Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “You know a lot of local lore,” she said.

  He smiled. “Not really. I bought a book of local hiking trails. We’re on one.”

  “Hi, mister.”

  Chazz squinted into the sun. “Yes?”

  “Hey.” The boy climbled nimbly up the dry-construction wall. “Hey.” He stood in front of the couple, head tilted up at them. “You were at Sally’s. I saw you.” He pointed west, toward the river.

  “Oh, yes.” Chazz squatted down. “What are you doing way down here?”

  “Dad works the sugar cane.” He twitched his dirty thumb toward town. “Got cousins.”

  “Sorry about your doll.”

  The boy shrugged. “It’s okay. He died. Like Sally. I buried him.”

  “I saw the funeral. How do you mean, like Sally?”

  “Sure. Akua, hey. Eat brains. I told you.”

  Chazz stood. “I remember. This lady is Patria.”

  “Sure,” the boy said. He shook her hand solemnly. “Wife?” he asked, looking at Chazz.

  Chazz glanced at her, then nodded. “Wife,” he said. The boy smiled, satisfied.

  “What’s your name?” Patria asked him.

  “Mikey.”

  “Tell me about akua, Mikey.”

  “Big,” the boy assured her. “Like that tree. Long, long arms.” He demonstrated, bent over, knuckles in the dust. “They come down from the mountains, eat brains.” He pointed out the mountains, clear green, and bright for once.

  “Monsters, huh?” She was hunkered down now, her eyes on a level with his. Chazz admired the directness of her contact with him. She’d be good with kids, he thought, then let the thought go.

  “Sure, monsters. Lotsa kinds, of course. But I don’t know if they’re real.” He was suddenly very grown-up.

  “You don’t?” Her question was serious.

  He shook his head. “Never seen one. But Sally died too, didn’t she?”

  Patria looked questioningly at Chazz.

  “Sally Cameron. An old lady on the north side.”

  “The north side? Where the other Russian fort was?” Chazz nodded. “How did Sally die?” Patria asked the boy.

  He shrugged. “Dunno.”

  “But nobody ate Sally’s brain, did they?”

  “No. Maybe ana’ana, hey?”

  “Is ana’ana real?”

  He stared. “Sure,” he said emphatically. He ran past them down the wall. At the corner he stopped and gestured them to follow.

  Heat pressed tangibly against their soles. The path on the wall rustled, quick with lizards, a sudden nest scattering before them. It was nearly noon, and the heat made a hollow room around them as they walked. Soon they saw the two men by the shore.

  Water broke in small nibbles on the jagged volcanic rock and dead coral before the two men. There was something odd about their pose, and the boy squatted down at the star point of the wall with his finger to his lips. Fragments of sound floated toward them like jellyfish in a sea of heat. The syllables were round and foreign, heavy with vowels, heavy as the heat, tangible as the dry grit under their knees as they watched.

  Chazz looked at the men. One was an elderly Hawaiian with broad padded shoulders under a ragged Hawaiian shirt and deep gray hair. The other was younger, an athletic, tan Caucasian. His hair hung shoulder-length over the collar of a tan T-shirt. He looked like a surfer in ragged cutoff chinos. The Hawaiian pointed suddenly, with a gesture so fierce and commanding that Chazz and Patria both followed it instantly.

  The water had a calm oiliness that went with the heat; the surface seemed solid, metallic. Across that blank surface something moved.

  “Mano,” Mikey whispered.

  “What?” Patria asked.

  Mikey half turned. “Mano,” he said. “Shark.”

  The fin swept a broad circle just outside the broken water around the reef, trailing the V of its wake. It moved again out to sea, and the older man called out. The fin-wake swerved again, moved in, slowing. The finger pointed once more, and far out, almost invisible against the odd gray sea another fin approached. Soon the two sharks were hanging ten meters away, facing shore.

  The younger man moved into the water, wearing reef-walkers, rubber ankle-length shoes. He squatted down in front of the closer shark, and even from the top of the wall they could see the shark’s mouth opening and closing just beneath the surface as it rolled slowly onto its side. The dorsal fin made a distant slapping sound when it hit the surface. The two sharks moved slowly toward the man’s hand, passed by, moved out to sea.

  A moment later the older man walked stiffly, as if his legs hurt, down the shore toward Poo Point. The younger followed; they passed out of sight beyond the spur of wall.

  Chazz stood. “What was that?” He didn’t know if he was asking the boy or asking Patria.

  Mikey smiled a dirty-toothed grin. “Kahuna,” he said. “Kalaipahoa is old Hawaiian kahuna. Magic. He called the mano in, hah.”

  “It certainly looked that way,” Patria said thoughtfully. “And that is ana’ana?”

  Mikey frowned. “Don’t know. Ana’ana is very bad. No one talks about it, you know. But Sally died.”

  “You liked Sally, didn’t you?” Patria was squatting at Mikey’s level again. The boy reached out for a moment, as if he was going to touch the smooth helmet of darkness that was her hair.

  His hand faltered and drew back. He turned away. “Sure,” he said. Then he ran down the wall and away. He was far up the river at the edge of town when they reached the place where they’d met him. When they turned back to the sea, the sharks were gone. Patria put her fingertip on Chazz’s forearm again, the nail drawing a line of electricity down the length of the muscle, which jumped as though galvanized.

  “I want you,” she said softly, as if to herself, half afraid he would deny what was going on between them, after last night, her fatigue— when she had fallen instantly asleep and left him awake on the shore of her sleep.

  He said nothing, but moved his hand up to hold her thin fingers in his palm. “Sharks,” he said. “Calling in the sharks.” Patria slid her thumb across the back of his hand and gripped it. “Yes,” she said, knowing he was talking about hunger.

  26

  “‘Lolo’ means brain,” Takamura said. His lean finger rested on a topographic map of Kauai spread on Chazz’s table. “It turns up in the word ‘pakalolo,’ marijuana; they grow it in Maui; not much here anymore. Brain tobacco. And in place names only on Kauai. Nobody knows exactly why, or where it came from. Speculation is that once, long ago, before Captain Cook, some Hawaiian chiefs offered the brains of their enemies to Pele. Apparently a local custom; the legends don’t appear on the other islands.”

  He paused to look at Patria quizzically. She nodded. “It’s possible,” she said. “Not an uncommon practice. It depends on where a culture believes the soul resides. To the Aztec it was the heart, of course. Ancient Greeks too. Others believe it’s the brain. As an offering, the home of the soul is pretty high-value, worthy of gods. And then the practice of eating the organs of your enemy, or of your prey, in order to acquire their virtues, their bravery or strength, is also common.”

  Takamura smiled. “That’s an unpleasant prospect in our present case. We have two bodies with the brains removed. I hope they haven’t been eaten. By the way, the Hawaiian word for ‘eat’ is ‘ai.’ Same as in aikido, Japanese word for harmony. Also a homonym for love. A bilingual and many-layered pun.”

  “Love what you eat,” Chazz suggested.

  Patria pinched him. “Eat what you love,” she said, intending the double meaning for Chazz alone. “There are the Fore.”

  “Who?” Takamura asked. His finger tapped the topographic map as if it were dipping into the Alakai Swamp, a blue stippled stain sunk into the highest part of the island.

  “A Stone Age tribe in New Guinea. As part of the mourning ritual they ate the brains of the deceased. They contracted a disease called kuru, which, it turned out, came from handling the
brains. It took years for kuru’s symptoms to show up, but once they did, it was always fatal. The practice is long gone now. But it was a case of eat what you love. Or whom you love.”

  “Slow virus,” Chazz said thoughtfully.

  Takamura was talking. “We have our akua here, legends of monsters who eat brains. Not their relatives, though. I’ve never heard of any evidence for it. Stories to scare children. I thought with those two murders we might have cannibals here, but it’s not likely. We haven’t had a death in ten days.”

  He put his finger on a series of red circles. “Nonetheless, police work goes on. Here,” he said, “was John Doe. His name, by the way, was Robert Lawson Hall, an assumed name. Thirty-seven years old. Born in Hilo as Robert Luria, moved to the mainland when he was six, grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to become a convicted felon of a depressingly ordinary sort. FBI prints and computer search indicated he had a substantial record: burglary, armed robbery, assault, receiving stolen goods and narcotics offenses.” He indicated Hall’s shack at the end of the dotted black line of a dirt road.

  “And here,” he went on, “we have Wyman, the diver.” The Slip was off the northwest coast of the island where steep, rugged cliffs fell to the sea, forever undermined by incessant waves and scoured by winter storms. Furrowed like a human brain. “Born in Lahaina, Maui. Former merchant seaman, lived all over the world, it seems. Moved here more than ten years ago. I don’t know what to make of him at all. There was a propeller, apparently from an old Navy ship, in his garage.” Takamura shrugged.

  “Here.” He tapped the broad valley of the Hanalei River. “Sally Cameron. And here the two bodies.” This red circle was east and inland from Hall’s shack. “These episodes quarter the island. No apparent connection among them. Strachey is still looking, but so far he can’t find a single common medical clue to them and doubts there is an epidemic. He’s waiting for word on some tissue samples he sent back to Atlanta. He has also requested some help. So far with no action.”

  Chazz watched light fall through the leaves of the bo tree.

  “What about kahuna ana’ana, witchcraft? I’d like to talk to a kahuna.” Patria said.

  Takamura said, “There aren’t many real kahuna left anymore. Between the destruction of traditional culture and a couple of hundred years of intermarriage, few pure Hawaiians are left. Some of the old hippies might be interested in traditional folk arts, even the darker ones. Praying to death, poisoning and so on; most of us tend to think nudism and free love are about the wickedest they get.”

  “And the burglary?” Chazz asked.

  Takamura ducked his head. “Nothing yet. We have informants, of course. And as Detective Chan says, ‘When money talks, few are deaf.’ Someone will try to sell something, and then we’ll have them. Don’t worry.”

  “Anything on the traffic accident? Smith, or Jones, or whatever his name was. KGB?”

  Takamura shook his head. “Nobody saw him. Nobody knew where he was coming from, though of course it was from the West. He could have been up looking at the Polihale sacred springs. He could have been sitting on a rock somewhere. As you suggested, he may have been here on vacation. There is no connection. He died of a crushed skull.”

  “And yet,” Chazz said.

  “Yet what?”

  “I’m not sure… You know, this island looks a little like a brain. Here are two hemispheres divided by Waimea Canyon, deep irregular furrows, a generally roundish shape.”

  “To me,” Takamura said, “it looks more like a badly made arrowhead.” He rolled up his map. “I’ll see if I can find a kahuna. Sammy probably knows someone.”

  Patria smiled for the first time that afternoon. “I’d appreciate that. Perhaps the one we saw at Fort Elizabeth, the one Mikey told us about. And of course there was a ritual aspect to the double murder, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes, except the boy apparently died of the same thing as the others.” Takamura said good-bye and vanished down the corridor. Chazz locked his office.

  As they walked to the van, they passed the bo tree. Chazz told Patria it was a fourth-generation clipping from the original. “Buddha’s bo tree, the one under which he was enlightened, was the great-grandfather of this tree. A cutting went to Ceylon, and a cutting of that one was brought to Honolulu. This tree was grown from a cutting of that tree, so it is a part of the original.”

  “What happened to the Buddha tree?” she asked. She had said nothing further of her need or his, but it was the unacknowledged background to their conversation, carrying them toward a kind of home.

  “It died.”

  “What is enlightenment, anyway?” she asked at the car.

  “Good question,” Chazz answered. He drove a little recklessly, a little too fast.

  27

  Light barred her back. He traced the path of the river Lacanjá down her spine, the shade and light past Bonampak where the ancient murals were, the jungle ruin she had told him of, clothed in vines, dense dark in the hollows. The river ran smooth here, soft against her banks. He felt his breath catch, the lightest touch of his fingertip against the small vertebral mount, felt the animal life move in the deep waters.

  She said nothing, head forward, her dark helmet of hair swept down against the cheek, lost in shadow. Leaves rustled against the whitewashed walls downriver from Palenque, harsh sun filtered through the thatch roof. Where was she, deep in jungle up that river? He thought she had been lost, had found another there. He touched the clasp of the top of her bathing suit, touched it. Felt his fingertip tremble.

  Still she said nothing. Her suit was damp; she felt it against her inner thigh, along her ribs. She felt salt and said nothing. And then she tasted salt and knew that she was crying, but he could not see. His fingertip trembled against her spine, the leaftip touch of palm against the window there, where moonlight filtered. Somewhere a gecko chirped, chirped, crouched in the rafters, a presence in this place. Where was she?

  He reached with his other hand, touched the clasp again. Suddenly the two halves fell away, two straps hung down along the soft curve of her rib, swayed with her sharp inhalation, the soft hiss. Chazz put both his palms against her shoulder blades, glided over smooth skin, skin not so tan as her forearms, skin barred with light and dark. Skin.

  Her hands rested on her knees; she— turned away from him seated on the bed –breathed out slowly, in spasms. “Bay,” she said. “Yes.”

  Chazz bent his forehead down, touched her nape with his brow, his own breath then on her back. His hands moved, one each way, rounding the curve of her along the rib furrows, through soft muscle rocking under his touch. Her breasts. Chazz ached.

  He lifted the suit top over her lowered head and she leaned back, into him. She was warm in the dim light, barred with light, a prisoner of shadow. Her back arched her breasts into his hands, and he felt the hard kernels of her grind slowly against his palms. He could barely move, barely breathe. Where was she?

  Her head turned, her breath against his own neck, his chin. Her lips moved against his skin.

  “Akna’,” she said. “Our Lady, I have missed you. Where have you been, oh my bäho’, my companion?” She spoke raggedly the ancient Mayan tongue, the glottals, the thick syllables, and he heard in them the deep meaning of blood and fire. And so he too stirred. They were standing then, face-to-face, hands lifted first to each other’s faces, then more swiftly down, sliding the damp cloth of their suits away.

  “Chich,” she said, smiling. “Hard. Intense.”

  “And you,” he said as her thighs closed tightly on his hand. “You are soft.”

  “Yes. Soft.” She held his hand, held it hard, the dark hair curled damp and rough against his hand. She pulled herself to him, still holding his hand, and his other hand found the base of her spine, the Lacanjá between deep banks, shifting in the shadows, running swifter here. The muscle jumped and she released his hand to grope backward for the bed.

  His face was buried in her hair, against her ear, his breath sl
ow and deep and very warm. “I’ve missed you,” he said, and she could barely hear despite his nearness, crying out as he entered and rocking slowly as they found each other’s rhythms where the river flowed, carrying them along beneath rain forest where moonlight slid swiftly through the canopy of leaves. Mahogany spread branches through which the animals called to one another, speaking in tongues.

  Chazz could see the coiled shapes of microscopic entities yearning toward one another too, as though the universe itself were one vast pattern of union, one infinitely replicated knot in the process of tying itself from infinitely small to infinitely large. The intensity of his pleasure met Patria’s, and they found their center together. He no longer wondered where she was, where she had been, whom she had been with, why she had left him for such a far strange place or why she had come back to him at this time, now, because the river moved swifter and swifter, the sound of it growing too into a roar where the falls would be, and their joined bodies turned in the current, carried, floating toward that plunge.

  Her breath grew rough, her arm twined around his neck, hugging his head to her own cheek with such intensity that he felt what was almost fear yet had no desire to move away, to break that terrible hold. Limbs thrashed, her back and pelvis arched bow-taut into him and she shuddered, frozen against him, suspended above the riot of white water in the river as though now they were soaring birds caught in an endless updraft, where she cried aloud a fierce hawk-cry that echoed through the canyon where the river flowed.

  Gradually she subsided; her back relaxed, slowly, slowly; and then she breathed again against him, saying, “That was yawat pixan, a cry of the soul, oh, Chazz, my God, it’s been so long,” and she was moving again, slowly wringing from him such intensity of pleasure it bordered on the pain of need; they were the bird again, circling down to blend with the rapids as a leaf floats to the surface of swift water, and there were huge rocks, boulders, tortured land around them with cataracts and channels where the water moved in spouts and fountains, in cascades, eddies, whirlpools and torrents, clear, cold water from the distant mountains where snow fell all the year in a silence beyond belief, while now the sound grew until it filled all the space left around them, and they swept spiraling around the final bend and flew over the falls in the desperate roar of white noise and interstellar static and fell forever into the dark at the bottom of the world. The knot pulled tight.