The Pope of Palm Beach Read online

  “Oh, I am?” Sterling’s grin curled up into a prep school sneer.

  “We’re not trespassing,” said Serge. “You’ll go to jail.”

  “Look around!” Sterling briefly pointed the Tasers in opposite directions up and down the shore. “There are no witnesses on the whole beach! I’ll just say you fell back across the mean-high-tide line after I Tased you. Who do you think they’re going to believe? I’m rich!”

  Chapter 4

  1968

  Thirty tiny children sat in thirty tiny school desks. All crying inconsolably.

  Except one.

  Little Serge rolled his eyes.

  A large, stern nun shaped like a water heater stood yelling at the front of the classroom. Her name was Sister Imogen. She bore down on the students, and crying intensified. Her nun hat had those fins.

  Sister Imogen once again was threatening to keep the entire class after school. But it was a double threat: She also wouldn’t tell their parents.

  In second grade, being kept after school without telling parents was the death penalty. Their folks would show up to take them home, wonder where the kids were and eventually leave. Then Sister Imogen would turn the class out on the street after dark and of course they’d all die. They’d discussed it at length on the playground.

  The children glanced nervously out the window. Parents began to arrive. The survival clock was ticking. Suddenly one of the seven-year-olds, a kid named Jimmy Scarpotto, suffered a breakdown. He ran to the front of the room and bent over. “Spank me! Do anything you want! Just let me go!”

  “Sit back down!”

  “But my mom doesn’t know I’m being kept after school!” Racking sobs. “Spank me!”

  “I said, sit down!”

  Halfway back in the room, Little Serge covered his face with his hands. “The shame.”

  Then, to everyone’s amazement, Jimmy kicked Sister Imogen in the shin and ran out the door.

  “Come back here!” The nun chased after him.

  Serge used the opportunity to dash to the front of the room. “Everyone, listen to me! Don’t show fear! They can smell it. It’s what she wants!”

  There were many such days at Saint Francis Elementary in Riviera Beach. Besides facing death after school, Serge’s other big memory was being sent to the office.

  He brought a baking-soda-and-vinegar rocket to class, and it somehow went off, shattering against the blackboard.

  “Go to the principal’s office!”

  Out of the blue he decided it would be an interesting experiment to start repeating everything the nun said.

  “Get out your pencils.”

  “Get out your pencils.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Who said that?”

  “Go to the office!”

  “Go to the office!”

  The next day he chose not to speak at all, rigidly gripping his desk until three nuns pried him loose.

  Another time his desk was simply on fire.

  “The office!”

  Then the big one. He started taking Communion, but on the way back to his pew, he’d furtively remove the little white circle from his mouth and stick it in his pocket. “This is way too important to just eat.” And one morning Sister Imogen happened to look inside Serge’s open cardboard pencil box to see all these Communion wafers stacked like poker chips. She gasped and grabbed her heart. “What?” said Serge. “I’m collecting them. See? I’ve written the dates on each one.”

  A trip to the office and confession.

  “I want to kill Sister Imogen.”

  “What!” said the priest.

  “Of course I’m not going to do it,” said Little Serge. “I’m just hoping for some kind of car accident.”

  Another powerful memory was all the scuttlebutt on the playground. The scarier the story, the better. Like the kid at Saint Clair’s in the next town who was kept after school and never seen again. But the most frightening tale making the rounds was Trapper. And not just at the playground, but in nearly every household in the county. All the parents talked about Trapper. Which was quite a phenomenon because Trapper wasn’t in the news, and almost nobody could even remember ever seeing him. It only made the rumors all the more mysterious, and adults referred to him in ominous, hushed tones. That’s how it filtered down to the schoolyards. Every child who grew up in that time and place knew the story of Trapper.

  The maximum bogeyman of Palm Beach County.

  Trapper was short for Trapper Nelson. A wild and crazy hermit who lived in the remote woods way up the equally wild Loxahatchee River, where almost nobody dared venture. He was said to live off the land, skinning alligators and anything else he could catch. And he’d shoot on sight anyone who came near his camp. Maybe skin them, too. The few people who’d gotten close enough by canoe reported glimpses of a shadowy figure darting among the trees onshore. Then hearing warning shots. He was known as the “Tarzan of the Loxahatchee.” The kids in the schoolyards loved that.

  The actual facts were less mythical and more fascinating. Vincent Nostokovich was born in New Jersey around 1909. He hopped freight trains, was jailed in Mexico, and gambled his way to Florida, ending up on the beach near the Jupiter Lighthouse. He made money selling animal furs during the Depression and bought cheap land as far up the Loxahatchee as was navigable. Which meant no neighbors or anything else for miles. Trapper was tall and rugged, and by hand he cleared part of the land, built a makeshift dock and used slash pine and mortar to construct cabins and shelters so sturdy that they easily weathered every hurricane. He built pens for some of the animals he captured alive, and opened Trapper Nelson’s Zoo and Jungle Gardens in the 1930s, where visitors on boat tours often stopped for lunch.

  Then it started unraveling. His health declined, the state ordered his zoo closed due to poor conditions, and he fell behind on property taxes. It all combined to usher in the hermit era. Bitterness, paranoia, warning everyone to keep away or else.

  “He always carries a shotgun,” said one of Serge’s friends on the playground.

  “And there’s buried treasure,” said another.

  “Wow.”

  The Present

  On a peaceful night in the Florida Keys, pharmaceutical president Sterling Hanover aimed a pair of Tasers and fired. Serge anticipated the shot and dove to the side like a soccer goalie on a penalty kick. The dart and wire flew harmlessly into the water.

  Coleman, not so agile.

  “Aaaaauuuuu! Aaaaaaauuuuuu!” Flopping in the sand like a stranded fish.

  “You bastard!” yelled Serge, tackling Sterling and turning off the voltage to the weapon that had harpooned his pal.

  ( . . . We now move forward with your regularly scheduled program, already in progress . . . )

  Sterling Hanover sat tied to a post-modern chair in the rear of the house. “What are you going to do to me?”

  “Hold still.” Serge flicked a droplet off the end of a hypodermic needle.

  “Aaauu! You stabbed me!”

  “Don’t be such a baby.” Serge showed him the syringe. “Only a prick.”

  “You poisoned me?”

  “No, this is medicine. You of all people should recognize that.”

  “You drugged me! I’ll sue!”

  “Just a little insulin,” said Serge. “You have that one-too-many-doughnuts look.”

  “I’m starting to feel weird,” said Sterling, his eyes sweeping around the feng shui interior. “Getting thirsty. Now I’m hungry . . .”

  Serge examined the remaining level on the syringe. “When I said a little, actually a lot. I’m all about transparency.”

  “I’m hungrier than I’ve ever been in my entire life!” said Sterling. “I have to eat something right now!”

  Coleman stumbled over after helping himself at the wet bar. “What happened?”

  “He’s going into insulin shock, insane thirst and appetite. Step One is complete.”

  “No, I don’t mean that.” Coleman looked o
ut the glass doors facing the ocean. “Down on the beach. What happened to me?”

  “You were Tased, bro.” Serge began undoing the knots around Sterling’s wrists. “He got you with that space-age gun over on the coffee table.”

  Sterling broke free.

  Coleman picked up the Taser. “He’s going to escape!”

  Serge grabbed his friend’s arm. “Don’t shoot. He’s not going anywhere except the refrigerator.”

  Sterling was stuffing his face with stuffed crab when Serge seized him around the neck. “Our whole culture eats way too much comfort food . . .”

  “Aaauuu! I’m still hungry! Where are you taking me?”

  “To nature’s harvest.” Serge twisted an arm behind Sterling’s back and led him across the room.

  From another direction: “Aaauuu!”

  Coleman twitched and flopped on the snow-white tile floor. Serge grabbed the Taser again and switched the power off. Coleman sat up and slapped the sides of his own face.

  “You moron,” said Serge. “You accidentally Tased yourself.”

  “No, that was deliberate,” said Coleman. “I like it.”

  “You what—?”

  Crash, smash, glass breaking. Sterling was back at the open refrigerator, arms inside, scooping the entire contents of a shelf toward his chest. Serge captured him again and led him outside toward the shore. “Why eat that genetically altered crap in a suspended-animation preservative stew when you possess some of the freshest food our state has to offer right in your own backyard?”

  “Where?”

  “Over by those mangroves. A couple of magnificent beach apple trees. See the succulent, glistening fruit?”

  Sterling took off at a sprint.

  Coleman waddled over with a Romanian crystal rocks glass topped off with vintage Rémy Martin Louis XIII. “What’s going on now?”

  “Step Two,” said Serge. “You’ve got about three hundred dollars of liquor in that glass.”

  Gulp. “Not anymore.”

  Over in the mangroves. “Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!” Sterling spit out the first bite of fruit and ran back screaming. “My mouth is on fire! My hands! My eyes!”

  Serge pulled a bottle of spring water from his gym bag. “Here you go. Don’t swallow because you’ll wash the bad stuff down and then your esophagus and GI tract will give you air-raid sirens. Just gargle and spit, repeat . . .”

  Coleman reached way back and flung the rocks glass high in the air toward the house.

  “That’s a four-hundred-dollar piece of crystal,” said Serge.

  Crash.

  “Not anymore.” Coleman looked down at a gagging, drooling young man. “I get it. You put something in the bottled water.”

  “Nope.” Serge grabbed another of the bottles and sipped it himself.

  Sterling continued flushing his mouth. Between rinses: “My eyes, my throat, my whole face and neck.” Gargle, spit. “Why is everything burning?”

  “I’m all about transparency.” Serge pointed at the tree. “Now, that was poison.”

  Cough, cough. “Those beach apples?”

  “A big no-no. All residents down here learn not to eat them.”

  “Then why’d you let me?”

  “To polish your Sunshine State survival skill set.” Serge poured more water on a washcloth and handed it to Sterling. “The early Floridians four thousand years ago went through the same trial and error. A guy on the edge of the tribe screaming and clawing his eyes, and the chief: ‘Make a note. Don’t eat that one.’”

  Sterling wiped his burning face with the moist towel. “But you said it was a beach apple.”

  “It is,” said Serge. “Sounds delicious and inviting, doesn’t it? From the manchineel tree, found in the mangrove lowlands of Florida, particularly in the Flamingo area on the southern tip of the mainland and along the Keys. Spanish call it ‘little apple of death.’”

  “I’m going to die?”

  “Not likely, but the experience is a bitch on tractor tires.” Serge pulled a field guide from the gym bag. “Says here that it’s one of the most highly irritant trees on earth. Don’t eat the fruit, don’t touch it, don’t brush against it, don’t even breathe near it. Wow, you picked the wrong plant.”

  “I’m starting to feel better,” said Sterling. “Except my nose . . . my whole sinus cavity is still burning up.”

  “Got just the panacea,” said Serge, pulling out a small bottle of nasal spray and tossing it. “Non-medicated saline solution, so there’s no problem if you use too much.”

  Sterling sprayed and sprayed until water poured out both nostrils. “It’s starting to work.”

  Coleman fired up a joint. “It’s starting to get boring.”

  “Actually it’s just about to get ridiculously interesting,” said Serge. “Step Three.”

  “I get it,” said Coleman. “This time you put something in the nasal spray. It’s not water.”

  “No, it’s really water,” said Serge. “Just not what originally came in the bottle. It’s Florida river water. It’s got a kicker.”

  “River water?”

  “I could have just filled it from a river, but then I wouldn’t be sure about Step Three, so to be on the safe side I stole this sample from a wetlands lab in Gainesville,” said Serge. “The security was next to nothing because other than me, who bothers?”

  “Why’d you have to steal water from a lab?”

  “Because they were studying what I needed for my project,” said Serge. “It’s pretty rare, but worldwide more than half the cases that have been diagnosed come from Texas and Florida. Naegleria fowleri.”

  “What’s that?”

  Serge grabbed Sterling’s left arm and steadied him on the walk back to the house. “As usual, I was boning up on my Florida ecology, and when I first saw it on the Internet I thought it was click-bait—the freakiest, most nightmarish thing I’ve ever heard of that exists in our state—but it’s definitely real, and more than lives up to its name: brain-eating amoeba.”

  “Good God!” said Coleman. “And I thought flesh-eating bacteria was bad.”

  “You’d pray for those critters if you had the brain-eaters in your head,” said Serge.

  “And that’s what this rich dude has right now?”

  “Afraid so.”

  Sterling staggered on. “You do realize I can hear everything you’re saying. You’re just trying to scare me. That’s bullshit.”

  “Of course it is,” said Serge. “Just like your pill pricing. Anyway, the amoeba can only infect you through the nose, where it travels to the brain. Normally this cantankerous bugger feasts on bacteria, but it’s somehow attracted by neurochemicals and will switch its value menu to your gray matter.”

  They returned to the house though the glass doors.

  “Back in the chair for you!” said Serge, looping and knotting rope again.

  “Haven’t you done enough to me?” Sterling began to tremble. “I swear not to tell anyone. Why don’t you just let me go?”

  “I am going to let you go.” Serge pulled hard on a sailor’s hitch. “But we’ll wait till morning.”

  “Why?”

  “Party!” yelled Coleman, drinking hundred-dollar slugs straight from the Rémy decanter.

  “He’s right,” said Serge. “We always celebrate at the end of the semester. And you’re just about to graduate.”

  “Serge! Come here! He has excellent taste in music!”

  Serge trotted over to the built-in media shelves. “So he does . . . And I’ve got the perfect tunes for the occasion, in honor of our host over there.”

  He selected a Floyd CD and stuck it in the stereo.

  “Crank it!” said Coleman.

  Serge turned the volume up to eleven.

  “. . . Money! . . . It’s a hit! . . .”

  Chapter 5

  1968

  Station wagons brimmed with Cub Scouts, heading north on U.S. 1 from Jupiter toward Hobe Sound. They turned into the entrance of Jonathan D
ickinson State Park and paid at the ranger station. A million field trips from every school and organization ended up at the park, because it was inexpensive, outdoors and the kids burned themselves out running around.

  Little Serge thought his Cub Scout uniform was stupid, but he liked his compass and flashlight and mess kit, and especially the snake-bite kit. He saw the wooden observation tower in the distance, the one he’d now climbed like ten times from all his other field trips. It stood on a natural sand dune that rose an entire eighty-six feet above sea level and was called Hobe Mountain. Because it was Florida.

  A troop of little blue caps bounced up to the top of the tower, looked at the ocean, bounced back down. The cars drove through the park to the landing by the water. Everyone changed into swimsuits and began splashing. Except Little Serge. He had another agenda. This might be his only chance. He strayed from the group to the rental canoes. He didn’t have any money but figured: I’m just a kid. What are they going to do?

  The adults were so busy making sure nobody drowned that they never noticed Serge slip the boat into the water and paddle out of sight around the mangroves and cabbage palms.

  The boy kicked off his shoes and paddled along in quiet solitude, bend after narrow bend, in childhood heaven. Branches overhead, osprey nests, herons, manatees, rows of turtles sunning on rotted logs sticking out of the brackish water. And alligators. Some became curious and neared the boat, and Serge simply clapped his paddle down flat on the surface to disperse them. The canoe disappeared around another ancient hairpin turn.

  The Loxahatchee River.

  Serge wiped his forehead and looked up as a hawk circled the sun. He checked his compass. The paddle went back in the water. It was taking longer than he thought. The river twisted and bent and forked as the sun tacked across the sky with more birds. It began to taper and still. Water bugs danced. Trees formed a canopy. He ducked under a cabbage palm that grew horizontally out from the shore before yearning upward. That’s when Serge saw it.

  He paddled to a fallen-down dock and tied off his boat. Bare feet climbed ashore. Small arms clawed their way through branches.