Port Vila Blues

Eight

Pacific Rim flight 39 from Melbourne and Sydney touched down at Port Vila International Airport a few minutes past the scheduled arrival time. Late Thursday morning and Lou Crystal unbuttoned his uniform jacket and went down the steps to the tarmac. The tropical air seemed to sneak up on him, warm, humid, smelling of aviation fuel and ripe, rich fruit, so that he was perspiring before he reached the terminal building. Over one shoulder he carried his usual stopover bag; in the other hand he carried the tartan suitcase that had been stashed in the U-Store locker in Melbourne. Crystal’s instructions were clear each time: attach an address label reading ‘Mr Huntsman, Reriki Island Resort’ to the tartan suitcase and lodge it with the driver of the Reriki Island Resort minibus.

The passengers from flight 39 were lining up at the immigration counters. Crystal eyed them as he walked through, wondering if one of them was Huntsman, but all he could see were backpackers, honeymooners and middle-aged Australians and New Zealanders spending their superannuation payouts. They looked tired and pasty-white, impatient to get to their resort hotels and try on neon yellow and green shorts, T-shirts and sunblock. Crystal despised them. He loathed their noisiness and ignorance and simple pleasures.

Pacific Rim Airlines had been flying in and out of Vanuatu since Independence in 1980. Crystal himself had been stopping over in Port Vila for five years. Everyone knew him and he nodded left and right as he slipped through immigration and customs and onto the main concourse. Here, clones of flight 39’s passengers were queuing up to pay their departure tax. They were noisier, a little more sunburnt, overburdened with cheap local handicrafts, but essentially no different. Crystal walked past them, still carrying the suitcase and his weekender bag, out to the taxi and minibus ranks outside die terminal building.

A misty rain was drifting in, obscuring the tops of the mountains, leaching brightness from the green of the lower slopes. Banyans, coconut palms, pandanus and a handful of tree ferns and milk trees bordered the airfield and lined the nearby roads. Creepers and orchids choked some of them. There were leaves like shields and swords everywhere in Vanuatu and in the rainy season they dripped water on to Crystal’s head. In the mornings sometimes he’d see spiders the size of his hand waiting motionless at the centre of huge webs strung between glossy trees.

There were half a dozen people waiting in the Reriki Island minibus. The driver was leaning against the canopied luggage trailer, smoking a cigarette. He smirked at Crystal, took the proffered suitcase and stored it on the covered trailer. Then he went back to smoking and waiting and forgot about Crystal. For his part, Crystal was glad to be rid of the case. He was guessing drugs, and drugs were bad news, even in this backwater.

Pacific Rim pilots and cabin crew on stopover were obliged to stay at the Palmtree Lodge, a small collection of motel units on a crabbed, featureless lagoon south-east of Port Vila. Fifteen minutes by car, a fare of eleven hundred vatu, and that’s where Lou Crystal should have been going when he climbed into the dented Toyota taxi.

‘Yu go wea? Palmtree Lodge?’ the driver asked, recognising Crystal as a regular and addressing him in Bislama.

Crystal shook his head. ‘Malapoa Restaurant.’

The driver started the engine. He nodded cannily. ‘Good coconut crab.’

‘That’s right,’ Crystal said.

The drive took ten minutes, past small houses and flat-roofed cement-walled shops set amongst cyclone-stripped palm trees. Crystal had been on Vanuatu when the last cyclone had hit the islands. He’d been unnerved by it, a ceaseless wind that bent palm trees almost to the horizontal, tore apart coral reefs and dumped ships hundreds of metres in from the water’s edge. He’d seen flying tin cut a woman’s arm off and his balcony furniture at the Palmtree Lodge had cartwheeled across the coarse cropped lawns between the motel units and the coral beach.

The taxi pulled off the road and stopped. ‘Nine hundred vatu,’ the driver said.

Crystal paid him and got out. The Malapoa Restaurant was on a tiny spit of land jutting into Port Vila harbour. Crystal had eaten excellent coconut crab there. If it hadn’t been for the patrons-idle yachting types from all over the world, shouting at one another-he would have eaten there more often.

He let the driver see him walk into the Malapoa courtyard. When the taxi was gone, Crystal re-emerged and walked fifty metres to a public toilet block. He went into one of the cubicles, his head reeling from the urine-thick atmosphere, and stripped off his uniform, exchanging it for shorts, T-shirt and sandals that he’d packed in the top of his weekender bag.

The toilet block was set on the edge of a narrow carpark attached to a small concrete wharf. Water taxis and harbour-cruise boats used the wharf. So did the Reriki Island ferry, and that’s all Crystal was interested in.

He stood under a corrugated iron shelter to wait. Reriki Island dominated Port Vila harbour. It was a humped, jungly lump of land in a small bay, the shore lined with airconditioned, balconied huts on stilts. It was a resort island; the manager lived in a red-roofed house among palm trees on the highest point of the island. There were three restaurants, a swimming pool, boats for hire and a tiny wharf. You did not have to be a resident to visit the place, and that’s what Crystal was banking on now.

He saw the ferry leave the island. It made the harbourside run every few minutes, twenty-four hours a day, a two-minute trip each way. Crystal watched the ferry skirt around a couple of two-masted yachts. One looked worn and hard-working. A bearded man was pegging towels and T-shirts to a rope above the galley. The words ‘Miami Florida’ were painted across the stern. The other yacht was tidier and more seaworthy by about a quarter of a million dollars. It came from Portsmouth and Crystal was betting the owner was one of the loudmouths in the Malapoa Restaurant.

The ferry docked and Crystal got ready to board. It was a long, low, flat-bottomed aluminium craft fitted with a canopy roof. The sides were painted in bright splashes of colour: words, symbols and shapes that reminded Crystal of the sanctioned graffiti he’d seen on railway underpasses in Melbourne.

One person got off. Three got on with Crystal. He eyed them briefly: two kids with slim brown legs and a local man dressed in a white shirt and a black cotton wrap-around garment like a skirt. The words ‘Reriki Island Resort’ were stencilled on the top pocket of his shirt.

The ferry drew away from the wharf. Crystal looked back at the receding harbour shoreline, the mixture of waterfront businesses, rusting warehouses and tattered inter-island cargo ships. At the midway point he saw the resort’s minibus pull into the carpark. He’d beaten it by only a few minutes. The driver and passengers got out and he saw the driver begin to stack the luggage next to the ferry landing.

The ferry docked at the island and Crystal alighted with the other passengers. Steep paths led up to the main buildings. The grounds were carefully landscaped: neat palms, pandanus, small banyans, orchids, coral-edged walking tracks, close-cropped grass in between.

Crystal sat on a bench at the centre of a patch of grass. The clouds cleared suddenly and he was drenched in late afternoon sunlight. There were several tourists nearby, doing what he was doing, enjoying the sun. He half closed his eyes, waited, and saw a Reriki Island bellboy wheel a trolley-load of suitcases up to the main office. The tartan suitcase was unmistakeable among them.

A few minutes later, Crystal followed. There were plenty of people about: visitors, people staying at the resort, resort staff. No one looked twice at him.

The main building was constructed to resemble an oversized jungle village meeting place: a high-ceilinged roof, exposed beams, open sides, a suggestion of bamboo fronds and rattan. It housed a bar, a dining room and the reservations desk. Crystal sat at a small cane table in a shadowy far corner of the vast room. He had 20-20 vision. The sky remained clear and he could see every detail of the harbour, the yachts and the distant rocky beaches smudged with mangroves and casuarinas. He could also see the bar clearly, and the reservations counter where the new arrivals’ luggage was being stacked by a porter.

Half an hour later the tartan suitcase was the only one not claimed or delivered to any of the cabins. Nursing a beer, Crystal maintained his watch over it. He grew drowsy. A small drama at the bar woke him, shouts of ‘bon jour’ as a middle-aged white man came into the bar and clasped several of the black staff. He seemed to be a great hit with them. ‘Bon jour,’ they said, and he beamed, and asked after their kids.

Crystal headed for the cover of a cane screen, fear and hate hammering in his heart. The man himself, centre of all his recent misery. Crystal peered around the screen. There was no mistaking De Lisle: aged about fifty, starting to go plump and soft, wearing a white shirt, white trousers, and a straw hat with a red band around it. The humidity seemed to be affecting him. He was pink in the face and mopped his forehead and neck with a blue handkerchief. He twinkled a lot, a hot, damp man in the tropics, surrounded by admirers. At one point he took an asthma spray from his pocket and sucked on it frantically, closing his eyes for a moment afterwards, his fleshy chin tipped back, rising to the tips of his neat tasselled shoes as though preparing to levitate, then returning with a smile to the people circling him, calling ‘bon jour’ to the bartenders, who were all grinning.

Lou Crystal took in every hated detail about the man. Then he took in how De Lisle left with the tartan suitcase, carrying it down to the jetty, where a waiting water taxi took him to a little dock under a cliff-top mansion on the other side of the harbour.