The Island (7 page)

“Now, if Robert Redford turned up missing, the government might get in an uproar,” Florio said with a chuckle. “But the average Joe, forget it. Besides, there’s a neat little hook in the law that makes a boatowner better off if he doesn’t cry wolf and call the cops. Insurance companies usually won’t pay off in cases of ‘capture and seizure.’ So the guy whose boat disappears, if he shuts his mouth and lets everybody believe it sank, he collects in full. If he goes to the FBI and makes a case that the boat was hijacked on the high seas, he doesn’t collect a dime. You got a hundred, a hundred and fifty thousand bucks in a boat, that’s a pretty strong reason to close your eyes and blame Neptune. Or the Bermuda Triangle. Everybody wants to believe in the Bermuda Triangle.”

“Do you?”

“What’s to believe? Oh, I’ve read all the books, that it’s Atlantis and spaceships and sea monsters and underwater hurricanes. No question, a lot of stuff disappears out there. But if you held a gun to my head and said, ‘What is it?’ I’d have to say that it’s a perfect example of man and nature working at cross-purposes. It’s a
big
goddamn area. There’s not much traffic, not much communication, not much decent mapping or weather forecasting. So when Charlie Sailboat leaves Miami to cruise the Bahamas, maybe using an Atlas for charts—and some of these idiots
do
that—he’s an accident looking for a place to happen.”

“Make a wild guess for me,” Maynard said. “Off the wall. What happened to all those boats?”

Florio slid his goggles off his eyes and let them hang around his neck. He gazed out the kitchen window, apparently doing figures in his head. “A third to half of them I’d say just went down, sank: weather, stupidity, whatever. A fifth—say, a hundred and thirty boats—were taken by the grasshoppers and then scuttled or maybe taken into the Pacific. A handful—a couple of dozen at most—were stolen like you’d steal a car and then resold somewhere else. Those are the real crazies who do that, who put their ass on the line for a double or triple homicide just to sell a hot boat.” Florio stopped.

“That still leaves more than a hundred boats.”

“I know.” Florio smiled bitterly. “And it’s those boats that got me put in charge of a bunch of lighthouses.” He looked at Maynard.
“Really
off the record? No bullshit?”

Maynard nodded.

“I think somebody’s taking those boats. I don’t know who, I don’t know why, and I don’t know what they’re doing with them. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. Look . . . this isn’t anything new. I got that six hundred and ten figure just by adding. I stopped at 1974 because . . . because I stopped. I could have kept adding, year by year, back as far as you want. Sure, there are more recently, because there are more boats around. But proportionally, that many boats have been disappearing, in one small area of the world, without a trace, without explanation, for as long as people have been keeping records. What is going on down there has been going on for at least
eighty years.”

“And you think it’ll keep going on.”

“I do. Christ, it
is.
There were two more this week, y’know.”

“I didn’t see anything about that.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. There are no hard facts. The only news is, two boats didn’t show up where they said they would. Two New Jersey couples. They may turn up yet, but, knowing where they were sailing, I wouldn’t bet on it.”

“Where was that?”

“A pocket between longitude . . .” Florio stopped. “Screw it. Showing you’s easier than telling you.” He stood, and led Maynard upstairs to his study, a small, snug room lined with books and filled with ships’ paraphernalia—a bell from one ship, a binnacle from another, a set of crossed belaying pins, a brass porthole. The walls were papered with marine charts. Florio knelt behind his desk and ran his finger across a crescent chain of islands. “In here. Around the Caicos Banks.”

Maynard searched the chart for broad reference points, but found none. “Where are they?”

“Caicos? Southeast of the Bahamas, northeast of Haiti. They’re a British colony. Full name is the Turks and Caicos Islands.”

“What’s down there?”

“Shipwrecks, mainly. In the early days, the Spaniards had to pass through Turks Passage, here, or Caicos Passage, here, on their way home. The place is a mare’s nest of shipwrecks. The Banks are a real nasty trap: You’re in deep water and suddenly—bang!—the bottom shallows up to four or five feet. Bermudians used to come down and rake salt in Turks, and for a while there was a sisal industry in some of the Caicos group.”

“Hold on.” Maynard was recalling something from his reading. “I once read an argument about where, exactly, Columbus had landed in the New World, the first time. One guy said San Salvador . . .”

“Yeah. That’s up in the Bahamas.”

“. . . but the other guy kept insisting it was in what he called ‘the Caicos group.’ I didn’t know what he meant.”

“There’s not much to know. It’s a God-forsaken place. And God’s the only one who knows how many boats have gone poof down there—hundreds, for damn sure.”

“Nobody’s kept track?”

“No way to do it. And nobody gives a damn, anyway.”

“How do you get down there?”

“By air? From Miami, when there’s an airline flying. The route changes hands about every six months. They haven’t killed anybody recently, but I’d guess that’s because the planes fly so slow.”

“You ever been there?”

“No. What I hear, the most attractive thing about the place is the scorpions.” Florio looked at Maynard and perceived that something was going on in the back of Maynard’s mind. “What do
you
know about the tropical islands? Firsthand, I mean.”

“I’ve been to Nassau. I fished at Walker’s Cay once, and I scuba-dived off Eleuthera. But that was years ago.”

“I don’t know what you’re thinking of, but the Caicos isn’t Nassau. It’s about as much like Nassau as Entebbe is like New York, and just about as civilized.”

“I’m not thinking of anything,” Maynard said.

“Yes, you are. But that’s your own business.”

It was one-thirty when Maynard returned to the Air and Space museum. He had been gone nearly three hours. Justin was not on the steps outside the museum, nor in the lobby.

Maynard found him in a line of people waiting to enter the movie theater. He called to Justin from behind the velveteen rope barrier.

Justin left his place in line and ducked under the rope.

“You can see it if you want. We’re not in any rush.”

“No, I saw it already. It’s about the history of flying. It’s neat. I almost puked.” Justin pointed through the glass doors, to a building across the mall. “Can we go over there? A kid told me there’s a neat gun exhibit.”

“Sure. The plane doesn’t leave for an hour and a half.”

As they crossed the avenue, Justin took his father’s hand. When they reached the green on the other side, Maynard relaxed his grip, but Justin held on. At first, Maynard felt a twinge of discomfort; he was not accustomed to holding hands. But then, recognizing his feeling, he felt sad. In the months of separation from the boy, he had lost touch with him, had not been exposed to his son’s daily worries and needs. He had ceased to regard him as a child: Justin was a person Maynard saw every other weekend, whose company he enjoyed and with whom he had civil, entertaining, but not intimate, conversations. Now the boy seemed to want to re-establish contact. Maynard was touched and flattered and grateful. He squeezed Justin’s hand.

“That was a cool museum,” Justin said.

“Good.” Maynard wanted to say more, but he didn’t know what or how.

They skirted the sunken sculpture garden by the Hirshhorn Gallery and headed for a gabled brown-brick building.

“What’s the exhibit?”

“The centennial something.”

“You mean
bi
centennial.”

“No. Centennial. That’s what the kid said.”

As part of the bicentennial celebration, the Smithsonian had reassembled a hall of exhibits that had been shown during the centennial celebration in 1876. It had been scheduled to close in early ’77, but had proved so popular that the institution had let it run.

There were cases of clothing, machinery, housewares, ships’ fittings, foodstuffs and medicines, and, in the rear of the building, an assembly of every weapon known to mid-nineteenth-century man: camel-mounted Gatling guns, mortars, tomahawks, Bowie knives, Derringers, and cannons. On a wall, in an enormous glass case, was a presentation set of Colt firearms.

Justin stood before the case, his eyes consuming each weapon, his imagination carrying him to battlefields and Indian camps and cattle drives.

Maynard’s mind wandered backward, to his conversation with Michael Florio. He repeated to himself questions and answers, recited numbers. Every question for which there was a satisfactory answer led inevitably to the one for which there was not even a credible hint.

“That’s my favorite,” Justin said, pointing to a percussion rifle with a six-shot revolving chamber. “I’ve never seen one of those before.”

“They’re rare. They didn’t last long.”

“Why not? They fired six shots. The others only fired one.”

“Yeah, but Winchester came along with their repeater that used cartridges instead of cap-and-ball. The trouble with the percussion rifles was that when one chamber went off, it sometimes set off all the others. People kept losing eyes and blowing off their left hands.” Maynard looked at his watch. “Let’s go.”

There was no traffic on the road to National Airport, and they arrived with twenty minutes to spare. On their way to the Eastern Shuttle gate, they passed a National Airlines lounge where a crowd was boarding a flight to Miami. Maynard stopped.

“What’s the matter?” Justin asked.

Maynard didn’t reply. His mind was a mess of impulses and doubts and hunches and rationalizations. Common sense commanded that they return to New York, shelve the boat-disappearance story. Think it through. Talk to Hiller. That was the way of safety and self-preservation. But somewhere in his mind he was driven by the thought that what he would return to in New York might not be worth preserving. The choice was not between safety and risk; it was between reaching for something and resigning himself to nothing.

He took Justin’s hand. “Come on.” He turned into the National lounge.

“That’s not our plane!”

“It is now.”

“Why?”

“Why not? You ever been to Miami?”

“I don’t even know where it is!”

“Twelve years old, and you don’t know where Miami is? Well, it’s time you learned.”

Justin allowed himself to be pulled along. “Chee! Mom is gonna
kill
me!”

“Why do you keep saying that? She’s never killed you yet. Besides, we’ll have you back before she knows you’re gone.”

Maynard took his American Express card from his wallet and approached the ticket desk.

C H A P T E R
5

“I
don’t even have a toothbrush.”

“We’ll buy you one. People in Florida brush their teeth.”

It was the tenth objection Justin had raised, and Maynard had answered, so far during the flight. The objections were not serious or considered, Maynard was sure; Justin was excited, and also was seeking reassurance by verbalizing every conceivable problem that might arise from a spontaneous departure from established routine. As his father solved, or explained how he would later solve, each problem, the boy grew more at ease.

“What’re we gonna
do
down there, anyway?”

“Fool around. See a few people. Ask a few questions. Maybe go sight-seeing.”

“When are you gonna grow up, Dad?”

Startled, Maynard said, “Hey, that’s not you talking, is it? That’s good old Mom.”

Justin blushed.

“Never mind. Why’d you ask? What makes you think I’m not grown up? I saw an ad for
Playboy
the other day, and they think I’m over the hill. After thirty-four, you’re not even worth market research.”

“Grownups don’t do things like this.” Justin gestured at the plane.

“Grownups can’t have fun?”

“Mom says you don’t like yourself very much any more. That’s why you stay at
Today
and do ‘Trends.’ ”

Maynard tried to think of a snappy, jocular response, but he couldn’t. He felt embarrassed and angry—angry especially, because he and Devon had agreed never to speak disparagingly of one another to their son. “Now look, Justin . . .”

Justin reached over and, tentatively, took Maynard’s hand.
“I
like you. Don’t you like yourself?
I
like you.”

“Hey, buddy . . .” Maynard patted Justin’s hand and looked away. After a moment, he said, “I’ll tell you. I work at
Today
for a lot of reasons. They pay me well, and we have to eat. I’m good at what I do there, as good as anybody can be, and that’s something. It’s not a bad job. There are a lot of people who’d
love
to write for
Today.”

“Do you want to do something else?”

Maynard smiled. “You mean, when I grow up?”

Justin looked sheepish. “Yeah.”

“I don’t know. I think about it, and sometimes I try not to think about it. It’s easier to think about what you are than what you’re not. If there’s one person in the world I’d like to be like, it’s Samuel Eliot Morison.’”

“Who’s he?”

“He traveled everywhere and saw everything, and what he couldn’t see because it was in the past he read about and tried to relive, and then he wrote books telling everybody else about what he’d learned.”

“You want to write stories.”

“True stories. That’s one reason we’re going to Florida.”

Justin nodded, apparently satisfied with the explanation.

“What do you want to be, Mr. Inquisitor?” Maynard asked. “Do you ever think about it?”

“Sometimes. When I was young, I wanted to be bionic, but now I’m not so sure.”

As soon as they landed in Miami, Maynard dispatched Justin to buy some comic books and an evening paper. He was hoping there would be details about the missing New Jersey couples. Meanwhile, he went to a counter labeled “Courtesy Desk.” An ebullient young woman—with dyed blond hair, a Barbie Doll face, and aspirations to a Dolly Parton figure—smiled at him and announced, “Hi! I’m Ginny! How can I help you?”