Crackdown (11 page)

We were side-slipping, starboard wing down, falling to earth with our engines howling. I flailed for support as the camera flew up to the padded ceiling. The Maggot whooped, dragged the stick back and our earthwards wing lifted and suddenly we were screaming just above the palm trees, close to the tiled roofs and at a speed that seemed to be doubled because of our proximity to the ground. The camera, re-entering the world of normal gravity, dropped hard beside my shoes. Beer bottles were everywhere. One broke, shattering liquid across the side windows. I had a glimpse of a fair-haired girl staring wide-eyed and terrified from a tennis court, her racket held loose by her side and tennis balls scattered at her feet and, though the trees and buildings and gardens were nothing but a high-speed blur, my mind nevertheless registered with a startling clarity that the girl had been completely naked. The plane’s engines were screaming. We whipped over the northernmost house, across the beach, and thus out to sea again. “What the hell?” I managed to ask.

“They fired at us! goddamn tracer bullets! Jesus!” The Maggot did not seem scared, but rather stung by the challenge. We were over the lagoon now, racing towards the northern strands of the Devil’s Necklace, but low enough so that the wash of our twin propellers was whipping the blue water into a wake of white-hazed foam. “Shee-it!” The Maggot said with inappropriate exultation, then twisted his head to stare back at the island. “Let’s go see them again!”

“Are you sure that’s wise?” I asked, but I might as well have saved my breath because the plane suddenly climbed, banked, then began descending fast towards the island again. The Maggot was growling to himself, relishing the confrontation. Sunlight reflected from a window among the palm trees to lance a sliver of dazzling light at our cockpit, then the reflection was gone and we were at sea level, engines screaming, and I fumbled for the camera, prayed it had not broken when it fell from the ceiling, and took another picture just before Maggot lifted the aircraft’s nose so that we swooped up and over the palm trees that edged the beach.

He jinked left, then right, throwing the plane into such steep and sudden turns that I was alternately jerked hard against the cockpit’s side window and then against his broad shoulder. The Maggot was not taking evasive action but quartering the ground in search of our enemy. “There!” he said abruptly and threw the plane straight again, but this time dropping the nose, and I saw a jeep churning dust from the dirt road which ran the length of the island’s long shank, between the golf course and the houses, and just as I saw the jeep so the red tracer bullets began climbing from a machine-gun mounted in the back of the vehicle.

“Oh, Jesus wept,” I said, snapped a last picture, then ducked down in momentary expectation of the windscreen shattering into a million bright scraps.

“Fuck you,” the Maggot screamed at whoever fired at him and I looked out of the Beechcraft’s side window to see palm trees going past at over 150 miles an hour and above us. Above us. Truly. And I thought it really had been a very good life, a fun life, despite Ellen never having gone to bed with me, and I wondered if my father would even notice my death, then the Maggot whooped with glee, hauled back on the stick, and our plane was screaming up into the wide blue lovely bullet-free sky and the Maggot was laughing and slapping my shoulder. “Wasn’t that just the best goddamned fun you can have this side of a blanket?”

“Was it?”

“You missed it?” He sounded aggrieved and astonished.

“Missed what?”

“I ran that turkey clean off the road! Shit, but I gave that bastard a headache!”

“I think you gave me one too,” I said, then, very gingerly, I straightened up and twisted round to see that Murder Cay was far behind us and well out of machine-gun range. “You’re mad,” I courteously informed John Maggovertski.

He laughed. “You’re the one who wanted to see the island.” We were gently circling northwards now, heading for home. “So now you’ve seen it.”

I tried to relax, letting the cold air from the vent cool the sweat from my face. My right hand shook as I remembered the sudden fear of seeing the crimson tracer flick up from the ground. “Hell!” I protested. “They can’t just open fire!”

The Maggot grinned through the black tangle of his beard.

“Nick, they are richer than your wettest dreams, and like all the very rich they think they are above the law.” He was speaking very casually, but I saw that his right hand, like mine, was shaking. It is not pleasant to be shot at, and even the pleasure of being missed is spoilt by the mind’s habit of constructing alternative scenarios; if the machine-gunner had been a bit quicker to react, or had led us with more skill, we would now be nothing but a heap of molten metal somewhere in the sea-grape. The Maggot shook his head. “Do you have any idea just how rich these people are?”

“Very, I imagine.”

“There’s an island not far from here that has just two thousand inhabitants, and last year, Nick, according to a banker I sometimes fly to Miami, those two thousand dirt poor and unemployed islanders deposited 24.3 million dollars in the one and only bank on their impoverished little island.” The Maggot laughed. “Not bad, eh? And I do not believe that 24.3 million dollars a year is the average reward for selling coconut milk and conch shells to honky tourists. That money is pure commission, Nick, a mere ten per cent of the value of the cocaine that was stored on their island while it awaited transportation to the good old US of A; and neither you, nor I, nor even the dickheads in the Drug Enforcement Administration will ever know just how much money was not put in the bank, but stored in paper bags under the bed.” He sounded depressed by the thought, but then cheered himself up by asking me for a beer.

I opened two bottles that I retrieved from the sticky mess on the cabin floor. We flew the rest of the way home in silence. It was not till we saw the captive aerostat balloon with its ever watching radar that the Americans had hoisted over Grand Bahama to probe for boats or aircraft smuggling drugs, that the Maggot again spoke, and by then he had recaptured all his old insouciance. “At this time, if you’d care to fold up your tray table and extinguish your hopes, we shall land this little sucker. Thank you for flying Maggovertski Airways; please return the stewardess her pantyhose, put her in the upright position, and kindly pray that the tyres don’t blow.”

They did not, and thus I came back to
Wavebreaker.

I went back to the Maggot’s foul house, where he kept his killer dog and astonishing collection of guns, and we sat on his makeshift verandah that overlooked a noxious and polluted creek and shared a few whiskies as he told me an incredibly tedious tale of how he had once sacked the quarterback of the San Francisco Sugar Plums. I retaliated with detailed instructions on how to bowl off-breaks to left-handers on a drying pitch, and we eventually declared a truce as we watched the sun sink across the oil-storage tanks beyond the creek. He offered me his spare bed for the night, but I could not stand the stench of the creek, and I wanted to make an early start on the work I had to do on
Wavebreaker,
so I caught the bus to McIllvanney’s boatyard. Naturally no one was there and the gate was locked and the top of the fence was rimmed with razor-wire so I could not climb it. I had not kept my old key, because I had hoped that my association with Cutwater Charters was done, so I was forced to carry my heavy pack into the tangle of dark alleys that lay behind the straw market and where I planned to find Ellen and borrow her key.

A tribe of stray cats scattered as I turned into the yard where Ellen’s apartment lay. The archway was bright with the brass plates of the dozens of corporations who were registered at the address to avoid paying tax in their home countries. The courtyard was inhabited by three tethered goats that stared malevolently at me. The open-air stairways were shadowed with creepers and flickering with the eerie lights of televisions that glowed from within the screened windows of the small apartments.

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.