by Philip Wylie
“Yes.”
Jerry came out of the glass booth at that moment and called up, “The circus is on the way. I’ll remove the driveway chains. Some of those people could turn in and flip over one, way they handle cars.” He added, as he mounted his bike, names of those he’d alerted.
“Abbotts?”
Jerry called back. “No. Tack’s in Washington. Sapphire gets up at six on school days. No need to bother her now—and plenty of time, before the morning mob arrives.”
Sirens began to echo among the black escarpments of Makapuu Point. Beam-up headlamps swung into the park, sashaying on the final curve. The law was arriving in force. Honolulu’s police chief, a large and largely Japanese man named Hosea Ikkyo, was among the first. The last was Warren Coy, FBI. The sequence took some of the zest out of the drama since Grove was obliged to repeat this account of events four times, with his biography, false, in part, but false by omission.
R. K. Grove seemed very near the name of an earlier R. W. Grove. The slight change of an initial was his idea of a disguise. To disappear, he’d found, it was best to move only a few blocks, change your name slightly—and dye your hair just a few shades. The nearer you cling to what you were the better the effect; because the pursuit will expect gross alterations, hunt other cities, and usually dismiss a visible, somewhat similar man with a similar name. That will seem coincidence.
Grove had proven his formula, often.
The Waimanalo police, soon in the background, gave Grove a complimentary bill. Chief Ikkyo obviously felt that since Grove was permitted to roam at night in Sea Life Park by the Abbotts he must be reliable. Also, the man was rich and exceedingly popular, even beloved—facts conveyed by the local officers in asides.
The FBI man was unimpressed, however.
Coy, a vain individual, also felt a need to exhibit his superior methods. “Your business, Mr. Grove?”
“Retired, mostly.”
“The rest?”
“Oh, I own a factory on the mainland.”
“Reason for moving here.”
Grove waved at the now-clear night. Warren Coy followed the wave and frowned. “Own stock in the park?”
“Wasn’t what I meant. But—yes.”
“What the devil did you mean?”
“I came here, Coy, for the banal reason that Hawaii is a wonderful place to live.”
“Mind being searched?” Coy didn’t like to be called Coy by anybody he ranked.
Grove smiled. “Any citizen would.”
“Suppose I insist? After all, you, and you alone, have a direct connection with this murder.”
“Visual only. You’d need a writ. Or—need to claim I’m a suspicious character.”
“Your claim might be grounds enough—that you merely saw the dead man.” Coy was angry now, and had, Grove thought, possibly been born that way. Coy, moreover, was genuinely upset by the situation owing to causes not stated by him but easily adduced by Grove: the FBI man knew, or suspected, that there was more to this killing than the police had realized. “Ever been fingerprinted?” Coy demanded.
Chief Ikkyo and several specialists from homicide were examining the body which now lay on the concrete floor. Coy’s tone was hardly proper as procedure unless its object was to panic a probably guilty person.
Grove kept smiling, however. He moved toward the FBI man before he replied. “Fingerprinted? Hasn’t everybody? Quit making like God.”
Too late, Grove realized he had overreacted. Out of practice, he thought—unforgivable. Still, he forgave himself. There was that about Warren Coy which repelled him—an Eaper-like quality, not physical but overly official and so, as if omniscient.
Coy now grabbed Grove’s aloha shirt. His later explanation was that the other had moved “threateningly.”
The rude grab was an error. Chief Ikkyo said sharply, “Lay off, Mr. Coy. He’s okay.”
Grove later, and with technical truth, said the grab was an unprovoked assault. Grove was not under arrest. Coy was simply showing off—and with no sense of hazard; he stood five-eleven and was thirty-five years old, in standard FBI condition, with standard training, while Grove was inches shorter and two decades older.
Under those circumstances, he confidently grabbed a handful of the shirt of the allegedly “resisting” man. “Drastic,” he was to admit later, “but sometimes a little roughness, early in the game, gets the best results.”
And it did get results.
Behind Coy was the wall around the aquarium, high enough to prevent kids from falling in. Warren Coy had grabbed the shirt with the intent of shaking its wearer, a simple scare measure. He pushed Grove backward and then hauled him forward, intending to continue the moves. But on the inward course the pattern changed. The old man crouched; his shirt tore free. There ensued a sort of blast, with Grove the agent and Coy the object. The object rose in the air, pivoted on the rim of the wall and splashed into the tank. Grove grinned as the startled police—and he—were doused. The water was about four feet deep where Coy landed so he was able to find footing. He did and bellowed, “Hold that man!”
Nobody budged. Nobody wanted to miss Coy’s part in the show.
This was viewed silently until Ikkyo began to laugh in a high, thin way. Coy charged back toward the wall but stopped, just as he reached it—stopped cold, stunned and somehow horrified. Then he howled.
No architect, engineer or park employee had anticipated the Reef Tank’s use as a wading pool by unauthorized persons. Not one of the millions of visitors had fallen over the wall. Those who did enter had requisite knowledge; but there is nothing about spiny echinoderms in the FBI training program.
Coy yelled, or, accurately, screamed. Pale, shaken, in agony but trying not to panic, he was helped over the wall. “Thank God there’s a doctor here!” he gasped, eying the medical examiner who had been summoned by the Honolulu police. “Get a tourniquet on me! A sea snake bit me!”
Grove said loudly, “No snakes here. Probably you stepped on a starfish.” He sounded very unsympathetic as he peered over the wall and added, “It was a starfish. You tipped the damn thing over. Luckily it’s not a lethal critter. Exceedingly painful, I know.”
The tired-looking doctor examined the wound. Coy ground his teeth audibly in an attempt to contain his agony—and rage—or both. A really nice try, Grove had to admit, but not a success. Unable to keep his teeth clenched, Coy screamed again and rolled his eyes interestingly. Several pinpricks on his sole were rapidly causing the foot to swell as a ruddy and then purplish aura spread from them. Coy’s eyes continued to roll up till the whites showed, only. He passed out.
Kitrick, back from a park search, had the decency and speed to catch the man. The Honolulu chief, barely able to speak between high and banjo-like bursts of mirth, faced Grove, pointing, to clarify his intent. “Go home. Go get drunk. Find a girl. Anything. We’ll take a statement, tomorrow, if we need more.”
Grove insisted on being searched, as Coy had demanded.
Ikkyo obliged but when Grove said, looking ruefully at the sodden Coy as he came back to consciousness and pain, “I should have chucked him somewhere else,” the pent-up mirth of officialdom gave way. The Reef Tank reverberated and fish darted about in alarm. Coy alone failed to join the laughter.
It would rain again soon, Grove saw, as he crossed the bridge to the entrance plaza.
He went down broad steps to the public walk and on toward his parked motorcycle. Jerry overtook him, however, and jerked his head. Grove followed and the watchman took him to a minor path where he stopped and beamed his flashlight on something at the side: a lei of wilted ylang-ylang blossoms, a lei broken apart. The perfume was pervasive, alluring, mnemonic—to Grove.
The night watchman eyed Grove carefully, then picked up the lei, raised the lid of a refuse can and dropped in the yellow, lavishly scented garland.
“Nobody else,” he said aggrievedly, “was interested.”
“No?”
“So some dame lost, or thr
ew away, her lei. So who can get fingerprints off flowers? Five to ten thousand people were here today. Meaning yesterday. And a thousand had leis? Dames, guys, kids? So what if ylang-ylang leis are rare?”
“Well?”
Jerry shrugged. “Guess I must be losing my grip. I did have a feeling—that you had a feeling—”
“Yeah. Took me back. Had a place, once, with a tree in the yard. Brazil.” Grove yawned. “Kind of a rugged night. I’m whipped.”
The watchman’s sense that Mr. Grove had reacted to the first mention of the flowers in a more meaningful way than this wasn’t quite erased. Jerry filed it and changed the subject. “I’ll go see Mrs. Abbott if the chief okays it.”
“I’ll tell her, if you like, Jerry. Or go with you. After all, she’s got to know and she’ll want to get word to Tack. Reporters will nail him in Washington.”
“It won’t be good publicity for the park,” Jerry replied somberly.
Grove stared. “Are you out of your mind? They’ll storm the place!”
Then Jerry laughed. “People! You sometimes forget how they are!”
“You sometimes,” Grove replied, “can’t properly guess, when you do remember ‘how people are.’”
“So right! Well, I’ll tell Sapphire since I’m on duty still, and you’re beat.”
Grove nodded and moved again toward his cycle; he straddled it and stood that way, looking east. A low light would soon appear over the Pacific, faint warrant for what was coming: the sun.
And with that thought, an answer came to a misty question he’d had no time to examine for answer in the past hours.
Dawn. And ylang-ylang.
Bangkok—Jerry had hit that place on the nose, by chance.
The Temple of the Dawn! Wat Arun; Grove remembered.
And as he rode away he recalled vividly Mavis Hampton wanting to watch the sun rise, with him, from that near obelisk. Mavis, wanting more—wanting to see him fall, crumpling and spinning, down those hundreds of feet of narrow stone steps that were as near vertical as is possible for a staircase.
Mavis Hampton, he almost spoke the name—alias Francine LaMer, and born Navna Kvolsk—a vital detail he’d learned long after that gaudy gidget had come so near to getting her two wishes granted. For it had not been Grove (then Robert L. Bush) who’d made the arcing, thudding, bone-cracking and blood-spattering tumble down the vertiginous stone stairway. The one who did was Nikolai Rolski, a great loss to the OGPU. But Mavis had seen that dawn, after all: it had taken the Thai fire department to get her back from the gallery at the summit.
Nikolai, presumed to be a White Russian refugee, was not the first man, or even the first lover, to have slipped or been pushed from that lofty temple, that near needle in the Marco Polo skyline of Bangkok. And the firemen plainly believed that the lady hadn’t pushed the deceased: her shock was too genuine to be faked by a murderess. But her poor state, as Grove had known in the end, was real enough, though not due to what the Thai police presumed. Her employers would exact an unthinkable price for her failure and, by it, the loss of Rolski.
Was it in…’46? Or before?
From back then to now? he asked himself. Still in business? And still a woman who could put a trained agent in the way of sudden death?
He rode on slowly, cutting to the highway shoulder to permit an ambulance to pass—one that would take Coy to a hospital or, it might be, collect another corpse in Grove’s carcass-spangled record.
He was still thinking of Mavis when he turned in at his garage, dismounted, pushed his cycle inside, relocked the doors and removed certain accessories from the vehicle. It was growing lighter, though he did not notice. His mind was busy with details of an old relationship—with memories of Mavis. He thought of her apartment, overlooking the Chao Phraya River; her pet cat; and the exquisite Siamese maids who served her. She had a manservant, too, a battered and menacing former Thai “boxer,” which was the nastiest of sports, Grove had felt then. There was, also, Mavis’ child—whom he’d never seen but had heard, once or twice.
A girl, he’d gathered; her daughter, he’d imagined, who well might grow up to inherit, or acquire, her mother’s duplicity and also her special taste for ylang-ylang blossoms, since, Grove suddenly realized, they might have a neat use. In lands where they would not be flaunted by every doxy on the street, as advertisements, a woman wearing them would be identifiable. Shipped anywhere by air, now, they would mark their wearer’s presence in pitch-darkness and without a sound from or the sight of their wearer.
Grove reflected on that in a self-deprecatory way as he crossed to and unlocked his front doors. He ought to have realized, at the critical time, the purpose of Mavis’ ylang-ylang penchant. He scanned the room beyond the last door. Things looked okay. He used more keys and stowed the auxiliary items he’d removed from his motorcycle in their regular and accessible place: on a shelf behind some books and a panel behind them.
He ought to have got onto the flower sign.
It was lucky, indeed, that when he’d found Mavis’ passionate embrace tended to edge them both along the wall atop the high tower, he’d been sufficiently alert to use what knowledge he did possess. Kissed girls close their eyes and some men do. But one who entertains, however reluctantly and slightly, a sudden sense that he is being both kissed and maneuvered toward a very hazardous spot should take care to keep open a slit of eye. That way, he can notice if his inamorata also slightly cracks open her lids and possibly has done so to make sure her lover is blinded by her behavior—and its immediate promise. Certain of that, however then mistaken, she can glance away briefly at something, which, if she does so, will indicate that she is not, perhaps, about to arrange herself gracefully on a stone floor hundreds of feet above the ground and reward her escort totally even if unconventionally, as here, in the exotic capital of what used to be called Siam. A furtively caught eye-shift may thus suggest to a lover that he is not about to be wrestling for love, or even with her, but with a nameless and hitherto unsuspected person, surely male, an enemy and no doubt muscular.
You have to watch things, he mused, crossing his living room and settling in a comfortable red leather chair, then reaching for a cigar. The staircases of the Temple of the Dawn had been built, he recalled, to supply a very risky penance for sinners against an ancient creed.
You have to watch things, he repeated.
And smell them analytically, too, this revelation added.
He sighed as he took the cigar from a humidor and unwrapped its foil cover. But his sigh became a faint grin even before he lifted a handsome lighter and dialed it to flame. Cigar, foil and briquet were, apparently, just that. And all three were just that.
“Opportunities” Eaper would regard as overlooked.
And certain others, also—hopefully.
Grove’s gaze went from the first ghost of smoke to the innocent telephone stand and the flameless humidor, at hand with a Directory, beneath, in which, if one looked, one would find listed the CIA and a number; but no address.
The cunning of it, he thought, chuckling as he turned to the night’s event.
The question now became, who’d be first to call?
Eaper’s boys? FBI? Police? Or the others?
The next new question was, when? Its answer seemed to be, soon.
For the game had begun with a vengeance—a literal vengeance. What sort of game?
Chess? Go? With Russian or Chinese players? Grove was bad at games, even checkers. So, whatever game they chose, he’d have to play it his way: by ear, so to speak; and by the hand that’s quicker than the eye.
Until now, he had “heard” nothing definite, he reflected. And even now, he had gained no inkling about Project Neptune—what it might be or where—or even if it existed. He was to continue in that ignorance for a long and often worrisome time.
6
Search
Grove smoked his cigar till his fingers were hot; he stubbed it out, then, and lit another. For some while he went over the pre
parations made in the period since he’d come to Hawaii—come here on what, till this moment, had increasingly seemed a false lead and might still be that. The preparations he now considered were many.…
Grove’s house was very close to the high-tide line; it furnished spectacular views of the sea and the nearby islands and, opposite, of the mountains. It was a two-story house; but the upper level alone rose above the grounds. The entire floor below was visible from the ocean side only, and windowless from there. It was walled with glass on the rear, and its several rooms could be entered by sliding glass doors. All of the chambers were equipped for the special hobbies and the business of the owner: a carpentry shop, metal-working room, another for chemical experiment and a larger one fitted out as a gymnasium. At one end of the house, on that lower level, a glass-roofed conservatory had been added and in it grew a collection of tropical plants, some, rare specimens that had been present on the islands before the Polynesians arrived—then the Europeans, serving God or seeking whales—the people who had brought the alien vegetation which had by now almost wiped out earlier and indigenous flora.
At the end of the house opposite the conservatory a shed stood, part of the original structure and meant for boats; but Grove had no boat and the lean-to contained odds and ends: discarded boxes, stored cartons and trunks and half-completed toys that had been intended for his business on the mainland but abandoned as unsuitable or set aside for alteration. Among them was a box of many-colored plastic pieces in as many shapes, intended as a do-it-yourself kit, with which youngsters could make their own mobiles. It was a good idea that Grove had set aside because it was based on Calder’s originals. He’d forwarded the toy version to the artist.
The glass-walled lower floor was separated by a flagged walk and flower beds from a little cliff of stone cut long before by a then-deeper sea. That gap was spanned at one place by a bridge with wooden sides. Entrance to the upper floor was gained that way; but tall palms on both sides of the bridge largely concealed the miniature canyon and the glass walls and doors. This feature had amused Grove. When he’d first perceived it, he’d thought of Eaper. With such a facility, Axe would have turned the walk into an automated drawbridge. Grove, of course, had no such intention.