Fire Knife Dancing (Jungle Beat)

by John Enright

  The Samoan voice that answered seemed to come from the house itself, rather than from an occupant of the house. The voice was strong, pleasant, feminine, elderly, and surprised. “Is that someone calling? Now, who could that be? They know they are welcome here. Whoever you are, I am honored. Come in, come in.”

  A young girl of maybe seven or eight came running through the house to hold the screen door open for him. The inside of the house was the opposite of the outside of the house. The outside had been palangi rococo, but the inside was Samoan simple—woven pandanus mats on the floor, no furniture aside from a few venerable old trunks, all the windows open to the air and the light, and nothing on the walls. There was a smell of old wood and flowers. The young girl smiled, skipped down the hall to a doorway on her right, and gestured Apelu there. Seated cross-legged in the middle of the floor was an old woman. She was washing her hands in a porcelain pot of water beside her. The water was charcoal colored. In front of her on the mat was a piece of siapo—fine bark cloth—onto which she had been painting an intricate geometric design using pandanus seed brushes. Beside her knee there was a half-coconut-shell bowl with her ink in it. If it was the same as what Apelu’s grandmother used to use, the ink was made from water, tree bark squeezings, and candlenut ashes. Her long white hair was held back by a plastic tortoiseshell comb.

  “Sit, sit,” she said. She dried her hands on a tea towel and pushed the bowl and towel aside. The young girl came and took them away. “What a pleasure to have a handsome young man come to visit me. How shall I call you?”

  “Apelu,” he said. “Apelu Soifua.”

  She was wearing a sun-faded blue-and-white cotton muumuu. Her face was a study of wrinkles. There was a sprig of flowering moso`oi behind one ear. She had beautiful dentures. “Such a wonderful name, Apelu Soifua!”

  She pulled a pack of Rothmans and a cigarette lighter out of her muumuu pocket, took one, offered one to Apelu, then allowed Apelu to light their cigarettes. The young girl appeared with an old tuna can ashtray. Apelu admired the old woman’s handiwork. The girl came with two opened drinking nuts cradled in chipped tin mugs, then returned with a plate of sugary store-bought biscuits. They talked as the girl sat watching them from the doorway.

  The woman’s name was Apolima Ti`ifau Strand. She was old enough to forget her exact number of years. This had been her husband’s parents’ house before it had been hers. She had been a widow for almost thirty years now. Lotteries supplied her only sense of the future. She wanted nothing to do with organized religion. The young girl was “just some scamp” that she “put up with.” The young girl smiled at the compliment of being mentioned at all.

  Apelu asked about Ezra. When was the last time she had seen him?

  The old lady smiled at the cigarette between her ink-stained crooked fingers. “Ezra,” she said and shook her head. “Is Ezra in trouble again?”

  Apelu didn’t answer.

  “The last time I saw Ezra was at a funeral over on Tutuila,” she said. “He was on crutches. That would have been Auntie Luisa’s funeral, at least ten years ago, maybe longer. What’s he done now?”

  “He shot up a police car,” Apelu said.

  “Mercy. Over there?”

  “That’s right. At his home in Piapiatele.”

  “Too many ghosts out there,” the old lady said. She was losing interest. She motioned for the girl to come and take the biscuits away. They had gone untouched and flies were now buzzing around them. “Why ask me about Ezra?” she asked.

  “I was wondering about his visits here, his business dealings, if you knew of any of his friends or business associates he had here.” Apelu now offered the old lady one of his cigarettes, which she turned down.

  “I wouldn’t know anything about any of that,” she said. “Ezra and our side of the family were never close. Especially after he married that woman.”

  “Dorothea?” Apelu asked.

  “No, not Dorothea, whoever that is. That little oriental whore.”

  “Leilani?”

  “Yes, her.”

  They were interrupted by the sound of a van pulling into the yard and its door slamming shut.

  “That would be Siaosi,” she said.

  The young girl jumped up and ran to the back of the house.

  It was barely ten in the morning, but Siaosi was already seriously drunk. He stumbled through the screen door and down the hall, stopping and steadying himself with a hand on the doorjamb of the room they were sitting in.

  “Mama,” he started, “I need—” Then he saw Apelu seated there and stopped and stared, trying to focus, wavering a bit. The odor of alcohol filled the room. He was not an attractive example of the human race. He was big but not tall. His face was puffy and scarred by old boils. He was balding, which was rare among Samoans. Below his lavalava his calves and feet were diabetes-blue and swollen. “Wha?” he said.

  “What is it, Siaosi? Can’t you see I have a visitor?” the old lady said matter-of-factly.

  Siaosi had managed to focus in on Apelu’s pack of Marlboro Light 100s and his cigarette lighter on the mat beside the ashtray. With considerably more grace than Apelu would have anticipated possible, Siaosi sat himself down and reached for the pack of cigarettes. “A visitor, huh?” he said, lighting one. “What sort of visitor? American smokes, heh?” Siaosi’s red eyes looked at Apelu. His look carried no meaning.

  “Apelu here just stopped by to inquire about your Uncle Ezra. Now if you could leave us alone, that would be nice,” the old lady said. Apelu noticed that as she spoke she was busy moving pieces of siapo and ink bowl and mugs behind her, away from her son, the way one would move things out of a toddler’s harm’s way.

  “Uncle Ezra? Fuck Uncle Ezra!” Siaosi said. “Who the hell are you to come here and ask about that piece of dirt?” He was enjoying his cigarette. “This is my house, my land. You have no right to come here and mention that crap’s name.”

  “Siaosi, behave yourself now,” the old lady snapped.

  “No. Who the hell does this guy think he is to come into my house and say shit like that? I ought to punch his teeth in for even saying that name here. What are you, some sort of pimp or pervert, you faggot?” His Marlboro Light 100 was only half finished but Siaosi stubbed it out clumsily, knocking over the tuna can of ashes and butts. “Fuck you. Get the fuck out of my house before I hurt you.”

  Siaosi was trying to get to his feet, but Apelu was standing before he got anywhere close. “Don’t get up. I’m leaving,” Apelu said, picking up his cigarettes. Siaosi was still trying to get up onto one knee. With a firm hand on one of his shoulders, Apelu forced him back down onto the mat. “I said stay there. Don’t move.” Apelu gave him a shove and Siaosi rolled drunkenly onto his side with a groan, then had trouble getting back upright.

  “Thank you for your hospitality, Apolima,” Apelu said, bending down to take her hand and touch his cheek to hers.

  “You are welcome, Apelu. Come back again,” she said, squeezing his hand.

  Siaosi had gotten himself upright enough to punch Apelu in the side. “And you can tell that still-born miscarriage of a boss of yours Schneider to go fuck himself too. Uncle Ezra and Billy Schneider, fucking shark bait. Right, Mama?”

  “Shut up, Siaosi. You are worse than your father. Good-bye now, Apelu.”

  Walking back to the gas station, Apelu rubbed his ribs where Siaosi had punched him. It had been a good shot. He stopped and pulled a small pad and a pen from his pocket and wrote down the name Billy Schneider the way he had heard it. He had no idea who Billy Schneider might be or what his connection to Ezra might be or why Siaosi would assume he was Apelu’s boss. Just the ranting of a brain-damaged drunk? And why would Apolima call sweet Leilani a whore when she had been married to Ezra for, like, forever? This was all history, deep family history of earlier battles and bad blood that would go back years and probably had nothing to do with what Apelu had hoped to learn about Ezra’s suspected smuggling operation.

  Back
at the store he bought a bag of rice, a can of Crown corned beef, and a ridiculously expensive can of salted peanuts and asked for them to be delivered to Apolima Strand. Apelu figured that with those good fake choppers she might enjoy the peanuts. He waited on the bench in the shade for a taxi headed back to town, and soon enough one came. His side ached. He went to light a cigarette and realized that Siaosi had taken his lighter.

  At Strand’s General Merchandise Store near the central market downtown Apelu found two more of Ezra’s distant relatives. They were both considerably less interested in the object of Apelu’s inquiries than Siaosi had been. One expressed surprise that Ezra was still alive. They knew nothing, but at least they were polite about it. He bought a new cigarette lighter there.

  Apelu checked in on Mati at headquarters to see if he wanted to get some lunch, but Mati was already eating with his new friends—Styrofoam take-out plates of barbecue chicken with taro and bananas in coconut cream, a six-pack of orange soda pop. Apelu asked Mati if he needed help with the number checking, but Mati insisted he had plenty of help and that everything was under control. Apelu went back to the hotel and had a light lunch in the bistro downstairs.

  Sina was on his mind, so back in the room he called his home number. Nobody answered. The muscles around his ribs where Siaosi had nailed him were cramping up. He hoped he didn’t have a cracked rib. He took a long hot shower. That helped. Then, sitting on his bed with just a towel wrapped around his waist, he dialed the number on Lisa Ah Chong’s business card.

  The first Chinese—all men—had been brought to the island basically as indentured slaves back in the early colonial days. If they had not been claimed outright as property by some planter or business, they might as well have been. A handful of the really hardened ones hung on, got a little business going, found Samoan families with enough extra daughters so that they could have one, then worked themselves to death creating a commercial niche for their half-caste kids to get their toe into and raise themselves up. The Samoans didn’t especially mind. Those kids and their kids and their kids’ kids were Samoans now, with just slightly different eyes and family names that were at least simpler to say than the other new German, English, and European family names. The surnames of those few original Chinese merchant families could now be seen on business signs throughout the town. They had been efficiently absorbed, not marginalized. There was no Chinatown.

  Lisa was in but was busy until four. Could he stop by then? Sure. Apelu put on a lavalava and a T-shirt and went down to the small bar in the bistro to get a double shot of Korbel for his ribs, drank it back in his room, then took a nap.

  The period of German occupation before the First World War had not left much of an architectural imprint upon Apia. Wood is not the medium for leaving monuments in the tropics, and wood had been all there was to build with. There was one remaining notable exception—the old courthouse on Beach Road at the corner of `Ifi`ifi Street. It had been the German colonial administration building and had somehow survived the termites, rot, neglect, and hurricanes. A rambling, two-story, filigreed, steep-gabled, veranda-jutting, and crumbling reminder of an eclipsed idea, it stood surrounded now by cement curbs and parking slots, looking lonesome for an era of horse traffic. Its cubicle warren of shabby offices now housed not only the High Court but also the Department of Justice and various other government agencies.

  The corner of `Ifi`ifi Street and Beach Road was a landmark in Samoan history. It was at this intersection in 1929 that the Samoan independence leader Tupua Tamasese and fifty-eight of his supporters, while leading a peaceful protest march, had been shot and machine-gunned by the occupying New Zealand police force. Paramount Chief Tamasese had died a slow and painful death from his wounds, to the end urging his people to avoid further bloodshed and continue their nonviolent campaign for independence. Apelu knew all about Tamasese because Apelu’s mother, the peacekeeper, had been related to his family, and Tamasese had been her hero. Tamasese’s Gandhiesque pacifism was part of Apelu’s genetic identity.

  Apelu, dressed now in slacks and an aloha shirt, stood on the curb at the corner of `Ifi`ifi and looked up the street at the old police headquarters building. The second-floor veranda where the machine gun had been mounted was still there, the line of fire still unimpeded. It was raining a light misty rain, and the roads were full with end-of-work traffic. Whenever he came to Apia, he always stopped here and studied the seven-decades-old crime scene. It always made him think of his mother, dead now for more than a dozen years, and her telling and retelling the story of that day, Black Saturday.

  None of the office doors inside the courthouse were marked and, it being after office hours, the building was virtually deserted. Apelu knocked on a dozen gray doors before finally getting an interior answer. Lisa let him into her small, cramped office filled with piles of journals, books, and files. The screen of a laptop computer cast a bluish light behind her desk.

  “Good security measure,” Apelu said.

  “What’s that?” Lisa asked, moving behind her desk to close what she had been working at on the computer.

  “Not having numbers or names on any of the doors. It would take a hit man far too long to find his victim.”

  Lisa laughed. It was a good laugh, sharp and quick. “Oh good,” she said, “our detective has the mind of a hit man. The fact is that nobody enters this building except under dire necessity, so they just have to find their own way. Quite Kafka.”

  “I guess,” Apelu said, still standing by the door. “I’ve never understood what people meant when they said that.”

  “Said what?” Lisa said, looking up at him with a slight smile.

  “Kafka, Kafkaesque, whatever,” Apelu said. “I know it means more than weird, but I’m not sure in which direction.”

  “Think nightmare,” she said, “one of those frustrating nightmares.”

  “Okay. Like where the corridors keep changing and clerks are always losing your papers?”

  “Right, and nobody knows who you are.” She shut down her machine. “Let’s talk here, if you don’t mind. Please sit down. Hand me that.” She had motioned him to a chair where her briefcase was sitting. “Thanks. I guess first off I should ask you for some identification, so that I’m sure whom I’m talking to. A policeman, not a hit man.”

  Apelu pulled out of his pants pocket the case with his badge and ID and handed it to her. She copied down his name and badge number and handed the case back to Apelu.

  “You said you were here in Apia on a smuggling case investigation. I didn’t think it usual for you people to expand your investigations here.” She said it just like a lawyer.

  “It’s not—usual, that is—but this is a case that involves checking a lot of numbers in your police department’s records. As a courtesy, your department let our department come over to do the boring work.”

  “You don’t strike me as a man of numbers, Detective.” She was still lawyering.

  “Well, we don’t have many of those, so I had to make do, and I’ve got someone to help.”

  “A team of investigators?” She raised an eyebrow as she pushed her glasses back up her little nose. “Might I ask from whom you received permission to conduct an investigation here, outside your jurisdiction?” Now she sounded more like a prosecutor than just a plain lawyer.

  “I just pull the assignments, ma’am, I don’t make the arrangements. I believe it was set up between my commissioner and your Public Safety Department.” Now Apelu felt like he was a witness, a hostile witness.

  “Exactly what kind of smuggling are you investigating?”

  “Retail goods, cigarettes and the like. We have reason to believe that some items we apprehended may not only have been smuggled out of here but were also stolen goods. Hence the cooperation.” Apelu noticed that he was sitting up in his chair as he would in a court witness stand—back straight, both feet on the floor, elbows all the way back on the arms of the chair, hands clasped in front of him.

  “Any luck?”


  “I don’t know, ma’am. We just started today, and I haven’t checked in with my cohort yet.”

  “Apelu…may I call you Apelu? Apelu, would you please stop calling me ma’am? Call me Lisa.”

  “Well, you are coming on sort of hard-nosed for us to be on a first-name basis.”

  “Was I?”

  “Yes.”

  “I just wanted to get…I only wished to establish in my mind your…qualifications, your official position, so that I could judge whether I could…confide in you or not.” Lisa was standing now, and Apelu could tell that she wanted to pace, but there was no room to pace. When she stood up, Apelu relaxed a little in his chair.

  “Actually, Apelu, when we met last night so fortuitously, it crossed my mind to enlist you for some assistance. I hope I haven’t foreclosed on that opportunity by being too hard-nosed.”

  “I like the way you talk,” he said. “What’s the favor?”

  “I’m afraid it involves more checking of records,” she said.

  “Not numbers, I hope.”

  “No, not numbers.” She sat back down at her desk and picked up a legal-size file folder. “This also has to do with smuggling of sorts, but we’re not talking cigarettes, we’re talking young women.”

  There were eight names on the list that Lisa showed Apelu, all women’s names, all between eighteen and twenty-one years old. All of them had departed Western Samoa for American Samoa months before on thirty-day visitor’s permits. None of them had returned.

  “It started from a single inquiry from a concerned parent,” Lisa said. “Immigration ran a check to see if the girl had returned and just hadn’t gone back to her village, but they could find no record of her returning.”