Privateers

by Charlie Newton

  BeBe’s penlight flashes on our right.

  Dead ahead, the Esmeralda’s engines fire.

  Anne says, “Once I’m aboard, count to five, then run to me.” She sprints the dock and disappears into the dark.

  Sistah and I count to five, run the dock, splashing water. The gunwale’s outline materializes, we jump over. BeBe and Taller do the same.

  We cast off with no running lights, aiming weapons in three directions. Anne idles us into the lagoon, then into the river; she’ll check the coordinates we found once we’re safer.

  The river is fifty feet wide now and rising. Barrel-drum fires light the shanties that cram both shores. The shanties’ rusted metal roofs are stacked with bags. I ask.

  BeBe says, “Human shit; nowhere but the roof to put it.”

  Anne skirts debris slicks bunching on the storm tide that’s pushing everything inland. The stench knots my stomach and waters my eyes. Easy to forget how precious little some people have.

  I borrow BeBe’s penlight to reread Eddie O’Hare’s papers. In a world as fucked up as this, the Gryphon setting a trap at Bois Caïman is the good outcome. If Bois Caïman was a fake, then there was no O’Hare clue there that’s gone missing—I fucked up, misread the real clue we found in Jamaica. Simple as that.

  I go with that possibility because it’s the only ‘truth’ I might be able to handicap, then reread each sentence of the Jamaica clue.

  Eyes shut, I whisper O’Hare’s words out loud and listen to the words—rhymes—cadence. We were on O’Hare’s trail in Jamaica; then he sent us here, but not to Bois Caïman? My teeth grind. The goddamn clues fit too well for Bois Caïman to be wrong.

  So what’s the fucking answer, Bill?

  Voices rise and fall from both riverbanks, frightened and angry. BeBe nudges my shoulder, “Get your pistol up. River be narrow ahead. Kill anyone swimmin’ who comes to the boat.”

  Our wake ripples layers of trash as we enter the narrows, the poverty and desperation so close I can taste it. In one day, Hurricane Lana will erase all this and wash these people out to sea. I tight-grip Eddie’s papers, aim my pistol at the dark water behind us, then lean backward to the back of Anne’s head. “You said the UN had a $600 million budget. What the fuck did they spend it on?”

  Anne stays focused on hidden obstacles that could sink us. She whispers, “They’ve their own treasure; $200 million for AIDS alone on top of your six hundred; $800 million total to fight over. Idamante will be a rich man. Revolution and Rebelyon have a way of bein’ the same story, different name.”

  On my left, Sistah rocks side to side. BeBe looks at her. I look away from my pistol barrel, toward the debris shoreline and hovels that won’t be here tomorrow. “What’s the Gryphon’s share of the $800 million?”

  Anne’s Rasta tam shakes an inch. “Like I told you, the Gryphon stays separate of Babylon’s business. That distance is why each new government allows him his kingdom.” Anne turns her chin to her shoulder. “I’d be studyin’, Bill. Talkin’ won’t fix where you have us.”

  The river’s width triples to 150 feet. Anne says we’re in the mouth of the Shada shantytown river. On our left, larger fires scorch-light the river’s western shore. Shadows jump and dance. Anne veers away toward the opposite bank.

  We pass a blind curve. UN riot lights illuminate a long perimeter of razor wire and UN vehicles behind it. Looks like a riverfront prison.

  BeBe says, “Airport. Five-thousand-foot landing strip. Too short for cargo planes.”

  Anne says, “She’s a resupply base. Supplies the UN’s frontline fortifications downriver at the harbor.” Anne points at the razor wire and fences. “Idamante won’t come at this base from this river; he’ll come from the mangrove swamp, beyond where we anchored the Sazerac, the same moment his rebels hit Cap-Haïtien.” Anne pauses, glances at Sistah. “Siri’s one of Idamante’s commanders; she’ll either be here or Port-au-Prince.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it? If she’s here?”

  Anne nods. “If she’s not all caught up in Rebelyon”—Anne glances at Sistah again—“thinkin’ our gold belongs to the Rebelyon’s treasury.”

  Past the base and its lights, we spill out of the river into the bay. Anne hits the throttles. We veer hard right for the Sazerac Star hidden in the mangroves on the bay’s east side. I belt my pistol and return to O’Hare’s pages. My light shines the three poems—Chicago, Jamaica, Bois Caïman.

  I shuffle the pages and shine again. The drawing on Eddie’s turtle is the same as the etching on the pig stone.

  Why do that if it’s not the clue? Think, goddammit. Handicap. Inductive reasoning. Eddie O’Hare’s a horseplayer speaking in poetry, but he’s still a horseplayer.

  The pieces float; the pieces drift

  Turn back

  If I did not send you

  No false heart survives my gift.

  Okay, that verse is a threat, not a clue. Unless . . .

  Does “false heart” mean something other than the obvious? “The pieces float; the pieces drift”—shipwrecks, right?

  False heart and a shipwreck?

  Did someone’s dishonesty or betrayal (false heart) wreck a ship in this bay? On this coast? A slave ship . . . like the Whydah? Anne knew of none and she’s a pirate with an Oxford education.

  Okay. Maybe “false heart” is a place?

  I look up to my left, then right. No answers appear in the dark over Cap-Haïtien. What about “survive my gift”? What gift?

  Eddie O’Hare’s a shithead lawyer, a horseplayer who robbed and murdered his partners. Gift is your ego talking, right, Eddie? Eddie doesn’t answer. I run through it a tenth time.

  Forever bound by Code Noir

  Maroons, multâre, and mara-bou

  Births the crocodile as sailor’s star

  A star to fear And to find

  the one true race

  who grows the vine.

  “Code Noir” is slavery stuff. So are “Maroons, multâre, and mara-bou.”

  The slaves meet at “the crocodile”—Bois Caïman. There, they “birth” the Rebelyon.

  The “sailor’s star” is the goddamn North Star, right?

  Out loud, I say: “So you go to Bois Caïman to ‘find’ guidance . . . from the slaves.”

  Simple. Has to be right. Both verses are about runaway slaves and that night at Bois Caïman in 1791. And the fucking clue is there, at Bois Caïman. I know it. The bottle is a 99 percent plant, but the stone isn’t. The stone is telling us something we needed to know. Just like the HMS Primrose plaque did, sent us from Spanish Town to the Guzik grave. A midpoint in the clue, a waystation.

  Anne says, “‘Code Noir,’ ‘Maroons, multâre, and mara-bou’ are multiracial. What if ‘the one true race’ doesn’t mean slaves—but the black race?”

  Blink. Hadn’t thought of that. Why would white-man Eddie O’Hare think blacks were the one true race?

  “Yeah. Meaning it isn’t blacks who are growing the vine.” What if Eddie’s hiding his horse’s workouts, showing the horse but not the speed? I touch Anne’s shoulder. “Who’s the one true race, the pure one? Down here?”

  Anne repeats: “‘The one true race who plants the vine’? That’d be the French, God bless the sanctimonious bastards.”

  “Right. The slaves weren’t a race, not to the French colonial masters. The slaves were farm animals.”

  “So it’s the French who grow the vines—”

  “To make what? Wine. The colonial masters lived for wine; it was their demonstrable status, everywhere in the world, right?”

  “Aye.”

  “And the French planters wouldn’t have allowed the slaves to make the wine. Slaves could’ve picked the grapes, but that was it.”

  Anne nods.

  “The first line of the last verse—”


  “The A in And is capitalized, like a new sentence. Read it like this: ‘And to find the one true race who grows the vine.’ Get it?”

  Anne shrugs, trying to see it. “We’re supposed to find . . . the French?”

  Her words hit me like a train:

  Plant the vine.

  Harvest the grapes.

  Make the wine.

  “We’re supposed to find a fucking winery.” I hug Anne from behind. “The Jamaica clue wants us to sail past Tortuga to the sailor’s star at Bois Caïman, just like we did. From there, the star would point us to ‘the one true race who grows the vine.’ That’s it. The ‘star’ is the pig stone we found. The stop we made wasn’t bullshit. The bottle was planted. For sure, the bottle was planted. And if the pig stone wasn’t replaced with a fake—”

  “Oh, I’m guessin’ she’s real.”

  I visualize the stone with the splayed pig outline and the cross inside. “What direction was the pig stone pointing?”

  Sistah turns 180 to me, full in my face.

  I lean back, checking Sistah’s hands—she has a cell phone, no knife, so I keep talking. “C’mon, Anne; see it? Boukman rallied the slaves to Bois Caïman to start the Rebelyon, right?”

  “Aye.”

  “The slaves had to come from French plantations, right? Close by, right?”

  Anne nods.

  “All of the plantations would’ve made wine, or tried. The Bois Caïman pig stone pointed to the plantation we want. There’ll be a wine cellar. A safe place for Eddie to bury his gold. See?”

  I’m so happy I want to dance—

  Anne doesn’t hug me off my feet. She squints at the tree-line silhouette we’re approaching, then nails the engines into reverse. Sistah and I slam forward into Anne.

  Anne roars us backward into the dark. Her boat planes; Anne slows; we stop one hundred feet farther out from the mangroves.

  Taller and the other gunman level their AKs back on the trees. BeBe sweeps a high-power light on the tree thatch to the left of the moored Sazerac Star, then the trees to the right, then focuses on the Sazerac Star’s deck.

  The extra gasoline drums are gone. What remains of Sundown, the man Anne left behind, is naked, stretched across the cabin door in an X, no feet, no hands, bloody holes for eyes.

  “Jesus.” I pull my pistol.

  BeBe cuts the light and whispers patois. Taller and the other gunman set down their AKs and slip over the side. Sistah is rigid, eyes straight ahead, cell phone still in one hand, her knife now in the other.

  Ten minutes pass in sweaty, dark silence. Sundown would’ve talked, told whoever cut him up everything he could in the almost three hours we’ve been gone.

  A light blinks from the Sazerac Star.

  BeBe waits, then blinks a light back.

  Engines fire in the mangroves, but no running lights. The engine noise rumbles out of the mangroves toward us. BeBe and I aim at the sounds. The engine rumble increases until the Sazerac Star’s stern begins to silhouette off our port bow, then slow-motors past us into the dark.

  Anne keeps pace in reverse. A mile deeper into the bay, we’re broadside to the Sazerac and stop. BeBe eyes the crucified body stretched across the cabin door, then tells Taller and the other gunman to cut down Sundown.

  They do. BeBe hops off the Esmeralda onto the Sazerac Star, pistol in one hand, marine flashlight in the other, and begins to search. Taller and the other gunman aim their AKs at the mangroves they can no longer see.

  From our bridge, Anne watches the search, one hand on the Esmeralda’s throttles, her pistol in the other. Sistah remains stone-still, eyes on the mangroves, her left hand gripping and regripping her cell phone.

  BeBe checks the bloody pockets of Sundown, then reaches across the water to hand Anne something. She accepts the object, stares at it, glances at me, then slides the object into her pocket.

  BeBe cuts his light. Only his eyes and silhouette are visible. He says, “They gone through everythin’; tore it up lookin’ for somethin’.” He nods at me and Eddie’s papers, then fans one finger at Anne. “Piccard and the Gryphon done this. Boat worth too much for anyone else to leave behind.”

  Anne says, “Aye.”

  BeBe says, “Goin’ below. See to it that everything cook-and-curry.”

  “Careful, BeBe. The Gryphon wants us to have our boat back. Likely we don’t want her.” Anne eases the Esmeralda ten feet away from the Sazerac Star. She turns to me. “Keep your pistol on the starboard water. Crocodile or man, anything swimmin’, you shoot it.”

  I squint for threat but can barely see past my hand.

  BeBe splashes his light through the Sazerac Star’s cabin. Our engines bubble salt water. Gasoline fumes linger in the humidity.

  BeBe yells, “Popper!” Then climbs through the main cabin’s doorway way too fast for it to be good.

  Anne hits him with her light. BeBe blinks at the glare and stumbles, both hands gingerly cradling a metal canister—a military-type explosive connected to a cell phone. “Gryphon gon’ ransom us on dis boat for the maps on yours.” BeBe raises the bomb to throw it over the Sazerac’s other side. He slips on the deck in Sundown’s blood.

  Blinding white light.

  Roar and concussion blow me over the side and the Esmeralda’s black hull halfway into the air. It crashes down, slides over, and buries me underwater.

  Gasp. Claw. Choke. I explode to the surface. Suck for air and flail my arms to stay there. Twenty feet away, the Sazerac Star is flames to the waterline. A hand grabs me from behind.

  Anne shouts: “Bill! In the boat!”

  I suck more air and scramble up the ladder. Sistah is prone in the bow, fanning a marine light across the water. No survivors flail in the beam. Anne yells, “BeBe! Taller! Lon!”

  No answer.

  Anne yells the names again, sees no one in the water, and pounds the wheel. “Goddamn!” She hits the throttles and leaps the Esmeralda past the flames into the night.

  Chapter 20

  Bill Owens

  We’re mid-bay on the Esmeralda. Pieces of Anne’s friends dot the water. Smoldering debris and burning oil carbonizes the air. Three survivors total—Anne, Sistah, and me. My heart rate’s still at 150. Anne has one hand on the throttles, the other squeezing the grip of a .45.

  Her face can’t hide the emotion. She looks away, forces herself to focus, then back. “We’ve not enough fuel to outrun the storm. Worse, there’s nowhere to hide where the Gryphon won’t overrun us. I’ve tried Siri four times since we left Jamaica and get no answer. Either we chance a dock raid in Cap-Haïtien for two fuel drums that’ll at least allow us to run with the storm, or we hunt Susie and the gold now, with what we have, and bear the consequences.”

  “I’m right, Anne; the gold’s in a winery.”

  Sistah, armed only with her phone, spits over the side.

  Anne extends her hand to me. “I’ll have the poems and coordinates from Bois Caïman. Keep your eyes on the water. He’s out there.”

  I pass Anne the papers, keep my pistol and eyes on the water. Anne maps the coordinates, exhales deep, spreads the remaining papers between us, glances at the lights of Cap-Haïtien dead ahead, then back to the last poem. Anne rereads the verses, then asks me to handicap Eddie O’Hare and the winery again.

  I do. When I finish, she nods. “Could be ya have it.”

  “What about the coordinates?”

  Anne shakes her head. “Only a fool like Dave Grossfeld would go where they lead.”

  Sistah points with her cell phone. “Before Boukman birth Rebelyon at Bois Caïman was Messiah Mackandal. Mackandal kill six thousand white men, women, and children.” Her eyes add pride. “Back then, de Mezy sugar own Messiah Mackandal and all the land roun’ Bois Caïman. One plantation, no wine there, no wine cellar.”

  I look sideways at Sistah. “T
hey were French for chrissake.”

  Anne balks. “Sistah born in Haiti, was a nun in Haiti, and fought Rebelyon in Haiti.”

  “Your girlfriend’s got some issues with what she knows and what she doesn’t.” I make a small medicine bottle with my thumb and finger. A medicine bottle that burned with the Sazerac Star. “Among other things.”

  Anne snorts hard to clear her eyes and nose, then squints at the poem. “Don’t recall another plantation, but there could’ve been another, or several, in three hundred years. Only way to know is in town.” Anne glances at Sistah. “To check the records.”

  Sistah thinks about it, then nods, suddenly with the program.

  None of this feels right. “Where are the records?”

  Anne shrugs and looks at Sistah.

  “Town square.”

  I look at the lights on shore. Not too bad from here. Up close, Cap-Haïtien will be mayhem. “Which direction did the pig stone point?”

  Anne says, “West.”

  “Is there anything remotely like a winery west of Bois Caïman now? A big plantation house?”

  Sistah doesn’t answer.

  I look to Anne. “Where was the de Mezy plantation? Must’ve been big if Sistah’s right and they were the only sugar plantation for miles.”

  Sistah stares. Anne nudges her for an answer. Sistah says, “Town. The records will say.”

  Nobody in their right mind wants to go to town, but now town is Sistah’s answer for everything. I glance at Anne but she doesn’t seem hinky about it.

  “Screw town. Anyone who lived here should know where the biggest plantation house in the area was.” I nod at Sistah. “Including her.”

  Anne gathers Sistah into her arms, hugging Sistah’s back to her chest. “If Sistah says she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know.”

  Sistah glares at me. “If de Mezy keep a plantation house, it stand in the breezes on Mountain Morne Rouge. G’wan. Find it there. Find the national police too. If the police there camped strong, they kill you for comin’.”