Praise for Randy Wayne White’s
CAPTIVA
“Captiva is… packed with finely drawn characters, relevant social issues, superb plotting and an effortless writing style. We’ll drop anything we’re doing to read a new Randy Wayne White novel and be glad we did.”
—The Denver Post
“White tells one whale of a story. Captiva builds to one of the more dramatic finales in mystery fiction.”
—The Miami Herald
“White… moves firmly into the major leagues with his latest Doc Ford story… and its lavish panorama of cross-cultural and environmental issues played out passionately in south Florida… a thoroughly convincing recreation of his chosen and much-loved world… a blast.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Having established his Carl Hiaasen credentials… White sounds a more ruminative note in this mixture of James W. Hall and John D. MacDonald. Ford takes every chance to stop and smell the hibiscus, and fans of tangled Florida intrigue will want to follow him.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“This is a top-shelf thriller written with poetic style and vision. Don’t miss it.”
—Booklist
“An enticing brew of hard-drinking, thick-skulled anglers, plodding detectives, and plotting marina bosses. White knows a thing or two about friendship, love and honor.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Riveting from the start… literally explosive… a fast-paced page-turner… Among readers of Captiva men will wish they were Doc Ford, and women will wish to be his paramour.”
—Naples Daily News
Praise for
RANDY WAYNE WHITE
“Randy Wayne White and his Doc Ford join my list of must-reads. It is no small matter when I assert that White is getting pretty darn close to joining Carl Hiaasen and John D. MacDonald as writers synonymous with serious Florida issues and engaging characters.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Randy Wayne White is a fine storyteller whose taut episodes are illuminated by humor and a strong sense of place.”
—Peter Matthissen
“White is a wildly inventive storyteller whose witty, offbeat novels come packed with pleasure.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“White is the rightful heir to John D. MacDonald, Carl Hiaasen, James Hall, Geoffrey Norman… his precise prose is as fresh and pungent as a salty breeze.”
—The Tampa Tribune-Times
Titles by Randy Wayne White
SANIBEL FLATS
THE HEAT ISLANDS
THE MAN WHO INVENTED FLORIDA
CAPTIVA
NORTH OF HAVANA
THE MANGROVE COAST
TEN THOUSAND ISLANDS
SHARK RIVER
Nonfiction
BATFISHING IN THE RAINFOREST
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers since 1838
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
Copyright © 1997 by Randy Wayne White.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
First G. P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition / 1997
First Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / May 1998
First G. P. Putnam’s Sons mass-market edition / June 2017
G. P. Putnam’s Sons mass-market edition ISBN: 9780425162941
Ebook ISBN: 9781101573778
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
penguinrandomhouse.com
Version_2
Author’s Note
I have visited Cuba several times, including a long stay in Mariel Harbor during the extraordinary and tragic 1980 refugee boat lift. Even so, writers whose knowledge of Cuba far exceeds my own have unknowingly contributed to this novel through their work. Highly recommended are Castro’s Final Hour, by Andres Oppenheimer, Fidel Castro, by Robert E. Quirk, and the Cruising Guide to Cuba, by Simon Charles, a book that revealed Sanibel Island’s topographical twin. Any factual errors or misrepresentations of fact in this novel are entirely my fault, or of my own creation, and their fine books played no role.
I would also like to thank the great people of Useppa Island, Florida, who allowed me room to work, particularly my friend Ginny Amsler, who read the early drafts and provided advice and support. I would also like to thank my buddies on Cabbage Key—Bob, Thea, Kim, Terry, Joleen, Jerry, Angel, Mike, and Judy—who always welcomed me with a cold beer and warm attention when, after a withering day of work, I came zombie eyed up the mound. Finally, I would like to thank Rogan White—a lifelong friend—for helping me finish this book.
For friends who are equal to Marion Ford’s tough definition of the word: Dr. Brian Hummel, Rob Wells, and Debra Jane White. Also: Robert Bunk Fizer, a proud fellow member of the jumping-out-of-the-boat-at-night club, who bailed a final time.
I had never seen primitive man in his native place till then.
—H. M. Tomlinson
The Sea and the Jungle
Our worst enemies are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.
—Graham Greene
The Human Factor
The islands of Sanibel and Cayo de Soto exist, but they are used fictitiously in this novel. Havana, Mariel Harbor, and the Cuban countryside are, I hope, accurately described and reflect my own observations and experiences there. In all other respects, this novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
NORTH
of
HAVANA
Table of Contents
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Epilogue
1
Tomlinson telephoned at three minutes before ten Friday evening, December 20, to tell me that he was stranded in Havana, broke, frustrated, sailboat impounded, seriously discommoded, wholly bummed out and if I wasn’t too busy, if I wasn’t right in the middle of boxing a shipment of sea anemones or if my manatee research project could be conveniently interrupted, maybe, just maybe, I could get my butt to a neutral country and catch a plane to Cuba.
I thought: Cuba? Nope; no way. I will not go back to Cuba.
Tomlinson was talking: “You heard of a person being held against his will? I’m being held against my bill, man. Like they’re holding No Más hostage until I can float the nut, plus charging me storage to boot! As in muchos simoleons, comprende?”
“The government?”
“These guys dressed in baby shit brown. Like storm troopers—”
/> “Who confiscated your boat, I mean.” I was beginning to get a sick feeling in my stomach.
“Aren’t you listening? Yes. The cubano-damn government. Man, it pains me to admit it, but socialism has gone to hell since I left the loop. I just thank the good Lord that Chairman Mao isn’t alive to see it. Talk about a reality check! These pud duckers give me any more crap, I’m going to contact my old comrades from the SDS, Boston cell, and raise a serious stink. Who do they think came down here and cut their goddamn sugarcane in nineteen seventy-one? Wouldn’t you think they had my name on file? Jesus Christ, we ate nothing but beans. We slept in barns. They had donkeys that bit like dogs! A machete scar meant something in those days.”
Tomlinson was ranting—conduct out of character. Lately, though, he had been doing many things out of character. As his neurosurgeon, Maria Corales, had told me, “You can expect some odd behavior. He’s been out of the hospital only what? A year? The beating he took, his brain was so traumatized that it could be another year—or more—before he’s back to normal. So be kind to him. Be understanding.”
So I listened kindly. And I tried to understand. But I kept thinking: Jesus, Cuba…
Tomlinson was calling, he said, from the Hotel Nacional, the old Meyer Lansky casino and brothel in downtown Havana, built during prohibition to service America’s thirsty leisure class. It was his fifth night in the hotel, but he was thinking of switching to the Havana Libre up the street. At a rack rate of two hundred bucks a night, neither he nor his female companion could afford the Nacional much longer, and it had taken him that long to figure out a way to contact me.
“The phone system here,” he said, “is not unlike whacking off. It’s a hell of a mess and leaves something to be desired.”
Not long ago, an American communications conglomerate received a lot of press about opening direct-dial phone service to Cuba. It was one of those hands-across-the-water events that implied a new relationship with our island foe of the old Cold War years. It also implied that Cubans had the freedom—never mind the financial means—to reciprocate. Not so, according to Tomlinson. You couldn’t just pick up a Havana pay phone and dial your friendly AT&T operator. So what he’d finally done was find a guy who helped him work out a phone patch through the Vancouver British Columbia Marine Operator, a bit of satellite pinball that now had our digitized voices ricocheting through the ionosphere, then back and forth across the continent. Person-to-person. Collect.
“Did I mention bring money?” Tomlinson asked. I could hear the muted equipment clatter and conduit roar of the Third World communication system; Tomlinson’s voice sounded as if he were yelling to me from the bottom of a stone well. “Lots and lots of money, cash American,” he said. “Ten thousand, minimum.”
I told him, “You keep me on the phone much longer I won’t have any money left to bring,” not because I meant it, but because saying it seemed a necessary courtesy to the woman who waited a few feet away, lying on my bed. With the phone against my ear, I looked at her, smiled, then I made a great show of being patient to illustrate my impatience with Tomlinson… an act that a perceptive, tough-talking woman such as Dewey Nye wasn’t likely to buy.
She didn’t. Dewey rolled gray-blue eyes heavenward, used a lopsided, cynical smile to accuse me of stalling, kicked off the covers, stood, and released a lanyard of butterscotch hair that fell heavily across her bare shoulders before she froze me with those sled dog eyes and mouthed the word “Coward!” Then she began to survey the room, searching for her shirt and jogging bra, which I had folded neatly over the Celestron telescope by the north window of my little house that stands in water, Dinkin’s Bay, Sanibel Island, Florida.
A peculiarity of the intimate male-female relationship is that each small gesture is a specific communication which, in sequence, creates a discourse so constant and telling that words do little more than outline what is expected or reaffirm what has already occurred. When one partner says, “We don’t talk enough,” it is usually much, much too late for talking. So I watched Dewey to see what she had to say. Watched her glide to the telescope, ropy thigh and calf muscles contracting like cables with each stride; a tall, big boned, slim-hipped woman who, naked except for bikini panties, moved with the lazy immodesty of the shower room jock. Noted that she turned her back to me before toweling off the body oil I had been using on her neck and shoulders—less a gesture of modesty than of rebuke. But just when I was beginning to read that she was genuinely peeved, she did a casual quarter-turn so that she was illuminated by the reading lamp: face, pale sweep and weight of breasts, the muscle-patched symmetry of abdomen as she wiggled into the jogging bra and latched it tight, a performance designed to be shared. When she caught me staring, she used long fingers to comb hair from her eyes and mouthed another word: “Asshole!”
Through the phone, I heard Tomlinson say, “Look’a that— cockroach the size of a damn chipmunk just tried to hump my shoe. Dirty little bastard! Hang on.… Hah! Killed it!”
I thought: Killed it? Tomlinson?
Then he was barking at me: “Yoo-hoo! I know you’re there ‘cause I can hear you breathing like a bear… or maybe it’s… hey, wait a minute. How could I be so stupid!” Inexplicably, his tone became guarded, his enunciation careful, as he said, “Mother of God, it just dawned on me! The ucking-fay ommie-cays got the phone bugged, right? We’re being ape-taed? The proletariat scum!”
“Pig Latin? For Christ’s sake, Tomlinson.”
“Don’t make it easy on them. Let the pink bastards wrestle with the code books. What gall! I was fighting for the collapse of capitalism when these twerps were abusing themselves with bootlegged Sears catalogues. Who do they think organized the Berkeley Expeditionary when Che Guevara was nabbed in sixty-eight? Was it my fault the Bolivian pigs shot him anyway? Is that what this’s all about! Okay! Okay! Boycotting alpaca sweaters didn’t carry the political juice I’d hoped. Turned out the whole firing squad owned llamas. But who knew with those Bolivians? Their sphincters are so tight, it’ll be another ten generations before they can actually walk upright. Even howler monkeys consider Bolivians a bad risk as breeding stock! AM I GOING SLOW ENOUGH FOR YOU, COMRADE?”
I raised my voice: “Tomlinson! Take a deep breath and calm down.” Paranoiac tangents were, in Tomlinson, a symptom of heavy stress… or of long-gone drug binges… or it could be the residue of the beating he had received at the hands of goons on an island called Sulfur Wells a year earlier. With him, the borders were always clouded. Nothing could be assumed. Even though I knew the conversation was probably being monitored, I said, “Nobody’s listening. We’re not being bugged. Relax. Okay?”
“You sure?”
“Why would they bother? Look, you sailed too close to Cuba and had your boat confiscated. It happens all the time. Take a deep breath and tell me about it, then I’ll see what I can do.”
“You just sounded, you know, for sure distracted. And then I thought… hey!” His tone became hopeful. “Maybe my call interrupted something, huh? Holiday romance? A game of lock-’n-load?”
Close, but not quite. I looked at Dewey, who was now standing at the mirror. It had been more than a year since I’d last seen her. In that time, she had abandoned the mannish pageboy cut and let her hair grow, perhaps in an attempt to appear more feminine. It seemed unnecessary… and a little sad, too. Why is it that we find the small failed gestures of others so endearing? Dewey has one of those California unisex beach girl faces: pale-lipped, high-cheeked, smile bright, but without the delicate, vacuous leer. There is nothing vacuous—or delicate—about Dewey. She has a square chin, a nose broken by a grade school hockey stick, luminous deep-set gray eyes with a webbing of smile lines at the corners, a right forearm that is nearly as thick as my own, and the sort of knobby wrists and knees more commonly seen on gawky fourteen-year-olds. But Dewey is a dozen years past fourteen, and she is neither gawky nor adolescent. She was once rated among the world’s best tennis players; she
is now working her way onto the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour. She is a superb athlete with all the endurance and grace that that implies. Perhaps it is because she also happens to be one of my best friends that I find it less easy to note that her body is unmistakably female, though she herself often jokes about it. “With my pelvis, I could foal a pony, no trouble.” Even though she is lean-butted and muscular. “I hate this! I get cold, anyone standing chest high should wear safety glasses.” That, at least, is true.
Sitting there watching her—she was now combing her hair—I allowed the slow swell of physical wanting to recede, holding emotion at bay with perverse logic: because she was my friend, we couldn’t be lovers.
Besides, Dewey already had a lover—a fading star on the professional tennis circuit named Walda Bzantovski, known to her close friends as Bets. A Romanian woman.
Over the phone, Tomlinson was pressing the issue. “That’s it, isn’t it? Romance. Jesus Christ, Doc, it’s not like I called about the weather. So my timing’s off. I interrupted.”
“Not at all,” I told him. He was more like the cavalry. Just in the nick of time.
Dewey had arrived that afternoon, Friday afternoon; flew in from New York on the cirrus fringe of December’s first cold front. West Florida’s cold fronts are something you won’t read about in the travel brochures. They begin with a musky southeast wind that blows warm out of the Bahamas until the air congeals into an oily calm. For Christmas newcomers, it must be strange to see storefront holly wreaths and plastic snowmen baking in the winter heat, yet it’s ideal tourist weather. Ideal weather for shelling and sunbathing and snook fishing and drinking margaritas on restaurant patios where snow-dazed midwesterners can lounge around in summer clothes and congratulate themselves on their balmy vacation choice.
North of Havana Page 1