Twenty Blue Devils (12 page)

"You don't believe them?"

"That they had him killed? Of course not.” She paused, then glanced at him, one eyebrow lifted. She was wearing carved wooden earrings shaped like conch shells. “Do
you?"

Gideon replied with a shrug of his own. “What about those accidents?"

"Such as?"

"I don't remember them all. Didn't his jeep flip over? Didn't the roof of one of the sheds almost come down on him?"

Maggie clucked irritably. “Oh, for God's sake. That jeep was an antique, forty years old, and the ‘roads’ up there are more like goat tracks. It's amazing it never flipped over before."

"What about the shed?"

"That thing was rickety from the start. I was in there doing a time-management class for the foremen the evening before and after everybody left I stayed there another couple of hours doing some paperwork, but then I had to get out because the wind came up and I thought the place was going to come down on me. I mentioned it to Poppa, and he was going to have it checked, but it collapsed first and Brian just happened to be there when it did. I mean, organized crime might be pretty powerful, but I don't think they can order up a windstorm on demand."

Gideon nodded. There wasn't much to say. He agreed with her.

"We turn there,” she said. “At the mini-mall."

And mini-mall it was, the Centre Apatea, plopped down into the brush-jungle beside the highway and looking startlingly like a street-corner mall that had been shipped whole from East Los Angeles, with only the signs changed, to French and Tahitian. There was a pharmacy, a video store, a fast-food place that specialized in sugary crullers and
casses-croutes—
sandwiches on crusty bread—and a
magasin
, the island's version of a 7-Eleven. And as in L.A., this was where the local kids hung out, brown, lean youngsters in T-shirts, shorts, and turned-around baseball caps, lounging against the cars in the parking lot. As Maggie turned from the highway onto the unmarked gravel road that led toward the interior of the island, he was able to read the legend on one of the boys’ shirts:
Hard Rock Cafe, Fiji.

Just on the other side of the mall a herd of brown-and-white, picture-book-pretty Guernsey cows browsed in the grass in a grove of tall, slender coconut palms, with the woolly green flanks of Mt. Iviroa beyond. To Gideon's eyes, at least, it was an unlikely sight, like some fanciful tropical collage with barnyard cow figures amusingly (and improbably) pasted on.

Once past the last of the palm trees, the car began climbing through relatively open rangeland spotted with neatly terraced fruit and vegetable orchards: mangoes, pineapples, taros, citrus.

"This is all our property,” Maggie said. “Two thousand acres. My father leases most of it to local farmers—Chinese, mostly. The coffee farm's only part of it. Here we are,” she said as they drove under a peeling stucco arch from the copra-farming days or even earlier, from cotton-picking times. The sign beside it was in both French and English.

A cup of coffee—real coffee—home-browned home-ground, home-made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils, and will exorcise them all.

Henry Ward Beecher

"Great quote,” Gideon said. “Certainly gets the salivary glands going."

"Haven't you ever seen it before? We put it on every package of Blue Devil, or don't you like Blue Devil?"

"No, I like it a lot.” But not enough to be intimately familiar with the package. Not at almost $40 a pound. When Gideon bought a bag of Paradise coffee, it was generally one of the less expensive ones like the House Blend or the Weekend Blend. And even then it was a splurge compared to almost everything else on the market. Paradise coffees didn't come cheap.

They pulled up at a rutted parking area beside a big, barn-like building with Plexiglas walls and a roof made of plates of Plexiglas and corrugated metal. “And this is the famous drying shed itself,” Maggie told him.

"It does look a little rickety,” Gideon said.

"Well, of course it does."

"Still, it's funny that it should have decided to collapse just when he was there.” Fishing. What for, he wasn't sure.

Maggie leaned her elbows on the steering wheel and looked him in the eye. “Gideon...” She hesitated, considered her words. “Frankly, those accidents were a bad spell that everyone would like to forget. We don't even like to talk about them anymore. But let me tell you something that I would never say to Nick, or, God help me, to ‘Therese. Brian wasn't the
target
of all those damn things that happened, he was...well, he was the
cause
, when you come right down to it. I'm sorry to say it, especially right now, but it's true."

Gideon frowned. “How do you mean, the cause?'

I don't mean directly,” she said, backing off a little, “not on purpose, but in a way, yes. Take the jeeps, for example— we actually bought five of them, if you can believe it; four to drive around in and one for spare parts. Old codgers from the Korean War. It was Brian's idea to get them; part of his ‘system-reengineering.’ We got them at a ridiculously low price, and he claimed it was the perfect way to get around in country like this. Maybe it was, but the damn things were
old
. Three of them broke down—I mean, they practically decomposed in front of us—inside of the first month, and then Brian happened to be in the last one when it finally gave up the ghost too. He drove it every day, so is there anything so surprising about that?"

"Well, not—"

"Now we use a couple of Toyota four-by-four vans to get around the place and we haven't had any accidents. The money we spent on the jeeps? A total waste. And the new shed? That was one of Brian's ideas too—to build it with these prefabricated roof trusses and floor joists or something. It was going to save all kinds of money. Fine, no problem—as long as the wind didn't blow. But it didn't stand up to the first halfway decent storm we got."

"But it's stood up since."

"Sure, because it's been propped up and strengthened—see that concrete footing? Cost more money than it took to build it in the first place. Some savings. And I still don't trust it."

She was off and running now, chewing the cud of some old sense of grievance, real or imagined. Did Gideon know about some of the other accidents they'd been having? The pulper, had he heard about that?

He nodded. “One of the workers lost a finger."

Two
fingers, Maggie told him. And why? Because Brian, Mr. MBA, was bent on automating production at Paradise. So he brought in the very latest, slickest equipment. Only he forgot about the human element. He didn't allow enough time for training. Maggie had demanded a week, but Brian had convinced Nick anyone could learn to operate it in a day.

"Well, Poppa and Brian were both wrong,” she said bitterly, “only it's Puarei Marae who has to get along without his thumb and index finger."

It was much the same story with the bean sorter that had broken down several times and the drying furnace in the basement that had burned up $15,000 worth of other people's beans: more “improvements” of Brian's. Lots of attention given to researching the equipment, choosing the right model, drawing workflow charts...and zilch given to the
people
who had to make it work.

"The thing is, Gideon, for all his love of Tahiti, Brian never came close to understanding the people, the culture. And workflow charting, let me tell you, isn't part of the Polynesian culture. And I haven't even talked about the computerization. The thing is, you have to work
with
the native values, not rely on typical Eurocentric misassumptions. You can't..."

She trailed off, apparently feeling that she'd gone on too vigorously and too long, considering the recency of Brian's death, or maybe that she was overstepping her bounds teaching an anthropologist about anthropology. She toyed, scowling, with one of the conch earrings. “Oh, heck, here I am making it sound as if Brian was this awful person, and he was anything but. He was the sweetest...my only point is that everybody goes around whispering about all these mysterious accidents, and there's nothing mysterious about them, nothing. Brian had a lot of new ideas, good ideas, and he was hellbent on putting them into effect, but this is Tahiti, not New York. You can't go around messing with traditional cultural values and expect not to have any problems. People—"

She stopped again and laughed good-naturedly at herself. “There I go again. I guess I don't have to tell you all that."

"No. You're right, of course."

And yet he was oddly unsatisfied. It wasn't that he harbored any conviction that these incidents were prelude to Brian's murder—he still didn't honestly think there had been any murder—but the more the string of accidents was explained away, the more doubtful and uneasy he became about them. And in an unanticipated way, about Maggie. Was everything that had gone wrong truly Brian's doing, or was there a bit of revisionist history under way? The only thing she hadn't blamed on him was the rainy spring. Not yet anyway.

As they got out of the car Nick came from the shed, wiping his hands on a ragged brown towel. Shirtless, shoeless, wearing nothing but a pair of old, stained khaki shorts, he was as furry as a sheepdog.

"Ah, Maggie, you found him! Tour time, Gideon.” He looked around as a dusty pickup truck crunched up the graveled road and pulled into the parking area. “Oh hell, here comes Antoine. This won't take any time at all. It's just one of the other growers. I've been doing some processing for him and we're still working out the costs. This'll just take a minute, Gideon."

"Bonjour, Antoine, comment ca va?"
he boomed, striding toward the newcomer.

"Don't
comment ca va me,
you tight-fisted, money-grubbing sonofabitch!” replied Antoine, stepping down from his truck and slamming the door. He shook a piece of paper, a bill or a receipt, under Nick's nose. “Tell me what the hell you call this?"

"I don't know why,” Gideon said to Maggie, “but I have this feeling this is going to take more than a minute."

"You're right,” Maggie said. “These two have been known to go at each other for hours. It keeps their blood oxygenated. I think I'd better get Tari to give you the tour."

Through waves of gestures she communicated her intention to Nick, who responded through the screen of Antoine's gesticulations with a helpless shrug.

"I've been wanting you to meet Tari anyway,” Maggie said as she took him around the shed to a loading dock at the rear where several men were wrestling hundred-pound burlap bags of coffee beans from the back of a pickup truck, loading them onto the weighing platform, recording the exact weights, and then emptying them into a pneumatic conveyor tube. “He's my prime example of employee development the way it
ought
to be done. The one with the clipboard—that's Tari."

At the sound of his name—Maggie's voice was like a trumpet most of the time—an immense man in a striped tank top shirt and shorts looked over one massive, brown shoulder. “'Lo, Maggie.” The thin, piping voice didn't go with the powerful body.

"Hoa, maita'i anei oe?"
Maggie said gravely, much the way Joel McCrea or Randolph Scott used to intone “How,” when addressing the chief of all the Apaches, in order to show respect for the great Apache nation and the ways of their people.

"Oh, pretty good, Maggie. How you doing yourself?"

Tari looked a little embarrassed, or maybe it was only a reaction to Maggie's Tahitian, which didn't strike Gideon as any too accurate. From up close, Tari was not quite as gigantic as he'd first seemed, but he was built like a sumo wrestler—no, more like a giant baby, with a round, smiling face, fat, lusty arms and legs, and a belly like a beer keg. All told, three hundred amply fleshed, formidable pounds.

"Maita'i roa,"
replied Maggie solemnly. “Gideon, this is Tari Terui,” she said proudly—and a little proprietorially, it seemed to Gideon. “Paradise Coffee's next operations manager. He's been doing an outstanding job of filling Brian's shoes."

"Oh, I don't know ‘bout that,” the huge man mumbled, shuffling wide, dusty feet in their thong sandals. Gideon got the impression that this was more than mere modesty. Under the naturally genial and placid planes of Tari's flat, broad face there was something worried.

"Nonsense,” Maggie said. “What's bothering you?"

Tari looked at his feet. “Lot of things."

"Such as?"

Tari shrugged. “Accounts payable...” he mumbled unhappily. “...supply-invoice stuff..."

"Well, don't you worry about it,” Maggie said, “we'll straighten it out at our Friday meeting. And if I can't make any sense out of it, we'll get Nelson or Rudy to explain. Don't worry, Tari, you're doing just fine.” She beamed at the big Tahitian. “Tari's the wave of the future,” she said to Gideon. “He's a role model for every Tahitian employee we have."

Tari glanced uncomfortably around, and Gideon caught the tail end of a scowl he cast at one of the workers, who had paused in his manhandling of the bags to eavesdrop with undisguised amusement. Obviously, being a role model to his fellow Tahitians was not something to which Tari aspired.

"Gideon is a friend of John's,” Maggie told him, “and Poppa wants him to see the farm. Can you take an hour or so and show him around?"

"Sure, you bet,” Tari declared, practically rolling his eyes with relief. Rattling around the plantation was clearly more to his liking than talking about accounts payable.

They started with the drying shed itself, a single room about eighty feet by a hundred, a good ten degrees warmer than it was outside, redolent with a pungent smell that Gideon associated more with wineries than with coffee plantations, and suffused with a milky glow from the light coming through the translucent walls and ceiling. The floor was made of wood planking, but except for a couple of cleared aisles down the center from each side, most of it was three or four inches deep in a sea of coffee beans ranging from greenish brown to palest beige and separated into different-colored sections by movable lengths of white plastic pipe. Workers shuffled slowly, sleepily, through them in the heat, spreading and rearranging the shallow heaps with homemade, blunt-toothed wooden rakes.