by Aaron Elkins
Gideon liked it.
Papeete seemed to him a lively, healthy, unpredictable hybrid on the way to becoming who knew what, a cordial if not quite settled mix of East and West—or rather North and South—of Gallic elegance and reserve and island energy, ease, and unflappability. From where he sat he could see copra being loaded onto age-grayed tramp steamers on the nearby docks. He could see sweating tourists with loaded plastic shopping bags; hefty middle-aged Tahitian women in bright muumuus with loaded grocery sacks and with flowers in their hair; even a few grizzled, hollow-eyed European beachcombers in mildewed white clothes, straight out of a Maugham story. Farther out, in the harbor, a traditional Polynesian racing canoe skimmed through the water, propelled by a team of muscular brown youths at its oars.
And all of this South Seas ambience he looked at from a table in an undeniably French brasserie located on a pretty street of restaurants, boutiques, and airline offices. With Elvis on the speakers.
John came awake with a start. “Jeez, what are we doing sitting here? It's eleven-thirty. I've got a lot of questions for Nick and I'm gonna want some answers.” He caught a hesitant look in Gideon's eye. “Doc, you'll come with me, won't you? You wouldn't chicken out on me?"
"Well, actually, I was thinking of doing a little shopping while I'm in town, looking for a present for Julie."
"Yeah, but—"
"John, look. I signed on to do my thing with a set of skeletal remains, and I'm still ready to do that. But I'm not going to go argue with Nick about it. I don't know what's right, and I just don't feel as if I have any business interfering in this."
Glumly John swirled the last half-inch of beer in his bottle, “Okay, yeah, you're right, Doc. It's my family, not yours. Lucky me.” He finished the beer. “I'll collar Nick and find out what the hell is going on. How'll you get back to the hotel?"
"I'll hop a ride on le truck."
John nodded. “All right, you go ahead, do your shopping, have a nice lunch, and go on back and lie around in a hammock all day. I'll deal with my screwball family."
Gideon beamed at him. “Now that,” he said, “is what I call a first-rate idea."
* * * *
John left the Renault in the parking area beside Nick's sprawling white house and walked around to the French doors that opened onto the beachside terrace in back, which was the way all but strangers entered. At the edge of the flagstone terrace in the feathery shade of a couple of tall, slender mape trees, his aunt Celine—Nick's wife, the mother of Maggie and Therese—was standing at an easel, her back to him, an artist's palette hooked over one thumb, a brush in the other hand, and a second brush between her teeth. She was contemplating the half-finished oil painting in front of her and the immense panorama of sea and sky beyond. Once a famous island beauty who had even had a brief juvenile career in a few Hollywood movies, she was now a chubby, twinkling little woman of sixty with thinning black hair, forever dressed in a capacious, all-concealing, flowered muumuu from which her small, round arms stuck out like a couple of dusky sausages.
When she heard him come up she turned. Her face lit up. “Hello, you!” she cried in the rich Tahitian lilt that she had never lost, although she had spoken little but English and French for decades. Like John's mother, she had been born in Tahiti to Chinese parents who had come to work as laborers on the great Atimaono cotton plantation, and Chinese had never been more than a second language to her. “Hey, why you still so skinny? She don't feed you?"
Daintily, and somewhat absentmindedly, she proffered her cheek to be kissed. He kissed it, smiling. Celine was a good-natured, garrulous woman, but usually a little remote as well; not in an aloof or offensive way, but as if in a reverie of self-absorption, as if there were always something intensely interesting on her mind, only it never happened to be you or what you were talking about at the time.
Her approach to painting had some of the same quality, Celine, who lived three months of the year in Paris and the rest in Papara, unvaryingly painted French pictures when in Tahiti and Tahitian pictures when in France. She claimed it stimulated her creativity.
She took the brush from between her teeth and gestured at the painting. “So tell me, what you think?"
True to form, with a sparkling Polynesian seascape of lagoon, foaming reef, and limpid, cloud-studded blue sky spread out in all its glory before her, she was painting a picture of Notre Dame Cathedral from a dog-eared postcard tacked to an arm of the easel.
Looks great, Celine. You get better all the time."
"Don't bullshit me,” she said, but she beamed. “Hey, you early, boy. Nick said you not coming up till later."
"Well, I wanted to ask him a couple of things. Is he in the house?"
She shook her head. “No,” she said, “up at the farm. In the shed, I think. That man in one hell of a mood."
"Well, with poor Brian—"
"No, everybody feel rotten about that. This something else. What you do to him last night?"
"Not a thing, Celine. He probably just missed his beauty sleep, that's all."
"Well, he goddamn mad today,” Celine said, her attention returning to the painting. She chewed her lip and scowled at it. “Now where the hell I gonna find vermilion in this dump, you tell me that."
"Nice talking to you, Makuahine makua,” John said fondly. “Look forward to seeing you later."
"Just gonna have to use lousy cadmium red instead,” she said and stuck the brush back between her teeth.
In the half-light of the drying shed, a large, round-bellied Tahitian looked up at John from his knees, where he was rolling a coffee bean in his fingers, having picked it from one of the amber mounds that were being systematically spread by a couple of workers with blunt wooden rakes.
"The boss? Yeah, he down below, by the furnace, You got to go outside and come in again. Hot as hell down there."
"Thanks,” John said.
"If you selling something, don't bother, come back another time."
"That seems to be the general opinion.” John smiled. “I guess you don't remember me, Tari."
The Tahitian took another look. His neutral expression changed. “Oh, hey, the boss's nephew, right? How you doing, John?"
"Fine, how about yourself? Running the place yet?"
Tari Terui was one of Maggie's “projects.” The son of a man who had himself worked on a coffee farm all his life, he had been with the Paradise plantation for fifteen of his thirty years, starting as an unskilled laborer on the loading dock and eventually working himself up to a crew chief, which seemed to be as far as his vocational aims went. But Maggie had seen some spark of intelligence or aptitude in him and had gotten him, against his own judgment, to enroll in the technical college in Papeete. To everyone's surprise but hers he had stuck to it, seen it through, and emerged with a certificate in hotel management and tourism, the closest thing to a management degree that one could get on the island.
Since then he had been her shining example, and she had nursed and groomed him all the way to his present job as production foreman, the highest position that had ever been held at the farm by a native Tahitian. Now, John had heard, she had him in mind for bigger things still. Last week, when Nick had begun to wonder how he was going to replace Brian at the farm, she had argued that he would have a hard time finding a better operations manager than Tari Terui, or one who knew more about the coffee business. Given a little coaching and a month or so to learn the ropes, he would do a wonderful job.
Nick had surprised her by promptly accepting the idea, and Tari had now been the official heir apparent for going on two weeks.
"Oh, be a while before I'm ready to run things,” he said, getting to his feet. “Not till Thursday, anyhow.” And he laughed, but with a nervous little hiccup that suggested less assurance than the words did.
Despite his accomplishments, Tari had always struck John as a simple soul, a big, likeable islander who had been goaded by Maggie, with all good intentions, to a level he would never have wanted or
reached on his own; a man who was in over his head or who thought so at any rate, and dearly wished himself back hefting bags at the loading dock with the other kanakas. As a result, under the friendly exterior and the high-pitched giggle there was an edge of uneasiness. If anything, John had seen it grow sharper over time.
Well, what the hell, it was Tart's life. If he didn't like it up there with the big boys, all he had to do was say no thanks. Nobody was forcing him. Still, he couldn't help rooting for the guy.
"Ah, you'll do fine, Tari. You know more about coffee than all the rest of them put together. So Nick's in a bad mood, huh?"
"You said it, brother."
"How bad? On a scale of one to ten."
"Oh, I don't know. Around seven hundred?"
"Thanks for the warning. See you later, Tari."
This was starting to get worrisome, John thought as he walked around the shed to the other entrance. Nick could be just about the most stubborn, contrary man in the world when he felt like it, and John wanted some answers—now, before Nick had time to concoct some kind of elaborate, cockamamie story. Obviously, a little psychology was called for, a little buttering-up.
A little coffee-talk.
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Chapter 13
* * * *
"Hi there, Unc,” he said, nephew-like and chipper. “God, don't you love the smell of coffee beans?” He inhaled deeply, swelling his chest. “Nothing like it."
Nick, his matted shoulders running with sweat, was using a scoop to poke through the open lid of a large, slowly revolving drum full of beans, one of four identical drums connected to a thrumming furnace a few feet away. “Coffee beans don't have any smell,” he muttered without looking up. “Not till later."
"No?"
"No."
"Must be my imagination, then.” He cleared his throat. “Because they look so good, you know?"
Nick merely glanced at him. “Christ."
So the preliminary reports on Nick's mood were accurate. John watched the older man sift a few more beans, feel them between his fingers, toss them back through the opening, close the lid, and move silently on to the next drum. The only sounds came from the furnace and from the masses of beans, shifting as the drums turned: sshhpp...sshhpp, like surf on a sandy beach.
John made another try. “Roasting, huh?” he asked brightly.
Nick closed the lid on the drum, straightened up, and eyed him levelly. “I'm not roasting, I'm a coffee-grower. Growers don't roast. Roasters roast."
"No?"
"No,"
The count: no balls, two strikes.
"So what are you doing then?"
"I'm drying. I'm pretty busy here, John."
"I thought you only air-dried—the ‘slow, natural Paradise way,'” John said, plucking this happy tidbit from a Caffe Paradiso ad he hadn't known he remembered.
"Paradise beans, yeah,” Nick said grudgingly. “But these are for some of our not-so-picky wholesale customers. That was one of Brian's ideas, you know—putting in a drying furnace for people who didn't want to spend for air-drying. And it's earned us a lot of money. Not everybody gives a damn, you know."
"Oh,” John said.
"Oh,” Nick said. He looked carefully at one of the beans he'd taken from the drum, then bit judiciously into it. “How's it taste?” John asked.
"I'm not tasting it,” Nick snapped and spit it out. “I'm testing the moisture content. For Christ's sake, John."
"Moisture content? Really? So—"
"John,” Nick said, his voice rising, “is there something I can do for you?"
But John, like his uncle, was not over-equipped with patience. “Yeah, there's something you can do for me,” he shouted back. “You can tell me why you've been jerking us around."
"What do you mean, jerking you around? Where do you come off—"
"Nick, we were at the police station this morning—"
"Yeah, I know,” Nick said sourly.
"—and the colonel there told us— You know? How do you know?"
"I know. Things get around. It's a small place."
"Do you know what he told us?"
"Suppose you tell me."
"That you withdrew the exhumation order, that you don't intend to have Brian's body dug up at all, that you're hiding something but he doesn't know what, that you've been giving us a royal runaround."
Strictly speaking, this was quite a bit more than Bertaud had told them, but from Nick's deep sigh it was clear that all or most of it was on the mark. He took off the fireman-red bandanna that had been loosely tied around his neck and mopped his head and throat with it. “Lord, it's hot. Let's go outside."
Near the platform scales at one end of the open shed Nick pulled a couple of liter cartons of papaya-and-pineapple juice out of a cooler and handed one to John. They went to sit at an ancient, splintery picnic table under a row of eucalyptus trees that bordered one side of the drying shed.
Nick slowly, wearily pulled his carton open, tipped it up, and swallowed a long, gurgling draft, his Adam's apple bobbing. Then another. He looked tired, washed-out.
"I'm sorry I lost my temper, Uncle Nick,” John said when he set the carton down.
"I'm the one who should be sorry, Johnny. I guess I owe you an explanation. Your friend too."
He crushed the carton against the table, carefully flattened it out, smoothed down the seams, took his time getting going.
"It was Therese,” he said, still working over the carton. “I sat down with her and told her we were having him exhumed and why, and she just about came apart. You can understand that, can't you? You know she's kind of...delicate. And she took Brian's death hard, John. They really loved each other."
"Yeah, I can understand that. So you called it off?"
"No, not then. I thought she'd come around after a day or two...” He shook his head. “...but I just couldn't get through to her. She was really...so yesterday I finally called the health department and canceled it. You guys were already on your way so I couldn't tell you not to come, and then when you got here I just didn't want to tell you you'd made the trip for nothing in the middle of the night.” He finally pushed the mashed carton aside and looked up. “So that's the story. I'm sorry if it screwed you up, but I still think I did the right thing."
John was silent for a moment. “I don't, Nick."
"Hell, it's not as if it was going to amount to anything."
"That's not true, Nick. There are a lot of unresolved questions here."
"I tell you the truth, John, I don't much care. Even if Gasparone's goons really knocked him off, then let that be the end of it. I don't think you understand how shook up she is, and I'm not going to put that girl through hell all over again. For what? I mean, let's say you turn out to be right, which I don't think you are, but just for the sake of argument. So what happens then, a trial? Testifying? Drag it out for two more years? And then what? Have you thought about that?"
John peered at him. “That doesn't sound like you, Nick."
Nick shrugged. “I'm not the man I was, John. I don't do battle with the world anymore. I'm almost seventy, you know. Wait'll you get there; you'll see."
That didn't sound like him either. “Nick, you can't just let this go. This was Brian. I want you to change your mind."
"No.” But Brian's name had brought a wince. “I can do whatever I damn please, John, and in this case I'm putting Therese first.” He got up. “I've got to get back to the dryers.” But he stood there a little longer, leaning on his knuckles on the table. “Look, I'm really sorry about your friend Gideon coming out here for nothing. But as long as you're here, I know Therese would appreciate it if you stayed for the service. Gideon too, if he wants; he's more than welcome. Until then, why don't you loosen up and relax, for Christ's sake? Lay back for a few days, see some of the islands, go over to Bora Bora, eat some good food, get reacquainted with the family. Some people actually like it here, you know."
John replied wit
h a shrug, not unfriendly but meaningless. He walked back with Nick and watched for a while as he scooped, studied, poked, and bit the revolving beans. “You have any objection if I talk to Therese about it?” he said after a few minutes.
"Jesus, can't we even have one dinner like a normal family before you start—"
"I don't mean today,” John said quickly. “Tomorrow, maybe."
Nick stopped his work and looked at John for a while. “I don't want you browbeating her, Johnny. She's been through enough."
"Hey, Nick.” He put his hand on the shaggy forearm and stopped him in mid-scoop. “You really think I'd browbeat Therese?"
Nick studied him hard for a moment, then relaxed. “No, I guess not. Sure, talk to her about it if you want. Just take no for an answer, will you?"
"Don't worry,” John said. “I've had lots of practice at that.” The air between them had almost cleared. “So tell me, how do you tell moisture content from chewing on the beans?"
"Don't start patronizing me. I'm not that decrepit."
"No, I'm really interested. Tell me."
Nick told him. The beans had to be dried to a ten percent moisture content before being bagged. Dryer than that and they lost flavor. Wetter—with a moisture content of even twelve percent, say—they were likely to mold within a few weeks. But at ten percent they stayed fresh indefinitely.
"You can do it scientifically, of course,” Nick said, “but I like the old eyetooth-crunch technique. Here, take one of these. Have a bite."
John bit.
"Sort of gummy,” Nick said, “right?"
John nodded.
"That's because the moisture's at twelve or thirteen percent. Now try this one.” He handed him another bean, slightly paler, from a drum that he had turned off earlier. “This one's right at ten percent."
John bit again.
"Crisp, isn't it?” Nick said. “Sort of snaps right in two. Feel the difference?"
"I sure do,” John said, nodding. “That's really interesting.” Nick's good-humored laugh rolled easily out of him. “You always were a good faker. Can you really tell the difference?” John grinned back at him. “Not if my life depended on it, Unc."