Dangerous Journey (16 page)

“You’re lucky to have such a friend.”

He nodded. “I know.”

They fell silent as she thought about all he had told her. “So why do the British police think you’re a bounty hunter?” she asked.

He shook his head ruefully. “That’s such a nasty name for something I don’t think is bad. I guess it’s true, though. In Hong Kong, especially around Jimmy’s friends, I’d hear a lot of things. To me, Hong Kong is the heart of Asia—everyone and everything important passes through it.”

“I heard about some Australian bank robbers. They were traced to Jakarta, but the police were stumped. The case interested me, and I got a few leads. I went to Jakarta and discovered the leads were good ones; the robbers were caught, and I received the reward money. The Australian and British police were a little put out by one man showing them up, I guess. As for me, I thought it was pretty easy money. There wasn’t much of it, though. I used it to give Jimmy what I felt I owed him. He accepted it; he realized it was a matter of pride.”

Expressionless, she nodded and waited.

“From then on, I paid a lot more attention to things I heard. More cases came my way. I’ve gotten a few big rewards and, with Jimmy’s help, made some even bigger investments. The one worthwhile thing I’ve done was to set up a trust for Alicia. At least she won’t think her father took off and left her with nothing. By the tune she’s eighteen, she won’t need to be dependent on anyone if she doesn’t want to be. And that, my dear Corabelle, is the whole sordid tale.”

“No, Darius, it’s not sordid, just...” She shook her head and bit her bottom lip. She couldn’t go on.

He walked to the window, facing the lights of Singapore.

He leaned his hands on the window frame as he began to speak, his back still toward her.

“You know, Cleo, you remind me of the way I saw the world years ago, back when I was young. Before Nadia, before Europe, Asia—when I was just a kid with dreams. There’s an innocence about you I thought no longer existed in the world. I’m glad to find it still does.”

“Am I really so naïve, Darius?”

“Don’t mock it. It’s a good thing.”

She walked up beside him. “I don’t want to be that way. I want…” She drew in her breath and admitted aloud what she’d been holding in heart. “I want to be with you.”

He shook his head, a mixture of anger and hurt shadowing his face. “You didn’t understand what I was saying!”

“I did understand, more than you know!”

He took hold of her arms. “I’d just be using you. With me, you’d give and give and never receive. In the end, you’d hate it. You’d hate me. I travel around Asia for months on end, tracking down heaven only knows what. Or why. But it’s my life now. It’s all I’ve got.”

She felt the color drain from her face. “I see,” she said, the words barely a whisper, hoping he wouldn’t realize that she was crumbling inside. “It’s okay, Darius. I never expected anything from you. I simply wanted you to know how I felt.” Her words were spoken nonchalantly, as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

He dropped his hands without replying.

“Let’s go eat now,”—she stood straight, shoulders square, jaw firm, upper lip stiff—“before we both fall into a dead faint from hunger.”

She picked up her handbag, opened the door to her room, took a deep breath and was halfway down the hall before Darius caught up to her.

They left the hotel and walked along the sidewalk without speaking.

He confused her. He fascinated her. Everything about him was unique and far beyond her experience. She cherished his vulnerabilities as well as his strengths, his dark moods as well as his humor, his macho bravado as well as his sensitive musical ability. He was a study in contrasts, the most intriguing man she had ever met. But she also saw that he was slowly tearing himself apart, tormented by his own unwillingness to accept life as it was.

And there was nothing she could do about it.

Chapter 14

The next day they flew to Kota Kinabalu, to Kuching and then, for a generous fee, found someone to fly them to the jungle clearing called Bir Sakan.

C.J. had wired ahead to Alan’s former co-workers that she was coming to pick up his belongings. As the small plane dropped toward the runway, she recognized the man waving in greeting.

“Miss Perkins, how nice to see you again,” he said with a Southern drawl so thick she could almost touch it. He held his hand out to help her off the plane.

“Thank you. I hadn’t expected anyone to meet us.”

“My pleasure.” He beamed, giving her hand an affectionate squeeze before he released it. He was a pleasant looking man, tall, with blue eyes, sandy hair and a ruddy, boyish complexion.

Darius stepped out beside her, and she introduced him. “This is Darius Kane, and this is Mister…”

“Hallinan. Hank Hallinan.” He held out his hand to Darius. “Pleased to meet you.”

“And you,” Darius replied as they shook hands.

“I’m sorry,” C.J. murmured to Hank, apologizing for forgetting his name.

He smiled warmly at her. “I understand. You were upset when you were here. I felt right bad for you, little lady—”

“By the way,” Darius interrupted, putting his hand on C.J.’s shoulder, “I should explain. I’m here to help Miss Perkins. I’m her fiancé.”

Hank’s eyebrows rose slightly; then he smiled broadly.

“Well, that does explain it, now doesn’t it? I was wondering about a sweet young thing like this travelling with some man. But now I see. Why, if she were my intended, I sure wouldn’t let her go off to a place like this alone. No sirree, I sure wouldn’t.” He picked up C.J.’s bag and started back toward his jeep. “Let’s get a move on,” he called over his shoulder to them.

As soon as Hank’s back was turned, C.J. shot Darius a scathing look. “What nerve!” she whispered.

“Nerve? If you can tell strangers I’m your brother, I can certainly tell them you’re my ‘intended.’” He looked like a kid who’d licked the bowl after making chocolate pudding.

“As if I’d have such bad taste!”

Darius chuckled causing Hank to glance back quickly at the two of them.

They reached the jeep and climbed in for the short ride to the village, C.J. sitting next to Hank, and Darius in the back.

“What’s the word on Alan? I reckon you found him,” Hank asked.

“Homesickness,” C.J. said blandly. “He went to Hong Kong for a while, then just felt he couldn’t return here, and went back to the States.”

Hank nodded. “Not surprising, I guess. He never did seem content here, always looking over the rainbow. For that pot of gold, you know.”

C.J. gave him a quick glance. Did he know something? Or did he simply have more insight into Alan’s character than she expected.

“Yes, he’s a dreamer,” she replied.

They swung into the village. It was just as C.J. remembered it: green and lush, children everywhere, and longhouses on stilts six feet off the ground lining the river. The longhouses could be reached only by ladders, and at night the ladders were pulled inside to protect the families from attack. About fifty families lived in each longhouse, sleeping on mats.

The first time she’d gone to Sarawak, she hadn’t known anything about the tribal people, the Iban. This time, on the flight over, she asked Darius to tell her about them.

She soon regretted her curiosity.

The Iban were the original “wild men of Borneo” of P.T. Barnum fame. They had once been headhunters. Heads of their enemies from neighboring tribes would be brought back to the longhouses and placed on shelves. Because the Iban believed a man’s spirit continued to live in the head after death, food and cigarettes would be stuffed into the victim’s mouth and the cigarettes lit so that the spirit would feel happy.

The government had declared headhunting illegal some years ago and, as far as was officially known or reported, it now happened only about once every five years. But who was counting?

Darius had never been to Sarawak, although he had once traveled to Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo. In the interior, where the Dayaks, a people similar to but a little less violent than the Iban, lived, he’d seen a number of dried human heads gracing the doorways of the longhouses. To keep the government off their backs, the natives insisted the heads on display had been taken many, many years earlier, but Darius hadn’t been so sure about that.

The more C.J. heard, the more nervous she became. Fear of pythons and orangutans paled compared to headhunters.

The two missionaries and Peace Corpsmen whom C.J. had met on her last trip, as well as an unknown white man, were waiting for them when they arrived, along with what looked like the entire village. A stranger’s arrival was a rare occurrence that brought everyone out to gawk.

“Alan’s in the States,” Hank called out as he pulled the jeep to a halt. “He was homesick.”

A murmur went through the crowd as everyone commented on the announcement. Hank stood up. “While y’all are here, let me make the introductions. Y’all remember Miss Perkins, I know. This here is her fiancé, Mr. Kane.”

Then he turned to C.J. and Darius. “Miss Perkins, you probably remember lots of these folks.” He gestured with his hand as he made the introductions. “Here’s Zachariah Jenkins and Bill Everett from the Methodist church, Tony Scioza was with Alan and me, and this here is John Carter, Alan’s replacement. Kaloo Mangyalubyang is the leader of this village. The mayor, we call him, and his assistant is Malu Butangyang. And all the rest of these here folks will make themselves known to you before the day’s out.”

Everyone laughed at that and greeted C.J. and Darius warmly.

She felt her skin prickle as the “mayor,” Kaloo, took her hand to shake it. He was one of the few Iban who practiced that particular Western custom. Damn Darius’s talk of headhunters, she thought. Kaloo was dressed in his finest clothes: red batik material around his hips with a silver belt holding a white loincloth and the batik in place. On his head was a magnificent headdress of bright multicolored material, shaped like a ten-inch hatbox, and topped with six long, rather ugly gray feathers. His skin was light brown with complex black tattoos covering both arms. When he smiled in greeting, C.J. saw that more teeth were missing than not.

She and Darius were led by Hank toward the “short” version of a longhouse, where the foreigners lived. “That room there,” he said to C.J., pointing at a door in the long building, “was Alan’s place. It’s John’s now, but so that you can have it while you’re here, he’s sharing my room.”

C.J. faced John Carter. “Thank you, that’s very kind,” she said with a smile, but was surprised to see a frown on his face. He smiled back as soon as he realized she was looking at him, but there was no sincerity in his gaze.

“Mr. Kane can, uh, bunk with Tony,” Hank sputtered. C.J. smiled inwardly at his obvious discomfort at not knowing just how to deal with this relationship. Unmarried couples often shared rooms in the U.S., but in Sarawak? And right under the noses of two missionaries? It wasn’t going to happen.

“Fine,” Darius said, also recognizing the man’s quandary.

The full coterie of men walked C.J. to the ladder that led to “her” room.

She climbed up and entered the tiny room alone. It hadn’t changed much since the last time she’d been there. A wafer-thin mattress lay on one of the few solid spots in the floor. Elsewhere, there were missing slats and warped pieces that protruded higher than the rest. One hole in the floor was there on purpose. It provided the Iban-style bathroom facility. Bamboo mats to sit on, shelves, a kerosene lamp and a small chest of drawers made up the rest of the furniture.

“Miss Perkins?” a male voice called to her from outside.

“Come in, please.”

John Carter entered the room. He was of average height, with a stocky build. He had brown hair, thinning at the crown, yet he looked fairly young, in his mid-twenties, C.J. guessed. His features were plain, making him the type of man one wouldn’t bother to notice in a crowd. He wore jeans and a T-shirt—the standard foreigner dress in Sarawak.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” he said, his dark brown eyes studying her.

“Not at all.”

“I tried to leave everything as your brother had it, in case he came back.”

“I see. You didn’t believe this assignment would be permanent, then?”

“I didn’t know. It was all so unexpected.” He smiled. “Alan’s in the U.S., you said?”

“Yes.”

“Back home?”

“No.” Was he just being polite, or was there a purpose to this?

“It must have been a pleasant surprise for you to find him so easily.” Again, the ingratiating smile was flashed at her.

C.J. was thankful for her artistic training, guessing that was what made her so aware that the look in his eyes was at odds with the smile on his lips. “Actually, I didn’t find him. He contacted my parents and told them he was fine. That’s all,” she lied.

“I see. How nice for you. I...we were all surprised that you would come to pick up his belongings personally. We could have packed them up and shipped them. The expense of this visit must be tremendous.”

She and Darius had wondered who would ask that question first, and they had figured out their response. “Darius once lived in Kota Kinabalu in Sabah. He wanted to see it again, and I wanted to see it for the first time. This was a good excuse for us to come to Borneo.”

“You must be wealthy.”

How rude of him, she thought, to persist with these questions.

“Not me.” She gave him a telling look, hoping to embarrass him into silence.

But he continued. “So Alan will soon be back in Columbus, Ohio, and his sister is sightseeing. A happy ending for the family.”

He knew about Columbus. The others must have told him. “No. He’ll never go back to Columbus. Nothing is there for him.” Something about this man’s questions was bothering her, and she felt the need to steer any possible interest away from her parents’ home. “I think he’s going to live in New York City.” It was one place she knew he’d never move to.

“Well, it’s almost suppertime. They’ve prepared a bit of a feast to celebrate your arrival. They couldn’t party during your last visit because of the circumstances, so the village wants to make it up to you this time.”