Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  “All of you,” Rickie encompassed the whole world with a wave of his hand, “fuck off. Really.” He had begun to weep, his thin shoulders heaving with enormous sobs.

  “I think he must have fallen,” I said.

  Chatterton shot me a look of withering scorn. “He never fell! Look at him! He’s high! He ain’t even bruised! He’s just burst a blood vessel, that’s all!” He twined a big hand in Rickie’s hair and thrust the boy’s head towards me. “Look!” Chatterton’s voice was harsh and ugly, full of hatred.

  I looked to see tears streaming down Rickie’s slack face to mingle with the blood that was dribbling on to the sole. He was grizzling like a small child, and staggering as the big seas rolled Wavebreaker’s long hull.

  “Look at the turkey’s nostrils!” Chatterton shouted, and I realised his anger was not directed at me, but at Rickie.

  I looked. Blood was filling and welling from Rickie’s nasal cavities, but at either side, on the very edges of his nostrils, there were traces of white powder.

  “Oh, God,” I said.

  “Fucking jerk!” Chatterton pulled Rickie away towards their cabin. “You miserable poxy jerk! You’ve got it, haven’t you? You smuggled your stuff on board!”

  “He’s got cocaine on board?” I asked naively.

  “He’s been fooling us!” Chatterton laid Rickie on the bed, but not roughly, and I began to see that much of the black man’s rage was aimed at himself for not being more alert to Rickie’s condition. He had assumed that Rickie was going through the turmoil of the abstinence phase, when in fact Rickie had just been oscillating up and down the euphoric scale between heaven and hell.

  Robin-Anne shrank back into the sofa, abandoning the television that hissed an untuned signal at us. She looked scared. She had been struggling against her abstinence phase all week, and even perhaps daring to hope that she was winning her battle, but Rickie had not tried at all. Somewhere on board Wavebreaker there was a supply of his cocaine. “Oh, damn,” I said tiredly, then went to stand in the door of Rickie’s cabin. I watched as Jackson Chatterton staunched the blood and began probing Rickie’s nose with a paintbrush. The big man worked with an extraordinary gentleness. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you put on dry clothes?” Chatterton asked me in return, but when I did not move, he held up the small bottle of oily liquid into which he had been dipping the paintbrush. “It’s an anaesthetic. You sniff enough cocaine, Nick, and the stuff eats away your nasal septum and your vocal cords till you don’t have a nose or a voice any more, do you?” This last question was snapped at the weeping Rickie. “Instead you’ll look like a leper, with a saddle-nose that’s nothing but a rotted cavity full of snot and stupidity!” He spat the words at Rickie, yet his hands were still very tender. “So where are you hiding your nose-candy, Rickie?”

  “Fuck off,” Rickie shrieked at Chatterton. I remembered Robin-Anne telling me how the threat of deprivation drove cocaine users into a bitter paranoia, and I was seeing that madness now in Rickie’s frenetic reaction to Chatterton’s questions. More than frenetic, for Rickie suddenly lashed out at the big man.

  That was a mistake. Chatterton rammed Rickie back on to the bed and thrust his face close to the screaming boy. “Oh, baby, you in trouble! You are in trouble! You nothin’ but white meat in a bad jail, Sweetpea. You ain’t got the brains of a tick! You go on like this, you be a big, dumb, blind motherfucker with your brains trickling out a hole in your dumb face!” Chatterton’s voice, honed to savagery by years of the army, utterly cowed Rickie who could only stare in shocked horror at the face so close above him. “You be such a dumb-ugly piece of shit, boy, that not even the blind prisoners want to rape you! You hear me?” Chatterton waited till Rickie, sobbing, nodded softly.

  Ellen, puzzled by the commotion, had appeared in the doorway beside me. She frowned, still not understanding. Rickie, oblivious to her presence, was racked with tears.

  I told Ellen the good news; that we had an overdosed Rickie and some hidden cocaine aboard.

  “I searched the turkey’s luggage!” Chatterton complained to us as he went back to working on Rickie’s nose, “and I did a good search, a real good search! I know he couldn’t have smuggled enough stuff aboard to do this to himself, I know!”

  “He probably didn’t.” Ellen stared dispassionately at Rickie, and then, in a very commonplace voice, suggested the obvious solution to our mystery. “But I suspect someone else did.”

  “Oh, God!” I spoke to myself. I was remembering a tall, handsome and laconic man, a southerner who wore a badge saying ‘Just Say No!’ I had asked Ellen to search the ship after Jesse Isambard Sweetman had trespassed on Wavebreaker, but that search had been to discover whether any item might have been stolen and it had not occurred to either of us that perhaps Sweetman had come to hide something aboard the schooner. But who else could it be?

  “Sweetman,” I said aloud.

  I felt like an idiot. We had gone to sea in such innocence, with such high hopes, and with such good intentions, and all the time Rickie had been laughing at us because his friend Jesse Sweetman had salted away the candy before Rickie even came on board.

  So now all we had to do was find it.

  We anchored that evening in the good shelter of Sea Rat Cay’s lagoon. Sea Rat Cay is a flat, nondescript and uninhabited patch of land where palms, casuarinas, slash pines and sea-grape grow. The lagoon has a sandy sea-bed that lets an anchor dig in hard, and is deep enough for a boat of Wavebreaker’s draught. The Cay itself is never more than ten feet above sea-level, but shaped like the letter C to give wonderful shelter from every wind except a rare westerly. By nightfall Thessy and I were content that our three anchors were well bedded against the rising wind that was tossing and clattering the palm fronds. Scraps of broken palm were whipping across the lagoon water that was rippling like a miniature angry sea, but at least the rain had stopped, though the dusk sky was foully black. I watched the wind tearing at the vegetation, then went below and saw that the pressure had stopped its steep fall.

  I copied the barometer reading into Wavebreaker’s log, then went back to the main stateroom where Jackson Chatterton was systematically taking apart every scrap of furniture. He was finding nothing. He had already combed the cabin he shared with Rickie and had discovered nothing except a few black and glossy pills that he said were Methedrine. “Better known as speed,” Chatterton told me. “The turkey probably had them in case he ran out of cocaine. And those are Dexamyl.” He showed me yet more pills he had since found in the main-cabin, but what he had not yet discovered was any cocaine. He searched diligently. Ellen watched him with folded arms. She seemed embarrassed by the proceedings, while Robin-Anne was dully oblivious to the whole drama. Rickie, his eyes still wet with tears, vociferously protested that the search was unnecessary. “I haven’t got any! None! Jesus! Why won’t you believe me?” He lit a cigarette, even though another was trickling smoke, barely lit, in the ashtray beside him.

  “Where did you meet Jesse Sweetman?” I asked him.

  “Get lost,” he said; then, in a reversion to an earlier insult, began to chant at me in a singsong voice. “Rum, sodomy and the lash. Rum, sodomy and the lash.”

  Thessy crouched at the foot of the companionway stairs, his eyes showing white and scared, so I went back to stand beside him and thus to give him encouragement.

  “You like a bit of black bum, do you?” Rickie jeered at me.

  “Oh, shut your silly face!” Ellen suddenly snapped at him.

  Rickie was astonished at Ellen’s hostility, and he turned to defend his point of view. “He’s a Brit!” He explained to Ellen but pointing at me. “Rum, sodomy and lash. Black bums and buggery!” He began to laugh, and I started walking towards him, my anger ready to explode in appalling force, but Ellen, just as she had averted my violence when Sweetman was aboard, now did so once again.

  “If I was hiding drugs aboard this boat,” she said in a very reasonable tone of voice, �
�I’d hide them in the one place where a person can be alone.”

  Chatterton frowned at her, then looked to me for amplification.

  “Try the heads,” I said, wondering why I had not thought of it earlier.

  “Oh, damn you all,” Rickie said despairingly, and thus confirming where we should look.

  We all seemed to meet in the doorway of the heads, all but Rickie who had gone the other way. He was still crying. He went to the radio desk where he clamped a set of earphones over his skull as though he could blot out the whole world and all its misery. And misery it would be, for we had found his cocaine.

  Chatterton found the first bag inserted in the toilet-roll holder, threaded inside the spring which tensioned the holder in its bracket. Another bag was taped deep behind the drain outflow under the small washbasin, while a third was concealed behind the panelling where it was attached to Wavebreaker’s steel hull. We could find no more of the drug, though Chatterton warned us of the addicts’ cunning. “I’ll keep looking,” he offered.

  I carried the three plastic bags into the stateroom. It was the first time I had ever seen cocaine at close quarters and it looked so very innocent. It was more crystalline than I had expected, with a glint like rock-salt, but it took an effort of the imagination to realise just what pure evil I held in my hands. Robin-Anne stared at the bags, then what little colour was in her face seemed to drain away as she recognised the powder. She licked her lips.

  I walked past her and tapped Rickie’s shoulder. He was hunched furtively over the microphone of the VHF, its headset tight over his ears. He flinched away from me, so I roughly pulled the headset away from his ears. “I want you.”

  “Go play with your black boy, Breakspear.”

  I hit him hard across the head; a smacking ringing bang of a blow that rocked him violently sideways. He opened his mouth to scream, but before he could utter a sound I had seized his shirt and pulled him harshly out of his chair and then, still one-handed, I spun him round and hurled him against the bulkhead. He crashed into the panelling, his black hair flopping with the whiplash of the impact. His nose had begun to pour blood again, and his eyes were wide with terror. I was holding the cocaine in my left hand, so I used my right to hit him in the belly. He uttered a moaning gasp and folded over. I grabbed his hair and forced him to stand upright against the bulkhead. “Make one more sound,” I hissed into his astonished and terrified face, “and I’ll beat you so hard that you’ll wish you had never been born.”

  “Nick?” Ellen said tentatively, then louder and with a note of warning in her voice, “Nick!”

  “Leave us alone,” I warned her. Ellen was clearly hating the violence, while Robin-Anne seemed not even to have noticed that it was happening. Jackson Chatterton, watching from the door of the heads, made a circle with his thumb and middle finger and offered it to me as a gesture of approval.

  Rickie’s breath was coming in huge lung-hurting gasps. Blood bubbled at his nostrils and trickled down to his chin. His blind eye was sheened by the lights, while his good eye was bloodshot and scared. He made not a sound, not even a sob, as I gripped his shirt and pulled his face towards me. “You’re coming on deck with me.”

  He nodded. I doubted that anyone had ever used physical violence against Rickie Crowninshield, and he was stunned by it. He was also as meek as a milksop now, and eager to please by hurrying after me up the companionway stairs. His nose dripped blood on to the non-skid treads, then on to the teak deck as I led him to the portside rail. Spits of rain were being carried on the wind that was hissing across the sheltered lagoon now ragged with scraps of vegetation torn from the trees and bushes on the darkening Sea Rat Cay. The wind was shrieking in Wavebreaker’s high rigging, trembling the masts and making the long hull tug against her anchor rodes.

  “Watch me,” I said.

  Rickie whimpered as, one by one, I tore the three bags open and tossed their contents to the wind. The keys of heaven’s gates were scattered to the sea and the angry wind and the malevolent sting of rain. God knows how much that cocaine was worth, but enough to make even Rickie Crowninshield cry as he watched the powder vanish into the dusk. When all three plastic bags were empty I washed them in a bucket of sea-water, tossed the fouled water overboard, then stuffed the clean bags into the gash bucket. “Is there any more on board?” I asked Rickie.

  “No,” he said quickly, eager to please me. “None. Really.”

  “If I find any more,” I told him, “I’ll hurt you properly.” At that moment I hated him. I hated his weakness, his tears, his money, his misused privilege, his deceit, and his utter uselessness. “So tell me about Sweetman,” I said. “He put that stuff aboard?”

  “Yes, he did. Yes.”

  “So who is he?”

  Rickie seemed puzzled by the question, as though he expected everyone to know who Sweetman was. “He’s our supplier,” he said at last.

  “Your supplier? You mean at home?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  “But you’re two thousand miles from home. What the hell is he doing here?”

  “I don’t know.” Rickie was crying harder now. “I just don’t know.”

  “Why the hell did you want to come on this boat if you weren’t going to make any effort to give up?” I asked angrily.

  “I do want to give up! I do, I do, I do!” He was grizzling pathetically; a tall crumpled broken boy.

  “Go away.” I could not hide my revulsion, but I don’t suppose he noticed. He just crept below.

  I stayed on deck as night fell, and I told myself that I stayed there to make sure that the anchors were holding, while the truth was that I simply did not want to go down and look at Rickie’s tearful, bloody face or at Robin-Anne’s soulless vacuity. So instead I sat in the cockpit, hunched against the splashes of rain, and watched the night fall black across the fretting lagoon. I sensed that the storm had either passed us to the south, or else that it had not worked itself into its full frenzy.

  “So just what did you expect of Rickie?” Ellen’s voice interrupted me. She had silently appeared in the companionway, holding a spare oilskin jacket that she now tossed at me.

  “I don’t know.” I pulled the jacket round my shoulders as a protection against the small rain that was falling, then shifted down the thwart to make room for her.

  Ellen sat and brought a bottle of my Irish whiskey out of her oilskin’s pocket. “You didn’t hide the bottles as well as Rickie hid his cocaine.” She poured three fingers into a glass. “So just what did you expect of him?” She handed me the glass.

  “A little effort,” I said. “This whole goddamn mess was his idea.”

  Ellen groaned. “Come on, Nick! This isn’t a Boy Scout cruise! He’s a very sick boy!”

  “Then he should be in a hospital!” I spoke very bitterly. “He shouldn’t be here. We’re not trained to deal with Rickie’s kind of crap.”

  Ellen poured herself some whiskey, then stared across the break in the lagoon towards the open sea. It was almost full dark, but we could just see how the wind was whipping the exposed waves into a churning mass of whitecaps. “I suppose,” Ellen said after a while, “that you’re planning to tell the senator that we can’t cope with Rickie?”

  “Something like that,” I confirmed her guess.

  She gave me a rueful look. “I could really use the three months’ money, Nick.”

  It had not been so very long since Ellen had savaged me for lumbering her with the company of rich junkies, yet now she was arguing for continuing with the cruise-cure. “I just can’t take three months of Rickie,” I said very fervently.

  “What you really hate in him,” Ellen said in a most prosaic voice, “is that he reminds you of yourself.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped, and meant obnoxious as well.

  “He’s just like you,” Ellen said flatly. “He’s rejected the world of his famous father. I’ve often thought that the real silver spoon in this world is not how much money you’re born to
, but how good an address book you inherit. I can’t really believe that all those second-generation actors and politicians and writers are born with natural talent, they’re just born knowing the right people, and familiarity means they’re not afraid of their parents’ trade, while the rest of us poor saps have to work our way up the hard way. But you rejected your father’s world, just as Rickie is rejecting his father’s world. I admit the rejections take different forms, but rejection is almost always graceless. I doubt your father enjoyed you being a marine, any more than the senator likes Rickie smoking crack.”

  “I am nothing like Rickie,” I said very clearly.

  “You’re a rebel,” Ellen said, “only your rebellion took the perverse form of seeking out respectability. Why did you become a marine?”

  I sought for a flippant answer, but none came, so I offered Ellen the truth. “Because my father marched to the American Embassy to protest against Vietnam, and he was in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the one thing he always professed to hate was militarism. So.” I shrugged, as though the rest was obvious.

  Ellen smiled. “Sweet, handsome Nick.” She said it very fondly and with what seemed to be some pity. “Could you have been an actor?”

  “No.”

  “But you probably wanted to be, and you probably felt horribly inadequate against your father’s excellence, and that’s just what Rickie is feeling now. Rickie has probably felt inadequate all his life, and right now, when he’s been given into our care, all he finds is this horribly competent Brit who scowls at him, and makes him feel useless, and shouts at him not to tread on the sailcloth or to wind a line the other way round a winch, and is it any wonder that he’s as miserable as a cat in a rainstorm?”

  I growled, reluctant to accept the criticism.

  Ellen smiled. “Be nice to him. Find something to praise!”

  “What am I supposed to do?” I bridled. “Tell him his hair looks nice?”