by Sean Rowe
I heard: “Bring me up to speed.”
The phone slipped out of my hand and clattered onto the navigation table. I picked it up, wiping coconut oil off my hands.
“Matthew?”
It was Tanel’s voice.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“How have you spent the last two days? I’m told you haven’t set foot in the office or kept anyone there apprised of your activities.”
I exhaled slowly. “You asked me to run my own investigation. That’s what I’m doing. It involves interviewing select subjects, some of them out of town. I’m in Key West right now.”
A pause. “What conclusions have you drawn?”
“That the letter in the Herald was real. The freighter bombing was orchestrated by disaffected local Cubans.”
“I would say that bodes well for Festival Cruise Lines, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes. As I tried to indicate in our last meeting, I think the people behind the freighter bombing would think twice before targeting a cruise ship.”
I heard the sound of a hand muffling the receiver; then Tanel came back on. “Take tomorrow off, Matthew.”
“I generally do on Sunday.”
“You’re Catholic, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“Good for you. Listen, you need to pace yourself. You don’t know how long your inquiry might last. And try to keep the cork in the bottle.”
“Is there a particular reason —”
“Call me in Chicago on Monday.”
The line went dead.
I leaned against the door of the toilet with my arms folded, trying to think, and finally gave up and shook my head and laughed.
There was half a loaf of bread beside a microwave in the galley. I found a plate in the cabinet and put some bread slices on it and opened the little refrigerator. I took jars of mustard and mayonnaise from the door shelf and found some sliced turkey and cheddar cheese.
When I had fixed the sandwich, I sat down at the nav station and switched on the lamp. I flipped through a Festival Cruise Lines brochure, looking at the pictures of young couples who were obviously models and old couples who were even more obviously models. There were lots of photos of the older ones sitting down to elegant suppers. One picture showed a washed-up movie star who was the company celebrity. He was hamming it up for the camera, holding his sunglasses in one hand and gesturing with the other toward some little cartoon maps of various cruise routes. The itinerary for the Eight-Day Western Caribbean Adventure had a star next to it to show that it was something new. Arrows starting in Miami went on to Key West and Havana, then over to Cozumel on the Yucatán Peninsula, in Mexico. From there the arrows kept going around the back side of Cuba to the Caymans and Jamaica, then through the Windward Passage and up the Bahama Channel to Miami again.
At the top of the page was a tiny silhouette of the Norwegian Empress, with specs listed underneath it. Gross tonnage, 22,000. Overall length, 524 feet. Beam, 78 feet. Draft, 18 feet. Cruising speed, 21 knots. Passengers, 900. Crew, 350. I knew the crew figures were exaggerated. Two hundred and fifty would be more accurate, working double shifts for months at a time for next to nothing, sending their wages back to Mindanao, Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Manila. This time of year, the off-season, there were probably fewer than 700 paying customers, plus another 50 to 60 perk passages thrown in.
“Key West, Florida, is the scenic southernmost point in the continental United States,” I read. “Downtown, you’ll find great shopping and delicious island delights like the famous Key lime pie. A visit isn’t complete without a peek at the town’s historic 19th century gingerbread mansions.”
I had set my plate down on top of a nautical chart, and now I put the brochure aside and looked at the chart while I finished the first half of the sandwich. Fontana had penciled a line from Key West to Havana. Halfway along the line he had made a small, strong X and written latitude and longitude coordinates off to the side.
Another X and another set of coordinates were over on the right, along the southern edge of the Marquesas. A shorter, dotted line connected the two X’s, and a compass heading was written above it. The Marquesas were tiny gray spots floating in a cloud of pale blue, but south and east of there the color bled away into white, where the water dropped below thirty fathoms. It was all white along the route the Empress would take, nothing but deep water.
There were various symbols and notations on the chart I didn’t understand. I decided that the sandwich needed a lettuce leaf, so I went back to the galley and pulled open the refrigerator door. I couldn’t find any lettuce, but something else was inside the crisper drawer.
Blood.
I pulled out two units and read the labels; they were both A-positive. Six bags total, from a blood bank in Hialeah, and all the expiration dates read tomorrow. I opened the other drawer, and it was full of liter bags of IV fluid: three clear, two tinged green. There were some smaller bags, one of them labeled with the name of an antibiotic, another that said Fluorouracil.
I knelt down and pulled everything out of the drawer. At the bottom were three hard-plastic boxes, each with ten glass vials. The black block letters on the side of each vial read morphine sulfate. I put everything back in the drawer and closed it and ate the rest of the sandwich standing there in the galley.
Suddenly I wasn’t sure of anything, not anything at all. Or maybe one thing: the reason Fontana had popped up in my life again, home from prison three years ahead of schedule. I really did have to get out of here.
9
I WAS COMING out the door into the cockpit when I saw Fontana’s head sticking up over the transom. I said, “We need to talk,” moving closer as I said it, seeing there was someone else beside him in the dinghy. The someone else was Julia Bonnell, in a Windbreaker and white tennis shorts.
“Let’s talk later,” Fontana replied, not smiling. He swung his feet over the gunwale and reached for a canvas gym bag Julia was handing him. “This is Matthew Shannon.” He said it looking at Julia, who looked at me, nodding. Then he said, “Matthew, Julia Bonnell.”
When Julia was standing in the cockpit, Fontana looked at me and back at her and asked, “I’m missing something, right?”
“Nice to see you again, Matt,” Julia said.
“I’m not so sure.”
“We bumped into each other at the Delano,” she explained.
“I see,” said Fontana.
“She’s not going with us.”
“Oh yes she is.”
“Oh yes I am,” Julia said.
Fontana was clearing the door to the salon, taking the gym bag with him. Julia yawned.
“I’m using the dinghy to get back to town,” I announced.
“Fine,” Fontana shot back. “Just do it in the next ten minutes because we need to get moving, with or without you. I’ll be in my cabin.”
Julia had followed him into the salon and sat down. Fontana was disappearing down the companionway stairs.
“This is a surprise,” she said. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“You don’t know?”
“I know as much as I want to. I’m just along for the ride.”
“It’s not the sort of thing you can just be along for the ride for.”
“Why don’t you go talk to Jack? You two seem to have a testosterone problem to work out.”
I went down the companionway stairs into a corridor. The door to one of the cabins was open, and Fontana was sitting on a bunk with his eyes closed. He looked pale in the overhead light.
“I’m tired, Matt,” he said.
When he opened his eyes I slapped him hard across the side of the face. He grabbed for the edge of the bunk but missed and went down on the floor. He put his arm up, waving me off, and got himself back against the wall.
When his breathing slowed down, he said, “Julia’s a friend of mine who’s going along to add camouflage. Two women on the boat is even better than one. If we get picked up, it’ll look mor
e convincing. She’ll stay with Manuel in the Marquesas, then help him rendezvous with us when it’s time.”
“That’s nice for us. She has no idea what she’s getting into, does she? She could spend the next twenty years in prison.”
“Not a chance. She doesn’t even know enough to be an accessory after the fact.”
“Then you should have told her.”
“She wouldn’t let me. Julia’s not stupid.” He looked me in the eyes. “I should have let you know about her. I apologize.”
“Not good enough. I want to know what else you haven’t told me.”
It was the wrong thing to say. He took his time starting to grin.
“You had me worried there, Matt. I thought you were going virtuous on me. You want to know who the money belongs to, that’s really it.”
True and not true.
“I already told you. It’s not going to make any difference if I fill in the blanks, because you aren’t going to know what it means, but here goes. The money belongs to Miriam Benages. She’s in the import-export business in Miami. OK?”
He was right; the name meant nothing.
“A woman?”
“Technically, yes. If it makes you feel any better, Miriam Benages has a lot of men working for her. Manuel Rodríguez Colón used to be one of them. Her nephew. Look, it’s nice we’re having this conversation, but if we don’t get moving very soon, it’s all academic. You can take the dinghy back to town, but Julia’s not going with you. You can stay, or you can go, but it’s way too late in the game for this kind of bullshit. What I really need you to do is go up in the spotting tower so I can teach you some things about the boat. I’d like you to take a turn at the wheel between here and —”
Fontana had been trying to open the gym bag, but he didn’t get to what he was looking for in time. He bent forward and threw up on the floor. What was on the floor was mostly liquid, some streaks of blood in it. He tried to say something and then bent over again, heaving. He had his fingers clenched around a handful of blanket. He sat up straight and took a deep breath.
“What the fuck is going on with you?”
“Seasick,” he said. He unzipped the gym bag and got out a little kidney-shaped bowl. I recognized it from the hospitals, what the nurses called an emesis basin. He said, “I’ll be up top in five.”
I stood in the doorway for another moment and then went down the corridor. In the salon, at the top of the stairs, Julia was sitting with her legs folded on one of the settees, a glass of milk in one hand. A magazine lay on the cushion beside her, together with the stethoscope from her room at the Cardozo.
“He’s throwing up,” I said.
She got up very quickly and brushed past me down the companionway. I listened from the top of the stairs, but I couldn’t hear anything coming from the cabin.
Outside in the cockpit I got a beer out of the cooler and looked at the dinghy for a while. I went so far as to untie the line from the cleat, then stopped, knowing I’d been conning myself.
I wasn’t going back to town. A hundred good reasons existed for going, and a hundred bad ones for staying, but none of them mattered. I could tell myself I owed Fontana, and I did. I could say we were brothers, after all, in all but blood; there were all those electric nights and spiraling footballs. Or I could claim it was about her, Julia, and it was; that was a part of it. But my reasons for staying were spookier than that, and simpler. Fontana knew something about me I hadn’t known till now in words: I needed to play this part to stay alive. He had called my bluff and won the hand. I tied the dinghy to the cleat and started climbing the tower.
The first thing I saw when I got up there was something the size of a cigarette pack wrapped in holiday paper and tied with a red ribbon. A playing card stuck out from beneath the ribbon: a jack of diamonds.
I tore the wrapping paper away and saw it was the black box, the gizmo that had disappeared from the patio three days ago. I rubbed it on my shirt and pitched it in the water.
Five minutes later Fontana walked forward along the side deck. He cast off the line from the mooring buoy, then came up the ladder into the spotting tower and started the engines, and we began moving toward the channel.
When we passed the Empress smoke was coming out of her stacks, and people were already on board looking over the rails, eager to get under way. One or two always got lost on Duval Street and didn’t make it back in time, but many more were like these, the ones who couldn’t wait to leave port, who probably didn’t want to get off the ship in the first place.
At the last channel marker, Fontana put the Ya-Ya up on plane and set the autopilot. All I had to do was watch out for other boats, he said. Just stand there and watch and don’t touch the wheel or the throttles unless we were about to run somebody over. After an hour, when I saw the nun buoy at Sampson Rock, I could cut the engines back to trolling speed and drive around in circles until he came back up to relieve me.
Krystal had left her Walkman on the bow, and Fontana had brought it with him up the ladder into the tower. He pulled a tape out of his pocket and handed it to me, yelling over the wind and the engines.
“In case you get bored! It’s OK if you go down and get beer; just be sure to keep an eye out front of the bow.”
I nodded. Key West was disappearing behind us. I could see the lights on top of the La Concha Hotel, that was about it. Up ahead was nothing but darkness, one or two fishing boats way off to the left.
“Matthew!”
“Yeah?”
“Why don’t cannibals eat clowns?”
“What?”
“Why don’t cannibals eat clowns?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Because they taste funny!”
10
THE JOKE WAS connected to what was on the tape recording, but I didn’t know that yet. When Fontana had gone down the ladder, I put the cassette in the Walkman and hit play. I was waiting for music, but what came through the earphones was a voice. The voice sounded far away and clear all at the same time. It was Kip, explaining how his hair had turned white. But I didn’t know that yet either.
I stood in the spotting tower looking at the night beyond the Ya-Ya’s bow, hanging tight to the grab rails and listening.
“About a year later I ran into one of their drillers in Galveston, and he told me what happened before we got there,” Kip’s voice said. “Northstar Petroleum was ready to go in with some ex-Contra guys they had used in Honduras, but then these Catholic priests got wind of it. The head priest shows up at company headquarters in Manaus and gets down on his knees right there on the shag carpet and starts praying. The field director for Northstar, he’s this Mick from Boston, he decides he’s got nothing to lose. So he flies the priests up into the rain forest in one of the company choppers and drops ’em off, and the pilot says he’ll be back in forty-eight hours to pick ’em up.
“So forty-eight hours later here comes the chopper. They took a few of the Honduran guys with rifles and grenades, so there’s five of ’em total. The priests are there all right, right where they left them, but they got spears sticking out of their backs. It looked like the Indians had popped ’em in the forest pretty close by and then brought the bodies back to the clearing. The priests were sitting around in a little circle facing each other, like they were having a prayer meeting, except they were butt-naked with the spears stuck in their backs and coming out the front. Then all these arrows start hitting the chopper. One of the Hondurans got it through the neck. The others are firing into the forest, but they can’t see a thing, even after they lift off and hightail it out of there.
“That’s when we got involved. I guess the company figured the Hondurans weren’t going to fill the bill. Someone set a bulldozer on fire. The dozer operator was missing, and at first they thought he did it, but a few days later they found him drunk in Brasília and the thinking was: Indians again. I was out in Texas at the time.
“There was eight of us that came down, and Northstar had
all our equipment waiting for us: weapons, flash-bangs, all this high-tech tracking gear, and I’m like, shit, we’re going hunting for little Third World midgets, right? What do we need this stuff for? They flew us up the Amazon to a base camp, and we pigged out on New York strips for a couple days. The compound had barbed wire around it, and they were drilling night and day all over the place, just mud and noise. These Contra fuckups were supposedly guarding the perimeter, but what they were really doing was watching MTV all day long in this tent they had set up. They pulled a hundred TV stations down off a satellite, and it was like black magic to these guys.
“We left out of there, and it was a long haul, hours. We had another Huey following behind us with extra fuel. Keep in mind, I didn’t know about the priests at that point, so when we get to that clearing, to me it’s just a bald spot on a hill. All the way in, it was nothing but jungle. We followed a river, the Negro, for the first hour or so, and once in a while you’d see a boat down there, but as soon as we turned north, there was nothing. I was hanging my feet out the gunner’s door, and I kept looking down past my boots trying to find something besides jungle, but it was trees forever, man. No villages, no fields, no railroad tracks, no highways. Once I thought I saw something moving on a trail, but I couldn’t be sure. I wasn’t even sure there was really a trail. You couldn’t see the ground, just the tops of trees, everything green. Pretty soon there were humps in one place, like little hills. That’s where the clearing was, and now of course I understand why the guys in the other chopper were so fast getting the shit unloaded. Lagrange, the pilot, he wouldn’t even get out. One of the Honduran guys refueled them from a fifty-five-gallon drum and then they were out of there, and it got real quiet.
“Northstar wanted these bad-ass Indians out of that part of the jungle so they could bring in their crews and start drilling. The priests had been doing their thing, see, trying to turn the Indians on to the baby Jesus. They thought they could talk ’em into moving farther north, but you saw what happened to that idea. There we were. It was seventeen thousand dollars a man for the job, and we figured it would take two or three days, so we were laughing our asses off. We set up watches and slept, and in the morning we took off and flew recon until we found their camp. We had three-month-old intelligence, and the camp turned out to be abandoned.
