by Jim Nisbet
Light haze
Remarks
I happened to be on the bow, taking a bearing, when a marlin breached, not fifty yards forward, and arced right over the compass I held at arm’s length. I could hardly believe my eyes. Magnificent. Why would somebody want to kill such a creature, only to mount it above a fireplace?
DATE TIME LOG COURSE WEATHER POSITION
3/22 2035 452 273°M NE 18 23°23’N.Lat.
1001 mb 80°19’ W. Long.
Hazy Cayo Bahía de Cadiz
Light bearing 228°M
Remarks
It just does not get any damn better than this. What a way to go out. I’m going to miss this boat. Have I made the right decision? Too late now, buddy! What a legacy …
Three days at the helm and I’m remembering the Sevennes and Marie and that Apollinaire poem she taught me by way of advancing my French. A long time ago. Probably it’s the other way around—Le Voyageur, then Marie, then the Sevennes, and don’t forget grapes picked, wine drunk, fromage consumed on bread with butter … Marie! What if what if what if. Oh, the wondering mind of man, not to mention the wandering vessel that contains it. And while it’s been filling up with Life ever since, the mind I mean, most of the Apollinaire has been superseded. But, cut to the chase, what really made me think of the snatch of verse was its reference to Euripos, or Euripus, another place I’ve never been! Euripus became generic for a dangerous channel because it’s notoriously rough, swift and unpredictable. It’s in the Aegean somewhere. They say its currents can run to twelve knots—yikes—and not only that, they reverse direction seven times a day! Jaysus! Does Apollinaire know whence to fetch his similes, or what?
Ouvrez-moi cette porte où je frappe en pleurent
La vie est variable aussi bien l’Euripe
Tu regardais le paquebot orphelin vers les fièvres futures
Et de tous ces regrets de tous ces repentirs
Te souviens-tu …
Hey, logbook, don’t worry, I’m about to translate it. The title should maybe be “The Traveler,” but of course us salty chickens aboard Vellela Vellela prefer “The Voyager.”
Open up this door on which I pound, weeping
Life is at least as unpredictable as Euripos
You watch the orphaned packet breaching a feverish future
And remember every regret, every repentance …
Sorry Guillaume, that’s all I can remember. That’s all I’ve been able to remember for years.
Twelve knots! Jaysus … !
DATE TIME LOG COURSE WEATHER POSITION
3/22 1900 559 020°T NE 15 23°27’ N. Lat.
1001 mb 80°19’ W. Long.
Hazy “MON DOME” charted light bearing 208°M.
Remarks
Havana! Mira por vos!
TWENTY-SIX
THE SUBSEQUENT PAGES, ABOUT A THIRD OF THE BOOK, WERE BLANK.
“That’s it?”
“He died the next day.”
Tipsy determinedly kept her eyes on the logbook. “A few pages seem to have gone missing.”
“The last ten,” Red agreed. “I counted the stubs.”
She looked up. “Who tore them out?”
He shook his head. “That’s the way I found it.”
“Maybe it means something?”
Red shrugged. “He was pinched for blank paper.”
Tipsy closed the book. “Volume eleven,” she said thoughtfully. She shook her head. “It seems funny that a guy so conscientious about his logbooks would tear a bunch of pages out of one, just for scratch paper.”
“Charley was particular about his logbooks,” Red acknowledged.
“So it’s not like you tore them out because there was more nasty stuff in there about what a criminal you are?”
“Worrying about stuff like that would be a full-time job,” Red pointed out. “They were gone when I fished the book out of the drink.”
“Say,” Tipsy said after a while, “that reminds me.”
“You want a drink?”
“No. What’s a Torx?”
“What?”
“No, really. I’ve never heard of it.”
Red straightened one leg, dug two fingers into the watch pocket of his jeans, and produced a hex drive Torx tip. “This is a No. 2, or a T2. Hold out your hand.” He dropped the tip onto her palm. It wasn’t three-quarters of an inch long.
“I’ve never seen one of these before. They make screws that fit this thing?”
“The six-point star configuration gives you a lot more torque than a Phillips tip, forget a slotted one. They’ve pretty much taken over the machine tool industry. You buy a screw gun or a power saw these days and they’re entirely assembled with Torx screws. I always carry a tip for the common ones, and there’s a full set on my boat.”
“This didn’t set off the metal detector at the airport?”
Red smiled bemusedly. “Not like Charley’s head did.”
Tipsy’s expression soured.
“I chose to see a bit of America via the windscreen of a drive-away Mercedes,” Red explained. “I bought two bags of ice every eight hours all the way across the country.”
“That’s real funny. Of course you didn’t fly.” She handed back the Torx tip. “You’re reminding me …”
“Yes?”
“That diver guy from Rum Cay.”
“Arnauld?”
She pointed. “He had to make one.”
“How do you know that?”
“Charley wrote to me.”
Red grimaced. “That stupid conch told me he had a full set.”
“Does it make a difference?
“Maybe no.” Red frowned. “Maybe yes.”
“Okay. That’s lucid. So why did he need one?”
Red dug into his briefcase, produced a copy of Twenty Sailboats to Take You Anywhere, by John Vigor, and opened it to a page with a turned-down corner. “This is a schematic of a Bristol Channel Cutter.” He flattened the book on the table. “Your brother’s boat—minus the bumpkin, the bowsprit, and about a hundred thousand dollars.” He touched the drawing. “He shortened the boom to clear a narrower backstay triangle, extended the mast by a couple of feet, so on and so forth. He had to get all new sails and rig, spars and the stick anyway, so … He did a cool job. The boat sailed great.”
“This is really Vellela Vellela?”
“That’s more or less her.”
“Charley’s boat. …” Tipsy’s eyes devoured every detail of the sail plan and hull. When she looked up: “While we’re about it, just what the hell does the name of Charley’s sailboat mean? It sounds painful, like veil of tears or something.”
“You’re reading a bit much into that one,” Red laughed, “but, well, funny you should ask that question, because Charley seems to have anticipated it. Were you guys twins?”
“Charley is—was—two and a half years older.”
“So there’s no chance of telepathy?”
“You mean,” she tartly retorted, “am I getting messages from my brother’s frozen head?”
“Right.” Red retrieved a clutch of papers from the briefcase. “These were in the waterproof envelope with the logbook. You live in California. Ever heard of a book called Between Pacific Tides by Ed Ricketts and Jack Calvin?”
“No,” said Tipsy.
“Me neither. So I did a little research. The book concerns itself exclusively with the intertidal denizens of the Pacific Coast.”
“Sure,” said Tipsy.
“It was perhaps the first book to do so.”
“Fascinating.”
“It’s a classic. After fifty or sixty years, it’s still taught in the California school system.”
“Let’s get a move on.”
Red brandished two printed pages, annoyed. “These were torn from a copy.”
“So maybe it means something?”
“Try to show a little enthusiasm, woman. Charley liked books. If mutilating a logbook was distasteful to him, why would he trash a re
al book? Maybe it means something, maybe not, but there’s an interesting literary angle. This guy Ricketts was the guy upon whom John Steinbeck based the character of Doc in his Cannery Row stories. Cool, huh?”
“Cool,” Tipsy acknowledged coolly.
Red frowned. “You ever read any of the Cannery Row stories?”
Tipsy made no reply.
“Any Steinbeck at all?”
Tipsy sighed an acediac sigh.
“Huh. Well, Steinbeck and the man he called Doc—who was this guy Ricketts—made the trip together that Steinbeck turned into Voyage to the Sea of Cortez. Later, Ricketts was run over by a train and killed.”
Tipsy sneezed. “My tongue is going numb.” She sneezed again. “Where the hell has this stuff been?”
Red moved the various materials to his side of the chart table. “Some of it’s a little moldy.”
Tipsy sneezed again, hard, and a fourth time. A large black bandana blossomed from Red’s hip pocket. “Jesus,” she said, blowing her nose into it. “Don’t let any pregnant women get around that stuff.”
“Oh,” Red said, affecting startled deference. “Are you—?”
“Not on your life.”
“So, I dodge another lawsuit. Well.” Red sorted through the moldy papers. “Since you can’t get near them, let me read something from them.”
“I’m out of rum.”
He pushed the bottle across the table. “Pages 226-228. I’ll keep it short.”
Some years in early spring vast swarms of by-the-wind sailors, Vellela vellela, often mistakenly called “Portuguese man-of-war,” are blown toward our coast, and great numbers of the little cellophane-like floats, with their erect triangular sails, may be cast ashore in windrows (Fig. 173). Often the fresh specimen is intact enough to place in an aquarium jar of water to observe its details. The animal, beneath its transparent float, is bluish to purple; contrary to older zoological opinion, it is not a colony of specialized individuals, like the Portuguese man-of-war, but a highly modified individual hydroid polyp that has taken up life on the high seas (Fig. 174). This can be visualized as the upside-down hydranth of a hydroid like Polymorpha, which has been developed from a larva that did not descend to the bottom to settle and grow a stalk but has since settled at the surface and grown a float, so to speak. Vellela and two or three lesser-known relatives are properly called chondrophores. … Vellela is one of the few examples of high seas life that a beachcomber may expect to find.
“I’ve seen those things,” Tipsy said, peering at the illustration, her voice entirely nasal. “Out at Ocean Beach, not far from my apartment. I never knew what they were called, but I can see how somebody might think it a perfect name for a sailboat.”
“Maybe especially Charley’s sailboat,” Red added absently, his eyes scanning the text.
“Is there more?”
Red turned up the second page. “Here’s a diagram depicting Vellela’s characteristics, the sail’s angle relative to the body, whatnot. Vellela vellela’s pretty much a downwind sailor. See?” She saw, with no idea what she was seeing. “Ricketts goes on to suggest that specimens from the eastern and western sides of the Pacific are mirror images of each other, so far as their sails are concerned. Since they tack at about a 45-degree angle from a following wind, he speculates that the two species commingle midocean by design. When big spring winds blow, however, the design fails and they’re herded ashore instead of out to sea. That’s if a natural design can be said to fail. Because, you know,” he thumped the stack of books and papers, “God sees the sparrow fall.”
“What,” Tipsy asked incredulously, “did you say?”
“Just kidding.”
“Good.” She sneezed. “I always start sneezing around Big Questions.” She sneezed again. “Not to mention large assumptions.”
“Then let’s don’t go there.” Red set the spoor-lofting materials on the bench on his side of the table. “We have enough questions as it is, and no assumptions to base on them.”
Tipsy perused the text accompanying the drawing of her brother’s boat. “A Bristol Channel Cutter is expensive?”
“That’s only until you run her up on a reef, strip her of all her gear, and salvage her as a total loss.”
Tipsy sneezed. “Will you stop already with the epistemology?” She sneezed again. “Or is it ontology?”
“You’re cute when you sneeze.”
Pausing the handkerchief on its way back to her nose, she gave him a look.
“But not completely,” Red hastened to add. “We’ve strayed from the point. Right here,” he touched the dividers to the silhouette of the hull, under the stern, “below the waterline, there was a compartment. For what it’s worth, it was right where the through-hull for a saltwater intake used to be, and there was a zinc screwed to the center of its cover plate, so it didn’t look out of place at all. The cover plate was held in place by Torx screws.”
“What’s a zinc?”
“A sacrificial anode.”
Tipsy evinced annoyance. “I’m not even going to ask about the saltwater intake.”
Red smiled thinly. “Eight Torx screws.” He indicated the black package on the countertop. “That compartment fit this payload like a Triple-X condom fits—” He didn’t finish the simile.
Tipsy ignored it. “Torx screws. Now I get it. Not to mention I forgot all about this package. Huh.” She shook her head. “Amazing.”
“What’s amazing is,” Red agreed, “some people would have killed us already over this deal, and a lot sooner in the conversation.”
“Is that what happened to Charley?”
“I told you already,” Red firmly reiterated, “if I had arrived in time, Charley’s sorry ass would have been snatched from the jaws of death. I might have roughed him up for fucking up the deal, but hey, what’s a long-suffering employer to do?”
“You were almost there to catch the falling sparrow,” Tipsy suggested.
Red scratched his under chin with the dull end of the dividers. “But then,” he said without a smile, “I might never have met you.”
“So he drowned,” Tipsy, sticking to the subject, said. “But wait a minute.” She gave Red a hard look. “You almost got there in time, you say. But what were you doing there at all?” She narrowed her eyes. “You mentioned that Charley had double-crossed you. Had you figured it out?”
Red shook his head. “I didn’t figure it out until I got back aboard Tunacide with this package.”
Tipsy frowned. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s not all there.”
“Some cocaine is missing?”
“What’s missing is the real reason for this ill-advised adventure.”
“Well?”
Red lay the dividers over the mouth of his glass and fiddled with them, as if intent on perfectly bifurcating the circumference. “You’re not going to believe me.”
“Try me.”
Red watched the dividers.
“Come on, Red. Out with it. How weird could it be?”
Red raised an eyebrow and nodded at the dividers. “Pretty weird.”
“Really?” Tipsy said. “Come on …”
“Okay.” Red looked at her, lifted his head, scratched his chin. “I was hired,” he said to the overhead, “to smuggle a DNA sample into the United States.” He lowered his eyes.
Tipsy blinked. “A DNA sample.” She halved a laugh. “A DNA sample?” she repeated incredulously.
“I know you don’t believe it.”
“You’re right.” Tipsy nodded. “I don’t believe it.”
Red shrugged. “The cocaine is—was—a beard, a cover.”
“But why? Aren’t DNA samples, like, saliva on a cotton swab at the end of a little stick? What’s the big deal? You could smuggle a saliva sample in a perfume bottle, or a cigarette filter, or a … a snow globe.”
“No.” Red shook his head. “It’s much more complicated than that.”
Tipsy was shaking her head.
&
nbsp; “Much more complicated,” Red assured her, “and I don’t even know the whole story.”
“What do you know?”
Red pursed his lips. “You’re not gonna believe me.”
“I already don’t believe you.”
“See? Why should I tell you anything?”
“Well, gee,” Tipsy said. “How about we go back to I’m in this deal whether I like it or not?”
“True story.”
“So why in the hell would somebody hire you to do a job any kid could do?”
Red chewed his lip. “I got hired because I’m a professional, not a kid. I designed the job in such a way as to maximize the chances for success, and part of that, it seemed to me, meant that I had to have a really twisted cover story for maximum credibility, which was that we were smuggling drugs, real drugs but not too much drugs, so that most people wouldn’t bother to look any further into our business. Because most people would have bigger fish to fry.”
“But I still—”
Red held up a hand. “Unlike your basic dope deal, different parties are interested in this particular DNA sample for different reasons. I was—am—working for only one of them. So staying undetected was a prime directive. Second, one of the parties I’m not working for is the feds, and even that’s complicated. There are feds and there are feds, or so I’m told, feds who work for Dynamo A and feds who work for Dynamo B, separate government fiefdoms, each with its agenda. There might even be Dynamos C and D. Third, actual law enforcement appears to have little or nothing to do with any of this. There are other forces at play, about which I know next to nothing, so it was important that I appear to be doing business as usual,f and steer clear of anything else. Fourth …”
Red stopped.
“Fourth?” Tipsy prompted him.
Red grinned. “This is gonna gobsmack you.”
“Try me. I spent five years working for a sexual cosmetics company. I’m pretty hard to gobsmack.”
“This DNA,” Red said, “isn’t just anybody’s DNA.”
“Oh,” Tipsy concluded, “it comes from somebody special? Who? Einstein? Edgar Allan Poe? Liberace?”
Red watched her. “It’s from a former president of the United States.”
