“Keep up the good work, Adrian.”
“So this evening is okay?”
“This evening is terrific.” I could start my phone calls this afternoon.
“Give me the name of the schools and the professor. If you have the years it would make it simpler, but I really don’t need it.”
“I’ve got everything.” I read him the list of schools and the years in question and spelled the professor’s name slowly, making Adrian repeat it twice. No sense running the search more than once.
“I’ll tell Claire you called. Are you going to her wedding?”
“I wasn’t invited.”
“Do you want me to tell Claire that you called?”
“It’s okay with me. Who is she marrying?”
“You don’t know him. I don’t think. He’s her new lawyer. This one’s a good one. I think.”
If I knew Claire, he would have to be a guy who would obediently march to her tune. She would keep him on a short leash. But I didn’t say any of that to Adrian. He knew it better than I did.
“She ever come in anymore?”
“Hardly ever. No reason to. I’m running the store.”
“Don’t be so modest.”
“Yeah, well.” There was a moment of silence, an uncomfortable lapse when we both ran out of things to say. “Can I e-mail that to you?” he asked, finally.
“Sure. You’ve got my address?”
“I set up the account.”
“Oh.” I had forgotten that. Adrian had also given me my first lesson in computers. I used my laptop for many things now, searching for obscure information that could never have been found without the Net. I would not have had the time. “I appreciate this, Adrian.”
“My pleasure, John. If you’ll excuse me.”
“Sure. Take care.”
“Call me anytime.”
We both hung up.
“He’ll have that list by this evening,” I told Felix.
“What?” He leaned against his forearms, watching a pale sun slowly descend over Ford Island. The vog, or volcanic smog, was thick with the sulfur from Kileaua, the young volcano going through a particularly active phase. Spectacular sunsets were the result of all that natural pollution. But could it be pollution if it was natural?
“Nothing. Why don’t you take some time off and go to Waikiki tonight? I’ll be all right. Busy, in fact. I’m not going anywhere.”
“You noticed?”
“Noticed what?”
“That I’m restless?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Only if you’re sure you’re okay.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m supposed to be your shadow.”
“Just don’t get in trouble.”
“No trouble. Not me. Not Felix.” He smiled a grim little smile and got up and climbed down the ladder to the lounge, a young man living his life a day at a time, without roots, without a partner, and without a feeling of where his life should be going. In many ways he reminded me of me.
He reminded me of me except he was much, much younger. A man my age should have grown out of this by now, should have settled down decades ago, should have had children, should be concerned for their college education, all of it. Somehow I had missed all that, the American dream. Now I was incapable of it. It would be laughable to try. While I had been otherwise occupied the chances had flown by.
I couldn’t be happier.
I waited in the cockpit until Felix returned, dressed for the city. He said nothing, but held up the Jeep’s keys. I nodded as he leaped over the side and jogged up to the parking lot of the Marina Restaurant, happy once again to be on his own.
When he was gone I felt a heaviness pass. I no longer needed a companion or a bodyguard, or whatever the hell he was. Chawlie’s gift now weighed on me. I would tell him the next time I saw him. I would thank him profusely, and I would tell him that I was feeling fairly good. I could even jog a little. I could not swim until all the wounds and the incisions completely healed, but I generally felt okay. And I would then ask Chawlie to send the boy home. Have him join the little nurses as a pleasant part of my life that was no more.
More than ever I was now a solitary man.
I headed down the ladder to the lounge to fire up my new computer and see if I had any e-mail.
I had an assignment. It wasn’t much of one, but it was something. It would keep my mind busy for a few days.
Just what I needed.
15
True to his word, Adrian e-mailed me the list by three o’clock Hawaii time, early evening California time. When I downloaded and printed the document I found a stack of thirty-two single-spaced pages in the Deskjet and another search on my plate. When I had asked Adrian to run a search I had neglected to ask him to update the former students’ current addresses. I attacked the list and had updated phone numbers for half of the first page by dinnertime. I brewed myself a pot of Blue Mountain, made a tall sandwich of fresh turkey, pepper cheese and jalapeños, and perfected my search techniques. By the time Felix came wandering in at two in the morning I had covered five pages.
“Still up? You waiting for me?” Felix yawned and covered his mouth with the back of his sleeve. His clothes smelled of smoke.
“I can make you some hot cocoa.”
Felix put his crossed fingers in front of him and made a face. “No. Thank. You.”
“You have fun?”
“Danced. Danced again. Danced some more.”
“Your legs must be tired.”
“You really want to know the details?”
“Not really.”
“I drank grapefruit juice all night.”
“Better eat some yogurt. Balance out all that acid.”
“Thanks, Mom.” He looked over my shoulder at the screen. “What are you doing?”
“Detecting.”
“The easy way.”
“Doesn’t seem so easy.” I explained what I was doing. He listened intently, then had some suggestions. I tried his ideas and found that he had cut my search time by a factor of five.
“Leave it to you Xers,” I said, logging off and shutting down.
“This help?”
“A lot. Thanks.”
“No problem,” he said, yawning. “Where’s David?”
“Asleep. Long time. He went to the movies, then came home and crashed.”
“He no help?”
“I didn’t think to ask.”
“He’s a scholar. And a propeller-head Xer. Why not?”
I shrugged. “Got a brain freeze, I guess.” Truthfully, I had hardly noticed the young man when he returned, so absorbed was I in my task.
“You’re tired. Go to bed.” Felix shook a finger at me.
I smiled, “Thanks, Mom.”
I went to my stateroom, undressed, showered carefully, mindful of keeping water away from my wounds, and crawled under the percale. I lay on my back, staring at the bulkhead above, my mind energized by its efforts, refusing to shut down.
It was a daunting task I had started. I could see hundreds of hours expended just to find the single lead. And I didn’t know what I looked for. I only had an idea that this Hayes who would steal one student’s work would have done it before. He would have been successful. So I looked for a bitter or angry scholar, one who would remember the professor.
There was an unspecified time in which to accomplish the task, too. Kimo said he would call when Tutu Mae secured the appointment, but he didn’t know when.
I hoped I had a month. But then I didn’t. The thought of spending a month in the communications cabin, on the phone in front of a computer screen did not thrill me.
But it was the job I had agreed to do, and it kept me busy. On my okole, and indoors, wasting the beautiful summer weather, but busy.
I turned over and buried my face in the pillow, trying to sleep, trying not to think, reaching for oblivion.
“They’re coming!”
“They’re in the wire!”
“I
n the wire!”
“The wire!”
“We’re overrun!”
The dream again. All the horror again, the shots, the blood, the killing.
A man carrying a long rifle with a sword-like bayonet comes running at me. I turn to face him.
Only a few feet away, the sharp steel point lunges at my chest.
I pull the trigger.
It snaps on an empty chamber.
I look up into the man’s face.
He stares back at me, his almond eyes round with hatred.
I sat up in the darkness, my chest heaving, my heart pounding. Somewhere off in the distance I heard the sound of a car radio playing rap, the angry bass sounds dwindling until they no longer intruded.
“Shit,” I muttered, unsure if I had actually screamed the scream I had remembered in the dream. When nothing stirred I lay back and concentrated on finding my center.
A memory of a particularly bad day, the dream marked the moment when my terror went past the stage where it meant anything to me anymore. I was never again frightened of death. It had come to visit and had gone away, but it had left its imprint on my psyche.
Weak as I was, I found no fear in me. Wounds heal. Bodies mend. There were few predators who walked the earth that could make me bend. I would not allow myself to be frightened by what lay before me. Nothing the state could do, and nothing the denizens of any prison could do, could break me.
Nice try. Good pep talk.
Now all I had to do was believe it.
I turned over and allowed the gentle rocking of the hull to lull me back to sleep, a stranger in an even stranger land.
16
Howard Hayes was a big man with a wheatshock of thick white hair that stood straight up from the top of his head and then fled in every direction. Costumed in dark brown tweeds and a red bow tie in his harshly air-conditioned office, he looked the part of the university professor so well I knew it had to be calculated. Nobody ever wore tweed in Hawaii. Not even the missionaries.
He also wore a superior, knowing smile as he ushered us into his office, a comfortable dark cave at the top floor of the faculty building, an office with heavy oak furniture that might have fit at Cambridge. There weren’t enough chairs, so Kimo and I stood against the back wall, leaving the seats for Donna and Tutu Mae and Tala Sufai, Donna’s attorney. Tala was a big Samoan woman, almost as big as Kimo, and nearly as strong. And maybe smarter than anybody in the room except Tutu Mae.
“Would you care for coffee?” asked Hayes pleasantly, as if he had no idea why we had suddenly descended upon him.
“No.” Tutu Mae’s answer was abrupt.
“How about the others?”
“Sit down,” she said. “We’re here to talk, not make house.”
Hayes raised his eyebrows and looked at Kimo and me, as if expecting a rational explanation from the males in the group. Kimo and I stared back. Hayes’s eyebrows, so bushy and so clearly intellectual I wondered if he’d had implants, worked up and down his forehead as if he thought great thoughts, then he sadly stared down at his desk for a moment and sat down heavily behind it.
His chair creaked under the weight of all that ponderous consideration.
“We are here because of the situation that has developed between you and Ms. Wong.” Tala Sufai spoke first, her demeanor crisp, letting him know we were here on serious business, as if Donna Wong and her entourage had not already telegraphed the intent.
Hayes picked up a pair of reading glasses and fixed them to the bridge of his nose. “A situation? Miss Wong is my student.”
“You are the adviser for her doctoral, excuse me, her double doctoral degree.”
“That is correct.”
“She has made a discovery, an important discovery, that you seem to have taken as your own.”
He looked at Donna, those eyebrows raised nearly to his hairline. “Miss Wong, what have you told these people?”
“Do you know who I am?” Tutu Mae said.
“Of course.” Hayes became cautious. He knew how much Tutu Mae meant to the university. And how much power she actually wielded. Living legends have a way of getting what they wanted. Hayes must have known that because he became instantly wary.
“Ms. Wong has been working with me since before the beginning. I have been helpful to her in many ways. She confided in me before she told you about the find.”
Hayes smiled thinly.
“Now you seem to have forgotten about her contributions. We understand that you intend to publish a paper about the discovery.”
“Now wait a minute—”
“Let me finish. You did not discover the site, Donna did. You did not do the primary research, Donna did. You merely advised her, although, if one were to look into it one would find that you did not advise her as much as I did. You did agree, however, to keep this discovery secret. And now, from what we hear, you intend to publish Donna’s findings without regard to that promise, and without proper attribution to the actual discoverer.”
“I assure you—”
“I’m not done. Rumors are circulating among Hawaiian rights groups that you have found a tremendous amount of Spanish treasure here in the Islands. That alone would prove contact prior to Cook and would make the discoverer famous. Donna has not told anyone. Her sisters, who are the only other people in the world who know the facts, have not said anything. That leaves you. And we understand that you intend to publish the findings. And that you would be the sole recipient of the honors. Is that correct?”
“Madam, I am not accustomed to having people barge in on me in my office and make accusations—”
“We didn’t barge, we had an appointment. And we’re not making accusations that you haven’t heard before.” She looked at me.
I pulled out my notebook and quickly reviewed the notes I had taken over the past week, the results of interviews I had pulled up from the database that Adrian had run for me. With his help I had no trouble locating a number of previous victims of the professor’s duplicity. “Do you know the name Jim Maurer?” I asked.
“No.”
“You should remember him. Nice fellow. Quite bright. Some people say brilliant. One of your students about five years ago. He teaches now at the University of Virginia. He remembers you. Very well, in fact. He claims that you took one of his papers and published it as your own.”
Hayes shook his head. “That’s ridiculous!”
“How about Alan Patricio?”
“Never heard the name!”
“Funny, he made a stink here at the university some years back. Same charge. Something about Polynesian migration traced through DNA. Mr. Patricio’s work made some huge gains in the theory, from what I’ve heard. And you published the paper as your own. There was a hearing.”
“I was exonerated.”
“So you do remember?”
“There was nothing to the charges. They were baseless!”
“But you recall his being your student. You once called him the best student you ever had?”
“Yes. He was brilliant, but he didn’t know—”
“How about Barbara Perez? That name ring a bell?”
“Barbara who?”
“Another student of yours. She made the same claim when you taught at Washington State, working with Native Americans. You were her adviser at the time when she dug into ancient mud-flows along riverbed locations looking for evidence of tribal civilizations that were wiped out by volcanic eruptions. She made a wonderful discovery, an entire river village in situ. You published her work as your own. The resulting attention and publicity got you your place here in Hawaii at this university. You don’t remember Barbara Perez?”
“I don’t see how all this applies …” His voice trailed off and he placed his hands on his temples and squeezed his eyes shut, his eyebrows bunching up into one continuous line behind the narrow lenses of his reading glasses. We watched him in silence while he pulled himself together.
“Professor Hayes?” D
onna Wong spoke, her voice quiet. When he did not respond she repeated his name.
He raised his head and looked at her. “Yes, Miss Wong?”
“We had an agreement.”
He continued staring at her but said nothing.
“I don’t care that much about my doctorate. Oh, that’s not true. I do care, it’s been a lot of work, but it’s nothing compared to the importance of what is out there. You, yourself, said that this was the most important archeological find in the history of these islands. Tutu Mae agrees, and speaking as kupuna, she agreed to let me study it as long as it was not disturbed, and as long as the location is never revealed. If you publish the Spanish connection, people will not look beyond the existence of the treasure. They will not understand how important it is that the Spanish had been here before the British, or their possible influence on the Hawaiian culture. They will only seek the treasure. Nothing else will matter.”
“You think I would do that?”
“That is what I have heard. Is it true? You know there is more work to be done at the site before we’re finished. We have to go back. If you publish now, the site will be exposed. It will be a secret no longer. And we will not be able to finish our work.”
Hayes leaned over and peered at her above his reading glasses. “Miss Wong,” he said, his voice heavy with the pedantic tone of a man used to lecturing, “I told you we do not own the work. It does not belong to us any more than the earth belongs to us. This is science. We must publish. It is our duty to let the world know what we have found. We—”
“Professor Hayes.”
He looked away from Donna, startled by Tala’s interruption.
“We are prepared to file a lawsuit and get an injunction against whoever agrees to distribute your paper. We are prepared to take the case to the chancellor if you will not stop publication immediately. We will use Tutu Mae as Ms. Wong’s expert witness, and use field notes against you. I believe that when we prove our case you will lose your tenure and your job.”
The man smiled a nasty smile. “Threats,” he said.
“I can assure you that these are not idle, Mr. Hayes. I have the papers ready to file. It all depends on your cooperation.”
Silversword Page 11