Left Turn at Paradise

by Thomas Shawver

  “Aside from your body, I suppose it’s your boyish enthusiasm.”

  “Some would call that immaturity.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but in your case, it’s been a saving grace.”

  “Who’s the wiseacre now, Josie?”

  “I’m not joking. I thought I knew you after our terrifying experience with Martin Quist. But the more we settled in, the more I realized you’re like the layers of an onion. Pull one away, there’s always another until I’m left with a question mark.”

  “Am I that unpredictable?”

  “Yes, darling.” She shifted so that we were face-to-face, sharing one pillow. “I love you, Mike, but I don’t want us to stay together if it means continually repairing differences just to be able to say at the end ‘We endured.’ ”

  “I don’t, either. I saw what it did to my parents. It’s just that I feel there’s a piece of the jigsaw missing.”

  Her fingertips caressed my face. “That’s why you need to go to New Zealand. Find what you seek. Bring it home to complete the puzzle. I’ll be here to help. I promise.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The moon had risen over Mount Aspiring when I got out of the hot spring, donned my dog-hair tuxedo, and walked back to my hut to find Pillow lounging provocatively on my mat.

  She wore something made of black and white feathers arranged in horizontal stripes that would have done justice to Alexander McQueen. Her hair was bundled on the top of her head with falcon quills. The backpack straps we’d used to immobilize her injured shoulder had been replaced by a binding of flat leather strips securing her right arm against her chest. Aside from its practical functionality, the wrap was an exquisite design of complicated concentric knots.

  “Well, if it isn’t Xena the Warrior Princess,” I said, sitting beside her.

  “And her best pal, Barney Rubble,” came the wry response.

  “Who wrapped your shoulder?”

  “One of Medusa’s ladies. Amazing how comfortable it is.”

  “Seen your father yet?”

  She shook her head, leaned back seductively, and tickled my chin with the index finger of her left hand. “Witako will be by in an hour to take us to him. I’ve missed you, Michael.”

  It never rains but it pours.

  The promise I’d made to myself was again being severely tested. It was hard enough declining Aronui’s entreaties. Now Pillow was hankering for a replay of our Wellington tryst.

  But Veronica Lake, Lady Godiva, and Bettie Page rolled into one couldn’t have brought me up to the plate. Things were getting too weird, what with green lizards and mysterious Asians about—not to mention a meeting with the Sky God looming.

  There was only one thing to do—look serious and stall.

  “Been keeping busy, have you?” I asked, with wide-eyed innocence.

  Ignoring the question, Pillow stopped the teasing. She sat up and, with a stare that could have frozen Genghis Khan, demanded, “What were you doing before coming here?”

  “Enjoying the waters,” I answered truthfully.

  “While a certain strumpet was enjoying you, I suppose.”

  The remark caught me off guard, not because she’d thought I’d been up to something with Aronui, but because it implied a real feeling of jealousy. Without bothering to counter her charge, I put on a perplexed Howdy Doody grin and repeated my question.

  It was enough to stop her inquisition. She sat up, all thoughts of passion gone for now. I adjusted my kilt and crossed my legs. (Ironically, now that I’d quelled her ardor, mine was beginning to act up.)

  “Until now,” she finally answered, “I’ve practically been a prisoner. Whenever I asked to see my father, I was told the time was ‘inconvenient.’ If it hadn’t been for Tane dropping by every day I might have gone crazy.”

  “Speaking of whom,” I said, “the last time I saw him was two days ago when we watched some young bucks at their weapons practice.”

  “It’s been a while for me as well.”

  “What is Tane to you, Pillow? Why did he apologize to you back at Esme’s?”

  Her lips twitched a little.

  “My friends and I used to play in a cave outside Arrowtown,” she began. “Being the skinniest, I usually was the one sent to check out the tightest spots and got stuck in a hole once. Tane was too big to get in close enough to pull me out. His brother Hemi wasn’t, though. Saved my life, really.”

  “And you paid accordingly?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t want to, but Hemi insisted. It was his first time. Tane was older and could have stopped it, but he just walked away.”

  “Is that why the Craddocks went to prison?”

  “Lord, no! Testifying would have just meant my being totally shunned.”

  She shrugged off the memory.

  “Anyway, no baby came of it. Given the rest of the blokes in that family, Tane wasn’t so bad. Three of the Craddocks got sent to prison for robbing a grocery store a few years later. Because he talked Hemi out of killing the clerk, Tane received a lighter sentence.”

  A number of secrets had come to light in the past couple of days. Alone in the semidarkness of the hut, I sensed the time was right to tell what I knew of her past.

  “I heard that your husband left you holding the bag on a debt.”

  “Congratulations,” Pillow retorted warily. “Our financial problems were hardly unknown in certain circles of Edinburgh and London.”

  “I know about the Russian, too—what he forced you to do.”

  Silence. Complete silence.

  I withheld the urge to shake her.

  Slowly, emptily, she said, “I take it Adrian told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how I dealt with it.”

  “I’m not judging you.”

  She stared back at me with stone cold eyes. “How very considerate.”

  “Sorry, Pillow. I didn’t intend a Sunday school lecture.”

  Her eyes, so hard before, now were pleading. “I’m not evil.”

  “Of course you’re not. I’d have fricasseed that Russian and goosed him on his way to hell.”

  She pressed her body against mine.

  “Adrian threatened to tell the police.”

  “And that’s the hold he has over you?”

  “Yes. Once he learned that my father had the third journal, Adrian knew I was the only way he’d be able to gain access to it.”

  “So why drag me into this?”

  “At first it was because I wanted added protection.” She was trembling. “But the more I came to know you…”

  “What is it?”

  “Will you stay with me when this is over?”

  My response to this astonishing request—I knew she’d given top marks to our one and only tumbling session, but I never imagined true romance might enter the equation—was to answer with a kiss.

  I’m not proud of it, but since it seemed neither the time nor the place to confess that Josie Majansik was my one true love, I saw no way around the situation. I already had enough enemies.

  Pillow was an odd one, to be sure: a victim of a terrible crime who had taken it upon herself to exact revenge in her own very personal way. She was part Amazon, part little girl, and part something else, and I wasn’t sure I could trust Pillow any more than I could Adrian Hart.

  I might have learned more had Witako not arrived to take us to meet his boss.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  We walked along a graveled path for twenty minutes before arriving at the steeply roofed house that I had glimpsed earlier with Aronui.

  Hart, who had exchanged his Maori getup for his clothes from the real world, was waiting impatiently for us by the door under the iron anchor. Pillow scarcely looked at him, and when she did it was with a Gorgon stare for having spilled her secrets.

  Every inch of the walls of the sparsely furnished space we entered was covered with beautiful carvings. A buzzing generator in a corner powered half a dozen electrical lights han
ging from overhead beams. Except for matches and running shoes, they were the only nod to the modern era I’d seen since arriving at the compound.

  A second room beckoned. On the lintel above the entrance was carved a Latin inscription: Adsum. Arcamun arcanorum.

  I knew Adsum meant “I am here,” but my grammar school Latin wasn’t up to the rest.

  Pillow’s classical education, however, was.

  “Arcanum Arcanorum—Secret of Secrets,” she told me. “To alchemists in the Middle Ages it meant the ultimate key to the unknown—the secret of nature.”

  Witako pressed his finger to his lips before motioning for us to follow him.

  God knows I’d had enough surprises since landing in this country, but considering what we encountered in the next room—a full-size replica of the Great Cabin of the HMS Resolution, complete with a pantry, cupboards for scientific and botanical equipment, ship lanterns, and a stuffed dodo—is there any wonder I felt trapped inside a maniac’s dream?

  A man whose long gray hair was tied back in a sailor’s rattail sat in a spindle-legged chair with his back to us. He scratched words onto a sheet of parchment with a feather quill.

  The broad oak table he wrote at was covered with old charts weighted down by a barometer and an old brass sextant. Some things had escaped the eighteenth century: a table lamp fed by a generator, books with contemporary titles, a front-loading steel safe.

  Without turning, he acknowledged the sound of our presence by raising his left arm and extending two fingers. Another minute passed before he set the quill into a copper ink pot and rose to face us.

  The Te Ranginui, hereditary leader of the Kāti Māmoe iwi, champion rugger and former billionaire CEO of TransNational Metals, wasn’t the type you’d find at Costco, sorting through the sale bin.

  He was lean, with long arms and immense hands, and tall, taller than me, but with a slight stoop as if used to bending over to hear others of lesser stature. His face, browned to a rich chestnut, was slightly pitted from some childhood disease. Silver-rimmed spectacles perched perilously on the end of a broad nose that tilted a quarter inch off center, then back to square one. A jagged three-inch scar creased his forehead.

  Despite these imperfections, it wasn’t an unpleasant face. Credit goes to the hypnotic eyes, the strong jaw, and a wide, sensuous mouth.

  His getup, however, was another matter. It looked like something out of a J. Peterman catalog whose fashion statement for the month was Mutiny on the Bounty. The white linen shirt with billowing sleeves, tucked into twill trousers fronted by exposed buttons instead of a zipper, must have come in the same box as the mauve silk brocade vest. His footwear consisted of bucket boots with the obligatory brass buckles.

  There was something else that didn’t match the man who had been a world-beater in everything he tried. Despite a face befitting a Comanche chief—or godfather to the Corsican mafia—he had the dazed manner of someone who had suffered a mental illness and was fearful of it returning soon.

  The inner tension became even more apparent as he tentatively ran the fingers of one hand through his hair. He seemed at a loss as to who we were.

  “How do you do?” he finally said, as if greeting us in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton. Then, before we could respond, he turned to Witako, who had moved to his side like a solicitous caregiver. “And why do I have the pleasure of their company?”

  “These men have brought your daughter to see you.”

  “Ah, yes.” He turned to Pillow, adjusting his glasses for better focus. “Leslie, is it?”

  “No, Rangi,” Witako corrected gently. “Leslie is in Auckland. This is your Penelope, who now lives in London.”

  “The burned creature?”

  “Yes, Father,” Pillow answered stoically. “Your little monster.”

  Ivo Mackin glanced at the rest of us for confirmation that this person was his bastard daughter.

  I felt the smile that had frozen my face getting another glazing. Adrian Hart shuffled his feet with impatience. Pillow chose to emulate a wooden Indian, albeit one with flushed cheeks.

  “Perhaps we should come back later,” I suggested, following the long, awkward silence.

  My words were mostly for the benefit of Witako, who seemed to be aching for an excuse to end the meeting.

  “Come back?” Mackin echoed. “Come back from where?” He leaned against his desk. “Who are you again?”

  I introduced myself while Pillow remained silent. Hart, ever the charmer, had lost all patience.

  “Look here, old man, we know you possess a journal relating to Captain Cook. We intend to see it.”

  Mackin stared questioningly at Hart, but something had registered in his clouded brain. He tipped backward on his heels, crossing his long arms as if locked in a straitjacket. A gleam emerged from behind the glasses.

  “See it, you say? Another word for ‘steal,’ perhaps. I’m not sure my people would allow that. Let me give you a word of advice, sir….”

  A peculiar expression suddenly swept across his face. Collapsing in his chair, he stared blankly at the ceiling and shuddered uncontrollably in the beginning throes of a seizure.

  Instantly, Witako took charge, grabbing his shoulders from behind while he chanted, “Ka rere te ringa kit e ure…Kai ure nga atua…Kai ure nga tapu…Kai ure ou makutu…”

  Within seconds the spasms stopped, bringing about a transition in the Ranginui’s appearance and demeanor. The mists of confusion departed. They were replaced by a piercing recollection of who we were and what Witako had explained to him earlier of our mission. It was remarkable to watch his recollections flutter like butterflies back to his consciousness.

  “Penelope, dear child!” Mackin gushed, rising and extending his arms. “How gratifying to see how beautiful you have become.”

  The blank mask on her face held firm for an instant before she walked around the table and fell into his embrace.

  “I trust your journey from London was pleasant?” he said, after the happy exchange.

  “Yes, papa-hakora. I’ve stayed away too long.”

  Then, turning toward the rest of us, Mackin asked, “And the hike over the col? Not too strenuous?”

  “A bit,” Hart answered, as he reshelved a book he had pulled from a cabinet. It was titled Metallurgy and Geological Findings of New Zealand by G. S. Woodcock. “Indeed, the journey proved to be most invigorating.”

  “Delighted to hear it,” Mackin murmured, returning to his chair. He scratched his nose with the quill. Then he motioned for us to sit.

  “Forgive me for seeming confused when you appeared. Apparitions sometimes invade my brain—terrible images of grotesque beings climb through the walls and ceiling, threatening to take me away with them. It’s a bit of a bother distinguishing what’s real and what isn’t. When you first entered they were my reality and you were the apparitions. It helps to write about them. Only by the Ariki’s intervention can they be dispelled. I meant no discourtesy.”

  “Understood,” Hart said brusquely. “But Witako might have warned us and saved us all the embarrassment.”

  Ivo Mackin’s placid smile remained steady.

  “A drink, Mr. Bevan?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Mr. Hart?”

  “If you insist.”

  Pillow declined.

  Witako brought out a bottle of single-malt whiskey—another nod to the present—from the pantry while Mackin motioned for us to sit in the other three saddleback chairs at the table.

  “To your journey,” he said, raising a glass.

  I drank to that. Then, taking advantage of Mackin’s civility, I asked, “I understand some Chinese technicians are in the caves? Are they taking samples or—”

  “Bloody hell, Bevan!” Hart blurted impatiently. “If you won’t get to the point, I will.”

  He turned to Mackin.

  “I—we—demand that our journals be returned immediately and that we be allowed to fully inspect yours as well.”
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br />   Pillow jumped to her feet. “For God’s sake, Adrian, show some respect to my father!”

  Mackin raised his hand. He looked directly at Hart, not unkindly.

  “While I appreciate the diligence that you have shown to find me, I must question the reasons for your request. Assuming,” he added mildly, “that I have what you wish to see.”

  “It’s quite simple,” Hart said. “Years ago I came across Gibson’s journal of Cook’s second voyage. Recently, Bevan here discovered that he possessed the first. We’ve spent considerable time and expense to share ours with you. It seems perfectly reasonable that you reciprocate.”

  “In what manner? For what purpose?”

  “I should think it apparent,” Hart rasped, warming to the demand. “It would be an insult to scholarship, not to mention British heritage, to deny the world of that last and, I suspect, most important witness to the final months, days, and hours of the great James Cook.”

  “But what if,” Mackin countered, maintaining his noncommittal smile, “the journal contained secrets the world was better off not knowing?”

  “Assuming you have beheld these mysteries, I find that attitude to be not only presumptive, but incredibly arrogant.”

  “Rather strong words, Mr. Hart.” The Sky God no longer smiled.

  That was my cue.

  “Excuse me, sir, but do you believe what Gibson wrote was based on honest observation?”

  “Yes, Mr. Bevan, I’m sure it was done in good faith.”

  “And you believe it to be accurate?”

  “I do, but it presents an unhappy, uncharitable revelation. I see no reason that a single lapse, largely due to illness brought about by incredible stress, should define the whole of a great man’s life.”

  Pillow joined the debate with heartfelt emotion.

  “Adrian has presented our case too bluntly, Father. I realize that for you this is a very personal matter.”

  “As it is for you, my dear.”

  Pillow looked at him curiously before continuing. “But none of us will live forever. Don’t you think there is a moral obligation to inform the world?”

  “It is not a lie if no one asks the question.”

  Hart again: “It’s no secret that by the end Cook might have been insane, tormented by sickness and stress. What can Gibson add that’s harsh enough to alter the image of this man?”