White Cargo

13

They slept at Idlewild, in a small bunkhouse attached to the office. An Indian woman made them some breakfast, then Bluey asked Cat for more money. “We’ve got to get a flight plan filed for us at Cartagena for Santa Marta. Our papers are okay, but you have to file in this country, and we can’t arrive at Santa Marta from out of nowhere. It’s going to take a thousand to get it done. We’ve got to pay for fuel and tie-down, too.”

Cat gave him five thousand dollars. “You’re going to need something for tips,” he said, dryly.

Bluey winked at him and went to make the arrangements.

Before takeoff, Bluey piled their luggage on top of the now-empty plastic ferry tank. “A spare tank sets off alarms with the cops or the army,” he said. “We don’t want to have to bribe somebody unnecessarily.”

Cat was grateful Bluey was being concerned about money. They had already put a sizable dent in his hundred thousand dollars.

They took off at midmorning and headed out to sea.

“We’ll circle around and approach Santa Marta from the west, just to look good,” Bluey explained. “It’s less than a hundred miles as the crow flies, and we’ll add another fifty to the trip.”

They had a brief glimpse of the nineteen-thousand-foot Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta before the building clouds obscured them. Cat remembered an earlier glimpse of the mountains from offshore, the day he had first sailed Catbird into Colombian waters. He tried not to think about what life would be like now if he had sailed on to Panama.

Santa Marta airport was a single, long, asphalt strip, and Cat, who was flying left seat at Bluey’s insistence, listened as the Australian read him the checklist for landing. It was the first time Cat had landed the airplane. As soon as their wheels touched the runway, Bluey shoved the throttle in and reduced the flaps.

“Go around,” he grinned. “Let’s get you some touch-and-go’s.”

There was a strong crosswind blowing, and Cat sweated out that and the unaccustomed controls and final checks through a dozen practice landings, including a couple of short field takeoffs and landings. Gradually, he became accustomed to the airplane, heavier, faster, and more complex than the trainers he had been flying. “I reckon you’re checked out in this airplane,” Bluey said when he had finally allowed Cat to taxi to the apron. “I’d sign your logbook if I was still certified.”

A policeman gave their papers a perfunctory glance and waved them through the barrier into the small terminal. In the taxi Bluey said, “I reckon we’ll stay out at El Rodadero, the beach area. There’s nothing all that great in the town.” He had a brief conversation in Spanish with the driver. Shortly they pulled into the drive of what seemed a modern hostelry, a cluster of low buildings hugging the beach. Cat was glad for the change. He had begun to think that Colombia was filled with nothing but seedy Excelsiors and drug runners’ bunkhouses. At the front desk he registered as Ellis and shortly they were in a comfortable two-bedroom suite. Cat drank in the air-conditioning.

“I’d like to get some sleep before we go into town,” Bluey said, yawning.

Cat glanced out the window at the blue Caribbean. “I think I’ll see if they have a swimsuit in the shop downstairs.” He hadn’t showered that morning, and he was feeling hot and grimy. When he had changed, he walked downstairs, through the lobby and a courtyard containing a large pool and a thatched bar. It all seemed oddly normal after the past few days. He walked on to the beach, dropped his towel, and ran for the water. It was perfect. He swam out a hundred yards, then did slow laps up and down the beach for half an hour, working out the kinks, happy for some exercise.

Back on the beach, he flopped down onto the sand and ordered a piña colada. He drank the icy, sweet rum drink in record time and stretched out on the towel. It seemed nearly like a vacation. Down the beach a group of children were building a sand castle while their mothers chattered under a large thatched umbrella. An attractive woman with short dark hair waded out of the sea and walked to within a dozen yards of where he sat. She was in her early thirties, he reckoned, lithe and athletic-looking. She dried herself, then sat down and began to apply tanning lotion to her shoulders. He had a sudden urge to speak to her, but balked. Would she speak English? And anyway, how long had it been since he had approached a woman? He and Katie had been married right out of college, and he had never needed anybody else. The thought of approaching her made him suddenly anxious, but he was surprised that he wanted to at all. Was this some sign of healing? He dismissed the thought. Nothing could ever heal until he found Jinx, he was sure of that.

He dozed, and when he woke she was gone. He felt relieved. He got up, dusted himself off, and walked back to the pool bar. The dark-haired woman was sitting at a table nearby. He ordered a sandwich and a beer and tried not to think about her.

Bluey turned up, looking refreshed, and ordered a sandwich, too. “Fairly nifty Sheila,” he said, nodding at the woman.

Cat laughed. “Is that your down-under way of expressing approval?”

“Too right, mate. I have always found Latin women fairly nifty, and you’re forgetting where I’ve been the last couple of years.”

“I am at that,” Cat replied. “Go ahead, if you’re in the mood.”

Bluey shook his head. “I’m not her type,” he said ruefully. “After a lifetime, I know the sort I turn on, and she’s not it. I’m not so sure she’s my sort, either. A little too classy.”

“If you say so, Bluey.”

They finished their sandwiches.

“How about we bomb into Santa Marta and take a look around?” Bluey said.

Cat gave the woman a last glance. “Okay, let’s do it.” When he had found Jinx, then he could think about women.

They got a rent-a-car at the desk and drove the few miles to the town. It was busier than Cat remembered. He had gone no farther than the waterfront on his first visit, and now they were entering the town from the land, making it seem quite different. They passed the cathedral, then a colorfully painted old locomotive preserved as an exhibit near the railway station. Cat didn’t feel like a tourist. His anxiety level was rising. He was back where it had all begun.

Bluey parked the car near the cathedral. “Let’s nose around, see if we see anybody we know.”

They walked slowly through the town for an hour, looking into cantinas, both men searching faces. Cat half expected to turn a corner and see Denny or the Pirate sitting at a sidewalk table sipping a cervesa. It didn’t happen. They got back into the car, drove to the waterfront, and parked again.

“Show me where you met Denny,” Bluey said.

They walked unmolested past a young policeman at a gate in a chain-link fence separating the docks from a large square. Keeping to the water, Cat finally brought them to the spot where they had tied up. He stared at the rusty ladder he had climbed on his last visit. A fishing boat was tied to it. Cat tried to swallow the lump in his throat.

“Let’s ask around,” Bluey said, buttonholing a man who was busy applying a fresh coat of yellow paint to a rusty boat engine. The man nodded. “He knows Denny,” Bluey translated. The man shook his head. “Hasn’t seen him for a long time — several months.” Bluey asked another question and got a negative reply. “He doesn’t know the guy you call the Pirate or a sportsfisherman called the Santa Maria.”

They continued to stroll along the concrete wharf. There were a handful of foreign yachts tied up, and Cat resisted an urge to find the skipper of each one and tell him to get the hell out of Santa Marta. Bluey approached a dozen people and, finally, got what seemed to Cat a positive response from a young fisherman when the name Santa Maria was mentioned.

Bluey thanked the man and rejoined Cat. “He says he saw such a boat less than a month ago anchored at Guairaca, a fishing village seven or eight kilometers east of here. He’s sure of it. Let’s go.”

They began driving, and Cat tried to keep his hopes down. Everything so far had been a red herring. They climbed into the hills east of Santa Marta, passing a large shanty town on the edge of the city. Houses had been thrown together from all sorts of materials — packing crates, sheets of tin, cardboard. They were little better than tents. “Jesus, what a way to live,” Cat said.

“Barrio,” Bluey replied. “A lot of people in this country live like that. Look.” He nodded at a roadside sign. “Some politician has put his name on this one. Probably got them a water tap or something.”

Soon they crested a hill and found a beautiful bay below them with a village nestled at its shore. Cat thought that any American real estate developer would love to get his hands on the site, it was so beautiful. The road fell rapidly away toward the village, and shortly they had drawn up to the beach.

“Look,” Bluey said, pointing. “There’s the Santa Maria.”

Cat followed his finger to the spot. Half numb, half frightened, he got out of the car and walked quickly down the beach, forty yards, to the boat. The name was clearly visible on her bows.

“That’s the boat,” Cat said as Bluey fell in beside him. “No mistake, this time.”

The two men stopped and stared together. The Santa Maria lay beached, a weedy mooring line still running, quite unnecessarily, from her bows to a large rock at the top of the beach. She was heeled sharply to port, and as they moved, her starboard side came into view, the hull charred and burned away, her interior exposed. She had been stripped of anything of possible value. Not so much as a cushion was left. Bluey walked over to a group of half a dozen men who sat on the sand mending nets.

Bluey translated as they spoke. “The skipper was a man named Pedro. Rough-looking fellow. That’s your Pirate. No one has seen him for months. He left the boat here and didn’t come back. Finally some robbers stripped her gear and set her afire. The men from the village tried to save her, beached her, but she ended up as we see her. No one knows where Pedro went. No one knows his last name.” He continued to talk with them a moment more. “He didn’t seem much interested in sportfishing. Nobody comes here looking for sportfishing, anyway. They naturally assumed he was running drugs. Nobody worries much about that around here, there’s so much of it.” They conversed for another few minutes, then Bluey waved Cat away, and they walked back to the car. An old woman carrying a large fish fell in step with them, talking rapidly, obviously trying to sell them the fish, grinning, revealing a toothless mouth. Bluey gave her some money, not even slowing down.

“He was always alone, they said. Nobody ever saw him with a girl or anybody else. I think that’s the whole story. In a village this size, everybody knows everything, and if there was anything more to it, these blokes would know it. They wouldn’t miss a thing around here, especially anything to do with a boat.”

Cat stood, watching a group of small boys play an impromptu soccer match in the street along the beach. “So we’re back to square one again?”

“Not quite. At least we’ve got a name we can put to the face around Santa Marta. We might turn up something in the cantinas.”

“Come on, Bluey, half the male population of South America must be named Pedro, and anyway, it’s probably not his real name, not if he was running drugs.”

“Doesn’t matter. If he called himself Pedro here, he used it somewhere else.”

The two men trudged back to the car and started for Santa Marta. They were quiet for a while.

“How long since you were in Australia, Bluey?” Cat asked. He didn’t want to think about Pedro any more today.

“Strooth,” Bluey chuckled. “Mid-fifties, I guess. I think of myself as American these days. Got my citizenship in ’64.”

“You got any people back there?”

“Tell you the truth, I don’t even know. My folks are dead. I had a brother and a sister, both older. I hadn’t seen them for a couple of years when I came to the States. I got an ex-wife and a little girl in Miami, but I haven’t seen them in a while, either. The lady’s name is Imelda; she’s Cuban.”

“I thought you said you’d always been a bachelor.” Bluey grinned. “Well, for all practical purposes. I wasn’t very good at being married, I guess.”

“How old is the little girl?”

“Marisa is eight now. I send her Christmas and birthday presents; that’s about it. Imelda remarried about three years ago. Seems happy and settled. She wanted a slightly more stable citizen than me, I reckon. Still, it’s good for the kid. I have this fantasy that when she’s eighteen, I’ll pop up and send her to college, if I ever get a few bucks ahead.”

“What will you do with the money you’re making on this trip?”

Bluey smiled. “That’s all spent, in my head, anyway. I got an old mate over in Alabama has a little airplane refurbishing business, paint and interiors. I’ve got a few ideas for some modifications to Cessnas and Pipers. I’d like to move into his shop and work on those, maybe teach a little flying, if I can get my ticket back. I’ve always liked showing other people how to do it. Don’t know why.”

“All finished with the grass business, then?”

Bluey snorted. “You betcha. This is my last trip south. I want to have someplace to go home to at night, you know?”

Cat knew. He wasn’t sure he had that, himself, anymore.

They drove back into Santa Marta. Bluey suggested they take up the chase tomorrow, and Cat agreed. He was tired and wanted some dinner and a good night’s sleep.

They stopped at a traffic light. It was rush hour in Santa Marta, and the streets were teeming with an assortment of cars, motorbikes, and the garishly painted American school buses that passed for public transport in Colombia. Cat glanced to his right at a kid on a motor scooter who had pulled up next to them. The boy couldn’t be more than twelve, Cat thought; his feet barely reached the pedals, and he had to lean way forward to manage the handlebars. Cat wondered where a kid that age got a motor scooter. Not only that, he thought, looking at the boy’s arm, but an expensive wristwatch, too.

“Jesus Christ!” he shouted, throwing open the door and leaping out. The light changed and the boy on the scooter accelerated and turned right. Cat sprinted after him shouting, “Hey, stop! I want to talk to you! Hold it!” He could hear Bluey shouting behind him, and the chorus of horns that said he was blocking an intersection.

The boy looked back and saw Cat gaining on him. He revved the engine, and sprayed sand and gravel in Cat’s face.

“Hold it! I just want to talk!” But the scooter was half a block ahead of him and gaining.

Bluey pulled up in the Bronco. “What the hell are you doing, Cat?”

“Catch that kid on the scooter up there,” Cat shouted at him. He looked down the block, but the scooter was gone. The boy must have turned into a side street. “Come on, Bluey, move it! That boy was wearing my Rolex wristwatch, we’ve got to find him!”

Bluey got the car in gear, and they began methodically cruising every side street, passing a strange mixture of hovels and mansions.

“Listen, Cat,” Bluey said, shifting gears, “you’re getting too excited about this. So the kid had a Rolex. He stole it, and he stole the scooter, too, probably, but half the drug runners in Colombia have Rolexes; they’re a big fad down here.”

Cat knew what Bluey was thinking. First he had seen the wrong boat, then the wrong girl, now the wrong watch. “You don’t understand, Bluey,” he said, swiveling his neck to peer down an alley. “Most of the Rolexes you see are the old self-winding, mechanical models. Mine is a newer type, a quartz movement. They look different, and there aren’t that many of them around. I’ll bet that’s the only one in Colombia. All I want to do is look at it. There’s some engraving on the back of mine.”

Bluey sighed and kept on driving. They turned another corner, and a block ahead of them they saw a small crowd of kids on a corner. A woman with some sort of movie camera was taking their picture. Bluey slowed so they could check out the group, but the boy on the scooter was not there.

Cat suddenly realized that the woman with the camera was the one he had seen on the beach that morning. “Stop the car,” Cat said. He rolled down the window. “Excuse me, señorita, do you speak English?”

“Well, yeah, a little,” she said.

Cat winced. The woman was American.

“We’re looking for a boy of eleven or twelve on a motor scooter. Could you ask these kids if they’ve seen him?”

The woman looked amused. She turned to the children and spoke to them in excellent Spanish. Their faces went blank, and they shook their heads gravely in unison. “Sorry,” she said to Cat. “Nobody’s seen him.”

Cat looked at her closely. He felt there was some sort of conspiracy between the woman and these children, some silent secret. He thanked her, and they drove on, searching vainly for a boy, a motor scooter, and a Rolex wristwatch.

After an hour of this, when it was getting dark, Cat turned to Bluey. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve had enough of this for one day. Why don’t we start again tomorrow? The boy will still be around.”

“Yeah, I know you must be bushed, Cat. Listen, I had a nap this afternoon when you were swimming, so I’m okay. Why don’t you take a cab back to El Rodadero and have a drink? I’ll keep at it for a bit, ask some questions around the cantinas. Maybe somebody knows the kid.”

Cat nodded. “Okay, if you’re game.”

Bluey drove him to a taxi stand and left him. Cat got into a cab and gave the driver the name of the hotel. Suddenly he had the odd feeling that he would not see Bluey again. He looked over his shoulder in time to see the Bronco turn a corner and disappear. It was the first time they had been separated since they had arrived in Colombia. Cat had come to trust the Australian, but some tiny corner of his mind still seemed to fear abandonment. Cat chased the thought from his head.