As if reading her mind, the old woman said, “You are the doctor for the Public Health.”
“Yes.”
“You are here to take care of old Fata.”
Again, Ann was not surprised. The only person who could know more about a traditional village than its bobby would be its old ladies. Again, as if in response to Ann’s thoughts, Ioane’s auntie nodded, still moving her bits of cloth through the machine.
“I was a public health nurse for thirty years. Commissioned Corps.” She said the last words, Commissioned Corps, in English. “Twenty years on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota.” She bellowed with un-chiefly laughter. She went on in Samoan. “The sky goes from side to side in much the same way. But there is more color in the ocean of grass. I learned this from the Sioux women.” Suddenly, Ann realized that what the old nurse was doing was piecing for a quilt, running up the little quadrangles of cloth into larger squares that would be sewn together to make the whole. And, looking up, realized that what were hanging from the high rafters, safe from blowing rain up in the high shelter of the roof beams, were folded quilts, bright flags of color and pattern, like heraldry in a medieval church.
Ann gazed at them, fascinated. Fascinated because they were so anomalous and so beautiful. And because she recognized that, like a person who has perfect pitch, can hear and reproduce tones perfectly, the old nurse saw color perfectly. And that she herself, Ann, could recognize that, and that the recognition was likewise something unusual. She, the one daughter without the gift of art, neither of music, like the one pair of sisters, or of painting, like the other pair. Only the imperfect art of medicine. But she could see color. Ann looked at the old lady who grinned at her and said, in English. “Fine mats are very boring. And you can’t wrap yourself in one of Mary Pritchard’s tapas.” She shrugged and dropped the finished square in the basket beside her. “But one must make peace with one’s oddities. Ah, Ioane: you are a good boy.”
Ann hadn’t noticed the young policeman leaving, but he crossed the floor to them now, hair wet, skin glowing, clad only in a clean lavalava in a print like an Escher vision of bird-of-paradise flowers. Jesus: no wonder Pua was in love with him. He was carrying a tray with a tea set and two mugs, the crockery all plain, bright colors, the cheap Portuguese stuff that turns up all over the world: salmon, lime, magenta, teal. Colors and forms, she watched them as he set the tray down, feeling slightly drunk.
The old nurse looked up at her great nephew. “Get yourself a mug as well. And then get some sleep. That bad man you work for will call you soon enough.” Ioane grinned at Ann, one of his eyebrows flicked up and down, and then he crossed back to the corner of the house where he had been brewing the tea on a spirit burner. The two women watched him in silence as he walked away from them. From where she sat, Ann’s gaze took in both the old lady seated on her left and the tall young man walking down the length of the long house. And the light coming in from the sea and the sand glowed off of the stone floor and up against their forms, lighting them from within like Tuscan marble. The old lady said, “He has no family, and in many ways, he is a fool, like any young man. But he is a good boy. He takes good care of the village.” She looked at Ann and one of her eyebrows moved in just the same way as Ioane’s. “The thumb is useful because it is alone.”
Any given proverb in Samoan can mean about three different things, depending on the context. The old lady could just be saying that Ioane Ioane tried harder because he had no status. Or that the village took advantage of him, expecting more of the communal work expected from all young men from him because of his lack of status. On the other hand, that proverb was probably as close as you could get in Samoan to saying, Sometimes, you’ve got to think outside the box.
Two hours later, duty done and old Fata apparently doing far better than any culture’s medical establishment would have said she had any right to, Ann climbed into her jeep. Ioane’s face appeared, bending to the passenger’s side window. He was in uniform again. “I must go back to Fagatogo,” he said, his face arrayed as good-village-boy.
“Sure.”
Ann started the car and drove out of the village. As soon as Ioane had gotten into the jeep, his expression had changed, flattened. The change made Ann edgy. People in general made her edgy. People are so universally either the source of pain or, as for her now—the ache of it came back suddenly, like coming out of anesthesia—of guilt for having caused pain. To which men add their peculiar gift for violence. Like any good Samoan, as long as she could spot the context accurately, therefore possibly being able to manipulate it, she could usually stay ahead of trouble. But she was not reading this kid. Then suddenly she recognized that what she was seeing was Ioane headed back to duty. The face was Han’s.
Thinking of Han could take her in a lot of directions at once. She concentrated on the girl in the dump. “I wonder,” she said in Samoan, “About the girl in the dump.” Ioane looked at her. “I believe that she is the girl with yellow hair from the big boat. Her two friends talked to me yesterday about her.”
“Yes,” he said. “The lieutenant talks to them today.”
“Oh. Okay. Good.”
“He believes that she was killed by the sailor with the red face hair.” Ioane grunted and looked at Ann, his face still tense. “He is wrong,” he said.
Ann registered that statement as nine-point-five on the Samoan social Richter scale. “Oh?”
“This girl meets a man at the Gooney Bird.” He used the English words for the name of the bar.
Ann drove for a while, concentrating on the road and trying to understand what she had just heard. For it seemed impossible. The other two girls from the boat had said their shipmate was clueless, but you’d have to be seriously clueless to be a female of any stamp, particularly palagi, and spend more than a very few minutes at the Gooney Bird. Had the guy who’d been killed, Pedersen, taken her there? Or is that where she had met whoever killed her? But if Ioane knew this, why did Han not know it?
The answer to that was simple enough.
She drove slowly through Amouli. The westering sun sparkled down through the palms onto the pearly sand. On the other side of the village, as if there were some shred more privacy here as the road rose through scrub to make the precarious traverse around the point, she said, gently, “You must tell him.” It won’t be the most awful thing he’s discovered in the last twenty-four hours. Maybe that will even make it easier for you. “Because you are an officer, you must tell him. But that’s really all you have to tell him.” She spoke in English. She couldn’t really drive that stretch and watch Ioane’s face. At least not and survive the experience. The boy wasn’t saying anything. Finally, she said, in Samoan, “The thumb is useful because it is alone.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him look at her for a while and then back to the road. He didn’t say anything more for the rest of the trip back to Fagatogo.
CHAPTER 26
Any number of law enforcement concerns might have had precedent over rounding up those marijuana growers. But that knowledge was about as useful to Han as telling a dog not to eat a piece of steak that’s dropped on the floor. He trotted back down to the station, called out to the airport substation to set up a preliminary observation of the site, called in a couple of his older officers who were overdue for a reminder that even chiefs pull their weight and woke up the assistant to the assistant Attorney General from a Saturday morning sleep-in to get the writs he needed started through the processing.
By the time he rounded up the two girls from the boat to walk them back to Nozaki’s, Han was feeling quite pleased with life.
The two girls had reached that point in their role in the investigation that the horror of their former shipmate’s present state had gone into its first remission and they were mostly excited at being the center of attention. Their skipper, Poulsen, was on Nozaki’s dock handing supplies down into
the dinghy to Ivor when the girls rounded the end of the store building. They ran up to him.
“It’s Wendy!”
“We saw her!”
“We even, like, identified her stuff.”
Poulsen met Han’s eyes, then looked down at Lee-girl-1. “You are sure?”
The girl shuddered. “She, like, had my underpants!”
Poulsen nodded as if that were an unarguable point.
Han said, “I’m going to need to get from you whatever personal information about her that you can give me. Ms. Kane-Lee and Ms. Lee have given us a good preliminary identification, but that will need to be verified by the pathology laboratory in Honolulu. Whatever additional information I can send up to them with the body tomorrow will make the process that much easier.”
Poulsen nodded slowly and his voice was sober. “Yes. Of course.”
Han turned to the girls. “You said you might have a photo we could use.” And then to the skipper. “I’ll also need to go through her personal possessions “
“Yeah,” said Lee-girl-1. “Maybe you’ll find my earrings “
“At this point,” Han went on, still to Poulsen, “I can’t rule out the possibility that she was murdered.”
Poulsen nodded, still with that air of abstraction. Han sensed no particular threat from him, just a man lost in calculation. Maybe regarding his business. Or maybe regarding the likelihood that he was going to get away with murder. Yeah, okay, but murder of whom?
Ivor was deputized to run Han and the girls out to the boat. There, they picked through what little Wendy had left when she had decamped, mainly half-empty of bottles of this and that—Han had no idea that hair required so much chemical attention—a few magazines. One magazine had an opened Bank of America Bankcard Center envelope tucked into it that the four of them, the two Lee girls and the sailors, all denied was theirs. The envelope had a cellophane window, so, no address, but at least suggested that the dead girl might have a traceable account. There was nothing else obvious. The girls found Han a snapshot of them with Wendy Sondheim in front of Honolulu’s Aloha Tower. Poulsen returned, and Han followed him into his tiny office behind the main ladder. Poulsen gave Han a slim file. “She gave a Honolulu address. My girls say it is a youth hostel near the University. I do not know.”
The file held an employment application form of sorts: local address, next of kin. The latter name wasn’t Sondheim, and Han didn’t recognize the name of the town, but the state was California and the zip code suggested the San Fernando valley.
“The girls say Wendy moved ashore as soon as you got here last Thursday. That she didn’t spend any more nights on the boat. That right?”
Poulsen shrugged. “If they say so. I do not care. There is work to do. All I ask is that it get done.”
“They say she wasn’t getting that done either.”
“As I told you before, she was not a good worker. She told me she had sailed. That was how she got to Honolulu. But she was sea-sick most of the time. Particularly the last two weeks. We did not have rough weather. I think she likes to sleep late. She does not like to work.”
“She was pregnant. Might account for that.”
“Ach.” Like when Han had told him about Pedersen’s death, the skipper’s face was suddenly grey, crumpled. “She was a stupid child. She told me she was educated, but this is hard to believe. I am sorry.”
“What are the chances the baby was your brother’s?”
Poulsen looked at him as if he had not understood the words. Then, still looking old and sick, he shook his head. “I do not know. I do not think so.” He shrugged. “It is true that they were…close. But I believe she was in Honolulu some weeks before she joined my crew. And we left very soon from there. We are only three weeks out now. I do not know much about these things, but I do not think so. With our children, it was some time before my wife became this way.”
Han wondered which had come first, Poulsen’s present occupation or his family. “When was the last time you saw Wendy?”
Poulsen stared through the open doorway into the main cabin. The sun was bright through the portholes, and heat beat down on them from overhead. “She was gone all day Thursday. Until night-time, anyway. Supper-time. She worked Friday. Yes, a little while in the afternoon. We had much to do before our first clients arrived. The girls had a little fight about this, but the work was done. Also Saturday.” His voice trailed away but then picked up again. “Yes, also Saturday. The girls can tell you more exactly, but we were all here working very hard through the day.”
“How did she get back and forth, if she was staying on shore? Did someone else, like, not your brother or Ivor, bring her?”
Poulsen shook his head. “This was not needed. We were tied up to the dock then. All come and go freely.”
“Sunday?”
Again, the skipper sat for a while before he spoke. Sweat rolled down between Han’s shoulder blades. “I do not remember. I do not think so. But Sundays, if we are in port, I do not pay attention. Only workdays.”
He would have also, Han guessed, had the mother and father of all hangovers last Sunday. The party had started at the hotel bar late Saturday afternoon, as Han recalled, accelerating slowly around the bay shore, until ending in the brawl on the Fagotogo green in front of the Gooney Bird just after midnight. It hadn’t been the first fight involving the Baltic schooner crew or the last, but it had been the biggest and had taken the longest to sort out.
“How about after that? Monday?”
“There was much rain.” Poulsen looked at Han, his eyebrows drawn together, as if looking for answers for questions he was asking himself. He nodded. “Big storm. We went nowhere. We had no clients until after the Thursday flight. So, we rest. The girls said that Wendy has moved ashore. Thorvald was angry, like a spoiled child, but he played with his eagle and his electronics. Perhaps I was wrong in this.” He looked down at his hands. “But it was quieter on the boat without her. The girls were not so.. “ His voice trailed away again.
“Not so what?”
“I cannot say. They fight, the three. Like cats. Hiss and spit.” He grinned suddenly at Han. “Sometimes it is better with all boys. There is less fighting. Though, when they fight, they do more damage.”
The two village boys who had the misfortune to be sent out to do a marijuana harvest that afternoon in preparation for the Sunday flight to Honolulu neither fought nor did any damage. At least to themselves. One of the joys of Samoa, from a law enforcement perspective, is that nobody ever takes a fall by himself. By four o’clock, the whole enterprise had collapsed, like a parachute folding itself to earth in gracefully pleating fabric of I-was-told-to-do-it. The Attorney General did not lend his legal expertise to this process, having left for Apia on the ten a.m. flight with connections to New Zealand. The Lieutenant Governor was closeted with the Governor much of the day and was unavailable for comment.
The individuals apparently elected to take the fall were two mid-level talking chiefs, one each from the two non-Nu’ufou families. They had some kind of uxo-rial connection and shared experiences in south L.A., and had worked out this clever side deal. At least, that was the story according to the senior talking chief from the western district who, at Sa’ili’s suggestion, Han had pulled out of a parish council meeting to deal with the traditional culture side of things. Certainly, by cultivating this tiny peripheral section of the contested land, the two mid-level chiefs had been reaping far more profit than the third family’s hot-shot talking chief was ever going to gain out of some government lease for a dump, even if he did then establish precedent claim to the land. Except now, of course, they had also just precipitated a legal mess that would leave the third family as winner. Han was still Korean enough to recognize winners and losers as a really stupid idea. But that wasn’t his problem.
As the last magenta glow of the s
unset behind the mountains lit the air like faerie, Han stepped out onto the courthouse veranda with the senior talking chief of the oversight district. The two mid-level talking chiefs identified as the major players had just been charged. Han and the old chief stood together and watched five DPS officers loading the two into a van to take them over to the jail. The senior district chief turned to Han and opened his mouth to say something, an exceptionally butter-wouldn’t-melt expression on his face. And Han knew, in that moment, that the old talking chief was going to say something about Sasa—in exquisitely diplomatic terms of course—but trying to implicate him non-the-less.
But the old chief didn’t speak right away. And Han knew that the Samoan was thinking that there was no point in making the hint because Han wasn’t going to understand either the hint or the threat because Han was a stupid palagi and a stupid Korean palagi to boot. Han smiled, shook the man’s hand, and thanked him for his cooperation.
The fact that no one had implicated Allen Stewart, the little Kiwi bush pilot, was an added benefit. And tomorrow, Han was going to sit down with a tape recorder, an official witness, and Ioane as translator, and take every one of those turkeys through it about a blond palagi tart called Wendy who was making the rounds of the bars at the end of last week.
Still grinning fiercely to himself, Han walked back across the Fagatogo green as the light shifted from purple to smoky pearl to night. The village was maybe a hair quieter than it was the rest of the day. Probably evening prayers time. He registered a little irritation that Ioane had missed the fun and games today, but he supposed the kid had to have a day off once in a while. And, of course, whatever grudges would be held regarding who got rounded up and how, they wouldn’t affect Ioane, which was probably a good thing. Han snorted to himself. Fucking Samoa.
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