The shock of seeing her with the fat man was like a whiff of ether
… and with that came the realization of another stupidity: Tomlinson had immediately realized what I refused to consider. Amanda’s childhood photos hadn’t been misplaced, they’d been stolen. By Merlot, on the chance that those boxes contained innocent photos of the two of them together, the cross-eyed child and the deliberate stranger. All photographs almost certainly taken with the same camera.
I wondered what kind of ruse Merlot had used to send the young mother off on an errand while he “baby-sat” her child. Or maybe he had sufficiently charmed Gail so that, for a time, he was little Amanda’s regular baby-sitter. A nauseating thought. So get the child alone, use the mother’s instant-print camera, hide the prints. What fun!
Merlot had been lucky enough to discover that Amanda’s memory of him had scarred shut. The proof was when she’d surprised Merlot at her mom’s house. Amanda genuinely believed that she’d never seen the fat man before. Even so, he couldn’t risk further association between himself and the daughter… or allow a chance encounter with an old photograph to key the memory electrodes…
17
The man behind the bar said, “Hello there, mate, you must be the Yank that Fernando was tellin’ me about.” I’d taken the bar stool in the far comer, the one nearest the door. Wasn’t feeling very talkative. I listened to him say, “You got a face like Iowa, so it’s not much of a guess… and from that expression, I’d say you either just screwed the pooch or the Turk’s been showing you some of his video toys.”
It was a little before 7:00 P.M. and a jungle breeze came off the water carrying aromatic little pockets of open sea, of jasmine and frangipani blossom… and of the city, too. The Old Walled City was just across the bridge. Narrow alleys of cobblestone, little markets that hadn’t missed a morning in three hundred years.
Even this far away, there was a hint of mangos plus crushed pineapple in the wind… and the odor of water on worn stone.
After my time aboard Moon of Kiz Kulesi, the breeze smelled pure, wonderfully uncontaminated. Can there be virtue in the fragrance of moving air?
“You’re name’s Ford, right, mate? Turns out we’ve got several mutual friends. Here-have a beer on me.”
That was a surprise. Apparently, some of my former associates had been on the telephone.
He’d wrapped the ten ounce bottle of Aquila in a brown napkin to keep it cool. I took it, drank it half down, paused to look at the condensation dripping down the bottleneck, then finished it.
“Must be thirsty.”
“Yeah.”
“Another?”
“Make this one a Polar.”
He used a church key to pop the top. No twist offs down here.
“After an hour or so with the Turk, it’s too bad a man can’t drink soap. Or get his soul pressure-washed. There’s just no quick way to get clean.”
“No. No, there’s not.”
“He try to sell you a membership to their freaky-deeky club?”
“That’s not the way he put it, but, yeah. Sounds pretty nice. I’m going to buy. Sounds like a great place.”
“Bullshit. You don’t need to lie to me. Like I said, we’ve got mutual friends. If the beer’s free, the least you can do is tell me the truth.” The man winked. “Hell, I’d tell the bloody truth all night long for free beer!”
I looked at him a moment and thought, yes, more than likely… he had that look… he’d been some places, seen some things, so we probably did have a lot in common. Maybe it was the same thing when Tucker and Fernando saw each other, members of the same secret club.
The man wore fishing shorts and a white T-shirt. The breast pocket of the shirt read: Walker Wilderness Tours- Northern Territory-Australia.
His hair was cropped short; looked to be in his late thirties maybe early forties. He had a flat, Irish face, a brown push-broom mustache and a nose that had done some traveling. Currently, it was pushed over to the right, just beneath his eye.
When he put the beer in front of me, I said, “Thanks.”
“Not a problem. Get five or six of those down you, I’ll start charging you triple, you won’t even notice.”
“You’re Garret, the guy who owns the place. I’ve heard about you, too.”
He had a good, strong laugh. Actually, it was more like a roar. “Hah! From the bloody Turk, I bet! What’d that nasty little sand nigger say about me? It was a lie, whatever it was. The man wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him on the arse!” In Colombia it is always the cocktail hour. It was now also the dinner hour, so I was not alone in this open room with its ceiling fans and decorative flags hanging from the palm thatching.
Garret didn’t care. He didn’t care who heard.
“The Turk? Fuckin’ Turk, I don’t know if he wants me to put him in jail or adopt him!”
“He says you let him stay here because you want his vessel.”
“Hah! That’s a bloody good’un! The only thing worth a shit on that piece of garbage is the two or three hundred kilos of hashish he thinks the federales don’t know about. Which is why I won’t touch his boat, because I refuse to deal with the poisonous shit. Not everyone in Colombia runs drugs, you know. But I’ll auction his tub off fast enough when the courts put his ass in jail!” Garret slapped the bar: Hah hah hah!
Down the bar was Raymond, a sixty-some-year-old Irishman I’d met earlier. He was a merchant seaman who’d missed his ship and was now stranded in Cartagena. Used his accent and his stories to charm drinks. Always had a cigarette and glass in his hand, a rummy. There were three or four tables of men and women eating dinner. A table of Brits and a table of Italians, judging from conversations. Nearby was also a German couple, men. They wore T-shirts over their jock-sized bathing suits. Homosexuals sailing the coast, nice people not bothering anybody. Also at the bar were a couple of American men, one middle-aged, the other in his twenties. Regular-looking, but they had some money. They belonged to an absolutely stunning forty-two-foot Hinkley moored just down from the Turk’s ghost freighter. I’d met them earlier, too. Jim and Chris aboard the Windelblo. From New England, the kind of men you trust right away, the two of them in a customized million-dollar work of art but like it was no big deal.
Garret said, “So I’ll ask you again: tell me you didn’t buy into their freaky sex club.”
I leaned forward. “I need to get to Panama. Right away. Tonight, if I can.”
“Tonight? It’ll be dark. Nothing’ll be open, and you won’t be able to see a damn thing.”
“That’s why I want to get there when it’s still dark.”
The man nodded. “You’re goin’ after the woman. The woman the fat man kept down here on his boat.”
I leaned back and thought about it for a moment. Then I used my index finger to signal him closer. Into his ear I said a single word that implied the accomplishments of two men. Then I asked Garret to fill in the blanks, supply the missing names.
The men I described were two good Australians I’d worked with, both SAS, one from Perth, the other Darwin. If Garret could be trusted, he’d know exactly who I was speaking of.
He knew the names.
Good. It was a good connection to have. I relaxed a little. “That’s right, I’m going after the lady. Damn right I’m going after the lady. How’d you know?”
“Simple. A woman like her throws a big wake. Class and style, it’s worth… well, with a woman like that, let’s just say men don’t give love, they invest it. And there she is running around loose?” Garret’s expression said he knew the ideal comparison. “You see that Hinkley sailboat out there? Finding the lady in this bar was like finding that Hinkley abandoned on the high seas. It just ain’t gonna happen. The only mystery was how she got mixed up with the fat man. After I ran him outta here, I told my wife, ‘Somebody’s gonna show up looking for that woman. And they’d better hurry, before she’s dead.’”