The Island (6 page)

“The jingle she was working on.”

“O that this too, too solid hair would fall and resolve itself unto the drain.” Maynard laughed again.

“What?”

“It’s
Hamlet.
His famous depilatory speech.”

“What’s
Hamlet?”

“A play. You’ll know it soon enough.”

Justin returned to
The American Rifleman
. “Hey, didn’t we used to have one of these?” He pointed to a photograph of a Colt Frontier revolver.

“Yup. A rare one, too. A .32-20. You remember how the holster used to shine? That leather was a hundred years old.”

“They say in here that the single-action Colts weren’t accurate. The grips were too small.”

“They didn’t have to be accurate beyond about twenty feet. The fighting was all close-in.”

“What about gunfights? You know, when they drew down on each other.”

“I bet that didn’t happen ten times in ten years. If a fight came to guns, they shot each other any way they could. In the back, from under a table, behind a door.”

“That’s not fair.”

“It wasn’t meant to be fair. The point was to get it over with as quickly as possible, and walk away from it in one piece.” Maynard paused and looked at his son. “No fight makes any sense, Justin. If you get into one, all you should want to do is end it. ‘Fair’ is for the other guy to worry about.”

The seat-belt sign lit up, and the stewardess announced over the intercom that they would be landing at National Airport in a few minutes.

“I wish we could still shoot,” Justin said. Until a year ago, when Maynard’s parents had moved to Arizona, Maynard and Justin had spent frequent weekends shooting with Maynard’s father, who was called Gramps, on his small Pennsylvania farm. Gramps had been Marine Corps rifle champion during World War II, and during the Korean War he had tested weapons for the Pentagon. His eighteenth-century stone farmhouse was packed with military memorabilia, from a James I-cipher musket to a Ferguson breech-loading flintlock rifle used at the battle of Kings Mountain during the Revolution, to (Justin’s favorite] a rare example of the protean “Stoner system,” which made a one-man battalion out of a modern soldier. They had been good weekends, warm and close and cozy and exciting.

“So do I,” Maynard said. “We will, someday.”

“When?” Justin looked at him, wanting a promise.

Maynard could not promise. “I don’t know.” He saw the boy look away, disappointed. “Hey, you remember when we shot skeet that time? You did really well.”

“I got three.”

“Yeah, but . . .” It was a stupid thing to bring up. Maynard had forgotten that the shotgun stock had been so long that Justin had had to hold it under his arm instead of against his shoulder. “I only got three the first time, too.”

“Yeah, but the second time you got nineteen.”

The plane dipped and bounced and slowed as the flaps were lowered.

“Have you decided which place you want to see?”

“The new one. Air and Space, I think it is. You said you’d be two hours.”

“More or less. But don’t get excited if I’m a little longer. And for God’s sake, don’t leave the building.”

“Dad . . .” Justin’s voice suggested insult and reprimand. His maturity and judgment had been impugned unjustly.

“Sorry.”

“What I still don’t get is, why you couldn’t talk to this guy on the telephone.”

“The telephone isn’t a good way to meet people. They can’t get to like you or trust you. I have to make this man trust me.”

“Why?”

“Because I want him to tell me things he’s been told not to talk about. My hunch is, he talked about them once already, and it ruined his career.”

“Then he’s not going to talk about them again.”

“Maybe, but I hope he will. I hope he’s angry.”

They took a taxi from the airport. Maynard dropped Justin at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space museum, armed with the phone number of
Today’
s Washington bureau, “in case the place burns down or something.” Then Maynard gave the taxi driver an address uptown, near the Washington Cathedral.

As the cab cruised along Rock Creek Parkway, Maynard reviewed the questions he planned to ask Michael Florio, the Coast Guard man who had been reassigned after questioning the boat disappearances. On the phone, Florio had been wary. At first, he had refused to speak to Maynard, had insisted on returning the call through the
Today
switchboard. It was an old-fashioned, but usually reliable, way to make sure that the caller was who he said he was—or, at least, that he worked where he said he worked. Then Florio had recited the standard litany of bureaucratic cant: He didn’t know for sure why he had been transferred: people were transferred all the time; he did what he was told.

None of these responses surprised Maynard. Florio was within a few years of retirement. Why should he jeopardize his pension just to get his name in a newsmagazine?

The cab turned off Connecticut Avenue and climbed Thirty-fourth Street into a quiet, bosky neighborhood of old, medium-size, medium-price homes. The driver stopped in front of a gray stucco house with a sagging wooden front porch.

Michael Florio was in his mid-forties, flat-bellied, evidently in good physical shape. His hair was cropped close to his skull. He wore a white T-shirt, and his hands, arms, and face were coated with fine white dust. There were goggle marks around his eyes.

“I appreciate your seeing me,” Maynard said.

“Yeah.” Florio ushered him into the hallway and shut the door. “Use a beer?”

“Thanks.”

Florio led the way back to the kitchen. Maynard guessed that he lived alone, for cooking in the kitchen would have been impossible: The room was a workshop. The round table was covered with drills and chisels and tiny hammers and pieces of ivory and bone. A vise had been bolted to the edge of the table. The shelves were filled with carvings—whales, sharks, fish, birds, and ships.

“Nice stuff,” Maynard said.

“Yeah.” Florio reached into the refrigerator for two cans of beer. “Gotta have a trade, for after. Can’t sit on the porch and watch the sun go down for twenty years.” He handed Maynard a beer and said, “I don’t do interviews.”

“I gathered.”

“Anything I say . . . I mean,
if
I say anything . . . is off the record.”

“That’s fine.”

“Is it?” Florio was surprised.

Maynard sipped his beer. “Don’t take offense, but I’m not really interested in you.”

“Good. I don’t want anybody interested in me. Twenty and out and screw ’em all.”

“I don’t want to hassle you. I won’t even identify you if you don’t want me to.”

“That’s it.” Florio was beginning to relax. He sat down and motioned Maynard to a seat across the table. A half-carved eagle’s head was clamped in the vise, and Florio could not take his eyes from it.

Maynard pointed at the eagle. “Don’t let me stop you.”

“Good.” Florio drained his beer and put on a pair of goggles and attacked the eagle with a slender chisel held between his fingertips. “They still call me, you know.”

“Who does?”

“The relatives of the missing ones. They know I cared—I
did,
too—and they think I can help. I can’t, but they think I can. It tears you up, seeing how they go on hoping.”

“Can anybody? Help, I mean.”

Florio shook his head. “The bitch of it is, there’s no cover-up or anything; it’s not like Watergate. It’s just . . .” He looked up. “I don’t know what it is. It’s like the Coast Guard says, ‘If we can find you easily, we will. If we can’t, tough titty. If you send us a radio message that you’re in trouble, we’ll bust our hump for you’—and I tell you, those guys are magicians when they get their act together—‘but if you disappear without a trace, well, good riddance.’ They’re a policeman on a beat, not a missing-persons bureau.”

“Six hundred and ten boats! There’s got to be
some
answer.”

“Sure, a bunch of them. You know some; you told me on the phone. There’s more: badly built boats that people take where they shouldn’t, people who sink their own boats for the insurance and then drown before they can be picked up, freak weather. One boat here, one boat there, they’re all good answers. But you’re right: more than six hundred goddamn boats! How many more, no one knows. Look at
Marita,
just the other day. That one’s a good and a bad example, by the way.”

“How so?”

“Good, because she was a sturdy boat, well built and well maintained, sailed by a captain with a master’s ticket—by law he was qualified to drive the frigging
QE II
—and manned by a crew of first-rate professionals. She sank,
if
she sank, on a flat-calm day, with a loss of all hands. I tell you, in those conditions a baby could’ve floated around on a seat cushion for three days and still come out of it okay. She’s a bad example because she was a Bahamas-registered boat, and the Coast Guard doesn’t give a rat’s ass what happened to her.”

“Do they have any theories?”

“Oh sure. They figure she either hit a reef and sank, or else one of her engines blew up. But you have to
try
to blow up a diesel engine, and if you do, it’s gonna scatter trash all over the frigging place. But there’s no debris. And if she went up on a reef and sank, why didn’t anybody get to shore? They say sharks. Shee-it!” Florio picked up a dental drill, turned it on, and held his breath while he probed delicately at one of the eagle’s eye sockets.

He blew bone dust away from the eagle’s eye and said, “The
Banshee
was a better example. She was registered in Wilmington, owned by a guy who made a bundle in cedar shingles. They had been fishing for a month, dicking around between Puerto Rico and Haiti, trying to raise a record marlin. The owner, he flew home from Port-au-Prince, and the captain started back with the boat. He radioed ahead to Mayaguana that he’d be there by nightfall. That’s the last anybody ever heard from him or the boat. Good weather, two mates who’d been with him for fifteen years, no hitchhikers. The Coast Guard thought maybe the captain had ditched her and split for parts unknown. But look here: The man made thirty thousand a year, plus half the charter fees for when the owner wasn’t using the boat, plus free private-school education for his three kids, plus a house in Fort Lauderdale. Man, he could have gone to
Palau
and not found a deal like that.”

“What’s your answer . . . for either boat?”

“I don’t have one. The drug thing is a possibility. They were both long-legged boats, had a range of a thousand miles or more. They’d be prizes for the grasshoppers. But I know for a fact that the skipper of
Banshee
carried guns aboard, so I don’t believe he was hijacked. Even if he was—even if they both were—that leaves six hundred and nine others. One boat has been disappearing every other day for three years. That’s how it averages out, like the population clock downtown: every so often, bingo!, roll over another one. Tell you the truth, I don’t think anybody’s ever going to know what happened to those boats. Not to all of them . . . not to half of them.”

“Why not?”

“Another beer?”

Florio began with the simple explanations: the difficulty of patrolling vast expanses of open ocean, the ignorance and carelessness of the new breed of sailor, the incomprehensible magnetic disturbances that rendered compasses and radios useless, and the sudden savagery of weather, the full potential of which was still only a matter of conjecture.

“You heard of rogue waves? Some people call them superwaves.”

“No.”

“Waves travel in what are called trains, sequences with different distances between crest and trough. Every now and again, the trains get in step. Three or four of them crest and trough together. The waves they make are monsters. Some of them go a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet high, and they come out of nowhere. They only last for a minute or so—the trains fall out of step pretty quick—but that’s all it takes. There’s a tanker, say, plowing along nice and easy through twenty-foot seas. All of a sudden, right in front of him, roaring down on him at fifty or sixty miles an hour, is a ten-story-high wall of black water. The hole in front of these things is sometimes deeper than the tanker is long, so he finds himself steaming straight down, with a mountain or water—millions and millions of tons of dead-weight water—ready to break on top of him.”

“It breaks them apart?”

“Some. Others can’t slow their own momentum. They just keep steaming on down. The ocean swallows them.” Florio took a sip of beer and searched through the rubble on the table for a small, spoon-bladed chisel. “Then there are collisions.”

“Most of them are reported, though.”

“Really? Couple of years ago, a tanker pulled into Long Beach, California. Easy passage from the Orient, everything fine. One of the longshoremen said, ‘What happened to your anchor, Cap?’ ‘What do you mean?’ says the captain. ‘Have a look,’ says the guy. The captain goes ashore and looks at his bows, and wrapped around his starboard anchor is a full set of sails and rigging.”

“They never felt anything? Heard anybody call out?”

“Feel what? A hundred-and-thirty-thousand-ton ship tooling along at twenty-five knots? He wouldn’t feel anything, he wouldn’t see anything, he wouldn’t hear anything—even if he had visual and radar lookouts on duty ’round the clock, which he did. On a rough sea on a bad night, a big ship and a small sailboat are pretty much invisible to each other. The sailors never knew what hit them.”

Florio moved on to enumerate a maze of jurisdictional confusions that muddied maritime affairs: The FBI had authority when there was evidence of a federal crime, but precious few facilities with which to investigate crimes committed on the high seas; the Drug Enforcement Administration could act on suspicion of a narcotics violation, but if smuggling was involved, then customs got into the act, too; many boats disappeared in the territorial waters of a foreign power, triggering interest from the State Department and Interpol. Always, the Coast Guard was in the middle, hamstrung.

And more often than not, the result of the interagency squabbling was inaction. After all, on a global scale the loss of an occasional boat and a few lives was not an issue of great public concern.