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“FINISHED YET?”
Curtis looked up from his reading of Lansing’s notebooks to ask the question of Sonderfeld, who was still bending over the body, intent on the grim business of evisceration and dismemberment.
“Very soon now.”
Sonderfeld’s voice was cool and professional.
It was morning. They were in Lansing’s hut, Curtis slightly in shadow at the table, Sonderfeld in the shaft of light from the doorway working under the curious stares of the villagers, who were held back by the line of police boys standing with rifles at the port, motionless as ebony statues.
They had come to the village late the previous night. They had made a cursory inspection of the scene, then posted a guard of police and retired to spend the night in the Kiap house. When morning came, Curtis had called the villagers together and questioned the luluai in their presence without shaking his story in the slightest particular. All the evidence confirmed its truth: the position of the body, the scars of the snakebite, the liquor and the shattered glass. No jury would have disputed a verdict of death by misadventure.
But Curtis was still not satisfied. He made a thorough search of the hut, collected all Lansing’s belongings, listed them carefully and had the police boys parcel them in woven mats for transport back to the bungalow and later to Goroka. The notebooks he had kept apart to read while Sonderfeld did his postmortem.
The body was already puffy with poison and incipient decay. The ants had begun to crawl on it and the big bush rats had begun to gnaw at the extremities, but Sonderfeld went about his work with calm and precision. His strong hands were encased in rubber gloves, and a sweating police boy stood near him with a wooden bowl of steaming water, a clean towel and a cake of disinfectant soap.
When he had finished, he straightened up, stripped off the gloves, washed his hands carefully and gave directions in pidgin for the sterilizing of his gloves and instruments. Then he turned to Curtis.
“It is done.”
“What’s the verdict?”
Sonderfeld shrugged.
“As before. He must have been very drunk. His stomach was still full of unabsorbed spirit.”
“The cause of death?”
“Paralysis of the motor centers, following the snakebite. One hour, two perhaps, after he had been bitten.”
“Can you identify the poison?”
“No. I have not the knowledge for that. I doubt if anyone has yet.”
Curtis closed the book with a snap and stood up. He pointed to the desk and the vacant chair.
“Mind writing me a report on it? Might as well get everything straight now.”
Sonderfeld made a gesture of indifference, sat down at the rough table and wrote his report with Lansing’s pencil on Lansing’s notepaper. His hand was steady, his script was firm and businesslike. When he had finished, he scribbled a signature, folded the paper and handed it to Curtis, who slipped it into his notebook and buttoned it in his breast pocket.
“We bury him,” said Curtis simply. “We bury him and then go home.”
They buried him under the shade of the tangket trees on the outer fringe of the village. They buried him deep to keep him safe from the snuffling pigs, and Curtis recited the Lord’s Prayer while Sonderfeld stood bareheaded and the villagers waited in theatrical grief and the police boys stood rigidly at attention. They they fired a salute over the open grave, Curtis threw in the first handful of black earth and the natives filled the hole with their hands, chattering and laughing and stamping the earth down with their bare feet.
They marked the grave with a big square stone and left him there—lonely in death as he had been in life—loveless, barren of achievement, Max Lansing, crowned with dust, naked in the naked earth of the oldest island on the planet.
At the moment of Max Lansing’s burial in the mountain village, Gerda Sonderfeld, Theodore Nelson and Père Louis sat together on the stoop of the bungalow.
Between them on the table lay the small tube of bamboo which N’Daria had given to Sonderfeld. Père Louis leant forward and lifted the tube between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Gerda and Nelson watched him, fascinated. His eyes were hard, his mouth was grim under the grey beard.
“Tell me—” He gestured with the shiny brown tube. “Tell me again how you came by this.”
“I picked it up in the bedroom,” said Gerda. “It fell from the pocket of Kurt’s trousers when the houseboy came to take them to the wash.”
“Do you know what it is?” asked Theodore Nelson.
“I do.”
“Have you seen it before?” It was Gerda’s question this time.
“I have seen others like it,” said Père Louis gravely. He slipped the cap from the tube and showed them the noisome, clotted wad inside. “In the other cases there was a handful of moss, a fragment of bark cloth. But the meaning is the same.”
He replaced the cap and laid the tube on the table.
“What is the meaning, Father?” Gerda’s anxious eyes searched his face.
“Before I tell you that, madame, I should like to know”—he turned his grim old eyes on Theodore Nelson—“what is your part in this?”
It was Gerda who answered for him, eagerly, as for a trusted ally.
“Mr. Nelson has been asked by the patrol officer to look after me and to pick up whatever information he can during the absence of proper authority.”
The answer seemed to satisfy the little priest. He nodded absently and spent a long time examining the wrinkled, mottled skin on the backs of his small hands. Then he spoke, slowly and carefully, like a man whose strength is running out and for whom even the effort of speech is a costly loss.
“What you saw in that tube was the life of a human being. The cotton wool is impregnated with the spittle and the blood and—I believe—the seed of a living man. Whoever holds this tube holds that man in bondage, because he holds his life and can compass his death.”
“My husband!” The words were a long-drawn whisper of horror.
Père Louis nodded soberly.
“It would seem so.”
“But—but—” Nelson stammered the words in his excitement. “To whom does that belong—that messy thing?”
Père Louis turned his grave, tired eyes on Gerda.
“Can you answer that, madame?”
Without hesitation she rose to the challenge.
“I believe so. I think it belongs to Kumo the Sorcerer. I think also that he is the man through whom my husband killed Max Lansing.”
“God Almighty!”
Theodore Nelson swore softly and mopped his clammy forehead. Père Louis was staring down at his old and knotted hands. It was a long time before any of them spoke again. Nelson was the first to break the silence.
“Does—does this thing really work?”
Père Louis nodded somberly.
“It works, my friend; be in no doubt of that. It works, as fear and superstition always work to corruption and death and the destruction of man’s immortal soul.”
“How in God’s name would he get such a thing?”
Père Louis spread his hands, palm upwards, on the table as if to emphasize the simplicity of the answer.
“He would get it through a woman, a woman whom he would send to seduce this man and fornicate with him. It is as blunt and as easy as that.”
Nelson shot a sidelong glance at Gerda, then averted his eyes in shame and embarrassment. Père Louis began to light his pipe, puffing furiously and sending great clouds of foul smoke curling over the table. Gerda alone was calm and contained. She said flatly, “The woman, of course, is N’Daria. She works for my husband. She is passionately in love with him. She would do anything he asked.”
Père Louis nodded agreement but said nothing. It was left to Theodore Nelson to lay down the final pieces in the pattern.
“So that’s what Lansing meant about the cargo cult and the domination of the tribes. That’s why he was killed, because he came too close to the truth. That’s why—”
“That is why we must say nothing of this until I have had the chance to speak to Curtis and decide what we must do.” The old priest picked up the bamboo tube and put it in his pocket. He pushed aside his chair and stood up. “Now, my friend, if you will excuse us, I should like a word in private with Madame. I suggest you walk in the garden awhile. The fresh air will do you good.”
Still dabbing at his damp forehead, Theodore Nelson made an awkward, stumbling exit, and Gerda was left alone with Père Louis.
The old priest laid his hand on hers with a gentle, comforting gesture.
“Now, my child, we will talk of things that concern only the two of us. But first—” His lined face relaxed into a boyish grin. “But first I should like a drink—a strong one!”
She brought him whisky and a jug of ice water. She waited patiently while he sank the first drink at a gulp and sipped at the second with careful relish. His silence and his deliberation troubled her not at all. Of all the people who surrounded her in this time of shame and crisis Père Louis was the one she trusted most. There was in his stringy old body an enduring strength. His spirit was endowed with a patient, compassionate wisdom to which the others were strangers. He had the bluntness of the man who has faced the final consequences of his belief, the tenderness of the man who knows the burden that belief lays on the shoulders of weak men and women. His presence rested her, gave her time and courage to collect her scattered strength.
Père Louis finished his drink and set down the empty glass.
“Now,” he said gently, “we will talk about you.”
“About me, Father?” She took it calmly enough, but she was as wary as a cat.
“About you and your immortal soul.”
She smiled bitterly.
“You are the first man I have met who was interested in my soul.”
Père Louis did not smile. His eyes were grave and gentle.
“Max Lansing? Did you love him?”
“No.”
“Do you love your husband?”
“I hate him.”
“So … you are married to a man you hate. You have committed adultery with a man you do not love.”
“With many men, Father.”
“Did it make you happy, my child?”
She shrugged, still smiling the rueful, crooked smile.
“Long ago, Father, I learnt that I should not expect happiness. I have tried to make myself content with what is left to me.”
“Do you believe in God, child?”
“No.”
“And yet you are a Pole. You were born and baptized in the Church.”
“Yes.”
“What happened to you? What happened to you that you came to lose the one thing that might have made you happy?”
There was no reproach in the old voice, only an attentive earnestness, as if he were a doctor probing a deep and painful wound. She felt no resentment—she was content to follow the line of his questioning, answering simply and without evasion because she had nothing to hide.
“There was a time, Father, when I needed God and He was not there. There was a time when I called on Him and He did not answer. It is as simple as that.”
“Tell me about it.”
She told him. She told him of the war and of the rape of the eastern cities. She told him of the long horror that ended with her meeting Reinach and the new horror that had grown out of the same meeting. She told him of her maiming and her servitude. She told him how Reinach became Sonderfeld and of the monstrous bargain she had made with him. She told of their life together and of their loves apart; and, when she had finished, it was as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders and a tight hand had loosened its grip around her heart. Père Louis lowered his eyes to hide the pity and the tenderness and the old, foolish tears. He took her white, slack hand between his own rough palms and patted it gently.
“To say that I am sorry for you, child, is to say an empty and a barren thing. I am a priest, an unworthy shepherd of the flock of Christ. You belong to that flock and you belong to me, though you have wandered a long, hard way from the fold. I say to you now, you do not need pity. You need strength and love and the grace to forgive others as God is ready to forgive you.”
She made a little shrugging gesture of despair.
“I have strength, I think. Otherwise I should not have endured so much and so long. But love … ? Perhaps I am incapable of love, as I am incapable of bearing children?”
“No!” Père Louis’ voice was suddenly strong in rejection. “You think you are incapable of love, because all these years you have made the act of love an act of self-torment, an act of revenge upon the man who has wronged you. To sin with love and passion is one thing. It is a sin according to nature, but a sin that carries the seed of its own salvation. To sin without love is a perversion, a monstrous contradiction that will debase you lower than the man you wish to hurt. Child …” The old man’s voice was warm again and soft with compassion. “Child, I am an old man. Like Solomon with all his years upon him, I have seen evil under the sun. But I have seen good, too—much good—so much that I am daily humbled and grateful to the good God. Believe me, I do not sell you cheap words. I am no huckster of the Gospel. I am a tired, spent man; I have no traffic but with the truth. Bend to me, child, bend a little and see at your feet the love of God, bright and beautiful, like the flowers in your garden.”
Gerda Sonderfeld buried her face in her hands and wept. The old man stood beside her and patted her dark hair like a father comforting a grieving child. Then, when all her tears were spent and she lifted her ravaged face, he fished in his pocket for a handkerchief and handed it to her with a wry grin.
“There now, already it begins to be better. Dry your eyes and we will see what can be done to mend this madness in the valleys.”
Père Louis was in a double dilemma.
Possession of the bamboo tube set him in a position of some power against both Sonderfeld and Kumo. Yet his status as a missionary deprived him of the authority to use it. There was only one authority in the valley—Cadet Patrol Officer Lee Curtis. He, being young and unsure of himself, might well resent the intrusion of the Church into secular affairs. He might, with more reason, object to paying the penalty for the Church’s mistakes—and mistakes were very possible when one was dealing with the abnormal psychologies of paranoiac modern and primitive man.
Père Louis found himself wishing, as he had wished many times in the last days, that George Oliver were on patrol again and not beating his head and bruising his heart against mountains of paper in the District Commissioner’s office at Goroka.
George Oliver would have understood and approved what he wanted to do. He had made his reputation by gambles such as this one. But George Oliver was two days away behind the southern barrier.
There was another problem, too—a moral one. Gerda Sonderfeld hated her husband and was prepared to revenge herself upon him for the death of her lover. To invite her cooperation in Sonderfeld’s downfall would be to lay on her and on himself a new burden of guilt. He was, first and foremost, a priest, and sin was to him a disorder worse than final chaos. Whatever he did, therefore, he must do without her knowledge.
He needed time, prayer, and a little solitude, to extricate himself from his dilemma. So, in spite of Gerda’s curiosity and disappointment, he took himself off in the direction of the big clump of bamboos that screened the boy houses from the main bungalow and Gerda’s garden.
There, sitting on a mossy log, he made a short prayer and smoked a long, soothing pipe before he made up his mind what to do.
First, he hailed one of the houseboys and traded him a plug of tobacco for a bamboo container similar in size and texture to Sonderfeld’s. He had the boy bring him a wad of cotton wool and, with the aid of spittle, tobacco juice and blood pricked from his finger, he made a reasonable facsimile of the contents of Sonderfeld’s tube.
Then he took the wad containing Kumo’s vital juices and transferred it to his own container. In its place he put the tampon he himself had made, closed both tubes and held them side by side in his outstretched hand—the real and the false—while he pondered how he should use them.
The forgery he would return to Gerda, so that Sonderfeld would find it when he came home. The original he would keep against the time of final conflict.
He saw it clearly and in detail: the assembly of the tribes in the Lahgi Valley, the tossing plumes, the spilt blood, the bodies of the sacrificial pigs piled high outside the spirit houses. He saw Sonderfeld proclaimed by Kumo as the incarnation of the Red Spirit. He saw himself, small and alone, in the center of the compound, challenging Sonderfeld for a liar and Kumo for a dupe and holding up his own bamboo capsule in proof of the challenge. He saw the doubt and the uncertainty in Kumo’s eyes—for even the great sorcerer could not pierce the bamboo walls to know which man was a liar and which held his life in the hollow of his hand.
The next moment he could not foresee, because this would be the moment of the final gamble, the moment when the shrewd primitive would weigh him against Sonderfeld for truth and credit and strength. This would be the moment in which he would have great need of the sheltering mercy of God, for if he were found wanting, he would be cut down by the stone axes and his blood would be spilt with the spilt blood of the pigs.
He shivered in spite of the warmth, thrust the tube into his pocket and, carrying the other in his clenched fist, walked slowly back to the bungalow.
In the rich darkness of the cool mountain night, Kurt Sonderfeld came home to his bungalow. His bones were weary from the long trek over the mountains, his body stank with fatigue and his stained clothes were stiff with mud and drying sweat. He was ill-tempered and troubled by the stiff reserve of Lee Curtis, who, in spite of his youth and inexperience, had conducted the investigation with punctilious caution. In spite of the fact that he had found nothing suspicious or at variance with the village story, he was reserved and wary and he made no secret of his displeasure at Sonderfeld’s constant questioning.
When, at the first homeward halt, he had asked to see Lansing’s manuscript, Curtis had handed it to him without demur. But, as he skimmed it, thumbing quickly through the close-written pages with their cryptic notes in professional jargon, he was conscious that Curtis was watching him closely, studying his face for any reaction of surprise or displeasure. The boy mistrusted him, but Sonderfeld was unable to put a finger on the cause of his distrust. So far as he could see in the first quick glance, there was nothing at all in the notes that could be construed as an accusation. Finally he shrugged off his fear, but the ill temper stayed with him the rest of the way home.
More than all, however, the loss of the bamboo tube fretted him. So much depended on his possession of that small sinister capsule; so much more depended on keeping his possession a secret. If Gerda found it, all would be well. She was indifferent to such things, accustomed to his having about him such trifles of native workmanship.
It was the houseboys who troubled him. If one of them had picked it up, he would be certain to open it—the Highland native is curious as a jackdaw. Then, when he saw what it contained, he would either fall into a gibbering panic or he would keep it for a trade with Kumo or another sorcerer. Either event could spell disaster for Sonderfeld.
But, when he came into the bedroom where Gerda was sleeping soundly, he saw on the bedside table a pile of freshly washed handkerchiefs and, on top of them, the bamboo tube. Gerda had found it then. She had done as wives do with a mislaid cuff link or a forgotten wristwatch—laid it where he would be sure to see it when he came home.
Sonderfeld smiled with satisfaction. His ill humour fell away from him like sloughed skin. He thrust the tube into his trouser pocket, then, remembering the mishap of the previous day, thought better of it and put it far back in the drawer of his cabinet and covered it with the handkerchiefs. It would be safe there until he needed it.
He stripped off his soiled clothes, threw a towel over his arm and walked down to the shower room to refresh himself for sleep. As he passed the half-open door of the guest room, he heard the sound of deep, regular breathing, punctuated by an occasional snore. He stopped, pushed the door open and peered into the room. Père Louis was sleeping the sleep of the just and godly. Sonderfeld withdrew, frowning.
The presence of the priest puzzled him. He remembered their last meeting and the old man’s refusal to visit him again unless he were summoned. He wondered if Gerda had sent for him. Then he remembered that Père Louis’ village was close to Lansing’s. He would have heard the news before any of them. But why had he come here instead of making straight for Lansing’s place?
He chewed on the proposition as he bathed and towelled himself; and, finally, because he could not brook any thought that challenged the perfection of his own planning, he decided that the priest had come to offer sympathy to the friends of the dead man—a natural enough gesture in the isolation of the mountains, where any excuse is good enough for a gathering. Perhaps, too, the old man wanted to make friends again. He would miss the whisky and the regular dinner among civilized people.
Sonderfeld smiled with sour triumph and walked back to the bedroom. He told himself he was a fool to trouble over trifles. Let them suspect what they would; let them hate him as much as they dared; they could not shake a single stone of the empire of Kurt Sonderfeld.
He threw himself on the bed, drew the covers about his shoulders and lapsed immediately into a dreamless sleep.
He did not hear the running feet of the cassowary bird pounding down the mountain, drumming past the village, thundering up the slope, towards the laboratory where N’Daria tossed uneasily in her lonely bed.
Père Louis heard them and sat bolt upright, instantly awake. The habit of years was strong in him; he had lived through times and in places where death walked the jungle paths, and more than one lonely missionary had fallen under the stone axes and the heavy clubs of the people he had come to save. He knew, too, that the cassowary bird does not stir abroad at night but sleeps like other birds during the hours of darkness.
The muffled crescendo could have only one meaning. Evil was abroad under the stars. The village slept and the kundus were silent, but the sorcerers were active about their dark business of perversion.
He listened intently. The running feet were closer. They were passing the village. They were turning up the slope towards the plantation. He threw off the covers, dressed himself hurriedly and crept out of the house.
The night was empty of all but stars and shadowy trees, but the air vibrated with the sound of drumming feet coming closer and closer yet. Père Louis crossed himself and invoked the protection of Christ and His Virgin Mother and walked slowly down the path to meet the oncoming footsteps.
N’Daria heard them, too, and trembled with terror in the darkness. She buried her head under the blankets, but she could not shut out the sound of their inexorable approach. She knew what they meant. Kumo was coming for her as she had known he must come, now that Sonderfeld had rejected her.
She had betrayed her lover and had been betrayed in her tum. Now her lover was coming to exact vengeance, the terrible, dark vengeance that only a sorcerer could exact.
Ever since that night she had lived in constant terror. She had not dared to go to the kunande. She had not set foot in the village. She had hidden herself even from the work boys and had kept herself in the laboratory hut, trying frantically to concentrate on the tasks that Sonderfeld had set her but that were now without meaning or potency. She was lost and she knew it. She had tried to live in two worlds, and in both her foothold had crumbled. She had rejected her own people. The white man had rejected her. The knowledge he had given her was no armour against the secret wisdom of the sorcerers.
Fearful, alone, full of guilt and remorse, she could do nothing but lie there, shivering and helpless, while the footbeats came closer and closer and finally stopped outside the window of the hut.