Read Online The Aztec Heresy by Paul Christopher - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Paul Christopher
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Mystery & Detective, Suspense fiction, Detective and Mystery Stories, cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat, Archaeologists, Women archaeologists
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between the buildings and the palms, they saw half a dozen overweight-looking cruise ships, sparkling white except for the crimson blot of the old Big Red Boat, once the Disney flagship but now owned by an obscure cartel of Spanish businessmen.
Poitier guided the rattletrap taxi through a quick set of left and right turns, finally coming out onto Bay Street again, now one way with all the traffic pointing east toward the bridge to Paradise Island and the Atlantis resort with its enormous aquarium and even larger casinos. Until the building of Atlantis, Bay Street had been the relatively civilized two-way main thoroughfare of Nassau, but the one-way change had turned traffic into a chaotic choked parade of taxis, jitney buses, and private cars turning up and down narrow side streets in an almost impossible effort to go in any other direction but east, through the center of town.
Poitier managed to get them out of the morning rush-hour hell past the banks and souvenir shops that lined both sides of Bay Street, past the government buildings and the brooding, funereal statue of Queen Victoria, finally heading down to the commercial docks and warehouses at the foot of Armstrong Street, just before the bridge to Atlantis.
Back down Bay Street at the Prince George Wharf, where the cruise ships docked, there was everything from a marketplace for stuffed barracuda heads, polished conch shells, and straw hats to half-naked men who’d behead a coconut for you with a single swipe of their machetes and twelve-year-old girls who’d give you cornrows for a dollar a plait. At the Armstrong wharf there was an old fireboat, a few conch-fishing trawlers, a couple of bottled-water barges from Miami, and two bottom-of-the -barrel deep-sea charters, wooden boats from the fifties, paint peeling, teak decks bleached bone white after half a century of salt and sun.
And then there was the Hispaniola . They’d argued about the name for weeks, trying out everything from the Gold Bug to the Dawn Treader —and every other fictional ship name in between from the Witch of Endor to the Orca, from Jaws. In the end the only one they could agree on was Hispaniola, the ship that had taken Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver to Treasure Island, although, according to Billy, Robert Louis Stevenson’s nephew had unilaterally decreed that his uncle should not put any girls into the story, which Finn resented, just a little.
The Hispaniola had a history older than either Finn or Billy. Dutch-built by J. T. Smith & Zone in 1962 for a British owner and originally named M.V. Severn, the Hispaniola was a 175-foot -long oceangoing tug that spent most of its early working life dragging oil rigs around the North Sea. She had been bought and sold several times since but had been rescued from the scrap yard by their lawyer, friend, and junior partner, Guido Derlagen, the stuffy Amsterdamer who’d thrown off his bureaucratic ways and now did all their legal work for them wearing unbelievably wild Tommy Bahamas tropical shirts and sunbathing on the bridge deck. Guido, who managed the incredible wealth they’d discovered in the secret room of the ancient house Billy and Finn had inherited on the Herengracht canal, got a respectable deal on the thirty-five-year-old tug, and eighteen months later it was reborn at Scheldepoort in Flushing as a free-ranging explorer yacht that could take its new owners around the world and back again, her twin diesels cruising at a respectable twelve knots through any seas you could throw at her. The only problem with the ship was that the engines never gave Run-Run McSeveney, their half-Scot, half-Chinese engineer, any trouble at all, a fact that made him even more cranky than usual. Of the original crew of the old Batavia Queen, the rusting freighter they’d lost during a China Sea typhoon two years before, McSeveney, Briney Hanson, the master, and Eli Santoro, the eye-patch -wearing thirty-year-old ex-U.S. Navy first officer, were all
Poitier guided the rattletrap taxi through a quick set of left and right turns, finally coming out onto Bay Street again, now one way with all the traffic pointing east toward the bridge to Paradise Island and the Atlantis resort with its enormous aquarium and even larger casinos. Until the building of Atlantis, Bay Street had been the relatively civilized two-way main thoroughfare of Nassau, but the one-way change had turned traffic into a chaotic choked parade of taxis, jitney buses, and private cars turning up and down narrow side streets in an almost impossible effort to go in any other direction but east, through the center of town.
Poitier managed to get them out of the morning rush-hour hell past the banks and souvenir shops that lined both sides of Bay Street, past the government buildings and the brooding, funereal statue of Queen Victoria, finally heading down to the commercial docks and warehouses at the foot of Armstrong Street, just before the bridge to Atlantis.
Back down Bay Street at the Prince George Wharf, where the cruise ships docked, there was everything from a marketplace for stuffed barracuda heads, polished conch shells, and straw hats to half-naked men who’d behead a coconut for you with a single swipe of their machetes and twelve-year-old girls who’d give you cornrows for a dollar a plait. At the Armstrong wharf there was an old fireboat, a few conch-fishing trawlers, a couple of bottled-water barges from Miami, and two bottom-of-the -barrel deep-sea charters, wooden boats from the fifties, paint peeling, teak decks bleached bone white after half a century of salt and sun.
And then there was the Hispaniola . They’d argued about the name for weeks, trying out everything from the Gold Bug to the Dawn Treader —and every other fictional ship name in between from the Witch of Endor to the Orca, from Jaws. In the end the only one they could agree on was Hispaniola, the ship that had taken Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver to Treasure Island, although, according to Billy, Robert Louis Stevenson’s nephew had unilaterally decreed that his uncle should not put any girls into the story, which Finn resented, just a little.
The Hispaniola had a history older than either Finn or Billy. Dutch-built by J. T. Smith & Zone in 1962 for a British owner and originally named M.V. Severn, the Hispaniola was a 175-foot -long oceangoing tug that spent most of its early working life dragging oil rigs around the North Sea. She had been bought and sold several times since but had been rescued from the scrap yard by their lawyer, friend, and junior partner, Guido Derlagen, the stuffy Amsterdamer who’d thrown off his bureaucratic ways and now did all their legal work for them wearing unbelievably wild Tommy Bahamas tropical shirts and sunbathing on the bridge deck. Guido, who managed the incredible wealth they’d discovered in the secret room of the ancient house Billy and Finn had inherited on the Herengracht canal, got a respectable deal on the thirty-five-year-old tug, and eighteen months later it was reborn at Scheldepoort in Flushing as a free-ranging explorer yacht that could take its new owners around the world and back again, her twin diesels cruising at a respectable twelve knots through any seas you could throw at her. The only problem with the ship was that the engines never gave Run-Run McSeveney, their half-Scot, half-Chinese engineer, any trouble at all, a fact that made him even more cranky than usual. Of the original crew of the old Batavia Queen, the rusting freighter they’d lost during a China Sea typhoon two years before, McSeveney, Briney Hanson, the master, and Eli Santoro, the eye-patch -wearing thirty-year-old ex-U.S. Navy first officer, were all