by Peter Tonkin
‘That’s not a mental image I want to hold on to,’ said Robin as they approached the door out on to South Locust. ‘But …’
‘They’ll be off as fast as humanly possible tomorrow. The second the tide stops running against them, as near as I can judge,’ Nic said.
‘That’s the plan. I thought you wanted them out from under this as early and as fast as possible,’ said Richard as they stepped out on to the pavement and a cab pulled up in front of them.
‘Especially as Florence and Emma seem to think you’ll demand a range of inappropriate forfeits if they lose,’ observed Robin tartly.
‘Fear not, my love – you know you’re all the woman I can handle,’ said Richard piously.
‘Well, let’s just hope you’re man enough for me.’ As she spoke, something fell from the lowering sky and shattered on the sidewalk at their feet. It took them a moment to realize that it was a single raindrop. But it hit the dusty ground hard enough to make a sound as threatening as a silenced gunshot. And it left a mark on the dry pavement big enough to suggest that it must have been about the size of a baseball.
Richard looked down at the little puddle that had formed instantaneously at their feet, then up at the low, leaden, under-lit cloud cover. ‘And it’s maybe just as well,’ he added, his tone suddenly sober and serious, ‘that we’re currently staying in the only hotel in Long Beach that’s actually designed to float …’
ELEVEN
One hour later and a thousand miles further south, Carlos Santiago was wearily bringing his fishing boat, Pilar, into harbour. Carlos and Pilar were equally tired, battered and superannuated. It was coming up to fifty years since Pilar slipped into the water off Encinitas, California. She had been called Miss Ellie to begin with, and had set out on a hopeful career under the firm hand of James Hardy, the man who had commissioned her. Carlos had been celebrating his fifteenth birthday round about then, learning the art of fishing from his father. How the boat he named Pilar after his wife came to him he had no clear idea, for he could not read the American records that told her story and was happy to accept the assurance of the man who sold her that she was a strong and reliable lady. And so she had proved to be – even though the woman for whom she was named died in childbirth, forcing him to raise their beautiful daughter alone.
Now he and Pilar were old and the town in which he had grown up, buried his wife and raised his daughter and seen her married was strange to him nowadays; full of strange buildings, strange people, strange accents and languages, strange sights and smells. A new breakwater big enough to have hotels stood on the seaward side of it. A new six-lane highway reached over the juncture of the inner marina and the outer docks. It was a haven for tourists and pleasure boats. Billionaires and drug dealers. Less and less room for honest working fishermen like himself.
As Carlos Santiago helmed the worn-out old trawler towards this strange new land, feeling the Pacific rollers begin to gather under her keel as the ocean floor started the precipitous rise that extended on to the land and up through the coastal cliffs of the Sierra Madre Mountains, he swept his left hand down his sweat-slick face and scratched the dripping white stubble on his chin as he leaned forward over the helm, squinting upwards through moss-brown eyes. The sky was high and clear enough, in spite of a thin scud of overcast reaching down from the north, in spite of the heat-haze that threatened to warp the air as though it was unseasoned wood. The stars which had guided him in from the outer reaches of the Tres Marias Deep and across the Bahia Banderas so far were still clear enough to rely on – unlike the air conditioning on Pilar’s bridge. He nodded to himself and stood back, lowering his gaze to the blaze of light dead ahead. The trusty old Raymarine he had bought in La Paz in better days was becoming increasingly unreliable now, as indeed was Pilar herself and most of the equipment aboard, including the rusty old Cummins KPA 1100 diesel.
The crew of twelve who had filled her crew quarters and filled her freezer storage areas with blue-fin tuna, snapper and swordfish ten years ago had begun to depart with the onset of federal restrictions and the departure of the fish. Now Pilar was lucky to carry half-a-dozen desperate and starving men in search of sardines. Carlos took his sad and sorry vessel further and further out, trailed finer and finer seined nets, tried longer and longer lines – flirting with arrest and total ruin if he should be caught. But tonight, as usual, he was bringing his boat and his crew home empty, guiding them in by the stars because the equipment was faulty. They were coming towards the harbour silently because he could not rely on the ancient SEA222 HF transceiver any more. He was confused and more hesitant than he cared to admit, not only because of the cataracts darkening his vision which he could not afford to have treated, but also because the dazzle of all the new buildings along the Malecón beachfront disorientated him, as though he had looked up into the heavens and found half-a-dozen new galaxies suddenly appearing there.
But then he saw what he had been looking for. The white house. Dahlia Blanca. The one new addition to Puerto Banderas that earned his blessings instead of his curses. It sat high on the jungle-dark cliff face, a still white beacon under the beams of the three-quarter moon perched just above the starboard wing of Pilar’s flying bridge like a parrot on a pirate’s shoulder. The point of tranquil brightness was like a lighthouse to Carlos Santiago. It shone out above the glare of new buildings like la estrella pola; it cut through the fog of his cataracts; it guided him across the approaches to the commercial dock beside the oldest beach of the burgeoning tourist venue that was now swamping the fishing village which had been his childhood home. The heart of what had been from time immemorial a barrio mariner, visited only by those wishing to hunt the big blue-fin tuna, the sail-fish and the swordfish, and to watch the migrating whales that populated the bahia. And the men in the old days – los hombres machos, the Americanos like the writer Hemingway, the filmmaker Huston and the actors Weathers and Schwarzenegger. The one place the effete, small-minded, modern tourists, the realtors, the speculators and the drug dealers hardly ever came to – Los Muertos.
‘Hola, Capitan,’ said Miguel-Angel Guerrero, the ship’s boy, coming on to the bridge. ‘It is hot tonight! Verdad?’
‘Verdad, hijo,’ answered Carlos. ‘I have never known it so hot at this time of year in all my life.’
‘Nor I,’ agreed Miguel-Angel seriously.
Carlos smiled, but he did not laugh out loud. The boy was sixteen; a quarter of the age of his capitan. So of course he would never have experienced anything Carlos had not experienced. But Carlos was concerned that Miguel-Angel would be insulted if he laughed – even though he would be laughing at the situation, not at the lad, whom he treated as a son because the boy respected him like a father, though he always called him Capitan. Out of respect, of course, for his own father, who owned the dockside chandlery, and was, like Carlos, alone but for his child. Though, unlike Carlos, he had lost his woman not to childbirth but to the lure of California, north of the border. His woman and his elder son.
Lacking a son of his own, Carlos had been busily passing his knowledge of the coastal waters to Miguel-Angel. Earlier that night he had made the boy stand silently beside the open windows, listening to the voices of the Tres Marias Islands, each of whom sang her own song created as wind and water rushed through huge coastal caves which varied in size and depth. Together they had stood and listened to the northernmost voice, Isla Maria Madre, whose song was deep and unmistakable. Then, later, they had listened to the roaring of the waters as they rushed over the reefs beside Isla Saint Isabel, who, together with the Tres Marias, gave a measure of protection to the harbour at Puerto Banderas.
Miguel-Angel walked forward to stand by his capitan and follow the direction of his gaze towards the last of the features that guided them safely home. ‘It is the Dahlia Blanca,’ the boy said. ‘It guides us home like a lighthouse.’ But he used the word faro, which means ‘beacon’.
‘It is like a beacon to me, indeed,’ agreed Carlos. ‘And in more
ways than one. It not only brings us home every night, but it ensures I have a home to go to, eh, Miguel-Angel?’
Miguel-Angel understood the old man’s point, for they had discussed the situation often and in detail. Carlos’s daughter, Pilar, had married a young man named Cesar, who had migrated here from Guadalajara and lacked any charm, skill or ambition that his father-in law could see. But Carlos, a fair man, admitted that few sons-in-law measured up to the dreams of their suegros. For some time the newly-weds relied on Carlos for housing and support while Pilar sought work in the villas and hotels being built on the outskirts of the old town. And Cesar had sought with little success to make the acquaintance of the most successful drug dealers in the barrio. It seemed for a while that Carlos would have to support them all for ever – or at least until he was called home to heaven by Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe.
But then el Americano Señor Bosqueverde – Greenbaum – came to Puerto Banderas, and this had led to Dahlia Blanca being constructed. Everything had changed. Pilar applied for a position there and was made a junior cook-housekeeper, earning a salary that seemed simply fabulous. Cesar most unexpectedly revealed a passion for plants and an ability to nurture them, an ability that might have recommended him to the local jefes narcos had they been interested in marijuana rather than cocaine and crystal meth. He too applied for work and was made junior groundsman, of equal standing in the gardens to Pilar in the house. And on an equal salary. They were able to afford a modest flat high on the hill slopes where the rent was cheap and the air was cool. A flat with a second bedroom for the baby they proposed to have soon. But in the meantime, Carlos occupied it, glad to get out of the two-roomed hovel behind Los Muertos in which he had been born and raised, with its veranda on which he had slept during the days – and nights – while Pilar and Cesar occupied the old bedroom and, indeed, the old bed in which she had been conceived. A veranda which was comfortable enough in the dry season and allowed the newly-weds some privacy, while being convenient to the outside lavatory which Carlos visited several time a night.
‘I am pleased your home is so comfortable nowadays,’ said Miguel-Angel wisely, ‘because you will need to sleep well tonight. The tide will be against us in the morning, but nevertheless we will need to be out early if we wish to have better luck than we had today. I did not say, but this morning I heard Hernan, who runs the Cabo 32 Riviera sport fishing boat, say that these are the last good days. From tomorrow or the day after, we must expect a Día del Diablo. And he wasn’t talking about Día de los Inocentes, such as we might have between Navidad and Ano Nuevo.’
‘I know,’ answered Carlos. ‘It is something in the air. I have also smelt it. The heat, the humidity. There is something bad coming, and soon, I fear.’
‘Do you believe,’ asked the eternally hopeful young Miguel-Angel, ‘that it will be enough, whatever it is, to make the prestamistas, the loan sharks, hesitate to collect everything that you owe them for keeping Pilar?’
The old man swung round to face the boy, unusually animated by sudden, frustrated rage. ‘If you can say such things then I have indeed told you too much and treated you like a man, un hombre, when you are still a child, a critura. Perhaps it would be better if you helped your father, Shipschandler Guerrero, safely ashore in his chandlery if there are bad days coming and you cannot hold your tongue like a man.’
But the boy was used to the old man’s temper. ‘Not so, Capitan,’ he answered gently. ‘It is my place as your mate, your primer official, to carry some of your burden. My father is well able to look after the shop himself and has no need of me there. So I say all that I mean to say. If we are to work well tomorrow before the devil days arrive, and pay the loan sharks enough to keep them quiet for the moment, then no matter how late we dock tonight, we must be up before dawn tomorrow and out even before the tide. That way we will be first to sea, and have the best chance of filling the freezers with blue-fin or swordfish. Or even with sardines.’
‘So long as they are full,’ agreed Carlos. ‘You are right, and I am sorry that I was angry. It is I who am the critura, the child. This is a thing which comes with age.’
‘You are not so old,’ said the boy with a smile. ‘But if you wish to age any further, Capitan, you had best pay attention to your heading or we will collide with the pier and destroy the harbour as well as ourselves. Then we will, as likely as not, join los muertos, the dead, before our time.’
TWELVE
Robin woke next morning to the sound of distant thunder. That and the absence of her husband. Again. There was no hesitation this time, no bleary-eyed contemplation of their splendid accommodation, which was filled with sinister shadows today instead of yesterday’s dazzling sunlight. Shadows that gave an ominous flicker before the threatening rumble echoed over the breathless air once more. And Robin was in action before the ominous sound faded back to silence, rolling out of bed and glancing around as she strode purposefully towards the en suite, muttering, ‘Oh, you bloody man. I know where you will be. And I’d better get up and out PDQ myself …’
They had packed rather than fooled around last night, so she didn’t even need to hesitate over her choice of costume. All she had left out were the toilet bag she shared with Richard and the outfit she proposed to wear aboard Maxima on her fast run south close behind Katapult8. Both were heading for Puerto Banderas a thousand miles away – and out from under whatever cataclysm the atmospheric river close above was preparing to hurl down upon California. Practical, almost indestructible, weatherproof clothing that was stylish, easy to wear and quick to get on and off. Much of it by Aquascutum of London, as she was going cruising aboard a state-of-the-art gin palace. Had she been joining Liberty aboard Katapult8, she would have preferred outfits by Helly Hansen or Gill Marine.
Her mood suddenly as dark as the dim, flickering daylight oozing coolly into her cabin, she shrugged off the confection by Janet Reger that had started their love-play off the night before last and padded into the bathroom where, prompted by the third distant snarl of thunder, she skipped her usual shower and brushed her hair and teeth with perfunctory thoughtlessness before getting dressed and going straight up on to the bridge without even checking Richard’s cell phone for confirmation of his whereabouts.
Richard was standing at the portside window looking away westward, the rigid lines of his frowning face reminding Robin of Keats’s verse as quoted by Nic yesterday … like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific – and all his men … Silent, upon a peak in Darien … Though to be fair she doubted whether the Spanish conquistador had been suited by Gieves and Hawkes or booted by John Lobb – like Aquascutum, the holder of many historic warrants for supplying the Royal family with clothes and shoes not least to the queen this vessel was named after and her husband, the king. The scar on Richard’s cheekbone would have suited Keats’s poetically heroic explorer well enough, however, she decided with a sudden rush of affection, if not the less politically correct conquistador thug of historical reality. She joined him silently, rose on tiptoe and kissed the buccaneer’s scar before snuggling close beside him and following the bright blue dazzle of his brooding gaze.
The western sky was almost coal black, seeming to press down on to Long Beach with a terrible, physical weight. The bases of the huge dark clouds appeared to be writhing as though there were winds like the jet stream roaring through them at dreadful speeds. As Robin stood at Richard’s shoulder, a great bolt of lightning struck down out of the black belly of the distant monster, seemingly straight into the invisible ocean. And still there was no wind, as yet, down here on the cowering earth. No rain. Just the rumble of distant thunder echoing in over the docks.
‘I don’t like the look of that at all,’ she said.
‘Me neither,’ agreed Richard. ‘If mackerel skies and mares’ tails make tall ships wear short sails, as the saying goes, this lot would make any sane sailor run for safe haven with all the speed he can.’
‘We need to get off this ship and o
n to Maxima as fast as humanly possible. It’s only a short hop across the docks.’
He nodded. ‘And we need to get Nic and Liberty running south before whatever is actually up there starts coming down in earnest.’
‘Damn right.’ She was in motion as she spoke.
‘You get things organized in the cabin and I’ll settle the bill. Meet you at the gangway,’ he said decisively, following in her footsteps. ‘And while I’m doing that I’ll check how things aboard Sulu Queen are proceeding. I don’t want Captain Sin to have to face this particular storm tiger either if we can possibly avoid it. Maybe Antoine can get some cargo for him in Puerto Banderas.’
‘If they have port facilities anywhere near big enough to handle her down there,’ called Robin as she vanished downwards towards their cabin. ‘I mean, I know she’s not a Maersk Triple E super freighter, but even so …’
Richard was waiting at the top of the gangplank when Robin reappeared with a laden steward in tow fifteen minutes later. ‘Captain Sin is not a happy bunny,’ he called, then paused, distracted by the coincidence that made him refer to Sin’s favourite Chinese insult. Unconscious association? he wondered. Then he speculated for a sidetracked instant who the outraged captain would be calling a son of a rabbit next. Richard himself, probably, for the cunning plan seemed to have backfired. The National Guard containers had been loaded aboard Sulu Queen by midnight, just as he had calculated – but they were still aboard, apparently, as were Antoine Prudhomme, Major Guerrero and his people. The freight yards were being cleared far more slowly than they had hoped. Guerrero’s emergency containers looked as though they would need to stay in place for much of the rest of the day, at least. And, until they were unloaded and the rest of Sulu Queen’s cargo removed and replaced, the vessel was stuck in dock. But maybe she was safer there, Richard thought, looking for the bright side as ever, in spite of what the NOAA scientists believed was on its way.
