“But any advice you have to offer,” she added, “it could be very helpful.”
“Advice, sure. If I can help, you bet I’ll try.”
“I’ll give you my number in Lauderdale. If you have any ideas, you can give me a call. I figure what I’ll have to do is just fly down there-Colombia, I mean, maybe get a friend to go with me-and have a look around.” The smile she then allowed me was one of those bright, meaningless smiles of dismissal; the kind of smile we all use when we are dealing with people who are attempting to sell us something we do not want, or who have not met our initial expectations.
I hoped my own bright smile mirrored hers. “Give you a call in Lauderdale, Amanda, you can count on it. Boy oh boy, I’ll give it some thought, too. Maybe try to figure out a way to locate your mom and the guy she’s traveling with. What was his name again?” Said it with false gusto, as if I hadn’t been paying attention.
“His name? You mean after listening to the whole story, you’ve already forgotten-” She stopped and eyed me closely, thinking it over.
I said, “Isn’t it handy to be able to take one look at a person and know what he’s like? And you’re so right! I’m the big, gawky, absent-minded-professor type. My brain’s so jammed with research material I just can’t seem to remember that guy’s name. The big fellow you described. Boy do I feel like a dope.”
I watched her expression: Is this an act? Then her face narrowed: Yep, it was definitely an act… but why?
“His name’s Merlot,” she said slowly.
“ Merlot. That’s right. You know, something that may account for my bad memory is when your dad and I were living over there in the jungles of Cambodia? It was almost too darn stressful. About half the time these little black-haired people were sneaking around trying to kill us. Well… I say ‘kill us,’ but what the Khmer really wanted to do was cut our heads off and carry them around on a pole. Know why?”
Her expression changed, but she didn’t answer.
“The reason they wanted to cut our heads off is because they believe a man remains conscious for nearly a minute after his head’s been severed. Which makes sense if you stop and think about it. Sure, you can’t breathe, you can’t walk, but your eyes and your brain are in the same place, right? To them, it’s like the perfect punishment. They’d cut off our heads and then position us in such a way so that the last thing we saw before we died was our own headless corpse. You talk about having a bad memory? The strain of worrying about that probably killed off some my brain cells.”
Her expression changed again. “Oh my God. You’re not exaggerating, are you?”
“Wish I was. So, yeah, I can understand why you wouldn’t trust someone like me to deal with a guy who might be taking advantage of your mother. This… what’s his name again?”
Reevaluation time: Maybe I wasn’t such a bookish, nerdish type after all. “Jackie,” she said. “Jackie Merlot.”
I was still smiling when I said, “Gee, a guy like that, I’d just love to meet.”
5
I got a fresh notebook from the lab and, in my small, blocky print, jotted down all the useful phone numbers and addresses that Amanda could provide.
Someday, if the notebook became important, I would attach a label, give it a file name, then lock the notebook away with the others I’d kept and saved over the years. There were some interesting titles in that fireproof box: Coast of Bengal Borneo/Sandakan Nicaragua/Politics/Baseball Havana I. Havana II Ox-Eyed Tarpon/South China Sea Masagua’s Ridley Turtles and the Magnetic Mountain Singapore to Kota Baharu (with 3rd Gurkhas)
There were others.
All contained the carefully kept details of a lifetime spent traveling alone through the Third World tropics; necessarily duplicitous years spent doing clandestine work, as well as the work I still care passionately about: marine biology.
The notebooks added order. They allowed me a sense of purpose, even though much of what I’ve done in my life now seems absurd, nearly existential because of the violence to which I’ve contributed.
Tomlinson knows a little bit about it. Not much, but enough to attempt to comfort me one beery evening when he said, “You’re not the Lone Ranger, Doc. Take the seventies, for instance. It wasn’t a decade, man. It was a damn crime scene. And you worry about the little bit of political stuff you were involved in?”
As I said, Tomlinson doesn’t know much about it.
So Bobby Richardson’s ladies were allotted their own notebook. When I’d finished with phone numbers and addresses, I asked Amanda if she’d thought to bring the four postcards she’d received from her mother. She had. They were in the envelope that contained her father’s letters. She paced around studying my overloaded shelves of books while I studied the postcards.
All the cards were postmarked Cartagena, Colombia, and onto each was pasted a hundred-peso stamp that paid tribute to emeralds, the gem for which the country’s jungles are famous. Cartagena is an ancient seaport city built like a fortress during the 1500s, when conquistadors shipped gold and silver to Madrid. I’d been there a number of times, but that had been years ago.
Three of the cards were photographs of sites I recognized as Cartagena tourist attractions: the clock tower entrance to the old walled city; a busy street vendor scene; a small Spanish garrison (stone walls with gunports overlooking Cartagena Harbor) that was now a restaurant, according to the card, called Club de Pesca.
Had I once eaten at that restaurant? It was possible. There was a little marina close to that old Spanish garrison. I’d maybe stopped at the marina for a beer, but I couldn’t remember the name of the place.
Who could I check with to find out? I’d have to think about it.
The fourth postcard showed a roomful of polished ship’s bells-“a magnificent nautical museum,” according to florid Spanish on the back of the card. The place was apparently a private museum near Cartagena called CoMarCa.
The cards were not dated, but they were postmarked: 6 January, 12 January, 16 February and 20 March, respectively.
On the back of each postcard, in flowing, ovoid script, were typical tourist inanities: “Everything is so different here!”… “The weather is very warm because we are so close to the equator!”… “Miss you, wish you were here!”
They contained nothing more personal than that.
There was no mention of Jackie Merlot, of where they were staying, or of where they planned to travel.
Each card was written in black ink from what might have been the same rollerpoint pen. I also noticed that each of the last three cards had suffered a few water smears, as if the wet ink had been splattered with random raindrops… or maybe beads of sweat.
I found that very odd. But still… there was a benign explanation. Wasn’t there?
I said to Amanda, “Are you absolutely certain this is your mother’s handwriting?”
“I’ve seen enough of it to know, yeah. Everything about her is so beautiful; even her letters are rounded and neat and perfect. It’s definitely my mom’s writing.”
“You mind if I hang on to these, maybe give them a closer look later?”
The woman shrugged. “They’re not exactly what you’d call private and personal. She could have been writing to a stranger instead of her daughter.”
“It’s one of the things that bothers me.”
That stopped her. She glanced up from the book she was leafing through. “Which tells me there are other things about them that bother you.”
I said, “Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I smiled. “It means I’m not sure. Relax. I’m on your side. I’m not hiding anything. But give me some time to think about it.”
She wanted to talk some more-I could tell, but she was also getting restless. Maybe she was uncomfortable in the close quarters of my little ship’s cabin cottage. The spartan furnishings and the near-absence of decoration make some women uneasy. Tomlinson says that it is because my lack of creativity strips away all pretense and therefore reduces sexuality to its most basic and unromantic components.