The Island

  Maynard pointed at the eagle. “Don’t let me stop you.”

  “Good.” Florio drained his beer and put on a pair of goggles and attacked the eagle with a slender chisel held between his fingertips. “They still call me, you know.”

  “Who does?”

  “The relatives of the missing ones. They know I cared—I did, too—and they think I can help. I can’t, but they think I can. It tears you up, seeing how they go on hoping.”

  “Can anybody? Help, I mean.”

  Florio shook his head. “The bitch of it is, there’s no cover-up or anything; it’s not like Watergate. It’s just . . .” He looked up. “I don’t know what it is. It’s like the Coast Guard says, ‘If we can find you easily, we will. If we can’t, tough titty. If you send us a radio message that you’re in trouble, we’ll bust our hump for you’—and I tell you, those guys are magicians when they get their act together—‘but if you disappear without a trace, well, good riddance.’ They’re a policeman on a beat, not a missing-persons bureau.”

  “Six hundred and ten boats! There’s got to be some answer.”

  “Sure, a bunch of them. You know some; you told me on the phone. There’s more: badly built boats that people take where they shouldn’t, people who sink their own boats for the insurance and then drown before they can be picked up, freak weather. One boat here, one boat there, they’re all good answers. But you’re right: more than six hundred goddamn boats! How many more, no one knows. Look at Marita, just the other day. That one’s a good and a bad example, by the way.”

  “How so?”

  “Good, because she was a sturdy boat, well built and well maintained, sailed by a captain with a master’s ticket—by law he was qualified to drive the frigging QE II—and manned by a crew of first-rate professionals. She sank, if she sank, on a flat-calm day, with a loss of all hands. I tell you, in those conditions a baby could’ve floated around on a seat cushion for three days and still come out of it okay. She’s a bad example because she was a Bahamas-registered boat, and the Coast Guard doesn’t give a rat’s ass what happened to her.”

  “Do they have any theories?”

  “Oh sure. They figure she either hit a reef and sank, or else one of her engines blew up. But you have to try to blow up a diesel engine, and if you do, it’s gonna scatter trash all over the frigging place. But there’s no debris. And if she went up on a reef and sank, why didn’t anybody get to shore? They say sharks. Shee-it!” Florio picked up a dental drill, turned it on, and held his breath while he probed delicately at one of the eagle’s eye sockets.

  He blew bone dust away from the eagle’s eye and said, “The Banshee was a better example. She was registered in Wilmington, owned by a guy who made a bundle in cedar shingles. They had been fishing for a month, dicking around between Puerto Rico and Haiti, trying to raise a record marlin. The owner, he flew home from Port-au-Prince, and the captain started back with the boat. He radioed ahead to Mayaguana that he’d be there by nightfall. That’s the last anybody ever heard from him or the boat. Good weather, two mates who’d been with him for fifteen years, no hitchhikers. The Coast Guard thought maybe the captain had ditched her and split for parts unknown. But look here: The man made thirty thousand a year, plus half the charter fees for when the owner wasn’t using the boat, plus free private-school education for his three kids, plus a house in Fort Lauderdale. Man, he could have gone to Palau and not found a deal like that.”

  “What’s your answer . . . for either boat?”

  “I don’t have one. The drug thing is a possibility. They were both long-legged boats, had a range of a thousand miles or more. They’d be prizes for the grasshoppers. But I know for a fact that the skipper of Banshee carried guns aboard, so I don’t believe he was hijacked. Even if he was—even if they both were—that leaves six hundred and nine others. One boat has been disappearing every other day for three years. That’s how it averages out, like the population clock downtown: every so often, bingo!, roll over another one. Tell you the truth, I don’t think anybody’s ever going to know what happened to those boats. Not to all of them . . . not to half of them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Another beer?”

  Florio began with the simple explanations: the difficulty of patrolling vast expanses of open ocean, the ignorance and carelessness of the new breed of sailor, the incomprehensible magnetic disturbances that rendered compasses and radios useless, and the sudden savagery of weather, the full potential of which was still only a matter of conjecture.

  “You heard of rogue waves? Some people call them superwaves.”

  “No.”

  “Waves travel in what are called trains, sequences with different distances between crest and trough. Every now and again, the trains get in step. Three or four of them crest and trough together. The waves they make are monsters. Some of them go a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet high, and they come out of nowhere. They only last for a minute or so—the trains fall out of step pretty quick—but that’s all it takes. There’s a tanker, say, plowing along nice and easy through twenty-foot seas. All of a sudden, right in front of him, roaring down on him at fifty or sixty miles an hour, is a ten-story-high wall of black water. The hole in front of these things is sometimes deeper than the tanker is long, so he finds himself steaming straight down, with a mountain or water—millions and millions of tons of dead-weight water—ready to break on top of him.”

  “It breaks them apart?”

  “Some. Others can’t slow their own momentum. They just keep steaming on down. The ocean swallows them.” Florio took a sip of beer and searched through the rubble on the table for a small, spoon-bladed chisel. “Then there are collisions.”

  “Most of them are reported, though.”

  “Really? Couple of years ago, a tanker pulled into Long Beach, California. Easy passage from the Orient, everything fine. One of the longshoremen said, ‘What happened to your anchor, Cap?’ ‘What do you mean?’ says the captain. ‘Have a look,’ says the guy. The captain goes ashore and looks at his bows, and wrapped around his starboard anchor is a full set of sails and rigging.”

  “They never felt anything? Heard anybody call out?”

  “Feel what? A hundred-and-thirty-thousand-ton ship tooling along at twenty-five knots? He wouldn’t feel anything, he wouldn’t see anything, he wouldn’t hear anything—even if he had visual and radar lookouts on duty ’round the clock, which he did. On a rough sea on a bad night, a big ship and a small sailboat are pretty much invisible to each other. The sailors never knew what hit them.”

  Florio moved on to enumerate a maze of jurisdictional confusions that muddied maritime affairs: The FBI had authority when there was evidence of a federal crime, but precious few facilities with which to investigate crimes committed on the high seas; the Drug Enforcement Administration could act on suspicion of a narcotics violation, but if smuggling was involved, then customs got into the act, too; many boats disappeared in the territorial waters of a foreign power, triggering interest from the State Department and Interpol. Always, the Coast Guard was in the middle, hamstrung.

  And more often than not, the result of the interagency squabbling was inaction. After all, on a global scale the loss of an occasional boat and a few lives was not an issue of great public concern.

  “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 t
he 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 bicentennial.”

  “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.”