‘BLOODY NUISANCE, THIS logging-camp business,’ said Maclehose, the District Commissioner. ‘That company has got a lot of influence in Whitehall. If we can persuade them to expand their timber industry in the west, we might even come close to balancing our budget one day.’
‘They bring plenty of problems with them too,’ said Welchman Buna. ‘I’m getting a lot of complaints about their Australian workers.’
‘The price of progress,’ shrugged Maclehose. ‘They come to Gizo on benders most weekends, but they spend a lot of money here.’
‘There’s the environmental aspect as well,’ said Kella. ‘They loggers have turned Alvaro into a hellhole. It’s only a matter of time before they move on to other islands and do the same there.’
‘I’m sure the authorities have that in hand,’ said Maclehose. One of his eyes twitched. For the last hour he had been undergoing an unexpected grilling from the politician. The so-called Invisible Man had been all too visible and audible at their meeting, and the District Commissioner was beginning to look punch-drunk. For an impressed Kella, it was like watching a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. The normally retiring Buna had been interrogating the official fiercely on every subject he had brought up about problems in the Roviana Lagoon. The islander must be pretty confident about getting elected to the Legislative Council, thought Kella. If his conduct over the last hour was anything to go by, the new assembly was going to be more than a mere talking-shop. Maclehose, another African retread, was probably recognising the symptoms, which would account for the twitch.
‘What about the tourists?’ Kella asked. ‘Do they give you any trouble?’
‘Apart from getting murdered like that man Blamire at the mission open day?’ asked the District Commissioner. ‘One or two of them practically live in this office. There’s a woman called Mrs Pargetter. So far she’s been in to complain about the dirty state of the rest-house, the slowness of mail to reach the Solomons from the USA and the fact that there is no television service in the islands. And there’s an American called Imison. He keeps coming in to ask me about the islands John F. Kennedy hid on while the Japanese were searching for him. I’ve told him everything I know about the man, but it doesn’t seem enough to satisfy him.’
‘What about the one who died—Ed Blamire?’ asked Kella. ‘Did he ever come in about anything?’
‘Just the once,’ said Maclehose. ‘What was that about? Oh yes, I remember. The fellow wanted to know if I had the power to arrest anyone.’
‘What did you tell him?’ asked Kella, interested at once.
‘I said that was the duty of the police.’
‘But Inspector Lammond and Sergeant Jomanu are away on New Georgia.’
‘I wasn’t aware of that at the time,’ said Maclehose.
‘Did he say anything else, like who he wanted arrested, and for what reason?’
The District Commissioner bowed his head in concentration. He looked like a man at prayer.
‘There was something,’ he said. ‘It was something about needing to find the letters before he could be sure. Yes, that’s it. He said he would find the letters and bring them back here as evidence.’
‘Evidence of what?’
‘He didn’t say,’ said Maclehose.
‘Do you have any idea what he was talking about?’
‘None at all, old boy. You’d be surprised at the amount of twaddle I have to sit and listen to in this office.’
Twenty minutes later, Kella and Buna were walking down the dusty main street together.
‘Where are you going next?’ asked the politician.
‘I’m hoping to find Joe Dontate,’ said the sergeant.
‘That’s somebody else we will have to keep an eye on after independence,’ said Buna. ‘I’m all for learning from other countries, but that young man picked up far too many tricks of the wrong sort during his stay in Australia. You would think that with his background, he would have more respect for the traditions of the islands.’
‘I think he does,’ said Kella. ‘He has to balance that against his desire to make money as quickly as possible.’
‘Much of that is due to his girlfriend, Mary Gui,’ said the politician. ‘She’s the one pushing Dontate to get involved in all these dubious ventures.’
Buna raised a hand in farewell and hurried away. Kella walked up the hill leading out of Gizo. Soon the bitumen road had faded into a mere track. Halfway up the hill, he came to the radio shack. It was little more than a large windowless shed with half a dozen aerials sprouting from the roof. Kella knocked on the door and went in.
There were two men inside the shack. They were both Melanesians. One was fat and somnolent, with a pockmarked face. The other was small and wiry. The fat man was asleep on top of a pile of sacks. The wiry man was sitting at a large radio receiver-transmitter that ran the full length of one side of the room. He looked up and saw the sergeant.
‘Hello, Kella,’ he said in Lau. ‘Do you want to buy a rifle?’
The wiry man’s name was Raesohu. During the war he had been a radio operator on the launch raiding Japanese stations in the Western District. He had been noted for his habit of swimming ashore at night and stealing rifles from sleeping Japanese troops before cutting their throats. Few of the weapons had been handed in to the authorities in 1945. Seventeen years later, the Malaita man was still selling them at thirty dollars apiece to all comers.
‘Hang on to it; you may need it when you start your own revolution,’ said Kella. ‘Do you keep records of the signals you send out?’
‘Of course.’
‘When the white man died at Marakosi Mission recently, his body was brought here to Gizo for a few hours. Did another white man come up here to send a radio message to Honiara?’
The fat man on the pile of sacks snored. Raesohu stood up and walked over to a heap of files on the floor. He extracted a flimsy piece of paper and handed it to the sergeant. Kella read it and copied the contents into a notebook that he took from his pocket. He handed the message back to the wireless operator.
‘Thanks,’ he said, heading for the door.
‘When I start that revolution, whose side are you going to be on?’ asked Raesohu.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ said Kella. ‘How’s the planning coming along?’
‘Just fine,’ said Raesohu.
‘Holding meetings and passing resolutions?’
Raesohu looked contemptuous. ‘That’s the last thing I need,’ he said. ‘When I decide to act, it won’t be after a committee meeting, believe me.’
‘No, I suppose not,’ said Kella. ‘Would you give me the names of some of the other men who think as you do in Gizo?’
‘Why on earth would I do that?’ asked Raesohu. ‘So that you could take the list to whitey?’
‘Do you think I would do that?’ asked Kella. ‘I want to talk to these men. If you give me their names, it may stop an innocent man going to prison.’
Raesohu looked at the police sergeant for a long time in silence. ‘It’s a good job I know you, Kella,’ he said. ‘If any other man had come to me with a request like that, his body would have turned up floating in the lagoon.’
‘I know,’ said Kella. ‘Three or four names will do.’
‘Lohmani,’ said Raesohu, ‘Otalifua, Dara and Tavo. Will that do you?’
‘If you say so,’ said the sergeant.
Kella walked back down the hill. He knew that he was getting nowhere with his investigations, and he knew why that was so. He was far from home, and in such unfamiliar territory that so far he had been conducting his enquiries like a white man. The policeman who had been sent to the Roviana Lagoon had been Sergeant Ben Kella, BA, MPhil, writer of dissertations and attender of courses. He was facing his usual problem of trying to exist in two worlds at the same time. Ever since his first Christian mission teachers had marked him out as a potential high-flyer, which, coincidentally, had been at about the same time that the old custom priests had called him to start his training as the aofia, he had been struggling to assimilate two different cultures. It was time to forget the white man’s influences and concentrate on what he was good at. What was wanted here was some good, old-fashioned bush-tracking.
He spent the next hour visiting the four men whose names he had been given at the radio station. In a small place like Gizo, it was not difficult to track each one down. They all gave him the answer he had been expecting. Then he occupied an exasperating hour in searching without success for Joe Dontate. Gizo was little more than a glorified village, with only a few hundred permanent residents, although the occasional tourist party and the crews of visiting vessels made up the numbers at various times. All the same, although Kella had tried most of the bars and cafés by noon, there had been no sign of the former boxer. It was shortly after midday that he reached one of the less salubrious waterfront drinking dens, an open-sided, thatched-roofed building with a bar consisting of beer crates piled on top of one another and a suspicious-looking Melanesian pushing bottles of Australian 4X beer to thirsty patrons. He directed a glare at the sight of Kella in his police uniform, but said nothing as the sergeant stood in the entrance on the wharf surveying the bar’s patrons. There were islanders from all over the Solomons, most seamen on Chinese trading vessels: dark-hued Melanesians, big, handsome light-skinned Polynesians and even a few spare, lithe Gilbertese uprooted from their own islands to their settlement at Wagina.
Kella saw a group of Lau seamen sitting on crates drinking in a corner, and made his way over to them. They shifted up respectfully to make room for the aofia. One of them offered him a swig from his bottle, but Kella declined with a grunt of thanks.
‘I’m looking for Joe Dontate,’ he said in the Lau dialect. ‘He’s a big man in Gizo.’
‘Or thinks he is,’ said one of the seamen, to general laughter.
‘True,’ nodded Kella. ‘Sometimes a lizard thinks that it is a crocodile. Does anyone know where I might find him?’
The others shook their heads placidly. One of them, a young man with his hair dyed blond with lime and wearing a dirty T-shirt with the inscription Elvis the King, raised a hand, like a schoolboy at the back of a classroom, and asked:
‘Why don’t you make him find you?’
‘How do I do that?’ asked Kella. A fight between a Tikopian and a Choiseul man broke out in the doorway, but no one in the group paid any attention to it. The sergeant noticed that the Choiseul man was swinging huge arching blows, while the Tikopian was ominously compact, nuzzling his opponent’s chest with his face as he delivered straight short-arm punches to the other man’s ribcage. Kella’s money was already on the Tikopian. The Lau men, connoisseurs of bar-room brawls, waited with puzzled attention for the blond youth’s response to Kella’s question.
‘Plenty of things going on Joe Dontate doesn’t want the police to know about, in plenty of different places,’ suggested the youth. ‘If the aofia goes and waits in one of them, Dontate will soon hear about it and come running to get rid of the evidence.’
The other seamen guffawed and slapped the blond boy on the back in appreciation of his animal cunning. Kella reached into his back pocket and produced an Australian five-dollar note, which he handed to the preening boy.
‘Good thinking, wantok,’ he said. ‘Buy your friends a drink. Can any of you suggest which place will draw Dontate to me the soonest?’
The Lau men conferred in undertones. Again it was the blond youth who addressed Kella first.
‘Place bilong kina,’ he said. ‘Dontate has something strange going on there this week. I saw him take some whiteys in there a few days ago.’
‘The shell house?’ asked Kella
‘Behind the Joy biscuit factory,’ said the blond youth.
‘Thank you, you keep your eyes open. Your captain should make you a lookout,’ said Kella, standing up.
‘That’s what we do when we rob the Chinese,’ said another Lau man.
The seamen were still laughing as Kella left the bar. As he did so, he stepped over the body of the already recumbent, groaning Choiseul man in the entrance.
The shell house was a long tin shed on a piece of wasteland behind the biscuit factory, which supplied Gizo with fresh bread three times a week. Kella kicked heavily on the door of the shed, making a booming noise. Somebody inside shouted at him in pidgin to go away. Kella kicked harder, making a dent in the door. The door was unlocked and inched open to reveal a pair of eyes. Kella kicked again, as hard as he could. The door flew open, sending the man who had unlocked it crashing backwards.
Kella stepped inside.
‘Good morning, olketta,’ he beamed at the workers inside the shell house.
There were about a dozen of them, all Melanesians, few of them young, sitting at long tables littered with carving implements, different types of wood and dozens of seashells. They looked up with apprehension as the sergeant made his dramatic entrance.
The man he had knocked over picked himself up and slammed the door shut, lumbering towards Kella. He was a big New Georgian islander with impressive biceps and a chest like a black iron trunk. He came to a halt when he saw Kella’s red beret and khaki uniform.
‘Just a routine inspection,’ said Kella, smiling benevolently and starting to patrol up and down the tables. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. Treat me as if I wasn’t here.’
The first table he passed at a leisurely pace was devoted to shell carving. The Melanesians stared at their work as if they found it fascinating, not looking up at the policeman. Kella could recognize cowries, mussels, conch shells, thorny oysters, cones, clams, turtle shells and a dozen others. The tools being used with contemptuous ease by the carvers allowed them to cut, pierce, polish and engrave. They handled and discarded saws, drills, knives, hammers, files and pumice stones.
Unfortunately, the work they were producing was of a shoddy standard. Kella looked at the mounds of beads, necklaces, bracelets, decorated boxes and pendants being dropped into boxes at the feet of the carvers. These were cheap and nasty imitations of genuine carving work and were designed only to fool unsuspecting tourists.
The same could be said of the wooden carvings being produced at another table. They were inferior copies of traditional pieces, made of the cheapest wood, badly finished, and sprayed with a cheap veneer to give the impression of age.
One of the older workers looked up and caught Kella’s eye. He was a Guadalcanal man with a helmet of snow-white hair above a craggy, distinguished face.
He saw the police sergeant’s disapproving expression and shrugged hopelessly. Kella nodded. There weren’t many jobs for the old in the Solomons; there weren’t a lot for the young, either. He could understand the Guadalcanal man’s shame at turning out such cheapjack wares. As he stared at the old man, the latter’s hand moved nervously to a drawer in the desk before him. Kella moved forward and pulled the drawer open. It contained a number of assorted carved shell trinkets.
The door at the end of the shed opened and Joe Dontate hurried in. ‘Kella!’ he shouted. ‘This is private property. Get the hell out!’
‘I wanted to see you, so I left you my calling card,’ Kella told him. ‘You didn’t have to run to get here. A sharp walk would have done.’
Dontate scowled and walked to a door leading to an office at the far end of the shed. Kella followed him in. There was a table and two chairs in the windowless room. Dontate sat behind the table. Kella took the chair in front of him.
‘Well?’ asked Dontate.
‘Something’s going on here in the West,’ Kella said. ‘I’m not sure what, but I think it’s big. Nothing goes off in the Roviana area without you knowing about it. So what is it?’
‘You’re making a mistake,’ said Dontate. ‘How would I know? I’m a respectable businessman.’
‘No, you’re not,’ Kella said. ‘Piece by piece you’re taking over crime in the Roviana Lagoon. The trouble is, this time you’re in danger of getting in over your head.’
‘Kind of you to care,’ Dontate said.
‘What makes it dangerous,’ said Kella, ‘is the fact that this goes outside the Solomons. This is international. I think we’ve had two lots of foreign agents here already.’
‘Fascinating,’ yawned Dontate, pretending to be absorbed in some plans on the table before him.
‘There’s just one way to get foreigners safely into the country,’ Kella said. ‘That’s as tourists. At the moment, the only tourist party we’ve got in the Protectorate is the one you’re guiding. Eight of them flew home a couple of days ago and one was murdered at Marakosi Mission. That leaves the three who have signed up with you for a personalized guide of the islands visited by John F. Kennedy in 1943.’
‘You’re out of your mind.’
‘Those three agents are looking for something to do with John F. Kennedy when he was a PT boat commander in the lagoon. They’re concentrating on matters that might discredit Kennedy.’
‘Why the hell would they do that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is what they are doing illegal?’
‘Not as far as I’m aware, no.’
‘Are you asking me to turn down a substantial fee to guide a group of Yanks round the lagoon?’
‘It might be better if you withdrew your services.’
‘Go and stuff yourself sideways!’ said Joe Dontate. ‘Is there any point to all this as far as I’m concerned?’
‘It’s bad enough you making efforts to be Mr Big in the lagoon, but I can put up with that as long as you don’t come near Malaita. What worries me is the way you’re getting involved with whitey. You’re too tough and too streetwise to be bothered by the local hoods, but if you invite expatriates into the area, sooner or later they’ll take over from you. You may think that you can control them, but you can’t. These guys will chew you up and spit you out, Dontate. Then I’ll have to come over and clear up the mess.’
‘Have you come here to deliver a sermon?’ asked Dontate.
‘I was hoping that you would tell me a few things. In the first place, why was Ed Blamire murdered?’
‘How would I know? I guide them, I don’t listen to their confessions.’
‘But you were at the Marakosi Mission open day?’
‘Every bugger and his dog was there. By lagoon standards, that afternoon came under the heading of “quite interesting.” Look, you’re wasting your time and mine.’
Kella stood up. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I was only trying to help you.’
‘That’ll be the day!’
‘Some time ago,’ said Kella, ‘when Johnny Cho and his Chinatown boys were trying to kill me, you came to my assistance. Before that, you helped me on Malaita once.’
‘We all make mistakes.’
‘Because of that, I owe you a couple, Dontate. This is my attempt at payback. Don’t have anything else to do with Imison and the other Americans. This isn’t some inter-tribal blood feud. It’s a big-time operation and you’re getting sucked into it.’
‘I go where the money is, Kella. Don’t you think you might be biting off more than you can chew yourself? After all, what are you? You’re just a witch-doctor-policeman and you don’t have any friends in this district.’
‘Just the one,’ said Kella. ‘Just the one.’
He stood up and left the office. He noticed that Dontate had not moved. By his standards, the islander was almost looking concerned.