Flight from a Firing Wall Read online

  “I’m a Cuban clam compared to you, Joe. ¡Hasta luego!”

  “Yeah, keep in touch, Tony. Some day you may need a boat that can outrun the good ship Kerritack. The Angelus won’t do it, but I know a thirty-one-foot deep V-hull Bertram that will, and I like excitement.”

  “Yes,” I said as I stepped ashore, “you struck me as being that sort of a guy.”

  I didn’t tell him that the last thing Luis Martínez had told me on the phone was that a charter-boat skipper named Joe Slade might give me some dope on Harrington, since he and his boat, the Angleus II, had already been of invaluable help to the AFAO. So I’d looked and happened to find him in. One thing work in the underground had taught me was that most people talked more freely when they were telling you facts they thought you didn’t want to know.

  5

  Two seafaring types, under the pavilion halfway out on Pier 3, were hunched over a folding card table oblivious to the imminent peril of the falling bomb. They wore the standard uniform of the men who called small boats their home, sneakers and khaki slacks cut off at the knees. They were engaged in a game of damas, incorrectly called “draughts” in England, and “checkers” in St. Petersburg, Florida, where it is really the national game.

  The gallery consisted of one old man and a friendly black pooch, curled up at his feet, too tired or too hot to scratch a flea. I made inquiries as to whether or not more spectators were welcome, and when I got the nod, I pulled up a backless kitchen chair and joined the cheering section. It wasn’t quite as exciting as jai alai, but the admission was free.

  Some ten cigarettes and twenty games later the match broke up without either side stealing the goal posts, so I mentally declared it a draw. Being on a very tight schedule of waiting, I ambled down to the end of the dock and took a quick look over the edge to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Nothing but the tide had come in, so far.

  Then I spotted her off of Bay Front Park about parallel with the public library just a few blocks away. I leaned against the railing and waited. The sun was almost down in back of the palms in the park, but suddenly some rays slipped through, struck the cabin windows and set them on fire. Livid blinding highlights flashed out all along the port side toward the shore. She was as black as Liliana’s goggles from stem to stern. She crept on in to the end of the slip, silent as an oil slick, lithe and lovely as a seventy-foot black panther stretching itself in the sun.

  I figured her cost at a C-note an inch, say $85,000, plus another grand a week to run. Two men in whites stood up on the flying bridge, obviously #1 and #2, and they knew their business. Fenders dropped overside. A bow and stern line, handled by two Negro deckhands in sailor suits, neatly lassoed pilings. Electric winches reeled in slack, and she was berthed with all the gentleness of a bride’s first kiss. A rail was lifted and a gangplank slid out. One of the deckhands removed and gently furled an American flag that was hanging limply at the stern. The Kerritack had come to town.

  Everyone on board had vanished. No sirens wailed. No flares were lit. No distress rockets soared aloft. It seemed a mite too peaceful an arrival for a ship that just a few hours before had sent out a “May Day” emergency call. I relieved the tired railing from the weight of my rear and took a stroll past Black Beauty to take a look at her stern. If they really needed a doctor that bad, the least I was entitled to was a little scurrying around.

  She had outriggers, all right, folded down now and made fast alongside. Lights came on, shining dimly through drawn silk curtains which screened a lounge occupying two-thirds of the afterdeck. Aft of that was an open deck, covered by an awning to shield a circular table and some lounge chairs scattered around. On the starboard side a companionway led down to a cockpit with three fishing chairs. Two of them were regular swivel armchairs with gimbaled rod seats set at the front in the middle. The one in the center, slightly abaft of the other two, was a fighting chair with all the gadgets. Unoccupied, it had a lonesome look as though the shop had closed for the day and the barber had just gone home. The gold commercial on the stern read: Kerritack, Miami, Florida. If it hadn’t been for old Hippocrates and his silly oath, I’d have gladly poisoned Harrington and married his widow. I knew it was the only way I could get a toy like that Kerritack to call my very own.

  As I started on the long trek back, the man I had tagged as Captain on the flying bridge came down the gangplank and stopped halfway. He was a stocky man, about five foot eight, with massive shoulders and built to scale. He threw back his head and went into a Mussolini freeze as though waiting for the flashbulbs to pop and the brass band to strike up with the “Hail!” I almost came to attention myself and was getting ready to return his salute, but he came on down giving me nothing but a dirty look when he saw I was the only reception committee there.

  I played it cozy and hard to get about twenty feet from him. Thwarted, he made a smart left turn by numbers and came marching to meet me in quickstep Navy time.

  “Pardon me, sir, but would you be Dr. Antonio Carrillo?” His voice was as starched as the ducks he wore, which looked like they had been laid on with a trowel.

  I said that I would be Dr. Antonio Carrillo.

  He said, “Mister and Missis Harrington present their compliments, sir, and trust that you haven’t been waiting too long.”

  “Four or five hours is nothing,” I told him. “I’m a very rich doctor who is working for the Veterans Administration to get experience. They’ll only stop it out of my pay.”

  “Yes, sir, quite so. I am Captain Jack Edwards, master of the Kerritack. We had a spot of engine trouble down the bay. Both Mister and Missis Harrington were very perturbed. But, if I may say so, doctor, I am sure that you will be amply remunerated for any time that you have lost, which was occasioned by our delay.”

  I said, “He’ll have to slip it to me under the table. I’m not allowed to perform any private practice or accept outside pay.”

  That also failed to amuse him. “Yes, sir, quite so.” He presented me with a second batch of the Harringtons’ compliments and added, “… they would deem it quite an honor if you would join them in the lounge for cocktails. If you will be so kind as to follow me, please.”

  His dialogue was something straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pinafore, but I had a sneaky feeling that the crew would have been much happier serving a trick on the Bounty, under that great humanitarian, Captain Bligh. Fearful of getting a taste of the lash, I followed him up the gangplank in a parade of two.

  On the afterdeck under the awning he slid open a door to the lounge and announced, “Dr. Carrillo, sir. He’s been waiting several hours, but I explained about the trouble we’d had with the starboard diesel, which caused the delay.”

  Having done his duty and briefed the boss on which of the engines had been so naughty, he was kind enough to get out of my way. I stepped inside without being pushed. The door slid quietly closed behind me.

  The air-conditioned lounge was indirectly lighted with pink fluorescents concealed behind moldings. When my eyes quit blinking, I saw that it was furnished in a neat combination of Modern-age and late Cunard Line, plus the addition of a small Knabe grand piano bolted to the floor. Four stools with backs provided roosts along a polished twelve-foot bar. The only thing lacking was safety belts to lash down any hardy souls who might want to imbibe while bucking a Gale-8 sea. The whole layout was neat, if expensive, and actually not more than half the size of the Fontainebleau lobby.

  Now that they had me safely boxed in, Harrington and sister Soledad put their cocktails on the bar and came down the center aisle to greet me. Soledad had on blue silk pajamas built like a sailor suit. Except for the fact that her nails were silvered instead of red, and that she lacked the goggles, she could have passed for Liliana’s sister anywhere. Also, in spite of the grand piano, I didn’t think she could sing. Judging by her husband’s size, the piano was merely there for ballast on the starboard side, while Orville was constantly kept on the port side to keep the ship in trim.

/>   He was a real six-foot behemoth with a round head, big ears and smooth pink cheeks. Thin white eyebrows made perfect semicircles over his round expressionless gray eyes. His head was topped with a slicked-back yellow growth that could have been hair, or equally well a two hundred dollar toupee.

  He wore a yellow knit pullover jersey with short sleeves, tailored white Bermuda shorts, yellow knee-length golf stockings, and a pair of white calfskin yachting shoes with rubber soles and serrated tongues, size 13-D. He could have used a pair of inner tubes for sleeve garters if he’d had a shirt on, and the stockings would have fitted the legs of a grand piano twice the size of the Knabe.

  His collar would have been a plus-19, if there had been any neck to put it on, but the neck was sort of missing. Nevertheless, give or take a few vertebrae, he could have weighed in with any of the grunt-and-groan boys, ringside, at 240, or if he really belonged to the Bahamas, which I somehow doubted, they would have billed him at 17-stone. I had probed enough suet during my short but undistinguished career to be able to tell it from muscle. All that brawn that Orville was packing hadn’t been accumulated from too much beer. It made sense that Captain Jack Edwards, no cream puff himself, always addressed him as “Sir!” Orville could have made it tough for a hippo, if he’d charged in from the rear.

  We shook hands in an unbiased fashion, and I met the wife.

  “It is such a pleasure, Dr. Carrillo, and you were so kind to come and wait so patiently. Orville was afraid you might be gone, after such an inexcusable delay.” Her English was smooth, but more accented than Liliana’s.

  “You should try reactors,” I suggested. “Those dastardly starboard diesels are always conking out in the middle of Biscayne Bay.”

  Her tapered fingers were resting in my hand and she had started to give me a welcome smile. At my crack about the diesels, her smile froze up and she hurriedly pulled her hand away. “¡Eso suena a insulto!" I thought if it sounded like an insult to her, I’d still leave it lay.

  “¡Chis! Calma, chiquita.” Orville shushed her in whispered Spanish as though I weren’t in the room. Then, catching up on himself he gave what he thought was a jovial laugh that sounded like tires on oyster shell. “The good doctor is only joking about the diesel, querida—American humor, you know! Perhaps we can make amends with a dry martini. House of Lords gin. I get it in the islands, and it’s rather good.”

  “None better, but this time I’ll have to pass. I’m supposed to be on duty and I’ve already exceeded my rum rations for the day.”

  If he got that duty part, he skipped it. “They’re already mixed and in the cooler, Doctor, not watered down. Perhaps something else, if you don’t care for a martini.”

  I started to say that I would settle for a glass of water and one patient, but an indescribable feeling of caution started tugging at me, warning me to play along. I said, “I appreciate your kindness, Mr. Harrington, but nothing right now, thanks. Perhaps a little later on.”

  “So that’s it? I thought so—‘a little later on’ when you’re with more congenial company than my wife and me.” The cabin was suddenly loaded with menace directed at me, and I was still without the slightest inkling of what might have caused it.

  “I’m sorry!” I tried to brush it off with a hollow laugh. “You’ve got me all wrong. It’s merely that martinis stone me. I’d enjoy nothing better than a drink with you and your wife, if you have a little sherry.” This pair insulted too easily. I hoped I had managed to hide my hatred of people who twisted my arm.

  “That’s better. Sherry it is.” We went to the bar. He poured me a glass of Amontillado, which was good if not dry. He filled their glasses out of a big red vacuum shaker shaped like a fire extinguisher. It played “How Dry I Am” on a music box while he was pouring, and quit when he set it down. No one was slipping a quick one over on Orville when he was dealing out House of Lords, at a quid a fifth, in his own bar, even with the depreciated pound. Still, I was disappointed that the music box hadn’t been rigged to play the last lines of María la O.

  He said, “Cheers!” so I said, “¡Salud!” and Soledad said nothing. She’d not only been insulted, but Orville had pinned her ears back and she still had a mad on.

  We sipped our drinks in sullen friendship, and after a moment Soledad slipped down quietly from her stool and disappeared up forward through a door to the right of the bar.

  I nervously fingered the thermometer in my inside pocket. I was beginning to wonder what I’d brought it along for. It wasn’t much good for testing martinis, or dead men, which seemed to be the only possibilities on the cards so far.

  6

  There followed a moment of reverent silence after Soledad’s departure. A ship’s clock set beside a twin barometer over the bar gave off with six bells. It was answered by another bell up forward, telling us that it was seven o’clock, on the Kerritack as well as on shore.

  I had plenty of time, while those round flinty eyes under the semicircles of white chewed me up in the mirror, to wonder still more about just what had happened to the very ill patient who had brought me there. Could be he’d died and was comfortably placed in the ship’s deepfreezer, but I preferred to think he’d been buried at sea with a few proper words and a snappy salute from Captain Jack Edwards while Soledad wiped a tear from her eyes and tried not to be insulted at a refusal of their hospitality. Death on board the Kerritack might be very pleasant, and you’d get the full treatment of amenities on such a nautical craft, I felt quite sure.

  Then, there was always the chance that they had just grown tired of him and set him adrift in an open boat, or marooned him on some desolate key with ample rations of House of Lords and a spot of caviar. I never was the type to pry. I decided to wait and sit it out, in spite of a sneaky feeling that Orville was already just a little tired of me.

  “More sherry, Doctor?” He unlatched his eyes to look at my glass which was still half full. I felt easier now that he’d finished finning, scaling and filleting me.

  “Thank you, no. When I get sherry as fine as this I like to savor it by sipping it slowly.”

  “Frankly, I can’t stand the stuff, or Cuban rum either for that matter. They taste like rotten varnish to me. I hope you don’t mind if I have another martini.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Harrington. Don’t mind me.” If he thought I was going to rise to that “Cuban rum” crack he was crazy.

  He took more ice from a silver bucket, put it in his glass, and the music box played. “Let’s find a more comfortable place to sit.”

  We took our drinks and sank down into armchairs filled with a foot of rubber foam. The arms had holes that held the glasses. I lit a cigarette. He leaned back, crossed his legs, folded his powerful hands across what in most men his size would have been a pot, and pulled a Cheshire cat grin on me.

  I’d had it. “It’s a crime to waste such wonderful liquor and charming company without a little light conversation. Cabbages and kings, you know.” I took a couple of nonchalant puffs, enjoying the cool breeze through the charcoal filter, and doused the butt in a tray. “Do you want to take the wraps off this Grade-B television show, or are you leaving it up to me?”

  “You start it, Doc.” The grin stayed fixed. “What have you got to say?”

  “Did you have any luck?”

  “At what, for instance?”

  “Fishing. I thought maybe you had the freezers full and I could take a couple of truckloads out to my suffering patients. Or maybe you’ve iced down a body for me to take out to the VA.”

  “Suffering patients is good!” That pleased him so that his grin grew even wider. “I only go after the big ones, Doc. I’m a sportsman. The tougher they are, the better I like it. I play them until they tire out, but if they’ve fought a good fight, sometimes instead of boating them I let them get away.”

  I said, “From the size of this blubber factory, you’re wasting your time. Why don’t you quit the islands and take a quick run down to Antarctica? That far south you might tie in to
Moby Dick, the great white whale, instead of some dying refugee. Then if you stayed out of sight for sixty years you wouldn’t have to use some corny tired diesel as an excuse for the delay.”

  That torpedo hit him amidships, but the unexpected backfire almost blew me away. He got to his feet without using his hands, and stood glowering down while the grin slowly changed from Cheshire cat to the loving smile of Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. I felt a sharp pain in my duodenum that might easily have been the start of an ulcer. He could have knocked off my head with a flick of his finger, and he looked as if he wanted to. My lungs didn’t really start functioning again until he strode to the bar and made more music.

  Clutching his glass, he sat on a stool and swiveled around while I checked the exits. I’d have never made it. I sat and looked silly while he gave me both barrels.

  “Outside of my wife and a few good gents, like Franco, Trujillo, and Batista, who really know how to handle you scum, I don’t like Latins. I particularly don’t like cheap, chiseling, blackmailing Cubans who come over here with their crying towels to suck on the US sugartit and milk our whole economy dry, because they can’t handle their own affairs at home.

  “The lowest of the lousy Latins are the sniveling, plotting, intriguers who have sold out as paid informers for our own crooked cops, or for any other bureaucratic bunch of bums who get their graft by harassing decent hard-working businessmen, whose taxes are paying the salaries of that gang up there in Washington.” I cringed as he took a swallow and set his glass down hard enough to dent the bar.

  “Just so there won’t be any misunderstanding, Dr. Punk, I’m talking about you. My skirts are clean, and I’m not afraid of the likes of you or whatever branch of those Pentagon pansies it is who are paying you—Army, Navy, Coast Guard, or Marines. Get it, buster! My skirts are clean!” He paused long enough to toast Mr. Clean with another swallow.