Kanani only shook her head. Lett gave her time. He refilled his rum. Eventually, she sighed. “They have a brothel here,” she said. “Well, okay, not so much a brothel but a bungalow they have set aside. Near the Main House.”

“The same place you live.”

She nodded.

“Is it for anyone?”

“No. I think just for important visitors.”

Lett thought of those men coming off the boat in Hilo and swaggering into fancy sedans. “You work there.”

“Uh-huh. Your friend Selfer gave me the duty.”

“Of course. I bet he really smoothed it over.”

“Oh, he’s one smoothie. One sharpie, too. He says I’ll run the show. Won’t have to do all the dirty work.” Kanani added a bitter chuckle. “It’s why I never invited you, I guess.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. I understand. They want to see what we can do, is all. Each of us in our own way.”

Kanani looked away, toward the tops of the palms and crooked trees. “Where did it go?”

“What, the shipment? Here, basically,” Lett said. He wasn’t going to lie. She perked up, so he continued. “We followed the trucks back this way, but they turned off close to camp. I didn’t see where. We were crammed in the back.”

Kanani’s mouth formed an O. She tapped at her chin. “They got some kine underground complex here. Right? Tunnels at the very least.”

“Yes. I’ve been down there. It’s where I started my treatment. They have rooms. I came out a stairway, just a hatch above ground like a pillbox.

“They must have several ways in. There must be other entrances, exits, depending on your clearance.” Kanani nodded at that. “They could even stretch on into island, into caves.”

Lett didn’t like the thought of all those tunnels merging into earthen caverns, leading ever deeper inland, a maze without a map. He buried the sickening thought away like he’d done so many times before, but another one came rushing up at him from the deepest caverns of his memory: the sight of a dead boy near the front in France. A team of GIs was pulling his bloated little body from a well. Why the damn well? Was he trying to save himself? Use it for cover? Lett would never know. He shook off the memory, took a deep breath.

He searched his mind for something he could know. There was one thing, he now realized. He recalled his first, gut reaction in Hilo when he noticed how heavy that load was. Gold, he’d thought, a dirty word. And then Frankie, and . . . Kanani. They’d come to him like links in a chain, the chain now attached to an orb he was polishing in his mind. It was blurry at first, but he kept polishing, slowly, all without looking at it. Without looking at Kanani, either. Then he looked. It was crystal goddamn clear.