Robert Jones - Blood Tide

Torres smiled and went out to fetch the commodore. On his way to the basin, he told the guards to take the man Kasim off the wall and get him up to Gólgota. Things were begining to move in the right direction. They always did with Billy Torres at the helm.

Culdee lay chin-deep in the hotsi bath, steeping like a tea ball. The water was salt—Perniciosa’s freshwater was precious, collected almost entirely by catchment and cistern from the brief, passing rainstorms that lashed the island nearly every day—but it felt damned good. Culdee ached all over from the hike. Two Japanese sat soaking at the far end of the bath, phlegmatic little men with graying hair and the hard gray-blue hands of laborers or mechanics. There were Japs all over the island, Culdee was learning. They’d ohayoed him and bowed politely when he came in, but now they were pretending he wasn’t there. That was fine with Culdee. He had things to think about.

Miranda had returned with Kasim at dusk, an hour behind Culdee and Sôbô. She was nearly hysterical. Freddie had been killed or at best captured. Kasim had chopped a man’s head off. A boat had blown up, bits of guys flying through the air, great literal balls of fire, gunplay. Culdee’s relief at Miranda’s safe return had been nearly squelched by the news about Freddie.

“It’s all a mistake,” she kept saying when he met her on the lee-shore beach. “We should never have come. Too many killings, too much danger, too much death for everyone, we’ve got to clear out of here.”

He’d tried to calm her and reassure her—maybe Freddie’s all right, you didn’t actually see them shoot him, or even see them capture him. Yeah, we’ll think about getting out of this place. But Culdee knew damned well they couldn’t. Sôbô had them now, for whatever end he had in mind, and he wasn’t going to just let them go.

Sôbô, of course, was delighted with the capture of the fast boat. His black go-stone eyes shone like those of a kid with a new toy, or, more aptly, an admiral with a new addition to his task force. He promised Miranda that everything possible was being done—he’d already given orders to rescue Effredio. He had agents in Millikan’s camp. And more such bullshit. If he had agents with Millikan, how come he didn’t know about the book bomb until that slippery Arab on Moro Armado told him? But Culdee didn’t mention that, certainly not to Miranda.

The funny thing was, Culdee didn’t want to clear out. Not knowing, as he did now, that Turner was there, and that Turner was Millikan. And that Sôbô planned to kill Millikan-Turner as dead as those SEALS who’d died at Brigadune. Culdee wanted to be in on that, even if it killed him in the process. But he also wanted Miranda out of it, whether she got her boat back or not. Shit. . . . Salt water stung his eyes, and it wasn’t from the hotsi bath. He ladled more of it over his head, to keep the Japs at the far end from noticing. She was his daughter, by God . . .

He found himself remembering something that had happened long ago, when Miranda was just a toddler. He’d been home-ported in Long Beach at the time, and one weekend he borrowed a car from a shipmate and drove Viv and the kid up to Marineland of the Pacific, in Palos Verdes. A family outing. Miranda would surely adore the porpoises exploding from the water in formation, the big black pilot whales suddenly erupting from the surface to take fish from a man’s hand. Guys who’d been there said kids loved it. While they were waiting in line for their tickets, Miranda staggered around at their feet—she was still unsteady on her pins, just learning to walk and proud of it—and a man trying to cut into the head of the line bumped into her, knocking her flat on her diapered duff. Culdee had never felt any particular possessiveness about his daughter up to that point, just a gentle, pleasant fondness for her, a mild sort of love. But when the line-jumper knocked her down, rage ignited in him like a gasoline fire. Before he knew it, he’d grabbed the man by the shoulder, spun him, and coldcocked him—knocked him sprawling on the dirty asphalt. He was shaking with rage when the security guards intervened. Viv straightened it all out, as did the other bystanders, and no harm was done, except to the other guy’s face and dignity.

It was a revelation. Culdee’d heard other men, tough old salts, officers and white hats alike, talk on the long night watches about how fiercely they loved their kids. He’d thought it was bunk. Then, he knew differently . . .

As he toweled himself dry on the steaming tiles, three more Japs came in. These were younger, though. Tougher-looking, or at least more swaggering than the older mechanic-Japs. When they stripped off their robes, he saw they were tattooed from their necks to their ankles, from wrist to wrist. Japs had to be crazy.

Sôbô sure was.

The two priests stood in the chancel, surveying the cathedral. Its santos, with the exception of San Lázaro, of course, were suitably draped in Lenten purple, as they had been all Holy Week. The patron saint’s effigy was wrapped in wax-steeped cerecloths, like those that bind a corpse. Under the flicker of candlelight he glowed faintly yellow in the gloom of the nave. It is the color of pus, thought Padre Cotinho, as from a suppurating wound. Not Christ’s wounds, surely, but those of a failing church.

An unearthly din filled the cavern of stone, the keening and wailing of old women—the manangs —as they chanted the pasyon , each in her own cadence. To Padre Cotinho’s eye they resembled molting vultures gathered at the final agonies of a dying beast—a great, noble stag perhaps, foully wounded by poachers, gut-shot and waiting for them to follow up with their axes and spears. This pabasa of the old women, this endlessly repetitive recitation of the Passion of Christ, was their way of hurrying the glorious moment of His death and their salvation. Ah, what a fine irony, Cotinho thought. They have no idea how close at hand their true salvation stands . . .

“It’s beautiful,” Padre Fagundes sighed. “Each year it moves me more deeply, each Easter I love God the more. I only wish I were younger and could make some fine sacrifice for him.”

“You could become a flagelante ,” Padre Cotinho said. “In your kapirosa they wouldn’t recognize you, so your sacrifice would be all the more noble, all the less self-serving.” The kapirosa was a hood the flagelantes wore, under a crown of thorns, to disguise themselves from their neighbors as they scourged their way up Gólgota behind the crosses with their flailing thongs of glass-spiked leather. On Lázaro they scourged the cross-bearers as well as themselves.

“Really, Barto,” Padre Fagundes said, “you do have the most macabre imagination—”

“Excuse me, Diogo,” Padre Cotinho interrupted. “I have a late confession to hear.” He had seen Rosalinda enter the narthex. She looked distraught, on the verge of panic. Padre Cotinho hurried to the confessional.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she rattled as he entered and knelt behind the screen. “They have your friend, Effredio Pascal.”

“Are you certain?”

“He fits your description, Padre, though he calls himself by a Moro name.” She described the man. It sounded like Effredio, all right.

“Has he talked?”

“Not yet. Only that the man Curt Hughes is his leader.” She paused, still breathing heavily from her run up the hillside. “I rather liked that part, about Hughes. Is that sinful of me, Padre.”

Cotinho suppressed a laugh.

“I shall absolve you in any case, my daughter,” he said. “But Effredio—he is still alive?”

“Yes. They plan to crucify him tomorrow with the others. Torres hopes the fear of that or, anyway, the bite of the nails, will draw more from him. I’m not sure they believe the business about Hughes.”