Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

  Sometimes it happens this way, Miranda thought.

  They listened to the water and the moai seemed to breathe behind them as a wide sky slowly wheeled overhead.

  Miranda had no idea how much time had passed before she stood up.

  “You want to swim?” she asked. Not waiting for a response, she stripped in the moonlight, dropping her clothes on the pebbled beach in a neat clump. She stood facing him. He rose to his feet, slowly removed his own clothing, never taking his eyes off hers, and when they were both naked, they joined hands and walked together into the low surf of the broad lagoon.

  They swam languidly, not frolicking, but with sweet fluid motions, staying close as they circled round and around each other, their eyes locked now in an embrace that seemed to Miranda the spiritual equivalent of making love. As they touched bottom, wading into the shallows, she took his hand and drew him close to her. “His name is Matteo,” she said to herself.

  Standing beside their clothes, they kissed and the lengths of their bodies touched gently and firmly.

  She tilted her head back and smiled. His eyes seemed filled with tears.

  “You are very beautiful,” she said.

  He ran the back of his hand across her forehead to lift a damp lock of her hair away from her eyes.

  “You are very beautiful,” he repeated, his accent smoothing the words into a kind of lament.

  There was a huge silence that seemed to swallow them whole. She did not move.

  “I like you,” she said.

  “I like you, too.”

  Too!

  She whirled away. She grabbed her clothes in a single motion and strode up onto the grass. She had never felt more vulnerable in her life.

  “You speak English, you bastard!”

  He scrambled after her.

  “Bastard!” she repeated.

  “What? Why am I a bastard? I speak English. It is an uncivilized language, in spite of Shakespeare, but that does not make me a bastard, Miranda Quin.”

  “Don’t call me by name. Don’t you dare.” She held her clothes awkwardly in front of her. He held his in front of himself, as well.

  “Why not, that is your name.”

  “Damn you. Have you any idea how stupid I feel?”

  “Because I speak English.

  “Because I’m stark naked on a beach with a total stranger.”

  “But I was not a stranger — if I did not speak English?”

  “Yes! No! You don’t understand a damn thing about romance.”

  “Maybe in Spanish, maybe in Rapanui. Apparently not in English.”

  “Don’t use apparently.”

  “What?”

  “The least you could do is speak broken English. You don’t have to use words like apparently.”

  “Apparently not. I have an accent, does that help?”

  “Shut your eyes, Matteo — if your name really is Matteo and not Bill or Roger or Bob.”

  “Bill?”

  “Turn around, damn you, don’t look at me naked.”

  “You or me?”

  “What?”

  “Naked. I don’t look at you being naked, or being naked, I shouldn’t look? If I get dressed first, is it okay to look?”

  “Me, damn it. I don’t care if you’re naked or not.”

  “Well, that’s a promising start to our relationship.”

  “We don’t have a relationship.”

  “I think I’ll get dressed, too.”

  Both of them struggled to get into their clothes. Both refused to turn their backs.

  “There is no relationship.”

  “Even if we’re dressed?”

  “I’m going.”

  “Where? You have no place to go.”

  “The Hotel Victoria.”

  “You are not registered there, ever, since yesterday. It is on the other side of the island.”

  “Give me my passport, take me to the hotel.”

  “Your passport? And that will make you Miranda Quin! Now, do you think you are nobody? You look lovely in clothes, bella señorita.”

  “You look better naked.”

  “Is that a comment on my body or on my tailor?”

  “Tailor! Nobody refers to their tailor.”

  They were both fully dressed, both a little bedraggled from donning clothes over wet skin. He held out his arm.

  “Miranda.”

  She glowered, but took it.

  They walked back to the police car under the whispering palms like old friends. Or, as an observer might have assumed, like brand-new lovers.

  Now Matteo seemed to be driving with a purpose. He sensed her apprehension and flashed a grin, which, in the lights of the dashboard, unfortunately looked macabre, like a mask of death. She sighed, not frightened, but resigned.

  “Was that you who smacked me?”

  “Where, in your room? Possibly. If it was me, it would have been because we did not know if you could be trusted.”

  “And now you’re all sweetness and light. What’s made the difference? Seeing me naked?”

  “Yes.” He smiled into the darkness. “And finding we have enemies in common.”

  “The secret police from Santiago, the ones you killed?”

  “The Carabinaros, they are dead, yes. You know the old saying.”

  “‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ But why was I their enemy?”

  “Because you are my friend. The friend of their enemy is the enemy, too.”

  “You’re rescuing me, then, not abducting me. It’s hard to tell.”

  “For me, too. We need you.”

  “Why did you trick me?” she said.

  “About what?”

  “About speaking English.”

  “You made the assumption.”

  “Bullroar,” she said. “We spent hours together.”

  “In which you never once asked if I spoke English.”

  “It was sneaky, despicable, and cowardly.”

  “All that, for not speaking your language. What if I don’t speak Swedish and Russian? How bad is that?”

  Miranda laughed.

  “How bad is that?” she said, giving the phrase an adolescent inflection. “Shuddup. Where’d you learn English?”

  “UCLA?”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Okay, now I’m confused. Who are you, really? How did I get here? Come on, Matteo.”

  “Maria D’Arcy sent you.” He did not try to explain who she was. He assumed Miranda was familiar with the name.

  “No, Maria D’Arcy did not send me.” He didn’t seem to know; he had not talked to his friend when they exchanged drivers. “I came here to write a book. No one sent me.” She paused. “Maria D’Arcy is dead.”

  The car veered, his eyes filled with moonlight, then went black. “You think no one sent you?” he said, ominously taking his foot from the gas peddle so they slowed to a crawl. “You are wrong.”

  “Damn it,” she responded, she wrenched the steering wheel from his grasp so the car swerved around on the gravel. It came to a jolting halt against a low bank of earth under the doleful gaze of a small herd of shaggy island horses in the nearby grass who flared their nostrils, shook out their manes, and went back to grazing. “This is not funny,” she said. He had not said anything to make her think that it was.

  “No, it is not funny. It is dangerous,” he responded.

  “What is dangerous?”

  “For you, being with us.”

  “Who is ‘us’?”

  “People. Some people on Rapa Nui. Not everyone.”

  “What? Is this a political movement? Have I floundered into a revolution?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh for God’s sake!”

  He said nothing.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you have a revolution; there are only three thousand people on the island.”

  “Four thousand. Revolutions have started with
less —”

  “Fewer —”

  “With fewer — did you just correct my grammar?”

  “Diction — my partner says it’s what I do, use pedantry to cover confusion.”

  “You are very confused.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is our ancestral home, you understand that. Some of us were born in Chile, or came back from Chile, but most have always lived here. We are Rapanui. When the Romans ruled Britain, Hoto Matua came here with his two canoes and landed on the beach at Anakana. Maybe it was not until Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire. We do not measure our lives and our generations by what happened in Europe.

  “This became our whole world without end. Te Pito o Te Henua we described it, the navel of the universe. That is not a name. It is a statement. Rapa Nui means big paddle; this name was given to us by Polynesians from Mangareva in the nineteenth century, during the days of slavery. We did not need a name before that.”

  “But you are Polynesian, right?”

  “That’s like saying Englishmen are Angles and Jutes. We are a people and we are a continent — you think about that, we are a continent. It is not a geographical term, it is a statement of being. Like the rest of the world we have suffered through rises and falls in fortune, especially after those distant descendents of the Romans discovered us. Your ancestors. We were ten thousand strong and they wrote us into their history, and, as they did this, from the early seventeen hundreds, we dwindled, and when all our men were taken into servitude in South America, and the handful who returned brought back smallpox, we were reduced to a hundred and eleven. Then Chile annexed us, and those few of us who survived were imprisoned within the village limits of Hanga Roa for a few generations while the rest of the island was turned over to sheep.”

  She listened intently. In the glow of the dashboard and the light streaming in from the moon his features had taken on a messianic aura of solemn and resolute conviction. She felt humble. She reached over and turned off the ignition and the car lights faded and his face softened.

  “Chile and the Church, they belong to the past. Americans in some ways have defined our present, they built the great runway for jet planes, for strategic purposes. Now tourists fly in and fly out, and we have discovered in the mirror of their eyes, and in the notebooks of scientific entrepreneurs, the past we had almost forgotten. This is the early morning of a new era. We want to possess our own future. It is not an unreasonable thing to wish for.”

  “Then secede,” she said, knowing it was not that simple.

  “Chile has a naval base here.”

  “Chile has a navy?”

  “The base is important, as Gibraltar was important to the British, as Guam was important to the Americans. Strategically, not in military terms, but geopolitically —”

  “Okay, please, you’re overwhelming me with rhetoric.”

  “It is not rhetoric, Miranda.”

  “No, I didn’t mean it that way. I just need to catch up.”

  “You have questions?”

  “I have questions. First of all, about you. We nearly became intimate, my silent lover, my abductor, guardian, whatever you are — are you my friend?” She paused, looking at him quizzically. Asking the question made her feel vulnerable. “Okay,” she said, “let’s start with UCLA, what is that all about?”

  “I received a scholarship, I studied in Valparaiso, I received another scholarship and with help from the Van Routenberg Fund and the Sebastian Englert Foundation I went to California.”

  “And studied what?”

  “Medicine.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Why? What is wrong with medicine?”

  “Nothing, nothing at all. It just seems an unlikely beginning for a career as a terrorist.”

  “Terrorist?”

  “Freedom fighter,” she amended.

  “Che was a doctor, many revolutionaries are doctors — although, proportionately, not many doctors are revolutionaries. You want to help people, you want to cure their bodies, then you want to cure the conditions of their lives, their political souls.”

  “Political souls? And did you graduate?”

  “In my last year I came home for a visit. I married and did not go back.”

  Miranda was stunned by the revelation of a domestic life, but she remained silent, attentive.

  “My wife disappeared. We never found her body.”

  A profound spasm of sadness ran through Miranda’s heart. She wished they had been lovers at the beach so that now she could comfort him or share his sorrow. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  He said nothing for a lingering moment, gathering his resources. Then he continued, “In the last days of Pinochet, we were a nuisance. Nuisances are not to be tolerated. We kept a low profile and waited. It was not until after his fascist regime collapsed that his people discovered how useful we could be. The junta, regrouping in the shadows, now supports us. We represent a threat to the stability of the present government.”

  “The Pinochet bunch, were they brought in by the CIA?”

  “It is not the first time American covert operations have backfired.”

  “Doing right for the wrong reasons?”

  “Doing wrong for the right reasons. Look at Afghanistan, look at Iraq, even Cuba. Pinochet and his cohort were known as the Chicago Boys! The chiefs of the military and the Carabinaros under Pinochet deposed Allende, a democratically elected Marxist, with help from their American friends. Pinochet, himself, is finished, of course, a discredited old man, but the junta remains in the wings. Still fascist to the core.”

  “And what about you?”

  “Fascist? No, of course not. But politics makes strange bedfellows, Miranda.”

  “So I’ve been told. If the present government of Chile goes down, you prevail. If you prevail, the government goes down. Either way, the fascist junta wins. Unless things stay as they are.”

  “The trick is to be Hitler’s ally without being Hitler’s apprentice.”

  “Sometimes it’s better to sleep alone.”

  “The present government — their agents were going to eliminate you, my friend. And it was not the junta in charge when my wife disappeared.”

  “And have I disappeared, Matteo? And Mr. Ross, has he disappeared?”

  “On a small island, to disappear is to die. You are here.” He smiled. “I see you.”

  “And if you witness my life, I exist?”

  “In this place I am your witness, yes.”

  “How does Maria D’Arcy fit into all this? If she was from Rapa Nui, why did she represent herself as a Brazilian heiress?”

  “That was gossip of the nattering class, of no consequence.”

  “And did her husband know?”

  “That she was Rapanui? Of course.”

  “And what’s the connection with me?”

  “As I said.”

  “No. She did not send me.”

  “Your colleague, he was here a year ago. Detective David Morgan.”

  “Yes?” She was wary now. “You aren’t going to tell me he manipulated me into coming?”

  “Possibly.”

  “No, if there is one person in the world I trust, it’s Morgan.”

  “Good. That is a good thing to know.”

  Miranda sat back in her seat, feeling that somehow she had betrayed her partner.

  “He told me about this place, how much he loved it.”

  “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “He would not remember me, but we talked several times. One evening we talked by the harbour for a few minutes. Another time, in a restaurant, from adjoining tables. I was part of the background. But I know him, I studied him, I researched Mr. Morgan. And through him, I know you.”

  “He talked about me?”

  “Not at all. But later, in Toronto, Maria opened a file on you. We like your mind.”

  “You what? Get serious.”

  “I am deadly serious, Miranda Qu
in.”

  Yes, he was, this strange man who spoke in passing of his wife’s murder, who seemed both profoundly engaged with a political cause, and a grim observer of the forces at play. “Perhaps we should now drive on and meet with our friends,” he said.

  “Our friends?”

  “Yes.”

  He backed off the low bank of earth that marked the edge of the road and began to drive without turning on the lights. Even in the fullness of the moon she could see the road only as a premonition. She felt a surge of relief, with each turn and twist, that he had managed to avoid slamming against remnants of ancient walls or smashing into wandering horses or crashing into the more indecipherable mysteries of the night. He negotiated the ragged terrain the same way she walked through her apartment in the darkness and knew where everything was, the way she had heard Inuit could trek through a snowstorm and read the landscape with all of their senses working together.

  Looking up through her window, she recognized a sheer edge of Rano Raraku receding in the darkness. Then nothing was familiar, not even the stars in their strange configurations. The Earth was different in the southern hemisphere from the planet she knew. Just as she was about to tell Matteo she would be happier if he slowed down, he wheeled the car into a long laneway, and, after edging around gaping potholes, pulled up beside a squat farmhouse, stuccoed in moonlight.

  When they got out of the car, Matteo drew his revolver and clicked off the safety. He motioned her to walk behind him, so that he was between her and the house. They approached the door slowly, and suddenly it swung open. A man’s silhouette loomed against the flickering glow of a lantern. He too held a gun in his hand, but casually, pointed off to the side.

  “Matteo?” he said, peering into the darkness. It was the voice of Thomas Edward Ross.

  Miranda was astonished at how vulnerable Ross made himself, back-lit and framed in the doorway. Then she heard a shuffling in the darkness beside them and turned to see the shadowy figure of Te Ave Teao glide into view, the glint of a rifle barrel preceding him. She had witnessed the policeman’s deadly efficiency at the hotel. Had they been enemies he would not have hesitated to shoot them.

  Ross welcomed them in without fanfare. He did not seem surprised to see Miranda and she suppressed any show of astonishment on finding him unapologetically safe. It was best to maintain an air of detachment, as it suggested she had not ceded control. The four of them settled around a table in the middle of the low-ceilinged room that took up the first floor of the house. There was a ladder leading up to a loft and a doorway opening at the back into a lean-to kitchen. The furnishings were sparse and the walls showed years of smoke from kerosene lamps, but the air was fresh, the place was untidy, but clean, the way places are when men live without women, or women without men.