It was the day following this somewhat cryptic conversation that I ate an early sandwich at the hotel, grabbed a floral arrangement of vanda orchids I’d purchased earlier in the morning, and set off to the Hôpital de Mamao for its noon visiting hours.
Before I got to the car, though, I ran into Bob West trudging across the parking lot, his arms full of towels.
“Housekeeper didn’t come to work today,” he grumbled from behind his load. “The trouble with—”
“—this country is that even the slaves want to live like tourists,” I finished. “I had a drink with your French gangsters,” I said, curious to see his reaction.
“What!” Alarm flashed across his bronzed face.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They think I’m a Frenchman from Chicago interested in buying their yacht. I never mentioned you at all.” Slowly the tension in his face ebbed away. “They did though.”
He set the towels down on the trunk of the car. “Just what did they say?” he asked lightly.
I shrugged. “Nothing really. Vague hints that maybe the actual ownership here is a little questionable. Nothing to indicate any interest of their own. Nothing you can put your finger on.”
He nodded soberly. “I see. Playing it cagy. What did you think of them?”
I reflected. “As you said, at one time they’ve been a tough bunch of guys. But now they’re well-spoken and pleasant enough. Not obvious gangster or extortionists. If you and Susan hadn’t told me what they were like.…” I shrugged evasively.
He pursed his lips. “Thanks. I’ll have to think about this.” He picked up the towels and used them to gesture at the orchids in my hands. “Off to see Mareta? Give her out best.”
She was sitting up in a crisply linened bed, a fluffy blue nightie drawn around her shoulder, and a French fashion magazine in her hands. The bloodstains were gone, her hair was straight and shiny, and even the mercurochrome was muted.
“Remember me?” I asked. “Probably not.” I stood at the foot of her bed and tried to look benign.
“You’re…you’re the man who…found me?” She lowered her eyes in embarrassment.
“That’s right. I brought you these,” I said awkwardly, and gestured with the flowers.
“Oh, how thoughtful! Set them over there, please. Really, you shouldn’t have. I wanted.… How can I.… Oh, I look so awful,” and she began to weep.
I comforted her the best I could, assured her that she was looking fine, that rescuing stranded ladies was all the day’s work, and that she’d be out of there in no time.
“You really think so?” she asked in a tiny voice, fingering the remains of the lump on her forehead.
“Of course,” I said cheerfully. “Look, your eye’s not swollen at all any more, that bump’s almost gone, and I can see you wiggling your toes at the end of that cast. Why, you could almost go dancing right now. In fact, I’ll be by for you at seven.”
She smiled, and almost turned it into a laugh. It was probably a long time since her last belly-laugh, and I supposed she might have forgotten how. “You’re really very kind,” she said. “Susan and Hinano and some of…that crowd have been by, but they’re always so grim and serious when they look at me…it makes me feel like I’m about ready to die.” And tears welled up in her eyes again.
I patted her hand. “Medicine, medicine,” I said jauntily, “just too much medicine. It makes your emotions go up and down like a yoyo. Why, when I was shot and full of dope I went on a crying jag that lasted for weeks!”
“You were shot!” Her eyes widened.
“Oh, years ago,” I said. “But it really wasn’t a very big gun.…”
She clutched my hand. “Oh, tell me about it!”
I smiled. “It was this way.…”
Before I left, an hour later, I’d promised to return.
* * * *
Friday evening I drove Hinano up to La Chaumière, another mountain restaurant, on the opposite side of town from the Belvédère. But the only naked girl I found that night was Hinano as she slipped into my bed.
The next day we got the kitchen to pack us a picnic lunch, and we drove out to the white-sand beach of Punaauia to lie in the sun and snorkel about in the crystal-clear water around the coral reefs. In the middle of a sunny afternoon it began to rain, at first from a cloudless sky, which was something that even San Francisco weather at its most baroque had never been able to do, and then from heavy gray clouds that rolled out from the hills behind us. We ran to the car and headed for town.
About halfway back to Papeete, where the road skirted the lagoon and a small-craft marina on one side and an exclusive housing development in the hills on the other, Hinano clutched my arm suddenly. “Oh, turn here! Let’s go see Bob and Susan. They’re always there on Saturday afternoons.”
“I thought you wanted a shower,” I said, already thinking of her gleaming ivory body stretching provocatively under a torrent of water.
“They’ve got lots of showers there,” she wheedled.
I shrugged in resignation. In Tahiti I guess you do drop in on your friends to take a shower when you feel like it.
The house was a fair distance up in the hills at the junction of a gully and a couple of ridges and was fairly isolated. The nearest neighbor was at least a hundred yards away, but there were a half-dozen cars parked along the sides of the unpaved road. The house itself was nearly out of sight, tucked away in a cutting down on the side of the hill, so that all you could see of it was a chain-link fence, a two-car garage at road-level, and the red tile roof of the house itself just below the road.
We got out of the car. The weather here was heavy and overcast, but not yet raining. A small red sign on the chain-link gate in the fence had neat white letters on it: FARE AUTE.
“What’s that mean, beware of the dog?”
“House Hibiscus, fare means house, aute is hibiscus.” I looked around but didn’t see any particular profusion of flowers overflowing the road or hillside. Hinano punched a button beside the gate and a voice from a speaker asked who was there.
“Hinano,” she replied, and the gate was buzzed open. I was taken aback: it was the first time I’d seen American-style security anywhere in Tahiti. We walked down some concrete stairs to a small terrace of dark red tiles. A concrete planter stood on each side of a brown wooden door, with bright red hibiscuses growing in one and yellow in the other. Hinano snapped off one of the large red flowers and tucked it neatly into her hair above her right ear, then did the same for me with a yellow one from the other plant. I smiled. Tahitians did like their flowers.
Hinano pushed the door open and we stepped into a tiled foyer, then a living room. I could hear voices on the far side of the house, and caught a glimpse of the end of a pool.
“Is that you, Hinano?” came Bob’s voice.
“Yes!” she shouted. “We’ll be right there!”
“Leave your clothes out there, you don’t want to embarrass anybody!” There was a murmur of merriment.
“Leave your clothes?” I said, laughing. “We’re only wearing our bathing suits.” But Hinano had already slipped out of her bikini top, and was stepping out of the bottom. I noticed now there were piles of clothing scattered about the living room. I looked back to Hinano and saw that the skin of her breasts was goose-pimpled and that the dark brown nipples were extended and hard.…
I pushed my way past and stepped out on the cement terrace. It abutted a wooden deck and a circular pool. There were chaise longues, pool mattresses, lots of cushions, and about fifteen people, all of them naked. Bob West looked up from the red-headed girl he was fondling and gaped at me in astonishment. My own face was probably a similar study.
After the initial reaction of gut-shock, I let out my breath in a sigh. It was only your friendly Marin County Saturday afternoon barbecue and swing-along transferred south of the equator. Just a lot of naked people doing various things to each other in varying combinations. With something of a pang I saw some long blond hair that might have been Susan’s, lost in a tangle of arms and legs of a man and another woman. Bob opened his mouth to protest, saw the expression on my face, and shut it again. A hush fell over the group: I’d cast a certain pall.
I felt Hinano’s hand on my arm and shook it off angrily.
“Nice party, Bob,” I said. “But unless there’s a hot-tub, it’s not for me. No peacocks, either.” I walked back through the living room. Hinano caught me at the stairs.
“I thought—”
“I’m old-fashioned,” I snarled, pushing her aside. “I even like it with the lights out.” On my way up the stairs I ripped the hibiscus from my hair and threw back it to the tiles of the terrace.