Oh.
Just then, scuttling a couple billion dollars in baubles and adornments didn’t seem that important. Losing the semiprecious hide of Jacob Lassiter, ballplayer-turned-barrister, was another matter.
Footsteps above us. Two crewmen clambered down the ladder and stepped into the hold. Swarthy, lean men in their twenties in jungle fatigues wearing sidearms. Soto spoke to them in Spanish, then turned to me. “They will protect you until we reach our destination,”
Protect me. Communists and fascists alike always have such a cute way of twisting words into their antonyms.
The four of us climbed back to the top deck in silence. On the deck, my two protectors maintained a polite distance of five yards. The nighttime breeze had turned cool, so why was I sweating? The air was thick with diesel fumes. Again, Soto and I stood at the rail. From overhead, suddenly, a whompeta-whompeta drew our eyes skyward. A helicopter, its searchlight aimed at us, scanned the freighter. From the bridge, a crewman was shouting in Spanish at Soto, who simply nodded. My bodyguards edged closer.
With the wind from the east and the copter approaching from the west, I hadn’t heard it until it was nearly above us. Descending now. My first thought: the Coast Guard to the rescue. Or maybe Army Special Forces, rappelling down on undulating ropes, armed with automatic weapons. Hey, I’d settle for a Miami Beach SWAT team. But it wasn’t the authorities. A private chopper. Lower now, I saw it clearly. Beige, rounded nose. I’d seen it before. It used to sit on the deck of Yagamata’s yacht.
The noise deafening now, the helicopter was just a few feet off the stern. I squinted my eyes against the blast of wind. When it touched down, a door to the passenger cabin opened and out stepped Matsuo Yagamata. He turned back toward the cabin. A hand reached out, and he grabbed it. The hand belonged to Lourdes Soto, who hopped gracefully onto the deck of the freighter. The two of them ducked under the whirling blade and walked toward us. A moment later, the engine revved, and the helicopter took off, veering to the west, and disappearing into the night.
Lourdes looked toward me and then directly at her father. She was wearing an all-white warm-up suit and running shoes. Her dark hair was windblown. Yagamata, short and chunky in a dark suit, looked tense. As he approached, he shot nervous glances at the armed crewmen. When Yagamata and Lourdes reached us, there was a brief moment of silence. Soto looked impassively at them both, then angrily shouted, “ Lourdes, no deberias estar aqui! ’”
“ Por que no? How else would I save you?”
Yagamata looked Soto squarely in the eyes. “Senor Soto, you have proved your point. You are a great patriot. But what you intend is a great waste of both human resources and irreplaceable objects of beauty.”
Soto turned to his daughter. “You should not have told him.”
“I did it to save you, Papi.”
It hit me then. Lourdes knew. She knew everything, including the fact I’d be on board.
Yagamata reached inside his suit coat and withdrew a black velvet pouch from a pocket. Loosening a drawstring, he poured something into his open palm. It looked like a thick gold chain. “Have you ever seen such magnificence?” he asked, holding it up in the light from the bridge.
The surprise from inside the Trans-Siberian Railway Egg. Yagamata’s favorite toy, the little gold train by Faberge. It sparkled in the glare of the deck lights, the intricate details of the engine and cars nearly surreal.
“What you have on board is several hundred thousand times what I hold in my hand. You must comprehend that!”
Soto nodded. “It makes my statement all the more significant. The treasure of the pigs destroyed.”
“The art belongs to the world!” Yagamata thundered.
Funny, Yagamata had acted as if it belonged to him.
Soto was expressionless. “What I have begun cannot be halted.”
“Spare the artwork,” Yagamata pleaded, gesturing toward the hold. “Spare yourself and the lives of your men.”
Yagamata replaced the train in the velvet pouch and slipped the pouch back into his suit pocket. His little game of show-and-tell didn’t seem to have the desired impact. “Individual lives are meaningless,” Soto said.
“I can broker the sale of the art,” Yagamata said. “You will have hundreds of millions more for your cause. Let me help you. “
“The money,” Soto said, “is important, but the principle even more so. The socialist revolution cannot be financed by the slavery of the masses. Your so-called works of art will die a death far more glorious than that of the peasants whose blood gave birth to such gluttony, such excess.”
Soto turned to Lourdes and said something in Spanish. Lourdes responded angrily. Her father spoke again, softly, apologetically, his eyes moist. He moved toward her to embrace, but she turned her back to him. Severo Soto walked away, pausing only to bark a command to a shotgun-toting crewman who stood straighter, his eyes Hashing from Yagamata to me and back again.
I went to Lourdes, who moved toward me and stepped close. “I didn’t come back just for Papi. I came back for you, too.’’
I put my arms around her. Our faces touched, and I caught the sweet scent of her hair, the fresh-scrubbed womanly essence of her skin. “Your father won’t do it now, will he? Not with you on board.’’
“There’s a lifeboat. It was intended for any of the crewmen who change their minds. They’re all handpicked disciples of Fidel and Che Guevara. They want to die for a glorious cause.”
There is a time for a man to be a man, and another time to look for a soft place to land. “Much room in that lifeboat?”
“Plenty, but Papi wants you en una pira funebre.”
My look told her I didn’t understand.
“ Como se dice en Ingles… on the funeral pyre. Papi says the revolutionary act is enhanced by destroying a symbol of the reactionary colonialists.”
“Me? I’ve never even voted Republican.”
“Papi wants to make the largest possible statement. That’s why we’re going to anchor off South Pointe Park, just a few hundred yards from the beach.”
“Why?”
“What’s tomorrow, Jake?”
“Sunday.”
“ Cuatro de julio, the Fourth of July. Papi wants to blow up the richest cache of art ever assembled during the celebration of what he calls your counterfeit freedom. It’s his poetic side. If he could, he’d like to have people singing ‘the rocket’s red glare’ when he pulls the switch.”
Bombs bursting in air, I said to myself.
U sually, at sea, I sleep the sleep of the innocent. Maybe it’s the gentle pitching, the faint whoosh of water against the hull. On the other hand, I sleep the same way in the woods or in a mountaintop cabin. So maybe it’s the sense of detachment, of being removed from the bustle of everyday life. So ordinarily, I am a two-hundred-twenty- six-pound slab of concrete in my bunk. Not tonight. I could have been worried that this was my last night on the planet Earth. And I was. But I also was sharing my bunk with a hundred-eighteen-pound lady who was lithe and warm and giving. We kissed and held each other, and I stroked the slopes and curves of her. We maneuvered into positions that stretched the cruciate ligaments of my bad knee, and she laughed when I fell with a thud to the deck. But she welcomed me back, and later, much later, I held and kissed and nuzzled her as the orange light of morning streaked through the porthole.
What would you eat for breakfast if you thought it was your last? Steak? Caviar and smoked salmon? I had huevos rancheros because that’s what was served in the small galley. Then Lourdes and I stood on the deck, watching the Florida Keys to our west. I recognized Big Pine, Bahia Honda, Molasses, and Fat Deer Key as we continued northeast in the Straits, keeping the Great Bahama Bank well to our east. It was a hot July day with wispy clouds on the horizon. It didn’t seem to matter if I got a touch of sunburn.
Lourdes and I were standing at the rail as we passed close to Sombrero Key where the earliest European to live in Florida made his home. Hernando d’Escalante Fontaneda was shipwrecked in the Keys around 1545 and spent the next two decades mapping the islands he called the Martires, or martyrs. He identified one Tequesta village called Guarugunbe, the place of weeping, and another, Cuchivaga, the place of suffering. Happy campers,
