A lean-to shack huddled amongst rotting pilings, just a roof with a counter of rough planking around three sides. Behind the counter, under the light ofa single bulb, a thin, bent, old man boiled noodles on a Coleman stove and served them to the fishermen who sat around the counter on upturned crates or fifty-five gallon drums, anything that made a seat. On closer look, the old man was probably another Nozaki, though he looked a lot closer to the original Japanese-Samoan cross than the younger ones Han knew. As Han watched, the old man put a bowl on the counter then reached around, pulled the chopsticks from a used bowl, swished them in a pail of water under the counter and set them across the new serving. One of the men sitting at the counter hailed Han in Korean.
„Evening, Captain.“ The men viewed Han as at least the equal of the ships‘ commanders. Therefore, he was a captain. End of discussion.
„Evening. Quieter tonight.“
The man grinned. „We put out tomorrow.“
The man next to him was a little older, had the look about him of a foreman, though all of their clothes were worn to rags and, as Paki said, stank of fish. „New group Sunday,“ this second man said. „Unload fish, sand, paint; out again.“
„Not much time to breathe,“ Han said, shaking his head to the proffered bowl of noodles.
The foreman grinned again. „Not much time for anything else either.“
„Yeah, well,“ Han said. „You do seem to manage. But that‘s not what I‘m after tonight. You guys ever pay any attention to those private boats there?“
All six heads swivelled to look out across the water. There was a kind ofcorpo-rate shrug.
„Pretty girls, though, on the big one.“
„Possessed.“ This from a weedy-looking kid at the end of the counter near the water who shivered as he spoke. „Hear ‚em „ Whatever he heard ended in coughing.
The others laughed. „It‘s a bird, stupid. Some kinda big bird.“
The conversation went on around the noodles and whatever they were pulling out of the bottle passing among them. For people who professed not to care what happened on the yachts, the fisherman knew the comings and goings on the water as well as any villager would of doings on the village green. But they couldn‘t talk themselves into having witnessed anyone shoving Thorvald Peder-sen‘s body into the bay yesterday afternoon.
Han walked back toward his jeep thinking that he was tired enough that just going on home actually seemed reasonable. The slap-slap of rubber sandals sounded behind him.
„Captain?“ It was the old foreman. „That boy, there, he is very sick. First time we get him up all day. Can you take him to the hospital? We cannot use the bus safely and we cannot afford a taxi, even if one would take us.“ The long-suffering fleet representative, Han knew, absorbed most of these baby-sitting chores, but even he couldn‘t prevent fishermen from being beaten up if they tried to ride the jitneys. One fisherman had been run over by a taxi driver. (Han had nabbed the son-of-a-bitch based on the tire pattern on the fisherman‘s chest. The jury had let the cabbie go. It hadn‘t made getting around any easier for the fishermen, but they had learned to walk about in larger groups.)
„Sure,“ he said.
They draped a dirty sheet around the kid‘s shoulders and loaded him into the passenger seat. He collapsed against the door frame. Given the kid‘s cough, Han would have rather had him in the back seat, but it wasn‘t a very long trip. The smell of fish was overwhelming. Fish and something else. Death, maybe.
Han slowed fractionally to pass through Fagatogo village and glanced at the kid. „How long you been sick?“
The kid shook his head. „Don‘t know, sir. Two days, haven‘t been able to work.“ He coughed again. Han stopped breathing, glad for the open windows, and put his foot down on the accelerator, hoping the drafts would blow whatever was coming out of the kid‘s mouth in the other direction. „Just lie in the hammock on deck. Fun. Every fisherman‘s dream.“ Han saw the quick tweak of the kid‘s pale lips. There‘s something to be said for being able to joke with your own death. „You ask about the North-men, the big sailboat.“
Han nodded. He should be telling the kid not to talk. But if he didn‘t hear what this kid had to tell him now, there might not be a second chance.
„Lying in the hammock. Just looking.“ The kid panted for a while. „Saw „
He coughed until he half-retched, wiping his mouth with the edge of the sheet draped across his shoulders. Han gritted his teeth, appalled by the illness, appalled by his own need to know whatever this kid was coughing his guts out to tell him. „Signal. Red, orange, flag. On-off-on-off. At the edge.of the water.“
„When?“
„Yesterday.“
„What time? Roughly. Early? Midday? Late?“
„Midday. Hot. Very hot. Sun.feels good.“ The kid coughed again, wiping his face again as the sputum came up. Don’t lead the witness, Han thought. Shit, I may have to carry him.
“Could you see who?”
The kid shook his head. “Bushes, rocks Can’t see very well. European:
beard.”
“Dark hair? Light hair? Fat? Thin?”
Han saw the kid’s head move fractionally. “Too far. All alike.”
“Was there any response from the boat?” All three of the men on the Baltic schooner had beards.
“No one.on deck.” The kid’s breathing was even more labored now, as if coughing had chewed him up inside. “All come.much later. Then you and “
He stopped, breathless again.
Han slowed to make the right turn into the hospital lane, trying not to throw the kid sideways against him. You and would be himself and McGee, arriving in McGee’s dinghy, disturbing the eagle, pulling off, then rowing back when Poulsen and Ivor and the Hawaiian girls had brought the tourists out. McGee had a beard, too, come to think of it.
He parked in the ambulance lane outside the ER and looked at his passenger. The boy’s eyes were closed and his mouth was open, his chest heaving with each breath. “I’m going to go get help.” But he couldn’t quite stop being a policeman. Halting by the passenger window, he looked at the kid again. The boy lay against the door frame, eyes closed, gasping.
“Is there anything else you wanted to tell me?”
The boy’s eyes opened and moved to Han’s face. “I think…not Northman.” “Who? What?”
The boy shivered again, his face twitched, and he died.
CHAPTER 22
Ann showered and put on her one good dress. She really didn’t want to go to this dinner. But she responded with dutiful cheeriness to Adele Hutchinson’s knock on her door, gathered up her long skirt and clambered into the back of Neil and Adele’s hard-top jeep. She spent the next two hours on the hotel terrace, gazing out over the bay, eating food ofwhose taste she had no recollection, smiling, and listening to a chubby bureaucrat talk about his car, his house, and his children, in that order, and his need to find redemption on a tropical island. By which she eventually figured out he meant doing a one-night stand with her. She had undertaken the small purgatory of the bureaucrat’s company as a way of avoiding any verbal or purposive visual contact with Wills McGee, but by the end of the evening was recalling her afternoon on McGee’s boat with something like nostalgia. Though possibly just for the flare pistol. She was very happy to close her door on all of it just before ten o’clock.
And then she remembered the damned Birdman. She stood in the dark in her bathroom for some seconds with the dress tangled in her arms over her head, arguing with herself about why she really didn’t need to go back over to the hospital and check on him. She lost the argument.
The nurses on the surgical ward were just beginning end-of-shift charting. Grayson had been no more trouble, they said. Ann stopped in the doorway of his cubicle. He appeared to be asleep, arm and newly dressed hand resting docilely on pillo
ws at his side. She stared at Sakiko’s flowers in their little vase. A friendly gesture from a woman who didn’t have many friends. The thought caught at Ann like a skeletal hand on her sleeve. Okay, so what’s wrong with Sakiko making friends with the Birdman? She tried to see him through some other woman’s eyes: high forehead, poetic tangle of oak-colored hair and beard, aquiline nose. Suddenly, the stone-grey eyes were open and staring at her.
“When do I get out of here?”
“Twenty-four hours of good behavior, and we’ll talk about it,” she said, smiling. “How’s your hand?”
He stared at her then lifted his bundled hand and looked at it. “How should I know?”
The smart-ass reply was like a slap in the face: another reason she preferred taking care of islanders rather than whites. But she was trained to keep trying. “How does it feel? Does it hurt? Throb?”
Grayson moved one shoulder against his sheets. “Dunno. Just there, I guess.” He turned his head, and his gaze hung in Sakiko’s flowers. His eyebrows drew together.
Ann said, “The flowers are very beautiful.” Grayson was still staring at the flowers as if reading something written on them in very fine print. She went on. “And the vase is wonderful.” She knew she was being stupid. But she suddenly, desperately, wanted to know if she had any hope. “Samoa doesn’t have a native ceramics tradition.” Her voice trailed off.
Grayson didn’t say anything for what seemed like a very long time. Long enough for Ann’s sense of the absurd to have almost reasserted itself. But then his gaze snapped to her face. “Ever been in a trap?” His voice was flat, harsh; she was reminded of him tackling the sailor on the dock yesterday morning.
“I’m a woman. Goes without saying.” She did recognize the flare-pistol answer. More gently, she said, “What do you mean?”
He was staring at the flowers again. “I hate this place,” he said. “Ugly, stupid, fat people. In your face all the time. Me; me; what I want. All about me. If I could pull the plug on this island, I’d do it.”
Of all the things Ann had ever heard anyone say about Samoa, or even thought about Samoa herself, that was the most bizarre. Finally, she said, “Well, I expect a lot of traditional Samoans feel the same way. About American Samoa, anyway.”
He was staring at her now. “Who are you?”
CCTJ
“I’m sorry?”
“You some kind of…social worker or something?”
Before she could answer, his eyes had closed again and his face slackened as if he had fallen asleep.
Ten minutes later, having talked to the nurses and made a note in Grayson’s chart, Ann was crossing the road in front of the hospital when Neil Hutchinson trotted down the terrace steps from the residential quad. Neil moved like a galloping giraffe. You couldn’t quite see how he did it, but he covered a hell of a lot of ground while you stood there wondering. The electricity hadn’t gone off, which was the usual thing that brought Neil to the hospital at a run.
“Ann. Good. Need you.” He waved her toward the ER, and she followed, not bothering to ask questions. “Fisherman coded being brought in for what sounds like a pneumonia.” Ann wasn’t surprised to see the police jeep. They pushed through the screen door of the ER.
Ann’s nose engaged before her eyes did: fish and dirt and blood and something else, the sweet-rot of pus and death. Then she saw Han. He was backed up against the wall, looking belligerent, which meant he was scared. A huge Samoan nurse was pumping up and down on the chest of a scrawny, half-naked Korean youth on the crash room table. The evening duty Samoan medical officer stood as far away from the kid’s head as he could, squeezing a mask-and-bag apparatus over the kid’s face, the air whooshing out audibly around the edges of the mask. And everybody else stood around watching.
Casually, Neil reseated the mask on the kid’s face and held it there with one long finger hooked around the kid’s jaw. He checked the kid’s femoral pulse and smiled at the nurse doing the chest compressions. “I’d offer to help, but I wouldn’t be nearly as effective.”
Ann choked back an hysterical giggle and turned away, picking what she needed out of the crash cart. There was always this moment of panic, the need to wrestle with her terror of failure and a mind that ran off in ninety directions in a crisis. Cha noh yu: tea ceremony. Close down smells; turn off the audio; only hands: touch and movement and vision like a brush stroke. Choose the blade; snap it in place; check the light; release. Choose the tube, check the seal, fit the guide. Lay the tools side by side. She nodded the medical officer out of the way, set the boy’s head, opened his jaw, and slid the speculum blade over the tongue and into the space in front of the vocal cords. Crouched there at the head of the table, lifting the speculum, she could feel the strain in her hands and shoulder and back and was rewarded by clear sight of the reversed V of the cords, like half drawn curtains, marking the opening of the trachea. One clear shot; pull out the guide; attach the bag; pump, pump.
“I only hear one side,” the medical officer said, listening with his stethoscope.
“Chest’s full of blood.” Welly Tuisosopo stood in the doorway from the back hall. “Get the suction hooked up.” In the interval while Neil orchestrated the first attempt at defibrillation, Welly barked his orders again in Samoan, and suddenly people began to move.
“X-ray’s coming,” Neil said, standing back while the nurse pumped again, and Ann sucked blood out of the kid’s chest and ventilated whatever lung tissue he had left.
“Yeah, well, tell ‘em to find the damned bronchoscope, too. Bet you fare to En Zed he’s bust a vessel into cavitary TB.” Neil was nodding, looking relaxed and sage as he got the first IV in. Another gift known only to the tall and, preferably, blond, Ann thought as she worked the bag and sucked out more blood: that look of being entirely in control. Her outlaw brain tossed up the image of Wills McGee. Well, so much for that illusion. Welly’s voice popped the balloon. “You,” he was saying to a supernumerary nurse, “Find me a Fogarty catheter.” The nurse looked confused, and Welly stomped off down the back hall, grumbling angrily to himself. He didn’t mind, Ann knew, having an evening’s drinking interrupted by a chance to go to the OR, but he hated housework. On the other hand, he was probably the only person in the hospital who remembered what a Fogarty catheter was—she certainly didn’t—or, for that matter, where the bronchoscope was.
Somehow, in the timewarp such experiences are for those who live them, over the next fifteen minutes, lots of stuff happened. And then, without words, Neil and Ann and Welly knew that there was no point going on. Together, they stood back. The swish of the respirator bag was the last sound. The boy’s body lay, still and silent, on the table, festooned with all those bits of plastic tubing and steel wiring with which they had tried to communicate with pieces of him without ever being able to get him whole again.
“What happened?” Han said. “I need to be able to tell the fleet rep.” He still looked belligerent, but now he was sitting with one hip hooked on the edge of the desk in the surgery lounge. Ann had insisted that everyone take long showers and change into clean scrubs before they went home. Welly had ignored her, washed his hands and marched off back to where ever he’d been before he’d turned up in the ER. Neil was long since scrubbed and gone.
“Best guess is that Welly was right,” Ann said. “Big blood vessel in an area of cavitary TB; vessel wall being eroded; suddenly gives way. Welly actually got the worst of the bleeding stopped. But we couldn’t get his heart going again. Kids’ hearts—and that guy was essentially a kid—are usually healthy enough that if you can fix whatever made them stop breathing—you know, like choking on something—fast enough, the heart never stops. Or it starts again as soon as there’s enough oxygen “ She shrugged unhappily. “Didn’t work with him. And now we’ve all presumably been swimming in tubercle bacilli for the last hour.” She smiled wryly. “What a mess.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, as soon as the lab confirms that it’s TB, which will likely be from the slides, tomorrow, we’ll have to do what’s called a contact study. Do TB skin tests on all of us now and then again in a couple of months, see who got infected during that little party. Though I can’t see how any of us could have missed out.”
Han looked even more belligerent. “My skin test’s already positive. I was vaccinated when I was a kid.” For a moment, she could see in his face all those memories of being a refugee child, the camps, the fear, but he clamped it down, the way he always did.
Ann smiled. Even her face muscles were tired. “True, true, and unrelated. I’m sure you had BCG vaccine as a kid, and your skin test may very well be positive. Doesn’t mean they’re connected. Other than proving that countries that have lots of TB routinely use BCG. I’m too tired to argue about it now. We’ll deal with it tomorrow.” She gathered up the towels the men had left scattered around the lounge furniture and dropped them in the bin by the door. Han hadn’t moved.
“What about AIDS?” His voice was rough. He might have been questioning a suspect.
“A good question,” she said evenly. “And I assure you some of that blood Neil secured for the lab will address that question. Though, even if he had HIV “
She shrugged. How do you explain to people how tightly you lock down the compartments of fear, getting from day to day? Though probably, to a cop, no explanation would be needed. “For all the mess, the blood was mostly contained in the suction apparatus and on the bronchoscope. Welly can be an asshole about stuff, but, maybe you didn’t notice, he did have two pairs of gloves on. Nobody splashed blood in their mouth or in their eyes. We all got a little blood on our clothes but nothing else. HIV doesn’t penetrate intact skin. And it isn’t air-born.”
A Bird in the Hand Page 16