She was right. Even though I had never met Gail Richardson Calloway, I felt fraternal and protective toward the woman to an emotional degree that I found surprising. I was also surprised to realize that Amanda’s story had filled me with an irrational dislike of a man I’d never seen, spoken with or met: Jackie Merlot. It had to do with an image that lingered in my imagination: a fat man with a boy’s face flashing a private smile at a tough, introverted girl with stringy strawberry blond tomboy hair; a man who took perverse joy in driving a wedge between a mother and a daughter.
But I was wary of my own reaction because I am wary of emotion as a motivator. Emotion is energy without structure, without reason. Emotion can be a dangerous indulgence.
I finished the last of my tea; rattled the ice cubes in my glass as I said, “What you want me to do is go to Colombia and try to find your mother. That’s the point of all this, isn’t it?”
Amanda was shaking her head. “I won’t say I didn’t come here hoping you’d offer. Yeah, that’s what I was hoping. I really was. But the main reason I came is because of the letters I found, my dad’s letters. It’s like he knew what was going to happen and he was giving me directions what to do. But I don’t expect you to try to help, Doc. Not now. Not after meeting you.”
What the hell did that mean? I said, “You just lost me.”
The girl stirred from her seat, stood away from the table and tugged at the T-shirt with its terse warning message. Through the window, near mangroves at the back entrance to the marina office, I could see Mack at the fish-cleaning table filleting a couple of pompano. Tucker Gatrell watched, yammering away. Suspended from the porch overhead was a cast net. It looked like a gigantic spider’s web. Jeth was enmeshed in the thing, carefully inspecting its elemental network, using a spool of fishing line to mend holes.
Amanda swiped a wisp of copper hair from her eyes and said, “I hoped you’d volunteer to go help my mom because of the way my dad described you. But the thing is, I pictured a… well, let’s just say I pictured a more adventurous type of guy.”
“More adventurous?” I said. “Is that right?”
“What was that line in my dad’s letter? ‘The man’s got special skills.’ He was talking about you, so I pictured one of the soldier-of-fortune types. One of the tough guys you see in films. But not somebody like you, Doc. As big as you are, I didn’t picture somebody who looks like they spend all their time reading books and looking through a microscope.”
“I like books,” I said agreeably. “And it’s true that my work requires a microscope.”
“Don’t take that the wrong way. It’s not a cut. I don’t like the macho types. Not at all, so no offense. Really.”
Listening to Amanda’s story, her tone, her tough logic, I could hear the faintest echo of a good man who was lost long ago and far away. It was a frail thin chord that was the voice of an old friend. I fought the urge to allow myself an ironic smile as I replied, “Gee, no offense taken, Amanda. Really.”
“But any advice you have to offer,” she added, “it could be very helpful.”
“Advice, sure. If I can help, you bet I’ll try.”
“I’ll give you my number in Lauderdale. If you have any ideas, you can give me a call. I figure what I’ll have to do is just fly down there-Colombia, I mean, maybe get a friend to go with me-and have a look around.” The smile she then allowed me was one of those bright, meaningless smiles of dismissal; the kind of smile we all use when we are dealing with people who are attempting to sell us something we do not want, or who have not met our initial expectations.
I hoped my own bright smile mirrored hers. “Give you a call in Lauderdale, Amanda, you can count on it. Boy oh boy, I’ll give it some thought, too. Maybe try to figure out a way to locate your mom and the guy she’s traveling with. What was his name again?” Said it with false gusto, as if I hadn’t been paying attention.
“His name? You mean after listening to the whole story, you’ve already forgotten-” She stopped and eyed me closely, thinking it over.
I said, “Isn’t it handy to be able to take one look at a person and know what he’s like? And you’re so right! I’m the big, gawky, absent-minded-professor type. My brain’s so jammed with research material I just can’t seem to remember that guy’s name. The big fellow you described. Boy do I feel like a dope.”
I watched her expression: Is this an act? Then her face narrowed: Yep, it was definitely an act… but why?
“His name’s Merlot,” she said slowly.
“ Merlot. That’s right. You know, something that may account for my bad memory is when your dad and I were living over there in the jungles of Cambodia? It was almost too darn stressful. About half the time these little black-haired people were sneaking around trying to kill us. Well… I say ‘kill us,’ but what the Khmer really wanted to do was cut our heads off and carry them around on a pole. Know why?”
Her expression changed, but she didn’t answer.
“The reason they wanted to cut our heads off is because they believe a man remains conscious for nearly a minute after his head’s been severed. Which makes sense if you stop and think about it. Sure, you can’t breathe, you can’t walk, but your eyes and your brain are in the same place, right? To them, it’s like the perfect punishment. They’d cut off our heads and then position us in such a way so that the last thing we saw before we died was our own headless corpse. You talk about having a bad memory? The strain of worrying about that probably killed off some my brain cells.”
Her expression changed again. “Oh my God. You’re not exaggerating, are you?”
“Wish I was. So, yeah, I can understand why you wouldn’t trust someone like me to deal with a guy who might be taking advantage of your mother. This… what’s his name again?”
Reevaluation time: Maybe I wasn’t such a bookish, nerdish type after all. “Jackie,” she said. “Jackie Merlot.”
I was still smiling when I said, “Gee, a guy like that, I’d just love to meet.”
5
I got a fresh notebook from the lab and, in my small, blocky print, jotted down all the useful phone numbers and addresses that Amanda could provide.
Someday, if the notebook became important, I would attach a label, give it a file name, then lock the notebook away with the others I’d kept and saved over the years. There were some interesting titles in that fireproof box: Coast of Bengal Borneo/Sandakan Nicaragua/Politics/Baseball Havana I. Havana II Ox-Eyed Tarpon/South China Sea Masagua’s Ridley Turtles and the Magnetic Mountain Singapore to Kota Baharu (with 3rd Gurkhas)
There were others.
All contained the carefully kept details of a lifetime spent traveling alone through the Third World tropics; necessarily duplicitous years spent doing clandestine work, as well as the work I still care passionately about: marine biology.
The notebooks added order. They allowed me a sense of purpose, even though much of what I’ve done in my life now seems absurd, nearly existential because of the violence to which I’ve contributed.
Tomlinson knows a little bit about it. Not much, but enough to attempt to comfort me one beery evening when he said, “You’re not the Lone Ranger, Doc. Take the seventies, for instance. It wasn’t a decade, man. It was a damn crime scene. And you worry about the little bit of political stuff you were involved in?”
As I said, Tomlinson doesn’t know much about it.
So Bobby Richardson’s ladies were allotted their own notebook. When I’d finished with phone numbers and addresses, I asked Amanda if she’d thought to bring the four postcards she’d received from her mother. She had. They were in the envelope that contained her father’s letters. She paced around studying my overloaded shelves of books while I studied the postcards.
All the cards were postmarked Cartagena, Colombia, and onto each was pasted a hundred-peso stamp that paid tribute to emeralds, the gem for which the country’s jungles are famous. Cartagena is an ancient seaport city built like a fortress during the 1500s, when conquistadors shipped gold and silver to Madrid. I’d been there a number of times, but that had been years ago.
