by Ted Bell
“This is where they shot the film Thunderbolt,” Hawke said, a somewhat bemused look in his eyes. “Did you know that, Ambrose?”
“What’s that?”
“Sorry. I’d forgotten. You’d never set foot inside a cinema unless it was a John Wayne picture. Thunderball was a James Bond film. Sean Connery. My favorite, actually.”
Hawke’s companion was a shortish, rounded man in his late fifties. He had a pair of deceptively sentimental blue eyes set in a baby’s face, a face partially obscured behind a colossal moustache. He heaved a deep sigh and mopped his brow with one of his trademark monogrammed linen handkerchiefs.
“I prefer John Wayne to James Bond simply because the Duke did less talking and more shooting,” Congreve sniffed.
“Yes, but Bond—”
“Excuse me, Alex. But, do you really think we ought to be standing out here in the blazing sun discussing ancient heroes of the cinema? Your two agents are sure to be waiting for you on shore.”
“Giving you a little local color, that’s all, Constable,” Hawke said, smiling.
“Well, I don’t need any local color. What I need is liquid refreshment. Let’s just get this over with, shall we?”
“You are a bit cranky, aren’t you? You need a nap is what you need.”
“Oh, rubbish! What I need,” Congreve said, “is an enormous fruity rum concoction or vast quantities of very cold beer.”
“You can’t drink, Constable, you’re on duty.”
“I would hardly call meeting with a pair of real estate agents duty.”
“Did I say real estate agents? Ah. I may have misspoken.”
Ambrose just shook his head and said, “You never misspeak, Alex.”
Ambrose Congreve, Hawke’s oldest and closest friend, had, to his parents’ chagrin, begun his career in law enforcement as a bobby on the streets of London. He’d studied Greek and Latin at Cambridge and had thoroughly distinguished himself in modern languages as well. But his true love was reading the tales of his two heroes. The dashing detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. And, of course, that Homeric figure, the incandescent Holmes.
He didn’t want to teach Greek. He wanted a life of derring-do. He didn’t want chalk on his fingers; he wanted to be a copper.
Early on in his new career, he’d shown a preternatural aptitude for investigation. His almost eerie ability to link seemingly trivial details helped him solve one famous case after another. He’d eventually risen to chief of New Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department. Unofficially retired from the CID now, he still maintained close ties with the Special Branch at the Yard. Still, he detested the nickname “Constable,” which is why Hawke enjoyed using it so frequently.
“My sole reason for accompanying you on this afternoon’s excursion,” Inspector Congreve said, “is that I envision a chilled adult beverage awaiting me in some disreputable saloon. I might even order the one thing your great hero did manage to get right—a properly shaken martini.”
“If you had any sense, Ambrose, you’d stop drinking so much and stop smoking that damnable pipe. Wasn’t a six-shooter got the Duke carted up Boot Hill, you know. It was a herd of unfiltered Camels.”
Congreve heaved an audible sigh and removed the old tweed cap from his head. He ran his fingers through his sparse thatch of chestnut brown hair.
Bloody hell, he thought, here was one mystery solved anyway. The precise latitude and longitudinal location where the phrase “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” had originated. He’d been absolutely barmy to go along with Hawke’s scheme. It was hot as Hades in these godforsaken islands. The obvious notion of removing his woolen bow tie or mismatched tweed jacket and waistcoat never occurred to Congreve.
Notoriously indifferent to his own wardrobe, Ambrose seldom noticed whether his suit trousers and jackets matched and his socks were frequently opposing colors. Wearing clothes appropriate for the season or the weather would simply never occur to him. Ian Baker-Soames, his tailor at Anderson & Sheppard, Savile Row, London, had long ago resigned himself to Congreve’s sartorial eccentricities.
Rara avis, the tailors whispered whenever Ambrose Congreve strode through the hallowed portals of A&S. If he had acquired the reputation of a rare bird, he was blissfully unaware of that distinction.
Hawke was still willfully ignoring his mutterings and pleas, going on and on with his geology lecture.
“That little atoll over there,” Hawke said, continuing despite his audience’s cool reaction. “It’s called Thunderball because of a small blowhole at the top. Bloody thing bellows like thundering gods when the sea blows in hard out of the west.”
“Most exciting, I’m sure,” Congreve said with a yawn.
“Isn’t it?”
“Quite.”
“Hullo, Tommy!” Hawke said suddenly, calling up to the young blond crewman standing guard on the dock. “You might take a quick stroll down the dock and see if our new friends have arrived. Won’t be hard to spot. Bad suits, bad haircuts, and bad neckties. Anything odd catches your eye, give me a quick call on the walkie-talkie.”
“Aye, sir!” Tommy Quick said, and took off down the docks at a run.
“You see, Ambrose,” Hawke said, continuing his dissertation, “Thunderball is completely hollow inside. The sea surges inside, forces the air out the top. Boom! Hear it for miles around, apparently.”
“A true geologic wonder. You’ll forgive me if I don’t hurl my cap into the air and prance about on the tips of my toes?”
“Yes,” Hawke said, too caught up in his enthusiasm to acknowledge the sarcasm. “I swam inside the thing early this morning. Certain aspects of its geology should make it an ideal spot for negotiating with a pair of arms dealers. You’ve got your bathing trunks with you, I assume? We’re going to take these bloody Russians on a little undersea adventure.”
“Arms dealers? Russians? You plainly led me to believe we were meeting some real estate agents.”
“Did I say that? Last-minute change of plans, I’m afraid,” Hawke said, scrambling up the ladder. “It’s cloak-and-dagger time again, old boy. Come along, Ambrose, the Russians are coming!”
Congreve was busy contemplating the shadowy movements of an especially large shark. He leaned over the rail and watched the fish patrolling the clear waters directly beneath the stern of the launch. Going for a swim? Is that what Hawke had said? Congreve considered all forms of athletic endeavor save golf to be sheer barbarism. He heaved what could only be called a wistful sigh. His idea of heaven was puttering and putting around his beloved Sunningdale links just outside London. There, at least, the fiercest creatures one was likely to encounter were surly caddies with apocalyptic hangovers or the odd dyspeptic chipmunk.
He had a standing foursome at Sunningdale, every Saturday morning, rain or shine. Been teeing it up for nearly a quarter of a century. To Ambrose’s great chagrin, he was the only member of his foursome never to have achieved a hole in one. It had become a lifelong obsession. He was hellbent on doing it one day, and—
“That’s a nurse shark, Ambrose,” Hawke shouted from above, interrupting his reverie. “Stop staring at him, you’ll scare the poor bastard to death.”
Congreve looked up and saw Hawke standing next to Quick at the top of the ladder. Hawke said, “Come along, will you? According to Tommy, we’ve still got a few minutes to stroll the docks before the Russkies arrive.”
Congreve grunted something and started wheezing his way up the ladder. He joined Hawke on the dock, pausing to catch his breath.
It was a pretty little cove, really. Four houses perched on stilts just beyond the docks, each one painted a more brilliant pastel shade than its neighbor. Brightly colored fishing boats bobbed on their moorings in waters too many shades of blue to count. Rather fetching, to be honest.
One rainy afternoon in January, about a month earlier, there’d been a long liquid lunch at White’s, Hawke’s club in London. It was there Hawke had first broached the notion of this littl
e Caribbean cruise. Congreve was ambivalent at first.
“I don’t know. How long a voyage do you envision?” he asked. “As Holmes put it so well, ‘My prolonged absence tends to generate too much unhealthy excitement amongst the criminal classes.’ ”
But Hawke wouldn’t take no for an answer and finally got Congreve to agree. After all, it meant an escape from the cold drizzle of midwinter London. Not to mention his tiny Special Branch office in Westminster. A few weeks of “sun, sightseeing, and a bit of shopping” was how the jaunt had been ladled up, and Congreve signed on.
Shopping?
Congreve had hardly been able to imagine what Hawke would want to buy in these godforsaken Bahamian backwaters. An island or two, perhaps? Of course, that was long before he’d learned Hawke was meeting not with real estate agents, but with arms dealers. Congreve looked at Hawke, who’d suddenly stopped dead in his tracks and gone stone silent.
“I’ve been in this harbor before, you know, Ambrose,” Hawke said, his eyes going somewhere else, getting very hard for a moment. “A long time ago. I was just a boy, of course. Barely seven years old. I really can’t remember much else, though.”
“Is that why you chose these particular islands for the meeting?”
“I don’t know,” Hawke said. “It’s odd. It was this mission that brought me here. Obviously. Still, I do feel drawn to the place! I’ve been having these peculiar dreams about these islands that—” He paused and looked away, unwilling or unable to continue.
“At any rate,” he finally said, “I’ve brought along a map. Had it since childhood. A map of a treasure that might be buried somewhere in this neck of the Caribbean. But, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure it’s the map that’s making me feel—feel like I’m on the verge of something here, Ambrose.”
“Yes?”
“I have no idea what it is,” Hawke said, looking at his friend with helpless eyes. “I just know somehow the map may be a part of the thing.”
“Shrouded in mystery is the term, I believe,” Congreve said, looking closely at his friend.
“Hmm. Yes,” Alex replied, staring at some imaginary point on the horizon. “Shrouded.”
Then he shrugged off whatever feelings he was having and said, “Anyway, it’s as good a place to meet these dodgy bastards as any other, I suppose.”
Constable Congreve put his hand on his friend’s shoulder and squeezed. He had been expecting this moment. Dreading it, actually.
Like many people, Ambrose knew the awful story of the murder of Hawke’s parents. Not from Hawke, certainly, who, in all these years, had never acknowledged the murders to a soul. Hawke had, Ambrose was sure, completely erased the tragedy from his conscious mind. At the very least, the horrific memories were submerged so deeply in his subconscious, Ambrose wondered if they’d ever resurface.
But in a large leather satchel Ambrose carried everywhere were certain CID files. Files whose existence was known only to Constable Congreve. A cold case for decades, the Hawke murders remained an unsolved double homicide that, without Congreve’s determination and commitment, would be moldering away somewhere in the Yard. In the dimly lit cemetery where they kept all the dead files buried.
Of course he’d never dared to raise the subject with Hawke. For his friend’s sake, such gruesome memories were clearly better left unstirred. But the murders, Congreve knew, had occurred somewhere in these islands. Quite possibly in these very waters, in fact. He couldn’t help but wonder if something, a particular sight or a sound, might trigger Hawke’s memory.
Now, Hawke’s odd expression as he gazed out over the harbor set Ambrose to wondering. What if all Hawke’s deeply submerged memories started to surface sooner rather than later? Pop up, exploding to the surface like some ancient underwater buoys whose unseen tethers have finally rotted and suddenly snapped? And if that happened, where would it all lead?
For a moment, it looked as if Alex might say something more; but then his eyes flickered and blinked and it was all gone, flown from his face in an instant. Hawke smiled at his friend.
“I’ll tell you one thing true, Ambrose Congreve.”
“Yes?”
“Everything in this world happens in the blink of an eye. Never forget that. Everything.”
3
Gomez, bruised and bleeding, emerged from the gloom of the ancient and crumbling hospital with just two things on his mind. Sex. And murder. Not necessarily in that order, either.
At least the rain had stopped. The broad tiled steps of the Hospital Calixto García were steaming under the wicked sun. Christ. The light made him squint as he walked down the slippery wet steps to the palmy courtyard, which was full of old soldiers in wheelchairs who had just rolled outside the former military hospital for a little air. It wasn’t all that great out here, but it sure beat the hell out of inside.
He saw the neon glow of the tiny bar where he’d had breakfast across the Avenida de la Universidad. He could really use a couple of cold ones about now. Like, about twelve should do it.
“I’m not having a good day,” he said to some old broad who was staring at his bloody mouth as he went through the wrought-iron gates. “Okay with you?”
He walked out into the sweltering street beyond, cupping his hand to the side of his mouth. Hurt like hell.
Taxi? Not when you need one. Lots of Flying Pigeon Chinese bicycles, but very few cars. He’d heard gasoline rations were down to three liters a month. Most of the cars he saw had red tags. Government cars. Hard times in the old hometown, baby. After five minutes he started to walk in the direction of the Malecón that ringed the bay. At least he could get his bearings there. Figure out where the hell he was going.
After the stink of sick people, now he had the stink of the streets up his nose. It was like somebody whipped up a big batch of what, sugar cane juice, motor oil, and rotten mangos. Popped that pudding in the oven at five hundred. Yum, that does smell good.
Oh, and sprinkle with sweat. Lots of sweat. Had these people never heard of Ban Roll-on? And stir in some of the stinky perfume the little jineteras wore who followed him everywhere, that’d be good, too.
Hookers, they were everywhere, and cops, too, cracking down on the hookers. It was like cracking down on roaches. They were in the woodwork.
There were two kinds of cops, he’d found out the hard way. The “tourist cops” who were okay, merely a pain in the ass. But the other ones, the ones with the berets, the national police, they were definitely not okay. You even look at them funny they whack you with a baton or haul your ass to jail.
But even they couldn’t stop the jineteras. Talk about a kid in a candy store. He’d landed in hooker heaven. There were crowds of them outside his hotel, morning, noon, and night. There had been a bunch waiting when he came out of the little family-owned paladar where he’d had lunch the day before.
Christ. He couldn’t shake ’em. It was like, despite his guayabera and his chinos, he had “American Sailor” tattooed on his goddamn forehead. He wondered if this was how movie stars felt. Or Elvis. Not that he especially minded being chased by hookers everywhere he went. That was the only good part of this whole two-day pass. The bad part, the really bad part, had been the last two hours at his dying mother’s bedside listening to her scream.
She had cancer of the gut. Bad. Now, you would think that the quote unquote best hospital in Havana would have some kind of painkillers for her. Let her die with some kind of goddamn peace and dignity. He had certainly been wiring her doctor enough money under the table to take special care of her.
Pain management, they called it, every time he called the hospital to check on her. All they could do at this stage, one doctor had said to him. Pain management, señor.
Yeah, well, that doctor had zoomed right to the top of Gomez’s personal shit list. A true chartbuster.
What had he given her for the pain today? Or yesterday? Or the whole last month as far as he could tell? Nada. Zippo. Not even one teensy little baby aspirin. No,
the United States government had taken care of that department with their stupid embargo on food and medicine. Still, they had to do something for her.
Finally, he’d pitched a complete shitfit with the doctors and nurses. They told him it wasn’t their fault. Blamed it all on America. He’d nearly beat that doctor’s brains out before they all pulled him off the guy. Some gorilla orderly had whacked his head on the floor and split his lip. The coppery taste of blood was still in his mouth and he bent over and spit his bloody saliva in the gutter.
Jesus H. Christ, was that a tooth going down the drain? He felt around inside his mouth with his tongue. Yes indeedy, one tooth missing. Okay, now he was getting major league pissed off.
That’s why he was now on his way over to the Swiss embassy. Kick some serious butt. Open a big can of whupass on somebody. The head nurse said they had an American desk there. A desk? She said she meant there were some American officials there, even though it was the Swiss embassy.
Make sense? No, but what the hell. Nothing in Cuba made sense anymore. Anyway, he was going to go over there to find one of those little bureaucratic dipshits and rip his goddamn head off.
Murder. That was the ultimate pain management.
That was the plan. First, kick some ass. Next, go get some ass. He bought a tourist map and some condoms from a street vendor. He paid one dollar American (nobody took pesos, only greenbacks) and located the embassy on the map. Only eight blocks. He’d hotfoot it over there and pound a few more heads.
Problem was, he found out when he finally got there, the damn embassy was closed. He banged on the door for ten minutes before he realized it was Sunday. Weren’t embassies supposed to be open seven days a week? Like 7-Eleven? What if he had an emergency? Which, by the way, he did. He needed some medicine. He was an American citizen. Hell, he was military. U.S. friggin’ Navy.
Not that the Navy could give a rat’s ass, either. He’d spent the last three nights in the Guantanamo brig for breaking into the base dispensary at three in the morning. He’d copped some morphine and Dilaudid and was just easing out the jimmied back door when the MPs nailed him. The fact that he was stealing medicine for his dying mother didn’t even register.