She looked him up and down. “What’s your name?” she said.
“It isn’t. It isn’t anything.”
“I know a journalist. That is why I here. I will leave for mainland. I will tell him many things. That’s why they send you. So I don’t do something like tell a journalist.”
Her eyes glazed, all wet. Maybe she was sad. She might be on opium. Maybe she was crazy. Then again, she might be mad with despair from the things she’d done and seen. Lett and Jock and the rest of them, they certainly understood that.
Yet Lett didn’t so much as blink. He didn’t forget what Selfer had told him. Maybe this really was his big chance. Maybe this woman was the consummate operator, and she was just reeling him in. She could have a weapon, or close access to one.
He gripped the Colt with both hands and trained it on her. He pushed off the safety with his thumb.
Her eyes flashed seeing it—she’d probably assumed he already had the safety off. The hammer was cocked, after all. But now Lett meant it. The shine in her eyes went dark.
“Very well,” she said.
And then it hit Lett. Her looks were so nondescript that he hadn’t realized who this Jade might be. He would’ve expected a lissome younger woman in a slinky red dress with Chinese dragons, a cigarette holder, a knowing smile. He’d seen too many movies. They all had.
A shiver shot through him.
“Miss Mae?” he said. “You’re Miss Mae?”
Her eyes widened, shined again. “Why, yes. It is I. Who—”
Footsteps. The whoosh of a car, pulling away. Miss Mae listened, then hissed something in Chinese and “shhhh” to Lett.
They stepped over to the front window together, Lett touching the barrel of the Colt to Mae’s ribs. The sun was only an ember left on the horizon, casting all in silhouette.
Figures were coming up the stairs, a man, two smaller figures—children.
Mae swallowed a gasp. “They are not supposed to come back,” she muttered to Lett, “they stay with a friend—”
“Who wasn’t?
“My husband. Children.”
“Jesus. Okay. Open it.”
Lett slid the pistol back inside his shirt as Mae opened the door smiling. She and the man she called her husband exchanged words in Chinese, which made the man search the louvered sundown light for Lett, who was standing back. Lett held up his left hand, smiled. The children rushed into the room, a boy and girl of no more than ten wearing matching outfits with aloha print, but the boy had short pants, the girl a skirt. They only glanced at Lett before rushing by, and Lett figured they were used to visitors. The husband was small and wore a threadbare suit of gray that made him look older than Jade. He was already trembling, sweating.
Mae kept talking to her husband and rapidly, the husband eyeing Lett with widening whites of his eyes, nodding along.
Lett felt like someone had poured sand down his throat. He felt at his shirt for his pistol.
The children chased each other around the sofa, the boy reached for a light switch. The husband barked at him in Chinese. The boy stopped, dead still, and the girl did the same, like recruits on maneuvers.
Lett kept close to the front door. Inside him, the old gears kicked into position. He would have to do them all in, the gears confirmed. These people had seen his face. He had killed a girl before. Of course he would do it. It was logical in the moment. What came later didn’t factor into it. He had the machinery already working inside him to do it. The whole apparatus was pumping away now, numbing his nerves and calming his blood. It sent signals of that pure cold reason to his brain. And all nagging emotion drained away, pushed out through valves that opened only for situations like this.
The husband wasn’t a threat, but he would have to be the first one—to shock them, and then Mae, and then . . . He might even use that suppressor, just in case.
“Keep them all in this room,” he said to Mae. “No one leaves it.”
The children stared, not knowing English apparently. Mae spoke to them, and they sat on the sofa and chatted casually. The husband joined them. Mae must’ve lied to them in Chinese. Maybe she promised a presentation from Lett. Maybe she said he was here to save them.
Mae turned to him. “Keep smiling,” she said in English. “They think you’re a friend.”
“None of them understand us?”
“None of them,” Mae muttered, losing her put-on face. “They are innocent.”
“Just, keep it together,” Lett said through his smile.
He couldn’t look at the sofa. If he did, he would see the boy kicking his legs that didn’t quite reach the floor, something Lett always did in the orphanage and got in trouble for. He would see that the girl had her black hair in long braided pigtails, just like the German girl he had to kill on that snafu mission in enemy-occupied Cologne—it was that or be found out.
Mae’s face reflected the last flash of sundown. In a moment, it would go dim.
A burn of vomit rose up his throat and he tried to swallow it, and the machinery inside him barely kept it down.
Everyone fell silent. Time seemed to stop a moment. Lett wasn’t sure how long. His gears weren’t working.
“What options do you have?” he heard himself say to Mae.
“Options? Yes! I have one,” Mae replied, the words popping out as if she’d been holding her breath, “just one, please, I can tell you, please.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
Mae uttered a bitter laugh. She threw a glance at her family. “You never ask.”
“All right, all right,” Lett said.
“I have a way off the island. No one knows. The family won’t know. About you here, with me? Husband will never tell. The children never tell. The war taught them silence. They know what happens. They have seen it.”
“What’s your play?”
“I go through the kitchen and out the backyard and go. As soon as they in bed, or sooner. Gone forever. I know how. I send for family later. Much later. When safe. I have means.”
“What about the reporter?”
“He doesn’t get to see me. I don’t tell. I disappear. Forever.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“It’s my family’s life now. Everything change. You can trust that.”
Lett stared a long while. Miss Mae babbled in English to fill the silence for her family’s benefit and even laughed, but still Lett didn’t speak. He might have nodded along.
“I never saw you,” he said finally. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I go out the back. Your family came home but never saw me. Ever. Keep it together, will you? Just listen. Tell them to turn on a light or two right after I go. It looks natural.”
Mae nodded. “Of course.”
“I just saved your life.”
“No,” Mae said. “You just save theirs. Yes? My life mean nothing. Not now.”
“Forget it. One more thing. Once I’m gone, and they don’t know? You disappear like you say. Or else.”
Lett started for the kitchen. Miss Mae touched him by the elbow. “You came from there, didn’t you?”
“Where’s that?” Lett grunted.
She smiled now, and Lett saw her real smile, full of teeth and happy creases.
“Is Kanani there? She is! Ah, I see it on your face.” Mae clasped hands, held her chin high. Lett could see the mama-san now.
“Pipe down, will you . . . geez.”
But Mae’s eyes dimmed again. She glanced back at her family, then whispered to Lett. “Is Frankie there yet, Frankie Baptiste?”
“Yet?”
“You must watch Kanani. She gets in over her head, that one.”
“She can hold her own.”
“No. Not for long. Oh, oh. This is my fault. The Preserve, it’s not what I thought.”
“You ain’t the only one, Miss Mae.”
“Go,” Mae said, pushing at his back with both hands. “Go!”
“Okay, okay,” Lett mumbled and marched past
the sofa without looking and went through that kitchen and he was gone, through the backyard and around the side, out onto the road.
Twenty minutes later, he was walking back down toward the harbor, keeping his eye on the light of that Aloha tower. It was dark now. The boat would be there as planned.
It occurred to him that he could’ve asked Miss Mae if he could flee with her. But he had no moves after that. There was also the looming proposition that his life could prove to be worth less to them than Miss Mae’s, and at any moment. As he walked, the anger boiled in him so hot and his arms cocked and his hands clawed so tight, that it felt as if he could reach out and grab and crush one of the city buildings down below like some giant lizard unleashed from the depths of the ocean.
He had tried walking away before. It would all catch up with him wherever he ran, hid, fled, landed.
For now, he was better off on The Preserve. At least there he had Kanani. At least there he had his dose.
Maybe he would pass through Hotel Street on the way to the boat, drink himself into a stupor before he boarded. It would certainly fit the lie.
Down around another curve, headlights found him from behind. A cab passed and pulled over in front of him. The same cab. Lett dropped into the back.
“What happened?” the cabbie said as he pulled away.
“Jade wasn’t there,” Lett said. “I was waiting for her, all good and ready, then her damn family shows up. I guess it was family. No one told me about that possibility. Why didn’t you? What a goddamn snafu.” He added a kick to the front seats.
“Easy. Mistakes happen. What then? Did you . . .?”
“No. Didn’t need to. Why should I? No one saw me. I slipped out the back just fine.”
The cabbie handed Lett a flask. It was rye. It burned away the sand in his throat.
“I got to tell you,” Lett said, wiping his mouth, “I don’t think your target is there anymore. Or here in Honolulu for that matter. I think your target fled the coop, see.”
“That was a safe house.”
“Which is my very point. You leave a safe house? It’s a one-way ticket.”
Lett took another long drink, and any machinery left inside him disengaged for good, and all his emotion came surging back through the valves, rushing his whole body and brain like a stray fast wave, and he had to gasp from it, as if choking, and the cabbie said, “You want I pull over?”
“I’ll be all right. Just, get me back.”
“You did good,” the cabbie said, but the only thing that let Lett breathe again was when he yanked out the Colt and thumbed the safety back on and uncocked that hammer.
23.
Kanani holed up in her boogie house preparing for the worst, starting with a hard rap on the door from Frankie. Frankie hadn’t spotted her watching him exit that lava tube tunnel secured with a metal door. But she’d always known he would show up here, ever since Lett saw him on Hilo Side, ever since he appeared in that Packard Clipper down on Alii Drive, probably. Still, nothing transpired. She holed up overnight, eyes fixed on the sheer lace curtains. Still nothing. In the morning, she found the courage to venture out into camp. She went to the laundry and helped fold clothes like she did when she needed to think. Frankie never showed, not anywhere.
She took a ham sandwich to Wendell Lett, but he wasn’t there—his bungalow all locked up. He wasn’t on duty in camp, she found out. Then she heard they’d sent him to weapons training first thing in the morning. But he wasn’t there, either. She only hoped it had nothing to do with Frankie. And she thought about the tunnels running under the camp like so many lava tubes, and that brought shivers to the ache in her heart and the unease in her gut.
She started coming to her senses. The daylight helped. Maybe Frankie was only visiting that part of camp she saw, and would never be back? Even if he did, she might have time.
She knew what to do. It had always been her only angle. That afternoon, she cased the Main House from her bungalow with the opera glass. They had no visitors, all quiet. Colonel Selfer’s car was there, that was it. When it was pushing evening, the setting sun just a glowing cinder, she strode over to the front door of the Main House. The little local old lady opened, Yoshiko. Yoshiko gave her the stink eye and told her that she “gotta wait cause she get no appointment.” She led Kanani to a living room and down into a sunken area she called a “conversation pit,” obviously not her word for it, and again Kanani couldn’t help being reminded of an imu for a kālua pig roast. She sat alone down there, in a rattan chair. On shelves in the living room she saw more little treasure objects and figurines with plenty of golden glimmer to them, buddhas and temples and bowls. The bar had Philippine rum and more bottles of that basi rotgut.
Five minutes passed. Still no one came. She plopped her feet on the coffee table. It had been a week since she and Charlie Selfer had returned from their jaunt down to the coast. They could have reached first, second, third base, and wherever else it led. But she’d played it cool. The home run would come. Let him come to her, let him think it was his doing.
There was no time for that now. Frankie had been looking for Miss Mae at her bungalow near Kona Town. And if he saw her here? He’d know that she knew. She and Frankie both had cooperated with the Military Government during the war. Frankie was even on the payroll of Police Chief Gabrielson when he wasn’t in bed with US intelligence. Playing all sides. Informing. He was smuggling too, because he knew when they would and would not be watching. Cooperating with their clampdown only made things like prostitution and gambling easier on the sly, as long as you pretended to go along with their hard set of rules in Chinatown, that was. When Chief Gabrielson found out she and Miss Mae were trying to open a boogie house outside of their red-light district, the chief threatened to beat her good once martial law was done with her. It was always easier for men. Frankie meanwhile helped run the sailors’ favorite cockfighting ring on the south shore of Oahu and made even more dollars that way despite the cops’ hefty take. Cockfighting wasn’t illegal before the war, but martial law changed that, too. Now it wasn’t a crime unless the police chief didn’t get his cut. The bare truth was, the Territory was learning how to deal and operate like the mainland and there was no turning back. She and Frankie had teamed up at one point for this and that racket. He liked her. He made his play for her, he wanted his hands on her. But she had kept him at bay. Then Miss Mae told her about The Preserve.
For a moment last night, her night terrors had intensified and a kind of delirium set in—and she considered the prospect of joining with Frankie for good. She shook it off. Not a chance, she told herself. It would be going backward. Sure, it sounded like a prime opportunity for a secret pact between locals, but it really, truly was nothing of the sort. Frankie’s showing up here could easily backfire. Frankie was too close to them. Who knew what he was promising them? What they were guaranteeing him? The moke was smart but even he had no idea what he was getting into. This wasn’t Police Chief Gabrielson, not even Military Government. This was something bigger and darker, from that same mainland ambition that grabbed the land with a promise then tore up the guarantee, laughing and spitting in your sorry brown colonial face.
Gotta keep moving, was what Wendell always said.
She threw back her whisky down in that living room pit.
She heard someone talking. She sat up in her rattan chair. Set her glass down on that barrel of a table.
Charlie Selfer strode in. He wore another handsome aloha shirt, pressed trousers, those white leather sandals of his.
She smiled.
Selfer rushed down to her, his face flushed. He wasn’t smiling. “What are you doing here?”
She wiggled her empty glass. “I ran out,” she said, “whisky, neat.”
“Right.” He fixed her one and one for him in seconds flat. He lit two Camels and bounded down to her, gulped, set a lit cigarette in her hand, sucked on his. Gulped.
“You okay? You not sleeping very well?” she said.
&
nbsp; “I’m not sleeping at all.” He rubbed at his temple.
Kanani couldn’t believe her eyes, ears, nose. In a mere few weeks, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Selfer had declined from one of the smoothest haoles she ever met to someone more like a rattled old gentleman from another era adrift in a new age where smoothness and subtlety played no part. It was such a contrast to Lansdale with his cockamamie sayings and that crazy look in his eye. If Selfer was the suave poet, Lansdale was the brash advertising man, and all knew who would win that day.
“I’m just . . . preoccupied, dear,” Selfer added. He flicked his already half-sucked Camel into the ashtray, a polished coconut shell. He set a hand on her wrist. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. Where’s Wendell?” she said. She hadn’t planned to ask this first. It just came out.
Selfer stared a moment as if trying to recall the name. “Lett, Wendell, he is . . . on a mission. That’s all I know.”
“So now it’s a ‘mission,’ is it?”
Selfer put on a smile finally and poured them another and swooped back down with two more lit Camels. His hair seemed more in place somehow, and his face relaxing. This was more like it. He crossed his legs, showing off his smooth, nearly feminine ankles, and brushed ash off his knee, though there wasn’t one speck.
“So, you hear about the recent arrival?” she said.
“There’s a recent arrival?”
“Francisco Baptiste.”
Selfer’s leg dropped. “How do you know about him?”
“I saw him. Accidently. Passing through camp.”
“Oh. Oh, I see,” Selfer said, his eyes darting around but they couldn’t keep up with his mind, which was apparently racing. A single bead of sweat appeared on his forehead, and he pushed it back up under his hair with a manicured fingertip. This wasn’t a good sign. She was hoping to find that Selfer was helping to control Frankie somehow. But someone else was clearly running Frankie. Selfer might not even know who or why.
“I knew him from Honolulu,” she said. “Everyone called him Frankie. Not sure what he goes by here.”
“Ah, yes, of course you would know him.” Selfer nodded like a person pretending to still know the score. “What do you make of him?”
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