Privateers

by Charlie Newton

  Anne strips the beret, stays focused outside on the torches, then pulls her long red hair back to her shoulders and asks, “Our Dracula is there?” Her Irish accent is cool and measured. She’s neither nervous nor relaxed. When she turns to me, her emerald eyes flash. Anne’s seen badly beaten men before, but she can’t quite hide her reaction.

  The best joke I can make is, “Elephant Man?”

  Anne studies me, but it’s not for the two years since we last saw each other. Carel told her; he must have. Shame burns through the narcotics and heats my face. Anne Bonny is twenty years old, two years younger than me, but big-time older in experience, the reincarnation of her never-hanged pirate great-great-great-grandmother. Anne touches the bandages on my swollen forehead.

  She says, “Bébé Doc arrived Paris all the dazzler on a plane provided by your USA. UPI says he brought $500 million dollars with him. Can you imagine?” Anne smooths patches of my hair into better order. “Assumin’, Bill, you can imagine anything beyond pain and the tablets.”

  “I’m all right, tougher than I look.”

  She smiles the smile. “And did ya do Carel’s lookin’ about?”

  “Best I could . . . the rest I had to get secondhand; people I work with who have family all over the island. Not as good as seeing it, but . . . it’s already so bad out there . . .”

  “Our Dracula?”

  “Landed last night.” I point down to l’Habitation Leclerc. “Torches are for him.”

  Anne turns back from the torches, uses both hands to stroke my neck and shoulders. “Are you up to the remainder, Mr. Bill?”

  “Hope so. Would kinda like to go home.”

  Anne searches my face from girlfriend distance, looking for the rapes and beatings. “Are you steamin’ mad, Bill? Behind that libertine smile you’re known for?” She pats my shoulders. “Best we keep any new temper in your shoes or we’ll all be dead.”

  Pride tries for bold-hero boyfriend material, but I can’t get there. “Did the recon; haven’t heard back on the boats yet.”

  “But are you up to it, Bill? Say no if it’s no, and I’ll do Carel’s boats myself.”

  I uncork a bottle of Barbancourt Reserve du Domaine with a bandaged hand, take a sip, and hand it to her. Anne sips, keeping her eyes on mine. “Then we best be on with it. There’s the storm comin’ . . . from the east and the west.”

  Carel’s plan will be the “storm from the west,” meaning he’s not arriving how I’d guessed. But he will arrive: simple, violent, and direct. I ask, “What’s the plan?”

  Anne looks back out the window, then back to me. She weighs my condition, my reliability, and my unfortunate need to know, then explains:

  “I entered the country as a BBC war correspondent, engaged to you,” she shows me the engagement ring and a BBC lanyard ID. “Stayin’ here at the Oloffson, in this room. Tomorrow, I interview Luckner Cambronne for the BBC. He and I have the history. The bugger asked my sister and I to his room when we were but schoolgirls in uniform.” Anne holds her hand four feet off the floor. “Was at a Kingston polo match where he was a guest of the high lord ministers and their ladies. The actress Maureen O’Hara was his preferred, on hand that day shootin’ a movie in Kingston she was, but the glorious one would have none of him. During tomorrow’s interview, I’ll be Mr. Cambronne’s Maureen, light his famous libido, use that thirst for Irish redheads to parlay him into a tryst right there.” She points to my bed.

  “Jesus, Anne, you are fucking nuts.”

  She smiles. “A man’s weakness is what I am. During our tryst, I’ll spike Mr. Cambronne with a syringe. Carel and his Scouts will kill Cambronne’s guards, place our Dracula naked in a bag like the gunnysacks his Tontons Macoutes bogeymen use, then drive to a port on the south coast.”

  “Driving through a three-way civil war?” I grab the bottle and drink.

  Anne smiles and avoids educating me. “Carel is known for his planning.”

  “The guys with Carel are all Selous Scouts?”

  She nods. “They’ll remove Cambronne from the island in a twin-engine fishing boat, cross the Corazón Santo to Port Royal. Requires six to eight hours if the sea stays favorable. From there, Cambronne sails to the hangman in Afrika.” Anne air-washes her hands. “Done.”

  The plan sounds too simple to work.

  Anne reads my skepticism. “There are no better than the Scouts. Carel and his mates are infamous for infiltrating rebel camps.”

  She’s got a point. One of the stories I remember was at a place in Mozambique called Nyadzonya Pungwe. The white Scouts marched in, pretending to be prisoners of their black comrades. Eighty-four Scouts total, including Carel Roos. When it was over, they’d killed almost a thousand.

  Anne reaches for the Barbancourt bottle, no smile, only resolve. “Best you and I be ready. My man Carel is as proficient a hunter-killer as walks Afrika. He’s not sayin’ so, but I can tell he’s got a bad feelin’ about this one.”

  Kingston, Jamaica

  Now

  Chapter 15

  Bill Owens

  Sunday

  United 622 from Newark skirts Jamaica’s spectacular Blue Mountains, then banks to land mid-harbor on a completely unprotected landfill airstrip with water on three sides. I weathered the jolts and lightning and white-knuckle miles over Cuba by trying to handicap Eddie O’Hare—lawyer, horseplayer/poet—and his treasure.

  The bad news is that even though I can read a Racing Form backward in three languages, I couldn’t handicap Eddie O’Hare’s poems. Poems I’m certain Mr. O’Hare wrote to protect himself should he be killed, or kidnapped and tortured for the gold’s location, forcing his kidnappers through a minefield that’d he’d never have to walk, and all others would.

  And if I can’t figure the starting gate, let alone the finish line in this race, then there’s better than a fifty-fifty chance this treasure hunt is about something else other than treasure. And that, given the players on all sides, would be a construct I probably can’t survive.

  But then, I probably can’t survive the Haitians and Loef Brummel either.

  Kingston’s landing strip is ten feet above sea level; probably half that by tonight when the storms land. For the fiftieth time, we jolt hard left, then right. The college kid sweating in the middle seat next to me goes rigid, his eyes shut, both hands death-gripped on the armrest. Marlboros pop out of his pocket and onto my lap.

  I nudge his hand using his cigarette pack. “Don’t worry, I fly this route every week. Trust me, odds are twenty to one these cigarettes will kill you. A plane crash, even down here, is twenty thousand to one.”

  The kid nods an inch, doesn’t grip for his cigarettes, and doesn’t open his eyes. Our Boeing 737 jolts again; people gasp. Lightning rips far to the east. The cabin PA announces: “We have completed our preliminary approach into Kingston and will be landing shortly.”

  The storm wall is on the other side of the plane. My window is Jamaica’s south coast lit in the odd half-light of inbound weather. Over the wing, directly across Kingston Harbour from the airport, are Eddie O’Hare’s coordinates for $26 million in gold. I squint for the waterfront downtown. The pilot banks a final time and the wing blocks where a giant X marks the spot should be floating. That’s how it would be in the Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew mysteries, so that’s how it should be for me. Probably no room for Anne Bonny and Susie Devereux, though, not in a Hardy Boys adventure.

  United 622 hits the runway hard. Three overhead bins snap open. The plane shudders, swerves, and the engines roar. Our speed quits; the engines cut . . . and we don’t slide into the bay. The cabin lights blink on. The college kid next to me opens his eyes and sucks a breath.

  I smile at him. “See? Just like I said. Get yourself a piña colada at Redbones; ask Enola Williams to take you to the all-night dance in Rae Town; party like Bob Marley sent you the invitation.”

 
The kid doesn’t ask for his Marlboros and I don’t offer them; Marlboros and bad judgment killed my mom when she was forty-six. I repack the Eddie O’Hare poems, map, and photos, then deplane into Kingston’s Norman Manley International Airport and my reunion with Herself: Anne Cormac Bonny, siren, sorceress.

  Been twenty-three years. This time, though, our three-way will include my new Bond-girl girlfriend instead of a Rhodesian mercenary. I smooth my wrinkled, stinky reunion outfit that might be overlooked if Brad Pitt had it on.

  Walking shiny linoleum toward immigration, the modern version of Norman Manley International Airport is a surprise. It wasn’t spotless or modern last time I was here. The steel-and-glass architecture feels like a real airport, not a matchstick rebuild waiting for the next hurricane.

  Up ahead, two hundred passengers stand in the immigration and customs queues. Only one intake crew is on duty. God bless tropical time. I smooth “wanted fugitive” out of my madras jacket and join the queue, then feign interest in one of the TV monitors and their real-time weather maps.

  The Atlantic Ocean is a spider cloud of hurricane possibilities.

  Blue-uniformed security people watch us. None seem interested; neither do the three immigration officers behind their podiums. I have unpleasant history here, but twenty-three years is half a lifetime in many parts of the West Indies. My heart rate increases anyway. The officer who will process me is a large woman in her forties, properly fatigued in the late afternoon and unmotivated by the crush.

  After twenty minutes in line, she waves me up. I present my passport and the white immigration card, using my hand without the name on the palm. She smells like the ocean, matches my face to my photograph, then checks her computer. “The reason for your visit to Jamaica?”

  “Vacation.”

  “You have been to Jamaica before, Mr. Owens?”

  “Nope. Looking forward to it.”

  Her round face turns from the screen to me. “No?”

  “First time.”

  “This is your passport?”

  “Yeah. A reissue; I lost the last one years and years ago.”

  She stares at her computer screen, shakes it with her palm, then slaps the monitor’s side. She frowns, looks to her right for a supervisor, mumbles a complaint in patois, and waits.

  A male supervisor appears, gestures toward the long lines behind me, and tells my immigration officer to get on with it.

  She turns back to me. “When did you work for Myers’s Rum?”

  “Me? Never. Never been here before.”

  She scowls an otherwise unlined face, slaps her computer again, and looks for her missing supervisor. “Your hotel?”

  “Eggy’s Bohemian, Treasure Beach.”

  She checks her computer screen again, shrugs, then stamps my passport so softly the ink is unreadable. Her tired, overworked exhale is audible as she hands the blue booklet back; her voice robotic: “Any change in your location, please contact immigration with your new hotel. Welcome to Jamaica.”

  I smile. She’s already looking past me. I weave through the crowded baggage-collection area to the customs line. The customs officer sleepy-eyes my immigration card: “What items have you to declare?” The suit-and-tie official next to him cranes around my shoulder to the baggage carousel and three Jamaicans yelling at each other.

  “None.” Smile.

  He waves me through into a throng of waiting black faces. I scan them for kidnappers and Haitian gunmen, politely snake between shoulders and hips and dreads to the terminal’s exit doors, don’t look back, and step outside:

  Heat blast and humidity. Jesus.

  But the pre-storm twilight is soft and pastel, fragrant and floral like two decades ago. Beyond the arrivals’ drive aisle, royal palms rise out of the pink-and-white bougainvillea. The palms have wind in them from the Atlantic front we just skirted. I look left, then right for Anne Bonny and our reunion. No Anne; no stand-in sirens or pirate girls; no armed guards for the clues I’m carrying to $26 million in gold.

  Anne or armed people from her crew should be here.

  The Anne-Bill reunion might be a college fantasy, but the Haitians at Nick & Nora’s weren’t. To my left, the tourists who were on the flight crush at the curb for the three taxis there with the required red PPV plate. Probably not a good idea to be here when immigration’s computers reboot. I break for the taxi line at the domestic terminal and call Loef Brummel while I walk.

  He answers, “Where are you?”

  “Trying to find your money. Had it won at Arlington, but Earle Fires invented a foul the stewards gave him.”

  “So I heard. Where’s my money?”

  “I’m trying something else. Dave’s dead; Barlow’s probably dead, and unless I get lucky, so am I. Paying you is important, but so we’re clear, this isn’t my debt; I don’t give a fuck what you say or who you say it to, this is between the fuckups who work with you and Dave.”

  “’Cause you disappear, the debt ain’t goin’ away.”

  “If I’m alive in seventy-two hours, I’ll be in touch.”

  I button off. Waiting alone at the domestic terminal is an AMC Gremlin gypsy cab freshly painted with green latex paint. One headlight is on. I bend to the driver’s window with $20 US. “Take me to town?” Town would be away from the storm.

  “No problem, mon.”

  The Gremlin’s door clanks when I open it. The back seat smells like fabric softener.

  We bend around the airport drive under courtesy lights beginning to cloud with bugs as the pre-storm dark overtakes the south coast. At the first roundabout, I touch his shoulder. “Make it the Sazerac Bar.”

  My driver adjusts his rearview mirror and fixes me with focused brown eyes. He wants to make the easy left into Kingston proper and the rest of Jamaica, not the looping right out onto the Palisadoes, a sand-spit road Jamaicans don’t trust and probably shouldn’t. The Palisadoes is “seawall harbor protection” that also pretends to be a road. This “seawall protection” is compacted silt, a total of twelve inches above sea level. One good earthquake—and they have biggies down here—and this seawall/road either liquefies or drops to the bottom of the ocean from beginning to end.

  But if luck is with you, and drowning isn’t to be your fate, then the Palisadoes will connect you to an island, the once-fortified pirate capital of Port Royal.

  Jamaicans have a centuries-old, almost genetic fear of Port Royal, and not without reason. In 1692, God dropped half the pirate-island city into a fiery ocean chasm, literally swallowing 80 percent of the residents, buildings, and all the ships in the harbor. Paintings and stories depict the initial survivors buried alive to their necks at God’s new shoreline, packs of hungry dogs eating at their heads.

  Not long after the 1692 earthquake, the remaining pirates and their descendants “repented.” Seeing God’s hand in their continuing brushes with cataclysm, the pirates traded outright piracy for privateer status with the British Empire—the residents of Port Royal could still be pirates, but licensed with letters of marque and reprisal as long as the prizes they took were enemies of the British Crown.

  Unfortunately, the anticipated end to God’s wrath against Port Royal didn’t happen. So, various disasters later, the locals abandoned piracy/privateering in favor of “black gold,” the slave trade. God didn’t see selling slaves as a behavioral improvement and continued to destroy the city. But the pirates’ descendants were nothing if not tenacious. The price for that tenacity has been repeated earthquakes, catastrophic fires, and a wave or two of disease on the scale of Europe’s Black Death.

  Fast forward into the mid-1980s when I was selling rum: The men and women of Port Royal had become fishermen. Translated from 1980s speak: contrabanders trafficking cocaine. Like their forefathers, the 1980s cocaine pirates of Port Royal didn’t like strangers. Hence, I didn’t visit.

  Our Gremlin slo
ws approaching the dead end of the Palisadoes. Our one headlight splashes an unwelcoming headland of high, garish rock. My driver says, “Gallows Point. Where dey hang the pirates.”

  Like most everyone in Kingston, I’ve seen pictures, but that’s it.

  My driver cold-eyes the cut-stone colonial fortress built atop the headland, what would be the last connected landmass between here and Cartagena. He says, “Lotta men from here died bad on these rocks.”

  Above us, orange light flickers inside narrow windows. Wind rustles the palm fronds.

  Gosh, how fitting. We’ve arrived at Anne Cormac Bonny’s family heirloom, the Sazerac Bar.

  My driver clears his throat and semi-whispers, “Respect, mon, this no place a stranger wanna be.”

  “Hear that. What’s your name?”

  “Delroy.” He shakes his head. “We leavin’ now.”

  “Wait. I gotta go in. If you can wait, I can pay.”

  Delroy eyes the Sazerac, obviously familiar with its ownership and history. “No, mon. Mos def, me leavin’ here.”

  I pat his shoulder with a second US twenty. “Just stay in the car, leave the engine running, anything gets weird—you’re gone.”

  He frowns. “Gone to sufferation.”

  I exit Delroy’s Gremlin and climb twenty-one granite treads to a gusty, wet verandah naked to the storm and windward ocean. The verandah is a slippery checkerboard of oversize green-and-black tiles wet with salt spray and marked with a stamp of some kind. I can make out “Mariana, Queen of Spain, 1655.” Alone in the wind and spray, the storm feels lots closer. Probably because it is.