by John Enright
“They’re really quite graceful,” Asia said, “in a martial arts sort of way.”
“It’s like ballet with claws,” Apelu said.
“Is it to the death?”
“Never. One of them will always retreat and the winner will quickly mount the nearest hen. To prove something, I guess.”
They went at it again, and the bigger, more experienced toa began to take over. In Samoan toa meant both rooster and warrior. But the younger bird refused to surrender the field easily and pushed Pops to the limit before finally conceding. Pops was bushed. Maybe next time or the time after that the result would be different. Pops was so tired he didn’t even claim his prize.
“I thought you said…?”
“Maybe they’re more polite about the screwing part when there’s a woman present.”
Torque came out the screen door alone onto the porch. “So, Sally, right? Dorset’s mainland squeeze. Torque,” and he went over to shake her hand. “Welcome to our mountain home.”
Asia half stood to meet him and shake his hand. “It’s a pleasure to be here.”
Torque turned to Apelu, “Sorry about yesterday, man. I just had to take a little rest.”
“No problem. Hey, I listened to the CDs. They’re not bad.”
“Good, good,” Torque said, sitting down.
“But that’s not why we’re here, really,” Apelu said. “We’re here to talk with Tia,” and he pulled out his ID case and badge to show Torque. He sort of hated saying good-bye to Dorset.
“Okay,” Torque said, “the CD deal is off. I don’t do business with cops.”
“Good idea. You can’t trust them with money,” Apelu said. “But you can talk to us. How do you know Tia?”
“Don’t really. She called a couple of days ago, needed a place to stay.” Torque seemed to have nothing to hide.
“How did she know to call you?”
“Mutual friend in Apia. You guys want some lunch? Sister is fixing some.”
“That would be nice,” Asia said. “I’ll go help.”
“No need. Sister and Tia got it covered.”
“A mutual friend?” Apelu asked.
“Yeah, a mutual friend.”
“Did Tia or your mutual friend tell you that she was in trouble?”
“Figured that out myself.”
“So do you usually hide people in trouble with Immigration?”
“I don’t think her trouble is with Immigration. Look, Dorset, or whatever your name is, the girl’s in a bind. I haven’t done anything wrong. She hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just know, okay? Tia’s just got to lay low for a while that’s all, and then we’ll get her back home.”
“Smuggle her back?” Apelu asked.
“Are you hungry?” Sister said, coming onto the porch, carrying a big plate of cold pan-fried reef fish and a metal bowl full of breadfruit in coconut cream. Behind her came Tia with a tray holding tall glasses of what looked like Tang. They put their things down on the picnic table, and Tia turned to go back inside.
“Oh, won’t you join us?” Asia asked, but the girl just smiled and kept going. “Tia, please eat with us,” Asia said in Samoan, and Tia stopped, then turned and looked at Torque, who nodded.
They ate together, the five of them around the table, without talking. When they had finished Tia got up to remove the dishes, but Apelu gestured her back into her seat. She obeyed.
“Tia, I’m Detective Soifua from the Territorial Department of Public Safety. We”—Apelu indicated Asia with a nod of his head—“have been looking for you. We were worried about you, after what happened to your friend and you disappearing.”
Tia was not a crier. Her eyes got larger and a little moist but they flashed, and her chin came up and out toward Apelu.
“So, you’re a detective,” Sister said, giving Torque a hard look. Then to Apelu, “What are you talking about? What happened to her friend?”
“Tia’s friend Tracey died last week. I think she was killed,” Apelu said, watching Tia’s face. At the mention of the dead girl’s name Tia’s posture became even more military and she caught the tips of her lips between her teeth, but she didn’t blink.
Torque twisted nervously, crossing and uncrossing his legs beneath the table. “That’s enough, man. We don’t know anything about any of that. You’re out of here, unwelcome. Good-bye. None of us have got to talk to you.”
“I think you all should talk to me, before some goons with a little bit heavier attitude show up here and don’t even bother asking questions.” Apelu didn’t raise his voice, but he made it hard.
“You trying to scare me, man? Because I don’t scare easy. You going to tell these goons where Tia is at? Because that’s the only way they’d find out. Tia’s my guest. You’re not. Now get out.” The muscles in Torque’s face had tightened up. His shoulders went back.
“If I leave now, you’ll have to come with me, Torque, downtown to answer some questions about smuggling and burglary and interfering with an investigation by stealing all the evidence from Ezra’s house.”
Torque was instantly on his feet, pushing himself up and away from the table. “Now you are pissing me off, man, coming in here pretending you’re someone you’re not, sticking your nose in my business. Now threatening to bust me. I’m gonna take shit like that here, in my own crib?”
Apelu was also on his feet now, and Torque’s fist caught him hard but glancingly off his cheek. Something inside Apelu, some inner tether that had been holding him down for all these days, snapped. His calmness exploded like when you throw kerosene onto a hot ember fire. A very small, distant part of him with no control whatsoever over what was happening watched him go over the picnic table and pick Torque up by his shirt and lift him off the floor.
“You stupid pile of pig shit,” he heard himself say. “Maybe you’ll understand it better unconscious,” and he slammed Torque backward against a wall. The small part of him watching was not happy with this, but it was beyond him now. He knew from past experiences—rarer now as he got older—that once that switch had been thrown the ensuing scene could not be stopped. His body, his very angry and tense and unsettled body, was in control now. Everything he had had to pen up, all the frustrations and confusions and insults and accusations, escaped in a fury. Nothing would hurt. Nothing very much mattered beyond the venting, the release, the just punishment about to be delivered. His arms slammed Torque against the wall again, then threw him down onto the porch floor where he could stomp him properly.
The sound of the metal bowl against his temple startled him. He swung in that direction, a little stunned. The second blow was the plate smashing over the back of his head. His sight lost its white balance. He could hear himself cursing loudly in Samoan. Another smash to the side of his head from the bowl put him down.
He wasn’t out long—the women were still helping Torque up off the floor—but the red warp spasm of fury was passing. He pushed himself up into a sitting position against a porch pillar and felt his head. It was bleeding. “You shouldn’t have hit me,” he said to Torque. “Don’t ever hit me.”
“I won’t, man. I won’t.”
“You Samoan bucks should be kept in cages,” Sister said to the porch at large.
Asia came slowly over and squatted in front of Apelu, looking at him curiously. Finally she said, “I thought you were a peace officer.”
“I’m a Samoan first,” he said. The blood of his subsiding rage was still ringing in his ears, and his voice sounded strange to him.
“So, who won round one, Mr. Toa?” Asia said, reaching out to divert a rivulet of blood falling over one of his eyebrows.
“Whoever won, at least he was Samoan.”
The repair work took a while. Torque had a nice wall-inflicted split on the back of his head. Apelu had a few plate-induced slashes on his scalp and a growing purple egg on one temple. There was a fair amount of blood on the deck of the porch, which Ti
a cleaned up. Sister gave Asia one of Torque’s T-shirts to give Apelu to replace his blood-soaked shirt. The women dealt with the aftermath—efficient, rough, acting judgmental. After about forty minutes, bandaged and cleaned up, Apelu and Torque were back sitting across from one another at the picnic table. For both of them the pains had begun, but Sister had denied them any pain killers. “Just suffer,” she said. Then Sister, Tia, and Asia had driven off in Asia’s Kia on some errand. Torque got up, went into the house, and came back with a bottle of tequila. “All I got in the way of painkiller,” he said. They passed the bottle back and forth, still not speaking.
Apelu finally broke the silence. “Is Sister really your sister?”
“Actually she’s sort of a cousin. We grew up together, anyway. Her parents did like she does and took in asshole kids like me when my parents gave up on me. Nice people, gentle. I never went back to my family. I’d spent my kidhood getting beaten up by my father. Sister’s dad never laid a hand on me. He just talked a lot. How’s your head?”
“Hurts.”
“Here, have more. Is Sally really your girlfriend, or just another cop?”
“Neither. I’m not sure what she is.”
“What do you know about this girl, Tia, and the dead chick, Tracey?” Torque asked, taking the bottle back.
“They were turning tricks on the dark side, something went wrong. Tracey turns up dead. Tia doesn’t but she knows enough to vanish. What do you know?”
“I knew that shit was going on over there, but I didn’t want to know about it so I ignored it. Then Willie called and told me to try to get together with Tia because he was worried about her. Then she called me. Willie had given her the number, and, yeah, I could smuggle her back to her village in Upolu tomorrow if I wanted to.”
“Willie. Would that be Willie Schneider?”
“Yeah, Schneider. How’d you know? Willie and I go back a long way.”
“Was it Willie who also told you to clean all the goods out of Ezra’s place?”
“You are starting to piss me off again, man. If you’re going to arrest me and charge me with something, then do it. Read me my fucking rights like on TV.”
“If I wanted to arrest you, I’d have done it already for assaulting a police officer. That’s a lot heavier than being a possible flunky in a smuggling operation. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on. I’ll tell you what, Torque, I’ll make a deal with you. I won’t charge you with the assault or anything to do with the smuggled goods and the burglary, if you tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m no stoolie, man.”
“You don’t have to name people—I already know about Ezra and Tia and Willie—just what else you know about this whole show.”
“Like what?”
“Like about where all that stuff at Ezra’s came from. Like about what Willie’s connection to Tia is. Shit like that.”
“I don’t think so, man.”
“Then I’ll have to make that little ‘You are under arrest’ speech, and I don’t want to do that.”
A group of the teenagers came walking up the driveway.
“We can’t talk here anymore. Let’s take a little hike,” Torque said.
After the kids went into the house Torque picked up the bottle of tequila and left the porch. Apelu hesitated for a second then decided Torque wasn’t the type to try anything drastic. He followed Torque up a trail behind the house into the bush.
The bunker was only a short hike farther up the ridgeline. It was bare gray concrete with straight walls and a curved roof partly covered by vines and bush. A path led up to a rectangular space where a door once hung, open now into the interior darkness. Apelu recognized it as one of the bunkers the US Marines had constructed on the island at the onset of World War Two when everyone had expected the islands to be attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy. Thanks to the US Navy’s defeat of the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway far to the north the invasion here had never happened, but the bunkers and pillboxes and gun installations still remained, scattered along the shorelines and ridgelines of the island. At one point in the war there had been as many US military personnel on the island as there had been natives, and the term afamalini—half marine—had entered the language. Those children were all pushing sixty now.
This bunker was bigger than the others Apelu had seen, and when they entered it he was surprised to find it dry and clean. In the middle of the ceiling was a large circular opening where an air vent once had been. A homemade ladder led up to it. Torque tucked the bottle of tequila into the waist of his shorts and climbed the ladder. When he had cleared the hole in the roof Apelu followed him. The concrete roof was hot in the sun, but a large fau tree shaded one side of the roof, and in its shadow the concrete was cool enough to sit on.
“Antiaircraft command bunker,” Torque said. “There are concrete pads for the guns all along here. We still find live ammo all over the place.”
From where they were seated they could see what the guns would have been protecting. Below them, along the edge of the ocean, was the airport, which had started its life as a Marine airbase in 1942 when most of the island’s defense work had been done. It was a good view of this end of the island.
“Okay,” Torque started, “I don’t like the Tia and Tracey thing, and I got nothing to do with it, so I’ll talk, but I don’t think Willie was involved in that either. I think he just knew about it too.”
“Why don’t we start with what you do know about—the deal with Ezra.”
“Sure, that’s like no news, old news, and I guess it’s over now.” Torque took another swallow of tequila, grimaced, and began to talk.
The smuggling operation went back a long way, back to when Ezra’s father had run the interisland shipping business. Willie’s dad, whom everyone called Billy, had worked for Ezra’s old man, and when Ezra was young those two had gotten the smuggling business going. It was like a given. Everyone got paid off. No one complained. Everyone looked the other way. It was just palangi regs they were ignoring. There was as much illicit cargo as legal stuff on every boat. It went on for decades. It was still going on when Ezra retired from show biz and came back to the islands, and he got back into it, running the Pago Pago end, Billy Schneider still in Apia. When old man Schneider died, his son Willie took over that end. But then Ezra started acting weird. He wouldn’t move stuff, business fell off. He started pissing people off.
“You can’t have anybody pissed off in that business, man. Everyone’s gotta be happy because it’s all built on trust, on knowing the money is regular and nobody is skimming or ratting or cutting you short.” Torque shook his head. “There was never any violence, man, threats, shit like that. Everyone was cool. For everybody involved it was just a side business, a way to make a couple of extra bucks above and beyond your shitty paycheck.”
“So what was Ezra’s problem?”
“Don’t know. Maybe he was just losing it.”
“So where were you in all this?”
Torque stopped and took another swallow of tequila. “You said you won’t use anything I say against me, right?”
“That’s right. You can trust me.”
“My old man was a Customs agent. He ran the deal on the docks here, had a government truck with special plates. I was his driver, hauling the shit there and away.”
“I thought you said you didn’t go back to your family.”
“I didn’t go back to the family, man. I went into the family business.” Torque laughed. “My old man is dead now, anyway. Then you guys got onto Ezra, I guess, and I got this call to clean his place out.”
“From Willie?”
“No, from someone I didn’t know. But they knew what they were talking about and they told me where I should take it and all. So I did. Kept the CDs as my payment. I was the one who ordered them anyway, then Ezra wouldn’t give ’em to me. He pointed a shotgun at me, that asshole, when I went to get ’em. That whacko old asshole. But it’s over now, I guess. Willi
e said that it was a shutdown and that I just should cool it.”
“When was that?”
“When he called from Apia to ask me to look out for Tia. He said something was shaking up over there and that he would be gone for a while. That probably means out of Apia, back to Auckland for Willie.”
“Willie and Tia connection?” Apelu had a bunch of questions.
“Like I said, I don’t think he was in on that importing prostitutes deal. He’s too classy for that shit, likes the ladies too much. A romantic, know what I mean? All the ladies are delicate saints to Willie.”
Then a voice called up from somewhere below them, “Yo, Torque, you up there?”
“Yo, what’s up?”
“Sister called. She says she needs your help.”
“Where’s she at?”
“At the police station. She said to tell you that she’s been arrested.”
CHAPTER 14
ON HIS WAY to town and the police station Torque gave Apelu a ride to where he could catch an ainga bus back out toward Piapiatele. His head was pounding. Sister had said nothing about Asia or Tia when she’d called. From where the bus dropped him off he walked first to Asia’s house. She wasn’t there, and he began to worry.
Back at Ezra’s, Apelu went to the bottle of codeine pills in Ezra’s bathroom medicine cabinet and swallowed several. When the pain pills hit the tequila he almost threw up, and he rummaged around in the kitchen until he found a packet of saimin noodles. He broke them up and ate them raw the way his kids did. They were stale, but he ate them all, as if they were a part of his medicine. He felt woozy, so he went to Leilani’s room to lie down. He had trouble finding a nonpainful position for his head on the pillows but must have succeeded because he finally dozed off.
