THE LAST SAVANNA Read online

  Bruiser doesn’t care from that. It’s a job. “Sylvia was nice to everyone,” he says. “You know how office people they look down on the rest of us? Sometimes they’re friendly just to pretend they ain’t ho’o kano. But Sylvia she wasn’t like that. When my Auntie Gracie passed last month, Sylvia she come the service…One time she went to Maui she bring me back mangoes right off her friend’s tree –”

  “She had a friend in Maui?”

  TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES will get you to Maui from Oahu on Island Air. A lovely view of the sapphire ocean, past the translucent aqua of Molokai Reef, the longest and most pristine coral reef north of Australia, then over the magnificent National Humpback Whale Sanctuary, then Penguin Banks, the richest feeding ground in the Pacific, and you land in Los Angeles only they call it Kahului. So Maui isn’t the green garden it used to be unless green to you means money.

  Because lots and lots of money was made building these huge concrete hotels and condominiums casting their dark shadows across the spindly beach. Shopping centers, fancy boutiques, chain restaurants and multi-lane highways going off in all directions and at night there’s all the three hundred dollar hookers you could want and any kind of drug you can imagine. Like Reagan used to say when he shilled for General Electric before he became president and shilled for big money, Progress is our most important product.

  One thing Reagan did say certainly applies to Hawaii: Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

  But there’s nothing wrong with being a hooker. The wrong politicians commit is pretending that they’re not. And while a whore actually gives you something for your money, a politician just takes your money and screws you in a different way.

  Sylvia’s friend Angie lived in a ramshackle plank house up a dirt road in an area where due to the present recession everything hadn’t been torn down yet to make condos. She was slight and pretty and blinked a lot to hide her tears, wiping them onto the short cotton skirt she wore with a skimpy halter top, but clearly at the moment she wasn’t any more interested in sex than I was.

  “Sylvia grew up on Kauai,” Angie said. “She and I were roommates at Bates, but after that I came home to Maui and she stayed on the mainland, was working in Boston, came out here to visit me last May…” Angie paused. “If only I hadn’t invited her…but she decided to stay here and got a job right away – can you imagine it in these times, as Maui correspondent for the Post – that’s the kind of person Sylvia was – could do anything she set her mind to-”

  “Except stay safe,” I said, feeling mean for saying it.

  She sniffed. “After three months they moved her to Honolulu as an investigative reporter. You know,” she looked at me pleadingly, “she almost didn’t go?”

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t like Honolulu, said she might as well live in New Jersey…” Angie turned away. “Oh what a horrible accident.”

  I learned long ago never tell anyone anything till you’re sure where they’re coming from. “An investigative reporter, that could have made her lots of enemies, yeah?”

  “Oh no. Everybody loved Sylvia.”

  Now I never heard of anyone everybody loved, but I kept quiet on that. “When you saw her last it was when, two weeks ago, did she talk what she was doing?”

  “Oh yes,” a brief flash of happy agreement. “She was doing research on a big series the Post had scheduled…She was really excited. ‘I’m finally really getting my teeth into something –’ that’s what she said.”

  “A series on what?”

  “This huge project that’s being planned, billions of dollars…monster wind turbines all over Maui, Lanai and Molokai, blasting a billion-dollar cable through the Whale Sanctuary. It’s supposed to bring power from all the other islands to Oahu.”

  I’d heard a little about this gargantuan taxpayer-subsidized scam but hadn’t paid attention, thinking no one could be so stupid as to actually do it. “So she was for it?”

  “Oh no. ‘The more I learn about it,’ Sylvia told me, ‘the worse it smells. And when I learn enough I’m going to break it wide open.’ It was a perfect example, she said, of why Money magazine rated Hawaii the most politically corrupt state in the country, and even worse than Russia. Those were about the last words she ever said to me.”

  “When was that?”

  “On the phone, two nights before she died.”

  “What else she say?”

  “That a lot of the other media had been ‘bought’ – that was the word she used – by the developers of this project, or they were part of the fat money system that’s run Hawaii since the conquest…”

  “Who’s behind this thing?”

  “Behind it? Oh everybody who has lots of money and wants more: the Governor, IEEC, Lanai Land Corporation, an outfit called Ecology Profits, which is a bunch of investment bankers, Sylvia said, masquerading as environmentalists. Plus WindPower and all the other mainland industrial wind companies living on billions of taxpayer ripoffs. That’s what she said.”

  Lanai Land Corporation was one of the colossal corporations founded on the holdings of Protestant missionary families I mentioned earlier, that had stolen most of the Hawaiians’ land decades ago and made billions on it since, mostly on sugar, bananas, pineapples and subdivisions. IEEC was Island Electric Energy Company, universally hated for its bullying monopolistic ways, bad management, and the nation’s highest electricity bills.

  “But the government,” I pointed out, “doesn’t have any money anymore.”

  Angie half-smiled. “That doesn’t stop the Washington pork, though, does it?”

  I scratched my head. I do that when I’m thinking. And as a result get lots of dandruff in my eyes. “What’s it called, this thing?”

  “You don’t know?” She widened her eyes as if I was being unnecessarily stupid. “Big Wind and the Interisland Cable.”