“Extremely bizarre,” agreed Tama drily. “Now this is how it was told to me...”
Charles Nystrom was a retired Swedish banker who was tall and thin and looked older than his fifty-eight years. He apparently had no family in Sweden and upon his retirement had come to Tahiti along with his French wife, Brigitte, who was thirty years his junior and as pert and saucy as Nystrom was dry and withered. They rented an expensive villa in the hills of Pamatai just behind town, with a fine view of the harbor and the jagged outline of the island of Moorea on the horizon.
At first Charles Nystrom spent most of his time at home, content to lie in the sun beside the sparkling blue pool, while his gay young Parisian wife was making a wide circle of acquaintances and spending a considerable part of each day lunching and shopping in town with her new female friends. Charles Nystrom’s only apparent interest was bridge. Eventually he joined a bridge club and began to play first in the weekend tournaments, then in their Wednesday afternoon and evening matches.
It was a Wednesday afternoon, about a year after the Nystroms’ arrival in the territory, that the frail Swede suddenly felt ill at the bridge table. He carefully excused himself and drove slowly back to his isolated home in the steep green hills. It was midafternoon, and as usual the Tahitian maid and gardener had both left soon after lunch. Rather to Charles Nystrom’s surprise, his wife’s shiny silver Mercedes coupe was in the garage, for he knew that normally she spent her Wednesday afternoons in town. He was even more surprised when he walked into their bright airy bedroom with its broad French windows opening onto the pool and found his handsome young wife in bed with another man.
As in all the best bedroom farces, the man in question made a dive for his clothes and leapt past the gaping cuckold to disappear with a flash of naked flesh into the poolside hibiscus bushes, while the startled wife cowered behind a hastily drawn-up sheet. Where the scene diverged from farce, however, was in the strangled noise that Charles Nystrom uttered just before clutching his chest and collapsing to the bedroom’s tiled floor with a massive heart attack.
An ambulance was summoned and the unconscious Swede was transported to the hospital, where he lay for four days in the intensive-care ward. At last his tearful wife was told that no hope remained and that she should see to the funeral arrangements. Charles Nystrom had once expressed his wish to be interred in his family plot in the forests near Borlange, and his guilt-stricken wife — soon now to be a wealthy widow — determined that his remains would be transported to Sweden in the most imposing casket available.
In a narrow dark valley not far from the hospital, she found the Chinese woodworker who slapped together most of the cheap pine coffins used for burials in Tahiti as well as building the hermetically sealed steel containers in which the international airlines required that all coffins be enclosed for shipment. Here she contracted for a coffin such as the delighted artisan had not constructed in years: a noble casket of gleaming African ironwood, lined with the finest of velvet and satin and incorporating all the massive silver angels and fittings that he had long ago given up any hope of selling. Hardly daring to breathe, he scrupulously calculated the overall cost and presented the grieving widow-to-be with the estimate. Brigitte Nystrom nodded tearfully and dashed back to her silver coupe. Whistling cheerfully, the Chinese craftsman summoned his two Tahitian assistants and carefully set to work.
The casket was finished in the final hour before dawn and as if in response, the dying Swede’s heart fluttered tremulously once, twice, and then settled down to a steady, powerful rhythm. The doctor who visited him at nine o’clock was astonished to find him still alive and was even more astonished when his patient was discharged from the hospital four weeks later, thin and pale, but alert and eager to return to the bright sunlight of his home in the hills.
His chastened wife Brigitte had kept a faithful bedside vigil during the long weeks in the hospital; now she welcomed him home with all the love and tenderness that had first captivated the middle-aged banker. His color returned and under her careful ministrations he daily waxed in strength. Friends were encouraged to visit, and by the end of two months the happy couple had organized an afternoon bridge party. It was, apparently, a near tragedy that had nevertheless had a happy ending.
Three months after Charles Nystrom’s discharge from the hospital, the chimes to the front door of his home rang softly one afternoon. The retired banker opened the door and frowned in puzzlement. A battered gray pickup truck was in his driveway, while a small Chinese in dark shorts stood by the doorway, an envelope in his hand.
“Good day, monsieur,” said the Chinese. “I’ve come to deliver your coffin.” He smiled politely and gestured to indicate a large steel container to one side of the doorway. “And inside...” He opened the container to proudly reveal a gleaming casket of dark red wood with a number of shiny angels and fittings. While Charles Nystrom’s eyes widened in shock, the Chinese extended the envelope. “And here, monsieur, are the costs...”
Alexandre Tama pinched the end of his nose and scowled darkly. “A beautiful Tahitian story, Opuu, except for one thing.”
Inspector Opuu nodded. “Yes. Except for—”
“The fact that this wretched Swede dropped dead of a heart attack upon being given the bill for his own coffin!” The commissaire de police sat back in his tau-wood chair with an enormous sigh. “I suppose that this time he really is dead?”
“We had a paper from the hospital saying he was, along with a request from the airline for permission to transport the coffin through town and out to the airport.”
“I see,” said Tama, swiveling around in his chair to look out of his second-floor window at the grass courtyard of the Palace of Justice. “As Tahitian stories go, it’s an awfully good one. Too good, really...” He turned around again so that his great belly scraped against the edge of his desk. “And he only died three days ago?” He cocked his head at his desk calendar. “There’s no direct flight for Europe until the day after tomorrow — I suppose that’s the one the coffin will be on?”
Inspector Opuu nodded.
The chief of police glanced at the bright sunlight that flooded the grassy courtyard below his window, then surged to his feet with a surprisingly graceful motion. “Confound it, Opuu, I didn’t become a policeman to shuffle papers back and forth across my desk like every other pension-hungry bureaucrat on this island of functionaries! That wretched Swede dropped dead here in town, in Pamatai. That’s our jurisdiction, not the gendarmes’. Go get the car: a policeman should be a policeman, not a miserable paper-pusher!”
Alexandre Tama pulled himself from the front seat of the long black Citroen with the aid of a stout metal tube that had been welded to the top of the car’s fender and stepped gingerly through the sawdust and scraps of wood that littered the tiny courtyard in front of Ah Ping Lii’s woodworking concern in the Titioro Valley. It was housed in a dilapidated building of sheet metal, and the ear-splitting sound of a band saw vied with the deafening percussion of something galvanized being beaten by a Tahitian with a large hammer.
A small, sallow Chinese with lank black hair and wearing a tattered brown bathing suit came out from the depths of the workshop, a chisel in one hand, a mallet in the other. “Monsieur le commissaire,” he said, extending his right wrist for Tama to shake.
“My assistant, Inspector Opuu,” grunted Tama, running his eyes over the cramped atelier. “So this is where you make the coffins. Tell me about this superdeluxe casket you made for the Swede.”