by Rob Swigart
At the end of the driveway he stopped to loosen up. He clasped his hands together and swung his elbows back and forth, letting the blood flow into his shoulders and back. His joints clicked as he moved, and he thought that he was getting a little too old for this sort of thing. He reached down and held his left ankle with both hands, slowly straightening his leg. He repeated on the right leg, then did some light jumping jacks in the darkness. In the distance headlights swung on to the Kuhio Highway and approached.
He felt foolish, exposed here doing exercises, a middle-aged man working off his midriff. He moved away from the road. The first false dawn light filled the coconut grove with gray shapes, and he slipped behind the nearest to complete his warm-ups. The lights swept past, heading north toward Kapa’a, a pickup truck bound for work in the cane fields. He inhaled deeply through his nose and let the air slip out through his mouth.
“Silly,” he said to himself. He began to run.
Out at sea to the east the undersides of clouds flushed slowly with pink. He could see the drifting veils of light rain, no doubt the same shower that had lately fallen on these coconut trees. As he ran the trunks interposed themselves, giving to the dawn a flickering cadence. He timed his breathing to that rhythm, five trunks in, five trunks out. Gradually his muscles loosened, warmed, and his breath evened.
Eight times around the coconut grove he reckoned to be two miles. By the second lap his breath was coming faster, more raggedly.
I should run farther, he thought, bring the distance up to three, maybe four miles a day. His life was filled with shoulds. Yet he was well satisfied. His daily regimen was sound; it had been designed by experts.
As he always did on his morning run, he began to calculate. Certain percentages might increase. A 6 percent per year return would create a positive cash flow on the sixty acres just converted. An added half-percent would project profits of over $100,000 per year, provided the tax incentives available from local government were continued through the fiscal year. There was some talk of changing the law, and there might be legal expenses. He figured them into the equation.
The calculations grew more complex: hidden costs, filing fees, architect and construction, advertising, political contributions, entertainment and travel occupied cells in his mental spreadsheet. His breath began to flow more evenly. The numbers shifted in rhythm to each footstep.
The light improved. A spear of brightness stabbed through the grove, illuminating the undersides of some of the heavy, drooping palm leaves. His feet fell rhythmically on the soft turf, the carefully trimmed zoysia springy and sensual under the waffled soles of his running shoes. Sweat began to trickle down his back, to stain the underarms of his silver and blue jacket.
The trunks of the palms moved as he ran, shifting location from the long precise rows to the well-staggered wall that marched away in perspective, only to form once more into clear lines as he moved past them. This was an orchard through which he ran, a coconut orchard, and as he moved past the long empty lanes between the rows of trees he could see all the way to the highway. Then he turned the corner, and the view was toward the oleander shrubs across the long entry to the hotel on one side, and on the other the blank side of the shopping center.
When the light was good enough he glanced at his Rolex as he ran. Fifteen minutes had passed. It was now just past six in the morning. He had swung around his sixth lap. He checked his other wrist: pulse at 147. His breathing was smooth, his arms swinging lightly, the figures in his head were falling into neat rows and columns, almost an echo of the rows and columns of the coconut trees. He applied a .3 percent increase to the loan guarantee cell and watched all the figures adjust on the screen in his head. The resulting changes were very satisfactory.
As he turned once more onto the driveway, the hotel gathered shape out of the gloom. Light glanced off some piece of metal or glass, catching his eye. The sudden flash reminded him of something.
He was young, seven or eight, running as he was now, when he saw something bright, a flash like this from breaking glass.
It was near the end of the war. Things looked desperate then, with rationing and shortages and so much damage everywhere in the cities. It was hard to know who to blame, who the enemy was. Was it the distant planes from which the bombs fell? Sometimes he could hear them far away, the drone of the engines and the soft thumping of the bombs. Or was it the grim-faced policemen who checked their papers?
One day, coming home from school, swinging his satchel, he’d passed old man Rutledge’s shop and on impulse he’d thrown a loose cobble at the window. Now, suddenly, that flash of dawn sunlight off a metallic object recalled that episode, just as the afternoon sun had caught a fragment of falling glass after he threw the cobble. He ran then, just as he was running now.
He shook his head as if that would rid him of the memory. He had never regretted the incident, hadn’t thought of it since, until this moment.
The figures vanished from his mind, and he could hear his breath again, rasping in his throat.
He should give up the cigars he’d come to love. Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow I’ll give them up. Today I have a meeting. I’ll need a cigar today. Tomorrow.
“Funny how that happens,” he said aloud, breaking the sentences into small, even fragments for each exhalation. “A little trick of the light… and a memory floods back.” Even now he could see the window break, as if in slow motion, the large shards of glass forming as the cobble went through, some of them imploding onto the paltry display of sausages and tired produce, others pausing for an instant before falling straight down, bottom first, onto the sidewalk. He could hear the creaking of the sign above the door as it swung on its chains. This was just before he broke and ran, his book satchel banging against his knee with every stride.
The sign banged against the side of the building. Like that car backfiring on the highway.
He reached out now to touch the palm trunks as he ran. It was growing noticeably warmer too. Damp sweetness rose from the zoysia, from the heavy plumeria blossoms across the access road. Hawaii, he thought, was too rich a place, too pregnant with smells and moisture and money. That was what made it so different from England, that richness, that heavy warmth.
Such warmth was like his ex-wife: too heavy, too rich, too thick. She had suffocated him with her silent criticism, her stoic regret and perfumed disapproval. She enjoyed the money— oh yes, she did enjoy that. She still enjoyed it. She lay there beside the pool at her house in Palm Springs and enjoyed the hell out of his money as she leathered and wrinkled in the desert sun. His hand slapped the palm trunks rhythmically as he jogged past them, palm smacking the trunk just before his sole slapped the pavement, ti-túm, ti-túm. It used to be his house in Palm Springs, but now it was hers. The bark was ridged and rough under his palm each time he slapped.
With an effort he threw back up onto his mental wall the computer screen of his spreadsheet program. The numbers appeared again, glowing green, each in its cell. Without willing it, he saw his alimony payments fall into place, and all the profits that had glowed so richly before dropped alarmingly. He could feel the stab of disappointment as they fell, could feel the bitter taste in his throat when he thought of Anne lying beside the pool, sipping one of her endless silent gins.
The sun was above the horizon now, and traffic on the Kuhio Highway grew with it. The pickups and ancient sedans flowed steadily north toward the remaining sugar fields, engines occasionally barking on the downshift. The quiet hum of traffic reassured him. To hell with Anne. Let her stew, let her roast. Let her burn her skin with ultraviolet until she rots. More power to her. He let the slap of his hand against the trunks slacken as he turned onto his eighth lap. By the time he was closing once more on the hotel entrance he was smiling again. What the hell, he thought. He should start adding that extra mile or two today. Why put it off? He ran on past the steps and into his ninth lap.
He saw that distant flash again as he turned the corner and moved down the l
ine of palms.
At the moment the bullet struck he was calculating how much of his income he could conceal from Anne’s lawyers by putting the Kapuna deal into a dummy corporation in Angela’s name.
He felt the surprisingly powerful shock, and ran on three steps, too surprised to stop. After the third step the pain seared him with a new heat far greater than that of the sun, now hovering, a red sphere, above the wet blue horizon behind him. He stumbled then and fell sideways against the nearest tree, pressing his hand to his side. What the hell is this? he thought. A heart attack? Wrong place, in the side here. He took his hand away and looked at it.
“What’s this?” he said aloud. “What is this?”
It was a stupid question. It was blood, a lot of blood, and it was his. He felt resentful, aggrieved, put upon by something vast and indifferent and vulgar, and he wanted to know what it was.
Sunlight was gilding the top leaves of the coconut palms, defining them with an impossible green. The coconuts themselves hung in bunches in the shadows beneath the leaves, heavy with promise, with meat, hairy and thick-skinned. The sunlight was very beautiful.
“I should get up,” he said thickly. He found himself seated, back against a tree. He could feel the ridges of the trunks pressing into his back. “I should get to the hospital.” He looked toward the highway, but it seemed impossibly far away, small and remote, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Life is filled with shoulds.
The hospital was only four miles away, his car less than a hundred yards, beside the hotel. He had a reserved spot there with his name on it. He could see the sign on the wall: Victor Linz. His name, his spot, his car.
I’ll just rest a minute, he said, or thought he said. I’ll just rest a minute. Then I’ll get up and walk to the car. I’ll get in, put the key in the ignition and start it. I’ll turn south on the Kuhio Highway and drive to the hospital turnoff. I’ll turn left into the emergency entrance. I’ll park at the emergency room. They’ll fix me up.
Then I’ll find the son of a bitch who did this to me.
A shadow fell across him. It seemed his head weighed far more than he could have believed, but he managed to lift it.
A shape loomed against the sun. It was only a shadow, vaguely defined. It could have been a person.
“What?” Victor said thickly.
He couldn’t tell if the shadow was smiling or not. He thought probably it was smiling, because it looked so relaxed and confident, standing there outlined against the sun.
“Help me. I’ve been shot.” Victor found it difficult to talk. His speech seemed slurred.
“Oh, yes. You’ve been gut-shot. It looks bad.” The voice was blurred, indistinct, as if it were coming to him in a fever, in delirium. For a moment he thought it was Anne. She had always wanted him dead.
Victor looked up, squinting against the bright back lighting.
“What do you want?” he asked. “Please help.” He tried to put meaning into the words, to push hard against their thickness, to infuse them with urgency. He thought he should be pleading, begging, imploring. He could not. His words sounded flat and meaningless, even to his own ears. A feeling of futility seemed to drag at his tongue. He heard his breath rasping.
“Sure, Victor.” It couldn’t be Anne, standing there. The sun was so bright, though. The voice so muffled. Anne didn’t like guns. She liked money. Someone she hired? Old man Rutledge? It was only a broken window.
“Who…?”
The shadow shook, as if with laughter. “I’m nobody, Victor.”
“But why…?”
The pain seemed to recede, to move swiftly away toward the highway, where the toy cars swished by from time to time. Not often, now, during the lull between the sugar workers going to the fields and the official start of the tourist day on the island. No one would hear him if he called out. He was too far from the entrance to the hotel, too far from the highway. Too far from everyone.
I should slow my breathing, he thought. I’ll get dizzy, breathing this fast.
He was not dizzy. He felt a distant ache in his side. It was very far away. He groped vaguely for the ground with his hands, felt the intricate weave of the fine-textured grass under each palm. He pushed with his arms. He could feel his shoulders lift, but even as he moved the pain struck him, searing and bleak. His vision narrowed sharply to what was directly before him. The dark figure against the sun vanished, leaving him alone with pain and a small circle of brilliance filled with oleanders.
Slowly the pain ebbed away. He moved his eyes (he had to tell them where to go) to his side. Blood soaked the jacket of his jogging suit, his thigh. With enormous effort he rolled his wrist over to look at his Rolex, but at first could see nothing but the blood on his hand and wrist. Finally he got the dial of the watch in focus, and through the fog of blood he read the time.
It was six-seventeen.
He had a meeting at seven.
Once more he pushed against the ground, forcing his back against the trunk of the palm. Inch by inch he squirmed himself up, pushing with his legs. The pain had receded somewhat, but his vision was still very narrow and he felt strangely weak. He could feel his legs shaking, the beginnings of nausea. He couldn’t believe all that blood was his. Something had happened. What? Where had all that blood come from?
He began to count the ridges in the trunk against his back. He could feel one against the thick flesh over his shoulder blades. He pushed, and the ridge moved downward an inch or so. He pushed again, and once more the ridge moved down.
As the first ridge passed into the hollow of the small of his back, he could feel another one against his shoulders. His arms were straight now, and he couldn’t push himself any higher. He pressed his heels against the ground and reached back with both hands to grip the trunk. He felt very sleepy, as if he had been up for a couple of days, but he persisted.
At last he was upright. He allowed his eyes to close. He could hear his breathing better that way, with his eyes closed. His breathing was very far away, very faint and shallow. It shouldn’t be this shallow. He’d been running. His breathing should be deep and regular, filling his lungs with air. Instead it was faint and unsatisfying.
He tried to look, to see if there was a cause for this strange shallowness of his breathing. With an effort he lifted his head. With another effort he opened his eyes.
“Come on, Victor,” the voice whispered.
Someone supported him. He took a tottering step, then another. Nausea rose in him, fell back. His toe hit something hard. He took a few more steps, touched something, lowered himself to the ground, felt the tree at his back.
There was nothing to look at now. He imagined the long rows of coconut palms, carefully planted, carefully tended across the vast acres behind him. He remembered the shifting patterns they made, first the neat long rows, then the regular profusion of trunks, then the rows again as he ran. The image of Anne, burned dark by the sun, standing against the sharp light glancing off the surface of the pool in Palm Springs, her head tilted, looking at him as if he should give up to her everything that made him who he was, formed, then blurred before him.
“I haven’t…” he said, but he forgot what he hadn’t. The man he expected to see there was gone. Weren’t they supposed to meet for breakfast? But perhaps that was another day. Anne was waiting for him to answer her question. He couldn’t remember what she had asked him. Probably it had to do with money.
He groped for his right wrist. His hands did not obey him properly. Finally he turned it over and peered down at the dial. His pulse was slower now, no longer 147. His pulse was very slow. He lay there, watching the dial that measured out his heartbeats.
CHAPTER 2
COBB TAKAMURA FROWNED. The expression pushed two small creases between his brows, disturbing the surprisingly smooth skin of his forehead. He was not accustomed to frowning.
His fingers, engaged in a delicate task, had paused.
“Go on,” Kenji said.
“
I don’t know precisely which way the next fold should go,” Cobb told him.
“That way,” Kenji urged, pointing.
Cobb’s frown didn’t go away. “Are you sure? Great will be the destruction if we are wrong.”
“ ‘Course I’m sure.”
“All right, Kenji-chan. Here I go. But if you’re wrong…”
“I’m not wrong.”
“OK, here goes.” Cobb grunted as he made the fold. He tugged on a corner and the frown vanished, replaced by a smile. “There you are. You were right.” He held out the intricately folded origami stork to his son.
“Thanks, Dad.” Kenji took the stork. “Now come on. Kiki wants to show you.”
Morning sun struck down through the broad leaves of a banana tree into Takamura’s garden. The light splashed on the red of earth, the rich green of grass, on the banks of lantana Mrs. Takamura lovingly tended. The house, set on a hillside above Kapa’a, looked southeast over the coast of the island of Kaua’i toward the ocean.
Takamura stood up and watched his eight-year-old son trot around the house, stork flying overhead at the end of his outstretched arm. Then, with a sigh, he turned toward the woman reclining in the hammock beside his patio and smiled. “ ‘Like cotton wool— filial devotion softens weight of parental crown’,” he said.
Patria Koenig laughed. “Sure, sure,” she said. “You are quoting, as usual, the great detective, Charlie Chan.”
Takamura, unsmiling, nodded. “The greatest detective Hawaii has ever had,” he affirmed.
“But a fictional detective, nonetheless.”
Takamura nodded. “As you say, nonetheless, though perhaps not completely a fictional detective. There was on the Honolulu police force at one time a rather well-known officer named Chang Apana who provided the model for Sergeant Chan.”
“Did he quote pseudo-Chinese wisdom?”
