The blacks were carved in miru wood, Polynesian kings and warrior knights with warclubs, stubby tiki-bishops. The whites were whalers, missionaries, a merchant-king. He handed the opposing queens to Mitch.

The white queen was a nordic nude of oak, with a faint pout. She stood hands on hips, imperiously. She was a royal tramp and she breathed sex. On her coiffure sat an intricate couronne de tiare, studded with bits of mother-of-pearl. It was a little askew.

The black was a dusky, slender Tahitian girl, regarding him from under long tresses, as if caught showering in a waterfall. She wore no crowns: the crown was her hair, and her royalty was in all of the lines of her body.

Mitch compared them. The Polynesian queen was delightful, but on-the-nose, stereotyped, unsophisticated. The white queen was off-beat, raucous, alive. Mitch handed them back. “You did the white?”

“Thank you, but no.” Taarii had carved her. His model was perhaps a Swedish tourist glimpsed in the Royal Tahitian restaurant, perhaps a French Army wife, even Taarii did not remember. She had lived within the oak, his fingers felt her there and cut her out.

Jean-Paul put the chess set back into the drawer. “So we have from a tiny fare in Vairao, at the end of the world on Tahiti-iti, a genius authentique, n’est-ce pas? A mahoo, like Michaelangelo. In Renaissance Rome, the Pope would steal him. Here, what shall we do with him? Show his work on a stand outside Quinn’s?”

He stooped suddenly and slid back a holly plank in the cabin sole. “Eh bien, for you!” Between floorboards and steel skin was a compartment. “For pot, and other secret things,” explained Jean-Paul. He drew out a figure wrapped in a rag. He uncovered it.

It was a two-foot-high carving of Mahura, laughing gaily, her pareu low on her hips and her breasts bare. It no more resembled the carved tourist-maidens on Rue Paul Gauguin than the Venus de Milo resembled a plaster statue in a Rome curio shop. It was carved in miru, hand-oiled. It seemed warm to the touch.

“It’s too much!” protested Mitch.

“He wants for you to have it. And he cannot risk keeping it here.”

At first Mitch thought that he meant the humidity would crack it. Jean-Paul, smiling faintly, turned up the kerosene lamp. Deep shadows swayed on the beams. “Study it more closely.” Mitch inspected the carving under the flickering light. Suddenly he put on the glasses dangling from his neck. “Jesus,” he breathed.

Scribed minutely in the grain, at the corners of the laughing eyes, around the throat, at the base of the bursting breasts, were lines of age. Mahura, like all Polynesians, would probably wear them too soon. Even in the soft light the breasts seemed suddenly to sag and the laughing face turn desperate, a skull glimpsed in the dark.

Xanadu creaked against a line. He shivered. “He’s jealous?” he murmured.