Thomas dropped me off in front of Claire's house, claiming his wife had something planned at home and he didn't want to disappoint her. It was the first time he'd ever mentioned having a wife and it sparked my curiosity. I'd pictured him as a loner, one of those self-sufficient Old West gunslinger types. Now that a wife had been mentioned, I didn't find it difficult to enter her into the equation. Ed Thomas was too civilized a gentleman not to have a woman in his life.
And he was far too private even to speak her name to someone like John Caine.
I walked up the circular drive toward the house. It looked exactly as it did when I first arrived. Nothing had changed, except everything had changed.
Juanita answered my knock, a look of joy on her face that changed when she saw the condition of my face.
“Madre de Dios!”
she said. “Meester Caine! Joo're ogly!”
“My mother used to say that.”
“No, I mean ⦠jour face!”
“That's what she meant, too.”
Juanita laughed, shaking her head. “Joo got beat up some more! That's what I meant to say!”
“Yeah. But here I am.”
“Come in, come in,” she said, pulling me in by the arm. “And joo messed up jour clothes again.”
“Can't take me anywhere.”
Laughing, she wagged a finger at me. “Joo don't take care of anything, do you?”
“No.”
Juanita reached up and kissed me on the cheek. “They say you find the money.
Gracias,
Meester Caine.”
“Por nada,”
I said, “for nothing.”
“No, for Mees Claire. And for all the people who work for Mees Claire. Like me.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Jess. I do. Mees Claire is upstairs. Weeth Mees Barbara. Go. Now.” Juanita gave me a little swat on the fanny. Merriment twinkled in her eyes.
“I'll be back,” I said.
“Don't be so sure!”
My gear was still in the guest bedroom and I went there first to get a change of clothing. I was looking through my clothes when Claire appeared at the door, leaning against the jamb, arms crossed.
“Didn't Juanita tell you to come see me?”
“Thought I'd shower first. It's been days.”
She smiled. Unlike her earlier smiles in this house, this was a warm one, no longer brittle. “That's that smell?” She uncrossed her arms. “You did it, didn't you.”
“We'll go get the money in a couple of days. We'll all go. Aboard
Olympia.”
“And?”
“And you can do whatever you want with it. It belongs to you. Nobody, no government, no court, no person can tell you otherwise. Besides, it's cash. All cash. I know, I looked. Two footlockers full of hundred-dollar bills. Nobody's ever disputed cash.”
Claire colored, her cheeks pinking all the way to the tops of her high cheekbones.
“Cash?”
“Yep. I don't know if you want to involve Barbara, but I know a guy who'll exchange the cash for letters of credit or cashier's checks from a Geneva bank. He'll help you convert it into ⦠I was going to say real money, but what money's more real than cash? I guess I should say âusable' money. Not much you can do with that much cash these days.”
“You know a Swiss banker?”
“Better than that,” I said, thinking of ways Chawlie could help replace the money, imagining Barbara's alarm when she discovered what Chawlie really was. “He's not a good man, but he'll work with you. He owes me.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
“Just good business. He'll work with you. I promise.”
“You always keep your promises, don't you?” She turned when Barbara entered, silently coming upon us as if she did not wish to disturb something. When she found nothing disturbed or disturbing, she looked relieved.
“You got hit in the face again,” Barbara said, smiling, crossing the room. “That happens a lot, doesn't it?”
“Ladies?” I put my arms around each woman and kissed a blond and a brunet head of hair, smelling a different flowered scent with each kiss. “I have to take a shower.”
“Yes,” Claire said, wrinkling her nose and wriggling out from under my arm. “You do.” Barbara remained in my embrace. In the mirror I saw a hint of a challenge in her expression as she looked at Claire.
“I'll be right out.” I tried to move away from Barbara, but she was having none of it, moving closer to me, her body proclaiming its own allegiance.
“Take your time,” she said, releasing me, but watching Claire.
Knowing when to retreat, I went into the bathroom and ran the water, leaving the door open. Barbara pushed Claire into the corridor and locked the door and came back and lounged on the bed, lying on her left side, watching me undress.
I got under the hot spray and did a better job than I was able to do in Mountain Meadows. Just standing under the shower made me feel better. I luxuriated, washing my hair, brushing my teeth, taking my time. After several days, this was more than a luxury, it was a need. Now I felt human, or at least as close as I ever felt.
The shower door opened and Barbara stepped in as I was rinsing my hair, my head down. I opened my eyes, saw bare legs and feet. She got behind me, put her arms around my waist and hugged me tightly, pressing her breasts against my back.
“I couldn't wait,” she said, one hand reaching down, grasping me, cupping my already thickening flesh. “I hope you don't mind.”
I turned around and nearly laughed, but her look was so vulnerable I didn't dare. It might have been a long time for her, the first time since her marriage ended, and she was fully aware of her gamble. This could end badly if it was not handled absolutely right.
“I'm not much of a catch.”
“I'm not looking for a husband, John. I've had one. Look where it got me.”
I laughed, enveloping her within my arms, wondering at her body, feeling the wonderful combination of suppleness and softness, of muscle covered by the ripe womanly flesh. It had been a long time for me, too.
“Come on,” she said, looking into my eyes. Barbara took my hand and we found the bed without drying. She didn't let go of my hand, grasping it in her own in a strong grip that was nearly painful. When she lay down on the bed, she brought me directly down on top of her, holding me tightly against her.
“No,” she said in response to my exploration of her body. “There's no time for that now.” She moved under me and I found her ready.
Sometimes the act can be gentle. Sometimes it can be passionate. On the extreme end of the scale, it is violent, a force of nature, where bodies are merely the means to the end and the end is the total, absolute reduction of the persona into sexual climax. Some women can climax more than once. Some cannot do it at all. Barbara was way off the scale, and it didn't take long before I discovered that making love to her was akin to experiencing an earthquake. The earth didn't just move, it damn near exploded.
The first time she came it was urgent, and our lovemaking had all the refinement of a wrestling match. When she discovered I had not joined her, she kissed me and breathlessly asked me to hold on, if I could. I found I could do nothing else but hold on, her passion, if that's what it was, so great and so overwhelming I could not follow her anyway.
Barbara climaxed three times, each time more intense
than before. She pinned my head into the soft place between her neck and shoulder, holding me tightly with strong arms, thrusting and bucking her hips and legs, wrapping herself around me in her frenzied quest for fulfillment.
Whatever she was seeking, she eventually found it. On her fourth and fifth occasions, she cried out, a hair-raising, atavistic cry celebrating her survival. By then I understood that I was nothing more than a lever, a tool to be used to assist her on her way.
This was not lovemaking. It was pure sex, a seeking not of completion with another human being, but of self-absorption so deep I could not see the bottom. It was not the stuff of romance.
When it was over, she pulled away and lay panting, eyes closed, one hand thrown over her face. I touched her, but she pushed my hand away.
“You must think I'm awful,” Barbara said into her hand, not facing me, not looking at me.
“No.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I'm thinking you're one hell of a woman. I'm thinking it would take one hell of a man to keep up with you.”
“Don't keep score.”
“I wouldn't dare. It was ⦠an experience.”
“It was ⦠this was just ⦠I don't know. You helped me exorcise some demons.”
“Are they gone?” We all have demons. I was surprised that Barbara's fears ran so deep. It had never shown before.
She nodded, opening her eyes. “I think so. Why?”
“You wanna try again? I mean I, uh ⦔
She looked, then put her hand on me, wrapping her fingers around me. Chuckling deep in her throat, she said, “Well, I'll be damned!”
“Please be gentle with me.”
She laughed, rolled over, and kissed me. This time she allowed me to explore her body the way I wanted to explore it, the way a woman's body is meant to be explored. This time she responded the way I'd expected.
And this time, when the earth moved, it moved for both of us.
Three days later we dropped anchor beyond the surf line, about a hundred yards from a barely familiar Baja beach. The lagoon and the black mesas beyond looked different from the water. From here the land looked alien.
We didn't go the next day, partly because of the weather, but mostly because I couldn't get through to the man I wanted to speak to. When I did, I was glad I'd made the effort. Some things are worth waiting for, as Barbara had happily pointed out to me a couple of days earlier.
We'd all put Barbara on a plane back to San Francisco the night before, making her departure an occasion complete with confetti and streamers. People turned and stared, wondering at the commotion.
I knew she had to return to her job, but I didn't enjoy it any more than she did. We both still resonated with the discovery of what could be a new love. Barbara's gift of herself had been such a surprise I'd nearly missed recognizing it for what it really was. In the end I let her go only after she promised to come back before I left the Mainland.
Ed Thomas and I took the Avon inflatable to shore. Claire and Farrell remained aboard. To prevent potential immigration problems, we left Juanita back in San Diego, happier, I thought, and relieved. Strange as it may seem to me, some people are not sailors.
We brought two small folding shovels, the kind the army calls entrenchment tools. I carried my Buck knife. Other than that, Thomas and I were unarmed. Farrell had his six-shooter, the shotguns, the elephant rifle, and the 7mm Magnum sniper rifle on board
Olympia,
but we took no weapons ashore. We
didn't expect trouble, and we were too old and tired to go looking for any. All we wanted was to pick up the money and go home. If we did have trouble, Farrell was there, watching over us like a guardian angel, an angel with killer eyes.
I found my monuments and markers immediately and within twenty minutes of digging, we found the footlockers. That was the easy part. Dragging them back to the Avon was harder. The hardest part was yet to come.
Getting out through the surf in a heavily laden inflatable boat isn't real easy, either, but I'd done it before and we made it, soaked by cold seawater, but intact. It didn't increase Thomas's sense of security when I inflated divers' buoys and secured them to each of the footlockers before we pushed off.
“Just in case,” I told him.
“Yeah, sure,” he grumbled in reply.
“We've gone to all this work, you want to lose them now?”
“Let's go, Caine.”
The hardest work was transferring the heavy metal boxes from the dinghy to the
Olympia.
The seas were rougher than I'd hoped, but we'd prepared for that, too. Farrell used the forward boom as a cargo winch, hoisting each footlocker from the bouncing Avon to the deck of my schooner, not exactly a stable platform. It wasn't a task I'd want to do every day, and it took longer than we'd planned, but eventually we wrestled the two heavy containers aboard. We all knew what was at risk.
It took the four of us to carry the footlockers below. I winced a couple of times when we scratched my teak getting them through the hatch. We stashed the money boxes in the main salon under the table. They looked like pirate chests. I guess, in effect, they served the same purpose.
“If you don't sink us, Caine, I think we've recovered the lady's money.” Thomas popped the top off an Edelweiss
Dunkel
and toasted me. “I do believe you know what you're doing.”
“Coming from you, Ed, that's a compliment.”
“Yes. It is.”
“There's more of those,” I said, meaning the beer. “I think we've all earned one.”
Thomas passed them around and we clinked the bottles together in a mutual toast.
“Now our only worry is the Coast Guard.” Thomas followed me up on deck and helped raise the anchor. “I don't care what you say, there's got to be something illegal about bringing that kind of cash into the country. Hell, there's probably some kind of law against having that kind of cash in the first place.”
“I don't think they'll bother us,” I said.
“Why's that?”
“Wait and see. Let's get the canvas up. Claire, can you handle the foresail?” We'd sailed down and I planned sailing back; it took about eight hours each way. We'd be home by early morning.
She could and she did handle the foresail, showing Thomas and Farrell how to unfurl
Olympia'
s full complement of canvas. This was my maiden voyage. The boat did everything she was supposed to.
The Mexican coastline looked brown and barren under the harsh winter sun, resembling the California coastline, save the gazillion-dollar homes. Baja was starting to get its share of those, too, what with American investment and the influx of new drug money, but it would be decades before its coastline looked anything like Southern California from Malibu to San Diego. Maybe it would never have the same prosperity. Until it did, there would always be the foot traffic of the small brown people coming north to seek their fortunes.
When the sun set, acres of glass reflected the pale peach-colored sky from a darkened shore.
Night falls quickly on the ocean. Dusk transforms to dark without effort.
Olympia
sailed on through the invisible barrier, marking one more day in our lives. This day would never come again. There would be other days, fewer for me than for others, more than for some. We never know when it will be our last sunrise, when the sunset we see now will be our final curtain. We never know what will become of us after it
is over. It is a universal question, one of the greatest mysteries in our lives.
Paul Peters was there, wherever
there
was. So was Stevenson. So were de la Peña, Chico, Paco and Elena and the rest of their gang. Vanished. Unable to appreciate this fine sunset and anticipate another. Kate was there, too. It isn't only the bad ones who die.
The crew must have sensed my mood. In any case, they left me alone. I remained on deck, making sure it was my watch when we entered American waters.
The cockpit had a radar screen slaved to the master unit in the communications cabin below. I saw the blips approach from twenty miles out, knowing we were on their radar, as well. They came right at us, without hesitation. They knew we were there.
I went below and woke Thomas and asked him to wake Farrell and meet me on deck. Then I went into my cabin.
“It's time?” Claire lay on the bunk, her hands behind her head, staring at the bulkhead.
“We're here, in U.S. waters. Just an hour more. Maybe two. Come on deck. There's something I'd like you to see.”
“How soon?”
“About ten minutes.”
“I'll make some coffee.”
“Farrell's already done it. He had the last watch and made it then.”
After my encounter with Barbara the other evening, Claire had made an effort to be nice, but her pleasantness was forced. I eventually understood that I'd merely performed a recovery service for the lady, removing the big bad wolf from the door, giving her reason to go on. As it was the night I'd met her, I was the hired help, appreciated, well paid, but as much a friend of the woman as her gardener.
Well, there are worse jobs. Not everyone is a friend after something like this. I'd recovered the money and restored her life to her. It was only what she had hired me to do, nothing more, nothing less. Of the husband there was nothing, so in that I had failed, although we both knew he was dead. I
watched Claire, and thought I knew what she was thinking. I could see her begin thoughts of the future, and to plan, now that the past was past and no longer controlled her.
“Penny for your thoughts, John,” she said.
“They're not worth that much.” Then I saw it. “There! See the lights?”
But it was wrong. The lights were approaching from the wrong direction.
“Ed! Hatley!”
Both men came on deck, Farrell with the long gun.
“We've got problems.” I pointed toward the southern horizon. A Mexican patrol boat quickly approached, guns bristling, its intentions apparent. We were the target. “Everyone get below, and get those guns out of sight.”
“We're in U.S. waters.”
“That's right, Ed, but we've got the global positioning system and they don't. They can do anything they want and claim they had the right.”
“You think they know about the money?”
“I think old de la Peña had partners, and they knew about it. Someone had to be watching the beach. It's just our luck they were a little slow relaying the information. Otherwise they'd have caught us on their side of the border.”
The patrol boat plowed through the swells, white spray turning a luminescent green in the black night.
“What's your plan?”
“We've got one ace card, but I'm not sure where it is.”
Thomas looked at me with an expression resembling a sneer. “You don't know where it is? Or what it is?”
“Where. Get below. You guys guard the money and Claire. When they come alongside, I'll play dumb.”
Thomas shook his head. “Good role for you to play, Caine,” he said, disgusted.
“And if they come aboard, we're in U.S. waters and it's piracy. Shoot to kill.”
He peered out into the darkness. “They might have fifties aboard, huh?”
I nodded. “Most likely.”
“We won't stand a chance.”
“We've got the money. Fifties would sink us.”
“Sure, and I believe in Santa Claus, too. Here's your gun.” He handed me the Colt. I shoved it into the waistband of my Levi's.
“It'll be okay,” I said, hoping I was right.
Then I was alone again, watching the radarscope, hoping for a miracle.
Claire came up from the cabin.
“Get below,” I told her. “If there's shooting, we'll be first.”
Her face, illuminated from below by the green radar screen, was bleak. “They take the money now, I might as well be dead.”
“Don't think that way.” I looked over the railing behind me. The patrol boat was two hundred yards to our stern and quickly closing.
“You're going to win, Claire. Believe it.”
She closed her eyes. “I wish I could.”
The boat was now a hundred yards back and beginning to slow to match our speed. I saw five men standing at the bow, making ready to board us. A searchlight reached out and found us. It remained focused on the cockpit as they glided in.
“Attention the
Olympia!
Stand by to be boarded!”
“Get below, Claire. I'm not letting them aboard.”
She shook her head fiercely. “I'm staying here!”
“Attention the
Olympia!”
“I heard you,” I said through my own loud-hailer. “This is a documented United States vessel sailing peacefully in American waters. Any attempt to interfere with us is piracy!”
“You are in Mexican waters and you will be boarded or we will sink you!” The tinny voice got closer. We had about three minutes before it was Molly Over the Windmill.
“I think this is called a Mexican standoff,” I said, watching the radar screen.
“What happens now?”
“Get below, Claire. They will not board us and they will not sink us, but you've got to give me some room to move up here. Okay? Trust me?”
She gave me the long look. She'd had little reason to trust any man lately.
“You promise?”
“Yep,” I said, watching the radar.
Without a word, she leaned over and kissed me on the mouth and went below.
The Mexican patrol craft came alongside, matching our speed. Twin-barreled .50-caliber machine guns pointed at me. One spasm, one twitch of a nervous finger, and John Caine would join his ancestors. Two seamen reached for our railing, trying to jump aboard. I twitched the wheel and they nearly fell overboard into the froth between the boats.
“You will comply!” the officer snarled. He had a thick black mustache that made him look like Saddam Hussein.
“Sorry, pal, but you're on the wrong side of the fence. Turn around and go home!” I stood, my .45 in plain sight. I could feel the tension rise a few notches, just the way I'd planned.
“You are armed in Mexico! Throw down your weapons!”
I heard the whoop, whoop, whoop of a boat siren far away. I looked toward the western horizon. Coming toward us, lit up like New Orleans at Mardi Gras, were two United States Navy inshore patrol boats. Smaller than Coast Guard cutters, but far faster than anything else on the seas. Updated PT boats of World War II, they were originally designed and built for coastal defense and unconventional warfare. They had weapons that dwarfed the Mexican .50s.