Crystal Ice

by Warren Miner-Williams

  “Hi Rewa, what would you like to drink?”

  As Rewa stretched up to kiss him on the cheek Petera could smell her perfume, ‘Rive Gauche.’ It was a favourite of his and reminded him of his days working at the New Zealand Flower Trade Centre in Auckland Central. Having the fragrance of gardenia, honeysuckle and magnolia, it was the perfume of his mother’s flower garden too.

  “I’ll have a Steinlager please.”

  When Rewa sat down the cause of all the attention disappeared and the ogling stopped. Petera watched them all as he made his way to the bar. They could sense the giant Māori checking them over ensuring they should not repeat their ogling if the opportunity arose again.

  “I love your perfume,” said Petera, passing Rewa the glass of beer. “It reminds me of the magnolia tree in our back garden.”

  “My, my you’re quite a sophisticated man mountain, aren’t you? You’ll be telling me that you like ballet and crochet next.” She smiled warmly as she joked. Petera’s cheeks flushed with a little embarrassment.

  “Actually, I do like crocheting, but what’s ballet?”

  Both he and Rewa laughed.

  “So where was this garden of yours?”

  “I was raised in Te Kuiti. My Mum still lives there.”

  “I used to live there too, with my Aunt Alma in Gadsby Road. I started at Te Kuiti High School in ’84.”

  “Wow, what a small world. I left High School in 1983, before I came to live up here and get a job.”

  “I would have thought there were plenty of farm jobs down there, why the move all the way up here?”

  “Well, I got a job in a print business in Manukau City first. The farm job I started as a favour to an uncle who died of liver cancer. His wife couldn’t cope and their only son, my cousin Tio Reihana, was off trying to be tough in some motorcycle gang. He abandoned the old man long before his illness and wouldn’t come back to help his Mum after his dad died. Not long after that my aunt died too, that was only the second time I ever set eyes on Tio, useless cretin. His Mum had written a will pledging the farm to me. All he got was a few family heirlooms that he’s never bothered to pick up. When he came back to the farm after the tangi, he demanded that I pay him for the farm. I told him to bugger off and I’ve never seen him since.”

  “Tio Reihana’s a cousin of mine. His family roots are in Taranaki, like mine. My whanau all came from Ngaere near Stratford. His whanau and ours are linked through my Aunt Anna. So, as I said, how the hell have I missed meeting a landmark like you before?”

  “Spooky eh!” smiled Petera. “I don’t know, but I wish we had.”

  “Oh, you big softy, I bet you say that to all the girls.” Punching his arm in jest.

  Petera coloured up once more as he searched Rewa’s eyes for ridicule. But there was none, just that disarming smile that could melt the heart of a snowman.

  “Well actually there haven’t been many girls in my life. I suppose not many like the smell of pigs.”

  “What smell I don’t smell any…. oh, that smell.” Rewa made a joke of everything. “No really I can’t smell anything remotely resembling pigs about you; you must have scared them away by some other method. Perhaps you grind your teeth in bed?”

  “No one’s ever complained of that, but I do pick my nose a lot.”

  “Well as long as you don’t eat it as well, I don’t mind.”

  “Why have you got a problem with grinding your teeth in bed?”

  “My late husband did it all the time, drove me mad. I solved it in the end though, I forced him to wear his rugby gum shield in bed. After that it wasn’t a problem, but I couldn’t stop him snoring though. I had to wear ear plugs in bed.” She looked wistful. “It’s funny how you miss the things you hate when they’re not there anymore. I never thought I’d be saying that just a few years down the track.”

  “Do you still miss him?”

  “No, I’ve got over that now. Robbie still misses him though. Carl was still a big kid at heart and to Robbie I suppose he was more like a brother. They did everything together. He’s got no one to go fishing with anymore.”

  “Well, with your permission I can fix that. I’ve got access to a boat out at Pine Harbour. I only have to give a mate of mine a few cans of DB and he’ll lone it to me. You could come too, there’s plenty of room.”

  “Robbie would really like that. If, I have you over for dinner sometime, I’ll introduce you and then it’s over to you. He’s a nice guy; I think you’ll like him. He had a tough time when his dad died. The bastard in the car never stopped and the police said that if an ambulance had been called to the scene soon after he’d been hit, he might have lived. As it was, Carl was left lying in the gutter for over two hours. He’d been drinking but he was doing the sensible thing by walking home. It was a senseless death. The copper who dealt with the accident scene said that the driver must have been drunk or stoned when he lost it coming round the bend by the Assembly of God church, mounted the pavement and hit Carl. Robbie is still very angry about it. I think that if he ever found out who it was then he’d be done for murder. That was a year and three months ago. We both miss him terribly. But as my Mum always said ‘life has to go on.’ And she’s right of course, you can’t live your life in the past.”

  As Rewa looked up at Petera there was a small tear in the corner of her eye that glinted in the pub lights. Realising that she had perhaps said too much, she swept it away and smiled at Petera once more.

  “Changing the subject how’s the pig business?”

  “Oh, it’s OK I suppose, it keeps me out of mischief. It’s a smelly job, but someone has to do it.”

  “You don’t milk pigs, do you? So, what do you do with them?”

  Petera laughed “No we don’t milk them; I don’t even think that’s possible. If it is, it could be a million-dollar idea? I’ll have to look into that.”

  “Hey, if there is any money in it, I want a finder’s fee.” Again, her smile was infectious.

  “Joking apart, what I do is to buy weaners, piglets less than 10 weeks old that have been weaned and can eat solids. Then I fatten them up and sell them on for bacon. That takes about 50 weeks. I’ve got two sheds that hold the pigs at different stages, so I have a continuous flow of animals ready for market. That means my income doesn’t go from boom to bust all the time, it stays steady.”

  “Sounds a bit like a production line to me. Don’t you ever get attached to them by the time you send them to market?”

  “I suppose it is a bit like a production line, but it’s not so cruel. They have a good life, they’re in open pens of about 25 animals in each and they have the best food. I don’t get emotional about them; I can’t afford to. And anyway, I’ve a few pet ones. I must confess that I have already got a girlfriend, a Gloucester Old Spot called Alice. She’s a real sweetie.

  “So, I’m having to compete with a pig? That doesn’t make a girl feel wanted. What is it that Alice’s got that I haven’t?”

  “Well, she doesn’t smell as good as you. I can’t afford the perfume for her. But if I could, well….”

  “Watch it buster, you’re on unsafe ground now! I think I’d better come and check out my competition. I’ll have to have a good talk with her, make sure she knows who she’s up against.”

  It was one of those moments, the sort that if you missed them, you regret them for the rest of your life. And Petera wasn’t going to miss this one. He reached across the table and took Rewa’s hand. She stretched over the table and kissed Petera gently on the lips. Her kiss was like a sip of good wine, a warming sensation with a hint of mystery, something that lingered longer than the physical contact, something that promised more. One sip was insufficient, Petera needed to kiss her again.

  7.

  The Necktie

  The MV Olga Tovic had slowed almost to a stop, having barely enough way to allow adequate steerage. A 4 metre Zodiac had been hurriedly assembled on the foredeck and was now being carefully lowered to the sea to trail alongsid
e the ship. Clothed completely in black the two assassins, each carrying a large rucksack, climbed nimbly down the ship’s embarkation ladder into the inflatable boat below. Once the 40hp Mariner outboard engine was fired up, they left the lee side of the ship and disappeared into the night. For a short time, their passage was marked by phosphorescence left in the boats wake, and then only by the muffled sound of the motor gave their progress away.

  Captain Goran Sumovich had watched their departure from the sanctuary of the warm bridge before he signalled a resumption of the ship’s cruising speed. The clang of the telegraph repeated his command as the chief engineer opened the throttles. She was an old ship, but sturdily built and well looked after. Goran Sumovich loved her, treated her respectfully and she had never let him down. Her strength and reliability had saved both him and his crew on many a stormy night.

  Sumovich had no idea what his passengers had been sent to sanitise, he had no knowledge of the drug trade per se and no wish to, either. Though he was a servant of Allah he was first and foremost the captain of a ship engaged in international trade. He had never considered dying for the cause. He would serve best by what he knew most about, the sea.

  As they steamed down the East Coast of New Zealand he thought with affection of his parents. They were the reason he had joined the cause, for them and all the other innocents who had been slaughtered by the actions of the unclean.

  Sumovich could never accept the death of his father, even though the old man was near death before the 1991 Serbian shelling of Dubrovnik began. Goran Sumovich hero-worshipped his father and the hatred that burned inside him was fuelled by what the Nazis, then the Serbs, had done to him and his family. The tortured shell his father became was in such contrast to what he had been before WWII. Though Jožef Sumovich was never a big man, at the time of his capture by the Gestapo he did have an athletic, well-developed body. In his youth he had been an accomplished swimmer and had even competed in the trial for the 1928 Yugoslavian Olympic Games team. Though Jožef was frail and sick at the end, his wife Irena never left his side, and she died trying to shield her husband from the falling masonry as their home was destroyed by the Serbian shelling.

  Goran’s niece, Sonja Kolar, had been caught up in the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. She had lived in Srebrenica with her husband Štefan, their son Miran and their two daughters Anica and Danica. The family, fearful of what might happen to them, had sheltered behind locked doors in the house that had been in Štefan’s family for five generations. Local Serb militia smashed through the doors of their sanctuary in the summer 1995. Forced into the rear garden of their home, Sonja and the two girls were raped repeatedly in front of Štefan and his son. The three women were then forced to watch as an officer of the militia tore at the throats of Štefan and Miran with a bread knife from their own kitchen. Helpless and hysterical, the women witnessed the death throes of their men folk before their own legs were broken repeatedly with a heavy iron bar. Sonja and Danica died slowly of their terrible injuries, only Anica survived. Left amongst the bodies of her family, Anica was rescued the following day by a neighbour. Sickened by the senseless violence, Janko Pintar and his wife Marta found the girl alive but unconscious close to the corpse of her mother. Fearful of reprisals, Janko left the other four bodies for another week before he eventually buried them where they lay. Anica had the femur of her right leg broken in two places, her left just once. Both her right and left tibia were also broken. Janko had treated horses in the past and he would have shot horses for far less injuries than those sustained by Anica. Racked with fever she lay in agony, drifting in and out of consciousness for the best part of a week before Marta persuaded a local doctor to treat the girl. There was little he could do; Anica required urgent orthopaedic surgery to repair her shattered legs. Using crude traction on his non-anaesthetised patient, the doctor managed to realign most of the bones, but that was all he could do. Another week passed before Janko and Marta smuggled the girl out of Srebrenica to a large hospital in Sarajevo. After many years and many operations, surgeons eventually succeeded in straightening Anica’s legs enough for her to walk, but only with the aid of a brace on her right leg.

  When Anica first came to live with Goran Sumovich and his wife Sara she suffered from terrifying reoccurring nightmares in which she relived the atrocities of the summer of 1995. For two years she slept with Sara, so that when she awoke screaming, help was close at hand. No operations or fancy drugs could erase those inhuman violations. Eventually Anica started to emerge from the horrors that stalked her mind and, on the surface at least, she seemed to be able to live a normal life. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is the sanitised description of how her mind had suffered, but it was woefully inadequate as a descriptor of what she had endured. Late one evening in June 2000, Anica attempted suicide by swallowing over 20 paracetamol tablets. When Sara found her, she had been vomiting for more than two hours before lapsing into unconsciousness. For ten days she lay in a hospital bed in Trieste, her condition described as critical. It took many days and nights before her liver started to recover. Only the love of Goran and Sara saved her. Sara loved Anica as dearly as she would a child of her own, and she swore that she would never allow Anica to feel alone again.

  The abhorrence of this assault on his family meant that every ounce of Goran’s body was dedicated to ensuring that such an atrocity would be repaid.

  ***

  While Brian Rupene waited for his luggage, he was already the target of attention. The thirty-two-year-old drug dealer was well known to both the NZ Police and to the NZ Customs Service. His referral into the red zone was inevitable, something that Brian accepted as ‘par for the course.’ He almost enjoyed watching them ferret through his belongings, trying to find some illicit substance to take him down. He was cleaner than clean, he was sterile, so was his girlfriend, and none of the customs boys would find anything on him, zip, nada, nothing. His holiday on the Gold Coast of Australia with his partner Jennifer Henare had been part business and part recreational. He never had any direct contact with drugs during these journeys abroad. So, the Customs efforts to catch him out were futile.

  As Brian, carrying his two small suitcases approached the customs officer he knew full well what he was going to say.

  “Have you anything to declare?” asked Grant Richards, a customs team leader.

  “No, nothing as usual.”

  “Did you pack your bags yourself sir?”

  “Yes, I certainly did.”

  “Would you mind going through to the red area please? I would like to ask you some more questions and inspect your luggage.”

  “Not a problem officer, it’s always a pleasure.”

  Just the same as he had always done, Brian slammed his two cases on the stainless-steel bench as a measure of protest. He had long since realised that if you push too hard, say fuck too many times, or call the customs staff bastards, it only prolonged the time of the search. Brian knew all about the Ion Scan machine that electronically sniffed at swabs the customs guys took of his pockets and luggage lining. He knew that if he were at all contaminated with the product, he sold they would strip him right down, to check if he was body packing drugs. Brian was Mr Big though, he didn’t need to do that shit. He would have some other dumb fuckers do that. Anyway, his organisation didn’t import shit these days, for that was how you got caught. So, out came the contents of his luggage and, on a separate search bench, Jennifer’s too. The officers swabbed and poked at the lining and checked for false bottoms in the cases. They even x-rayed the empty cases.

  Brian sneered. “See that split in the lining officer? One of your mates did that last time. It’s exactly the same bag as before. You didn’t find anything then and you won’t find ‘jack-shit’ this time either.”

  “Yes Mr Rupene, I understand that we have checked you before, and I am also aware that we didn’t find anything then either. However, we get paid to search suspicious people and you look suspicious to me.”

  “OK smart
arse, what is it about me that’s suspicious?”

  “Well, if I told you that you wouldn’t be suspicious anymore, would you now?” Smiled Grant Richards.

  “I wouldn’t, and then you’d be redundant. I suppose it’s folk like me that keep your kids in shoes. I have charity, really, I do, and I understand my public duty to support you guys. So, search away captain, ‘knock yourself out.’”

  “Thank you for your co-operation. Tell me, what’s this stuffed into the lining?” said Grant, holding a yellow post-it notepaper. Grant was the team leader, the senior customs officer, in the red area that evening. Although Brian Rupene didn’t seem to realise, this wasn’t the first time that Grant Richards had searched him. Two years ago, he had been through the same procedure and Brian was still saying the same things.