Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “No,” he shouted, turning her toward him and lifting her up. “It is electricity! The hum of power through vast dynamos turning, the crackle of civilization. It invigorates!”

  “Oh,” she said, squirming against him. “I guess it does. But be careful. We have some precious freight here.”

  “Oh, my God,” he said, lowering her gently to the ground. “I almost forgot.”

  “Well, really, Chazz. You needn’t be that careful.” She ran her palm down his chest and tugged at his belt. “After all, it’s only been three months. She hardly shows yet.”

  “She?” he asked, his own palms sliding from the round edges of her shoulders to her bare arms, then down to her sides, where he began to slide the loose tail of her blouse up, caressing the fragile ridges of her ribs. “How do you know it’s a daughter in there?”

  “Oh, we women have our secret ways.” She pulled the belt slowly out of its loops and dropped it on the floor behind her as the fingers of her other hand worked at the top button of his jeans. “It’s innate, you see. Genetic. Instinct.”

  Her blouse rose above her breasts now, and he lowered his mouth to her neck as he held them in his hands. “How can you say such a thing? You’re a scientist. Cold, dispassionate precision is your mode.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, stretching her neck toward his kiss. With a series of quick jerking motions she yanked his jeans down around his hips and dug her nails into the flesh of his buttocks. He arched toward her, pulling her blouse over her head. It joined his belt on the floor.

  “True,” she said. “Cold, dispassionate, absolutely objective.” Her breath was a little ragged as she spoke. His fingers probed down now behind the small of her back, down under the elastic band of her slacks.

  “Mmm-hmm,” he murmured into her neck. “But you still haven’t told me about your day.”

  Her hands held the hard round muscles of his backside and squeezed them convulsively. “You ask about archaeology?” she breathed. “I will tell you about archaeology. There is a terrific site at Kapuna, one of the best I’ve seen here.”

  She fell against him, pushing him back up against the wall. His back flicked the switch on the light, and the chandelier came on again. They did not notice.

  “Really?” he asked. His palm rolled her nipple in small circles as it hardened. She bit his ear.

  “Absolutely one of the best. A precontact religious shrine at one end, and complete settlement and midden on the other.” She arched her own back against his hand, grasping his shoulder.

  “Precontact?”

  “Before Captain Cook,” she said. She slid her fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck. “An authentic Polynesian cultural site. We can learn so many things from such places.”

  “What kinds of things?” he asked. His other hand slid down under her waistband again and cupped the smooth flesh of her buttock. She tore at his shirt, and a button sailed off into the living room.

  “You know. Things,” she said vaguely. “Family relations, for example.” She slid his shirt off his shoulders and down his arms. For a moment he was trapped by the sleeves, one hand against her breast, the other under her waistband. She left him like that for a moment to push his jeans down further, then his shorts, until he sprang into view.

  “Family relations?”

  She leaned back to look at him and giggled. He was effectively trussed by shirt, pants, and her own clothing. “Things like procreation,” she whispered, leaning forward again to blow in his ear. He struggled free and threw his shirt on top of her blouse.

  She pushed her palms against his chest, through the thick gray hair, around his ribs and back under his shoulder blades. His breath was hot against her neck and ear. “Procreation?”

  “Oh God, yes,” she said. “How they made little Hawaiians, that sort of thing.” She pulled his head down and kissed him fiercely. Their tongues played for a few minutes. Then she pushed his head down until he was kneeling before her. Slowly he slid her slacks down over the smooth swell of her belly, rolling her panties with them. With one hand on his shoulder she stepped out of the slacks, first one foot, then the other. The slacks joined the rest of the clothing. He buried his face against her belly and thighs.

  “You see,” she went on, playing lightly with the hair on top of his head, “a site like this, near fresh water and the sea, with a natural rise for the heiau, is extraordinary. All these years it’s been there, waiting, under the rich soil planted with sugar. Waiting for us to uncover it, to peel away the years one by one, slowly, slowly, oh yes, layer by layer, probing in the earth so delicately for each clue, each tiny fragment of someone’s life buried there waiting to come out into the air. Like this, oh, yes, Chazz.”

  His mouth moved around her. His palms, flat against the outward curve of her belly, held the life growing there as though it were already born into the day. He held her hips then as he kissed her stomach, her navel, and she closed her fingers around his ears, tugged at them this way, that way, so he followed with his tongue what she told him with her hands.

  “So,” he said, pulling away a few words at a time, maintaining the conversation, “this is… a site… of extra… importance?”

  “Yes,” she said. “There. Yes. And there. Good. Daily lives are written there. The relations between men and women, parents and children, all there. Oh, Chazz, there! It would be a tragedy to lose that to a collection of condominiums for wealthy haoles to play tennis and play yes there my god.”

  His hands rubbed deeply down the outsides of her thighs and back up, over and over, the sides and the back of her thighs, behind her knees which seemed to give under the slightest pressure so he had to straighten her legs for her to keep her upright. “Play,” he said, “tennis… and… golf?”

  She bent over him, her hands over his shoulders, then tugged at his arms, pulling him up. His jeans were tangled around his feet, and she helped him step out of them, laughing and almost crying at once. Then, laughing still, she lowered herself to her knees and took him in her hands and mouth and his back turned off the light in the living room, though the sunlight streamed in through the empty windows and splashed golden across the white carpet.

  “How can you tell all that stuff is buried there?” he asked, and she looked up at him, running the tip of her tongue along his underside.

  “Oh,” she said, closing her hand around him and stroking lightly. “You get a feel for these things.”

  He tried to laugh, but it was more of a choke as she moved her mouth onto him once more. “No, seriously,” he said as her tongue and lips moved. “It’s covered with dirt, right? Plants grow on top. How can you tell anything is in there?”

  “Mmm,” she said. Then paused. “In here?” she asked, taking him in again.

  “Yes,” he said. “I mean, no. How can you tell there are houses, temples, garbage heaps in the ground. No, no, I really want to know. Don’t stop. Yes. Tell me.” His hands cupped her ears, stroked her dark hair, touched her cheeks, her temples.

  “Oh, that’s so nice,” she said, her hand sliding on him now, slick and shining. “Shape of the land, outcroppings of stone, the kinds of plants that grow around there, the likelihood of it being a settlement location, old stories and legends, and… mmmm,” licking.

  Her fingers ran lightly between his legs, tickling up, closer and closer, then down, and his knees were sagging now too. Soon he was on the carpet beside her.

  “What if the phone rings?” he said.

  “No phone,” she answered. Her eyes were closed as she held his length by her cheek, her breath warm and moist on his belly, his thighs. “Tomorrow,” she said, moving around to hover over him so he could join her, mouth on mouth on skin smooth and damp with juices and sweat and kissing. “They’re installing it tomorrow. Or the day after.”

  “Ahh,” he said, and it was less an answer than a sigh. “I see,” he said, and he did. “So,” he continued as she turned around and joined him face to face, breast to breast and legs on legs,
“archaeology is all a matter of digging?” And as she finally slid down onto him and arched her back, straddling him, and opened her mouth, and breathed into him, he thought she must have said yes again and again, because they were peeling it away, layer by layer, exposing the daily lives of people who might have been their ancestors or might have been themselves reflected back from an ancient past.

  Chazz Koenig saw now, king of his house, in the ceiling, in the undersides of her swollen breasts swaying over him, in the smooth ripe roundness of her belly, in the interminable exquisite grip of her sex on his, that he would never be able to explain or understand a mystery as deep and clear and complex as this, his joining with her, her with him, their separate selves plunged into absolute self-absorption as if they did not, each one from the other, exist in the same universe, as if they were utterly alone in the center of blind chaotic energy, yet moved so completely in unison that there was nothing to distinguish one from the other.

  They forgot first archaeology then each other, and when she fell sideways and pulled him on top and bit his ears and cheeks and shoulder, and his hands cupped behind her pulled her tightly to him over and over until it was all over and she cried against him for long minutes as he lay frozen rigid and swiftly emptying, and then they laughed weakly and lay in the sunlight pouring over them golden on the liquids that covered their limbs and lips and love.

  The sun moved then, after pausing all this time, and the golden heat moved across his belly and hers, across his legs and hers, and onto the carpet and then the far wall. He traced small circles around her dimpled navel with his fingernail for a time, fascinated by the way the skin puckered under his finger, by the way the small delicate hairs stood up when the nail passed them by, and the goose bumps stood out on her skin.

  Then he leaned down and listened to her belly as it pressed against his ear.

  She started to speak, and he held up his hand and said, “Shh.”

  She giggled and moved her hips. “Quiet,” he said. “I hear something.”

  She giggled again. And moved her hips. “Come on, Chazz. It’s way too soon. You can’t hear anything.”

  “No,” he said. “Seriously. I hear something. I think you’re hungry.”

  She pulled his ears. He dipped his finger into her and held it up, glistening. “Not this time, fellas,” he said. “You’re too late.”

  She pulled his ears again and kissed him fiercely. “I’m happy,” she said. “We have blessed our house. This will be a happy home.”

  He pushed up on one elbow to look down at her, and his face was grave. “I hope you’re right,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I was right not to ask you before. But now I suppose I have to. Tell me about your day: there’s something wrong.”

  “I don’t know. I hope not, of course. I told you they have a man at the hospital. I looked at the samples Dr. Shih gave me.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t know. I’m not really an electron microscopist. There’re certainly a lot of peculiar things in them.”

  He stood smoothly and walked over to the glass doors that opened onto the back. A few yards away the dark green forest began to climb the mountain behind the house. Shadows were falling already across the treetops as the sun sank to his left. He spoke without turning. “The calls, this sick man, they suggest the satellite had something on it. It appears to be toxic. If it was deliberate, if they are researching toxins, then that means biological warfare research. And we still don’t know whose satellite it is, ours or theirs. If it’s theirs, then we have a very legitimate cause for complaint. If it is ours, then not only do they have cause, but we have cause as well. It threatens everyone on this island.”

  Patria lay propped on one elbow, admiring the lines of his back and legs where the shadows pooled in the hollows. He stood, one arm lifted to lean against the frame of the glass door, looking out. She watched the shape of his beard, neatly trimmed for a change, move as he spoke. “But we don’t know for certain?” she asked. She put her hand on her belly.

  “No.” He dropped his own hand to his side and smiled at her. “So far only one person is sick. If no one else gets sick, it could be some isolated disease he brought with him and have no connection. The suspicious aspect is that he was trying to drive up the jeep road toward the mountain. As if he wanted to find the satellite. He couldn’t have known how bad those roads are if he hasn’t been here long. It takes a four-wheel drive to get in there, and even in daylight it takes over an hour to get to the end of the road. Yet he kept at it over a mile. Then he got sick. So what did he want?”

  “Did you get lunch?”

  He laughed. “You’re the one who’s hungry. I heard. And no, I did not get any lunch. I got shanghaied to the hospital, took the samples right back and looked at them, and then met you here. This last was certainly the high point of my day.”

  “Come here.”

  He came over and sat beside her. She put her head on his shoulder and hugged his arm. The twilight deepened. “Come on,” she said. “We should get ready. We should eat. We have electricity, I guess we could cook something. Except we don’t have any food, and we don’t have any pots and pans.”

  “Or plates, knives, forks, spoons, or cups. But we could always go to a supermarket and make a selection of appropriate purchases. Then we could begin to bury our garbage out back so that future archaeologists would have something to dig up.”

  She slapped his arm, but otherwise made no immediate effort to move.

  “I suppose we could do that,” she said after a time. A few minutes later he said, “I suppose so.” Then she said, “What if it starts an epidemic?”

  “Then we will have a serious problem on this island. There are few hospital beds, few doctors, and narrow roads. If there is panic, there’ll be more of a mess than I think they can handle. So far, though, so good.”

  “What did you see, when you looked at the samples?”

  “Macrophages. Foreign bodies. Fibrin. I could show you if you like.”

  She sat up. “I’d like that. Dinner first, though.”

  He sighed and stood up. “I suppose we’d better delay our housewarming dinner and eat out, then. Or go back to the condo. I think we left something in the fridge there.”

  “We eat out,” she said. “Tomorrow we buy supplies and eat here. Tomorrow we bring in a bed, too. Once on the floor is enough.”

  He helped her up. They dressed and went outside, carefully locking the front door behind them. The last light was fading from the sky, filling the air with that luminous violet of Hawaiian dusk. With their arms around each other they walked out to his battered white VW van and drove down the rise toward the coast and town.

  As they approached Koloa the emergency sirens began sounding, starting slowly with a low growl but rising rapidly to a swelling continuous ululation that went on and on.

  It had been exactly twenty-three hours and sixteen minutes since the satellite had crashed. It had been thirty-seven hours and twenty-two minutes since a bullet struck down Victor Linz.

  ISOLATE

  CHAPTER 11

  THE SIRENS WAILED steadily for three minutes, paused for a minute and repeated. In Koloa and Waimea, Haena and Princeville, Kekaha and Kapa’a, people stopped what they were doing and looked at one another. Those near a radio turned it on. Others merely waited for a few moments, forks halfway to their mouths if they were at dinner, newspapers folded back unread if they were seated comfortably in their living rooms, or paused, money halfway to the cash register as they made change if they were at work.

  The repetitions went on longer than normal for a test. Besides, this was not the first working day of the month when such tests ordinarily took place. Many felt the uneasiness the unusual provoked in them.

  In the end, though, most merely shrugged and made a face, as if this were another noisy inconvenience, like the sounds of cane trucks or airliners, to endure for a few minutes, and which soon would be over. After all, it was dinn
er time. Trucks and cars were headed home from service or agricultural jobs; no one wanted to be diverted from a glass of beer and dinner, and darkness was falling. The Emergency Broadcast System did not seem to be functioning, so what could there be to worry about?

  Some remembered the satellite that had fallen last night, an event enough out of the ordinary to elicit comment, but not so ominous as to provoke fear, despite the thrilling rumors about it. Now, though, that slight uneasiness crept in. Perhaps, as the rumors had hinted, this was a dangerous Russian satellite. Hadn’t one fallen on Canada a few years back, scattering radioactive debris all over the wilderness? Surely it could happen again. It could even happen here, couldn’t it?

  There had been no reports of a hurricane or tsunami, and the surf was certainly not high enough to cause concern. It had to be that satellite.

  Slowly at first, but with rapidly mounting intensity, the switchboard at the Kaua’i Police Department was swamped with calls. Sergeant Hirogawa, still on swing shift, referred them to Civil Defense at first, but that number was busy. For half an hour people were calling at the rate of over ten a minute. Then, when the sirens had stopped sounding and nothing more happened for a time, they trailed off. By nine o’clock calls were down to an average of one every two or three minutes. The telephone at Civil Defense was still busy, however, and so the rumors began to spread once more.

  It started slowly at first. Someone had seen a report on Honolulu television, or part of a report. The satellite was Russian; that was confirmed, or, if not confirmed, strongly suspected. A “high government official,” who might also have been a “reliable source,” said he had information that the Soviet Union had been testing some kind of new technology, and that either it had gone wrong and failed, or they had deliberately dropped the satellite into the Pacific, onto the island of Kaua’i.

  When asked if the satellite might not be ours, since that rumor was also going around Washington, he denied it emphatically. “I can declare, categorically and without hesitation, that the satellite which has fallen on Kaua’i is not American,” he said. “There is no doubt in my mind that it is a Soviet satellite, probably a research satellite, although we have some suspicions that it could be a Kosmos spy satellite or radar ferret designed to probe American defenses. We are preparing a strongly worded protest to this provocation from the Soviet Union.”