Martin Billings Caribbean Crime Thrillers

by Ed Teja

  "Probably garbage," I said. "We are downwind from the plume." That was consistent with my theories on luck and annoyances. Even though the breeze was light, almost nonexistent, I was sure we'd start to smell the stink any minute now. The fishermen burn plastic a lot.

  Of course, they have a lot of plastic garbage and garbage collection is largely an ignored art form in most of the country and they have to do something with it.

  "It isn't garbage," Rudy said with great assurance. He stood up and the boat rocked as he balanced, trying to see more. Then he smiled happily. "It is a big fire." I could tell that he liked the idea of a really big fire and wanted to find out just what was burning. He rubbed his hands together as he sat back down and swung the prow of the boat in the general direction of the first thing that had interested truly him all day.

  "Before we go over there, we should check out these bays, Rudy."

  "But the fire..."

  "If it is a big one, we have time to check the bays before it goes out. Then we can go see what is burning in Santa Fe."

  Convinced that my priorities were both strange and perverted, Rudy shrugged and pointed the boat back on our previous course.

  Naturally, the first bay I had insisted on checking was empty, or nearly so. We found a couple of high-speed powerboats with big bellies rafted together with a standard Venezuelan-style party was going full tilt.

  They fulfilled all the criteria—the music was loud and there seemed to be plenty of rum and an interesting assortment of chicas wearing brilliant green or yellow thongs dancing on the bows. That was a pleasant enough sight and Rudy probably slowed down more than absolutely necessary as we passed them.

  He grinned and waved; the girls waved back, and the men gave us wary smiles and stared at us like the intruders we were. There was no sign of Walker or a sailboat named George or anything else.

  In the next bay, my heart beat faster as we saw a sailboat that was both white and plastic and about the right size. As we came alongside, I had Rudy slow way down and I shouted a hello.

  A groggy-looking couple poked their heads up through the hatch and then came on deck to see what was going on. I called over and asked, but they didn't remember seeing a sailboat named George.

  "There was another boat here yesterday," the man said. "Can't remember its name though."

  "Wasn't George, though," the woman said.

  "Who'd name a boat George?" the man asked.

  "Stalin, maybe," I said. "I understand he had a perverse sense of humor when you got enough vodka in him."

  "It wasn't George," the woman said. "I think we'd remember that."

  I thought she was probably right.

  So, I thanked them and reluctantly told Rudy to take us to see what was burning. We needed a beer break anyway.

  When we got to Santa Fe, the black plume of smoke was still getting bigger. As I'd promised, the fire was growing, not going out and Rudy had been right about it being a big fire. He had been wrong about exactly where the fire was located, however. Whatever was burning was on the other side of Bahía Cruz.

  We rounded the point on the south side of the Gulf, headed toward the town of Santa Fe, and then we saw it.

  In retrospect, I should have known what we'd find. Coincidence is a word that means you don't know what connections exist between things. We were looking for a boat—an uncommon occurrence, in the scheme of things. We saw a large fire in a bay—an even less common coincidence.

  In retrospect, as I said, I should have known they were connected. I think I had let my hopes get the better of me once again. I do that.

  Rudy crossed himself. "Deus Mío!" he said as we came in view of a fiberglass sloop, about forty feet long, lying on its side up on the beach. The entire boat was engulfed in flames, the hull and cabin partially melted and belching out the giant black plume of stinking smoke we'd seen.

  A crowd of onlookers had circled it, happily watching the out-of-control fire. They seemed to be standing awfully close to the fire for my money. Most cruising sailboats carry one or more propane tanks for cooking, gasoline for the outboard on the dingy and diesel in their fuel tanks—an interesting array of lovely explosive devices.

  The smoke, heavy with particulates, had begun rolling out over the water. Rudy ran the peñero up on the beach. As we pulled it up on the sand, I saw a half-melted life ring that was tied to the boat's railing with enough paint left on it to tell that it had once said: "S/V George".

  "I think we have found your friend's boat," Rudy said. He smiled happily, knowing we had accomplished our task. I stared at the boat, open mouthed until he handed me a cold Polar beer he had gotten from an enterprising vendor who was doing a landslide business among the onlookers.

  I nodded. "Seems that we did find it."

  Rudy took a long pull on his beer and then touched the bottle to my shoulder. "Somehow, I don't think he will want to do any business today. He has other concerns."

  I sipped my beer glumly, watching the boat do that cross between burning and melting that plastic always does. If it kept burning, soon it would be scarcely recognizable as a boat. I wished I had a camera.

  "My day isn't working out well," I told Rudy after taking a long drink of the beer.

  "Your amigo is probably saying the same thing," he said. "And, compared to his, your day is delightful, is it not?"

  I had to admit that it didn't seem that Walker's day was going too well, if it was still going at all.

  "I am glad we found this boat named George you wished to find," Rudy said happily.

  "Why?"

  "I thought you were telling me a story. I wondered why, but who wants to find a sailboat? And who names a boat a stupid name? It sounded like a drunken story." He laughed. "Now it just looks like a stupid story."

  Among the crowd standing around watching the fire, some boys were halfheartedly throwing sand in the general direction of the boat. I wasn't sure if they thought of themselves as firefighters or if it was just something to do. I didn't see any serious attempts to put the fire out.

  "So, they just let it burn?" I asked Rudy, assuming his local knowledge might give him insights.

  He pointed at some buckets scattered on the ground. "Maybe they tried to put it out at first. After all, there were expensive things on board."

  Obviously, that hadn't worked out well and the fire had gotten beyond any hope of control. Besides, a fire was interesting to watch. A burning boat had an eerie motion to it as you watched the fiberglass distort and delaminate. So now, the former firefighters simply enjoyed the show.

  "See if anyone can tell you anything about what happened," I said. I knew that the people here spoke rough Spanish. Learning anything useful would require knowledge of the slang and a good profanity filter.

  Rudy gave me an odd look. "What happened? Amigo, the boat burned," he said. He wrinkled his nose. "If it was a Venezuelan boat it wouldn't stink."

  "The powerboats would."

  "I mean fishing boats. Good wooden craft."

  "Right. But I want to know what happened to the people on board. Maybe someone knows how the fire started and if the people got off okay."

  He nodded. "Okay. I will take another beer with me and add it to your bill." This was obviously more fun than the searching and he wandered off into the crowd to chat with the other fishermen and see what he could learn.

  He was right about the stink, up to a point. Wood smells a lot better than plastic when it burns. Even a wooden boat stinks when it burns, just not as bad.

  After a bit, Rudy came over to report. He looked pleased with himself.

  "I talked to the only intelligent people," he said, nodding toward the fishermen. "They say that the boat was sitting there since yesterday. They ignored it, hoping it would leave. When they woke this morning, it was on fire. So, they went to see what was happening."

  "How did it get on the beach?"

  "They dragged it up on the beach to keep it from s
inking while they tried to put out the fire." He grinned. "It's easier to salvage when it is on the beach. Of course, then it was harder to get water on the fire and they lost control of it." He shrugged. "I hope that these men are better fishermen than they are firemen."

  "Did they see any people on the boat?"

  "They saw a woman, a gringa, come up on deck last night. They saw no one this morning." He looked at the charred and melted hull and shook his head. "Of course, no one was stupid enough to go inside the boat and look. If the fire started while they slept, then perhaps your amigos are still in there."

  Unfortunately, that was exactly how it looked. The toxic fumes would have killed sleepers long before the fire got to them. The boat's inflatable dinghy, now a mass of melted rubber, still hung on the side of the boat, looking like a suspended glob of gray snot attached to a halyard.

  No one had gone ashore in it that morning. Unless another boat came by and took them off, anyone who got off had swum ashore. Not that that was difficult.

  As we helplessly watched the fire finally simmer down to a smolder, soldiers of the Guardia Nacional arrived in a big open truck that barreled down onto the beach. The Guardia is a cross between the Coast Guard, border patrol, and police, but it is a military organization.

  That naturally meant that the investigation began with armed soldiers jumping out and forming a ring around the boat, belatedly moving the people watching back from the scene with the barrels of their guns.

  An officer walked up to the crowd and started asking questions of a few of the spectators standing closest to the wreck, although he wasn't taking any notes.

  "Now this might be exciting. They can threaten the fire. Tell it they will shoot it if it doesn't go out for them or if it tries to escape," Rudy laughed. "They are very brave, our Guardia. Some of them are even old enough to shave."

  By this time there wasn't much left to see of the boat. The edges of what fiberglass still remained were curling up as the heat delaminated the material. When you love boats, even watching a plastic boat burn is sad, and the sight depressed me.

  I turned away, looking at the crowd and I caught a glimpse of a tall, thin blonde, clearly a gringa. Dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt, she stood at the edge of the road, a bit above the scene, taking photos of the wreckage with a telephoto lens.

  Curious, I started over to her. She was, after all, the only one out of the ordinary, the only person who didn't appear to belong...besides me, of course. Most likely there was a very ordinary reason she was here.

  The only major road along the coast was up on that hill and if she was passing by, it would be natural to stop, as we had, to see what was going on. She might be interesting to talk to anyway. So, I headed over to have a word, exchange phone numbers and promise to do lunch sometime.

  I got only a few steps toward her before being intercepted by the Comandante of the Guardia troop. I don't know their insignia well, but the nametag over his breast pocket said: COMANDANTE SANCHEZ.

  The squat little man seemed more curious about me than about the boat. Getting answers to his questions, of course, had priority over whatever I might want. I was an American, and tall, and had to be informed of who was in charge.

  "This is your boat, Señor?" he asked hopefully, and in terrible English.

  In my best Spanish, I assured him it wasn't my boat. He smiled at the realization that we could have the interview in his language. "But you know the owner of the boat?"

  "No," I said.

  Rudy looked at me curiously, so added to my statement. "If this is the right boat, then I was looking for the owner, but I don't know him."

  The Comandante's eyes narrowed. Unlike the troops, the officers in the Guardia tend to be reasonably well educated and are often of the upper classes.

  Not that this means they are smart, or that it is always an advantage for them or their current investigation, but it does give them an edge in dealing with a population who give the officers a respect they don't give the troops.

  Finally, he organized his question the way he wanted to ask it. "Please explain to me. If you don't know him, then why were you looking for him?"

  "I was asked to find him. His business partner in Grenada needed him to sign some papers. Apparently, the business was urgent. When I arrived, I was told he had gone sailing, so I put the papers in my pocket and hired this fisherman to help me find him," I said, nodding towards Rudy.

  "You came from where?"

  "Today? We came from Puerto La Cruz in the peñero. Yesterday I was in Grenada."

  He cocked his head trying to decide if I was being flip. "And you found this hombre? The man who owns the boat?"

  "No. Not yet, anyway." I nodded at Rudy. "He and I just arrived a few minutes ago." I pointed at the boat. "We found only this. I haven't seen anyone who might be him. Now I don't know if he is even alive to look for."

  The Comandante gave one of the men standing next to him the old head nod and the man moved away from us, walking over and starting to talk to Rudy. That was fine with me.

  As I always do when talking to people in uniform above the level of parking lot attendant, I had kept my story as simple and truthful as possible. That way it would mesh with almost anything that Rudy chose to tell them.

  I really didn't want to get involved any further in this mess than I already was, not officially and especially not as a suspect. Particularly not as a foreign suspect.

  The Comandante smiled. "I find it a curious coincidence that you arrived in time to watch the boat burn."

  "It would be a lot more of a strange coincidence if it had started burning after I got here," I pointed out. I took the papers out of my pocket, opening the plastic baggy and showing him the documents that I'd brought along. He couldn't read them, but he did note that the pages had your standard blank spaces waiting for Mr. Walker's signature. "I didn't get his signature," I said. "And that is what I came all this way for."

  Finally, after examining the documents and my passport, and writing down my name and Walker's full name and my passport number, he seemed to be satisfied.

  "What hotel are you staying at?" he asked.

  When I told him, he made a face. "That is not a nice place."

  "But cheap," I said.

  "You will be available there if there are other questions?"

  "Available? I'm not going to be sitting around my room, if that's what you mean. I still need to find this guy. If my boss decides this is a dead end, then I'm not sure how long I'll be even staying in the country."

  My answer didn't seem to please the little man, so I handed him one of Walker's business cards that I had taken from the office. "While I am in town you can contact me through this man's office. The manager is there during office hours to take messages."

  He took a business card from his shirt pocket and thrust it at me. "Before you go anywhere, especially an airport, please make certain you let me know. The number for my cellular phone is on the card so can reach me any time."

  I assured him that I would call. I noted that he was based in Cumaná. I knew his boss would be in Puerto La Cruz where the headquarters for the eastern region was located. But Comandante Sanchez had jurisdiction over Santa Fe.

  If I'd been in a playful mood, I could have tangled him up in a jurisdictional dispute, or at least threatened one, but it seldom pays to give people in charge of soldiers any smart comments or reasons to mistrust you.

  Guys with that much gold braid don't have a sense of humor, and the ones I knew about here didn't tend to need a reason to throw you in jail beyond wanting to teach you a lesson. Once you are in jail, getting out can be tricky.

  Having finished his questioning of the only bona fide suspect, he turned and strutted off down the beach, probably to interrogate some chicas. He resembled a proud peacock, or at least a policeman who had extracted a confession from a serial killer.

  Without much hope of her still being around after all this time, I took
a look up toward the road. The girl with the skinny body and fancy camera had disappeared.

  "What are you looking for?" Rudy asked, walking up slowly.

  When I explained that I was looking for a pretty girl, he smiled. Now I was looking for something he could understand.

  I sketched out the details and he eagerly helped me ask around, talking to people who had seen her or might have talked to her. When we compared notes, we learned that the consensus was that she was certainly a journalist for a foreign newspaper, worked for an insurance company who would be paying a lot of money for the boat and that she was either a CIA spy or the owner of the boat that had burned.

  Add to that that she was definitely from either Columbia or Norway and you can see that our investigation produced a very extensive, intriguing and rather useless biography of the mystery lady.

  Having exhausted that avenue, I couldn't think of any other reason for hanging around the scene. By the time the boat cooled down enough to check it out, anything of value or interest would have been looted.

  Rudy and I each got one last expensive beer and launched the boat, heading back to Puerto La Cruz.

  # # #

  The entire trip back to the marina I had to endure an irritating, self-satisfied smile that Rudy wore with great satisfaction, if not actual pleasure. I wasn't sure if it was the fact that George was gone and would plague him no more, or that he had been correct in saying the trip was for nothing.

  Either way, it made for a long trip back to Puerto La Cruz.

  Finally, he pulled the boat in alongside the fuel dock in the marina. When we tied up, I climbed out and paid him for his work.

  Even though the size of my tip turned his smirk into a friendly (okay, friendlier) grin, it probably also reinforced his conviction of the stupidity of gringos. I didn't care about that as much as staying on his good side. I might need his help again sometime. He was a good boatman and knew the waters as well as Pierre had suggested.