A Bird in the Hand

by Lynn Stansbury

  Han thought: No; fear. But he didn’t say so, and the old man sat down on the dock and steadied the canoe with his feet. Han started to sit as well.

  “No,” the old man said. “Not to sit. Bend the leg. Use the foot.”

  Getting something from one person’s right brain to their left brain and then to another person’s left brain and on over to the right brain is never easy. Then try it in two languages. Or three when, as now, the long-buried fears of Han’s Korean childhood were rising like bloated corpses out of the depth. But then somehow he was seated in the little outrigger’s cockpit. The feel was not unlike sitting in an Adirondack chair: not soft but not uncomfortable and certainly not like it was going to do anything unexpected. The old fish-master coached him through a little paddle work, and then he was headed across the open water toward the schooner. Didn’t solve the problem of how the hell he was going to get out of the damned thing, but at least he was on his way.

  When he was close enough to the schooner that if someone came above decks and tried to throw anything overboard, he would see it, he hailed the boat.

  And was answered by the blood-curdling scream of the eagle mewed in the cabin. Fuck, Han thought, letting the canoe drift, better than a damned pitbull. Hardly a paddle-length from the big yacht’s sides, he circled slowly around it. He didn’t expect to find anything, but at least it gave him a sense of where he’d want to look carefully when he had the opportunity.

  Someone shouted across the water. He looked back at Nozaki’s, but the dock was empty. Then he could hear an engine, and the shout came again. He swivelled toward the hotel point. The blunt-nosed whaler was bouncing across the water towards him: two sailors; no clients; no girls.

  They could, he thought, run right over him.

  He shifted his little craft in under the bowsprit. At least they would have to choose between damaging their boat or skewering themselves. Almost in answer to his thought, the little whaler slowed and settled into the water.

  The skipper’s voice came clearly across the water. “You look for me?”

  “I need to talk to you.” The bow-wave from the whaler reached him, and the canoe rode over it handily like a horse cantering over little fences. Without thinking clearly about it, he recognized that the movement didn’t bother him.

  “It is Thorvald?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come aboard.”

  The skipper jerked his head at his crewman, and the man nosed the whaler up to the schooner’s ladder. The two sailors scrambled aboard, leaving the whaler tied off the ladder. Han thought: Showtime. Fortunately, he had strong shoulders and more appreciation of basic physics than Ann credited him with. And he remembered to bring the canoe’s bowline with him.

  The schooner was big enough that there was a real deck between the wheel and the opening to the living quarters. The two sailors stood together, watching him secure the canoe, saying nothing. When he straightened up and turned to them, the skipper spoke.

  “You have Thorvald?”

  Han nodded. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this “ Give ‘em just that little courtesy, just for the record, just in case they’re not the killers. “…Thorvald Ped-ersen was found dead about an hour ago.”

  Whatever reaction Han had been expecting, it wasn’t what happened. The skipper’s face was suddenly grey, the skin around his eyes and mouth stiff as if trying to control tears. He looked away from Han, out across the water. The other man asked him something.

  The reply was a single gruff syllable, clear enough across the Anglo-Saxon bridges from Old Norse: dead. The other man muttered something more, but the skipper shook his head and looked back to Han. “How?”

  “Not sure. We’ll need you to identify him. Then his family will have to be notified.”

  “I am his family. He is my brother. My half-brother.” The skipper’s head moved dismissively, as if the qualification didn’t matter.

  “I’m sorry,” Han said. And, not that he didn’t mean it, he also wondered if he had just been handed another whole layer of potential motives for murder. “His body is at the hospital.” He didn’t add what’s left of it. Thorvald Pedersen’s brother would find that out soon enough, and, as Han had said to McGee, he wasn’t averse to seeing what the shock value might produce. But he had other business first. “Before we go, I’d like to take a quick look at your brother’s quarters.

  He had chosen the words carefully. Anything Han found on his own might not hold up in court. But he didn’t want to miss this chance at a first look, before the news of Pedersen’s death had quite sunk in. Or, if the news was that the body’d been found, because they already knew he was dead, before they had a chance to clean up. But he didn’t want to provoke active resistance if he could avoid it. The skipper still stood in the middle of the deck staring at Han.

  Finally, he said, slowly, “This is legal?”

  “If you’re asking,” Han said, keeping his voice slow, neutral, polite, “If searching your boat is legal, it is certainly legal if you give me permission. If you do not give me permission,” he smiled thinly, “it will still be legal, but we will all have paid the lawyers a lot more by the time the judge says so.” Han wasn’t sure the man was taking in what he had said. He still looked half stunned. Finally, he moved his head as if shaking off a fly, lifted one shoulder, and gestured toward the doorway to below decks.

  “Please,” Han said. “After you. I’ll need you to explain what I’m seeing.” That was not precisely true, but it was a good enough line to get them down the ladder and into what looked like the main living area.

  The space surprised him. Both he and the tall sailor could stand up straight. But he was aware of the boat’s sides, uncomfortably close on either hand, and the sense of wanting to sidle down passages, even though that wasn’t really necessary. The wooden surfaces glowed in the sunlight filtering down through open hatches. The effect was beautiful and about as good a camouflage for obvious clues of bloodshed as a murderer could wish for.

  Han stopped. “What’s the smell?’ The stink was everywhere but stronger as they moved forward. It wasn’t quite as bad as the girl they had pulled out of the dump yesterday, but close. “When was the last time you emptied the trash?”

  They were moving past a closed compartment. The odor was strong enough to choke on. Han stopped, about to demand that the skipper open the door, when the goddamned bird let off another screech. The sound was oddly muffled, compared to how it sounded from outside the boat, but it was obviously right on the other side of the closed door.

  “Ah,” the skipper said, nodding. “It is the eagle. We have not cleaned her area properly today. That was my brother’s job.”

  No wonder Pedersen drank. “Can I look at it?”

  “It will unsettle her. She is dangerous.” But the big man shrugged and slid the compartment door open. Standing on a perch that had been rigged across a tiny cabin padded with leather, the bird seemed to fill the space. Even hooded, she moved back and forth across the perch with the caged energy of a pacing feline. Under the perch, a refuse tray was obviously the source of the smell. The bird screamed again.

  The skipper spoke reassuringly to the bird and slid the door closed.

  “How much does that thing eat in a day?”

  “She eats one, two big fish a day.” He was gesturing with his hands. So, Han thought, maybe two human arms. Or a leg. But not three-quarters of a human.

  Brotherhood had very little influence on Han’s thinking about what one man might do or not do to another. But if the bird could only eat a quarter of a man in a day, it could only eat a quarter of a man in a day. He made a mental note to ask Sa’ili’s Birdman about it. And a second mental note that, at least as far as the eagle was concerned, he and the Birdman were on the same page on that issue.

  The skipper gestured into the next cabin. “Thorvald and
Ivor sleep here.”

  Han looked into the tiny space, about the same as the eagle’s, a long narrow closet but with a double set of bunks running its length. Everything was neatly stowed, nothing individual beyond a row of books tucked into a shelf with a deep lip. The books did not quite fill the space. A wad of cloth had been stuffed between two books to keep the whole collection from shifting around in rough weather, one of those spontaneous gestures that attract policemen like kittens to trailing yarn. Han pulled the wad out. It was a T-shirt, clean, still with the price tag, with a logo of trees and the words fa’aola o le vao. Just like the dead-girl’s T-shirt.

  “Where’d this come from?”

  The skipper shook his head. “I do not know. Apia perhaps. Apia was our first stop after a long passage. We all bought,” he shrugged again, “foolish things. Maybe it belongs to Ivor. I don’t know.”

  “The girls have them?”

  “If so, I do not see them.”

  “Where are the girls now?”

  “On shore.”

  “All three of them? Together?”

  “As far as I know. They went to visit her.”

  “I’m sorry: went to visit who?”

  “The other one. They go to visit.” The skipper moved his head as if shaking a word free. “To find Wendy.”

  “To find her? Where’s she been?”

  The skipper shook his head again. “She says she does not want to be on the boat while we are here. She is lazy. She wishes to write books. If I could spare her, I would leave her here. The girls said they would try to find her, talk to her. I cannot train new persons now.” His voice broke. How much of that was the man’s investment in his business, and how much was a peripheral issue being made to front for the real one? But like seeing the man’s face on hearing of his half-brother’s death, the perception blurred viewing him as a murderer, single or double.

  “I’m going to need to talk to them as well. All three of them.”

  The skipper nodded but said nothing, and Han left it. Finding the Hawaiian girls was always easy: they turned every post-pubescent male head on the island. And the twins would lead him to Wendy. Or confirm that she was missing. And then you start all over again: when, under what circumstances did you last see, etcetera. The skipper ushered Han through the rest of the spaces: two more tiny two-person cabins, double-bed cabins fore and aft, toilet, shower. Han guessed they were considered luxurious, but they brought out his claustrophobia and offered no immediate insight into the last days of Thorvald Pedersen. One of the larger cabins clearly belonged to the girls: layers of clutter and a cloud of synthetic floral scent. Maybe they were trying to drown out the stink from the eagle. Or club it to death. Han’s head was pounding. Still carrying the T-shirt, he stumbled up on deck into the fresh air.

  He showed the T-shirt to the crewman, Ivor. “This yours?” The man shrugged and shook his head. The skipper translated and the man shook his head again. “I need to take the shirt with me,” Han said to the skipper. “I’ll write you a receipt.”

  He pulled out his notebook, but something caught the edge of his vision: McGee, rowing out from Nozaki’s in his inflatable dinghy. At first, Han thought the other person in the tiny craft was a kid. And then, watching the lithe form move easily up the ladder onto McGee’s boat and turn to steady the boat for him, Han realized that he was looking at Ann Maglynn. Ann Maglynn wearing khaki short shorts and a life vest and, to the best Han could tell, damn little else, just like any other boat floozy. Ann with her back to him now, one little fist locked in her dark red hair, arm akimbo. And then scampering up forward at some command of McGee’s like the boat was home to her and she’d lived on it all her life.

  The sails on McGee’s boat went up, first the big one, then the little one in front. White, they caught in the wind and filled out. Like a sea-bird’s wings. The next thoughts were not words so much as a knot in his chest like a brass-knuckled fist against his breast-bone. Now she will fly away.

  CHAPTER 18

  Ann looked at McGee and, when he nodded, raised the mainsail, then, when he nodded again, unrolled the jib. She moved easily around the forequarter of the boat, setting the lines in the clamshell clamps, flipping them easily into the right knots. She knew how to make all those bits of modest yachting technology work for her. She had been over the boat like a monkey when she had first come aboard, poking into its corners, finding the sail lockers and the extra line and hardware, the radio and navigation system, the flare gun and the life-jackets, natural enough for an experienced sailor headed out. But it was really a ritual of extending her dimensions, becoming a different person than she felt on land: clever, strong, knowledgeable, self-confident, the son her father had never had and she so clearly wasn’t, the brother, or even the sister, that her older sisters couldn’t dominate or ignore, the one-too-many, non-too-wonderful, fifth child, the fifth wheel. The sails filled, and the boat heeled slightly and came alive. The mid-afternoon breeze was moderate from the north-east, perfect for a single close-hauled leg out the east-west line of the inner bay, then a gradual falling off south east and then south-south east, then an easy jibe across the wind to tuck into Faga’alu cove. She settled easily on the windward rail and gazed up at the sails and for a moment was perfectly happy.

  “Ready about, then,” McGee said. She glanced forward then looked at him.

  “The wind’ll hold,” she said. “You can make the point there by the hotel without tacking. Stays deep very close in because of the deepwater docks. Then it’s essentially a straight shot to Faga’alu.” As soon as she spoke, she knew she had made a mistake. Yes, she knew the local conditions, but he was one of those skippers. And she was a woman. Bugger, she thought.

  “I’ve got the main,” he said and thrust the wheel over. Ann freed the jib, but they didn’t have much way, so she let it backfill, pulling the heavy boat through the wind and onto its new tack. Then she pulled the jib through and set it.

  McGee grinned. “Fair enough.” It wasn’t an apology, just a resetting of the bar.

  Ann smiled. “Boats are probably the one thing I’m really good at.”

  “Not medicine?” He was teasing. Was he also flirting? She could never quite tell, never quite believe anyone would be that interested.

  She shrugged, still smiling, shifted to leeward to adjust the jib then sat back again. Another nice thing about boats is that whoever’s at the helm is at the helm. Tied down. Unlike crew who are free to move around. “What can I say? If I were any good at medicine I suppose I’d be back in the States making lots of money or teaching.” She pointed toward a line of white in the water straight ahead of them echoing the line of the beach. “That line of foam is just the highest part of the reef. The bulk of the reef actually starts about twenty yards on this side.” Like, tack, asshole, or you’re going to run aground. But she didn’t say it.

  He waited just long enough, she supposed, for testosterone to equilibrate with a rationally trained mind, then said, “Okay. Ready about.”

  They made the little tack in silence. Ann sat on her hands on the windward rail, shoulders hunched, the mood of contentment gone. The conversation went on, or at least he talked. She smiled and uh-huh-ed as needed, but mostly she watched the smooth curve of Utulei slip behind them to leeward and the wide beaches of Aua and Ava curving away to windward.

  Finally, during a long pause, for something to say, she said, “You said something about Namibia yesterday.”

  “No, I said Wintervelt. But I’ve spent a lot of time in Namibia as well.” So much for conversation, Ann thought. But after a few minutes, McGee spoke again. “In the army. Like everybody else.” There’s always something on a sailboat you can fiddle with to cover awkward moments. Ann let the jib out again. Too far. So she trimmed it. “Actually,” he went on. “My Opa had a farm there, in Namibia. We used to go there all the time when we were kids, before Opa w
as killed. In October, the flowers come out. Whole hillsides covered in purple and orange. So I was better off than a lot of’em I guess. At least I felt like I was defending something I cared about.”

  “Opa: that’s Dutch for grand-dad.”

  “Afrikaans as well. Oh, yes, my grand-dad was an Afrikaner. Card-carrying, you might say. Born in a British prison camp in 1903. So your copper friend and I have something in common.”

  Ann raised her eyebrows but said nothing. If McGee meant Han’s uncle’s odyssey, that seemed less of a burden in Han’s case than his own of being a Korean married to a Japanese. Like being an Anglo-South African with a Boer in the woodpile. Or whoever’s woodpile was the issue. And to the outsider, they’re indistinguishable. Like Hutus and Tutsis. Like all of Europe for a thousand years. How stupid is that? And what chance then do people who really look different from each other have? And to think that calling a person a dog is an insult. Bloody well the other way around.

  “Your family still in South Africa?”

  “Life’s a bit complicated for our family just now. One of my sisters is at the University of Cape Town.” He snorted again. “Cape Town’s always tolerated ambivalence a little better than other places. But the rest of us are all over everywhere. One brother in Boston and the other in London; other sister in Amsterdam; parents in Melbourne.”

  Ball in your court: say something sympathetic. But all she could think of to do was to nod and keep silent. She wondered if this was what she had sensed about McGee, all that stuff, right below the surface. She could feel the edge of it now, like a knife under silk. Han had the same edge; it was what made him a cop. But with Han, the edge felt like a tool. With McGee, she sensed a weapon. Physician, cop: should be the other way around. But of course, McGee’s patients were mostly dead. Or at least separated from him by a test-tube or a glass slide and a surgeon’s knife. She flexed her shoulders, glad this trip was almost over.