“Or, when the mark is smarter, they make the switch right in front of him, let him carry the envelope, and go to the bank with him. These things always depend on human greed. This option con, Arthur, was a more sophisticated version of the same tired old thing, with Stebber as the operator, Wilma as the roper, Gisik, Waxwell and Watts as accomplices. When they make a hit, they go to the ground. But as this one was quasi-legal, some of them had to stay out in the open-Watts and Waxwell. I suspect they got small pieces. So what we have to do is put out some bait.”
Chook scowled at me. “To get Stebber and Gisik out in the open? You don’t look like a mark, Trav. And if you run into Wilma, she knows you.‘’
“I have somebody all roped, and I need some competent help to pick him clean.”
“Who?” Arthur asked blankly.
“We’ll have to invent him. But if I have to produce him, we should have somebody in mind, somebody who could run over here at short notice and put on a good act.”
“And you do have somebody in mind, don’t you?” Chook said accusingly.
“You ever run into Roger Bliss?”
She didn’t know him. I told them about Roger. Except for an unfortunate taint of honesty, he could have become one of the great confidence men of our times: After a fine arts education, he had gone to Italy to study and paint. There he had gotten in with the movie crowd and had been put to work doing character bits. He was a natural mimic. He’d learned he’d never make it as a painter. And, in time, the movie thing bored him.
Now he owned a small expensive sales gallery in Hollywood, Florida, had nutured a profitable list of art patrons, lived well, was often restless, particularly during the slack season, and had helped me a couple of times in the past, when I needed someone who could be, on request, a convincing psychiatrist, air force colonel, college dean or Oklahoma wildcatter. He had a wicked ability of being absolutely plausible, down to the smallest mannerism and detail of dress. I would make sure he was available, just in case. And think up a cover story which would make Stebber and company salivate freely.
So we cruised up the flank of the Everglades, past the misted shoreline of the Ten Thousand Mangrove Islands. It is dark strange country, one of the few places left which man has not been able to mess up. The great river of grass starts up near Okeechobee, the widest shallowest river on the continent, and flows south. The hammocks of oak, cabbage palm, fifty other varieties of trees, are the quaking islands in the thirty-mile width of the sawgrass river.
On the broad moist banks are the silent stands of cypress. Where the tides seep up into the river, at the northernmost limits of brackishness, the dwarf mangrove starts. The Ten Thousand Islands comprise the vast steamy tidal basin where the river enters the Gulf and Florida Bay.
Man, forever stubborn, has made but a few small dents in this eternal silence. Perimeter outposts-Everglades, Marco, Flamingo, Chokoloskee. But he has never thrived. There is rich soil there, rich enough so that a hundred years ago tomatoes grown in the Everglades were bringing twenty-four dollars a case in New York during the winter season. But hurricanes thrash through, pushing salt tides that take years to leach out of the poisoned soil. The fevers, the bugs, the storms, the isolation-these things have always broken the spirits of all but the toughest, the kind of human who can describe the peak of the mosquito season as the time when you can swing a one-pint jar and catch a quart of them.
The tough Calusa Indians were there at the time Christ was born, building storm shelter islands out of the shells of the oysters and clams they ate, leaving a staggering enough tonnage of shells by the time the Spaniards totally eliminated them that miles and miles of the first rude roads into the edges of the Glades were paved with those shells.
This is the land of the great enduring myth of the Seminole. They, were a ragtag ethnic jumble, driven all the way down from Georgia and the Carolinas, until finally after the forced resettlement of most of them in the southwest, there were not two hundred and fifty left-scattered, hiding, demoralized-not worth any further military effort. For fifty years their numbers remained about the same.
Then slowly they reestablished a new culture composed of remembered fragments of many old ones, speaking pidgin versions of old tongues. They had even begun to acquire a kind of plaintive dignity, but then the white man pushed the Tamiami Trail across the Glades from Naples to Miami, eliminating them as a tribe, turning them into roadside merchants of such a vast gypsy cynicism that of all the artifacts they manufacture and sell to the tourists-not one bears any relation to their customs, habits, or prior way of life. They are the carnival Indians, degraded by commerce, curious heirs to the big colorful lie that they were never whipped, never made a truce. They are the comedy Indians who, never having tomtoms in their history, never having used the tomahawks or bows and arrows like the Plains Indians, now made vast quantities of each and sell them to people from Ohio.
Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into the draglined canals that give him “waterfront” lots to sell. As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying. All the area north of Copeland had been logged out, and will never come back. As the Glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness.
But it will take a long time to kill it. And years from now foolish men will still be able to kill themselves off within miles of help, hopelessly lost among islands which all look exactly alike. It is a black land, and like every wilderness in the world, it punishes quickly when a mistake is made, quickly and with a casual, savage indifference.
I studied the chart and picked a spot. I went beyond Marco Pass to a wide pass named Hurricane Pass. The channel was easy to read from the topside controls. The Flush draws four feet and is heavily skegged to protect the shafts and wheels. Roy Cannon Island, deserted, lies just inside the pass. It was low tide as we came in just before sunset. The pass is so wide, Roy Cannon has a sand beach. I edged a little north to get the protection of the headland which forms the north edge of the pass. At dead slow I ran the bow into the beach sand.
With Chook and Arthur helping, we put out all four anchors, the two bow ones well up on the beach, wedged into the skeletal whiteness of mangrove killed by the sand which had built up, probably after Hurricane Donna had widened the pass. I carried the stern hooks out into water neck deep, wedged them in, stomped them firm. She would rest well there, lifting free with the incoming tide, settling back at the low. I’d topped off the fuel and water at Flamingo. We swam as the sun went down, and then clouds of mosquitoes, shrill with hunger, drove us below decks to break out the bombs and drop the ones that had come in with us. It was such a hot and airless night, I started the generator and put the air-conditioning on. After dinner, over coffee, I took Arthur through the best physical descriptions of the four men that he could manage, particularly Stebber and Gisik. I wanted to be certain to know them if the names were changed.