Undue Influence

by Steve Martini

  I show it to her, point with my finger at her name.

  She makes gestures of modesty.

  ‘The press,’ she says. ‘Once on their “A” list you never get off. They have to have something to fill in around the ads,’ she says.

  But I know better. Dana’s in the power set in Capital City. Well-thought-of and a serious contender for higher office.

  We talk for a while, doze on and off. My head is spinning. The blast from this afternoon, the pressure of the cabin, the droning of the engines, all combine to make for fitful sleep.

  By the time we do the interisland flight it is nearing midnight Hawaiian time. Stars so bright you want to reach out and grab them as we do the last few miles on the road to Wailea and our hotel. I’m driving the rental car as Dana navigates.

  I would have slept in some fleabag near the airport, but Dana insists that we will both need a good night’s sleep for the road to Hana in the morning.

  ‘You’ve been there?’ I say.

  ‘Once.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Everyman’s dream of paradise,’ she says. ‘Azure seas, blue skies, puffy clouds, and the hills are green, very, very green.’

  She smiles. ‘And then there is the road to Hana,’ she says.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You’ll see in the morning.’

  The highway suddenly comes to an end and I make a sweeping right turn down a winding drive toward the sea. We dead-end at the driveway to a shopping center, upscale. I see signs with arrows in every direction, golf courses and clubhouses at every point of the compass.

  ‘You want to go left,’ she says.

  I turn, and about a hundred yards up the road I see the sign for the hotel.

  We turn in and stop at the kiosk. A woman in a flowing silk sarong greets us.

  ‘Welcome to Grand Wailea. Are you staying with us?’

  ‘The reservation’s under “Colby,”’ says Dana.

  ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘We got the call.’

  The woman gives me a parking pass and sends us through, down the broad curving driveway, past cascades of water backlit by colored lights. We turn and stop under the massive carport at the front entrance. A car hop gets the keys. A bellboy takes our bags. If they had six stars, this place would get them all.

  We are lei-ed about the neck as we enter the lobby, something from Elephant Walk – open air and lush vegetation, a reflecting pond larger than some lakes, and an enormous covered bar in the center, its blue-tiled roof floating on concrete spires fifty feet in the air. We are greeted by a girl in starched white livery at reception, a white tunic with gold buttons, Asian eyes, and an accent that rings with intrigue.

  They are doing impressions of our credit cards, and I am wondering how mine will hold up.

  Dana leans in my ear. ‘Not to worry. I got us a good rate,’ she says.

  The girl at the counter smiles.

  Great. Three hundred a night, I’m thinking.

  They bring us hot hand towels and little glasses of papaya juice. The girl hits the bell twice and our luggage appears on a cart. We follow the bellhop to the elevator, and outside, under stars and flickering tiki torches, past giant banyan trees and a sea of bamboo, palm fronds clacking in the trade winds.

  He stops with the rolling cart in front of a door, glossy white enamel with brass fittings, and with the card key opens it. He shows Dana in, drops off her bags, and takes me to my room next door.

  I tip him and he’s out the door.

  The place is palatial but muggy. I open the plantation louvers and the sliding door behind them, walk out on the balcony overlooking the sea, surging white surf on a curve of beach shimmering in the moonlight.

  I hear knocking.

  It’s Dana at the adjoining door.

  I unlatch my side and she comes in.

  ‘Like it?’ she says.

  ‘What’s not to like? The government rate must be a little better than when I worked for the DA,’ I tell her.

  ‘Pulled a few strings,’ she says. ‘Some people in Honolulu owed me a favor.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ I say.

  ‘Some people. Relax,’ she says. ‘Enjoy the evening. Tomorrow comes… the road to Hana.’ She makes it sound ominous, then smiles at me.

  It’s a warm night, but the breeze off the ocean carries its own chill. I shiver, more from exhaustion, leaning on the railing at the balcony.

  ‘Do you want to order something in the room to eat?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘So this is how the other half lives,’ I say. A world away from the gray-cast skies and freezing ground fog of Capital City in the winter.

  ‘The place really is something, isn’t it?’ She’s reading my mind. ‘You must think I’m awful. The pampered woman. Tagging along and demanding only the best,’ she says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I should have let you make the arrangements,’ she says. I turn and look at her. A smile. ‘Why would I think you’re awful? Because you have good taste?’ She is shimmering hair, and the magic gleam of night light dancing in amethyst eyes.

  ‘Now you’re patronizing,’ she says. ‘Believe me, if this trip had taken us to any other place, it would have been government per diem and a travel allowance. Like I said, tonight is a special deal.’

  ‘Why?’

  She looks at me, strokes my face with the side of her hand. ‘You had a rough day. I thought you needed something… special,’ she says.

  ‘Your husband took you to nice places. He must have been well-heeled.’

  ‘You sound jealous.’ She winks. A schoolgirl’s grin. ‘You never took Nikki anywhere like this?’

  I shake my head. ‘The anxiety attacks waiting for the bill would have stolen all the pleasure,’ I tell her. ‘We’re both blue-collar, down to the third cervical vertebra. Vacations, the few times we took them, were a rented mountain cabin that belonged to a friend, meals in, and vacuum before you leave.’

  I turn to the railing. She is behind me, the contour of her body pressed to mine, shielded against the breeze of the trades. I feel her knee in the crook of my own.

  ‘My husband’s family had money.’ She’s musing, almost talking to herself, leaning on me, her chin nestled on the back of my shoulder.

  ‘Problem was, Darrel only knew how to spend it. He would have been the prodigal son, except he never really left home. Never grew up,’ she says.

  ‘Sounds like you had a child to raise after all,’ I say.

  ‘You could say that. Oh, as a woman I always felt good on Darrel’s arm. He wore the right clothes, made all the proper gestures, he was tall, good-looking in a charming sort of way. He had the kind of humor that can make a woman forgive a lot, and a first impression that lasted longer than the crease in his pants.

  ‘It took me the better part of the first year to figure out where all the money was coming from. Darrel couldn’t hold a job if he owned the place. Daddy kept buying him businesses, and Darrel kept treating them like hobbies.’

  ‘Is that what brought it to an end?’

  ‘In part. One night he got drunk and I saw the darker side. He’d had an argument with his father over money, and took it out on me. Slapped me around until I got the car keys. And that was that,’ she says. ‘I never went back.’

  ‘You left him?’

  ‘Quickest divorce in history. Still like how the other half lives?’ she says.

  ‘I suppose the grass is always greener,’ I tell her. I’m nodding, swaying in the cool breeze, listening to the rollers as they crash on the beach below, white foam glistening in the moonlight.

  Three fingers of her right hand are through the buttons on the front of my shirt, twirling through the hairs on my chest, the tip of one foraging over a nipple, like searing heat.

  I wonder for a moment if I should move, but there is nothing uncomfortable in this. It feels so natural. A woman’s hand on my chest, something I have not felt in months.
/>   The soft whisper of her lips caresses the nape of my neck. I turn, and I am looking into her eyes, dazed, wondering what is happening.

  Shattering glass and death, the explosion at the post office, seem something from another decade, another century.

  I am mesmerized by the glow in her face. My hands, clasped at the small of her back, take on a life of their own. She is soft and warm, her hands at my shirt, suddenly inside, buttons undone, the soft slide of silk as her blouse driven by points of ecstasy grazes my chest.

  The throbbing in my ears is no longer from pain. My fingers at the buttons on the back of her blouse. A trail of fabric in our wake as we grasp and grope each other, moving through the room. My knee gripped by silken thighs. Her hungry mouth pressed on my own, the whisper of her tongue.

  There is the slickness of nylon against my naked leg as I ease her onto the bed. I am captured by the reality of her near nakedness. She lies, her hair cascading on the pillow, stripped to the waist, the soft tenderness of her breasts like two beacons, her thin waist encircled by the lacy gauze of a black garterbelt. The tender bare flesh of thighs, above nylon.

  She looks at me, her eyes glazed by lust, a mirror image of my own.

  She beckons, her flesh moist with the scent of the tropics.

  I sink, our bodies two melding pools of pleasure.

  She is in my ear, hot whispers of passion laced with my name. Lower regions pressing, the slick wet heat of desire moving, roiling, undulating ancient rhythms of bliss, her fingers everywhere. My mind a sea of confusion, lust, or love. My lips, the edge of teeth jagged at her nipple. She arches her back, and between quick breaths of passion, grinding bone to pelvic bone, she pleads for the pleasure of release.

  Chapter 14

  Shafts of light pierce the louvered shutters of the room like golden arrows. The songs of exotic birds erupt from the verdant bush outside my room, along with the rush of water over rocks in the gardens. There are random voices, people walking on the path beneath the balcony.

  My senses, dulled by half-sleep, detect a shadow moving in the distant reaches of the room. I am wrapped in rumpled sheets, sprawled on the bed, feeling the warm humid air of morning in the tropics.

  As I open my eyes and focus, she’s sitting in a chair, her eyes locked on me, smiling. Dana is wrapped in two bath towels, her hair wet from a washing.

  ‘Did anybody ever tell you that you make these little noises when you sleep?’ she says. ‘Little mewing sounds.’ She mimics something like a kitten complaining to get out of a box.

  ‘Lovely,’ I say. The bright daylight outside the window finally registers.

  I roll over and sit up, a sheet wrapped around me.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Almost ten,’ she says.

  ‘What! Why didn’t you get me up?’

  ‘Oh, I did,’ she says. ‘Last night. At least three times.’

  ‘Cute,’ I say. I can still feel the yen for Dana climb in my groin, a frolic on the edge of hedonism, and wonder what God-made substance can possibly flood the brain to produce such pleasure.

  ‘You were tired. I thought I’d let you sleep.’

  I feel the scratches on my face from the flying glass of yesterday. Two of the bandages have come off during the night. I wonder how much of the soreness that racks my body is from the explosion and how much derives from our antics of the night.

  ‘We oughta be halfway to Hana by now,’ I tell her.

  ‘I’ll be ready in ten minutes,’ she says.

  I’m up, sheets of modesty dragging on the floor, tripping, grousing through the trail of discarded clothing, looking for my pants. I have distant memories of someone taking a shower in the middle of the night. I feel my body. Sticky. It wasn’t me.

  ‘They’re on the other chair,’ she says. My pants.

  I grab them and start to put a leg through, then discover that I have nothing on underneath.

  She’s laughing, out loud.

  ‘Your suitcase is over there,’ she says. ‘By the table.’

  First things first. I rummage and find a clean pair of Jockeys.

  She’s out of the chair and into the bathroom in her room. I can hear the sound of the hair dryer.

  ‘There’s croissants and coffee on the table in here,’ she shouts over the drone of the dryer. ‘I ordered from room service.’

  In two seconds I’m hovering over the table in her room, scarfing with both hands.

  ‘Hungry?’

  ‘Famished like a bear,’ I tell her.

  ‘And just as fuzzy,’ she says.

  I am hairy chested and without a shirt.

  ‘How long will it take to get to Hana?’

  ‘Depends how dangerously you want to live,’ she says.

  The way to Hana seems its own form of paradise, verdant sugarcane fields and plantation villages, a rocky coastline, the many surfaces of the sea, cresting emerald waves crowned by white froth. Lava ridges rise from white-sand beaches, forming a dark tawny color to match the tanned brown thighs of girls in thong bikinis as we whisk along the highway.

  Then forty miles in heaven turns to hell. Single-lane bridges on hairpin turns, white concrete walls, and plummeting waterfalls that drop a thousand feet out of virgin jungle; switchbacks so severe that half the time we are going in the wrong direction.

  The locals drive like someone has loaded their java with testosterone. Life on the road to Hana, it seems, is a perpetual game of chicken.

  The road begins to narrow until at one point I have to back up a hundred feet, to a soft spot on the shoulder over a vertical cliff, to let a cement truck pass in the other direction. The driver, a big Hawaiian, beams me a grin like some sumo wrestler who’s bounced my ass out of the circle. Like what’s amatter, hauole? No balls? Even Dana gives me a look, like if I’d pressed it I could have slid between his tires and under the axle.

  I offer her the wheel but she declines.

  It is after two o’clock by the time I see the dark basalt landing strip of the Hana airport. It lies on a flat point of land over the sea, chopped out of the jungle and carved lava stone. A couple of miles on is the town of Hana. Two churches, the post office, a couple of grocery stores, and a gas station.

  ‘The road gets worse on the other side of town,’ she tells me.

  ‘How can it?’

  ‘I’ve been there,’ she says. ‘Trust me.’

  There’s a single hotel. Dana points me in the direction, and a couple of minutes later we roll into the circular drive of the Hotel Hana-Maui, single-story bungalows with plantation roofs of tile and tin, old Hawaii before American and Japanese megabucks tried to marble it over like ancient Rome.

  But one thing is certain. Hana would be the place of choice for anyone wanting to get lost from the prying eyes of this world.

  A woman directs us to the registration desk. We are already registered, adjoining rooms in a bungalow on the grass. I figure Dana was busy on the phone from the plane last night.

  ‘Mr. Opolo is in the bungalow across the way,’ says the clerk.

  ‘Good,’ says Dana.

  ‘Who’s Mr. Opolo?’

  ‘I’ll introduce you in a minute,’ she says.

  I sense there’s some surprise coming. ‘Tell me now,’ I say.

  ‘You’re going to meet him in just a minute.’

  ‘Then humor me.’

  ‘He’s a friend. From Honolulu.’

  ‘What kind of a friend?’

  ‘Professional colleague,’ she says.

  ‘Dana.’

  ‘Okay. He’s with the FBI. Agent in charge of the Honolulu office.’

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ I say. ‘I thought we had a deal.’

  ‘Listen, you’re not going to get anywhere on your own. Jessie can help.’

  I’m shaking my head. ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘He knows the people. This is an insular place,’ she says. She makes it sound like the Ozarks of Polynesia. ‘The locals want to run you in circles, they’ll do it
. There’s a thousand houses in these hills, from estates to the stars to one-room stone huts. The Merlows could be in any one of them.’

  ‘And they could be here in the hotel, in the room next to us,’ I say.

  ‘They’re not. We already checked,’ she says, droll.

  ‘Great.’

  The clerk hands me a map of the hotel grounds. At this moment I could spit on it. A bellhop grabs our bags and loads them into an electric cart, Dana giving me a million and one reasons why I should thank her for calling in the FBI.

  I’m beginning to think Harry was right, and wondering who fucked who last night.

  She’s still talking at me minutes later when the phone rings in her room.

  ‘Jessie.’ Relief in her voice. The troops are here.

  ‘Where are you? Come on over,’ she says.

  Two minutes later there’s a knock on the door, and Dana opens it.

  Outside is a man, maybe late forties, hair like white silk, skin the color of burnished wood. He’s barrel-chested, a big man, a face like a totem, austere. He’s wearing one of those loud print shirts, flowers in every color of the rainbow.

  ‘Hey, girl. It’s good to see you,’ he says.

  ‘It’s been a long time,’ Dana greets him.

  ‘Let’s see. Since San Francisco,’ he says. ‘What – five years?’

  She agrees with him, puts her hands on his shoulders, and gives him a peck on the cheek.

  Opolo has to bow his neck a little to get under the low lintel of the door.

  ‘Jessie Opolo. Paul Madriani.’ She makes the introduction, unsure how I’m going to respond.

  ‘Glad to meet you.’ He smiles. I wonder if it’s as artless as it looks or the face of Polynesian guile.

  I won’t be an asshole, so I take his hand.

  ‘A pleasure,’ I say.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ she says.

  ‘Since this morning,’ he tells her. ‘Coptered in about nine.’

  ‘Anybody with you?’

  ‘Two agents,’ he says.

  It’s a fucking army, I think. I’m waltzing away, rolling my eyes.