Painkiller

19

One year before the USS Chameleon was sunk by the Vietnamese mine, a group of London businessmen each kicked in five thousand pounds sterling and purchased one-half of a private island in the British Virgin Islands. Another twenty-five-hundred U.S. dollars built each partner a two-room bungalow, and the partners had themselves a nifty investment property. Part vacation time-share, part tax shelter, it allowed its owners to split up the high-season calendar among themselves and rent out the rooms for the remainder of the year. On paper, the resort lost money; in reality, it provided the partners a small but undeclared cash dividend at the end of each year.

To manage the property, the investors found a suitable candidate when a graduate student named Chris Woolsey applied to the ad they’d posted at Oxford. At the end of his first summer of work, Woolsey accepted the investors’ offer and dropped out of the two-year masters program he’d beat out thousands of candidates to attend and opted, instead, to turn his first few months spent at the place called Conch Bay into an endless summer.

It didn’t take much of Woolsey’s time or energy to tend to Conch Bay’s guests. Woolsey made a daily run to Tortola on a rickety skiff, retrieving enough in the way of food and supplies to keep his charges drunk and fed; he cleaned the outhouse seat every night, turned down the cots, and threw the old set of sheets in the wash and hung them out to dry in the sun each afternoon. A cistern collected and filtered rainwater for the showers; a septic-tank service boat came to do the dirty work every three weeks or so. After his supply run in the morning, Woolsey, meanwhile, spent the remainder of each day one of three ways: on the beach, at the bar, or in the water. He read virtually every literary classic still in print.

Easily the oddest of the many odd guests ever to stay at the rustic resort was a visitor who’d arrived about three years into Woolsey’s tour of duty. The guest introduced himself with only one name, arriving one morning on a water taxi and renting one of the ramshackle bungalows by paying six months’ rent up front, in cash; he added five thousand on top of the rent to cover whatever meal-and-alcohol plan Woolsey could muster for the same stretch of time. He then, to Woolsey’s amusement, proceeded to do little more than stay in his room, sleep on the beach, and get schnockered for three months running. The guy didn’t talk once. Still, Woolsey provided him with a plastic cooler, ducking into the man’s quarters whenever he went out to the beach, Woolsey keeping the cooler loaded with tuna sandwiches and whatever fresh fruit he’d brought over on the skiff. The man always ate all the food, so Woolsey kept filling it up.

Five months in, the guest took to snorkeling out along the rim of the bay, staying out for two or three hours at a time, Woolsey once timing him at four hours and thirty-three minutes. He began jogging on the beach, the shortest beach Woolsey had ever seen a man run on, no longer than a quarter mile, but once he’d started the habit, in no time at all the guest was out running the length of the beach fifteen to twenty times each morning around dawn.

The guest paid for another six months, Woolsey wondering where he’d been keeping the cash all this time. When the man offered Woolsey a thousand-dollar tip, Woolsey waved it off and said the proprietors paid him just fine, but thanks for the thought just the same. The next day Woolsey told him about some good snorkeling he’d done over on Virgin Gorda, in a place called the Baths, Woolsey saying that maybe he would want to come along with the other guests he was taking over there on the skiff. The man went, and on the ride back, passing the bigger island’s marina, asked Woolsey if he knew anybody running a deep-sea fishing charter, maybe one with a captain who knew where the marlin ran. Woolsey told him he knew a guy who could take care of him, and a couple days later-after a morning at sea-the man came back with ten pounds of swordfish filets. Woolsey grilled up a batch of steaks for the guests, and the extras kept the cooler full of sandwiches for a week.

One afternoon the man was taking up three feet of the six-foot bar and working on the seventh glass of his new favorite drink, Puerto Rican rum and Coke with a lime wedge, Woolsey serving him the Cuba libres, when Woolsey said, “Got some bad news, Guv. Proprietors are looking to sell.”

Cooper, clearly not wishing to be disturbed, said, “That right.”

“Figure they can get top dollar for the real estate,” Woolsey said, “all these cruise ships doing so much business down here. Owners don’t come around anymore anyway-bunch of old fogeys. One of ’em even died, I think. Bloody shame, you ask me.”

Cooper asked why he thought it was such a shame, that people died all the time, and Woolsey shook his head and waved his arm out at the beach, where the bay’s two-inch wavelets were busy lapping at the white sand. “Look at this effin’ place,” he said. “Anybody with half a noggin and five pounds,” he said, “he’d put up a restaurant, throw a thatched roof over the bar, build a bigger dock-in fact, he’d get some old bugger like you to dive down, pour some concrete moorings out in that bay-and there you go.”

Cooper said, “Where?”

“What?”

“You just told me ‘there you go.’ Where?”

Woolsey looked at him and said, “I’ll tell you where you go. You go to a few travel magazines and invite ’em to visit you free of charge. Spread the word that if you’ve got a sailboat and you’re coming through the BVIs, well, stop by this little island down here, and they’ll serve you conch fritters and mahimahi steaks. If you want, you can fly in through Tortola and they’ll taxi you over free of charge, then put you up for a week for next to nothing. More than we charge now, but still a fair price. Throw up some palm trees, couple of tropical bushes, make it look like a real resort-and make a bloody fortune doing it.”

Woolsey said, “Place may cost a hundred grand, not a big ticket for a place like this, but you’ve gotta spend another hundred to make it worth your while, otherwise nobody who can afford the higher price is staying here. Marriott or Westin could afford to do it, and therein lies your problem, Guv-they’ll put up a high-rise, replace this whole bleedin’ lagoon with a swimming pool, put in some fake waterfalls with fuckin’ water lilies.”

Woolsey told Cooper he’d been saving plenty of money, skimming whatever he could off the top, but no way in hell could he drop two hundred grand into this place. Not even the first hundred.

“So that,” he said, “is why it’s a bloody shame.” He looked out at the bay again and shrugged. “Thought you’d want to be the first to know, Guv. Let me know, you want some help finding another island to hide out on.”

“Thanks for telling me,” Cooper said, then did his best to ignore Woolsey for the rest of the night. He fell asleep on the beach with his naked feet brushing the edge of the water in the dark.

Just under five weeks later, a short, heavyset man wearing a navy blue business suit arrived at Conch Bay on a water taxi at ten in the morning. When he told Woolsey he’d just flown in from the Caymans and was looking for a man named Chris Woolsey, Woolsey shook hands with the man, who introduced himself as Jacob Bartleby, attorney-at-law. Bartleby said he represented a holding corporation out of Grand Cayman specializing in resort investments, and Woolsey, long since accustomed to such inquiries, told Bartleby to come over to his office, where he would provide the information on how to contact the proprietors.

When they reached the office-a converted outhouse with a pair of folding metal chairs-Bartleby said, “Mr. Woolsey, my clients have already contacted the proprietors.”

Bartleby withdrew a cashier’s check from the briefcase he’d brought and handed it to Woolsey. Woolsey read the check, which was made out in the sum of $140,000 to a company called Conch Bay LP.

“This cashier’s check reflects my clients’ estimate for the costs of renovation, marketing, and maintenance that would be required to keep this resort running, profitably, for the foreseeable future. Do you feel this number is realistic?”

“Realistic?” Woolsey shook his head. “I don’t know, Guv. Asking price is a hundred K, and that’d leave you with forty. Could be done, you could dress the place up a little, I suppose, but you’ll lose money, probably a lot of it in fact, if that’s all you’re puttin’ into it.”

“I’m sorry,” Bartleby said, “allow me to clarify. My clients have already purchased the resort. Or to be precise, they have had the ninety-nine-year lease from the local government assigned to them. And you’re correct-the price was one hundred thousand U.S. dollars.”

Bartleby pulled a sheet of paper and a pen from his briefcase and handed both to Woolsey.

“This is a limited partnership agreement. If you sign it, my clients’ rights to the ninety-nine-year lease will be assigned to the partnership. In exchange for such assignment, and the check I’ve just given you, my clients would like to retain a forty-nine percent stake in the limited partnership, which obviously would entitle them to the equivalent share of any profits generated by the partnership, in perpetuity.”

Woolsey read the document, where he discovered the odd feature of his name, printed in the text of the agreement. He looked up at Bartleby with a forced, lopsided grin intended to mask his confusion.

“Look, Guv’nor, I’m not sure your clients understand how-well, bloody hell. Mr.-Bartleby, is it?”

“Yes.”

“You see, well, I’m not sure I understand, mate.”

Bartleby offered a firm grin.

“The fifty-one percent share goes to you, Mr. Woolsey, as managing partner. In exchange, of course, you would need to be willing to run the day-today operations of the resort on a continuing basis. My clients,” he said, “intend to be passive partners in this venture.”

Later that afternoon, Woolsey found Cooper out on the beach, sipping a Cuba libre on a lounge chair. Woolsey pulled up another chair, clicked it back to the same angle as Cooper’s, and sat beside him.

“Listen, mate,” Woolsey said. “A pesky little man representing a Cayman Islands holding firm came by to see me this morning.”

“That right,” Cooper said.

“Seems they’ve bought the resort,” Woolsey said. “Want me to run it, seems.”

Cooper grunted. Woolsey was silent for a moment.

Then he said, “You have any ideas about that?”

Cooper looked out into the bay, reaching up with his right hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun. “Sounds to me,” he said after a long while of looking out at the bay, “that things may just stay the same around here.”

Woolsey nodded, and the two of them stared out at the bay, sitting in the two lounge chairs, the sun glaring down at them from the sky, careening off the water and the sand, keeping the air warm as the wind rustled the trees behind the bungalows.

“I’ve given this some thought,” Woolsey said.

Cooper didn’t say anything.

“I get through putting this place together, I’m thinking it’ll have nine bungalows. I’m thinking the one I’ll build over there, the one with the most privacy, I’m thinking you ought to stay in that one.”

Cooper kept looking out at the turquoise bay. Soaking up the sun.

“I’m thinking you ought to stay there free of charge,” Woolsey said, “and I know you like to drink a lot, so once I get the restaurant going, remodel the bar, maybe put up a thatched roof, then you’ll also be able to eat and drink for free. That sound all right to you?”

After a while, Cooper nodded, said, “I don’t see why not,” and fell asleep.

After a while Woolsey stood, but didn’t leave. Cooper woke up, feeling Woolsey’s annoying presence behind him as he attempted to relax. Woolsey shifted his weight from one foot to another in the sand. Finally, Cooper shaded his eyes from the sun with a hand again, craned his neck to look up at Woolsey, and said, “What do you want?”

“What I told you that day,” Woolsey said, “that part about skimming off the top. I just wanted to let you know I won’t be doing that any longer.”

Through with what he had to say, the gangly young man walked away and left Cooper alone with the sun.