The Sun Is God (4 page)

“Herr Prior, it is a delicate business . . .” Kessler began and coughed.

I knew it
, Will groaned inwardly.
He's either going to demand the notes of credit or ask me to do the decent thing and blow me bloody brains out. Fat chance of either.

Kessler attempted a smile and then said in a low tone: “Herr Prior, Will, if I may, you are not, how shall I put it, still honor-bound in allegiance to the English Empire?”

“You want me for a spy!”

“No.”

“What then?”

Kessler leaned even further forward so that now he was nearly off the chair. His voice had sunk to a whisper: “What I will tell you must remain between us, Herr Prior. Do you understand? Only myself, Governor Hahl, and Herr Doctor Bremmer know the truth of it.”

“I'm listening,” Will said, intrigued.

“There has been another incident among the Cocovores,” Kessler said. He gave Will a knowing look.

“The Cocovores . . . that's out near Fiji is it?” Will asked, dubiously, geography not his strong suit.

“No!” Kessler said.

“Where are they then?”

“Not where. Who. The Cocovores are not a group of islands. They are a group of men . . . No, no, let us not get into that, yet. First, I should tell you that Polizeimeister Beyer has been taken ill.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. What ails him?”

“Officially cholera,” Kessler said with a sigh.

“And unofficially?”

“Syphilitic brain disease. Rather an advanced case, I'm afraid. He had been dosing himself with mercury sulfate, but . . .”

“Oh dear. I hadn't seen him around for a month or so. I had no idea. No hope I suppose?”

Captain Kessler shook his head. “And as you may be aware, Unteroffizier Fischer has gone with Munt to the Court in Apia.”

Karl Munt had murdered his wife, cutting off her head and putting it on a spike in front of his house. This after High Mass as the Catholic congregation had been letting out. The Governor's wife and her servants had seen it, which meant that there was no possibility of hushing it up, so Munt, the only European dentist for a thousand miles, had been arrested. It was a big loss to the colony.

“Fischer's in Apia, Beyer's off his rocker, who does that leave?”

“The native Polizeitruppe.”

“That bunch of tripes? They'd turn tail at the first sign of a Ju Ju Man from the jungle.”

Kessler took a piece of paper from his trouser pocket. A by now very damp piece of paper. “Herr Prior, I am come on a mission of some import. I do not know how to ask you this without it appearing as an insult.”

“I am as hooked as a Humber trout, I assure you.”

“When you came here a little over two years ago you were made to provide a number of referees and affidavits.”

“Ah, about that, listen, those references, now, some of them were rather elderly gentlemen so if you've had trouble—” Will began.

Kessler had taken a pair of gold-rimmed glasses from a case and placed them on the end of his nose like an apothecary. He unfolded the piece of paper and read: “From March 1899 until May 1903 you were a member of the British Army's Military Foot Police, attaining the rank of First Lieutenant.”

“That's right.”

“As a military policeman did you look into ordinary crimes?”

“That was part of our duties, yes.”

“Did you ever investigate a murder?”

In the Military Foot Police, Will reflected, a murder was one drunken private bashing another drunken private over the head and then crying about it until the MFPs came to arrest him.

“I've looked into the occasional murder. What's all this about?”

Kessler nodded. Yes, Will Prior would do very nicely. He was an ex-military policeman and had undertaken murder cases. He was not a fool and neither was he so scrupulous that he would run to the Fathers or the newspapers if he found scandalous goings on. He was therefore the only man in the entire colony who could investigate the suspected murder of Max Lutzow on Kabakon Island.

Kessler stood. “You are to get dressed. We must see Governor Hahl immediately.”

Will smiled and shook his head. “I am not getting dressed for the Governor on this or any other fine Sunday afternoon.”

“No?”

“My dear Klaus, Sunday is a day for contemplation and relaxation, even in a German colony.”

Kessler shook his head. “Twenty guineas says you will come.”

Will's eyes widened. “Twenty English guineas?”

“Do you accept?”

“If you put it like that, yes, I accept.”

“Then attend to your toilet, Herr Prior,” Kessler said, already assuming the mantle of command.

“Siwa!” Will yelled. She appeared in the doorway, arms folded and frowning. “Where's me kit, lass? I have to go out.”

She nodded and went into the back room.

“And one more thing, Will,” Kessler said.

“Yes?”

“It is Tuesday.”

4

THE IMMORTAL IN THE MORGUE

I
t was fortunate that Siwa had had Will's shirts, flannel trousers, and Norfolk jacket washed and steam-ironed by Lee and sons, otherwise he would have had nothing to wear but his cricket whites. While Kessler waited on the veranda, Will got into his trousers, pulled on his Liverpool Rubber Company plimsolls, and buttoned his collarless shirt. He did not possess a tie or cravat, but with the cleaned and ironed jacket he felt that he looked presentable enough. Captain Kessler thought otherwise. “Do you even possess a button collar?”

“Why would I in this bloody heat?”

“What do you wear at the club or the bar of the hotel?”

“This,” Will said.

Kessler sighed. “If you are unable to change your toilet, at the very least you must shave,” Kessler said with a trace of exasperation.

Will made a face. “Siwa! Shave!” he yelled. Siwa had obviously anticipated this exigency for she appeared a moment later with a bowl of water. Will adjourned to the porch and sat in a wicker chair. She lathered him and began shaving him with a Gillette safety razor. Pinching his long, angular nose she ran the razor over his throat, cheeks, and prominent chin, cleaning the razor in the water between strokes. “What do you think of my new shaving device?” Will asked.

“You must not speak!” Siwa scolded, easing the blade over his carotid artery.

“Show him the razor,” Will said to Siwa who, ignoring him, stroked the blade over his Adam's apple.

“The whiskers?” she asked hopefully. It was obviously a point of contention for Will did not even need to reply before she moved onto his cheeks. When Siwa had completed her shave, she bathed Will's face with a towel dipped in hot water. Will got up from the chair and, as if completing an imagined conversation, he added: “My mustache is quite the thing, actually, in the civilized world. Swoons from the young ladies left and right.”

He grabbed a straw boater and slapped it on his head at a rakish thirty-degree angle. “How do I look?” he asked. He knew in fact that he looked good. He had his mother's green eyes, cheek bones, and soft oval face, and his father's dark red hair and whiskers.

“Will you be returning for dinner?” Siwa asked.

Will looked at Kessler. “I expect not,” Kessler said apologetically.

Siwa's brow furrowed again. She took Will's sleeve. “You will be cross with yourself if they find it necessary to bring you home in a wheelbarrow,” she whispered.

“Christ! Have
some
faith in me, eh lass?” he said, and with a sad little shake of her head she retired indoors.

Kessler retrieved Brunhilde from under the overhang and all three walked down the hill toward Herbertshöhe. The sleepy little settlement of perhaps three dozen houses was quiet. The warehouses of the Forsayth Company were inactive, the telegraph shack closed, and the German New Guinea Company office empty. There were no Europeans on the muddy street and save for a few miserable natives chewing and spitting betel juice, not another living soul. The natives were naked, emaciated, their mouths stained purple. Most of them were infected with ring worm and they scratched incessantly when they were not spitting or coughing. The constant writhing and betel chewing of the New Guineans was what had finally put an end to Kessler's church going at the French Mission. “You should do something for those poor devils,” Will said, giving them a wide berth.

“What can we do?” Kessler asked. There was no cure for ring worm and the only palliative was opium.

They walked a little further along Hanover Strasse. “Quiet today,” Will remarked. It was always quiet, except for when a Forsayth boat was at the jetty or the monthly steamer entered the bay. For European companionship only the hotel or the yacht club could be relied upon, but Will increasingly avoided both those places—too many of the people propping up the bar reminded him of himself, or, how he would be a year or two down the line. Kessler tapped his watch. “Do you have the hour, Will?” he asked without much hope.

“Not I,” Will said, with a guilty recollection that his grandfather's Great Western repeater had bought a case of brandy.

Since Will had been in town last, several people had boarded up their homes for the rainy season or gone bust or taken ship to Samoa or Australia. The Chinese general store he didn't patronize had closed and if a Chinaman couldn't make it here, nobody could. Even Governor Hahl usually avoided Herbertshöhe, out surveying his islands, or off on some jaunt up-country, where, if there was any justice, he'd be killed and eaten like several prominent Europeans before him.

Brunhilde's cheerless clip clop became a doleful commentary on the white man's need to venture to Earth's more forlorn places. Herbertshöhe was undoubtedly a dreary place and it would have been duller still but for the local grandee “Queen” Emma Forsayth who still managed to dragoon interesting people from anywhere within a hundred leagues. It was a sign of the esteem with which Emma held Will that he had only been invited to her house once in his entire time here.

Kessler stepped over a woolly haired Melanesian who was lying dead drunk at the side of the road while Will picked a purple berry off a tree.

“The undertaker's business is brisk enough without such insanity,” Kessler said, shaking the berry out of Will's hand.

“Wild grape,” Will protested.

A line of fruit bats half a mile long flew along the waterfront and banked left for the jungle. The sky was full of trailing figbirds and imperial pigeons and above them goshawks and grey teal.

Both men felt their hearts sinking. The sun was four fingers above nearby New Ireland now and night would be here in an hour or less. It had clouded over but the dwindling day had lost none of its fug: it was breezeless and heavy, a day for steamers and canoes but not proas. Everything was caught in that oh-so-familiar torpor of coastal New Guinea, a torpor that sucked European men into early graves and that seemed even to affect the lizards, rodents, and the flocks of cheerless parrots and lorikeets sitting patiently on the telegraph wires, waiting for some inebriated soldier to shoot them.

Will felt oppressed but this was always his emotion at sundown when he was without the benefit of arak or Siwa. He swatted a blood-bloated horsefly from Brunhilde's neck while Kessler considered how much to tell Will before they encountered Doctor Bremmer and Governor Hahl.

“Will . . .”

“Yes?”

“The first thing I must emphasize is discretion. Scandal is a poison that could spread from Herbertshöhe to the whole colony.”

“And of course back to Berlin,” Will said.

Kessler nodded. “I will tell you the brute facts. No doubt Doctor Bremmer will explain everything in more biological detail.”

“Go on then.”

“Two days ago an Australian man called Clark brought his skiff in from Kabakon with the body of a German national and instructions to give him a Christian burial. He had died of malaria.”

“Clark?”

“An Australian pilot, he carries messages and small cargoes between here and Ulu and throughout the islands. He is dependable and more reliable than the canoes.”

“Never met an Australian yet who was on the level. Who was the dead man?”

“His name was Lutzow, Max Lutzow, a music critic and journalist, well known in some circles.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Neither had I before he came here, but apparently he wrote for the
Suddeutsche Zeitung
. He was also a concert pianist at one time."

“I take it Doctor Bremmer was not convinced by the malaria explanation?”

“Lutzow did not die of malaria.”

“So who killed him? Clark?”

“Not Clark. Nearly three months ago Lutzow joined a community, which has been established on Frau Forsayth's island of Kabakon.”

Will was intrigued. “What do you mean by
community
?”

“Their leader is a man called August Engelhardt. A ‘charismatic.' He also is a journalist and pamphleteer. They call themselves the Sonnenorden. Sun worshippers. They believe that nudity and the eating of coconuts will give them immortality.”

“Coconuts?”

“The fruit that grows closest to the sun. Engelhardt believes that worshipping the sun and eating only coconuts purifies the body of ‘the foul pollutants and excesses of modern twentieth-century life.' Free from these toxins apparently humans can live an unlimited lifespan in paradise.”

“I assume Kabakon has a healthy supply of coconuts?”

“I would imagine so, for they are forbidden to consume anything else! They call themselves Cocovores, as the coconut is considered to be the only pure food.”

They had reached the low fence around the Governor's mansion. They tied Brunhilde to a rail, smartened themselves up, and walked to the swing gate. A native sentry was standing to attention under a small bamboo awning. He was a New Guinean wearing a police uniform of thick khaki with a gleaming white pith helmet low over his face. He had on a bandoleer but carried no firearm.