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"Protected for what?" Terri Pomfret asked.
"You're going back into that cave," said the man.
Terri thought that was what he said. She could have sworn that was what he said. But she wasn't quite sure, however, because she was in a very comfortable, deep blackness.
Two
His name was Remo and the sun was setting red over Bay Rouge in St. Maarten as he guided his sloop to a slow anchor in the small bay.
The West Indies island was the size of a county back in the states, but it was a perfect location to beam and receive information from satellite traffic in space. That was what he had been told.
The island was half French and half Dutch and therefore, in that confusion, America could do just about anything without being suspected. It was the perfect island for a special project, except that it had too many people.
Seventeen too many.
Jean Baptiste Malaise and his sixteen brothers lived in grand houses between Marigot and Grand Case, two villages that were barely large enough to deserve that name, but which had more fine restaurants than almost any American city, and all of Britain, Asia, and Africa. Combined.
Fine yachts would dock at Marigot or Grand Case for their owners to enjoy the cuisine. And sometimes, if the owners were alone and returned
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to their yachts alone, sometimes they were never seen again and their boats, under a different name and different flag, would join the drug fleet of the Malaise family.
The family might never have been bothered except that the island had to be clean. And it had to be cleaned of seventeen people too many. There could be no outside force functioning on the island.
The initial plan was that Remo would purchase a powerboat, just the kind that the Malaise were known to prefer for their drug traffic-two Chrysler engines with a specific gear-to-power ratio, a certain kind of propellor, a certain kind of cabin, a special decking that they absolutely loved, and a rakish swept configuration that was produced largely by a California man in conjunction with a Florida motor assembly works.
Remo would take this boat and dock on the eastern side of the island. Then he would go to a restaurant alone, allow himself to be followed by one of the seventeen Malaise brothers, and then quietly dispose of him somewhere off the island.
He would continue to do this until the remaining brothers stopped following him, and then he would quietly remove whoever was left.
But the plan didn't work. The problem was the boat. He had bought the right boat in St. Bart's, a neighboring island, right on time a month ago.
But the boat needed what Remo understood was a "fuesal." Everybody else he brought the boat to didn't know what a fuesal was. When someone finally figured out he was mispronouncing the item, three weeks of his time had gone and no one could
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get the part for another month because it had to be flown in from Denmark.
He never did find out what a fuesal was exactly. He pointed to another boat.
"Give me that," he had said.
"That is not a powerboat, sir."
"Does it run?"
"Yes. On sail with an auxiliary motor."
"Sails I don't need. Does the motor run and does it have enough gas to get me to St. Maarten?"
"Yes. I imagine so."
"I want it," Remo said.
"You want the sloop," the man said.
"I want the thing that has enough gas to get me from here," said Remo, pointing to his feet, "to there." He pointed to the large volcanic island of St. Maarten, squatting under the Caribbean sun.
So instead of a powerboat a month earlier, a powerboat that the Malaise family would have coveted, he had a sloop and now he had only 24 hours to clean the island.
He made it to St. Martin easily in the unfamiliar boat because he did not have to turn too much.
He was a thin man and he slipped into the water of Bay Rouge without a wrinkle on a wave. No one on the beach noticed that his arms did not flail the water like most swimmers, but that that body moved by the exact and powerful thrusts of the spinal column, pushing it forward, more like a shark than a man.
The arms merely guided everything. There was hardly any wake behind the swimmer and then he went underwater so silently one could have watched
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him, and thought only, "Did I really see a man swimming out there?"
He moved up out of the water onto a rocky part of the shore with the speed of a chameleon, like man's first ascent from the sea. He was thin and without visible musculature. His clothes clung wet and sticky to his body but he allowed the heat to escape from his pores and as he walked in the evening air, the clothing became dry.
The first person he met, a little boy, knew where the Malaises lived. The boy spoke in the singsong of the West Indies.
"They are all along the beach here, good sir, but I would not go there without permission. No one goes there. They have wire fences that shock. They have the alligator in the pools around their houses. No one visits the Malaise, good sir, unless of course they invite you."
"Pretty bad people, I guess," said Remo.
"Oh, no. They buy things from everyone. They are nice," the boy said.
The electric fence was little more than a few wide strands that might keep an arthritic old cow from trying to dance out of its field. The moat with alligators was a moist marsh area with an old alligator too well fed to do anything but burp softly as Remo passed its jaws. Remo could see the house had small holes in the walls for gunbarrels. But there were also air conditioners in the windows, and nothing appeared to be locked. Obviously the Malaises no longer feared anyone or anything.
Remo knocked on the door of the house and a
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tired woman, still beating a food mixture in a bowl, answered the door.
"Is this the home of Jean Malaise?"
The woman nodded. She called out something in French and a man answered gruffly from inside the house.
"What do you want?" asked the woman.
"I've come to kill him and his brothers."
"You don't have a chance," said the woman. "They have guns and knives. Go back and get help before you try."
"No, no. That's all right," Remo said. "I can do it by myself."
"What does he want?" called the man's voice in heavily accented English.
"Nothing, dear. He is going to come back later."
"Tell him to bring some beer," yelled her husband.
"I don't need help," Remo told the woman.
"You're just one man. I have lived with Jean Baptiste for twenty years. I know him. He is my husband. Will you at least listen to a wife? You don't stand a chance against him alone, let alone the entire clan."
"Don't tell me my business," Remo said.
"You come here. You come to our island. You knock on the door and when I try to tell you you don't know my husband, you say it is your business. Well, I tell you, good. Then die."
"I'm not going to die," said Remo.
"Hah," said the wife.
"Is he going to bring back beer?" called the husband.
"No," said the wife.
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"Why not?"
"Because he is one of those Americans who think they know everything."
"I don't know everything," Remo said. "I don't know what a fuesal is."
"For a boat?"
Remo nodded.
"Jean knows," said the woman, and then, full-lung: "Jean, what is a fuesal?"
"What?"
"A fuesal?"
"Never heard of it," the man called back.
Remo went into the main room where Jean Baptiste, a large man with much girth and much hair on that girth, sat on a straight-backed chair. His hair glistened with oil. He had shaved no sooner than a week before. He belched loudly.
"I don't know what a fuesal is," he said. He was watching television; Remo saw Columbo in French. It seemed funny to have the American talk in loud and violent French.