Crackdown

PART ONE

You cannot cheat death. It is not an illusion. It does not melt into air, into thin air, it is instead a clumsy thing of the night, to be discovered in the dawn.

And it was in the dawn, in a gentle Bahamian dawn, that I discovered Hirondelle.

She had been a cruising yacht; a pretty thirty-eight-foot fibreglass sloop. She had been a graceful thing, and she had been butchered.

When I found Hirondelle she was nothing but a barely floating derelict, so low in the water that I might have missed her altogether except that a heave of her sluggish hull flashed a reflection of the sun’s new wan light from a polished deck-fitting into my eyes. I was so tired that I almost took no notice, assuming that the scrap of light had been mirrored from a discarded and floating beer can, but something made me pick up my binoculars and there she was; a dead creature which rolled under the blows of the short dawn chop.

I could see no one aboard the rolling hull. Her apparent abandonment, together with my weariness, tempted me to ease my helm to starboard and thus slip past the stricken boat that, like any other piece of floating junk, would have been out of sight within moments, and forgotten within hours, but curiosity and my sense of duty would not let me ignore her. There was still a slight chance that a wounded mariner was aboard, and so the wave-drenched wreck had to be boarded.

At least the weather was being kind. There was no steep chop or gusting wind to make boarding the waterlogged hull difficult. Instead the dawn was a calm, lovely finish to what had been a perfect tropical night during which I had been reaching northwards with every sail set; jib, staysail, foresail, mainsail and both jackyard topsails. Wavebreaker must have looked unutterably beautiful in that ghostly sunrise until the moment when I ran her head into wind and pressed the buttons which controlled the electric motors that furled her sails. I still found it odd to be sailing a boat on which everything was mechanised, electrified or computerised because by inclination and income I was a sailor of simpler tastes, but for the present I was Wavebreaker’s hired skipper, and Wavebreaker was a luxury charter schooner, and the kind of people who rented her expected to find her loaded down with as many gadgets as a space shuttle.

We had no charterers aboard on the morning I discovered Hirondelle. Instead we had been ‘dead-heading’, meaning that Wavebreaker sailed with only her crew aboard. The three of us had just spent four weeks off the western coast of Andros where Wavebreaker had been hired to make a television commercial for cat food. The notion of the commercial had been that an extremely wealthy cat had chartered the schooner to search the world’s oceans for the best-tasting fish, only to discover that Pussy-Cute Cat Food had already caught and canned the taste. The commercial must have cost Pussy-Cute millions of dollars, and Wavebreaker had been overrun with camera crews, designers, visualisers, scriptwriters, cat-handlers, fish-handlers, directors, account executives, make-up girls, hairdressers, line-producers, assistant-producers, real producers, as well as all the girlfriends and boyfriends and hermaphrodite-friends of everyone involved. Serious adults had argued passionately about the motivation of the rich cat, and even I, who had thought myself immune to the insanities of the film world, had been astonished when an elderly actor had been specially flown down from New York to imitate the beast’s miaow because the real thing had not been considered sufficiently authentic. The elderly actor, coming aboard Wavebreaker for the first time, had stared at me in astonishment; then, though he had never seen me in his life before, he spread his arms in familiar and lavish welcome. “Sweet Tom!” He had called me by my father’s name, and I had smiled wanly, then confessed that I was indeed Tom Breakspear’s son. “How could you not be?” the New York actor had demanded. “You’re the very image of him! Will you remember me to the old rascal?” Everyone knew my father. Everyone wanted me to know how they just loved my father. Everyone told me just how like my father I looked, though very few dared ask me from which of my father’s wives I had been whelped.

But now, thank God, I was free of miaowing Thespians, and Wavebreaker was sailing back to her home port on Grand Bahama where, in just twenty-four hours’ time, she would begin her last charter of the season. Then came Hirondelle to spoil the dawn.

I had been alone on deck when I first saw the wreck. Ellen had been sleeping in the stern-cabin’s king-sized bed, and Thessy had been snoring in one of the clients’ forward cabins. It was only when we were dead-heading that we were allowed to make free with the air-conditioned luxuries of the boat’s staterooms. The brochure promised our charterers the ‘authentic sea-salt taste of tropical seafaring’, though sailing on Wavebreaker was about as authentic as Pussy-Cute’s miaow.

The whine of the sail-furling motors brought an alarmed Thessy running on deck. He stood blinking in the new daylight, then stared in astonishment at the waterlogged white hull which rolled sluggishly under our lee. We were now close enough to read the name on her transom and could see that the derelict was called Hirondelle, and hailed from Ostend. The small waves slopped and splashed across the neat blue lettering. It seemed a terrible waste to have run from that grim North Sea port safely across the Atlantic to what must have seemed like the sunlit paradise of the Bahamas’ sheltered shallow waters, only to meet this savage fate.

And something savage had happened to Hirondelle: She was a mastless mess, trailing a tangle of sodden rigging. Her coachroof and deck were riddled with holes; so many holes that groups of them had joined together to make dark, jagged and splintered craters. My first thought was that someone had run berserk with an industrial drill, but then I saw a glint of brass in her scuppers and I recognised an empty cartridge case and knew I was looking at bullet holes. Hirondelle had been machine-gunned. Someone had poured fire at her, but she had stayed afloat because she was one of the few production boats that were built to be unsinkable. Foam had been sandwiched between her fibreglass layers and crammed into every unused space inside her hull and that foam was now holding her afloat, fighting against the dead weight of her ballast and engine and winches and galley stove.

“Help me with the skiff,” I said to Thessy.

“You think someone’s on board?” he asked with a trepidation that matched my own, for God only knew what horrors might be concealed in the darkness of those cabins.

Thessy and I unlashed the skiff that hung from Wavebreaker’s stern davits, I climbed aboard, and Thessy worked the electric motors that lowered me down to the small petulant slap of the early morning waves.

Ellen appeared on deck just as I was casting off. She was dressed in a Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt that served as her nightdress. She yawned, then scowled at the Belgian yacht.

“Morning!” I shouted cheerfully.

She scowled at me, but said nothing. Ellen was never at her brightest and best first thing in the morning.

I pulled the skiff’s outboard into life, then puttered across to the waterlogged yacht. As I got close I saw that her underwater hull had been holed by bullets which must have been fired from inside the boat because all the splinters had been driven outwards so that the hull looked like some giant and exotic sea urchin with red and white fibreglass spines.

I tied the skiff’s painter to one of Hirondelle’s cleats and climbed gingerly on to the foredeck where I cautiously lifted what was left of the forward hatch to peer into the bow cabin. I half expected to see a body, but there was only dark water sloshing a few inches beneath the deck. No blood had been diluted by the water, or none that I could see. I edged my way aft and stepped down into the flooded cockpit. I steeled myself to look into the main-cabin, but I need not have worried for the big saloon was as blessedly empty of horror as the forecabin. Hirondelle held nothing but flotsam; so much flotsam that the water in her main-cabin looked like sludge. My eyes adjusted to the gloom and I saw that the sludge was really a thick layer of floating cornflakes, loose cigarettes, and a million scraps of foam that must have been shattered out of the hull by the gunfire. Embedded in that heaving mess were a plastic mug, some wooden clothes pegs, a broken pencil, a red shirt and a mutilated, sodden chart. There was a dark smear on the lip of the coachroof that might have been blood, but could just as easily have been a spill of varnish.

“What happened to her?” Ellen shouted. Wavebreaker had now drifted so close to Hirondelle that the schooner’s huge hull was casting a shadow over me.

“God knows.” I pulled the flimsy remnants of the chart out of the water.

“Are we going to salvage her?” Ellen was leaning over Wavebreaker’s rail and the sun, rising behind her, turned her mass of red hair into an incandescent haze.

“She’s beyond help!” I called back. The waterlogged Hirondelle was much too heavy for Wavebreaker to take in tow, and I had neither the time nor the equipment to patch the hull and pump it dry. Besides, Hirondelle had been so badly damaged that no yard would ever think of trying to rebuild her. Not only had the Belgian boat been riddled with bullets, but I could see great gouges where an axe had been taken to the boat’s decking. It all seemed so pointless. Hirondelle had clearly been a beautiful boat, yet someone had wantonly tried to destroy her.

I tossed the soaking chart into the skiff and stooped to see if there was anything else I should take from the cabin. I was not searching for plunder, but rather for any clue as to who might have owned this boat or what might have provoked its destruction. I found nothing, except that as I stepped back from the companionway my bare feet trod hard and painfully on some lumpish sharp objects. I ducked down in the cockpit, groped on the grating underfoot, and came up with a handful of cartridge cases. Some were brass, but most were green-lacquered steel. They were 7.62 millimetre cartridges, military issue, and I had a half-memory from the dozy days when I had slept through the perfunctory Warsaw Pact familiarisation lectures that only a few East European countries lacquered steel cartridges green.

It was all very peculiar. A Belgian boat in Bahamian waters with Warsaw Pact cartridges? What was clear to me was that someone must have stood in this cockpit and fired a machine-gun down the companionway into the main-cabin. They had hoped to shatter the bottom of the hull so that Hirondelle would sink without trace, but they had not reckoned with the foam sandwiched in the boat’s hull, and thus the evidence of their crime, if crime it was, still floated.

Thessy had started Wavebreaker’s engines. The wind had been driving the big schooner down on to Hirondelle so now Thessy gave the schooner’s propellers a burst of power that churned the sea white and drove her clear. The schooner’s shadow vanished, letting the new day’s sun slash at me with brilliant force and lance through a line of bullet holes that had pierced the side of Hirondelle’s coachroof. The shafts of new sunlight lay like spears of gold in the cabin’s muck-ridden gloom. I wondered if I should explore the boat further, but decided that such an exploration was best left to the police.

I tossed my handful of cartridge cases into the skiff, then went forrard along Hirondelle’s flooded deck to where an undamaged whisker pole lay in its foredeck clips. I tied the red shirt to the pole’s top, then rammed my makeshift flagpole into one of the bullet holes so that the treacherous hulk would be visible to any other mariner. Then I climbed back into the skiff, feeling oddly desolate. There is something very sad about mindless destruction, especially of a boat.

I went back to Wavebreaker where, as Thessy stowed the skiff, I called the Royal Bahamian Defence Forces on the VHF radio. I reported our position and my opinion that Hirondelle was a danger to navigation; then, feeling very virtuous, I revealed my discovery of the empty cartridge cases and my suspicions that the Belgian boat, and perhaps its crew, had met with a sinister fate. The Bahamian radio operator did not seem particularly interested.

Ellen, who had come below to pull on a pair of shorts and a shirt, listened to the last words of my transmission. “That was a waste of time,” she said scornfully.

“Why?” I had long learned not to be offended by Ellen’s caustic remarks. She had an Irish-American mother and a Polish-American father, which volatile blend had produced a girl of startling beauty and nitro-glycerine temper.

“Just what do you think happened to that boat?” she asked me in a venomous voice. “You think it’s something simple like an insurance scam? Or a clumsy waste-disposal job?” She paused, waiting for my answer, but I gave her none. “Drugs,” she answered for me.

“We don’t know that,” I protested.

“Oh, Nick!” Ellen was exasperated. “These are the Bahamas! Whoever was on that boat was stupid enough to get involved with drugs, and if you get involved with that boat’s fate, then you’ll be just as stupid. Which means that you should chuck that chart and those cartridges overboard. Now.”

“I shall hand them over to the proper authorities,” I said stubbornly.

“God save me from feeble-minded males.” She turned towards the galley. “You want some coffee?”

“The prime purpose of the Defence Forces is to guarantee freedom of navigation in Bahamian waters,” I said very pompously.

“Oh, sure!” Ellen laughed as she pumped water into the kettle. Thessy was still on deck where he had reset Wavebreaker’s sails and taken the helm. I glanced at the fluxgate compass over the chart table to see that we were once again heading northwards. Ellen lit the galley stove, then unscrewed the lid from the jar of instant coffee. “The real purpose of the Bahamian Defence Forces”—she pointed a teaspoon at me to emphasise her words—“is to present the appearance of being zealously engaged in the war against drugs; which appearance of diligence is designed solely to placate the American government who otherwise might issue an official warning to its citizens that the Bahamas are no longer a safe destination for the vacation trade, which warning will effectively stifle the islands’ tourist and casino trade which, after drugs, are its most profitable industries.” She offered me the pitying and self-satisfied smile of someone who has just proved a debating point. “So no one will thank you for drawing attention to a visiting yacht filled with inconvenient bullet holes. Such things are bad for the tourist business.”

“Thank you for explaining it, Professor,” I said sarcastically.

She grimaced at me. Ms Ellen Skandinsky, PhD, never liked being reminded that she had abandoned a tenured professorship in Women’s Studies to run away to sea; a decision that she liked to portray as quixotic, but which I suspected had been sparked by the pure boredom and pomposity of academic life. Ellen herself swore that she had made the change in order to discover ‘real life’, a commodity evidently unavailable on campus and one which she believed necessary to her true ambition, which was to be a writer. For Ellen, ‘real life’ had proved to be a one-room cold-water apartment behind the Straw Market, an unpaid volunteer’s job with a Bahamian Literacy Project, and a paid job as a ship’s cook, a job so traitorous to her former life and feminist beliefs that even she was astonished to discover that she enjoyed it. I think Ellen had been even more astonished to discover that she and I had become friends in the months we had worked together, no more than friends, but close enough for her to be wondering whether to sail away with me around the world. Not in Wavebreaker, but in my own boat that needed to be rebuilt before I took it across the South Pacific.

I heard a whine of servo-motors and guessed that Thessy had turned on the automatic pilot. He came down the companionway, holding the chart I had rescued from Hirondelle and which I had spread to dry on Wavebreaker’s deck. The torn paper was still sodden. “Nick?” There was consternation in his voice. “Do you know vere they vere two nights ago?” Thessy had the Bahamian out-islander’s odd Dickensian accent. He was seventeen years old, skinny as a sopping-wet cat, and was Wavebreaker’s first and only mate, which also made him the boat’s steward, gorilla, ship’s boy, skivvy and mascot. His real name was Thessalonians, and he was just as pious as that New Testament name suggested. “Do you see, Nick?” He was pointing at the wet chart that he had draped across the galley table. “They vere there just two days ago. Only two days!”

The chart had been soaked in sea-water, but salt cannot remove the pencil notations from a chart, and whoever had sailed Hirondelle had been a meticulous navigator. A pencil line extended from No Name Bay just south of Miami and reached across the Gulf Stream and into the Bahamas. Hirondelle’s navigator had sailed much of the course by dead reckoning, and I could see just where that navigator had finally taken a fix and discovered that he or she had underestimated the northwards current of the Gulf Stream, but by very little, so that the Belgian yacht had only been five nautical miles off its estimated course. That course had curved to the south of Bimini towards a tiny island, lost all by itself between the Biminis and the Berrys, with the unprepossessing name of Murder Cay. The pencil line ended there, punctuated by a small circle enclosing a dot beside which the navigator had written the date and time of Hirondelle’s arrival. And that arrival, as Thessy had noted, had been just two days before. No neat pencilled line betrayed Hirondelle’s departure from the ill-named Murder Cay.

I had never noticed the island before, despite its most noticeable name. It was a very small island, a mere speck that lay some twenty miles south-east from Wavebreaker’s present position, and that was exactly the direction from which the currents and wind would drive a derelict boat.

I fetched the pilot book and looked up Murder Cay, but found no listing for the grimly named island. “Try Sister Island,” Ellen suggested laconically.

It seemed a perverse suggestion, but Ellen’s perversity was often justified, so I duly looked up Sister Island and discovered that was the new name for Murder Cay. The Pilot Book offered no explanation for that change of name, which seemed a deal of trouble for what must be one of the smallest inhabited islands in all the Bahamas. Sister Island was only three miles long and was never more than a half-mile wide. The island’s southernmost promontory was marked with a white light which was meant to flash three times every fifteen seconds and be visible up to five miles away, but the book ominously reported that the light was ‘unreliable’. The whole island was surrounded by coral reefs called the Devil’s Necklace, and I wondered what unfortunate sailor had given the island and its reefs their macabre names. The deep-water access to Murder Cay lay through a dog-legged and unbuoyed passage to the west of the island. The best guide to the deep-water approach seemed to be a tall skeleton radio mast that was conveniently opposite the passage entrance and was supposedly marked with red air-warning beacons. There was an airstrip on the island which should have displayed a flashing green and white light, but, like the white light and the air-warning beacons, the green and white light was also said to be unreliable. The eastern part of the lagoon evidently offered good shelter, but the pilot book noted that the island had no facilities for visiting yachts. In other words, mariners were being warned to keep away from Murder Cay, yet the pencil line on Hirondelle’s chart led inexorably to that island, and there it had ended.

“The government decided the old name was bad for the tourist business,” Ellen remarked in an odd sort of voice, almost as if she was trying to reassert a commonplace normality over the sinister implications of that line on an abandoned chart.

“Perhaps the islanders shot the crew,” I said, but in a voice that carried no conviction for, despite the missing crew and the all-too-present cartridges, I really could not believe that murder had been done on Murder Cay. I did not want to believe in murder. I wanted the boat’s fate, like I wanted life, to be explicable without causing me astonishment. I had been brought up in a house that specialised in giving astonishment, which was why I had run away from home to become a Royal Marine. The Marines had toughened me, and taught me to swear and fight and screw and drink, but they had not taught me cynicism, nor had they obliterated the innocent hope for innocent explanations. “Perhaps,” I amended my previous supposition, “it’s just an accident.”

“Whatever happened,” Ellen said brusquely, “it’s none of our business.”

“And Mr McIllwanney varned us to stay avay from the island!” Thessy said.

I remembered no such warning, but Thessy went to the shelves under the chart table and found one of McIllvanney’s green sheets of paper. I hardly ever read McIllvanney’s self-styled Notices to Mariners, and I had clearly overlooked this warning that was brief and to the point. ‘You will stay away from Sister Island. The Royal Bahamian Defence Forces have issued a warning that the island’s new owners don’t like trespass, and I don’t want to lose any boats to that dislike, so ALL Cutwater Charter Boats will henceforth keep AT LEAST five nautical miles from Sister Island until further notice.’

I thought of the bullet holes that had shattered Hirondelle’s once elegant hull. “Those poor bastards,” I said softly.

“It’s not our business, Nick,” Ellen said in warning.

I looked again at McIllvanney’s notice. “Do you think the island’s new owners are mixed up in drugs?” I asked.

Ellen sighed. She is much given to long-suffering sighs which are her way of informing the male part of the world that it is ineradicably dim-witted. “Do you think they smuggle auto-parts, Nick? Or lavatory paper? Of course they’re into drugs, you airhead. And that is why it is not our business.”

“I never said it was our business,” I spoke defensively.

“So throw those cartridges overboard and lose that chart,” Ellen advised me very curtly.

“The police should see them,” I insisted.

“You are a fool, Nicholas Breakspear,” Ellen said, but not in an unkind manner.

“I’ve already advised the Defence Forces that the police should look at the boat,” I said.

Ellen gave another of her long-suffering sighs. “The dragons won, Nick, and the knights errant lost. Don’t you know that? You’ve delivered the message, so now forget it! No chart. No cartridges. It’s over. No heroics!”

She meant well, but I could not forget Hirondelle, because something evil had stirred in this paradise of beaches and lagoons and palm-covered islands, and I wanted the authorities to take the damp torn chart and to find just what lay at the end of its carefully pencilled line. So I shrugged off Ellen’s cynical and doubtless sensible pleading, and went topsides to take the helm. Wavebreaker’s wake lay white and straight across a brilliant sunlit sea on which, far to our west, I could see a string of grey warships that were American naval vessels come to the Bahamas for an exercise called Stingray. The sight of the flotilla reminded me of my time in the Royal Marines, and I felt a rueful envy of the American Marines who had this tropical playground with its warm seas and palm trees for their training. I had learned the killing trade under the bitter flail of Norwegian sleet and Scottish snow, but that was all in my past, and now I was a free man and I had just one more charter to skipper, after which I could mend my own boat and sail her on new paths across old oceans.

Just as Hirondelle had sailed to her adventure.

But, in its place, had found a coral scrap of land called Murder Cay. And there died.

We docked at midday. The deserted boatyard was swimming in heat. It was well into the charter business’s low season, so the vast majority of Cutwater’s yachts had either gone north for the summer or were sitting on jackstands out of the water. A couple of our bareboat yachts were still at sea, and Wavebreaker had one more paying charter to complete, but otherwise McIllvanney’s yard had the torpor of tropical summer about it. Even Stella, McIllvanney’s long-suffering secretary, had taken the day off, leaving the office locked, which meant I had to walk into town to find a public telephone from which I called the Bahamian Police and told them about Hirondelle, and added that I had rescued a chart and a handful of cartridges from the stricken boat. The police sounded surprised that I had bothered to call them, and I walked back to the boatyard feeling strangely foolish.

Ellen laughed at my punctiliousness. Doubtless the police had responded to my call by sharpening their cutlasses and charging their muskets, she mocked, in readiness for an invasion of Murder Cay?

“I didn’t mention Murder Cay,” I said. “I just told them about the bullet damage to the boat and about the chart.”

“Well now that you’ve single-handedly won the war on drugs, perhaps you can do something useful, like scrub the deck?” We had only this one day to resupply and prepare Wavebreaker for her last charter, which meant the schooner had to be refuelled and provisioned, her carpets must be vacuumed, her bilges poisoned against rats and cockroaches, her galley made spotless, her deck scrubbed and her brightwork polished.

In the middle of the afternoon, when it seemed that the work would never be done on time, Bellybutton arrived at the yard. Bellybutton was McIllvanney’s foreman, and for a few seconds I dared hope that he had come to help us, but instead he told me that one of the bareboat thirty-three-footers was in trouble. “The man radioed that his engine broke,” Bellybutton grumbled, “so I have to fetch the idiot in Starkisser.” He was pretending that the errand was a nuisance, though at the same time he was grinning with pleasure at the thought of taking McIllvanney’s brand new sportsboat to sea. Starkisser’s midnight-blue hull had metalflake embedded in its fibreglass so that the sleek boat seemed to scintillate with an internal and infernal dark blue light. She had to be one of the fastest production boats in the islands; her twin big-block engines could hurl the three-ton wedge-shaped hull at over eighty miles an hour, and it worried neither McIllvanney nor Bellybutton that at such a speed a man could not hear himself scream and that even the smallest wave shook the bones right out of their flesh.

“There ain’t a girl in creation who don’t melt after a ride in Starkisser,” Bellybutton liked to boast. His real name was Benjamin, but no one ever called him Benjamin or even Ben. To the whole island he was Bellybutton. It was rumoured he had earned the nickname by biting the navel clean out of a whore who had displeased him, and I found the rumour all too believable for he was not a pleasant man. In fact he was a black version of McIllvanney himself; rangy, knowing, tall and sarcastic. “Mr Mac wants to see you tonight,” Bellybutton leered at me, as though he suspected I would not enjoy the meeting. “He says you’re to go to his place at sundown.”

“Why isn’t he in the yard today?” I asked.

“Mr Mac’s taking a day off!” Bellybutton said in an indignant voice, as though my question had impugned McIllvanney’s honour. “He has business to take care of. He had to take a boat to Miami, and that’s why he give me the keys to Starkisser. You maybe want to take Miss Ellen for a ride in Starkisser?” He dangled the sportsboat’s keys enticingly. “I won’t tell Mr Mac, long as you give me a ride on Miss Ellen when you’re done.” He laughed and obscenely pumped his lean hips.

“You’re an offensive shit, Bellybutton,” I said in a very friendly voice, but he had already turned his attention away from me because a car had suddenly appeared in the yard. It was a long white Lincoln with black-tinted windows. The car slid quietly between the cradled yachts to stop just short of Wavebreaker’s pier. Apart from the crunching sound of the tyres the Lincoln’s approach had been silent and oddly sinister.

One of the passenger doors opened and a very tall and very black-skinned man climbed slowly into the sunlight. “A friend of yours?” I asked Bellybutton, but his eyes widened, he muttered a curse and, instead of answering, he dashed frantically towards Starkisser’s pontoon.

The tall black man who had emerged from the Lincoln was dressed in a dark blue three-piece suit that looked incongruously heavy for such a hot day. He wore the elegantly cut suit over a white shirt and an old Etonian tie. He was impressively built; thin hipped and wide shouldered, like a boxer who could punch hard and dance lightly. He looked calmly around the yard, then put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses before slamming the car door shut.

Bellybutton had thrown off Starkisser’s lines and now let the sportsboat float away from the pontoon as he unclipped her jet-black cockpit cover. Then, plainly frantic to escape the elegant man, he punched the boat’s engines into life. The echo of the twin motors crackled back from the nearby buildings like the sound of a battle-tank firing up for action. Scared pelicans flapped away, and Ellen came up from the galley to see what had caused the commotion. Bellybutton gave one last look at the man walking along the dock, then shoved Starkisser’s tachometers way into their red zones so that the dark blue powerboat stood on her tail and screamed out to sea as though the devil himself was on her tail.

“A guilty conscience is a terrible thing.” The tall black man chuckled, then sauntered across Wavebreaker’s gangplank. Once on deck he stopped to admire Ellen who was dressed in a brief pair of shorts and a faded tank top. Even with her glorious hair scraped back into a loose bun, and with her hands and face smeared with soap and sweat from the exertions of scrubbing the galley stove, she looked utterly beguiling. The black man momentarily took off his sunglasses as though to examine Ellen more closely and I saw he had very hard and very cynical eyes that were suddenly turned full on me. “You must be Breakspear.”

“Yes.”

“My name is Deacon Billingsley—” he paused as though I should recognise the name, “and I am a police officer.”

The arrival of Deacon Billingsley should have given me the satisfaction that my telephone call had been treated seriously, but I sensed this policeman was not going to offer me any satisfaction at all. He had spoken very flatly, making his introduction sound like a threat. The sun, mirrored in the obsidian brightness of his glasses, momentarily dazzled me. “What were you doing when you found Hirondelle, Breakspear?” Billingsley asked me.

“Making passage.”

“Making passage.” He mocked my British accent, then turned on Ellen who had stayed on deck to hear the conversation. “Where were you coming from, lady?”

“Hey! Count me out, OK? I didn’t call any goddamn cavalry. You want to know anything about that boat, you ask Nick, not me.” She twisted contemptuously towards the companionway.

Billingsley watched her walk away. “She’s American?” He seemed amused rather than offended by Ellen’s defiance.

“She’s American,” I confirmed.

Ellen dropped out of sight and Billingsley turned back to me. “Are you screwing the American, Breakspear?” I was so astonished by the sudden question that I just gaped at him. “Are you laying the girl?” Billingsley rephrased his insolent question as though I had not understood the first version. His tone of voice was so bland that he might as well have been asking my opinion of Wavebreaker’s sea-keeping qualities.

“The answer is no,” I finally said, “and fuck off.”

Billingsley lit a cigar. It had a red and yellow band on which I could just read the word Cubana. He took his time; first cutting the cigar, then heating its tip with a succession of matches that he carelessly and provocatively dropped on to Wavebreaker’s scrubbed deck. He used the toes of his expensive brogues to grind each dead match into the teakwood so that the charred tips smeared black carbonised streaks across the wood’s bone-whiteness. He finally drew the cigar into red heat and discarded the final match. He raised his eyes to stare into my face, and I felt a surge of fear. It was not Billingsley’s physical size that provoked that fear, for I was of a size with him, nor was it his profession that gave me pause, but rather the aura of incipient violence that he radiated like a blast furnace. “You mess with me, Breakspear,” he said in a deceptively mild voice, “and I’ll rip your spine out of your asshole.”

I was damned if I would show him my fear. “Do you have a warrant card?” I asked him instead.

For a second I thought he was going to hit me, but then he reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a wallet that he unfolded and thrust towards me, giving me just enough time to see that he held the rank of chief inspector, one of the highest ranks in the Bahamian police force, then the wallet was snapped shut and Deacon Billingsley moved to stand very close to me, so close that I could smell the cigar smoke on his breath. “Where’s the chart you took from Hirondelle?”

“Down below.”

“Then fetch it,” he said dismissively.

I obeyed. The chart had dried into stiff and faded folds, but Billingsley did not look at it, instead he just screwed it up and thrust it into a pocket of his expensive jacket.

“I also found these,” I said, and offered him the handful of cartridge cases.

He ignored my outstretched hand. “What were you doing at Sister Island, Breakspear?”

The question puzzled me for I had not mentioned Sister Island, nor its old name of Murder Cay, to either the police or to the Defence Forces, nor had Billingsley troubled to look at the pencilled line on the chart, yet he had somehow connected Hirondelle with the mysterious island. “I asked you what you were doing at Sister Island,” Deacon Billingsley said threateningly.

“We weren’t anywhere near the island!” I protested. “You can check that for yourself! I reported the co-ordinates where we found Hirondelle over the radio, and those co-ordinates are twenty miles north-west of Sister Island. That’s as close as we ever got to it.”

He said nothing for a few seconds, and I sensed that I might have unsettled this policeman. I had also angered him, though his anger seemed directed at himself. He had come here on a misunderstanding; believing that Wavebreaker had been at Murder Cay when in fact we had not even been within sight of that mysterious island.

But Billingsley had clearly known about Hirondelle’s visit to Murder Cay, and I realised that this senior police officer had not come here to enquire into a crime, but to cover it up. Hirondelle’s owners, he said glibly, had decided to fly home and, despairing of ever selling the yacht in a glutted market, had simply abandoned it and someone had evidently used the hulk for target practice. “Maybe it was the Americans,” Billingsley suggested airily, “you know there’s a naval exercise in progress? Perhaps they machine-gunned the hulk?”

“Those cartridge cases aren’t American issue,” I said, holding out the green-lacquered steel casings. I should have kept my silence, for the only purpose my words served was to demonstrate my disbelief in Billingsley’s outrageous explanation.

That disbelief was a challenge, and Deacon Billingsley was not a man to resist a challenge. He tipped my hand with his own strong grasp, spilling the cartridge cases into his left palm, then, one by one, he tossed the cartridge cases overboard. “You have a boat in the Bahamas.” It was not a question, but a flat statement. “A ketch called Masquerade, presently marooned on Straker’s Cay.”

“She’s not marooned,” I said, “she’s under repair.”

He ignored my emendation, but just continued to toss the cartridge cases over the gunwale. “And how will you repair your boat, Breakspear, or even take her away, if I put your name on the Stop List? You do know what the Stop List is, Breakspear?”

I knew only too well. It was the list of undesirable aliens who were banned from entering the Bahamas, and if my name was put on that Stop List, and if I was then thrown off the islands, I would probably never see my boat again. The threat was effective and blunt.

“Do you understand me?” Billingsley asked as he threw the last cartridge overboard. I suspected that as soon as he left the boatyard the chart would be similarly destroyed. Doubtless Hirondelle had already been blown up, just as my own boat would be butchered if I insisted on challenging this man. “Do you understand me?” he asked a second time.

“Yes.” I tasted the sourness of humble pie.

“So do you still find anything suspicious in the circumstances surrounding your discovery of the yacht Hirondelle?” Billingsley asked with a mocking punctiliousness that was intended to humiliate me, but the humiliation was my own fault for having challenged the policeman’s lie.

“No,” I said, and hated myself for telling the untruth, but I was thinking of my own boat standing propped on the sand of Straker’s Cay, and I thought of all the work I had lavished on Masquerade, and of all the love and care and time I had poured into her, and I tried to imagine her rotting under the tropical sun with her paint peeling, her deck planks opening and her timbers riddled with termites. So I lied and said I detected nothing untoward in finding a bullet-riddled boat awash in the Bahamian seas.

Chief Inspector Deacon Billingsley raised his right hand and victoriously, patronisingly and very gently, patted my cheek so that I felt the cold touch of his heavy gold rings. “Good boy,” he said derisively. “And when you see Bellybutton, tell him that I know where his brother is, and I’ll pick the bastard up whenever I choose and then feed him head first into a cane-shredder.” He turned abruptly away, not waiting for any answer. The gangplank bounced under his confident step. He walked down the quay without looking back, but he must have known I was watching him for he stopped a few yards short of his car and very ostentatiously took the incriminating chart from his jacket pocket. I thought for a second he was going to burn it, but instead he tore it into tiny scraps that he tossed into the warm wind.

“The bastard,” I breathed. In that moment, Hirondelle and her crew had disappeared for good.

The Lincoln’s driver was a uniformed constable who climbed into the sunlight to open the car door for Billingsley. “I told you not to bother,” Ellen said disparagingly as she climbed the main companionway, and I guessed that she had been listening to my conversation with Billingsley by standing just under the saloon skylight which was propped open. Now she stood beside me and watched the white Lincoln drive out of the boatyard. “Didn’t I say you’d be wasting your time?”

“Sod my time,” I said angrily. “Did you hear what he asked about you and me?”

“Of course I heard.” She seemed quite unfazed by Billingsley’s impertinent question whether we slept together, doubtless translating the policeman’s particular curiosity as a general confirmation of men’s innate tackiness. Ellen was more irritated by my answer than by Billingsley’s question. “Why didn’t you just tell him the truth?”

“I did.”

“I mean the truthful explanation.” Which was that Ellen had sworn herself to celibacy while she worked as a cook, a decision that was to me as eccentric as it was both incomprehensible and frustrating.

“I shouldn’t have told the arrogant bastard anything.” I stared at the empty yard where Billingsley’s car had stood. “My God! But I ought to report him! I know what I’ll do! I’ll bloody well call the Belgian Embassy!”

“Don’t be so stupid, Nick!” Ellen was genuinely frightened for me, but she was also indignant at me. “Report him, and you’ll be thrown off the islands before the week’s end! Don’t you understand what’s going on? Are you entirely blind? Don’t you understand that in small countries power is more likely to remain undisguised because there isn’t sufficient societal depth to conceal the realities of institutionalised brutality beneath a respectable fiction?”

But I was not listening to the professor’s explanation. I was feeling disgust at myself. It seemed to me that the stench of Billingsley’s cigar smoke clung to the boat like the sulphurous reek of the pit, and with it lingered the realisation that I had been twisted into dishonesty as easily as a length of rope could be coiled into hanks. I had lied, and I had let myself be used by evil. But all for Masquerade.

Masquerade is my boat. She’s a beauty; a forty-foot ketch built of mahogany on oak. She had been constructed in Hampshire before the Second World War by craftsmen who had taken pride in their work, but fibreglass had made wooden boats redundant and Masquerade had been laid up and left to rot at a boatyard on the River Exe.

I had found her when I was a Weapons Instructor at the Royal Marines’ Lympstone camp in Devon. I had bought her for a song, then spent a fortune restoring her and, when my term of service expired and I could afford to become the gypsy-sailor I had always wanted to be, I left the Marines and made Masquerade my new home. For a couple of years she and I had knocked around the Mediterranean, then I had sailed her across the Atlantic. That voyage had been the first leg of a planned circumnavigation, but those dreams had been brutally shattered when Masquerade was stolen from an anchorage in the Florida Keys. She turned up ten days later, stranded on a coral reef in the Bahamas with most of her gear missing and her starboard bilges half ripped out by the savage coral heads. The thieves were never found.

That theft and recovery had taken place just over a year ago. Now, laboriously rescued by Thessy’s father, a fisherman, Masquerade was standing in the sandy backyard of Thessy’s house where she was cradled by timber props among the casuarinas and palm trees, and where chickens roosted in her cockpit. She needed repairs and she needed love. She needed to feel the sea about her long deep keel again. Her timbers needed to swell with the salt water. She needed me. Which was why I had bowed to the imperative of Deacon Billingsley’s dishonesty, because otherwise I would have lost her.

And I would have lost the chance to sail across the Pacific with Ellen, because Ellen was on the verge of agreeing to come with me, and if I had not yielded to the policeman’s blackmail I would have lost Ellen as well as my boat.

And so I had lied.

A few moments before sundown I extricated Wavebreaker’s folding bicycle from the big locker on the boat’s after swim-platform, forced the rusting hinges open, then pedalled along Midshipman Road to the glittering block of apartments where our esteemed boss lived.

Matthew McIllvanney was not the real boss of Cutwater Yacht Charters (Bahamas) Limited, which belonged to a retired theatre owner who now lived in Bermuda and was a long-time friend of my father, a friendship that had secured me the job of skippering Wavebreaker when Masquerade was wrecked, but McIllvanney actually looked after the day-to-day running of the charter business. Cutwater’s charter bookings were usually made by agencies in Fort Lauderdale and London, then faxed to McIllvanney’s yard in Freeport where the boats were docked and maintained. McIllvanney also kept a few power-cruisers of his own for charter, and his yard ran an efficient yacht-servicing and marine supplies business, and thus the boundaries between his operations and Cutwater Charters were necessarily blurred and, for all intents and purposes, he could have been said to run Cutwater. He also ran a couple of other businesses that had nothing to do with boats and were probably much more profitable.

McIllvanney was certainly making money from somewhere. Starkisser had to have cost him close to a hundred thousand US dollars, and the Lucaya penthouse apartment, with its private docks and its view towards Silver Point Beach, probably cost ten times as much. He kept a BMW and an old open-top MG in the garage, though his vehicle of choice was a big Kawasaki motorbike. Matthew McIllvanney, even by the standards of the expatriate retired Americans who lived all around him, was a rich man.

I chained Wavebreaker’s bicycle to an ornamental fence outside McIllvanney’s apartment block, and persuaded the uniformed ape on security that I was not a terrorist. The ape keyed the lift panel so that the elevator would go to the very top floor where it opened directly into McIllvanney’s apartment. I had visited the apartment at least a dozen times, but I still found the fact of a lift opening directly into a living room incredibly impressive; a proof of wealth as convincing as the possession of gold taps or of mink rugs or of the girl who waited to greet me just beyond the lift doors. She was a very tall and very fair and dazzlingly beautiful creature whose skin was goose-pimpled under the impact of McIllvanney’s air conditioning which was set to a level that might have made a penguin shiver. “Hi!” she said enthusiastically. “You’ve got to be Nick! Matt’s expecting you. He’s right outside.” The girl, who looked as though she had been made in heaven out of peaches and cream, was wearing a few pieces of string arranged as a bikini, high heels, the goose-pimples, and nothing else. She nodded towards the screened porch that overlooked the sea. “You’ll have a drinkie, Nick?”

“Irish whiskey,” I said, “no ice, some water, and thank you.”

“You’re surely welcome. My name’s Donna.” Donna gave me a limpid hand to shake, then wiggled her way towards the liquor cabinet. Just to watch her walk threatened to break your heart. She waved a hand about McIllvanney’s apartment. “Isn’t this just the cutest place you ever did see, Nick?”

“It’s very splendid,” I agreed politely. The apartment was indeed attractive, perhaps because it had nothing whatever of McIllvanney about it. The apartment’s previous owners had hired an expensive interior designer from New York and ordered her to trick out the rooms in a horse-country olde-English Spy-Cartoons look, which had been done to extravagant perfection, but McIllvanney was none of those things. McIllvanney was a Protestant bully from the Shankill Road in Belfast, who had learned his thuggery in the hard school of Northern Ireland’s prejudices, honed it in the British army, and now put it to whatever good use he wanted in the Bahamas. If I had been asked to decorate a flat to reflect McIllvanney’s character then I would have given him an East Belfast bar with sawdust scattered on the floor, King Billy strutting on the walls, and blood splattered across its tobacco-stained ceiling.

“Why don’t you just go on through, Nick,” Donna invited me, “and I’ll bring you and Matt your drinkies.”

I went on through, sliding the heavy plate glass aside to walk on to the humid porch where a morose looking McIllvanney slouched in a cane chair and stared through the insect screens at the darkening sea. “It’s you,” he greeted me without delight and as though he had been expecting someone else.

“You wanted to see me,” I pointed out. Spending time with McIllvanney was not my idea of relaxation, and I didn’t much take to his lack of enthusiasm.

“Sit down,” he said grudgingly, “your Holiness.” Calling me ‘your Holiness’ was McIllvanney’s joke. It was not because I was particularly pious, but rather because my namesake, Nicholas Breakspear, had been the only Englishman who had ever become Pope. He had taken the name Adrian IV and had ruled the church in the twelfth century, a fact that very few people other than myself knew, but a fact I had been foolish enough to tell McIllvanney whose hatred of ‘taigs’, Catholics, ensured he would never forget my papal connection. In truth there was no connection, for my original family name was Sillitoe, but, long before I was born, my father had adopted Breakspear as his stage name and I had really known no other.

“Did that focker Bellybutton bring Starkisser back?” McIllvanney suddenly demanded of me in his sour Belfast accent.

“In one piece, even.”

“He’s getting too big for his focking black boots, that feller is.” The complaint was a ritual, not to be taken seriously, a mere habitual statement made solely to impress on me how tough McIllvanney was. If he had to choose between me and Bellybutton, or between Bellybutton and his own mother, he would have chosen Bellybutton any day. They were two of a kind.

McIllvanney was a tall, harshly scarred and surprisingly handsome man, with a hard knowing face and a deceptively thin body. It was deceptive for he was brutally strong. He could also be excellent company, with a fund of stories that he told with an exquisite sense of timing, though such good moments were rare for he preferred to brood savagely over life’s injustices; the chief of which was the inexplicable existence of Roman Catholics.

“Are you a Catholic?” he asked Donna as she brought out the drinks. I suspected the question was meant for my amusement rather than for his own enlightenment.

“Gracious, no! In our family we’re all Episcopalians.” She gave him a big smile. “From Philadelphia,” she added for my benefit and with yet another winning smile. Donna was one of life’s cheerleaders; her teeth were a triumph of the orthodontic trade, her hair was a confection of gel, spray and heat, and her body was a tribute to wholesome American food and exercise. “I’ve heard so much about you,” she said to me, as though settling herself in for a long cosy chat.

“So now fock away off and forget him,” McIllvanney snapped at her.

“It’s just been so nice visiting with you, Nick!” Donna gave me a last dazzling smile, then, apparently impervious to McIllvanney’s evil-tempered scorn, clicked away on her ridiculously high heels.

I waited till Donna was safely out of earshot. “Is she your newest?” Pretty girls moved through McIllvanney’s life at an astonishing rate, though the last, who had endured a record six months, had left just a few weeks before.

He shook his head. “She’s one of the girls, so she is. She’ll cost you two thousand US a day, Nick, plus air-fare, food and a present. I had to bring her over from Miami today because the stupid cow won’t fly. Can you believe that? She’s frightened of airplanes, so she is! So I had to fetch her in Junkanoo.”

Junkanoo was one of McIllvanney’s boats, doubtless purchased on the profits of his call-girl service. He liked to boast that the service was very elegant, and certainly not crude like the part-time pimp service that Bellybutton enforced with his teeth. Instead McIllvanney was the Bahamian agent for a Miami-based business that claimed to provide the world’s most beautiful girls to anyone with the money to pay for them. McIllvanney arranged the girls’ visits to clients in the Bahamas and guaranteed their safety while they were in the islands. That made McIllvanney a gold-plated pimp, though he preferred to describe himself as a ‘leisure-agent’; however, he usually had the grace to smile when he used that label. He showed a similar amusement now. “I hear that black bugger Billingsley scared the living daylights out of you today?”

McIllvanney enjoyed making the accusation. He did not like me. I was the son of a rich and famous man and, to McIllvanney, that accident of birth clinked with the corrupt sound of silver spoons. It did not matter that I had rejected my father’s ways, that I had become a marine and was as poor as a church mouse while McIllvanney had become a rich man; the stench of privilege still clung to me and McIllvanney loved to discomfort me because of it. “How do you know what Billingsley did to me?” I asked him.

“How the fock do you think I know? He told me!”

I should have realised that in an island as small as Grand Bahamas two men like McIllvanney and Billingsley would know each other. McIllvanney must have been Billingsley’s source for the policeman’s information about my boat and my plans to repair her. Doubtless, before coming to the yard, Billingsley had talked with McIllvanney, and I guessed that he had also entertained the Ulsterman afterwards with an account of my pusillanimity. I suddenly felt an immense relief that I only had one more charter to complete for Cutwater, and that I would then be free of these men.

“So what did Billingsley tell you?” McIllvanney seemed amused by my silence. “That the Belgian owners got pissed off with sailing and trotted off home?”

“Yes.”

“Billingsley’s a lying black bastard, so he is. Those Belgians must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they probably saw something they shouldn’t have seen, so someone shut them up for good. They’ll not have been the first tourists to be fed to the sharks and they won’t be the last.”

“You’re telling me they were murdered?” I was feeling guilty at giving in so easily to Billingsley’s blackmail.

“I don’t know what happened to them, do I?” McIllvanney said tiredly. “And if I did know, would I be telling you? I’m just telling you what I think happened, so I am. And I don’t think they pissed off home because they were suddenly hungry for Belgian waffles. I think they were sent for their tea by Billingsley and his friends, and I’ll tell you something more, no one will ever know what happened to them, so forget it! If you know what’s good for you, Thessy and Ellen, none of you even saw the Belgian boat this morning!” He glared at me, almost daring me to contradict his advice. I kept a cowardly silence that was broken by a strident and sudden eruption of Goombay music from one of the nearby beach hotels. The music triggered a burst of applause. “It’s a convention,” McIllvanney explained with a sneer, “off-season rates, car dealers and their wives from Europe, and the product is a five-speed piece of tin-plate junk. Man’s a prick.”

He had added the last three words with the same morose carelessness with which he had decried the car dealers’ convention, but he offered no elucidation as to what the words meant. “Who is?” I finally asked.

“Deacon Billingsley, of course. He’s as tough as old boots, but playing with drugs is still a mug’s game. If the spics don’t blow you away then the Americans will. The man’s a prick to be involved.”

“So he is involved?” I asked, and I was unable to hide my surprise even though McIllvanney was merely confirming my own suspicion that Billingsley was corrupt. Yet suspecting and knowing are two different things, and I was still naïve enough to want to believe that all policemen could be trusted. Ellen was amused by my naïvety, claiming that if she dug deep enough she would probably discover that I still believed in Santa Claus. I did not like the accusation of naïvety, preferring to believe that I was an honest man who found it hard to imagine how other people could live with a guilty conscience. Whatever, I sounded primly shocked at hearing my suspicions of Billingsley’s corruption confirmed.

McIllvanney stared at me as though I was a complete idiot. “Of course he’s focking involved. He’s up to his black eyeballs in the drug trade. He’s even got a house on Murder Cay, so he has, and he’s not the only one with his nose stuck in that particular trough, but it’s not your business, and you don’t mess with the man because he’s got friends who won’t think twice about feeding you to the sharks. I’ve got a job for you.”

I almost ignored his last words because I was still thinking about Billingsley’s dishonesty, but then I realised just what McIllvanney had said and I frowned. “A job? What kind of job?”

“What the hell sort of a job do you think it is? It’s an extra charter for Wavebreaker, of course.”

“I can’t do it, you know I can’t,” I said instantly and very firmly. McIllvanney did not respond, except to stare at me with his unblinking and reptilian eyes, and thus he forced me to add an unnecessary explanation. “I want to sail Masquerade south before the hurricane season, so I’m going to need all that’s left of this summer to repair her.” That was entirely true, but it sounded very limp as I said it and my voice just tailed away. “Of course I’d like to help you, but…”

“The job will pay extra,” McIllvanney said flatly. He was not looking at me any more, but was staring out to sea where a small tanker, her navigation lights glowing bright in the falling darkness, nudged gingerly towards the bunkering buoys. “A lot extra. And it’s legal.”

“If it wasn’t for Masquerade—” I began, but McIllvanney cut me off.

“The client’s offering 115 American dollars a day for the skipper, which makes the whole thing worth over ten thousand bucks to you. Ellen will clear eight thousand, so she will, and Thessalonians will make over three.”

I was doing some swift mental arithmetic, and the result was so crazy that I paused to rework the sums in my head. The car salesmen cheered from the darkness beneath as I stared into McIllvanney’s implacable eyes. “Three months?” I asked in disbelief. “The client wants the boat for three months! That’s impossible. I’ve got Masquerade to repair.”

“The client says he’s an admirer of yours.” McIllvanney managed to insert a sneer into the word admirer. “He wants you particularly, so he does. You remember Senator Crowninshield?”

“Of course I do.” I remembered George Crowninshield very well, for he and his wife had been my very first clients on board Wavebreaker and I had been nervous, not just at the prospect of a new job, but because of the client’s eminence. George Crowninshield was a US senator, one of the stars of that legislature, and these days it was impossible to see his name in a magazine or newspaper without the added speculation that he might soon become the President of the United States. He was not the clear favourite for the Oval Office, for there were other men whose achievements were more palpable than George Crowninshield’s, but he looked good, sounded better and no journalist had ever discovered him with his fingers in the till or his legs in the wrong bed. His enemies said that he was a politician without a cause, but if that was the worst they could say of him then he could indeed look towards the White House.

I had liked the senator. I had expected an American senator to be as pompous and flatulent as a British MP, but George Crowninshield had proved affable and friendly. He had been intrigued by my relationship with my father, and sympathetic to my rejection of the theatre. My father, Sir Tom, was the second most famous man of the British stage, of any stage for that matter; a towering and famous figure, one of the great actors of all time, who accepted the adulation as his due and who had expected me, like the rest of his children, to follow in his footsteps. Instead, in rebellion against the illusions of the stage and films, I had run away from home and joined the Marines. Not as an officer, but as a marine. Sir Tom had tried to get me out, had failed, and had then left me to my own devices. What hurt him was how much I looked like him. I, the only one of his children who had not gone on to the stage, had inherited the famous Breakspear eyes, the Breakspear height, the Breakspear cheekbones, the brooding Breakspear presence that my father had used to break the hearts of unnumbered women. I was often called Hamlet because I so resembled my father’s appearance in his most famous film, the ‘Coronation’ Hamlet, so named because it had been released in Coronation year. Yet I was not my father. I was an exmarine sergeant who was also a damned good sailor.

Senator Crowninshield had been sympathetic to the problems a child might have with a famous parent. The senator had a son and daughter of his own and, though he had never talked specifically of their problems, I sensed that in my life he was seeking an answer to his own family’s complexities. He and I had talked long into the tropical nights and I had enjoyed his company, and I would have liked to have spent more time with Senator Crowninshield, but three months? “Just how can a US senator take off from his job for three months?” I now asked McIllvanney in astonishment

“The senator doesn’t want the boat for himself.” McIllvanney shook a cigarette out of a packet, then opened his briefcase that lay on the floor beside his chair. “He wants the boat for his two children. Except they’re hardly children any more; the wee bastards are twenty-four, so they are. Twins, you see, a boy and a girl.” He had found his lighter in the briefcase, as well as a letter that was embossed with a blue and gold eagle above the rubric ‘From the Washington Office of Senator George Crowninshield’. McIllvanney held the letter out to me as though it explained everything. “The girl’s called Robin-Anne, and the boy is Rickie. It’s a graduation present for her, so it is.”

I ignored the letter. “A graduation present?” I was accustomed to wealthy Americans treating their children to lavish rewards for completing extremely average educations, but three months’ charter aboard Wavebreaker seemed uncommonly generous, even to a man as famously wealthy as Senator Crowninshield.

“It’s his focking money,” McIllvanney justified the senator’s generosity.

“But it’s my time,” I said as I stood up, “and I can’t spare it. I’ve got a boat to repair.”

“Ellen will be disappointed,” McIllvanney said slyly, “she likes her money, so she does.”

He again managed to invest his words with a sneer. “She’s only saving her money,” I sprang to Ellen’s defence, “so she has something to live on while she writes her first novel.”

“She should shack up with a man, then, like the other women writers do,” McIllvanney said nastily and, when I did not respond, he jabbed a finger at me. “If she’s so keen to save a spot of money then she won’t thank you for cheating her of eight grand.”

“Find someone else to skipper the charter,” I said. “Why don’t you ask Sammy Meredith? He’d love to do it.” Sammy was another of Cutwater’s skippers, and a good one.

“Because the senator asked for you personally,” McIllvanney said. “He wants you, not Sammy or anyone else, and if you won’t do it, then you’re not just putting Ellen’s money at risk, but you’re putting my commission on the line too, and I might not like that.”

“Get lost.” I would not be threatened by McIllvanney. “Ask Sammy Meredith.”

“A hundred and twenty-five dollars a day?” McIllvanney offered.

It never occurred to me that something quite extraordinary must be implicated in the charter if George Crowninshield was willing to pay such an egregious price for an out-of-season charter. “The answer’s still no,” I said.

McIllvanney shrugged acceptance of my refusal, then held up a hand to stop me leaving. “Talking of Ellen,” he said casually, “is the silly bint still refusing to fock?”

“Jesus wept!” I was wondering if the world had gone mad. “You’re as bad as Billingsley!”

McIllvanney was quite unmoved by my anger. “Because if she can’t make money from the senator’s charter,” he went on, “I was thinking of offering her a job or two on my own behalf. I mean, she’s an attractive girl, so she is, despite her ideas, and she could make a pretty penny out of her looks. Know what I mean?”

I knew exactly what he meant, and I felt a seething of anger at his suggestion. “Ask her yourself. I won’t bloody pimp for you.” I snatched his sliding door open and went back into the arctic cold where I punched the button to summon the lift. Donna was on the telephone. She smiled at me as the lift doors opened, then mouthed a silent farewell and fluttered her fingers at me till the lift doors closed.

I rode the bicycle back to the darkened and empty boatyard. Ellen had gone to her one-room apartment in town while Thessy was reading his Bible in the main-cabin, so I heated myself some baked beans in Wavebreaker’s microwave, spread them on buttered toast, soaked them in brown sauce, then ate a morose supper on deck until the bugs drove me to the screened sanctuary of the staterooms below. Thessy asked me what McIllvanney had wanted, but I said it had been nothing very much for I was too disgusted with the man to tell Thessy the truth. I felt dirtied by the corruption of pimps, yet I would soon be free of them for I had just one more job to do, and then I would be loosed to the consolations of Masquerade and to the joys of the South Pacific’s winds. Just one more job; then home to the sea.

Next morning the sky was clear, the wind steady, and the barometer high. The customers’ beds were made, the galley was stocked, and the black scorch marks of Deacon Billingsley’s matches had been scrubbed out of Wavebreaker’s pale decks. Her fuel tanks were filled with diesel, the last fresh water was aboard, there was sun-tan lotion and lip-salve in every cabin, and the rotted chicken heads were safe in the freezer. We were ready.

McIllvanney made his usual inspection. Wavebreaker was the flagship of Cutwater’s fleet and McIllvanney liked to see her sparkling before each charter. That morning, as usual, he found nothing to complain of, so instead he wheeled on me to demand whether the boat’s electronic instruments were functioning properly.

“Ask Ellen,” I replied laconically, for Ellen was the only person who truly understood all the fancy gadgets though, perversely, she had still not mastered a sextant. She confirmed to McIllvanney that the weather-fax machine and the Loran and the Satnav and the radar and all the other things that hummed and winked and glowed in the night were working properly.

McIllvanney flicked a non-existent scrap of dust from the varnished rail, then gave Thessy a sly glance. “I suppose His Holiness Pope Breakspear told you about the senator’s offer, eh, Thessalonians? And I dare say you’re disappointed about it, because it’s not every day that an out-island lad gets offered that sort of money, is it now? It’s even better money than you could earn in high season, so it is, but of course your father isn’t Sir Thomas Bloody Breakspear and as rich as a pig in shit, so you need the money, while his Holiness here doesn’t. And the senator was most particular in wanting Pope Breakspear. No one else, the senator said, just his Holiness.” McIllvanney favoured me with a jackal-like smile.

Thessy hesitated, torn between curiosity and his loyalty to me, but he finally shook his head. “I don’t know about the senator’s offer, sir.”

McIllvanney pretended astonishment. “Did I speak out of turn? That’s terrible, if I did. Forget I even spoke.” He shot a glance at Ellen, making sure that she had understood him as well as Thessy, then he looked at his watch and shouted for Bellybutton to start up one of the workboats. “I’ll see you in a week’s time, so I will.” He gave me an evil grin, knowing just what dissension he had sown in Wavebreaker’s crew, then he was gone.

“What offer?” Ellen asked icily when McIllvanney was out of earshot. “And what senator?”

So, just as McIllvanney had intended, I was forced to tell Ellen and Thessy about George Crowninshield’s offer, and how the senator was willing to pay above the odds if we would all abandon our summer plans and take his precious kids to sea for three months. I tried to make the prospect unattractive, but McIllvanney’s vision of money had dazzled both Ellen and Thessy.

“Why the hell did you say no?” Ellen demanded angrily.

“I didn’t say no. I just said I couldn’t go myself! But I told McIllvanney that Sammy Meredith could go instead of me.”

Ellen did not like that suggestion. Sammy was a competent skipper, but he could not keep his hands to himself when Ellen was close. Sammy was presently delivering one of our Nautor Swans to its Massachusetts owner; many of the charter yachts were privately owned and only leased into Cutwater’s care on condition that we delivered them back to their owners for the northern summer. I assumed McIllvanney had sent a message to Massachusetts asking Sammy to telephone as soon as he reached port, and I was certain that Sammy would jump at the chance of three months’ extra salary, and if he did then Ellen and Thessy would similarly earn their small fortunes.

“But Mr McIllvanney said the senator vants you, Nick,” Thessy said unhappily.

“He just wants someone to give his two spoilt brats a holiday. He doesn’t care who skippers the boat!”

“But maybe he does,” Thessy insisted sadly, and both he and Ellen stared reproachfully at me as though I was risking all their future prosperity.

“For God’s sake,” I said angrily, “you’ll both get your money. Sammy Meredith will jump at the chance of three months’ work. I can’t do it, OK? I’ve got a boat to mend.” The two of them still gazed at me with resentful misunderstanding. Damn McIllvanney, I thought, and damn his blackmail. I turned away from my crew to demonstrate that I would not discuss the Crowninshield charter any further. “Thessy? Put up the flags.”

The flags were our final welcoming touch. Wavebreaker was registered in the Channel Islands, and thus sailed under a defaced British red ensign with the Bahamian flag flying as a courtesy ensign from the main spreaders, but I always greeted arriving charter guests with their own country’s flag—though such a gesture was considered bad flag etiquette by nautical purists, it was good for our final tip—and so Thessy now hoisted the Stars and Stripes to the mainmast’s spreaders and a smaller Stars and Bars just beneath. The Confederate flag had been Ellen’s idea, to be unfurled whenever we had charterers from the deep South, and this week’s guests were three married couples from Georgia. I watched the two handsome flags uncurl to the warm wind, then went on my own tour of inspection. Wavebreaker looked good, and we, her crew, looked just as good in our matching blue and white clothes.

We were ready, even to the pitcher of orange juice, bucket of champagne and iced flask of vodka that waited on a table Ellen had carried up to the cockpit. The wind lifted the snow-white tablecloth and stirred the handsome red ensign at Wavebreaker’s stern. “She looks good,” I told my crew, “well done.”

“But suppose Crowninshield won’t accept anyone but you as Wavebreaker’s captain?” Ellen, refusing to be sidetracked from her lost dollars, asked in a sulky and defiant voice.

The question annoyed me. “I’m supposed to abandon Masquerade just to give his spoilt bloody kids a holiday?”

“No, you’re supposed to abandon Masquerade just so I can earn a few thousand dollars.” Ellen smiled very sweetly at me. “And if I don’t earn those few thousand dollars then I am sure as hell not going to sail away with you. As the psalmist says, dear Nicholas,” and Ellen’s smile became even sweeter, “you can blow that dream right up your ass.”

Thessy gasped at such blasphemy, while I scowled at Ellen’s blackmail. “You can earn your money with Sammy Meredith,” I insisted, “then sail away with me.”

“I can’t if the senator demands you,” Ellen said stubbornly, then turned away as Cutwater’s courtesy taxi arrived from the airport in a salvo of backfires and black smoke. Thessy slid down the companionway, took the cassette from the rack, and waited by the boat’s sound system for my signal.

The taxi doors opened. We knew very little about these last clients of the season except that they were two attorneys and a proctologist, all from Georgia and all vacationing with their wives, and we also knew that one of the wives was a vegetarian and that the proctologist hated pasta, but beyond that our guests were utter strangers and so we waited nervously to see what kind of people would be our companions and paymasters for the next week. Doubtless the arriving customers were just as anxious about us, and part of our job was to relax them quickly. “You have to remember,” Ellen liked to lecture Thessy and me, “just how absurdly wealthy they all are, and how desperately the wealthy want to be liked because they can’t help feeling guilty about being so rich, so we only have to be obsequious, give them loads of booze, and pretend to be impressed by their entirely predictable and usually jejune opinions, after which they’ll reward us with an outrageously large tip—which is, after all, the sole reason for being nice to the ghastly creatures in the first place.”

The first man out of the Chevrolet was wearing blue and green Bermuda shorts, a pink and scarlet Hawaiian shirt and a blue tennis visor with the words ‘Go Dawgs’ inscribed on its peak. “He must be the proctologist,” Ellen said sweetly.

“Vot’s a proctologist?” Thessy, ever eager to extend his education, asked from the foot of the companionway.

“A proctologist is an asshole doctor, Thessy dear,” Ellen explained, then gave me a smile that would have frozen the heart out of a blast furnace. “Or in Nick’s case,” she added loudly, “a brain surgeon.”

“Now!” I interrupted Thessy’s next earnest question, and he pushed the cassette into the tape deck and a steel band arrangement of ‘Yellow Bird’ thumped and jangled from the cockpit speakers to fill the marina with its bright and jaunty welcome. Bellybutton, a straw hat over his eyes, danced a few ludicrous steps on the deck of the workboat, thus looking for all the world like a simple Bahamian native welcoming the nice white folks from Georgia who now stood blinking in the bright sunlight beside a growing mound of their designer-label luggage. The man with the ‘Go Dawgs’ hat saw our rebel flag at the spreaders and let out an approving yell that sent two gulls squawking up from the garbage cans behind McIllvanney’s office.

“Asshole,” the Yankee Ellen said scathingly, then, joined by Thessy, we stepped forward to offer our practised and smiling welcome.

My last charter had begun; I had one week to work, then it would be back to Masquerade, and then to the long winds of the southern ocean that led to the uttermost ends of the earth, and thus to happiness.

Wavebreaker, despite her ethereal beauty, was not the most practical boat with which to cruise the Bahamas. She drew too much water, and the Bahamas, for the most part, are a shallow bank dotted with ripsaw coral heads and treacherous shoals where flat-bottomed boats might glide in comparative safety, but where a deep-keeled schooner was forced to creep with painful care. Whenever we reached coral or shoal waters Thessy was forced to spend hours perched at the foremast’s lower spreaders to watch the water’s colour. Deep safe water was a dark royal blue, while over a coral reef the sea shaded to green or, when perilously shallow, to brown, and Thessy, peering ahead, would shout at me to go to port or starboard, or even to go backwards as fast as the motors would catch hold. We tried to avoid such adventures by sticking to the deeper channels and harbours, but some guests demanded we anchor in the shallower lagoons where the rays glided above the bright sand and the grey snappers schooled and the barracudas patrolled. One way to discourage such demands was secretly to salt a shallow anchorage with a bag of rotted chicken heads which would quickly draw a sinuous and evil-looking pack of otherwise harmless sand sharks that would twist menacingly under our keel and persuade the paying customers to seek the deeper darker waters offshore.

Guests who still wanted to explore the lagoons and sea-flats could use Wavebreaker’s skiff. Our Georgia guests used the small flat-bottomed craft to go bonefishing one afternoon, and Thessy, well trained by his father, led them unerringly to a sea-flat by a mangrove swamp where, in just a few heart-racing moments, they landed four of the gleaming and elusive fish. None weighed more than three pounds, but the sheer savage strength of the mirror-plated fish astonished our guests. “Hey, beautiful!” the proctologist, back aboard Wavebreaker at sunset, called down the companionway steps to where Ellen was tearing apart a lettuce for the evening meal. “Can you cook me a bonefish?”

“I can cook it, doctor, but you won’t want to eat it.” Ellen gave him her sweetest smile, the one calculated to provoke cardiac arrest in a sworn celibate. “Eating bonefish is just like sucking fish-juice off a mouthful of tin-tacks.”

“So what are you doing for my supper, darling?”

“French fries and New York strip steak.”

“Who strips? You or the beef?” The proctologist whooped with laughter and punched my arm. “Get it, Nick? Who strips? You or the beef? Shee-it, I kill myself sometimes. Was she really a college professor?”

“So she tells me.”

“They didn’t look like that when I was at college. I tell you, Nick, the old bags who lectured us were all spayed before they were allowed near the students.” He chuckled, then held his glass out for a refill of vodka and orange juice. Once the glass was full he held it up to the lantern that hung from the awning’s strut and toasted whichever patient had paid for that afternoon’s bonefishing. All week our doctor and two lawyers had thus credited their clients for their various pleasures. The proctologist drank the toast, then raised his glass once more, this time in tribute to Thessy’s prowess as a bonefish guide. “Is the kid’s name really Thessalonians?”

“It truly is,” I confirmed.

“Weirdest goddamn name I ever did hear.” The proctologist shook his head then turned to look at our private scrap of paradise. The evening was dropping like velvet and the lagoon was fading to a deep dusky richness in which the curving palms were reflected as cleanly as though the water were a dark-silvered looking-glass. We had moored off a deserted cay rimmed with a beach of clear sand above which the first stars were pricking the warm sky, while, beneath Wavebreaker’s bimini cover, half-moon ice cubes clinked in crystal glasses. “This is the life.” The proctologist stretched his sunburned legs on the cockpit cushions and rested his head so he could stare past the bimini cover at the stars. “You’re one hell of a lucky guy, Nick. You spend your life with Ellen, while I get to stare up assholes all day.” He grimaced, then rolled his head to look at me. “Why didn’t you become an actor like your dad?”

“I’m no good at it.”

“Ineptitude didn’t stop me becoming an asshole doctor!” The proctologist hooted at his own wit before asking which of my father’s famous wives was my mother. I told him and he shook his head in admiration. “She was some looker, Nick! Wow.”

“Wow,” I agreed. In her time Mother had been almost as famous as Father, but presently she was in a home for inebriates where, on good days, she could remember who she was, but the good days were very rare and getting scarcer. I thought what a snakepit my family was; a snakepit dominated by a genius who knew how to create any illusion—even love.

“It must be pretty great having Sir Thomas as a father.” The proctologist was fishing for gossip.

“It’s wonderful,” I said with suitable sanctimony. “He’s a great man.”

The doctor nodded agreement. “You can tell that just from looking at him.” He was entirely serious, and had adopted a portentous tone suitable for expressing admiration for the Greatest Living Englishman. “Know what I mean, Nick? You look at Sir Tom on the screen and it doesn’t matter what part he’s playing but you can tell he’s a great guy. What’s the word I’m looking for? Help me out here, Nick.” He snapped his fingers. “Integrity!” he said at last. “Your dad’s got integrity.”

Father would not know what integrity was if it sneaked up and bit his backside. “I know,” I said humbly.

The proctologist swirled the ice in his glass. “You’re a lucky fellow, Nick.”

“I know,” I said again, and I was too, but not for the reasons the proctologist believed. I was lucky because I had turned my back on illusion, pursuing instead common-sense reality. I had run away from Sir Tom because I needed to find a bedrock of truth on which to build a life. I had no time for my father’s illusions. Illusion could not fix a position from a sextant reading, nor fight two hundred square feet of heavy flogging wet canvas in a tumbling sea and a rough wind. People envied me my birth and my childhood, but my secret pride was that I had rejected both to make of myself a prosaic and common-sense fellow.

The proctologist was bored with talking about Sir Tom. “You reckon we can go bonefishing again tomorrow?” he asked me instead.

“It’s your charter, doctor. You can do whatever you like.”

“Hey, Ellen!” the doctor shouted down to the galley where Ellen was trying to disguise the fact that the frozen steaks were being thawed in a microwave. “Nick says I can do whatever I like! You want to come skinny-dipping with me tomorrow?”

“I don’t think I could take the excitement, doctor.”

By the week’s end the proctologist was saying that it had been the best goddamned vacation he had ever taken, and as we passed the bunkering moorings near McIllvanney’s yard I saw him take Ellen aside and I guessed he was offering her a job. In the year I had skippered Wavebreaker at least half of our married male charterers had either offered Ellen a job or pressed her to visit their offices the next time she passed through their city. It was almost tedious to watch it happen.

We docked ten minutes later, and Thessy and I carried the luggage out to the yard where the courtesy taxi shimmered in the heat. One of the lawyers’ wives wanted to know the secret of Ellen’s coffee, and Ellen modestly said she just followed the percolator instructions, while the truth was that she put a cupful of cheap instant coffee powder into every percolated pot. The proctologist handed me three envelopes, one addressed to each of us, then told me that if I ever had piles I could rely on him to cut them out for cost.

Ellen held her happy smile till the courtesy taxi had disappeared, then she tore up the proctologist’s business card. “The creep suggested I might be his receptionist.” She ripped open her envelope to find two hundred dollars. Mine had the same amount, while Thessy’s only contained a hundred, though the proctologist had also given him the ‘Go Dawgs’ hat. Not that the inequity of the tip mattered, for we always pooled and shared the money evenly.

It took just over an hour to empty Wavebreaker of her garbage and dirty linen, and then to hook up the shoreside electricity and pump diesel and fresh water into her tanks. Those chores done, and the synthetic fabric of the precious sails covered from the ravages of sunlight, I hefted my old marine kit bag on to the dock where Ellen was waiting to ambush me.

Ellen planned to return to her tiny apartment in the town where she kept her precious books and where, on an old manual typewriter, she wrote what she called her ‘five-finger exercises’, which she would never let anyone read. McIllvanney had offered to let her stay on board Wavebreaker, so long as the boat’s air conditioners were disconnected, but his offer was not as generous as it seemed for Ellen would have been little more than an unpaid security guard and also subject to Bellybutton’s endlessly tedious suggestions, and she far preferred her small hot room in the busy crowded apartment block that smelt of cooking all day and marijuana all night.

“I’ll see you in a week’s time, Nick?” Ellen now challenged me.

I shook my head. “You know you won’t. I’ve got a boat to mend.” I tried to edge past her, but she blocked my progress with her bicycle. “Sammy Meredith can skipper the boat,” I suggested.

“Sam Meredith is a creep. Be here in one week, Nick, or you won’t see me again!”

Thessy was already waiting at the yard gate where our taxi thumped and quivered. Ellen was still arguing with me as Thessy and I climbed in and backfired away, but I was no longer listening. I had Masquerade to mend and a life to live and, even if it meant living it without Ellen, my charter days were done. I was free.

I had been in New York when Masquerade was stolen. I had gone there from Florida because my father had pleaded with me to go. He was opening his celebrated King Lear on Broadway. He was old, he told me, and he was feeling his age, and he had played the Lear for five months at the National in London and he was tired, and he wanted to patch things up with me because it would make him feel better, and I was the only one of all his children whom he could trust, and he needed my youth to support him at this difficult time and so, like a fool, I had believed him and flown to New York where I had found the rogue ensconced in a suite of the Plaza with a frizzy-haired girl young enough to be his great-granddaughter. “The dear soul wishes to be in the theatre,” he told me, “and her legs are good enough to allow me to encourage that ambition, though doubtless at the risk of slipping a disc or two in my back. Would you like to sleep with her?”

I went to his opening night. He was brilliant. I still don’t know how he does it. He despises the method actors. “Grubby little players,” he calls them, “vermin in greasepaint. They’re not paid to be amateur psychiatrists, but to be players, to be actors. The stage is a job, dear Nick, not a mindfuck.” On that first Broadway night I had stood in the wings where he was absent-mindedly fondling the breasts of his frizzy-haired admirer, and to me he had looked just like any other dirty old man; but then, as the royal fanfare sounded, he had twitched his grey gown, given me a wink, and walked into the stage’s glare. “Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester.” He had spoken Lear’s opening lines and I had felt a shiver run through the theatre’s great darkness, because the voice was there, and the power of it, and he was suddenly not a dirty old man at all, but a great, kind, foolish and painfully honest King.

The performance was a triumph. Later that night, drinking champagne at the first night party, he gave me his usual disclaimers; how it was all an illusion, everything was an illusion, all life was an illusion, and how he, Sir Tom, was the master of illusion, but how his dear children were real because they alone could not be spawned from the imagination. “Sweet soul—” he took my arm in his, “come home to me. To England.” He was drunk.

“Why?”

“You could succeed me. You have it in you, you know.”

“Of course I don’t.”

“You are my bad conscience, Nick. That is why I need you.” He looked across the room to where a famous actress held scornful court. “I screwed her in a hot-air balloon. Over California. Her husband chased us in a jeep, and the oscillations of the basket told him what I was doing to his wife, and the poor man was jealous.” My father had begun to giggle. “Do you know what she told me, Nick? She said she could feel a shard of genius enter her soul with my seed! Oh, Nick! How generous I have been with my genius. Her silly husband shot himself, which was hardly surprising because she was a rotten lay.”

He talked me into staying two more days, and thus three days passed before I discovered that Masquerade was missing. It was another seven days before she was found grinding her starboard side to shreds on a coral reef north of Straker’s Cay in the Far-Out Islands. Bonefish Straker reckoned that some Bahamian kids must have stolen the boat as a means of getting home, but we would never know who had wrecked her, only that they had removed a dinghy load of gear including her chronometer, sextant, VHF, barometer, spare sails, lines, fenders, and even the mattress off the starboard quarter-berth. They had stolen my good oilskins, but the thieves had never found my small stash of money which had been hidden in a redundant sea-cock, nor had they found the old Webley .455 revolver that I had hidden deep in Masquerade’s bilges. The gun itself had been a prop in a film version of Journey’s End in which my father had starred, and when the filming was over he had ‘forgotten’ to return the pistol which was still in good working order. I had fewer than a hundred rounds for the gun which I kept solely as a deterrent for those remote places where cruising yachtsmen are seen as plump victims, ripe for pillaging, and the Webley offered me good protection for, though the gun was over seventy years old, it was massively built and frighteningly powerful.

Bonefish Straker had rescued Masquerade, propping her up in his own backyard and refusing to take any money from me as a salvage fee. Bonefish Straker was Thessalonians’ father, and also father to two dozen other children, most of them orphans who had been unofficially adopted by Bonefish and his wife, Sarah. Bonefish’s real name was Hector, but he had earned his nickname because of his uncanny ability to find the elusive fish. He was reckoned one of the islands’ best fishing guides, a man who could name his own price to the rich northerners who came to the blue waters to kill gamefish, but Bonefish believed that his family might stray from the path of righteousness if he spent too much time away from home so he restricted his guide work to just a few weeks of the year. The rest of the time he caught snapper or conch or lobster, and brooded over the souls of his ramshackle family; each of whom was named for a different book in the Bible. He had started at the back of the good book and was perversely working his way towards Genesis, which meant that his eldest daughter was called Revelation Straker; a young woman as pretty as her name, and as happy as all the other children who grew up under Bonefish’s skinny care. Bonefish, in brief, was a very good man who had never heard of Sir Thomas Breakspear, and I was a very lucky man for the fortunate accident of having met Bonefish.

He watched in anxious silence as I ran a hand over the repairs he had begun on Masquerade. A Danish yawl had been wrecked on the far side of the island two years before and Bonefish had rescued some of her oak timbers which he had scarfed in to Masquerade’s broken hull. Only one rib had needed replacing and Bonefish apologised that he had fashioned that new one from a piece of his own Madeira wood.

“It’s a wonderful job,” I said respectfully. It was, too.

“I vould have done more, sir, but life is busy.”

“Don’t call me ‘sir’. My name’s Nick.”

“Werry busy, sir,” Bonefish went on as though I had not spoken. He called all white men ‘sir’. To him we were still the missionaries who had brought God to his soul and law to his land. I had tried to tell him that the world had changed drastically, but Bonefish did not want to believe in change. He was descended from slaves who had accompanied their master, one Rafe Straker, from Long Island in 1783. Rafe Straker, like many of the original white settlers of the Bahamas, had been an American loyalist who could not stomach life under George Washington. The white Straker family had long disappeared, their genes and blood melded into the vigorous bodies of their freed slaves, and only the Straker name lived on to be given new dignity by Bonefish and his family. “I don’t know from vere ve’ll fetch the copper.” Bonefish drew his hand over the abraded edges of the copper sheathing left on Masquerade’s hull.

“I’ll have some sent from England, and some bronze nails. But we can get the tar and brown paper locally?” The copper was bedded on to the wood with tarred brown paper.

Bonefish gave me a swift silent grin. “I think ve can manage tar and paper, sir.”

Thessy, squatting nearby as he waited for his father’s permission to join the conversation, looked up as a twin-engined plane howled low overhead. The plane’s registration number was so faded as to be illegible, but I recognised the machine anyway. It belonged to the Maggot, whose real name was John Maggovertski. The Maggot was an expatriate American who ran a slew of businesses from his Grand Bahama home. All of the Maggot’s businesses were perpetually on the fringe of bankruptcy. One of his shakier concerns was an air-taxi service with which he scared the wits out of travellers too innocent to know better than to fly with him. The shriek of the plane’s engines drowned our voices, so Bonefish and I just watched as the plane sank towards Straker Cay’s small airstrip. Once the machine had disappeared behind the trees Bonefish shook his head sadly. To him all aircraft were harbingers of dreadful change, mere noisy messengers of a Godless world; which, I realised, was a pretty accurate description of the Maggot himself.

I assumed the Maggot was delivering or picking up a customer, but it was none of my business, so I stripped down to my shorts and began work as Thessy, his brother Philemon and their father took a battered wooden skiff across the lagoon. Two brown pelicans flapped past as I began shaping the broken ends of Masquerade’s shattered planking. The sun was warm on my back, but the south-easterly wind took the edge off the stifling heat. A gaggle of Bonefish’s children were in constant, but changing, attendance, sometimes helping me, but more often chasing each other in a complicated game of tag up and over Masquerade’s hull. Revelation came and sat in the shade of Masquerade’s bows where she plucked two chickens that I suspected had been killed in honour of my return to the island. The chickens’ surviving relatives clucked and scratched in the dirt, oblivious to the drifting feathers. Revelation and I chatted idly, content to let the minutes drift pass like warm thistledown. “Thessy says he’s been offered a lot of money for a charter?” Revelation eventually challenged me.

“That’s true.”

“But you von’t do it?”

“I don’t want to leave you, Revelation.”

She gave that piece of gallantry the scorn it deserved. “Father vouldn’t really vant him to go for all the summer.”

“So it doesn’t matter if I say no,” I said with some relief, for I had been feeling somewhat guilty at risking Thessy’s chances of making some money.

“But if you go on this charter, Father will let Thessy go.” Revelation went sweetly on, thus impaling me on the hook of my own guilt once more. It was I who had introduced Thessy to McIllvanney and who had secured him the job with Cutwater, but Bonefish had only allowed his son into the wide wicked world because of his trust in me. I was not certain that the trust was deserved, but Bonefish was convinced I was protecting his son from iniquity, and no assertion to the contrary would convince him otherwise. “And if Thessy vent,” Revelation continued, “then the money vould be good, because the outboard is broken and Father can’t mend it and there’s no money for another.” She sighed, then twisted on her stool to gaze in astonishment because a car was thumping and crashing its way along the dirt road that led from the island’s one village to Bonefish’s sprawl of shacks. It was clear from Revelation’s expression that cars were as uncommon at this end of the island as polar bears; indeed, the sight of one was so surprising that she picked up her skirts and, with the younger children around her, fled towards the safety of her mother’s kitchen.

The car, an ancient Pontiac taxi that was painted six shades of yellow and purple, stopped outside the twin piles of broken coral that were Bonefish’s proud gateposts. There was a pause, then the back door of the cab opened, and a very tall white man climbed out into the sun. He was dressed in checked golfing trousers, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. He blinked uncertainly at the landscape. He looked lost and nervous, as though he was unsure of where he was or why he had bothered to come.

Then he saw me, waved, and began walking slowly towards me. I did not respond, for I was feeling nothing but astonishment. I could not even speak. I was struck dumb because George Crowninshield, senator and possibly a future President of the United States, had come alone to Straker’s Cay. “Hello, Nick.” He held out a hand and gave me a smile.

“Oh, bloody hell,” I found my voice. Then shook his hand.

One night during our charter, when we had been sipping whisky under the stars, Senator Crowninshield had told me that no fat man could ever again become President of the United States. “William Taft will be the last really fat President,” he had told me.

“Was he very fat?”

“Big as a house, Nick.” The senator had frowned, then opined that it was not just the fat who were for ever barred from the Oval Office, but even the ugly. America, Crowninshield had said with a note of amusement in his voice, was doomed for ever to have toothsome Presidents, and all because television now ruled politics. He had sounded amused, but then he had turned to me and pointed to his chin. “See the scar?”

There had been the faintest mark against his tanned skin, so I had nodded.

“I had a dimple there,” the Senator had confessed with his engaging frankness, “which my advisers determined made me look too baby-faced, and so we had it removed.” He had laughed, simultaneously mocking the stupidity of government by cosmetics and confessing that he was also a part of it, just as he was part of government by voice coach and acting coach.

Not that the senator needed a beautician’s help if he was to become President, for George Crowninshield was a good-looking man with a strong-boned face and a head of thick black hair. He had to be fifty, but he did not look a day over thirty-five, an illusion helped by his lopsided boyish grin that was so very full of charm. It was the candid charm that was his greatest public asset. He was popularly supposed to be a man who not only told the truth, but who could not tell a lie, and the senator’s aides and publicists were not unhappy to promulgate that echo of a previous President’s virtues.

Not everyone was so impressed by Senator Crowninshield. Ellen said he was a political lightweight whose stagecraft was better than his statecraft. The usual jibe was that Crowninshield was a politician without a cause, or rather that he would support any cause so long as it was fashionable, but his critics also attacked Crowninshield for being wealthy, claiming that his eminence was solely due to the vast amounts of money that he spent on his campaigns. One night, long after the senator had chartered Wavebreaker, I had defended him to Ellen, saying that it was not Crowninshield’s fault that he had been born to wealthy parents, and that he had used his wealth well. “He’s an honest man,” I had said trenchantly, “and there aren’t too many of those in politics.”

Ellen had given me one of her pitying looks. “Honest? For God’s sake, Nick, he graduated from Yale Law School! He’s just pretending to be an aw-shucks-gee-look-what-happened-to-me-when-I-wasn’t-trying kind of guy. He’s nice to us because we don’t threaten him, and because he’s cultivated the vote-catching art of being modestly affable, but wearing cowboy boots and grinning like a demented Howdy-Doody doesn’t turn a rattlesnake into a puppy!”

I had not believed her then, and I did not believe her now. I believed the senator was a thoughtful man whose wealth had elevated him above the need to make compromises with his convictions. He was also a man who seemed mighty pleased to see me again. He lightly punched my shoulder. “You look good, Nick, real good.”

“So do you, senator.”

“I ought to, Nick, considering how much I pay my fitness advisers and dietitians. You know what it costs to join a health club these days? Of course”—he offered me his ingenuous grin—“what really keeps me fit is all that prime USDA beef.” The senator represented a beef-rearing state and never forgot to extol the benefits of a plateful of bleeding home-grown American steak, while in private, as I had learned when he and his wife had chartered Wavebreaker, George Crowninshield rarely touched red meat.

“How did you find me?” I asked him.

“One of my staff spoke to that guy McIllvanney. I had to be in Nassau anyway, so I thought I’d look you up. I can’t stay long, but I had a particular reason to speak with you.” The yellow and purple taxi was waiting for him. The taxi driver was squatting by one of Bonefish’s gateposts where he surreptitiously smoked a cigarette. When the cigarette was finished the driver would be invited to wait in the shade of Bonefish’s casuarinas, but not before.

“Did the Maggot fly you here?” I asked Crowninshield.

The senator nodded and laughed. “I remember him, of course, from when he played for the Giants. My Lord! He flies a plane in the same way he used to sack quarterbacks!”

The Maggot had played American football until he had come off his Harley-Davidson at eighty miles an hour and permanently damaged his left knee. Sometimes, when drunk, he would regale me with stories of his footballing prowess, but such stories went past me like galley smoke because I could not bring myself to enquire, nor indeed to care, about the differences between a Tight End and a flea-flicker. When the Maggot became too boring about football I told him cricketing stories until he shut up. We liked each other, and I was glad that the senator also liked him.

Now, fanning his face with his hat, Senator Crowninshield followed me into the shade of Masquerade’s hull and stared up at her scarred flank. “So this is your famous boat, eh?”

“What’s left of her.”

“She’s surely pretty, Nick.” He walked to the stern where her name was lettered in gold. “Sounds like a tribute to your father’s profession, Nick.”

“She was called Masquerade when I bought her. It’s said to be unlucky to change a boat’s name.”

He gave me a shrewd look, clearly suspecting that I would have changed the name had I dared defy the superstition. He said nothing about his suspicion, instead asking me to remind him of how Masquerade had become damaged.

“Some swine stole her and ran her on to a coral reef,” I said, “and I’m spending the next two months mending her.”

Crowninshield walked a few paces in silence until he was standing under the palms which edged the lagoon. “So you’re mending your boat instead of taking my twins sailing?”

“You got it.” I mimicked his slow accent, and the mimicry made him turn and stare at me, and the look on his face instantly made me regret my mimicry. He was a man whose approachability made him seem so very affable, but no one, however wealthy, becomes a Presidential hopeful without some steel in the soul, and it was that sudden steel that I now saw in the senator’s eyes. I had offended him, and the look he gave me was positively frightening. I tried to back away from my levity. “Someone else will take your kids to sea, senator. There’s a fellow called Sammy Meredith who’s every bit as good a sailor as I am.”

“But I want you.” He had evidently forgiven my mimicry. He now took a pair of sunglasses from his shirt pocket and pointed them at me. When I made no response he turned and gazed at the far line of coral reef that was marked by a fret of white breaking water. I could see Bonefish and his sons working the lateen-sail of their skiff way beyond the reef, perhaps looking for turtles which they could sell to the men who exported the rich flesh to the Japanese. The sun was flat and hard and brilliant on the nearer water, forcing Crowninshield to turn back to me. “I need your help, Nick, because my only son is dying and my only daughter is following his example, and I need a strong man who will save them.” He said the words in the same light tone of voice he had used when speaking of my boat, and somehow the discordant contrast between the tone and the message threw me. I was not certain I had heard aright, then knew I had, and I suddenly felt a very British rush of embarrassment because of the senator’s frankness.

“Your son is dying?” I responded inadequately.

“Rickie is a drug addict,” he explained gently.

I said nothing for a few seconds. “Oh, shit,” I then said, because that was how I felt and because I suddenly knew that the next few minutes were going to be extraordinarily difficult.

“Specifically Rickie is addicted to cocaine,” the senator continued, “but I can’t say he’s particular in his tastes. He uses crack and cocaine and amphetamines, then more crack and more cocaine and perhaps even a speedball to round things off. You know what a speedball is, Nick?”

“No.”

“It’s an injection of cocaine mixed with heroin. It’s real big boy stuff”—the senator’s voice was very bitter—“and all of that garbage is washed down with alcohol and pickled in nicotine. My son is a dying junkie, but he doesn’t want to die alone so he’s encouraging Robin-Anne to keep him company and now she’s become addicted to cocaine and it won’t be very long before she’s smoking crack and trying speedballs.” The senator spoke with a sudden and incredible venom, and I realised it was only that angry force that was keeping him from weeping for his two children. “It seems,” he went on in a calmer voice, “that Rickie and Robin-Anne are among the sizeable minority of the population that is peculiarly prone to severe addiction.”

I wondered why McIllvanney had not told me that Rickie and Robin-Anne Crowninshield were drug addicts, then I realised that McIllvanney would not have told me anything that might have risked my acceptance of the charter, but now that I had learned that the twins had such a severe drug problem I was even less keen to take on the job. “I’m no expert on drugs, senator,” I said. “There must be hospitals they can go to?”

He nodded. “Of course there are such hospitals, and the twins are under the supervision of a clinic right now, but I believe they need extraordinary help.” He paused, and gave me a flicker of his famous smile. “Help from an extraordinary person, Nick. You.”

“I’m not extraordinary,” I said flatly.

Crowninshield smiled. “You were a marine.”

“They’ll take anyone who isn’t blind,” I said with dismissive untruth.

“And you understand what makes a son rebel against a father,” Crowninshield went on. “I remember those nights we shared our thoughts on that subject, Nick, and I think my son kind of needs the understanding you can give him.”

I shied away from the very American-sounding compliment. “Get him a good doctor.”

“I want you.”

“I’m not an expert!” I protested.

“Yes you are,” Crowninshield insisted. “You’re an expert sailor, and that’s good because it means you can take the twins to sea and keep them there until they’re damn well cured. I don’t care what hell they go through. I don’t care if they have to be strapped to the mast. I don’t care if they’re hallucinating purple snakes and blue baboons, because the whole point of putting them on a boat is that they can’t get off and swim home, and they can’t get drugs on board, and they can’t bribe you to take them to land, and that means they’ll have no damned choice but to get cured.”

I said nothing. I was thinking of all the work I needed to do on Masquerade; all the painstaking hours of sawing and planing and caulking and rigging.

Crowninshield stared at me through his obscuring lenses. “Nick,” he said at last, “my son is going to die within a year if I don’t do something very drastic. He’s already lost the sight of his left eye because cocaine starved the retina of blood, and he’s damn lucky not to be totally blind, or even dead, because the next time it could constrict the arteries of his heart or block the blood from reaching his brain. Or next time it could be Robin-Anne. So I have to do something because I can’t just stand idle and let my kids die.”

The pain in the senator’s voice was awful, but I still did not want to become involved. I began walking along the track leading behind the beach towards the village, which was marked by the red tin roof of a tiny church showing above the casuarinas and palm trees. The senator fell into step beside me while some of Bonefish’s smaller children followed at a safe distance. We stopped close to a small graveyard where a tribe of wild goats stared suspiciously at us from between the mounds of earth and bleak wooden crosses. The senator was looking at the sun-reflecting sea. “The truth is, Nick, I messed up my kids, and that hurts. It wasn’t lack of love. Hell, I had a bumper sticker saying ‘Have You Hugged Your Kids Today?’ and, sure, I hugged them every day I could, but nowadays I sometimes wonder just what in hell is going on inside their heads. Especially Rickie. It’s easier to extract sense out of a fruitfly than to get a civil word out of Rickie. They threw him out of college because of cocaine, and he was damn lucky that they didn’t call the police, but all he’d say to me was to stay cool! To stay cool, for Christ’s sake! Your only son is a college drop-out, and bleeding from the nose because his blood vessels are popping from all the cocaine in his system, and he tells you to keep your cool!”

I didn’t know what to say, so said nothing. A tiny lizard watched me with unblinking eyes from a rock beside the lagoon, while above the trees the red tin church roof shimmered bright in the sultry heat.

“Did you ever take drugs?” the senator asked me after a long silence.

“No.” My father had often urged me to try some of his marijuana, but I had never accepted, just as I had refused even to look at the cocaine that he kept in his dressing room.

“Lucky you,” the senator said ruefully. “You’re a happy man, aren’t you, Nick? That’s why I want you to take the twins to sea. I want some of your certainty and happiness to rub off on my kids.”

I shrugged that embarrassing wish away. Ellen had once assured me that I was only happy because I did not think too deeply, and probably she was right, but it is still that shallow contentment which makes people bring me their troubles just as the senator was now bringing me his two children. “What I don’t understand,” I said harshly, and in an attempt to steer the conversation away from compliments, “is why you give the twins enough money to buy themselves drugs in the first place.” What I really could not understand was why the senator did not beat ten kinds of nonsense out of a son who told him to cool it, but telling middle-class Americans to thump their kids is like asking them to burn their flag, so I did not waste my time.

“They’ve got their own money,” the senator answered, “left to them by their grandmother. The twins are only entitled to the income, while Barbara and I control the capital, but all that changes on their birthday next month.”

“When they scoop the pool?”

The senator nodded. He sensed my curiosity about how much the twins were worth, and for a few seconds reticence and candour fought across his face, but then he shrugged. “They’ll inherit about six million dollars each.”

“Jesus wept!” I stared at him. “And you let them use the income off that? Even though you know they blow it away on drugs?”

“The alternative, Nick, is much much worse.”

“What alternative?”

The senator was again not looking at me but at the sea, and his voice was immensely sad. “A drug addict will do anything to feed his habit. He’ll steal, beg, pawn or sell his family treasures, anything. I let the twins use their money on drugs because I don’t want to turn them into thieves—” he paused, “or hookers. Getting laid has never been so cheap in all history. Go to a crack house, Nick, and you can buy anything you want in the way of human flesh. Do you think I want to see my kids turning tricks for a smear of white powder?”

I felt his sadness and hopelessness, but I was still reluctant to embroil myself. There had to be agencies and clinics that were competent to deal with drug abuse, while the best I could be was an enthusiastic amateur, and that was rarely good enough. “So tell me about the twins,” I said, not because I was interested, but because I wanted the senator to talk while I dreamed up a strategy to turn down his request.

“You’ll like Robin-Anne,” the senator said too quickly, thus betraying that I would probably not like Rickie. “She’s always been the quiet one in the family. She was a Liberal Arts major at college, and has never really been any trouble.” He must have read my thoughts, for he hurried on to explain how such a paragon could end up addicted to cocaine. “A boyfriend hooked her on drugs, and that boyfriend was a room-mate of Rickie’s.”

“And Rickie,” I said sardonically, “is not the quiet one?”

“True.” The senator did not seem to want to say much more.

“What was his major?”

“Girls? Sun-tanning? Skiing?” The senator found it hard to hide the rancour his own son provoked in him. “Cocaine? Actually he majored in Phys Ed, but to tell you the truth, Rickie was always a slow learner. He’s not truly backward, but he suffers from some kind of learning dysfunctionalism.”

I wondered why Americans always called a spade a manually powered entrenching instrument. The senator meant that his son was dumb, but psycho-babble made stupidity sound respectable. I walked to the water’s edge where a coconut husk trembled in the backwash of the lagoon’s tiny waves. “Are you sure you don’t just want Rickie out of the way?” I felt nervous of challenging a man as important as Crowninshield with the truth, but I did it anyway. “I mean it can’t help your Presidential prospects if the voters discover that your kids are drug addicts.”

The senator responded with a practised smile. “What Presidential prospects? I haven’t declared.”

“Rickie’s still an embarrassment,” I accused him.

“Indeed,” he accepted the charge, “and more of an embarrassment than you know. He was arrested two months ago on a charge of trafficking in drugs. Provisionally his trial is set for December, and till then he’s released on bail.” He hesitated for a few seconds. “Nick,” he continued with a tone of wry honesty in his voice, “there are some mighty clever people who say I could be President of the United States three years from now, but what no one seems to realise is that I don’t care about that. I just care about getting my kids off drugs.”

He said it with such heartfelt force that I believed him. I felt guilty for challenging his motives and, even though a tiny corner of my mind was hearing an imaginary Ellen scoff at my naïvety, I believed the senator’s sudden and passionate sincerity. Ellen would doubtless tell me that the senator was trying to turn an electoral liability into an advantage, meaning that if he could parade his cured children in front of the electorate he could then pose as both a noble parent and as an expert on drugs, but I preferred to ignore that imagined cynicism, choosing a different reservation. “You could spend a small fortune this summer,” I told the senator, “and if Rickie doesn’t want to stop killing himself, then he won’t. I could take him to sea and keep him clean for three months, but how do you know that the moment the court case is done he won’t just stuff his nose full of crap again?”

“I don’t know that,” the senator said simply. Above us the fronds of the palm trees clattered in the warm wind, while out to sea Bonefish’s ragged and patched sail dipped in the steep waves beyond the reef. “But Rickie knows he’s in trouble, big trouble, which is why he suggested this idea of isolating himself at sea.”

“Rickie suggested it?” I could not hide my surprise. The senator had just told me how difficult it was to extract any sense from his son, yet apparently Rickie was not so far gone as the senator had suggested.

“It surprised me too,” the senator confessed wryly. “Rickie calls it his ‘cruise-cure’. I’m not sure he understands all that it involves. I think he’s expecting a glorified vacation with a lot of scuba diving and board-sailing, but he does understand that a cruise-cure means giving up drugs. I guess he heard Barbara and me discussing the good time we had with you, and he kind of picked up on it, and he wondered why he couldn’t come down to the Bahamas and isolate himself from drugs. Our lawyer took the idea to the court, and the judge altered the terms of Rickie’s bail to let him come here for a therapeutic cruise. Even the judge thought it was a great idea, Nick, because on a boat Rickie will be far away from temptation.”

I gave the senator a cynical glance. “Plenty of temptation in the Bahamas. The islands are awash with drugs.”

“So take the twins for a proper voyage,” the senator said with what he hoped was a contagious enthusiasm. “You can teach them navigation? Robin-Anne has always liked sailing, and I kind of think Rickie could take to it as well. You could go home! You could drink some of that warm English beer you were always telling me was so good.”

“It isn’t warm, and it isn’t as easy as that, senator.” I paused to marshal all my heartfelt arguments against the cruise-cure, but at the same time I felt a sudden and oceanic surge of homesickness. I imagined conning Wavebreaker into Dartmouth, and taking the power skiff upriver to one of my old and favourite pubs where the ale had real taste instead of the limp-wristed chill of North American beers. I suddenly wanted to see the green-leafed Devon river banks and to feel the grey sharp waves of the Channel buffeting my hull.

“It can’t take too long to prepare Wavebreaker for a long voyage, can it?” The senator had sensed my vacillation and now pressed me.

“It can be done,” I allowed, “but not by next week.”

“But surely you can do some of that preparatory work at sea?”

“Some,” I yielded the point, “but at this time of year I won’t go far from land while I do it.” This early in the summer most of the hurricane tracks lay well to the south of the Bahamas, but the islands could still be racked by ship-killing tropical storms and, till I was sure of Wavebreaker’s rigging, I would not go too far from safe harbours. Then I realised that I was actually contemplating accepting the senator’s offer, and I told myself that the last thing I needed this summer was to babysit two spoilt rich-kid junkies. “And if Wavebreaker does sail across the Atlantic”—I was carefully not including myself in that statement, and I was also piling on the practical difficulties attendant on the cruise-cure—“she’ll need a proper crew. She’ll want at least another three watch-keepers, and preferably two of them must understand celestial navigation. I know Wavebreaker’s got more electronic toys than a battleship, but if the electricity fails then you’re back to the sextant and the sharp pencil.”

“You can have whatever and whoever you want,” Crowninshield promised flatly.

“What I want”—I turned and pointed towards Masquerade—“is to have my boat mended and re-equipped, and then to sail her away.”

“I’ll have her repaired and re-equipped.” Crowninshield sliced through my objections with all the brute force of his family’s fortune. “You write the specifications for her repairs, and I’ll guarantee to have them done at the best boatyard in America.”

“But I don’t know how to cope with drug addicts!” I returned to my first and most potent objection. “And I’m sure Ellen doesn’t either, and I know Thessy can’t cope. We’re not medical people!”

“I wouldn’t expect you to cope.” The senator was seemingly prepared for every difficulty I raised. “I’ve hired a medical specialist from the Rinkfels Clinic to sail with you. He’s a para-medic rather than a doctor, but his presence means you won’t have to worry about the twins’ health.”

The senator had trapped me. I could have given him a straight rejection, but I suppose that was not in my nature. I wanted to overwhelm the senator with so many difficulties that he would abandon the idea, but instead I was the one who was weakening. I tried one last desperate objection. “We can’t sail next week. It’s impossible. There isn’t another ferry off Straker’s Cay till Saturday night and it’s no good expecting me to get any preparatory work done on Wavebreaker till Monday at the earliest, and then it’ll be two or three days before—”

“I’ll have you flown back to the Grand Bahama today,” Crowninshield said patiently, “and the twins can join you on Sunday morning.”

“But I’ve only just got here,” I said weakly.

“Listen, Nick.” The senator had beaten down my last defences, and now offered me a compromise that might make my surrender to his wishes more acceptable. “Take my kids to sea for two weeks, just two weeks, and if at the end of those two weeks you really believe that the cruise-cure won’t work, or if you’re convinced that you’re the wrong guy for the job, then send the twins home. Does that sound OK? You return the twins to me and I won’t blame you one bit for failing, because all I’m asking you to do is to try. I’m not demanding that you succeed, only that you try. That’s all we can ever ask of anyone, isn’t it?” His voice was almost plaintive. “To try?”

I looked into his eyes. For all the senator’s affability he was a proud man and I knew he had humbled himself to ask for my help and I also knew I could not refuse him. Which was exactly why, of course, he had taken the trouble to come all this way to look into my eyes as he asked for my help. “Shee-it,” I said, and felt guilty that I was leaving the island without sharing the chicken dinner that Sarah Straker was doubtless cooking for me at that very moment. “I shouldn’t be doing this!” I said to the senator. “I really should not.”

He smiled. “But I’m glad you are, Nick, and thank you.” He held out his hand.

I thought of all the extra equipment his money would buy for Masquerade, and that’s how I tried to justify my acceptance of the senator’s proposal, but in reality it was because Crowninshield had invited me to play Galahad and I never could resist the lure of the dragon’s breath even if it did mean charging into idiocy like a fool. So I reached for the senator’s hand, and thereby couched my lance to face the dragon’s fire. I should have thought more deeply before I agreed, but that’s not how fools charge in. I didn’t think before I went into the recruiting office and became a marine, and I didn’t think now. Instead I consoled myself that Ellen would be pleased, and a pleased Ellen might become my shipmate all the way around the world, so really, I told myself, I was not doing this for the senator’s happiness, and not even for the twins, but for my own, and so I shook the senator’s hand.

The Maggot was waiting at the airstrip. He gave me a welcoming grin and an ironic bow to acknowledge the exalted company I was keeping, then he ushered the senator on to the starboard wing and so into the aeroplane.

It always seemed miraculous that the Maggot could fit himself into a small aircraft, for John Maggovertski was a huge man: six foot five and well over two hundred pounds, and none of those pounds was fat. I sometimes tried to imagine blocking the Maggot during a game of American football and simply could not. It would be like trying to stop a buffalo, because he was nothing but muscle, weight and bone. For exterior decoration he had a thick black beard, dark eyes, a shock of tousled hair, and weight-lifter’s arms that were tattooed with snakes, naked ladies and the twin flags of the USA and the Maggot’s home state of Arkansas.

He put the senator into one of the back seats, first shoving aside a tangle of camera equipment. Another of John Maggovertski’s failing businesses was taking aerial photographs of rich folk’s houses. He also refilled air-bottles for scuba divers, ran sports-fishing excursions and, despite his slow left knee, was a good enough tennis player to have been hired as a coach at some of the Lucaya hotels, though the Maggot’s career as a tennis coach had been somewhat jeopardised by his insistence on helping only the prettier guests to improve their game. He sporadically published a newsletter about rare firearms, collected guns himself, and was the proud owner of a decrepit fishing boat that was called Bronco-Buster in honour of the Giants’ Superbowl victory, though the Maggot himself never referred to the beaten team as the Denver Broncos, but always and ever as the Denver Fairies.

The Maggot referred to himself as a ‘good old country boy’, which description provoked Ellen, who could not stand the sight of him, to comment that John Maggovertski was to country what the serpent was to Eden. The Maggot, Ellen insisted, was an untoilet-trained redneck jerk whose only expertise was as a player of the most brutal and mindless sport to be devised since the lions took on the Christians. The Maggot, faced with these scathing judgments, countered by asserting that Ellen’s education had ruined what might otherwise have been a useful bimbo, and loudly proclaimed that her extreme aversion to himself was positive psychological proof that she was secretly enamoured of him. On the whole I found it less tiring to keep the two of them apart.

The Maggot now ordered me into the right-hand pilot’s seat and told me to keep my thieving hands off his knobs. As he fired up the twin engines I wondered just what instruments had once occupied the vacant holes in the dashboard, from which empty holes there now trailed forlorn scraps of wiring. It was best not to wonder, for I faced a long journey in what remained of the Maggot’s plane. We were flying first to Nassau where the senator was to be guest of honour at an American Embassy reception for senior officers of the naval units taking part in Exercise Stingray, and after Nassau the Maggot and I would fly on to Grand Bahama where he lived and where Wavebreaker was docked. “Are you sure you don’t want us boys to keep you company at the reception, senator?” John asked.

“I’d be surely delighted to have your company.” The senator, ever affable, seemed unworried at the thought of taking the Maggot into polite society.

“Do I have to wear a tie?”

“I guess so. I’ll be wearing one.”

“Reckon I’ll leave the embassy girls to you then, senator,” the Maggot had to shout over the sound of the engines, “and me and Nick will just have to play with each other on account of forgetting to bring our ties.” He laughed, then frowned at the aircraft’s controls as if he was not entirely certain what most of them did. One reason why John’s air-taxi service was less than successful was his habit of pretending not to know how to fly the plane or, worse, pretending to have forgotten how to land it once he had succeeded in becoming airborne. The performances made his customers understandably nervous, and nervous customers do not pass on glowing recommendations to their friends. “I suppose we should try and get this hot heap of shit off the ground,” the Maggot growled now. It was indeed as hot as hell inside the aircraft.

We taxied away from the palm-thatched hut that was proudly styled as Straker’s Cay Airport Terminal Number One. The hut was home to some lizards and to the island’s one taxi driver who had sequestered it as his office and gasoline store. The airstrip itself had been built to serve a golf and diving resort that a consortium of Dutch and American businessmen had planned to build on Straker’s Cay, but the money had run out before the hotel or marina had been built and all that was left of their grandiose plans was this pinkish runway made of compacted coral and a few abandoned cement mixers which rusted forlornly where the hotel’s swimming pool was to have been built.

The Maggot, who refused to wear a seat belt, shoved his throttles forward, and I felt the sweat trickling down my belly as the brakes were released and the small plane thundered down the rough surface. “It plays hell with the tyres, senator!” The Maggot yelled over the howling engine noise.

“What does?” The senator shouted back.

“Runways made of crushed coral! As likely as not we’ll blow a tyre, slew off, and become three small puddles of melted fat in a blackened and twisted plane wreck!”

The senator blanched and leaned back. I had heard it all before and so was a little more sanguine. The Maggot, pleased to have spoilt someone’s day, pulled back the stick and we lifted safely off the runway and there was suddenly a wonderful rush of cool air coming from an overhead vent. We banked over Bonefish’s house and I waved at Thessy who was standing beside Masquerade. Thessy would follow on the weekend ferry, arriving at Grand Bahama on the same day as the senator’s twins.

The Maggot’s Beechcraft clawed higher, its progress punctuated by the alarm sirens that the Maggot ignored and which the senator had learned not to worry about. Once, when an alarm became peculiarly insistent, the Maggot thumped the instrument panel until it stopped. “I think that goddamn racket means we should all be dead,” he announced cheerfully, then carried on with an involved story of how he had once won undying glory by intercepting a pass against the Philadelphia Faggots. In the senator the Maggot had found a listener who was only too eager to hear his tales of goal-line stands and blocked punts, concussed running backs and sacked quarterbacks.

The one subject we did not talk about was why the senator had flown to Straker’s Cay to meet me. I knew the Maggot was dying to hear the senator’s business, but even the Maggot had enough delicacy to wait until we had safely delivered the senator to Nassau before asking. But once Crowninshield was gone, and when we had refuelled the Beechcraft and put a crate of beer on to one of her back seats, the Maggot demanded to know everything.

I suspected that he was hoping to hear that the senator had been arranging for an illicit love affair on board Wavebreaker. We had embarked two such affairs in the last year; the most memorable being an English lawyer who had arrived with his French mistress, but only after telling his wife that he was attending a legal conference in Brussels and, to preserve the lie, he had been forced to hide every inch of his pallid skin in case a sun-tan betrayed him. The French girl, to Thessy’s infinite embarrassment, had strolled stark naked about Wavebreaker’s deck while the lawyer had cowered in the stateroom cloaked like an Ayatollah with impetigo. The Maggot, disappointed that the senator’s business offered no such rich pickings of gossip, scowled at me. “You mean you’re just babysitting two rich junkies?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Shee-it.” We had at last taken off from Nassau and were banking north to where three American warships sliced white water. I opened us each a beer, then idly unfolded the aviation chart that the Maggot had stuck down between our seats. It looked very different to a nautical chart and made little sense to me, but I gradually deciphered some of the meaning from its weird markings.

“You ain’t going to have fun,” the Maggot said suddenly.

“I’m sorry?”

“You ain’t going to have fun with two goddamn cocaine addicts. That stuff is the hardest to kick.”

“So the senator told me.”

“And there ain’t no magic pill that will do it.” Maggovertski sounded unusually sombre. He lit a cigarette. “I hate cocaine,” he said finally, and he surprised me by saying it for the Maggot had always struck me as one of life’s rebels. If he discovered a new rule he would immediately seek a way of breaking it, and I had assumed that he would have some sympathy with those who flouted the laws against drugs, yet there was no denying the genuine anger in his voice when he talked of cocaine. He must have sensed my puzzlement, for he offered a reluctant explanation. “I knew a girl who got hooked on cocaine. She taught in a health club; aerobics, that kind of thing, and the next we knew she was wearing hot pants on a street corner in New York and strutting her stuff at the cars. Jesus, if you knew how hard we tried to get her off that damned powder.”

“Did you succeed?”

He paused, and finally shook his head. “Last time I saw her she was doing a peep-show in Pittsburgh. Hell, Nick, I tried to get her out of that place, but she didn’t care. All she wanted to do was shovel that crap up her nose, and if that’s how someone wants to pass their time, then there’s diddly-squat you can do to stop them.”

He had sounded immensely sad as he spoke, and I wondered if the girl had meant more to him than being merely a casual friend, but I did not like to ask and Maggovertski was clearly disinclined to explain more, so I just stared down at the aerial chart, and I suddenly noticed, in an otherwise empty space beneath an intersection of two air corridors, the tiny island of Murder Cay. The chart, either printed before the government’s name change or else blithely ignoring it, noted the existence of a 2500-foot paved airstrip. “Is 2500 feet long for a runway?” I asked Maggot.

“Two five? Short as a quarterback’s dick.” He was evidently still thinking of the girl, for the obscenity was automatic and his voice was clipped and distant.

“Have you ever flown into Murder Cay?” I asked him.

The big shaggy head turned to look at me. He frowned and sucked on his cigarette and I somehow got the impression that my question had annoyed him, but when he answered his voice was mild enough. “It’s a snakepit, Nick. Leave it alone.”

“So who are the snakes?” I insisted.

“The dickheads who bought the place, of course.” He paused to pull on his beer bottle which, emptied, he tossed out through the tiny triangular window at his left elbow. “I ran a couple of passengers there before the dickheads bought the island. It was a real nice place two years ago; nothing but luxury houses for the super-rich, but then the snakes bought it and they’ve painted a big yellow cross on their runway. You know what a big yellow cross on a runway means? It means keep away if you want to go on living.”

“So who are the new owners?” I tried again.

“Never been introduced to them, Nick.”

“Drug people?”

“Of course!” The Maggot assumed I had already known that.

I looked down at the chart and saw that the island was not so very far off our course, and I knew that the Beechcraft was brim-full with fuel. “You fancy having a look at the island?”

The Maggot laughed. “What’s made you feel suicidal? Did you get bored with waiting for Ellen to drop her panties?”

“I’m just curious,” I said with as much innocence as I could muster, “but of course, if you’re scared of the place…”

“Oh, damn you.” I had reckoned that an accusation of fear would sting the Maggot, and even before he interrupted me he had banked the plane westwards. He snatched the chart off my lap and worked out a crude course for the remote island. “So why do you want to stir the bastards up?” he grumbled.

I told him about Hirondelle and how Deacon Billingsley had lied about the yacht’s fate, and I confessed that though there was nothing I could do about a corrupt policeman, nor about what I strongly suspected had been the murder of a yacht’s crew, I was still curious about the island.

“Billingsley’s a bastard.” The Maggot, who had lived long enough in the Bahamas to learn and relish all the important gossip, growled the verdict. “You want to stay upwind of him.”

“McIllvanney says that Billingsley owns a house on Murder Cay.”

“That figures,” the Maggot said gloomily. “The dickheads know that the best way of keeping the Americans off their backs is by buying themselves a slice of the local law.” His disgruntled voice made it seem as though the precautions of the drug smugglers formed a personal affront to his patriotism.

Yet if anyone’s patriotism should have been affronted by what happened in the islands, it was the Bahamians, for they were forced to endure the indignity of having another nation’s law-enforcement agencies operating in their waters. The islands had always been a smugglers’ paradise, and had proved a perfect place to stockpile cocaine before running it across the narrow Straits of Florida to the waiting American markets. The American government had pressed the Bahamians to clean out the drug lords, but instead the trade had flourished until the Americans finally insisted that their own coastguard be allowed to patrol Bahamian waters. A scintilla of Bahamian pride was preserved by the presence of a native officer on every American boat or helicopter, but no one really believed the polite fiction that the local officer was thus in command.

“But we ain’t in command either,” the Maggot said sourly. “We can stop a boat at sea, but we sure as hell can’t put a foot on dry land without Bahamian permission. And you can bet your pretty ass that your policeman friend is making sure that permission to search Murder Cay is never given, or if it is, that the guys on the island are well warned before our boys get anywhere near.”

“We?” It was so incongruous to hear the Maggot aligning himself with the forces of law that I was forced to ask the question. “Our boys?”

“I keep thinking of that girl in Pittsburgh,” he said with a bitter ruefulness, “and how the bastards who run the peep-show have to put sawdust on the booth floors every hour. You don’t get much lower than that, Nick, and if anyone wants to kick the balls of the people who put her there, then those are my guys.” He paused to light another cigarette, then nodded through his scratched windscreen. “I reckon that’s your snakepit, Nick.”

Far ahead, and blurred by the heat haze, there was a bright green dot of an island ringed by coral-fretted water. No other land was visible. The Maggot turned in his seat and rummaged in his camera bag until he found a battered Nikon and a roll of black and white film. “Take some pictures for me. You never know, some customer might want a snap of Murder Cay one day.”

By the time I had loaded the camera we were already close to the reefs that formed the Devil’s Necklace. The shadow of our plane skipped across the bright sea, then flickered over the outer coral. We were approaching the island from the south-east, coming with the wind at a height of six thousand feet. The island was shaped rather like an anchor. The airstrip, with its unfriendly yellow cross that warned strange aircraft from landing, had been built across the curved flukes of the anchor, which otherwise seemed to be covered in low scrub, slash pine and sea-grape. The surprisingly big houses were all built on the western side of the north-south shank of the anchor that was thick with palm trees and vivid with bright blue swimming pools. The rest of the shank was a long narrow golf course, punctuated with sand traps. I twisted in the seat to see that there were a dozen or so boats moored in the protected crook of the easternmost anchor fluke.

The Maggot dipped the starboard wing to let me take a picture of the deep water channel that dog-legged in from the west. We flew above the skeletal radio mast and I stared down at the row of huge houses. No one and nothing stirred there. “They spent a fortune developing the place,” the Maggot said, “but the rich folks never came, so they sold it to the rich dickheads instead.” We flew out across the northern reefs.

“One more pass?” I asked John.

“Why not?”

“And a bit lower?”

“Yeah, maybe.” He had turned to fly around the eastern edge of the island’s encircling reefs and was now staring intently at the houses, searching for any signs of danger, but it seemed as though Murder Cay was deserted. “What the hell,” the Maggot said, and he wrenched the plane round in a tight turn until we were aimed plumb at the island’s southernmost tip, then he dropped the nose ready to make one high speed and low level pass above the Cay. “That’s friendly!” he shouted over the engine noise, and he pointed through the windscreen at the concrete airstrip which not only had the yellow cross painted huge at its western end, but also had two trucks parked in its centre line, thus making it impossible for any plane to land. Despite the obstructions it was clear that aircraft did use the runway, for it was marked by the black rubber streaks of fresh tyre marks, but the two trucks, together with the yellow cross, were evidence that the runway could only be used by invitation.

We slashed across the shank of the island, then we were over the anchorage and I had a glimpse of a sailing boat’s shadow black on the bed of the lagoon before our own winged shadow whipped across a gaggle of powerboats. We were going too fast to see any details of the moored vessels so I just snapped a random photograph and, at the very same instant, the Maggot swore and banked and rammed the throttles hard forward.

We were side-slipping, starboard wing down, falling to earth with our engines howling. I flailed for support as the camera flew up to the padded ceiling. The Maggot whooped, dragged the stick back and our earthwards wing lifted and suddenly we were screaming just above the palm trees, close to the tiled roofs and at a speed that seemed to be doubled because of our proximity to the ground. The camera, re-entering the world of normal gravity, dropped hard beside my shoes. Beer bottles were everywhere. One broke, shattering liquid across the side windows. I had a glimpse of a fair-haired girl staring wide-eyed and terrified from a tennis court, her racket held loose by her side and tennis balls scattered at her feet and, though the trees and buildings and gardens were nothing but a high-speed blur, my mind nevertheless registered with a startling clarity that the girl had been completely naked. The plane’s engines were screaming. We whipped over the northernmost house, across the beach, and thus out to sea again. “What the hell?” I managed to ask.

“They fired at us! goddamn tracer bullets! Jesus!” The Maggot did not seem scared, but rather stung by the challenge. We were over the lagoon now, racing towards the northern strands of the Devil’s Necklace, but low enough so that the wash of our twin propellers was whipping the blue water into a wake of white-hazed foam. “Shee-it!” The Maggot said with inappropriate exultation, then twisted his head to stare back at the island. “Let’s go see them again!”

“Are you sure that’s wise?” I asked, but I might as well have saved my breath because the plane suddenly climbed, banked, then began descending fast towards the island again. The Maggot was growling to himself, relishing the confrontation. Sunlight reflected from a window among the palm trees to lance a sliver of dazzling light at our cockpit, then the reflection was gone and we were at sea level, engines screaming, and I fumbled for the camera, prayed it had not broken when it fell from the ceiling, and took another picture just before Maggot lifted the aircraft’s nose so that we swooped up and over the palm trees that edged the beach.

He jinked left, then right, throwing the plane into such steep and sudden turns that I was alternately jerked hard against the cockpit’s side window and then against his broad shoulder. The Maggot was not taking evasive action but quartering the ground in search of our enemy. “There!” he said abruptly and threw the plane straight again, but this time dropping the nose, and I saw a jeep churning dust from the dirt road which ran the length of the island’s long shank, between the golf course and the houses, and just as I saw the jeep so the red tracer bullets began climbing from a machine-gun mounted in the back of the vehicle.

“Oh, Jesus wept,” I said, snapped a last picture, then ducked down in momentary expectation of the windscreen shattering into a million bright scraps.

“Fuck you,” the Maggot screamed at whoever fired at him and I looked out of the Beechcraft’s side window to see palm trees going past at over 150 miles an hour and above us. Above us. Truly. And I thought it really had been a very good life, a fun life, despite Ellen never having gone to bed with me, and I wondered if my father would even notice my death, then the Maggot whooped with glee, hauled back on the stick, and our plane was screaming up into the wide blue lovely bullet-free sky and the Maggot was laughing and slapping my shoulder. “Wasn’t that just the best goddamned fun you can have this side of a blanket?”

“Was it?”

“You missed it?” He sounded aggrieved and astonished.

“Missed what?”

“I ran that turkey clean off the road! Shit, but I gave that bastard a headache!”

“I think you gave me one too,” I said, then, very gingerly, I straightened up and twisted round to see that Murder Cay was far behind us and well out of machine-gun range. “You’re mad,” I courteously informed John Maggovertski.

He laughed. “You’re the one who wanted to see the island.” We were gently circling northwards now, heading for home. “So now you’ve seen it.”

I tried to relax, letting the cold air from the vent cool the sweat from my face. My right hand shook as I remembered the sudden fear of seeing the crimson tracer flick up from the ground. “Hell!” I protested. “They can’t just open fire!”

The Maggot grinned through the black tangle of his beard. “Nick, they are richer than your wettest dreams, and like all the very rich they think they are above the law.” He was speaking very casually, but I saw that his right hand, like mine, was shaking. It is not pleasant to be shot at, and even the pleasure of being missed is spoilt by the mind’s habit of constructing alternative scenarios; if the machine-gunner had been a bit quicker to react, or had led us with more skill, we would now be nothing but a heap of molten metal somewhere in the sea-grape. The Maggot shook his head. “Do you have any idea just how rich these people are?”

“Very, I imagine.”

“There’s an island not far from here that has just two thousand inhabitants, and last year, Nick, according to a banker I sometimes fly to Miami, those two thousand dirt poor and unemployed islanders deposited 24.3 million dollars in the one and only bank on their impoverished little island.” The Maggot laughed. “Not bad, eh? And I do not believe that 24.3 million dollars a year is the average reward for selling coconut milk and conch shells to honky tourists. That money is pure commission, Nick, a mere ten per cent of the value of the cocaine that was stored on their island while it awaited transportation to the good old US of A; and neither you, nor I, nor even the dickheads in the Drug Enforcement Administration will ever know just how much money was not put in the bank, but stored in paper bags under the bed.” He sounded depressed by the thought, but then cheered himself up by asking me for a beer.

I opened two bottles that I retrieved from the sticky mess on the cabin floor. We flew the rest of the way home in silence. It was not till we saw the captive aerostat balloon with its ever watching radar that the Americans had hoisted over Grand Bahama to probe for boats or aircraft smuggling drugs, that the Maggot again spoke, and by then he had recaptured all his old insouciance. “At this time, if you’d care to fold up your tray table and extinguish your hopes, we shall land this little sucker. Thank you for flying Maggovertski Airways; please return the stewardess her pantyhose, put her in the upright position, and kindly pray that the tyres don’t blow.”

They did not, and thus I came back to Wavebreaker.

I went back to the Maggot’s foul house, where he kept his killer dog and astonishing collection of guns, and we sat on his makeshift verandah that overlooked a noxious and polluted creek and shared a few whiskies as he told me an incredibly tedious tale of how he had once sacked the quarterback of the San Francisco Sugar Plums. I retaliated with detailed instructions on how to bowl off-breaks to left-handers on a drying pitch, and we eventually declared a truce as we watched the sun sink across the oil-storage tanks beyond the creek. He offered me his spare bed for the night, but I could not stand the stench of the creek, and I wanted to make an early start on the work I had to do on Wavebreaker, so I caught the bus to McIllvanney’s boatyard. Naturally no one was there and the gate was locked and the top of the fence was rimmed with razor-wire so I could not climb it. I had not kept my old key, because I had hoped that my association with Cutwater Charters was done, so I was forced to carry my heavy pack into the tangle of dark alleys that lay behind the straw market and where I planned to find Ellen and borrow her key.

A tribe of stray cats scattered as I turned into the yard where Ellen’s apartment lay. The archway was bright with the brass plates of the dozens of corporations who were registered at the address to avoid paying tax in their home countries. The courtyard was inhabited by three tethered goats that stared malevolently at me. The open-air stairways were shadowed with creepers and flickering with the eerie lights of televisions that glowed from within the screened windows of the small apartments.

I climbed the two flights of stairs and walked down the rickety balcony which led to Ellen’s small end room. A child was screaming in one of the flats, while two dogs were snarling as they fought in the wasteland beyond the apartment house. The chorus of televisions was tuned to an American game show in which competing families were leaping up and down and screaming with apparent incontinence because they had won a trip to Disneyworld. Then, above all those discordant sounds, I heard Ellen’s voice rise in sudden indignation. “No! No! No!”

I stopped outside her open window. Her room was lit by a single naked bulb which hung from the ceiling and shone harshly on Ellen who was standing in the doorway of her tiny bathroom. She was facing the window, but did not see me beyond its screen because she was staring at Matthew McIllvanney who seemed to fill the whole room with his malevolence. “I’m just asking you to think about it,” I heard him say in a calm voice.

“I’ve thought”—I could see Ellen was trying hard to recover her composure—“and the answer is no.”

“Six hundred.” McIllvanney’s persistence in the face of any refusal was monotonous and relentless. “And I won’t even take my usual commission on that, so you’ll get to keep it all, and remember the agreed price is just a guaranteed minimum and there’s always a tip. Isn’t there always a tip, Bellybutton?”

“This one’s a big tipper, Miss Ellen.” Bellybutton laughed suggestively. He was standing just inside the front door and was thus hidden from me.

“Shut up, you black bastard,” McIllvanney snapped, then paused to light a cigarette. A small battery-powered fan whirled the smoke away and generally tried to stir up the humid air which played such havoc with Ellen’s precious books in their orange-crate shelves. The Ulsterman blew smoke towards her. “Breakspear won’t do the senator’s cruise,” he said, “so you’ll lose that money, but if you work one night a week for me then you’ll earn just as much anyway. And you’re wanting to save money, isn’t that right? So you can keep yourself while you write your book? So I’m offering you a good wage, girl! And this client’s a good-looking fellow, isn’t that right, Bellybutton? And he’s already seen you, he likes you, and he’s willing to pay you a professional’s fee even though he knows you’re an amateur, and—”

“No!” Ellen shouted again.

“He might go to seven-fifty,” McIllvanney said dubiously, as though the price was the only possible objection Ellen might have to whoring herself.

That was as far as the conversation went, for I decided to end it by pushing open the screen door. All three stared in astonishment as I tossed my kit bag on to the floor. “I didn’t have a key to the boatyard,” I introduced myself, “so I thought I’d borrow Ellen’s. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“You are not, Nick, no!” Ellen almost flew across the small room and, to my astonishment and probably to everyone else’s, greeted me with a warm kiss.

“What the hell are you doing here?” McIllvanney asked sourly, while Bellybutton just grinned maliciously at me.

“You sent the senator to see me? So he came, he saw, and he conquered me, which means I’ve agreed to do his charter. The Maggot flew me back, because if we want to leave on Sunday morning then we’ve got a heap of work to do first. God, I’m hungry.”

Ellen still clung to my arm. “We’ll go out and eat,” she said quickly, “I’ll get ready,” and she twisted away to the bathroom, which also served as her wardrobe, and slammed the door to leave me alone with McIllvanney and Bellybutton.

“If the suggestion I heard just now,” I said to McIllvanney, “was what I thought it was, then don’t make it again. Not to Ellen.”

McIllvanney found my defiance wonderfully amusing. “Who’s to stop me.”

“Just me.”

He came and stood very close to me, trying to intimidate me as Billingsley had done. He blew cigarette smoke to sting my eyes. “Just because you were a poxy marine, your Holiness, doesn’t make you tough.”

“Piss off.”

That also amused him. “Is there something going on between you and Ellen, now? Got your boots under her table, have you?”

“No,” I said firmly, “so get out.”

“Did you know she’s a Catholic?” he asked me as though it really mattered, and he gestured with his cigarette at a crucifix that hung over the narrow bed, which I knew was there solely for sentimental purposes because it had belonged to Ellen’s dead father, but to McIllvanney it was a challenge. “If I’d realised she was a taig I’d never have hired her.” He used the Ulster slang, knowing I would have learned it during my tours of duty on attachment in Belfast. “Is it the papist meat that gets you going, Breakspear, is that it?” McIllvanney laughed, then stepped quickly back as he sensed I might bring my knee up into his balls. Then, as if counter-attacking, he jabbed the cigarette towards my face. “I’ll do business how I like, with whom I like, and when I like, and I don’t need your focking permission to do it, Nicholas Breakspear. Nor does the girl have to agree to anything I ask. I’m not forcing her, I’m merely making a business proposition. Do you understand me?”

“Get out of here,” I said.

McIllvanney continued to stare into my eyes, but he spoke to Bellybutton who was cackling behind me. “He should have put on a pair of tights and joined his daddy in front of the fairy-lights.” The Ulsterman’s scorn was like a blowtorch, then he turned away, clicked his fingers at Bellybutton, and the two of them were gone.

Ellen and I did not go out to eat. She was too shocked by McIllvanney’s offer and, at the same time, she was paradoxically surprised at herself for being so shocked. “I really thought I could handle something like that! I really did! I knew I wasn’t in danger, because they weren’t going to rape me, but it really, really upset me!”

“It upset me,” I said.

“Shit!” Ellen was too angry with herself to be assuaged by or even interested in my sympathy. She paced up and down the tiny room while I sat on her bed, and she explained to me that McIllvanney had been approached by a client who had apparently seen Ellen and authorised McIllvanney to offer her the money. McIllvanney had made the offer very dispassionately, but that businesslike approach only seemed to add to Ellen’s fury. “What kind of a jerk pays that money?” she asked me.

“A rich and randy jerk?” I suggested, and decided not to tell her that for most of McIllvanney’s girls six or seven hundred dollars a night was small change.

“And get this.” She whirled on me. “This jerk has got something about redheads! But before he’d pay any money he had to be satisfied that I was red-haired all over! I mean, Jesus! How nauseating can you get?”

“Who was he?”

“McIllvanney wouldn’t say.” She shuddered, then plucked some typed sheets of paper from the small table under the window and stuffed them into a folder. The floor was crowded with cardboard boxes that were filled with leaflets for the Literacy Project that Ellen helped in her spare time. I idly picked up one of the leaflets which had two pictures on its cover; the first illustration showed a happy black family, all neatly dressed and reading books around a table that was filled with platefuls of food and with jugs labelled ‘milk’. The second picture, clearly designed to demonstrate the rewards of illiteracy, showed a scabby-looking native dressed in a threadbare loincloth who crouched in the mud outside a grass hut and who seemed to be sharing his lunch bowl with a baboon. Ellen caught my eye, looked down at the ridiculous leaflet, and suddenly we both began to laugh helplessly. “I know they’re absurd.” She had tears in her eyes as she tried to recover from the laughter. “They were printed for Africa sometime in the 1950s and the United Nations sent them to our project, God knows why. There are too many to throw away all at once, so I take a handful out every day and hide them in someone’s garbage can. They make rotten toilet paper, and I don’t know what else to do with them, and, oh Nick”—she suddenly sat heavily beside me on the bed—“you’re a good man and sometimes I think how nice it would be to have a good man in my life again.”

“I’m available.”

She kissed me on the nose, but then, as though rejecting her idea of adopting a good man, stood up briskly. “You reek of cheap whisky. I suppose you’ve been with that awful Maggovertski?”

“He sends his most fervent and undying love.”

She mocked that assertion with a grimace. “If you want a sandwich there’s some margarine and foul cheese in the cupboard and some not very fresh bread in the bin.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to go out to eat?”

She shook her head. “I want to write up my notes.”

“About what happened tonight?” I sounded surprised.

“Sure, why not? But I need a shower first.” She went into the bathroom and I made my own supper by slicing some of the foul cheese and shoving it between two slices of greased plastic bread. Then I ate the sandwich as I walked back to Wavebreaker. Alone.

Ellen was perversely unhappy about the Crowninshield charter. She had nagged me to accept it, but now she behaved as though I had done her a disservice by doing so. “The senator obviously just wants us to drown his children so they can’t embarrass him when the time comes to run for President,” she told me next morning.

“I accused him of that,” I said, proud of having anticipated Ellen’s diagnosis, “and he told me he’d rather lose the election than lose his children.”

Ellen put down her cup of coffee and stared at me as though I had gone completely mad. “He’s a politician, Nick,” she said at last, and in a voice she might have used to reason with a three-year-old, “and politicians would sell their mothers, let alone their kids, to win an election. He’s just using us!”

I shrugged, but said nothing. Ellen had bought some melon and coffee on her way to the boatyard and we were eating a late breakfast in Wavebreaker’s cockpit. Bellybutton was pressure-hosing a hull across the yard, while McIllvanney was evidently taking another day off. I hoped that he was avoiding us because he felt ashamed of his offer to Ellen, but I doubted whether Matthew McIllvanney had ever felt ashamed of anything.

“God!” Ellen said in a tone which implied that I had entirely misunderstood the senator’s motives, which she would now have to explain to me by the application of sound feminist arguments. Sound feminist argument usually means making the nearest male look like an idiot, which in Ellen’s case was not a very demanding task. “We are talking about a man’s image, Nicholas. If he runs for President next year then he’s got to be clean, and that means that the issue of his drug-sodden kids will have to be defused. And above all, he’s got to keep Rickie out of prison, and that’s clearly our job. We have to clean the boy up so the judge will merely tap his wrist.”

“Is that so bad?” I demanded.

“I just don’t like being used by rich politicians,” Ellen said angrily, though I silently noted she had no objections to taking their money.

“At least we’ll be taking two kids off drugs,” I said warmly, “and that’s something to be proud of.”

“Jesus wept,” she said in disgust. “I do hate goddamn junkies, and I especially hate rich goddamn junkies. They don’t even have the excuse of poverty for their addiction.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I don’t know why I apologised because it was not my fault that the Crowninshield twins were cocaine freaks, nor that their father wanted to charter Wavebreaker, but I sympathised with Ellen’s distaste for cocaine and was foolish enough to say as much.

“Don’t be so downright stupid, Nick,” Ellen witheringly rejected my sympathy. “Of course I don’t disapprove of cocaine. You forget that I was an academic.”

I tried to work out an obvious connection between scholarship and cocaine and could not, but knew better than to ask. “But you can’t possibly approve of drugs,” I said instead.

“I neither approve nor disapprove. Cocaine is merely a recreational drug and, taken to excess, like alcohol or nicotine, it is undoubtedly dangerous, but judiciously used it can be a source of harmless pleasure, and even of intellectual stimulation. Eat your melon, it’s good for you.”

“I don’t believe this.” I stared in genuine horror at her. I was trying to imagine a girl in a Pittsburgh peep-show, put there by cocaine. “Did you feed that kind of intellectual garbage to your students?” I asked Ellen.

She stared defiantly across the cockpit table at me. “Nicholas Breakspear,” she said at last, “there are times when you can be excessively tedious. You are a turkey—” she cast about for an even worse insult, “a puritan!”

“Rickie Crowninshield,” I said stiffly, “has already lost the sight of one eye because of cocaine, and if he doesn’t stop using the drug then he will almost certainly go to jail or even kill himself with an overdose.”

“So Rickie Crowninshield is an irresponsible idiot,” Ellen said coldly, “but you can’t run society on the assumption that everyone is a retard, and you have to accept that there will be casualties in a free society. If you’re so intent on keeping the young alive then why don’t you ban rock climbing? Or surfing? Or motorcycles? Or alcohol? Or have you forgotten that America did once try to ban alcohol, and look what happened!” Her voice was scathing. “The vaunted land of the free became the last best hope of organised crime, and it has never recovered. The clear and obvious course for America is to legalise cocaine so the trade can be controlled, but there is no way that we shall ever persuade the airheads in Congress of that most obvious piece of wisdom. If you don’t want the melon, I do.”

“But you do believe the trade should be controlled?” I was seeking a scrap of common ground on which we could mutually back away from the argument.

“I naturally believe that the financial profits of the drug-suppliers are offensive,” Ellen said, “which is why I’ve only used cocaine on a handful of occasions. I can’t say I liked it much.” She poured out the last of the coffee, then looked up into my horrified eyes. “Oh, come on, Nick! Don’t be so innocent! And stop worrying, I won’t reveal my views on the drug to the twins. The poor dim little creatures doubtless need all the help they can get, and I promise not to confuse them with anything so threatening as an idea.”

“Robin-Anne’s not dim,” I said. “She passed her degree!”

“My dear Nicholas, a mentally retarded slug could get a degree in Liberal Arts! For God’s sake, the silly little twinkie might as well have majored in handwriting or media studies!” Ellen gave me a dismissive glance. “Still, I suppose to the uneducated even a degree in Liberal Arts is impressive.”

Cocaine thus became another of the subjects which Ellen and I decorously avoided, like the existence of God, the wisdom of my having been a marine, feminism and the cartoons in the New Yorker. Ellen was adamantly opposed to the first two and a noisy supporter of the last two, while my position was more or less the opposite. God alone knew why we wanted to sail to New Zealand together, except that in a strange way we were friends.

But for the moment we were friends who had to prepare Wavebreaker for a possible Atlantic crossing. Thessy and I would have a chance to strengthen the rigging during our two-week trial period with the twins, but some jobs simply could not be done at sea. Thus I stripped out all Wavebreaker’s unnecessary furniture and equipment, and I installed extra fresh-water tanks and fuel bunkers. I made storm shields for the big cabin windows and skylights. They were a delight for the charterers in the Bahamian lagoons, but in an Atlantic storm such wide windows could be our death warrants for if Wavebreaker fell off a big wave the glass could be driven out of the windows and the boat be filling with water in seconds, and so I cut and shaped sheet steel shutters that could be bolted over the boat’s glass at the first sign of bad weather. The shutters’ anchor points had to be welded to the hull and, especially at the stern where the windows wrapped round Wavebreaker’s counter, the bolts looked intrusive and ugly, but better that than to be a good-looking boat fifty fathoms down and still sinking.

Ellen and I worked hard that week and, on the Saturday, as though to commiserate with ourselves on this being our last day alone together, we stopped work at midday and took a bus to Mama Sipcott’s Café on the beach where we ate lobster and drank too much of Mama’s sticky-sweet white wine. Ellen proposed a toast to the prospect of her first Atlantic crossing under sail.

I drank to the toast, though I was not at all sure that we would actually make the crossing in Wavebreaker. The best season for an eastwards voyage was already past, though it was just possible that we might run far north and cross in the high latitudes where, even in summer, we could expect fog, rain and cold. I knew Ellen hated the cold, and I tried to warn her of the conditions we might expect in those latitudes. I told her of the big green seas, all crinkled and slow, heaving up astern as the icy wind scoured their tops into freezing spume.

Ellen smiled at my enthusiastic description. “My poetic and romantic Nick.” She cocked her head on one side and gave me a long scrutiny, almost as though she had never seen me before. “You did inherit a lot from your father.”

“You’ll find that northern seas are oddly more threatening”—I ignored her insult—“because sunlight on water always makes it seem less formidable. But if we travel the northern route we probably won’t see the sun for weeks, and the daylight is grey and the sea is green and grey, while at night you just see the cold white wavetops hissing out of blackness.” It seemed curious to be describing such ice-cold seas while sitting in a palm-thatched Bahamian beach café that looked on to a shoreline where pelicans perched under the diamond-hard sun. “You’ll need long johns,” I went on gleefully, “and thermal underwear and layers of greasy-wool sweaters and good oilies and a woolly hat and a towelling scarf to stop the seas slopping down your neck and good sea-boots and as many pairs of gloves as you can find, because gloves never stay dry and—”

“Shut up,” Ellen said firmly.

“I thought you wanted to go.”

“I do, and I shall go. But I also want to enjoy the anticipation of going.”

I smiled. “Just pray we don’t get a North Atlantic fog, because in those latitudes we could roll in the swells for days, with the moisture beading the shrouds and the air as cold as charity, and always being terrified that a super-tanker will barrel out of the muck at full speed to thump you under her bows without even knowing you were ever there.”

Ellen borrowed the adjustable spanner that Mama Sipcott provided as a lobster-claw cracker. “Don’t come the Ancient Mariner with me, Nicholas Breakspear.” She opened a claw and pulled out a sliver of succulent flesh. “If we encounter fog over the North Atlantic we will turn on the radar, switch on the Satnav, and start the engines. These are the 1980s, not the twelfth century when your namesake was Pope. He wasn’t even a very good Pope.”

“He was excellent!” I protested.

“Authoritative, unimaginative, anti-Irish, and a lousy politician,” Ellen commented, then she smiled and pushed the lobster meat into my mouth. “God knows why I like you, Nicholas Breakspear.”

“Because of my sexy legs,” I assured her.

She laughed. Mama Sipcott’s butter sauce was gleaming on her chin and she looked very beautiful. Beauty, I thought, was something to do with the way a face betrayed character. She seemed oblivious to my scrutiny. “I suppose I like you,” she said after a moment’s thought, “because you lack guile. You remind me of a cocker spaniel I once owned.”

“Oh, woof-woof. Thanks a million.”

She made a face at me. “You’d prefer to be villainous?”

I nodded. “I’ve always wanted to be mysterious and a little bit sinister and have girls swoon when they see me.” Like my father, I realised, and tried to reject the thought.

To Ellen, my wish to be mysterious was a hoot. “Forget it. You have an open face, Nick, and you smile too easily, and you’re much too honest, and you really can’t resist helping people; and frankly, you’re about as subtle as a Mack truck. As a villain, Nick, you just don’t measure up.”

I turned and looked at myself in the cracked Cutty Sark Whisky mirror behind Mama Sipcott’s bar. Hamlet, not Macbeth or Richard III, stared back. I turned again to Ellen, pretty freckled Ellen with her high cheekbones and clever green eyes and flaming hair and mocking smile, and I suddenly wondered whether McIllvanney had spoken to her again in the last week. “Did McIllvanney—” I began tentatively.

“Oh, yes,” Ellen cut in smoothly, and without any disgust in her voice. “In fact he increased the fee to a thousand dollars.” She sounded perversely proud of her increased value, and again I thought it best not to inform her that a bubblehead like Donna could earn twice that fee in a single night. “I told him to go jump in a lake,” Ellen said very calmly, “and then I told him that just as soon as I’ve finished with the Crowninshield twins I shall be sailing away—” she clinked her glass on mine, “with you.”

It was the first time she had actually said for certain that she would sail with me and I could not hide my joy, and Ellen, seeing that pleasure, laughed at it. “Of course I’m coming with you, Nick! I was always planning to sail with you! Do you think I’d pass up an adventure like that?”

So who cared about having a too-honest face? I was lucky Nick and she was pretty Ellen, and so I ordered another bottle of the sticky white wine and we let our dreams take wings. For we were going to sea.

Ellen and I lingered on in Mama Sipcott’s for another hour and a half; indulging in the sailor’s shorebound pastime of planning the perfect voyage. We decided that Masquerade would sail from the Bahamas to Panama, and thence to the Galapagos where we would find Darwin’s giant tortoises. Then we would sail south to Easter Island to explore the mysterious statues before going to the mutineers’ refuge on Pitcairn Island. After that we would go to Tahiti, and I saw the excitement grow in Ellen as she realised that these plans were so close to coming true. It was an excitement that matched my own, for I had never sailed the South Seas and I had long dreamed of that scatter of tiny, magically named islands strewn across one third of a globe. By the time we had drunk our third bottle of wine Ellen and I had long reached New Zealand and were already sailing north towards New Caledonia. We were happy.

We caught the bus back to Ellen’s apartment and collected her clothes and notebooks. She was moving back on board Wavebreaker in preparation for the next day’s early departure. I carried her luggage to the yard, noting that even Ellen’s strident feminism evaporated in the face of two heavy bags and tropical heat.

Once in the boatyard Ellen ran ahead of me, evidently eager to reach Wavebreaker’s air conditioning. Then, as she reached the dock’s edge, she suddenly checked. “What on earth is that? Oh, no!” She began to run again.

When I reached the water’s edge I understood her dismay. A large sports-fishing boat was moored alongside Wavebreaker, but moored so crudely that whoever had brought the powerboat alongside the schooner had not bothered to put out fenders, but instead had gouged long ugly gashes in Wavebreaker’s white paint.

Yet even the gashes were not so ugly as the expensive boat that had caused them. There was nothing wrong with the boat’s lines, which were sleekly functional, but her long powerful hull, her upperworks, and even the interior of her capacious working deck had all been painted with a wartime dazzle paint. The seemingly random and jagged-edged pattern of blue, black, silver, green and white had been designed to disguise a boat’s shape from the prying eyes of U-Boat captains, so it seemed somewhat fanciful to thus camouflage a pleasure boat in the Bahamas. This boat was called Dream Baby, and she was clearly an expensive infant for rods and whip-aerials and outriggers splayed from her upperworks like the antennae of some outlandish insect. She boasted a harpoon walkway, a flybridge, and, above the highest wheel-platform, an aluminium canopy which held a radar aerial. The fighting chair on her aft deck had thick white leather straps giving it the appearance of a padded electric chair, while the dazzle paint gave the boat an oddly military look that was completed by the number 666 that was painted on her bows in silver-edged black numerals like those warships use to display their commissioning numbers. The boat’s wrap-around windscreens were made of black polarised glass which only added to Dream Baby’s ugly air of menace.

Ellen, unencumbered with luggage, had already reached Wavebreaker and taken two plastic fenders from a locker. She swung lithely down to Dream Baby’s gaudily painted deck and cushioned the two hulls.

“How bad is the damage?” I called down to her when I reached Wavebreaker.

“It’s scraped back to bare metal!”

“I’ll give it some paint.” Wavebreaker’s hull was made of steel and, while such hulls are marvellously strong and safe, they are soon weakened if their steel is exposed to salt air. I had to paint the gashes as soon as possible so that rust would not begin to bite into Wavebreaker’s long sleekness.

Ellen looked around the oddly painted powerboat. “You’d think someone rich enough to own a rig like this could afford a pair of fenders.”

“Who cares? Just cut the damn boat loose,” I said vengefully.

Ellen ignored my advice while I, obedient to the rule that if a job needed doing then do it without delay, found a pot of white paint and dug through the locker for a clean brush. Then, from behind me, an unfamiliar voice sounded: “Oh, ring my bells.” It was a man’s voice; drawling and lazy.

I twisted around and almost blinded myself by staring straight into the sun, but then, through the dizzying glare, I made out the long silhouette of a tall man who seemed, incongruously, to be dressed in a long, transparent dressing gown. He was emerging in stately fashion from Wavebreaker’s companionway and, though I could see he was tall and lanky and had a ponytail of hair, I could make out no details of his face. “Who the hell are you?” I demanded.

The man ignored me, walking instead towards Ellen who, dressed only in shorts and T-shirt, was climbing long-legged over Wavebreaker’s rail. “Be still my restless heart,” the man had a strong, caressing voice and the slow luscious accent of America’s deep south. “Dear lady, dear lady, to think that I might have lived my whole life through and never seen you. Oh, lay me down, just lay me down.”

Ellen, usually so quick with a scornful reply, just stood and stared at the elegant stranger who stopped one pace away from her, took her hand, then bowed above her fingers. He kissed the air a fastidiously polite inch above her knuckles, then closed his eyes. “Dear sweet Lord above, I do thank Thee for Thy kindness in showing me this lovely woman before I died.” To my astonishment and chagrin Ellen left her hand in his as he opened his eyes and smiled at her. “My name,” he stroked her with his voice, “is Jesse Isambard Sweetman. And who, dear creature, are you?”

Ellen still said nothing. I had straightened up and moved aside so that the sun no longer dazzled me and I could see Sweetman properly, and what I saw I did not like. His face was old and young, sardonic and knowing, amused and handsome; the face of a man who has seen the world’s wickedness and knows how to match it with his own. His long black hair was tied into its ponytail with a velvet ribbon, his skin was parchment pale, and his eyes dark. I put his age at forty, but even among men twenty years younger he would have been accounted handsome, and he knew it, for his expression showed both confidence and amusement as he continued to hold Ellen’s hand, and he showed even more amusement when she suddenly realised just what liberty she was thus granting him and jerked her fingers swiftly away.

Thus released, Jesse Sweetman turned to look at me. The dressing gown had proved to be a long, stylish, ankle-length duster coat which was loosely woven from a delicate white cotton. Beneath the filmy topcoat he wore a black shirt and black trousers that were tucked into tall black boots. It was a dramatic and impractical outfit of a kind I only expected to see on the male models who posed in the more outlandish fashion magazines that our rich clients brought aboard Wavebreaker, yet Jesse Isambard Sweetman managed to wear the elaborate style with an elegant insouciance. The only incongruous note was a cheap round badge, enamelled in red and yellow, that he wore on his shirt, which bore the legend ‘Just Say No!’. “You must be Nicholas Breakspear,” he said carelessly, as though he did not much care whether I was or not.

“Is that gaudy piece of junk your boat?” I gestured to where Dream Baby’s aerials showed above Wavebreaker’s gunwale.

Sweetman turned and pretended to notice the sports-fishing boat for the first time. “No,” he said helpfully, then bestowed a patronising smile on me. “You look so like your father. It’s really uncanny.”

“Did you bring that boat here?” I persevered.

“Oh, indeed I did,” he said brightly, as though he merely indulged a rather dim child’s curiosity. “Your mother was Malise Fielding, am I right? Or are you Lucy de Sills’ son?”

“Why the hell didn’t you use fenders when you tied alongside?”

He sighed, intimating what a bore I was being. “I did not use fenders, Breakspear, because I despise precautions. Precautions are the symptoms of small and fearful minds. Precautions will not conquer empires, they will not build great cities, they will not transmute dreams into gold or carry men across wide oceans, and precautions will not, emphatically not, win fair ladies,” and here he turned to Ellen and lasciviously dropped his gaze to her long bare legs. Ellen twisted away and Sweetman laughed at her obvious discomfiture, then, as coolly as though he owned Wavebreaker, he stepped down into the central cockpit where he first brushed at, then sat on, one of the white cushioned seats by the ship’s wheel. “I’ve had a look round the boat,” he said very coolly, “and I approve of her. So tell me the cost of a week’s charter.”

“The man you want to see,” I said, “is called Matthew McIllvanney and his office is the pink building with the outside staircase. He’s not here this afternoon, but you can doubtless telephone him next week.”

Sweetman took a pair of polarised sunglasses from his shirt pocket and put them on before inspecting me again. He did not seem to like what he saw. “You’re really not being noticeably helpful,” he said after a pause, “so let us try again shall we? Would you please tell me the high season price for one week?”

“How many passengers?” Ellen asked before I could refuse to answer.

Sweetman paused again, this time to light a long pale blue cigarette with a slim gold lighter. He shrugged. “Two, four, six passengers? Does it really matter?”

“One week in high season costs ten thousand US dollars for two people, and every extra couple is another thousand bucks.” Ellen’s voice was cold, as though she disliked satisfying his curiosity. “And to those prices you have to add the boat’s running costs.”

“Which are?” Sweetman asked carelessly.

“A lot.” Ellen said flatly. “You’re talking fuel, food and liquor, plus any toys you might want aboard like scuba equipment, snorkels, jet-skis or sailboards.”

Sweetman drew on his fancy cigarette, then blew a plume of smoke into Wavebreaker’s rigging before smiling lazily at Ellen. “And tell me, sweet creature, do you count as a toy? Or are you a part of the initial ten thousand dollars?”

“Get off the boat,” I said.

“Shut up.” He turned on me like a snake. “You’re nothing but a hired hand, Breakspear, so shut the fuck up.” He glanced at the paint pot and brush that I was still holding. “Go and paint something. Be useful.” He stared into my eyes, challenging me to defy him, and when I did not move he looked back to Ellen. “I asked you a question, dear heart. Please be so good as to answer.”

“Get off this boat,” I told him, but my anger only amused Sweetman who unfolded his long thin legs from the cushioned thwart.

“Dick off,” he said to me.

I was surprised that he so eagerly sought to confront me. I am not a small man, nor am I a weakling, yet the thin Sweetman seemed unconcerned as I jumped down into the cockpit. Then I saw why he was so confident. He put a hand into a pocket of his elegant duster coat and brought out a small .22 pistol that he pointed at my face. “A ladies’ gun,” he said, “but remarkably effective at close range.”

“Nick!” Ellen called warningly, as though I might not have seen the gun.

The gun’s threat had not stopped my advance. I was calling Sweetman’s bluff, confident he would not dare pull the trigger, and equally confident that my marine training would let me turn him into mincemeat. I was also half drunk, and thus filled with the Dutch courage offered by Mama Sipcott’s worst white wine.

Sweetman stood. There was, at last, a look of alarm on his face, and I could see him wondering whether he really would have to pull the small trigger. He held the gun pointed at my eyes. I began to fear that he would fire, and a small sober part of my brain registered just how foolish this confrontation was; a contest caused solely by two male egos over a girl sworn to celibacy.

“Stop it! Both of you! I mean it!” Ellen’s voice was suddenly a harsh scream, so harsh that we both looked towards her and saw that she was threatening both of us with one of Wavebreaker’s heavy-duty fire extinguishers that she had snatched from its rack at the head of the main companionway. The cylinder was filled with a compressed chemical that would have smothered both Sweetman and me in an avalanche of nauseating foam. “Step back, Nick!” Ellen said to me, her voice recovering its normal timbre.

“But I’m only going to kill him,” I said reasonably.

“It is neither wise nor manly to get into a pissing contest with a skunk,” Ellen said coldly, “so step back, Nick.” She menaced me with the extinguisher’s nozzle and, because I knew Ellen did not make idle threats, and because I knew she despised all displays of macho violence, I obediently stepped backwards and watched as she transferred the extinguisher’s aim to Sweetman. “Leave us.” she said.

“Listen, sweet lady—”

“I said leave us!”

He gave her his most confidently patronising smile. “Dear lady, I merely wish…”

Ellen squeezed the lever. There was a gulp from the extinguisher’s valve and a trickle of yellow-white liquid dribbled pathetically from its nozzle. Sweetman crowed with laughter, but too soon, for, just as it seemed as though Ellen’s gesture had indeed collapsed into an ignominious anti-climax, the extinguisher first coughed, then spat a vicious deluge of white muck that fanned from the flared nozzle to splatter spectacularly against Sweetman’s chest. He staggered back, half tripped on the cockpit coaming, scrambled up to the deck and then to the ship’s rail. Ellen, who was utterly delighted with her achievement, followed him to spray the churning mess over his hair, then down on to the decks of Dream Baby as Sweetman jumped panic-stricken from our gunwale. “Nick!” she called. “It won’t turn off!” Ellen was laughing as she tried to stop the gunk that still spewed from the cylinder. Sweetman, safe under Dream Baby’s canopy, was starting his motors. He risked a soaking of foam as he darted out to cut his mooring lines, then twisted Dream Baby’s wheel and thrust her throttles forward. Ellen was laughing like a child let loose in a sweet shop. “It won’t turn off!” she said again.

“Throw it overboard!” I didn’t want to spend the rest of the afternoon cleaning foam from Wavebreaker’s decks.

Ellen hurled the still discharging extinguisher over the side. The cylinder bounced hard on Dream Baby’s dazzle-painted transom, then sank in the clear water where, resting on the sea-bed, it continued to discharge its disgusting foam. Sweetman turned a furious smeared face at us, then drove his garish boat hard at Wavebreaker’s hull to gouge a long scratch down to the bare metal. I heard the screech of protesting steel, then the powerboat bounced off our hull and accelerated away so that, within seconds, its powerful drives were swirling the sea into twin sprays of white water.

“Damn him.” I leaned over the rail to inspect the new scratch in Wavebreaker’s paint.

“Didn’t I do well?” Ellen asked proudly.

I had to laugh. “You did wonderfully!”

“He had a gun!” She sounded astonished, and I knew that the real danger of the moment was only just occurring to her.

“For someone who hates violence,” I agreed, “you used force with great skill. You gained a victory over a piece of scum, and I congratulate you.”

“A piece of scum?” Ellen turned to look at the rapidly disappearing Dream Baby. “I thought he was kind of cute.”

“Cute!” I was astonished by her. “You thought that scabby creep was cute?”

“Yeah,” she sounded defensive, “kind of.”

“Bloody hell,” I said, and decided that I would never understand women. “You’d better check that your cute friend didn’t steal anything when he was down below.”

It took me two hours to paint out the damage that Sweetman had caused to our hull. Ellen meanwhile cleared the foam from the teak deck, then searched Wavebreaker’s cabins. She reported that Jesse Sweetman appeared to have stolen nothing and, except for the padlock on the companionway, had damaged nothing either. Ellen and I both assumed that Sweetman’s interest in Wavebreaker’s had been merely that of a prospective charterer who wanted to reconnoitre the boat’s amenities.

So I forgot about him, at least until that evening when I gave Ellen some practice with the sextant. She was trying to master celestial navigation and I stood beside her as she trapped Altair in the mirror, then delicately and successfully brought the star down to the horizon. She read the star’s altitude off the sextant’s micrometer, and I dutifully jotted down the numbers and the time of day for her. “Does 666 mean anything?” I suddenly asked, remembering the numerals painted on Dream Baby’s bows.

“Of course it does.” Ellen was already trying to identify another star. “It’s the number of the Beast, the anti-Christ, the personification of everything that’s evil.”

“Seriously,” I said, “does it mean anything?”

Ellen looked at me. “I’m not joking, Nick. It’s from the Bible. Ask Thessy tomorrow. It’s a bad news number, a kind of theological mindfuck.”

I looked out to sea, almost as though I expected to see a puff of smoke and a beast with a forked tail appear from the darkness. “And you think Sweetman’s cute?” I asked Ellen.

“I think he’s best avoided,” Ellen said in an unexpectedly sober voice, and suddenly, and for no particular reason on a very warm night, we both shivered.

If McIllvanney’s yard had been deserted on Saturday afternoon, on Sunday morning it was unnaturally busy. Thessy arrived first, tired after an uncomfortable night on the ferry, and five minutes later Bellybutton half danced and half shuffled down the pontoon with a can of paint and a pocketful of rags and brushes. He arranged his materials on Starkisser’s long midnight-blue bows and, seeing my interest, offered an explanation. “Mr Mac wants a star painted on his sharp end, and what Mr Mac wants, Mr Mac gets.”

Ten minutes later Mr Mac himself arrived, blasting his big Kawasaki into the yard before strolling down the quay to cast his sceptical gaze at Wavebreaker. “She looks all right,” he said grudgingly, then he crossed the gangplank for a closer look. “Good holiday?” he asked Thessy.

“Thank you, sir, yes, sir.”

“Well, it’s over now, you lazy black bastard, and the client wants three scuba sets put on board.” He tossed Thessy the keys to the storeroom. “So go fetch.”

“Scuba?” I asked as Thessy ran towards the stores.

“Master Rickie Crowninshield likes to scuba,” McIllvanney said sourly, “and his daddy’s paying for the gear, so gear they will have. Good morning, Ellen.” He stared defiantly at Ellen who, standing at the stern just above Wavebreaker’s swimming platform, nodded back very coolly. McIllvanney turned back to me and dropped his voice very slightly. “Ellen tells me she’s sailing away with you?”

“Yes, she is.”

“You’re the lucky one, aren’t you.” He peered into the binnacle as though checking that no one had stolen the compass. “Screwing her, are you, Nick?”

“Piss off.”

He laughed, clearly in high spirits. “And the senator tells me that you’re only doing a two-week trial with his kids, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“No, it isn’t.” He straightened up from the binnacle and jabbed a finger painfully into my chest. “You do the full three months, Nicholas Breakspear, because I want the commission on this one, do you hear me?” If a charter was booked direct by McIllvanney, and not through either the London or the Fort Lauderdale agencies, then the Ulsterman collected the full fifteen per cent commission, which meant that the senator’s jaunt was worth at least eighteen thousand dollars to McIllvanney. “You cut this one short”—he jabbed my chest again—“and I’ll cut you so short that you’ll be singing falsetto.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a filthy bastard?” I asked McIllvanney in a tone of genuine enquiry.

“The last creature who told me that is living in a greengrocer’s shop now. You know what lives in greengrocers’ shops, Nick? Vegetables do,” He guffawed, then gave a grotesque imitation of a witless paraplegic slumped in a wheelchair. “So everything’s ready, is it?” he asked, suddenly businesslike again.

I nodded; then, on an impulse, I asked if McIllvanney had ever met a man called Jesse Sweetman.

McIllvanney did not even need to think about his answer, but just shook his head. “What kind of a name is Jesse?”

“It’s a southern name,” I said, “perhaps from South Carolina or Georgia? He runs around in a dazzle-painted sports-fisherman called Dream Baby.”

“Dream Baby?” That name clearly struck a chord in McIllvanney, for he frowned at me for a few seconds, but the chord must have faded for he shrugged it off. “I’ve seen that boat somewhere, but I can’t place it. Does it matter?”

“Sweetman and Dream Baby were here yesterday afternoon,” I said, “and he gouged Wavebreaker’s hull and prised open the companionway. He didn’t steal anything, but he annoyed me.”

“He broke into the boat? The bastard.” Whatever else, McIllvanney ran a good boatyard and hated to think of it being vandalised. “Bellybutton!” he shouted.

“I hear you!” Bellybutton had painted the outline of a five-pointed shooting star on the sleek deck of Starkisser’s bows. He had a surprisingly delicate touch and the silver star was going to look beautiful when it was finished. He had given the star a long fiery tail and surrounded it with darts of reflected light.

“What do you know about a sports-fisherman called Dream Baby?” McIllvanney shouted over the water.

Bellybutton, kneeling over his work, thought about it for a second, then spread his hands in a gesture of ignorance. “Don’t mean nothing to me, boss.”

“Well if you see the bugger, run him off!” McIllvanney said angrily, then turned to look at the yard where a silver-grey stretch limo, its windows tinted black against the sun, rolled ponderously to park beside the stairs to his office. He scowled, because he never liked meeting the clients, and clearly the big car was bringing the Crowninshield twins for their cruise-cure.

Ellen came and stood beside me. Our usual nervousness about meeting clients seemed more intense this bright morning, for neither of us knew quite what to expect of the senator’s children. One part of me, despite George Crowninshield’s reassurances, anticipated that the twins would emerge as shambling twitching wrecks, and for a second, believing my worst fears, I bitterly regretted accepting the senator’s charter. However, Rickie Crowninshield appeared reassuringly normal when he emerged from the limousine. At the very least I had expected him to be physically frail and mentally chastened; a boy worn out by his long addiction and frightened of the criminal charges that hung over him, but instead he came out of the limo and down the dock with the frisky energy of a puppy. He ran across the gangplank as enthusiastically as though he sought votes for his father’s election campaign, then approached us with an outstretched hand and a voice full of bright greetings. “You must be Nick? Dad told me about you. He says you’re one hell of a guy. Really!” His handshake was warm and firm, and his face redolent of his father’s sincerity. “And, oh boy! I know who you are. Ellen Skandinsky! Wow!” He gave her an admiring grin that was very reminiscent of the senator’s beguiling charm.

“Hello.” Ellen’s manner was almost British in its cool restraint, matching our welcome which we had deliberately pitched at a low key. We were not filling the marina with the steel band jollity of Yellow Bird, nor were any of us in our matching blue and white uniforms, for this was not a usual charter, and none of us were at Rickie or Robin-Anne Crowninshield’s beck and call. Instead, if we were anything, we were their jailers. I introduced Rickie to McIllvanney who screwed his face into what he thought was a pleasant smile then, after exchanging an inanity or two, fled to his office.

“A terrific boat, Nick! Really!” Rickie looked appreciatively round Wavebreaker’s deck. He sucked on a cigarette and I saw that the fingers of his right hand were stained a deep yellow by the nicotine. “Just outstanding! My mom said she had just the greatest time with you all last year. She said it was a blast, really! So I thought we could have a really good time as well, yeah?”

“I do hope so,” I said with polite enthusiasm.

“Just outstanding,” Rickie said, but referring to what I could not tell. He was built like a basketball player; tall and as thin as a stick insect. I noticed a slight discolouration in his left eye that betrayed its blindness, but otherwise he looked as fit as a cricket. He had his father’s black hair, a strong sun-tan, and seemed filled with a manic energy; ready and eager to enjoy both Wavebreaker and our company. “God, you look like him,” he said to me, “like your dad, I mean. Really something. Wow.” He turned as Thessy struggled aboard with a heavy scuba outfit. “You must be Thessy, right? Just great to meet you, just great! Do I call you Thessy or Thessalonians?”

Thessy, forced to put the scuba outfit down to shake Rickie’s hand, stammered that he did not mind what he was called, but Rickie had already forgotten his question. “Hey! Jackson!” He shouted towards a black man who was walking slowly along the dock. “You’re just going to eat this up! Really! This is just awesome!”

The man who now approached Wavebreaker was as tall as Rickie Crowninshield, but, where Rickie was attenuated, this man was as broad shouldered and as heavily muscled as a pit bull. He was a black version of the Maggot, but this man appeared to have none of the Maggot’s casual bonhomie. I guessed he was in his forties and he had a hard face with small wary eyes and tightly curled hair that was cut very short.

“That’s Jackson Chatterton,” Rickie introduced the big man, “and he’s my minder! Really! Ain’t that right, Jacko?” Chatterton carried two heavy suitcases across the gangplank and ignored the over-excited Rickie who shadowboxed two punches at his left arm.

Chatterton dropped the suitcases and turned to me. “Chatterton,” he said flatly. “I’m a para-medic attached to the Rinkfels clinic.”

“He’ll tell you he’s a male nurse,” Rickie said, “but he’s really my bodyguard. A big bad black bodyguard. Ain’t that what you are, Jacko?”

Chatterton continued to ignore Rickie, as did I. “My name’s Breakspear,” I said to the huge man, “and welcome aboard.” Jackson Chatterton had not offered me his hand and appeared not to notice when I offered mine. Nor did he introduce himself to Ellen or Thessy, but instead looked warily up into the rigging as though he expected to be ambushed from the foremast’s crosstrees. “You were a soldier,” I said, not as a question, but as a straight assertion of fact, for almost everything about him spoke of the military.

“He was a killer!” Rickie answered for the giant Chatterton. “Really! Wow! Bang-bang.”

“Airborne,” Chatterton confirmed to me. “Sergeant.”

“Vietnam?”

“Yes sir! And proud of it.”

Ellen opened her mouth, then had the brilliant good sense to close it unused.

“You?” Chatterton unbent enough to ask me the question.

“Royal Marines. Sergeant.” I summed up my military career in Chatterton’s own staccato fashion.

The big man gave me an approving nod, then gestured at the suitcases. “Not mine, the twins’. Where?”

“Ellen will show you.”

Ellen offered me a poisonous smile, but I had no time to worry about her distaste for the militaristic para-medic. Instead I was looking down the quay to where a pathetically thin girl was walking beside a smartly dressed woman. “That’s Robin-Anne,” Rickie told me helpfully, “with Denise.”

I crossed the gangway and Rickie came after me. “Were you really a marine?”

“Yes.”

“A sergeant? Why not an officer?”

“I didn’t want to be an officer.”

“No shit! Really?” Rickie was literally dancing in circles around me as I walked down the dock towards his sister, but then he paused in his frenetic progress to light one cigarette from the stump of another, and I wondered just what perverted fate decreed that such a boy should receive a legacy of six million dollars. “Is that your motorbike?” He had spotted McIllvanney’s Kawasaki.

“No.”

“Just awesome, Nick. Really! I mean, what a blast! Wow!” He ran on ahead, shouting at his sister. “He’s a killer, Robbie! Really! He was a marine! Just awesome!”

Robin-Anne Crowninshield shyly offered me her hand. Like her brother she was painfully thin, but otherwise they seemed utterly unlike, despite being twins. Robin-Anne had her mother’s fair hair, so fair that it looked bleached, and she had her mother’s delicate good looks etched on to a face so pale that it seemed as though her skin must burn if it was exposed to anything more powerful than a light bulb. Her hand lay in mine as lightly as a bird’s wing. “It’s very hot,” she said.

“It’ll be cooler at sea,” I reassured her, then I looked at her companion who was a very crisp and handsome black woman. “My name’s Breakspear,” I introduced myself.

“Denise Harriman,” she responded. “I’m one of Senator Crowninshield’s aides.”

“She’s from Washington,” the manic Rickie explained, in a tone of voice which suggested I should be impressed. “She had to deliver us here, but she ain’t coming with us because she gets seasick. Ain’t that right, Denise? You barf in boats?” Rickie began mimicking an attack of vomiting.

“I don’t just barf on boats.” Denise Harriman shot Rickie a look of pure venom.

The sarcasm went airily past Rickie who had suddenly stiffened, and whose face now showed a look of the most terrible anxiety. I dreaded to discover just what symptom of drug dependency I was witnessing, and wondered if I should shout for the big Jackson Chatterton to come and rescue me, but then Rickie turned his terrified gaze on to me. “Jesus!” He punched one hand into the other. “My dad promised to ask you a question, but he forgot, and Mom couldn’t remember. Shit!” He was clearly so fearful of the answer to his father’s unasked question that he scarcely dared pose it himself, but then summoned up the courage. “Does this boat have a sound system, Nick?”

I nodded. “Sure. We’ve got a tape deck and a CD player.”

His relief was palpable. “Really? A CD? Oh God, that’s awesome! Come on, Robbie!” His good spirits thus restored, Rickie seized his sister’s hand and dragged her excitedly towards the boat. Robin-Anne, who had been looking very apprehensive, seemed to go aboard Wavebreaker rather unwillingly.

Denise Harriman, the senator’s aide, uttered a barely audible sigh which I translated as an expression of relief that her responsibility for the twins was ending. She took a thick manila envelope from her attaché case. “That envelope contains the twins’ documentation, Mr Breakspear: their passports, emergency air tickets and medical records. There’s also a full list of the senator’s telephone numbers.” She handed me that envelope, then took another from the briefcase. “And these are the papers concerning your own boat.” She opened the envelope and handed me the forms which would be needed if the senator undertook the repairs to Masquerade. For the moment my boat was staying on Straker’s Cay, and she would only pass into the senator’s care if I agreed to extend the trial two weeks’ cruise-cure into a full summer’s excursion.

I spread the forms on the saddle of McIllvanney’s Kawasaki. If I did take the twins away all summer then Masquerade would be taken to a boatyard in Florida, so I now signed the necessary customs forms and the insurance waiver and the dozen other pieces of paper that would be needed to keep the United States government and the delivery company happy. I signed the last sheet, hoped to God that the US Customs service did not discover the huge Webley pistol deep in its box in Masquerade’s bilges, and handed Denise Harriman back her pen. She put the signed papers in her attaché case, then shot a poisonous glance towards Rickie who was rummaging though his pile of luggage on Wavebreaker’s deck. “Bon voyage,” she called aloud to him, and it was possible to discern a dance of relieved joy in her step as she walked back to the limousine.

Bellybutton, painting his delicate silver star, laughed up at the twins with his discoloured teeth, while McIllvanney leered at them from his office window. The last of their luggage was brought from the limousine and, as Thessy and I prepared to cast off, Rickie tested our sound system with a cacophonous cassette of rock music. Robin-Anne searched for a silent dark hole in which to hide, Jackson Chatterton scowled at us, Ellen looked exasperated and Thessy appeared just plain scared. I started Wavebreaker’s engines, used the bow thruster to drive her stem away from the quay and, with an apparent cargo of misery and mania, went to sea.