Left Turn at Paradise

by Thomas Shawver

  “Ever think, given his current mental condition, he dreamed up Billy Bartow’s reappearance?”

  “But the email from New Zealand?”

  “How do you know it even came from there? You say he deleted the message.”

  “Why would he send it to himself?”

  I couldn’t answer that, but I was looking for any excuse to get out of this appalling development.

  Then another tear—this time from the other eye—slid down her comely cheek. It was getting downright embarrassing. Customers at nearby tables were looking askance in my direction. Deirdre Lescalle shook her head accusingly.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’m as willing as any Sir Galahad to help a beautiful woman in distress. But traipsing halfway across the world to search for her partner, who sounded a trifle pixilated, seemed a bit much.

  The look in Pillow’s beautiful dark eyes, however, wasn’t about to retreat.

  “Even if Adrian were hallucinating, he needs our help,” she said, touching my hand. “More than that, I need it. You’re the only person I can depend upon.”

  She was a crafty beauty, all right. Something began to stir within me and it wasn’t my mind. Nonetheless, I shook my head and tried to look profound.

  “Look, Pillow, you’ve made a mistake coming here. I’m a man of modest ambition who has been offered a chance to make real money again in a grown-up profession. I’m finished dealing with characters who wrangle old books for a living.”

  I’m no stranger to withering looks—Marine drill instructors, mother superiors, and a particularly nasty Cape Town neck-breaker have all frozen me with their peepers—but Ms. Wilkes could hold her own with the best.

  She didn’t say a thing, content to play some kind of piano concerto with the fingers against her cheek while her other hand squeezed the teacup as if it were my throat.

  I looked sideways out the window, then back to her. Summer was arriving in the Northern Hemisphere and I didn’t intend to miss it gallivanting around the wintry Antipodes.

  “I’m not the one to help find your partner,” I insisted.

  “I thought you were made of sterner stuff, Bevan. Adrian has his faults, but he’s shown courage and gumption to go after what was stolen. As I recall, you lost a prize to Billy Bartow as well.”

  She finished her tea, got to her feet, and handed me a card with her international cell phone number.

  “I’ll be at the Wellesley Club in Wellington until the twelfth.”

  With that she exited the café, dragging every eye in the place with her.

  I paid the bill and returned to the shop, where Josie greeted me with a sly smile and the first-class airline ticket to New Zealand Pillow had left for me.

  “Interesting woman, Mike.”

  “Yup.”

  “She told me all about it before you arrived.”

  “She did, huh?”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Is your passport current?”

  “D’ya think I’m nuts?”

  “Most definitely, if you don’t follow her.”

  I started to tell Josie to mind her own chickens. Instead, I looked out the window and pretended to be interested in a couple of robins doing what robins usually do that time of year.

  She reached up to my face, bringing me back to her.

  “The days of the quaint bookshop around the corner are long gone, Josie.”

  “Don’t give in yet. How many times have you forgotten to eat while reading The New York Review of Books? You’re a bookman, Michael Bevan, right down to your last synapse and corpuscle. Be true to yourself for once. And while you’re at it, consider what I mean to you as well.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “I simply don’t know how you’d behave if we got in real trouble again, whether you’d be first on the lifeboat or last to leave the sinking ship.”

  Never one to appreciate lectures, especially when they concern me, I retreated behind the counter. It was a barrier that proved as effective from her assault as the Maginot Line had been for France.

  She stormed up and searched my face across that two-foot divide.

  I avoided her eyes, rubbed a hand across my forehead. It didn’t do much good.

  “I don’t get you anymore, Mike.”

  My eyes lifted.

  “I can say the same for you. What kind of woman insists that her lover fly off to New Zealand with that long-legged Amazon?”

  “Anything to keep you away from Sandra Epstein.”

  Josie smiled, but her smile looked a little tired.

  Chapter Ten

  I didn’t get much sleep the night before departing. What should have been a romantic evening tripping the bedsprings fantastic with Josie had been tense and mechanical. Perhaps she felt guilty for having urged me to go on this harebrained venture; or maybe it was a subconscious attempt by both of us to make the parting seem not so doleful. The last time we’d been apart it verged on becoming permanent and, despite the recent rapprochement, our love affair was still looking frayed.

  I blamed the open relationship we’d decided upon a year earlier. The old “Let’s give it a try before committing to marriage” had been my idea. I’d suspected that once Josie helped to get the bookstore on sound footing she’d become bored and her restless nature would lead her back to the more thrilling life she’d known before—as if selling tattered editions by Sherwood Anderson or mastering the ABC’s of bookbinding wasn’t rip-roaring excitement enough.

  Smart, feisty, disturbingly courageous, and possessing a body one doesn’t often find outside an Olympic training camp, the former FBI agent was more cartoon action figure than flesh-and-blood woman, the very things that had attracted me to her in the first place.

  All well and good if you’re into adrenaline-charged thrill junkies. But I also had a business to run, and every six months or so Josie felt compelled to engage in some daredevil escapade. The previous August had seen her running a marathon with the Tarahumara people in the desolate Copper Canyon of Mexico. Then it was Wyoming on the Outward Bound winter survival course. Now she was pushing me out of my comfortable nest, as if challenging me to be more adventurous. I shuddered to think what she’d expect of me next, given that the natives were restless in Samarkand.

  We didn’t say much on the drive to the airport. When Josie kissed me good-bye I had the unshakable feeling that I’d never see her again. I think she did, too.

  * * *

  Twenty hours later my premonition appeared to be coming true. The sou’easter blowing out of the Antarctic funneled through the Cook Strait and caught the 707 in its crosswinds during the approach to the narrow, hill-bound Miramar Peninsula.

  While the aircraft wobbled sickeningly through one air pocket after another I made the mistake of peeking out the window. We were so close to the roiling waves that salt water sprayed the bottom of the wings. As if I wasn’t already aware of our dire situation, a woman seated behind me screeched, “Jaysus, look there!” and pointed to a pair of tugboats, toylike among the towering swells, racing to rescue a large ferry listing near the jagged shoals of the harbor.

  “Windy” Wellington was certainly living up to its reputation as one of the most difficult major airports in the world in which to land.

  Several more throat-bobbing seconds followed before the wheels slapped down on the absurdly short runway, the reverse thrust buckets opened, and the plane taxied to a stop with me leading the round of applause for our pilot. I was still shaking when the taxi dropped me off at the Duxton Hotel.

  I put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the outside handle of my door and flopped onto the bed without taking off my clothes. Five hours later, a nightmare featuring an aircraft tumbling through fire-streaked skies was interrupted by a series of ever-insistent knocks. I staggered, half asleep, to the door.

  “Sorry, sir.” The assistant concierge handed me a note. “You weren’t answering your call button. The lady insisted you get this immediately.”<
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  It was from Pillow, telling me to meet her at the Wellesley Club at four o’clock. That gave me less than an hour to shuck off jet lag, get presentable, and find the place, which according to the city map was ten blocks from my hotel.

  I felt halfway human by the time I stepped onto Wakefield Street. The skies were still overcast, but the earlier tempest had calmed. I declined the doorman’s offer of a cab, preferring a walk in the fresh salt air after twenty hours cooped up in airplanes. I did, however, accept his loan of an umbrella.

  On a corner stoop across from the hotel slumped a mahogany-skinned young man. He was dressed in greasy chinos and an equally grimy leather jerkin. A wooden crutch lay beside him and next to that a cap with a few coins scattered in it. His dreadlocks were bound with a neon-yellow bandanna and his tangled beard was spotted with crumbs. He cupped in his hands an arctic tern with a broken wing that must have blown in with the gale.

  Gently raising the bird to his face, he attempted to feed it a piece of bread held between his lips. When it became obvious that the tern was having none of it, he snapped the white-feathered neck and dropped the creature into a pocket of his jacket.

  I crossed the street, placed a two-dollar coin in the cap without meeting his eyes, and walked on. When I looked back a few seconds later, I saw him stand with the help of the crutch and limp, zombielike, along the edge of the harbor.

  Farther along the quay, I mingled among pasty-faced government office workers and shoppers thronging the city square on mid-morning tea breaks. The Down Under autumn weather was similar to Seattle’s and everyone was dressed in sweaters and anoraks, invariably black or gray. Some sat on metal railings and the steps of government buildings, chatting amiably about sports and politics while keeping wary eyes on the dark clouds scudding above the harbor.

  I had just stopped at a vending truck for a cup of coffee when two groups of beefy gang members brandishing steel bars, axes, and hammers swarmed from opposite corners into the center of the plaza. Fifty or more to a side, they faced off like opposing football teams, hurling obscene threats at each other. Those bystanders who could slunk instantly to the safer peripheries of the square. I wasn’t one of them. Whether it was jet lag numbing my senses or my general tendency to watch train wrecks from the standpoint of the tracks, I stood there, slack-jawed and woolly-eyed, innocent as a new-laid egg and just as bright.

  A leader for one of the packs stepped forward, raised his hand, and slowly brought it down again, resulting in silence from both sides. But the resulting calm, eerie in its suddenness, was merely an orchestrated prelude to the astonishing savagery that followed.

  This leader waited several more seconds, then, with bulging eyes and grotesquely extended tongue, produced a hideous yell:

  “A-a-a-! He ringa pakia!”

  In response, the men behind him began to clap their hands on their thighs.

  Again, the leader’s cry: “A-a-a-a! He waewae takahia!”

  That set off a fierce and frenzied posture dance that included a rapid vibration of hands, wildly exaggerated eye rolls, and protruding tongue flicks.

  Anyone who has witnessed New Zealand’s national rugby team perform the tauranga a tohu haka, the traditional Maori war dance, knows how impressive it can be. Whether presented as a fierce sporting challenge or a ceremonial welcome, it has few equals when it comes to facial distortion and rhythmic movements.

  But what these thugs exhibited was a perversion of the traditional Maori ritual, accompanied as it was by tonsil-rattling insults in English that were vile enough to make 2 Live Crew cringe.

  Similarly dressed in the universal motorcycle-horde outfit of filthy jeans, ripped T-shirts, and hobnailed boots, the only way to distinguish each gang member from his enemy was by their “colors,” à la Crips and Bloods.

  The side that initiated the challenge wore leather vests dyed red and black with the cartoon of a British bulldog and the name “Mongrel Mob/Raitorua” emblazoned on their backs. Some wore Nazi helmets over their long, plaited hair, while others sported wool hats or bandannas.

  Their opposites wore predominately dark blue colors and the logo “Black Power” and appeared to have Tongan and other Pacific Islander features. Whether Maori or Islander, a member of the Mongrel Mob or Black Power, they all had varying degrees of European ancestry, something that—despite the British bulldog logo, the Nazi helmets, the “Sieg Heils”—they clearly despised. Most of the faces were covered with gang-slang tattoos interspersed among swirls of traditional Maori mokos.

  My first thought was that I was watching some kind of radical street theater, like the mock cowboy gunfights staged in Dodge City on the Fourth of July. After all, this was taking place in the heart of the capital of New Zealand, supposedly one of the most law-abiding countries in the world.

  But when the Mongrel Mob’s choirmaster charged his blue-clad opposite with a raised hand ax, cleaving the man’s clavicle, I suddenly realized this wasn’t a weirdly extravagant flash mob performance.

  Somebody bawled “Taupokina! Taupokina!” which sounded a lot like “Attack!” The rampage ignited in earnest. Finding myself caught on that hellish stage of swinging axes and clubs, punctuated by the screams of wounded gangbangers and howled profanities, I bolted toward the nearest side street, blubbering gibberish and waving my umbrella like it was a Mameluke saber. My false heroics didn’t last long. Facing a pack of bloodthirsty poltroons, I sprawled into a fetal position, suffering only a few stomps to my head as they clambered past.

  A minute or two later I emerged from the melee relatively unscathed, but considerably wiser as to Wellington welcoming committees.

  * * *

  When at last a sufficient number of police arrived to halt the carnage, the skies opened up, washing away the blood on the cobblestones and scattering combatants and onlookers alike. I proceeded along the quay, leaning into a horizontal tempest that shredded the umbrella by the time I arrived at the Wellesley Club.

  Soaked to the armpits, I reflected how, during my first few hours in New Zealand, I’d experienced a harrowing airplane landing and had a front-row seat at teatime to a gang war. Feverish enough excitement for a used bookman, but I’d known worse when an insurgent antiair missile brought down the CH-53E helicopter ferrying me and a platoon of Marines to Hajaf, Iraq.

  * * *

  I expected to find a uniformed concierge inside the handsome marble building that housed the oldest social club in the city, but no one was behind the service desk. The only light came from flickering teardrop-shaped bulbs encased in wall sconces. At just past four, the place looked abandoned.

  The driving rain had turned to sleet, making a sound like the fingers of a skeleton drumming against the beveled windowpanes. I wandered into the empty restaurant, where I cozied up to an electric space heater set on top of a bench.

  After warming my backside, I walked to the maître d’s stand, dropped the remains of the umbrella into a trash basket, and rang a bell. This brought a rustling sound in the kitchen followed by a waiter wearing a starched white jacket, a black vest, and black trousers who walked as if his feet hurt. His narrow bow tie was striped with the Wellesley’s gold and maroon colors. He held a dish towel in one hand and an empty wine carafe in the other. His smile exposed crooked, yellowish teeth.

  “We open for dinner in an hour, sir.”

  “Ms. Wilkes…”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, nodding toward a shuttered door. “In the bar. She’s enjoying a pinot noir from Two Paddocks vineyard. Shall I bring you one as well?”

  “Fine.”

  Pillow sat at a small round table farthest away from a blazing log fire in the walnut-paneled room. Caricatures of Wellington’s sporting, political, and business leaders covered the walls. Except for the pictures, everything in the room was dark. Dark brown walls, dark leather chairs, black tabletops, a maroon rug.

  She stood when I approached, offered a dry smile that left the rest of her face unmoved, and greeted me with a brisk handshake.
As before, she wore little makeup. There was a severe elegance in the clothes that covered her from ankle to chin, like a nun’s habit designed by Chanel.

  Her face was all business, if not a little wistful.

  “I knew you would come,” she said once we had settled into our chairs, “but thank you anyway.”

  “Why so certain?”

  “You seemed remarkably bored. Or was it frustration?”

  “Far from it. I’m quite happy with the way things are.”

  She took a sip of her wine and stared at me over the edge of her glass. For an instant I thought I’d detected an inviting gleam in her eyes.

  “Wouldn’t you be happier to have your journal back?”

  “Of course,” I replied. “Like you and everyone else on the planet, I could use more money.”

  “But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I don’t mean to offend, but I suspect you aren’t particularly satisfied with the way your life has gone. I could see it within fifteen seconds of our meeting in San Francisco. It was even more apparent at your shop.”

  Her voice had lost some of its hardness.

  “It takes more than words to offend me,” I said. “Besides, I’ve heard it plenty enough from someone else.”

  “Miss Majansik?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  The waiter appeared with the platter. He filled my glass and left the carafe on the table. When he noticed the water dripping from my clothes onto the floor, he asked if we would be more comfortable closer to the fireplace.

  “We’re fine,” Pillow answered sharply.

  The light from the sconces on the wall above us glinted in her dark hair. Her staring eyes, those dark drowning pools, bore into my brain. Her right hand, as usual, fiddled with the fabric covering her neck. Her nails were like a sensible child’s, clipped and unpolished. I said I liked the wine.

  “It’s local,” she said. “Sam Neill’s vineyard.”