A smile tugged slowly at a corner of Jeremy Ash’s mouth and seeped into his eyes. He reached out and tapped the biscuit in Chan’s left hand. “Cookie,” he said. “You gonna eat that?”
Chan gave up the cookie, threw back his head and laughed. “I thought you were looking at me,” he said. “People often do.”
Jeremy Ash bit the cookie and cocked his head innocently. “Can’t imagine why.”
Angela, unable to contain herself, erupted in a contrapuntal laughter, which was made a chorus when it was joined by everyone else, including the pilot who—with his headphones on and the engines loudly reminding everyone that they were there and doing their job—hadn’t been able to hear the exchange. Dr. Chan laughed loudest of all and, for a moment, the horrors that had so recently defiled his English tongue, receded to those regions where demons await Judgment.
The plane’s approach, and that of its assorted passengers, had been radioed to Constable Patuai on the island. That spark fell among ready tinder, and spread rapidly. By the time the plane landed, an assortment of cars, trucks, and ATVs had assembled to convey them to their destinations: Dr. Chan and Sergeant Jeffreys to the cooling house where the day’s catch and Woolie-Woolie were being kept on ice; Angela, Jeremy Ash, and Wendell, in Frenchie’s vehicle—once a Land Rover, but transformed by years of hard use into a mechanical Frankenstein with parts taken from just about every wreck on the island t—to the Chatham Inn.
Frenchie didn’t subscribe to any fixed rule of the road, but seemed to take the straightest possible line—whether to the extreme right or left—indifferent to the inconvenience of this tactic to oncoming traffic. Fortunately, her vehicle, which she called Truck, was easily recognizable from a distance, and that oncoming traffic had the good sense to pull aside and let the rattling, clattering, exhaust-spewing knot of motorized fury pass, only dimly aware of their proximity.
Frenchie spoke more with her hands than she drove with them. Now and then a few of her fingers would brush the wheel, offering it mild encouragement to stay the course, as she recounted recent events from her more intimate perspective, which was much more visceral than the dry chronicle they’d heard earlier.
“Odd bird, the Professor,” she said, pausing at the end of the telling only long enough to inhale. “Fancy him, of all people, finding poor Woolie-Woolie floating in the ocean, his insides all gone.”
That would be true of both the finder and the findee, thought Jeremy Ash. He couldn’t help but wonder how many more shocks to the system Albert could take.
Albert might have been wondering the same thing, if not in so many words, as he watched Truck’s progress along the coast road. His instinct had been to run. To catch the first plane, or boat, outrigger, canoe, or piece of driftwood off the island, and put behind him the ghoulish realities that had risen from the timeless mists to welcome him to Chatham.
Then there was the girl on the beach. And the series of deaths on Parliament Row, the explanations for which had left such a bitter taste in his mouth. Death and its attendant misery weren’t exclusive to the island. But he couldn’t leave anyway. Constable Patuai had told him he’d have to be there for the inquest.
He was surprised, and pleased, to see that Wendell had come—that part of the message apprising him of the plane’s approach hadn’t reached him—and that he was attending Jeremy Ash, whose presence somehow made the world a less frightening place. Albert stood on the porch and waited for Truck to rattle to a stop at the foot of the steps and emerge coquettishly from the veils of blue smoke that slipped from its shoulders, sank to the ground, and dissipated.
Angela had gotten out and was holding the door for Wendell as he wrestled the wheelchair from the back seat, and settled Jeremy Ash in it. “Hello, Albert,” she said.
Albert nodded in a welcoming way “There’s a room for you. Upstairs.”
“Well, that’s good to hear. Has it a bath? I need one!”
Albert had no idea. His room had a sink. There might be a bathroom through that door he hadn’t opened. There was a public toilet in the lobby, and so far that’s all he needed. Maybe he needed a bath as well. He sniffed the air.
“Ah, there you are!” said a woman, bumping open the screen door with her hip. Her hands troubled a dishtowel into a knot, from which the right one materialized in welcome. “I’m Milly, your hostess,” she chuckled and bowed. “So glad you’re joining us. Not many guests this time of year . . .”
“Or any other,” said Albert, echoing a piece of knowledge he’d heard earlier.
Milly took no offense. She chuckled again. “Too right, Maestro. Too right.” Her balloonish frame dented in the direction of the new arrivals. “Secret’s out, I reckon. Chatham’s not Tahiti!” She tossed an arm around Angela’s waist, drawing her away from her door-keeping chores and up the few steps to the porch. “Come along, then, my love. Come along. Saved the best room at the top of the house for you.”
She’d said the same thing to Albert his first night at the inn. When did his stop being the best room? Probably when he moved in. He was feeling self-conscious about the bath. When had he last had one? Oh yes, after he tried to drown himself.
There must be a tub somewhere.
Milly caught sight of the wheelchair and, taking a glancing inventory, noted Jeremy Ash was running a deficit in the matter of legs. “Oh dear. Hmm. Yes, well. A cripple,” she observed, as if he wasn’t there. “No one mentioned . . .” She brightened suddenly. “Not to worry, we’ll clear out the room at the end of the corridor, it’s . . .”
Jeremy Ash did not respond well to being treated as furniture. “I need a room next to his,” he said, nodding at Albert.
“Yes, well . . .” Milly seemed surprised that he had spoken. “Yes. But, well, we don’t have an elevator, and . . .”
“No worries,” said Jeremy, adopting a colloquialism he’d heard often since arriving in New Zealand, especially when there was something to worry about. “I brought my own.” He jerked a thumb at Wendell. “Otis. Like the elevator.”
Bemusement pressed a thumb on Wendell’s left eyebrow, but he didn’t say anything.
Milly semi-navigated Wendell, reconnoitering his substantial landscape over the top of her glasses. “Yes. See what you mean.” She tossed the dishtowel over her shoulder. “Well, I was going to put the lass in the room next his, but if you’d rather . . .”
“He would,” said Albert. “He’d rather.”
Milly looked at Albert, then at Angela, who was inspecting the lobby and seemed to have no opinion, then at Jeremy Ash. “Well, as you wish.” She continued speaking to Angela as she herded her guests through the door and into the lobby. “That puts you across the hall from the . . . from the boy. And you . . .” she thrust a fleshy elbow at Wendell, who absorbed the intrusion upon his person without notice, “next her but one. The bathroom’s between. Or the other way ’round. Seven and eight, anyway. Both the same. Take your pick.”
Albert filed this under “Useful Information”, not recalling that the bathroom in question was the one in which he’d been thawed after his near-drowning.
“Who’d like a cup of tea before you get settled?” said Milly, nodding toward the fireplace at the eastern end of the lobby. “Won’t take the shake of a lamb’s tail.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Angela, removing her coat and cloth cap. She shook out her hair and it fell about her shoulders. “Albert? What about you?”
Albert was foremost in the little parade that formed behind her, and distributed itself in the various comfortable, non-matching chairs around the fire. “This’ll do nicely, won’t it Albert?”
Albert hadn’t noticed a fire in the fireplace before. In fact, he hadn’t noticed the fireplace. Or the wall it was set in. Or the large fish fixed to an oval board above it. “Yes.”
“So,” said Jeremy Ash, when Wendell had deposited him on a chaise lounge, “how are you doing?”
“I’m okay.” Albert was staring at the fire that seemed to be saying
something to him. “I know,” it said. “I know,” it crackled. “But I won’t tell.” Fires could be trusted with secrets.
“You lie,” said Jeremy Ash.
Albert continued staring at the fire. “Yes.”
“What’s next?”
“The inquest. Tomorrow.”
“You need to be there?”
“Yes.”
“What time?”
“That’ll be ten, Chatham time,” said Frenchie who, having finished whatever business she’d been about, had entered the conversational orbit of the guests with a tray of tea and cookies. “That’d be somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 in the real world.”
Angela helped hand out the cups and saucers and pour the tea. “We were so sorry to hear about . . . what happened, Albert. It must have been a shock to you.”
It had been. So shocking, in fact, that all feeling had been shocked from him. “He’d been harvested,” he said. “That’s what Patuai said.”
“He’s the constable,” said Frenchie with her mouth full of shortbread.
“Yes,” said Angela. She’d asked with his rescue of the Sea Queen in mind, but quickly remembered the more recent horror. “We heard. Horrible. Horrible.”
“Horrible,” said Albert, listening to the word. It didn’t satisfy. “Worse.”
“I don’t suppose they have any idea . . .”
“Not yet,” said Frenchie.
“The Venice Regent,” said Albert. “They picked him up, killed him, harvested his body, and threw . . . threw the rest of him in the ocean. Like a fish.”
“The Venice Regent was here?” said Jeremy Ash.
“Yes. Near Pitt—an island south of here,” said Albert. “They call it Peet.”
“What are you talking about?” said Frenchie. “What’s the Venice Regent? A ship?
“A freighter,” Albert clarified, remembering what Patuai had told him. “It has a freezer. They need that. To keep things . . . parts . . . for later.”
“Venice Regent,” said Frenchie. “First I heard of it.”
“But that doesn't make sense,” said Jeremy Ash. “They just found it run aground on some island.”
“Taranga,” said Wendell. “Northeast of Auckland.”
Angela considered the implications. “How long had the boy been in the water when you found him, Albert?”
“Woolie-Woolie,' said Albert. “His real name was Walter.”
“How long?” Angela pressed.
“They said six days,” said Albert, trying to distance his ears form his lips as he said it. “Six days.”
“It takes the Sea Queen three days to make the crossing?
“Plenty of time to get from here to there, and run aground,” said Frenchie.
“That's not the problem,” said Jeremy Ash. “The problem is that, according to Al, the reason they ran aground is that the ship was taken over by pirates who didn't know what they were doing, and that seems to be the case.”
“Which means,” said Angela, “that they commandeered the ship after it got back to the mainland.”
“Because,” said Jeremy Ash, as Albert was inhaling to say 'Why?', “if they'd had it out here, they'd have known how to handle it by the time they got to the North Island.
“So,” said Albert, “the pirates weren't the ones doing the Trade, they just happened to steal a ship that was.”
One more complication, one more thing to think about.
“What do they do with ’em?” said Jeremy Ash. “The parts?”
“Sell them,” said Angela. “Vile.”
It occurred to Albert that the letters in 'vile' could be rearranged to form the word that had come to his mind. “Evil.”
“Who’d buy parts of dead bodies?”
Angela speculated. “Medical research. Transplants.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” said Jeremy Ash, and seemed about to follow through on the threat. “But where? I mean, it’s not like someone puts out a catalog.” A guilty thought flashed through his brain, laughing at him. If he could get his hands on such a thing, he’d have to take a peek under “L” for “Legs”. What if they didn’t have a matching pair? What would he look like with one from a dwarf, one from a Watusi? In fact, what would he walk like? He suppressed a giggle. “How do people find out about parts? Who needs what, where, when, what kind, and how do they get ’em where they’re going?”
Albert hadn’t considered the commercial and logistical aspects of the Trade. He had to say something before Jeremy Ash—a notorious possibility machine—said something that made him forget what he was trying to remember. “That’s what happened to the girl on the beach.”
Now, there was an interesting thought, Albert thought as he thought it.
“What girl?” said Jeremy Ash. “Our girl?”
“Yes.”
“But, she wasn’t harvested. She was . . . is . . .”
“She got away.” There were times, Albert had discovered, that it was best just to let his mouth say whatever it wanted, then think about it after he’d heard it. This was one of those times. His tongue had taken the lead, and his mind, without being bidden, had decided to chase it, beginning with the observation he’d made to Frenchie and Patuai earlier. “She was kidnapped from . . . from somewhere . . . and was being kept alive to keep her . . . fresh.”
His mouth felt defiled by the words.
“That would explain why nobody’s reported her missing—at least nobody in New Zealand,” said Wendell. “She was taken from somewhere far away.”
“She must have been at a party of some kind, the way she was dressed,” said Angela. “Maybe a wedding. A dance?”
Someone had to tie a string to this balloon. “I was thinking about my Uncle Albert,” he said.
“You were named after your Uncle Albert?” said Jeremy Ash. “I didn’t know that.”
Neither did Albert. He’d never thought about where people’s names came from. Had he been asked, he would have answered that, as far as he knew, they were handed out at the hospital, or back seats of taxi cabs, or wherever else babies were introduced to the world outside the womb. He would not have been surprised to be told that, according to long-held tradition, the first person to see the child would say, “That looks like an Aljernon or Persephone,” and that’s what the child was.
Indians did that, he seemed to recall—named the child after the first thing its mother saw when she opened her eyes after it was born. That could be good or bad.
The thought that he might have inherited his name from someone was a novel one. Did that make him indebted to his Uncle Albert, or was it just a hand-me-down, secondhand name? Perhaps Uncle Albert had inherited it, as well. Was there a protocol?
Anyway, he liked Uncle Albert. He was nice. That was a good thing.
“Okay,” said Jeremy Ash. “I’m missing somethin’ here. What’s your Uncle Albert got to do with anything?”
“?”
“Why did you mention him?”
“I thought you did,” said Albert. “I was thinking about special events. Things people get dressed up for. Birthdays.”
There were times, Jeremy Ash had learned—in the interest of clarity—to press Albert on a point, and times when(?) one of his comments was so obscure, no amount of pressing would extract a potable fluid from it. “What about the girl . . . on the beach?”
“She escaped from the Venice Regent,” Albert said, reviewing his suspicions aloud, more for his own benefit than that of his hearers. “When it went aground on that island.”
“Taranga,” footnoted Wendell.
Angela took a thoughtful sip of tea and nodded. “Makes sense.”
“That’s why the sharks didn’t get her,” said Wendell. “She wasn’t in the water that long.”
Frenchie was about to throw up her hands, when her brain stepped in and reminded her she was holding a cup of hot tea. “I still can’t bring myself to believe such things can actually happen.”
“She hit her head some
how,” Albert continued.
“Knocked her out,” said Wendell and Jeremy Ash at once.
“Left her in a coma,” said Angela in summary.
“She’s lucky, I’d say,” said Frenchie. “Bump on the head’s better than . . .”
Albert didn’t want to go down that road again, so his tongue threw up a roadblock. “Clothes have labels,” he said, remembering something he’d read in either Sherlock Holmes or the Hardy Boys. “Did her clothes have labels?”
The question arched Angela’s eyebrows. “Never thought of that.”
“That would tell where her clothes were made,” said Jeremy Ash appreciatively. “Which might be where she was from.”
Impulsively, Albert took Angela by the shoulders and, turning her back to him, tugged at the neck of her sweater, revealing the label. “Indonesia,” he said. Angela was not from Indonesia.
It had been a thought.
Angela straightened herself and her sweater. “Well, if it were a dress off the rack, that might be the case. But hers was bespoke.”
“Say what?” said Jeremy Ash.
“Custom made,” said Angela. “Expensive. And it would have had to be fitted in person. So, if there is a label, and it is custom made, then it’s not unreasonable to suppose it was made in her hometown. Home country, at the very least.”
“Unless it’s secondhand,” said Albert, thinking about his name.
Angela chose to ignore the suggestion, because she felt they were onto a good thing. “We should call the police in Auckland and ask them to find out.”
“We?” said Albert, who imagined them all talking on the phone at once, a trio simultaneously singing harmonies and melodies of different songs, rhythms, genres, and lyrics. Audio chaos.
“Me, then.”
A solo. Much better.
By the time she returned from her phone call, the tea in her cup was cold, and Jeremy Ash and Wendell—now answering to Otis, as well—had gone for a “push-walk”. Frenchie had been talking, but fell silent as Angela came within earshot.
Albert looked up. “Did you get through?”
“Yes.”
Improvisato Page 16
