The Night Boat Page 8

  “I do, Lenny,” Kip said.

  “Mr. Langstree, he be back from his trip to Steele Cay tomorrow or the next day, and when he find out what he got in here…well, I don’ think he goin’ to like it too much, you know?” Lenny Cochran was Langstree’s foreman. He had agreed to go along with this because Kip was the constable and a man he respected, but he was still worried his boss was going to come down hard on him.

  “He’s never had need to use this basin,” Kip reminded him, sensing the man’s unease. “It’s just full of junk the British navy left behind—just a damned storage warehouse. If he jumps, you tell him I ordered you and the rest of the men, and send the old goat over to see me.”

  Lenny smiled. “Shouldn’t talk ’bout Mr. Langstree that way.”

  There was a rattle of chains and the sound of a winch in operation; the far bulkhead slid down into the water, just missing the stern and submerged propellers of the submarine by a few feet. The only light in the shelter streamed through a series of large, rust-edged holes in the roof almost thirty feet above them. Water gurgled noisily around the U-boat’s hull vents; its conning-tower and periscope shafts loomed high. Shadows played across the shelter’s opposite wall as several of the men moved about, examining the boat at a respectful distance.

  “She ain’t in such bad shape,” Lenny said softly. He looked down the boat’s length and whistled. “Mon, she must’ve been hell in her day, you know?”

  “I’m sure of it.” The deck was fully out of water now, and the sea streamed in rivulets through the mass of debris, making strange whispering noises that echoed within the shelter. Kip looked past the tower bridge toward the stern, then something caught his eye and he jerked his head back. Jesus! he thought, stunned. What was that!

  He was almost certain he’d seen someone standing there, hands on the iron coaming, a dark, lean figure of a man staring down at them. He saw now it was an interplay of shadows and light, locking together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, through one of the roof holes. Christ, that had given him a shock! Jumbies, he told himself sarcastically, and then chided himself. Don’t go thinking voodoo, Kip; there are no such things as haunts.

  “What’s the matter, Kip?” Lenny asked him a second time—Kip had not seemed to hear before.

  “Nothing.” He blinked his eyes and looked back to the bridge again. A shadow, that was all.

  And then he was certain someone was staring at him.

  Kip turned his head. In the corner, near the wreckage of timber that had once been a naval carpentry shop, a red dot glowed. As Kip watched, the dot flared and a stream of smoke rolled out, like a ghostly essence, through a splotch of light. A black man smoking a thin cigar, wearing faded jeans and a sweat-stained T-shirt, emerged from the shadows. He had no expression on his hard face; there was a cold, rather cunning set to the line of his lips, but he moved with an animal-like grace.

  “That the boat killed old man Kephas?” the man said to Kip. His eyes didn’t seem to register the men’s presence; they focused somewhere on the submarine. His name was Turk; he had only recently arrived on the island, and Kip had already had trouble with him, throwing him in the cell two Saturdays before for brawling. Langstree had bailed him out; the young man was supposed to be an expert hand at a torch, and Langstree was paying him top wages for a welder. But Kip had seen a lot of these island drifters pass through, and he knew Turk was a rootless, undisciplined type of man.

  “What happened to Kephas was an accident,” Kip said.

  The young man had a tough face, thick eyebrows, a black goatee. “I saw the body this mornin’. Bad way to die.” He exhaled smoke through flared nostrils. “Why you put that thing in here, to hide it?”

  “Go on about your business, mon,” Lenny cautioned him.

  Turk ignored him. “I hear some things ’bout that fucker. I hear it’s a Nazi sub.”

  Kip nodded.

  “How ’bout that, huh? Goddam bitch jus’ corked off the bottom, ain’t that so? I never heard of that happenin’ before. What’s inside her?”

  “A few tons of corroded iron, twisted bulkheads, maybe a couple of live torpedoes.” Kip said. And what else? he wondered suddenly. What had Moore mentioned about the sealed hatches?

  “Why don’t you open it up and have a see?” Turk raised an eyebrow.

  “Too dangerous. And I’m not that curious.”

  Turk nodded, smiling thinly. He turned and stared at the boat for a moment, then took the cigar stub out of his mouth and flicked it. It hit iron, falling in a shower of sparks into the placid water. “Off the Caymans couple or three years ago,” he said, “somebody found a German gunboat sunk in about a hundred feet. They used an underwater torch to get through a few collapsed bulkheads, and they burned into a vault. You know what that fucker yielded?” He looked from one man to the other. “Gold bars. Made those fellas rich. Fuckin’ rich.”

  “Gold bars?” Lenny asked.

  “That’s bullshit.” Kip interrupted quickly. “And if you think this beat-up crate’s carrying gold bars you’re out of your mind.”

  Turk shrugged. “Maybe not gold. But maybe somethin’ else. Those goddamn Nazis carried all manner of stuff with ’em. You never know ’til you look.”

  “The only thing in there is a lot of old machinery,” Kip told him.

  “Maybe so, maybe not.” Turk smiled again, his eyes still blank.

  Kip recognized that hungry look. “Now you hear me. If you’re thinking about doing a bit of free-lance torching, forget it. Like I say, you spark some explosives and you’ll be picking gold bars off the streets of Heaven.”

  The other man held up his hands defensively. “I’m talkin’, that’s all.” He smiled again and walked past the constable toward the battered frame door set into one wall. He opened the door, admitting a shaft of blinding sunlight, and was gone.

  “He got no respect for elders,” Lenny said. “He’s trouble, but he damn good at what he does.”

  “So I hear.” Kip gazed at the U-boat for a few more seconds, feeling a chill creep up his back. He could hear the sounds of it settling; creaking timbers, water sloshing around, the groan of a deep metal bulkhead—eerie, distant voices. “Lenny,” he said, “keep the workmen away from here, will you? I don’t want anybody fooling around with this thing, and what I said about explosives maybe being on board is true.”

  “Okay,” Lenny agreed, nodding. “I do what you say.” He raised his voice and called to the rest of the men, “She down now, let’s get on with our business! J.R., you and Murphy got a hull-scrapin’ to finish up! Percy, you done paintin’? Come on, let’s get back!”

  Kip clapped the man on the shoulder and made his way out. But even in the fierce sun, his eyes aching from the glare, he saw the image of a dark form standing on that conning tower, as silent and motionless as Death itself. Keep it up, he told himself, starting the jeep’s engine. You’ll be seeing jumbies in your soup. He drove out of the boatyard, heading for the fishermen’s shanties. Like it or not, he had to pay a call on the Kephas woman. There was work to be done, and a sorry task it was indeed.

  But before his jeep had made a hundred yards more he felt that chill again, like a premonition. He had a wall inside him, cutting him in half, blocking off a dark place where he feared to look.

  That boat had been built to destroy; it had been baptized in blood and fury, and God only knew how many ships and good men had gone down in the wake of its torpedoes and guns. Boniface’s words haunted him: Take it out of the harbor. Sink it. Sink it. Sink it.

  “How, by God?” he said aloud.

  Abruptly the bright colors of Coquina village came up around him, and his mind had just begun to wonder how he could soothe the Kephas woman when he felt the first slow scrape of jagged nails across the wall inside his soul.

  Seven

  HE PAUSED IN the darkness, took from a back pocket a flask and uncapped it, tilted it to his lips, and let the good strong Blackjack rum flow down. Then he wiped his mouth on his sleeve,
returned the flask to the pocket, and continued walking the road.

  The darkness was absolute, the midnight breezes thick. They clung around him. No lights burning in the village. Everyone asleep. No, no—there was a light burning up at the Indigo Inn. A single square of light in an upstairs window. He didn’t know the white man, but he’d seen him around the village before. It was the white man found the submarine.

  The jungle grew wild just beyond the road; cicadas were singing like sawblades in the trees, and every now and then a bird skreeled. It was just enough noise to unnerve him. Out at sea there was only the blackness; he could hear the surf on the coral and he knew the beach was near, but he couldn’t see it.

  He’d gone back to the naval shelter three more times that day to look at the U-boat, to think about what might be waiting for him inside. The gold bars found in Cayman waters had flamed his greed. Of course, he didn’t know if the stories were true or not—he’d heard them from a rum-rag in a bar—but if it was true! It was. It had to be true. He quickened his pace. The boatyard was around the next curve in the road, and he had hard work to do.

  Something about that vessel had eaten into Turk; there was a strangeness to it, he had a weird feeling about it. He’d spent all day thinking about it, wondering what treasures it could be hiding. Maybe that damned policeman knew more than he was saying, too. Why else would he have wanted to put it away inside that shelter? Why not just let it rot in the harbor? No, somethin’ was real strange. The policeman was hidin’ somethin’. And nobody had ever hid any secrets from Turk Pierce.

  The whitewashed wooden gates to the boatyard entrance were straight ahead. It would be easy to either slip under them or climb over. Hell, who was going to know? He had almost reached them when a shadow detached itself from the other jungle shadows and stepped out into the road.

  Turk stopped, frozen, his mouth half-open.

  In the darkness the apparition was huge, a hulking form with wide bare shoulders, its chest covered by the thinnest cotton shirt. He took a step back before he realized it was real—it was a man. He was bald-headed, his flesh a tawny color instead of pure ebony; he had a white beard and mustache, cropped close to his shadow-covered face, and Turk caught the sudden gleam of a small gold ring hanging from one earlobe. The man was carrying a crate of some kind, and Turk could see the muscles defined on his forearms. The figure stood perfectly still, watching.

  “Hey, you scared the fuck out of me,” Turk said easily, trying to control his voice. Christ! He didn’t want any trouble, especially not with a bastard as big as this. “Who are you?”

  The man said nothing.

  Turk stepped forward, trying to see the face, but the figure had vanished, swallowed up by the foliage. A knot had caught in Turk’s throat; he thought he’d seen one side of the face, and it had been a hideous mass of scars. He stood still for a long time, then took his flashlight from his belt and shined it into the jungle, cautiously. Nothing there. If the man was still around, he was moving silently. Turk shivered, fighting off a cold wave of nameless fears. What was that thing, a damn jumbie walking the road maybe hunting a soul? Something lookin’ for a little child to suck the blood out of?

  He kept the light on, moving it from side to side before him. When he reached the gates, he saw there was enough room for him to slide beneath them on his belly. Crossing the yard, moving through discarded piles of machinery, empty oil barrels, around beached boat hulks, he saw the naval shelter. He paused for a moment, standing against a mountain of cable, and switched off his light. He’d heard a noise, like the sound of someone walking along wharf planking. A goddamn night watchman? There was the noise again, and then Turk realized it was just the breeze, slapping the weathered boatyard sign against its support posts. He could hear the sound of the clangers in the far distance, and the bass rumble of breaking waves. Turk snapped his light on again, still uneasy from his encounter with that figure on the road, and approached the shelter. Cochran hadn’t put a chain or padlock on the door, thank God; it was closed, a few crates blocking it. A handpainted sign read: Keep out. Cochran.

  Turk pulled the crates away, scowling when he found they’d been filled with heavy odds-and-ends—bolts and broken tools. He opened the door, shined the light around inside, then entered. It smelled like a burial vault and the stench was almost overpowering, but he swallowed and tried to keep his mind off it. Light reflected off the water and rippled across the walls, undulating beneath the thing’s hull. Strange shadows moved away from the beam of light, like phantoms scurrying for the safety of darkness. He worked the light over the conning tower, up to the tops of the shafts, and then back along the superstructure. You ain’t so much hell now, are you? he asked the thing. Something clattered sharply behind him, and Turk sucked in his breath; he flashed the light into a corner, his heart hammering. It was only a rat, panicked by the unfamiliar light, squeezing among a clutter of oil cans and rag scraps.

  There was a gangplank between the concrete walkway and the U-boat’s deck, and Turk crossed it, careful of his footing. He had already climbed to the bridge and examined the main hatch there during the day; water and sand more than an inch deep still swirled over it. There was another hatch on the aft deck, covered with the tendrils of cables, and he couldn’t work them away alone. But on the fore deck, near the gun’s snout, there was a third hatch, the seam line marking a large rectangular opening. It was covered over by a broken planked lid.

  Turk bent down, his eyes following the circle of the light, and lifted the hatch cover to examine the iron again. How thick would this bitch be? he wondered. He banged a hand against the iron and knew it was going to be a hell of a job. He sat back on his haunches and swung the light toward the spear-point of the bow far ahead. Hell of a big mothafucker, he thought. His impulse to burn through was stronger than ever, though he was oddly unnerved by the sheer size of the boat. There was probably no gold inside, but what about souvenirs? he wondered. The dealers in Kingston and Port-au-Prince could move anything. And there was a collector for everything under the sun. He might be able to get a good price for some of the equipment inside, maybe find himself the skeleton of a pistol or intact instrument gauges. And what about bodies? Maybe they in here, may they ain’t. Come on, come on; you got a job to do.

  Something made a noise on the other side of the shelter; Turk swung his light around, swearing softly. The rattle of a can. The flashlight beam shone through thick clumps of brown weed that hung down from the tower bulwark, and he could smell the sea in them. Another rat, Turk told himself. The shelter was filled with the things, big bloated wharf rats that ate the dockside roaches. He’d best get on with it.

  Hidden back in the carpentry shop, covered by an oily tarpaulin, was a cylinder truck—an apparatus like a pushcart—with a cylinder of acetylene gas and a larger cylinder filled with oxygen. From the two cylinders there were hoses that connected to the welding-torch unit, providing a flammable mix of the gas, in this case, for the cutting process. Turk had wheeled the unit over to the shelter just before quitting time and had hidden it in the carpentry shop. He was taking a chance, if Cochran had decided to take a check of the supply shed, but the worker in charge of the equipment was a lazy bastard, Turk thought. Which had worked out fine for him.

  Now he wheeled the truck over the gangplank onto the deck, carefully because it was fairly heavy and the planks groaned beneath its weight. He got the truck positioned as he wanted it before putting on the welder’s mask he’d left hanging on the truck frame. Turning on the valves to release the gas and oxygen flow, he used his striker to spark the torch tip and it sprang into life, a soft orange glow in the darkness. He adjusted the mix until he was ready, then bent down and began to work, his hand moving in a smooth semicircular motion.

  Over the soft hissssss of the burning gas he heard the great boat moan, like a sluggish and heavy creature awakening from sleep.

  In the small bedroom of a brown-painted stucco house across the island, Steven Kip jerked suddenly and
his eyes opened.

  He lay very still, listening to the repetitious voice of the surf, wondered what it was that had awakened him. Beside him his wife, Myra, was sleeping peacefully, one slender arm thrown out across his chest, her body pressed against his side. He turned his head and kissed her very softly on the cheek, and she rustled the sheet and smiled. They had been through a lot together, and though the years had made Kip tougher and more cynical, they had been gentle with her. There were laugh lines around her eyes and mouth, but they were lines of good living. He kissed her again. He was a light sleeper, so anything could have awakened him: a wave breaking, the clatter of a coconut palm, the shrill of a nightbird. He waited for a few moments. Still nothing. All familiar sounds he had heard a thousand times before. He lay his head back on the pillow beside hers, and closed his eyes.

  Then he heard it again.

  A muffled stacatto of drums, echoing from somewhere distant.

  He sat up, drew the covers aside, and rose from the bed. Myra stirred and lifted her head. “It’s nothing, baby,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep. I’m going to have to go out.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked, rubbing her eyes. “What time is it?”

  “After three. Lie back now, and sleep. I won’t be long.” Already he was getting into his trousers, then buttoning his shirt. Myra pulled the sheet up around her, and Kip crossed the room to peer out through a window that faced the harbor. It was pitch black out there except for the stars, tiny clusters of light in the sky like the wheelhouse lanterns of a thousand spectral ships against a black ocean.

  Then, again, echoing through the jungle, the sharp rattle of the drums; Kip’s skin tightened at the back of his neck. Damn it to hell! he thought, pulling on his shoes and leaving the house as quietly as possible.

  He drove the jeep to Front Street, turned along the dark shanty village on the harbor rim and toward the jungle, the wind sharp in his face. He watched the windows for lights and searched the streets for moving figures, but no one was stirring. Who else was listening to those drums? How many lay in the dark, eyes open, trying to read the message that was swept across the island with the early breezes? Kip knew what it had to be: Boniface conducting a ritual over the boat. Damn the man! Kip cursed silently, still watching for lights. I’m the law here, the only law, above and beyond Boniface’s voodoo gods.