Light Action in the Caribbean (16 page)

“You put dat money you got in de pocket of your BC, mon, and you leave a little in de envelope, cause if we haf to pay, de gonna want it all.”

“I’m cool.”

David split the money, putting $4,500 in his buoyancy control vest, leaving $500 in the envelope.

“What’s happening,” asked Libby, pulling a linen wrap around herself and trying to stand steady on the pounding deck.

“Military, maybe,” said David. “We might have gotten in too close to Itesea here, so these guys could be hard-asses about it. Maybe we’re going to have to buy our way out.”

The boat closed on them like a barracuda, then roared along parallel with the Whaler. The driver indicated to Esteban with a hand gesture to shut it down. Esteban thought to
just hold his course for San Carlos until he saw the guns. He throttled back, and then the big boat, twice the length of his, was wallowing alongside, its exhaust guttering as it rolled in its own wake. The boat had a low cabin forward, a sleek white hull, and no insignia. The barefoot man at the helm had dreadlocks and dark glasses and was wearing a dirty pair of pale blue trousers. Two other men stood braced at the boat’s gunwale, looking them over. One of them wore four watches, two on each wrist.

“This is not the military,” said Esteban.

The shirtless man in madras shorts raised a .9 mm Glock and began spraying Esteban. The first bullet tore through his left triceps, the second, third, fourth, and fifth hit nothing, the sixth perforated his spleen, the seventh and eighth hit nothing, the ninth hit the console, sending electrical sparks up, the tenth went through his right palm, the next four went into the air, the fifteenth tore his left ear away, the sixteenth ricocheted off the sixth cervical vertebrae and drove down through his heart, exiting through his abdomen and lodging in his foot. The seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth went out over the water.

David watched Esteban shudder and fall like an imploded vase.

The driver dropped white fenders over the side and powered the boat in closer. The other two snagged bow and stern cleats with a pole and gaff, snugged the boats together and tied off. Then both jumped on board. David raised his hands to say he would be no problem, take whatever. The first man to reach him seemed uncoordinated, as if he were drunk, but his first punch broke David’s nose and then he pummeled him
backward over a seat, and when he fell the man slammed him repeatedly in the head with a dive regulator.

The other man, who had a barbed-wire tattoo wrapped around his chest, plowed through the contents of the dive bags. He pitched the tin of marijuana to the first man. When he found the envelope he ripped the money out and stuffed the bills in his swim trunks. Libby stood in the back of the skiff, crying, with her hands over her mouth. The man in the other boat glanced at her, but she could not see his eyes. Once in a while he brought his throttle up to steady the boats on the swell.

The man with the chest tattoo was ransacking the many pockets of the dive bags in a fury. The other one had yanked David’s gold Rolex Submariner off and was kicking at him to keep him still while he adjusted it on his wrist. The man in the swim trunks threw the doors of the steering console open, emptied out the lunch locker and opened the fish wells, until nothing around him stood unopened. He gazed at the man in the other boat, waiting for instructions. The whites of his eyes were marred with many tiny exploded blood vessels. The man on the other boat shrugged, as if it hadn’t been worth it.

“You got more money, sweetheart?” said the man in the boat.

Libby rushed to the BC, tore open the Velcro pocket, and held out the $4,500.

“Nice, very nice,” said the man in the boat. “We goin now,” he shouted to the other two. “Kill dem.”

“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” Libby murmured.

The man with the tattoo hit her in the neck with his fist, knocking her into the engines, and then banged her head on
the deck of the boat until she was unconscious. He laid her over the back of a bench seat and raped her. It took him a long time and in the middle of it he lit a cigarette. The man with the watches trussed David with monofilament fishing line and choked him to death while he raped him.

When they were finished, the man in the boat hoisted over three pairs of concrete footings. The others tied the bodies to metal straps on the footings, rolled them over the side and dropped the blocks in the water. Tied to the two white people were their dive bags, zippered shut with their belongings. They handed the dive tanks and other equipment across to the driver, who helped the man with the tattoo board and then they cast off.

The man with the watches used Esteban’s deck brushes to clean the boat, washing the blood into the engine well. Then he brought the throttles up on the idling engines and turned the skiff in a skidding arc after the other boat. The water in the engine well flushed out through the scuppers and Esteban’s Whaler came up on plane, following the other boat toward Itesea.

A few miles east a man was fishing for grouper. He had caught only two among the reefs since sunup, not such a good day, but they pay very good at the dock, he thought, and whatever he brought in they always bought. He was thinking how he liked that, coming in with the fish at the end of the day. The guests from the hotel always liked it that he was wearing the Docker cut-offs his wife had fixed up and his J. Crew shirt or the shirt with the black Labrador. They liked his fish and
his accent. They liked his laugh. He only had to get more fish, he thought, more fish and it was going to be good.

He held the baited hook up before his eyes. His father had taught him how to make the tiny marks he had cut in its shank, and he stared hard at them now and said, “Do your work.”

He flipped the baited hook overboard and watched the line spool out under his thumb.

When I was an undergraduate at Brown I came across a book called
The City of Ascensions
, about Bogotá. I knew nothing of Bogotá, but I felt the author had captured its essence. My view was that Onesimo Peña had not written a travel book but a work about the soul of Bogotá. Even if I were to read it later in life, I thought, I would not be able to get all Peña meant in a single reading. I looked him up at the library but he had apparently written no other books, at least not any in English.

In my senior year I discovered a somewhat better known book,
The City of Trembling Leaves
, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, about Reno, Nevada. I liked it, but it did not have the superior depth, the integration of Peña’s work. Peña, you had the feeling, could walk you through the warrens of Bogotá without a map and put your hands directly on the vitality of any modern century—the baptismal registries of a particular
cathedral, a cornerstone that had been taken from one building to be used in another, a London plane tree planted by Bolívar. He had such a command of the idiom of this city, and the book itself demonstrated such complex linkages, it was easy to believe Peña had no other subject, that he could have written nothing else. I believed this was so until I read
The City of Floating Sand
a year later, a book about Cape Town, and then a book about Djakarta, called
The City of Frangipani
. Though the former was by one Frans Haartman and the latter by a Jemboa Tran, each had the distinctive organic layering of the Peña book, and I felt certain they’d been written by the same man.

A national library search through the University of Michigan, where I had gone to work on a master’s degree in geography, produced hundreds of books with titles similar to these. I had to know whether Peña had written any others and so read or skimmed perhaps thirty of those I got through interlibrary loan. Some, though wretched, were strange enough to be engaging; others were brilliant but not in the way of Peña. I ended up ordering copies of five I believed Peña had written, books about Perth, Lagos, Tokyo, Venice, and Boston, the last a volume by William Smith Everett called
The City of Cod
.

Who Peña actually was I could not then determine. Letters to publishers eventually led me to a literary agency in New York where I was told that the author did not wish to be known. I pressed for information about what else he might have written, inquired whether he was still alive (the book about Venice had been published more than fifty years before), but got nowhere.

As a doctoral student at Duke I made the seven Peña books the basis of a dissertation. I wanted to show in a series of city maps, based on all the detail in Peña’s descriptions, what a brilliant exegesis of the social dynamics of these cities he had achieved. My maps showed, for example, how water moved through Djakarta, not just municipal water but also trucked water and, street by street, the flow of rainwater. And how road building in Cape Town reflected the policy of apartheid.

I received quite a few compliments on the work, but I knew the maps did not make apparent the hard, translucent jewel of integration that was each Peña book. I had only created some illustrations, however well done. But had I known whether he was alive or where he lived, I would still have sent him a copy out of a sense of collegiality and respect.

After I finished the dissertation I moved my wife and three young children to Brookline, a suburb of Boston, and set up a practice as a restoration geographer. Fifteen years later I embarked on my fourth or fifth trip to Tokyo as a consultant to a planning firm there, and one evening I took a train out to Chiyoda-ku to visit bookstores in an area called Jimbocho. Just down the street from a bridge over the Kanda River is the Sanseido Book Store, a regular haunt by then for me. Up on the fifth floor I bought two translations of books by Japanese writers on the Asian architectual response to topography in mountain cities. I was exiting the store on the ground floor, a level given over entirely to maps, closing my coat against the spring night, when I happened to spot the kanji for “Tokyo” on a tier of drawers. I opened one of them to browse. Toward
the bottom of a second drawer, I came upon a set of maps that seemed vaguely familiar, though the entries were all in kanji. After a few minutes of leafing through, it dawned on me that they bore a resemblance to the maps I had done as a student at Duke. I was considering buying one of them as a memento when I caught a name in English in the corner—Corlis Benefideo. It appeared there on every map.

I stared at that name a long while, and I began to consider what you also may be thinking. I bought all thirteen maps. Even without language to identify information in the keys, even without titles, I could decipher what the mapmaker was up to. One designated areas prone to flooding as water from the Sumida River backed up through the city’s storm drains. Another showed the location of all shops dealing in Edo Period manuscripts and artwork. Another, using small pink arrows, showed the point of view of each of Hiroshige’s famous One Hundred Views. Yet another showed, in six time-sequenced panels, the rise and decline of horse barns in the city.

My office in Boston was fourteen hours behind me, so I had to leave a message for my assistant, asking him to look up Corlis Benefideo’s name. I gave him some contacts at map libraries I used regularly, and asked him to call me back as soon as he had anything, no matter the hour. He called at three a.m. to say that Corlis Benefideo had worked as a mapmaker for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington from 1932 until 1958, and that he was going to fax me some more information.

I dressed and went down to the hotel lobby to wait for the faxes and read them while I stood there. Benefideo was born
in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1912. He went to work for the federal government straight out of Grinnell College during the Depression and by 1940 was traveling to various places—Venice, Bogotá, Lagos—in an exchange program. In 1958 he went into private practice as a cartographer in Chicago. His main source of income at that time appeared to be from the production of individualized site maps for large estate homes being built along the North Shore of Lake Michigan. The maps were bound in oversize books, twenty by thirty inches, and showed the vegetation, geology, hydrology, biology, and even archaeology of each site. They were subcontracted for under several architects.

Benefideo’s Chicago practice closed in 1975. The fax said nothing more was known of his work history, and that he was not listed in any Chicago area phone books, nor with any professional organizations. I faxed back to my office, asking them to check phone books in Fargo, in Washington, D.C., and around Grinnell, Iowa—Des Moines and those towns. And asking them to try to find someone at what was now the National Geodetic Survey who might have known Benefideo or who could provide some detail.

When I came back to the hotel the following afternoon, there was another fax. No luck with the phone books, I read, but I could call a Maxwell Abert at the National Survey who’d worked with Benefideo. I waited the necessary few hours for the time change and called.

Abert said he had overlapped with Benefideo for one year, 1958, and though Benefideo had left voluntarily, it wasn’t his idea.

“What you had to understand about Corlis,” he said, “was
that he was a patriot. Now, that word today, I don’t know, means maybe nothing, but Corlis felt this very strong commitment to his country, and to a certain kind of mapmaking, and he and the Survey just ended up on a collision course. The way Corlis worked, you see, the way he approached things, slowed down the production of maps. That wasn’t any good from a bureaucratic point of view. He couldn’t give up being comprehensive, you understand, and they just didn’t know what to do with him.”

“What happened to him?”

“Well, the man spoke five or six languages, and he had both the drafting ability and the conceptual skill of a first-rate cartographer, so the government should have done something to keep the guy—and he was also very loyal—but they didn’t. Oh, his last year they created a project for him, but it was temporary. He saw they didn’t want him. He moved to Chicago—but you said you knew that.”

“Mmm. Do you know where he went after Chicago?”