Nicko turned his head to look at me, and the look was murderous, I think because I'd offered him a get-out he couldn't take.
'Fucking shuddup.'
His fat little face shone with sweat. I could smell him from where I stood. Then he looked back at the man kneeling in front of him, at the back of his head.
The timing wasn't right: I couldn't make a move. If I tried making a move the timing would have to be perfect, and I would need to use Fidel the Cuban and I would need to use him in the moment of his death.
'Nicko.' From the cabin. 'You want me to come and do it, Nicko?'
I think Vicente knew the fat man well enough to know that he would be stung by that, would feel unbrave, unable to kill a man without his gun.
Do you know how to turn?
The swell moved under us all, lifting and letting us fall as if to the rhythm of our mother's bosom, the bosom of Mother Earth, as if we were brothers, Nicko, Vicente, Roget, Fidel and the man at the helm whose name I didn't know, as if they were my brothers.
Very fast? Do you know how to turn very fast?
Which in a way I suppose they were, my brothers, born with me on this little piece of interstellar rock, to be nurtured by the same essences of water and of air, the same magnetic waves, the same vibrations, and then to die. But I was not going to think about that.
He stood there holding the marlin spike, my little fat brother, smelling of sweat, mine own executioner.
It might amuse you, my good friend, if I tell you how to make a very fast turn, in case you don't already know. It will make an interesting digression in my stream of consciousness, because I always feel a certain lightheadedness when faced with the prospect of mortality; it has happened before.
Well, then, let us to the matter. It is performed sometimes in Shotokan karate, in Heian Shodan, when one moves from zenkutsu-dachi to kokutsu-dachi, turning completely through two hundred and seventy degrees. There are six things to do, each of them making the turn faster and faster, and it doesn't make any difference whether you're in zenkutsu-dachi or standing normally, though it's better if you have one foot forward a little, say the right foot, because this will be the pivot for the turn.
The lights swing upwards into view, brightly bedecking the night's horizon over there as we fall away to a hollow in the sea.
Nicko stands tensely now. He is very tense, his knuckles white as he grips the heavy spike. Only a second has gone by since Vicente spoke to him, daring him, though it seems much longer.
The right foot, yes, will provide the pivot, and the first thing you have to do is push off with the left one, if you are turning backwards to the left. The second thing is to swing the hips in that direction, to be conscious only of the hips in this millisecond of our little game, and the third thing to do is to swing the left arm in the same direction, to lend centrifugal force, and here it is worth mentioning that the left arm and hand provide a potent weapon at the end of the turn, if, say, the hand forms a fist with the knuckles vertical and the thumb uppermost.
Fidel is praying, as he has prayed before; he kneels as if in his church, and of course appropriately, since he is about, in his mind, to meet the personification of infinity he calls God. Nicko is starting to lift the marlin spike, swinging it in an arc above his head. It is heavy. He is sweating copiously. He stinks.
Vicente is watching from the cabin, hands by his sides. He looks Italianate, as his name suggests. I think he is a cool man, confident in himself, and therefore dangerous. The other man is of course looking ahead of him across the milky moonlit sea, maintaining the diesels at something like a quarter throttle with the bows cutting the horizon. The night is warm as we sail on in brotherhood, sharing its warmth.
But that is not quite true. The night has no warmth for me, because when the fat man has split the head of the Cuban he will come for me and if I do anything to stop him they will shoot, the others, and risk calling attention.
I am not, however, forgetting you, my good friend, as you wait agog to perform this totally spectacular turn, or so my totally inexcusable degree of self-indulgence allows me to believe. The fourth thing to do, then, is to use the right arm in the same direction, again using centrifugal force, and yet again, if the right hand is formed, say, flat and with the palm upwards and the fingers closed to provide a cutting edge, it will offer an effective strike at the face or throat or clavicle, should you wish to defend yourself against attack. The two last requirements for the turn are not physical. The first is mental, the second almost spiritual. You have to think Get there, and finally you have to feel Be there.
He is lifting the heavy spike, Nicko, swinging it back and upwards, his small pink mouth puckered and the material of his expensive jacket going into folds at the shoulder, the single button pulling at the waist.
… Que Dios se acuerde lo bueno que he hecho en mi vida y se olvide lo malo…
The lips of Fidel are moving, though I don't see them from this angle; I know they are moving because I can hear the sibilants of his last prayer. Vicente is watching from the cabin; he hasn't moved. Time has slowed, as always happens when the mind, brought to a high degree of stress, becomes aware that time is a man-made artifact, and subject to contradiction by the infinite.
The marlin spike swings higher. I watch it.
The turn, yes, we must not forget the turn, the expression of my sense of lightness, of unreality as my life nears its seeming close. But you already have it all, my good friend, and you should practise each segment of the turn one after another, and you will find the speed increasing, and to the point where you are carried off balance – a sign of progress. Then you should put all those segments together, and let them happen at once, like an explosion, and in the instant of completion, tighten the abdomen to preserve the balance and land squarely at whatever degree you wish to – it doesn't have to be at two hundred and seventy, there's no magic in that number. The last requirement, to Be there, has to be made with the muscles relaxed and the mind in alpha waves, and this may not happen at the fiftieth turn of your practice, but could well happen at the hundredth.
The deck trembles a little beneath our feet. The lanyard slaps to the wind of our passage. The sibilants fall from the lips of the kneeling Cuban as the little fat man brings the marlin spike to the top of its arc and it comes fluting downwards to the Cuban's fragile skull and his executioner grunts with the effort.
It strikes. It strikes the skull.
Be there.
A whirl of lights as the city of Miami span across my vision field and the black was suddenly close to me and my right arm swung through the turn and the right hand lifted a degree to line up with his throat and even now the surprise was only just coming into his eyes and of course too late because the sword-hand was in contact with its target and beginning to bury there at the site of the thyroid gland.
What I had started to do was over now and it had taken very little more than one half-second, though the planning had taken longer. From this instant there would be chaos of a kind and there'd be no way for me to control it. There were risks, appalling risks to this desperate enterprise but it had been a question of choice, of letting myself get into a sordid little confrontation with Nicko and having to kill him an unknown number of seconds before Roget blew the heart out of my ribs with the Suzuki, or of going for this trick, getting rid of the black before anything else and taking the others on later. If I could reach the black's motor nerves fast enough and freeze them he wouldn't fire the gun and Nicko and Vicente and the man at the helm would opt to maintain silence on the boat and come for me with their hands or a knife and I might have a chance of dropping overboard before they could reach me, dropping and diving deep and turning for the long journey to the shore.