Valley of the Templars

down to the sheds and wharves of the shipyards. He pulled to a stop in front of a tumbledown shed and switched off the key. It was noon and brutally hot and Holliday could feel the sweat trickling down his spine as he climbed out of the sidecar. The waterfront here was bustling and the snap of welding torches and the droning of industrial belt sanders filled the dusty air. There seemed to be a lot of laughter as men called back and forth to the tinny sound of Lady Gaga doing “Paparazzi” coming from a radio somewhere.

“So, tell me about this man Arango,” said Holliday as they made their way down the boardwalk by the riverbank.

“Montalvo Arango is a disgusting pig and a criminal,” answered Eddie, smiling broadly. “He stinks like an old fish—he drinks too much ron and smokes very cheap cigars. He is the true viejo hombre del mar, this man.” The Cuban paused and winked. “But he has a boat.”

They found both the man and the boat at the far end of the shipyard, closest to the mouth of the river. In the distance Holliday could see half a dozen men fishing from the stony beach with hand lines and rods. According to Eddie, under Cuban law what they were doing was a crime for which they could be sent to prison, the arrest and imprisonment deferred if they handed over half their catch to the policeman who caught them.

“Buenas tardes, Montalvo,” said Eddie. The man looked up from what he was doing. He could have been anything from seventy to a hundred and seventy. His eyelids drooped in folds over watery brown eyes and his mahogany-tanned narrow face was seamed and cut by wrinkles as deep as scars. The skin of his cheeks drooped over a bristly chin, and his neck had as many wattles as a turkey. The parts of his face not cracked and slashed by wrinkles were sprinkled with dark moles and warts from being in the bright sun for most of his life. The butt of a cigar hung wetly from his thin pursed lips. From what Holliday could see of his sideburns and the foliage sprouting from his flat, saucerlike ears, his hair was white. The top of his head was covered by a stained and ragged fedora that looked as if it came out of a thirties gangster movie.

“Buenas tardes, Capitaine Cabrera,” said Arango. He took the cigar stub out of his mouth and hawked a dark, mucousy mass off the side of the wharf and into the water. It was the first time Holliday had ever heard Eddie being called by his military rank.

“Que pasa?” Eddie asked, although it was obvious what the old man was doing. Kneeling on the concrete boardwalk with a worn blade in his gnarled hand, he was gutting a fish that had to be five feet long, thick tendrils as long as eels hanging from its wide, rubbery mouth. Holliday had seen a documentary about this kind of creature—it was a wels catfish, probably introduced by some well-meaning Russian aquaculturist as a food source years before. At thirty pounds, they were a good source of protein, but let them get into the food chain and they could live for thirty years and reach lengths of nine feet and weights of over three hundred pounds. They were cannibals, happy to eat their own kind and also the occasional fisherman or swimmer who got too close.

“Estoy limpieza de las tripas de este grande barbo repugnante ahora,” said the old man. His sun-bleached cotton pants and ancient, laceless sneakers were covered with blood and bits of flesh and his wifebeater undershirt was streaked like a butcher’s apron.

He glanced at Holliday, his eyes squinting upward. “I catch at the river mouth this morning, when I am coming in from the sea,” he said in English. His voice was as rough as his cigar and his mouth was missing a few teeth here and there. He turned to Eddie. “Su amigo pirata hablaba nada de espanol?”

“His pirate friend speaks enough Spanish to get by,” said Holliday.

“Then we get along okay,” said the old man, and spit into the water again. As he gutted the fish he tossed the already flyblown trails of slimy offal into the water and then began cutting the giant fish into large fist-sized pieces and throwing them into a pair of old foam coolers beside him. “Cebo,” he grunted. “Bait.” He nodded toward the boat clewed to the wharf a few yards behind him.

The boat looked almost as old as Arango. Once upon a time the hull had been white with a light blue superstructure, but sometime in its life it had been painted deep blue fading up to gray. On the horizon she would disappear against the sea and the sky, and Holliday had a fairly good idea why.

She was filthy, paint peeling everywhere. The stem was battered with its varnish worn off down to the bare wood from decades of turbulent passages, and the canvas sunshade on the flybridge above the cabin was gray and torn. To Holliday’s eye she looked to be about thirty-five or forty feet long and lay squat in the water as though she was bottom heavy. For a wooden boat of that weight, it was odd that the whole side of the hull for two feet above the waterline was so beaten up and scratched. That kind of wear and tear usually meant the boat was used to traveling at brutally high speeds. The name on her transom was in red picked out in black:

TIBURON BLANCO

Even his basic Spanish was good enough to translate that: White Shark.

Arango sucked on his cigar, gave Eddie a look and picked up the first of the foam containers, the sinews on his wiry sun-blackened arms leaping out like stretched cables. He hauled the cooler back to the boat and heaved it over the gunwale and into the cockpit at the stern. Taking the hint, Eddie picked up the second bait box and followed suit.

The old man straightened, arching his back. He took a long puff on the cigar, the pull making a dry, crackling sound. He looked up at the sky and blew the smoke upward. Lady Gaga had been replaced by Pittbull doing “Ay Chico.” Arango looked down at Eddie again. He hawked and this time the blob of nicotine-colored phlegm landed within an inch of Eddie’s feet.

“Que quieres, cabron? What you want with a poor old man like me?”

Eddie took out a Romeo y Julieta Short Churchill he’d purchased at the hotel tobacconist’s and lit it with his old Zippo.

“Because I want your boat, cabron—quiero alquilar su barco maldito, maldito el hombre de cerdo.”

“How much you pay me? Dollars.”

“How much do you want?” Holliday asked.

“Two hundred a day.”

“Fine.”

“Three hundred?”

“A hundred and fifty,” answered Holliday.

“No, no, two hundred,” said Arango hastily.

“Si,” said Eddie.

“Plus diesel.”

“Si.”

“And food.”

“Si.”

“Ron.”

“One bottle a day.”

“Cerveza, asi.”

“Fijado.”

“And cigars like those?” Arango said, pointing a bony finger at the Short Churchill Eddie had just fired up.

Eddie grinned, turned to Holliday and winked again. He turned back to Arango and handed him the already lit cigar. The old man carefully took the juicy stub of the cigar from his mouth, stuck a fat tongue on the end to make sure it was dead and stuck the thing behind his ear. He put the Churchill into his mouth, chewed happily and wiped his hand on his undershirt before extending it to Holliday. A little apprehensively Holliday shook the man’s hand, surprised at its strength.

“We got a deal, American. You drive a hard bargain.”

“Vete a la mierda, viejo. Let’s get aboard.”

Oak Lawn Farm is a two-hundred-acre secluded estate at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Covesville, Virginia, and about a two-hour drive south of Washington, D.C. The home sits on a gentle knoll, surrounded by elegant hardwoods and ancient boxwoods overlooking pastoral and mountain views in every