The Tide Between Us

Tuesday, August 19, 1975. Hillsboro Inlet, Florida.

The sloop was dying slowly, the way old wooden things do, and Gideon Marsh could hear every plank of it.

He stood in the wheelhouse of the Maribel with the spotlight swinging across black water, and the sound came to him over the diesel: a wet, tired groaning, like a mule that had walked too far. Forty feet of boat, maybe less. No lights. Riding so low that the swells washed clean across her deck.

"Tell me that's not what I think it is," said Lola Vega, who had come up the ladder from the engine room with a cigar in her teeth and grease to her elbows.

"It's what you think."

"Haitians?"

"Haitians." Gideon eased the throttle back. Off the starboard bow, the Hillsboro lighthouse swept its beam across the Atlantic, a hundred miles of nothing, and each time it passed, he saw heads. Dozens of them, bunched along the rail. A child's arm lifted, waving, as if the Maribel were a taxi.

"They're not going to make the inlet," Lola said. "The tide is running out like a bathtub."

"Then we make it for them."

He had towed drunks off sandbars and freighters out of the ship channel, and once a dead man in a shrimp net, but he had never towed a boat that was sinking as he watched. He put the Maribel alongside in a swell that wanted to kill them both, Lola threw the line, and a man on the sloop caught it with both hands and a prayer, and then the two boats were bound together, one dragging the other toward the lights of the shore.

It took fifty minutes. Nobody on the sloop screamed. That was what Gideon remembered afterward. Sixty-five people, and they went into that dark inlet as silent as a church.The Coast Guard got there first, and then the Border Patrol, and then the long white vans with INS lettered on the doors. By two in the morning the Pompano side of the inlet was blinding with headlights, and men in short-sleeved shirts were writing names on clipboards, and a woman with a blanket around her shoulders was saying the same word over and over.

"Asile. Asile."

"Ma'am, I don't speak-"

"Asile."

Gideon leaned against a piling with a coffee going cold in his hand and watched an agent give up and look around for someone, anyone, who understood. He was not surprised, when a girl pushed through the crowd at the barricade.

She was young, early twenties, small and straight-backed, in a yellow cotton dress that had no business being at a boat landing at two in the morning. Her hair was pinned up under a scarf. Her hands held a notebook against her chest like a shield. She said something to the agent, quick and low, and he shrugged and lifted the tape.

She went to the woman in the blanket and crouched and spoke in a language that sounded like water over stones. The woman's face broke open. She grabbed the girl's wrists. The words poured out. Gideon found that he had moved closer without meaning to.

"She says," the girl told the agent, and her English was careful, round, each word placed like a coin on a counter, "zat they are from Jérémie. Her husband is in the water. He did not come in. She asks that someone go back. Please. You must send a boat."

"Miss, we've got a procedure-"

"Eet is not a procedure. Eet is a man."

Her voice did not rise. That made it worse. The agent looked at his clipboard.

"Hey, Coast Guard," Gideon said.

They all turned. He had not meant to speak. He set the coffee on the piling.

"I've got a tug and a spotlight. I'll go back out. Somebody tell me where the husband went in."

The girl looked at him for the first time. She had a wide, grave face, brown eyes like tea held to the light, and the steady look of someone who has learned that favors cost.

"You are the captain of zat boat," she said."Gideon Marsh."

"You brought them here."

"I brought them in. They were sinking."

"You brought them here," she said, and he understood, a moment late, that she was pointing at the vans, the clipboards, the barbed gray fence behind the Border Patrol trucks. "To zis. They will put them in a jail. For a year, perhaps more. Their children. And you will go home and sleep."

He was tired. It had been a bad week, a worse month, and a mortgage payment he could not make was riding in his shirt pocket like a stone. He said what he should not have.

"Lady, I pulled them out of the ocean. Somebody else gets to decide what happens next."

"Somebody else." She said it the way a person tastes spoiled milk. "Always zere is somebody else."

"What's your name?"

"Why should I tell you?"

"So I know who to thank when I find her husband."

It was the wrong thing and the right thing, and she knew it. She lifted her chin.

"Solange Pierre-Louis," she said.

They found the husband at four-ten in the morning, clinging to a cooler lid two miles offshore, alive, blue with cold, singing a hymn. Lola hauled him over the rail like a tuna.

Gideon radioed it in, and when the Maribel limped back to the dock at dawn the girl was still there. She had not gone home. She stood on the pier with her notebook, looking gray with fatigue, and when the husband was carried down the gangway she bowed her head and said nothing and did not look at Gideon at all.

It bothered him more than thanks would have.

He was coiling line when she came to the edge of the pier.

"Captain."

"Gideon."

"I have a thing to ask. Not for me." She glanced behind her. A man in a damp gray suitwas being led by two agents toward a van, thin and gaunt, his shirt buttoned wrong. He turned his head and looked at the girl across the parking lot, and something passed between them like a held breath. "That is my uncle. Rodolphe. He was on your boat."

"Your uncle was on the sloop?"

"Since June he was in Cuba, in the Bahamas, the islands. It is a long story and I have no time." She lowered her voice, and the careful English began to fray at the edges. "They will take him to Dade County. They will not let me speak with him. But he will pass me something now, in two minutes. I need you to stand there. Là. Between me and zose men. As if you are shouting at me."

"Shouting at you."

"You were very rude before. It will look natural."

Despite everything, the corner of his mouth moved. "I can do rude."

He stepped between her and the agents and put his hands on his hips and said, loudly,

"Miss, I told you, this is a working dock!" and heard behind him a rustle, a whisper, the quick press of something into her hands. When he turned around she was holding her notebook to her chest again, hiding a slim tin pouch wrapped in oilcloth.

"Thank you," she said, and this time she meant it, and this time it was he who could not meet her eyes.

"What's in it?"

"You do not want to know."

"Probably not."

She was already walking, quick-footed, to a battered green Plymouth at the end of the lot. Lola came up beside him, puffing her cigar.

"That girl just stole something from the INS in front of forty people."

"I think so."

"I like her."

"She called me a murderer."

"She called you a taxi." Lola considered. "Different thing."

He didn't see her open the pouch. That happened an hour later, in the front seat of thePlymouth, parked on the shoulder of A1A with the windows rolled up against the heat and the sun coming through the salt-streaked glass. Solange Pierre-Louis, twenty-two years old, paralegal at Pruitt, Vail & Mendez, unrolled the oilcloth with hands that would not stay still.

Inside was a ledger. Thin, ruled, in her uncle's cramped bookkeeper's hand. Pages and pages of numbers, dates, ship names. The Estrella del Sur. The Marea Alta. A column of initials. A column of dollar amounts that made her stomach turn.

And on the last page, in the right margin, circled twice in red ink, three letters she knew.

She knew them from the letterhead on every document she had typed in the last year.

She knew them from the portrait that hung in the lobby of her own law firm.

H.C.

Harlan Crane.

She sat there with the engine ticking and the ocean glittering beyond the dunes, and she began, very quietly, to pray in French. Then the car radio, which she had left on low, cut through the static with the news from WIOD, a calm male voice reading the morning bulletin.

"...Miami shipping and real-estate magnate Harlan Crane, sixty-eight, was found dead early this morning at his Palm Beach estate. Police say foul play is not suspected. Mr. Crane leaves a widow, a son, and-according to sources close to the family-a large and unsettled estate..."

The ledger slid from her lap and fell open on the floor mat, its last page staring up at her.

Harlan Crane was dead. And she was the only person alive who knew what her uncle had been carrying, and who had paid him to carry it.