Small boys crowded around the barricades blocking off the street. Uniformed officers with nightsticks patrolled in front of them.
One boy pointed at Paul, spoke shrilly to a newcomer: “That’s the guy shot ’im.”
Paul looked away, shivered.
A plainclothes lieutenant came up beside Paul, touched lighter flame to a cigarette. The man had a craggy, rocklike face under a grey hat brim. He studied Paul with hard, cynical eyes. “Thought you’d like to know,” he said. “Carlos talked. We got the fifth member of this mob while he was waiting in the getaway car.” He shook his head. “When I think how close this one was …”
“When can I go over to the hospital to see my uncle?” asked Paul. “I’ve told you everything I know.”
“Soon as I can spare a car and driver,” said the lieutenant. “But you heard what the ambulance doc said—your uncle will probably outlive all of us. Those old guys surprise you sometimes.”
“I know, but …”
“Now, don’t you worry,” said the lieutenant. “Last we heard, your uncle was resting easy. They’ll tell us if there’s a change.”
Paul took a deep breath, turned away. He felt restless, uncertain.
The lieutenant inhaled a deep drag of the cigarette, blew smoke across the darkening air. “I saw that Carlos,” he said. “Man, you really worked him over. Took guts to go up against a guy with a gun like that.”
Paul shook his head. “I just knew I had to do it.”
“You ever want a job on the force, let me know,” said the lieutenant. He glanced back at the stairwell. “Don’t worry about boarding up your shop tonight. We’ll have two men patrolling.”
“They can come and cart the place away for all I care,” said Paul.
The lieutenant flicked his cigarette into the gutter. “Well … we’ll be through here pretty soon. We just have to make sure we got all the prints off that van across there. Could have been some others in this that Carlos didn’t know about.”
Paul nodded, his mind veering to a memory of Angelo waiting on the stretcher here in the street while the ambulance doctor prepared a hypodermic. The old man’s face had looked pale, strained, with raw red marks where the tape had covered his mouth. Paul had been forced to bend close to hear his uncle’s low voice.
Angelo spoke in Greek: “When that Carlos took me outside, I looked down through my little window. It was as though I had never looked through there before. Such a little place. So dirty. It was like looking inside myself.”
Paul slipped into his mother tongue. “Uncle, please save your strength.”
It was as though Angelo had not heard. The dark old lips moved slowly, fumbling for words. “Pavlos … I keep thinking—thirty-one years! Is that what thirty-one years is like … inside? No wife. No kids. No friends. Just a dirty little shop with one window … squinting at me!”
Paul glanced at the ambulance doctor, wishing he would hurry. “Uncle, we can talk later.”
The doctor bent over, pulled Angelo’s coat off one arm, ripped away the shirt. He nodded to Paul. “Could you hold his arm like this, please?”
Angelo ignored the intrusion. “I have seen your letters from friends in the army. I thought they were taking you away from me. I wanted to keep you all to myself. Instead, I drove you toward someone like Carlos.”
“No, Uncle!”
“I have been an old fool, Pavlos.” He winced at the bite of the needle. “Don’t be like me. Don’t crouch in a little dirty place … inside … afraid of everything.”
The doctor tucked a blanket around Angelo’s neck. “We’ll leave him just a minute until that takes effect.”
Angelo gulped, took a trembling breath. “In that truck … in the dark … I thought many things. How smart I believed I was—watching people through my window, learning things about them. But—you know, Pavlos—never once did I do a good thing with what I learned.”
Angelo blinked, stared up into the anxious young face, the features so much like his own had been. His vision blurred, faded. Muddiness washed across his mind. He brought up a last reserve of consciousness. “Maybe one good thing that I did, Pavlos. That nice girl—she is the right girl for you.” He closed his eyes.
Paul stood up as the ambulance attendants lifted the stretcher. “Yes, Uncle.”
He watched them slide the stretcher into the ambulance, drive away.
And now it was full dark on the corner. The lieutenant had joined the technicians across the street. The officers at the barricades paced through yellow patches from streetlights. Only a few children remained.
Abruptly, someone started the motor of the van.
Paul sensed rather than saw a figure come up beside him. He smelled perfume, looked down. Jean Lovett stared up at him, the grey-green eyes reflecting specks of light. He saw that she had straightened her hair, removed the ink smudge from her cheek.
She turned away, spoke without looking at him. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you.”
“Well, I got you into that trouble,” said Paul. He shrugged. “Besides, if you hadn’t taken Carlos’s attention off me …”
“I knew you’d do something. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did.” She turned back, facing him. “When you go to the hospital to see your uncle … may I go with you?”
“You don’t owe us anything,” he said.
She glanced down, long lashes flickering. “There’s something you should know that …” She hesitated.
And Paul noted how the yellow streetlight almost faded out her freckles. He decided that he liked her better with freckles.
“I asked your uncle to let me deliver that envelope,” she said. Her glance came up, down. “Wasn’t that brazen of me? I wanted to meet this paragon he described. But I was afraid …” She stopped, looked up at him. “You won’t get mad?”
“I’m through getting mad.”
“I was afraid you’d be like him …” She plunged ahead. “… I mean, bent over, afraid … just like my mother.” She smiled—shy, tentative. “But you weren’t.”
Paul matched her smile. He felt suddenly lighthearted.
Jean stepped closer.
It felt natural to put his arms around her—she stepped so easily into them. He rested his cheek against her hair, smelled the wonderful, soft pungency of it. There was a kind of weary humor in the thought that flitted through his mind: Uncle Angie—matchmaker! And then the bitter aftertaste: Imagine building a whole life around “Don’t do something!”
Jean stirred, pushed away, patted his cheek. It was an intimate, possessive gesture that made him feel warm and sure of the future.
“I called my boss,” she said. “Mr. Carter. He and his wife want me to bring you to their home … later. They want us to spend the night. I think maybe it’s a good idea. I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
“Never again,” said Paul.
He heard the van driving away, saw the lieutenant approaching. The lieutenant looked breezy, happy—his cragginess broken by a smile.
“Well, let’s go, kids,” he said. “Guess I’ll have to take you over to the hospital myself. Then, whatsay we get all the routine business out of the way and let me buy you a dinner on the expense account? I guess the city owes you that much, anyway.” He took Jean’s arm, pulled them into motion.
They rounded the corner three abreast.
As they passed the little window, Paul felt glass grind under his feet. He glanced down into the dark eye of the shop, kicked at the pieces of the shattered window. God! he thought. Thirty-one years!
The Waters of Kan-E
The voice of the old woman drifted up to us on the veranda. She was seated cross-legged at the bole of a fara tree on Makatea’s north shore, the fattest woman I have ever seen. She was a round hillock of flesh heaped upon the sand, a faded lavaru only half covering her. Five dark-skinned children danced and laughed around her as she clapped and sang for them.
The woman’s skin was what attracted my particular attention.
It was a pattern of the conventional dark brown broken by blotches of dead gray. And yet she didn’t appear to be ill or in any discomfort.
Off and on, all morning, I had been watching the old woman and the children, wanting to ask Paul Sargeant beside me about the peculiar skin but afraid to show my ignorance.
As I watched, the woman gestured with her right hand. The children stopped their dancing and sank to the sand around her, looking up expectantly. The woman bent forward, and her voice seemed to lift out of the background of hissing surf, a tone plaintive, low, and so sad it crept into my breast and cried.
“A harres ta fow,
“A toro ta farraro,
“A now ta tararta.”
Paul looked up from the six-week-old copy of the Melbourne Times he was reading. “Right out of Melville,” he said.
“The palm tree shall grow,
“The coral shall spread,
“But man shall cease.”
He put aside the paper and took his pipe from the table before us. “That’s Grandma Pu-pu,” he said. “She doesn’t believe that herself about man going the way of the dinosaur.” He put a match to his pipe. “Although that old chant may be closer to home than we think, what with atom bombs and hydrogen bombs.” He took the pipe from his mouth and gestured toward the paper on the table. “Grandma Pu-pu could teach them a lesson.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Take a good look at that old woman,” Paul said. “Look at her skin. There is a real, honest-to-God living legend. She’s famous from here to Hawaii. There are chants about her. Not as good chants as the old ones, I’ll grant you, because the old manner seems to have been lost, but those chants about Grandma will live long after she’s gone.”
I turned back toward the beach. The children were still watching, and the old woman was half talking, half chanting to them. Her arms moved in a graceful rhythm, which shrugged off the heavy flesh and said that here was still a woman. It was only a caricature of a woman, though. A ridiculous wattle of fat beneath her chin swayed and undulated with her chant.
Now she swayed back and again forward. I caught the word “mo-o-o-o-o,” long and drawn-out.
“She’s telling them about Au-ke-le, the seeker,” Paul said. “It’s the legend of the Polynesian hero who sought the waters of Kan-e, the source of everlasting life.”
Paul’s wide-set eyes stared fixedly at the beach, and his brows drew down in mirrored T crosses above his thin nose. “I dare say Grandma Pu-pu knows more about that particular legend than any other living human,” he said. “You see, she found the waters of Kan-e.”
“Oh, come now,” I said. “I know the Polynesian fountain of youth story. That nice old grandmother down there doesn’t look like any Ponce de Leon.”
Paul’s wide mouth split in a grin. “No,” he said. “But where the Spaniard failed, she succeeded.”
I leaned back. “Spill it,” I said.
“Spill it?” Paul looked at me questioningly. “Oh, you mean tell you the story.” He chuckled. “Spill it. I thought you meant the sacred waters.”
He paused to get his pipe going. The tobacco glowed red. Then he looked down at Grandma Pu-pu on the beach with eyes that peered through her and beyond into the distant years.
“It was 1924,” he said. “Grandma is a Raratonga woman. She was married to Pete Mahi, a quarter-breed French and Polynesian shell buyer. Pete traded the lower archipelago in his schooner, the Auroheva. They’d been married seventeen years and had four sons, the oldest, Pete Junior, being eighteen.”
Paul’s voice began to blend with the more remote chanting of Grandma Pu-pu and took on some of her rhythm.
“It was the end of the pearling season. They were Papeete-bound from Fakarova with a full load of shell and some fair pearls. The Auroheva was an old schooner, twenty-two tons and with the long, sour smell in her hold of the shell there. There was a holiday feeling aboard her, though.
“Grandma Pu-pu was just as fat then as you see her now. She always went with Pete on the trade tour, and her boys with her. It was a queer custom to the Polynesians, who leave their women at home, but then Pete was one-fourth ‘Papaa.’ The whites were notoriously strange in the head. In addition to young Pete, the boys were Paalo, Wim, and Joe. They had seven natives in the crew and two divers with their families.
“They were twenty-nine souls on the Auroheva, the old schooner standing west of Faaite, course west-southwest. Every person aboard was urging the ship to a few more knots; they were that anxious to start the holiday. Then it happened.”
Paul knocked out his pipe on the veranda rail.
“Hurricane?” I asked.
Paul smiled distantly.
“We live with hurricanes down here,” he said. “You have to understand that completely to know what the people on the Auroheva were thinking and what they did. Not only had they lived with hurricanes, but so had their ancestors back to the earliest legends. Hurricane is a god, a capricious god, who comes to smite the evil in men to stillness. I do not know if those aboard the schooner completely believed this, but certainly it was so close to their lives that they could not entirely disbelieve it.
“Yes, it was a hurricane.
“First, the glass began to drop. It went down from 29.90 to 29.80 in the first hour and then plummeted as though the mercury was being siphoned out. They knew what it meant, but they had both ancient and modern lore with which to meet it. They were seafaring people with confidence in themselves and their ship, which had ridden out a full six such storms before.
“Pete tried running for it on the port tack, the standard move here below the equator. When he saw he wouldn’t make it, he still wasn’t afraid. He ordered all sail off, and they lashed down every movable object. Then they put over the beg kedge anchor with one hundred fathoms of line as a drag. It’s an old hurricane trick.
“The full weight of the storm struck about midmorning. The wind swept across the water like a black wall, actually flattening the seas before it.
“Then came the hurricane waves—‘Long Wave and Short Wave,’ the Polynesians call them. You must see them to believe them. They advance like mountains until even an ocean liner is a puny mite before them. They are accompanied by the sting of driven water, which you cannot face and breathe, and the banshee of the wind, which seems to still the voice of life within you.
“The Auroheva was a fluff of gull down on those waves. Her rigging whined in protest. Strange music was strummed from the stays. The masts waved barren against the steel sky.
“Pete and the eldest were on deck with the seven crewmen. The others were below, with the hatches battened above them. What happened on that deck isn’t clear. Some think the line to the drogue parted. Others believe the old Auroheva just gave up after twenty-five years of deep-water passages and hurricanes—the proverbial last straw.
“The way Grandma Pu-pu tells it, she was wedged in a corner of the galley, slicing bread for sandwiches with the shark knife she wore on a line around her neck. Suddenly the schooner lurched and heeled over. There was a roar like a thousand surfs. Grandma found herself sitting in the water, still clutching the knife, and the schooner was nowhere to be seen. That isn’t remarkable because she couldn’t see six feet in any direction through the spume. Her dress had been torn off, and she floundered there, stark naked, with the knife in one hand.
“There is a clue to the nature of these people in the fact that this scene provokes laughter when Grandma tells it now.
“For a time, she wasn’t certain which was the sea and which the air. But she was a born swimmer, and, too, she was padded with buoyant fat. In the midst of this melee of spray and wind, she thrashed around, and her hands encountered a rope. It was a line to a cargo sling full of coconuts, which had been on the Auroheva’s deck. And on such a chance hangs this legend.
“Grandma had no idea how long the storm lasted. She missed the center, so it probably was six or eight hours. The wind passed, though, and it was night. She clung
to the net all through those dark hours. The sea shook her. It bruised her against the coconuts. It offered forgetfulness and tore at her grip on the line. She held fast to the rope and prayed to Kau-hu-hu, the shark god, for protection from his people.”
“Shark god?” I asked. “I know you didn’t say so, but somehow, I got the impression she was a Christian.”
“Oh, she is,” Paul said. “But who would deny her a shark god in the middle of the ocean?
“The sun came up hot that first morning. When Grandma tells it, she says she called out Ma-ui to shield her from A-hele-a-ka-la, the rays of the sun. And her listeners nod. They know of Ma-ui. He is part of another legend. It is right that legends intertwine.
“The seas had become long, rolling swells by that time. They moved in from the southwest. Once it was full daylight, she tried to climb upon the net of coconuts. The net shifted each time, and the coconuts rolled, tumbling her back into the ocean. She gave it up at last and worried out a nut, cracked it with her shark knife, drank the milk, and ate some of the meat.
“About noon, she noticed a flock of seabirds to the east, screaming and diving down onto the water. Some circled her but flew back to their companions without alighting. Grandma pushed herself out of the water as far as she could. The crest of a wave lifted her. She glimpsed something dark on the water beneath the birds. It wasn’t far. She pushed away from the net and swam toward the birds. She was almost upon them before she realized they were at a body. She swam up, scattered the birds with a fistful of water, and rolled the body over. It was Pete Junior. He was tangled up in a line and a broken spar.
“I think many people would have given up to grief right there—probably drowned. But Grandma Pu-pu came to a decision. She knew there was nothing she could do for her firstborn, so she turned away and swam back to the net.
“She was about halfway back when she saw the fin. It was like a knifeblade in the seas, circling her. She paddled slower, pausing to put her face in the water and watch for the attack. The shark is a coward, and this one took a long time to make its first rush. Grandma saw it and met the shark with the flat of her hand on its snout. The force of the rush pushed her half out of the water.
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