They all looked at him in silence, stunned and fearing the worst.
The old man looked around at the gathering. He assumed a contrite, almost fatalistic tone. “Misunderstandings, swindles, fraudulent sales, acquisitions by force, wars, biased treaties. Your governments have never respected anything. Today our people are dying on the ruins of their history. Your world no longer tolerates us. We don’t have much longer left but we won’t leave Papatuanuku36 without a fight.” The face of the tohunga briefly lit up with thoughts of vengeance. His voice was soft, his eyes almost melancholy. It was hard to say if the man was crazy or if he represented the last hope of an oppressed people.
“What is all this nonsense?” Burdett cried.
There was a burst of gunfire from the garden.
Timu stepped forward. “Where’s my son?”
Nepia gave a weak smile. “Don’t worry,” he replied in a perfectly calm voice. “He’s in good hands.”
“We made a deal!” Timu protested.
“That you’d get your son back, yes.” His expression changed abruptly. “Come on,” he said, irritably, “let’s not waste any time!”
The hooded men motioned to them to get moving. Melrose wanted to know where they were being taken, but he, too, was hit several times with the grip of a submachine gun. He tried hard to protect his head, but his ear and the area above his eyes were soon bleeding.
“No questions!” Nepia screamed.
The six men left the living room, dazed, and were escorted to the van waiting outside. Their hair stood on end when they saw the bodies lying on the lawn, riddled with bullets: Mitchell and all the others, shot down.
One by one, their heads were cut off with a hatchet.
That was when Jon Timu realized he wasn’t going to get his son back. Nepia was a madman.
A dangerous madman.
14.
It was while on the trail of Malcolm Kirk that Fitzgerald had crossed paths with Zinzan Bee. An accomplice of Kirk’s, Bee was also under the influence of Nepia—it was he who had initiated both of them into the cult of Hauhau. Discovering the mass grave where they executed their victims, Fitzgerald had eliminated not only Kirk but also Zinzan Bee, just as he had claimed in his last radio message. But Nepia had spirited away the body for his famous mokomokais. Had Fitzgerald known about Nepia? Had he made Zinzan Bee spill the beans? Osborne had no idea. His friends’s suicide was still a mystery but the question was beside the point now. If Nepia had taken the risk of going behind Fitzgerald’s back to recover the body of a warrior who had died in battle, that also meant that he would try to recover Tagaloa’s.
Amelia.
She was alone with the corpse.
Osborne hurried out of the airport. He had wasted precious time waiting for a flight to Auckland, there was no reply from Amelia’s cell phone, and he was seeing dead bodies everywhere.
He threw himself on the still-warm seat of the Chevrolet, finished the bottle of water he had bought in the airport shop, and left the parking lot at top speed. He still had a few pills but nothing to make the anxiety go away. He lit a cigarette, gritted his teeth, and gripped the wheel tight. There were few cars on the expressway.
Today was New Zealand’s national day, commemorating the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, which had ceded most of the land of the Maoris to the Queen of England. That was why Nepia and his sect had left their lair on Great Barrier in such a hurry. They were going to act today, on the mainland. A symbolic act capable of raising public awareness of the native condition and awakening the resistance, even if it meant sacrificing the Maori nation in a collective suicide.
The skyscrapers of Auckland were looming on the misty horizon. Trying to avoid his own face in the rearview mirror, Osborne stubbed out his cigarette. The sea air was cool, reminding him of Amelia’s basement.
* * *
Te Atatu.
The white flowers of the kamahis were dancing in the evening breeze. Amelia’s Honda was parked under the birches, in the same place as this morning. Osborne walked to the house and entered without ringing the bell. He took a step into the room and instinctively his hand went to his gun. The first thing he saw was the streak of blood on the wooden floor, then the legs sticking out from behind the bar. He rushed foward.
Amelia lay there in a pool of blood. Without a head, it was as if her body didn’t have a meaning.
Osborne swayed. The sight of that decapitated trunk made him nauseous. He almost threw up, unable to take his eyes off the corpse.
No sound in the room. He was looking at her lying on the floor, but Amelia wasn’t completely there: part of her was missing. The most important part. Osborne fell to the floor without even realizing it, bent over her as if to kiss her, but there was no mouth there to kiss, just a pool of blood. He felt suddenly awkward and clumsy with this abbreviated woman’s body: he didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know how to hold her. Choked by this vision of horror, Osborne seized her around the waist, and clasped to him this unwitting monster, cradling it for a long time.
They hadn’t simply shared a bath of sperm the other night. Amelia had offered him her life. She had him in her skin: that was what she had said. And this was how he had thanked her—with death.
Osborne was moaning softly as he cradled his love, he was wading in her blood, it was everywhere, on the rim of the cooker, on the walls, his hands, his shirt, he even had some on his neck, and Amelia seemed quite alive against him, still warm, so that for a moment he was no longer sure who was shaking, who was clasping who, or why.
Tears were flowing, but they were pointless. He suddenly relaxed his embrace, and the decapitated body fell back on the floor, into its pool.
The monster.
Osborne left the house, wild-eyed. He could barely put one step in front of the other. He stood there under the birches, unsure what to do. Twilight was falling over the ocean, the foam was advancing on the rocks, and it was all his fault.
The monster.
It took him a while to calm his nerves. The sounds came back to him in dribs and drabs: the sea, the birds. At last, he resigned himself to going back into the house.
His professional instinct regained the upper hand, long enough to figure out what had happened. Amelia had been killed here, between the door leading down to the basement and the kitchen. The hall door had been forced: she must have been surprised as she was coming back up from the lab. The blood had started to congeal on the floor. He estimated the time of death as several hours earlier. The neck had been cleanly severed, along with the arteries and tendons. Decapitated with a hatchet, probably. Osborne fought back the ball of phlegm in his throat and went down to the basment.
Tagaloa’s corpse had disappeared from the autopsy table. They had come for his head.
His fault.
