The Lower Deep (14 page)

"Our chief cook. Tom Driscoll hired him, and I guess I'm trying to work up enough courage to undo the mistake."

"Food's bad, you mean?"

"It isn't good. The garlic seems to get heftier every day, for one thing."

"Most of our people are fond of garlic. He
is
from St. Joe, isn't he?"

"Yes."
Steve hesitated, then added, "I'm almost certain I knew him when I worked at the Brightman. But he insists he's never been there."

"So you think he's hiding something?"

"I don't know what to think." They were in the office now, and Steve closed the door. "I've asked just about everyone here who might know anything about his past—even phoned the Brightman to see if they remember him—but so far, nothing."

"I guess we're all a little jumpy these days."

Clermont sat. Following suit, Steve rested his elbows on the desk, looked at his caller curiously, and waited.

"Want to tell you about a girl named Ginette Jourdan," Clermont said. "Maybe I shouldn't, but I'm going to. I've just come from her house."

He told Steve what had happened there.

"It occurs to me," he said then, "that if we work together on this, we might be able to help both Ginny and your man Henninger. What do you think?"

Steve did not even hesitate. "I agree."

"Don't exactly know why I should feel this way," the St. Joe medic went on, "but I do, emphatically. Anyway, I'm fond of the girl. And whatever's happening there at the cove seems to concern her and your Paul Henninger more than anyone else we know about. So if I come up with anything, I'll call you."

"And if I learn anything here, I'll call you," Steve said. "Better give me your number."

Clermont offered a card from his wallet, then stood up and put out his hand. Steve clasped it.

It was odd, Steve mused as the tall figure slouched out of his office. Ever since Clermont's earlier departure, he'd been thinking about the man. Thinking about him in a quite positive way, wishing he knew him well enough to suggest they might work together, somehow, in their effort to solve the Anse Douce riddle.

Dr. Louis Clermont of the Caribbean island of St. Joseph, black and trained in Paris. Dr. Stephen Spence of the U.S.A., white and trained in New York. Neither of them dedicated to the proposition that the goal of all medics should be to make buckets of money.

The Lord moved in mysterious ways.

After telling her husband to sleep and dream the dream, George Benson's wife had disappeared. All that night while Paul Henninger claimed to have been swimming, and all the next day while Dr. Louis Clermont busied himself at the Jourdans' and the Azagon, Alice remained among the missing.

She finally turned up at eleven o'clock that
night, when George was sitting at the kitchen table, trying to figure out some way to persuade the people of St. Joseph to eat shark meat. Some sharks were very good eating, damn it. The black-tip, for instance. Those he had caught here ran from twenty to thirty pounds—a good-sized fish for St. Joe—and the meat of a black-tip was not only both tasty and nutritious, it was white and looked good. A young friend of his back in the States, a kid fisherman named Eddie, had caught one that ran over three hundred fifty pounds—couldn't lift it into his boat and had to tow it home, for the love of Pete—and for a week the kid had talked about how much money he got for it. Maybe if St. Joe's fishermen were told that story . . .

Alice had been with her friend Germaine, she said. "I'm sorry I didn't let you know I was going there, George. You were asleep when I left and, really, I thought I'd be back in an hour or so. But Germaine was down with this flu that's been going around."

"I didn't know there was any flu going around," George countered.

"Well, there is, and it makes you so weak you just can't cope. She lives alone, so I stayed to help."

She was lying, of course, George told himself. One of these nights he really ought to follow her and find out what she was up to.

Then again, who gave a damn?

T
he affection George Benson no longer felt for
his wife he most certainly did feel for his boat. A thirty-foot, twin-engined cruiser, she wasn't exactly what he had expected, no. Nothing like a commercial fisherman had been available when he arrived in St. Joe and was told to choose what he wanted from secondhand craft for sale on the capital's waterfront. But on his first voyage in her, when he ran her up the coast from the capital to Pointe Pierre, he had loved everything about her.

With a fresh coat of white paint she looked new now, and she proudly bore a new name,
Ti Maman,
after one of the country's best-loved folk songs.
"Ti Maman"
didn't mean "Little Mother," precisely, nor did it precisely mean "sweetheart."

In St. Joe, a man's
"ti maman"
was a mistress or sweetheart who had borne him a child.

Ti maman,
fe
ti ha pou mwen,

Pa kité'm allé . . .

Ti maman, give me a little kiss,

Don't let me go . . .

George used the boat in a number of ways. When the north coast road was bad, she was a more convenient means of transportation than his Jeep. And he constantly needed a boat in his work with the fishermen, of course. And sometimes he was required to allow certain of St. Joe's political elite to use her for their pleasure.

Usually these were St. Joseph City politicians, because the country was run from there. For a weekend of fun and games, they would fly to Cap Matelot. George would meet them with his Jeep and transport them to Pointe Pierre, where the
Ti Maman
was docked.

He didn't like it. But in this country, political favors were expected and necessary if one hoped to function.

At seven A.M. on the Sunday following the latest adventure of George's wife, the
Ti Maman
purred out of Pointe Pierre with one Felix Abry at her wheel. A suitably nautical cap perched jauntily on his graying hair. His left hand gripped a bottle of beer.

George Benson knew Felix Abry personally—which was not always the case with the politicians who used his boat. Months ago, when George had answered St. Joe's ad for an experienced profes
sional to teach its fishermen, Abry had flown to Mississippi to interview him and observe him in action. Abry's enthusiastic recommendation had resulted in George's landing the job.

At fifty-seven, Felix Abry was a large, happy man with a bright future in St. Joe's political scheme of things—one day he might even be a candidate for president. His robust, loud-laughing wife, Jeanette, stood proudly beside him this morning as the craft headed for the old buccaneer island, Ile du Vent.

With these two aboard George Benson's boat were two other guests quite different from them in origin and skin color, but close friends of theirs. Tall Jan Langer, born in Holland, managed the Plantation Margot, a sisal estate near Dame Marie of which Felix Abry was an important stockholder. Jan's plump and pretty Dutch wife, Elizabeth, though ten years younger than Jeanette Abry, was the St. Joseph woman's best friend.

The four planned to explore the Isle of the Wind and return to Pointe Pierre the following day. A grand adventure, for though the island was now home to a few thousand St. Joe peasants, it was still roadless, primitive, and much the same as when the pirate brotherhood had used it for a base.

As the sun rose behind her, the
Ti Maman
purred westward over a sea smooth as glass. Jan Langer said to his wife, "You won't be seasick today, sweetheart."

"It was calm like this the last time," Elizabeth reminded him, referring to a day eight weeks before when they had been turned back by a sudden, violent storm. "It was like this for a long while, if you remember. Then—pow!"

At the wheel, Felix Abry lowered the beer bottle from his mouth, and grinned. "That's the kind of ocean this is, Liz. You just never know."

"Well, I hope it's on its best behavior today."

The sea remained smooth and they were the only craft on its glistening surface as the
Ti Maman
droned on. The sun climbed a crimson sky and the air shed its nighttime chill. The man at the wheel opened another beer. His wife broke loudly into song, her voice as rich as when she had sung years ago in some of the capital's better night spots.

"Good girl," Felix said, patting her bottom when the song ended. "Let's have another, hey? How about 'Caroline Acao'? You two back there, open up some beer for yourselves."

Jan Langer said "Sure, Felix" and did so, but his wife wagged her head. "Not me, not yet," she said. "Not till I know for sure it won't get rough. If we run into one of those squalls again, I don't want any beer inside me this time, thank you very much."

"Sissy," Felix jeered.

"No, she's right," his wife said. "When you have a queasy stomach, it's better you watch it. You, you big slob"—affectionately she punched him in the ribs—"you could drink a case of
rum
and a
hurricane
wouldn't affect you."

The
Ti Maman
hummed on. The sea stayed calm. Felix and Jan drank beer and Jeanette entertained with her lusty singing. Some of the songs were French, some were Creole: the Creole ones were
both bawdier and more melodious. Elizabeth Langer alone worried about the weather and kept a watchful eye on the empty sea while longing for the drinks she denied herself.

They had been out about forty minutes and were still loafing along, more interested in the beauty of the morning than in making time, when Elizabeth, suddenly frowning, pushed herself erect. "Hey!" she said. "What's that out there?"

She pointed, and when the others looked where she was pointing, they too saw something in the water ahead.

"Looks like a fish," Felix said. "Pretty big one. Hurt. Maybe a shark hit it."

His wife said, "That's no fish, Felix!" and reached for binoculars. Peering through them, she said, "If that isn't a man swimming, I'm crazy. Here." She handed the glasses to Felix. "Look!"

"For God's sake, it is! It's a white man, too!"

"Naked," Jeanette said.

"Yes, naked. How in hell did he get way out here? You suppose he fell off a boat?" Even while speaking, Felix was turning the craft and reducing speed so he could come alongside the swimmer without danger of running him down.

"He couldn't have fallen off a boat in weather like this, Felix," Jan Langer said. "Not unless he was blind drunk. Even then, his mates could easily have picked him up."

"Well, he sure as hell didn't swim out here," Felix said.

The naked white man in the water was nearer now, and they could see he was near the end of his endurance. Yet he was actually trying to swim, not just to tread water and stay afloat.

His arms rose and fell as though they were almost too heavy for him to lift. His feet moved even more slowly, scarcely turning up a disturbance in the smooth water. Apparently he was so intent on what he was doing, on attaining a goal of some sort, that he was unaware of the boat coming up behind him.

"Hey!" Felix yelled. "You in the water there!" The swimmer seemed not to hear.

"This is crazy," Felix said. "Jan, look. If I come alongside of him, you think you can lean over and grab him?"

"
I'1l try
."

"My God!" Elizabeth Langer suddenly cried out. "Look beyond him at the water!"

Beyond him at the water? Yes. Something was happening there. A dimple had formed on the sea's glistening skin. Like a slowly opening eye it grew in diameter. Now it was a smooth, round hole some ten feet across, slowly revolving. Now twenty feet in diameter, and revolving more swiftly. Now thirty feet, and spinning like a whirlpool.

Caught in it, the naked swimmer was a human fly being sucked down the drain of a monstrous bathtub. Those on the boat saw his face turn toward them in a grotesque mask of terror. With his last lungful of air he managed a feeble scream for help that keened across the water like a gull cry. Then he vanished.

At that moment
Ti Maman
felt the pull from the whirlpool's rim, and Felix frantically threw the
craft into reverse while his wife let out a scream of her own. But in watching the fate of the swimmer, Felix had waited too long. That awesome hole in the sea, its smooth sides spinning faster and faster, had trapped the boat in its ever-spreading suction.

Despite the best her engine could do, she was drawn shuddering toward the edge of the funnel. Not so swiftly as the swimmer, not so easy a victim, but just as helpless. Just as surely doomed.