Swimming to Catalina (18 page)
It took until just before lunch. The phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Barrington?”
“Yes.”
“This is Onofrio Ippolito. How are you?”
“I’m very well, Mr. Ippolito. I’m surprised to hear from you; hardly anyone knows I’m staying at the Bel-Air.”
“It’s a small town.”
“I suppose so.”
“I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk more at dinner at Vance’s house. David Sturmack tells me you’re going to be doing some work for him in New York.”
“We discussed it.”
“I have many interests in New York, too; I wonder if we might talk about your doing some work for me?”
“Of course.”
“Tell you what; I’m giving a dinner party on my yacht this evening. Why don’t you come to dinner, and we’ll find a few minutes to talk privately.”
“I’d be delighted.”
“The yacht is moored off Catalina Island, so if you’ll be at Marina Del Rey at eight o’clock, I’ll see that you’re ferried out there.”
“Fine.”
Ippolito gave him a slip number and a boat’s name,
Maria.
“I’ll look forward to seeing you,” he said.
“Thank you; I’ll see you this evening.”
Stone hung up the phone and sat back. Time to face the man and ask some direct questions. In the meantime, he thought, he’d have a swim. He got up and went to look for a robe.
S
tone arrived at Marina Del Rey at a little after eight and parked the car. He had dressed in one of his new Purple Label suits, dark blue with a white pinstripe, and had wom one of the new Sea Island cotton shirts and a new tie. He would probably e overdressed at the dinner party, but better that than underdressed.
He walked down the ramp and along the pontoons, looking for the berth number he had been given. The light was going now, and as he passed the pontoon where
Paloma
was berthed, he noticed no lights were on. Maybe he’d see Barbara and her boyfriend at dinner. He finally found the correct pontoon and worked his way down the berth numbers until he came to
Maria,
a sports fisherman of thirty-odd feet, complete with a tall flying bridge. Standing in the stem of the boat was one of the two men who had followed him in the Lincoln.
Stone experienced an urge to turn around and walk
the other way, but before he could, the man smiled and spoke.
“Mr. Barrington? We’ve been waiting for you; come aboard, please.”
Stone walked up the small gangplank.
“I’m Manny,” the man said, as another man came up from below. “This is Vinnie. We both work for Mr. Ippolito.”
Vincent Mancuso stuck out a hand, and Stone shook it. After all, they had never been formally introduced. “We’re all ready,” Vinnie said. He turned, switched on the ignition, and started the engines, while Manny dealt with the gangplank and the mooring lines.
“Where’s Mr. Ippolito,” Stone asked, “and the other guests?”
Vinnie put the throttles ahead, and the boat moved out of the berth. “Most of the guests are already aboard the big boat. Mr. Ippolito and the others are choppering out from a meeting downtown.”
“Can I get you something to drink?” Manny asked.
“A beer would be good.”
Manny went below and came up with a Heineken and a glass on a silver tray. “There you are; would you like to stay in the cockpit or ride down below?”
“I’ll stay up here, I think,” Stone replied. “It’s a nice evening.” He felt more comfortable now, and he took a seat near the stem and sipped his beer.
“Yeah, it is a nice night, isn’t it?” Manny said. “When we’re clear of the marina we’ll see a hell of a sunset.”
Stone watched the moored boats go past as the sports fisherman moved down the channel toward the breakwater. Five minutes later they were on a calm
Pacific Ocean, and Vinnie put the throttles forward. “How long will it take us to get to Mr. Ippolito’s yacht?” Stone asked.
“Oh, forty or forty-five minutes, I guess,” Manny shouted over the rumble of the engines. “It’s about twenty-five miles, and we’re gonna be doing a good forty knots. This baby is fast.”
The boat was roaring through a flat sea now, into a giant red ball of a sun, and Stone began to enjoy the ride. They passed other boats coming from and going to Marina Del Rey, then after a while, they were alone on the water, tearing along.
Stone began to think about what he was going to say to Ippolito. Not much, he decided; he’d listen instead. He doubted if he was ever going to get any legal work from either Sturmack or Ippolito—that had just been the bait to get him out here. He was dying to know what they wanted to tell him.
They had been moving fast for more than half an hour when Vinnie began slowing down. Stone stood up and looked ahead. The sun was gone, Catalina was at twelve o’clock, and the mooring lights on a hundred yacht masts lay ahead. People had anchored for the night and were having drinks and dinner aboard their boats. It occurred to Stone that he was getting hungry. They continued on for another few minutes, and Vinnie slowed down further.
“Don’t want to rock anybody’s boat with our wake,” he said, then made a ninety-degree turn to the left and pulled the throttles back to idle, out of gear. The boat drifted.
“Where’s Mr. Ippolito’s yacht?” Stone asked. Then, from behind him, he heard the metallic sound of a gun being cocked, and he felt cold steel on the back of his
neck. He turned to find Manny holding an automatic pistol to his head.
“You’re not going to make it to the yacht,” Manny said.
Stone opened his mouth to speak as Vinnie applied a strip of duct tape to his mouth.
“Hold out your hands,” Manny said, as Vinnie tore more tape from the roll.
Stone didn’t move.
Manny held the pistol against Stone’s left eye. “We can do this neat, or we can do it messy,” he said. “What’s it gonna be?”
Stone held out his hands, and Vinnie taped his wrists together, then bent over and taped his ankles together as well. Vinnie then went to a locker and extracted a fathom of chain and a plow anchor.
Stone’s bowels turned to water, and he contracted his stomach muscles to keep something embarrassing from happening. This was bad enough without making it worse. He began, somewhat late, looking for a way out. Why had he gotten aboard this boat? The sun was down and a nearly full moon had risen, bathing the cockpit of the boat in a pale light.
Vinnie and Manny were talking about shackles now, but their voices seemed distant. Stone watched as one of them took a tool kit from a locker, found a shackle, attached it to the chain, and tightened it with pliers.
Now they were coaxing him toward the stem. At first Stone resisted moving, but then he saw the toolbox. At Manny’s urging, he took a hop forward, then fell on top of the toolbox, spilling implements over the deck.
Vinnie and Manny were swearing and looking for
the pliers, while Stone was feeling for something else. He’d seen a marlin spike in the top tray of the toolbox, he was sure, and he wanted the shiny tool more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. While they rummaged through the tools for the pliers, he got the marlin spike wedged between his taped hands.
He was yanked roughly to his feet, and somebody handed him an anchor. They actually wanted him to hold the anchor! There didn’t seem much point in not holding it, so he did.
“Any last words?” somebody said.
Stone shot the man a hot look, and both the hoods burst out laughing. Then they were dragging him toward the stem of the boat.
“You get us moving a little,” Manny said, “and I’ll handle this end.” Vinnie went forward, the engines rumbled, and the boat began to move.
Stone started taking deep breaths through his nose, deeper each time, packing air into his lungs. Then he was standing all alone in the stem of the boat, holding the heavy anchor, trying not to fall overboard.
“Compliments of Onofrio Ippolito!” he heard Manny yell over the engines.
Stone took one more deep breath, and then he felt a solid kick in the small of the back. He hung on to the breath as he fell astern, striking the cold, foaming water, and then everything went quiet except the retreating roar of the engines and the scream in his head.
H
e was sinking rapidly, head first. He had no idea how deep the water was, didn’t know when the increasing pressure would force the air from his lungs. He held on to that air with all his strength; he needed the buoyancy as much as the air.
Twisting his wrists back and forth to gain as much slack as possible, which wasn’t much, he held the anchor and the marlin spike with one hand as he found the shackle with the other. The spike had a slot at its top, made for this very job, if not this very moment. Frantically, he got the nub of the shackle pin into the slot in the marlin spike, loosened it, then, using his fingers, quickly unscrewed the pin, yanked it out, and let go of the anchor. He stopped sinking, seeming to have achieved neutral buoyancy. Then he made an awful discovery. When he had let go of the anchor he had let go of the marlin spike, too, and there remained one shackle to defeat, the one holding the chain around his waist.
Once, as a boy, he had been sent to a socialist summer camp by his left-wing parents, and some of the camp counselors had amused themselves by binding the boys hand and foot and tossing them into the lake, just to see how long they would last before they had to be rescued. There were no rescuers at hand now, but at least camp had given Stone some experience of swimming with his hands and feet tied. He tried once to loosen the shackle pin with his fingers, then, with his lungs exploding, began to kick and paddle as best he could toward the surface. Looking up, he could see the bright moon lighting his way, but he had no idea of how deep he had gone. The going seemed painfully slow.
To take his mind off the struggle, he thought about how long he had been underwater. He figured he was at about one minute now, and the surface still seemed miles away. Air began to leak from his nostrils, and he fought to hang on to it, since there was nothing to replace it but seawater. He struggled on, wishing his mouth wasn’t taped so that he could scream, and still the surface eluded him.
He thought of himself as a porpoise and tried to propel himself faster with the kick he had been taught at camp as part of the butterfly stroke. The seconds flew like hours. And then, suddenly, he could see the moon clearly, and he was expelling air and ripping at the tape over his mouth. It came free and as he broke the surface he gulped in air, shouting as he expelled it, then gulped in more.
A minute passed before his intake of air began to catch up with his need for oxygen. He looked around and saw, in the distance, the running lights of the sports fisherman as it turned toward Catalina, then he
looked for other boats. There was a fleet of them, but they were a long, long way from where he struggled to keep his head above water.
He tried floating on his back, but the chain around his waist and the weight of his sodden clothing made that impossible. The best he could do was to continue his porpoise kick and draw his taped hands through the water. He felt for the end of the tape with his tongue, thinking to pull it off his hands with his teeth, but apparently the end was inaccessible. There was nothing to do but swim for it as best he could.
He developed a kind of rhythm, a two-hands-together dog paddle which, combined with his porpoise kick, moved him through the water, though not very fast. His goal was the forest of lighted masts ahead of him—how far? Two hundred, three hundred, a thousand yards away? He thought about the strength he had left and wondered if it would be enough or if, finally, the chain would drag him down, short of the goal ahead. He remembered reading somewhere that drowning was an easy way to die, but he didn’t believe it. He thought of himself drifting along the bottom, being fed upon by the crabs and—oh, God—sharks. Sharks were nocturnal creatures, weren’t they? They were attracted by splashing at the surface, and he was doing a lot of splashing in his effort to reach something he could hang on to. He could not get used to the cold of the water; it seemed to be right at the freezing point. Why were there no chunks of ice floating in it? He could hang on to an ice floe and rest his weary muscles.
Cold water. The great white shark was a cold-water creature, wasn’t it? Didn’t fishermen catch great whites in these waters? Clips from the film
Jaws
flashed
through his mind. A naked girl hanging desperately on to a buoy as the giant fish tore its way through her lower extremities. At least he wasn’t naked, though he knew he could swim faster if he were. He thought about kicking off his shoes, but they didn’t seem to be slowing him down, and anyway, he had paid six hundred and fifty dollars to have them made. He’d hang on to the shoes.
He thought about making love to Betty the night before, but then he recalled that Betty was responsible for his being where he was, and he thought about Barbara Tierney instead. Where was she now Drinking champagne aboard Ippolito’s yacht, anchored at Catalina? Or was the yacht really there? Or was there really a yacht? Yes, there was; he recalled the bank manager telling him that Ippolito had a veritable flotilla—was that the word he had used? Stone had already been aboard two of Ippolito’s boats, albeit briefly.
He tried a sidestroke but began sinking, so he went back to his crippled dog paddle. There was no way to rest—the chain prevented that—so he slogged on, stroke after stroke, kick after kick, gulp after gulp of air, on and on into the night. At this rate he might miss Catalina entirely and continue on toward Hawaii.
The lights were closer now, but not that much closer, and he was fading. His strokes were getting shorter and slower, and nothing his brain could say to his muscles would make them work better or longer. Thank God there isn’t a sea running, he thought; I’d be dead by now. He thought about dying and discovered that he wasn’t ready to do it. The thought gave him new strength, but not much; you couldn’t call it a second wind, hardly that. He thought about Arrington and the child she carried inside her. Was it his? If he
died tonight, would there be a son to carry on the Barrington name, such as it was? No, he would carry on the Calder name, no matter to whom he owed his DNA.
