Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  “She’s not marooned,” I said, “she’s under repair.”

  He ignored my emendation, but just continued to toss the cartridge cases over the gunwale. “And how will you repair your boat, Breakspear, or even take her away, if I put your name on the Stop List? You do know what the Stop List is, Breakspear?”

  I knew only too well. It was the list of undesirable aliens who were banned from entering the Bahamas, and if my name was put on that Stop List, and if I was then thrown off the islands, I would probably never see my boat again. The threat was effective and blunt.

  “Do you understand me?” Billingsley asked as he threw the last cartridge overboard. I suspected that as soon as he left the boatyard the chart would be similarly destroyed. Doubtless Hirondelle had already been blown up, just as my own boat would be butchered if I insisted on challenging this man. “Do you understand me?” he asked a second time.

  “Yes.” I tasted the sourness of humble pie.

  “So do you still find anything suspicious in the circumstances surrounding your discovery of the yacht Hirondelle?” Billingsley asked with a mocking punctiliousness that was intended to humiliate me, but the humiliation was my own fault for having challenged the policeman’s lie.

  “No,” I said, and hated myself for telling the untruth, but I was thinking of my own boat standing propped on the sand of Straker’s Cay, and I thought of all the work I had lavished on Masquerade, and of all the love and care and time I had poured into her, and I tried to imagine her rotting under the tropical sun with her paint peeling, her deck planks opening and her timbers riddled with termites. So I lied and said I detected nothing untoward in finding a bullet-riddled boat awash in the Bahamian seas.

  Chief Inspector Deacon Billingsley raised his right hand and victoriously, patronisingly and very gently, patted my cheek so that I felt the cold touch of his heavy gold rings. “Good boy,” he said derisively. “And when you see Bellybutton, tell him that I know where his brother is, and I’ll pick the bastard up whenever I choose and then feed him head first into a cane-shredder.” He turned abruptly away, not waiting for any answer. The gangplank bounced under his confident step. He walked down the quay without looking back, but he must have known I was watching him for he stopped a few yards short of his car and very ostentatiously took the incriminating chart from his jacket pocket. I thought for a second he was going to burn it, but instead he tore it into tiny scraps that he tossed into the warm wind.

  “The bastard,” I breathed. In that moment, Hirondelle and her crew had disappeared for good.

  The Lincoln’s driver was a uniformed constable who climbed into the sunlight to open the car door for Billingsley. “I told you not to bother,” Ellen said disparagingly as she climbed the main companionway, and I guessed that she had been listening to my conversation with Billingsley by standing just under the saloon skylight which was propped open. Now she stood beside me and watched the white Lincoln drive out of the boatyard. “Didn’t I say you’d be wasting your time?”

  “Sod my time,” I said angrily. “Did you hear what he asked about you and me?”

  “Of course I heard.” She seemed quite unfazed by Billingsley’s impertinent question whether we slept together, doubtless translating the policeman’s particular curiosity as a general confirmation of men’s innate tackiness. Ellen was more irritated by my answer than by Billingsley’s question. “Why didn’t you just tell him the truth?”

  “I did.”

  “I mean the truthful explanation.” Which was that Ellen had sworn herself to celibacy while she worked as a cook, a decision that was to me as eccentric as it was both incomprehensible and frustrating.

  “I shouldn’t have told the arrogant bastard anything.” I stared at the empty yard where Billingsley’s car had stood. “My God! But I ought to report him! I know what I’ll do! I’ll bloody well call the Belgian Embassy!”

  “Don’t be so stupid, Nick!” Ellen was genuinely frightened for me, but she was also indignant at me. “Report him, and you’ll be thrown off the islands before the week’s end! Don’t you understand what’s going on? Are you entirely blind? Don’t you understand that in small countries power is more likely to remain undisguised because there isn’t sufficient societal depth to conceal the realities of institutionalised brutality beneath a respectable fiction?”

  But I was not listening to the professor’s explanation. I was feeling disgust at myself. It seemed to me that the stench of Billingsley’s cigar smoke clung to the boat like the sulphurous reek of the pit, and with it lingered the realisation that I had been twisted into dishonesty as easily as a length of rope could be coiled into hanks. I had lied, and I had let myself be used by evil. But all for Masquerade.

  Masquerade is my boat. She’s a beauty; a forty-foot ketch built of mahogany on oak. She had been constructed in Hampshire before the Second World War by craftsmen who had taken pride in their work, but fibreglass had made wooden boats redundant and Masquerade had been laid up and left to rot at a boatyard on the River Exe.

  I had found her when I was a Weapons Instructor at the Royal Marines’ Lympstone camp in Devon. I had bought her for a song, then spent a fortune restoring her and, when my term of service expired and I could afford to become the gypsy-sailor I had always wanted to be, I left the Marines and made Masquerade my new home. For a couple of years she and I had knocked around the Mediterranean, then I had sailed her across the Atlantic. That voyage had been the first leg of a planned circumnavigation, but those dreams had been brutally shattered when Masquerade was stolen from an anchorage in the Florida Keys. She turned up ten days later, stranded on a coral reef in the Bahamas with most of her gear missing and her starboard bilges half ripped out by the savage coral heads. The thieves were never found.

  That theft and recovery had taken place just over a year ago. Now, laboriously rescued by Thessy’s father, a fisherman, Masquerade was standing in the sandy backyard of Thessy’s house where she was cradled by timber props among the casuarinas and palm trees, and where chickens roosted in her cockpit. She needed repairs and she needed love. She needed to feel the sea about her long deep keel again. Her timbers needed to swell with the salt water. She needed me. Which was why I had bowed to the imperative of Deacon Billingsley’s dishonesty, because otherwise I would have lost her.

  And I would have lost the chance to sail across the Pacific with Ellen, because Ellen was on the verge of agreeing to come with me, and if I had not yielded to the policeman’s blackmail I would have lost Ellen as well as my boat.

  And so I had lied.

  A few moments before sundown I extricated Wavebreaker’s folding bicycle from the big locker on the boat’s after swim-platform, forced the rusting hinges open, then pedalled along Midshipman Road to the glittering block of apartments where our esteemed boss lived.

  Matthew McIllvanney was not the real boss of Cutwater Yacht Charters (Bahamas) Limited, which belonged to a retired theatre owner who now lived in Bermuda and was a long-time friend of my father, a friendship that had secured me the job of skippering Wavebreaker when Masquerade was wrecked, but McIllvanney actually looked after the day-to-day running of the charter business. Cutwater’s charter bookings were usually made by agencies in Fort Lauderdale and London, then faxed to McIllvanney’s yard in Free-port where the boats were docked and maintained. McIllvanney also kept a few power-cruisers of his own for charter, and his yard ran an efficient yacht-servicing and marine supplies business, and thus the boundaries between his operations and Cutwater Charters were necessarily blurred and, for all intents and purposes, he could have been said to run Cutwater. He also ran a couple of other businesses that had nothing to do with boats and were probably much more profitable.

  McIllvanney was certainly making money from somewhere. Starkisser had to have cost him close to a hundred thousand US dollars, and the Lucaya penthouse apartment, with its private docks and its view towards Silver Point Beach, probably cost ten times as much. He kept a BMW and an old open-top MG in
the garage, though his vehicle of choice was a big Kawasaki motorbike. Matthew McIllvanney, even by the standards of the expatriate retired Americans who lived all around him, was a rich man.

  I chained Wavebreaker’s bicycle to an ornamental fence outside McIllvanney’s apartment block, and persuaded the uniformed ape on security that I was not a terrorist. The ape keyed the lift panel so that the elevator would go to the very top floor where it opened directly into McIllvanney’s apartment. I had visited the apartment at least a dozen times, but I still found the fact of a lift opening directly into a living room incredibly impressive; a proof of wealth as convincing as the possession of gold taps or of mink rugs or of the girl who waited to greet me just beyond the lift doors. She was a very tall and very fair and dazzlingly beautiful creature whose skin was goose-pimpled under the impact of McIllvanney’s air conditioning which was set to a level that might have made a penguin shiver. “Hi!” she said enthusiastically. “You’ve got to be Nick! Matt’s expecting you. He’s right outside.” The girl, who looked as though she had been made in heaven out of peaches and cream, was wearing a few pieces of string arranged as a bikini, high heels, the goose-pimples, and nothing else. She nodded towards the screened porch that overlooked the sea. “You’ll have a drinkie, Nick?”

  “Irish whiskey,” I said, “no ice, some water, and thank you.”

  “You’re surely welcome. My name’s Donna.” Donna gave me a limpid hand to shake, then wiggled her way towards the liquor cabinet. Just to watch her walk threatened to break your heart. She waved a hand about Mclllvanney’s apartment. “Isn’t this just the cutest place you ever did see, Nick?”

  “It’s very splendid,” I agreed politely. The apartment was indeed attractive, perhaps because it had nothing whatever of McIllvanney about it. The apartment’s previous owners had hired an expensive interior designer from New York and ordered her to trick out the rooms in a horse-country olde-English Spy-Cartoons look, which had been done to extravagant perfection, but McIllvanney was none of those things. McIllvanney was a Protestant bully from the Shankill Road in Belfast, who had learned his thuggery in the hard school of Northern Ireland’s prejudices, honed it in the British army, and now put it to whatever good use he wanted in the Bahamas. If I had been asked to decorate a flat to reflect McIllvanney’s character then I would have given him an East Belfast bar with sawdust scattered on the floor, King Billy strutting on the walls, and blood splattered across its tobacco-stained ceiling.

  “Why don’t you just go on through, Nick,” Donna invited me, “and I’ll bring you and Matt your drinkies.”

  I went on through, sliding the heavy plate glass aside to walk on to the humid porch where a morose looking McIllvanney slouched in a cane chair and stared through the insect screens at the darkening sea. “It’s you,” he greeted me without delight and as though he had been expecting someone else.

  “You wanted to see me,” I pointed out. Spending time with McIllvanney was not my idea of relaxation, and I didn’t much take to his lack of enthusiasm.

  “Sit down,” he said grudgingly, “your Holiness.” Calling me ‘your Holiness’ was McIllvanney’s joke. It was not because I was particularly pious, but rather because my namesake, Nicholas Breakspear, had been the only Englishman who had ever become Pope. He had taken the name Adrian IV and had ruled the church in the twelfth century, a fact that very few people other than myself knew, but a fact I had been foolish enough to tell McIllvanney whose hatred of ‘taigs’, Catholics, ensured he would never forget my papal connection. In truth there was no connection, for my original family name was Sillitoe, but, long before I was born, my father had adopted Breakspear as his stage name and I had really known no other.

  “Did that focker Bellybutton bring Starkisser back?” McIllvanney suddenly demanded of me in his sour Belfast accent.

  “In one piece, even.”

  “He’s getting too big for his focking black boots, that feller is.” The complaint was a ritual, not to be taken seriously, a mere habitual statement made solely to impress on me how tough McIllvanney was. If he had to choose between me and Bellybutton, or between Bellybutton and his own mother, he would have chosen Bellybutton any day. They were two of a kind.

  McIllvanney was a tall, harshly scarred and surprisingly handsome man, with a hard knowing face and a deceptively thin body. It was deceptive for he was brutally strong. He could also be excellent company, with a fund of stories that he told with an exquisite sense of timing, though such good moments were rare for he preferred to brood savagely over life’s injustices; the chief of which was the inexplicable existence of Roman Catholics.

  “Are you a Catholic?” he asked Donna as she brought out the drinks. I suspected the question was meant for my amusement rather than for his own enlightenment.

  “Gracious, no! In our family we’re all Episcopalians.” She gave him a big smile. “From Philadelphia,” she added for my benefit and with yet another winning smile. Donna was one of life’s cheerleaders; her teeth were a triumph of the orthodontic trade, her hair was a confection of gel, spray and heat, and her body was a tribute to wholesome American food and exercise. “I’ve heard so much about you,” she said to me, as though settling herself in for a long cosy chat.

  “So now fock away off and forget him,” McIllvanney snapped at her.

  “It’s just been so nice visiting with you, Nick!” Donna gave me a last dazzling smile, then, apparently impervious to McIllvanney’s evil-tempered scorn, clicked away on her ridiculously high heels.

  I waited till Donna was safely out of earshot. “Is she your newest?” Pretty girls moved through McIllvanney’s life at an astonishing rate, though the last, who had endured a record six months, had left just a few weeks before.

  He shook his head. “She’s one of the girls, so she is. She’ll cost you two thousand US a day, Nick, plus air-fare, food and a present. I had to bring her over from Miami today because the stupid cow won’t fly. Can you believe that? She’s frightened of airplanes, so she is! So I had to fetch her in Junkanoo.”

  Junkanoo was one of McIllvanney’s boats, doubtless purchased on the profits of his call-girl service. He liked to boast that the service was very elegant, and certainly not crude like the part-time pimp service that Bellybutton enforced with his teeth. Instead McIllvanney was the Bahamian agent for a Miami-based business that claimed to provide the world’s most beautiful girls to anyone with the money to pay for them. McIllvanney arranged the girls’ visits to clients in the Bahamas and guaranteed their safety while they were in the islands. That made McIllvanney a gold-plated pimp, though he preferred to describe himself as a ‘leisure-agent’; however, he usually had the grace to smile when he used that label. He showed a similar amusement now. “I hear that black bugger Billingsley scared the living daylights out of you today?”

  McIllvanney enjoyed making the accusation. He did not like me. I was the son of a rich and famous man and, to McIllvanney, that accident of birth clinked with the corrupt sound of silver spoons. It did not matter that I had rejected my father’s ways, that I had become a marine and was as poor as a church mouse while McIllvanney had become a rich man; the stench of privilege still clung to me and McIllvanney loved to discomfort me because of it. “How do you know what Billingsley did to me?” I asked him.

  “How the fock do you think I know? He told me!”

  I should have realised that in an island as small as Grand Bahamas two men like McIllvanney and Billingsley would know each other. McIllvanney must have been Billingsley’s source for the policeman’s information about my boat and my plans to repair her. Doubtless, before coming to the yard, Billingsley had talked with McIllvanney, and I guessed that he had also entertained the Ulsterman afterwards with an account of my pusillanimity. I suddenly felt an immense relief that I only had one more charter to complete for Cutwater, and that I would then be free of these men.

  “So what did Billingsley tell you?” McIllvanney seemed amused by my silence. “That the Belgian own
ers got pissed off with sailing and trotted off home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Billingsley’s a lying black bastard, so he is. Those Belgians must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they probably saw something they shouldn’t have seen, so someone shut them up for good. They’ll not have been the first tourists to be fed to the sharks and they won’t be the last.”

  “You’re telling me they were murdered?” I was feeling guilty at giving in so easily to Billingsley’s blackmail.

  “I don’t know what happened to them, do I?” McIllvanney said tiredly. “And if I did know, would I be telling you? I’m just telling you what I think happened, so I am. And I don’t think they pissed off home because they were suddenly hungry for Belgian waffles. I think they were sent for their tea by Billingsley and his friends, and I’ll tell you something more, no one will ever know what happened to them, so forget it! If you know what’s good for you, Thessy and Ellen, none of you even saw the Belgian boat this morning!” He glared at me, almost daring me to contradict his advice. I kept a cowardly silence that was broken by a strident and sudden eruption of Goombay music from one of the nearby beach hotels. The music triggered a burst of applause. “It’s a convention,” McIllvanney explained with a sneer, “off-season rates, car dealers and their wives from Europe, and the product is a five-speed piece of tin-plate junk. Man’s a prick.”

  He had added the last three words with the same morose carelessness with which he had decried the car dealers’ convention, but he offered no elucidation as to what the words meant. “Who is?” I finally asked.

  “Deacon Billingsley, of course. He’s as tough as old boots, but playing with drugs is still a mug’s game. If the spics don’t blow you away then the Americans will. The man’s a prick to be involved.”

  “So he is involved?” I asked, and I was unable to hide my surprise even though McIllvanney was merely confirming my own suspicion that Billingsley was corrupt. Yet suspecting and knowing are two different things, and I was still naive enough to want to believe that all policemen could be trusted. Ellen was amused by my naivety, claiming that if she dug deep enough she would probably discover that I still believed in Santa Claus. I did not like the accusation of naivety, preferring to believe that I was an honest man who found it hard to imagine how other people could live with a guilty conscience. Whatever, I sounded primly shocked at hearing my suspicions of Billingsley’s corruption confirmed.