Privateers

by Charlie Newton

  Horn. Brakes. Jolt-stop.

  The Peugeot’s dark trunk illuminates to dim green and stays green.

  Susie’s here.

  I aim the pistol at the trunk lid—fifty-fifty Idamante has her and the castle—I cover the green light on my chest, hold my breath. The lid pops. My driver startles backward from the pistol.

  Voices—commotion—

  Two bandaged white faces aim .45s inside the trunk—Susie Devereux and Anne Bonny. One of Susie’s eyes is black. Anne’s left arm is in a sling duct-taped across her naked stomach. Susie’s face softens. “Oh my God.”

  Anne says, “I’ll be damned. Grand it is to see you, Bill.”

  Holy shit. I made it.

  Susie belts her .45. She and my driver help me out of the car. Susie and Anne have AKs slung over their shoulders, hair tied back in bandannas like the pirate movies, boat shorts and boots they must have found inside Castle Barbancourt’s shot-up main doors.

  Susie hugs me with both arms. She smells like soap and rhum and has an open bottle of Barbancourt in her left hand. Anne hugs us both with one arm and kisses me on the mouth. She tastes like rhum and fresh bananas.

  I tell the Haitian woman: “Thank you. Swear to God, if I’m alive next week—”

  She accepts the US bills I offer, jumps in her car, races back toward her husband and hopefully safety from the black eye wall rotating around us.

  Grinning in disbelief, Anne says, “Never thought, not for a minute, I’d see you again. God bless ya again, Bill, for savin’ this adventure.”

  Susie’s lips part and her head shakes once. “No matter what happens from here, I want you to know—” She chokes, sniffs, and semi-whispers: “Thanks. What you did—Thanks.” Her hand with the rhum bottle and one arm pull me to her, soft against her breasts.

  She feels as good as I’d imagined. My smile crinkles the remaining mud-cake on my face. I tell her, “I’m a really good dancer.”

  Susie keeps hold of me.

  “Piccard’s dead. Fed him the grenade.”

  She pushes me to arm’s length. “You’re sure?”

  “Saw half his head on the floor.”

  Susie rocks to her heels. Anne steadies her. “Took a long time, dearie, but you got ’im.”

  Susie hugs me again, her lips at my ear, says something so soft I can’t hear it, and squeezes hard, like the Flyers do when their emotions won’t translate into words.

  Anne says, “And the Gryphon?”

  Susie lets go to look at me.

  “No, but Monastery Dimanche was shaking bad and the water was rising fast.” I show them the tracking device. “Susie got a tracking chip on her.”

  Susie drops her rhum bottle and starts to strip. Anne stops her, points her .45 high at Lana closing fast from two directions, and says, “Best be movin’ inside. She’ll happen so fast, ya won’t know she took ya.” Anne turns to me and chins at the castle. “We’ve a bit of a problem inside.”

  I laugh; rib pain winces me. “Shit. Get me inside to the cellar; I’ll face any dragon you can produce.”

  They look at each other.

  We all limp fast toward Castle Barbancourt’s main doors. Lana’s wind kicks up the gravel and blows Susie’s bandanna off her hair. Churn builds toward howl. This place should be packed with locals hoping to ride out the storm—

  I grab Susie’s shoulder. “Did we find it? The gold?”

  She has to yell: “Sort of.”

  ***

  Inside the castle, Susie and I jam the main doors shut against the wind and lashing gravel. Anne points me left, down into the cellar. Castle Barbancourt should be full of Haitians, but it’s empty. And smells like it’s on fire. Anne points again.

  The stairs to the right are scorched and splattered with blood and debris . . . similar to how Susie and Anne look, other than their clean clothes. A shredded jacket and charred hat from one of the Gryphon’s Tontons is piled in the first turn.

  I ask, “O’Hare’s shear blew you guys up too?”

  “Aye.” She points down the stairs to the left but doesn’t go. “Feel the heat?”

  Now that she mentions it, yeah.

  Susie points again. “Why there’s no one else here.”

  We walk down the steps; the air at each tread is warmer than the last. At the bottom of the stairs, the arched cellar doors are jammed open under their collapsed arch that now rests atop them. Not the type of support that will last long.

  We scoot through. Instantly it’s a brick-walled pizza oven. In front of me is a jagged fissure where the floor used to be. The fissure separates us from the main cellar, where I’m guessing we have to go. I look down into the fissure, way down into a glow . . . that could be the old fuel depot storage tanks. The fissure zigzags across the cellar floor to the cliffside wall. The wall is gone above the fissure, cleaved open ten feet wide. Between the fissure’s gaping sides, I can see all the way across the valley to the stark white cliffs of La Boule Blanche. Empty concrete trestles stairstep across the valley.

  The floor shudders.

  Lana hits the castle, this time with her eastern eye wall. The jagged opening in the cellar wall goes black. The howl increases one hundredfold. Both hands jam over my ears. All the air is sucked out of the cellar like a 747’s window breaking. My shirt rips open; I teeter at the fissure’s edge, grab for handhold—

  Two hands claw me back, then farther back and through the arched doors. We crowd into a small room lit with candles and two lanterns. Susie shuts the door behind me.

  The roar muffles to a train’s rumble.

  Susie says, “Best we can figure, the new part of this castle was built over a pipeline or fuel reservoir.” She points out toward the valley and the concrete trestles we can’t see. “The hurricane ripped it up and it exploded. Most of the fire gushed into the valley, but what didn’t fractured the castle’s foundation where the new meets the old.”

  “Good guess. Fuel depot is exactly what’s underneath here, originally built during World War One, I think.”

  Anne points Susie at my chest, the Velcro strap, box, and green light. Susie strips her boots, socks, and boat shorts and begins to search.

  Anne says, “You were dead-right about the painting—Pauline Bonaparte and General Leclerc blew one Tonton to fragments. We dispatched the other, called Piccard, then Susie and I looked everywhere for what the key fit. It wasn’t in the wall.”

  Susie, in her T-shirt and panties, is an athletic woman with centerfold body parts. She says, “Can’t find the chip,” and pulls her T-shirt over her head. Her back is to me, a mass of welts that run to her waist, under her panties, and down her legs.

  “Jesus.” I reach—

  She flinches, but not as bad as before.

  “Let me look; maybe they cut it into you.” I hold the candle up to her back. A number of cuts and small lumps dot the long welts. She would’ve been unconscious not to remember surgery. I hold the candle close to a severely swollen bluish lump beneath Susie’s right shoulder blade. “Does your right shoulder feel any worse than the rest of you?”

  “Maybe. Feels like my ankle.”

  Anne looks close at Susie’s back, then pushes once with her index finger. “That hurt?”

  Susie spins. “Goddammit!”

  Anne nods. “Be my pleasure to remove your transmitter.” Anne pulls a knife she probably took off one of the Tontons. “Hands on the table, dearie. Like you’ve your usual line of boys behind you.”

  Susie’s eyes narrow.

  “Sorry. Just puttin’ your focus elsewhere.” Anne pours rhum across the blade. “Your hands? On the table.”

  Susie grabs the table’s sides, grits her teeth, and says, “Do it.”

  Anne cuts out a dime-size divot and the chip with it. Susie collapses to her elbows. I rip part of the shirt and soak it in rhum. “This
is gonna hurt. A lot.”

  I press the cloth to the wound. She screams. I duct-tape it to her back. Anne says, “Pretty as a picture, you are,” then slaps Susie’s shoulder and jumps back. Susie spins and I bear-hug her—most of her naked against me—until she calms.

  Anne grins. “For trying to kill us in the plane.”

  Susie says, “Let go.”

  “You’re sure? I’m a really good dancer.”

  Susie’s eyes are six inches below mine but look like they mean it. I hand her the T-shirt, eyes reluctantly staying with hers, then say, “Could we talk about the key? We’re sitting on a burning fuel depot, on a cliff, in a Category 3 hurricane.”

  Susie says, “Lana’s a 4, for certain, maybe a 5,” then cringes as she tugs the T-shirt over her shoulders.

  I point at the ceiling. “Swell. If we’re still here fifteen minutes after this thing passes, the Gryphon will be out front to retrieve his chip.”

  Anne says, “Aye, clock’s tickin’, but the bastard’s still gotta beat war and weather to get here.”

  Susie reaches past me for the bloody chunk of her back and the chip buried in it. The chip is tiny. She holds it up close to her face, says “State of the art,” then turns to me. “I figured the key.”

  “No shit?”

  “In the floor, not the wall. The key fit an impression in one of the floor bricks. We pried it up; underneath was a three-inch pipe cemented into the rock with a bottle inside. Not a bottle of Barbancourt.” Broken smile, like the first time we met. “A bottle of Myers’s.”

  “Myers’s? This rotten, fucking lawyer just ran us through the hell of Haiti, taught us all about sugarcane, slavery, and rebellion, but we’re going back to Jamaica?”

  “In the Myers’s bottle”—Susie leans back and stops—“was another vial.”

  I wave for her to continue. She doesn’t. I say, “What, goddammit?” I look to Anne. She grimaces.

  Susie says, “Lana’s front wall hit and we lost our light; the explosion was right after. We scrambled, the foundation caved in, and we haven’t been able to get back across.” Susie shows me the bowl key. “The clue’s still on the other side. Someone, whose legs are still good, has to long-jump the fissure.”

  I look at both of them. “Definitely a woman’s job. Rugby’s about running. You guys are perfect.”

  Both show me the gashed-and-battered versions of shapely legs.

  “I just ran a marathon, okay? Slept five hours in a previous life. Had a can of Spam. But somehow I’m the right man for the job?”

  Anne grins. “A woman needs a man.”

  “A woman can’t remember what the clue said?”

  “Only read half. And you wouldn’t be jumping if we could.”

  Exhale. I stand, tear a strip off my shirt to make earplugs. Susie does the same and hands Anne a strip to wad into her ears. I wad mine, grab one lantern, mouth “Stay put,” and open the door.

  Leading with the lantern, I step to the collapsed arched doors. Hurricane winds roar outside the castle’s breached walls. I duck through the doors, walk to the edge of the fissure. Oven hot. The narrowest point in the fissure will be a ten-foot jump. Getting a run at it will be . . . creative.

  To my right, rain churns past the jagged opening in the cliffside wall. Susie and Anne appear between it and my shoulders. They don’t look confident. Susie stomps the chip, then kicks it into the fissure. I point us all back to the room.

  Inside, we all pull our earplugs. I say, “Here’s the plan: you two all-star rugby players stand at the fissure’s edge. Hang both lanterns out over the fissure so I can see some of both sides. I’ll run from the collapsed entry, do a Carl Lewis. If I make it, you carefully toss me one lantern. I find the clue, we ride off into the sunset.”

  Anne nods. “Full scholarship at Oxford. Never doubted you a minute.”

  “I didn’t graduate; you did; probably why I’m the one jumping.” I point at the lantern: “I’ll need your matches.”

  Anne hands me matches. I wipe sweat out of my eyes, wad in the earplugs, and reach for the door. Susie slaps my ass and shouts in my ear: “Girls jump twenty feet in the Olympics.”

  “My favorite stripper song is ‘Gloria,’ the U2 version.”

  “Soon as you’re back.”

  I walk out to the collapsed entry arch. The ear wads stop half the howl. Susie and Anne continue with the lanterns to the fissure’s edge. At the fissure’s edge, I drop to both knees, squint down into the heat, palm-sweep where my foot will plant for the leap, then consider the ten-foot chasm I have to jump.

  I crawl back to the entry using both forearms to sweep clean my approach path. I stand, turn, take long, measured strides back to the fissure.

  Five strides. Okay. I swivel my sweaty back to the fissure, nervous heels at its edge.

  I long-stride back to the starting line. Shit, we got this—Carl Lewis could cha-cha ten feet.

  Deep breath. I turn again, glance to my right at the hurricane churning outside, then wave ready.

  Susie and Anne hoist their lanterns. Susie gives the thumbs-up.

  I bolt—right, left, right, left, right, toes at the edge, LEAP—airborne, airborne, airborne, crash-land into furniture, and grab.

  Made it. I check my pants. No stain. Dry as a bone.

  I wobble-walk to my edge of the fissure and wave for the light.

  Anne and Susie are applauding in the bad light and muffled roar. One lantern arcs over the heat blast. I catch it with both hands; the kerosene doesn’t spill and set me on fire. Santa Anita’s Trevor Denman says we’re five lengths ahead on a speed-favoring day going into the turn.

  I mantra: Girls do yoga at this temperature; I can do treasure.

  The Myers’s bottle, clue, and vial are where Susie said she dropped them. I roll the clue into the vial, seal it into the bottle, walk back to my side of the fissure, show Anne and Susie the bottle, and make a throwing motion.

  Susie nods. She has the two hands.

  I set the lantern down at the fissure’s edge. Then toss the bottle.

  Susie catches it with both hands and her chest. Anne extends the lantern for my jump.

  I pace off six long strides. Pace it a second time. Wipe sweat so I can see . . . turn and start running . . . sixth stride, edge, LEAP—airborne, airborne, airborne—land, crash, and roll.

  Fuck you, white men can’t jump!

  Susie helps me up. The three of us stagger out of the oven, through the collapsed entry, and back into the room with the door.

  The candles are still lit; room’s probably 120 degrees but feels like a freezer. Anne chugs water. We pull the ear wads. Susie hands me her bottle and wipes at my face while I drink.

  Anne says, “Didn’t know you could do that.”

  “Should see me moonwalk.”

  Anne opens the Myers’s bottle one-handed, pours out the vial, and opens it. Susie grabs the stationery and reads.

  Anne says, “Lemme see.” Susie hands her the stationery. Anne reads, blinks once, reads again, then hands it to me.

  Susie says, “‘La Vibora’ means ‘the serpent’ or ‘viper.’”

  Anne shakes her head. “Ah, you’re a pretty thing, but it’s the island history that wins the boys at this dance.”

  Susie rolls her eyes.

  Anne continues. “La Vibora is the Spanish name for the Pedro Bank.” She taps the first line—

  —adds, “That’s our poet O’Hare sayin’ the gold went from the Bank of Haiti to the Pedro Bank. The Pedro’s off Jamaica’s south coast, forty miles of wicked reefs, three hundred shipwrecks, bad weather, and pirates.”

  Makes sense. I say, “BeBe mentioned the Pedro Bank when we were in Kingston at the old ships’ coordinates. Said it was used by the queen-conch fishermen.” I show Anne the clue:

  “Ah,” says Anne. “Mak
es sense now. ‘Her Majesty’ is the queen conch the fisherman hunt, seasonal weather permittin’.”

  I smile. “You’re getting good at this.”

  “And we’ll have to be if the Pedro Bank is where we’re goin’. In the bank’s reefs, there’s a string of small cays, two of ’em for the fishermen and the prostitutes who service ’em. One for a Jamaica Defence Force station I avoid regular, and an officially-not-there station for the US Marshals Service.”

  “That’s it for locations?”

  “There’s one more named cay on the bank: Southwest Cay, called Bird Cay by some. Now she’s a government-protected home to hundreds of frigate birds.”

  “Frigate?” I tap ‘frigate’ in the verse:

  Anne leans back, seriously surprised. She smiles the smile all the way to its limits.

  I say, “‘Frigates’ that ‘sail and sink’ isn’t ships; it’s birds—”

  Susie shouts: “The gold’s on Bird Cay!”

  Anne nods. “But she’s thirty-five acres . . .” Anne rereads the clue, looks at us, rebuilds the smile, and says, “They also call Bird Cay One Tree Cay because . . .”

  I clap. “Yowzah!” Point at her. “Because it has only one tree.”

  Susie points at the clue—

  —shouts, “For shade, me thinks!”

  “Holy shit, X marks the spot.” I high-five Susie. We do a three-way happy dance.

  Susie swigs rhum, asks, “How high is Bird Cay?”

  Anne shrugs. “Ten feet, maybe fifteen.”

  “And the waves out there now—” Susie holds the bottle over her head. “Thirty footers, twenty for sure. Our island’s under water.”

  “Aye, she’ll be a bit damp till the storm recedes.” Anne unrolls a Haiti map and flattens it over O’Hare’s stationery. “And with a bit of luck, we’ll be puttin’ to sea to test those waves.” Anne points at Haiti’s Highway 101 snaking into mountains that separate Castle Barbancourt from the ocean to the south. “Our best bet is south through the peaks, then down to Marigot at the water. Twenty-five miles of mountain cut if the narrows aren’t washed out.”