by Blake Banner
“Look at me, keeping you standing. If your preamble had been more pre and less amble, I might have asked you to sit down half an hour ago.”
“That’s funny.” I slipped off my rucksack and as I sat I saw her two boys with the cases of booze eyeing me from across the cabin. Their expressionlessness had become an expression in itself. One that said, “I’m going to gut you like a fish.”
I gave them a little wave with my fingers. She raised an eyebrow at me. “They’re Nanny’s sons. Don’t worry about them.”
“Sure. They just look friendly. You know somewhere where I might be able to stay tonight?”
“As I say. Kick a palm tree and someone in flip-flops and a straw hat will fall out and offer you an inn, but you might find some unwelcome company in your bed at night.” She examined my face for a moment before adding, “Not girls, Mr. Friedman—cockroaches or, if you’re very lucky, snakes. They are a problem on the island. Finding a good, clean place where the food is fresh—and what it claims to be—is less easy. I suppose your best bet is Old Joe’s. Advantages are it’s very clean and comfortable, the food is good and it has a decent nightlife. My own bar is just across the road, the Trade Winds.”
I smiled. “Is that an advantage?”
She returned the smile but didn’t take up the invitation to flirt.
“If you want a change of scene, we have a pretty lively scene too.”
“I read about a place, Old Father Joseph? Or plain Father Joseph? But I’m not sure if that was in Jackstown.”
She shook her head, the boat shuddered, the engines ground and we reared over a wave.
“Old Joe’s, it’s the same place, we just call it Old Joe’s. It belongs to a close friend of mine, Maria Garcia Ortega. She’s from Colombia, and a damned good businesswoman. Mention my name and she’ll give you a good room and a good price.”
“Wow,” I smiled like I really meant it, maybe I did, “you’ve been real helpful. I thought at first I came across as such an asshole you were going to blow me off.”
She shook her head silently for a moment, trying to read my eyes. I frowned, like I was confused. She said, “That wasn’t why I was going to blow you off. I was going to blow you off because of your bumbling act. Nobody bumbles better than the English, David. We can bumble past the best and bewilder even seasoned bumblers; prime ministers do it, ambassadors do it, judges and politicians do it, even generals, CEOs, husbands and wives do it. But very few Americans know how to do it. You try to imitate Hugh Grant, and that’s just not good enough.”
I burst out laughing, partly because it was almost word for word what the brigadier had told me during one of our extended arrest and interrogation field courses, and partly because she had pulled the rug right out from under my feet and revealed just how thin the ice was.
I leaned forward, trying to look both pleased and offended at the same time. Like this was something I didn’t like, but somehow it drew us closer.
“I did not try to imitate—my god! Hugh Grant? Why would you say that?”
“You were bumbling, Mr. Friedman. And not very well. People bumble when they want to hide something and look foolish at the same time. What are you trying to hide, Mr. Friedman?”
“A minute ago you called me David, I like that better.”
She held her hand palm up, like Hamlet regarding Yorick’s skull. “Evasion?”
I laughed again, with less humor. “You work for the cops?”
“No, but Maria and I, two women alone in a very machista society, we look out for each other.” She gestured at me with both hands. “An American, alone, out of season, old enough to have a house and a big SUV, and a wife and kids, shows up with a rucksack and he hasn’t hired a car or booked a room? All the red flags are up, then he uses second-rate bumbling techniques learned from rom-coms from the ’90s, and I am going to say this Yank ain’t what he says he is.” There was nothing mean about her smile. It was like her. It was what it was and for a moment I felt a kind of envy. She gave a small laugh and folded her arms. “Feel like sharing? If it gets boring I’ll tell you.”
I nodded a while, looking at the tabletop. “You’re pretty ruthless. I’ve never been taken apart like that before. It was pretty systematic. You’ve got some secrets yourself.”
She shook her head. “Just because you don’t know what they are, doesn’t make them secrets. That’s the difference, David. You have secrets, I haven’t.”
Somehow, the way she said it told me. Something in the steel in her eyes, the set of her shoulders, the way she brought everything down to the basic elements…
“You were a cop.” She nodded, but I went on, “But you were a detective. You were good, maybe too good. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you got too involved in the psychology of the criminals and the victims, and it got too much. So you dumped it for the bar, with a small ‘b.’”
“That’s very clever. Unfortunately you have confirmed my suspicion that you are no bumbler. So, out with it, Mr. Friedman, what are you doing here?”
I sighed and sagged back in my seat. The world outside was vast, wet and black. We creaked and rolled. I thought it as I said it. “Why does anybody come to a place like St. George?”
“I am not going to answer my own question, David.”
“I didn’t intend you to. It was a rhetorical question.” I held up my thumb. “People come here to escape—from whatever—people come here to paint, to write poetry nobody is ever going to read, and to write ‘that novel.’” I fought down the temptation to put finger quotes around the words and won. I shrugged slowly and made a helpless face. “That’s me. I am a New York Jewish pseudo intellectual, escaping here to write my novel.” I gestured at her. “You are attractive and obviously educated. And I am embarrassed because I am a walking cliché. So maybe unconsciously I thought being a walking British cliché would be cooler.”
She had the good grace to laugh. Then she sat staring at me and laughed some more.
“Another writer,” she said at last. “We have rather a lot of them. They all walk around with their laptops, drinking espresso and staring at the sky. Thankfully they can’t afford to print what they write—those that actually write something—so very few of them can actually ask you to read what they have written anymore. It must have been a nightmare in the days of typewriters.”
“I promise not to offer you…”
“What will you write about, David?” She surprised my by reaching in her bag and pulling out a pack of Camels. She poked one in her mouth and lit it with a match, then blew smoke at the ceiling, keeping her eyes on me all the while.
“Nothing original or intellectual. This is a job, right? So I have to offer a product somebody is going to want to sell. Either that or I can go starve to death in a cave in Tibet, writing seventeen-syllable poems nobody is ever going to read. I don’t want to do that. I want to make a living from writing. So I figure I need to write thrillers about what I have experience of.”
“Good lord, somebody get me a gin and tonic, a man on this forsaken island who has common sense and modesty! So what have you experience of?”
“I was in the Marines, in the UK. Not the US Marines, the Royal Marines. I saw some action.” I was watching her eyes carefully as I spoke. “Then I went back to New York, made some kind of peace with my parents, finished my law degree and went into a law firm. Got sick of that pretty quick, dropped out and here I am.”
She looked serious for a moment. “You don’t sound to me like a man who ever needs to bumble, Mr. Friedman. You sound like a man who has every right to be himself, exactly as he is.”
“If I knew how to blush, I’d blush.”
There was a sudden change in the pitch and grind of the diesel.
“No need. You can buy me a drink instead. I was going to make you get a taxi. I am mean like that sometimes. But I’ll drive you to San Fernando and introduce you to Maria, then you can buy us both a drink…,” she affected a strange variation of the Caribbean accent an
d said, “‘weeth American dolla boah!’ and tell us all about life with the Royal Marines. I’m hooked.”
Having Helen hooked was not something that displeased me, either professionally or otherwise, and considering the inauspicious beginning we’d had, things had ultimately played out pretty well. So I gave her my best cowboy grin and said, “That will be my pleasure, ma’am.”
“Oh, stop it, silly boy!”
Deep in the back of my mind I heard Ernie Skinner, one of my old pals from the Regiment, leering at me and saying, “I think yer in there, mate. I think yer in there!”
I stilled the voice and turned to look at the approaching lights, disembodied and eerie like ghosts in the black glass. I rose and went out on the deck, where the cars were all strapped down, bright with salt spray, to watch as we eased with desultory bursts of diesel into the port. There wasn’t a lot to see at first: just a large, concrete harbor wall on the right, with a lighthouse standing vigil at the harbor mouth. As we slowed and the gears ground down, churning the black, oily water around us, I saw that along the left quay there were several boats moored. They all had the look of ferries or small cargo ships. The empty space we were headed for was right at the back, and a couple of guys were standing in the dull orange light of tall, steel lamps to take the ropes and haul us in.
That same dead, orange light that bathed those men’s olive black skin and straw hats, also bathed a terrace of bars along the south end of the port. They were made of wood, painted in red and blue and yellow, and you could hear the dull, jerky rhythm of reggae coming from them. There were trucks and bikes scattered at random out front, where dirt and sand fused with the blacktop. There was nothing that immediately suggested itself as a taxi.
I pushed inside again among the press of people getting to their feet and grabbed my rucksack. “Anything I can carry for you?”
She glanced at the kids with the cases of booze. “Nanny’s sons will take care of it.”
“Do they get to come drinking with us? Are they ever fun?”
She observed me with glassy eyes, sighed and stood to push past me. “I have absolutely no idea,” she said.
I followed her out, along the gangplank and onto the dock. She was one of those women who don’t stroll. They go everywhere with a purpose and they stride to get there. That surprised me because those women usually live in New York, LA or London. One of those cities which want you to believe there really is nothing worth pausing to look at, and if there is, then you should pay to see it.
Helen swung her hips like a city girl and took strides like a city girl; she also flicked her butts into the sea like a city girl. It didn’t take me long to spot the car she was headed for. A convertible BMW 8 Series in dark blue. The hood was down but there was no sign it had been tampered with or that anybody had gone near the cream leather upholstery or the walnut dash and steering wheel.
But that wasn’t the car I had my eye on. I was looking at the beaten-up, but still indestructible Toyota Hilux standing beside it, with the three kids sitting on the hood and the four drinking Coke in the tailgate. My suspicions were confirmed when Nanny’s boys, who were now wheeling the five cases of booze in a patched-up barrow, began to run toward the truck and shout. The one who was not doing the wheeling was also waving his fists in the air. The kids scampered, laughing, and the two boys loaded the boxes in the tail of the truck.
She unlocked the cab and I opened the passenger door. I didn’t look. But I could feel at least a dozen pairs of eyes burning into the back of my head. It wasn’t a warm, fuzzy feeling, and it was exactly the kind of attention the colonel had told me to avoid. Nanny’s sons jumped in the back and she climbed behind the wheel. I got in and slammed the door.
“I think I have eye-burn on my back,” I said, as I scanned the cars and the rows of guys watching us as we backed out of the lot.
“People in ports, in the Caribbean. It’s deep rooted. It’s not like other port towns. You’ll find San Fernando more welcoming.”
She cranked in first and we moved out along the twisting strip of asphalt into the blackness of total night. I looked back at the disappearing port, with the few scattered lights winking on the water. We shifted up to second and third.
“That was a brand spanking new 8 Series convertible back there. You get many of those on the island?”
She turned to look at me as we rattled among pines and tall palm trees silhouetted against a perfect, starlit sky. Her face was slightly luminous in the gloom. “Are you the kind of man who always asks a lot of questions and pries into things that are not his concern?”
I pretended to think about it while I enjoyed looking at her face. Then I shrugged.
“I could answer by saying, ‘Hey, I’m a writer, so I am curious.’ But I have never written anything I published for money, so I don’t think I have that right.” She was watching me with narrowed eyes. “However, I can say that I have many of the attitudes that go with being a writer. So I see a brand-new 8 Series bimmer, parked outside a dive at a Caribbean port, and the kids haven’t dared to even look at it…” I shrugged. “It’s begging the question, right?”
“This is, as you said, the Caribbean, David. We are less than two hundred and fifty miles from Venezuela and Guyana. It is a very easy trip by river from Colombia to that coastal area, the Amacuro Delta.” She gave her head a single shake. “People who ask too many of those kinds of questions tend to get washed up on beaches, all blue and puffy.”
“That’s pretty intense.”
“It’s what happens and it is upsetting, especially if it happens to be a friend of yours, and you know that the man who killed him is standing across the bar from you, buying your girlfriend a drink, with the same hands he used to hold the knife, the same hands he now has holding her waist and her shoulders.”
I grunted, filing away the image for later consideration, and said, half to myself. “Huh, so Colombia still traffics through the Caribbean. Who knew?”
She looked at me curiously a moment, then said, “Yes, Colombia still traffics through the Caribbean, via St. George. God help us when Mexico finds out.”
Four
It was impossible to get any sense of route or distance. There were no road signs, no road lamps, in fact no artificial lighting of any kind save the occasional, distant winking of a house or a farm, disembodied in the darkness. What light there was came from the stars, and from a fat, orange, three-quarters moon that appeared rising over the ocean in the east.
We passed a turn on the right for Jackstown, and after about fifteen minutes we came suddenly upon a broad dirt track on the left that forked immediately. One track rose, with a terrace of two-story villas on the left and a small, ancient school on the right set among what looked like rubble and scrubland. The other track kept on going, broad and straight, seeming to skirt the town into the darkness beyond.
Helen slowed, leaned out of the window and snapped, “Hold on!” then spun the wheel, came off the asphalt and surged up the hill, past the terraced houses and the village school, rocking and bouncing as we followed the road left again, past the Hotel Geronimo and onto the busy Main Street, then slowed and jerked to a halt outside the Trade Winds bar. There was no terrace and no tables, save a couple flanking the door, and all they held was a collection of empty bottles and overcrowded ashtrays. But the windows, a row of six plate-glass ones that ran across the front of the building, were alive with light and color.
The real action was inside, and what struck me forcefully, as I swung down from the cab and watched Nanny’s boys carry the cases of booze to the bar, was that all of that action was white. The darkest people in the place, apart from the kids who were carrying the cases of drink, were the two guys behind the bar and the three girls tending the tables. I figured they were Latino, but everyone else, the men and women who were at the tables, drinking, shouting, laughing and roaring, the men who were standing at the bar, leaning with their elbows and pounding with their fists, shouting and laughing into each other�
�s faces, were all, every solitary man Jack of them, white.
It’s not a thing I would normally notice. It’s not an issue I’m interested in. If you’re being raped or tortured, I don’t care what color you are. I don’t even care what species you are. We all bleed red, and pain feels the same to any creature who’s alive. I care if you’re a child, I care if you’re a woman and I care if you are old. I care if you’re vulnerable, but I don’t give a solitary damn what color you’re vulnerable in.
But that night, as I pushed through the door of the Trade Winds, into the noise and the bustle, I noticed. And I noticed it because I knew it was important.
Helen brushed past me and shouldered her way through the crowd to the bar. People greeted her here and there, and somehow she managed to acknowledge their greetings without ever actually greeting them back. It was like she drifted along saying, “Yes, you greeted me, that’s nice.”
When she got to the bar she leaned on it with both elbows and clasped her hands while she talked to the guy I guessed was her senior barman. He didn’t talk, he just listened. Then she turned on her heel and advanced on me. I was pretty sure she didn’t say goodbye.
She took my arm and propelled me back out into the night. “Come on, Mr. Cowboy, let’s go and get you fixed up for the night.”
She slipped her hand through my elbow and we stepped out onto the expanse of dirt which was Main Street. There were a few people here and there, sloping across the road, headed in the direction of one or other of the bars, but the hub of light, activity and noise was the long terrace of Father Joseph’s, or, as the neon writing on the front now said in glowing blue, Old Joe’s.