Improvisato

by David Crossman

  “No,” said Mikaere. “When I say out here, I mean out here.” The gesture that accompanied this declaration swept much of the Southern Hemisphere in its embrace and, for a moment, Albert wondered if that meant New Zealand had no phones. Then he remembered that Mr. Sweetman had one, and that he’d spoken to Huffy on it. And that there had been one at the inn on Chatham Island,—on which sergeant Jeffrey's had spoken to Edna, and Dr. Chan had spoken to the hospitalwhich meant there were at least four.. “Nearest one’s what Ngaio uses. Neighbor’s. A mile or so that way.” He waved his hand at the night. “Jimmy’s got a CB in his truck.”

  It took a while, but eventually Albert woke Jimmy, who was sleeping in the bed of his truck, and animated him with his request.

  “Sure,” said Jimmy, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Who do you need to call?”

  “Sergeant Jeffreys,” said Albert and explained who Jeffreys was and why he wanted to speak to him.

  “No need to call, then,” said Mikaere. “I’ve got the NZSG.”

  “The New Zealand Shipping Gazette,” Jimmy explained in an aside. “It’s got charts and things all about tides and ships. Schedules and that. All the fishermen have it.”

  Somehow, Mikaere managed the almost superhuman task of entering the camper, retrieving the paper from whatever cranny it had occupied, extracting two bottles of beer from the fridge, leaving the camper—shutting the door behind him—and returned to them without waking the sleepers.

  Mikaere opened the beers while Jimmy lit the lantern and put it in the middle of the table. “What are you wanting to know?” He opened the tabloid to the middle and flattened it out.

  Albert explained that he wanted to know how often the Venice Regent had come to New Zealand in the last three years.

  “Oh,” said Jimmy, disappointment seeping from the syllable. “You’re not going to find that in here.” He took a swig of his uncle’s beer. “You’ll need to call Auckland.”

  “Nah, Jimmy,” said Mikaere. “You might as well call Never-Never Land.” He tapped the back of Albert’s hand, which was holding the journal down against a rising breeze. “You want the Ministry of Transport. Marine Division.”

  “Edna,” said Albert, remembering Sergeant Jeffreys’ cousin—or half cousin, or step-sister.

  “Edna?”

  “She works there. She knows everyone.”

  But he didn’t want to talk to anyone about anything. He just wanted someone to tell him what he wanted to know.

  “’Course, won’t be anyone there this time of day,” Mikaere continued. He looked at the eastern horizon. “Another three hours yet. Best get a bit more kip.” So saying, he placed the empty beer bottle on the bench seat of his picnic table, crawled back into his sleeping bag, and lay down. Jimmy seemed amenable to the idea of going back to bed. He gathered up the Gazette, put it on the ground and placed a rock on it.

  “Nothing you can do for a few hours, yet,” he said. “You’ll be glad of another hour’s sleep behind your eyes before talking to the gover’ment. Always makes a long day, talking to those people.” Jimmy shuffled back to his makeshift bed.

  Albert sat, in his sleeping bag, on the edge of the table. The music of the night had all but died. But not quite. Deep listening drew from the seeming silence the birth of a new movement. It began with a single chirp. In one of the surrounding trees, a bird had awoken. Then a buzzing insect of some kind flew by. Then—somewhere in the near distance—another chirp, identical to the first—an E flat three octaves above middle C, but from a different member of the chorus.

  Albert closed his eyes, and held out his hands over an imaginary keyboard. He played the E flat. And again. Then a G flat. Then, slowly, rocked back and forth between the two. Then an F on the offbeat.

  And so began a symphony none but heaven would ever hear, unfolding flawlessly, perfectly embracing each new sound as the day awoke: the song of every bird, the buzz of every bee, the rustle of the reeds, even the tumble of grains of sand as a hermit crab cleared from the mouth of its burrow the refuse of the night, and the rush of dew to the tips of the leaves, where it congregated, united, and fell. Then, beneath it all, the vast, bottomless rumbling of the engine of the sun, the powerful, superheated dervish at the center of the solar system, merrily whirling the planets about itself on unbreakable strands of gravity.

  This was the song God had written in celebration of Creation, and bade Albert play, and Albert obeyed and—for the first time—rejoiced in the music he made as it assaulted, and bathed, and caressed, and bound, and burst, and freed him from all directions, from within and without, from nowhere and everywhere, flowing through his senses and like the dew, congregating at his fingers, and dropping onto the keys that, though they weren’t there, had never been more present.

  As the last note sounded – G flat, unresolved.

  When at last he opened his eyes, he saw that an audience had congregated around him. Ngaio and Suzie, draped in blankets, sat on the bench seat of Mikaere’s table, holding steaming cups of coffee under their noses.

  “That was beautiful,” said Suzie.

  Albert’s hands were still poised over the nonexistent keyboard. He lowered them. “Yes,” he said, and then, without preamble, he leveled his gaze, still warm with the residue of Creation, at Suzie. “What’s your name?”

  Le Thi Phuong bowed her head, and spoke her name.

  “We found you on the beach two months after Colonel Riven’s wife died.” He looked meaningfully at the women. “Two months.

  “Someone on Parliament Row died every two months, except for Mrs. Sweetman.” He added as an aside, “She was a real Suzie.”

  “And Woolie-Woolie,” said Mikaere whose sleeping bag was now a waking bag, though its occupant was still horizontal.

  Albert had not thought about Woolie Woolie in conjunction with the dead of Parliament Row, but surely, if he could make the connection for Le Thi Phuong—who had nothing to do with Parliament Row—why not Woolie-Woolie as well? What bound the threads was death and coincidence.

  “Woolie-Woolie was found a week after he went missing, on Chatham Island,” he said, hoping his mouth would come up with the magic string his mind was missing. “So what?” his brain said. “So,” said his mouth, “that would have been the same week we found you on the beach.”

  “Then it can’t have had anything to do with the Venice Regent,” said Mikaere. He pointed an unobtrusive finger at Le Thi Phuong. “It’s three days fair weather for a ship like that to get to Chatham. It can’t be two places at once.”

  But Tipene Patuai had told Albert that the Venice Regent had been seen off Pitt Island. And the observation had been seconded by Chalky Spud. Albert told them this.

  “Then it must have been some other ship you jumped from,” Mikaere declared, once again jabbing the air in Le Thi Phuong’s direction.

  “No! No! It Benice Regent!” the girl protested. “Big words on side boat!” Her hand swept the panorama of her recollection. “Benice Regent! Yes!”

  “No explanation for that, then,” said Mikaere. “Ship that size couldn’t make six hundred kilometers in less than three days. That’s your mystery there, Al.”

  Ngaio was holding her coffee cup under her nose, and warming her nostrils with its rising steam. “No great mystery,” she said. All eyes turned toward her. “Different boats, same name.”

  “Different boats, same name,” echoed Mikaere, nodding.

  “Same name,” said Albert. Which meant, what? Two ships of the same name, hundreds of miles apart. Coincidence? He might have thought so, if not for Woolie-Woolie. He was sure the Venice Regent off Pitt Island was behind that.

  And he now knew that the Venice Regent that had burned and sunk at the dock in Auckland was the ship Le Thi Phuong had escaped from. Two boats, same name, same ugly business—trading in body parts.

  His tongue leaked his thoughts into the atmosphere. “Burned and sunk,” he said.

  “What sunk?” Mikaere asked.

>   “What burn?” said Le Thi Phuong.

  “Where’s the coffee?”

  The last speaker was Jimmy Jomoga who, rubbing the small of his back with the knuckles of one hand, his left eye with the other, had added himself to the breakfast club.

  “I’ll start a fresh pot,” said Ngaio, and, heralded by a chorus of large lady noises that formed a perfect counterpoint to those produced by her husbands physical efforts, she went to do so.

  Despite the growing warmth of the day, a chill crept up Albert’s spine as he recalled the fire that had nearly taken his life in Tryon, South Carolina, which brought with it the even darker memory of the apartment fire in Ashburn, Massachusetts, in which Tewksbury lost his life. Both fires had been deliberately set, simply to destroy evidence. Whether or not that was the reason behind all inexplicable fires, who could say? Maybe a fireman would know. But Albert was sure it was so in the case of the Venice Regent.

  So, where did that leave his two-month theory? As far as he could tell, it was still intact. It’s just that the most recent two-month cycle had nearly resulted in two deaths, not just one.

  But that wasn’t right. Presumably a heart had been secured for Le Thi Phuong. That meant someone had died. They were probably killed. Murdered, like Woolie-Woolie.

  Woolie-Woolie! B Negative!

  Albert reached out and seized Phuong’s elbow, startling her, but she was too fixed by the intensity of his gaze to pull away. “What is your blood type?”

  “B Negative.”

  “So was his!”

  “Whose?”

  “Woolie-Woolie! He had B Negative blood.”

  “You’re saying, it was his heart that she was supposed to . . .”

  “I not want hear this!” said the girl, slapping hands over her ears.

  “B Negative is rare,” Albert recalled aloud. “Less than 2 percent of people have it. They must have been looking for someone like Woolie-Woolie a long time.”

  Le Thi Phuong’s hands provided poor sound-proofing. “I not want! No heart! No Woolie-Woolie heart!” she cried and, jumping from the table, ran into the forest. Jimmy started after her.

  “Bad tapu on this business,” said Mikaere, who had sat up and shed his sleeping bag. He was watching the dappled figures of his nephew and the girl with the bad heart, running through the trees. Albert turned toward him with the unspoken question in his eyes. “Like a curse,” Mikaere explained. “Bad mojo.”

  “Tapu,” said Albert.

  “Kuruki, whakataha!” yelled Mikaere suddenly, standing, stamping his feet the in dirt. His eyes bulged and he stuck out his tongue and waggled it at something only he could see. Then he uncontorted himself and settled back on his picnic table, just as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  Like the cat with the hairball.

  “That scares away bad spirits,” said Mikaere, as his wife loomed behind him.

  It could also loosen the bowels of a piano player, Albert discovered, and it was not without great effort that he managed to tighten his grip on things.

  Though apparently in no hurry to arrive, eight-thirty finally came, and Albert prevailed upon Jimmy, who had retrieved Phuong from the forest and calmed her down, to put through a call to the Ministry of Transport. The procedure, which Albert would not have been surprised to find fairly straight-forward, was not. In the end, a prodigious network of alchemical connections involving citizen’s band and ship-to-shore radio as well as, so far as Albert could tell—Indian smoke signals, Hammurabi’s Code, carrier pigeons, and telephonic communication— were pressed into service to convey the message.

  That message, too far diminished by its circuitous travels, was all but stillborn when it arrived, yet it had one final obstacle to surmount: the mid-level government functionary whose job it was to maintain the unbreachable wall between a government official (not Edna) and those he was appointed to serve—a task for which he would have sustained a perfect record had it not been for what was later explained to Albert, by Richard Prebble, Minister of Transport, as the Elvis Presley factor.

  “Never heard of it?” he said at that time, seeming simultaneously surprised and not surprised, indicating his aptitude for politics. “In the Sun Records days, back in Memphis,” he declaimed—and one might have been forgiven for supposing, as Albert did, that he was speaking from personal experience. “Elvis just happened to be walking down the hall when he heard music coming from one of the offices. He stopped to give it a listen, and liked what he heard. It was Love Me Tender! One of the King’s greatest hits. But if he hadn’t happened by at that moment—on his way to the loo, or to get a peanut butter and banana sandwich, no one will ever know—they’d have tossed it.”

  “Baby with the bathwater,” had said Albert, in response to the only part of the Minister’s monologue which sparked any connection with something he had heard recently.

  “Exactly!” said the Minister, reading in Albert’s response both understanding and an interest that wasn’t there, and prompting him to think that the piano genius wasn’t as opaque as he’d been led to believe. “Charming fellow, really,” he’d told others thereafter, whenever the opportunity arose, which, oddly enough, was often. “We had quite a lengthy talk after the awards ceremony. Big Elvis fan, the Maestro.” Pause. “What?” Pause. “Oh, yes, you wouldn’t think it, would you? Charming. And bright! What they say about him is all so much tosh.” Pause for effect. “Saved the Sea Queen almost single-handed!” Pause. “What!? You haven’t heard!”

  Which meant they were about to.

  Flashback to the earlier future.

  “Exactly,” said Albert, further reinforcing the Minister’s assumptions.

  “That’s what happened when your call came in. I just happened to be walking by the office of my junior when he repeated your name. I knew who you were, of course. Well, one thing and another and Bob’s your uncle!”

  “Albert,” said Albert, whose uncle was Albert. But the Minister wasn’t listening, further demonstrating his facility for politics.

  “I must say, you’ve been the flavor of the month about the water cooler,” he said, and went on to recount all he knew—and much of what he imagined—of Albert’s experience aboard the Sea Queen.

  Albert allowed the air to run out of the Minister’s sack and, contrary to Prebble’s expectations, waited for something useful.

  “Yes,” said Prebble, clearing his throat. “Well, yes. Yes. I have the information you requested, though I confess curiosity. A bit out of your line, I should think. Shipping schedules and that?” Albert had nothing to say about the Minister’s curiosity, so he didn’t say it. “Yes, well, turned up something odd about the Venice Regent,” he continued. Albert wasn’t surprised, given that everything concerning the Venice Regent was odd.

  “The manifest has it in either Napier or Auckland every two months, as you suggested. The odd thing, though, is that according to the document I have before me, it was once reported in both places the same day.” He gave the date in question and, lowering his voice, added. “This is what happens when you let the locals handle the paperwork, if you take my meaning.”

  Albert said, “It was two ships, with the same name.”

  On his end of the phone, the Minister concussed his immediate surroundings with an incredulous snort. “Not likely that, Maestro. Rules are pretty strict governing ships of similar tonnage and purpose sharing a name. That would lead to all sorts of confusion. And paperwork! Doesn’t bear thinking.”

  Albert was indifferent to paperwork, but he certainly understood how two ships sharing the same name could—did, in fact—lead to much confusion. But two errant threads and been tied off: there were—or until recently had been—two ships named the Venice Regent, and they were almost certainly shared cahoots; or whatever one did with cahoots. One thread. The other? The shipping routes of one or the other, or both, brought them to New Zealand every two months.

  There was only one more question he needed the Minister to answer. “What d
ates were they here?”

  “In New Zealand?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a rustling of paper in Wellington. “Going back how far?”

  “Two years.”

  “That long. Here, give me a moment and I’ll have Miss. Brickmaker look it up.” The sounds of Miss. Brickmaker looking it up littered the background of electronic static that was the CB’s native tongue.

  “Anything else I can have her do while she’s at it?”

  Odd he should have said that just as it occurred to Albert to ask. “Yes. Was the Venice Regent—either of them—in New Zealand in December of 1985?”

  “I’ll have her check that as well. With pleasure. Something significant about that date?”

  “Yes.”

  Long pause. “Yes. Well. I see,” said the Minister. “Of course. Ah! Here it is! Thank you, Miss. Brickmaker.” And so, over the course of the next two or three minutes, as his secretary handed him various documents, he read out the information Albert had requested.

  “That what you’re looking for, Maestro?”

  It was. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure entirely.”

  Whether or not it was the pleasure of Miss. Brickmaker, who, after all, had done all the work, would be a mystery of the ages. “Anything else?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “Most welcome! Most welcome! My office is at your disposal anytime. May we expect the pleasure of a concert in Wellington during your visit?”

  “Huffy would know,” said Albert, and taking his finger off the microphone button, he handed it back to Jimmy.

  “Well,” said Jimmy, who had been listening, along with everyone else, to his CB radio. “You were right, Auntie.” He switched the radio off.

  “It’s a burden I carry,” Ngaio replied with a smile that revealed her gold front bicuspid just in time to catch a ray of the sun and toss it into the eyes of her hearers.

  Albert recited the information. “Two boats, same name, different places,” he said, tapping the palm of his left hand with the first and second fingers of his right.

  “Same nasty business,” said Mikaere.