Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

  “You know about our writing?”

  “Yes, a little.” She had honoured in semiotics and linguistics at the University of Toronto. Most in the field knew about the writing of a people who could no longer decipher their own documents, writing that stood paradoxically between them and their past.

  “Only men could write and read,” Matteo continued. “They were like medieval monks in Europe. Generation by generation, they would re-copy our scripts because we had only slabs of wood to work with, which would deteriorate just like parchment and paper. We managed to develop writing, but never anything durable to write on. Men spent their lives incising script into wood for readings on formal occasions. Then the slavers came at about the same time as slavery was ending in the United States. They took away all the men. Of the few who returned, only my grandfather could still read the past, and when he died shortly after returning. Then the church enacted its own little Inquisition and ordered all remaining Rongorongo tablets to be gathered in a great fire. It was like the reversal of Genesis: God charged Adam to unname the world. The few pieces that survived were scattered throughout the world, and they remain, mostly in museums, a few with private collectors, a vital link and a terrible barrier between what we had been and what we might become. Perhaps there are more still undiscovered.”

  “Humberto Rapu Haoa was your grandfather?” Miranda marvelled at how incredibly articulate this man could be, this descendent of orators and priests.

  “Yes, three times removed. He was my great-great-great grandfather, and it is because of him I come into this cave without fear. This is where the arikis would live, sometimes for years, to bleach their skin white. I believe that was something we did only after the Dutchmen and Spaniards and English and French appeared in the eighteenth century and passed so briefly and with such devastating consequences through our lives. Like a white cloud of death. Why would we want to be white?”

  Miranda surveyed Matteo’s handsome face and remembered thinking the moment she had arrived how beautiful the Polynesian complexion was, how perfect their features. Or was that Morgan who had told her to expect such beauty and she had only affirmed his judgment? Right now Morgan was probably sipping tea on the verandah of the Royal Toronto Yacht Club gazing over at the CN Tower, thinking of her. No, she thought, with Morgan life is more complex than that.

  * * *

  Morgan was in fact thinking of Miranda as he huddled on the shore of Baffin Island. He imagined his partner on Easter Island, basking in the Pacific sunshine, writing her mystery novel. He was trying to conjure an image vivid enough that he could feel the heat. He shivered and leaned closer to Gloria Simmons. Miranda wouldn’t write romance, she wasn’t romantic. She was rational, down to earth, a no-nonsense realist. Despite her location, she’d write about Toronto. It wouldn’t be a thriller; it would be a police procedural. Her protagonist would be a woman, of course, who had a clever and annoying male sidekick. The woman would be beautiful in a subtle and provocative way. Gloria shifted and Morgan moved against her.

  “What do you think?” she said. “The cloud cover is lifting a little. We might do better back at the plane. They’ll see us there.” She seemed to be gathering her spirits, perhaps having determined that her own partner might still be alive by virtue of the improbable equation that his associate was not. Not so improbable: someone had buried him.

  “Do you think the plane’s a writeoff?”

  “Hell, no. Twin Otters endure.” She had reclaimed her feisty aplomb, if not her cool serenity. “That should be the De Havilland motto. We endure.”

  “Well, let’s hope we’re as durable. Yeah, we’d better head back. We left the sleeping bag there.”

  “Forget it, Morgan. We’re not having another naked encounter just yet.”

  * * *

  “Can we be sure Thomas Ross is an ally?” Miranda leaned conspiratorially across the table, searching for something in Matteo’s dark eyes to affirm their connection. “Leaving the book behind in this cavern suggests it was a bargaining chip, in case he was bushwhacked by either side. He said it was for leverage with the soldiers, but it would be with you, even more. He didn’t expect you to find me. He was sure you thought I was dead.”

  “Bushwhacked?”

  “Ambushed — same difference — that’s another Canadianism. It doesn’t sound like he intended on coming back for me, does it? Why bother, if the damned book was stowed safely away in the depths of the earth? I was expendable. I told him I’d broken the code. He didn’t care.”

  “Have you?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Did you tell Ross what you think it says?”

  “No, of course not. I don’t even know if there is a code, for goodness’ sake. But I suspect he actually believes the book has more value to you and your people if it remains a mystery.” He looked at her quizzically and the lamplight flickered across the book lying on the table between them. “Matteo, I am sure he believes there is more power in the unknown than the known. Whatever the secrets of your holy book, they’re not likely to change the world. A mysterious talisman in the present trumps messages from the past, no matter how stirring. He may have a point.”

  “He is a cynic, I am a zealot, you are somewhere between. A romantic, perhaps.”

  “A realist, maybe, caught between forces of history at play in someone else’s backyard — where I happen to have turned up by pure chance.” He gazed into her eyes, projecting dismay that she could possibly be so naive. “Believe what you will,” she said. “Your faith is what’s keeping me alive.”

  “Miranda Quin, we do not want you harmed. If you can help us, you will help us. If not, either way, we will try to protect you. The government agents who followed you from Santiago, they came to Rapa Nui to kill you. That did not happen. The soldiers came to my grandparent’s house to kill you. That did not happen. You are among friends.”

  “The smoking man and his shadow, they were Carabinaros. What did you do with them?”

  “You were there. You know.”

  “But what happened to their bodies?”

  “They are now among the desaparecidos, the disparu,” he said, without irony. “There are more places for the dead on this island than for the living.”

  “And Thomas Edward Ross, is he also among the des-apare-cidos?”

  “Oh no, he is much too valuable. He is a man with very powerful connections in Santiago —”

  “The Pinochet fascists?”

  “Yes, but with the government, as well.”

  “And for you?”

  “Yes, he is valuable for us.”

  “Where is he now?” she asked.

  “Good question. There is a cruise ship anchored off Hanga Roa.”

  “Do you think he’s gone?”

  “Quite possibly he is in the process of leaving.”

  “So he can leave? Just like that! What about me? How would we go about the process of my leaving”

  “Life is not fair. We need you for now.”

  “Look, maybe the book is just a book, Matteo. I’m not a literary critic. I can’t interpret the ambiguities of a text and come up with the answer to life. I’m a homicide detective.”

  “And a novelist.”

  “Too busy surviving one bloody mystery to write another.” The depths in his sympathetic eyes seemed to counter the grim set of his jaw. Saying nothing, he urged her on and she felt stifled by the pressure but compelled to continue.

  “Okay, let’s say the book really is a delivery system. We’re looking for something hidden in plain sight. We have to figure out what the code is before we can figure out what it says.” She smiled with a shrug of resignation. “Let’s accept that the book is a map and I am the key.”

  “You are the key. It is a treasure chest and only you can open it.”

  Miranda shuddered at the preternatural implications, then suddenly realized the divergence in what they had each said. “We’re singing in different keys, Matteo! I wonder, are we looking for a leg
end on a map that allows us to translate, or for an instrument that allows us to unlock some revelation?”

  “Perhaps they are the same thing.”

  “You are a genius, Matteo.” He beamed, but his forehead furrowed with lines of consternation. “We need a key,” she continued, “a key that will reveal the message and allow us to decipher what it means. Meaningless messages won’t help the revolution. We’re moving, here, we’re on the right track.” Miranda was excited, she could feel her pulse rising, her heart beating through her entire system. “The book is in English, written by a Norwegian, and it’s about Rapa Nui. The writings in the margin are in English, written in a very deliberate script. It’s like someone copied the notes letter by letter. I don’t think it’s about the words, they’re just markers. Otherwise, why bother dropping them here and there throughout the text? So what do they mark? It could be phrases or passages on the marked pages. Maybe if we add up the letters in each snippet of wisdom and then count — count, Matteo? Numbers! That’s it.”

  “Numbers?”

  Miranda took a deep breath and opened the Heyerdahl book to the flyleaf. Her index finger quivered with suppressed excitement, she pointed. “What does it say there?”

  “Aku-Aku. It refers to the spirits of our ancestors.”

  “No, no, you’re looking at the title page.”

  “In handwriting it says, Thor Heyerdahl, I think. And a mathematical equation of some sort. Incomplete, nonsensical.”

  “Exactly. Mathematically, it makes no sense. So we read it metaphorically. 4/5 = 00. If the parallel zeroes stand for infinity, the temporal version of space without end, then, okay, we have God! The Abrahamic religions are obsessed with the infinite and the eternal, correct? And what do they have in common? Muslims, Christians, and Jews all revere the first five books of the Bible. The Pentateuch.”

  “The Pentateuch?”

  “The five books of the Torah, the Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. The fourth book of the holy five is Numbers. The inscription directs us to look for the message in numbers, not words. Matteo, we’ve done it!”

  “We have?” he said, a little incredulous.

  “Yes, we have. Hand me the book. What sets of numbers are in a book? Page numbers. Illustration numbers. Chapter numbers.”

  “Where do we start? That is a lot of numbers”

  Miranda turned the pages a few at a time, tilting the book to the lamplight. Matteo sat back, waiting for the revelation to unfold. Miranda fidgeted.

  “Let’s try looking at the page numbers where the marginal notes have been added,” she suggested.

  “You see, my sister sent you.”

  Miranda asked for a pen and some paper. He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the stub of a pencil. No paper. Removing the dust jacket from the book she began inscribing numbers on the back. She made two columns. In one column she wrote 3, 60, 73, 294. In the other she wrote 5, 20, 36, 95. She stared at the columns. She wrote down the numbers again, but this time in horizontal lines.

  Matteo leaned forward, watching her think. “Why are there two groups? How do you know one group from another?”

  “Four of the statements concern enemies. Four do not. It seemed like a logical division.”

  “Why two groups? Why not three or four or five?”

  “Because the first is a cluster of four. I’m guessing the others, which seem to have a vague affinity based on honour and beauty, would be the same.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.” She stared at the lines of numbers, then at the columns, then back at the horizontal lines. “Maps. Of course. Map coordinates. Do you have an atlas?”

  “Not handy.”

  “No, of course not, we’re in a cave.” She looked up and smiled. “What we have here is a very specific location. So, the first set signifies northern latitude. The second is western longitude.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “It’s my mushier side; I’m interpreting tropes of emotion.”

  “Tropes?”

  “Something we used to say in literature class, years ago. It’s me being a literary critic, don’t worry about it. What I’m figuring is that if the person encrypting was an islander, or an outsider sympathetic to the islanders, the sentiments expressed about enemies and the dangers of allies might refer to Holland, Spain, France, and England. That is, Europeans, the emissaries of death and disaster from the northern hemisphere. The more positive sentiments in this scheme of things would be reserved for Rapa Nui, the island in the west. Okay! The numbers. Simple. Get rid of the divisions. Write them down, so.”

  She wrote down 36073294N and below that she wrote 5203695W.

  “These numbers, they’re not the same length.”

  “Therefore,” she said, we move from right to left. We know for sure the final number in each case will probably be a four digit statement of seconds. That’s the convention, seconds to two decimal places. Then the next number to the left will be two digits.”

  “Why not one, or three?” He leaned forward as if he were trying to hear her think.

  “Not three because it will be a measurement of minutes, which only go up to sixty. And a single digit anywhere within the sequence would be expressed as two digits, with a zero added to avoid confusion, as in zero-one, zero-two, et cetera.” She pronounced the word, et kay teh rah, her fractured Latin an indicator of the ebullience she felt in resolving what seemed an impossible conundrum ten minutes previously. “Since the middle number must be two digits, and a measurement of minutes cannot be more than two digits, the first number is whatever remains.” She took a deep breath. “So now we have 36 degrees, 07 minutes, 32.94 seconds, north latitude. And we have 5 degrees, 20 minutes, 36.95 seconds west longitude.”

  “I hate to be, how should we say it, annoying, but ...”

  “But?”

  “There is no zero in front of the 5.”

  “It’s implied. Catch up with me, Matteo. The zero is necessary only within a sequence. The degrees figure must be, like I said, whatever is left over.”

  “You are a mathematical prodigy.”

  “Smart cop from Toronto. And modest. Now, may I go home?” She knew her revelation had little to do with arithmetical skills or math, unless logic could be called a subset of mathematics, but she was pleased with herself.

  “So where would this place you have discovered occur, if we had a map?”

  “I’m guessing around Malta, maybe Gibraltar, maybe Casablanca or Tangier.”

  “And why would that matter to us?”

  “Well, apparently it does. Whoever went to all the trouble to create the encryption must have thought it was a location worth dying for.”

  “On the other side of the world?”

  “Yes, but conveyed in a book called Aku-Aku. Any book might have delivered the same message, but it seems your mysterious correspondent chose a book with a significant title. These are your ancestors speaking to you through Heyerdahl. I think you should trust them. Your quest is just getting started. But this is where I get off, I’m going home, now, Matteo.” She paused, then said grandiloquently, for her own amusement, “My work here is done.”

  * * *

  Unable to reach the plane, Morgan and Gloria Simmons sat on the rocky embankment and ate their remaining chocolate bar while boulders the size of basketballs worked their way downstream in the rushing torrent, grinding and jamming together to form new back currents and eddies that shifted the flow as they watched. They listened to the river roar like the rumble of faraway thunder.

  The crystalline clarity of the water roiling at their feet, the turgid opaque water surging against the rocks on the opposite shore, the paradox struck Morgan as one of those natural anomalies that makes the world seem like an astonishing experiment. He considered a walk along the bank to see if the waters converged before reaching the sea. Instead, he turned to his companion and spoke in a voice loud enough to carry over the background noise o
f the river.

  “Do you suppose we’ll die here?” he said. It didn’t seem a matter of much consequence. A conversational gambit.

  “Quite possibly,” she answered, looking up at the clouds that had closed over again and seemed to be descending rapidly, with rain lashing toward them in the quickening wind.

  “If I go first, please feel free to eat my remains,” he said.

  “And vice versa,” she responded. “You’ve already observed the choicest bits. But leave the face, I’ve always promised myself I’d go to the grave without facial surgery. Do we have a sharp knife?”

  “Not even a dull one. Let’s survive.”

  “Let’s.”

  They lapsed into silence, huddled closely, but did not get out of the incoming storm until the first streaks of sleet-laden rain lashed at their cheeks. They rose simultaneously and scrambled over to a cluster of rocks set back from the embankment. By squeezing together they were able to crawl under a rock slab that effectively shielded them from the downpour. During a lull, Morgan tramped around, ripping up clumps of moss that were quite dry where they had clung in the lea of boulders, although patches growing in the sparse open soil were saturated. He threw the driest moss into their makeshift den and Gloria Simmons worked it around to make a viable nest. He crawled back in as the rains picked up and they fell into a sound sleep in each other’s arms.

  ***

  When Miranda and Matteo made their way to the mouth of the cave the sun was high overhead. They walked up a steep pathway that must have once accommodated caretaker servants of the arikis who inhabited the cave. At the crest of the precipice, she stopped to gaze around. She could see most of Rapa Nui from this vantage and as she followed the rolling landscape to the edge of perception she realized the possibility of a fondness for this small island, alone in the vast reaches of the South Pacific, that might be strong enough to arouse the most fierce loyalty in its people.

  She reached over and grasped Matteo’s hand and squeezed it with the passion of a compatriot. He had lost his wife and his sister and how many more to their cause, which in the larger world remained virtually unknown. If the attraction she had felt for Ross was the seductive reflection of his offhand indifference to morality, the attraction of this man beside her was his moral commitment. His unspeakable troubles he endured without fanfare through the strength of his character, the honour of his purpose. Beside him, she felt humble and yet proud. She was in love, she decided, but not with the man. Rather, with his quietude, his calm, and indomitable spirit.