The Crook Factory

by Dan Simmons

  As we lashed the extra fuel drum in place in the aft cockpit, the Cuban lieutenant approached. “Señor Lucas,” he said, his voice apologetic, “we have just received notice on the radio that a boat matching this description has been stolen at gunpoint. We are ordered to arrest or shoot the bandit if we sight him.”

  I nodded and looked the short lieutenant in the eye. “Have you sighted him, Lieutenant?”

  The Cuban sighed and opened his hands. “Unfortunately, no, Señor Lucas. But I will have my men keep a close watch through the rest of the day and night.”

  “That is wise, Lieutenant. I thank you.”

  “For the gasoline, señor? It was brought here for Señor Hemingway’s use.”

  “I thank you for everything,” I said, and held out my hand. The lieutenant shook it firmly.

  “Go with God, Señor Lucas.”

  I THOUGHT ABOUT MY DECISION to leave the other men behind as I headed south toward the mainland. Perhaps I was grandstanding… Saxon, Fuentes, and Sinsky certainly knew how to fight, while Herrera and Guest would give their lives in an instant for “Ernesto.” Six armed men had to be better than one when going into harm’s way.

  Only I knew that this was not true. Six of us in the speedboat would get in one another’s way, and the thought of six of us firing submachine guns at once made me wince. It would be chaos. No one on the Pilar’s crew except Saxon had the discipline and experience of having been under fire to be reliable in an emergency, and not even Saxon was ready to take orders from me. So they had grumbled and glowered, but they had let me go on alone when I insisted that Papa’s life would be in greater danger if we all went barreling after him. I suggested that he would probably show up while I was out hunting for him, so it would be better if they remained on the key where he had told them to stay.

  “Please tell Papa to come back, Lucas,” said Patrick, looking me dead in the eye with a man’s earnestness and intent.

  I nodded and touched the boy’s shoulder with no condescension, as one man would touch another’s at a serious moment.

  There was no sign of the Pilar in the Enseñada Herradura or north or south along the coast. Hemingway’s boat was too large to conceal in the mangrove swamp as we had hidden the Lorraine, but I laid off the reef and put the glasses on every possible hiding place anyway. No boat.

  The rain had slacked off as I raised the mainland, but the surf was crashing across the reef north to Point Brava and all along the rocks below Point Jesus and east. It was a miserable day. The high waves had obliterated the sandy spit and were chewing at the low cliff by the beacon where the German boys were buried. As I came in through the heavy surf and fought the wheel to make the inlet opening, the sudden stench of decay washed across me despite the trailing wind and the rain-sweetened air. The crabs or something larger had done their digging.

  Then I was through the stench and the inlet and swinging hard to starboard to stay within the narrow channel. The railroad tracks and abandoned shack and sagging piers became visible to my right. The Doce Apostoles came into sight on my left. I throttled back, kicking up mud, and loosened the Thompson on its strap, my hand on the clip and trigger guard. At Castle Morro above Havana Harbor, the Twelve Apostles were cannon; here they were just big rocks and some abandoned shacks. But I felt like the boulders and black windows were gunsights zeroing in on me as I rumbled past.

  There was the Pilar—anchored just west of the little bay island called Cayo Largo on the Nokomis charts—about sixty yards out from the western shoreline, just opposite the rocky hill that separated the abandoned rail line buildings and stack from the southeastern bend in the bay where the old mill sat amidst vines and cane fields.

  I let the engines idle while I studied Hemingway’s boat through the binoculars. Nothing moved. My skin crawled as it waited for the impact of a rifle bullet from the shore, but nothing came. The Pilar was held in place only by a bow anchor, and as the green-and-black boat moved slightly with the wind and current, I saw that the Lorraine was tied up behind it. Shevlin’s speedboat also appeared to be empty.

  I unhinged the windshield and dropped it flat onto the bow of the Southern Cross speedboat. Then I dropped to one knee on the front bench, lifted the Remington out of the waterproof gun case Guest had given me, actioned a round into the chamber, strung the sling around my left arm, and set the six-power scope on both boats. The magnification was not as good as the binoculars, but I could still see that there was no movement.

  Strange. If Columbia was aboard the Lorraine when Hemingway arrived, the agent either swam ashore, had another boat pick him up, or is still aboard the Pilar.

  Besides canvas curtains on the port side of the cockpit beneath the flying bridge and smaller glass windows next to that canvas, Pilar had a glass windshield that propped open at the front of the cockpit, three wooden rectangular porthole covers on the side of the raised forward compartment—all three of which were closed—a hatch opening halfway forward atop the main compartment, and a sliding hatch at the forward end of the compartment just where the last eight feet or so of bow began. I scoped all of that as the Pilar moved slowly at anchor. The gunwales were low toward the stern, but still too high for me to see if anyone was lying on the deck. As both boats pivoted toward me, the Pilar rotating to the current around its bow anchor and the Lorraine tied to a cleat on the starboard side of Hemingway’s boat, near the stern—I could see that no one was in the cockpit behind the wheel of the Pilar and that all of the seats of Shevlin’s speedboat were empty.

  Minutes passed. Mosquitoes buzzed around my head, landed on my face and neck, and began to drink. I held the rifleman’s pose, the scope bobbing slightly with the boat but steady enough to squeeze off a shot if and when I had to. I was wearing the street shoes, torn trousers, and blue shirt I had put on the night before. The jacket was on the rear bench of the forward cockpit. The .357 was in the quick-release holster on my belt and the Thompson was slung around my back. More minutes passed. I turned my head only to check the shoreline to the left and right, and occasionally to glance quickly behind me. No movement. No other boats.

  I began to feel certain that Hemingway was wounded, lying on the floor of his boat and bleeding to death while I knelt there and watched through my scope, letting vital moments pass, allowing him to die. Do something! my imagination demanded. Anything.

  I shut off my imagination and held my firing stance, remembering to blink and breathe normally, moving only when I had to restart circulation in my legs and arms. I could see my watch turned backward on my wrist above the taut rifle sling. Ten minutes passed. Eighteen. Twenty-three. It began to rain again. Some of the mosquitoes left. Others arrived.

  Suddenly a figure bolted from the cockpit of the Pilar and leaped into the Lorraine. As he untied the speedboat, I confirmed that it was not Hemingway—too thin, too short, clean shaven. He was hatless, wearing tan slacks and a gray shirt and was carrying the German courier pouch slung over his shoulder. He had a Schmeisser machine pistol in his right hand. I fired just as he started the Lorraine’s engine. His left arm jerked and the windshield in front of him exploded, but I could not tell if it had been a clean hit because of the movement of all three boats and the sudden downpour.

  The Lorraine roared ahead and disappeared behind Cayo Largo. I stood in my speedboat, bracing myself against the hinge of the flattened windshield, watching the Pilar for any further movement, and waiting for the Lorraine to come around the east side of the little island. Columbia—if that is who it was—had nowhere to go on that side of the bay: the water was less than a foot deep for most of that wide, muddy expanse of shallows.

  Ten seconds later the Lorraine came roaring around the island, cutting back toward the deep channel behind it as it sliced through silty banks and sludge. The man was standing at the wheel, steering with the left arm I thought I had hit, and firing the machine pistol at me with his right hand. I saw the puffs of smoke and felt the Southern Cross speedboat vibrate softly to several impacts, but I h
ad no time to pay attention to that as I tried to stand firmly on the bobbing boat and fire. I levered in another round, fired again, actioned in another round, fired again.

  My first shot blew apart the spotlight next to the man’s arm. The second shot missed. The third shot knocked the man off his feet onto the deck behind the seat.

  The Lorraine roared by, throttle still wide open. I slammed the Chris-Craft’s throttles forward and swung her in a tight arc, still watching the Pilar for movement. It would be a perfect ambush for a rifleman there to take me out now. Nothing.

  I could see the man in the gray shirt flopping around on the deck like some great, gray fish as the Lorraine continued to roar straight down the channel between the semisubmerged marker sticks. He was wounded but trying to get to his feet, trying to get to the wheel. I pushed both throttles full forward and fishtailed from side to side, trying to see over the raised bow of my own boat and taking some evasive action as he found his machine pistol and began firing again. A bullet smashed the right windshield. Another tore leather and stuffing out of the seat cushion next to me. Two or three more thunked into the fifty-gallon gasoline drum behind me, and I immediately smelled the stink of gasoline as it poured into the rear cockpit. Nothing exploded or ignited.

  The Lorraine seemed to know her own way out of the harbor and was making straight for the inlet at thirty-five knots. But I was gaining on her, sluicing mud as I cut it too close with the banks to my right—if I struck a real sandbar there at this speed I would go flying out over the windshield—and I dropped the Remington, raised the Thompson, and emptied the entire clip into the Lorraine’s cockpit as I came up on her starboard quarter.

  The man twitched and danced like a poorly handled marionette and jacknifed backward against the port gunwale. I pulled out the empty clip, slammed in another, and began firing again, but stopped when I saw the left shoreline rushing at both boats.

  I threw the starboard prop into reverse and cut hard to starboard, throwing a curtain of water all the way to the narrow beach as I just missed the mud banks and shoreline. The Lorraine roared ahead as if determined to cut across the spit of rocky land below the ridge in its quest for open sea.

  My own boat slammed across two mud banks and almost threw me out before I jammed both throttles forward again and regained the narrow channel, my stern toward the inlet. I killed the throttles and looked back just in time to watch the Lorraine tear herself apart on the rocks and mud banks.

  The top of Shevlin’s beautiful boat came apart and flew through the air in a shower of glass, chrome, mahogany, and wire as the hull—splintered and shattered but still driven ahead by the screaming engine—roared on through shallows, rocks, vines, and beach before tearing itself into ten thousand pieces on the hillside where we had buried the Germans. Flames erupted here and there, but there was no central explosion. The air smelled of gasoline.

  The man’s body had been thrown sixty feet and had landed face down in the water near the center channel. He floated with his arms and legs spread-eagled, blood from his wounds mingling with the billows of mud.

  I turned the Chris-Craft around and advanced very slowly, the submachine gun raised and ready. Three minutes and he did not move except to bob up and down on the Lorraine’s dying wake. The courier pouch had been thrown free, and I could see documents in the treetops, the shallows, and sinking in the main channel. Good riddance. When my boat floated close enough, I could see the white of the man’s spine peeking through the shreds of shirt and torn flesh.

  I laid the submachine gun on the seat, got the gaff, and struggled to hook him to turn him over.

  There were no serious wounds on the face, only an open-jawed expression of absolute surprise. So must it be for most of us. I reached down, grabbed him by the hair and shirt, and dragged him aboard. Water and blood ran across the polished deck of the speedboat and gurgled in the scuppers.

  I did not know this man. He had a thin, pale face; some stubble; short, wiry hair; and bright blue eyes that were already clouding over. The bullets from the Thompson had caught him across the chest and groin. The inside of his left arm showed the grazing path of the first Remington slug and a larger entrance wound in his side showed where the second had knocked him down. Some impact in the crash had almost torn off his right arm.

  I fished in his pockets. Amazingly, a billfold had stayed in his jacket pocket. A small, sodden card with no photograph identified him as SS Major Kurt Friedrich Daufeldt, officer of the Reich Security Administration, Sicherheitsdienst, AMT VI. A separate, typed note under the twin SS lightning strokes said simply that SS Major Daufeldt was carrying out sensitive and important work for the Third Reich and should be offered every possible courtesy and cooperation by any member of the armed forces or security apparatus or intelligence wing of the Third Reich. Heil Hitler! The note was signed by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, SS Lieutenant General and Chief der Sicherheitspolizei Reinhard Heydrich, and SS Major Walter Schellenberg, chief of RSHA VI.

  Well, that’s it, then. I put the ID and soggy letter in my pocket and looked at the stranger’s dead face. “Hello, Columbia,” I said. I doubted if there would be too many agents in Cuba with this rank and such a letter from the three highest men in the SD. One was now dead in Czechoslovakia, but the letter was still almost unique in the power it conferred on this corpse. Whatever Operation Raven had been, it had been important and approved at the highest possible levels in the Nazi hierarchy. I doubted if he had carried this card and letter around with him during his undercover work here, but perhaps he had been planning to leave this evening after dealing with Hemingway and wanted his bona fides with him. “Good-bye, Columbia,” I said. “Herr Major Daufeldt. Auf wiedersehn.”

  The corpse said nothing. The rain had let up, but a light drizzle continued to moisten the upturned face.

  I shut off the engine and checked the damage to the Chris-Craft. There were three holes in the fifty-gallon drum, and gasoline had spilled everywhere. This was not good. It had been pure luck that the pooled fuel and fumes had not ignited—either by the bullets’ impact or the hot engine just forward of the aft cockpit. The speedboat had one small console and I rummaged in it, coming up with some rags, a small bucket, and a roll of duct tape. I used the tape to seal the holes as best I could, rolling the drum around until the perforations were pointed skyward and then re-securing the heavy thing, and then mopping up the gas with the rags and throwing them overboard. I stripped the shirt off the corpse and used it as best I could to get the rest of the spilled fuel swabbed up, and dipped the bucket into the sea to wash down the cushions and deck until the reek of gasoline lessened. I checked the bilge, decided that not much of the gas had gotten in there and that the fumes were neglible, and then started up the small bilge pump to empty it. The speedboat did not explode.

  Hurry! my subconscious kept shouting. Hemingway may be hurt or dying. Well, it would not help him if I blew up the boat only a few hundred yards away.

  When the bilge was empty and all gasoline fumes vented, I crawled forward and dragged Major Daufeldt’s corpse across the engine compartment and wedged him onto the deck of the aft cockpit beneath the gas drum. Then I finished mopping up the blood still soaking the deck of the forward cockpit.

  Once under way again, I studied the Pilar through the twelve-power binoculars. Still no movement. But there had been none before Major Daufeldt had made his break for it.

  I swung around to the west, coming up slowly on the stern of Hemingway’s boat, the .357 in my hand now as I carefully avoided mud banks and sandbars. I could see into the cockpit and into the dark entrance to the forward compartments from this angle. Nothing. When I was twenty feet away, by standing upright, I could see the deck of the compartment almost to the stern bench.

  A body lay face down there. I saw the shorts, the sprawled legs, the massive upper body under a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, the bull neck, the short hair, the beard. It was Hemingway. The back and side of his head were bloody, and the thic
k fluid stirred sluggishly as the Pilar yawed back and forth with the waves. He did not appear to be breathing.

  “Aw, goddamn it,” I whispered to no one as the Chris-Craft crept up to the Pilar’s starboard quarter and bumped against the bigger boat. No movement or noise from the forward compartment. The side canvas was rigged and the windshield was lowered on the left side above the wheel. Hemingway might have been under way when the shot came, but someone had dropped the bow anchor.

  Columbia… Daufeldt… shot the writer from the shore, near the pier, then took the Lorraine out here and dropped the Pilar’s anchor.

  Maybe. I tied on to the aft starboard cleat, just where the Lorraine had been tied up, waited for the waves to match, and hopped aboard, the Magnum in my right hand and a grenade in my left, watching the stairs to the forward compartment and the hatch visible along the upper superstructure beyond the dropped windshield. Nothing. Only the sound of the waves.

  I risked a glance at Hemingway. There was a lot of blood and at least one section of scalp lifted away from the bone above and behind his ear. Because of the motion of the boat, I could not tell if he was breathing. The swollen ear I had given him was covered with blood from the head wound. I felt another pang of regret for that fight.

  I turned back toward the cockpit and that dark entrance just as a pistol came up and out of the forward hatch. I raised the .357, but too late. There were three short, sharp slaps and I felt two solid impacts on my upper right chest, then—as I was spinning, still trying to bring the .357 to bear—another cracking sound and a more terrible blow exploding in my left side.

  I dropped the pistol and grenade and fell into the stern cushions, then over the stern board that Hemingway had modified lower than usual to facilitate landing big fish. I heard a distant splash as I hit the water. I do not know if the darkness that swallowed me was unconsciousness or just the black water as I sank toward the muddy bottom.