From his pilot-house rail, Captain Stooz repeats, “Careful,” and taps the shark logo on his hat. “Weather permittin’, be back through the week comin’.”
I give him the peace sign.
According to the Stooz-man, the Grand Hotel Boblo has nine bungalow rooms, two bars—one with mosquitoes—a landing strip if you’re desperate or fortified with recreational medication, and the best hurricane-hole marina between Hispaniola and the Florida Keys. It was built by a bush-pilot contrabander and a deranged artist who loved limestone, chain saws, and ocean trash that could be massed into giant Burning Man sculptures. But it was the bush pilot’s Sicilian girlfriend—a five-foot, stunning bit of business named Yolande Citro—who added the colonial white shutters, pale-yellow siding, pink roof, and high-end escorts looking for a working vacation.
The “hotel” sits on, in, and around a limestone quarry sixteen feet above sea level. Hurricanes pass through often, as do sport fishermen who aren’t fishing for fish, as well as modern-day rumrunners (cocaine) on forced holiday from their respective countries of origin and the international police who hunt them. The Grand Hotel Boblo also gets the occasional rock star trolling for trouble they can’t find in a tour bus. The sign out front reads:
Another gringo folly, an alcohol-soaked, sunstroke vision of paradise driven by ego and the lack of any geographic knowledge of the region whatsoever.
—James William Buffett
misquoted, as are many, at Hotel Boblo
Captain Stooz also said that if you stop smiling in either bar at Grand Hotel Boblo, it’s only because your cheeks are tired. So the bar is where me and my Top-Siders go.
***
Someone is panfrying fish in the back. I finish my second on-island beer and push the photo across the bar for the fifth time, having added a $20 with each push.
Shrieeeek!
Outside at the hurricane-hole dock is a 58-foot luxury yacht that was Eurotrash posh in the ’70s. The five topless girls aboard point at the water. The water’s calm, nothing odd, pastel blue—a shark explodes through the blue at a poodle on the yacht’s ski deck. The five girls jump backward, and the dog does an Olympic high jump. The shark’s sharp half thrashes the ski deck, lucks into the dead wahoo about to be the girls’ lunch, chomps the fish, and slams back into the water.
Ooo-kay.
Got it. Don’t feed the animals.
I re-push the photo across the bar. This time, my lean, sun-weathered, sixty-something bartender scoops the twenties into his “Fly or Dye” T-shirt pocket. Kayak Jim Jordan smiles and turns the photograph toward me—three women rugby players post-match, arm in arm. He says, “Where’d you get this? Photoshop?”
“A lawyer in Chicago. Said it was taken in ’94 or ’95 in Glasgow, Scotland. They were playing for a Barbarian team owned by the guy behind them in the photo, a Scotsman named Norrie Rowan.”
Kayak Jim smiles again, shaking his head. “The Witches of Eastwick. Wow. Never seen a picture of all three together. If this is real, it’s almost as good as that ’50s photo of Elvis, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee at Sun Records.” Kayak Jim points at his wall. “Love to have this up there.”
I grin at our good fortune.
Kayak Jim says, “Don’t know what a ‘Barbarian team’ is, but the black babe is Cuban military—Che Guevara type—Florent Dusson-Siri, but she doesn’t look like that anymore.” Kayak Jim palms the side of his face. “Burned. The redhead is Anne Bonny.” Kayak Jim’s eyes narrow and he nods southwest. “Women don’t come more dangerous than Anne Cormac Bonny. They say she does ‘salvage.’ Anchors in, or near, Port Royal, Jamaica. But you don’t want to find her, even if you could.” Kayak Jim taps two fingertips on the last woman. “The brunette is your Susie Devereux. Flashy little number, but no walk in the park either. Scottish Moroccan, pirate from birth, dead three years ago aboard her boat in the Camagüey Breaks.” Kayak Jim winces, sorry. “Devereux’s dead, but I’m keeping your money.”
I nod. Polite being my default demeanor, and the five twenties weren’t my money. “Anyone find her body?”
“Nah. But she’s dead.”
“Last time Susie Devereux was ‘dead,’ it was actually the witness-protection program.”
Kayak Jim prunes, not a believer.
I repeat some of the info provided with my stipend—a full-on Bond-girl profile that I reread more often than was required for this I’ll find the money adventure. “Before the US Air Force killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006, he put a price on Susie Devereux’s head, literally. Al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda crew tried twice to kidnap her—once in Santiago de Cuba and once in Egypt, where they got her, promising both times to behead her on video.”
Kayak Jim’s eyes go cartoon-wide. “The Arab with those sword videos was after Susie Devereux, down here?”
“Scary, huh? Miss Devereux worked as a private contractor at Sheberghan, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo. She’s good at not being dead when she’s dead.”
“Never heard any of that. Her boat was here, in and out, five, six times three years back, but she and her crew kept to themselves. Nice enough fellas—an American and an Afrikaner, polite, but serious, you know?” Kayak Jim stops. “Sorta looked like you under that aloha shirt, now that I think about it—middle age, white, good size, good shape, eyes that’d been around the block.”
“Really?” I check the Grand Hotel Boblo’s backbar mirror.
Kayak Jim says, “Yeah, really.”
Me in the mirror looks like Tinkerbell not Captain Hook, the violence of my previous life buried where the mirror can’t reflect it and only a psychiatrist or mortician could mine it.
I smile my best Tinkerbell.
Kayak Jim continues, “Given Susie Devereux’s reputation, it seemed prudent to let her be. It wasn’t a party or a hole-up; they were working.”
“Looking for the Capone gold?”
Kayak Jim floats bushy eyebrows. “As in Al Capone?”
I nod. The book Barlow gave me, Get Capone, was written by a Chicago guy named Jonathan Eig. Reading it on the way here, I found no map to the missing gold—Barlow’s convinced it’s part of Susie Devereux’s story. Unfortunately, I can’t use Mr. Barlow’s name as support for this conversation, or any other. Pretending to be Eig will be lots easier.
My bartender says, “Son, I’ve been kicking around down here a long time and never heard Al Capone’s name south of Miami. Hollywood puts Capone’s hand on every criminal act ever committed by an American, but in these parts, the Golden Age of Piracy was two centuries before Capone was born.”
I stay with my employer’s theory. “Capone’s gold was definitely modern-day. Would’ve been in the 1920s or ’30s.”
Kayak Jim says, “The only modern-day gold I know about is what went missing from the Banque Nationale d’Haiti during World War One, almost a hundred years ago. A treasure hunter’s ghost story.”
Gag; cough. Barlow did not mention Haiti. My neck-chain talisman is choking me. Kayak Jim glances at my right hand, the palm now flattened over a name carved across the lifeline.
“Could Susie Devereux have been chasing that gold? From”—I cough again—“Haiti?”
Kayak Jim fisheyes me. “Doubt it. And she never said. And I wasn’t in the breaks, but the Cubans say Susie Devereux is dead down island of Cayo Romano. No one over here on the non-Communist side of the channel has seen, or heard of, her since.” Kayak Jim polishes the bar. “Why’s Susie Devereux worth a hundred dollars to a guy like you?” Small smile. “Whatever kinda guy you are?”
Behind Kayak Jim, reflected in the bar mirror, a truly odd white guy walks past the bar’s windows. No shirt, powerfully built, a wad of sandy hair no barber college could explain. I know he’s not Eurotrash, because they almost never carry chain saws. The white guy comes through the door, sets the chain saw on the bar next to me, and extends his hand. “Bobby Little, my pleasure
to meet ya.”
I reach to shake and tell him my fake name. The girls on the boat shriek again. Bobby Little says, “Excuse me” and grabs his saw off the bar.
Three steps out the door, Bobby fires the chain saw. Everything that’s alive, in or out of the water, runs for cover. Bobby jumps off the dock, lands chest-deep in the water, and fans the saw like he intends to go diving with it.
Kayak Jim shakes his head. “My partner; nothing to worry about,” then asks me again: “Why’s Susie Devereux worth a hundred dollars to a guy like you?”
I quit looking at the potential showdown in the harbor between chain saw and shark and ease into my cover story. “I stumbled onto a crate of Capone documents that a US federal prosecutor had squirreled away back in the ’30s. Used ’em to write a book about Capone that’s about to publish.” I push Barlow’s copy of Get Capone across the bar. “Thinking about writing a sequel; wanted to see if the Capone gold is more than an urban legend.”
“You’re a writer? Woulda guessed smuggler, cocaine maybe, or guns.” Both hands go up. “No offense. What’s your name again?”
I lie. “Jonathan Eig.”
“No . . . the Weaponized Accounting Jonathan Eig?”
I swell on my stool. “Yep.”
“No shit? Stay put. Next beer’s on me.” Kayak Jim walks down the bar and disappears through a gray kitchen door. I check Bobby Little still in the water, now chopping at it with his chain saw. His partner returns with a mangled Jon Eig paperback, a Michael Lewis hardcover, and a 2005 Rolling Stone magazine in a clear plastic bag. On the cover: “The Man Who Sold the War.” Kayak Jim pushes the paperback at me with a pen. “Would you mind? Make it to Kayak Jim Jordan. I tell all the girls and captains who dock here—tell ’em all the time—read these three, not the Bible.”
I sign messy over Jonathan Eig’s faded back-cover bio (no photo) that says he was an investigative reporter for a list of big-time newspapers.
Kayak Jim adds: “All you need to know. The whole goddamn world-scenario is Wall Street fiction—Iraq’s WMD, the War on Drugs, campaign finance reform—all of it bullshit.”
At the far end of the serpentine tile bar, a sun-and-life-mottled captain with navy tattoos sits on his stool unfazed by the shark-poodle attack and the continuing chain saw response. The captain’s lack of interest isn’t completely out of line; he has a tanned, topless young lady on his lap.
“God bless Buddy Holly,” says the captain, raising a Carib beer in a toast. “Best place for facts is always a rock ’n’ roll tabloid.”
Shouting outside.
Kayak Jim says: “Goddammit,” jumps the bar, a revolver in hand, and runs for the dock. The blue water around Bobby Little is red for ten feet in every direction. Kayak Jim aims at the water and shouts at two Bahamians watching the carnage. They jump in, grab Bobby and his chain saw, haul him out, and drop him on the dock. Bobby Little jumps to his feet, points at the dogs on the dock, then yells at the water: “Not the goddamn dogs! Dogs are not fish!”
From behind his topless stool mate, the captain says, “Odd, an educated fellow like yourself down here hunting gold.”
I cut back to the captain and his Cinderella.
“Not hunting.” My fingers make a crucifix. “Just want to vet the Capone gold story. But if it’s true, then the money trail’s real, and the money trail is what I’m actually interested in.”
“Money trail?”
“Same general theory as you’ll find in our bartender’s reading list.” I nod to the ghost of Kayak Jim. “US foreign policy in collusion with Wall Street banks, add Capone as the criminal element, and we’re looking at another Iran-Contra or United Fruit—the same crime-business-government three-way that Senator Estes Kefauver called the ‘Rotten Bargain’ back in the 1950s. The story I’m chasing has the gold embezzled from a bank down here in the Caribbean with the help of a bank in New York.”
The captain sips his beer, his chin above Cinderella’s naked shoulder. “Never heard about Capone being involved, but your story could be Haiti. Lots of Haitians say gold was looted from their treasury, not embezzled. The Ida rebels in particular never stop selling that story. The gold itself is fact, and it’s MIA, but that gold never belonged to the Haitian treasury. That gold belonged to the bank’s US investors as part of their reserve requirement.”
I squint confusion.
The captain says, “During World War One, Haiti’s president was assassinated, chopped into edible pieces. The US government feared that a slave revolt, the cacos, led by Charlemagne Péralte, would take power, steal the bank’s gold, fill Haiti’s treasury, then help the Germans attack America. If it’s that gold you’re talking about, that gold has killed everyone said to have touched it, including your Susie Devereux if that’s what she was after.”
“And the Gryphon?”
Cinderella loses her smile. The captain hardens. He stares and doesn’t speak.
Oops. Whoever Mr. Gryphon is, I’ve overplayed knowing about him.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean anything. Heard the name from a Chicago lawyer who worked in DC twenty years ago, that’s all. He said this Gryphon guy was a player down here back then. That he might know something about Susie Devereux.”
The captain eyes the doors and Kayak Jim returning, then the windows, showing more concern than he did for the shark fight. “I suggest you finish your beer, Mr. Eig, and go wherever it is you’re going. Keep that name to yourself and good luck to you.”
I conjure a Jonathan Eig apology. “Sorry. Really. I used to be a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. A guy hears things, so he asks, that’s all. Old habit. No offense.” I toast the captain with my beer. “Really.”
The already diminished happy in the room diminishes to zero.
Kayak Jim changes the subject. “I can tell you about the gold; can’t say I don’t look when I’m flying that water.” Grin. “On December 17, 1914, sixty-five US Marines under the command of one Major C. B. Hatch ‘looted’ the Banque Nationale d’Haiti. They loaded 1,650 pounds of gold aboard the US Gunboat Machias—$500,000 worth at $20 an ounce—then sailed immediately from the harbor at Port-au-Prince. Later that day, engine trouble forced the Machias into the old port at Kingston, Jamaica. A day later, the Machias docked in Santiago de Cuba at Guantanamo Bay, trying to avoid the hurricane that almost sank her in the harbor anyway. She left Cuba on December 21, 1914; was found adrift off Charleston, South Carolina, on January 3, 1915, a ghost ship—no crew, no US Marines, no gold.”
The girl on the captain’s lap speaks for the first time, eyes on her beer: “Don’t go to Haiti; you won’t come back.” She raises her eyes to me, staring like the naked and fervent do in Madonna videos. “Ayiti’s civil war will start soon, fifty thousand Ida rebels . . . but they won’t be what kills you; he’ll know you’re coming before you know you’re going.”
All righty, then.
It makes me ill to say Haiti—and there’s absolutely no chance I’d go—but these reactions are too over the top not to press. “Think one of your fellow captains would take me? To Haiti?”
The captain shakes his head. “You don’t listen well, do you?”
Actually, the real me does. “It’s not that far, is it?” I point southeast.
The captain shakes his head again and nods toward our bartender. “Jonathan Eig, meet Kayak Jim Jordan. Bush pilot. Seaplane. Half owner of Hotel Boblo. And crazy.” The captain nods outside at Bobby Little. “And that’s saying something. Write down your next of kin; I’ll make sure they get word.”
***
Rather than do that, I set up my office on the Grand Hotel Boblo dock—sufficiently far back to avoid a shark reprisal—unfold my laptop, log on to Boblo’s pirated cell signal, and task Google with “Anne Cormac Bonny, gold, Jamaica.” The signal is slow. Three multicultural terriers sniff my laptop and me. They smell like scavenged crabmeat and sweat.
<
br /> The girls aboard the yacht giggle and shriek and throw food in the water. The dogs eye the food. I remind them, “Shark? Big teeth? Chomp?”
My screen lights up with Anne Bonny’s namesake ancestor, the pirate from the 1700s. I add “smuggler, treasure hunter, salvage” and get a Jamaica Gleaner op-ed article with a photo, written three months ago. It says that Anne Cormac Bonny is “out of favor with the current government, considered a smuggler and a subversive whose continued presence on our island is an insult to the republic.”
Gosh, what a shock. My girl Anne is, as always, the epicenter of happy.
Barlow was correct that Anne and I have a history. Why Dave Grossfeld felt the need to share that fact is one of several in-your-face conversations he and I will have when I see him.
Although Anne’s one of the reasons Barlow selected me for this mission, he’s unaware that we have not spoken since 1986. My night terrors are the reason. If Anne knows that Susie D. is somehow alive, I doubt Anne will tell me unless Susie D. wants me to know.
Anne’s picture in the Gleaner is in front of the Sazerac Bar, a bar the article says Anne owns in Port Royal, the pirate capital of the world back in her namesake’s day. In the photo, Anne hasn’t changed much since our days at Oxford—still a shoulders-back flaming redhead, but in a national-pattern sarong skirt instead of a kilt, bathing-suit top, muscled arms and shoulders, and the same full-lipped half-grin that promised way more than a smart person could handle.
I try an email address that my employer said was associated with an Anne Bonny in the “professional salvage” business. The email address produces an automated reply asking for my info and the reason for my enquiry. I type my reason but expect no reply. I try a phone number search. Three numbers with 876 prefixes (Jamaica) match Anne’s name. I call—at two dollars and twenty cents per minute—and each number answers with a recording prompting me to leave a message.
Hm.
Kingston would be a three-hour flight in Kayak Jim’s single-engine seaplane . . . and seeing Anne again is definitely tempting, but so is not seeing her (I do have to sleep at night). And the Glasgow rugby photograph of Anne and Susie D. is fourteen years old, so it isn’t like Anne and Susie D. are current mates. Then there’s the history Anne and I and her boyfriend had in that country I’m never going back to. Seriously unpleasant history I do not care to revisit, talisman or no. And . . . what do the Fates say? Jamaica or Cuba?
Privateers Page 3
