Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  “As far as Max goes, I could show you the logs,” Malo said. “Excessive speed, controlled substances, DUI, vagrancy, loitering.” Malo folded his hands and placed them on his blotter. “But so what?”

  “The charges were dropped—all of them?” Olive said.

  “On my orders.”

  “I’m sure you had a reason.”

  “I had a lot of reasons,” Malo said.

  He pulled out a drawer in his desk and pawed the objects inside with the wide rake of his thick fingers, finally alighting on a disk encased in a square of plastic. Rising from his desk with a grunt, he crossed the room to a DVD player and fed the disk into the slot with one hand, then manipulated a remote control the size of a candy bar with the other hand.

  “Show you something,” he said as the monitor brightened. Without any prologue or narration the exterior of a church with a pencil-point steeple flickered into view, buttery in sunshine. “Central Union Church,” Malo said. “Most holiest church on O‘ahu.”

  Men wearing aloha shirts and women in colorful dresses, carrying garlands of flowers, walked among the royal palms, hundreds of them in a procession, filing into the church. Mingling among the bright shirts were police officers in blue uniforms and white gloves, many of them with armloads of blossoms.

  “Some kind of service,” Olive said.

  Malo shushed her, and as he did so the interior of the church filled the screen, white pillars lining the sides, an altar decked in flowers, and a clergyman, decorous in a white surplice trimmed with lace, standing before the congregation, holding what had to be a Bible.

  A dark bare-chested man wearing a crown of flowers approached the altar rail, a red cloak knotted on one shoulder and billowing across his body as though he were wrapped in a flag. He carried a wooden staff, which he raised to silence the congregation. In a clear piercing voice he began crying out in his own language, a lilting litany that echoed in the church, that at some moments sounded like praise and at others like a sustained and lyrical denunciation.

  “Oli mahalo—the chant for thanks,” Malo said. “Hawaiian kine.”

  When the man’s cries died down, a hymn sung by an unseen choir began. The camera angle was positioned from the choir loft, the church spread out below. While the hymn continued, a procession made its way down the central aisle: a priest with a tall gold cross, altar boys holding candles, and following them an elaborate casket, part of it draped in silk and stitched with orchids, purple and white.

  “Please be seated,” the priest with the cross said, facing the congregation and standing a little apart from the priest clutching the Bible.

  To the rattle and thump of seats and kneelers, Malo said, “Church was packed. Standing room only.”

  “We gather here to celebrate the life of Daisy Lokelani Hino,” the priest said.

  As he spoke, the camera tracked among the pews, going closer, finding grieving face after grieving face—more women than men, and the women looked especially stricken. They were lovely women, masked in sadness, most of them young, Hawaiian or Asian, some of them Black, all in vibrant feathery dresses, weeping as the priest spoke of the life of the woman in the casket.

  “Lokelani means heavenly rose,” he said. “The thorns of a rose remind us of Christ’s suffering at the hands of the soldiers at his crucifixion. The rose itself tells us about hope and resurrection in the eternity of heaven.”

  Raising his voice, he spoke of love, of forgiveness, of Christ’s compassion—of Mary Magdalene; and he told the story of the woman with the alabaster jar who wept before Christ, her tears falling on his feet, how she wiped them away with her sweet-smelling hair and covered his feet with kisses and then massaged them with the ointment from her jar. Pausing between elements in the story, which was tinged with sensuality, he invoked the name of Daisy Lokelani Hino, using it as a sort of chorus, until it seemed she too was a biblical character, another follower of Christ.

  Praying in Hawaiian—“She will hear us, it is her mother tongue”—the priest urged the mourners to understand her immortal soul and to consider that she was not dead, that she lived in the arms of God, that her spirit dwelled within the hearts of everyone present, to guide them.

  “Grief is holy,” he intoned. “Lokelani is not dead. She is showing us the way to salvation.”

  And so for the next half-hour Deputy Chief Malo sat before the monitor, absorbed in the funeral service, as alert as though he were seeing it for the first time. At intervals, covertly, he pressed his fists to his eyes, and when he took them away his eyes were puffy and reddened with tears.

  Moved by the display of mourning and by the sweetness of the hymns, the harmonies echoing in the church, Olive took Sharkey’s hand. It was cold, as lifeless as a slab of meat, and yet he was attentive, watching closely the progress of the service.

  As the organ swelled, cascades of urgent chords drowning the choir, the pallbearers guided the casket down the aisle, the mourners nearby in the pews reaching out to graze it with their fingers or place a flower on it, as though caressing the body inside.

  The last vivid shot was not of the casket or the church; the camera veered and swung to capture a tight shot of a young man with a deeply tanned face and tousled blond hair, standing half in shadow, staring sadly in the direction the casket had gone.

  “That’s Max.”

  Malo aimed the clicker, froze the moment—the handsome man in profile—then switched off the machine, and the screen went black.

  Olive said, “That was quite a funeral.”

  “Like royalty,” Malo said. “Like when Bruddah Iz pass. Cost tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands. All those flowers. All that music. The band.”

  “Who was she?” Olive said. “Someone special, I imagine.”

  Malo hesitated, perhaps for the drama of the pause, and he lingered a bit longer, but when in the stillness he had their attention, he spoke with grave solemnity.

  “A prostitute,” he said. “Sex worker. Wahine got murdered.”

  In spite of herself, Olive groaned, then swallowed and went silent. Sharkey emitted an involuntary cluck, a twig-snap on his tongue, like punctuation.

  “Was a big event—was historic,” Malo said. “Everyone in Honolulu knew about it. Was in the Star-Bulletin and the Advertiser. Big stories and pictures. The wahine had no family, just those popolo hookers and sex workers you see in the church. Wahine had no money. Body was unclaimed. The papers wrote about that, how that big funeral happened with mystery money. What people didn’t know was that Max Mulgrave, when he found out the body was unclaimed at the morgue, he paid for the whole thing. Was a whole bunch of money—the flowers, the choir, the musicians, some big-name Hawaiian performers, like Don Ho and Danny Kaleikini and the Makaha Sons of Niihau. You seen them, no? The Hawaiian kahu chanting, the hearse, the headstone, and afterward big luau at Paradise Cove, with hula, and they imu a bunch of pigs. Hey, the whole nine yards.”

  “Murdered,” Sharkey said. “Did they catch the guy?”

  “Max involved in that big-time,” Malo said. “Was a guy with a Taser. Tased half a dozen Waikiki hookers in hotel rooms, then raped and robbed them. They injured bad but they survived. One was from HPD, a decoy cop, policewoman plain clothes, Officer Ah Wong. She get heart trouble from the electric shock of the Taser.”

  “Cardiac arrhythmia,” Olive said. “A stun gun sometimes captures the heartbeat and causes ventricular tachycardia.”

  “You got it, sister. Officer Ah Wong had to quit the force and retire on disability. Daisy Hino not so lucky. She get tased and go into cardiac arrest. Then a coma for weeks. Finally they take her off life support.”

  Olive said, “So who was the guy with the Taser?”

  “The murderer,” Malo said, widening his eyes, in a voice of correction, “was one haole college professor. No joke. Leading a double life—classroom life and low-life. He thinks he can get away with it, because, hey, who cares about hookers? Plus the perp had good cover—who’s gonna look
in a college for a haole murder suspect?”

  “But you caught him,” Olive said.

  “Because we got one tip. A lady ID’d his car. We trace the car to the college, over Windward Side. Max gave us the technology to track him. This was early days of GPS—testing stage. But Max had friends in the business, because he’s a tech guy. We followed the guy’s every movement without him knowing, and one night—maybe two a.m.—we bust him. He’s with a hooker, he got a Taser, he’s ready to pounce, but we pounce first. All those ladies you see at the funeral? Three or four of them testify against him. He have a good lawyer with a bullshit story of how he carry a Taser for protection. But we have something special in our favor.”

  He smiled and paused, as though to encourage Olive to ask what the special advantage was. She glanced at Sharkey, who was slumped in his chair but facing the TV monitor as though replaying the elaborate funeral in his memory, like a glittering succession of afterimages.

  “So what did you have in your favor?” Olive said.

  “Money,” Malo said, savoring his reply. “Big money. Money for lawyers, money for Officer Ah Wong’s medical bills, money for the force to upgrade our surveillance.” He smiled again. “Max’s money.”

  “When did all this take place—the arrest, the trial, the funeral?”

  “Early on, when Max was one malihini in Wai‘anae. But we never forget it. He stay in our good books, like a hero. He tattoo her name on his arm—Chinese kine.”

  “Do you know anything about Max’s ex-wife?”

  “She threaten come stalking him. That’s why he applied for a handgun license, because she verbalizing threats. He took out a TRO—we have her contact address. My secretary, Mable, has all those details, but it could be out-of-date. Was long time ago.”

  Snatching and straightening papers on his desk, Malo made a show of being busy, ignoring Sharkey and Olive, and then, when they displayed signs of leaving, Sharkey stretching, Olive groping in her bag for her car keys, Malo got up and went to the door of his office and opened it.

  “Amazing story, eh?” he said. “Like a legend. Max Mulgrave legend. Okay, gotta get back to work, folks.”

  Olive was still sitting, though, with her keys in her hand, stilled by a struggle with logic, too preoccupied to stand up.

  “I’m bothered by one thing,” she said as she tugged at the arms of her chair and got to her feet. “If you never convicted Max Mulgrave for his DUIs or drug possession or vagrancy or all the other mentions in the logs . . .”

  She swayed slightly, unsure of how to finish her sentence.

  “Yeah, so what?” Malo said, as though anticipating an accusation.

  “Maybe you contributed to his downfall,” Olive said. “Maybe you could have saved him.”

  “Maybe you could have saved him,” Malo said, and now he was staring stony-faced at Sharkey. “But instead you killed him.”

  11

  Smack

  The rain had stopped; the land swelled with sunlight, alive now, limpid, dripping in the soft late-afternoon glow, a fattening rainbow arched in the cloudless sky over Hale‘iwa, its luminous stripes textured like tissue, or threadbare cloth spun across the town. Olive was at the wheel, Sharkey fixed in one of his silences, as they drove along the soaked and blackened bypass road, the big trees sparkling, their boughs still wet, the tall grass sodden, glistening from the purification of the downpour, the day washed clean.

  And then a sudden ugliness. “The camp,” Olive said as they passed the tulip tree and the break in the roadside fence. “I don’t have the strength to face those people today.” She answered herself, as she often did these days, because Sharkey seemed numb and deaf. “Maybe some other time.”

  But Sharkey was alert at the surf breaks. At Lani’s and Chun’s, and later at Leftovers and Alligators, he marveled at the storm-driven waves, ragged from the aftermath of the rain. The day was serene, but the chop still churned, an effect of the westerly that had dragged over the sea.

  A solitary figure appeared at Waimea, and his darkness got Sharkey’s attention as they rounded the bay—a man, his back turned, but familiar, plodding down the bluff of sand to where it shelved and was undercut by the shore break. The man wore shorts but did not carry a board, nor did he hesitate to dip his toe first but walked into the low wall of surf and stepped into the sea and vanished as though into a hole.

  Sharkey mouthed the words, “Gone under.”

  At home Olive was talkative, seeming to reassure herself, her characteristic and chatty back-and-forth, the way she muttered when she was alone, thinking out loud, more slangy and British when she talked to herself—“Mustn’t grumble . . . Cuppa tea would do me a power of good . . . Get cracking”—all of it unintelligible to Sharkey.

  She said, “That Chinese character tattooed on his arm that we couldn’t fathom—it was her name.”

  The storm was still swirling in Sharkey’s head, the surf like wild applause. He was silent, but he was not calm; his brain was frenzied, needing relief, rehearsing the mute panic of being underwater, tumbled and struggling, caught beneath a wave. But instead of fearing it he saw it as a form of rescue—an answer, a painkiller.

  “Maybe tomorrow, crack of dawn,” Olive said, still quizzing herself over the homeless camp. “Start as we mean to go on.”

  The idea filled Sharkey with dread, the uncertainty of “maybe,” the horror of “tomorrow.” He felt punished by time; he wanted no more days of pain.

  “I’m sure you’re as knackered as I am,” Olive said, speaking on his behalf, because he was lying on the bed, the last of the daylight dimming on his face, decaying to a shadow passing over his eyes. He had not spoken aloud since the police station, his “Gone under” had not been audible. But he was awake—more than awake, his body buzzed with anticipation.

  And when, stimulated by his sleeplessness—Olive asleep and turned away and lightly snoring—he slid from the bed, left the house, and started down the hill.

  Sometime in the night, in the twitch of a dream, yawning and rolling over, Olive threw her arm beside her and was woken when it flopped against the emptiness of the bed, her arm unexpectedly loosened by a missing body.

  “Joe?”

  The silence clarified her mind. She called again, dressed and quickly looked from room to room, and then dashed to the lanai, where Sharkey often sat, his legs extended, when he could not sleep. There she saw his phone on the side table. She picked it up, thinking, If he left it behind, he’s not coming back—finding something reckless and final in his leaving it, like abandonment.

  On an impulse, because it was late, because he was forgiving and mellow and she easily found his name on the phone, she called Moe Kahiko.

  “Yah.” His voice was phlegmy, clotted with sleep.

  “It’s Olive from down the road—I can’t find Joe. Will you help me look for him?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Two, or nearabout.”

  “Where he stay?”

  Waiting for his laborious sighlike yawn, like a groan, to cease, she paused, then said, “I don’t know. Moe, that’s why I’m asking you.”

  “Give me a minute. I put some clothes on and pick you up.”

  Two-twenty by her watch as she slid the gate open; a moony night of stillness, the only sound the drone of surf from down the hill at Waimea, audible confusion, strangely mechanical but out of sync, like the stammer of a pump misfiring, a sequence of interrupted thumps, the waves.

  The lights of Moe’s pickup truck entered the gateway, and she ran to the vehicle, the sound of the surf immediate in her consciousness. She said, “Let’s try the beach.”

  “It come up big, the surf today night.”

  She remembered her chuntering monologue, how Sharkey had said nothing, made no reply even to direct questions; how he had looked past her at the storm surf as they’d rounded the bay.

  They were down the hill in minutes, the road silvered by the moon, and Moe ran the red light at Foodland, passing Rubber
Duckies and Three Tables and then the overlook above the lava rocks of the bay. Olive strained to see Sharkey. That the beach was empty, the sand whitened by moonglow, did not reassure her. She thought, We’re too late—he’s gone.

  Moe pulled into the parking lot, close by the changing rooms, where another car was parked aslant on the grass verge. Two people were visible inside, smoke trailing from a cracked-open side window, the mildewed aroma of smoldering pakalolo.

  “Ask them if they saw him,” Olive called out.

  But failing to get their attention by rapping on the car window, Moe pulled the door open. The man at the wheel said, “You a cop?” The woman beside him ducked, hiding her face.

  “Looking for my braddah,” Moe said.

  The man grunted and switched on his headlights, illuminating the beach, and at the ledge, in the slosh of the shore break, Sharkey stood facing the bay in water to his knees.

  “Joe!”

  Hearing his name, Sharkey plunged into the waves. He did not swim. He thrashed and fought the water, as though attempting to sink himself under a wave.

  Moe sprinted to him and caught one of his flailing arms, while Sharkey protested, trying to yank his arm free, hitting Moe with his other arm.

  “What you doing, you lolo?”

  Olive approached, sinking in the wet sand, howling with a force that startled Sharkey, stalling him; and he surrendered to Moe’s embrace, looking defeated and ashamed as he was led to the car.

  At the house Moe helped him through the door to his bed, Sharkey stumbling, and held him while Olive sedated him with two capsules, urging him to drink from the glass she tipped to his lips.

  “What kine meds?” Moe said.

  “Xanax.”

  “We like snort it.” He allowed himself a cluck of recognition.

  “He’ll be okay in the morning.”

  Moe said, “He just flipped out.”

  “Maybe he was afraid. We’re supposed to visit that homeless camp on the bypass road.”

  “Kimo’s ohana,” Moe said.

  “You know them?”