Riptide

CHAPTER 23

When Captain James Cook, commander of the British ship Resolution, landed on the Big Island of Hawaii in January 1779, he was accorded the honors of a chieftain. Priests in feather capes sang chants in his honor, and local chiefs brought him pigs and fruits and native wines.

The chiefs’ generosity caused a food shortage among the commoners, who soon grew weary of the visitors. Within weeks, the Hawaiians began stealing the British seamen’s supplies. Cook responded with a vengeance, burning houses in retaliation for a stolen goat, flogging those suspected of petty crimes. Still, the thievery continued — blacksmith’s tongs, nails, finally a small boat.

Captain Cook himself led a small expedition of Marines that last day, hoping to take King Kalaniopuu hostage, to be held as ransom for the boat. As with later military disasters — Ponce de Leon and the Caloosas, General Custer and the Sioux — the white strangers woefully failed to comprehend the determination of the natives on whose land they had intruded. The Hawaiians attacked the British with rocks, fence posts, and wooden clubs. The British Marines fired one round from their muskets but were overwhelmed before they could reload. Though the entire battle took place on the lava rocks at the shore and Cook’s dinghy waited beyond the surf line, he did not attempt to make it to that haven. James Cook, the world’s greatest ship captain — conqueror of the Pacific, explorer of Tahiti, Hawaii, and Alaska — could not swim.

One of Kalaniopuu’s chiefs stabbed Cook. Other warriors crushed his skull against the lava rocks. Then, with knives descended from the Stone Age, the Hawaiians stripped Cook’s flesh and returned it to the British ship, believing Cook’s men would want it. Instead, the British were horrified and returned to England having concluded that the Hawaiians had eaten portions of their captain and expected them to do the same.

The haoles had discovered Hawaii.

Harry Marlin didn’t know Maui from Coney Island, but he booked the first flight. Five and a half hours Miami to L. A. on American, a three-hour layover and then five hours and twenty minutes to Honolulu, another layover, and finally a commuter flight ninety miles to the small city of Kahului on Maui, the Valley Isle of the Hawaiian chain. And so Harry Marlin emerged from the small plane… bleary-eyed, groggy, dehydrated, and constipated.

Pausing on the top step of the stairway, Harry blinked against the harsh sunlight. Across the runway, through the trees, he could see colorful sails zipping by, windsurfers at Kanaha Beach park, less than a mile from the tarmac. Sons of bitches. He hated them as he hated Keaka Kealia, imagined them young and tanned and getting all the pussy they could handle.

A strong trade wind from the northeast nearly toppled him from the stairs. A real tank town, Harry thought, not even a jetway for the big planes rolling up nearby. And that wind. Good thing he didn’t wear a toupee, it’d be in Samoa by now.

“Aloha,” said the Asian woman at the foot of the stairs, placing a lei of fragrant white plumeria over his head. “Maui no ka oi. Maui is the best.” The day was warm and the sky cloudless and the woman stood smiling at him, her straight black hair blowing in the wind. Harry Marlin despised the place.

He rented a four-door Chevrolet Celebrity and drove to the hotel in Kaanapali. He wasn’t thinking of the coupons, not yet, because at the moment he had only two things on his mind — taking a crap and getting some sleep. Tomorrow he could set out after the bastard who ripped him off.

Harry passed through the central valley of the island, the towering peak of Haleakala to his left, lost in the clouds, the lower green mountains of west Maui to his right. On both sides of the road, fields of sugarcane swayed in the wind. He passed the smokestacks of the processing plant at Puunene, the aroma like sweet summer corn hot off the grill. But the air turned bittersweet, the sky blackened nearby, hundreds of acres being burned to strip away the cane’s useless leaves.

The hotel was a jungle and a menagerie filled with plants and animals. Harry Marlin stood in the open-air lobby beneath a seven-story Japanese banyan tree. Flowers everywhere. Pink lokelanis, the Maui rose, were mixed with crimson bougainvilleas, the heart-shaped anthurium, and the exotic bird of paradise. Plumeria added fragrance as strong as burning incense.

Then the animals. The fish, Japanese koi, orange and black, swimming in a stream, getting fat on pretzels as they swam by the bar in the lobby. There were parrots and macaws and cranes, and nearby, miniature penguins hopped into their little pool. The birds all tweeting and the flowers reeking and the walls all teak and glass. Makes the Fontainebleau look like a flophouse, Harry Marlin thought.

In fact, the hotel was ersatz Hawaii, a jungle the way Walt Disney might have imagined it, where the palm trees were stripped of their coconuts so that mice were not attracted, and the birds, like the concierge, worked an eight-hour shift, nine to five, then back to the cages. An upscale tourist’s ideal, a touch of exotica but no mosquitoes for three hundred bucks a night.

Harry shrugged off the bellman and carried his own bag, riding the elevator to the eighth floor. He took one look at the view — the Pacific Ocean, the island of Lanai — closed the curtains, and fell into bed. He slept soundly, the sleep of a man who does not know enough to be afraid of the dark.

The waitress chirped g’morning and said, “How hout starting with some papaya juice and all-bran cereal, great for the digestive tract?” She was young with a ponytail and eyes that had never seen trouble and was probably a health food nut, Harry figured. California written all over her. The type that wouldn’t dream of a cheeseburger sizzling in grease at the Lincoln Road Grill.

Harry had the papaya juice and the bran but his digestive tract was still as congested as 1-95 in rush hour. Then he set out in his rented Chevy in search of Keaka Kealia. It had taken only a couple of questions in the hotel to learn that the windsurfers all hung out in Paia, a town on the north shore.

Yeah, I know Keaka, everybody knows Keaka. That’s what all the suntanned, long-haired, glassy-eyed kids said in every shop, but nobody had seen him since the trip to Miami. Paia had turned out to be little more than a few dusty blocks crammed with windsurfing shops and hippie restaurants serving mahi-mahi burgers.

The day wasted, Harry returned to the hotel and tried to figure out what he would tell Violet. He dialed her number and got the machine — “y’all leave a message” — and figured she’d call him back. Where on God’s green earth you been? So Harry wasn’t surprised when the phone rang in his room. It was a woman’s voice, all right, but young and sweet. No, definitely not Violet.

“Mr. Marlin, you don’t know me. I am with Keaka Kealia. He asked me to contact you. He very much regrets that the two of you had a misunderstanding.”

“Misunderstanding! Look, honey, that bastard stole my hard-earned grubstake.”

“As I say, Mr. Marlin, Keaka regrets your misunderstanding and wants you to know he has a great deal of respect for you, the way you traveled all the way here, your courage in coming to a strange land.”

Okay, Harry Marlin thought. That’s more like it. Found out I was nosing around, got nervous, wants to deal. Even better than me making the first move. Dumb bastard shows his weakness right off the bat.

“Tell him to save the grease job, just gimme back my property, he can keep ten percent just like we agreed and I’ll forget how he double-crossed me.”

The sugary voice continued in the same tone, “Keaka asked me to arrange a meeting with the two of you.”

“You think I’m gonna meet your pal in some dark alley, forget it.”

“Mr. Marlin, I’m in the lobby. Would you care to join me at the Banyan Bar in, say, ten minutes? We can discuss the meeting there over drinks.” The voice still even, smooth, but a nice lilt on the word “drinks,” a bit of interest there.

Why not? Safe place, young babe in a hotel bar, maybe hot to trot. What was it Violet was talking about, the old man saying something about his lawyer falling for the Hawaiian’s girlfriend, she was a real number. Okay, gonna meet her, maybe one of those nymphos. But how about this chicken-shit bastard sending his squeeze to do the dirty work. I’d never do that to Violet.

Only a few customers at the bar, some watching the fish swim under the bridge, a few couples talking at tables, one guy at the end of the bar staring into a drink.

“Mr. Marlin.” A woman’s voice, sweet and soft.

Harry turned around. Okay. All right. The Hawaiian had good taste in cooze. Harry gave her a grin that countless women had found resistible. “Yeah, that’s me.”

In a dainty sweeping motion, the young woman extended her right arm and shook Harry’s hand with a grip that couldn’t break an egg. “So pleased to meet you,” she said.

“You got a name, honey?”

“Lee Hu,” said the petite woman with a shy smile. “My friends call me Little Lee.”

Harry Marlin didn’t notice the man at the end of the bar watching them, didn’t notice anything but Little Lee’s big dark eyes and compact body. He ordered drinks, Perrier for Lee Hu, a Blue Hawaii — pineapple juice, vodka, and blue Curasao — for himself.

“Okolemaluna,” she said, hoisting her Perrier.

“Huh?”

“ Okole, that’s butt or bottom. Luna, that’s moon. So, bottoms to the moon, or bottoms up.”

“Gotcha,” he said, sipping at the straw, it being hard to toss down a drink served in a hollowed-out pineapple. Wouldn’t mind seeing her old-koley, Harry thought, a tight little bottom on this one.

They talked. Yes, Keaka had the coupons, had stashed them on the slopes of Haleakala, the extinct volcano. She would meet Harry in the morning, take him there. Keaka had a new proposition, she said, a fifty-fifty split.

Harry used the miniature umbrella to stir a second Blue Hawaii — not much vodka there — and said he would sleep on it. Shit, he would grab it, grab half the coupons and get the hell out of there. Then he asked her if she’d like to have a nightcap in his room. A polite no-thank-you. Okay, can’t blame a guy for trying, can’t get a hit if you don’t swing the bat. She’d pick him up at seven a.m. Better get some sleep. Maybe the digestive tract would be working in the morning, Harry hoped as he headed to his room.

A Hawaiian man, early forties, in khaki slacks and an aloha shirt, moved from the end of the bar where he had been nursing a drink and slid next to Lee Hu. “What do you think?” he asked.

“It should be easy. He’s a fool, he makes eyes at me like I’m a pushover, spends six-fifty for a drink that looks like toilet bowl cleaner. He has no sense of who he is, his limitations, or where he is, the dangers.”

The man smiled and squeezed her arm affectionately. “Good work, Little Lee. It’s no wonder Keaka likes you so much. You catch on quick.”

“Compared to bringing a load in from Colombia through Coast Guard and Navy reconnaissance, this is child’s play.”

“We’ll see you in the morning then.”

He started to get up, but she touched his arm lightly and said, “Tell Keaka not to get careless. There was a bulge in the sports coat, a gun I suppose.”

“I saw it halfway across the lobby. Don’t worry.”

“Mikala, you’ll take care of Keaka for me?”

The man nodded. “He takes care of himself pretty well. And he’s my flesh and blood. Anybody touches a hair of his head, I blow the guy away.”

Paul Levine

Riptide