To tell just when the hands will stop
At late or early hour.
Now is the only time you own.
Live, love, toil with a will.
Place no faith in time.
For the clock may soon be still.
In the front seat, BeBe says, “Police ahead. You say it’s the water behind the market?” His wide-set eyes stare at me from the mirror.
“Take Ocean Boulevard. Where the ruined frigates were back in the ’80s.”
“Know it.” He turns.
Just past downtown, I tell BeBe, “Pull off where the boulevard turns back inland into the city.”
BeBe drives five blocks of the only modern high-rises in Kingston, bends inland with the boulevard, steers a few yards, and stops. I peek for police, see none, and sit up.
Across the road is Google Earth’s satellite image of Eddie O’Hare’s coordinates.
No X floats ten feet offshore; must be why I couldn’t see it from the plane. The X would lie among the sixteen rotted pier pylons. Where you’d dock a boat or boats. That could move. Like the ones that were here twenty-three years ago when I was here.
Anne motions me to give her the file, then refocuses on the new pages I brought from Chicago. “Have a look at your spot, Bill, do your puzzlin’ magic, but nothing more. Péralte and O’Hare left us the riddles and traps, deadly every one of ’em. I’ll be there shortly.”
My “puzzlin’ magic” is just inductive reasoning—bottom-up logic that allows for the possibility that the conclusion you reach is false, even if all of the premises are true (the opposite of Sherlock Holmes; Sherlock would have died of a broken heart at the racetrack).
I get out with BeBe and walk to the water. He covers his MAC with a towel. Up close, the water is muck and flotsam and shallow enough to wade neck-deep. Three young boys are in the water. Eddie O’Hare’s clue hasn’t killed them. That’s good, but likely means that whatever trap was here caught someone else a long time ago. The only thing that could still be here from the 1930s would be concrete. Concrete buried so deep that a hurricane couldn’t suck it up and toss it across the road. And how many hurricanes have come through here in the last seventy to eighty years? Twenty? Fifty?
I glance the pylons; all sixteen have survived long enough to rot. That’s a good sign.
But Eddie O’Hare’s not burying a clue for life insurance, a failing memory, or his heirs, then hoping the clue stays there, even for a year or two.
Okay . . . what if the clue is a boat that sits at the dock the pylons supported? Some kinda special boat that eight decades ago in the 1930s wanted to be next to downtown?
Gambling boat? Hookers, musicians, et cetera? Like the SS Rex, the converted four-master casino boat that anchored off Santa Monica, California, long enough for Cary Grant to play the owner in Mr. Lucky?
BeBe’s standing next to me. I ask him.
He shrugs, thinks about it. “Maybe way back, them Rae Town people fish from here.” He frowns, shakes his head. “Nah, dock too short. Maybe a longboat fishing the Pedro Bank for the queen conch. Thirty miles out, long time ago before us born . . . could be.”
I got nothing. Zip.
BeBe points west toward the gantry cranes in Kingston Harbour. “Before the harbor get big like she is now, this foreshore all sand and fishermen canoes from end to end. After that come the ganja and cocaine.” BeBe points north beyond downtown. “Dudus Coke and the Shower Posse come down here, make all the rag-a-bag yardies fish somewhere else.”
“Can you get those boys to dive? See what’s on the bottom?”
“Why bwoys? Afraid the crabs get you?”
“Actually, yeah.”
“Every bwoy on these beaches can dive. Say what you want.”
I point the three kids to generally where Google Earth said the coordinates were. “You get $10 US to dive, but be careful. And another $50 US if you find something I want.”
BeBe glances up the road. “Been a time since I was here. Used to come as a punk, look for treasure on them old brigantine wrecks. The Becca, the Falmouth, the Primrose. Took the wood into town for the charcoal burners.”
Punk used to mean “youngster,” not asshole, not that I intend to confirm either.
Anne approaches from the Land Rover. She’s wearing sunglasses, hiding her hair under a Rasta tam, and laughing at me. She mimics BeBe’s Jamaican accent. “Where you been born, bwoy?”
“Chicago. We don’t have five hundred years of history.”
“The mail ship HMS Primrose. Queen mother of the island.” Anne wags the file. “Before Jamaica had her roads, the Prim sailed the mail and supplies up and down the coast to the small towns, the forts, and fisherman camps.”
I can visualize Eddie O’Hare and a ship, sort of. “Where’s she now?”
Anne shakes her head in disbelief, like we’re talking about the Mayflower. “Aye, Bill, don’chya see it?”
“Enlighten me.”
“She’s in Spanish Town.”
I stare.
Anne says, “Jamaica’s first capital? Where they hanged Calico Jack? My great-gran’s consort?”
“When did they move her?”
“Parts of her were saved and moved. Must’ve been the ’20s. She’s a monument now, on Eagle House hill.”
Hmm . . . Eddie O’Hare, lawyer-poet being poetic: the coordinates are here, but without the history you’re “dead in the water”? I’m too embarrassed to say that out loud, so I don’t. I wave the diver boys up to us and hand BeBe $50. “Please pay our divers; we’re going to Spanish Town.”
From the murky water, the boy points at Anne in disguise. “You Anne Bonny, the hot steppa runnin’ from Babylon.”
BeBe tells the boy that talk like that will kill him, then looks at Anne. She’s pulling a new pistol from her waistband and checking the road we’ll take.
Shit. Now I remember Spanish Town.
Chapter 17
Bill Owens
BeBe drives us into Spanish Town from the south, avoiding stalled cars, hordes of rainbow-dressed, market-day pedestrians; higglers selling everything from rebottled water to salvation; and two police roadblocks—probably the sporadic car-document-and-dope checks that pretend to be control of the roads.
Ten blocks from the HMS Primrose’s supposed resting place, another roadblock forces us off the road and into a housing scheme, what the Jamaicans call a housing edition.
Anne grips the MAC-10 on her lap. “Not where we want to be. A few streets up we’ll be facin’ the first of Spanish Town’s sixteen garrison communities, headquarters of the One Order gang.”
“What’s a ‘garrison community’?”
“Same as she sounds—fortified private enclaves that used to be neighborhoods. ‘Political’ gangs run ’em now. They answer to the larger drug gangs, the posses. After you left in the ’80s, the MPs from both our political parties used the posses and garrisons to win elections but still had control of ’em. Now, the posses run the country—Dudus Coke and the Shower Posse in particular—and it’s the members of parliament who do what they’re told.”
BeBe stares through the windshield, reading the terrain and traffic.
Anne says, “Maybe we walk up from behind Eagle House hill.”
BeBe doesn’t answer. I pull the pistol I’ve been given and ask Anne how far.
“Half mile, three-quarters. No whites, though, not alone, maybe not even with BeBe.”
I point at the clues. “No choice. We have to go.”
BeBe throws an arm over the seat top. “I got a bad feelin’ about dis fuckery we intendin’. Best we get to the boat and gone.”
Anne glances east toward a tropical storm we can’t see yet, then me, then the papers, then BeBe. “My gallows at Tower Street sounds better, does it? Or fishing the Pedro Bank for a livin’?” She winks at BeBe. “G
’wan, now, time’s a wastin’.”
BeBe studies Anne, then turns and studies the loud, busy street market beyond his windshield. Something he sees, or thinks, puts his foot on the gas and we speed through the first intersection and don’t stop until the hill at Eagle House.
The half-mile walk is uphill in the nubby grass and takes fifteen minutes. Trash is burning somewhere upwind. The stern of the HMS Primrose is the monument. The grass around it hasn’t been cut in months, maybe years. Scorched piles of blackened wood dot the low hill. Crab shells, plastic bottles, and used condoms make up most of the debris.
Anne glances back a hundred yards toward BeBe and our car blocking the road, then does a slow 180. I walk to the stern of the Primrose, inspect the hull for something carved in the wood . . . something that undoubtedly would’ve been painted over a hundred times in seventy or eighty years—Jamaicans love paint, paint their houses twice a year if they can afford it.
I step back and try to take in the whole picture, the angles, the brass plaque affixed to a giant coral chunk, then the five guys watching Anne and me from a hundred feet away. My pistol’s in my hand. Anne steps between me and the five men watching us, says “Hurry up,” and pulls the towel off her MAC.
I walk to the plaque, read the HMS Primrose history. The last line reads:
This Jamaica national land donated and maintained in honor of the Sephardim of St. Jago de la Vega, Hunts Bay.
Blink, slight turn toward the ocean. I point, ask Anne, “That’s Hunts Bay, right?”
She nods, refocuses on the five men, says, “A back bay. Every year when the big weather begins, Hunts Bay fills up with whatever the Kingston sewers can’t hold. Breeds clouds of mosquitoes. She separates Spanish Town from Caymanas Park Racetrack—your alma mater during your Myers’s days. Squint, and you’ll see her as well.”
I squint at the plaque instead, read “Sephardim” out loud.
Sephardim rings a bell. Back in my Myers’s days, I worked with Spanish Jews who are, or were, the descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal. They attended Synagogue Shaare Shalom, around the corner on Duke Street from Myers’s.
Anne points at the “St. Jago de la Vega” on the plaque. “That’s the original name of Spanish Town.”
I squeeze the pistol grip, try to see what Eddie O’Hare saw, not the five garrison gangsters deciding how best to circle an armed white woman and her idiot tourist boyfriend.
Hmm . . . local Spanish Town Jews donate, then maintain this “national” land. In honor of Jews from Hunts Bay.
Except no one can live in Hunts Bay.
Hmm.
Donate?
Maintain?
The Jewish congregations my mausoleum company works with back in Chicago make a big deal about protecting and maintaining old Jewish cemeteries and their residents. Dave got us a bunch of that business.
If the Hunts Bay reference meant a Jewish cemetery—my lips curl at both corners—a Jew could be ‘from’ there. And it would be a great place to bury something you didn’t want to lose. Lots better than the boat dock or this spot.
“Bingo.” I slap at Anne’s shoulder. “I am handicapper of the year. Tell me there’s a cemetery at Hunts Bay.”
“Aye. Old, though. Way, way older than what we’re lookin’ for.”
“If you can get us past our friends there on the hill, I’d like to pay my respects. I do believe our lawyer Eddie O’Hare may have left our birthday present there.”
Anne doesn’t bite.
I explain.
She kisses me on the cheek. “What lovely man you are. Susie and I may have to fight over you.” Anne shows the MAC and its magazine to the garrison gangsters. They hold their ground. She tells me: “Show your pistol but don’t aim her. Just walk me to the car like we’re courtin’ on the Falls Road.”
“We’re courting?”
Big grin. “A lad as smart as you ought to have children.”
***
Finding Hunts Bay Cemetery is on its fourth stop-and-ask even though Anne and BeBe “know” where it is. We’re stopped out front of the crumbling Apostolic Assembly Church. The church’s cross is half the size of a far newer JLP banner (Jamaica Labor Party) hanging above the front door. The rail-thin preacher talking to me says he can provide directions but wants to talk first, while the white-and-blue police cars drive by. He thinks I should know that he’s well informed on Jews, that there are two hundred Jews living in Jamaica, but there used to be many more.
“Really? Gosh. And where’s the cemetery?”
He smiles his white-stubble beard at Anne disguised in the Land Rover and points. “The Jews at Port Royal, they were merchants and pirates, same as all the peoples out there. But burying-wise, the Jews was different, didn’t use the ocean; used to row their dead four miles across the harbor and back bay; carry them a hundred yards to that low hill.” He smiles at Anne again.
I dig for a small donation to his church. “And where was that?”
“Better I show you.”
***
We follow the preacher’s dented Yugo. His last turn is onto a rutted red-dirt lane long forgotten by the JLP government. The lane leads to an open, scrubby five-acre wasteland that fronts the bay between two heavy industrial neighbors. Eight hundred yards south of us the sky is dominated by giant sky spiders, the seventeen-story gantry cranes of Kingston Harbour.
Anne smiles the smile and says, “Hunts Bay Cemetery,” then slaps my thigh like we’ve arrived at Woodstock just as the fences come down.
From the car, I scan the storm-dimmed twilight and finally see the graves, uneven rows of mostly sunken gray slabs. BeBe backs the Land Rover to a spot with a clear view of the graves and the red-dirt road in. Anne and I keep our weapons and step out.
Mosquitoes buzz and promise malaria.
Anne and I walk into the rows of grave slabs—bluestone, marble, and limestone—some dating from the 1600s. Several are engraved with elaborate skulls and crossbones. Maybe three hundred graves total, some on raised brick bases that haven’t partially sunk. I smile manly confidence at Anne and wish I knew what I was looking for.
I point her at the stones and step into the next row. “Read the names out loud as you walk past. I’ll do the same. If one means something to you, say so.”
Anne drones through the rows: “Lindo . . . Sangster . . . De Silva . . .”
So do I: “Marish . . . Babb . . . Magnus . . .”
Nope. None means anything to a treasure hunt. She stares at me for Now what?
Okay, I build mausoleums. Weight matters. Foundations. Start with that. Except I’m in a swamp where weight and foundations would have to be kept to a minimum.
Okay, maybe weight’s not it.
Be present; be Eddie O’Hare when he was here. Eddie’s right here sometime between 1934 and late 1938. Mosquitoes, lowland swamp, and heat. Eddie is a Christian lawyer from St. Louis and Chicago, not a Jew—why’s he here? He’s into dog racing and horses, walking right here, hiding 1,650 pounds of gold stolen from a Sicilian gangster. Has to weigh as much as ten caskets. Weight has to matter—
“Look out!” I grab for Anne’s arm.
She rocks forward, rigid on her toes, then back to her heels, MAC-10 in both hands, staring at the parched grass in front of us; then the dirt between the slabs. Our feet have stopped just short of a booby trap that isn’t there. I say, “Sorry.”
Anne fisheyes me.
“Lemme see the file.”
She hands me the file from her waistband. I pull the page from the Barbancourt bottle I recovered at Zelda Calhoun’s house. Below the Kingston coordinates that sent us to this cemetery are two lines I’ve read fifty times.
I read the last words on the page out loud:
Fear the feds; fear the sky;
fear the pencilmen; who never die.
/> Eddie’s life insurance policy can’t just say it? Has to be cute?
The nearest grave is inscribed, but it’s in Portuguese and Hebrew. Couldn’t be Spanish, or God forbid, English. I do a 360 in the sticky heat and shadows, swearing at Eddie and his Haitian accomplice—
No, Remi Péralte wouldn’t be here; this is reverse engineering, a minefield trail made after the gold had been relocated. Remi’s already dead, Capone in prison . . . I look at Anne, then the sky: “‘Fear the feds’ I get, but why ‘fear the sky’?”
Anne checks the sky, the distant storm in the east. She says, “Hurricane? Demons? Locusts? Rain? Flood?”
The back bay to the harbor is four hundred away . . . and drains a bunch of Kingston’s overflow. I turn slowly toward the nearest tree line . . . whose trunks disappear below the grade we’re standing. Walking toward the trees, a deep, dry reddish ravine becomes visible . . . a big drainage channel that probably carries a bunch of water when it rains. From the sky. ‘Fear the sky’?
The ravine’s edge is exposed rock. There are more gravestones over here, these planted into and above the rock, not in the softer, easier-to-dig lowland. I kneel, looking for a booby trap I can’t see. Try to translate the first granite-slab engraving, can’t, and neither can Google in a “no bars” neighborhood.
“You’re a pirate, can you read Portuguese or Hebrew?”
“Gaelic.” Anne refits red hair back under her Rasta tam.
From my knees I stare at the slab. Why can’t I read Hebrew? Just for today? I stand, step up on the slab, and 360 again: Lowland cemetery in half-light shadows, bugs everywhere, heat. What am I missing?
Anne walks to the end of the row, stands on the last stone. She reads the name, steps onto the next stone and reads them all as she walks back to me:
“DeCohen . . . Levy . . . Guzik . . . Codner—”
“What?”
“Codner.”
“Before that.”
Anne walks back one grave. “Guzik.”
I step to her. Right there between her shoes is a name with bagsful of poetic justice for Eddie O’Hare, aspiring poet/pirate. Carved into marble hundreds of years ago that will never die:
Privateers Page 17