War Lord (9 page)

Meanwhile, the nuts arrived along with Petinski’s Coke. I signed and handed the investigator her drink just as a black man in a khaki policeman’s uniform pushed through the door between the elevator and the terrace and walked toward us. He didn’t look like he was here for a swim or a beer.

‘Ms Petinski,’ the uniform said. ‘Detective Inspector Grubb wants you to come with me. He also suggests that you bring a change of underwear.’ He looked at me. ‘Are you Mr Cooper, by any chance?’

I gave him a nod.

‘Aren’t you staying at the A-Star? I was going there next.’

W
ithout headsets the flight from Darwin was noisy as well as being cramped and dull: two hours of looking at pretty much nothing except the occasional herd of cattle or kangaroo or dolphin pod out the tiny porthole beside my shoulder as we flew low across the top end of Australia. Finally, the Cessna dipped its wing over the blue sea as it lightened to green, and the droning engine note changed. In the front passenger seat, Grubb turned and pointed down at the ground, following this with the thumbs-up sign as we crossed a white-and-black-sand beach of an island that was tinder-dry khaki-colored scrub over red earth. Elcho Island. Petinski struggled forward, craned her neck and looked past me out the window, then wedged herself back into her default position, a cross between aloof and snooty, and continued staring at pretty much nothing except the back of Grubb’s head.

The pilot flew over the corrugated metal roofs of the settlement called – if I heard it right – Galiwinku. Grubb had already briefed us on the place before departure. It was home to the largest indigenous community in this part of the world, known as Arnhem Land. It was also home to Senior Constable David Nolngu, sitting behind us in the back seat, whom the detective inspector had borrowed from another department to act as our guide and effectively get us a free pass into the community, access to which was apparently limited and subject to all kinds of formal requests to public servants who always said no.

The Cessna banked again several times to line up the runway, then dived steeply down, flaps extended. Something didn’t feel right. Maybe it was our speed. The pilot pulled the nose up a little, goosed the throttle, and we roared along, tracking the strip at about tree height. I understood the problem when I pressed my nose up against the porthole and saw maybe fifty kangaroos scattering helter-skelter across the dusty runway below us, in a panic to avoid being chopped into pet food. The pilot was just clearing the decks. Another circuit of the runway and we landed, bouncing a couple of times on the undulating surface lined with kangaroos staring blankly at us, and finally taxied up to an aluminum-clad shed servicing another light aircraft similar to the one we’d arrived in.

‘How was that, mate?’ Grubb asked as we climbed out of the winged sardine can.

I opened my mouth to clear the ringing out of my ears. ‘Can’t wait to do it all again,’ I said, brushing a fly out of my face while trying to adopt the über-casualness of the Australians.

‘There a restroom nearby?’ Petinski asked, scanning the area.

Grubb consulted with SC Nolngu and then said, ‘Sorry, luv, not here. Plenty of bushes, though.’ Black flies were at the corners of his mouth, a couple making a play for his nostrils. ‘Is it urgent?’ He brushed at his face.

‘I’m okay,’ she replied.

I waved at half a dozen of the critters myself, my hand hitting several on the way through, something that didn’t seem to discourage them at all.

‘The flies are bad,’ said Petinski, stating the obvious.

The senior constable produced a tube of insect repellent and handed it to her.

‘In this part of the world, we got two seasons,’ Grubb remarked. ‘Dry season and fly season. This is nothing – hardly any of the buggers around at the moment.’

Petinski squeezed some repellent into the palm of her hand then passed me the tube. The back of Nolngu’s khaki shirt was covered in moving black dots.

An old Toyota SUV drove out from behind the maintenance shed and came to a stop in front of us, an Aboriginal man at the wheel. Nolngu raised his hand and smiled broadly, approaching the car. A hand came out the window and patted the senior on the back. Nolngu opened the rear passenger door and gestured at us to climb in. ‘This is Robert. He’s my brother.’

Robert turned and flashed us a startlingly wide grin as we took our seats. We made our own introductions as the pilot and SC Nolngu pulled gear from the underside of the Cessna and transferred it to the Toyota’s roof racks.

‘Only an hour of daylight left,’ said Grubb. ‘So we’re going to stay here overnight and get up at sparrow’s tomorrow.’

‘Sparrow’s?’ Petinski inquired.

‘Sparrow’s fart, luv. Means fucken early.’

The Toyota moved off with a jerk, bumped over some ruts and rattled down a road of red dust. The homes – the handful I saw – were small with simple gable roofs and deep verandas all the way around. None had gardens or lawns. Mostly they were set on hard-packed red dirt, a layer of red dust over everything. I wasn’t sure whether the place was dirt poor or the people just lived simply. The only white folk around were in the vehicle with me. Kids seemed happy enough though, and I saw groups of them chasing each other, fighting with sticks, playing in and around an abandoned rusted-out vehicle sitting in the dirt on bare axles. Small groups of adults sat in the shade here and there and talked, mostly ignoring us as we drove by sending up a wall of red dust that drifted across toward them. There were no shops, at least not on this road.

‘I bet the A-Star chain has a hotel here,’ I said, leaning forward.

‘No hotels, no pubs. But they got a footy club,’ Grubb replied over his shoulder. ‘That’s where we’re staying.’

‘No pubs? No bars?’ A cold shiver ran through me.

‘This is a dry community. No alcohol allowed. Causes problems. No gasoline, either, for the same reason. Cars here run on stuff called Opal – you can’t get hooked on it.’

I didn’t know anything about Australian Aborigines – the indigenous people – other than that they’d been in this country a very long time and were supposedly masters at living off the land; at least, they were when they lived on it. My guess was that the European Johnny-come-latelies had changed the rules of survival too fast for the locals to catch up. If so, the story had a familiar ring to it.

I sat back as we drove past two old women in colorful summer dresses that fit them like only hand-me-downs can. First one woman and then the other looked up and waved at us. David Nolngu waved back, hand out the window, as we motored by and bathed them in dust.

A few minutes on down the road, we pulled up to the footy club, a cinderblock bunker beside an oval playing field. The windows had been removed, leaving black holes in the brick. We parked, got out, and I helped the Nolngus pull the gear, packed into a couple of sealed canoe-shaped tubes, off the roof racks. The DI opened one of the tubes, found a backpack, took out a roll of toilet paper and tossed it to Petinski.

‘It’s inside.’ He gestured at the club.

‘Thanks,’ she replied, and walked hurriedly up to the building’s open doorway.

‘Gonna go with me brother,’ said the senior constable. ‘Bring back some tucker. All right, sir?’ Nolngu talked fast, his lips barely moving. Make a hell of a ventriloquist if he could do that drinking a glass of water.

‘No worries, mate,’ Grubb told him. ‘See yez later.’

The two brothers hopped back in the Toyota, and Grubb and I watched it disappear in a red dust cloud.

‘Gimme a hand,’ said the DI, putting the lid back on the tube and lifting the front end. We carried it up the steps and into the club. The space inside was littered with trash – paper, cans, containers, plastic and bottles, some of them smashed. The interior walls were covered in spray-painted black writing. I couldn’t make out any of it, though I gathered that someone was unhappy about something. Actually, having just driven along the outskirts of the settlement and seen the conditions there, I figured the unhappiness was probably about everything.

We set the tube down on the floor, a smooth concrete slab, and went back for the other. Setting it down, Grubb removed the lid. Inside were a number of items – sleeping bags, inflatable mattresses, a gas stove and various cooking and eating utensils. There were also two rifles, both with telescopic sights.

‘That a Remington 710?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, a . 300 Win Mag. That’s mine. The old Brno 601 is Nolngu’s.’

I was familiar with the Remington. There were photos in a drawer back home of my uncle holding one. The camera was close and he was looking over his shoulder into the lens, smiling. I never knew what happened to that gun. Maybe he pawned it.

The DI lifted the weapon out of the tube. It was probably the rifle featured in the hunting pictures on his office wall. It was well used, the look of an heirloom about it. He pulled back the bolt, showed me the empty chamber and the fact that the safety was on, and handed it over. Nice rig. The weight and balance felt about perfect. I took the cups off the sight, kept my forefinger outside the trigger guard and aimed out the window, at the sky. The . 300 Winchester was a large bore round – 7.62 x 67mm – and it packed a kick.

‘Expecting trouble?’ I asked him.

‘Keeps the salties honest.’

I handed the rifle back as Petinski came out with the toilet roll in hand, her face pale. She dropped the roll in the tube and said, ‘Next time I’m going behind a bush.’

The Nolngus returned half an hour after sunset with a massive silver fish, already gutted and scaled. Robert cut steaks off it, which were thrown with some unidentified herbs into a large pan sitting on the gas burner, and within a few minutes half a dozen black men in shorts and t-shirts turned up to help us eat. They sat crouched on their haunches in a semicircle around the burner, smiling broadly, but there wasn’t much dinner conversation to go with the best fish I’d ever eaten, at least not with Petinski and me. They didn’t speak our language. Or maybe they did – we just couldn’t understand it. Eventually, though, Senior Constable Nolngu introduced us to two of the men, who were somewhere between thirty and fifty, saying that they were the two who’d caught the original bull sharks from which the partial remains of the pilot had been pulled. Petinski and I both told them they’d done a great job, which seemed to trigger a flurry of amused discussion between them and the senior constable.

‘They want me to tell you a joke,’ said Nolngu when the exchanges had finished.

‘Must be a good one,’ I said, based on the fact that one of the men was already on his back, laughing.

‘There are two sharks,’ the senior began, ‘a large father shark and his smaller son. They are swimming around and eventually come across some humans splashing about at a beach. “Let’s go and eat them,” says the son, who is ready to snatch a tasty-looking human. “No,” says the father shark. “That is not the best way. Follow me and do as I do.” The son follows his father, who rises to the surface so that his fin slices the air above the water. The humans scream. The father shark then rushes away and comes back, flicking his tail above the water. The son does as his father does. The humans are crying and wailing. Finally, the father shark races in, circles the humans and snatches one, shaking him hard so the water turns red. Later, after the father and son have had their fill of human and are swimming away, the young shark asks, “Father, why didn’t we just go straight in and tear them all up? Why waste all that time going in and out?” The wise father shark says, “Because, son, they taste so much better when there’s no shit left in them.”’

I saw the punch line coming, but the way Nolngu told it was funny. The men all fell over, the sound of their cackling bouncing like stones off the cinderblock walls.

Petinski leaned close to me and whispered out the side of her mouth, ‘What’s so funny?’

I looked at her, the grin frozen on my face. Maybe Petinski had a no-humor policy to go with her no-drinking one. Fortunately, though, she had infeasibly large breasts with which to offset those deficiencies.

‘There’s a man torn to shreds, Cooper – someone you knew, for Christ’s sake,’ she reminded me.

She was probably right, but the times you don’t feel you should laugh are, perversely, some of the times when you just can’t seem to stop.

*

Robert Nolngu turned up with his Toyota at dawn and drove us through low, salt-battered bush five klicks or so to a boat ramp on the other side of the island. I’d slept okay, the hard floor agreeing with my back, though I sensed Petinski tossing and turning a few feet away. She sat beside me, looking the other way, silent. She hadn’t said much to anyone since we arrived, preoccupied with the seriousness of the task at hand, I supposed.

My window was down, the rushing air cool, the flies still in bed as we broke through the scrub and the sand dunes and the sea opened out to a horizon edged with rose gold. I could see a large double-hulled fishing boat nosed up onto the sand; two men silhouetted by the pre-dawn light were tending to its anchor. Robert plowed the Toyota down onto the beach, but didn’t get far before it stopped with a jolt. One of the silhouettes acknowledged us with a quick wave.

We got out and walked toward the boat, and the man who’d waved jogged up and shook hands with Grubb. The guy was large, as well as being salt-, sun- and alcohol-damaged, with short gray hair and a puffy red face that reminded me of a blister about to burst. Grubb handled the introductions. The man’s name was Ern. This was his boat, the words
Killing Spree
stenciled on the side in pink and silver lettering. The detective inspector was going to borrow it for the day, which Ern seemed more than fine with. I overheard several exchanges between the two pals; I gathered they were regular fishing buddies. Perhaps his photo was up on Grubb’s wall along with the coroner’s.

Within minutes the DI was behind the wheel, opening the throttles on the two massive outboards hung off the back of the boat, and we accelerated toward the horizon just as the top of the sun winked above the edge of the world.

‘How far?’ I shouted above the engine and wind noise, the boat leaping over the lines of swell.

‘Bit more than an hour,’ Grubb shouted back.

On the other side of the DI, Senior Constable Nolngu gazed out across the water, dark eyes hidden in the deep shadows under his brow.

I glanced behind to watch the shoreline recede, a white gouge in the blue water churned by the Johnsons. A few fishing rods placed in holders along the boat’s gunnels whipped back and forth a little in the wind. A couple of crab pots and a hand net occupied some deck space. Petinski sat in a chair facing the receding shore, a waterproof jacket done up tight to keep out the morning chill and sea spray, her hair contained under a blue NTSB ball cap. She seemed lost in her own world. I worked my way back and sat beside her.