The Night Boat Read online

  The constable’s office, a small stucco building painted a light green, was on the village square. There was an oval park of palmettos in the center of the street, and the weather-etched granite statue of a black man hefting a harpoon that had been erected by the British as a peace concession to the Carib Indian tribe. It honored one of the Carib chieftains—a man named Cheyne—who in the 1600s had led a rag-tag army against a band of pirates who were trying to seize Coquina as a fortress. The Caribs had been here at least a hundred years before the first British settlers had arrived; they lived off the sea and the land, keeping to themselves unless feeling threatened, and then their wrath could be awesome. It was clear that the Caribs were to be left alone, judging from the number of British settlers who were laid in their graves in those early years. Now they were mostly quiet, and Moore didn’t know much about their current way of life. Across the Square were brightly painted buildings: Everybody’s Grocers and Cafe, Langstree’s marine supply store, an open-air market where the inland farmers displayed their goods on Saturdays, and the Coquina Hardware Store. Dirt-track streets cut back through the jungle to more houses. Beyond those, the foliage grew thick and wild.

  Coquina was fifteen miles around, housing a population of a little more than seven hundred. In centuries past it had served as a battleground between the British and the French; the island, along with a dozen other small spits of sand in the area, had been possessed first, in the early 1500s, by the Spanish, who had left it pretty much alone, then a hundred years later by the British, who’d fought the Caribs to make a go of sugar and tobacco plantations. The French had attacked when the plantations had proven profitable. And so on in a spiral of naval and diplomatic warfare, until finally the British seized it as a permanent possession. Some of the old plantation great houses still stood in the deep jungle although now they were cracked mounds of rubble through which the vines and growth had reclaimed their own territory. When Moore wandered these old plantation houses through the long corridors and empty, ghostly rooms, he thought sometimes he could feel how it must have been: the land barons gazing out over their sloping fields to the seas beyond, the schooners with billowing sails slipping across the ocean to take on new cargoes for mother England. Coquina had been a good and inexpensive investment for the British, until the Caribs had rebelled and killed most of the plantation owners.

  The island was so named because it was shaped like a coquina’s shell; also because the beaches were filled with the little clamlike sand-diggers. They were thrown up by the surge of the surf and then would rapidly scurry down again into the safety of the wet sand, their paths marked only by bursting bubbles of air.

  And now, over two hundred years since the French and British had battled here, Coquina was home to David Moore. Perhaps it would not be home forever, but for now it was good enough.

  God, how the years have passed, he thought as he drove into the Square. Rapidly flashing by in swirls of color, of experience, of memories he kept close to his chest like a deck of cards. In the space of seven years, everything had changed and the changes had led him here. His mind sheered away from the old vision: riotous gray waves, soaring whitecaps, a storm that had swept up without warning, thunderclouds torn from the sky above the Atlantic into Chesapeake Bay. The ragged images tortured him, filled him with a sense of dull, throbbing rage and left him with the knowledge that at any given instant, the security and hope of a man’s life could fall away like rotten flooring.

  “You okay?” Kip asked, gently touching Moore’s arm. “You just passed my office. Slow down.”

  Moore shook himself from the memories. “Sure. Guess I wasn’t thinking.”

  He turned the pickup around and parked in front of Kip’s office.

  “You had your breakfast?” Kip asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Come on in and I’ll throw something on the griddle.” He opened the door and Moore followed him inside. Kip’s office was piled high with varied and assorted things—there was scarcely room to turn around. There was a desk and a reading lamp, a few chairs, a bookshelf with legal volumes; behind the desk a locked gun cabinet, faced with glass, holding two rifles. On a wall hung framed certificates of merit from Kingston, and there was also a crayon drawing of a scene in Coquina harbor—the trading vessels with masts like telephone poles and all of them colored a different hue—done by Kip’s five-year-old daughter, Mindy. Gunmetal-gray filing cabinets stood against the opposite wall next to a storage closet; another door with an inset of glass at eye-level led back to two cells.

  Kip drew open the blinds; sunlight flooded in. He slid a couple of the windows open so the sea-breezes could enter, and then he went to the far side of the room. There was a small sink with a shelf above it holding a few plates and cups as well as a hot plate, which Kip plugged into a wall socket, and a portable icebox. He rummaged in the icebox, found a couple of eggs, and knifed strips from a slab of bacon.

  Moore settled himself into a chair before the constable’s desk and ran a hand across his face. He sighed wearily.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Kip asked him. “You not getting enough sleep?” He threw the bacon into a skillet he had placed on the hot plate. He smiled. “I understand your problem, my friend. You had too much company last night.”

  “How’d you hear about that?”

  “I’m supposed to know everything that goes on around here.” Kip picked up two of the cups, saw that they were clean but rinsed them anyway. He filled a teakettle and waited for the bacon to crisp. “You ought to stop living out of damned cans like you do, David. It’s no trouble for Myra to set an extra place.”

  “She’d strangle you if she heard you say that.”

  “Possibly.” The bacon was curling; the scent of it wafted about the office. One of Kip’s duties as constable was to keep whatever prisoners he had confined in good health, which meant feeding them three times a day, and on his budget he couldn’t afford to send out for food. “I made a call to my cousin Cyril in Kingston yesterday evening,” he said after a pause.

  “And…?”

  “He couldn’t offer any suggestions; he thought I was joking at first, and I had a bad time convincing him. In any event, Cyril’s promised to pass the information along to the Daily Gleaner.” Kip forked the bacon out of the skillet and onto the plates; he cracked the eggs and let them fry.

  “It bothers me.” Moore said quietly.

  “What does?”

  “The submarine. What made it go down? And what about the crew?”

  Kip looked over his shoulder as he lifted out the fried eggs. “What about the crew?”

  “I wonder…what kind of men they were, and how did they come to be so far away from home…”

  “Well, there were a lot of U-boats patrolling the Caribbean in the early part of the war,” Kip reminded him. “You needn’t be concerned about the crew. Most likely they’re old men relaxing in slippers by their hearths, puffing their pipes, sipping their steins of beer, and swapping war stories. Here. Take this while I do the tea.”

  Moore took the plate. “But the hatches are sealed. How could they have gotten out?”

  Kip shrugged. “All those old crates had to have an emergency hatch of some kind. I don’t know; I’m certainly not an expert. Are you going to stare at that egg or eat it?”

  Moore probed it with his fork. “I’m not sure; I think I might be safer just staring.”

  The kettle whistled. Kip poured water over a teabag in each cup and offered one to Moore, then he sat down behind his desk and began to eat. “I’m more concerned with the present,” he said, in a graver tone. “I’ll be going by to see the Kephas woman, and I’m not quite sure what to say to her. Damn it! The chances of an accident like that happening to her husband are one in a million.” His jaw clenched. “Boniface worries me. Oh, he’s pretty much harmless, but a lot of people on Coquina pay him heed. I don’t want him stirring up trouble over the submarine. You’ve heard those drums going out in the jungle as many tim
es as I have; God only knows what he’s up to during those ceremonies. And of course there’s no legal action I could take, if I wanted to—which I don’t. I don’t care what gods the islanders pray to, I just don’t want undue and irrational fears taking over.” He picked at his egg and then shoved his plate away. “I wish to God Boniface had stayed in Haiti where he belonged.”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  Kip drank down the rest of his tea. “Local trouble.” He began to roll a cigarette for himself, using an island-grown tobacco. “A feud between him and another voodoo priest—a houngan—over territorial rights, I suppose. From what I gather there was a lot of bad stuff going on; Boniface’s home was burned down and his family chased off into the jungle. Not long after that the other houngan was found in the Port-au-Prince bay, weighted down by a gutfull of nails. The police got on the track but nothing was ever proven; you know how those things go. But this houngan was supposed to have had some powerful friends, and they went hunting Boniface’s head. One way or another he got out of Haiti and wandered around the Caribbean for a while. He settled here just before the war. Some day I’d like to find out just how many skeletons I can pull from his closet. Which brings us to that damned hulk. I’d love to donate it to Langstree to be hammered into scrap, but some museum curator would probably slit my throat. Now, with the thing in my harbor…something’s got to be done.” He lit the cigarette and stood up, taking the two plates over to the sink.

  Moore got up and went to the door. “I’ve got things of my own to do. Shutters and drainpipes still need some patching.”

  Kip walked out to the truck with him, and they exchanged a few more comments about the ferocity of the storm that had just passed. Kip could only think of one thing: he dreaded the way the Kephas woman would stare at him when he said, I’m sorry, there’s nothing I could have done, it was an unavoidable accident. Unavoidable?

  Moore swung up into the truck and started the engine, waving back at his friend. He drove along the street toward the Indigo Inn. After he was out of sight, Kip turned toward the flat blue-green expanse of the harbor, watching the thing that grew across the sandbar like a cancer.

  He drew on his cigarette, exhaled smoke. A trawler was moving out through the passage, with a gang of men on its starboard deck making sure they cleared the submarine’s bulk. Far out at sea, an industry freighter was swinging in to take on a load of fish, coconuts, or tobacco.

  It would take three trawlers to break it off the bar and guide it, he decided. Langstree would scream like hell, but that was something Kip had encountered before. He closed and locked the office door and in another moment was in his jeep, driving out of the Square toward the harbor below.

  Six

  A SWIRL OF dark smoke from straining diesel engines stained the blue of the afternoon sky. The men on the trawlers’ decks called back and forth to each other as they yanked at thick hawsers and cables, securing them around heavy-duty cleats and bollards. Lines drew tight, coming up out of the sea with a popping sound, sending droplets of water flying. Someone called out, “Pull! Break her ass, there!”

  Timbers creaked; the noise of diesels mounted, their vibrations pounding decks and churning the guts of the blacks who worked there. Sweat rolled off their backs beneath the hot sun. “Give ’er more,” the captain of the Hellie shouted out, the stub of a Brazilian cigar clenched firmly in his teeth. “Come on, mon!” Water boiled at the stern. The captain looked across to the other trawler, the Lucy J. Leen, stretched tight on its spiderweb of hawsers. The Lucy’s diesels were smoking, and it looked as if her captain was going to have to drop his main lines.

  The Hellie’s master squinted and exhaled a large cloud of blue smoke. Christ A’mighty! That big bitch had her nose stuck tight in sand; she wasn’t going to move, no matter how much power they squeezed into the engines. One of the starboard lines was fraying fast; he saw it and pointed, “Hey! You men watch your fuckin’ heads when that baby comes flyin’ back, you hear me?”

  Another trawler, a rickety old boat with a smaller draft, had secured lines onto the hulk’s bow, pulling its nose out of the sand while the other bigger boats hauled at its length. The thing was heavy—heavier than she looked. The Hellie’s master didn’t want his diesels wrecked, and he was almost ready to tell his first mate to shut them down. But he’d told Steve Kip he’d do his best, and by God that’s what he was going to do. “We’re heatin’!” someone cried out, and the captain yelled back, “Let ’er heat!”

  The props were foaming wild water at the sterns of the trawlers; now sand was coming up, too. That was a lot of power working in there. Shit! The captain grunted and chewed the butt. Fuckin’ thing won’t move!

  But suddenly there was a sliding sound and the Hellie lurched forward. “Ease up!” the captain called out sharply. “Drop her down a few notches!” The diesels immediately began to rumble more quietly, and a man in the stern on the trawler securing the bow lines waved his arms.

  “Okay,” the captain called out toward the squat wheelhouse. “Full ahead.”

  “Full ahead!” The order went back, by way of two or three crewmen.

  The Hellie began to move back, as did the Lucy J. Leen, still smoking badly, and the sliding noise intensified. Then, abruptly, it ceased. The submarine’s bow began to swing free, and the beat-up trawler tightened its hawsers to keep control over the thing. Holding the U-boat secured within their circle, the trawler armada moved at a crawl past the wharfs where the crew of a Bahaman freighter watched from their aft deck. The swells rolled in toward the fishing wharfs, bobbing the small boats up and down against their tire-brows and bumpers, spreading out beneath the pilings, and smashing into the beach in a mass of oil-streaked foam.

  The trawlers moved along the semicircle of the harbor, past the village toward the boatyard beyond. Past a couple of old, submerged wrecks with masts and funnels protruding from blue water, past another large trawler at anchor, past the boatyard wharfs they moved. The Hellie’s captain looked along the port deck and could see the aluminum drydock shelters. The largest one, the one used as a temporary shelter for patrol boats during the war, was right on the lip of the sea. It had been built on a concrete bedding with a large door that could be raised or lowered and a dam and pumping system that could allow flooding; now the captain could see the open shelter doorway. It was set amid a jumble of unused, rotting piers the navy had built and then abandoned. It was going to be damned tricky getting such a length in there, damned tricky.

  He watched the angle of the swells as they flowed around Kiss Bottom’s bommies. The sea was running a bit rough this afternoon, and that was going to cause more problems. The Hellie’s master had been a first mate on a British ocean-going salvage tug, and that was the primary reason Kip had asked him to oversee the operation. He’d towed for the British navy in the latter years of the war and had brought in many dead or dying ships to the Navy facilities here in this very harbor. He twisted around to check the lines. Number four fraying badly, number two as well. Goddamn it! he snarled to himself. No good rope in the islands these days! The Lucy J. Leen was cutting back somewhat due to her overtaxed diesels; someone was going to catch hell about letting those engines get in such a shit-awful shape.

  Dark-green water roiled inside the abandoned naval shelter. He could see the workmen waiting with their sturdy hawsers to secure the hulk. The trawlers passed the shelter; the smaller craft with the bow lines turned in front of the submarine and made for the open doorway. Diesels shrilled, but in another moment the hulk responded and started moving bow-first toward the shelter. Simultaneously the larger boats cut their engines; now it was up to the small boat to line up the submarine with the shelter and take it in. Moving steadily and slowly, the bow trawler maneuvered into position, heading its own nose into the darkness of the shelter. The other boats swung around, using their combined power to haul the U-boat forward. At the last moment the small boat dropped its lines and swung sharply to starboard; the U-boat was cutting a bow-wake, movin
g too fast, so the trawlers cut back on their engines to slow it.

  The U-boat moved into the shelter, and though its speed had been reduced, it still sent water crashing into the concrete sides of the shelter basin. Its bow crunched against concrete even as men leaped aboard her and caught lines to tie the boat to iron cleats. The trawlers dropped their lines then and swung off, and for a moment the heavy swells thrown up by the action of the boats sent foam and spray flying inside the drydock basin. The dock workers fought to lash the hulk down, but as the swells subsided the water smoothed out and the boat held firm between tightly pulled fore and aft hawsers.

  Kip stood and looked at the thing. God, what a machine! He took a last puff on his cigarette and tossed it into the brackish water; the butt hissed and went up underneath the hull. He was standing on a wide concrete platform level with the hull which ran around the entire shelter. Ladders leading off the platform that would normally have gone down to a dry pit were almost submerged. Behind Kip was an abandoned work area now jammed with old crates and forgotten machinery, a carpentry area where a stack of timber lay, an electrician’s cubicle now cluttered with pieces of iron and thick coils of all-purpose wiring. The concrete flooring was coated with a film of aged oil. The entire shelter smelled of sweat, diesel fuel, and oil, and compounding the odors was the fetid smell of the hulk itself. It was decaying, Kip thought, right in front of his eyes.

  “She’s in tight,” said a tall, barrel-chested black with a gold tooth gleaming in his mouth. “Sure hope you know what you’re doin’.”