Cryptozoica (10 page)

“And you say that’s what happened on Big Tamtung?”

“Partly.” Belleau shrugged. “I realize this all seems a bit much to absorb in one sitting, but it’s the truth. On Big Tamtung, the past has not stopped breathing. The evidence is there, darlin’.”

Scowling, Honoré slapped the open book in her lap. “This is by no means evidence. At best, it’s a fanciful footnote to actual history. At worst, it’s a Cardiff Giant type hoax that never got off the ground.”

Belleau shook his head. “Skepticism is a trait to be encouraged, but what you’re exhibiting is closer to denial. You haven’t looked at the entire photographic record.”

Swiftly, angrily, Honoré flipped page after page, reviewing the photographs within the transparent sleeves. They progressed from blurry black-and-white plates of smudges that might have been animals or even shrubs, to color shots of distant quadrupedal and bipedal shapes.

Only one photo depicted a creature with any degree of clarity. A dark green mass with outspread feathery wings filled the frame. She prepared to dismiss it as an out-of-focus shot of a tropical bird, until she identified the three highly developed, claw-tipped fingers at the top wing-joint.

The word archaeopteryx jumped to the forefront of her mind, but she refused to utter it. Instead she asked, “When and how were these pictures taken?”

“A concealed duck blind was constructed in the 1840s and maintained until about thirty-five years ago,” Belleau answered.

“Maintained by whom?” she demanded.

“All in good time, darlin’. All in good time.”

Honoré thumbed through several other photographs, but they depicted human beings. She gazed at a candid shot of a tall, lean man wearing the dark blue dress uniform of the United States Air Force. Sunglasses masked his eyes and Captain’s bars glinted on his collar.

“Who is this?” she asked.

Belleau craned his neck and snorted derisively. “A nobody. His name is Kavanaugh, a former officer in the US Air Force. As I understand it, he’s known as Tombstone Jack.”

The man’s face was not conventionally handsome. In fact, it had a craggy, rawboned, American Indian stolidity, but she found something strangely appealing in it.

“He left the military and opened a rather disreputable travel agency in partnership with another nobody,” Belleau continued contemptuously. “He’s more or less responsible for the entire Cryptozoica debacle. I’ll tell you about that later.”

“Why not now?”

“Does he interest you for some reason?”

Honoré detected a hint of jealously underscoring Belleau’s voice. Rather than respond to it, she turned the page to another photograph. Three men stood outside of a white-walled building in bright sunlight, all of them with cigars jutting at jaunty angles from grinning mouths. The blond man in the center had his arms draped around the shoulders of Kavanaugh and a big black man. The building in the background bore a sign reading Cryptozoica Enterprises & Horizons Unlimited.

“Who is this?” Honoré asked, turning the book toward Belleau.

“The man in the middle is Howard Philips Flitcroft himself…the other is Kavanaugh and his partner, Augustus Crowe. The other nobody I mentioned.” He paused and added sourly, “All Yanks, of course.”

Honoré smiled. “Of course. So am I to understand that these are the principals in the Cryptozoica affair?”

Belleau shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Not quite all of them. Frankly, I’m reluctant to share everything about the Tamtungs and Cryptozoica with you.”

Honoré slitted her eyes. “Then I shall be equally reluctant to give you my full cooperation.”

Belleau leaned forward, placing a hand lightly on her right knee, gazing earnestly into her face. “Honoré, I will be breaking an oath sworn to a brotherhood that male members of my family have been part of for nearly two hundred years.”

Honoré crossed her legs, dislodging the man’s hand. “The Freemasons?”

Belleau bared his teeth in a ferocious scowl, then it turned into a rueful grin. “My darlin’ Dr. Roxton. You need to be indoctrinated so you can grasp the entire convoluted context.”

Lifting the glass to his lips, Aubrey Belleau drained the last of the Singapore Sling, took a deep breath and stated, “We shall begin your indoctrination with a lesson in hidden history. What do you know of the School of Night?”

“Nothing.”

Belleau’s grin widened and he reached into the valise. “Tell me, Honoré …in your studies did you ever come across references to Prima Materia?”

May 11
th

The morning sky was as blue as a dream of summer, full of wispy white clouds and lazy shadows. Mouzi thought about all of her unfulfilled summer dreams and blinked back the stinging tears of self-pity.

Then the greasy socket wrench slipped on the nut and she skinned a knuckle against a flange of the bilge pump. Turning her face toward the sky, she shouted loudly and earnestly, “Fuck this!”

Crowe poked his head up through the hatchway and asked mildly, “Does that help or do you need another set of wrenches?”

Massaging her throbbing right hand, Mouzi said sullenly, “Another set of knuckles, more like.”

Crowe heaved himself up onto the vaka, the main deck of the
Krakatoa
. His pants legs were wet from the cuff to the knee with foul-smelling bilge water. The noonday sun blazed down with a heat only a few degrees shy of merciless. The strip of cloth tied around his forehead was soaked through with sweat. Perspiration trickled down his face and clung to the ends of his mustache like tiny glass beads.

Mouzi wore a one-piece black thong leotard. It barely contained one sixty-fourth of her caramel-colored body. She shifted position, allowing Crowe an unrestricted view of the bulldog’s face snarling from her right buttock. The small tattoo of the dog wearing a German coalscuttle helmet symbolized her membership in the Mongrel Mob, the Maori street-gang she had joined while running wild in New Zealand’s Rotorura district.

The
Krakatoa
rocked slightly on the swells. The day had dawned mild, the seas fairly calm, the sun strong and so Crowe decided it was as good a time as any to work on the trimaran’s bilge pump. If nothing else, it kept him and Mouzi from being drafted into house-painting detail by Flitcroft.

Shading her eyes with her hands, Mouzi gazed in the direction of the canal cutting past of the Huang Luan. Seagulls swooped and dove at a dark shape bobbing on the water, trapped between a piling and the canal wall. She turned away disinterestedly, looking toward the hotel.

Several men hosed down the façade and sloshed soapy water over the windows. Old Tinh Bien, the island’s self-proclaimed calligrapher, stood on a ladder and meticulously repainted the words Cryptozoica Enterprises & Horizons Unlimited over the door. She commented blandly, “Sprucin’ up still?”

Crowe grunted. “Howie wants everything spit on and polished up before the big-wigs get here.”

“When’s that supposed to be again?”

Crowe reached for the bilge pump housing. “Any minute now. He sent his own jet for ‘em.”

Mouzi smiled sourly. “In that case, maybe somebody should do something about the dead body over there.”

Crowe straightened up, squinting in the direction of her waving hand. “Over where?”

“There...see them gulls?”

“How do you know it’s a body?”

Mouzi shrugged and picked up the socket wrench. “You know how intuitive we South Sea Islanders are.”

Crowe blew out a disgusted sigh. “Don’t I just.

Mouzi affected not to notice when Crowe strode across the deck and jumped onto the pier. He shouted toward Chou Lai who straddled his pedicab at the intersection of four footpaths. The two men exchanged words in what she took to be some form of pidgin Cantonese. Reluctantly, Chou Lai pedaled his vehicle toward the hotel.

Mouzi watched as Chou Lai yelled to the workmen. After a minute, three of them put down their hoses and brushes and trudged toward the canal. Crowe came back aboard and as he stalked past her, he growled, “Conscience of a shark.”

Mouzi hawked up from deep in her throat and spit over the side. Crowe ignored her expectoration and Mouzi ignored him as he went into the wheelhouse. She knew the big man well enough to pick up on his anger. As a former lieutenant in the United States Navy SEALS, Crowe was no stranger to violence or death, but he preferred not to associate with either if other options were available.

Mouzi was steeped in the warrior tradition of her people and although she wasn’t of pure Maori blood, she was most definitely proud of what did flow through her veins. Born in a sulphate-scented village on the banks of Lake Ngapouri, she had answered an ad for a tsunami relief service and through it eventually met Augustus Crowe and Jack Kavanaugh.

Within a month of the meeting, she found herself promoted to the position of chief grease monkey for Horizons Unlimited. Even after Cryptozoica Enterprises had fallen apart, she stayed on Little Tamtung. She had no immediate family anywhere in the world and the island was as good a place to call home as any, certainly better than the ghettos of Rotorua’s Fenton Street.

Besides, Kavanaugh needed looking after and Crowe needed a mechanic, even though she hadn’t drawn a paycheck in nearly two years. But the men treated her respectfully most of the time and provided her with a house of her own and enough food to eat, so she didn’t want for much. She and Crowe enjoyed a friends-with-benefits relationship and despite the difference in their ages, she supposed she loved the big man and didn’t care to leave him. Besides, as a bail-jumper and fugitive, she had no great desire to rejoin what passed for civilized society in New Zealand.

After being arrested for strong-arm robbery in Wellington, Mouzi hid herself in the backwaters of the Third World. She made the acquaintance of twenty-first century pirates, who were always on the prowl for the angle and the profit. Claiming to be representatives tsunami relief organizations provided a good cover for the scavengers.

Mouzi fell for one of them, a dashing Russian who made a great lover but a terrifying enemy, who would lend her his last dime one night and then break her nose the next because she hadn’t moved fast enough to fetch him a fresh bottle of vodka.

But from Nikolai and his Mafiya confederates, Mouzi learned how to be a shark swimming in those turbid waters—to bite fast and ruthlessly when the occasion called for it.

Cutting the throat of Dai Chinnah had not disturbed her emotional equilibrium overmuch. The Papuan seaman reminded her of the man who raped her shortly before her fourteenth birthday. Mouzi had cut his throat too, some weeks later when she came across him drunk and belligerent outside of a bar.

She had stabbed two of his friends in the same melee but she never knew if she had killed them—nor did she give much of a damn.

“Looks like they found somebody,” Crowe intoned. “Surprise, surprise.”

Mouzi squinted across the harborside. The workmen hauled up a limp human shape from the canal water by a length of rope. She said quietly, “Poor bastard must’ve had an accident.”

“That’s what I figured,” Crowe drawled. “He tripped and fell neck-first onto your knives.”

Mouzi directed a glare at him. “I told you what happened.”

“So you did.”

“So why do you care?” she demanded angrily. “He was a rapist, a woman-beater—

“—I don’t give a shit about him,” Crowe broke in. “But I care about police showing up here with outstanding warrants for Jack.”

Mouzi shrugged dismissively. “Howie’ll just pay ‘em off like before.”

Crowe shook his head. “He’s got too many other things to throw his money at now.”

“Like what?”

Crowe didn’t answer. At the far edge of audibility, they heard a faint, droning whine. Tilting her head back, Mouzi saw a tiny speck in the sky, skimming across it like a tadpole through an azure pool. Between one heartbeat and another, the speck resolved itself into the bewinged shape of a jet. Sunlight winked from its white fuselage as it approached at a sharply descending angle.

“Like that, I imagine,” Crowe said, taking a rag from his back pocket and wiping his hands.

“The big-wigs?”

“Who else? Want to go take a look at them?”

“Why not?” Mouzi put down her wrench, then rolled off the
Krakatoa
, falling into the water between the main hull and the portside outrigger hull. Her diminutive body barely made a splash.

“What are the hell are you doing?” Crowe asked.

“Cooling off first.” Mouzi spit a jet of water in his direction. “You mind?”

“Be careful of the sharks…don’t be biting on any.”

Grinning, the girl snapped her teeth at him. She knew as well as he did that just about every imaginable nasty creature swam in the Indo-Australian oceans, from venomous sea snakes, moray eels, to barracuda. Sharks constituted the least of the threats, but Mouzi had no fear any of them. She made her way toward the beach with an inelegant but functional backstroke. There was nothing fancy about her swimming style, but it always got her to where she was going.

Crowe stepped off the boat onto the dock and walked quickly toward the airstrip adjacent to the hotel property. Like the harborside, it had been constructed several years before in anticipation of various holiday package flights landing and taking off.

Flitcroft’s C21 Learjet was only one of three winged aircraft that had ever arrived and departed from the runaway. The other two planes had belonged to the families of Jessup and Shah Nikan, when they came to retrieve the mangled remains of the financers. Most of the island’s supplies arrived by monthly ship.

Crowe watched as the pilot of the jet trimmed the flaps and cut the throttle way back, subtly changing the pitch of the engine’s rumbling whine. By the time he reached the edge of the tarmac, the jet touched down with a squeal of rubber tires and taxied to a lumbering stop. Heat waves shimmered from the blacktop. Crowe looked for Kavanaugh but saw no sign of him. He figured the man was sulking someplace, maybe in the Huang Luan, but he was definitely aware of the arrival of the jet.

As Crowe strolled onto the runway, he stepped aside as Chou Lai rang the bell of his pedicab. The young man wheeled it past him, on a direct line with the jet, as anxious for paying customers as everyone else on Little Tamtung. Crowe felt a surge of annoyance when he spied Kavanaugh seated in the passenger box.

The jet rolled to a complete halt and the whine of the engines faded, leaving only humid silence. Crowe stalked up to Kavanaugh as he climbed out of the cab. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Kavanaugh countered, running his fingers through his hair, smoothing it down. “I was with Howie…he asked me to come and fetch his experts.”

Crowe gave Kavanaugh a swift visual examination. Although his eyes were masked by sunglasses, his face was clean-shaved, his hair trimmed and his breath wasn’t redolent of stale whiskey and potted meat. Although he wore his usual ensemble of tropical print shirt and faded jeans, they smelled freshly laundered. He appeared to be as sober as a bishop.

Crowe observed dourly. “So you finally figured out how to work the washer and dryer.”

Kavanaugh affected not to have heard the inquiry.

“I thought you didn’t want any part of this deal,” Crowe said.

“I never said that. You were the one who called Howie’s idea stupid and suicidal.”

“That’s because I think it is,” Crowe admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to make money from it if there is any to be made.”

“Good. Then we’re both on the same page.”

The portside hatch of the Learjet popped open, pushed up from the inside. Crowe and Kavanaugh moved forward, both men forcing smiles to their faces. Crowe’s step faltered and Kavanaugh’s smile vanished when a huge brute of man climbed out.

The giant paid the two men no attention at first, busying himself with pulling retractable aluminum steps out from beneath the hatchway, then he turned and regarded Crowe and Kavanaugh with bleak, blank eyes.

He wore a short-sleeved white shirt, khaki pants and sandals, but he looked uncomfortable in the ensemble. Kavanaugh guessed he was accustomed to wearing entirely different kind of clothes. His skin was pallid, as if it had never been exposed to direct sunlight.

Crowe extended his right hand. “Welcome to Little Tamtung. The name’s Augustus Crowe. This is Jack Kavanaugh.”

The man hesitated an instant before taking his hand, but the contact was more of a furtive palm-brush than an actual shake.

The giant repeated the same swift, cursory move with Kavanaugh, but not before he glimpsed a three-character Asian ideogram blue-tattooed on the man’s thick right forearm. Kavanaugh had seen the symbol before in Okinawa—it denoted a high-ranking professional martial artist, a master of the Shorin-ryu style. The man’s hand so briefly in his had a hard, leathery ridge of callus running along the edge of the palm.

“Oakshott,” the man replied in a surprisingly high voice, touched by a British accent. He sounded like Mike Tyson impersonating an English valet.

Crowe tried hard to repress a smile, but he doubted he succeeded.

Oakshott said,  “We are to meet a man named Howard Philips Flitcroft. Where might he be found?”

Kavanaugh hooked a thumb toward the hotel. “In his office I imagine. The mountain will have to come to Mohammed in this instance.”

Oakshott’s eyes narrowed as if he suspected he was being mocked. “We have quite a bit of luggage and we will need reliable transportation—

Chou Lai rang the bell on the handlebars of his pedicab.

Oakshott ignored him. “—For my employer and his guest.”