Billy howled loudly enough that the trio actually missed a couple of notes. "I know that dude, man! I know him!"
I did not react right away. The trio was looking directly at us and Billy was waiting for me to acknowledge my good fortune.
"Where do you know him from?" I asked cautiously.
"From sailing, man."
"Back east?"
"No, out here. Remember I told you about training? We did a tune-up race, Newport Beach to Ensenada, and he was there. Him and Doc ran into each other down there in Mexico." Billy was smiling, but sweat was rolling down his face.
"He was racing, too?"
Billy busied himself wiping his eyes clear. He did it by using his shoulders. "I don"t think so. I think he was just there, "cause he was coming up from the other direction. He just sailed up from Tamarindo."
"Which is where?"
Billy looked doubtful for a moment. He also looked like he was losing weight by the minute. "I think it"s Costa Rica, man."
"This meeting, did it seem to be unexpected?"
"Absolutely. It was like, real unexpected."
I let him know he needed to elaborate on that one.
"Like neither one of them expected the other to be there and all of a sudden there they both were." Billy gestured with his hand back and forth from his chest to mine, as though the same thing had just happened to us.
"Was it awkward?"
"Awkward?" Billy repeated. I was taxing him now. He had to talk it through, recite the facts to answer the question. "We were in a restaurant at this big table, I remember, and Doc was at the head of the table because he was buying-and all of a sudden this guy walked by and they recognized each other and Doc stood up. I remember that because I was sitting right there at Doc"s end and I figured he was gonna start introducing everyone. So I was getting ready, you know?" He demonstrated how he was getting ready by placing both his hands on the edge of the table as if about to spring to his feet. "But the two of them just talked for a minute and that"s where I heard the dude tell Doc he had come up from Tamarindo. And I"m, like, waiting the whole time." He relaxed his grip. "But then the guy just left."
"And you thought that was strange?"
"Well, what happened was, okay ..." Billy pulled his upper lip as if trying to extract the memory from his mind, get it to come out his mouth. "Okay, after the guy leaves, Doc asks if I knew who he was. I wasn"t sure, you know? So I ask what his name was and he goes, "Jason Whatever, used to sail off the Cape." "
"Stockover."
"What?"
"Jason Stockover, that"s the guy I"m looking for."
"Yeah. That"s him. Guy from Tamarindo."
He seemed very anxious that I understand that. At the time, I a.s.sumed it was because he wanted to make sure I got my money"s worth.
"HE"S GONE," I TOLD BARBARA.
"He can"t be," she insisted.
I explained the situation and she cursed Tyler"s name. Then I told her about Billy, and about Jason. "Can you make up an excuse for me?"
I asked.
"Like what?"
"Like, I don"t know, tell Mitch I broke my leg."
"Except when you come walking in a couple of days from now, what are you going to say then?"
"That I went to Mexico for a miracle cure. I don"t know. Tell him I"ve got the flu."
"And that you"re still in Hawaii?"
"Let him think that, yeah."
"Only you won"t be."
"Well, I"m in California now, so obviously not."
"Where will you be?"
"Costa Rica. Where else?"
TAMARINDO, COSTA RICA, July 2008.
I FLEW INTO THE CAPITAL, SAN JOSe, YET ANOTHER MISTAKE BY a naive traveler. I rented a car and drove for hours until the pavement ran out. Then I continued on a hard-packed dirt road until I was sure I had gone the wrong way. By this time I was in cattle country, and I was supposed to be heading for the coast. The red-orange dust swirled around me, making me keep the windows closed and limiting my vision to no more than about ten to fifteen yards ahead of me. And then all of a sudden there was an apparition, a barefoot man carrying a surfboard across the road. I hit the brakes.
The dust raced past me, back to front, and then it cleared and there was a bank on my left. An honest-to-G.o.d Bank-of-America type bank. And behind that was some minishopping mall. There had, indeed, been a surfer crossing my path. He had reached the far side of the road and was walking up a sidewalk with a board under his arm. I looked back to the side from which he had come, looked through trees and what were now wisps of dust, and I could see ocean water.
I drove on.
The city center was basically a fork in the road. Turn left, go slightly uphill, come to restaurants and surf shops and little businesses selling trips to see tortoises, sailboat rides, deep-sea fishing excursions, zipline and rainforest adventures; turn right and head down toward the water, where smaller, older shops sold trinkets, jewelry, Central American fast foods, bathing suits, T-shirts, skirts and wraps and blouses, and where the streets were made of cobblestones and men walked around hawking boxes of Cuban cigars.
I drove until I got slightly south of town, where I came upon a bungalow-like hotel that fronted the beach. For a hundred bucks a night I got a room in the Captain Suizo, directly on Playa Tamarindo. It was July, and the place was barely occupied because it was supposed to be the rainy season, off-season for tourists. Except there was no sign of rain that I could see. All I could see was dust.
The woman who checked me in was thin, with long blond hair that marked her as an exotic in Costa Rica. It turned out she was from Denmark.
"Oh, Copenhagen?"
"No."
It was that way with the whole process-no further information needed. Stay, don"t stay ... one night, two nights, three nights, whatever you wish. I tried to be just as laid back as I told her I had come down from California and, hey, you happen to know an American named Jason who lives in town? Her casualness reached the point of lethargy. No, she didn"t know anyone named Jason. Here was my room key. Go around the back of the building, ground floor, third door. Goodbye.
I WALKED THE BEACH. IT WAS AN EASY WALK AND PEOPLE SEEMED to be using it as the main means of getting to and from town. Most of the people I encountered were quite friendly, especially the older Anglos. They smiled at me as if we shared a secret, as if we each had discovered a place that was absolutely perfect but ought to be kept quiet. I didn"t think it was perfect. Someone was building a high-rise within twenty-five yards of the water, and gray cement dust was mixing with the brown road dust and the noise of hammers. .h.i.tting spikes and forklifts dinging as they backed up and cement mixers rattling and occasionally banging; and all of it was ruining the tranquility of the bay. Still, I nodded amiably at anyone and everyone whose eyes met my own, and I looked for an opening where I could say Hi, how are you? You know Jason Stockover?
It did not take long to realize that the people who weren"t smiling were the younger ones, those in their twenties and thirties. If I got anything in response to my silent overtures, it was only a nod, a quick nod as they moved on, moved past. Don"t ask me anything, man, they seemed to say. I wasn"t here, remember?
The older people had a secret place. The younger ones just had secrets.
I got to town and found a bar at the edge of the sand. A restaurant-bar.
I walked in off the beach and sat down at an outdoor table on a concrete ap.r.o.n. For a while, n.o.body came to wait on me, and then a waitress showed up, a local girl, a Tica, short, squat, with a dazzling smile when she chose to use it and the same att.i.tude I had seen at the hotel. You want to eat? Fine. You want to drink? Fine. You don"t want either one? That"s fine, too. I asked her what was good and she said coconut pie. I looked at my watch, saw that it was only three o"clock and ordered coconut pie and a beer. It turned out to be the best coconut pie I ever had.
Then I sat and stared at the water and wondered what I should do next.
I EVENTUALLY HAD to notice the sailboats. We were on a big bay, a broad bay, and it had no marina as such. Sailboats were simply anch.o.r.ed, most of them about a quarter-mile off sh.o.r.e. There were nice-looking two- and even three-masted craft out there, flying flags of the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries that I did not immediately recognize. Jason Stockover, my prey, was a sailor. He had sailed with the Gregorys. He had sailed to the finish of the Ensenada race just to be there when the compet.i.tors came in.
I called the waitress over and when she eventually made it I asked where the sailors hung out. She ran the question through her mind, probably translating it as she tried to understand what I was asking. "Here," she said.
I looked around. It was now about four o"clock and the only other customers at the restaurant were a table full of Germans pounding Imperial beers faster than I was. She saw me look and said, "Wait."
A minute later she was back with the manager. I had seen her before, seen her messing with napkins and things like that, moving in and out of the kitchen, but I had not paid much attention. Now I did. She was a jockish-looking woman whose short brown hair did not quite go with her complexion. She had a slight gap between her front teeth and a dusting of freckles that had more or less been faded by the sun. She wore a sleeveless blue shirt that showed off a pair of muscular arms and that was not intended to reach the top of her white cotton drawstring pants, from which a tattooed green-and-red bird was clawing its way upward to get to her magnificently flat belly. "Hi," she said.
"Hi," I said, trying not to look at her tattoo, not to look at her belly.
"You wanna go sailing?" She was clearly an American.
"Well, I was just asking. I see all the boats out there and I didn"t realize this was a sailor"s port."
"It"s not, really. More of a fishing village turned surfer town. Those boats ... mostly people who like to cruise the coastline." She put her hand over her brow and stared out to sea as if to confirm what she had just told me. I again tried not to look at her belly.
She was saying something about people who were sailing around the world sometimes coming in and anchoring for a week or two. But there was not really a sailing culture in Tamarindo.
She p.r.o.nounced the word "cul-tcha."
I asked where she was from.
She told me all over.
I said she had a Boston accent and she blushed. "Yeah. Grew up around there," she said, "a long time ago. I been trying to lose it."
I told her I was from the Cape and a whole new look came over her face. It was as though she was inspecting each and every one of my features, making sure it pa.s.sed muster. She wanted to know where I was staying and I took that as a good sign, a sign to keep talking. She listened attentively until I asked if she knew a guy named Jason Stockover.
No, she told me, didn"t know him. And she really had to get back to work.
"Nice chatting with you," I said, but she was already gone, there was somebody at the front desk, somebody who could not pick out one of the twenty empty tables for himself.
I flagged the waitress and ordered another Imperial. Then I looked around. The manager had disappeared. More people came in. They simply sat down without the manager"s help.
I got the waitress"s attention yet again.
"Yes?" she asked, smiling as though I was becoming a pain in the a.s.s, ordering my beers one at a time, not even giving her a few minutes ... five, ten, fifteen ... to go and get them.
"The manager," I said. "What"s her name?"
"Leanne," she said.
"That"s what I thought," I said.
I WALKED BACK TO THE HOTEL AND TRIED THE DANE.
The waitress hadn"t been able to tell me any more than Leanne"s name and the fact that she was the owner"s girlfriend. The owner whose name was not Jason, but J.T. Which was close enough. She did not know where they lived. But she had pushed her hand in the direction of the Captain Suizo.
"Yes," the Dane said when I asked if she knew the restaurant down the beach. She had been leaning on the reception desk, reading a newspaper. It was a tabloid newspaper, printed in Spanish, with lots of photos. She looked up, as if she actually were going to pay attention to me this time.
"You want a reservation?" Her tone said such a thing was unnecessary, maybe even unimaginable.
"No. I was hoping you could tell me something about the person who owns it."
"The restaurant?"
I nodded, tried to look as though it was a perfectly innocent question.
"You mean J.T.?"
"J.T. what?"
"What?" the woman said back. She folded the newspaper without looking at what she was doing.
"What"s his last name?"
"You want to buy the restaurant?"