Crackdown (7 page)

We docked ten minutes later, and Thessy and I carried the luggage out to the yard where the courtesy taxi shimmered in the heat. One of the lawyers’ wives wanted to know the secret of Ellen’s coffee, and Ellen modestly said she just followed the percolator instructions, while the truth was that she put a cupful of cheap instant coffee powder into every percolated pot. The proctologist handed me three envelopes, one addressed to each of us, then told me that if I ever had piles I could rely on him to cut them out for cost.

Ellen held her happy smile till the courtesy taxi had disappeared, then she tore up the proctologist’s business card. “The creep suggested I might be his receptionist.” She ripped open her envelope to find two hundred dollars. Mine had the same amount, while Thessy’s only contained a hundred, though the proctologist had also given him the ‘Go Dawgs’ hat. Not that the inequity of the tip mattered, for we always pooled and shared the money evenly.

It took just over an hour to empty
Wavebreaker
of her garbage and dirty linen, and then to hook up the shoreside electricity and pump diesel and fresh water into her tanks. Those chores done, and the synthetic fabric of the precious sails covered from the ravages of sunlight, I hefted my old marine kit bag on to the dock where Ellen was waiting to ambush me.

Ellen planned to return to her tiny apartment in the town where she kept her precious books and where, on an old manual typewriter, she wrote what she called her ‘five-finger exercises’, which she would never let anyone read. McIllvanney had offered to let her stay on board
Wavebreaker,
so long as the boat’s air conditioners were disconnected, but his offer was not as generous as it seemed for Ellen would have been little more than an unpaid security guard and also subject to Bellybutton’s endlessly tedious suggestions, and she far preferred her small hot room in the busy crowded apartment block that smelt of cooking all day and marijuana all night.

“I’ll see you in a week’s time, Nick?” Ellen now challenged me.

I shook my head. “You know you won’t. I’ve got a boat to mend.” I tried to edge past her, but she blocked my progress with her bicycle. “Sammy Meredith can skipper the boat,” I suggested.

“Sam Meredith is a creep. Be here in one week, Nick, or you won’t see me again!”

Thessy was already waiting at the yard gate where our taxi thumped and quivered. Ellen was still arguing with me as Thessy and I climbed in and backfired away, but I was no longer listening. I had
Masquerade
to mend and a life to live and, even if it meant living it without Ellen, my charter days were done. I was free.

I had been in New York when
Masquerade
was stolen. I had gone there from Florida because my father had pleaded with me to go. He was opening his celebrated King Lear on Broadway. He was old, he told me, and he was feeling his age, and he had played the Lear for five months at the National in London and he was tired, and he wanted to patch things up with me because it would make him feel better, and I was the only one of all his children whom he could trust, and he needed my youth to support him at this difficult time and so, like a fool, I had believed him and flown to New York where I had found the rogue ensconced in a suite of the Plaza with a frizzy-haired girl young enough to be his great-granddaughter. “The dear soul wishes to be in the theatre,” he told me, “and her legs are good enough to allow me to encourage that ambition, though doubtless at the risk of slipping a disc or two in my back. Would you like to sleep with her?”

I went to his opening night. He was brilliant. I still don’t know how he does it. He despises the method actors. “Grubby little players,” he calls them, “vermin in greasepaint. They’re not paid to be amateur psychiatrists, but to be players, to be actors. The stage is a job, dear Nick, not a mindfuck.” On that first Broadway night I had stood in the wings where he was absent-mindedly fondling the breasts of his frizzy-haired admirer, and to me he had looked just like any other dirty old man; but then, as the royal fanfare sounded, he had twitched his grey gown, given me a wink, and walked into the stage’s glare. “Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester.” He had spoken Lear’s opening lines and I had felt a shiver run through the theatre’s great darkness, because the voice was there, and the power of it, and he was suddenly not a dirty old man at all, but a great, kind, foolish and painfully honest King.

The performance was a triumph. Later that night, drinking champagne at the first night party, he gave me his usual disclaimers; how it was all an illusion, everything was an illusion, all life was an illusion, and how he, Sir Tom, was the master of illusion, but how his dear children were real because they alone could not be spawned from the imagination. “Sweet soul—” he took my arm in his, “come home to me. To England.” He was drunk.

“Why?”

“You could succeed me. You have it in you, you know.”

“Of course I don’t.”

“You are my bad conscience, Nick. That is why I need you.” He looked across the room to where a famous actress held scornful court. “I screwed her in a hot-air balloon. Over California. Her husband chased us in a jeep, and the oscillations of the basket told him what I was doing to his wife, and the poor man was jealous.” My father had begun to giggle. “Do you know what she told me, Nick? She said she could feel a shard of genius enter her soul with my seed! Oh, Nick! How generous I have been with my genius. Her silly husband shot himself, which was hardly surprising because she was a rotten lay.”

He talked me into staying two more days, and thus three days passed before I discovered that
Masquerade
was missing. It was another seven days before she was found grinding her starboard side to shreds on a coral reef north of Straker’s Cay in the Far-Out Islands. Bonefish Straker reckoned that some Bahamian kids must have stolen the boat as a means of getting home, but we would never know who had wrecked her, only that they had removed a dinghy load of gear including her chronometer, sextant, VHF, barometer, spare sails, lines, fenders, and even the mattress off the starboard quarter-berth. They had stolen my good oilskins, but the thieves had never found my small stash of money which had been hidden in a redundant sea-cock, nor had they found the old Webley .455 revolver that I had hidden deep in
Masquerade
’s bilges. The gun itself had been a prop in a film version of
Journey’s End
in which my father had starred, and when the filming was over he had ‘forgotten’ to return the pistol which was still in good working order. I had fewer than a hundred rounds for the gun which I kept solely as a deterrent for those remote places where cruising yachtsmen are seen as plump victims, ripe for pillaging, and the Webley offered me good protection for, though the gun was over seventy years old, it was massively built and frighteningly powerful.

Bonefish Straker had rescued
Masquerade,
propping her up in his own backyard and refusing to take any money from me as a salvage fee. Bonefish Straker was Thessalonians’ father, and also father to two dozen other children, most of them orphans who had been unofficially adopted by Bonefish and his wife, Sarah. Bonefish’s real name was Hector, but he had earned his nickname because of his uncanny ability to find the elusive fish. He was reckoned one of the islands’ best fishing guides, a man who could name his own price to the rich northerners who came to the blue waters to kill gamefish, but Bonefish believed that his family might stray from the path of righteousness if he spent too much time away from home so he restricted his guide work to just a few weeks of the year. The rest of the time he caught snapper or conch or lobster, and brooded over the souls of his ramshackle family; each of whom was named for a different book in the Bible. He had started at the back of the good book and was perversely working his way towards Genesis, which meant that his eldest daughter was called Revelation Straker; a young woman as pretty as her name, and as happy as all the other children who grew up under Bonefish’s skinny care. Bonefish, in brief, was a very good man who had never heard of Sir Thomas Breakspear, and I was a very lucky man for the fortunate accident of having met Bonefish.

He watched in anxious silence as I ran a hand over the repairs he had begun on
Masquerade.
A Danish yawl had been wrecked on the far side of the island two years before and Bonefish had rescued some of her oak timbers which he had scarfed in to
Masquerade
’s broken hull. Only one rib had needed replacing and Bonefish apologised that he had fashioned that new one from a piece of his own Madeira wood.

“It’s a wonderful job,” I said respectfully. It was, too.

“I vould have done more, sir, but life is busy.”

“Don’t call me ‘sir’. My name’s Nick.”

“Werry busy, sir,” Bonefish went on as though I had not spoken. He called all white men ‘sir’. To him we were still the missionaries who had brought God to his soul and law to his land. I had tried to tell him that the world had changed drastically, but Bonefish did not want to believe in change. He was descended from slaves who had accompanied their master, one Rafe Straker, from Long Island in 1783. Rafe Straker, like many of the original white settlers of the Bahamas, had been an American loyalist who could not stomach life under George Washington. The white Straker family had long disappeared, their genes and blood melded into the vigorous bodies of their freed slaves, and only the Straker name lived on to be given new dignity by Bonefish and his family. “I don’t know from vere ve’ll fetch the copper.” Bonefish drew his hand over the abraded edges of the copper sheathing left on
Masquerade’s
hull.

“I’ll have some sent from England, and some bronze nails. But we can get the tar and brown paper locally?” The copper was bedded on to the wood with tarred brown paper.

Bonefish gave me a swift silent grin. “I think ve can manage tar and paper, sir.”

Thessy, squatting nearby as he waited for his father’s permission to join the conversation, looked up as a twin-engined plane howled low overhead. The plane’s registration number was so faded as to be illegible, but I recognised the machine anyway. It belonged to the Maggot, whose real name was John Maggovertski. The Maggot was an expatriate American who ran a slew of businesses from his Grand Bahama home. All of the Maggot’s businesses were perpetually on the fringe of bankruptcy. One of his shakier concerns was an air-taxi service with which he scared the wits out of travellers too innocent to know better than to fly with him. The shriek of the plane’s engines drowned our voices, so Bonefish and I just watched as the plane sank towards Straker Cay’s small airstrip. Once the machine had disappeared behind the trees Bonefish shook his head sadly. To him all aircraft were harbingers of dreadful change, mere noisy messengers of a Godless world; which, I realised, was a pretty accurate description of the Maggot himself.

I assumed the Maggot was delivering or picking up a customer, but it was none of my business, so I stripped down to my shorts and began work as Thessy, his brother Philemon and their father took a battered wooden skiff across the lagoon. Two brown pelicans flapped past as I began shaping the broken ends of
Masquerade’s
shattered planking. The sun was warm on my back, but the south-easterly wind took the edge off the stifling heat. A gaggle of Bonefish’s children were in constant, but changing, attendance, sometimes helping me, but more often chasing each other in a complicated game of tag up and over
Masquerade
’s hull. Revelation came and sat in the shade of
Masquerade
’s bows where she plucked two chickens that I suspected had been killed in honour of my return to the island. The chickens’ surviving relatives clucked and scratched in the dirt, oblivious to the drifting feathers. Revelation and I chatted idly, content to let the minutes drift pass like warm thistledown. “Thessy says he’s been offered a lot of money for a charter?” Revelation eventually challenged me.

“That’s true.”

“But you von’t do it?”

“I don’t want to leave you, Revelation.”

She gave that piece of gallantry the scorn it deserved. “Father vouldn’t really vant him to go for all the summer.”

“So it doesn’t matter if I say no,” I said with some relief, for I had been feeling somewhat guilty at risking Thessy’s chances of making some money.

“But if you go on this charter, Father will let Thessy go.” Revelation went sweetly on, thus impaling me on the hook of my own guilt once more. It was I who had introduced Thessy to McIllvanney and who had secured him the job with Cutwater, but Bonefish had only allowed his son into the wide wicked world because of his trust in me. I was not certain that the trust was deserved, but Bonefish was convinced I was protecting his son from iniquity, and no assertion to the contrary would convince him otherwise. “And if Thessy vent,” Revelation continued, “then the money vould be good, because the outboard is broken and Father can’t mend it and there’s no money for another.” She sighed, then twisted on her stool to gaze in astonishment because a car was thumping and crashing its way along the dirt road that led from the island’s one village to Bonefish’s sprawl of shacks. It was clear from Revelation’s expression that cars were as uncommon at this end of the island as polar bears; indeed, the sight of one was so surprising that she picked up her skirts and, with the younger children around her, fled towards the safety of her mother’s kitchen.

The car, an ancient Pontiac taxi that was painted six shades of yellow and purple, stopped outside the twin piles of broken coral that were Bonefish’s proud gateposts. There was a pause, then the back door of the cab opened, and a very tall white man climbed out into the sun. He was dressed in checked golfing trousers, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. He blinked uncertainly at the landscape. He looked lost and nervous, as though he was unsure of where he was or why he had bothered to come.

Then he saw me, waved, and began walking slowly towards me. I did not respond, for I was feeling nothing but astonishment. I could not even speak. I was struck dumb because George Crowninshield, senator and possibly a future President of the United States, had come alone to Straker’s Cay. “Hello, Nick.” He held out a hand and gave me a smile.