EQMM, May 2012 (22 page)

From the sea, it resembled a huge arrowhead encrusted with thick greenery, its tip concealed by an overhang of unmoving cumulus clouds that looked like great puffs of new cotton fresh from the boll, its lower sides braced by swaying palms, and its base ringed with a white sand beach.

"Isn't it lovely?” a soft voice said. It was Domi, making her weekly trip home to be with her young daughter.

"Yes,” Leland said. “It looks like a postcard. Does it get a lot of tourists?"

"No, none. Mr. Tamu owns the island. Only a few personal friends with boats are allowed to visit."

A few friends with boats. To smuggle away the black-pearl harvests.

"How large is the island?” he asked conversationally.

"The ring road that encircles the island is twenty-two miles. You must let me show you around. When will you be diving?"

"Tomorrow, early. As soon as the tide is all the way out. Will you let me meet your daughter?"

"Of course. She will probably think you are very handsome. She reads a lot of American movie magazines."

"I doubt she'll think
I'm
handsome then, not compared to a movie star."

"But you are, Beely!” she said, laughing and pinching his arm.

Simon Tamu, at the wheel of the cruiser, guided it gently and with expert precision into a lagoon of cerulean blue water and cut the engine next to a wooden pier bleached white by the tropical sun. Brit and Frog, already on the pier, quickly moored the vessel with rigging ropes.

"Do they work for Mr. Tamu too?” Leland asked.

"Yes."

"How did they get over here so quickly?"

Domi shrugged. “They probably came over last night on another boat."

"What do they do for Mr. Tamu?"

"They are shellers; they open the oysters and feel down in their tissues for pearls."

"Are there a lot of shellers?"

"There are some native shellers who work with the lagoon oysters, but those two men work only with deep-water oysters when Mr. Tamu is able to get them."

So Brit and Frog worked only with oysters that might have black pearls in them. Interesting.

"How have they brought up deep-water oysters without divers like me?” he asked her.

"Some of the lagoon divers went into the close deep waters for a while, but when they reached the drop-off into the outlying waters, they could go no farther. That's why Mr. Tamu hired you, I suppose."

"Yes, I suppose."

When the craft was securely moored, Simon Tamu came forward to get them. “Well, here we are, Bill."

Yes, here we are, Leland thought. The isle of disappearing men.

Or had they disappeared?

Leland prepared for his first dive the following morning. Unpacking his dive bag at the end of the pier, while Simon Tamu, along with Brit and Frog, watched with interest, he put on his fins and set out his dive cylinders, which had been charged back in Papeete, and arranged the harness that he would use to strap them to his back.

"How much oxygen do your tanks hold?” Tamu asked.

"It isn't just oxygen,” Leland told him. “It's actually a gas called heliox: a mixture of one-fifth oxygen and four-fifths helium. I have enough to stay under for about seventy minutes."

Affixing a back sheet of strong reinforced rubber to his shoulders, he had Brit set the cylinders in place and attached it all snugly to him with quick-release buckle straps over his shoulders, across his abdomen, and under his crotch. When all else was ready, he brought around the two hoses from the cylinders, one on each side, and the breathing apparatus for intake and exhalation. On another line was a small underwater console which contained a pressure gauge, depth gauge, and compass. Then he securely fitted on his face mask, started the time on his underwater wrist watch, and inserted the mouthpiece. With a nod to Frog, he was handed a tightly woven net bag with a drawstring opening. Then, giving Simon Tamu a thumbs-up, he calmly stepped off the pier into the crystal-clear water.

Submerging downward on a forty-five degree angle, Leland entered a wondrous world of fascinating, exotic sea life. The water was clear and clean, as if it were in a well-cared-for vast aquarium. Gliding around him, apparently unconcerned by his presence, was a virtual rainbow of underwater creatures of every imaginable combination of colors: butterflyfish, eagle rays, scissortails, blue-striped grunt, sea turtles half his own size, schools of sargo swimming in perfect formation, surgeonfish—literally hundreds of living beings so beautifully pigmented that only God could have created them. Although he was an experienced diver, Leland was stunned by the sight of them, astonished by their number and variety. He had been diving for ten years, had explored the depths of the Maldives, Fiji, the Marianas, the Marshalls, and all of the major Hawaiian islands—but nowhere in the world had he encountered such a glorious sight. It was celestial without the heavens.

Before Leland realized it, he had been under for twenty-two minutes. Gathering his senses, he moved downward, fifty feet, sixty, seventy—and then reached an underwater plateau the size of a football stadium that stretched out before him before dropping off to even greater depths. On a plate of sand and moss and shimmering greenery that seemed to be dancing in slow motion on its watery stage lay a bed of white oysters like a field of underwater snow.

Releasing the binding of the tightly rolled net, he let it flow open to its full six feet of length, then pulled it effortlessly down to the oyster bed and began harvesting the oysters with wide swings of one arm, scooping them into the net he held open to receive them. It took him fifteen minutes to fully pack the net into what looked like a long cylinder tied snugly at its top with a drawstring knot.

With the buoyancy of weightlessness now compromised by the weight of the net, Leland began a slow ascent back toward the surface.

That afternoon, while Frog and Brit were busy shelling the seven or eight hundred oysters Leland had brought up, and Simon Tamu had returned by boat to Papeete to recharge Leland's tanks for the next day's dive, Domi found him lying in the shade of a huge lemon tree blossoming with fruit nearly the size of melons. With her was a delicately pretty little girl wearing a flowered sarong that matched her mother's.

"I brought my daughter to meet you,” Domi said. “Marama, this is Beel."

"Hello, Beel,” Marama said. She studied him frankly. “Are you a movie star?"

"Not anymore,” he said. “I used to be, but I got tired of it and quit."

"Did you know Johnny Depp?"

"Sure. I taught him how to act."

"Really!” the little girl almost squealed. Domi rolled her eyes.

"Yes. I taught Tom Cruise too. He was a problem. Didn't have that much talent—"

"All right, that's enough of that,” Domi interrupted. “We came to show you around our island. I borrowed one of Mr. Tamu's Jeeps. Come on—"

Domi drove, with Leland next to her and Marama on the jump seat in back. Domi had packed a wicker-basket lunch from which the girl had already pulled a plantain, eating it as she thumbed through a month-old copy of
Entertainment Weekly.

Domi took the ring road that circled the island, driving alongside long stretches of white sand beaches backed by endless palm trees swaying slightly in the afternoon breeze left by the trade winds as they drifted toward the equator. In some places, slightly offshore, orange and yellow coral reefs reflected the sunlight like dancing dervishes.

At one point, halfway around the island, Domi turned the Jeep inland and they began to climb upward into what at times looked like an impenetrable wilderness. All around them could be heard the cawing of wild parrots and the melodious chirping of scores of land-bound frigate birds. The road twisted and turned and the aroma of mangroves and rattan and huge orchids permeated the air as they climbed higher and left the lowland humidity behind.

"This place is glorious,” Leland found himself saying, not really to Domi, but just
saying
it because it was.

"Wait and see what lies ahead,” Domi said, hearing him.

"What?"

"Just wait,” she teased.

Ten minutes later, she pulled the Jeep over to the side of the road and parked. On each side of them there appeared to Leland to be nothing but a mass entanglement of impenetrable tropical jungle. Leland could see no apparent place of access; it was like a dense natural wall.

"Grab the lunch basket and come on,” Domi said, swinging her legs out of the Jeep. “Marama, bring the quilt."

Then, to Leland's complete surprise, Domi led the way to a stand of bright yellow blossoms that easily parted under the gentle touch of her hands. Marama ran ahead of her mother, a blanket roll slung over her shoulder, several magazines tucked under one arm. “Come on,” Domi said, and led Leland along a now revealed path that seemed to unfold for them with each step they took. Marama, who obviously knew where she was going, led the way, giggling with delight.

In minutes, they came to a hidden clearing deep in the undergrowth, wherein lay an almost perfectly shaped round pool afloat with wild orchids, fed on one side by a slowly cascading waterfall perhaps fifteen feet high, springing from somewhere unseen deep in the undergrowth. Its water flowed onto a wide flat rock, then down onto another, and onto still a third, forming steps into the pool. The sight of it all was breathtaking to Leland.

As he stood staring in wonder at the scene before him, Marama was unfolding a large multicolored patchwork quilt on thick grass at the pool's edge, and Domi was laying out three fluffy folded towels, along with plates and utensils from the wicker basket.

"Let's swim!” Marama shrieked, and to Leland's complete surprise threw off her sarong and dove naked into the pool. Domi stepped over beside Leland, who stood with gaping mouth, and said, “Don't be shocked. This is a secret place, and this is Tahiti. We are not ashamed of our bodies.” She dropped her own sarong onto the quilt and walked toward the pool, where Marama was frolicking uninhibitedly. “Come on, Beely,” Domi said. She walked in up to her waist and waited.

Taking a deep breath, Leland began to undress.

In the ten days that followed, Leland made one dive each day for an agreed-upon fee of five hundred dollars each. After he had cleaned out the oyster bed he had found at sixty feet, he went to the edge of that underwater plateau and dropped down to seventy-five feet, clinging to the ragged rock formation on the side of the plateau to maintain his buoyant equilibrium. Feeling his way around to the face of the plateau, he discovered a shelf extending out at a depth of seventy-eight feet. At that depth he knew that his dive time would be reduced, but what he found was so surprising that he knew he would continue working there. For spread out on the shelf was the largest oyster bed he had ever seen: literally tens of thousand of oysters—a virtual metropolis of them.

Later that day, after he brought up his filled net, he found Simon Tamu sitting on the verandah of his home on a bluff overlooking the town center and the dock and ocean beyond, and sat down beside him to announce his incredible find. As he described it, Simon Tamu's expression became solemn.

"There are so many oysters down there,” Leland emphasized, “it might take a hundred or more dives to bring them all up."

Tamu shook his head thoughtfully. “You might not
ever
be able to bring them all up,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.

"What do you mean?"

"What you have found, my young friend, is an oyster breeding mantle."

"A what?"

"Breeding mantle. A place where thousands of oysters attach themselves to breed. For every hundred you harvest, there may be two hundred being bred. Because they no longer have legs, they must find something to which they can attach themselves in order to reproduce."

"Are you saying oysters once had
legs?"
Leland asked incredulously.

"Yes, indeed. They could crawl around like crabs to find breeding grounds. But over time, for some unknown evolutionary reason, their legs disappeared. Just as through evolution humans learned to walk upright, the oyster lost its ability to walk at all. To compensate for that loss, they now depend on deep-water currents to find someplace immoveable, stationary, on which to procreate. The oysters you found chose that mantle."

"Did you know it was down there?” Leland asked.

"I suspected as much,” Tamu admitted, “based on the oysters you've harvested on the last several dives. I knew that they had bred in deeper water than where you had been."

"How could you tell?"

The door leading from the house to the verandah opened and Brit and Frog came out.

Brit had a revolver stuck in his waistband, and Frog was carrying a truncheon.

"He could tell,” Brit said evenly, “by the quality of the black pearls you've been finding. That's why you're here, isn't it? To find out about the black pearls?"

"I don't know what you're talking about.” Leland tried to sound innocent.

"Don't try to play games with us,” Frog said threateningly. “Who sent you? Interpol? Department of Justice? Who do you work for?"

"Nobody sent me—"

Brit drew his revolver. “You're very close to becoming shark bait, you lying bastard!"

"That's enough!” Simon Tamu said sharply. “Put that gun away! Tell him who you are, both of you."

Brit stuck the revolver back in his waistband. “Ian Tipton,” he said. “Formerly of Scotland Yard."

"Paul Duval,” Frog stated. “Ex-lieutenant in the French Police Nationale."

"Now why don't you enlighten us about yourself,” Tamu said to Leland.

Leland sighed deeply. “Daniel Leland, special agent of the FBI."

"All right,” Simon Tamu said, rising. “Let's all go inside and have a nice friendly chat. Paul, put away that club, and you, Ian, return that pistol to the drawer where you got it. We are all civilized here."

Simon Tamu's study was richly stocked with old leather-bound volumes lining the shelves of one wall; vintage maps spread open on a large wood table; intricate models of famous sailing ships, including
HMS Bounty
; and a sizeable collection of ancient native spears, hatchets, drums, and feathered headdresses displayed in glass-doored cabinets. The four men sat in a circle and sipped Napoleon brandy from Irish crystal glasses, served by a white-coated servant. As they drank, Simon Tamu told Leland the story of Makalea Island.