Aaron Elkins: Where there's a will

“No, we were just thinking about it.”

“Great. How about if I join you?”

“Well, sure,” Gideon said, puzzled. He and John were scheduled to be deposed by Fukida the next morning at CIS. What couldn’t wait until then? And dinner? Why the sudden sociability?

“Um, fine, Ted. We’ll wait for you. We’re at Hawaii Calls, in the resort.”

Fukida heard the ambiguity in his voice and laughed, rather merrily for him. “Ah, don’t sound so worried. My wife’s in Honolulu this week. I just thought it’d be nice to have some company, and eat some decent food, too. See you in a few minutes.”

“Fine.”

“Oh, also… there’s somebody I’d like you to meet.” And with an improbable final happy chuckle he hung up.

“HE’S got something up his sleeve, that’s all I know,” Gideon said. “He was chuckling.”

“Chuckling?” John said. “There’s something wrong there. Snicker, I could see. Sneer, for sure. But chuckle? Whoa, this looks bad. I’m telling you, Teddy can be… Teddy can be…” The words trailed off. He was staring into space, apparently at nothing. “… He can be …”

“John, what is it?” Julie asked.

But John was at a loss for words in the most literal sense of the phrase. He had jumped up, knocking over his chair, and all he could do was point.

Gideon turned to see Fukida coming toward them through the restaurant with an old man wearing a captain’s hat with faded gold braid, a yellow T-shirt with some kind of logo on it, and rumpled khakis. Not much taller than Fukida, he had the look of an old rake, bearded and pony-tailed, with a black patch over one eye and a rolling limp. When they got closer, Gideon was able to read the T-shirt logo: Old Fishermen Never Die, They Just Smell That Way.

“Hello, everybody,” Fukida said, grinning.

John, still staring at the old man, found his voice again. “Mr. T! How did you… we thought you were… we were sure you were.. .”

“Well, as you can see, I’m not,” the old man said. “I’m hale and hearty and crabbier than ever. It’s nice to see you, boy.”

“And this is Gideon Oliver,” Fukida said, “the one I’ve been telling you about.”

The old man laughed delightedly. “Oh, yeah. You’ve been working on my case, I hear.”

As he got to his feet, Gideon’s mind was whirling at top speed, teeming with what seemed to be impossibilities. Who was this guy supposed to be? Could he actually be Magnus Torkelsson, whose body, after all, was never positively identified? But if so, whose burned body had been left in the hay barn? Or could it be… what was his name, Andreas, the oldest brother, who had supposedly died decades ago? But if so, what did “you’ve been working on my case” mean?

“You’re-you’re Magnus Torkelsson?” he asked, choosing the less improbable impossibility.

The old man threw a glance at Fukida and laughed, both of them looking pleased with themselves. “Magnus? No, I’m not Magnus.” He sat down at the table. “Me, I’m Torkel.”

Gideon was flabbergasted. “You can’t be Torkel. I examined your remains myself,” he said stupidly. “I identified you from your right foot. It’s in a… it’s in a box at the Kona police station.”

“Oh, so that’s where it is.” Smiling, he pulled his right cuff up above his white sock and rapped with his knuckles on the almost-flesh-colored plastic shell that substituted for his right lower leg.

He had seen the lights when the Grumman was fifty feet above the surface of the lagoon, he told them, but he hadn’t known what they were-a pair of whale-oil lanterns hung on posts at the front ends of two dugout canoes that had been night-fishing for rockfish and rays along the reef. Four men altogether, they had come from Tiku, the nearest inhabited island, and they had been flabbergasted when the plane fell without warning out of the sky and plowed itself into the water within a few hundred feet of them.

The last thing he remembered from that night was the wrenching screech of the wing shearing off as it hit the water. The next thing was waking up in a pandanus-roofed hut two, or possibly four, days later-he had never figured out their language well enough to know for sure. But what he did know for sure was that they had paddled to the downed plane before it sank. They had found the pilot dead and Torkel unconscious, with his foot caught inextricably in the twisted metal under the console. Using the tools they had brought for gutting and quartering the rays, they had taken his leg off at the knee, staunched the blood with a tourniquet made from his shirt, and taken him to Tiku.

There, with the stump bound up in pandanus leaves that had been soaked in an evil-smelling poultice, he slowly recovered, although one eye was damaged beyond repair. He remained on Tiku for five weeks, leaving with the first people to call there during his stay-a Japanese scientific team studying the effects of ocean currents on intertidal marine life. They had taken him to Tarawa, from where he’d gone first to Australia, then to Fiji, and then, a year after the plane crash, to the island of Moorea, part of French Polynesia. And there he’d stayed, living a lonely and isolated life, carving furniture and drums from the local milo and kamani woods, until he met and married a beautiful French widow, his “trophy wife” (she was seventy-one).

After that he’d given up the furniture shop, bought a boat (she was rich as well as beautiful), and set himself up in the fishing charter business, which he still worked at two or three days a week whenever he felt like it.

“And that’s about it,” he said. “The story of my life. Never for one minute did I regret leaving Hawaii and the ranch behind. The best decision I ever made.”

“Is that a heck of a story, or what?” Fukida said with a delighted, almost proprietary air. “I’ve been on some pretty strange cases, but that has to be a first.”

“It’s a first for me, too,” Gideon said slowly, still struggling to absorb what he’d just heard. “It’s the first time I ever identified a living man from his skeletal remains.” He couldn’t help laughing. “It’s probably a first for the science of forensic anthropology.”

Torkel guffawed. He was really enjoying himself. “I never would have come back either, but then I read about what happened to my sister, and I knew it just had to have something to do with what happened back then, and the will and all, and I figured I owed it to her to come back and finally straighten things out”-he sobered-“and do what I could to help the police find out who killed her.”

“And Mr. Torkelsson has been very helpful,” Fukida said. “What he said jibed right down the line with what Felix told me.”

“Were you surprised that it was Axel, Mr. Torkelsson?” Julie asked.

Torkel leaned back in his chair, lifted his cap, smoothed down his lank gray hair, and screwed the cap back on. Cap’n Jack’s Charters, it said in faded gold braid. “Not really. The boy always seemed like a little apple-polisher to me. ‘Yes, Uncle Torkel, no, uncle Torkel.’ But I never knew until today that anybody tried to kill me, though. That was some surprise.”

They hadn’t thought to order food until well into Torkel’s account, and now the waitress and a busboy showed up to remove their salads and set out the main courses. Since no one had wanted to interrupt his narrative by studying the menu, they’d all followed the waitress’s recommendation: blackened tuna in a soy-mustard dressing.

Once the luscious-smelling plates were set in front of them, however, they seemed to realize how hungry they were, so for a few minutes they simply shoveled the food in, limiting their conversation, such as it was, to little more than appreciative grunts.