It was eating at the Mierda organization. The newspaper stories touting the triumphs of the other cartels only rubbed it in. The cocaine business was an intensely competitive one, with a pecking order as rigid as the seating chart at the Oscars. Word of the submarine discovered in the Colombian highlands had reached Grenada, and it got under Mr. Grande’s skin.
This called for a sit-down.
Mr. Grande drove his golf cart up the winding road to cartel headquarters, a top secret mountain hideaway concealed in the thickest part of the rain forest, near the top of Mount St. Catherine. He stopped at the mailbox and removed a stack of threatening collection notices. His men were already waiting in the study, submachine guns hanging from shoulder straps. They stood when Mr. Grande entered, and they sat when he sat. When they did, one of the submachine guns accidentally went off, a quick burst of bullets whistling across the room into the saltwater aquarium.
“Who did that?” demanded Mr. Grande, clownfish flopping on the floor.
They pointed at Paco.
“Give it!”
“But—”
“Now!”
Paco shuffled across the room, head down, and handed the weapon to Mr. Grande, who stuck it in the bottom drawer of his desk and closed it.
Mr. Grande then held up the newspaper with the submarine article. He slapped the page with the back of his hand. “This is what we should be doing!” He picked up the phone.
After a brief conversation, he hung up and turned to his men. “Our problems are solved.”
Mr. Grande had phoned the cartel that lost the submarine. He knew the raid had put them behind schedule, and he made a persuasive argument to subcontract his own boys for rush delivery of a new thirty-million-dollar sub.
“Where are we going to get a sub?” asked Paco.
“Estupido!” yelled Mr. Grande.
The men crowded around as their boss rolled his office chair over to the computer and logged onto Yahoo! Five minutes later, he stood at the printer. Out came a crosshatch schematic blueprint of the submarine H. L. Hunley. What attracted Mr. Grande was the Hunley’s elegant simplicity.
“We can build one of these with our eyes closed,” he said. “Then we’ll have all the money we need…and some respect!”
The phone rang.
“What now?” said Mr. Grande.
It was the power company.
“Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?” he screamed in the receiver. “I could have you killed just for saying that! One word from me and your whole family will be blown up!…Hello? Hello?…”
Mr. Grande put down the phone, and the lights went out.
A month later, the Mierda Cartel packed themselves into a convoy of pickup trucks and drove down from their mountain headquarters to the coastal capital of St. George’s. The curious townspeople came out of the shops and restaurants as the cartel backed a trailer up to the water. The residents faintly recognized the object on the trailer but couldn’t quite place it.
One of the cartel stood knee-deep in the surf and motioned to the driver, who watched in the side mirror as he backed up.
“Keep coming. Keep coming. Keep coming…” He held up a hand. “Stop!”
They untied the restraining straps, and a large, bulbous object slid gently into the water. Then they opened a hatch on top and the entire cartel got inside except Mr. Grande, who stood on the beach focusing binoculars.
The onlookers inched forward and formed a semicircle around their local kingpin. Mr. Grande didn’t look at them, but he knew they were there, and he swelled with pride. Finally, respect.
The craft began its maiden voyage, moving under its own power at modest speed until it reached deeper water and submerged, just the periscope showing. The impressed crowd murmured.
Mr. Grande had become supremely confident the moment he saw the H. L. Hunley on the Internet. He immediately recognized the shape and knew exactly where he could lay his hands on something watertight to use for the pressure hull. He cajoled Grenada Power & Light to turn the electricity back on and talked a local merchant into extending credit one last time. “You won’t be sorry.”
The cartel took delivery of the “hull” the next afternoon and worked round the clock with drills, jigsaws and rivet guns, carefully following their computer diagrams. They attached hand cranks to underwater paddles with axles fitted through greased nylon gaskets in the hull, and they employed a similar shaft design for the rudder. They bought plastic fifty-gallon outboard gas containers for ballast tanks, which also acted as the keel. A shuttlecock valve let water into the tanks, and an air-mattress foot pump pushed it out. And finally, they installed a periscope, a hatch and a series of portholes in the hull, which was a fiberglass septic tank.
Mr. Grande’s smile broadened as he watched through the binoculars. The crowd’s approval grew louder until cheering broke out. The sub moved into deeper and deeper water, until the periscope finally disappeared. Bubbles. Then nothing.
They waited.
The reason for the Hunley’s simplicity: It was the first submarine ever used in combat. Built during the Civil War, it was launched off Charleston in 1864.
The Mierda Cartel couldn’t read English, so they didn’t know the vintage or history of the Hunley, but they had no problem with the diagrams. They followed them perfectly. Too perfectly, in fact, and, like its historic predecessor, the cartel’s sub promptly sank on its maiden voyage with all hands.
Mr. Grande lowered his binoculars. “Damn.”
The crowd was silent. The cartel owed all of them money, but they decided it was an awkward time to bring it up, and they parted and let Mr. Grande pass through unmolested.
10
A pink Cadillac sat quietly at the end of an empty parking lot, catching shade from some jasmine. Lenny sat alone in the car, head back over the headrest, exhaling smoke straight up, flicking the nub of a roach out on the pavement. He turned and squinted toward the long, bright-white building with the string of Mediterranean arches facing some train tracks. The building had twin cupolas in the middle, topped with Moorish domes, and between them, curved over the main arch: ORLANDO.
“Will you come on!” yelled Lenny.
Serge’s shout came back faintly: “A couple more seconds!” Lenny watched him in the distance, standing in the middle of the train tracks, snapping photos of the back of a departing Amtrak heading south to Kissimmee. A handful of weary passengers had just gotten off and carried suitcases across the pavement toward the depot. Otherwise, the place was deserted, the Florida sun directly overhead without clouds. No wind. Crickets, sandspurs. The stagnant heat seemed to have weight.
“Will you come on! I’m getting something on the tracker!”
Serge took a couple parting shots, then sprinted back to the car and vaulted into the passenger seat without opening the door.
“What the hell were you doing?” asked Lenny.
“I’ve decided to completely dedicate my life to the study of trains and things that look like trains.”
Lenny started up the engine. “I knew I should never have asked you about trains. Now we’ll never catch up with that briefcase.”
“This was on the way to the briefcase — sort of. And besides, we’ve got them cornered with the five million.”
“Really?” said Lenny. “I thought this was just fucking around. Not that I’m against that.”
Serge pointed his arms in two different directions. “The logical escape routes are Daytona and Miami. But the tracker’s pinging due east, which can only mean the port and the cruise ships out of the country. The next one leaves Friday.”
“How do you know?”
“I have the schedule memorized,” said Serge. “I go over my own escape routes all the time. To survive in this state, you have to think like the French Resistance.”