White Cargo

16

With Meg Greville’s help, Cat managed to file a flight plan for Cartagena and get a weather forecast. He was relieved to have good flying weather, since, in spite of the instrument rating on his forged license, he didn’t want to have to make an instrument approach.

On the taxiway, he went slowly and carefully through the checklist, doing the procedure as Bluey had taught him. “Listen,” he said to Meg, “the international language of air traffic control is supposed to be English, but if I get into trouble, jump in and save me, okay?”

“Sure. I don’t fly, myself, but I’ve got a lot of hours as a passenger in light planes in Latin America. I know the drill pretty well.”

Cat called the tower and reported ready for takeoff. He was relieved to get permission in clear English. He taxied onto the runway, noting the time, glad to have the Rolex back on his wrist where it belonged, and shoved the throttle forward, watching the airspeed indicator carefully. At sixty knots, he pulled back on the yoke and the airplane rose into the air. He climbed to his filed altitude of four thousand, five hundred feet and turned southwest, working through his checklist. He leaned out the engine, set a course, and switched on the autopilot and altitude hold. He relaxed a little, feeling as if Bluey were still seated beside him, issuing instructions.

Cat chose to fly over the sea, a mile or so offshore, to get a better view of the coast. In an emergency, he could always set down on the beach. The coastline looked ordinary enough. There was an occasional tiny village, hard against the beach, and the large city of Barranquilla with its VOR beacon. He hardly needed radio navigation, though. It was simply a matter of hugging the shore until Cartagena hove into view.

Just before Barranquilla, Meg pointed ahead and down. “Can you make out a twin-engine airplane just inshore of the beach?”

Cat looked for a moment and found it. The aircraft was sitting only a few yards from a house.

“Drug runner inbound from the States,” she said. “Probably aiming for the Guajira, got lost, and ran out of fuel. He put it down on the water, skipped a couple of times, plowed across the beach, and came to rest in somebody’s front yard.”

Cat was thankful he’d been with somebody as capable as Bluey on his inbound trip.

An hour or so after leaving Santa Marta, Meg pointed again. “There’s Cartagena Airport.”

They were five miles out, and the single long strip was easily visible. Cat started a descent and called the tower. Shortly, he was on final approach, running through the last of his checklist. He bounced once, then settled the airplane down. Soon he wished he’d aimed for the middle of the ten-thousand-foot runway. It was a long taxi to the terminal. A lineman guided him to a parking spot, and Meg ordered fuel. A policeman appeared, but the forged papers and a smile from Meg got them cleared quickly. A teenage boy turned up with a cart to carry their luggage.

“Where do we get a cab?” Cat asked Meg.

“My car’s in the parking lot,” she said.

The car was a dusty, elderly Mercedes sedan, from which the radio had apparently been stolen. Soon they were entering the city, driving along a high, stuccoed wall.

“What’s behind the wall?” Cat asked.

“The Old City. I’ll show you later.”

They came to a stretch of beach rimmed by a string of high-rise hotels disappearing into the distance. Modern Cartagena, at least the beach portion of it, looked very like a Florida resort city. The Caribé stood out among the modern hotels, an older, lower building of pink stucco. Meg pulled into the driveway and under a portico. A doorman took the car, and they entered the cool lobby of the Spanish-style building and approached the front desk.

“May I speak with the manager, please?” Cat asked a woman at the front desk.

“He is occupied, señor,” she replied. “Will you wait a few minutes?”

“We’ll be at the pool restaurant,” Meg said quickly. “Mr. Ellis is the name.” She turned to Cat. “I’m hungry. Let’s get a sandwich while we’re waiting.”

They walked out of the lobby, through a densely gardened area, and up some stairs to the pool.

Cat was impressed. “I wasn’t expecting anything quite like this in Colombia,” he said, gazing at the large, handsome pool and the beautiful bodies surrounding it. “This reminds me of the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

“Oh, this can be a very pleasant country,” Meg said, sitting down at a poolside table. “This hotel is my favorite in Cartagena. It was designed by a Cuban just after World War II, and I think it must be a bit like Havana before Castro.”

As they were finishing their lunch, a young man in a suit approached them. “Excuse me, Mr. Ellis? The manager will be occupied for some time. My name is Rodriguez, may I be of assistance?”

Cat offered the man a chair. He had his story ready. “Earlier this month, I believe my niece may have been staying here. I had a brief telephone call from her — a very bad connection — and then we were cut off. I was unable to get through that day, and when I finally did I was told that she was not registered. I’d like to locate her; her mother is worried about her.”

“What was your niece’s name, Señor? I will check my records.”

“Her name is Katharine Ellis, but I think she was travelling with friends, so she may not have been registered. I think if I could learn who she was travelling with, I might be able to contact her through her friends.”

Rodriguez looked puzzled.

“What I wonder if you could help me with is, would it be possible to check your telephone records for the date and learn from which room the call was made? Then we would know to whom the room was registered. The call was made on the second of this month.”

Rodriguez now looked doubtful, and not a little suspicious.

“I am afraid this is irregular, señor. We do not divulge the names of our guests to informal inquiries. In any case, the hotel was filled to capacity on that date, and that would mean searching the records of more than two hundred rooms.”

Cat jotted a number in his notebook, ripped it out, and pushed it across the table, covering two one-hundred-dollar bills. “Here is the number she telephoned. It is in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States. I know this is a great imposition, but I wonder if you might take the time to have a look through your records?”

Rodriguez glanced quickly about him, then pocketed the number and the bills. “Well, perhaps I could take a look through the telephone records this evening, when I am off duty.”

“Thank you so much,” Cat said.

“Where may I reach you, Señor Ellis? This may take a few days, unless I am lucky.”

Meg cut in and gave the man a phone number.

Rodriguez stood and bowed. “I shall be in touch as soon as possible, Señor Ellis,” he said.

“Thank you,” Cat replied. “I will be equally grateful when you have found the information.”

The young man smiled and left.

“What was that number you gave him?” Cat asked.

“My place. You may as well stay out there. There’s a lot of room.”

“You’re sure I’m not putting you out? I could get a room here.”

“Not at all,” she said.

They finished lunch and left the hotel, driving along the beach.

“We’ll take a turn through the Old City,” she said, maneuvering through cars, brightly painted schoolbuses, and horse-drawn carriages. She drove through a gate in the fifty-foot-thick walls, and the character of Cartagena changed dramatically. Suddenly, they were in an earlier century. They wandered through narrow streets and elegant squares. The buildings were beautifully restored and maintained, made of the same masonry and stucco, with the same tile roofs. There was a harmony of design that grew from centuries of tradition and slow change.

“This is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen,” Cat said. “I expected this whole country to be one great big hovel, but I was wrong.”

“This part of the city goes back to the early sixteenth century. This was the strongest fortress in South America, the port from which most of South America’s treasure was hauled away by the Spanish.”

They left the walled city and drove northeast along the coast on a two-lane tarmac road. A few miles out of Cartagena, Meg turned left onto a rough dirt track and slowed enough to manage the potholes.

Cat had been impressed with the Caribé Hotel and looked forward to comfortable arrangements for the night. Now, as the Mercedes banged along the track through the cactus, he saw that hope vanishing. He began to think in terms of hammocks slung under thatch. His hopes were not improved when Meg got out to open the padlock on a battered steel gate. After that, though, the road smoothed out and showed signs of having been graveled. Shortly a large tree appeared before them, and as Meg swung the car around it, the house came into view.

It was no more than a few years old, of the traditional white stucco and red roof tiles. Meg used several keys on a sturdy oak door, then they were inside a large, sunlit space, stiflingly hot.

“Jesus, let’s get some air in here,” she said, and began unlocking large sliding glass doors opening onto a wide veranda. The sea breeze swept into the house, quickly cooling the interior. The living-room furniture was a mixture of Bauhaus leather and steel and soft pieces upholstered in pale Haitian cotton. “You’re this way,” she said, waving him into a large, sunny bedroom with a large bed and wicker furniture. “Say, do you play tennis?”

“Sure,” he said, dropping his bags on the bed. “I don’t have any gear, though. Tennis wasn’t what I had been expecting from Colombia.”

She laughed. “In Colombia, expect the unexpected. Look in the second closet, there. I think you’ll find what you need.”

Cat opened the closet and found tennis clothes and bathing suits in a variety of sizes, men’s and women’s. He found some shoes and changed. He could hear her in the kitchen as he came out of the bedroom.

“Just thawing some steaks for dinner,” she called out.

He had another look around the living room. He hadn’t noticed the pictures before. They were very South American-looking, mostly primitives. He liked them. The effect of the whole place was pleasing, much like its owner.

A moment later she joined him and led the way out the front door and along a path to a nicely built hard court. “This is my pride and joy,” she said. “I never have guests who don’t play tennis.” She blew the surface clean with an electric blower, and they began to hit balls.

She played more like a man than a woman, he thought, feeling it in his wrist as he returned one of her forehands. She won the serve and aced him twice before he even got a racket on a ball.

“Sorry about that,” she called out. “I get worse as it goes on.”

She wasn’t sorry about it, and she didn’t get worse. Cat thought if he had not been working out so much the last few months, she’d have run him off his feet. She took the first set six-one, and he stopped feeling guilty about wanting to beat a woman. Playing as hard as he could, he squeaked through the next set, winning it seven-five. At four-four in the third set, she broke his serve, and he reached down inside himself for something more. He had a brief flash of memory, of Quantico and a ten-mile run, surely the last time he had had to try this hard at anything. He broke her serve, then lost his again, then took hers again. His concentration was total now; he might have been playing at Wimbledon. He aced her to get to seven-six, then hit four of the hardest returns of service he had ever hit to beat her, eight-six.

They flopped onto a bench at courtside, both pouring with sweat and breathing hard.

“You sonofabitch,” she said conversationally. “Do you always play so hard against girls?”

“Girl? You’re the goddamned Bionic Woman. Don’t you have any pity?”

“You’re the first man to teat me in a long time.”

“The first man? What women have you been playing — Navratilova?”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“I’m...” He stopped, tried to unscramble his brain, finally looked at his watch. The twenty-ninth. “Good God, I’d forgotten.”

“Forgotten what?”

“I’ll be fifty tomorrow.”

“Fifty?”

“I may be the boy in this match, but you’ve got what, twelve years on me?”

“I’ve got fifteen years on you, buster.”

“Oops, sorry.”

“Race you to the beach,” she said, and sprinted off.

He staggered after her down a narrow path to the sea, and as he came around a large boulder, he saw a trail of tennis clothes stretching across the sand and, hitting the water, a lithe, naked form. He hopped along on one foot, struggling with a shoe, then another, then his shorts and shirt. He hit the surf sprinting, loped a few steps through the water, then dived flat and started swimming. She had fifty yards on him but was moving more slowly than he. He caught her a hundred yards out.

“As a swimmer, you’re a great tennis player,” he said, overtaking her at last.

She shoved water in his face and began swimming slowly back toward the beach. He followed a few strokes behind. She found the bottom, waded from the water, and flopped on her back on the wet sand. He fell down beside her. They were both breathing hard from the tennis and the swimming, and he was very conscious of her nakedness, particularly her full, tanned breasts as they heaved with her breathing. There were no untanned strips anywhere. He suddenly found it necessary to roll onto his stomach to conceal his growing concern with her body.

“God, I haven’t had such a workout in ages,” she said, still breathing hard.

“Neither have I,” he said, breathing, if anything, even harder. He knew he was staring, but he could not help himself.

She seemed unconcerned with her nakedness or his. “It’ll be dark soon,” she said, shivering a little. “I’d better go start dinner.”

“I’ll stay here for a minute and recover my health,” he said, embarrassed to move.

She got to her feet and jogged toward the house, collecting their clothing as she went He watched as she paused to rinse herself under an outdoor shower. The setting sun turned her body a hot shade of coppery gold. Then she was gone.

It took a couple of minutes of thinking about something else before he felt it was safe to stand. He trotted to the shower, grabbed a towel on the veranda, and let himself into his room through the sliding doors. He shaved, took a hot shower, and stretched out on the bed, just for a moment.

She placed the cool back of a hand on his face to waken him. It was dark in the room. He lay on his back, the towel covering his crotch. “How about a drink?” she suggested. “Dinner’s in half an hour.”

He looked at his watch. He had been asleep for an hour and a half. “Sure. Make me something local.”

He unpacked his clothes and dressed in light cotton clothes and deck shoes. She had a rum punch waiting for him in the kitchen while she grilled some steaks and worked on dinner.

“I’m afraid it’s frozen vegetables,” she said. “There’s nothing fresh in the house but potatoes, which are baking even as we speak.” She was wearing a loose-flowing caftan of a soft beige material that occasionally revealed the outline of her body as she moved about the kitchen.

“I thought you might be ready for an American meal,” she said.

“Sounds good. The house is wonderful.”

“It’s the only thing I own, except for the Mercedes,” she said. “I’ve been putting it together for four years. It’s just about where I want it now.”

“I should have guessed. It’s like you. Why did you bring me here? You don’t know me.”

“Yes, I do — better than I did yesterday, anyway. Want an instant character analysis?”

“Why not?”

“Well, of course, I know the general stuff about you, the business you built, and all that.”

“I’ll tell you a secret. My brother-in-law built the business. I just worked on the technical stuff.”

“When I met you, you were wound pretty tight. I thought you might break when your friend was killed.”

“I did break,” he said. “I was in a state of complete despair, didn’t know what to do next. I was about to pack it in and go home.”

“But you didn’t. When you got that phone call, you came back fast. That told me a lot — that, and the way you played tennis this afternoon. I beat you pretty easy the first set; then you decided you wanted to win. I was very impressed the way you played the last couple of games of the last set.”

“Don’t expect that sort of performance again. I don’t think I’ve ever played that well.”

“I don’t mean how well you played; I mean how hard you played.”

“Well,” he chuckled, “I couldn’t let myself be beaten by a mere slip of a girl.”

“A mere slip of a girl who had a year on the pro tour. I was never ranked very high; I overtrained for too long, and my knees went on me.”

“It doesn’t surprise me to hear that. You strike me as somebody who goes after things pretty hard.”

“That’s something you and I share,” she said.

He shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever had to go after things hard. I had it pretty easy, except in the Marines, and nobody had it easy there.”

“I learned something else about you during that tennis match, something you probably don’t know yourself. Not yet, anyway.”

“What’s that?”

“You have it in you to be completely ruthless. It didn’t take you long to put aside the fact that I was a woman, and that it might not be very graceful to play your best game.”

He laughed at that. “You’re right, you know; I am capable of ruthlessness, but apart from this afternoon, I can only remember once when I let it get the best of me.”

“Dinner is served,” she said, “but keep talking.” She got the steaks, vegetables, and potatoes on the table and handed him a bottle of red wine to open. “Come on, when were you ruthless?”

“It was in the Marines. I had a Naval ROTC commission from college, and I was one of four platoon leaders in my company — two other ROTC guys and one Academy man, a guy named Hedger. Hedger looked down on us ordinary college boys, thought of himself as infinitely superior. Our commanding officer, a major and an Academy man himself, shared Hedger’s view.

“Now you have to understand, you have to be a little crazy to survive in the Marine Corps, and if you’re not, you have to find a way to get a little crazy. Barry Hedger was my way. I lived to beat him, beat him at any and everything. I worked my ass off, day and night, to beat him at tactics, small-weapons training, personal combat — I even beat him in report writing, something an Academy man really does well. My platoon beat his platoon on the obstacle course, on the rifle range — even in keeping their barracks clean. My platoon sergeant knew what was going on between Hedger and me, and he used it to fire up the men. Christ, they reveled in it! The C.O. was on Hedger’s back constantly to beat me in something. How could an Academy man — one of the top ten in his class, yet — allow himself and his platoon to be bested by a Rotsie officer and his platoon?

“Finally, Hedger snapped, invited me outside one night at the officers’ club, promised to clean my clock. Everybody poured out of the bar, we stripped our blouses, and got down to it. Hedger came at me sort of karate style, half squatting, waving his hands around, making little noises. It’s funny, I hadn’t had a fistfight since grammar school — haven’t had one since, but I kicked him in the knee and hit him once — broke his nose. Oh, Jesus, there was a lot of blood and all, and then some colonel came and broke it up, chewed us both out good, made us shake hands. Didn’t report us to our C.O.

“On Review Day my platoon won all the silver, and Hedger marched with a limp and a taped nose. And then I realized what I’d done. I — an unmotivated, short-time officer, who couldn’t wait to get out of the Corps — had ruthlessly, gleefully, pursued a good officer — not a very nice guy, but a good officer — pounded him into the ground, inch by inch — for the sheer hell of it. Oh, I didn’t ruin his career, I guess — his platoon finished ahead of the other two and close behind mine — but the commendation that went in my record would have meant a hell of a lot more to him than it did to me. After I thought about it, I was ashamed of what I’d done.

“We got different assignments after that, and I never saw him again. And you know what? Part of the news in that phone call from my brother-in-law last night was that Barry Hedger is working in the Bogotá embassy. He’s my contact if I need help!”

Meg laughed. “I sure as hell hope you don’t need it!” She began clearing dishes away. “Here, take the brandy into the living room.”

He poured two glasses and sank into the large sofa. As he did the lights went off.

“Oh, damn,” she said, settling into the sofa beside him, her feet tucked under her, “the power’s always going out. It’ll probably be out all night.”

“Never mind,” he said, pointing outside, “we’ve got another source of light.” A large moon had risen from the sea, illuminating the room in a patchwork of astonishingly white light.

She rose to her knees, reached down, took his face in her hands, and kissed him. “I didn’t think you’d do this first,” she said.

“I wish I had had the guts,” he replied, kissing her back. He reached for her, and his hand fell squarely on a breast. She made a small noise, and he left it there.

Then, in one smooth motion, she hoisted the caftan over her head and let it drop to the floor. The moonlight made her naked body glow like marble as she helped him with his clothes. They stretched out together on the wide sofa, and in a moment were locked hungrily together.

When they had finished and were lying, spent, Cat felt as if he had taken a great leap across a wide chasm and safely made the other side. He tried to think more about it, but sleep overwhelmed him.

Much later, he woke. The moon was high over the house now, and the room was dark; the veranda and the beach were nearly as bright as day. He thought about himself, thought about the way he had been in the months since Katie had died. With his right hand he felt his wedding ring; he had never taken it off since the day he had been married.

He gently extricated himself from the sleeping Meg and walked out onto the terrace. He continued down to the beach, a warm breeze playing about his naked body. At the water’s edge, tears streaming down his face, he dipped his hand into the water, for lubrication, then, with difficulty, worked the gold band over his knuckle. He stood still for a moment, then drew back and threw the ring as far out into the sea as he could, out to where Katie slept in Catbird. For weeks he had not been able to recall her face clearly, but now he could, this last time. Finally, he could let her go.

“Goodbye, Katie,” he said aloud to her. “Peace.”

He turned and walked back toward the house.