The Preserve

by Steve Anderson

The truth of such a stark white shock? He was already a dead man if he didn’t act.

  Lett pulled his bedroll over him, up to his chin like a boy sleeping outside for the first time. He more than mistrusted Lansdale, he now realized. He feared him. He feared the very man who was giving him his cure.

  He was sweating, but it cooled. Eventually, he dozed off.

  Later, he dreamt. Some would call it a nightmare, but to Lett it was the dream he’d always had, the one that woke him alone in his Kona Town billet room and then in Kanani’s borrowed bungalow down on Alii Drive . . .

  He grabs his own throat, squeezes and squeezes. He peers into his eyes and sees horror in his bulging white eyeballs, his distending pupils. Then it’s her. The German girl. He feels her so deep within his chest, wrenching his distended heart, that he tightens his grip on her muffled screams just to make it all stop. This little German girl is no more than eleven and her long dark braided pigtails whip around as he suffocates her, clamping down, his knuckles gone all white. His mouth hangs open, but nothing comes out, like hers now, and his hot tears drop onto her dulling eyes as he hovers over her for leverage, pressing down, compressing, and his heart aches all the more. He can’t look at her. He peers around and all he can see is that cold, gray, bombed-out street in Cologne, the scene of his war crime. What could he do? She’d spotted him and his team and she was going to alert the street patrol, was going to give them away in their hiding place, and then they’d be surrounded, no way out . . .

  Lett woke in his pup tent, wide awake. He heard rustling in the leaves, from afar, then closer. His head reared up. All was dark. He was all alone. It was a pup tent now, but he might as well be the only man in the forward foxhole, a human tripwire. The rustling came closer.

  Attackers! Surprise raid!

  He started sweating again, his chest hot, his blood pumping, but it was good. It was his steel and cables and gears and fresh oil.

  He must alert the first line and the command post before he’s surrounded, but they didn’t string comm wire, didn’t give him a field phone. It’s all up to him.

  He felt around in the dark, mechanically, fingered his M1 carbine and cradled it while he fastened his web belt holding his sheathed trench knife. He didn’t need his boots. They only made noise, soft ground or no.

  He heard whispers. And footsteps now, boots along soft ground and grass.

  Always keep moving. Stop and you’re cornered. Keep your eyes open.

  He slipped out of his pup tent on all fours, his light M1 riding in the bends of his arms, sliding toward the sounds like a snake, his tongue even stretching out, tasting the air.

  He followed the silhouettes in the night, and he could see in the pitch dark.

  They’ve passed the first line and are heading for the command post.

  There were three of them, crouching, with no gun barrels that he could see, but knives surely. They moved in a triangle pattern, fanning out but not too far, just enough space for him to strike and strike and strike.

  He lunged.

  He took out the first two in quick order. One now had wet gleaming blood for a face. The other was curled up but with one leg bent forward doll-like, as if he had no knee. He struck the third as he came at him, got on top of the man, digging into him, keeping him down.

  Lett was choking the man below him with both hands, pressing down, twisting, making him wheeze.

  “Stop, stop,” the man wheezed.

  “You?” Lett loosened up a little but kept him down.

  “Goddamn it, listen to me,” the man sputtered, words tumbling out like gravel into water. “We shoulda killed them when we had the chance, killed them in that tent, got me?”

  “No. No . . .”

  “I know you thought it. They’re gonna wreck you. He is. There is no fucking cure—”

  “Let him loose, Lett! Stop.”

  Lights flashed. Hands pulled Lett up. He reared around, but they had him by the arms and he floated. They dropped him down on his rear. Their flashlights shined on the bodies. The two lifeless ones wore small shorts, old boots without socks, burlap. They were dark. Natives. Dead.

  “Holy mackerel,” someone said. “Man, oh man.”

  The light shined on the third man. It was the commando. He was still gasping for air, moaning.

  Frankie whistled in wonder at Lett’s work, and Kodama showed him a bow.

  Then Frankie and Kodama carried the commando away, his feet dragging.

  “Lett? You hear me in there? Lett?”

  The flashlight pointed upward and found a long and delighted face, casting an eerie glow, making him a happy Frankenstein. It was Lansdale.

  “Now that was some mighty fine handiwork,” he sang.

  17.

  Kanani could not wait. She didn’t have a choice. That ringmaster Edward Lansdale wasn’t at The Preserve. He seemed to have left and taken that Japanese thug with a thing for geishas with him. And Frankie, she had to assume, could show up any moment even if he had only been spotted once, on the other side of the island. She could’ve used trusty Wendell Lett here, but he was out on assignment. She wanted to wait for Miss Mae, but the clock was tick-tocking.

  She’d been snooping around even more while they were all gone. All the clues, like the ones she wrested from that Japanese thug, always led away from the Territory of Hawaii, to places and possibly players she could not know. She needed clues back here, right here.

  The only angle was probing any weak links.

  This got her thinking about Lieutenant Colonel Selfer. Charlie Selfer, she was starting to see, might not be anything like the high makamaka he appeared to be, let alone the big kahuna he dreamed of becoming. That was the way it looked when she’d spied on the Main House windows with the opera glass that was included in that footlocker of strange toys at her boogie bungalow. She knew body language, all right. The important visitors who’d been here discussed and debated from their sofas and leather armchairs, always led by the one and only Lansdale. Selfer had never led any talks. Selfer barely talked at all. Selfer never got to sit. Selfer smiled and smoothed and was the only one to bring their drinks on a platter like at some catered affair in the Kona Inn. Selfer only hosted. Selfer waited. Selfer ingratiated, sure, but it got him nowhere she could see. Sometimes the important visitors had asked him to leave the room. And sometimes they had snickered after he left the room. Lansdale had snickered.

  Selfer appeared to manage The Preserve, and he likely filed a report from time to time, but he might just be a glorified confidential secretary. And he might not like that very much, based on what Wendell Lett told her about how the man made his name during the war.

  And so she let Charlie Selfer find her, just strolling through camp that evening after she had a drink in the bar. Selfer had been there holding court with the nurses at their usual table in the corner, and he didn’t eye her once—except the one time he strolled over to the men’s and shot her a glance out of the corner of his eye. She was, after all, wearing one of those suggestive tropical numbers every haole liked . . .

  All she had to do was get close to him. Get her face close to him. No boy could resist a girl with her face close enough to him. Miss Mae had taught her that. A girl had her wiles. Those could be a curse, something every man used and exploited. Or, she could use them to her advantage. Use her sex against them. She thought about how it could shake out. Once she was inside the Main House a few times, she could figure out the lay of the place. Supposing there was some cabinet or safe? Supposing Selfer liked a little strange, or even some opium or other dose with his strange, and then he might well tell her things he didn’t mean to and not even remember. She had to try. Keep moving, Wendell always said.

  So she swung her hips as she walked by him in the bar and had proceeded to let him flirt, and the next morning she found herself riding in Selfer’s convertible DeSoto out the front gate. He drove her along the narrow roads that delivered them down the hills heading makai, toward the sea. A road below crossed
the old 1871 Trail and led them to the water. They could hear it once Selfer parked the DeSoto and put up the top, and they could smell its salty freshness. They walked a path to a flat open strand punctuated by solitary palm trees and spans of sandy earth and walkable black lava. A cozy inlet had a beach no wider than a football field, framed by short walls of black stones.

  “This is a sacred area,” Kanani told him as a breeze stroked their foreheads. “The Place of Refuge. In old days, Hawaiians who broke the ancient laws could avoid certain death by gaining entrance to this sacred place. But, you first had to swim across that bay out there called da Shark Den and if you made it without dying, then the kahuna—that’s like a priest to you, haole—he had to offer you sanctuary and absolve you of any wrongdoing.”

  “Now, if I’m not mistaken there’s another small bay nearby,” Selfer said. “There the explorer Captain Cook got pummeled and dismembered—and baked—by the natives for the ‘mana’ the priests believed was contained in his bones. Mana, that’s like a person’s mojo?”

  “Ho, that’s not bad. Yep, that happened over in Kealakekua Bay.”

  Selfer thought of everything. His picnic basket contained shrimp-and-cucumber sandwiches, mango salad, and a white wine from France. She spread out the blanket and propped up the large umbrella just so. She sunk her toes in the beach sand and so did he, smiling at her as if being tickled.

  “If you don’t like the wine? I have rum in the trunk—that or basi.”

  “Basi?”

  “It’s Filipino. Wine made from sugar cane. Has bark and leaves in it, can be rather bitter.” Selfer added a scrunched-up face.

  “Why don’t you take your hat off so I can see you?” she said.

  He was wearing a white panama hat. He removed it.

  “Now you look less like one plantation owner.”

  “Is that what you all think of me?” he joked.

  She shrugged. He also had bags under his eyes. That was new. Maybe he stayed up late burdened by the worries of managing a camp he didn’t actually run. Or maybe he’d only had a late night with that fresh nurse he was pursuing.

  “Wine sounds good,” she said.

  He pulled it from the basket. It was still cold, wrapped as it was in a thick hand towel. They drank from paper cone cups. The wine was sharper than she thought it would be, but it went down nice.

  “Look out there to the left,” she said. Farther out stood what would look to Selfer like a shack but was a rebuilt ancient temple. “Out past that rock wall.”

  “You mean that shack?”

  “That’s a temple.”

  “Ah. Imagine that. Nothing’s ever like it seems, this part of the world.”

  She turned to him. “Plenty stuff is coming in from the Philippines nowadays, yeah?”

  “Coming in?”

  “Get rum and cigars and trinkets and china and who knows what, and now it’s this bisi.”

  “Basi.” He added a shrug. “Well, this is a US territory.”

  “You don’t requisition it yourself, though, do you? You yourself, I mean. But someone has to requisition it, and someone has to send it.”

  He yanked his toes from the sand, pulled out a pack of Camels. He didn’t offer her one.

  “Don’t get sore,” she said. “It’s okay if you don’t know. You can’t know everything. And, everyone has to take orders from someone.”

  “It’s not that, it’s just that . . . I can’t talk about certain matters.” He paused. He put his smile back on. “You know something? Let’s just enjoy this lovely island haven for once.” He pulled himself up and jogged the few yards to the barely lapping tide, rolled up his white trousers a little higher, and splashed his feet in the water. She had to admit he didn’t dress down half bad. His aloha shirt wasn’t too gaudy, and it hung off him well.

  He strolled back looking looser and plopped down next to her.

  “Be more careful,” she said. “Coral out there. If coral doesn’t cut you then it’s lava rock.”

  “Is anything simply as nice as it looks?” he said, adding that smile again. “Take you, for instance.”

  She expected a smoother move from the likes of him, but the man had to start somehow. She smiled and buried her cheek in a shoulder. It was easy to blush with this wine.

  They sipped, their shoulders touching.

  “All that stuff from the Philippines,” she said. “Territory of Hawaii doesn’t need goods like that from the Philippines, never needed it before. And the US military certainly doesn’t.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Remember where I come from. Honolulu. Chinatown. Part of rackets and rings your US Military Government helped create. Yeah? So I know one smuggle job when I see it.”

  Selfer didn’t answer. But he didn’t laugh in her face, either.

  “Crates say ‘Wine’ or whatever—that’s no wine, just bottles on top.”

  Selfer pulled out a chrome hip flask and sucked on it like a teat and offered her a snort without telling her what it was. She waved it away. Eventually, he nodded. “We require certain funding,” he said, “for what it is we do. But I’m already telling you too much.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “You know who. The Directorate. Or whatever they’re going to call it.” He had lowered his voice, although not even the gecko staring at them from a rock three feet away could hear him over the water lapping and the flapping palm leaves.

  “You just said they, not we.”

  He held out hands. He couldn’t tell her.

  “No?” she continued. “Then what exactly do you do here, if you don’t know a thing?”

  Selfer seemed to think about that for a long time. He picked up his hat and stared at it. Set it back down, just so. He stared into the sand, his eyes widening like a kid trying to count all the granules. “It’s a valid question,” he said.

  “You know what this says to me? Look at me. It means that this isn’t at all what you thought it would be when you took the job.”

  He chuckled at that, but it wasn’t through a smile.

  “Ho, you mainlanders,” she said through an equally bitter chuckle, “always trying to trade up for the next best thing.”

  They heard laughing and tensed up, but it was just island boys far out on the rocks.

  Selfer turned to her. “This is how we fund covert ops. All right?”

  She stared at him. “Fund in what way?”

  “Sometimes, things can’t be on paper, say, in reports, or part of a record.”

  “Ah. Speaking of: I used to have a good friend in Honolulu,” she started to say but stopped—she’d almost said Frankie. She choked back the name. “Her name is Mae, Miss Mae to us. She’s Chinese. You ever hear of her?”

  “No. But everyone has code names, so who knows?” He held up his pack of Camels and offered her one now. She declined. “This Miss Mae where you got that fancy lighter of yours?” he added.

  “What lighter is that?”

  “Oh, come on.” He grinned.

  She stared at him, stalling. She held out a hand for his flask and he passed it to her. “Ho bruddah! Dis da basi? More better than French kine wine.”

  “Atta girl,” Selfer said, suddenly sounding more like a streetwise sharpie and not the smoothie officer after all.

  “Know what I know?” she said. “There are tunnels under here—there under The Preserve, I mean.”

  “You know, or you hear? Who told you—Wendell Lett?”

  “Mister Lansdale,” she said. She lied.

  Selfer grunted. “It’s Major Lansdale.”

  “He’s a major?”

  “After a fashion,” Selfer muttered.

  So he really did take orders from Lansdale, even though he outranked Lansdale—on paper anyway.

  “What else did Lansdale tell you?” Selfer added.

  “He told me I was to keep a certain important Japanese partner of his company. A thug.”

  “Kodama. You don’t say? And Lansdale, he want
ed you to extract information.”

  “That his name—Kodama?”

  “On second thought? No, it isn’t. You never heard it from me.”

  “Okay. So, this Japanese thug, he was too drunk to tell me much. All he did was give me a location.”

  “Oh? And what might that be?”

  “The Philippines!” She pushed at his shoulder. “Why you think I’m asking?”

  “Of course. I see, yes. Was that enough for Lansdale?”

  “It must have been. Because he ain’t here now, is he?”

  “No. Right.” Selfer sucked on his flask. “Tell me, why do I get the strange feeling you know more than this, or are after more?”

  “Girls do strange things to a guy,” was all she said.

  “Indeed.”

  Selfer added a smile that should’ve given her the heebie-jeebies, but somehow it didn’t.

  She shook her head at that and drank. “I tell you one thing. He’s a good man.”

  “Lansdale?” Selfer snapped.

  “Wendell Lett. You better treat him right. He came here thinking this place was gonna heal him somehow.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” he snapped again. “I’m the one who promised him.”

  “Okay, okay, sorry,” she said. She shifted closer, and his smile came back. “Will you promise me, too?”

  He set a hand on hers and caressed it. It warmed her tummy more than that wine or basi. She squirmed to make it go away, but that only made it worse. He kept gazing into her eyes, and those bags underneath were all gone, flushed away by sparkle and the blush of booze and desire.

  She yanked her hand away. “You never answered my question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The tunnels.”

  “Oh, they’re here—up there, I mean. But that’s all I can say.” He made the zippering gesture across his lips.

  “All you can say, or all you want to say?”

  He held out his hands, palms up. “We shall see, won’t we?”

  They got to work pulling out the food and setting it out without speaking like a couple together a long while, or at least months. They poured wine, toasted, ate, poured more wine.

  “What is this?” he said. “What are we doing here?”