Free Pressure Drop by Peter Abrahams Page B

have bought Cesarito’s freedom: he was a class enemy. Matthias, a lower and less worthy form of antagonist, was swapped for medical supplies. Two years on the Isle of Pines. He’d survived. He’d even come back with a few funny stories to tell, at least they seemed funny in the bar at Zombie Bay. He came back with those funny stories and the scars on his back.
    Now Matthias could make out a square-topped shadow due west: the Bluff. He thought he could even see a yellow light shining from its northern end. Hew had trouble sleeping. He read old copies of Punch until dawn. Matthias pulled back on the throttles. The sea lifted the bow into the air and let it gently down. Matthias set the throttles at neutral and switched off the engines.
    True silence fell all around him. All sound was of his own making: his breathing, his pulse, the scraping of his hard shoes on the deck. His businessman shoes. He took them off. Then he took off his suit, his shirt, his socks, his undershorts. He stood behind the console, floating over the Tongue of the Ocean, the bottom a thousand fathoms beneath his feet.
    Matthias climbed over the side of So What and slipped into the sea. The water was warm, warmer than the air. He floated on his back for a while, drifting on a slow current beside his boat. Then he rolled over, jackknifed and kicked down.
    Not far. Forty feet, maybe fifty, he couldn’t tell, didn’t care. He saw the same thing eyes open or closed: blackness. The sea drummed and gurgled in his ears. Matthias stopped kicking, straightened, hung suspended in the water. The ocean drummed and gurgled its soft song to him. Yo soy turisto , he thought, almost laughing aloud. Then he realized where he was: not far from the spot where the plaintiff and his nameless partner had gone down. Matthias kicked his way back up.
    So What had drifted to the north. The current was running faster than he had thought. The tide had turned. With long easy strokes, Matthias swam after it, caught the transom, pulled himself up. As he dried his body with his shirt, he sensed the day coming behind him. He turned and saw a milky spill in the eastern sky. Everything was black and white for a few moments. Then color was discovered and immediately splashed across the sky and sea without restraint. Matthias knew there was something much bigger than mankind. Not God, necessarily, just bigger. It was a something you never saw in places like the Isle of Pines.
    Matthias had his answer to Ravoukian’s offer. Yes, he knew how to use explosives underwater. Yes, he wanted to keep Zombie Bay; it was hard to imagine his life without it. But he wouldn’t do anything that would put him on a Turkish version of Isla de Piños. He wouldn’t let himself be that stupid twice. He also wouldn’t be stupid enough to believe he had better than a fifty-fifty chance. The answer was no. He had until December twelfth to think of something else.
    Matthias switched on the engines and headed for Andros. The blue-black water turned bottle-green; he ran south along the Bluff to Gun Point, then threaded his way through the coral heads they called The Angel Fingers and sliced a widening V in the baby-blue water of Zombie Bay. The club lay under tall palms behind the long curved beach: the central hut with the bar, dining room and library; the office; the cottages; the equipment shed. How tiny it all looked, like a play town in a sandbox. But it was perfect.
    Dawn. August 1.

8
    August first was not a good day to be six months pregnant in the city of New York. Nina had the feeling she’d been teleported to Planet Greenhouse, with a gravity like Jupiter’s and a climate like Kinshasa’s. All the life forms swung back and forth between somnolence and psychosis, smelled like goats and wheezed with every breath. Everyone who could get out of town had done so. Suze was at Tanglewood with the Auschwitz Cadillac man; Jason was on the road with the West Village