Twenty Blue Devils (10 page)
Gideon was sympathetic, but only to a point. It seemed to him that Bertaud had right on his side, that the more they considered the “evidence” for a murder having been committed the flimsier it got, that while Nick's actions were hard to explain, there was no reason to assume that a cover-up was behind them. He was beginning to think that he and John were here on a wild-goose chase, not that he would mind all that much if that's what it came to. He had been ambivalent from the beginning, and if what it amounted to in the end was nothing more than a few days’ winter respite in the South Seas, he could live with that.
Besides, deep down he had the feeling that all these people, John included, would be better off if Brian were left in peace. Exhumations were like lawsuits; once begun they rarely turned out as expected, and however they turned out they had a way of leaving in their wake a family that wasn't much of a family anymore.
He sipped his beer, waited for John to come out of his funk, and abstractedly watched the parade of noontime activity just beyond the cafe tables, along the boulevard Pomare, Papeete's bustling heart. Guidebooks to Tahiti are near-unanimous in their advice on what to do when in Papeete: get out of it as soon as possible and go someplace that is unspoiled. Papeete, they explain, is noisy, dirty, tacky, commercial, and coarse. The bad press is nothing new. Robert Louis Stevenson sourly referred to it as “the dreaded semi-civilization of Papeete.” To Zane Grey it was “the eddying point for all the riffraff of the South Seas.” Somerset Maugham hated it. Paul Gauguin hated it. Jack London hated it.
Gideon liked it.
Papeete seemed to him a lively, healthy, unpredictable hybrid on the way to becoming who knew what, a cordial if not quite settled mix of East and West—or rather North and South—of Gallic elegance and reserve and island energy, ease, and unflappability. From where he sat he could see copra being loaded onto age-grayed tramp steamers on the nearby docks. He could see sweating tourists with loaded plastic shopping bags; hefty middle-aged Tahitian women in bright muumuus with loaded grocery sacks and with flowers in their hair; even a few grizzled, hollow-eyed European beachcombers in mildewed white clothes, straight out of a Maugham story. Farther out, in the harbor, a traditional Polynesian racing canoe skimmed through the water, propelled by a team of muscular brown youths at its oars.
And all of this South Seas ambience he looked at from a table in an undeniably French brasserie located on a pretty street of restaurants, boutiques, and airline offices. With Elvis on the speakers.
John came awake with a start. “Jeez, what are we doing sitting here? It's eleven-thirty. I've got a lot of questions for Nick and I'm gonna want some answers.” He caught a hesitant look in Gideon's eye. “Doc, you'll come with me, won't you? You wouldn't chicken out on me?"
"Well, actually, I was thinking of doing a little shopping while I'm in town, looking for a present for Julie."
"Yeah, but—"
"John, look. I signed on to do my thing with a set of skeletal remains, and I'm still ready to do that. But I'm not going to go argue with Nick about it. I don't know what's right, and I just don't feel as if I have any business interfering in this."
Glumly John swirled the last half-inch of beer in his bottle, “Okay, yeah, you're right, Doc. It's my family, not yours. Lucky me.” He finished the beer. “I'll collar Nick and find out what the hell is going on. How'll you get back to the hotel?"
"I'll hop a ride on
le truck.
"
John nodded. “All right, you go ahead, do your shopping, have a nice lunch, and go on back and lie around in a hammock all day.
I'll
deal with my screwball family."
Gideon beamed at him. “Now that,” he said, “is what I call a first-rate idea."
John left the Renault in the parking area beside Nick's sprawling white house and walked around to the French doors that opened onto the beachside terrace in back, which was the way all but strangers entered. At the edge of the flagstone terrace in the feathery shade of a couple of tall, slender mape trees, his aunt Celine—Nick's wife, the mother of Maggie and Therese—was standing at an easel, her back to him, an artist's palette hooked over one thumb, a brush in the other hand, and a second brush between her teeth. She was contemplating the half-finished oil painting in front of her and the immense panorama of sea and sky beyond. Once a famous island beauty who had even had a brief juvenile career in a few Hollywood movies, she was now a chubby, twinkling little woman of sixty with thinning black hair, forever dressed in a capacious, all-concealing, flowered muumuu from which her small, round arms stuck out like a couple of dusky sausages.
When she heard him come up she turned. Her face lit up. “Hello, you!” she cried in the rich Tahitian lilt that she had never lost, although she had spoken little but English and French for decades. Like John's mother, she had been born in Tahiti to Chinese parents who had come to work as laborers on the great Atimaono cotton plantation, and Chinese had never been more than a second language to her. “Hey, why you still so skinny? She don't feed you?"
Daintily, and somewhat absentmindedly, she proffered her cheek to be kissed. He kissed it, smiling. Celine was a good-natured, garrulous woman, but usually a little remote as well; not in an aloof or offensive way, but as if in a reverie of self-absorption, as if there were always something intensely interesting on her mind, only it never happened to be you or what you were talking about at the time.
Her approach to painting had some of the same quality, Celine, who lived three months of the year in Paris and the rest in Papara, unvaryingly painted French pictures when in Tahiti and Tahitian pictures when in France. She claimed it stimulated her creativity.
She took the brush from between her teeth and gestured at the painting. “So tell me, what you think?"
True to form, with a sparkling Polynesian seascape of lagoon, foaming reef, and limpid, cloud-studded blue sky spread out in all its glory before her, she was painting a picture of Notre Dame Cathedral from a dog-eared postcard tacked to an arm of the easel.
Looks great, Celine. You get better all the time."
"Don't bullshit me,” she said, but she beamed. “Hey, you early, boy. Nick said you not coming up till later."
"Well, I wanted to ask him a couple of things. Is he in the house?"
She shook her head. “No,” she said, “up at the farm. In the shed, I think. That man in one hell of a mood."
"Well, with poor Brian—"
"No, everybody feel rotten about that. This something else. What you do to him last night?"
"Not a thing, Celine. He probably just missed his beauty sleep, that's all."
"Well, he goddamn mad today,” Celine said, her attention returning to the painting. She chewed her lip and scowled at it. “Now where the hell I gonna find vermilion in this dump, you tell me that."
"Nice talking to you,
Makuahine makua,
” John said fondly. “Look forward to seeing you later."
"Just gonna have to use lousy cadmium red instead,” she said and stuck the brush back between her teeth.
In the half-light of the drying shed, a large, round-bellied Tahitian looked up at John from his knees, where he was rolling a coffee bean in his fingers, having picked it from one of the amber mounds that were being systematically spread by a couple of workers with blunt wooden rakes.
"The boss? Yeah, he down below, by the furnace, You got to go outside and come in again. Hot as hell down there."
"Thanks,” John said.
"If you selling something, don't bother, come back another time."
"That seems to be the general opinion.” John smiled. “I guess you don't remember me, Tari."
The Tahitian took another look. His neutral expression changed. “Oh, hey, the boss's nephew, right? How you doing, John?"
"Fine, how about yourself? Running the place yet?"
Tari Terui was one of Maggie's “projects.” The son of a man who had himself worked on a coffee farm all his life, he had been with the Paradise plantation for fifteen of his thirty years, starting as an unskilled laborer on the loading dock and eventually working himself up to a crew chief, which seemed to be as far as his vocational aims went. But Maggie had seen some spark of intelligence or aptitude in him and had gotten him, against his own judgment, to enroll in the technical college in Papeete. To everyone's surprise but hers he had stuck to it, seen it through, and emerged with a certificate in hotel management and tourism, the closest thing to a management degree that one could get on the island.
Since then he had been her shining example, and she had nursed and groomed him all the way to his present job as production foreman, the highest position that had ever been held at the farm by a native Tahitian. Now, John had heard, she had him in mind for bigger things still. Last week, when Nick had begun to wonder how he was going to replace Brian at the farm, she had argued that he would have a hard time finding a better operations manager than Tari Terui, or one who knew more about the coffee business. Given a little coaching and a month or so to learn the ropes, he would do a wonderful job.
Nick had surprised her by promptly accepting the idea, and Tari had now been the official heir apparent for going on two weeks.
"Oh, be a while before I'm ready to run things,” he said, getting to his feet. “Not till Thursday, anyhow.” And he laughed, but with a nervous little hiccup that suggested less assurance than the words did.
Despite his accomplishments, Tari had always struck John as a simple soul, a big, likeable islander who had been goaded by Maggie, with all good intentions, to a level he would never have wanted or reached on his own; a man who was in over his head or who thought so at any rate, and dearly wished himself back hefting bags at the loading dock with the other
kanakas
. As a result, under the friendly exterior and the high-pitched giggle there was an edge of uneasiness. If anything, John had seen it grow sharper over time.
Well, what the hell, it was Tart's life. If he didn't like it up there with the big boys, all he had to do was say no thanks. Nobody was forcing him. Still, he couldn't help rooting for the guy.
"Ah, you'll do fine, Tari. You know more about coffee than all the rest of them put together. So Nick's in a bad mood, huh?"
"You said it, brother."
"How bad? On a scale of one to ten."
"Oh, I don't know. Around seven hundred?"
"Thanks for the warning. See you later, Tari."
This was starting to get worrisome, John thought as he walked around the shed to the other entrance. Nick could be just about the most stubborn, contrary man in the world when he felt like it, and John wanted some answers—now, before Nick had time to concoct some kind of elaborate, cockamamie story. Obviously, a little psychology was called for, a little buttering-up.
A little coffee-talk.
"Hi there, Unc,” he said, nephew-like and chipper. “God, don't you love the smell of coffee beans?” He inhaled deeply, swelling his chest. “Nothing like it."
Nick, his matted shoulders running with sweat, was using a scoop to poke through the open lid of a large, slowly revolving drum full of beans, one of four identical drums connected to a thrumming furnace a few feet away. “Coffee beans don't have any smell,” he muttered without looking up. “Not till later."
"No?"
"No."
"Must be my imagination, then.” He cleared his throat. “Because they
look
so good, you know?"
Nick merely glanced at him. “Christ."
So the preliminary reports on Nick's mood were accurate. John watched the older man sift a few more beans, feel them between his fingers, toss them back through the opening, close the lid, and move silently on to the next drum. The only sounds came from the furnace and from the masses of beans, shifting as the drums turned:
sshhpp...sshhpp,
like surf on a sandy beach.
John made another try. “Roasting, huh?” he asked brightly.
Nick closed the lid on the drum, straightened up, and eyed him levelly. “I'm not roasting, I'm a coffee-grower. Growers don't roast. Roasters roast."
"No?"
"No,"
The count: no balls, two strikes.
"So what are you doing then?"
"I'm drying. I'm pretty busy here, John."
"I thought you only air-dried—the ‘slow, natural Paradise way,'” John said, plucking this happy tidbit from a Caffe Paradiso ad he hadn't known he remembered.
"Paradise beans, yeah,” Nick said grudgingly. “But these are for some of our not-so-picky wholesale customers. That was one of Brian's ideas, you know—putting in a drying furnace for people who didn't want to spend for air-drying. And it's earned us a lot of money. Not everybody gives a damn, you know."
"Oh,” John said.
"Oh,” Nick said. He looked carefully at one of the beans he'd taken from the drum, then bit judiciously into it. “How's it taste?” John asked.
"I'm not
tasting
it,” Nick snapped and spit it out. “I'm testing the moisture content. For Christ's sake, John."
"Moisture content? Really? So—"
"John,” Nick said, his voice rising, “is there something I can do for you?"
But John, like his uncle, was not over-equipped with patience. “Yeah, there's something you can do for me,” he shouted back. “You can tell me why you've been jerking us around."
"What do you mean, jerking you around? Where do you come off—"
"Nick, we were at the police station this morning—"
"Yeah, I know,” Nick said sourly.
"—and the colonel there told us— You know? How do you know?"
"I know. Things get around. It's a small place."
"Do you know what he told us?"
"Suppose you tell me."
"That you withdrew the exhumation order, that you don't intend to have Brian's body dug up at all, that you're hiding something but he doesn't know what, that you've been giving us a royal runaround."
Strictly speaking, this was quite a bit more than Bertaud had told them, but from Nick's deep sigh it was clear that all or most of it was on the mark. He took off the fireman-red bandanna that had been loosely tied around his neck and mopped his head and throat with it. “Lord, it's hot. Let's go outside."
