Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 114, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 697 & 698, September/October 1999

The Girl in the Picture by Hayford Peirce

©1999 by Hayford Peirce

Readers sometimes ask where an author’s ideas come from. In this case, the author, like one of the characters in the story, was in possession of a photograph taken in 1961, of a girl he once knew. Hayford Peirce is fortunate in having a police inspector son-in-law (in Tahiti) and so, in real life, as in the story, he asked the detective to try to track down his onetime friend. You may be interested to know that Mr. Peirce’s son-in-law has so far been unsuccessful.

The demi-Chinoise in the color snapshot was as beautiful a girl as I had ever seen in a long lifetime of admiring — sadly, in most cases, from all too great a distance — beautiful girls. An obvious half-Tahitian, half-Chinese, she sat in a round deck chair set against a bamboo wall, her long, bare, golden legs tucked beneath her. Glossy black hair framed an oval face and hung down over breasts that were concealed by a slinky, form-fitting dress almost the color of her skin. Her lips were half-parted, and her almond eyes gazed wistfully, almost adoringly, at the young man sitting beside her. She was, I judged, somewhere in her late teens, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she was no more than sixteen or seventeen. As well as being ethereally beautiful, she also radiated total innocence.

Not only that, in some strange way she also seemed tantalizingly familiar...

I fell instantly in love with her.

“That’s some girl,” I said in the rough but serviceable French I had picked up in the company of various Germans, Hungarians, and other non-Frenchmen in my years as a sergeant major in the Foreign Legion.

“Yes. That’s me she’s talking to.”

“It is?”

I glanced at the man on the other side of my desk in dismay. This old geezer — he was the relatively good-looking young guy sitting there with Miss Galaxy? My love turned to bitter ashes. If this was true, then my inamorata had begun her reign thirty or forty years ago and was now most likely a toothless old granny who, on a relentlessly starchy diet of taro, breadfruit, and plantains, had swollen into a 300-pound Mama Ruau.

“Bien sûr, that’s me!” snapped my prospective client indignantly. “You can’t see the resemblance?” He peered at me suspiciously. “You are a detective, aren’t you? That’s what the sign says.”

The sign he was referring to is epoxied to the front of the building three flights below and says, in discreet gold letters on black:

“Of course, of course,” I reassured him. “The demoiselle in the picture is so ravishing that I simply hadn’t had eyes for anyone else.”

This sort of flowery garbage goes down better in French than in English, of course, and it seemed to satisfy the man across from me, whose French, in any case, was even more peculiar-sounding than mine, being of the French-Canadian persuasion and so heavily accented as to be nearly impenetrable.

“Can you find her for me?”

I just managed to keep from demanding how anyone could possibly misplace so stunning a creature and grunted noncommittally. “Just how old is this picture?”

“Almost forty years old,” he admitted reluctantly. “It was taken at the old Matavai Hotel sometime in nineteen sixty-one, back when they still had bungalows.”

“It’s a very clear picture — hard to believe it wasn’t taken yesterday. That’s a bungalow you’re sitting in front of?” I tapped the glossy lines of polished bamboo in the left side of the picture.

“Yes. We were sitting outside the bungalow of one of the MGM people who were here making the Bounty. I was drinking Hinano beer, and she was drinking limonade blanc.”

“That’s a pretty good memory of something thirty-seven years old.”

“She was the first girl I’d ever fallen in love with...”

“Yes.” I examined my potential client a little more carefully. He wasn’t really an old geezer, just a multi-chinned guy in his mid- to late-fifties who’d let his belly expand and his gray hair recede and had yellowing teeth and wore tight-fitting shorts and a flowery pareo-cloth shirt that made him look even chubbier than he was. I turned back to the photo.

The boy in the picture was probably eighteen or nineteen, and although his face was in sharp profile against a black background he had a full head of dark brown hair and a bony jaw. Even for a highly trained operative like Joe Caneili, with his advanced degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Detectology, it was impossible to say with certainty that it was really the same guy who had plunked himself down in my little office three minutes earlier. Once again I let my eyes flicker between the two. Some people do change more in thirty-five years than others...

And photos can be deceiving...

I couldn’t make up my mind. Call it a tossup.

“Okay, Monsieur—”

“Duchamps, Hippolyte.”

“—Duchamps, what’s the name of this girl you want me to find?”

“Tara. Tara Héréhéré.”

“Héréhéré?”

“Yes.”

I shrugged. Maybe Duchamps was joshing me about his love goddess’s name, maybe he wasn’t. If I had a crusty brown baguette for every lie or piece of misinformation that my clients have told me over the years...

“If I do find her for you, then what?”

“Then what?” Clearly this was not a matter Duchamps had fully considered. “Why... why, you tell me where she is, or point her out to me, and I pay you, and that’s it. And... and I go ask her if she remembers me.”

I considered the round-faced French-Canadian carefully. He blinked back at me with earnest brown eyes that seemed mirrors of candor, but in my profession it’s always better to be safe than sorry. “Well, I regret infinitely, Monsieur Duchamps, but there have been some unfortunate stalking incidents recently, here, and in the States, and in France, that everyone is aware of, and I really think we’d have to modify your intentions if I were to accept trying to find your friend.”

Now he scowled, with bushy gray eyebrows that didn’t seem to be much in evidence in the picture. “How do you mean, modify?”

“It’s no big deal. If I find her, I’ll take a written or oral message from you to her, or ask her if she’ll meet you somewhere public. She’ll say yes, you’ll meet her, and I’ll go to bed with a clear conscience. What could be simpler?”

Hippolyte Duchamps didn’t like it, but after another couple of minutes of batting it back and forth he discovered that there really was no choice in the matter. Either he agreed to my terms or he got shown the door.

“Before I take your down payment,” I said, “I’ll give you three minutes’ worth of free detective work.”

“How do you mean?” he muttered sullenly.

“I’ll look through the phone book for any Héréhérés.”

“I’ve already done that.”

“For all of the different islands?”

“Mmm, maybe not.”

“See, that’s why it’s always wise to invest in professional help in time of need.”

As it turned out, however, even a rank amateur like Hippolyte Duchamps could have done the job: There was absolutely no person of any sex whatsoever listed in any of the 112 islands of French Polynesia with the name of Héréhéré.

“All right,” I sighed, “now I’ll need some money, and some more information. Where are you staying?”

“The Hotel Tahara’a, the one up on the hill.”

“Ah. When was the last time you actually saw this girl?”

He gestured at the picture in my hand. “Probably about July of sixty-one — I only knew her for a couple of weeks.”

“And you don’t know anything about her except her name?”

“I think she was born on the island of Rimatara in the Australes. Her mother was Tahitian, she said, her father Chinese. She was working as a salesgirl in a perfume store in the old Vaima block.”

I nodded in resignation. Her father had probably been the owner of one of the ubiquitous Chinese general stores that were still the lifeblood of the outer islands and was now most likely dead. And the old Vaima block had been torn down twenty years ago. Two almost certain dead ends. “You say you met her during the filming of Mutiny on the Bounty?”

“Yes. Our bicycles ran into each other in town one day.”

I let my eyes linger again with pleasure upon the girl in the picture. “Anyone as beautiful as this must have been in the movie.”

“No. She was too Chinese-looking, they said, not Tahitian enough. This photo was taken with a flash at night and shows her Tahitian side. If you saw her in the daylight she generally looked a lot more Chinese.”

I sighed audibly. Now I was looking for a gorgeous girl who also was a master of disguise. “How old was she? What would she be now?”

“I think she said she was eighteen. So that would make her fifty-five, more or less.”

“Was she just a girlfriend that you dated, or did you actually live with her for a while?”

“Both. She lived at the old Hotel Moorea with me for about ten days.”

“And you don’t know anything more about her than what you’ve just told me?”

“No.”

Once again I sighed. That was the old-time Tahiti for you: live with a girl for ten days and just barely manage to learn her name. Of course, as far as I knew, that was probably the new-time Tahiti also...

I rose to my feet. “All right, Monsieur Duchamps, I’ll do my best. I may find her this afternoon, or I may never find her. A girl as beautiful as that is probably married to the Directeur-Général of the Bank of France and living in a chateau on the Loire.” I paused. “By the way, what were you doing in Tahiti when you met her? July of nineteen sixty-one was pretty old-time Tahiti. Was the jet-strip even here?”

“I was just a tourist, Monsieur Caneili, a tourist who met a beautiful girl that he’s never forgotten...”

I watched Hippolyte Duchamps’s ample derriére waddle down the shabby concrete steps to the next landing and wondered if anything he had told me was true beyond the fact that the girl in the picture was undeniably beautiful.

For a while I pondered what to do next, then gathered up the traveler’s checks that the French-Canadian had endorsed over to me. I filled out a deposit slip, made a brief telephone call, then slipped into my broad-brimmed and rather tattered plantation hat made of bleached pandanus, and ambled down to the sidewalk.

Just in front of me, on the other side of a wall of immobile traffic, was the old whitewashed colonial cathedral that used to have an occasional small tree growing out of its tiled roof. Now, in keeping with the continuing modernization of downtown Papeete, the trees had finally been banished. I skipped lightly through the stalled cars with the insouciance that years in the Foreign Legion can give a man, past the massive doors of the stately monument to superstition, through another wedge of fuming motorists, and up the steps to the Westpac Bank. Here I made my modest deposit without eliciting overt hoots of laughter from the mostly smiling young tellers and strolled back to the glare of the midafternoon sun.

Now, I said to myself resolutely, to work.

As I walked to where I had finally found a parking space nearly a kilometer away in the automotive inferno that was daytime Papeete, I briefly reviewed my chain of reasoning.

I wanted to find (or merely even find out about) a girl who had certainly been one of the most noted lovelies on the island thirty-five years ago. Noted lovelies seldom keep their beauty entirely to themselves.

Certain men, I knew, Joe Caneili, malheureusement, not being among them, seemed to attract beautiful girls as effortlessly as flowers attract honeybees. Because, perhaps, they were the physical equivalency, in the eyes of women, of beautiful girls? If so, it was all a mystery to Caneili.

But I did happen to know one of the island’s more celebrated beefcakes, an otherwise decent enough guy whom I occasionally ran into in bars and fishing tournaments, usually with adoring throngs of the weaker sex draped around him in breathless profusion.

Today I found Heimata Mahimana just where his office had told me he ought to be: on the work site of an elaborate cement-block home going up in the hills of Punaauia. I got out of my car and inhaled a deep breath of non-polluted air. Far below were the waving green tops of the coconut, chestnut, breadfruit, and iron-wood trees that covered the narrow coastal plain between the mountains and the placid gray Pacific. And ten miles away the jagged profile of the sister island of Moorea loomed like the backbone of some fantastic dinosaur against the cloudless sky. It was good to be out of the big, bad city.

I waited until the master builder had finished discussing a set of blueprints with three of his workmen, then gestured him off to one side. As usual, Heimata flashed his mouthful of enormous white teeth at me, so shiny against the rest of his mahogany-colored face that even in daylight they appeared fluorescent. His enormous paw didn’t quite mangle my hand but only because a legionnaire is prepared for any eventuality.

“You’re looking a little ragged for a young man in his twenties,” I joshed him. “Why don’t you take a vacation from some of those lovely ladies?”

The dazzling smile grew even wider, and I had to admit that if broad shoulders, narrow hips, bulging muscles, shoulder-length wavy black hair, and a profusion of gold chains, rings, bracelets, and anklets were your style, then Heimata Mahimana was right up your alley.

“That Caneili, always the jokester!” he rumbled happily. He thumped himself on his washboard belly with a sound like a bank vault closing. “Weren’t you there for my fiftieth birthday last month? I know you were invited.”

“In Bora Bora on a job.” I sighed. “Is it fifty years already? Where do the decades go?” I reached into my shirt pocket for the picture that Hippolyte Duchamps had reluctantly left with me. “But that means you’re not yet senile enough to have forgotten this beauteous creature. Cast your eyes upon this, Heimata, old friend, stir your memories just a bit, and tell me who she is.”

The Tahitian glanced idly at the picture, then with mounting enthusiasm. “I don’t believe it!” he breathed. “Caneili, is this picture really thirty years old? It can’t be!”

“More like thirty-five.”

His eyes glittered. “Then it is her!”

“Surely not your very first girlfriend, Heimata, the one you never forgot? That would really be too much of a coincidence.”

“First girlfriend, no, of course not. And I have forgotten her name, by the way. But this one—” he waved the picture enthusiastically “—this is the one I fell in love with when I was fifteen years old! I loved her like crazy! For months and months, Caneili!”

“You did? And then?”

He waggled his great Polynesian head wonderingly. “And then — nothing! I never got anywhere with her! She said I was too young for her! She was twenty-two and I was fifteen, and I was too young!” He shook his head some more.

“Well, even the Babe struck out occasionally,” I muttered, seizing the snapshot and restoring it to my pocket. “So what was this unforgettable girl’s name?”

“Tara’s? It was one of those long names like they have down in the Australes, Vaninioréoré or something like that.”

“It wasn’t Héréhéré, then?”

“Héréhéré? Are you crazy, Caneili? That’s the Tahitian word for ‘love.’ ”

I grinned.

“That’s what I thought. Someone is fooling someone else here — or was thirty-five years ago.” I lowered my voice. “What was she doing when you knew her?”

“Doing? Not much, except living with old Hubert Hollmane, the guy who used to have the first dry-cleaning business in town.”

“A Frenchman?”

“Yeah, skinny old coot with a cigarette butt always stuck in the gap between his two front teeth — how could he possibly attract a girl like that?” But Heimata Mahimana’s indignation faded and he flashed a sudden cheerful smile. “But she left him, of course, went off with some guy she’d known from the Bounty a couple of years before and married him. Must have broken about a million hearts, including mine all over again.”

“Good grief. Was it Brando she married?”

“No, no, just a guy from the boat they brought down to make the movie, not a guy from the movie itself. A lot of the local girls married the sailors and went off with them to live in romantic old Canada.”

“Canada? Tahitian girls in romantic old tropical Canada?”

“Sure. Nova Scotia, that’s where they built the boat. Sailed it down here with a Canadian crew.”

I removed my hat in order to scratch my head. “Well, well, what next? So this superb Tara Heartbreaker is still in Canada, then?”

Heimata Mahimana stared at me as if I had drifted away from my moorings. “Of course not! How many of those dumb Tahitian girls ever made it through the first Canadian winter, do you think? Married to a bunch of dumb sailors?” He snorted indulgently. “No, she’s back, just like all the rest of them.” He pursed his lips and stared thoughtfully into the distance for a moment. “Saw her a couple years ago. Still looks pretty good.”

In spite of myself I could feel a tingle of excitement. “So you know where she is, then?”

“Can probably help you find her.” The master builder gave his leonine head a tragic shake. “But now that I’m not too young for her, she’s way too old for me...”

Later that evening I got a call through to my client’s room at the Hotel Tahara’a. “I’ve found her.”

“What! Already?”

“It was easy,” I said with feigned modesty. And actually, it had been easy. Heimata Beefcake had distinctly remembered from his last sighting of her that Tara Long-Australes-Name was now somehow connected with the hotel business. As a private eye of assured discretion, I was in reasonably good standing with most of the local hotel managers, all of whom suffered from the usual petty crimes associated with the hotel game. The third one I talked to told me precisely where the former Tara “Héréhéré” could be found and under what name. And now I was reporting the good news to my slightly weather-beaten Canadian client.

“I’ll need a little expense money,” I said, “and I can stop off at the hotel on my way to town tomorrow morning to pick up any note you care to write — it’ll save you a trip to my office.”

“You still won’t just tell me where she is and let me telephone her? I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me — do I really look like a monster?”

“No, of course not, and I know I’m probably being stupid, certainly old-maidish, but that’s the way it’s got to be.”

“So you can sleep soundly at night,” he sneered bitingly.

“My sleep is very important to me.”

“It’s my legionnaire!”

I blinked my eyes in the cool, dark interior of the driftwood, bamboo, and coconut-thatch boutique that was a welcome oasis in the blinding dazzle of the sun-drenched atoll of Tetiaroa. A middle-aged Island woman who was taller than average and still reasonably slim glided out from behind a coconut-plank counter and, to my astonishment, wrapped her pareo-clothed body around mine. For a long moment I gaped foolishly at the glossy black hair rubbing against my cheek. “You’re Tara? Tara Héréhéré? Tara Vairoaroaraa?”

The Chinese-Tahitian face turned up to mine, looking distinctly more Tahitian than Chinese. “Not Héréhéré,” she giggled, “that’s just a joke name. But I’m certainly Tara Vairoaroaraa. And you—” she squeezed me affectionately, “—you’re my favorite legionnaire!”

But even the most battle-hardened legionnaire is entitled to an occasional time-out to recover his élan. I eased away from my long-lost friend, pulled my broad-brimmed hat from my brow, and scratched my forehead as if that actually aided the thinking process. “But you looked Chinese when I knew you,” I finally protested weakly. “And your name was Helene. I may be dumb, in fact, we know I’m dumb, but even I would have remembered you if your name had been Tara.”

Tara flicked an airy gesture of dismissal. “Oh, that was just something that Tahitian girls all did when I was growing up, adopt some French name or other to replace our Tahitian names. We thought it made us exotic and sophisticated. The one I chose was Helene.”

I sighed deeply. “And when I knew you, you were still using it.”

“Only as a nom de guerre.” She giggled again. “When I went out dancing and needed rescuing by legionnaires.”

“From other legionnaires.” I glanced around the dim hotel boutique, empty of humanity except for us, at its stock of pareo cloths and shirts, girly calendars, bottles of suntan lotion, French wines and perfumes, carved war-clubs from the Marquesas Islands, polished shells, and all the other junk you could find in fifty similar shops scattered across French Polynesia. “Looks like you could shut down for a moment while we go have a limonade or a beer and catch up on our news. This is your shop, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Le patron lets me have it rent-free — I’m an old friend of a friend of his.” Tara moved gracefully to the shop’s glass door, pushed me through, and led me through a few yards of bright sunlight into the relative dimness of the hotel’s dining room-lobby. At ten in the morning, a few stragglers were still finishing their breakfasts under the round, coconut-thatched roof while three barefooted Tahitian waitresses in pareos had begun a lethargic cleaning-up. “Let’s go sit out by the bar,” suggested Tara, “they want to close up in here.”

A few minutes later we were sprawled in deck chairs in the shade of a thick clump of banana plants, waiting for coffee to arrive. A distant whine grew suddenly louder — much louder — and I looked up to see the small twin-engined plane that had brought me to Tetiaroa climbing into the deep blue sky only a few dozen yards away. Conversation was impossible until it had dwindled into the distance on its way back to Papeete. The flight was only about fifteen minutes, and I hoped that the young Tahitian pilot would remember that he had another paying passenger for his three o’clock run — I’d been the only passenger on the morning flight and, as far as I could tell, upon my arrival only three hotel guests had ambled from the lobby to the doors of the waiting plane. Business seemed far from brisk on the island hideaway of Tahiti’s most famous resident, and I asked myself how long an ordinary hotel owner could have stayed open in similar circumstances.

Our coffee arrived, and as I stirred my own I wondered how to bring up the reason for my visit. Having the elusive Tara Héréhéré, a.k.a. Tara Vairoaroaraa, suddenly turn into the woman I had once fancifully called Hélène de Troie had shaken me slightly. “There were a couple of big whales in the water just off the reef when we flew in,” I temporized. “The pilot wanted to see them too, so he flew us around a couple of times just about upside down.”

“I wondered what he was up to — normally I don’t even hear the plane until it lands and pulls up right beside the shop.” She raised her coffee cup and clinked it against mine. “Good to see you again, mon légionnaire. Are you here as a tourist? Or as a detective? You’re sort of famous, you know, Tahiti’s only private detective...”

“I think I’ve got some Chinese competition now, but that’s okay with me — I don’t speak Chinese.”

“Just legionnaire French.” She smiled, and I surmised that she was thinking of that Saturday evening ten or eleven years ago at the Hotel Tahiti when I’d rescued her from the enthusiastic but unwanted attentions of a trio of drunken legionnaires who were boisterously celebrating the annual commemoration of the Legion’s glorious military defeat at Bir-Hakeim forty years before in the North African desert. All four of us were wearing our best dress whites and stiff-brimmed kepis, and even though I had been mustered out a few years before, I found that I could still effortlessly summon up my parade-ground sergeant major’s voice, as well as a few colorful phrases in various Eastern European languages. After a few uneasy moments in which I wondered just how much physical damage I could sustain from three angry legionnaires, the trio had snapped to attention, saluted raggedly, and lurched off in search of more acquiescent companionship.

I turned to the good-looking damsel I had just rescued from the fire-breathing dragons. She was wearing something very tight-fitting made of shiny green silk decorated with lots of golden dragons. It had slits on both sides that ran nearly to her waist. Her hair was pulled back into an intricate bun and her high cheekbones and almond eyes glittered in the flickering light of the garden’s kerosene tiki torches. To my relatively inexperienced but still appreciative eye she seemed about ninety-five percent Chinese and five percent Tahitian.

She smiled. “I’m called Hélène,” she said, and I found that I had made a friend for life.

Or at least for the rest of the weekend, until early Monday morning, when she vanished from my existence as suddenly as she had entered it.

My Helen of Troy. I’d looked for her at the next ten Bals de Bir-Hakeim but never saw her again.

Until now — as the successfully unearthed quarry of my French-Canadian client.

Finally, I could see no easy way around it. I removed the photo from my shirt pocket but kept it screened from Tara’s view. “There’s a feller who’s hired me to find you,” I said. “Says he knew you once a long time ago. I’ve got a written message from him to give to you.” Her eyes lit up in wonder. “You’ve been hired to find me?”

“Yes.” I handed her the picture. “Here’s the guy — and you, a certain number of years ago. Looking almost as gorgeous as you do today.”

But Tara’s eyes had grown even rounder as she gasped in surprise. “Your client says he’s the man in this picture?”

“Yes. But it’s hard to tell — maybe he is, maybe he isn’t.”

Tara’s lips tightened angrily. “Well, he certainly isn’t!”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!” She waved the picture under my nose. “I ought to know my own dead husband, hadn’t I?”

That called for another pot of coffee and while we drank it she told me about meeting André Machette, a Nova Scotian sailor who was crewing on H.M.S. Bounty in 1960 and ’61, following him back to Halifax a few years later, and marrying him. From there they’d moved to French-speaking Trois-Rivières, in the province of Québec. Here, while her husband made a modest living from the small boatyard he’d started, Tara Machette had given birth to two boys.

“We were reasonably happy,” she said, “not a lot of money, but enough, and the children were wonderful. Both of them grew up around boats, so the older one joined the Canadian Navy just as soon as he could. That... that was just before my husband died.”

I thought of the undeniably alive French-Canadian calling himself Hippolyte Duchamps and wondered what sort of can of worms I had just gotten myself into. “How did he die?”

“He loved to go fishing. Every fall he and a couple of friends would take a canoe and go into the back country and paddle and fish and camp for two weeks. Then one year his two friends suddenly couldn’t make it, so he decided to go by himself. He really was a wonderful sailor, you know. So he went by himself up to Lac Barriére and on the fourth or fifth day a terrible storm came up and two or three days later they found his empty canoe drifting upside down. But not André...”

“He was never... recovered?”

The middle-aged Chinese-Tahitian woman shook her head. By now the second pot of coffee had stretched out into a leisurely lunch and Tara had recovered most of her earlier self-assurance. “No. It took years to get him declared officially dead. By that time my other son had joined the navy too, and there wasn’t any reason for me to stay in Canada and freeze to death, so I came back to Tahiti — and met my legionnaire.”

I grinned, but persevered. “And you’re sure your late husband is dead?”

“Well, of course! Wait here.” She darted away from her chair and returned a few minutes later with a thin, beige-colored booklet that she tossed on the table before me. It was, I saw, a Livret de Famille, or Family Booklet, which is delivered by the French government to married couples and officially records births and deaths and marriages and divorces of all subsequent members of the family. “Look,” she said, turning the pages. “Here’s André — and the date of his death. You know how the French are about their Livrets de Famille — there’s no way in the world they’d ever say he was dead unless he really was.”

I nodded. The French did indeed take their Livrets de Famille very seriously.

Tara studied the photo once again — she hadn’t yet read the sealed envelope I’d brought from Hippolyte Duchamps — then shrugged. “Anyway, even if he was still alive, he’s been out of my life for thirteen years now — it’s not as if I was still in love with him.” She reached across to catch two of my fingers and to toy with them idly. “What do you think I should do?”

“First, read the note he sent.”

“All right.” She tore open the envelope, glanced at the page within, and snorted derisively. “We’ve got to talk,’ it says. That’s all.”

“Is it your husband’s handwriting?”

“It’s been a long time. I just don’t remember...”

“Would you like me to talk to him about all this? Find out what he says?” It wouldn’t be as if I were betraying my client — after all, it was now clear that he had in some way lied to me, even if I wasn’t yet sure about the particulars.

“Would you?”

“Sure — curiosity is my greatest fault. Could you come over to meet him if I thought it was safe — and desirable?”

Tara ran a finger along her still shapely chin as she considered. “In two or three days, yes. I can’t just walk away from the shop...”

“All right. I’ll call you as soon as I have any news.”

A distant drone was gradually growing louder. “That sounds like the plane to take me back.” Tara accompanied me back to the shade of the coconut trees that framed the atoll’s tiny crushed-coral landing strip. An even smaller plane than the one that had brought me stood at the end of the strip. A lanky Frenchman in a blue work smock was peering under the cowling of its single engine.

“Ah,” said Tara, “Marlon must be going to town.”

“I didn’t think he ever went to town — except to fly to the States.” The atoll’s owner was notoriously reclusive.

“Oh, occasionally to see a dentist, stuff like that. But not very often.”

A moment later we watched the two-engined plane that served the hotel bounce onto the coral strip and rumble towards us. Shortly afterwards I and two other passengers were being pulled into the blue skies of Tetiaroa. For a while, far below, I could see Tara waving.

Polynesians are early risers, particularly in the outer islands, so most of them are also early sleepers. I called Tara at a quarter to ten that evening. “Yes?” Her voice sounded hoarse, as if she had just been pulled from sleep.

“Sorry to wake you. Just wanted to say that I haven’t been able to get hold of this guy who calls himself Hippolyte Duchamps. He must be out on the town. I’ll get him tomorrow.”

“Thank you, mon légionnaire, I do appreciate it.”

But the next day was more of the same. Impossible to reach the French-Canadian by telephone. After listening to the phone ring endlessly in his room at the Hotel Tahara’a for the umpteenth time, I beat my way through the merciless downtown traffic, across the bedroom districts of Pirae and Arue, and eventually, twenty-five minutes later, found myself in the parking lot of my client’s hotel.

The Tahara’a had been built by Americans thirty years earlier on One Tree Hill, a majestic point of rocky cliffs thrusting into Matavai Bay, where Captains Cook and Bligh had weighed anchor two centuries earlier. It was an impressive architectural achievement, with a couple of large buildings with concave roofs vaguely shaped like Polynesian longhouses at the tip of the point, and below them the eight floors or so of bedrooms that marched down the cliffs like enormous staircases. It was by far the most spectacular location for a hotel on the island and yet it had only enjoyed moderate success over the years. Right now it was under its fourth or fifth owner and, from outward appearances, didn’t seem to be attracting many more clients than Brando’s hotel on Tetiaroa.

For a few minutes I wandered through the lush vegetation that had grown up around the main buildings and water park, admiring the spectacular views that the site offered of Matavai Bay and Point Venus to one side, and of Papeete and the sister island of Moorea on the other. And of the smooth gray Pacific lapping the rocks far below, and of the great green and blue mountains of the island’s interior behind me. Then I made for the offices off the main lobby and started the day’s serious work.

Half an hour later I was back in the parking lot, no closer to finding my suddenly elusive client than when I had first driven in. I did know that the name on the Canadian passport he’d shown at the front desk upon checking in was the same as what he’d given me, Hippolyte Duchamps, so whether he was also André Machette or not, at least his present alias wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment improvisation.

I’d also learned that his bed hadn’t been slept in the night before and that no one in the hotel had any memory of seeing him since the morning before. My friend, the assistant manager, who had supplied this meager information, also gave me a knowing Polynesian grin. “He’s off somewhere with a vahiné and will show up later today with a hangover and a hole in his wallet. Isn’t that what they come to Tahiti for?”

Once again I telephoned Tara Vairoaroaraa on Tetiaroa.

“How very strange,” she said in a tight voice.

“I’m sure he didn’t follow me to the airport when I flew over yesterday. But just in case he somehow managed to find out where you are, are you certain he hasn’t turned up over there?”

“Of course. The plane only comes in twice a day, and I can see everyone who gets off. The only boats are the hotel supply boats once a week or so. He couldn’t have swum over!”

“Hrmph.” I looked out my office window at the nearby cathedral. Nothing I saw there lent wings to my thoughts. “Well, he did tell me he was going to be here for a couple of weeks, so I guess we have all the time in the world...”

And I had, after all, been more or less fully paid in advance, so what did I care if I never saw him again?

All the time in the world...

The next morning I read a late bulletin in the local newspaper about the body of a Canadian tourist being found wedged in the rocks at the base of the Hotel Tahara’a. He had apparently been in the water for some time before the surf had deposited him where three Tahitian fishermen had found him the evening before. The name of the tragically deceased was being withheld by the authorities until the next of kin were notified.

Old Joe Caneili didn’t have to get out his crystal ball to divine the name they had found on his passport. I did wonder, however, just what they would learn about his next of kin...

As the morning plane to Tetiaroa hummed smoothly along a few thousand feet above the almost motionless Pacific, I turned in my seat beside the pilot to watch another tiny plane moving directly towards us off to the right. “Monsieur la vedette,” grunted the pilot, meaning, more or less, “Mister Movie Star” in the language I had grown up speaking in Bookbinder, Kansas.

“You must see him a lot.”

“Not since he got his own plane. Now nobody sees him except a couple of people on his island. That’s the way he seems to want it.”

I found Tara in the still-empty boutique and wondered how she managed to eke a living out of her shop even if the kindly patron did let her have it rent-free. She was wearing her usual work costume of a red and white pareo that draped nicely from her high bosom. A large yellow hibiscus was in her straight black hair and she smelled pleasantly of monoi, the distinctive local perfume. But her eyelids were swollen and her face seemed taut and strained, far more gaunt and Chinese-appearing than a few days before.

“Let’s go have some coffee,” I suggested. Or maybe even a double brandy, I added under my breath.

“Did you see this morning’s paper?” I asked when we had pulled our chairs into the dappled shadows.

“No. They arrive with the plane — they haven’t been brought to the shop yet.”

“I thought that might be the case. Here.” I handed her the clipping I’d made from Le Journal de Tahiti.

Tara’s hand flew to her lips and she gasped audibly as she scanned the item. Finally her hand dropped limply to the table and she stared at me blankly. “He’s dead? He really is?”

“Yes.” I had, in fact, made a call to someone I knew at the gendarmerie to confirm that it really had been the body of Hippolyte Duchamps. “So I guess we’ll never know who he was, or what he wanted.”

Tara shook her head back and forth in shocked bewilderment, and when she finally raised her eyes to mine it was difficult to see in her drawn features the carefree beauty of the girl in the picture. “You won’t say anything to them about him wanting to see me?” she whispered.

“Why should I? And why would anyone even ask?” I took a healthy swallow of the Hinano beer I had ordered to go with my coffee.

“I suppose you’re right. Do you still have that picture you showed me of... us?”

I pulled it from my pocket and passed it across. Tara stared at it expressionlessly for a moment, then tore it into neat little shreds that she scattered to the wind. I nodded and said nothing.

We sat for another ten minutes finishing our coffee and beer without exchanging another word, each thinking our own thoughts. Finally I tossed some money on the table. “I think if I hurry I can catch the flight back,” I said as I began to pull myself to my feet.

“Wait!” Tara reached across to grasp me by the wrist. Without looking at me she murmured, “You helped me once before when I needed it. Can you do it again?”

“Sure. For what it’s worth.”

She darted a furtive glance at two other guests lolling in the sun a good dozen yards away, as well as at the small coconut-thatched bar shack, now empty of barmen, and pulled her chair next to mine. “What do you call it when you... when you tell someone something that might have happened, but didn’t really happen? You know, just so you can talk about it, even though it isn’t real...”

It took awhile to get my brain back in gear, but finally I offered, rather tentatively: “Hypothetical question, maybe?”

Tara uttered a tiny sigh of relief, as if we had already made enormous progress towards some distant goal. “That’s it, that’s just what I was trying to say!”

“You have a hypothetical question, then?”

“Yes.” For a while the woman with whom I had once spent a very pleasant weekend a dozen years before seemed to wonder what to say next, then suddenly began talking rapidly, almost nonstop. “Well, here’s the question, then. Suppose someone told you, just supposing, remember, that... that after a certain person was over here a couple of days ago talking to another certain person, that the certain person over here watched the other one fly away, back to Tahiti...”

“All right, I can suppose that pretty easily,” I encouraged her. “Then what did that certain person, the one who was left on Tetiaroa, do?”

“Well, she... that certain person, I mean, she watched him fly away, then her friend, the one who was also a friend of le patron, came into her shop and asked her to fly to Papeete with him. He was going to see a couple of lawyers and notaires about something really important and wanted me to drive him around since he doesn’t drive himself. Normally le patron’s pilot would do it, but that day the pilot had to stay at the airport to see about a part for the plane. And you know what traffic and parking can be like in town...”

“Yes indeed.” They were, in fact, the bane of my existence. “So you flew over to Papeete on le patron’s plane not long after I’d returned to Tahiti?”

“Well, that certain per—”

“Yes, yes,” I interrupted impatiently, “we’re still talking about this hypothetical situation, but let’s just make it easier for both of us to talk, okay?”

Tara nodded. “Well, we got a car at the airport and I drove him into town and dropped him off at the notary’s office and was just about to go try to park the car somewhere when he came back out with two notaries and said that they were going to meet someone from the States up at the Hotel Tahara’a. So I drove them all up to the Tahara’a, and my friend said it would take at least a couple of hours and I should go have a drink or something to eat out at the water park.”

I nodded in horrified fascination, not really wanting to hear what came next, but unable to keep myself from listening.

“So I walked out to the water park and got a Coke and some poisson cru and ate them and wandered around the pools for a while, just looking at the people, when suddenly someone said, ‘Tara?’ and I turned around and there he was.”

I didn’t have to ask whom she meant by he. “And was it really the long-lost husband, the one who is legally dead?”

“Oh, yes,” she breathed, “absolutely. I saw it at once. Even though he was fatter, and a lot older-looking, it was him, all right.”

“André Machette. If we were actually talking about real people, of course...”

Tara managed a faintly conspiratorial twist to her lips. “Yes. Anyway, I didn’t really want to talk to him; here was the man who’d already ruined my life once by dying on me, and now here he was again! But he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away from the water park and through some of the trees and stuff and out to one of the benches by the edge of the cliffs.”

Once again I nodded. From what I understood was going on with liability claims back in the States, no hotel in the country would have dared put a bench in such a spot in a million years. Not without three sets of railings and fences, warning signs, spotlights, security officers, and God knows what else. Maybe an ever-present lawyer to hand out quitclaim forms...

Here in Tahiti, though, the philosophy was still: Fall off the cliff, buddy? It’s your own damn fault. If you’re nice about it, though, maybe we won’t charge you for your room while you’re in the hospital... “So what did this guy tell you when you got out to the bench?”

Tara looked down at her hands. “Well, first he said all kinds of stuff about how great I looked and how much he’d missed me and how sorry he was it had taken him all these years after his boating accident to get his memory back and—”

“Wait! He said he’d lost his memory? And you believed this?” Tara looked up with an unmistakable glitter to her eye. “Of course I didn’t believe him! He’d always been a liar before, and he was still a liar now. And I told him so!”

“Well, good for you. And then what did he say?”

“What might have been the truth, but probably wasn’t — he was always a guy who liked to he just for the pleasure of it. Anyway, he sort of looked away from me and said that even though he’d always loved me, he’d once met another woman who was like a witch who’d cast a spell on him and he couldn’t live without her. She worked in the Registry of Motor Vehicles or some place like that in Québec City, where it was easy to manufacture phony ID’s, and they invented another name for him and a whole other life. And they also took out a lot of life insurance on him under his real name.”

“With the benefits going to her? Hmmm, that’s a pretty tricky ploy — insurance companies weren’t born yesterday.”

“That’s what he said they did — that she did. In any case, he had his accident, she collected the money, and he went to live with her, all because she’d enchanted him.”

“And then what happened? The spell suddenly wore off?”

“She died a little while ago. And all the money was gone. And he didn’t have a business anymore. And now he’s sick and needs an operation. And he’s still in love with me. And the spell is broken. And he saw a picture of me in a magazine article about the hotel and recognized me. And now he wants to come live with me in Tahiti and marry me — again!”

I doubt if my mouth literally fell open as I listened to all this, for legionnaires are trained to keep their mouths firmly shut no matter how preposterous the circumstances. But I sure felt as if my mouth should be hanging open. “This guy... this André Machette that you’d been in love with and married to actually told you all this? Fifteen years after he’d abandoned you and your children?”

Now Tara looked at me with the same wide-eyed innocence of the girl in the picture. “Do you think I could make this up?”

“No, of course not. No one could make up anything as ridiculous as this.” I reached over and took her hands in mine. “And then what happened?”

“Well, by now that... that man and I were standing up, and when he told me that he wanted me to marry him again and he moved closer and put his hand around my arm and hurt me, and then tried to kiss me, I could see all his awful teeth and I just hated him! And I guess that I just sort of reached out and hit him in the face and then pushed him on the shoulders, and he sort of stumbled backwards through some bushes and I ran back to the water park and... and...”

Tara shrugged helplessly. “And that’s all! And then I went back to the car and waited for my friend and then drove back to the airport and got on the plane and went home.”

As a dramatic ending, it seemed distinctly anticlimactic to the act of pushing your supposedly dead husband off a cliff. I considered my next words very carefully. “So when I called later that same evening to say I couldn’t find my client, as far as you were concerned that client was just someone who’d fallen into the bushes, pulled himself out, and probably gone out for dinner?”

“Yes. I was still dreadfully upset when you called, of course, but just because of meeting him in the first place.”

“Not because you knew he’d fallen down the cliff and into the ocean?”

“No! Of course not!” Tara wrung the fingers of my right hand mercilessly. “Even if... even if...”

“Even if he deserved it?” I finished for her. I looked at her grimly. “Well, as far as I’m concerned, he did.”

“You think so?” she said in a tiny voice. “So what do you think that... that certain person should do now?”

I extricated one hand to waggle a finger at a passing waitress for two beers. “Nothing at all,” I said firmly. “Except the next time you come to town on an errand for le patron, give me a call in advance and I’ll see if I can remember how to do the legionnaire two-step...”