Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

  The shops were closed, the office workers had gone home, the street was quiet. The air felt hot and wet and thick, more like a low density ocean than a mixture of gases. Matthias parked his bike in front of Island Cameras and approached the adjoining door. There were half a dozen bronze name plaques on the wall—Island Imports, Inc., The Bank of Zurich and the Bahamas, the Nassau Panamanian Bank, RR Group, RR Investments Ltd., Ravoukian and Ravoukian, Barristers and Solicitors—but only one buzzer. As Matthias reached for it, he heard a husky whisper from the shadows: “Smoke?”

  Matthias didn’t reply.

  The whisper came again, more insistent. “Hey, mahn. You wan’ some smoke?”

  “Nope,” said Matthias. Soft footsteps padded away.

  Matthias pressed the buzzer. A voice crackled from a speaker above the door. “Yes?”

  “Matthias,” Matthias said. The door clicked open.

  Matthias stepped inside, closed the door behind him and climbed a worn wooden staircase. At the top were another set of name plaques and a single door, partly open. As he went inside, through the simply furnished waiting room, with its mildewing copies of People and Ebony, he smelled burning tobacco, strong and European, the same smell released on opening a book by Eric Ambler.

  Ravoukian sat behind his desk in the inner office. He was writing rapidly on a legal pad; blue smoke curled slowly up from his cigarette until the ceiling fan sucked it in and whirled it away. Ravoukian looked up. He was a short, round man with big dark eyes, made bigger by the thick lenses of his glasses. “Not good?” he said.

  “Not good.”

  Ravoukian leaned back in his chair and sighed, blowing a smoke cone across the room. “You look tired, Mr. Matthias. Sit down.”

  Matthias sat. Smoke rose. The ceiling fan turned. Through the walls came the faint chordings of a guitar. The Bahamian beat: like reggae, but a little faster and less pronounced. Ravoukian stubbed out his cigarette in a styrofoam coffee cup. He peered for a while at the ashes inside as though reading tea leaves. “It’s too bad,” he said. “Too, too bad. I think you have—would have had—better than a fifty-fifty chance on appeal.”

  “On what grounds?”

  Ravoukian waved his plump hand. “Various. There were procedural errors. Some of the medical evidence might be shown to have been tainted. A few other things.” Somewhere behind the wall, the guitarist stopped playing. The room was silent.

  Matthias said: “Do you ever work on a contingency basis?”

  “What are you suggesting, Mr. Matthias?”

  Matthias forced the words out; perhaps he was only able to speak them because he knew what the response would be. “Take the appeal and I’ll give you half of Zombie Bay.”

  Ravoukian smiled. He had a mouthful of crooked teeth that he’d never bothered to fix. Ravoukian didn’t have to waste money on front: his reputation was all the front he needed. “And what if we lose? What happens to my share then?”

  “You said I had a better than fifty-fifty chance.”

  “And that is my true opinion. But I’m not a gambler, Mr. Matthias. I charge a fee, based on my experience and the amount of work invested. My retainer for any work in the Court of Appeal, as I think I mentioned, is fifty thousand, U.S.”

  Ravoukian already had thirty thousand dollars of his money from the first trial. Matthias rose. His body suddenly seemed very heavy and it was a great effort. The big dark eyes were watching him without expression, as though viewing a not particularly interesting movie already seen several times.

  “I have had one small thought, Mr. Matthias.”

  “About what?”

  “Taking your appeal. Sit down, please.”

  Matthias felt like a clinical subject in a stimulus-response experiment, but he sat down.

  Ravoukian pushed the legal pad aside, cleared a neat space on the middle of his desk. He put his hands together in the attitude of prayer and rested them in the cleared space. “When you first came to me about this matter, Mr. Matthias, I knew nothing about you. I hadn’t even heard of you. You’ll pardon me for noting this fact. I’ve been practicing law from this office for thirty-five years. I thought I knew everyone in the Bahamas. Of the ownership class. But somehow you escaped my knowledge. My loss, Mr. Matthias, because I have since learned a little about you, all creditable.”

  “Like what?”

  Ravoukian waved his plump hand again. Matthias wondered whether it was a tic that jumped in him whenever he was asked for details. “You were a Seal, for instance. I’ve always been an admirer of the training provided by elite military organizations. I’ve also heard something of your Cuban adventure. And—”

  “Who have you been talking to?”

  “No one special. It seems to be common knowledge, in certain circles, at least. I’ve also learned how Zombie Bay came into your hands—an inspirational tale, if true. It all confirms my belief that you could be a very useful man.”

  “To whom?”

  Ravoukian showed his crooked teeth. “As a Seal, Mr. Matthias, were you trained in the use of underwater explosives?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought as much. I’m an admirer of the Seals, the Green Berets, all those groups. I like the philosophy they instill.”

  “I didn’t enlist in the Navy for its philosophy,” Matthias said. “I needed someone to pay my college tuition. It was that or the draft.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Ravoukian, as if Matthias had reinforced his argument. “Of course. Precisely the attitude certain acquaintances of mine would desire.”

  “Are you proposing something, Mr. Ravoukian?”

  Ravoukian leaned forward slightly. “These acquaintances might have a job for you. If they did, and if you were prepared to take it on, I would be prepared to handle your appeal gratis.”

  “What job?”

  Ravoukian sat back. “That would be better described by them. Perhaps a meeting could be arranged.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Naturally your expenses would be taken care of. Airplane tickets, hotels, meals, et cetera.”

  “Tickets to where, Mr. Ravoukian?”

  “Paris would be a good meeting place, I think. Do you know Paris, Mr. Matthias?”

  “No. Are these friends—”

  “Acquaintances, Mr.—”

  “—or whatever you want to call them, are they countrymen of yours?”

  “Do you mean Bahamians, Mr. Matthias?”

  “I mean Armenians.”

  “I don’t think we can speak of Armenians as countrymen. Armenians have no country of their own, Mr. Matthias.” Ravoukian’s tone remained bland and professional, but his stubby fingers shook slightly as he reached for a cigarette.

  Matthias said: “Does this job involve underwater explosives, Mr. Ravoukian?”

  Ravoukian didn’t reply right away. He sucked on the cigarette. Its end glowed and so did his eyes. “That’s for my acquaintances to answer.”

  Ravoukian’s last word lit up a memory in Matthias’s mind: Cesarito, who had listened to Top 40 radio all the time to improve his English, softly singing “Blowin’ In The Wind” from the bow on that last night.

  “By all means. But there are time constraints.” Ravoukian rose and crossed the room to the file cabinets. He wore sandals. Matthias smelled leather and sweat. Ravoukian found a file and returned to the desk. He took out a letter. “This is from the plaintiff’s U.S. counsel. It’s a polite reminder that notice of appeal must be filed by the twelfth of December—six months from the finding of the lower court. Otherwise the judgment stands and, as it says, ‘payment of said judgment, that is one million one hundred thousand dollars (U.S.), will be due on that date.’” Ravoukian laid the letter on his desk. The paper itself seemed intimidating: thick and deckle-edged. And so did the letterhead: Ablewhite, Godfrey, Percival & Glyde.

  Matthias rose again. “I’ll let you know,” he said. This time Ravoukian didn’t call him back.

  Matthias rode to the East Bay marina. He parked the
bike beside East Bay Divers, dropped the key in the letter slot and walked to the end of the dock. So What, his nineteen-foot Mako with the twin Merc nineties, floated in the last slip. Matthias climbed aboard, cast off and motored slowly west along the channel. A big cruiser was coming the other way, much too fast; its wash foamed in the moonlight. The cruiser went by with a roar of motors and music; Matthias, rocking in its wake, saw a man and a woman standing with champagne flutes in the stern. The man wore a white suit, the woman a white skirt and nothing else. She saw Matthias and waved. Her breasts gleamed like marble. The man tilted his head and drained his glass.

  Matthias passed the tip of Paradise Island, rounded Silver Cay and backed off until the compass came around to two-hundred-and-seventy-eight degrees. Then he pushed the throttles all the way down. So What raised its bow in the air like a rearing horse and surged forward. Matthias headed for home.

  The sea was a flat sheet of silver and black. The boat skimmed along so smoothly it seemed to have levitated above the surface, gliding the way boats glide in the dreams of little boys. Nothing moved except the moon rising above, and Matthias cutting through the water below, like two bits of matter scattered by the Big Bang. There was no sound but the twin nineties, and after a while it ceased to be sound, leaving Matthias alone with his thoughts.

  He thought of everyone he had mishandled during the day, of Dicky Dumaurier, Marilyn, Ravoukian—and Danny, most of all: Danny, swinging at a ball he couldn’t hit; Danny pounding his club on the rubber mat. Danny was to the ball as he was to Danny: he hadn’t connected. Perhaps Danny was already beyond his reach, driven away by the Big Bang of the divorce. Or was it just his own ignorance of what a father did and how he did it?

  Matthias had no memories of his own father. He had died young, leaving him a name he didn’t like, a blurred photograph and a medal. The name: Nathan Hale. Was it chosen because his father admired the patriot or had a premonition his son would come to a similar end? Matthias didn’t know. The photograph: a sailor in dress blues standing on a beach with a smile on his face. It had lain in the back of a drawer in a plywood chest that had been lost on one of the moves. The medal: the Medal of Honor in a velvet-lined box. Matthias could still recall the feel of its inanimate coolness in his hand: touching it was one of his earliest memories, reaching back to a time long before he had ever heard of Okinawa or World War II. The medal was sold by Stepdaddy Number Two to make a monthly payment on his Coupe de Ville.

  Matthias could no longer picture the face of Stepdaddy Number Two, but he retained a sparkling image of that two-tone Coupe de Ville, its red-and-white bodywork polished by Stepdaddy Number Two until it glowed. One Sunday morning an errant baseball went through its windshield while it was parked in the yard; the sound had gotten Stepdaddy Number Two out of bed and running outside in his undershorts, whirling his belt in the air. Matthias’s legs had frozen at the sight. He hadn’t been able to run a step. Number Two had given him the kind of beating that was known in their neighborhood as “a good whipping.” Matthias could picture the belt as vividly as the Coupe de Ville—snakeskin with a silver buckle. Once he’d woken in the night and seen his mother wearing it and nothing else.

  So What glided over the Tongue of the Ocean with Matthias barely touching the wheel, never checking the compass. The boat knew the way. On the northwest horizon, where the black of the sky met the lesser black of the sea, Matthias saw the rounded shadows of the Berry Islands, as clearly as he would have seen them by day. The full moon lit the world as finely as the sun, but worked only in black. It had been on a silent night much like this that they had drifted in to the beach at the foot of the Sierra Maestra. Cesarito. Rodriguez. Cruz-Romero. And the boy Tonio.

  Cesarito had sung nervously under his breath while they unloaded the crates on the beach and waited for Rodriguez’s brother’s men to come down out of the hills. Matthias had set the anchor and swum in to help them. He needn’t have done that: he was simply the boatman, in for the money. That little swim had led to his second whipping.

  Men had come out of the Sierra Maestra, but they were Fidel’s men, not Rodriguez’s brother’s. Guns went off. Rodriguez and the boy had fallen on the spot. Tonio. A skinny boy. A burst of automatic fire had cut through his neck; Tonio’s head had hit the sand with a thump Matthias heard clearly, distinct from all the noises of the fighting. Then he had turned toward the boat, seen the way blocked and run into the hills. Two days later, filthy, ragged, scratched by thorns, he had stepped out of the bush into the gunsights of a patrol. “Yo soy turisto,” he had said, raising his hands. They hadn’t even cracked a smile.

  Then came two years on the Isle of Pines: sleeping every night with a knife made from a fork in his hand. Isla de Piños, where he had done what he did for Cesarito and where they punished him for it; where Cesarito died anyway, but left him a gift: Zombie Bay, one of many things owned by the son of rich Habaneros. But no amount of money could ever have bought Cesarito’s freedom: he was a class enemy. Matthias, a lower and less worthy form of antagonist, was swapped for medical supplies. Two years on the Isle of Pines. He’d survived. He’d even come back with a few funny stories to tell, at least they seemed funny in the bar at Zombie Bay. He came back with those funny stories and the scars on his back.

  Now Matthias could make out a square-topped shadow due west: the Bluff. He thought he could even see a yellow light shining from its northern end. Hew had trouble sleeping. He read old copies of Punch until dawn. Matthias pulled back on the throttles. The sea lifted the bow into the air and let it gently down. Matthias set the throttles at neutral and switched off the engines.

  True silence fell all around him. All sound was of his own making: his breathing, his pulse, the scraping of his hard shoes on the deck. His businessman shoes. He took them off. Then he took off his suit, his shirt, his socks, his undershorts. He stood behind the console, floating over the Tongue of the Ocean, the bottom a thousand fathoms beneath his feet.

  Matthias climbed over the side of So What and slipped into the sea. The water was warm, warmer than the air. He floated on his back for a while, drifting on a slow current beside his boat. Then he rolled over, jackknifed and kicked down.

  Not far. Forty feet, maybe fifty, he couldn’t tell, didn’t care. He saw the same thing eyes open or closed: blackness. The sea drummed and gurgled in his ears. Matthias stopped kicking, straightened, hung suspended in the water. The ocean drummed and gurgled its soft song to him. Yo soy turisto, he thought, almost laughing aloud. Then he realized where he was: not far from the spot where the plaintiff and his nameless partner had gone down. Matthias kicked his way back up.

  So What had drifted to the north. The current was running faster than he had thought. The tide had turned. With long easy strokes, Matthias swam after it, caught the transom, pulled himself up. As he dried his body with his shirt, he sensed the day coming behind him. He turned and saw a milky spill in the eastern sky. Everything was black and white for a few moments. Then color was discovered and immediately splashed across the sky and sea without restraint. Matthias knew there was something much bigger than mankind. Not God, necessarily, just bigger. It was a something you never saw in places like the Isle of Pines.

  Matthias had his answer to Ravoukian’s offer. Yes, he knew how to use explosives underwater. Yes, he wanted to keep Zombie Bay; it was hard to imagine his life without it. But he wouldn’t do anything that would put him on a Turkish version of Isla de Piños. He wouldn’t let himself be that stupid twice. He also wouldn’t be stupid enough to believe he had better than a fifty-fifty chance. The answer was no. He had until December twelfth to think of something else.

  Matthias switched on the engines and headed for Andros. The blue-black water turned bottle-green; he ran south along the Bluff to Gun Point, then threaded his way through the coral heads they called The Angel Fingers and sliced a widening V in the baby-blue water of Zombie Bay. The club lay under tall palms behind the long curved beach: the central hut with the bar, dining room
and library; the office; the cottages; the equipment shed. How tiny it all looked, like a play town in a sandbox. But it was perfect.

  Dawn. August 1.

  8

  August first was not a good day to be six months pregnant in the city of New York. Nina had the feeling she’d been teleported to Planet Greenhouse, with a gravity like Jupiter’s and a climate like Kinshasa’s. All the life forms swung back and forth between somnolence and psychosis, smelled like goats and wheezed with every breath. Everyone who could get out of town had done so. Suze was at Tanglewood with the Auschwitz Cadillac man; Jason was on the road with the West Village Croquet Team. Nina had an invitation to Nantucket, but August first was the date of her introductory childbirth class.

  She staggered outside. A cab shimmied over to the curb. Nina got in and and gave the address to the driver.

  “Fucking shit,” he said.

  Too late, Nina realized the air-conditioning wasn’t working. She closed her eyes. She felt the car move, stop, move, stop. From time to time the driver said, “Fucking shit,” again, but Nina didn’t open her eyes to find out why. Then, in the thick of a noxious crosstown traffic jam, Nina felt something for the first time: movement in her womb. It was a little rolling movement, as though a sleeper had changed positions in the middle of a long night.

  Nina placed her hand gently on her strange, round belly, hoping for more. “Are you okay, baby?” she said.

  “Huh?” said the driver.

  Her womb was still.

  The class was held at the West Side Women’s Reproductive Counseling Center. Every woman except Nina had brought a man. The men were either soft and round or long and skinny; the women had pink faces and mottled skin. They sat in a circle on blue gym mats, like Brownies and Cub Scouts at their twentieth reunion. “Who’s afraid of pain?” asked the instructor, who looked slim and snappy in culottes and a tank top.