Twenty Blue Devils (16 page)

"If you're saying that Tari is—embezzling, or—or—"

"Oh, spare me,” Nelson said. “I'm not accusing him of being a crook, for God's sake—"

"So what are you accusing him of?"

"Of screwing up, if you'll pardon the expression. The man is simply—and I've said this from the beginning, I don't think anyone can deny that—the man is simply not capable of handling figures. In the few weeks that he's had access to them, our books have become an incomprehensible mess. He finds something that doesn't make sense to him in accounts payable, and rather than come and ask someone in a position to know, he ‘corrects’ the entry, so that naturally it is no longer consistent with either the purchase order or the invoice—"

"You've never given him a fair chance, you've—"

"May I say something?” Rudy interrupted. “Unprecedented though it may be, Nelson is actually making a cogent point. I've been concerned with Tari's—shall we say, whimsical— approach to the finances myself."

"Then why aren't you helping him instead of telling us? You're supposed to be coaching him, not criticizing him behind his back."

"I've been trying, Maggie,” Rudy said, “but getting the man to understand is an ordeal approximately on par with a double root canal. No, worse. It's like having to sit through an entire performance of
Cats."

"I'm not saying it's his fault,” Nelson cut in. “It's a well-known fact that the Tahitian numerical system lacks—"

"Oh, balls,” Maggie said disgustedly.

"People,” Nick admonished quietly. “We have company."

But Nelson was just warming up. “Let me give you just one example—our account with Java Green Mountain. We owe them for four thousand pounds of beans, duly purchased at $12.45 a pound and due at the end of the month. That's $49,800."

"Nelson...” Nick said a little less patiently.

"Only our friend Mr. Terui took it upon himself to ‘correct’ it for us. I suppose you could say he made only one
teeny
mistake, shifting the decimal point one little place to the left. But what would the result have been if I hadn't caught it? We would have sent Green Mountain a check for $4,980 and not the $49,800 we owe them."

Nick burst out laughing. “Hey, I like the guy's approach. Maybe we should put him in charge of the books."

Predictably, this failed to amuse either Nelson or Maggie.

"You don't
want
him to succeed,” Maggie said hotly. “Neither of you, not really. You just—"

Fortunately, one of the workers yelled “Chowtime!” from the cooking area at this point, whereupon everybody headed for the buffet table, most of them making a detour at the bar first. Gideon refreshed his Scotch, then helped himself to rice, string beans, and grilled mahimahi, surprising and perhaps offending the server by declining her offer to dress the fish with coconut milk hand-wrung from a clump of pulverized coconut wrapped in cheesecloth. Coconut milk was the one staple of the sweet, pleasantly bland Polynesian diet that Gideon could do entirely without. No doubt it would look pretty good if you were perishing of thirst on a desert island, but it was hardly something you'd use to spoil a two-inch-thick chunk of nicely seared mahimahi.

"Hey, Gideon,” Celine said as she resettled herself beside him with her plate, “why you think my hair's so thin?"

"Oh, it's not really that—"

"Sure, it is. You a scientist. Guess."

"Well, it's hard to say. In a lot of people—"

"Tennis."

Gideon studied his Scotch, “Tennis,” he said.

"That's right, tennis. Used to play all the time. Douglas Fairbanks teach me. Junior, not father. You looking at the number-one player, Papeete Racquet Club, 1948, ‘50, ‘51."

"But how,” Gideon asked, intrigued now, “did tennis affect your hair?"

Celine laughed. She had tiny, rounded teeth, like little pearls. “Not tennis, God love you. Too many showers with lousy shampoo.” She shook her head ruefully. “Didn't have no Vidal Sassoon back then. Oh-oh, they at it again."

This last was a reference to Maggie and Nelson, whose arena had now shifted to the French plans to renew nuclear testing, suspended since 1992, at Mururoa atoll, southwest of Tahiti. Nelson was all for them because of the economic benefits that a renewal of testing would bring.

"And what about the radiation?” Maggie wanted to know, having more than recovered her composure since the earlier dispute.

"Poppycock,” said Nelson. “Do you seriously think, for one moment, that the French government would put our lives at risk? Don't be ridiculous."

Maggie looked pityingly at him. “Unbelievable,” she said through a mouthful of prawn.

Nelson waggled a finger at her. “Can you point, in all honesty, to a single verified illness from all the previous tests?” Nelson demanded. “Has a radioactive cloud ever once passed over Tahiti? Has it? Has it?"

Aside from a faint similarity in the set of their lips, Nelson was about as different from John as one brother could be from another. Where John was big and beefy, Nelson was compact, with small, feminine hands and feet; where John seemed to take up more space than his size strictly demanded, Nelson seemed to fill less; where John was generally easygoing but easy to ignite, Nelson seemed to operate at a constant, irritable simmer. And altogether unlike John, he appeared to be totally devoid of humor.

Add the finicky little mustache—two dainty, symmetrical, upturned commas—to everything else, and John's older brother put Gideon in mind of nothing so much as a pompous fussbudget of a hotel manager in morning coat and striped pants; the little man who postured and sniffed behind the reception desk (and said things like “poppycock” and “don't be ridiculous") in one old Hollywood comedy after another, only to end up being put inevitably in his place by a suave and impeccable Cary Grant, or David Niven, or Katharine Hepburn. Huff and puff as he might, there was simply something about Nelson that made it hard to take him seriously.

Even now, while his finger remained leveled magisterially at the space between Maggie's eyes, she continued to chew away at her prawn, unruffled. “If those tests are so safe...” she finally said when she was good and ready, then chewed some more.

"Yes,” an impatient Nelson prodded, “if those tests are so safe...?"

"...then why don't they blow them up over France?"

There was a splutter of laughter from Nick and the others. Nelson merely stared at Maggie. “If you're not going to be serious,” he said scornfully, “I don't see the point of discussing it any further."

"Good!” Nick said, whacking the table. “It's about time “

"Besides,” Nelson went on, addressing the group at large, “there's something else we need to talk about.” He waited for the others to quiet down and listen, which they didn't. “We have a new offer from Superstar."

That got their attention. A near-perceptible current sizzled around the table. Conversations stopped in mid-sentence. Forks were laid on plates. Faces that had been relaxed and open-countenanced a moment before, abruptly looked shifty and cunning. Gideon and John exchanged glances, both thinking the same thing: maybe the connection between Superstar's offers and Brian's death wasn't so far-fetched after all. Half the people around them looked ready to kill over it right now.

"Um...Superstar?” Maggie said off-handedly.

Nelson nodded significantly. “In this afternoon's mail."

"For God's sake,” Rudy said, “don't those people ever give up? What do they want to give us now, Rockefeller Center?"

"No,” said Nelson, “as a matter of fact—"

"Now, wait.” Nick was on his feet and leaning over the table, his long arms propped on sandy-haired knuckles (in a strikingly simian manner, Gideon couldn't help observing).

"This is a family dinner, not a corporate business meeting. And we have company—"

"John's not company,” a tipsy Maggie said, raising her glass to her cousin.

"Well, Gideon is. There's no reason this can't keep till tomorrow morning."

"I won't be here tomorrow morning,” Nelson said. “There's a chamber of commerce meeting in Papeete."

"All right, Wednesday."

"Sorry, I'll be in Hawaii Wednesday,” Rudy contributed. “Pacific Growers meeting."

"All right, Th—"

"No can do,” said Maggie. “Training sessions morning and afternoon."

"They've asked for an answer by the end of the week,” Nelson said.

Nick was starting to show his frustration. “Well, that's too damn bad,” he snapped, “they just might have to wait. For Christ's sake, we're having dinner! You think John and Gideon came all the way out here to listen to us hash over company business?"

Good question, Gideon thought; he wouldn't mind the answer to that himself. What
had
they come for?

"Hey, don't worry about us,” John said with another sidewise glance at Gideon. “Go ahead and talk about it. It'll probably take less time than arguing about whether you should or shouldn't talk about it."

At that Nick capitulated, taking his seat and throwing up his hands with a sigh. “Go ahead and talk, what do I know?"

Now Nelson stood up. “As I see it, it's a relatively straightforward proposition."

It was. Superstar Resorts International, of Omaha, Nebraska, had upped its offer for the property by a generous ten percent, said amount to be—

"What about the training center?” Maggie interrupted.

"The earlier stipulation still stands. Two acres to be set aside as a training and placement institute for young Tahitians interested in entering the hotel and tourist industry. Adequate funding to be provided."

Maggie jerked her fist with boozy satisfaction. “All
right!"

"And that's it, really,” Nelson said. “Other than the money, the earlier offer holds in its entirety. What's your reaction, Nick?"

Nick inclined his head thoughtfully. “It's a lot of money...” Maggie, Rudy, and Nelson started speaking at once, with Nelson carrying the day through sheer tenacity. “Not only is it a lot of money, Nick, but it's the right time to get out of the coffee business. Are you aware—"

"Out of the coffee business and into what?” Nick asked.

"What about Bora Bora?” Maggie said. “What about that destination resort you're always talking about building on the Bora Bora property? With this kind of money, couldn't you just up and do it?"

Nick gave it some thought. “Maybe I could at that,” he said quietly, and the look in his eyes made it clear that the idea had its attractions. Nick Druett was an entrepreneur at heart, Gideon realized, not a coffee baron, or a land baron, or any other kind of baron. For men like Nick, the possibility of something new, of something big, of making something from nothing, was what got them out of bed every morning.

"Not me,” said Celine flatly. “I'm not going to Bora Bora. No art supplies on Bora Bora. No nothing on Bora Bora. Tahiti is plenty bad enough."

"But you wouldn't have to
live
on Bora Bora, Momma,” Maggie said. “You could live anywhere. You could—"

"May I just finish my point?"
Nelson cut in. He was still standing at his chair and he spoke directly to Nick. “I think it's time for us to take a good look at market trends. Has anyone besides me given any thought to the fact that coffee consumption, worldwide, has been going
down
, not up? That despite all the talk about a coffee boom, people consume less than half of what they did thirty years ago? That the world market has been stagnant for decades? That with Japanese demand driving up prices and higher wages driving up costs, the profit window for growers shrinks every year? I grant you, Paradise is doing fine for the time being, but all the same—"

"All the same,” a mocking drone interrupted, “the reports of coffee's demise are greatly exaggerated."

The comment had come from Rudy, on Gideon's right. One of the three Caucasians at the table—the others were Nick and Gideon—he was the only one there who was from the “other” side of the family, being the son of Nick's dead brother, and the only one who had spent most of his life in the continental United States as opposed to Tahiti or Hawaii. As a result he had contributed little beyond droll, oblique footnotes to the family reminiscences.

He was far from oblique now, however. The only stagnant part of the market was the
robusta
sector, the others were crisply informed; the big industrial roasters, the Folgerses, the Maxwell Houses. The
arabica
sector, the specialty growers and roasters, were doing better than fine, and not just for the time being either. They now had twelve percent of the market, up from less than one percent only a few years ago, and were still climbing, with Paradise near the front of the pack. As for coffee prices, when had they
not
been going up and down and up again? Back in the eighteenth century it had been $4.68 a pound for ordinary green beans, four times what it was now— had they known that?

They hadn't. “Even so—” said Nelson.

But Rudy wasn't easy to cut off when he chose not to be. Did they know that the coffee industry employed almost thirty million people in one capacity or another? Would they care to guess what the earth's most-traded commodity just happened to be?

"Coffee?” asked John, being helpful.

"Wrong,” said Rudy, “petroleum. Now: Would anyone care to guess the world's second-most-traded commodity?"

"Coffee?” asked John.

"Excellent guess,” said Rudy. “Somebody give that man a coconut. Last year, eleven billion pounds were traded at the wholesale level alone."

For all his waspishness, Rudy was amusing in a dry, puckery kind of way. With his balding dome, his pruney, disapproving mouth, and his baggy-eyed sad sack of a face, his sharp, funny thrusts rarely failed to surprise.

"I take it,” Nick said, on the dry side himself for the moment, “that you're suggesting that we don't accept their offer?"

Rudy nodded. “As before,
padrone
."

The others started talking again. Nick held up his hand. “Let's save some time. Maggie, Nelson—you think it's time to sell."

More nods. “A training center would be a fantastic legacy, Poppa,” said Maggie, her eyes shining. “A way to pay back all we've plundered from the island."