I made a face at the darkness. A couple of days in Tahiti haven’t made you any nicer a guy than you used to be, have they, LaRoche? I asked myself rhetorically. “Nope,” I answered out loud, “you’re just as big a son of bitch as you ever were.”
The gendarmes eyed me quizzically.
CHAPTER 2
My room key was at the desk where I’d left it earlier in the day, so I made my way into the lobby feeling like a refugee from an encounter with the Frankenstein monster. Flakes of dried blood cracked and fell to the polished tile floor, but at that time of night there weren’t any fellow guests to terrify. They were mostly an elderly continent of fellow Americans with blue rinses and maroon Bermuda shorts who were snoring in their bungalows by the time the sun went down—which I’d discovered in the tropics is early.
There was no one behind the desk either, so I reached over for my key and was skulking back out, on my way to a long hot shower, when a door opened down a passageway and the manager of the hotel stepped through briskly, shaking water off his hands.
“Jesus Christ!” he said, taking an automatic step forward, his fists clenched. He had good natural instincts. “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?” he snarled.
“Hey, it’s just me, your guest in number seven,” I said in English. “There’s been an accident.”
Relief swept over his face and his fists relaxed. “Christ, if you could see yourself.” He suddenly remembered his hotel training. “An accident? Are you hurt?” He stepped forward and peered at me dubiously. No hotel manager wants a guest to drop dead in the middle of his lobby. Especially when none of the night staff is around to help him conceal the body. I explained briefly and he shook his head in dismay. “On the Belvédère road? Over the side? Jesus! Let’s go open the bar and have a drink. You practically stopped my heart.”
I grinned in spite of myself. “I’d stain the barstools.”
“Forget it, forget it, they’re plastic.”
I gulped a Scotch-on-the-rocks, and then another, in the time it took him to mix a Scotch and soda and add just the right amount of ice for himself. We raised our glasses and clinked them together.
“Confusion to our enemies,” he toasted.
“That sounds English.”
He shrugged. “I guess so. I used to read a lot—now I don’t have the time.” He thrust a hand at me. “By the way, I’m Bob West. And you’re Mister…Mister…LaRoche?” He pronounced it the French way, to rhyme with “posh.”
I shook my head. “Sort of. It’s ‘LaRock,’ as in ‘Rocks in your head.’”
“I’ll be damned.” He seemed genuinely surprised. “I never heard an American speak French like you did when you checked in. I know you’ve got an American passport: you’re naturalized maybe?”
I sipped my whiskey. “Almost right. It’s my parents who were naturalized. I grew up in San Francisco, working in their French restaurant and going to the French lycée until I got big enough to decide for myself that I wanted to speak English like the other kids. And pronounce my name some way that other people could too.” I set down the glass. “But you don’t look much like a Frenchman, either. I thought you had to be French to live in Tahiti.”
He nodded. “It helps, but isn’t a one hundred percent rule. I’m just another California boy like you.”
“Oh yeah?” I hadn’t paid much attention to him before, but now I looked him over. He was a handsome enough guy in his late thirties or so, with something of the Southern California look about him. At least he had that healthy bronzed skin, pearly teeth and perpetual grin, twinkly blue eyes that seemed to be assessing how high the surf was running, and the requisite blond hair.
But the hair was cropped short to hide the fact it was thinning rapidly, and even though he was thick through the shoulders and still looked reasonably hard and fit, he wasn’t quite tall enough to support the little pot belly that was beginning to push against his tailored shirt of pale blue silk. The top three buttons were undone of course, and the standard issue gold chain hung down nearly to his navel. He wore white duck trousers and what I supposed were probably Gucci loafers. All in all, he wouldn’t win any contests for Mr. Beachboy, but for the manager of a small backwater hotel in Tahiti he was quite an eyeful.
He caught my glance at his midriff and grinned sheepishly.
“One of the hazards of the trade. Never enough exercise, wining and dining the customers, checking out everything on the menu by eating it twice a day, having a couple of after-hour snorts with your friends.… Speaking of which.…” He clapped me affably on my bare shoulder: I was a friend, not just another faceless guest.
“How come the manager’s running the place at one in the morning?” I asked as he poured more drinks. “Light for me.”
“The night auditor didn’t show up. That’s the trouble with this damn country—no one bothers to tell you whether they’re coming or not. Tomorrow he’ll have some long story about how his pet goldfish got sick and none of the phones were working.” He swallowed some Scotch and soda. “Maybe it’s true, who knows? Odd things happen here.”
“But tough on the manager.”
“That’s true. But I’m the owner too, me and the wife, so I guess I probably put in a couple more hours than your ordinary hotel manager would.”
I tried to conceal a yawn. “The owner, huh? That must be quite a job in a country like this. Maybe I can buy you a drink tomorrow and you’ll tell me about it. Right now it’s me for a shower and some sleep. I feel like a piece of sandpaper with all this crud on me.” I set down the empty glass.
He stood up. “Super. Always like to talk shop. I’m generally out on the terrace around noontime or towards the end of the afternoon. See you then.” He held out his hand. People in Tahiti seemed to spend most of their waking hours shaking hands, whether they were meeting you for the first time that day or the fortieth. I pumped it limply and stepped out into the hot muggy night. So far the rain had held off, but I felt what seemed to be the initial drops. When it came, I wanted to be snug in my bed.
“I forgot to ask,” his voice called after me. “What about the guy in the car? Did they ever find him?”
“Not while I was there, they hadn’t. There was a place where it looked like a car might have gone off, but with all the trees and bushes on the hillside it was hard to be sure. The last I saw of them, they had some paratrooper types attached to ropes going down the cliff.” There was a dull roar growing louder, like the approach of a freight train, and the drops on my shoulders were suddenly heavy and cold. “I figure the girl probably got bounced out within fifty yards or so after going over. One of the gendarmes said that particular valley goes almost straight down for over a thousand feet. If that guy went down with the ship they’re not gonna find enough of him to take to the funeral.”
The roaring noise was nearly on us and the rain was pelting down. Bob West’s eyes had lost some of their twinkle. “Jesus. What a way to go.”
“It’s not what I’d choose, that’s for sure.”
The roaring was full in my ears and the sky exploded and dumped the Pacific Ocean over me. I ran.
* * * *
The Gendarmerie Nationale was at the end of a short tree-lined street that ran a couple of blocks from the waterfront, where the yachts were tied up, to the beginning of the mountains behind town. This particular street seemed to be the center of government: modern administration buildings of stainless steel and plate glass rubbed elbows with nineteenth-century colonial structures that looked like army barracks and prisons—at least the windows were small and barred and the old stone walls seemed a good couple of feet thick. The branches from the trees on either side of the street formed a dense canopy overhead and only an occasional shaft of sunlight pierced through.
The Gendarmerie itself was neither old or new, just a utilitarian gray building with the blue, white, and red of France manifested in a couple of flags and in a large gaudy archway over the driveway. The deskman regarded me with sour suspicion and told m
e to wait. I occupied the time by eyeballing what appeared to be two tiny holding cells with solid steel doors in the short corridor directly behind him and wondering what it’d be like to be shut up in them. Depressing to say the least, I decided.
A few minutes later two more gendarmes came to get me. They wore the same khaki shirts, shorts, and long socks as the ones I’d seen the night before. I gathered that one was an officer and the other a flunky. We went into a small room with two desks and they lit up cigarettes. I refused their offer, and handed them my passport to study. After the standard remarks about my name and my French we got down to business.
I felt a vague sense of unease, of being on the wrong side of the desk, that I should be taking the statement instead of giving it. But after a moment I was able to rattle it off in short, simple, declarative sentences, with pauses at just the right moment to enable the flunky to write it down in laborious longhand. They were as bored by the whole business as I was by now, and the only thing that stirred their interest was my profession: retired policeman.
After he’d read it back to me, the flunky went out to type it up and the officer and I traded shoptalk. I learned that the gendarmes were more like state troopers than anything else. Like most Americans I’d always thought that all French policeman were gendarmes. But no: the gendarmes handled business outside the cities, and the Police Judiciaire, who called themselves agents, took care of it inside. The mountain road to the Belvédère was obviously the gendarmes’ jurisdiction, so they’d be handling the case to its conclusion.
Which was now just a matter of paperwork. A few hours before—just after the deluge had ended at dawn—they’d located the missing car about seven hundred feet below the spot it had gone over. Patrick, the wayward husband, hadn’t managed to deploy a parachute after all. What remained of his body was being painstakingly gathered up. The gendarme grimaced, and I passed along a few of the juicier tidbits about the habits of the Market Street Monster, still uncaught in late September. It looked as if the Monster would be able to take personal credit for the installation of a new Mayor after the upcoming election. I shook my head dolefully, read the typed statement, initialed each page at the bottom left, dated it September 26, 1982, and signed it carefully.
I shook hands all around, including that of the surly deskman, and walked out to my car. I’d have to see about getting the blood off the seats or the rental agency would have a field day assessing me damages. I stared at the dark stains for a moment, then walked back to the Gendarmerie. The officer was still there.
He told me that the girl, Mareta something-or-other, had come out of the tumbling car with a damaged leg, fractured shoulder blades, and seven broken ribs. She’d be in the hospital at least a month but would come out of it without a scar.
At least on her body. He didn’t speculate about her psyche.
CHAPTER 3
A blazing sun glinted from a cloudless cobalt sky on the broad sweep of the gray ocean, and spread out below was a sizeable portion of the island of Tahiti. The city of Papeete and its U-shaped harbor nestled at the foot of the hills off to my left, and to my right rugged mountains reared high into the sky. The volcanic peaks of the sister island of Moorea a few miles across the channel dominated the horizon, looking as artificial as a movie lot’s backdrop, or as jagged as a stegosaurus’s back, depending on your flight of fancy. A fresh breeze caressed my face, and the mountain’s smell of eucalyptus was everywhere.
It was hard to credit the reality of the events of the night before. But my shirt still hung from the branch where I’d left it, and I stood on the roadside where I’d held Mareta in my arms. Except now I could see the dried pool of blood where she’d been kneeling when I found her.
I couldn’t locate the spot the car had gone over, or where she’d climbed back up, but it didn’t make much difference. Her feat was breathtaking wherever she’d done it. It was hard to judge because of the tangle vegetation and the occasional tree growing precariously out from the hillside, but it looked as if the mountainside plunged off at a 50 or 60-degree angle at the very least. It would have been a hard, dangerous climb for a fit man in broad daylight. In the dark, concussed and in shock, with broken ribs and shoulders, it must have been a nightmare. The gendarmes had figured that it had taken her at least three hours to claw and fight her way perhaps fifty yards up to the road. I tried to put myself in her place, and I could feel the hairs suddenly standing up on my arms as my flesh goose-pimpled. I marveled anew at the human spirit and the wonders it could perform.
I walked back to the car. It was time for a drink.
* * * *
My bungalow was one of a dozen or so scattered around the tropical gardens of the Hotel Taaone. It was built of bamboo, had a high thatched roof, and a lot of screening, evidently to keep in the mosquitos the maids enticed in every morning when they made up the room. I changed into my bathing suit, slapping at random at the infuriating mosquitos, grabbed a towel, then walked through the banana trees and hibiscus and bougainvillea and coconut palms to the black sand beach of the Commune of Pirae.
The hotel’s main buildings were next to the beach, more bamboo and thatch structures. There was a large sunny terrace with tables between the restaurant and the bar, which was a small building nearly hidden by crotons and hibiscus. A couple of coconut trees grew on the terrace, their fronds swaying gently in the sea breezes. The nearly nude figures of half a dozen lithe young local girls of various racial origins lay stretched out tanning in the sun. I glanced at them wistfully. Their bare breasts were varying shades of white, gold, brown, and café-au-lait. All of them were pleasant to contemplate. The life of an expatriate American hotel owner no longer seemed as trying as it had the night before.
I saw the owner in question sitting at a corner table in the shade of some bamboo plants and sketched a greeting. He was talking with two attractive women in scanty bikinis, so I continued on my way to the beach. He waved me over. I exchanged cautious smiles with the ladies as Bob bounced lightly to his feet and pulled out a chair.
“Come and join us. This is my wife, Susan, and this is a friend of ours, Hinano. This is Mr. LaRoche, pronounced ‘LaRock.’”
“Alain’s the first name,” I added, “pronounced ‘Alan.’ Just to confuse it further.” I reached over to shake hands with Susan and Hinano. “Most people just call me Rocky—it’s simpler.”
“Rock-y,” said Susan slowly, chewing over the syllables as if they were sounds of an unknown language. “How nice. You look familiar, Rocky. Do I know you from somewhere?” She stared at me with the directness of a child, a tall, thinnish blonde in her late thirties with enormous brown eyes and a wide sensuous mouth. Her ash-blond hair was long and straight, in the fashion of the sixties. My first impression of her was that she was slightly simple. Or spaced out, as the kids said these days. Something about her nagged at the back of my mind.
“I hope you don’t know me,” I bantered. “I used to be a policeman, and I didn’t meet very many nice people that way.”
“A…policeman?” Her eyes widened. “How…exciting. In…Philadelphia?”
“Philadelphia?” I cocked my head at her, perplexed. “No. San Francisco. Why Philadelphia?” I kicked myself mentally and held up a hand. “Sorry. That’s just a policeman’s old habits: asking questions. It’s hard to stop. I won’t do it again.”
She looked at me seriously. “It’s just that I’m from Philadelphia. I thought if I’d seen you before it must have been there.”
I smiled what I hoped was disarmingly. “Of course. I’m slow today.” Bob ordered a beer from a passing waitress, and I raised my eyebrows at the other girl, Hinano, who was sipping delicately at a lemonade.
“Is that a coincidence?” I said to her in French. “The beer’s called Hinano, and so are you. Or are all lovely things in Tahiti called Hinano?” You can say things in French that would leave a stevedore blushing with embarrassment in English.
I could hear Bob snort into his drink, but Hinano smile
d readily. “I suppose it must be simple coincidence,” she said mock-seriously. “The hinano is the flower of the fara, which is the pandanus tree. The roof of the restaurant there is made from the leaves of the pandanus.”
I didn’t know whether she was pulling my leg or not, so I grinned fatuously. “Now I’ve learned something. I knew it would be educational coming to Tahiti.”
“Is that the only thing you’ve learned in Tahiti?” she asked roguishly. Our eyes met and held. She was a good-looking girl somewhat younger and shorter than Susan West, with a lush figure. She seemed to be in her late twenties. She had skin the color of old ivory and brown hair cut short page-boy fashion, but spoke educated French with a Tahitian accent, so I judged her to be of mixed French and Tahitian blood. She wore a tiny blue bikini that left none of her assets to the imagination, and I have a good imagination.
“With the right teacher,” I said, “I think I’d be ready to learn any number of things.”
She laughed coquettishly. The waitress brought my beer, and Susan West leaned across to grip my wrist with long, delicate fingers. “Bob was telling us about your horrible experience last night. How terrible it must have been for that poor girl. Do you know how she is? Did they find her husband? What are they going to do to him?”
I told them what I knew, and described what I’d seen earlier that morning, high in the hills. Susan shook her head somberly. “How really terrible. How can people do those things?”
We sat silent for a moment. “Do you know their names?” asked Hinano.
I thought back. “Patrick is the name of the guy, no trouble there. The girl’s name is something Tahitian, and their last name is something Tahitian I didn’t get at all. Let’s see. Mateta?”
“Mareta?” said Hinano. “That’s a Tahitian name.”
“Mareta.” I turned it over in my mind. “That’s it.”
Bob West turned to look at his wife. “Didn’t we meet a couple named Patrick and Mareta once? She was sort of a slim, good-looking half-Tahitian?”
Trouble in Tahiti Page 2