Jeffreys reached for the phone. “That’ll be Edna,” he said. “She wasn’t there when I called. I left a message.” He put the phone to his ear. “Hi, Ed.”
Edna, it seemed to those who sat around awaiting the unfolding of events, had a lot to say, of which the import if not the specifics were written on the sergeant’s face as he listened. When next he spoke it was only to say, “Thanks, Ed,” and “Cheers.”
He handed the phone back to his hostess, who seemed in no hurry to return it to its cradle.
“Well?” said Angela impatiently.
“The Venice Regent caught fire last night and sank—right at the dock where they’d towed her.”
Jeremy Ash did a pitch-perfect imitation of a submarine claxton.
“Too right,” Jeffreys seconded. “Somebody’s bailing out, and trying to cover their tracks.”
“That means they have to find the girl,” said Albert.
Chapter Sixteen
“I thought you were dead!”
Le Thi Phuong woke with a start and at once her arm flew up to shield her eyes from the sun. She drew the silhouette of the speaker, a mixed-blood Maori, into focus. He was a boy not much older than herself. He lowered the tailgate of the truck and extracted her gently from among the boxes of potato crisps where she had secreted herself when dawn had been just a suggestion in the east.
“No,” she said, sitting on the tailgate. The boy sat beside her. “I sleep.”
“Right,” he said. “Why?”
“I tired.”
The boy nodded. “Right. Well, I’m glad you’re not dead.” He dug a piece couple of pieces of hard candy from his shirt pocket and offered her one. She took it, peeled off the wrapper, and popped it in her mouth.
“Thanks.” It was sour lemon. She winced, but kept on sucking. “Where we are?”
“Where are we?” he corrected. “Helensville. I’ve got to deliver those.” He nodded from the crisps to a low, red-roofed store across the street.
“How far we come from?” the girl asked.
“From Auckland?” The boy shrugged. “Forty kilometers or so, I reckon.” He untied a small hand-truck from the van wall, dropped it to the ground, and began stacking boxes on it. Phuong helped. “Where you going?”
Phuong froze in mid-motion. “Not know,” she said. “I think I supposed to die.”
It was the boy’s turn to freeze. “Supposed to die? How do you mean, supposed to die?”
“Mon coeur,” said Phuong, patting her chest, “this, is bad.”
“Dicky heart, you mean?”
“Heart. Yes. Is bad.”
“Hm.” They resumed loading the hand-truck and she followed him across the street. “Shouldn’t you be in hospital?” he said. Reaching the wooden sidewalk, he spun neatly about, stepped up onto it and tugged the hand-truck expertly up beside him. “I mean, can’t be good for the ticker jumpin’ in lorries, and that.” Phuong leaned against one of the posts supporting the porch roof and watched him thoughtfully as he went mechanically about the business of his delivery.
Since waking from her coma and discovering, to her horror, that the doctor in attendance upon her was the one who had been in charge of prepping her for transplant aboard the Venice Regent, and her subsequent escape, Phuong, who had never wanted for anything, was, for the first time in her life, alone, penniless, and friendless, cast upon her own resources in a strange city. Among those resources, she was surprised to discover an aptitude for thievery.
Her first, most pressing need had been for clothing to replace the conspicuous green gown. This she obtained at a packed and tiny thrift store by way of an exchange of which the proprietor was unaware.
Coming from a country in which involvement with the police was to be avoided under the best of circumstances, the notion of exposing her situation to the New Zealand authorities only fleetingly crossed her mind.
Thanks to quick fingers and the deep reaches of her newly acquired handbag, food had not been a problem. The resulting menu was eclectic, but filling.
The greatest challenge, with her photo on the front page of papers and magazines at every street-corner newsagent, was staying hidden. While there were plenty of Orientals in Auckland, and it was easy enough to conceal herself in their neighborhoods—as long as she kept her mouth shut—but being Vietnamese and, therefore, as foreign among the predominantly Chinese population as an Englishman in Heidelberg, she would have quickly drawn attention within the tight-knit community.
Waking early from a damp, uncomfortable night in the darkest corner of her favorite city park, she had taken to wandering the deserted streets to warm herself. That she had stumbled upon the Maori boy and his truck, just as he had finished loading it and was climbing into the cab, was pure coincidence. Her decision to run after the vehicle and throw herself over the tailgate involved a cocktail of desperation, madness, and impulse too powerful to deny—as if her heart hadn’t enough to contend with from sheer stress and anxiety.
But she knew people were looking for her, and that one of two things would happen if they found her: the first she would not allow, the second she could not avoid; either meant death . . . for someone.
“What’s you name?” she asked when the boy returned from the shop and she helped him reload the hand-truck.
“Jimmy,” he said. “Jimmy Jomoga.”
“Jimmy.”
“Right. You?”
“Suzie,” she said quickly. She’d been vacillating between Lucy and Suzie, and when it came time to make a choice, it was her tongue that decided.
“Suzie it is,” Jimmy said, though he had his suspicions. In fact, he’d known from the instant he first saw her that she was the girl who had been found on the beach on Parua Bay, and had disappeared from the hospital, and that the authorities were looking for her. He also knew they wouldn’t have to look any further; there being no constable in Helensville, he’d just called the Auckland police from the phone in Mr. McLeod’s little office at the back of the store, and they’d be there within thirty or forty minutes. McLeod himself, overhearing the call, had made his way to the porch for a look at the missing girl.
“Miss,” he said with a touch at the brim of an imaginary hat.
Phuong felt suddenly uncomfortable at the poorly-concealed knowing in his eyes. “I go,” she said under her breath as Jimmy passed within hearing. “Thank you.” She ran across the street and headed north out of town.
“Hey!” Jimmy called. “Where you goin’?” He was aware of the frantic edge to his voice, and tried to soften his tone. “You need a ride?” He spied her handbag in the back of the truck and, waving it in the air, ran after her. “Hey! Suzie! You forgot this!”
Rather than slowing down, or looking back, the girl sprang from a trot to a full-on gallop. Still, Jimmy caught up to her well before she reached the edge of town and, grabbing her elbow, pulled her to a stop. The terror in the eyes she turned on him hit like a slap in the face.
“What?” he said. “What’s the trouble?”
“You no understand,” she said, snatching her arm from his grasp. “You know me.”
“Well, I . . .”
“You tell that man,” she pointed. “Now he know. He tell police.”
Jimmy’s expression—accompanied by an instantaneous flushing of his copper cheeks—betrayed him. “You tell!” She tossed a glance at the store. Mr. McLeod was trotting toward them. “You call police!”
“Well, I thought you was in trouble. They say on the radio you might be . . .” he twiddled a forefinger in the vicinity of his temple.
“I not crazy!” she said. “Doctor kill!”
It was Jimmy’s turn to be alarmed. Had he gotten the wrong end of the stick? “Doctor? What doctor? Doctors don’t kill. Not in New Zealand, anyway. I think if we get you back to the hospital, you know; your heart and that.”
“No!” She grabbed her handbag from his hand with such force that he nearly left his feet. “You go away!” She held up her hand at McLeod, s
topping him in his tracks. “You go away! I not want heart!”
She turned and ran.
McLeod drew up beside Jimmy. “‘Don’t want a heart’. Is that what she said?”
“That’s what it sounded like. She’s Chinese or something, though. Hard to tell.”
“Well, what’s she runnin’ for, that’s what I want to know.”
Up to that point, Jimmy had been conflicted, but as he watched her diminish in the distance, it struck her how frightened and pathetic she looked. “I gotta go get her.” He ran back to his truck, with McLeod thundering behind.
“What about the police?” said McLeod. “What am I s’pose to tell ’em when they get here?”
“Tell ’em it was just some kid pullin’ a prank.” Jimmy drove off after the runaway girl.
When he caught up with her, she was walking on the verge of the two-lane road with a grim, head-up set of the chin. It had been clear to him, as he approached, that she was scanning the vicinity, looking for someplace to run. But the terrain, though undulating, offered no ready hiding place—the grass was low, and the trees too skinny and widely separated to be of any use as cover. He drew abreast of her and leaned his elbow on the window and idled along at her pace. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Callin’ the police, an’ that.”
She didn’t reply, at least not with words, but her chin raised another notch or two.
“I told McLeod to just tell ’em it was a joke.” She said nothing. “You understand? Joke?”
Still no reply, but Jimmy sensed a slight relaxing about the earlobes. “Look, get in and I’ll take you up the road to a place you’ll be safe ’til you decide what you want to do.”
The girl stopped. Jimmy pressed his foot on the brake. A desultory cloud of dust caught up to them and settled on their shoulders as she turned to him.
“What you say me?”
“I say you,” said Jimmy, “there’s a place yonder where you’ll be safe—nobody see you.” He covered his eyes with the palm of his hand.
“Where?”
Jimmy nodded through the windshield. “I’ve got an aunt and uncle live up the road; Shelly Beach on the inlet. He grows sweet potatoes.” Why he added that tidbit of domestic information, he didn’t know but, for whatever reason, it seemed to sway the argument.
“Okay,” said Phuong. Having reached the decision, she acted upon it immediately and, rounding the hood, hopped in beside him. “We go.”
Twenty minutes later, an incongruous scene had developed in a small, sandy clearing within a stone’s toss of the inlet. While Jimmy’s truck—sporting a large, multi-colored Mr. Pookie’s Crisps and Pretzels logo on either side—featured as the anchor of the tableau, its principal characters had, with a minimum of both words and gestures, exchanged personal histories and negotiated conditions amenable to all. Suzie had won time in which to determine what to do.
A small fire burned in the brazier that night, and Suzie, Jimmy, Mikaere and Ngaio, Jimmy’s aunt and uncle, poked sticks at its remains in a perfunctory way as they talked.
“So, what do you know about this man who found you?” said Jimmy, once an hour or so had been devoted to the ancestry of his aunt and uncle’s relative tribes, and how it came about that Jimmy’s last name was not Maori, but Papuan. “This American.”
“American? Who?”
“You don’t know?”
“Say me. What American?”
“The newspapers said he found you on the beach, over at Parua Bay. He’s a pianist.” Jimmy pianoed the air. “They’re the ones who got you to the hospital. Well, I guess it was the police, but . . .”
“They? Who they?”
“Well, he was with some friends. Anyway, he’s famous, so he’s the one they said found you.”
“What name, this man?”
Jimmy told her Albert’s name.
“Him! I know him! I play,” she, too, pianoed the air, but much more classically than Jimmy whose riff, had it been audible, would have been, at best, highly improvisational jazz. “I hear him! He play Hanoi! Wow!’ She became pensive, then puzzled. “He find me? Wow! How?”
“Just walking along the beach and there you were, I reckon,” said Jimmy. “There was something about a green outfit you had on.”
“Where he now?”
“He who? Him?” Jimmy pointed at the paper.
“Yes. Where he now?”
Jimmy shrugged. Where did famous people go when they weren’t doing whatever it was that made them famous? “Search me.”
“Aw Jimmy, that’s what you get for not watching the news,” said his uncle. “It’s all over. He’s out on Chatham Island.”
“Chatham?”
“Where this?” Suzie demanded sharply.
Jimmy ignored her. “What’s he doing there?”
“Found another body.”
“Another body!”
“Maori boy. Fished him out of the water.”
Jimmy had never thought about what pianists did in their free time, but if he had, he’d never imagined that they went around pulling bodies from the ocean. It’s a strange old world.
“Where this place?” Suzie demanded again.
Ngaio drew a branch from the pile of dry manoao kindling and sketched a map of the North Island in the dirt. Mikaere took the stick from his wife and stabbed a little hole about three feet to the east. “There,” he said.
Suzie lapsed into thoughtful silence and her hosts, for whom thoughtful silence was a sacred thing, left her to them. “I go him,” she said at last.
Of the several things Jimmy imagined the girl might be thinking, this was not on the list. “Go to him? On Chatham? Why?”
“He not police.”
Jimmy considered this for half a second. “A lot of people aren’t the police.”
“He not doctor,” she said.
“Neither am I,” said Jimmy; then with a nod at his aunt and uncle, added, “neither are they. But what’s wrong with doctors?”
“They want give me heart.”
The comment bent Jimmy’s eyebrows. “Well, that sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? You said you had a dicky heart. Wouldn’t a new one put you right?”
Suzie looked up from the little indentation representing Chatham Island and its six hundred and thirty residents and fixed her eyes on Jimmy. She thought carefully, struggling to disinter enough high school English from her memory to make sense of what she was about to say.
“New heart,” she said, placing a hand on her own, “come from someone else.”
“A donor, you mean,” said Ngaio. She turned to Jimmy and her husband. “That’s when someone dies and wills their organs to, well, people like her.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You not understand,” said Suzie, suddenly jumping to her feet. “From donor not dead!”
“Donor not dead?” Mikaere said. “Bit hard on ’em that way, isn’t it?”
Ngaio was the first to get the inference. “You mean, an unwilling donor.”
“Unwilling?” said Suzie.
“Someone who doesn’t want to donate. Someone who is killed for the purpose. Murdered.”
Suzie sank to her knees. “Yes. Murdered.”
Mikaere was stunned. “Why?”
“Money,” said Suzie. “Much money.”
Jimmy shook his head sharply, severing the strands until the cobweb broke free. “You mean someone pays someone else to kill someone else, and take their heart?!”
Suzy hung her head and nodded. “This is true.”
“Who’d do such a thing?”
Suzie raised her eyes to Mikaere, who had asked the question. “Parents,” she said. “Mother, father, not want they daughter died.”
Ngaio reached out hesitantly and placed her hand on Suzie’s foot. “Is that what happened to you? You have a bad heart, so your mum and dad made this . . . this arrangement to get you a good one.”
Suzie nodded. “They doctor try find, from donor, but no find. Special blood.
So . . .”
Ngaio looked knowingly from her husband to Jimmy. “Black market in body parts.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Jimmy.
Mikaere, who had lived longer and knew better, said nothing, but his chin dropped to his chest.
“They send me cruise on tramp . . . What word is? Tramp . . .”
“Tramp steamer,” said Mikaere.
“Yes. They say me good for heart. I go Venice Regent. Very nice. Other peoples there. I have birthday party then, I . . .” she pointed to her ears.
“You hear something?” Jimmy prodded.
“Hear! Yes. I not should hear, but one man tell this woman plan— to kill other passenger and give me she heart!”
“How horrible!” said Ngaio.
“I not think to know what do. I make pretend sick. Go to cabin. Think. At night, I make, make . . . little boat from these.” She mimicked putting on a life jacket.
“A life vest?” said Jimmy, impressed. “You made a raft of life vests?”
“That true,” she said. She mimed tying the flotation devices together and throwning them overboard. “So!”
“Struth!”
“Then, I jump.”
“Where did this happen?” asked Mikaere.
“By here,” Suzie replied. “New Zealand.”
“How far from shore were you?”
She didn’t seem to understand the question, so he rephrased it. “How long you in water?” He accompanied the query with gestures, first pointing to his watch, then undulating it back and forth like ocean waves.
“Many time,” she said.
“Struth,” said the old Maori under his breath. “It’s a wonder she wasn’t eaten! More sharks out there than leaves in a(?) Chinaman’s tea.”
“Then why don’t you tell all this to the police?” said Jimmy.
“No! Police no good. Some gets money for not tell!”
“Bribery?”
“Bribe! Yes. That. Some want kill me, I think. I know much.”
“That’s a bit thick,” said Mikaere. “Why don't you just go home?”
“Home? Not home,” said the girl. “So great shame from parents.”
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