Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

  “No.”

  “Right, then. I’ll wait.” She gazed at him, trying to find something in his facial expression to connect with. He was inordinately handsome again, but revealed almost nothing. Chameleon good looks, it must have something to do with danger and the unknown. “So you’re here in relation to the deaths of the D’Arcys?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “A few minutes ago.”

  “Then I am. Yes, in relation to, that’s the best way of explaining it. Okay, go to the bathroom, leave the door open, if there’s any funny business — what a curious expression — I will shoot your partner through the head, And when you come back, hand me that lovely pigskin valise by the door.”

  When Miranda returned with the valise, Ross sat down and set it carefully on his lap, leaning the Winchester against his chair within easy access. Morgan had remained contemplative while she was gone, aware that smouldering just beneath the awkward civility of their bizarre little gathering was the potential for revelation or bedlam, possibly both. He was intrigued by his own inability to anticipate how it would all work out.

  “Now then,” Ross said. “I am in Toronto for two reasons. One, as she is well aware, is to deal with Ms. Simmons. The other is more interesting.”

  14

  Come Away, Death

  T.E. Ross slouched back in his chair, and, instead of explaining the valise, or clarifying his enigmatic pronouncement, he gazed about the room, apparently examining the array of Inuit carvings as if he were seeing them for the first time. Miranda sidled closer to the table where she had set her purse. If she was quick, and if Ross hesitated, she might retrieve the Glock in a single lunge. Morgan, who at this point was conducting an inner monologue on conflict resolution, caught her eye. He shook his head. She glanced at Ross. He smiled. The moment had passed. She was grateful.

  “Why deal with anyone?” she said, returning to the sofa. She wasn’t at all sure he was capable of murder. He was not unfamiliar with violent death. Hell, she thought, it seems to follow in his wake. And he was obviously not beyond meting out violence. She turned to look at Morgan — despite the initial spurt of blood, his wound was little more than a scratch. Morgan squinted at her, trying to guess what she was thinking. He was waiting for her to take the initiative. Despite their compromised situation, he considered Ross to be primarily her problem, as Gloria Simmons was his. Miranda suspected as much. She found his obtuseness absurd, even dangerous, but oddly endearing.

  “The D’Arcys are dead,” Ross said. “There are people who wish them avenged. I am being paid with these,” he said, opening the valise and extracting a pair of toromiro slabs incised with Rongorongo. “They should fetch a fair price. I’m very interested in Easter Island antiquities, you know. There is a huge black market for the very best artifacts, and they don’t come better than this.”

  “Exactly how much are they worth?” Gloria Simmons spoke up quite casually. She might have been negotiating the price of a hat. “How much is my life worth, Mr. Ross? I’m sure I could double it.”

  “No doubt,” he said. “But that isn’t the point, is it? I am not a man without feelings and you have murdered my friends. Well, you’re a friend, too, but you see what I’m getting at. It’s about Easter Island, Gloria. I really do wish the best for the island.”

  “To enhance your investment, I imagine. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a few more artifacts squirreled away. Whatever the state of island sovereignty, you need to maintain your connection. Is your treasure trove still there?”

  It is, thought Miranda. Deep in the bowels of an ariki’s cave. Te Pito o Te Henua. Stored in munitions boxes. “You are a morally corrupt man,” she muttered with suppressed indignation. In spite of everything she would have preferred to find something admirable in Ross apart from his roguish good looks.

  “Morality isn’t what it used to be, my dear Miranda.”

  “Was it ever?” said Morgan.

  “Your partner is making a very good point. Certainly, in my case, it never was,” said Ross without bothering to look at Morgan. “I am somewhat rootless, as you have observed. A man without a history by choice. I am condemned to be free, to make it up as I go along, you might say.”

  “Your values?”

  “My life.”

  “Talk about illusions of grandeur.”

  “Were we? I would think it humility, to confess being a man unsustained by conventional morality.”

  “Unencumbered.”

  “But keenly aware of the morals of others,” said Ross.

  “Which makes him a dangerous man to know,” said Morgan as if only he and Miranda were talking.

  “Which gives me power, Detective Morgan.”

  “The gun helps,” Miranda observed.

  “Indubitably.”

  “I don’t think anyone has said indubitably since Arthur Conan Doyle turned from making fiction to believing in it.”

  “I am tempted then to say it again, then. Indubitably. But more to the point, being morally aware means I am not a psychopath, and that must be a relief to us all. But ethical — I do believe I am an ethical man. If I am indeed condemned to be free — I believe Jean Paul Sartre said that before I did — then what I am is a matter of choice. And what I choose is self-respect. I have been bought and well paid for, yes. Matteo made the arrangements; Rove McMan delivered. Now I am honour-bound to comply with my end of the bargain, even if it means my life.”

  “Or mine,” said Gloria Simmons.

  “Indeed, or yours.”

  “Then let us proceed,” said Gloria Simmons. “I’ll be interested to see which it is.”

  “Do you care?” said Ross, then, distracted perhaps by his own lack of gallantry, he engaged her in what from his tone might have been a casual conversation. “How did Maria die exactly? The same way as Harrington and the gentleman from Chile?’

  “She died in my arms.”

  “Quite literally the kiss of death?”

  Miranda watched as Gloria Simmons struggled briefly with emotion, but responded with detachment. “Our causes conflicted. She was prepared to die for hers. I was prepared to do what was necessary.”

  She turned to Morgan. If anyone deserved an explanation, it was him. “We made love in the Pemberly cabin. A bottle of Dom, it was a perfect encounter. A few tears. We lay in each other’s embrace. Harrington came on board, he looked down into the light. He knew she was dead. He locked us below. I fixed her makeup and covered her naked body with a blanket. The air was getting cool. I tried to get out. Used a screwdriver, but it didn’t work. Harrington was on deck, contemplating fate, I suppose. I talked to him through the wood. Fate relented. He opened the hatch. We lifted her out.”

  “Did you put on her bikini?” Morgan asked.

  “Not the top. She had lovely breasts, rather voluptuous. Harrington insisted we cover her. I left him to fuss and work out his strategies. I had my own to consider.”

  Miranda was mesmerized, listening to this woman who was guided by the strength of conviction to commit the most heinous crimes, a cold-blooded and passionate, fearless and sensitive, arrestingly beautiful monster. She glanced over at Morgan who seemed to have drawn a line under the accumulated details as he switched his attention back to Ross.

  “You said you were in Toronto for two reasons?” Morgan phrased his words as an incentive for their captor to continue. As long as he’s talking, Morgan thought, there is the possibility of a resolution to our situation without further violence. He was intrigued by Ross’s definition of himself as a man of principle without principles. This made him dangerously unpredictable, but not vicious, nor capricious, and not necessarily adversarial.

  “There is the matter of Ms. Simmons, yes. And to connect with Rove McMan. Which I have. It’s about bringing the parts of the puzzle together, you know,” said Thomas Ross. “There’s something I want to show you. You will enjoy this. I know you have seen the cache on the Tangata Manu. On Matteo’s authority, I have taken my small cut.” H
e glanced at Miranda and picked up the two pieces of Rongorongo from the floor where he had casually set them and returned them to the valise. He then proceeded to pull out another slab of wood incised on both sides.

  “This will interest you,” he exclaimed with a note of triumph. “This is from St. Michael’s in Gibraltar. On Gibraltar. It’s a false island, you know, just an outcropping of rock on the Iberian peninsula.”

  “That’s it!” Miranda exclaimed. “You found the Rapa Nui treasure.”

  “The key to their treasury, I would call it. The coordinates were right on the money, although, I must say, there was a bit of a puzzle to be resolved; you would have liked that Miranda, I nearly missed out.”

  “It wasn’t inside the cave, was it?”

  “You knew!”

  “Not until now. But I did wonder how anyone could conceal something in such a public place. The coordinates don’t pinpoint the height above sea level.”

  “Exactly,” said Ross, quite pleased with himself. “It was hidden among the rocks on top of the cave, not inside at all. And incidentally, Rove knows I have it. That’s part of the deal. Now he can sail west, into the setting sun, and avoid the Somali pirates. A much better course, don’t you think, for our ancient mariner in the making?”

  Morgan reached out and Thomas Ross surprised both of them by handing the treasured piece of wood across to him. Morgan turned it over and over, then chuckled and handed it to Miranda. She tilted it to the light this way and that, turned it over a couple of times, then set it down carefully on the table beside her.

  “Astonishing!” She exchanged glances with Morgan, but addressed Ross. “It’s not just another piece of Rongorongo!”

  “No,” said Ross with a smirk that threatened to swallow him whole. “It is not.”

  “What?” Gloria Simmons leaned forward, trying to determine what it was that had so easily relegated her fate to the margins. “What is it?”

  “It is very important,” said Morgan.

  “The Rosetta Stone,” Miranda declared.

  “The exemplar of translation machines,” Gloria Simmons observed without seeming to pick up the excitement. “British museum. Ptolemy the fifth.” She smiled wanly before reverting to casual indifference, and Miranda recognized her energy was flagging; there was much more going on in Gloria Simmons’s head than the mysteries of Rongorongo. It took disciplined concentration to maintain her cool demeanour.

  “The Rosetta Stone has three kinds of inscription on it. Egyptian in hieroglyphs, Egyptian in script, and classical Greek,” mused Miranda. “All say the same thing. It was used as a decoder.”

  “And that’s what this is.” Gloria Simmons declared before closing her eyes. A small smile spread from the edges of her mouth and fanned out from the corners of her eyes, giving her face the kind of radiance Miranda had occasionally seen on the dying just before they lapsed into final stillness.

  “It is,” said Miranda. “It is,” she repeated. She picked up the piece of wood again. It felt different from the Chinese box, but she was certain the stylized pictographic incisions were by the same hand. “What do you think, Morgan, what kind of wood?”

  “It’s not toromiro.” He took it from her. “It doesn’t look like the Peruvian rosewood the box is made from. What’s the island wood they used when they ran out of toromiro?”

  “Mako’i. Yeah, that’s what I think. Take a look on the back.”

  “I know. It makes sense. Latin.”

  “The person who carved this was Humberto Rapu Haoa. I’m sure of it. Before being shipped off to Peru in chains, he studied Latin with the priests, and he studied Rongorongo as an ariki. He carved the history of his people into the sides of the box while he was in servitude, and when he returned to the island, a dying man, he realized he was the last ariki and he carved this, the key to the sacred text. He used the only wood available. What an utterly astonishing gift to his descendents.”

  Miranda realized as she talked that Ross was no longer a shadowy figure in the Rapa Nui story, but central to how it played out. Her treacherous handsome Englishman was the designated chamberlain, the keeper of the key, as Rove McMan was the guardian of the treasury. Whatever else was happening here, for weal or woe, Ross held the future of a people in his charming perfidious grip.

  “This is mana,” she said, “the best of good fortune. Humberto Rapu Hoa has given his people their past. The rest is up to you.”

  “Actually,” Ross corrected her, “mana is more about power, usually with supernatural origins.” At that moment he seemed benign, and a bit of a pompous prig. “My Rosetta slab and Rove’s Chinese box have a magical affinity. Don’t you worry, the rogue and the sailor, we’ll both play our parts.”

  Miranda marvelled at the strange integrity of those two men, both of whom lived outside the pale. Each knew the other had an invaluable treasure that would be immeasurably enhanced by his own, yet there seemed no question of stealing or extorting to gain access to both. Honour among scoundrels, she thought — except Rove McMan was neither scoundrel nor thief. She glanced at Ross. Perhaps he was both, but he was still, in his own way, a man of honour.

  She stood up and walked over to Gloria Simmons with her back to Thomas Ross. She untied the woman’s wrists. “It’s over,” she said, turning to face their captor. “Your call, you can shoot us, but why bother? It would be a nasty distraction. Or you could leave now, return this amazing gift from the past to the island, as you say you’re going to, and slip into another persona. I’m sure you have a few lives left in you yet. Vengeance will be through due process. We’ll call it justice. Gloria Simmons will be dealt with. You told me something, once. Actually, you wrote it in a note. Don’t pull the rug out from under yourself.”

  Morgan had quietly risen to his feet. Ross seemed to be mulling things over. Morgan leaned down to take the Winchester. Ross tightened his grip, then released it with a shrug that asserted he relinquished no power by giving it up. Morgan hefted the rifle tentatively, letting his fingers curl around the unfamiliar rhapsody of cold steel and darkly polished wood, admiring its functional perfection. So this was the gun that won the West. And revolutionized the North. It was heavier than he expected. He stepped back and held the rifle at an angle between himself and Ross, with the barrel poised to slash down across the other man’s face.

  “Morgan,” Miranda cautioned.

  “Miranda, I am not a violent man.”

  Ross stared up at him with an annoying sense of bravado and made a gesture with the back of his hand as if to push the gun barrel away, but then thought better of it and let his hand drop. “One cannot die in the middle of Act Five,” he declared.

  Morgan leaned the Winchester against the shelves at the back of the kitchen counter, then picked it up again, aimed it to the side and pumped the lever action in rapid succession, spewing the remaining live cartridges onto the carpet. Equanimity restored by this small act of controlled violence, he lay the rifle down on the floor and moved into the centre of the room, then moved to flank Gloria Simmons on the other side from Miranda.

  Gloria Simmons leaned forward in her chair. She turned her head to address Ross as if she were clarifying matters of litigation. “I have two questions. One, to you. How did your magical Rongorongo piece end up in a Gibraltar cave? And two,” she glanced first at Morgan and then at Miranda, “how do you expect to convict me for anything more than flying a Twin Otter without a license and misleading a cop in a sleeping bag?”

  Morgan flinched, Miranda tried unsuccessfully to suppress a grin.

  Ross turned to look at Gloria Simmons, then began to walk around the room, touching things as he talked, moving around Miranda and around Morgan. He ran his hands over a number of the Inuit carvings and seemed to settle his interest on one in particular. “I have visited Easter Island a number of times, you pick up the stories,” he said. “Foreigners took away many valuable things, but this special piece was sent away for safekeeping.” He retrieved the Rosetta slab from the table a
nd turned it in the muted light, running his fingers gently over the runic incisions then set it back, Latin side down. “There are moai wrenched out of their place as ancestral guardians now sitting in major museums of the world.”

  He reached into his pocket and extracted a Swiss Army knife. “This carving, Ms. Simmons, it is a beauty.” He held the knife absently in one hand and with the other he caressed the smooth green stone of a raptor caught in a brilliant instant of violent motion. “A Peregrine falcon, I presume. You can tell by the owlish face. Do you know these devils murder at two hundred miles an hour?”

  Morgan looked over at the soapstone raptor, a beautiful piece with wings arced sinuously to arrest his sudden descent as he swooped on his prey. Talons like razors spread for the kill, flared eyes glaring yellow against the green-grey stone, pupils murderously black.

  Morgan couldn’t resist: “Not Maltese?”

  “More deadly, I think. I’ll bet I know how the stone-carver did the eyes. A clever innovation. I understand Inuit sculpture is a recent phenomenon.”

  And then, while Morgan was anticipating an irritating monologue on Dashiell Hammett and Inuit sculptors not being bound by tradition, Ross launched into a different discourse entirely:

  “An Englishwoman by the name of Katherine Routledge mounted an expedition to Easter Island just before the Great War.” He spoke softly, but his eyes kept flashing deliberately from one of them to the other. “Routledge was an historian, a spiritualist, an incipient schizophrenic, and a pioneer in the field of anthropology. Quite a beauty in her day, although somewhat faded by the time she arrived on the island. Incidentally, her armada consisted of a single schooner she named Mana. Ironic, isn’t it? Routledge and her enterprise were invested with the unseen powers of empire: her mana had the strength of the imperial enterprise behind it while the mana of the islanders had been diminished almost to extinction. She meant well, I’m sure.”