by Aaron Elkins
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Chapter 14
* * * *
There is no rail system on the island of Tahiti, no commuter plane network, no bus service. If you want public transportation you do what the locals do: you climb aboard le truck, as everyone refers, individually and collectively, to the ubiquitous and whimsically painted fleet of “cabooses” mounted on individually owned flatbed trucks (which is why they are called le truck and not le bus).
Gideon waved down a southbound one on rue Francois Cardella and found an unoccupied section of padded bench. On his left was a smiling old man clad only in shorts, with a wire crate containing two plainly disgruntled white chickens on his lap. On his right was a middle-aged woman wearing a bright pareu, with a hibiscus flower in her hair, thong sandals on her feet, and a braided string of gleaming red mullet in one hand. In the other hand was a leather attache case with a cellular telephone clamped to it.
Across from him a gaggle of high school girls, already Polynesian stunners at fifteen or sixteen, tittered and chattered away in Tahitian, bothered by neither the reggae music blaring from le truck's loudspeaker nor the transistor radios plugged into their ears.
Culture in flux, he thought. At the lively, sprawling market an hour earlier he had bought Julie a handsome black-pearl pendant. The native woman at the stall, shy and smiling, had spoken no English and only a little French. She had struck him as a charming throwback to the unspoiled Tahiti of the eighteenth century. But when he had made his choice she had revealed a minimal knowledge of English after all. “Visa? MasterCard? American Express?” she had inquired in a charming accent and then processed the transaction on a computer screen equipped with Windows.
Le truck made its stop-and-start journey through the outer reaches of Papeete's urban sprawl: a long string of convenience stores, bars, restaurants, shoddy two-story apartment buildings, and metal-roofed shantytowns. But after twenty minutes the smelly, noisy commercial traffic eased off and the shantytowns thinned out and then disappeared entirely, to be replaced by occasional native villages, one much like another: modest, compact assemblages of small stucco houses—some nice, some not so nice—set among astonishing profusions of hibiscus and gardenia, often with old stone churches as centerpieces.
Between the villages the vegetation thickened and became more tropical, and clefts in the coastal mountains opened up to reveal the stupendous hanging green valleys of the interior. When Gideon saw the sign for the Shangri-La coming up, he pressed the old-fashioned doorbell-button above his head and le truck pulled up beside the trellised arch over the entryway to the grounds. He walked around to the driver's window, handed over the fare-200 French Pacific francs, about $2— and went to his cottage to get in some work on the Bronze Age symposium.
But he hadn't been at it five minutes when he knew his heart, and more important, his head, weren't in it. He yawned, threw his notes down, and looked at his watch. Not much after one o'clock. Another yawn. Finding a hammock was starting to sound like a pretty good idea, and he was giving serious thought to the possibility of acting on it when he recalled Nick's invitation of the night before: a tour of the coffee farm.
Why not? Considering the thousands of gallons of the stuff he'd downed in the last twenty years, it was about time he visited one. Besides, underneath all that reasonable and healthy skepticism he'd been expressing to John, he had to admit to a certain curiosity about seeing the murderous pulper, the falling-down shed, and the various other inanimate objects that seemed to have it in for Nick Druett and the Paradise Coffee enterprise.
The hammock could wait; Gideon went to find Dean Parks at the front desk.
"Dean, how would I get up to Nick's plantation from here?"
"Easy. I'll have Honu take you up in the van. Whoops, not for a couple of hours, though; he's in town picking up supplies."
"Is it too far to walk?"
"'Bout eight miles. Uphill every blessed inch."
"Too far,” Gideon said.
"I'd say so. His house is less than half a mile down the road, though. Easy walking. If you don't want to wait for the van, somebody there's bound to give you a lift up to the farm."
"I think I'll try that. How do I recognize his house?"
Dean laughed. “Keep your eyeballs peeled for the place that looks like it belongs to the Wazir of Kitchipoo."
* * * *
Dean was exaggerating, but not by that much. Nick's house stood in splendid isolation, in walled, parklike grounds that jutted out into the sea on their own private promontory. Like ninety-nine percent of the houses in the South Seas, it was covered with a green, corrugated metal roof. Other than that, it would have been right at home on the French Riviera. Faced with white stucco and polished river rock, embellished with ornate white grillwork on its several balconies and verandas, and fronted with rows of French doors instead of windows, the handsome two-story structure stood on a wide lawn commanding a wonderful view of beach, ocean, and, in the distance, the domed green peninsula of Tahiti Iti.
Gideon walked between the twin stone pillars of the driveway and headed toward the house at an angle across the lawn.
"Can I help you?"
He looked toward a trellised patio on the right to see a pair of women finishing off a meal with mugs of coffee at a round, glass-topped table; one about forty, the other in her sixties, with scant, dark hair that sat on her scalp like a cloud. The older one was Asiatic—Chinese, he guessed—the younger a mixture of Asiatic and Caucasian and a foot taller, but the shape of their jaws, the slope of their shoulders, even the inquisitive tilt of their heads marked them as relatives. Mother and daughter, he thought. Celine and Maggie.
"Hi,” he said. “I'm Gideon Oliver. I'm—"
"Oh, you Johnny's friend,” said the older woman, her round face crinkling into a smile not all that different from John's. She held up a pitcher. “Want some coffee?"
He shook his head. “Thanks, I had some with lunch. You're Mrs. Druett?"
"You bet. Johnny's Auntie Celine."
"And I'm Maggie, John's cousin,” said the younger one, the one who had called out, frankly appraising him with sharp, black, intelligent eyes. “Well, well. The family's heard some pretty strange stories about you over the years."
Likewise, Gideon thought but didn't say. He laughed. “Well, you can't believe everything John says, you know."
Maggie swallowed the last of her coffee and stood up, a solid, thick-bodied woman with a Chinese-style, bolerolike silk jacket decorously buttoned over shoulders left bare by her pareu. She leaned over to kiss her mother on the forehead. “See you tomorrow, Mom."
"Okay, honey,” Celine said absently, “you be good now. Gideon, you know something? You looking at the only woman alive who work with John Barrymore."
"Really?” said Gideon.
"He gonna be my uncle in Pippi of the Islands. Nineteen forty-two. He drop dead right before filming start. Damn picture never got made."
"Really,” said Gideon.
"He don't believe me,” Celine said.
"It's true,” Maggie told him. “More or less. Mom was the Tahitian Shirley Temple for a while. Listen, I'm on my way back up to the plantation. How about a lift? Poppa said you were coming up for a tour."
"Sure,” said Gideon. “I was hoping for a ride. Goodbye, Mrs. Druett. Nice meeting you."
"Work with Abbott and Costello too,” Celine informed him.
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Chapter 15
* * * *
"The man without a mission,” said Maggie as she got into the driver's seat of her gray Peugeot.
"Pardon?"
"Well, you were coming out to do your thing on poor Brian, weren't you? Until Poppa changed his mind?"
Gideon turned to face her more directly as she steered the car onto the highway. “Do you know what made him change it?"
She shrugged. “Nothing makes Nick Druett change his mind. He just changed it, that's all. I guess he thought it wa
sn't such a good idea after all."
"And what do you think?"
Not a good question. Maggie's face hardened. “What I think is that my father usually turns out to be right about most things."
But after a few moments, when she saw he wasn't going to pursue it, she softened. “All the same, I'm a little sorry we're not going through with it. It would have been nice to lay that stupid gangland business to rest once and for all. This way, there'll always be rumors."
"You don't believe them?"
"That they had him killed? Of course not.” She paused, then glanced at him, one eyebrow lifted. She was wearing carved wooden earrings shaped like conch shells. “Do you?"
Gideon replied with a shrug of his own. “What about those accidents?"
"Such as?"
"I don't remember them all. Didn't his jeep flip over? Didn't the roof of one of the sheds almost come down on him?"
Maggie clucked irritably. “Oh, for God's sake. That jeep was an antique, forty years old, and the ‘roads’ up there are more like goat tracks. It's amazing it never flipped over before."
"What about the shed?"
"That thing was rickety from the start. I was in there doing a time-management class for the foremen the evening before and after everybody left I stayed there another couple of hours doing some paperwork, but then I had to get out because the wind came up and I thought the place was going to come down on me. I mentioned it to Poppa, and he was going to have it checked, but it collapsed first and Brian just happened to be there when it did. I mean, organized crime might be pretty powerful, but I don't think they can order up a windstorm on demand."
Gideon nodded. There wasn't much to say. He agreed with her.
"We turn there,” she said. “At the mini-mall."
And mini-mall it was, the Centre Apatea, plopped down into the brush-jungle beside the highway and looking startlingly like a street-corner mall that had been shipped whole from East Los Angeles, with only the signs changed, to French and Tahitian. There was a pharmacy, a video store, a fast-food place that specialized in sugary crullers and casses-croutes—sandwiches on crusty bread—and a magasin, the island's version of a 7-Eleven. And as in L.A., this was where the local kids hung out, brown, lean youngsters in T-shirts, shorts, and turned-around baseball caps, lounging against the cars in the parking lot. As Maggie turned from the highway onto the unmarked gravel road that led toward the interior of the island, he was able to read the legend on one of the boys’ shirts: Hard Rock Cafe, Fiji.
Just on the other side of the mall a herd of brown-and-white, picture-book-pretty Guernsey cows browsed in the grass in a grove of tall, slender coconut palms, with the woolly green flanks of Mt. Iviroa beyond. To Gideon's eyes, at least, it was an unlikely sight, like some fanciful tropical collage with barnyard cow figures amusingly (and improbably) pasted on.
Once past the last of the palm trees, the car began climbing through relatively open rangeland spotted with neatly terraced fruit and vegetable orchards: mangoes, pineapples, taros, citrus.
"This is all our property,” Maggie said. “Two thousand acres. My father leases most of it to local farmers—Chinese, mostly. The coffee farm's only part of it. Here we are,” she said as they drove under a peeling stucco arch from the copra-farming days or even earlier, from cotton-picking times. The sign beside it was in both French and English.
Paradise Coffee Plantation
Home of Blue Devil Coffee
A cup of coffee—real coffee—home-browned home-ground, home-made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils, and will exorcise them all.
Henry Ward Beecher
"Great quote,” Gideon said. “Certainly gets the salivary glands going."
"Haven't you ever seen it before? We put it on every package of Blue Devil, or don't you like Blue Devil?"
"No, I like it a lot.” But not enough to be intimately familiar with the package. Not at almost $40 a pound. When Gideon bought a bag of Paradise coffee, it was generally one of the less expensive ones like the House Blend or the Weekend Blend. And even then it was a splurge compared to almost everything else on the market. Paradise coffees didn't come cheap.
They pulled up at a rutted parking area beside a big, barn-like building with Plexiglas walls and a roof made of plates of Plexiglas and corrugated metal. “And this is the famous drying shed itself,” Maggie told him.
"It does look a little rickety,” Gideon said.
"Well, of course it does."
"Still, it's funny that it should have decided to collapse just when he was there.” Fishing. What for, he wasn't sure.
Maggie leaned her elbows on the steering wheel and looked him in the eye. “Gideon...” She hesitated, considered her words. “Frankly, those accidents were a bad spell that everyone would like to forget. We don't even like to talk about them anymore. But let me tell you something that I would never say to Nick, or, God help me, to ‘Therese. Brian wasn't the target of all those damn things that happened, he was...well, he was the cause, when you come right down to it. I'm sorry to say it, especially right now, but it's true."
Gideon frowned. “How do you mean, the cause?'
I don't mean directly,” she said, backing off a little, “not on purpose, but in a way, yes. Take the jeeps, for example— we actually bought five of them, if you can believe it; four to drive around in and one for spare parts. Old codgers from the Korean War. It was Brian's idea to get them; part of his ‘system-reengineering.’ We got them at a ridiculously low price, and he claimed it was the perfect way to get around in country like this. Maybe it was, but the damn things were old. Three of them broke down—I mean, they practically decomposed in front of us—inside of the first month, and then Brian happened to be in the last one when it finally gave up the ghost too. He drove it every day, so is there anything so surprising about that?"
"Well, not—"
"Now we use a couple of Toyota four-by-four vans to get around the place and we haven't had any accidents. The money we spent on the jeeps? A total waste. And the new shed? That was one of Brian's ideas too—to build it with these prefabricated roof trusses and floor joists or something. It was going to save all kinds of money. Fine, no problem—as long as the wind didn't blow. But it didn't stand up to the first halfway decent storm we got."
"But it's stood up since."
"Sure, because it's been propped up and strengthened—see that concrete footing? Cost more money than it took to build it in the first place. Some savings. And I still don't trust it."
She was off and running now, chewing the cud of some old sense of grievance, real or imagined. Did Gideon know about some of the other accidents they'd been having? The pulper, had he heard about that?
He nodded. “One of the workers lost a finger."
Two fingers, Maggie told him. And why? Because Brian, Mr. MBA, was bent on automating production at Paradise. So he brought in the very latest, slickest equipment. Only he forgot about the human element. He didn't allow enough time for training. Maggie had demanded a week, but Brian had convinced Nick anyone could learn to operate it in a day.
"Well, Poppa and Brian were both wrong,” she said bitterly, “only it's Puarei Marae who has to get along without his thumb and index finger."
It was much the same story with the bean sorter that had broken down several times and the drying furnace in the basement that had burned up $15,000 worth of other people's beans: more “improvements” of Brian's. Lots of attention given to researching the equipment, choosing the right model, drawing workflow charts...and zilch given to the people who had to make it work.
"The thing is, Gideon, for all his love of Tahiti, Brian never came close to understanding the people, the culture. And workflow charting, let me tell you, isn't part of the Polynesian cult
ure. And I haven't even talked about the computerization. The thing is, you have to work with the native values, not rely on typical Eurocentric misassumptions. You can't..."
She trailed off, apparently feeling that she'd gone on too vigorously and too long, considering the recency of Brian's death, or maybe that she was overstepping her bounds teaching an anthropologist about anthropology. She toyed, scowling, with one of the conch earrings. “Oh, heck, here I am making it sound as if Brian was this awful person, and he was anything but. He was the sweetest...my only point is that everybody goes around whispering about all these mysterious accidents, and there's nothing mysterious about them, nothing. Brian had a lot of new ideas, good ideas, and he was hellbent on putting them into effect, but this is Tahiti, not New York. You can't go around messing with traditional cultural values and expect not to have any problems. People—"
She stopped again and laughed good-naturedly at herself. “There I go again. I guess I don't have to tell you all that."
"No. You're right, of course."
And yet he was oddly unsatisfied. It wasn't that he harbored any conviction that these incidents were prelude to Brian's murder—he still didn't honestly think there had been any murder—but the more the string of accidents was explained away, the more doubtful and uneasy he became about them. And in an unanticipated way, about Maggie. Was everything that had gone wrong truly Brian's doing, or was there a bit of revisionist history under way? The only thing she hadn't blamed on him was the rainy spring. Not yet anyway.
As they got out of the car Nick came from the shed, wiping his hands on a ragged brown towel. Shirtless, shoeless, wearing nothing but a pair of old, stained khaki shorts, he was as furry as a sheepdog.
"Ah, Maggie, you found him! Tour time, Gideon.” He looked around as a dusty pickup truck crunched up the graveled road and pulled into the parking area. “Oh hell, here comes Antoine. This won't take any time at all. It's just one of the other growers. I've been doing some processing for him and we're still working out the costs. This'll just take a minute, Gideon."
