Fires of Eden Page 10

  I admit that I blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  “They et her,” said Mr. Clemens, the cigar firmly between his teeth again.

  “The natives,” I said, my voice small with shock. “The Hawaiians.”

  Mr. Clemens glanced at me with something that might have also been shock. “Of course the natives. Whom do you think I mean, Miss Stewart…the other missionaries?”

  “How dreadful.”

  He nodded, obviously interested in his own tale now. “They said they were sorry. The natives, that is. When the poor lady’s family sent for her things, the heathens said that they were dreadful sorry. They said that it was an accident. They said that it would not happen again.”

  I could only stare at him in the growing darkness. Our horses set their feet with care on the wet lava.

  “An accident,” I said, the scorn audible in my voice.

  He shifted the cigar. “I agree, Miss Stewart. It was no accident. Why, there’s no such thing as an accident.” He raised one arm, his finger pointing skyward in the gloom. “It was Divine Providence that caused my St. Louis lady-friend’s sister to be et…it is all part of the Cosmic Plan!”

  I waited.

  Mr. Clemens turned in my direction, twitched something that may have been a smile under his mustache, and spurred his horse ahead, swinging around the Reverend Haymark and the two boys—now fallen into a sullen silence—to catch up to Hananui again.

  Ahead of us, beyond a screen of trees that were the first grove we had seen in hours, the sky and earth burned red with a glow more fierce than the reflected sunset that had already come and passed. Puddles of water around us were transformed into crimson pools, so that I admit that I had images of heathens carrying out human sacrifice on the black rock and leaving behind these puddles of blood.

  I was looking at the volcano’s glory. We were approaching Madame Pele’s fire.

  To kill time before the art lecture, Eleanor walked the grounds of the Mauna Pele. She was beginning to understand the layout. East of the Big Hale were the gardens, a forest of palms, one of the three tennis centers, and both of the eighteen-hole golf courses, one curling away north toward the coast, the other south. To the west of the Big Hale was the Sea Meadow, more gardens, waterfalls, and lagoons, the Shipwreck Bar, the manta pool, and a quarter mile of crescent beach. Walk south along the beach and one would see the dense forest in which most of the hales were situated—hers included. Walk north along the beach and follow the long, rocky peninsula seaward, and one encountered the so-called Samoan Bungalows—huge hales with their own pools and yards. To the extreme east, south, and north were the lava fields—heaps of a’a extending for miles. The bay and the beach, as well as the sheltered sailing center on the north side of the peninsula, were the only places where the sea could be approached: cliffs to the north and south suffered the direct assault of the Pacific.

  Eleanor had already located the petroglyph area—a jogging trail ran through the south boundary of lava field to the coast, just beyond the fairways of the southernmost golf course. A small plaque at the beginning of the trail explained that the designs on the rocks here had been painted by early Hawaiians and were being stringently protected by the Mauna Pele Resort. Other signs warned the joggers to stay on the trail and to return before dark, since the a’a fields were dangerous places, filled with crevices and collapsed lava tubes.

  After a quick survey of the grounds, Eleanor returned to the Big Hale with twenty minutes to explore before the art tour was to begin. Passing the stairway to the Whale Watching Lanai and several fancier restaurants, closed during the day, she traversed a wide staircase to the Hale atrium. Eleanor realized at once that the Big Hale was a resort unto itself; guests could stay within the confines of this single building and feel that they had experienced an exotic vacation.

  The exterior of the building was misleading: with a simulated thatched roof and wide overhang, its seven stories of terraces spilling with potted plants, the Big Hale fit into the “native hut” theme of the resort, but seen from the atrium or interior halls, the structure was elegant to the extreme. Built into a hillside, the Big Hale showed only five stories to someone approaching the east portico. Entering from the ocean side as Eleanor had, one passed shops and restaurants to step into a bamboo forest and follow a path through terraced grass hills past koi ponds and clusters of hanging orchids. The interior of the Big Hale was open to the sky, each ascending inside terrace stepped out a bit farther over the wooded atrium with vines and flowered plants hanging from planters. Eleanor thought that this was indeed what Babylon must have looked like.

  The lobby was two stories up from the lower level, its tiled floors gleaming, gold Buddhas smiling at the entrance, all of it open to the trade winds that blew unimpeded from the eastern entrance steps across to the westward terrace above the Whale Watching Lanai. Eleanor could see a few hotel workers moving discreetly through the sunny corridors, but the primary impression was one of clean emptiness and silence broken only by the surf, the birds—inside and outside, since the atrium and lobby held a variety of huge cages in which cockatoos, macaws, parrots, and other exotic birds whistled and talked—and by the constant susurration of surf and fronds.

  Eleanor had once had a long love affair with an architect, and now her eye appraised the expensive fittings, the polished brass, the gleaming cedar and beautifully carved mahogany, the dark ironwood moldings around windows and subtle marble framings around the elevators, and the traditional Japanese verandas and dimensions which somehow blended into a statement that was, incredibly, both post-modern and attractive. This structure avoided the Hyatt/Disney offensiveness without surrendering impact. Or at least that is how Eleanor imagined her former lover expressing it.

  At this moment, she was thinking that she would like to have her hair done. Eleanor’s hair was usually cut short—one friend had said that she looked like Amelia Earhart—but in the spring, she usually let it grow longer just for the purpose of having it cut wherever she traveled. Usually Eleanor’s first act after settling into her hotel room was to leave the hotel of whatever city she had arrived in, and wander the streets until she found a place that cut women’s hair: a beauty parlor, although Aunt Beanie had taught her to laugh at that phrase when she was five. There, receiving whatever terrible haircut was in vogue in that city, that country, Eleanor almost always broke through the barriers of language and culture to make contact with other women. After getting her hair done—and sometimes her nails—Eleanor was armed with enough information about the city to find the real restaurants, shop the real stores and marketplaces, see the real sights, and often ended up eating and traveling with some of the women she had met under hair dryers. She had suffered haircuts in Moscow and Barcelona, Reykjavik and Bangkok, Kyoto and Santiago, Havana and Istanbul…the hair always grew out and she would cut it after returning to campus in the fall. In the meantime, she was often mistaken for a local in the country she was visiting—buying clothes at the stores frequented by the women she met in the beauty parlors was usually the second item on her agenda—and this also helped break down barriers.

  Now Eleanor wondered where the women who worked at the Mauna Pele had their hair done. Not here, certainly. The resort beauty salon might as well have been in Beverly Hills. Eleanor knew that the help were bused in from miles away along the Kona Coast, some from as far as Hilo.

  She glanced at her watch. It was time for the art tour. The daily activity sheet had said only to meet near the Buddhas in the main lobby, but Eleanor saw no one else waiting. The Buddhas appeared to be made of gilt bronze and, upon closer inspection, were not Buddhas at all. Eleanor had spent enough time traveling the Pacific Rim to identify these as kneeling “Buddhist Disciples,” their palms set together in prayer, their bodies thin under the gilded bronze-and-mirrored glass robes. She thought that they were probably from Thailand or Cambodia.

  “Thailand,” said a pleasant voice behind her. “Late eighteenth century.”

  Ele
anor turned and saw a man about her height, perhaps a few years older, although his face had the unlined quality of people with Asian or Polynesian ancestry. His hair was cropped short but still showed a mat of curls, some graying. His eyes were large and expressive behind round Armani glasses. He was clean-shaven; his skin was the color of the richly tanned wood used in the interior moldings of the Big Hale. He wore a loose shirt of embossed navy silk, linen trousers, and sandals.

  “Dr. Kukali?” said Eleanor, extending her hand.

  His handshake was pleasant. “Paul Kukali,” he said in the same rich baritone that had made her turn. “And you seem to be my entire art tour group today. May I ask your name?”

  “Eleanor Perry,” she said.

  “Pleased to meet you, Ms. Perry.”

  “Since our group is so small, it will have to be Eleanor,” she said, turning back to the figural sculpture and looking at its twin kneeling across the entrance. “And these disciples are marvelous.”

  Paul Kukali looked at her appraisingly. “Ah, you are aware of the use to which these were put. Did you notice that there are small differences in their appearance?”

  Eleanor took a step back. “Now I do. Their noses are slightly different. Their robes vary slightly. They both have the long earlobes that mean royal birth…”

  “Lakshana,” said the art and archaeology curator.

  “Yes, but this one’s ears are just…larger.” Eleanor chuckled.

  The curator stepped closer and set his hand on the gold leaf-and-black lacquer surface of the piece. “They’re idealized portraits of the donors. One sees the same thing in Renaissance altarpieces in Europe. The donors could rarely resist seeing their own images displayed near the object of their worship.”

  Eleanor looked around at the sculptures, carved tables, wall hangings, bowls, carved figures, and Buddhist altars visible in the lobby, the adjoining corridors, and the terraces above. “This place must be a veritable museum.”

  “It is a museum,” said Paul Kukali with a small smile. “Only I convinced Mr. Trumbo not to label anything with brass plaques or explanations. But scattered around the Big Hale and other buildings of the Mauna Pele is the finest collection of Asian and Pacific art in the state of Hawaii—our only competitor is the Mauna Kea up the coast, and that’s because Laurence Rockefeller collected the art himself.”

  “Why did you convince Mr. Trumbo not to label these treasures?” asked Eleanor. She had crossed the lobby to look at a red Japanese tansu that was at least five feet high and eight feet long.

  “Well, my argument was that the guests should encounter the pieces not as if they were in a museum, but in the way they would if they were visiting at a friend’s home and came across such marvelous things.”

  “Nice,” said Eleanor. Atop the tansu were two wooden votive tablets which she thought were Thai.

  “Also,” continued Paul Kukali, “leaving these things unlabeled would ensure that I kept my job here giving tours when I wasn’t lecturing at the university in Hilo.”

  Eleanor laughed. The curator made a gesture toward the main stairway. The tour began.

  The Mauna Pele had two golf courses, the “easy” 6,825-yard, par-72 course laid out by Robert Trent Jones, Jr., and the newer, more difficult 7,321-yard, par-74 course designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. Both courses had signature over-the-water holes and both resembled green landscape sculptures carved into the endless miles of lava rock. Byron Trumbo thought that Hiroshe Sato would enjoy the easier, southernmost Robert Trent Jones, Jr., course today and take on the ball-buster Coore-Crenshaw links tomorrow.

  The first eight holes went well enough. The lead foursome would have been Trumbo, Sato, Inazo Ono, and Will Bryant—but, to Trumbo’s endless irritation, Bryant refused to learn golf and had to stay with the golf carts while his boss played. Trumbo accepted Bobby Tanaka as their fourth, and although Tanaka played constantly in Japan as part of his role as liaison and negotiator, his game was uninspired at best. Sato, on the other hand, played a game almost as aggressive as Byron Trumbo’s.

  Trumbo knew that if the deal was to be settled with Sato, it might very well be settled here on the links. To that end, he kept his drives reined back a bit so that his ball ended up near Sato’s more often than not. He had his usual Mauna Pele caddy, Gus Roo, and Sato was using a caddy he had flown in with him—an ancient old guy who looked as if he would be more at home in a peasant fishing village than a five-star resort.

  The day remained clear and pleasant—temperature in the mid-80s but with almost no humidity, due to the ocean breeze—and Sato stayed within a stroke or two of Trumbo, who had the smaller handicap. Byron Trumbo was as fiercely competitive in golf as he was in everything else, but he would have been happy to lose repeatedly to this billionaire brat if it meant unloading the Pele. Meanwhile, the weather stayed perfect, the ash cloud stayed out of sight, no wall of lava came burbling down to bury the buyers, and Trumbo had hopes for a productive afternoon and then getting the whole thing settled.

  Things started falling apart on the eighth hole. After he had putted in and was waiting for Sato to quit mumbling and putt, Will Bryant beckoned him over to the cart. Will had been on the phone. “Bad news. Sherman called from Antigua. Bicki’s on a tear. She threw a fit at Felix until he agreed to pick her up in the Gulfstream.”

  “Shit,” muttered Trumbo. Sato putted—an easy six-footer—and missed it by ten inches. Trumbo shook his head and nodded his sympathy. “Where the hell is she headed?” he whispered to Bryant.

  “Here.”

  “Here?”

  “Here.”

  Trumbo gripped his putter hard enough to bend graphite. “Fuck. Who told her where I was?”

  Will Bryant shrugged. “That’s not the bad news.”

  Trumbo merely stared.

  “Mrs. Trumbo and her lawyer left New York about four hours ago.”

  “Tell me they’re not headed here,” said Trumbo. Sato putted again, missed by two inches.

  “They’re headed here,” said Will Bryant. “Evidently they’re serious about putting a lien on the Mauna Pele. Koestler must have gotten wind of the sale.”

  Byron Trumbo had an image of the gray-haired, ponytailed divorce lawyer—once an advocate of Black Panthers and antiwar radicals, Myron Koestler was now usually a divorce lawyer to billionaires’ wives—and tried to remember the phone number of the Mafia hit man he’d been introduced to once in Detroit. “Caitlin, Caitlin,” he whispered to himself. “I’m going to have you killed, my dear darling girl.”

  “More,” said Bryant.

  Sato knelt, lining up his six-inch putt. Trumbo turned away before he screamed. “Maya?”

  Will Bryant rubbed his chin with the phone and nodded.

  “Headed here?” Trumbo tried to imagine the three women in his life being in the same place at the same time. He had tried before. He had no more success this time.

  “Barry’s not sure,” said Will Bryant. “She went shopping at Barney’s this afternoon and didn’t come back.”

  Trumbo smiled. Maya had her own executive jet. “Find out,” he said. “If she’s headed here, tell the airport not to give her clearance. If she gets clearance, send Briggs over to the airport with a Stinger missile and shoot the plane down.”

  Will Bryant glanced over at the hulking security chief but said nothing.

  “Aw, fuck,” Byron Trumbo said sincerely.

  “Yes,” agreed his executive assistant.

  Hiroshe Sato sank his putt. Trumbo applauded and smiled. “Have Briggs shoot down all their planes,” he said to Will Bryant as he walked past. The party moved on to the ninth hole.

  The art tour had been scheduled for one hour but it went on for almost ninety minutes before either Eleanor or Paul Kukali noticed the time. Wandering the seven floors of the Big Hale and the gardens outside, the curator had shown her exquisite Hawaiian bowls, five-foot-high New Guinea Ritual House masks, a fourteenth-century Kamakura Japanese Buddhist sculpture, Thai wood car
vings from the Ayudhya period, a beautiful Indian Buddha from Nagapattinam hidden away under a banyan tree in the garden, “winged lion” bronzes guarding the entrance to the Presidential Suite upstairs, an amusing crouching goat carved in red-lacquered wood, and a dozen other treasures. Eleanor had rarely enjoyed an art discussion so much.

  Also on their walk, she had discovered that Paul Kukali was a widower of six years, and he that Eleanor had never married, he had guessed that she was a professor but had been surprised at her specialty of the Enlightenment, they each had expressed a deep interest in Zen and found they had visited many of the same formal gardens in Japan, they discovered a mutual passion for Thai food and passionate dislike of campus politics, and found that they laughed at the same type of silly puns.

  “I apologize for running over,” said Paul as they finished the tour in the lobby. “It was the seated Buddha. I always get carried away when talking about the Buddha.”

  “Nonsense,” said Eleanor. “I loved it. If you hadn’t pointed it out, I never would have noticed the ‘wheel of law’ inscribed in his palm.”

  The curator smiled. “It was nice of you to leave a flower there. And correct.”

  Eleanor glanced at her watch. “Well… I’m almost embarrassed to mention it, but I’d planned to show up for your petroglyph tour. If I’m the only guest who shows, will the tour still go on?”

  Paul smiled more broadly, showing perfect teeth. “If you’re the only guest who shows, the tour may run late again.” He looked at his own watch. “I have an idea. If you’re interested, we could have lunch together on the lanai and go straight to the petroglyph field from there.” He paused a second. “Damn. That sounded like a line, didn’t it?”

  “No,” said Eleanor. “It sounded like an invitation. I accept.”

  There were fewer than a dozen people on the lanai for lunch, but one of them was Cordie Stumpf, wrapped in a flowered beach cover-up that matched her swimsuit. Cordie was sipping from a tall drink with several blossoms in it, and frowning at the menu as if it were written in a foreign language.