Buried At Sea (25 page)

"Sony. I'm in a whirlpool."

"That must be a sight."

"My weight-lifter boyfriend likes it."

"Oh. Well, you can't blame a man for trying. You have a nice voice." It was night. The club was closed. She had the whirlpool to herself—a tub of warm water swirling around like her brain. She loved that Jim had surprised the heck out of her. The daredevil in her said, Go for it! But it made the question "Who is Will Spark?" more important than ever.

Charlie Post had retired to a Daytona Beach trailer park after serving a sentence for stock fraud. Shannon had met him in an Internet chat room—Mooches Anonymous—frequented by victims of telemarketing rip-offs. This stockbroker seemed to be atoning for his crimes by letting his former victims flame him. He seemed lonely and had leaped at the chance to talk on the telephone.

"Will Spark?" Shannon asked. "Do you know him" "Never heard of him."

"I saw his name attached to CanCure.com."

"I didn't know anybody called Will Spark at CanCure." "Maybe he was after your time?"

"No, I was there from the day we opened shop to the day the Feds kicked the door in."

"Did you know everyone there?"

"Sure. It was just six guys in a room. No Will Spark." "Only six?"

"Six guys, six phones. And the boss. The guy who had set it up."

"Could any of them have ever changed their names?" "All six, and the boss." Charlie Post laughed.

"Did you?"

"Naw. I was getting too old for that stuff?'

She had to be sure Billy Cole and Will Spark were the same crook. 'Was CanCure.com completely a scam?" "What do you mean?"

"Was there a cure?"

"It wasn't about a cure. It was about investing in a cure. People are greedy. They want to get rich quick. We used the buzzwords, pushed the hot buttons. We gave them the chance to feel that it was their turn to get rich like everybody else. Which it was. For a while."

"In their dreams?"

"Where do you think people live?"

"One more question."

"I got all night."

"Were any of them sailors?"

"Sure. The boss was a heck of a sailor. A regular yachtsman. Owned his own boat."

"Was his boat named Hustle?"

"No. It was called Runner." He laughed. "Didn't work. They caught him anyway. Funny thing, for a smart guy, he pulled a mighty slow getaway."

"And his name was Will, right?"

"No. His name was Billy. Billy Cole. A pisser, excuse my language. Hell of a guy."

"What happened to him?"

"Five years."

"You mean in prison?"

"Out in six months, I heard."

"Have you seen him?"

"Christ, no. I told you, I've gone straight?'

"Did Billy go straight too?"

Charlie Post laughed again. "Billy Cole? Straight? If Billy ever died, they'd have to dig a crooked hole. Hell of a guy, though. He could make you feel good about selling your sister—"

"Could Billy Cole have changed his name to Will Spark?" 'What does Spark look like?"

"Sixty-something, white hair, and looks like a banker. He's in good shape."

"Billy Cole's older than that, I think. Can't say he was in good shape:'

"Could he look like a banker?"

"Anytime he had to."

"And he is a sailor?"

"Long John Silver. Minus the parrot. Plus a leg?' "Well, thank you very much."

"That's it? Good-bye? We just got started."

"I really appreciate it. If you're ever up this way, come by and I'll be happy to comp you into the club."

"Terrific. Maybe I'll take you up on it. Try your whirlpool. Hey, if you run into Billy Cole, say hi."

"Is Billy Cole his real name?"

"It was when I knew him."

Shannon found a Seattle magazine with a photo of Billy Cole in handcuffs. She wondered if she had made a mistake. The elderly mastermind of the CanCure fraud looked frail and much older than the vigorous Will Spark Jim had described. If anything, he looked a little like the blurry picture of the old man on Will Spark's health club membership card. She compared the two photographs carefully, until she realized what he had done. It was neat trick. He wore eyeglasses and looked down from the camera. In the full-body shot in the newspaper he had lowered his arms to shrink his shoulders. The overall impression was of a bent old man peering uncertainly through his glasses. The newspaper quoted the prosecutor's lamenting the mild sentence—millions of dollars had been stolen and little of the money was returned to the bilked investors. But his case had been weak. The only codefendant who turned state's evidence had been shredded by the defense lawyers. While Billy Cole, in testimony one reporter described as "dazzling," had hammered home the fact—in a "quavering" voice—that the charges, which he vigorously denied, were for investor fraud, not patient fraud.

"No one invested their money hoping for their own cure; they were hoping to make a killing."

In the end, the jury returned minor convictions on a technicality. Billy Cole was released soon after with time off for good behavior, time served, and consideration of his age and poor health. Upon his release, a reporter who had obviously grown to like Billy quoted him as saying that disappointed investors were a hazard that investment bankers had to live with, just as people in Seattle had to live with constant rain. Claiming he was tired of both, he boarded a sailboat and headed into Puget Sound, bound, he claimed, "For a faraway sunny beach where I hope to live out my days trading seashells:'

Hustle crossed the equator on a dark night. There was supposed to be some ceremony, Jim recalled reading. Some custom of the sea where sailors who had "crossed the line" initiated those who hadn't. But Will was fast asleep, zonked out on penicillin and morphine, so he sat alone in the cockpit, holding the GPS in his hand, watching it tick the long, lingering tenths of miles like the world's slowest video game. The South Atlantic spread to the ends of the earth. The boat was doing six knots. Seven miles an hour? A brisk walk? Which made the vast sea measureless. Three thousand four hundred miles to go. He thought of writing Shannon. Email offered a striking illusion of closeness. Virtual proximity? Not tonight. Not when distance felt so real. He wandered below to look at the chart. His penciled line from GPS fix to GPS fix pointed southwest into emptiness—a hyphen-sized fleck of lead for each day's run. He inspected the line through Will's magnifying glass. The boat was a dot lost in a dot. He switched on the depth finder. It read no bottom. Out of range. He found the nearest depth reading on the chart-3,861 meters of water under the hull. Three miles deep. Still thinking that crossing the equator deserved some ceremony, he found Moby-Dick on Will's bookshelf and thumbed through it looking for what Melville said about crossing the equator. He couldn't find it anywhere, but he did stumble over the phrase "unshored, harborless immensities," which aptly described what lay ahead. And he learned that the whalers called the grounds off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata "the plate," which gave his goal, 3,400 miles ahead, a name to savor.

We are not lost, he thought. We are only hiding.

He missed green salads. He missed the smell of laundry driers on a suburban street. He missed Shannon's cat, a wild one she had tamed. But most of all he missed Shannon. Missed her big laugh. Missed the hand she would slip into

his. Missed her in bed. He went looking for his wallet to find her picture. The depth-finder alarm dinged urgently.

Jim rushed to the monitor, his heart leaping.

Fifty meters. He ran up on deck. Land? This was the middle of nowhere and of course there was no land. He returned to the screen. No bottom. Then, as he watched in puzzlement, sixty meters, fifty, forty . . . Will called. The alarm had awakened him.

A school of fish, he explained to Jim. Or a whale. Or even, he added with a smile, a giant squid, on a placid voyage under theirs.

"Sailing," said Will, walking shakily into the galley, "doesn't have to be the most expensive way to be uncomfortable."

He was holding counter edges and hand grips with his right hand, favoring the left. "How do you feel?" Jim asked. Something about him looked better. His cheeks were pink and smooth.

"You shaved?"

"Of course I shaved. How many times do I have to remind you that cleanliness, intelligent food shopping, careful stowage, kitchen skills, and a decent bottle of wine are requisites for a talent for civilization."

"I see you're feeling much better."

"Not quite up to the bottle of wine."

"Hungry?"

"I want a shower, first."

"The water maker's on the fritz again."

"Hose me down on the foredeck."

Jim helped him up on deck and into a harness, then walked him forward. He gave Will a saltwater bath with the fire hose, then turned it on himself.

Drying off in the cockpit, before the salt stuck to his skin, Will said, "I would kill for French toast and black coffee. And then I think it's high time we give Hustle a spring cleaning. We'll start with the galley. It's looking a little grungy." With Will directing, Jim mixed dried eggs and long life ultrapasteurized milk. Then he hacked thick chunks of bread from their last frozen loaf. They thawed swiftly in the heavy heat. He glanced at Will, and the instant he started to speak Jim chorused, "Now here's the secret of French toast."

"Okay, wise guy. You know the secret?"

"Tell me the secret."

"Patience. Most people don't wait for the bread to be thoroughly soaked." Will tried to help clean the galley, but he quickly tired. Jim said, "Why don't you check your e-mail? You haven't in a while."

When he glanced over Will's shoulder, he saw that the screen was a crazy quilt of numbers and symbols.

"What's with the squiggles? Secret formula for Sentinel?"

"It's encrypted. I told you the McVays can intercept email. If they interpret this all they get is our e-mail addresses—which tells them zip—and a code they can't crack before doomsday."

Will leaned forward suddenly, shielding the computer's keyboard with his body, and typed in a command. When he straightened up, Jim saw that the laptop was displaying an ordinary e-mail.

"What did you do?"

"Told the computer to decode the e-mail."

"How?"

Will shrugged. "My people installed a chip and a program." Jim saw the greeting: "My very good friend."

"Who's that?"

"One of my cavemen. Wants to know why he isn't rich yet." Okay. Jim. Here's who I think your friend is:

Jim read Shannon's e-mail over and over. He didn't want Will to be a crook. And he sure as hell didn't want

Sentinel to be a fraud. He wanted a piece of something that was real. Something that would make him and give him a place in the world. The trouble was, Shannon's last lines read:

Will Spark/Billy Cole landed in jail because he suckered people into investing money in so-called high-tech medical research that was nothing more than a scam. I'm sorry. darling. but your shipmate is a con man.

He started to type back, "You have no absolute proof that Will and this Billy Cole are the same . ." He stopped, reopened the incoming-mail window, and stared hard at Shannon's letter. Of course she did—much more than just the letter with a common name Jim had given her, or the inscription on Will's watch.

Runner. Will's last boat, previous to Hustle. He flipped open Ocean Passages. The names of three boats were written inside the cover: Cordelia. Runner. Hustle. Jim looked into Will's cabin. The old man looked asleep, but he opened his eyes. Then he removed his headset and said, "You have to hear this."

He pulled the wire and music poured from his cabin speakers. "Mel Torme."

"My mother listened to him. My father couldn't stand him, but he was an old hippie, so what did he know?" "Hey, grow up. Cut your father a little slack."

"He called me 'man.' As in, 'You had to be there, man.' Demonstrations, free love—like he'd won World War H or something. Talked and talked and talked like you, Will. On and on."

"And you listened?"

"It got to be a habit."

"Then listen to the piano. George Shearing. Do you hear what he's doing? Not a single note on the melody. Mel's carrying the melody, Shearing's playing between the notes. It's so beautiful."

"Will. We have to talk?'

"Jim, there's so much to love. ..." He closed his eyes.

"And so goddamned much to envy. So much you wish you could do. Wish you could have done."

"Is that why you're a crook?"

"Crook? What are you talking about?"

"Billy Cole? CanCure.com?"

Will turned off the music.

SHANNON CHECKED YOU out on the Internet. She found the trial and that you went to jail."

"Clever Shannon. What else did she tell you?"

"You didn't go to Yale."

"Never said I did."

"But you wear Yale shorts."

Will gave him a look. "They came back in the laundry. They fit. I kept them." Jim shot back, "No, you bought 'em or stole 'em. You wanted to look like something you weren't."

"So?"

"It's dishonest," Jim yelled, and when that word seemed to echo too thinly to matter, he yelled louder, "It's a lie!"

"It's a world of labels, Jim. When people think you're Ivy League, they treat you better than a kid from the wrong side of the tracks."

"Is that how you got into the Larchmont Yacht Club? By claiming you went to Yale?"

"Oh man, you are on a tear. Do you really want to know how I got into the Larchmont Yacht Club? I hung out there since I was eleven. You want to know how? I needed work. I

got my first job painting boat bottoms. I kept my ears open and learned how to act. Pretty soon I realized that the ritzy high-class sailing world was actually quite open to newcomers. All you needed was money. Or skills. Anyway, one day this rich old guy was short crew on his Soling. We won the race."

"Will? I was a lit major, remember? I read The Great Gatsby."

"I was more like a slow-motion Gatsby," Will replied. "It took time. But instead of bagging groceries to help my family make ends meet I was spending my weekends with the swells. And their daughters."