The Man Unconquerable

A prim accountant in starched collars, heir to a Polynesian lagoon that glitters with black-lipped oysters, sails south on a windjammer whose sails bruise the sky like paper hearts; the horizon smells of copra and phosphorus. On the atoll he finds ledgers bleeding salt-water, a chapel organ warped by monsoons, a schooner’s ribs half-buried in coral grit, and a half-caste girl who counts pearls by moonlight as if each orb were a sin she might one day expiate. Between tide and taboo he unravels a ledger of smuggled arms, a vanished missionary, a copra fire that still burns in the lungs of every island elder, and a curse whispered by a leper who once wore the deceased uncle’s ring. The deeper he dives after nacre the more he surfaces with blood on his cufflinks; every oyster opens on a mirror that shows him wearing the same ruthless grin his uncle wore in the only faded photograph left in the plantation office. When the church bell that was salvaged from a wreck tolls at equinox, the lagoon answers with a tsunami of silt, and the inherited empire—boats, divers, shell-sorting sheds—slides into the trench where phosphor fish glow like verdicts. What remains is a single imperfect pearl, a woman wrapped in a wet sarong, and a man whose starched morality has been ironed into something as pliable, and as dangerous, as damp currency.