“Excuse me, John?”
I looked up. David Klein stood next to my chair. I hadn't seen him approach. “David! It's good to see you! Pull up a chair.”
When he sat down he looked at Felix and Felix looked at him, but didn't say anything. “David, this is Felix Chen. Felix, this is David Klein. He's an old friend and diving companion.”
David smiled.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Felix. His voice was soft, but he was guarded, as if he resented David's presence.
“Felix has been body surfing.”
That earned me a nasty look.
“The front desk told me you weren't in your suite,” said David. “They told me to check in the bar.”
Felix smiled over the top of his grapefruit juice.
“You're here for R&R?”
“Yeah. Finals were a bitch, but they're over.”
“David is a graduate student at Berkeley. When he gets his advanced degree in something or other, he gets to wear a neon sign on his forehead that says, âBERKELEY' in red capital letters. Then people will think he's smart.”
David laughed. Mom says hello.”
Felix did not look happy. I wondered if he had taken an instant dislike to David, or if he felt as if he had to compete with him. The more I thought about it, the more that seemed likely.
“She still up in Telluride?” I asked.
“She flies up there every other week. The contractor finally understands that she means business.”
“You met David's mother,” I said to Felix.
Felix nodded. “She said you were a Disneyland ride.”
David looked confused.
“She was expressing her deep disappointment with my inability
to grow up,” I said. When his confusion seemed to grow, I changed the subject. “You're here for how long?”
“A month or so. I decided to just hang out here for the summer.”
“And you were hoping to stay on the boat?”
“I was hoping to. Mom said you offered.”
“She was right. I'll give you the keys. I'm feeling better and we'll probably get out of here pretty soon. Then we can go diving.”
Felix looked even more unhappy.
“Here you are!”
I looked up. My old friend, Lieutenant Kimo Kahanamoku of the Honolulu Police Department, stood at the table beaming down at me, Tutu Mae, his tiny grandmother, standing quietly off to the side. Kimo wore a pink Aloha shirt covered with startling green pineapples. He looked like a David Hockney painting, one of those larger-than-life, more-colorful-than-nature kind of canvases that he does. I made the introductions, while David and Felix stood to offer their seats.
“Sit! Felix, can you see about getting us a bigger table?”
“They told us you would be in the bar,” said Kimo.
Felix smiled to himself as he hurried off to find the waitress.
“We must talk with you, Mr. Caine,” said Tutu Mae, her voice a quiet rasp. “I have a student with a problem.” For the first time I noticed an attractive young Chinese woman hovering at the edge of the group, a part of the group but detached, alone.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I cannot say anything here in public,” said Tutu Mae. “It is really very, very private.”
“Then let's go upstairs.” There wasn't anything I could do but listen politely. If Tutu Mae thought I could help the young lady, then it was possible that I could help her. Tutu Mae was a kupuna, one of Hawaii's greatest living assets, one of her culture's living legends. If she wanted help from me, then help was what I would offer.
Felix returned with our server. I held up my hand. “We're going to the suite. Anybody want anything? They can send it up.”
“Coffee will be fine,” said Tutu Mae. She didn't smile, but then, I rarely saw her smile. Kimo had once told me that she liked me, but I'd never seen any evidence of it.
“Yeah, coffee,” Kimo nodded, taking the lead from his grandmother, even though I knew he wanted beer.
I looked at Tutu Mae, who smiled graciously. “Why don't we have a couple of pots sent up?”
The waitress nodded.
“Teetotalers,” I said to the waitress.
“I'll have another grapefruit juice,” Felix told her.
“If there's anything worse than teetotalers,” I said, “it's vegans.”
W
ho is the kid?” Kimo waited to whisper his question until we reached the suite.
“Son of an old friend. He's over for the summer.”
“Get rid of him.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Your pet bulldog, too. Get rid of them both.”
“Why?”
Kimo just stared.
“Okay.” I called Felix over and he joined us, still dripping from his swim, dropping sand and salt water on an ancient silk carpet. “After you change you can drive David over to the boat. You remember where it is?”
“Yes.”
“Here are the dock and boat keys. Tell him the bottom needs cleaning. You can help him. I'd be most appreciative.”
“You want to get rid of us.”
I pointed to Kimo. “Give David the keys to the Jeep, too. He'll take good care of it.”
“Yo.”
“Yo?”
“As in yo-ho, mi capitán.” He pronounced each syllable with equal emphasis, giving it just a taste of Caribbean island spice mixed with the sarcasm.
“You know, Kimo,” I said, “if I didn't know any better I'd swear I was being mocked. And in a really bad accent.”
Kimo shrugged, uninterested. “Could be.” He looked around the suite. “Where are your nursemaids? I hear they're something to see.”
“Not my day to watch âem,” I said, annoyed by the questions. Since I had improved, the nurse force had been reduced to two, Angel and a night nurse. Angel had taken some personal time when I went walking with Felix, disappearing into the urban sprawl of Honolulu.
Kimo's eyes wandered around the suite. He must have felt alien here, a policeman in the den of the island's greatest criminals.
The two women settled in the parlor, sitting quietly, like poor relatives come to visit a rich uncle. Tutu Mae seemed to be lost somewhere in the huge overstuffed chair. The young woman I had guessed to be the student sat at the end of the couch next to Tutu Mae's big chair, as if protected from harm by proximity.
“It's nice to see you again,” I said to Tutu Mae.
“I was told that you were ill,” she said, inspecting my bare feet and damp shorts. She waited imperiously, expecting a defense.
“I'm pushing the envelope, ma'am,” I finally replied. “Doctors said six weeks.”
“You think you're smarter than your doctors?”
“It's not a matter of smarter. I just know my own body. It made demands on me for activity.”
She nodded, her mouth a thin line. “Following your body's demands. That is the problem with too many men.”
I didn't know if I was supposed to smile or not, but I couldn't help it.
“This is Miss Wong,” she said, indicating the young woman, who smiled tentatively at me when I glanced her way. “She is a double doctoral candidate in archeology and anthropology at the university.” She paused and stared at Felix, who had just entered the room pulling a clean white tee shirt down over his chest.
David, who had been standing quietly near the door, gazed at
the young woman who had just been introduced. He looked stunned.
“Oh,” said Felix, finding that everyone in the room had followed Tutu Mae's example. “We're just leaving. Come on, David.”
He pushed David out the door and followed him.
When he had closed the door, Tutu Mae looked at me with her dark, autocratic eyes. “I have worked with Miss Wong for several years. She is intelligent. She is kama'aina, and she knows what is important and what is not. She is an honest person. She is a good person.”
The young woman blushed at the compliment, apparently unfamiliar with receiving praise from Tutu Mae.
“Miss Wong's faculty adviser is not so honest.” Tutu Mae looked at the door, as if expecting Felix and David to burst in on us. When they didn't, she continued.
“Do you know much about the history of our Hawai'i?” She pronounced it with the added glottal stop, in the way of the original inhabitants. When I hear it pronounced that way, I remember that it meant the place where we go when we die. Even then, to the ancient ones, Hawaii was heaven.
“I have read
The Shoal of Time, The Fatal Impact, The Kumulipo.
Other books.”
She nodded. “A good start. Every Honolulu bookshop sells those. But there is much more.” She looked at Kimo, studying his face in silent argument. After a moment she shook her head and looked at me. “You are a good man, John Caine. You know what is right and what is wrong, as does Miss Wong. What we are about to tell you must not leave this room. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” I said.
“It is important that you believe what you just said.”
“I can keep a secret.”
She nodded. “Kimo tells me so.”
Miss Wong stared through the thick lenses of her glasses, peering intently at me.
Tutu Mae reached over and touched the young student's
arm, flicking her fingers toward me. She had evidently made her decision.
Miss Wong continued studying my face for a long moment, as if trying to draw out vestiges of my character. Finally she seemed satisfied that I would not run out and shout everything I knew to everybody I met. “What do you know about the Spanish influence in Hawaii?” she asked.
“I didn't know there was any.”
She nodded to herself and leaned forward, a posture of intimacy. “Officially, Spain never had contact with the Hawaiian Islands, although their treasure ships sailed back and forth across the Pacific for 223 years. For some reason they never found it, or if they did, they didn't think much of it. There are no records of any European reaching these shores until Captain Cook in 1778.”
She paused as if deciding the direction of her next comment.
“You are a sailor, Mr. Caine?”
“Was. I live aboard my boat because I like the sense of it. If things don't work out here I can up anchor and drift off to another port.”
She nodded to herself, taking my comment seriously. I reminded myself that her sense of humor was subordinated to her problem. Whatever it was involved sailors. I sympathized. A lot of young women over the centuries have had the same problem.
“Have you heard the treasure stories?”
“Not about Hawaii.”
“Not one?”
“No. I didn't suppose treasure ships ever reached here, not like they did in the Caribbean.”
“Written history says that the first European ships the Hawaiians ever saw were in Cook's fleet. The Hawaiians thought Cook was the god Lono when they saw him. Not only because he sailed into Kealakekua Bay at the height of the Makahiki celebration, but also because he was white, hairless, and sailed aboard a great ship with square sails, exactly like those of the god Lono-i-ka-makahiki. It was a tragic coincidence that this British explorer blundered into Hawaii at the exact time and place promised by
Lono, and sailing a square-rigged vessel so large it looked to the Hawaiians like a floating island, complete with trees and the thunder of cannon. Anyone with that much power just had to be a god.”
I kept silent, knowing a running monologue when I heard one.
“The Hawaiian Islands changed from that day. Did you know that at the time before Cook this was the only true paradise left on earth? No trees or shrubs with thorns existed here. There was simply no reason why a plant should have them, and so, in the evolutionary process, those plants that found their way to Hawaii eventually lost them. The ne'ne geese lost their ability to fly because there were no predators and therefore no reason to use their wings. There were no mosquitoes, no cockroaches, no poisonous plants or animals at all. Infectious diseases were unknown because the population was self-contained. It was a soft and gentle place.
“In five short years after Cook arrived, the people began dying. Sexually transmitted diseases, air- and water-borne plagues, and the exotic insects brought by the whalers decimated them. It was the unfortunate price of contact.”
She quietly stretched against the cushions, as if her back was tender from stress.
“Did you know that even today in Antarctica, the people who live and work down there dread the arrival of new people at the station? Always, without exception, the new people bring with them a load of new flu, colds and other maladies that make life miserable for the next few weeks. And Antarctica is isolated for only a few months at a time. At the time Cook landed here, the islands had been isolated for more than eight hundred years. Smallpox and syphilis killed eight out of ten Hawaiians, and that was even before American whalers introduced mosquitoes and the diseases they carried.”
I nodded, having once visited the very creek in Lahaina where two ignorant seamen had dumped a cask of bad water loaded with the larvae.
Tutu Mae reached over and lightly touched Miss Wong's arm. She was going to tell me about the Spanish, and she took off into the ether and ended up lecturing about mosquitoes and syphilis.
I looked out the window. The day was perfect, one of those late tropical spring days that just break your heart with their beauty. Outside, palm fronds brushed gently against the windows. The horizon stretched to a stainless blue sky. This was all very interesting, but I didn't see what it had to do with me. Or what I could do about anything she told me. If it was background, and if I was smart enough to figure that out, she was going at it the long way around.
“I'm sorry, Mr. Caine. Tutu Mae reminded me that we have serious issues to discuss, and that I was wandering far afield. But you must understand the history to understand the present.”
“Who said that?”
She looked blank. “I just did, Mr. Caine.”
“Must be great minds and all that. And please call me John.”
“Hawaii was a Stone Age culture before Contact. We had no metal. Everything used here was either stone or shell or wood or fiber, natural stock that grew or was found here.
“But there are strange things that are difficult to explain.
“Many years ago, Robert Langdon, a scholar from the Australian National University, wrote a paper about two alien artifacts found in the burial chamber of a Hawaiian ali'i named Lono-i-ka-makahiki, an evidently revered man who died at the end of the seventeenth century. Does that name sound familiar?”
“Cook.”
“Exactly. The items are at the Bishop. I have examined them and find them extremely anomalous. One is a piece of iron embedded in a wooden handle, much like a knife or chisel, but badly degraded so that its original shape is in question. The other is a piece of heavy cotton cloth, eight feet long by one foot wide. Tests indicate that it has the characteristics of sailcloth.
“There were no cotton plants in Hawaii prior to Contact. The wood was determined to be oak, which never grew here prior to Contact. A piece of iron in a Stone Age society is alien and
explainable in only one of two ways. The Hawaiians went there and brought it back, or someone came here and left it.”
“How can you know which happened?”
“Hawaiian oral tradition speaks of the coming of the hairless, light-skinned people who were given wives and who became chiefs. And there is a map of the Pacific, also dating from the seventeenth century, that shows two islands, La Mesa and Los Mojas, at the approximate location of the Hawaiian Islands. Because of their isolation, these islands could represent no other land mass but Hawaii.”
“So you're saying that the Spanish were here.”
“It's possible. Many people have speculated about the shape of the feathered ali'i helmets and the cloaks that appear to be Spanish in origin, especially when no other Polynesian culture adopted similar helmets and cloaks. It gets even more interesting when you compare the Hawaiian royal colors of red and yellow with those of the Spanish monarchs, which were identical.”
“All of which means nothing, I'm sure.”
Miss Wong smiled. “Aside from your admitted ignorance of the subject, there have been long-standing rumors of a Spanish treasure ship that foundered off of Lanai in a hurricane, but no one has ever found the wreck site, or any trace of her cannon.”
I noted that when Miss Wong got into her subject matter her shyness disappeared.
“I spoke earlier of treasure ships. It is historical fact that the Spanish made annual commercial voyages between Acapulco, Mexico and the Philippines from 1556 to 1778. They ferried treasure looted from Asian cities to Mexico, where it was transshipped overland, loaded into other ships, and sent across the Atlantic to Spain.
“It is historical fact that several of the treasure ships did not reach Mexico, victims of the great Pacific hurricanes. I spent time in Madrid earlier this year searching for the name of a certain ship,
La Reina de Plata
. It did not take me long.
La Reina de Plata
was one of the treasure ships that vanished on a return voyage from Asia, loaded with gold, silver and jewels. It left Manila in 1629 and never reached Mexico.”