Black Sunday

16

EDDIE STILES SAT BY THE window in the New York City Aquarium snack bar worrying. From his table he could see Rachel Bauman below him and forty yards away at the rail of the penguin pen. It was not Rachel Bauman who disturbed him; it was the two men standing with her. Stiles did not like their looks at all. The one on her left looked like Man Mountain Dean. The other one was a little smaller, but worse. He had the easy, economical movements and the balance that Eddie had learned to fear. The predators in Eddie’s world had moved that way. The expensive ones. Very different from the muscle the shylocks employed, the blocky hard guys with their weight on their heels.

Eddie did not like the way this man’s eyes swept over the high places, the roof of the shark house, the fences on the dunes between the Aquarium and the Coney Island board-walk. One slow sweep and then the man quartered the grounds going over it minutely, infantry style, from close to far, and all the time wagging his finger over an interested penguin’s head.

Eddie was sorry he had chosen this place to meet. On a weekday the crowd was not big enough to give him that comfortable, anonymous feeling.

He had Dr. Bauman’s word that he would not be involved. She had never lied to him. His life, the life he was trying to build, was based on what he had learned about himself with Dr. Bauman’s help. If that was not true, then nothing was true. He drained his coffee cup and walked quickly down the stairs and around to the whale tank. He could hear the whale blowing before he reached the tank. It was a forty-foot female killer whale, elegant with her gleaming black and white markings. A show was under way. A young man stood on a platform over the water holding up a fish in the pale winter sunshine. The surface of the water bulged in a line across the pool as beneath the surface the whale came like a black locomotive. She cannoned vertically out of the water and her great length seemed to hang in the air as she took the fish in her triangular teeth.

Eddie heard the applause behind him as he went down the steps to the underground gallery with its big plate-glass windows. The room was dim and damp, lit by the sun shining down through the blue-green water of the whale tank. Eddie looked into the tank. The whale was moving over the light-dappled bottom, rolling over and over, chewing. Three families came down the stairs and joined him. They all had loud children.

“Daddy, I can’t see.”

The father hoisted the boy to his shoulders, bumping his head on the ceiling, then took him outside squalling.

“Hi, Eddie,” Rachel said.

Her two companions stood on the far side of her, away from Eddie. That was good manners, Eddie thought. Goons would have come up on either side. Cops would have, too. “Hello, Dr. Bauman.” His eyes flicked over her shoulder.

“Eddie, this is David and this is Robert.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance.” Eddie shook their hands. The big one had a piece under his left arm, no doubt about it. Maybe the other guy had one too, but the coat fit better. This David. Enlarged knuckles on the first two fingers and the edge of his hand like a wood rasp. He didn’t get that learning to yo-yo. Dr. Bauman was a very wise and understanding woman, but there were some things she did not know about, Eddie thought. “Dr. Bauman, I’d like to talk to you a second, uh, personal if you don’t mind.”

At the other end of the chamber, he spoke close to her ear. Yelling children covered his voice. “Doc, I want to know—do you really know these guys? I know you think you do, but I mean know them? Dr. Bauman, these are some very hard guys. There are, you know, hard guys and hard guys. This is a thing I happen to know about. These are the harder type of hard guy, rather than mugs, if you follow me. These don’t look like no fuzz to me. I can’t see you around these type of fellows. You know, unless they were kin to you or something like that you can’t do anything about.”

Rachel put her hand on his arm. “Thanks, Eddie. I know what you’re saying. But I’ve known these two for a long time. They’re my friends.”

A porpoise had been put in the tank with the whale to provide her company. It was busy hiding pieces of fish in the drain while the whale was distracted by the trainer. The whale slid by the underwater window, taking a full ten seconds to pass by, its small eye looking through the glass at the people talking on the other side.

“This guy I hear about, Jerry Sapp, did a job in Cuba a couple of years ago,” Stiles told Kabakov. “Cuba! He ran in under the coastal radar close to Puerta Cabanas with some Cubans from Miami.” Stiles looked from Kabakov to Rachel and back again. “They had some business on shore, you know, they ran in through the surf in one of these inflatables, like an Avon or a Zodiac, and they came off with this box. I don’t know what the hell it was, but this guy didn’t come back to Florida. He got into it with a Cuban patrol boat out of Bahia Honda and ran straight across to Yucatán. Had a big bladder tank on the foredeck.”

Kabakov listened, tapping his fingers on the rail. The whale was quiet now, resting on the surface. Her great tail arched down, dropping her flukes ten feet below the surface.

“These kids are driving me nuts,” Eddie said. “Let’s move.”

They stood in the dark corridor of the shark house, watching the long gray shapes endlessly circling, small bright fish darting between them.

“Anyway, I had always wondered how this guy ran in close to Cuba. Since the Bay of Pigs they got radar you wouldn’t believe. You said your guy slipped away from the Coast Guard radar. Same thing. So I asked around a little, you know, about this Sapp. He was in Sweeney’s in Asbury Park there, about two weeks ago. But nobody’s seen him since. His boat’s a thirty-eight-foot sportfisherman, a Shing Lu job. They’re built in Hong Kong, and I mean built. This one’s all wood.”

“Where did he keep his boat?” Kabakov asked.

“I don’t know. Nobody seemed to know. I mean, you can’t ask too close, you know? But look, the bartender at Sweeney’s takes messages for this guy, I think he could get in touch. If it was business.”

“What kind of business would he go for?”

“Depends. He has to know he’s hot. If he went himself on this job you’re interested in, of course he knows he’s hot. If it was a contract job, if he let out the boat, then he was listening to the Coast Guard frequency the whole time. Wouldn’t you?”

“Where would you run, if you were this man?”

“I would have watched the boat for a day after it was back, to make sure it wasn’t staked out. Then if I had a place to work I’d paint it, put the legit registration back on and change it up—I’d put a tuna tower on it. I’d catch a string of Gold Platers running south to Florida along the ditch and I’d get right in with ‘em—a string of yachts going down the Intra-coastal Waterway,” Eddie explained. “Those rich guys like to go in a pack.”

“Give me a high-profit item away from here that would make him surface,” Kabakov said. “Something that would require the boat.”

“Smack,” Eddie said, with a guilty glance toward Rachel. “Heroin. Out of Mexico into, say, Corpus Christi or Aransas Pass on the Texas coast. He might go for that. There would have to be some front money, though. And he would have to be approached very careful. He would spook easy.”

“Think about the contact, Eddie. And thank you,” Kabakov said.

“I did it for the doc.” The sharks moved silently in the lighted tank. “Look, I’m gonna split now. I don’t want to look at these things anymore.”

“I’ll meet you back in town, David,” Rachel said.

Kabakov was surprised to see a kind of distaste in her eyes when she looked at him. She and Eddie walked away together, their heads bent, talking. Her arm was around the little man’s shoulders.

Kabakov would have preferred to keep Corley out of it. So far, the FBI agent knew nothing of this business of Jerry Sapp and his boat. Kabakov wanted to pursue it alone. He needed to talk to Sapp before the man wrapped himself in the Constitution.

Kabakov did not mind violating a man’s rights, his dignity, or his person if the violation provided immediate benefits. The fact of doing it did not bother him, but the seed within him that was nourished by the success of these tactics made him uneasy.

He felt himself developing contemptuous attitudes toward the web of safeguards between the citizen and the expediency of investigation. He did not try to rationalize his acts with catchphrases like “the greater good,” for he was not a reflective man. While Kabakov believed his measures to be necessary—knew that they worked—he feared that the mentality a man could develop in their practice was an ugly and dangerous thing, and for him it wore a face. The face of Hitler.

Kabakov recognized that the things he did marked his mind as surely as they marked his body. He wanted to think that his increasing impatience with the restraints of the law were entirely the result of his experience, that he felt anger against these obstacles just as he felt stiffness in old wounds on winter mornings.

But this was not entirely true. The seed of his attitudes was in his nature, a fact he had discovered years ago near Tiberias, in Galilee.

He was en route to inspect some positions on the Syrian border when he stopped his jeep at a well on a mountainside. A windmill, an old American Aermotor, pumped the cold water out of the rock. The windmill creaked at regular intervals as the blades slowly revolved, a lonely sound on a bright and quiet day. Leaning against his jeep, the water still cool on his face, Kabakov watched a flock of sheep grazing above him on the mountainside. A sense of aloneness pressed around him and made him aware of the shape and position of his body in these great tilted spaces. And then he saw an eagle, high, riding a thermal, wingtip feathers splayed like fingers, slipping sideways over the mountain’s face, his shadow slipping fast over the rocks. The eagle was not hunting sheep, for it was winter and there were no lambs among them, but it was above the sheep and they saw it and baaed among themselves. Kabakov became dizzy watching the bird, his horizontal reference distorted by the mountain slope. He found himself holding on to the jeep for balance.

And then he realized that he loved the eagle better than the sheep and that he always would and that, because he did, because it was in him to do it, he could never be perfect in the sight of God.

Kabakov was glad that he would never have any real power.

Now, in an apartment in a cliff face in Manhattan, Kabakov considered how the bait could be presented to Jerry Sapp. If he pursued Sapp alone, then Eddie Stiles had to make the contact. He was the only person Kabakov knew who had access to crime circles along the waterfront. Without him, Kabakov would have to use Corley’s resources. Stiles would do it for Rachel.

“No,” Rachel said at breakfast.

“He would do it if you asked him. We could cover him all the time—”

“He’s not going to do it, so forget it.”

It was hard to believe that twenty minutes before, she had been so warm and morning-rosy over him, her hair a gentle pendulum that brushed his face and chest.

“I know you don’t like to use him, but Goddamn it—”

“I don’t like me using him, I don’t like you using me. I’m using you, too, in a different way that I haven’t figured out yet. It’s okay, our using each other. We have something besides that and it’s good. But no more Eddie.”

She was really splendid, Kabakov thought, with the flush creeping out of the lace and up her neck.

“I can’t do it. I won’t do it,” she said. “Would you like some orange juice?”

“Please.”

Reluctantly, Kabakov went to Corley. He gave him the information on Jerry Sapp. He did not give the source.

Corley worked on the bait for two days with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. He spent an hour on the telephone to Mexico City. Then he met with Kabakov in the FBI’s Manhattan office.

“Anything on the Greek?”

“Not yet,” Kabakov said. “Moshevsky is still working the bars. Go on with Sapp.”

“The Bureau has no record on a Jerry Sapp,” Corley said. “Whoever he is, he’s clean under that name. Coast Guard registration does not have him. Their files are not cross-indexed on boat type down to the detail we need. The paint we have will do for positive comparison, but tracing origin is another matter. It’s not marine paint. It’s a commercial brand of semi-gloss over a heavy sealer, available anywhere.”

“Tell me about the dope.”

“I’m getting to that. Here’s the package. Did you follow the Krapf-Mendoza case in Chihuahua by any chance? Well, I didn’t know the details either. From 1970 through 1973 they got 115 pounds of heroin into this country. It went to Boston. Clever method. For each shipment they used a pretext to hire an American citizen to go down to Mexico. Sometimes it was a man, sometimes a woman, but always a loner who had no close relatives. The stooge flew down on a tourist visa and after a few days unfortunately died. The body was shipped home with a belly full of heroin. They had a funeral home on this end. Your hair is growing out nicely by the way.”

“Go on, go on.”

“Two things we got out of it. The money man in Boston still has a good name with the mob. He helps us out because he’s trying to stave off forty years mandatory in the joint. The Mexican authorities left a guy in Cozumel on the street. Better not to ask what he’s trying to stave off.”

“So if our man sends word down the pipeline that he is looking for a good man with a boat to run the stuff out of Cozumel into Texas, it would look reasonable because the old method was stopped,” Kabakov said. “And if Sapp calls our man, he can give references in Mexico and in Boston.”

“Yeah. This Sapp would check it out before he showed himself. Even getting the word to him will probably involve a couple of cutouts. This is what bothers me, if we find him we’ve got almost nothing on him. We might get him on some bullshit conspiracy charge involving the use of his boat, but that would take time to develop. We’ve got nothing to threaten him with.”

Oh, yes, we do, Kabakov thought to himself.

By midafternoon Corley had asked the U.S. District Court in Newark for permission to tap the two telephones in Sweeney’s Bar & Grill in Asbury Park. By four p.m. the request had been denied. Corley had no evidence whatsover of any wrongdoing at Sweeney‘s, and he was acting on anonymous allegations of little substance, the magistrate explained. The magistrate said that he was sorry.

At ten a.m. on the following day a blue van pulled into the supermarket parking lot adjacent to Sweeney’s. An elderly lady was at the wheel. The lot was full and she drove along slowly, apparently looking for a parking place. In a car parked beside the telephone pole thirty feet from the rear of Sweeney’s Bar a man was dozing.

“He’s asleep, for Christ’s sake,” the elderly lady said, apparently speaking to her bosom.

The dozing man in the car awoke as the radio beside him crackled angrily. With a sheepish expression, he pulled out of the parking space. The van backed into the place. A few shoppers rolled carts down the traffic aisle. The man who vacated the parking space got out of his car.

“Lady, I think you got a flat.”

“Oh, yeah?”

The man walked to the rear wheel of the van, close beside the pole. Two thin wires, brown against the brown pole, led from the telephone line to the ground and terminated in a double jack. The man plugged the jack into a socket in the fender well of the van.

“No, the tire’s just low. You can drive on it all right.” He drove away.

In the rear of the van, Kabakov leaned back with his hands behind his head. He was wearing earphones and smoking a cigar.

“You don’t have to wear them all the time,” said the balding young man at the miniature switchboard. “I say you don’t have to wear them all the time. When it rings or when it’s picked up on this end, you’ll see this light and hear the buzzer. You want some coffee? Here.” He leaned close to the partition behind the cab. “Hey, Mom. You want coffee?”

“No” came the voice from the front. “And you leave the bialys in the bag. You know they give you gas.” Bernie Biner’s mother had switched from the driver’s seat to the passenger side. She was knitting an afghan. As the mother of one of the best freelance wire men in the business, it was her job to drive, look innocent, and watch for the police.

“Eleven dollars and forty cents an hour she charges me and she’s supervising my diet,” Biner told Kabakov.

The buzzer sounded. Bernie’s quick fingers started the tape recorder. He and Kabakov put on the earphones. They could hear the telephone ringing in the bar.

“Hello. Sweeney’s.”

“Freddy?” A woman’s voice. “Listen, honey, I can’t come in today.”

“Shit, Frances, what is this, twice in two weeks?”

“Freddy, I’m sorry. I got the cramps like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Every week you get the cramps? You better go to the muff doctor, kid. What about Arlene?”

“I called her house already—she’s not home.”

“Well, you get somebody over here. I’m not waiting tables and working the bar too.”

“I’ll try, Freddy.”

They heard the bartender hang up and a woman’s laughter before the phone was replaced on the other end. Kabakov blew a smoke ring and told himself to be patient. Corley’s stooge had planted an urgent message for Sapp when Sweeney’s opened a half-hour ago. The stooge had given the bartender fifty dollars to hurry it up. It was a simple message saying business was available and asking Sapp to call a number in Manhattan to talk business or to get references. The number was to be given to Sapp alone. If Sapp called, Corley would try to fool him into a meeting. Kabakov was not satisfied. That was why he had hired Biner, who already received a weekly retainer to check the Israeli mission phones for bugs. Kabakov had not consulted Corley about the matter.

A light on Biner’s switchboard indicated the second telephone in the bar had been picked up. Through the earphones, they heard ten digits dialed. Then a telephone ringing. It was not answered.

Bernie Biner ran back his tape recording of the dialing, then played it at a slower speed, counting the clicks. “Three oh-five area code. That’s Florida. Here’s the number. Eight-four-four-six-oh-six-nine. Just a second.” He consulted a thick table of prefixes. “It’s somewhere in the West Palm Beach area.

Half an hour passed before the switchboard in the van signaled that another call was being placed from the bar. Ten digits again.

“Glamareef Lounge.”

“Yeah, I’m calling for Mr. Sapp. He said I could leave him a message at this number if I needed to.”

“Who is this?”

“Freddy Hodges at Sweeney’s. Mr. Sapp will know.”

“All right. What is it?”

“I want him to call me.”

“I don’t know if I can get him on the phone. You say Freddy Hodges?”

“Yeah. He knows the number. It’s important, tell him. It’s business.”

“Uh, look, he may come in around five or six. Sometimes he comes in. I see him, I’ll tell him.”

“Tell him it’s important. That Freddy Hodges called.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll tell him.” A click.

Bernie Biner called West Palm Beach information and confirmed that the number was that of the Glamareef Lounge.

The fire on Kabakov’s cigar was two inches long. He was elated. He had expected Sapp to use a telephone cutout, a person who did not know his identity, but whom he called under a code name to receive messages. Instead it was a simple message drop in a bar. Now it would not be necessary to go through the intricate process of setting up a meeting with Sapp. He could find him at the bar.

“Bernie, I want a tap until Sapp calls Sweeney’s here. When that happens, let me know the second you’re sure it’s him.”

“Where will you be?”

“In Florida. I’ll give you a number when I get there.” Kabakov glanced at his watch. He intended to be in the Glamareef at five p.m. He had six hours.

The Glamareef in West Palm Beach is a cinder-block building on a sandy lot. Like many Southern drinking places constructed after air-conditioning became popular, it has no windows. Originally it was a jukebox-and-pool-table beer joint called Shangala, with a loud air conditioner and a block of ice in the urinal. Now it went after a faster crowd. Its Nau gahyde booths and dim bar drew people from two worlds—the paycheck playboys and the big-money yachting people who liked to slum. The Glamareef, nee Shangala, was a good place to look for young women with marital problems. It was a good place for an older, affluent woman to find a body-and-fender man who had never had it on a silk sheet.

Kabakov sat at the end of the bar drinking beer. He and Moshevsky had rented a car at the airport and their hurried drive past the four nearby marinas had been discouraging. There was a small city of boats in West Palm Beach, many of them sportfishermen. They would have to find the man first, then the boat.

He had been waiting an hour when a husky man in his middle thirties came into the bar. Kabakov ordered another beer and asked for change. He studied the new arrival in the mirrored front of the cigarette machine. He was of medium height and he had a deep suntan and heavy muscles under his polo shirt. The bartender put a drink in front of him and, with it, a note.

The husky man finished his drink in a few long swallows and went to a phone booth in the comer. Kabakov doodled on his napkin. He could see the man’s mouth moving in the telephone booth.

The bar telephone rang twice before the bartender picked it up. He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Is there a Shirley Tatum here?” he said loudly, looking around. “No. I’m sorry.” He hung up.

That was Moshevsky, calling the bar from a pay phone outside, relaying the signal from Bernie Biner in Asbury Park. The man Kabakov was watching in the telephone booth was talking to Sweeney’s Bar in Asbury Park with Bernie listening in. He was Jerry Sapp.

Kabakov sorted his change in a roadside telephone booth a half hour before dark. He dialed Rachel’s number.

“Hello.”

“Rachel, don’t wait dinner on me. I’m in Florida.”

“You found the boat.”

“Yes. I found Sapp first and followed him to it. I haven’t examined it yet. Or talked to Sapp. Listen, tomorrow I want you to call Corley. Tell him Sapp and the boat are at the Clear Springs Marina near West Palm Beach. Have you got that? The boat is green now. Number FL 4040 AL. Call him about ten a.m., not before.”

“You’re going aboard it tonight, and in the morning, if you’re still alive, you’re planning to call me and say you’ve changed your mind about telling Corley, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” There was a long silence. Kabakov had to break it. “It’s a private marina, very exclusive. Lucky Luciano used to keep a boat here years ago. Also other archcriminals. The man at the bait store told me. I had to buy a bucket of shrimp to find that out.”

“Why don’t you go in with Corley and a warrant?”

“They don’t admit Jews.”

“You’ll take Moshevsky with you, won’t you?”

“Sure. He’ll be close by.”

“David?”

“Yes.”

“I love you, to a certain extent.”

“Thank you, Rachel.” He hung up.

He did not tell her that the marina was isolated, that the landward side was surrounded by a twelve-foot hurricane fence, floodlit. Or that two tall men with short shotguns manned the gate and patrolled the piers.

Kabakov drove a half mile down the winding road through the scrub growth, the rented johnboat bouncing on its trailer behind him. He parked the car in a thicket and climbed a small knoll where Moshevsky lay with two pairs of field glasses.

“He’s still aboard,” the big man said. “There are fleas in this damned sand.”

With his binoculars, Kabakov scanned the three long piers jutting into Lake Worth. A guard was on the farthest pier, walking slowly, his hat set back on his head. The whole marina had a sinister, fast-money look. Kabakov could imagine what would happen if a warrant were served at the gate. The alarm would be given and whatever was illegal in any of the boats would go over the side. There must be some clue aboard Sapp’s boat. Or in Sapp’s head. Something that would lead him to the Arabs.

“He’s coming out,” Moshevsky said.

Kabakov zeroed in on the green sportfisherman moored stern-to in the line of boats at the center pier. Sapp climbed up through the foredeck hatch and locked it behind him. He was dressed for dinner. He stepped down from the bow into a dinghy and pulled well away from his boat to a vacant slip, then climbed onto the pier.

“Why didn’t he just walk back along the boat and get onto the pier?” muttered Moshevsky, lowering his field glasses and rubbing his eyes.

“Because the damned thing is wired,” Kabakov replied wearily. “Let’s get our boat.”

Kabakov swam slowly in the darkness under the pier, feeling ahead for the pilings. Cobwebs hanging from the planks above him brushed his face, and, from the smell, there was a dead fish nearby. He paused, hugging a piling he could not see, feet gripping the rough sea growth crusting the piling beneath the water. A little light came under the edges of the long pier, and he could see the dark, square shapes of the motor yachts moored stern-to against it.

He had counted seven on the right side. He had six to go. A foot and a half above him, the underside of the pier was studded with nail points where the planks had been nailed down. High tide would be hard on his scalp. A spider ran across his neck and he submerged to drown it. The water tasted like diesel fuel.

Kabakov heard a woman’s laughter and the tinkle of ice. He shifted his equipment bag farther around on his back and swam on. This should be it. He made his way around a tangle of rusty cable and stopped just under the edge of the pier, the stern of the boat rising black above him.

Here the air was not so close, and he breathed deeply as he peered at the luminous dial of his watch. It had been fifteen minutes since Moshevsky steered the outboard past the seaward end of the marina and he had slipped over the side. He hoped Sapp would linger over dessert.

The man had some kind of alarm system. Either a pressure-sensitive mat in the open cockpit at the stern or something fancier. Kabakov swam along the stern until he found the cable that carried 110-volt shore power to the craft. He unplugged the cable from the jack in the stern. If the alarm used shore power it was now inoperative. He heard footsteps and slid back under the pier. The heavy tread passed overhead, sending a trickle of grit down in his face.

No, he decided, if it were his alarm system, it would be independent of shore power. He would not go over the stern. He would go in as Sapp had come out.

Kabakov swam along the hull to the darkness under the flaring bow. Two mooring lines, slack to accommodate the tide, ran from the bow to pilings on either side of the slip. Kabakov pulled himself up, hand over hand, until he could lock his arms around the stanchion supporting the bow rail. He could see into the cabin of the yacht next door. A man and a woman were seated on a couch. The backs of their heads were visible. They were necking. The woman’s head disappeared. Kabakov climbed up on the foredeck and lay against the windshield, the cabin shielding him from the dock. The windshield was dogged tightly shut. Here was the hatch.

With a screwdriver, he removed the thick plastic window in the center of it. The hole was just big enough for his arm. Reaching inside, he turned the lock and felt around the edges of the hatch until he found the contacts of the burglar alarm sensor. His mind was picturing the wiring as his fingers felt for the wires in the padded overhead. The switch was on the coaming, and it was held open by a magnet on the hatch. Take loose the magnet, then, and hold it in place on the switch. Don’t drop it! Ease open the hatch. Don’t ring, don’t ring, don’t ring.

He dropped into the darkness of the forward cabin and closed the hatch, replacing the window and the magnet.

Kabakov felt good. Some of the sting was gone from the debacle at Muzi’s house. With his flashlight he found the alarm circuit box and disconnected it from its clutch of dry-cell batteries. Sapp did neat wiring. A timer permitted him to leave without setting off the alarm, a magnet-sensitive cutout against the skin of the boat permitted him to reenter.

Now Kabakov could move around. A quick search of the forward cabin revealed nothing unusual except a full ounce of high-grade crystal cocaine and a coke spoon from which to sniff it.

He switched off his flashlight and opened the hatch leading up to the main cabin. The dock lights shining through the ports provided a little light. Suddenly Kabakov’s Parabellum was out and cocked, the trigger squeezed within an ounce of firing.

Something was moving in the cabin. He saw it again, a small, repetitive movement, and again, a flicker of dark against the port. Kabakov lay down in the companionway to silhouette the movement against the light. He smiled. It was Sapp’s little surprise for an intruder coming aboard from the dock, an electronic scanner of a new and expensive type. It swept the cockpit constantly, ready to sound the alarm. Kabakov came up behind it and turned off the switch.

For an hour, he searched the boat. In a concealed compartment near the wheel he found a Belgian FN automatic rifle and a revolver. But there was nothing to prove that Sapp or Sapp’s boat had been involved in moving the plastic explosive.

It was in the chart bin that he found what he was looking for. A bump at the bow interrupted him. The dinghy. Sapp was coming back. Kabakov slipped into the forward cabin and squeezed into the narrow point of the bow.

Above him, the hatch opened. Feet and then legs appeared. Sapp’s head was still out of the hatch when Kabakov’s heel slammed into his diaphragm.

Sapp regained consciousness to find himself tied hand and foot on one of the two berths with a sock stuffed in his mouth. A lantern hanging from the ceiling gave off a yellow light and a strong odor of kerosene. Kabakov sat on the opposite bunk smoking a cigar and cleaning his fingernails with Sapp’s icepick.

“Good evening, Mr. Sapp. Is your head clear or shall I throw some water on you? All right? On November twelfth, you took a load of plastic explosive from a freighter off the New Jersey Coast. I want to know who was with you and where the plastic is. I have no interest in you otherwise.

“If you tell me, you will not be harmed. If you don‘t, I will leave you worse than dead. I’ll leave you blind, dumb, and crippled. Do I have to hurt you now to demonstrate that I’m serious? I don’t think so. I’ll remove this sock from your mouth now. If you scream, I’ll give you something to scream about, do you understand me?”

Sapp nodded. He spat out lint. “Who the hell are you?”

“That doesn’t concern you. Tell me about the plastic.”

“I don’t know anything about it. You got nothing on me.”

“Don’t think in legalistic terms, Mr. Sapp. You are not protected from me by the law. The people you worked for are not mob-connected, by the way. You don’t have to protect them on that account.”

Sapp said nothing.

“The FBI is looking for you on a smuggling charge. Soon they will add mass murder to the list. That’s a lot of plastic, Sapp. It will kill a lot of people unless you tell me where it is. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

“Kiss my ass.”

Kabakov rose and jammed the sock back in Sapp’s mouth. He grabbed Sapp by the hair and forced his head back against the wooden bulkhead. The tip of the icepick rested lightly in the corner of Sapp’s rolling eye. A growl rumbled from Kabakov’s chest as he drew back the icepick and struck, pinning Sapp’s ear to the bulkhead. The color had gone from Sapp’s face and there was a foul odor in the cabin.

“You really must look at me when I’m talking to you,” Kabakov said. “Are you ready to cooperate? Blink for yes. Die for no.”

Sapp blinked and Kabakov removed the sock.

“I didn’t go. I didn’t know it was plastic.”

Kabakov believed this was probably true. Sapp was shorter than the man described by the Leticia’s first mate. “But your boat went.”

“Yes. I don’t know who took it out. No! Honestly, I don’t know. Look, it’s my business not to know. I didn’t want to know.”

“How were you contacted?”

“A man called me the last week in October. He wanted the boat ready, standing by, during the week of November eighth. He didn’t say who he was and I didn’t ask.” Sapp grimaced with pain. “He wanted to know a few things about the boat, not much. Hours on the engines, whether it had any new electronics.”

“Any new electronics?”

“Yeah, I told him the loran was out—for God’s sake take this thing out of my ear.”

“All right. You’ll get it through the other one if I catch you in a lie. This man that called, he already knew the boat?”

“Ouch!” Sapp turned his head from side to side and cut his eyes far over, as though he could see his ear. “I guess he knew the boat, he sounded like it. It was worth a thousand to him for it to be available, like a retainer. I got the thousand in the mail at Sweeney’s in Asbury Park two days later.”

“Do you have the envelope?”

“No, it was a plain envelope, New York City postmark.”

“He called you again.”

“Yeah, about November tenth. He wanted the boat for the twelfth, a Tuesday. The money was delivered to Sweeney’s that night.”

“How much?”

“Two thousand for the boat, sixty-five thousand deposit. All cash.”

“How was it delivered?”

“A cab brought it in a picnic basket. Food was on top of it. A few minutes later the phone rang again. It was the guy. I told him where to get the boat.”

“You never saw him pick it up or return it?”

“No.” Sapp described the boathouse in Toms River.

Kabakov had the photo of Fasil and the composite of the woman sealed in a rubber glove in his bag. He took them out. Sapp shook his head at both pictures.

“If you still think I went out with the boat, I’ve got an alibi for that day. A dentist in Asbury Park fixed my teeth. I have a receipt.”

“I expect you have,” Kabakov said. “How long have you owned the boat?”

“A long time. Eight years.”

“Any previous owners?”

“I had it built.”

“How did you return the deposit?”

“I left it in the same basket in the trunk of my car by a supermarket and put the trunk key under the floor mat. Somebody picked it up.”

The New Jersey coastal chart Kabakov had found in Sapp’s chart bin had the course to the rendezvous marked with a neat black line, departure time and running time checks jotted beside it. The bearings for two radio direction finder fixes were penciled in. Three bearings for each fix.

Kabakov held the chart by the edges, under the lantern where Sapp could see it. “Did you mark this chart?”

“No. I didn’t know it was on the boat or I would have gotten rid of it.”

Kabakov took another chart from the bin, a Florida chart. “Did you plot the course on this one?”

“Yes.”

He compared the two charts. Sapp’s handwriting was different. He had used only two bearings for an RDF fix. Sapp’s times were written in Eastern Standard. Time for the rendezvous with the Leticia, jotted on the New Jersey chart, was 2115. This puzzled Kabakov. He knew the Coast Guard cutter had spotted the speedboat close to the freighter at 1700 Eastern Standard. The boat must have been there for some minutes, loading the plastic, so the rendezvous was about 1615 or 1630. Yet it was marked on the chart for five hours later. Why? The departure time from Toms River and the running time checks were also marked about five hours later than they must have occurred. It didn’t make sense. And then it did make sense—the man Kabakov was seeking had not used Eastern Standard time, he had used Greenwich Mean Time—Zulu time—Pilot time!

“What fliers do you know?” Kabakov demanded. “Professional pilots.”

“I don’t know any professional pilots I can think of,” Sapp said.

“Think hard.”

“Maybe a guy in Jamaica with a commercial license. But he’s been in the jug down there ever since the feds vacuumed his luggage compartment. He’s the only professional pilot I know. I’m sure of it.”

“You know no pilots. You don’t know who hired the boat. You know very little, Mr. Sapp.”

“I don’t. I can’t think of any pilots. Look, you can bust me up. You probably will, but I still won’t know.”

Kabakov considered torturing Sapp. The idea was sickening to him, but he would do it if he thought the results would be worth it. No. Sapp was not a principal in the plot. Threatened with prosecution, fearful that he might be an accessory to a major atrocity involving the explosives, he would try to cooperate. He would try to recall any small detail that would identify the man who hired his boat. Better not to hurt him badly now.

The next step should be an intensive interrogation of Sapp about his activities and associates and a thorough lab analysis of the chart. The FBI was better equipped to do these things. Kabakov had come a long way for very little.

He called Corley from a telephone booth on the pier.

Sapp had not consciously lied to Kabakov, but he was mistaken in saying that he knew no professional pilots. It was an understandable memory lapse—it had been years since he had last seen Michael Lander or thought about the frightening, infuriating day of their first meeting.

Sapp had been on his seasonal migration northward when a floating timber mangled both his propellers off Manasquan, New Jersey, forcing him to stop. Sapp was strong and capable, but he could not change a jammed and twisted prop in open water with a sea running. The boat was drifting slowly toward the beach, dragging her anchor before a relentless onshore wind. He could not call the Coast Guard because they would smell the same stench that gagged him as he went below to get his storm anchor—the smell of $5,500 worth of black market alligator hides bought from a Florida poacher and bound for New York. When Sapp returned to the deck, he saw a boat approaching.

Michael Lander, out with his family in a trim little cruiser, threw Sapp a line and towed him to a protected inlet. Sapp, not wanting to be stuck at a marina with a disabled boat loaded with hot hides, asked Lander to help him. Wearing snorkle masks and flippers, they worked beneath the boat, and their combined strength was enough to pry one of the propellers off its shaft and fit the spare. Sapp could limp home.

“Excuse the smell,” Sapp said uneasily as they sat on the stern, resting. Since Lander had been below in the course of the work, he could not have helped seeing the hides.

“None of my business,” Lander said.

The incident began a casual friendship that ended when Lander returned to Vietnam for his second hitch. Sapp’s friendship with Margaret Lander had continued, however, for some months after that. On the rare occasions when he thought about the Landers, it was the woman Sapp recalled most clearly, not the pilot.