Philip Kerr - Field Grey

By the time we got to Santiago the next day the dark orchid of her head had been resting on my shoulder almost a hundred miles. We were behaving like any young courting couple when one of them happens to be more than twice as old as the other, who also happens to be a murderer. Perhaps that's a little unfair. Melba wasn't the only one of us who'd pulled the trigger on someone. I had some experience of murder myself. Quite a lot of experience as it happens, only I hardly wanted to tell her about that. I was trying to keep my thoughts on what lay ahead of us. Sometimes the future seems a little dark and frightening, but the past is even worse. My past most of all. But now it was the very present danger of the Santiago police I was worried about. They had a reputation for brutality that was probably well deserved and easily explained by the truth of Dona Marina's remark that all of Cuba's revolutions got started in Santiago.

It was impossible to imagine much else that got started there. A start implied some activity, movement, or even work, and there wasn't much sign of any of these tiring nouns on the sleepy streets of Santiago. Ladders stood around idle and alone, wheelbarrows sat unattended, horses kicked their heels, boats bobbed in the harbour and fishing nets lay drying in the sun. About the only people who appeared to be working were the cops, if you could call it work. Parked up in the shade of the city's pastel-coloured buildings, they sat smoking cigarettes and waiting for things to cool down and warm up, depending on how you looked at it. Probably it was too hot and sunny for trouble. The sky was too blue and the cars were too shiny; the sea was too much like glass and the banana leaves too glossy; the statues were too white and the shadows too short. Even the coconuts were wearing sunglasses.

After a couple of wrong turns I spotted the coaling station of Cincoreales, which was a landmark for finding my way around the shanty town of boatyards, booms, quays, pontoons, dry docks and slipways that serviced the flotilla of boats in Santiago Bay. I pointed the car down a steep, cobbled hill and along a narrow street. Heavy brackets for trams that were no longer running hung over our heads like the rigging of a schooner that had long ago sailed without it. I steered onto the sidewalk in front of an open set of double doors and peered down into a boatyard.

A bearded, weather-beaten man wearing shorts and sandals was manoeuvring a boat that hung from an ancient-looking crane. I didn't mind when the boat clunked against the harbour wall and then hit the water like a bar of soap. But then, it wasn't my boat.

We got out of the Chevy. I fetched Melba's suitcase from the trunk and carried it into the yard, stepping carefully around or over tins of paint, buckets, lengths of rope and hose line, pieces of wood, old tyres, and oil cans. The office in a little wooden hut at the back was no less of a shambles than the yard. Mendy wasn't about to win the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval any time soon, but he knew boats, and since I knew them hardly at all this was just as well.

Once, a long time ago, Mendy had been white. But a lifetime on and by the sea had turned the part of his face that wasn't covered by a salt-and-pepper beard to the colour and texture of an old baseball mitt. He belonged in a hammock on some pirate ship bound for Hispaniola, with a hornpipe in one hand and a bottle of rum in the other. He finished what he was doing and didn't seem to notice me until the crane was out of the way and even then all he said was 'Senor Hausner.'

I nodded back at him. 'Mendy.'

He fetched a half-smoked cigar from the breast pocket of his grubby shirt and plugged it into a space between beard and moustache and spent the next few minutes while we talked patting himself down for a light.

'Mendy, this is Senorita Otero. She's coming on the boat with me. I told her it was just a crummy fishing boat, only she and her suitcase appear to be under the illusion that we're going sailing on the Queen Mary.'

Mendy's eyes flicked between Melba and me as if he had been watching a game of table tennis. Then he smiled at her and said, 'But the Senorita is absolutely right, Senor Hausner. The first rule of going to sea is to be prepared for absolutely anything.'

'Thank you,' said Melba. 'That's what I said.'

Mendy looked at me and shook his head. 'Clearly you know nothing about women, Senor,' he said.

'About as much as I know about boats,' I said.

Mendy chuckled. 'For your sake, I hope it's a little more than that.'

He led the way out of the boatyard and down to the L-shaped pontoon where a wooden launch was moored. We stepped aboard and sat down. Mendy tugged a motor into life and then steered us out into the bay. Five minutes later we were tying up alongside a thirty-five-foot wooden sports-fishing boat.

La Guajaba was narrow, with a broad stern, a bridge and three compartments. There were two Chrysler engines, each producing about ninety horsepower, giving the boat a top speed of about nine knots. And that was more or less everything I knew about her other than where I kept the brandy and the glasses. I'd won the boat in a game of backgammon from an American who owned the Bimini Bar on Obispo Street. With a full tank of fuel La Guajaba had a range of about five hundred miles, and it was less than half that to Port-au-Prince. I'd used the boat about three times in as many years and what I didn't know about boats would have filled several nautical almanacs, possibly all of them. But I knew how to use a compass and I figured all I needed to do was point the bow east and then, according to the Thor Heyerdahl principle of navigation, keep going until we hit something. I couldn't see how what we hit wouldn't be the island of Hispaniola; after all, there were thirty thousand square miles of it to aim at.

I handed Mendy a fistful of cash and my car keys and then climbed aboard. I'd thought about mentioning Omara and how it might have been better for me if he had kept his mouth shut, only there didn't seem to be much point. It would have risked incurring some of the brutal candour for which Cubans are justly famous; doubtless he would have told me that I was just another gringo with too much money and unworthy of the boat I owned, which would have been true: if you make yourself like sugar, the ants will eat you.

As soon as we were under way Melba went below and put on a two-piece swimsuit with a leopard-skin print that would have made a mackerel whistle. That's the nice thing about boats and warm weather. They bring out the best in people. Beneath the battlements of Morro Castle, which stands on the summit of a 200-foot-high rock promontory, the harbour entrance is almost as wide. A long flight of crumbling steps, hewn out of the rock, leads up from the water's edge to the castle and I almost made the boat try to climb them. Two hundred feet of open sea to aim at and I still managed to nearly put us on the rocks. So long as I was looking at Melba it wasn't looking good for our chances of hitting Haiti.

'I wish you'd put some clothes on,' I said.

'Don't you like my bikini?'

'I like it fine. But there's a good reason Columbus didn't take women with him on the Santa Maria. When they're wearing bikinis they affect the ship's steering. With you around they'd probably have discovered Tasmania.'

She lit a cigarette and ignored me and I did my best to ignore her back. I checked the tachometer, the oil level, the ammeter and the motor temperature. Then I glanced out of the wheelhouse window. Smith Key, a small island once held by the British, lay ahead of us. It was home to many of Santiago's fishing folk and pilots, and its red-tiled houses and small ruined chapel made it look very picturesque. But it wasn't much next to the scene inside Melba's bikini pants.

The sea was calm until we reached the mouth of the harbour where the water started to swell a bit. I pushed the throttle forward and held the boat on a steady east-south-east course until Santiago was no longer visible. Behind us the boat's wake unzipped a great white scar in the ocean that was hundreds of feet long. Melba sat in the fisherman's chair and squealed with excitement as our speed increased.