Black Tide (6 page)

I finished the lemonade and started crunching on the ice. "Nope."

Felix said, "Look, don't say no or yes, okay? Just think about it for a day or two."

"I already said no."

"Yeah, but I didn't tell you what's in it for you."

"Let me guess. Going on a one-way trip out to Hampton Shoals on a boat with guys named Guido and No Neck, with a length of anchor chain wrapped around my body, all because I decided to help you out."

He smiled and shook his head and said, "Look, I'm going to be the lightning rod here, okay? You'll be fine. No danger. And besides, you help me out, I'll give you 10 percent of what I'm going to demand for the location of the safe house and its contents."

"Which is what?"

Felix told me and the ice in my mouth damn near melted of its own accord. "That's a healthy amount."

"Yeah, pretty robust, ain't it?" He slapped his hands on his thick thighs and said, "Look, I'll let you be, Lewis. Give me a call in a day or two, and we'll go on from there."

He got up and I walked him to the door. Before he went outside in the wet and gray afternoon, he slapped me on my side --- the good side, the one without any scars --- and said, "Whatever you decide, do decide one thing, Lewis. Lay off the beers for a while. They're making you fat, and they're slowing you down. Not a good prescription for one just out of a hospital."

"Thanks, Doc."

He slapped me on the side again, softer, and said, "If you don't be nice, I'll sic Christy on you."

"You do that, I'll send Diane Woods in your direction. She has a nasty habit of playing with handcuffs."

That brought another laugh and I watched for a minute or two as he trudged up the dirt path that led up to the parking lot of the Lafayette House, where his Mercedes was parked. I rolled the figure that he had mentioned around in my mind for a bit, before dosing the door. A lot of money. Enough to help me do some other things.

I closed the door and went upstairs to get to work, and for the rest of the afternoon, all I drank was ice water. Not because of any health reasons, but because the damn taste of rubber was still strong in my mouth.

Chapter Four

On the Sunday evening of June 23, when I was sleeping in my private and free room at the Cambridge Hospital, the
Petro Star
was heading up the Atlantic coast, heading for the harbor at Porter, New Hampshire, and the Piscassic River, which leads upstream to a complex of terminals and oil farms at Lewington.  The 30,000-ton tanker was 550 feet long, with a 90-foot beam, drawing a 35-foot draft. It carried a loaf of fuel oil, and as the single-screw tanker headed north, it was not a happy ship.  As with most cargo ships these days, it had a mixed crew, and communications among the crew members were equally mixed. The captain was an old German, a year or two away from retirement, and his first officer was from India. The deck officers were Filipino, and the deckhands were Chinese. There had been difficulties with the Loran navigation system and the steering system was balky.

             
On the evening of June 23, the captain was drunk and asleep in his cabin. The first officer was ill with a stomach virus, and the ships wheel was in the hands of a young Filipino man who was inexperienced and unaware of the treacherous waters around the Isles of Shoals. At about 10:40 P.M. the steering mechanism began a slow failure that led to the ship being off course, and the scared and unskilled Filipino sailor brought the
Petro Star
with up on a ledge off White Island. The force of the grounding even woke up the captain, and panicked at what was going to happen to him and his retirement, he tried to get the ship off the ledge without contacting the Coast Guard.

             
It didn’t work.

             
The
Petro Star
was single-hulled, and soon its cargo began spilling into the waters around Porter and the Isles of Shoals. When the Coast Guard came ---- alerted from its base on Foss Island --- there wasn’t much to do except try to begin the cleanup and start finding out what the hell happened. Even with the fuel oil coming ashore the next day, the very first session of a Coast Guard hearing began at a courthouse in Porter. Within a couple of days, after is cargo had been off-loaded to another ship, the damaged
Petro Star
was taken north, to a dock facility in Portland, Maine, to be repaired while the other players in the drama continued their activities.

             
So there it rested. After the black tide washed up on the shores and the cleanup commenced and the newspaper stories were written and the lawsuits were threatened, all I cared about was the man who ran the show: and this man, like myself, seemed to have a well-hidden past.

             
The
Petro Star
was owned by a corporation ---- Petro Associates --- that had registered the ship in its supposed homeport of Monrovia, Liberia. The corporation was based in Burma ---- or Myanmar, depending on your geography teacher ---- and its officers were from Thailand.  Petro Associates also had a business office in New York City, run by one Dmitros Skarvelis, who had a 3 percent ownership in the company. Whoever owned the other 97 percent of the shares was a secret, except that in reading and rereading the pages of testimony from the preliminary hearings on the grounding and the oil spill, I had learned one interesting fact: Petro Associates had a majority owner, a man who made the decisions, and this man was an American.

So he was in this country. He was "gettable." But investigators with the U.S. Coast Guard, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Justice had been unable to locate him. Usually the United States had a cooperative working relationship with shipping investigators in Thailand and Burma, but this year --- due to a border dispute between the two countries and the current Administration's policy on the matter ---- Thailand and Burma were both politely telling the United States to go to hell. Dmitros Skarvelis had smiled a lot when he was not answering questions, and then one night he left his New Jersey apartment and was now believed to be back in Athens.

I leaned back in my chair and rubbed at my neck. My Macintosh Plus was on, its friendly gray screen setting up a glow in the late evening twilight of this July Tuesday. It had been more than a day since Felix Tinios had left me, and except for sleeping and eating and a bit of recreational reading, I had spent most of the past twenty-four hours in this room on the second floor of my house. The study has windows that overlook the ocean and my tiny beach to the east, and the jumbled rocks and wooden hills of the Samson State Wildlife Preserve to the south. Years ago, when the place was called the Samson Point Artillery Station, two batteries of giant twelve-inch artillery pieces were maintained and hidden in concrete bunkers that were covered with dirt and growing grass, to masquerade them as benign hills, and to hide them from the eyes of the Spaniards, and then later the Germans and even the Soviets.

But years later the masquerade was over, the hidden guns were pulled away, and tourists and picnickers now walked the previously forbidden grounds of what was once a sealed military installation.

So some masquerades get pulled away. But the man I was looking for had a very firm mask, one that was proving difficult to displace.

''And what do you do when you find him?" I announced to my empty study. ''Arrest him?"

I swiveled some in my chair, enjoying the faint squeaking noise that I'm sure would drive others crazy but which soothed me and made me think. The study was about as large as my bedroom, and in addition to the Macintosh Plus and an office-surplus desk that shared its paint style with battleships, there were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Among the biographies and history books and astronomy texts, there were also some bound back issues of
Shoreline.
  Black filing cabinets held scraps of information and newspaper clippings and bills, and there was one Oriental rug in the center of the polished hardwood floor.

And among all the books in this room, I had not picked up one in the past twenty-four hours in my quest for the man behind the
Petro Star
. The reason for that was my Macintosh Plus, my modem and my telephone. If one didn't care that much about long-distance telephone charges --- which I didn't --- one had entire libraries, newspaper morgues, encyclopedias, clipping services and reference materials available just by dialing up phone numbers. There are thousands --- maybe even tens of thousands ---of computer bulletin boards and on-line services --- including the information superhighway known as the Internet --- that can serve practically any purpose, any need. There are computer bulletin boards where you can enter and play sex games over your keyboard with someone in a different time zone. There's a bulletin board that, if you give your longitude and latitude, will tell you when the Mir space station will go overhead. And there are bulletin boards that, well, offer some unique and strange interests. Coon hunting, for example, or comic book collecting. And in my own hunt over the past day, I had gone through a dozen or so of the boards, doing what was called "info surfing" just setting up word and program searches about the
Petro Star
and Petro Associates. It had taken some time, and besides helping increase the net worth of AT&T's long distance division, there hadn't been much out there.

So far, I had about a handful of sentences' worth of information. The man with the 97 percent share in Petro Associates was quite deep. I had not been very successful, and I was almost depressed at the lack of information I had managed to retrieve. All I knew was that he was male, he lived in the United States, he was a businessman who owned the majority shares of Petro Associates, and he had other business interests. For all the work I had done, I had garnered information which could have been connected to about half of the mailing list for
The Wall Street Journal
. Not much progress. And yet…. well, there was one more phone number…

"Nope," I said, speaking again to the empty room. "Not tonight, and not ever."

I shut down the computer and switched off the modem and went downstairs. In the living room I turned the television on, then turned it off, and sat down on the couch. On the coffee table was a copy of yesterday's
Tyler Chronicle
, and the lead story had been written by Paula Quinn. The headline said, DEAD DIVER RECOVERED AT NORTH BEACH, and I wondered how the
New York Post
or the Daily News would have reported it: HEADLESS DIVER COMES ASHORE? CATCH OF THE DAY: DISMEMBERED DIVER?

Her lead: "Tyler and State Police are investigating the death of a man clad in a wet suit who washed ashore at North Beach on Sunday and whose body had been mutilated."

Not bad. In the second graph, she mentioned the lack of head or hands, and she had quoted Diane Woods by the fourth paragraph. And throughout the entire story, not once had she mentioned how the body had been recovered, how a columnist from
Shoreline
had gone in and had swum out, and had dragged it ashore with a rope.

The man was between twenty and thirty years of age. No word on any identifying scars or tattoos, which made me think that there had to be some evidence there, which Diane Woods and the State Police were keeping secret. No word of any missing divers, nor was there any information about diving equipment being overdue from any of the rental shops on the coast.

There also wasn't any information about anybody witnessing a headless body being tossed overboard from a passing boat or fishing vessel, but I guess that was too much to hope for.

Along with the story was a photograph of Diane Woods and Roger Krohn of the Massachusetts State Police, standing around and looking at a blanket-covered shape on the beach. I thought for a moment of calling Diane, knowing that she'd probably be at her condo at this hour, but it was fairly late, and if she had any time to herself right now, she was probably sleeping. I had nothing to offer, nothing except a word or two of encouragement, and tat wasn't worth getting awake for.

Besides, I really didn't want to know any more about the diver. I had brought him in. It was up to others to give him a name and to send him home. I got up from the couch and headed to the kitchen, and remembering with a wince what Felix had said the other day, I skipped the beers and threw some ice cubes in a glass and drew some water from the sink. I slid open the door to the rear deck and stepped outside. The sounds of the waves were quiet, just a gentle hush, like some distant soft breathing, and luck was with me this evening, for the night sky was clear and the stars were quite bright. The teapot shape of Sagittarius was tipping to the horizon to the south, and over my head I made out the constellations of  Cygnus, the swan, and Cepheus, the husband of Cassiopeia, captured forever in their flight across the sky. Within two weeks, the Perseid meteor showers would begin, and I would not get much sleep, for this yearly show promised to be a good one this summer, with no moon to glare away the streaking light of the meteors, and with the possibility of clear and crisp weather to cut down on the haze. At least for a few nights then, I would spend the dark hours out here on my deck, on a mattress and with a blanket, counting the shooting stars and looking for the steady movement of satellites across the sky.

I drank the water in one gulp and sat down and propped my feet up on the railing. Though the stars were bright and clear tonight, there was still something dirty out there, something distorted, like a puddle of urine before a garden statue. With every breath and movement of air, the stench of oil came to me. There was still cleaning to be done, though the volunteers and. the state and the Coast Guard had given up and had passed on that responsibility to nature and her waves. The natural cleansing action of the ocean, I saw it called in one of Paula Quinn's newspaper articles about the spill.