I did not know the relationship was in any difficulty until after our showers, after we were dressed and I was ready to drive back to Lauderdale and she was ready to go back to work. It was a banquet night for some fraternal order and she wanted to watch it very closely, as it was their first arrangement at the Eden Beach.
I said, “When can I come back? When can you drive over? Seems to me I’ve asked before.”
“It’s pretty damn convenient for you, Travis.”
“I’m not sure how you mean that.”
“I’m not really sure either. It just seems to me you’re kind of a lucky chauvinist.”
“Now hold on! We are pretty damn convenient for each other, if you want to put it that way. I wouldn’t exactly call you unfulfilled, lady.”
“Bragging about your work?”
“Jesus, Annie!”
“I’m sorry. I’m trying to hurt you, I guess, but I don’t know why.”
“I thought we got on together pretty well.”
“We do, we do. Of course we do. Maybe it’s some kind of chronic guilt. I used to have the guilts when I worked for Ellis and lived with him. Everybody is supposed to have the right to live as they please these days. Oh, hell, I know what it is, but I hate having to try to explain it to you.”
“Please do.”
“We’ve talked a lot, Travis. That’s been such a big part of us, all the good talk. And you’ve told me about the loves you’ve had and the way you lost them. But… I sense a kind of reserve about you. You seem to be totally open with me, but some part of you is holding back. Some part of you doesn’t really believe that you are not going to lose me also. So you cut down on the amount of loss by not getting as deeply involved as… as we could be involved. Do you understand?”
“I’m trying to. I’m not holding back. I don’t think I am. I tell you I love you. Maybe oftener I should tell you?”
“It isn’t words or deeds, dear. We’re never part of each other. We are each of us on the outside of the other person.”
“And this is no time for a bawdy comment.”
“No, it is not!”
“Are you talking about marriage, for instance?”
“No, dammit! But I would like it if we lived closer together and saw each other oftener.”
“Hell, I wish you’d pick up your life savings, separation pay and all that, and move aboard the Flush.”
“You know better than that. I really really love it here. I’m doing one hell of a job. It shows in the figures I send in, and in the appreciation they’re giving me. I’m just about the best manager in the chain. I like working with people, finding the way to approach each one to make him or her do a better job, to motivate them. Because of me this resort hotel is clean and profitable and fun.”
“Okay, already. Why can’t you just settle for what we have? I think it’s a little better than what most people settle for.”
She sighed and leaned against me, then reached up to kiss the side of my chin. “Okay McGee. I’ll try, but something about us hasn’t quite meshed yet. Maybe it never will. Who can say? Run along. Drive carefully. Phone often.”
Two
THE FIFTH of July began with heavy rain from a tropical depression in the Atlantic east of Miami, a warm rain accompanied by random gusts of wind.
By ten in the morning, the rain had diminished to a misty drizzle and Meyer’s stubby little cruiser, The John Maynard Keynes, had left the gas dock at Pier 66, Fort Lauderdale, proceeded under the bridge, past the cruise ships tied up at Port Everglades, out the main channel and past the sea buoy, and had headed on an east-southeast course, the blunt bow lifting with the chop, mashing out small sheets of spray each time it fell back.
An old man in a condominium apartment facing the sea was looking out his sixth-floor window at the time of the explosion and was able to fix the time of it at precisely 10:41 Eastern Daylight Time.
A cabin cruiser was inbound from Nassau, heading for the channel and wallowing a little in the following sea. It was the Brandy-Gal out of Venice, Florida, owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Simmons Davis. Mrs. Davis was in one of the two fishing chairs, the one on the starboard side, and her husband was at the wheel up on the fly bridge. They both testified that when the two cruisers passed each other, a slender dark-haired woman in an orange string bikini had waved and Mrs. Davis had waved back. They had both seen a bulky man at the wheel and a blond man in the cockpit, coiling and stowing a line.
Mrs. Davis said she remembered being amused at the unusual name on the cruiser, The John Maynard Keynes; she knew that any mention of Keynesian economic theory tended to make her husband very cross. And she remembered thinking that the chunky little cruiser did not take the chop,very well, and that if it were hers she would head back to the Inland Waterway. Also, she thought it seemed to ride too low in the water.
She estimated that it was two hundred and fifty to three hundred feet from the Brandy-Gal when it blew up. It was there, and then suddenly the only visible thing was a white bright glare, larger than the cruiser, with small objects arching up out of it. There was a sound she described as being both sharp and heavy, a kind of cracking whump that made her ears ring, and she felt heat on her face. Simmons Davis wheeled the Brandy-Gal about and went back in a hopeless search for survivors. He knew he was in eighty to a hundred feet of water. He rigged a small spare anchor to an orange float with ample braided nylon line and flipped it overboard. Then he and his wife, using scoop nets, picked up the few floating bits of debris. Half a scorched life ring. A soiled white cap with a blue bill, part of it still smoldering. The lid from an ice chest.
He called the Coast Guard on his radio and reported the incident and then headed in, with his wife, Brandy, vomiting over the side.
An anonymous call was made to the Fort Lauderdale police a few minutes after the explosion. The call was recorded. It was a muffled male voice, heavy and deep, with an accent which could have been Spanish or Portuguese.
“The Liberation Army of the Chilean peoples bass executed the pig dog Doctor Meyer. Death to all who geev help to the fascist military dictatorship.”
I knew nothing about it until I got back to Bahia Mar a little after six that Monday evening. I was walking from the parking area over to Slip F-18 where my houseboat, the Busted Flush, is tied up, when Captain Johnny Dow came trotting up to fall in step with me and say, “Hey, they got Meyer.”
I stopped and stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“Hell, they blew him up.”
“In Toronto?”
“What do you mean, Toronto? In that stupidlooking little cruiser of his. Out past the sea buoy, this morning. They blew him up and took the credit.”
“Who is they?”
“One of those bunches of terrorists. You know. The red army of liberation, truth, and justice. One of those.”
Suddenly I felt hollow and sick. “Johnny, don’t you know who was aboard the Keynes?”
“How should I know? I just got back from Key West.”
I explained it to him patiently. “Meyer is doing a series of lectures at a seminar in international banking at Queen’s College in Toronto. His niece and her husband were on vacation. They were living aboard for the two weeks he’d be gone. And Meyer had arranged with Hack Jenkins to take them out fishing or cruising if they wanted to go, because neither of them could operate a boat. Hack was free because his boat is having the engines replaced.”
Johnny Dow looked stricken. “I knew about the work he was having done on the HooBoy. Jesus! What they say, it was one hell of a big explosion. Anybody aboard got blown to little tiny bits. Jesus! I better go see Hack’s wife. This is terrible, Trav.”