GUZIK.
I reread Eddie O’Hare’s warning out loud:
Fear the feds; fear the sky;
fear the pencilmen; who never die.
Eddie O’Hare thinks like a handicapper. I’m starting to like Eddie O’Hare, crooked lawyer, murderer aside.
“What?” Anne looks between her shoes where I’m pointing. “Have you found it, Bill?”
“Eddie O’Hare had one sworn enemy in Al Capone’s Outfit, a man who sensed that Eddie O’Hare was a liar and a cheat—Capone’s pencilman, Jewish accountant Jake ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzik.”
Anne grins big, then steps off the grave. “And be soft with your inspection, Bill. In our adventure, this’ll be where the grave defiler dies.”
***
Moving the slab will require help that my good friend the preacher is now hiring off Spanish Town Road at $10 US per man. While the preacher hunts for grave robbers, Anne stands guard and I check the slab, then the exposed casing and brick foundations every way I know how for trip wires or contact points.
Nope. Nothing.
“Think we’re good . . . unless it’s some kind of spring-loaded detonator from the inside. But why do that? If Eddie put the gold inside, then he’d have to open it someday as well.”
“Aye,” says Anne, “but the Egyptians were famous for death traps on their hiding places and so were the pirates from here to Cartagena. Sent slaves in first to take the blast.”
***
Of our six young grave robbers, Lorenzo appears the strongest. Nice-looking kid; might have been a college student or a soccer player had he grown up with schoolbooks instead of garrison communities and drug posses. Lorenzo has a lengthy iron bar and looks at Anne longer than I would if I were him.
Anne makes sure the boys also see her MAC and the pistol in her belt—robbing us won’t be less work than grave-robbing, assuming we all don’t die in Eddie O’Hare’s trap.
I wave for the bar. “Lemme see that.”
Lorenzo hands it to me.
“Stand back.”
All six move back. Anne shakes her head, then moves back as well.
I take the iron bar, poise it at the top slab’s edge, say “Flyers rule,” and wedge it in—
A booby trap doesn’t kill me.
I exhale big, wedge deeper, and lean into the bar as a lever. Lorenzo jumps over to help. The slab moves four inches off the low walls—
EXPLOSION.
I land on my ass; so does Lorenzo. His pants are on fire. I jump on him, put out the flames, roll off and away.
The grave doesn’t explode again. The now-cracked slab that saved us is scorched black and three-quarters off the grave.
Crouched, Anne 360s her MAC around the cemetery’s borders. “In you go, Bill. Don’t let good sense hold ya back.”
“Wasn’t that you who said step soft?”
She nods east. “Dark’s comin’. We’ll not want to be here.”
I kneel at the open grave, point Lorenzo back to his mates. “You all get your $10 if you hang around to put the slab back.” I sniff, smell nothing but the explosion, visually sift the dust, rags, and human bones. If the gold is here, it will be underneath.
I nervous into the brick-lined hole. Between my feet I find a skull . . . stringy hair . . . long whitish bones . . . bits of bone . . . glass—a bottle. Of Barbancourt Rhum. The bottle is light and dusty in my hand, sealed with ruby-red wax. Something rattles inside. I cut the wax with a bone shard, twist out the cork, and pour a long corked glass tube into my palm.
Decanted, the tube contains linen stationery and a sliver of gold ingot stamped with a US Mint serial number. “We’ve got gold. And somewhere else to go—”
Click.
I look up at Anne. Her finger’s tight on the MAC’s trigger. I let the bottle settle back into the chalky dust. “You’re robbing me?”
“No.” Her eyes are slits and focused elsewhere. “I’m shootin’ the garrison bwoys your preacher hired.” Anne’s MAC is leveled across the grave above my head.
She yells, “I’m the better shot, bwoys! Stand down, or I’ll stack the lot of ya in this hole. Mama never find ya.”
I pull my pistol and stand up in the grave.
Lorenzo and our laborers are gone. Four gunmen and the preacher aim handguns at Anne. The preacher shouts: “Radio say you a convicted woman! A hundred thousand $J on your head for murderin’ a JLP minister. Better price than removing ten crocodiles.” He waves a cell phone with one hand; shakes a revolver at Anne with the other. “Drop that gun, woman! Police comin’ now.”
Anne steadies, knees bent, MAC aimed at the four gunmen. “I’d be Anne Bonny herself.” She strips the Rasta tam, the red hair wild at her shoulders. “Don’t you bwoys get killed followin’ this git. G’wan home.” Over her shoulder she yells: “BeBe! Babylon on the wire!”
The four gunmen shout patois, grab their balls, and threaten with their guns. A rank breeze blows in off Hunts Bay. The foul air mixes with the fermenting trash and poverty of Spanish Town, a good reason for these fellows to believe a gunfight with Anne Bonny is worth the risk.
BeBe’s out of the Rover.
Three. Two. One—
“Don’t!” I yell at the garrison bwoys.
The preacher and his garrison bwoys fire first. Anne empties the MAC. BeBe empties his. The roar lasts two seconds. Sixty rounds total.
Four Jamaicans are sprawled; one running away. Anne slaps another 30-round magazine, racks the bolt, but doesn’t fire. She runs to the preacher sprawled between two graves, pulls her pistol, and screams in his face, “Ya fuckin’ jammy bastard!” She fires twice into his chest, then five times over the head of the man running away. “Ya think I’d walk to the gallows?!” She fires again. “Goddamn ya!”
BeBe runs for the Land Rover. Anne and I race behind him and dive in the back. He guns it up the red dirt. Sirens wail from both directions.
We hit the main road, skid-turn onto another, then onto a waterfront causeway. BeBe loops a container terminal, makes it all the way around and onto a narrow bridge that separates the bay from the main harbor. My heart pounds; cars and trucks whiz past. The last of the causeway dumps us onto a shorefront road. BeBe stays on the gas, slams the brakes at the Rodney’s Arms pub, then ducks us down behind a line of fishing shacks that separate Rodney’s Arms from the beach and Kingston’s twenty-square-mile harbor.
Our vehicle skids onto the sand.
Fifteen feet offshore, Anne’s two gleaming jet-black contraband boats bob at anchor, a 43-foot Donzi ZR and a 48-foot Sea Ray Sundancer with a flying bridge. The three black men I met earlier at her Sazerac Bar stand on the dirty beach, all armed, eyeing the road we just raced.
Anne tells one: “Sundown, take the Rover south to Dream Beach; hide it; Captain BeBe pick you up now.” She circles her hand above her head. “In the boats! Babylon comin’.”
BeBe wades out fast to the deep-V Donzi. On her stern is: “Esmeralda, Port Royal, Jamaica.”
Anne tells me to follow her out to the Sea Ray. BeBe climbs aboard the Donzi and fires the engines. Anne and I climb aboard the Sazerac Star.
Sistah—who tried to shoot me earlier today—rises from the deck. She’s wearing a T-shirt now and holding a live chicken by its feet. She watches me board the Sazerac Star, then drops down into the main cabin.
Anne fires the engines and yells me up to the bridge. I climb the chrome ladder, grab Anne’s MAC-10 off the seat next to her, then strap in for the run across the harbor to the ocean. Anne slams both throttles. My neck snaps back; she shouts over the engines: “If we make the ocean, they’ll not follow us into a hurricane.”
I focus east where we’re pointed. “Lana’s a hurricane?”
The wind keeps most of the engine roar and all the smell behind us. “Up to a Cat 1 and buildin’.” Anne chins at a screen next t
o the throttles. “She’s out there, due east eight hundred miles of Hispaniola. We’re built for wind and water. If we hole up somewhere proper in the next thirty-six hours, it’ll be rough but likely won’t sink us.”
“Likely?” I twist to see if soldiers or police have reached the beach.
So does Anne; she winces apology. “Unfortunate back there. Dudus and the posse dons got these gang bwoys crazy.” She eyes me for bullet damage I don’t have, then refocuses forward. “Might be we could run north for Cuba, the hurricane hole at Punta Barlovento.”
“Our treasure hunt’s killing a lot of people.”
“Aye. Maybe our Susie, God bless her; and us, too, if our luck doesn’t hold. Our adversaries don’t worry blood; they’ll be bold with it. Try Susie’s phone.”
I hit redial on “Rugby Gurl.” It rings, but no answer.
Anne frowns. “Susie’s a good one.” She knocks the wood wheel with the heel of her hand. “But Piccard and the Gryphon are . . . a lot.” She bends around and yells to the deck, “Taller! Get on the glasses; track us any police boats comin’!”
I re-glance the coastline behind us, then out east into the enormous harbor we have to escape, then back to Anne. Three days ago I was some version of normal.
Wind blows through Anne’s red hair. One scarlet fingernail pokes the new piece of stationery death-gripped in my hand. “There’s nothing we can do for Susie that she can’t do for herself. If she didn’t think she could hold the best of it, there’s no way they’d take her alive.” Anne checks her mirror for Jamaican police boats. “But if somehow the bastards did take her, then the gold’s her only chance. What’s our new bottle’s news?”
I read from the stationery aloud:
Beneath the word gift is a small drawing that might be a turtle and a carefully drawn squiggly line below it. The turtle’s flippers sort of resemble compass points. If they are, and the top of the page is north, then the turtle’s “head” points east-southeast. The turtle’s shell bears an insignia of some type, part relic-style cross, part . . . animal shape?
The Sazerac Star knifes east. I steady against the hull’s concussions.
Anne says, “We’ll make the open ocean between Drunken Man’s Cay and Hellshire Bay. Waves will double.”
Staring at the stationery, I say: “If it matters, the cross could be crossed coffin nails, the old kind. I saw a cross made out of ’em at the Field Museum in Chicago, a pirate exhibit, the slave ship Whydah. Vodou uses coffin nails, right?”
Anne traces the turtle shape with her fingernail, then the head, then the wavy line. Her eyes cut to me, then away. She frowns, shakes her head, then shouts down to one of her two men who came aboard with us, “Get Sistah.”
I stare at the drawing but don’t see the message that Anne seems to see.
Sistah climbs to the bridge and stands behind Anne. Anne pulls her between us. “We gone from Kingston, gurl, like you want. But we goin’ to Haiti.”
Sistah stiffens, then recovers.
Anne squeezes Sistah’s hand and says, “I have to know. Will Sistah keep hold of herself?”
“Why Ayiti? Why now? With this white man?”
Anne shows Sistah the slice of US Mint gold ingot. “The best treasure of all time. The fabled Banque Nationale gold.”
Sistah fixes on the gold, then Anne, then turns to me. “This time, white man, you will not kill Ayiti’s Rebelyon; my country will kill you.”
Anne turns Sistah away from me. “G’wan down, now. Tell Taller to bring me the charts for Tortuga.”
Sistah climbs down. Anne says, “She’ll bear watchin’. Should leave her behind, her past loyalties and memories being what they are, but I can’t. Babylon would imprison her; maybe give her my gallows. I’d be honor bound to set her free.”
“Don’t take me to Haiti, Anne. I’m not kidding. Not gonna happen.”
“Ya think I want to go?” Anne waves me off. “Not to Haiti, just close.” She taps the turtle drawing beneath gift.
Taller’s oversize hands precede him up the ladder. A red kerchief is tied to his thick neck under a scarred chin, badly sewn lip, and two gold teeth. He hands Anne a roll of charts. “Sistah say it’s Haiti?”
Anne nods.
“Fuckery it is. Anne Bonny got no friends in Haiti.” Taller looks at me. “And Sistah says your white man got the goddamn devil waitin’ on ’im there.”
“Aye, Taller.” Anne gives him the smile. “But she’s our fuckery and the devil don’ scare us.”
Taller frowns hard like he wants to argue, thinks better of it, and climbs down.
Anne loses the smile and unrolls a chart of Haiti’s north coast across her instruments. She points at a tiny island shaped like the turtle in Eddie’s drawing and says, “Tortuga; first buccaneer capital of the West Indies.” She smiles. “Not Haiti. Read the poem again.”
I mantra Not Haiti. Try to visualize Eddie O’Hare sitting somewhere drafting his poem. Our boat pounds the water.
Anne notices, says: “Second verse—”
“‘Maroons’ in Jamaica and Cuba were runaway slaves. ‘Code Noir’ were the slave regulations that governed them.” She points at crocodile in the same verse, reads aloud:
“‘Births the crocodile as sailor’s star.’ Caiman are Haiti’s crocodiles.” Anne drags her finger two inches east-southeast across the Tortuga Channel to where the well-drawn turtle’s head might point, then stops on mainland Haiti near the port city of Cap-Haïtien and says, “Bois Caïman is here,” like I’m supposed to know.
I don’t.
“Bois Caïman is where Haiti’s historic slave Rebelyon began. Where vodou houngan Dutty Boukman and mambo Cécile Fatiman made their pact with the devil for the freedom they’d win; sold the souls of Haiti for a thousand years. Year of our Lord, 1791.”
I refocus on the poem’s second verse, speculate: “‘Sailor’s star’ could mean ‘navigation’—like it’s what we want to follow.”
“Read that last verse.” Anne pats at the poem.
I do.
Anne cuts to me for help. “So maybe it’s the ‘sailor’s star’ we’re supposed to follow? Find her at Bois Caïman?”
I frown at her theory. “You said Bois Caïman is in Haiti. I’m not going to Haiti.”
Open Ocean
Chapter 18
Bill Owens
Every minute of the last hour the open ocean has beat the shit out of me. I go below to collapse on the day bunk, hoping me and my Flyers talisman can sleep. My good friend Sistah and her live chicken are on the floor, wedged into the galley’s far corner.
Sistah waits till I’m prone, then pulls a knife I didn’t know she had. She decapitates the chicken; squeezes its neck to paint a blood circle on the floor around her—
I bolt off the bunk, climb up and out to the aft deck. Sistah probably hasn’t read Moby Dick, but I have. She’s doing the dreadlocks-Corazón-Santo version of Queequeg-the-harpooner building his own coffin.
I curl up between the fifty-five-gallon drums of high-octane gas. The smell will add to the rat dreams of where this “adventure” is headed. Sleep is doze-then-jolt, the precursor to night terrors; then gory flashes of Susie Devereux in the hands of the monster she feared most.
Sleep is obviously not the way to go. I climb back to Anne on the bridge.
***
All night, the Sazerac Star and the Esmeralda roar northeast. Anne points me at the Southern Cross, low in the night sky, then smiles like that should mean something good. In the brief moments when Anne’s satellite phone gets a signal, Susie never answers. Sistah stays below in her blood circle.
Guantanamo Bay’s lights flicker twenty miles to port.
Ten minutes later, we pick up a series of lights. Anne says: “Gunboats. Cuban. We’re on the outer edge of their territorial waters.”
The gunboats clo
se to three hundred feet on the port side. For two hours we race under the stars, Anne running full-throttle. She’s trying for the Windward Passage, a fifty-mile strait that separates the eastern tip of Cuba from Hispaniola.
Anne points down the ladder. “Decision time. Grab us two life jackets. Cubans don’t care that we’re fugitives from Jamaica, but if they decide we’re pirates, they’ll sink us rather than let us go.”
Near Cuba’s eastern tip, both gunboats veer into us, preparing to shoot. The lead boat draws so close I can see the sailors manning a deck gun. It veers again, this time hard to port, and away. The second boat does the same. Anne says, “Their radio’s broadcastin’ same news as ours.”
“Huh?”
Anne nods dead ahead into a sunrise that should be on our bow, but isn’t.
Anne doesn’t relax as Cuba disappears to our left. The maritime warnings over her radio are saying Hurricane Lana has grown to a Cat 3. She’s out there behind the black, six hundred miles east and closing.
I try to remember the words to “On the Good Ship Lollipop” but can’t. Anne’s radio continues to crackle with official warnings—everything afloat should be somewhere else, then for the fifth time, rebroadcasts our boats’ descriptions and Jamaica’s bounty offer.
I glance blue ocean for the white whale. There won’t be a non-Communist port in the Caribbean that can’t ID us when we hole up from the hurricane.
“We made her, the Windward Passage.” Anne pats her chest twice, then stretches both arms to point port and starboard. “That last bit of Cuba we just ran is twenty miles to port. Haiti’s north coast and Tortuga is twenty miles to starboard. Landfall in ninety minutes.”
She tries Susie again, can’t get a signal, then touches the phone to her chin and looks at the sky. “Tell me where you are, Susie.” Anne punch-dials another call, tells me, “Tryin’ Siri.” Anne gets a signal, but no answer. She calls Susie again, gets no answer, shuts her eyes, and says, “I’m comin’. Tell me where you are.”
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