Crackdown (10 page)

“I’d be surely delighted to have your company.” The senator, ever affable, seemed unworried at the thought of taking the Maggot into polite society.

“Do I have to wear a tie?”

“I guess so. I’ll be wearing one.”

“Reckon I’ll leave the embassy girls to you then, senator,” the Maggot had to shout over the sound of the engines, “and me and Nick will just have to play with each other on account of forgetting to bring our ties.” He laughed, then frowned at the aircraft’s controls as if he was not entirely certain what most of them did. One reason why John’s air-taxi service was less than successful was his habit of pretending not to know how to fly the plane or, worse, pretending to have forgotten how to land it once he had succeeded in becoming airborne. The performances made his customers understandably nervous, and nervous customers do not pass on glowing recommendations to their friends. “I suppose we should try and get this hot heap of shit off the ground,” the Maggot growled now. It was indeed as hot as hell inside the aircraft.

We taxied away from the palm-thatched hut that was proudly styled as Straker’s Cay Airport Terminal Number One. The hut was home to some lizards and to the island’s one taxi driver who had sequestered it as his office and gasoline store. The airstrip itself had been built to serve a golf and diving resort that a consortium of Dutch and American businessmen had planned to build on Straker’s Cay, but the money had run out before the hotel or marina had been built and all that was left of their grandiose plans was this pinkish runway made of compacted coral and a few abandoned cement mixers which rusted forlornly where the hotel’s swimming pool was to have been built.

The Maggot, who refused to wear a seat belt, shoved his throttles forward, and I felt the sweat trickling down my belly as the brakes were released and the small plane thundered down the rough surface. “It plays hell with the tyres, senator!” The Maggot yelled over the howling engine noise.

“What does?” The senator shouted back.

“Runways made of crushed coral! As likely as not we’ll blow a tyre, slew off, and become three small puddles of melted fat in a blackened and twisted plane wreck!”

The senator blanched and leaned back. I had heard it all before and so was a little more sanguine. The Maggot, pleased to have spoilt someone’s day, pulled back the stick and we lifted safely off the runway and there was suddenly a wonderful rush of cool air coming from an overhead vent. We banked over Bonefish’s house and I waved at Thessy who was standing beside
Masquerade.
Thessy would follow on the weekend ferry, arriving at Grand Bahama on the same day as the senator’s twins.

The Maggot’s Beechcraft clawed higher, its progress punctuated by the alarm sirens that the Maggot ignored and which the senator had learned not to worry about. Once, when an alarm became peculiarly insistent, the Maggot thumped the instrument panel until it stopped. “I think that goddamn racket means we should all be dead,” he announced cheerfully, then carried on with an involved story of how he had once won undying glory by intercepting a pass against the Philadelphia Faggots. In the senator the Maggot had found a listener who was only too eager to hear his tales of goal-line stands and blocked punts, concussed running backs and sacked quarterbacks.

The one subject we did not talk about was why the senator had flown to Straker’s Cay to meet me. I knew the Maggot was dying to hear the senator’s business, but even the Maggot had enough delicacy to wait until we had safely delivered the senator to Nassau before asking. But once Crowninshield was gone, and when we had refuelled the Beechcraft and put a crate of beer on to one of her back seats, the Maggot demanded to know everything.

I suspected that he was hoping to hear that the senator had been arranging for an illicit love affair on board
Wavebreaker.
We had embarked two such affairs in the last year; the most memorable being an English lawyer who had arrived with his French mistress, but only after telling his wife that he was attending a legal conference in Brussels and, to preserve the lie, he had been forced to hide every inch of his pallid skin in case a sun-tan betrayed him. The French girl, to Thessy’s infinite embarrassment, had strolled stark naked about
Wavebreaker’s
deck while the lawyer had cowered in the stateroom cloaked like an Ayatollah with impetigo. The Maggot, disappointed that the senator’s business offered no such rich pickings of gossip, scowled at me. “You mean you’re just babysitting two rich junkies?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Shee-it.” We had at last taken off from Nassau and were banking north to where three American warships sliced white water. I opened us each a beer, then idly unfolded the aviation chart that the Maggot had stuck down between our seats. It looked very different to a nautical chart and made little sense to me, but I gradually deciphered some of the meaning from its weird markings.

“You ain’t going to have fun,” the Maggot said suddenly.

“I’m sorry?”

“You ain’t going to have fun with two goddamn cocaine addicts. That stuff is the hardest to kick.”

“So the senator told me.”

“And there ain’t no magic pill that will do it.” Maggovertski sounded unusually sombre. He lit a cigarette. “I hate cocaine,” he said finally, and he surprised me by saying it for the Maggot had always struck me as one of life’s rebels. If he discovered a new rule he would immediately seek a way of breaking it, and I had assumed that he would have some sympathy with those who flouted the laws against drugs, yet there was no denying the genuine anger in his voice when he talked of cocaine. He must have sensed my puzzlement, for he offered a reluctant explanation. “I knew a girl who got hooked on cocaine. She taught in a health club; aerobics, that kind of thing, and the next we knew she was wearing hot pants on a street corner in New York and strutting her stuff at the cars. Jesus, if you knew how hard we tried to get her off that damned powder.”

“Did you succeed?”

He paused, and finally shook his head. “Last time I saw her she was doing a peep-show in Pittsburgh. Hell, Nick, I tried to get her out of that place, but she didn’t care. All she wanted to do was shovel that crap up her nose, and if that’s how someone wants to pass their time, then there’s diddly-squat you can do to stop them.”

He had sounded immensely sad as he spoke, and I wondered if the girl had meant more to him than being merely a casual friend, but I did not like to ask and Maggovertski was clearly disinclined to explain more, so I just stared down at the aerial chart, and I suddenly noticed, in an otherwise empty space beneath an intersection of two air corridors, the tiny island of Murder Cay. The chart, either printed before the government’s name change or else blithely ignoring it, noted the existence of a 2500-foot paved airstrip. “Is 2500 feet long for a runway?” I asked Maggot.

“Two five? Short as a quarterback’s dick.” He was evidently still thinking of the girl, for the obscenity was automatic and his voice was clipped and distant.

“Have you ever flown into Murder Cay?” I asked him.

The big shaggy head turned to look at me. He frowned and sucked on his cigarette and I somehow got the impression that my question had annoyed him, but when he answered his voice was mild enough. “It’s a snakepit, Nick. Leave it alone.”

“So who are the snakes?” I insisted.

“The dickheads who bought the place, of course.” He paused to pull on his beer bottle which, emptied, he tossed out through the tiny triangular window at his left elbow. “I ran a couple of passengers there before the dickheads bought the island. It was a real nice place two years ago; nothing but luxury houses for the super-rich, but then the snakes bought it and they’ve painted a big yellow cross on their runway. You know what a big yellow cross on a runway means? It means keep away if you want to go on living.”

“So who are the new owners?” I tried again.

“Never been introduced to them, Nick.”

“Drug people?”

“Of course!” The Maggot assumed I had already known that.

I looked down at the chart and saw that the island was not so very far off our course, and I knew that the Beechcraft was brim-full with fuel. “You fancy having a look at the island?”

The Maggot laughed. “What’s made you feel suicidal? Did you get bored with waiting for Ellen to drop her panties?”

“I’m just curious,” I said with as much innocence as I could muster, “but of course, if you’re scared of the place...”

“Oh, damn you.” I had reckoned that an accusation of fear would sting the Maggot, and even before he interrupted me he had banked the plane westwards. He snatched the chart off my lap and worked out a crude course for the remote island. “So why do you want to stir the bastards up?” he grumbled.

I told him about
Hirondelle
and how Deacon Billingsley had lied about the yacht’s fate, and I confessed that though there was nothing I could do about a corrupt policeman, nor about what I strongly suspected had been the murder of a yacht’s crew, I was still curious about the island.

“Billingsley’s a bastard.” The Maggot, who had lived long enough in the Bahamas to learn and relish all the important gossip, growled the verdict. “You want to stay upwind of him.”

“McIllvanney says that Billingsley owns a house on Murder Cay.”

“That figures,” the Maggot said gloomily. “The dickheads know that the best way of keeping the Americans off their backs is by buying themselves a slice of the local law.” His disgruntled voice made it seem as though the precautions of the drug smugglers formed a personal affront to his patriotism.

Yet if anyone’s patriotism should have been affronted by what happened in the islands, it was the Bahamians, for they were forced to endure the indignity of having another nation’s law-enforcement agencies operating in their waters. The islands had always been a smugglers’ paradise, and had proved a perfect place to stockpile cocaine before running it across the narrow Straits of Florida to the waiting American markets. The American government had pressed the Bahamians to clean out the drug lords, but instead the trade had flourished until the Americans finally insisted that their own coastguard be allowed to patrol Bahamian waters. A scintilla of Bahamian pride was preserved by the presence of a native officer on every American boat or helicopter, but no one really believed the polite fiction that the local officer was thus in command.

“But we ain’t in command either,” the Maggot said sourly. “We can stop a boat at sea, but we sure as hell can’t put a foot on dry land without Bahamian permission. And you can bet your pretty ass that your policeman friend is making sure that permission to search Murder Cay is never given, or if it is, that the guys on the island are well warned before our boys get anywhere near.”

“We?” It was so incongruous to hear the Maggot aligning himself with the forces of law that I was forced to ask the question. “Our boys?”

“I keep thinking of that girl in Pittsburgh,” he said with a bitter ruefulness, “and how the bastards who run the peep-show have to put sawdust on the booth floors every hour. You don’t get much lower than that, Nick, and if anyone wants to kick the balls of the people who put her there, then those are my guys.” He paused to light another cigarette, then nodded through his scratched windscreen. “I reckon that’s your snakepit, Nick.”

Far ahead, and blurred by the heat haze, there was a bright green dot of an island ringed by coral-fretted water. No other land was visible. The Maggot turned in his seat and rummaged in his camera bag until he found a battered Nikon and a roll of black and white film. “Take some pictures for me. You never know, some customer might want a snap of Murder Cay one day.”

By the time I had loaded the camera we were already close to the reefs that formed the Devil’s Necklace. The shadow of our plane skipped across the bright sea, then flickered over the outer coral. We were approaching the island from the south-east, coming with the wind at a height of six thousand feet. The island was shaped rather like an anchor. The airstrip, with its unfriendly yellow cross that warned strange aircraft from landing, had been built across the curved flukes of the anchor, which otherwise seemed to be covered in low scrub, slash pine and sea-grape. The surprisingly big houses were all built on the western side of the north-south shank of the anchor that was thick with palm trees and vivid with bright blue swimming pools. The rest of the shank was a long narrow golf course, punctuated with sand traps. I twisted in the seat to see that there were a dozen or so boats moored in the protected crook of the easternmost anchor fluke.

The Maggot dipped the starboard wing to let me take a picture of the deep water channel that dog-legged in from the west. We flew above the skeletal radio mast and I stared down at the row of huge houses. No one and nothing stirred there.

“They spent a fortune developing the place,” the Maggot said, “but the rich folks never came, so they sold it to the rich dickheads instead.” We flew out across the northern reefs.

“One more pass?” I asked John.

“Why not?”

“And a bit lower?”

“Yeah, maybe.” He had turned to fly around the eastern edge of the island’s encircling reefs and was now staring intently at the houses, searching for any signs of danger, but it seemed as though Murder Cay was deserted. “What the hell,” the Maggot said, and he wrenched the plane round in a tight turn until we were aimed plumb at the island’s southernmost tip, then he dropped the nose ready to make one high speed and low level pass above the Cay. “That’s friendly!” he shouted over the engine noise, and he pointed through the windscreen at the concrete airstrip which not only had the yellow cross painted huge at its western end, but also had two trucks parked in its centre line, thus making it impossible for any plane to land. Despite the obstructions it was clear that aircraft did use the runway, for it was marked by the black rubber streaks of fresh tyre marks, but the two trucks, together with the yellow cross, were evidence that the runway could only be used by invitation.

We slashed across the shank of the island, then we were over the anchorage and I had a glimpse of a sailing boat’s shadow black on the bed of the lagoon before our own winged shadow whipped across a gaggle of powerboats. We were going too fast to see any details of the moored vessels so I just snapped a random photograph and, at the very same instant, the Maggot swore and banked and rammed the throttles hard forward.