by Rob Swigart
“This thing,” Baron Samedi touched Vincent with the toe of his boot, “he will confess to the world that the foundation assassinated its own people and tried to blame France. Won’t you, my little beast?”
Vincent looked up but did not speak. No one had told him what to say.
“I leave him with you for the next few hours,” the Phoenix who called himself Cavanaugh said. “Duvalois is here, and I must take care of him. I will be on the Big Island, but tonight I will return. The police, as he said, may find out what happened. We must stop them— the Koenig woman with the kid, the policeman. He will be back from Tahiti. I assume you took care of the Koenig?” A couple of the figures nodded. “Good. The women are smart, though. So we have much work yet to do. Baka will help us. Later. He will be very useful indeed.”
TWENTY-TWO
BURNING MAN
Alain Duvalois stood beside the bed and scowled at the rumpled spread, one of thousands in a long line of hotel rooms. Outside, the beaches filled with tourists caressed by balmy air, warmed by subtropical sun.
No one else could do what he had to do. No one else knew Phénix the way Alain Duvalois knew him.
He’d been forced to wait for this gun, a lightweight composite graphite-and-plastic affair of dubious accuracy disassembled and scattered through his checked luggage. It was stupid to have to pack a large suitcase full of useless clothing just to get a gun into this country.
But then this whole thing was stupid. Duvalois thought the man had done France a favor, but now it was out of control. Lawsuits were in the air. The man had gone over. Everyone had known that was possible, someone like that couldn’t be stable. Now that he had gone over, he was capable of terrible things. Only Alain Duvalois knew what things.
He’d poisoned everyone on the ship. That was fine, but there was a survivor; if she recovered, that would not be fine. Then, too, he had engineered the affair in Raïatéa, with Queneau. That was not fine, and it did not make sense. Queneau was a popular man, loved by natives and French alike. Killing him was crazy. Perhaps it could be blamed on Noel Taviri, a known troublemaker, and the native separatist movement, but Alain did not want to think about the public relations problem that scenario presented. It was a mess.
The man had knowledge, very special knowledge. He had skill and the kind of determination needed to act on his knowledge. And he was insane. He was a rogue. Duvalois had to stop him.
To terminate him, with prejudice.
He knew how difficult the assignment was going to be, what little chance he had of success; he knew what little chance he had of returning to Tahiti alive. He cursed himself, because he had argued in favor of termination. He thought there was no possibility he would get the assignment. He was too old and out of shape, close to retirement. He should have a desk at SDECE somewhere, filling out request forms and filing field reports.
He should not be here fitting the stock to the frame of this ridiculous toy. The sound the two parts made when they met was soft and damp and totally without authority. It was the sound of high-tech, and did not belong here in the Waiohai Beach Resort Hotel on Poipu Beach, on the south coast of Kauai.
He put on a light sports jacket over the gun and left the room. He would pass through airport security without difficulty.
The lobby was busy with sunbathers and hostesses in light green muumuus. Waitresses moved deftly through the mob, carrying trays of pink and green drinks with tiny paper umbrellas and slices of pineapple in them.
Alain drove his rented car out the Koloa Road. Small puffs of clouds formed over the volcanic peak in the center of the island. It reminded him of Tahiti, but it was not the same. He had to remember it was not the same.
Yesterday he had checked the hospital. He had called the newspaper office. He had called the Coast Guard. He had the available facts. He read in The Garden Isle about the murders of two women, tourists, both expertly strangled, leaving no prints. He had spoken with Sangier from the French Consulate in San Francisco. Sangier had told him to talk to the owner of the ship, a man named Meissner. Meissner was the fulcrum, the place where he could stand to flush out the Phoenix.
He had then met with Vincent Meissner. He had been seated in an overstuffed and oddly uncomfortable chair in the lobby of the Hilton, looking at some papers in a manila folder. Duvalois had watched for a few moments from the entrance until the fat man looked up at him and smiled. It was a smile with neither warmth nor welcome.
The lobby of the Hilton was indistinguishable from the lobby at the Waiohai, from a thousand other lobbies. A lobby was a place for waiting, a room you passed through. Duvalois had settled into the next chair and ordered a beer from the attentive waitress in a pink muumuu with a plumeria blossom behind her ear.
“I want this situation resolved,” Meissner had said without preamble. “I told Cavanaugh the same. I want it finished. I have work to do.”
Duvalois had grunted but said nothing. The waitress in the pink muumuu returned with his beer. He dropped a few crumpled dollars on her tray and she went away. He did not ask who Cavanaugh was; he knew perfectly well Cavanaugh was Phénix.
“Cavanaugh is an… unusual man,” Duvalois said after swallowing half his beer. It was cold. Almost too cold.
“He seemed to know how to get the job done. There’s some kind of fanatical right-wing group in France. They attacked the Ocean Mother crew. He’s making up the evidence.”
“Ah, yes. Evidence.” Duvalois looked into his glass. He was not interested in evidence.
Meissner stared at him. “Who are you, Duvalois? You work with Cavanaugh, don’t you? Or with Sangier?”
“We are… colleagues.”
“Then get on him. Tell him it needs to end. The whole thing is getting out of hand. Too many groups, too much confusion and conspiracy. No one can benefit from such confusion. The press doesn’t like confusion. International tribunals do not like it. I don’t like it.”
Duvalois spread his hands, his beer finished. “Of course,” he’d said softly. “I am happy to talk to him. But I cannot talk to Cavanaugh if I do not know where he is.”
Meissner was surprised. “You don’t know?”
“Alas, he forgot to leave his forwarding. I came up in a hurry. He was to meet me at the airport,” Duvalois lied smoothly. “It seems he was meeting with you at the time.”
“Of course, I see.” Meissner had tugged at the skin of his throat. “He said he was going to go to Hawaii. The Big Island. To a town south of Kona. He was going to pick up the evidence there; someone he knew could put it together. He knows people. That’s what he said. He knows people. Tomorrow, he said.”
That was yesterday. Today Duvalois left the hotel. He drove to the airport and turned in his rental car. He would find Phoenix on the Big Island. He knew people, too.
The flight from Kauai was convenient and quick, the intermediate landing in Maui little more than a bounce, and he was there, talking to one of the people he knew.
She was old. Older than he was, older even than he felt. Her face was nested in wrinkles and wreathed in smoke from the cigarette dangling from her lower lip. The cigarette was stuck there by some alchemy known only to her.
She was French, from Marseille, but her soul was black as the smoke that poured from the factory stacks of Rouen. She was Duvalois’s sister-in-law, and she had lived in Hawaii for twenty-seven years, watching her small pension dwindle away.
So she supplemented her income in various ways. Duvalois handed her a new one-hundred-dollar bill. She snapped it taut a couple of times, squinting at it through the smoke. They spoke in French.
“You want to know what is in this town? Nothing is in this town at all. That’s why I like it, you shit. Your shit of a brother liked it here. It killed him, so I like it here.”
“Why would a certain man want to come here?” he asked, watching a spider so impossibly large as to suggest mutant insects from the horror films of the 1950s climb the streaked wallpaper of her living room. “A man intereste
d in, oh, say, the occult?”
She coughed, sending a spray of ashes onto him. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? You come flapping in here and spread your diseased old carcass all over my lovely furniture and expect me to read your mind? Ha!” She took the cigarette away from her mouth and squinted at it. It failed to pass this test, apparently for length, for she smashed it out in an overflowing ashtray and immediately lit another, a Gauloise, harsh, thick, and cancerous.
“Now, Florence, I did not come flapping in here, and your furniture is not lovely, it’s disgusting. So tell me. I don’t have much time.”
“Small blessings, anyway,” she muttered. “Drink?”
He shrugged of course, and she poured out two thick glasses of Pernod. He let the licorice fire drown his throat. He still felt cold. Then he looked at her.
“There’s a school for kahuna here,” she said. “Anyone wants to learn about the occult, they go there, talk to Waialani O’Brien.” Her fingers shook. The growing ash on her cigarette trembled.
“What kind of a name is that? Never mind.” He finished his Pernod. “Merci, Florence.” He stood up.
“Go fuck yourself,” she said. She brushed at the place he had been sitting with a dish towel. “And don’t bother coming back, you piece of shit. I never liked your brother. I like you less.”
“You’re welcome,” he said from the door. She was lighting another cigarette. He smiled at her fondly and left.
Her house was a dismal condominium on a beach abandoned by the tides of tourism. The School for Kahunas was three blocks away on a side street, a makeshift residence awash in nostalgia for a past when magicians and healers ruled the souls of the people. Duvalois had seen its like in Tahiti and Fiji and Samoa.
He sat in his a car indistinguishable from the one he had rented in Kauai, and watched the house for an hour.
That was all it took. Phénix came out and looked both ways. Duvalois smiled, but it was a grim smile. Who was he now, this Phénix? Was he still Cavanaugh? Or someone else?
Whoever he was, he turned the other way and walked slowly, almost aimlessly, toward the beach.
Alain Duvalois was not a naive man. He did not doubt that Phénix was luring him, had deliberately told Meissner where he was going. He had no option but to follow. He put the car in gear and drifted along the deserted and poorly maintained road, pretending to look at street numbers. At the corner, he stopped and watched his man get into a car the twin of his. Phénix pulled away with a roar and a flurry of leaves, and Duvalois accelerated behind him.
On the coast highway they turned south. Traffic was light, but there were enough cars to maintain a semblance of cover, though the feeling of hopelessness grew with each passing mile. He didn’t know where Phénix was leading him, but it was going to be someplace they could confront one another alone. He reached down and touched the plastic gun. The bullets were the best Federal 115-grain JHP 9mm Parabellum available. He had purchased them quite openly at a sporting goods shop in Honolulu before catching his flight to Kauai. The popgun might be effective with decent ammunition at close quarters, but he had no illusions about it. Phénix was not only a professional, he was also a lunatic, and that was a dangerous combination.
Signs appeared warning that the road was closed a few miles ahead because of the Hoopuloa lava flow Phénix did not slow down. Traffic thinned, leaving only the two cars, a few hundred meters apart, moving south on the highway. Smoke spread across the horizon. Phénix turned hard to the left. His car skidded sideways and bounded up a dirt track toward the mountain, paralleling the flow of lava from the current eruption of Kilauea.
The dirt track turned to corrugated lava, and Phénix slowed to navigate the shattered surface. Smoke blew low over the sloping field. The lava was hardened here, black and tortured, but it radiated heat onto the bottom of the car. Duvalois could feel it through the soles of his shoes.
They passed the trunk of a tree sticking out of the black rock. It was charred black, two twisted branches reaching out as the car roared past.
Duvalois steered with one hand and pulled the gun out of his belt with the other, laying it on the passenger seat. If he got a clear shot, he would take the chance. It would be dangerous to get too close to Phénix.
He wished he were back in Tahiti, where he could carry a real weapon.
This operation was outside the rules. He had no right or authority to kill someone on American soil. He knew that. He would have to make it clean and undiscovered and leave the country immediately. He would have to take this plastic toy apart and scatter the parts in his luggage again to get through airport security. He would have to act like a criminal, a terrorist.
This made him no different from Phénix. A rogue.
He shook his head and pushed back the lank gray hair falling across his eyes. The car bounced and lurched over the twisted surface that had now given up all pretense of being a road. Three hundred meters up the slope, the other car slowed to a stop, and Phénix got out. Smoke rolled across the slope, moving up hill. Phénix disappeared into it, and Duvalois cursed softly in French. He had lost his chance at a clear shot.
He stopped beside the other car. The smoke came from burning trees to the south. He could see from here the red glow of the lava, the flames. It was a scene from hell. The air choked him.
He took the gun, almost lost in his large hand, and puffed up the slope. Phénix was waiting somewhere in the smoke and flames and broken ground.
For a moment he considered going back to the car, driving down to the highway, and returning to the airport at Kona. He could fly back to Kauai, collect his luggage, and return to Tahiti. He could say he had lost Phénix, couldn’t find him, he was the American’s problem now. Phénix no longer worked for the French government. Let someone else take care of it.
But it was not a job, not any more. It had become personal. Phénix was taunting him up there. He heard his voice calling through the smoke.
“Du… val… ois!” the voice called, bits and pieces of the sound lost in the background roar. The roar of molten rock, flowing downhill with the slow deliberate majesty of a glacier, was implacable and overwhelming. “Du… val… ois!”
“Phénix!” Duvalois shouted back. He cut to his left and scrambled over the heated stone, cursing under his breath. He was old, out of shape, soft. He had only his years of experience, his intelligence, his cunning.
Phénix was in shape, younger, insane. He was waiting.
Duvalois wanted to circle around, gain high ground, look for a break in the constant flow of smoke laid down like a screen by the gentle trade winds. The smoke lay close to the ground, only five or six meters above the pillows and cracks and tilted plates of cooled rock, but too high to get above.
Duvalois was gasping when he found what he was looking for, a hummock of rounded cooled lava. He clambered up the side and squatted on top, his gun braced in his hands. Already he could feel his eyes tearing, the burning in them more painful by the minute. He blinked and stared, but there were no breaks in the smoke streaming around him.
“Duvalois.” The voice was to his right, a little behind. How the hell had he gotten this high? How did he find him?
“You want to know how I can find you,” Phénix said. His voice was pleasant, conversational. They might have been waiting for a bus. Duvalois said nothing. He aimed his weapon in the direction of the voice. “Of course you do, but I can find you easily, Alain. Easily, as if I can see you, as if the smoke and noise are not here… Did you see what the lava does to the trees, Alain?”
Duvalois did not answer. The voice had moved a little, perhaps closer, perhaps a bit more to the right. He didn’t know, not precisely, but felt a small leap of hope. He was high; he had the field of fire. Phénix would move into his killing zone, and Duvalois would have him.
“Magma turned the trees to charcoal, Alain, like burning men, their arms out, crying for mercy, crying for death. You want to be like that, a burning man, don’t you, Alain?”
“I knew you’d find me at the Kahuna School,” the voice went on. It was moving again, away this time. “I left you a trail, my old friend, easy to follow. I knew you’d follow. I’m going to give you a chance.”
Alain put his gun down on the hot stone and pulled his notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket. He took the silver ballpoint pen, the one Queneau had given him for Christmas back in 1981, and wrote in the notebook. He wrote blindly, his eyes streaming.
The voice moved closer again, then away. “I’m a magician, Alain; I have special powers, but I am going to give you a chance to catch me. See, I move away. You can follow. Come along, follow me, Alain. I got Queneau, and I can get you. I wanted you all along, too, my friend. You are my friend, aren’t you? My friend, my brother, my double.”
“No.”
“And the American, Koenig, the biologist, he is also my brother.” The voice was relentless, bodiless; it went on and on. Duvalois ached to kill that voice, to stop it forever. “I sent my four pretty little puppets after him, did you know? Of course not, you were gone, weren’t you, already on your way here after me? But I told them they must dispose of the American biologist, he was a threat to France. They love that patriotic merde, my lovely image. They eat that shit with their croissants and coffee. So the American should be dead by now, another sacrifice to that greedy god Oro.”
The voice grew fainter. Duvalois laid down his notebook so he could take up his gun again. Phoenix didn’t know where he was! He really didn’t know. Alain said that to himself, and he almost believed it as he climbed down from the rounded pillow of frozen stone and dodged behind the off side.