Death’s head moon—spook talk I first heard from an Irish Gunnery Sergeant in Nietzsche’s War at a place called Belleau Wood during the battle of the Marne. Looking more porcine than human with his hog jowls, tiny and hard hog eyes, bristle-cut gray hair, and large mouth curled at the corners to a hog sneer, Sergeant Seamus Doyle clung to me from the first day we arrived in that breakneck terrain.
He found me during the artillery bombardment when we got blown up.
The day was brilliant. It mocked our misery. Golden shafts slanted through green cascades of the Bois de Belleau while shells whined overhead and burst around us, tossing dirt and smoke into the cloudless blue. Shrapnel whistled in the spring air, sizzled through the forest canopy, and thudded among the tree trunks.
The force of the high-impact explosions knocked us out of our bodies. More than once, I thought I was dead. The earth shook, the concussion came down heavy as an elephant’s foot, mashed me into trench mud, crushed the breath out of me, and I was gone.
Deaf, I soared through windswept smoke, sunlight fizzing around me like champagne. I flew serenely beyond earth’s blue day into velvet darkness. Each time, before the dark could undo me, the elephant’s foot lifted, breath wrenched into my lungs, and I was back, chewing mud.
“Mourny morning, lad! And a boomin’ huff of a mourny morning it is at that. You’ve a classicoal peat boggy mug ever I cast eyes upon a son o’ Diarmuid. What’s your name, boyo?”
Filthy with trench muck, the hog face that pressed close to me was an authentic hog face, nothing even vaguely human about it.
I couldn’t hear a thing except the roar of blood in my ears. The lilting insanity of that Irish voice somehow bypassed my stunned ears and pierced my brain direct. “Richard!” I shouted and heard nothing of my own voice. “Richard Malone!”
One corner of the hog mouth hooked to a smile, and those tight swine eyes tightened merrier. “Fah! A Malone! I shoulda been forewarned by them cross-knit eyebrows, the bane o’ your breed. The folklord has it the Malones did some severe philosoflying with the Druidiots—and the strain on the Malone brains got ‘em so flummoxed they cannot ever hope again to unknit their brows! Haw!”
Doyle heaved himself over me, and I felt us go up in the air. We came down under a massive wave of earth and were buried so deep that if he hadn’t been there to know I was under him and to grope down and yank me up by the scruff, I’d never again have seen daylight.
It was worse at night. The explosions in the woods cast stark shadows. Debris came hissing out of the dark. I saw Jesus walking through the broken trees.
Doyle pressed his hog jowls to my face. “You google-eye him there in the blasty light, don’t ya? There! That bearded bugger in the shroudy robe! ‘Tis Finn McCool.”
All that night, he yammered about the Son of McCool, champion of the Fianna, the Celtic warriors of legend, and their defeat at the Battle of Gabhra and McCool’s journey to the Otherworld where he sleeps and will one day wake and return.
I tried not to listen. I wanted Jesus.
But in the numb deafness between explosions, Doyle’s hog mouth spewed endless fantasies about the bombardment digging up the Hallows where the Tuatha de Danaan—the fairy lords—dwelled, for all of France was once Celtic terrain, and McCool was on the march to prophesy doom and salvation among our Gaelic brethren.
I just wanted Jesus. I prayed a Hail Mary and an Our Father for each shell that struck close enough to shake the ground under us to pudding. But it didn’t shut him up.
He said McCool could foresee the future by chewing his thumb. And, sure enough, in the strobe flashes going off beyond the trees where men in their holes were being torn into chunks of meat and their prayers brusquely silenced, Jesus strolled, his long hair flying in the blast wind, his radiant robe pressed tight against his narrow body—and a hand to his mouth!
Was he sucking his thumb? No—no—it was some kind of rabbinic benediction, kissing his hand, and blessing the departing souls.
In the abrupt flashes and percussive silence, I saw them flying, a squad of souls like tattered smoke.
“King Alfred’s lads and der Amerikaners be flyin’ to the heavendor in the sky who sells their souls a penny an eye. But we’ve naught to fear, boyo. Finn McCool is twixt us and the banshee.”
McCool’s prophetic power came to him by accident, when he was an apprentice to Eire’s great Druid, Finegas. McCool was roasting a salmon for Finegas—a salmon that had inadvertently eaten a magic hazelnut—and when McCool tried to turn the seared fish, he burnt his thumb, instantly stuck it in his mouth and so indirectly acquired some of the clairvoyance of the supernatural nut.
I go on about this, because if you were there, with the artillery bombardment in its second day, and blood crawling out of your ears, and the night brighter than day with phosphor explosions, and the pummeling shocks interfering with your prayers, and your head filled with cottony nothing, and a mad Irishman with a hog’s face screaming about Druids and magic hazelnuts, you would want it to mean something.
It should mean something.
I wanted Jesus. I was eighteen, and I wanted everything my mother had told me about Jesus.
But I’m from Boston. Seamus Doyle was out of Tralee. During the bombardment, his battalion in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers had been almost annihilated: 500 men slain from a total strength of 670. Chaos had tossed him in among the American Expeditionary Forces. Irish luck brought him to me and the Marine brigade of the Second Division, and he filled my head with spook talk.
At three in the morning after two days of continuous bombardment, the shelling stopped and our assault through the smoky woods began. The densely forested and boulder-strewn area was fortified by the Huns’ heavy machine guns camouflaged in the rocky strongholds above us.
Now we understood why, days earlier, for the glory of getting into these murderous woods, we had to shove our way through fleeing French troops and refugees, who kept screaming at us, hysterical as women: “Retraite! Retournez! N’allez pas en avant! Tout est perdu! Les Allemands ne peuvent pas être arrêtés!”
After losing scores of men under the artillery bombardment with no more of a defensive position than the ditches we dug in the leaf litter with our kit spoons and bayonets, we got up from those ditches and went forward against a death wall of machine guns. We did it with rifle and bayonet. For four days, we dodged among splintered trees, creeping forward by inches through root coves, dashing a few yards and hunkering behind stinking corpses of Marines bloated with gas gangrene.
Doyle was at my side the whole time, yammering about McCool and the Druids. I just wanted Jesus. With bullets scything over our heads and trees chewed to stumps and the wood meat flying like in a saw mill, I wept out every prayer I knew. Two days into our bloody advance, my prayers blurred. I couldn’t call them to mind. I began to listen to Doyle.
At night, against the staccato flashes of machine gun fire, he glimpsed McCool showing him the doorways between the trees that led to survival. I followed him, and we lived. Day three and day four, we chose the right doorways and lived and others beside us chose the wrong doorways and died.
Time and again, a Marine an arm’s length away went down wounded and lay thrashing in agony, drawing more machine gun fire, bullets ripping him apart, buttons flying, shreds of uniform spinning like leaves, till finally he lay still. I didn’t want to look. But you got to look. It’s a man dying. A moment before, he had been hungry and thirsty and scared like you. He stepped between the trees like you, but he went down.
There were a lot of men who went down. You could walk across their backs and never touch the ground.
By the end of the fourth day, we had crawled into a V-shaped oat field bordered on all sides by thick woodland. We were hemmed in under ferocious crossfire. It was 9:00 PM on the tenth of June, and it was just getting dark.
“Where’s mac Cumhal?” I asked Doyle. He gave no response. He hadn’t shut up in six days, and my heart winced with the certainty a bullet had silenced him. But when I crept closer, careful not to stir the oats and call enemy fire out of the twilight, I found him lying on his side, helmet tilted against his cheek, and those tiny hog eyes staring in wide terror at the maroon sky.
Above the ragged tree line floated a blood-jelly moon quartered like a shard of skull. The Heines had used mortars to throw gas shells from the rocky heights into the woods, and syrupy fumes streaked the phosphorescent moon with something like a ghastly visage, something like eye sockets and a jawbone grimace webbed with putrid flesh.
“Death’s head moon!” Doyle groaned. “Oho! I’m sorrowfool to behold that morbiddy mug in the farthy firmamental. It’s done for us now, Malone. Neither mac Cumhal nor Jay-sus can thwart the trumpy jazz we’ll be hearin’ from yon angels afore this hale nightmary be concludicrous. Make your peace, boyo.”
There was no time for peace that night. Soon as dark descended, the order came to advance. Bellycrawling in the mud with bullets whining inches overhead, crackling through the oats, pounding across the field like hoof beats, I noticed everything in such detail I thought I must already be dead and seeing with a wraith’s unblinking gaze.
I still remember, vivid as a postal card, the mud aglow like amber, like wax in the radiance of the incandescent flares. Among embedded oat stems, I beheld beetles shiny as onyx, writhing angleworms scrawling angelic script, and a black salamander with red freckles arrayed in dice dots making eight the hard way.
This teeming world thrived apart from the war. For a while, I belonged to it.
Then, we crawled out of the oat field into the far woods. At the same time, other Marines had rounded the woods and with grenades had cleared two machine gun nests in the rocky caves. We had been trained on a German machine gun previously captured, and those leathernecks knew how to handle them.
Swept out from their coverts in the trees by bursts from the commandeered machine guns, the Kaiser’s Fifth Guard Division came charging into our sights. I shot three while still flat on my belly. Then, Doyle grabbed my collar and dragged me behind a tree.
A moment later, a mortar shell impacted where I had lain.
I lifted a pale and shaken stare of gratitude to my savior, but he and half the tree where he had hauled me were gone. The shrapnel butchered him where he had stood, just alongside me. In the fire shadows, I didn’t recognize the slurry of bone meal and bloody rags that remained. Even his helmet had been mangled to a twist of slag.
The Heines came rushing through the trees, mad to escape the frenzy of rapid fire at their backs. I staggered to my feet shooting. The lucid focus that had sharpened my gaze in the oat field persisted, and I directed each shot with dream-like clarity and lethal precision.
I’d seen the death’s head moon. McCool or Jesus or whatever specter had guided us through the killing grounds was gone. Seamus Doyle was gone. And I was confident that at any moment I’d be gone, too.
I strolled out from behind my blasted tree and ambled into the throng of fleeing Huns, all the while firing with tranquil intensity. A Model 1917 Springfield rifle holds five .30 caliber bullets in each clip, and my bandolier sported ten clips. When I ran out of ammunition, I yanked a Mauser carbine from the clutches of a corpse and continued firing.
Bullets burned past my face. At one point, a Heine’s bayonet snagged in my bandolier while mine pried past his ribs and dug for his heart. Mortar blasts knocked me down twice. But after the fighting was over, I was still alive among the torn trees.
I searched the starry night for the moon. It had set hours before.
At dawn, I went back through the shattered forest, looking for Doyle among the fallen. The stench thwarted me, and once I began retching I couldn’t stop. Entrails dangled from jagged boughs. Severed limbs and body parts littered the woods, and big black birds picked at clots of flesh.
The officers had already completed rummaging through the rucksacks of the enemy dead, gathering maps and command papers useful to intelligence. Among the broken bodies lay numerous discarded personal items, including letters, pocket-sized Bibles and durable military editions of Also Sprach Zarathustra.
I never found Doyle or any remnant of his Fusiliers’ uniform, and too often over the intervening years I’ve wondered if he had been real or a figment of my shell-shocked brain. Hardly does it matter.
As dread memento, I claimed for my own a blood-stained copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s war-bible. I lifted it from the carcass of a Heine infantryman who had fallen about where I had lost Doyle. It was years before I could read that souvenir of a very bad time. Then, some hobo who understood German translated the title for me: Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen—Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One.
I was no one.
By that time, ten years after Nietzsche’s War, I’d had a dozen tough jobs, everything from quarry work to lumberjack, and I’d lost them all to my belligerence. I liked to fight. The war had never stopped for me. I even exploited my size and brawn to work the boxing ring for a while—but I also liked to drink, and drink and the sweet science don’t kiss.
I met the hobo who read German when I was earning my way as a freight yard bull. My job was to ply my belligerence against the bandits who raided the yards at night for whatever they could take from the sitting boxcars and the tool sheds. I was also supposed to drive off the hobos, but mostly they were my drinking buddies.
Ich liebe Den, welcher sich schämt, wenn der Würfel zu seinem Glücke fällt und der dann fragt: bin ich denn ein falscher Spieler?—denn er will zu Grunde gehen.
Those were the words that hooked me to that lunatic philosopher. When I heard them in English, it was like I’d become a philosophy hobo and this was a catch-out in an open boxcar for the ride of my life:
I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favor, and who then asks: “Am I a cheat?”—for he wants to perish.
That was me! A goose. Why was I alive? Why had I rolled eight the hard way and Doyle and so many other good men came up snake eyes? The answer to that question was always in the next drink or the next fight.
Really, I just wanted to die.
The opportunity came often enough doing bull work in the marshalling yards, where the Mob was bent on looting whole freight cars. I got shot once, in the buttocks, but I was so sauced I don’t much remember it. I don’t much remember anything from those years, except I didn’t stay a bull long. I lost that job and became a hobo myself.
I hopped the rails, drank white lightning from a fruit jar, and earned my way between rides cutting ricks of wood for twenty-five cents each or picking cotton at fifty cents a hundred pounds. It’s all a blur—until after that wretched night I saw again the death’s head moon.
That was spring of ‘35 in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, at a roadhouse where I kept a sheba that I think I cared about, but I don’t truly recall. I mean, I must have cared about her, because when I saw that leering skull moon ghoulish with ripped flesh from the dust storm black rolling across the countryside a hundred miles south, I rushed to the roadhouse.
I was afraid I’d find her dead or suffering.
Instead, I found my sheba naked in bed with another sheik. By his greasy hair, I yanked him to his feet and hit him, expecting him to hit me back. But he didn’t. He just fell down dead.
Except for his pomaded hair and penciled mustache, I can’t for the life of me remember what he looked like, I was that blotto. But I saw he was just a kid, some young Okie playing at being a swank slickster—just a prom-trotter acting the bunk part of a wolf. I can still hear my sheba shrieking like someone with a hot poker stuck in her eye.
I lit out fast and sobered up pretty quick. Oklahoma was a hanging state, and I was a no-account drifter with a bad history who’d killed a local mother’s little Jimmy. That night, I rode the rails out of the state. Two days later, I arrived in Fog City and within a week I stowed away on a tramp steamer leaving the country.
By the time I arrived in Honolulu, I’d sweated out the shakes, but there was no getting quit of the fact I’d murdered a man. Sober for the first time since the War, I felt like the woken dead. I didn’t recognize a damn thing under that tropical sun, not the eleven shades of blue in the sea or the tumbling clouds fat as laughing gods or the obscene flowers like open wounds or the tide pools of vaporous jellyfish and the starved face of my own reflection staring back hollow-eyed as a desert saint.
The docks offered work, but I didn’t team well with the big, easy-going Hawaiian stevedores. I couldn’t shake the doleful misery that dogged me, not only for the young sap I’d put down at the roadhouse but also for all the young roughnecks who went west on those killing fields so many years ago. Bad feelings wormed my brain, and my distraction put everybody on the docks in jeopardy.
The easy Hawaiians let me go, and I took a job as a broom-pusher at a wharfside club called The Sneaky Tiki. A thousand and one tiki gods carved in every variety of frightful crowded the dark, mildewed niches of that bamboo hovel, and Ah Fu, the shriveled Chinese crone who owned the place, expected me to dust them and the floor daily as well as bounce rowdy sailors, protect her quiffs when the johns got rough, and collect vig on the unpaid debts from whoever was fool enough to play her rigged backroom tables.
I liked the job, because—after the day’s extensive dusting was done—work was sporadic enough for me to pursue my new passion: I had committed myself to studying the lunatic philosopher who had poisoned my soul by inspiring the vehement war to end all wars. In the right dose, poison is its own medicine, right?
During my hobo travels, I had managed to get translated enough of the blood-soaked war memento to understand that Nietzsche wrote about finding strength in suffering. The idea of the overman had a lot to do with why I took the job at The Sneaky Tiki. Getting over.
Dort war’s auch, wo ich das Wort ‘Übermensch’ vom Wege auflas, und dass der Mensch Etwas sei, das überwunden werden müsse.
In an inebriated hand, I had penciled atop those words: There, too, was where I picked up from the path the word “overman,” and that man is something that must be overcome.
What had I done to overcome myself? I took a job at The Sneaky Tiki—and I never touched the booze or any of the quiffs. I had overcome what had overcome me in years past. Or I thought I had.
The mad philosopher also wrote: Je mehr er hinauf in die Höhe und Helle will, um so stärker streben seine Wurzeln erdwärts, abwärts, in’s Dunkle, Tiefe,—in’s Böse.
In my shaky hand, that came out: The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark and deep—into evil.
That was truer than I knew—until the third time I met the death’s head moon. Then, I got to know the truth of those words with my blood—and with the piteous heart our blood lassoes.
Autumn of ’37, stiff winds had lofted to great heights plumes of ash from the volcanoes to the south. Standing in the shorebreak off Diamond Head, torch fishing with some of the club regulars, I gazed with stupendous dread upon stratospheric clouds of lava dust that had smeared a squalid grin across the moon’s skull.
I dropped my torch where I stood and slogged to shore without looking back, chilled to my bones, because the name my companions were shouting after me was not my own but the moniker I chose to hide under—and it sounded more horrible than I can say in the light of the death’s head moon:
“Doyle! Hey, Doyle! We no pau! Where you goin’, braddah?”
A year before, Ah Fu had given me a gun—a Smith and Wesson revolver, the kind our officers carried in the War, the ones that fire those big .45-inch caliber bullets—and she told me, “You go Double Eight Noodle Shop, shoot one Moon Duck! What for you wait? Ah-ya! Take gun, you! No go talk. You hear? You talk too much. Moon Duck no talk. He fantastical crazy. You go shoot him plenty dead, heyah!”
Moon Duck, a notorious Chinatown bookie and Ah Fu’s most fierce competitor, was a nasty bald-headed Korean goon with skin the color of rancid butter and no hair on his whole body except exceedingly long eyebrows twitchy as spider legs. During one of my off hours, he had put the squeeze on the crone for half her earnings—and, when she gave him the stink eye and some fast lip, he’d nearly fitted her for a wooden kimono by bouncing a tiki off her gray head.
As if those screws weren’t tight enough, he proceeded to slice up two of her best paying quiffs—nothing to disfigure them, since he expected them to be working for him soon, only some razor cuts on the soles of their feet.
I took the revolver from Ah Fu just to dry up her grievous squalling, which was shrill enough to give the Buddha a nosebleed. I left the big gun under the mattress where I slept in the flop room above the club, because I had no intention of shooting anybody. My size and melancholy countenance are usually sufficient to get the job done, and those pugs who think they rate, they dance with me until they can’t crawl.
I’m not a tough guy. I read German philosophy and drink buttermilk. How tough can I be? But my patience can be saturated, and when my disposition sours I frighten myself. Too bad Moon Duck didn’t know that.
The busboy at Double Eight Noodle Shop directed me to a ramshackle shanty at the dark end of the canal in Chinatown. I found Moon Duck and his cronies sitting on papaya crates around a big wooden chest with many drawers that used to hold medicinal herbs but served now to sort bookie slips. Before I could complete my spiel, Moon Duck shrieked like an electrified cat and stuck in my face a miniature pistol with a cocked hammer ready to send its tiny slug rattling around inside my skull scrambling my brains.
He should have dropped the hammer.
Instead, the screwy goon had me drop my pants. Then, he put my scrotum in one of the tiny drawers of that big cabinet, slammed it shut and locked it.
The place had been rigged with turpentine canisters to burn with a fury, reducing the shanty and its illegal contents to a soot smudge in the event of a vice raid. Moon Duck, with mirthful exuberance, ignited the torch rags, then slapped an open straight razor atop the cabinet within my reach. He strolled outside with his cronies to see if I would burn or castrate myself.
Flames gusted through the shanty with a roar and sucked the air right out of my lungs. In a panic, I tried lifting the cabinet and shuffling out with it. But that was hopeless. The straight razor spun off the tilted surface, and I dropped the cabinet and caught the naked blade, slicing my fingers.
That act of desperation saved my life. If I hadn’t panicked and absurdly attempted to muscle out of that inferno, I’d have roasted or made my way thereafter as a capon. Lubricating the razor with my blood, I just barely managed to slide the flat of the blade into the tight seam underneath the drawer. I shoved downward on the jammed razor with both hands and snapped the blade. But I’d also splintered the base of the drawer, and my desperate and bleeding fingers ripped apart the front panel and freed my bruised scrotum.
Into a vortex of flame, arms crossed over my face, I leaped, crashing through the back of the shanty. The black water of the canal received me with a serpent’s hiss, and when I surfaced the shanty was a pillar of fire.
I returned to The Sneaky Tiki and got the .45. I was back on the street before the bamboo shades in my flop room stopped rattling.
A willow of smoke was all that remained of the bookie’s shanty when I stalked back into Chinatown. I must have been a horrific sight. Hair singed to my blistered scalp, face blackened, clothes charred to rags, I lurched through Chinatown like some infernal demon big with wrath and cut loose from whatever perdition the denizens of that alien quarter most dreaded, because the usually crowded and noisy lanes loomed vacant before my advance.
Despite my obvious homicidal intent—or perhaps because of it—word did not reach Moon Duck of my shambling approach. I found him gaily smoking cigarettes with his cronies before a tureen of pickled cabbage and offal in the very noodle shop where Ah Fu had originally instructed me to ask for him.
The smile was still on his buttery face and tobacco fumes twirling from his nostrils like dragon whiskers when I shot him between the eyes and splashed his brains out the back of his head.
I would have shot his cronies too, as well as the waitress and the busboy, but they all vanished like a magician’s smoke trick before the boom of that big revolver stomped out the door and down the empty street.
For a long time after that unhappy experience, I expected retribution. But the police invested no effort in bringing to justice the murderer of a murderer, and I never so much as glimpsed another of Moon Duck’s cronies again. I think my insane rage spooked them.
But I still haven’t stopped looking over my shoulder, in case they’re playing some Chinese angle on revenge.
And that’s what I was thinking the night I waded to shore under the death’s head moon. Upon my return to The Sneaky Tiki, I came in the back way, past the battered trash bins stinking of vomit and excrement from the losers reeling out of Ah Fu’s backroom creep joint befouled of ill luck and bad liquor.
Pale as a fish’s underbelly, I peeked through the bead curtains behind the bar, looking for trouble boys. The joint was percolating. A few months back, some swank movie stars on island holiday chose The Sneaky Tiki for their slumming. Word got out, and now every high hat and butter-and-egg man visiting the isles showed up with their dumb Doras eager to get hot.
Ah Fu, grinning large with all that dough rolling in, set up candle-lit tables, strolling cigarette girls, a wisecracking bartender, and a smalltime big band. That, for me, was the best thing about the jamming crowd—the right music. Those boys worked some hot improvisation over jazz and blues tunes.
To that swinging jive, the floorflushers in their two-tone shoes and high-waisted trousers slid across the polished wood dance planks with frantic bims who were all garter-flash and swiveling hips. Gives me chickenskin thinking about it.
Swingtime’s complex, six-step footwork had arrived direct from Harlem’s Savoy with those big spenders on tropical holiday. Set my marrow quivering like jelly to behold dancers with intricate, double-paced steps literally walking off the ground, taking air steps and riding aerial moves on the blaring horns and flaring drums of that juiced orchestra.
Most nights, I blissed, but that lurid night under the death’s head moon, my blood was lizard grease and cold. I ranked the crowd for leg-breakers. I remember the music was especially sharp. A guest guitar player was on stage, a local boy who’d done good in L.A., Sol Ho’opi’i. He played electric lap steel with a C# minor tuning (B D E G# C# E, bass to treble), which allowed more sophisticated chord and melody work than the open A or open G tunings I usually heard.
He was in the midst of a blues treatment to a Hawaiian favorite, “Hula Girl,” when Ah Fu took my elbow and stiffened my spine.
“Ah-ya! Why you so jumpy? Business good. Many dolla. You go see doxy at shark table. She wait on you two hour.”
My gaze shot to the far corner of the club, where a young woman of Japanese mien sat demurely sipping tea and reading a book by candlelight.
“Who is she?” I asked, but Ah Fu’s narrow eyes had already fixed on some tipsy high rollers she was sizing up for her gaming tables.
I swung around the outside of the room, keeping to the shadows behind the large tikis. A tiki is just a piece of wood. The typical ones with the snarling mouths are called “Kona style” and began with the great Kamehameha, the warrior king from Kona who united the Hawaiian Islands back in the 1790s. They’re meant to impress with their savagery and to deliver a clear message: don’t monkey with the king.
Most of the tikis in the club were of this variety. But situated at cardinal points around the dance floor stood tikis that were more than just pieces of wood. They were ki’i, spiritual beings, loaned to Ah Fu by the island hunas—witch doctors—to whom my superstitious boss paid a couple yards each month for their magical protection.
These genuine gods had abstract shapes, were very old, and had been activated by the presence of the akua—a tremendous spirit power only the huna could direct. It was all hooey to me.
Ach, ihr Brüder, dieser Gott, den ich schuf, war Menschen-Werk und Wahnsinn, gleich allen Göttern!
I couldn’t agree more with that kraut genius, and my handwriting over the gore-blotched passage was strong and clear: Ah, my brothers, that God whom I created was man-made and madness, like all gods!
But it was Ah Fu’s madness, and she seemed to have done all right by it. The shark table was under the ki’i of the shark god, and it’s where Ah Fu sat each morning tallying her books. That she would seat this young lady there told me she ranked this ankle a sweet Jane worthy of protection in our den of wolves.
I thought she might be a honey trap ribbed up by Moon Duck’s cronies, so I watched her a while. She sipped her tea. She read her book—some slim volume that looked like poetry. The slick action on the floor didn’t seem to grab her, but when Sol Ho’opi’i glided into his solo, she was all ears and eyes. That steadied my nerves, and I approached her table.
“You looking for me, sister?”
She regarded me with an expression of expectation and gentle innocence that snatched at my soul sweet and chill as a waft of opium.
After what I did in Oklahoma, I had taken the veil. My yearning for broads was strong as ever, I assure you, and that’s what made my self-denial a kind of penance. Zehn Mal musst du des Tages dich selber überwinden, Zarathustra spake. Ten times a day must you overcome yourself.
I’d done a lot of overcoming and plenty of penance in the last two years and the island dolls had inflicted genuine suffering, but I’d not once gotten dizzy with a dame—not until that moment. She was a kid, twenty-two, and lovely, I mean like some kind of dream figment that inspires a feeling of calamitous solitude—you know what I’m saying, that lonely revelation you’ve been alone your entire miserable life waiting for this—this misfortune of unpredictable and ferocious passion to hunt you down and menace you with all the lascivious misery of desire, shamelessness, and inevitable and inconsolable loss.
“Are you Mister Richard Doyle?”
From far away, I heard myself answer mindlessly, “What of it?”
She closed her book—the poems of Emily Dickinson—and motioned for me to sit. I sat.
“My name is Risa Watari. My grandfather has sent me here to retain your services.”
I nodded, entranced by her dignity and quiet intelligence. She explained how her father and brother had died recently in a fiery car crash off the cliffs of Makapu’u, apparently in a double suicide after they had gambled away their family farm. Risa’s mother had passed on years before, and Risa was the last of her family in the islands. The territorial court had recognized the transfer of the farm’s deed to some property management company representing an anonymous new owner.
She had been obliged to forsake her family farm and take a residence in Honolulu with her grandfather, who had come from Japan when he learned the tragic news. Both he and Risa did not believe the police report of suicide.
“My father and brother were not gamblers.”
She looked convinced, but with her nose in a book of poems and her ears green as corn in April, I figured her to be the last to know. I suggested she hire a licensed private investigator. Let him be the hard heart who held the mirror up to her family’s ugly side—and leave me with the sweet nostalgia of this girlie’s ardent innocence.
She shook her head earnestly, and the raven dark of her pulled back hair spun candlelight in my eyes like a hop smoker’s waking dream.
“Grandfather sent me for you specifically, Mister Doyle. He says you are Mu-nan—the man who never turned back.”
She read the bewilderment on my mug and added, “That’s how you’re known among the Japanese community for going after the Korean gangster Moon Duck.”
I might have taken that as a compliment on any other night—but not under the death’s head moon.
I wanted to agree with the overman: Wirkliche sind wir ganz, und ohne Glauben und Aberglauben—We are most real when we are wholly without faith and superstition. But I’d been with Seamus Doyle in Belleau Wood. I’d seen Fionn mac Cumhal distinguish the doorways of life and death. Twice before, the death’s head moon had grinned down on me and men had died.
I got up and shook my head. “I can’t help you, lady. Tell your granddaddy I’m not who he thinks I am.”
She fixed me with a schoolmarm’s sympathetic frown, sweetly disdainful of my ignorance. “My grandfather is an excellent judge of character, Mister Doyle.” She placed a brown envelope on the table. “This is one hundred dollars in ten dollar bills, which he is paying you to speak with him tomorrow morning at our residence. This payment entails no other responsibility. Please, accept it as a token of our respect for your courage and virtue.”
Virtue?
I could have shown her the shabby book I carried everywhere with me in my pants pocket and the blood-stained page with these overwritten words: Was ist das Grösste, das ihr erleben könnt? Die Stunde, wo ihr sagt: ‘Was liegt an meiner Tugend! Wie müde bin ich meines Guten und meines Bösen! Alles das ist Armuth und Schmutz und ein erbärmliches Behagen!’—What is the greatest thing you can experience? The hour when you say: “What good is my virtue? How weary I am of my good and my evil! It is all poverty and filth and miserable self-complacency!”
There was a lot of spondulix in that envelope. An Irish fight promoter back in Boston disclosed to me the meaning and importance of spondulix, after I’d taken the broderick in fifteen rounds for fifty bucks, but it might as well have been Seamus Doyle himself who laid it out in his glittering lilt: “It ain’t fifty bucks, boyo—it’s fifty spondulix, from the Gaelic sponc for sperm and diúlach for bloke, which is why in our poor mother’s slang all money is spondúlaigh, because a bloke has to spill his guts to get it, see?”
I took the envelope and offered the poetry lover a drink. But she declined and had me call her a cab. On the way out the door, I learned she was a librarian at the main branch and resolved to continue my philosophy studies there after politely declining her granddaddy the next morning. Who knew what exaggerated expectations he cherished of the man who never turned back, but I was too old to try to live up to that bushwa—especially in the company of the death’s head moon.
The next day I brought the forty-five with me, tucked into a holster at my back under the silk shantung cream blazer I sported. I admit, I wore my spiff rags, buffed my soft leather oxblood loafers, and took a barber’s trim and a shave to impress the librarian. I borrowed Ah Fu’s ’22 Alvis Coupe—an antique ash-framed coach with polished aluminum panels—which she used for her produce pickups in Chinatown and for squiring her huna pals around the island to various heiau, sacred places, where they gathered the magic necessary for recharging the club’s ki’i.
I drove to the address on the spondulix envelope, which took me up a remote switchback in the lush mountains of Nu’uanu, and arrived on the nose in a pine grove at the end of a cedar chip drive. Beyond the pines stood a small airy house with wide sliding doors, winged eaves and blue tile roof. It looked like a joss house—and a dandy place to get zotzed by Moon Duck’s cronies.
I kept my hand on my iron until the librarian greeted me at the door. She wore a bias-cut dress, a fashionable floral print, but she carried it with a wholly foreign demeanor. She bowed, stepped into wood sandals, and led me around back.
A waterfall slashed through green rocks into a narrow gorge, and braces of tall bamboo walled the perimeter of an expansive emerald sward. Close to the house, the grass ended in raked gravel and a few boulders splotched with lichen. A diminutive old man with sparse gray hair and wearing a green satin robe sat cross-legged on a straw mat, motionless, emotionless, and shiny brown as a violin.
The rock garden, the small house, and the pine trees blocked the vista. Only after I squatted on the flat rock before the old man did I confront an unexpected view through the bamboo of the shimmering sea in the far distance. Without uttering a word or making a single gesture, granddaddy had impressed on me his affiliation with the vast sea and the remote culture beyond this island.
His granddaughter sat slightly behind him to his left, and he began speaking slowly, deliberately, like a man with much on his mind, very little time, and an unwillingness to be misunderstood. He spoke Japanese, and the librarian gave me the news in English.
“Good morning, Mister Doyle. I am Matsuo Watari, grandfather of Risa.”
He repeated the tragic story of the car crash off Makapu’u. That morning, I’d read it for myself in the archives of The Honolulu Advertiser on my way to the barber, and I knew all the unhappy details. Risa’s fifty-two-year-old father Ogai, a watercress and orchid farmer, and his twenty-four-year-old son, sole partner in the family business, had been weak sisters in a chump game of craps at an infamous gambling den in Chinatown. A ho-hum tale of woe—except they took it over a cliff. The paper dismissed their deaths as suicide and chalked that up to samurai tradition.
The old man didn’t buy it, and he’d come to the islands for justice. But he was savvy to the American way—and Hawai’i being an American territory, he knew there’d be no justice for two Nipponese farmers. He needed an American gunshi—a tough guy to settle the score.
From under his satin robe he produced an envelope stuffed with two large. At that price, he could have bought some very serious iron, not a no-name dance club bouncer. His quiet eyes read my thoughts perfectly.
“A so desu ka,” he said very slowly, so I heard each syllable.
“Grandfather questions your self-doubt,” the sloe-eyed beauty said, looking at me beseechingly, urging me with a serene nod to take the money. For her alone, I would have. I was that goofy for her. But there was a blood-soaked book in my pocket that said to me: Macht wollen sie, viel Geld,—diese Unvermögenden!—They seek power, much money—these impotent ones!
“I live a simple life, Mister Watari. I go to work. I fish with my friends. After dinner, I go to sleep. I’m not the man for this job.”
The old man listened to his granddaughter’s translation, then shot back in his native tongue. Risa nodded knowingly and conveyed, “On the contrary. You are the ideal man. You are full of the void.”
I laughed. “I think the expression is, full of nothing. He’s right about that. I got a whole lot of nothing.”
Risa shook her head emphatically. “No, Grandfather means something very special. He is quoting a famous Japanese warrior—Miyamoto Musashi.” The old man’s head nudged, the frilled throat and hooded eyes loaning him the shriveled aspect of a turtle.
Risa translated what he had to say: “Of course the void is nothingness. By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist. That is the void. People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This is not the true void. It is bewilderment.”
I waved off the fat envelope and shook my head. “You’re tooting the wrong ringer,” I declared, and the librarian’s dark eyes went wide.
“You must not insult Grandfather. He has done you a great honor, quoting to you from ‘The Book of the Void.’”
I shrugged. “No dishonor meant. Let me square it by quoting to him from A Book for Everyone and No One: ‘Zehn Mal musst du des Tages dich selber überwinden.’—‘Ten times a day you’ve got to overcome yourself.’ That’s how it is with me. Two grand is a lot of money, and I’m seriously tempted. Flattered, even. But I’ve got to overcome myself again and say no.”
I smiled apologetically and rose to depart. I was walking away from more spondulix than I’d ever seen in one place at one time, all because the moon had looked queer last night. Strange to say, I honestly felt I was getting the sweet end of that transaction—at least, until the next moment when the old man opened his yap to say, “You sit—Mistah Marone.”
I pulled my head back sharply, like avoiding a punch. “What did you say?”
The small, withered man nodded softly to his granddaughter, and that sweet thing looked me in the eye and said, “Richard Malone—Grandfather is aware that a warrant for your arrest has been issued by the State of Oklahoma on the charge of first-degree murder.”
My heart hammered against my ribs so hard it hurt. “First-degree!” My voice choked off.
The old man removed a hundred-dollar bill from the fat envelope and tossed it fluttering to my nicely buffed oxblood loafers. The librarian watched me as serenely as if I were a tropical sunset instead of a killer on the lam with veins bulging at his temples.
“Grandfather says, ‘Since you will not work for money, you must work for your life.’ If you do not obey him faithfully, he will notify the territorial authorities—who have a strict extradition policy for all cases of homicide.”
With a gnashed cry of fury, I lunged at the hinky gink. What did I intend? To wring his neck? To shake him silly? To barter his life for mine? I never had a chance to find out. The next instant, he had my thumb in a searing grip, and white-hot pain brought me howling to my knees.
Through a blear of tears, I saw close-up that aged face hashed with wrinkles and gazing at me with vague, soporific satisfaction. He released my thumb, and I crumbled to the gravel depleted, stunned, abruptly alert to the morning light, filtered by the pines, quivering over the gravel like the surface of a pool.
“How’d you get the dope on me?” I practically sobbed.
The old man’s granddaughter put me wise. “It was obvious that the infamous Mu-nan had a criminal history. Why else would a sleazy wharfside club be home to the man who never turned back? Even a cursory glance of the fugitives reported by the National Bureau of Criminal Identification for the year you first arrived in Honolulu disclosed your true identity. Your uncommon size was the giveaway.”
I shut my eyes for a moment, as if things would be different when I opened them. The old man sat impassive as a statue, but Risa’s eyes were keen to my pain and humiliation.
“Grandfather needs a gunshi. He’s too old to restore our family’s honor alone. If you serve him, your secret is safe. But if you refuse, Grandfather is the kind of man who will find you worse than useless and be sure that you are apprehended.”
I wanted to take out the forty-five and plug the little devil. But I remembered the death’s head moon—and picked up the Ben Franklin between my shoes. I had thought I could run away from the moon. I had actually thought that!
I took out Zarathustra and deliberately folded the bill into the page with my marching orders: Was ist das Schwerste, ihr Helden?—“What is the heaviest thing, you heroes?” I mumbled and tucked the book back into my pocket.
Ist es nicht das: sich erniedrigen, um seinem Hochmuth wehe zu thun?—“Is it not this: To humiliate oneself in order to mortify one’s pride?”
I stood and dusted off my linen slacks.
Seine Thorheit leuchten lassen, um seiner Weisheit zu spotten?—“To exhibit one’s folly in order to mock at one’s wisdom?”
The librarian’s beautiful and attentive features brightened as though she’d just solved a puzzle.
Seinen letzten Herrn sucht er sich hier.—“Here he seeks his last master,” I finished and offered my aching hand to the old man.
“Friedrich Nietzsche,” Risa pegged my muttering and parlayed in Japanese with her granddaddy. He gave me a curt nod of approval, took my hand in both of his, and strenuously manipulated the flesh between my thumb and forefinger. When he released my hand, I flexed it painlessly.
“Gunshi Mu-nan,” he said, making me his official snooper.
“Don’t call me that. I’m your pug, because you were going to send me over. But I’m no gunshi, and I’m no Mu-nan. I’m Richard Malone. Tell him.”
He received this from his granddaughter without a flicker.
“Riki,” he called me with a decisive air and stood up. “Riki Marone.”
A smile of approval poured through Risa’s bright eyes. “Riki means energy—power. Grandfather respects your self-control, Mister Doyle, and calling you Riki is his way of telling you there are no hard feelings. If that’s okay with you, give him a bow, and let’s get over to Chinatown and find the people who swindled my father and brother.”
I imitated Risa’s stiff bow, which the old man received with a smug nod, and five minutes later we were in the Alvis Coupe gliding down Nu’uanu Drive under the shaggy ironwood trees.
“Your granddaddy is a tough customer.”
She scrutinized my profile, and when I looked at her, those feline eyes accepted my attention without turning away. “Grandfather is tough. He’s a warrior and a founding member of Kokuryu-kai—the Amur River Society—a private club of Japanese good old boys who love their country, especially the ancient warrior traditions. The fiercest members are called Black Dragons, and Grandfather’s one of them. He’s a tough guy. But what you did back there was even tougher. You’ve taken all that übermensch business to heart, haven’t you?”
I heard a note of wonder in the librarian’s voice. “You’ve read Nietzsche?” I asked and had trouble keeping my eyes on the road.
She laughed like a wicked adolescent. “I’m a librarian. It’s not whether I’ve read Nietzsche that should concern you, Mister Doyle, it’s what I think of his aristocratic radicalism and the historic defeat of the ‘splendid blond beast.’”
This tomato was hot socks! We chatted briefly about nihilism, the desire for nothingness, that Nietzsche believed had replaced God. Her granddaddy’s void was something else—ku, an emptiness meant to describe a situation devoid of independent reality, a process, a flow that connects everything through relationship. Experiencing ku meant being one with the moment.
So she said. I didn’t follow, but her voice was a music I didn’t want to stop.
When we arrived at the dice parlor where the Wataris supposedly rolled away the farm, the situation spun out as we expected. No one there had ever seen the mugs of Ogai and Robun, no matter how much cabbage Risa tossed around with her photo album. The craps game was a flimsy ruse for a blatant land grab.
“It must be the airport the government intends to build,” Risa figured. “It’s not in the papers yet, but I’ve read a recommendation for it in the library’s transcripts from last year’s meeting of the Territorial Land Use Committee. Once the proposal reaches the legislature next session, those real estate prices will go through the roof.”
Nothing stinks quite so rotten as motive.
Our next step was finding out who held the paper on the farm. Territorial law made no provision for public access to property records. The convenient deaths of Ogai and Robun masked the transfer of deed. Only a court order would disclose who benefited, and I was a lot more comfortable bribing the night security guard at the conveyance office than a territorial judge.
I dropped off Risa for her day job at the main branch of the library on Punchbowl next to Iolani Palace. The so-called palace was an ugly Greek Revival manse, where the last Hawaiian monarchs had ruled in garish European splendor before the Marines deposed them forty years ago. It housed the administrative offices that would process my extradition and send me back to Oklahoma to do the dance.
I got out of there fast and returned to The Sneaky Tiki to contemplate my fate. The ki’i got a more thorough dusting than usual, especially the shark ki’i where I’d first met Risa. Maybe that guardian spirit would protect me from the trouble that had visited me with that Japanese doll and the death’s head moon.
And then again, maybe not.
Reflecting on what had followed my previous grisly lunar viewings, my heart felt cramped, overmuscled, and I had to breathe through my mouth to calm down. The taut fear reminded me of choosing doorways among the trees in Belleau Wood. Where was Fionn mac Cumhal now? I wished Seamus Doyle was at the bar sipping hooch and available for a consult. Instead, Ah Fu’s aggressive face scowled up at me.
“What for you so displeasurably unhappy? Hotshot date with Japanese doxy not so terrifical, heyah?”
I used the opportunity to ask to borrow the Alvis Coupe for another hotshot date that night. Actually, I intended to go alone to the conveyance office, but Risa showed up at the club around midnight wearing a sleek black evening dress with white gloves to the elbows and a pearl-studded handbag. Ah Fu grimaced a good-luck wink at me.
I drove Risa directly to the territorial office building, and the yard the old man had paid me for a retainer bought us a midnight viewing of the land transfer records.
While we were riffling through those turf sheets, I asked the young thing, “If your granddaddy has so much lettuce, why’d your father have to bust sod?”
A blush tinged the flat, ivory planes of her face, and she didn’t look up from the open file cabinet as she replied, “I’m from a poor family. My father is the youngest of Grandfather’s five sons and had no expectation of an inheritance. He came to Hawai’i as a young man to make his fortune. My brother and I were born here, but Grandfather summoned me back to Japan after I finished my library studies and began my career, so I’d know my family. I was with Grandfather when we received news of the accident.”
A moment later, she found the winner: Dunkel & Bose, a realty firm on Bishop Street, held the deed to the acreage that had formerly been Watari Nursery.
We were congratulating ourselves with big grins and goo-goo eyes when the frosted glass door banged open. A long-shouldered bruno in a pineapple shirt strode in. He had the drop on me with a .38 police special, and in that confined space, that was a hefty down payment on oblivion. He motioned us out of the room, and I started walking though I knew he was taking us on a long walk to nowhere.
Risa, never having seen the way bowels, brains, and blood got nothing to hide in the company of a bullet, chose to put up a fight. As she approached the bruno, she yanked open a file cabinet and grabbed for his gat. The blast pounded me deaf an instant after I heard the slug suck past my ear.
My fist was in the bruno’s face while my free hand reached behind to draw the .45. Eager to get the doll away from that hatchetman’s flailing gun, I heaved myself into him, and we toppled to the floor.
He was no pushover. His blows rattled my skull like a box of broken china, and my gun flew clattering across the floor with what must have been a couple of my molars. As he swung his .38 up to my chin, I dug my thumbs into his eyes and then fastened the shutters with a sharp head blow.
I reeled to my feet in a snowstorm of spinning stars. Risa took me by the arm and led me tottering like a rummy to the window. On the fire escape, I pulled my arm free and turned to go back for my gun, but the security guard was already in the doorway, and the bruno was sitting up with a scowl too ugly for a bulldog.
We rode the escape ladder to the ground and dashed for the Coupe.
“Who was that gunman?” the librarian asked, breathless, but I didn’t answer right away. I was too busy trying to drive and see straight at the same time.
Her composure calmed me. She placed a steady hand on my arm, and the violence we’d just escaped, the whole lethal situation that had ensnared us, seemed less.
“Whoever that was, he was going to kill us, wasn’t he?” she asked with a lazy look of amorous appraisal.
I wanted to say something ducky, but my jaw hurt too much—so, I kept a manly silence and concentrated on driving straight.
Back at the joss house in Nu’uanu, the old man had an opinion he imparted slowly for my benefit, “Senmin No Oh.”
Risa poured me a cup of tea, though I would have preferred a snort. “The King of the Lower Classes,” Risa translated. “Grandfather is sure the security guard was paid to call for that gunman if anyone came nosing around. Senmin No Oh is his way of saying that Dunkel & Bose must have a thousand underlings.”
The room in which we sat on the floor was small but appeared huge, because there was no furniture, just straw floor mats, a low chocolate-brown table with the tea service, and wide bamboo-slat windows that let the night pour in. Lit by paper lanterns and wispy with incense that kept mosquitoes at bay, the room glowed warmly.
“So now that granddaddy knows, what does he want to do?”
Risa straightened as if a cop had loomed up behind and laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. “You should show some respect to the man who holds your life in his hands, Mister Doyle. My grandfather deserves to be addressed as Mister Watari.”
I offered a glum smile, and the old man turned his wrinkled and somber face toward me. “Riki, you gunshi. You go talk Senmin No Oh. You ask for Ogai, for Robun. You find …” He said something in Nipponese, and my inquisitive frown invited Risa to lay it out, “… the truth. Grandfather wants you to—”
I stopped her with a weary nod. “Yeah, yeah. He wants me to find out if Dunkel & Bose blipped your father and brother. So, we find out. The cops and this coconut court won’t touch those pooh-bahs. So then what?”
She poured herself tea, returned the kettle to its rattan placemat, and lifted her cup with both hands. Her motions, so feminine, so serenely self-possessed, unmanned me.
“So, then we know.”
Her words floated through me like a perfume, and they lingered with me on the long, star-splattered ride back to The Sneaky Tiki.
So, then we know. We had no evidence. There wouldn’t be any evidence. Two Nipponese farmers in a crash and burn. I might have wondered why she and her granddaddy believed knowing was so important. No matter how much wampum he had, he couldn’t buy a hit on those island muckamucks. But the pages of blood spoke to me:
Ich liebe Den, welcher lebt, damit er erkenne—I love him who lives in order to know.
I slept restlessly that night. I worried about the gun I’d lost. Would the dicks trace it to me, maybe even tie it to Moon Duck’s bump-off? And what did I intend to actually say tomorrow to the mopes at Dunkel & Bose? I had to say something to get them to own up or I’d be taking the jump in Oklahoma. Mister Watari was no bunny. He would know—or I would go.
My zany German egghead agreed with the old man: Begehrt sie nach Wissen wie der Löwe nach seiner Nahrung?—Does it long for knowledge as the lion for his prey?
I got up the next morning intent on feeding the lion. With no weapon to hide, I dressed light, in a Hawaiian three-piece—sandals, khaki slacks, and a silk shirt, cerise with no printed flowers or hula girls. Ah Fu needed the Alvis Coupe to visit a heiau with her huna chums, so I hoofed to Kapiolani Boulevard.
Lemon green morning light shuffling out of the palms accompanied my bus ride downtown. Though the tropical heat was dense, my shirt didn’t stick: the trades were blowing big clouds across the sky, those laughing gods, and pollen breezes swirled down from the mountains and soothed my nerves.
At Bishop Street, I got out and entered an office building that looked made of old gingerbread. Dunkel & Bose appeared on a slender brass plate elegantly affixed to a marble wall in a vestibule like a mausoleum. I was still wondering how I was going to punch the bag with these upstage realtors, when a distant fluting voice called, “Mister Doyle!”
Across the street, among the flowering trees of a corner park, Risa stood in a white summer dress waving to me with a pink-gloved hand. Wands of sunlight slanting through the trees ignited the cotton pleats of her dress, silhouetting her long stems. For a startling moment, I was certain I was staring through the x-rayed fabric at the cleft between her thighs that the poets call a camel toe.
“I didn’t expect you so early,” she said after crossing the street. “I took the day off and was hoping to get some reading done.” She tucked her slim volume of Dickinson poems into a black patent leather handbag.
“Look, Risa—why don’t you wait for me in the park? Read your poetry. This won’t take long.”
She turned her pale face away and, with a knowing sidelong look, asked, “Why, Mister Doyle? Are you worried about me?”
I took her delicate elbow in my hand. “After last night, aren’t you worried?” I stepped close enough to smell hints of jasmine whispering from her glossy black hair. “I can’t put you in a tight spot again.”
She pressed closer. “I’m afraid I’m the one who put you in a tight spot.”
My hand squeezed her arm, her gaze deepened, and we both knew then we wanted each other. But I might as well have tried to straddle a sunbeam. She took my face in her gloved hands and kissed me hard, our teeth briefly clashing, and then her tongue in my mouth, flickering. Before I could pull her to me, she backed away with a triumphant, half-stifled smile.
Not uttering another word, we entered the building and took the brass gate elevator to the third floor, entirely occupied by Dunkel & Bose.
I opened the gate on an anteroom with old paneling shining with wax, gilt-framed portraits of sallow-faced men, and a deep red carpet. Doors to most of the rooms stood wide, exposing conference tables, telephones, burnished wood file cabinets, and no people. I worried we’d arrived too early. Then, I pushed through the one door with Dunkel & Bose pegged in polished letters, and we confronted the bruno from last night.
He was sitting at a receptionist’s desk wearing an elegant white linen suit and hunched over a copy of Black Mask Magazine, open to “The Man from Shanghai” by Ramon Decolta—a story I knew, because it involved my favorite dick, Jo Gar, Island Investigator. Jo was a small, soft-spoken hombre in the Philippines who, despite his gentle, polite manner, never misjudged evil.
I was surprised this dingus could read. Too bad he didn’t understand what he was reading.
He pushed to his feet glaring, his left eye bruised purple as the welt on my jaw.
“Relax, sister, this is a social call.” I peered past him into a chamber the size of a courtroom where two suits dangled over a mahogany desk big as a pool table. They were scrutinizing the tickertape from a rattling bell jar and didn’t notice us until I shoved the bruno back in his seat and we entered their private club.
“Dunkel and Bose? Got a minute for Doyle and Watari?”
The swells looked up startled, and I took their measure quick because I knew the bruno was bearing down.
One of the suits was short, bald, with a pointy nose, wire-frame spectacles, and a mustache—a weasel. The other stood tall, broad-shouldered, his curly blond hair thinning above a ruddy, square-jawed face—an Ivy-league oarsman gone paunchy.
I gently nudged Risa farther into the room so that when the bruno strode angrily through the doorway, there was room to fake him with a right and clip him hard under the chin with a left. He went down like a creaky dumbwaiter and sat there gnashing teeth, straining to see straight.
“Aren’t you boys going to offer the lady a seat?”
The weasel scowled indignantly and asked, “Who are you? What do you want?”
The oarsman grinned with a grim yet boyish charm and motioned to one of three lyre-back chairs beside the giant desk.
“You’re related to those farmers who gambled away their nursery, aren’t you? That turned out badly. I’m sorry.”
I flung a cold laugh at the suits. “Stow the sympathy, jasper. We’ve been to Chinatown, and we know there was no gambling involved. And as that pretty boy on the floor with the stars in his eyes must have told you, we know you hold the deed to the farm—a property that’s going to be worth some heavy sugar when the airport’s approved. Seems what we’ve got here is a criminal land grab.”
The oarsman’s extremely cold blue eyes assessed us, faint white wrinkles at the corners grooving merrily. “You can prove this?”
My stare narrowed. “What do you think?”
The faint white wrinkles deepened. “I think you’re a lousy poker player, Doyle.”
By now, the bruno had found his legs. He staggered in with his hand in his jacket.
“That won’t be necessary, Max.” The oarsman raised a restraining hand. “The lady and the gentleman are leaving.”
I stepped forward and placed both palms on the desktop. “The lady just got here, and she wants some answers. Tell Max to sit down or he’s going through the window.”
The merry wrinkles vanished. “What answers do you want, Doyle?”
The weasel dropped the ribbon of tickertape he was still holding and whined, “Who cares what answers he wants? Max, get these intruders out of here.”
Risa piped up, “Why are you holding the deed to my father’s farm? And don’t tell me he gambled it away. My father did not gamble.”
The weasel had fixed Max with a hard stare. “Get them out of here. We don’t have to answer their questions.”
Risa pointed at Max. “Please, put that gun away. You’re frightening me. I only came here for the truth. I don’t have any authority to reclaim my father’s farm.”
The weasel laughed harshly. “Damn right! That land is ours. Your father signed it away. We have the legal documents.”
Risa nodded softly. “But he didn’t gamble it away. I want the truth.”
The oarsman sighed. “The truth is an ugly business, young lady. You’re better off just leaving that alone. Doyle, be a right guy and spare her the pain.”
Risa lifted her chin defiantly. “I can stand the truth. I don’t care how ugly it is.”
The oarsman cocked an eyebrow. “Don’t fool yourself. Show them out, Max.”
I pushed off the desk and shoved myself up against Max. “You budge, pal, and that iron is going in your out box.”
Anger flared through the tough guy, but before he could make his move, Risa stood.
“I don’t want trouble. I will leave. Just tell me why you’re afraid of the truth? The farm of my father and brother—how did you get the deed?”
The weasel snorted. “They signed it over. It’s as simple as that.”
She shot him a hot look. “Why?”
The oarsman exhaled another exasperated sigh. “We offered them a fair price.”
The weasel snapped, “Shut up, Donald!”
The merry wrinkles returned. “What are they going to do? We have the paper. The law is on our side.”
Risa stepped up to the desk and laid down her handbag. “My father would never sign away his land. Not for any price.”
Donald shrugged. “That was why he got pushed over.”
The weasel shook his bald head. “What are you doing?”
Donald’s bronze eyebrows tightened. “She wants the truth. I’m giving her the truth. We didn’t do anything that hasn’t always been done. How do you think our grandfathers made out in these islands?”
Donald looked at her with his icy blue eyes. “What are your people doing in Manchuria right now, even as we’re speaking? Do you think the Chinese invited the Japanese into Nanking?”
The weasel groaned. “Enough, Donald. You made your point.”
Donald’s face was shining, lit with a chill and blameless anger. “Have I? Have I made my point, Miss Watari? We did better for your daddy than the Chinese got. We offered to buy him out. He wouldn’t budge. What did that Jap think was going to happen?”
A sob escaped Risa. She bit her lower lip, and tears glistened as she took in the oarsman’s umbrage, the weasel’s alarm.
I glowered at the two suits. “You can’t get away with this. We’re in an American territory.”
Donald smirked. “Tell it to the Hawaiians.”
He spoke Risa’s name again with curdled contempt. “Miss Watari, I’m sorry for the history lesson, but you pushed. You had to know. In this shrinking world—as your people understand so damn well—land belongs to whoever’s strong enough to take it. Now, blow your nose and get out of here.”
Risa opened her purse, reached in for a handkerchief, and came out with my Smith and Wesson .45-caliber revolver. Using a double-handed grip with full arm extension, slightly bent at the elbows and sighting with both eyes open, she shot Max in the face.
Startled by the loud blast, I hurtled back two paces as Max fell away from me, a big hole where his nose had been. I was still moving when the second shot exploded and the back of Donald’s head burst, spewing brains and blood onto the tall, sunny windows overlooking the park.
The weasel had turned and was fleeing toward a side door. He completed three long strides before the third shot rang out and a hot, fat slug of lead skewered him through the base of the skull.
Then, Risa turned, and I was staring into the smoking barrel of my own gun.
With a fright so intense it was ethereal, I realized what a dupe I’d been. I was no gunshi—I was a patsy. The old man and his charming granddaughter had set me up to cover these murders. At this range, that .45 would decapitate me, and this cold-blooded frail could leave the piece in my hand, make it look like a suicide. Let the buttons try to figure out a motive.
Now, those pink gloves made lethal sense. The dinner gloves last night, too. No prints anywhere. At least, none of hers. And that tongue in my mouth, flickering like a snake’s—a Judas kiss for a sucker.
“Riki,” she said, and her samurai grandfather’s term of endearment sounded harsh, commanding, without the slightest tremor of shock, fear, or uneasiness. “Get rid of this gun.”
She handed me the .45, and I received it with stunned and, I admit, tremulous fingers.
The constriction in my throat eased up when I saw she wasn’t going to kill me, and I mumbled, “You planned this.”
She moved quickly toward the side door, gingerly sidestepping the pool of crimson blood widening from under the weasel’s face-down corpse. “Come on. We’ll take the back way out.”
Her voice was as cool as the gun in my hand was hot.
I followed her out the door and down six flights of stairs to a back alley cluttered with dented trash bins and a reek of festering garbage. No one saw us exit. By then, the muzzle had cooled, and I tucked the big gun in the belt under my shirt.
She took me by the hand, and her touch was steady and dry. We strolled down Bishop Street easy as holiday lovers.
“You planned that,” I repeated, my voice stronger.
She fixed me with a sunny smile of striking cheerfulness. “Grandfather will be pleased. His family honor is restored.”
I stopped short, yanked her close, and said through my teeth, “You should have told me.”
She winced with the ferocity of my grasp, then lifted her angel’s face and asked with a surly smile, “Why? Would you have killed those men for me, Mister Malone?”
She pulled free, and I let her go. I watched her cross the street to a waiting bus. She didn’t look back, and when the bus pulled away I glimpsed her pretty profile gazing sweetly out the window at the dazzling sun raining through the palms.
I dropped the gun off a wharf and returned shaken to The Sneaky Tiki—shaken not by the killings, which had been brutally efficient and nothing like the frantic carnage of war or the blind violence I’d visited upon that poor kid in Oklahoma—but shaken by that kitten’s ruthless composure.
For days after, those gruesome murders were front-page news. But I ignored the papers. My thoughts were somewhere else. I couldn’t get her sun-struck dress out of my mind or that peek of camel toe or the spicy and forlorn taste of her.
When I dusted the shark ki’i, I actually wondered if that akua had made the difference when I was staring into the steel zero of the .45’s barrel. She had meant to kill me, too. The more I thought of it, the more certain I became. Why keep alive the only witness?
I could almost hear the old man instructing her, “Riki must die.” Why else had she called me Riki? The old man’s voice was in her head. But she had spared me—for what? Love? Pity? Or the mysterious touch of the akua in whose shadow I had first met her?
To put an end to these screwy thoughts, I steeped myself again in those pages soaked in my enemy’s blood, listening attentively to my German master’s warning:
Wollt Nichts über euer Vermögen: es giebt eine schlimme Falschheit bei Solchen, die über ihr Vermögen wollen.—Do not will anything beyond your power: there is a bad falseness in those who will beyond their power.
With those words in mind, I stopped trying to understand. The Watari clan had their revenge. And I was still alive—though, at any moment, the cops could descend on me, alerted to my whereabouts by an anonymous tip from the old man or his ice-water-for-blood granddaughter.
I thought of moving on. But the work at the club was too easy and the music too good. The whoopee crowds and occasional celebrity were still showing up, and at two in the AM when the horns were wailing, the skins pounding, and jazz notes glittering from the strings like shooting stars, The Sneaky Tiki was the reason the earth spun.
After a couple weeks, when the law didn’t show, I stopped feeling sorry for myself. I had a sweet job that provided spondulix for the silk threads I fancied, fishing buddies to share a yuk with, and Moon Duck’s cronies nowhere in sight, just where I needed them to keep me sharp.
Now and again, I hankered for a swig, to feel once more that place in the soul wide as sunset and happy with forgetfulness. I hankered for that touch of firewater about as often as I hankered to see that cute librarian, that deadly doll who had briefly ignited the sizzle in me.
But that was just now and again—enough to remind me that honesty and loyalty and valor exist only because we create them, the way we create bayonets and carbines, as weapons to fight ourselves.
Man erlebt endlich nur noch sich selber.—In the end, one experiences only oneself.
So, the mad genius says and goes on to say:
Aber der schlimmste Feind, dem du begegnen kannst, wirst du immer dir selber sein.—But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself.
Take that as a warning. I should have.
You see, I thought the death’s head moon had played out. Three times is a charm, right? Torch fishing under the sponged moon, I stayed alert for sharks. On the street, I watched the shadows and the alleys. And in the club, my back was always to the wall.
But when trouble came, as usual, I was a stranger to surprise.
“Heyah! What for pretty-face doxy linger at table for you with romantical cow eyes?” Ah Fu asked, summoning me one evening from the gaming room where I had just eased a bad loser out the door. “You see tea-drinking doxy off-hour. What for I pay you plenty dolla?”
I stared across the dance floor’s hopping crowd, and my heart rattled ribs to spy Risa Watari in a sleek red satin evening gown sitting at her candlelit table under the shark ki’i.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” I admitted when I found myself standing at her table and added, “I thought you were done with me.”
She gently motioned with her smiling eyes for me to sit, and I sat.
“I was hoping I’d just begun with you.” She put her hand on mine, squeezed it warmly, and poured her liquid gaze into the back of my eyes.
“How’s granddad?” I mumbled.
She didn’t answer for a moment. She just stared at me, into me, as if compelling assent. Only after I returned her hand squeeze and leaned in closer did she reply, “He has another job for you, Mister Malone.”
I stiffened visibly. “I don’t like you calling me that. And I—most definitely—am not wearing your granddaddy’s pajamas again. Once was plenty.”
She tossed her head back with a sparkling laugh. “It’s nothing like before, Riki. It’s a cakewalk.”
This was surely one of the ten times in this particular day where I had to overcome myself, and I moved to get up, to get away from my desire and the big trouble it promised.
“Goodbye, Risa.”
I stood, but she wouldn’t let go of my hand and stared up at me with a languid, bemused smile.
“It’s nothing like you think, silly. Grandfather just wants some travel photos for his old chums back home in the Amur River Society.”
She tugged at my arm with a petulant insistence and a pout that made my blood spin faster.
I sat. “Travel photos? I’m no photographer. But let me guess. You are.”
She nodded with girlish glee. “Grandfather doesn’t want me going to these places without an escort.”
I huffed a laugh. “I pity the poor slob that gives you static.”
She wrinkled her nose. “It’s not like that. The old fellows at the Amur River Society desire snapshots of some of the wild river sites on O’ahu. Grandfather wants you there in case I twist an ankle.”
I rocked my jaw, thinking it over. “River photos?”
She lidded her eyes with sultry shrewdness. “We’ll be alone in remote places. I’m sure I’ll need you.”
My jaw snapped into place. “When do we start?”
The delight of her enthusiastic smile stirred skittish desire in me.
“Tomorrow! We’ll begin with some photos of the estuary and work our way up into the watershed.”
My bones glowed with happiness.
“Sounds copacetic. I’ll get the Coupe for the day and pick you up after breakfast. Where are we going?”
She bent toward me, and a swerve of her midnight hair covered one eye.
“Pearl Harbor.”