The Fata Morgana

by Leo A. Frankowski

  "Dere was somebody dat was supposed to shoot him?" Adam asked. His phony accent had come back the moment he stepped off the plane in Bay City.

  "Yes, that's what I heard, from another client of mine who's presently in jail."

  "Well, dey did shoot somebody on our boat back den. A young girl named Dawn Daleki. She was maybe tree feet from Treet when dey killed her wit a long shot from a rifle."

  Greenberg wrote the name down, and said, "Shit. Murder One. That opens another can of worms. But let's finish up with what I was saying, before we get into this murder case. I'll go through all the details and show you the file on your case later, before you get my bill for all of this work, but the short of it was that the judge deposited your Brazilian check in his trust account, but was hesitant about disbursing the money while you were still alive. I brought considerable pressure on him, which eventually got him disbarred and impeached, and seventeen point three million of your money is now in my client trust account, awaiting your pleasure.

  "The machinery dealer who made such a nice profit on the resale of your equipment, faced with things like Conspiracy to Defraud, Purchasing and Possession of Stolen Goods, and Grand Larceny saw fit to pay you the full replacement cost of the machinery that had been in your plant. That is to say, what it would cost you to go out and buy all new stuff. It came to eight point eight million, and it too is currently drawing interest in my client trust account, less the two point one million that it took to satisfy your legitimate creditors. Incidentally, I had your bankruptcy overturned, and your good credit standing has been restored.

  "Now then, the public humiliation of all of this proved to be too much for the judge, and he committed suicide twelve days ago. Any animosity you might have for him is now moot, but there is still your ex-wife. What do you want me to try to do about her? The terms of your divorce settlement have also been overturned, and she got absolutely nothing out of it except for some personal property and the bill from her lawyer. She has already been stripped of most or perhaps all of the financial gains she'd hoped to make, but we can still see that criminal action is taken against the woman."

  I was stunned by all of this. It was a few moments before I said, "I don't know. This is all coming too quickly at me, and I just don't know what to do." I paused for a while, thinking. "No. I don't hate Helen. I know it sounds crazy, but I think that some part of me still loves her. I don't want to hurt her. I just don't want to ever see her or hear from her again."

  Alan was taking copious notes.

  "Dat sounds just fine, Treet. But what about Dawn? Don't we owe her sumptin? I mean, she was wit us, and we let her get killed."

  "True. Alan, just what can we do concerning Dawn's death?"

  "Thinking about it, probably not much. She was apparently accidentally murdered in a foreign country by a foreign hired assassin, who won't be easy to find. I didn't hear whether or not your ex-wife had anything to do with it. It's possible that it was totally the judge's doing. The information that I got on it was from a multiple felon, who claimed to have heard about it from another prison inmate who has since died. I really don't see how the prosecutor could put together a case out of it, even if he did have jurisdiction. I'll look into it for you, but don't expect too much."

  Greenberg looked at his watch and said that he was going to have to leave in order to get to court on time. He said that since I didn't want to continue any further legal actions against my ex-wife, and didn't want to see her, it wouldn't be necessary for me to show up personally in court. His legal secretary could take care of the insurance claims forms for us.

  He was halfway out the door when Adam yelled, "Hey, you want dinner wit us tonight? Dat place at da river, Knot's Landing? I'm buying!"

  "You're on. Seven." And Alan was gone.

  I said, "Adam, your Hamtramck accent is back."

  "Natch. I'm back in Bay City, ain't I."

  We took over Alan's office, since we had a lot of planning to do. The claims on The Brick Royal came first. Adam had it insured for almost three million dollars, with lots of documentation and photos in a safe-deposit box to back up his claims. Rather than trying to explain a case of arson on a mysterious floating island, which the insurance company wouldn't have believed, and which would have kicked off a round of lawsuits and countersuits that would have dragged on for years, he just put it down as sunk in the storm that blew us into Mexico. Officially, it was his ship and his insurance policy, so I just kept my mouth shut.

  One of the big advantages to being a Christian is that you can confess your sins, say a few prayers, and your sins are all gone. Us Atheists know that the universe has a way of getting back at you for all your transgressions. It keeps us a good deal more ethical than most Christians tend to be.

  Once the insurance claims were attended to, the secretary tried gently to get us out of there.

  Adam said, "Come on, Sarah, we got work to do. You guys is makin' probably a coupla million bucks off us, so can't you let your best customers borrow an empty office for a coupla hours?"

  She allowed that put that way, it seemed reasonable.

  As she left the room, I said, "We have a lot more money going for us than I thought. That means that we can start our project in a lot bigger way than what we had originally planned."

  "Yeah, but you keep sayin `we' and `us.' Dis is mostly your money, ain't it? I mean, except maybe for da boat. Maybe it would be fair to call da boat `ours,' and I did pay for dat insurance myself, you know."

  "Didn't we agree to be partners? `Retroactive back to the beginning of time'? You can't wiggle out of it now, Adam."

  "But you're bein' way too generous wit dis ting."

  "Nope, it's going to cost you, maybe more than you'll want to pay."

  "Like what?"

  "Like if you want in, you've got to stop using that God damned phony Hamtramck accent! The damned thing drives me crazy! From now on, you've got to speak like a normal human being, or our whole deal is off!"

  "Oh. Well, if you feel that strongly about it, okay, I'll speak Midwest Standard whenever I'm around you. But if it bothered you so much, why didn't you ever say anything?"

  * * *

  The next two months were "interesting times."

  At our lawyer's urging, we decided that we'd be better off with a corporate form of ownership rather than a simple partnership. Soon, we were The Western Isles, Ltd., with half the stock in each of our names. Adam was chairman of the board and treasurer, while I was president and CEO. I kept a million in my personal account, Adam kept a million in gold, and we threw everything else each of us owned into the corporation treasury.

  Our lawyer's bill came to twenty percent of what he'd saved for us, a huge sum, but considering that we wouldn't have gotten anything at all without him, we considered it money well spent. We were both surprised that Greenberg wasn't interested in buying any stock in our new corporation, and being on the board of directors, even after, having sworn him to secrecy, we told him the whole true story.

  "You are passing up the opportunity of a lifetime," Adam told him.

  "I'm still aghast at your newfound diction, Adam, but no. I work best as an individual, not as a member of a group. But thanks for the offer, anyway."

  So, we put him on a retainer as our corporate attorney, and let it go at that. Personally, I think that he thought we were both more than a little crazy, and that no such island could possibly exist.

  Shirley, my old office girl, accountant, and receptionist jumped at the chance to come back and work for us. She didn't care whether the islands existed or not, she said, and she claimed that she already knew that we were both crazy. She said she'd known that for years. Mostly, she just wanted to be part of the team again, and was downright antsy to get out of Chrysler Corporation, where she'd been working for the last year or so. Her husband, who also used to work for me, felt the same way, and while we didn't need a machinist just now, you can always use an intelligent and honest man, so we hired him anyway. All th
is despite the fact that we were moving the office to San Diego, and before we told her that we were doubling her salary.

  We gave Shirley a checkbook and told her to rent us a warehouse with a nice office suite near the San Diego docks, and a couple of big apartments near them for Adam and me. She was given a long list of things to buy once we had a place to put them, and was told to look around for a small, used ocean-going freighter, as well. It's great to have people that you trust. It's awkward and then some to have to work with those that you don't dare trust.

  When you need to get a lot of things done, you have to start working on your long lead time items first. The thing that we needed to do that would take the most time was to design and build a machine to scrape the coral and waterlogged featherrock from the bottom of the Western Islands. Having such a machine working would show the duke that we were seriously concerned with the long-term welfare of his people.

  We spent a week looking for a company that could build us an underwater, remote-controlled, inverted bulldozer, until we finally found the outfit that makes those underwater remote-controlled submarines that are used for deep-sea exploration and salvage. What we wanted was bigger than anything they'd ever built before, but we figured that they knew enough about the special engineering problems that are faced in deep, high-pressure water to handle our job.

  We faced a problem in that we couldn't tell them exactly what we wanted to do with the machine we were asking for. We had to keep secret the fact that the Western Isles existed. Public disclosure would be socially, medically, and politically disastrous for the islanders. It would also be financially disastrous for Adam and me, and would destroy any hope we might have of reconciliation with the powers that be on the Western Islands.

  The people at Modern Oceanographics couldn't help being curious when all we could tell them was what the dozer had to do, and not where it would be used or why it was needed.

  Finally, Adam said, "Look, if you want us to tell you lies, just say so. Otherwise, please shut up about it."

  In the end, they agreed to stop asking why, and we agreed to give them the design and build contract for what we needed.

  Adam and I are machinery designers, and it would have been fun to do the design job ourselves, but in design work, the fun jobs are those where you are doing something different from what you have done before. That is to say, where you don't quite know what you are doing. Making something that works properly requires that you do know what you're doing. Situated between fun and accomplishment is education, and educating yourself with only mother nature for a teacher is always a very expensive and time-consuming proposition.

  Even so, one of us, usually Adam, flew out to New England about once a week to keep an eye on what was happening, until we were ready to go back to the Western Isles. By then, the design was complete, but the dozer itself wouldn't be completed for another three months. Also, by then the dozer was no longer a dozer. It was now a submarine with caterpillar treads on the roof and a set of vertical milling cutters in front.

  As Murphy's Law required, we were three weeks getting our Westronese agricultural samples through customs, and after two weeks we had to put Greenberg on the case, but eventually we were successful.

  Shirley and her husband got going on the three crates, the four books, and the electronic version of Thomas Register, trying to match each item up with a company or two that might have some use for it. Soon, they were going international in their company search.

  We started negotiations with dozens of outfits, and had sent samples to six of them before we shipped out. Not that being on shipboard would stop us from negotiating anything, what with modern communications and all. There was no significant income from all this yet, but it would come.

  In the meantime, we amassed canned meat and grains, enough to feed twelve thousand people for a year.

  We bought an estimated two-year supply of commercial fertilizers.

  We bought samples of small, Japanese-built farm machinery, suitable for working small plots of land.

  We bought samples of hand tools and gardening equipment of a hundred different types. Indeed, we bought enough hardware of all kinds to open a fair-sized store, which was just what we planned to do.

  We bought lumber, steel, and glass.

  When the cost of silver coins proved to be much higher than the cost of silver, we had our own coins made, slugs, really, but in the denominations in use in the Western Isles. Copper pennies, on the other hand, were cheaper than the cost of copper slugs, thanks to the strange ways of the U.S. Government.

  We bought diesel generators sufficient to electrify about a quarter of the island, and wiring and lights enough for all the regularly traveled tunnels.

  We bought fuel enough to run those generators for a year.

  We bought televisions, VCRs, and radios. And a big projection system, for auditorium-style viewing.

  We bought compressors, hoses, and SCUBA gear for fifty men.

  We bought a small but complete machine shop, with a small electric smelter and a modern forge, to fix anything that broke, and to make anything that we might have forgotten.

  We bought a cellular, digital phone system, with two hundred handsets. And a satellite communication system to tie into it.

  We bought more navigation, communication, and remote sensing equipment than we had on the old Brick Royal.

  The biggest, long lead time items like generators and machine tools were often bought secondhand, but most of the rest was new, with factory warranties.

  And we had a ball doing it, spending much of our newfound wealth.

  We found and hired a medical doctor and her nurse, two women with experience in mass immunizations in faraway lands. We were vague about where we told them we were going, but we let them buy what they felt they needed to take care of twelve thousand people.

  Finding the freighter to haul all of this out to the Western Islands wouldn't be difficult. There were lots of them on the market. Hiring a captain and crew that we could trust was another problem entirely. They had to know where we were going, or we obviously wouldn't get there. Once we were there, they would know what we had found. We needed people who were either absolutely honest or absolutely loyal to us, because they would be in a position to screw us royally, while making themselves a fortune doing it.

  "Dare we try to run the ship ourselves?" I said.

  "If it was in good enough shape to begin with, and not likely to break down, I don't see why not. Navigating a big ship is no different than navigating a rowboat," Adam said. "Except for the fact that it would be against the law. It takes all kinds of licences and permits before they let you run a commercial, oceangoing freighter."

  "Well, what if we buy a boat registered in Nigeria or Ecuador or something. Doesn't that get us around the law?" I asked.

  "Maybe, I'm not sure. But I still don't like it. There's a lot more to running a ship than a sailboat. If we blow it, we could get a lot of people killed. Including us. Tell you what. Let's go talk to a bonding company. They sell a sort of insurance on people, where if somebody cheats on us, or gives away company secrets like the Western Isles, we get paid a lot, and the crook gets shafted properly."

  So that's what we did. We got recommendations on a captain, and had the bonding company check him out. Then we told him exactly what we were doing, paid him half again what was usual, and had him check out and recommend the ship to buy. We even let him hire his own, minimal crew, although they also had to pass the bonding company's muster.

  We used the same approach on our security team. Soon, we had our own, well-paid, twelve-man police force. Their leader was Colonel Jezowski, and Major Perkins was his executive officer. Of the other ten, some of them were ex-SEALs, and the rest were ex-Special Forces. They were all retired sergeants or navy chiefs, and all had some civilian police training. And yeah, they were expensive, but this time, Adam and I weren't going to be beat up, burned out, and chased out of town.

  THIRTY-SEVEN
>
  We set sail on a fine morning, under a clear blue sky, which was ordinary enough for San Diego, but a special delight for a couple of men born and raised under the often grey skies of Michigan. With Shirley and her husband holding down the office in San Diego, Adam and I were returning to the Western Islands, and to our ladies fair.

  Our ship was fueled, loaded and crewed. Captain Cyrus Johnson was the sort of man who exuded trust and confidence, almost too much of it, with his close-clipped white hair, his ramrod-straight posture, and his impeccably tailored uniforms. He was an Annapolis graduate, had been a career U.S. Navy man, and had spent the last ten years as a merchant captain before he had been forcibly retired at seventy-one. He was physically healthy, mentally alert, and wanted to stay at sea. If some idiot shipping company insisted on letting him go, that was their sad problem. Adam and I figured that we would have been fools to pass him by.

  The members of his seven-man crew had similar backgrounds, and they always saluted him in military fashion. It just came natural around the man. Even Adam and I had to restrain ourselves from saluting, genuflecting or kowtowing in some manner. Here he was, working for us, and there we were, working hard at not subordinating ourselves to him. But I could hardly criticize a man for being too much of what we had asked for in the first place. We figured that if we ever needed someone to stare down his grace Duke Guilhem Alberigo XXI, Captain Johnson was our man.

  The ship, the James Crawford, was old but well kept. We got it for a lot less than I thought we'd have to spend. Small freighters like ours were no longer economical. They couldn't begin to compete with the big, fast container ships, but for what we had in mind, it was perfect.

  Adam and I toyed with changing the name, since nobody had the slightest idea who James Crawford was or had been. But the captain wasn't enthusiastic about it, so we let the matter lie.

  Our Chief of Police, or perhaps I should call him our Guard Captain, Colonel Jezowski, had a fair amount in common with Captain Johnson. A West Point graduate, with a distinguished career in the U.S. Army, he had been a police chief in a middle-sized Oregon town until he too had been forcibly retired.