by John Moss
* * *
Hanga Roa, the only community on Rapa Nui, surprised Miranda. She had expected something more exotic. This was a small town not unlike Waldron, the village where she had grown up, an hour west of Toronto on the banks of the Grand River. There were a few streets, mostly unpaved, a few palm trees, a scattering of shops and restaurants nestled casually among stucco and cinderblock houses, an open-walled market and a closed-in market, two scuba-dive shops in the tiny open harbour, and there was one bank. There was an imposing church, fronted by carvings of saints with bird heads. The people seemed to be a mixture of Spanish and Polynesian. Teenage boys rode island horses among occasional taxis and the odd delivery van. Girls wore full skirts or school uniforms. Tourists were few, and stood out as much for their vaguely furtive demeanour as for their wash-and-wear clothes. Dogs and chickens ranged freely along the sidewalks, haphazardly chasing each other.
It’s nothing at all like home, she thought, changing her mind as the taxi pulled up a gentle incline to the Hotel Victoria. While she unpacked in the simple room with white plaster walls and a window opening west toward Tahiti and New Zealand, she wondered where such a notion had come from. Perhaps the island was not lush like the background in a Gauguin painting, nor wondrously strange, despite the giant statues for which it is known throughout the world, but it was definitely alien territory.
Miranda realized she was standing by the open window, staring into the empty distance, thinking about times lost and about home, feeling lonely.
There was a faint knock on the door.
“Come in,” she said, assuming it was the elderly gentleman who had let her the room.
She turned as the door swung open, but no one was there. Although it was midday, the corridor was dark and cool and she could feel the gentle rush of air. She walked to the doorway. On the floor of the corridor to the side of the door, a man’s body was slumped in deep shadow. A pool of blood, drained of colour in the murky light, spread out from the body on the smooth cement floor.
She knew he was alive from the stillness of the body in its awkward posture, the muscles not yet settled into their final grip on his contorted frame.
It was the Englishman.
She squatted beside him and gently rolled him over. His eyes were open.
“Hang on, there,” she said. “You’re not dead yet.”
She thought she detected the glimmer of a smile. In his eyes. They searched her face.
“How’d you get here?” she said. She did not expect an answer. She had seen enough of violent death to recognize someone at the precarious edge. He tried to focus on her, his eyes widened, he nodded assent, as if claiming he had got there himself, as if he were declaring he was not about to slip over.
“You’ve been shot,” she said.
His eyes closed, then opened again.
“No? You’ve been stabbed. A knife. Let’s see. Under the ribs.” She probed gently beneath his blood-soaked shirt. “Good,” she said. “Only once. It’s not sucking. You’re not spitting blood. It missed your lungs. In broad daylight. Drying blood, you opened the wound getting here. Where from? Not far. Down the hall —”
She slipped away from him and instinctively strode down the hall to an open door, forgetting she was unarmed, and swung into a room, the duplicate of her own except for the unmade bed and congealing blood on the floor.
Satisfied his attacker was gone, she returned to the Englishman. He seemed to have rallied and was trying unsuccessfully to turn onto his side.
“I wasn’t trying to catch him, you know,” she said as she lifted under his shoulders and began to drag him out of the corridor. “I just wanted to know he wasn’t lurking around to attack me, too.”
“So,” he coughed. “Preemptive,” he said. “Bad strategy.”
“Hush,” she said. She forced him to lie back, then hauled him across the floor, and, with great difficulty, onto her bed.
“We’re going to owe the Hotel Victoria for clean sheets,” she said.
“Honeymoon suite,” he murmured.
“What? Oh, quaint,” she said. “God,” she added, “you do attract trouble. But I doubt you’re going to die, not today. Let’s get a doctor in here.”
“No,” he said, and passed out.
* * *
Usually, when Morgan entered the granite edifice that was Police Headquarters, he felt soothed by its vast public spaces that led to a warren of offices, calmed by the pink of the stone and the jet transparency of the glass slabs that mirrored the city. Today he felt stifled and claustrophobic at his desk. After lunch with colleagues in the food court across the street, where he tried to be congenial and failed, he returned to his paperwork, out of sorts.
The telephone rang and he ignored it.
The telephone persisted. He picked up without saying anything.
“Morgan?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said.
“It’s Miranda.”
“Sounds like you’re in the next room.” He was suddenly cheerful. “So how’s Easter Island? You found a suitable distraction, yet?”
“Well, I do have a strange man in my bed.”
“Good for you,” he said with what he knew was excessive good cheer.
“And he’s unconscious.”
“Not good.”
“And bleeding.”
“Not good at all.”
“And I think he’s a spy.”
“A spy?”
“Yes.”
“Is he dying?”
“Probably not. I dressed the wound. Morgan, talk to me.”
“Have you called the police?”
“The Chilean police do not inspire confidence. They paid me a visit in Santiago. In the middle of the night, Morgan. I thought they would kill me.”
He was alarmed.
“And they didn’t?”
“Hilarious. It was scary. They were looking for him.”
“Who?”
“This guy in my bed. They say he’s Harrington D’Arcy.”
“Who’s they?”
“The Chilean cops. Carabinaros.”
“Miranda.”
“Yes.”
“He’s not.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“You know who Harrington D’Arcy is, don’t you? His wife has just been murdered — she’s dead and her husband thinks it was murder, or he wants us to think it was murder. He might be the murderer. I think he might want us to think that, too. It’s my case. And you could help. What’s that perfume you used to wear, the expensive one?”
“Rare, not so expensive. It was Fleurs de Rocaille. Morgan, what on earth are you talking about?”
“Fleurs de Rocaille, yeah. Someone broke into the morgue and washed it off her body.”
“Whose body? Broke into the morgue? To steal her perfume? Morgan, you are making no sense.”
“You’ve got a guy on the verge of expiring in your bed and the only thing you know for certain is that he is not Harrington D’Arcy.”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re making sense but I’m not? Sorry I can’t help, I don’t know who he is, either. Otherwise, how’s it going down there?”
“It was good talking to you, Morgan.”
“You, too.”
“Bye.”
“You’re alright?”
“Yeah, it’s a good place to be.”
“That’s it, then?”
“Take care, Morgan.”
“Bye.”
Morgan’s ebullient mood wavered on the brink of collapse. Miranda in his life made him feel good. He had never felt as close to anyone else, not even his former wife. Especially not her. Perhaps to a girlfriend, the year he lived in England half a lifetime ago, Susan with the copper-red hair. He was fine now. Miranda was still in the world. People got on planes, went away, and you didn’t know if they were real anymore. But hearing her voice, she was still real.
But what the hell had they been talking about? It was like they had caught
brief glimpses of each other across an abyss between parallel worlds. He felt himself slipping into a funk. He envied her having an adventure. A fake Harrington D’Arcy bleeding in your bed at the Hotel Victoria. She had slipped into a story by Somerset Maugham. A spy? Not likely, if he was using the name of an establishment lawyer. He was attractive, though. He could tell by her voice. And dangerous.
* * *
Miranda sat on the only chair in the room, gazing at her unconscious companion with something approaching affection. He had roused while she was talking to Morgan, then slipped off into a deep sleep, which projected, as it does among even the most dangerous, an innocent vulnerability that she found disconcerting. They had been through a lot together. So it seemed. Really, he had been through a lot, and so had she, but separately. She would let him sleep and heal. Then she would try to sort things out. It was good talking to Morgan. She had not crossed over into another dimension after all.
She had gone out and gotten medical supplies from a pharmaceutical and curio shop on the main street and picked up a few ready-to-eat groceries from a small grocery and curio store next to it. She had noticed very few tourists in Hanga Roa, but every retail outlet in town seemed to have rows of table-top moai replicas, gaping maki-maki ashtrays fashioned after an open-mouthed god of the island, and a stack of T-shirts emblazoned with moai or birdmen or heroic images of Hoto Matua, the island’s first leader when the people of Rapa Nui arrived from the sea, about the time ancient Rome fell to the invading Vandals.
Cruise ships, she reasoned. At random intervals, a sudden influx of exotic visitors would no doubt arrive, take photographs of themselves standing in front of a scowling moai to prove they had been there, pick up a few souvenirs on the run, and sail away. There can’t be too many, she thought. The nearest port for their next stop would be more than two thousand kilometres away. Curiously, she did not feel isolated, or that the rest of the world was remote. She knew her loneliness was something carried within, not imposed from outside. This would be a good place to write mysteries, if she could just step away from the one she was in.
When she returned to her room, she dressed the man’s wound. He shuddered from pain, without fully awakening, and when she was finished he mumbled something and fell back into sleep. After the interlude with Morgan on the phone, she squirmed down in the room’s only chair and watched as the hours went by, until the room grew suddenly dark when the subtropical sun plunged into the western ocean. She got up and went to the bathroom, leaving the door open in case the Englishman stirred. When she came back, he was awake. He had turned on the bedside light. Even in pain, he was insufferably handsome.
“Hey, how are you doing?” she said.
“Good, a lot better.”
“You just lie easy.”
He boosted himself up against the headboard.
“I’m all right,” he said. “I’m a fast healer.
“You lost blood.”
“I’ve got a lot. Was it blue?”
“Was it, oh yes, very blue. Sloane Square and Oxford, right? And before that, Eton or Harrow, no doubt.”
“Eton.”
“And what name are you going by today?”
“Tonight? Shaw, Thomas Edward Shaw.”
“You’re lying.”
“Am I? Yes, I suppose I am.” He hunched a bit to the side, to relieve pressure on his wound. “What about Ross,” he said, “could my name be Ross?”
“I suspect your name is Lawrence — T.E. Lawrence of Arabia, he used both Ross and Shaw as pseudonyms.”
“Quite so. You must be very good at crossword puzzles.”
“Yes I am.”
“Did you read his very pretentious book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom? Are you a Middle-Eastern history buff? Or was it the film with Peter O’Toole? An excellent film.”
“Where on earth did you get the energy? You were dying a few hours ago. I read the abridged version; Revolt in the Desert. Didn’t finish it. And what’s your connection with Harrington D’Arcy?”
“I am of stern stuff, my mother habitually proclaimed. Heal or die, my father would say. I had a Victorian childhood, generations too late. My parents were really quite evil, in their own charming way. I have never met Harrington D’Arcy. It’s just a name with a history, powerful, but obscure. Makes it easier to take on another identity if there’s an identity to take on, so to speak. For now, I need to be Ross. I believe I am carrying papers that will establish I am Thomas Edward Ross.”
“And are you?”
“Yes, certainly. Did you know when Lawrence was Ross he was John Hume Ross. He was only T.E. as himself and as Shaw. If there was an himself. I prefer my own version. Do you know Mr. D’Arcy?”
“Intimately. From a distance. His wife was just murdered — died.”
“Which is it, Miss Quin?” He was trying for a quip, but he seemed, for a moment, confused. “How could you know that?” he said. He glanced around, then looked at the telephone.
“And how would you know she was not?” said Miranda.
The Englishman who had decided to call himself Ross shifted his weight against the headboard.
“I think perhaps we should clean up the blood,” he said.
“I’ll do it later. I bought cleanser and some wiper-uppers.”
“Were you out?”
“I don’t carry dressings for a knife wound when I travel,” she said, gesturing toward his bandaged abdomen.
“Yes, of course. Thank you. Why are you being so helpful? Thank you for not calling the police.”
“I reserve the option. At this point, though, I’d rather keep the so-called authorities as far away as possible. I had some midnight callers in Santiago. They claimed to be police. Carabineros. They were looking for you. They did not inspire confidence.”
“And do I?”
“Inspire confidence? Anything but. You seem like a dangerous man to know.” She paused, then smiled. “I doubt you’re a cop, but I do think you’re one of the good guys. That could just be part of your disguise, of course.”
“Disguise?”
Come on, Thomas Edward Ross, she thought. No one wears good looks so casually without something to hide.
“Yeah,” she said.
He smiled with roguish insouciance. “I have no idea what you are talking about, Miss Quin. I will confess, I am not actually a member of the constabulary, although I might have been, had life gone in a somewhat different direction. I am a wounded man and vulnerable. Have we anything to eat?”
“And I might have been Pope,” she said. “We eat after you fill me in the mysteries of life, Mr. Ross. You disappeared on the plane to São Paulo. Then what? Begin there. Conclude with what you know about the death of Mrs. D’Arcy.”
“Nothing, I know absolutely nothing about her death.”
“The plane, you disappeared. You left me a note.”
“Right. Well, I did, yes. It didn’t do me much good.”
“Nor much harm, apparently. You’re here.”
“Somewhat harmed.”
“Yes, well…. Let’s start with, who do you work for?”
“Myself, mostly. In the end, we all do.”
“Oh really?”
“The age of spies and spying isn’t what it used to be.”
“If it ever was.”
“Point taken, Miss Quin.”
“Would you stop calling me that.”
“Certainly. Calling you what?”
“Miss — Miranda Quin, yes. Detective Quin, or Ms. Quin, if you feel compelled to give me a title. Not Miss Quin. My great-aunt Maude was Miss Quin.”
“Indeed, Ms. Quin. Or might I presume and call you Miranda? Detective, next question?”
“Your employer?”
“Would it be enough to say I am associated with a certain large entity that does not wish to be compromised by being associated with me?”
“That’s a start, if it’s the truth — which I doubt.”
“Quite wisely. But it’s something like th
at. I’m more of an agent than a spy. You really do not need to know more. You are alive because you know so little.”
“You think my visitors in Santiago might have killed me?”
“Of course. They are professionals. And skilled enough to know you could lead them to me — which you have.”
“Hardly. You got here first.”
“Yes, I came in on an American freight plane yesterday afternoon.”
“And coincidentally ended up in a room down the hall.”
“Hanga Roa is small. You are travelling under your own name. It was easy to find you, even before you arrived.”
“And they knew you’d find me?”
“Apparently.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why find me?”
“Because you are a very attractive woman.”
“Thank you.”
“And to check out the status of my book.”
“You’re kidding. They had them, you know. In Santiago. Both copies,”
“That is a shame. It belonged to Maria D’Arcy.”
Miranda sat upright. Until now, she had felt surrounded by terrors so absurd they were laughable, because sooner or later she knew she’d wake up. Suddenly, she was awake.
“I have it, again,” she said. “Your copy and mine. They apparently don’t like Heyerdahl. I thought you didn’t know D’Arcy.”
“I don’t. I know his wife — I knew her.”
“And you just picked her husband’s name at random. Now that is quite a coincidence.”
“I’ve lost a lot of blood, Ms. Quin, is that better? Do be kind. I have been quite careless — ”
“With your lies.”
“With the truth.”
“Same thing.”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” he said.
The connection between them was the death of Mrs. D’Arcy. Miranda felt like she had plunged into a Hitchcock film, the victim of forces beyond her control.
“I assure you,” said Ross, as if despite the revelation nothing had changed, “I did not know that Maria D’Arcy was dead. I had a private dinner with her near the airport, only hours before I met you. She was very much alive.”
“What is a private dinner, may I ask?”