The Island

by Peter Benchley

  “Two thousand people are missing.”

  “Fifty thousand people get killed every year on the highways. I don’t get your point.”

  “My point is,” Maynard said, “boating has become a huge sport, or pastime, or industry, or whatever you want to call it.”

  “So has skateboarding.”

  “Yeah, but two thousand people don’t disappear off skateboards. There’s something going on, and I think it’d make a hell of a good ‘Trends’ cover. How come these boats are vanishing? Where are they vanishing to? How dangerous is it to cruise the islands? What can you do—”

  Hiller interrupted “Speaking of covers, have you come up with a broad to put on the fall-fashions cover?”

  “You mean a celebrity?”

  “We have reason to believe that Newsweek will be doing Diane von Furstenberg.”

  “And?”

  “And she is one smart-looking lady. I want you to find somebody just as good. If a guy goes to a newsstand, I don’t want him to be faced with a choice between Diane von Furstenberg and a gargoyle. Our whole issue will be down the tubes.”

  “So, get Farrah Fawcett-Majors and roll her up in Saran Wrap.”

  “That’s not helpful, Blair.”

  “Leonard, I’m trying to sell you on a story I think is important. You’re always after me to come up with what you call big story ideas.”

  “Yeah, but fun ones. Problems they’ve got plenty of in the front of the book.”

  “This story will reach people. It affects a hell of a lot of our readership. It’s got romance; it’s about the part of the world they used to call the Spanish Main. It’s got hard news—a possibility, anyway—and at the same time it’s a pure ‘Trends’ story.”

  “Boats don’t sell magazines.”

  “Because they don’t have tits?”

  “Forget it. Look, this story would cost too much time and too much money, and there’s probably a simple explanation for the whole damn thing.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like . . . I don’t know. That’s your department. Has the Times done anything on it?”

  “I’ll check.” Maynard pressed, sensing that Hiller was weakening. “If there is something on it, can I do the story?”

  “Query the Atlanta bureau.”

  “The Coast Guard is in Washington.”

  “Coast Guard? All right, Washington, then.” Now Hiller was wearying of the argument.

  “They don’t like to answer queries from the back-of-the-book. You know that. Half of them think they’re Woodward and Bernstein, and the other half are Walter Lippmann.” Maynard stood up. “I’ll check the clips.”

  “Just don’t forget the fashion cover. I want a real dynamite board. Like Jackie Bisset in a wet T-shirt, only high-fashion.”

  “How about Dena Gaines?” Maynard said from the doorway. “Wrapped in whips.”

  On his way back to the office, Maynard stopped by the Today library and signed out folders on “Boats,” “Boating,” and, as an afterthought, “Missing persons” and “Disappearances, mysterious.”

  Dena had already left for her noontime aikido class. Maynard plucked a telephone message from his typewriter, tossed the library clips on his desk, and dialed his wife’s office number.

  “Devon Smith’s office.”

  “Hello, Nancy. It’s Blair Maynard.”

  “Mr. Maynard! How nice to hear from you! How are you?”

  It was the same question Devon’s secretary asked every time he called, posed with the same solicitude, a question loaded with implicit sympathy. What he felt he was really being asked was: How are you surviving without this wonderful woman? Are you bearing up? Isn’t it a shame that she outgrew you? Left you behind?

  Maynard always had to fight the temptation to explain. Devon hadn’t actually left him, except technically, geographically. Their separation (which ninety-three days hence would become a divorce) had been agreed upon tearlessly and relatively amicably. After twelve years of marriage, they had simply concluded that they were traveling different roads to different destinations. In fact, Devon had done the concluding, but Maynard had agreed.

  For the first few years, they had had a common goal: his success. He had been an eager, talented, and ambitious reporter for the Washington Tribune, making $10,000 a year, living in a basement apartment in Georgetown, and enjoying the suspense, the unpredictability, of Washington newspaper work. Every routine story had potential. A traffic ticket could blossom into an enormous political scandal, revealing, say, alcoholism and philandering in the private life of a powerful committee chairman. A plea copped by a low-level white-collar criminal might lead a diligent reporter into a maze of higher-level corruption. (Watergate was still years in the future, but it had its antecedents.)

  Maynard had been seduced away from Washington by his own impatience. Analyzing his future at the Tribune, he saw that if he continued to perform well, in two or three years he might be rewarded with a beat covering a suburban school system. By age thirty, he might be the paper’s Anne Arundel County correspondent.

  Today lured him away from the Tribune with a salary of $15,000 and a job that put him in charge of a major department of the magazine. He was listed on the masthead as a department head. He and Devon were courted by public-relations executives and invited to cocktail parties, dinners, and private screenings. It was a heady time for a man who had just turned twenty-five. If he was no longer required to exercise his reportorial skills (more than half of his stories were filed by bureau reporters), well, that was all right. Now he was a writer—of newsmagazine prose, granted, but he was learning to write tight, lean pieces that told a story quickly and with clarity. He and Devon agreed that after he had had time to hone his skills, he would try to write a novel or a screenplay. A newsmagazine was a terrific training ground, but it wasn’t a career.

  The day after he turned thirty, he was offered the senior editor’s job for the first time. Devon urged him to take it. It was a promotion, it paid more money, and, most important, it would mean change. There was no longer any challenge in writing for the magazine; he could write his whole section in a couple of hours.

  He had argued with her. If he took the editing job, any salary increase would be eaten up by the loss of free-lance income. Senior editors had no time to free-lance. It would mean giving up all hope for a novel or screenplay. Better to stay where he was, make a decent wage for working (in fact) a two-day week, broaden his experience and contacts through free-lance work, absorb ideas that could be used later on.

  Devon was disappointed, but she continued to support and encourage him, to appreciate his free-lance pieces (for they were the work he was proudest of), to help him develop possible story lines for a novel. Not once did she accuse him of settling into a rut of comfortable survival. Not once did she suggest that his novel represented a dream of freedom and fulfillment that he would never attain.

  Their marriage had begun to break up four years ago, though neither of them knew it at the time. Their son, Justin, had entered second grade at the Allen-Stevenson School, and for the first time, he was away from home from eight until four. Devon took a job at an advertising agency and, to her utter surprise, turned out to be a good copywriter, and then, with practice, a brilliant one. When her boss and two other colleagues left the agency to form a new one, they took her with them. Within a year, she was chief copywriter and a partner in the firm. Her annual salary was $50,000, augmented by a bonus of half again as much.

  She loved everything about her work—long hours, hustling new accounts, traveling, entertaining clients, and the challenge of convincing the public to spend money on her products rather than on the competition’s.

  She built herself a world in which she was happy, while Maynard floated through a world of someone else’s making, doing well enough without really doing anything, and not knowing exactly what he wanted to do. He had no particular lust for fame, and contempt for celebrity; He believed in Andy Warhol’s prediction tha
t by the year 2000 everyone in America would be a celebrity for twenty minutes. His one real passion was for history—perhaps, he realized, because of a subconscious dissatisfaction with the present. In his daydreams he lived during an age of discovery (say, the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century), when people did things for the sake of doing them, went places simply because no one had been there before, and lived out (he recalled the quote from a book about the Spanish Main) “. . . a dream of irresponsibility, lethal larkiness and, above all, mobility . . .”

  His dream was Devon’s nightmare. Finally, they agreed, they faced different futures. She asked for no alimony and accepted a token $500 a month in child support.

  “Fine, Nancy,” Maynard said. “Just fine. Devon called?”

  “Yes, sir. She’s at lunch. I know she’ll be mad that she missed you.”

  “Sure. What did she want?” He knew that Devon would have given Nancy the message; she never bothered him without a reason, and there was rarely anything to say that Nancy could not transmit efficiently. For all Maynard knew, Devon was in her office now, but didn’t want to make idle, awkward conversation with him. He knew that she had come to regard him as a part of her past; if he was not actually forgotten, he was stashed at the back of a closet, and consulted, along with baby pictures and college yearbooks, only when nostalgia crept in.

  “She wondered if you could take Justin for a few days. She has to go to Dallas, and—”

  Maynard cut in. “Sure. Fine. Starting when?”

  “Tomorrow. For a week.”

  “Okay. Tell him to take the bus down here, and . . .” He stopped. “No, forget it. ‘Trends’ has been killed for this week. I’ll pick him up at school.”

  Maynard hung up and opened the folders he had brought from the library. Most of the clippings were “trend” pieces, dating back to the mid-1950s, about various stages in the boating boom in the United States. There were stories about boat shows, new developments in ferro-cement hulls, and inflatable runabouts as a tool for coping with the energy crisis. There were short items about the disappearance or sinking of individual boats. But nothing to corroborate the statistics in The Wall Street Journal.

  Then he found a note in an information packet from the Coast Guard. He might have overlooked it if it had not spilled on the floor. It was a Coast Guard bulletin urging yachtsmen to take special precautions when sailing in the Gulf of Mexico, around the Bahamas, and in the Caribbean. And, more helpful to him, a Xerox copy of a 4,000-word wire-service piece titled “Peril on the High Seas—Dawn of a New Age of Danger.”

  He read the piece once quickly and once thoroughly, underlining as he read, and then walked down the hall to Hiller’s office. The door was closed.

  “He’s editing,” Hiller’s secretary said.

  Maynard nodded at the secretary and opened the door.

  Hiller was hunched over his desk, scrawling changes in the margins and between the lines of a story. He looked up, annoyed at the interruption, but when he saw Maynard he smiled and said, “Margaret Trudeau.”

  “What?”

  “For the fashion cover. She’s dynamite! Well connected and well put together. She’s a natural.”

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  “Think about it. That’s all I ask.”

  “Listen, I found something on this boat business. In the clips. There have been six hundred and ten disappearances—even more by now; the piece is a year old. Nobody knows why. The Coast Guard figures maybe fifty foundered—you know, broke up and sank. Another half dozen or dozen they know were heisted.”

  “What do you mean, heisted?”

  “Hijacked. Stolen. Say Mom and Pop are going for a cruise. They can handle the boat themselves on the Inland Waterway, but when they get to Florida and want to go to the Caribbean, they need an extra hand. They stop somewhere and hire a crew—one, maybe two guys, who say they’ll work for free if they can get passage to one of the islands. A couple of days out of Florida, they kill Mom and Pop, dump them overboard, and take the boat.”

  “What for?”

  “Two reasons. They can go up north and sell the boat, forge a bill of sale that says they bought it, or fence it to someone who’ll change the numbers and the papers and resell it. Even if they get a fifth of its value, that could be ten or fifteen thousand bucks. Or they take the boat south and use it for running drugs up from Colombia. They’re known as grasshoppers. Some cruddy old Colombian boat could never get into an East Coast port without being searched, but a clean, U.S.-registered boat returning to its home port—nobody’d stop it. Once they make the drop, these guys take the boat offshore, scuttle it, come back to shore in a dinghy, and wait for another sucker.”

  Hiller said, “Drugs bore the piss out of me.”

  “It isn’t just drugs,” Maynard pressed. “That’s only a dozen boats. Make it a hundred boats! Add that to fifty they think sank by themselves, that still leaves more than 450 boats that have simply vanished. Gone!”

  “The Bermuda Triangle,” Hiller said. “Bigfoot got ’em.”

  “Leonard . . .” Maynard suppressed an impulse to swear. “. . . whatever this thing is, it has screwed up the ethic of the sea. Nobody goes to help a boat in distress any more, because they’re scared they’ll get boarded and Christ-knows-what. A sailboat with two kids on it went down in sight of three fishing boats last July, because no one would help.”

  “So, you tell me. What’s the answer?”

  “I don’t know. All I ask is, let me have a look at it.”

  “I told you: Send a query.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  Hiller said nothing. He fixed his gaze on Maynard, leaned back in his chair, and formed a tent with his fingertips, making a sucking sound with his teeth.

  Maynard thought, He’s trying to look like Clarence Darrow.

  Still without a word, Hiller got up, walked across the room, and shut the door. Returning to his desk, he looked somber. “I suppose this is as good a time as any,” he said, sitting down again.

  “Now what?”

  “Don’t you think it’s time you settled down?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Made peace with yourself.”

  “About what?”

  “What you’re doing here.”

  “I’m earning a living.”

  “And in return?”

  “I do my job.”

  “I agree,” said Hiller. “But that’s all.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you to give me something extra, an enthusiasm, a commitment.”

  “You want me to be enthusiastic about fall fashions? You want me to commit myself to TV Tennis, pinball machines?”

  “Blair, look . . .” Hiller paused. “Christ, this may sound patronizing, but listen anyway. There’s a time when everybody has to come to terms with himself, has to say to himself, ‘This is what I’m good at, I’m not gonna be President of the United States or win the Pulitzer Prize. I’m gonna be the best damn newsmagazine writer there is.’ Or whatever.”

  “Yeah. I’m still looking for ‘whatever.’ ”

  “You’ve found it, and you know it, but you won’t admit it. Something inside you knew it when you turned down this job.” Hiller slapped his desk. “You’re a newsmagazine writer. That’s what you’re good at, and that’s all you’re good at. Maybe ten years from now you’ll win a talent contest and be a movie star, but—”

  Maynard interrupted. “You mean I’m mediocre and I might as well learn to live with it.”

  “No! I mean you’ve found something you can do well, and you should be happy with it, just for what it is. Don’t overreach. You’ll screw everything up.”

  “Yeah. I might even lose my dental plan.” Maynard stood up. “I’m going to Washington.”

  “What’s in Washington?”

  “A Coast Guard guy who looked into this boat business. They pulled him off the job and put him in charge of a bunch of lighthouses. They called him a fear
-monger. I want to talk to him.”

  Hiller said, “You were the one who told me the bureau guys think they’re Woodward and Bernstein. What does this make you?”

  “It’s the weekend. I can do what I want.”

  “Okay. But think about what I said, will you?”

  “You mean about accepting the fact that I’m a loser?”

  “Blair, for Christ’s sake . . .”

  Maynard walked to the door. “I may be a loser, Leonard,” he said. “But if I’m gonna fall on my ass, I might as well make a big splash.”

  C H A P T E R

  3

  They had sailed together, in tandem, for protection as well as company.

  They were partners in an accounting firm in Montclair, New Jersey, one a tax expert, one a specialist in corporate audits. They had been roommates at Wharton, taken their CPA training at the same firm, and worked together for twenty-five years. They had had their boats built by the same man, to identical specifications: a single mast that would carry a main and a jib; two comfortable bunks amidships and two cramped ones forward; a dry cockpit; a simple, reliable auxiliary engine, state-of-the-art communications equipment. The only difference between Burt Lazlo’s Penzance and Walter Burguis’ Pinafore was in interior headroom. Lazlo’s wife, Bella, was six feet tall, while neither Ellen nor Walter Burguis was over five-ten.

  The Burguises and the Lazlos had sailed together every vacation since 1965. They spent weeks selecting a course, learning about port facilities—where you could get ice and water and fuel, where there were showers open to the public, where decent restaurants were—planning side trips to inland historical sites. They tried, as best they could, to leave nothing to chance.

  This year’s trip was their most ambitious, from Miami to Haiti, island-hopping through the Bahamas on the way. As an extra precaution, each boat carried—broken down and hidden in the food locker when they cleared Bahamas customs—a 12-gauge shotgun and fifty rounds of number-four buckshot.

  Twice—once at Eleuthera, once at Crooked Island—they had been approached by wharf rats, young, excessively charming Americans who pleaded for passage south (anywhere south) in return for whatever work needed to be done. But the Lazlos and the Burguises had read the Coast Guard precautions, and they refused.