Crackdown (25 page)

Thessy and I had rerigged her well. Even when she finally toppled, her topmasts did not break. She settled on her starboard flank, her port side just out of the water and her long masts reaching out across the lagoon. I waited till I was sure she had settled firm, then I swam out to her, hauling myself up her almost vertical deck to perch on her rail that was just four feet above the lagoon’s rippled surface. I sat there, feeling the misery of a man who has lost a boat. I had never been very fond of
Wavebreaker,
but she had still been mine to command, and now she was a sad sunken wreck.

Ellen and Chatterton followed me. “We can’t refloat her,” I greeted them. Doubtless
Wavebreaker
would be salvaged, for she was hardly damaged, but we had none of the equipment that was needed to rescue her. “So we’ll have to call for help.”

Ellen gingerly climbed up to sit beside me. She looked nervously around, and I guessed she was frightened of seeing Thessy’s body, but there was no sign of it. There was a big streak of blood on the patch of exposed deck beneath us, but no corpses.

“What do we do?” Ellen asked dully.

“First we find some fresh water and food, then we get the hell out of here.” I was trying to sound optimistic, but Chatterton and Ellen seemed sunk in gloom. I left them, slipping off the rail and swimming down the deck, past the cockpit, then down to the huge lockers which opened on to the swim platform. Beneath me, in the astonishingly clear water, I could see a Kalashnikov lying on the sand. Near the gun were the piles of cut halliard wires that Rickie had dumped overboard. A ray flapped its wings to swim across the heap of wires as I opened the portside locker where Rickie’s scuba equipment had all been stored. All three sets had been stolen, but Sweetman had left the old face masks that Thessy and I had sometimes used when we dived to check that our anchors had bitten into uncertain ground. I pulled one of the masks free and fitted it over my eyes.

I swam back to the sunken companionway above which I took a deep breath, then kicked my way down to the galley. It was dark as Hades inside the sunken boat and I lost my bearings and began to panic. I flailed to find an exit, hurt my arm on the stove’s edge, then saw a dim green light filtering from the companionway stairs. My chest was bursting, but I kicked my way to the stairs and shot back to the surface where I gasped for breath and found myself shaking.

Ellen had donned the other mask. She took a breath, jack-knifed, and dived elegantly down. I followed more clumsily, this time pushing back the hatchway’s sliding coaming to allow more light into the galley area. I sank down to join Ellen and saw that she was already opening the supply lockers. Air bubbles dribbled from her mouth to join the mess of cornflakes and flour that floated around her. She turned with two bottles of Perrier, and I thrust myself back out of the way so as not to obstruct her.

The three of us sat on the rail and breakfasted on Perrier. We were thirsty as hell. Afterwards I swam to the stern and pulled the lanyard on the life-raft’s canister, which opened like a fibreglass clamshell to expose the expanding orange-coloured raft which began to unfold as its gas canisters automatically discharged into the inflatable tubes. The raft had a canopy, so would offer us shelter from the sun, and it also had some iron rations and two flasks of bitter-tasting water. Best of all, though, it had an Epirb.

Sweetman and Rickie had forgotten the Epirb, or perhaps neither had known that it existed. “What the hell is an Epirb?” Jackson Chatterton asked as I towed the raft towards the exposed patch of
Wavebreaker’s
hull.

“An emergency position indicating radio beacon.” I offered him the full name, then unfolded the device’s radio aerial and simply tossed the buoy into the water. It floated there, already transmitting its distress signal to any passing satellite or aircraft. “Within about five minutes,” I told Chatterton, “the US Coastguard in Nassau will know we’re here, and they may think we set the beacon off by mistake, but they’ll still send someone to take a look.”

Two hours later, as we still waited for rescue, Ellen suddenly remembered her notebooks. “I’ve got to have them,” she insisted.

I knew she kept her precious writer’s notes in the stern-cabin that she had shared with Robin-Anne, but I did not want her to risk her life by swimming back to that cabin where she could so easily be trapped underwater. I tried to dissuade her by saying that the notebooks would surely be soaked and illegible by now.

“I’m not a complete idiot,” she said with a touch of her old asperity. “At sea I keep the notebooks in a waterproof plastic case.” Even so, she saw the danger of trying to swim from the companionway back to the stern-cabin, so instead suggested that we break the big stern windows.

“It’ll take something very heavy to smash them,” I said dubiously, then I remembered the heavy bolt-cutters that I had found on deck just twenty-four hours before, and which I had put back in one of the lockers built into the cockpit coaming. I donned the face mask again, dropped down deep into the water, then tugged back the locker’s heavy metal lid.

And Thessy floated out.

I gagged, swallowed water, retched, then kicked desperately to the surface where I choked and gasped on the warm air. Beneath me, with an obscene sluggishness, Thessy’s body bumped over the locker’s sill and floated slowly upwards. The sea-water had washed the huge hole in his skull clean and bloodless. I swam frantically clear, as though the corpse was somehow threatening.

Ellen screamed.

Overhead, suddenly clattering and driving the sea into a frenzy, was a US Coastguard helicopter. The Epirb had done its magic, but too late for justice, for
Dream Baby
had long vanished among far islands.

So we rescued Thessy’s body, found Ellen’s notebooks, salvaged the bullet-ridden ensign, and flew away.

Thessy was buried on Straker’s Cay, close to the small church where he had worshipped all his short life and the small seapool in which he had been baptised. The little church had a red-painted corrugated tin roof and a white wooden belfry and blue-painted walls in which huge unglazed windows were covered with palm-leaf blinds. Lizards clung to the walls and to the tar-soaked beams that held up the roof. The pews were old park benches made of wooden slats slotted into cast-iron frames, and every seat was taken and still more islanders crowded in to line the walls and fill the aisle. Ellen and I were the only white faces, and there was no face with dry eyes. We sang till we were hoarse, and then Bonefish wanted to sing some more, and so the congregation rocked back and forth as though the very strength of our voices and the rhythm of our clapping could propel Thessy to his better place beyond the river where one day we would all gather to be dressed in glowing silks and to live for ever in the place where there would be no more crying and no more sin and no more grief and no more death, but only sweet joy eternal.

Flowers were piled by Thessy’s coffin, and more were heaped on the Mercy Seat above which the preacher stood to promise us the Resurrection, and the congregation shouted Hallelujah, before—still singing, and with the feet of the islanders stamping dust from the path that led from the church to the graveyard—we carried Thessy’s coffin to the sandy cemetery with its painted wooden crosses and cheap jars of wilted flowers and its herd of goats and its view of the long, long sea beating eternally from the east; the sea that Thessy had loved and sailed so well. Jackson Chatterton helped carry the flowers, while Bonefish insisted that I helped carry his son’s coffin. Bonefish still called me ‘sir’, and his son’s coffin weighed so very little. Thessy’s head was resting on the defaced and bullet-torn ensign that I had rescued from
Wavebreaker.
It was not the flag of the Bahamas, but it was the flag that Thessy had sailed under, and he had been proud of it.

Bonefish spoke by the grave. We would meet Thessalonians again, he promised, in that blessed land above, and we should not mourn for his son, for he had been translated into glory, gone to be with Jesus, and all the voices called Hallelujah—or rather all the voices except for that of Denise Harriman, George Crowninshield’s black aide from Washington, who had arrived late to represent the senator at the funeral, but who now looked desperately embarrassed by the ritual as though the primitive faith that now entrusted Thessy’s soul to God was an affront to her Washington sophistication.

We lowered the box into the scrabbling dry soil, and we threw handfuls of sand that rattled on its lid, and then the minister read the twenty-third psalm as the flowers were heaped at the foot of the slowly filling grave. The senator had sent a wreath of white lilies and a handwritten note that expressed his deepest regret that he could not be present, but he promised Bonefish that he would visit Straker’s Cay soon, and he would try to make some sense, if any could be made, of Thessy’s death.

Bonefish and Sarah, Thessy’s mother, were on their knees beside the grave, weeping and rocking, and I knelt beside Bonefish and tried to say how sorry I was, but I could not speak because my throat was hoarse and lumpish. The sun beat on my bowed shoulders as Bonefish put his arm across my back and said how grateful he was that I had been a friend to Thessy, and how I had been a hero to Thessy, and all I could think of was that I had let Thessy die and I began to cry. I could hear the sea crashing and scraping at the nearby beach, and I was glad that Thessy would have that noise in his ears for all eternity, or at least till the graves were opened and the dead flew up to meet their Lord.

We piled the last of the flowers on the new dry mound of sandy soil. John Maggovertski, who hardly knew Thessy, had sent a wreath, but nothing had come from Matthew McIllvanney, and, more surprisingly, nothing from the owners of Cutwater Charters. McIllvanney had cursed me when I told him of the boat’s loss, then he had gone to fight his battles with the insurers. I had been told that
Wavebreaker
was being salvaged and she would probably soon be back at her dockside, but I would not sail on her again, and neither would Ellen for McIllvanney had fired her. He did not actually have the power to fire me, but he hardly needed to, for I had lost any chance of a job when
Wavebreaker
sank. Instead of flowers, McIllvanney had sent a message demanding that I visit his office to sign the necessary forms for the loss adjuster and salvage company. I had thrown the message away.

When the funeral was over and the mourners were making their slow way back to Bonefish’s house where the singing would go on all day, Ellen gently steered me in the opposite direction. “I just want to talk with you,” she said. I had not seen Ellen since the morning we had been rescued from
Wavebreaker,
after which I had become entangled with the police. As soon as the police had reluctantly released me, I had come straight to see Bonefish, and thus Ellen and I had not seen each other until today when she and Jackson Chatterton had arrived on the morning ferry. When she had first disembarked I had not recognised her for she was wearing a dress. The dress was a very dark wine-red colour with a long full skirt and it made her look oddly unfamiliar and wondrously beautiful.

If Ellen wanted to talk to me in private she was to be disappointed. Jackson Chatterton, suspecting we wanted to be alone, had the tact to walk away, but Ellen and I had hardly been ten seconds together before we were waylaid by Denise Harriman. The senator’s aide had been joined by a tall, short-haired man who had not been in the church, and whom I had not spotted at the graveside. He was in his early middle-age and had a tanned hatchet face with gunfighter eyes. “This is Warren Smedley,” Denise Harriman introduced us, “Mr Smedley is an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington DC.”

Smedley nodded, but did not offer to shake hands. There was something very sharklike in the economy of his movements and in his silence. He was wearing a dark blue suit, a starched white shirt and a sober grey tie.

“The senator asked Mr Smedley to talk with you,” Denise Harriman explained the agent’s presence, then paused as though to let Smedley speak, but the DEA agent just stared out across the long shoaling lines of foam that ran white and ragged from north to east. We had all stopped at the shoreline and were standing in awkward proximity. Ellen, her eyes red from too much crying, took my hand and pulled me a pace backwards.

“Did you know that Robin-Anne telephoned her father’s office?” Denise Harriman suddenly asked me, as though to break the embarrassing silence.

“No,” I said. “Did she want him to rescue her?”

“The very opposite. She called to say that she and her brother are entirely safe and happy, but are not coming home.” Denise Harriman took a pair of sunglasses from her handbag. “She refused to tell us where they were hiding. They’re very stupid children.”

“It was all planned,” I said tiredly.

“We imagine so, yes.” Denise Harriman did not sound very interested, or perhaps she was just nervous of the silent and glowering Warren Smedley who was listening to our conversation but contributing nothing towards it.

“I think Rickie only suggested the cruise-cure so he could get his passport back and join his drug friends,” I said. “He fooled us all, didn’t he?”

“Especially the senator,” Denise Harriman said very tartly, as though any inconvenience that the rest of us might have experienced as a result of Rickie’s machinations were as nothing compared to the senator’s sufferings. “Senator Crowninshield personally put up the half-million dollars cash for his son’s bail.”

Ellen made a scornful noise, and I suspected she was about to compare the level of bail with the millions of dollars that the senator spent on his own election campaigns. “Damn Rickie,” I blurted out before Ellen could say anything. I was thinking of Bonefish’s loss, which was so much greater than any the senator had suffered.

Smedley turned on me suddenly, as though my words had alarmed or intrigued him. “Are you apprised of Rickie Crowninshield’s present whereabouts?” he asked in a very nasal but oddly toneless voice.