“When you say the boat’s worth nothing to you,” Cooper said, “it’s the public property of the British Virgin Islands ‘you,’ correct?”
“Oh, yeah, mon, nothin’ but.”
“Just clarifying the rules of the gray zone.”
“And ain’t that nice of you, mon. You know, it turn out, after a bit o’ interrogation, this smuggler tell me the contraband you just took fifteen percent of is one shipment among many in a pipeline of antiquities flowin’ south to north. He takes a few transport deals, stays out of it other than that.”
“Out of curiosity,” Cooper said, “you planning on telling me anytime soon what it is you want me to do?”
Roy, smiling, made a sweeping gesture toward the sprawling, sunlit view of Road Town. “Take a look-lovely place, ain’t it? Yeah, mon.”
Cooper refused to turn. “Had a look on the way in,” he said. “I’ve had a thousand looks on a thousand ways in.”
“Movin’ back from the water, though, it get worse, eh, mon? Roads gettin’ some potholes, people hungry too. Conditions not be the best among the entire population.”
Cooper yawned.
“Seem to me,” Roy said, “somebody knowin’ the kind of people you know might be capable o’ findin’ us a fence, or a buyer-maybe one willin’ to pony up top dollar for the native treasure trove you just finished pillagin’. Nobody need be tellin’ you how far that money’d go toward helpin’ us rebuild our strugglin’ little village by the sea.”
Cooper felt the urge to ask Roy a question-Native treasure trove of which natives?-but he let it go, since there would have been no rational way that Roy could have known the answer. Plus, it was an answer Cooper wondered why he felt curious enough to ask about at all.
Leave it alone, he heard himself think.
“Took you long enough,” Cooper said, “to get to that nifty little word.”
Roy grinned. “‘Fence’?”
“Yeah,” Cooper said. “Fence.”
Cap’n Roy stood, replaced his cap, and flipped open a Nextel phone.
“Come on down,” he said into it, “and take Cooper back to the beach.”
Cooper snuck a look out the window. The fireboat was easing off on its dousing of the yacht with its arcing spray, the geyser from the fire hose going limp. The SCUBA divers were climbing out of their boat onto the Marine Base dock. The show, it seemed, was winding to a close.
“Any interest,” Roy said, “in seein’ the smuggler? I’m set to sit down with ’im again, see if there’s anythin’ else useful he know might be good for me to know too.”
Cooper lifted the heavy bag of idols, hearing the clunk again as he picked it up.
“I’ll pass,” he said.
“Riley give you some photos for the road. We snapped every little thing in the treasure trove. Got ’em from every angle-eBay-ready, mon,” he said.
Cooper, standing, saw that Riley now stood in the doorway down the end of the hall.
He looked down at his sack of contraband. I could take this with me and decide later. Give Chief Minister Roy a call from his bungalow, tell him he’d be taking a pass on the fencing assignment, and ship the pirated goods back by way of the Lieutenant Riley shuttle. Or, if the mood struck, he could make a few calls, toss his bag of goodies in for a commission fee, and call himself even on his poker losses.
Deciding he was too thick with lethargy to undertake any brash decision making just yet-Always good, he thought, to keep your options open-he heaved the sack over his shoulder.
Without so much as shaking hands or otherwise offering Cap’n Roy any form of farewell, Cooper left the chief minister’s office, ambled down the hallway, and out past Riley into the blinding sun. He held his free thumb up and out as he passed Riley. Hitching a ride.
Riley followed him down to the dock.
5
The next morning, at six-after he’d had only fifteen and one-half hours of sleep-one of the goats residing on the old man’s private residence behind the club woke Cooper up. This was a daily problem. The goats worked like a combination rooster and alarm clock, alternating only due to weather-in rain, they didn’t make any noise until seven; if the sun came out, they were whining away from six o’clock on. They’d always stop after thirty minutes or so, and Cooper had never quite been able to figure out why they performed their rooster imitation in the first place. Somewhere along the line he satisfied himself with the theory that each morning, one of the goats became convinced today was the big day-that somebody would open the gate and let him wander off the old man’s property and down to the beach.
The snorkeling ain’t what it used to be here, kid, he wanted to tell this morning’s goat. Too many boats been mooring here too many years. There’s something wrong with the coral, so stay up where that old farmer feeds you apples, where you eat the shrubs on the hill, or whatever it is you do when you’re not pulling alarm clock duty.
He made a pit stop for a cup of black coffee at the beachfront veranda, where Ronnie was already up, slicing melons for the guests who’d bought the meal plan. They usually started coming down from their bungalows around seven-fifteen. Cooper sat in one of the chairs and kicked his feet up on the railing, from which spot he watched the sea as it shifted from gray to blue. Parts of the lagoon soon turned a bright shade of turquoise, a color you only found in the waters of the Caribbean and maybe a scant few other exotic locales.
Across the channel, where Tortola hunched, and off to his left-St. John-he could see places where the sun, rising behind him, had begun to pummel the islands with its rays. As with most mornings, Cooper felt as though he were staring at a postcard. He’d grown accustomed, but never tired, of the view.
“What did you do with the bucket,” he asked Ronnie without looking at him.
Ronnie continued with his slicing. He was working on a honeydew melon.
“Used it the day before yesterday on the ferry,” he said. “Think I put it behind the kitchen.”
Cooper nodded, still examining the view, then polished off his coffee and stood. Ronnie had a look at him: Cooper wore an old blue swimsuit, no shirt, and his swimming goggles, which he’d wrapped around his neck. There were enough old scars on his torso to make his skin resemble a tie-dyed shirt.
“Gettin’ to work this morning, then, are you, mate?” Ronnie said.
Cooper grunted as he set the coffee cup on one of the trays Ronnie would use to bus the breakfast tables once the guests came.
“Yes, I am,” he said.
When Cooper cleaned his boat, he cleaned every inch. For the all-important scrubbing beneath the waterline, he liked to dive in with the swim goggles and a sponge, mopping off accumulated grime, all the while counting off the seconds to test how long he could hold his breath underwater. Due to many years of skin diving on deeper and deeper wrecks around the islands, he’d recently been able to set his personal best, managing to count to one hundred and ninety-four: three minutes and fourteen seconds without coming up for air. Having sucked down the prosthetic-faced Clancy’s secondhand smoke for a few days, though, Cooper didn’t hold out much hope of breaking any records.
He took his dinghy out to the Apache and brought the big racing boat in to the dock. The dock didn’t fill up until eleven-thirty or twelve, when all the visiting yacht-charter types came over from their catamarans aboard a fleet of identical-looking gray Zodiacs, mostly to sample the club’s cooking, made famous by Rosie, Odessa, and Dennise, the three well-fed West Indian women who’d been working their culinary artistry there for years.
Cooper flipped the bumpers over the edge and pulled against the dock, gunning the throttle then killing it-let the boat coast into position, no bullshit reverse-forward-reverse throttle work needed here. As the Apache lolled against the side of the dock, squeezing the bumpers, Cooper tossed one line to the dock, came around to the bow to grab the other line, leaped to the dock with it, tied it off, then strolled to the stern and secured that line. He already had the bucket out on the dock, and a hose too, which he’d stretched from the spigot behind the kitchen.