Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

  “So did the Spanish Inquisition,” Miranda observed with wry exasperation.

  “It is all a matter of perspective,” Ross responded. While speaking, he had kept one hand on the polished head of the stone falcon, seeming to absorb the smooth coolness through his open palm. He withdrew his hand, stooped and stared directly into the brilliant eyes. He opened his knife, exposing a small allen wrench. “The eyes are magnificent, aren’t they? The artist has cut cross-section slices from a yellow screw-driver handle, do you see, and embedded them in hollows in the stone. Ingenious!” He straightened and looked around almost as if he expected applause.

  “Simply ingenious,” he repeated. “Reminds me of the eye sockets in moai on Rapa Nui. They filled them with red scoria set into white coral. It was done after the statues had been hauled to their final destinations, I believe. The ancestors only resided in the stone once the eyes were installed. Living stone, you know, and why not?” He seemed pleased with his level of erudition. “You see, I have studied a little. I like to know about my investments.”

  He shifted his position so that the other three seemed to be arranged about the room as his audience. “Now Katherine and her husband, did I mention he was on the expedition, something often overlooked by her fans. Scoresby. A delightful name. They had a very close friend on the island, a handsome devil by the name of Jean Akarikitea.” The syllables flowed like he had been born to the language. “The three of them, Jean Akarikitea and the Routledges, remind me of what I’ve been hearing about the D’Arcys and you, Gloria. Much the same dynamic, I expect. But that is another story, isn’t it?”

  Despite being freed, Gloria Simmons had not moved from her chair. Miranda and Morgan had made themselves comfortable, leaning against furniture, but remained on their feet.

  “Now then,” said Ross. “The pupils, you see, appear to be deep because they’re empty. That might almost be a lesson in life! But not to digress. The holes are where the steel shaft of the screwdriver went through the plastic handle. This little do-hickey on my knife seems to fit the hole quite precisely. Look, when I twist and pull, the whole eye comes out. Both eyes. Isn’t that haunting, those big empty black eye sockets. Now it looks like the angel of death.”

  He twisted around to gaze at Gloria Simmons who sat perfectly still, her own eyes fixed on him with a pitiless stare.

  “I don’t know for sure if this Jean Akarikitea was a grandson of Humberto Rapu Haoa, the last ariki, but he might have been,” continued Ross. “It doesn’t matter, he was the father of Matteo Akarikitea, the grandfather of my friends, Maria and Matteo, and great-grandfather to Matteo’s children in Chile — they were, and are, all bound to the same kainga, the land claim of their ancestors. It may surprise you to know that on such a small island there are territorial divisions, but they still exist.”

  Thomas Ross bent forward and poked an index finger into each of the raptor’s eye sockets, dislodging from a hollow within a small packet that he drew out through one eye, pushing it through from behind.

  “But the Routledges, yes. After sixteen months of collecting and collating and speculating and, oh, becoming very much involved in the distant war effort as it impinged on Chilean politics and the sovereignty of Easter Island — at one point they had to hide their plunder from a ragtag contingent of the German fleet — they left. Stopped at Pitcairn and the Gambier Islands, then doubled back to San Francisco, stopped at Gibraltar, and arrived home in time for Christmas.”

  Ross appeared to pace aimlessly as he talked but he ended up behind Gloria Simmons, placing one hand on her shoulder. “Lovely earrings,” he said. “What a shame.”

  “What’s that?” Morgan asked, indicating the packet.

  “Ms. Simmons will explain in due course.” Ross shrugged. “Whatever Katherine Routledge may have plundered, sanctioned by archaeology, the imperial science — or is that anthropology? No matter — I believe Jean Akarikitea freely gave her the magic slab for safekeeping.”

  “Because it wasn’t time, yet,” Miranda explained, unable to resist speaking up.

  “Is it ever?” Ross retorted somewhat testily.

  Miranda thought she detected an edge of despair within the cynicism. “The island population was far too small,” she went on. “The Rapa Nui had been reduced to just over a hundred and were increasing slowly. The authority of the Church, reinforced by the government of Chile, was soul-destroying. It was time to wait.” As she spoke, she felt a connection with Matteo and his brother, Te Ave Teao, and images of the dusty streets of Hanga Roa, the majestic moai of Rano Raraku aslant in the sun, the farmhouse still standing as if there had been no fire, all flashed through her mind. She lapsed into silence, inviting Ross to continue.

  “Katherine had a spot of trouble over the next few decades,” Ross declared. “Delusional paranoia. Her papers are with the Royal Geographical Society, but some of them took a long time getting there. Scoresby had her kidnapped and locked in an asylum, where she eventually died. Madness had taken over their lives and he ended up living in Cyprus. Died in 1939. Various documents, photographs, and letters turned up over the next few decades. A woman by the name of Van Tilburg is making great headway on the story as we speak. Among their papers was a copy of Katherine’s book, The Mystery of Easter Island. It was originally published in 1919 but this copy was special. It was inscribed to Jean Akarikitea of Rapa Nui, but, according to Matteo, it was never sent, not until Scoresby’s things were being tidied up. By the time it reached the island, Akarikitea had died, but Matteo Akarikitea, his son, was there to receive it. The book contained strange notations by Katherine herself. She had devised an intricate code to record where in the world their Rosetta piece was hidden. I don’t think Scoresby was much interested. The whole thing smacks of paranoia, doesn’t it? Of course it does. Katherine was paranoid.”

  “About Rapa Nui, perhaps for good reason,” said Morgan.

  “One does have to wonder why she didn’t simply drop Jean Akarikitea a note explaining her encryption.” Ross seemed genuinely perplexed.

  “Better yet,” Morgan concurred, “a note telling him that the translation slab was hidden inside Gibraltar.”

  “No!” Miranda protested. “Katherine Routledge must have known it could take generations before the island came into its own; she needed to protect its past until a future was possible. There’s nothing delusional about that. Hopeful, maybe. She was an historical determinist, she believed the code would be broken when the time was right.”

  “And it was,” said Ross.

  “Possibly,” Miranda acknowledged, enjoying a tingle of satisfaction. “But? How do we get from The Mystery of Easter Island to Aku-Aku? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I have no idea,” said Ross. “Matteo suggested Heyerdahl took the Routledge book away with him in the 1950s. It’s probably with his papers in Oslo, or been sold to a private collector.”

  For a moment suspended in time, the four of them might have been friends. Whatever else they were thinking, each was also engaged with resolving the problem of transference: how could a secret embedded in the particular pages of one book end up in another if the person transcribing didn’t understand the system of encryption?

  “Perhaps whoever copied it actually did know the code,” Morgan suggested.

  “Then they wouldn’t have needed me,” said Miranda.

  “All right,” said Ross, smiling at her with a warmth that ignored the fact he had jammed a rifle butt into her abdomen only a short time before. “You solved the primary puzzle — why not this one, as well?”

  Miranda glowered at him without conviction, looked to Morgan for support, and then into the expectant eyes of Gloria Simmons who had been following everything closely since the focus had shifted away from her. For reasons Miranda could not quite comprehend, all this seemed vitally important to the woman from Baffin, the Toronto lawyer whose lethal activities had so casually sabotaged Rapa Nui interests as collateral damage to her own.

  Morgan was thinki
ng about navigation through time by dead reckoning. The future is determined by assumptions about the past. If your calculations are wrong, you end up lost or on the rocks. There’s a reckoning — you’re dead.

  “You’re sure Heyerdahl took the Routledge book?” he asked.

  “As a latter-day artifact, yes, according to Matteo.”

  “Why on earth would those people give up their treasures?” Gloria Simmons spoke up suddenly, shaping her words with a mixture of exasperation and despair.

  Morgan wondered why she did not seem to comprehend the powerlessness of the exploited. Ross raised his eyebrows in surprise and let them droop to a furrow of reluctant respect. Miranda resisted the urge to plea for empathy, the one faculty she felt certain Gloria Simmons did not possess.

  “We were never defeated,” the blonde Inuk declared in a sort of refrain, leaving it to the others to make the connection. There was an emphasis to her pronouncement that left no room for argument.

  Miranda stared. Gloria Simmons’s defiance of Ross was beginning to take on larger dimensions.

  And then, out of nowhere, Miranda conceived a scenario to explain how the transference of the coded message had occurred. Sometimes people fulfilled their destinies without understanding what it was they were doing. Not, she reminded herself, not that she believed in destiny.

  “Maria’s grandfather copied Routledge’s message into the Heyerdahl book,” she explained. It all seemed self-evident. “The handwriting in Aku-Aku is very deliberate. Now I realize why. It was copied letter for letter by someone who didn’t know English. Thor Heyerdahl gave Matteo Akarikitea an autographed copy of his own book in exchange for The Mystery of Easter Island. Before parting with the book that Routledge had inscribed to his father, the islander laboriously transferred her notations. If he had understood English, he might have copied her words onto a flyleaf or a scrap of paper. But because he couldn’t read the words, their context must have seemed as important as the script itself. He replicated, page for page, Routledge’s original.”

  “Rongorongo all over again,” said Morgan. He was touched by the image of an elderly Rapanui urgently copying messages from the past without knowing what they were saying. He remembered the bittersweet feelings he’d had, seeing intricate but unintelligible inscriptions on slabs of imported wood for sale in the markets of Hanga Roa. How poignant to replicate copies in the hope that someday someone might know what they meant.

  “A lovely irony,” he said. “Heyerdahl’s ‘acquisition’ forced a new interest on the island in Routledge’s coded message. Aku-Aku displaced the Routledge book as the sacred text. A new testament displacing the old: same message, different text. And it ended up with the D’Arcys, who brought the secret full circle through you, Miranda.” Morgan was both pleased and wary that the details were coming together. “With help from you, Mr. Ross. Even you and I, Ms. Simmons, we all seem to have played our parts in the drama. We must be nearing the end of Act Five.”

  Miranda shuddered at the implications. She looked at her partner, flashing acknowledgement of his astute if unnerving summation, looked at Ross, seeing him as both a relatively benign enemy and a dangerous ally, and looked at Gloria Simmons. “Are you okay?” she said.

  Gloria Simmons permitted herself a small smile. “As well as can be expected under the circumstances.” She paused, as if searching for some sort of closure. “Maria’s ashes and Harrington’s ashes, I mixed them together. They’re in a sterling silver casket on board the Tangata Manu, on their way to Rapa Nui. When things change on the island, they will be there. There will be time for waiting,” she said, enigmatically, “no matter how long it takes.”

  “One of the few benefits of death,” said Ross.

  The small sack in his hand rustled in the shadows behind Gloria Simmons. She remained perfectly still. He extricated a tiny bottle from the folds of cloth and twisted open the cap. A copy of Maclean’s magazine lay on the coffee table. He picked it up, and, giving the bottle a quick shake he tapped out a sprinkling of fine powder, which settled lightly on the cover picture, obscuring the eyes of a world dignitary. Morgan had expected it to be a potion. Ross handed the vial over her shoulder to Gloria Simmons who grasped it between thumb and two fingers as if it were a butterfly and she had to be careful not to damage its wings.

  “I always thought it might end like this,” she said. “Poetic justice.” She held up the bottle as if to catch traces of light in the butterfly’s wings. “It’s a mixture of coniine, pancuronium, talcum powder, and ground glass, none of them very difficult to procure. I ground the glass myself.”

  The tension in the room was palpable, although each must have felt it in a different way. Miranda and Morgan edged closer to Gloria Simmons, but as they reached out to restrain her before she did something foolish, Ross held the magazine at arm’s length in front of his face and issued what seemed like a controlled but explosive sneeze. Morgan’s hand shot to the wound on his neck in a small act of self-preservation. Swirls of lethal powder took to the air in a cluster of tiny exploding tornadoes and with virtually no time passing, a thin layer of powder settled on their exposed skin. Instinctively, they stopped dead still. Morgan throttled the urge to brush it away from his eyes, the stronger urge to reach out and wipe the powder from Miranda’s cheeks and chin and upper lip and blow it away from the exposed curve of her breasts peeking above her summer dress.

  “Freeze!” said the ice queen emphatically, if unnecessarily. A fine residue on her forehead caught the lamplight like face powder on an old woman’s face. “Do not move,” she reiterated. A slight tremor crept into Gloria Simmons’s voice that left no one in doubt about the urgency of her command. “Neither of you. Morgan, think like an Inuk, remember the sleeping bag, movement will kill you.”

  Ross carefully set the magazine down and stepped back a pace. “Stay very still,” he echoed, his voice was insistent, reinforcing her directive. “I have no interest in seeing you die, Miranda, nor you, Detective Morgan, but she’s right, you will indeed die if you try to interfere. Hobson’s choice — witnesses to justice, you are police, after all, or collateral damage. You were police, past tense. Either way. Ms. Simmons is dead.”

  They might have been figures in the gloomy tableaux of a master sculptor, their arrested movement caught at the moment of death. Only Ross seemed alive as he proceeded with uncanny stealth to move through the shadows until he could see into everyone’s eyes, but he said nothing more, satisfied for the present to observe. He had set something in motion that was inexorable and unholy, and he was determined to watch it play out.

  “Listen to me, Morgan.” Gloria Simmons was speaking to him like an intimate friend. “If you move, if you sweat, the ground glass, the slightest abrasion, will allow the poison access to your system and it’s over. Keep your hand over the open wound on your neck. Trust me. Even a facial expression will kill you. Trust me,” she repeated. Her features shifted into a curiously wry and possibly lethal smile. Not sardonic, no cynicism, just wry, apparently in response to her admonition of trust. “Stay very, very still.”

  After an interminable wait — Morgan felt his Bulova watch silently strike the hour — Ross became impatient and shifted his strategy. “It is now indeed the end of Act Five, Ms. Simmons,” he said. “Your move.”

  “No!” Miranda exclaimed, rocking on her feet but remaining otherwise motionless. “You have a choice,” she declared through clenched teeth.

  “No, Miranda, I do not. But you do.”

  Morgan shuffled slightly, trying to inhale through his mouth, but exhale through his nostrils, to avoid taking wisps of the poison mixture into his body or spreading it around on his face. He could feel Miranda’s stillness beside him the way he could sometimes feel the stillness of death on a homicide case. But he could also feel the warmth emanating from her body and he knew she could feel his. He looked at Gloria Simmons and they made eye contact, then her eyes shifted focus to Ross.

  “Is this what you want, Thomas?” Her voice
was steady, a little threatening, almost seductive. “To murder a couple of cops? Not a smart move for a very smart guy.”

  Ross raised an eyebrow. “Gloria Simmons,” he said, “I truly wish we could have been chums and lovers.”

  “Chums, perhaps.”

  “Do you ever consummate any of your affairs, Mr. Ross?” Morgan’s eyes flashed to the side. This was Miranda talking. The enunciation was slurred as she struggled to keep her features immobile, but, damn it, no jibe was worth the risk. He hoped she could feel his censure.

  The women exchanged a knowing gaze. Everyone, even Ross, stood motionless. Morgan was sure he could hear the hum of a light bulb on the verge of expiring. Miranda felt a bead of sweat gathering between her shoulder blades and involuntarily twitched inside her clothes. Morgan sensed her movement and glowered without looking at her, then felt an intolerable itch in the clenched hair of his groin and focused with excruciating effort until it subsided. Miranda cleared her throat, admonishing him to remain still.

  Gloria Simmons spoke, “Miranda Quin, David Morgan, here’s what I want you to do.”

  Good God, thought Miranda, the woman is directing her own death scene.

  “I want you to move very slowly — remember David how we refused to sweat — just shuffle, I believe Mr. Ross will not object, it is not to his benefit, move together, and when you get to the bathroom turn on the shower very gently so the flow will not drive the poison into your skin, and let warm water flow over your exposed skin, and gently, very carefully, remove each others’ clothes. Some powder will float free into your clothes and onto your skin, do not use soap directly, create a lather, and let it rinse across your skin. Do it for one another, and then dry each other gently under the radiant light. You may survive. I hope you do. In another life, David, we could have been lovers; more likely, in another life, Miranda, you and I would have been lovers and your partner and I, we could have been close friends.”

  She gave the bottle a shake and a fine dust drifted across her collarbone and down into her cleavage. “Think of this as Nemesis, my friend, restoring order to the universe.” She addressed Morgan with a whimsical glint in her eyes. Gloria Simmons rubbed the powder languorously into her exposed skin. “I’m sorry it isn’t Fleurs de Rocaille.” She smiled in Miranda’s direction, then shifted in her chair to try and bring Ross’s face into focus, but he stepped back into the cavern of shadows formed by the drawn curtains.