CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

From the next room I hear him begin to howl in Maori, a dirge, the kind of wounded cries that they sing at death. It breaks across a range of piercing tones marking weakness and pain, then moves to a different level, more powerful and defiant. I have never heard anything as unnerving. It violates the boundaries between human and inhuman, like the echo of a voice returning from darkness amplified and changed in tone by the enormities which have repelled it. The sound that goes furthest into my head suggests the scraping of insolence against a hard edge of terror. There are others, less recognisable, so clenched in intensity that in the end there is no way of separating the worship of death from the struggle against it.

In spite of this, in an uncontrollable rush from consciousness I drift into a sleep. I am lifted a long way above the abandoned city and all its houses and blocks of towers are laid out dead below, miles of dark stone and glass and ribbed iron. And in the centre, a tower with one speck of light, a solitary dot. The only sounds on earth come from this; a diesel feeding energy into the concrete space, and the wail of a prehistoric death chant. When this fades I hear the whispering in the distance of the old dream I’ve had many times, indecipherable; the voices I will not hear.

At light I wake, rise, and listen. The place is very quiet. Again I fold the jacket over my arm and go into the room slowly, holding the gun hidden. He is still in the same place, sitting upright, head lowered, chin on his chest. I stand opposite. His face comes up. Has he been asleep? His eyes point in my direction. There is no response when I speak his name. I say it several times. Then he says, ‘Get out.’

The corpse is pale, like a shell; an arm is extended and the empty eyes are half open. A smell of antiseptic and dead sweat presses into my throat. I walk round the bed and pause as I go by him. Without looking at me he reaches his left arm up and makes a pushing gesture to get rid of me. The jacket slips and my sudden grab at it makes him turn and stare. He sees the gun. I step back.

He does not seem surprised, he just looks slowly up from the gun to my face and back down to the gun again.

‘Go on,’ he says. He turns so that he is facing me, very passive and without any expression. His left hand moves gradually through the air towards his face and the forefinger extends until it almost touches the centre of his forehead. Then he says, ‘Here.’ And there is a silence. ‘Go on. Do it.’ I am back in the next room, leaning again on the door, knowing that within minutes I must understand my life, I must force my memory to the very centre, the holding power of every defence. I must remember. He told me that, days ago, when he heard me shouting in the dream. Then, in there, he said the opposite. Forget, don’t remember, blot it out, it does no good. I still have no choice. I can’t—

Cells tense inside my head. I feel the pain, of what he pointed for me to do, through my own skull.

When I look again into the room only moments later he has vanished. I stand in a stupor. I heard nothing. But the door to the corridor is half open. I stride to it and glance along the passage into the grey light. The door to the stairs is squeezing shut furtively with a faint hiss of its automatic lever.

Quick. Will he have gone up to the rooms where the guns are, or down to the car park, to his jeep? I run along, haul the door open and look up and down the stairwell. No sign of him. So he must have gone down, out on the top floor of the car park building. Still clutching the revolver, I jump down the stairs three at a time, kick open the exit door and run out into the great cavern of the car park. The generator is humming in the lower level, the basement. I flick on the fluorescent lights and run behind the nearest row of cars, crouching. The jeep is parked next to my car against the far wall. I stop and look. The noise of the generator makes it hard to hear. Damn. I was wrong. He isn’t here. He tricked me. He must have gone up one floor, then left the stairwell and run along the corridor to the other set of stairs. Now he’ll be up on the eighth floor with his weapons.

I dash to the jeep and pull the tarpaulin back. What did he leave here? Boxes of ammunition. The practice grenades. Some real ones. I take two out and slip one into each pocket, making sure the rings connected to the release catches don’t snag.

He will come down after me. I won’t be able to hear because of the generator. I run along to the ramp which leads down to the next level. The machine noise gets louder as I descend. Along, and down again. There it is. I pause, then crouch behind the generator, glancing all around. When I switch it off, the sound falls into a long drone and the lights shrink. The machine dies with an animal-like convulsion, then the lights seem to be blotted out by silence. Enough grey light is coming in through the open side of the parking building to show the exit doors from the hotel staircase about ten metres away. I dodge across and get on the far side of a concrete pillar. By looking at the reflection on the side of a black car standing to the right, I can still see the exit door I think he will come through on the left.

The silence solidifies. I can hear nothing but my own breathing and my heart thudding like mad. I still can’t think what’s happening.

There’s a very faint sound, somewhere above. A clicking, and a rustle. Silence, then more rustling, and silence again. He must be on the upper floor, with the jeep. What will he expect me to do next? Or least expect me to do? Is it any use trying to reason with him? I don’t even know if this is the real thing. Are we trying to kill each other?

‘Hobson!’ He shouts, from above, the echoes making the voice seem everywhere. ‘Hobson! Throw the gun out where I can see it.’

I look up, trying to see where he is. There are more movements, then a pause.

‘I know you’re down there. Come on out.’

‘Maketu!’ My voice is hoarse. ‘For God’s sake, this is stupid.’

‘Too right. You want to kill me, eh?’

‘No no—’ Is he moving closer? ‘Listen—’

‘You don’t get a second chance, boy. Throw the gun out.’

‘Apirana!’

‘Shit to that!’

‘I don’t want to kill you.’

‘Like hell. Throw the fucken’ gun out.’

He’s trying to work out where I am. He’s moved closer, now he’s somewhere on the next floor, above and to my right, near the sloping ramp about fifteen metres away. I move behind the black car. There is a silence. Then: ‘Going to count to three. Throw the gun out where I can see it. You better do what I say, Hobson. I’m not fucken’ around. I mean it.’

A pause. I transfer the revolver to my left hand and take a grenade out of my right pocket.

‘One.’

How can I pull the pin out without putting the gun down? Sweat itches down my face.

‘Two.’

I reach up and hook the metal ring at the top of the grenade onto the projecting handle of the car door and keeping my fingers firmly round the grenade to hold the striker against the side, I tug the ring loose. The percussion cap will only set the fuse burning when I let go. He showed me that the day we drove down from Turangi.

‘Three.’

There’s a rustling movement above, a metallic click, and something bounces down the ramp and rolls across the concrete floor a few metres away. Grenade! I swing my arm back and lob my grenade over the tops of the cars towards the ramp. As I duck down behind the car I see he’s thrown a practice grenade, a thunder flash, not the real thing, just to scare me with the noise. Too late. In the next second I hear the real grenade I’ve hurled at the ramp hit a concrete column and clatter onto the slope and I hear him yell, Shit! Then the thunder flash explodes with a loud firework bang and the grenade straight away detonates in a shattering explosion, huge bursts of noise echoing in the confined space, shrapnel from the grenade whacking hard concrete, whining in all directions, something punching the side car window to green crystal, a spray of broken bits of glass bouncing over me and across the floor as the main echo of the explosion blasts back from the far wall, compressing the air.

An acrid cordite smell and a haze of blue smoke hangs beneath the ceiling and drifts down. Beyond the ringing inside my ears I can hear nothing. No sign of movement. I slide up and peer through the back window of the car towards the ramp. Nothing. If he was hurt, he’d be making a noise.

Now it’s for real.

I turn and run, still crouching, to the door which leads to the inner hotel staircase; pause in the doorway and gently pull the door open. I listen, then slide inside into the darkness, closing the door very quietly. I feel around in the pitch dark for the stair rail and move my feet forward till I tap the first step. Then, gun in my right hand again, I carefully work my way up the steps to the next floor. By the next door I stop and crouch, pushing it outwards with my left knee and operating the handle with my left hand.

The door opens soundlessly. I point the gun out and push harder, coming up from the crouch. Through the ten-centimetre space I see a figure moving slowly behind the nearest row of cars, back to me, facing away, then glancing round. The moment he sees me he whips round and brings the automatic rifle up. I get only a fraction of a second to leap back and slam the metal door before the first wild bullet hits the concrete lintel. The gun bangs away like a pneumatic drill on metal. I throw myself frantically up the stairs away from the door. The firing stops. I go on running up, bounding up in the dark. The handrail knocks against me.

I just have time to gain the next floor before the door below is kicked open and I hear the clink of the metal grenade hitting the concrete wall. I panic, first pushing on the door handle instead of pulling. Then it’s opening and I’m diving inside. The explosion roars up the concrete shaft of the staircase like a cannon firing. The pressure slams the door behind me and jolts the hotel so hard that white powder comes showering down from the corridor ceiling.

I’m back on the first floor. Without thinking, I run along the corridor and into the room where the woman’s body is lying. The daylight is stronger. The open doors from this room and the next show the corridor clearly from here to the staircase door. I prop myself in the doorway and hold the gun steady, looking back towards the staircase. The white dust settles on the carpet. I wipe the sweat from my face onto my sleeve. There is no way out now. This is it.

The minutes tick by. Where is he? Behind that staircase door? He can’t rush into the corridor because the door opens the wrong way. If he pulls it open far enough to throw a grenade down the corridor I’ll have time to close this door and step behind the concrete wall of the bathroom.

The angle of the door handle begins to change, so slowly I can hardly be sure at first. Yes, he’s there. Then, a long wait before a dark line starts to widen along the side of the door. It opens no more than a few centimetres. I’m blinking back the sweat from my eyes and straining to see.

‘Hobson!’ His voice barks down the corridor, booming from the concrete shaft of the staircase with a string of curses. ‘You come away from there, you bastard.’

I suddenly realise he won’t throw any grenades because of the woman. Even though she’s dead. He won’t do it. The shouting goes on.

‘You’re fucken’ mad, you know what you are, you fucken’ porangi bastard? You better not touch her. You hear that, pakeha? Stay away from her. You hear?’

I let him work himself almost hoarse with rage; then I yell back, ‘You killed her, Apirana!’

I use his first name deliberately, drawing it out mockingly. ‘Apirana. You killed her.’

A choking noise, an incoherent word, bursts from the gap in the door. I tense my finger on the trigger of the gun and hold the weapon as firm as I can with both hands before I shout, ‘Like you killed them in Vietnam. Is that right? Killed the women and kids, chopped them up? Apirana! You’re the one who’s mad, boy!’

The air seems to split sideways. I fall back into the room the moment the submachine gun jolts from behind the far door. The firing, like perforated steel being ripped apart, whacks dozens of bullets into the corridor, splintering wood, bursting glass, in a great roar. Lights explode. Sparks crack from concrete hit by steel. The doorjamb is chainsawed to bits, chopped apart, pieces flying everywhere. The banging and splintering seems to roar on for ages, and all I can do is crouch inside the doorway, press myself down and pray for the bullets to end.

When it stops I can’t move. I hear the staircase door thud open and then a clattering sound, like a gun being dropped. I have to force my body to get up.

Smoke and dust, tasting of cement and cordite. I nerve myself to glance out, quick. He is standing at the far end of the corridor, arms slack by his sides, his gun thrown down on the floor. I level the revolver at him but stay well inside the shelter of the edge of the door. And there we are, for a long minute, the blue haze clearing from the air.

Then he begins to walk forward in a vague way, stumbling over the gun, his hand going out to the wall to steady himself. He kicks the gun aside without looking down. And comes towards me another two steps, keeping his right hand on the wall. His face is quite blank, as though he’s finding his way along in total darkness. I move out to stand in the corridor, still holding the gun at him with both hands, my finger on the trigger.

‘Stay there! Keep back!’ I shout. ‘I’ll fire.’

He doesn’t seem to hear. Slowly he advances down the corridor directly at me.

‘Apirana! For God’s sake!’ My hands wobble. ‘Stop!’ At the last moment he knows, I can see in his face he knows I’m going to shoot, maybe a fraction of a second before I know, myself, I will do it.

The gun jerks back as I pull the trigger. The explosion seems to hit him in the chest with the force of a hammer, sending him sprawling away against the wall. He turns, one hand on his chest, the other flat on the wall; then he goes down suddenly onto his knees and forward on his face.

I lower the gun. A shuddering comes over me, making my arms flick around uncontrollably. The gun drops, unfixing itself from the tightness of my fingers. As I walk towards him, he pushes himself up with his left hand, half sideways, lifting his face, his legs making useless crawling movements on the carpet. His eyes fix on my shoes. The dazed expression pulls back to a sudden hatred, his lips gather, and with a huge effort he spits viciously at my shoes. It is all blood, gleaming down his chin and out of the sides of his mouth as he spits, then rolls over onto his back in one movement. His hands hold deep red liquid on his chest.

I crouch by him. He looks directly up towards me. For a moment his eyes widen, as if amazed, the black shining surrounded by yellowish white. Then he says, ‘Hemi. You’re dead, Hemi.’

The eyes slip sideways. A rush of darkness comes from his mouth.