Pirate Freedom (33 page)

"Yes, if they knew."

"They'd know, because his crew would talk about it when they got back to New Spain."

Something struck Bouton as funny, and he roared.

When he finally quieted down, I asked what it had been.

"They would not get there, Captain. Not to Port Royal, certainly. What chance would a Spanish ship have there?"

He had a point, and I said, "You're right, but that's just another arm of the argument I'm making. Anyway, look at this. A rich man, a big landowner, has a beautiful little ship he uses for pleasure trips and so on. By and by he loses his wife. There's a lot of disease, and who knows? He marries again and uses his ship to take his new bride to Spain, then on a nice cruise to Italy and France. Maybe all around the Mediterranean. What's wrong with that?"

Bouton rubbed his jaw. "Nothing, I suppose, if he can dodge the corsairs."

"They stop at Naples or wherever, and he gives his crew leave, except for one or two men he can trust—the captain and the mate, maybe. When they sail out of the Bay of Naples, the ship's a bit lighter. But who's going to notice?"

"Low," Bouton told me. "This secret place for gold will be very near the keel."

I nodded. "I think so, too. But I couldn't find it without tearing the ship apart. The thing is, Jaime did. Maybe Don José showed it to him—I don't know. When he found out Estrellita had been cheating on him with Don José, he went down there. My guess is that he just wanted to be alone for a
while to think things out. He did, and it drove him a little crazy. Sabina was his wife. I know you know that."

"I comprehend."

"He beat her because he thought she'd fallen for me. He'd beaten her before, but this time he really laid into her, and a few days later he did it again. One day he came home and she was gone, and she never came back. It must have hurt him a lot."

"Any man would be hurt, Captain." Bouton was nothing like handsome. Looking at him in the watery light of a lantern somebody had run up the mizzen, I wondered whether any woman had ever loved him, and whether any woman ever would.

"So Jaime took up with his housemaid, Estrellita. It would be a cinch to blame her for that, but I'll skip it. If she had played it straight, she'd probably have ended up with the second son of a grocer. Jaime was big and strong, and rich. A lot of women have done worse things."

Bouton nodded.

"Only Don José was richer and a lot smoother. She probably thought Jaime might dump her when they got to New Spain, and it would be smart to have somebody to fall back on. Only Jaime found out, and when he did he got a little crazy."

"Yet he did not leap into the sea as Don José recounted," Bouton put in.

"Right. My guess is that Don José really thought he had, though, at least at first. The secret compartment down in the hold can't be very big. About the size of a coffin, if I had to guess. Don José probably thought Jaime wouldn't get in there, and he might have thought Jaime couldn't. Later he must have found out he was wrong."

"His crew suffered, Captain. Not ours alone."

"Exactly. What would you have done?"

Bouton drew his finger across his throat.

"Sure. It would have been easy to kill him. Let's say he could shoot through the wood and into that secret compartment. Then he drags the body up on deck. There's an officer on watch who's awake, and a man at the wheel, even if the rest of the watch is asleep."

"The shots would awaken many," Bouton said.

"I think so, too. They make port in New Spain, somebody talks, and Don José gets busted."

"I am in agreement," Bouton said. "He will not do this. He will take his
captain and perhaps one other man. They will open the compartment. If this Jaime fights, they will kill him."

"Swell. Only now Ojeda and the other man know where the compartment is and how it works. Besides, what if they don't kill him? Suppose he just gives up. Or suppose Don José shoots him, but he doesn't die? He was Don José's partner. My guess is that he was originally supposed to be their Spanish connection. He'll talk."

I shook my head. "Don José played it smart. He let Jaime alone. There was a good chance somebody in the crew he tried to jump would kill him. There was also a real good chance he would try to jump Don José. If he did that, Don José would be ready. He'd have weapons, probably a knife and couple of pocket pistols, and everybody would call him a hero. He'd have to act before they made port, sure. But until they did, the smart move was to watch and wait and hope for the best. Which is what he did."

We were quiet for a while after that. Finally Bouton said, "He killed him, Captain. This Jaime who was the husband of Señora Sabina. He strangled Don José. It was shortly after we dropped anchor at Île à Vache, was it not?"

"That's right. Don José pushed his luck too far. He hoped Jaime would come around to see him when we left him alone in the hold. He'd always been able to talk Jaime into just about anything, and this time he'd talk him into cutting him loose. The two of them would sneak up on deck, go over the side, and swim for shore. With luck, they might have been able to lose themselves on the island until we left. Only it didn't work—"

That was when Novia came up and asked when I was coming to bed.

THE SECRETARY
of State was on TV tonight. She said flatly that the PCC is losing its grip. I cannot express the joy I feel.

I will see my Novia again, or die trying. I will even the score—no, that is wrong. Vengeance is a sin. I will forgive him, if I can. May God forgive all his cruelty and betrayal.

LAST NIGHT I
was shaken by what I had heard. Today I was joyful, whistling and singing under my breath. Old, old chanteys we sang around the capstan, and songs the men used to ask me to sing after we found the guitar on the
Castillo Blanco
—"Far Aloft," "Ritorna-Me," "Sott'er Cielo de Roma," "Mon Petit Bateau," and on and on.

"Carmela," "La Golondrina," "El Cefiro," and "Flor de Limón." Old Spanish songs the priest in Coruña had taught me or that Novia had taught
me. Simple songs we had played in the music class at the monastery. It was all I could do to keep from humming when I said mass. To a congregation of old ladies, I preached on the goodness of God. And was really preaching to myself, and preaching to the choir at that.

What follows will be—must be—summary. I will have time for nothing more.

WE HAD A
Spanish carpenter on board. I believe I have explained that. I set him to work making more gunports, and before we made Port Royal we had all the guns from the
Castillo Blanco
in place and ready to fire. It gave us fifteen guns per side, plus the same bow and stern chasers we had on the
Castillo Blanco
. With five twelve-pounders and five nine-pounders per side, we could stand up to anything short of a galleon.

In Port Royal, where a big crane on a barge made things easy for us, we reshuffled the guns as well, putting the twelve-pounders on the lower deck and our old nines on the upper deck where the twelves had been. I knew it would make the ship a better sailer, which it did.

We repainted, too. And when the repainting was almost complete, we renamed our ship, making her the
Santa Sabina de Roma
.

We gilded a lot of woodwork on the stern, too. The idea was to make the
Sabina
look like one of the smaller Spanish galleons. Novia wanted to embroider a cross on the mainsail. That would have taken forever, but she and I laid one out, marking it with charcoal, and painted it in an afternoon.

Port Royal was a very interesting town if you stayed sober and kept your eyes open. There were water hoys all over the place, because the town had no wells. Water had to be fetched across from the Copper River. You could buy a white woman—an indentured servant—there just like you would buy a slave. Novia and I watched it one time, and the best-looking one (she was blond and looked German or maybe Dutch) went for forty doubloons.

The fact of the matter was that there was not much you could not buy there. Prices were the highest you would see anywhere, but whatever it was, somebody had it or would get it.

One of the chores I had there was talking to the merchant—his name was Bowen—who had gotten ransoms for Don José and Pilar for us. I had to tell him Don José was dead.

"What of the woman, his wife, Captain. You have her still?"

I said yes.

"Very well." He rubbed his hands. "You'll turn her over to me? I'll see that she reaches her friends safely."

"Sure," I said. "You'll be doing me a big favor."

"And myself, Captain. The ransoms were for both. We will return half, less—let me see … Less twenty percent. I will complain that due to the slowness with which the very modest ransom you asked was paid, Don José perished in captivity. Would you care for a cigar?"

I said no, and he lit one for himself from a little spirit lamp.

"As the ransoms were for both, we have every right to return the wife to her friends and family, and keep half. I will take my commission of ten percent on that. Twenty percent of the remaining half we will retain for our trouble, and to defray the expense of holding the two for so long, of writing and sending letters and so forth. Of that, I will take half, you the remaining half. Is that agreeable?"

I could have argued that he was entitled to ten percent, not fifty. But if I had, he would have reminded me that it was my fault Don José was dead. Which it was.

Could I have gotten ninety percent? Sure. I could have cocked my pistol and cut up rough, and gotten every last doubloon—after which, he would never have worked with me again. Instead, I said half the twenty percent was fine with me and walked out with everything I had coming, in gold. If you do the math, you will find that I got better than fifty-five percent of what I had been hoping for the first time I talked to him. I had gone in there expecting to get nothing. John Bowen could have taken Pilar off my hands and kept everything for himself. He did not, and after that I understood why people had advised me to do business with him.

MRS. TAYLOR ASKED
whether I would schedule confession sometime. It made me feel as guilty as I ever get, which is not nearly guilty enough in a lot of cases. Fr. Houdek had not really believed in confession, and neither had Fr. Phil. They did not say it, but you could see it from the way they acted. Talking with Mrs. Taylor made me think about the priests at Our Lady of Bethlehem, and how they went into Havana at least once a week to hear confessions. We had confession in the chapel every evening. You did not have to go, but you could.

I told Mrs. Taylor that I would hear confessions every Saturday afternoon from two to four, for as long as I was at Holy Family. If no one came, I would wait for those two hours anyway—it would give me a fine chance to pray.

It will also mean that I will no longer be tempted to go to New Jersey on Saturday, a temptation that has been growing stronger and stronger in the past few weeks. I tell myself that if I do not speak to either of them it can do no harm. That may be true, but can I control the urge to speak to them when I see them?

What if they speak to me?

It would be so easy. Fr. Wahl would be delighted to take my mass. I would buy a monorail ticket, change trains in the city, and arrive in four hours or so. When evening came, I would beg a night's lodging at some rectory. In the morning, I would return.

Very easy—and it might ruin everything. What if my father decided not to go to Cuba to run the casino? What if he did not enroll me in the monastery school because of something I ("that tall priest with the beat-up face," he would call me) happened to say to him? Novia would be lost. Everything would be lost.
None of it would ever have happened
.

I pray God will put this temptation from me.

HAVE I SET
down all the important stuff about Port Royal? I think so, and some unimportant stuff, too. With better ships and more men to crew them, we sailed around the island to Long Bay—that's my two ships, Rombeau in
Magdelena
and Novia and me in
Sabina
.

There was a sloop there flying the black flag. The captain—as small and active as his ship—asked to come aboard and did. When I had talked to him a little I got Rombeau over, too, and called a meeting.