Twenty blue devils

Chapter 12

"I am really steamed,” John said through clenched teeth. “I mean, I am really pissed! I mean, I really let that little crud get to me."

"No kidding,” Gideon said. “Really?"

He had convinced John to stop for a cool-down beer at a sidewalk cafe a few blocks from the gendarmerie, in the heart of Papeete's downtown; a busy place with bright, cherry-colored canvas chairs, bright cherry-colored plastic tables, and a big, bright, cherry-colored canvas awning over everything that filtered the strong sunshine, letting through only a cool, watery, reddish glow that made it seem as if they were sitting on the bottom of a pink-lemonade ocean. Even the dust motes were rosy. Cafe Le Retro, it said on the awning. Pizzeria-Brasserie-Bar Americain. And if nothing else, at least the music on the speaker system was American: Elvis Presley crooning “Love Me Tender."

"Eez he ghrreally weez zuh aef-bee-aie?” John mouthed, doing a savage, surprisingly good imitation of Bertaud. “What a prune."

"He was just trying to be funny,” Gideon said. “It was a joke."

"Sure.” John glowered at him over the table. “Did you think it was funny?"

"Of course I didn't,” Gideon said promptly, glad now that he'd managed to resist the impulse to laugh at the time. “But remember, you were getting on his nerves a little too."

"Me!” John was flabbergasted. “What did I do?"

"Well, you did imply once or twice that an investigation that he signed off on might have been botched."

John dismissed this with a grunt. “He's short, that's his problem. He's got a chip on his shoulder, and all anybody- what's the joke now?"

"Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh. I just don't remember you letting anybody get under your skin like this.” The waiter arrived with their order: two Hinano beers in squat brown bottles with labels that proclaimed them la Biere de Tahiti in bold letters above a Polynesian version of the girl on the White Rock bottles.

John swigged directly from his bottle. “You know who he reminds me of? Not in looks, I mean. My brother, Nelson.” Then, perhaps mellowed by the beer: “Well, I don't know, maybe not as bad as Nelson.” He heaved a sigh and settled down. “Listen, you think he was telling us the truth about the exhumation?"

"The commandant of police?” Gideon poured a half-glass of Hinano that he didn't really want. “Sure, why would he lie?"

"I don't know. But if he's not lying, that means that Nick is. He didn't run into any red tape, he just changed his mind. And that raises some questions."

"Such as, what are we doing here?"

"Such as, what the hell is going on? Why would Nick back down?"

"It happens, John. Digging up relatives makes people squeamish when the time comes. It's not that surprising."

Maybe it wasn't, John told him, but weasel-words from Nick Druett were, no matter the circumstances. When Nick committed himself to something he did it; no fencing, no dodging, no humbug about Tahitian red tape.

"Besides,” John added, “if he changed his mind, why would he fly us out here, and put us up, and all the rest of it?"

"Beats me. He's your uncle; you ought to do what Bertaud said and ask him “

"Yeah, I'll do just that,” said John. “But you know what I'm starting to think? I think Bertaud and Nick are-” he held up two fingers close together “-like that. I think Bertaud's in Nick's pocket. Nick's a powerful guy around here."

Gideon shook his head. “John, I really don't think so."

"Yeah, well allow me to differ.” And with that he sank into one of his rare sulks, slumping in his chair, sipping from the bottle, and scowling moodily into the middle distance.

Gideon was sympathetic, but only to a point. It seemed to him that Bertaud had right on his side, that the more they considered the “evidence” for a murder having been committed the flimsier it got, that while Nick's actions were hard to explain, there was no reason to assume that a cover-up was behind them. He was beginning to think that he and John were here on a wild-goose chase, not that he would mind all that much if that's what it came to. He had been ambivalent from the beginning, and if what it amounted to in the end was nothing more than a few days’ winter respite in the South Seas, he could live with that.

Besides, deep down he had the feeling that all these people, John included, would be better off if Brian were left in peace. Exhumations were like lawsuits; once begun they rarely turned out as expected, and however they turned out they had a way of leaving in their wake a family that wasn't much of a family anymore.

He sipped his beer, waited for John to come out of his funk, and abstractedly watched the parade of noontime activity just beyond the cafe tables, along the boulevard Pomare, Papeete's bustling heart. Guidebooks to Tahiti are near-unanimous in their advice on what to do when in Papeete: get out of it as soon as possible and go someplace that is unspoiled. Papeete, they explain, is noisy, dirty, tacky, commercial, and coarse. The bad press is nothing new. Robert Louis Stevenson sourly referred to it as “the dreaded semi-civilization of Papeete.” To Zane Grey it was “the eddying point for all the riffraff of the South Seas.” Somerset Maugham hated it. Paul Gauguin hated it. Jack London hated it.

Gideon liked it.

Papeete seemed to him a lively, healthy, unpredictable hybrid on the way to becoming who knew what, a cordial if not quite settled mix of East and West-or rather North and South-of Gallic elegance and reserve and island energy, ease, and unflappability. From where he sat he could see copra being loaded onto age-grayed tramp steamers on the nearby docks. He could see sweating tourists with loaded plastic shopping bags; hefty middle-aged Tahitian women in bright muumuus with loaded grocery sacks and with flowers in their hair; even a few grizzled, hollow-eyed European beachcombers in mildewed white clothes, straight out of a Maugham story. Farther out, in the harbor, a traditional Polynesian racing canoe skimmed through the water, propelled by a team of muscular brown youths at its oars.

And all of this South Seas ambience he looked at from a table in an undeniably French brasserie located on a pretty street of restaurants, boutiques, and airline offices. With Elvis on the speakers.

John came awake with a start. “Jeez, what are we doing sitting here? It's eleven-thirty. I've got a lot of questions for Nick and I'm gonna want some answers.” He caught a hesitant look in Gideon's eye. “Doc, you'll come with me, won't you? You wouldn't chicken out on me?"

"Well, actually, I was thinking of doing a little shopping while I'm in town, looking for a present for Julie."

"Yeah, but-"

"John, look. I signed on to do my thing with a set of skeletal remains, and I'm still ready to do that. But I'm not going to go argue with Nick about it. I don't know what's right, and I just don't feel as if I have any business interfering in this."

Glumly John swirled the last half-inch of beer in his bottle, “Okay, yeah, you're right, Doc. It's my family, not yours. Lucky me.” He finished the beer. “I'll collar Nick and find out what the hell is going on. How'll you get back to the hotel?"

"I'll hop a ride on le truck. "

John nodded. “All right, you go ahead, do your shopping, have a nice lunch, and go on back and lie around in a hammock all day. I'll deal with my screwball family."

Gideon beamed at him. “Now that,” he said, “is what I call a first-rate idea."

John left the Renault in the parking area beside Nick's sprawling white house and walked around to the French doors that opened onto the beachside terrace in back, which was the way all but strangers entered. At the edge of the flagstone terrace in the feathery shade of a couple of tall, slender mape trees, his aunt Celine-Nick's wife, the mother of Maggie and Therese-was standing at an easel, her back to him, an artist's palette hooked over one thumb, a brush in the other hand, and a second brush between her teeth. She was contemplating the half-finished oil painting in front of her and the immense panorama of sea and sky beyond. Once a famous island beauty who had even had a brief juvenile career in a few Hollywood movies, she was now a chubby, twinkling little woman of sixty with thinning black hair, forever dressed in a capacious, all-concealing, flowered muumuu from which her small, round arms stuck out like a couple of dusky sausages.

When she heard him come up she turned. Her face lit up. “Hello, you!” she cried in the rich Tahitian lilt that she had never lost, although she had spoken little but English and French for decades. Like John's mother, she had been born in Tahiti to Chinese parents who had come to work as laborers on the great Atimaono cotton plantation, and Chinese had never been more than a second language to her. “Hey, why you still so skinny? She don't feed you?"

Daintily, and somewhat absentmindedly, she proffered her cheek to be kissed. He kissed it, smiling. Celine was a good-natured, garrulous woman, but usually a little remote as well; not in an aloof or offensive way, but as if in a reverie of self-absorption, as if there were always something intensely interesting on her mind, only it never happened to be you or what you were talking about at the time.

Her approach to painting had some of the same quality, Celine, who lived three months of the year in Paris and the rest in Papara, unvaryingly painted French pictures when in Tahiti and Tahitian pictures when in France. She claimed it stimulated her creativity.

She took the brush from between her teeth and gestured at the painting. “So tell me, what you think?"

True to form, with a sparkling Polynesian seascape of lagoon, foaming reef, and limpid, cloud-studded blue sky spread out in all its glory before her, she was painting a picture of Notre Dame Cathedral from a dog-eared postcard tacked to an arm of the easel.

Looks great, Celine. You get better all the time."

"Don't bullshit me,” she said, but she beamed. “Hey, you early, boy. Nick said you not coming up till later."

"Well, I wanted to ask him a couple of things. Is he in the house?"

She shook her head. “No,” she said, “up at the farm. In the shed, I think. That man in one hell of a mood."

"Well, with poor Brian-"

"No, everybody feel rotten about that. This something else. What you do to him last night?"

"Not a thing, Celine. He probably just missed his beauty sleep, that's all."

"Well, he goddamn mad today,” Celine said, her attention returning to the painting. She chewed her lip and scowled at it. “Now where the hell I gonna find vermilion in this dump, you tell me that."

"Nice talking to you, Makuahine makua, ” John said fondly. “Look forward to seeing you later."

"Just gonna have to use lousy cadmium red instead,” she said and stuck the brush back between her teeth.

In the half-light of the drying shed, a large, round-bellied Tahitian looked up at John from his knees, where he was rolling a coffee bean in his fingers, having picked it from one of the amber mounds that were being systematically spread by a couple of workers with blunt wooden rakes.

"The boss? Yeah, he down below, by the furnace, You got to go outside and come in again. Hot as hell down there."

"Thanks,” John said.

"If you selling something, don't bother, come back another time."

"That seems to be the general opinion.” John smiled. “I guess you don't remember me, Tari."

The Tahitian took another look. His neutral expression changed. “Oh, hey, the boss's nephew, right? How you doing, John?"

"Fine, how about yourself? Running the place yet?"

Tari Terui was one of Maggie's “projects.” The son of a man who had himself worked on a coffee farm all his life, he had been with the Paradise plantation for fifteen of his thirty years, starting as an unskilled laborer on the loading dock and eventually working himself up to a crew chief, which seemed to be as far as his vocational aims went. But Maggie had seen some spark of intelligence or aptitude in him and had gotten him, against his own judgment, to enroll in the technical college in Papeete. To everyone's surprise but hers he had stuck to it, seen it through, and emerged with a certificate in hotel management and tourism, the closest thing to a management degree that one could get on the island.

Since then he had been her shining example, and she had nursed and groomed him all the way to his present job as production foreman, the highest position that had ever been held at the farm by a native Tahitian. Now, John had heard, she had him in mind for bigger things still. Last week, when Nick had begun to wonder how he was going to replace Brian at the farm, she had argued that he would have a hard time finding a better operations manager than Tari Terui, or one who knew more about the coffee business. Given a little coaching and a month or so to learn the ropes, he would do a wonderful job.

Nick had surprised her by promptly accepting the idea, and Tari had now been the official heir apparent for going on two weeks.

"Oh, be a while before I'm ready to run things,” he said, getting to his feet. “Not till Thursday, anyhow.” And he laughed, but with a nervous little hiccup that suggested less assurance than the words did.

Despite his accomplishments, Tari had always struck John as a simple soul, a big, likeable islander who had been goaded by Maggie, with all good intentions, to a level he would never have wanted or reached on his own; a man who was in over his head or who thought so at any rate, and dearly wished himself back hefting bags at the loading dock with the other kanakas. As a result, under the friendly exterior and the high-pitched giggle there was an edge of uneasiness. If anything, John had seen it grow sharper over time.

Well, what the hell, it was Tart's life. If he didn't like it up there with the big boys, all he had to do was say no thanks. Nobody was forcing him. Still, he couldn't help rooting for the guy.

"Ah, you'll do fine, Tari. You know more about coffee than all the rest of them put together. So Nick's in a bad mood, huh?"

"You said it, brother."

"How bad? On a scale of one to ten."

"Oh, I don't know. Around seven hundred?"

"Thanks for the warning. See you later, Tari."

This was starting to get worrisome, John thought as he walked around the shed to the other entrance. Nick could be just about the most stubborn, contrary man in the world when he felt like it, and John wanted some answers-now, before Nick had time to concoct some kind of elaborate, cockamamie story. Obviously, a little psychology was called for, a little buttering-up.

A little coffee-talk.