Beatriz Williams - The Wicked Redhead

I take his arm. “Are you sure about this? You know what you’re doing?”

He gives me this amazed look. “Why, what’s wrong?”

“I just got a feeling, that’s all. Chill down my spine.”

Anson examines my eyelashes, slings his arm about my neck, and pulls me in for the kind of long, soft kiss that draws forth a chorus of whooping from above. I am surely too shocked to resist. When he’s done, he touches his forehead to mine and whispers, “You’re safe. Trust me.”

I want to scream back that it’s not my safety giving me the chills, it’s his, but somebody’s calling down words of some kind—afraid I’m still too discombobulated by the kissing to hear them properly—and then a rope ladder falls at our feet, and the time for turning back has long past. Tick tock. Just swallow back your terror and climb that rope, I guess, doing your best to hold on with your one good hand.

TURNS OUT they know each other, Anson and this captain of his, I haven’t yet caught his name. He thinks it’s a great joke that Special Agent Marshall is no longer agent of anything to speak of. Pours him a bumper of Scotch whiskey to celebrate, and to my amazement Anson slings it right back. Yes, he does! Slings it right back, sets the glass on the table, and delivers me a slow wink that sets my insides to bubbling.

“For you, madam?” asks the captain.

“I’ll have what he’s having.”

I sip my whiskey with considerably more reserve than Anson does. I figure one of us should remain sober. The captain—turns out his name is Logan or something—pours out another for Anson and another for himself, and Anson asks Logan how’s business since he’s been away.

“Business is booming, Marshall. Business is booming. I can’t keep my vintage champagne in stock. Fellows come all the way from Palm Beach for champagne.”

“Can’t they get champagne in Miami?”

Logan makes a noise of disgust. “These boys out of Nassau, they got plenty of British liquor but they don’t get no French ships no more. So I have a fellow from up north who supplies me.”

“From where? Saint Pierre?”

“That’s the place. Ever been there?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure.”

Logan laughs and tops everybody off from a bottle of what claims to be a fifteen-year-old single malt from Ayrshire, though I have my doubts. In case you’re wondering, we’re sitting in the captain’s own cabin, which isn’t so grand as it sounds. Cramped, damp, dark, smells of fish and piss and wood soaked in brine, all of it baked together like some kind of stew in the oven of a Florida afternoon. There’s a bunk built into the wall, a green sofa—on which I’m presently sitting next to Anson—and an armchair for Logan the color of mustard, everything built of sticks and horsehair cushions and scraps of old upholstery. You’d think they were smuggling milk instead of a commodity so lucrative as rum.

“Neither have I,” Logan says, setting down the bottle, “but I heard it ain’t much. Just some wet rock off the coast of Newfoundland with a port that don’t ice over in winter.”

“I guess that’s useful, in your line of work,” I say.

“Oh, it’s useful, all right. But the real kicker is it’s French.”

“French? But doesn’t Newfoundland belong to Canada?”

“Thrown around between the two of them for centuries. England and France, I mean. The point is, Saint Pierre ended up French, which makes it a gift from God direct to champagne vineyards and Scotch distilleries. And the Canadians, too, by God. Especially the Canadians.”

Possibly my face betrays some confusion. I take in a little more Scotch whiskey and watch Logan as he pulls out a cigarette and lights it with a match kept in this special jar with a lid. I guess sailors worry about such things. Anyway, he watches me watching him and offers me a cigarette, which I accept because a low-down wicked dame like me ought to take a cigarette when it’s stuck in her direction, oughtn’t she? The better to corrupt her menfolk with. And I pick up a little courage with the familiar smell of burning tobacco, so I say, “Why does that make any difference? Being French?”

“Why, because of taxes, Miss Kelly.”

Anson lays his arm across my shoulders and speaks in this low, gravelly voice. “In the first place, Saint Pierre’s import duties amount to maybe a tenth of what they charge in Nassau, which is pure profit for suppliers.”

“And the French don’t even pay that,” says Logan, “so they don’t send no more bottles by way of Nassau. Why should they? You could about bathe in champagne, on the island of Saint Pierre.”

Anson smiles. “And second, the Canadian distillers don’t have to pay duty on export bottles, so the government refunds the tax once the company provides proof it’s been imported into another country. That’s where the good men of Saint Pierre oblige. Unload the liquor, hand the captain a stack of stamped import certificates. Distiller gets his tax bond back from the Canadian government and sells the cargo to whatever racket’s waiting there in the harbor for some merchandise.”

“Or else ships it direct to the Row,” Logan says.

“Now every man, woman, child, and dog in Saint Pierre keeps busy from dawn to dusk in the liquor trade.”

“I bet they never had it so good.” I wave my cigarette to indicate the ship around us. “The liquor trade beats the fishing trade, any day. In price and in general atmosphere, if you know what I mean.”

Logan leans forward. “Listen to this, Miss Kelly. Listen good. I spent seventeen years fishing the coast around here, and I never cleared more than a thousand dollars in a single year. Just enough to get by. Keep my wife and my three kids. Now? I clear more than that in a month. Sometimes a week. I make so much dough, I got a wife and a girl down in Port Saint Lucie.” He roars his joy and slaps Anson’s knee. “Now that’s what I call prosperity!”

“I guess your wife’s over the moon,” I say.

“Aw, she don’t care. Why, she’s sitting in her nice new house right now, wearing a nice new dress.” He inspects the uninspired neck of my own serge frock. “You could use some more dough yourself, Marshall, now that you’re out of the enforcement business. You need to set this doll of yours up like she deserves.”

I suck on my cigarette and say I couldn’t agree more.

“You see, Marshall? A beauty like this, she likes a fellow with a little bread in his pocket. If she don’t get it from you, she’ll be looking elsewhere fast.”

Anson shrugs his big shoulders. Fingers draw a circle or two on my upper arm, through the thick material of the dress. “I might have a plan or two up my sleeve. You never know.”

“Well, you better not wait too long, brother. You better not. I hear there’s some talk of a new treaty. Move the line out another ten miles or more.”

“Is that so?”

“You mean the boundary for United States waters?” I ask.

“That’s what I mean.” Logan points out the nearby porthole. “You can just about see the shore from here, when the haze don’t set in too bad. From ten or twenty miles out, you might as well be in the middle of the ocean, for all you can catch glimpse of the United States. And some fellow carrying a few bottles from ship to shore, why, he’s got a lot of water to cover. Lot of salt water for the Coast Guard to catch him in.”

From the gathering tension in the muscles of Anson’s arm along my shoulders, I figure this piece of information interests him. But his fingers continue that delicious circling at exactly the same pace. His voice continues in the same gravelly drawl. He reaches out the other long arm and gathers up his glass of whiskey, and I guess I’m the only one who feels him wince. Those poor abused ribs of his. “Lot of water,” he agrees.