Twenty Blue Devils

by Aaron Elkins

  "Bonjour, Antoine, comment ca va?" he boomed, striding toward the newcomer.

  "Don't comment ca va me, you tight-fisted, money-grubbing sonofabitch!” replied Antoine, stepping down from his truck and slamming the door. He shook a piece of paper, a bill or a receipt, under Nick's nose. “Tell me what the hell you call this?"

  "I don't know why,” Gideon said to Maggie, “but I have this feeling this is going to take more than a minute."

  "You're right,” Maggie said. “These two have been known to go at each other for hours. It keeps their blood oxygenated. I think I'd better get Tari to give you the tour."

  Through waves of gestures she communicated her intention to Nick, who responded through the screen of Antoine's gesticulations with a helpless shrug.

  "I've been wanting you to meet Tari anyway,” Maggie said as she took him around the shed to a loading dock at the rear where several men were wrestling hundred-pound burlap bags of coffee beans from the back of a pickup truck, loading them onto the weighing platform, recording the exact weights, and then emptying them into a pneumatic conveyor tube. “He's my prime example of employee development the way it ought to be done. The one with the clipboard—that's Tari."

  At the sound of his name—Maggie's voice was like a trumpet most of the time—an immense man in a striped tank top shirt and shorts looked over one massive, brown shoulder. “'Lo, Maggie.” The thin, piping voice didn't go with the powerful body.

  "Hoa, maita'i anei oe?" Maggie said gravely, much the way Joel McCrea or Randolph Scott used to intone “How,” when addressing the chief of all the Apaches, in order to show respect for the great Apache nation and the ways of their people.

  "Oh, pretty good, Maggie. How you doing yourself?"

  Tari looked a little embarrassed, or maybe it was only a reaction to Maggie's Tahitian, which didn't strike Gideon as any too accurate. From up close, Tari was not quite as gigantic as he'd first seemed, but he was built like a sumo wrestler—no, more like a giant baby, with a round, smiling face, fat, lusty arms and legs, and a belly like a beer keg. All told, three hundred amply fleshed, formidable pounds.

  "Maita'i roa," replied Maggie solemnly. “Gideon, this is Tari Terui,” she said proudly—and a little proprietorially, it seemed to Gideon. “Paradise Coffee's next operations manager. He's been doing an outstanding job of filling Brian's shoes."

  "Oh, I don't know ‘bout that,” the huge man mumbled, shuffling wide, dusty feet in their thong sandals. Gideon got the impression that this was more than mere modesty. Under the naturally genial and placid planes of Tari's flat, broad face there was something worried.

  "Nonsense,” Maggie said. “What's bothering you?"

  Tari looked at his feet. “Lot of things."

  "Such as?"

  Tari shrugged. “Accounts payable...” he mumbled unhappily. “...supply-invoice stuff..."

  "Well, don't you worry about it,” Maggie said, “we'll straighten it out at our Friday meeting. And if I can't make any sense out of it, we'll get Nelson or Rudy to explain. Don't worry, Tari, you're doing just fine.” She beamed at the big Tahitian. “Tari's the wave of the future,” she said to Gideon. “He's a role model for every Tahitian employee we have."

  Tari glanced uncomfortably around, and Gideon caught the tail end of a scowl he cast at one of the workers, who had paused in his manhandling of the bags to eavesdrop with undisguised amusement. Obviously, being a role model to his fellow Tahitians was not something to which Tari aspired.

  "Gideon is a friend of John's,” Maggie told him, “and Poppa wants him to see the farm. Can you take an hour or so and show him around?"

  "Sure, you bet,” Tari declared, practically rolling his eyes with relief. Rattling around the plantation was clearly more to his liking than talking about accounts payable.

  They started with the drying shed itself, a single room about eighty feet by a hundred, a good ten degrees warmer than it was outside, redolent with a pungent smell that Gideon associated more with wineries than with coffee plantations, and suffused with a milky glow from the light coming through the translucent walls and ceiling. The floor was made of wood planking, but except for a couple of cleared aisles down the center from each side, most of it was three or four inches deep in a sea of coffee beans ranging from greenish brown to palest beige and separated into different-colored sections by movable lengths of white plastic pipe. Workers shuffled slowly, sleepily, through them in the heat, spreading and rearranging the shallow heaps with homemade, blunt-toothed wooden rakes.

  Tari, now in his element, was an enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide. Gideon learned that the beans varied in color because they lightened as they dried, that drying took ten days to two weeks, depending on the weather, that they had to be raked and turned over three or four times a day to keep them from drying unevenly. He learned that when the coffee berries came in from the field they were loaded into the pulper, a gleaming, stainless-steel contraption of belts, pulleys, gears, conveyors, and tanks that took up one end of the shed, and then, via conveyor belt, into several large vats, where they fermented for two or three days—that was where the winery-like fragrance came from—before being washed and spread on the floor to dry. And that was it. They were then bagged and shipped to warehouses and masteries around the world.

  "Interesting,” murmured Gideon in the sober, receptive tone one uses at such times. “And so this is the pulper. Impressive piece of machinery."

  "Plenty bells and whistles,” Tari agreed, looking at it fondly.

  "Looks as if you must have to be pretty careful around it."

  He was fishing again, but Tari wasn't biting. “Oh yeah, you bet,” he said amiably. “You sure don't want to get no parts caught in there."

  "Mm. Seems to me I remember hearing that one of the men was hurt a while back."

  "Yeah, two fingers chopped off, but now we got a training program. Nobody losing parts no more."

  "I'm glad to hear it,” Gideon said, speaking with a personal stake in the matter. Opening a bag of Weekend Blend some morning and finding somebody's parts in with the beans would be a hell of a way to wake up.

  When they left the shed, Tari drove him up the mountain in one of the white Toyota vans, and with Gideon hanging on to the window frame to keep his seat—Maggie proved right about the goat-track roads—they bucked and wobbled over sinkholes, rocks, and streambeds. A fifteen-minute drive took them past neatly tended plots of Chinese vegetables and banana and breadfruit trees and up into the wilder, more spectacular vegetation of the interior: tall, arching acacias with their naked pink trunks wreathed with moss; flame trees alight with brilliant, red-orange flowers; a thousand kinds of ferns growing anywhere there was space. The temperature cooled when they moved underneath the cloud cover that hung about the top of Mt. Iviroa most afternoons. At about the two-thousand-foot level, Tari pulled over at the base of a hillside that had been cleared and replanted.

  He waved an arm. “Coffee trees."

  They didn't look like trees to Gideon. Bushes, maybe, and not very impressive ones. Eight or nine feet tall, straggling, droopy, and undernourished-looking, they seemed like poor cousins to most other growing things on the mountainside.

  "These are coffee trees?” he couldn't help saying.

  Tari looked at him with amusement. “Sure, man, you bet. Big, fat trees—lousy berries. Crummy, skinny trees—berries taste great, all the flavor goes into them. This part here, we on the Blue Devil farm. Best damn coffee in whole world,” he said reverently, and then a moment later: “Bar none, man."

  The trees didn't look like trees and the farm didn't look like a farm; not the farms Gideon was used to (admittedly, not all that many) There were no neatly laid-out rows, no straight lines of furrowed earth. The spindly coffee trees were planted helter-skelter on the hillside, with other plants—banana, papaya, avocado—growing among them, seemingly at random.

  But there was a reason for the apparent disorder, Tari was quick to let him know. Coffee trees did n
ot replenish nitrogen in the soil, but banana, papaya, and avocado did. It was all a matter of conservation.

  "Ah,” said Gideon.

  Tari plucked a berry from one of the trees, a little red fruit about the size and color of a small radish.

  "Hey, Gideon, how many these buggers you think it take to make one pound coffee?"

  "A hundred?” Gideon said, trying to please.

  Tari, pleased, threw back his head and laughed. “Guess again, man."

  "A thousand?"

  "Two thousand! And they all got to be hand-picked, no machines, because they don't get ripe all the same time. See?” He showed him two berries growing on the same branch; one a bright red, ready for harvesting, the other as green and hard as a dried pea. “Two thousand, hand-picked!"

  "Wow, no wonder it's expensive."

  "You bet!” Tari plucked a ripe berry from the tree and squeezed it between thumb and forefinger. The coffee bean itself, a relatively large seed with a white, fibrous covering, burst from the berry into the palm of his other hand.

  "You know what always gets me?” he said, studying it with what was surely affection. “This here is from the same kind of tree like cherries, you know, or peaches, I forget the name..."

  "Drupes,” said Gideon.

  Tari showed mild surprise. Gideon had risen in his estimation. “Yeah, that's right, drupes. Only with cherries, peaches, you eat the fruit, throw away the pit. Simple, right? But coffee, you throw away the fruit, keep the pit. Then you got to dry it, roast it, grind it, pour hot water over it, and then drink the damn water. How you figure they ever think of it?"

  Gideon smiled. “It beats the hell out of me, Tari. It was probably the same guy who first looked a lobster in the eye and had the nerve to wonder if there was something good to eat in there."

  "Beats the hell out of me too,” said Tari.

  * * * *

  As they bumped back down the mountain road, Gideon noticed something he hadn't spotted on the way up. Lying on its side in a jungly gully fifty feet below the road, half-overgrown with wild ginger and lantana, was the rusting carcass of a U.S. Army jeep, ghostly and forlorn, the white star still dimly visible on its olive-drab side.

  "Is that the one that went over the side a few months ago?” Gideon asked

  "Yeah,” Tari said. “No fun, man."

  Gideon looked at him. “You were in it?"

  For an answer Tari hooked a thumb behind his upper front teeth and popped them out: a finely made removable bridge consisting of the two central incisors. “Best you can buy. The boss, he ordered it for me from France.” In it went again, with a little click. “And Brian, he bust his arm really bad. Two places, you could see the bones sticking right out. We damn near get ourselves killed. No fun, man,” he said again. “I don't even like to talk about it."

  For something nobody liked to talk about, Gideon thought, those accidents seemed to crop up a lot in conversation. “You're lucky you weren't killed,” he said, hoping it might draw the big Tahitian out a little more.

  It did. “You bet,” he agreed soberly. “Maggie even luckier. Brian, he the unlucky one. Didn't have no business riding around Thursday morning."

  Thursday morning, it seemed, was when Maggie usually made her weekly personnel tour of the plantation, with Tari at the wheel. They would stop and chat with the workers at the various locations, eliciting gripes and suggestions and holding informal “tailgate sessions.” The other four mornings of the week Brian and Tari made their normal production rounds. But on this particular Thursday morning, the Thursday morning that the jeep's rear axle decided to come loose at the worst section of the road, Maggie was scheduled to give a guest lecture on employee relations at the Lycee Technique de Hotellerie et Tourisme in Papeete. So she and Brian had traded days: Maggie and Tari had made their rounds on Wednesday, and Brian and Tari on Thursday; the fateful Thursday.

  The result? A compound fracture for Brian, two dislodged teeth for Tari, and a brush with death for both.

  And Maggie? mused Gideon. Maggie had gotten off scot-free. Almost on its own, the thought tucked itself away for future retrieval.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter 16

  * * * *

  Gideon's single-minded intention, when Tari delivered him to the Shangri-La, had been to go to his room and buckle down to work on those symposium notes. But at the meeting of lawn and sand in front of his cottage—in front of each of the cottages along the strand—a net hammock was slung invitingly between two sturdy guava trees. As he passed it his resolution wavered, just a little. It was John's fault, really, for bringing up the idea of a hammock in the first place. But the thing was, it looked so comfortable swaying there in the cool, dappled shade, and it had been such a long time—years?— since he'd been in one, that he climbed in to get the feel of it, pushing off with his foot against a nearby lawn chair to start himself swinging. Overhead, the thick green leaves swayed soothingly back and forth against a cobalt sky.

  He woke up an hour later, at a little after four, with his foot still hanging over the side, a warm breeze off the lagoon stirring the hair on his arms. He felt rested and loose. The temperature was about 70 degrees, the air like satin on his skin. Stretching away on either side of him, along the curving fringe of the beach, coconut palms nodded on slender, arching trunks. The air was perfumed with wildflowers and the crisp tang of the sea. He remembered the last weather report he'd heard before leaving home a day earlier: snow showers mixed with sleet and changing to freezing rain, but with a slight possibility of late-afternoon “sunbreaks,” those rare, brief phenomena offered up almost daily throughout the gray winter by the sadistic weather forecasters of the Pacific Northwest.

  Like Julie, he preferred coolness to warmth, fir trees to palms, and misty, pearl-gray skies to flat, hot, sunny ones, but, by God, he had to admit that there was something to be said for the tropics, particularly at this time of year. Assuming that the confusion over the exhumation order was some kind of mix-up that could be straightened out, he had three, maybe four, more days of summer ahead, three days to bake the winter hunch out of his shoulders, three days of tropical flowers, and lush fruits, and no sleet-changing-to-freezing-rain weather forecasts.

  One long sunbreak.

  "Hey, Doc, what is it with you, sleeping sickness? Come on, wake up, it's almost five o'clock."

  "John,” Gideon said with his eyes still closed, “I really wish you'd stop doing that. It's extremely annoying."

  "What do you want me to do? Every time I need to talk to you, you're flat on your back. It's amazing. We haven't even been here one day and you're already going to seed."

  Gideon smiled placidly. “It does seem that way, doesn't it?"

  Well, why not? Going to seed was what you were supposed to do in Tahiti. Anyway, what was the hurry? Unless John had accomplished the unexpected with Nick, they still didn't have an exhumation order.

  He yawned, stretched enjoyably, and pulled himself to a sitting position in the hammock. “How'd it go with your uncle?"

  "Interesting. Come on, let's take a walk on the beach; I'll tell you about it. I mean, if you think you can stand the exertion."

  * * * *

  "There's something I don't understand,” Gideon said ten minutes later. “Why is it up to Nick anyway? Why isn't it your cousin Therese who's involved in it? It's her husband's body we're talking about, isn't it?"

  "Not exactly. Brian and Therese never got married, you see—"

  "They weren't married? I thought—"

  "Well, as far as everybody's concerned, they are married— only they're really not. I never heard all the details, but the upshot is that Brian had an ex-wife somewhere, except she isn't exactly ‘ex.’ Didn't want him, but had some way of blocking him from getting a divorce."

  "And Nick knew about that? It didn't bother him?"

  John shrugged. “This is the South Seas. Just about everybody who washes up here and stays has something back home he'd just as soon not
talk about. Anyway, the point I'm getting at is that Therese doesn't have any more say about what happens to Brian's body than anybody else does. And the main thing is, Brian's buried in this little cemetery up in a corner of the coffee plantation; it's private property and guess who it belongs to."

  "Nick,” Gideon said.

  "Nick,” John confirmed. “And Nick says no dice."

  "Because he doesn't want to upset his daughter."

  John didn't answer right away. They continued walking northward along the edge of the lagoon, their soles squeaking against the sand. On the landward side of the narrow beach were groves of coconut palms, and beyond them the land rose toward the hypnotically, impossibly green flanks of the jagged mountains that formed the island's core.

  "So he says,” John said at last.

  Gideon glanced at him. “You don't believe him?"

  "No,” John said shortly, and then after another brief hesitation: “I'll tell you what I think. I think he got back here and thought things over, and pulled the plug on us because he's afraid somebody in the family killed Brian."

  "Not the Mob?” Gideon stopped walking and stared at John. “Somebody in his own family—in your own family? Who?"

  "I don't think he had any idea who, Doc. I think he's just worried that it might turn out that way. He never did think too much of the Mob idea. Neither did I, to tell you the truth."

  "Neither did I, to tell you the truth. But what does he think, then? Why would he assume it's one of your relatives?"

  "Well, he didn't tell me this, you understand, but there's been some pretty heavy-duty fighting going on between them for a few years now."

  This came as a surprise. “So how come you're always telling me how great everybody gets along?"

  "They do get along,” John said defensively. “What the hell, we're a family like any other family. We can always find things to argue about."

  "Like what?"

  John shrugged and started them walking again. “Business,” he said testily, his hands thrust into his pockets. “It gets pretty complicated; I never did get everything straight."