Off the Mangrove Coast (Ss) (2000) Read online

  To kill… and to get the knife.

  I lunged at him then, batting the hook aside, feeling it rip the suit and my leg as I dove across the mahogany roof of the deck house. I thrust at him with the harpoon. His face twisted with fear, he sprang back, stepped on some spilled fish guts staining the deck. He threw up his arms, lost hold of the boat hook, and fell backward, arms flailing for balance. He hit the bulwark and his feet flew up and he went over, taking my harpoon with him … a foot of it stuck out his back … and there was an angry swirl in the water, a dark boiling … and after a while, the harpoon floated to the surface, and lay there, moving slightly with the wash of the sea.

  There’s a place on the Sigalong River, close by the Trusan waters, a place where the nipa palms make shade and rustle their long leaves in the slightest touch of wind. Under the palms, within sound of the water, I buried Smoke Bassett on a Sunday afternoon … two long days he lasted, and a wonder at that, for the side of his head was curiously crushed. How the man had remained at the pump might be called a mystery … but I knew.

  For he was a loyal man; I had trusted him with my lines, and there can be no greater trust. So when he was gone, I buried him there and covered over the grave with coral rock and made a marker for it and then I went down to the dinghy and pushed off for the ketch.

  Sometimes now, when there is rain upon the roof an when the fire crackles on the hearth, sometimes I will member: the bow wash about the hull, the rustling of nipa palms, the calm waters of a shallow lagoon. I will remember all that happened, the money I found, the men that died, and the friend I had … .

  *

  THE CROSS AND THE CANDLE

  When in Paris, I went often to a little hotel in a narrow street off the Avenue de la Grande Armee. Two doors opened into the building; one into a dark hallway and then by a winding stair to the chambers above, the other to the cafe, a tiny bistro patronized by the guests and a few people of the vicinity.

  It was in no way different from a hundred other such places. The rooms were chill and dank in the morning (there was little heat in Paris, even the girls in the Follies Bergere were dancing in goose pimples), the furnishings had that added Parisian touch of full-length mirrors running alongside the bed for the obvious and interesting purpose of enabling one, and one’s companion, to observe themselves and their activities.

  Madame was a Breton, and as my own family were of I Breton extraction, I liked listening to her tales of Roscoff, Morlaix, and the villages along the coast. She was a veritable treasure of ancient beliefs and customs, quaint habits and interesting lore. There was scarcely a place from Saint-Malo to the Bay of Douarnenez of which she didn’t have a story to tell.

  Often when I came to the cafe, there would be a man seated in the corner opposite the end of the bar. Somewhat below medium height, the thick column of his neck spread out into massive shoulders and a powerful chest. His arms were heavy with muscle and the brown hands that rested on the table before him were thick and strong.

  Altogether, I have seen few men who gave such an impression of sheer animal strength and vitality. He moved in leisurely fashion, rarely smiled, and during my first visits had little to say.

  In some bygone brawl, his nose had been broken and a | deep scar began over his left eye and ran to a point beneath a left ear of which half the lobe was gone. You looked at his wide face, the mahogany skin, and polished over the broad cheekbones and you told yourself, “This man is dangerous!” Yet often there was also a glint of hard, tough humor in his eyes.

  He sat in his corner, his watchful eyes missing nothing. After a time or two, I came to the impression that he was spinning a web, like some exotic form of spider, but what manner of fly he sought to catch, I could not guess.

  Madame told me he was a marin, a sailor, and had lived for a time in Madagascar.

  One afternoon when I came to the cafe, he was sitting in his corner alone. The place was empty, dim, and cold. Hat on the table beside him, he sat over an empty glass.

  He got up when I came in and moved behind the bar. I ordered vin blanc and suggested he join me. He filled the two glasses without comment, then lifted his glass. “A votre sante!” he said. We touched glasses and drank.

  “Cold, today,” he said suddenly.

  The English startled me. In the two months past, I had spoken to him perhaps a dozen times, and he replied always in French.

  “You speak English then?”

  He grinned at me, a tough, friendly grin touched by a sort, of wry cynicism. “I’m an American,” he said, “or I was.”

  “The devil you say!” Americans are of all kinds, but somehow … still, he could have been anything.

  “Born in Idaho,” he said, refilling our glasses. When I started to pay, he shook his head and brought money from his own pocket and placed it under an ashtray for Madame to put in the register when she returned. “They call me Tomas here. My old man was an Irish miner, but my mother was Basque.”

  “I took it for granted you were French.”

  “Most of them do. My mother spoke French and Spanish. Picked them up around home from her parents, as I did from her. After I went to sea, I stopped in Madagascar four years, and then went to Mauritius and Indochina.”

  “You were here during the war?”

  “Part of the time. When it started, I was in Tananarive; but I returned here, got away from the Boche, and fought with the maquis for a while. Then I came back to Paris.”

  He looked up at me and the slate-gray eyes were flat and ugly. “My girl was dead.”

  “Bombs?”

  “No. A Vichy rat.”

  He would say nothing more on the subject and our talk drifted to a strange and little known people who live in and atop a mountain in Madagascar, and their peculiar customs. I, too, had followed the sea for a time so there was much good talk of the ways of ships and men.

  Tomas was without education in the accepted sense, yet he had observed well and missed little. He had read widely. His knowledge of primitive peoples would have fascinated an anthropologist and he had appreciation and understanding for their beliefs.

  After talking with him, I came more often to the cafe, for we found much in common. His cynical toughness appealed to me, and we had an understanding growing from mutual experiences and interests. Yet as our acquaintance grew, I came to realize that he was a different man when we talked together alone than when others were in the room. Then his manner changed. He became increasingly watchful, talked less and only in French.

  The man was watching for someone or something. Observing without seeming to, I became aware the center of his interests were those who came most often to the cafe. And of these, there were four that held his attention most.

  Mombello was a slender Italian of middle years who worked in a market. Picard was a chemist, and Leon Mat-sys owned a small iron foundry on the edge of Paris and a produce business near The Halles. Matsys was a heavy man who had done well, had educated himself, and was inclined to tell everyone so. Jean Mignet, a sleek, catlike man, was supported by his wife, an actress of sorts. He was pleasant enough to know, but I suspected him of being a thief.

  Few women came to the cafe. Usually the girls who came to the hotel entered by the other door and went to the chambers above, and after a period of time, returned, through the same door. To us, they existed merely as light footsteps in the dark hall and on the stairs.

  Madame herself, a friendly, practical Breton woman, was usually around and occasionally one of the daughters Mombello would come in search of their father.

  The oldest was eighteen and very pretty, but businesslike without interest in the men of the cafe. The younger girl was thin, woefully thin from lack of proper food, but a beautiful child with large, magnificent dark eyes, dark wavy hair, and lips like the petals of a flower.

  Someone among these must be the center of interest, yet I could not find that his interest remained long with any one of the four men. For their part, they seemed to accept him as one
of themselves. Only one, I think, was conscious of being watched. That one was Jean Mignet.

  On another of those dismal afternoons, we sat alone in the cafe and talked. (It always seemed that I came there only when the outside was bleak and unhappy, for on the sunny days, I liked being along the boulevards or in St. Germaine.) The subject again arose of strange superstitions and unique customs.

  There was a Swede on one of my ships who would never use salt when there was a Greek at the table; an idea no more ridiculous than the fear some people have of eating fish and drinking milk in the same meal.

  Tomas nodded. “I’ve known of many such ideas,” he said, “and in some of the old families you will find customs that have been passed along from generation to generation in great secrecy for hundreds of years.

  “I know of one” he hesitated, describing circles on the dark tabletop with the wet bottom of his glass “that is, a religious custom followed so far as I know by only one family.”

  He looked up at me. “You must never speak of this around here,” he said, and he spoke so sharply and with so much feeling, I assured him I’d never speak of it anywhere, if he so wished.

  “In the family of my girl,” he said, “there is an ancient custom that goes back to the Crusades. Her ancestor was a soldier with Saint Louis at Saint-Jean-d’Acre. No doubt you know more of that than I do. Anyway, when his brother was killed in the fighting, there was no shrine or church nearby, so he thrust his dagger into a log. As you know, the hilts of daggers and swords were at that time almost always in the form of a cross, and he used it so in this case, burning a candle before the dagger.

  “It became the custom of a religious and fighting family, and hence whenever there is a death, this same dagger is taken from its wrappings of silk and with the point thrust into wood, a candle for the dead is burned before it.

  “Marie told me of this custom after her mother’s death when I came hurriedly into her room and surprised her with the candle burning. For some forgotten reason, a tradition of secrecy had grown around the custom, and no one outside the family ever knew of it.

  “That night in the darkened room, we watched the candle slowly burn away before that ancient dagger, a unique dagger where on crosspiece or guard was carved the body of Christ upon the cross and the blade was engraved with the figure of a snake, the snake signifying the powers of evil fallen before God.

  “I never saw the dagger again while she lived. It was put away among her things, locked carefully in an iron chest, never to be brought out again until, as she said, she herself died, or her brother. Then, she looked at me, and said, “Or you, Tomas, for you are of my family now.” “

  He looked at me, and underneath the scarred brows, there were tears in his eyes.

  “She must have been a fine girl,” I said, for he was deeply moved.

  “She was the only thing in my life! Only a madman, a mad American, would return to France after the war broke out. But I loved her.

  “Look at me. I’m not the kind of man many women could love. I’m too rough, too brutal! I’m a seaman, that is all, and never asked to be more. A good man at sea or in a fight, but I have no words with which to say nice things to a woman, and she was a beautiful girl with an education.”

  Tomas took out his wallet and removed a worn photograph. When I looked at it, I was frankly astonished. The girl was not merely a pretty girl, she was all he had said, and more. She was beautiful.

  Furthermore, there was something in her eyes and face that let you know that here was a girl who had character, maybe one who knew what loyalty was.

  “She is lovely,” I said sincerely. “I never saw anyone more beautiful!”

  He was pleased, and he looked at me with his face suddenly lighter. “She was magical!” he said. “The best thing in my life. I came first to her house with her brother, who had been my shipmate on a voyage from Saigon. She was a child then, and I thought of her as nothing else.

  “So, when next I came to the house, I brought her a present from Liverpool, and then others from Barcelona and Algiers. Simple things, and inexpensive, the sort of things a sailor may find in almost any port, but they had romance, I suppose, a color.

  “I gave them simply because I was a lonely man, and this family had taken me as one of them, and because the giving of things is good for a lonely heart.

  “One day, she was twelve then, I think, she had gone to a theater in the Boulevard de Clichy with her brother, and when they came out, she saw me with a girl, a girl from a cafe in the Pigalle. She was very angry and for days she would not speak to me.

  “Her brother teased her, and said, “Look! Marie thinks already she is a woman! She is jealous for you, Tomas!” “

  He smiled at the memory. “Then, I was gone again to sea, and when I came again to the house, Marie was fourteen, taller, frightened, and skinny. Always she stared at me, and I brought her presents as before. Sometimes I took her to the theater, but to me she was a child. She was no longer gay, full of excitement and anger. She walked be side me very seriously.

  “Four years then I was gone, and when I returned … you should have seen her! She was beautiful. Oh, I tell you, she was a woman now, and no doubt about it.

  “I fell in love! So much that I could not talk for feeling it, but never did I think for a moment that it could matter. “But did I have a choice? Not in the least! She had not changed, that one. She was both the little girl I knew first and the older one I knew later, and more besides. She laughed at me and said that long ago she had made up her mind that I was to be her man, and so it was to be whether I liked it or not! Me, I liked it. She was so much of what I wanted that she frightened me.

  “Can you imagine what that did to me, m’sieu? I was a lonely man, a very lonely man. There had been the girls of the ports, but they are not for a man of soul, only for the coarse-grained who would satisfy the needs of the moment. Me, I wanted love, tenderness.

  “I know.” He shrugged. “I don’t look it. I am a sailor and pleased to be one, and I’ve done my share of hard living. More than once, I’ve twisted my knife in the belly of a man who asked for it, and used my boots on them, too. But who is to say what feeling lives in the heart of a man? Or what need for love burns inside him?

  “My parents died when I was young and the sea robbed me of my country. In such a life, one makes no close friends, no attachments, puts down no roots. Then, this girl, this beautiful girl, fell in love with me.

  “Fell in love? No, I think the expression is wrong. She said she had always loved me even when she was a child and too young to know what it meant.

  “Her mother and brother approved. They were good people, and I had lived long among them. Then the mother died, Pierre was away in the colonies, and Marie and I were to be married when he returned. So we lived together.

  “Is this wrong? Who is to say what is right and what is wrong? In our hearts we understood and in France, well, they understand such things. What man is to live without a girl? Or a girl without a man?

  “Then away I went to sea on my last trip, and while I was gone, the war came, and with it the Germans. When I returned, I joined the maquis to get back into France. Her letters were smuggled to me.

  “Marie? She was a French girl, and she worked with the underground. She was very skillful, and very adept at fooling the Boche. Then, something happened.

  “One of the men close to her was betrayed, then another, finally, it was her brother who was killed. The gestapo had them, but they died without talking. One night I came to her to plead that she come away with me, it had been three years that I had fought in the underground, for her, almost six. But she told me she could not go; that someone close to her was working with the Nazis, someone who knew her. She must stay until she knew who it was.

  “Yet try as she could, there was no clue. The man was shrewd, and a very devil. He finally came to her himself, after her brother was caught. He told her what he knew of her underground activities and of mine. He told her unl
ess she came to live with him that I would be tortured and killed.

  “He had spied upon her. He had even discovered her burning the candle before the dagger for Pierre after he was killed. He told her of it, to prove how much he knew to prove he knew enough to find me and she had admitted the reason.

  “In the letter in which all this was told, she could not tell me who he was. He had friends in the underground, and she was fearful that learning who she was writing about, they would destroy the letter if they saw his name, and then she would be cut off from me and from all help.

  “She would give me his name, she said, when I came next to Paris. He had not forced himself on her, just threatened. We had to plan to do away with him quickly. Marie said, too, that she was afraid that if the invasion came, he would kill her, for she alone could betray him; she alone knew of his activities for the Nazis.

  “The invasion a secret? Of course! But when orders began to come for the underground, come thick and fast, we knew it was coming. Then, the landings were made, and for days we were desperately busy.

  “We rose in Paris, and they were exciting, desperate days, and bitter days for the collaborators and the men of Vichy. Their servitude to the Nazis had turned to bitterness and gall; they fled; and they begged, and they died.

  “When I could, I hurried to the flat where Marie lived. It was near here, just around the corner. I found her dying. She had been raped and shot by this collaborator two days before and she had crawled to her apartment to wait for me. She died telling me of it, but unable before her last breath to give me his name.”

  “And there was no way you could figure out who he was?” I asked.

  “How?” He spread his hands expressively. “No one suspected him. His desire for her was such that he had threatened her, and in threatening her he had boasted of what he had done. That was a mistake he rectified by killing her.