“Aye, Bill. No prisoners. Them or us.”
Twenty-six million in win tickets. Life in the world-loves-me lane. Headshake; exhale. I hear the dumbest guy I know say, “Fuck it, then; let’s go get our Bond girl.”
Chapter 25
Bill Owens
Mid-bay, hugging the southern rim.
Anne’s hands grip the Esmeralda’s wheel and throttles. Mine sweat on the AK I hold at port arms. All around us, Fort Liberté Bay is three-foot waves blowing west. We slice through, backtracking east. Wind peppers us with bits of debris in the starless dark. The Tonton is prone on the deck. He told Anne this is the way “to the woman in the cage.”
I try not to visualize that or the Gryphon’s boats hunting us in the bay, focus instead on the clues, on what I can remember of Castle Barbancourt’s interior—the walls, windows, terraces, paintings, furniture. The amber key is safe in my sock. We have to figure the gold’s location in the castle, or at least a compelling lie, to buy Susie’s life. And ours.
In fantasy world, happy-ever-after will go like this:
We make Anne’s deal with the Gryphon—trade him a share of the treasure for Susie and a fast way for his crew, and us, to reach it. We beat the hurricane, find the gold, and don’t die when the Gryphon tries to murder us. Hammer Film makes the movie: Christopher Lee as the Gryphon, lots of T&A. It premieres in London; the Krays are dead, so I can attend; we all live happy ever after. What could go wrong?
Anne interrupts. “So, we’re inside Castle Barbancourt, walk me to our treasure.”
I edge closer to her ear, my eyes on the Tonton, and put the Barbancourt bottle under her dim instrument lights. “Try this: In the castle, there’s a life-size painting of this image”—I tap the bottle’s label—“Napoleon’s sister, and her husband, Leclerc. Same pose and clothes.”
Anne looks . . . begins a grin . . . says, “Our ‘fille de joie.’”
“That’s what I’m thinking. O’Hare’s last clue before the key warned us to never trust ‘the shade’ nor his ‘fille de joie.’ We figured fille could mean a prostitute or a whore.”
“And Pauline Bonaparte was a whore. Assumin’ what our Oxford professors taught was so.”
“And her husband was—”
“Napoleon sent Pauline’s husband to Haiti to put down the Rebelyon and ensure slavery, the two things all these clues contain.” Anne grins wider, building the theory. “But Haiti kills Leclerc. Yellow fever.”
“Right. And that makes him our ghost or ‘shade.’”
Anne kisses me. “What’ll we name our children? Even if she’s a darlin’ girl, I’ll call her Bill.”
“Picture this: Off the castle’s main entry, in the old, old section, there’s two opposing stairwells that curve down to the cellar, where all the bottles and casks are. In the stairwell to the right is the life-size painting. I’ve been to the cellar, I’m positive that’s where the key will fit into . . . something. We go past, or to, that painting, but we’re not supposed to trust them. Together, Pauline and Leclerc are—”
“A shear.”
“Huh?”
“Expect a shear if we’re finally close to the gold. If O’Hare were forced to lead in a captor, a shear would kill the captor, not O’Hare. And you say don’t trust ’em.”
“Yeah; but I don’t see the shear in the clue—”
“That’d be the point of it.”
“Great, you’re the pirate; I’m the handicapper. When we get to the painting, maybe we don’t look behind it, don’t touch it; maybe it points somewhere. Beyond it at the bottom of the stairs, there’s a heavy cellar door; maybe go through it, then look for something that O’Hare would connect with slavery or Rebelyon, or the water well, or racehorses, or a turtle—a door or a wall, another painting, something.”
Anne’s grin fades.
“No. Trust me. We’ll know it when we see it. Doesn’t have to be big, but it could be. The key will fit a lock. The key’s amber. The lock could be covered by an amber bottle—”
Rumble ahead. Somewhere in the dark, louder than the wind.
Anne cuts our engines, kills the instrument lights. Wind shoves us backward.
I jump on the Tonton’s back and arm-choke his neck. “Not a sound.”
Ahead on our right, the mangroves begin to glow. The rumble becomes roar. Running lights leap out of the mangroves and into the bay.
Two smaller sets of lights follow, loud but slower, definitely not canoes. The three boats race toward the slaughterhouse island.
Anne says, “Count ten, then fan your light fast to starboard.”
I face-plant the bent Tonton, grab a light, and splash the mangroves on our right, now only six feet away. Just ahead is the opening that belched the pirate boats. It’s black dark and fifteen feet wide with mangroves thatched across the top.
Anne wipes at her mouth, then sets her shoulders. “Through that hole, there’s no mercy and no turnin’ back.”
We eye each other for a way to back down.
A way to run for the gold and let Susie twist.
Anne Cormac Bonny has a fault or two, but she’s who you’d want on the other end of your promises when the wolf’s at the door. She makes the sign of the cross on her chest, winks at me, waits for a break in the waves, and knifes us in.
Chapter 26
Bill Owens
Branches scrape the Esmeralda as we squeeze through the mangrove hole. The air and water go dead calm. I fan my light. It’s a main-bayou channel, forty feet wide, steamy and fetid, roofed by a thousand years of tall mangroves tangled together. No satellite camera could penetrate that canopy, and no UN naval ship could sail under it. Any attack would have to come up this bayou in a convoy of nothing bigger than fifty-footers . . . and hope the guns they carry would be enough.
Everything is eerie still. Like we’ve been swallowed. Anne glides the Esmeralda upriver. Five minutes become twenty in the flat, pungent water and heavy air, then sixty. Then another sixty.
Three hundred feet ahead, the black dark thins to deep gray. Dim lights appear, one to port, one to starboard. I squint. My finger tightens on the AK’s trigger.
Anne has one hand on the throttles, one on the wheel.
As we pass, the source on both sides becomes five small lanterns, one after the other. Each lantern glows four feet above the water in the chest cavity of a cloth-and-straw manikin chained to a mangrove trunk. All ten are impaled on pikes and topped with oversize dolls’ heads.
Insects cloud the lanterns and dolls’ heads. My jaw clamps. The heads aren’t dolls—
Lights behind us. Loud engines and running fast.
Anne gets past the pike lights, hugs the black hull of the Esmeralda into the mangroves, then says, “Don’t shoot. When I toss the bottle, hit ’em with the light.”
I press my foot on the Tonton’s neck. “Not a fucking sound.”
Two small boats motor past; same running lights we saw exit this bayou two hours ago. Behind them, higher, brighter lights follow mid-channel. The bigger boat is ten feet off our port side when Anne tosses the empty Barbancourt bottle onto their deck.
I spin the marine light and fire it.
Four men jerk toward the light, shading their eyes.
Anne shouts: “From the island well! We know where the gold is!”
The big boat’s engines reverse. The two smaller boats in front veer to turn back.
Anne shouts: “Tell your boats to go on!”
A voice from the big boat yells a command in Kreyol. The small boats keep turning into a full 360 and slow-motor farther up the bayou. I shine the light on them—both have drums of high-octane avgas strung on the deck—then shine my light back to the big boat. All three are loaded for long, ultra-fast pursuits.
Anne says, “Tell the Gryphon I have his gold. We trade for the white woman in the cage.”
“We know where the gold is. Twenty-six million dollars.”
“For this you want the white woman?”
“Go tell him.”
The captain shakes his ropy white hair off his neck. “No, mon ami, you mus’ come.”
“The woman. Brought to this boat. Or no gold.”
The Tonton under my foot yells in Kreyol. I stomp him silent. The captain of the big boat laughs. “He say whites fight over the gold. Gon’ kill the other.”
Anne shouts: “Then no gold for the Gryphon. He sells your kidneys, serves the rest of you for dinner.”
The captain laughs and palms his heart. “Kalm, mon ami. Kalm.”
Out of the dark, the silhouette of a boat rushes at our bow. I two-hand the AK and empty the magazine. So does Anne. The bayou goes white-light concussion, blows me backward off my feet, and showers the Esmeralda’s windscreen and Anne behind it.
I fumble for another AK magazine, jam it, rack the bolt, and roll up to my knees.
Burning mangrove branches light the bayou, char the air. No boarders rush from the big boat. It hasn’t moved. Men aim rifles at us.
Anne shouts: “We die, your boss gets nothing!”
“Kalm, mon ami. Be kalm.”
I jump over the Tonton to our starboard gunwale that’s up against the mangroves. My feet hit a wooden box, the grenades. I grab one, pull the pin, throw the grenade over the big boat into the mangroves behind them, and shout: “Grenade!”
The explosion showers the pirate captain with water and tree shards.
I yell, “Get the fuck back! Next one’s in your boat!”
Anne shines a light on the water between our boats, then up-bayou for the remaining small boat. “Get me the woman in the cage, or we all die here.”
Captain Fan-tom Chimere shakes his head.
I aim the AK at his chest.
The captain raises his hands and shows us a radio. “I call now.” He pulls the radio to his mouth. Static drifts across the water, not voices.
Anne whispers, “They’ll not bring Susie here.”
“What do we do?”
The captain quits the radio and chins inland. “Up; go to the Gryphon. He decides.”
I yell down the AK’s barrel: “Fuck you. I decide. The woman, or I put a bullet in your chest.”
Slow headshake.
Anne tells me, “Plan B,” then shouts across the dark: “If we die, the gold dies. Lead us in.”
I lean the AK against the far gunwale, grab the two grenades, stand, and tell the pirates: “Shine a light over here.” A beam splashes me. I spread my arms, holding the grenades so the pirates can’t see that the pins are still in. “US government issue, M67. I just pulled the pins. Somebody grabs for me, or my hands get tired, no gold.”
The light stays on me. The captain speaks Kreyol and the light quits.
I shout: “We got a hurricane coming. And maybe we have to go to Port-au-Prince for the gold. The Gryphon can make that happen. But all three white people have to go.”
The light splashes me again. “Where?”
I show him the grenades. “My hands are getting tired. Lotta money at stake.”
“Port-au-Prince is far.”
“Bullshit. You have an airstrip. Somewhere. And at least one or two hangars for your planes.”
“Non.”
“You’re moving blow by the ton, right? And red-market body parts. The Colombians fly it in; you steal boats out there in the passage, pack ’em full of dope, package the crews you kill into red-market pieces, and it’s off to Mexico or America. Get a fucking plane ready, asshole; get us on it, and we’ll go get the gold.”
Lightning flashes above the tree canopy.
The captain thinks about it. “We see the Gryphon. He take you to Port-au-Prince. But if you lie, better to swim naked with the crocodiles.”
Anne shouts: “Storm’s comin’, Cap. Lead us in.”
The captain’s big boat throttles up, and we fall in behind. Anne tells me over her shoulder, “Get all the grenades and the extra magazines up here. Our plan B is all or nothing.”
***
Ahead of us, the big boat’s running lights splash the mangroves on both sides and above. Three miles in, two bayous converge into ours at a sharp Y. At the vertex of the Y, a large tube-like cage hangs from a pike. The cage is man-size and conical.
Anne says, “Gibbet.”
This gibbet’s empty. A large vulture of some kind sits the top, eyeing us as we pass. He wouldn’t be sitting there if the cage were always empty. I picture the vulture eating, then glance at a new oily stench to starboard, in the trees we’re passing close enough to touch.
“Whoa. Shit.”
Perched in the stench are vultures feeding on three bodies crammed into gibbets. The faces are forward, mouths torn ragged and eyes gone. I stumble sideways and bump the Tonton. He’s standing and rips my AK out of my hands. I bang him backward into the gunwale, grab the AK, and he backflips over the side.
Anne shouts, “Goddammit! We needed him.”
Past the three gibbets and vultures, lanterns glow in the trees, hung every twenty-five feet. Between the lanterns, we slow-pass more gibbets, each with a corpse, two with what might be bloody Arab keffiyehs hanging from partially exposed skulls. And more vultures, maybe twenty. They line the trees, flexing their wings, soundless, watching.
Captain Fan-tom’s running lights bend left to port. The bayou narrows under a much lower ceiling of thatched mangroves.
Anne ducks, rotating her head to check for pirates above us in the branches.
We finish the low ceiling, then pop out and veer hard to starboard into a large bowl-shaped bulge on both sides of the bayou channel. The right side is strung with naked electric lights in the mangroves. Under the lights is a medieval cut-stone seawall.
The seawall rises three feet out of the water and fronts the right side of the bayou for eighty feet. It continues until it bends into a blind turn clogged with anchored pirate boats and canoes.
Back at the seawall’s midpoint, a short dock juts into the bayou.
Eight iron pikes angle out over the water. Gibbets hang from the pikes. Fifty Tontons line the dock, seawall, and the anchored boats, all armed, all silent, wearing clothes of every imaginable type. The women are naked to the waist, painted with inverted red crosses from neck to belly. Some have chalk-white eye sockets and foreheads . . . masks that resemble Sistah’s birthmarks.
Captain Fan-tom fans his boat so his stern is to the anchored boats and his bow faces ours from the other side of the short dock.
Lightning cracks to the east.
I rocket back to 1986, sling the AK, hook one grenade to my shirt pocket, and pull the pin on the other. “Not raping me.”
“Bill! Goddammit.” Anne’s voice. “Don’t kill us! Plan B. Plan B.”
“Kalm, mon ami.”
Tontons pump weapons overhead; painted mouths shriek and howl. Gunfire explodes into the mangrove thatch.
I snap backward and stumble. “Not raping me.”
Anne shouts, “Grenade!”
My hand still has a grenade but no lever.
I throw. Anne rams the throttles. The bayou explodes. We crash into the jutted dock, slide its length into the seawall, then bounce back into the bayou, bow still facing the shrieking Tontons on the seawall.
The Tontons rush to board us. Anne reverses the throttles. I rip the other grenade off my shirt and grab a .45 sliding on the seat.
“Goddamn, Bill.”
Fifty against two. Every Tonton weapon aimed at us. “No fucking way.
We can’t go in there. Not raping me.”
“They’ll not let us leave.”
I raise the grenade. “Not raping me.”
“Don’t!” Anne kicks at me but keeps hold of the wheel and throttles. “Susie’s in there! We’re here for her.”
Jolt. Howling savages everywhere; rifles in our faces. Anne yells over the windscreen at the Tontons. “Tell the Gryphon it’s plata o plomo, bombs or treasure—”
“Ahoy, the Esmeralda.”
I wheel with the .45. Astern are three boats. Two are gunboats and Tontons aiming automatic weapons. The middle boat is a pontoon, roofed and lit with lanterns. The pontoon boat has a table with a soiled tablecloth and two chairs. A rail-thin white man in a white suit sits in one chair, a white woman in dirty pants and shirt in the other. The woman’s face is down on the table, her hair long and dark. Her arms and legs are chained to hooks on the deck. She has a square bandage on her ankle.
The white man’s hands are folded on the table next to an enormous glass jar. He says, “My compliments, Mr. Owens.” His fingers uncurl and remove papers from a file. “These poems are, for the most part, indecipherable. But fate has smiled upon us, brought you and I and Miss Bonny together again.” He turns the jar.
Inside is Dave Grossfeld’s head.
The white man is Cranston Piccard, the CIA conduit who pulled me out of prison twenty-three years ago. Even seen through lantern light at this distance, his twenty-three years have been some kind of hell.
Anne says, “Hold tight, Bill. Hold tight.” She’s focused forward at the rifles on the seawall.
Behind us, Piccard drums his fingers on the jar. “Your associate David was dishonest. But you are not. You have the gold as promised?”
“Not raping me.”
“Bill!”
I snap to Anne’s voice. “Yeah.”
Piccard smiles. “The gold, Mr. Owens?”
“Yeah.” Pant, blink. “Found a map in the well. Memorized it, then burned it.”
Piccard frowns. “Memory has a way of muddling any endeavor. Trading for a memory is risky business.”
Privateers Page 28
