A Wild and Lonely Place (19 page)

“So you think running off on a Caribbean junket will solve your problems?”

“Get serious. This isn’t about me, Gage. It’s about a little girl whom you were ready and willing to yank out of that consulate
this morning. It’s about a maniac who continues to deliver lethal packages.”

“You’re not going to crack the Diplo-bomber case by running off on a rescue mission.”

“Maybe not. But I’ll bet you ten-to-one that these bombings are directly related to Dave Hamid and—yes—his mother, too. They’re
at dead center of what’s been going on. You indulge the client’s wishes now, you’re setting her up for disaster. And I’ll
bet you that I find out something down there that’ll prove me right.”

Renshaw looked thoughtful. “You’ll give me ten-to-one odds on that?”

“Yes.”

“I suddenly feel myself becoming a gambling man. Okay, Sharon, you feel so strongly about the kid and you think you can find
out something that’ll crack the case, go ahead and fly down there. But on one condition: if you succeed, you get your expenses
and ten times your fee. If you don’t, you get nothing, and you work nine more jobs for us free of charge.”

Jesus, me and my smart mouth! I was a damned fool for making such a wager at a time when I was starting a new business. But
my pride wouldn’t allow me to backpedal, not with Renshaw. Hoping I sounded more confident than I felt, I said, “You’ve got
yourself a bet.”

We shook on it.

* * *

After I’d made arrangements for Gage to either get hold of Habiba’s passport or a false one on which she could travel, I went
to find Hy. The poker game he’d mentioned was going on in one of the second-floor conference rooms. When he saw me he turned
his cards face down and said, “I fold. Cash in my chips, will you, Bruce? I’ll collect from you later.”

As he came toward me I noticed he looked pale. He grinned easily when he took my arm, though, and we went into the corridor.
“The next time you get to thinking I don’t appreciate you,” he said, “just remember that I folded with a pair of aces. So
did my wishing you luck pay off?”

“Yes, it did.” As we walked to the corner office that he seldom used, I gave him a brief rundown on my evening’s activities,
including my wager with Renshaw.

“My God, McCone, I ought to send you to Gamblers Anonymous!”

“Yes, I’m beginning to understand how people get in trouble. But anyway, I’m leaving for St. Maarten at twelve-thirty. Want
to come along?”

“Wish I could, but I’m moving on this Haitian project tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

“Situation’s heating up. Foolish to delay any longer.”

“Well, good luck.”

“Thanks. Actually, it’ll be a piece of cake.”

I followed him into the office and flopped on the leather couch. Suddenly I felt beat, the prospect of two long plane flights
overwhelming me. Maybe I’d be able to sleep en route—if my mind didn’t get too active, if I wasn’t visited by nightmares of
a body floating on the black water, if…

Hy sat next to me, his arm around my shoulders. My gaze wandered about the office. It was expensively and tastefully furnished,
courtesy of RKI’s decorator, but contained no trace of its occasional occupant, save a gnarled chunk of what looked to be
porous rock but actually was calcified vegetation from one of the towers of Tufa Lake near his ranch in Mono County. Hy’s
late wife’s environmental foundation had saved the dying lake from virtual extinction.

Sometimes I wondered if my lover didn’t miss the rough-and-tumble ecological wars in which he’d been a frontline soldier for
many years, but recently I’d realized that his current work suited him better. The edge was off the environmental battles;
the Spaulding Foundation continued its work under a white flag of uneasy truce. But there was a part of Hy that needed conflict,
that courted danger in the same way I did. Harness it to the business of saving lives, and it was an asset; leave it untethered,
and it could become a lethal liability.

“Where did you say you’re flying into?” he asked.

“St. Maarten.”

“You probably could use a contact there.” He got up, consulted a Rolodex, and scribbled a few lines on a scratch pad. “Cam
Connors, old buddy of mine, runs an air-charter service out of there; lives in Marigot, the capital of St. Martin, the French
side of the island. I’ll call him, tell him you’re coming.”

“Thanks.” I tucked the paper in my wallet. “Do you happen to know somebody in every corner of the world?”

“Just about.” He sat down again and began nuzzling my neck.

“Quit!” I exclaimed. “I’ve got to go home and dig out my passport. I’ve got to pack, and I’m not sure what shape my hot-weather
clothes are in.”

“Why’re women always worried about what to wear?” He bit my earlobe and nuzzled some more, lower.

“I can’t go down there not looking like a tourist; I don’t want to call attention to myself.”

“Pay attention to
this.
”

“Ripinsky! I have to—Hy!”

Well, maybe I did have a half hour to spare.…

I replaced the Airfone in its cradle on the seatback in front of me, extracted my American Express card from the slot, and
began to worry seriously. I’d been calling Adah every half hour since my flight left SFO, and still there was no answer. I
was half tempted to call her parents, Barbara and Rupert, but I didn’t want to alarm them unnecessarily. Besides, if Barbara
thought her daughter was in danger, she’d be out scouring the streets for her, and Rupert would be banging on the mayor’s
door, demanding to know why he hadn’t made those streets safe for his little girl.

And Adah, once she surfaced, would kill me.

Their excesses aside, sometimes I envied Adah her parents. After we McCone kids fled the nest, my mother used to fuss endlessly
about us, but now that her new love, Melvin Hunt, had sold his chain of Laundromats, they’d begun to travel extensively; what
little news I had from her came on postcards from foreign lands. The photograph she’d recently sent of herself riding in a
rickshaw in Hong Kong couldn’t begin to replace the weekly phone calls she used to make from home. As for my father, even
before Ma divorced him he’d spent most of his time puttering in the garage while singing bawdy ballads. Now he too had found
himself a companion, a widow named Nancy Sullivan, and they were constantly on the go in Pa’s Chevy Suburban, a new Airstream
trailer hitched to its rear. They didn’t even send postcards.

Time passes, the structure of a family disintegrates. I could accept that. You stay close to some members, as I had to my
brother John and sister Charlene; you drift away from others, as I had from my brother Joey and sister Patsy. But I’d never
dreamed that Ma and Pa would drift away from us.

Maybe that was why I’d embarked on such a frenzy of nest-feathering at the cottage. Create a new structure, a new shared home.
That, and the fact that I sensed a number of my old friendships at All Souls and elsewhere to be fading away. My focus had
narrowed to the tried-and-true: Hank and his wife Anne-Marie, Rae, Ted, Adah. And of course, Hy.…

My hand strayed toward the Airfone. Hy was staying at RKI’s hospitality suite tonight; I could call him, relay my anxiety
about Adah, ask him to check on her—

No, he needed his rest. He was leaving for the Dominican Republic tomorrow, and then he’d cross the border into strife-torn
Haiti to bring out the political dissident. Piece of cake, he’d called it, and I didn’t believe that for an instant.

Thinking about the danger he’d face put chills on my shoulder blades, what-ifs in my mind.

To banish them I leaned back, closed my eyes, listened to the thrum of the engines. Immediately images began to flicker against
the back of my eyelids.

Habiba sitting in the passenger seat of the MG, begging to be taken for a ride—lost little girl who worried about her mother
and missed her father. Mavis dealing out a hand of solitaire in front of her fireplace—lost wounded woman who missed the days
when she wrote her poems. Mavis floating facedown in the water, the poems lost to her forever. Langley Newton’s face when
he said, “I hate men who prey on women.” Eric Sparling’s face when he said, “I just hope I’m not sending you to the same fate
as the Hamid woman.” And Habiba’s dark eyes: what they must have seen at the marina, what they might be witnessing now.

I forced my own eyes open. The images were all unbearably lonely.

Maybe it was only the plane: so huge compared to the Citabria, so full of strangers. In the Citabria I’d flown through a high,
beautiful world guided only by my fledgling pilot’s instincts and felt not the least bit lonely. But in this 767 I felt as
if I’d been abandoned on a distant space satellite.

Lonesome world up here. Down there too, sometimes.

The Leeward Islands

May 23 – 25

It was drizzling and muggy when I landed at Princess Juliana Airport on St. Maarten. The little yellow terminal seemed stuck
in another time, the Netherlands’ crown princess having long ago been succeeded as queen by her daughter. We left the aircraft
by stairs rather than a jetway and crossed tarmac from which steam rose in plumes. By the time I cleared Immigration, the
light Tee that I’d changed to during my brief stopover in San Juan was sweat-plastered to my back. I hurried outside and encountered
a swarm of taxi drivers.

A tall chocolate-skinned man in a Dodgers cap accosted me first, speaking softly and swiftly in French-flavored English. I
gave him Cam Connors’s address on Rue de la Liberté in Marigot, and we agreed on a price and set out in a red Toyota Celica
that had seen hard service. In spite of the fact he was taking me to St. Martin, the French side of the island, the driver—whose
name was Kenny—kept up a running commentary on the hotels and restaurants that clustered near the airport. The monologue—much
of it in outdated American slang—relaxed me because I didn’t really have to listen and, more important, because it proved
that my tourist guise was convincing. I stared out the window at the pastel high-rise hotels that rose across a silver-gray
lagoon, then looked toward the cloud-draped hills of the island’s interior. After a while the oppressive heat made me nod
off.

I was a few frames into a cool dream of walking on the beach at Bootlegger’s Cove when the cab came to such an abrupt halt
that I had to grab the armrest to keep from sliding to the floor. The Toyota’s front bumper was only inches from the back
of a bus, and traffic ahead had stopped. “Philipsburg,” Kenny said with a philosophical shrug that I took to mean it was always
congested there. “Bypass,” he added, wrenching the wheel to the left and gunning between two oncoming cars.

The side street he turned onto was narrow and potholed, lined with pastel cinder-block houses with corrugated iron roofs.
People lounged on their porches or in their doorways, the women clad in bright-colored shift dresses reminiscent of the fifties,
the men wearing T-shirts and tropical-weight pants. Children played in the dirt, and an inordinate number of mangy dogs lazed
in the street. The dogs were supremely confident, barely raising their heads at the taxi’s approach; Kenny obligingly steered
around them. Interspersed among the residences were lottery-ticket stands that seemed to be doing a turnaway business; they
put me in mind of Speed Schechtmann.

For a moment I considered asking Kenny if he knew of Schechtmann or Jumbie Cay, but decided against it. On a small island
of less than thirty thousand population, word of the unusual gets around fast; an American woman asking about things no tourist
had business knowing would certainly qualify.

We rejoined the main road on the other side of Philipsburg and Kenny began telling me an involved story about a Dutchman and
a Frenchman dividing the island by walking in opposite directions around its perimeter until they came face-to-face again.
Its punch line was that the French got the lion’s share because the Dutchman was fat and stopped on the way for gin. Kenny,
who had told me he lived on the French side, laughed uproariously and slapped the steering wheel. The story probably wasn’t
true, he said, but it was a good one on the Dutch, wasn’t it?

I laughed politely and agreed it was a good one—and wished I’d chosen a less talkative driver. I appreciated his efforts at
making me feel welcome, but the combination of his chatter and the hot muggy air was now making me edgy.

Finally we crested a hill and a sign appeared saying we were entering St. Martin. After the congestion around the airport
and Philipsburg, Marigot seemed tranquil, with a tropical French feel that reminded me of New Orleans in the sleepy off-season.
The buildings were graceful pastel structures, many fronted by sidewalk cafés; small shade-dappled parks abounded. I supposed
Kenny was giving me the full tourist treatment, because he drove down to the quay at the crescent-shaped harbor where freighters
and a Cunard Lines cruise ship lay at anchor. The drizzle had stopped, and slivers of sunlight pierced the clouds; vendors
at an open-air market along the waterfront were pulling tarps off their displays of T-shirts and other souvenirs. On the streets
people in cruise clothes strolled, dazzled by the arrays of merchandise in the windows of the duty-free shops. Finally Kenny
brought the cab to a stop at a two-storied white stucco building with ornate wrought-iron balconies draped in cascades of
vermilion flowers.

Cam Connors’s number was one of those painted on the building’s wall below an arrow pointing to a narrow cobble-stoned passageway.
I paid Kenny, taking the card he offered and promising to call him should I want a tour of the interior, and slung the strap
of my travel bag over my shoulder. The passageway led to a courtyard with palmetto trees growing in its center; more blossom-draped
balconies overlooked it. I climbed a staircase, located a door, and followed an interior hallway around two bends before I
came to Connors’s apartment.