by John Enright
“I didn’t know it meant anything like that, and I was only following orders.”
“I have seen no written authorization, directions, or requests for permission for your extraordinary activities, Sergeant.”
“The Western Samoa police had no problems with our investigation.”
“This transcends being a police matter. You have violated tenets of international law. This is a sensitive and serious allegation. It impinges upon questions of diplomatic reciprocity and yet to be achieved agreements of jurisdiction and extradition.”
“It was the assistant commissioner’s idea. The commissioner and my CID captain agreed to it.”
“The assistant commissioner is off-island at present and not here to supply his side of the story. And as for the commissioner and your captain, I have reason to believe that they only thought your trip was a short vacation perk for a veteran officer, not that you would become the cause of an international incident.”
“An international incident?” Apelu’s voice rose just as he did from his chair. One of the men took a step toward him.
“And there is also the matter of reports of your public drunkenness in Apia, your involvement in a public civic disturbance involving property damage and terroristic threatening at a drinking establishment called the VIP Lounge, and your association with a Miss Ulifanua Malolo, a known underworld figure.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Apelu was now standing in front of the AG’s desk and his voice was loud. Both of the men at the door came toward him, and the AG pushed himself in his chair backward from the desk.
“I’d advise you to get a lawyer, Sergeant, and prepare for an extended dose of litigation, the specifics of which you will be served with in due time by this office. And I would hope you will cooperate fully with your department’s own internal investigation by turning over any notes and records of your activities in Apia.” The AG was gripping the arms of his chair as he seemed to recite this, staring at Apelu. “You can go.”
One of the men took Apelu’s elbow to lead him away, but he jerked his arm loose. “What about your man Mati, Investigator Sparks? He was there with me. Wasn’t his presence your office’s mark of approval for our investigation?”
“Tavita?” the AG asked one of the men.
“Sparks has been on vacation the past week, sir. He said he was going off-island. He’s not due back until Monday,” the man who hadn’t grabbed Apelu answered.
“On assignment?” the AG asked.
“No, on leave.”
“And I think you had better leave, Sergeant,” the AG said, “before you get yourself into more trouble than you are already in with false accusations.”
The AG’s goon took his elbow again and again Apelu jerked it away, but he left, peaceably, shaking his head.
Apelu didn’t return the truck to Sina. She could get home without it. First he drove home and found Lisa Ah Chong’s business card. The line the AG was taking sounded familiar. He was lucky and caught her in her office. He was surprised when she recognized his voice before he could introduce himself.
“Surely you don’t have news for me already, Apelu?”
“I’m not sure if this is news to you or not, Lisa, but I’m in trouble over here, and it sounds suspiciously like what you were quizzing me about.”
“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”
Apelu decided not to tell her about the suspension. “An investigation by the attorney general’s office into what I was doing in Apia and what international laws I may have been breaking by doing so. I was just wondering if you had shared your concerns about that with anyone else.”
There was a silent pause. “You mean, did I rat on you to my superiors?” Lisa sounded a little pissed.
“Something like that, yeah.” Apelu tapped a cigarette out of his pack and lit it. Sina had declared the house a smoke-free zone, but he was in a rules-breaking mood.
“Listen, Apelu, I do not appreciate that suggestion. We may not have hit it off, but I’m not going to go out of my way to get you in trouble, especially seeing as I haven’t been exactly kosher by enlisting your assistance. Nobody else knows about our little meeting. As far as I know, nobody else in this department even knows you were over here or what you were doing.”
“How about your friends at the table that night?”
“Only one of them works here, and he’s in contracts. He wouldn’t have noticed if you were carrying two dead babies.”
“Well, somebody got a complaint to the AG and fast.”
“I can’t believe anybody here would want to make a big deal over it. For one thing it would also get the people here who cooperated with you in trouble.”
“So, you don’t know anything about this?” Apelu stretched the cord on the kitchen wall phone to the max so that he could flick his cigarette ash into the sink.
“No, I don’t, Apelu. Goddamn it.” There was another silent pause, but Apelu didn’t fill it. “Listen, Apelu, I’m sorry if you’ve got your thing in a wringer, but I had nothing to do with it.” Another silence. “Apelu? You there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.” Pause. “I believe you.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“But could you sort of snoop around, see where all this is coming from?” Apelu turned on the kitchen sink faucet to put out his cigarette.
“I’ll see what I can see.” Lisa didn’t sound terribly enthusiastic. “Can you still look into that list of names for me? Or does this…?”
“No, no, I’ll follow up on that for you.” I’ll have plenty of time on my hands, Apelu thought.
“So, how can I reach you if I find anything out?” Lisa asked.
“No, don’t reach me. I’ll reach you. I’ll call you back in a few days when I find something out. Listen, Lisa, no hard feelings. I’m just trying to figure this all out. I thought maybe you had to file a report or something or that someone may have asked you about me. Just trying to figure it out, that’s all.”
“All right. I guess.” Pause. “If you can’t reach me at this number, try me at home.” And Lisa gave him her home phone number. Apelu wrote it down on the back of her business card.
Then Apelu went for another ride. He hit the back roads that he seldom drove on—the dirt tracks off the ends of the asphalt, the gravel ruts that dead-ended at deserted seaside cliffs, the no-exit plantation roads where the grass got so high he had to stop and switch his wheels to four-wheel drive. He drove slowly, as if searching for something. It calmed him.
Late in the afternoon he ended up at the country club bar. There was seldom anyone in there at that time of day. The golfers in their cleats would be drinking at the open-air beer stand downstairs. The lunch crowd had left, and it would be hours before the first dinner cocktail customers would arrive. He had the bar to himself and ordered a Steinlager. In front of him, behind the bar, a plate-glass window ran the length of the counter. The view was out over the back nine holes of the golf course with its occasional tall trophy banyan trees, the island’s green mountainous spine beyond, a stretch of white foam-boarded coastline jagging out toward a distant vanishing point, and the ocean.
Apelu recognized the attorney general coming in from the eighteenth green with a couple of other department-head types, but it didn’t mean much to him. Apelu was thinking about the mountains, how when he was a kid he and his buddies would escape there for entire days, hunting birds with slingshots, raiding plantations for coconuts and bananas, pretending to all sorts of freedoms, and by living out their pretensions making them real, at least for that day.
Apelu remembered a story his grandmother told. It was meant to scare them, but he, his brothers, and their male cousins loved the story because it offered an alternative, an escape from the lives they knew and sometimes chaffed against. It was the story of the wild man.
The Samoans called him Malua, though that Samoan word couldn’t have been his real name because he was a Solomon Islander, a Melanesian, as black as basalt—or as Apelu’s grand
mother had put it, as black as a hole in the ground in the middle of the night. The story was that back when blackbirders—palangi slavers who captured or enticed natives of one island group to be sold as plantation laborers elsewhere in the Pacific—still plied the islands, several Solomon Islanders had escaped from their captors while en route to somewhere else. The escapees ended up on the shores of Tutuila, where they took to the mountain jungles. Over the years two of them either came in from the bush or died, and only a third, Malua, was left in hiding. He survived for twenty years in splendid isolation off what his vast jungle keep offered in abundance. Here was an actual jungle boogeyman in the bush. He was used to frighten a whole generation of Samoan children into fearful social compliance. Apelu’s grandmother had been one of those children, and she kept the boogeyman alive in her stories long after his capture and death.
For Apelu and his childhood mates Malua was still there in the mountains—him or someone like him, an offspring maybe. In the bush you always felt like someone was watching you. With a Malua there that someone took on form, drama, meaning. When you stopped to glance over your shoulder at a distant movement that you had felt but hadn’t seen, when you all froze at the sound of a branch breaking down the hidden canyon, when you came across a track in the bush that you didn’t remember being there before—their causes had an embodiment, a name, a mystery attached to them. Sometimes they would pretend to search for Malua’s campsites—an excuse for exploring beyond the ridgelines and valleys they already knew. Sometimes Apelu still dreamed he was Malua, a barefoot wild man for whom the deepest bush was like a playground through which he could glide like a barracuda across a reef face or swoop like an owl from ridgeline to ridgeline. He was the ultimate outsider, lone survivor, someone needing no one but himself, secure in his solitary powers. That childhood fantasy entertained him now as he sat at the bar and watched the darkness deepen in the mountain clefts. He saw himself sitting on a thick mat of new-cut leaves on his ledge of a camp high in the back of one of those valleys, watching the light show of another day dying on the expanse of the ocean below, sipping…what? A fresh drinking coconut? Some sort of chunky, syrupy, jungle-made toddy? Apelu ordered another beer. Was part of his fantasy that he would be free of his job and its hassles, free of his bosses and social obligations, free of his marriage, free of all those things that made him feel trapped?
The reality was it was sunset, he had the truck, and Sina would need it soon to get to her bingo game. He drank up, knowing that for the time being at least Sina would not want to—nor need to—know anything about what was happening in either his real or fantasy lives.
CHAPTER 8
THAT NIGHT APELU slept alone and very uncomfortably on the sofa in the front room. He left before first light, before anyone else in the house awoke. He caught a jitney bus to town. He hadn’t told Sina, who was still ignoring him, about his suspension. It was strange going into town and not having to go to work. He ate breakfast at a place near the market, then walked to the governor’s office building. He was first in line at the Immigration office when it opened its doors. As it happened, he knew the clerk he drew, not well but well enough so that they both pretended that they were old friends. The guy knew that Apelu was a detective, so Apelu didn’t have to show his badge or falsely claim that he was there on official business.
“We got a missing person I’m trying to track down. I’m hoping you guys can help,” Apelu said.
“How so?”
“Well, it looks like she’s an overstayer on a visa from Western. Her family is worried about her. We just need the name of her sponsor so I can follow up on it.” Apelu pulled Lisa’s folded-up list from his pocket.
“Her family doesn’t know who her sponsor is?”
“Seems not.” Apelu shook his head, commiserating with the clerk’s incredulity. “Is there some form I have to fill out or something?”
“We normally don’t give out that sort of information.”
“Well, this is a police matter.”
“Still.” The clerk looked down then left and right. “Wait here.” And he went off toward an office whose door had a sign saying Assistant Chief Immigration Officer.
Apelu waited. There were by now half a dozen people in the line behind him. At the next window over, a very fat, very loud woman was waving a fistful of papers in another clerk’s face, telling him that he was an idiot, the descendent of famous idiots, and that if she didn’t get her appointment with the Immigration Board she would personally make sure that no more idiots would be born in his part of the idiot family. That clerk also disappeared. The lines grew longer. The door to the assistant chief immigration officer’s office opened, and a portly bureaucrat in a dress shirt and tie and dress lavalava looked out at Apelu, then the door closed again.
Five minutes later Apelu’s clerk returned, carrying a cup of coffee. “Fill in this form with the information you’re requesting and I’ll pass it along, Apelu. That’s the best I can do.”
It was the wrong form, but Apelu filled it in as best he could, putting lines through items that didn’t apply, adding an explanatory note at the bottom of the page. He only asked about the first girl on Lisa’s list, but the clerk noticed the other names and asked about them.
“Yes, those too,” Apelu said. “But let’s do them one at a time, seeing as it’s not normal for you to do this. If you can do it for this one, I’ll come back for the others.” He knew this was not a time to be pushy.
“Same request? Request for the sponsor’s name?” the clerk asked.
“Yeah,” Apelu said and looked at him.
“Then give me that list and I’ll xerox it, attach it to the form, a blanket request. No reason for you to stand in line every time.”
“Okay. That’s cool. Let’s do that.” Apelu handed him Lisa’s list, and the clerk went off to make a copy. Maybe this would be easier than he had expected it would be, after all, Apelu thought. He added another note to the bottom of the form, asking for the same information for the names on the attached list. Then he signed the form and gave it to the clerk.
“How long will this take?” Apelu asked.
“If it’s approved, it wouldn’t take half an hour to pull the names from the files,” the clerk said. “They’ll give you a call.”
“No. That’s all right. I’m seldom at my desk at headquarters, and they’re no good at taking messages. I’ll check back tomorrow. Who should I ask for?”
“Assistant Chief Pouli, I guess.” The clerk handed Lisa’s list back to Apelu and stapled the copy to the back of the form.
This time Apelu borrowed the pickup without telling Sina. He drove out to Piapiatele, to Ezra’s place. Why should he spend his money on cranberry juice for Ezra when he had a whole room full of it?
As he pulled up to the house he could hear the dogs barking back in their kennel. As before, the doors were locked except for the sliding glass door onto the patio. The dogs were still barking. The place looked the same inside until he got to the kitchen. The hallway that had been piled with cases of cranberry juice was empty. He checked the storeroom that had been filled with tins of crackers and boxes of canned fruit—empty. He checked the freezer in the breezeway—all the T-bone steaks were gone. By the time he got to Ezra’s bunker it didn’t surprise him that it had also been cleaned out of its boxes of booty. The fire knives, though, were still there. Well, the fire knives aren’t hot, he thought, then laughed at himself.
Apelu went to the back of the house to check on the dogs. They stopped barking when they saw him and came over to the chain-link fence to slobber on it. He could see that there was water in the tin tub that served as their water dish. The kennel was clean.
“Yo, Nick, yo, Nora,” he said. “Howzit with you guys? Back home, huh?”
Nick gave three sharp barks and put a huge paw up on the inside of the gate. Nora flopped down to lick her privates.
“I guess somebody’s looking after you. Are you two happy monsters or what?”
Nick gave him a deep back-of-throat rumble and two barks and banged the gate again.
“Can’t right now, guy. Ain’t got the key.” Apelu held up the locked Yale to show the dog.
Nick barked four very precisely timed barks in the imperative voice.
“Sorry, big guy.” As Apelu walked away both of the dogs started barking again.
When Apelu rounded the corner of the house Asia was standing there with a shotgun, a familiar-looking shotgun, and once again it was pointed at him. He slowly extended his hands sideways, palms out. “Animal lover, just an innocent animal lover,” he said.
“Oh, it’s just you,” Asia said and lowered the muzzle of the gun.
“Nick and Nora look good,” Apelu said, lowering his hands. “Back home.”
“They’re just too much to deal with out of the kennel. I hate keeping them tied up.”
“Why the firepower?” Apelu asked.
“I heard them barking and thought someone was bothering them.”
“And…?”
“And some strange stuff has been going on over here.”
“Like people coming and going?”
“Yes, that. And I know that Ezra is still in jail because I tried to see him. So I came over here thinking Leilani was home, but it wasn’t her, just some men with a truck. I left them alone. Then they came back again later last night. I could tell it was them because the truck sounded the same.”
“Bum muffler?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe they hit one of those boulders in the road.”
“Maybe. What are you doing here? More police work?”
“No. I came to get cranberry juice to take to Ezra.”
“He likes cranberry juice.”
Apelu nodded toward the shotgun. “Do you think you could put down that gun? It makes me nervous.”
“What?” Asia seemed surprised that she was holding a gun. “Oh yeah.” And she uncocked the gun and leaned it gingerly against the wall of the house.