Edward Marriott - Savage Shore: Life and Death With Nicaraguas Last Shark Hunters

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The shark-fin dealer, sweating heavily, coughed wetly into his handkerchief.

Go on, he said to his assistant, an old man who stood silently before us. Open the bag.

The old man lowered his eyes and began to untwist the plastic. He smoothed it, shook it down, and then, very slowly, started to roll back the top. The plastic sighed and crackled; the dealers mongrelsscabby, baldinggrowled, dozily.

Bull-shark fins, announced the dealer, his hands clasping and unclasping in his lap. Dorsal, pectoral, tail fin. Go on, you can look.

I sat forward; the old man nodded encouragingly. From the bag I lifted a small handful, laid them in my open palms, surprised by how little they weighed. They cannot have come from large sharksthe longest fin was no more than eight inches across, the smallest less than five. They were a pure, dull gray, with a skein of palest blue: a painters stormy sky. The knife cut had exposed a tidy wound, already sun-dried hard as wood: a slice of ivory ligament and, between the edges of skin, a wafer of caramel-colored flesh.

And the rest? To judge by the number of boards Id seen around Bluefields with the dealers name and address and his trademark grinning shark, he was surely the biggest buyer on the coast. It was to this man, Obregn, that my friend Arturo, the shark fisherman, sold his catch, and I half expected to see a freezer truck unloading finsat the very least, a fridgeful in the house.

The rest? He tried to smile, but it came out all lopsided, a post-dentist smile. This is all I have. Maximothe other dealer, that crookhe and my wife, they smashed in, took my dollars and my shark fins. I built thishe waved a hefty arm about his yard, indicating the steel mesh that enclosed us, overhead and above each perimeter wallbecause next time they come for me.

* * *

Obregn was near-cylindrical, a vast, neckless mestizo with a pale, waxy face and hair that, through either neglect or some quirky Atlantic Coast fashion, was pasted flat to his scalp. Beside him hed laid a jailers hoop of keys, and he would pick these up and stroke each in turn, feeling across the ridges, then lift the whole bunch to his chest, pressing them close. The night of the robberyjust two weeks earlierhed been here, in the house.

Did you see what happened? Try and stop them? Even stumbling and bleary, a naked Obregn would have cut a pretty intimidating figure.

He shook his head. Asleep. He rattled his keys, snapped out an order. The old man shuffled away toward the house.

And no one else heard? It was hard to believe there was much privacy in this street; the houses were of wood or corrugated zinc, their backyards separated only by wire fence.

Obregn stared at his knees, chewed the inside of his cheek, blinked repeatedly.

It just seems odd, I went on, when it was clear he wasnt planning to answer. I mean, they cant have been particularly quiet.

Yes, well. He threw his keys onto the seat beside him and mumbled, Mi mujer. My woman.

Your wife?

My woman, my girlfriend. She was here.

With you?

He blushed at this, wiping a hand hard across his face. He made as if to stand up, then, overbalancing, fell back heavily in the swing seat. No s. I dont know what happened.

Your girlfriend. Wheres she now? Far better to hear her testimony: taken alone, Obregns accusations amounted to little more than hearsay.

Not here.

Shell be back?

No, she left. The day after they took my fins.

* * *

Obregns finsa months haul, almost a hundred pounds in weighthad been stored in a triple-padlocked chest in one corner of his living room. The chest was nailed to the floor and to two walls. His house, which stood on stilts, was small but secure, or so he believed: Barred doors secured front and back, and every night at seven, Obregn would bolt and lock up, transfer six Victorias from fridge to portable cooler, sit down to three hours of subtitled American movies on satellite, then sleep the sleep of a dead man, content in the knowledge that both he and his booty were untouchable.

Then, two weeks ago while he slept, they sawed through his floor. Obregn, frothing a little at the mouth now, led me inside the house and lifted the lid of the chest. What do you see? he said, but Id stepped too close to his raised arm and, before realizing, sucked in a lungful of sour sweat. I backed off, dizzy, and approached again more slowly, keeping my distance this time. In the bottom of the chest was a jagged hole: a triangle, perhaps eight inches across. And, three feet below that, the littered earth. I reached down, amazed that Obregn could have slept through: his bed was only in the next room, separated from here by a plywood partition. One of his dogs, hearing us, had sloped under the house and was looking up through the hole, head on one side. It sniffed the wood, pressed its nose through, sawdust on its whiskers.

Useless dog, Obregn spat, and slammed the lid.

* * *

A hundred pounds of bull-shark fins were worth four thousand dollars; Obregn bought from fishermen at thirty-six dollars a pound, which, on a haul this size, spelled a dealers cut of four hundred dollars, handsome earnings in a country where the monthly salary hovered around fifty dollars. Until hed set up shop two years ago, his rival Maximo had enjoyed a monopoly in Bluefieldsdictating the prices, buying from the fishermen at ten dollars a pound and shipping to El Salvador and Miami at forty dollars. Hed become a very rich man, according to Obregn, and must have guessed that, sooner or later in the new, free-market Nicaragua, competition would arrive.

Yet, compared with thirty years before, Maximo and Obregn were really just squabbling over the leftovers. In the 1960s, by contrast, there had been fifteen or twenty shark-fin dealers on the coast. This figure accelerated exponentially until, in 1969so shark fishermen would ruefully remind methe dictator Anastasio Debayle Somoza built a processing plant on Lake Nicaragua. From then until 1979, when the Sandinistas overthrew his regime and closed the plant, many thousands of bull sharks were slaughtered each year for their fins, their oil, and their skins.

They were hunted here, in Bluefields; at the mouth and up the length of the Ro San Juan; and throughout Lake Nicaragua itself. It was hard to believe there wasnt some measure of revenge in the very scale of the slaughter: a desperate assertion of mans supremacy, coupled with a horror of the deep, of everything unseen.

* * *

Nicaraguas jungle coast. Not the Caribbeandespite cartographers insistencesbut, deliberately, the Atlantic. No one here spoke of this ocean, with its broken, unlovely shoreline, as the Caribbean: that would have been too misleading, too obvious a misrepresentation. No, this was the Atlantic Coast, with its mangrove swamps and alligators, hurricanes and stiff westers that washed up bales of high-grade cocaine, shrink-wrapped for export. Three hundred years ago, pirates sheltered here, at constant war with the Spanish; now, the people still viewed themselves as being apart. They had lost their king and they had lost their power, were poorer than they had ever been, but soon, they warned, they would rise up again.