Bed of Nails (26 page)

But all of that was just the frame around
her.

If Yvette Theron had stopped the Mountie dead in his tracks at the Seattle convention, that was a prelude compared with the whammy that flattened him now. As lithe and lean as only youth can bestow, her body was accented by electric blue. The flimsy triangles that held her breasts were tied at the back of her neck and cupped their bounty in such a way that she needn’t have worn a top. The bottom of her bikini was hidden in the hip-hugging wrap of an ankle-length matching blue pareu, except that its cloth was patterned with white hibiscuses and flame-shaped red leaves. Was the bottom beneath as skimpy as the top? he wondered. Around her ankle was a bracelet of tiny white shells.

“Nope,” she said. “No better playmate.”

With a languid move as calculated as Gypsy Rose Lee’s, she tugged the pareu free from her waist. Closing in on Zinc, who still stood by the hammock, she looped the garment around his neck like she might a lasso. Her sunglasses were pushed up on top of her head. Her blonde hair, ruffled by the offshore breeze, had a life of its own. A bloodred flower was tucked behind her ear. And those eyes, the shade of one of the hues in the lagoon beyond, seemed to tug him into her like a magnetic dream.

The pareu slipped through her fingers until it hung free around her captive. Turning, Yvette strolled away toward the beckoning lagoon. His eyes slipped down her hourglass figure to her long and shapely legs, then back up to the bikini bottom.

Suddenly she stopped and looked over her shoulder.

“Well, are you going to join me?”

“Sure,” he said, and followed.

“If I were you,” she said, “I’d change into my trunks. You might sleep in your clothes. But swimming in them is a little much.”

“Here’s to bad beer,” he said, raising his coffee cup.

“I can’t toast that, Zinc. It made them
really
sick.”

“Made who sick?”

“Most of the Odyssey writers.”

“Bad beer?”

“
Bush
beer. Bad home brew.”

“Where was that?”

“On Atiu. At the
tumunu.
”

Refreshed by their morning frolic in Muri Lagoon, Zinc and Yvette were eating breakfast in the beachfront restaurant. The open-air octagon-shaped hut sat at the point where a stream that snaked through the lush resort fed the sea. In the light of day, the dark grounds through which the Mountie had followed the night porter a few hours ago were bursting with the riotous red, yellow, orange, and pink blossoms of torch gingers, fruit salad, monkey tails, hibiscus, frangipani, golden trumpets, and tropical snow planted in a manicured jungle of green, green, green. Beyond the railing beside their table on the perimeter deck of the hut, a school of mullet fish swam in lilied waters stalked by a predatory eel.

“Eat up,” Yvette said. “We have to catch a plane.”

“The Odyssey continues?”

“With diminished ranks.”

“Who survived the bad beer?”

“Bret, Wes, Petra, me, and two lawyers-slash-wannabe writers.”

“Where are they now?”

“On Atiu. Waiting for us.”

“
Us?
They know I’m coming?”

“I spilled the beans. That’s how I got to accompany the poisoned ones back here. To pick you up.”

“Poisoned?”

“Get your food. Time is tight.”

The buffet breakfast was laid out in the center of the thatched hut. The roof was supported by several poles sheathed with green fronds, the ribs of each palm radiating out from a vertical spine. Suspended over the table spread with tropical fare, an old wooden outrigger canoe hung in a fishing net. As he stocked his plate with fresh papaw, starfruit, guava, pineapple, coconut meat, and grapefruit that tasted like lime, Zinc prayed that the meshes above weren’t rotten from brine. The cop knew he was Down Under—in the case of the boat,
literally
—by the Kiwi and Aussie voices he heard using colloquialisms like “poor bloke” and “mate” and “bit of a shocker” in accents that complemented tossing another shrimp on the barbie. That this was a parallel world to his was obvious from brand names. Nothing was packaged as it should be. They had Ricies instead of Rice Krispies, Skippy instead of Corn Flakes, and Weetabix instead of Shredded Wheat. And why all the Germans?

Yvette was shooing the mynah birds away as Zinc returned to their table. He maneuvered around a pair of chickens pecking crumbs up off the floor, and reclaimed his seat while the pesky mynahs took to the air in a flap of white stripes on brown feathered wings and tails, amid caws of protest from their yellow beaks. A second later, they were landing on the next table.

“Damn birds,” Zinc swore. “It’s like that Hitchcock film.”

“There’s a story in this.”

“Yeah? Pray tell.”

“Mynah birds are native to India. Tahiti imported them in the 1800s to control coconut stick insects. The mynahs were so successful at the job that the Cooks imported them in the 1900s. They saved the coconut trees and multiplied so quickly that now they have pushed out most of Rarotonga’s native birds and drive diners like us mad.”

“You’re a font of knowledge.”

“I want to be a writer. Dig deep enough and there’s a story waiting to be mined from everything.”

“Can you tell me another story?”

“Sure.” Yvette rubbed her hands.

“Why are there so many Germans on the island? One of the clocks in reception tracks Frankfurt.”

“Easy,” she replied. “The curse of
Treasure Island.
”

“This I gotta hear.”

“Captain Cook sailed the South Seas and grabbed lots of sand for Britain. The French colonized Polynesia too. By the time Germany came looking for its place in the sun, there was squat left. Only Samoa, which was independent.”

“That was Germany’s Treasure Island?”

“No, I meant the book.”

“By Stevenson?”

“Yes, Robert Louis. By then, he was famous for
Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Jekyll and Hyde.
But the climate of Scotland was doing him in, and he was dying of consumption. So Stevenson left Edinburgh on a round-the-world quest to find somewhere that would alleviate his T.B. In the end, he chose Samoa.

“The Samoans took instantly to their new guest. The Scot learned their language quickly so that he could enthrall them with stories. By the time the Germans landed to stake their claim, not only was he ‘Tusitala,’ the Samoans’ teller of tales, but they had built him a magnificent estate—Vaima—in their midst. Not impressed, the Germans ordered Stevenson off their island, and that’s when the islanders pulled their knives. ‘That’s our Tusitala,’ they said.”

Zinc grinned. He could picture it.

“When Tusitala died, the Samoans hacked their way up a pinnacle of rock to bury him near the heavens. The curse of
Treasure Island
cost the Germans their colony after the First World War. So ever since, they’ve been forced to wander the South Pacific in search of sun under a foreign flag, and that was the
real
cause of the Second World War.”

Zinc laughed. “I think your plot needs work.”

“That’s my story,” Yvette said, “and I’m sticking to it.”

He felt as if he could sit and listen to her forever. It was one of those idyllic junctures in life when everything comes together: setting, company, conversation, weather, the works. For the first time since Alex died, he was reveling in love, lust, infatuation, the whole mirage. If fate had sent the Reaper to harvest him instead of Alex, this is the outcome that he would have wished for her. To find someone new to dispel crippling memories so that life could move on.

Tempus fugit.

But still he felt guilty. Yvette was
too
young and
too
sexy.

“I’ll give you another chance. Tell me the story behind bad beer,” he said.

“Do you know what a
tumunu
is?”

“No idea.”

“The bush-beer drinking school that survives on Atiu. As planned, the Odyssey arrived in Raro on Wednesday. The next morning, we flew to Atiu, the cannibal island. Since that’s where the initial writing seminar was to be held, Bret thought it a good idea to pass his literary wisdom on to us neophytes in the traditional way.”

“At a
tumunu?
”

“Uh-huh. A makeshift pub in the bush. That word actually refers to the trunk of the coconut tree—the round, thick part that’s closest to the ground and can be hollowed out to make a container that holds up to forty gallons of drink.”

“Of bush beer?” said Zinc.

“Not originally. In the years before Captain Cook put Atiu on his map, kava was the drink prepared in the trunk. It was made from the root of the pepper plant. Though nonalcoholic, it packed a punch. Depending on your tolerance, you got a mild buzz or were knocked flat on your butt. The
tumunu
was strictly for men. They’d sit around, get zonked, eat, and talk about life.”

“Eat like cannibals?”

“I suppose. When the missionaries hit the beach in the 1800s, they suppressed kava
tumunus
with their blue laws. But they also introduced oranges as food, and soon the islanders learned from white Tahitian beachcombers how to brew orange beer. If the natives thought kava was potent, that stuff was Kickapoo joy juice.”

“No doubt the Bible-thumpers reveled in that.”

“They tried to stamp it out, of course, but the
tumunus
moved into the bush. Word would spread as to where and when, like it does now for raves back home. The boozing was done in the bush, so it became ‘bush beer.’ And because the drinking sessions were how the elders passed on their wisdom, the
tumunu
became known as the ‘bush-beer school.’ So that’s why Bret suggested it for a seminar.”

“And the poison?”

“Bret paid some of the locals for use of their
tumunu
site, and for a few gallons of brew. The thirteen of us gathered in the bush to drink and talk. A bush-beer setup consists of a ring of stools cut from coconut logs, with the hollowed-out trunk in the center. The barman, or
tangata kapu
—which was Bret, in our case—sits beside the beer. He scoops a cupful out of the
tumunu
with a small coconut shell and hands it to one of those on the stools to swallow in a gulp. The drinker returns the cup to the barman to refill, then it’s passed to the next in line.”

“Everyone drinks from the same cup?”

“Yes,” said Yvette, “unless you wave the cup by. No one is forced to drink what they don’t want.”

“Is that what happened there? Bret controlled the drinking?”

“Right. He filled the cup from the trunk and passed it to each of us in turn. Until most began throwing up.”

“Did you drink?”

“No.”

“Did Petra?”

“Don’t think so.”

“What about Bret and Wes?”

“I know Bret had a few. Someone made a joke about our ending up with a drunken barman.”

“How does that make sense? If it was bad beer in the
tumunu,
why didn’t he get sick?”

“Good question.”

“Could Bret have poisoned the others?”

“What, you mean could he have scooped a cupful inside the trunk, then added poison of some sort while it was out of sight, before drawing the cup from the trunk to pass it to someone on the stools?”

“That’s what I mean.”

Yvette shrugged. “I guess so. But why would Bret do that? Travel with us to the Cooks, then reduce the group?”

Zinc was still packed from his overnight flight, so all he had to do to get ready to fly on to Atiu was take a quick shower and dig out fresh clothes: a tropical patterned short-sleeved shirt worn with the tail out over khaki shorts and sandals. To top it off, he plunked a wide-brimmed safari hat on his head and contemplated fastening one side up, Australian-style, but then concluded that would be geek chic in a tourist. Besides, it seemed illogical to bare one side of your face to the sun, when the purpose of wearing a hat was to protect yourself from its rays. By the time he carried his bag out to the beachside patio, Yvette sat waiting for him in a lounge chair. She had switched her hip-hugging pareu for a full-body one worn like a dress. The curvy sheath was navy blue with royal-blue marbling and a pattern of bright red-and-yellow flowers. The actual flowers behind her ear matched the print.

“Why do men always keep you waiting?” she asked.

“I had to paint my toenails.”

“Excuses, excuses. One thing I’ll say about the tropics is no fuss, no muss. Fuss with your makeup, muss with your hair, and you look like a clown.”

“Another story?”

“Try me.”

“What gives with all the tattoos?”

With breakfast over, the sand was the place to hang out. The Kiwis and the Aussies were staking their claims to wide-open plots of beach. True, this was the age of new tribalism, when body piercing, scarification, and tattooing were back in vogue, but even so, the Down Under folks appeared to be addicted to taking ink. Both genders were human canvases.

Most of the males wore surfing shorts with muscle shirts. Splotches of color on their shoulders were in, as were barbed-wire rings around their upper arms. The funny thing about guys with tattoos is that they appear to swagger, as if their balls are a little too big to fit between their thighs.

“The Kiwis are a snap,” Yvette said. “Their islands once belonged to the Maoris. The Maoris were the tattooingest culture on earth. Horrific designs on their faces and full-body cover. As for Aussies, Oz began as a prison colony for transported Brits. Cons love tattoos, so ink’s in their descendants’ genes.”

“Shh! Keep your voice down! You’ll get us creamed!”

“That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

The tattoos on the females were much subtler. The scent of exotic lotions wafted up the beach as—having set up shop with sand towels, sandals, paperbacks, and peeled-off pareus—they slathered creams onto their tanned bodies in preparation for another bake. A Chinese girl had a snake tattooed the length of her spine. From his case in Hong Kong, Zinc recognized the symbols at top and bottom as “good luck” and “dragon.” The peekaboo brigade was out in force too—those women who tucked half-hidden etchings away in their wispy bikinis, like the Amazon who stretched out facedown on the sand nearby and undid the top of her swimsuit to flash a creamy patch on the side of her patterned breast.

“You have a tattoo?” Zinc asked.

“Maybe,” Yvette replied.

“I doubt it. I’ve seen most of you.”

“But not
all
of me
.
”

“Then I guess I’ll never know,” he said, sighing.

“You never know,” she said.

They accompanied his luggage through the garden of Eden in the center of the resort, depositing his bag beside hers in reception while Zinc checked out. A handsome Cook Islander in a blue Polynesian shirt with a name on his tag that the Mountie couldn’t pronounce processed his Visa card, then Zinc and Yvette boarded the airport bus.

“Kia Orana”
—“Hello”—read the overhead welcome sign at their backs.

The literal translation was “May you live.”

Which was more to the point.

The bus continued clockwise around the island, in the same direction as that driven when Zinc had arrived. As it rounded the west coast to reach the airport along the northwest shore, it passed a big white missionary church in Arorangi village, the first to be built on the island, in 1849. Just up the road from it and before a nine-hole golf course, Yvette pointed down to the beach.

“Black Rock,” she said.

“I saw that film.”

“
Bad Day at Black Rock?
I saw it too.”

“Spencer Tracy.”

“The one-armed man. He lays Ernest Borgnine flat with a karate chop.”

“You like old movies?”

“Better than the shit Hollywood turns out these days,” she replied.

“Why so much crap?”

“They ceased buying novels. Instead, Hollywood churns out plots with no foundation. Like buildings, they topple.”

Not only did Yvette
look
like Alex, but their interests ran parallel too.

Another writer.

Another retro addict.

“Petra’s the expert on missionaries.” Again, Yvette indicated the passing beach. “I think it’s some sort of
danse macabre
between her and her dad.”

“The preacher’s daughter,” said Zinc.

“It can really screw you up. Anything you need for a plot, just ask her. Black Rock is where the spirits of the dead departed from Rarotonga for their voyage back to Avaiki.”

“Hawaii? A land of ghosts? I thought that was where zonked-out surfers went to wear puka shells?”

“It sounds like Hawaii, but it’s not. In fact, Hawaii takes its name from the mythical Avaiki. Polynesians viewed the universe as the hollow of a vast coconut shell. Avaiki was at the center. They had no conception of a creator. Instead, they believed that their islands had been dragged up out of the depths of Avaiki—the Netherworld—otherwise known as Po, or the Night. These islands were merely the gross outward form, or body, so the spirits of the dead returned to Avaiki and added their ethereal essence to the other world.”

“From Black Rock?”

“Uh-huh. From the beach below. So imagine what Cook Islanders must have thought in 1823 when Papeiha, the first Christian missionary, waded ashore to the same beach, clasping the Bible over his head to bring the word of God from a distant realm.”

“I’ll bet there’s a story in
that,
” Zinc teased.

“Tinomana was the local cannibal chief. He challenged Papeiha to eat a banana roasted on a burning idol from his sacred
marae.
When the missionary didn’t drop dead on the spot, the chief became the first Cook Islander to convert. Within a year, all the idols on Raro had been overthrown and burned. Tinomana gave the missionaries the land for the church we just passed. Papeiha is buried in the center of its graveyard, beneath the giant monument erected by his descendants. The missionary married the daughter of the chief, but Tinomana isn’t buried at the church. Instead, his bones are up on the hill behind Arorangi, near the old
marae
from his cannibal days.”

“Is there a moral?”

“There’s certainly a question. Did the chief have second thoughts about the new religion?”

Daylight had downscaled the Rarotonga airport appreciably. Gone was the Air New Zealand Boeing 767 jet from the single runway’s ramp, and in its stead sat a tiny eighteen-passenger Air Rarotonga Bandeirante turboprop. The plane was a dainty little thing. The white fuselage ran back to a two-toned blue tail patterned with three pink flowers. The pilots looked like a pair of kindergarten kids strolling toward a toy plane in their schoolboy duds: blue shorts and white kneesocks, gray shirts with blue epaulets, and aviator shades. Zinc felt like Gulliver in Lilliput, for everything about this island was on a miniature scale. The building beside the runway and closer to the shore was erected in 1973 as a hostel for the New Zealand workers who had been imported to construct the airport to bring tourists to the islands. It was now the Cook Islands Parliament, and the bedrooms were the offices of the prime minister and other officials.

The interisland check-in was an open-air shed. The boarding gate was a hole in a hedge. A swath of grass with benches served as a waiting lounge. Security did not involve a rectal search. Instead, the Mountie and Yvette simply walked through the hedge and across the scorching Tarmac to the stairs up into the plane, which pulled down out of the fuselage like a stepping stool. If it was hot outside, it was an oven within. A single file of seats flanked each side of the aisle back to a bench in the rear. Sweat was dripping off Zinc by the time he buckled himself into the front row. His seat was 1G, which made no sense. The turboprop was just outside his window. He knew of a case in North America where a prop had spun off a plane and slashed into the fuselage to decapitate a passenger sitting in the front row.

The Bandeirante buzzed like a hornet on takeoff. Sunlight glinted off the silver nose cone of the prop as they lifted up, up, and away. Because the takeoff was out to sea to the west, and the island of Atiu was back to the east, the plane banked sharply and gave Zinc a bird’s-eye look down on Rarotonga. Being the only high volcanic island in the Cooks, it was a mountainous maze of razorback ridges, steep valleys, and tumbling white cascades. The mountains were what remained of the rim of the volcanic cone, and except for a jutting spike of rock known as the Needle, the highlands were covered with dense green jungle. As Zinc’s eyes plunged down the inclines to Muri Lagoon, they picked out white goats and black pigs grazing in papaw patches and citrus groves, and men with shovels digging out swampy taro fields.

“See where we were?” Yvette asked, leaning across the aisle. She had to shout over the droning of the engines and the whooshing of air that did little to quell the oven heat.

“Yeah, I see the
motus.
And the passage through the reef.”

“There’s a story behind that.”

“Do I want to know?” Zinc joshed.

“In less than forty-five minutes, we’ll land on Atiu. Both Bret and Wes are going to wonder why you’re there. Your cover story is that like the burnt-out lawyers on the Odyssey, you hope writing will be a ticket out of your current job. The theme of this junket is cannibal plots. Does it not behoove you as a cop to show as much interest in your new career as possible?”

“Feed me,” Zinc said.

“The Cook Islands are the crossroads of the South Pacific. What’s ironic is that Cook all but ignored them. His paradises were Tahiti to the east and Tonga to the west. The only Cook Island that Cook actually set foot on was the deserted atoll of Palmerston. He named them the Hervey Islands, after some insignificant British admiral. Half a century later, the Herveys were renamed the Cooks by a Russian cartographer to honor the captain who had sailed them.”

Zinc knew that. But he loved to hear her talk. And it didn’t hurt to see down her neckline while Yvette leaned over.

“What would you call the Cooks?” he asked.

“I’d call them the Blighs.”

“After the
Bounty?
”

“Yes,” she said. “Captain Bligh discovered Aitutaki to the north in 1789. Seventeen days later, en route to Tonga, the mutiny occurred. The
Bounty,
under Fletcher Christian, discovered Rarotonga while sailing the South Seas to find a place to hide from the British navy. Their hunters—Captain Edwards on HMS
Pandora
—came through too. And a few years later, Bligh returned. A lot of thrilling history played out here, so I think Captain Bligh should get the nod.”

“Is that your story?”

“No, that’s the buildup. The
Bounty
discovered Rarotonga, but the mutineers didn’t land. The next ship that passed by found sandalwood in the sea, a valuable commodity in Asia for making incense joss sticks. So an Australian sandalwood company sent Capt. Philip Goodenough and the
Cumberland
to Rarotonga in 1814 to harvest that plant. Goodenough took his female companion, Ann Butcher, along, so she became the first European woman in the Cooks. The whites came ashore at Muri Lagoon and stayed for three months. Eventually, a series of squabbles arose. The sailors hauled local women off to the ship for sex. On discovering
nono,
a plant that produces yellow dye, they dug it up in front of the sacred
marae.
And when they tried to steal a hoard of coconuts from the wrong man, all hell broke loose. One by one, the whites were chased down, hacked apart, and eaten. Ann Butcher was abducted by a cannibal named Moe. His plan was to take her as a lover, but another lust got the better of him. As Goodenough sailed away to save his sorry ass, she was being butchered and roasted on a spit.”

“That was the layer of history under our feet?”

“What do you think? It’s a true story.”

“With a lot of play on words. Ann got cooked in the Cook Islands. Goodenough’s girlfriend was good enough to eat. And the cannibal who abducted her butchered Ann Butcher.”

“Mind if I use that?” Yvette asked.

“Be my guest.”

“That’s the story I plan to write out of this Odyssey. I’m going to tell it from Ann’s point of view.”

Sunlight streamed into that side of the plane. Through the opening into the cockpit, Zinc watched the pilot wedge a square of cardboard into his side window as a sunscreen. After readjusting a dial to trim the plane, he went back to reading a binder entitled “Operating Manual.” Zinc hoped he was studying to upgrade to another model, and not to learn about the one they were in.