Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Asshole,” the Yankee Ellen said scathingly, then, joined by Thessy, we stepped forward to offer our practised and smiling welcome.

  My last charter had begun; I had one week to work, then it would be back to Masquerade, and then to the long winds of the southern ocean that led to the uttermost ends of the earth, and thus to happiness.

  Wavebreaker, despite her ethereal beauty, was not the most practical boat with which to cruise the Bahamas. She drew too much water, and the Bahamas, for the most part, are a shallow bank dotted with ripsaw coral heads and treacherous shoals where flat-bottomed boats might glide in comparative safety, but where a deep-keeled schooner was forced to creep with painful care. Whenever we reached coral or shoal waters Thessy was forced to spend hours perched at the foremast’s lower spreaders to watch the water’s colour. Deep safe water was a dark royal blue, while over a coral reef the sea shaded to green or, when perilously shallow, to brown, and Thessy, peering ahead, would shout at me to go to port or starboard, or even to go backwards as fast as the motors would catch hold. We tried to avoid such adventures by sticking to the deeper channels and harbours, but some guests demanded we anchor in the shallower lagoons where the rays glided above the bright sand and the grey snappers schooled and the barracudas patrolled. One way to discourage such demands was secretly to salt a shallow anchorage with a bag of rotted chicken heads which would quickly draw a sinuous and evil-looking pack of otherwise harmless sand sharks that would twist menacingly under our keel and persuade the paying customers to seek the deeper darker waters offshore.

  Guests who still wanted to explore the lagoons and sea-flats could use Wavebreaker’s skiff. Our Georgia guests used the small flat-bottomed craft to go bonefishing one afternoon, and Thessy, well trained by his father, led them unerringly to a sea-flat by a mangrove swamp where, in just a few heart-racing moments, they landed four of the gleaming and elusive fish. None weighed more than three pounds, but the sheer savage strength of the mirror-plated fish astonished our guests. “Hey, beautiful!” the proctologist, back aboard Wavebreaker at sunset, called down the companionway steps to where Ellen was tearing apart a lettuce for the evening meal. “Can you cook me a bonefish?”

  “I can cook it, doctor, but you won’t want to eat it.” Ellen gave him her sweetest smile, the one calculated to provoke cardiac arrest in a sworn celibate. “Eating bonefish is just like sucking fish-juice off a mouthful of tin-tacks.”

  “So what are you doing for my supper, darling?”

  “French fries and New York strip steak.”

  “Who strips? You or the beef?” The proctologist whooped with laughter and punched my arm. “Get it, Nick? Who strips? You or the beef? Shee-it, I kill myself sometimes. Was she really a college professor?”

  “So she tells me.”

  “They didn’t look like that when I was at college. I tell you, Nick, the old bags who lectured us were all spayed before they were allowed near the students.” He chuckled, then held his glass out for a refill of vodka and orange juice. Once the glass was full he held it up to the lantern that hung from the awning’s strut and toasted whichever patient had paid for that afternoon’s bonefishing. All week our doctor and two lawyers had thus credited their clients for their various pleasures. The proctologist drank the toast, then raised his glass once more, this time in tribute to Thessy’s prowess as a bonefish guide. “Is the kid’s name really Thessalonians?”

  “It truly is,” I confirmed.

  “Weirdest goddamn name I ever did hear.” The proctologist shook his head then turned to look at our private scrap of paradise. The evening was dropping like velvet and the lagoon was fading to a deep dusky richness in which the curving palms were reflected as cleanly as though the water were a dark-silvered looking-glass. We had moored off a deserted cay rimmed with a beach of clear sand above which the first stars were pricking the warm sky, while, beneath Wavebreaker’s bimini cover, half-moon ice cubes clinked in crystal glasses. “This is the life.” The proctologist stretched his sunburned legs on the cockpit cushions and rested his head so he could stare past the bimini cover at the stars. “You’re one hell of a lucky guy, Nick. You spend your life with Ellen, while I get to stare up assholes all day.” He grimaced, then rolled his head to look at me. “Why didn’t you become an actor like your dad?”

  “I’m no good at it.”

  “Ineptitude didn’t stop me becoming an asshole doctor!” The proctologist hooted at his own wit before asking which of my father’s famous wives was my mother. I told him and he shook his head in admiration. “She was some looker, Nick! Wow.”

  “Wow,” I agreed. In her time Mother had been almost as famous as Father, but presently she was in a home for inebriates where, on good days, she could remember who she was, but the good days were very rare and getting scarcer. I thought what a snakepit my family was; a snakepit dominated by a genius who knew how to create any illusion—even love.

  “It must be pretty great having Sir Thomas as a father.” The proctologist was fishing for gossip.

  “It’s wonderful,” I said with suitable sanctimony. “He’s a great man.”

  The doctor nodded agreement. “You can tell that just from looking at him.” He was entirely serious, and had adopted a portentous tone suitable for expressing admiration for the Greatest Living Englishman. “Know what I mean, Nick? You look at Sir Tom on the screen and it doesn’t matter what part he’s playing but you can tell he’s a great guy. What’s the word I’m looking for? Help me out here, Nick.” He snapped his fingers. “Integrity!” he said at last. “Your dad’s got integrity.”

  Father would not know what integrity was if it sneaked up and bit his backside. “I know,” I said humbly.

  The proctologist swirled the ice in his glass. “You’re a lucky fellow, Nick.”

  “I know,” I said again, and I was too, but not for the reasons the proctologist believed. I was lucky because I had turned my back on illusion, pursuing instead common-sense reality. I had run away from Sir Tom because I needed to find a bedrock of truth on which to build a life. I had no time for my father’s illusions. Illusion could not fix a position from a sextant reading, nor fight two hundred square feet of heavy flogging wet canvas in a tumbling sea and a rough wind. People envied me my birth and my childhood, but my secret pride was that I had rejected both to make of myself a prosaic and common-sense fellow.

  The proctologist was bored with talking about Sir Tom. “You reckon we can go bonefishing again tomorrow?” he asked me instead.

  “It’s your charter, doctor. You can do whatever you like.”

  “Hey, Ellen!” the doctor shouted down to the galley where Ellen was trying to disguise the fact that the frozen steaks were being thawed in a microwave. “Nick says I can do whatever I like! You want to come skinny-dipping with me tomorrow?”

  “I don’t think I could take the excitement, doctor.”

  By the week’s end the proctologist was saying that it had been the best goddamned vacation he had ever taken, and as we passed the bunkering moorings near McIllvanney’s yard I saw him take Ellen aside and I guessed he was offering her a job. In the year I had skippered Wavebreaker at least half of our married male charterers had either offered Ellen a job or pressed her to visit their offices the next time she passed through their city. It was almost tedious to watch it happen.

  We docked ten minutes later, and Thessy and I carried the luggage out to the yard where the courtesy taxi shimmered in the heat. One of the lawyers’ wives wanted to know the secret of Ellen’s coffee, and Ellen modestly said she just followed the percolator instructions, while the truth was that she put a cupful of cheap instant coffee powder into every percolated pot. The proctologist handed me three envelopes, one addressed to each of us, then told me that if I ever had piles I could rely on him to cut them out for cost.

  Ellen held her happy smile till the courtesy taxi had disappeared, then she tore up the proctologist’s business card. “The creep suggested I might be his receptionist
.” She ripped open her envelope to find two hundred dollars. Mine had the same amount, while Thessy’s only contained a hundred, though the proctologist had also given him the ‘Go Dawgs’ hat. Not that the inequity of the tip mattered, for we always pooled and shared the money evenly.

  It took just over an hour to empty Wavebreaker of her garbage and dirty linen, and then to hook up the shoreside electricity and pump diesel and fresh water into her tanks. Those chores done, and the synthetic fabric of the precious sails covered from the ravages of sunlight, I hefted my old marine kit bag on to the dock where Ellen was waiting to ambush me.

  Ellen planned to return to her tiny apartment in the town where she kept her precious books and where, on an old manual typewriter, she wrote what she called her ‘five-finger exercises’, which she would never let anyone read. McIllvanney had offered to let her stay on board Wavebreaker, so long as the boat’s air conditioners were disconnected, but his offer was not as generous as it seemed for Ellen would have been little more than an unpaid security guard and also subject to Bellybutton’s endlessly tedious suggestions, and she far preferred her small hot room in the busy crowded apartment block that smelt of cooking all day and marijuana all night.

  “I’ll see you in a week’s time, Nick?” Ellen now challenged me.

  I shook my head. “You know you won’t. I’ve got a boat to mend.” I tried to edge past her, but she blocked my progress with her bicycle. “Sammy Meredith can skipper the boat,” I suggested.

  “Sam Meredith is a creep. Be here in one week, Nick, or you won’t see me again!”

  Thessy was already waiting at the yard gate where our taxi thumped and quivered. Ellen was still arguing with me as Thessy and I climbed in and backfired away, but I was no longer listening. I had Masquerade to mend and a life to live and, even if it meant living it without Ellen, my charter days were done. I was free.

  I had been in New York when Masquerade was stolen. I had gone there from Florida because my father had pleaded with me to go. He was opening his celebrated King Lear on Broadway. He was old, he told me, and he was feeling his age, and he had played the Lear for five months at the National in London and he was tired, and he wanted to patch things up with me because it would make him feel better, and I was the only one of all his children whom he could trust, and he needed my youth to support him at this difficult time and so, like a fool, I had believed him and flown to New York where I had found the rogue ensconced in a suite of the Plaza with a frizzy-haired girl young enough to be his great-granddaughter. “The dear soul wishes to be in the theatre,” he told me, “and her legs are good enough to allow me to encourage that ambition, though doubtless at the risk of slipping a disc or two in my back. Would you like to sleep with her?”

  I went to his opening night. He was brilliant. I still don’t know how he does it. He despises the method actors. “Grubby little players,” he calls them, “vermin in greasepaint. They’re not paid to be amateur psychiatrists, but to be players, to be actors. The stage is a job, dear Nick, not a mindfuck.” On that first Broadway night I had stood in the wings where he was absent-mindedly fondling the breasts of his frizzy-haired admirer, and to me he had looked just like any other dirty old man; but then, as the royal fanfare sounded, he had twitched his grey gown, given me a wink, and walked into the stage’s glare. “Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester.” He had spoken Lear’s opening lines and I had felt a shiver run through the theatre’s great darkness, because the voice was there, and the power of it, and he was suddenly not a dirty old man at all, but a great, kind, foolish and painfully honest King.

  The performance was a triumph. Later that night, drinking champagne at the first night party, he gave me his usual disclaimers; how it was all an illusion, everything was an illusion, all life was an illusion, and how he, Sir Tom, was the master of illusion, but how his dear children were real because they alone could not be spawned from the imagination. “Sweet soul—” he took my arm in his, “come home to me. To England.” He was drunk.

  “Why?”

  “You could succeed me. You have it in you, you know.”

  “Of course I don’t.”

  “You are my bad conscience, Nick. That is why I need you.” He looked across the room to where a famous actress held scornful court. “I screwed her in a hot-air balloon. Over California. Her husband chased us in a jeep, and the oscillations of the basket told him what I was doing to his wife, and the poor man was jealous.” My father had begun to giggle. “Do you know what she told me, Nick? She said she could feel a shard of genius enter her soul with my seed! Oh, Nick! How generous I have been with my genius. Her silly husband shot himself, which was hardly surprising because she was a rotten lay.”

  He talked me into staying two more days, and thus three days passed before I discovered that Masquerade was missing. It was another seven days before she was found grinding her starboard side to shreds on a coral reef north of Straker’s Cay in the Far-Out Islands. Bonefish Straker reckoned that some Bahamian kids must have stolen the boat as a means of getting home, but we would never know who had wrecked her, only that they had removed a dinghy load of gear including her chronometer, sextant, VHF, barometer, spare sails, lines, fenders, and even the mattress off the starboard quarter-berth. They had stolen my good oilskins, but the thieves had never found my small stash of money which had been hidden in a redundant sea-cock, nor had they found the old Webley .455 revolver that I had hidden deep in Masquerade’s bilges. The gun itself had been a prop in a film version of Journey’s End in which my father had starred, and when the filming was over he had ‘forgotten’ to return the pistol which was still in good working order. I had fewer than a hundred rounds for the gun which I kept solely as a deterrent for those remote places where cruising yachtsmen are seen as plump victims, ripe for pillaging, and the Webley offered me good protection for, though the gun was over seventy years old, it was massively built and frighteningly powerful.

  Bonefish Straker had rescued Masquerade, propping her up in his own backyard and refusing to take any money from me as a salvage fee. Bonefish Straker was Thessalonians’ father, and also father to two dozen other children, most of them orphans who had been unofficially adopted by Bonefish and his wife, Sarah. Bonefish’s real name was Hector, but he had earned his nickname because of his uncanny ability to find the elusive fish. He was reckoned one of the islands’ best fishing guides, a man who could name his own price to the rich northerners who came to the blue waters to kill gamefish, but Bonefish believed that his family might stray from the path of righteousness if he spent too much time away from home so he restricted his guide work to just a few weeks of the year. The rest of the time he caught snapper or conch or lobster, and brooded over the souls of his ramshackle family; each of whom was named for a different book in the Bible. He had started at the back of the good book and was perversely working his way towards Genesis, which meant that his eldest daughter was called Revelation Straker; a young woman as pretty as her name, and as happy as all the other children who grew up under Bonefish’s skinny care. Bonefish, in brief, was a very good man who had never heard of Sir Thomas Breakspear, and I was a very lucky man for the fortunate accident of having met Bonefish.

  He watched in anxious silence as I ran a hand over the repairs he had begun on Masquerade. A Danish yawl had been wrecked on the far side of the island two years before and Bonefish had rescued some of her oak timbers which he had scarfed in to Masquerade’s broken hull. Only one rib had needed replacing and Bonefish apologised that he had fashioned that new one from a piece of his own Madeira wood.

  “It’s a wonderful job,” I said respectfully. It was, too.

  “I vould have done more, sir, but life is busy.”

  “Don’t call me ‘sir’. My name’s Nick.”

  “Werry busy, sir,” Bonefish went on as though I had not spoken. He called all white men ‘sir’. To him we were still the missionaries who had brought God to his soul and law to his land. I had tried to te
ll him that the world had changed drastically, but Bonefish did not want to believe in change. He was descended from slaves who had accompanied their master, one Rafe Straker, from Long Island in 1783. Rafe Straker, like many of the original white settlers of the Bahamas, had been an American loyalist who could not stomach life under George Washington. The white Straker family had long disappeared, their genes and blood melded into the vigorous bodies of their freed slaves, and only the Straker name lived on to be given new dignity by Bonefish and his family. “I don’t know from vere ve’ll fetch the copper.” Bonefish drew his hand over the abraded edges of the copper sheathing left on Masquerade’s hull.

  “I’ll have some sent from England, and some bronze nails. But we can get the tar and brown paper locally?” The copper was bedded on to the wood with tarred brown paper.

  Bonefish gave me a swift silent grin. “I think ve can manage tar and paper, sir.”

  Thessy, squatting nearby as he waited for his father’s permission to join the conversation, looked up as a twin-engined plane howled low overhead. The plane’s registration number was so faded as to be illegible, but I recognised the machine anyway. It belonged to the Maggot, whose real name was John Maggovertski. The Maggot was an expatriate American who ran a slew of businesses from his Grand Bahama home. All of the Maggot’s businesses were perpetually on the fringe of bankruptcy. One of his shakier concerns was an air-taxi service with which he scared the wits out of travellers too innocent to know better than to fly with him. The shriek of the plane’s engines drowned our voices, so Bonefish and I just watched as the plane sank towards Straker Cay’s small airstrip. Once the machine had disappeared behind the trees Bonefish shook his head sadly. To him all aircraft were harbingers of dreadful change, mere noisy messengers of a Godless world; which, I realised, was a pretty accurate description of the Maggot himself.