Tama was icy and Schneider furious about our activities of the night before, but short of throwing Payton and me into jail there was nothing they could do about it. They could shout and bellow, of course, and they did, but in the face of Payton’s total impenitence they began to run down.
“I’ve set them up for you,” he insisted stubbornly. “When they try to work the next ransom payoff we’ll be ready for them.”
“I still say—” fumed Tama.
“LaRoche has told you about the routine they ran him through last night,” said Payton irritably. “Do you really think you could have followed him as far as the drive-in in that stolen car without being spotted and getting my wife killed. Well?” He leaned over Tama’s desk, his chin thrust out aggressively. He looked like two hundred million angry dollars.
“Hrmph.” Tama fiddled with an intricately carved Marquesan warclub that had made an appearance upon his desk since the last time I had been in his office. I had no doubt at all that he would have loved to use it for its original purpose: to brain both of us. “You keep saying you’ve set them up for the next time. I say, if there’s a next time.”
I looked at my watch. 9:41. “Gotta go to the hospital,” I said, without telling them why. They paused in their argument to eye the stitches sticking out from my skull, nodded indifferently, and picked up where they’d left off.
I had no intention of sitting around all day waiting for the out-patient butchers to fiddle around with my scalp any more than they already had, so on the way I stopped off first at the office of Jackie Laurent the swinging doctor. He eyed my scalp disdainfully. “What a bunch of clowns,” he said, “it’s a wonder they left you alive.” He poked and trimmed, cut and sewed, and although I left feeling no better, I might have looked a trifle more presentable. His touch was deft and delicate.
“You’ve got the good hands,” I said. “You’d be a great shortstop for the Giants.”
I left him studying his fingers thoughtfully.
Ten minutes later I’d picked up Mareta at the hospital and carried her stuff out to the battered Renault that had replaced the demolished Fiat. Mareta walked slowly, and with a noticeable limb, but with determination.
She tossed her head in the morning sun and flashed her teeth. “As last,” she cried gaily, “at last!”
I drove her to the home she and Patrick had shared in a residential area of Papeete not far from the big Mormon church. There was a small Peugeot station wagon in the garage, and while she spent forty minutes in the house getting some of her affairs together I managed to get it started and to the neighborhood filling station for a quick check.
When I got back she was sitting on the porch, two suitcases and a box of kitchen equipment beside her. I loaded them into the station wagon and handed her into the front seat. Fifteen minutes later we were somewhere in the Faaa hills on the other side of town. We bounced along for a quarter of a mile on a dirt road cut through the tall grass and choked with weeds, till we came to a small beaverboard structure that was more than a shack but less than a house. The faded green paint was peeling off but it was nestled in the shade of an enormous old ironwood tree and was the only habitation for hundreds of yards. “Nice,” I said.
She smiled wistfully. “It’s all mine,” she said. “The house at any rate. All this was my grandparents’ land. It’s been in the courts for twenty-five years now over how it gets divided. In the meantime I built that little house when I left the Marquesas. I lived there for a year before I met Patrick.” She shook her head in dismayed wonder.
“Even so, you must own the Papeete house, now that—”
She turned on me fiercely, her eyes flashing. “I don’t want to ever set foot there! I’ll take my stuff out and sell it. This is my house,” she hissed.
“Sure.” I carried her things in while she set herself to housecleaning. Ten minutes later she looked up and grimaced. “I’m so stupid. No bed. I’ll have to go back.”
“I’ll go with you. My car’s still at your place, remember?”
In Pirae I helped her shove a mattress and some further items of housekeeping into her station wagon and offered to drive her back, but she shook her head. “You’ve done too much already.” She looked down at her feet. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Don’t try.” I looked into her eyes and then we moved forward simultaneously and our arms wrapped around each other. Her lips found mine and her tongue probed softly between my lips. She was taller than I’d realized. After a moment I could feel her stiffened nipples through the light T-shirt she wore. I clutched her tighter but with a gasp she pushed herself away. My breath was coming irregularly.
“Later,” she said huskily. “Let me get things ready. For…for…a housewarming!”
I watched her in the rearview mirror as I drove off. She stood on the side of the road and waved until I was out of sight. I was touched and pleased. She was a nice girl, especially when you considered her against most of the other inhabitants of the cesspool I’d found myself in here in Tahiti.
I sighed, and picked up the envelope that I’d found lying on the front seat when I’d got in the car thirty seconds before.
Some detective, I said to myself bitterly. People follow you all over Papeete and you’re too busy talking to girls to notice. Suppose that was a bomb they’d been wiring under your seat while you were hauling suitcases around up in the hills.…
I stopped in the shade of a red-flowered flamboyant tree to read the note. It was the same stenciled illiteracy as before, but this time it told me that since the first payoff had gone so satisfactorily I’d find instructions for the next one at Danielle Payton’s house in the mountains.
“Well, why the hell can’t you just give them to me now?” I groused aloud as I started the Renault and shoved it into gear. I drove a hundred yards in the direction of Mahina before my brain began to belatedly work, and stopped again. “Oh,” I said. “Ambush time.”
There was a constricted feeling in my gut as I drove past Avenue Bruat and all its offices of organized law enforcement, all of them filled with eager policemen whose greatest joy would be to convoy me to the Mahina hills. But I kept going, and continued on to Punaauia. Neither Payton nor Tamara was at home. Something else was though, the little .25 Biretta I’d nobbled from the Wests’ bedside table. It was still inside the toe of a brown shoe at the back of the closet, held there by a wadded-up sock. I stuck it in my pocket and returned to the car, my heart beating a little faster and with the first squirts of adrenaline flowing in my system.
By the time I got to Mahina I was tense enough to be snapped in two. As I drove up the mountain road to the Payton’s turnoff I hugged the nearside of the road and kept a constant watch in the rearview mirror, on the heights above me, and on the clumps of bushes and trees that passed alongside. I got out to open the gate only after a long hard look at the surroundings, but finally I shrugged. If there was a sniper in the hills with a high-powered rifle and a good scope my ass was grass and I’d never know it. There was nothing you could do against an isolated gunman, as a number of public figures had learned to their cost. I swallowed nervously and opened the gate.
The trees and growth that hugged the road on the way in offered dozens of likely spots for lethal assault, and it was all I could do to keep from trying to drive in at 100 miles an hour. But the stillness was absolute, and nothing at all happened. I crested the last hill and coasted on down into the high grass that grew around Danielle Payton’s Japanese playpen. The gardener obviously hadn’t been sent out from Punaauia for some time now.
Were those tire marks in the damp lawn? I stopped the Renault some distance from the house and got out cautiously, although once again I was a dead duck if a rifle was already tracking me from inside the house or from behind the generator shed. More as a morale booster than as a practical measure, I took the automatic out and shuffled slowly forward. At the edge of my consciousness there was a faint buzzing. I stopped and looked around but located nothing that could be causing it. Maybe it was just my ears ringing from the altitude.
At 1,000 feet? Pretty delicate ears, LaRoche.
Forget it.
I moved on.
I stooped to examine what might have been tire marks in the long grass and soft earth, but I was a city boy, not Natty Bumpo. Maybe Tama’s team of experts from France could make something of them. I got up and continued on around the house, going low and fast around each of its corners, feeling foolish, but preferring that to suddenly feeling dead.
By the time I got back to the garage the buzzing sound was nagging at me, as well as a faint sickly odor that came and went with the breeze that blew down from the mountains. I stopped and flared my nostrils but couldn’t identify it.
I got the key from above the kitchen door, then slammed it open with my foot while jumping to one side. Nothing happened.
After a while I went on in and through the house. There was nobody home and nothing that hadn’t been there on my only previous visit with Tamara Payton.
I stepped back into the garage and locked the door behind me. A peculiar situation, I thought. If someone wants to ambush me, why doesn’t he do it? Or if he wants to give me a ransom note, why doesn’t he leave it where I can find it?
I moved forward to the end of the garage and my eyes scanned the property. They found the water tank and moved on to the generator shed. They stopped. Something, somewhere, was different. I blinked, and tried to concentrate. There, by the shed.
Something cream-colored. I blinked again.
Suddenly it came into focus.
It was the suitcase in which I’d delivered one million dollars the night before.
I swallowed and took half a step backwards, the Biretta clutched in my fist. Once again I scanned the trees and bushes, the top of the water tank, the hill beyond. Nothing.
I moved forward through the ankle-length grass.
My foot suddenly jolted painfully against something hard and I pitched headlong. I landed heavily on a patch of concrete, twisting my wrist and scraping the knuckles where I still clenched the Biretta.
I lay spent and scared on the concrete, the wind knocked from my lungs, my heart pounding. A rank, overpowering smell of putrefaction assailed my nostrils and I felt my stomach turn over. I pushed myself to my knees and looked down.
I’d tripped over the concrete apron that surrounded the leach pit of a septic tank system. It was a couple of feet around. A concrete slab about eighteen inches square was set askew in the apron, its joints gaping. It rocked slightly beneath my weight. I got to my feet and started to move away from the ripe, putrid smell. I stopped.
Why would a leach pit smell like a dinosaur’s outhouse? Especially at a house that had been shut for years?
I tried to remember what the gardener at the Payton’s place in Punaauia had told me one idle afternoon. All the sewerage from a Tahitian house flowed first into a septic tank, he’d said, and from there the excess water drained to the leach pit, where it filtered out into the surrounding earth. It was a fine place to plant a tree, whose roots would absorb the nutrients in the soil.
I turned back toward the house. There in the grass was the larger, rectangular concrete apron of the septic tank with its two inset slabs. I bent over to examine them. They fit snugly into the apron, and the joints were jammed with dirt and caked mud. A cold sweat suddenly broke out on my forehead, and a taste of bile rose to my mouth.
It’s the septic tank with its accumulated solids that has to be pumped out by the honey-wagon every year or so, he’d told me. The puissard, or seepage pit, or leach field, merely drained off the water and in theory never had to be emptied.
I moved reluctantly back to the oval concrete of the leach pit and its wobbly cement slab. I didn’t have to bend over to see from the heavy scratch marks in the concrete that the slab had been recently pulled up and carelessly set back.
The sickening smell of total corruption assaulted me, and I nearly gagged. I’d grown soft in Tahiti. Human, maybe.
I looked up and saw the suitcase by the generator shed. I took a step toward it, then stopped. I walked back to the garage and a closetful of tools against the wall. Inside was a pickax. I walked slowly, reluctantly, back to the leach pit, the pickax dangling heavily from my hand.
The buzzing in my ears had become louder now but I ignored it. I gulped once, and then again. I drew as much air as I could into my lungs and tightened my lips till they hurt.
There was a small metal loop set in the top of the slab. I poked the sharp end of the pickax under it and pulled back on the handle. The broad end of the ax lay on the edge of the apron and acted as a lever. The four-inch thick slab of concrete rose slowly, torturously. A miasma of evil rose with it, poisoning the air.
With a gasp I jerked back on the handle and toppled the slab out on the grass. Cockroaches fled from the edge of the hole, scuttling deeper into the pit. My ears pounded and my lungs ached. I bent forward and forced my eyes downward.
The roaring in my ears was deafening.
I looked down into the pit.
Dark auburn hair glinted in the sunlight. A cockroach too sated to move lay on top of a pale white ear.
I thanked God I couldn’t see the face.
I staggered backward, half-collapsing as I gulped fresh air while my stomach tried to spew up its contents. My eyes watered and my vision blurred.
The roaring now was nearly on top on me, and I was suddenly nearly knocked from my feet by a gust of wind that slammed me like a giant hand. I raised my eyes and stared unbelievingly.
Tama and Schneider were jumping down from a bubbletop helicopter that was still settling into the grass.
Two more gendarmes followed them. They carried submachine guns in their hands.
I closed my eyes, in relief, I think. It was out of my hands now: the Marines had landed.
A gendarme dug a submachine-gun butt into my ribcage and shoved me aside. Tama and Schneider strode past grimly as if I didn’t exist. They looked down into the leach pit without visible signs of emotion.
Tama turned his great brown face towards me. His eyes were as hard and cold as Schneider’s had ever been. “You have some explaining to do,” he said in a tight, controlled voice, his lips hardly moving.
“It’s easy enough,” I said. “I got a note telling me to come up here to get instructions for the next drop. I saw that suitcase and I was on my way to get it.” Their heads turned to follow the direction of my outstretched arm. “I stumbled on…the side of that thing. So I opened it.…”
“So you did,” said Tama, his disgust no longer contained. “And the suitcase?”
“It’s the one I delivered the ransom in last night.” I stepped forward, but at a nod from Schneider his pet gendarme clubbed me in the ribs again.
“Don’t move,” ordered Schneider. “Don’t move a step.” He nodded at the second gendarme, who trotted obediently over to the generator house. We watched him in stony silence as he went, his heavy boots and long socks moving in and out of the thick grass. His hand was reaching out for the handle when the thought that had passed through my mind an hour earlier reoccurred to me.
Suppose that was a bomb they’d been wiring under your seat while you were hauling suitcases around up in the hills? I’d said to myself.
“No!” I screamed. “Don’t touch it!”
He looked up at me curiously as his hand tightened around the handle.
I threw myself at Tama, knocking him to the ground, just as it exploded.