Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  Ellen laughed, then kissed me, and a tear fell from her cheek on to mine. “So what are you going to do?” she asked softly.

  “Nothing.” That sad truth was forced on me by reality, not by inclination. “I don’t even know where to find Sweetman, so I can’t do anything.”

  “Good,” she said, then rested her head beside mine. “Sleep now.”

  I woke tired, and after breakfast I worked on Masquerade while Ellen read her book in the shade of the cradled hull. Her ferry was not due till the evening, but at midday, just as he had promised, the Maggot’s aircraft swept low overhead. Ellen frowned as the dirty plane sank beyond the palm trees. “I hope that’s not who I think it is.”

  “The Maggot?” I managed to sound very innocent. “He’s not such a bad fellow.”

  “For a maggot,” Ellen said, “he’s a louse.”

  Twenty minutes later the Maggot walked up to Bonefish’s yard, looking as innocent as any man wearing an appallingly garish Hawaiian shirt could look. He pretended that he had simply dropped by the island to see me, and feigned surprise on discovering Ellen was with me, though he could not resist imbuing that surprise with a foully suggestive leer. “Having a good time?” he asked Ellen.

  She smiled glacially. “Why don’t I leave you two good old boys to grunt at each other in peace. Maybe you could indulge in a mutual grooming session?” She snapped the book shut, and stood ready to leave, but I managed to stop her by feigning a sudden and brilliant idea.

  “Are you flying back to Freeport?” I asked the Maggot, knowing full well that he was.

  “I sure am, Nick.” It seemed to me that he was over-acting, but Ellen did not notice.

  “It’s crazy for you to take the ferry,” I said to Ellen. “You’ll get home much quicker if you fly! And you’ll save money. You won’t charge her, will you, John?”

  “Not a red cent,” he said, like the good trooper he had agreed to be, for on the phone he had nobly undertaken not only to fly Ellen to Freeport, but then to drive her from the airport to her apartment, and from her apartment to the marina where Addendum was moored. Ellen, whether she wished it or not, was going to be guarded, though whether she would permit the Maggot to drive her round the island once she reached Freeport was debatable. Still, by making the phone call to the Maggot I had done what I could to look after her.

  She still hesitated before accepting the Maggot’s offer—though I was certain she would accept—for Ellen disliked the ferries, and flying was a far more convenient method of moving around the islands, but the long duration of her hesitation was an eloquent measure of her dislike for the Maggot. However, she finally nodded and even found it possible to thank him politely. “It’s really very kind of you, Mr Maggovertski.”

  “It’s all my pleasure, honey. You’ll be ready in an hour?”

  The ‘honey’ put a skim of ice on to Ellen’s voice. “I shall indeed be ready, Mr Maggovertski.”

  The Maggot scratched deep in his beard. “Call me Maggot, honey, everyone does.”

  “Not me, Mr Maggovertski, not me.” She stalked away.

  The Maggot watched her until she was out of earshot then shook his head wistfully. “You lucky bastard, Nick.” He took a half-cigarette from behind his ear and relit it. “I’ve never seen her looking so well! You can just see that she was shrivelling away for lack of a bedding, can’t you now? I know she might be a professor, but under the skin she’s just another bimbo.”

  There were times, I thought, when Ellen was entirely accurate in her judgement of the Maggot, but I was still grateful to the huge man, so I ignored his crudities and instead thanked him for donating his time, fuel and aeroplane.

  “Hell, Nick, it’s a pleasure. But do you really think you’re in danger?” He sounded very sceptical. When I had telephoned the Maggot I had described my fears of Sweetman’s reprisals, and now I forcefully reiterated my conviction that Ellen was in danger. The Maggot, though plainly reluctant to believe me, was polite enough not to scoff at my tale of possible revenge. He was also curious about the events at Sea Rat Cay, and made me tell him the whole story.

  “Have you ever seen Dream Baby?” I asked him when I had finished describing the fight on board Wavebreaker. I thought it entirely possible that the Maggot might have seen the oddly painted powerboat during one of his flights about the islands.

  He shook his head. “I’d remember a boat like that, Nick.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “You think I could forget a boat called Dream Baby? With a camouflage paint job?” He shook his head, then frowned. “Does it matter very much?”

  “I’d just like to know where they are, that’s all.”

  The Maggot gave my shoulder what he thought was a light punch, but which was more like being whacked by a piledriver. “Don’t worry about where they are, but just make sure they don’t know where you are.”

  An hour later the three of us walked to the Maggot’s plane that stood baking in the shimmering heat. The plane looked horrible, oil-streaked and filthy, and Ellen shuddered at the sight of it. “Is it safe?” she asked.

  “Hell, yes,” the Maggot said. “Mind you, you can never tell what’s safe, can you? I remember when the New Orleans Fruits, that’s the Saints to you, honey, had a fourth and one against us, and they decided to run it, and we reckoned it had to be safe because those toads couldn’t float a fairy fart down a sewer, but—”

  “Maggot,” I said, “shut up.”

  “I think it’s time we went.” He climbed on to the wing and opened the plane’s door. I helped Ellen up. She was not going to kiss me in front of the Maggot, but she gave me a smile he could not see and, once she was inside the plane, she secretly blew me a kiss.

  “I’ll write to you from Florida!” she called.

  “Soon! Please!” I called back.

  The engines hammered into life, driving scraps of grass and chips of coral back from the propeller’s wash. I stepped back as the plane lurched forward, then watched as it hurtled down the runway and lifted smoothly and safely into the air. The Beechcraft climbed up over Thessy’s grave and I watched my love go, watched till the plane was just a scrap of light in the northern sky, and I went on watching till the faraway plane winked out into distant invisibility. I turned away and felt very much alone, and very much in love.

  As it turned out I did have reason to go to Freeport after all, and had I known that good reason I would have had no problem in persuading Ellen to let me accompany her.

  Because, once I had watched her fly away, I went to the village post office, which operated in what had once been a chicken shed, to discover that a letter had come to me from McIllvanney’s boatyard. McIllvanney’s secretary, Stella, apologised that she had not sent the money Cutwater Charters owed me for the proctologist’s cruise, but sadly Mr McIllvanney would not authorise the release of any funds until I turned up at the yard to sign the necessary insurance and salvage forms for Wavebreaker.

  I swore in frustration. I should have known that McIllvanney would muck around with the money he owed me! And if I had just visited the post office before taking Ellen to the plane I could have flown with her to Freeport. Now I would have to waste a day and two nights making the journey by ferry.

  Poverty dictated that I make the journey so, two days later, I clambered down the pier’s dangerous iron ladder and was carried out to the waiting ferry. I changed boats in Nassau, reaching Freeport early on the Thursday morning. I caught a bus to McIllvanney’s boatyard and found the man himself standing on a floating pontoon next to his sleek forty-two-foot motor yacht called Junkanoo. Junkanoo was one of McIllvanney’s own charter boats, but he was plainly about to use her himself for her motor was burbling away and he had been busy untying her stern warp as I arrived. It was also plain that he had company aboard for there was a pile of luggage on Junkanoo’s stern deck and I suspected that the pink garment bag and lavender suitcase were not McIllvanney’s choice of travel gear. Leaning on the suitcase was a tennis racke
t in a lavender slip case that was embroidered with a big initial ‘D’. McIllvanney, it was apparent, had a girl aboard his boat, which perhaps explained the lack of warmth in his welcome. “So what the fock do you want, Breakspear?”

  “You wanted me to sign some papers,” I courteously explained my presence. “So here I am.”

  “So come back next week, your Holiness.”

  “Just forget it,” I walked away from him. “I’m only in town today, and that’s it. So please yourself. I’ll send you a writ for the money you owe me.”

  “Wait, you bastard!”

  I waited. He made fast Junkanoo’s stern warp, then jumped aboard to kill her engine. Almost immediately the door from the main-cabin opened and the tall, fair-haired girl I had met in McIllvanney’s Lucaya apartment walked on to the stern deck. She was still wearing high heels and very little else. She recognised me and gave me a wholesome and welcoming smile. “Nick! It’s just so very good to see you again. How are you doing?” She asked the question with that earnest rising inflection by which Americans seem to imply a genuine curiosity for what is otherwise an entirely formal greeting.

  “Very well, thank you, and yourself?” I matched her politeness, but I was also trying to remember the girl’s name. Her body, clad in its barely existent bikini, was entirely unforgettable, but her name had disappeared into the space between the stars.

  “I’m doing good, thank you,” the girl said with heartfelt enthusiasm, “real good!”

  I still could not place her name, and my only clue was the big ‘D’ embroidered in shiny pink thread on the tennis racket’s lavender case. Debbie? Dolly? Denise? Donna, of course! “It’s very nice to meet you again, Donna,” I said.

  “You’re just going to have to forgive me for one little moment, Nick,” she said as though our meeting was the most important thing in her world, then she turned a worried face on McIllvanney. “I just thought you ought to know, Matt, that the air conditioning went off.”

  “Of course it went off, you silly cow, because I turned the focking engine off, and you can’t have the air conditioner on unless you’re generating some focking electricity because it drains too much current from the focking battery.”

  “Oh! How silly of me! I should have known!” She gave me another gladsome smile, all teeth and sparkle. “Are you coming aboard, Nick? We’ve got some champagne in the cooler.”

  “No, he’s focking well not coming on board, he’s coming with me.” McIllvanney jumped on to the pontoon. “Just wait for me, woman.”

  “It’s been so good talking with you again, Nick,” Donna called as we walked away.

  “Are you poaching the firm’s inventory?” I asked McIllvanney when we were safely out of Donna’s earshot.

  “I’m just doing a delivery job, all right!” He turned, clearly upset by my jocular accusation. He rammed his fingers towards my eyes as though trying to blind me, but instead forcing me to take a backwards step along the pontoon. “I’m just delivering the bint to a client!”

  “OK! Forget I spoke!” I said placatingly.

  “I’m just delivering her to a client, and when he’s used the stupid cow, I fetch her back. Either me or Bellybutton fetches her back, but there’s no funny business, you understand?” He walked on, simmering with fury. Starkisser rocked gently beside the pontoon and I noted how skilfully Bellybutton had painted the silver star on her long glittering bow. He had added a lipstick-red cupid’s mouth at the very centre of the shooting star. Bellybutton himself had sidled away from my unexpected arrival, scuttling away up the office stairs as though he was desperate to avoid me.

  McIllvanney took the same stairs two at a time, while I hobbled behind him. Bellybutton, as I entered the office, was finishing a telephone call. He gave me his usual sly and maniacal grin, then edged about the room towards the door. Stella had already found the necessary papers in the filing cabinet and now spread them on McIllvanney’s desk. “Sign wherever there’s a pencil cross,” McIllvanney curtly ordered me. Bellybutton, the door safely reached, gave one last mocking smile and was gone.

  I began reading the top form.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” McIllvanney complained, “but are you going to read every word before you sign them?”

  “Yes.”

  He growled, but there was nothing he could do. Stella, with a friendly but nervous smile to me, had slipped out of the office to buy some milk, leaving me alone with McIllvanney who stared angrily out of the window while I methodically read through the small print and sub-clauses and obfuscations of the various forms. Yet, despite having been written by language-murdering lawyers, the forms were straightforward enough; mere formalities to do with insurance and with Wavebreaker’s condition on the morning she sank. I began signing the forms, first authenticating my own qualifications to prove that the boat had been under competent command, though that, I thought, was a dubious assertion, for in fact Wavebreaker had been pirated before she sank. “I hear you’re salvaging her?” I said to McIllvanney.

  “Aye.” He was adding his own signature to some of the forms and, for a moment, he seemed reluctant to say any more, then he decided that a modicum of politeness might hasten the scribbling of my signatures, and so he grudgingly elaborated. “They say they’ll have her up by tomorrow night.”

  “I’d be grateful if you could find Thessy’s Bible for me, and ask Stella to send it on to his father?”

  I thought he would refuse the favour, but then he nodded curtly before sweeping the signed papers into an envelope. Donna was doing aerobic exercises on Junkanoo’s rear deck, a sight to provoke cardiac arrest. “Do you know what the hell has happened to Ellen?” McIllvanney asked me. He had his back to the window as he wrote an address on the envelope.

  So far as I knew Ellen was on board Addendum, and hopefully in the Florida Keys by now, but I had no intention of letting McIllvanney know anything about her travels. “Has Ellen been away?” I asked ingenuously instead.

  McIllvanney responded to my mock-innocent question with a filthy look. “Of course she’s been away. She went to the funeral, and she hasn’t been seen since. I know that, because I went to her flat on Sunday, but she wasn’t there.”

  “Why don’t you just leave her alone?” I asked with rising anger. “She’s not for hire. She’s not going to become one of your whores, so just forget her!”

  “It’s none of your focking business why I want to talk to the bint, and—”

  The clashing noise of the pistol’s cocking action stopped his voice cold. He looked up, and for once I actually saw McIllvanney go pale. He was staring into the cavernous black muzzle of my .455 Webley pistol. It is a very frightening pistol. For a start it fires an enormous bullet, so the barrel gapes alarmingly, and the gun is built on a gigantic scale. The weapon is almost a foot long. As it happened the gun which was threatening McIllvanney was not loaded, but he did not know that, and the sweat was prickling at his forehead. “Ellen is not for hire,” I said again, but this time very slowly and very distinctly.

  “Jesus goddamn wept.” McIllvanney, still pale, stared in horror at the gun’s gaping muzzle. “Christ in his heaven, but why the hell are you carrying that, you fool?”

  “Because there are men out there who might want to take revenge for the deaths of the guys I killed. It’s like a family feud, but I’ll be damned before I make it easy for them to finish me off.” The gun had made a hard uncomfortable lump at the small of my back, and I had been glad of the chance to take it out and thus remove the pressure from my spine.

  Now the unloaded gun was pointing directly at the bridge of McIllvanney’s nose. He was shaking, and I was using both hands to train the gun, just as if it really was primed to go pop and I was preparing for the mule-like kick of the recoil. “Ellen is not for hire,” I said a third time. “Do you understand me?”

  “Bloody hell fire!” McIllvanney stared wide-eyed at me, and his voice took on the aggrieved tone of wounded innocence. “I only wanted to do the girl a favour
! Ned Carraway needs a cook on board Hobgoblin because his girl has caught the pox or something, and Ned phoned me to ask if Ellen could step in for a few days!” Ned Carraway was the owner and skipper of a beautiful locally built schooner, Hobgoblin, which was a few feet shorter than Wavebreaker and several light years prettier. Hobgoblin was built of wood and was bereft of almost every modern comfort except the sheer loveliness of sailing blue seas in a proper wooden boat, though the price that Ned and his American wife paid was to spend most of their spare time painting the beast or coaxing its ill-tempered and dangerous petrol engine into brief and reluctant life.

  So Ned had needed a replacement cook? I stared at McIllvanney who, sensing my discomfort, pushed the telephone towards me. “If you don’t believe me, phone him!”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling stupid and lowering the gun.

  “You’re focking mad!” McIllvanney said fervently. I had scared the daylights out of him, which was something of an achievement, even though I now felt like an idiot.

  “Ellen’s got a job looking after a friend’s boat,” I said helpfully, “so I don’t know if she can work for Ned, but if she’s in touch I’ll pass on the message.”

  “Ned’s probably found someone else by now. He was pretty desperate, so he was.” McIllvanney was still shaking with the fear that had made him loquacious. It really is very unpleasant indeed to stare into a gun’s muzzle.

  I held the gun loosely in my left hand. “It wasn’t loaded,” I told McIllvanney, as though that might make him feel better.

  “I don’t give a toss! You should be locked up! Who the hell do you think is coming after you?”

  “Sweetman. And the other fellow, Miguel. The guys who were on Dream Baby. Which reminds me. Can you remember where you saw Dream Baby? Because if I can find her, then I’ll find the guys who were responsible for Thessy’s death.”