Wind Raker - Book IV of The Order of the Air (6 page)

“There’s a good deal to see,” Dr. Buck said. “I hope you’ll find the time.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon looking at the survey maps of Collins’ pineapple grove and making some preliminary plans. To Jerry’s relief, he and Radke were in agreement on the basic parameters of the dig site, and on the best places to put the first test trenches, and Dr. Buck promised to send Gray with a full team of laborers as soon as they were ready to get started.

“Shall we say at nine o’clock?” Radke asked, and Jerry nodded. It still felt as though the ground was heaving underfoot, but surely that would wear off in another day or two.

“Excellent.” Radke rubbed his hands together. “And now if I might borrow Mr. Hanson I would like to sort out the equipment you offered, Dr. Buck?”

“By all means,” Dr. Buck answered. “Bob, I’ve told Dr. Radke he’s welcome to any and all of our tools. In the meantime, Dr. Ballard, one of our museum volunteers has offered to put you up for the night, and to help with making more permanent arrangements. Mrs. Patton is quite good at such things.”

“That’s very generous,” Jerry said. What he’d really hoped for was a nice hotel room and perhaps dinner with Radke and a chance to — discuss their shared experiences — not to have to make nice to someone who was clearly a valuable museum employee. Not to mention having to negotiate a stranger’s house with only one leg to stand on.

“Then we should go find her.” Dr. Buck held the door and Jerry perforce preceded him.

The galleries of the Bishop Museum were cluttered. Too many artifacts and too little space resulted in cases of objects down the middle of rooms that should have had room to stand back, precious statuary roped off in corridors. Boxes of labeled potsherds and spearheads were affixed to the walls over shelves of entirely different objects with little explanation or reason. In short, they had an excess of riches and no place to put them. It was a glaring contrast with the spacious corridors of the Met. Spear tips from Ancient Egypt resided in their own padded boxes at the Met, nestled in cotton wool and properly labeled by an army of graduate students and curators. Here, spear tips from Polynesia were jumbled together in a box with a handwritten tag. Still, Jerry thought, this was the best collection in the world of everything Pacific, better even than the Victoria Museum in Melbourne. At least these things were being preserved and studied rather than broken up as curiosities to private collectors.

The private areas of the museum were even more confusing. An electric fan turned slowly overhead, moving air from the single open window, and a middle-aged woman looked up from a dining table in the middle of the room. She had a cardboard box full of stone fishhooks and was sorting them into seven green cloth trays, a magnifying glass at her elbow. She was perhaps Jerry's age, with brown hair going gray pulled back in an untidy bun, and a white shirtwaist dress. She looked up when the door opened, her face lighting with a smile that seemed entirely unfeigned. There was something vaguely familiar about that expression, but he couldn’t seem to place it.

"This is Dr. Ballard," Dr. Buck said. "Dr. Ballard, Mrs. Patton."

She got up quickly and offered her hand, which Jerry shook. "It's nice to meet you, Mrs. Patton."

"It's so nice to meet you too," she said. "I've heard a great deal about you, and I'm delighted you'll be spending the summer in Hawai'i." Like Dr. Buck, she pronounced the last word with the ending emphasized, as though it were part of a language other than English — which he supposed it was, now that he thought about it.

"I will leave Dr. Ballard to your tender care," Dr. Buck said. "How are the fishhooks coming?"

"Slowly," she said. She gave Jerry another smile, inviting him to see. "We've been given a box of fishhooks that a man collected all over the South Pacific on his travels — lovely, of course, but he could not tell us where any of them came from or when he got them. So I'm sorting them stylistically by island group. There are about two hundred, all total." She picked up the nearest one. "This one is from Easter Island. It's very distinctive."

"If you say so," Jerry said politely. "I'm a Classicist by training, and I'm afraid the taxonomy of Polynesian fishhooks isn't my area of expertise."

"Polynesian, Melanesian, Maori…" Dr. Buck said. "We have a little of everything. At best we hope for context and order, so that future generations may be able to give these artifacts the attention they deserve. Mrs. Patton has been one of our volunteers for the better part of a decade, saving the years when she had to leave the islands." His expression seemed rather warmer than one might expect for a mere volunteer. "And of course a family friend."

Jerry couldn't get over the prickling feeling that he'd met her before. "Why did you leave the islands?"

"My husband is in the service. We were posted elsewhere for a while. And delighted to return!" She got up, putting the fishhook back on the cloth tray, and reached down for an enormous straw handbag under the chair. "You're welcome to stay until you find another place, Dr. Ballard. We've rented this house and it's perfectly enormous for us. You could stay in a hotel, of course, but I must tell you that Honolulu hotels are very expensive and not very good. If you're going to be here for several months you're much better off with a rental. There is an agent I can recommend if you're interested. Or I do have a friend who has a house for rent. A military family unexpectedly transferred."

"Much appreciated," Jerry said. He wondered if a hotel wasn't better, though. A cottage just for him seemed excessive — though if he could persuade Radke to share, they would have a certain amount of privacy. But then they’d have to hire someone to cook and clean and that could be complicated. And all of that assumed that Radke was actually interested, though he’d certainly seemed not uninterested…

"I will see you tomorrow then," Buck said, offering his hand again. "Perhaps you could meet me at nine and we'll drive over to the dig together? Beatrice, is nine too early for you?"

"Not at all," she said. "Buddy will be in school, so I'll deliver Dr. Ballard promptly. We have another week until school is out. And then it's just insanity ahead!" She put her purse on her shoulder and led Jerry through a side door to another door labeled "Do Not Open." She opened it, letting the warm air and sunshine in and showing a tiny staff parking lot outside.

"You have children?" Jerry asked, making conversation as he followed her carefully down the two poured concrete steps.

"My son's in fifth grade," she said. She unlocked the door of a sleek blue Packard. "And my daughter's studying physical therapy at the Naval Hospital over at Pearl Harbor. I think every young person should have a means of adequately supporting themselves, don't you?"

"I suppose," Jerry said, easing himself into the passenger seat. It was quite a luxurious car.

"My older daughter is married and back east," she said. "And of course my husband is on the post a good deal of the time, but he should be around later. I think it will be just the three of us tonight. Buddy has some sports thing or other and Ruth will be late at the hospital. It's an excellent program. She should qualify as a fully certified physical therapist at the end."

Jerry rolled the window down, letting the hot air out of the car where it had been sitting in the sun. "Are you an anthropologist?"

"Only an amateur." Bea put on her sunglasses and popped the car into gear with a great deal of stomping on the clutch. "Actually, I'm a writer."

Jerry's eyebrows rose. "Oh?"

"I've published a number of short stories and my first novel is coming out next year." The corners of her mouth twitched. "It's about interracial marriage and gods who act through their mortal avatars and how bloods mingle in the womb. And war and sex and eternal love, of course."

"That sounds ambitious," Jerry said. And not at all the sort of thing someone so aggressively respectable-seeming would write.

"Well, I expect Henry Kershaw will buy a copy."

“Henry Kershaw?" Jerry blinked.

She gave him a quick smile as they stopped at a traffic light. "I asked Henry about you when I saw your name on the list for the dig. I thought you seemed familiar and then I remembered."

"The Great Passenger Derby," Jerry said. That was why she looked familiar. He'd seen her at Henry's launch party in Los Angeles the night the cursed necklace was stolen.

"You're in Mitchell Sorley's lodge," she said, and Jerry winced. Henry had no business babbling about lodges or who was in what. Discretion was the rule, both spoken and unspoken. "I had a good chat with him at the party. And then we found the safe cracked."

"Ah," Jerry said. Now he had her placed. The woman Mitch had been talking to the police with. He didn't think he'd actually seen her for more than a moment.

She shot him a quick glance as the traffic moved on. "I'm Isis and Serapis myself." And that was proper — to expose oneself the same way one exposed the other, mutual jeopardy. "We have a very eclectic meeting here in the islands, a little of this and a little of that, rather than sticking to one formal tradition. There are people from all over, you see. This is a place where people pass through, and it welcomes all travelers with its spirit of aloha."

"Doesn't that mean hello?" Jerry asked.

"What does 'ave' mean?" She downshifted as they went around a switchback and started climbing a steep hill. "It means hello. And goodbye. And a lot of other things too. But for now I give it to you as a gift and a beginning."

W
illi Radke sat on the lanai of the Moana Hotel, staring out at the beach where the surf flashed white in the twilight, the last mai tai of the night half-finished in his hand. It had been an interesting day, to say the least, even if he had had to spend more of lunch than he would have liked tap-dancing around the question of who had put up the money for this most unlikely of digs. Buck was suspicious, for which one could hardly blame him, and he could foresee weeks of awkward conversation around the topic. He wasn’t actually lying, he reminded himself; he truly didn’t know who had been recruited to make the offer, even if he could guess exactly where the money had come from. But it didn’t really make him feel any better about the questions. Professor Buck was a great man in the field; it was degrading to have to deceive him this way.

Although… He smiled. Dr. Ballard’s look of amused appreciation had almost been worth it. And of course Ballard had then managed to ask — so casually! — about Leo’s. That was a real club, not for the tourists or the latest horde of sun-worshipping he-men, and it had been impossible not to respond in kind. Dropping hairpins, one of his American friends had called it, that delicious dance of hint and innuendo, all the more exciting for being conducted under the noses of their normal companions. There had been a positive clatter of pins from Dr. Ballard.

And he wanted very much to pick them up. Willi took a long swallow of his drink, fruit juice and heady rum in what seemed to be equal and generous measure, the breeze from the ocean cool on his face. Even knowing how dangerous it could be.

Though maybe it was not as dangerous as all that, or at least no more so than usual. Ballard was hardly going to betray him, and even if something slipped, he wasn’t working in his usual field, and he was a long way from anyone who knew him. Except that he was expected to make reports to certain men at the consulate, and that brought him entirely too much into the government’s eye.

There was also no knowing what Ballard’s part might be in this game. He was a Classicist, entirely the wrong man to be supervising this dig; yes, he had said he was doing it to prove that he could in fact manage a dig despite his missing leg, and that was not unreasonable on the surface, but — there were surely better qualified men available, even for a vanity project like this. He had been warned not to underestimate the Americans.

And yet, Ballard had made the first move. That was not the act of an agent. The men from the consulate couldn’t question his spending time with his colleagues. It was merely devotion to his work. The trouble was, he wanted to take the chance, foolish and dangerous as it might be. He had read Ballard’s papers, even agreed with some of them; he liked the wry humor he’d seen in flashes over the afternoon, and he admired both the courage it took to ask and the careful way he’d done it. He’d left himself an out, could have claimed to be shocked himself up to the moment Willi had admitted knowing the place. And also — even crippled, he was an attractive man. Willi allowed his thoughts to linger on the well-cut suit, the crimson-striped tie, a nod to Ballard’s university and to his tastes, another hairpin slipping free. He imagined loosening that neat half-Windsor knot, unbuttoning the collar, his hands in the graying hair and a kiss that tasted of pineapple and tobacco. It had been a long dry winter in the desert, under the too-watchful eye of the Chinese authorities and of his own colleagues. Surely he could afford to indulge himself just a little.

He drained his glass, and rose sedately from his chair, the sound of the surf hollow in the distance. The sensible thing to do would be to let it go, but he was not that sensible. He would see how far they could go before he had to call a halt.

J
erry slept better than he had expected, considering that the bed still seemed to move unexpectedly under him every time he started to fall asleep. Mrs. Patton had chosen his room carefully, close enough to the bathroom that he could make it there on his crutches without waking the entire household, and it had been nice not to have to worry about having to fumble with his leg in the middle of the night. But of course she was a military wife; it was a good bet that some of Colonel Patton’s friends were similarly handicapped, given that he was easily old enough to have been in the War. He woke to light through the curtains and the sound of voices in the hall, but by the time he was properly dressed and shaved the house was silent except for the sound of a radio. He stood for a moment in the doorway of his room, feeling the familiar prickle of standing wards — a tradition not quite his own, cast by a sure hand — then followed the radio’s music through the house and out to the shaded lanai where a teak table and chairs looked out over palm trees.