Primal Instinct Page 35

  The time alone, waiting for Jim to return, was passed with her own showering and freshening up, and a brief nap after a call to room service for a cheese and wine tray to be sent up. She'd gone out on the balcony, put her feet up and after a few glasses of wine, had dozed against a pillow. When she awoke, native birds had

  roosted on the table and were sampling the cheese and crackers while the sky all around had softened into a cloud of lavenders and purples.

  Night was descending rapidly now and she feared Jim had left her, believing she'd be safer left behind, the thought infuriating her. She lashed out at the birds, shooing them off. Then she quickly dressed in jeans and a pullover, and was about to storm out the door when the phone rang.

  She grabbed for it.

  “Jess, it's me.”

  “Where are you, Jim9”

  “Take a cab and meet me at Nuekuela Point Wailea harbor. We've got passage.”

  “I thought you'd left me.”

  “Don't think I didn't give it serious thought. You realize if we're taken into custody by the local tribesmen, well, it'll be hell to get off the island, much less fax for help from Washington. You sure you don't want to reconsider, Jess?”

  “I've stopped thinking about it, Jim. Let's just do it. I've got to know where this Jack the Ripper is, and if there's a chance in hell we can bring him to justice, then I say we go for it.”

  “We won't have a scuba in from the boat either.”

  “Really?”

  “We're rafting in, inflatable.”

  “Terrific.”

  “And we'll have a guide.”

  “A guide? This is sounding better and better.”He remained cautionary. “It's not like any guided tour you've had of the much-visited islands, kiddo, so don't think it's like the little choo-choo ride through the plantation.”

  “Don't worry about me.”

  “Still, it's someone who knows the island.”

  “Sounds like one hell of a plus to me,” she replied with enthusiasm.

  “Name is Ben Awai. He trades with the locals, knows the village on Molokai where Lopaka grew up. How's that for a turn of good fortune?”

  “Has he been able to confirm your suspicions?”

  “Some, not all. Says Lopaka's people did move out to Kahoolawe, but doesn't know if our killer's out there or not.”

  A glint of suspicion like the sliver of shadow and light that runs the gamut of a knife blade flashed along her consciousness before it faded. But she didn't allow her suspicious nature to sway her this time. Jim had wanted her to be less suspicious, more trusting of him.

  “I'm on my way, Jim, and don't you dare embark without me, you hear?”

  11 P.M., Wailea Harbor, Maui

  At the harbor where the cab let her off, she saw Jim coming toward her in the dark. The harbor lights were dim and pretty, reflecting off the water, more show than functional, creating paths for lovers to walk, not light for boatmen to work by. Still the harbor was thick with fishing boats and men unloading large caches of fish, carving them up over a worn, gray boardwalk long before stained and discolored with blood.

  Jim hailed her and casually said, “Ready for that moonlight boat ride, honey?”

  “I can hardly wait, dear,” she replied, not missing her cue, realizing Jim feared one or both of them might be recognized and that their trip must remain clandestine.

  He guided her down the pier, the calm Pacific lapping at the boats in the harbor, rocking them gently against their moorings. Ropes and lines swayed with the masts here and metal clinked so gently against metal that the effect was of a hundred crystal wine glasses chiming together.

  A crescent moon blinked over the scene, the sea a watery blend of turquoise, jade and azure, like an unfinished oil painting, its colors running, except that this seascape was real. She carefully boarded the small craft that Jim had arranged for, nodding to Ben Awai, a thick-necked, barrel-chested Hawaiian with the familiar knatty, red-burnished hair and grinning eyes of his race. Ship's master here, Awai welcomed Jessica aboard with the economy of words she'd come to expect from his race, saying, “He mea 'ole.”

  “He says welcome aboard,” Jim translated.

  The ship's master mumbled something in Hawaiian to the two crew members, also Hawaiian. The other two laughed and began casting off, wasting no time.

  Jessica felt the comforting weight of her ankle holster and gun, knowing that Jim's own weapon was safely tucked into the small of his back below the dark green U of H sweatshirt he wore. “How well do you know these characters, Jim?” she whispered as the boat began its slow departure from port.

  “Enough. Don't worry.”

  “What're you saying? Situation normal, all fucked up, or have you simply gone beyond worry stage? Exit left or no exit left?”

  “Awai will do right by us. I've had assurances from friends on the island that he's okay, that he's a man of his word.”

  “Friends?”

  “In law enforcement.”

  This didn't quell her fears, especially when she saw one of the other crewmen glaring unashamedly at her. This was followed by more mumbling between the crewmen and more icy stares.

  “What're they saying?” she asked Jim.

  “Can't make it out. Something about how pretty you are, I think.”

  She gritted her teeth. “I don't feel entirely right about sticking our necks out so far, Jim.”

  “Hey, come on, you don't want a blind crew, do you? And they'd have to be blind if they didn't see how beautiful you are. As for sticking our necks out, I tried, if you remember, to leave you behind.”

  She frowned, paced the small deck of the fishing charter and wrapped her hands around one of the thick ropes of hemp. “Yeah, you did warn me of the risks. But now we're actually out here, sailing away from all contact with the outside world... I mean, anything could happen out there on Kahoolawe. We have no jurisdiction, our badges are worthless. What if we have to fall back on our weapons, Jim? You and me, we could end up on the wrong side of the law very easily.”

  “Kahoolawe law, yeah, quite easily.”

  “Just how much do you know about the people on the island? Are they as feudal as they sound?”

  “They're made up of people who chose to return to a completely traditional way of life, all of them cultists in a sense—”

  “Great, sounds more and more like we're stepping into a David Koresh situation without backup.”

  “Cultists in the sense they embrace the old ways. They've come to Kahoolawe only recently, actually, appearing from all over the other islands, Molokai, Maui, even Oahu and the big island of Hawaii itself. They're not much different from the American Indians who're trying desperately to hold onto their culture in the States, and they enjoy the same kind of immunity from governmental pressures as do the American Indians. Sure, we could storm the reservation, but the political repercussions would cause a ripple effect that would be felt all the way back to D.C.”

  “And the already widening rift between the peoples of the island would be opened wider?” she added. Old scars, she thought, ripped to bleed as never before, something neither side wanted.

  He put an arm around her and squeezed her shoulder firmly as the boat slipped its moorings and backed out under the power of its relatively quiet motor. “We just have to play this one by ear.”

  'Tell me everything you know about Kahoolawe.”

  “I already have!”

  “Everything, Jim.”

  “Hmmmm, well, there's no way your prophet on the mountain, Lomelea, could be right about the so-called legend of Lopaka Kowona's having seen his brother killed.”

  “Why do you say so?”

  “If it happened, it happened on Molokai, but records there indicate that there was no brother, that Lopaka in fact is and always has been the only son conceived by Chief Kowona, and this with a white wife who died of cholera when Lopaka was quite young. She was pregnant with a second child at the time, but no brother was bom. That is accordin
g to a rough census taken.”

  “The old chief could've lied.”

  “Perhaps... perhaps not. I don't know a hell of a lot about psychology but I do know that killers lie, and very often they lie to themselves, to rationalize that which cannot be explained away in any other manner, if you get my drift.”

  “That would only prove Lomelea wrong factually; symbolically, for the killer, he did have a brother who was destroyed by his father, even if that brother was his alter ego.”

  “Yeah, well, that's best left to the shrinks.”

  “If it ever comes to that.”

  “Anyway, it was only in the early nineties that the U.S. Government returned Kahoolawe to the Ohana.”

  “The Ohanal Isn't that Kaniola's newspaper?”

  “No, no, the PKO—Protect Kahoolawe Ohana. Ohana means family, but the PKO, which came into existence in '76, has turned Kahoolawe into the principal symbol of native Hawaiian consciousness. Native Hawaiians made it clear they wanted Kahoolawe back.”

  “But you said there's nothing there, no resources or riches.”

  “Still, it's been the most hotly contested piece of real estate in the islands, primarily because land is so limited and scarce in the islands—any land, even land with hundreds of unexploded U.S. Navy shells lying about.”

  “There're live shells all over the island?” she asked. “That's a real comfort, Jim.”

  “Any rate, the PKO's become a powerful political group in the islands. Hell, unless I miss my guess they were behind Ewelo's kidnapping of Oniiwah, and Kaniola's Ohana newspaper makes the perfect mouthpiece for them.”

  “Now I understand better your attitude toward him.”

  “Their big push on is to restore as much island land and sacred temples and burial grounds as possible, and there are some prime archaeological sites on Kahoolawe that they have their eyes on, which fortunately escaped as targets of the U.S. military over the years.”

  “I can see their point of view,” she said, staring out toward the black mound of the island in the distance. “They've been so disenfranchised by us over the years.”

  “If we were to go over the island in Lee's chopper, Jess, you'd see just how desolate the place is, how awful the results of the years of bombings have been, not to mention the goats.”

  “Goats? Yeah, you mentioned something before about goats.”

  “The only thriving creatures on the island since the bombings, save for lizards, insects and maybe some mongoose.”

  “Mongoose in Hawaii?” she asked.

  “Imported but thriving and remarkably prolific, and the goats too have been allowed to roam free and wild, and have overpopu- lated and devastated the topsoil on the slopes over much of the island. There needs to be a serious effort to decrease their numbers, but the PKO and the U.S. Government can't seem to agree on how it should be done; consequently, nothing's been done.”

  “Sounds sadly typical and political.”

  “You got that right. Anyway, from overhead, in the air, Kahoolawe is a uniquely Hawaiian anomaly.”

  “What?” she asked, turning to look into his eyes.

  “An ugly, undesirable piece of property. Not supposed to be any such thing in Hawaii. Seven miles off the coast of East Maui, we come across a barren, windswept island inhabited by goats and cultists.”

  “Maybe you're being harsh to call them cultists, Jim. Maybe they're just what they say they are, native Hawaiians who want to live as their forefathers lived.”

  “Yeah, maybe I've got my prejudices, sure. Some people in the islands just see them as fools. There's barely enough vegetation on the island for shade much less raising livestock, and streams around the island dry up in the summer. Mt. Haleakala on the bigger island just about squeezes all the rain from the clouds before they reach here. The only thing Maui sends over are the dry, cold Makaniloa winds off the slopes of Halekala. Kahool- awe's hot and humid during the day, and cold at night. Much of the red-soil landscape is lunar in nature.”

  “Add to that fifty years of poundings by naval artillery and airforce bombers,” she inteijected. “Maybe it's become such a symbol for native unity because it most represents what Kaniola would call blatant haole disregard for his homeland? I can sympathize with the desire to see the land returned to civilian control.”

  “In an island state, land of any kind is valuable, Jess. All that the PKO knows is that one day Kahoolawe will be worth a fortune, and if they can squat on it... well, squatters' rights, you know. Hell, Jess, as a practice bombing site for the Navy and Airforce, it was perfect.”

  “Perfect, huh?”

  “It's only one hundred ten miles from Pearl, the U.S. headquarters for operations in the Pacific.”

  “And you think that makes it okay?”

  “In the best tradition of might makes right and given the context of the times, I don't know. Since the fifties the natives have been given visitation rights several months of each year to the island and limited fishing rights year round. It was never contested until the PKO came into prominence.”

  She thought Jim Parry was sounding political now, perhaps even racist, but then who could live day in and day out here without taking sides? she wondered.

  “In '76 the PKO occupied the island against the orders of the Navy. It got ugly.”

  “There were riots?”

  “More like there were arrests. It was the first of many battles fought in the name of their sacred island, and since then the PKO has scored some impressive victories. They backed their own man for Congress and he's won every year since. In 1990, Congress passed a two-year moratorium on the bombing while a federal and state commission studied the cost of clearing the island of shells and debris, its future use, and who would eventually have jurisdiction over the place.”

  “So what was the outcome?”

  “You're looking at it,” he said, pointing ahead to the dense growth in the fast approaching bay along this stretch of the island. “A return to the past.”

  She thought for a moment of all that Jim's phrase implied, the multifaceted levels of connotation in his words. Was going back to the past a personal affront to the white race? Did it imply that Christianity was dealt a blow, that the American way of life, Western civilization, was a poor substitute for a simple agrarian lifestyle? That democracy and the Puritan work ethic of the whites were all a fraud perpetrated on humanity by a rigid mind-set, no less treacherous in its way than that of a conqueror of another kind?

  “A sacred island, they call it?” she asked. “Is it sacred, or is it like the Seven Sacred Pools, a slogan written by an ad man?”

  He raised his shoulders. “I guess Kahoolawe is sacred in the native mind.” But Jim wanted to talk of things associated with the island other than its sacredness to the Hawaiians. “The Ohana, with some big guns in Congress now, won their argument to have the island set aside for cultural and educational purposes. Had the island declared a national freaking historic monument. Can you believe that?” He held his voice down, obviously not wishing Awai or the crewmen to hear him on this.

  “Why do they regard the island as sacred? And if it was sacred, how did they ever lose control of it in the first place?”

  “They were herded off the island when the military declared it theirs. They hadn't any choice in the matter, and they weren't exactly prepared to take on the U.S., either through force or through the courts, believe me.”

  She repeated her question. “What makes it sacred to them?”

  “Usual crap.”

  “Jim, why're you sounding so... so unlike yourself over this? Why're you sounding like a racist?”

  He took a deep breath and blew it out toward the island, which was taking on more formidable size before them. “Because now this sacred place, this native Hawaiian jurisdiction, is a sanctuary, a natural haven for fugitives like Lopaka Kowona. That's why. And it frustrates and infuriates me that they hide behind a wall of sacred cows when in fact this place is no better policed than Indian Territor
y in the American West of the 1800s. Just pisses me off, and it hasn't got squat to do with race or sacredness.”

  “You still haven't answered my question.”

  'They think it sacred because in ancient times it was known as Kanaloa, after one of the four major Hawaiian gods. It's mentioned all the time in their chants and the legends passed down through the generations. At one time all travelers to Tahiti stopped on the island to perform rituals before journeying on, and in 1874, King David Kalakaua was personally brought here by his kahuna — “

  “His kahuna? His priest?”

  “Yeah, his priest... to purge himself before ascending to the throne. There are ancient shrines and fishing temples all over the island, and since the Navy imposed isolation, these shrines are in excellent condition, so the Ohana, naturally—”

  “I see; understood. Then maybe the Ohana were right, their intentions good.”

  “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” he countered. “I don't know. I'm just a cop when it comes down to it, way out of navigable waters here. The PKO did force the Navy to make a comprehensive study of the environmental impact of the shelling and bombing, and a thorough survey of the archaeological sites and conditions of each. Amazingly, the shrines survived all the hits. The Ohana also managed in '81 to gain the historic site status which made the Navy's continued policy of obliterating the place appear downright un-American.”

  “Not to mention stupid.” She laughed lightly at this. “Cunning move for the kanakas, heh, Joe? Chalk one up.”

  “Right, the beginning of the checkmate, if you ask me, because next the Ohana won the right for natives to visit the island four days a month for ten months each year. While at the same time the U.S. military stubbornly held onto its bombing schedule, at least in the abstract, since they seldom fired again on the island after this.”

  “Damned fools had to know that if some fool scheduled a bomb run on a day when natives were visiting shrines, well, all hell would've broken loose,” she said, laughing. He smiled at the image before continuing. “The northeast shore, where we're landing, a place called Ule Point, is where most of the visitors over the years have made pilgrimages to shrines. It's the area that gets most rainfall and has best survived the U.S. Navy assaults. Nowadays, Polynesians the islands over gather here to 'go native,' to dress in ancient clothing, celebrate ancient ritual and legends, to talk story, their phrase for oral histories. Some of the celebrations have been filmed and can be seen at the Bishop Museum by haoles, but none are invited here.”