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That afternoon Dan again ate lunch in the courtyard of his Darwin hotel, shaded by the swaying fronds of the tall palms. The pool was full of laughing tourists and noisy teenage kids, their pink skin glistening with suntan oil as they batted a ball back and forth. The ball splashed unnoticed into the water and the laughter and noise stopped when a young, smartly-dressed aboriginal man walked past them and approached the table where Dan was sitting.
“Detective Connor? I’m Ernie Gamma with the Aboriginal Police. I was asked to bring you some information.” He held out a large envelope. “It’s all in here.”
His words were formal and he stood very erect, but his eyes kept sliding towards the pool and his shoulders twitched as if he felt the eyes of the people there boring into his back.
“Thanks.” Dan took the envelope from his hands and gestured towards a chair. “Have a seat. I’ll get us something to drink.”
Ernie shook his head. “Uh, no. No thanks. I need to get back to the station.”
“I’ll only keep you a few of minutes. I’m hoping you can help me answer a couple of questions and you may as well be comfortable while we talk.” Dan signalled to a hovering waiter. “Could you bring us some juice please, and some ice water?”
He watched as Ernie reluctantly lowered himself into a chair. “Don’t let those people in the pool bother you, Ernie. You belong here. They don’t.”
Ernie’s smile gleamed in his dark face. “I don’t think either they or the hotel would agree with you, but thank you. So what were your questions?”
“I assume you work here in Darwin?”
“Yes, sometimes, but only at the old mission out in Parap, or at the places where my people gather. I don’t go to places like this.”
“You mean places where white people are?” Dan smiled when he saw Ernie nod his agreement. “It can be the same in my country, Ernie, but it’s changing. It will change here too.” He poured them both a glass of juice. “When you do come into town, have you ever seen a white man with long, dark hair wearing a caftan—a long robe?”
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“OH YES, WE’VE ALL SEEN him wandering around in his red caftan. He’s always asking questions about the ancestors and the spirits and where they live. Sometimes he goes to the old mission the day after welfare day and asks people there if they want to sell him a tjuringa.”
“The day after? You mean when he knows there will be people who have been drinking? Who are maybe short of money after a night on the town?”
Ernie nodded. “It’s no secret that many of the people who live there have a problem with alcohol. Most grew up in a white man’s residential school. Alcohol is how they deal with their memories.”
“Do you know this man’s name?”
“He calls himself by many different names and none make any sense. I’ve heard Dantor, Met, and Kalfu – or at least that’s what they sound like. Maybe he’s foreign, although he speaks good English. I think perhaps he’s a little crazy.”
Dan pulled a napkin out of the holder and scribbled the names on it. He would check them later, but something about them sounded vaguely familiar.
“Have you heard of anyone who’s sold him a tjuringa?”
Ernie let his eyes stray to the pool where the kids had started their game again. “No. That would never happen. The people he talks to are lost. If any of them ever had a tjuringa, it would have been taken from them long ago. Now? Now they’ve probably forgotten what a tjuringa is, just like they’ve forgotten who they are and where they came from.” Ernie’s eyes had a faraway look, as if he was remembering his own roots and wishing he could return there, and once again Dan was reminded of Walker.
“Your home around here, Ernie? You get to go back sometimes?”
A flock of Rainbow lorikeets erupted from the fronds of the palm trees, their deep blue heads, orange bellies, and the scarlet bars under their wings brilliant in the sunlight, their raucous calls drowning out the noise coming from the pool.
“Not really. My country is over east, below the Daintree in Queensland. Takes a long time to get there.”
Dan signalled the waiter to bring another round of juice and water.
“Any idea where this caftan fellow lives?”
Ernie shrugged. “I don’t think he’s local. He seems to just come and go. I know he’s been seen at the airport a few times, and I saw him down on the wharf a couple of weeks ago. One of the regional people was talking to him.”
“One of the regional people? You mean the regional police?”
“Yes, but not the regular fellas. One of their administration people. White shirt and long pants. I don’t know his name. I don’t have much to do with the regionals.”
Dan closed his eyes. The description could fit any senior officer, but senior officers did not go out and question people, and if it was Harbinson . . .
***
DAN ORDERED LUNCH TO be sent up to his room and he read the contents of the envelope Ernie had given him while he ate. It seemed he didn’t need Harbinson’s cooperation to get the information he needed: the guys back at the Interpol office in Sydney had come up with everything he had asked for. A copy of the deed for Snake Island showed the owner as a man called Emile Dahonney. According to an attached document pulled from Australian immigration records, Dahonney was an American, originally from Louisiana. He had taken out Australian citizenship three years earlier and then purchased the island from a biologist who had spent most of his life working in the area. Dahonney was fifty-eight years old and unmarried. His profession was listed as geologist. He had no criminal record and had met all the financial requirements for citizenship.
It wasn’t until Dan saw Dahonney’s passport photo and read his physical description that he found anything of interest. Dahonney’s height was listed as 1.5 meters, his face showed a mouth distorted by crowded teeth, and his skin was covered by odd brownish patches. It stated the man suffered from both dwarfism and something called Porphyria or an extreme sensitivity to light which could cause blistering on exposed skin. This was obviously the man both Claire and Janet had mentioned, but why on earth would someone who was sensitive to light move to northern Australia?
The second group of papers was even more interesting. Information from the Darwin airport listed frequent visits from Emile Dahonney including re-fueling records showing he landed there often and normally took on between 40 and 50 liters of fuel, plus 30 liters in an auxiliary tank. There was even a photo showing a bright red helicopter, undoubtedly the same kind of chopper both Annie and the guys at the Prince Rupert airport had reported seeing. It, too, had an odd pattern painted on it, but there the similarities ended. The design was nothing like the Vèvè of Ayizan.
Later that evening Dan walked down to the beach and watched the sun disappear into the ocean. The night sky turned black above his head and even with the loom of lights from the city behind him the stars shone with an intensity he had seldom seen before. He stretched out on the warm sand and spent a couple of hours trying to find a new way of looking at what he had learned. Both Dahonney and Chauvet came from places where Voudou was practiced and both had a helicopter with some kind of symbol painted on it. They weren’t the same symbols, but they were similar. Could they be simply a kind of logo Chauvet put on the helicopters he sold or was there another meaning?
***
THE FLIGHT TO MANINGRIDA was blessedly short and uneventful. No air pockets caused him to dig his fingers into the armrests and both take-off and landing were smooth enough to make him believe he might someday be able to get over his fear of flying—although it would certainly never be his favourite form of transportation.
He climbed down the stairs onto a smooth, tarmac runway which, like the runway at Wurrumiyanga, was edged by wide strips of bright red earth. A small group of people sat on plastic chairs pushed against the wall of a tin-roofed building, all but one of them almost indiscernible in the deep shade.
“Good thing you’re blonde,” he said against Claire’s hair as he pulled her close. “I almost missed you in the crowd.”
“Idiot,” she said, smiling as she gestured to the man with aboriginal features and dark hair but lighter skin who was standing behind her. “Dan, this is Waru. Anything you want to know about this land and what lives here, he can tell you—and about what’s in the water too.”
The two men shook hands and Waru led them to a dusty jeep and drove them through the smooth, red dirt streets that made up the town.
“I never thought it would be so flat here,” Dan said, “nor that there would be so few trees. I always figured the coast would be really tropical.”
Waru grinned. “We’ve got a few mountains and lakes—we call them billabongs. Even got some waterfalls in the Kakadu—and there’s lots of trees down there at the bottom of the inlet where the river comes in below Snake Island.”
“And is this the only town?” Dan asked.
“Nah, there’s a few others,” Wally said. “Yirrkala, Gunbalanya, Jabiru. But they’re all smaller than this and it’s probably not a good idea to go exploring. Most of them are inland, and they don’t welcome outsiders.”
Dan nodded. “Still true for some in Canada,” he said. “And probably for the same reason.”
***
THE ROAD RAN OUT ONTO a beach where a boat sat on the sandy bottom a few feet offshore.
“Welcome to Larapan II,” Claire said, removing her shoes and wading into the water. “She’s named after an old mission boat that used to supply the mission over on Bathurst Island.” She turned to smile at Dan. “You should feel right at home seeing you’ve just come from there.”
“She’s a great boat for this job,” Waru said as they watched Claire clamber aboard. “The original owner was a real character. When he retired he sold the Larapan I, but he missed the sea so he bought this one.” He nodded towards the boat now starting to lift with the waves as Claire started the engine. “Lived aboard for a few years, but he died without a will and no one could find any relatives so she ended up with the government and they gave her to us.”
“Us being Maningrida, or the dugong program?” Dan asked.
“Actually neither. I work with an environmental group run by several of the Arnhem Land aboriginal nations. They made me the government liaison officer, probably because I’m a ‘coconut’—dark on the outside but white on the inside.” He laughed. “I was sent to school in Darwin then went to university in Sydney so my people figure I can see things from a whitefella’s point of view.”
“And can you?” Dan asked.
“Usually, although I don’t often agree with them.” Waru’s wide smile took the sting out of his words and Dan could see why Claire liked the man. He, like Walker, was completely comfortable in who he was.
“Claire told me you come from Bathurst Island,” Dan said. “Do you know anything about the thefts that happened there?”
“I know they happened.” Waru’s tone turned sombre. “Nothing more. I didn’t believe it when I first heard about it. It still seems impossible.”
“Do you have any idea how anyone would know when and how the tjuringa was being brought into town? From everything I’ve been told, that information would be kept from everyone except the custodian and the person that owns it—although ‘own’ is perhaps not the right term?”
“Close enough, and you’re right, that information would not normally be known, at least not officially. All the tjuringas that ‘belong’ to a particular spirit are kept in a secret place by the man we call the custodian, but the tjuringa that was stolen had been removed because there was to be an initiation.”
Dan nodded. “They told me it was to be shown to the initiate for the first time.”
Waru rubbed a hand over his hair and let his eyes follow the flight of a gull. Dan heard him take a deep breath and slowly let it out. “Many would have known there was to be an initiation, and that always means a tjuringa will be brought in from wherever it is kept. Some would even know who the custodian of that tjuringa was, but no one would have known where he stored it, the route he would take, or the time he would arrive.”
“Someone knew,” Dan said. “You’ve heard what happened to the custodian?”
Waru nodded. “I heard. He’s a member of my skin, my family. I checked with the hospital a couple of hours ago. He’s still in a coma.”