Twenty blue devils

Chapter 6

That depended on who was asked. Dinner was rice cakes topped with pecan-garbanzo paste, grilled-eggplant-and-feta-cheese salad, and spicy squash-and-orzo stew, all of it perfectly cooked and beautifully served, but still, from John's point of view, rice cakes, eggplant, and squash.

Rudy uncomplainingly if inattentively consumed whatever was put before him, as he usually did. John sometimes wondered if all that coffee-tasting had burned out his taste buds and immunized them against anything else. Excepting wine, of course. Nelson, whose French-born wife had taught him to like creamed dishes and elegant sauces, picked at his food and filled up on mango-pumpkin bread and apple-fig chutney. Only Maggie ate with any enthusiasm, but then John had once, with his own ears, heard her say that the happiest she got when it came to food was when she sat down to a steaming plate of organic brown rice and poached carrots.

Nick, like John, ate moderately and with an occasional polite murmur of appreciation, but John knew his secret. Whenever Nick knew he was coming to dinner at the Lam’ he first fortified himself with a four-course restaurant lunch, usually of prime rib and butter-drenched baked potato. (On company-dinner nights, John did exactly the same, except that he usually made it T-bone steak and butter-drenched baked potato.)

One of Marti's missions in life was to stamp out what she thought of as junk food (which included nearly everything John loved), and most of her menus, John swore, came from TV cooking shows hosted by onetime gourmet chefs who had suffered heart attacks, seen the light, and were now fanatical preachers of low-fat, sodium-free living. Fortunately for the happy state of their marriage, Marti's job as a nutritionist kept her at the Virginia Mason Clinic until late in the afternoon, zestfully dishing up fatless, saltless recipes to hapless patients unable to defend themselves, and Marti and John themselves had to eat out most evenings.

But once a week or so, there was an unavoidable meal like this, which John, grateful for Marti's many other virtues, considered a small price to pay. The fact that wine, not on her list of forbidden matter, flowed freely made it all the easier. This evening's had been brought by Rudy, three different California Cabernets, to be drunk (naturally) in a meticulously prescribed order.

By the time the third bottle was opened, Nick, the natural and uncontested focus of family gatherings, was in high gear with reminiscences of his days as a young soldier in the South Pacific-he had illegally joined up at sixteen-during World War II.

"Then there was this miserable, no-name island in the Solomons,” he was saying expansively, hands clasped behind his neck, “all of about half a mile square, but, God, did the Japanese put up a fight.” He shook his head, remembering, and after half a moment went off on a slightly different tack.

"We used to do a lot of gambling, you know? Poker, craps…I mean, what else was there to spend your money on? And I had this natural talent I didn't even know I had. I don't have it anymore, but I had it then. Well, a lot of money used to change hands and a few people won big, including me. I had over ten thousand bucks at one point. Well, with everything going on, you'd have to be crazy to carry all that money on you in one place. So we used to split it up and give it to ‘carriers'-these would-be buddies who'd keep it on them for you for fifty bucks a day. So-"

His blue eyes swung around the table. “Did I ever tell you this story?"

Maggie laughed affectionately. “Once or twice."

"You never let that stop you before,” John said, pouring him some more wine. Everybody enjoyed hearing Nick tell his stories. Even Nelson was wearing his pinched smile.

"Well, I haven't heard it,” Marti said.

Which was all the convincing Nick needed. “So. This one morning I've got maybe three thousand dollars on me, and another seven thousand split between two carriers, and my unit's out on patrol, and suddenly everything around us is splintering with machine gun bullets. We all jump into the trees and most of us make it, but I see one guy hit in the leg and pinned down behind this tree trunk. Well, I panicked because this is the guy with four thousand dollars of my money. So I make a run for it under fire, I get to him, and I actually make it back with him with my heart in my mouth, and the first thing he says is: ‘You gotta go back. They got Julio too.’ What are you laughing at, John?"

"I'm out ahead of you, that's all."

Marti was grinning too. “So am I, I think. Go ahead, Uncle Nick."

"Okay, you're right: Julio is the other sonofabitch with my winnings. Isn't that something? Two guys get hit, and they're both carrying my money. I practically had a heart attack. Anyway, back I go-by now I have some covering fire-and somehow I get him out of there too. Both of them."

"Holy moley,” Marti said.

"Wait for the punch line,” John instructed her.

"And not only that,” said Nick, who was too good a storyteller to let anyone throw his rhythm off, “but the lieutenant, who didn't know his ass-well, he didn't have a clue, period-he couldn't believe it. He said it was the bravest thing he ever saw. He put me up for the Distinguished Service Cross, and damned if I didn't get it!"

The telephone chirped just as he got the last words out, and with Marti sitting there laughing helplessly John got up and went to the wall phone in the kitchen.

"Hel-"

"John, it's Brenda."

Her tone snuffed out the last of his own chuckle. “What's wrong?"

"I just got off the phone with Therese. It's Brian. He's dead."

His body had been found three days earlier on the mountainous, barely populated island of Raiatea, where he'd gone for his annual camping trip. A pair of backpacking New Zealanders had smelled something unpleasant and had discovered him in a thicket at the foot of a rugged, two-hundred-foot bluff near the base of Mt. Tefatua. According to the police, some of his camping gear had been found on the plateau atop the bluff. Apparently, the police said, he had gotten too near the edge, something that inexperienced hikers were likely to do in the loose, rocky volcanic soil. And, like others before him over the years, he had unfortunately fallen to his death.

"But Brian wasn't an inexperienced hiker,” John murmured.

"No, John, I don't believe this was an accident. If you put everything together-sixteen months ago he almost gets killed when the shed blows down; a few months after that he almost gets killed when the jeep turns over. And now he does finally get killed-because he doesn't know you weren't supposed to get near the edge of a cliff? It's just too much. I mean, forget the computer breaking down and the beans burning up and all that stuff. Just think about what's been happening to Brian. Growing coffee isn't that dangerous. Nick hasn't been having any accidents, Maggie hasn't been having any accidents, Nelson hasn't been having any accidents…I think someone's been trying to kill Brian, and now they finally did."

John heard her out, his head lowered. Behind him in the dining room Nick was on another story. John could hear Marti's unrestrained chortling, Maggie's bluff horse laugh, Nelson's dry whinny. Warm sounds, family sounds.

"John? Say something."

"I admit,” he said slowly. “It makes you think."

"What should we do?"

"Do you know if there's been an autopsy? Has a competent pathologist been over the body?"

An arid laugh came from the receiver. “What, on Raiatea?"

"All right, on Tahiti. Isn't that where the government offices are? There must be somebody-"

"No, it's too late. For one thing, his body was out there for a week or more and…well, you can imagine…"

"Oh, Christ. Brenda, how is Therese taking this?"

Therese, as heartbreakingly lovely as she was, had nevertheless been unhappy as a girl, insecure and bumbling-until Brian Scott had come into her life. Then she'd bloomed like some fantastic tropical flower. John had seen them together when she brought him to Hawaii to meet the contingent of the family that lived there, and to say that she had stars in her eyes when she looked at him would have been putting it mildly. And Brian, the protective John had been pleased to see, had been just as moonstruck with her.

That had been five years ago, and the periodic reports that he got from Nick and the others suggested that little had changed.

"She just sounded numb,” Brenda said. “Hollow. And listen, she's already had him buried, up in the old plantation cemetery. I don't think she'd go along with having him dug up, if that's what you're thinking; not Therese."

"He's already buried? Why so fast?"

"Why wouldn't she bury him right away? You know, it's summertime there now; it's getting pretty warm. There must have been a pretty strong…well, smell."

Abruptly, something went out of him. He slumped heavily onto a stool at the kitchen counter, bent his head, and passed his hand wearily over his eyes.

Brian Galen Scott, thirty-eight, boyish and bright and handsome and happy, father of a pair of picture-book-perfect four-year-old twins, warmly accepted son-in-law of Nick Druett, fast-rising operations manager and all-around whiz kid at the Paradise Coffee plantation.

Brian, the man with everything to live for.

"Yeah,” he said gruffly, “but you'd think she'd have some kind of service so the rest of the family-"

"She's going to have a memorial service after everybody gets back. You don't need the body to have a service."

"No, I suppose you don't. Brenda, what took her so long to call? You said they found him three days ago."

"Yes, the poor kid's just been sitting on this by herself all this time. She just couldn't face telling anybody, especially Nick. Or Aunt Celine for that matter.” Celine was Therese's and Maggie's-mother, Nick's wife. “She's not home either. She's on a shopping trip to Sydney. I promised to call her myself right after I hang up with you. As for telling Nick, I'm afraid that's going to be your job, little brother. And I think he's going to take it hard."

When John replaced the receiver he looked over his shoulder into the dining room. Nick was well into another familiar escapade, this one about the time he'd been sailing in coastal island waters on a pitch-black night (why, he never explained) and had run sharply aground on something. When he tried to pole himself off it, he couldn't reach anything under the boat to push off against. But the boat stayed stuck. Bewildered, he waited for daylight, and when morning came he found that he'd unwittingly sailed sixty feet into a cave and was caught, not by anything in the water, but by the cave's roof He was, as he was about to conclude,

"…the only sailor in the history of the world who ever got grounded by the top of his mast."

John, smiling in spite of himself-these would be the evening's last smiles-waited for Nick to finish the story, waited for the explosion of laughter, and walked slowly back into the dining room.