Billingsgate Shoal (8 page)

Distant gulls cried, a faint plaintive
eeeyonk,
eyonk, yonk-yank-yank
. The groaner buoy
bleeped. The dune grass hissed, gray-green as it bent to the wind. It
would have been a lovely evening under ordinary circumstances.

"Charlie, the water's ready. Time to put them
in."

She had stopped at the lobster pool and bought two
gigantic specimens for dinner, no doubt to cheer me up. But it
didn't.

The thought of the two big
crustaceans scurrying and crawling their way into oblivion in the
scalding water did not appeal to me at all. As one who worked on
people's teeth and I mouths I was acutely aware of pain. If death
must be done, then best do it quickly, cleanly, with the proper
equipment. I fetched an ice pick from the back entry and then took
the lobsters from the refrigerator. I grabbed them by their middles;
they flung their arms out and backward in a futile attempt to take my
hands off. Their big claws were immobilized by the pegs and thick
rubber bands, and I was glad. I inserted the steel point quickly and
forcefully down between each animal's head and thorax. It made a
noise like a stapler. They didn't say or do a damn thing; when I
picked them up their bodies dangled like latex. I dropped the limp
corpses into the boiling water and put the butter on to melt. The
dinner helped some; we sat outside and watched the sun go down. It
hit bottom just when the bottle of chablis did.

* * *

The next morning at eleven they buried Allan Hart.
The funeral was bad enough, but to watch Jack and five other young
men carry the casket down the church aisle and out of the hearse to
the grave was unbearable. It was that first shovelful of dirt that
got me, and his mother. She wept openly, I silently, with little
convulsive shudders and throat squeals.

My fault. .. my fault. ..

We had Sarah and the rest over to the cottage
afterward. Extremely glum. Boy was I glad when it was over. Then I
sat and stared out across the water for the rest of the day. Life is
boring and death is terrifying. And here we are dangling on spider
silk, caught right in the middle.

The next day Mary went to a local art fair. When she
returned we sat at the kitchen table eating two small chef salads.
She had brought a copy of the Globe with her that somebody had left
behind at the fair. She flipped through it absently, and I saw a
picture flash by that I wanted to retrieve. I found it. It was a
picture of a boat. White and low-slung with a small cabin, it was a
lobster boat. I read the story. The boat, out of Marblehead, had
disappeared almost two weeks ago. It did not look good for the
skipper, a certain Andrew D'Corzo.

The article had set me to thinking. I had planned to
make contact with Daniel Murdock, the boatbuilder who had signed the
carpenter's certificate, as soon as I returned to Concord. But I
remembered what Lieutenant Ruggles had told me in his office about
vessels appearing and disappearing. Perhaps I should look for a boat
that had recently disappeared and would roughly fit the dimensions of
Penelope. If indeed the boat I saw wasn't new, then she had to have a
previous life: What better way to discover it than to check on boats
recently lost?

"How's the wrist?" asked Mary.

"Still hurts. And I can't drive golf balls. I
can't beat you at tennis. I can't swim. I can't practice my trade
except to remove stitches from previous extractions?

"What makes you so sure you'd beat me at tennis?
And anyway it's your left wrist."

"How could I serve?"

"Oh. That brat. Did you ever decide on an
appropriate torture, by the way?"

"Yes, I have in mind a dual program for the lad:
the Agony of the Thousand Cuts to be followed by Impalement. Well?"

She nodded approvingly as she popped the last forkful
into her mouth.

I got the number of Murdock's boatyard in Gloucester
and called all day without an answer. Then I called the Boston office
of the Coast Guard. At the Department of Marine Safety, they informed
me that the USCG kept a case log—a file—on all recently missing
boats, regardless of size or purpose. They had various investigative
procedures to track them down too, like phoning likely harbors and
boatyards. If the errant skipper left a float plan, or indicated even
vaguely his plans of destination, the Coast Guard cutters would
traverse the probable routes, looking for the vessel or wreckage of
same. After a "reasonable time," the files were closed,
with the vessel and crew presumed lost. I asked what a reasonable
time was, and was told it varied. If a vessel disappeared during a
violent gale, the reasonable time was not as long as under other
conditions. This seemed to make sense.

"Where can I get a list of vessels lost during
the last month or two?"

"From where, sir?"

"From the entire New England region, but
especially from the Cape and the Islands northward to, say,
Portsmouth."

"We have that information here. It's available
to the public."

I thanked him and hung up. Mary was in the hallway in
front of the mirror trying on a new straw hat. She canted it at
various angles and spun on her toe.

"Honey, I'm going to put my unexpected vacation
to use. I'm going to locate the
Penelope
."

"That's good. How?"

"Tomorrow I'm going up to Boston and through
some files. Then I'm going to track down some boatbuilders and
reporters."

"You could work on the gutters and repair the
broken window in the garage."

"Can't. Are you
forgetting the wrist?"

* * *

I was at the outskirts of the city in a little over
an hour, and shortly thereafter was pulling Mary's car into the lot
behind the Boston Garden. I turned left on Causeway Street and went
right past the regional Coast Guard headquarters to the smaller
building next door that housed the Boston station.

There I was shown the files that contained the case
logs. I began to scan them, starting with cases that occurred in May.
Some of these were already marked for abandonment; the CG was
assuming the boat lost, the crew dead. Two of these were draggers
that disappeared in heavy weather over Georges Bank. I went through
all the files. As might be suspected, the recent cases were more
numerous. Presumably these would be whittled down as people gave up
hope and as boats were found. I imagined they found quite a few of
them tucked away in small coves and in big marinas, the owner with
his case of whiskey and his girlfriend explaining lamely that geez,
they just seemed to forget about the time. . .

One case caught my eye immediately. It stuck out like
Ayer's Rock. It was a boat named
Windhover
that disappeared—or rather failed to report back—June 25. She was
out of Gloucester, and her dimensions matched those of
Penelope
to a T.
Windhover
disappears end of June in calm weather (so the report said).
Penelope
appears, having been allegedly built in same port, in Wellfleet two
months later.

The
Windhover
was a noncommercial vessel engaged for a the purpose of
"archaeological salvage" (this phrase directly from the
report). I remembered now Ruggles's comment as shown on the
Penelope's documentation certificate, that she was also
noncommercial. Most of all, her home port stuck out: Gloucester.

Penelope
had allegedly
just been built by Mr. Daniel Murdock of Gloucester. But Sonny
Pappas, who'd repaired her, said she wasn't new. I felt little bells
tinkling in the back of the gray matter.

The
Windhover's
owner was a man named Walter Kincaid, of Manchester-by-the-Sea, a
posh town just south of Gloucester. I left the Coast Guard and
started up toward Beacon Hill with the name ringing in my head.
Walter Kincaid. Walter Kincaid. Where had I heard that? I was
standing on the corner opposite the Saltonstall Building on Cambridge
Street when it came to me: Wallace Kinchloe. Wallace Kinchloe was the
owner of the
Penelope
.
Walter Kincaid—Wallace Kinchloe.

I trudged up the hill. The chimes at the Park Street
Church boomed ten o'clock. I had a fifteen minute walk to Copley
Square and the Boston Public Library. I crossed over Beacon Hill,
just skirting the State House and dodging piles of dog shit that
littered the old cobblestone sidewalks. On the average day in Boston
you will smell four things, this being one of them. The other three
odors are Italian cooking, garbage, and the Bay if the wind is right.
I crossed the Boston Common, and made my way through clots of winos,
dopers, religious fanatics, street jugglers, street musicians, thugs,
pushers, and street crazies, to Boylston Street, where I turned right
and headed up to Copley Square.

Once inside the library I made my way to the
periodical room and scanned a series of microfilms of the Boston
Globe. I asked for the last week in June and the first week in July.
It wasn't long before I found the account of the missing boat. This
is what I read:

Windhover Still Missing

GL0UCESTER—The research vessel
Windhover
,
owned and operated by Walter Kincaid of Manchester, is still reported
as missing. by the Coast Guard. The
Windhover
set out from Gloucester June 25, and has not been heard from or seen
since. Mr. Kincaid, a retired businessman who founded the Wheel-Lock
Corporation of Melrose, used the vessel for exploring various
archaeological expeditions along the New England coast.

According to his wife, Laura, Kincaid was
headed to Provincetown as a first stop in an expedition that would
take the
Windhover
down the outer Cape coast to the islands.

The disappearance of the boat is all the
more baffling to the Coast Guard because of the mild weather
recently, and accompanying calm seas.

But what was really interesting was the photograph
that went along with the aiticle. This was what I had been seeking.
The
Windhover
looked
familiar. Of course this wasn't surprising considering that she was a
converted commercial fishing boat. Draggers, trawlers, and lobster
boats look a lot alike. So in fact, do pleasure boats. Yet there was
a certain lilt of the gunwale line, a rise and sheer of her stem
particularly, that struck a familiar chord. I shunted the photograph
around in the microfilm viewer machine with the knots on its sides. I
read the credit on the photo's bottom: Globe Photo by Peter Scimone.

OK, I'd call him and get a print. I returned the
microfilm and on the way back down Boylston Street stopped at the
Boylston Street Union for a run and a sauna bath. I ran five miles
around the gym floor; there is no track at the Boston YMCU. There is
no pool there either. In fact there isn't anything except an old
four-story stone building that's loaded with old musty locker rooms,
an ancient gymnasium, and a healthy population of cockroaches. The
lobby, if such I may call it, looks like the Greyhound bus station in
Indianapolis in 1936. And that's doing it a favor.

Well then—you might well ask—what does the YMCU
have? What it has or rather what it is, is a microcosmic slice of
that place called Boston, thinly shaved, stained, and mounted in a
slide. If you want to see Boston, don't go to Newbury Street. Newbury
Street could be anywhere. The North End is good; it could only be in
Boston, or New York, but it's all Italian. Likewise the city of South
Boston (or Southie, not to be confused with the South End of Boston)
is all Irish. Moreover these ethnic enclaves leave out groups like
the blacks, Chinese, and Spanish-speaking Bostonians. But everybody's
at the Union. Everybody. Guys named McNally and Ferreggio. Washington
and Pekkalla, Chang, Papadopoulos, Garcia, Frentz, Jainaitis,
Hudachko, and. . .and Adams. Just about every third guy who goes to
the Union checks a piece at the front desk: .38 police specials, .22
autos, I've even seen a few .357 magnums and .45s too. They're cops,
detectives, and prosecutors. We don't got no violence or trouble at
the YMCU. Nope. Because the place is crawling with fuzz. And to help
them out are the body builders, muscle freaks, and karate/Aikido
addicts who can eat Buicks for lunch and break cement with their
pinky fingers.

I have two friends at the YMCU. One is Liatis
Roantis, the Lithuanian ex-mercenary who teaches martial arts. He
spent some years with the French Foreign Legion and some with the
U.S. Special Forces, where he taught guys how to kill people with
their earlobes. Somebody once asked me to describe him. I said that
if you took every Charles Bronson movie ever made and took all the
characters that Bronson ever played and melted them down in a test
tube, the result would be Liatis Roantis. I had taken four courses
from him: beginning and intermediate judo and karate. Boy is he good.
To mess with him in any way—especially after he's had about seven
beers—invites death or severe permanent injury. He is a pit bulldog
in human shape. '