Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

  Rove McMan was sitting in the cockpit when Morgan approached, working loose the knots in a tangle of rope with a marlin spike.

  McMan waved the spike in an ambiguous salutation when he saw Morgan, and invited him aboard.

  “Your boat?” Morgan asked.

  “Yes,” said Rove McMan. “She’s a nice old thing.”

  “It actually belongs to D’Arcy, though?”

  “She’s registered in his name. She’s not much for speed, but she’s comfortable.”

  “You live on board?”

  “Yes. You want to see below? It’s quite homey.”

  “This is the boat in the Easter Island pictures.”

  “There’s no secret about that, Detective. Its name is Rapanui —”

  “For bird-man, I know.”

  “Well done, Detective.”

  Irritated, Morgan turned and backed down the companionway steps into a beamy cabin that seemed more like an indulgent bachelor’s den than the austere quarters he had expected. The space was richly appointed with deep blue Ultrasuede and bright mahogany. There were various chrome and copper instruments and a stainless-steel galley. Morgan quelled a pang of envy that anyone might feel for the life of a wanderer, and moved forward beyond the head and sail-locker into the fo’c’s’le, which was cluttered with gear.

  When he turned back into the main cabin, Rove McMan was peering down at him through the companionway hatch. “Everything all right down there, mate?” he asked.

  Morgan was looking for something, but he was not sure what.

  “Yeah,” he responded, sitting down on one of the bunks.

  “You got time for a sail?”

  “No. Thanks. You were just out.”

  “Right. But I can always go for another.”

  “You sailed this back from Easter Island yourself?”

  “Through the Panama and up the inland waterway.”

  “Around Cape Hatteras?”

  “Yes, that’s the only difficult part. You’re on open water there. Apart from a couple thousand kilometres on the Pacific.”

  “You need to carry a lot of ballast for stability.”

  “No, Detective. A boat like this has all the ballast she needs built into the keel.”

  “Then what’s under here?”

  “Where?”

  “Under the floorboards.”

  “Storage tanks. For water. Farther aft, for fuel.”

  “You mind if I look?”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “I don’t see why you’d bother.”

  “But I’d like to. Of course, I can get a warrant.”

  Rove McMan gazed at him, with the light shimmering behind so that Morgan could not see his features. But his voice suggested forbearance. He was not pleased, but he was resigned to whatever was about to happen.

  “It’s up to you, mate.”

  Morgan lifted back the sisal floor-covering and raised a large wood panel to reveal a fibreglass tank the size of a child’s coffin, with the lid bolted in place.

  “Satisfied, Detective? It’s a freshwater tank.”

  “With a removable top. Could you hand me a wrench?”

  McMan descended into the cabin and retrieved a large wrench from a toolbox behind the companionway steps. He raised it, as he had the marlin spike, in an ambiguous gesture, then turned it innocuously to the side and handed it to Morgan.

  When the bolts were removed, Morgan grasped the lid with his fingertips and wiggled it loose while McMan watched impassively.

  Whether he expected to find treasure or a mummified corpse, Morgan wasn’t sure. Whatever would be revealed, he knew it was important. At first it seemed like packets of heroin or cocaine, neatly wrapped in airtight plastic, taped meticulously against contamination. But the shapes were unusually long and thin, like paddle blades or embalmed forearms, stacked neatly to fill the casket to the brim. He lifted one, it was surprisingly light.

  “You know what’s in here,” he said to McMan.

  “Of course.”

  “Hand me a knife.”

  “Be careful,” said McMan, handing him his knife.

  Morgan slit open the plastic wrap around one of the packets. A funerary odour of old wood and oils seeped into the air. He unrolled the covering on his lap until a flat slab of ancient wood emerged in the dull cabin light, gleaming with a patina of tiny carved symbols. He held it up. Despite its obvious age, it did not seem brittle.

  “You know about Rongorongo?” asked McMan in a curiously conciliatory voice.

  “Yeah,” said Morgan. “This is quite a treasure.”

  “There’s another tank up forward, maybe two dozen altogether.”

  “All old?”

  “Well, the wood is, for sure.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “That’s toromiro. Exceptionally rare. Most of the tablets extant are mako’i, some people call it miro, but it’s not the same.” He seemed quite pleased to be able to elucidate. “In the sixties, Thor Heyerdahl took seeds from the last toromiro tree back to a botanical garden in Sweden. I don’t know why, since he was Norwegian. On Rapa Nui, toromiro had all but disappeared by the seventeenth century, before Europeans arrived. ”

  “Why you?” said Morgan.

  “What, why am I the keeper of the island coffers? Good question. It just happened that way. I lived there for five or six years.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “I’m not much for calendars. Months and years are useful for predicting currents and weather, that’s about it. I sail by dead reckoning: you’re where you’re at today based on where you think you were yesterday and where you hope to be tomorrow. It’s all about trade winds for me.”

  “There must be a fortune here,” said Morgan, ignoring the lesson in navigation and lifestyle. “There are only a few of these known to exist in all the museums of the world. Do you know what they’re worth?”

  “To whom, Detective?” He shrugged amiably. “Several million, maybe more.”

  “But only if they were released a few at a time. Otherwise you’d saturate the market.”

  “You’re on the wrong tack there, I’m afraid. These Rongorongo have more value than anything you’d get at Sotheby’s.”

  “Explain.”

  “Well,” said McMan, his voice dropping an octave for added authority, “written here is the Rapa Nui Declaration of Independence, Detective Morgan. This is their political legacy. You ever heard of the Domesday Book, when William the Conqueror surveyed his offshore domain and turned British geography into history, fixing forever the rules and roles of Britain in print. These are their Domesday Book. This is their history, their link with the ancestral past, when they were Te Pito o Te Henua, the only place in the world.”

  “Even if no one can read it?”

  “It will be deciphered.”

  “You seem certain. By whom?”

  “Maria was working on it.”

  Morgan’s head reeled with improbable connections. “That’s why Miranda is there,” he said. He had the feeling she had been sent.

  “I don’t know about that. I don’t know Miranda.”

  “Miranda Quin?”

  “No, I’ve never met Miranda Quin. I knew someone called Miranda, once. On Ibiza. We were young and, well, you know, we didn’t have last names back then. I doubt it was Quin. She wasn’t Irish. On Ibiza, it was …”

  As McMan prattled on, Morgan decided he was a peripheral character in the complex scenario, playing his role without even knowing he was inside a play. Or else. Or else he was Prospero, controlling the entire illusion, including his own desultory appearance. It was possible. He was not stupid.

  “… and of course, there was Miranda in The Tempest, Prospero’s daughter, but …”

  If he was a master illusionist, he was letting the machinery show from the wings. Almost certainly, he was the guardian of the trove only because it was stored on a boat, and in return he got to treat
the boat like his own.

  “There is nothing illegal, here, Detective Morgan. There’s no law that says Rongorongo cannot be hoarded.”

  “The Chilean government might not be happy to have it in circulation.”

  “I really don’t think they care.”

  “On the contrary,” said Morgan. “If these are historical artifacts representing the sovereignty of the island, I suspect the Chileans would be vitally interested.”

  “I suppose you’re right. The truth is, I haven’t given a great deal of thought to all this, not until Maria died. I’ve been waiting to speak to Harrington. We’ll have to sort out what is to happen — sooner or later, something has to be done with old things like this.”

  “Old things like the Rongorongo, or the boat, or you?”

  “Ah. All three, I suppose. But wither we go, that’s up to Mr. D’Arcy.”

  “You might be waiting a while, my friend.”

  “Are we friends? Isn’t that pleasant. And are you suggesting Mr. D’Arcy is no longer in charge of the world?”

  “He seems to be missing.”

  “Just because you don’t know where he is? Detective Morgan, Mr. D’Arcy is where Mr. D’Arcy is.”

  “Well, Mr. D’Arcy seems to be adrift in Baffin Strait, somewhere off the coast of Greenland.”

  “Really? That seems unlikely.”

  “That he’s in the Arctic or that he is adrift?” If Harrington D’Arcy was not adrift, then he was dead in the water. “What is Maria D’Arcy’s connection with Easter Island?” The two of them secured the top to the fibreglass casket and replaced the floorboards and sisal carpet. “Do you know someone on the island called Te Ave Teao?”

  The sailor looked into his eyes, flashed a thin smile, and shrugged noncommittally.

  “Te Ave Teao,” Morgan repeated. “Were they lovers?”

  Again the man flashed the thin smile. “I couldn’t say, Detective. The only passions that catch my interest have to do with strong winds and billowing sails.”

  Morgan shrugged in turn and gave strict instructions that the Rapa Nui treasury was to remain undisturbed until he returned. Then he went back to the clubhouse and telephoned his superintendent. His cellphone was as usual in a drawer in his office desk, his Glock semi-automatic in the gun locker. He preferred to travel light.

  Rufalo was no more surprised than Morgan himself that he was flying north in a private jet to interview Harrison D’Arcy, especially since the man was no longer unavailable but actually missing. Morgan didn’t explain his conviction that the mystery surrounding Maria D’Arcy’s death was linked to a murky connection between Baffin Island and Easter Island. Harrington D’Arcy seemed the most likely person to clarify that connection. He mumbled something about Mohammed and mountains, while denying he was the Prophet or that D’Arcy was a mountain. But he was going. Morgan’s standing joke was that for him, North, the concept so revered by Canadians who haven’t been there, began at Highway 401, running across the top of Toronto. Yet on the vaguest of premonitions, the fuzziest of speculations, he was on his way to the Arctic.

  When he emerged from the clubhouse, McMan was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps in front of the sweeping verandah. He held an old-fashioned Raleigh bicycle leaning away in a gesture of offering. “Just leave it at the terminal,” he said.

  Morgan took the bicycle from him testily. He did not like being subject to the initiative of others, as if his own free agency were only an illusion. He did not like someone else knowing what he intended to do before he did. He listened as McMan gave him instructions on which route among the forking paths would lead to the Island Airport. If he went straightaway, he could be there before noon.

  Setting off on the bike into an avenue of shrubbery and trees, he felt mildly embarrassed about his own petulance and gave McMan a backward wave over his shoulder. He was sure the sailor would be watching. The laneway broke into the open and skirted down almost to Gibraltar Point before tucking back in toward the airstrip. In other circumstances, it might have seemed a charming ride.

  Leaning the borrowed bicycle against a security fence that he scaled with no trouble, Morgan strode across a sward of grass onto the tarmac. From a distance, he recognized Gloria Simmons approaching an executive jet positioned for takeoff. She walked with her head tilted forward like someone wearing glasses in the rain, only she wasn’t wearing glasses and it wasn’t raining. The wind blew her skirt taut against her thighs and her open jacket flapped around her shoulders, accentuating the thrust of her breasts in a thin cotton blouse. Morgan nodded, surprised at his response, and aware that she wasn’t dressed for the Arctic. She nodded back, showing no surprise that he was there, nor at his strange arrival.

  * * *

  By mid-morning, none of the men had reappeared. Miranda was apprehensive and restless. She could see the occasional rooster-tail of dust rising from vehicles passing beyond her line of vision in the sullen heat and she realized that she was not a prisoner, had perhaps never been a prisoner, and was free to leave. But how? Where to? She washed yesterday’s sundress and underwear using dish detergent and hung them outside to dry. Although it was the tail end of the rainy season, the weather had been inordinately dry, verging on a drought, and surprisingly hot. The sundress was all she needed, although she had been told the evenings could turn suddenly cool. She had packed according to her desire for a semi-tropical climate.

  She could always buy cold-weather gear if she needed it.

  She walked to the edge of the property marked by a low stone wall, beyond which the grasses were only a little longer and more tangled, the rubble only a little less orderly. She wondered if there was a boulder, a rock, a pebble, a grain of sand, on the entire island that had not been arranged and rearranged by human hands? Ten thousand people for a thousand years on an island the size of Manhattan. Were there pockets of earth and grit and gravel that did not contain the granular fragments of human bone?

  She settled into the shade of the crude latticed portico and nursed the brackish dregs of coffee in her cup, still lukewarm from the ambient heat. She stared at the Heyerdahl book on the raw wood table as if it were a distant relative, familiar but inscrutable, then picked it up, leaned back in her rickety chair, opened it to the flyleaf where she scrutinized the autograph, trying by sheer force of mind to decide whether or not it was real. Not that it mattered. In any case, the equation below it was in a different hand, written with great deliberation. Four over five equals two zeros. Or was it infinity? Probably infinity, since two zeros on their own are pointlessly redundant. So four over five equals infinity. Infinity or eternity? Boundless space or illimitable time, each was the measure of the other. She proceeded to thumb through the book, front to back, then back to front, and front to back, again and again, waiting for the revelation that, surely, she felt, was at hand.

  And slowly an idea began to coalesce in her mind. She could see her reflection in the glass chimney of the kerosene lantern hanging over the table. In this age of instant communication, when coded messages could be embedded in the most innocuous email, why use something as cumbersome and fragile as a book to convey dark secrets? Either the book was just a book or this particular book was imbued with hidden meaning before the advent of electronics and the person who sent it from Toronto had been unable to break into its elusive cache.

  Miranda stood up, prepared to let out a whoop, or the Canadian version, a fist pumped to shoulder height followed by a cadenced “Yeah!” but her triumphant exclamation was squelched as she caught sight of a roiling fantail of dust moving up from the main road. As the red Land Rover lurched into view she clutched the book in her hand and receded among the shadows of the portico, backed through the door into the house, wheeled and stumbled across the ground floor, and ventured out again into the light at the rear. Keeping the building between herself and the new arrivals, she scurried through the low underbrush, then made her way to the side in a running crouch ,and burrowed under a pile of volcanic boulders wher
e she was completely hidden, but had a good vantage on the grounds of the house.

  The Land Rover was new, the red paint, the colour of congealed blood, hardly grazed enough to give the accumulating grime a purchase, the fenders only a little dented by flying gravel. Miranda had seen it parked outside what she now understood was a Chilean Naval Base. Even before spotting it coming up the lane, she could tell by the thumping roar of the engine and the aggressive swirl of dust in its wake that it was a government vehicle and that had made her wary, so she was surprised when the first two people out of the vehicle were Matteo and Te Ave Teao. For a moment they stood squared off in front of the house as if they had never seen it before. Then three other men in uniform got out of the Land Rover. Two of them carried what looked like Kalashnikov AK-47s slung at the ready. Could be Colt M4 Carbines, but whatever, they were lethal. Miranda pressed down into the coarse grit on the floor of her shallow lair, then lifted her head and came face to face with a human skull.

  She had taken refuge in what appeared to be a makeshift grave. She squirmed around so that she could reach out and touch the skull with her finger tips. The bone felt smooth and porous, brittle around the eye sockets, suggesting her host in this shadowy cavern, while not ancient, had been there awhile. Miranda realized she was still clutching the Heyerdahl book in her hands and she set it close to the skull, then twisted onto her side so she could look upwards, and, as she had begun to suspect, the scowering visage of a moai pressed down on her. The forehead and chin formed the edges of her lair, while the nose crumbled into rubble from which shards and slivers of human bone protruded. The pursed lips leered directly above her head. This must have been a statue that had fallen in transit, or had been attacked or abandoned and pushed over. The head was severed from the torso, and the body segments must have been levered into position against the head to form a burial chamber for ensuing generations.