“Yes, sir.” Han watched Ioane slither down the trash pile. There had been no irony in the reply: orders received.
Han looked out across the clearing. What made the place feel odd was that it was flat. Not only flat but with no sense of a mountain right behind you or a cliff at your feet. There just isn’t that much of Samoa that’s not going damn near straight up or straight down. And those few places that are flat are used pretty intensively. So this feeling of profound privacy couldn’t extend very far in any direction.
He couldn’t see any other obvious ingress. The undulating, rocky terrain was overgrown with every bit of crawling and climbing greenery imaginable. At the edges of the clearing, the plaited screen of plant life was a wall. At a distance, Han heard the low roar of engines. In the States, that would be the rumble of a highway. Here, and given the direction, probably the airport. Daily flights were inter-island carriers, with just the two weekly flights to Honolulu. In American terms, the airport was right next door. Here, it was the other side of the world. That was, Han thought, the problem. To leave a body in this dump, you needed a team. A community. Or the American equivalent of community, a car.
CHAPTER 5
Ioane Ioane padded nervously up the track toward the loop road. He wished he had someone with him, but he had no sense of what he was allowed beyond the letter of Han’s orders, to the extent that he understood them. And no one would have come with him except by Han’s order. Han confused and frightened and fascinated him. He had never known anyone like the Lieutenant. At times, he was not quite human. Not insectile, like the tuna-boat Koreans that he superficially resembled, nor like whites, palagis, like pigs, snorting and grunting through situations with no sensibility to the web of human relationships and obligations around them. More like a very senior chief: hyper-aware, like a talking chief, of his surroundings, but not calculating, more remote, disengaged from village passions, like the ideal high chief. But you couldn’t trust him to stay put, waiting for things to come to him, as all things must to a high chief. He would turn up in the middle of what he had told you to do, like a ghost or a demon, asking questions, poking at things: no dignity at all, like a mynah or a fish hawk, unrepentantly disruptive. And never punished. Ioane’s great aunt, with whom Ioane lived, who had been a nurse forever and who knew everything, told Ioane not to be a fool. Man, ghost, or demon; it doesn’t matter. He’s a chief. That’s all you need to know. The interpretation helped Ioane get from day to day, but it didn’t feel like the whole answer.
He couldn’t see nor hear the working party back at the dump. The forest pressed around him. The feeling was evil. He could hardly breathe, as if ghosts were sitting on his chest. He thought about Han again. No: the thing about the Lieutenant was that he got away with his behavior. Even with their chief, who was not just Chief of Police but arguably the most important traditional chief in both Samoas. And Ioane really wanted to know how he did it.
The track came out onto the paved loop road in line with its mountains-to-sea axis, just where the loop road made a right angle turn to Ioane’s right, toward the airport. In either direction, Ioane could see places where the trees thinned slightly, suggesting homesteads. He couldn’t imagine a Samoan community like this, strung along a road, one house or group of houses invisible from the next, no community center, no village green, no view of the sea. He shuddered, looking up and down the road and wondered if he had the guts for this. But it would take more guts to go back and tell Han that he couldn’t do the job. So he crossed the road toward the only homestead he could actually see from here.
The trees opened suddenly as he approached, almost as if they had stepped aside. The house in the clearing was palagi-style: up on stilts, balcony all around, walls mostly glass louvers, rusty tin roof. The floor was up high enough to provide a cover for an old sedan and the government’s Bobcat, so presumably this was the caretaker’s house. At least the family graves beside the house were tidy, the concrete sarcophagi crisp and freshly painted: pink, yellow, blue. The well cared-for dead were contented dead and caused far less trouble than the neglected. Thinking of the body in the dump, he shuddered again. Behind the house was a small traditional house. That would be the women’s weaving house, probably doubling, in this stripped-down homestead, as guest house and family consultation space. Behind it, the forest had been thinned back even farther, allowing for two straggling taro patches. But the place seemed deserted: no women weaving pandanus or stringing flowers and gossiping in the weaving house; no boys out in the taro patch, no children running around, not even any chickens working the front lawn.
Broadcast sounds, a radio, or maybe a TV, came from the open mid-section of the house. It wasn’t immediately obvious how people got up there. Then he saw a ladder in under the house that must come from a trap door in the floor. Ioane came from the far eastern end of the island. Or at least had been raised there. In a very traditional village. Where people did things correctly. This was the creepiest house, if you could call it a house, Ioane had ever seen. It went along with the village that wasn’t a village. A shadow crossed behind one louvered wall, and Ioane wondered if a person was going to appear in the open doorway or a ghost.
But the figure who appeared seemed ordinary enough: a stocky, middle-aged male with a slightly rolling swagger to his walk, wrapped in a lavalava the unisex Samoan kilt, but tailored, with a waistband and pockets. The stance, the body shape, and the government’s Bobcat under the house strongly suggested that, as
Ioane had told Han, the man held at least one chiefly title. The man returned his greeting but did not come down.
“Best greetings, your honor.” Ioane almost choked on the your honor. But his great aunt had raised him well. He knew how to use the chiefly language of respect: better to inflate initially than to inadvertently undercut. Like playing poker. The thought was sudden, frightening, like an alien voice inside his head. He played poker, of course, guiltily, like the other boys, but never at work and never in a context that could have anything to do with talking to a chief. He suppressed the thought like stomping on a snail.
“You are from the police,” the man said.
“Yes, your honor.” Even as he said the words, he stood up a little straighter in his uniform. Only a handsome man can do a thing well, his great-aunt liked to say. He wasn’t altogether sure how this applied to him, but he was willing to try anything. He lifted his plastic ID card. “I am Ioane Ioane. My chief wishes me to ask you questions about the body of the dead person in the dump.” He carefully avoided specifying just who that chief might be. A slant-eyed palagi was one thing; a paramount chief of Manu’a was another. With luck, this man didn’t know anything about Han and would make the obvious connection regarding the back-up authority of this otherwise essentially nameless young man standing before him. The man’s eyes flicked at Ioane’s ID, but, that high up, he couldn’t have read it.
“Come up,” he said finally. “It will rain again soon.” He said it like a proverb, but if it was, Ioane didn’t get it. Ducking under the house and starting up the ladder, he wondered if it was some kind of threat. As his head came up through the opening in the floor, he half expected to be hit over the head with something.
But the man was courteous, offering Ioane a warm soda and a clean mat to sit on. Despite its very peculiar exterior, the house was ordinary enough inside: a single open space, the glass louvers at either end taking the place of the screens of woven mats in a traditional house that could be let down against driving rain. A small portable TV was running in one sheltered corner. Toilet and shower were under the house, but they hadn’t been in use, and there was no one else up here. Odd. But perhaps the children were at school and the wife also a government employee.
The man settled with another soda. Ioane hated this task. At least he was in the house, but Lieutenant Han would have now begun to ask a series of rude and pre-emptive questions that turned Samoan social expectations on the
ir ear. But seemed to get him what he wanted. Or a handle on who’s lying, said the alien voice. He shivered but suddenly also got lucky. The man said, “Ask what you wish.”
“Thank you, your honor. You found this dead person?” Ioane knew the man hadn’t but couldn’t think how else to begin.
“No. The palagi lady doctor found it.”
“You work at the dump every day?”
“Not Sunday. But most days. Until the hot time of day. But this week there is too much rain, too much storm. One cannot drive to the dump safely, even with the Bobcat. So no rubbish comes any day this week. Today, I can drive the Bobcat to the dump, but I can’t work. It’s a lake.”
The minor typhoon had blown in Sunday night. Ioane began counting on his fingers. “So: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, you did not go there, but also, you saw no other cars go there?” For a moment, he thought that he had been too insistent, had chosen insufficiently polite language. But the man just smiled sourly.
“Nor any boats, neither.”
“Who uses this dump? It’s not a government site.”
The man shrugged “The family. Other families.”
But not, Ioane thought, the other families claiming this land. But he didn’t have the nerve to say that.
“On Saturday, did anyone come?”
The man nodded. “Usual. Same, each week. Each day. Same trucks; same boys.”
“And nothing odd, nothing different. No…disturbance.”
The man shook his head. “No. And I always shift the rubbish around. There was no dead person there on Saturday before I left.”
“At what time please, sir, did you leave?”
The man shrugged. “Mid-day. As always.”
“And no one came to use the dump in the afternoon?”
“They can’t. The chain’s across.”
Ioane remembered the pair of pilings at the entrance to the dump site and kicked himself mentally for having not seen the chain. “What about other cars driving through here later on Saturday? Or Sunday?”
The man was shaking his head. “No cars on Sunday. Everyone is at church.” That wasn’t quite the answer to Ioane’s question, but he understood the meaning: driving was frowned upon and they would have noticed a stranger driving their road.
“And Saturday afternoon? Saturday night? Not in your village, I am sure, but many people behave badly on Saturday night.”
The man’s face became very strange for a moment. As if laugh lines and frown lines had become pick-up-sticks. Finally, he said, “Only if ghosts drive cars.” He spoke as a joke. But his face was still very odd. Han would have asked Why do you say that? But Ioane could not question a chief in that way, uniform or no uniform.
Whatever else that moment was about, Ioane knew that he would get nothing more from the man. He made a few polite inquiries about the extent and structure of the village—who were the other chiefs who should be consulted to avoid giving offense and so forth—but then gave up gratefully and headed back to the dump.
CHAPTER 6
McGee wasn’t at the hospital so Ann went on to Nozaki’s. The penny-economy empire of Samoa’s only Samoan-Japanese family was headquartered on a wide spot in the road between Fagatogo and Pago. The shore road was particularly dangerous through there, narrow, overhung by half-forested lava terraces on the land side and crowded by brush, lava boulders and the bay on the other. The shores of PagoPago Bay don’t offer many lonely places to die, but the few hundred yards from Nozaki’s to Paki’s Bar and Grill and the struggling sub-village perched on the steep slopes above the restaurant, were one of them. In the two years Ann had been in American Samoa, three pedestrians had been killed on that stretch of road. Ann slowed to make the turn onto the strip of sand that served Nozaki’s for parking and wondered that you never heard talk about ghosts there. But then, even ghosts would think twice before tackling Old Lady Nozaki.
Ann parked the jeep and walked around the end of the shack that served as the deli, Laundromat and general store and onto the dock. One tall, lean, bearded, Nordic-looking man was loading supplies into an inflatable dinghy. Another, much the same except that the nose and the beard were redder and the beard had beads braided into it, stood farther down the dock watching one of Old Lady Nozaki’s lovely granddaughters pulling a large case of something along the grubby concrete dock with a sound like fingernails across a blackboard.
Ann looked at the man loading the dinghy. “Dr. McGee?”
The man straightened and overtly examined her attributes, all but visibly ticking down the list: tits, too small; face, oh well; hair, maybe a dyke; fashion sense, zip. But then he smiled. “Call me Wills. Just like the prince.” He stuck out his hand, and Ann shook it. “Comin’ to check out the boat, ay? Neil said you were a sailor.” He nodded toward the Baltic schooner, seventy feet of glowing varnished wood docked off the far end of the L-shaped pier. Ann’s gaze moved quickly to the smaller boats moored out in the cove and stopped on a tidy, cutter-rigged, forty-footer. She was flattered that McGee remembered anything at all about her. So now she had to show off.
“That yours? Never seen one of those here before, but they’re wonderful boats.” McGee’s smile widened, and his eyes considered her again.
“Just on my way out now. Come along, why don’t you?”
Ann came back to now with a sense of physical impact. She shook her head. “Sorry. I was actually sent to get you.” Suddenly, inserting Wills McGee between herself and that rotting corpse at the dump seemed like a really good idea. “There’s been a body found at the dump. The police are there now. Lieutenant Han…he said he met you this morning…asked if you would come and…do the medical examiner bit. I mean, I don’t know how much Neil has told you, but I’m afraid that’s part of the job.”
The other man on the dock, presumably one of the Baltic Schooner’s crew, though she didn’t know them individually, was now gazing openly at Ann and McGee. McGee’s face had gone calm, attentive. It’s the doctor face, Ann thought. We all have it. It’s handed out with the diploma.
“Bugger,” he said. “Found me one already, ay? All right. Just let me secure this stuff.” He fitted a tarp over the dingy and went inside the store.
A family jitney pulled into Nozaki’s lot. Ann watched a young palagi man with a bulky dressing on one hand climb out of the pickup bed. She recognized him; the guy everyone called the Birdman. She and Welly Tuiasosopo had drained an abscess in the man’s hand a couple of days ago. He turned, saw her, hesitated, then glanced away, as if looking for cover. Probably ditched out of the hospital AMA.
But then, as if he hadn’t seen Ann at all, he shouted, “Hey, you!” and strode past her and planted himself in front of the other sailor, who was still out on the dock. “You’ve got an eagle on that boat.” At least that’s what Ann thought he said, though the words didn’t make much sense. The tone didn’t make sense either: flat, pedantic, with a patronizing edge. Just about perfectly calibrated to pick a fight. The sailor stared at him.
“An eagle?” The contrast between the two men was absurd. The sailor, tall, his shoulders, thick and broad, even the beard an act of aggression; the Birdman, almost as tall but thin, body curved and tense as if strung like a bow.
A gut-rending screech sounded from the schooner. Ann jumped. Both men on the dock half-turned to look at the boat. McGee appeared in the store’s back doorway.
“Christ,” the Birdman said. “A sea eagle. You can’t keep that bird. It’s illegal.”
The sailor shrugged. “She is mine. I take care of her.” The eagle screamed again. Ann couldn’t see the bird; it was as if the boat were screaming. In that same, flat, schoolmaster’s tone, the Birdman said, “You can’t own a sea eagle. She’d be better off dead than trapped on that boat.” He pushed up into the sailor’s face.
The sailor smiled, picked him up, swung him around all but eff
ortlessly, and shot-putted him, backpack and all, out over the water. The Birdman hit butt-first with a huge splash. The sailor picked up a life-preserver and tossed it casually out to the Birdman now righting himself in the water, coughing and flapping, his pack bobbing up behind him like a child’s flotation device. “The dock is very slippery,” the sailor called to him. “You should be more careful.”
“You! You be more careful!” A small rhinoceros in a pink muumuu rushed out onto the dock: Old Lady Nozaki with a cleaver in one hand and something purple and phallic in the other. “You get your boat off my dock.” She waved the big knife and the phallus, actually probably an eggplant, at the big man’s groin. “I don’t want you here close no more. You got dingy; you use it like any other. Go! Out. In the harbor.”
The sailor took a step backward and almost tipped himself into the water. Another tall, bearded Norseman appeared on the deck of the schooner. He barked something at the sailor, his voice a command and a question, and started across the gangplank between the schooner and the dock.
Ann and McGee fished the Birdman out of the water. The dressing on his hand was a mess. “You all right?” Ann said. The Birdman stood up, coughing. He nodded. Like most people who spent any time in the forest, he stank of jungle rot. Even three days in hospital hadn’t tempered that much.
“Fucker,” the Birdman said, looking at his sodden dressing. Ann’s nose caught a whiff of iodine. Surely Welly hadn’t let him go with a packing still in his hand? “Fucking bastard.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a vial of pills. “Fuck. I’m going to have to go back to the hospital.” The edge in the man’s voice was clear and sharp now, like a knife flicked from beneath a towel. His eyes moved to the sailors at the other end of the dock, and the muscles in his face were tense. They needed to get him out of there before he decided to go for the man again. Last thing in the world they needed was to have to try to restrain him. Or worse, not be able to. Out of the corner of her eye, Ann could see the second sailor, probably the skipper, negotiating with Old Lady Nozaki, his hands moving placatingly. Ann snorted. She wouldn’t have waved anything immediately detachable in front of Old Lady Nozaki on a calm day, much less when the old witch was armed.
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