Mana

by John A. Broussard

  On the way to the station, Lehua had tried to reassure the disconsolate officer. “There was no way anyone could tell someone would come down from the roof. Besides, I was the one who insisted you leave.”

  Millie was still showing no signs of being mollified. “If Captain Silva doesn’t lift my badge for this, I swear I won’t let you out of my sight, not even to go to the lua.”

  Sam Silva did not lift her badge. In fact, he said nothing at all about her role in the incident as he lumbered in, face expressionless, and plopped down into his chair. “O.K., Lehua, give me the story…from the beginning.”

  Lehua hesitated, gathered her thoughts, and said, “I was standing at the file cabinet and turned around to see the window washer, or rather the fake window washer. He grinned, took a gun out of his bucket, aimed it at me and pulled the trigger. Three times. The window exploded and blew him loose from the casing.”

  Silva shifted in his chair, reached into his pocket and dropped three flattened steel-jacketed bullets onto the desk in front of him. “Those were on the floor of your office. Any idea how they got that way?”

  Lehua shook her head, then said, “I suppose the window did it.”

  Silva’s eyes narrowed. “I checked. Those windows are a heavy laminated glass, double paned. Both of them were plenty tough, but no way could they have done that to those bullets. And that’s something else. What made the window explode? Bullets could go through them, all right, but it would have taken a sledgehammer to smash them out like that, something like the sledgehammer it would have taken to break Reveille’s arm.”

  Lehua’s lips tightened. “I just can’t explain it.”

  Ignoring her, Silva continued his description of the preliminary pm. “The Doc says that about every bone in that guy’s body is broken. He says he’s never seen anything like it since the first Gulf War, when they found the body of an Iraqi who’d been run over by a dozen tanks trying to get away from an air attack. It’s kind of hard to understand how a six-floor fall could account for something like that.” Sam rubbed his chin and looked steadily at Lehua, before adding, “I checked with Building Maintenance. They say those steel eyes the gunman was hooked to passed a 5000-pound test when they were installed, and there’s no sign of corrosion on them.”

  Millie could no longer hold back. “I’m really sorry about what happened, Captain. I know I should have stayed with her.”

  Without moving his head, Silva’s eyes shifted to her. “Would it have made any difference if you had been there?”

  Before Millie could answer, Lehua decided to talk about something else, partly to get her own mind off of the rag-doll figure she had seen on the sidewalk beneath her shattered window, and partly to spare Millie a reprimand, though now it seemed unlikely there would be any. “What about the acid thrower? Has he told you anything yet?”

  Silva’s eyes shifted back to her. “He’s fading fast, and can’t even write now. He did scribble one last sentence before he lapsed into unconsciousness.”

  “What did it say?”

  “‘She did throw that acid at me.’”

  * * *

  By the time they were leaving the station, Millie had partially recovered from her dismay. “What I can’t figure out, is how he found out you were in the office alone? Since he knew you were in the building, he must have seen me with you, and he must have known I wouldn’t just have stood there waving at him.”

  “Is there an officer named Sing in the department?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Well, there’s your explanation,” Lehua said. “I got a call for you, and I should have been suspicious at the time. It was someone who said he wanted to talk to you and who finally identified himself as patrolman Sing. Now, it’s obvious it was the fake window washer just checking to make sure you weren’t there.”

  “And I’m sure he had some fancy story ready for me if I had been there, something to get me out of your office. Dumb as I am, I’d have probably fallen for it too.”

  Lehua started to protest, but Millie went on without listening.

  “Number One seems to think of everything. His only problem is he’s been unlucky…so far.” Millie paused. As she slid behind the wheel of her car and Lehua closed the passenger door, she added, “The Captain’s right, you know. There’s more to all this than meets the eye, and I’m beginning to think the way he’s thinking.” As she spoke she cramped the wheel and pulled out of the parking place,

  Lehua stared straight ahead and said nothing. Once out in the traffic stream, she turned to the now silent Millie and asked, “What are you thinking?”

  “That there’s a lot more going on than just Number One’s bad luck, and you know what it is. Captain Silva’s got a point. Why don’t you level with him?”

  Lehua sighed and looked at her watch. “I’m not sure I can explain what’s happening, not even to you, never mind to Sam. But I’m willing to give it a try. I’ll need some help, though. Tessa Kaholakula, head of Hawaiian Studies on the West Hawai’i campus, should be free around noon. Let’s go out there now and see if she’s in her office.”

  In response, Millie made an illegal U-turn in the middle of the block and headed out of town toward the University. Lehua expected questions, but Millie was again silent. Turning to look at her, she saw the Sergeant peering up into the rear view mirror.

  “We’re being followed,” Millie said. “Don’t turn around. Just move your side mirror so you can see it. It’s a big car. Black. Looks like a hotel limo. It pulled into a parking lot when I turned, then came out behind me.” As she spoke, she unhooked the radio mike from the dashboard. By the time she had gotten the message to the station and they had alerted a patrol car to pick up the tail, they were approaching the entrance to the campus.

  “Damn!” Millie said. Lehua could see the reason for the expletive. The black vehicle had fallen back and turned up into the Palisades. “They’ll never find him in that maze of roads,” Millie added.

  “Maybe it wasn’t following us. Maybe it was just someone who suddenly remembered they’d left a stove burner on.”

  Millie’s response was heavy with sarcasm, “Yeah, and maybe no one really wants to kill you. Dream on!”

  * * *

  This time, Tessa cleared off two seats herself as she walked through her paper-strewn office on the way to her own chair. “Make yourselves comfortable,” she said. “Excuse me while I find my calendar and make a note about a meeting I’ve got tomorrow. If I don’t write it down right away, I’ll forget for sure.”

  The search wasn’t an easy one. The missing calendar was finally found in one of the piles of paper Tessa had removed from the chairs. Having been introduced to Millie and told of her role as protector, Tessa asked, “More threats?”

  It was then Lehua realized Tessa was unaware of the acid throwing. The professor’s face darkened as she heard of the previous day’s incident. She shook her head in horror at the even more recent attempt on Lehua’s life. Lehua did not try to detail how she had escaped harm, knowing Tessa needed no such details.

  “Does the sergeant know?”

  “No. That’s partly why I’m here. I know she’s not about to believe me, but she might be convinced by both of us.”

  “Why don’t you try your pencil trick again?”

  Lehua shook her head. “I told you I was uneasy about that when I tried it on you. I just don’t want to take any more chances.”

  Tessa looked over at the puzzled Millie, grinned, shrugged and turned to Lehua. “I suppose the rest of the reason you’re here is to find out if I’ve learned anything more about mana.”

  “Right.”

  “One thing I’ve learned from all of my years studying folklore is contradictions are the rule and not the exception. The legends on mana are typical. There is a common core running through all of them, though, and that’s the notion this force is independent of everyone, gods and humans alike. It can be controlled, but only in part. The chief who possesses this gift is only a
transmitter of the power, a kind of temporary guardian.

  “The problem is the word is used in so many different ways. Famous athletes are said to have mana. So are exceptional dancers, artists and other people with outstanding skills. Kahuna claim it. But, independently of all that, there’s constant reference to mana as a special force giving whoever has it a quality of untouchability.”

  Millie still looked puzzled, as Tessa continued. “As for the talking board, I had a long talk with Cy Walton. Before I was through, we were having a telephone conference call, with half the department over there taking part. They’re all excited about the board. I faxed them a copy of the rubbing, and the consensus is it’s the real thing. It would take someone really knowledgeable to have faked it.”

  “Could anyone there read it?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that. It’s just that it has a lot of the elements of other boards they know are genuine.”

  “Did you tell them about me?”

  “No. There wouldn’t have been much point to telling them.” An amused Tessa looked over at Millie who was shaking her head. “They’d have just reacted the way your friend is reacting right now.”

  “Did they know of any connection between the boards and mana?”

  Tessa’s eyes lit up. “I see you’ve been giving this a lot of thought. There’s one possible connection. One of the graduate students is doing her dissertation on early European contacts with Polynesians. She’s found a reference to a Portuguese priest who was taken captive by the Tongans back in the sixteenth century. When he was finally rescued by a Spanish ship, he was in pretty bad shape, but the story he told was copied down by one of the crew before the priest died. According to the student, the Spaniard had a poor grasp of Portuguese, and the priest’s Spanish probably wasn’t any better, so the story is badly garbled. The part we’re interested in deals with how the chiefs acquired mana.”

  Lehua sat forward in her chair. Millie simply looked even more puzzled. Tessa went on with her story. “When the great chief died, the oldest of the Tongan kahuna would take one of the chief’s sons aside, normally the eldest, and talk to him. Afterwards, no one could touch the son, and he became the new chief.”

  “No board?”

  “No mention of it in the chronicle.”

  “That’s all there was?”

  “There was one more thing. The kahuna told whatever he told the son three times.”

  “That’s something.”

  “I did find out something more about mana itself from a couple of the faculty over there.”

  Lehua leaned forward again. “What?”

  Tessa paused, then said, “I should warn you ahead of time a lot of this is speculation. I guess the best that can be said for it is it’s educated speculation.”

  “Whatever you found out is more than I know now.”

  “To begin with, it probably isn’t as impersonal as I pictured it to be. Somehow it seems to be like a reactive force, with intent to harm resulting in harm to the doer. Evil intent leads to a resulting evil.”

  “So the basketball was interpreted as being not harmful.”

  “Exactly. But mana works by a different set of logic than you and I are familiar with. Evil as we know it is a human construct, even a cultural construct. Mana doesn’t necessarily share our views concerning the nature of evil. There’s a lot of evidence those serving a chief who possessed mana had to be extremely careful, no matter how friendly their intentions.”

  Millie was about to say something, but Lehua broke in first. “What’s that mean?”

  “The one consistent thing is that abrupt movements were taboo. If the chief stumbled, you could get yourself into serious trouble if you made a quick move to keep him from falling, however well-intentioned your motives. Any touching of the chief, however benign or even necessary, had to be done carefully. His attendants always had to be walking on eggs.”

  “That takes me back to square one,” sighed Lehua. “I have no way of knowing for sure how it would react to a handshake. There might be something I’m totally unaware of that’s important in determining how it’s going to react.”

  “Right. You have to know something about electricity’s peculiarities to be aware standing in water when you put your finger into a live socket is just not a good idea. On the other hand you might be able to get away with the same act if you were standing on a rubber mat. One other item of information I picked up that could help is that there’s an expert on the mana legend who’s got an important paper in the works.”

  Lehua’s eyes lit up. “Who is it? Can we get in touch with whoever it is?”

  “Maybe. The department chairman is trying to run him down. His name’s Stanley Toa, a Tongan. He’s someplace in Europe right now, searching through the archives for written narratives going back to the early Pacific voyages. Cy insists if there’s anyone in the world who knows more about mana than Toa does, he’s never heard of them.”

  “All right; all right,” Millie said, the exasperation clearly apparent in her voice. She was no longer able to contain herself. “You two are talking in riddles. What’s going on?”

  Lehua sighed, then began her story with the discovery of the whale bladder and its contents. Millie’s exasperation changed to complete skepticism as Lehua described the actual events of the attempted rape, the acid-throwing episode and that day’s disaster at her office.

  “All of this came from that board with some kind of writing on it?” Millie asked, shaking her head incredulously.

  Tessa broke in before Lehua could answer. “Somehow the reading of it gave Lehua this power. We’re not sure how.”

  “It wasn’t just the reading, Tessa,” Lehua said. “I played Annie’s recital three times. Now I’m positive that’s what did it.”

  Millie gave a loud snort. “You two don’t really expect me to believe any of this black magic nonsense?”

  Lehua looked helplessly across the desk at Tessa. “Now you can see why I wasn’t about to tell Captain Silva about it.”

  Tessa pushed back from the desk and got up. “I don’t know about you two, but I’m starved. Come on over to the cafeteria. I’ve got scrip to spare, and I’ll treat you. Maybe Millie will believe better on a full stomach.”

  Millie’s face showed no signs of softening, but she got up along with the other two, and in a few moments they were crossing the broad expanse of Campus Way.

  * * *

  Millie was the first one to spot it. It was a long, sleek black automobile with heavily-tinted glass. It pulled away from the curb from the direction of the entrance, some hundred yards away and, despite its rapid acceleration, made little noise. Millie shouted, “Watch out!” reached with her right hand for the service revolver on her hip, punched Tessa away with her left hand and got one shot off at the limo before it stopped and crumpled with an ear-splitting crash some fifteen feet from them. It was difficult to tell exactly what happened.

  The front bumper of the vehicle was now bent up and back through the shattered windshield. Smoke rose in wisps from the shards of glass and twisted metal that only a few moments before had been a shiny, luxurious limousine. Before Millie could get to the wreck, the smoke broke into a single flame which was followed by a small explosion, then fire spread throughout the broken mass.

  A security policeman came running from the direction of the cafeteria, turned, and in a few moments was back with a fire extinguisher. The flames finally gave in to the chemicals. By that time a crowd of students and faculty had gathered around, and the wail of a siren sounded in the near distance.

  Millie walked quickly back to where the other two women were sitting on the curb. “I’m a convert,” she said, her voice expressing her awe. “There can’t be any other explanation for what happened. I’m going to talk to the patrolman as soon as he gets here.” Then, turning to Lehua, she said emphatically, “I’m taking you home to your apartment. You look white as a sheet, and I sure as hell don’t blame you. I’ll dream about that damn car for t
he next year.”

  Lehua glanced up at the sergeant. “The car wasn’t what bothered me. It was you.”

  “Me?” Millie looked completely baffled.

  “Yes. Just think what might have happened to you if you’d punched me instead of Tessa.”

  Millie paused, thought for a moment, looked over at the still smoldering wreck as the patrol car pulled up beside it, then she slowly nodded her head. “You’ve got a point. Maybe it won’t be the car that’ll be haunting my dreams.”

  Chapter 8

  “It’s going to take more than crazy Hawaiian spirits to interfere with my soup.” Millie had the Portuguese sausage frying and was carefully pouring the white beans she had soaked overnight into a colander before transferring them to a heavy iron pot containing smoked ham hocks. Lehua had volunteered to prepare the vegetables and was busy cutting the carrots up according to the chef’s instructions, when both of them looked up at the sound of a loud knock at the front door of the apartment. Millie waved Lehua back, pulled the revolver from the holster she had hung on the back of a kitchen chair and walked over to the door, standing off to the side.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  The voice was unmistakable. “Captain Silva.”

  Even so, Millie was taking no chances, peering through the fish eye first and not unhitching the chain until she had verified the Captain was alone in the hall.

  Grunting a greeting to the two of them, the Captain lumbered over to the couch which Lehua gestured him to. The furniture gave a futile protest at the unaccustomed burden.

  “Care for a Koholau, Sam?” Lehua asked.

  “After what’s been happening the last few days, I’m going to need more than a beer, but thanks. I’ll settle for a cold one.”

  No one said anything until he had settled back with the bottle almost hidden in his huge hand.

  His eyes switched from one of the women to the other. “So which of you is going to give me the first cock-and-bull story about what happened at the University today?”