Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"They were arguing," Buddy said.

"The man raped his mother," I said. "What was there to argue about?"

Around this time I found Rose in my office looking at a dictionary. I asked her what word she was looking up.

She hesitated and then said, "Rapture."

Her innocent literal-mindedness made her a bad liar. Why had she concealed from me the real word she had searched for and found on that same page? The word "rape" was all over the hotel.

Trey, the assistant barman, told me that Amo and Madam Ma had had lunch and that Chip had not been present. The rape had occurred after lunch. Chip had surprised Amo in the act and then left the hotel the way he had come. In the earlier version of the story he had been chasing Amo, but the kitchen staff said he left alone and that Amo had left later. Why had they left separately, and why no chase? Our phone records showed that

Madam Ma had reported the rape later that evening. She had also called Ferretti's wife, whom she knew, looking for Chip.

"There was a beef. They was fighting," the woman said. "Your kid went off on my husband. They left, I don't know where."

Instead of looking for her son, Madam Ma went to Honolulu Police headquarters and filed a complaint, reporting in detail that Amo Ferretti had raped her, that her son had stumbled upon the crime, and that Ferretti had threatened to kill him.

There were discrepancies in the exact times, but certain facts were not in dispute: Chip had been to the hotel, seen the rape, and left; Amo had been seen leaving later; Madam Ma had not reported the rape until after she had spoken to Mrs. Ferretti.

"I wanted to find out where he was so the police could arrest him," Madam Ma said, explaining why she had not reported the rape earlier.

But the complaint she filed late in the evening was explicit. The time of the incident was given as 2:25 P.M. She was taken to the hospital and examined. The report was made public — "evidence of bruising in the genital area," and "traces of semen were found," and more of equally grotesque clinical descriptions on page two of the family newspaper. What vindicated the publication of these unseemly facts was that justice had been served, and the murder charge had been reduced. Even so, there was general disapproval that a son had been given any jail time at all for killing his mother's rapist.

Talk about the case finally ceased, but Madam Ma was still on my mind. As a resident of the hotel, she was visible every day. I knew her movements. She said nothing. Chip was in jail, Amo was dead, she was her old antagonistic self, writing her insincere column. If she knew anything more about the case, she wasn't saying.

Of course, the hotel staff knew everything. The Honolulu police had interviewed them, yet shrewdly they answered only the questions they were asked. In the police station they did not volunteer any information; they were unspontaneous and monosyllabic. With me they were more forthcoming, however, especially when they saw that Madam Ma had begun to order them around. Sweetie, as head of Housekeeping, supplied me with informants.

"We saw the guy Ferretti all the time on the fifth floor, and in the room," Pacita said. And Marlene, her cleaning partner, said, "If you clean someone's room, you know all about them. The wastebasket is full of secrets. The bathroom too."

Amo regularly visited Madam Ma in her room. On the days he replaced the flowers in the lobby, Amo stayed for lunch — it was part of his contract — and Madam Ma joined him. Usually they drank on her lanai afterward, and Room Service had a record of those orders. Housekeeping did the rest — disposed of the bottles, picked up the glasses — and part of performing their job was to wander the corridors, tidying, vacuuming, trying doors and entering unoccupied rooms. On the days of Amo's visits, Madam Ma's door stayed locked, with the Do Not Disturb sign hung on the

knob. Later, the Please Service This Room sign went up and the sheets were changed.

"If you make the bed, you know everything," Marlene said.

Madam Ma was one of the strongest women I had ever known. She looked birdlike but she was a bully. There was a reason for Marlene to confide in me. One day she had broken a glass in Madam Ma's bathroom. To punish her, Madam Ma insisted that Marlene pick up the bits of glass with her bare hands, and she stood over her, scolding. She hectored Rose, she nagged me, she bossed the staff. How was it possible that she had been overpowered by Amo?

Simply, she had not been. Amo was her lover. She had been in control the entire time. The staff knew every detail: how she was dressed on the afternoons when they were together, the pink negligee, the high- heeled slippers. "She looked beautiful those days." And they had games, fantasies that she scripted, that they acted out, that were audible in the adjoining rooms. After the drinking, she slipped into the bedroom to get ready, and Amo entered the bedroom from the lanai as Madam Ma admired herself in the mirror. She saw the man's menacing reflection.

Hairy Amo slipped the negligee from her shoulders, pushed her to her knees, and took her from behind. Her greatest pleasure came later, when Amo was so frenzied he ignored her pleas. He took her roughly on the floor of the room, and that was rapture. And though their endearments could be heard afterward, on the day in question they were interrupted by Chip, who drew his own conclusions and saw the lovemaking as rape.

In the annals of true crime there is no darker comedy than that of a murder gone horribly wrong — the blundering blood-smeared killer with sticky hands, frantic in the front seat, as the corpse in the back seat rises up bloated with gas and seems to come alive, protesting with assertive farts. That Hawaii story was plenty for most people and was macabre enough to satisfy them and make them tune out. But there were sequels. This story kept changing as time passed.

The principals, Chip and Amo, were gay. Amo, the older, soon-to-be- bludgeoned one, was known to boast, "He's my bitch." So it was a gay man killing his presumptuous lover, a crime not unknown in Hawaii, except in this case the dead and gaseous gay Amo had been married, with a wife and two kids in Kailua. People said, "I pity the kids." And "What kind of wife puts up with a husband like that?"

"A crime of passion," the papers reported when it was revealed that the dead man had been caught in the Hotel Honolulu raping the mother of the man who killed him. In the next version, I learned from Housekeeping that what looked like rape had been sex play: the gay man's gay lover was having a steamy affair with the gay man's divorced mother, the prominent Honolulu columnist Madam Ma.

And when I thought I had had enough of the affair of Chip and Amo and Madam Ma, there was more. Soon after the trial had ended and he was imprisoned in Honolulu, Chip sent a message through his lawyer that he did not wish to receive visits from his mother. Given the fact that what had looked like rape had in reality been rapture, and that he was being two-timed by his lover with the connivance of his mother, it seemed unexpected for Chip to keep the woman away. He did not have another friend in Hawaii, which was his whole world.

"He paranoid," Keola said. And, watering plants in Paradise Lost, Peewee agreed. I liked this, the pair of them in bare feet, discussing paranoia.

"What does 'paranoid' mean?" I asked.

"He freaking out," Keola said.

Madam Ma, still resident in the hotel, was not downcast by her son's refusal to see her. With the trial over, her newspaper column reappeared in the Advertiser, and the only difference was that her son, who had previously been a friendly feature in her writing, no longer appeared. There was nothing in her column except the trivial babble of restaurant openings, celebrity sightings, and the free weekends she spent as a guest of public relations. And repeated mention of the Hotel Honolulu, "Waikiki's multistory secret."