by Ed Teja
She lifted her glass and peered through it at me. “You have many things to think about.”
“You don’t?”
“I will tell you how I might help clarify things for you. First, I am sure that your friend will understand our relationship if you tell him that so far it is a matter of good sex—and nothing else is certain. Any friend of yours should be wise enough to appreciate that our gonads can lead us into such relationships. Second, tomorrow I am going to find out if it is possible to let you know who my client is, and by extension, as we lawyers love to say, who I am.” I raised my eyebrows. “I promise that, if I can, it won’t be bad news.”
I laughed. “That would be nice.”
“But I need something from you first.”
Everything has a price. “What?”
“Take your time finishing your scotch and have another if it suits you. But then take me back to that sleazy hotel of yours, drag me into your bed and continue what we started last night.”
“I can do that,” I said. “Yes, I can definitely do that, you wicked woman.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ugly Bill showed up right on time the next morning. Bill believes in being punctual and never more so than when a meal is involved.
“Turns out to be no big deal with the gearbox,” he said when I met him in the lobby. “The kid wizard who looked at it claims it's some kind of adjustment. He said he could make it hum with his eyes closed, but I told him I’d pay quicker if he did it with them both wide open.”
The restaurant had just opened, and we went in and ordered our three breakfasts. Once the waiter realized we weren’t waiting for anyone else, he left, and I brought Bill up to date on the hunt for truth in Venezuela. His rather mobile face knotted into a severe frown over the nastier bits of information, María’s brutal death, the assault on Tim, the attack on Ramón and me and so on, but brightened at the story of Victoria’s nick-of-time rescue.
At the end, he asked, “But Maggie still hasn’t called?”
“There was no message as of this morning, and she hasn’t called her contact in Puerto La Cruz either.”
“Damn, Junior, that’s not like Maggie. She takes this kind of mess real serious. That’s why she got you into it in the first place.” Bill managed to talk as he tackled his breakfast, the American Breakfast, they called it, with a ferocity unique in the annals of human history.
I looked at my breakfast, unsure what made it American, unless it was just that Venezuelans seldom eat breakfast.
I picked at my food, admiring Bill’s insistence on taking everything head on, including his food. It wasn’t always an effective strategy, or even the easiest way to get things done, but he could always feel good about his efforts and it kept things simple. His attitude about the current problem reflected that same thinking.
“I say we grab this skinny gringo dude and squeeze him until his head pops like a pimple,” he said, shoving a heaping fork load of egg and pancake into his mouth. “It’s just a suggestion, mind you.”
“I don’t know where to find him,” I pointed out, “and I’d rather find Maggie. I would like to talk to her before I meet Ramón at noon. We need to get the plan in motion.”
“I ain’t been in these waters much lately. How long you figure it would take old Harm to get to Tigrillo and back?”
“It’s a bit over ten miles each way, mate. Pushing her hard, I guess we could get back here in three hours, if you allow an hour for what I think you are thinking.”
He looked at his watch. “Not really enough time before noon. That would be cutting it too close. But there’s no reason we can’t go this afternoon.”
“None at all. We just have to figure out what to tell Ramón.”
Bill laughed. “Tell him to pack his bags.”
“Shouldn’t we wait until we talk to Maggie?”
“Naw! Look, if all he wants for his information is a slightly illegal ride to Trinidad, I’ll haul his skinny little butt in Harm. Finding Maggie is just so we can rest easy about her.”
“Great!” For once the head-on approach made a lot of sense. Get Ramón on his way, find Maggie, get the information from Ramón, and pop Tim out of jail. Just like in the movies. It made you wonder what it was going to take to fuck up such a great plan.
Bill finished breakfast number two and his second pot of coffee and patted his stomach. “Not a bad snack.”
“As snacks go.”
“Since we got a little time, let’s go see Timmy boy.”
I signed for the breakfast bill. “Okay. We can go see him, but unless his condition has improved since I talked to the doctors last, he won’t even know we are there.”
Bill grabbed my forearm with a meaty paw as we went through the lobby. “Junior, don’t go saying as fact things that you don’t know as fact. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ as my Daddy used to say.”
“Your daddy said that, huh?”
“Right. And just ’cause the boy doesn’t jump up and offer you tea and crumpets when you waltz into his room you can’t say for sure that he doesn’t know you are there. Maybe he only knows it at some deep level, sure, but I figure if that’s the level he’s operating at, then that’s where you go to deal with him.”
You don’t argue with Ugly Bill at times like these, so I just nodded and let him lead me by the hand like some wayward child.
At the hospital, the doctors stood by Tim’s unconscious form and gave us their predictable guarded forecast. Tim lay in his bed looking frail and far away. In a modern American hospital, Tim would have been connected to cascades of expensive machines, monitoring every brainwave. In Venezuela, where basic medical care was both good and free, but resource limited, they didn’t waste equipment on someone who was in a coma. In particular, not a prisoner. In particular, not a poor person. They had a couple of IV bottles keeping him nourished and that was the extent of it.
Bill snarled at the doctors, and then embarrassed me by grabbing Tim’s hand and talking to him as if he was wide-awake and capable of having a real conversation. The doctor and I gave him room.
“Hey, Timmy, it’s Ugly Bill. What the hell you doing in that bed, you dumb fuck? Don’t you know that hospital beds are for sick people? I never saw such a lazy ass in all of my life as you. There are people in here who are hurting, dude. But you, all you have to do is open your eyes and smile. You’re a royal pain, is what you are. I mean we gotta walk all the way over here because your brother is too cheap to pop for a cab, then we gotta bullshit the good doctor into letting us in, and all you do is lie there and pretend it’s the middle of the night.
“Yeah, I know you are hurt. I been hurt myself a time or two, so I know what it’s like, but if you don’t get on with feeling the pain, facing up to it square, you won’t get better. It’s that simple. Hurting for a while is the price of getting better and ain’t nobody can do it for you. So quit wasting time.”
He patted Tim’s hand, then put it down and touched his cheek. “C’mon boy. Let’s go sailing. You can be second mate. If you work hard, I might even pay you something, even though you ought to pay me, all the help I’m gonna have to give you. Yeah, you come help me haul freight on Harm. We can get your brother drunk and leave him behind in some waterfront dive.”
“Hey!” I said.
“He really can’t hear you,” the doctor said with professional sympathy, which is to say none.
Bill roared at him. “Another fucking know-it-all. You ever been in a coma, Doc?” The doctor shook his head. “Then how the fuck you have any idea what’s going on inside that head? I’ve been there, friend, and I’m telling you he hears every damn word.”
He turned and we headed for the door, realizing that we had outstayed our welcome. As we reached the door, a feeble voice said, “Fuck you, Bill, I’ll be First Mate.”
The doctor shouted something and ran for the bed, and the staff threw us out of
the hospital.
Bill grumbled. “Happens every time. They always throw me out, so they don’t have to give me credit for one of my miracle cures.”
“You’ve done this before?”
Bill stretched. “Or something like it. How long until lunch?”
I bought Bill an arepa to keep his mind off the sins of worthless doctors, and we wandered around, poking into hardware stores, pricing tools and boat hardware, while we waited for noon. Bill bought a couple of shackles for the anchor chain. The stores carried a greater variety of nautical stuff than when we’d been here last.
“Think Tim’s buddy would hold his water long enough for us to do a quickie haul-out before I take him to Trinitown?” Bill asked. “It's a lot cheaper to go into Mike's yard here, and I like it better in this neck of the woods too.”
“I doubt he’ll talk until he is out of the country and feeling safe.”
Bill shrugged his it-was-worth-a-try shrug.
At eleven, with Bill’s stomach sending him urgent messages again, we went to a little restaurant near the park to get lunch out of the way. With any good luck we would have a busy afternoon smuggling a small Venezuelan out of the country.
Just before noon we walked to the park to give Ramón the good news. This time no one followed. Bill plopped down on the same bench that Victoria had used the day before while I wandered around near the statue. A couple of schoolgirls in uniforms of blue short-sleeve blouses worn too tight to conceal blossoming breasts, and black skirts, sat on the bench that Ramón had been on yesterday. He wasn’t with them. He wasn’t on any of the other benches either.
I stood around thinking about how some of these chunky little girls would grow into beautiful women. Not all, of course. But the mix of Spanish and Indian blood, and a sprinkling of Italian, promised many an exotic beauty. After all, Venezuela was famous for the incredible number of Miss Universes she produced.
Thoughts of exotic women led me to thinking of Victoria. Most of these were sexual and counterproductive thoughts. Then my thoughts drifted to Maggie, and these were concerned thoughts. I hoped like hell she was just off someplace having such a good time that she didn’t bother calling. I wished even more that I could convince myself that that was the case. Maggie, as Ugly Bill pointed out, didn’t operate that way.
After a time, the schoolgirls gathered up their books and left. I sat on the bench to wait, growing uncomfortable. I saw Bill pretending to read a local tabloid he’d found somewhere, but no sign of Ramón. At one-thirty, I gave up. I stood up and went to Bill’s bench.
“I think we’ve been stood up.”
He yawned. “Guard duty makes me tired. I guess we try again tomorrow?” I nodded. “This detective stuff is dull shit, dude.”
I agreed. “It’s better reading about it. That way you get just the exciting parts.”
We talked about what to do and settled on going to the hotel to check for messages one more time before going looking for Maggie. There were no messages at all, although Wilfredo had called. Since he hadn’t left a message, I figured he just wanted to make sure that I was still hanging around. I got the idea of calling Chris again. Bill liked the idea.
Chris, however, didn’t think it was a very good idea at all. In fact, he sounded unhappy to be hearing from me at all.
“Do you know where Maggie is?” I asked outright.
He hesitated. “Her charter was over yesterday,” he said, “but she hasn’t gone back to Mochima. She likes to sail.”
I got angry. “I know she likes to sail!”
Then a strange note crept into Chris’s voice. “Look, I don’t know you very well, and Maggie is a friend of mine.”
“So what?”
“I don’t know how much to tell you.”
“You’d better speak plain, mister.”
“Well, Maggie has been here for a few years now, off and on. She knows a lot of people. She has friends.”
I didn’t say anything, waiting for him to tell me where this was going. I had been doing more than enough guessing. “Men friends,” he said. “I think that she ran into one, maybe on the charter or something.”
I laughed at him. “I didn’t think she was a nun.” I said. “I’m not worried about who she might be with.”
“What’s he saying?” Bill demanded.
I covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “That Maggie has a sex life.”
“I’m shocked!”
“Look, Chris, this isn’t about me or Tim. I am worried because Maggie is reliable and she hasn’t checked in, even to find out about Tim’s condition. She is concerned about him. I don’t see anything getting in the way of her making a call for that.”
“Well, she’s a woman,” Chris protested. “Maybe she thought you’d be upset if she went off with some guy. How do I know?”
Right, I thought. How do you know? “Thanks for nothing.” I said and hung up.
Bill was upset. “This twerp thinks that our Maggie has that little class? Sure, she might go for some guy, but she wouldn’t just take off after promising to call. Not with Tiny Tim on the endangered species list and you on a short rope. That’s just stupid thinking.”
At the moment we didn’t know how stupid. We walked down to the waterfront and got Sammy to pick us up in the dinghy, then made a high-speed run to Mochima Park. We headed straight for Tigrillo. It didn’t take long to check out all the bays that Scape could’ve anchored in. We saw a couple of yachts, but not her. We swung south of Verado towards Golfo Santa Fé. Santa Fé has had some problems with banditos over the years. The typical crime was a dinghy motor stolen in the night, and sometimes banditos actually brought guns and robbed a boat. People had even been killed there, but I’d never heard of the banditos making a boat disappear.
We didn’t have time to search all of Santa Fé, but we managed to check out what Bill and I thought were the most likely spots. And we weren’t inconspicuous either. Harm makes a fair degree of noise. If Maggie had been nearby, she would have let us know. We kept the radio on the hailing frequency and on loud.
I was getting pretty depressed, and we were running out of time. Bill said it best.
“She ain’t here, Junior. We are doing nothing but wasting time and diesel.”
Bill didn’t discuss it with me, he just swung the helm over and headed Harm back toward Cumaná. I went out to stand on the bow. Standing out there as she makes a high-speed run through calm water has an amazing soothing power. It’s my favorite place to think. You feel the vibration as that great steel bow parts the water. There is a rushing sound as the bow wave wraps around her, cradling the big steel ship in a foamy hand.
Without any hope, I scanned the bays of Mochima that I could see from outside the mouth with my binoculars. I didn’t expect to find her there. I could see La Gabarra and Garrapata, but neither had any boats at all. A school of dolphins came to play in our wake. They were small ones, about ten of them, and they raced alongside us without visible effort, first pacing us, then darting ahead as if we’d stop short—hard aground. They stayed with us most of the way to Cumaná, but even that good omen didn’t raise my spirits.
I went up to the bridge where Bill and Sammy were arguing about something or other. “I am now officially worried,” I said. “As soon as we get back, I’m calling the cop I know. He might have some ideas.”
Neither of them said a word, and I couldn’t tell if they agreed with my plan or were just respecting my concern.
By the time we anchored, it was almost dark. Sammy took us ashore.
“He’s a good kid,” Bill said as Sammy rowed back.
I thought so too. Sammy was about eighteen, a Trinidad street urchin when we’d met him. He was sharp and Bill had liked him right away despite some of his rather rough edges. We hired him as a day laborer on Harm. He’d worked out so well that we took him on as crew, but he was now family. He was a small and slight man of Asian Indian descent. He was unfailingly polite, but never we
ak, and he earned his keep. For one thing, he didn’t mind staying on Harm as a babysitter.
I thought I’d go back to the hotel to call Wilfredo. I had my notebook there and I wanted to reread it and have it handy. Nothing in it had anything to do with Maggie as far as I knew, but it was time to look at the information with new eyes.
We got back to the room, hadn’t even sat down, when the phone rang. Bill and I looked at each other and I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was—that it was about Maggie. But we were wrong. It wasn’t about Maggie, it was Maggie.
“Maggie!” I cried out. “We’ve been looking all over for you. Where are you?”
“I’m not sure,” she said in a shaky voice. “This Highball creep we met in Mochima grabbed me when I showed up to get my charter guests. I’m a prisoner.”
“Are you all right?”
“Is that a trick question? I’ve been better. He hasn’t done anything to me, hit me or assaulted me, if that’s what you mean, but I’m not happy about the way I’m being treated either. In fact, I’m scared, filthy, and hungry.”
“Tell him…”
“Tell me yourself,” Highball said. “I just wanted you to know the situation with your lady, that she is okay, more or less, at least for the moment. She is kind of bitchy though.”
I resisted the temptation to direct a series of meaningless threats at him. The usual “if you touch a hair of her head” stuff. First, I knew he didn’t care, and second, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of getting the response he seemed to be trying to provoke. I let silence fill the space for a time.
“So, what do you want?”
He chuckled, an ugly, greedy sound. “That’s the boy. The all-American cut to the chase. What do I want? Well, a smart kid like you could probably figure it out pretty easy if he wanted to, but I don’t want to run the risk of you getting it wrong, so I’ll spell it out nice and clear. I want the dope that that asshole Ramón stole and promised to sell me.”
