Eve's Men

by Newton Thornburg

  “Way to go, Brian! Way to go! Don’t take no shit off nobody! Nosiree!”

  In contrast, Brian’s voice was level, unexcited. “On second thought, we’d better keep them in the bow cabin, where we can watch them. Down below, he might try to screw with the engines.”

  “Right on,” Beaver said, watching from the salon. “And I’ll padlock the hatch too, just to be safe.”

  Brian nodded. “And we’ll keep the guns out here. No sense inviting trouble.”

  Charley was on his feet by then, with Eve and Terry still helping him. His ribs felt as if a stake had been driven between them, and every breath he took seemed to work it in deeper. Before going inside, he looked over at Brian again.

  “I’ll remember that,” he told him.

  Brian shook his head in regret. “Hey, I’m sorry, man. Believe me, it wasn’t what I wanted.”

  “That boat won’t be either.”

  “We’ll see.”

  The bow cabin was not as large as the other stateroom. It had a narrow bed on either side, connecting at the front, with storage compartments below. In the back, one step up, there was a vanity and closet on one side and a head and shower on the other. Two more steps up was the louvered door to the main cabin, with the helm immediately on the left and the dinette on the right. It was there that Beaver sat watching them while Brian and Chester kept watch on the bridge.

  Terry had got an ice pack for Charley’s swelling ribs, and Eve filched a bottle of brandy on the way forward, so he was not without care. Both women seemed cowed by what Brian had done, not to mention what he was planning to do. Eve begged Charley not to try anything else.

  “They’ve got guns now.” she said. “Even Chester. Brian actually gave one to that murderous little creep. So we’re helpless now, Charley. We can’t do anything. Do you understand? You can’t do anything.”

  When the women were helping him down into bow cabin, Charley had been vaguely aware of Beaver getting a rifle and handgun out of a locked cabinet near the helm, and this hadn’t surprised him greatly, considering what Brian was planning to do.

  “Terrorists do carry weapons,” he said to Eve now.

  “Right. So we’ve got to cool it. Agreed?”

  Charley didn’t answer. Terry, sitting on the opposite bed, was moist-eyed and trembling, nothing like the snarling Amazon he had seen at Greenwalt’s. He reached across the aisle and put his hand on her shoulder, and she immediately began to cry.

  “Hey, we’re going to be all right,” he said. “The worst that can happen is like the man said—a boat gets blown up. That’s all. We’ll be okay.”

  “After Greenwalt’s, I just couldn’t stop shaking,” she got out. “I couldn’t believe what I’d done. But Brian was so cool, you know? Just like now, like it was his daily routine or something. I really like him, and respect him—I really do—but I guess he scares me now.”

  “That’s his problem,” Eve said, “that he’s not scared.”

  “At Greenwalt’s he was so cool about it all,” the girl repeated. “And I thought, well, it was the right thing to do. I believed in what he was doing, and that’s why I helped him. But I was so scared, I thought I’d die.”

  Still watching them, Beaver laughed out loud. “Christ, you three sound like you’re at a wake. You ought to be grateful you’re here, for shit’s sake. The man’s making history, and all you do is whine. You make me want to puke.”

  But instead of puking, he bragged. If it hadn’t been for him, Brian never would have even known about the Nomad, he said. And he was the one who located it too. Calling himself photo-journalist Roger Moon, he had phoned the home office of Stekko Inc. in San Francisco and had explained that he was doing an article on classic yachts for National Geographic and needed to interview Mr. Stekko and get some fresh shots of the Nomad. Stekko’s very cooperative secretary then made a few calls and phoned Beaver with the good news that her boss had reservations at the Romano Resort through the weekend and could be reached there. She also gave him the Nomad’s marine phone number.

  “So here we are,” Beaver said. “And I might add that without my help Brian Poole wouldn’t know how to blow up a balloon. For a job like this, it takes more than gasoline and a lighter. You also gotta have fuse cord and the know-how to use it. And it don’t hurt to know something about boats either, like where the fuel intakes are on an old scow like the Nomad.”

  “You’re a wonder,” Charley told him.

  “Ain’t I, though?” Beaver paused to shake a small amount of white powder onto his thumb, which he then brought up to his nose and snorted, almost as if he felt compelled to demonstrate for them the source of his remarkable endurance, not to mention bad judgment.

  Eve asked him if he wasn’t worried about going to prison, and he made a face, dismissing the idea. “All this is under duress,” he said. “Brian’s forced me to do it, can’t you see that? And he’s the one who called Stekko, not me. That’s what he’ll tell the police anyway. Just ask him.”

  “So you’ll be free to get yourself an agent and sell your story,” Charley said. “Go on talk shows. Be a celebrity.”

  Beaver shrugged in helpless agreement. “A man’s gotta live.”

  “And some gotta crawl.”

  “Aw, quit it. You’re breaking my heart.”

  It was then that they heard Chester begin to yell up above.

  “There they go! There they go!”

  Brian immediately appeared in the rear doorway, hanging sideways from the ladder, and announced that it was time to leave. Then he went back on top. Beaver squared his captain’s cap and moved across the aisle, into the helm seat, out of Charley’s view. One after another, the engines kicked in, followed by the whine of the anchor windlass. Looking out through one of the cabin’s slotlike windows, Charley saw in the distance the tiny Chris-Craft as it departed the long white yacht and headed around the breakwater, toward the resort’s landing. Though it was not quite dark yet, lights were burning in the buildings and over the walkways and the tennis courts and pool.

  As the Seagal began to move out across the waterway all the lights on the boat suddenly went off, Beaver evidently having thrown a master switch of some kind. In the dimness, Eve looked at Charley, practically glared at him.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” she said.

  Charley nodded, but in his mind he was thinking of the explosion to come, pieces of the Nomad falling on the resort, hitting innocent people, maybe a child or two. And he was thinking that if anything were to be done, it had to be done now, while Brian and Chester were still up on the bridge. And all he could think to do was overpower Beaver and lock the other two out of the cabin, then turn the boat around and beach it on the near shore. Certainly Brian wouldn’t shoot at him or allow Chester to. He knew full well that it would be a wildly reckless thing to try and that the stakes probably didn’t justify it, since he really didn’t know that anything other than property loss was involved. Yet he couldn’t control the sudden thumping of his heart or the dryness in his mouth or the coiled tension in his body, the urge to do something, to move.

  And move, he did, bounding up the three steps to the salon now and coming around the corner onto Beaver at the helm like a cat onto a mouse, not missing the man’s bugged eyes or his long fringe of hair flying out as Charley seized him by the front of his jacket and, yanking him out of the seat, threw him down the curving stairway. Abruptly the boat veered to the left, causing Charley to lose a step in his headlong rush to the sliding glass door, to close and lock it. And it proved a costly step, for Brian suddenly dropped like Tarzan into the opening, having jumped down from the ladder. Instead of breaking his forward motion, however, Charley simply put his head down and plowed into his brother’s stomach, sending them both sprawling out onto the deck. Then, scrambling to get to his feet before Brian, he heard Chester’s feral squeal again and saw in his peripheral vision the glint of a handgun coming at him.

  When he regained consciousness, Charley found himse
lf lying on his side on the salon carpet, with his head in Eve’s lap and his hands taped behind his back. He could see Terry looking out through the open doorway at Beaver handing a five-gallon can of gasoline and a large bundle of rags over the railing to Chester on the stern ladder. And beyond Beaver, Charley could see the lights of the resort, much brighter now that night had fallen. The boat’s engines were silent and the only light in the salon came from the helm control panel, green and faint, but enough for Charley to see clearly the fear and concern in Eve’s eyes as she held a compress to his head.

  “How long have I been out?” he asked.

  That made her smile. “You haven’t been out. You crawled in here. The little bastard was going to hit you some more, but Brian stopped him.”

  “Brian’s a prince,” he said.

  From the doorway, Terry looked down at him. “And Eve kept Beaver from kicking you. She practically threw him down the stairs again.”

  Charley felt weak and nauseated, and his head ached, to the point where he had forgotten about his ribs.

  “He wasn’t too happy about what you did to him,” Eve said. “He was limping and his nose bled all over his little sailor suit.”

  “You’re my girl,” Charley said.

  “That’s for sure.” She bent down and kissed him on the head.

  “I take it Brian’s still going through with it,” he said.

  “So it appears.” Eve took the compress off his head and looked at it. “Well, Rambo, you’ve stopped bleeding. You’ll probably live. So I imagine you’ll be wanting to try something else now, maybe something reckless for a change.”

  “Not very likely.”

  “In case you do, you should know that I won’t be freeing your hands. Beaver’s orders. And he’s carrying a rifle.”

  At that point Beaver called out over the water: “Remember! It burns at four feet a minute!”

  He came over to the doorway then and told Eve and Terry to “bring the bastard” out onto the deck. “I wanna keep my eye on him,” he said. “And you bitches too.”

  The women helped Charley to his feet. Then the three of them went outside. Beaver was gesturing nervously with the rifle.

  “Over there,” he commanded.

  Eve helped Charley into a canvas chair at the corner of the stern railing, as far from Beaver as they could get. She and Charley were both wearing jackets, and Terry had pulled a blanket around her, yet they were all shivering in the cool, salty air as they watched the dinghy moving toward the long dark shape of the Nomad about two hundred yards away. Silhouetted against the brightness of the resort, the yacht had one white light burning atop its superstructure, plus some dim interior lights in the main cabin and above the outside stairway. Without these, Charley doubted that he would have been able to make out the men in the dinghy—Brian rowing and Chester huddled down, holding onto both gunwales as the tiny craft rose and fell in the two-foot chop. Charley saw that the Nomad’s speedboat was still gone, apparently tied up at shore while Rupert Stekko and his family and guests were enjoying dinner.

  Once again Beaver wanted them all to know what a vital part of the operation he was. “I sure hope Brian remembers everything I told him,” he said, going on then to explain that yachts as large as the Nomad often had fuel intakes on both sides of the vessel, which meant that there would most likely be a portside intake somewhere near the top of the retractable stairway. After removing the cap, Brian was going to hook a wire either into the intake or around it and attach it to a gasoline-soaked rag, which in turn would be tied to the end of one of the fuses.

  “The first step,” Beaver said, “will be to spread most of the rags outside the pilot house and soak them down with gas and attach the other fuse cord. Then they’re gonna run both fuses down the stairway and light ’em as they take off. One way or another, that baby’s gonna blow.”

  “How about finding out if anyone’s still aboard?” Charley asked. “They gonna try to work that in?”

  Beaver snorted with scorn. “Well, hell yes, what do you think? But there ain’t anyone. The Chris-Craft made two trips to shore. The captain—who’s probably a combination pilot, mechanic, and janitor—he took the beautiful people in first, then came back for a woman, probably the chief cook and bottle-washer. But Brian’s gonna look anyway, so don’t worry your busted little head about it.”

  As the dinghy reached the Nomad, they all fell silent. Brian and Chester were only silhouettes by then, one large and the other small. And though they moved with obvious stealth, Charley nevertheless clearly heard the gas can clank as the two men made their way up the outside stairway of the yacht. They disappeared onto the deck for a while, then Charley saw them again as they passed in front of the lighted windows of the main cabin. The larger figure went inside for a short time and then came out and worked alongside the other, next to the pilot house. Less that a minute passed before they retreated to the top of the stairway and went to work again, huddled figures all but invisible in the darkness. Then they went back down the stairway and Charley saw the larger figure untie the dinghy and hold it steady while the smaller man got into it. A cigarette lighter flared in the darkness, lighting the fuses, and suddenly there appeared to be two Fourth of July sparklers climbing the side of the yacht. In their flickering light Charley could see Brian scramble into the dinghy and begin to row. Eve, standing behind Charley, dug her fingers into his shoulders.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “It’s a nightmare.”

  Beaver laughed nervously. “Not yet it ain’t! But it’s gonna be! A couple more minutes is all!”

  A couple more eternities was more like it, Charley thought, as the sparklers continued to crawl upward through the darkness. And though Brian was rowing hard, the dinghy also seemed to crawl, rising and falling with the waves, pushing ahead only a few feet with each stroke of the oars. Still, the two men had almost reached the Seagal when the sun seemed to rise up out of the water behind them, in an orange and yellow inferno against which the dark image of the Nomad appeared for a millisecond, long and elegant and somehow wraithlike, as if it were already a ghost ship. Then it disappeared in a thunderclap.

  “Oh my Jesus!” Beaver cried. “Look at that! Just look at that!”

  It was a sight Charley knew he would remember the rest of his life: the blazing pieces of wood and metal—parts of engines and saunas and gold faucets and ancient teak and mahogany woodwork—falling all over the bay and the resort in a gentle rain of fire. Closer to the Seagal, pieces of the classic yacht fell hissing into the water. In the harbor a couple of other boats had caught fire, and on the hillside above the main building patches of brush were burning. A siren began to wail at the resort and then a small fire truck appeared out of nowhere and clanged its way toward the marina. People were running about and shouting, some pointing at what had been the Nomad, but which now was only a pile of smoky rubble sinking into the sea.

  Brian and Chester already had pulled the dinghy onto the transom and secured it to the davits there, and now the two men came up the ladder and onto the deck, Chester first, looking demented with joy. He even danced a little jig.

  “We did it! We did it!” he cried. “We shore as hell did it!”

  Beaver by then was looking pale and shaky. “You bet we did,” he asserted.

  In contrast, Brian seemed impatient more than anything else. “Why aren’t the engines running?” he asked. “And the anchor’s still down. For Christ’s sake, let’s get with it!”

  As Beaver hurried inside, Brian looked over at Charley and Eve for the first time. And Charley could see, in the light of the fires, his brother’s anger and frustration—why, Charley wasn’t sure.

  “Well, is that it now?” he asked. “Is it over?”

  Brian didn’t answer. Instead he came across the deck and took out a pocket knife and cut the duct tape binding Charley’s hands. Then he went inside with Chester and Beaver, as the engines kicked in, followed by the sound of the windlass. And soon they were underwa
y, the boat steadily gathering speed as Beaver opened the throttles wide. Though it was even colder now on the deck, Charley continued to sit there in the canvas chair, with Eve and Terry standing close to him, at the railing. In silence, they all watched as the lights of the resort—and the scattered fires—grew slowly dimmer.

  Chapter Fourteen

  In time the cold and the sea spray drove them inside, into the dark of the salon, where they sat waiting like relatives at a hospital. For over thirty minutes Beaver kept running without lights, a practice he said he wouldn’t recommend unless one knew the San Juans as he did, like the back of his hand. To Charley, though, the visibility did not seem that bad. There was a three-quarter moon illuminating a thin layer of clouds, which in turn seemed to light up the entire Sound, enough anyway to make out the shoreline on either side of them.

  Beaver said that their goal was one of the many coves at the south end of Lopez Island and that they would anchor there through the night and the next morning, so that when they reached Seattle in the late afternoon, the Ballard Locks would be crowded with scores of boats waiting to get through to their moorages in Lake Union or Lake Washington. There was safety in numbers, he said, and he didn’t want the police knowing about the Seagal or his “involuntary” participation in the operation until Brian gave the word.

  At the moment, though, it appeared a good deal of time would have to pass before Brian gave anyone the word about anything. Like a man under arrest, he stood with his hands pressed up against the glass doors at the back of the salon, leaning there and staring out at the night and the water as if they were old enemies of his. From his mood, one would have thought that both fuses had fizzled out and left the Nomad riding peacefully at anchor.