The Sun Is God (19 page)

“But it does not mean that they are murderers.”

“No, but it leaves us in a pretty pass. Either Anna
and
Harry are lying about the night's events or someone drowned Lutzow in an impossibly brief interval . . . Or Doctor Bremmer got it wrong or our Australian somehow ballsed up his corpse delivery so badly that it fooled Doctor Bremmer into thinking that Lutzow drowned.”

“Either murder or incompetence.”

Will nodded.

“What do we do now?” Kessler asked.

Will considered for a time.

“Half of a military policeman's job is just being present,” he said. “Merely being there changes things. Puts people under pressure. Be present and keep asking them questions, that's the ticket.”

They sat on the beach for a long time under a sickly, greenish sky.

On their walk back to the Augustburg they met Jürgen—the German American—and Will vainly attempted to converse with him but he could not draw the taciturn fellow out.

In the Augustburg itself, none of the Sonnenorden spoke of the morning's incident. Their hospitality remained intact, and that afternoon they invited Miss Pullen-Burry, Kessler, and Will to join them for dinner and partake of the coconut feast and the heroin-laced arak.

The talk at dinner was of philosophy and literature.

Will retreated to his hut. The floor was still a red pond of tiny crabs, and he kept his shoes on as he climbed into the hammock and adjusted the mosquito net.

After a while Klaus came into the hut, and to avoid conversation Will pretended to be asleep, and not too long after that the powerful Bayer heroin dissolving in his stomach converted Will's pretense into a pleasant reality.

Three buildings over, Miss Pullen-Burry returned from her nightly constitutional to an empty dwelling. Helena had gone to spend the night with Fräulein Schwab, and with Miss Herzen safely back on New Britain, she was alone in the large timber hut. She lit a candle, scooted an impressive menagerie of insects from the writing table, and picked up her pen.

She wrote in Welsh, the language of her nanny in Cumberland, because she was certain that no one on Kabakon would be able to understand it.

. . . Of the remaining women I say little. The countess is vain and foolish. Miss Schwab is the living proof of the adage:
cito maturum cito putridum.
In the morning I shall flatter their vanity a little and fully repair our friendship. The men are quite another matter. August Engelhardt is interesting and charismatic: his conversation polite and engaging. I like Harry a great deal and I certainly do not think him capable of murder. Denfer, Christian, and Bradtke have barely exchanged two words with me, but I do not sense any deep malice there. My impression of August Bethman is of an intelligent, charming man—at times he is so solicitous of me—but such a temper! Miss Herzen is well rid of him. Of all the Cocovores, Jürgen Schreckengost (if that is in fact how you spell such an extraordinary name) is the personage with whom I have had the most “to say.” And yet we have actually “said” very little indeed. He has taken a great delight in showing me interesting mammals and birds on Kabakon and has admired my drawings in this journal. I can confess this only to you, Bessie, my future self, that this is perhaps the first time in my life that I have had the suspicion of an . . . one hardly knows how to put it . . . an interest in me which goes beyond the Platonic.
Abyssus abyssum invocat
. This, I confess, has excited me a great deal but no doubt I am mistaken and what I take for Herr Schreckengost's latent carnality is mere politeness. I MUST NOT make a fool of myself. A note on the late Herr Lutzow . . . There is little sympathy for the man, here. An irascible, discontented fellow it seems. Miss Herzen says that his “writings” upset some of the others, which was intriguing to me but alas the unfortunate young lady had little time to elaborate as I was attempting to expedite her departure. A note on the birds. One does not think of parrots as social creatures. One sees them in cages by themselves or in ones or twos in closed aviaries. But here they go in great flocks of thirty and more. They crave company and togetherness as we poor Earth-bound mortals also do.

14

SUN BATHING

I
n the wee hours, shortly after Miss Pullen-Burry had retired, Will awoke suddenly, convinced that someone was in the room with them. He clawed at the mosquito net, but when he struggled out of the hammock and lit the spirit lantern there was no one there. He was certain, however, that someone
had
been there a moment ago. He checked his stuff, checked on Klaus, looked out into the piazza, saw no one, and reluctantly climbed back into the hammock.

It was hot, airless, and humid, and despite the heroin in his system it took a long time for him to fall asleep again. Gradually he became aware of light ebbing into the room. He could not remember his dreams, but the feeling of unease remained like the slime trails of the little crabs that had been washed out of their hut and had now gone. The sun had not yet risen and he lay for a time listening to the ghastly squawking of parrots and the unnamed arboreal creatures shrieking indignantly at one another through the trees.

He looked at the holes he had made in the mosquito net. It would be foolish to stay here much longer without quinine pills or bark. Would Helena or Fräulein Schwab or Miss Pullen-Burry know how to sew and repair a mosquito net? “My arse,” he muttered. Doubtless, they would take his request as some kind of affront. He scratched at his fresh bites and looked over at Klaus's bed but the German was already up and gone again!

When Will did get out of the hammock he found a cup of lukewarm Turkish coffee on the writing table and a brief note from Klaus: “Gone to meet the pilot. Have coffee. Good luck.”

Will drank the coffee, pulled on a shirt, and walked into the piazza where he encountered a naked Miss Pullen-Burry drawing in her notebook.

“Good morning!” she said happily.

“Good morning, Miss Pullen-Burry. What are you—”

“The birds, Mr. Prior! Jürgen has been kind enough to lend me a book on the subject. Fruit doves, hanging parrots, imperial pigeons, pygmy parrots, blue eyed cockatoos, friar birds, black tailed monarchs, atoll starlings, rare Kabakon thrushes, rarer still, the poisonous singing pithooey! And such color and variety too. Such diversity of song!”

“If you say so, I'm sure,” Will replied.

“So many more birds than in Herbertshöhe!”

“That's because the Prussian officers shoot all the ones in town.”

“Will, over here!” Harry shouted.

He turned to see Harry and the other Sonnenorden heading down the trail into the plantations.

“Hello,” Will said.

“The weather will be fine today. Come with us!”

“Where are you going?” Will asked.

“Sol Island. Come with us,” Harry insisted.

“What are you going to do there?”

“We are going to bathe in the sun all day until nightfall. You should come along.”

It did not sound promising, but Harry's enthusiasm was a cure for Will's humors.

“We will swim and bathe in the sun,” Miss Pullen-Burry said. “I am going too.”

“Sea bathing and land bathing does not sound too onerous,” Will muttered.

“It will be a new experience,” Harry said.

“That it will. Everyone else is going?”

“All of us.”

Will had a sudden dread of being left alone at the camp. “All right, I'm in,” he said.

“Good. Hurry!”

“I shall leave a quick note for Klaus.”

He wrote, “Gone to Sol island, I'll try to do some interrogating, back this evening,” and left it on the writing desk.

Will, Miss Pullen-Burry, and Harry joined the others on the trail across the island.

“Ah, you have come to join us!” August Engelhardt exclaimed. “Excellent. I should tell you, however, that for we Sonnenorden this is a sacred journey.”

“Oh?”

“We must ask you to be silent until nightfall. We only talk when necessary on Sol Island.”

There goes the interrogation
, Will thought.

“May I draw in my notebook?” Miss Pullen-Burry asked.

“I would prefer that you do not,” Engelhardt said sternly.

“What may we do?” Will asked, beginning to have second thoughts about this trip.

“You may embrace the sun! You may feel the divine light!”

Will almost turned round there and then, but seeing his reticence Fräulein Schwab and Helena marched on either side of him and put their arms through his, which, he had to admit, was an unexpected and charming experience.

They crossed to the far side of Kabakon and there beyond the black sand was Sol Island, a small rocky treeless outcrop of coral about a quarter of a mile from shore.

“How do we get out there?” Will asked.

“Most of the men swim. The ladies take the canoe,” Harry explained. “Which do you prefer?”

Will was a moderate swimmer but he was more concerned about the sharks than drowning in the water. “I'll join the ladies in the dugout canoe,” he said.

The crossing was uneventful and when they arrived at Sol Island the sun bathing began immediately.

“What do we do?” Will mouthed to Harry. Harry showed him. It was simplicity itself. All one did was lie on the rock with one's eyes closed.

After an hour he began to feel uncomfortable and Fräulein Schwab offered to rub him with coconut oil.

The experience was sensual and intensely pleasurable; but after a further hour, even with all the oil, he had begun to blister, and Helena was good enough to lend him her parasol.

The rocks were oven yellow and griddle hard. Engelhardt passed around a bottle of coconut milk and heroin. As usual the heroin had its effect and under the multiplications of the sun Will's mind drifted.

He drifted from the island and his fellow bathers. He drifted above the highest birds. Up through the leagues of cool air. The sky was music. The sun a flute. His body a blank stave on which the sun wrote red ghazals. He could see the Earth as a jigsaw carved up by the Germans, Russians, French, Americans, Japanese, and of course that most beneficent of gentle rulers, England. He went further. Like Verne's Michel Ardan he walked among moon creatures and saw wonders

“Will,” Helena whispered and woke him gently.

He rubbed his eyes and sat. “What is it?” he mouthed.

“It is time to go,” she whispered.

“What? Where—”

“It is dusk. It is time to go back to the Augustburg.”

“We slept the whole day!” Another day gone?

He felt weak. Burned. Exhausted. He tried to get to his feet, fell. “Someone will have to carry me,” he moaned.

“It is always like this the first time,” Helena explained.

“No, I feel ill,” he insisted.

Miss Pullen-Burry instructed Schreckengost, the big German-American, to carry him gently down to the canoe.

The sea voyage revived him a little. “Are we allowed to speak now?” he asked Miss Pullen-Burry.

“I think so. Did you enjoy the “sun bathing,” Mr. Prior?”

“Most interesting,” he said. “Yesterday's unpleasantness seems to have been forgotten.”

“Yes. I believe I was quite successful in smoothing things over with the Countess Höhenzollern. I told her that one must not be too black-letter when enforcing the contracts of servants. Good companions are impossible to find. I advertised inthe
Times
and
Manchester Guardian
and not one English or Irish lady would accompany me to New Guinea.”

“They probably thought they would end up in a cooking pot,” Will said.

“That is exactly what they thought, Mr. Prior,” Miss Pullen-Burry said with a smile. Will was too exhausted to join them at dinner and made his excuses and retired to the tranquility of his hut. The sun had given him multiple blisters but the coconut oil had done wonders for his mosquito bites and for the first time in days he found that he could lie down without having to scratch himself like a tinker. He poured himself a generous measure of the Johnnie Walker and was thus happily recumbent when Klaus came in, dressed in a pair of Nanking trousers, half boots, and his uniform jacket—as relaxed as the poor fellow could possibly get.

“Did you have a productive day, Will?” Klaus asked.

“Uhm . . . not as productive as I would have liked.”

“You must have learned something. You were gone with them all for twelve hours.”

“Bethman seems to have forgiven me the blow. Miss Pullen-Burry has repaired relations with the ladies.”

“Did you question the others about Lutzow's death?”

“I had hoped to, but apparently sun bathing is a sacred act and must be endured in silence. I shall interrogate the others tomorrow.”

Kessler sat on the chair and waited for Will to speak further, but Will had nothing to add. At least nothing that could be put into words, although he had the curious feeling that he had come to know more about the Sonnenorden in this day of silence than in all the previous days' questioning. He was a little more sympathetic to them now. The Sonnenorden weren't mad, they were merely Bohemian, different.

The heroin, the sun bathing . . . he had never experienced anything like that before. And that feeling of contentment, he hadn't felt that at ease with himself since before he went to Africa.

“I had the most extraordinary dreams, Klaus,” Will said.

“Oh? What about?”

He suddenly felt embarrassed. Flying? The moon?

“Uhm, I don't remember.”

Kessler lit the oil lamp and almost immediately the hut filled with bright white moths. “What did
you
do today?” Will asked.

“This and that.”

“Listen Klaus, could Doctor Bremmer have made a mistake?”

Kessler put down his book and looked at Will with uncertain eyes. “I am incapable of judging Doctor Bremmer's competence.”