Speaking of which, Pete now enters. He doesn’t see O’Doull at first, and he yells to me, “Okay, Johnny, we’re off!” And he says, “Embarcamos.” Which is a Spanish expression meaning we are about to leave on a boat. Not very cool.
Then he sees O’Doull and he starts. He says, “Thewfie O’Doull, for the Lord’s sake, boy, and what are you doing off the mainland?”
There is an energetic grabbing of hands and there are expressions of good will, but Pete’s eyes are working furtively back and forth among us. I know he has a taxi waiting outside to take him and me to Bill Stutely’s boat. Pete sits awhile and talks with O’Doull, galloping along nervously, and after a bit he gives me the eye and goes out to his cab. I decide to find my way to the marina by a different taxi and go out the back door on the excuse I have to take a piss. . . .
***
Mitchell was exploding around the Potship offices like a string of firecrackers.
“Somebody find me some goddamn policemen around here,” he bellowed.
The wiretap monitors scrunched over their machines, hiding their heads in earphones. A surveillance man, Constable Landesrau, gingerly stepped into the room, and into the line of fire.
“Don’t blame me,” Landesrau said, taking the initiative. “I was right outside the bar. Kerrivan got into the cab beside the driver, and it took off. I radioed here. That’s what I’m supposed to do.”
Mitchell turned to Constable McDonald. “I suppose you’ve got a good one, too. You were supposed to have been watching Night-hawk.”
McDonald looked at Landesrau as if to include him in a small neighborhood of guilt. “Him and me, we never knew there was even a back door to that place. We both checked the alley out before, and didn’t see no door.” McDonald spotted O’Doull, and pointed a finger at him. “Newf there can tell you more than anybody. He was talking to Kerrivan just before he disappeared on us.”
Mitchell followed the direction of McDonald’s index finger. Against the far wall, by his worktable, was Sergeant Theophile O’Doull, nervously rubbing his fingers together.
Mitchell spoke slowly. “You were talking to Kerrivan?”
O’Doull held up a typewritten report sheet, walked up to Mitchell, and gave it to him. “When I heard they had taken off, if they have, and I guess they have, I came down here and typed this up for you to see when you got back.”
Mitchell started reading. “The Blue Boar Lounge? That’s one of their hangouts. You’re not supposed to be seen in there. You know that.”
“It’s my old bar, Inspector,” O’Doull said. “They used to let me in when I was under age.” Someone laughed, then choked it back. “I kind of dropped in for old times. I wasn’t going to stay. Kevin Kelly came in when I was halfway through my beer. Nighthawk was with him. I kind of hunched myself into a corner, but they saw me. Then Pete came in. He didn’t see me at first, and he said to Night-hawk, ‘Okay, Johnny, we’re off.’”
Mitchell repeated, “‘Okay, Johnny, we’re off.’ Kerrivan said that, huh?”
“It didn’t seem like anything at the time. He said something in Spanish, too. Then he recognized me —”
Mitchell summarized, looking down at the report. “And Kerrivan goes out to the taxi, which has been sitting outside the bar running up the meter. And The Hawk excuses himself to go back for a piss.” He looked up at O’Doull as if seeking to understand the man, to search his mind. “And you sit there for ten more minutes before you and Kelly go your separate ways. Nighthawk never comes back after his piss.”
Mitchell let O’Doull’s report dangle from two fingers pinched together, as if he were holding a pair of soiled undershorts. “And you don’t come in with this report until someone phones you at home to tell you that Kerrivan and Nighthawk have virtually disappeared from Canada. Virtually? Hell, they’re gone, Theo. Gone.”
O’Doull wore a hangdog expression. He was surrounded by twenty pairs of eyes.
“I’ll tell you, O’Doull,” said Mitchell, “you make a good scientist. You make a lousy detective.”
Mitchell’s secretary came into the room. “Corporal Dreidger is on the phone,” she said. “Kerrivan’s bank manager is in his contact group. Kerrivan phoned the bank manager this afternoon to have a two-thousand-dollar draft sent to a correspondent bank in San Francisco. It’s to be held for his arrival for the next three days.”
Mitchell took a breath. “Okay, let’s get moving on that. Do something useful, Theo, connect me with the DEA in San Francisco. Tell them we’ll send some men down.”
Johnny Nighthawk
Pete and I decide to crash on Bill Stutely’s boat for the night. Pete says there will be a fog in the morning — he has a sense for such things — and a foggy morning is a good time to say good-bye to Newfoundland.
The next morning at six the wind has backed and fallen, as Pete knew it would, and there is a blind, airy sea, billowing clouds from off the Banks. You can see for five feet, then everything is gray. Bill Stutely has been up and started the engine. It is going blurp, blurp, warming up. Pete and I are fairly tense with the excitement of getting away, getting the trip together.
And then we hear the sound of feet running along the dock towards the boat. I think that these feet sound too fast to be friendly — but Pete knows right away who it is. Before there is even a shout from the dock, he beams a happy smile at me through the fog.
“You wouldn’t go without your first mate, now, would you?” says Kelly as he throws his duffle bag onto the deck with a clank. The clank, I assume, is at least a couple of horseshoes, because Kevin always likes to nail a couple above the wheelhouse and the door of his cabin.
Also making weight in the bag is a bottle of Newfoundland Screech, which is a brand name for a locally bottled rum. Kelly pours a few stiff fingers into five mugs and passes them around to me and Pete and Stutely up at the wheel. He knocks one back for himself and tosses the fifth into the sea for Old Man Neptune.
We chug out of St. John’s harbor, into the sea, and a wind begins to shred the fog. We hear the caw of a crow, strangely far from land. Raucous, ragged. Kelly catches his breath and looks pale. Then we see it, winging from shore with its mate. One for sorrow, two for mirth . . . Kelly is like a nervous elf, but happier now. Then come two more crows . . . the third a wedding, and fourth a birth. “Boys,” Kelly says, “I think my wife is pregnant again.”
It is occasion for another round. And soon there comes an even better excuse for a third. “Potheads!” Stutely shouts. “Off the port bow!”
A pod of little Atlantic whales. Spouting and dancing on the waves. Grinning at us.
The potheads lead us southwest towards Maine into a sunny day, a day that shines like a gem.
PART TWO
El Mayor Juan Atrapa
Chapter Twelve
Johnny Nighthawk
You will have to go to the Caribbean coast of Colombia to understand it. Even then, you will not believe it. After you have been robbed once or twice you actually begin to long for an honest cop.
Crime is the way of life here. Personally I do not like it, and it is why I no longer live in Colombia.
A brief travelogue. We will start in the east, at the Guajira Peninsula. This is a hard, hot nipple that sticks into the sea near Venezuela, and marijuana flows from it like mother’s milk. It is only a thousand miles from Florida. Around this time of year your ears are filled with the roar of planes going heavy, returning light. You can find beaches where the whole village turns out to help man the dugout canoas which ferry bultos to waiting ships. These bultos are sisal sacks full of compressed pot, double-wrapped in waterproof black plastic, and they usually weigh sixty to a hundred pounds. There is deep water just off the Guajira, and in some places a small ship can tie up close.
As I say, there is little in the way of law here. The contrabandistas, even the gringos, carry guns. It is the Wild West of Americ
an mythology. The Guajira Indians, brothers of my people, ride the dusty trails in packs, on horseback, rifles slung over their shoulders, war paint on their faces.
I lived with them for a few years. I was accepted, shared their life. What a connection I was for the gringos!
The Guajira is guarded to the west by a great mountain, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Although it is called a sierra, it is really one massive peak, the highest point in Colombia — from the sea it rises twenty thousand feet into perpetual snow, then descends in a series of cascading plateaus and foothills and waterfalls into the valleys of the Magdalena and César rivers.
On the lower slopes of the Nevada grow the famous strains of cannabis, the many varieties of sativa and indica: chiba, Santa Marta gold, rainbow block, orange mona, and, last but best, punta roja, which grows on the high plateaus where there are cool nights and burning days. It is the pick.
To the west of this is Santa Marta, a shaggy tourist resort and haven for dope traders, squeezed between the mountain and the ocean. This city can rock and roll in season. You wear your wristwatch high up the arm. You carry your wallet in a deep, tight pocket. Women dumb enough to wear pierced earrings have had their earlobes torn away.
Okay, we leave Santa Marta, go west across the red dirt and cactus, the Magdalena marshes, to the horror show which is Barranquilla, then over the humpy-bumpy roads to Cartagena — and here is a city that tastes like fine old champagne. You will picture it as an ancient walled city surrounded by water, containing an old quarter with narrow streets and balconies separated by the reach of a hand. From below, from the cantinas, you hear the plaintive music of romance. The women are beautiful: mestizos, blacks, Indians, Castilians. It is a city that goes to my heart.
But back for now to Barranquilla. This is where we arrive on an Avianca flight. It is the center of the north coast. It is a cesspool. It sits like a lizard along the banks of the Magdalena River — such a lovely name, such an ugly river. There are a million people here in tin shacks. Cattle pick through the garbage in the gutters. Vultures hang in the sky. It is the world’s ugliest city. It is like the aftermath of war.
Ba-ran-kee-ya. That is where our dirty freighter sits, by a dock on the river, beside the offices of Maritimas Manejos del Atlantico, S.A., the offices of Peddigrew’s friend Juares. We look at the city from a distance.
The ship is perfect for Barranquilla. She suits the city.
We crack a few halfhearted jokes. Then we ask the taxi driver to take the three of us to El Golf Hotel, where Marianne Larochelle is quartered. She has been here five days and has been buying supplies.
Pete is nervous about his next encounter with her. But I remember feeling, Pete and Marianne are simply not made for each other. She is urbane, café society. He is rough cut, unpolished. She is Montreal. He is O’Donoghue’s Nose, Bay D’Espoir.
I remember thinking: I will hear about it if he ever succeeds in making out with this woman. Pete enjoyed his own legend as a lover and regularly nourished it with new material from his own mouth. Perhaps I seem to slight him. I should explain: I love this man.
My heart went out to him in Barranquilla, where Fate dealt him another hard blow.
When we arrive at the hotel, we find that Marianne has Barranquilla turista. She is white, and the carpet in her room has a path worn to the bathroom. Pete will not get close to her this night.
“Juares is a crook,” she says, speaking through gray lips. “Don’t pay him any money.” Juares’s end was being taken from Peddigrew’s cut — that was our understanding. But people are always on the bite for a little more. La mordida. A way of life.
As to the ship Marianne just rolls her eyes. “Let’s not go too far off the coast,” she says. “It’s just a rusted sieve. It didn’t have a single life jacket. I’ve been spending money like crazy.”
***
Maritimas Manejos del Atlantico, S.A., is a company in the classic mold for Colombia: grungy, decrepit, crooked. So is Juares. His teeth are rotting, and there is five years of grime under his fingernails and in the creases of his neck.
“Compadres,” he says. We are sorry his mouth opens when he smiles.
He pumps our hands, slaps backs. “Señor James,” he tells us, “I meet heem in Toronto.” I assume he means Peddigrew. “He speak ver’ beneficial to you. We are partner, no es verdad?” He winks. “I am like you, Pedro — old client. I am arrest at Canada airport five years ago.” With his hand he describes a body pack tied around his belly. “Two kilogram of coca. Señor James, he have me out of jail two years, deportation. Is good abogado, no? Is best in Nort’ America.” He was proud of such connections. “He is my partner — our partner. And Marianne. How is feeling Señorita Marianne?”
“She still has the shits,” Pete says.
“Her is muy hermosa.” He leers.
“Can we look at the boat?” Pete asks.
She was sitting high in the water by the dock. I hesitate to call her a she. She is no woman. She is a bum.
“We make meellion on thees sheep,” says Juares. “Is name El Mayor Juan Atrapa after ver’ famous mayor of Barranquilla. Is good shape for long voyage, señors. Sound. Ver’ sound.”
She is a dirty old tub and smelled of dead rats. In the holds, I feel around above the bulwarks and an ounce of rust flakes off and falls at my feet.
“Please not worry,” says Juares. “Steel is many repair and welding to do.”
There is a guy wandering around with a welding torch; another is sandblasting the stern, and a third is following him around with a bucket of paint. It has been in dry dock, and from what we can see of the hull, it has been sandblasted, has new zincs, new paint. The color is a convenient rust-red, with brown trim.
Juares shows us some sheets with the thickness readings on the hull, and the disintegration does not appear to be that bad. As long as she will float, that is number one.
Number two is, will she run? Kelly and I spend some time in the engine room. The ship does seem well loaded down with spares, from what is in the storage.
Juares tells us that the Atrapa was laid up for a few years before he picked it up, and we could see that the engines seem to have been preserved in heavy oil, which is like a slime over everything. But they are clean.
“A-one condition, the engeens,” Juares says. “Like Rolls-Royce.”
We tinker around, figure everything out pretty well, then start up the auxiliary generator. No problem that we can see or hear. The auxiliary generator is the key to this kind of diesel-electric system. If it doesn’t work, the ship will be dead in the water because it provides excitation power for the engines which in turn run electric motors that go into a reduction gear and power the single propeller. If you lose your auxiliary generator, you lose propulsion.
The engines and generators rumble to life, and I must admit that the sound is not bad to the ears. We will get some horses out of them.
We spend the whole day on the ship, checking the electric motors, the bilge pumps, the water pumps, the switch gear. The important gauges seem to work. There is a crane on the deck, and we check out its motor carefully because it will be used to sling the bales of pot on and off of the ship. We will have to buy some heavy shrimp nets to use as slings.
Pete spends most of his time in the wheelhouse, where there is a Loran A, an old Decca radar, a few local charts, a VHF marine radio, and a single-side band. Not much of an electronics package for deep sea.
Juares takes us back to his office, still winking and grinning. We share a few bottles of Bavaria beer, and Pete turns to Kelly and me. “What do you think? Can we get this old beater up there?”
“It’s worth a try,” I say. “It’ll hold a lot of grass.” There is enormous cargo space. Bulkheads have been removed to expand the cargo areas. Some of the old crew’s quarters have been converted for cargo. Even with all the volume you have when you carry marijuana,
we will be able to squeeze forty tons on this ship.
“It runs,” says Kevin. “We better make sure we got spares for everything. And tools.”
“Yeah,” I say, “and lifeboats. Lots of lifeboats.”
“If the Loran packs it in,” Pete says, “there’s no backup except for the gyro and the sextant.” He shrugs. “We don’t need anything more.” Cruising over three thousand miles of ocean with a sextant is Pete’s idea of heroism.
“We have sheep,” says Juares. “All we need is la marimba.” On this coast, that is what they call marijuana.
“We’ll get the marimba,” Pete says.
“You have connection?”
“Yes.” Pete is not going to take this guy into his confidence if it can be avoided.
“Now, please,” says Juares, “we make plans for loading. Under-neath, the marimba. We put on top scrap metal.” He points out the window at a pile of scrap: busted-out engines, lines of cable, old rails.
“Yeah, we’ll work out the details,” says Pete.
Juares shakes his head and takes on an expression of great seriousness, perhaps sorrow.
“Is ver’ expenseev to refit sheep and engines,” he says. “For diesel gas, twenty t’ousand dollars.” He pushes a paper with some figures on it towards Pete. “Refit is feefty t’ousand dollar in U.S.”
Pete says, “You work that out with Señor James.”
“He says you pay me.”
“He don’t say that, Juares.”
I changed the subject. “We’ll need about five more guys. Assistant engineer, someone for the galley. We can’t run this old coaster with four people.”
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