She was silent, her face looked strange and bloodless. After a while she answered. “I’ve exhausted every other way. For almost twenty years I’ve tried. All that’s left is this. I won’t back down.”
His eyes grew dark, he listened to a kettle screaming in another room. She turned it off, came back and paced the room, highly agitated. He stood up, reached for her hand, turning it over and over in his, her golden-brown skin making his look larval.
“I know you’re not in love with me. Maybe one day. But part of you trusts part of me, don’t deny it. What I’m saying is, if this is what you choose ... I choose to go with you. I’ll work beside you, teach your people what I know about explosives, assembling, detonating.”
“They won’t trust you. They won’t accept you.”
“Then, make them!” He rubbed his hand across his face. “Christ, I’m exhausted, been up three nights tracking you. It’s late. I’ve taken a room at the Ilikai. I think I’ve given you enough to dwell on.” Timidly, he kissed her cheek. “I’ll see you in the morning, Vanya.”
She held him back by his arm. “I need to know why. Why did you really come here? Why are you offering to help me?”
He looked at her, the dark, lush beauty of this woman, a principled anger in the eyes. He could smell her scent, even smell the change in her temperature. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
When he left, she paced the living room again, still agitated. Then she touched the chair he sat in, as if touch would process the experience of his really having been there. A simple chair, upright, accommodating. He was gone, and if he never returned, that was all she had, a chair he sat in.
In bed, she tossed and turned, remembering his ginger hair brushing her shoulders, how it disturbed, then aroused her. She put her hand between her legs, touching, touching until she was very moist. Then driving, outdistancing herself, but when she had come and come again, and lay exhausted, she still wanted him. She moaned, sat up, leaning at a window, wondering if sex was just the body screaming of its will to live. Flowers pelted down, poinciana, pīkake, trees bent praying in the wind. What has happened, that I can no longer pray?
The phone rang very late, and it was Simon. “There was something on the news. Federal agents just busted marijuana growers over on the Big Island, vicinity of Hilo. You know, of course, the FBI has opened up a branch there?”
“I’ve heard rumors.”
“Well, it may fit in with something I got on the military pipeline before I left Darwin. Outside Kailua there’s a shop, sells Army-Navy surplus, you know, tents, boots, fatigues. Word is, it’s a front for Army Intelligence.” He paused. “You get my drift?”
“Not exactly.”
“They’re stepping up surveillance, Vanya. Too much happening on the Big Island, proposed spaceport, huge resorts, too many angry locals. Now, they’ve got both sides of the island covered, Hilo, and Kailua.” He paused, thinking. “Actually, I’d be careful about conversations on the phone.”
She hung up slowly, thinking of Simon, how he could help her, the possibility that he might really care for her. She turned her back to such possibilities, fell asleep reciting her long list of reasons not to trust him.
Ka Hale o Ka ‘Ili
* * *
House of Skin
RACHEL LAY BACK ON A CHAISE, sunlight dappling her hand which held her grandfather’s hand. He dozed beside her in his wheelchair, newspaper drifting from his lap. Beyond him, Pono sprawled, snoring softly in the porch-swing, hair flowing down to the lānai. It billowed softly in the trades. Her beauty seemed to have stepped forward in the months since they brought Duke home. Lying there, head flung back, her cheeks were smooth, as if all the wrinkles had been ironed out. She looked like a young, native girl on a Sunday porch beside her lover.
A peacock strutted by, pecking at the ground, doves warbled in the guavas, and Rachel was struck by the brilliance of the day, feeling drugged from the sweet heaviness of pīkake and frangipani. She gazed at her grandparents, their faces played upon by light and shadow. In sleep, Pono’s foot was touching Duke’s foot, in turn his hand was held by Rachel’s. Blood humming through each other, blending into one another. A breathing, dreaming tribe. She knew such perfect joy then, such completeness, the moment seemed a sacrament.
Yet Pono’s movements, even in the past few weeks, had slowed, as if all the days of all the decades of summoning the superhuman strength that kept her life, her land, her secret intact, had finally taken their toll. Duke was home, she was allowed to rest.
Rachel sat up as if a bell had clanged inside her. She could feel each moment’s passing, like electric shocks, knowing she could never recreate this wholeness, this magic, with anything of equal weight. She would have to learn the lesson every day: that, sometimes, all that will define a person—instill within them dignity and purpose—all the human answers, are frozen in a few moments, a few days, and all the days to come are just a looking back. She closed her eyes, stroked Duke’s hand, tears drifted down her cheeks. This is my childhood. It has come so very late. But, it has come.
Later, when Run Run stepped outside, she found the three of them so deep in sleep—side by side, hands, feet touching—they looked like the newly dead.
She crossed herself, shook Rachel awake. “Da phone . . . somet’ing wrong wit’ Hiro.”
Rachel listened, could make no sense of it. Her cook, Fumiko, hated the phone, all “ring-ring, yak-yak,” she complained. When messages were left, she wrote nothing down, remembered only key words. “Hiro . .. hurt . . . coming home.” Puzzled, Rachel slowly climbed the stairs to pack.
While the driver slid her bags into a taxi, she sat with her head on Duke’s shoulder. “I was so young when we married, so in need. I thought I had found my father, that being with Hiro would protect me from the world.”
Duke spoke softly, caressing her hair. “Has he taught you wisdom?”
Pono grunted. “Taught her the ways of lowlife, mizu-shobai!”
Duke frowned at her. “Tsssk! Learn charity in your old age, woman.”
“He taught me ...” Rachel paused, giving it consideration. He had taught her to explore the many secret passages of lust, had taught her nuance, illusion, veiled suggestion. But he had also taught her to be sly, how to foil and disarm the world. He had taught her there was nothing more accurate than silence.
“. . . He taught me how to listen to a person’s voice, their implications, to look for the echo, not the sound. The shadow, not the light. Yes, Grandfather, he has taught me wisdom. And humility.”
“These are important things, things a father would have taught you. Be grateful to your husband. There are many kinds of love.” He turned to Pono. “Have you nothing to say to our child who is going to her injured husband?”
Pono looked away, smoothed her dress, looked back at Rachel. “Each night of my long life, your mother’s feet have run across my heart. Each day, your beauty, your generosity to others, leaves wet tracks on my vision. Come here, keiki.”
Pono held her then, like she would never let her go, this cub, this orphaned one. “My bones will rock with pride for you, through all eternity.” She hugged her with such ferocity, Rachel wondered if her grandmother had loved her most of all.
A taxi in the driveway of her house. A strange man standing on her lawn. From the back, she thought it was Hiro, hair slick, ebony-dark, slender waist, shoulder blades like drake’s wings pushing through his tailored suit. He turned, and he was young, he was no one she had ever seen. Approaching her slowly, he bowed. Alarmed, somewhat confused, Rachel motioned him through French doors into the living room.
He looked round at wealth displayed so subtlely it could be missed by the unknowing. But Hiro had trained him well. A soft austerity in simple silk-covered couches and chairs. In an otherwise empty corner, a solitary Menji vase, museum-quality. An ancient, nine-foot scroll embossed with gold-leaf characters hung from a wall.
“Ming dynasty,” he said softly, looking at the scroll, hi
s English halting, but correct.
Rachel waited, as the cook served tea in tall glasses with jade straws, cookies shaped like lotuses. She studied him before she spoke. No more than thirty, extremely fine-boned like a bird, which gave him natural elegance. Face flat, cheekbones wide, the amber skin of an Indo-Chinese.
“Where is my husband? What has happened to him? Who are you?”
He looked at her, puzzled. “I understood you had received the message. From the U.S. Embassy.”
She shook her head. “I know nothing. They never reached me. My cook called, told me Hiro was hurt, and coming home.”
The young man dropped his face in his hands, began to sob. “Master ... is dead!”
Rachel stared at him, his dark head reflecting iridescence of a sunbeam. Hiro was due. He’d soon be home, roaming the house calling out “Hai!” Even if he was dead, he’d soon be home.
When her voice came it was husky, almost male. “What did you say?”
“Master is dead!”
“Don’t use that word in my house. Stand up, please. Your name.”
He struggled to his feet, still weeping. “Ban Somporn Chantai.”
“Tell me what has happened.”
He wiped his face, blew his nose delicately. “Master . .. Mr. Hiro was shot, in a gambling den in Chiang Mai.” He began to weep again.
She couldn’t move. It seemed wrong to move. She suddenly felt exhausted. She wanted to lie down on the floor. “Who . . . shot him?”
He looked up, frightened. “Gangsters from Burma, now called My-anmar. He was moving into their gum trade.”
“Gum?”
“Poppy.”
Opium. Heroin. She passed her hand over her eyes, thinking of Ming. “Where is my husband’s body?”
“Honolulu Airport. You must have a mortuary sign for its release.”
She always thought she would die when Hiro died. She would die without him. Yet, here was her heart beating along inside her ribs. Maybe hearts are nearsighted, she thought. Maybe it thinks the man before me is Hiro, a younger Hiro. He wasn’t dead. Not yet. Even if he was. His death would come slowly, emerging in her shrieks at some dark hour when she accepted it. Her hands fell into pieces in her lap, yet her voice was calm, unnaturally calm.
“What is your role in all of this? Be honest. I will investigate you, anyway.”
His eyes, so dark and earnest, filled her with inquietude. He seemed so fragile, so defenseless, she wondered how he came to know someone like Hiro.
“I was .. . some years ago, he came to my village near Chiang Mai, several hours north of Bangkok. He was scouting for young girls for his pleasure houses. I have ... I had . . .three sisters, and he wanted them.”
“How old?”
“Kim was thirteen. My father sold her. The others, eight and nine, were beauties. Mr. Hiro offered much money. My mother said too young, said she would kill herself. So, he took the oldest. And me. I was twenty then. Had been to Pali Introductory School in Bangkok, studying to be a teacher, but was called home when my father fell ill with tuberculosis.”
Hiro’s death—if he was dead—his life leading to his death, began to be an odyssey spiralling into other odyssies.
“What did my husband train you for?”
He looked down, then looked across the room. “At first, I was going to be one of his boys. The ones he dressed as girls.”
She closed her eyes, at first she thought she had fainted. How can I bear this? How can I bear myself? She remembered all the nights Hiro had dressed her as a boy, bound her in delicate braided silk handcuffs, entered her stealthily, as he would a boy. Calling her boy-names.
“But I am clever,” Ban continued. “I began to tell him stories, myths, our lives, our village. It was like Scheherazade—night after night I talked. He began to see how bright I was, see me in a different way. He took me out of girl-clothes, began to train me as an adjutant. He began to call me Son, the son he said he never had.”
She gasped. The child I never gave him. How could I? That was not what I was for. I was another kind of child, in endless rut. Who is that weeping? Yes, it could be me.
“Oh, please don’t cry!” he begged.
Rachel calmed herself, motioned for him to continue.
“He was good to me,” Ban said. “And patient. But something happened to my sister, Kim. He put her in a pleasure house for sailors, gangsters. Men were very cruel because she was not beautiful. One day she hanged herself. She was my favorite and I ran away. Mr. Hiro found me, and promised me a better life. He gave me more responsibility, ordering his clothes and jewelry, dealing with doctors and examinations for the girls, while quietly learning the business-side of things. Shipments, delays, distributors. Yet, in my heart always the desire to finish my education, be someone respectable.”
“And how did you get his body out of Thailand?”
“Paying the authorities, police, consulates, even people at the U.S. Embassy. No one wants to be involved. You see, he had done things for the U.S. during the Korean War, and Vietnam.”
“Things?”
“Well, passing information. His connections through the water trade. In return, he said, no one interfered with his businesses. They turned their heads, gave him an open passport, anywhere he wished to go. But now ...”
“Now he is of no use-to them. And where did you get the money to pay off these people?”
“I have a modest bank account in Hong Kong.”
“Yes. You are clever, Ban. And now you want a show of gratitude from me. Perhaps a large check?”
He leaned forward, clasping his hands as if in prayer. “I have something else in mind, though I fear it may shock you.”
She sat back, wondering what more he could tell her, what more he could do to her. He had already made her different; she was no longer a woman waiting. There was no one to wait for.
He saw Rachel’s apprehension. “Please. I am not an opportunist. Someday I am going back to school. I shall be a doctor. Yes, that sounds artificial and cliché, what every grasping Thai says. ‘I want to help my people.’ But, I am going to succeed. So, I must keep my conscience clean.”
“What is it you are asking me?”
He looked round the room, and outside toward the spacious lawns, koi splashing in the pond, the gardener, the long, wide swimming pool. “You are not poor.”
“Obviously.” She crossed her slender legs with considerable composure. Yet her head swam. She felt extremely weak, knowing when she digested what this Ban had told her, she would shriek, her body would revolt.
“.. . so you must have many connections. Immigration, the Board of Health. People who would help you.”
A vision surfaced, Hiro in a box. She stood up almost screaming. “Please! Get on with it.”
“I will give you all I own, all of my savings. I will start again from scratch, if you will only help them, sponsor them. You would save their lives.”
She looked at him, confused. “Who? Who is so important to you?”
“My sisters! Men working for your husband, they have already bought them from my father. Only thirteen and twelve, they are already in a brothel. No rules, customers don’t care. Only filthy signs that read CUSTOMERS REQUESTED TO WEAR CONDOMS. Men laugh! Our neighbor’s daughter, they threw her out of the brothel when she grew too big. She came home begging with her newborn, both of them infected with AIDS virus.”
Rachel sat very still. He was presenting her with too much reality.
“I don’t know where to turn. My visa here is only for two weeks. I know no one else outside of Thailand.”
“What do you mean ’sponsor’?” she asked.
“Buy my sisters. Anyone can buy them, men, women. Bring them here to Honolulu, give them work as servants, yard-girls, anything.” He wept again, his fist hitting his knee repeatedly. “They are my life, my connection to this earth. They are beaten because I have made them promise to refuse men who will not wear condoms. They sit behind glass windows on a stage.
Customers select them like a piece of fruit. In six months, one month, one night! the wrong man will come, they will surely catch the virus. It’s a terrible epidemic in my country, did you know?”
She could not believe what she was hearing, what he was asking her to do. “You want me to travel to Chiang Mai, to buy your sisters from these thugs?”
“Yes! If I were rich, I would buy them, take them far away.”
“Why are you asking me?”
He looked at Rachel for a long time. “Because it is the moral thing. I have met others like you, wives whose husbands trade in girls, and boys, and drugs. The wives profess ignorance, pretend their husbands are international financiers, yacht and soy investors. But in their eyes I read guilt, terrible self-hatred.”
Rachel pointed her finger at him. “My husband paid you with profits made from young girls. How could you accept it?”
“I worked for him to save my sisters. Now I am asking you to save them.”
She stared at him, astonished. “I’ve never laid eyes on you before. How dare you come here, asking such a thing. Besides, I’ve never left these islands. I know nothing of the world.”
“Yes,” he said. “Living here in Paradise. No one starving, no one desperate ...” His voice turned dreamy, as if in a trance. “Have you ever loved someone enough to take their life? I have thought of killing my sisters, so they would die clean. It would be fast, painless. Of course, I would then kill myself. Life is not so precious. Life is very dirty.”
He seemed a young boy then, battered, lost. She wanted to touch his head like a mother.
“You are my last hope,” Ban said. “Someone with power.”
She had never thought of herself as powerful. She had only possessed the power of her beauty. A beautiful child. Hiro’s child. One of Hiro’s many children. You filth. You fornicator. Pederast. You trafficker in slaves.
“Ban, you say my husband is dead. I must be alone with this. If it’s true, there are things I must do. There’s a guest house here across the lawn. Kori-Kori will attend you. Go and rest for now.”
Shark Dialogues Page 44