“But that means they’ll get away with it, with cold-blooded murder!”
“Jan, they already have. And they’re proud of it, proud of their own cleverness. I think they contrived to tell us the story on purpose, with just enough hints so we’d figure out the truth.”
“Why would they do that?”
“The same reason they latched onto us, convinced themselves we’re kindred spirits. The same reason they’re so damned eager. They’re looking for somebody to share their secret with.”
“Dear God.”
We were silent after that. The tropical night was no longer soft; the air had a close, sticky feel. The smell of hibiscus and plumeria had turned cloyingly sweet. I swallowed some of my drink, and it tasted bitter. Paradise tasted bitter now, the way it must have to Adam after Eve bit into the forbidden fruit.
The guidebooks do lie, I thought. There are serpents in this Eden, too.
Early the next morning, very early, we checked out of the Kolekole and took the first interisland flight to Honolulu and then the first plane home.
Under the Skin
In the opulent lobby lounge of the St. Francis Hotel, where he and Tom Olivet had gone for a drink after the A.C.T. dramatic production was over, Walter Carpenter sipped his second Scotch-and-water and thought that he was a pretty lucky man. Good job, happy marriage, kids of whom he could be proud, and a best friend who had a similar temperament, similar attitudes, aspirations, likes and dislikes. Most people went through life claiming lots of casual friends and a few close ones, but seldom did a perfectly compatible relationship develop as it had between Tom and him. He knew brothers who were not nearly as close. Walter smiled. That’s just what the two of us are like, he thought. Brothers.
Across the table Tom said, “Why the sudden smile?”
“Oh, just thinking that we’re a hell of a team,” Walter said.
“Sure,” Tom said. “Carpenter and Olivet, the Gold Dust Twins.”
Walter laughed. “No, I mean it. Did you ever stop to think how few friends get along as well as we do? I mean, we like to do the same things, go to the same places. The play tonight, for example. I couldn’t get Cynthia to go, but as soon as I mentioned it to you, you were all set for it.”
“Well, we’ve known each other for twenty years,” Tom said. “Two people spend as much time together as we have, they get to thinking alike and acting alike. I guess we’re one head on just about everything, all right.”
“A couple of carbon copies,” Walter said. “Here’s to friendship.”
They raised their glasses and drank, and when Walter put his down on the table he noticed the hands on his wristwatch. “Hey,” he said. “It’s almost eleven-thirty. We’d better hustle if we’re going to catch the train. Last one for Daly City leaves at midnight.”
“Right,” Tom said.
They split the check down the middle, then left the hotel and walked down Powell Street to the Bay Area Rapid Transit station at Market. Ordinarily one of them would have driven in that morning from the Monterey Heights area where they lived two blocks apart; but Tom’s car was in the garage for minor repairs, and Walter’s wife Cynthia had needed their car for errands. So they had ridden a BART train in, and after work they’d had dinner in a restaurant near Union Square before going on to the play.
Inside the Powell station Walter called Cynthia from a pay phone and told her they were taking the next train out; she said she would pick them up at Glen Park. Then he and Tom rode the escalator down to the train platform. Some twenty people stood or sat there waiting for trains, half a dozen of them drunks and other unsavory-looking types. Subway crime had not been much of a problem since BART, which connected several San Francisco points with a number of East Bay cities, opened two years earlier. Still, there were isolated incidents. Walter began to feel vaguely nervous; it was the first time he had gone anywhere this late by train.
The nervousness eased when a westbound pulled in almost immediately and none of the unsavory-looking types followed them into a nearly empty car. They sat together, Walter next to the window. Once the train had pulled out he could see their reflections in the window glass. Hell, he thought, the two of us even look alike sometimes. Carbon copies, for a fact. Brothers of the spirit.
A young man in workman’s garb got off at the 24th and Mission stop, leaving them alone in the car. Walter’s ears popped as the train picked up speed for the run to Glen Park. He said, “These new babies really move, don’t they?”
“That’s for sure,” Tom said.
“You ever ride a fast-express passenger train?”
“No,” Tom said. “You?”
“No. Say, you know what would be fun?”
“What?”
“Taking a train trip across Canada,” Walter said. “They’ve still got crack passenger expresses up there — they run across the whole of Canada from Vancouver to Montreal.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard about those,” Tom said.
“Maybe we could take the families up there and ride one of them next summer,” Walter said. “You know, fly to Vancouver and then fly home from Montreal.”
“Sounds great to me.”
“Think the wives would go for it?”
“I don’t see why not.”
For a couple of minutes the tunnel lights flashed by in a yellow blur; then the train began to slow and the globes steadied into a widening chain. When they slid out of the tunnel into the Glen Park station, Tom stood up and Walter followed him to the doors. They stepped out. No one was waiting to get on, and the doors hissed closed again almost immediately. The westbound rumbled ahead into the tunnel that led to Daly City.
The platform was empty except for a man in an overcoat and a baseball cap lounging against the tiled wall that sided the escalators; Walter and Tom had been the only passengers to get off. The nearest of the two electronic clock-and-message boards suspended above the platform read 12:02.
The sound of the train faded into silence as they walked toward the escalators, and their steps echoed hollowly. Midnight-empty this way, the fluorescent-lit station had an eerie quality. Walter felt the faint uneasiness return and impulsively quickened his pace.
They were ten yards from the escalators when the man in the overcoat stepped away from the wall and came toward them. He had the collar pulled up around his face and his chin tucked down into it; the bill of the baseball cap hid his forehead, so that his features were shadowy. His right hand was inside a coat pocket.
The hair prickled on Walter’s neck. He glanced at Tom to keep from staring at the approaching man, but Tom did not seem to have noticed him at all.
Just before they reached the escalators the man in the overcoat stepped across in front of them, blocking their way, and planted his feet. They pulled up short. Tom said, “Hey,” and Walter thought in sudden alarm: Oh, my God!
The man took his hand out of his pocket and showed them the long thin blade of a knife. “Wallets,” he said flatly. “Hurry it up, don’t make me use this.”
Walter’s breath seemed to clog in his lungs; he tasted the brassiness of fear. There was a moment of tense inactivity, the three of them as motionless as wax statues in a museum exhibit. Then, jerkily, his hand trembling, Walter reached into his jacket pocket and fumbled his wallet out.
But Tom just stood staring, first at the knife and then at the man’s shadowed face. He did not seem to be afraid. His lips were pinched instead with anger. “A damned mugger,” he said.