by John Enright
“A secret?”
“For the time being. I have to confirm it.”
“So who switched the mystery person’s name to mine?”
“Who is in charge of the Office of Immigration?”
“Sometimes it seems like nobody is in charge over there. What do you mean?”
“What government department is the Office of Immigration a part of?”
“Why, your office, the Attorney General’s Office.”
Mati didn’t say anything.
“You mean the attorney general changed the sponsorship names?”
“I think my boss the attorney general has it in for you.”
“I’m flattered, of course, but why do you suppose that is?”
“I think he thought you were sniffing around his house of cards too close for comfort, and he wanted to discredit you, scare you off the case. Which is why he was relieved when you disappeared.”
“What case?” Apelu lit a cigarette.
“You know, I picked up an interesting piece of information in Apia. I wasn’t just there checking numbers. Know who the AG is related to? Mrs. Strand.”
“Leilani?”
“Yep, his auntie. That piece of the puzzle fell nicely into place. I was looking for that one extra connection, and there it was, the family thing. I think I can make a case now, at least enough of a case to get some subpoenas brought down.”
“Look, Mati, I already know you’re FBI.”
Mati looked at Apelu. For the first time they looked at each other sort of as equals.
“I knew you were a good cop,” Mati said, “but I didn’t know you were that good a detective. Anyone else know?”
“I didn’t tell anyone, if that’s what you mean.”
“That as general knowledge would not be helpful at this juncture.”
“Why all the secrecy? You feds don’t trust us?”
“Do you trust us?”
“Not especially, unless you are collaring some international fugitive here.”
“Well, we trust you guys even less, and it is the top law enforcement official in the territory we are going after. When I was implanted here I was told to keep my cover.”
“Then you shouldn’t have gone through my things in Apia.”
Mati snorted, nodded, and looked out to sea. “Say, isn’t that your bird?” he said.
And sure enough, circling slowly a hundred yards or so offshore was the white heron.
“Talofa, lo`u susuga. Afio mai,” Apelu said to the bird. “He’s here to help me handle this well,” he said to Mati. “So, why FBI? What’s the big deal? A little interisland smuggling in the middle of watery nowhere.”
“That’s the way it looked to us too, at first. Your assistant commissioner made an unofficial back-channel request for an investigation through the Department of the Interior. Interior to Justice, then the State Department got involved too because the case crossed international borders. Everybody wanted to look good for the other agencies. So what started out as—I gather—just a play in a little old political battle between the assistant commissioner’s family and the AG’s family—grinding an ax that went back a bunch of generations—turned into full federal involvement. It’s on the docket of a federal grand jury in San Francisco, and they’re ready to bust the AG—if I can come up with enough to present to them.”
“Ezra’s old smuggling ring before a federal grand jury? That’s hilarious.”
“Well, it’s not just Ezra’s old smuggling ring. The AG has been involved—through his family connection and for a cut of the profits—in protecting it since he came into office. That’s what the assistant commissioner had on him. That’s what Interior didn’t like, the official corruption angle. But now, thanks to you, I think we may be able to connect him to the sex trafficking trade as well.”
“Thanks to me?”
“Yeah. You know the AG called me into his office and questioned me about your claim that I was in Apia working with you on the smuggling case, and I denied it, said sure, I was over there on vacation, chasing a little pussy, and we ran into each other and talked about what you were doing, but that I had nothing to do with it. How could I? I had never been assigned that job, and I don’t do anything I’m not assigned.”
“So nobody in your office knew you were working on that?”
“No, when I wasn’t in the office, they just thought I was goofing off. I told the AG that you must have just made up the bit about working with me in a desperate shot at giving yourself some sort of plausible excuse. I think he bought it, because he has a rather low opinion of my…um…my work ethic. Anyway, he seemed sort of obsessed with getting you suspended. Then when your name was in the paper as that girl’s sponsor, that seemed really strange to me, so I did some checking around. You gave Immigration a list of names of overstayers you were wondering about, right?”
“Yeah, a list of Western Samoan women’s names.”
“Well, I found that list and followed up on it, and for every one of those women the name of their sponsor had been changed to one of two people—to either you or the assistant commissioner. Then I uncovered who their previous sponsors had been—they forgot to deep-six records of who paid their original immigration bonds—and another cover-up looked pretty obvious.”
“Your mystery name?”
“Names. Let’s just say they were already familiar to me.”
“From your smuggling investigation?”
“From the smuggling investigation. Well, when I reported that to my home office all sorts of lights went on, because a new directive had just come down about prioritizing cases of human trafficking, and here we had a possible case of sex slaves being imported from a foreign country into a US territory for criminal purposes. In addition to which one of the sex slaves had just died in mysterious circumstances, and one or more high-ranking local political figures were possibly involved. Well, piranhas could learn from the feeding frenzy that set off.”
“And no one else here knows about any of this?” Apelu flicked the butt of his finished cigarette over the lip of the cliff.
“Nope. Just the assistant commissioner, not his boss nor his boss’s boss. Just him, me, and now you.”
“And why me?”
“Partly it’s that enemy-of-my-enemy thing. My job is to get enough on the AG to indict him, and he thinks that you are his biggest threat. The mere fact that he set you up twice—having you suspended for your Apia trip and then hanging the dead whore around your neck—proves that you’re not one of his guys. And I need a little backup here. The assistant commissioner is off in San Francisco talking to the grand jury. My office is trying to get a couple more agents down here, but that won’t happen before this weekend’s flight from Honolulu at the earliest. And I need this girl Tia. I need her testimony. I could use your help with finding her. I figured that she was what you were looking for at the Captain’s Table that night, not picking up white chicks but looking for Tia. Any luck?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Well, yeah, I found her. Then I lost her. She was picked up by the police yesterday afternoon. They took her downtown.”
“Immigration?”
“Gotta be. Plainclothes bust.”
“Shit. Shit.” Mati got up and started pacing. There wasn’t much room on the ledge to pace, so it was more like turning around in one place.
“But I got her story,” Apelu said.
A car horn started honking up by the road.
“Sparks, Sparks,” someone was yelling.
“Who the fuck is that?” Mati said. He was irritated. He darted up the trail to the graveyard, out of sight. “Yeah, what?” he yelled.
There were four rapid shots, the solid pops of a high-powered weapon with a muzzle silencer. The first one missed. Apelu heard it ricochet off the stony ground. The other three didn’t miss. Apelu could hear those too, stopped with a squishy thud. Mati uttered a sound when the first slug hit him—a two-note
combined complaint and plea. The second slug elicited only a surrendering groan. The third slug was met by silence. Apelu heard the body hit the hard earth. He was quickly on his hands and knees, looking over the edge of the cliff for a way out of there when he heard the screech of departing tires. By the time he got to Mati the fleeing black sedan had almost reached the first curve in the road leading away from them. Apelu caught the flash of a bright yellow government plate above the rear bumper, just like the plates on Mati’s car.
CHAPTER 15
IT WAS A four–to five–mile hike back along the coast from Vailoatai to Piapiatele, and stretches of it were not easy walking. Beyond Sliding Rock Apelu had to find bush trails because the cliffs were too treacherous. He didn’t hear any distant sirens and he wondered how long Mati’s body would lie there before it was found. The last shot had been to the head, and there wasn’t much left of it. On the edge of Vaitogi he stopped at a bush store and bought a liter of water and a couple of apples. Food didn’t interest him, but he knew he should eat something. He stopped at Asia’s house, but she wasn’t there. Apelu was sort of glad for that.
Back at Ezra’s he stood under the shower for a long time, but when he got out he still didn’t feel clean. He washed and dried all his clothes in the machines, throwing his blood-stained shirt from the day before into the trash. He wanted a song in his head, but there was none. He wanted to hear music, but there was nothing there to play it on.
Apelu called Lisa Ah Chong’s office number in Apia and got her. Before he placed the call he had decided not to tell Lisa anything about the FBI, Mati, and the case he had been trying to make against the AG, any of it, especially not about the day’s events, which he still had not fully absorbed.
“Lisa? Talofa, Apelu here, checking in for a little information exchange. How you doing?”
“Apelu? Where are you calling from?”
“Why does that seem to be the first thing everyone wants to know about me?”
“You sound like you’re still in Tutuila from the connection.”
“Yes, I’m still in Tutuila. Why?”
“Because yesterday we got a request to keep an eye out for you over here.”
“A request from whom?”
“Your Attorney General’s Office, I believe. It didn’t say you were wanted for anything, just that they wanted information about your whereabouts.”
“Is that usual?”
“No, it’s highly irregular, which is why it was brought to my attention, for a legal opinion.”
“Which was?”
“That, seeing as we get so little cooperation from them on similar requests, screw them, show them the mirror. There are no legal grounds for us to do anything. What have you done?”
“Pissed off a few people, I guess. No big problem. They just couldn’t find me for a couple of days. Like you said, I’m not wanted for anything. It’s being straightened out.” About as straight as a pig’s intestines, Apelu thought. “Listen, I wanted to let you know that the missing girl turned up alive, okay, and she got picked up by our Immigration. I guess they’ll send her back.”
“All the others are back. I’ve got tabs on it.”
“Talked to any of them yet?”
“No. I’ve been told that I can’t, have no reason to, that they didn’t break any of our laws.”
“Come on, Lisa.”
“I’ll be seeing two of them this weekend, on my own time.”
“That’s more like it. Got anything for me?”
“I looked into your Mr. Schneider and Ms. Malolo. Turns out I’ve met Mr. Schneider, though I didn’t know the name. Everybody I know calls him Uila, not Willy, and he moves in a crowd that goes by just nicknames. A bit of a playboy. In fact, he made a play for me in a bar once. Good dancer, I must say. He’s got two priors, both for grand theft. One he got dropped on a procedural technicality—all of the physical evidence against him went missing. The other he got plea bargained down to a fine and parole-level violation. No time. Current whereabouts strangely unknown. I even hit the places that would be regular for someone like him the other night and didn’t find him. No one has seen him around in a week or two.”
Apelu grunted.
“Your Miss Ulifanua Malolo I could find nothing on.”
“Figures,” Apelu said. “I’ve got another name for you to look into, if you don’t mind. It happens to be Chinese. No offense, no innuendo. Doctor Win Chung.”
“No offense taken. Wait. That sounds familiar. Win Chung? Hold on. Yes. Remember that joke list our Immigration goons here gave me, of recent arrivals of people with Chinese surnames? Win Chung was one of those names. Only there’s no Doctor in front of it, just Win Chung.”
“I think there’s a connection between him and our dead girl.”
“What sort of connection?”
“Circumstantial. Let’s call it circumstantial. How many Chinese names you got on your list?”
“Eight, nine counting your Dr. Chung. Why?”
“What’s your policy on Chinese nationals as visitors?”
“Pretty loose. Though we don’t get many. They’re treated like any other tourists, automatic thirty-day visas. Come on, they’ve got an embassy here. They’re very generous with aid.”
“Built you a new sports stadium, I believe.”
“And a very nice one too, much nicer than anything you’ve got over there in American Samoa. Listen, Apelu, what’s going on over there? Your authorities have ignored these girls as overstayers for months, years in some cases, now suddenly there’s a dragnet out for them? Some sort of turf war going on or what?”
“No, not a turf war, I don’t think. There’s no evidence of that. Something else is going on. Something’s falling apart.” Apelu thought of a bright yellow license plate on a black sedan disappearing around a curve on a seaside road. “I don’t know what exactly. I’ll get back to you.”
Apelu fixed himself a bowl of saimin, fixing it properly this time, pouring hot water over the noodles and letting them soften in their sauce before eating. Then he took two more of Ezra’s codeine and went out to feed Nick and Nora. They were happy to see him. He did what he had seen Asia do. He scooped dog food from the galvanized garbage can into the plastic bucket, and then he found the key to the lock on the ledge above the gate, unlocked the lock, and went into the kennel. He dumped the dry dog food into one trough and filled the other with water from the hose. Nick watched him carefully as Nora ate.
“Kind of boring in here in the cage, big guy? It would be more fun out there running around in the jungle, wouldn’t it?”
Nick’s eyes were a yellow gold.
“Well, at least you got your buddy here with you.”
Nick finally nodded and bent his head down to eat.
Apelu left them eating, locked them in. The song that finally arrived in his head was not a very cheerful one, and he tried to push it away, but couldn’t, something by Simon and Garfunkel, but he couldn’t remember the words just the melody, slow and sad, then the bridge bringing it back.
The road out from Piapiatele, after you got to the macadam, took a curving detour around the landing end of the airport’s main runway. From the slight rise of the road you could look over the barbed-wire-topped security fence at the palangi-precise lines of landing lights—amber and red then green and white—stretching out toward a mutual vanishing point a mile away. Apelu stopped there, off the downside of the road, as he often did when passing this spot, especially at night like this, the runway lights making all that surrounded them darker. Their bold insistence upon how correct they must be was like a jeweled gauntlet thrown down across the natural chaos through which they sliced. What at his birth had been jungle and reef was now an electrified statement visible to satellites. Not that he yearned for those old days back—he didn’t—but surely all this was too quick, too much a challenge for a people who welcomed change, but only in the time frame of a grandchild or two. It was still a shock to him—an alien landing strip, an enemy i
nstallation.
No planes landed while Apelu sat there. At one point the lights at the distant end of the runway disappeared in rain then reappeared. He hiked on in the dark, shoulders slumped, baseball cap down over his eyes. When headlights came from behind him he walked as far off the roadway as he could. When they came toward him he ducked his face away from them until they swept past, leaving a darker blackness behind them. It was only another two miles or less to the VA Hall in Tafuna. There were no other pedestrians.
The bingo game at the VA was the biggest one on-island on Thursday nights, and the parked cars and pickups overflowed the hall’s parking lot along the road and into an adjacent field. From the outer edge of the parked vehicles Apelu could hear the announcer calling out the numbers in Samoan over the PA system, “B-sefulu.” It took him about fifteen minutes to find his wife’s pickup near the far edge of the unlit field. He stretched out in the bed of the truck on his back, looking up at the stars. There was an old Samoan superstition that if you lie on your back beneath the open sky it would bring rain, but there was hardly a cloud in the sky now. The moon wasn’t up yet. The stars were bright, the Milky Way, `avina, like a brush slap of whitewash across the sky, swooping, irregularly graceful—the opposite of the runway lights. After a while, listening to the repetitive drone of the bingo numbers being called out, he drifted off to an uneasy sleep, dreams of cars speeding away.
The sound of the truck door opening woke him up. He laid still and listened. There was just the one door, no voices, so Sina was alone.
“Sina,” he said without sitting up. “Sina, it’s me, Apelu.”
“Pelu? That is you. Why are you hiding? Where have you been?”
Apelu sat up. “I wasn’t hiding. I was resting. How are you, Sina? How are the kids?”
“We’re all fine, if feeling a bit deserted. Your captain brought your paycheck to my office on Tuesday after you didn’t pick it up. He asked about you again. Are you okay? Why haven’t you been home? Where are you staying?”
“I’m all right, and I have as many questions as you do about what’s going on, but not many answers yet.”
