Beast (9 page)

“I don’t get it,” Mike said.

“You will.”

“You’re driving him to the cut.”

“Not exactly to it.”

Mike thought for a moment, and then he got it, and he smiled.

For five more minutes Darling chased Frith, always checking the sun behind him and the reefs ahead. Then, gently, he pulled back on his throttle. Privateer slowed, and Frith gradually drew away.

Frith looked back and saw that he was gaining. He shouted something that was snatched away by the wind, and he threw Darling the finger.

Darling pulled his throttle back into neutral, and Privateer stopped. “Bye, Carl,” he called. “Have a nice day.” He pointed off the bow. Not five feet away, barely covered by water, was the first of a ragged phalanx of yellow coral heads.

“Think it’ll work?” Mike said. “He knows these reefs.”

“No man knows these reefs, Michael, if he can’t see.”

Carl Frith dodged one coral head, then another.

Take it easy, he told himself. You may only draw three feet, but some of these buggers aren’t a foot deep.

He throttled back, slowing down, letting his breath catch up with his heart.

Damn him, the self-righteous bastard. Who was Whip Darling to tell a man how to make a living? Whip wasn’t doing such a good job of it himself, from what he’d heard. You’d think he’d have some sympathy. Parrotfish important? Breams? That was a laugh. They were trash fish, everybody knew that.

Whip was just pissed off ‘cause he hadn’t had any traps to stiff the government for.

Never mind. No problem. Whip had said he wasn’t about to report him, and, whatever else there was about Whip, he was a man of his word. He wanted this to be personal, Frith would keep it personal. He’d go out one day and maybe just cut away Whip’s buoys, all that horseshit he did for the aquarium. Not even man’s work.

Anyway, it was obvious Whip wasn’t too serious, or he would’ve done more than just chase him up into the shallows. No big deal. All he had to do was turn around and …

Frith looked to the west. He couldn’t see anything, just the blinding yellow flashes of the sun on the dappled sea. No definition to the water, no coral heads, nothing. It was like looking at a sheet of tinfoil at high noon.

He realized he was trapped. He couldn’t go eastward because there the coral heads actually broke water. He couldn’t go west because he couldn’t see: Blind, he was guaranteed to tear the bottom out of his boat. And the tide was falling, he remembered that from this morning when he had checked the tide tables to be sure he could find his buoys.

He could wait till sunset—and what? Try it in the dark? Forget it.

He’d have to wait till morning. He’d put his anchor down and wait, have a beer and a sleep and …

But he didn’t dare. If the wind came up, he might be forced to move in the middle of the night. What was the wind supposed to do? He hadn’t bothered to check, it hadn’t seemed important.

He couldn’t see Whip’s boat: It was out there somewhere in the sunlight. He shouted, “God damn you!…”

Darling watched Frith’s boat slow down, then stop. He imagined Frith thinking everything was fine, then turning around and looking into the sun.

“He’ll wait till morning,” Mike said.

“Not Carl. He hasn’t got the patience.”

They stayed for a few more minutes, drifting at the edge of the shallow reef.

“Maybe you’re right,” Darling said, and he reached for his throttle.

Just then, they heard Frith’s engine roar.

“Nope,” Mike said, grinning.

They listened to the sound of the engine across the still water, heard it rev up then die off, advancing and retreating.

“He’s searching,” Darling said. “Like a blind man.”

A moment later they felt a little tremor in their feet, sent by the water through the Privateer’s steel plates, and then they heard a low grinding kind of noise, followed suddenly by the yowl of Frith’s engine.

“He did it,” Darling said, and he laughed and slapped Mike on the shoulder. “Ran himself up on that reef, hard and fast.”

“Want me to call the police?” Mike asked. “They can send the rubber boat.”

“Let him swim. He could use the workout.” Darling turned his boat to the west. “Besides, we got a duty to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Wreck the bastard’s traps.”

“He’ll report us,” Mike said. Then he paused. “No, now I think of it, I don’t guess he will.”

*

By the time Darling rounded the point into Mangrove Bay, the blue of the sky was fast turning violet, and the departed sun had tinted the western clouds the color of salmon.

A single light bulb burned on the dock, and beneath it, moored to a piling, was a white twenty-five-foot outboard motorboat with the word POLICE stenciled on the side in foot-high blue letters.

“Christ,” Mike said, “he’s reported us already.”

“I doubt it,” said Darling. “Carl’s a fool, but he’s not crazy.”

Two young policemen stood on the dock, one white, one black, both wearing uniform shirts, shorts and knee socks. They watched as Darling eased the boat against the dock, and they passed Mike the bow and stern lines.

Darling knew the policemen, had no problem with them—no more than he had with the marine police in general, whom he regarded as ill-trained, under-equipped and overburdened. These two he had taken to sea with him on their days off, had helped them learn to read the reefs, had shown them shortcuts to the few deep-water channels in and out of Bermuda.

Still, he chose to remain on the flying bridge, sensing instinctively that altitude reinforced his authority.

He leaned on the railing and raised a finger and said, “Colin … Barnett …”

“Hey, Whip …” Colin, the white cop, said.

Barnett said, “Come aboard?”

“Come ahead,” said Darling. “What brings you fellas out of a night?”

“Hear you found a raft,” Barnett said.

“True enough.”

Barnett stepped aboard and pointed to the raft lying athwart the cockpit. “That it?”

“That’s the one.”

Barnett shone a flashlight on the raft and leaned down to it. “Lord, it stinks!”

Colin stayed where he was and said hesitantly, “Whip … we gotta take it.”

Darling paused. “Why’s that? Somebody claim to have lost it?”

“No … not exactly.”

“Then it’s mine, isn’t it? … First law of salvage: finders keepers.”

“Well …” Colin seemed uneasy. He looked at his feet. “Not this time.”

“That so.” Darling waited, feeling a roil of anger in his stomach, fighting it down. “What, then?”

“Dr. St. John,“Colin said. “He wants it.”

“Dr. St. John.” Now Darling knew he was bound to lose, and his temper was bound to win. “I see.”

Liam St. John was one of the few men in Bermuda whom Darling took the trouble to loathe. A second-generation Irish immigrant, he had gone away to school in Montana and graduated from some diploma mill that awarded him a doctorate. Exactly what the doctorate was in, nobody knew and he never said. All anybody knew for certain was that little Liam had left Bermuda pronouncing his name “Saint John” and had returned pronouncing it (and insisting everyone else do, too) “SINjin.”

Armed with an alphabet appended to his name, St. John had rallied a few powerful friends of his parents and besieged the government, arguing that certain disciplines, such as maritime history and wildlife management, were being grossly mishandled by amateurs and should be turned over to certified, qualified experts— which meant him, since he was the only status-Bermudian with a doctorate in anything other than medicine. Never mind that his degree was in an unknown field, probably something utterly useless like Druid combs.

The politicians, who were unconcerned with shipwrecks and nettled by loudmouthed fishermen, were pleased to remove both from their agendas, and for Dr. Liam St. John, Ph.D., they created the new position of minister of cultural heritage. They didn’t bother with a precise job description, which suited St. John just fine, for he defined and expanded the job as he went along, assuming more and more authority and enforcing rules and regulations of his own making.

As far as Darling was concerned, all St. John and his regulations had done was turn hundreds of Bermudians into criminals. He had decreed, for example, that no one was permitted to touch any shipwreck without first securing a license from him and agreeing to pay one of his staff two hundred dollars a day to supervise work on the wreck. The result was that nobody ever reported finding anything, and if they did dig up some coins or artifacts, gold earrings or Spanish pottery, they hid them until they could smuggle them out of Bermuda.

Thanks to the minister of cultural heritage, Bermuda’s heritage was being sold in galleries on Madison Avenue in New York.

Scientists who had once regarded Bermuda as a prime deep-water laboratory, a unique speck of land in the mid-Atlantic, no longer bothered to come, because St. John insisted that all discoveries be turned over to and examined by his staff, who prepared papers (always pedestrian, usually erroneous) for him to deliver at academic conclaves.

For almost a year, Darling and his diver friends had fantasized about ways to get rid of St. John. Someone had suggested reporting a shipwreck find and taking St. John to have a look at it and then sinking the boat. (It was said that St. John didn’t know how to swim.) The idea was vetoed, largely on the grounds that St. John would never go himself: He’d send one of his stooges.

Someone else suggested they just kill him—hit him on the head and dump him in the deep. But although everyone agreed that the result was desirable, no one volunteered to do the deed.

Darling wouldn’t have been surprised, however, if it were to happen some night—if St. John were simply to vanish. Nor would he have been crestfallen at the news.

“Colin,” he said, “I want you to do me a favor.”

“Name it.”

“You go back and tell Dr. St. John that I’ll give him the raft… .”

“Okay.”

“… if he’ll come over here himself and let me shove it up his ass.”

“Oh.” Colin looked at Barnett, then at his feet again, then, reluctantly, at Darling. “You know I can’t do that, Whip.”

“Then we got us a problem, don’t we, Colin? ‘Cause there’s something else you can’t do, and that’s take the raft.”

“But we have to!” There was a wailing note in Colin’s voice.

Barnett stepped away from the raft and came forward and stood at the bottom of the ladder, looking up.

As Darling looked down at him, he saw movement in the shadows aft. It was Mike, moving silently toward the rack where they kept the clubs and gaff hooks for subduing big fish.

“Whip,” Barnett said, “you don’t want to do this.”

“That raft is mine, Barnett, and you know it.” Darling wanted to say more, wanted to say that it wasn’t a matter of the raft, wasn’t even just a matter of principle, it was also a matter of the two or three or four thousand dollars, dollars that could make a difference, dollars he was not going to let Liam St. John steal from him. But he said none of it; he was not about to whine to a policeman.

“Not if St. John wants to study it like he says.”

“Prick doesn’t want to study it. He wants to keep it. He knows what it’s worth.”

“That’s not what he says.”

“And since when has he become a frigging paragon of truthfulness?”

“Whip …” Barnett sighed. Something made him look aft—a glimmer of light, maybe, or a sound—and he saw Mike standing in the darkness, holding across his chest a three-foot gaff with a honed four-inch hook on the end. “You know what we’re gonna have to do.”

“Yep. Go back and tell Dr. St. John to suck eggs.”

“No. We’re gonna go back and get a dozen more coppers and come back and take the raft.”

“Not without somebody getting bruised.”

“That may be, Whip, but think about it: That happens, you’re gonna end up in jail, we’re gonna end up with the raft, and who’s gonna get the last laugh? Doctor St.-fucking-John.”

Darling looked away, across the dark water of Mangrove Bay, at the lights of the cars crossing Watford Bridge, at the glow of lanterns on the veranda of Cambridge Beaches, the hotel nearby, where some bygone singer was warbling along with the band, telling the world he did it His Way.

Darling wanted to fight, wanted to rage and defy and storm around. But he swallowed it, because he knew Barnett was right.

“Barnett,” he said at last, and he started down the ladder, “you are the soul of wisdom.”

Barnett looked over at Colin, who let out a big breath and smiled back at him.

“Dr. SINjin wants my raft,” Darling said as he strode aft and took the gaff from Mike, “Dr. SINjin shall have my raft.”

He stepped over to the raft and raised the gaff above his shoulder and slashed downward at the bow. The hook plunged through the rubber, and, with a pop and a hiss, the cell collapsed.

“Whoops!” Darling said, “sorry,” and he dragged the raft toward the bulwark. He slammed the hook into another cell, and it deflated, and he hauled the sagging rubber up onto the bulwark. Something small fell from the raft and hit the steel deck with a click and rattled away. He withdrew the hook and stepped back and drove it through the aftermost cell. He yanked upward and held the raft in the air over the police boat. The muscles in his shoulders were afire, and the sinews in his neck stuck out like wires.

“Whoops!” he said again, and he dropped the raft into the police boat, where it landed in a heap of hissing rubber. He turned back to the two policemen and dropped the gaff on the deck and said, “There. Dr. St. John can have his bloody raft.”

The policemen looked at one another. “Okay,” said Colin, as he quickly stepped off onto the dock. “We’ll tell Dr. St. John that’s how you found it.”

“Right,” said Barnett, and he followed Colin. “Looks to me like a shark got it.”

“And there was a sea on,” Colin said. “You couldn’t go into the water after it, sharks all around… . ‘Night, Whip.”

Darling watched as the policemen piled the raft in the stern of their boat and started their motor and backed away into the darkness. He felt drained and slightly nauseated, half-pleased with himself and half-ashamed.