“Left you?” said Stella.
Angus nodded. “Last Monday. Found a note on the table. Bit hackneyed, really. I hadn’t realised. She knew all about it, you see.”
“About—?”
“Us.”
“Ah.”
Stella fiddled with her bracelet, leaning back against the freezer. Outside the kitchen window, it was already dark.
After a minute, Angus said, “Stella?”
“Mmm?”
“Where’s Tony?”
Stella smiled sadly.
“He’s... gone, Angus. I don’t think we’ll be seeing him again.”
“You mean—” Angus frowned. “He knew about us, so he buggered off like Jane?”
Stella shook her head. “I thought it was enough,” she said. “More than enough, perhaps.”
She stroked the lid of the freezer lovingly, and then straightened up and crossed to the window. They stood close together, arms round each other, looking out at the dark garden.
“Fulfilled,” she said. “Satisfied. He was happy while it lasted. And, really, he’d got the garden into very good shape. Who was I to stop him? Early retirement isn’t easy, you know, Angus.”
“I suppose not.” His eyes were puzzled, searching her face.
“It was time,” she said. “It could have been cabinet ministers... royals... So much trouble there’d have been...”
She summoned a smile.
“We mustn’t get downhearted. There’s a lot we can do, Angus, to cheer each other up.”
He nodded, a little doubtful.
“Gardening, for instance,” she said. “I’m thinking of going down to the garden centre tomorrow to buy a sundial. I thought it would look nice all laid out with fancy paving.” She gestured into the darkness. “Out there, in the middle of the roses.”
Her voice became pleading.
“A memorial sort of thing, to Tony. To mark the passing hours. You’d help me, Angus, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you, Angus?”
A Coffin for a Banker
by Hayford Peirce
© 1994 by Hayford Peirce
For a taste of the exotic, San Francisco writer Hayford Peirce takes us to Tahiti where his detective, Chief of Police Alexandre Tama, who first appeared in the 1985 anthology The Ethnic Detectives, plies his trade. Mr. Peirce himself lived in Tahiti for more than twenty years and conveys wonderfully the flavor of the island...
Even on an island of notably stout trenchermen, Alexandre Tama, commissaire de police, was justly celebrated for both his appetite and his girth. He and his family had just returned to Tahiti from a month’s vacation in France, the chief of police wedged into two adjacent economy-class seats that had been specially configured by the accommodating French airline for his oversized figure. Tama was always glad to return home, for while French cuisine was of course the finest in the world, he had a single reproach to make of it: it was never served in sufficient quantities.
Now, the second evening of his return to duty, he was pleased to find himself at a traditional Tahitian feast on a gaily decorated covered terrace where a childhood friend was celebrating his recent promotion to minister of education for French Polynesia, that far-flung archipelago in the South Pacific of which Papeete on the island of Tahiti is the capital.
Bright green fronds of coconut palms had been spread along the top of the long table and bottles of red and white wine alternated with red and orange soda pop and quarts of Hinano beer. Great platters of marinated raw fish passed from guest to guest, along with thick slices of purple taro and French bread, three kinds of cooked bananas and plantains, diced chicken in spinach and coconut cream, fish that had been baked, fried, and boiled, and, finally, crispy pieces of an entire pig from an underground oven. Three elderly Tahitian women in bright orange muumuus sat at one end of the table strumming traditional island songs on guitars and homemade ukuleles.
The gargantuan chief of police mopped the sweat from his broad mahogany-colored forehead. A gaudy red napkin was tucked into the snowy white shirt that billowed across the enormous mound of his rotund belly and a glass of chilled red wine perched precariously on the slope of the napkin. “—and that,” he concluded to a roar of appreciative laughter from around the table, “is how your chief of police solved the mystery of the three missing coconut trees!”
He raised the glass of wine to his lips and downed its contents in a single triumphant swallow. His face contorted and he gulped convulsively, as if in distress. His great shovel-like hand reached to his mouth and to his astonishment pulled a dark red rose from its interior. As the guests along the table gaped, he pulled forth a second rose and then a third, and finally an entire bouquet. Shaking his head in bewilderment, he handed the flowers to the flabbergasted Tahitian woman on his left. “I knew there was something peculiar about the bouquet of that wine,” he muttered with a perfectly straight face.
The thirty dinner guests groaned loudly and Tama’s diminutive Tahitian wife sighed in resignation. While she and the three children had spent two days in Disneyland and Universal Studios during their two-day stopover in Los Angeles, her husband had deserted them for the Magic Castle in Hollywood and the shops that catered to professional magicians. An extra suitcase had been purchased to accommodate the latest additions to his collection of magical paraphernalia. If only he could find some less tiresome hobby such as playing pétanque in the garden on Sunday afternoons like all the other policemen in Tahiti...
“If you think that’s funny,” said the new minister of education in his loudest public-speaking voice, “wait till you hear this story! I got it this morning from the head of the lycée — his wife’s a friend of the woman involved and it’s absolutely true. A real Tahitian story, just wait till you hear it!”
“Hrmph!” If stories were being told, Alexandre Tama preferred to be the center of attention, but it was not his party after all, so after pulling a lighted cigar from the ear of the startled French architect to his right he sat back politely to listen to the minister. Halfway through the story he began to chuckle along with the rest of the table, and at its sudden startling denouement he uttered a bark of harsh laughter mixed with shock. He shook his great head. For once his boyhood friend the minister had been absolutely precise in what he said: this really was a Tahitian story.
But as the tempo of the music quickened and the more physically agile at the table jumped up to dance away some of their heavy dinner in the crowded living room, the chief of police began to puff increasingly thoughtfully at his long thick cigar...
The next day he summoned his aide and chauffeur, Inspector Opuu, to his utilitarian air-conditioned office in the police station next to the Palace of Justice. Inspector Opuu had been born in the searing dry heat of a Tuamotu atoll and was as lean and leathery as Alexandre Tama was round and smooth. He was dressed neatly in dark blue pants with a light blue shirt and this morning had tucked the small white bud of a tiare Tahiti into the long black hair over his right ear. Tama waved him to a folding metal chair on the other side of his plain metal desk and settled back in his own enormous custom-made chair of shiny tau wood. “Have you heard about this Swede?” he asked in the clear accent of the Loire Valley that he had acquired in his youth at the University of Angers.
Inspector Opuu frowned. “There was some bizarre story...”