Twenty Blue Devils

'That's because the moisture's at twelve or thirteen percent. Now try this one.” He handed him another bean, slightly paler, from a drum that he had turned off earlier. “This one's right at ten percent.'

John bit again.

'Crisp, isn't it?” Nick said. “Sort of snaps right in two. Feel the difference?'

'I sure do,” John said, nodding. “That's really interesting.” Nick's good-humored laugh rolled easily out of him. “You always were a good faker. Can you really tell the difference?” John grinned back at him. “Not if my life depended on it, Unc.'

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 14

* * * *

There is no rail system on the island of Tahiti, no commuter plane network, no bus service. If you want public transportation you do what the locals do: you climb aboard le truck, as everyone refers, individually and collectively, to the ubiquitous and whimsically painted fleet of “cabooses” mounted on individually owned flatbed trucks (which is why they are called le truck and not le bus).

Gideon waved down a southbound one on rue Francois Cardella and found an unoccupied section of padded bench. On his left was a smiling old man clad only in shorts, with a wire crate containing two plainly disgruntled white chickens on his lap. On his right was a middle-aged woman wearing a bright pareu, with a hibiscus flower in her hair, thong sandals on her feet, and a braided string of gleaming red mullet in one hand. In the other hand was a leather attache case with a cellular telephone clamped to it.

Across from him a gaggle of high school girls, already Polynesian stunners at fifteen or sixteen, tittered and chattered away in Tahitian, bothered by neither the reggae music blaring from le truck's loudspeaker nor the transistor radios plugged into their ears.

Culture in flux, he thought. At the lively, sprawling market an hour earlier he had bought Julie a handsome black-pearl pendant. The native woman at the stall, shy and smiling, had spoken no English and only a little French. She had struck him as a charming throwback to the unspoiled Tahiti of the eighteenth century. But when he had made his choice she had revealed a minimal knowledge of English after all. “Visa? MasterCard? American Express?” she had inquired in a charming accent and then processed the transaction on a computer screen equipped with Windows.

Le truck made its stop-and-start journey through the outer reaches of Papeete's urban sprawl: a long string of convenience stores, bars, restaurants, shoddy two-story apartment buildings, and metal-roofed shantytowns. But after twenty minutes the smelly, noisy commercial traffic eased off and the shantytowns thinned out and then disappeared entirely, to be replaced by occasional native villages, one much like another: modest, compact assemblages of small stucco houses—some nice, some not so nice—set among astonishing profusions of hibiscus and gardenia, often with old stone churches as centerpieces.

Between the villages the vegetation thickened and became more tropical, and clefts in the coastal mountains opened up to reveal the stupendous hanging green valleys of the interior. When Gideon saw the sign for the Shangri-La coming up, he pressed the old-fashioned doorbell-button above his head and le truck pulled up beside the trellised arch over the entryway to the grounds. He walked around to the driver's window, handed over the fare-200 French Pacific francs, about $2— and went to his cottage to get in some work on the Bronze Age symposium.

But he hadn't been at it five minutes when he knew his heart, and more important, his head, weren't in it. He yawned, threw his notes down, and looked at his watch. Not much after one o'clock. Another yawn. Finding a hammock was starting to sound like a pretty good idea, and he was giving serious thought to the possibility of acting on it when he recalled Nick's invitation of the night before: a tour of the coffee farm.

Why not? Considering the thousands of gallons of the stuff he'd downed in the last twenty years, it was about time he visited one. Besides, underneath all that reasonable and healthy skepticism he'd been expressing to John, he had to admit to a certain curiosity about seeing the murderous pulper, the falling-down shed, and the various other inanimate objects that seemed to have it in for Nick Druett and the Paradise Coffee enterprise.

The hammock could wait; Gideon went to find Dean Parks at the front desk.

'Dean, how would I get up to Nick's plantation from here?'

'Easy. I'll have Honu take you up in the van. Whoops, not for a couple of hours, though; he's in town picking up supplies.'

'Is it too far to walk?'

''Bout eight miles. Uphill every blessed inch.'

'Too far,” Gideon said.

'I'd say so. His house is less than half a mile down the road, though. Easy walking. If you don't want to wait for the van, somebody there's bound to give you a lift up to the farm.'

'I think I'll try that. How do I recognize his house?'

Dean laughed. “Keep your eyeballs peeled for the place that looks like it belongs to the Wazir of Kitchipoo.'

* * * *

Dean was exaggerating, but not by that much. Nick's house stood in splendid isolation, in walled, parklike grounds that jutted out into the sea on their own private promontory. Like ninety-nine percent of the houses in the South Seas, it was covered with a green, corrugated metal roof. Other than that, it would have been right at home on the French Riviera. Faced with white stucco and polished river rock, embellished with ornate white grillwork on its several balconies and verandas, and fronted with rows of French doors instead of windows, the handsome two- story structure stood on a wide lawn commanding a wonderful view of beach, ocean, and, in the distance, the domed green peninsula of Tahiti Iti.