Billingsgate Shoal (21 page)

I lay back in the bunk on the starboard side. A
porthole was directly to my right. Above and behind me to the left
was the companionway. Wicked sounds scudded down through it. Sounds
of mad water and storm. And then I became fully conscious of the
building din in my ears: the crashing of the rain upon the cabin top
and decks. It roared and pounded. It ran and whispered in mounting
rivulets along the coaming and through the scuppers.

I smuggled into the down covers and sipped., Outside
there was wrack and ruin all about me: gale-force winds, pelting
rain, and angry tide. Two feet from me was cold water, dark with
endless murky bottoms and slimy things. I was alone, floating in a
howling gale. But inside, the gimballed lamps shone brightly, the
coal stove sent. forth its warm radiance. The whiskey had tugged
lovingly at my brain now, so it was a wee bit soft at the edges. It
was like the filmy curl of a breaker—that leading edge of a
breaking wave that foams and tumbles leaping onward, that fizzes
outward slightly in delicious anticipation of the Great Going On.

I shook the tiny grate and closed the damper cover
halfway. The coals, now diminished, glowed merrily. Temporarily
braving the storm's ferocity, I opened the hatch shutters and stuck
my head out under the gizmo canopy. The rain sound shifted from a
drum roll to a rattlesnake hiss. The anchor light was fine. I plunged
back down below, leaving the shutters open. It would get cold in the
cabin now. I blew out the gimballed lights, tossed off the last of
the Scotch, and fell back on the pillow, listening. I was propelled
down a roaring musical tunnel of sound and motion to sleep.
 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I AWOKE AT SIX A.M., hungry as a tiger. I emerged
from my rabbit hole and poked my head out under the gizmo and looked
around. It was bad.

Now in most places in the world, an all-night
rainstorm means that the morn will dawn bright, sparkly clear, with
blue skies and sun. In most places, yes.

In New England, an all-night rain means that Mother
Nature is getting warmed up. She's doing her sitting-up exercises for
the real bad stuff. The violent storm had given way to a thin
drizzle. These spells of Heavenly Displeasure may last for two or
three days. The sky is overcast, and changes from dark to less dark.
What remains constant is the near-invisible rain of tiny threads of
water droplets which, over an extended period of time, make
everything damp: all your clothes, your socks especially, your skin,
your carpets and bedsheets, curtains, and your spirits.

I could hear the faint patter of the drizzle on the
tarp that formed the gizmo. I was depressed. I wanted a big hot meal
with lots and lots of coffee. I looked at the tiny alcohol stove in
the cramped galley. I shook my head. The last thing I wanted to do in
my hungry and depressed state was to sit kneeling down in front of a
small stove—you have to kneel down in a catboat; there isn't enough
up-and-down room to do anything e1se—and cook my breakfast. I'd
have to pump up the stove and clean up everything afterward. No, I
deserved better after what I'd been through the previous night. I
deserved to sit in a booth and order heaps of everything. I returned
to the cabin and got dressed. Almost as an afterthought, I took my
dark glasses to help hide the black eye, which was hanging on like a
summer cold. I peeked out from under the canvas again and wished it
weren't so.

The tide had receded, leaving a lot of muddy, dusky
banks of purple mud and slime. The water was quiet. Even in the
drizzle it reflected the dank earth and dull brick buildings of North
Plymouth. It didn't even look like water. It looked like used motor
oil. I heard a creak like an old rusty hinge. Birds. Two gulls were
gliding over the slick, as if afraid to land on it. They glided
motionless, wings steady, about two feet off the water, rasping and
churring. They wheeled and pumped air with their long wings, settling
on what looked like a giant cowpie in the middle of the still shine.
Even the birds were depressed.

"This is awful," I murmured. I sat down on
one of the cockpit cushions, which I dredged up out of the lazaret.
If you wanna see ugly, I'll show you ugly: North Plymouth in a slow
morning drizzle at low tide. There was a tall smokestack across from
me near Gray's Beach. It marked the commercial pier built by the
Plymouth Cordage Company, which (I later discovered) used to make
hempen ropes, twine, and that grisly stuff you see in lumber yards
called sisal. Anyway, the Plymouth Cordage Company was doing about as
well as the Acme Buggywhip Corporation, which was not very. The
cordage company was in a state representative of many older New
England industries: like a punk poker hand, it had folded.

I heard a low growl off to my left, and saw a dragger
bravely making its way through the muck out into the main channel. A
bit later came the high whine of an outboard, and a skiff darted out
from Duxbury Harbor and made a neat lazy crescent around past me and
followed the dragger. The wake came at me in dark troughs on the
shiny water.

I got the marine glasses out of the bosun's box and
glassed the pier. Nothing. I could see only one side of it. But there
were four draggers tied up there. . .no restaurant. I was getting
hungrier. The dock was dingy. It was a series of abandoned warehouses
and old pilings.

Everything was still and putrid. The water didn't
move; it sat. The still air hovered in thick dampness. The herring
gulls sat in long lines on the mudflats. They were all fluffed up and
pouty, and didn't say a thing. No shoreside sounds reached me. . .not
a screech of brakes, a pile driver, or a jet plane. Nothing.

I was seriously contemplating returning to the bunk
with a book and a bottle when I spotted an American flag hung limp on
a masthead at the end of a small pier near Gray's Beach. I grabbed
the binoculars and was delighted to see a gilded sign with a lobster
on it. Further inspection revealed a sign in the window that said
OPEN. Faint shapes bustled about within. Soon I had the dory whining
along on the slick straight toward the old stone dock. It was
apparently an old quay that had been furbished and graced with a
small restaurant. The big commercial pier was off to my left, and as
I proceeded toward breakfast I noticed that the boat dock curved
around the other side of the big brick warehouse, and was full of all
kinds of vessels. Several draggers were moored off the pier in the
gray water. The boats sat immobile, lapping up the waves of my tiny
wake that struck their big, blunt bows. I passed them and headed on
to the old stone quay. Arriving there I took the dory around and
moored it next to a slanting foot ramp that was, at low tide, about
45 degrees to the water.

As I was making fast, I looked at the
Hatton
riding far off in the mist. She slightly resembled a Gypsy caravan
because of the big gizmo tent that covered her boom.

I trudged along the big pier, clad in a waterproof
parka, thick woolen sweater, and my droopy canvas rain hat that just
about covered my face. Despite the clouds and rain I wore my
sunglasses to hide my black eye. My pants were getting slowly soaked.
But I didn't care; the wind was warm, and I would linger over
breakfast and coffee, and the Globe.

I followed a group of patrons into the place. The
varnished pine door was warm and sticky. The inside smelled a bit too
much of cooking oil. But it was crowded. At seven o'clock that had to
be some kind of recommendation. There were big booths separated from
one another by pine partitions that rose up a foot and a half above
the heads of the seated customers.

I sank into one of the booths at the far end of the
restaurant. Nearby was a window that looked out into the harbor and
the grim silent shapes of the big draggers that swung in a line into
the current of the incoming tide. Was one of them the boat that
awakened me in the wee hours? A waitress appeared and poured me
coffee. It was actually pretty good (and I'm fussy—if you haven't
already guessed). I ordered two poached eggs on toast, hash browns,
bacon, and a side plate of kippers with extra lemon. I removed my
dripping canvas hat and placed it on the seat next to me. I drank the
coffee and gobbled the breakfast. I had been sitting for perhaps half
an hour with the paper when a sound—or rather certain sounds in
sequence—sent my blood cold.

I don't know when I became aware of it. It crept upon
me gradually as I was reading the paper. Sometime in the middle of an
article about Ted Kennedy, I replaced the canvas rain hat upon my
head and drew it down on all sides. I slipped my damaged hand into
the depths of my thick woolen sweater, replaced the big dark glasses,
and turned into my booth to gaze out the window, hunched over.

And yet if anyone were to happen upon the scene and
ask me why I couldn't have answered. Perhaps it was that same
message—sent coursing through my injured brain—that forced me to
swim under the filthy waters of Gloucester Harbor rather than surface
to be killed. Like a Canada goose gliding low over a duckblind, I
veered warily. I sat hunched, invisible as I could make myself.

The sound I was hearing was the scuffing footstep of
a heavy man pacing back and forth behind me. Underneath that sound I
could hear, at intervals as regular as Old Faithful, the sniffing,
snorting, of a man nervously clearing his throat. I listened for ten
minutes. There was no mistake. The fearful hour in the cold water was
indelibly burned into my memory. I knew.

Mr. X, the Quiet One, the lethal sneak who sandbagged
people, was behind me.

The pine partition of the booth kept me out of view.
In the momentary dizziness of my discovery it—was curious how my
mind had remained in a rather pedestrian state as I stared out the
window, watching the big draggers in the gray drizzle. I felt a thump
at my back, and almost jumped out of my skin. I do not consider
myself the least bit cowardly (I suppose nobody does), but the
thought of that expert sapper behind my line of vision upset me. It
upset me a good deal.

The thump was someone sitting down in the booth
directly behind me, throwing. his weight back against the partition.
Was it Mr. X? I wasn't about to turn around and ask. Had he seen me?
Probably not. First of all, he certainly wasn't expecting Yours
Truly, having assumed that green crabs and slimy things were now
dining on my remains,. Also, there was the recent beard, the pulled
down cap, and my general low profile. I listened.

If indeed the patron behind me was Mr. X, or one of
his accomplices, it didn't come out in the talk, at least in the few
words I was able to hear. There was a continual reference to dawn,
which I later decided was Shawn, or Sean, but I wasn't I sure. The
partition kept thumping me in the kidneys, as if the occupant of the
next booth was on edge, or excited. I stared out at the boats in the
rain. I focused in especially on the one I thought bore a strong
resemblance to P
enelope
.
I stared hard. The more I stared, the more I realized it wasn't her.
Just wasn't, from a thousand big and little clues.

Perhaps one of these big boats was the one that
thumped by me in the night. . .but
Penelope
was not among them.

"We ready'?" came another voice from the
booth behind me.

'
Almost."

Then they talked some more, their words drowned out
by the clatter of dishes and chatter of customers. I looked at my I
watch: 7:40. Jack was to meet me at 4 P.M. at Duxbury! Plymouth
Harbor. If I failed to appear he was to call out the militia. Another
thump hit me in the kidneys and I heard the booth patrons get up and
walk away to the counter. I didn't move. Half a minute later the door
slammed, and I saw the two men walking past the window. The bigger
one was limping, ever so slightly. It was more a slight roll than a
limp. It was Mr. X. He was wearing a yellow slicker and a blue billed
hat. He had a dark beard. His shoulders were wide. Very wide. The man
next to him hobbled along quick and nervous, like a fox terrier.
There was something vaguely familiar about his manner. Finally I
recognized him as the man in the runabout who had streaked for shore
in Wellfleet Harbor to seek the much-needed repair job for
Penelope
.
I remembered too the same man hobbling with great agility on the sand
flats a few hours previous. The men reached the end of the dock and
began to descend a ramp to their boat, which obviously rode on the
water out of sight. But at the top the big man turned and stared at
something. Then I saw him in profile, and I knew I was looking at
James Schilling, presumed dead. My heart skipped about three beats in
a row—

Schilling was momentarily frozen at the top of the
ramp. What was he looking at?

Then I realized he was staring at the
Hatton
.
He kept looking at her a goodly time. Then he swung around, slow and
stately as a bull elk, and looked down at the water on the side of
the pier opposite the ramp he was standing on. That's where I'd tied
the dory. And then, he kept swinging around and fixed his level gaze
in my direction, though I was certain he didn't see me.

I didn't like it. I was about to glide casually over
to one of the phone booths and bunker down into it, back to the
window, if he came inside again. It wasn't that I was terribly afraid
he'd attempt something in a crowded restaurant. If so, assuming he
carried no firearm or hidden machete, I would I get in a few good
licks myself. Lord knows I had reason to. Besides I was getting to be
an expert at fighting lately. But I had to remain invisible from
Schilling. If he knew I wasn't dead, he'd keep after me. More
important, he'd realize his cover was blown, and lie low or
disappear. Had he recognized the
Hatton
?
I remembered again the glare he shot us when I took his picture as we
left Wellfleet. No doubt he'd gazed after the departing catboat
uneasily. Now he sees a catboat in Plymouth. No. I was worrying
unnecessarily. Still I couldn't help wonder if he knew, or even
thought, that the man in the Schooner Race was indeed the same fellow
who snapped his picture in the harbor. Had he put my two identities
together? I thought of the photograph on my driver's license.