Bernard Cornwell - Crackdown

“Why don’t you just go on through, Nick,” Donna invited me, “and I’ll bring you and Matt your drinkies.”

I went on through, sliding the heavy plate glass aside to walk on to the humid porch where a morose looking McIllvanney slouched in a cane chair and stared through the insect screens at the darkening sea. “It’s you,” he greeted me without delight and as though he had been expecting someone else.

“You wanted to see me,” I pointed out. Spending time with McIllvanney was not my idea of relaxation, and I didn’t much take to his lack of enthusiasm.

“Sit down,” he said grudgingly, “your Holiness.” Calling me ‘your Holiness’ was McIllvanney’s joke. It was not because I was particularly pious, but rather because my namesake, Nicholas Breakspear, had been the only Englishman who had ever become Pope. He had taken the name Adrian IV and had ruled the church in the twelfth century, a fact that very few people other than myself knew, but a fact I had been foolish enough to tell McIllvanney whose hatred of ‘taigs’, Catholics, ensured he would never forget my papal connection. In truth there was no connection, for my original family name was Sillitoe, but, long before I was born, my father had adopted Breakspear as his stage name and I had really known no other.

“Did that focker Bellybutton bring Starkisser back?” McIllvanney suddenly demanded of me in his sour Belfast accent.

“In one piece, even.”

“He’s getting too big for his focking black boots, that feller is.” The complaint was a ritual, not to be taken seriously, a mere habitual statement made solely to impress on me how tough McIllvanney was. If he had to choose between me and Bellybutton, or between Bellybutton and his own mother, he would have chosen Bellybutton any day. They were two of a kind.

McIllvanney was a tall, harshly scarred and surprisingly handsome man, with a hard knowing face and a deceptively thin body. It was deceptive for he was brutally strong. He could also be excellent company, with a fund of stories that he told with an exquisite sense of timing, though such good moments were rare for he preferred to brood savagely over life’s injustices; the chief of which was the inexplicable existence of Roman Catholics.

“Are you a Catholic?” he asked Donna as she brought out the drinks. I suspected the question was meant for my amusement rather than for his own enlightenment.

“Gracious, no! In our family we’re all Episcopalians.” She gave him a big smile. “From Philadelphia,” she added for my benefit and with yet another winning smile. Donna was one of life’s cheerleaders; her teeth were a triumph of the orthodontic trade, her hair was a confection of gel, spray and heat, and her body was a tribute to wholesome American food and exercise. “I’ve heard so much about you,” she said to me, as though settling herself in for a long cosy chat.

“So now fock away off and forget him,” McIllvanney snapped at her.

“It’s just been so nice visiting with you, Nick!” Donna gave me a last dazzling smile, then, apparently impervious to McIllvanney’s evil-tempered scorn, clicked away on her ridiculously high heels.

I waited till Donna was safely out of earshot. “Is she your newest?” Pretty girls moved through McIllvanney’s life at an astonishing rate, though the last, who had endured a record six months, had left just a few weeks before.

He shook his head. “She’s one of the girls, so she is. She’ll cost you two thousand US a day, Nick, plus air-fare, food and a present. I had to bring her over from Miami today because the stupid cow won’t fly. Can you believe that? She’s frightened of airplanes, so she is! So I had to fetch her in Junkanoo .”

Junkanoo was one of McIllvanney’s boats, doubtless purchased on the profits of his call-girl service. He liked to boast that the service was very elegant, and certainly not crude like the part-time pimp service that Bellybutton enforced with his teeth. Instead McIllvanney was the Bahamian agent for a Miami-based business that claimed to provide the world’s most beautiful girls to anyone with the money to pay for them. McIllvanney arranged the girls’ visits to clients in the Bahamas and guaranteed their safety while they were in the islands. That made McIllvanney a gold-plated pimp, though he preferred to describe himself as a ‘leisure-agent’; however, he usually had the grace to smile when he used that label. He showed a similar amusement now. “I hear that black bugger Billingsley scared the living daylights out of you today?”

McIllvanney enjoyed making the accusation. He did not like me. I was the son of a rich and famous man and, to McIllvanney, that accident of birth clinked with the corrupt sound of silver spoons. It did not matter that I had rejected my father’s ways, that I had become a marine and was as poor as a church mouse while McIllvanney had become a rich man; the stench of privilege still clung to me and McIllvanney loved to discomfort me because of it. “How do you know what Billingsley did to me?” I asked him.

“How the fock do you think I know? He told me!”

I should have realised that in an island as small as Grand Bahamas two men like McIllvanney and Billingsley would know each other. McIllvanney must have been Billingsley’s source for the policeman’s information about my boat and my plans to repair her. Doubtless, before coming to the yard, Billingsley had talked with McIllvanney, and I guessed that he had also entertained the Ulsterman afterwards with an account of my pusillanimity. I suddenly felt an immense relief that I only had one more charter to complete for Cutwater, and that I would then be free of these men.

“So what did Billingsley tell you?” McIllvanney seemed amused by my silence. “That the Belgian owners got pissed off with sailing and trotted off home?”

“Yes.”

“Billingsley’s a lying black bastard, so he is. Those Belgians must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they probably saw something they shouldn’t have seen, so someone shut them up for good. They’ll not have been the first tourists to be fed to the sharks and they won’t be the last.”

“You’re telling me they were murdered?” I was feeling guilty at giving in so easily to Billingsley’s blackmail.

“I don’t know what happened to them, do I?” McIllvanney said tiredly. “And if I did know, would I be telling you? I’m just telling you what I think happened, so I am. And I don’t think they pissed off home because they were suddenly hungry for Belgian waffles. I think they were sent for their tea by Billingsley and his friends, and I’ll tell you something more, no one will ever know what happened to them, so forget it! If you know what’s good for you, Thessy and Ellen, none of you even saw the Belgian boat this morning!” He glared at me, almost daring me to contradict his advice. I kept a cowardly silence that was broken by a strident and sudden eruption of Goombay music from one of the nearby beach hotels. The music triggered a burst of applause. “It’s a convention,” McIllvanney explained with a sneer, “off-season rates, car dealers and their wives from Europe, and the product is a five-speed piece of tin-plate junk. Man’s a prick.”

He had added the last three words with the same morose carelessness with which he had decried the car dealers’ convention, but he offered no elucidation as to what the words meant. “Who is?” I finally asked.

“Deacon Billingsley, of course. He’s as tough as old boots, but playing with drugs is still a mug’s game. If the spics don’t blow you away then the Americans will. The man’s a prick to be involved.”

“So he is involved?” I asked, and I was unable to hide my surprise even though McIllvanney was merely confirming my own suspicion that Billingsley was corrupt. Yet suspecting and knowing are two different things, and I was still naïve enough to want to believe that all policemen could be trusted. Ellen was amused by my naïvety, claiming that if she dug deep enough she would probably discover that I still believed in Santa Claus. I did not like the accusation of naïvety, preferring to believe that I was an honest man who found it hard to imagine how other people could live with a guilty conscience. Whatever, I sounded primly shocked at hearing my suspicions of Billingsley’s corruption confirmed.