Dead of Night, page 2
Culebra.
Another reason he thought of her as the Snake Woman.
Serpiente.
The way she was holding him, fingers gripped, steering him into the shadows as if he had wheels, Solaris realized something that he would later find unsettling. He’d been born with this weakness. Maybe all men were.
A man with his built-in leash.
They’d been coming to Vinales, western Cuba, for the past sixteen months, arriving in a Volvo limo, or by small helicopter, dropping over rock towers into the valley beneath mountains where coffee grew green in summer, white when bushes bloomed.
There were two, Dasha, the blond Russian, with an older American man who had money, no mistaking it. It was an attitude, the way the man’s eyes blurred, empty as a camera lens, indifferent to breathing things that were tiny, peasants who would die in silence.
Dr. Desmond Stokes.
Rich Americans, they never had to open their mouths. As a boy, Solaris had pushed an ice cart around the docks of Marina Hemingway west of Havana. He knew.
They came every other month, sometimes more, the two of them alone, or with an associate. Usually a gigantic Russian with black hair that grew out of his ears like a wolf. Aleski was the wolf’s name.
Once, they’d brought a nervous little man with glasses who carried a microscope in a case. A biologist of some type. He’d jumped at unexpected sounds. Began to cry when they told him he had to fly in the helicopter again.
Solaris had never seen an adult man cry. Disgusting. Even so, the woman treated the little man like he was important. Spent time off alone, whispering.
Usually, though, Dasha was with Dr. Stokes. He allowed her to leave his side only when he talked privately with the Chinaman. Business. Money. Powerful chiefs cutting a deal.
Actually, the Chinaman was Vietnamese, Bat-tuy Nguyen. A fat man who wore bright scarves, gold jewelry, who’d learned the exotic animal trade from someone named Keng Wong. This was before Wong got extradited from Mexico to the U.S., and was sentenced to twenty-five years.
“The best-known rare animal dealer in the world,” Nguyen told Solaris. It was part of the sales pitch when the Chinaman recruited Solaris and his uncle, who was in charge of the village landing strip.
Same with the article about Wong in El Mundo, part of which read: “... reptiles rate third as the world’s most lucrative commodity to smuggle, after firearms and drugs. According to U.N. officials, the trade is worth about $10 billion internationally. It is further evidence that capitalism must destroy natural resources to fuel its own growth....”
The article was written months before the Bearded One died. Before world crime syndicates rushed into the political vacuum to stake out territory.
Cubans no longer cared about politics, only dollars. And survival.
“If you work hard, learn how the business works, maybe you’ll one day be as rich as the great Keng Wong!” the Chinaman told him and his uncle.
His cynical uncle had replied, “If the Chino is so great, why is he in a Yankee prison?” but they accepted jobs anyway.
Nguyen did a surprising business, using the village as his rendezvous place and warehouse. He imported strange creatures, illegal products from all over the world. Not drugs, though. Too risky. Better wealthy collectors than desperate addicts.
The clients were from the U.S., sometimes Europe or Colombia.
Once, Solaris said to the Chinaman, “What kind of people buy this shit?”
Nguyen told him, “We sell to a few scientists who can’t get permits, men looking for cures for cancer, high blood pressure, whatever. Discover a drug that works, you’re rich forever. Like Dr. Stokes, when he lost his license and got run out of the U.S. That’s how I started with him. Just snakes at first, now everything.”
Otherwise, the Chinaman said, most of their clients were people so protected by their wealth that they enjoyed toying with danger.
“It’s why I know we’ll make money. Something that’s illegal and dangerous—it’s a way of showing off. One of the scorpions in that cage?” He’d pointed at scorpions with robotic tails as thick as the fat man’s thumb. “They cost us twenty cents, U.S. A penny if we hatch them from eggs, which we’ve been doing. Calcutta funeral scorpions—poisonous, but not as dangerous as people think. Because of the name, we can charge two or three hundred dollars a pair. Where else can collectors buy them?”
Speaking of “us” and “we” as if Solaris and his uncle were getting part of the profit instead of the wrinkled dollar bills the fat man stuffed into their hands at the end of the day.
“Komodo dragons? They kill a man by biting his stomach open, eating his guts. The rarest of rare. In Indonesia, we buy a dozen Komodo eggs for twenty dollars, ship them like gold for a thousand. If only three hatch? There’s a group of ranchers in Texas who buy all the Komodos I can deliver at fifty thousand cash, no questions as long as their veterinarian okays the animal.
“Man-children. They wear loincloths, carry torches at night, hunt the lizards with spears. Probably paint their faces and scream at the moon. Play caveman, then go home and enter their wives from behind. Who knows? They tell me dragon tail tastes like eagle squab.”
African mambas, the Chinaman said, were the most dangerous snakes on earth. They moved over the ground faster than a racehorse; grew more than five meters long. Australian death vipers were a better example, because of the name. For an adult female death viper, he could get five, ten thousand. If the female was gravid—“they’re live-bearers,” he explained—twice that.
“Both are listed among the ten most venomous snakes in the world,” he said. “It’s like a sports title. Deadly, so valuable. Understand what I’m telling you?”
Solaris was in charge of maintaining storage barns, procuring feed, keeping track of inventory. Also, he was big enough to scare anyone thinking about robbing the place.
The morning Snake Woman lured him into the barn for the first time, he’d copied the Chinaman’s writing onto a clipboard.
Sold to Dr. Desmond Stokes:25 dozen African mamba eggs & hatchlings
10 death adders, 6 gravid females
25 pint containers of thick-tailed scorpion eggs & hatchlings
50-liter drum/parasites, West Africa
50-liter drum/mosquito larvae, Brazil
50-liter drum/sewage, East Africa
14 laboratory rats test-positive, cholera, Johannesburg
Cholera? Madre de Jesús. The things they ordered were always like that. Weird. Dangerous. Dirty.
What sort of research was that strange man doing? This was not like the pet store toys other clients wanted.
But God, the blond Russian, what a body. Solaris would think of her at night, his four younger brothers asleep in the same room, and try not to tremble.
The Chinaman wasn’t dumb. He caught on quick about what the two of them were doing alone in the tobacco barn.
“She’ll be the death of you,” the fat man said one afternoon, not laughing.
Solaris took it as a joke. “But that woman loves me so much, what a way to go!”
But the fat man was right.
2
Aside from a strange, shy message on an answering machine, the first words I heard Jobe Applebee speak were: “Please, don’t hit me again. My brain... you don’t understand. I can’t.”
The way he said it, “I can’t,” sounded touchingly childlike. This thirty-some-year-old man wasn’t begging. He was apologizing. Telling the blond woman who was beating him that he wanted to cooperate. He simply didn’t know how.
Only a minute or two before, I’d been standing on the porch of Applebee’s secluded island home on Lake Toho, Central Florida, in citrus, cattle, bass boat, and Disney country. I’d stood there feeling out of place, a little silly, looking up at all the dark gables and darker windows of the man’s solitary three-story. I would have guessed the place was empty but for a golf cart umbilicaled to a charger next to the porch.
Golf carts are standard transportation in Florida’s island communities. Drive them to the boat dock when leaving, drive them home upon return. The cart meant that Applebee probably was inside.
I didn’t know the man. Had never met him. I was there because I’d made a reluctant promise to his sister, a friend.
It was a promise I already regretted.
As I stood there trying to decide what to do, I grunted and I sighed, made the silly, adolescent sounds that a person utters when he’s about to continue some damn, silly task he doesn’t want to continue. I certainly did not want to do this, but, as Applebee’s sister pointed out, I am an ever-dependable pushover. I am Marion D. Ford, the amiable marine biologist, bookworm nerd, collector of sea creatures, and “wouldn’t hurt a flea, cheery sunset cohort who can’t say no to a pal.”
My friend’s words.
Finally, I stepped onto Applebee’s porch, went to the door.
There wasn’t a bell, so I leaned to knock... then stopped, knuckles poised, head tilted, listening to an unexpected sound. Stood for long seconds straining to identify an indistinct moaning. It was a noise that someone in pain might make. Or someone frightened. Or someone trying to pull a very bad joke.
This was no joke. The moaning was coming from the rear of the house.
Quietly, I tested the doorknob. Locked.
I waited, ears focused . . . heard it again: someone in pain.
Hurrying now, I swung over the porch railing and jogged to the rear of the house. That’s when I heard Applebee’s frightened, apologetic voice; heard him in person for the first time: “Please, don’t hit me again. My brain . . . you don’t understand. I can’t.”
Heard the words during a lull in the music that was being played loud, probably to cover the man’s pleading, and then his scream: “Stop, please. I can’t stand this!”
In bizarre contrast was the music, a Disney tune that even I recognized. Something about it being a small world after all.
The sound of a grown man begging detonates all the primitive caveman alarms. Terror has a distinctive pitch. We hear it through the base of the skull, not the auditory canal, and it’s interpreted as an electric prickle down the spine.
I waited until the music resumed, then began to move toward a set of French doors from which Applebee’s voice drifted. As I did, I fished a cellular phone out of my pocket, dialed 911. To the woman who answered, I whispered, “There’s a man being assaulted on an island, south of Orlando. Night’s Landing ... no ... Nightshade Landing. House number thirty-nine; owner’s name is Applebee. Dr. Jobe Applebee. Get a police boat or a chopper out here A-S-A-P. I’m going to try and help.”
I listened long enough to make certain she understood, then shoved the phone into my pocket.
There was a smaller porch at the rear entrance. I stepped up onto the deck, and pressed my face to the double glass doors. Through a space in the curtains, I saw the little man I knew to be Applebee—recognizable because he’s the identical twin of the sister who’d asked me to check on him.
Even with Applebee’s bloodied face, the likeness was unmistakable.
He was sitting on a chair in the dimly lighted space, dressed like an underpaid junior college professor: charcoal slacks, white shirt with a collar stiff enough to hold a clip-on tie. He was barefooted, which gave the peculiar impression that he was unclothed.
Men like Jobe Applebee do not go around without socks and shoes.
On his right ankle was a sloppy surgical dressing of gauze and tape. Maybe that’s why he was shoeless. He had a minor injury. It seemed a further indignity that the bandage was visible.
He had his face buried in his hands, rocking rhythmically even though the chair wasn’t a rocker. Nose and lips were bleeding, glasses askew. He had angular features, more feminine than his sister. His body was frail, as if his bone scaffolding were made of balsa wood.
Two people stood over him. One, a man, was behind the chair, his hands on Applebee’s shoulders, steadying him, while the other, a woman, crouched in front, a leather belt doubled in her right hand. That moronic song had begun to play yet again—It’s a small world!—but I was close enough to hear the woman say in clumsy English, “Why you make us do this thing to you? You think I like hitting your face, idiot? Tell us what we want to know. Then we stop. We all be friends afterward.”
I watched as the woman used the belt to slap Jobe’s face sideways. It made an ugly, bullwhip th-WHACK against flesh.
She was Eastern European, probably Russian. Her accent was as telling as the high Slavic cheeks and forehead, the short chin, the high nasal bridge. She was tall—over six feet. Lean, athletic, flat chested with skinny ballerina hips, long sprinter’s legs, and short ballerina blond hair.
The man was her opposite. He was oxlike, with curly, shoulder-length black hair, and dense body pelt showing on arms, the backs of his hands, and neck. His face had similar Slavic characteristics.
He wore the sort of workman’s pants you find in chain outlets, and an equally cheap T-shirt, breast pocket squared by a box of cigarettes. The woman, though, dressed like she had money: pleated boating slacks and a baggy, silken blouse that gave her a traditional peasant look.
I’d seen the style when I was in Moscow.
Conclusion: Two immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Suspicion: Russians who slip into the U.S. illegally are often black marketers. They bring their talents with them. Crime is what they know best.
So maybe I was witnessing a robbery, or a crime-for-hire.
Ancillary impression: The woman enjoyed her role as abusive interrogator. She was the sort of person, typically male, who should be boxed up and studied like a bug.
This all went through my mind as subtext. I was more concerned with whatever weapons they might be carrying. Charging in, getting shot, wasn’t going to help anyone. I do dumb things on a regular basis, but seldom intentionally.
I held my glasses to my face as I touched my right eye to the door’s window. If they were armed, it wasn’t obvious. No telltale bulge of pocket, or pant cuff.
I was still watching as the woman used the belt on the little man again. Slapped him hard, then hit his face again.
Yeah... she liked it.
After that, I wasn’t thinking anymore. Just reacting.
I took three long steps backward, then charged the door, shoulder down.
Even though we’d never met, the guy I was attempting to rescue seemed worth rescuing. Jobe Applebee, Ph.D., was the twin brother of my old friend Dr. Frieda Applebee Matthews, both considered by peers to be among Florida’s finest field biologists.
Frieda is an authority on Caribbean sea mammals. The manatee, a hippo-sized, fluke-tailed estuarine mammal, is her specialty. You seldom read a newspaper story on the animal in which she is not quoted, or a scientific paper on the species in which her work is not referenced.
Brother Jobe was a hydrobiologist, an expert on the flow of nutrient pollution through karstic systems: how water makes its way through regions of porous limestone, plus the impact once the contaminants have spread.
Freshwater was his main interest, but I’d read some of his papers relating to salt water as well. He’d done work with deep-ocean blowholes and freshwater springs found a hundred miles out at sea. His data suggested that karsts channel ways to transport the same poisons you’d expect to find in garbage dumps of industrial towns.
Really excellent stuff. Painstaking and professional, but also brilliant in the same quirky, left-field way my old hipster pal, Tomlinson, is brilliant. Tomlinson, the unrepentant social revolutionary, drug fancier, and Zen Buddhist monk who might say something like, “Jogging is a masochistic form of bulimia, only in the active tense,” then give you a perfectly logical explanation for why the statement’s justified.
Applebee had the same weird gift. In a couple of his papers, he started with premises that seemed unlikely at first pass, but then he backed the data with a series of unexpected proofs, all from oddball angles (anomalies in his field, at least) to reach what I considered to be virtuoso conclusions. The way he stacked figures and minutiae suggested a penchant for the obsessive—not a bad thing for a scientist.
Numbers. The man loved numbers.
People who’d worked with him said that he was as introverted as his sister, Frieda, was outgoing. She lived in Tallahassee, the state capital, and was at ease drinking cocktails with lobbyists and upper-echelon bureaucrats. As a researcher and environmental consultant, her work required that kind of interaction, but she also enjoyed it.
Her brother, the lady told me, never socialized.
My friend Frieda lives with a much-loved husband and young son. Brother Jobe had lived alone his entire adult life, much of it on an island in a lake south of Orlando. As far as she knew, the only time he went out was to buy necessities, or to do fieldwork.
She’d written me that in an e-mail the week before, then added, “He’ll at least answer the phone, though. But he hasn’t for the last three days. I’m worried about him. I wouldn’t ask, but you said you were driving to Vero Beach to go surfing, which means, coming and going across the state, his house isn’t that far out of your way. Plus, you’re trailering your boat. You’d have access. I know it’s a pain in the butt, but would you mind stopping and checking on Jobe?”
I’d made the mistake of mentioning that I was supposed to meet Tomlinson at Sebastian Inlet, north of Vero Beach, to try my hand at surfing. The Atlantic has bigger, more dependable waves than Florida’s Gulf Coast. But just in case a nor’easter wasn’t blowing, I was also bringing my twenty-one-foot skiff so we could poke around the Indian River Aquatic Preserve, an interesting estuary separated from open sea by a strand of barrier islands.
“Skiff” is another word for a fast, shallow water boat with low freeboard.
So, yes, it was true that a detour to see her brother would not take me far off course. The woman was familiar enough with my habits to know that I avoid driving interstate highways. Hate the damn things. So the route from my little stilt house, Dinkin’s Bay, Sanibel Island, on the Gulf Coast, to the much busier Atlantic Coast would wind me through Florida’s agricultural, theme-parked, and water-rich interior. It would take me within a few miles of the lake, and the tiny island development where her brother lived.
