The Revengers (8 page)

An early-rising fisherman was heading out of the marina in a small outboard-powered boat; otherwise everything was very quiet as I stepped ashore. The little vessel’s

V-shaped wake traveled silently across the glassy water of the harbor, but made small, surging, hissing noises when it encountered the sea wall, and sent a ripple of movement through the docked boats. I padded along the sea wall to the pay phone across the road from the lounge and restaurant, now closed and silent. If you want to buy breakfast in that resort, you have to hike or drive up to their coffee shop on the highway; but most of the cabins have kitchen facilities. Waiting for my call to Miami to go through collect, I admired the boats, now lying still once more, and the motionless palms, and the clear blue Florida sky. I hoped for a pelican to appear—the ugliest bird in the world and the most beautiful flyer—but they’re getting scarce down there nowadays and none showed.

“Eric here,” I said when a voice spoke in my ear. “Report.”

“The Paradise Towers Hotel, Nassau.”

“What the hell is she doing in Nassau? I thought she was down in the Virgin Islands somewhere.”

“The location is our business, friend; the motivation is yours.”

I grimaced at a flying seagull, who didn’t seem to mind. “Well, that pretty well confirms my guess about what she’s really after; she must be checking up on that last ship that went down, but she reacts fast . . .
Fairfax Constellation
,” I said. “Twenty-five-thousand-ton tanker, Liberian registry, out of Aruba, recently sunk somewhere off the Bahamas. It was in the Miami papers yesterday; probably others as well. Get what details you can and locate the surviving crew for me, will you? Although I have a hunch all I have to do is keep Miss Brand in sight and she’ll lead me to them.”

“Request noted.”

“Who’s our man in Nassau these days, Freddie?”

“Fred is still our man in Nassau, yes.”

The voice was expressionless; but there are very few secrets in the organization and I had a hunch that our man in Miami, a young standby agent named Brent with whom I’d worked in the past, was quite aware that there had been friction between Fred and me the last time I’d operated in the Islands. Fred thought I was a racist bastard and he was perfectly right. I am highly intolerant of black men who are slow pulling the trigger when my life is at stake; and the last time we’d worked together he’d been damned slow. Of course I’m also intolerant of white men, blue men, red men, and green men who display similar dilatory characteristics under similar circumstances.

I said, “Can you set me up for the flight and the hotel?”

“Already done, friend. Get yourself up to Miami today; you’ve got a room for the night at the Airport Hotel. You take Eastern out tomorrow morning at eight-oh-five and land on New Providence Island at eight-fifty. Your reservation at the Paradise Towers is waiting. The subject is in room four-oh-five. She has company along; male, blond, husky, handsome. Ostensible occupation, photographer, but I wouldn’t trust him to cover my wedding if I were getting married, which I’m not. More muscle than art, I’d say. Name, Warren Peterson. Room four-oh-seven. I believe there are connecting doors.”

“I’m jealous already,” I said. “But that’s real service; I’ll mail you a gold star for your report card. A couple more things. Please find out for me what the hell is a COLREGS. Cee-oh-ell-are. . . .”

“The latest International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea were promulgated in 1972 by the United Nations Inter-Governmental Marine Consultative Organization. They were updated recently, I believe in 1977. They are now known as COLREGS—Collision Regulations, get it? In case you’re interested, the organization itself is known as IMCO. Just as a seagoing toilet is nowadays known as a Marine Sanitation Device or MSD, a life preserver is a Personal Flotation Device or PFD, and a pump or bucket is a Dewatering Device or DD—well, I don’t vouch for that last contraction. All courtesy of the fun-loving linguistic jokers of the United States Coast Guard known as USCG. What part of the rules?”

“Rule 18-a-iv.”

“I don’t have it on tap but I can find it.”

“It’s a relief to learn there’s something you don’t know offhand. I thought for a moment I might be hooked into our omniscient friendly neighborhood computer. Well, look it up and get it to me care of Fred, will you? Also a copy of an old article in Travel Times entitled ‘Kiruna Today,’ by a lady named Louise Taylor.” I gave him the date and waited while he wrote it down. He read it back to me to make sure he had it right. I went on, “I’d also appreciate it if you’d send somebody down here to keep an eye on Captain Harriet Robinson. You remember Cap’n Hattie. I have a hunch she knows too much to be perfectly safe.” There was something I had forgotten, but it came back to me. “Oh, and check on a name for me, please. George Winfield Lorca.”

I heard a soft whistle. “Watch yourself, friend. That name packs a punch.”

“I’m just an ignorant desert dweller,” I said.

“I’ll send you what I can get in an asbestos envelope. Tell Fred to have his fire tongs handy.”

“I get the message,” I said. “I’ll wear my bulletproof union suit known as BVD when I land in the British West Indies known as BWI. Only they aren’t that any longer, are they?”

“No, they’re pretty much an independent nation now. Good luck.”

“Eric out.”

As I stepped out of the booth I saw that one lonely brown pelican had, after all, put in an appearance. He was sitting perched on top of one of the dockside pilings I had to pass, in the stump-like way they have, long beak tucked in close to long neck. He gave me a baleful look as I approached and spread his wings and glided away, instantly transforming himself from a figure of fun to a creature of remarkable grace. Even the outsized bill looked right when he was flying.

I walked gingerly over to the rental car in my bare feet, got my suitcase out of the trunk, and returned to the boat. There was no sound from the forward stateroom as I shaved in the diminutive cubicle called a head, utilized the apparatus known as MSD, and made myself reasonably respectable; shoes, shirt, and the works. I hoped Harriet had fewer protective and possessive feelings about her galley than Martha had about her kitchen, although that was not exactly a comfortable thought. My life seemed to be getting a bit complex with regard to the opposite sex. Risking displeasure, I fired up the stove, which operated in normal fashion on butane gas, a relief. Some boat cookers use alcohol or kerosene and require priming; and while I was checked out at an early age on Coleman gasoline camp stoves, which operate similarly, my rustic-stove techniques had become pretty rusty of late.

I started heating water for instant coffee—Harriet seemed to be of my own persuasion in this respect—and found bacon and eggs in the small boat refrigerator; also some canned orange juice, which always seems unnatural in Florida. All those citrus groves and you’re supposed to drink it out of a
can
, for God’s sake? But the last time I got real, fresh-squeezed, breakfast orange juice handed to me in a restaurant, I recalled was in a motel in a little Mexican mining town with the odd name of Heroica de Caborca, where they were too far from civilization to know any better. The galley was very neat and tidy, but it was a sailor’s neatness, not a cook’s neatness. There was nothing to indicate that cooking was anything but just another boat chore to the owner, like polishing the fittings or scrubbing the decks. There were no intriguing, specialized, culinary implements in evidence, or oddball spices. When the deckhouse table was set and the bacon was draining on a paper towel, I went downstairs—oops, below—to wake my lady.

She was kind of breathtaking lying there asleep, tanned and lovely; she had always been a spectacular lady. She had declared war upon the United States of America because of the arbitrary way its bureaucracy had condemned some land she’d owned and loved for purposes of which she did not approve—it had been part of a sizeable estate she’d inherited up there in Maryland. I could have sympathized with her angry feelings if she hadn’t picked her allies so badly, disregarding their motives and political beliefs in her desire to strike back at the establishment that, she felt, had robbed her of an important part of her birthright—and if, as I’d reminded her the night before, she hadn’t caused the death of one of our people in the course of her vengeful operations.

She’d come close to killing me, or having me killed; and in the end only the breaks of the game had prevented me from killing her or sending her to prison. Despite our differences, however, I’d been relieved when she’d made her escape in the end, diving overboard from her wrecked schooner yacht in the storm in which she was now officially listed as having drowned. It had pleased me to know for sure, later, when she was found living down here under a different name and in considerably different circumstances, that she hadn’t drowned after all. Not that I’d considered it much of a possibility. She wasn’t an easy girl to drown.

So the long rough game between us had started there up north, where I had thus won Round One by frustrating her plans and those of the foreign associates she’d been angry enough to choose, making a fugitive of her. The second round, however, had been hers, down here, when in the course of a different assignment I’d received information from her that had saved my life, obligating us to do our best to make her secure in her new existence. One and one. Yesterday the bell had rung for Round Three; but as I looked down at her sleeping face I found myself entertaining strong emotions I did not care to identify. Their mere existence, however, indicated that some time during the night it had ceased to be a game. . . .

She became aware of my presence, and opened her eyes a bit warily; then she turned lazily onto her back, remembering, and smiled to see me standing there.

“Hey, spook.”

“Breakfast is served, Captain Robinson, ma’am. The dining room steward wishes to be informed if you want your eggs fried or scrambled.”

“How about poached, shirred, or coddled?”

“We can only serve what’s on the menu, ma’am. No special orders.”

She sat up and shook her tousled dark hair into place—it was short enough that it needed no more to discipline it—swung her feet to the cabin sole and restored a vagrant satin ribbon, pretending to be a shoulder strap, to its proper functioning position. It made her shoulder look very smooth and brown. I’d asked for a gift-wrapped lady and she’d given me one. The nightgown was white, long and graceful, with some discreet lace top and bottom. It was neither wantonly provocative nor innocently bridal; it was simply a handsome and becoming gown that raised the whole man-woman business to a much higher plane than simple, crude, nude copulation. Naked dames have their place, no doubt, and I’m not knocking nudity; but there’s something very special about being allowed the privilege of discovering, and lovingly uncovering as far as necessary, a beautiful woman within a decorative garment she’s put on specifically for the purpose of having her body admired and explored, and in the end, fully exploited, by you.

Yet there was a sadness, too, in seeing her in her expensive gown. It was obviously something she’d bought on impulse, in a moment of weakness, to remind herself of what she had been and no longer was. It did not belong to her present incarnation as a tough female sportfishing captain living under rather Spartan circumstances on a forty-foot boat. When I kissed her I felt her cling to me for a moment, as if she needed the reassurance of some affectionate bodily contact even though we’d finished with passion for the moment. I’d never before thought of her as someone who might need reassurance and the idea disturbed me; but after a moment she laughed softly and freed herself.

“Two, over easy,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. Coming right up, ma’am.”

I was just placing our breakfast on the table, about to call her, when she appeared in the deckhouse wearing jeans, a short-sleeved jersey and brown leather boat shoes with white patent soles, the kind with the squeegee pattern that supposedly won’t slip on any deck no matter how slick and wet. I couldn’t see the pattern, but I knew the shoes; they’re worn everywhere around the docks. She looked lean and competent. The soft, clinging female in the fragile, lacy gown might never have existed.

“What, no toast?” she said, seating herself. “You’ll have to snap into it, steward, we run a taut ship here.”

“Toast being served, ma’am.”

We batted it back and forth like that for a while, with variations, but there were tensions here that had not existed as long as we were below in each others’ arms. Now that the hint had been given me I could see that she had changed, and I could realize that what had been so very good about last night was the fact that she’d needed me desperately; me, or at least the assurance I could give her that she was still an attractive and important person— Harriet Robinson, formerly Robin Rosten, who’d never needed anyone before in her life. The evidence had all been there but I’d preferred to ignore it.

When I’d last seen her she wouldn’t have dreamed of worrying how she’d be received in the cocktail lounge, any cocktail lounge, after working on her engines; in fact, she hadn’t. She’d considered them damned lucky to have her even in baggy pants with grease on them. She’d never have referred to her present existence as an exile; and she’d certainly never have thought of buying some frivolous and expensive lingerie to remind her, in secret, of the gracious life she’d left behind forever. Nor would she have considered holding her tongue about anything for timid and sensible reasons of self-protection. Back then she’d been playing the part of Captain Harriet Robinson to the hilt and enjoying it immensely; but now, I could see, the enjoyment had faded and regret and caution had taken its place.

I could look at her clearly at last and know that she was lost. She was a lovely lady and she was breaking and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do to help her. This rather primitive and, in many ways, humbling life—a charter boat captain, male or female, has to take a lot of guff from a lot of slobs—was wearing her down, not to mention the fact that despite our best efforts she was still legally a fugitive with the ultimate horror of prison still hanging over her. But mainly she was remembering everything she’d given up. She was realizing that she wasn’t really made for this, she was being wasted here, and the waste was irretrievable. I had a momentary sickening picture of another woman I’d just seen who’d been totally degraded by pressures too great for her to bear. I did not think that Harriet’s break, when it came, would take that form—it was an unbearable thing to even consider—but she was obviously no longer holding her own here and the end, some end, was inevitable.