Black Tide

by Brendan DuBois

  I took another swallow of lemonade. The rain was plastering itself against the windows, making a sound like the glass was being slapped with wet towels, and I said, "Relax, Felix. I'm in no mood to track this one down. I'm going to let Diane Woods and the Tyler police and the State Police have everything on their own. My column this month is probably going to be on the new fisheries bill."

  He seemed to relax a bit at that. He placed the half-empty water glass on the counter and said, "Good. That's why they get paid tax dollars. To shine flashlights in dark places and find out things other people would rather not know about."

  "Nice point of view," I said. I raised my lemonade glass up in a salute and said, ''A few minutes ago you said you had problems, and that you needed to ask me something. Well, ask away, Felix. "

  "Well," he said, hunching himself up a bit in his jacket. "It's sort of complicated."

  "With you, Felix, I'm sure it couldn't be anything but."

  He motioned to the living room. "Mind if we sit down?"

  I nodded and followed him into the next room, which was an open living room and adjacent to the kitchen. He sat on the couch and I took one of the two nearby chairs. Near us was a stereo and GE television with VCR unit, and in the large room were three bookshelves, crammed with hardcovers and paperbacks. Against the open stairs leading up to the second floor was the cold and quiet brick of the room's fireplace. Behind me were the sliding-glass doors that led out to the first-floor deck, where I had been earlier that day, dreamily drinking a bottle of beer and getting ready for another one, when I saw the shape moving across the water. The day's events had quickly burned off whatever alcohol I had consumed, and though I was tired, I was ready for whatever Felix had to say.

  Above Felix's head and mounted on the wall was an old photograph of the White Fleet, the naval fleet that our second President of the twentieth century sent around the world in 1907 to prove that the United States was now a great power to be dealt with. There's also a framed picture of the space shuttle Discovery taking off on the other wall, and in both of their journeys, they circled the globe and spoke of United States power and prestige. One fleet was now only scrap metal, and the other, smaller white fleet was still alive, and that suited me fine.

  Then Felix surprised me by saying, "I need your help."

  "You need what?"

  "Your help." He stretched out his feet on the hardwood floor of my house, which was covered by oriental rugs purchased at estate auctions throughout the state. "I'm involved with something tricky, something complex."

  I held the glass of lemonade in both hands and said, "What are you trying to do, write a magazine article?"

  Outside, the rain was still roaring down, and there was a hard slap-slap sound of the rain falling on the first-floor deck. Another rumble of thunder came from the south. This storm was taking its time in moving through.

  Felix tugged at an ear and said, "I'm not joking, Lewis. Look. I'm dealing with something that's interrupting my regular business. It's become a hassle, and I need your company and your good graces, along with your calming influence, as I handle things. I need an outsider's point of view. Otherwise, I'm afraid that I might lose it, might lose it bad. And I want to walk away from this one nice and happy and resume my career."

  "It must be a weird and tough time when you come see a magazine writer for help," I said.

  He eyed me for a moment and said, "You may say you're nothing more than a writer, Lewis, and that's like me telling everyone I'm just a security consultant. Wordplay, that's all. What counts is what's there, and what I know about you and your background makes you more than just a writer. You had some years at the Department of Defense, and from what little I've learned, you were up to your eyeballs in some sort of black work. Then something happened in Nevada to put you in a hospital and that's it, nothing else. And then you ended up here with a habit of getting into stuff that's right on the border. So don't try to play spin doctor on who you are and what you can do, Lewis. I know what kind of pay there is in magazines, and unless you own one, I don't think you could afford this place and the wheels you drive around in."

  I nodded at him and said, "Thanks for the philosophy lesson. Give me some background, Felix, and words on why you came here."

  Felix sat back and tossed an arm across the couch and the leather of his shoulder holster became visible. "Some old history is coming back to bite me, that's what's wrong. I've been getting calls and mail these past couple of weeks, people asking me the address of one of Jimmy Corelli's safe houses. Jimmy's been dead for a couple of years --- he died in Leavenworth, in his sleep, if you can believe it --- and he had a couple of safe houses that he used whenever he needed to get away from Boston. These houses were in false names and Jimmy dealt with some real estate firms through third parties that kept the taxes and utilities and landscaping paid. Where these houses are located is about as deep a secret as you can get."

  He rubbed the fabric on the rear of the couch. "There haven't been that many firefights and feuds here in New England --- at least not lately --- but it's always made sense to have a base or two where you could lie low until things quieted down."

  "So you worked for this Jimmy Corelli?" I asked.

  Felix shrugged. "Yeah, for a while, when I was younger. I was sort of a utility player back then. Passed around to whoever needed something done at the time. And for a bit I was a soldier for Jimmy Corelli."

  ''And when you worked for him, you found out where his safe houses were."

  He held up a finger. "Only one, Lewis. Only one."

  "So who's asking you about the safe house now?"

  Felix managed a slight smile at that one. "Nameless and gutless wonders who leave odd messages on my answering machine and send me nasty notes. Threats that say horrible things will happen if I don't reveal the location of Corelli's safe house. They want me to send a note to a post office box in Porter with the safe house's address. So the fact that people are asking me about the house's location made me think that maybe now I'm the only one who knows where it is. Which can happen, the way they keep secrets." He laughed. "Like I have to tell you about keeping secrets."

  "I imagine you weren't in a hurry to come right out and write that note about where the house is." "

  You imagined right."

  I shifted in my seat. The sounds of the rain started to slow down, and the rumbling of the thunder seemed to quiet some. I said, "Sounds like something important is stashed at the safe house. Money. Drugs. Jimmy Hoffa."

  Felix's smile was wider. "My thoughts exactly. So one afternoon I went up there and the house was still where I remembered it, looking nice and neat. I let myself in with a key that's hidden on the property, and it only took me about five minutes to find out what the fuss is all about."

  ''And what's the fuss?" Felix crossed his legs and his pant leg rolled up, exposing a length of sock. Felix is the type of guy who would never have socks short enough to expose his shins while crossing his legs.

  He said, "My secret, for now. Let's just say that what's at the house is something that was stolen from this state five years ago, and which made tremendous news at the time. You were probably still working in D.C. five years ago, right?"

  I held up my near-empty glass. "Like you said, that's my secret, for now. So what's the big deal? Tell them where the house is and let them be on their way."

  Felix shook his head. "That's against my principles, to give away something for nothing, and especially when they've been so rude to me. They want the location of the house and what's in there, then it's going to cost them some money."

  "They might not want to give you any money, Felix."

  He replied harshly: "They might not have a choice."

  I looked at him and said, "It must be something quite valuable, then."

  He nodded. "Quite. And in addition to wanting some money, I want some guarantees. The value of what's there… Well, let's just say that it's a great incentive for someone to take care of any loose e
nds. My mamma didn't raise me to be a loose end, Lewis. So I'm looking for money, and I'm looking for guarantees."

  The rain had nearly stopped, and the sky was growing lighter, as the dark clouds moved south. I said, "So why in hell are you here, looking for me?"

  He uncrossed his leg, smoothed out the fabric of his pants. "Like I said before, I need your calming influence. Eventually there's going to be some discussion, some sort of negotiations. They're going to do their best to upset me, to make me fly off the handle. Okay, that comes with the turf. But I'm looking for you to help me out, to make me see things clearly."

  I finished the lemonade and started crunching on the ice. "Nope."

  Felix said, "Look, don't say no or yes, okay? Just think about it for a day or two."

  "I already said no."

  "Yeah, but I didn't tell you what's in it for you."

  "Let me guess. Going on a one-way trip out to Hampton Shoals on a boat with guys named Guido and No Neck, with a length of anchor chain wrapped around my body, all because I decided to help you out."

  He smiled and shook his head and said, "Look, I'm going to be the lightning rod here, okay? You'll be fine. No danger. And besides, you help me out, I'll give you 10 percent of what I'm going to demand for the location of the safe house and its contents."

  "Which is what?"

  Felix told me and the ice in my mouth damn near melted of its own accord. "That's a healthy amount."

  "Yeah, pretty robust, ain't it?" He slapped his hands on his thick thighs and said, "Look, I'll let you be, Lewis. Give me a call in a day or two, and we'll go on from there."

  He got up and I walked him to the door. Before he went outside in the wet and gray afternoon, he slapped me on my side --- the good side, the one without any scars --- and said, "Whatever you decide, do decide one thing, Lewis. Lay off the beers for a while. They're making you fat, and they're slowing you down. Not a good prescription for one just out of a hospital."

  "Thanks, Doc."

  He slapped me on the side again, softer, and said, "If you don't be nice, I'll sic Christy on you."

  "You do that, I'll send Diane Woods in your direction. She has a nasty habit of playing with handcuffs."

  That brought another laugh and I watched for a minute or two as he trudged up the dirt path that led up to the parking lot of the Lafayette House, where his Mercedes was parked. I rolled the figure that he had mentioned around in my mind for a bit, before dosing the door. A lot of money. Enough to help me do some other things.

  I closed the door and went upstairs to get to work, and for the rest of the afternoon, all I drank was ice water. Not because of any health reasons, but because the damn taste of rubber was still strong in my mouth.

  Chapter Four

  On the Sunday evening of June 23, when I was sleeping in my private and free room at the Cambridge Hospital, the Petro Star was heading up the Atlantic coast, heading for the harbor at Porter, New Hampshire, and the Piscassic River, which leads upstream to a complex of terminals and oil farms at Lewington. The 30,000-ton tanker was 550 feet long, with a 90-foot beam, drawing a 35-foot draft. It carried a loaf of fuel oil, and as the single-screw tanker headed north, it was not a happy ship. As with most cargo ships these days, it had a mixed crew, and communications among the crew members were equally mixed. The captain was an old German, a year or two away from retirement, and his first officer was from India. The deck officers were Filipino, and the deckhands were Chinese. There had been difficulties with the Loran navigation system and the steering system was balky.

  On the evening of June 23, the captain was drunk and asleep in his cabin. The first officer was ill with a stomach virus, and the ships wheel was in the hands of a young Filipino man who was inexperienced and unaware of the treacherous waters around the Isles of Shoals. At about 10:40 P.M. the steering mechanism began a slow failure that led to the ship being off course, and the scared and unskilled Filipino sailor brought the Petro Star with up on a ledge off White Island. The force of the grounding even woke up the captain, and panicked at what was going to happen to him and his retirement, he tried to get the ship off the ledge without contacting the Coast Guard.

  It didn’t work.

  The Petro Star was single-hulled, and soon its cargo began spilling into the waters around Porter and the Isles of Shoals. When the Coast Guard came ---- alerted from its base on Foss Island --- there wasn’t much to do except try to begin the cleanup and start finding out what the hell happened. Even with the fuel oil coming ashore the next day, the very first session of a Coast Guard hearing began at a courthouse in Porter. Within a couple of days, after is cargo had been off-loaded to another ship, the damaged Petro Star was taken north, to a dock facility in Portland, Maine, to be repaired while the other players in the drama continued their activities.

  So there it rested. After the black tide washed up on the shores and the cleanup commenced and the newspaper stories were written and the lawsuits were threatened, all I cared about was the man who ran the show: and this man, like myself, seemed to have a well-hidden past.

  The Petro Star was owned by a corporation ---- Petro Associates --- that had registered the ship in its supposed homeport of Monrovia, Liberia. The corporation was based in Burma ---- or Myanmar, depending on your geography teacher ---- and its officers were from Thailand. Petro Associates also had a business office in New York City, run by one Dmitros Skarvelis, who had a 3 percent ownership in the company. Whoever owned the other 97 percent of the shares was a secret, except that in reading and rereading the pages of testimony from the preliminary hearings on the grounding and the oil spill, I had learned one interesting fact: Petro Associates had a majority owner, a man who made the decisions, and this man was an American.

  So he was in this country. He was "gettable." But investigators with the U.S. Coast Guard, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Justice had been unable to locate him. Usually the United States had a cooperative working relationship with shipping investigators in Thailand and Burma, but this year --- due to a border dispute between the two countries and the current Administration's policy on the matter ---- Thailand and Burma were both politely telling the United States to go to hell. Dmitros Skarvelis had smiled a lot when he was not answering questions, and then one night he left his New Jersey apartment and was now believed to be back in Athens.

  I leaned back in my chair and rubbed at my neck. My Macintosh Plus was on, its friendly gray screen setting up a glow in the late evening twilight of this July Tuesday. It had been more than a day since Felix Tinios had left me, and except for sleeping and eating and a bit of recreational reading, I had spent most of the past twenty-four hours in this room on the second floor of my house. The study has windows that overlook the ocean and my tiny beach to the east, and the jumbled rocks and wooden hills of the Samson State Wildlife Preserve to the south. Years ago, when the place was called the Samson Point Artillery Station, two batteries of giant twelve-inch artillery pieces were maintained and hidden in concrete bunkers that were covered with dirt and growing grass, to masquerade them as benign hills, and to hide them from the eyes of the Spaniards, and then later the Germans and even the Soviets.

  But years later the masquerade was over, the hidden guns were pulled away, and tourists and picnickers now walked the previously forbidden grounds of what was once a sealed military installation.

  So some masquerades get pulled away. But the man I was looking for had a very firm mask, one that was proving difficult to displace.

  ''And what do you do when you find him?" I announced to my empty study. ''Arrest him?"

  I swiveled some in my chair, enjoying the faint squeaking noise that I'm sure would drive others crazy but which soothed me and made me think. The study was about as large as my bedroom, and in addition to the Macintosh Plus and an office-surplus desk that shared its paint style with battleships, there were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Among the biographies and history books and astronomy texts, there were also some bo
und back issues of Shoreline. Black filing cabinets held scraps of information and newspaper clippings and bills, and there was one Oriental rug in the center of the polished hardwood floor.

  And among all the books in this room, I had not picked up one in the past twenty-four hours in my quest for the man behind the Petro Star. The reason for that was my Macintosh Plus, my modem and my telephone. If one didn't care that much about long-distance telephone charges --- which I didn't --- one had entire libraries, newspaper morgues, encyclopedias, clipping services and reference materials available just by dialing up phone numbers. There are thousands --- maybe even tens of thousands ---of computer bulletin boards and on-line services --- including the information superhighway known as the Internet --- that can serve practically any purpose, any need. There are computer bulletin boards where you can enter and play sex games over your keyboard with someone in a different time zone. There's a bulletin board that, if you give your longitude and latitude, will tell you when the Mir space station will go overhead. And there are bulletin boards that, well, offer some unique and strange interests. Coon hunting, for example, or comic book collecting. And in my own hunt over the past day, I had gone through a dozen or so of the boards, doing what was called "info surfing" just setting up word and program searches about the Petro Star and Petro Associates. It had taken some time, and besides helping increase the net worth of AT&T's long distance division, there hadn't been much out there.

  So far, I had about a handful of sentences' worth of information. The man with the 97 percent share in Petro Associates was quite deep. I had not been very successful, and I was almost depressed at the lack of information I had managed to retrieve. All I knew was that he was male, he lived in the United States, he was a businessman who owned the majority shares of Petro Associates, and he had other business interests. For all the work I had done, I had garnered information which could have been connected to about half of the mailing list for The Wall Street Journal. Not much progress. And yet…. well, there was one more phone number…