Port Vila Blues

Forty

The black water was not so black once he was upon it. Wyatt found a style with the paddle that would not swamp the canoe or waste energy in spurts and misdirections, and began to see phosphorescence boiling around him, shoreline reflections, and a low, sombre tone in the water itself, a colour he couldn’t name. Far to his left there were shouts, incoherent above the restless ping of sail rigging slapping the masts of the big yachts as they gently tossed at anchor.

Wyatt recalled a heist he’d pulled off the northern Australian coast a decade earlier. Salvage divers had found a Dutch DC3 in forty metres of water near Broome. The DC3 had been there since 1942 and a member of the salvage team had made the mistake of telling a pub crowd that it had been carrying a handful of fleeing Dutch colonial officers from Java and a box full of diamonds. Wyatt and a professional diver had got to the wreckage first. At a little over thirty metres, burdened with an air tank, torch, hatchet and knife, Wyatt began to feel the first, subversive lightheadedness as nitrogen built up in his blood, brought on by water pressure. He’d heard the term ‘rapture of the deep’, and now it made sense to him. He felt loose, forgetful, in a state to be playful and take chances, dangerous attitudes at that sort of depth. Fortunately the professional diver with him had not taken chances but brought him back to the surface in five stages, waiting three minutes at each stage for him to decompress. At the surface they’d seen a salvage ship with a police escort, so that had been the end of that.

He steered in a wide half-circle around the yachts now, aware that people could be awake aboard them, curious about the commotion on the island. The crossing took ten minutes. When he was a few metres short of De Lisle’s water frontage he stopped paddling, allowing the outrigger canoe to glide in against the little dock just aft of the yacht moored there. The area was dimly illuminated by the lights in the house above.

According to a nameplate bolted on the stern, above the rudder, the yacht was the Stiletto, home port Panama.

Wyatt needed a weapon. Perhaps there was one on board the yacht. He reached for the short chrome ladder on the starboard flank of the yacht and climbed aboard. He could just as easily have climbed the steps to the dock and stepped onto the yacht, but the risk of standing exposed under the light was greater that way.

There was no one on deck. He crouched at the steps that led below and listened. Nothing.

The cabin was empty. There was a light switch but he drew open the curtains rather than turn it on.

It was clear at once that De Lisle was intending to flee. The first thing Wyatt found was the original name-plate, Pegasus, home port Coffs Harbour.

The second thing he found was a Very pistol and a box of signal flares. He loaded one flare and stuck a further two into his waistband and went looking for a knife.

The galley offered some cheap alloy cutlery but nothing sharper than a bread knife. Wyatt felt there had to be a decent knife somewhere. How did De Lisle cut rope or sailcloth? How would he clean fish?

Wyatt went through the boat quickly and systematically, tapping the bulkhead, checking inside sail lockers, cupboards, the space under the benches. The knife showed up in a door rack, along with a small axe and a handsaw. It had a thick rubber grip and a broad flat tempered steel blade with a short, curved, slicing edge and a sharp stabbing tip. But Wyatt felt that there had to be a handgun, too. He kept looking.

And that’s how he found the safe. He tugged on the black glass door of a small wall oven, the whole unit slid out, and he found himself looking into the open space behind it. De Lisle had left the safe unlocked. That could mean he was still packing to go and didn’t want to bother with unlocking the oven every time he came down to the yacht with a handful of whatever he was running with.

Wyatt rocked back on his heels. Rings, bracelets, necklaces, tiaras; diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls; platinum, gold. That was on the lower shelf. On the top shelf were a number of files and Wyatt saw that De Lisle had kept a record of every robbery bis team had pulled, together with dirt on the men who had worked for him.

There was a garbage compactor under the sink in the galley. Wyatt fed the files into it, piece by piece, then left the yacht. He didn’t lock the safe, just pushed the oven home so that it wouldn’t excite attention. The jewels could wait: he didn’t want to go up against De Lisle with his pockets weighing him down. And later, when he left on the run, he didn’t want to waste time trying to force the safe open to get at what he now considered to be his property.

The final problem solved itself. De Lisle hadn’t locked the gate. Wyatt propped it open with a rock, then ran up the steps to the house. There were no dogs. If there were guards, none came at him from the seaward side of the house.

The steps stopped at a coral-chip path that made a lazy loop left then right through the final stretch of terraced garden. It ended at a long, low verandah. The path wound through a ground cover of fleshy-leafed plants and Wyatt cut across that way, avoiding the noisy coral.

There were two doors and several windows along the verandah. Wyatt didn’t go in but circled the house a couple of times quickly, once to locate other doors and windows, the second time to come back to a well-lighted room where he’d heard a voice that was pitched on the wrong side of reason.