A muggy, windless morning, but Treasure Cove’s dining room is cool, air-conditioned, furnished with Spanish Colonial-style tables and chairs, its whitewashed ceiling crossed by thick varnished beams. On the wall above the bar is a painted map of the island—Dagger Key, the legend reads (the Spanish name is inscribed in smaller letters and enclosed in parentheses beneath). The other walls are hung with flintlocks and cutlasses, replica work manufactured and given a patina of antiquity on the mainland. Sunlight tilts in through a big bay window overlooking the sea, leaving most of the room in shadow. Beside it, bumping against the glass, a pair of flies mate in mid-air, their buzzing unnaturally loud. Close to the horizon, a shrimper lies becalmed in an inch of dazzle.
Only three of the tables are occupied, one by a woman and her two small children, their piping voices shrill and demanding; another by an elderly couple peering at a guidebook, and the third by Wilton Barrios and a gray-haired man. He picks at a fruit plate and nods solemnly while Wilton talks. Fredo sits at the bar and Vinroy, the bartender, a handsome, young, energetic black man, serves him a cup of rich-smelling coffee.
“Can you tell me anything about this Klose fella that staying here?” Fredo asks.
“Klose,” Vinroy says. “Yeah, the pirate mon. One thing I know, his wife ain’t never going to be lonely. She catting around something crazy. Every time he go for a swim, she in here fooling with whoever on duty.”
“You not tempted by that, now?”
“I tempted, all right.” Vinroy rubs thumb and forefinger together. “Cash money, you know. She willing to pay, I willing to play.”
“You going to lose your job, mon.”
“Ain’t lost it yet.” Vinroy grins. “Tell the truth, I expect her husband be happy if someone take her off his hands.”
Fredo sips his coffee. “How they fixed for money?”
Vinroy takes a stack of round glass ashtrays and begins distributing them. “He throw the cash around pretty good. Their diving gear real sweet.” He aims an ashtray as might a shuffleboard player, slides it along the bar, gives it some body english, and snaps his fingers when it teeters at the end of the counter and stabilizes. “Divina, the girl who clean they suite, she say the wife got herself some fine clothes.” He picks up a rag, swipes it along the bar. “They got a nice little motor boat with a cabin below decks and a wheel house. Klose tell me it were builded from a kit, you know. So I don’t expect it worth that much. They come down along the coast from Cozumel. That’s where he buy it. They planning to run the coast down to the Bay Islands.”
Fredo removes a cigarette from a crumpled pack. “They early risers?”
“You ain’t got long to wait. Mon come in every morning about this time. The woman like to sleep in.” Vinroy checks his watch. “I got to go change. You all right on the coffee?”
“I could use some fire.”
Vinroy reaches beneath the bar, flips him a packet of matches with a skull-and-crossbones on the flap, and goes out through the kitchen. Fredo lights the cigarette. His smoke uncoils bluely and his thoughts stretch out, less thoughts than they are appreciations of the coolness, the taste of the coffee, the play of light and shadow beneath the window.
Skin a delicate mosaic,
inlay of viridian and jade,
a gekko freezes on the wall
waiting for an unwitting fly
and Klose enters the bar, a folded newspaper under his arm. He stops on seeing Fredo and comes over. “Mister Galvez!” He puts a hand lightly on Fredo’s shoulder. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”
“Thought I’d hear the finish of that tale,” says Fredo.
Klose hesitates, smiles. “Will you join me for breakfast?”
They relocate to a corner table and Vinroy, now dressed in white shorts and a navy polo shirt with Treasure Cove inscribed in white on the breast pocket, comes to take their order. Fredo asks for eight strips of bacon, well done, and a roll.
“So much meat,” Klose says chidingly. “It’s not healthy to eat meat so early in the morning.”
“I have me some fritters earlier. I figure I wrap the bacon up for lunch.”
Klose’s smile falters as he digests, perhaps, the economic nuances that attach to Fredo’s response.
“What you got to tell me about old Eduardo Galvez?” says Fredo. “The mon who marry Annie.”
“You know about this?”
“Sure I know. It family business.”
Klose appears stunned. “You are claiming to be Anne Bonny’s descendant?”
“Yesterday you trying to pin it on me, and now you say I claiming it?”
“You denied the connection. I thought…”
“I don’t like talking about Annie where other people can hear.”
“But why? All this happened three hundred years ago.”
“It still happening, mon. But I’ll get to that.” Fredo has a sip of coffee, finds it to have cooled. “You worked out some of the story; now I going to tell you the rest. Annie come to the island and she marry Eduardo Galvez some years after. But she did not come alone. That Mary Reade were with her. I know…” He holds up a hand to forestall an interruption. “They say she die in prison, but that were another woman did the dying. It were Mary that engineered the escape. She bribe someone high up with the promise of treasure. It ain’t clear who. Someone she knew that were close to the governor, though…”
Fredo breaks off as Vinroy approaches with a tray, delivering bacon and rolls, granola, chopped banana, chunks of mango and papaya, a fresh jug of coffee.
“The plan were for Mary and Annie to take their share of the treasure and go to New Orleans,” Fredo says once Vinroy is out of earshot. “But Mary…”
“The treasure was here?” asks Klose. “On Cay Cuchillo?”
He’s excited, unmindful of his food, and Fredo feels more secure about telling him the rest.
“That’s right,” he says. “Calico Jack bury it here, and Mary use the knowledge to secure their freedom. They make sail from New Provincetown to Cay Cuchillo and once they divide the treasure up, like I saying, they plan to find a boat what will carry them to New Orleans. But Mary decide she want to stay here. They have a big row about it, but in the end they build a café on the island and call it The Two Swans.”
Wilton Barrios stands abruptly, knocking over his chair, and spits curses in Spanish. The gray-haired man looks up at him placidly and has a bite of melon.
“Maricon!” Wilton clenches his fists and appears ready to strike the man, but instead turns and stalks toward the door. On seeing Fredo and Klose, he takes a hitch in his stride and his furious expression abates as he goes out into the corridor, leaving the children gawking in his wake, the elderly couple whispering together, Vinroy shaking his head behind the bar.
As far as Klose is concerned, however, none of this might have happened. “The Two Swans,” he said. “This is your cafe?”
“It been rebuilt more times than I can tally,” says Fredo. “The boards rot, the winds blow it down…you know. Over the years, people drop the ‘Two,’ and then when the British write down the name for their records, they throw in an extra n and the change stick. But I guess you could say it more-or-less the same. It occupy the same ground, at least.”
Fredo nibbles the end of a thick-cut strip of bacon. “Cay Cuchillo were a place where nobody care what two women do with one another, and that why Mary so strong for to stay here. For a while they happy, but Annie have a roving eye. She like men and other women, too. And come the day when she say she going to take her fair share of the treasure and leave. Mary beg her to stay, but once Annie have it in mind to do something, the weight of the world can be against her and she going to have her way. So Mary say, ‘Go ahead, then. But the treasure ain’t going nowhere.’ She snatch up a cutlass and menace Annie. She not angry, she stricken by the thought of losing her love. But Annie’s angry at being thwarted, and when she angry she a terror. She go at Mary with a dagger and stab her deep. Mary run out onto the beach, down toward the point from the café, and that’s where Annie catch her. Mary pleading for her life. She tell Annie that she didn’t mean nothing, she loves her. But Annie say, ‘To hell with love, and to hell with you!’ And she cut Mary down.