“It’s hardly surprising, sir,” Harry said.
Raki’s eyes, their whites nearly yellow, looked blandly into Harry’s. “Sadly, the Minister feels—and I must admit that I agree with him—that some definite date must be put to the end of your search. After all, this disagreeable business has now hung over our fledgling tourist industry for four months. The Minister is most anxious that you make your search as thorough as you wish, but we must agree on a date upon which it ceases. The date agreed is the first day of April, which gives you plenty of time to search our small island with the proverbial toothbrush.”
President Raki’s reasonable tone of voice suddenly changed. “After that you will search no more!” His black eyes looked into Harry’s gray ones with all the friendliness of a Highland stag about to dispute territory. “After that, Mr. Scott, your eagerness to seek your friends will be interpreted as an exasperating and aggressive attempt to sabotage our efforts at attracting foreign visitors to Paui both for business and pleasure.”
The President stood up and leaned forward with both hands pressed on the desktop. “As to our business negotiations, these will not commence until this search of yours has ended. As I must achieve the best possible price for my country, I intend to discuss the mining concession with other interested parties. I believe you know Mr. Jaime Ongpin, president of the Beguet mining conglomerate? A most charming chap, a skilled economist, a scholar of Ateneo University, Manila, and a most interesting fellow. Goodnight, Mr. Scott.”
* * *
On the morning of March 10 the eight pilots of the Cherokees shook hands all around, said they were really sorry that they’d found nothing, it really was a bloody shame, and flew back to Port Moresby.
That evening Harry returned, depressed and later than usual, to Mrs. Chang’s hotel. As he entered the lobby, Freddy sprang out and said excitedly, “Master! Master! Mrs. Chang want tok-tok you quicktime!”
On enormous splayed feet, Freddy flitted up the wooden stairs. Harry waited, wondering why Mrs. Chang wanted to talk to him.
Wearing a triumphant smile, she appeared, clutching the banister. Moving down like a timorous child, one step at a time, with the left foot always first, Mrs. Chang lowered her enormous magenta bulk down the stairs and waddled across the lobby to Harry. Without a word, she dug her right fist deep into her pocket and then opened it under Harry’s nose.
On her sweaty little palm lay a battered steel watch.
* * *
Harry telephoned Kerry and asked him to fly down in the Bell the next morning. He then waited up to put through a call to Jerry Pearce in Pittsburgh, where it was seven o’clock in the morning. Jerry was now Acting President of Nexus as well as Finance Exec.
Sitting in Mrs. Chang’s old-fashioned swivel chair, Harry sniffed the musky odor of sweat and sandalwood, magnolia and dust. Through the heavy telephone in his hand, he heard a click, a pause and then, as clearly as if she were in the next room, a polite telephone operator who had probably showered in the last few hours and probably wore a crisp white smile and a blouse to match. “Your party is on the line, sir. Have a nice day.”
Harry told Jerry that Mrs. Chang had produced a second watch—an old stainless steel Rolex Oyster, waterproof and automatic, with a perpetual-date system. The watch didn’t fit any of the seven descriptions of insured watches that Harry had brought back from Pittsburgh. This watch clearly wasn’t valuable enough to be insured—but it might be worth millions of dollars because on the back were inscribed the words “Roderick Douglas, December 7, 1965.”
“Looks as though Roddy got it for his eighteenth birthday,” Harry reported. “It’s been wiped clean, but there’s still what looks like blood in the bracelet links…. No, I don’t know what blood type he was, but Roddy’s doctor will have a record…. No, I know the insurance assessors won’t accept it as proof of death, but now we have proof that Roddy and Arthur aren’t wearing their watches. In other words, Arthur’s watch can no longer be considered an accidental theft, unconnected with the disappearances.”
“Better send them both to me,” Jerry said.
“No, Jerry, I’m not trusting the watches to a courier; they’ll both be locked in a bank where they’ll be safe until I personally bring them to Pittsburgh…. No, Jerry, in my experience, couriers aren’t reliable, James Bond types. Couriers sit in airplanes and lose things…. No, Jerry, to hell with correct procedure and what Washington wants; Washington is very efficient at being inefficient. I expect there’s a pile of telexes reaching to the ceiling by now, about why nothing has been achieved.”
In Pittsburgh, Jerry winced and clutched at his stomach. Damned if he was going to get an ulcer over this. He asked, “Do you know where the watch came from, Harry?”
“Not exactly. Not yet. A local—well, I suppose you’d call him a doctor—took it off a dead soldier near a riverside village called Malong. That’s about forty miles south of Queenstown…. Yes, I’m going there with an interpreter, tomorrow, by boat…. No, it’s only about fifteen miles upriver, but it might be in impenetrable jungle or swamp and we’d never get a helicopter in. If I can locate more of this soldier’s possessions—a paybook or something like that—it might give us a lead to where the man came from. He might have been billeted in a nearby village; he might be one of Raki’s military infiltrators…. Sure, as soon as I get identification we’ll formally ask the Minister of Defense where the bloke was stationed.”
Useless to explain to Jerry what had really happened.
Roddy’s watch had been worn on the wrist of a Filipino soldier who had shot a piglet in the bush and roasted it. The nearby villagers, to whom the piglet belonged, hadn’t even demanded Payback money for the dead animal. As the soldier left the vicinity of the village, the village luluai had simply called for his bow and shot the soldier in the back. That was Payback in action.
The Malong villagers already had a telephone, a twelve-bore shotgun and a Mickey Mouse watch, but they lacked a transistor radio. The village medicine man had taken money and the watch from the dead soldier, then traveled by canoe forty-one miles to Queenstown.
As soon as the Malong medicine man had traded the Rolex, the local cheap-radio dealer had nipped into Ronald Chang’s shop—everyone knew that Ronald was offering unusually good money for watches. The radio dealer didn’t know what had happened to the dead man, but the villagers wouldn’t have wasted a good soldier; they would have roasted him.
From faraway Pittsburgh, Jerry Pearce asked how the concession discussions were proceeding.
Trying not to inhale the magnolia miasma that hung about the mouthpiece of the telephone, Harry said, “Raki won’t discuss the concessions until this search is finished, he says it’s upsetting their tourist business. By the way, it looks as though we have the competition we expected…. Yes, Beguet.”
“Raki’s dealing with Beguet and you’re concentrating on this futile search!” Jerry roared over thousands of miles. “Shit, that’s the worst news I’ve heard all week! You should be concentrating on that deal, instead of taking boat rides. Look, Harry, I’m ordering you to stop the search. We’ve done everything we can, but it’s over, Harry.”
“But, Jerry,” Harry began.
Jerry yelled, “The stock is seventeen points higher than ever before and we’re about to announce a dividend that’s up sixteen percent from last year. Wall Street is sending us all the right signals—the shareholders have accepted our new management. We don’t want to hear any more about the disappearances. It brings the whole subject up again. It creates unnecessary anxiety. It’s unsettling for employees and for shareholders. Let it die down, Harry. Forget it. That’s an order, Harry.” Jerry slammed down the receiver.
Harry thought, Jerry’s been in charge for four months. He’s proved he can do the job. He’s confident, and sure of his position. Jerry thinks he’s safe. And he would be—if I didn’t have those watches.
He was damned if he was going to give up.
* * *
T
he following morning, shortly after dawn, the old Duck deposited Harry and his native interpreter at the mouth of the Malong River. It was the tenth day of Harry’s coastline search, and the interpreter was the fifth with whom he had traveled during that period. Harry didn’t care for these constant changes of interpreter, but they were necessary because his total coastal search would mean asking questions in seventeen different languages, all with their own different dialects, according to the area.
Harry inflated the black dinghy with the foot pump, and slowly the sides swelled into black sausages. The interpreter loaded three cans of special fuel, the five-gallon can of drinking water, the insect repellent and tins of food. Harry straightened the map on his clipboard and whipped the outboard into action.
The little craft headed away from the sandy beaches and lagoons that marked the coastline and started its journey up the wide, muddy river. Purple convolvulus and sword-bean vines grew just above the high-tide mark; they passed sea almonds and salt-tolerant oaks dotted with scarlet hibiscus, then the narrow coastal strip of forest disappeared, the gnarled limbs of mangroves were left behind them and the river started to narrow.
Above the steady chug of the outboard, Harry could hear the pure sound of birdsong. He spotted eagles and kingfishers, and watched a red-eyed, silver-crested ground dove that flew before the dinghy, passing a group of black-beaked herons the same milky-brown color as the water in which they fished.
Soon the three levels of rain-forest tree growth were clearly visible on either bank. Yellow orchids hung from the second, middle layer of trees; there was no getting away from the yellow orchid on Paui, it was the national flower. Harry trailed his finger in the water and it emerged covered in a brown sheen.
The small, skinny interpreter shook his head in warning. “No hand in water, puk-puk in water.”
And indeed, within two minutes Harry had also spotted the ugly snouts of crocodiles.
At seven o’clock Harry cut the outboard and fired the first green flare into the sky.
After that, the river gradually narrowed, writhing its way through the forest. Harry quickly realized that the map wasn’t much use. The muddy rivers which divided southeastern Paui into isolated areas boiled with turbulence in the rainy season, then meandered, writhed and continually changed direction. Old channels closed and new ones opened. After the Long Wet a river might follow a totally different course from the one it had pursued a few months earlier.
Almost indiscernibly, the vegetation closed in. Through the increasingly thick overhead tangle Harry could still see the sky, but he soon stopped trying to keep track of the route they were taking as the river swayed around bends, snaked back on itself, wound around as if chasing its tail, then suddenly spurted in the opposite direction.
Harry maneuvered the dinghy around dead branches that swirled past it and rotting trees that had been submerged when the river changed course. As they rounded each bend, they saw another bend before them. The bends seemed endless.
The river was running against him, like everything on this island. As he followed the convoluted twists, Harry’s mind went around and around with possible explanations for the disappearance of the Nexus group, but he was never able to come to any satisfactory conclusion. It was as if those people had been wiped off the earth.
Just after Harry fired the ten o’clock flare, the river twisted up to the right. The dinghy edged into a narrow channel where the trees on either bank almost met overhead. The current seemed to grow stronger as the banks grew higher and water weeds tore at the little boat. As the river narrowed, it seemed to run faster and deeper and smell worse—a stench of slime and rotting vegetation. The branches overhead now twisted together so that the river became danker and darker.
It was hard to find an opening to the sky in order to fire the eleven o’clock flare. After he had done so, Harry felt increasingly depressed. He punted the dinghy deeper and deeper into the tangle; he felt sucked into this damp, dark, rotting maw, consumed by this river of unmistakable menace.
It had not been possible to find a guide who knew this area well, and they were following directions given by Ronald Chang which were based on information from the medicine man who’d sold him Roddy’s watch.
The sluggish brown water swirled against the dinghy. Flotsam bumped continually against the black rubber sides. Insects and unseen creatures rustled in the tall, coarse grass that grew on both banks. Once they heard a high shrill scream, abruptly cut off.
“Snake eat rat,” said the interpreter with a grin. Harry immediately thought of Raki. Each time Harry had listened to Raki’s disclaimers of responsibility, each time he had agreed with the President that Nexus could complain of nothing, that no stone had been unturned and so forth, Harry had sensed a puzzling gleeful note of menace in the President’s voice—a gloating semiquaver of triumph that ran contrary to his words. Why? Harry wondered with increasing irritation. Harry could not bear unsolved problems. He liked to believe that there always was a solution, if you studied a problem carefully enough, long enough.
The dinghy was now entering the mosaic of swampland and lakes that Harry had been warned to expect. A good sign, he thought, as he gazed up at the twenty-foot-high clumps of wild sugarcane and pitpit grass that lined both banks. The muddy banks were now lower, blacker and stickier. Green scum clung to the water’s edge, limp, greasy and rotting, like three-day-old salad. It all smelled vile.
Once, Harry didn’t duck fast enough. A swaying branch left a worm of blood on his left cheek. Could have been worse, could have been my eye, Harry thought, as he leaned over the stern and pushed the boat upstream with an oar. Once again they found themselves in a deep green tunnel. It was like sliding down a great, dark, rotten throat, Harry felt as the vegetation closed around him.
But always, just when he was at the point of turning back, the river widened, as if sensing his thoughts. The menacing trees fell back, the air became easier to breathe, and they saw occasional glimpses of blue sky. They halted beneath one of these overhead gaps so that Harry could fire the midday flare.
About ten minutes later, they were stopped by an impenetrable mass of wild sugarcane blocking the stream ahead.
The interpreter sighed. “Wrong feller water, mebbe.”
The two men tugged their way to the left bank and with their oars hacked at the grass that bound the propeller, then continued upstream.
It took them nearly an hour to reach relatively clear water where Harry was able to fire the one o’clock flare. He was now left with only two flares. He had expected to be back at the beach by now.
At one thirty Harry realized that the boat could go no farther. They had reached another impenetrable tangle of cane—another dead end.
Harry retraced—or thought he did—the route back to the stream they had left. Wearily, as he looked up and squinted at the overhead branches he blew a cloud of midges and mosquitoes from his nose. He would probably have to climb a tree to fire his two o’clock signal. He wondered whether he could still climb a high tree. The interpreter could probably scramble up easily enough, but he didn’t really want the interpreter to fire the flare gun. There were only two flares left and Harry couldn’t afford a misfire.
Harry glanced to the left. He gasped.
Two huge black hands jerked the pitpit canes apart and the most terrifying face Harry had ever seen glared at him. The face was painted bright yellow, the eyes and mouth were outlined in scarlet, a scarlet line ran centrally down the forehead and the splayed nose was pierced by a white feather. Hostile black eyes stared from jaundiced eyeballs patterned by red veins.
The terrible mouth opened and said, “Cigarette?”
With a trembling hand, Harry threw a pack of Marlboros, which was caught by one of those enormous hands.
Harry looked at the terrified interpreter. “Offer him more cigarettes, if he’ll guide us back to the river.”
The interpreter shouted questions in a clacking language that sounded like two wooden paddles be
ing hit together. He turned to Harry. “This feller him i savvy this feller place. This feller him i walk one time you me.”
By now Harry knew that “walk one time” meant “not far,” but that might mean ten minutes or ten hours. Anything under a day’s journey seemed to be described as “not far.” But what had they to lose?
“Okay. Tell him.”
The yellow face disappeared and the pitpit cane sprang back into place.
A few minutes later Yellow-Face appeared in a dugout canoe just ahead of the dinghy. They followed the stone black back, which, Harry noticed, was covered with small welts, cut in the pattern of crocodile skin.
Within minutes the dugout turned to the left, up a trickle of water so narrow that Harry would not have dared to take it. After about two hundred yards of torturous wriggling the dinghy suddenly shot out onto wide, milk-chocolate ripples, which, Harry hoped, meant that they had regained the main channel of the river.
As it was nearly two o’clock, the interpreter called ahead to Yellow-Face to halt. They waited in the stream until it was time to fire the flare.
Yellow-Face was clearly impressed. His mouth hung open and his eyes followed the fizzing balls of incandescent red light as it shot up into the sky.
Farther upstream, a few pink water lilies were seen amid the muck of the swampy channel. Animal life suddenly appeared again. Harry spotted a white heron and a couple of ducks. He could glimpse fish in the water and see frogs on the riverbank. Ahead of him the native poled his dugout silently through narrow waterways between swaying savannas of rice grass. Whichever way Harry looked, the view now appeared unvarying.
Yellow-Face gestured to the right. Although Harry could see nothing, he heard domestic noises: the cries of children at play, the squeal of pigs, the squawk of chickens, women calling shrill commands.
As the dinghy rounded the bend to the right, Harry saw the village. Smoke from cooking fires curled up into the air; dugout canoes were tethered beneath thatched huts on stilts; pigs, dogs and children played in the shade under the huts. Women with sticks the size of baseball bats were whacking sago-palm hearts to a pulp, and two old grannies played with a white bird.