A woman who might have been Gail, but it was difficult to be certain because she had no face…
A third person blasted from the flames who was so badly damaged that I refuse to attempt description. I will not do it.
The Panamanian police asked me about Amanda, saw the look in my eye and did not ask again.
Seventeen days later, when I awoke from what the good doctors described as a “life-threatening concussion,” Fernando had recovered sufficiently to tell me what he had already learned.
Tucker had been shipped back to Florida and buried with full Masonic honors. But not until after word of some lingering trouble in Cartagena. Someone had beaten the Turk senseless, pissed on him (I didn’t ask how that was verified), pick-axed his computer plus all its gear, stolen his hookah and then nosed the Turk’s old junk wind freighter out into Cartagena Bay, where the federales did, indeed, impound the cache of hashish aboard, arrest the injured man and take him to a prison hospital.
“Your uncle was mucho hombre, much man, much man!” Fernando said. “But I would not return to Colombia for a while. Tucker Gatrell became famous there in a very short time. It will be remembered by some small and angry people that you are a relative.”
Amanda, dear sensitive Amanda, was also killed instantly in the blast. Gail, however, though badly burned, had held on for many days before finally succumbing to pneumonia.
“One day I went to see her, but her bed was empty,” Fernando said. “She was just gone. Disappeared. They told me that she had been flown back to Florida to be laid to rest next to the daughter and the first husband, the husband she loved.”
Fernando gave me two more interesting tidbits of news. Our huge hospital bills had been paid in full by someone, they wouldn’t tell Fernando who.
The men in the blue shirts, probably. Their generosity was unexpected, but not out of character. Matt Davidson had been right; the intelligence community tries to take care of its own.
Other news was that Panamanian authorities, working with the FBI and Interpol, were after Jackie Merlot and whomever he’d hired to rig the bomb in the boat.
So far, there was no sign of him.
It was as if he’d vanished from the earth.
Epilogue
F or the next six months, I concentrated on my work and getting my health back. Physically, I recovered quickly. I was running and swimming as fast and as far as ever, but my mental health vacillated between depression and rage.
It worried my friends. I could see the concern on their faces when they thought that I wasn’t looking.
It worried me, too. Something I did not tell them was this: I feared that I was slowly, inexorably, going insane.
That sentence, You should have killed him, came to haunt me in a way that I suspect Tucker Gatrell had been haunted by a mistake he had made many years before. To experience such a thing revealed to me much about why my uncle behaved as he did. To openly discuss what had happened would have invited a weight of despair that might have crushed him. So he locked the guilt away in a little room. He lived with the monster.
I was now living with my monster.
Much of my time alone was spent anticipating the day when I would comer Jackie Merlot and once again stand face to face with him. The authorities still had no leads on his whereabouts. Nor had my many contacts worldwide from the intelligence community been able to supply me with any hint of where the man was hiding.
I became so obsessed with finding him that I bought a superb computer and modem and spent my evenings trolling the chat rooms, asking people if they’d ever been contacted by Merl or Darkrume or Betty of Unity.
All of them the fat man.
I have never quit anything in my life.
Our day would come.
Something helpful was that Maggie, my workout partner from Tampa, finally separated from her husband, and she took it upon herself to oversee my recovery. At first, the Dinkin’s Bay women were less than friendly. I was their patient and no long, leggy blonde from Hyde Park was going to come onto their docks and take charge.
As JoAnn Smallwood said in a moment of pique, “What’re you doing with this Maggie woman, Doc? She doesn’t even like to fish.”
No… but Maggie made me laugh. She could make faces like a sit-com comedienne. She was smart and kind and thoughtful and I liked the smell of her and I could crawl naked into bed beside her and, for ever longer periods of time, I felt at peace… at peace until I drifted off and the dreams returned…
Black rain, banana leaves fauceting water, lunar halos, small precise breasts, a woman’s eyes diminished by uncertainty, a mangrove shore… Moon, wind, water, blood…
Those images and words came back to me in an endless, repetitive chorus that was maddening.
But it helped that Maggie was there. And because she is a kind and valuable person, the Dinkin’s Bay women soon accepted her and she became a member of the community.
I was getting better.
It was Maggie who brought me the hand-wrapped little package that arrived via UPS on a blustery December afternoon. The afternoon was cold enough for a fire in the little wood stove that I’d installed myself only weeks before.
Woodsmoke and turtlenecks and thick socks on Dinkin’s Bay. It was a nice change.
I’d been drinking a mug of hot chocolate that the lady had provided me.
I should have put the mug safely on a table when I opened the package.
I did not.
When I opened the package and saw what was inside, I dropped the mug. Hot chocolate all over me and the floor, but I didn’t even notice.
“Doc? Doc?” Maggie said hurrying toward me. “My God, you look like you’re going to faint. What is it?”
I had my mouth open, forcing myself to breath. I took a few steps back and sat heavily in the reading chair beside my Celestron telescope near the north window. Finally, I had enough air to speak. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. It’s just a photograph of… of someone I knew.”
“What’d you mean, don’t worry about it? You’re white as a ghost!”
She moved to put her arms around me, but I gently, very gently, nudged her away. I couldn’t let her see this photograph.
Two photos, actually.
One was gruesome beyond imagination. It was a stock print of a sort that I recognized from my years working in the foreign service. It was clean-which is to say it was printed via a process that could not be traced.
It was a vertical shot, eight-by-ten color glossy. It had been taken early in the morning or late in the day in a mangrove swamp. The light was very rich: golds and iridescent greens beneath a peach-colored sky. It could have been taken anywhere. Florida, Central America, Asia. Anyplace that had been isolated by mangrove coast.
Mangroves were in the background. In the foreground was a stout pole that had been planted in the muck. Atop that pole was Jackie Merlot’s pumpkin-sized head. His mouth was a round dark hole, a defining void, and his black eyes were opened wide but glazed with something. Flies?
I looked more closely.
Yes, flies.
Even so, those eyes seemed directed at the mound of flesh at the base of the pole.
Someone had positioned the head so that it faced its own body. Perhaps the Phmong were right. Perhaps Merlot’s brain had functioned long enough. Perhaps the last thing he saw was his own decapitated corpse…
“Doc…? Doc, please! Tell me what’s wrong. You’re scaring me, Doc.”
I was standing again. Kept the photos with me-no one could ever see them. Ever. I rushed to my dresser, opened the botton drawer, and pulled out the scarf with the raspberry red checks that I’d found the afternoon Frank Calloway died.
I was grinning at Maggie. I could see in her face that she thought that maybe, just maybe, I really had gone mad.
I told her, “I know what this is now. Finally! It’s a traditional scarf that the mountain people wear. It’s called a kramas. And the smell-the odor it had. It’s this fermented fish sauce. Terrible stuff, but the locals get addicted to it. Like Vegemite in Australia, only this stuff is rotten. It’s called nuoc mam.”