Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  I climbed the two flights of stairs and walked down the rickety balcony which led to Ellen’s small end room. A child was screaming in one of the flats, while two dogs were snarling as they fought in the wasteland beyond the apartment house. The chorus of televisions was tuned to an American game show in which competing families were leaping up and down and screaming with apparent incontinence because they had won a trip to Disneyworld. Then, above all those discordant sounds, I heard Ellen’s voice rise in sudden indignation. “No! No! No!”

  I stopped outside her open window. Her room was lit by a single naked bulb which hung from the ceiling and shone harshly on Ellen who was standing in the doorway of her tiny bathroom. She was facing the window, but did not see me beyond its screen because she was staring at Matthew McIllvanney who seemed to fill the whole room with his malevolence. “I’m just asking you to think about it,” I heard him say in a calm voice.

  “I’ve thought”—I could see Ellen was trying hard to recover her composure—”and the answer is no.”

  “Six hundred.” McIllvanney’s persistence in the face of any refusal was monotonous and relentless. “And I won’t even take my usual commission on that, so you’ll get to keep it all, and remember the agreed price is just a guaranteed minimum and there’s always a tip. Isn’t there always a tip, Bellybutton?”

  “This one’s a big tipper, Miss Ellen.” Bellybutton laughed suggestively. He was standing just inside the front door and was thus hidden from me.

  “Shut up, you black bastard,” McIllvanney snapped, then paused to light a cigarette. A small battery-powered fan whirled the smoke away and generally tried to stir up the humid air which played such havoc with Ellen’s precious books in their orange-crate shelves. The Ulsterman blew smoke towards her. “Breakspear won’t do the senator’s cruise,” he said, “so you’ll lose that money, but if you work one night a week for me then you’ll earn just as much anyway. And you’re wanting to save money, isn’t that right? So you can keep yourself while you write your book? So I’m offering you a good wage, girl! And this client’s a good-looking fellow, isn’t that right, Bellybutton? And he’s already seen you, he likes you, and he’s willing to pay you a professional’s fee even though he knows you’re an amateur, and—”

  “No!” Ellen shouted again.

  “He might go to seven-fifty,” McIllvanney said dubiously, as though the price was the only possible objection Ellen might have to whoring herself.

  That was as far as the conversation went, for I decided to end it by pushing open the screen door. All three stared in astonishment as I tossed my kit bag on to the floor. “I didn’t have a key to the boatyard,” I introduced myself, “so I thought I’d borrow Ellen’s. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

  “You are not, Nick, no!” Ellen almost flew across the small room and, to my astonishment and probably to everyone else’s, greeted me with a warm kiss.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” McIllvanney asked sourly, while Bellybutton just grinned maliciously at me.

  “You sent the senator to see me? So he came, he saw, and he conquered me, which means I’ve agreed to do his charter. The Maggot flew me back, because if we want to leave on Sunday morning then we’ve got a heap of work to do first. God, I’m hungry.”

  Ellen still clung to my arm. “We’ll go out and eat,” she said quickly, “I’ll get ready,” and she twisted away to the bathroom, which also served as her wardrobe, and slammed the door to leave me alone with McIllvanney and Bellybutton.

  “If the suggestion I heard just now,” I said to McIllvanney, “was what I thought it was, then don’t make it again. Not to Ellen.”

  McIllvanney found my defiance wonderfully amusing. “Who’s to stop me.”

  “Just me.”

  He came and stood very close to me, trying to intimidate me as Billingsley had done. He blew cigarette smoke to sting my eyes. “Just because you were a poxy marine, your Holiness, doesn’t make you tough.”

  “Piss off.”

  That also amused him. “Is there something going on between you and Ellen, now? Got your boots under her table, have you?”

  “No,” I said firmly, “so get out.”

  “Did you know she’s a Catholic?” he asked me as though it really mattered, and he gestured with his cigarette at a crucifix that hung over the narrow bed, which I knew was there solely for sentimental purposes because it had belonged to Ellen’s dead father, but to McIllvanney it was a challenge. “If I’d realised she was a taig I’d never have hired her.” He used the Ulster slang, knowing I would have learned it during my tours of duty on attachment in Belfast. “Is it the papist meat that gets you going, Breakspear, is that it?” McIllvanney laughed, then stepped quickly back as he sensed I might bring my knee up into his balls. Then, as if counter-attacking, he jabbed the cigarette towards my face. “I’ll do business how I like, with whom I like, and when I like, and I don’t need your focking permission to do it, Nicholas Breakspear. Nor does the girl have to agree to anything I ask. I’m not forcing her, I’m merely making a business proposition. Do you understand me?”

  “Get out of here,” I said.

  McIllvanney continued to stare into my eyes, but he spoke to Bellybutton who was cackling behind me. “He should have put on a pair of tights and joined his daddy in front of the fairy-lights.” The Ulsterman’s scorn was like a blowtorch, then he turned away, clicked his fingers at Bellybutton, and the two of them were gone.

  Ellen and I did not go out to eat. She was too shocked by McIllvanney’s offer and, at the same time, she was paradoxically surprised at herself for being so shocked. “I really thought I could handle something like that! I really did! I knew I wasn’t in danger, because they weren’t going to rape me, but it really, really upset me!”

  “It upset me,” I said.

  “Shit!” Ellen was too angry with herself to be assuaged by or even interested in my sympathy. She paced up and down the tiny room while I sat on her bed, and she explained to me that McIllvanney had been approached by a client who had apparently seen Ellen and authorised McIllvanney to offer her the money. McIllvanney had made the offer very dispassionately, but that businesslike approach only seemed to add to Ellen’s fury. “What kind of a jerk pays that money?” she asked me.

  “A rich and randy jerk?” I suggested, and decided not to tell her that for most of McIllvanney’s girls six or seven hundred dollars a night was small change.

  “And get this.” She whirled on me. “This jerk has got something about redheads! But before he’d pay any money he had to be satisfied that I was red-haired all over! I mean, Jesus! How nauseating can you get?”

  “Who was he?”

  “McIllvanney wouldn’t say.” She shuddered, then plucked some typed sheets of paper from the small table under the window and stuffed them into a folder. The floor was crowded with cardboard boxes that were filled with leaflets for the Literacy Project that Ellen helped in her spare time. I idly picked up one of the leaflets which had two pictures on its cover; the first illustration showed a happy black family, all neatly dressed and reading books around a table that was filled with platefuls of food and with jugs labelled ‘milk’. The second picture, clearly designed to demonstrate the rewards of illiteracy, showed a scabby-looking native dressed in a threadbare loincloth who crouched in the mud outside a grass hut and who seemed to be sharing his lunch bowl with a baboon. Ellen caught my eye, looked down at the ridiculous leaflet, and suddenly we both began to laugh helplessly. “I know they’re absurd.” She had tears in her eyes as she tried to recover from the laughter. “They were printed for Africa sometime in the 1950s and the United Nations sent them to our project, God knows why. There are too many to throw away all at once, so I take a handful out every day and hide them in someone’s garbage can. They make rotten toilet paper, and I don’t know what else to do with them, and, oh Nick”—she suddenly sat heavily beside me on the bed—”you’re a good man and sometimes I think how nice it would be to have
a good man in my life again.”

  “I’m available.”

  She kissed me on the nose, but then, as though rejecting her idea of adopting a good man, stood up briskly. “You reek of cheap whisky. I suppose you’ve been with that awful Maggovertski?”

  “He sends his most fervent and undying love.”

  She mocked that assertion with a grimace. “If you want a sandwich there’s some margarine and foul cheese in the cupboard and some not very fresh bread in the bin.”

  “You’re sure you don’t want to go out to eat?”

  She shook her head. “I want to write up my notes.”

  “About what happened tonight?” I sounded surprised.

  “Sure, why not? But I need a shower first.” She went into the bathroom and I made my own supper by slicing some of the foul cheese and shoving it between two slices of greased plastic bread. Then I ate the sandwich as I walked back to Wavebreaker. Alone.

  Ellen was perversely unhappy about the Crowninshield charter. She had nagged me to accept it, but now she behaved as though I had done her a disservice by doing so. “The senator obviously just wants us to drown his children so they can’t embarrass him when the time comes to run for President,” she told me next morning.

  “I accused him of that,” I said, proud of having anticipated Ellen’s diagnosis, “and he told me he’d rather lose the election than lose his children.”

  Ellen put down her cup of coffee and stared at me as though I had gone completely mad. “He’s a politician, Nick,” she said at last, and in a voice she might have used to reason with a three-year-old, “and politicians would sell their mothers, let alone their kids, to win an election. He’s just using us!”

  I shrugged, but said nothing. Ellen had bought some melon and coffee on her way to the boatyard and we were eating a late breakfast in Wavebreaker’s cockpit. Bellybutton was pressure-hosing a hull across the yard, while McIllvanney was evidently taking another day off. I hoped that he was avoiding us because he felt ashamed of his offer to Ellen, but I doubted whether Matthew McIllvanney had ever felt ashamed of anything.

  “God!” Ellen said in a tone which implied that I had entirely misunderstood the senator’s motives, which she would now have to explain to me by the application of sound feminist arguments. Sound feminist argument usually means making the nearest male look like an idiot, which in Ellen’s case was not a very demanding task. “We are talking about a man’s image, Nicholas. If he runs for President next year then he’s got to be clean, and that means that the issue of his drug-sodden kids will have to be defused. And above all, he’s got to keep Rickie out of prison, and that’s clearly our job. We have to clean the boy up so the judge will merely tap his wrist.”

  “Is that so bad?” I demanded.

  “I just don’t like being used by rich politicians,” Ellen said angrily, though I silently noted she had no objections to taking their money.

  “At least we’ll be taking two kids off drugs,” I said warmly, “and that’s something to be proud of.”

  “Jesus wept,” she said in disgust. “I do hate goddamn junkies, and I especially hate rich goddamn junkies. They don’t even have the excuse of poverty for their addiction.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I don’t know why I apologised because it was not my fault that the Crowninshield twins were cocaine freaks, nor that their father wanted to charter Wavebreaker, but I sympathised with Ellen’s distaste for cocaine and was foolish enough to say as much.

  “Don’t be so downright stupid, Nick,” Ellen witheringly rejected my sympathy. “Of course I don’t disapprove of cocaine. You forget that I was an academic.”

  I tried to work out an obvious connection between scholarship and cocaine and could not, but knew better than to ask. “But you can’t possibly approve of drugs,” I said instead.

  “I neither approve nor disapprove. Cocaine is merely a recreational drug and, taken to excess, like alcohol or nicotine, it is undoubtedly dangerous, but judiciously used it can be a source of harmless pleasure, and even of intellectual stimulation. Eat your melon, it’s good for you.”

  “I don’t believe this.” I stared in genuine horror at her. I was trying to imagine a girl in a Pittsburgh peep-show, put there by cocaine. “Did you feed that kind of intellectual garbage to your students?” I asked Ellen.

  She stared defiantly across the cockpit table at me. “Nicholas Breakspear,” she said at last, “there are times when you can be excessively tedious. You are a turkey—” she cast about for an even worse insult, “a puritan!”

  “Rickie Crowninshield,” I said stiffly, “has already lost the sight of one eye because of cocaine, and if he doesn’t stop using the drug then he will almost certainly go to jail or even kill himself with an overdose.”

  “So Rickie Crowninshield is an irresponsible idiot,” Ellen said coldly, “but you can’t run society on the assumption that everyone is a retard, and you have to accept that there will be casualties in a free society. If you’re so intent on keeping the young alive then why don’t you ban rock climbing? Or surfing? Or motorcycles? Or alcohol? Or have you forgotten that America did once try to ban alcohol, and look what happened!” Her voice was scathing. “The vaunted land of the free became the last best hope of organised crime, and it has never recovered. The clear and obvious course for America is to legalise cocaine so the trade can be controlled, but there is no way that we shall ever persuade the airheads in Congress of that most obvious piece of wisdom. If you don’t want the melon, I do.”

  “But you do believe the trade should be controlled?” I was seeking a scrap of common ground on which we could mutually back away from the argument.

  “I naturally believe that the financial profits of the drug-suppliers are offensive,” Ellen said, “which is why I’ve only used cocaine on a handful of occasions. I can’t say I liked it much.” She poured out the last of the coffee, then looked up into my horrified eyes. “Oh, come on, Nick! Don’t be so innocent! And stop worrying, I won’t reveal my views on the drug to the twins. The poor dim little creatures doubtless need all the help they can get, and I promise not to confuse them with anything so threatening as an idea.”

  “Robin-Anne’s not dim,” I said. “She passed her degree!”

  “My dear Nicholas, a mentally retarded slug could get a degree in Liberal Arts! For God’s sake, the silly little twinkie might as well have majored in handwriting or media studies!” Ellen gave me a dismissive glance. “Still, I suppose to the uneducated even a degree in Liberal Arts is impressive.”

  Cocaine thus became another of the subjects which Ellen and I decorously avoided, like the existence of God, the wisdom of my having been a marine, feminism and the cartoons in the New Yorker. Ellen was adamantly opposed to the first two and a noisy supporter of the last two, while my position was more or less the opposite. God alone knew why we wanted to sail to New Zealand together, except that in a strange way we were friends.

  But for the moment we were friends who had to prepare Wavebreaker for a possible Atlantic crossing. Thessy and I would have a chance to strengthen the rigging during our two-week trial period with the twins, but some jobs simply could not be done at sea. Thus I stripped out all Wavebreaker’s unnecessary furniture and equipment, and I installed extra fresh-water tanks and fuel bunkers. I made storm shields for the big cabin windows and skylights. They were a delight for the charterers in the Bahamian lagoons, but in an Atlantic storm such wide windows could be our death warrants for if Wavebreaker fell off a big wave the glass could be driven out of the windows and the boat be filling with water in seconds, and so I cut and shaped sheet steel shutters that could be bolted over the boat’s glass at the first sign of bad weather. The shutters’ anchor points had to be welded to the hull and, especially at the stern where the windows wrapped round Wavebreaker’s counter, the bolts looked intrusive and ugly, but better that than to be a good-looking boat fifty fathoms down and still sinking.

  Ellen and I worked hard that week and, on
the Saturday, as though to commiserate with ourselves on this being our last day alone together, we stopped work at midday and took a bus to Mama Sipcott’s Cafe on the beach where we ate lobster and drank too much of Mama’s sticky-sweet white wine. Ellen proposed a toast to the prospect of her first Atlantic crossing under sail.

  I drank to the toast, though I was not at all sure that we would actually make the crossing in Wavebreaker. The best season for an eastwards voyage was already past, though it was just possible that we might run far north and cross in the high latitudes where, even in summer, we could expect fog, rain and cold. I knew Ellen hated the cold, and I tried to warn her of the conditions we might expect in those latitudes. I told her of the big green seas, all crinkled and slow, heaving up astern as the icy wind scoured their tops into freezing spume.

  Ellen smiled at my enthusiastic description. “My poetic and romantic Nick.” She cocked her head on one side and gave me a long scrutiny, almost as though she had never seen me before. “You did inherit a lot from your father.”

  “You’ll find that northern seas are oddly more threatening”—I ignored her insult—”because sunlight on water always makes it seem less formidable. But if we travel the northern route we probably won’t see the sun for weeks, and the daylight is grey and the sea is green and grey, while at night you just see the cold white wavetops hissing out of blackness.” It seemed curious to be describing such ice-cold seas while sitting in a palm-thatched Bahamian beach cafe that looked on to a shoreline where pelicans perched under the diamond-hard sun. “You’ll need long johns,” I went on gleefully, “and thermal underwear and layers of greasy-wool sweaters and good oilies and a woolly hat and a towelling scarf to stop the seas slopping down your neck and good sea-boots and as many pairs of gloves as you can find, because gloves never stay dry and—”