Trouble in Tahiti

by Hayford Peirce

  YOU WENT TO THE POLICE. IT’S GOING TO COST YOU HER LIFE. WE WILL GIVE YOU ANOTHER AND LAST CHANCE. THERE IS THE WEDDING RING. IF YOU DESOBEIR AGAIN, WE SEND YOU HER FINGER AND THEN HER HEAD. WE HAVE NO CONFIDENCE ON YOU, TO PROVE YOUR GOOD TRUST YOU WILL GIVE US 10 MILLIONS OF FRANCS (PACIFIC MONY) LIQUID ONLY! AND TOMORROW NIGHT. WE GIVE YOU AGAIN OTHER INSTRUCTIONS TOMOROW—FOLLOW THEM! OTHER WISE YOU CAN BE SURE WE KILL YOUR WIFE!

  A platinum band lay on the desk beside it. Payton and I had found the letter in the post office an hour before, and after opening it at the Commissariat Payton had gone to his bank to arrange for the ten million francs. It was only about $82,000 but he was going to have trouble getting it, for today was Saturday and only a couple of branch banks were open. But people who had two hundred million dollars were seldom reticent about hassling bank directors at their weekend retreats. He would get the cash.

  “You still think it’s these three paras,” I said.

  “Colonel Schneider does,” muttered the enormous Tahitian policeman evasively. “That cigarette lighter you found yesterday afternoon up in the hills clinches it for him. Their old regiment was the 120th Parachute. It’s quite a coincidence finding a 120th lighter in that very spot.”

  “Not if they were just lovers. She could have brought one or all of them up there and sent them out to the generator house to get the juice going.”

  “You really believe that?” demanded Tama.

  I hesitated. “I don’t think so,” I said reluctantly. “On the other hand, if these three paras have been in jail for the past two days, who’s sending ransom notes and wedding rings?”

  “An accomplice. A fourth member of the gang, whoever it is that is actually holding Mrs. Payton prisoner. This demand for a miserable ten million is just his way of trying to draw us off the track, of trying to make us believe in the innocence of the three paras.”

  “In other words, the more that happens while they’re in your jail, the more the proof that they’re actually guilty.”

  Tama nodded.

  I shook my head in wonderment. “Are you sure you went to school in the States? Only the French could use logic like that.”

  “I went to university in France, in Angers.”

  “Angers…on the Loire River. Where you polished up your French accent. That’s supposed to be the purest accent in France, down on the Loire.”

  Commissaire Tama nodded complacently as he fiddled with a small yellow and white flower bud that poked out coyly above his right ear. “So they say, monsieur.”

  I sighed and brought us back to the issue at hand. “And that’s the only evidence you have?”

  Tama’s finger traced small circles on his desk. “We have made broad inquiries. No one has seen Danielle Payton since Friday, October 1st.”

  “That you know of.”

  “That we know of,” he conceded. “Luria and company sailed their boat out of Papeete harbor late that afternoon and returned the morning of October 4th. During that time we have absolutely no accounting of their movements. No one, not even a passing fishing boat, saw them during that time. They could have been doing anything.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as abducting Mrs. Payton and transporting her by boat to some hiding place of their choosing, perhaps on the far side of the island, or perhaps…drowning her!”

  I sat up, surprised. “Drowning her! Then who’s the glamor girl in the photos with the daily newspaper in her hand?”

  Tama scratched the side of his nose thoughtfully. “Colonel Schneider’s pet photographer appears to believe that the photos could have been faked, a clever montage perhaps of face and newspapers. One of the paratroopers, Buisson, began as an army photographer and then became an expert in the analysis of aerial photography. There’s no telling what tricks he picked up. In any case, an expert is arriving tomorrow from Paris, along with a fingerprinting team.”

  I was too exasperated to keep silent. “You really believe this…baloney?”

  Commissaire Tama drew his enormous bulk up like an angry linebacker about to pounce on a hapless quarterback and glared at me ferociously. “I can no longer discuss that with you, monsieur,” he said coldly. “Now, if.…”

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “I’m on edged, from being around the Paytons. It’s not the same as when I used to sit over there on your side of the desk. It’s his wife, it’s her mother. It’s a real person, Monsieur le Commissaire, not just an exercise in a textbook. You get involved.” He nodded grudgingly, accepting my apology.

  “What makes it all so hard to swallow,” I said, “is the why? Why would these three gangsters pull such a blatant stunt? How could they possibly hope to get away with it?”

  “Over-confidence, perhaps. You’ve never arrested successful crooks who came to believe themselves immortal supermen, capable of anything? In defiance of everyone?”

  “That’s true,” I admitted.

  “As to the why: they may not be as well off as their yacht implies. Profit-making in the underworld has its ups and downs just like it does in the business world. For instance, it’s hard to keep an eye on your investments when you’re on the other side of the world, especially when your businesses are the shady kind they’re in. There are always other gangsters ready to move in on the pickings left by their absent friends. Moreover, it seems likely that they are in a position to lose a good deal of money in this Hotel Taaone situation.”

  “I was wondering about that.”

  Tama leafed through a dossier. “It is really extremely complicated, but briefly the situation is this: your friends the Wests bought a long-term lease on the hotel, just as they told you, not at a bankruptcy auction in Tahiti, but rather from a Frenchman living in France. Within a short period of time they missed some of the stipulated payments as well as perhaps failing to meet certain other obligations in the contract.” Tama held up a hand. “Or so it is alleged. This Frenchman from whom they held the contract, judging that their violations of the contract rendered it invalid, then proceeded to sell the hotel lease to the company owned by our three paratroopers.”

  “Just like that?”

  Tama smiled grimly. “I think he may have been a bit of a gangster himself. Some of the subsequent legal problems arise from the fact that this Frenchman is now dead—of natural causes, I may add—and the notaire in France who handled the paperwork for the second transaction and who would normally be responsible for the title has since been disbarred and is serving a term in prison for sundry malfeasances. Furthermore, there are six heirs to the Frenchman’s estate, and each of them has entered an action attempting to regain the hotel for himself.” He shook his head. “This is the sort of case at which French lawyers excel. They will feather their nests with it for the next twenty years. In the meantime, the Wests pay rent to the paratroopers and no one is happy except the lawyers and the judges.”

  Tama leaned forward and lowered his voice. “And the paratroopers, it seems, paid several hundred thousand of your dollars in order to buy this lease. They may well be needing an acute transfusion of capital into their personal banking accounts. In fact, Colonel Schneider goes somewhat further: he speculates that perhaps they invested not their own money, but perhaps the money of others, authentic Marseille mobsters. The sort who would not take kindly to being swindled out of their money. That might lead to a certain…reckless disregard for the risks on the part of our three friends, would it not?”

  I nodded glumly. It all sounded more plausible than I would have thought possible.

  “But what I really don’t understand is you!” growled Tama, waggling a banana-sized finger at me. “You yourself have done more to put these three men behind bars than all the rest of us together. Don’t tell me a tender conscience is concerned about the possibility of arresting innocent men?”

  I snorted. “Not in the least. There’s just something about it that doesn’t smell right.”

  * * * *

  But it wasn’t until Monday, two days later, that we receive
d any further instructions. Had the kidnappers simply forgotten about Sunday and no mail delivery? Or had the delay been deliberate, to stretch out nerves even further? Or had they been unable to think of an alternate method of communicating with us safely, particularly if we assumed that the brains of the operation—the three paratroopers—were unable to assist in the planning from the seclusion of their cells.

  The waiting made for a bad weekend. Tension was high at the Payton home, and nerves were on edge. We sat silently in the living room, staring at each other and waiting for the shrilling of the phone, thinking of a wedding ring and of the finger it had encircled. Like Tamara and her father, I was angry and frustrated, and I felt like venting my frustrations on somebody else.

  The somebodies who came to mind were Hiro and Billy, those jolly soulmates on the good ship Book of Dreams. Sunday afternoon I actually got as far as my Fiat and sat for a moment in the driver’s seat, bouncing my homemade sandbag pensively in my hand, before common sense reasserted itself and with a sigh I shoved it back in the glove compartment.

  The ransom instructions came in Monday morning’s mail. This time there was a crowd of experts from Paris to do the honors of opening the envelope. The note itself was written in the same broken English as before. While the technicians fiddled with the envelope and letter, I amused myself by translating the English into French. It didn’t read any more smoothly in French than in English. Maybe that was a Clue. I crumpled my scratch paper and tossed it in the waste basket. Or maybe it wasn’t.

  CHAPTER 21

  At ten o’clock that evening I was sixty feet above the ground, lying on the edge of the roof of the Hotel Maeva-Beach, peering into the darkness through a set of binoculars with night lenses, courtesy of the French Gendarmerie. A hundred yards away, halfway between the five-story hotel and the main road that ran around the island, was a parking lot partially obscured by trees. It could hold, I judged, a couple of hundred cars, but on this Monday evening was nearly empty. The new freeway that ran out of town to Punaauia joined the old circle-island road just down the way, and beyond that well-lighted junction there was nothing but the shapeless darkness of the hills.

  Scattered somewhere about the grounds and hills, in bushes and on hotel balconies, in cars and on motorcycles, were dozens of gendarmes and policemen, all of them hooked together by an elaborate walkie-talkie communications system. They’d started getting ponderously into place by five that afternoon, and any kidnapper with a grain of sense could have sauntered into the Maeva-Beach for a late afternoon cocktail and discerned the activity without turning his head. So I wasn’t optimistic about the evening’s activities.

  On the other hand, I was lucky to be there at all. Colonel Schneider had been in charge of the preparations. “You have entrusted the matter to us, Monsieur Payton,” he declared solemnly, “and with great respect I must now ask you to leave it our competence. As for the intrusion of Monsieur LaRoche into—”

  “With even greater respect,” said Charles Wentworth Payton, tight-lipped with anger, “that is my wife being held captive and my ransom money, and by God I’m going to have my say in the matter. Monsieur LaRoche is my representative and will accompany your men as an observer.”

  “Impossible, monsieur” said Colonel Schneider disdainfully. But Commissaire Tama, foreseeing the outcome of the test of wills, tugged idly at one of his many chins, trying to conceal a smirk.

  “Nothing is impossible,” said Payton, barely able to restrain his rage from boiling over. “I can, for instance, pick up that phone on your desk and be speaking with the President of the United States within thirty seconds. Whether he would then call the President of the French Republic himself or leave it to the Secretary of State I admit I don’t know. But in any case, I can assure you that this phone would shortly begin to ring from Paris.”

  “Very well,” grated Colonel Schneider, glaring at me with dreadful pale gray eyes. I made a silent vow never to find myself in one of his holding cells.

  * * * *

  The moon had just come down from behind a cloud at a quarter to eleven when the gendarme to the right of me of the roof nudged me with a sharp elbow. A motorcycle was coming up the well-lighted driveway to the hotel. I had already been focused in on it. It was a powerful dark Kawasaki, at least 500ccs. It slowed suddenly to turn into the darkness of the parking lot and I could see that the driver was probably Tahitian, but with goggles and crash helmet in the way it was difficult to be certain. The radio behind us on the roof crackled and its operator spoke briefly.

  Through our night lenses we watched the motorcycle cruise slowly up and down the lanes of the parking lot. On the second pass through it stopped just behind Tamara’s Mercedes, which had been sitting there for three hours now. The driver got off and without hesitation opened the trunk. Inside, following the ransom note’s instructions, was an air-travel bag stuffed with 2,000 notes of 5,000 francs each—10 million francs. The gendarme on my left snapped a dozen photographs through his telephoto lens before the motorcycle driver slung the straps of the bag around his neck, slammed the trunk shut, and got back on his engine. A moment later he was barreling through the parking lot and heading for the road. I watched through the binoculars as he shot across the bow of a small Renault, skidded at high speed into the freeway intersection, and zoomed up the hill leading to town as if all the gendarmes in France were at his heels.

  Which, of course, they were.

  Ten minutes later he’d been tracked to his lair in a shanty-town by the Fautaua River just on the other side of Papeete. A dozen mobile units had convoyed him there from front and back, all directed from a central communications post at the Gendarmerie.

  A few hundred yards downriver, parked by the side of the road, I sat in a radio car with Commissaire Tama. Dogs yapped and snarled, televisions blared, and an occasional demented rooster squawked maddeningly. It was all very Tahitian.

  “Difficult, very difficult,” mumbled Tama. “This particular area is a Tahitian quarter of beaverboard shanties built one against the other. There are 1,000 children, 10,000 roosters, and one million dogs, all of them ready to howl at the sight of a stranger, particularly a white man.”

  “Then it’s not very likely that Mrs. Payton is in there, is it?” I said nastily.

  “No,” he admitted bleakly. “Everyone in the quarter would have known about it within thirty seconds.” I knew that Tama’s thoughts were the same as mine. If he and Schneider grabbed the motorcyclist and didn’t liberate Danielle Payton in consequence, then very likely they would end up with a corpse on their hands. And a rampaging billionaire with a friend in the very highest place of all.

  There was a sour taste of bile in my mouth. It was going wrong, and we both knew it.

  “So there’s no point in raiding it.”

  Tama grimaced. “We can keep watch from a safe distance on each side of the quarter, along the road here. We’ve already sent men across the river to watch from the opposite bank. So he won’t be swimming away from us. We’ll just wait for the others to come join him. Or for him to go join them.” But his voice lacked conviction.

  “He didn’t seem very apprehensive when he picked up the loot,” I said. “Or on his way here. I gather he drove straight on in, no attempt to ditch a tail at all. Not really the behavior of your typical Red Brigade kidnapper.” Whoever the guy on the motorcycle was, he looked like a patsy to me, an intermediary suckered by the kidnappers into doing their dirty work.

  “I agree,” said Tama with a sigh, and I could tell that he was beginning to wish that Payton had followed the kidnapper’s instructions by paying the loot and never bringing the police into it at all. “Nevertheless, he does have the ransom money, and that’s certainly good for a jail cell in any man’s world. Wait a minute.” He pressed the radio headset to his ears.

  “We’ve identified the owner of the motorcycle,” he said with sardonic satisfaction. “It’s registered to a Tahitian named Eat-Lair Terorotua.”

  “Eat-lair,�
�� I repeated, puzzled. Something about the sounds seemed vaguely familiar, as if I should recognize them.

  “Eat-lair, Eat-lair,” snapped Tama irritably. “Like the dictator, Eat-lair!”

  “What? You mean…Hitler?”

  “Of course, what do you think I’ve been saying? Eat-lair!”

  * * * *

  It wasn’t until nine the next morning that Eat-Lair made his move. And when he did, it was only to the nearest workingman’s saloon. A Tahitian plainclothesman followed him in and reported presently that Hitler was drinking beer and whiskey, paid for from an enormous roll of cash. Tama and I blinked at each other blearily. I’d slept four hours on a cot at the Commissariat, while Tama had spent the night alone with his thoughts in the rear seat of his car. I felt even gloomier about recovering Danielle Payton alive than I had the night before. But short of getting out the electrodes and hooking them up to the three paratroopers, Hitler was the only game in town.

  So now we were tracking the dark red Kawasaki on its sudden darts about Papeete. From the Bar Kikiriri Hitler moved to a hi-fi shop, where he paid $6,000 cash for the purchase of a 250-watt stereo system. By eleven o’clock he’d stopped off in two more watering holes and was beginning to price video recorders.

  “If that guy’s a kidnapper I’m Uncle Joe Stalin,” I said, trying to conceal my nervousness.

  Tama nodded sadly, as if he could see his pension melting away like frost in the morning sun. “Those shopkeepers are going to hate it when we confiscate that money.”

  “It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” I said.

  * * * *

  The interrogation of Hitler Terorotua began at noon on Monday and with only brief respites continued on through the night and late into the following afternoon. I missed the first three hours of it, since I’d been excluded under seven different statutes of French law and custom. Charles Wentworth Payton had got out his address book and begun phoning Washington. At 3:07 that afternoon a previously overlooked statute was discovered in the legal code and I moved into the interrogation room with the status of observer. I sat in a corner and kept my mouth shut.