High Crimes

by William Deverell

  “My family has put millions of pesos into the technology of agriculture, Captain Kerrivan. We are determined to make a major move on the American market. Ours is the first Colombian experiment in sinsemilla. It has been done successfully near Oaxaca. It is done in Hawaii. The North American strains are becoming very popular. If we do not compete, we perish. This entire country will collapse.”

  Kerrivan almost expected Paez to say the country’s future was now in Kerrivan’s hands. But all he said was, “You had better take some guns, Captain Kerrivan. There are pirates in the Caribbean.”

  “I can manage without guns, Senator.”

  “Meyers will provide you with hand arms, anyway.” Paez doodled in the sand with the point of his cane. “Do you think he is an honest man — Meyers?”

  “I don’t know,” Kerrivan said.

  “Yes.” He seemed to muse. “Yes, he is an enigma. But I pay him well for the information he obtains and for the people he brings me. I told him to bring me someone I could trust. I trust you, Captain Kerrivan. You have an open face. You look me in the eye. I am told you have had ten years’ experience and have never lost a shipment.”

  “Then Meyers gave you bad information. I have lost two loads. One of them belonged to Mr. Ugarte. I was arrested once.”

  Paez slapped him hard on the shoulder. “Yes, these things I know.” He sounded hearty. “This is just a little test of your honesty, Captain Kerrivan. Yes, Meyers has indeed investigated your background. He is very well connected with the authorities in North America.” He looked sideways at Kerrivan. “You do not find this strange? Perhaps not in my country, but in America?”

  Kerrivan shrugged. “Some people play both ends, Senator.”

  “But you play just one, eh? My end, Captain Kerrivan. You would not be reckless when it comes to my property. Because you understand that if you are careful, you will be a millionaire, is that not so? Twenty million dollars, less your expenses and your crew shares. That will leave you enough? You will not starve?” He chuckled and slapped Kerrivan on the shoulder again. “And you will be paid when you deliver to our people in New York City, yes? That is the arrangement.”

  “Fifteen down, the rest in a month.”

  “Yes, it will tax my reserves of capital. And you have a hidden inlet, a secret cove somewhere in Canada? How will you bring it back down into the United States?”

  “I’d prefer not to tell you.”

  Again, Paez slapped him on the shoulder. “Excellent. It is better not to speak of these things. There are ears everywhere, yes?”

  A flock of sandpipers came running up the beach, following the surf, pecking at its leavings. Paez picked up a stone and skimmed it across the surface of the water. The birds rose with a clatter, swirled through the air, then settled farther down the beach.

  “Will it not be very expensive to pay off the customs at your border with the United States?”

  “It won’t be necessary. There are no fences at the border. It’s five thousand miles long.”

  “Tell me nothing more, Captain Kerrivan. I am reassured. You have safe harbors on the Atlantic, and you have a border that has no guards. And few people expect shipments of las mercanías to come from the north, from Canada. But tell me nothing more. I understand. It is not that you don’t trust me.”

  “No.”

  “You do trust me.”

  “I don’t have to trust you, Senator.”

  Paez smiled. “And why is that?”

  “Because if I am not paid the fifteen million, your people will not have the merchandise.”

  “Of course,” Paez said. “Of course. Now, perhaps you would enjoy a dip in the pool before dinner.”

  ***

  At the table, servants swarmed about them. Kerrivan sat beside Paez’s brother, who was in the full-dress uniform of a general of the Colombian Army. Kerrivan conducted a desultory, tentative conversation with him, while ignoring the existence, across the table, of Marianne Larochelle, whose breasts were barely hidden in a gown that seemed to be buttoned two stops above the navel. Escarlata was in a dinner jacket and punctuated his conversation with a gold cigarette holder which he moved like a baton.

  Escarlata was telling heroic tales of the days of the Castro insurgency. He looked at Kerrivan and followed his eyes to Larochelle.

  “She is stunning, don’t you think?” he said. “Exquisite taste. I’m afraid she literally dragged me through the boutiques of Caracas. Many of these places import from Paris.”

  “Did you have a good time?” Kerrivan asked. He tried to control the edge in his voice.

  “Yes.” The pupils of her eyes were pinned. Two dark stars in a green softness.

  “I have a little surprise for you, Mr. Kerrivan,” Escarlata said. “I understand you might need an extra crew member. It has been suggested that I join your ship.”

  “Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that,” said Senator Paez, from the end of the table. “Colonel Escarlata has kindly offered to join you. As I said, the Caribbean is a sea of pirates. Colonel Escarlata is experienced with small arms, an outstanding shot. I know, because we were out on the firing range this morning. He made me look like an amateur.”

  Kerrivan felt sick.

  “I guess you’ve been on boats before,” he said to Escarlata.

  “Unfortunately, my background is as a soldier and an airman, not a sailor. Perhaps my most useful function will be in keeping out of everybody’s way.”

  Kerrivan didn’t smile. “You understand that this is my ship, Colonel. There’s only one captain on a ship.”

  “Of course. By the way, Mr. Kerrivan, when you know me a little better, you might get to like me. There seems to be an obstacle in the way of our friendship. But I am going to apply myself diligently to the task of liking you, and I wonder if you would try as well. I plan to enjoy this journey. I am a lover of adventure.”

  Kerrivan offered a stiff smile. His eyes remained glacial. “I like you better already, Colonel.”

  “Excellent,” said Paez. “A happy ship is a healthy ship.” He stood up with a glass of champagne. “A toast, ladies and gentlemen. To health, to happiness, to riches. To a successful journey. Salud!”

  Kerrivan poured a little champagne into the crystal goblet that was in front of him, and pulled himself to his feet.

  “Health,” he repeated. “Happiness. You bet.” The rims of the glasses touched and rang like bells.

  Kerrivan looked at Larochelle, who smiled her seraphic smile at him. He looked at Paez, the patron, who seemed contained in an aura of power. He looked at Escarlata, whose white teeth seemed to reflect the gleam of candles from the chandelier.

  He looked at Meyers, whose glass contained only water. Meyers was smiling. He was always smiling.

  Chapter Twenty

  Johnny Nighthawk

  We are drifting down the Magdalena River under a fat moon. Lights blink and fade along the shore.

  The river spills into the long swell of the sea.

  We have laid a course due north to the Windward Passage. We putter along at thirteen knots, a good speed that we have urged from the old engines.

  Kevin Kelly, awaiting his turn at the engine watch, is wobbily standing on his head on the deck. The vitaripakarini, the hatha yoga headstand. He explains, “You fix the moon in the navel and a radiating sun in the palate.”

  Marianne Larochelle has been dancing Tai-Chi. She alternates this with a flurry of Kung Fu movements, whirling, spinning, kicking. This is done incongruously to the sound of Santana from the speakers — the driving, urgent rhythms of Latin rock.

  Later, Kelly is seated under a lamp at the galley table, facing east, incense swirling around his neck. He is laying out the tarot spreads, predicting morose futures. The atmosphere in the galley is heavy with fish stew.

  ***

  After a five-hour shift in th
e engine room, I escape and go atop the pilothouse to help Pete with the aerials. The VHF is nonfunctional. Likewise the Loran A. There’s a used Loran C, installed by Juares, but we are south of its range. The gyrocompass is suspect. The single-side band, we have discovered, has the wrong crystals. There is a sextant of great age, doubtless a relic from the days of the Spanish Armada. We trusted the word of Juares as to the condition of all these things, and of course we were fools.

  Eventually, Pete and I discover that the aerials are not the problem. We will have to look inside the Loran and the VHF. It will be a complex task.

  But Pete doesn’t really seem to give a shit. He has the sextant and a magnetic compass, and he is Captain Kerrivan of Newfoundland. Or Horatio Hornblower at the helm of his ship of the line.

  Augustin Escarlata is useless. He wears a yachting cap, looks like he is out for a day’s sail in a twelve-meter sloop. Pete has him tying things down. He cannot tell a bowline from a half hitch.

  I have sized Escarlata up as an aging romantic, a revolutionary whose dream was doomed to fail, a fifty-year-old Cuban warrior unable to admit to himself he lacks the stuff and mettle of a Castro or a Guevara, and who blames his country for his own deficiencies. So he has run away from it. But this is cynical. I envy him for his savoir faire, his flashing teeth. In this, Pete is my brother, although he suffers more, of course.

  By unspoken agreement, Marianne shares a cabin with Augustin. Billy Lee, Kelly, and I are in another. Pete has the captain’s night room. The captain’s day room is filled with marijuana. Everywhere we are crawling over these sacks. After we filled the holds, there were a hundred bultos still left on the barge. So we stowed them in the cabins, in the storage rooms, in the passages, on the deck under tarps. As for the scrap metal, I told Juares to forget it. We left it behind.

  The bultos are double-wrapped in heavy-gauge black plastic inside sisal sacking. Despite that, the aroma of the flowers often drifts through the air. You become acclimatized to being ever-so-softly stoned. . . .

  ***

  Marianne is now at the wheel. She and Billy Lee have been given this watch, and we have instructed them as to the control console. Pete or Kevin will take the wheel if we see a ship near our course. Marianne is sultry in cloth that wraps around her hips like a sarong, braless under a denim shirt.

  Billy Lee is picking a course off the charts with a pair of dividers. He glances at Marianne from time to time. As I do. As Pete does. Where her shirt is open, one sees a perfect curve of breast and a brown nipple. She has been doing nose candy all day.

  Standing near Pete, I feel his tension when he looks at her. Pete should be sleeping, taking a break.

  But none of us sleep much, day or night.

  We keep the speakers out on the deck during the day. They are KLH’s from the Barranquilla black market, five feet tall, driven by three hundred amps each side. We have about fifty cassettes. There is a reggae tape on now. Bob Marley. It seems to suit the climate and the space. We will soon be coming into the Jamaica Channel.

  Each hour on the hour, Meyers’s plane, a Cherokee 6, gives us a little flyby. We have an aircraft radio tuned to his frequency.

  “All clear to the north,” he tells us. “All clear east of Jamaica.”

  “I do not trust the man,” says Kelly. “There is an evil presence among the influences guiding us. I see him in the cards.”

  ***

  The sun rises over a trembling sea. A thick bank of nimbostratus climbs the western sky to windward. A high cirrus curls above us, showing red. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. And the barometer has started to pump hard to average. Jamaica marine radio predicts a blow, a snotter.

  But Pete is unconcerned. “It will keep the Coasties off our tail and snug inside the cocktail bars,” he says.

  There is a smell of bacon and eggs from the galley. Pete has decided to put Escarlata in charge there, where he can do limited damage. How did he fight a war without losing an arm or a foot? His tales of heroism in the Sierra Maestre — perhaps they cannot be believed.

  By ten a.m. it is baking hot. The sun has room to travel, but the clouds are packing in even thicker to windward.

  Marianne is lying atop an inflated dinghy, on her back. She has stripped her clothes off. This makes us suffer. She breathes in, breathes out. Her breasts are dark and show no tan line. Billy Lee can’t stand it any longer. He goes to his cabin to try to sleep.

  Soon the air has grown muggy and soft. An unsettling calm augurs a storm. Jamaica says the blow will be coming in later today at around nine or ten on the Beaufort scale, with forty-knot winds and up. The needle has started to jerk, and is falling very fast.

  I go to the engine room. The engines are groaning like sick dogs. There are ominous clanks, but the gauges are deadpan, revealing nothing. Somehow, between Kelly and me, we have to nurse these machines.

  ***

  It is early afternoon, and the clouds eat the sun. The wind hits us a hard slap, and from the west, the sea is building up, sending curling smokers at us, hurling foam. We are chugging into the belly of a Force 10 gale.

  I am praying the engines will hold. If we go dead in the water, crosswise to the swell, we are in danger of broaching to, of capsizing. I have been in rougher water, but in better ships.

  Kelly relieves me for a while in the engine room. I poke my head into the pilot house. Pete has a maniacal look on his face, a grotesque smile that is out of place. His arm muscles, like whipcords, are straining to hold us steady on.

  I hustle around, battening things down. In the galley I find Augustin Escarlata, and now I know why Pete was smiling. The ex-revolutionary is on his knees before a basin, his face as green as the ocean, and he is heaving his breakfast.

  An hour later, we are whooshing wildly up and down a roller-coaster sea, pitching and yawing, slewing heavily from side to side. The rain comes hard and sudden, a great, gray curtain. In the wheelhouse, Pete’s screams can barely be heard above the roar of the wind. “You cocksucker!” he calls out. “You dirty cocksucker!” But there is a great smile crinkling across his face, and his screams are screams of joy.

  As evening comes, the sea continues to heap up, and there are bomb bursts of green water as the gale spits foam from the crests of the waves. We are sliding down wave fronts, surfing into the troughs, the bow splitting the stomachs of the waves with the sound of thunder.

  The generators are now acting up — the voltage fluctuating, the breaker kicking out intermittently, causing the gyro to tumble, making it useless.

  None of this seems to dim Pete’s joy. “I’m going to stick this sucker right up the gut of the Windward Passage!” he boasts.

  Marianne and Billy Lee are sick now, too, and mostly useless. Pete and Kelly and I are alone with the Juan Atrapa and the sea.

  I am in the engine room again, offering love and prayer to these awful machines, coaxing them, sweet-talking them. I have no idea where on the expanse of the Caribbean our little ship might be found, and I have visions of cleaving open the hull on a Cuban rock. I am becoming a fearful believer in Kelly’s black portents.

  The winds back around and carry us north fast, faster than we wish, although we have slowed to ease the strain on the engines.

  But Pete brings us through the passage. I do not know how he does this. He has the instincts of a migrating salmon.

  At five a.m. the sky suddenly splits open, and Pete takes a star shot with the sextant as we cruise the crest of a long rolling wave. We are through the pass, he says, north of Cuba, southwest of the Bahama Islands. The sea is hissing and swirling, but it is now settling as the gale shows us its ass and runs away to the northeast. Soon, in the glow of early twilight, we see the storm clouds shredding into long rips. And quickly the sun comes over a crisp, clear horizon.

  “Nothing to it,” says Pete. And in his triumph, he looks around for Marianne.

&nbs
p; I do not tell him that she is below with Escarlata, spooning split pea soup into him. Perhaps she has no room for heroes in her life.

  ***

  In the evening, we are picked up by the Gulf Stream, and we nestle into it, gaining a couple of knots, hoping to soar right up the Florida Strait before the sun comes up.

  Meyers’s spy plane has been a frequent visitor. We have told him our navigational aids aren’t working. (Predictably, the Loran C is also haywire, although we are now in its range.) Meyers promises to drop a packet in the morning with a new Loran C, or an Omega. “We really don’t need that fucking stuff,” says Captain Jackpot.

  Pete has now given Escarlata some dirty clothes, and the colonel is helping us change fuel filters. We have sixty thousand gallons of dirty Colombian diesel aboard, and we are constantly changing filters. Pete has decided it is a good job for the Cuban to learn.

  By now Escarlata must not like Pete very much.

  Later, about midnight, the number-two generator starts heating up, cooking itself. It takes us two hours to get the plant back on the line — and then the other one starts to freeze up. What do we have — gremlins?

  We are up all night with flashlights and lamps. We have shut everything down and are getting back to basics. It has something to do with shorting problems, and we are going over the wiring millimeter by millimeter, cursing Juares with language that is majestic.

  In the meantime, we are dead in the water, the current sucking us up the Florida Strait.

  “Aw, God,” says Kelly, “this is the shits for sure. We should be a thousand miles out in the middle of the Atlantic. What in the good Lord’s name are we doing here, drifting who knows how close to the shores of Florida? This is Coast Guard country, Pete. And us with fifty tons of flowertop all over the goddamn ship. I warned you, Pete. ‘Don’t go,’ I said. No, the great Peter Kerrivan has to do one more trip.”

  Pete grunts, searching for a little bolt and washer he has dropped. “I’m doing this for you, Kevin, my boy. All I want is to make you rich and happy. I have no other dream.”