I remember Gail crying. The two of us talking, holding each other, as she buried her face in my shoulder and she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
We were in the bar? Yes, the bar. I had requested that the band play a song for her: “The Twelfth of Never.” Something else: the shower… she commented on the shower. About how good it was to be clean. The way she said it, it reminded me of an observation that Garret had made while I was in Colombia, something about the Turk. Something about the difficulties of getting clean. Or was that Tucker?
No… not Tucker. It was Tucker who had said, “You won’t give me a chance to make it up to you!”
Tucker and Gail. Both right.
The rest of it jumps ahead in time. It is all blurry, so jumbled that dredging it up plays through the memory like a badly framed home movie. Here are little snippets of video that remain with me:
Gail holding my hand as we walked down the yacht club’s wooden steps to the bar on a verandah of worn gray marble. Seeing the big water, sailboats out there anchored with their wind fans spinning, the Panama Canal and the volcanic gloom of islands beyond…
Then hearing a familiar voice: “Hello!” Amanda standing topside aboard a large canary yellow racing boat, a Scarab. Waving at us from the cement pier, this huge grin on her face and maybe a little teary-eyed as she called, “I just got here! Haven’t even put the groceries away yet!”
The boat’s name in red letters, Double Haul, I remember reading that, plus a little surge of pleasure at seeing the lines of the Scarab, the implicit speed, and thinking it was going to be fun running a boat so fast and well designed up Panama’s jungle coast.
Then… and then Gail is helped aboard and hugged by her much relieved daughter… the two of them disappearing below deck, each with a bag of groceries in hand… and suddenly, unexpectedly, I hear the shout of a man’s voice: “Get them off that boat!”
I turn to see Tuck and the black bartender from Club Nautico charging down the steps toward me. Fernando? Yes, that was the man’s name.
What the hell were they doing there?
Fernando and Tucker running, their expressions panicked, Tucker’s feet going clump-clump-clump on seagoing wood that had probably never been fouled by a cowboy boot.
It made no sense seeing them. Tucker was in Colombia. I’d left him there at the little marina where his Freemason buddy worked as a bartender. How had they gotten to Panama? And how could Tucker possibly know where to find me?
“Marion! Marion! GET THEM OFF THAT BOAT!”
I was on the finger pier now, about to step aboard. From the galley below deck, I could hear Gail and Amanda laughing. Heard one of them say, “Where’s the power switch?”
I stopped; looked at the open hatch, then looked at Tucker, who was still yelling: “The Turk, he was getting Amanda’s E-mail! You understand?”
No. Nothing made sense. I stepped toward Tucker, my hands held out to stop him, but he charged right past me, almost knocked me into the water, as he jumped aboard the Scarab. Moved pretty good for a man that old. Was still yelling: “Amanda. Amanda! Don’t touch a damn thing. They know you’re here, that you’re meeting your mama. You told ‘em in your letter.”
I couldn’t hear her, but Amanda must have asked what or why, because Tucker said, “That Ohio woman. What the hell’s her name, Betty? You’ve been writing to a church lady named Betty, but it’s really the fat man!”
Which is when I was blinded by a light so devastatingly bright that it was as if a shard of ice had been driven through my brain…
Then I was in the water. I was in the water and deaf, stone deaf, before a bright and busy inferno, from which tumbled the frantic shapes of people I had once known but could no longer recognize…
A blazing cowboy hat worn by a flailing old man who had been long shadowed by the guilty memory of the very thing that now killed him…
A woman who might have been Gail, but it was difficult to be certain because she had no face…
A third person blasted from the flames who was so badly damaged that I refuse to attempt description. I will not do it.
The Panamanian police asked me about Amanda, saw the look in my eye and did not ask again.
Seventeen days later, when I awoke from what the good doctors described as a “life-threatening concussion,” Fernando had recovered sufficiently to tell me what he had already learned.
Tucker had been shipped back to Florida and buried with full Masonic honors. But not until after word of some lingering trouble in Cartagena. Someone had beaten the Turk senseless, pissed on him (I didn’t ask how that was verified), pick-axed his computer plus all its gear, stolen his hookah and then nosed the Turk’s old junk wind freighter out into Cartagena Bay, where the federales did, indeed, impound the cache of hashish aboard, arrest the injured man and take him to a prison hospital.
“Your uncle was mucho hombre, much man, much man!” Fernando said. “But I would not return to Colombia for a while. Tucker Gatrell became famous there in a very short time. It will be remembered by some small and angry people that you are a relative.”
Amanda, dear sensitive Amanda, was also killed instantly in the blast. Gail, however, though badly burned, had held on for many days before finally succumbing to pneumonia.
“One day I went to see her, but her bed was empty,” Fernando said. “She was just gone. Disappeared. They told me that she had been flown back to Florida to be laid to rest next to the daughter and the first husband, the husband she loved.”
Fernando gave me two more interesting tidbits of news. Our huge hospital bills had been paid in full by someone, they wouldn’t tell Fernando who.
The men in the blue shirts, probably. Their generosity was unexpected, but not out of character. Matt Davidson had been right; the intelligence community tries to take care of its own.
Other news was that Panamanian authorities, working with the FBI and Interpol, were after Jackie Merlot and whomever he’d hired to rig the bomb in the boat.
So far, there was no sign of him.
It was as if he’d vanished from the earth.
Epilogue
F or the next six months, I concentrated on my work and getting my health back. Physically, I recovered quickly. I was running and swimming as fast and as far as ever, but my mental health vacillated between depression and rage.
It worried my friends. I could see the concern on their faces when they thought that I wasn’t looking.
It worried me, too. Something I did not tell them was this: I feared that I was slowly, inexorably, going insane.
That sentence, You should have killed him, came to haunt me in a way that I suspect Tucker Gatrell had been haunted by a mistake he had made many years before. To experience such a thing revealed to me much about why my uncle behaved as he did. To openly discuss what had happened would have invited a weight of despair that might have crushed him. So he locked the guilt away in a little room. He lived with the monster.
I was now living with my monster.
Much of my time alone was spent anticipating the day when I would comer Jackie Merlot and once again stand face to face with him. The authorities still had no leads on his whereabouts. Nor had my many contacts worldwide from the intelligence community been able to supply me with any hint of where the man was hiding.
I became so obsessed with finding him that I bought a superb computer and modem and spent my evenings trolling the chat rooms, asking people if they’d ever been contacted by Merl or Darkrume or Betty of Unity.
All of them the fat man.
I have never quit anything in my life.
Our day would come.
