“Taylor, making friends wherever he goes.”
“I told her to get out of there. The drugs pulled her into danger.” He paused, shifted the jacket from one arm to the other. “Something Grandpop said got me thinking. Me helping Mary. I didn’t want you to think anything was … was up with that.”
“Because of you and your strays?” A slight tilt of her head shifted auburn hair across one blue eye.
“Somethin’ like that.”
“Your job’s all about strays. Least the way you go about it.” Taylor frowned. That wasn’t how he viewed it. “Well, there’s usually a stray in each of your stories.”
“Like you back in November?”
“No, stupid.” She punched him nice and hard. “Mason, that big dumb Labrador, was the stray last November. Who picks up an abandoned dog in the middle of doing a story on a double homicide? And I,” she hit him again, “can take care of myself.”
“You certainly can.”
He rubbed his arm. She was the ex-cop. He, a reporter with a notebook and a .32 he couldn’t aim properly. He smiled, relieved and happy she wasn’t angry. Tension came off him like gravity itself had been turned down a notch or two.
Samantha and all those strays were, indeed, different. He rescued strays with stories. Samantha rescued Taylor from loneliness.
“Wendy will do everything she can.” Her look was grim, not joking. “Mary is going to be tough. She hasn’t hit bottom. She’s still partying. Her favorite damn word. Wendy can’t help her until she does.”
A boat horn made them look out over the marina. Novak waved from the open bridge of a cabin cruiser twice the size of the NYPD Harbor Launch Patrolman Crane. Maybe bigger meant a gentler ride? Taylor yawned, sleepy. The Dramamine kicking in? He hoped so. This was going to be a long evening if he spent it hung over the side.
Chapter 12
The cabin cruiser swung out into the Hudson River amid a traffic jam of pleasure craft. Cruisers bigger than Novak’s. Sailboats. A dingy with a motor. Yachts. Thousands of them racing around to see the tall ships and naval armada assembled in the waterways of New York. Taylor was certain there was going be an accident. Many accidents. In fact, he was afraid Novak was going to be the cause of one of them with the way he whipped his father’s big boat around on the river.
Novak turned and yelled down at Taylor and Samantha on the main deck. “Welcome aboard the Drug Merchant.”
“Your father called his boat the Drug Merchant?” Taylor said.
Novak shrugged, smiled. “He owns a pharmaceutical company.” He tossed a shirt to Taylor. “Put that on.”
Taylor caught a white T with black, blocky iron-on letters reading City News Bureau, Always on the Story. Novak already wore one.
Taylor held the shirt up and away from himself like it was a fish he’d pulled out of the Hudson—assuming there were any left to pull.
“We’re wearing matching T-shirts?”
“It’s marketing, man. This whole giant festival’s marketing. And a party. No reason to be dressed up. Sorry, Samantha. I don’t have one for you.”
“I’ll survive.” Samantha didn’t sound disappointed at not having to change her pale-yellow short-sleeved shirt. It was a much better complement to the red skirt, which wasn’t quite mini, but still showed off her smooth, athletic legs.
“Yeah, you’ll survive,” Taylor said as he went by her, “by not looking ridiculous.”
“You never look ridiculous. Well, not a lot.” She laughed.
In the cabin, Taylor took off his dress shirt, peeled off his undershirt, and pulled the promotional T over his head. In recent months, Taylor had found a new flexibility in himself when it came to Novak’s marketing schemes. Maybe it was the chance Novak had taken on him. Maybe it was because they were good friends going back to their first days at the MT. Maybe he was getting soft. He didn’t like the last thought, since it was a doorway to his fears about his career, about his stories disappearing into a deep dark pit. He shook his head as he straightened the shirt. Never satisfied. Wasn’t satisfied so he always fought the city desk at the Messenger-Telegram. Now, without that fight, wasn’t satisfied about where his career was going. When would he be satisfied?
He yawned again.
The pills.
Back on deck, Taylor climbed the ladder to the flying bridge and stood next to Novak. The craft rode smoother than the police boat—a nice surprise. Taylor’s stomach so far remained steady. He blinked twice. He was definitely getting tired.
Anchored off the Battery were two Israeli missile boats, Yaffo and Tarshish. Novak called out their names. A big crowd had gathered on the land and was cheering the boats.
“They’re enthusiastic,” said Taylor.
Novak surveyed the scene. “You haven’t heard, have ya? Too busy running around Harlem.”
“Heard what?”
“UPI moved a bulletin. Israeli commandos raided the Entebbe airport in Uganda. They freed the hostages and flew them out of the country.”
“All one hundred and five?”
“Sounds like it.”
“Casualties?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Man, you don’t fuck with the Israelis.”
“No, you don’t. Those two boats will be getting a lot of attention from the New York crowd. Sidebar, you think?”
“If I can get near one of them.”
They left the Hudson River for New York’s Upper Bay. Taylor had learned the geography of these waterways writing the advance pieces on Op Sail. Until that point, he’d have said there was the Hudson, the East River, and the ocean—and that was it.
On the Jersey side, from Liberty Island to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and on the Brooklyn side, in a double line from Governor’s Island almost to the bridge, were anchored 40 additional naval ships, a guard of honor on both sides of the main channel. The vessels were more of that weird hodgepodge of types and sizes, looking like the assembled prizes of a giant, deranged collector.
Novak called out their countries from his sheet. West Germany, South Africa, Turkey, Norway, and the U.S.A., with 20 different ships representing the host country.
He turned toward Brooklyn and pointed. “That one. That one there. That’s the Egyptian presidential yacht. The Hurriya.” The cream and gold vessel might win the prize as most-out-of-place surrounded by all the gray steel ships of war. “Goddammit!” Novak hit the brain-splitting boat horn and turned hard to miss a speedboat skipping past them. “Rules of the road, asshole!”
“There must be thousands of boats out here,” Taylor said.
“I’d say tens of thousands.”
“Who’s writing about the accidents? And do not say me.”
“Templeton’s doing all the small craft stuff.”
“He understands he needs to remain conscious through tomorrow night?”
“I gave him a quota of calls to make. Cramly grabbed all the bottles he could find in his desk. He gets to leave the office when he’s done his calls.”
“With that incentive, you might get accidents that never happened.”
“Cramly’s problem.”
“Bet he’s in a great mood.”
“I’m out on the water and in a fine mood. Not worrying about Cramly.”
“Give you credit, Novak, you do know how to run a wire service.”
“Compliments from Taylor? Feeling all right? How about a beer?” He kicked at a Styrofoam cooler. “You need one after the day you’ve already had.”
Taylor would have loved a beer. Craved one, in fact. He didn’t want to upset the delicate détente he had going with his stomach. Didn’t know how beer and Dramamine mixed.
A shadow crept across the cooler, Novak, Taylor, and the rest of the cabin cruiser. Above, towering over what now seemed their tiny boat was the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal, looking like an odd-shaped skyscraper that had toppled into the water and floated across the harbor. Pleasure boats were even more numerous here yet looked like water bugs dancing
around the massive ship. She was the grandstand for tomorrow’s naval review. All the bigwigs would have their privileged seats on the huge flat deck way up there somewhere.
Novak took the Drug Merchant in a slow orbit around the Forrestal. The ship seemed to grow as they circled, like you couldn’t comprehend how big the thing was until you saw the whole. Taylor worried that if she shifted a tiny bit, hundreds of the buzzing little boats would be sunk, scattered, or capsized.
Guns crashed. A pirate ship and its quarry traded thunderous broadsides. Pirates waved swords … but they weren’t dressed correctly. They looked like movie gangsters, pinstripe suits and all. The quarry was a Chinese junk commanded by a shirtless Bruce Lee. A spectacular explosion shook the pirate ship. Shook Taylor.
Samantha shook Taylor.
“You dozed off.”
He sat up. The particular strangeness of a daytime dream did a fast fade in favor of reality, which in terms of a typical New York afternoon was weird enough. Three lines of sailing ships stretched off into the distance under a white blue sky.
“How much did I miss?”
Samantha held up his notebook. “Nothing. I took notes.”
“Seasickness?” Novak laughed at Taylor sitting on the chair where he’d dozed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We don’t have enough reporters for me to be seasick. Sober reporters at least.”
“Well, Samantha’s got it covered. Cop, reporter. What’s the difference anyway? You write down what happened.” Both Taylor and Samantha frowned at the comparison, which made Novak laugh harder.
She handed Taylor the notebook. “Just the facts. As always.”
If anything, the notes on what he’d missed were more detailed than his would have been, since he often jotted down key words and phrases to help him remember the full picture later. Interviews were the only thing he took down word for word, using a personal shorthand scribble no one else could read.
“We’re in Gravesend Bay on the other side of the Narrows.” Novak eased back on the throttle so the boat barely made forward way. “Just off Brooklyn, where they put the smaller ships closer to shore. The tall ships are in the third line farthest out.”
An entire squadron had shown up since he was in Brooklyn yesterday to see the Kruzenshtern at anchor all alone.
Novak pulled alongside a sailing ship with the name Clearwater painted on her stern. After some yelling back and forth, a gangway was extended to the Drug Merchant.
Clearwater was a Hudson River sloop, they were quickly told, and crewed almost exclusively by hippies still hanging on to the sixties. The sloop sported a single mast, sat low in the water, and turned out to have a surprisingly wide deck once they got on board.
“Where’re you from?” Taylor asked.
A ponytailed man wearing a battered captain’s hat arched a brow. “We’re from here.”
“New York City?”
“The Hudson River. The Clearwater was built to clean up the river.”
“You’re going to need a bigger boat.”
“She’s a symbol. Pete Seeger came up with the idea. Build a boat to save the river. Clearwater helped get the Clean Water Act passed in Seventy-two. You’re a journalist. You’ve never heard of us?”
“I cover police stories.”
“If you cover the pigs, what’re doing out here?”
“Everybody’s out here. Even those of us who cover cops. Mainly I write about the victims, though. They need someone to speak for them too. Just like a river.”
The eyebrow went up again, followed by a smile. “Come see Pete.”
A middle-aged man with a banjo sat in front of the mast, circled by crewmembers. One had a guitar and another a fiddle. The fiddler pulled the instrument off her chin. “What’s next, Pete?”
The banjo player, who had a full beard, tipped back a blue sailing cap. “ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Because there is still so much we need to overcome. Even on the eve of America’s great birthday celebration.”
The blue cap didn’t display any sign of rank, but Taylor could tell everyone on the Clearwater looked to this man for direction.
“We Shall Overcome” was followed by “If I Had a Hammer.” Taylor hadn’t paid attention to the folk scene, to the protest songs of the past decade. He’d gone from fifties rock and roll to rock to the vast wasteland of early seventies music, only saved by punk rockers like the Ramones and Patti Smith, and now Springsteen, with his own sound so different from the crap that came earlier. On the gently swaying deck of the Clearwater—gentle enough so his stomach was okay or the Dramamine was working—he listened to the lyrics. These words were meant to grab your attention, to tell you something. Maybe he’d misjudged folk music.
“Let’s finish with ‘This Land is Your Land.’ Let’s remember why Woody wrote this one.”
Taylor whispered to the hippie captain, “Woody?”
“Woody Guthrie,” as if to someone profoundly stupid.
“He got tired of hearing ol’ Kate Smith singing ‘God Bless America,’ ” Seeger said. “He thought it complacent and tired. Let’s be none of those things. Tonight. Tomorrow. Every day we sail this sturdy sloop.”
The whole crew joined in singing “This Land is Your Land,” a song Taylor had sung, it seemed, a million times in elementary school, never knowing it was a protest against the other patriotic ditty. As people mingled after, Taylor caught the distinct happy burning-hay perfume of pot.
He found the captain. “Where do you get pot out here?”
“You want some?”
“No. Curious. Off the record.”
“Brought it down from Beacon. Keeping our eyes out for the harbor patrol. Though they seem pretty busy with bigger things. Been hearing stories. Supposedly, one of the Op Sail ships is trying to land drugs. Heavy stuff.”
“Heavy?”
“Heroin. Cocaine. Who knows if it’s true? Sailors love a good story, man. Pass ’em from ship to ship. The harbor patrol’s been asking a lot of leading questions. They gotta be careful. They can’t go crazy and search foreign ships. That wouldn’t be cool during the big party.”
“Where are the drugs supposed to be coming from?”
“I had to guess. South America. Still in all, you never know what can get across the Atlantic.” Taylor thought of Marseilles. “To be honest, the way the cops are jumping round, it’s like they think more than one ship is using the celebration to sneak in some junk. That or they have no idea what’s going on.”
The latter could be as true as the former. Jersey Stein said as much.
Novak called to Taylor it was time to leave. He found Samantha at the front of the ship, finishing a walk around the sloop with a woman in a peasant shirt and bib overalls.
“Did you like your hippie tour?”
Samantha took Taylor’s arm and squeezed. “They may be hippies, but at least they’re hippies with a plan. They’re getting something done.”
“They don’t like cops.”
“Who does these days? I’m used to that. Shit, my own father was corrupt.” She paused, perhaps having stumbled into a topic she didn’t expect or welcome. “Look, they’re out trying to fix the damage. They’re not rolling around in a commune.”
“Are there communes anymore?”
They were at the gangway.
Novak navigated the boat away from the first row of vessels and headed for the rank of tall ships anchored farthest out in the bay. He wanted a particular ship: the Gazela Primeiro. In spite of her name, she was the other American tall ship at Operation Sail. The Eagle, the Coast Guard Academy’s training ship and lead vessel in tomorrow’s parade, was the official host. The Gazela was of lowlier station, a former Portuguese fisherman now sailed by the Philadelphia Maritime Museum. Taylor had come up with the idea to visit her. He had a thing for the little guy—the second (or third or fourth) place finisher. It was a story other reporters might miss. There’d be 2,700 profiles of the Eagle. How many on the Gazela Primeiro?
They
cruised up to the Gazela, her masts soaring into the blue sky. Lines ran everywhere in a confusion Taylor couldn’t ever imagine understanding. Despite how his stomach might object, he so wanted to be on that deck when she had a tremendous swirl and billow of sails above. The crew was as trim and neat as the ship. Taylor got the quotes he needed, but couldn’t get anyone to talk about the drug rumors he’d heard. Shipshape and tight-lipped. There’d be no singing “This Land is Your Land” on the deck of the Gazela. He was certain this was an “America the Beautiful” ship.
Back on board, Novak brought the Drug Merchant around, and while Taylor went below and radioed in his story on the ship visits and the atmosphere on the eve of Operation Sail, the boat cruised under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, bearing east toward the Brooklyn docks.
Lights were coming on all over the harbor as they slowed near the piers; the sun sunk toward the horizon. The super-fleet of pleasure craft had thinned some. Taylor pointed, Novak gave thumbs up, and the boat motored closer to the pier near where Bridget Collucci’s body had been pulled up. Taylor, emboldened by the fact he was on this same stretch of water and not puking, pulled out a Schlitz and popped the top. Novak had his second. Samantha took one.
Taylor tried to picture the scene three days earlier, but he couldn’t be sure exactly where the diver had recovered the body. A crime scene on the water vanished as soon as the police boat pulled away with the victim. No yellow tape. No blood. Nothing broken. Rooms, sidewalks, streets, even the ground, they held the memory of a victim—at least for a decent interval.
A motorboat best suited to towing water skiers scooted by fast. Taylor didn’t give it a second look. He was still staring at the water. He wasn’t crazy enough to think he could will an answer up from below. What could he learn here? Nothing. The stop was in Bridget’s memory, not in hopes of finding anything. The sadness peculiar to his work, over the loss of someone he never knew and never could know, overtook him. The little shiver. His eyes clouded. It happened more than he’d admit to anyone, and every time it surprised him.
“You want to go over to the Jersey docks next?” Novak reversed the boat slowly. “Ugliest view we could go looking for on this prettiest of nights.”
A Black Sail Page 10