The Island (5 page)

Maynard interrupted. “You mean I’m mediocre and I might as well learn to live with it.”

“No! I mean you’ve found something you can do well, and you should be happy with it, just for what it is. Don’t overreach. You’ll screw everything up.”

“Yeah. I might even lose my dental plan.” Maynard stood up. “I’m going to Washington.”

“What’s in Washington?”

“A Coast Guard guy who looked into this boat business. They pulled him off the job and put him in charge of a bunch of lighthouses. They called him a fear-monger. I want to talk to him.”

Hiller said, “You were the one who told me the bureau guys think they’re Woodward and Bernstein. What does this make you?”

“It’s the weekend. I can do what I want.”

“Okay. But think about what I said, will you?”

“You mean about accepting the fact that I’m a loser?”

“Blair, for Christ’s sake . . .”

Maynard walked to the door. “I may be a loser, Leonard,” he said. “But if I’m gonna fall on my ass, I might as well make a big splash.”

C H A P T E R
3

T
hey had sailed together, in tandem, for protection as well as company.

They were partners in an accounting firm in Montclair, New Jersey, one a tax expert, one a specialist in corporate audits. They had been roommates at Wharton, taken their CPA training at the same firm, and worked together for twenty-five years. They had had their boats built by the same man, to identical specifications: a single mast that would carry a main and a jib; two comfortable bunks amidships and two cramped ones forward; a dry cockpit; a simple, reliable auxiliary engine, state-of-the-art communications equipment. The only difference between Burt Lazlo’s
Penzance
and Walter Burguis’
Pinafore
was in interior headroom. Lazlo’s wife, Bella, was six feet tall, while neither Ellen nor Walter Burguis was over five-ten.

The Burguises and the Lazlos had sailed together every vacation since 1965. They spent weeks selecting a course, learning about port facilities—where you could get ice and water and fuel, where there were showers open to the public, where decent restaurants were—planning side trips to inland historical sites. They tried, as best they could, to leave nothing to chance.

This year’s trip was their most ambitious, from Miami to Haiti, island-hopping through the Bahamas on the way. As an extra precaution, each boat carried—broken down and hidden in the food locker when they cleared Bahamas customs—a 12-gauge shotgun and fifty rounds of number-four buckshot.

Twice—once at Eleuthera, once at Crooked Island—they had been approached by wharf rats, young, excessively charming Americans who pleaded for passage south (anywhere south) in return for whatever work needed to be done. But the Lazlos and the Burguises had read the Coast Guard precautions, and they refused.

The wind had been blowing from the east at a steady ten knots all day, and there was no reason to believe—from the radio or the sky or the breeze itself—that it was about to change. So the skippers of
Penzance
and
Pinafore
cruised slowly southeast along the western shore of a low island, searching for a leeward anchorage.

The island was not on the Defense Mapping Agency Hydrographic Center charts, but such omissions had long since ceased to concern them. Everything about this part of the world was badly charted: Shoals appeared where none were marked; deep-water channels separated islands, that were, supposedly, one; lighthouses listed on the charts were heaps of rabble; “submerged reefs” turned out to be whole islands; and named islands were often nothing more than lines of breaking surf. Navigation was based on the principle of “What you see is what you get.” Consequently, the Lazlos and the Burguises never sailed at night.

A hundred yards ahead of
Pinafore,
Lazlo sat at the helm of Penzance and scanned the craggy shoreline. The island was about half a mile long, ten-foot-high cliffs topped with a tangle of scrub and thornbushes and sisal trees. Lazlo noted idly that the sisal trees had been stripped and were regrowing. Once, the sisal must have been harvested, its fibers used to make rope. But, though Lazlo couldn’t see into the interior (if there was one), it was obvious that no one bothered with the island now. Nothing lived there. Nothing
could
live there, except birds. And bugs.

“You’d best get the 6-12, dear,” Lazlo said. “I’m afraid tonight will be buggy.”

“You’re not going ashore,” said Bella, pointing to the desolate island. “Not on
that.’’

“No, but the water’s too deep to anchor out. We’ll have to be within fifty yards of shore. And you know what kind of radar those devils have.”

Lazlo saw a break in the cliff line ahead. He took a microphone from the bulkhead. “Walter, there’s an inlet up there. I’m going to head for it.”

“All right,” Burguis’ voice came back. “I certainly can’t drop a hook here. I’d never get it back.”

As he drew nearer, Lazlo saw that the inlet was a small harbor, perhaps a hundred yards wide and two hundred deep. At the far end, rusty iron tracks led up the beach into the scrub.

“To haul the carts of sisal, I suspect,” he said before Bella could ask. “They probably loaded it aboard ship in here.”

Lazlo anchored
Penzance,
while Burguis hung outside the harbor. Lazlo used his engine to maneuver his boat as close to dead-center as he could: At the moment, the tide was running into the harbor; the boat would lay at anchor with its stern toward the shore. But, in a few hours, the tide would slacken and turn, heading out. The boats would need plenty of room to swing with the tide. By morning, their sterns would be pointing out to sea.

As soon as the boat turned away from the wind, the bugs struck, kamikaze mosquitoes and tiny black gnats known as “no-see-ums” that transmitted no itch or sting when they bit but whose toxin later raised painful welts. Lazlo removed his sunglasses and wrist watch (a substance in the bug spray corroded plastic lenses, first making them opaque and then, weeks later, dissolving them until they cracked and fell apart) and let his wife spray him with 6-12 from the part in his hair to the soles of his feet.

Pinafore
anchored aft of
Penzance.
The Lazlos hauled in the rubber Zodiac tethered to their stern, climbed aboard, and let themselves drift back until they could board
Pinafore.
While Walter Burguis mixed martinis, Ellen and Bella started a charcoal fire in a hibachi that fit in slots on
Pinafore’
s stern.

As they ate club steaks and canned
petits pois
and watched the sun set, the water behind the boat came alive with rolling, jumping, feeding fish.

“Jacks,” said Burguis.

“Really?” Lazlo said. “How can you tell?”

“He can’t,” said Ellen Burguis. “Everything’s jacks, unless he’s swimming and they bite him, and then they’re sharks.”

“That’s not so, Ellen,” Burguis said. “It’s true that I have . . . well, respect . . . for the anthropophagi. Call it a morbid fear if you like. But there is a characteristic way that jacks flail their caudal fins when they feed, not unlike our own blue-fish.” He smiled. “You see, even we pedants sometimes know what we’re talking about.”

Lazlo finished his meal and washed his plate off the stern. “I hope you folks have a wonderful icthyological symposium,” he said, “but I think it’s time we hit the sack. Tomorrow’s a long stretch of open water. Who wants the first watch?”

Burguis said, “I’ll take it. I’m not tired. Ellen can take the second, Bella the third. That’ll give you a good five or six hours before your turn.”

“You think we have to stand watch
here?”
Bella Lazlo complained. “There’s no weather, and none forecast, and there’s not exactly a lot of traffic.”

“We agreed on the rules,” said her husband, “and we should follow them.”

“But what could happen?”

“A change in the wind, a freak squall, anything.”

“Even poachers,” said Burguis. “The book says there are lobster poachers from Haiti and Cuba around here all the time. Believe it or not, they can come aboard and strip you clean while you sleep.”

“We don’t have anything they’d want.”

“We don’t know what they want. For all we know, they’re 6-12 addicts who’ll kill for a squirt.”

“It’s basic good-seamanship,” Lazlo said. “We stand watches every night, even in port, and we wake up hale and hearty. There’s no reason to break the routine.” He reeled in the Zodiac, hopped aboard, and held it beside
Pinafore
until Bella got in.

As they pulled themselves back to
Penzance,
they heard Burguis call, “It’s eight-thirty now. Ellen will take over at ten-thirty, and she’ll wake you, Bella, at half-past twelve.” Bella waved.

Burguis upended the hibachi, spilling the charcoal briquets overboard. He watched as the school of jacks surrounded the tumbling crumbs, circled them, and, when they concluded that the ashes were inedible, sped away into the twilight. He went below and returned with the Remington pump shotgun, which he loaded with three shells.

“You really think that’s necessary?” his wife said, wiping the dishes dry.

“If you’re going to stand a watch, stand a watch. There’s no point in
not
having it.”

With no clouds in the sky to reflect light, once the sun dropped below the horizon the sky grew quickly dark.

Ellen Burguis looked at her watch. “Well . . .”

“You might as well try. Any sleep is better than none.”

“All right.” She went below and pulled the curtain across the doorway.

Burguis had brought with him a brief case full of books. At home, he found time to read little more than daily papers and trade journals, and during the year he set aside piles of books to read on his vacation. They were all paperbacks, light, not bulky, and dispensable. Burguis liked to feel free to stop reading an unsatisfying book after twenty or thirty pages and pitch it into the sea. “Prose pollution,” he would mutter happily as he watched the soggy book wallow in
Pinafore’
s wake.

He sat in the stern, the shotgun by his side, using a small flashlight to illuminate the pages of
Dragons of Eden.

The night was full of nature’s noises: ashore, the random hooting and cawing of birds; in the water, the swirls and splashes of fish; and on the boat, below, the rattling of Ellen’s breathing through congested antrums.

Burguis heard a splash close behind the boat—not loud, but more substantial than a rolling fish would make. Curious, he pointed his flashlight overboard and saw a circle of ripples spreading, as if something had been dropped. A fish must have jumped completely out of the water and re-entered headfirst. He returned to Carl Sagan’s analysis of the R-complex function of the brain.

Suddenly, the stern of the boat seemed to sink—gently, just a few inches. Burguis turned, but before his pupils could dilate to adjust to the darkness, a garotte had whipped around his neck and the filament of wire had severed everything but bone.

Dragged backward overboard, in his last seconds Burguis felt no pain. There was an instant of perplexity, a sense that something had gone wrong, and then nothing.

The man stood in the cockpit, dripping, listening. He heard snoring. He pulled the curtain back from the doorway.

Ellen Burguis lay on her back, covered by a sheet, breathing deeply through her nose. A drop of water fell on her face and trickled up a nostril. She stirred.

“Already?” She snuffled, to clear her nose, and felt a sting of salt water. She smelled something terrible, as if an animal had died in the bilges.

A figure stood between her bunk and the doorway, blocking the starlight. “Walter?”

“Ha a prayer, mum?”

“Walter?”

She tried to sit up, but the heel of a hand drove her back against the pillow. A shadow flashed by her eyes.

The figure turned away. Ellen reached for it, and tried to speak, and only then realized that her throat had been cut.

In the stern, the man held the shotgun and examined it, turning it in his hands, aiming it at the sky. The pump slide was alien to him. He jiggled it and pulled it back, startled when a shell ejected from the chamber and spun out over the water. He peered into the open chamber and counted the shells that remained, then pushed the slide forward.

Holding the shotgun aloft in his right hand, he slipped over the stern and paddled silently, scissor-kicking with his sodden, hide-wrapped feet, toward
Penzance.

A few moments later, two shots resounded across the still water and echoed off the rock cliffs.

C H A P T E R
4

“O
h-oh!” Justin looked up from his magazine, the latest issue of
The American Rifleman.
“Mom’s gonna kill me!”

Beside him, in the aisle seat, Maynard closed the folder in which he carried all the
Today
clippings. “What’d you do?”

“My piano lesson. I forgot.”

“When is it?”

“Noon. Every Saturday.”

Maynard looked at his watch. “It’s only nine-forty. We’ll call your teacher from the airport. She’ll be easy.”

“It’s a him. Mr. Yanovsky. He doesn’t believe excuses.”

“He’ll believe me. I’ll tell him you have a bad case of sunspots.” Maynard smiled, remembering. “I used that once on the
Tribune
when I had a God-awful hangover. It worked, too. The city editor thought it was a cancer.”

Justin was not placated. “She’s still gonna have to pay him.”

“I’ll pay him, okay? A deal?”

“I don’t know.” Justin flushed. “Mom says your checks bounce.”

“Oh she does, does she? One lousy check does not make a habit. I’ll pay your piano teacher and the check’ll be good. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” Maynard frowned. “She shouldn’t tell you things like that.”

“She says a bad example is the best sermon.”

Maynard laughed aloud. “First of all, it’s ‘a
good
example is the best sermon.’ It’s Benjamin Franklin.”

“I know. But it didn’t fit.”

“Didn’t fit what?”