Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  And what’s that?

  Rum.

  Ah, Cedric thought. Excellent idea.

  The bottle stood on the counter. Haitian, it was, too. Not often seen. Mighty genial. Cedric drew the stopper and sniffed. Damn.

  For the first time in two weeks, Cedric smiled.

  If Cedric knew anything at all, he knew this: there is nothing—nothing—so mutually copacetic as clean cocaine and a fine Haitian rum.

  He drank it straight from the bottle. The rum cut through the bolus of cocainized mucus encapsulating his epiglottis like a herd of alligator shrimp eating through dead bottom paint—or, for you landlubbers, like baby formula cut with melamine will eat through infant actuarial tables. Take your pick. Centuries away, the Samurai knows. Ah ha ha hahaha …

  Double D damn. Text that. Cedric stood up and rummaged around until he found a glass, half-filled it with rum, and took another sip from the bottle before he stoppered it.

  Ice? What am I? A fucking Eskimo? Fuck ice.

  After years in the tropics, Cedric had learned to do without ice—not rum, just ice.

  He paced back and forth along the edge of the chart table. This is perfect, he thought. Fucked up on rum and blow and surveying forty feet of mercury-lit dock and a rotting Cal 20, who the hell cares if it’s in San Francisco as opposed to somewhere within a hundred miles north or south of latitude 25? He saluted the row of windows. That will come, that will come. I will discharge my pact with Charley and make my way home, bus or train or walk if I have to, though I may never again have the money for a bottle of this rum. Let alone and forget a kilo of blow. Maybe there’s some way I can get both across the country? This is aside from the fact that at my age I need either stimulant like I need a snake that quacks like a duck. On the other hand, at my age, what difference does it make? I’ve already seen hurricanes, Latin spitfires, megayachts in flames, a shark-sundered water-skier, the wrong end of an automatic weapon—and still I have not been forced to grow up. What’s to get older about? But now—he held up a forefinger—I must sin.

  Cedric looked around. Yes. Of course there’s one. He carefully lifted the door of the reefer so as not to cause the diced cocaine to slide off its face. It’s a sin to put ice in a rum like this. He ran a hand under the lid. But …

  “So you found your friend at last.”

  Along with the voice wafted Justine.

  The lid fell open. Two protracted rails of cocaine disappeared over the side of the cabinet and into the whorls of a damp sword mat on the cabin sole below. Charley’s head by the hair in one hand, glass of rum in the other, Cedric turned slowly.

  “Now at least you can say that your commission is based on more than a mere supposition.”

  Though half-cloaked in shadow, the man addressing him was dressed head to foot in black, including his shoes. His sleek blonde hair and a beautifully tanned complexion stood away from the gloom of the cabin like the recently cleaned visage of a saint in an otherwise begrimed peristyle.

  Outside of the many and perpetual discussions he carried on with and within his own mind, Cedric was not a man of many words. But in this case he was moved to communicate. He held up the head. “You know who this is?”

  The blond-haired man nodded. “Yes.”

  “Do you know how he came to be … like this?”

  The blond man nodded again.

  “Did you have anything to do with it?”

  The blond man turned his head slightly. “Not really,” he told Cedric. “Not directly.”

  “Not directly,” Cedric repeated.

  “No.”

  Cedric set Charley on the counter.

  “How, then?”

  “I’ll have to think about that,” the blond man said. “It’s an interesting question.”

  “You do that.” Cedric raked a little ice up out of the refrigerator and added it to his rum.

  “In the end, however,” the blond man said, with no outward sign of cogitation, “it all comes to the same thing.”

  Cedric took up his knife and stirred his drink with the blade. “What’s your name, why are you here, and what comes to the same thing?” He wiped each side of the blade on his tongue.

  “They call me Miou Miou.”

  Cedric’s face wrinkled into a mask of revulsion botoxed with incredulity.

  “Not that it matters,” continued Miou Miou, “in the eye of Allah. It’s you—”

  “Allah?” Cedric said quickly. “What’s Allah got to do with it?”

  “Nothing.” Miou Miou smiled. “It’s just an expression. You know, like, Allah sees the sparrow fall?”

  “I been hearing about fucking ragheads running round the world these days, blowing shit up,” Cedric said, thinking he might piss this guy off enough to get him to make a mistake. He took a sip of his drink. “But,” he admitted, taking another sip, “you don’t look like no raghead.”

  “Rags mean an entirely different thing to me,” Miou Miou affably agreed.

  “Is that affirmative? You’re not a raghead?”

  “More like a raghorse.”

  “Me,” said Cedric, rattling the ice in his drink, “I don’t care about a man’s affiliation. So long as he lets me alone, he can affiliate all he wants.”

  Miou Miou appeared to consider this. Then, “Sometimes,” he said, “affiliations are hard to avoid.”

  “How’s that?” Cedric took a sip of rum.

  “Take your friend Charley,” Miou Miou said.

  Cedric didn’t look at Charley. “What about him?”

  “Late in life, he acquired a certain … affiliation.”

  “So?”

  “So look where it got him.”

  “Where did it get him?”

  Miou Miou smiled. “It got him to where he fits very neatly into a top-loading countertop refrigerator, like a six-pack. Like a gallon of wine. Like a frozen chicken.”

  Now Cedric realized that, along with his sense of humor, he had better put down his drink. Not the knife. Just the drink.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” Miou Miou said unexpectedly.

  “That,” Cedric answered, “is kind of you.” Not taking his eyes off Miou Miou, Cedric pointed his blade at the severed head. “Did you do this?”

  The blond man shook his head.

  “Do you know who did?”

  The blond man nodded.

  “Who?”

  “Red Means.”

  “I’m very disappointed,” Cedric nodded back.

  “Yes,” said Miou Miou.

  “Yes what? What do you know about it?”

  “Charley left you a note, I believe.”

  Cedric frowned.

  “A note,” Miou Miou added, “and some chump change.”

  Cedric is not liking this, Cedric thought.

  “It said, in effect, in case anything happens to me, Red Means is the party responsible.”

  Cedric blinked.

  “Correct?” Miou Miou asked.

  “What business is this of yours?”

  Miou Miou dismissed this. “It’s true?”

  Cedric made no response.

  Miou Miou answered his own question. “So you’ve come to avenge your friend.”

  Cedric said nothing.

  “How loyal. How quaint. How stupid.”

  “What would you know about it?”

  Miou Miou spoke in the dark. “If you promise not to mistakenly avenge the death of your friend and go straight back to where you came from, I’ll let you go.”

  “You will let me go?”

  Miou Miou nodded in the dark.

  For the first time in two weeks, Cedric laughed.

  In the dark, Miou Miou did not laugh.

  Cedric abruptly turned serious. “Not bloody likely. Aside from the fact that it’s none of your business, what do you have to do with this?” Cedric moved his head toward Charley’s. “How do you fit in?”

  “You’re the one,” Miou Miou replied, “who doesn’t fit in.”

  �
��Felix Timbalón,” Cedric realized aloud.

  “An unreliable hophead,” Miou Miou said with contempt. “Obviously.”

  “At least he was working for a living,” Cedric observed.

  “And what would it be, precisely,” replied Miou Miou, “that you think I am doing?”

  Despite the rather intense atmosphere presently reigning over the main cabin, Cedric thought that what he’d really like to do before they continued with the conversation was help himself to another blast. At a minimum, it would delay the hard work of trying to figure out what was going on, let alone doing something about it.

  “Normally I’d be considered the perfectly amoral man,” Miou Miou said to Cedric. “A job’s a job and, so long as I get my money, it’s all the same to me. Naturally, I get my kicks. But from where I stand, it’s not difficult to surmise that not a soul in the world is going to miss you, high or not.”

  Surprisingly adroit, considering the addled metabolism that made it, Cedric locked open the spike in the handle of his knife as he lunged. Spike and blade formed a T, with Cedric’s fist balled around their handle, and they appeared to comprise a formidable weapon.

  But Miou Miou was a little too far across the deck for Cedric to cover the distance in less than a measurable amount of time. Plus, truth to tell, Cedric misjudged it. Cedric was loaded. Miou Miou was a professional, and he didn’t show up for work loaded. Cedric was just a dope smuggler, retired, with compromised reflexes. Before Cedric really realized it, but as a result of a move Cedric found sickeningly familiar, and slow even, he watched himself find himself face down in the carpet with his arm twisted high up between his shoulder blades, its shoulder dislocated, and the knife tumbling uselessly off the small of his back to the deck.

  The end will converge quickly, he thought to himself.

  “Have you ever heard of a snake that quacks like a duck?” Cedric feebly inquired of the floor.

  Miou Miou broke Cedric’s neck and stood up. “No.” He shot a cuff. “Can’t say as I have.”

  The business end of a boat hook speared Miou Miou through his right ear drum, inducing a shrieking tinnitus that Dopplered through his brain like an oncoming rape whistle. So that’s what a mistake sounds like, Miou Miou thought, as the impact shattered his skull. I wonder if mistakes are communicable.

  “Nobody’s going to miss you, either,” Red said, as Miou Miou collapsed on top of Cedric, “motherfucker.”

  I figured that out, Miou Miou thought, as he died, a long time ago.

  Red opened and closed the torn palm in the dark. At this rate, the son of a bitch is never going to heal.

  He leaned the boat hook in a corner. “Sorry I’m late, Cedric.” He stepped to the sink and inverted Cedric’s drink over the wounded paw. “I’m late a lot lately.”

  Red raked some ice out of the reefer with one hand, replaced Charley with the other, and dropped the lid. He recharged Cedric’s glass with ice and rum, keeping a few shards for the palm of his hand, and sipped judiciously. When the ice in his palm had melted, he set down the glass, knelt on the floor, and methodically turned out both sets of pockets.

  Miou Miou, being a professional, had nothing but cash on him, maybe five grand in dollars and euros.

  Cedric had his 100-ton Coast Guard license and a familiar-looking envelope. Inside it, Red found $504 Bahamian, $112 American, and a note, which he read by the glare of the dock light.

  Cedric,

  Long time no see. I’ve been owing you this grand, plus vigorish, for a while. Try not to put it all in one arm.

  Unfortunately or otherwise, if you don’t see me face to face before the beginning of hurricane season, then I’m toast and Red’s the reason.

  See you around the blue hole,

  Charley

  Red scrutinized the envelope. The postmark was faint and the light was bad, but eventually he made it out as Colonel Hill, Crooked Island, Bahamas. “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Red told the ghostly darkness. He read the note a second time. He read the postmark a second time. Nothing had changed. He brought his fist down on the lid of the countertop reefer hard enough to dent it, which started the palm bleeding again.

  Then he stood in the gloom of the cabin for a long time. After a while, the night heron flew between the dockside illumination and the cabin windows.

  Red thoughtfully folded envelope, note, Coast Guard license, and money into his hip pocket.

  Then he took up the glass, finished the rum in it, and chewed up the ice.

  “Miou Miou,” he said finally, “I owe you one.” He shook his head and set the glass in the sink. “Fucking Charley.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  SCREAMS FOLLOWED THE DOCTOR THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR. AN ELBOWED lever closed it behind him, silent as a bivalve.

  “Medical ethics prohibit my calling a patient, especially one with so dire a need, a fucking cunt,” declaimed the doctor, calmly stripping off a pair of bloodied latex gloves. The lid of a stainless steel trash can yawned to the touch of his foot, and he fed the gloves into its mouth. “But I’ve just about had it with ethics.”

  “About time, if you ask me,” commented the orderly.

  “Nobody asked you,” said the doctor, rolling on fresh gloves. “People who’d siphon a fix from a fentanyl drip in the orthopedic ward should not be allowed to hold opinions concerning ethics.”

  “That was Johnston,” the orderly corrected him gravely.

  “Let alone express them.”

  “Now he works at St. Petrale.”

  “Oh, so,” said the doctor, “we’re in touch with the base scum? Are we texting him?” He sequentially slotted each finger of one hand at right angles to the fingers of the other to seat the latex. “Is it a union thing?”

  “Everybody knows he’s at St. Petrale,” the orderly responded calmly without answering the question. “I was present at the staff meeting at which you yourself suggested the efficacy of our highly recommending him to there by way of speedily jettisoning him from here. You—”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the doctor cut him short. His eye fell on Quentin. “What have we here?” He did not deny himself a little sneer.

  Quentin drew himself up. “And whom do I have the honor of addressing?”

  “We, in the trauma center, find ourselves shorn entirely of manners,” the doctor said.

  Quentin’s eye involuntarily fell to the man’s breast, which bore a nameplate not unlike the orderly’s. “Doctor Felton-Foote,” he read. “Didn’t I know you in Guadalajara?”

  Felton-Foote favored Quentin with the regard of a colonial entomologist. “I daresay you knew everybody worth knowing in Guadalajara.”

  “Except you, it would seem.”

  “I’ve never been there,” Felton-Foote sniffed.

  Officer Ventana was looking puzzled. “What’s going on in Guadalajara?”

  “Medical school,” the orderly informed him, in a stage whisper sufficient to be heard in the back row of the balcony. “It’s a good one, too.”

  Felton-Foote favored the orderly with an icy regard. “And what exactly would you know about the disparate, not to mention relative, merits of a given institute of medicine?”

  “I judge them by what they send me,” the orderly answered, in all simplicity.

  “All I know,” Felton-Foote grimly regarded Quentin, “is what the streets of San Francisco send me. So.” He pulled Quentin’s head abruptly forward and peered at his shaved scalp. “Gay bashing?”

  Quentin cracked aside the forearm of the doctor with his own and leveled eyes with him. “Not yet,” he snarled. “Not just yet.”

  Dr. Felton-Foote’s cellphone rang a vaguely familiar tune. He retrieved the device from a holster beneath his scrubs, frowned at its readout, and took the call. “What is it?”

  “The theme from Doctor Zhivago,” the orderly stage-whispered helpfully. Quentin and Ventana looked at him. “He holds an undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature. His thesis posited t
hat Boris Pasternak admired Petrarch sufficiently to have named Zhivago’s Laura after the poet’s Laura, and there’s a long appendix with genealogical charts showing how the real Laura, on which Petrarch’s idealization was based, married into the family that produced the Marquis de Sade.”

  “There’s always a Russian connection of late,” Quentin marveled, “but I didn’t know that about the Marquis de Sade. Is it true?”

  The orderly shrugged. “He writes cementitious poetry, too.”

  Felton-Foote did not bother to leave the room or even walk away. “Call me when you’ve debrised the wound.” He tried to hang up, but the caller forestalled him. “So start an IV,” Felton-Foote barked. “What are you, helpless?” He listened briefly. “No, no, no.” He stabbed a latexed forefinger into the air in front of him as if it were a lofty prostate. “It’s a simple gunshot wound. Of course she’s going into shock. Start the IV, give her a local, debris the wound, call me when she’s ready. What part of Service and Humility don’t you understand—?” He listened some more. “Ms. Thomas,” he said, as if patiently, “gunshot mothers are delivering babies all over the planet at any given moment within the context of less than two percent of the resources available to this hospital. As a theoretical part of these vast resources, have you never heard of an epidural?” He listened briefly. “Look look look,” he said, obviously interrupting. “Don’t get hysterical. Do as I’ve told you, and I’ll be along. Is that clear? Christ, look at it from the point of view of your residency. To wit, do you want to assist on a caesarean on a gunshot victim, or—” he contemplated Quentin, “—or do you want to suture a quotidian skull laceration?” He waited. “Okay.” He holstered the phone. “Residents,” he apostrophized in disgust.

  “I got into this business,” the orderly observed, “to alleviate the suffering of mankind. But,” he indicated Quentin, “this gentleman has been sitting on this gurney for two hours already.”

  Ventana indicated the television, at which he’d been staring as if fascinated. “That’s about how long that guy’s been dissecting a Superbowl that hasn’t happened yet.”

  The orderly didn’t even look.

  Quentin glanced up at the digital readout in the lower right-hand corner of the television screen. “One hour and forty minutes.”