“Because of her old man,” said Payton disgustedly. “He refused to go to the police even after she was returned safely. He was some sort of a nut about sex. Danielle had been…raped several times. He got it into his head that she…had enjoyed it, had encouraged it, even. So he transferred the blame to her, as if she had been the criminal. His beautiful daughter, ruined. You can imagine what that did for her, psychologically. It’s a wonder she isn’t a basket case.”
“Not a pretty story,” I said. “But how does it relate—”
“—to anything else? I’m not sure, exactly. Neither are the psychiatrists. We’ve been married for twenty-four years now, ever since she turned twenty-one, and that kidnapping remains the central event in her life. The first time we had a serious quarrel, just after Tamara was born, Danielle simply disappeared. Two days later the police came to my house. They’d received a phone call saying that I was holding a kidnapped woman in the basement. A week later Danielle walked into a police station in Muncie, Indiana, and told them she had been kidnapped and raped by a man named Charles Wentworth Payton.”
He buried his face in his hands. “She was in…a clinic for six months after that. When she came out, I arranged for treatment from the finest psychiatrists in the world. After that…she was all right for a number of years. Then…wham! A kidnapping. And another. After a while we began to see patterns in them. The kidnappings were arranged so that Tamara never became aware of them. And while she was pretending to be kidnapped, she’d let herself be picked up by gangs of men and…well, you can imagine. And, finally, she never did it in Tahiti, only in the United States. When we realized that, I naturally encouraged her to spend as much time here as possible. And so far, it’s worked.”
“Up to now,” I said after a while. It had not been a cheerful story. “There are changes in the pattern. Why do you think they would change?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the pressure of the divorce, of the election, her age, her astrological signs, who knows?”
“I thought you’d been arranging this divorce for years?”
“We have. It was nearly worked out three years ago, when Danielle suddenly had another one of her…episodes.” His eyes stared blindly into the past. “The worst. She reappeared one night with a gun and tried to murder me. She fired seven shots at close range. They all missed. It cost a small fortune to hush that one up.” He splashed more brandy into his glass. “Since then she’s been mostly in Tahiti. It cost me half a million bucks to have a shrink leave his practice in Los Angeles for two years and come down to live here in Tahiti. Just for her.”
I felt numb: that was something I didn’t hear five times a year.
“The shrink left a year ago. He said the best therapy seemed to be Danielle’s…orgies. He talked a lot about sublimation, role playing, baloney, baloney. I think he was crazy too. After that, I…just gave up. Said the hell with it. I gave her a million bucks if she’d stay away from me. I know what you’re thinking, LaRoche. So maybe that doesn’t make me husband of the year. Well, I can’t take it any more, do you hear?” His voice rose to a shout. “All my life I’ve been serving my country. You weren’t even born yet when I joined the Marine Corps in 1944—I was sixteen years old. I went through three island campaigns in the Pacific. I re-enlisted for the Korean War. After that I tried to help people, to bring them together, with my magazines. Now I want to do something more. I want to help straighten out this situation in Washington, to help get rid of these clowns who’ve screwed up our system and our wonderful country. That’s what I want to do, LaRoche, and by God I’ll do it!”
He sucked in air noisily between clenched teeth. “And no crazy bitch who fucks ten men at a time and tries to blow my head off is going to stop me!”
CHAPTER 19
The next morning I was yawning my way through breakfast until the Wests, Bob and Susan, came into the dining room carrying copies of the local papers. Wordlessly they tossed them on the table, and sat down across from me. They looked at me inquiringly. I shrugged listlessly. There didn’t appear to be anything to say. I looked through the papers. There were enormous headlines and blurred photographs of the Payton family in various poses, including the Polaroid sent by the kidnappers, but no mention that three Frenchmen named Baudchon, Luria, and Buisson were assisting the police in their inquiries, as the British like to say. I laid the papers down.
“What’s happening?” asked Susan anxiously. “Do you think there’s any…hope?” Her eyes were flecked with red, as if she’d had a sleepless night. I poured myself more coffee and told them most of what I knew. Bob’s mouth hung slightly open while I talked. When I came to what the paras and then Tama had said about the ownership of the hotel he and Susan sat as if carved from stone.
“I can’t believe it,” he said when I’d finished. “Those three gangsters? They’re the ones who have Danielle?” The knuckles of his clenched fist were white against the red tablecloth.
“It looks like it,” I said without any great conviction. “But unless the local cops get out the thumbscrews, it isn’t getting us any nearer to finding her.”
I left them sitting at the table, staring sightlessly at the Dépêche.
* * * *
Mareta had a copy of Les Nouvelles in her hands when I walked into her hospital room a few minutes after ten o’clock. I’d called the Punaauia house and been told by the maid that Tamara and her father had left for town. There was nothing I could think of doing that seemed even remotely useful, so I headed for Mamao for a moment’s gossip.
“That’s atrocious!” she said fiercely, crumpling the paper. “Even Danielle Payton shouldn’t have something like that happen to her.”
“Even Danielle?” I repeated slowly. “You know her? And why even? What’s the matter with her?”
My voice must have been sharp, for she looked at me uncertainly, then turned her head away.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” I said, leaning over to run my hand across the smooth skin of her cheek. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just that I’ve been trying to help out on this kidnapping, and I’m a little jumpy. I’m still looking for her.”
“Oh,” she said in a small voice. She lowered her eyes to watch her fingers fiddle with the hem of her nightgown. “I…I used to know Danielle. I…didn’t like her.”
“Why not?” I said softly, although I was afraid I knew.
“Why do you want to know?” she whispered.
“Hrmph. Tell you what. I’ll tell you everything I know about it, and then you can decide whether you want to tell me or not. Okay?”
“I see,” she said twenty minutes later. “So you don’t really know whether these paras kidnapped her or not?”
“Exactly. That’s why any information.…”
“Yes, I can see that.” She closed her eyes, but not before a large tear had rolled down each cheek. “It’s so awful,” she said in a voice I had to strain to hear. “I hate to even think about it, never mind tell someone tell someone.… But you already know most of it. About those…parties…at the Wests’. And things like that. My…my husband used to take me to them. He made me do…things. He was a friend of that whore Chatoune who works in the drugstore. I think she was the one who got him started. But it wasn’t until after we were married that I learned about…well, those things. I didn’t know anybody did them. Like animals!”
She gulped convulsively and smeared the tears on her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I…loved Patrick. I never…knew a man until I met him, I was raised by the nuns in the Marquesas, I told you that, they were very strict. I didn’t even know what men…were like. It was only after we’d been married for two or three years that I began to learn that Patrick wasn’t normal, like other men. At first he began to have trouble when…well, not very often. Then more and more, until it was all the time. And then he began to say it was all my fault.”
“Trouble?”
“He was impotent,” she whispered.
I nodded sadly.
> The rest of the story I could have written myself. To cure his impotence, Patrick convinced, or coerced, his horror-stricken but still-loving wife to accompany him on his forays into the world of group sex. And for the jaded men and women who congregated at Bob West’s pool parties there was nothing more enticing than an innocent young girl raised by the nuns.
“I loved him, you see,” she stammered between gulps and sobs. “I loved him. And it was true. When we were at those…parties, he wasn’t…impotent at all.” Her fists clenched and unclenched as she tore at the cloth of her nightgown. “I used to see Danielle at those parties. She kept saying how beautiful I was, and all the while she’d be caressing me, and Patrick would watch, and all the others, and then she’d make me.…” She sobbed despairingly. “I…used to…throw up when we got home.…”
“Easy,” I said, “easy. It’s all over now. You won’t ever have to see her again, or any of them.”
But she went on doggedly, as if this were a rite of exorcism that had to be finished. And perhaps it was.
“Once…once we went up to her house in the mountains, just the two of us. She was there with this Tahitian named Hiro, and.…”
When the nasty tale was over and the tears had stopped, I gripped her hand encouragingly and said, “Her house in the mountains? She lives by the lagoon, out in Punaauia.”
“This was in the mountains,” she said weakly. “Somewhere in Mahina, a house all by itself. Patrick and—”
“Hush,” I soothed. “That’s all over. Forever.” I leaned over and kissed her lightly on the mouth. Her lips were salty with tears.
* * * *
When I got to the Commissariat on Avenue Bruat I found a small crowd sheltering from the brilliant sunlight in the shade of a large tree in the courtyard. I edged my way into it and discovered that Charles Wentworth Payton was holding a press conference. Always the politician, I thought sourly. He’d just finished answering questions in French when I arrived. The first question put to him in English came from someone holding an NBC microphone. “The latest opinion poll in New Mexico shows you running well behind your opponent, by a margin of 39 to 48 percent. Given that, plus the fact that you and your wife have been separated for years, and the fact that there has never been a kidnapping in the recorded history of Tahiti, what is your comment on what some people are now whispering—that this so-called kidnapping is nothing but a publicity stunt?”
There was a gasp from some of the onlookers, and Payton flushed angrily. I grinned and backed out of the crowd. Now that he was in the big leagues, Payton would have to get used to being flattened by beanballs. I found Tamara on the other side of the crowd, seething indignantly.
Drawing her aside, I calmed her down and asked if her mother had a place in the mountains. For a moment she looked blank. “In the mountains? Oh. Of course. I’d forgotten all about it. My parents built a place years ago, but then they got tired of it and built the one in Punaauia. The first one was too small and too much trouble.”
“Can you find it for me?”
“Right now? Sure.”
“Let’s go.”
* * * *
The Commune of Mahina was only five or six miles to the east of the bright sunshine of Papeete, but here the weather was dark and overcast. Coconut trees trembled against the blackening sky as the wind harried them, and a feeling of gloomy foreboding enveloped us as if it were a physical presence. The only words we spoke were muttered directions.
Not far from the Atomic Energy Commission camp, I turned up into the mountains. We climbed rapidly on a series of switchbacks, and in a short time I was driving in and out of the scudding clouds. I turned on the windshield wipers and slowed to a crawl as Tamara stared intently from her side of the car. Three or four minutes later she told me to stop at a steep embankment on the side of the hill. A road had been cut into it and paved at some point. Now the pavement was cracked and weed-choked. I got out to force open the rusty metal gate that blocked the entrance and returned to the car.
“What…what do you think we’ll find?” asked Tamara, swallowing nervously.
“I don’t know. Nothing probably.” We drove down through a gully and climbed another hill. Dense vegetation and towering trees grew close around us and it was dank and fetid smelling in the murky shadows. There was a sense of terrible isolation, as if we were thousands of miles from civilization. “Something just tells me we should come here.” I tried to laugh. “Maybe just because it’s so gloomy looking. As if.…” My words trailed off.
“As if anything could happen here,” said Tamara somberly.
Rain suddenly drummed down on the car as we reached the top of the hill, reducing visibility to a few feet, but fortunately we had arrived. We descended a few yards on the other side and came to a stop on a piece of land that had been bulldozed out of the hillside. Through the mist that fogged the inside of the car and the driving rain I could vaguely make out the shape of a small rectangular house and, some distance off, dark forms against the hillside that might have been outbuildings.
“There’s a garage on the other side of the house,” said Tamara.
There was also a spectacular view. The isolation here in the mountains was absolute, and the house had been built near the edge of a precipice that fell sheer for at least a thousand feet to a narrow valley below. On the other side of the valley, only a few hundred yards away, even loftier cliffs loomed above us and merged with the great peaks of the interior. Chased by the wind, wispy gray clouds tore through the valley, while further inland massive black thunderheads bulked ominously against the mountains. Half a dozen waterfalls tumbled precipitously down the cliffs across the way. Even in the rain it was a breathtaking vista, and I stood sheltering under the eaves at the back of the house for a long moment.
“I can see why your parents built here,” I said admiringly. “It’s fantastic.”
“It’s also gloomy and dank and a long way from town when you run out of butter,” said Tamara prosaically. “We had to have our own electrical generator, and a water tank, and we had to pump up our own water. If you like living like Robinson Crusoe it’s okay, I guess.”
“Anytime,” I said, “anytime.”
The house itself was Japanese in style, with a roof of red tiles, walls of white stucco, and sliding shoji panels in place of most of the windows and doors. There was a key on a ledge over a standard wooden door in the garage, and with it Tamara let us into the kitchen.
Inside the house there wasn’t much. A single living room-dining room, furnished mostly with cushions and low Hawaiian-style bamboo furniture, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. There were cobwebs and a musty, mildewy smell as if the place hadn’t been opened for years. I was wrong however.
“It looks pretty good,” said Tamara, surprised. “Mama must be sending the maid up occasionally. And the gardener.”
“I’d have said it had been shut for years.”
“Things age fast in Tahiti.”
We poked around the house for twenty minutes while the rain thundered down on the roof but turned up nothing of interest. The beds were made, there were towels in the bathroom, and a nearly empty bottle of whiskey stood on the kitchen counter. There were three glasses in the sink. I sniffed at them, but they had been rinsed out. It was a perfect setting for kidnapping or a murder, but there was nothing to indicate that it had ever been used for anything more illicit than a little group sex. We returned to the car feeling depressed and let-down, as if we’d been unfairly denied a promised reward.
As I backed the Fiat out of the garage the rain suddenly stopped and a shaft of light dazzled us by bursting through the cloud cover and flooding the house with sunshine.
“An omen,” I said, getting out of the car. “I’ll just take a look at that junk over there. I should have done it anyway.”
There was a redwood water tank built into the hillside, about twenty feet above house level. I clambered up a ladder attached to the side and pried open the top. I could feel my heart beating
in my chest, and my throat was suddenly dry. I looked down into the tank.
I must have been expecting the horrifying worst: the body of Danielle Payton floating there. But all I found was water.
Relieved in spite of myself, I climbed down. The clouds were rapidly dissipating, and in the bright sunlight eerie wraiths of steam were rising from the red tile roof and the concrete apron around the house. The cliffs across the valley were now a dazzling green.
At the base of the water tank was a small building with drums of fuel along one wall. I pushed open an implausibly heavy door and found myself in the generator room. It was too dark to see much except a lot of machinery. I was about to back out when a reflected glimmer caught my eye at the base of the generator. I reached out for it automatically, but a heartbeat away from picking it up some inner warning brought my hand to a stop. I could feel the hair prickling at the base of my neck. Crouching down on my haunches, I leaned forward until the object was almost touching my nose.
It was a cigarette lighter of heavy chased silver, with some sort of design on it. I squinted in the darkness. I could make out an eagle, its claws extended, shrieking as it attacked. Above the eagle was an embossed number: 120ième. French for 120th.
Memories flooded in. Cigars and cognac and conversation at the Vaima Café. Three large French paratroopers. An over-sized lighter, which might have been a souvenir of their regiment, in the hands of one of them. Jean-Paul Luria, I seemed to recall. Now an identical lighter was here, in the generator room of a house owned by Danielle Payton.
I let out the breath I’d been holding pent up and got to my feet. I shut the door and walked down the slope to where Tamara was waiting for me in the car.
CHAPTER 20
I frowned at the note lying on Tama’s desk.
Trouble in Tahiti Page 12