enter the workshop. Both equally surprised, the two men stared at each other for a fraction of a second. The Maori, who had no weapon, was the quicker to react. He ran to the table, grabbed one of the bone chisels and swooped on Osborne, who caught his wrist as his hand came down. Their breaths mingled in a furious embrace. The Maori tried to plant the chisel in Osborne’s throat. He was very young but already as strong as an ox. They rolled across the table, scattering the objects, and fell to the floor. Osborne freed himself very quickly, pulled out his gun, aimed it, but then changed his mind.
The Maori was sitting motionless on the beaten earth floor of the workshop, watching the trickle of blood running over his belly, as if he couldn’t understand what was happening to him. In falling, he had planted the chisel in his own abdomen. In fact he was still holding it, half sunk into his skin. He was a light-skinned boy, his arms covered in tattoos—similar to those on the severed heads—with a veil of pain over his fine green eyes. He tried to remove the chisel, but didn’t have the strength. His eyelids fluttered a moment. There was nothing in his head, no thought at all, only the curious consciousness that he was losing consciousness forever.
Osborne watched his death agony. His back wedged against the table, the Maori still had his eyes half open. His body slowly slid down onto the beaten earth.
Osborne shook himself—the noise was going to alert the others. He left the hut, gun in hand. Already the sounds of several voices echoed from the undergrowth, voices coming closer. He sheltered under the fronds of the ferns and kept his eye on the path. A group of half a dozen men approached, carrying tin trunks. Most of them were tattooed. Among them, he recognized the Tagaloa brothers. From his hiding place, he could hear their raucous voices, but he could only catch snatches. “Time to get there . . . the others . . . soon . . . meet . . . nightfall . . . ” They were all young, all Maoris. But there was no sign of Hana.
The group came to a halt outside the hut. Those carrying the trunks placed them on the carpet of thorns, and one of them entered the hut. He came out again almost immediately and, blurting a few brief words, cast a hostile look about him. Large-bore pistols appeared from inside their tunics. With his five bullets, Osborne didn’t stand a chance. He retreated deeper into the shelter of the ferns. The images were becoming confused in his mind: the heads with their sewed-up lips on the shelf, which seemed to pursue him into the undergrowth, the teenager with the half-open eyes he had just killed, the ghost of Hana, who was nowhere to be found. He circled around to the other side of the house, at a distance. His hand still tensed on the grip of the revolver, he crouched behind the bushes, his breath coming in short gasps, and waited. He was now about half a mile from the shore. Osborne feared they would come into the bushes in search of him, but nothing happened. A minute passed, then two. Observing no other movement than that of the insects swarming in the bush, he retraced his steps. Had they set a trap for him? He hadn’t seen any vehicle along the path, or heard the slightest noise of an engine, but the Maoris must have had a means of transportation.
Osborne reached the first of the inlets strewn at the foot of the cliff. That was when he saw the motorboat floating on the turquoise water. The Maoris he had seen earlier had climbed onboard. They were putting the trunks away at the bottom of the boat and getting ready to cast off. A body was lying near the cabin—the boy from the hut. The Maoris lifted the anchor and left without further ado, propellers turning, headed for the open sea.
Kneeling beneath the giant stalks on the edge of the cliff, Osborne had counted seven men on board. No women.
The boat was nothing now but a white dot on the sea. They were heading due north.
Strange. Not to say incomprehensible.
Osborne walked back to the house, gun in hand. Fearing they had left a man behind to cover their rear, he went in through the back door, the one that faced the woods. An unnecessary precaution: the house was empty. Or rather, emptied. There were no clothes, no personal effects of any kind.
The same went for the hut. The tattooist’s tools had disappeared, and even the heads had gone. The Maoris had struck camp.
To go where?
The sun was at its height by the time Osborne got back on the dirt road. He was thinking about this mokomokai business, Fitzgerald, the Maoris who had just slipped through his fingers, taking their precious heads. His brain caught in a vise, his lungs like razors, he set off at a stride back to where he had left the car parked. The sound of an engine replaced the buzzing in his head. A pickup truck was coming down the hill, raising a cloud of acrid dust.
