Lucas opened the drawer and lay down in it, taking a bottle of whiskey with him, one of the many scattered about. He replaced the whiskey with water. He fell asleep, only waking up when Cliff came into his quarters. The captain was laughing to himself. He picked up the camera and continued taking pictures of the book. Someone knocked at the door and entered.
“Hey, Cliff.”
“Yes,” responded the captain.
“What are you doing?”
“Making a copy of our life insurance policy.”
“Hmm,” the voice answered him.
“The prick must have done the same. He had enough time for that and to send everything by mail,” worried the captain.
“Who could it be?” asked the voice.
“I don’t know, John. I have no idea, but it was a contract job. That’s for sure.”
“But by who?” John tried to imagine.
“We’ve got to find out. We have to take care of this. If not, whoever it is will pull a fast one on us,” the captain synthesized.
“If our calculations are right.”
“Exactly,” responded Cliff.
“The problem is that we still don’t have the money to proceed.”
“I’m going to make some contacts,” Cliff answered him. “The Russians have a ship on the way to Newfoundland. It can’t be far. The owner of this cargo won’t ever see it.”
“Are you crazy? If we show up with empty hands, they’ll smoke us,” John reminded him.
“There’s a storm coming, John. If we’re quick, the ship will sink in the storm.”
“Can we reach our rendezvous before the storm?” inquired his assistant.
“With a little luck. Prepare the sea-cocks for opening and put another motor and whatever else we need in our lifeboat,” ordered the captain.
“And the crew won’t talk?”
“No, they’re up to their necks in this.”
“And those who aren’t in the loop?”
“Let the others take care of them. Have you got the slugs ID’s?
“No,” John answered.
“Take care of that now. You can’t fail me,” Cliff ordered.
“Yes. Vive le Québec libre!” John proclaimed sarcastically.
“Take care of the orphans and the rest.”
“Later.”
Is his Excellency stupid or what? thought Lucas. How can he be sure that the part of the crew not involved in this scheme will be eliminated by those involved and how can he guarantee that they’ll keep quiet, like he needs? What’s in the book? Truly lost treasures? But then why wait so many years to go look for the gold? Ships have sea-cocks so they can be sunk? Lucas realized that the ship had been stopped for several hours and there were comings and goings from the captain’s suite.
Then the storm hit. Lucas took a chance and left the drawer. He closed the door from the inside. He went to the bathroom and shaved his sparse beard with Cliff B. Richard’s things. The captain’s aftershave was good.
Lucas opened the door and glanced down the corridor but had to retreat. People were coming. He went in the suite’s lavatory since he didn’t have enough time to hide in the drawer. Cliff and John came in together.
“Nobody saw you, did they?” the captain asked.
“No,” John assured him.
“Did they fall into the sea?”
“Both of them.”
“Excellent. Is our lifeboat ready?” Clifford B. Richard asked.
“Almost,” John clarified.
“Finish it. It’s number seven, right?”
“Yes, only the G.P.S. is missing. The guns and money will go with us,” contemplated his aid.
“Let’s do this. I’ll gather the crew. You open the sea-cocks.”
They left. Lucas took the poor devils’ identification. One of them resembled him. His name was Louis Marcé. “Louis Marcé,” he repeated to himself. It suited him since his brother in Lisbon was Luís and he, too, would have the same name on the western side of the Atlantic. He also took the captain’s and John’s. He might offer them to the Canadian police. He opened a large backpack in the armchair and saw guns, ammunition, thirty-five kilos of one hundred dollar bills, the book, and the camera. The camera was heavy and went out the porthole, but the lense stayed right on the table as a paperweight.
He left with the backpack. No one was in the corridor. He went up the stairs. Out there, in the rain, the captain was reviewing the situation with his crew. Lucas walked to the opposite side of the ship. The first boat there was inscribed with a number that could have been either seven or one. He peered in and saw nothing. A hatch on the bow was ajar and, with his owl-like vision, he spied a tenuous intermittent luminosity. He entered the boat, looked through the hatch and saw a clock bomb. It was programmed to explode in sixty-seven minutes. So the captain wasn’t really counting on the sailors’ silence. He was going to silence them with the bomb and the sea-cocks. He took it and put it in the backpack. Lucas followed the string of lifeboats until reaching number seven and glanced inside: it was full of equipment. He went back. On deck, the sailors seemed agitated. He turned back to boat number seven but, passing by the galley, he had an irresistible idea; covered by the dark, he hung the clock bomb one meter from the pantry floor, like he had the manuscript.
He ran back to boat seven and opened the release mechanism, jumping in the vessel immediately. When it hit the sea, he was afraid the lifeboat was going to come apart, such was the shock, but it didn’t. Lucas confirmed that the boat had been released from the ship and started the motor, accelerating away from the condemned giant. When he was about three miles out, he took a Very light and fired it toward the ship. And then another. The response from the collier was not long in coming: a palisade of firearms disgorged lead at him. The latest developments were now known on the deck of that candidate for submarine service. Why did he fire the Very lights? Why? He didn’t know, but the sailors’ rage justified his initial gesture. At least aesthetically.
In fact, the captain and his accomplice had just reached his cabin when they saw a solitary object on the table, above a sheet of paper that said, “Thanks for the money, motherfuckers,” signed Louis Marcé. At that point, they heard shouting. An obese Chinaman had come across the bomb swinging in the air. He fled immediately proclaiming that there was dynamite in the galley.
“The boat,” Burton ordered and ran with his aid to the lifeboat. The space was there, intact, untouched, but the boat itself was missing, bobbing some three miles distant. Shortly thereafter, several sailors appeared alongside the captain, advising “bomb, bomb.” Cliff Burton ran to the pantry and saw one of his clock bombs hanging by a thread.
“It was the rat,” he snarled. “Check to see if the boats are operational.” They were all set with traps, as he well knew. At that point, a sailor announced, “We’re taking on water, we’re sinking.” The sky immediately was lit up by Louis’s Very lights.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in thirty years at sea,” the captain confessed, as laconically as stupefied. He had realized nothing.
“It was a plot,” John assured him. “A plot by a very powerful group, Cliff.”
* * *
Louis Marcé knew nothing about sailing. He was up the creek without a paddle. But as the storm took shape, he realized that he had to point the bow at the waves. The waves quickly reached more than fifteen meters of pitch black, as if the ocean wanted to shake the unwelcome parasite off its fine, shallow skin. When they advanced, they looked like a concrete wall, the ultimate compacting machine. It was death without the comforting hand of a friendly soul. How the boat rose above them was inexplicable.
One could say that, compared to the storm of magma that Theia’s first passage brought forth from the Earth’s entrails, making it split, spitting part of it into space and giving birth to the Moon, this was no more than the sea gargling. Even confronted with watery mass’s surge during the tidal wave that swept through Lisbon’s lowlands in 1755, this wou
ld be a tempest in a teacup. But it is well known that the only difference between a grain of sand and the highest mountain range is the dosage of the mountain and, in its own scale, that grain has enough mountains doses to bury you.
For a simple man’s size, that shock was, yes, the promised return of Theia, threatening to drown him with no time for last words and without the sky gaining a new moon out of it. As Lucas realized the lifeboat actually floated, his terror became mixed with traces of pleasure. He was confronting the elements. The ocean was testing Lucas without his having to make the ocean bleed. It had come dressed as a behemoth at the bottom of the sea, a silent behemoth, a stray wolf that can be overcome without the pack perishing so it can test other men in the future, until either men or the ocean are done in. After the first half hour, Lucas was convinced he had been born for this. Sailing in an eternal struggle against the great lake. Each angry wave was an adversary and the rain and cold were music for his face and his hands, again with blue fingers, but blue from the coldness of freedom. He’d always liked the cold and had never been a sweet sugar person who would dissolve in water.
Lucas had passed his life between close walls and only now realized nature’s amplitude. Freedom was not moving from this to another cell in the large prison that was Lisbon. To visit one or another prisoner who saw himself as free and to choose a lunch menu, a gift for your girlfriend or a movie in the evening. Freedom was the space with no horizon. A night in the sky’s darkness and another night in the darkness of the sea.
He needed to turn on the G.P.S. and the compass, since he knew neither where he was nor where he was going. Not that it made a big difference at that point, but he couldn’t even think about turning his back on the waves. He took the instrument from underneath the oilcloth still covering part of the boat. It was simple and intuitive. It found him in the sea and showed him the continents; he was heading straight to the State of Virginia in the United States. Unexpectedly, between the Atlantic rain and the liquid desert, he saw another boat being offered up to the sky by the fist of a wave in front of him. His heart raced—a boat from the collier.
Chapter 7
Death in the Storm
They must not have seen him as they were focused on the waves. He had the upper hand. How many lifeboats could be nearby? He thought there should live inside himself, hidden, old corsairs or maybe he was under the influence from the book he’d read, since he felt attracted to the boat that preceded him. In ten minutes, it’s either me or you. He opened his backpack and took out a pistol. It was loaded. He looked back to make sure he wasn’t being pursued by other lifeboats. He wasn’t. When the enemy lifeboat reappeared after another wave, it was presented to him obliquely and apparently without a motor. The boat was in trouble. Lucas accelerated, not knowing if he’d been seen. A wave moved between them. Suddenly, a Very light illuminated the sky. It was coming at an angle from the boat, but passed about twenty meters above him. They’re calling the pack, he thought. Another Very light, in his direction, like a tracer, parallel to the water.
He took two flares and shot them in his opponent’s direction. The response was given. The prey was in his sights when Lucas bested the next wave. The boat was totally by his side, full of water, and the crew—a grandmother, a woman, and two drenched children—were holding onto one another, waiting either for him or for death. They were neither Cliff Burton Richard nor John nor their ilk. They were common people, offered by destiny to be drowned. He was frightened. More than when he saw the liquid compactor smashing into his boat, more than when the captain Cliff ordered the women’s bathrooms opened, exposing his refuge, more than when his mother appeared before him, livid in his doorway with the police behind her.
The boat reappeared and the women waved and shouted. One tossed a rope that he grasped firmly, but the force of the sea tore it from his hands as if he were a tender child. They screamed something, pointing to his boat and he realized that the rope had to be tied off. The two lifeboats banged together and remained side by side to the sea that, predictably, poured tons of salt water in them. He stretched out and grabbed a child. She must have not been more than nine or ten years old. And then another, very blonde and maybe thirteen. And then the elderly woman, thin, stiff, with no sign of giving up. It was all very quick, as the next wave prepared itself to write the end of this paragraph. He still tried to grab the last woman, but in a hysteriform gesture, she refused his hand and retreated to the lifeboat that was sinking. She was committing suicide.
Lucas had to untie the rope or they would all die together, but the knot he’d made was not a sailor’s knot and could not be easily untied. There is a pact of the devil between incompetence and death in the sea. The woman remaining on the other side undid her knot in one quick movement. What luck. The boat freed itself in time to take the behemoth’s chest straight on and, once again, overcome it. When the wave passed, the women’s small lifeboat was some eighty meters distant and had overturned. There was no law of physics to explain that distance. He took a risk. Lucas turned his back to the waves and moved back, accelerating the motor for all it was worth. Sideways to the waves never, that would mean certain death. Then he turned the boat aslant to ocean chops, toward the wrecked wherry. A desperate woman and an exhausted man grabbed the side. He threw them a buoy, and they entered the boat one at a time.
The man, an American, had a deathly pallor, a widespread fatal cancer, and was passionate about the sea. His wife, daughters, and mother had offered him a last ocean voyage. The suffering mariner would die at peace in the Atlantic. They hadn’t counted on the storm that did their sailboat in. The two adult women, with the help of the older child, put the lifeboat in order. The collier’s boat was five stars, had the resistance of a rhinoceros and, after bailing it out, recovered its gazelle-like agility.
When the tempest appeared to lessen, the little girl pointed toward the horizon and asked what that was. They turned around and saw two heavy rescue helicopters over the area where the collier was supposedly at risk of sinking. They were illuminating the water with powerful spotlights. But instead of picking up the sailors, the helicopters fired two missiles each and annihilated the ship. They remained in a muted paralysis for a brief moment. The helicopters now were flying in circles over the sea, firing a heavy machine gun here and there, probably at the shipwrecked crew’s lifeboats. When the airships came near them, they tuned off the motor and hid beneath the oilcloth. Without propulsion, the boat adorned the waves, a little tamer, and transformed itself into another drifting pool. The Americans prayed, holding hands, including him in the circle of fear and hope. At some point they no longer heard the helicopters, confirmed that they’d disappeared and then poured all of the water out of the boat.
In the following hours, the storm abated, and then ended. Only the rain continued, despite being sparser. Both the man lying in the bottom of the boat and the women knew well that Louis understood nothing about the sea. They didn’t ask him anything with their voices but wanted to know everything with their looks. He explained to them that he was European and was fleeing the Lisbon police. He knew that all criminals said the same thing, but he really was innocent. He had stowed away on the collier and witnessed a crime that put his life at risk and, for that reason, he’d fled in the boat.
The woman only said to him, “You don’t look like a criminal to me.”
Her husband’s breathing slowed down. He’d lost his deathly air. Calm, he looked at this family together and safe. He was ready to leave this life and died three hours later. His family hugged him for a long time, rocking him with the sway of the boat. His daughters, blonde like angels, cried quietly, holding hands, and his mother was almost smiling between her tears that the rain swept to the sea. His wife’s expression exhaled the peaceful tranquility of a mission accomplished. They wrapped him in a blanket and the grandmother sang a child’s lullaby he did not know but which was simply so beautiful that Louis would never forget it. They then offered his body to the deep, taking care so
the druids of the depths, friends of the travelers that the song convoked, would look after him and give him peace. He has found peace, Louis thought.
Daylight brought calm, with neither breeze nor rain. Still seas. The ocean had the same water and the same salt, but the behemoth had gone to other parts.
Louis entered the United States protected by the family that he’d saved. He stayed in their home, near the coast. The girls adored him, and he learned a lot of English from them during the hours he spent dedicated to that language. Secretly, he studied Québécois French because of his adoptive birthplace. The American mother knew that, being a fugitive from the police, Louis would only stay in their home temporarily, but she was determined that he would decide when to leave and, until that day arrived, the young man would be treated like part of the family. It was also obvious that it would be better for him if she did not know details about his future plans. During the first few days, Louis avoided contact with other people and dedicated himself to small maintenance jobs in the yard and the house, cutting the grass, trimming trees, painting, unclogging pipes, and so on. The few times he went out, walking in the streets lined with trees, landscaped yards and children running in bands, observing that the houses’ doors were closed only with a latch, he felt a peace and a renewed sense of security. Everything was spacious and green. The houses were made of or covered in wood, like boats. There were no buildings. Americans seemed to live in boats run aground decades ago.
Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn Page 6