Crackdown (39 page)

“I don’t need anyone to stay with me,” I said petulantly. “They’ve lost us, so there’s no immediate danger, but the sooner we’re all on the boat, the better. One of us has to be arse-end Charlie, and that one’s me. So go!” I turned away from them, intimating I had no more to say, and hefted the Russian machine-gun on to the makeshift breastwork of the ruined wall. I aimed the gun at the nearest house which was no more than two hundred paces away. The building was dark and seemingly deserted.

The Maggot and the senator abandoned their boots and flak-jackets; then, wearing only their lightweight fatigues, they waded into the lagoon and breast-stroked through the limpid black water. The Maggot had strapped the M16 across his back, but had left his sub-machine-guns on the beach. The closest motor-cruiser, a sports-fisherman, was no more than sixty yards away.

I watched them swim for a moment, then turned to stare towards the blazing fire which silhouetted the southernmost houses. Stingray. That was the word the senator had used on the radio, and Stingray was the name of the US naval exercise that had filled the Bahamian seaways with lean grey ships and the island bars with boisterous sailors. I turned and gazed at the two shapes which swam so soft and slow towards the powerboat. Stingray. And I remembered how, on the day that the senator had come to find me on Straker’s Cay, he had gone on to a reception at the American Embassy in Nassau where he had met officers from the Stingray fleet. And that very same day he had turned up in the unlikely company of the Maggot. And that reminded me of an earlier question: exactly how had the senator found the Maggot?

The two men had reached the transom of the big sports-fisherman, and I watched as the Maggot’s huge dark shape moved cautiously up the boat’s stern ladder. A few seconds later I heard a splintering crack as the main-cabin door was forced. I guessed the Maggot was now searching for the electrical master switch. After that he would have to find the secondary switches to power the radio circuit, then discover the radio itself.

The senator climbed the stern ladder. None of the Colombians seemed to have noticed what was happening in the lagoon. What had the Maggot called the Colombians?
Narcotraficantes,
I had noted his use of that word, and wondered at it, because the Maggot was not usually a man to dignify someone with a proper noun when an improper word would suffice. I stared at the dark shape of the boat from which the Maggot was undoubtedly sending the radio message. But to whom?

Illusion, I thought to myself, everything is illusory. Truth is so slippery. The art of politics, like the art of the theatre, is to create a perfect illusion. It had taken a politician to make a simulacrum of Camelot in the twentieth century, and he had done it so perfectly that no one noticed that the Knights of the Round Table were being sent to be slaughtered in Vietnam.

The voters had wanted the illusion. “You have to remember,” my father liked to say, “that the bard was wrong. Not all the world’s a stage, most of it is an auditorium instead. Some of us are born to entertain, while the lumpen mass is born to be amused. But do remember, dear boy, that it is that lumpen audience which pays, and we performers who take their money. I make a bad audience, but am a great and rich performer; while you, Nick, are in danger of becoming a poor and astonishingly credulous spectator.” He had despised my naivety, wanting me to make the falsehoods of the stage into my avocation, but I had rebelled, preferring credulity to skill, innocence to knowledge, and naivety to cynicism. I still preferred truth to lies, yet somewhere in this night’s darkness I knew there was a great dark lie that I had been made to serve.

“Nick!” the Maggot suddenly hissed across the black water. “Nick! It’s OK! Come on!”

The summons undoubtedly meant that the radio message had been successfully sent, and doubtless the sensible thing for me to do was to join the two Americans on the boat, but it was dawning on me that I had been tricked and harried into coming to Murder Cay to ride shotgun for a purpose that had never been revealed; and I sensed, too, that no one but me cared what might have happened to Ellen. The senator did not care if she was raped and had died, because he had his own agenda. But Ellen had become my agenda.

So I ignored the Maggot’s summons.

Instead, I stood up, looped the belt of heavy linked cartridges around my neck, and picked up the machine-gun. While my enemies regrouped, I would find my woman. My cue had come at last, and it was time to leave the credulous audience and become a performer, making my entrance according to a stage direction I would write myself; enter from the night a deceived lover, armed and angry, seeking truth.

T
he Maggot hissed at me to join them on board their boat. I walked away. I was angry, but at who and what I was not sure. My anger made me careless. I made no attempt to hide, but just strolled up the beach carrying the heavy Kalashnikov.

My actions were not quite so foolhardy as they seemed, for the beach on the eastern side of Murder Cay was backed by a sand bluff nearly six feet high, and, by stooping, I could have walked almost the whole length of the island concealed from anyone who might have watched from the houses. But at that moment I did not care about concealment for the madness was on me; the insane conviction that I was armoured by righteousness and that no harm could therefore come to me.

A mortar bomb fluttered far overhead, dropping somewhere near the runway. A white parachute flare followed the bomb to explode over the island’s centre before drifting down behind its straggling plume of brightly lit smoke. Another flare was fired to burn brilliantly above the ruined beach house. The flares cast shadows as black as the mouth of hell, and I was walking in one such inky shadow.

I was walking towards the northernmost house which I believed belonged to Jesse Sweetman and to which, I was sure, Ellen had been taken. Sweetman had made no secret of his lust for Ellen, and he could clearly afford to pay McIllvanney his pimp-price. I trudged clumsily, my boots sliding in the treacherous sand. I had to negotiate the awkward pilings which supported the wooden piers that jutted off the sandy bluff and led to the private docks. I tripped on a discarded sailboard and banged my head on the low slanting trunk of a palm tree that grew across the sand. The linked ammunition looped round my neck clinked with every step, and the Scorpion slung from my left shoulder kept swinging to crash tinnily against the Kalashnikov, but no one heard me through the din of mortar explosions and the crackle of random gunfire. I plodded heavily on, walking like a man in a dream, and I was still moving in that same dreamlike unreality when I reached Sweetman’s house. I took no soldierly precautions, but simply climbed the wooden steps from the beach and walked across the marble-paved terrace as though I was a welcome visitor. The madness told me I would survive, and perhaps the madness was right, for no one saw me, and no one challenged me, and no one fired at me.

Then the trance snapped as a shadow moved in the flowering shrubs off to my left, and I threw myself sideways, guns and ammunition crashing loud on the marble terrace, and I wrenched the machine-gun round to face the sudden threat, and the Kalashnikov’s steel-clawed bipod scraped on stone as my finger took up the first pressure on the trigger.

Then I froze. Because the threat miaowed, then purred, then rubbed itself soft and warm against my right cheek. Sweat was pouring off me. “Oh, Jesus,” I blasphemed softly, and laid my head on my left forearm.

An explosion jarred me back into alertness. It was a huge explosion, thumping my eardrums and pulsing a sheet of red flame high into the night. I guessed that the fire started by the Maggot had spread to a big tank of cooking gas that supplied the island’s largest house. I could see men running in the garden of that house, fleeing from flames that were leaping as high as the radar aerial on the small tower. A bush crackled into instant fire to stream golden sparks into the night. Behind me the lagoon was being fingered silver by the falling flares.

Those flares were being sprayed haphazardly about the sky, just as the mortar bombs were now being scattered indiscriminately across the island’s open spaces. The mortar seemed to be emplaced in the garden of the house just beyond the raging fire. I could hear men shouting in that garden. Every now and then a machine-gun or rifle would open fire, but without purpose. The
narcotraficantes
had lost us. They were night-blinded by their own fire and by their flares, and they neither knew how many enemy faced them nor where that enemy was.

The northernmost house lay silent and dark. A hot tub on its terrace seemed to be filled with molten silver where the crescent moon glossed its water. Beyond the tub was a black wall of glass in which one sliding window had been left open. A white curtain stirred in the gap, but I could sense nothing threatening beyond the curtain, and so I stood up and edged round the hot tub’s gleaming water to the open glass door. No one challenged me. I paused by the billowing curtain, listening, but I heard nothing to scare me, and so I walked unopposed and undetected into my enemy’s house. There was a distinct smell of perfume, as though an exotic woman had just left the darkened room. I stood, eyes wide, till a flare cracked apart in the southern sky to cast an eerie white glow through the open window, and I saw that I was in a long elegant room furnished with cushioned wicker furniture. More glass doors opened on to the central courtyard where a swimming pool reflected the flare’s harsh fire. The walls of the elegant room were hung with fine antique prints; the home of a civilised murderer.

I stood utterly still. I was trying to sense danger in this perfumed house, using whatever primitive instincts were left to me, but then a door opened deep in the house, and I saw the flicker of a candle flame and I realised that someone was walking down a long corridor towards me.

One side of the corridor was formed by the glass wall that looked on to the central courtyard while the other was a lined with bookcases. Whoever walked between the books and the glass was shielding the candle flame with his hand so that his forward motion would not extinguish the small light.

It was Rickie, and he came unsuspecting towards me.

He was weaving slightly on the carpeted floor, and staring intently down at the candle. He had left the door at the far end of the corridor open and more candles burned in the room beyond, but I sensed Rickie was alone. He was humming to himself, concentrating on preserving the flickering fragile flame, then he saw the flash-suppressor of the machine-gun pointing at his midriff, and his eyes slowly came up to mine, and the candle dropped to extinguish itself on the floor.

“Hello, Rickie,” I said gently.

He was shaking. He could see me well enough, because I was illuminated by the candles in the room behind him, but I could only dimly see his face. What I glimpsed was not good. He looked ravaged and old before his time. His mouth opened and closed as though he was trying to speak, but he could not, then he began to back away from me with his hands held towards me. “You’re dead!” he said. “They told me you were dead!”

“Your father’s here, Rickie. He’s come to take you away.”

Rickie backed into the candlelit room and I saw just how pale and sick he looked. His one good eye was bloodshot and there were flecks of dried blood at his nostrils. A pulse was racing at his neck. He backed further from me, stopping at a table on which he sat as limply as a puppet loosed of its strings.

“You shouldn’t be here!” he whimpered, and he held his hands towards the walls as though feebly trying to protect the room’s contents, and the odd gesture made me realise just what was being stored in the big, high-ceilinged chamber.

It was the new riches of the Americas.

I was standing among the new gold that flowed to corrupt old nations; the new white gold of cocaine. I was in a room filled with cocaine; a room crammed with plastic-wrapped bales that must have been stuffed with the white crystalline powder. So much powder that I was crunching it beneath my boots because someone, I assumed Rickie, had slashed open one of the bales to pluck out a noseful of heaven.

There was money on the table behind Rickie, and a machine for counting banknotes, and there was also a knife. Rickie picked up the blade and held it towards me, but his threat lacked menace. It was merely a dutiful gesture, and it was no trouble to pluck the blade from his nerveless fingers. He shivered, perhaps thinking that I would attack him with the knife, but instead I went to the piled bales and slashed at their plastic wrappings. I sliced again and again, each cut of the blade spilling more wealth than had ever filled the hold of a galleon sailing from the Spanish Main. The cocaine glittered as it cascaded to the floor and covered the carpet in glinting drifts. I ripped open more of the bellying plastic sacks, burying my hand to its wrist in a flood of pure cocaine. Rickie, watching me, suddenly began to giggle, then to choke, then to laugh. “You’re Nick,” he said at last.

“That’s right.”

“They said they were going to kill you.” He spoke like a small child who had trouble remembering exactly how the syllables should be joined together.

“They tried,” I said, and I slashed into another bale and yet more cocaine hissed and seethed down to the floor. “Where’s Ellen?” I asked.

“Ellen’s pretty.” Rickie was staring with awe at the cocaine that silted the carpet.

“Where is she, Rickie?”

“I have to tell them you’re here, so they can kill you,” he said in a very matter-of-fact voice.

“Of course you do.” I stabbed at plastic, wrenched the blade and watched the powder fall. “But first tell me where Ellen is.”

“You’re a ghost! You’re dead!” Rickie sounded suddenly alarmed, and he began to make curious weaving motions with his hands as though he was trying to ward off my unquiet spirit. His nose had started to trickle blood, and he was crying. He seemed to have disappeared into a private misery of hopeless despair. “You’re dead! Dead!” he screamed at me, spitting sputum and flecks of blood that stained the snow-white powder drifts on the floor. “You’re fucking dead and I hate you!” He hated himself, and he hated me, and he spat at me with pure loathing before shrieking at me to go away.