They walked slowly through the town for an hour, looking into cantinas, both men searching faces. Cat half expected to turn a corner and see Denny or the Pirate sitting at a sidewalk table sipping a cervesa. It didn’t happen. They got back into the car, drove to the waterfront, and parked again.
“Show me where you met Denny,” Bluey said.
They walked unmolested past a young policeman at a gate in a chain-link fence separating the docks from a large square. Keeping to the water, Cat finally brought them to the spot where they had tied up. He stared at the rusty ladder he had climbed on his last visit. A fishing boat was tied to it. Cat tried to swallow the lump in his throat.
“Let’s ask around,” Bluey said, buttonholing a man who was busy applying a fresh coat of yellow paint to a rusty boat engine. The man nodded. “He knows Denny,” Bluey translated. The man shook his head. “Hasn’t seen him for a long time — several months.” Bluey asked another question and got a negative reply. “He doesn’t know the guy you call the Pirate or a sportsfisherman called the Santa Maria.”
They continued to stroll along the concrete wharf. There were a handful of foreign yachts tied up, and Cat resisted an urge to find the skipper of each one and tell him to get the hell out of Santa Marta. Bluey approached a dozen people and, finally, got what seemed to Cat a positive response from a young fisherman when the name Santa Maria was mentioned.
Bluey thanked the man and rejoined Cat. “He says he saw such a boat less than a month ago anchored at Guairaca, a fishing village seven or eight kilometers east of here. He’s sure of it. Let’s go.”
They began driving, and Cat tried to keep his hopes down. Everything so far had been a red herring. They climbed into the hills east of Santa Marta, passing a large shanty town on the edge of the city. Houses had been thrown together from all sorts of materials — packing crates, sheets of tin, cardboard. They were little better than tents. “Jesus, what a way to live,” Cat said.
“Barrio,” Bluey replied. “A lot of people in this country live like that. Look.” He nodded at a roadside sign. “Some politician has put his name on this one. Probably got them a water tap or something.”
Soon they crested a hill and found a beautiful bay below them with a village nestled at its shore. Cat thought that any American real estate developer would love to get his hands on the site, it was so beautiful. The road fell rapidly away toward the village, and shortly they had drawn up to the beach.
“Look,” Bluey said, pointing. “There’s the Santa Maria.”
Cat followed his finger to the spot. Half numb, half frightened, he got out of the car and walked quickly down the beach, forty yards, to the boat. The name was clearly visible on her bows.
“That’s the boat,” Cat said as Bluey fell in beside him. “No mistake, this time.”
The two men stopped and stared together. The Santa Maria lay beached, a weedy mooring line still running, quite unnecessarily, from her bows to a large rock at the top of the beach. She was heeled sharply to port, and as they moved, her starboard side came into view, the hull charred and burned away, her interior exposed. She had been stripped of anything of possible value. Not so much as a cushion was left. Bluey walked over to a group of half a dozen men who sat on the sand mending nets.
Bluey translated as they spoke. “The skipper was a man named Pedro. Rough-looking fellow. That’s your Pirate. No one has seen him for months. He left the boat here and didn’t come back. Finally some robbers stripped her gear and set her afire. The men from the village tried to save her, beached her, but she ended up as we see her. No one knows where Pedro went. No one knows his last name.” He continued to talk with them a moment more. “He didn’t seem much interested in sportfishing. Nobody comes here looking for sportfishing, anyway. They naturally assumed he was running drugs. Nobody worries much about that around here, there’s so much of it.” They conversed for another few minutes, then Bluey waved Cat away, and they walked back to the car. An old woman carrying a large fish fell in step with them, talking rapidly, obviously trying to sell them the fish, grinning, revealing a toothless mouth. Bluey gave her some money, not even slowing down.
“He was always alone, they said. Nobody ever saw him with a girl or anybody else. I think that’s the whole story. In a village this size, everybody knows everything, and if there was anything more to it, these blokes would know it. They wouldn’t miss a thing around here, especially anything to do with a boat.”
Cat stood, watching a group of small boys play an impromptu soccer match in the street along the beach. “So we’re back to square one again?”
“Not quite. At least we’ve got a name we can put to the face around Santa Marta. We might turn up something in the cantinas.”
“Come on, Bluey, half the male population of South America must be named Pedro, and anyway, it’s probably not his real name, not if he was running drugs.”
“Doesn’t matter. If he called himself Pedro here, he used it somewhere else.”
The two men trudged back to the car and started for Santa Marta. They were quiet for a while.
“How long since you were in Australia, Bluey?” Cat asked. He didn’t want to think about Pedro any more today.
“Strooth,” Bluey chuckled. “Mid-fifties, I guess. I think of myself as American these days. Got my citizenship in ’64.”
“You got any people back there?”
“Tell you the truth, I don’t even know. My folks are dead. I had a brother and a sister, both older. I hadn’t seen them for a couple of years when I came to the States. I got an ex-wife and a little girl in Miami, but I haven’t seen them in a while, either. The lady’s name is Imelda; she’s Cuban.”
“I thought you said you’d always been a bachelor.” Bluey grinned. “Well, for all practical purposes. I wasn’t very good at being married, I guess.”
“How old is the little girl?”
“Marisa is eight now. I send her Christmas and birthday presents; that’s about it. Imelda remarried about three years ago. Seems happy and settled. She wanted a slightly more stable citizen than me, I reckon. Still, it’s good for the kid. I have this fantasy that when she’s eighteen, I’ll pop up and send her to college, if I ever get a few bucks ahead.”
“What will you do with the money you’re making on this trip?”
Bluey smiled. “That’s all spent, in my head, anyway. I got an old mate over in Alabama has a little airplane refurbishing business, paint and interiors. I’ve got a few ideas for some modifications to Cessnas and Pipers. I’d like to move into his shop and work on those, maybe teach a little flying, if I can get my ticket back. I’ve always liked showing other people how to do it. Don’t know why.”
“All finished with the grass business, then?”
Bluey snorted. “You betcha. This is my last trip south. I want to have someplace to go home to at night, you know?”
Cat knew. He wasn’t sure he had that, himself, anymore.
They drove back into Santa Marta. Bluey suggested they take up the chase tomorrow, and Cat agreed. He was tired and wanted some dinner and a good night’s sleep.
They stopped at a traffic light. It was rush hour in Santa Marta, and the streets were teeming with an assortment of cars, motorbikes, and the garishly painted American school buses that passed for public transport in Colombia. Cat glanced to his right at a kid on a motor scooter who had pulled up next to them. The boy couldn’t be more than twelve, Cat thought; his feet barely reached the pedals, and he had to lean way forward to manage the handlebars. Cat wondered where a kid that age got a motor scooter. Not only that, he thought, looking at the boy’s arm, but an expensive wristwatch, too.