Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “My room,” Chazz said.

  “So. Well, then, Jean Prévert, he has a French passport, he is from Lyon. He has a case, for his samples, he says. Drugs. Legitimate drugs. He has papers for these drugs, as he must of course. But he does not visit any doctors. Soon he is wandering around the island, people see him here, there. He goes down south, he goes over to Oporo, where the yachties go. He takes a guided hike up to Temehani, see the flowers pop open at dawn. His guide for that was Freddie Barrone’s wife. She’s a big woman, bigger than Freddie, but she’s tough. She can climb. She tells us that this Jean Prévert, he asks questions. What about ancient religion? He hears about Oro, old god of war, and he gets excited. He meets a lot of people, this French seller of legitimate drugs, people get used to him. Then one day he goes down south, hitchhikes a ride down south past Faaroa, and no one sees him again. Poof, M. Prévert is gone.”

  Dr. Rathé appeared at the front door of the hospital and gestured. They went inside.

  “And so Prévert is gone?” Cobb asked as they went down the corridor to the woman’s room.

  “Ah, yes. Interesting, isn’t it?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, next day Calabrese appeared. Activist. A man with glasses. But perhaps he looks a little like Prévert. No one thought much of it at the time. Raïatéa does get visitors; it isn’t as if no strangers come here. But it does seem coincidental now that Calabrese gets on board the Ocean Mother. Prévert was good at getting himself invited onto boats. Now Calabrese gets invited. Hmm hmm. Interesting. I find it so.”

  The door was open. The woman was still sitting below the window. Her face was blank.

  “Good morning, Teavai. Ia orana. Bonjour.” Duvalois peered into her blank face. “You see there is no response. What could cause such a reaction? This is a woman who brutally murdered a man— hauled him into the mountains, tortured him, killed him, gouged out his eye, hanged him from a tree with a stake through his skull. Psycbose. You say psychosis? What could be the cause?”

  He was looking at Chazz, who said, “You need an anthropologist, someone who specializes in preliterate religion. I know someone…” He frowned. Patria still did not answer. “And the use of plants. Why not talk to Freddie Barrone? He’s a botanist. Maybe he has some ideas on what kinds of local plants could affect people like this. Someone may have poisoned her.”

  “Yes. Posthypnotic suggestion, perhaps.” Duvalois was doubtful.

  Dr. Rathé was looking out the window, although there was little to see out there but sky. The top of a coconut palm tossed its fronds into view from time to time. A small wind rising, soon to die.

  “She was infertile,” he said in English. He might have been speaking to himself.

  “What’s that?” Lieutenant Takamura was interested.

  “She could not have children. She was a patient here, some years ago. Her medical records. She was barren. Her mind may have been affected, if you understand me. She was… upset by the news.”

  Takamura nodded. “A barren woman, filled with rage at men, perhaps. She was suggestible. Someone could tell her, go and kill Queneau. And she would do it?”

  “It is possible,” Dr. Rathé agreed.

  “So who?” Chazz asked.

  “We are looking for a man,” Duvalois said. “We know that. He left with the Ocean Mother. We know that. He did not appear in Kauai. We know that. He left this woman, hien, wandering the hills, instructed to kill? We know that, too. She killed, perhaps for him. What we do not know is who is this man, this Calabrese, this Jean Prévert? What we do know is that he’s very good at what he does.”

  “What’s that?” Chazz asked.

  “Murder,” Duvalois said.

  They went back to the hotel.

  “I want to try Patria again.” Chazz went to the reception desk.

  There was a message for Cobb: Call Captain Taxeira, Kauai County Police.

  “Where the hell are you?” Taxeira asked over the thready connection, almost drowned by the winds of space. His voice wavered and faded in and out.

  “At the hotel,” Takamura shouted. “You called us here.”

  “I called some guy named ‘Cue-no,’ that number you left. No answer. I finally got a hold of some guy in Papeete name of ‘Lee Blank,’ says you are staying at this place, but you weren’t.”

  “We are now,” Cobb said, looking at Chazz with his eyebrows raised.

  “There’s been another one,” Taxeira said.

  Patria and Kimiko found her, he told them. In the Wailua River below the falls. Strangled, like the other one.

  “Where the hell are they?” Chazz asked irritably, reaching for the phone.

  “Dr. Koenig would like to know where Mrs. Koenig and Mrs. Takamura are now?”

  “Protective custody,” Taxeira said. “We put them up at the county condo in Kapaa. Mrs. Koenig was afraid they might have been followed, that the killer was still around. A feeling, she said.”

  Cobb told Chazz, “They’re safe, at the condo in Kapaa. There’s been another murder.”

  Chazz nodded. “Get the number,” he said. “I want to call.”

  When Takamura had finished, Chazz dialed the condo in Kapaa. Yes, Patria was fine, Orli was fine, Kimiko was out shopping, they would stay there for a few days, when was he coming home?

  Soon. Soon. It looked as if the eighth member of the crew was a man who might be French or maybe Italian, who knew how to change his identity, who understood chemistry, botany, whatever. Who had probably poisoned a woman named Teavai and sent her out to kill. They needed Patria’s expertise.

  “It was something you said, the other day. About zombies.”

  “What about it? I was just thinking out loud.”

  “I think he made one here. She just sits there. She looks an awful lot like that girl, Tracy Ann. Same empty face.”

  “Well, it resembles reports from Haiti. Zombies are supposed to have that look. They’ve been frightened. Usually they’re pronounced dead, buried alive. Later the bokor digs them up. Rescue like that focuses the mind most wonderfully: on the savior, the bokor. The zombie will do anything, owing his life as he does.” She sounded tired.

  “We may have something here, then.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Jean Prévert came from Central America,” Chazz said. “The other side of Central America is Haiti.”

  PART THREE

  THE EARTH THAT IS NOT FILLED WITH WATER

  SIXTEEN

  THE DARK SIDE OF PARADISE

  Freddie Barrone braked a battered yellow Renault in front of the Chinese market. “It’s unbelievable,” he said as Chazz settled into the miniscule seat. “The tax is like a hunnert percent on cars here. Plus amazing freight.”

  The car sputtered and spit black smoke. They passed the airport. A plane was on final approach. Freddie said it was the commuter from Huahine. “Go on to Bora Bora next, today’s Sunday, right?”

  It was getting hotter. No rain in sight, and this was the rainy season. He chattered as they drove. The mayor lives there, he told Chazz, pointing up at a house on the hillside. And down there a retired French banker with a tired old title before his name kept his yacht. The Vicomte de Fleur-en-Vosge or something. There was a fatal car accident on this curve year before last.

  The road wound along the coast. They passed the Moorings, where blue and white sloops rocked gently at anchor. Chazz remembered them from the approach to the airport, off to the right.

  The next bay was Freddie’s. They walked along the wooden piers, looking down into the water. Seaweed thronged there. A one storey wooden building on the shore was where they extracted the vitamins. Big tanks with paddles turned a green-brown sludge.

  The oysters had their own preserve. They produced black pearls of inferior quality and small size. They were working on it. This was only the second year; it would get better. Freddie had big plans. Next year, or the year after, the pearls would be better. They were experimenting with different seeding techniques,
different additives to the oyster beds. Oysters like music, he said. He played some Tahitian chants on the car stereo. Chazz thought if he were an oyster, they would not interest him particularly. But they had been here longer than he had. Perhaps they were used to it.

  Chazz took notes. He promised to keep in touch. He would pass along Freddie’s ideas, his questions, his interests. Vitamins were interesting. The sea was bountiful. We had a lot to learn.

  They had lunch at a cafe on the harbor in Uturoa. It was not good. Clouds began to gather over Tahaa to the north. They rose and swelled and withered away, only to reappear over Mt. Temehani on this island. They rose and swelled and did not wither away.

  It began to rain.

  Freddie said it had been a wonderful morning, an exciting experience to talk to a scientist from the states, and one with such wide interests, one so well connected. Chazz rubbed his calf and smiled painfully. Now Freddie had an appointment and had to be excused. And so he left.

  Chazz watched the rain fall. Then it stopped, and he watched the dust dry out. Finally, he shook himself and took a walk. Cobb was interviewing people who had been in contact with the crew of the Ocean Mother. It wasn’t going to be productive, but it had to be done. Chazz wasn’t interested.

  There was a serial sex killer loose on Kauai. Patria and his child were there. He should be with them. He and Cobb had found everything there was to find here. None of it was good. This was not a normal man, this Prévert·Calabrese. He killed people by dosing them with some kind of poison.

  Chazz walked along the shore. Soon he was out of town. He found a small street going off to the right, toward the interior, toward the mountain shrouded again in rain clouds. A light mist fell through the trees.

  Prévert dosed his victims, and some the dose did not kill. To those he gave orders, and they carried them out. The orders were dark and messy.

  It was mingled with dark religion, with death and control and mutilation. With fear. Fear of death, of loss of control, of suffocation and premature burial.

  Chazz felt that fear reach out and touch him at the back of the neck. A man who would do such things would lie in wait, invisible against the background of normality, and strike without warning and without mercy. He was indiscriminate in his choice of victims. There was a sense of him as evil in a way Chazz had thought was impossible, given the psychologizing of the late twentieth century. This man would be camouflaged, like a venomous creature pretending to be harmless, a centipede disguised as a caterpillar.

  He did not have human feelings, and that made him invulnerable and invisible.

  And he was not in Tahiti— he was in Kauai. Chazz was certain of that now.

  He walked along a dusty road through trees only vaguely familiar. Similar to Hawaiian trees, but not quite the same, a subtle difference that he found disorienting, as if everything had the familiarity of a dream. A nightmare.

  On his left was a house, spread out under trees. A hammock swung idly between two of them. A car sat in the carport. The house was obviously empty and forlorn, despite the car. A small hand-painted sign told Chazz this was the Maison de Queneau. The judge, their host, who lay in the morgue in town.

  The woman had hidden in those trees over there, watching. She waited until he was asleep and then crept forward with a stone in her hand.

  Chazz walked over to the hammock. Someone might have been sleeping there a few minutes before, driven away by the soft drizzle. The soft cords of the hammock were damp. He walked over to the edge of the woods and looked around. Ferns, pandanus, banana trees. The air was heavy with perfume. Chazz grunted and brushed the moisture away from his face. He walked back to the road and looked at the house. It was painted green with white trim.

  Someone was walking down the road toward him, a stringy old fellow with a rolling gait and a wide, gapped smile. “Ia orana,” he said brightly.

  “Ia orana,” Chazz replied.

  “I am Tepe,” the man said in English.

  “Chazz.” They shook hands, standing on the road in a mist that flowed like a wraith through the tops of the trees on either side. “You found him?” Chazz asked, pointing at the house.

  “Yes, yes.” Tepe nodded vigorously, his smile fixed on his face. “Very bad.” His face darkened for a moment. “A good man. Queneau. You knowed him?”

  “No.”

  “You are Marite, American.” Tepe was proud. “My sister been to America.”

  “Yes, American.”

  The conversation reached the limits of language and foundered. They looked together at the ghosts among the leaves, drifting.

  “You meet many people?” Chazz asked after a time.

  “Yes, yes, many. Tepe likes meeting people.”

  “You meet a man called Prévert? Or a man called Calabrese?”

  “Sure, sure, meet him.” Tepe nodded again, smiling.

  “Which one?”

  He looked puzzled. “Which one?”

  “Prévert or Calabrese. Which man did you meet?”

  “Same man, different name. Look different, a little, but same man. His business.”

  Chazz chewed on his lip a moment. His mustache and beard were wet and matted, cold to the touch. “I see. What was his business, do you know?”

  “Sure,” Tepe said. “Poissons. Fish.”

  “Fish?”

  “Sure, sure. Ask me, where are fish. Wants special fish. I say no good. Huehue.”

  “Oh. Huehue?”

  “Sure. Huehue.”

  “What kind of fish is that? In English?”

  Tepe shrugged. “Don’t know.” He puffed up his cheeks and blew out, laughing.

  “Blowfish?”

  “Maybe so. Bought two.”

  “When was this, when the man asked about the blowfish?”

  “Six weeks maybe.”

  Conversation fell asleep again, and this time it did not wake up. Tepe waved and walked on, down the road to the highway. He was smiling. The world was a wonderful place, full of mystery and delight. He had talked to a Marite. This did not happen every day. Usually he met only the Farani, like the four coming up the road toward him now. He waved and said “Ia orana`’ to them, but they did not answer. Very rude, the Farani.

  Chazz kept walking. Prévert-Calabrese was interested in blowfish. He bought two of them. A delicacy to the Japanese, a dangerous treat. The liver and ovaries were highly toxic. Tetrodotoxin, a paralytic. Kimiko Takamura had a lot of funny aphorisms about blowfish. Fugu, in Japanese. What did she say? I want to eat blowfish but I value my life. She had another one he remembered: The man who eats blowfish is a fool. So is the man who does not.

  Was he buying them to eat? Chefs who prepare fugu in Japan are licensed by the government and must undergo rigorous training. There are only a few such chefs in the country, so it can cost several hundred dollars for the thrill of flirting with death. A tingling inside the mouth is part of the desired effect.

  The road dwindled to a trail and wound into the mountains. Chazz climbed hard on the sudden switchbacks as the trail moved into the steeply ridged country behind the town. Small streams tumbled down the slopes. The trees closed in.

  He stopped and cocked his head. He had a feeling of being watched. Zanshin, he thought. The almost supernal awareness of the martial artist. Or, more likely, nerves. Paranoia. There was no one. He went on.

  The killer has come from Haiti. He knew about voodoo, zombies. He knew about superstition, how to manipulate it. He knew about poisons. He had pretended to be a pharmaceuticals salesman. He had come to Tahiti a few months ago.

  Why? What brought him halfway around the world?

  He wanted to kill someone.

  Queneau? It was certainly risky to start his creature after the man and leave her behind to do the job. Something could have gone wrong. She could have recovered. She could have starved to death in the mountains. She’d been missing for weeks, wandering around, eating off the land.

  All right, Queneau was a side issue. He did not c
ome around the world to kill an obscure retired French judge, a man beloved by everyone, who had no enemies until he made one of the killer. He was a random victim, a test for the killer’s techniques. The ship was his real target.

  The trail steepened. He crossed a stream just below a long thread of a waterfall. He was deep in the cloud now and could barely see the trees along the trail. The falls had a curiously muffled sound, hidden in mist. The trail fell away to his right, and he looked down into depthless gray. Occasionally, the dim outline of a broad-leafed tree or twisted branch formed and faded.

  His calf ached, but the walk was doing it good. He could feel the blood rushing in his body. His breathing was deep and regular. He was in good shape.

  Okay. The killer was psychotic. He came to Tahiti because they speak French, and he is French. They spoke French in Haiti, too, so why leave? He came deliberately, to reach the Ocean Mother.

  It was a small sound, very faint, muffled like all sounds in the shroud of fog. He nearly dismissed it. An animal of some kind, a goat or a pig or a dog. But the sound did not repeat, and an animal would have kept moving, knowing where he was. He was not trying to be quiet.

  His thoughts were spooky, circling a killer— a psychotic, irrational, random killer who used poisons and superstition and suggestion.

  The trail switched back again. He must be nearing the top. The slope fell away to his left now. If he went over the side, he would fall or roll to the trail below.

  Or a killer who strangled women.

  Chazz felt the chill again, the tendrils of fear. It seemed impossible that it was the same man. But if they were the same, then Patria might be directly threatened. And Kimiko.