Ник Картер: The Liquidator

“A test?”

“Why not? Did you think I was going to give you a crash course without a final exam?”

I hadn’t thought about that, but I had to agree it seemed like a good idea. On the other hand, I still didn’t know why. So I asked.

“Oh, it’s too late to discuss all that this evening, Mr. McKee. Come back inside a moment.”

We returned to the livingroom, where he took down a book from a shelf. I noticed that there were a number of identical volumes side by side; at least the dust jackets were all the same.

“At the risk of seeming immodest, I’d suggest that you take this with you for bedtime reading,” Nathaniel said. “Even though I wrote it myself, it’s not bad.”

The title was Lines & Spars, and in my hand it felt as heavy as the Manhattan telephone directory.

“Just to get you in the mood,” Nathaniel was saying. “Immerse yourself in the trivial details of fitting out and handling a sailing craft, as long as you can stay awake. But be careful, Mr. McKee.”

There was a different note in his voice that brought me up tense. “Careful?”

He smiled. “Don’t let the book fall on your face as you’re dozing off. It’s heavy enough to break your nose.”

The next few days were a madhouse of physical and mental exhaustion. We sailed Nathaniel’s thirty-nine-foot ketch up and down the Sakonnet River, which isn’t a river at all but an estuary where the tides boil in and out like Colorado River rapids. Well... maybe not quite that violently, but it’s quite an experience to be running with a pretty fair wind astern, all sails flying, and find yourself going backward with the tide. At one point even Nathaniel admitted defeat and turned on the auxiliary motor to help us make it to the dock. That made me feel better. There’s a kind of mystique surrounding deep-water sailors; you get the impression they’d rather drift forever than resort to their engines, but Nathaniel made no apologies.

“If you have to get somewhere,” he said, “get there the best way you can. We’re not racing, and we’re not showing off.”

To test my navigation and all-around boat-handling, we took a cruise that lasted a couple of days. First to Cuttyhunk, which isn’t all that far, but Nathaniel thoughtfully chose a day when the fog was so thick you could almost roll it into little balls and store it. He sat in the cockpit, not too close to me, and read a book while I struggled with the wind and tides and the fact that I could barely see as far as the bow of the ketch. I was pretty proud of myself when we made the buoy marking the entrance to the harbor, but my wily instructor had one more little surprise in store for me; he hadn’t mentioned that a good-sized set of waves breaks right through the harbor entrance, and when we arrived they were big enough to make a surfer’s mouth water.

So I did the smart thing, dropping the sails, no help from Nathaniel, and switched on the auxiliary. He didn’t say a word, but I got the impression he would have done the same thing.

From there we took off for Martha’s Vineyard, spent the night on board in the Edgartown harbor, and left early the next morning for Block Island, a stretch of blue-water sailing with no landmarks in sight. I learned some things about drift and compensation I couldn’t have taught myself in a dozen years, and when the high, dull red cliffs of the island came into view, I was more relieved than smug.

We rounded the island and went into Great Salt Pond, the natural harbor on the west side. It was still daylight, late afternoon, and Nathaniel suggested we go ashore.

“I figured we could make it back to Newport by tonight,” I said.

“No hurry. Have you ever been here before?”

“Never.”

“It’s an interesting place. Let’s go rent a couple of bicycles and take the tour.”

“Bicycles?”

“Of course! It’s the only way to travel when you’re not on the water.”

So we went ashore, tying up at a high dock that was built primarily to accommodate the summertime ferries that run between the island and the mainland. The little cluster of shops and food stands seemed to be closed, but Nathaniel knocked on the door of a weathered, sagging building. A woman opened up; she had a scarlet face, which meant she was either a lifelong lush or had some sort of terrible disease. Anyway, she beamed when she saw Nathaniel, gave him a hug and then escorted us to the rear of the building, where a shed housed a couple of hundred bikes stacked all over each other like jackstraws.

“Take anything you like, Mr. Frederick. Long as they run, huh?”

We dragged a couple of bikes out of the pile, checked them out.

“These will do nicely, Mrs. Gormsen,” Nathaniel said. “We’ll be back in a couple of hours, probably.”

“You stayin’ overnight or sailin’ out?”

“We haven’t decided. Do you want to feed us?”

The woman chuckled heartily. “Oh Lord no, Mr. Frederick. This time o’ the year we mostly live on frozen hot dogs we didn’t sell last summer. You’re welcome to it, but I don’t think you’d want it.”

“I won’t debate that point,” Nathaniel said, swinging a leg over the seat of his bike.

We traveled the main road, a potholed strip of blacktop that ran past vacant, shuttered old hotels and summer boarding houses, any of which might have had their quota of ancestral ghosts lurking behind the blind windows. Block Island is a high piece of land; we traveled past areas that looked like the moors of England, dotted with slate gray ponds. But we weren’t entirely isolated; when we were halfway down the island we encountered a young couple on a tandem bike, pedaling steadily and obviously having a marvelous time. We gave them room, and they waved and laughed, then disappeared into the deepening twilight.

“I didn’t think anybody visited here off season,” I said to Nathaniel.

“Oh, there are always a few oddballs. I rather like to see them around.”

We pedaled on until we reached the far end of the island, a high bluff overlooking the Atlantic. From where we stood, it was an impressive view, maybe a hundred feet down with the waves crashing relentlessly against the rocky shore below. Far off to our left was a lighthouse, its beam just beginning to circle through the gathering night. Nathaniel and I stood for a few minutes, taking in the cool, clean air blowing from somewhere like the Azores. Then we turned back to our bikes.

With the noise of the wind and the waves, we hadn’t heard the car approach; now it stood, headlights out, battered grill nosed against our bicycles. A man stood by the open door on the driver’s side, and behind the windshield I could make out a blur of a face, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I was a lot more interested in the shotgun the man was pointing in our direction.

“Mr. Frederick?” he asked, his voice weak against the wind.

“Oh my,” Nathaniel said mildly.

“You remember me?”

“I’m afraid so.” Nathaniel didn’t move; he kept his hands at his sides and seemed almost relaxed. “It’s been so long, though...”

“A lot longer for me.” He moved the shotgun slightly in a way I didn’t like. “They didn’t believe me, you know. They thought I was working for your people instead of them, and it was more’n a year before they let me go.”

“You must have had a difficult time.”

“It was living hell! A whole goddam year on that factory ship, and it weren’t no pleasure cruise!”

“No, I don’t imagine so, Graves.” Nathaniel took a half-step toward the man and pointed at the shotgun. “Are you intending to use that?”

“I didn’t come out here for the fresh air.”

I could see now that he was a man in his late thirties, with big-knuckled hands and a seamed face roughened by wind and water. Under his nondescript windbreaker his impressive shoulder muscles bulged.