by Jacob Ross
‘What kinda boat you going put six of them on?’
‘Them is the six engines you been talking about, last meeting?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nuh!’
‘Nuh what?’
‘Who goin want to do that?’
‘You not answering my question, Spider.’
‘Six 557s on a boat! Dat’s not a boat, Missa Digger, dat’s a plane.’
‘I asking if is possible, Spiderface.’
Spiderface hummed and hawed as if he were in agony. ‘Yes, with a strong enough transom assembly at the back. Definitely not a small boat, becuz all dat power at de back goin somersault it. Boat got to be strong an’ heavy enough to hold onto de water.’
He went quiet for a while. ‘Department planning to fit one up? Becuz I more than glad to help. In fact, I know a cheaper way – just one engine, yunno. Department don’t even need to buy no boat. One engine on my boat and is seventy-five miles an hour we talkin there. Or get a Mercury Verado Pro 300. Put it on my boat and y’all use it for de work.’ He sounded desperate.
‘Let’s say we have one of them boats and we want to keep it outta sight – how you suppose we do that, Spider?’
‘Ain got nowhere we kin hide a boat like dat, Missa Digger, even if you cover it up, somebody going to know. Is in Camaho we livin. So when we getting the engine?’
‘Enjoy your party, Spiderface. And thanks.’
‘Missa Digger, let’s talk, nuh.’
‘That what we been doing, not so? Thanks again.’
57
I trekked the five miles to the Commissioner’s house – a steep uphill walk from my place on narrow mud tracks, then down the other side, and up again to Morne Bijoux and the clusters of sprawling, whitewashed mansions that crowned his end of the hill. I’d received a message through Chilman that my father wanted to see me. Go easy on him, Digson. He got feelings too.
He was in the veranda, The Wife behind his chair, her arms draped over his shoulders. She retreated when she saw me.
I’d told Miss Stanislaus about this woman, who, when my grandmother sent me begging at my father’s gates, would not look at me. Would send the money with the servant, rather than have him come near me. I used to leave that gate with my hands full of coins and my guts hollow with humiliation, and a longing that I’d learned to replace with rage.
‘And how De Wife is with you now?’ Miss Stanislaus wanted to know.
‘She doesn’t stick around.’
Miss Stanislaus smacked her lips. ‘Mebbe is shame she carrying now? Mebbe she was finkin that two girlchildren don’t stand no chance of gettin love from the father if boychild there to take all of it? Mebbe she know is what a father do in Camaho?’
I opened the gate and let myself in. Their gardener was putting the polish to what I knew now as The Wife’s blue Daihatsu.
‘You walked!’ He rose from the chair and held out his hand. I barely heard him after that. I was peering through the window looking for my sisters.
A different look from him this time – narrow-eyed and smiling.
‘What!’ I said.
‘They’re hiding,’ he muttered. Grinning, he raised his voice. ‘Michael wants a drink.’
Squawks and giggles and shuffling somewhere in the house. A fridge door banged. A series of shrieks. The chiding voice of The Wife, and then they were racing across the living room, each with a glass of juice in her hand. Lucia and Nevis held out their glass to me. I took both, placed their rims against my lips and tried to drink.
I rested the glasses on the veranda wall and braced myself. They jostled each other for a while, each vying to get a deathgrip on my body.
‘Enough,’ their father said.
They retreated into the house as abruptly as they came.
‘Now, I have something for you.’
He went into the house and returned with a bunch of keys. He nodded at the car the gardener had been polishing.
‘You lending it—’
‘You don’t have a car, I’m giving it to you.’
‘I can’t take it, Sir. I’ll make arrangements with the bank to—’
‘Take it, Michael.’
‘Is your wife’ car, Sir.’
‘She agreed to let you have it. It was her idea.’
I shook my head.
The girls must have been behind the door. Lucia shoved past him. She was already as tall as he.
‘Dad, Michael doesn’t want the car from you. Give the car to me.’ The old man’s brows bunched together. Nevis squeezed past him too, threw a quick look at her sister then turned to him. ‘Let Lucia have it.’
The Commissioner looked confused, almost boyish in his uncertainty. I saw something shift in him, caught a glimpse of his softness for these two girlchildren. He loosened his fingers and the keys dropped into Lucia’s hand.
‘Thanks, Dad; it’s my car now.’ She held out the keys to me. ‘I’m the one giving it to you now, Michael.’
She leaned forward, brought her lips to my ear. ‘Behave yourself. You hurting him.’
I felt the weight of the keys in my shirt pocket.
I stood there feeling stupid. The old man shrugged and turned his gaze past the high white walls of his house to the Coburn hills ahead, his lower lip pulled in.
Lucia flipped a wrist at Nevis, and with fingers digging into my arm, she steered me down the steps.
‘Scuse us, folks. Michael taking us for a ride. Okay, Nevis?’
Behind us, the old man made a sound – something between a chuckle and a cough.
‘Where y’all going?’ I said.
‘Anywhere,’ Lucia said.
‘I’ll take y’all to anywhere, then.’
We got onto the Western Main.
One of those evenings when the fading sun threw a yellow afterglow on everything. The birds were still out making a racket. Somewhere along, Lucia did something with her hand and the roof slid open. There was a blanket of stillness over everything. Sounds travelled clear and sharp. My sisters pressed their heads against the glass to stare at Camahoan women strolling along the roadside with infants on their shoulders.
‘Giving the baby breeze,’ I said. ‘Is how the love affair with Camaho begins. Wherever in the world they go, they will never forget this island.’
‘Miss Merry said so too.’
‘Who’s Miss Merry?’
‘Mum’s helper. She cooks for us.’
‘Helper’s the new name for servant girl now? How old?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘What you know about Miss Merry?’
‘She’s our helper, Michael.’
‘That’s all you know? Where she lives?’
‘Somewhere on the coast, I think.’
‘Kanvi,’ Nevis said.
‘Want to see how she lives? Is time y’all meet the neighbours. Besides, is Fish Friday. Going to be a nice lime in Kanvi.’
On the way, I stopped at roadside stalls, put money in their hands and sent them out the car. I watched them eat roast corn and barbecued fish with bare hands, their shyness replaced with a don’t-give-a-damn abandon as they dug into the food, licked their fingers and bared their perfect teeth at vendors. I sat them on seaside boulders with their bare feet in the water while they bit into mangoes and licked at the juices trailing down their arms.
Then I drove to Kanvi – the town that never slept. The air was sizzling with fried fish and conversation. I emptied my little bag of coins in their hands and challenged them to buy whatever they fancied but return with half the money.
They walked through the rows of stalls with smiles and nods and gestures, tossing back their thick plaits and haggling as if their lives depended on it. They were breathless when they got back, hands packed with food trays, with more than half the money in their pockets.
‘Ready for home?’
‘What’s the hurry?’
I drove to the edge of the beach, sat with them facing the sea.
‘That’s how y
ou live, Michael?’
‘Yup! Merry too – in fact, most people here on Camaho.’
We watched the night come over the town. A group of men strolled onto the beach and tossed a net in the waters of the foreshore. Suddenly the whole place began to swarm with children and adults with bottle-torches in their hands. The sand grew warm and yellow, the torches throwing their shadows half the length of the beach. I wondered if they would have done this if Shadowman was still around.
A young man poked his head into the car, waved to another further down the beach.
‘Ay, Man! Gimme one of them nice likkle woman you got in there, nah!’
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I got something even better.’
I reached into my glove compartment, pulled out my revolver and pushed the muzzle under his nose.
He backed away as if he’d been stung on the arse, spun on his heels and shot off.
The girls were rocking with laughter. I raised my brows, twisted my lips gangster-style and glowered at them. That set them off again.
Out to sea, the lights of fishing boats stippled the darkness. Beyond them, the barely visible bulk of a giant boat, most likely Chinese or South Korean. And as usual, I felt the unease, watching these people on the beach hauling in an almost empty net because of the fish-killing factory out there.
Fireflies were out by the time we got to Beau Séjour – a mist of blinking lights, the black flag that Lazar Wilkinson’s mother had planted by the roadside still standing.
On Morne Bijoux Road, Nevis started a memory game. She covered Lucia’s eyes with her hands and challenged her to guess where they were. Lucia never got it right. Nevis always did.
The outside lights of the house bathed the lawn – the shape of The Wife in the veranda, my father beside her. Waiting.
I told myself that someday I’d have to find a way to make peace with the woman. I’d have to reach into myself and offer something that she had never given me, my father’s outside child. But right now, I wasn’t in the mood.
‘Michael, we’d like to go with you again,’ Lucia said.
Nevis threw me a sidelong glance and nodded.
‘Anytime,’ I said.
I waited till they climbed the steps, tapped the horn and drove off.
58
Miss Stanislaus and I were sitting in the shade of a giant almond tree on Grand Beach facing the sea. Teenagers rushed past us in the yellow evening light, kicking up white sand. They hit the water and became silhouettes against the blazing sunset. Boys and girls paired off, sank to their necks in the water and began the old surreptitious game of lovemaking, heads a foot or so apart and still as statues. Their torsos – no doubt angled forward – would be busy underneath. And they thought they were being smart! A saintly soul like Miss Stanislaus would never have a clue.
‘Miss Stanislaus,’ I said, ‘yunno, what’s the best contraceptive in the world – that don’t cost nothing.’
‘The sea, Missa Digger.’ She rolled those bright brown eyes at me. ‘That’s why you an Miss Dressy always in de sea?’
I decided to drop the conversation.
She pulled off her sandals, laid them preciously beside her and cleared her throat. ‘Missa Digger, I been thinking about my daughter. I never tell Daphne how I come by her. She used to ask all the time. What’s my father name, Mam? Where he live? Yunno!’ Miss Stanislaus cleared her throat again. ‘I kin never find it in me to tell her. One day, she stop asking me, jusso, but I see the question all the time in ’er face. What answer I kin give her now if I got to tell her? That Juba Hurs’ was her father and I was force’ to kill him?’
‘I would find a way to tell her, Miss Stanislaus.’
She said nothing for a while, then her voice dropped low. ‘Missa Digger, ain got nothing else in the world that frighten me except that. I ’fraid I going to spoil it. Is like all the feelins I got for my girlchild get wash’ clean after I clear Juba outta my life, and I want to keep it clean.’
‘That’s just what I think, Miss Stanislaus – that’s all. Is up to you.’
‘Missa Digger, I been finkin about you and Miss Dressy too.’
‘What about Dessie?’
‘I want to know why you holdin onto her. Becuz in your head, you done with Miss Dressy, specially after her father put you down, and she been lying boldface to you to protect her husband name.’
‘You not making sense, Miss Stanislaus.’
‘I is makin sense and y’unnerstan me perfik!’ Her voice had risen an octave.
‘Okay, so you don like her—’
‘For what she is, Missa Digger. And she don like you for what you is. No matter what she tell you, she’ll never want to have your chil’ren. So why you holdin on to her? You not her servant-boy! Open your hand and let her go. Is de same fing you doing to Miss Pet.’
‘I not doin anything to Pet! I never had no relationship with Pet.’
‘So why you encourage her with your sweet-talk? I hear you all de time. Tell Miss Pet you don’t want nuffing with her that way. Make it clear to her. Let her live her life.’
She was distracted by a fast boat pulling a skier. It was a beautiful thing to watch. The skier was good, the water butter-yellow beneath the skis – as if she were gliding on a lake of molten gold. The boat slowed and swerved a hundred yards or so further down the beach. The driver leapt into the water with a swift fluid movement of his body. He attached a rope to the stern of the craft and guided it shoreward the way one would do a horse.
‘Luther Caine,’ I said.
‘I know,’ Miss Stanislaus said. ‘Yunno the woman?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Her eyes settled on my face as if alerted to something.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘She call herself Sarona and I have to tell you I think you right. I don’t think Tamara had anything to do with what happened to Lazar Wilkinson. I believe this is the woman them youngfellas said they saw. Small problem, though – she’s the woman Malan believe is his.’
Her lips twitched. ‘And you saying we can’t touch her because of Malan and Loofer Came?’
‘We will, Miss Stanislaus, we got to.’
Miss Stanislaus remained silent for a while. ‘Missa Digger, mebbe I the only pusson who don’t believe is not just a manover-woman fight you got with Loofer Came.’
‘You change your mind?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘When?’
‘After I see him lookin at you and killin you in his mind. The man look like a murderer, Missa Digger. You keep sayin you want to pull him down but you going about it like a crazy-fella drivin a bulldozer.’
‘All I need is the evidence.’
‘From what you arready tell me, it right there in front ov you. It been there in front ov you from time.’
‘Dunno what you mean.’
‘Miss Dressy, Missa Digger.’
‘I already talk to Dessie.’
She held out her hand. ‘Gimme the evidence then. Put it in my hand.’
Miss Stanislaus sniffed and cast an eye down the beach. ‘That’s the point I making, Missa Digger. You don’t want the woman to tell you de evidence. You want her to give it to you!’
She got up, fished her sandals off the sand. ‘Missa Digger, the evenin wastin. Let’s take a lil breeze.’ Miss Stanislaus lifted a hand at the beach that had become a mile-long curve of glowing amber in the last of the evening sun. ‘And,’ she dropped a hand on my arm, ‘we still got to find Miss Tamara.’
It felt like a long time since we’d been chasing Tamara. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that she’d disappeared so suddenly along with two men. The young woman had managed to stay out of sight with the whole Police Force on the island looking for her. It was an embarrassment.
Dead or hostage? Or just a young girl prostituting herself with two fellas who didn’t seem to have a problem with killing anybody? My heart sank at the thought of another murder. I was close to certain that they were the drivers of the boat
which I now knew existed. That boat would be loaded and ready to go; would have left a long time ago had it not been for two damaged propellers. And why weren’t four engines enough to get them out of Camaho at speed? In fact, flying! I’d researched those outboard engines that Spiderface called ‘De Alien’.
V8 powerhead, double exhaust, 557 horsepower – it sounded like the kind of thing that could propel you to the moon, just one of them. Six! I’d Googled around until I found the makers of those engines: Seven Marine, based in Germantown, Wisconsin, USA. The 7557 – The most advanced outboard motor on the planet. I’d contacted them through their website and enquired how long it would take between ordering a spare part and having it arrive in Camaho. Four weeks they’d said, via Bermuda.
I made a rough calculation, factoring in the time it would take for the replacement to arrive, the two weeks to process the cocaine – based on Caran’s estimate – and load the stuff onto the boat plus a couple of days to fit the propellers. In total, just over six weeks. My heart sank with the conclusion. We were the second day into the seventh week. Anytime soon, they’ll be gone.
And yes, Miss Stanislaus was right, regardless of her part in all of this, we also needed to find Tamara.
59
Dessie’s mother was on their front lawn decorating a long white wicker chair with her person, her dancer’s feet daintily planted on a flowered cushion. I parked in the middle of their driveway behind Raymond Manille’s Hyundai Genesis.
Mrs Shona Manille nudged her sunglasses up her forehead and looked up, then rose to her feet with an easy, flowing movement. She tilted her chin at the big bay window overlooking us.
‘Dessima – he’s here.’ Her tone was tight with accusation, and I thought I heard in it a warning to her daughter.
I raised my voice. ‘I not here to see Dessie, Mrs Manille. I’d like to have a serious conversation with you about your daughter.’
The skin on the woman’s forehead tightened.
I heard a tumble of footsteps on the stairs inside. Dessie appeared, dressed in a light blue tracksuit and matching top – Armani, of course.
‘Digger,’ she called, ‘you here to see me?’
I smiled at her mother. ‘Sorry, I mistook you for Dessie.’