by David Pierce
And what he saw was six feet seven and a quarter inches of male splendor, albeit studded with the occasional scar, burnt patch, bullet-wound pucker, dent, and old stitch mark, which, like a beautiful woman's one small birthmark on an otherwise flawless face, merely served as an alluring—nay, intriguing—contrast to the overall perfection. At least that's what he would have seen had I, like him, been vain enough to walk around in a pair of shorts little bigger than a weightlifter's cache-sexe.
"Jeffrey, a word, please," Dan said when we'd finished eyeballing each other. They strode out of earshot, then Dan came back and Jeff went off on a little amble down the pier. Dan squatted down on his heels in front of us but in profile—so he could keep one eye out to sea, I guessed.
"So what's on your mind, Victor?"
"A sea cruise," I said, "is what is sort of on my mind. A healthy sea cruise."
"Where to?"
"Anywhere but here," I said.
"Here being Mexico, I take it," Dan said.
"You take it right." I said.
"Brown pelican," he said as a large, foolish-looking bird flapped by us and gave us the once-over. "Well. Anywhere but south presents problems. Considerable problems. If you follow the coast all the way up Mexico to, like, Matamoros, planning to walk across to Brownsville, first of all it takes forever and second of all you've got continual hassles from both the Mexicans and the U.S. Coast Guard."
"Yeah," I said. "Big Jeff mentioned something on that subject."
"And it is a long run, too, to Miami or Key West," he said, "unless you hop off somewhere like the Dry Tortugas, where something really fast is waiting for you. I doubt you particularly want to go to Cuba, and both the Caymans and Jamaica have their problems, or to put it another way, I have in the past had my problems with both of them."
"For shame," I said.
"So," he said. "That leaves south, meaning that way." He gestured off to our right with one thumb.
"And what's there?" Benny asked.
"Belize is what's there," Cap'n Dan said. "Frigate bird," he said, pointing up at a long-winged, forked-tailed feathered friend who was trying to steal a fish dinner right out of the mouth of a gull. "Largest wing span in proportion to body weight of all species."
"Why doesn't it catch its own fish?" Sara asked. "Too lazy?"
Dan grinned at her. "Not waterproof enough," he said. "If it gets too wet it sinks."
She gave him a disbelieving look. She wasn't the only one.
"Belize," I said. "Speak to me of Belize."
"Once British Honduras, now independent," he said. "Bounded on the north by dear old Méjico, the west by Guatemala, the east by the ocean, and the south by the never-was-British Honduras."
"Hmm," I said. "Let me ask you this, Cap'n Dan. Would it be possible for one to slip into Belize quietly some eve without having to be bothered with all those utterly tiresome customs and immigration formalities?"
"More than possible," Dan said. "Extremely probable." He stopped for a moment when the cantina owner emerged from his hut to chuck a bowl of scraps into the water. "One has several choices, one has. One could simply take a bus or drive down to Chetumal, last town on the Mex side, and look around for an Indian guide there to take you up the river until you can ford it. If this 'one' you keep referring to is more than one—"
"Four, actually," I said.
"Ah," he said. "Then one of you crosses legally into Belize, if that's possible, and picks up a guide there where it is both easier and safer, they tell me. Once in Belize, there's a bus that goes to the capital, and from there you can even hop the mail boat as far as Livingstone in Guatemala, if you're crazy enough."
"I don't know if I'm crazy about fording that river," I said. "I suppose that means the whole African Queen number, with leeches and barracudas and eels and they're the good news. I don't know if Sara could take it."
"What a sissy," said Sara.
"Or," Dan said, shifting his weight slightly, "you find some amiable seadog with a suitable boat and he drops you off on the Island of Belize, where you wait for the morning ferry to take you to the mainland, where you pick up a cab that takes you to the airport, where there are things called planes, which take you anywhere in the world."
"Speak to me of this island," I said, "where one might have to spend a night."
"He wants to know if there are any leeches there," Sara said. "Or electric eels in the bidet just waitin' to ring his bells."
"Really, Sara," I said. "Vulgarity is always unbecoming in the fair sex. Or unfair sex, as someone, not I, once quipped."
"I guess you got to watch your back there like anywhere," Dan said, "but most of the time it's so laid back it's half-asleep. I remember once though, pulling in to the little dock there and everyone in sight was hopping around and speeding away like in some old movie being projected too fast. Finally one of them tells me what happened was a container of coke got washed up and the whole island had been tooting it for days. So the village elders get together to try and figure out what to do, which isn't easy because they're all out of their skulls too. They decide to collect all the rest of the coke, or what they can, and then send a trusted representative to the mainland with it to flog it and split the money and they'll all be rich. So off goes the trusty representative with a suitcase full of coke, worth on the streets like a quarter of a million, but of course all Belize knows what's been going down by now, so he gets robbed five minutes after leaving the ferry."
"Oh, terrific," I said. "Sounds like my sort of real estate. Anyway. To regress slightly. You mentioned that what would also be required would be some amiable seadog with a suitable boat. Would you describe yourself as amiable, Cap'n?"
"The very picture of, sometimes," he said.
"It would be too much I suppose to expect that boat you own to be suitable, I guess," I said.
"Oh, I don't know, . . ." he said, as if he was thinking it over. "She is a staunch old lady come to think about it, seventy-six foot long, Texas built, glass hull, eight seventy-one Detroit diesel main, double electronics, paper recorder, Raytheon loran, sleeps six at a pinch, she might be up to it."
"Is she parked out there by any chance?" I asked, indicating the bay.
"Golly, no," Dan said, looking innocent. "Someone might scratch a fender or something out there, it's so crowded. I've got my own parking place, or moorage, as we like to put it, right over there." He made a gesture up the coast that took in about fifty square miles of tarantula territory.
"Makes sense," I said, nodding, "if boat hops are anything like car hops."
Dan grinned again, then said, "Well, citizens, this is all very enjoyable and all that—I like sitting in the sun and yarning as much as the next sailor—but maybe it's time we got down to it, comprende?"
I said I comprendo-ed. I told him what we were up to as briefly as possible. When I was done, he had a few questions, quite a few, which didn't surprise me all that much.
"When are you springing him?"
It was then Wednesday. I said, "All being well, Friday afternoon."
"How?"
I shrugged. "Where there is a will, there is a way."
"Then what?" Dan said. "How are you going to get him and you all down here?"
Oops, I thought. Actually I thought something a lot worse than oops. I hadn't even considered that part of it, I'd been so busy being clever about the rest.
"Don't worry, we got that in the bag," Benny said unexpectedly.
"Of course we do, Dan," I said, recovering with customary adroitness. "It was one of the first things we took care of."
"All right," said Dan. "I'll take your word that you can get him out and get you all down here sometime Friday evening, even though every federale south of Nuevo Laredo will be looking under every cactus for you. What traces will you leave behind? What kind of a trail? Are your backs covered at all? It's not going to do you any good if you do get to, say, Belize and then onto a plane if your names are waiting on a list in every port of entry in
the States."
"Ah," I said. "I'm glad you asked that, Dan. There will be no names on no lists, at least not our real ones because we didn't use real ones in Mérida or when we first crossed the border. So no comeback there. As for a trail, I thought about that too. I suppose it's remotely conceivable, if they wanted to go to the trouble, that they could find one of mine or Benny's or Sara's fingerprints, despite the cleanup we'll do before we leave and also despite the care Benny and I took—because we talked about it before—in places like Febrero Segundo and our hotel rooms. I mean, we did go to cafés and took taxis and steam baths and all, so it is possible. Sara's no problem because she told me she's never had her prints taken. Mine obviously are on file as a registered private detective and an ex–soldier boy and an ex–couple of other things I won't mention right now, so are Benny's. Say they got a print. Let's even admit they might have sufficient liaison with the appropriate law enforcement agencies back home too. Let's even admit they have the technology to link up their computers with U.S. ones and eventually get an ID on us. Señor, we'd be long home by then, and the Mexican authorities would have a hell of a job trying to extradite us bona fide American citizens back down here for anything less than wholesale manslaughter, and even then they'd have problems.
"Also," I said, "we have a little surprise up our commodious sleeves that should take the heat off us, if there is any, immediately and put it somewhere else that I assure you is guaranteed heatproof."
"We hope," said Dan. He took a small penknife out of his pocket and began to trim off a jagged splinter he'd found on the pier by his bare feet. "All right," he said again. "Let's say you can get him out and can get down here and you are clean when you get here. And let us say you and me make a deal and we sail away into the setting sun, and let us further say I get you to Belize Island and you catch the morning ferry and then a taxi to the airport. Let us say all that. You all got passports?"
Sara looked offended. "Only for years," she said.
"Me too," said Benny. "Several, if needs be."
"Well . . ." I began. They all looked at me as if I was the Thing from Outer Space.
"I don't believe it," Doris said, shaking her (actually my) wig. "Mastermind here hasn't even got a simple, ordinary, everyday item like a plain old passport."
"Oh, shut up," I said. "How was I going to know I'd need one?"
"You could have figured it out without booking too much computer time," she said. "I mean it was obvious from the start we couldn't go back to the States directly from Mexico."
"Oh, it was, was it?" I said. "And what about Billy? Where's his passport supposed to be? I know it's not under his mattress because he hasn't even got a mattress."
"Calm down," said Dan, without looking up from his whittling. "Where there's a will. Are any of you wanted right now in the States, for anything serious, I mean?"
"My mother probably seriously wants me," I said. "But that's it as far as I know."
"Bear with me," he said. "And none of you is on any FBI list prohibiting you from reentering the States for serious offenses in the past?"
We all shook our heads, even Benny.
"No sweat, then," said Dan. "You hit the U.S. consulate in Belize as soon as it opens—as I remember, it opens for a couple of hours Saturday mornings. You tell them you got mugged in a bar Friday night and lost some money and all your ID and you naturally didn't want to go to the cops because your money and IDs were long gone anyway and you couldn't pick out the two muggers if they were in a two-man lineup, and besides, there was no way you all wanted to hang around Belize for a couple of weeks while the cops got nowhere, and besides, your mother is sick and you've got to get back for business reasons and you get the picture."
We all agreed we got the picture.
"What they do in cases like yours is make one check by telex to the FBI to see that you're clean as far as they are concerned, and that is usually it," Dan said. "I hope so for your sake. We do not want them checking to see if you all had passports issued to you at some time, passports that were still valid, meaning you had entered Belize legally."
"No, we certainly do not," I said.
"And we do not want them phoning your home addresses to check that people with the names you give them actually live at those addresses but are presently on holiday in Mexico because who knows if Billy even has an address after all this time and if he gives his parents', who knows what they'll say if some government type phones them up and asks them, 'Oh, by the way, where's your son these days?'"
I shuddered at the thought.
"Let us be optimistic," Dan said. "Let's hope they are busy or hungry or lazy or hung over and just get the usual clearance. Then what they do is issue you temporary traveling papers good for one one-way ticket back to the land of the free. If you're broke, which they do not like, they will finally, reluctantly lend you the fare to the nearest point of entry in the U.S., if you are unable or won't wire home to someone for money yourself. So better is, what you say is luckily you had just enough fare money or one credit card stashed away down one sock. ¿Comprende?"
I not only said I comprendo-ed but that I was grateful for all the survival tips, deeply grateful at that. I only hoped he knew what the hell he was talking about. Then I asked him the 64-million-peso question: how much?
He finished up his good housekeeping chore and put his knife away again.
"Without going into all the details," he said, proceeding like all good salesmen to go into enough of them, "in our favor is that no one smuggles anything from here to there, it's always the other way round, so it's rare to get stopped, and if we do get stopped, we're not smuggling anything anyway, we're just gringos out for a sail. Also all our sailing in Mexican waters will be done at night. And if the federales are together for once and the navy has been warned to look out for dangerous types like you because your backstop hasn't worked, then first of all, they have to catch us in the middle of the night, and by the time they do, the easily identifiable ones, Victor and Billy, will be safely hidden away under the bulkheads, where they could look for a month without finding you, and Benny and Sara won't look like Benny and Sara anymore, and anyway if they do hear about you and find us and board us and find the stowaways, we'll just pay the buggers off, won't we?"
I nodded confidently.
"On the other hand," Dan said, ticking the points off one by one on the fingers of his other hand, "there are such expenses as diesel fuel, oil, my deck hand—"
"If you mean Alfredo the invisible," I said, "he's back there trying to find someone to bait his hook for him."
"My deck hand, whoever he may be," Dan went on smoothly, "food and water, and this and that, and remember, if we do get caught, I can always plead innocence. What captain asks to see his passenger's papers before a little cruise down the coast?"
"You won't look so innocent if they find us hiding in the bulwarks, wherever they are," I said.
"There is that," he admitted. "And it's bulkheads. At the least they'll confiscate my boat, and insurance companies are notoriously unwilling to pay out if your boat has been confiscated with just cause."
"I bet," said Sara.
"So all in all," said Dan, furrowing his brow in deep thought, as if he hadn't already worked out the price per passenger per nautical mile per hour afloat and per stale sandwich eaten. "So, all in all . . ." And he named a sum that had more zeros in it than Tokyo airport during World War II.
"How would you like that paid?" I said. "Gold bullion do?"
"Dollars, traveler's, certified check, even pounds," he said. "I don't care. Half when you board, please, half on arrival."
I looked over at Benny, who gave a noncommittal shrug.
"You're a big help," I said. "OK, Cap'n, you got a deal." We shook hands briefly. "Sara, got three grand you can lend me till a week from Friday?"
"Sure, in pesos," she said.
All that remained was for Dan and me to agree on where and when. He told me where—if we took the dirt road th
at goes to the Ceiba but continued north instead of turning off to the hotel, in about fifteen minutes we'd get to another turnoff, which we wouldn't take either, but we would take the next one and bear left when we got a chance, and it would take us to the estuary of a small river that was just big enough for Dan to back his boat into, bulkheads and all. Then he told me when—midnight on Friday. He asked us for a phone number in Mérida where he could get in touch with us or get a message from us Thursday or Friday morning to confirm. Benny gave him Jorge's.
"Anything else?" Dan said, effortlessly getting to his feet with nary a creak from his leg bones.
No one could think of anything else, so we made our farewells and were just turning to leave when he said, "Oh, there is one thing. There's a chance something may come up and I may not be able to make it."
That time I located the mot juste with no trouble at all.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"As far as I know, only one," Big Jeff said, lighting up one of his stogies with his flamethrower.
We were in the cab driving back to Cancún.
In light of the severe shock to my system, already wobbly, delivered a few minutes previously by Cap'n Dan, I was putting a few searching questions to Jeff about his erstwhile shipmate. The way we had left things with Dan was like this—if whatever the hell it was that was more important even than saving my life did come up, he'd try to keep our rendezvous seven nights later at the same time or, failing that, seven midnights after that. And that was the best we could get out of him.