He sat back expectantly, waiting for their reactions.
Gideon wasn’t sure what his own was. Was he surprised? No, not really; not after the questions he and John had been raising the last few days. Did that mean he’d been expecting this? No, he couldn’t say that either. He’d known that a lot of the Torkelssons’ story was bogus, but he couldn’t say that he’d explicitly formed the theory that they were all involved in the switched identities. At the same time, he was conscious of a curious sense of anti-climax, as if he’d been anticipating something more, something worse, but what that might be he wasn’t sure.
Aside from that, did he feel exploited by them, made a fool of? Well, yes. They’d trundled him off to a humid, fly-infested atoll to do his thing when they’d already known perfectly well who was in that plane. On the other hand, he couldn’t deny that he’d enjoyed the day, and Waikiki had been a pleasant interlude, so what was there to be angry about?
There was one other thing. When John had suggested visiting Dagmar at home that morning, hadn’t Axel said she’d be in the hospital till three in the afternoon, two hours from now? But obviously, she wasn’t. What was that all about?
But mostly he was confused, wondering once more why, if they knew about the Torkel-Magnus switch and wanted to keep it to themselves, they would have encouraged him, first to go to Maravovo, and then to examine the autopsy report. Surely they would have realized he might come up with the truth about the identities. Had they really thought he’d fail to notice the chopped-off toes?
John’s reaction was more defined. His face had darkened, his well-fleshed cheeks had flattened, and his chin had settled almost down to his chest. He was angry and he was hurt. “All of them knew?” he asked. “You’re including Axel in that?”
“Oh, yeah. They were all in on it, every last one of them.”
“Hell.”
“Well, listen to the story before you get too tough on him,” Fukida said. “Here’s the way they say it happened.”
The first part of Dagmar’s deposition was accurate, she had said. Torkel and Magnus had gone to the hay barn after dinner to put in some work, and there they had been attacked by two gunmen. That was so. But everything after that had been a lie. There had been no telephone call from Torkel pretending to be Magnus. Instead, he’d shown up at the house, dazed and cradling his bloodied hand. He’d explained to his sister that Magnus had been murdered, but he himself had managed to escape into the darkness, although one of the shots they’d fired after him had gone through his hand. He’d hidden on the roof of a nearby shed until well after they’d left, then walked the half-mile of dirt track back home.
“Who shot him?” Gideon asked. “Did he tell her, or was it just ‘them’ again?”
“She says he saw them, but he was pretty sure he didn’t know them. Had no idea who sent them. They just showed up out of nowhere. Two guys, both white, both on the small side, both with revolvers-”
“Revolvers?” John interrupted. “She said ‘revolvers’? Not just ‘pistols’ or ‘guns’?”
Fukida frowned. “She said ‘revolvers,’ but I’m not sure she knows the difference, or that Torkel was quick enough to see what they were carrying in the dark. She probably just meant handguns. Why, what’s the big deal?”
“Forget it,” John said. “Go ahead.” But Gideon caught a little tilt of his head that told him that he knew something they didn’t and was reserving it for later.
“Anyway,” Fukida said, absently getting a couple of thick rubber bands from a cup on his desk and slipping them over his wrist, “Dagmar telephones Inge, and Inge runs right over, and they doctor him up a little and try to tell him that the best thing to do is to go to the police right then and there, but he doesn’t want to hear it. The guy is in shock, and he’s scared to death they’re coming after him, too, and all he wants to do is get the hell out of there. Only where’s he supposed to go?”
“He had no idea who they were or why they were there, and yet he was positive they were coming back for him?” Gideon said. “Doesn’t that seem a little strange to you?”
“Guy was in shock,” Fukida repeated with a shrug. “That makes you strange.”
John held his counsel, looking more inscrutable by the minute.
Fukida continued: “At that point, they call the others over-Hedwig, and Axel, and the one that lives in Honolulu now-”
“Felix,” Gideon said.
“Felix, right. Felix the Cat. And they hold a war council. Everyone tells Torkel the best thing for him to do is to go straight to the police-”
“So they say now,” John said.
“So they say now,” Fukida agreed.
But nobody could convince him, Fukida continued. They couldn’t shake his certainty that he was next on the list. They finally gave up and, putting their heads together, came up with what would be their plan. Torkel would flee, heading for the tiny landing strip on the privately owned island of Tarabao, where Hedwig’s ex-husband, an osteopath turned beachcomber, now lived, and there he would stay until it was safe to return; they hoped, with luck, that it would be a matter of a few weeks or months. The idea of exchanging identities with Magnus was all Torkel’s. They had argued vociferously against it So they say now, Gideon thought.
– but had finally gone reluctantly along when they were unable to sway him. The leaving of the ring, the removal of the toes, and the burning of the hay barn were cover-ups following from that. And they decided that, if it was going to be done at all, it would be best if the responsibility for the deception was shared by everyone. So each niece or nephew had taken on a specific task. Inge and Hedwig had gone back to the hay barn, where Hedwig set the fire and Inge had forced the ring on his finger and removed the offending toes.
“What’d she use?” John asked.
“She used a Swiss garlic-chopper,” Fukida said.
“Come again?”
“A Swiss garlic-chopper. Like a miniature cleaver. With an old branding-iron paperweight as a mallet.”
John glanced at Gideon. “Score one for you, Doc.”
Gideon modestly shrugged it off. “Easy when you know how. I wonder what she did with them-with the toes.”
“I asked her that,” Fukida said. “They had pigs at the time. She said she tossed them in the trough.”
Gideon shuddered. “Tough lady.”
Axel’s job had been to drive the fainting Torkel to the airport, get the plane out of the hangar and gassed up, and get his uncle into it to await the arrival of the pilot. Felix had stayed the night with Dagmar to provide moral support and assistance once the fire and the body were discovered and the police and fire departments got into the act.
As soon as the Grumman had taken off, everyone but Felix had gone back to their homes. The spouses-Malani and Keoni-had been kept in the dark and fed the same story that the police were shortly to hear. Torkel was to call Inge the next day to let them know he was safe, but of course that never happened.
Fukida, now chewing a couple of sticks of spearmint gum, tipped his chair back and clasped his hands behind his neck, signifying that he had come to the end.
“It all fits,” John said half to himself. “It all goddam fits.”
“I don’t quite get it,” Gideon said. “Were they ever going to tell the police what really happened, or did Torkel plan on being Magnus for the rest of his life?”
“At the time, I don’t think they had it all worked out,” Fukida said. “They weren’t exactly doing a lot of long-range planning. They were all scared, not just Torkel.”
“And what about the wills?” John asked sourly. “Don’t tell me it didn’t occur to them that they were whole lot better off if Torkel was supposedly dead, gone, and out of the picture, and Magnus’s will would be the one that counted. They all profited from the switch.”
“I don’t know. They say that didn’t have anything to do with it.”