I had dinner that night on the terrace of the Taaone with Bob and Susan West. Hinano worked in commercial documentation in the foreign exchange department of the Banque de l’Indosuez and had returned home just as the sun was settling into the lagoon to prepare for the onset of another week’s labors. We’d driven around the island, along with most of the rest of the population, after she and Susan had finished at the hospital, and had a late Sunday lunch, which in any French restaurant worthy of its name can easily last until 4:30 or 5:00. Afterwards we’d returned to my bungalow for some slightly tipsy, drowsy love.
I was asleep on the bed when Bob West’s voice called from outside the bungalow. Would I like to join them for dinner? Not really, being still groggy and stuffed from lunch, though I didn’t say so. But now that I was awake what else was there to do? I stood under a cold shower for a long time, then strolled through the dark to the terrace. It was lit by kerosene tiki torches, and the crystal glasses and stiffly starched linen glittered invitingly on the tables. The Wests were already seated, the only people on the terrace, although there were a handful on others in the dining room.
They set down their glasses, and I shook hands with Bob, while Susan half-rose from her chair to proffer her face for a kiss. She was dressed tonight in an electric blue jumpsuit that was unzipped enough to let your eyes play peekaboo with her small breasts, and had stuck a bright red blossom of some kind into her pale blonde hair. She’d put on a light pink lipstick, blue and gold eye shadow, and a subtle hint of perfume. My opinion of her continued to redefine itself: she was still a mite bony and angular, I judged, but only by just a mite. She smiled warmly, and when her lips brushed my cheeks and the scent of her freshly washed hair was in my nostrils a pleasurable tingle ran through me.
Bob had reverted to his usual fashion-plate self from this morning’s casual undress, but when he shook my hand I didn’t experience any tingle at all, pleasurable or otherwise.
We dawdled through a long, slow dinner while they kept my glasses filled with various wines and the conversation turned to my experiences on the force. Everyone likes to talk about himself, retired policemen especially, and Bob and Susan didn’t have much difficulty extracting a highly colored account of LaRoche’s years on the force, the Terror of the Evil-Doer, including a brief description of the events that had led to my forced retirement.
“But that’s terrible!” said Susan, her eyes wide. “It’s just what he deserved, the sneaky little bastard!”
“It’s not as if you’d killed him!” put in Bob indignantly.
“Well, paralyzed for life, he probably got more sympathy from the sob-sisters than if I’d just wasted him with the magnum,” I said casually. “At least if the son of a bitch was dead, he wouldn’t have been giving out interviews to the newspapers and talk shows. I won’t make that mistake again.” I hiccupped and sipped my cognac, feeling warm and pleasantly fuddled, not much caring what I was saying. If the Wests were police groupies who got a kick out of thinking of me as a big bad macho cop ready to blow away little old ladies for fifteen-minute parking violations, what difference did it make? In a couple of weeks they’d never see me again, and in the meantime, I knew, female police groupies sometimes got themselves up to pretty interesting activities.…
“Boy, that must make it hard getting another job,” said Bob, pouring cognac and oozing sympathy.
“Not for me, pal,” I could hear the cognac boasting. “Got me a buddy down in Dallas who owns a private security firm down there, biggest one in Texas. I’m going in on November 15th as executive vice-president at twice the salary I was making on the force. Hell, a little caper like mine, in Texas they’re giving you promotions.” It’s a wonder I didn’t let out a rebel yell.
“I see,” said Bob thoughtfully. He exchanged glances with Susan, and I saw her nod slightly. “The thing is, Rocky, we were wondering if we could maybe hire you on the quiet for a little bit of unofficial work for the hotel.”
“The house dick for the Hotel Taaone?” I laughed derisively. “I’m afraid that’s not quite my speed.” I suppose I could have been more obnoxious, if I’d been wearing boots and spurs, maybe, and had climbed up on the table to stomp around the dishes.
Bob smiled faintly, but Susan reached across the table to grasp my hand firmly, and as she shifted about, her knee came to rest lightly against my thigh. The sensation was agreeable, and I made no move to end it. “Not for the hotel,” she said softly, “for us. We need your help.”
“Well, maybe,” amended her husband cautiously. “I’m not sure what kind of help we need. You see those guys sitting in the dining room, over by the windows there, one of them’s just lighting a cigar?”
There was no one else in the restaurant right now except a bored Tahitian waitress, so I could make them out all right, but not much more than that. They were some distance away, and the Taaone specialized in romantic dining by candlelight. All three appeared to be in early middle age. They wore long-sleeved Tahitian shirts and dark trousers, and something indefinable about them, their clothes, their faces, or their bearing stamped them unquestionably as Frenchmen. Their faces were hard and competent, and there was an air of confidence that radiated from the table.
“What about them?” I said in a small voice, while I told myself, through the brandy fumes that clouded my brain, to tread carefully, carefully. Warning signals prickled all over my body and I recognized dimly that the entire dinner had been a long, slow build-up to just this moment. I knew that I was going to be asked to do something a little trickier than checking the towel count.
“They’re three Frenchmen, from France,” said Bob. “They say they’re businessmen.”
“Gangsters is more like it,” said Susan venomously, and squeezed my hand.
“Whatever,” said Bob, wearily. “Here’s the deal. Susan and I came down here five or six years ago and bought this hotel. My old man’s got a couple of seats on the New York Stock Exchange, and I made a little money on my own when I used to work for him. Susan’s family is, well…well-off. We’d sailed down here on our boat a couple of times and thought we’d like to retire while we were young enough to enjoy it. But we wanted something to occupy us, and when this place came up for sale we bought it. It was a bankruptcy sale, so we got it cheap, and since then we’ve turned it into a real money-maker. Right now my father is getting together a syndicate to put up ten million, and we’re going to build a hundred-room addition.”
“Sounds good,” I said, envious. “How do these Frenchmen fit in?”
“The guy who built this hotel was a half-Tahitian who didn’t have the money to buy the land. The man who owned the land was a Frenchman living back in France, so he leased the land to this local on a thirty-year renewable lease. When we bought it, we were actually buying the remainder of the lease and whatever improvements were on it. Every month we pay rent to the guy in France.”
“But when the lease is up, you don’t have to give him the hotel?”
“No, because we have the right to renew for another thirty years. It’s a standard sort of deal in Tahiti. What’s happening is that there’s twenty-one years to go on the lease, but now the guy in France has sold the land to these three Frenchmen.”
“So you just pay your rent to them, right? What’s the difference?”
Bob stared into his liqueur. “They want to break the lease and take over the land and put up their own high-rise hotel. They said they’d buy us out, but their offers are ridiculous, and anyway, it’s the principle of the thing. What the hell, we don’t need the money. But this our baby.”
Susan moved closer, and now the length of her thigh came to rest against mine. “None of that would be a problem, Rocky, we’ve seen our lawyers, there’s nothing they can do to break the lease.”
“What we’re afraid of,” said Bob softly, with downcast eyes, as if he were admitting some unmanly act, “is that they’re going to try to break us—literally.”
I stared at him. “How do you mean?”
He shrugged. “Threats, menaces, little hints of what could happen if we don’t come to an agreement. How a bungalow might burn down some night, or the restaurant. Or there might be a bad case of food poisoning. Or someone might have an accident out swimming. Like Susan or me.”
I could feel Susan’s hand begin to tremble, and her leg quivered against my thigh. “One…one night I was alone at the desk and one of them came in and…and put his hands on…me. I started to scream, but he covered my mouth with his hand. He’s very quick and strong. He whispered in my ear…vile things. Then he laughed and pushed me away. He said it was just a sample. Maybe the next time there’d be the three of them. And maybe the gardener would find a body in the bushes the next morning.…”
I squeezed her hand involuntarily. “Jesus,” I said. “And these characters have the guff to stay here?” I turned to stare at the three Frenchmen wonderingly. They were puffing smoke from long cigars and rolling large cognac snifters in their hands.
Bob let out his breath. “Almost. They have a rented house somewhere, and they spend a lot of time on their yacht. But they come by for dinner every now and then, just to laugh at us. After that…episode with Susan I went to town the next day and grabbed the son of a bitch who did it and started to pound on him. I got a couple of good shots in, but his two pals jumped in and held me off. They really are a tough bunch of bastards, that’s what makes them so scary. There wasn’t much point in going to the cops—whatever one of them does, the other two can always swear they were all sitting around on their yacht. I think they were all three of them paratroopers when the French were fighting in Algeria. And those paratroopers were tough customers. At least they were good at torturing people.”
Susan leaned closer. “They…they hinted, just to scare us, maybe, that they’d been in the OAS, you know, the Organization de l’Armée Secrète that revolted when de Gaulle gave Algeria its independence and tried to kill de Gaulle and take over France.”
“I’ve heard of them,” I said. “My parents used to talk about them. They’re the ones that hired that assassin in that Day of the Jackal movie. A really nasty bunch of guys.”
“It was a nasty war stamping them out,” said Bob somberly. “Lots of killing and torturing on both sides. It’s left a scar on France. That’s what scares us about these three. Killing and torture and extortion are right up their alley. Hell, before they joined the OAS and learned how to rob banks and blow up cafés, they were probably taught by the regular army how to burn down places, and poison people, and strangle them so it looks like drowning.…”
Susan leaned closer still, until her lips were inches from mine and I could feel her warm breath on my face. “Will you help us, Rocky?” she breathed. “Will you help us?”
“Jesus.” I pulled my hand away from hers and pushed my chair back. I took a deep breath and looked up at the stars. They didn’t make my thinking any clearer. My gaze came back to Bob, then Susan. They were staring at me in rapt expectation. “What exactly do you think I could do? What do you want me to do?”
Bob’s Adam’s apple worked, and Susan lowered her eyes to study the backs of her hands. There was a long silence. Inside the restaurant the three Frenchmen had stubbed out their cigars and were climbing leisurely to their feet. I watched them disappear into the night.
“Well,” said Bob, licking his lips nervously, “I guess what we want is your expert opinion. What we should do. And if you think it’s something the police here couldn’t handle…well, like I said, money’s really no object. We’re not professionals like you. All…all we want is to be left in peace. I guess we’d…we’d want you…to take any steps…you thought might do…the trick.”
He buried his face in the brandy snifter. Susan was still absorbed by the study of her hands: they were busy now fiddling with the zipper on her jumpsuit.
“I see,” I said at last. I touched my cheek with the back of my fingers. It felt curiously hot. I drank what was left in my water glass and pushed aside the remains of the brandy. “An interesting proposition,” I said finally. “You’ve caught me by surprise. Tell you what: let me sleep on it, and we’ll talk about it in the morning.”
“Good enough,” said Bob. “We can’t ask for more than that.”
“Oh, Rocky, thank you,” said Susan. “If only.…” Her voice trailed off.
I gave them a brief, meaningless smile, and stumbled off into the darkness.
* * * *
I slept on it all right, and towards the end of the next morning I found them by the front desk. They seemed to have been doing the same. We eyed each other with wary embarrassment, as if all of us were just piecing together dim memories from the same drunken orgy, one in which we’d all participated in particularly bestial acts. There was a slight quaver to my hands.
“I don’t think this is the sort of thing I could handle,” I said without preamble. “I’m a foreigner in a strange country. I don’t have any official standing. There’s three of them, and one of me.” I looked at them bleakly. “And I’m an ex-cop, not an ex-killer.”
Their eyes widened, and their mouths opened to protest. I smiled fractionally, to take some of the sting from the words. After all, we’d all had a lot to drink the night before, and even sober it’s easy enough to misjudge people and their motives.
Sometimes.
I raised a hand to still their protests. “You wanted my advice, here it is. I think you’re badly underestimating the resources of the local police and gendarmes. You’re respectable local residents in good standing, with a business that’s important to the territory, and even more important than that, you’ve got a lot of money. I’ve always heard that French cops are pretty good at defending the rights of people with a lot of money, from gangsters or anyone else. For one thing, they don’t have to worry about the Supreme Court and the ACLU. So if I was you, I’d forget about LaRoche and go by and have a quiet chat with the Chief, and maybe drop a hint of that OAS business to some of the security people. I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble.”
They didn’t say anything, just looked into each other’s eyes and nodded slowly. Was that relief I saw etched on their faces?
As I said: it’s hard to judge people and their motives.