Standing around his broken body, doing their little dance, were Cap’n Roy’s band of Marine Base cops. They kept on with the show as Cooper watched them from his nook in the rocks, Riley and the others doing their best to distract any wandering eyes with the illusion that work was being done out here, so that the wandering eyes would fail to notice the pile of rags and rotting flesh and bone that had washed ashore.
19
One year before the USS Chameleon was sunk by the Vietnamese mine, a group of London businessmen each kicked in five thousand pounds sterling and purchased one-half of a private island in the British Virgin Islands. Another twenty-five-hundred U.S. dollars built each partner a two-room bungalow, and the partners had themselves a nifty investment property. Part vacation time-share, part tax shelter, it allowed its owners to split up the high-season calendar among themselves and rent out the rooms for the remainder of the year. On paper, the resort lost money; in reality, it provided the partners a small but undeclared cash dividend at the end of each year.
To manage the property, the investors found a suitable candidate when a graduate student named Chris Woolsey applied to the ad they’d posted at Oxford. At the end of his first summer of work, Woolsey accepted the investors’ offer and dropped out of the two-year masters program he’d beat out thousands of candidates to attend and opted, instead, to turn his first few months spent at the place called Conch Bay into an endless summer.
It didn’t take much of Woolsey’s time or energy to tend to Conch Bay’s guests. Woolsey made a daily run to Tortola on a rickety skiff, retrieving enough in the way of food and supplies to keep his charges drunk and fed; he cleaned the outhouse seat every night, turned down the cots, and threw the old set of sheets in the wash and hung them out to dry in the sun each afternoon. A cistern collected and filtered rainwater for the showers; a septic-tank service boat came to do the dirty work every three weeks or so. After his supply run in the morning, Woolsey, meanwhile, spent the remainder of each day one of three ways: on the beach, at the bar, or in the water. He read virtually every literary classic still in print.
Easily the oddest of the many odd guests ever to stay at the rustic resort was a visitor who’d arrived about three years into Woolsey’s tour of duty. The guest introduced himself with only one name, arriving one morning on a water taxi and renting one of the ramshackle bungalows by paying six months’ rent up front, in cash; he added five thousand on top of the rent to cover whatever meal-and-alcohol plan Woolsey could muster for the same stretch of time. He then, to Woolsey’s amusement, proceeded to do little more than stay in his room, sleep on the beach, and get schnockered for three months running. The guy didn’t talk once. Still, Woolsey provided him with a plastic cooler, ducking into the man’s quarters whenever he went out to the beach, Woolsey keeping the cooler loaded with tuna sandwiches and whatever fresh fruit he’d brought over on the skiff. The man always ate all the food, so Woolsey kept filling it up.
Five months in, the guest took to snorkeling out along the rim of the bay, staying out for two or three hours at a time, Woolsey once timing him at four hours and thirty-three minutes. He began jogging on the beach, the shortest beach Woolsey had ever seen a man run on, no longer than a quarter mile, but once he’d started the habit, in no time at all the guest was out running the length of the beach fifteen to twenty times each morning around dawn.
The guest paid for another six months, Woolsey wondering where he’d been keeping the cash all this time. When the man offered Woolsey a thousand-dollar tip, Woolsey waved it off and said the proprietors paid him just fine, but thanks for the thought just the same. The next day Woolsey told him about some good snorkeling he’d done over on Virgin Gorda, in a place called the Baths, Woolsey saying that maybe he would want to come along with the other guests he was taking over there on the skiff. The man went, and on the ride back, passing the bigger island’s marina, asked Woolsey if he knew anybody running a deep-sea fishing charter, maybe one with a captain who knew where the marlin ran. Woolsey told him he knew a guy who could take care of him, and a couple days later-after a morning at sea-the man came back with ten pounds of swordfish filets. Woolsey grilled up a batch of steaks for the guests, and the extras kept the cooler full of sandwiches for a week.
One afternoon the man was taking up three feet of the six-foot bar and working on the seventh glass of his new favorite drink, Puerto Rican rum and Coke with a lime wedge, Woolsey serving him the Cuba libres, when Woolsey said, “Got some bad news, Guv. Proprietors are looking to sell.”
Cooper, clearly not wishing to be disturbed, said, “That right.”
“Figure they can get top dollar for the real estate,” Woolsey said, “all these cruise ships doing so much business down here. Owners don’t come around anymore anyway-bunch of old fogeys. One of ’em even died, I think. Bloody shame, you ask me.”
Cooper asked why he thought it was such a shame, that people died all the time, and Woolsey shook his head and waved his arm out at the beach, where the bay’s two-inch wavelets were busy lapping at the white sand. “Look at this effin’ place,” he said. “Anybody with half a noggin and five pounds,” he said, “he’d put up a restaurant, throw a thatched roof over the bar, build a bigger dock-in fact, he’d get some old bugger like you to dive down, pour some concrete moorings out in that bay-and there you go.”
Cooper said, “Where?”
“What?”
“You just told me ‘there you go.’ Where?”
Woolsey looked at him and said, “I’ll tell you where you go. You go to a few travel magazines and invite ’em to visit you free of charge. Spread the word that if you’ve got a sailboat and you’re coming through the BVIs, well, stop by this little island down here, and they’ll serve you conch fritters and mahimahi steaks. If you want, you can fly in through Tortola and they’ll taxi you over free of charge, then put you up for a week for next to nothing. More than we charge now, but still a fair price. Throw up some palm trees, couple of tropical bushes, make it look like a real resort-and make a bloody fortune doing it.”
Woolsey said, “Place may cost a hundred grand, not a big ticket for a place like this, but you’ve gotta spend another hundred to make it worth your while, otherwise nobody who can afford the higher price is staying here. Marriott or Westin could afford to do it, and therein lies your problem, Guv-they’ll put up a high-rise, replace this whole bleedin’ lagoon with a swimming pool, put in some fake waterfalls with fuckin’ water lilies.”
Woolsey told Cooper he’d been saving plenty of money, skimming whatever he could off the top, but no way in hell could he drop two hundred grand into this place. Not even the first hundred.
“So that,” he said, “is why it’s a bloody shame.” He looked out at the bay again and shrugged. “Thought you’d want to be the first to know, Guv. Let me know, you want some help finding another island to hide out on.”
“Thanks for telling me,” Cooper said, then did his best to ignore Woolsey for the rest of the night. He fell asleep on the beach with his naked feet brushing the edge of the water in the dark.
Just under five weeks later, a short, heavyset man wearing a navy blue business suit arrived at Conch Bay on a water taxi at ten in the morning. When he told Woolsey he’d just flown in from the Caymans and was looking for a man named Chris Woolsey, Woolsey shook hands with the man, who introduced himself as Jacob Bartleby, attorney-at-law. Bartleby said he represented a holding corporation out of Grand Cayman specializing in resort investments, and Woolsey, long since accustomed to such inquiries, told Bartleby to come over to his office, where he would provide the information on how to contact the proprietors.