The Betrayers

Chapter Twenty

NOT BEING AN experienced seaman, I can't give all the technical details of the trip. The basic problem, as posed by the charts and my pocket compass, was simple enough. We wanted to sail north to Molokai, but the trade winds, which blow from the northeast in those parts, didn't really want to let us. This conflict of opinion made things quite wet and violent on board, particularly after we passed the tip of Maui and no longer had the mass of that island to shelter us.

I'd expected a certain amount of commotion, and I'd made what preparations I could. I'd collected Isobel's shoes and purse and glasses, and my shoes and gun, and rolled them up in my coat. I'd secured the bundle with my necktie and lashed it to the mast with her stockings, which lowered my popularity quotient even further. I guess no woman likes to see knots tied in her nylons. But at least we were cleared for action, so to speak, and everything was lashed down that could fall off or blow away or wash overboard when we entered the channel proper. It was just as well.

In theory, I knew, a sailboat should be able to head within about forty-five degrees, or four compass points, of the wind. In other words, with a northeast wind blowing, our northerly course was theoretically possible. This much I remembered from what I'd been taught by the old Navy chief who'd run the small-boat training school I'd attended at Annapolis years ago. I could recall him explaining to us exactly why a sailboat goes to windward. He'd drawn the parallelogram of forces on the blackboard for us. Then he'd taken us out for practical instruction, one by one, and I remembered his simple directions for sailing close-hauled, as it's called:

Just hike your ass out to weather, sir, and watch your luff.

It had seemed a relatively simple procedure in a good-sized sailboat on the sheltered waters of Chesapeake Bay in broad daylight. On a fiberglass shingle in the Paiolo Channel at night, with the trade winds blowing across a thousand miles of open ocean and the waves marching out of the darkness mast-high, it got considerably more complicated. Well, I don't suppose they were really mast-high, and it wasn't much of a mast anyway, but after pounding into the stuff for over an hour and capsizing once, I began to have some doubts as to the feasibility of the voyage on which I'd embarked.

I mean, there's something very discouraging-not to say frightening-about clinging to an overturned boat in the dark in the middle of nowhere, even when you know perfectly well it won't sink and you'll be able to get it upright again as soon as you catch your breath from the ducking. The water was reasonably warm; there was no question of dying of exposure. Nevertheless I began to have a nagging suspicion that those old Polynesians with their hollow logs might just possibly have been better men than I.

It was then, as we rolled the boat back on its bottom and squirmed aboard, that I heard Isobel give her kookie little laugh once more.

"Darling, you're absolutely the world's worst sailor!" she shouted. "Let me take her."

"What?"

"We're not making any headway. Move over. Give me the tiller. Let me show you… All right, don't trust me. But you're pinching her to death."

"What the hell does that mean?" I yelled. "Pinching whom?"

"The boat. You're frustrating the poor thing terribly. You're trying to make her point much too high. You've got that silly little lateen sail sheeted in so hard it can't draw properly, and you won't let it out an inch: that's why we flipped just now. And every time she does get some way on her, you run her up into the wind and stop her dead!"

It was a surprising amount of nautical lingo to come from the lips of a decorative pillar of society, even a thoroughly wet one. However, I didn't have time to figure out the implications at the moment. A wave broke over the bow and sluiced along the deck on which we sat, half filling the cockpit. There was some kind of bailing device working down there, but for a minute or two the little vessel handled sluggishly with the extra weight of water, and I had my hands full keeping her under control.

Then I pulled my compass out of my pocket and nudged my companion to draw her attention to the luminous needle. "We've got to steer north, don't we?" I shouted. "Molokai's north, not northwest."

I heard her laugh again. "Darling, you can't work a sailboat by compass! You've got to sail by the wind and the sea. Molokai's over thirty miles long; we're not going to miss it. Once we're there, in protected water, we can make up whatever we've lost to leeward. But you're not sailing a racing yacht, Matt, with a deep lead keel and lots of momentum. You're sailing a centerboard skimming dish. To hell with pointing, you've got to keep her footing. Slack that sheet and bear off. Let her drive, or we'll be splashing around here all night."

Again, the seagoing jargon had a strange sound, considering the source, but this was hardly the place to worry about it. I hesitated only a moment. She could be tricking me somehow, but what the hell, I couldn't do worse than I was doing. I remembered that on land a sheet may be a piece of cloth, but on the water it's a rope-excuse me, a line. I let some of the nylon cord that controlled the sail slip through my hand. I pulled on the tiller, and felt the little boat swing and steady, and take off slantingly down the back of a wave like an eager pony.

Rising, she shouldered the oncoming crest aside and made the swift downward rush again, almost planing. I felt a hand take hold of the nylon line to which I clung, and I looked quickly at the woman beside me.

"At least let me tend sheet for you," Isobel shouted. "Now you're getting the idea. Just keep her driving!"

That was all there was to it-except about four more hours of wind and spray. It was still dark when we reached Molokai, feeling the motion ease as we sailed into the lee of the island. Presently I spotted the flash of breakers ahead, and made out the solid mass of the mountains against the starry black sky. It took us a while to beat around the end of the island against the wind. We felt the full blast of the trades again, rounding the eastermnost point of land, but pretty soon we were able to swing away from it and run more or less downwind, really flying. The sky was getting light behind us. The forbidding north coast of Molokai began to open up to our left.

I headed into the first bay I saw, but there was a station wagon parked on the sandy beach-fishermen perhaps-and a road wound up the cliff behind it. I remembered Jill telling me about the road that went just around the end of the island and no farther: I'd obviously headed in too soon. I steered back out, and let a couple of minor openings go past, and managed to jibe and dunk us once more as I turned in again. As Isobel had suggested, I was undoubtedly the worst sailor ever to visit this coast.

We knew our vessel pretty well by now, however, and it took us only a moment to right her, scramble back aboard, and get her going again. Then we were sailing into a deep cove between towering black cliffs. There was a pretty bit of white beach at the end and a stream. Lush jungle led back up a spectacularly beautiful valley to high mountains boasting a sparkling waterfall just touched by the first rays of the sun.

I mean, it was an unreal place and an unreal situation. Coming there by motorboat properly equipped for exploration would have been one thing. Sailing up to the beach on a glorified surfboard, with nothing but the clothes we'd put on for dinner the night before, was something else again. It was crazy enough to give the whole business a vague, dreamlike quality.

I pulled up the centerboard. We slid off into the water on opposite sides of our faithful little ship and carried her reverently up on shore. Then we turned to face each other in the growing light. There were all kinds of questions still to be settled between us, but one thing was certain: between us we'd licked the Pacific Ocean, or a small part of it. That was a bond that couldn't be ignored.

Isobel made a gesture of pushing the tangled wet hair out of her eyes. In a sense, I knew her very well after what we'd just been through together. In another sense, she was an utter stranger, standing there barefoot with her careful makeup washed away and her expensive cocktail dress soaked and disorganized. The funny thing was, she looked kind of soft and pretty and appealing that way. In the tropics, I realized, being wet wasn't really a social disaster, particularly on a deserted beach at daybreak. You merely had to discard a few stodgy, civilized notions about smoothly ironed dresses and sharply creased pants.

"Well, we made it," Isobel said in a strangely gentle voice. "You and your Viking ancestors! If you'd been aboard, Leif Ericson would surely have drowned before he got halfway to Vinland."

I grinned. "Why is it that the most insufferably conceited people in the world are invariably those who've managed to learn the difference between a sheet and a halyard?"

What we were saying had, of course, nothing to do with what we were thinking; and what we were thinking-what I was thinking, at least-had very little to do with danger and duty and my reasons for coming here in the first place. To hell with Monk. If he wanted me, he could come and get me, and save me the trouble of searching for him.

In the meantime, there was other business to be transacted. Tired and bruised as we both were after the long, rough sail, we still knew what this place was for. I mean, who can mistake the Garden of Eden? But there had been some misunderstandings in the past and we had to feel our way.

I said rather tritely, like any movie hero confronted by a damp movie heroine, "Well, you'd better get out of those wet clothes while I scout around a bit."

She smiled at this. "Don't be corny," she murmured.

"I'm not cold. I'll be dry in a few minutes, as soon as the sun gets up a little higher." Her smile grew stronger. "If you really want my dress off, Matt, you'll have to think up a better reason."

I did.