Riptide

by Paul Levine

  “… I’m not perfect, but I’m perfect for you-ou …”

  Music so loud your ears hurt, whatshername singing, Grace Jones, built like a licorice stick, hair cut like a Marine, a wild look like she’d bite it off she had half a chance.

  The skinny stripper unhooked the G-string, wrapped it around a metal pole on the stage, rehooked it on the other side, and strung her legs around the pole, humping it to the music. Not bad, mushy ass and all, not bad and Harry felt a stirring.

  Where was the guy anyway? Goddamn noise giving him a headache. Ever since Buddy Holly died, music’d been shit. Tried to hum it, “All my love, all my kissin’, you don’t know what you been missin’.” But the tune in his head couldn’t compete with the blasting tape that told him he was “addicted to love.”

  When the music stopped, so did the stripper, boom, as if the factory whistle blew and the assembly line crashed, you weren’t gonna get one extra bump outta that bitch. Then she stretched out a leg and with her high-heel sequined shoe, she flicked off the light switch that illuminated the stage a whorey red.

  Another girl would be out in a minute, but Harry wasn’t in the mood. It was eight-thirty and he would wait another five minutes, then fuck it. Harry went to the rest room in the back hauling a tote bag. He took a leak, studied the graffiti, felt for a forgotten quarter in the condom machine change slot, then came back out. In the rear of the joint, near the tables for private dances — ten-dollar minimum — was an aquarium. Funny, a bunch of fish in a place like this, but there it was. Harry walked over, aimlessly, looking at the fish, killing time.

  Harry could tell from the way light reflected off the tank that someone had opened the front door, but he didn’t turn around. He was watching the tank, and as he did, a cream-colored lionfish sneaked up behind a blue-and-yellow angelfish, tailing it like a cop on surveillance. The angelfish would wiggle right, the lionfish would wiggle right, flaring its large gills, the mane of a lion. They swam inside a little cavern, out again, up and down, and finally, the lionfish grew tired of the game. It came from behind the angelfish and swallowed it whole, just swallowed it, no bites, no struggle. One second there were two fish, then there was one.

  At about the same time that the Miami Beach fish population decreased by one, Harry saw a reflection in the glass tank, a man behind him, strong guy, the silhouette of sinewy muscles bulging from each side of his neck. Harry felt a shiver, then turned around to see the unsmiling face of Keaka Kealia.

  They shook hands, Harry’s knuckles ricocheting off each other like billiard balls on a clean break.

  Harry massaged his right hand with his left and said, “A guy walks into a bar with an alligator and asks the bartender if they serve lawyers …

  Keaka was studying the smaller man as if he were a moderately interesting chimpanzee at the zoo.

  “‘Sure,’ the bartender says. ‘Good,’ the guys says. ‘Give me a beer and my gator a lawyer!’”

  Keaka didn’t smile.

  “It’s a joke,” Harry said. “But I’m worried about the lawyer.”

  “Lassiter?”

  “Yeah. He’ll be there, won’t he?”

  “In the lead boat, nothing to worry about.”

  They talked about the coupons, Harry lifting the canvas tote bag with two hands. Keaka said, sure he could get them to Bimini if they fit into a backpack. The added weight, no problem, he was the best in the world. Customs? No problem. Customs doesn’t check guys coming over on a sanctioned, nationally televised windsurfing race.

  “Okay, partner, you know where the Great Bahama Bank is?” Harry Marlin asked.

  “Yeah,” Keaka Kealia said, showing the first trace of a smile. “It’s not hard to find.”

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  “What?”

  “At the bank. I’ll meet you at the Great Bahama Bank. At a teller’s window. You bring the coupons and we’ll settle up, a nice safe place for both of us, no monkey business there.”

  Keaka spoke slowly then, as if he hadn’t understood what Harry said. “You want me to meet you at the Great Bahama Bank?”

  Shit, Harry thought, this guy is two pickles short of a Whopper. Gotta explain it all twice. “That’s right, partner, any problem?”

  “The Great Bahama Bank,” Keaka Kealia repeated. “That’s where I’ll be.”

  Good, Harry Marlin said, relieved to have worked it out. Then Harry said that he’d be watching during the race, he’d be right behind, and not to be threatening or anything, but he’d be packing heat.

  “No problem,” Keaka Kealia said, baring his teeth in what Harry Marlin mistook for a smile.

  * * *

  “Easy as pie,” Harry told Violet that night. “The sucker’s gonna do it for a ten percent commission — that’s what I called it, a commission. He’s taking the risk for a lousy ten percent and we’ll deposit more than a million in the Great Bahama Bank, just like some cocaine kingpins.”

  “You gave him the coupons?” Violet asked.

  “Not to worry, I got his pecker in my pocket.”

  “Harry Marlin, you ain’t got but lint in your pocket.”

  “Vi honey, I wish you wouldn’t be always putting me down that way. I got feelings, you know.”

  “You? C’mon, Harry, you’re as sensitive as an aluminum foil condom. Now, tell me everything.”

  “I told him I’d be on his tail, put the fear of a steel-jacketed .38 caliber right into him.”

  But Harry hadn’t seen any fear. He had watched the guy leave the bar, walking on the balls of his feet, head perfectly still, shoulders back, a cocky walk, an alert walk, like he could see all around him.

  If the guy wasn’t so dumb, Harry Marlin thought, I’d be worried about him.

  “Not much time to make plans,” Keaka Kealia told Lila Summers in their suite at the hotel. The sliding door on the balcony was open and the wind from the ocean rustled the drapes. “Better call Mikala. Has a friend here from ‘Nam can get us a plane.”

  “What about the haole?” Lila asked.

  “Stupid and weak,” Keaka said. “Thinks the Great Bahama Bank is a place to cash checks, has hands like a baby’s ass.”

  “Haoles” Lila said, shaking her head.

  “Thinks he can shoot me from a boat crossing the Gulf Stream.”

  “Not unless he’s Buffalo Bill,” Lila said, laughing. They emptied the multicolored coupons into a yellow waterproof backpack, filling it. Lila hefted it and whistled. “It’s a load.”

  “It’s our big chance.”

  Lila walked to the balcony door, letting the ocean breeze cool her. “There’s a risk. The DEA knows we’re here, especially after the other night.”

  “The DEA’s looking for drugs coming into the country, not bonds going out,” Keaka said. “That’s the beauty of it.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The Name’s Marlin

  If you look at a map of southeast Florida, you see a string of islands. Just offshore from Miami are Miami Beach, Virginia Key, and Key Biscayne, all sedimentary barrier islands that began as sandbars, the ocean currents depositing tiny particles of limestone and quartz over the millennia. The islands farther south along the Florida Keys began as coral reefs, the skeletal remains of ancient marine animals. The early sailors — Spanish, English, and Dutch — faced a perilous journey through the Straits, avoiding the Florida Reef to the west and the Great Bahama Bank to the east.

  A ridge of limestone sand only six feet below the surface, the Great Bahama Bank runs close to the Biminis, which appear on maps as a cartographer’s mistake, tiny splashes of ink from a fountain pen. No casinos or fancy nightclubs on these islands. Just waters rich with fish and saloons with shutters open to the southeast breeze. Ernest Hemingway fished and wrote and drank in the Biminis and did all three better than anyone else. More than four hundred years earlier, a Spanish explorer set out for Bimini, lured by tales that the island’s waters could turn old men into youths. Juan Ponce de Leon never found the fountain of yo
uth but on Easter Sunday in 1513 he saw the sedimentary barrier islands that would become Miami Beach and Key Biscayne. Rather than step ashore, Ponce de Leon sailed northward along the coastline of what he believed to be an island he named Florida. He landed near what is now St. Augustine, far from Bimini and without finding magic waters to soothe the aches of a fifty-three-year-old explorer.

  Two years later he again sailed, this time exploring the southwest coast of Florida. It was there, probably near Sanibel Island, that the Spaniards came upon the Caloosa Indians. Like the native Hawaiians encountered by Captain Cook two hundred years later, the Caloosas were warriors. They were deadly with bow and arrow and hurled spears from crotched sticks. When the soldiers commanded the Caloosas to convert to Catholicism, the proud warriors responded with battle cries and a hail of arrows, killing many of the Spaniards, including Ponce de Leon.

  Europeans had discovered the New World.

  * * *

  “Better secure your gear below, Charlie,” Jake Lassiter said. “We’ll be going too fast to troll, and bouncing through the chop, you may break something.”

  Charlie Riggs frowned and held on to the rail of the Big Daddy, an excessively well-equipped fifty-eight-foot Hatteras that was swaying at anchor three hundred yards off the Key Biscayne shore. “Don’t know why I agreed to this. I could be in Bimini in thirty minutes by seaplane, have my first Acanthocybium solandri by noon.”

  “Sounds serious. Can you take penicillin for it?”

  “Wahoo, Jake. Ever see one burn up a reel? Just a flash of steel blue … whoosh … like a rocket, it’s gone.”

  “Well, the fish will wait, and I need your help,” Lassiter said.

  “You want to chat or you expecting a body to pop up?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on. The other day, at Matheson Hammock, I didn’t exactly tell Detective Farrell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  “Ah, and you want to atone for your sin, expiatum peccatum.”

  “Not really. I want to tie some loose ends together, then go to Farrell. For starters, I’m trying to figure out what Berto was doing on the beach a day before he was killed.”

  “Getting a suntan was out of the question, I suppose.”

  “He was with the best board sailor in the world, a guy who also thinks he’s a reincarnated Hawaiian king and seems to yearn for the good old days of war canoes and flaming arrows.”

  Charlie reached into a pocket of his bush jacket and withdrew his pipe. He tamped tobacco into the bowl and struck three matches in the ocean breeze before giving up. “Am I supposed to find anything suspicious in that? I’m sure Berto saw many people his last few days, some of them far more unsavory than an athlete with a sense of ethnic heritage.”

  “It’s hard to explain, Charlie, but the two of them didn’t fit together. No common ground. Certainly not windsurfing …”

  “Then perhaps drug smuggling …”

  They both let it hang there.

  “Sorry, Jake, but I’ve never adhered to Chilon’s admonition, ‘De mortuis nihil nisi bonum.’ If I only spoke kindly of the dead, I’d have very little to say. Little indeed.”

  A white-coated waiter offered them piña coladas from a tray. A prerace buffet was in full swing, the yacht club brass, some ABC dignitaries, and assorted hangers-on spearing cold shrimp and slathering duck pate on crackers. Lassiter and Riggs moved farther down the rail, but the partygoers crowded their way. A man in a faded madras sports coat was engaged in animated conversation with Paul Flanigan, the boat’s owner, and a yacht club honcho.

  “What the hell we gonna do tonight?” the man asked.

  “Nothing to do on Bimini but fish, drink, and screw, and you can’t fish at night,” Flanigan said. He was an old Bimini hand, two-time winner of the Adam Clayton Powell Memorial Fishing Contest.

  Jake Lassiter led Doc Riggs toward the stern, then pointed toward the beach. “There he is, rigging for the crossing. Here, use these.” Lassiter handed over his binoculars.

  Doc Riggs peered through the high-powered lenses. “Strong, athletic, not much else I could say from here.”

  “Keaka Kealia is the fastest sailor who ever lived,” Lassiter said. “He shattered the Crossbow’s record by more than four knots.”

  Riggs thought about it a moment. “Which means he broke the forty-knot barrier.”

  “Right. A space-age trimaran goes thirty-six knots, and nobody comes close for ten years. Then a descendant of Polynesian warriors obliterates the record standing on a sliver of fiberglass with a tiny patch of sail.”

  “Which tells us what, Jake?”

  “That he’s tough, single-minded, fearless. Probably egocentric. Loves a one-man sport, not a team player.”

  “But a killer?”

  Lassiter shook his head. “Who knows? When we get to Bimini, we’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him about Berto’s death. You watch for his reaction, judge his respiration for me, watch for an increase in body temperature.”

  “You really think I can do that?”

  “You’re the human polygraph machine. You’ve done it before.”

  “Jake, I hate to shatter your illusions, but I was faking it. When I got a confession out of the woman who brained her husband with the frozen rack of lamb, I was making it up as I went along. She went for it and gave me the murder weapon before it defrosted.”

  “Maybe you can fake out the reincarnated Polynesian king.”

  Charlie Riggs laughed. “Rex non potest peccare. The king can do no wrong.”

  * * *

  The racers would put their boards into the water in the shadow of the old lighthouse. They would head due east where the bottom falls away quickly to two hundred feet just north of Fowey Rocks, and soon they would reach the Gulf Stream, a warm, choppy river flowing north, the water two thousand feet deep. Then on to the Great Bahama Bank, the bottom coming up suddenly again near the Biminis.

  Two Zodiacs, inflatable boats with egg-beater motors, were ferrying race officials and medical personnel to a Magnum 63 that would follow the sailors while the Big Daddy would lead them. Though the Magnum was glitzy and had twin staterooms furnished like luxury hotel suites, it was long and sleek and could hit sixty miles an hour.

  Even had he seen the last passenger to scramble into the Zodiac, Jake Lassiter wouldn’t have known him. No one else on the Magnum knew him either, and by the time the strangely dressed man climbed unsteadily from the ladder and onto the deck, he could have been the answer to the question: What’s wrong with this picture?

  “You can’t come aboard in those shoes,” said Commodore Ralph Whittaker, an aging mariner whose white slacks and white shirt with epaulets matched his white mustache and beard.

  The man stood on one foot, took off his worn leather loafers, and climbed aboard. The big toe of his right foot peeked through a hole in his thin black sock. The commodore eyed the man suspiciously.

  “Marlin,” the stranger announced with authority, as if the name demanded recognition and respect.

  “You have the wrong boat,” the commodore said. “No fishing here. We’re bringing up the rear of a race.”

  The man tried again. “Harry Marlin.”

  “No blue marlin, no white marlin, no hairy marlin, whatever that is. This is no fishing trip, just a bunch of Hawaiians and hippies and beach bums and what have you.”

  “The name’s Marlin! Harry Marlin. Jake Lassiter said I could go along.” It was a bluff, but it couldn’t fail, Harry figured. He’d hung around the sponsors’ tent long enough that morning to find out which boat Lassiter was on, and then headed for one of the others.

  “All right then,” the commodore said, warming up. “There’s plenty of room on this baby, eh. Help yourself to a Bloody Mary.” Which is just what Harry Marlin did, to steady his nerves, then below he went, wondering if the boat was going to rock back and forth like this once they got going. He still wore his jacket, the green-and-black camouflage number from the army surplus store, while e
veryone else was in short-sleeve knits and shorts. Harry was wearing shorts, too — khaki safari shorts like an English gentleman in India — but with the camouflage jacket, they made him seem even more out of place. He didn’t care. The jacket hid a shoulder holster, and it held a loaded Police Bulldog .38 Special.

  * * *

  Jake Lassiter trained the binoculars on the beach again, this time searching for a sailor in a one-piece suit, cut low in front and high over the hip. He found her, tugging on a skin-tight wet suit. Nearby, Keaka Kealia adjusted the weight of a yellow waterproof backpack that was slung across his shoulders. Lila wore an identical pack. Up and down the beach, the young competitors stood on the bleached sand, loosening up, stretching hamstrings, their minds visualizing the rough crossing, preparing for a test of body and mind in the same, silent ritual athletes have employed since the days of ancient Greece.

  The starter blew the air horn, one minute until the start. The athletes, sun-darkened bodies in stark contrast to the white beach, moved to their positions. The horn sounded again, and the twenty-eight competitors grabbed their rigs and lugged them into the water, a Le Mans start. Lila struggled a bit as she beach-started, the backpack swinging free under one arm. Keaka hopped onto the board and was the first sailor through the shore break, Gary Koenigsberg three board lengths behind. Mickey Kerbel, a former Israeli paratrooper, cut upwind of Koenigsberg, stealing his air, and briefly taking second place. Leslie Weeks, an Australian woman, was next. A Canadian whose sail was emblazoned with a maple leaf was close behind, in a dead heat with Frangoise Duvalier.

  Within minutes, all the boards were in open water, and the pack thinned out. The water was calm except for the wind chop. Unlike the smaller boards that become airborne on the lip of the slightest wave, the big cruising boards stayed in the water as sailors leaned back, trimmed their sails tight, and headed toward the horizon. As they neared the Gulf Stream, they routinely adjusted to the ocean swells with reflexes that had been honed on waters from the Tasman Sea to the Mediterranean. Some cursed themselves for rigging too big as the wind pounded at a steady twenty knots from the north, guaranteeing five hours of unremitting pain on shoulders, elbows, and wrists. Others yearned for more Mylar as they had rigged too small. In the front, his sail trimmed perfectly, Keaka Kealia led the pack.