Island of Thieves (12 page)

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Forget it.”

“You're cross with me, aren't you?”

“I said forget it.”

I tried the door handle. Still locked. I knocked on the door. “Hello? Anyone there? Can we come out, please?”

I heard movement. Creaking. Footsteps. The key rattled in the lock, and the door swung open to reveal Arturo. He must have swapped with Miguel in the middle of the night. “Good morning,” he said.

“Buenos días,”
I replied.

That was pretty much all we knew of each other's language.

Downstairs in the restaurant, a grumpy waitress was serving coffee and stale bread. There was nothing else to eat so I grabbed a couple of slices and a glass of cold water.

Uncle Harvey perked up after his second cup of coffee and looked around the room. “Where's Otto?”

“Don't ask me.”

He waved at Arturo. “Hey, where's the boss?
Dónde está Otto?
”

Arturo jerked his thumb at the door.

After breakfast we checked out of the hotel. Someone else had already paid the bill. Arturo carried our bags to the car and put them in the trunk.

“Dónde está Otto?”
asked my uncle again.

Arturo pointed toward the sea.

He drove us down to the harbor. A couple of fishermen were already aboard their boats. They gave us sly glances as they coiled their ropes.

Arturo led us along the dock to a red speedboat with a big outboard motor and a little cabin, just big enough for a couple of people to shelter from the rain. Some fishing rods and two wicker baskets were lying in the bottom of the boat. I wondered if they'd brought a packed lunch.

Miguel was fiddling with the engine. Otto was standing on the dock, waiting for us. “Good morning,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”

My uncle replied for both of us. “Very well, thank you.”

“Good. Now come aboard. Let's go and dig up some gold.”

“Wait a minute,” said my uncle. “We have to talk about something. I want Tom to stay here. He's too young for all this. Could Arturo put him on a bus to Lima?”

Otto looked at me for a moment, then shook his head. “No.”

“He's just a kid, Otto. He doesn't have to be involved in all this. Let him—”

“No,” repeated Otto. He said it in such a way that suggested that there was no point in arguing any further. Even so, my uncle tried to persuade him, almost begging that I should be allowed to stay behind, but Otto wouldn't budge.

So four of us boarded the boat: Otto, Miguel, my uncle, and me.
The odds aren't bad,
I thought.
Two of them and two of us. If it came to a fight, we might survive.
Sure, they had guns, but being on a boat evened things out.

Our bags stayed ashore, safely stowed in the trunk of Arturo's Toyota. I thought about the manuscript, wrapped in a shirt and zipped into my bag. Should I try to get it out and take it with me? No, that would be dumb. I didn't want to alert Otto to its value. Anyway, it was probably safer in the car than on the boat. If we managed to survive the rest of this morning, we'd just have to find some way to get it out again.

The air was bracing and cold. A strong breeze was blowing off the sea. It was a good day for sailing. If you liked danger and the taste of salt.

Further down the dock, a few weird-looking birds were squabbling over a fish. I had been watching them for a while before I realized they were pelicans. With their huge beaks they didn't look quite real, but no one else seemed at all interested in them. Pelicans were obviously just as common here as pigeons at home.

My uncle noticed what I was looking at. He said, “That's a good omen.”

“Why?”

“Pelicans. The
Pelican.
Remember?”

“Oh, yes. Of course.”

“Now we just need to see a deer.”

“A female deer.”

“Aren't they called does?”

“I don't know.”

“They are. Like in the song.” He hummed a few notes. “What's the difference between a doe and a hind?”

“You're asking the wrong person.”

“If they hadn't nicked my phone, I could look it up on the Internet.”

“Why don't you ask for it back?”

“I did. Otto said no.”

Miguel started the engine. The motor throbbed. Arturo untied the boat and threw the ropes aboard. Water churned at the stern. And we were off, reversing, then turning around and heading across the channel.

As soon as we left the shelter of the harbor, the swell picked up. The wind was stronger too. Spray splashed over the front of the boat. I was wearing a coat, but I was still cold and got soaked pretty much immediately.

Up ahead, the island looked like an enormous triangle of cheese dropped into the water, tall at one end and flat at the other.

At the northern tip of the island, where we were headed, the cliffs were at their highest. Down at the south, where the island was at its lowest, we could see a few prickles of light. As we came closer, these filled out into the silhouettes of massive buildings, which looked more like factories than houses. Two hundred thieves and murderers were confined behind those walls, guarded by jumpy men with machine guns.

Miguel took us out to sea, keeping a good distance from the prison and its harbor. Now we had no protection, and the Pacific attacked us with all its force. A great cloud of spray exploded over the front of the boat and icy water dribbled down my face.

Again and again as we went through wave after wave, torrents of water came crashing down on us, soaking through our clothes, filling our shoes.

I had been sailing a few times before out of Mystic Harbor. The sea can be rough out there and I thought of myself as quite an experienced sailor, but I'd never seen anything like this.

We plunged down into troughs so deep that I thought we'd never make it up the other side. Then I'd look up and see an even bigger wave bearing down on us, tipped with frothing white spray. I would brace myself for the boat to break apart. Then we'd be tipped onto our side and swept upward.

Up, up, up we'd go, all the way onto the crest of the wave, where we would hang for a moment, balancing like an acrobat on a trapeze, the air still, the water frothing around us, and then we'd shudder and dip and plunge down, down, down into the next trough.

I kept thinking to myself:
I should be terrified. I might die. Any second now a wave will smash this little boat apart and I'll be adrift, freezing, drowning, sucked under. Why aren't I terrified? What's wrong with me?
I don't know the answer to that, but I can tell you this: I wasn't scared. I was exhilarated. It was better than any roller coaster. Imagine biking to the top of a big hill and freewheeling down the other side, again and again, and then speed it up, and you'll have some idea of how good it was to be in that boat, crashing through those beautiful waves.

Our boat did feel very small. It wouldn't take much for a wave to turn us over and tip us out. If that happened, we wouldn't have a chance. None of us was wearing a life jacket, and even with them, we wouldn't survive for long out here. Battered by the huge waves, chilled by the icy water, we'd be dead in minutes.

I thought about John Drake, sitting in a little boat with his cousin and six other men, pulling at the oars. Their boat didn't even have a motor. How did they survive? Why weren't they smashed against the cliffs?

Otto ordered Miguel aside and took command of the boat. He steered us around the northern tip of the island and we chugged back and forth, trying to find a landing place.

We stood in a row, the four of us, staring at the cliffs, wondering what we were supposed to find here.

The sun was hidden behind a thick layer of cloud, but the sky was lighter and we could see everything now: the crags above us and the gulls circling overhead, wondering why we were disturbing their peace.

I searched for any sign of the landmarks mentioned in the manuscript. The rock shaped like a fish. The angel: her fifteen feet, her black mouth, her dark heart. But there was nothing. Just rock and cliff and water.

Nor was there anywhere to moor the boat. Even if we somehow managed to leap ashore, the cliffs were too high to climb. A man might be able to do it if he was brave and nimble enough, but not carrying a wooden chest packed with gold.

We fought through the waves for ten minutes, then another ten, and ten more, searching and searching, but we couldn't see what we were looking for. It was very cold. I was shivering. The others probably were too. Gradually I began to lose heart. I didn't know exactly what we had done or how we had managed to do it, but we must have misunderstood John Drake's instructions or missed a vital clue. The fish-shaped rock wasn't here.

We were in the wrong place. That was the only explanation.

I could see my uncle reaching the same conclusion. He was talking to Otto. They argued back and forth for a couple of minutes, then Otto nodded, wrenched the wheel around, and yanked the throttle down. We headed toward the open sea, leaving the island behind us.

I staggered across the cabin to my uncle. The wind howled and the waves threw me from side to side. I yelled at him: “What's happening?”

“We're going back,” he answered.

“Why?”

“What else can we do?”

“Shouldn't we keep looking?”

“What do you want to look at?”

I didn't have an answer to that.

“We must have made a mistake,” he said. “We'll circle the whole island, see where we went wrong. If we can't find anything, we'll go back to the hotel and look through the manuscript again.” A sudden wave threw us both against the side of the boat, and he grabbed my arm. “Hey, sit down. I don't want to lose you.”

I could have argued with him, but there didn't seem to be much point. What could I say? I could have asked for another ten or fifteen minutes, but what could we do that we hadn't already done? We'd looked everywhere. Searched everything. Uncle Harvey was right. We must have missed some vital piece of information. Perhaps John Drake had hidden the treasure's true location in a riddle or a puzzle and we'd actually come to the wrong island.

We could plow up and down the cliffs, battling the waves, but I couldn't imagine that we would find anything that we hadn't seen in the past half-hour.

I sat down. Miguel gave me another of his glances. I pretended I hadn't noticed and gave my full attention to the high cliffs, the circling gulls, the crags and crevices, saying a silent goodbye to the northernmost tip of the Isla de la Frontera.

And then I saw it.

I thought my eyes must be deceiving me. I blinked and stared, checking I wasn't making a mistake, but it didn't disappear. I shouted, “There!”

They turned to look at me, Miguel and Otto and my uncle, who was the only one to say anything. He called back, “What is it, Tom?”

“Look.” I pointed.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“That rock,” I said. “The one shaped like a fish.”

The funny thing was,
none of them believed me at first. Not even my uncle. They thought I was so desperate to find the treasure that I'd just imagined a fish in a rock where none really existed. But I insisted.

“It's there,” I said. “I saw it. We've got to go back.”

Otto looked at me for a moment, making up his mind, then nodded and turned the boat around once more. We headed back toward the cliffs.

Uncle Harvey stood beside me. In a low voice, he said, “You'd better be right.”

“I am,” I said, trying to sound much more confident than I actually felt. As soon as I'd taken my eyes off the rock, the fish had vanished. Now I had moved, and the boat had too, and the fish hadn't come back again, and I wasn't even sure which was the right rock, the one shaped like a fish. Where was it? Had I imagined the whole thing? I stared at the rocks, hoping I wasn't making a fool of myself, and then I saw it again.

“There.” I pointed. “You see?”

“No,” said Uncle Harvey.

“There.”

He followed the line of my arm, then shook his head. “I can't see it.”

“There! There! Look!”

“Tom, I'm not suggesting you're making things up, but maybe your mind is playing tricks on you. When you really want something to be true, sometimes you see it or you feel it, even if it's not actually true.”

“I'm not imagining anything. It's there! Look!”

“I am looking, Tom, and I can't . . . Oh, my God! You're right!” He turned to Otto. “He's right! There it is! Look!”

“Where? Where?” clamored Otto.

With Uncle Harvey's help, Otto saw it too, and his face broke into a big, gleeful grin.

Once you knew it was there, the fish's bulging eyes and open mouth were so obvious that you might have thought a sculptor had carved them out of the rock. The funny thing was, you could only see them from this particular angle. If we hadn't turned around and headed back toward the open sea, and I hadn't happened to look back at the cliffs at that particular moment, we would have returned to Las Lomas, never knowing how close we'd been, and the treasure would still be hidden in the angel's heart.

Ah, yes. The angel and her fifteen feet and her black heart. Where were they?

Staring at the cliffs, I saw her almost immediately. It was weird. My eyes must have gone over those exact crags ten times already, if not twenty, searching for features that resembled a fish or an angel, but I had seen nothing that looked like either. Now that I knew we were on the right track, I spotted her immediately. The fissures and stones shifted into a face, a body, two wings.

“That's her,” I said.

“Where?” asked my uncle.

“There.” I pointed. “You see?”

“No.”

“Can't you see the wings? One there. The other there. And the body in between.”