I search the map with my finger and find it. “I see it.”
“Head there,” he says. “What time have you got?”
I look at my watch. “A few minutes past one. What’s happening?”
“All hell’s breaking loose here,” he says. “Government square inside the fort. Media, American news crews with cameras. They’re all over the place, asking questions about Ginnis. Why the local government on the island doesn’t know there’s a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court vacationing here.”
“They didn’t know?”
“No,” says Herman. “According to what they told the press, not a clue.”
I knew the cameras would all show up, but I was hoping they would give us one more day.
“How do you know he’s at this place, Jan Thiel?”
“I don’t,” says Herman. “But his clerk, Alberto Aranda, swims there every day about noon.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because his girlfriend back in the States told one of the reporters. I heard the newsies talking about it. He calls her every day about noon from the beach. She says he swims somewhere near a sunken tug. Get your ass down there. You don’t have much time.”
“Harry is at the north end of the island,” I tell him. “He’ll never make it in time.”
“I know that.” I can hear him breathing heavily, running. “I’m catching a cab. Be there as fast as I can,” he says.
Even though I’m only a short distance away, it takes me more than twenty minutes to find the brackish backwater of the inlet and the dirt road that leads to the beach at the place on the map called Jan Thiel. The road forks at a steep hill. I take the left fork and go up and around. On my right as I skirt the hill, I can see a circular, fortresslike tower, old stone, probably planted on the top of the hill three or four centuries ago and now abandoned.
As the wheels of my car hit pavement again and I get past the brush blocking my view, I see the small harbor. There is a cargo ship of some kind tied up at one dock and a large four-masted schooner-more than a hundred feet in length, I would guess-tied off at another. There are several other, smaller sailing vessels moored in the harbor, one of them a party boat. Passengers in swimsuits are swinging from ropes out over the bow, doing dives and belly flops into the water.
I keep driving maybe a quarter of a mile, until the road I’m on dead-ends in a parking lot. Directly in front of me, tied up at the dock, broadside, is the large schooner. I turn right, into one of the open parking spaces. That’s when I see the beach, a broad shelf running down to the water maybe two hundred yards long. There is a line of shacks and huts behind it, bamboo and palm leaves for shelter, what looks like a take-out counter for food, and an outdoor tavern for drinks.
Midday Saturday, and there must be more than two hundred chairs and lounges spread out along the arc of the beach, and every one of them is occupied. Kids playing in the water, couples holding hands, bodies slick with tanning oil. Finding Aranda here is not going to be easy.
I turn off the engine and step out of the car. I see a couple of divers with tanks and wet suits heading the other way, out toward the dock and the schooner.
“Excuse me.”
One of them turns to look at me.
“Either of you know anything about a sunken tugboat around here?”
They keep walking, hauling their heavy gear, but the guy looking at me waves his left arm as if to point, in the general direction they’re going. So I follow.
We walk through the lot, past parked cars toward the schooner. Just off to the left, toward the bow of the vessel, is a small building with a white metal roof and a sign over the door that says DIVE SHOP. I follow the two guys toward it, and just before I get there, I see a large boulder, a jagged piece of gray basalt the size and shape of a headstone. It is painted red with a white diagonal strip running across it from top left to bottom right, the international symbol for a dive site. Across the stone at the top right is the word TUGBOAT painted in black letters.
As I look off to the left past the stone, I see a small cove, no sand beach but a shelf against the cliff, covered by broken pieces of gray coral. There are maybe eight or ten plastic chaise lounges set out on top of the coral, a few with towels on them. Two at this end, closest to me, are occupied by a couple readying their masks and fins for a snorkel adventure. Farther back in the cove, perhaps forty yards away, is a solitary figure, a guy sitting sideways on the lounge, facing me. He is talking on a cell phone.
I’ve never seen a picture of Aranda, but the man’s appearance fits the bill. He looks to be in his early thirties, short-cropped dark hair, well built, broad shoulders and narrow waist. With him seated, I can’t tell how tall he is, but he is lean and appears very fit.
I keep checking my watch every few minutes, hoping that Herman will get here.
If the man sitting on the chaise lounge is Aranda, I know that he is not going to talk on the phone for long, not with roaming charges just off the coast of Venezuela. And when he hangs up, he’s going to either hit the water or head back to wherever it is he came from. I could approach him and try to talk to him, but I’m afraid he would simply get up and run, in which case I would have to track him in the car on winding dirt roads through clouds of dust. And you could be sure that he would not go anywhere near Ginnis until he was certain he’d lost me.
Once Herman gets here, we can take our chances. Herman can block him with his girth while I talk. Herman always packs a folding knife. If we have to, he can punch one of the tires on Aranda’s car and we can trap him in the lot until we talk his ear off. Give him a ride and let him show us where Ginnis is.
I check my watch again. Herman should be here any second. Then I see it, a cloud of dust, a fast-moving vehicle coming this way from the land side of the hill with the towered fortress. Herman to the rescue. When the large, dark SUV comes out of a line of brush and turns this way, it’s moving so fast that the rear end fishtails on the sand and loose gravel.
As soon as they stop and two of them get out, one of them with a good-size camera, I know I’m in trouble. Part of the media mob has found its way to Jan Thiel, and they’re ahead of Herman.
Now there’s no time to waste. I head directly toward the man on the phone, long strides, my shoes digging into the broken pieces of coral. As I walk right up to him his head is down, he’s smiling, talking on the phone. When he sees my feet stop a yard or so in front of him, he finally looks up.
“Are you Alberto Aranda?”
The expression in his eyes is one I have seen before, whenever I am forced to surrender a client to be taken into custody by police in my office.
“Sweetie, I gotta go. I’ll call you later.” He snaps the clamshell phone closed. “Who are you?”
“My name is Paul Madriani. I’m a lawyer from San Diego-”
Before I can even finish the sentence, he slips rubber thongs on his feet, grabs his snorkel gear, gets off the chaise lounge, and brushes right past me.
“You better not go that way. The media is waiting for you with cameras in the parking lot.”
This stops him like a bullet.
He turns and looks at me. “What do you want?”
“I want to know where Arthur Ginnis is.”
At this moment his expression is a mask of anxiety. He thinks for a second, then looks toward the parking lot again. “Are you with them?”
“No. I just want to talk to you. All I want to know is where Justice Ginnis is.”
“Get me out of here,” he says, “and I’ll take you to him.”
A towel over his head for shade, carrying his gear, and me walking beside him, we draw little or no attention. We head back through the parking lot. By now the cameras have swelled to two crews, who are gathering their equipment. One of the reporters is scanning the forest of chaise lounges and oiled bodies on the beach at the other side of the parking area. Their vehicles, two full-size SUVs, motors still running with drivers behind the wheels, are parked not in spaces but behind other cars, blocking them. One of these is mine.