by Rob Swigart
20
“Pity,” Dr. Strachey murmured. “I was hoping this would be routine. But then it never is, I suppose.”
Takamura watched Strachey’s eyes, not the object of his attention: John Doe’s brain resting on a glass plate. The brain, which looked something like a grayish pink cauliflower neatly divided in half, had several dark blotches on its surface. It looked like a plant disease of some kind, a smutty stain.
Strachey and Shih were conferring, leaving Takamura out as much by their vocabulary as by having their backs to him. “Evidence of hemorrhaging…” she was saying, tapping one of the stains with her forceps. “Inconsistent with cerebral aneurysm…”
“Any meningeal involvement?”
“None evident as yet.” Strachey picked up the brain and turned it over. He did not look happy.
“What is it?” Takamura asked.
“It’s a brain,” Strachey said with forced cheer.
“That’s helpful. I meant, should I alert the hospital, call out the National Guard, get the hell out of here? Is this an infectious disease that is going to kill us all, or what?”
“You needn’t…” Dr. Strachey looked up. “Oh, I see, you’re joking. I don’t think it’s necessary to panic just yet. These cases are too isolated and far apart to suggest anything very infectious. But I don’t know what it is, not yet.”
“Okay,” Takamura said. “I’m going back to my office. I have paperwork.”
Strachey had already turned back, and waved his free hand. Dr. Shih seemed to be smiling good-bye over her mask, but Takamura couldn’t tell for sure. He left.
His IN box was full, the OUT box empty. He fed a sheet into his typewriter and began his report on the two murders, referring from time to time to his notes. Time passed. He finished the report and put it into the OUT box. Four pages in the OUT box. IN was still full. He took some of the pages and read. There were memos from the sheriff’s department regarding an intersection in Kapa’a which had been judged unsafe. There was an announcement of the biannual weapons checkout; a message about an advanced course in Honolulu on antiterrorist techniques.
There was a new directive from the Governor’s office regarding Civil Defense evacuation procedures for the outer islands, a concept that always pained Takamura’s sense of decorum. There was some kind of military installation on every island. A nuclear device directed at Kauai would most likely eliminate the island altogether. Evacuating everyone to Lihue and providing barges to take them to Honolulu seemed ludicrous. There weren’t enough boats for 30,000 people, and it seemed most likely Honolulu would not be there when what boats there were arrived.
The IN box was finally empty. OUT now contained some pressing matters, most of which would find their way into a file cabinet somewhere. Takamura’s eyes were closed when Sammy Akeakamai and Charles Koenig appeared.
“He sleeps on the job,” Sammy said. “Very uncharacteristic of the Japanese.”
“I was not sleeping, Kukui Nut. I was cogitating. There is considerable, if subtle, difference. What of the burglary.”
“The slides are gone,” Chazz said. “So are the electron ’scope preparations.”
Takamura sat up. “Oh?”
“Lots of other stuff, of course. Personal things from people’s desks. Some computer disks, small electronic devices. Drug cabinets broken into. Weird, because we don’t have any recreational drugs around. The pictures are gone, too. Lovely color Polaroids of a phage ghost.”
“You think that’s what they were after?” Takamura asked the room in general.
Sammy shrugged. “Could be, or they could have just grabbed a bunch of stuff at random. No way to tell. Dr. Koenig locked his office yesterday. The slides were on a shelf by the desk. Pix too. The whole batch is missing. So’s a gold pen.”
“Why ‘they’?”
“There were two of them from the prints and the amount of damage to the shrubbery. Wearing reef walkers. Every shop on the island sells them. No useful prints yet, but Kim is still dusting all over the place.”
“So des’ka? Well. I guess Dr. Strachey will have to wait until Dr. Shih can prepare him some more slides to get a look.”
Sammy nodded.
“One of the problems,” Takamura explained, “of being in a small police force is that homicide and robbery fall in the same department. You see, the homicide section seldom has anything to do here, so just to keep them busy we are also given robbery. And, from time to time, vice, narcotics and traffic. We are never bored. So I suppose we’d better solve this one. Isn’t there a guard shack at the Research Center?”
Takamura leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his neck and adopted a ready, receptive air.
“Sure.” Sammy shrugged. “Guard didn’t hear anything. Didn’t see anything. It was a quiet night, like most. Said he was really pissed off, because now he isn’t going to get to go surfing and today, according to the surf report, the waves at Poipu are going to be perfect. Abso-lutely perfect-o. He said he was going to get a job as a waiter so he wouldn’t have so much responsibility. He’s got his surfboard at the Hanapepe Police Station, where he is even now struggling to recall anything out of the ordinary that might have happened last night. He won’t come up with much. I think he was asleep. Like you, boss.”
Takamura twitched his thumb. “The Kukui Nut,” he told Chazz. “‘Must turn up many stones to find hiding place of snake.’ It’s time to do the legwork. If I were you, I wouldn’t come along. This is the ‘When did you see him last and how did he look?’ phase of the investigation. Unglamorous and boring.”
“I’ve got to get home, anyway,” Chazz said. “My wife is arriving tonight.”
Takamura raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you were married.”
“She’s a career anthropologist. I wanted a family. So we don’t see much of each other these days.”
“Soon you will come for Mrs. T.’s tempura. Then you will see a family in action. Perhaps you will come with your wife.” His eyes twinkled with good humor.
“I’m sure as an anthropologist she’d like that. Observing native customs or whatever.”
“So?” Takamura stood up. “We all have our work to do, then. Why don’t you come downstairs and meet Dr. Strachey before you go; we can stop off and see if the computer has returned any information to us, which I doubt, but high-tech police work requires occasional obeisance at the shrine.”
The computer had spat out a message. According to SAFE (the State Department list of Suspected Agents of Foreign Embassies), the accident victim was not an insurance salesman from Indianapolis, but a probable lower-echelon KGB operative in the Midwest attached to the Chicago consulate.
“I bet he was here on vacation,” Chazz said.
21
It remained one of those rare February days made of balm and myrrh. Even the man watching from across the street felt good. When he saw Koenig come out, he stretched and yawned and breathed deeply of this somehow nearly liquid air. He said, very softly, “Hot damn.” It was that kind of day.
Chazz paused on the steps, glanced up and down the street. It was, he suddenly realized, Sunday morning. This light traffic would be for the island’s bewildering array of churches and temples, with their swirl of overlapping schedules. Some of these cars would carry Portuguese fishermen and hunters and their families to Mass, Chinese families to the Hawaii Chinese Buddhist Society, Japanese shopkeepers to the Honpa Hongwanji or the Soto Mission or the Daijungu Shinto Temple, Filipinos and Koreans and other Japanese to the Methodist church, Hawaiians to any of these, or smatterings of any ethnic community to the Mormon, the Lutheran, the Baptist or Pentecostal.
Whatever God there might be must smile at all the ways He finds Himself worshiped here; perhaps that is the nature of Paradise. Chazz, more agnostic than devout and more Zen than agnostic, felt sublimely tolerant at this moment of everything and everyone. The day was fine, and tonight Patria would arrive. He hadn’t realized the void that work and isolation had m
ade. His marriage was a tentative, fragile structure, nearly dead, but perhaps with proper breathing and calm encouragement it might flourish once more.
In this thick yellow sun it was difficult to brood on evil. The cult must be a small one, a couple of people, three or four at the most. Probably it was from California, where such things were woven into the social fabric, though it had been a long time since this sort had been visible, even in California. This looked like Manson or voodoo. Takamura would find them and that would be the end of it.
And the mysterious disease? A new virus? An old virus mutated? An environmental toxin or toxic waste? Chazz shrugged. It wasn’t all that serious, not in this air, this light, these frangipani scents. He could see night-blooming cereus from here, blooms now closed, and banks of poinsettia. The flowers visible from the County Building steps were as various and representative of the floral population of the world as the churches were of its people. Of course there would be an occasional odd disease. But it affected only a few, and those with obviously unhealthy lifestyles. Dr. Strachey from the Centers for Disease Control would take care of it, if it hadn’t already died out of its own accord.
The burglary too he could dismiss. There was plenty of disaffection, plenty of poverty, plenty of despair, even in Hawaii, to account for a break-in. After all, sugar prices were down again. Tourism was the only other industry left here, and that had been hit hard by economic recession. Someone thought there would be something in the lab to sell.
He believed it, every bit of it. He was smiling as he trotted down the steps and walked over to his rented van. Nothing could disturb the feeling of hope, not the MacDonald’s across the way nor the Radio Shack in the shopping plaza. There was a warm and limitless ocean out there teeming with life. There were brightly colored birds in the ornamental shrubs and blossoms heavy with perfume. There was food for the asking.
That reminded him that he hadn’t eaten in almost a day; he’d had no dinner last night, no breakfast this morning. He relocked the van door and walked across the nearly empty parking lot of the A & P. He hardly noticed the man across the street, who had been leaning against the glass window of a realtor’s office, stretch and then walk aimlessly up the sidewalk. He was a short, stocky, muscular man with a neat dark mustache and dark sunglasses, vital on a day of such brilliant sunshine. He was most likely on his way to church, for he was dressed in sober dark blue slacks and a neat white shirt.
Chazz walked up Rice Street toward a breakfast place called Eggbert’s. He passed the museum. Traffic picked up as the day advanced, and the irregular hours of church services brought more cars onto the road.
Chazz looked down Rice before entering the restaurant. There were no pedestrians in sight, but the poinsettias by the Museum were brilliant, the heavy crimson bracts bowing gently in the breeze.
Eggbert’s was famous for blueberry waffles. Chazz had two helpings. When he finished, it was nearly noon. Lihue was busier. Most of the churches were emptying, and groups of strollers moved smiling along the walks. He could detect no evidence of panic, no terror of disease and death. God was in His churches and all was well with the world.
The figure idly window-shopping across the street before the display of a Japanese shop specializing in pearls was vaguely familiar; neat blue trousers and white shirt. Chazz shrugged and crossed to the parking lot. The old van took some coaxing but started at last, and he turned up Rice to the Kaumuali’i Highway. He didn’t notice the silver four-wheel-drive Subaru three cars behind him.
He turned into the Kukui Nut Shopping Center, a new and thoroughly mainland enterprise filled with the usual tourist boutiques, record store, a Mexican restaurant, Sears and supermarket. He sauntered around for an hour or so, picking up groceries, cleaning materials, a couple of extra pairs of reef walkers. He browsed in the bookstore for a few minutes and finally bought a book on local hiking trails.
At 1:15 he emerged from the end of the plaza and walked around the building to his parking place. He passed a silver Subaru Brat streaked with reddish mud. The driver was reading the newspaper, and Chazz could see the headline and part of the picture of the Slide. The headline was a momentary ripple on the surface of his Sunday tranquility.
He was nearly at the end of the eucalyptus drive when the Subaru appeared a half-mile back. When he turned off the Koloa Road onto Kapuna, the Subaru was a quarter-mile back, but it had vanished before Chazz got to the complex at number 47.
He parked under the carport. As he carried the first two bags of supplies up the cement walk to his kitchen door, two men in telephone company overalls appeared around the corner. They could only have come from his kitchen.
“Hello,” the first man said to Chazz, who had stopped, holding his two bags of groceries.
“Hello,” Chazz said. He shifted the two bags of groceries to his left side.
“Hawaiian Bell,” the man said unnecessarily, pointing at the insignia on his breast pocket. The other man, holding a toolbox, nodded agreement.
“I see,” Chazz said. “Something wrong?” He was ready to drop the bags if necessary. He thought of two men breaking into his office.
“Nope. All square. We had a line out, but everything’s working fine again. Sorry if we inconvenienced you.”
“Not at all.”
They could be from the phone company. He watched them go to the visitors’ parking area and climb into a panel truck. It looked like a phone company truck. As they drove off, the second man waved at him.
Chazz shrugged. He saw no reason not to wave back.
22
Takamura was accustomed to the even tranquility of his island; he had an intuitive feel for its psychic life, the rhythm of its cycles of happiness and despair. In his gut he knew the effects of unemployment and weather and good economic news and high levels of tourism. There were times when outsiders discovered his island and money flowed in, along with the people in the funny shirts; and other times when it was forgotten and a somnolence set in. There were times when sugar prices were high and almost everyone had a job; and times when the world markets fell and petty crime and drunkenness increased. Tourists’ cars would be broken into more frequently, small thefts would increase. There would be more accidents.
Now, though, there was an anomalous spike on his internal statistical chart. Homicides, cults, epidemics, these things did not fit.
“Who’s first?” he asked Sammy.
Sammy, who was driving, shrugged his heavy shoulders, and the little Toyota wobbled on the highway. “Start at the beginning,” he suggested. “Up the dirt road to John Doe’s house. There are six houses on that road besides his shack. Small farms, most of them. Three Portuguese, a Hawaiian, two Japanese. Everyone should be back from church by now. Maybe somebody saw something.”
“Maybe,” Takamura said without conviction.
It was too many days ago; too much rain and sun and a minor flash flood had happened since then. One of the Hawaiian kids who’d been home sick from school thought he saw a car. Was it a big, old dark car? No, it was small, no one he knew. Could have been a tourist, they did that sometimes, drove up the side streets to see what there was to see. There wasn’t much up this road; it didn’t even have a name.
One of the Portuguese families had been up in the hills looking for a strayed goat that day; no one was home. The other two Portuguese families had been in town. One of the Japanese women thought she might have heard a car. It was very muddy that day; she remembered it rained all night the night before and the car sounded as if it was having trouble with the mud. Not too much trouble, though. A four-wheel drive, she thought. It had stopped to shift into four-wheel drive, then continued more easily, that’s how she knew.
The remaining two families drew blanks. No one knew the man who lived in the shack beyond the end of the road, though they had seen him a few times. He didn’t have a car; he always hiked up the road with an old backpack. But pig hunters hiked in here from time to time as well. It was possible to live a long time
alone up there. Food was plentiful in the hills, mangoes and bananas and breadfruit. No, they didn’t know he was a drug addict, though now it was mentioned, he did seem unhealthy, pale, with a strange sheen of sweat on his face. Still, they assumed he was a hunter.
How long was he around? Some said a couple of months, others said a year, maybe. Sure, it was their street, and he was a stranger, but he never bothered anybody and they hadn’t seen him very often, just a few times. He kept to himself.
Takamura and Sammy stopped at the shack again. Not much had changed since they were here last. It wasn’t raining now, but this far up the mountain it was cloudy. The wild lantana was still blooming. The roof was rusted, the sink was full of mosquito larvae. The smell had faded, though.
Sammy wandered off; Takamura sat on the rickety porch and twirled his porkpie hat in his hands. He could spin it a few times on one finger. He could bend the brim into various configurations.
Sammy returned and sat down heavily on the porch. “There’s a dump back there,” he said.
“Mmm.” Takamura turned up the brim in front and put on the hat. He looked very silly, but neither of them laughed. “People been dumping junk there for years. Off the side of the road, back a hundred yards. Not a lot of stuff left there. He used the dump for materials.” Sammy twitched his head back at the shack.
“Yup,” Takamura said.
“You know,” Sammy said, “you haven’t quoted Charlie Chan in a long time. You worried or something?”
“Yup,” Takamura answered shortly.
“We’ve had junkies before. They bring junk with them from Oahu. It comes in from the Far East. Out back are a bunch of plastic bags.”
“I know.”
Sammy occupied himself in carefully unwrapping the paper from a minted toothpick. The paper had Japanese characters printed on it. He meticulously rolled the paper up into a small cylinder and put it into his shirt pocket. The pocket was filled with those tiny cylinders. He placed the toothpick between his large teeth and chewed thoughtfully.
