But he was policeman enough to be curious. He re-kilted his lavalava and trotted silently out to the street. Away to his left, the car’s engine caught. Its headlights were off: no gleam of light on the white gravel, but Ioane saw its tail-lights disappear around the back of the building at the Pago end of the green. Just another night-crawler. Just like you.
He slipped back up the lane beside the Gooney Bird, meaning to cross through the alley behind the building toward the police station. Since his induction into the hours of criminal investigation, he had spent any number of nights at the station, catching a half-night’s sleep on the records-room floor. There was a spigot out behind the building that did for a shower, and, following Han’s example, he even had a spare uniform cached in a filing cabinet. Barefoot, absolutely silent, he ducked around the back corner of the Gooney Bird past the back door and the foot of the ladder and in to the absolute shadow under the porch.
A long, sinewy hand wrapped around his upper arm. A harsh whisper: We talk, hey? Man smell, not Pua, too tall, wrong voice, wrong feel. Night crawler. Something with the car. But even as he thought the words, he was throwing himself sideways toward the voice, catching the man mid-ribs with his shoulder and ramming him against the wall. The man cried out softly, then grunted and sank against the concrete. Ioane left him there and ran away down the alley.
CHAPTER 15
Han woke with a headache, as he had every morning for the last week. Part of him was sure he had a brain tumor. But the pain always went away after he’d been up for a while, so he forgot to ask anyone about it. And he wasn’t waking up next to Ann any more, so he couldn’t ask her when he did remember. He rolled silently off the futon and padded into the kitchen to make tea. He liked his tea English style, learned from his uncle and his uncle’s English wife. They had been an epic pair, and San Francisco was probably the only city in the world that could have put up with them. They were both dead now, part of the late twentieth century sacrifice to the great god Tobacco, and he missed them terribly.
He could have used a family of his own just now, even Samoan extended family style: mythology, bulwark, point-of-view, endless obligation, pain in the butt. But there for you in ways that birthright Americans couldn’t imagine with their family values bullshit. Someplace where you didn’t have to be trying to figure out who you were from minute to minute. You just were. Or if you weren’t, some old lady would pound you over the head with something. He grinned to himself, set the mug on the floor, and then sat down to work through his stretches as another might have said his prayers. The whole routine was done in absolute silence, the goal being to get out of the house without waking either his wife or his kid.
Outside, he killed a few early-bird mosquitoes and took off at a trot. This was the one good moment of the day: ocean to the left, forest to the right, the arch of road-side palms overhead, the air almost cool. A quarter of a mile and his pace began to settle out of the early morning aches. Then he came through the screen of palm, pandanus, and mimosa along the point and into purple dawn over Pago Bay.
Next was the gauntlet of villages from the point to the tuna canneries. But, as he had told McGee, the young men and boys tumbling out of their communal sleeping quarters, ducking heads under the village spigot or staggering into the bay to wash, no longer viewed Han like a dog pack would have viewed a crippled fruit bat, hobbling along the ground. They just grinned or maybe raised a hand in greeting as they retied their lavalavas, picked up their machetes and headed up into the plantations on the mountain slopes. All very tame. And if you believe that, I’ve got this bridge in San Francisco I can let you have for cheap.
Forty-five minutes later, he was walking onto the Fagatogo village green, pouring sweat and breathing hard but the headache gone and feeling a whole lot better than a man has any right to on four hours sleep. Or maybe that was why he was a little late noticing that there was more going on in the station than was usual for six-thirty in the morning.
“I want to talk to the chief.” The voice was strident, Norse-tinged, and rolled out of the downstairs front windows like a foghorn. “Call him if he is not here. I demand to speak to him.”
Han ducked behind the building, trotted up the back stairs to his office, shucked out of his running clothes, wrapped himself in a lavalava and went out to the spigot behind the station to shower like any other village boy. Whatever was exercising the Baltic schooner crew this morning could wait while the officers on duty inside worked through what calling the Chief meant, given that the Chief was in Honolulu and that one did not call a high chief of Manu’a for anything. Five minutes later he was dressed in a clean uniform shirt and shorts and walking down the inside staircase. He could still hear the thunder of seafaring indignation. He stopped in the doorway to the main room.
Without missing a beat, the big yacht’s skipper turned to Han. “My crew member, Thorvald Pedersen, has been missing for more than twenty-four hours. If you are holding him here, I demand to be allowed to speak to him.”
Han wondered how many other small-town jails the skipper had bailed Ped out of for that rather peculiar request to have rolled so easily off his tongue. He also wondered just how precise that missing for twenty-four hours was. So Ped hadn’t sailed off with the pleasure party yesterday afternoon. And what about the blond girl, what’s-er-name, Wendy?
“Well, to start with, you may not have seen him in twenty-four hours, but his whereabouts are verifiable at least until about mid-morning yesterday, when I have one witness who says he was drinking at Paki’s. Beyond that, I can’t help you. Indeed, I’d still like to talk to him myself. Also to the woman crew member. The one called Wendy.”
“We are leaving for Ofu this afternoon,” the skipper said indignantly. “They must work. We need them. They cannot stay here.”
They? So was Wendy back on the boat? “Have you checked at the hospital?”
“Hospital? There is a hospital in this God-forsaken place?”
Since a large measure of what had constituted God forsaken about American Samoa in the last week had involved this man and his crew, Han had a little trouble with that one, but he kept a straight face.
“Faga’alu,” Han said. “Two villages up.”
“Do they have no telephone?”
Han nodded to Ioane, standing behind the main desk. Ioane was already touching out the numbers. He handed the receiver to the skipper, smiling genially.
Han left the skipper to his researches and went over to check the occurrences log. He still dreamed of being able to get his men to do formal change-of shift reports, but it hadn’t happened yet and didn’t seem likely to any time soon. The only entry after midnight was Iosefa Mata’afa reports he thinks body tangled in his anchor. Han caught Ioane’s eye and pointed to the entry. Ioane flashed him the same glorious smile and nodded, as if responding to a compliment.
The skipper slammed the telephone down. “They know nothing, these people.”
“Well,” Han said smoothly, “We will certainly continue to look for him. And we will inform you as soon as we find him, I’m sure. Will you still be leaving for Ofu this afternoon if he hasn’t turned up?”
The skipper moved his blond head back and forth like a puzzled god. “We must go. We have clients.”
“Well, we’ll…do our best for you.”
Han all but herded the big man out the door.
Ten minutes later, Han stood on a rotting block of concrete anchored among the boulders between Nozaki’s and Paki’s Bar and Grill, both just out of sight along the crumpled shoreline. As many times a day as he traveled this section of shore road, Han hadn’t known about this little makeshift dock. Nestled into the overhanging weeds and bushes, it would be invisible from either Nozaki’s or Paki’s. He certainly hadn’t seen anything when he had jogged by here this morning. Now, a wizened old man crouched between Han and Ioane on the dock, showing them what had come
up in one of his anchor flukes.
It was a section of human arm. Funny, Han thought, looking down at the waterlogged hunk of ragged meat, how clearly he knew that. Just that tiny expanse of waterlogged skin, the inner fold of the elbow. White skin. Well, anyway, the clam-shell grey of relatively fresh, water-logged, dead white skin.
“Okay,” Han said to Ioane. “We need to see how much of the rest of him we can find.”
He knew enough about drowned bodies in general and drowned bodies in Pago Bay in particular to know that whatever was left of this guy—and he had little doubt that they were looking a piece ofThorvald Pedersen—it would be close by. Whatever the sharks had left.
As if reading Han’s mind, the old man said, “Tuna boats out. Too bad. Sharks hungry.”
Han snorted sourly and scrambled up to the road to get his crime scene bag out of the back of the Department’s jeep. Large plastic trash bags tended to be his most important piece of equipment. He looked for Ioane to send him for more men and alert Sarge at the hospital in case they found big enough pieces to need the ambulance, but the young officer was still down on the dock.
“This old man is fish-master,” Ioane said. “He sees fish on the reef for fishermen. ‘Even the fish obey him’.” Han snorted again. He doubted the proverb applied to dead bodies. He stair-stepped down the boulders to join them on the dock.
The old man smiled softly, looking at Han. He said, “Long ago, I can find body for you. Hard to breathe so deep now.” Just above the old man’s knees, an inch or so of his traditional tattoo peeked out from below his lavalava. The tattoo would extend from his navel across his genitals and buttocks and down to just above the knee, the Samoan equivalent of a Silver Star for bravery under fire and a Purple Heart for battle wounds. The old man pointed down the road to where the roofs of a couple of traditional houses were just visible. To Ioane, he said: “You go for my grandson, Iokopo. He swims strong. Dives deep. No fear.” The old man spoke in English, presumably as a courtesy to Han, but his voice was a clear command. To his credit, Ioane glanced at Han, who nodded.
Jesus Han thought. Only in Samoa. He was half expecting Ioane to bring back some half-grown kid, but the old man’s grandson looked like he was home on leave from the Marines. Not, Han thought, that a traditional Samoan twelve-year-old couldn’t have handled the job, but it would look better on Han’s demotion if his failure to follow protocol didn’t involve psychologically traumatizing a minor. Not, of course, that there was a protocol. The younger man was dressed in a T-shirt, lavalava and flip-flops and carried a bundle wrapped in cloth. This proved to be a diving mask, a knife, and a home-made spear gun made of a section of bamboo, a spring of surgical tubing, and a harpoon. Okay, so maybe he was a Navy SEAL home on leave. He shed his T-shirt and sandals, rigged himself and dove off the dock like a pro. The old man slipped into his one-man outrigger and pushed off.
“Like fish,” Ioane said. “He will know where.”
It wasn’t quite that easy. The first retrievals were a tire and a scrap of what looked like boating equipment. But then something in the arch of the old man’s back was different, and he twisted to secure something to his aft outrigger pole. His grandson didn’t dive again but swam toward shore. As the tiny canoe slid in beside the dock, Han saw clearly enough the human forequarter drifting along behind the boat, the part with the head. Or at least enough of the head to see the long red hair floating out, Medusa-like, in the water and the splay of beard hair woven with beads.
“Sorry,” McGee said for the second time in twenty-four hours. “Haven’t got a clue on this one either. For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure he was dead when the sharks started on him.” He grinned at Han, “They didn’t leave me much to work on.” He zipped the remaining chunks of Thorvald Pedersen into their bag. “Skull’s intact, though; most of the spine.”
“So he didn’t just get hit over the head and dumped into the water.”
McGee nodded. “The one side of his face is real chewed up. Even bone damage, but it looks post-mortem to me. I guess he could have tripped and fallen over in the road, maybe knocked himself out, particularly if he was real drunk to start with. Problem is, like I said, there isn’t a lot to go on, but my money’d be on him being dead when he hit the water. Heart attack, maybe.” Neither of them said it: the sharks hadn’t left the heart for examination. “I did run a probe up what was left of the carotid on the one side; lotta crunch in there for a young man, cholesterol plaques. Could be natural causes. Enough’s left of the upper airways, the upper end of the trachea, glottis, the stuff at least partially protected by the jaw: he didn’t choke to death. Didn’t, like, pass out and choke to death on his own vomitus, like a lot of drunks.”
“Or,” said Han, “Get himself throttled. Sober or drunk.”
McGee nodded. He started to washed up. “I’m not sure your forensics fellas in Honolulu’ll find much more for you. Maybe they can get something out of those little bits of lung that’re left. I took some tissue samples to fix and stain on the chance some of those dirty-looking edges’d turn out to be powder burns. Any rate: something to tell you why the sharks took him apart so fast. Usually it takes ‘em at least a couple of days to show interest, ‘less they’ve got a big wound or something to get’em started. From the jaw-spans of the bites, I’d say these were little guys, just kind of nibbled away at him, rather than one or two big ones taking him apart. They’d want a wound, the proverbial blood in the water, to get ‘em going.”
Han nodded absently, thinking of the old fish-master’s diagnosis, but he didn’t say anything. Every once in a while, even after all these years, a body could really upset him: a raped child, signs of torture. He wouldn’t have guessed that the end of Thorvald Pedersen would have that power. But to have so little left of someone he had been talking to yesterday morning was like being a soldier again, only without the adrenalin and without the dope.
“Thanks,” he said. “Well. Keep him on ice, and we’ll pack him out with the other one. Looks like we will have a flight tomorrow.” He held the morgue door for the pathologist. “You may get some crap from his skipper about holding the body.”
“Sure as hell can’t take it with ‘em. Maybe feed it to that big hawk of theirs.”
“Maybe. More likely just raising hell about getting the remains sent home. Preferably at our expense.”
“Do I let ‘im see it?”
“Not without me present.” Han said. “We need the official ID.” His mouth twisted. “And I’m sure it will be educational.”
CHAPTER 16
Ann sat at her desk in the not-quite-air-conditioned public health division wing of the hospital, staring at nothing. Part of her mind was wondering what she could possibly say to the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services regional inspectors touring the hospital today that would make any sense of her work here. And part of her mind was thinking that human beings clutter life up with so much shit. And that’s just the easy bits like clothes and cuisine and what’s funny and who does what work. She could force Han to choose between his wife and child and herself. And be crushed when he chose them. Or, just as likely, think less of him if he chose her. Christ: yet another bit of your bizarre take on the biological clock? Yuck. I really do dislike humans. So how did you end up in a place where non-humans are only tolerated for their edible potential? Girl, you seriously need a cup of coffee.
She started across the quad between the pavilions just as the skies opened up for the mid-morning downpour. She took off running, popped through the back door of the clinic wing and almost bowled over the two Hawaiian girls from the Baltic schooner.
“We were looking for you,” said one.
“Oh, yeah?”
“’Member us?” said the other.
“We all had sore throats when we got here?” said the first one.
Yes, Ann thought. Two strep and one clap, as I recall. B
ut she didn’t say that. “Sure. I’m going for coffee. Or at least what passes for it here. Come along?”
The girls shrugged and looked at each other.
“Don’t really like coffee.”
“We want to talk to you.”
Not really in the mood for literal-minded American adolescents, Ann almost said something inexcusable, but the lovely Hawaiian lilt in their voices made her sentimental, and she stopped herself in time.
“Well, come along anyway. I’m just going to the dining hall. There might be something there you like.” The two girls exchanged a look. Ann went on. “And it’s actually reasonably private. As such things go around here. Certainly more private than where I work.”
That seemed to be the issue, for they followed along after her. The dining hall was the back end of one of the central pavilions. Ann got her coffee, the girls accepted Cokes, and the three of them colonized the end of the far corner table. Nobody said anything. Finally, feeling that nothing she could say would make this situation any sillier, Ann said, “Where’s your third? The haole girl.” The two girls exchanged another look.
“We wanted to talk to you about her.”
“Can you contact people on other islands?”
“She’s so clueless.”
“We “ The one who was speaking stopped and looked at the other one and then back at Ann. “We think she’s pregnant.”
“She’s just clueless.” The other one said again. If she got the baby, Ann thought, the same place she got the clap, that’s pretty clueless. “I mean, I don’t know why we’re bothering. She like totally doesn’t get being on a boat. It’s not like she’s any help. If she wants to play earth mother, that’s her business.”
A Bird in the Hand Page 10