Part 8 (2/2)

She cringed slightly as the houseboat came within a foot of hitting us. For a moment, I thought she was going to yell something at the pilot. But instead she said, ”Captain Lobo asked me about that scar on your face. He wanted to know why I had hired a gringo charterboat captain. He seemed suspicious of you.”

”Well, I'm a little suspicious of him, too. I can't figure out why he followed us in, then boarded us first with all those other boats at the mouth of the harbor waiting.”

”Maybe they had already been searched.”

”That's another thing-he and Zapata hardly even took a good look at my boat. What did they do? Poke their nose into the cabin and didn't even check the engine compartments. I would hardly call it a search.”

I watched her as closely as I could while running Sniper. I wanted to see what her reaction was. I wanted to find out if her suspicions were the same as mine: that Lobo and his cohort gave us special attention because they knew that Androsa Santarun was a spy.

But if she had any suspicions, she never let on.

”Mr. MacMorgan,” she said, ”please don't ask me any questions, because I have no answers. Just promise me this-that you will never again jeopardize my . . . my attempts to get my father out of Cuba with your silly jokes.”

”I thought you hated the Castro Cubans. It seems to me that what I did-”

”I do hate them!” She said it fiercely. She meant it. ”I hate every single thing they stand for. Look at that!” She swept her hand toward the tropical wilderness beyond the Naval Academy. ”Never was there a place so beautiful as Cuba. But Castro did not take it from Batista to give it to the Cuban people. He took it for himself. I do hate them, and that is exactly why I don't want to take the chance of playing silly jokes. It could . . . could ruin everything.”

We had been told to anchor on the west side of the harbor, so I pointed Sniper toward one of the few chunks of open water, away from the flood of other boats. A broad peninsula of white sand and Australian pines separated the port from a finger of bay, and on the peninsula was a ragged military outpost. There was a colony of barrack houses built of concrete block and painted a shabby blue or bleached pink. Some of the roofs were tiled, others were thatched. Just to the south of the huts was a small but modern aircraft control tower and an amphibious landing strip. Absently, I wondered how much it had cost the Russians. Beyond the gla.s.s quadrangular of control tower was a steel pier where two antiquated gunboats were moored, and above that, in a clearing, was a baseball diamond with a chicken-wire backstop. Guards patrolled the beach with emaciated German shepherds, and there were bunkers beyond the beach, poorly camouflaged.

I nosed Sniper uptide, and before I went forward to drop the hook, I turned to the woman.

”You're right,” I said. ”Giving that Zapata character snuff was a rotten joke. And I promise I'll never do it again. But you have to admit-it was kind of funny. Did you see him start to sweat and hold onto the table like the boat was spinning? I thought he was going to break a leg trying to get out of that cabin. . . .”

Androsa turned abruptly away from me and walked back toward the starboard fighting chair.

I watched her trying hard to repress a smile as she went.

And so the waiting began.

We were just one of fifteen hundred American boats in Mariel Harbor waiting on some word of the relatives we wanted to take back to America.

Androsa Santarun knew all the steps in the procedure after her talk with Captain Lobo. First, her triplicate papers with her father's name would go to the Cuban immigration authorities. They would process the papers and decide if he was eligible to go to America-”eligible” meaning that he was not of military age, that he was not a physician or government employee, and that he was not an ”enemy of the people.”

The last requirement was pretty vague, of course. And could be used to stop anybody from leaving that they d.a.m.n well didn't want to leave.

After the papers were processed and okayed, the relatives supposedly would be sent to the waiting boats.

But the woman said she knew otherwise. She said it was a lot more complicated than that. She told me about it at dinner that night, in the longest conversation we had had the whole trip. That's one thing about a boat. People crammed together in close quarters long enough either turn murderous, or they find a common plateau of conversation and acceptance that will at least make the trip bearable.

Happily enough, she had chosen the latter alternative.

I had spent the hot afternoon leaning into the narrow confines of the engine room, puttering with this, changing that, adding seals and new belts where they were needed. Every now and then I'd break for a cold beer, wipe my face with a towel, and sit in the shade to watch the Cuban patrol and taxi boats idle between anchorages. The woman had changed from pants and blouse to a striking white bikini that had men on the boats nearest ours running for their binoculars. As aloof as Androsa Santarun was, she seemed totally unconcerned with the impact of her physical appearance.

And the impact was considerable.

She was a woman of length and curves: long black hair streaming toward the ripe flexure of high, round b.u.t.tocks and the grace of long legs. The white suit emphasized the darkness of her, and her ribs undulated promisingly toward the wide, firm impetus of b.r.e.a.s.t.s, barely covered by the skimpy top.

It was all I could do not to stare at her when she walked past me to rummage in the cabin for a book, or a cold drink, or a towel.

But I made myself; forced myself to act oblivious to her s.e.xuality, knowing that if she did feel my eyes upon her-and she would-that I would be dismissed as just one more h.o.r.n.y son of a b.i.t.c.h.

And that's when I knew that she had me.

Any time you start measuring your reactions to please or impress someone, then you know their effect on you is something other than commonplace.

Great, MacMorgan. Just great. You've been with this woman how long? Little more than twenty-four hours. You see her kill a man coldly and professionally, and you have sat like a kid in a corner while she treated you like hired help. So why the special interest? There is a woman in Chicago, another in New York, and the best of them all back in Key West-every one of them beautiful, intelligent, eager, and one h.e.l.l of a lot easier to get along with. So why get taken in by this one?

I really didn't know why I was playing little games for her approval.

Maybe it was the way she had acted when she saw the man with his throat cut on Storm Nest.

Maybe it was that hint of vulnerability beneath the black ice of her eyes in that singular moment. Or the way she had leaned against me for support. Or the smallness of her beneath my hands, or . . . h.e.l.l, I just didn't know.

So I worked hard all afternoon in the sun. And tried to ignore the vision in the white suit. And tried harder to force the urge to seek her favor from my head.

Across the harbor, half a mile of water and several hundred boats away, I could hear the voice of Cuban authority over a big PA system somewhere north of the Naval Academy. On the beach of the peninsula, only a hundred yards away, the guards still patrolled the area with their AK-47s and their shepherds, watching for Cubans who might try to make a swim for one of the American boats.

The place didn't exactly exude friendliness.

For supper that night, I had thawed out four sizable lobster tails. I had caught plenty the season before, and now was a good time to enjoy them. Mariel Harbor, it was easy to see, didn't offer much else in the way of luxury.

At sundown, I went for a short swim, toweled off, and then went below to set water to boiling for the lobster. In another pot, I dumped in a stick of real b.u.t.ter and set the alcohol burner on dead low.

Lobster and what else? I thought for a moment. If I was alone, what else would I fix?

Garlic bread, toasted. Maybe a salad. That's all. And if the woman didn't like it, she could fix her own supper.

I cleaned off the galley table and added plates. Then I went to work on the salad, cutting plenty of sweet onion into it.

”How was the water?”

She came down the cabin stairs, all long legs and swell of womanhood beneath the suit. Her high Indian cheeks were bronzed by the sun, and her hair was s.h.i.+ny with tanning oil.

”Water's dirty-too d.a.m.n dirty for swimming.”

She grabbed a chunk of onion as she swept past me and chewed it while she spoke. ”I thought about going in, but . . . well, I was afraid there might be sharks around.”

”Sharks?” I looked down into her mahogany eyes. For the first time, she looked relaxed. Even sleepy. ”I imagine most of the sharks in this harbor left when they heard you were here. No, the most dangerous thing about that water is staph infection. When I got out, I washed my ears with some of that cheap rum under the sink.”

”So that's what I smelled.”

”And you just thought I was drunk again, right?”

She fished out another piece of onion from the salad. ”Isn't that the way you charterboat captains live? You make enough money to get good and drunk, and then you don't go back to work until the booze runs out. That's what everyone says, anyway.”

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