Crackdown

  The Maggot at last appeared in the far doorway. He strolled towards me as though he had all the time in the world, even stopping to chat to the men in white overalls, then wandering with blithe unconcern around the plane as he inspected its wings and tail. “Nothing’s fallen off,” he reassured me as he climbed into the cabin, “and we’ve got clearance for Fort Lauderdale.”

  “Thank Christ for that.”

  “Not that we’re going to Fort Lauderdale, of course. I thought we might visit Coffinhead Porter instead. Do you know Coffinhead?”

  I knew Coffinhead, though not as well as the Maggot did. Coffinhead was a Bahamian who had become rich through years of lucrative smuggling, though of late he had retired to a small, but legitimate, marina in the Berry Islands from which he ran a very quick fishing boat and a fleet of diving boats. Coffinhead, whose nickname arose from his oddly elongated and boxlike skull, had sometimes helped out our charter clients by taking them to dive on some especially exotic coral reef, but so far as I knew Coffinhead Porter was not a lawyer, so he could not fight a murder charge on my behalf, and nor did Coffinhead Porter own an airline, so he could not fly me away from Deacon Billingsley’s vengeance. “Just why the hell are we going to see Coffinhead?” I asked the Maggot in a very bitter voice.

  “Because Senator Crowninshield’s there, of course,” the Maggot said as though that was the most obvious answer in all the world, “so hold on to your underwear and we’ll see if this thing flies.”

  The thing flew, and it felt wonderful as the wheels left the ground and, second by second, we climbed higher into a police-free sky. Yet I knew there would be more policemen wherever I landed, and I wondered if I would ever be free of their pursuit. I stared regretfully down at the impossibly blue sea that was scarred with the white wakes of pleasure boats and tried to make sense of all the things that had happened to me since the morning. Nothing clicked into place, nothing. “What on earth is Crowninshield doing at Coffin-head’s place?” I asked the Maggot.

  “He wants to see you. Perhaps he likes you?” The Maggot offered me a suggestive simper.

  “Maggot, what the hell is happening?”

  He looked at me as though I was mad. “What the hell do you think is happening? The senator wants to get his children back. He’s asked me to help him, and I said I wouldn’t do it unless you were included in the fun and games. That’s why I know Ellen isn’t at Streaker’s Cay, because I went there to find you.”

  “Does the senator know where the twins are?”

  “Of course he does!” The Maggot was astonished that I needed to ask.

  I felt the day’s first pulse of hope, though it was a very feeble pulse. If the senator knew where the twins were, then that was surely the place where Jesse Sweetman could be found, and where Jesse Sweetman was, so also was Ellen, if she was alive. As a straw it was not very strong, but it was something to cling on to all the same. “How the devil did the senator find out?” I asked.

  “He didn’t find out. You did.” He banked towards the south, lancing bright sunlight across the cockpit. Cool air was at last venting out of the nozzles.

  “I did?” The world was out of joint.

  “There,” the Maggot pointed to one of the back seats where, among his papers and guns, a brown envelope lay.

  I opened the envelope to find that it held a sheaf of black and white photographs. They were the pictures I had taken of Murder Cay on the last occasion that I had flown with the Maggot.

  They were not good photographs. One was a distant view of the island, but the picture was so hazed by heat that it was difficult to see anything except the outline of surf and coral and a mass of palm trees on the island itself. There was a reasonable photograph of the dog-leg entrance channel, and there was a perfect picture of two of the island’s houses, which looked much bigger than I remembered, and both of which had lavish swimming pools, tennis courts, elegant landscaping, white stone terraces and satellite dishes on their pantiled roofs; but most of the other pictures were horribly blurred, though I could just make out one of the two trucks which had been parked to block the island’s runway and, beyond the truck, the elongated painted cross at the end of the airstrip.

  “I grant you’re good at blowing away narcotraficantes,” the Maggot grinned at me, “but you’re pure dogshit with a camera.”

  I grunted acknowledgement of that truth as I sifted quickly through the rest of the prints, many of which had been flared into obscurity by the bloom of the sun’s reflection on the plane’s windscreen. The very last picture in the pile was the one I had snapped just as the Maggot had desperately sideslipped to evade the machine-gun fire. As a consequence the picture was skewed and one edge was a blur which I assumed was a part of the plane’s cockpit. I had been trying to photograph the boats in the island’s anchorage, but all I had captured was a sailing yacht and a white working boat with a stubby little wheelhouse. The shadows of the boats showed dark on the pale clear sand of the lagoon’s bed. I looked at the Maggot who was lighting himself a cigarette. “So?” I asked. I had rarely seen a worse set of photographs, and I did not understand how they could possibly have identified Murder Cay as the place where the senator’s twins had taken refuge.

  “Have a look at that last picture again,” the Maggot shouted above the engine noise. I looked. It was the skewed and blurred photograph which showed the yacht and the working boat. “How many boats can you see?” the Maggot asked me with evident enjoyment.

  “Two.”

  “And how many shadows on the lagoon bed?”

  I looked, I counted, then I blasphemed. “Good God,” I said in wonderment.

  “Bingo.” The Maggot grinned at me. “Two boats, but three shadows. Well snapped, Nick.”

  I gazed at the photograph. At a casual glance there did indeed seem to be just the two boats in the picture, but three solid hulls were indisputably shadowed on the sandy sea-bed, and the moment I noticed that third shadow I saw the third boat that was floating just above and to one side of it. That third boat was a sports-fisherman which had been camouflaged with dazzle paint, and the camouflage had melded the boat into the sun-chopped water and rippled lagoon-bed sand with an extraordinary efficiency. It was Dream Baby and, once disentangled from her background, she was so glaringly obvious that I wondered how I had ever missed her with my first casual look. I could even make out the antennae splaying from her upperworks and the white straps on her fighting chair.

  “You found Dream Baby,” the Maggot said. “She ain’t there now, of course, but she was the day that you and I flew over Murder Cay, and I’ll bet you a case of whores to a thimble of cold beer that your friend Sweetman lives on Murder Cay.”

  And Billingsley, I remembered, had a house on Murder Cay, which explained why the Maggot had been so sure that the policeman was behind the attempt to murder me. It all made sense. Sweetman wanted to cover his tracks, and he had called in his favours from the big policeman to do it. And Ellen? I closed my eyes in sudden fear. “How do you know Dream Baby’s not there now?” I asked the Maggot in an attempt to take my mind off Ellen.

  “Because the senator pulled strings in Washington, and he got some surveillance photographs taken two mornings ago. They’re in that blue folder.”

  The folder bore the embossed seal of the Drug Enforcement Administration. I pulled it out from under the canvas bag that held the Russian machine-gun and extracted the photographs. The first picture showed the whole anchor-shaped island surrounded by the coral reefs of the Devil’s Necklace. The next picture was an oblique view of the eight lavish houses that were built on the anchor’s shank, then there was a set of prints showing details of the individual houses which, like the palaces of ancient Rome, were built about pillared courtyards. They had swimming pools, tennis courts, private docks, servants’ quarters and terraced views across the western part of the lagoon. The largest house was topped by a blunt tower which sported a small radar aerial. There had once been a ninth house, closer to the airstrip and bui
lt right on the beach, but at some time that house had been half demolished and its ruins now stood like some part-excavated archaeological site. The remaining eight houses all stood on the western side of the narrow spit of land, while the eastern half formed a long and narrow nine-hole golf course, complete with sand traps and beside which a skeletal radio mast sprang incongruously from a stretch of sandy wasteland.

  The prints were all in colour. The shadows in the photographs stretched westward, and the sprinklers on the golf course were venting huge sprays that sparkled in the low-angled sunlight. None of the householders was visible, only their servants. A maid swept a tiled terrace with a besom. A black gardener watered urns of flowers, while another man scooped leaves from a swimming pool with a long-handled net. A cook washed some fruit in a back yard while, beside her on the edge of a well, a tabby cat yawned. Clearly none of the servants had been aware of the surveillance aircraft that must have been tens of thousands of feet high, yet still the pictures were of a startling clarity; I could even see a clutch of tennis balls lying discarded in the corner of a court, while in another photograph I could read the title of a newspaper, El Espectador, that had been discarded on an upholstered lounger beside a tiled pool. More ominous was the photograph of a jeep that had a half-inch Browning machine-gun mounted on a pintle in its rear bed.

  “Some place, eh?” the Maggot said. “You have to be a drug-smuggler or a quarterback to be rich enough to own one of those houses.”

  “And you think Sweetman owns them?”

  “No!” The Maggot was scathing. “The island belongs to a Colombian family called the Colons!” He grinned his pleasure at the Spanish name which was amusing only in English. “They manufacture cocaine and smuggle it to the Bahamas. Sweetman works for them, and the senator thinks he must own one of the houses. We do know that Deacon Billingsley and the cabinet minister have each got a house on the island, while the biggest house, the one with the radar aerial, belongs to the Colon family. You met Miguel Colon. He was the charmer who helped Sweetman sink your boat.”

  And a charmer, I thought, who had arranged some wonderful insurance for his family. Not only did one of the Bahamas’ most senior policemen have a vacation mansion in this drug lord’s private paradise, but a cabinet minister was housed there as well. Doubtless the Americans would love to have searched Murder Cay; they would want to swamp the island with their screaming Blackhawk helicopters and Blue Thunder patrol boats, and send in drug-sniffing dogs and men in bullet-proof vests carrying bullhorns and rifles. The Americans doubtless wanted a mini Grenada or Panama and they would probably have arrested anyone on Murder Cay who was found in possession of so much as an unlicensed aspirin, but they were helpless as long as they needed Bahamian permission to operate on Bahamian soil, because the Colon family had the insurance of having a top policeman and a senior politician on their payroll.

  “So”—I looked at the Maggot—”the senator is going in on his own?”

  “No.” The Maggot grinned. “He wants us to go in with him.”

  “Jesus,” I said; not swearing, but praying. I was thinking of that half-inch Browning mounted on the jeep pintle.

  The Maggot grinned at me. “The senator’s paying well! And if you’re anything like me then a bit of cash won’t come amiss.”

  But I would not help the senator because of his money. Instead I was remembering my feeble straw of hope that perhaps Ellen was still alive and being held captive by Sweetman. The hope blossomed impossibly, for I could not bear to think of her dead. I stared westwards across the heat-hazed sea. Somewhere over there was the island where perhaps Ellen was being held. Perhaps. Beneath me, their prows sharp as blades, American warships sliced the blue water to cream.

  Twenty minutes later the Beechcraft’s wheels thumped down from the wings as we circled to get downwind of our landing field. I felt the sweat prickle at my skin. I was frightened that the police would be waiting for me. “Fear not”—the Maggot sensed my apprehension—”for I am with thee.” He grinned, then launched into his customary litany of landing. “Thank you for flying Maggovertski Airways; please return the stewardess her pantyhose and restore her to the upright position, and kindly pray that the tyres don’t blow.”

  The wheels bounced and spewed smoke.

  The tyres did not shred on the coral, nor were any police waiting. There was only a taxi that we loaded with the guns, and which then took us to find the senator.

  George Crowninshield was waiting for us in the palm-thatched office of Coffinhead’s small marina. He looked horribly out of place for, despite his media-advisers’ insistence that he dress in cowboy boots and drench his speeches in down-home folksiness, he was not a man who was at home with the common folk. The senator was more of a white-wine-and-finger-food politician than a cakes-and-ale populist. He was also missing his herd of advisers and aides, for he was quite alone in the small office. “I’m not here on official business,” he explained his solitary state, “but privately, just as I was when I first came to see you about the twins.” He shook my hand. “Thank you for coming, Nick. Truly, thank you.”

  I forbore to say that two dead Bahamian policemen had given me small choice in the matter. Instead I shrugged away his thanks and asked just what exactly he wanted of me. “I don’t want any trouble, Nick, you understand that? No trouble! I just want to visit Murder Cay tonight and talk to the twins and see if they’ll come away.” He stared through the window to where the Maggot was unloading the green canvas bags from the boot of the taxi. “And it would be just great if you could come and help me,” the senator added.

  I thought of the fearsome firepower that the Colon family would undoubtedly unleash in defence of Murder Cay. “Why don’t you just telephone the twins?” I asked him.

  “I’ve tried.” The poor man was desperately nervous, but that was understandable for it was not every day that a father sought a confrontation with drug-runners. “There’s only one telephone line on to the island and the man who answers pretends not to understand me. I even had a Spanish-speaking staff member try for me, but she got nowhere. We were lucky,” he suddenly added.

  “Lucky?” I did not follow the train of thought.

  “That the photograph you took showed that camouflaged boat.”

  The senator was even luckier, I thought, that the Maggot had thought to inform him of the photograph. Which was odd, in a way, for the Maggot seemed to have no liking for the senator. “Are you quite sure the twins are on the island?” I asked the senator.

  “It seems the obvious solution.” Crowninshield was sweating profusely. “We think that Rickie wants to buy one of the empty houses. He could live in a drug heaven, you see, but he can’t have bought the house yet because he doesn’t inherit his money till next week.”

  “And is that why we’re going to Murder Cay?” I challenged him. “To protect your family’s fortune? And to make sure you don’t lose the half-million dollars you put up for Rickie’s bail?”

  Crowninshield looked angry and flushed, and I thought for a second that he was about to protest at my accusations, but instead he suddenly seemed to crumple inside. “Probably,” he admitted, “and why not? You think I should just let the money go?”

  I had nothing to say, so kept silent. The senator frowned at me, seeking to broaden his justification for going to Murder Cay. “But it isn’t just money, Nick. If there was no money involved, and only my children’s lives at stake, I’d still go. Even if by going I lose my career, it’s still something I have to do.” He stopped, evidently seeking words that would convince me, and when he spoke again his voice was more measured, as though making the speech was calming his frayed nerves. “I simply want to reach my children and talk to them, Nick, and perhaps persuade them to make another effort to live without drugs. I’m not going as a senator, I’m not doing anything official, I’m just a father trying to save his kids.” He smiled ruefully, offering a glimpse of his famous charm. “Everyone on my staff says I’m mad. They say that what I’m
doing today is political suicide, and perhaps it is, but Robin-Anne and Rickie are my kids, and no one else will save them.”

  There had been a noble and convincing ring of truth to his words, but I was still not wholly persuaded. “And the twins are worth the White House?”

  He stared at me, a half-frown of puzzlement on his handsome face. “You’re not a father?”

  “No.”

  “If you were a father,” he said heavily, “you would know.”

  The door of the office opened and the Maggot, grinning broadly, staggered in under the weight of the assorted machine-guns and ammunition, which he dumped on Coffinhead’s table. George Crowninshield scowled at the awesome display of weaponry. “I’m sure we’re not going to need all that firepower, Mr Maggovertski.”

  “The trick of kicking ass, senator, is to equip yourself with a very heavy boot. And some bullet-proof vests.” The Maggot carried three flak-jackets that he now added to the arsenal.

  Like the senator I stared with some alarm at the guns. “I thought you didn’t want any trouble.”

  “I suppose we ought to be ready for trouble?” the senator said tentatively.

  “Then buy some yachting smoke-flares off Coffinhead,” I advised him, “because if those bastards start shooting then the best thing we can do is hide, not shoot back. Or else we get in the plane and get the hell out of there!”

  “We’re not flying there,” the Maggot said. “Remember those trucks they keep parked on the runway? If we fly there, Nick, we’ll all be hamburger meat by midnight. No, we’re renting one of Coffinhead’s inflatables.”