He lifted it over his head in thanks then dropped it around his neck.
“Thanks, guys.” Laughter followed him around the end of the building. The side entrance opened into the back end of the lounge and functioned, pub style, as a kind of private bar entrance.
However, this door had no step. Han swung up through the doorway like stepping through a window, and the noise and heat from the front part of the room hit him like a stone. He dodged to one side, ready to roll and evade if someone came at him with a broken bottle. The only light came from behind the bar. The two people at the tiny round table at this end of the bar took in Han’s Asian face and were suddenly quiet. Han couldn’t guess their sex, but that wasn’t the issue. Their eyes moved slowly down: face, uniform. And then, Han guessed, the flower lei. The sum was a kind of communal shrug and a resumption of whatever they had been up to just before Han’s appearance.
The owner/bartender was also in do-girl style tonight in a tailored lavalava and matching over-blouse of yellow tropic print, more like a Sunday school teacher than a pimp, though being built like a linebacker lent a certain through-the-fun-house-mirror quality.
“How can I help you, Assistant Chief?” Han recognized the gambit: the bartender was greeting Han by his most important title, a declaration both of the speaker’s respect and his cleverness. Since all of Han’s previous visits to the Gooney Bird had to do with criminal investigations, this was not a bad move.
“How about a Vailima?”
Totally Samoan, the bartender took a few seconds to sort through the various levels of message: Han-the-man; Han-the-uniform, Han-in-flower-lei-order-ing-beer-at-half-past-midnight. A smile like a first quarter moon spread across the big man’s face.
“Good and cold tonight: power on all day. Please.” He gestured to the little round table. It was suddenly clear, its former patrons now pushing in with another group at one of the oilcloth-covered picnic tables that filled the rest of the hot dark space. Watching the stir, Han was again faintly aware of someone fading back from view, like the shadowy figure in the window with the nurse. But it was no more than that, just a sense. With no sense of threat attached. And certainly with no beard.
The bartender came back with Han’s beer. Han picked up the cold bottle and pressed it against his chest as air-conditioning. “Miti: You had apalagi girl drinking in here last week? Maybe Saturday night?”
“Palagi? You want a palagi girl?”
“No, I don’t want apalagi girl.” The Samoan’s eyebrows went up. “No, and I don’t want a boy either. I’m trying to “ Shit, Han thought. What am I trying to do? Keep it simple. “The body of a dead palagi girl was found today, blond, maybe about twenty years old. Doesn’t seem to be local. Dr. Tuiasosopo said he thought he saw someone, fit that description, in here, maybe Saturday night.” Welly had said he saw the blond boat floozy but that may have been just Welly trying to explain the otherwise inexplicable. Miti’s face was a smooth copper oh of incredulity.
“Never here,” he said.
Han didn’t believe him. Samoans don’t lie. Not in the Western sense of intent to mislead. But response to questions has both factual and social requirements, and there is never any doubt which is more important. And a bartender, in his own way, has to be more astute about social nuance than a senior talking chief. Han didn’t know why his current social position required the answer that no white girls had been drinking in the Gooney Bird in the last week or so. But he was more sure that Miti’s answer was based on his assessment of Han’s social status than he was that the girl had never been here.
“Well,” he said, “If you hear anything, anything at all, about a palagi girl being missing, let me know.” Miti looked at him, eyebrows drawn together. Han thought: I might as well be speaking Russian. And it’s not that Miti couldn’t give a reasonable definition for every word I used. “Thanks,” Han said, apropos of sweet Fanny Adams. Miti looked relieved and drifted off to deal with his more comprehensible customers.
Han sat for some minutes, the noise and the heat, the movement of bodies in the dim light coming to him as if from a distance, through deep water. She says she wants some place she belongs. She’s fucking lucky she’s got a choice. He tried to turn off the words in his head, hard to do when you have two fluent and two pidgin languages stumbling over each other. Words, words, words. And what happens when those languages describe worlds so different as to be mutually incomprehensible? The room was coming to him now in bleeding browns and reds and yellows, like glaze across one of his wife’s pots.
The problem is, you’re a cop. It’s all you know how to be. But you can’t stay here forever and you have nowhere else to go. That wasn’t true of course. Not in terms of paperwork and people’s expectations. But he knew it was true for himself. If he never saw one more city back alley with a rat-nibbled body jammed behind a dumpster or a child’s brains spattered on a wall by a stray bullet intended for someone else, it would be too soon. Lots of cops feel that way. Lots of cops get out. But it’s what you are: guarding the dysfunctional margins of society from itself.
Poised on the knife-edge between law and power. Okay. When you still believe there’s good. When you still believe that it’s just a margin, just an edge. What happens when the edge becomes a beach and the beach becomes an ocean and you know that all your colleagues are nuts so you must be nuts too? Time to ‘re-invent yourself? As what? Deny experience and memory, judgment and hope, become one more plastic action figure whose only community is the television? ‘When you talk like that’, a friend told him once, ‘I used to think you were drunk. Now I know it’s just you.’ He pulled the bottle of beer, still untasted but considerably warmer, away from his chest and looked at it. Like many Asians, for him alcohol set off a reaction like having a hot flash. Last thing in the world you need in Samoa. He had to be feeling really sorry for himself to drink alcohol. Getting there. Fucking getting there.
On the other hand, he was still here, and he still had a job to do. There was no way in hell the story of “the Captain” drinking at the Gooney Bird on a do-girl night wasn’t going to be all over the island by mid-day tomorrow, investigation or no investigation. He set the virgin bottle of beer on a ten dollar bill on the bar, waved to Miti to make it all appropriately public, and stepped back out into the night.
“Captain?” The soft, slightly husky voice, like the touch on his arm, was like the touch of a bird’s wing: the Fijian girl from this morning. Yesterday morning, now. Her skin was dark enough that she faded into the night. He was aware of her only as another layer of warm air, half-ghost, and the brief silhouette of a lacy globe of hair. “I see you.”
He almost said, well, I can’t see you. But he had lost enough word games for one day. The light from the doorway caught in the edges of her mouth and eyes.
“I am with you?” she said, her body arching toward him.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. He could smell her, slightly rank, very human, offering him something he needed right now, a simple transaction. A hand in the bush is worth two giving the bird.
Han felt pressure in his chest like a hand, pushing him back. The feeling surprised and scared him, and he stepped back, breathing hard. The pressure faded.
“No,” he said, not altogether sure who he was speaking to, but still a little spooked. Aware of the girl again, he said, “No. Thanks.”
He turned and strode toward the station, touching the damp front of his shirt gingerly with one hand, trying to reassert some rationality into whatever had just happened. Conscience? Where the hell from? He wouldn’t have said he had one. Ghosts? Certainly a Samoan explanation, though he’d never heard of Samoan ghosts trying to do good nor could he think of a Samoan ghost who’d give a shit about him. Angina more likely. Holy crap: was he getting that old? Not fair for a man who runs six miles every other day and neither smokes nor drinks. Shit. True-blue American: ‘Death i
s negotiable’.
As he stepped through the front door of the station, the lights went out. So he spent a few minutes helping the midnight shift—all two of them and completely mystified by his being there at one in the morning—get lanterns lit, refused the offer of tea, and went up to his office, carrying a candle like a Victorian poster child, headed for nighty-night. Lighting his hurricane lantern, he could hear the purr of generators across the bay at the cannery. No one else in Pago would be bothering at this time of night.
He should go home. Six o’clock in the morning was coming on like a train. But the last sixteen hours were a door that had opened into his future. And he wasn’t ready to go there.
He picked up the telephone, dialed a precinct house in south L.A., thinking about time zones: same as Hawai’i, three hours behind the coast, so, going on four in the morning. Quiet time on the graveyard shift. One could hope.
A voice said, “Lee, here.” Anybody else in that time and place would have added, at least in tone, What’s it to ya? But Derrick Lee had built from an immigrant adoptee childhood even more bizarre than Han’s, a there’s-got-to-be-a-pony-in-this-pile-of-shit world view Han needed to hear every once in a while. Particularly when he was far enough away that he couldn’t get his hands around Derrick’s neck to strangle him for being so cheerful.
“This is the Acting Assistant Chief of Police of the U.S. Territory of American Samoa.”
“Y’ got rid of that Korean asshole from San Francisco then?”
“Shit, man. I wish.”
“What’s up?”
“Dead girl in a dump. Sanitary landfill, that is. Dead about four days. No obvious cause of death, according to the preliminaries. No ID. Nobody knows who she is.”
“Unrecoverable error. Reboot.”
“Huh?”
“Come on, man, you’re still in Samoa, right? Not back in SF?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Four days and nobody’s saying who she is? Where’s your head, man?” Derrick’s specialty was the Samoan immigrant community of south L.A. He would, Han thought, have been a far better choice for this job than Han, but he didn’t speak Korean. His mother might have been a street girl from Seoul and his father an unknown black G.I., but his adoptive parents banked a million bucks a year in
Santa Monica between them and their son did not speak Korean. So he made up for it in other ways. “Samoan gets offed here, and it might take thirty-six hours before every other Samoan in L.A. knows it, but everybody tells me news moves slower here than in the islands.”
“White girl. That make a difference?” He and Derrick had met at a really stupid conference on policing and race-relations and never laid eyes on each other since, but their telephone partnership tracking the Samoan bad-guy communities of their respective cities had become legendary. Good news for Derrick, who was ten years younger than Han and moving up fast. Bad news for Han, who had finally pissed off one too many people in the SFPD. An instinct for survival: probably the only thing that made taking and staying in this job look good.
“Some. But not a lot. I assume you’ve contacted all the usual sources of white girls.”
“Short of recent airline passenger lists, name for body, yeah.” He thought about Sa’ili’s half-joking suggestion to ask the dump families about their young men’s tastes in girlfriends.
“Well, somebody’s lying to you.”
“Thanks. I had gotten that far myself. But it’s just so fucking odd-ball. It’s not like it’s easy to get there. The dump, I mean. And it’s a private deal. Not run by the government. And during the week, at least, there’s a caretaker.”
“Caretaker did it.”
“Get stuffed, man. Though it does suggest she was left there over the weekend. Fits with the post, anyway.” He pulled out his notebook and read off the three family names Sa’ili had given him. “Ring any bells? Any connections with your crews?”
Derrick repeated the names, rolling the Polynesian syllables off his tongue with obvious pleasure. “Not off hand,” he said slowly. “I’ll keep an ear out, though “ His voice trailed off. “You know. There’s something. How’s your agricultural situation?”
“Alive and well. But local use only, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell. You bust people from time to time with stuff, but they always say they grew it themselves, and I can’t say I’ve ever proven different.”
“Should think the weed’d do well there.”
“Too hot and too wet for the best. Mountain slopes of Hawai’i, now: perfect, they say.”
“Maui Wowie. Look, let me poke around a bit. This site: Pago side? Leone?”
“Behind the airport.”
“Oo. Even better. I’ll get back to you.”
Half an hour later, Han coasted in the driveway of his house, listening to the crunch of his tires on the gravel of broken shells. He sat for some minutes, listening to the sounds of night, ocean on the reef, squeak of bats. When the sound of him slapping mosquitoes was probably getting loud enough to wake his family, he went into the house. The house was absolutely silent. He had just dropped his shirt into the laundry when he heard a sound not unlike the whisper of the cloth into the basket. He had turned on no lights and there was no moon, but the starlight was bright enough almost to cast shadows. He could see the child, standing outside of the bathroom, thumb in mouth, teddy bear in hand, a silver-edged silhouette against the floor-to-ceiling screen walls. He dropped to one knee. She took her thumb out of her mouth.
“Papa?”
“Yes. I am your Papa.” It was one of their lessons.
She said, “My name is Jenny.”
“Yes, your name is Jenny.”
She stepped forward, like a wild thing out of the forest. He picked her up and she wrapped her arms around his neck, bopping him on the back of the head with the teddy bear.
Suddenly, his wife was there in the doorway. “What are you doing?” she barked at him in Korean.
Jenny turned to her mother and said, in Korean, “My papa.”
CHAPTER 14
Ioane Ioane woke awash in sweat and wondered where in hell he might be. For this must be hell: a darkness beyond night: no moon, no stars, no gleam of waves on a distant reef. And more than that, a weight of guilt so crushing, so isolating from one’s community, that this, not fire, must be the definition of hell. Beside him, Pua moaned softly and shifted on the mat, deeply asleep. Heat radiated from Pua and from the wooden walls of this breathless space. Even without reaching to define it with his arms, Ioane knew that the space was hardly more than the size of a cupboard. He inched sideways away from the other boy’s length, his body and his brain gradually sorting among the data: what was permissible to remember, what was not.
He did recall that there was some kind of a window here somewhere. At least a shutter, a trap door that could be opened for a little air. His fingers found a hinge and then worked down around corners to where gentle pressure opened a slit along a bottom edge. The air from outside wasn’t much cooler, but Ioane lay sucking it in, bracing the trap shutter with his head, one eye gazing down at the dim silver strip that was the difference between the night outside and the night inside. Gradually, he realized that he was looking at a section of board planking. The unpainted wood glimmered, as weathered wood will, particularly when polished by frequent rain and much foot traffic. He was looking at exterior flooring.
He thought about what he knew about this building. There was a rickety second floor exit, something between a lanai and a fire escape, that ran across the back of the building and down a ladder-like stair to the back door and the alley behind the building. There, what he had always thought were more flap-trap window shutters to the main store-room probably actually gave onto crib spaces like this one. He slid one arm out. He could just touch his middle finger to the flooring outside.
He list
ened to Pua’s breathing: like a child’s, deeply asleep. He wrinkled his forehead in puzzlement. There was something here waiting to be worked out. Pua and his friends were the first people his own age who had ever welcomed him, uncritical, teasing, but never bullying. But he couldn’t avoid the notion that their life was something of night, even when they walked about in the daytime as themselves. And he still had around him too much of daylight to get away with things, to leave them unexamined. Some of that was his great aunt. Some of that, increasingly, was the lieutenant. The lieutenant. He shuddered. Had the lieutenant seen him? What was he there for, if not looking for him, Ioane? Don’t be a fool; his face was like wood. That’s when he’s seeing the most. Like a cat; he sees better at night.
He folded himself smoothly to his knees and pushed the shutter out slowly, supporting it with both hands to keep the hinges from creaking. It was the one skill he had learned in his brief stay in the orphanage, or shelter or whatever it had been—bloody palagi cage anyway—in Apia before he had come to live with his great aunt. He slid out between the sill and the shutter and crouched, listening but not moving, as if hunting birds in the forest. The stars were a silver dome overhead, and the weathered boards of the narrow porch gleamed.
They also creaked. Finally, by crawling on all fours, he was able to distribute his weight sufficiently across the boards that they made less noise. But the four body lengths between the window and the ladder were a torture of shame. Not even the Samoan boys’ tradition of ‘night crawling’, the bold conquest of poorly guarded virginity. Just crawling away from, from what? Something in the dark. The starlight is better. The person can breathe in starlight. He was just stepping down onto the ladder, his back rotating outward toward the alley, when he heard a sound behind him like the slithering of a huge fish on stones. He crouched against the ladder, praying that the dark-painted wall of the building would obscure him and realizing at the same time that what he was hearing was not a demon but car tires, car tires rolling down the sandy, cobbled lane beyond the alley, a car with no lights and no engine noise. It rolled past the building toward the green. Under the cover of the sound from the car’s tires, Ioane moved swiftly down the ladder. He couldn’t see what the car did next.
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