Dieselpunk: An Anthology (15 page)

Sweating slightly, I push forward
Estrella’
s throttles and taxi towards the docks where a pair of armed boats are waiting. I follow their directions, bow-mounted machineguns being excellent motivators. I look back at Donna Magdalena. She seems nervous, eyeing the gunboats, clutching her journal to her chest. “Donna,” I say, “If it wouldn’t be demanding too much, could you head to the nose? I need someone to toss a line to the dock.” She keeps staring out the windows at the gunboat. “Donna!”

“
Wait, what?” she asks, again in English.

“
Donna, I need someone to…forget it, I don’t have time to explain.” I cut off the engines and slip down between the seats into
Estrella’
s nose where I hastily pop the nose hatch and toss a longshoreman a tie-down line. I slide my feet onto the dock and assist the longshoreman in securing her. I’m just finishing up a tight hitching knot when I notice three men in sweat-stained Floridiano gendarme uniforms walking up, their brown jackboots clomping out-of-step on the dock boards. One is an aging and overweight officer, the others two younger toughs.

“
Antonio Lagarto, owner and operator of Torino-Falastra Canard de la Mer number CA-042?” asks the officer, staring at a clipboard. His black, waxed mustache seems to dance on his lip like a dying bait worm. His nametag reads “Alandro-Mendez.”

“
Yes, sir, that’s me,” I answer. No point in denying it.

“
We have received reports of contraband goods on your vessel. Your vessel is hereby impounded until a thorough investigation into her contents can be completed.”

Mierda
. Just what I need.

“
You seem more annoyed than surprised, Sr. Lagarto,” says Ofc. Alandro-Mendez, smugly.

“
Probably mistaken identity,” I answer calmly. More likely one of my rivals playing a dumb prank.

“
May I see your manifest?”

“
Sure, sir, just give me a second.” I hoist myself onto
Estrella’
s nose. The two young officers tense and reach for pistols. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I say, hands aloft. “The manifest is inside.”

“
Don’t try anything funny,” one says.

“
Okay, there are three of you, I’m grounded, tied, engines off, blocked in by gunboats. What am I going to do?”

“
Proceed, Sr. Lagarto,” says Alandro-Mendez, arms crossed.

Santa Maria, protect me from jumpy fools and petty authority. I slip back into
Estrella
and start getting my things together: my bag, my Peruvian-style straw hat, and, just to be safe, my knife. I dig out my flight manifest and then pick up Don, placing him onto my shoulder. His claws dig into the linen shirt, scratching my skin slightly. I head back through the companionway to alert Donna Magdalena, pushing open the screen sheet (had I closed that?). I’m met with a shriek and almost immediately shriek myself, quickly averting my eyes. Her dress front is up over her waistline and she is hiding her journal in her garter belt.

“
Sr. Lagarto! I…why?!” she babbles.

“
Sorry, Donna. Had I known…forget it,” I say, awkwardly, hands over my eyes. “Look, just get your stuff together. A group of gendarmes is about to descend upon this plane. I think it might be time to catch an early dinner.”

I can feel her tension build. “Wh…what will they . . .?”

“I told you already, they won’t find anything. Grab everything you’ll need for overnight. Knowing Floridianos, particularly Huesianos, it’ll be dark before they’re done and it’ll probably take another few hours for me to fix the damage they do.” And I’d just reupholstered, too. “Plan for an overnight stay.”

I assist Donna Magdalena out of the hatch. She slides demurely to the dock, keeping her balance despite the high heels. Officer Alandro-Mendez seems to immediately recognize her nobility, as if he can smell money and power. “Madam, my apologies for this disruption in your routine,” he says, clicking his heels like a Saxon prince and bowing to kiss her hand.

“Ofc. Alandro-Mendez,” I say, “may I introduce my passenger, Donna Magdalena Consuela Alvarez Xoclital de Santo Sebastian de Santa Maria de Tikal de los Yucataños, third countess of Tikal, en route to Roanoketown, Virginia, and eager to make it to her cousin’s wedding.” I had no idea about any wedding, but it sounded good and might pressure Alandro-Mendez into speeding up the search. With luck, it’ll only take five hours now instead of six.

“
Charmed, Donna Magdalena,” he says, voice dripping with false flattery and sleazy charm. Any sudden stops on her part and his head will get firmly planted in her dainty little backside. He barks orders to his toughs, who march into my plane like Cossacks into Budapest. He escorts the donna to a guard shack while I wait on the dock. I take the opportunity to light a cigar, trying to regain some semblance of that long lost serenity as the goons tear apart my
Estrella
. As the last inch of my cigar fades to ash, and a second crate of mangoes crashes open on the dock where the second goon waits to cut each and every one open with a knife, Alandro-Mendez finally waddles back up the dock to check my manifest. He reads through the manifest item by item, scrutinizing my face as I answer in the affirmative for each crate of fruit or rum, each bag of coffee beans, each box of cigars. He occasionally slips in something to try and trip me up. “A bag of coca refinite…an ounce of opium gum…a crate of rifles.” I just roll my eyes with each lame attempt. When he’s finally satisfied he’s not sweating some confession out of me he releases me. I click my heels and trudge down the dock, hearing the sounds of
Estrella’
s carpet being ripped up as I do so. Well, I guess they’ll find the hidden compartments, and find them empty, of course. I’ll just feign ignorance and blame the previous owner, as I always do.

When the Spanish conquistadores first discovered the two-by-four-mile island at the southwest end of the Florida Cays it was covered in human bones. Hundreds if not thousands of them, bodies stacked like cordwood, possibly the remainders of an ancient slaughter among warring Indio factions. They named the macabre island Cayo Hueso, Island of Bones, on their maps. I walk down the dirty crushed coral streets of Cayo Hueso, wondering how much of the dusty white gravel crunching beneath my feet (and getting sucked into my lungs with each breath) is coral and how much is long-dead Indio. Donna Magdalena is by my side, her gloved right hand on my arm to steady herself, left hand holding a large and expensive floppy white hat down onto her head against the prevailing pulls of the sea breeze. What a pair we must make: a silk-clad donna with cocoa skin, long, straight nose and high Indio cheekbones, and a short, thin Island Jumper with a sweaty straw hat, three-day beard, and skin as leathery as the iguana clinging to his shoulder. To add to the scene, a teenage longshoreman walks behind us, the donna’s colossal overnight bags stacked on his head, and behind him an armed gendarme, there to make sure the donna remains safe and I stay out of trouble. If he was smart he’d take the opposite approach.

Our strange caravan crunches down the Camino Hueso, the main north-south street on the island. We march past carts of produce and trinkets crowding the street, begging toothless peasants with skin decades older than their true ages, the occasional suspicious gendarme or plotting thug, and here and there a lady of ill-repute. Our gendarme escort shoos away a roving band of shoeless children coming up to beg from the wealthy donna, and if possible pick her pocket. Donna Magdalena turns up her nose at the lot of them. “Swamp men,” she snorts derisively, again in English.

“A few, I’m sure,” I reply, “but mostly sailors, fishers, wreckers, and those who just want to be left alone. Plenty of others into smuggling or piracy. A pretty donna like you would do well to remember whose sandbox she’s in.”

She leans in to whisper in my ear and for a moment the jasmine scent of her hair overwhelms the smells of Hueso. “Well, my strong and brave Sr. Lagarto, I’m sure you’ll be here to protect me from these piratical swamp men.”

“Of course, Donna,” I say, my left ear tingling with the warmth and proximity of her breath.

“
Much as you defended us from those brutish little seaplanes!” she continues, her voice holding a vicious mix of spite, flattery, and seduction likely mastered from years of high-class socialization. “How bravely you flew exactly where they commanded! How boldly you took orders! I’ll have such a story to tell my ‘cousin’ at her ‘wedding’!”

My ears now burn with anger. “My apologies, my good donna. Next time I’ll opt for running from armed pursuit planes. What a dashing story that’ll be for your ‘cousin’ when she finally catches up to us in Purgatory.”

“I’ve had about enough of your attitude, Sr. Lagarto,” she says softly, smiling coldly.

“
My apologies, Donna. Here, your hotel waits.” I gesture grandly to the tallest structure on the island, towering at a whole five floors. Its cracked stucco walls are painted bright pink. “La Flaminga Real, the best hotel on the island.”

“
What a dump!”

“
You should see the place they’re boarding me.”

“
Better there than the holding cell in which they would have placed you,” she snorts.

“
Yes, my thanks again, Donna.”

“
You can meet me back here at the hotel cantina in an hour,” she says, as if giving an order to a house servant. “I need to freshen up after the day’s travails. Hopefully the water will be clean.”

“
What there is of it, Donna,” I say. “It’s been a dry summer and the cisterns may be low.”

“
I’ll have to make do, it seems.”

“
We all face our trials, Donna,” I say, bowing formally, hat in hand like a cavalier, and surprise a small squeak of mirth from her.

We go our separate ways at that point, her and her longshoreman bag handler through the Spanish doors of La Flaminga Real, me and the gendarme to a flophouse above a sloppy little watering hole called José’s. My escort waits in the cantina while I climb the dry-rotted steps to the flophouse. The bells of Santa Maria’s up the street ring out two as I drop my shoulder bag on my mat. Hopefully all the contents will be there when I return. I’ve left nothing of value, but even so. I drop back downstairs and belly up to the bar. I have a couple of cervesas, trying to clear my head of pretty donnas and portly port authorities. The gendarme stands nervously behind me. I order him a cervesa and he calms down, taking a seat beside me.

When the bells of Santa Maria’s chime three, I slip out and make my way back to La Flaminga Real’s cantina. It has a Spanish-style courtyard with arched palisades supporting a framework of vine-choked oaken beams. I see the donna seated in the corner. With her is a man in a white suit and a red fez, a hookah pipe in his left hand. As I approach, I notice the right arm of the jacket pinned up in absence of an arm to fill it. I also immediately recognize the burn-scarred face, the black patch over the right eye, the scar-twisted smirk. He sends me a crocodilian smile as I walk up. “Sr. Lagarto,” he says, “always a pleasure!” Don hisses from my shoulder.

“
Hasan Pasha,” I reply, cold as Don’s blood.

“
Please, please, have a seat. May I introduce…”

“
My passenger? We’ve met.” I pull up a wrought-iron chair and signal for the server. “And what business does the sultan have in the Cays?” I ask.

Hasan Pasha’s smile leaves his eye behind. He draws a bubbling lungful from the hookah and exhales a mint-scented cloud of smoke from his nostrils. “Why Sr. Lagarto, you do know how much I loathe to talk shop, particularly in such elegant company,” he adds, smiling warmly at the donna.

Her smile is charming, but empty. She rests her chin on interlaced white-gloved fingers, her elbows, also sheathed by the long gloves, on the table. I notice she’s changed into a long satin evening gown, cream-colored and exposing her soft cocoa-brown left shoulder. Her hair is piled up in an intricate knot revealing the graceful curve of her long neck. Her jewelry could buy
Estrella
a pair of younger sisters. It is a look completely out of place in a town where people wear work pants to Mass. “Normally I would not associate with heathens,” she says, “but a pasha is certainly more fitting company than the usual rabble in this dirty little cay. Just as long as he realizes I am not available to be one of his wives.”

“
Charming,” he laughs. “Yet the donna mistakes me for an Arab goatherd turned petrol pasha, not for my true station as a blooded representative of His Excellency the Sultan. And she need not be concerned for her virtue, for I am perfectly content with the two lovely wives I have.”

“
I’d shake your hand, sir,” she says, half-reaching out, “but I believe that’s the dirty one, yes?”

“
So custom goes,” he replies calmly, refusing to give her the rise she apparently wanted. He sets down the hookah pipe to reach for a small cup of coffee. I suppress a shudder. The donna has no idea what the loss of that arm did to him. She’s blissfully unaware of his favorite saying, one I last heard as he approached the
hashassin
that night in Venice: “God has left me only the dirty hand, my friend. This is because he needs those who do the dirty business.” I try to purge my mind of the memory of what came next.