The Island by Peter Benchley Read Free Book Online Page A

Then Florio had recited the standard litany of bureaucratic cant: He didn’t know for sure why he had been transferred: people were transferred all the time; he did what he was told.
    None of these responses surprised Maynard. Florio was within a few years of retirement. Why should he jeopardize his pension just to get his name in a newsmagazine?
    The cab turned off Connecticut Avenue and climbed Thirty-fourth Street into a quiet, bosky neighborhood of old, medium-size, medium-price homes. The driver stopped in front of a gray stucco house with a sagging wooden front porch.
    Michael Florio was in his mid-forties, flat-bellied, evidently in good physical shape. His hair was cropped close to his skull. He wore a white T-shirt, and his hands, arms, and face were coated with fine white dust. There were goggle marks around his eyes.
    “I appreciate your seeing me,” Maynard said.
    “Yeah.” Florio ushered him into the hallway and shut the door. “Use a beer?”
    “Thanks.”
    Florio led the way back to the kitchen. Maynard guessed that he lived alone, for cooking in the kitchen would have been impossible: The room was a workshop. The round table was covered with drills and chisels and tiny hammers and pieces of ivory and bone. A vise had been bolted to the edge of the table. The shelves were filled with carvings—whales, sharks, fish, birds, and ships.
    “Nice stuff,” Maynard said.
    “Yeah.” Florio reached into the refrigerator for two cans of beer. “Gotta have a trade, for after. Can’t sit on the porch and watch the sun go down for twenty years.” He handed Maynard a beer and said, “I don’t do interviews.”
    “I gathered.”
    “Anything I say . . . I mean, if I say anything . . . is off the record.”
    “That’s fine.”
    “Is it?” Florio was surprised.
    Maynard sipped his beer. “Don’t take offense, but I’m not really interested in you.”
    “Good. I don’t want anybody interested in me. Twenty and out and screw ’em all.”
    “I don’t want to hassle you. I won’t even identify you if you don’t want me to.”
    “That’s it.” Florio was beginning to relax. He sat down and motioned Maynard to a seat across the table. A half-carved eagle’s head was clamped in the vise, and Florio could not take his eyes from it.
    Maynard pointed at the eagle. “Don’t let me stop you.”
    “Good.” Florio drained his beer and put on a pair of goggles and attacked the eagle with a slender chisel held between his fingertips. “They still call me, you know.”
    “Who does?”
    “The relatives of the missing ones. They know I cared—I did, too—and they think I can help. I can’t, but they think I can. It tears you up, seeing how they go on hoping.”
    “Can anybody? Help, I mean.”
    Florio shook his head. “The bitch of it is, there’s no cover-up or anything; it’s not like Watergate. It’s just . . .” He looked up. “I don’t know what it is. It’s like the Coast Guard says, ‘If we can find you easily, we will. If we can’t, tough titty. If you send us a radio message that you’re in trouble, we’ll bust our hump for you’—and I tell you, those guys are magicians when they get their act together—‘but if you disappear without a trace, well, good riddance.’ They’re a policeman on a beat, not a missing-persons bureau.”
    “Six hundred and ten boats! There’s got to be some answer.”
    “Sure, a bunch of them. You know some; you told me on the phone. There’s more: badly built boats that people take where they shouldn’t, people who sink their own boats for the insurance and then drown before they can be picked up, freak weather. One boat here, one boat there, they’re all good answers. But you’re right: more than six hundred goddamn boats! How many more, no one knows. Look at Marita, just the other day. That one’s a good and a bad example, by the way.”
    “How so?”
    “Good, because she was a sturdy boat, well built and well maintained, sailed by a