Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “Queneau was a mistake, Phénix,” he shouted suddenly, moving after the voice, into the smoke, toward the fire.

  Laughter came back at him, out of the darkness and the red flame. Duvalois crouched down and aimed. He pulled the trigger, and felt the recoil, but the sound of the shot went unheard in all the roar and destruction. He shouted again. “You should not have had the woman kill Queneau. That was a mistake, Phénix.”

  The laughter was far away, itself almost lost in the sounds of burning. “Oh, yes,” the voice of the Phénix agreed. “We all knew about your friendship with Queneau, my brother. Alain Duvalois, the protégé. The agent with a heart. And now it is personal, with you? You want revenge for this necessary sacrifice?” Somewhere nearby a tree exploded, and the roar of the flowing lava swelled, louder and louder. In the distance, where liquid stone met water, explosions were continuous, water superheated to steam, rock turned from liquid to solid and split from the heat. The world was on fire. It was the end of everything.

  Duvalois plunged into the thickest smoke. He could not see. He tripped and fell and climbed to his feet again.

  “Queneau was weak, Alain.” The mocking voice had moved again, off to his left now, up hill, very close to the intolerable heat oozing down the side of the mountain toward the sea. Duvalois squeezed off two more shots, filled with hopelessness. The voice went on. “There is no way out. He knew my mother. You see, he knew her, yes, in that way. Disgusting, it was. So he had to die. We spoke of it, he and I, in Uturoa, in the week before that ship left, and then I knew he had to die. He might have told someone about me, he knew who I was, what I was doing. He might have told you or the Americans. It was for Oro, you know who Oro was, Alain? The god of war and death and sacrifice. Queneau had to be the sacrifice. His soul to heaven, his body to the birds. It was so easy. As it will be with you.”

  “What are you talking about? What are you saying?”

  “Queneau was my mother’s lover, Alain. You didn’t know, you fool, my twin. The Saint of All the Causes, my mother. They said she slept with Sartre once, and now she sleeps with Queneau, eh? Two old wrecks, fucking like dogs. Funny, isn’t it? So very amusing.” The voice was rising, moving parallel to him as he spoke, but rising, more shrill.

  Alain coughed, gagging on the smoke. He could feel the heat ahead of him, growing as he moved into it, but the chill he felt was greater. The voice was there, dancing ahead of him, up the tormented hillside.

  He threw away his gun. He would not need a gun. He stumbled on into the smoke and fire. He was the burning man, and he carried a sword of flame. Up ahead was the demon who called himself Phénix.

  TWENTY-THREE

  DR. SHIH

  “I believed the world I lived in was safe,” Chazz Koenig said.

  Patria sat beside his bed and held his hand. The hand was large and capable and could not be harmed. “Safe.” She repeated the word.

  “Safe,” he agreed. “But you didn’t answer the phone. Taxeira said you were staying at the condo in Kapaa and not at our house, and I knew it wasn’t a safe world. I wasn’t paying attention. I lost zanshin, my focus. I was walking in paradise, and four French soldiers jumped me, and I lost the fight. The world is not safe.”

  “No,” she agreed. They sat in silence. The hospital breathed around them as hospitals do, soft soles on waxed floors and antiseptic and fear. The room was small and private and warm. A soft breeze swelled the thin curtains at the window. The room must be safe as the world outside was not.

  She said. “You can go home.”

  He agreed, “And you?”

  “I saw him, the man. He was everywhere I looked, everywhere I went. Not really, of course, but it seemed that way. In the street, in the Pay ‘N Save, in the park. Kimiko and I found the woman, and I saw him again. It was getting dark, I had the baby. I knew she’d been murdered, like the other one. I saw her arm, her hand, lying on the dirt, and I knew. I can’t really explain it. I was pushing the stroller up the trail, across the parking lot, and he was there, watching. It was dusk, getting dark. I worried about Kimiko, but she was fine, sitting by the river when I got back with Sergeant Handel. Afterwards I called Sammy, and he said go to Kapaa, to the condo. The county owns it; he can’t follow there. He didn’t ask; he didn’t question. He just said go.”

  “Then?”

  “Then I got scared. So I went. We went. We’ve been there since. I haven’t seen him, but he’s here on the island, somewhere. He’s waiting for something. He isn’t finished, you know.”

  “It was dusk?”

  “Don’t question it, Chazz. He was there. I felt him. I’m not easily frightened. This man frightens me. He isn’t… human. He lives in darkness.”

  There was a darkness in the room too. “The man who killed the two women was also the one on the Ocean Mother?”

  “Same person, Chazz. Don’t you doubt it.” Her hand held his. Her fingers were thin and dark and very strong. His hands were large and powerful, but he felt the pressure as a reassuring pain.

  “I think you’re right,” he said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. His hospital gown fluttered. The floor was cold.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Yes,” he answered, not looking at her. “Duvalois is here, too.”

  “Who?”

  “A French… agent, I guess he is. I think he’s after the man, though I don’t know why. Perhaps to warn him, to get him away from here. Or to kill him. I don’t know.” He stood up and did not look at her.

  She pretended not to notice, reached out to touch his bare side. “It looks awful. Yellow and black. Where it isn’t white with bandage.”

  “Yellow and black. The Hornets. My old high school colors.” He laughed and then winced a little. The ribs were cracked, but he could walk. She sat in the hard plastic chair and watched him dress. His body was large, his waist spreading a little, but she knew it was solid.

  “Naked, you don’t look like a biologist,” she said.

  “Does anyone?” He smiled at her.

  She touched the swathes of bandage around his ribs and the exposed scrapes painted with a noxious green disinfectant. “Not like this, I guess,” she said softly. “Oh, Chazz.”

  He watched himself button his shirt in the mirror over the sink. His eye was swollen, but he could see through it. “I love you,” he said to the image, and she didn’t know at first whether he was talking to her or to himself. Then he looked at her reflection behind him, and she knew he meant her.

  “I’ve been coming here every day, Chazz. I sit with her.”

  She meant Tracy Ann, who sat by the window in her own room, staring.

  “Good of you,” he said.

  “No. I don’t do it to be good. I do it because it’s a mystery. I want to find it out.”

  He fastened his belt and picked up his shoes from the floor of the small closet with a grunt. As he stood he twisted, stretching. Everything was working. “Find out?”

  “She went somewhere, near death. Not all the way. She might not come back. Some people are fascinated by it. They go there, they don’t need to die, but they linger, looking at it, their own death. Death is attractive. Seductive. I think Tracy Ann’s looking at it now. She doesn’t see the room she’s in; she doesn’t see me. Only that dark warmth, that safety. Mother Death.”

  “I thought you were a scientist.” He said it without irony. He did think that, that Patria was a scientist.

  “Yes. The human spirit. It is in there, in all of us. In Orli. You can see it in children. I didn’t know that before. Hard to study, hard to weigh, but when it’s gone you can see that too.”

  “And Tracy Ann…?”

  “She’s going, Chazz. Dying. Every day she’s a little farther away. Her parents came here, then they left. They couldn’t take it.” She stood up and held him. “You okay?”

  He made a soft sound, deep in his throat. The door opened and the small, inquisitive face of the county medical examiner peered around the edge. “H
ow are we?” Dr. Shih asked. Her body followed her face into the room. “Are we well?” Cobb Takamura came in right behind her.

  “We are,” Chazz admitted. “And how are we?”

  “Don’t be smart, Dr. Koenig,” Dr. Shih chided. Her pockets winked with stainless instruments, forceps and scissors and the cup of her stethoscope. “Doctors always talk like that, but you aren’t a doctor of the right sort.”

  “No, I suppose not. I’m going home.”

  “Well, of course you are. Fit, you are. Cracked ribs. Contusions, abrasions, possible concussion. Of course you’re going home. You are the all-American fighting male. So go on home, and good luck to you. Anyway, I’m not your doctor. I came to tell your wife Tracy Ann is the same, no change.”

  “There was a woman in Raïatéa looked like that,” Chazz said. “Stared at the wall, wouldn’t talk.”

  “Same cause,” Takamura said softly. “Made into a zombie.”

  “Nonsense,” Dr. Shih snorted as Patria opened the door. “Ain’t no such, sir. And you a policeman!”

  “A toxin, Dr. Shih. Tetrodotoxin, I believe it’s called.”

  “Oh, well. That’s different, of course. Nothing we can do, though, except wait. Time will tell.”

  A disturbance at the end of the hall caught their attention. Two orderlies wheeled a gurney onto the ward. Their patient was thrashing wildly, foam flecking the corners of his mouth. A strange animal wail came from him, a sound so far from anything that could be human it seemed as if it might be coming from the PA system instead, some electronic malfunction. A doctor hurried along behind them. They stopped at the nurse’s station. The doctor gave orders to the nurse, who hurried away, returning almost immediately with a hypodermic.

  The sound continued, subsiding very gradually after she injected the man.

  “What happened to him?” Cobb asked.

  “What? Oh, Lieutenant Takamura.” The doctor shook his hand. “He’s been here two or three days. Poisoned, we suppose. It’s not clear. Looks like he got into something he shouldn’t have, though. I ordered morphine. Seems to have helped.”

  Dr. Shih peered at the patient’s face, the sheen of perspiration. “Interesting,” she murmured, pulling back an eyelid. White sclera reflected the greenish ceiling fluorescents in stippled bands.

  He lolled on the gurney now, eyes closed. Under the lids, the pupils jerked back and forth as if he were deep in REM sleep. From his expression, his dreams were not good. He looked as if he had joined the same world as Tracy Ann. His short dark hair was spiky with sweat.

  “Who is he?” Takamura gazed down at the patient. His own eyes were hooded.

  The doctor shrugged. “Not sure. He had no ID, but the power company employee who brought him in must’ve said his name was Herbert. At least that’s what’s on the chart.”

  “The man who brought him in, what did he say?”

  “He made a statement, went back to work. Said Herbert was with some guy from Waimea named Sanderson, they drove out past Mana, he suddenly went crazy, started running around tearing off his clothes. He jumped in an old irrigation pond.”

  “What could cause this?” Cobb asked.

  The doctor looked at the ceiling, as if answers were written up there. “Any number of plants containing atropine or related substances, if ingested or inhaled.”

  “For instance?” Chazz looked up with interest.

  The doctor continued looking at the ceiling. “Well, Datura stramonium could do it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Jimsonweed. Grows all over the place.” The doctor shrugged at Dr. Shih, who smiled at him reassuringly. Dr. Shih had seen it all. Even this.

  “Look at this,” Patria said, bending over the man on the gurney. “Strange.”

  “What?”

  She touched a virulent purple-and-blue octopus writhing around the muscular forearm.

  “So? It’s a tattoo.” Chazz was frowning in thought.

  “Don’t you remember?” Patria asked.

  Takamura said, “Remember what?”

  “The French journalist. What was his name? Hobart, Herbert, something like that. Dark short, spiky hair. Tattoo on the forearm. A strong man, not too tall.”

  “This is him? Hobart?”

  “The tattoo looks the same. It’s hard to tell: I mean, when we saw him he was standing up, talking, alive. This, I don’t know. It sure looks like him.”

  “Okay, so this is Hobart. That ends your worries, doesn’t it? I mean, he was the one you felt was following you around, wasn’t he? The French journalist looking into the Ocean Mother affair?”

  Patria pulled in her lower lip. “Mmm. Yes.”

  “You sound doubtful.” Chazz took her elbow in his palm. “You think this isn’t the one?”

  “Tattoo’s the same,” she said. It was no answer. “It must be him.”

  “Come on,” Chazz said. “I want to see Orli and take a shower and eat a real lunch and… other things.” He leered at her. She smiled.

  Dr. Shih also smiled. The young people were so transparent. Only forty years old or so, still filled with passions.

  Dr. Shih followed the gurney down the hallway and into the ward. This case interested her. She thought there was something familiar about the symptoms. Yes, Jimsonweed, certainly. Eaten, probably, though why anyone would eat the stuff she could not imagine: It tasted terrible. And why a French journalist?

  Dr. Shih had been the county medical examiner for more years than she cared to contemplate. She had seen bodies mutilated by traffic and by human hand. She had done autopsies on human beings destroyed by viruses designed and built by the human mind and hand, conceived in the terrible dark places in the human heart.

  She had grandchildren, seven of them. She had a husband who was a structural engineer, a man she had met when she was in medical school in Los Angeles. He was a gifted amateur violinist, and she loved to listen to him play Bach partitas. She thought of him fondly as she looked down on the ravaged person on the bed. The elegant structures of the partitas filled her mind, imposing a different kind of order on the chaos that lived inside this man’s head. Datura poisoning was ugly. It destroyed memory.

  Dr. Shih’s husband’s music rebuilt memory. Dr. Shih’s husband was Chinese, of course, as was Dr. Shih. His name was Norman Shih, and her maiden name was Shen. She had not had to change her initials when they married, and that had pleased her. It maintained a thread of memory, a continuity with her own ancestral past.

  Dr. Shih was a scientist in the Western tradition. She used tools that were shiny and clean. Her thinking was logical and built on an elaborate structure of memory and experience. But she had, somewhere back there in her cultural past, a different view, and from time to time she could look down on a patient, if he or she was alive, or a body, if it was not, and sense the shapes of energies, the patterns of meridians, the points of ebb and flow and blockage, and she could touch a place and free something. And the patient, if alive, would get better, or the body, if not alive, would give up to her some secret of its demise.

  Hobart was giving up nothing, though. His breathing was rough and irregular. His pulse raced, then inexplicably slowed. Perspiration formed along his hairline, then suddenly evaporated and his skin was dry and hot. His eyes twitched.

  So Dr. Shih sat down beside the bed. Tentatively, slowly, she reached out and touched the man’s temple. Her eyes, nested in fine wrinkles, calm and brown and filled with facts and knowledge, grew dim and inward and soft, as if she were making an effort to forget what she knew, all of it, from this morning’s journal articles to the first anatomy lecture in medical school. She tried to feel, through her fingertip, the errant flow of yin and yang, the rise and fall, the orientation of Qi as it moved around the scalp and through the bone of the skull, along the long nerve fibers, the channels.

  She did not think. Sometimes it was important not to think, not to force logic into a place it did not belong.

  And then it came to her: a sense that what s
he touched here, this cold temple clad in clammy skin, was evil.

  Not the skin itself, nor the bone beneath it, but what had happened to them. She felt the imbalance, the loss of control, the wild oscillations of yin and yang that had come to this.

  Evil was not a word in a medical doctor’s vocabulary, of course. Life and death, sickness and health, disease and cure, yes, but not good and evil.

  Yet evil was here. Someone, she was certain, had done this thing, had made this creature lying here less than human.

  He would probably not recover. She could feel that through her fingertip. He would never know again who he was. His identity had been taken away from him. His soul. He was alive, yet not alive. Datura had seen to that.

  The others, the dead ones from the ship, and the still-living one, they had been robbed in a similar way. The means were not the same, but the evil was the same. From the same source. She felt it in the faintly racing pulse in the temple under her fingertip, in the gasps for breath, the heat and cold that flashed through this man. This former man.

  The same person who had killed the crew, killed the women, had done this. She was certain of it. She opened her eyes with no memory of when she had closed them. She could see, built into the air of the room, the seamless structures of the Bach partitas, constructing themselves note by note. She loved her husband, who was so logical and so feeling too, though he said little. She thought of Lieutenant Takamura’s beloved Charlie Chan, a Westerner’s stereotyped view of a Chinese detective. Dr. Shih shivered a little, thinking that she was herself acting like a stereotypical Chinese, drenched in silly mysticism, measuring through her extrasensory fingertip the channels of her patient’s meridians and the flow of yin and yang.

  She snorted. Silly, of course. Superstitious nonsense.

  But she couldn’t shake the feeling of evil that clung to the end of her forefinger and made her want to scrub and disinfect it.

  Patria thought this man was the killer, and now they were safe.

  But Dr. Shih did not think that.

  She thought this man on the bed here was the victim of an evil; he was not the evil itself.