We’d come roaring around the end of Key Vaca, named, I’d been told, after the sea cow or manatee. The long bridge of the Overseas Highway to Key West was ahead. I aimed the bow at one of the arches. Some workmen painting a railing stopped to stare at the three-thousand-pound projectile hurtling toward them. There was a clap of sound as the exhausts bounced back at us from the arch, and a funny little shimmy as the tidal currents tried to throw us off course and failed. Then we were out of the Gulf of Mexico. The broad Atlantic was ahead, and the spidery framework of Sombrero Light, with which I’d become acquainted on a previous visit to the area in more pleasant company, now dead, but that was nothing to think about now…
The big twin outboards ate up the five miles to the lighthouse in spectacular fashion. Beyond, the water soon turned from light to dark blue. It’s never really smooth out in the Gulf Stream; and at this speed, it was like driving a car with four flat tires down a street full of potholes. We were both standing, to take the shocks with our legs. Haseltine, clinging to the windshield railing with one hand, poked me with the other and jerked his thumb upwards.
I glanced up to see a helicopter hanging over us. When they saw me looking, they pulled ahead, slightly off to starboard. I swung that way, and read the course off the compass: 193°, a little west of south. The lighthouse was rapidly getting smaller astern. There was nothing ahead at first, just the blue, sunlit waters of the Stream. After about half an hour, however, I became aware of a recurrent little flash of spray dead ahead, like a breaking wave in the distance, only the waves weren’t breaking today.
Gradually, the fleeing boat became clearly visible. After a while, I could even make out the wildly blowing long dark hair of the steersman. When we were within half a mile, I pulled back on the throttles until we were just holding our own; this cut the decibels from behind to where communication was possible after a fashion.
I said, “We need that man alive. Never mind the details, but he figures in a deal I think you’ll approve. You take the wheel. Give me a little time to get ready; then pull on past and cut across his bow. Give yourself room enough so you can swing clear around and put her alongside just as he hits our wake. If he’s got a gun, as he probably does, that ought to throw his aim off, we hope. Come along the starboard side where he’s sitting. When I yell, sheer off and give her the gun. Now take over…”
I slid from behind the wheel as he took it and, bracing myself in the boat, studied the tools available, but I’d already made my plan, such as it was. Boarding Morgan’s boat to take him barehanded might be dramatic, but it was kind of silly. I’d already charged a gun once in the course of this operation; twice would be straining my luck. I got the big flying gaff from the rack to port.
Freshwater fishermen use a net, as a rule, to bring their fish aboard; and for some reason, salmon fishermen seem to pride themselves on also netting their trophies unmarred, even in salt water; but just about every other ocean angler after fish of any size employs a gaff: a big, sharp, metal hook with a long handle. The difference between a fixed gaff and a flying gaff is that on the latter, the gaff hook has an eye and a sturdy rope, and the handle can be removed, in the heat of action, after the hook goes home. This is for truly big fish, the kind you don’t just casually lift aboard, but hoist over the side with a block and tackle.
Harriet’s flying gaff was a wicked-looking implement with a handle almost eight feet long. It was equipped with a stout new line, which I coiled after making the end fast to a cleat near the boat’s transom.
“Company,” Haseltine’s voice said, sounding quite calm about it. “Dead ahead. Coming fast. I’d judge their intentions are hostile.”
I looked up. Still a couple of miles off was a big white sportfisherman heading straight for us. Even at the distance, I could see that she was throwing a bow wave like a destroyer. I laid the gaff carefully on the floor—excuse me, cockpit sole—and steadied myself against the console.
“Okay, let’s take him before they get here,” I said.
The oversized outboards aft began to scream once more. Haseltine, for a man with Plains Indian blood in his veins, was a surprisingly good helmsman, better than I was in spite of my seagoing Viking ancestry. So much for heredity. I clung to the windshield handrail and watched him ease up on the smaller craft skillfully. Morgan had, of course, spotted us by now; he kept looking back, long hair blowing, and hammering at his single throttle in a futile, angry, frustrated sort of way. We passed about fifty yards to his port, and he produced the expected pistol and took a couple of wild shots at us, which we could afford to ignore at that range, the way both boats were bouncing.
Well ahead, Haseltine swung the wheel hard right, cutting across the smaller boat’s bow and coming clear around to the same course once more. His timing was beautiful. Jockeying wheel and throttles nicely, he laid us right alongside just as both boats smacked hard into the big wake we’d laid across Morgan’s path.
The big man was just rising to take aim when we hit; I could see his tough, craggy face intent behind the pistol, contrasting oddly with the long, girlish hair. Then his boat lurched, throwing him off balance. Well, he’d already had the two shots I’d promised Renee Schneider I’d allow him. I swung the eight-foot gaff between the boats and socked it into his shoulder. I twisted and jerked to get the handle free.
“Now!” I yelled.
Haseltine swung the wheel and hit the throttles. The boats separated. The rope came tight; the big steel meat hook took the strain; and Morgan screamed as he was yanked bodily out of his craft into the sea.
21
I was asleep, dreaming of an open boat far offshore, with no land in sight, being pursued by a much larger sportfishing vessel that was not, I knew, controlled by sportsmen or engaged in fishing. One of the three men on board the smaller boat was unconscious, soaking wet and, unlikely though it might seem, bleeding profusely from a steel hook in the shoulder. In my dream I was kneeling beside him trying to remove the gaff and plug the hole, at least temporarily. The man at the boat’s helm was whistling-an off-key tune, glancing back every now and then at the vessel astern.
“Let me know when I can open her up,” this one said.
“I just don’t want the bastard to bleed to death,” I said, in my dream.
“That’s what I like about you, Helm,” he said, “your tender, humanitarian impulses.”
“How are they doing back there?”
“Not to worry, amigo. That thing’s fifty feet long. Nobody’s going to drive a hull that big much over twenty-five knots, not with any normal civilian powerplants, they aren’t. We can play with her all day; but your chopper friends are getting nervous up ahead. I think they want to take the package off our hands, but we’ll need a little time and space to make the transfer.”
I said, “Okay, I’ve got him patched up, more or less. Cut loose your Texas wolf…”
As Haseltine shoved the throttles forward, in my dream, there was a loud hammering sound like, maybe, an overstrained powerplant tearing itself apart. Then the dream faded. I sat up groggily in my bed in my now fairly familiar resort cabin, remembering that nothing had happened to the motors. The pursuing boat had turned away when it became obvious that we could outrun it easily. There had been a tricky helicopter bit like in the movies, with a sling lowered from a winch, and Morgan, still unconscious—I’d had to rap him over the head with the billy club Harriet kept handy for subduing big fish—had disappeared skyward, to be repaired and maintained somewhere in breathing condition, we hoped, until needed. The loud knock on the cabin door came again.
“Mr. Helm?”
I found my snubnosed revolver and dropped it into my pants pocket. With my hand on it, I crossed the room and opened the door. A small, tanned boy in ragged shorts and sneakers stood there, holding out an envelope.
“Helm, Cabin Twenty-six?” he said. “For you?”
I took the envelope and gave him a quarter and closed the door. It was a cheap, small envelope, probably saturate
d with contact poison and crammed full of tarantulas eager to insert their lethal weapons in human flesh. I opened it anyway. Inside was a small visiting card. On the front was a name: Paul Martin Manderfield. On the back, neatly written in ink, were two words: Salty Dog.
I frowned at the card, thoughtfully. I’d expected some kind of summons or invitation, of course—that was the whole point of the exercise—but I’d kind of assumed it would be delivered by Harriet. This was better, I decided. We were getting the children and amateurs off the street. Pros were dealing with pros now; and the other party to the negotiations, whoever he might be, was making this clear to me. Good for him.
I looked at my watch. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. I was glad I’d taken the opportunity to lie down on the bed and grab a little sleep after cleaning and refueling the boat and making up some suitable lies for the dock-master. There might be a busy night ahead. Haseltine should have his chartered express cruiser here soon, if he hadn’t put her on the mud or ripped her open on a coral head; and he probably hadn’t. Although I still objected to the guy in principle, I had to admit that he seemed to be a pretty competent seaman, which was what counted here. I could always find some congenial landlubber to pal around with afterwards.
My pretty girl friend was at the desk in the office when I came in. “Yes, Mr. Helm?” she said.
“Is there by any chance a place around here called Salty Dog?” I asked.
“Why, yes,” she said. “About five miles east, at the other end of the island. The Salty Dog Lodge, Bar, and Restaurant.”
“Any good?”
“Well,” she said judiciously, “they won’t poison you, but you can get better food and liquor right here, or maybe I’m prejudiced.”
I said, “With a name like that, I’d better go take a look at the joint, just the same. Salty Dog, for God’s sake.”
Back in the rental car, I examined the visiting card again. Unlike the inexpensive envelope in which it had come, it was very high class, engraved yet. The name, Manderfield, meant nothing to me. I suppose I could have used the telephone to find out if it meant something to somebody else, but I was getting a bit tired of the elaborate organizational stuff. Helicopters, for God’s sake; and when the chips were really down, you still had to do the job with a simple steel hook and a length of rope while the fancy goddamn whirlybird fluttered around the sky like a helpless sparrow…
The Salty Dog Lodge had its main facilities right on the busy highway. Parking nearby, I got a glimpse of rows of cabins behind the headquarters building, running down to a small marina installation on the water. The restaurant was dark after the bright sunshine outside. The bar was in the far left corner. I could just make out a lone male customer talking to the barman. I moved that way, parked myself on a stool, and waited for somebody to notice me. After a while, the bartender moved my way.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m looking,” I said, “for a martini and a Mr. Manderfield.”
“I’m Manderfield,” said the other customer. “Let’s be comfortable at a table, Mr. Helm. Joe will bring your drink… And another for me, Joe, please.”
My eyes were getting used to the dusk; and I got a good look at him as we went through the business of offering each other a choice of chairs, as if it mattered. He was a neat, compact, medium-sized, middle-aged man in good shape, with the usual Florida businessman’s tan. He was wearing light slacks and a gaudy sports shirt. His dark hair was streaked with gray, smoothly parted and combed; and he wore dark prescription glasses with strong bifocal segments that gave him an odd, four-eyed look. It was hard to feel menaced by a gent with bifocals, but I don’t suppose weak eyes are necessarily an indication of good moral character.
Having got the seating problem worked out to everybody’s satisfaction, we waited for the barman to produce our drinks. When they came, I tasted mine without hesitation. Manderfield had deliberately given me plenty of opportunity to have the place covered; there wouldn’t be any monkey business here. In a sense, we were operating under a flag of truce—not that it couldn’t be violated; but the violation, if any, wouldn’t be anything as obvious and stupid as a Mickey Finn.
“You weren’t very nice to our Mr. Morgan this morning,” Manderfield said abruptly.
Good boy. No fancy double-talk or elaborate introductions; and who needed introductions, anyway? He knew me and I knew him. That is, I’d never met him before, or heard his name, but I’d met a dozen like him, all professionals. I could have had the dossier read to me over the phone, but I wouldn’t have learned anything I didn’t already know, aside from a few meaningless details. I could spot a graduate of that particular finishing school across any street in the world.
“Mr. Morgan wasn’t very nice to our Mr. Pendleton last night,” I said.
“We were given to understand, by a certain lady, that you already had Morgan in custody. Imagine our surprise when he called this morning requesting a rendezvous at sea.”
I shrugged. “Sometimes I bend the truth a little. It’s a terrible habit I have,” I said. “Anyway, we’ve got him now.”
“He’s really of very little importance, Mr. Helm. These muscle-men are all expendable, you know that.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“Ah, but you are a little more than just a muscle-man, aren’t you, sir?”
“It’s kind of you to say so.” After a moment, I said, “So Morgan is of no value to you. Too bad. After all the trouble we went to to catch him, too.”
Manderfield laughed. “You pin me down, sir. Is one not permitted a bit of bargaining? Actually, we do have a slight interest in Mr. Morgan. Or at least in Mr. Morgan’s silence.”
“I thought you might,” I said. “Of course, the guy went ape about the girl who got killed, the way no good muscle-man should. He went hunting on his own to avenge her, interfering with some plans of yours; so there’s also a question of making an example of him for discipline’s sake. I mean, you might have condoned his going after me independently if he’d been successful; but the way he flipped, strangled the wrong man, changed his mind about killing me, and ran off with the corpse…” I shrugged. “A guy like that, you just can’t afford to keep around any longer, can you?”
Manderfield smiled without humor. “How do you explain his erratic behavior, Mr. Helm?”
“It’s the great weakness of your system,” I said. “Your boys and girls are great, operating under detailed orders, but they don’t do too well thinking for themselves. And when one of them tries to buck the machinery that made him, he’s lost and he knows it. Morgan knew he was being a very naughty boy, satisfying his own human thirst for revenge. Lenin, Marx, and Stalin were all breathing down his neck as he stood there waiting to get his big hands around my neck. He knew that he was betraying socialist peoples everywhere for purely bourgeois emotional reasons. When Pendleton blundered in on him, he cracked, committed murder unnecessarily, and then, driven by guilt, decided to atone by cleaning up after himself and surrendering to the great mother machine again to take the punishment he knew he deserved.”
“You seem to fancy yourself as a psychologist, Mr. Helm,” Manderfield said after a moment’s pause. “I think your analysis of our agents as mechanized automatons incapable of independent thought will cause you trouble one day, but that’s no concern of mine. As a self-styled psychologist, can you tell me my motives in asking you to this meeting?”
“Sure,” I said. “You want Morgan, mildly. You want to talk with me to see if you can figure out what I’m up to. The lady’s report probably left you slightly confused. It was meant to.”
Manderfield smiled. I decided that, pro or no pro, he wasn’t a guy I was ever going to like very much. Some people’s smiles are like that.
“Your record is impressive, sir,” he said. “But you can hardly call it a record of self-sacrificing nobility. You can hardly expect us to believe that you’re offering us your life in return for the lives of some people you don’t even know, which is
roughly what you seem to be saying.”
I shook my head. “Not at all. What I’m offering you is a crack at my life. There’s a difference.”
“That means you expect to trick us somehow.”
I said irritably, “Hell, that’s what I told Hattie; didn’t she pass it along? Sure I expect to trick you. It’s just a question of who’s got the best tricks.”
“You’re bluffing, Mr. Helm. You’re trying to get something for nothing.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“You want a number of people rather badly. We want Morgan, as you say, just mildly. Since we’ve been assigned you, and failure is not encouraged, we’d like to get you, but it’s hardly an obsession with us. There will be other times. On the whole, it doesn’t put you in a very strong bargaining position, does it, sir?”
I said, “You’re right up to a point. However, there’s also the fact that, now that it’s been called to your attention, you’d like to see this melodramatic foolishness that’s being perpetrated, or at least assisted, by your allies to the south, stopped before it leads to serious trouble, trouble nobody wants around here right now.”
“That’s wishful thinking, Mr. Helm. We don’t tell the Cubans their business, and they don’t tell us ours.” He grimaced. “Well, that’s not entirely true. Unfortunately, like many recent converts, they take their revolutionary principles very seriously and grimly. One gets a little tired of being lectured on points of doctrine by bearded fanatics who seem to feel that Communism is their own private island invention…” Manderfield shook his head quickly, and laughed. “But that is beside the point, isn’t it, sir? The point is that you’re trying to claim a community of interest between us that does not, in fact, exist. Why should we care how many idiot self-styled Caribbean patriots are permitted to indulge in their gaudy antics from bases along the Cuban coast? Why?”
The Intimidators Page 17