Fires of Eden, Page 3

  “Yes, sir,” came the tight voice, “but you realize that there are only a couple of dozen guests here, Mr. Trumbo. The publicity’s been so bad… I mean, the Sato people are bound to notice that there are five hundred some rooms and hales empty. I mean…”

  “We’ll tell them that we emptied the place out in their honor,” said Trumbo. “We’ll tell them that we couldn’t pass up this chance to see the fucking volcano. I don’t care what we tell them, as long as we get this fucking place sold. You do what you have to do to sit on it until we all get there, Steve.”

  “Yes, sir, but I think that…”

  Trumbo clicked off. “Will, get the chopper on the roof in twenty minutes. Call the field and have the Gulfstream ready to go as soon as I’m there. Get Bobby on the horn and tell him his job depends on getting the Sato Group to change destinations and like it. Finally, call Maya…no, I’ll call her…you call Bicki and tell her that I was called away for a couple of days. Don’t tell her where. Send the other Gulfstream to pick her up and fly her to the Antigua house and tell her I’ll join her as soon as I’ve finished with whatever you decide I’m supposed to be doing. And…shit, where’s Cait?”

  “Here in New York, sir. Visiting her lawyers.”

  Trumbo made a rude noise. He walked into the glass-and-marble bathroom behind his desk. The outer shower wall looked down on the park. He stripped out of his shorts and T-shirt and turned on the water. “Fuck her lawyers. Fuck her. Just make sure that she doesn’t get wind of where I am or where Maya is, OK?”

  Will nodded and followed his boss into the bathroom. “Mr. T, the volcano really is showing signs of life.”

  Trumbo poked his head and hairy shoulders out of the water. “What?”

  “I said, the volcano really is doing strange things. Dr. Hastings says that seismic activity is the strongest along the southwest rift since the 1920s…perhaps the strongest in this century.”

  Trumbo shrugged and ducked his head under the water. “So?” he shouted. “I thought that the volcano acting up was supposed to bring us tourists up the ass, right?”

  “Yes, but there’s a problem with…”

  Trumbo was not listening. “I’ll talk to Hastings from the plane,” he shouted, face in the water. “You call Bicki. Tell Jason to have my Hawaii bag ready in five minutes and let Briggs know that it’ll just be him going. I don’t want to spook the Japs with too much security.”

  “Is that wise…” began Will.

  “Come on, Will, move,” said Byron Trumbo. Still standing in the pounding spray, he raised his heavy hands to the water-beaded glass wall and looked down at the park. “We’re going to sell that fucking white elephant to the dumbest bunch of Japs since the generals who advised Hirohito to bomb Pearl Harbor…and we’re going to use that capital to start our comeback.” He turned and looked through the spray at his assistant. Water flew like saliva from Trumbo’s thick lips. “Move, Will.”

  Will Bryant moved.

  THREE

  What I have always longed for was the privilege of living forever away up on one of those mountains in the Sandwich Islands overlooking the sea.

  —Mark Twain

  Once, when asked why she refused to fly, Eleanor Perry’s seventy-two-year-old Aunt Beanie—she was seventy-two when she was asked, she was ninety-six now and still living by herself—took out a book on the history of the slave trade and showed Eleanor a drawing of the slaves wedged in between “decks” that were no more than three feet high.

  “See how they had to lie there, head to head, feet to feet, chained up and rolling in their own filth during the long passage?” Aunt Beanie had asked, pointing with a hand that even then had been bony and age-mottled with freckles: what Eleanor as a child had thought of as “Campbell’s Soup hands.”

  That year, twenty-four years ago, having just turned twenty-one and only recently graduated from Oberlin—the same school where she now taught—Eleanor had looked at the diagram of the slave ship with the Africans stacked like cordwood, wrinkled her nose, and said, “I see it, Aunt Beanie. But what does it have to do with your refusing to fly down to Florida to see Uncle Leonard?”

  Aunt Beanie had shaken her head. “Do you know why they laid those poor Negroes in there like so many hogsheads of molasses even if it meant half of them would die during the crossing?”

  Eleanor had shaken her head, her nose wrinkling again at the word “Negroes.” The term “politically correct” had not been coined when Eleanor graduated from Oberlin that year, in 1970, but, term or no term, it was still politically incorrect to say “Negroes,” and while she knew that Aunt Beanie was perhaps the least prejudiced person she had ever known, the older woman’s language betrayed the fact that she had been born before the century had begun. “Why did they lay the blacks in like so many barrels of molasses?”

  “Money,” said Aunt Beanie, withdrawing her bony hand and slapping the book shut. “Profit. If they crammed six hundred Africans in and three hundred died, it still paid them better than if they let four hundred ride like human beings and lost a hundred and fifty. Profit, pure and simple.”

  “I still don’t see why…” began Eleanor, and then stopped. She saw the point. “Aunt Beanie, the planes aren’t that crowded.”

  The older woman had not spoken, merely raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, OK, they’re crowded,” Eleanor conceded, “but it only takes a few hours to get down to Florida by plane, and if you have Cousin Dick drive you it’ll take two or three days…” She had stopped when she saw Aunt Beanie set her bony, Campbell’s Soup hand on the slave-trade book as if to say, Do you think they were in such a hurry to get where they were going?

  Now, twenty-four years later, Eleanor sat in the economy section of the stretch-747, squashed between two fat men in the center row of five seats, listening to the babble of the three hundred-plus people wedged in behind her. She craned over the high back of the seat ahead of her to see the flickering video of the heavily edited in-flight movie and realized that Aunt Beanie had been right again. How we get there is usually as important as where we’re going.

  But not this time.

  Eleanor sighed, awkwardly bent to tug her briefcase out from under the seat in front of her, searched around in it until she found Aunt Kidder’s small leather diary, and fumbled to turn on the overhead reading light. The fat man on her right snorted asthmatically in his sleep and laid a sweaty forearm on her armrest, making Eleanor shift slightly toward the fat man on her left. She opened Kidder’s diary to the proper page without looking, so familiar was the journal to her fingers.

  June 3, 1866, Aboard the Boomerang—

  Still dubious about this unplanned trip to see the volcano on Hawaii and perhaps still more entranced with the prospect of a quiet week at Mr. and Mrs. Lyman’s mission guest house in Honolulu, I nonetheless allowed myself to be convinced yesterday that this would be my life’s only opportunity to see a “living volcano,” and so this morning I found myself packed and boarded and waved farewell to by the majority of the delightful folk who have filled the previous two weeks with such frivolity and learning. Our “group” consists of the elder Miss Lyman, her nephew Thomas and nurse, Miss Adams, Master Gregory Wendt, the duller of the Smith twins I mentioned who attended the Honolulu dance all “got up” like linen-encrusted penguins, Miss Dryton from the orphanage, the Reverend Haymark (not the handsome young minister I mentioned in my earlier missive, but an older, heavier man of the cloth whose habit of taking snuff and sneezing violently at every opportunity would keep me in the solitude of my cabin were it not for the cockroaches), and an irritating young correspondent for a Sacramento paper which I have had the good fortune never to have read. The gentleman’s name is Mr. Samuel Clemens, but it says something about the seriousness of his writing that he brags of having published under such “clever” noms de plume as “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.”

  Besides being vulgar and overly boisterous and terribly full of himself due to having been the only correspond
ent in the Sandwich Islands two weeks ago when the survivors of that ill-fated clipper ship, the Hornet, made landfall here, Mr. Clemens is somewhat ill-kempt and rather a braggart and a boor. He leavens his bad manners a bit with constant attempts at humor, but most of his witticisms droop as seriously as do his wilting mustaches. Today, as our intercoastal ship the Boomerang left Honolulu harbor while Mr. Clemens was describing to Mrs. Lyman and some of us the glories of his “scoop” on the forty-three-day ordeal on the open seas of the Hornet’s survivors, I could not help but interpose some questions based upon some knowledge granted to me by the delightful Mrs. Allwyte, wife of the Reverend Patrick Allwyte, who volunteered her time at the hospital and who had confided in me when the tale of the Hornet was all the rage in Honolulu.

  “Mr. Clemens,” I interrupted ingenuously, adopting my pose as wide-eyed admirer, “you say that you interviewed Captain Mitchell and some of the other survivors?”

  “Why, yes, Miss Stewart,” said the red-haired correspondent. “It was my duty and professional pleasure to interrogate the hapless men.”

  “An obligation which may go far to further your career, Mr. Clemens,” I suggested demurely.

  The correspondent bit the end off a cigar and spat it over the railing as if he were in a saloon. He did not notice Mrs. Lyman’s wince and I pretended not to. “Indeed, Miss Stewart,” said the scribbler, “I will go so far as to suggest that it will make me about the best-known honest man on the West Coast.” His smile, I confess, is boyish, although Mr. Clemens is all of thirty or thirty-one years old according to my informants…hardly a boy.

  “Indeed, Mr. Clemens,” I echoed, “how fortunate for you that you happened to visit the hospital just as Captain Mitchell and his men arrived…”

  Here the correspondent puffed on his cigar and cleared his throat, obviously ill at ease.

  “You did visit the hospital to carry out your interview, did you not, Mr. Clemens?”

  The correspondent made a noise in his throat. “The interview was conducted at the hospital while the captain and his men convalesced, yes, Miss Stewart.”

  “But were you ever at the hospital, Mr. Clemens?” I asked, some of the demureness gone from my voice now.

  “Ah…not…ah…personally,” said the red-headed scribe. “I…ah…forwarded the questions through the agency of my friend, Mr. Anson Burlingame.”

  “But of course!” I cried. “Mr. Burlingame…our country’s next minister to China! He was such a delight at the Mission Ball. But tell us, Mr. Clemens, how is it that a correspondent of your obvious talents and instincts would have used an intermediary in such an important story? Why not visit Captain Josiah Mitchell and his would-be cannibals in person for the interview?”

  Something about my use of the phrase “would-be cannibals” seemed to inform Mr. Clemens that he was dealing with a person of some wit and he smiled slightly, although he was obviously still ill at ease as our little group looked on.

  “I was…ah…indisposed, one would say, Miss Stewart.”

  “Not ill, I hope, Mr. Clemens,” said I, knowing quite precisely the source of our newly famous correspondent’s indisposition due to the good offices of the indispensable Mrs. Allwyte.

  “No, not ill,” said Mr. Clemens, his teeth showing through his mustaches now. “Merely indisposed due to far too much time spent on horseback the previous four days.”

  I covered my face with a fan like an ingenue at her first ball. “You mean…” I began.

  “I mean saddle boils,” said Mr. Clemens, his story of literary triumph quite derailed for the moment. “The size of silver dollars. It was a week before I could walk. It may be a lifetime before I board any four-legged creature as a passenger again. It is my fervent wish, Miss Stewart, that the natives of Oahu have some pagan ceremony wherein they offer up a creature of equine ancestry in one of their volcano rituals, and that the first nag they choose to throw into the fiery cauldron is the sway-backed creature who inflicted such misery upon me.”

  Mrs. Lyman, her nephew, Miss Adams, and the others did not quite know what to make of this confession. I fanned myself contentedly. “Well, thank heavens for Mr. Burlingame,” I said. “Perhaps it would be only fair if he were to become the second most famous honest person on the West Coast.”

  Mr. Clemens drew deeply on his cigar. The breezes had picked up considerably once we were out at open sea between the islands. “It is Mr. Burlingame’s happy destiny to be off to China, Miss Stewart.”

  “Indeed, Mr. Clemens,” said I, “but we have not specified whose destinies have been formed by this event, only who has done the actual work to form them.” And with that I went below for tea with Mrs. Lyman.

  Eleanor Perry lowered the leather diary and found herself being stared at by the fat man on her left.

  “Interesting book?” asked the man. His smile showed the insincere sincerity of someone in sales. He was in his late forties, a few years older than Eleanor.

  “Quite interesting,” said Eleanor, and closed Aunt Kidder’s diary. She set it in her briefcase and kicked the briefcase into its cramped space under the seat in front of her. Slave cargo.

  “Heading for Hawaii, huh?” said the salesman.

  Since the flight was nonstop between San Francisco and the Keahole-Kona airport, Eleanor did not feel that the question deserved a reply.

  “I’m from Evanston,” said the salesman. “I think I saw you on the plane from Chicago to San Fran.”

  San Fran, thought Eleanor with a pall of resignation that was not unlike airsickness. “Yes,” she said.

  Undeterred, the salesman said, “I’m in sales. Microelectronics. Games mostly. Me and two other guys from the midwest division won the incentive bonus. I got four days at the Hyatt Regency Waikoloa. That’s the resort where you get to swim with the dolphins. No kidding.”

  Eleanor nodded her appreciation of these facts.

  “I’m not married,” said the salesman. “Well, divorced, actually. That’s the reason I’m going alone. The other guys—they won two tickets to a resort—but the company only gives out one ticket when the employee isn’t married anymore.” The heavy man gave a lame smile that was more sincere for its lameness. “Anyway, that’s why I’m heading to Hawaii by myself.”

  Eleanor smiled her understanding and ignored the implied Why are you heading to Hawaii by yourself?

  “You headed for one of the resorts?” asked the microelectronics man after a long silence.

  “The Mauna Pele,” said Eleanor. On the small screen five rows ahead of them, Tom Hanks was mouthing something with a boyish grin. People with earphones chuckled.

  The salesman whistled. “The Mauna Pele. Wow. That’s the most expensive super-resort on the west coast of the Big Island, isn’t it? Ritzier than the Mauna Lani or Kona Village or the Mauna Rea.”

  “I really don’t know,” said Eleanor. This was not quite true. When she had made the reservations through the travel agent in Oberlin, the woman had tried to convince her that the other resorts were just as nice and much cheaper. The agent had never mentioned the murders, but she had done her best to dissuade Eleanor from traveling to the Mauna Pele. When Eleanor had persisted, the rates the agent quoted were truly staggering.

  “The Mauna Pele’s like a new millionaires’ playground, isn’t it? I think it is,” said the salesman. “I saw something about it on the TV. You must have a really good job to afford a vacation in a place like that.” He smiled shrewdly. “Or be married to someone who’s got a really good job.”

  “I teach,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah? What grade? You remind me of a third-grade teacher I had once.”

  “At Oberlin,” said Eleanor.

  “Is that like a high school?”

  “A college,” said Eleanor. “In Ohio.”

  “Interesting,” said the salesman in a voice that was quickly losing interest. “You teach like one subject or something?”

  “History,” said Eleanor. “Mostly mid-eighteenth-century intell
ectual history. The Enlightenment, to be precise.”

  “Hmmm,” said the salesman, obviously finding nothing to pursue there. He was frowning slightly. “The Mauna Pele, now…that’s the new resort. It’s farther south than the others, isn’t it?” He was obviously trying to remember what he had heard on the news recently about the Mauna Pele.

  “Yes,” said Eleanor, “it’s farther down the South Kona Coast.”

  “Murders!” said the microelectronics man, snapping his finger. “There’s been a bunch of murders there since it opened last fall. I seen something on A Current Affair about it.”

  Eleanor managed not to wince at the grammar. “I really don’t know,” she said, lifting the in-flight magazine out of its pocket.

  “Sure! There’s been a bunch of people killed or disappeared or something there. That’s the resort that Byron Trumbo, the Big T, built. They arrested some crazy Hawaiian, didn’t they?”

  Eleanor smiled her lack of knowledge and studied a luggage ad. People around her chuckled as Tom Hanks shouted something silently at a young starlet.

  “Gosh, I didn’t know that anyone was going to that place after all of the…” began the salesman, but was interrupted by an announcement over the intercom and earphones.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your first officer speaking. We’re about forty minutes northeast of the Big Island and just beginning our descent toward the Keahole-Kona airport, but…ah…we’ve just been advised by Honolulu Center that all traffic into Kona is being rerouted to Hilo on the east coast. The reason for this is probably the reason some of you folks are visitin’ the Big Island at this time…namely, the activity of the two volcanoes there on the south end of the island, Mauna Loa and Kilauea. There’s no danger…the eruptions aren’t threatening any developed areas…but the prevailing winds are from the east this afternoon and those two volcanoes are spewing out a lot of airborne ash and crud. It sorta creates a smog layer from the fifteen-thousand-foot level right on down almost to the deck—no worse than home for you folks from the L.A. area—but FAA regulations won’t allow us to fly through it even if there’s no real danger.