Fire Knife Dancing Read online

  Fire Knife Dancing

  Jungle Beat [2]

  John Enright

  Thomas Mercer (2013)

  * * *

  Rating: ★★★★☆

  Samoan detective Apelu Soifua lives on the knife edge of two disparate cultures, navigating a perilous dance between native and new that, over the years, has landed him in his fair share of trouble. So when a routine patrol on a remote jungle estate uncovers an inter-island smuggling ring, it doesn’t take long for Apelu to realize there’s more than just cigarettes and bootleg CDs at stake. Someone in Apelu’s corner of paradise is trafficking humans—and they won’t think twice about setting up a cop to take the fall.

  Now Apelu stands accused of murder, and his only shot at proving his innocence is to go AWOL from his job and his wife until he can unearth the truth. Hunted by the police, his only ally is a young American widow whom he quickly discovers is anything but what she seems. Apelu knows he’s playing with fire—but can he unmask a killer before he gets burned?

  About the Author

  John Enright was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945. After serving stints in semi-pro baseball and the Lackawanna steel mills, he earned his degree from City College while working full-time at Fortune, Time, * and Newsweek magazines. He later completed a master’s degree in folklore at UC-Berkeley, before devoting the 1970s to the publishing industry in New York, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. In 1981, he left the United States to teach at the American Samoa Community College and spent the next twenty-six years living on the islands of the South Pacific. Over the past four decades, his essays, articles, short stories, and poems have appeared in more than seventy books, anthologies, journals, periodicals, and online magazines. His collection of poems from Samoa, 14 Degrees South*, won the University of the South Pacific Press’s inaugural International Literature Competition. Today, he and his wife, ceramicist Connie Payne, live in Jamestown, Rhode Island.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 John Enright

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612185019

  ISBN-10: 1612185010

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012923476

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my island brothers Tau Hunkin and Joe Kennedy.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  FOR MANY YEARS it was the only house out there, a house of elegant exile. The road to it was little more than a track cut through the jungle over black lava ribs and down red mud hollows. The poles along the road carried power and phone lines to that house alone. The house crouched on a black and barren cliff above the reefless sea. Even in calm weather, the sea could dispatch rogue breakers into the cliff face with enough strength to raise a plume of spray twenty feet high. In storms the mist was so thick that the house seemed submerged in an aerated sea.

  But it was a strong house, built to be in just that place. Its sturdy rolled eaves suggested a wrestler’s slouched shoulders, always on the defensive. It hugged the contour of the land it held. No one else had ever thought to build there, at the margin of two inhospitalities—the choked jungle on a landscape of fractured volcanism behind and the kinetic and potential violence of the world’s largest ocean knocking at the front door. The jungle’s verge was guarded by thickets of sword-edged pandanus. The sea’s sole amenity here was its vista.

  Detective Sergeant Apelu Soifua had been inside the house only once, maybe ten years before, for a lavish party on a sea-peaceful starry night. The hosts had hired a van to ferry their guests over the road in and out so that no one had to endanger their vehicles. Besides, there was nowhere to park there. The party had been for some visiting entertainers. He remembered a large, lantern-lit patio overlooking the starlit black-and-white coastline—the black ever stationary, the white always in motion. It had been a good party. Servants kept glasses full. There was too much to eat. The entertainers entertained. He had been glad for the ride back out. He couldn’t have driven it.

  But what Apelu remembered most about the house was the interior—the foot-friendly Persian carpets, the warm glow of polished hardwood, walls hung with Polynesian folk art and show biz memorabilia, rafters, recessed lighting, and always the sound of the surf exploding below them. At the end of a spacious, people-filled living room was a bar like one lifted from some sixties nightclub. Apelu liked to drink just a little too much at parties like that so that he could savor the illusion that he belonged there in those surroundings, owned it all, at least for an hour or two.

  The house’s isolation, though, was probably its most notable feature among the local populace. Thousands of years of island experience had inbred in Samoans the assurance that safety feeds on numbers, on human proximity, on being as close to the social center as possible. Everyone knew that marginal places like the one the house occupied were aitua—haunted, dangerous, and only for entities with powers that exceeded theirs.

  Entertainment people really are a class apart. They lack a common fear. What seems like shallowness is really just a focus elsewhere. Entertainers see themselves through a following lens of imagined observation. They are best at routines they’ve run through before and are seldom surprising in any original way. Real artists are different. They may be employed as entertainers by chance, but rarely, and then only secondarily—the way caged animals don’t think of themselves as spectacles of anything.

  The owners of the house, the hosts of that long-ago party, had lived their lives as professional entertainers in Polynesian dance troupes in Hawaii and California, even in the movies. They were retired old pros, with hidden-camera smiles and perfect body language. Even in their sixties they were still entertainers in a show of being themselves that had slowly replaced their real lives, the way minerals mimic trees in a petrified forest.

  Apelu had been an entertainer himself for a while. Soon after his father had moved the family from Samoa to San Francisco when Apelu was fourteen, a distant auntie in LA learned that back in Samoa Apelu had been trained as, and had performed as, a fire knife dancer. She ran Polynesian dance shows in LA, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs nightclubs. She could always use a new, young, Samoan fire knife dancer. His family needed the money since they were trying to build a place for themselves in the Mission District. She flew up from LA to check him out.

  If it hadn’t been for his mother, Apelu’s formal education probably would have ended there. His father quickly signed a contract for him. Apelu couldn’t recall exactly how he felt about it. His fear of starting at Mission High School with next to no English was probably on a par with his dread of being removed from his family. But as a boy, a tama, he really had no say in the matter. His distant auntie, Sia, was a gigantic woman—close to six feet tall and well over thre
e hundred pounds—who was always dressed as if she were about to introduce the next act. Imperious was not a word Apelu would learn for many years, but she became its definition when he learned it.

  Auntie Sia had Apelu off packing his meager clothes and possessions when his mother finally weighed in. They were staying with some cousins, the whole family sharing one bedroom. Only Apelu’s sister was with him in the room as he searched for his clothes. They both were crying. Everything about their lives was falling apart. What could they ever know or trust again? How would they know what to do, who they were outside the family, without one another?

  Normally Apelu’s mother was soft-spoken, the peacemaker in the family. Her strength came from soothing. But as Apelu and his sister stopped to listen, they could hear their mother’s voice downstairs in the kitchen slowly rise in volume. In fiery Samoan she denounced their father, then turned her full rage on Auntie Sia. The tidal wave of her emotions was unanswerable. Auntie Sia quickly left the house, and his father was evicted soon after. Apelu and his sister had sat in silence, in shock, staring at each other. Then their mother had come into the room, holding the pieces of the torn-up contract. She was weeping. They went to comfort her.

  In the end, a compromise was worked out. Apelu worked part-time for Auntie Sia when his mother allowed it—summers, school breaks, occasional weekends if there was a gig in Reno or Lake Tahoe. His father was let back into the house. Apelu’s oldest sister ended up dancing full-time in one of Auntie Sia’s reviews. It was during those years that Apelu first met and fire knife danced for Ezra and Leilani—the owners of the grand house—though they claimed not to remember him from those days.

  It was not the first complaint that the department had received about Ezra Strand discharging a firearm at hikers and boaters along the cliffs near his house in Piapiatele. Sometimes a patrol car was sent out, but usually someone in the commissioner’s office gave Ezra a call and told him to cool it. But this time he’d made the mistake of blasting away with his shotgun over the heads of a pair of National Geographic photographers. Some errant, low-diving buckshot had hit their equipment. The commissioner had gotten a call from their DC attorney.

  Apelu was on duty and underemployed—by his captain’s estimation—so he was sent out to Piapiatele to bring in the weapon and ask for particulars. Apelu hadn’t seen Ezra in a while. On a small island like Tutuila you normally saw most of the people you knew just by shopping and going to the post office. There were only two main roads, and island pastimes included identifying people by their vehicles and catching the eye of oncoming drivers. Days later, acquaintances would tell you who was in your truck with you when you whizzed by or where they saw your truck on Tuesday afternoon when your wife had it. Other people’s whereabouts were part of the shifting unconscious social map everyone kept inside their heads. Apelu had once started receiving curious condolence calls at work after their old truck had broken down in front of a casket shop, and Sina, his wife, who was driving it at the time, had just left it there.

  But on the ride out to Piapiatele, Apelu realized—checking his mental maps—that Ezra had pretty much disappeared. He still saw Leilani around—always looking petite and great for a now old lady. She always gave him a kiss on his cheek and would hold his hand in that backward way women have when they want to hint you’re special. But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Ezra. Apelu had heard that Ezra had gone pretty much to ground, and was hiding in the house. The warning shots at hikers were part of that. Apelu wondered how much booze had to do with it. Ezra had once been fairly famous for his transgressions in that arena.

  There were a few more houses on the road out to Ezra and Leilani’s house now, and the road—just an unpaved driveway, really—had been improved, smoothed out a bit at least, until he got to the last stretch. Apelu stopped the squad car well short of the chain that blocked the road at the edge of Ezra’s land and studied the ruts and boulders in front of him. The chain was wrapped around two coconut trees on opposite sides of the road. Well, he would have to get out and walk from there anyway, he thought, might as well spare the squad car this last stretch. So he got out of the car and started walking toward the chain and the house beyond.

  They were the two biggest fucking dogs he had ever seen. Mastiffs or something. Apelu was only halfway to the chain when they exploded toward him from somewhere near the house. Besides being large, they were loud, they liked showing off their teeth, and they were coming straight for him at motorcycle speed. Apelu retreated to the squad car, just beating them there. Adrenaline rush. He hit the emergency lights and the siren, put the squad car in gear, and slowly bounced and scraped the big Crown Royal up to the chain. The dogs went berserk. Apelu noticed they foamed at the mouth, and when they attacked his tires it was the first time he had ever considered the possibility that a dog might actually damage a steel-belted radial.

  Apelu sat there for a while with the lights and the siren on because he was beginning to enjoy the dogs’ frenzy. They were good-looking animals, actually, with wide shoulders, square skulls, and no necks to speak of. One was coal black and the other was lion-colored—beautiful short-haired coats. Well fed, well cared for. He turned off the siren but left the flashers on. The dogs calmed down. They looked a little worn out. Apelu used his PA speaker to broadcast a message in Samoan to Ezra.

  “Chief, Ezra, Mr. Strand, I’m just here to check on you and have a few words. Come out and call off your dogs.”

  It was getting hot in the squad car because Apelu had rolled up the windows—now with dog slobber drying on them—to keep the beasts out. He rolled the two front windows partway down, but the dogs were ignoring him now, using their excess saliva for a nice lick-down. Apelu turned off the flashers and waited. After a while he clicked the mike back on and asked, “Chief?” A few more minutes went by and then Ezra appeared, walking slowly over the rise that hid the front of the house from the driveway. He was dressed in a long-sleeve white shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. He was carrying a shotgun cradled under his arm, muzzle down—a hunter’s carry.

  “Put down the shotgun, Chief,” Apelu said through the mike. “I’m not armed.”

  “Good!” Ezra yelled back, and then he raised and leveled his shotgun and pulled the trigger. The blast took out the squad car’s windshield, but Apelu was on the floor before that. The dogs again exploded into action, attacking the car.

  Without sitting up fully, Apelu turned on the ignition and put the squad car into reverse. He sat up far enough to try to back out the car through the route he used to come in, figuring Ezra wouldn’t fire at the car with the dogs all over it. But when Apelu took a look back in Ezra’s direction, he was walking back toward the house. He had evidently called the dogs, for they were running after him.

  In his sixteen years of police work—six years on the SFPD and ten years here in American Samoa’s Department of Public Safety—Apelu had never before been fired on. He was probably lucky that it was Ezra who had done it, and that he hadn’t seemed all that interested in finishing the job. Apelu backed the squad car up until he could pull into a driveway and call for support.

  Apelu’s wife, Sina, belonged to a cult that worshipped a dog. Well, sort of. Nominally they were Catholics, but several years before, a young female dog had been discovered in their village of Leone. The dog was fortunate enough to be born with the image of the Madonna and child clearly emblazoned in black and white on its side. A year previously, a large leaf bearing the same (or nearly the same) image had been found in the same neighborhood. Together, these two events led to a belief that Leone might be the Blessed Virgin’s next touch-down spot, like Lourdes or Fatima or that other place.

  Apelu had seen the bitch, examined it actually—to his wife’s disgust. The image was real. It wasn’t painted on or anything. Apelu had pointed out, however, that it could just as well be the outline of a cumulus cloud.

  “Then worship the clouds,” Sina had said disdainfully.

  The dog had gotten a
lot bigger, being pampered and overfed, and the image had gotten distorted as it grew. But still every year on some Feast of the Virgin, it was paraded through the village in the back of a pickup truck in a candlelight procession, along with the now laminated leaf. A walking chorus sang hymns. Young bare-chested men with shotguns escorted the appointed and adorned pickup truck. Apelu wondered what they would do if the bitch ever got knocked up, but he kept that to himself. Sina marched in that parade. He did diss the dog, though, saying something about how every year it looked more like the Buddha.

  Sina would say he’d gotten shot at for dissing her holy dog and then tormenting Ezra’s two. He knew the way she chose to understand things. She wouldn’t think that Ezra had anything to do with it because she had no connection to Ezra; somehow it always had to do with her. Otherwise there was no point in trying to make any sense out of it, was there?

  Another, more likely explanation—at least to the part of Apelu’s brain that was colonized by police work—was that Ezra was involved in some sort of criminal activity inside the house. Well, that would soon be over. Apelu could think of at least five crimes Ezra could be charged with just for taking a shot at the squad car. Whatever was going on inside the house wouldn’t be a secret for long. Apelu checked his mental maps for Leilani. It had been several weeks since he had seen her. Was it that simple? Some sort of domestic craziness? Leilani hurt or held captive or something? That shit happened here just like everywhere else.

  Or was Ezra making some sort of last stand, some final statement to a life that already had a pretty full plate of dramatic events—of which Ezra himself had been both the author and the leading man? There was the drunken death threat leveled at the head of state in his native, neighboring country of independent Western Samoa, which had made him permanently unwelcome there. There was the string of Samoan swear words he had inserted into his dialogue while playing a native in a Tales of the South Seas TV episode—no one important had discovered it until after the broadcast. He once threw a punch at Ronald Reagan in an LA bar when Reagan was head of the Screen Actors Guild. He hid from the IRS here on Tutuila then got caught while trying to sneak back onto the mainland. There was the should-have-been-dead skull fracture from the beating he received from an irate husband. Put together, all the Ezra stories were like a fond, folk scrapbook of warrants and mug shots and newspaper clippings. When such collections of negative legends gained enough bulk, they earned one the grudging respect of the community at large. All of the cumulative transgressions were forgiven in light of the larger genius—a portrait of a person being consistently and so self-destructively himself. But he’d gotten rich at it too, rich enough to retire to this fancy keep.