Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  Ellen’s neighbour, a man who worked a night shift as a cashier at one of the island’s casinos, had been disturbed by the noise I had made breaking down Ellen’s door, and now came to see just what or who had caused that commotion. He arrived as I was picking up the gun from Ellen’s straw matting and, seeing the weapon, he backed sharply away and made noises as though he was trying to restrain a horse. “Whoa! Whoa! It’s OK, I ain’t curious! Not me! You just break in, don’t you care about me, man! I ain’t curious, oh no!”

  “It’s OK!” I ran on to the balcony that connected the small apartments and tried to placate him. “I’m just looking for Ellen. I’m her English friend, Nick.”

  I was not sure he believed me. Certainly the glimpse of the evil-looking gun had unnerved him. He raised his hands to ward me off. “I ain’t seen Ellen for days, man! Not for days! It ain’t my business. That’s what I told the other gentlemen.”

  “What other gentlemen?” I had pursued the casino cashier almost into his apartment.

  “Just people! They were here last week.”

  “White people? Hispanic? Blacks?”

  “All sorts, man, all sorts. I don’t know who they are, and I can’t tell you more!” The cashier had backed inside his tiny apartment where a television flickered. I caught a glimpse of a girl’s dark and naked legs curled on a sheet printed with a tiger-skin pattern, then the cashier slammed the door in my face. “You go away!” He shouted through the door as he slammed its bolts shut. “Go away!” I heard the girl asking questions, but the cashier was more concerned with getting rid of me. “Go away!” he shouted again, his voice shrill with fear, “just go away!”

  I went away. I suspected that the visitors the cashier had described were McIllvanney and Bellybutton. McIllvanney, after all, had already told me that he had visited Ellen’s flat.

  I went into the street and used some of the money I had cashed that morning to buy a hasp, a padlock, eight screws and a screwdriver, then I went back to Ellen’s apartment and, after leaving her a note apologising for the mess I had caused and begging her to telephone the Maggot if she came home, I made good the damage I had caused. I scribbled another note for the cashier next door, apologising for scaring him, and asking him to leave a message at John Maggovertski’s number if he heard any news of Ellen. I wrote down the Maggot’s phone number and address, and added that I hoped to be at that address later that day. I hid the padlock’s key in the place where Ellen normally hid her own spare key. The casino cashier watched me through a crack in his curtains, but pretended not to be home when I knocked on his window, so I slid the message under his door and left him to the girl on his bed and the harridans on his television.

  I needed a telephone. The public phone just outside Ellen’s apartment block had been used as a public urinal, and its handset torn away, so I walked down to the waterfront, then along to McIllvanney’s yard.

  “I’m supposed to call the police and have you thrown out,” Stella greeted me cheerfully, “but do you want your mail and a cup of tea first?”

  “Thanks.” I went to the window and stared down into the yard. Junkanoo’s pontoon was empty, evidence that McIllvan-ney had taken Donna to her client. There was no sign of Bellybutton. Starkisser rocked gently at her berth. The marina looked strangely empty without Wavebreaker’s towering presence. “Can I use the phone?” I asked Stella. “It’s long distance.”

  “Call the moon for all I care, Nick. I don’t pay the bills.” I called Ellen’s mother in Providence, Rhode Island. I did not want to alarm her so I merely described myself as an old colleague who happened to be in America and wanted to speak with Ellen. Her mother told me that Ellen was in the Bahamas. I thanked her. Another escape route of hope was thus blocked.

  I dialled the Maggot, but again I only reached his irritating message. “John?” I said to the damned machine, “this is Nick, and I’ve lost Ellen, and I need to talk to you. If you come home, then for God’s sake don’t leave till we’ve spoken. I’ll keep trying to reach you.” I put the telephone down. “Shit.”

  Stella had heard the message I had dictated to the Maggot’s machine. “You lost Ellen?”

  I nodded. “She’s not at her apartment, she hasn’t gone back to her mother, she’s not on her friends’ boat, and she’s not working for the Literacy Project.” I shrugged. “So I don’t know where she is.”

  Stella heard the despair in my voice and tried to cheer me up by saying that Ellen was a survivor and a tough girl. I smiled my thanks for her efforts, and tried to believe her. Then I sat in McIllvanney’s chair to read my small pile of mail. Most of it had been forwarded from England. A journalist from London had written to say he was writing my father’s biography and he would be most grateful if I could spare him some time to share my memories. One of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Taxes wrote to remind me that I had not filed an Income Tax return in three years, and that consequently Her Majesty would appreciate hearing from me pronto. A bank wanted to send me a credit card. “Stuff ‘em.” I screwed the mail into a ball and tossed it at the garbage can.

  Stella gave me a mug of coffee. “I know the man tried to see Ellen on Sunday.” ‘The man’ was McIllvanney.

  “He told me,” I said, then, thinking of the cashier’s assertion that there had been more than one man trying to see Ellen, I asked whether Bellybutton had accompanied McIllvanney. If McIllvanney had gone to Ellen’s apartment alone, then the men the cashier had seen must have been Sweetman’s friends.

  Stella, who did not like Bellybutton, shrugged. “I don’t know.” She frowned suddenly, then pointed at me with a teaspoon. “But when you came to the yard to sign those papers this morning, Bellybutton made a phone call. It was about you. I heard him say your name.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “I couldn’t hear.” She suddenly gave me a guileless smile. “But you can always ask him.”

  “Bellybutton’s still here?”

  “He’s playing poker in the sail loft.” Before I could stop her Stella had opened the office door and was shouting down into the yard. “Hey, Bellybutton! I want you! Get your lazy bones up here!”

  I would have preferred to approach Bellybutton in my own way, but Stella had precipitated the moment, so I went past her on to the outside staircase just as Bellybutton emerged scowling from the sail loft. “What is it, woman?” he was shouting, then he saw me. “You!” He pointed a threatening finger at me. “You’re not supposed to be here! You get the hell out of here!”

  “You answer Nick’s questions, Bellybutton, you hear me?” Stella demanded stridently.

  “You shut your black mouth, woman!”

  “Listen—” I tried to intervene.

  “You get your white ass out of here!” Bellybutton screamed at me. “You got ten seconds! And I’m counting!”

  “I only wanted to ask you...”

  “Bellybutton!” Stella screeched at him. “You remember your good manners!”

  “Fuck my good manners.” He looked back to me. “Five seconds! You’re not asking me nothing! You’re getting out of here! That’s what Mr Mac says you’re to do, and that’s what you’re going to do! Three seconds, two, one!” Suddenly, and with alarming speed, he drew a knife from his belt. It was a heavy-bladed filleting knife that he pointed towards me as he advanced to the bottom of the stairs. “You want to give me aggravation? OK, I don’t mind aggravation. My Mama weaned me on to aggravation!” His three poker-playing friends, two of them still holding their playing cards, had come to the sail loft’s door. Bellybutton, evidently needing to show off in front of this small audience, began climbing the stairs towards me.

  “You go back!” Stella ordered him. “And you put that cutter away!”

  “Shut your filthy black mouth, woman!”

  “I only want to ask you some questions...” I began, trying to introduce a little civility into the yard, but I could have saved my breath.

  “OK, man! You’re in real trouble!” Bellybutton began taking
the stairs two at a time.

  So I drew the gun.

  Stella screamed and fled into the office. She slammed the door.

  One of the poker players shouted a warning at Bellybutton, but the warning was hardly needed for he had already seen the gun and his eyes had widened to the size of eggs. He had also stopped cold. “No!” he said.

  “I just want to ask you.” I began again and in the same civil, unfrightening tone.

  “No! No!” Bellybutton backed away, stumbled on a step, then took a flying leap from the staircase to land in an ungainly sprawl on the yard. A stray cat fled in terror.

  “Listen!” I shouted.

  “You’re mad! Mad!” Bellybutton picked himself up and ran towards the pontoons. His friends were making themselves scarce, fleeing towards the gate and scattering their cards to the warm wind.

  “Stop!” I shouted at Bellybutton. I was running after him, but he was much faster and was already unclipping Starkisser’s cockpit cover. He had the boat’s keys on a chain hanging from his belt.

  I took a couple of the big cartridges from my trousers’ pocket and shoved them into the Webley’s cylinder. I closed the gun, then cocked it. “Stop!” I shouted again.

  Bellybutton used his knife to slash Starkisser’s warps. He thrust the boat away from the pontoon. I was running closer, but stopping to load the heavy gun had cost me time. “I only want to ask you a question.” I was pleading with him.

  Bellybutton fumbled the key into the ignition, turned it, and Starkisser’s twin drives crackled into deafening life. A startled pelican flopped off a pontoon stake, and pigeons clattered up from the yard’s roofs. Bellybutton twisted his panicked face towards me, then rammed the twin throttles hard forward so that Starkisser skidded away from the dock like a terrified horse.

  “Damn you! Stop!” I fired, not at the boat, nor at Bellybutton, but into the water ahead of Starkisser. I could hardly hear the gun’s report over the snarl of the engines, but I saw the bullet spurt up a white fountain, then Bellybutton was snatching at the wheel to stop the sleek blue craft from slip-sliding into the rock wall that was Wavebreaker’s empty wharf. I fired again, this time blasting a small puff of rock dust from the dock above Bellybutton’s head, and at the very same moment Starkisser’s polished stern struck the wharf with a crack that must have been heard halfway to Florida, but the boat did not falter. Instead she just dug her rear end into the water and took off like a jet-fighter overdosing on after-burners.

  “Shit.” Bellybutton had known something, I was sure of it, but I had lost him. Or perhaps he was just plain terrified of guns. Whatever, he was gone, and I pushed the gun back into my waistband. The water in the dock was slopping and churning from the turmoil of Starkisser’s stern drives.

  Stella, reappearing at the top of the office stairs, had a hand over her mouth as she tried to stifle a scream. “I’m sorry, Stella.” I went to the bottom of the office steps. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s OK, Nick.”

  I told her that if Ellen telephoned then would she please ask her to get in touch with the Maggot. I gave Stella the Maggot’s address and telephone number, but I could feel hopelessness rising around me like a great cold flood. I gave the Maggot another call, but his answering machine just offered me its flippant, crude message. Stella called me a taxi. I had two places left to search, after which I faced the anhedonia of despair.

  McIllvanney’s cheque had given me more than enough money to pay for the long taxi drive to West End. I could have saved myself the cost of the cab by telephoning, but the very act of moving about the island engendered its own hope. Motion. staved off despair.

  It was lunchtime when the taxi dropped me off at the Harbour Hotel. I bought a bottle of beer before walking back along the straggling waterfront from where I could see that Hobgoblin’s mooring was empty, or rather that it was occupied only by Ned Carraway’s cream-painted dinghy. Ned Carraway’s cream-painted house was shaded by a huge bougainvillaea. Everything Ned and Julie owned was painted cream; the boat, the house, the furniture, the bicycles, the van, even the children’s home-made building blocks. Hobgoblin was a wooden boat that needed paint to save her from the sun’s destruction, and Ned had bought a job lot of cream paint from a bankrupt building merchant, and he now owned enough cream paint to last a dozen lifetimes. Julie claimed that she dreamed of cream paint. I opened the cream-coloured gate and immediately a tethered piglet tried to charge me and only succeeded in tripping itself up and squealing with sudden fright. A slew of nappies were hanging to dry on a washing line at the side of the house. I banged on the screen door. “Julie!”

  “Nick! It’s my dream man!” Julie Carraway came to the door with her latest baby propped on her hip. The baby was the colour of cafe au lait, while Julie, who was a plump and cheerful girl from Cincinnati, was the colour of melded freckles. “Don’t tell me,” she said, “you’ve come to take me away. You’ve got a Rolls-Royce waiting at the Star Hotel, a private aeroplane on the strip, and a bottle of champagne hidden behind your back?”

  I brought out my half empty bottle of beer. “Will that do?”

  “Story of my life.” She plopped on to a half-broken chair on the cream-painted verandah and unselfconsciously bared a heavy breast for the baby. “He’s a hungry little devil. Takes after his father.” She grinned from the baby to me. “Sit down, Nick. Don’t mind the madhouse. If you want another beer there’s some in the kitchen, but don’t bother with the fridge because it’s broken. The bottles are in a zinc bucket under the sink.” I could hear those children too small to be at school playing behind the house. Julie had six children; all of whom she happily called her half-and-halves. One of the smaller half-and-halves looked solemnly at me from the edge of the cream-painted screen door, then, with a grin, ran off to join her siblings.

  I perched on the verandah’s edge. “I’m looking for Ellen.”

  Julie must have heard the despair in my voice for she offered me a sympathetic look, but she could offer me nothing more. “I haven’t seen her in weeks, Nick.” Then her antennae must have detected something else, for she gave me a very shrewd glance. “Are you two suddenly sweet on each other?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s great, Nick! I always thought you and Ellen should get together. You’re just like Ned and me, unlikely enough to make it really work!” Julie’s pleasure was genuine and touching.

  That pleasure made me smile, but sadly. “She’s disappeared, Julie, and that bastard McIllvanney said that Ned had phoned because he needed a replacement cook on Hobgoblin, and I was wondering if that’s where she’s gone?”

  “Ned called Matt McIllvanney?” Julie sounded incredulous, for McIllvanney was not noted for showing any kindness to his rivals, even to rivals as unthreatening as Ned and Julie, which made it somewhat odd that Ned might have asked the Ulsterman for help.

  “McIllvanney says Ned called him,” I insisted.

  “When?”

  “Sometime last week?”

  Julie frowned. “Ned was having a problem with Gwen. Do you know Gwen?” Julie had herself been Hobgoblin’s cook till she became the first mate’s mate, after which she and Ned had bought the boat as a home for their marriage, though now, because most charter customers don’t take kindly to being overrun by the skipper and cook’s small children, Julie lived ashore and Gwen, who was one of Ned’s distant cousins from the Family Islands, cooked superb meals on Hobgoblin’s antiquated charcoal stoves. I said I knew Gwen, and Julie shifted the sucking baby to a more comfortable position. “Her mom was ill, if I remember. Ned called me eight days ago, but he didn’t say anything about Ellen. He wasn’t even phoning about Gwen, really, but because he’d had to go ashore to get a new gasket for the air-tank compressor. I remember he said that Gwen was worried, but he didn’t mention replacing her, and they were way away, Nick! All the way down in the Turks, for God’s sake! He called me from Sapodilla Bay!”

  Sapodilla Bay was in the Turks and Caicos Islands, five hundred m
iles away. “Can you talk to Ned?” I asked her.

  Julie hooted. “We’re not rigged like Wavebreaker! Ned’s got one antique VHF that only works if you kick it, then sing it the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’! I’ll hear from him when he gets back, and not before, unless he has a problem and has to phone me from one of the islands.”

  “When is he back?”

  “The day after tomorrow.”

  “Ask him to give me a call at the Maggot’s.” I frowned, trying to find a scrap of hope in anything Julie had said. “Are you sure he didn’t mention Ellen at all?”

  “Not a word,” Julie said patiently. “He talked about the compressor, he mentioned Gwen’s mom, and he told me that I was the girl of his dreams, but that if a handsome Brit came along it was quite all right for me to run away with him.” She paused to let me laugh, but I was too worried, and so she reached over and patted my arm. “Nick! I wish I could help, but I don’t see how she can be with Ned! He’d have told me! I’ve been away, but he knew where to reach me.”

  “You’ve been away?” I was snatching at the frailest straws of hope; dreaming suddenly that Ned might have reached Ellen without Julie’s knowledge.

  “I took the kids to Nassau for the weekend.” Julie grimaced. “I went to see the Dreadful Parents who won’t visit us here because they think the toilets are dirty, so they pay me to stay in a nice clean hotel in Nassau. They were trying to persuade me to get a divorce, abandon the half-and-halves, then go home and marry a nice white stockbroker called Elmer who plays golf with Daddy, drives a BMW, and has a mortgage.” She laughed at the very thought. “But Ned knew which hotel we were staying at, and he didn’t call me. Mind you,” she added cheerfully, “Ned wouldn’t talk to the Dreadful Parents if he could possibly help it, and I can’t say I blame him. I’m not really sure why I talk to them myself any longer.”

  “Damn,” I said, but speaking of Ellen rather than Julie’s parental woes, and I tilted my head back to stare up into the bougainvillaea. Even the bougainvillaea was cream.