Chapter 10

Three days later Koitska’s voice, coming from Chandler’s lips, summoned him out to the TWA shack again.

Wise now in the ways of this world, Chandler commandeered a police car and was hurried out to the South Gate, where the guards allowed him a car of his own. The door of the building was unlocked and Chandler went right up.

He was astonished. The fat man was actually sitting up. He was fully dressed--more or less; incongruously he wore flowered shorts and a bright red, short-sleeve shirt, with rope sandals. He said, “You fly a gilikopter? No? No difference. Help me.” An arm like a mountain went over Chandler’s shoulders. The man must have weighed three hundred pounds. Slowly, wheezing, he limped toward the back of the room and touched a button.

A door opened.

Chandler had not known before that there was an elevator in the building. That was one of the things the exec did not consider important for his slaves to know. It lowered them with great grace and delicacy to the first floor, where a large old Cadillac, ancient but immaculately kept, the kind that used to be called a “gangster’s car,” waited in a private parking bay.

Chandler followed Koitska’s directions and drove to an airfield where a small, Plexiglas-nosed helicopter waited. More by the force of Chandler pushing him from behind than through his own fat thighs, Koitska puffed up the little staircase into the cabin. Originally the copter had been fitted for four passengers. Now there was the pilot’s seat and a seat beside it, and in the back a wide, soft couch. Koitska collapsed onto it. His face blanked out--he was, Chandler knew, somewhere else, just then.

In a moment his eyes opened again. He looked at Chandler with no interest at all, and turned his face to the wall.

After a moment he wheezed. “Sit down. At de controls.” He breathed noisily for a while. Then, “It von’t pay you to be interested in Rosalie,” he said.

Chandler was startled. He craned around in the seat but saw only Koitska’s back. “I’m not! Or anyway--” But he had no place to go in that sentence, and in any case Koitska no longer seemed interested.

After a moment Koitska stirred, settled himself more comfortably, and Chandler felt himself taken. He turned to face the split wheel and the unfamiliar pedals and watched himself work the controls. It was an admirable performance. Whoever Chandler was just then--he could not guess--he was a first-class helicopter pilot.

They crossed a wide body of ocean and approached another island; from one quick glance at a navigation map that his eyes had taken, Chandler guessed it to be Hilo. He landed the craft expertly on the margin of a small airstrip, where two DC-3s were already parked and being unloaded, and felt himself free again.

Two husky young men, apparently native Hawaiians by their size, rolled up a ramp and assisted Koitska down it and into a building. Chandler was left to his own devices. The building was rundown but sound. Around it stalky grass clumped, long uncut, and a few mauve and scarlet blossoms, almost hidden, showed where someone had once tended beds of bougainvillea and poinsettias. He could not guess what the building had been doing there, looking like a small office-factory combination out in the remote wilds, until he caught sight of a sign the winds had blown against a wall: Dole. Apparently this had been headquarters for one of the plantations. Now it was stripped almost clean inside, a welter of desks and rusted machines piled heedlessly where there once had been a parking lot. New equipment was being loaded into it from the cargo planes. Chandler recognized some of it as from the list he had given the parts man, Hsi. There also seemed to be a gasoline-driven generator--a large one--but what the other things were he could not guess.

Besides Koitska, there were at least five coronet-wearing execs visible around the place. Chandler was not surprised. It would have to be something big to winkle these torpid slugs out of their shells, but he knew what it was, and that it was big enough to them indeed; in fact, it was their lives. He deduced that Koitska’s plans for his future comfort required a standby transmitter to service the coronets, in case something went wrong. And clearly it was this that they were to put together here.

For ten hours, while the afternoon became dark night, they worked at a furious pace. When the sun set one of the execs gestured and the generator was started, rocking on its rubber-tired wheels as its rotors spun and fumes chugged out, and they worked on by strings of incandescent lights. It was pick-and-shovel work for Chandler, no engineering, just unloading and roughly grouping the equipment where it was ready to be assembled. The execs did not take part in the work. Nor were they idle. They busied themselves in one room of the building with some small device--Chandler could not see what--and when he looked again it was gone. He did not see them take it away and did not know where it was taken. Toward midnight he suddenly realized that it was likely some essential part which they would not permit anyone but themselves to handle, and that, no doubt, was why they had come in person, instead of working through proxies.

Just before they left Koitska and two or three of the other execs quizzed him briefly. He was too tired to think beyond the questions, but they seemed to be trying to find out if he was able to do the simpler parts of the construction without supervision, and they seemed satisfied with the answers. He flew the helicopter home, with someone else guilding his arms and legs, but he was half asleep as he did it, and he never quite remembered how he managed to get back to his room at Tripler.

The next morning he went back to Parts ‘n Plenty with an additional list, covering replacement of some parts that had been damaged. Hsi glanced at it quickly and nodded. “All this stuff I have. You can pick it up this afternoon if you like.”

Chandler offered him a cigarette out of a stale pack. “About the other night--”

Hsi began to perspire, but he said, casually enough, “Interested in baseball?”

“Baseball?”

Hsi said, as though there had been nothing incongruous about the question, “There’ll be a Little League game this afternoon. Back of the school on Punahou and Wilder. I thought I might stop by, then we can come back and pick up the rest of your gear. Two o’clock. Hope I’ll see you.”

Chandler walked away thoughtfully. He had no real intention of going there, but something in Hsi’s attitude suggested more than a ball game; after a quick and poor lunch he decided to go.

The field was a dirty playground, scuffed out of what had probably once been an attractive campus. The players were ten-year-olds, of the mixture of hair colors and complexions typical of the islands. Chandler was puzzled. Surely even the wildest baseball rooter wouldn’t go far out of his way for this, and yet there was an audience of at least fifty adults watching the game. And none seemed to be related to the ballplayers. The Little Leaguers played grave, careful ball, and the audience watched them without a word of parental encouragement or joy.

Hsi approached him from the shadow of the school building. “Glad you could make it, Chandler. No, no questions. Just watch.”

In the fifth inning, with the score aggregating around thirty, there was an interruption. A tall, red-headed man glanced at his watch, licked his lips, took a deep breath and walked out onto the diamond. He glanced at the crowd, while the kids suspended play without surprise. Then the red-headed man nodded to the umpire and stepped off the field. The ballplayers resumed their game, but now the whole attention of the audience was on the red-headed man.

Suspicion crossed Chandler’s mind. In a moment it was confirmed, as the red-headed man raised his hands waist high and clasped his right hand around his left wrist--only for a moment, but that was enough.

The ball game was a cover. Chandler was present at a meeting of what Hsi had called The Society of Slaves, the underground that dared to pit itself against the execs.

Hsi cleared his throat and said, “This is the one. I vouch for him.” And that was startling too, Chandler thought, because all these wrist-circled men and women were looking at him.

“All right,” said the red-headed man nervously, “let’s get started then. First thing, anybody got any weapons? Sure? Take a look--we don’t want any slipups. Turn out your pockets.”

There was a flurry and a woman near Chandler held up a key ring with a tiny knife on it “Penknife? Hell, yes; get rid of it. Throw it in the outfield. You can pick it up after the meeting.” A hundred eyes watched the pearly object fly. “We ought to be all right here,” said the red-headed man. “The kids have been playing every day this week and nobody looked in. But watch your neighbor. See anything suspicious, don’t wait. Don’t take a chance. Holler ‘Kill the umpire!’ or anything you like, but holler. Good and loud.” He paused, breathing hard. “All right, Hsi. Introduce him.”