by John Enright
“I’m glad I don’t know any of that or I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to speak it. How did you learn?” Apelu asked.
“I studied languages in college. They interest me. Then, when Paulo and I got together, I started teaching myself Samoan—with his help—so that we could have our own private language in public, and so that I could understand his Samoan friends and family when we were with them. They were great about it. First they taught me all the things I shouldn’t say. Then we sang Samoan songs, covers of American songs so that I’d know the English lyrics already. They took me to their Samoan Baptist church services in Kalihi so I could listen to their endless Sunday sermons. That didn’t help much. And Paulo and I spoke Samoan at home much of the time. Though when we argued I had to argue in English. Samoan is really such a lovely language, so soft, almost swallowed when spoken well, and Samoans are so forgiving. When I make mistakes, they just laugh and make a joke out of it.”
“You’ll never really get it, you know,” Apelu felt impelled to tell her.
“I know. The more I learn the less I realize I know. Did that make sense to you?”
“See if you can say it in Samoan, then I might understand it better.”
Asia turned up an unmarked dirt side road into the back of the village of Vaitogi. The road branched and branched again into narrower side roads. There were only occasional bush houses, many of them old Samoan style with no walls, and plantation sheds. There were well-tended plots of banana and coconut and taro, and dotted among them a surprising number of ruins of old hurricane-broken houses.
She finally parked on the leveled gravel space behind her house When they left the car she locked it and beeped on its alarm. Apelu took his son’s bag with his stuff, which he dropped inside Asia’s back door after she had opened it and turned off the house alarm.
“You want to stay here or what?” Asia asked. “You’re welcome to.”
“No, I think I’ll trek on to Ezra’s place, use that as headquarters for the time being. Maybe I’ll save you as a fallback position or something. A lot to do.”
“Want to take Ezra’s shotgun?” Asia asked, not quite seriously.
“I’ll leave the ordnance with you,” Apelu said. “I’ve got the dogs.”
“I’ll be up to feed them later.”
Apelu took his bag and left by the porch, taking the steps down toward the cliffs.
CHAPTER 11
APELU HAD SLIPPED Lisa Ah Chong’s business card into the leather space behind his badge in his ID case. From the phone in Ezra’s bunker he called her Apia work number. She wasn’t in. They asked him for his name and number. He said, no, he’d call back. He called headquarters and asked for the captain, who was in. He had calmed down from the day before. He asked Apelu where he was.
“On leave, remember?”
“Well, there are a couple of people who would like to talk with you.”
“Has the commissioner named a board of inquiry for my internal investigation yet? I believe that’s the way this is supposed to be done,” Apelu said. Such internal investigations at the department were all too frequent. Normally nothing ever came of them. Reports were never finalized. The charges evaporated with time, and the next new scandal would eclipse all interest in the old.
“Nothing official yet, but there are some questions you should answer.”
“I don’t think so, Captain. I’ll be retaining counsel, and he’ll like to see something specific from the board of inquiry. I’ve not been charged with anything, have I?”
“Listen, Soifua, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Maybe if you came in and answered a few questions, there won’t be any need for an internal investigation or charges.” The captain was using his flat, unconvincing voice, and he didn’t even know it.
“Plenty of time for all that, captain, inside the proper procedures. I’ve got something a little more pressing for you—another girl who’s gone missing since the night our floater took her last swim.”
“I heard all those girls were swept up by Immigration,” the captain said.
“Well, check and see if this girl is among them,” and Apelu gave the captain her name. “If she’s not, she’s among the missing.”
“Hold on,” the captain said. “Give me that name again.”
Apelu did.
“Yeah, she’s another one on your list of sponsorees. No wonder you’re worried about her. Your little side industry’s gone a bit flat, Soifua? You want the department to go find your missing whores for you?” The captain was getting excited again. “How much do you take in a night from these bitches, eh, Soifua? I am not in the find-your-missing-whore business.”
“I just wanted to give you that identification, captain. The girl may be in danger.”
“From whom? You?” The captain’s voice had risen noticeably. Apelu could almost see the spit hitting the receiver.
“You are a worthless asshole, captain,” Apelu said and hung up.
His second call to Lisa got through, and she was there. He gave her the news about the girls—one dead, one missing, the rest unaccounted for, though she might want to check today’s and tomorrow’s returning flights. Lisa wanted details. Apelu gave her what he knew, along with the names of Mr. and Mrs. Woo.
“Although I doubt their names are on the sponsorship papers,” Apelu added.
“Did you find out any of the sponsors’ names?” Lisa asked.
“Only one. Mine.”
“What?”
“I’ve been told that I was listed as the immigration sponsor for both the dead girl and the missing one, probably others.”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Apelu said. “I’m sort of at a loss. I never sponsored anyone. You know these Woo people?”
“No, I don’t, Apelu. Why would I? Because they have a Chinese last name like I do?”
“Well, the wife is Samoan, from Apia, first name Atalena. Just wondering,” Apelu said. Lisa seemed a bit testy.
“I must say, Apelu, that whatever you’ve done hasn’t been very helpful or constructive.”
“I didn’t kill the girl, counselor.”
“Maybe not, but she was alive before you became involved, and I can’t help feeling that there are things you haven’t told me about all this.”
Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you anything at all, Apelu thought. How do I know who you are talking to? What else is going on here? Why did you get me involved in this in the first place?
“Listen, Lisa,” he said, “I don’t know what else I can do for you on this end. It’s getting a little personal.”
“Bailing out?”
“Bailing in. I can’t do anything official for you now, but I’ll stay in touch.” Whatever trip Lisa was on now, he didn’t need it. The sense of irritation in her tone reminded him of Sina.
“You’ll stay in touch?” Sarcasm.
Oh, fuck this, Apelu thought. What is it with women? So quick to take offense, always trying to put him on the defensive. At least he could remain polite, treat her like a fellow professional.
“Yes, I’ll stay in touch. You could do me a favor, though. Two names—Willie Schneider and Ulifanua Malolo—whatever you can find out about them.”
“So now I’m working for you?”
“It’s called cooperation, Lisa. It goes both ways. It’s free.”
“Uli who?”
“Ulifanua Malolo, early thirties, maybe.”
“I’ll see if I can cooperate, or reciprocate. I’ll see if I can have one of them killed for you.”
“Don’t be that way, Lisa.”
“I don’t take orders from you, Apelu.”
“Make it a request then.”
“All right. Let’s back off a little here. Your phone call has not made my day, and your suggestion that I know who these pimps are just because he’s Chinese was not appreciated.”
“I didn’t say that. I just asked—”
“Oh, forget it,” Lisa cut him off. “I just
got the same ethnic shit from our Immigration inspectors here earlier. Just to get back at me for making them work, they sent over a list of random Chinese names they had found in their entry logs when they were looking for the names on my list of missing girls. They attached a sarcastic note asking how many of them I was related to. I didn’t ask for that and I didn’t ask for your ethnic innuendo either. There are no Woos in Western Samoa. I know every Chinese family here.”
“I don’t do innuendo, Lisa. I’m not smart enough. I’m just a dumb cop without answers, remember? And this has not been exactly a stellar day for me either. If I ever do figure anything out I’ll give you a call.”
There were two khaki-green geckos, each about five inches long, either fighting or having foreplay on the wall beside the bathroom mirror. Apelu wondered if they knew which they were doing. They made saurian barks as they circled each other like predators. He would tell if they were fighting if one of them ended up without a tail.
Apelu was standing in front of the mirror in Ezra’s bathroom, shaving off his moustache. This was an unusual thing to be doing. He had had the moustache most of his adult life, ever since he had stopped being a performer—fire knife dancers weren’t allowed to have facial hair. He had to shave slowly because he had no scissors to cut it down to stubble length. It felt strange. He finished one side, then flashed his old and new profiles back and forth in the mirror by turning his head. It made a difference. He looked less like an Arab without the moustache. He finished up and splashed cold water on his face, then some of Ezra’s Old Spice aftershave. His upper lip was tender and felt naked but it wasn’t that much lighter in color than the rest of his face. He had found a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses on a dresser in Ezra’s bedroom. He tried them on. He never wore sunglasses. He almost didn’t recognize himself.
In Ezra’s closet he found a red-and-white-checkered shirt large enough to fit him—something he would never wear—and a faded San Diego Chargers baseball cap, which he put on backward, the way the kids wore them. A black T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and his Nike cross-trainers completed the outfit. He wore the checkered shirt out and open. There was a full-length mirror in Leilani’s room. He had to admit he looked younger. He left by the patio door, leaving it closed and unlocked. As he walked up the driveway toward the slack chain, Nora then Nick started barking.
At the golf course road Apelu caught an ainga bus headed toward town. Ainga buses were the sole means of public transportation in Samoa aside from taxicabs. They were all privately owned and operated, and all handmade—wooden bodies on truck chassis. They were pretty much the same in construction, if individual in their character and imaginative paint jobs. They had names like Titanic, Light on the Ocean, Spiderman, South of Pago Pago. One thing they all had in common was a sound system. At the driver’s left hand was always a pile of cassettes and a tape deck haphazardly wired to invariably giant speakers. The sound systems all had only one volume setting—loud. Teenagers picked their buses by their soundtracks. The benches were unpadded wood. The windows were sheets of Plexiglas that slid up or down in wooden tracks, sometimes. The buses were always packed. After one bus wreck several years before, a palangi coroner had listed the fatalities’ cause of death as “death by splinters.”
While the exteriors of the buses were decorated with their distinctive names and spray-painted scenes related to them—or maybe a portrait of the owner’s baby daughter—the interior décor was pretty much the driver’s domain—flags, posters, decals, family photos, Christmas lights, bobblehead animals, Last Supper paintings on black velvet, political bumper stickers, beer ads with rugby players, and all variety of holiday trim. Apelu’s favorite was still the bus with the triptych of full-color posters above the front window—an effeminate Jesus showing his Sacred Heart flanked by Sylvester Stallone as a battered Rocky and war-blackened Rambo.
The speakers on the bus Apelu boarded had been so blown out by their volume that it took him a while to separate the words from the noise. The lyrics were in English—a rapper song that exhorted its listeners to no end to rape the hos and kill the honky motherfuckers. Seated beside him on the cramped wooden bench was a shriveled gray-haired auntie, who smiled at him when he sat down then looked rather blissfully out the window as they sped and braked down the road, their bodies comfortably leaning into each other as they bounced and lurched along. She seemed removed from the rap racket, but Apelu, hearing the words, was embarrassed for her. Instinctively, he reached for his badge and ID. He would make the asshole bus driver change the music. Then he realized he couldn’t do that, because he was supposed to be incognito. Then he did it anyway.
Apelu walked to the front of the bus, keeping his balance by hanging onto the backs of the wooden benches. He squatted down beside the driver.
“Listen,” he said and tapped the driver on the shoulder to get his attention. “Listen, turn off this crap and put on a nice Samoan song.”
“Says who?” the driver said, not looking.
“Says my grandmother in the back and says this.” Apelu pulled his badge case out of his back pocket and shoved it, open, in front of the driver’s face. “And now. And turn it down.”
Apelu got up and returned to his seat before the driver could say anything, but the music was changed—a Samoan song—and turned down. The old auntie didn’t seem to notice, but a couple of other passengers around him muttered their thanks. A girl across the narrow aisle held out her can of Cheetos to him. He took one. It made him realize how hungry he was. It was well on into the afternoon, and he hadn’t eaten yet. He got off the bus in Nu`uuli and ate at a plate lunch place. He ate a big meal since he figured that would be his main feed of the day. Then he caught another bus.
At Seau’s Garage in Utulei Apelu walked to the side lot where the Tongan crew fixed and changed tires. It was the main place on the island to get that sort of thing done. Apelu had known the head of the Tongan crew a long time. Nothing special, they’d just been doing the same thing in the same place for years, and the big Tongan was a garrulous type, chummy with everyone. Apelu had to take off his glasses and cap and tell the Tongan who he was.
“Didn’t recognize you, Pelu. You undercover now?”
“Sort of. I got a question for you.”
“Sure, shoot.” The Tongan went back to work on his tire-changing machine, stripping a blowout off its rim.
Apelu asked him about the truck Asia had seen picking up the loot at Ezra’s. The Tongan and his crew fixed just about everybody’s tires on the island. He had a great memory for vehicles and their owners. Asia hadn’t given him much of a description. “Pickup, black, maybe ten years old”—she had said that it “wasn’t new”—“Toyota probably”—the beds on Toyota trucks rusted out faster in the tropics than those on American trucks, but otherwise they ran so well it was worth putting a wooden bed on them—“with a homemade wooden slat-sided bed, no plates.”
“Samoan owner?” the Tongan asked as he threw the badly worn tire into a pile of other badly worn discarded tires along one wall.
“Yes,” Apelu guessed.
“That’s not much to go on. I can think of a number. You sure it’s Toyota?”
“No, but Japanese probably.”
“Yeah, the bed. Regular tires?”
“Don’t know. Bum muffler.”
One of the Tongan’s assistants had been listening in. He now volunteered something in Tongan to his boss, who in turn asked him a couple of questions in Tongan.
“Sione here thinks he knows the truck. He says his cousin just changed the muffler on a truck like that.”
Sione laughed and said something else in Tongan. By now the whole Tongan crew was listening. At the end of Sione’s story everybody laughed.
“What’s the joke?” Apelu asked.
“He said, everybody knew about it because the Samoan guy paid his cousin in frozen meat, but it was all thawing out and going bad and his cousin had to cook it all, so everybody in their little neighborhood got to eat steak that night
.”
“That would be our man,” Apelu said.
“You go undercover to chase meat thieves?” the Tongan asked, then repeated it in Tongan to keep the laughs coming.
“Does Sione’s cousin know the guy’s name?” Apelu asked when the laughter died down.
Sione answered him directly, in Samoan. “They call him J-Cool. He lives up top Canco Hill.”
“Well, thanks, you guys. This is very helpful.” Apelu reached out to shake their grime-caked hands, but instead they each made a fist and butted their fists with his.
“No problem, Pelu. Anytime,” the big Tongan said. “Hey, you assholes, get back to work.”
Apelu put back on his sunglasses and backward baseball cap and walked on into what served the island as downtown. He had to walk past the building where Sina worked above the bank and past headquarters. No one paid him any attention.
The Captain’s Table lounge was in a low, patched-together, tin-roofed building near the water’s edge beyond the farmers’ market. There was a back entry from the dockside, and Apelu used that one. It took his Ray-Ban’d eyes a minute to adjust from the full sun glare of the streets and the bay and focus inside the saloon’s gloom. What struck him first was the smell of the place—a beer-soaked waft of cigarette air and the twin aromas of the bathrooms’ disinfectant and what it failed to mask. The place was echoingly empty, just a few regulars hunched in drunk meditation at the beer-sign-lit bar. But there was a waitress. She turned around from a conversation with the bartender to glance at Apelu. He sat down at a round Formica-topped table in a booth toward the rear, and the waitress came over. Apelu studied her face until he was fairly certain he didn’t know her, and then he took off the sunglasses, smiled, and ordered a beer. He was enjoying this loss of identity. Or was it a new identity—nobody?
When the waitress returned with his Steinlager, Apelu asked her if Atalena was around. She said no as if she were turning down a lewd proposition. Apelu waited. By the time he had finished his second beer and the daylight was quickly fading from the bayside windows, a slightly built Chinese man entered by the front door and quickly disappeared through another door behind the bar. Mr. Woo, Apelu concluded. The bar was beginning to fill up now—after-work drinkers, early starters. More lights had been turned on, including a disco ball revolving and reflecting tiny dim squares of light around the room, but the place was still gloomy. Music was coming from behind the bar now—a tape of dated Samoan rock-and-roll songs. Apelu recognized three cops from headquarters—out of uniform—with their heads together over a table near the front door. He put his sunglasses back on and slouched lower in his booth. He was waiting for Mrs. Woo, because he figured if he was going to pull anything off, get any information, he would have to do it in Samoan with a Samoan, and he wanted to meet this Atalena.
