by Ed Teja
“Sounds like police the world over. So, when did you tell Tim I was coming?”
“Just before I called you. I went to see him in jail and—of course!”
“What?”
Her eyes lit up with excitement. “They insist on having a guard present when I meet with Tim. He’s a sleepy-eyed old oaf who sits in a corner and blends into the wallpaper. He claimed he didn’t speak English, and I fell for it.” Her knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. “Damn!”
“No harm done,” I pointed out. “We weren’t depending on a surprise counterattack or anything.” She didn’t answer, so I pressed the point. “Were we? I mean, I wasn’t.”
She said nothing, but she was smiling again.
The blinding glare of the afternoon sun through the windshield made it hard to enjoy the view or, more importantly, for the driver to see the road ahead. Fortunately, we came to an intersection and Maggie turned, putting the sun on our side. “I know I haven’t been in Cumaná in a long time, but aren’t we going the wrong way? I thought the jail was to the right.”
“It is to the right, but it is a structured institution with traditions and rules. One such rule is its visiting hours, which are from nine to noon, and five to seven p.m. I thought you might as well see him first thing in the morning, rather than wait around town all day.
“So, we are going…?”
“To the wondrous village of Mochima. I’ve got my boat anchored out in front of the town dock. Early tomorrow morning we can drive in and see Tim.”
“So, I’m staying on the boat?”
She laughed. “I should’ve said something, asked about that. I just figured it would be okay. It’s okay, isn’t it? You don’t mind?”
“It sounds great,” I said and relaxed back into the seat. Events pushed me in curious directions. The flow seemed nice at the moment.
“Now it is your turn,” she said.
“For what?”
“Oh, silent one, a beer for your thoughts.”
“Ah, yes, I had drifted away a bit. Well, like the beautiful lady who spoke before me…”
“Flattery will get you a lot, of tolerance anyway.”
“I am sorting through the confusion, my own confusion at least. Others will have to sort through their own. I have just flown into Venezuela to solve a problem, to play, as Ugly Bill puts it, the role of cavalry. So far, so good. Of course, I know almost nothing about the situation I am coming in to rescue, which is par for the course, but things haven’t gone down in a sensible way. I am feeling quite out of synch with the great ‘what’s happening.’ If I were on a boat, I’d think the glass was falling—a storm was headed for us. Well, you know that sense. There is nothing in the sky, no logical evidence to support the idea, but you feel it in your bones that something is going to break, hard and fast.”
“And you go with it, cause ninety percent of the time you are right.”
“Exactly. Now when I left this morning—was it only this morning? —in addition to having no clue about the scope of Tim’s problems, I didn’t know if you’d want to see me. I had no idea what our relationship is, or was, or will be. I don’t know what Tim will want or expect. In fact, the only person involved in this that I am clear on is Ms. López, who may be lying. But I am pretty sure that, in her case, the message—that I should go home immediately, if not sooner—was the intended message.”
“But now you are clearer about me as well?”
“I hope so.”
“And Ugly Bill. You are clear about him.”
“It’s hard not to be. You get it wrong and he tells you and then tells the world what a fool you are. Well, maybe tomorrow morning your friendly jail guard will be able to shed some light on who Victoria López is.”
“Sure, for the right price if he knows. But it may be a simple dialing for dollars scheme.”
“Not a game I know.”
“You need to watch television some time. If she is as smart as you think,” she paused and chuckled to herself, “and I should mention at this point that your judgment about women can be rather fallible...”
“Cheap shot! True but still cheap.”
“...then she most likely is just someone who gives him a number and says call me every time the gringo has a visitor and you win some money.”
I had to admit that it sounded all too likely.
The divided highway ended, and Jezebel started up the hills of the sole highway—a two-lane road that winds along the coast toward Mochima. Mochima is the name of a huge national park, but it is also the name of a small village with a population of about twelve hundred that sits on one of its nicer bays. A former fishing village, Mochima is now a tourist destination, famous for its beaches. Located about halfway between the cities of Cumaná and Puerto La Cruz, the hidden bays of Mochima offer many lovely and safe places to anchor a boat. The first Westerners to catch on to this useful fact were the Spanish sailors who hid from pirates there in the 1500s when Cumaná was a brand-new spot on the brand-new maps. The citizens of Mochima trace their lineage back to happier relationships between those Spaniards and the Cumanágoto Indians who lived there at the time and were probably rather amused at being discovered until they learned what it meant.
As we drove, I asked Maggie for as much detail as she had about Tim’s case. “I know almost nothing,” I said. “So, start at the beginning.”
“He’s only been in Venezuela a few months, about six, I think,” she said. “He came down here to do field work for an ecology group called The Ecological Difference. It’s a low-pay job. Sort of an internship. There are only a few actual employees working for the group, and volunteers do most of the work. The employees are more into admin and coordinating the volunteers. But there are a few key jobs that they do so that there is continuity in the work as volunteers come and go.
“Initially Tim got hired to run a boat. He took scientists around the park so they could do whatever it is scientists do in order to be able to write learned papers on water quality and the proliferation or disappearance of various critters from the environment, so that they can cop headlines exposing the greed of major corporations, or suing them, or begging them for money. But he was supposed to be learning, too, training for better things. Chris, his boss, is due to be rotated back to the States soon. Tim’s understanding was that he was training to be promoted into Chris’s job. But the two of them didn’t hit it off very well. Tim mumbled some rather incoherent things about Chris screwing him out of his opportunity. Now I assume that Chris will be replaced with someone from the States.
“At any rate, in the course of taking scientists around the park, and making rounds himself, Tim got to know a lot of the fishermen who live in the park. He became good friends with one in particular who was named Antonio. For some reason that I don’t know anything about, the two of them had a fight in a bar one Saturday night. Some people said it was about drugs, others said it was because Tim was living with Antonio’s younger sister. Tim told me that he doesn’t really know what it was about. But the point is that no one denies there was a fight and that before it was over Tim slugged Antonio, mumbled something that, the next day, various witnesses interpreted as threats, or so the rumors go, and left. Two days later, on Monday morning, someone went out to the fish camp. Antonio was a watcher—do you know how that works?”
I nodded.
“This person snuck up behind Antonio and cut his throat. Two days later the cops arrested Tim at Antonio’s sister’s house. Her name is María by the way. When the cops kicked in the door the two of them were in bed together. And,” she sighed, “they found the obligatory ‘small quantity of controlled substances, probably cocaine’ on the premises, which lent enough credence to the drug theory, or rumors, to make the police as happy as pigs in shit.”
“Whew!”
“Right.”
“What does Tim say?”
Maggie frowned. “Martin, if it’s okay with you I’d rather let him t
ell you himself. I don’t want to put words in his mouth or even say them differently than he would.”
I swallowed my impatience. She was right to make me hear it myself.
Maggie skillfully brought the rattling Jezebel down the steep and winding incline toward Mochima. At one point we had a beautiful view of the bay and I could see Maggie’s lovely wooden ketch, Scape, at anchor, a dash of nautical white bobbing on an improbably blue bay. The Venezuelan coast is dotted with such picture-postcard photo opportunities, which is only one factor that makes it so popular with tourists from around the world.
Maggie parked Jezebel on a back street in Mochima. To be precise, she parked her on the back street. Mochima only has two streets that run parallel through the town. One goes along the waterfront and is home to the stores and restaurants, the other runs a few meters further inland.
I grabbed my duffle and we made the short walk to the waterfront from the more sheltered street. Even in that brief time, the temperature dropped noticeably as a breeze blowing from the water met us halfway. As we walked Maggie exchanged friendly greetings with a number of local people, all of whom seemed happy to see her. An agreeable temperature, agreeable people, and a charming town were not unusual first impressions of Mochima.
We stopped for lunch at El Mochimero, a waterfront restaurant which offered a lunchtime special on pargo rojo, local red snapper. The restaurant had no walls on the seaside, so no matter where you sat, if you looked toward the water, you were rewarded with a postcard view of the bay. Brightly colored peñeros shuttled tourists to and from the beaches or brought in fishermen with their catch.
The paint scheme of each peñero reflected the aesthetics of its owner, and each boat had its name painted in large letters, with “P. Sucre” written underneath, for the name of the State. Many of the boat names were dedications, such as mi familia—my family or mis hijos—my children. Some were nicknames, such as los locos—the crazies. And some were named after girlfriends or patron saints.
Halfway into the bay sat a different kind of boat. A less colorful boat, just the natural color of wood, with a white hull, but perhaps for that even more beautiful. The sailing vessel Scape floated patiently at anchor, awaiting Maggie’s return.
“My refuge,” Maggie sighed as her professional eye scanned Scape’s lines and rigging, looking for any sign that anything was amiss. She looked to be in Bristol condition to me—nothing badly maintained or out of place, but as her owner and a professional skipper, I knew that Maggie spotted a dozen minor things I missed.
My reverie was interrupted by the abrupt and cheerful arrival of an overweight local girl who told me her name was Linda. Maggie already knew her, of course, and smiled as Linda informed me that she was delighted to be our waitress on this most beautiful of all God’s beautiful days. She overflowed with happiness, and throughout our leisurely lunch, served us with remarkable enthusiasm. Whether it was because we were the only customers, or simply that it was her nature to bubble over with greetings, questions and comments about how good the food tasted and how the weather was, didn’t matter. Her demeanor became another agreeable thing about this part of the day and made me feel that the opportunity to serve us lunch had made her life worth living. I could happily live with a few more such kind fictions.
Maggie had tied Scape’s tender, a gray rubber inflatable dinghy often referred to as a rubber duck, to a stanchion on the front of the restaurant. When we finished eating and paid for our meal, I grabbed my duffle and we walked to her in that unhurried after-dinner walk and hopped in. Maggie started up the five-horse outboard motor and in minutes we were aboard.
Once we climbed on board, I trailed the dinghy in Scape’s wake, noting that the tide was moderate and ebbing. I tied her rope, the painter, in sailor speak, to the stern. I tossed my duffle in the center cockpit, in the shade of the awning, and sat myself down on the comfortable cushions while Maggie unlocked the hatches and went below to open the port lights and let fresh air in below decks.
I had arrived during the off season for tourists, which in Mochima primarily means that it wasn’t a weekend, or Holy Week, or Simon Bolívar’s birthday, or any of the other Venezuelan holidays of which there are so many you need a computerized calendar to track them. So, the town was remarkably quiet, especially for a rural town, and Scape was alone in the bay, with only a few passing peñeros to stir the water around us.
Maggie came back up on deck and sat beside me, slumping back against the cushions. It dawned on me that it must’ve been a long and stressful day for her too. She couldn’t have even been certain I would actually arrive.
“Did you say that Tim worked in this park and that is how he knew Antonio?” She nodded. “I thought the park was for recreational use only. I know they banned houses here, except for the pueblo of Mochima, so how is it that Antonio was living there?”
“Parks in Venezuela are sometimes a bit different than anywhere else,” she reminded me with a smile. “When the park was formed the fishermen and their families had been living here for a few hundred years already. The government decided to allow the families who were here to stay. They could keep the existing fish camps but not build new ones.”
“So, Antonio’s family has been in the area for a long time?”
“Someone joked that when Columbus arrived, he was met by these fishermen who rowed out to see if he wanted to buy any fish. Ironically, that probably is not a joke but one of the more accurate historical anecdotes. But yes, they have been in the area an unimaginably long time. They have a fishing camp at Punta Tigrillo, it’s around the point, less than half an hour away by peñero.”
“What is it I remember about that area?” I knew the place well as one of the more beautiful spots on a spectacular coast, but for others there were different attractions as well. “Weren’t there some major drug busts there, around Isla Caracas?”
She laughed and leaned up against me. “Welcome to South America!”
Her shoulders felt soft and good. I put my arm around her and pulled her a little closer as she explained.
“Every year, it seems, there is a reported bust or a discovery of a cache of drugs hidden there. If not there, then somewhere else in the area.” She lifted her head to look at me. “It seems that the remoteness of the islands is too tempting to resist, especially given that they are right on the major trafficking route. The Venezuelan authorities claim that the bad guys are Colombians using Venezuela as a transshipment point.”
I laughed. “The same thing Trinidad says about Venezuela and the islands in the Gulf of Paria.”
“Exactly. And regardless of who is doing the smuggling, everyone agrees about how popular those routes are for the smugglers. So, the islands are great temporary hiding spots.” She rocked her head back, again resting it against my shoulder. “Martin, do you think that all this trouble is somehow tied into drugs? I know the police claimed it was, but I had never really believed that.”
“What problems don’t involve drugs these days?” I asked as I watched a brown pelican make a spectacular turn, dive fifteen feet into the water and emerge with a fish. “But I don’t have any ideas yet, really. I’m trying my damn best to not jump to any conclusions while I’m still getting the story sorted out. But I accept the fact that drugs mean money often enough that people get killed over them regularly. And I know that drug money can buy a lot of information and cooperation.”
She turned her face toward mine. “You mean the woman at the airport?”
I could feel my eyebrows go up involuntarily. “Ms. López? I hadn’t even thought about her, or rather I had happily put her out of my mind for a while. But sure, she could be tied up with drug dealers. Or, maybe she is just a hired face, and the nasties begin with whomever she works for. If the issue is drug money, she may know nothing about it, but then again, if she is a hired gun she isn’t the kind who would work cheap. And maybe she wouldn’t care if it was about drugs or not.”
“Is she pret
ty?”
I knew the issue would come up sooner or later. I also knew that lying would be death. “Ms. López? Yes,” I said, hoping it could be left at that.
“Hmm.”
“Which means?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Oh no! Whenever a woman tells me that nothing is the matter, I know it is serious.”
“Okay, so it isn’t nothing. Just a thought.”
“Care to share?”
“She had to be pretty, and probably glamorous.”
“Why?”
“See, if she were ugly, then it would be suspicious, because someone who is what she claims to be would have to be quite pretty. So, anyone pretending to be what she claims to be would also have to be pretty. And dressed well too.”
“I don’t get it.”
“That’s because you are a man.”
Fearing for my sanity, I let that one go, and we sat in silence. I held her in my arms and we simply watched the afternoon age, and then begin the gentle slip toward evening. The peñeros stopped running, having brought the few tourists back from the beach, and they pulled the boats up along the water’s edge where they added bright color to the waterfront.
Finally, she asked, “Would you like a sundowner? I’m afraid all I can offer in the way of drinks is rum and orange juice.”
I didn’t really want her to move, but, “I’d love a drink, but let me provide the nectar.” I reached into my bag and pulled out the bottle of unblended scotch.
She clasped her hands together melodramatically. “My hero,” she said and went below for glasses and ice, leaving the warm spot where she had been leaning against me cooling rapidly. I felt a bit empty.
As we toasted the sunset, and the first stars of the evening, I couldn’t keep from playing through the events of the day. My mind continued sorting out the mountain of information I’d been inundated with over the last two days. Tiredness and alcohol swept over me gently, and the erotic touch and smell of Maggie’s presence didn’t help me organize my thoughts. Even the boat conspired against my efforts by rocking gently in a way that made me want to give in completely, and let my conscious brain have a nice holiday.