Black Tide (15 page)

"What do you mean?" Felix asked. He had on madras shorts and a white polo shirt and wraparound Italian sunglasses. His forearms were dark and were covered with fine  hair and he had a watch on one wrist and a gold bracelet on another.

"The day you leave behind your Mercedes-Benz and take a rental car for a drive, then I know it's serious." He glanced over at me and smiled as we sailed through a yellow light. "Maybe I borrowed it from one of my many friends."

I pushed the electric switch that lowered the window and let the breeze wash over me, and I said, "First of all, it's too clean. But it's the rear bumper that says it all. You scraped off the rental sticker after you got the car. You been driving rentals for long?"

"Here and there, ever since the postcards and the phone calls started. I didn't want to make things too easy for them."

We left the downtown of Porter and got onto a traffic circle that was the junction of 1-95, Route 4, Route 1 and Route 1 A. We spent several minutes going around the circle, and I didn't insult Felix by asking him if he was sure we weren't being followed. I settled down in my seat, feeling a queasy sort of nervousness about what I was getting into, but also feeling a quiet triumph that at least I wasn't just getting into another six-pack of beer.

Then Felix made a violent turn and speeded up the Taurus we shot off an exit and got onto Route 1, heading into Maine. We drove through a strip that had gasoline stations, restaurants truckers, an auto parts store, and two adult bookstores --- one either side of the highway, how convenient --- and then we passed a park that had a submarine out of water, the
USS Albacore
. It was an experimental submarine, built in the teardrop design, and on its sail were painted its numbers in white: 569. The same yahoos who didn't like the renewal of Porter thirty years earlier were also against hauling a submarine up on land for museum, and thankfully the yahoos were batting zero. It was a hell of a place, and I had gone through the submarine twice, amazed that men had actually worked in such tight quarters, hundreds of feet beneath the ocean.

We crossed over a drawbridge that spanned the Piscassic River. I turned to the right and looked down at the brick buildings of Porter's waterfront, a scrap-metal pile near the state pier and the cranes and sleek  shapes that were on the other side of the harbor, at the famous Porter Naval Shipyard. It's the oldest naval shipyard in the country, and it's built vessels from wooden sailing ships to nuclear-powered submarines, and it also built the Albacore.

As the Taurus's wheels touched the soil of the Pine Tree State, Felix said, “All right, I can give you the fact that you learned about the Winslow Homers by just doing some basic research. Jesus, I practically spelled it out for you, Lewis, saying it was stolen five years ago and it made a big fuss at the time. But how in hell did you find out the safe house was in Maine?"

A blue-and-white sign said "WELCOME TO MAINE. THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE," which seemed to me a fairly presumptuous slogan. We passed through Kittery and went past a series of discount malls and outlet shops selling everything from Brooks Brothers suits to Black & Decker tools.

I said, "I didn't find out."

"You didn't?" "Nope. I guessed."

He looked over at me and I wished his sunglasses were off. I wanted to see the look on his face. He said, "You can go on, if you'd like."

I shrugged. "You said that the valuables were taken from this state five years ago. All right, that tells me they're now out of state. Then you said you went 'up there' to check on the safe house, and that you did that in an afternoon. That means you didn't travel to Quebec or New Brunswick. So you went to Maine. Where we are now, right?"

He shook his head. "So right."

The road was now two-lane, and at about seven or so miles from Porter, we entered the town of York. Like my home state, Maine has an odd relationship with the outside world. It's known for its fishermen and "Down East" lore and quiet, biting humor, but that's only the coastal part of the state, the part that makes the shows, movies and Sunday newspaper travel supplements. Trave1 inland from the coast and you'll find great tracts of wooded wilderness, owned by paper mills and wood-pulp companies, small towns struggling with their budget from month to month, and proud poor people who've never eaten a lobster in their life.

At the intersection for Route 1A, Felix made a right and we entered York, going past the Civil War monument in the center of town. The homes were small and set back, and there were a few shops for the tourist crowd. We drove past the library, the Old York Historical Society, a Congregational church and the town hall. Most of the homes were old colonials or Federalists, and most of those buildings were painted the same as the church and the town hall: white.

Felix said, "Didn't those early settlers ever hear of another color besides white?" 

"Maybe they wanted to symbolize purity. You know anything about purity?" He just laughed and then pulled into the empty parking lot of a Catholic church, St. Christopher by the Sea. It was angular shaped, built to look like a ship. I looked over at Felix in disbelief and he said, "Who ever bothers cars parked at a church?"

The church was on a small road called Barrell Lane --- I'm not sure why it has an extra "I" in its name --- and our walk took only few minutes, as we headed down to the harbor. We went through a small residential area on a hill near Barrell Lane that was clustered with a lot of pine and oak trees. Most of the homes were built away from the main road, off the small lane, which was called Landing Lane. Felix and I said not one word to each other and then he turned and went into a vacant lot, pushing through some brambles and thorns. They didn't seem to bother him even though he was wearing shorts, and I followed him into overgrowth. The land was dry and there was the sound of whirring crickets. I knew it would seem funny to anyone watching us, two grown men thrashing through the underbrush in a Maine town. But Felix wasn't laughing and I didn't feel particularly amused either. We walked for a couple of minutes and then Felix hunched down and I joined him. The ground had cleared away some and we were near the base of a birch tree.

Before us was a dirt driveway that led up a slight incline and curved around before a two-story house. It was a large Cape, with dormered windows on the second floor and with black shingles. It had white vinyl siding and to the rear I could make out an addition, built out toward the harbor. The shades on the front windows were drawn and there was a tiny front yard, fenced in by split-wood railings. There was a paved area for a vehicle to the right but no garage. It was quiet. I could hear Felix breathing and I said, "So, this is it?"

He nodded, took off his sunglasses and squinted some. A trickle of sweat was running down a smooth cheek and he said, "I never want anyone seeing me enter the driveway and walk down, so this is why I go this way."

''And here I thought you were just trying to get back to nature."

Felix folded up his sunglasses and slipped them into his shorts as he stood up, smiling. "My idea of nature is an outdoor barbecue. "

I followed him as he went onto the dirt driveway and then up the flagstone path to the front door.  As we got nearer, I said, "Doesn't look like much of a safe house. Too much growth and trees around for people to hide. Would hate to defend a place like this."

Felix said, "Just blending in, my friend. Just blending in. This is a place to lie low and wait for the shooting or shouting to stop. Nothing fancy or loud. Just a place to keep clean and to wait."

"Ever been used?"

"Not for what it's been designed for," he said, unlocking the front door. ''And as you've figured out, it's now being used as a storage center."

Inside the house there was a kitchen area to the left and a dining room set to the right. The air was musty and smelled of  a harsh cleaner. The light seemed strange, as if it were coming in through some dirty gauze filter. Something seemed wrong to me, straight away, and it took a moment to figure it out: the kitchen, the counters and the metal dining room set looked like something out of a 1969 Sears catalogue. There were bright pastel colors and funky little daisy flowers painted on the refrigerator, and there was a lot of stainless steel along the counters. There was a wainscoting along the walls that seemed to be made of fake knotty and the floor was yellow linoleum, the type that used to ~ in big rolls. The house felt like a time capsule, or a "model home" that had never been inhabited. It was clean and untouched and perfectly preserved, and it seemed spooky, like we were walking into a crypt or a tomb.

Felix had moved ahead of me, and I went out to an open area that split off to the left and to the right, to closed doors and a side hallway, leading upstairs.

"Bedrooms," Felix said. "Never used."

There was a railing before us and a short set of stairs that led down to a lower living room. Two brown vinyl couches flanked a glass-topped coffee table, and there were two easy chairs clustered around a Zenith television set in the far corner. It looked like a black-and-white set, and there were a handful of magazines on top of it, next to an old rotary-dial telephone. The floor lamps looked like set decorations from a made-for-television science fiction movie from 1970. We went downstairs and the floor had wall-to-wall white carpeting that had faded to something that looked like yellowed ivory. I went to the television and glanced at the magazines. The top one was a faded 1971 issue of Cosmopolitan, the chatty magazine that would collapse if italics were ever outlawed. The far wall had floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors whose view was hidden by a dark brown curtain, and the near wall had a large picture window that looked out to an overgrowth of brush. To my left was a door that led down to a cellar, and I closed the door after opening it. It seemed too dark to go down the stairs.

There were two closets near the television set and I opened one and smelled a lot of mothballs and counted three wire hangers clumped together in one corner. The other closet was a bit more cluttered, with a couple of rakes and a shovel, some crumpled-up paper bags and an open toolbox.

Felix said, "Done with your snooping?"

"It's called satisfying one's curiosity. Where are they, Felix?"

"Over here," he said, taking the key ring again in his hand, He undid a lock to the sliding-glass door and it moved slowly to the right. The odd feeling of being in a bad place tickled at me again, and I saw that the curtains were on the other side of the glass door, so that they were always blocking what was there. Felix grasped the curtains and tugged them open, and I felt my chest move and it surprised me, since for a few moments I had forgotten to breathe.

"There," he said, satisfied with himself, and I walked through the open door. The paintings were on a wooden frame against the far wall, hanging crookedly but still bright and alive. In their position they partially covered two windows, but since the light blue curtains on those windows were closed, it didn't make any difference. This floor was hardwood and there were three lawn chairs, and part of me observed "sunroom" as I walked closer. There on the left was
Fog Warning
, with the solitary fisherman, hard at work in his dory, heading for the far-off sanctuary of his schooner. Then there was
Eight Bells
, the two sailors on deck, huddled together like sodden animals, having survived a terrible ordeal, their tools and instruments of civilization trembling in their cold hands. And then
The Gulf Stream
, the black sailor looking off in the distance, exhausted, either not seeing or not wanting to see the sharks beneath him, and it seemed as if the eyes of the broaching shark were looking straight at me.

"My God," I said. Felix started to say something and I held up my hand to shut him up. I took another step forward, looking more closely at the canvases and the heavy paint, trying to think through how odd it was that these paintings were created over a hundred years ago up the coast at Prout's Neck, and how they traveled far and had been looked at by hundreds of thousands of people. Then they had been ripped away and hidden and here they were, for five years, gathering dust in this empty house, far away from home and the place they were created, only yards away from the ocean and yet a million miles away from the place their creator had hoped for. Winslow Homer. He had had some imagination back then, painting alone at Prout's Neck, but I doubted that even he would have thought that his work would have ended up in York in the home of a criminal.

Felix stood next to me and, not turning, I said, "How did they get here, Felix?"

'I don't have answers, but I have guesses."

“Those'll do," and I thought, my God, after all these years, how sharp and clear those colors were, as if they had been touched upon the canvas just a week or so ago.

He said, ''A lot of times, guys go out on their own. There's always a competition, always jockeying for position. Let's say that someone wants to make an impression on his superiors. So he pans and makes the hit, a big hit, one that gets in all the news.  The paintings are stolen and they get stashed here, and then word gets up to someone that somebody who works for him was involved in one of the biggest crimes of the decade. What do you think this superior's reaction's gonna be?"

I rubbed at my chin, still staring at the shark's eyes in
The Gulf Stream
. "Unless he's an art aficionado, he'll probably be horrified. Every State Police unit in New England, the FBI, Treasury and Customs are all running around the landscape, trying to find out who stole the paintings. And it's his guys. A lot of unexpected heat."