The tone of his voice appeared to convey his surrender to his fate. The boss went to the door and shut it all the same. Cal took a sly account of the bulge of his holstered gun inside the skirting of his jacket.
His captor lumbered around the beam. Blissfully, hands worked to unknot his bonds. The big boss had to nudge up close to do it. A reek of cheap cologne mixed with body odor assaulted Cal. Midway through the untying, the man spoke quietly, “You are handsome boy.”
“Thanks,” Cal said. Though his eyes worried around from the unexpected compliment. One hand was unfettered from the ropes. His free wrist throbbed, but the removal of the pressure was glorious. The gangster told him, with a touch of buoyancy, “You like the rich men.”
That spun things into freakier territory. Cal held down a surge of panic. “Oh, I don’t know that I have a preference,” he tried out. “I’ve always been more attracted to what’s on the inside.” His second hand came free. Cal breathed out in relief. He massaged his aching, chafed wrists. The hairy mobster came around and looked Cal in the face.
“I, rich man,” he said. “I make you very happy.”
“That’s sweet,” Cal managed to say. “I feel a lot better already. How about you untie my feet?”
The mobster gazed at him in wonder. Something may have been lost in translation, Cal feared. But fortunately, the guy got down on his knees to unknot the cords around Cal’s feet. He looked up at Cal. “I make you beautiful home in Albania. You like?”
“I’ve never been to Albania. I’ve never been anywhere in Europe besides Greece. I bet it’s a beautiful country.” Cal realized he was on the razor-thin edge of keeping himself in the guy’s good graces and giving him the horribly wrong impression. What could he do? While the man worked on unknotting his ankles, he stretched into another topic. “Does your work have you traveling a lot?”
“Traveling?” the man repeated. “Where you like to traveling?” He grinned at Cal, giving off a slight hint of a younger, waggish version of himself with his wide and sparkling eyes. “You like to make party? I take you all the places. Mykonos. Bodrum. Tel Aviv.”
Cal smiled. “You’ve been to all those places?”
“I am young man once. Make big party everywhere.” He looked at Cal grimly. “I still know how to make big party with handsome Greek boy.”
Cal turned his head and blushed. The old, behemoth Romeo was almost endearing. Cal was untangled from the ropes and tangled in a new, uncomfortable predicament. He flexed his unbound feet to get the blood coursing again. The man stood up proudly. Cal pushed his achy body up from the floor. An awkward silence passed while the boss man gazed at him, nearly giddy like a teenage girl. Meanwhile, urine saturated the crotch of Cal’s shorts and was soaking into the seat. He looked to the pile of clothes the Romanian had brought.
The guy caught the cue. He gathered the clothes from the floor and handed them to Cal. Cal looked around the hold. It wasn’t a very big space, but there was a dark corner that would give him a little discretion.
“I’ll just go over here,” he said, nudging his head in the direction.
Cal stepped away, and thankfully, his new admirer stayed put. Now he had to work out a way to get to the gun. Facing the wall of the hull, in a hollow of shallow, Cal took his time piecing through the articles of clothing he’d been given. He couldn’t hurt the man. Cal was too softhearted to do that. Maybe the boss man deserved it for smuggling him into his boat, for conspiring to ransom Brendan, but Cal had seen a gentler side of the gangster, and didn’t every criminal have a hard-luck story that was owed some sympathy? His family couldn’t have approved of his life choices. Maybe they were destitute. Maybe he’d grown up in a neighborhood of violence and crime.
Cal could hear what Derek would say—Cal was being naïve and overly trusting. Had he developed Stockholm syndrome? He’d read about that in psychology class. If he ever expected to gain his freedom, he would need to harden his heart. Getting the guy’s gun was his only chance.
His change of clothes was troubling. A pair of briefs that would fit him like a droopy diaper. Trousers that he could use to compete in a potato-sack race. Fortunately, the guy had provided him with a thin leather belt to hold up his pants. Cal doffed his drenched shorts and underwear and stepped into his new clothes. He laced the belt through the pant loops and found that the remaining ends needed to be tied up in a double knot to accomplish cinching his pants. He cuffed the legs in clownish wads. Adding to the absurdity, he had one flip-flop. Cal peeked over his shoulder and saw his companion had turned his back chivalrously. An idea hit Cal. It was something he’d seen in a spy movie.
He stepped out of the shadowy corner and presented himself to the Romanian. The man’s face turned rosy, and he let out a throaty chuckle. “Big,” he declared.
Cal pshawed. “They’re perfect. Believe me; it’s an improvement on what I was wearing.” He gestured to the pants. “They’re yours?”
The Romanian nodded bashfully. Cal stepped closer. He channeled the cool of an actor, while trying not to trip on the cuffing of his pants. He didn’t end his steps until he was a mere hand’s reach from his companion and could look him boldly in the face. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
The Romanian’s eyes quivered. He was suddenly scared stiff. Cal put out of mind the smell and sight of him. The deed had to be done. He pressed up close and kissed the gangster on the mouth, even contriving a little tongue action.
The guy’s lips were cold. Caught by surprise, he was nervous, even virginal. Cal extended the kiss while venturing one hand beneath his jacket, searching for the place where he had holstered his gun. Before he could reach it, the guy coughed into his mouth.
Cal drew back. The man had turned pale as a sheet, and he winced and clutched the left side of his chest. His eyes stabbed at Cal, and a Romanian gasp escaped from his lips. Then he foundered to his knees with a thud and collapsed onto his side.
Cal leapt down beside him with a hand drawn over his mouth. The guy’s eyes were wide open, though unfocused, and his chest was moving with shallow breaths. A heart attack? The timing was miraculous, but to have been the cause of it was troubling.
“I’m so sorry,” Cal said. He pried a revolver from the man’s holster. It was so much easier to do than he’d imagined. He fastened on the man again. “I’m so sorry about this. Really, I am.”
Cal stood and looked to the door. A charitable little part of him suggested he call for help. He banished the idea. He had to be ruthless. The gun was his ticket off the boat, and the guy was still breathing. On his way out, he could alert the henchmen, and they would attend to him.
A fluster of movement gained up on the other side of the door. That hard fall the boss man had taken must have been loud enough to alert the goons. The door swung open, and the two mobster bookends appeared in states of high alert.
Channeling policeman drama, Cal launched his arm out at eye level and pointed the gun at the thugs. They glimpsed the gun, glimpsed their boss laid out, and threw up their hands like pussy willows.
Sweat sprouted from Cal’s temples, but he held his cool. He gestured with the gun. “Get in.”
The guys shuffled into the freight hold, and Cal stepped around them, keeping the gun aimed at their chests while he went. He passed through the portal and pushed it shut, and then he got to working on the wheel that closed up its bolts. It held fast. A steel trap, half a foot thick. Cal looked around. He saw a ladder to the deck. Lord knew, he had no idea of how a tugboat worked, but he guessed he’d find a cabin above deck where there’d be a radio and steering controls, and maybe by grace, a phone he could figure out how to work. He stashed the revolver in his sizeable pants’ pocket and climbed the ladder.
Cal emerged to a murky night and a great chasm of sea all around the boat. A cabin and a bridge were aglow with light, and he saw antennas and a masthead, topped with a red flashing beacon. Cal climbed another ladder up to the bridge. That was where people captained their vessels. He knew th
at much. The cool, gusty air surprised him, as did the wave-tossed deck. Cal probably had all the time in the world with the three crooks in lockup, but it didn’t feel like it. He staggered into the cabin on the bridge.
The bridge console was a helpless puzzle, with its dials, switches, blinking lights, and a screen showing numbers and bleeps in an inscrutable navigational language. Anything labeled was in Romanian.
Cal found an old-fashioned telephone receiver and picked it up. Dead silence, and he couldn’t find a dial or switch or number pad that did anything to work the device. Static droned from a radio. He found its dial, but working the radio was another mystery. Faint, tinny voices drifted in and out as he tried to tune into channels. He found a handheld microphone and called out desperately for some response, trying English, Greek, and the universal “Mayday.”
Panic overwhelmed him. He threw switches, punched buttons, twisted dials. Something he did triggered a floodlight from the bridge. It shone onto the waters up ahead. But Cal had no idea how, or even where, to navigate the vessel. He found a throttle that controlled its engine and something like a joystick that seemed to steer it slightly one way or another. Everything was very touchy and unreliable, like trying to commandeer a shuttle in outer space. He’d end up in a wreck trying to put the boat to land. The best he could do was cut off the engine when he got close to a harbor or a beach or even another boat. Then he’d use a lifeboat or swim the rest of the way to safety.
Glancing out of the bridge, he spotted a blinking light, straight ahead on the horizon. Cal wiped the sweat away from his eyes and stared at it. A tower buoy, tall as a house, some thirty yards away, directly in the tugboat’s path.
Cal grasped the joystick to try to swerve around it. With his mental faculties entirely frazzled, he swung the throttle into higher gear by mistake. Pulling it back did little to decelerate the momentum, even after he cut off the engine completely. He batted around for anything to slow his course. Something triggered the cranking of an anchor from below. It was too late. They rammed into the tower in a violent clash of metal. It sent the boat shuddering and knocked Cal’s legs out from under him.
In the aftermath, the vessel wallowed, and Cal gingerly lifted himself back on his feet. He looked out of the bridge to the floodlit scene. The tugboat was moored against the bent signal tower. Bumper tires floated around, ripped from the bow, and the boat groaned and rattled in duress. What a foray into seafaring! Within minutes, Cal had nearly sunk the vessel.
He worked the throttle to try to get moving again. The engine revved and strained, snared from below by the anchor which must have caught on the girding of the tower. Meanwhile, the vessel tilted heavily to one side, and surf doused the deck. Would the whole thing go under? Cal moaned from the situation. He broke out of bridge cabin, went down to the deck, and searched for a lifeboat.
Off the high side of the deck, he found the wooden dinghy the crooks had used to grab him off the beach in Hydra. Desperately, he unfastened its moorings. Waves rushed over the deck, steadily burying a greater portion of it. Would the whole ship sink with the gangsters trapped in the hold? Cal thought about running down there to let them out, thought about the possibility of a violent confrontation. The dinghy came loose and clattered down the side of the hull, and he was left with the choice of descending before it floated away or rushing back below deck on the chance he could inspire some teamwork for their survival.
Cal climbed over the gunwale and jumped down into the little boat. He’d hope for a naval rescue for the mobsters. Surely, some marine authority would be alerted to the busted beacon tower, and they’d come before the hold flooded with seawater. If the lifeboat had a radio, he’d call in the disaster. But first, he had to make sure he stayed afloat himself.
Orienting himself, he saw a pair of oars, life jackets, waterproof bundles of supplies, and most helpfully, an outboard motor.
This, Cal knew how to use. He had motored around Lake Onondaga with his brothers in the summertime. He attached the fuel line, gave it some pumps, unlatched the choke, got the handle in start position, and put his strength into pulling the wind to bring the engine to life. Gloriously, it sputtered and revved up to a vigorous churn.
Cal steered the vessel away from the wreckage, triumphant for a brief moment. Anxiety cramped up inside him soon enough. He was motoring through the pitch-black night across an enormous and unfamiliar sea and could be headed farther from land. He might not encounter another boat for days, and the dinghy likely had spare provisions and at best a flare gun to try to signal for help. Meanwhile, Cal noticed when he patted his trouser pocket the boss’s gun must have tumbled out when he jumped into the lifeboat.
Chapter Fifteen
BRENDAN MARSHALED DEREK through town to the police station and onward to Lieutenant Constantinides. They found the dapper, young Greek at his leisure, watching music videos of voluptuous Persian pop stars on the computer at his desk. He seemed completely unbothered by the intrusion, and clicking closed his day’s entertainment with a winsome grin, he offered them Greek coffee. Brendan declined for both of them, and he nudged Derek to report what he’d seen the morning Cal disappeared.
This, Derek did straightaway, telling the lieutenant about the strange tugboat lurking on the water near the hotel. Constantinides took the story in with a troubling expression of amusement. When Derek was done, the lieutenant turned his attention to Brendan.
“This is now the two of you playing at detectives?” he asked.
Brendan’s shoulders tensed. “It’s a lead. Don’t you think?” He ventured to lay his hand on the lieutenant’s immaculate desk. “Cal hasn’t turned up anywhere on the island. We checked the ferry. No one saw him leave that day. The only way he could have gotten off Hydra was in a private or a commercial boat.”
Constantinides knitted his graceful hands together. “Mr. Thackeray-Prentiss, dozens of freight liners pass by Hydra every day. We are in the middle of the major seaway to Athens. You are suggesting to me that one of them saw your fiancé, waving from the beach near your hotel, and decided to set anchor so that he could climb aboard?”
“Or they took him by force,” Derek said, trying to be helpful. “It looked suspicious.”
“Why do you say this word, ‘suspicious’?”
“It was early in the morning,” Derek said. “It was just sitting there out on the water. And it wasn’t a big freight liner. It was an old, rickety tugboat.” He scratched his ear. “I don’t know, Lieutenant. Maybe one thing has nothing to do with the other. But when Cal left the hotel, there was no one around for miles. Except for that boat. How can you explain him vanishing from the beach, leaving one flip-flop and a bracelet?”
Constantinides put on a deadpan face. “This is a most interesting theory. So you believe this tugboat quietly stole up on Mr. Panagopoulos while he was walking the beach, and a group of sailors stormed down from its deck, into the water, trudging to the beach, and caught him by surprise to drag him back to the ship?” He sniffed. “This would make a very excellent Hollywood movie.” He turned to Brendan. “Perhaps one which your father would be interested in producing?”
Brendan realized his high-profile American family must have engendered gossip on the tiny island. He didn’t mind Europeans resenting American tourists, as a general rule, but he’d had enough of the lieutenant’s attitude.
“What exactly are you doing to investigate?” he blurted out. “Isn’t it your job to find missing persons?”
The lieutenant’s easy bearing changed. “Ah yes. How peasant-like of me to forget. Especially when I have already been reminded of this fact by a phone call I received from the Minister of the Hellenic Police. It appears he was handed down an inquiry about my handling of Mr. Panagopoulos’s disappearance from the U.S. Secretary of State. This is a friend of your grandfather, Mr. Harold Thackeray, if I am not mistaken?”
Brendan blinked. Grandad worked fast. His call to his senator friend must have ratcheted up the matter. Though in this case, his met
hods had made an enemy of the local authorities. Brendan tried to take things more gently.
“Can’t you check out this tugboat? Its owner could be questioned at least. Even if they weren’t involved, someone aboard could have seen what happened to Cal.”
Constantinides looked upon Brendan with a grimace. He picked up his phone and dialed. A pleasant-sounding conversation in Greek ensued. Brendan and Derek exchanged a glance. It would have been marvelous to actually understand the discussion going on, to hear whether Constantinides was dropping in the words “American fascists” or some such with his colleague. The lieutenant sounded like he was handling everything companionably. He said goodbye and replaced his phone.
“I have consulted with the Harbor Marshal,” the lieutenant told them. “It appears there was a tugboat making port yesterday morning for the purpose of refueling.”
Brendan brightened. “Did he say where it was going?”
Constantinides shook his head. “No. It was a vessel of Romanian origins. We will conduct a query based on its IMO number, which will lead us to its owner and its recent ports of call.”
Brendan turned to Derek. “That’s great.” He looked to the lieutenant. “How long does it take to conduct a query?”
“This is all done through a computer database. One hour. Two perhaps.”
“Thank you,” Derek said.
The lieutenant frowned impartially. He glanced to the door. He was over the whole exchange. Nevertheless, Brendan asked to borrow his gold-plated pen and his notepad and wrote down his cell phone number.
“Can you call me when you find out about the boat?”
“I am at your service, Mr. Thackeray-Prentiss. Now perhaps you will allow me to attend to other matters which concern the public safety of the good people of Hydra.”
Brendan and Derek stood and removed themselves from the office.
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