In the helicopter Dawn sat in the front seat with a pout on her face. “I suppose you’re happy now,” she said as I walked over with Archie.
“I would say I’m more relieved than happy.”
“Tully, I would have taken care of you. Even now. We could still do it. You could come with me. Eventually —”
Archie began digging at the pockets of her jeans. “Let go of me, you limey pig!” she screamed.
It was in her sock that Archie found the hidden cell phone. He pulled it out, dropped it on the ground, and stomped on it. “That takes care of that. Now what to do with you?”
“I am going to the beach,” Dawn said smugly, settling into the seat.
“Not in this machine, and not today,” Archie said. With lightning speed, he pulled her from the helicopter and shoved her to the ground. He whistled loudly, and another Land Rover burst out of the bushes. It was driven by some of the workers from Kafiri, who were also carrying guns. They gagged Dawn, and the last I saw of her was her lovely golden hair as she was loaded into the back of the Rover. It disappeared into the bush, and Archie came back to the helicopter.
“Winston,” he said to the helicopter pilot, “the less said about this, the better, if you know what I mean? They are going to hold her until we can get clear of this area, and then she will be released, unharmed.”
“No problem,” the pilot replied as he started the engine.
“I never got to say good-bye,” I said to Archie.
“I said it for you,” he replied.
We watched the chopper take off and head south. In a few minutes, the sound faded, and only the wind and the birds could be heard. Then the Fishmobile roared up to us with Ix-Nay at the wheel. “It is a great truck.”
“Great truck,” Bucky added.
“I guess it goes without saying that we bought it.”
“We did,” Bucky said.
“But I doubt I will be making the trip back to Lost Boys with you guys,” I said.
“Tully,” Captain Kirk told me, “if I were you, I think I would be putting on my sailing shoes.”
34
On the Case
Before Ix-Nay stepped on the gas, Bucky handed me an envelope. “This came while you were gone. You sure know how to pick your pen pals, Tully,” he said.
From the handwriting, I could see it was another letter from Willie Singer. I was going to write him back last time, but the events of the past few days put a monkey wrench in that plan. I promised myself I would sit down and write to him the first chance I got.
I tore open the envelope and read it as we bumped along the road. Not only had my rescuers snatched me from the Wicked Witch and her flying monkeys but they had also devised a plan to hide me in a safe harbor somewhere. I could sense that this ride in the Fishmobile was going to be a long one. That was good, for it was a long letter.
To: Tully Mars
From: Willie Singer
Nouméa, New Caledonia
French Polynesia
Dear Tully,
Please inform Captain Highbourne that as her South Pacific representative in the search for the soul of the light for Cayo Loco, I have made progress, as you will see—but I have to start where I left off.
After we blasted off from Minola, I began stocking up on lighthouse reading material wherever I could find it, and I have made some progress, I think. Getting to New Caledonia was quite an adventure, and there were times I said a few prayers to your patron saint of lightning.
The leg to Tahiti started off without a hitch, and the Pearl ran like a Swiss watch. But the weather reared its very ugly head as we crossed the equator. We wound up zigzagging like a bottle rocket and going nearly to the Cook Islands to get around the storms. Let me just say one other thing about squalls on the equator: they take rain to another level. At times we were flying through such a thick downpour that I thought I was driving a submarine. At other times, we had to scud run only a few feet above thirty- to forty-foot waves because it was the only place where we could make out any kind of a horizon. I don’t think I was ever so glad to see the sun as when it finally broke through the clouds north of Bora-Bora. After that, the run to Papeete was uneventful.
No mode of transportation elicits as much interest as making a water landing in an old flying boat. The harbormaster who came out to greet us in the pilot boat told me over the radio that we were the first flying boat to set down in Papeete Harbor in more than thirty years. The French don’t need a lot of encouragement to declare a celebration, and I guess we were a big two-engine excuse. I have taken off and landed from a lot of tropical ports, but I never saw any greeting like this. There were flags, bands, a boat parade, hundreds of hula girls blowing us kisses from the shore, and a small barge loaded with leis that were tossed by children into the water as a means of guiding us up the channel to our anchorage.
Tom Prophet, an old friend and promoter on the island who had brought me here to sing the first time, was riding the lead boat, surrounded by a bevy of hula girls and a man I didn’t recognize. Once we had the plane secure and went ashore, the party began. That is where Tom introduced me to his partner, Philippe Parfait, who is the cultural attaché for French Polynesia.
Any country, territory, or island larger than a postage stamp has a minister of culture or a cultural attaché. Their job seems to be having drinks with visitors and getting their picture in the local papers and on TV with visiting celebrities.
Boy, did Philippe Parfait fit the part. He stood about six feet tall, with a head of curly silver hair and obvious Polynesian features along with his “Frenchness.” He wore tailored blue slacks and a white silk shirt, and a lei of fresh jasmine blossoms hung around his neck. As I was about to shake his hand, a beautiful girl, dressed in traditional dance attire, stepped forward and lowered a similar lei around my neck and kissed me on both cheeks.
Parfait spoke perfect English as he gently took my arm and walked me toward a podium where I was welcomed by the mayor, did several interviews with the local paper, exchanged a multitude of champagne toasts, and topped it off with platters of fresh oysters flown in from New Zealand. Add ten hours of hard-weather flying to that, and you are a tired puppy by the time you get your head on a pillow. I slept an entire day, which is unheard of for me.
The next morning the phone rang early. It was Philippe. “I am taking you to breakfast. There will be a few press people around afterward to ask you about your film.”
“What film?” I asked.
“The one you told me you were making,” he answered.
“Oh, you mean my homemade video of the trip?”
“No, the documentary you are producing and directing about your epic flight across the Pacific. The film that will provide you easy transit through the islands.”
“I don’t quite understand.”
“You will once you wake up,” he told me. “I’ll be waiting in the lobby with some strong coffee.”
Philippe greeted me with a huge mug and a morning paper. There was a giant photo of The Flying Pearl landing in the bay on the front page of Le Peche. “You are a very popular man on this island today, Willie,” he said with an air of self-satisfaction. Over breakfast, Philippe explained the reason for the dog-and-pony-show approach to our visit. Between recent rebel activity in New Caledonia and nuclear testing in French Polynesia, the military was suspicious of any oddball traveling through the islands and could give us problems. We did not appear to be your typical tourists. “I have created a cover story for you, and it will hopefully help you to avoid any unpleasant confrontations with these paranoid paratroopers. For the next few days, it would help if you acted like a movie star.”
“Why?” I asked.
“To deal with bureaucracy. You see, we French invented bureaucracy as well as diplomacy. ‘No’ is the easiest and safest answer for any government employee to say. But everything changes if you are in the movie business. Hollywood is the detour around any bureaucratic logjam. Movie stars get more attenti
on than diplomats or presidents. Nothing greases wheels anywhere in the world faster than the thought of a movie coming to town, and you, my friend, are now a movie star. That is, if you want to get to New Caledonia.”
“I do.”
“Then finish your breakfast. We are late.”
“For what?” I asked.
Well, it didn’t take long to find out. We walked out of the restaurant and were instantly greeted by a crowd of reporters that suddenly surrounded us at the corner. I guess Philippe thought I might run, because with one hand he gripped me like an osprey holding a fish while he waved with the other. I waved and smiled as well.
“How long will you be shooting in Tahiti?” a reporter shouted from the crowd.
“I always do.”
The crowd looked confused but wrote down my answer. I just smiled like a movie star as Philippe pulled me into a waiting car.
We soaked up our few days of celebrity status. The piece in the paper made it sound as if we were going to film the Polynesian remake of Gone with the Wind. But it worked. Strangers waved and offered to buy me drinks. Women smiled as they passed me on the streets. Gendarmes along the boulevard called me by my name. Then it was time to leave. We bid farewell to our friends in Tahiti and headed for New Caledonia, expecting the same kind of warm greeting. Boy, were we in for a surprise.
I hate to think of any time spent in the Pearl over the Pacific as routine, but things were just humming along, and we enjoyed the view. We were greeted in Pago Pago by a classic third-world screwup when the fuel truck parked in front of the plane ran out of gas. A gang fight nearly erupted among the very large Samoans on the ramp. Somehow we assumed the role of UN peacekeepers and managed to get fueled and get going to New Caledonia. Eight and a half uneventful hours later, I was sitting in the cockpit rereading our headlines in the Tahiti newspaper when Hollis, my copilot, yelled, “Jesus, look at that!” I dropped the paper immediately when I spotted a lighthouse that looked as if it reached all the way to the floor of heaven.
Here are a few lighthouse-junkie facts: Amedee Light is about 185 feet tall. It sits on the edge of the Passe de Boulari, which carves through the largest lagoon in the world—about ten miles from Nouméa, the capital of New Caledonia. It was built in 1862 under the reign of Napoléon III, and it has been working ever since.
I let Hollis fly the plane and went to the rear and poked my video camera out the hatch into the wind and recorded our circles around the light. After all, we were supposed to be making a movie. Below us, tour boats and a couple dinghies were tied to the pier by the light. People on the beach and in the light tower were waving frantically at us as we dropped down to two hundred feet and did a tight circle around the light itself. I am sure they weren’t expecting an air show that day, but they sure as hell got one.
We headed off for the airport and readied ourselves for another celebratory arrival, but our welcoming committee was not a crowd of flower-laden hula girls. Instead we were boarded, searched, and interrogated by some not-too-friendly Frenchmen, who it turns out were members of the DGSE—the French equivalent of the CIA. They are the guys who blew up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland back in 1985, as it was getting ready to sail to Moruroa in the Tuamotu Islands where the French still explode nuclear weapons. These guys were serious.
There we were, dressed in shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops, doing our best to look like movie stars as Parfait had instructed. At first, I knew this had to be a practical joke, after all the press and assurances from Parfait that we could go anywhere and do anything we wanted on French soil. But when I saw the automatic rifles hanging from the shoulders of our camouflage-covered greeting committee, I knew they were not big readers of the local-living section of the papers. I guess we fit the profile of troublemakers, so that was how we were being treated. We were detained in a small room for four hours before a very short, chain-smoking officer came in, dismissing us like bad cheese. He told us we could not enter the country.
I then explained that there must be some kind of misunderstanding—that Philippe Parfait . . .
At the mention of Parfait, the muscles in the man’s neck began to quiver. “That oyster,” the man snapped.
Just as he said it, the door opened, and I heard a voice say, “Belons, Capitaine. Je prefer les belons. Et vous?”
The chain-smoking officer’s face turned scarlet.
The last time I had seen Philippe Parfait, he was singing Frank Sinatra karaoke with the local band at our farewell party. Today he was all business, and I watched in glee as the cultural attaché trumped the hard-assed officer. He presented the officer with several documents and excused him out of our lives with a scolding that was felt by all the gun-toting soldiers in the room. They all filed out as he pointed at the door. Simultaneously, smiles returned to the faces of the customs agents who stamped our passports and now welcomed us to Nouméa. That night, Philippe arranged our hotel accommodations and bought us an apologetic dinner, where he told me he had arranged everything at the lighthouse. “Amedee will make a great opening shot for your film, no?” he said with a wink.
Philippe was unable to go to the island with us the next morning. The message came as we exited our cab at the Club Med dock for the half-hour ride out to the light. A small government boat was waiting for us. The captain greeted us, gave us life jackets, and once we were away from the dock, he became an instant tour guide as well. I asked if a Fresnel lens powered the light. The question seemed to startle him. “Why, yes, of course,” he answered.
When we docked, the light keeper and his staff were standing in perfectly starched uniforms and greeted us warmly and ushered us up the tower. I was more interested in getting information about a bull’s-eye lens, but they were on another page and brought us quickly up to the light. Tully, all I can tell you is that the lens in that light room looked like a small glass cathedral, and I knew then something good was about to happen. Our tour was concluded, and we were ushered back down the steps, where we posed for photos with the light keepers. I still tried to ask about the bull’s-eye lens, but the light keeper ignored my questions and just said, “Monsieur Parfait.”
Philippe greeted us at the dock. “Well, you are now famous in New Caledonia,” he said as he handed me a copy of the paper with a collage of pictures from our dinner party. A story had been fabricated around the suggestion that we would be back to film a movie on the island. It was then that he mentioned the local TV station would like to film our departure and flyby of the lighthouse.
I knew my answer was yes before I said it. It was part of the game.
“Come, I have a van,” he said and led us down to the dock.
We all rode in the van behind the police car, into which Philippe had climbed. I wanted information about the bull’s-eye lens, but I suddenly found myself being whisked to the airport where God-knows-what awaited. It suddenly dawned on me that we would probably be in the air on the way to Vanuatu in a few minutes without ever having discovered anything about the lens. My worst fears were realized as we passed through the airport security gate.
The press had all gathered around the Pearl. Next to it a helicopter stood by, with the engines whining. We were cleared through customs faster than a waiter making a table change at Joe’s Stone Crab, and Philippe handed me our paperwork and passports. I was trying to ask Parfait a question about the lighthouse when he hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks. The video cameras whirred, and the flashbulbs popped. “By the way,” he said quietly as we walked to the door of the plane, “when you get to Luganville, if you draw as much attention there as you did here with your plane, ask around the airport for someone who can get you to my friend Waltham. I think he might be able to help you with your bull’s-eye. Smile at the cameras, and don’t ask any questions.”
It was the way he said it that made me realize this was not another one of his publicity stunts. He was serious.
So, as the boys are preflighting the plane, I am rushing to finish this letter so
I can drop it through the window to Parfait before we taxi out. He already promised me that he would have it delivered to you. Now I am off to find this Waltham character. I have a strange feeling I am on to something.
Willie
PS: Do you have any of these at Lost Boys? The photo I’ve included is three-quarters of the largest bonefish that I have ever had on the end of a line. I caught him on Minola. I thought he was a fucking barracuda. He ran three hundred yards, backing off my reel twice, and as you can tell by the missing last third of his body, the sharks got him before I could reel him in. As a whole fish, he was probably well over twenty pounds, but I will let you and Ix-Nay be the judges of that.
35
Trying to Catch a Little Neutral
I find that laughter can cure just about anything, and boy, that long letter of Willie’s tickled my funny bone. I studied the pictures of the giant, half-eaten, world-record bonefish and then put the letter in my pocket. I was jealous about the fish. But when I went back to looking at the scenery, the bumpy road woke up my nervous system, and I could feel the lingering pain. Still, all I could do was laugh at what had just happened to me, and to Willie, halfway around the world. We had both escaped bad situations with the help of friends. I can never quite figure out how things work out, but they always happen for a reason.
As the flat cane fields rolled by, I have to admit I was still thinking about Dawn. I couldn’t believe that I was actually feeling sorry for a femme fatale who had come so close to sending me to prison as if it were part of her spring-break agenda. I realized that any woman who could come up with such a scheme was going to find her way in the world. I would probably see her again, on the arm of a Dallas Cowboy quarterback or as the trophy wife of some obscenely rich mogul. A woman like Dawn, as young as she was, always had a plan B. I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only key that could unlock her mother’s treasure box.
Archie was now at the wheel, and Ix-Nay was up front with him, inspecting all the gadgets, buttons, and switches on the dashboard. In their haste to rescue me, he hadn’t taken a proper test ride. He read the owner’s manual aloud at times and asked Archie endless questions about the truck. Archie happily answered all of them. Bucky was stretched out on the rear seat, asleep after the all-night race from Lost Boys to Kafiri. I was bone tired as well, but I wasn’t closing my eyes until I knew we had put a fair bit of distance between my pursuers and me. Captain Kirk sat next to me with his headphones on, listening to his Joni Mitchell.