There was a lull in the storm when we got back to Bahia Mar. I parked and locked the station wagon, took Meyer to my place, then took the car keys back to Wendy aboard the ‘Bama Gal.
“Stay with Meyer,” she told me. “Stay close to him. Don’t let him be by himself too much.”
When I got back to the Flush I found Meyer fixing himself a very stiff arrangement of Boodles gin and ice. “Sleep insurance,” he said. I fixed one half that size for myself, and we went up to the topside controls, under the shelter of the overhead there. He swiveled the starboard chair around and stared through the night toward the place where, for years, The John Maynard Keynes had been berthed. He hoisted his glass in a half salute. “Damn boat,” he said. “Bad lines. Cranky. Not enough freeboard.”
So we drank to the damn boat.
In a little while, in a very gravelly voice, Meyer said, “I feel gutted. Everything was aboard her. All my files and records. Copies of all the papers I’ve had published. All the speeches I’ve given, except the ones I updated and took to Toronto. Letters from the long dead. From my father. From old friends. Photographs. My professional library. Unanswered letters. My address book. I feel as if, on some strange level, I’ve ceased to exist. I’ve lost so many proofs of my existence.”
“Safety deposit box?”
“Yes. A few things there. Passport, birth certificate, bearer bonds.” He swiveled the chair back around so the dock light angled across the right side of his face. “It’s so damned senseless! I had nothing to do with the overthrow of Allende. What is that word used by the agencies? Destabilization. When I was in Santiago, the military was busy returning to private ownership the hundreds of companies nationalized by Allende and badly run by Allende’s people. Who is most hurt by hyperinflation? The old, the poor. So I helped them as much as I could. We devised and recommended the controls, enough controls to put a leaky lid on inflation without stifling initiative. Nobody in Toronto had ever heard of that group. What do they call themselves?”
“The Liberation Army of the Chilean People. Two men will be here to talk to you in the morning. They were here this afternoon. I couldn’t give them much help.”
“Who has jurisdiction?”
“Hard to say. State of Florida. Coast Guard. Federal agencies. The State Attorney’s people are investigating, but they aren’t what you’d call eager.”
“Can we find out, Travis, the two of us?”
I tried not to show reluctance as I said, “I promised you we’d give it a try.”
He was still there when I went to bed. He’d made a fresh drink. He knew how to lock up. After I turned the bed lamp off, I kept thinking about Meyer. The fates were trying to grind him down. And almost doing the job.
The hard rains had begun again. Soon I heard water running in the head, saw a light under the door. Then it went out. I knew he’d sleep.
I reconstructed from memory the bilge of The John Maynard Keynes, the twin engines, the shafts and gas tanks-gasoline, not diesel. I marked the mental spot where I would place the heavy charge, right where the heat of it would turn the two gas tanks into additional explosive force, going up simultaneously with the charge, blowing the boat to junk and splinters. Perhaps it had been detonated by a timer. But how could whoever planted it be certain the boat would be out in relatively deep water when the timed instant arrived?
Had it blown at the dock with that much force, it would have taken the neighbor vessels as well, and a lot more than three lives. People who have tried to put bombs on airliners have used timers or fuses that worked on reduced atmospheric pressure. A bomb aboard a little pleasure boat couldn’t reasonably be hooked up to the depth finder.
Interesting problem. What does a boat do out in deep water that it doesn’t do at the dock? Answer: It pitches and tosses. Very good, McGee. So you use a battery and you get a very stiff piece of wire or leaf spring and you solder a weight to the end of it. It will not bend down to touch the contact, closing the circuit, firing the cap that fires the charge, until it has started oscillating in rough water. That would be efficient, because the whole device could be selfcontained and would take only a moment to place below decks. It could have been placed there while they were gassing up at Pier 66.
What if out in the channel somebody came from the opposite direction, throwing a big wash? Okay, so it was a little more sophisticated, perhaps. It had a counting device, a cogwheel arrangement. On the twentieth big lift and drop, or the fiftieth, bah-room!
And maybe it had been stowed aboard weeks before Norma and Evan arrived. Maybe a fake factory rep inspecting the new sniffer Meyer had installed had brought it aboard back in January, tucked it into the recess aft of one of the tanks.
When the mind starts that kind of spinning, sleep becomes impossible. So I wrenched my thoughts away from explosives and thought about Annie Renzetti, about all her sweetness and unexpected strength. I reinvented her, bit by bit, portion by portion, and went trotting down after her, into sleep.
Four
THE NEXT morning came with a black sky low enough to touch, and about the time I heard Meyer in the shower, the two men from Washington returned. The big natty one with the white hair and red cheeks was Warner Housell, and he called himself a staff person on Senator Derregrand’s AntiTerrorist Committee, and the terrier type with the hair-piece and the hearing aid was Rowland Service, a specialist from the Treasury Department.
They both carried dark brown dispatch cases with brass hardware. I told them Meyer would be out in a few minutes, and would they like coffee, and they said they would, no sugar no cream. They were less friendly with each other than they had been the previous afternoon.
Meyer came out wearing a bathrobe and a headache, and after I had introduced him, he poured himself some coffee and put a chip of ice in it so he could get to it quicker.
Warner Housell asked the questions. Since he had last called on me, he had briefed himself on Meyer’s career, and he was properly respectful. He just took a few quick dabs at Meyer’s background and then said, “How did you get involved in the Santiago conference?”
“I was invited by the chairman. Dr. Isling from the London School of Economics. I imagine there was some sort of selection process, but I don’t know what it was. It was an interesting group.”
“Had you been associated with any of the members before?”
“Only very indirectly. Good people. Academics with a good sense of what is practical, of what might actually work.”
“Are you aware of and have you expressed any opinions in your speeches or your writings about the way the military regime treats dissidents?”
“I’ve expressed no opinions except to friends, like Travis McGee here. Yes, I’ve been aware of the reports of violations of human rights.”
He turned to me. “Can you recall any such opinions expressed by Dr. Meyer?”
“Not in his exact words. We’ve discussed what he calls the Shah of Iran paradox. When you crush a rebellion by killing people who are trying to overthrow your government and install their own, at what point are you violating their human rights, and at what point are they violating yours? The Shah let Khomeini escape to Paris. And Batista let Castro leave the country. At what point on the scale are people dissidents, and at what point does it become armed rebellion?”