Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

Morgan had revised his earlier judgment of Rove McMan. He had seemed likeable, but feckless, a charming drifter. His boat was a repository of incalculable treasure, but he had seemed hardly impressed. He had described the toromiro tablets as the Rapa Nui Domesday Book and Constitution and Charter of Rights rolled into one, yet he had seemed not much concerned with what would become of them. Now he was setting out to sail to the other side of the world to deliver them home. Single-handed. The long way around. And in the process he would retrieve whatever was hidden in St. Michael’s Cave and return it, as well.

  And he seemed genuinely concerned for Miranda.

  He wondered what one would do with the Domesday Book if no one knew what it said? Why return the Rongorongo to Rapa Nui when their value’s out on the open market? Take them to Sotheby’s or Ritchie’s or Christie’s. Use the money to pay for the funerals of Miranda’s friends on the island. Start up a scholarship fund. Buy the whole island a trip to the Arctic.

  “Could I see the Rongorongo?” Miranda was saying.

  Morgan suddenly realized the other two had been talking while his mind was avoiding the brutal realities where his odyssey to the Arctic and her excursion to Easter Island converged. McMan and Miranda descended into the main cabin. Morgan remained in the cockpit, trying to reconstruct from random details of memory exactly what he had been through with Gloria Simmons, and what he had missed.

  Miranda carefully unwrapped a slab of wood and held it up to the light. “This is toromiro, isn’t it? It has a lovely swirl to the grain; very dark, almost ebony, with auburn streaks. I saw a few pieces on the island. Used for carvings, though, not Rongorongo. It looks very old.”

  “Yeah, I’m guessing these are among the very few that survived the bonfires.”

  “When the priests came?”

  “In the mid-nineteenth century.” He took a deep breath, attracting Morgan’s attention. “We brought lethal diseases and gave them an alien God to forgive them for dying. We erased their memory, you know, and filled the emptiness with our own cultural cast-offs. We taught them to be ashamed, to be humble, to cower in fear of the Lord. Can you imagine ennobling a God who demands your fear, for God’s sake. How pathetic we really are.”

  Morgan listened from the cockpit, slack-jawed in amazement but gratified to hear so clearly articulated the sailor’s disgust with the world that drove him to wander. Miranda, who had no expectations, merely smiled. The weight of the colonial legacy driven home by his repetition of the word we, curiously made her feel strong. She did not carry a burden of guilt for the past, but she did feel empathy for the people who were struggling out from under the oppression of the imperial project, a phantom kinship with people like Matteo and Te Ave Teao and Maria and the rest.

  “Are they all toromiro wood?” she asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “What about the ones up front?”

  “In the bow?’ He seemed offended by her ignorance of nautical terminology. “I really don’t know.”

  “Let’s take a look.”

  Squeezing forward with Miranda peering over his shoulder, Rove McMan extricated a wrapped bundle from its vault beneath the fo’c’sle floorboards and passed it back to her. Braced between lockers and the door to the head, she peeled away outer layers of plastic as the pungent scent of oils and wood filled the cramped spaces around her. Moving back into the main cabin, she carefully unfolded the oily coverings from the first two slabs in the bundle and held them to the light, then she called Morgan to come down and see what she had. She proceeded to unwrap the other pieces and lay them out on a berth as he backed down the companionway steps.

  Miranda contemplated the pieces, but let them lie where she’d placed them. Morgan watched her thinking. McMan glanced back and forth between the other two. He was a man used to waiting.

  Many of the pieces showed curious notches and channels cut into wood which didn’t have the density or depth of colour she had expected. “They’re smaller than the others,” she observed. “The ones back here.” She nodded to the gaping hole by their feet, and then to the single dark piece streaked with light that McMan had set carefully on top of the chart table. “These aren’t toromiro, are they?”

  “No,” said McMan. “It looks like mako’i wood.”

  “Does that mean they’re more recent?” Morgan asked. He had been impressed by McMan’s knowledge of island woods.

  Rove McMan shrugged. “I haven’t given it much thought.”

  Miranda began fiddling with the slabs, handling them with deliberate care as she arranged notches and tabs, channels and edges, until they took the form of a small cabinet the size of a breadbox. “There,” she said. “Now if we only knew what treasure it used to contain.”

  The two men had been watching her in astonishment, and each in turn lifted the box when it was fully assembled and turned it over and over in his hands, testing its heft and solidity.

  “It was like a Chinese puzzle box,” she said. “I’m good with puzzles.”

  The box gleamed from tamanu oil, which had been rubbed into its pores to preserve the wood. Miranda recognized the scent from shops in Hanga Roa and Tahiti. Sold as an oil and an elixir, exported for some ungodly reason in bulk to Utah. When the lid was held in place so that the upper edges of each side were lodged in corresponding grooves, the box had a soundness that proclaimed it a marvel in cabinetry and engineering. And in artistry and perhaps scholarship, as well. Incised on every plane, inside and out, were lines of intricate glyphs, some tiny figurative renderings of birds and humans and sea creatures, and others geometric and abstract. But, while the exterior was somewhat scuffed, the interior showed no markings scratched or gouged by lost treasure. It simply was what it was.

  Rove McMan seemed as surprised as Miranda and Morgan that the pieces came together in such perfect accord. The three of them stared at it, sitting on the chart table like a holy relic. McMan’s urgency to return it to the island now seemed to make sense, perhaps even to him, although he appeared to be driven by wanderlust more than commitment, content to sail over the horizon in either direction, westward or eastward as Miranda’s revelations would determine.

  It was Morgan who broke the silence. “Aku-Aku, the book,” he said. “It was a delivery system, right?”

  Anticipating where he was going, she realized the same could be said for the Rongorongo box. “The treasure isn’t missing,” she declared.

  “Exactly.” Morgan turned to McMan. “When do you figure this was carved? Maybe the 1880s?”

  “No, earlier. It’s not toromiro. And tamanu nuts didn’t grow on the island. The oil would have come in from the Marquesas, maybe brought by traders or whalers.”

  “But you’ve never seen anything like this box, right?”

  “Never seen, nor heard, of anything like it.”

  “You said the wood might be mako’i from Rapa Nui. That means it might not be. Could it be Peruvian?” Morgan was on to something. The pieces were falling into place.

  “Yes, for sure. A rosewood of some sort.”

  “A wood that might remind a Rapa Nui exile of home.”

  “Morgan?” She wasn’t questioning him, she was urging him on.

  “The last king of the island died as an indentured servant in Peru. His name was Kaimoko. Most of the people sold by the slavers into servitude didn’t die in guano mines. That’s what anthropologists and historians used to think. Most died as household slaves, many from disease. Over a thousand. All men. Some of those men were ariki, they could read Rongorongo; they knew how to write it. Perhaps one particular ariki, in the fragments of time he could claim for himself, maybe he made this.”

  “You’ve been reading again.”

  “Yeah, I have.” He paused for dramatic effect. “There was a Chinese population in Lima at the time. And, let’s say, an ariki enslaved in Lima studied their boxes and decided to build his own. And he inscribed each piece so that together they make a book of his people. This is their history, their collective memory, their a
ncestral past. This,” he turned directly to Rove McMan, “this is their real Domesday Book. The information on the other pieces is incidental. Relatively speaking.”

  “But it found its way back to the island, it was given to us on Rapa Nui,” McMan protested.

  “I’m coming to that. A handful of men returned. Miranda, you talked about Matteo and Maria, they are descendents of the last ariki. He brought it home, freed from slavery by order of the same Church responsible for erasing his heritage. He was dying with smallpox. Freed from bondage, he brought hope for the remnants of his people. But it had to be hidden, it had to be protected. It had to outlast the powers of alien gods and foreign governments. And so it has.”

  “His name was Humberto Rapu Haoa,” Miranda said. “Who gave it to you?’ she asked, turning to McMan.

  “Matteo’s mother. Not to me, to the D’Arcys for safekeeping.”

  “When did the D’Arcys meet?” she asked, trying to understand their shared connection to Rapa Nui.

  “On the island. The first time we sailed there. Harrington and I, nearly twenty years ago. I stayed for half a dozen years. He stayed for six months, then flew off to Tahiti and back to Toronto.”

  “With Maria?”

  “Yes. Back home, his law practice thrived; they prospered. Several years ago, we returned, the three of us, on the Tangata Manu. That’s when Maria Pilar gave us the bundles. She did not understand their significance, but she knew the elder Matteo, the father of her children’s father, Matteo Akarikitea, he was what they call a taiki ana, literally a guardian of the cave, he had treasured them. When her husband died, the old man told her these were the gift of the last ariki. Later, she flew to Toronto. I pity the poor woman, her children are dead and she is alive, it must seem unnatural. She has only her grandchildren and they are at school in Chile.”

  “Grandchildren!” Miranda exclaimed. “I didn’t know the D’Arcys had children.”

  “They didn’t, but they paid the school fees, they are the godparents.”

  “Matteo’s? Are they Matteo’s?”

  “They are Matteo’s children, a boy and a girl. Twins, nearly ten.”

  Miranda tried to assimilate what he was saying. Matteo had never talked about children. He talked of the future, but always as a cause, a commitment. Why would he need to protect them from her? No, he was protecting himself. Their mother was dead. They were safe. If anything happened to him, they could be moved to Toronto. He was protecting himself from the pain of having to leave them.

  Morgan looked across the cabin and shifted around to shield his eyes from the sharp rays of the afternoon sun streaming through the portholes. Miranda, triumphant only moments ago, now looked forlorn. He wanted to say something to reassure her, but there was nothing to say. She had to work through her relationship with Matteo. Relationships don’t stop when someone dies, not for the living.

  “Your plan is to take this back, then?” Morgan asked the sailor.

  McMan looked at him and reverted to his ancient mariner guise. “Aye. It’s time to move on. I’ve no more stories to tell. I need to stock up in the enchanted islands and for sure on the open seas.”

  Morgan couldn’t tell if the man was joking or really believed he could juggle personas without being seen as a misfit or a fool. Or if he cared.

  “Via Gibraltar.”

  “There’s no other way,” he said, nodding toward Miranda, who seemed distracted by her private thoughts. “I might take Maria Pilar with me, if she wants to go.”

  “The old woman? I’d think she’d have all she needs right here,” said Morgan. “Especially if she brings the twins up from Chile. And if she went, certainly she’d fly?”

  “She’ll go back, eventually. She will take the children back to the island. She really has no choice. Historical inevitability, you know.”

  “Nothing is inevitable until it’s over. History is written in the past tense.”

  “History is never past, Detective Morgan. Before it occurs, we call it fate, but fate’s just history getting ready to happen. Dead reckoning, detective.”

  Miranda picked up the last few sentences in their conversation and turned abruptly to McMan. “Do you know Thomas Edward Ross?” In her mind, the question had something to do with fate and the manipulation of history.

  “I’ve met him. He used to spend time on the island while I was there. I didn’t know him very well.” He paused, then volunteered, “I didn’t like him. I didn’t trust him, but I gather he was useful.”

  “To the cause?”

  “The cause, yes, the independence movement, if you can call a handful of dissidents a movement.”

  “You don’t sound impressed.”

  “On the contrary. They were my friends. I admired them tremendously. More so because they were doomed to fail. As for Ross, I would describe him as whatever I’m not.”

  Miranda knew just what he meant. She had met people who could best be explained in no better way, they were what she was not. “His interests paralleled those of the movement, but he was working for the Pinochet faction,” she suggested.

  “Faction? The fascist junta! No, not really, he works for himself. He apparently does quite well. A few million stashed away here and a few million there. A villa with a view looking over Lake Cuomo in Italy, a suite on the Island Queen. He would occasionally bring a case or two of armaments to the island, courtesy of his patrons in Chile, and he would trade them for artifacts. The movement, as we’re calling it, posthumously, had little money. The authorities kept close tabs on Matteo to see that no funds came through from Toronto. These small shipments were Ross’s way of keeping in touch with the revolution. He may have been working for the government, as well. He’s a fake, you know.”

  “His personality or his credentials?” she asked

  “Everything. His class. Borrowed, he has none of his own.

  “Oxford?”

  “He was born in a village on the outskirts of Cambridge. Abington Piggotts. Charming name. Never completed his A levels.

  “Sloane Square?”

  “Earls Court.”

  “Washington?”

  “Highly unlikely, although I’m sure he is monitored by the CIA, and probably CSIS, MI6, Mossad, and possibly the KGB. He might even do the occasional odd job spying for one or the other. But he’s too high profile to be much use. Spoiled by his own success as a scoundrel, you might say. Mostly, he’s a pawn who thinks he’s a knight on the chessboard of life.”

  “Very poetic,” said Miranda. “And what piece are you?”

  “I’m the sailor, of course.”

  “There is no sailor.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  Miranda liked Rove McMan. He apparently had the privileged background that Ross claimed to have, and he chose to go his own way. She looked around the cabin of the Tangata Manu with renewed interest. Almost everything of real importance in this man’s world was nearly within arm’s reach. She looked over at Morgan. His eyes were almost closed, he seemed to be enjoying the gentle rocking of the boat, the murmur of voices as she talked with McMan. She didn’t know if he was following or not.

  “Tell me about Maria. She was betrothed to Te Ave Teao, wasn’t she?”

  It took him a moment to assimilate the shift in conversational direction. “On the island? No, there was nothing formal. It was something they grew up with. He was desperately in love with her. Everyone knew that. But for Maria, he was like Matteo, they were her brothers.”

  “He must have been crushed when she went off with D’Arcy.”

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  She waited for an explanation, but none came. “Perhaps he was pleased for her good fortune.”

  Rove McMan again indicated no response was forthcoming.

  “D’Arcy described her as wanton,” said Morgan. He had been thinking about the packet of letters tied in a faded blue ribbon. He had not had them translated. He would return them to Maria’s mother.

  “As they say in Rapanui, ka
i i te au. I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “You sailed with her for weeks at a time, you knew her when she was barely out of her teens. What do you think, was she promiscuous?”

  “Like I said.”

  “What about D’Arcy?” said Morgan. “He described himself as bisexual.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Homosexual?”

  “We lived in cramped quarters for months on end.”

  “You have a high opinion of yourself. What about asexual?”

  “Not interested? Possibly. Likely, I guess.”

  “Do you think his wife was promiscuous?”

  “You asked me that. And no, I did not have an affair with her. Nothing, not so much as an exchange of lascivious glances. And not with her husband, either.”

  “I had the impression they were on the verge of divorce,” said Morgan.

  Rove McMan stared at the floorboards and shrugged noncommittally.

  “Is there any chance D’Arcy was having an affair with his partner?” Miranda asked.

  “Gloria Simmons? Hardly.” He straightened and looked resolutely first at Morgan and then at Miranda. “You don’t get it, do you? With Maria and Harrington, it wasn’t about sex or money or privilege. They were passionately, deeply, romantically, wholeheartedly in love. I just don’t think sex had much to do with it. Or money. Or privilege.”

  Romance and passion without sex. Miranda spun the notion around in her mind, looking for traction. Morgan recalled his strange affair on Easter Island, the woman with eyes like Miranda’s, brown and green and golden. They had shared an exquisite romance and never had sex. It was perhaps the most intimate relationship he had ever had and they never did more than hold hands in the moonlight. I get it, he thought. But for Miranda, the concept seemed as dreary as sex without passion. Maybe without romance, but not without passion. Why bother?

  “One thing they shared,” Rove McMan continued, unaware of their divergent personal responses, “was a profound connection with Rapa Nui, Te Pito o Te Henua, it was the centre of the world for both of them.”

  “Understandable for her, but why for him?” Morgan asked.