Angels in Heaven

for the morning ferry to take you
to the mainland, where you pick up a cab that takes you to the airport, where
there are things called planes, which take you anywhere in the world.”
    “Speak to me of this island,” I said,
“where one might have to spend a night.”
    “He wants to know if there are any
leeches there,” Sara said. “Or electric eels in the bidet just waitin’ to ring
his bells.”
    “Really, Sara,” I said. “Vulgarity is
always unbecoming *n the fair sex. Or unfair sex, as someone, not I, once
quipped.”
    “I guess you got to watch your back
there like anywhere,” Dan said, “but most of the time it’s so laid back it’s
half-asleep. I remember once though, pulling in to the little dock there and
everyone in sight was hopping around and speeding away like in some old movie
being projected too fast. Finally one of them tells me what happened was a
container of coke got washed up and the whole island had been tooting it for
days. So the village elders get together to try and figure out what to do,
which isn’t easy because they’re all out of their skulls too. They decide to
collect all the rest of the coke, or what they can, and then send a trusted
representative to the mainland with it to flog it and split the money and
they’ll all be rich. So off goes the trusty representative with a suitcase*
full of coke, worth on the streets like a quarter of a million, but of course
all Belize knows what’s been going down by now, so he gets robbed five minutes
after leaving the ferry.”
    “Oh, terrific,” I said. “Sounds like
my sort of real estate. Anyway. To regress slightly. You mentioned that what
would also be required would be some amiable seadog with a suitable boat. Would
you describe yourself as amiable, Cap’n?” v “The very picture of, sometimes,”
he said.
    “It would be too much I suppose to
expect that boat you own to be suitable, I guess,” I said. I
    “Oh, I don’t know,...” he said, as if
he was thinking it over. “She is a staunch old lady come to think about it,
seventy-six foot long, Texas built, glass hull, eight seventy-one Detroit
diesel main, double electronics, paper recorder, ; Raytheon loran, sleeps six
at a pinch, she might be up to it.”
    “Is she parked out there by any
chance?” I asked, indicating the bay.
    “Golly, no,” Dan said, looking
innocent. “Someone might scratch a fender or something out there, it’s so
crowded. I’ve got my own parking place, or moorage, as we like to put it, right
over there.” He made a gesture up the coast that took I in about fifty square
miles of tarantula territory.
    “Makes sense,” I said, nodding, “if
boat hops are any- thing like car hops.”
    Dan grinned again, then said, “Well,
citizens, this is all very enjoyable and all that—I like sitting in the sun and
yarning as much as the next sailor—but maybe it’s time we got down to it, comprende ?”
    I said I comprendoed. I told him what
we were up to as briefly as possible. When I was done, he had a few questions,
quite a few, which didn’t surprise me all that much.
    “When are you springing him?”
    It was then Wednesday. I said, “AH
being well, Friday afternoon.”
    “How?”
    I shrugged. “Where there is a will,
there is a way.”
    “Then what?” Dan said. “How are you
going to get him and you all down here?”
    Oops, I thought. Actually I thought
something a lot worse than oops. I hadn’t even considered that part of it, I’d
been so busy being clever about the rest.
    “Don’t worry, we got that in the
bag,” Benny said unexpectedly.
    “Of course we do, Dan,” I said,
recovering with customary adroitness. “It was one of the first things we took
care of.”
    “All right,” said Dan. “I’ll take
your word that you can get him out and get you all down here sometime Friday
evening, even though every federate south of Nuevo Laredo will be
looking under every cactus for you. What traces will you leave behind? What
kind of a trail? Are your backs covered at all? It’s not going to do you any
good if you do get to, say, Belize and then onto a plane if your names are
waiting on a list in every port of entry in the States.”
    “Ah,” I said. “I’m glad you asked
that, Dan. There will be no names on no lists, at least not our real ones
because we didn’t use real ones in Mérida or when we first crossed the border.
So no comeback there. As for a trail, I thought about that too. I suppose it’s
remotely