by Rob Swigart
Takamura smiled. “I expect not,” he said. “‘Man is not incurably drowned – if he still knows he’s all wet.’”
“Hah!” She snorted. “Charlie Chan again. Everybody on this island is all wet, let me tell you. When people are already dead, they stay that way. That’s why I prefer pathology. Frankly, Lieutenant, clinical work scares me. I never liked losing patients. Your two friends are going to be all right. You can go see them.”
“Thanks.” He went on down the hall.
Chazz was sipping orange juice through a bent plastic straw. Somehow the sight of that big man holding the tiny plastic glass in his hand sipping delicately through a bent straw pleased Takamura.
“That’s nice,” he said.
“What’s nice about it?” Chazz growled.
“You’re sitting up. Almost.”
“Yeah.” Chazz paused. “She’s going to be all right. They said Patria’s all right.”
Takamura nodded. “They were worried about exposure, dehydration, but she’s tough.”
Chazz nodded. He crumpled his plastic cup and tossed it at the wastebasket across the room. It hit the rim, balanced for a moment, fell in.
“Good,” Takamura approved.
“First one I’ve made. How long have I been here?”
“What do you remember?”
“There you go, answering a question with a–”
“Question. A habit. Police work, you know.”
“Not much. We went into the swamp. I wanted to avoid the cliff. We went east, I think. It was dark and raining and very boggy. I didn’t know where the hunter was, either. Renfrew. He’s dangerous. Immediately dangerous, anyway. The others are more so in the long run. They’ve got to be stopped.”
“Yes, that is our problem.”
Chazz closed his eyes. “We were in the swamp at least one night and then a day, a dark one. We had no food. Plenty of water, but I didn’t trust it.”
“You were right,” Takamura agreed. “Feral goats, pigs. It’s bad, full of parasites.”
Chazz nodded. “Before that, though, there was a fight. In the cabin. It burned. I broke someone’s arm, the muscle builder. I shouldn’t have broken his arm.”
“No?”
“I should have protected him too. I wasn’t good enough.”
“You got away. He’ll recover.”
“That’s all I remember. You found us.”
“Park rangers. They’re good at that sort of thing.”
“Thanks.”
“Any time.”
“I hope not.”
Takamura watched Chazz in silence for a time, twisting the brim of his damp hat up and down in both hands. Finally Chazz said, “Something’s bothering you.”
Takamura said nothing.
“There’s been another one?”
Takamura nodded.
“Who?”
“Collins. Navy, a lieutenant. No visible marks, a nasty expression. Neurologic.”
Chazz nodded. “Their bugs are loose. He was there. They could have some kind of epidemic at the Naval Facility. Why haven’t they notified you? The health people?”
Takamura shrugged. “He’d tried to walk into Kekaha. The driver of an emergency road vehicle found him. He wasn’t dead yet. He said a name. Lolo.”
“Brain? A code name?” Chazz asked.
Takamura shook his head. “I don’t know. Sammy had met him at a bar. He’d talked about boats. Paint. He didn’t make much sense, but Sammy called it in.”
“Yeah, I know about the boats. Any way to check with the Navy?”
“The phones are down. Only very high priority messages can use the satellite link, and even then transmissions are unreliable. This is high priority, of course, but nothing’s come in. This island is isolated, Chazz. This is the worst storm in many years. There’s been a lot of damage. I almost didn’t find out about Collins.”
“Can I see Patria?” Chazz asked after a few minutes. There wasn’t much he could do about the weather. It would pass by itself.
“I’ll see if she’s awake.” Takamura went to the nurses’ station to ask. When he came back, he was pushing a wheelchair. “Come on, Koenig, she’d like to see you.”
“I don’t need that,” Chazz said, standing. His legs gave out and he toppled into the wheelchair.
On the way down the hall Chazz stopped the chair to look at Takamura. “I heard about Sammy. How is he?”
Takamura shook his head. “Not good, Chazz. Not good. It took too long to get him down. It took too damn long to get everyone down. They don’t think he’s going to make it.”
50
Paul Ulana arrived at the hospital at dusk, driving a battered pickup well past its prime. The roads were closed to all except emergency traffic, yet the old man had no trouble getting through.
It was the third day of the waning storm. Debris littered downtown Lihue. Surf had breached the Nawiliwili harbor wall and washed away a park. Some resort areas lay in ruins, beaches gone, trees toppled, roads washed out.
He parked the truck and pulled an ancient cheap suitcase from the back. The wind lifted the case in his hand, tugging at it. Rain swept across his back as he limped up the stairs. He dripped on the floor in the sudden quiet, nodded at the receptionist, who smiled fleetingly and went back to her romance. Bruised old Hawaiian men were a common sight in this hospital, even during the storm, even at night, even carrying suitcases. Paul Ulana walked painfully to the elevators, waited patiently for the car to arrive, nodded to the doctor and two nurses who emerged, and rode in silence to the fourth floor, touching the raw scrape on his forehead. His knees ached, his ribs turned painfully when he breathed, yet he smiled pleasantly to all he met.
Unnoticed amid the orderly frenzy of medical activity just before bedtime, he sauntered down the hallway to West Four. In a waiting area he looked for a long moment out the windows at the night. Drops spattered the glass, and most of what he could see was a reflection of the room distorted by the drops as they rolled slantways down the glass, blown by the wind. Finally he shrugged and moved on down to 407. He pushed open the door and moved into the room. One shaded lamp beyond the bed cast a dim circle onto the floor, the wall beneath the window and half of a leatherette easy chair; the array of monitoring equipment on a trolley beeped and flickered in the rudimentary language of medical technology. It was, he thought, a different sort of magic, no more effective than his own. Perhaps less.
The figure lying on the bed was deep in coma. He could read that in the slow flicker on the oscilloscope screen, the monotonous drip of the IV, the languid spike of respiration, the nearly motionless sheet across the man’s chest.
The old man murmured some words, in which his other name, the poison god Kalaipahoa, was clear. His eyes grew red in the shadowed light as he approached and saw the tiny frown of pain on Sammy Akeakamai’s face, almost invisible amid the plump wrinkles of good humor. The old man moved the straight-backed metal chair beside the bed and sat cross-legged on the floor. Silently he set the suitcase beside him and bent to open it. It was filled with five-ply braided coconut-husk fiber called sennit. He took the bundle out and laid it to one side. A folded tapa cloth made from the inner bark of the tree called wauke, or paper mulberry, filled the rest of the case. The cloth was carefully decorated with a black and white pattern of chevrons of various sizes.
The old man set to work with the fiber, weaving an odd basket shape. From time to time he looked up at the monitors, but there was no change in the slow green pulse of the oscilloscope, the spike of respiration. The dim lamplight threw highlights off his hair as he bent to his work, glistened on the whites of his eyes when he looked up. His mustache was ghostly white.
Gradually the thing he was making took shape, a pinch-waisted barrel shape the size of a man’s trunk. Row after row of sennit plaiting moved up to shoulders without arms, sloped in to a neck. It was after midnight when he began work on the head, an elongated grotesque with goggle eyes, small bumps for ears, a rudimentary
nose, and a grimacing mouth filled with skull teeth. He attached the completed head to the neck and held the light object at arm’s length to examine it.
Satisfied, he stood beside the bed for a long time, gazing down at Sammy’s face. There had been no change in the expression, that subtle hint of pain. The arrow had done considerable damage to his right lung, two ribs and some major blood vessels. Prognosis was bad. Plastic tubes looped from the bandages over his chest to bottles on the rack beside the bed. One of the bottles bubbled with air from the pleural tears. Chest wounds of this kind were difficult to treat in the field, and usually fatal.
Kalaipahoa moved the metal chair back beside the bed, arranged carefully so that anyone entering the room would see the patient first, and then notice the objects he now set out. First the carefully folded tapa cloth, handmade and extremely valuable, for tapa represented hours of labor, pounding and working the bark until it was soft and felted. On this he set the monstrous human figure, facing the patient. He stood for a moment gazing at the two shapes, the man and his woven ghost, then he closed his case and eased out of the room. It was nearly two in the morning when he returned to the waiting area. The plastic-cushioned couches and chairs held a smattering of relatives of other storm victims. The old man settled himself onto one of the couches and almost immediately fell into a light sleep.
Three and a half hours later, hospital routine picked up. The breakfast trolley moved down the halls; medicines were delivered; the phone at the nurses’ station began buzzing quietly. Outside, the wind had died down. No one paid any attention to another old Hawaiian man sleeping in the waiting room. Finally he sat up, stretched once, went down to the hospital cafeteria and ate breakfast, returned to the fourth floor and waited some more. Eventually, he knew, they would show up.
They did. The neat Japanese policeman with the porkpie hat appeared, carrying a leather bag slung over one shoulder. The old Hawaiian dozed in the waiting area, watching the lieutenant walk briskly down the hall. Minutes passed. He reappeared with Koenig and his wife, walking slowly. At the nurses’ station they spoke for a few moments with the duty nurse. They went down the hall to 407. Kalaipahoa went after them. He knocked at the door.
“Come in.” It was Takamura’s voice.
He pushed open the door. They were standing by the bed. The woven figure sat on the chair; but now, in the gray daylight that filled the room, the figure did not look so monstrous.
“Ah,” Cobb Takamura said. “Mr. Ulana. What the hell happened to you?”
“A slight fall, Lieutenant. Nothing serious. How are you?”
To Chazz the exchange had an unreal quality, beside the bed where Sammy lay dying, but Takamura was introducing them as if this were the street on an ordinary day. “You’ve met Mrs. Koenig already, I believe. This is Dr. Koenig – Paul Ulana, Sammy’s uncle. Is this your work, Mr. Ulana?”
He indicated the torso on the chair.
Paul nodded. “It’s an ’aha fiber casket, Lieutenant. Ka’ai. For his bones. He is royalty, you know, an ancient alii family. If he dies, he will need this.”
Takamura nodded. “Of course. If he dies. If he does not die, he will thank you for your concern.” There was no irony in his tone. “So far, The Kukui Nut is holding his own.”
Ulana nodded. “I’ll come back later.” He paused. “I believe the storm may be soon over.”
“Yes,” Takamura said. “May be.”
“Nice to have met you, Dr. Koenig, and your wife, of course. We had a very interesting talk. It was a pleasure being her informant, as I believe it’s called.” He smiled affably as he spoke, and Chazz, watching his face closely, heard words that did not seem to match the movement of his mouth: Renfrew. Beware, he seemed to say.
But he was saying good-bye, moving toward the door, and Chazz wasn’t sure he’d really heard. A face swam in his mind, though. Bound in camouflage. Chazz nodded and the old man left the room.
Chazz looked at Takamura, but he was standing by the bed looking down at his partner. He did not appear to have heard what Kalaipahoa had said, but Patria looked at the departing figure thoughtfully.
The ka’ai on the chair seemed to be grinning.
51
“He is,” Takamura said softly, looking down at Sammy’s face framed by the pillow, at the frown of pain, “the Kukui Nut. Also known as the candle nut. Children would take the midrib of a coconut leaf and string the kernels of the kukui nut on them. They were burned for light. The kukui nut burns well, not long but bright and clear; the children would keep them strung and lit. That is children’s work in the world, I suppose, to keep the light alive. I hope he will not need that thing.” He nodded toward the casket on the chair.
The wind was brisk with ragged clouds, palm fronds turning end over end across the parking lot. They said nothing, each absorbed in thought.
Later, on the way to the laboratory, Patria whispered to Chazz: “Something’s wrong. What’s bothering you?”
He shook his head. “The man in the cabin. I broke his arm.”
She stared. “He would have killed us.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Chazz. You protected us. The first ethical order is to protect yourself, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
While Takamura drove carefully around the eucalyptus debris that littered the road, Chazz asked about Paul Ulana. “You’d have to ask The Kukui Nut about him.”
“I mean, what does he do? Besides helping Dewilliter find lobelioids and making straw coffins?”
Takamura looked at him sharply. “Retired, I believe. Why?”
Chazz shrugged. “Don’t know. I suspect everything.”
“Well, consider this. All the victims apparently worked at the sugar mill near Koloa at one time or another. Except Collins, of course.”
“I’ll consider it.”
They waited in the quiet of the Douglass Research Center for the computer search to end. “Here it is,” Chazz said. As lists scrolled up the screen, the computer beeped softly, indicating a match. Numbers flashed: 2.3*107 kb 712 bp match, Sample 1 Sample 4, another beep, Sample 3, Sample 7, Sample 10, Sample 14– The numbers shifted and rippled, lining the samples up in columns, all 2.3*107 kb 712 bp match. A yellow line divided the screen in half, and the color image of a sequence of DNA appeared, bases twisting in colors around the helix. The sequence was coiled upon itself, the helix itself twined into a helix, the ends unraveled slightly to label 3’ and 5’ ends.
“Mitochondria again,” Chazz murmured.
“What does it mean?” Takamura asked.
“It means that every one of the victims has an identical sequence in the mitochondrial DNA at a location 2.3 times ten to the fourth kilobases in from the 3-prime end, where, see here, there is a homologous site, this 59.283 kilobase-pair sequence. The computer’s run through all the samples looking for matches. I didn’t really expect any this good, but this is what Strachey and I were doing all night. A hunch. It is very odd for people to have identical sequences this long. It ties them all together. See, the controls don’t have this sequence at all.”
“What does it mean?” Takamura asked again.
“I think it means they had something in common, something genetic, a gene plus, perhaps, a viral intrusion of some kind. Something inherited from the mother, plus something else. They were targets for an intruder.”
“I don’t get that either,” Patria said. “An intruder?”
Chazz leaned back in his chair and crossed his hands behind his neck, partly to stretch and partly to think. Finally he straightened up.
“Imagine a secret agent, a spy. To do his job he needs to get into the host country, the host culture; once there he needs to look and act like a native. It’s just as important for that culture to have ways of recognizing impostors or invaders, of telling them from us. Living beings do this by labeling their own DNA with a chemical marker that says this molecule belongs. Foreigners are destroyed, attacked and brok
en apart by enzymes; natives are left alone. For a secret agent – a virus, say – to survive, it must be disguised as a native, have the proper chemical marker. He must wear the right clothes, speak the right language, know the right cues, gestures, responses and so forth.”
Chazz tapped the screen where the DNA sequence slowly rotated, displaying its structure. “There’s the spy. Part of it, anyway.”
Takamura and Patria leaned forward to look at the screen, frowns of puzzlement on their faces. “How do you know?” Patria asked.
“The odds against a sequence this length matching at this location between two human genotypes are astronomical. Lots of sequences will match, of course; genes are genes, after all. Or recognition sites. But they are very, very rarely in precisely the same location. Yet all the victims had this match. That could mean that the victims were invaded, a fragment of foreign genetic material insinuated itself into the host DNA and became indistinguishable from the host. The perfect secret agent.”
“Go on.”
“The viroid, a fragment of RNA, perhaps, looks for a common sequence. A marker, say the genetic code for blue eyes— I’m drastically oversimplifying, of course. It snips the DNA and inserts itself there. Presto, a new gene has appeared.”
“A disease?” Takamura suggested.
“Maybe. Some cancers work that way. But where does it come from, and what does this particular sequence do? What does this foreign gene express – what protein does it encode, and when? The secret agent must get in, then he must get rid of the evidence of how he got in. In other words, he must cover his tracks. We don’t really know, but from what Freeman said to me, the bugs they are working on at PACMAN have gotten loose and mutated. In itself, that’s extremely unlikely. Very puzzling. There should be evidence of how this sequence got established in its host, and there was none, no evidence that Dr. Shih could find, none that Strachey or I could find. That’s suspicious. And second, of course, the spy has a mission. In this case, though, the mission is to kill the host organism. The question is how. We should run this program on Collins, too, but I’d bet the results will be the same.”
