Island Books
Riddle of the robe

By Ann M. Sato

Is the Chinese Robe a bad-luck talisman? A priceless artifact? Is it a tool of evil or a tool of God?

Should Adam Mariner insist that it be returned to China even if he has to carry it there himself? Should he sell it to the highest bidder to recoup the money he's lost in his quest for the robe's origins? Or should he just get the cursed thing out of his life as fast as he can before it destroys him?

Scott Stone's odd little thriller, set mostly on Maui and O'ahu, sketches the story of a Tao master's robe — fashioned from the finest silk, woven with silver and iron and embroidered with sacred symbols and figures — that is stolen by bandits during the Ming dynasty.

Four hundred years later, it finds it way to toney Gump's department store in Waikiki, and from there into the hands of Mariner, a rough-hewn Vietnam vet turned devout Roman Catholic who has settled into a peaceful, productive life on Maui.

Mariner — born out of wedlock to a penniless Island woman and a sailor father, named Adam because he is his mother's first, Mariner because his father was in the Navy, rootless and raised by foster parents — is an Everyman.

He's had some hard knocks, but he's found his center in his faith, his life's work as a sought-after agricultural consultant, and the other half of his heart in a matching Everywoman called Annie. (She's one of those impossibly patient, wise, resilient people that seem only to live in books, the sort of person we wish we could be.)

He is content and at peace until the robe, secreted away in a trunk, begins to lure him into a nightmarish effort to uncover its mysteries and return it to its rightful home, the Tao monastery at T'ai Shan in China. Stone explains in a foreward, by the way, that the story is fiction but the robe, known as the Pei-chi Tao-pa'o, is real and some of the circumstances are drawn from fact.

Stone leaves much of the robe's history untold; it's not even clear how the one-of-a-kind artifact got from Mariner's father to Mariner himself. Is this purposeful — Stone allowing the reader to fill in the blanks, imagining the trail of tragedies left in the robe's wake? Is he planning a sequel or an expanded version of the manuscript?

The story has the feel of an idea fleshed out, but not completely, not to the edges of its possiblities.There are paths left tantalizingly unexplored. One might be a sort of "Red Violin" tale about how the robe passed from hand to hand, and how it affected those who touched it. Mariner's life story, only hinted at here, seems as though it would make interesting reading, as well. And the sometime narrator of the story, a free-lance writer who tries to help Mariner, seems to be a character worth exploring.

Stone is a fascinating character himself, a Volcano-based writer, author of previous locally published books on Living Treasures of Hawai'i and on Pearl Harbor and the Edgar Award-winning 1969 thriller, "The Dragon's Eye," a veteran of clandestine operations in Vietnam and Korea and former reporter and foreign correspondent.

Whether he plans to revisit this story, we'll have to wait and see. In any case, "The Chinese Robe" is a good, quick read. It explores some important questions not usually the purview of suspense fiction: about the nature of faith, and the depth of self-delusion. Even if it leaves us with questions, they're questions we enjoy pondering. And perhaps Stone will someday tell us more about the mysterious robe and the intriguing Adam Mariner.