The Turquoise Lament

The Turquoise Lament

John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee Book 15 The Turquoise Lament

John D. MacDonald

Revenge is the best way to get even.

ARCHIE BUNKER

For Dorothy, again.

One

THE PLACE Pidge had borrowed was a studio apartment on the eleventh floor of the Kaiulani Towers on Hobron Lane, about a hundred yards to the left off Ala Moana Boulevard on the way toward downtown Honolulu.

Riding in from the airport, I had found out why taxis cost so much in Hawaii. When, you want to know something, ask. “What happens,” the driver said, “the companies bid for exclusive. Like the Ala Moana Shopping Center. I could drop you there, but I can’t pick up from there. You pay so much for exclusive, see; it’s got to be passed on to the customer. Your first time here?”

“No. But I’m no regular visitor.”

“Everything costs an ass and a half, sport, and it keeps going right on up.”

It does, indeed it does, sport.

Even though I had phoned from the airport, and had used the low-fidelity speaker system in the cramped foyer, Pidge Brindle didn’t undo the door until she had opened it a few inches, to the end of the safety chain. A round eye, a segment of wide smile, a squeak of pleasure. She slammed the door, and I heard the clinking and clicking of chains and bolts, and then she swung it wide and pulled me in, saving the obligatory embrace until she had done up the door once more. Then she stood tiptoe tall, reaching up to hug with strength and enthusiasm, saying, “I can’t believe it, Trav. I can’t, I really can’t believe you’re here, you came.”

“You called, didn’t you?”

“I know. Yes. But it is a long way to come.”

Five time zones is a long way. Here it wasn’t yet time for lunch, and back at Lauderdale, Bahia Mar was almost into the early dark of early December. I had me a case of jet lag. It turns your brain to putty and makes the edges of everything too bright and sharp.

But Pidge looked very good, very real, though far too pale. It had been a little more than a year since she and Howie Brindle, a few months married, had set off from Bahia Mar in the Trepid to take their sweet long time going around the world. There had been a few postcards. But there always are, when people leave. Marinas are transient places. They are big, elegant, outdoor waiting rooms.

Then the phone call, small and meek and scared. “Please? Please?”

And as Meyer had pointed out, though it was not at all necessary so to do, if I had to make a list of the people to whom I owed a Big One, it would have to include one dead man named Ted Lewellen, whose only child, Linda, had come to be named Pidge because when very young she had learned to imitate the throaty warble and coo of a city pigeon perfectly. Meyer didn’t have to remind me about Professor Ted because I had already said yes to that small faraway voice. I had told her to stay put and I would make it as soon as I could.

And so I phoned an airline, went through my checklist of things to do when leaving the old houseboat for an indefinite time, packed, and took off, leaving Meyer to keep an eye on the store and hang onto any mail which might come. Everything I needed went into a bag small enough to go under the seat. I carried extra funds. Her voice had overtones of the deep miseries. Most solutions are available in your local shopping center, at high prices. The call had caught me about one week into another segment of my retirement. I had made score enough for a half year of it this time, so I had ample cash in the hidey-hole in the bow of the Busted Flush. I stocked the wallet handsomely and put the larger reserve supply in a safe place.

I learned about the safe place long ago from a man who had to carry four complete sets of identity papers in his line of work. You get hold of one of the longer Ace bandages for people with trick knees. I have one anyway, the left one. You divide the money into two equal stacks, fold each in half, wrap each stack in pliofilm, slip one under the bandage above the knee in front, one above the knee in back. No risk of losing. Nothing uncomfortable. Just comfortable presence.

I bought my ticket amid the night people at the National counter at Miami. There are two ways to go-first and tourist. First is better. Everybody’s life style is jam-packed with as many small arbitrary annoyances as the industrial-governmental bureaucracy can cram into it. So when you buy first class you buy lower blood pressure, because when it comes right down to nit and grit, they call more decisions your way if you have an F after your flight number. And for a man who’s six four and a bit, with a 34-inch inseam, there is more sprawl room in F. I had a DC-10 to Los Angeles and found on arrival that, for reasons unknown, my connecting flight, originating in Chicago, had not yet left there. So I shopped the terminals in the first gray light of day and switched to Continental, to a 747, to the window seat in the rearward starboard corner of first class, leaving in an hour and a half. The bigger the bird, the more you feel like something being processed, and that feeling is enhanced if you sit forward in first on a long flight in the 747, because they will sure-God pull down the movie screen and then yank down the little slide that will cover your window. “But sir, it spoils the quality of the picture for the people watching the movie if your window lets any light in.” And what crass person would spoil the movie for a small crowd of first-class clutzes thirty-seven thousand feet in the air?

Airplanes are empty three weeks before Christmas. There is a little lull in there. I think we had seven jolly girls flouncing about, servicing fifteen customers. After the unreality at the terminal of being served pineapple Kool-Aid by a couple of yawning ladies in plastic grass skirts, and the further unreality of the Inspection Before Boarding-a ceremony that any certified maniac could outwit-I caught a single tilted vista of Los Angeles in morning light, and the altitude and the sweep of the light gave it a strange appearance of total emptiness, a grid pattern of pale broken structures and rubble, long abandoned, a place of small dry vines and basking serpents. Moments later I got a second rearward look from a higher place, and it was no longer city, but stale pizza sprinkled heavily with chopped nutmeats.

As soon as they had unstrapped, the hearty girls set about getting us bombed on Marys, then nailed our feet to boards and crammed us chock-full of airline food, depending on the dual stupor of booze and food to drop us off to sleep. For the sleepless, the stereo high fidelity of the sterilized, repackaged headsets with a choice of umpty channels, or the sterilized, repackaged motion picture, would keep them from bothering the stewardess crew with any demands for service…

Halfway along, a great big stewardess, a king-size pretty, came back and stopped and looked at me in a troubled way. I wasn’t eating, drinking, reading, listening to music, or watching the movie. I was sitting there with my eyes open. This was unthinkable! Would I like a drink? A magazine? A newspaper, maybe?

In A.D. 3174 the busy, jolly nosexicles on the planet Squanta III will sever our spinal cords, put us into our bright We eternity wombs, deftly attach the blood tube, feeding tube, waste tube and monitor circuitry, remove the eyelids quickly and painlessly, and, with little chirps of cheer, strokes and pats of friendship and farewell, they will lower the lid and seal it, leaving us surrounded by a bright dimensional vista of desert, a smell of heat and sage, a sound of the oncoming hoofs on full gallop as, to the sound of a calvary bugle, John Wayne comes riding, riding, riding…

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m just thinking.”

Pursed lips. Vertical lines between the dark brows. “Thinking? Hey, I’ve got a friend who’s totally freaked on the contemplation thing, you know, how a person can do brain waves. I thought a person had to be all quiet and alone. I didn’t know you could do it on airplanes. Is that what you’re doing?”

“Yes. You can do it on big reliable airplanes.”

“We’re pretty steady this time on account of we’re taking sixteen tons of plywood to Hawaii on account of some kind of strike.”

“That would make it very steady.”

“If I set you back by talking to you, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to mess up anything. You just go… right ahead, huh?”

She went away happy. I wasn’t idle at all. I was no longer a symbol of stewardess failure. But her farewell at Honolulu international was full of that special warmth which meant she was glad to be rid of me. Meyer says that not only are the New People incapable of being alone and idle without cracking; they feel compelled to turn all loners into group animals like themselves.

Anyway, before seeing Pidge again, I had a chance to think about her. Swift, bright images of Pidge. Color stills starting ten years back when she’d been fifteen. That’s when she had appeared around Bahia Mar, the motherless daughter of Professor Ted Lewellen. Ted’s wife had died suddenly, and out of impulse born of grief and shock, he had taken a long leave of absence from the midwest university where he had taught for years. The cover story was that he was taking off to write a book.

I would hate to have to estimate how many genuine, authentic, priceless treasure maps have been offered to me. Sunken treasure along the Florida keys, off Bahama reefs, near Yucatan. I think there must be a printing plant in Tampa which turns them out on a production basis, shredding the edges and boiling them in tea.

Ted Lewellen had taken a sabbatical year a couple of years before his wife died and had spent that year in the old vaults and dead-storage rooms of the ancient libraries of Lisbon, Madrid, Cartagena and Barcelona. Because his colloquial Spanish and Portuguese were almost without flaw and his credentials as linguist, scholar, historian were perhaps more honored there than here, and because his project appealed to national pride and honorbeing the tracing of the lesser-known voyages and forgotten heroes of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries who had sailed from Western Europe-he was given full cooperation.

Long after he had decided he could trust me, he had told me about that year. Letters, ships’ logs, statements of account. Great masses of material never adequately researched. Stilted formal tales of gold and blood, piracy and disease, tempests and greed. So, along with his scholarly project, he had kept a personal account of treasure clues. He had called it the dream book. He and his wife had made jokes about it. Some day, baby, ahunting we will go.

The next year, during summer vacation, Ted and his wife had come to Florida, learned the rituals and precautions of scuba diving, visited the sites of a couple of the wrecks of the galleons which had sunk close to the Florida shore. He read the extravagant literature of the treasure hunters and, with a scholar’s discipline, extracted the helpful facts and discarded the gaudy myths. From every available source, he compiled a master list of known or suspected treasure sites, and then he went through his dream book and wrote off those he had found on other lists, knowing that either they had been cleaned out long ago or they had eluded long and diligent search.

I met them, father and daughter, when they had first come down and were looking for a boat. Each trying to turn it into fun for the other one. Both trying to respond. They had heard I was selling a boat for a friend. I drove them up the Waterway to Oscar’s Dock, where Matly Odell’s Whazzit was quietly, politely moldering away. I remember I wondered at the time if he was another treasure freak. But he didn’t have the gleam in the eye, or the elaborate and misleading explanations about why he wanted a sturdy old scow like the Whazzit. He did not make the usual buyer’s mistake of pretending to know a lot of things he didn’t know. I answered his questions. He was on a close budget. He had an expert go over it. Then he made Matty’s widow a first and final offer and she took it. I forgot about it until I was over at the gas dock one day about two months later and the Professor brought the scow in for fuel. It was now called Lumpy.

More than the name was changed; I could only guess at how many backbreaking hours he and his daughter had put into that tub. The Professor was leaned down to strings and sinew and sun-dried cordovan hide. He asked me aboard, showed me the big rebuilt generators, the air compressor. I noted the oversized Danforths and the hawser-type anchor line. It was still a slow, ugly old scow, but now it was a nice old scow.

I asked him why he’d equipped it the way he had, and he said he had an underwater research project lined up. I asked him where Pidge was, and he said she was in school and adjusting well. He said she never had trouble making friends. I watched him take the Lumpy on out, handling it smartly in wind and tide.

A few months later I learned by accident that Lewellen had sold the Lumpy to a scuba club down near Marathon. I decided he had gone broke and gone home. Then I learned that somebody had bought the Dutchess. She’d been on the block for a long time at Dinner Key. Out of my reach, financially. A fantastic custom motor sailer,with a semitrawler hull and a beam you wouldn’t believe. She was about ten years old then. The hull had been made in Hong Kong. Mahogany and teak. The diesels and all the rest of the mechanical items had been installed in Amsterdam. Huge fuel capacity, desalinization, all navigational aids. She had been rigged with automatic winches and heavy-duty fittings so that one man could sail her alone.

The new owner was having a lot of work done on her. Then he brought her to Bahia Mar, to a big empty slip. I walked over when she came in and found Ted Lewellen and Pidge crewing the 7repid, as he had renamed her. You could take that thing anywhere in the world and stay as long as you wanted.

It is very easy to tell yourself not to get involved. Too easy. I told myself that about once a day until finally I knew I had to get involved. I picked a morning when Pidge was in school. We had our long talk in the main cabin of the Trepid, the rain coming down in torrents on the deck, a gusty wind pushing at the bare pole and giving all those tons of boat a gentle motion.

It was obvious to me that he had gone out on his own and, found something very rich on the bottom of the sea, and if I could add it up that way, a lot of other people in the area could add it up just as easily, and when they did, they were the type to come aboard, beat the top of his skull flat, and search every inch of his great boat.

He did it well. Shock, surprise, consternation, disbelief. He had a long story about wills and trusts and estates and executors, and how it had taken a long time for his wife’s estate to go through probate and for the distribution to be made.

So I told him that even if that was the truth, the dumb and ugly ones could come swarming aboard, and the ones who were a little bit smarter might check the probate records up north and find out if there was enough money left him to buy this much boat and do all this extra work to it. He thought that over and thanked me for thinking about him and warning him, and said he would take suitable precautions. When I realized he thought I was trying to cut a piece of his action, I explained just how my special little aspect of the salvage business worked. In case he might need my services. He didn’t think he would.

Our relationship was one of guarded friendliness until, two years later, he decided he could trust me. Pidge, at seventeen; had suddenly acquired one of the great crushes of the western world. And- she was fixated on me. It is difficult to imagine oneself as being a romantic image to a teen-age girl. When she looked at me, her eyes would go round and then get heavy. She would blush, turn pale, blush again. She would stop in the middle of a sentence, forgetting where it was going. She tripped and blundered into things and followed me like a dog. Had she been a knob-jointed gawk with chipmunk teeth and a tilted squint, it would have been one thing. But a tawny, limber, lovely, blue-eyed girl in the first full burst of ripeness is another thing entire. A total humble adoration is discomfiting. It alarmed and irritated her father and made me a figure of fun around the marina. There goes McGee and his fan club.

Pigeon’s mission was very clear, very simple. She wanted to be married to me right away, and whatever she had to do to make that happen was perfectly okay with her, and she was out to prove she was a grown woman.

When it got so intense I began to wonder about her sanity I provisioned the Busted Flush and took off down the Waterway. I made- it halfway down Biscayne Bay below Miami when I chunked into something floating almost totally submerged. It thumped the hull and then managed to come back up and take a whack at the starboard wheel, getting to it in spite of the hull being heavily skegged. There was so much vibration I had to cut the engine off. The Flush is not exactly nimble even on both little diesels, and I had a tide set and a steady hard breeze out of the west to fight. I crabbed along until I got sick of it, then looked at the chart and headed on across the bay to some no-name islands on the far side. At dusk I put down two hooks and got out the wheel puller and a spare wheel, all ready to make my repairs in the morning. I was fixing a big drink when Pidge came floating to the galley door, eyes huge and misty, a tender little smile on her lips. “Hello, my darling,” she breathed. “Surprised?”

I was. We talked all night. The only thing I managed to convince her of was that I did not want any child bride, or any child mistress, or even any quick joyful romp that she promised she would never never mention to anyone ever, word of honor. She booed and hawed and strangled until her face was a big red heartbroken bloat, and her voice a sickly rasp. I got a call through to her loving daddy at midnight and explained the situation. I sensed he could not make himself believe in the bent-wheel story. It was a hard one to sell. He said he had been on the verge of calling the cops. I gave him an estimate of when I’d be back. He said he would prefer it if I off-loaded her at Dinner Key. I said that was fine with me, which caused another fit of hawing, hiccuping and general leaky misery.

By dawn she was exhausted, spiritless, leaden. She made terrible coffee. I moved the Flush to sand shallows, went over the side, pulled the bent wheel and put the spare on. I ran the Flush from the fly bridge, and she went way forward and sat out there on the bow hatch, huddled small and miserable. Even her round little behind in her white sailcloth shorts looked humble and defeated. But there was something in the curve of hip into waist, and waist into back and shoulder, that made a little stir of lech and regret. It is always a tossup with me as to whether I am sorriest for my misdeeds or the deeds undone. In a world intent on defusing sex, I had failed to do my part. I’d let a classic get away.

We got to Dinner Key at ten o’clock and I saw Lewellen pacing back and forth over near the gas dock. I took it over there and sent Pidge forward with her little blue flight bag and waved off any help with lines. I had no intention of tying up. I held it steady and she stepped ashore and trotted to Daddy. A little cluster of boat bums watched her with appreciation. I guess she had been planning it all the way to Dinner Key. She wheeled away from his grasp and spun and pointed an accusing finger at me, and in a high, clear, artificial tone, she said, “Daddy, do you know what he did to me? Do you want to know what Travis did? All night long, all he did was sc…”

By then Ted Lewellen had read the scene, detected the revenge wish of the maiden scorned, and understood how it was a perfect affirmation of my innocence. I was boiling back away from the dock, widening the gap. He clamped a hand gently over her mouth just in time, and she collapsed into his arms. He gave me a half-shy grin, a shrug, and led her away toward the parking lot.

Pretty soon she was eighteen and had gone away to school.

And here, years later, five time zones away, the lady and I embraced. Then broke it up quickly and clumsily. Old restraints are a memory in the flesh. She had a faint blush, a half smile, and spoke quickly, “Just this bag? Is this all you have? Sure. I remember. You always feel oppressed by things. Hemmed in and all. I hope you didn’t find a place to stay. But you couldn’t have unless you made a reservation from California. Help me stop gibbering, please.”

“Hush up, Linda Lewellen Brindle, dear.”

“Thanks.”

“Want to talk later? Or now.”

“Now. Come over here.”

She took me over to a window. She had me lean close to the glass. From there I could see a segment of the forest of spars in the Yacht Harbor. She showed me where to start counting. Six berths over. And there, eleven stories below us and a half mile away, was the distinctive bulk of the Trepid.

“Where’s Howie?” I asked.

“Living aboard.”

“And you’re living here?”

“For a month so far,” she said. “It belongs to my best friend in school. She’s back on the mainland to be with her mother, who’s dying of cancer.”

“Let me guess. Am I here to save a marriage?” She dropped onto an orange sofa and touched her throat. “Not exactly, Trav.”

“Then?”

“It’s narrowed down to just two things that could be happening to me. Just two things. I am losing my mind. Or Howie is going to kill me.”

It was a mind-boggling thought. “Howie? D. Howard Brindle, for chrissake!”

She looked at me most solemnly, and I saw the two simultaneous tears bulge large on her lower lids, then spill over and make shiny little snail tracks down her cheeks in an edge of light from the window.

“I keep trying to make it come out that it’s the first thing. I want to believe I’m losing my mind. But I can’t believe it. Then I say that people who are crazy can never believe they are, and that means I probably am. I just can’t…” And then came slow bow of the face into the hands, lowering of the hands, and head to the lady-knees, brown hair hanging long, gleaming with life.

She made a soft, snuffling sound. Okay McGee, salvage expert, salvage the lady’s life. Give her a choice. Crazy or dead.

Howie Brindle? Howie? Come on, Pidge. Now really.

Two

I WALKED out to the Hawaii Yacht Club at the end of the long pier. A fellow looked at my membership card from the Royal Biscayne and straightened perceptibly. Yes, of course, any member of the Royal Biscayne has reciprocal privileges, sir.

I said I was just looking to see if any Florida friends were in port. He sent me to the dockmaster, who showed me the big map of the protected boat basin on the side wall of his office and told me to take a look. The tags for stateside boats were fastened to the cork board with pale blue pushpins.

Nobody I knew well. Three big boats I knew, and one I didn’t. The large money has the full-time hired crew to go with the large boat, and the rich have the crew make the long runs. They fly out later. Like old McKimber. Now dead. He used to keep a crew of six aboard the Missy III. One hundred and fifteen feet. Seven hundred thousand gleaming dollars afloat and a minimum hundred thou a year wages and running expenses. He’d send it where he wanted to go. Portugal, the Riviera, the Greek Islands, Papeete, Acapulco. Then he would fly out and go aboard and stay for a time, accompanied by one of those big, blond, jolly ladies of his. But he never cruised in the Missy III. It made him too nervous. He didn’t like to wake up in the night and hear all that creaking and crackling and sloshing.

So I made a sound of pleasure at spotting the Trepid and asked the dockmaster if the Brindles were aboard, and he said that as far as he knew it was just the mister staying aboard her. I thanked him and went to say hello to Good Old Howie.

The Trepid was well laced into her U-shaped slip, stern to the pier, with husky stern lines crossed to the big bollards, bow lines to the pilings, and a pair of spring lines to big cleats on the narrow dock on the starboard. A short gangplank had been rigged, and I went to the dock end of it and yelled, “Howie? You aboard?”

He rose up from the far side of the trunk cabin, where he had a deck chair centered under the shade of a tarp. He stared at me for an uncomprehending second, and then his big face broke into familiar groupings of grin-wrinkles, teeth white against tan hide, brown eyes looking misty with pleasure.

“McGee! Son of a gun! What are you doing out here, man? Come on aboard.”

I had planned my explanation so that it was neither too elaborate nor too vague. And entirely plausible. Hand delivery of a legal document, and get the certified check before turning it over. A wellpaid favor for a friend of a friend.

He got me a cold beer from below. We sat in the shade of the tarp, amid boat smells and marina sounds. He wore faded red swim trunks. I had forgotten the size of him. Almost eye to eye with my six four, but a McGee and a half wide. About two seventy, I would guess. Practically no body hair. A soft slack look to the smooth tanned hide. But do not be misled. There is a physical iype which has a layer of smooth fat over very useful muscle. Hard, rubbery fat. Big men, light on their feet, agile, and very tough. You find a lot of them in the pro football ranks. Linemen and linebackers. I had played volleyball with Howie on a Lauderdale beach. Set the net up in soft loose sand on a blazing day and some very good specimens crap out on you quickly. I fool with it only when I’m in top shape, which seems to happen less often these years. The regulars were glad to have a new fish in the game, and they tried to run him into the ground. But old Howie Brindle kept bounding tirelessly, sweating, laughing, yelping, making great saves and going high for the kill. He didn’t even breathe hard.

Later, one night, the week before he married Pidge, he told me about his skimpy football career. Because of disciplinary problems, he had played in only three games out of nine his senior year at Gainesville. He was a defensive tackle. He wasn’t anybody’s draft choice, but the Dolphins gave him an invitation to camp.

There under the stars on the sun deck of the Flush, he said, “Those coaches kept chewing at me, Trav. They kept saying what a shame it was, somebody with all my natural equipment and talent, I didn’t have enough resolve. I wasn’t hungry enough. What they want, you should keep getting again and chasing that ball carrier even after you know you haven’t a hope in hell of ever catching him. It just didn’t make sense to me. Give me an angle and I could lay it on them a heavy ton, like I fell off a roof on them. It doesn’t make a lot of difference now, I guess. I’ll say this. It all seemed pretty bush for a bunch of pros to want that kind of nonsense from somebody.”

So now he asked about Meyer and the Alabama Tiger, Johnny Dow and Chookie and Arthur, and all the Bahia Mar regulars. And then I said, “Where’s Pidge? Off shopping?” Pidge and I had decided I might get a better reading if he believed I had not yet talked to her.

He looked down at one of his big banana-fingered hands, made a slack fist of it, then inspected the nails. “She’s not living aboard,” he said at last.

“Trouble?” I asked.

I was given a quick troubled, brown-eyed glance. “Lots,” he said.

“It happens. Snits and tizzies. You two guys will straighten it out.”

“I don’t know. It isn’t the kind of thing… I mean… I just really don’t know what the hell to do, Trav. I don’t know how to handle it. And I don’t even want to talk about it, okay?”

“What do you mean, is it okay? If you want to talk I’m here. If you want me to go talk to her, that’s okay too. Is she on Oahu?”

He grimaced, lifted a big arm, and pointed. “She’s on the eleventh floor of that place over there; about half of it sticks out to the side of that brown build ing. Kaiulani Towers. Apartment eleven-twelve. Some girl friend from school, name of Alice Dorck. It’s her place and she’s away.”

“What will I say to her?”

“I didn’t say I wanted you to-”

He was interrupted by a hail from the dock. “Hey, Howie? I’m ready to unstep the big stick. Your muscles still available?”

“Okay Jer. Coming,” he called in a cheerful voice. He stood up and said, “This’ll take maybe twenty minutes. You in any kind of a rush?”

“I’ll be here.”

He grinned and went padding off on his big bare brown feet. His streaked blond-brown hair was shoved back and cropped off square, just below the nape of his neck. He had lost the front third of his hair, all of it. It gave him a huge area of face, all of it a deepwater tan. Apparently he was a very obliging guy around the yacht harbor just as he had been around Bahia Mar. The muscles were always available.

I strolled the deck areas of the Trepid. I wanted the pleasure of a good, long, quiet look at her. It is so damned trite to say that they don’t build them like that any more. They can still build them, if there’s anybody left with money like that. The anticipated pleasure slowly faded and died. I did not enjoy looking at the Trepid. Let me explain about a boat person, one like me who is always a step behind or a step and a half behind the normal maintenance chores aboard the Busted Flush. The Trepid was sound and good, and she would have looked just great to a civilian.

Her lines are quite a lot like the forty-six-foot Rhodes Fiberglass Motorsailor, vintage 1972, but the Trepid has ten feet more length, six feet more beam, and in spite of a dead-weight tonnage nearly twice that of the Rhodes, actually draws a little less when that big beefy centerboard is wound all the way up into its slot in the hull. She is a husky boat, built like a workboat, and if you want to use a small jib like a staysail and go on diesels, she can give you almost three thousand miles at eight or nine knots, depending on the condition of her hull at the time.

What I saw was dry, corroding running gear and blocks which looked as if they might be frozen by corrosion. I saw pitted metal, flaking paint, smudges and stains, milky cracking varnish, oily spots on the teak deck, and a speckly green on the sail cover which could be the beginning of a fatal case of mildew. Everywhere I looked I saw hundreds of hours of undone labor, and very dull labor it is. The sea has no mercy, and there is no such thing as “maintenance-free.” All you get near the water is either more maintenance than you can handle, or so much that you can just about stay ahead of it. The fee I pay for living aboard the Flush is a minimum of two hours a day for exterior housework every day I am aboard.

The Trepid was like a large, healthy, handsome woman who had been forced to sleep in her clothes and go without comb, soap or makeup for a couple of weeks. She was still sound, but her morale had started to go sour.

Not like when she was Ted Lewellen’s lady. Not the way she was treated when Meyer and I flew out and lived aboard the Trepid anchored in sheltered water in Pitchilingue Cove in the Bay of La Paz in Baja California. There were five of us aboard. Beside Ted, there was Joe Delladio, a Mexican electronics engineer, and ftank Hayes, a construction engineer and scuba expert.. Maybe Lewellen wouldn’t have brought me into his action even then, but I guess that I was the only one he could think of when two of the minor partners in his venture decided they could no longer keep on pretending they were not afraid of sharks. And three men could not do all the work which had to be done before the good season changed. At my suggestion, Meyer became the other replacement.

It was in the big salon of the Trepid the evening of the day we arrived that Ted told us about his past, about all the research and about the treasure clues he had found in the old original documents, the ships’ logs, officers’ letters.

He explained what he was after this time. The information had come out of the archives in Madrid and in Amsterdam. Long ago a Dutch pirate ship had knocked off a series of Spanish galleons and had loaded herself down with more treasure than was prudent. She had been intercepted by Cromwell, who was also a pirate at that time, in command of two English vessels. They caught the Dutchman north northeast of La Paz Bay, which is near the tip of Baja California, on the sheltered side.

The Dutchman had not surrendered very quietly and, in the fuss, was holed at the waterline. Cromwell took the dismasted hulk in tow and tried to make it to the shallows, but she sank well offshore. Some of the Hollanders escaped to shore, probably not more than a dozen, and two eventually made it back to their homeland. Professor Lewellen estimated that the pirate ship had been laden with about twelve million in gold and silver. He had used Spanish sources to get a reading. From English and Dutch accounts of the confrontation, he had prepared an overlay of a geodetic chart of the area, with the search area marked out.

He explained we weren’t looking for some romantic old vessel resting on the bottom. Tides and currents would have shifted her and broken her up a long time ago. Somewhere in the shaded areas of the overlay, she would have burst herself open like a rotten sack and dumped the heavy metal. The area was silt and sand bottom, constantly shifting. We would be working at a depth range of seventy to a hundred and thirty feet.

“I believe the heavy metal would stay pretty well bunched, no matter what happened to the ship. I think that her cannon will be in the same area as the precious metals. All I’ll say about the search method is that it involves exhausting, gut-busting labor. And we may never find anything. If you decide against it, I’ll pay your fare back, no complaints, no questions, no pleading. If you decide for it, then the cut works this way. After we take the expenses off the top, fifty percent comes to me and the vessel. Of the remaining fifty percent, Joe and Frank get sixteen percent each, and you and Meyer get nine percent each. If we cashed in at two million net, that would be ninety thousand apiece for you. If we get nothing, you’ve been nonpaying guests, and manual labor.”

I looked at Meyer. Meyer had pursed his lips, beetled his brow, and said, “How did you become owner of this fine vessel, Professor Ted?”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

“Meyer’s question is pertinent,” I reminded Lewellen.

He stared directly at me, and I have a vivid memory of that look. He had seemed a mild and gentle fellow, professorial, meticulous and fussy. He looked out at me from under sun-whitened lashes and eyebrows. Once upon a time I rescued a great blue heron. Some cretinous subhuman had busted his wing with a small-caliber slug. After I had run him down and quelled him with my right arm wrapped around the surprising lightness of wings and body, my left hand holding that long lethal bill, he held still and looked at me, unblinking. It was the predator appraisal. How would I taste? Was I worth killing and eating? A pale calm yellow stare, devoid of fear.

Lewellen shrugged and turned slightly, and the look was hidden, but in that few moments he had become quite another person to me.

“You have a right to ask for batting averages,” he said. “There were three sites in the Bahamas. Pidge and I worked them, aboard the Lumpy. We were empty on one of them. We got sixteen hundred pounds of silver ingots from another. We took seven hundred pounds of gold coin minted in Mexico from the third. We stopped when some strangers began to take an interest-the new government in Nassau has a nasty habit of taking a hundred percent as its cut. I researched the clandestine market in numismatic rarities. It’s of no moment to you gentlemen how and when I can turn such finds into usable cash. All you need to know is that I can do it… if we find anything. And I rather think we will. That gold, part of it, made it possible to buy the Trepid.”

Meyer sighed and nodded. So we went to work. Joe Delladio had set up the cover story, marine geodetic research under a foundation grant. The Trepid stayed at anchor in the cove. The search area had been marked with buoys. We worked from a heavy-beamed old scow-an oversized skiff actually-which Delladio and Frank Hayes had overloaded with a high-pressure diesel pump and big diesel generator, as well as a gasoline compressor to refill the scuba tanks.

We had a dozen twenty-foot lengths of highimpact plastic pipe two inches in diameter, open at one end, closed and pointed at the other. The procedure was to clamp the hose nozzle to the pointed end of the pipe, then jet the pipe down through the sand and ooze until about a foot was left above the surface. Signal to stop pump. Call for electronib probe. Then slowly lower it down inside the pipe, down through the ancient shifting strata of sand and silt, while topside somebody monitored the dial, ready to give a tug on the signal cord if the needle swung in any significant way.

We kept as close as we could to a square pattern, sinking the holes thirty feet apart. And we tried to keep from thinking about the simple mathematical fact that the three-square-mile search area would need a hundred and twenty thousand holes to complete it. Five men were the minimum possible. Meyer and I were more handicap than help until we learned how to handle the high-pressure hose. Then, after a week, we got to the point where we could stop thinking about every move, and production climbed up to the prior level, before the other two men had quit. -Rotating the topside and seabottom jobs, the crew-allowing for mechanical delays-could average five holes an hour, but we could not push ourselves past eight hours, so it came out to forty a day. Meyer remarked that on a seven-day-week basis, that was only eight years of work ahead.

We switched jobs every hour or every five holes, which ever came first. The weather held. It was such brutal labor, there was a tendency to forget why we were doing it. Just before dusk we’d buoy the location of the last hole, and then we’d read and mark the bearings of a shale cliff north of us, a giant boulder offshore to the south, and the entrance to the cove where the Trepid was at anchor, just in case something happened to the buoy. We took a lot of pains about that, and we argued a lot about it. One hundred and twenty thousand holes is enough without sinking a single one of them twice. And then we would go droning back to the cove, shower the salt off, build a big drink, eat like ravenous monsters, and sit in a stuporous yawning daze for a half hour before tottering to a bunk, feeling as if all the strings and tendons and wires and muscles had come unfastened from the joints and sockets.

We tried not to think about what would happen if we got a reading. We would buoy the spat and bring the Trepid out and use four hooks to fasten her over the spot, and then go to work with the monster pump mounted in the bilge. It was, in effect, a small dredge, with a four-inch cutting head that would suck up the goop and then spill it over the side of the Trepid into a catch basin of heavy steel mesh.

The sharks came around. Shallow-water types. Nurse, sand, hammerhead. I would have felt uncomfortable if we’d had to work in murky water. But there was a good tide current across the work area at all times except right on the changes, and you could work upstream from the hole you were sinking and be in clear water. I wouldn’t want to spend too much time in the same water with the tiger sharks and leopard sharks, because the averages might catch up with you. But they work a lot further offshore than we were in those waters.

The sharks were cruising their range, as is their habit. They would come upon us, put on the brakes, turn and make a big circle, watching us all the while, and then take off again. No wild creature, except perhaps the cockroach, is an experimental gourmet. Unless the food supply has disappeared, wild things want to eat what they have always eaten. Something that does not look, sound or move like anything that has ever been on their menu is not about to be tasted. It might taste incredibly nasty. Why take the risk?

Barracuda would come in quiet groups and hang almost without motion in the clear water, giving us the big eye for an hour at a time. Curiosity, not hunger. All wild creatures especially well adapted to their environment have free time they do not have to use in search for food and shelter, or in fleeing from their enemies. This free time develops the sense of curiosity and the sense of play. Porpoises play. Monkeys play. Otters play. Seals play. Young mammals play. Barracuda stand around and watch, like old men at a construction site, until a pang of hunger sends them darting off about their business.

The eerie savage predators of the deep have gotten a very bad press. I met a man who used to don an old-fashioned diving costume and go down into a tank in Hollywood and be pursued by a horrid, deadly octopus with arms about nine feet long. Octopi are timid and gentle. Hank would sort of lean way back on his heels and put his hands up in front of him as if to ward off untidy death, and then would walk slowly toward the octopus and it would retreat just as slowly. Then they would run the film backwards.

When the good weather broke and began to make up in too threatening a way for us to risk the scow in offshore waters, even though they were semiprotected waters, we took a day off. There were provisions to pick up. Professor Ted, Joe Delladio and I were eager for a break in the routine. Meyer and Frank Hayes stayed aboard to nourish a chess feud. Meyer had discovered, to his dismay, that when Hayes played the black, he had worked out a variation of the Yugoslav sacrifice in the King’s Indian defense which Meyer had not successfully countered in three tough tries.

We broke out the little Whaler, clamped the outboard onto it, and kept to the sheltered side of the cove and the bay, oddly eager to see strange faces and hear unfamiliar voices.

Joe Delladio knew the area. So we went to a place where he was known, a little fishing resort and hotel called Club de Pescadores. At the Club (pronounced Cloob) Joe was given a warm Mexican abrazo by most of the staff. It was a little before noon. He borrowed a pink Jeep with a canopy to go into town and get the supplies, saying that if we were along, they’d cost more. We set ourselves up, Ted Lewellen on my left, at a table near a little outdoor pavilion bar with a thatched roof, with canvas laced between the posts on two sides as a wind screen. There were wire chairs and a tin table, like in the faded photos of old drugstores. Gray scud went past at express speed, and the wind was hot and wet.

I drank tall ones with fruit juice and a local gin called Oso Negro, black bear. It is guaranteed to let you know you have been drinking. Touch a fingertip to the top of your skull the next morning and your head will fall open like a cleavered melon.

It was all very nice after having been prunewrinkled by long immersion in the sea, then barbecued in the sun glare aboard our work boat. I enjoyed the bar, the drink and even the company, though Ted was not one to use three words when one would be enough.

I could not understand why I felt so very damned good and said so. It was a different kind of good feeling from what I get when I am in good shape. I wondered aloud.

“Heart,” Professor Ted said, and then explained that a man’s heart shares to a certain extent that “ trait of the whale heart and porpoise heart of slowing when they dive deeply, to give a maximum use of the oxygen in the blood, to make it last. ”You develop a bigger, slower beat, Travis, so that topside you’re getting more nourishment to the cells of muscles and brain and gut.“

It made sense. I was wondering how to ask about our chances of getting rich when a small herd of sports fishermen from the States came trooping in. They were noisy. They were clad in the Real Thing big game garments from Abercrombie, L. L. Bean, Herter’s, all properly sun-faded, salt-crusted, spotted with oil and fish blood. As there was absolutely no chance of any of the boats going out in that blow, the outfits looked too contrived.

They clotted around the bar and ordered booze in broken Mexican and tried to all talk at once about old Charlie trying to harpoon that big sonofabitchofa leopard ray, and how that idiot boy Pedro, had gaffed the striped marlin when it was too green and got a sprained wrist and some loosened teeth from the gaff handle, and how poor old Tom lost a three-hundred-dollar outfit to some big billfish nobody ever even got a good look at. And they whined and moaned and bitched about the weather that was taking a good hunk out of their expensive fishing trip.

They were aware of us sitting there and made their loud brags for our benefit, with the sidelong looks that tried to estimate us and figure out who we were, sitting so sedately in clean khaki slacks, boat shoes, T-shirts, wondering no doubt if we were of the great billfish brotherhood.

Finally, as could be expected, one of them came wandering over, smiling, glass in hand, and said, “Hi, you guys. Just get in? You must have come by boat. Nobody gets color like that except on the water. Come down from California?”

Professor Ted looked at him for a slow five-count and said, “No.”

Nine out of ten would have wandered off. I wish he had. But he was like a friendly dog in a friendly neighborhood. He smiled and sat in one of the vacant chairs at our table and said, “Mind? Honest to God, I’m the jinx of all time, and you better believe it. I’ve been counting on this for years. What is today? Thursday? I left Florida last Sunday, and we got out there bright and early Tuesday and in two full days you know what I got? Three strikes and flubbed every one of them. Bunny Mills over there he’s my boss-in charge of the southeastern district out of Atlanta-he got a blue that went two hundred and thirty. I’m the only one skunked so far, and I got to leave Saturday, and Manuel tells us this is a twoor three-day blow. How about that? Say, my name is Don Benjamin.”

He held his hand out to me. What can you do? He was about thirty, slender, dark-haired, with a reddened and peeling nose and forehead. I took his hand and said, “McGee. And Lewellen.”

“Glad to meet you. You been doing any good?”

I mentioned the fake survey and the fake foundation. Ted yawned. He signaled the bartender for a pair of refills. Don Benjamin sighed wistfully and said, “You know sitting here like this, it doesn’t seem possible that come Monday morning I’ll be right back there in Suncrest, right back in the old routine, peddling insurance.”

He looked expectant. One of the afflictions of a transient society is the do-you-know disease. I knew a few people in Suncrest. But I didn’t want to play. “Too bad,” I said.

So Bunny Mills came sauntering over. Don’s boss. Don introduced him. Beef and belly, and a broad and meaningless grin. A type. The nasal, slurred, high-pitched back-country Southern whine of one of the “good old boys.” I could guess that he moved his insurance business in political directions, had a piece of this and a piece of that, tiptoed on the outer edge of tax fraud, whacked judges on the back, and leaned hard on the serfs who worked for him. He came over to punish flagrant disloyalty. Don Benjamin had taken unauthorized leave of absence from his role as junior ass kisser to consort with strangers-without permission.

Bunny Mills beamed at Professor Ted and at me and said, “This little ol‘ boy here come so close to winning this here trip on the company, I tooken pity and sprang for it outen my own pocket, and never did I see a boy so plain dumb fumble-handed around a boat and tackle. He’s just plain in the way. He even damn near lost me my blue, right, Donnie?”

Don Benjamin was staring up at him, his expression strained. “Mr. Mills, the premiums and renewals and the new business put me in the upper-”

“Argue that with the home office, boy.” The grin was still there, with the small mean eyes looking out from behind it.

“But the printed list had me-”

“You got a sorry way of rubbing me wrong, Donnie boy. Best you shut your mouth and come back over to the bar.”

We hadn’t wanted Don moving in on us in the first place. But I’ve never enjoyed watching the abuse of power. So, slumped deeply into the chair, I grinned up into Mill’s grin and said, “Soon as we finish our private conversation, Fats, I’ll ship him back over to you.”

There are men whose passports should be stamped NOT VALID OUTSIDE THE CONTINENTAL LIMITS OF THE USA. The further they get from home, the louder, cheaper, and tougher they get. And the more careless. They rove the world in honky style.

If I’d been wearing the right clothes for bill fishing, I would have been a good old boy too. I made a serious mistake. I underestimated his capacity for violence, and I had not seen the weapon.

I didn’t see it until he pulled it free. It was a fish billy, with a thong through the hardwood handle, the thong having been suspended from one of those brass belt hooks sold to men who like to plod about jangling with the tools of play. Fourteen inches of club with a wide bracelet of metal encircling the fat end, said bracelet studded all the way around with little pyramids of steel about a half inch high and a half inch apart.

His face had clenched instantly into a red something that looked more like a fat boiled fist than a face. He planted his feet, snatched the club free, and made his whistling, grunting, earnest effort to cave in the whole middle of my face. Maybe he had never made a serious attempt to kill anyone before. God only knows what angers and frustrations had built him into this abrupt deadliness. He was ready, and I was there. And he was far from home.

My reflexes were in fine shape. There was no time for any conscious thought. I caught a glimpse of the club flickering toward me, shoved hard with both feet and went over backward in the chair, not certain it would miss me until it had. I wanted to tuck and roll and come up onto my feet, but I gave my head a solid ringing crack against the flagstones, and in the roll I caught my feet over the arm of a chair at the table behind me. It was a very sorry performance. People were roaring and I was moving in slow, slow motion. Comedy routine. Mommy, watch the man with the red face crush the skull of the man on the floor!

He was tippy-toe quick the way some beefy men are. I did manage to roll just enough so that the second blow clanked the stones close to my ear. But I saw that he was definitely going to get me with his third try. Very definitely.

He was bending over me, feet planted wide, club high, hesitating so as to get a good aim and maximum impact. Everybody was too shocked to move. Except Professor Ted. There was only one way he could change the pattern of events in time. He said later he had jumped up as I had gone over backward and had come around the table as the second swing struck sparks off the patio rock. He kicked big Bunny Mills in the testes from behind. Though on the scrawny side, Lewellen was in good shape. And he had played soccer before, during, and after college. And he was in a hurry.

I did not know what had happened. I heard a heavy thud of impact. I got a quick glimpse of big Bunny’s face as he stumbled across me, all wide eyes and round wide screaming mouth. My hazy feeling from banging my head on the stone was fading very quickly, and I got up. Mr. Mills was on his back both knees jacked as high as he could get them, rolling gently from side to side, making sweet little sounds like a basket of kittens, gently clasping the spreading stains in the fine sportsman fabric of his crotch.

Then, as is customary, everybody who had not done one damn thing until that moment began to try to do everything at once. They began running into each other and shouting orders at each other. Finally they picked him up and carried him tenderly into the clubhouse without trying to unfold him. Don Benjamin trotted alongside. I wondered if he knew that his career with that particular insurance company had ended then and there. The fisherman fellows perhaps handled their good old buddy a little awkwardly. I heard him scream twice, far away.

Joe Delladio appeared about thirty seconds after the second scream. He got a quick briefing from us and then talked to the bartender, the waiter, and one of the owners of the place, all of whom had watched, with awe, the gringos at play. They retold the story with much emotion, with descriptive gestures.

Joe came back to the table, minus his earlier apprehension. “An unprovoked attack,” he said. “Mills has been here before. He always gets tight and makes some kind of trouble. They’ll swear he tried to kill you and your friend saved your life. There’s no doctor here. They’ll arrange to have him flown over to Guaymas. So let’s have a drink, amigos. Professor Ted, you astonish me.”

“But not as much as he astonished Mills,” I said. We drank until the buzz was exactly right, and then we ate the specialties of the house, cooked with tender loving care for their old friend Joe, for the tall gringo who nearly got killed, and for the tough old one who had doubtless gelded the fat animal. We had sea turtle, caguama, cooked in its shell with an odd spicy sauce, and bacha, the giant clam with the sweet, firm meat, broiled just enough. And bottles of that great dark Dos Equis beer. It looked as if it could come up rain, so we carried the stores down to the Whaler and got back to the Trepid a little past four, took a siesta, and woke to the sound of the wet storm wind shoving and snapping at the hull, noisier than the familiar drone of the generator.

That evening I said to Professor Ted, “I owe you a Big One.”

“I was trying to keep my work crew intact, McGee.”

“I still owe you.”

“When I need it, I’ll let you know.”

“Fair enough. Your deal.”

Three

YES, WE found the cannon and we found gold. We found the site ten feet below the floor of the sea in a water depth of seventy-five feet, on the tenth of July at eleven o’clock in the morning. We used the high-pressure hose to wash our way down to it. It had whacked the needle way over against the stop. Ted said the cannon was of the right period.

We toasted the find in warm gaggy whiskey; and we laughed a lot at very little. Joe Delladio planted his waterproof gadget close to the cannon. It was fail-safe, would transmit for a year on its battery pack, and could be picked up at three hundred yards on a transmitting frequency too exotic for anybody to stumble on it. We took sightings, then pulled the buoys and headed home to the Trepid.

By ten the following morning the Trepid was moored right over the spot, and Joe and I were below, fighting the dredge head, one man on each side of it clinging to a brace improvised from a spade handle, sucking a wide area around the target because the sand and muck were too loose to hold more than an 8- to 10-degree slope. We knew that if something of interest were sucked up and spewed into the catch mesh, the people up above would cut the big pump. Or if we had visitors they would cut it and we would go into our science-fantasy act.

By early afternoon, having rotated tasks on the half hour, we were beginning to wonder if some old pirate hadn’t deep-sixed a busted cannon. Ted wondered if they hadn’t jettisoned everything heavy to try to save the ship. Frank Hayes kept close watch on his big pump, mumbling about how hot it was running.

About three o’clock we uncovered the business end of another cannon, and then the dredge sucked up a pocket of miscellaneous junk. Ted and Meyer were on the cutting head, and when the pump was cut off, they came up to look at what we had. After all the chunks of shell, bushels of weed, pecks of sandworms, it was a pleasure to see some manmade objects.

We spread corroding chunks out on the deck. It is a truly fantastic experience to watch what happens to iron after it has been in the sea for a few hundred years. When the air first hits it, the iron is chunky and solid. As it dries, the rusting process is so weirdly speeded up it is as though some terrible acid were working on the objects. They turned to flakes and powder, then to piles of dark dust in just the gentle motion of the Trepid.

There was one prize. At first it was a chunk of corrosion in the shape of an old flintlock pistol. As it dried, most of it crumbled into flakes and scabs and powder, leaving some solid parts behind-an ornate brass trigger guard, green with corrosion, some brass screws, an ebony grip, a brass butt cover, and, untouched by the sea or the years, gleaming yellow and pure, two lacy, fragile pieces of gold, representing a curve of vine with small delicate leaves. Ted identified the two pieces as the gold inlay which had been worked into the metal on either side of the weapon, in the area between the trigger and the hammer. The art of putting a hole in someone was accomplished with a great deal more elegance in the olden days.

The second prize came at ten the next morning, a single gold coin. A big one. It was crude but mintfresh. Joe Delladio was so excited he lost his English entirely. I saw a very slight tremble of Ted Lewellen’s hands as he turned it this way and that. “Spanish five-peseta,” he said calmly. “A beauty. Look at the sharpness of the die marks. Often, the first run of gold coins with a new die were presentation pieces, to be given to the king. If our luck is good, there’ll be a lot of those down there. God only knows what they’d bring at auction.”

Maybe there were a lot. They are probably still there. Joe and I were on the cutting head when the pump stopped. When we climbed wearily up onto the deck, they told us that the big pump had suddenly started sounding like a washing machine full of broken stone. Frank came up from below, sweat soaked, with a fresh and ugly burn on his forearm. “Vibration cracked a fitting,” he said. “Main seal ruptured. Sucked sand into itself. Scored everything all to hell. Blocked the cooling system and froze up a half second before I hit the switch.”

“How long to fix it?” Ted asked.

After staring at him for at least five seconds, Frank said. “You’ve now got the biggest, ugliest anchor in Mexico.”

So after the conference about ways and means, Meyer and I flew back to Florida, Joe flew back to Guadalajara, and Ted Lewellen and Frank Hayes set a course for San Diego and a better pump. We were going to hit it again, the five of us, when the new season began, when we could count on good weather.

But that had to be the year that one of the rare whirly ladies came stomping into that part of the coast. Most of them roam out into the Pacific and die. She started quickly, stayed small and intense, curved right into that area of the Mexican coast, and changed a lot of the geography of both the land areas and the bottom.

Ted Lewellen had given up on it before I got a chance to talk to him a year later, when the Trepid came gliding into Bahia Mar, showing the effects of long sea duty. Maybe I asked too many questions about how hard they’d looked for Joe Delladio’s little electronic beeper. Finally he said with irritation, “For God’s sake, McGee! You can’t even find where the Club de Pescadores once stood. You can’t find a trace of a foundation. One of the islands is gone. Just plain gone. So is that rock the size of a church. Joe’s gadget could be halfway to Los Mochis, in twenty-five hundred feet of water, or the damned thing could be in the top of a tall tree near Chihuahua! Part of the bottom we surveyed is dry land now. Part of it is three hundred feet deep!”

“Okay, okay. I was just asking, Ted.”

“There are other ones.”

“Not like that one.”

His grin was tired, wry inverted. “Not exactly like that one, no. Some are smaller and some are bigger, and they are all out there for the finding.”

Out of almost every experience comes something useful. Sometimes you don’t know what it is until you have turned it this way and that and checked it against the light, hefted it. I had learned that not finding treasure is almost as good as finding it. I had been given that absolutely vivid memory of how the lacy gold looked in the Mexican sunlight. And the coin. They were with me in total recall forever. So was the strange, sick excitement of making the hit, finding the place, knowing you were going to suck it clean.

Meyer agreed. Ted Lewellen hinted that he might be going out again soon. We hinted of a casual interest in going along. He worked on the Trepid eight to ten hours a day. One afternoon he went over to the center of town to buy something he needed. He rode the little Honda he kept aboard the Trepid. As they tell it, a rain started to come down as he was heading back. It had not rained in a long time. After a dry spell, the first rain turns the roads to grease. Ted was hurrying along, shoulders hunched, when a small fearless dog ran yapping out to bite him in the leg. Ted swerved and the bike slid out from under him, and Ted and bike slid slowly under a giant-size transit-mix cement truck, one of the juggernauts of the Kondominium Kulture. Their massive bumpers are at decapitation height, and too many of them are driven by arrogant murderous imbeciles encouraged by a venal management to “make time.” The one who squashed Professor Ted might not have even known it had he not caught a glimpse of man and motorbike sliding under him.

He stopped, got out, took a look and had the grace to require hospitalization for shock.

The semipermanent population of Bahia Mar takes care of its own. Sympathy may not be longlasting, but when it is focused, there is a lot of it. Pidge got a lot, and it helped her through the worst of it. There was no one else. She was halfway through school by then, and she thought that she had someone else, but the boy revealed to her an essential coldness by taking the death of the daddy as an irritating inconvenience. Looking at him with unclouded vision, she saw the poseur, the charmer, the manipulator, and told him to skip the trip to Florida, and skip everything else as well. Arrangements were made. Lewellen was cremated, and there was a small service at Lauderdale and then a graveside service in Indiana, where his urn was buried beside the one which held the ashes of his wife.

Meyer researched the problems of money, estate, taxes, and red tape. Ted had moved his money business from Indiana to First Oceanside Bank and Trust and made the bank the executor. After the Trust Officer, a Mr. Lawton Hisp, had accepted Pidge’s instructions to let Meyer know all, Meyer finally made a bemused report to me of the situation as Professor Ted had left it.

“When your work brings you into contact with shark-type sharks and two-legged sharks, you keep things neat,” he said. “He was a neat man. She gets the Trepid free and clear. He’s been audited every year for four years, and he is okay with the IRS. There’s cash to take care of the estate tax. There’s a very nice portfolio which won’t have to be disturbed, all in trust for Pidge. The only change Hisp will make is to divert the income to her instead of plowing it back into the kind of thing he has been buying, which are good solid convertible bonds and convertible preferreds. The yield based on current market value isn’t so great, like four point seven percent, but because it is computed on a current asset value of eight hundred and seventy-seven thousand, she’ll get a little over forty-one thousand a year taxable income. Hisp and I talked about moving it all into tax-free bonds, and she would get about the same income without taxes to pay, but we both felt uneasy about putting a person so young into fixed-obligation stuff. He’s invested in the convertibles of companies big in natural resources, so if inflation ten years from now makes a new Chevvie cost forty thousand, the increase in the value of the natural-resources common stocks will have pulled the convertible bonds and preferred up-not in direct ratio, but certainly into the six-toone, eight-to-one range. We agreed she should pay taxes now and maintain her equity position. At twenty-one, which is very soon, she can tap the principal if she wants to, but no more than ten percent of the asset value in any calendar year. When she’s forty, the trust is distributed to her and her kids, if any, in equal portions. If she dies before forty, her children get the income until the youngest is twenty-one, then they get the principal, evenly divided.”

We could all understand why she didn’t sell the Trepid. It was the most direct link to happier days. And living aboard at Bahia Mar, she felt as if she was among friends. She had no desire to return to school. Whoever was handy helped her when she needed help. Pretty soon it was Howard Brindle who was taking care of the chores. He had not been around Bahia Mar for very long, yet he fitted in so well it seemed as if he’d been there a lot longer. He never scrounged. He gave full value in time and muscle for all favors.

When it became serious, the whole village nodded and said that it was probably a good thing. Meyer and I appointed ourselves a two-headed daddy and grilled Howie.

Meyer planted the needle beautifully. “What do you want to be, Howie? Who do you want to be? Or are you happy and satisfied just to fall into it?”

This was aboard the Flush. Howie looked troubled and thoughtful and said, “We’ve talked about that a lot, Pidge and me. It comes down to this. I just haven’t got much work ethic. We talked it out. It certainly isn’t going to bother me if both of us live off what her dad left her. It isn’t as if it was money Pidge earned herself. If it was turned around so my dad had left it to me, it wouldn’t bother me living off it and doing nothing. I mean, how can you prove that anything a man does is really worth doing? She says it won’t bother her because there’s more than she needs, the way she wants to live. So what we want to do is get married, get the Trepid geared up for around the world, and then, by God, go around it, even if it takes three or four years. But it isn’t as if we’re closing the door on anything else. We could get restless. We could see something we think is worth doing, and then we could change our minds. The options are open. But neither of us is going to feel guilty if we don’t take any other option ever. We’ve talked this all out.”

“Maybe,” I said, “you might want to pick up where Ted left off.”

“I thought of that. He was getting geared up to go after something. We can’t find a clue. She told me she’d searched every inch of the vessel. He hadn’t left his research records at the bank, in the deposit box. We went over the boat together. We took three days, three whole days. Nothing. It’s just as well. What would I be doing looking for goodies in the ocean? What could I buy I haven’t got already?”

So that made three searches, counting the one Meyer and I made that lasted from the time we heard Ted had been killed until dawn the next morning. Not for ourselves. For the daughter.

Howie was plausible enough, and it was easy to see how happy they were just to be with each other. So there was a wedding, and there was a lot of work done on the Trepid, and a lot of intensive study of charts and celestial navigation and a lot of instruction in how to maintain and operate all the navigation aids and servomechanisms aboard that would go pockety-queek all the time she was trudging across the ocean blue.

And this was the first time I’d seen the Trepid since we all watched her take off one morning in November over a year ago, moving out into the tide run, tipping to the first ground swell, aiming southeast once past the sea buoy, about 105 degrees, the farewell champagne still cold in the glass.

I roamed forward, squatted on a big cleat, and picked, morosely at a clot of some kind of tarry guck stuck to the teak. When a boat carries you all those sea miles safely and well, she deserves better treatment. In the marriage row, the Trepid was the innocent bystander getting hurt. I wondered how much green beard was hanging from her bottom. I wondered if her engines would start without an overhaul. There was a good sting in the Hawaii sunshine.

Howie came back aboard and I stood up and walked aft. He was sweating heavily and had lost some hide off the top of his right shoulder. He said the two of them had gotten the mast down on Jer’s boat. Sorry it took so long.

“You were saying you don’t want to talk about your problem?”

He flinched. “Not like that. Hell. I suppose why not? It’s just that it’s weird. Trav?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t even want to say it.”

“Try hard.”

“I think… shem wummul neminum.” He sat, big brown arms resting across his round brown knees, and he was staring down at the deck huge hands hanging loose from his wrists.

“I can’t hear you, Howie!”

He lifted his head, contortion twisting his mouth, brown eyes agonized. “I think she’s flipping! Losing her head! Falling out of her tree. Oh, God damn it all anyway.”

He popped up with that surprising, flexible agility, ducked out from under the tarp, and stood at the rail with his back to me. He made a single, gulping sob sound.

After he settled down, he told me how it had begun. They had hopped the Caribbean islands on the way down, skipping some, hiding from bad weather, learning how much and how little they could expect from the Trepid, settling into the routines of who does what and when. Honeymoon voyage, masks and fins over the reefs, unnamed empty beaches, music tapes aboard, scream of the reel with the line being pulled out against all the drag one dared use, sail popping and tilting as a listless breeze freshened, saliy, sandy lovemaking under improbable skies. Santo Domingo, Guayama, Frederiksted, Basse-Terre, Roseau, Fort-de-France, Castries, Bridgetown, St. George’s, San Fernando; and from there they hopped the coast of South America westward; La Asuncion, Puerto La Cruz, Carenero, La Guaira, with a run up to Willemstad, then west and down to Riohacha, Santa Marta, Cartagena, and then across the gulf of Portobello and Colon and the Canal.

Things broke and were fixed. Other things wore out and were replaced. Sometimes the bank had to cable money. Twice, he thought. Maybe three times, but he doubted it. He could remember just the two times. They had worked their way slowly up the Pacific coast of Central America, and I broke into his recital of the ports they had hit and asked again where the trouble had started.

“Well, quite a way back. Anyway, we stopped at Mazatlan and got everything in top shape and stowed all the provisions aboard and… came here. Mazatlan seemed like a good place to start from because it is almost the same latitude as Honolulu, which is about thirty-two hundred miles due west. We’d had a lot of practice in navigation by then. No sweat. We knew we’d hit it and we did. One storm made me wonder, though. It was one big rough son of-”

“Howie! Get on with it!”

“Okay, okay. The first thing that seemed weird-it didn’t seem important at the time-all over the islands you’ve got these kids with rucksacks, guitars, and Granola, hitching boat rides. I don’t have to tell you. Tie up in Puerto Rico and pretty soon they’re at dockside with the sleeping bags, looking to go up to the Bahamas or over to the Virgins or down to the Grenadines. From the ones we used to get at Bahia Mar, Pidge and I know you have to watch it. Most are really great persons, but some of them, you’d be better off stowing nitro in the hold, or carrying lepers.”

Again he was sidestepping the obligation to be specific about Pidge. I waited him out. Finally he got to it. At Frederiksted, on St. Croix, two blond girls wanted a ride down to Montserrat, where one of them had an older sister married to a lawyer in Plymouth. They’d been traveling with a boy who’d had to return to the States because of some kind of family trouble. Joy Harris and Celia Fox. They had the crew bunks forward available to loan the girls if they chose. The girls couldn’t afford to pay for the passage or the extra supplies, but they said they would work, really work, any kind of work aboard. They were tanned and pretty and young, trail toughened to a watchful and skeptical wisdom.

Pidge and Howie had talked it over and decided the girls were all right, and when they came back they would be invited aboard for the trip. Pidge made some jokes about exclusivity and about becoming one of the three Brindle women.

But only one girl returned. The Harris girl, the smaller and prettier of the two. She said that she and Celia had decided not to travel together any more. She said she thought Celia was going back to the States, but actually she could not care less what Celia did, or how she did it.

“We talked it over and it was still okay with me, but Pidge had a lot of second thoughts. She said two girls were okay, but one was something else. If it was one girl, she would be with us all the time, and dependent on us. Four was company, three was a crowd. I didn’t see it exactly that way. There were enough chores to keep three people busy. I told her she was being silly about it. She said she happened to own the boat. That wasn’t like her, to say something like that to me. I shrugged it off. Hell, if it meant that much to her, so be it. So we sailed without the girl. We didn’t even let her know we’d decided not to take her.”

I frowned at him. “I don’t see anything especially weird about her reaction.”

“I haven’t come to it. She was very quiet for three days. I thought it was on account of the quarrel. Not really a quarrel, but close to it. Enough to shake me up. So that night at midnight she came and woke me up and I went up to the wheelhouse to take over. She was on pilot, rumbling along on the diesels. There was enough breeze to go onto canvas, and the direction was good, but it wasn’t steady enough to count on and it seemed a lot of trouble. She leaned against the bulkhead, right beside me, in the darkness. There were the instrument lights and some light from our running lights. I said that the stars were nice, and she said I was a cheap, dirty, sick bastard and then she went on from there, all of it in a low voice. I didn’t know what was wrong with her. I didn’t know what she was getting at. I kept asking her what her problem was. Finally she said, ‘Stop trying to kid me, Howard. How did you expect to get, away with it? You smuggled that blond ass, Joy Harris, aboard, and she’s forward and keeps the door locked and the hatch dogged down. I know about the food you sneak to her, and I know about you balling her, and I’ve heard you two whispering and giggling and groaning.’ Those aren’t the exact words, but that’s what she said. So I asked her if she meant Joy was on board that minute, and she said I knew damned well she was. The way she said it, the back of my neck got all cold and prickly. We were so damned… alone! You know how it is. And we weren’t even going to Montserrat, where the girls wanted to go. I should have used reason, I guess.”

“What did you do?”

“It scalded me. It really did. It hurt to have her think I could do a jerk thing like that. So I told her she was absolutely right and I was going to keep an extra piece stashed aboard wherever we went. So she went below. She was crying. Right away I was sorry I’d been smart-ass about it. I stayed on watch right on into the sunrise and past it. It was hot and calm. I’d figured out how I should handle it. I cut the power off and in minutes we drifted dead in the water. I woke her up and told her to take her time looking around. I told her all the keys were on the cork board in the lounge. When she was satisfied, she could hail me and I’d come back aboard. So I tossed a raft over-that little one there-jumped after it and climbed aboard, freed the little paddle, and went off a hundred yards and stretched out on my face and went to sleep. It took a lot of yelling over the bullhorn to wake me up. By then it was ten o’clock. I went aboard. She was very quiet and strange. She agreed we were alone aboard. She wouldn’t agree we had been alone the day before. She was jumpy. She had a way of looking at me. She didn’t want me to touch her.

“For a lot of days we were very polite to each other. It wasn’t much fun. We tied up three days at Fort-de-France, and the third day when she came back from one of her trips ashore, she was really in a weird mood. She kept trying to grin, but her teeth were chattering. She wanted to hang onto me. She was a very scared person. But she wouldn’t say why. I was glad to have her want to be close to me again. I didn’t push it. In her own time she finally told me. I guess I should say she showed me. At Fort-de-France she’d found a place where she could get a roll of film developed and printed. Twelve prints. It was the last three prints on the roll that scared her. I didn’t understand why at first. They were shots of the bow taken from aboard. Dumb pictures, really. Empty-looking. She said she had taken three pictures of that girl, of Joy Harris, two of them of her sunbathing and one of her standing, holding onto the bow rail. She was sure she’d had proof I’d brought the girl aboard. She wanted to… you know, wave them in my face and ask me to explain. But there wasn’t any girl in the pictures. I told her there’d never been any girl aboard. I told her she’d had some kind of hallucination. I told her that what we ought to do was head back and get her a good workup. She said she was okay. She said nothing like that had ever happened before and it would never happen again. So… we kept on. And sort of forgot it. Tucked it away. And things were great again.”

I pried the second episode out of him. It started during the run from La Guaira to Willemstad. He’d wanted somebody to work on the generator at La Guaira, but the political situation was such no mechanic would touch the Trepid. It was a ticklish problem just to buy stores and get them aboard. The generator was getting noisy. Lubrication didn’t seem to help.

“We were under sail, and at dusk I turned on the generator and she like had some kind of a fit. She kept asking me to listen. All I could hear was the noisy generator. She made me turn it off and on again. Every time it was off, there was no sound at all aboard. Every time it was on she could hear, sort of mixed in with the noise, that Joy Harris girl talking and laughing. Trav, she could really hear that. I know. It was hallucination. But it was so damn real to her she almost made me hear it too. All the way up to Willemstad I ran it as seldom as possible. The only way she could stand it was to shut herself in the forward cabin, with rubber plugs in her ears. She lost weight. She got very jumpy. At Willemstad I got some parts replaced on the generator. It quieted down. She couldn’t hear the voices and laughing any more after that. But it had changed her somehow. It made her quieter. She doesn’t laugh a lot the way she used to.”

The third episode was murky because he apparently did not understand just what had happened. After coming through the Canal in a convoy of freighters, after going under the high swing bridge of the Pan American highway, they made the eightmile final leg to Balboa Harbor. It was suffocatingly hot. A launch took the pilot and the Panamanian line handlers off the Trepid. It was an hour before sunset, and they decided to keep moving and so they headed out into the Pacific, dipping and lifting in the long slow swells. The chart looked clean. He figured the heading at 190 degrees after adjusting for deviation. That would give them good water down through the Gulf of Panama, staying well clear of Las Perlas, passing them well to the west. And that heading would bring them within visual range of the light on Punta Mala to the west of them, and he drew a line on the chart to intersect the 190-degree line and told Pidge that they should be directly abeam of Punta Mala at about four thirty in the morning, if the wind held, giving them eight knots, and then they would change to 230 degrees. By daylight he hoped to take visual bearings of the coast and set the new course for the long run to Puntarenas, tucked snugly into the Gulf of Nicoya.

Pidge went forward to make certain everything was secured. The stars were beginning to come out. He caught a glimpse of her as she went over the side.

With no hesitation he yanked a life ring free and slung it into the dark sea as she slipped by. “It was a fresh breeze, almost abeam, heeling us over to port. No time and no chance to get her onto power. God, you know how small the chances are! I turned to starboard and into the eye and smacked her around, trying to count time, estimate speed, draw the lopsided circle in the back of my mind, and use dead reckoning to come all the way around and up and lay the Trepid dead in the water at where she ought to be. It had to be right the first time because the boat wasn’t going to stay there very long. You know how she’s set up. Under sail you use that wheel back aft, in the forward part of the cockpit, and under power you can run her from there or the wheelhouse. I came back up, trying to be downwind from where she went over. I was counting time and distance, and then I took my shot. I headed into the wind and yelled to her, and tried to hear something over all the gear slapping and creaking and banging. I was straining to see while she was in irons. Then, as the wind started to push the boat backward, I saw the white life ring back off the stern quarter. I didn’t know if she was in it at first. Then I could make her out. The Trepid was swinging about and the wind popped the main full and heeled her over, but there was no way on her yet, no answer to the helm. I ran up to the bow and threw a line to her and could just make out the way it fell across the ring. I made it fast to a bow cleat and yelled to her to make it fast to the ring. When I got back to the wheel, there was enough way on her so I could turn her back up into the wind, and this brought Pidge swinging in alongside near the transom. I got the line with a boathook and pulled it up, got hold of the line, pulled her up inside the ring, skinned her knee on the hull. I was laughing and crying. It was such a hell of a long chance. And we’d made it. Know what she thought really happened?”

“What?”

“She thought I was watching her after she went forward and saw her lean way over the rail to free a line, and I turned sharp to port to flip her overboard. She thought I came back around and tried to run her down, for God’s sake! And then for some damned reason, changed my mind and rescued her!”

“She get over that too?”

“I’d have to say not completely. I’m sorry I have to say it. If she’d just… give me a chance. Or if she’d get professional help. But as soon as we tied up, she got the hell off and won’t even talk to me. It’s a month. I don’t know what to do.”

“What were you planning to do?”

“The next leg? It was sort of open. It’s a hell of a jump from here. You’ve got to want three thousand miles of open ocean and be ready for it. We’d planned to drop on south-Tahiti, American Samoa, then maybe Fiji to Auckland to Sydney-and decide there if we wanted all the rest of it, or if we’d had the best of it. If so, then we thought we’d probably sell the Trepid there and fly home.”

Perhaps I let too much show as I looked around the deck.

“I know, I know,” he said. “I just haven’t had the heart to do the chores. Everything has just been meaningless.”

“Maybe you’d feel better if you turned to, Howie.” He sighed and nodded. “You’re probably right. I guess I would. This is a nice machine, and she’s beginning to look like a slum. Yes, I guess I’ll do that, Trav. I shouldn’t have needed somebody to tell me.”

“Shall I look Pidge up and talk to her?”

He looked eager. “Would you? Would you give it a try?”

“Of course.”

“And get back to me?”

“Why not?”

“I hate to say this. But you see if you think she needs help. If you think she does, maybe she’ll listen to you.”

“I’ll let you know.”

He walked with me down the long jetty, past all the boats. He knew a lot of people for having been there such a short time. Hey there, Howie. How’s it going, fella?

At the end of the jetty, he made a short sound of laughter without mirth. “When things start to go bad, they really go,” he said. “I’ve told you enough. You shouldn’t hear it all from me. Something else happened when we were a week out from here. You let her tell you about that one, and draw your own conclusions. That’s why she got off the boat and why I can’t even talk to her.”

I shook his hand. He didn’t let go. He looked at me with his big dumb brown brute eyes, and they watered, and in a husky voice, he said, “What I really want is… I want her back… If you could just…”

He let go and spun away. His voice had broken. He started walking slowly back out the jetty toward the Trepid. It was a listless and dejected walk. A big dumpy giant, sad in the Christmas-coming sunshine.

Four

IT WAS late afternoon when I got back to Pidge’s borrowed apartment. She seemed remote, ill at ease, and strangely indifferent to my reaction to whatever Howie had told me. She took me down to the ninth floor and showed me the little studio apartment she had borrowed. She gave me the key and said I could come up when I’d freshened up.

I said it had been a while since I’d done any hotel-hopping, so how about humoring me and going out with me. She brightened perceptibly. By the time she phoned down and said she was ready and would meet me at the garage level, she sounded almost cheerful.

She wore a handsome pants suit and had carefully applied a fiesta face. She found it easy to smile. She had the use of the white Toyota of the missing Alice Dorck and said that she was getting almost used to the traffic, so maybe…?

She sat very erect behind the wheel, with firm grip and frown of concentration. She angled the little car through holes just before they started to close. She whipped around the indecisive and tucked herself away from the certifiable maniacs. She picked productive lanes and managed to locate, without hesitation, the last parking slot in the lot off Seaside.

It was a good night for strolling, the air balmy and soft. Along Waikiki the hotels have not yet had to adopt the Miami Beach hospitality routine of posting armed guards at doorways who demand a look at your key and, if you look kinky, escort you to the desk for official clearance. At Waikiki you can still walk in and buy a lady a drink. We worked the little cluster across from the International Market the Outrigger, the Surfrider, the Moana, checking out the outdoor bars. Get the rum drink in the squat glass and you get a stick of fresh pineapple to stir it with. Get the Mary, which she was drinking with both care and thirst, and the stir-stick is a stalk of celery.

I steered the talk to safe places, back to Bahama seas and Florida beaches. She cheered up and freshened, and her voice broke free of the monolevel, moving up and down the scale of her emotions. Have a drink; take a walk; drink again.

In the most inconspicuous way, I was trying to get her well smashed. Yes, in vino there is veritas, if you can translate it, if you can figure out which side of the truth you are seeing. The International Market was closing. We roamed through a corner of it and I bought her one flower, the color of cinnamon, not quite an orchid, not quite anything else either. And then to the slightly airport flavor of the Princess Kaiulani Hotel, where I steered her, slow, smiling and smashed, through interlocking lobbies track to that place where the Chinese food is the very best of Mandarin, the tastes less separated than Cantonese, more heavily spiced.

We made wishes with chopsticks, pulling them apart, then arguing over who got the largest portion of the bamboo base where it split. She won both sets, and said she would think about the wishes. Her small, strong-looking hands were deft with the chopsticks. She ate with hunger, glancing across the candlelight, smiling, saying, “Mmmm.” She would swing and shake her head in a certain remembered way to settle the brown hair back. Nice. “And the two wishes?” I asked.

She took one more morsel of the squash, then dropped the sticks on the plate. She shook her head. “Oh, Trav, you know… if I could only have just one wish… how I need that one wish.”

She jumped up and was gone. I waited ten minutes and then paid the check and tipped our waitress to look in the ladies’ room. She came back and told me the lady would meet me in a couple of minutes in the lobby. The waitress had a sweet, worried smile. Lovers’ quarrel?

Irregular formations of touring Japanese men moved through the lobbies with worried celerity, all their satin-black Nikons with the bulky nighttime headdress of rechargeable strobe. Why are their glasses frames always so shiny?

Pidge came to me, shy and damp-lashed, the nose red from blowing. “First date in forever, and I can’t hack it,” she said.

“Home?”

“To what passes for same. Yes. And a lovely, lovely time up until I went owly.”

I drove back through practically no traffic, and she showed me where to duck into the ramp under the Towers, and where the car. belonged. On the way up in the elevator, I heard her sigh over the whisper of machinery. At eleven, I held the door open by leaning against the edge of it and said, “We’ll tackle it tomorrow?”

She studied me and turned, just a little uneasy on her tall shoes. “No. Come on. Damn it all. Come on, let’s pick the scabs off.” So I let the urgent doors hiss shut behind us, and helped her with the double-key arrangement to number 1112.

I made a mild joke, something about her friend Alice Dorck being some kind of security-conscious international agent. She said Alice had answered the door once for a man who said he wanted to replace the filter in the air intake. She let him in, and in the process of raping her he broke two ribs and three fingers on her left hand, tore her earlobe, and squeezed her throat so hard she had traumatic laryngitis for two weeks. She said that after that, Alice tended to be lock-conscious.

No more jokes, I decided. Once inside I asked for a drink and was assured to see her pour one for herself. Down to cases.

“Here it is! This is the camera. Instamatic. I’ve had it forever. I buy Kodacolor in twelves. You can usually get it developed almost anyplace.”

“And these are the twelve prints.”

“How many times do you-”

“Now tell me again, Pidge. These three pictures, the last three on the roll. You took them in this order?”

“Y-yes. Yes, that’s right.”

“You looked through the finder and you took this picture. What did you see in the finder? Details!”

“Don’t roar at me! I saw Joy Harris. I guess she’d come up through the small hatch, and she was stretched out on the bigger hatch cover. She was… on her side with her elbow stretched straight out and her head on her hand, and she was looking straight ahead. I thought about what a cute figure she had. Small but kind of lush. She had on bikini bottoms, faded blue or blue-green. The top was under her, on the hatch. Her blond hair was kind of damp-dark, like sweat or she’d washed it.”

“She fitted in the frame?”

“Oh, sure. It takes in a lot. You hardly ever have to back off to get things in.”

“And this one?”

“She hadn’t seen me. Howie was asleep. I went back to the cockpit to see if we had moved too far off course. I’d put a loop over a spoke. It was okay, so I went back up the side deck on the starboard side and she had rolled over onto her face, so I got a little closer and took this one. See? The hatch is bigger. I was closer. I was thinking that I was getting real evidence. I wanted to get her face. I was thinking of yelling at her and taking it when she jumped up. It said ‘eleven’ through the little window, so I cranked it up to twelve, and that was the last one on the roll. As I was wondering what to do, she sat up and put the bikini top on. I backed off. When I looked again, she was standing at the rail. Right here. So I took the last picture of her. Her hair was blowing in the wind. She sensed it, I guess, because she turned and saw me before I could lower the camera. I ran from her. How about that? My boat and my camera and my marriage. And I ran.”

“And you took these first nine,on the roll?”

“Sure. These are all at St. Croix, the dock area and the other boats and so on. That one was a real nice trimaran from Houston, the biggest I ever saw. I didn’t know they made them that big. See? Howie is in these two. Yes, I took them all at St. Croix.”

“Then what about the film?”

“I told you before that-”

“More detail this time.”

“Jesus, you are a terrible person. You know that? All right, all right. I went below. Once you finish a roll, you just keep on winding and it all goes over into the other side and you see little lines through the window. Then you open it here and take it out. That’s what I did. I hid it in a place nobody knows about but me.”

“You sound certain.”

“I am certain. In my music box. You think you are looking right through it where the little dancer turns around and around, but you’re not. It’s mirrors in there, at angles so you think you’re looking through. It’s `Lara’s Theme,‘ and there’s a certain place where I push the little nub to stop it. If anybody opened it when I wasn’t there I would know because the music wouldn’t start in my place, where I always stop it when I hide anything in there. Nobody got at that film, if that’s what you mean. God, how I wish they had! After we were tied up at Fort-de-France, I took it out of the box and it wasn’t out of my hand until I gave it to the man in the camera store.”

“By then you knew the girl wasn’t on the boat.”

“I didn’t know anything by then. I didn’t know what to believe. When I got the film back and saw these three pictures and she… just wasn’t in them, the whole world turned black. Black with little specks roaming around in it, and a roaring goIng on. Travis, I’m getting so tired of…”

“Let’s go back to the voices you heard.”

“Why? I heard voices. Everybody hears voices. All crazy people hear voices.”

“Always the same girl?”

“Yes. Joy. I never could make out the words. The laugh was the same. It was Joy and Howie talking and laughing. Much more of this?”

“Quite a lot, I think.”

“Then we need another drink.”

She brought the drinks back to the sofa in the living room. When she touched glasses, she touched a little too hard, spilling drinks from both our glasses. She giggled and mopped it up.

She said, “To answer the question you haven’t asked, Yes, the son of a bitch was trying to run right over me with the Trepid.”

“And you think he could see you?”

“Why not? It wasn’t black night yet. And I didn’t have any trouble seeing him.”

“He handled the boat in such a way, he made you fall overboard?”

“No doubt about it.”

“But he threw you a life ring.”

“I think he just didn’t have the guts to do it. I think he knocked me overboard and then panicked and threw the ring. While he was working his way around and back, he got his courage up again and decided to run me down, and then at the last minute he veered off and threw me a line. Like the rifle.”

“He didn’t mention that.”

“I can see why he didn’t.”

“He said there was something else, and you should tell me about it.”

“It’s the rifle my father bought for sharks. It goes in an aluminum case he bolted to the side of the instrument panel in the wheelhouse, sort of in the corner, barrel up. The case has pressure clips and a rubber lip. It would even float. Anyway, he taught me to use it when I went with him the first time. It’s a Remington seven hundred. I forget what it shoots.”

“Probably three-oh-eight?”

“Right! Sometimes they get funny about a gun and you have to let the customs people keep it for you while you’re in port, but in a small boat usually it’s okay. Which you already know. We were a week from Honolulu, dead flat calm, grinding along at about six knots, which is the best for stingy, on automatic pilot. I was sitting on the roof, forward, reading and drying my hair. BAM! Out of nowhere! I spun around and he was in back of me, not eight feet away. He had the rifle and he had a couple of empty cans in the other hand. He had a dazed look on his face. He said he thought he had unloaded it. He didn’t know how it went off. Anyway, it was pointed almost straight up when it went off, he said. But I know how that thing sounds when it’s straight up or out to the side or pointing away from you. It’s more like whack. Or smack. Not like BAM. This ear still isn’t right. It rings a lot. Trav, I think that slug was inches from my head.”

“How did he act?”

“Really shocked. Like… almost too shocked. He cried. He threw up. That was later. He’d been going to ask me to throw the cans off the bow, out as far as I could. Then he was going to try to plink them from the stern as we went by.”

“And you decided right then to leave him as soon as you docked?”

“Not right then. No.”

“Something else happened that last week?”

“Oh, no. I mean I think I’d sort of decided even without the rifle part. Maybe without falling overboard, or the voices, or the girl who wasn’t there.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Neither do I. Oh, God, Trav, I’m drunk. I can’t say words right. I’m seeing two of things. You got me drunk.”

“You mean that it wasn’t going so well, as a marriage.”

“Please let me sleep!”

“Okay. You can have a nap. I’ll wake you up.”

“I mean really go to bed. Please. And you go away, huh?”

“Not until we get through all of it.”

“What in hell else can there be? You’re turning me inside out on these things.”

“You said you had to find out something. We’re trying to find out.”

“I’ve got to go wash my face and get out of these clothes. I get all sweaty thinking of how scared I got.”

“Make it fast.”

She came back in ten minutes with scrubbed face and brushed hair, wearing a shorae caftan in a big flower print. She was barefoot, and she was drugged and dazed by drink and weariness and strain.

She plumped down on a stool, fists between her knees, and swayed, yawned, and said, “Honest to God. Really McGee. I just…”,

“Did Joy have moles?”

“Huh? What?”

“Moles, marks, visible scars, insect bites, any kind of flaw when you looked at her through the finder?”

“N-no.”

“The laughter you heard. They were both laughing at you. Right?”

“Yes. Yes, they were.”

“And you’re no damned good in bed.”

She peered at me. “Huh? Whaddaya mean? I was pretty much okay with Scott. You could say I was a lot better than okay. Chee, you jump around so.”

I remembered Scott was the boyfriend who flunked out when her father was killed. “But nowhere near okay with Howie.”

She reached and got her glass. The ice was long melted, the drink still strong. She drank and made a face. She told it piecemeal, the first pieces the most difficult. Good old Uncle Travis.

She had wanted every part of the marriage to be great. Howie was a strange person. You wanted to know him. He was like a little house with a door in the front and a door in the back. One room. He’d let you in his house and it was fun. Chuckles and games. No pressure. So you wanted to know him better and so you went through the doorway into what was going to be the next room of his personal house, but you found yourself back out in the yard, and the little house looked just the same, back and front. One room.

“Me, I’m a personal person,” she said. She’d finished her drink. She leaned toward me and put her palms against the side of my face, cupping the sockets of the jaw. She slid forward off the stool, round knees bumping the rug; stood erect on her knees, and tugged at me until our noses were six inches apart, each of us well inside the other’s living space, each breathing into the other’s domain. “Look inside of me,” she said.

Well, so they were lady eyes, slightly inflamed, gray but so almost blue they would be blue at times, a tiny spangle of small pale tan dots in the left one, in the iris at seven and eight o’clock, close to the wet jet black of the pupil. They wobbled and then fixed full focus upon my eyes. They were lady eyes for ten heartbeats, and then something veered and dipped inside my head. There was a dizziness, then everything except her eyes seemed misted out of focus, and the eyes seemed larger. She became a special identity to me. Linda Lewellen Brindle? There had been a kid named Pidge who had a terrible crush. There had been a bride in white called Linda by the Man with the Book. She was an identity which had no name as yet, this new one. Pidge was a name suitable for the yacht-club porch at Bar Harbor, or doubles in Palm Springs.

“Hey Lewellen,” I said, changing the last-name tempo, turning it into a half-whispered name of a suthrun gal. Lou Ellen. Somehow right.

It startled her. She sat back onto her heels and frowned up at me, shaking her hair back. “Who told you that? That was my grandpop’s idea. They all said it was flaky. They all said you couldn’t saddle a kid with such a weird name. Lou Ellen Lewellen. I didn’t even know until I was maybe ten, and hated Pidge and hated Linda, and called myself Lou Ellen for… oh… a couple of years. I almost forgot until now.”

“It just seemed to fit.”

“Are you going to call me that?” The strangeness that had started working at six inches was now working just as well at a yard away.

“Probably. Okay with you?”

“Perfect with me. Travis. This eye thing. What I wanted to show you… well, you know. It works for us. For you and me. I’m a personal person. What I was trying to say about Howie, you could look into his eyes eight hours a day, eight days a week, and they’re pretty brown glass. You bounce off. They look back at me the way my dollies used to.”

She was wiggling loose. Inquisition requires a kind of domination, a control of tempo and intensity. I pulled away from all the invisible strands she had looped around me so quickly.

“And you know why the voices were laughing at you, right?”

It jolted her back off balance. “I don’t want to talk… ”

“Talk about anything that might be your fault, think about anything that might be your fault. You want to be perfect.”

“W-why do you get so-so damned mean? What made you say that about being no good in bed?”

“Because it was a funny wedding, honey. No musk, no steam, no itch. A wedding of good buddies. A wedding of brother and sister. Remember the kiss after the pronouncement? The kind of quick peck the long-married get at airports.”

So she got down to the clinical details. She said at first it was all her fault, not being able to respond. And as she explained her incapacity to respond, the picture of the sensuality of Howie Brindle emerged. Beef and sweat, quickly stimulated, quickly satisfied. Some days early in the voyage, an almost insatiable gluttony, a dozen episodes a day, in a dozen places on the boat. Apparently very little tenderness, emotion, romance.

“Like those damned chocolate bars,” she said.

“Like what?”

“He keeps a locker practically full. He says he’s a chocoholic. Right in the middle of plotting a course, or working out a position from the tables, or fixing the trolling lines, he’ll pop up and go peel a chocolate bar and chonk, chonk, chonk, it’s gone. Wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, lick his fingers, wipe his hand on his pants, smack his lips, and back to whatever he was doing. When it was happening often enough, and I was trying hard, I could stay far enough up sometimes, in between times, to make it, but when you have to be worried about not making it, it isn’t all that good when you do. And when you don’t and you have to ask somebody to help you afterward, it’s another kind of turnoff.”

And by the time they had reached the Virgins, the edge was off his appetite to the point where he would take her at those times when he was awakening her to take the watch, or she went below to shake him awake. But it was not ritual. It was now and again.

“My father was gone and Scott turned out to be a terrible mistake, and when I finally could lift my head and look around, there was Howie, taking care of things, taking charge. And it seemed as if that might be a good way for life to be. Sort of safe and steady.”

“You began to have, very bad dreams?”

She cocked her head. “How’d you know that? Very foul and very vivid. They’d cling in my mind for days. Something wrong with me, usually. Like in one I looked down and there were two smooth holes in my chest. Somehow I’d gotten my breasts on backwards and the nipples were way inside there someplace. I was frantic to keep people from knowing it. It was so shameful. I kept hunting for round things I could hold there with my bra, but they’d fall out.”

“Numb places on your hands?”

“You know, you’re a weird person, Travis? Right along here, on the edges of my hands and around the base of my thumb. And I would get numb around my mouth sometimes too.”

“And diarrhea?”

“Where’d you graduate from, Doctor? Constantly!”

“Now think back. Was there ever a time in your life when you felt as if you were utterly without any value at all, completely worthless and contemptible?”

“Yes. After my mom died. It didn’t make any sense, but I had the feeling it was my fault somehow, that if I hadn’t been such a total nothing of a person, she wouldn’t have gotten sick and died and left me. I sort of went down and down and down. I slept all the time, practically. Food tasted vile. I didn’t want to leave the house. Daddy took me to a clinic, some kind of diagnostic thing, and they gave me every test known to man. Then they recommended some kind of special school. But my father got a prescription from them for something that made me feel edgy and jumpy. We had some terrible scenes. He yelled at me that I was letting him down, and I, by God, was going to learn navigation, small boat handling, marine engines, map reading, scuba diving. When he wasn’t yelling at me, he was telling me what a wonderful person I was, how special I was. How smart and pretty and outgoing and all. And… I began to work hard, and I came out of it, and by the time we got to Florida, I was pretty much okay again.”

“I’ve got one last question, Lou Ellen.”

“Oh, it better be the last. My head is trying to fall asleep and my stomach is trying to throw up.”

“Do you like yourself?”

“What the hell kind of a question is that?”

“Do you, Linda Lewellen Brindle, like Linda Lewellen Brindle as a person.”

“How can people like themselves anyway?”

“Do you like yourself?”

She shuddered. “You mean really?”

“Really”

“Oh, God. No. I just don’t think about myself if I can help it. I’m such a wormy kind of sneak. I’m a nothing, pretending to be something. Can’t you see me? Fat thighs and dumb lumpy breasts and nothing-colored hair and weird-looking teeth. People are always talking about things I don’t understand. I like real square dumb things. I got through school, almost. I just can’t… respond to life because I don’t know what is really going on most of the time. Why are you doing this to me? I’m practically dead!”

“I’m no doctor. I can’t shoot you with sodium Pentothal. I shot you with booze. This is a small group for group therapy. I’ve been pushing you. Lou Ellen, dear, you are, I think, an anxiety type. Sometimes I detect a whiff of it in myself. What is that bit about the neurotic? The psychotic says two and two are five and the neurotic knows two and two are four, and hates it.”

“But I-”

“Listen for just a minute. Some of the classic symptoms of anxiety neurosis. The numbness, vivid and ugly dreams of something being wrong with your body, diarrhea, depression, self-contempt. There are others. Double vision, incontinence, and being always too hot or too cold, night sweats…”

“There’s another of mine.”

I took her hands and pulled her onto the couch beside me and kept hold of her hands. “Listen, dear. Why shouldn’t it happen to you? An only child. A lot of pressure on you to be the best child ever. Impossible goal, of course. Sense of failure at not making it. So your mother died when you were at peak vulnerability, and then your father died, and you never had a chance to prove to them you could hack it in this world.”

“This is funny. I’m not really crying. It’s just water running out of my eyes like this.”

“So, out of a sense of being terribly alone, you marry a very large and sort of limited guy. Part of it was rebound from Scott. And revenge on Scott. And it was the pursuit of perfection. You have all the images and symbols working for you. Hold still! A great motor sailer, youth, money, time, honeymoon, tropic seas. But on board the Trepid we have two people who maybe can’t make a marriage, can’t make a honeymoon, can’t make a future. Other people have all the excuses. Rotten jobs, cost of living, depressing neighborhood, meddling in-laws, babies too soon. What’s the excuse when you can’t hack it in paradise? So you lay it all on yourself, Pidge. Very heavy. And somewhere you start to make that funny little sidestep into another world, where it changes neurotic to psychotic, changes suspicion to paranoia.”

She shook the mists out of her head, held my hands in a grip that dug her nails into me. Her eyes went wide and looked through me, looked back down the avenue of the months and months of cruising. I think she stopped breathing.

Suddenly she wrenched her hands free and left, running unsteadily, whamming the doorframe with a hip as she went into the connecting hallway to bedroom and bath. A door slammed. In the silence oi‘ predawn I heard her in there yawking and hawking and wheezing, and knew she was the sort who would rather break blood vessels than have her head held.

I leaned back, rubbed granular eyelids, then pushed the stud on the Pulsar. The red numerals glared up at me from the ruby screen on my wrist. 4:11. I held the stud down and the seconds appeared… 56… 57… 58… 59… 00. The 5 was constant, and the second figure changed to each subsequent figure in that odd, parts-saving method of digital design. I released it and pressed the.stud again for an instant, and 4:12 glared at me for the second and a quarter, the specified recognition interval. I had checked it with the shortwave time signal from Greenwich a week after a rich lady had given it to me. Gift of a toy in return for making the right contact for her which enabled her to buy back the stolen, uninsured black opal ring her deceased husband had given her on his last Christmas on earth. An easy salvage, too easy to warrant charging half the value. A good rule is to levy the standard charge or nothing at all. So it was nothing at all, and the watch was a gratitude gift. And running two seconds fast.

Little red numbers to fit you back into time and place. Going on quarter after four on Friday morning, December 7th, in Hawaii-where they have had some remarkable December 7ths.

Meyer made one of his Meyerlike observations about the Pulsar. He said it was ironic that this space-age, world-of-the future, computerized gadget was, in reality, a return to the easier and more relaxing and contemplative times of yesteryear. The wristwatch with dial and hands keeps needling you every time you happen, by design or by accident, to look at your wrist. Get on with it, brother! Life is running out the bottom of the tube! In gentler eras, if a man wished to know the time, he took out his gold pocket watch and snapped it open and looked at the hands. If he did not want to know the time, it never intruded. Time served man. The Hamilton Pulsar does not intrude either, until you decide you want to know the time, and you push the stud, and it tells you, then keeps its peace until next time.

It is, the booklet said, guaranteed to withstand a force of 2500 G’s. But can McGee, who wears it, endure having his body weight upped to two hundred and seventy-five tons? I would cover the area of a tennis court to a depth of a sixteenth of an inch, and there in the middle of me would be the sticky lump of the Pulsar, ready to glare red-numbered accuracy at the next fellow to push the little stud.

I snapped out of a smoky doze as she came floating out, in a different and floor-length caftan, looking fifteen pounds lighter, three inches shorter and five years younger. She sat shyly on the edge of the couch.

“I just imagined those things,” she said. “I know that now. You’re right. Oh, I got so god-awful close. to the edge. There’s a funny thing about the edge. When you get close, somehow you… want to get closer. You want to look down. You might even want to fall over the edge.”

“Has this past month been better?”

“Off the boat? I guess so. Yes. It has been better, but then, when I kept phoning and phoning you and finally got the call through and then I couldn’t say anything I’d planned to say, that was a low point. Believe me, that was a very low point. A feeling of… complete, total failure in everything.”

“Who’s watching? Who’s keeping score on you? Who’s grading your paper, honey?”

She looked puzzled. “They are. Whoever They might be. The ones who watch you.”

“And who live inside your head?”

“They live somewhere.”

“You can walk down ten thousand crowded streets in ten thousand cities of the world, and nobody will give damn one about whether you cope or can’t cope, whether you live or die. The ones who notice you wonder if there’s any safe way to use you, or they give you a part in the little fantasy theater inside their skulls. There is an estimated price on your clothes, shoes and purse, but the rest of you is just so much live meat. Pretty meat. No bonus for how well you perform the feat of living.”

“That is so goddamn cold!” she said loudly.

“Scare you?”

“I guess.”

“That’s the way it is. Nobody grades your performance except you and your own ghosts. And you’ve gotten so anxious about the scoring, you hallucinated.”

She sighed and softened, and in moments was nodding and yawning once more. Where the light touched her hair, it wove fine patterns of gold in spun threads, and her posture pulled the caftan tight to the round of left hip and flank.

So I got up and, with a small pat of affection, a quick kiss on the temple, I said good night and got out of there, all the scruples of my self-awarded medical degree intact. Guilt in one area, Meyer says, can lead to unexpected virtue in everything else. Also, it is unseemly for a sportsman to feed the tame deer a carrot and then shoot it dead.

In the borrowed bed on the ninth floor I was able to spend at least fifty seconds in somber thought before sleep took me. When people invite you to come into their lives and meddle, that is what you do, if you are concerned about them. Right? Right? Right…

Five

I WOKE up at eleven in the gloom of the draperied room, having just dreamed of being dead. I was dead on the stones of the patio of the Club de Pescadores, my skull mashed by the blow of the fish billy swung by Bunny Mills, the blue-tail flies already humming around the raw broken meat.

In my dream I had been mourning me. Dead is dead. Dead lasts long. The word is strange, like a tap on a slack drumhead. Like striking the key of a piano when the hammer mechanism is broken. I had been dream-mourning the rangy, knuckly, chopped-up, pale-eyed, wry-minded beach bum. Meyer was quite broody about losing me. The regulars at Bahia Mar would gather a few times and laugh at crazy memories, hoist the sentimental glass and get mournfully drunk. It would move them, I suppose. In each relationship there had been something of meaning, some communication beyond that inaccurate code-and-cipher convention of speech. Male or female, it would fit that Rilke quotation:

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

… That slip over there, that’s where what’s-hisname used to live aboard a houseboat named… damn it, how can I forget names so easy?

So suddenly, sitting on the edge of the bed, I began to laugh. Big hard laughter, clenching the belly and roughening the throat. The vision of the lugubrious McGee, whining as he fondled his incomparable skull, was too much.

In the shower stall I thought about death in a definitely jolly way. Pidge had talked about Them. I have my own set. They gave me a little bit of space at the edge of the gaming table, and They gave me a few hints about the rules. I made the choice, as does everyone, about how much I want to bet and how often. I decide what I am willing to win and willing to lose.

The house takes a cut of every wager. So you can play a close tight game, work out little conservative systems, calculate the odds to several decimal places, and no matter what you do, sooner or later They will bust you, because the house busts everybody. The house percentage does it, sooner or later.

Or, if you want, you can bet the long shots, go for the hunches. You will give Them a chance to bust you sooner, but you will maybe live a little bigger and better while you still have a place at the table. Only children of all ages think they will play forever. The man who knows in advance that They are going to bust him should not start whining about it in advance. They will bust you with Big C, or a truck driver on uppers, or pilot error, or an Irish bomb, or a coronary occlusion, or gas in the bilge. Other creatures play on smaller tables, and they all get lmsted, from mayfly to possum to quick red fox. By the time I began shaving, the shadows were not as heavy across the back of my mind. Dreams can change a day. I guessed that being aboard the Trepid had brought Bunny Mills back. Most probably he had never tried to kill anyone else, before or since. The time and place had been just right. A whole set of his internal cycles had peaked at the righe time, making a killing possible, or even necessary. In the presence of professionals, my instincts would probably keep me alive. God deliver me from amateurs. Bunny had nearly gotten me, and maybe the mark it left was deeper than I had realized.

l had finished shaving when the door chime bonged once and then again. I knotted the big yellow bath towel around me and went to the door.

Pidge came plunging into the room, all manic intensity, with a smile that came and went so quickly it was like a grimace. She wore a little white dress. Her voice was fast and was pitched a half octave high. She gave the impression of trotting back and forth in the small studio room, like some kind of nervous goalie. She shook her hair back a lot. She made mouths of many different shapes. Yes, she had been up since eight; woke up abruptly, knew she couldn’t sleep any more, knew I was right. Yes. it had all come clear to her.

“‘The big question, you see, is did I ever really love him. It is one thing to accept the idea you can really and terrifyingly hallucinate and think you are actually going crazy, and another thing to sort it all out and say, Do I go back to him and start again. Well, suppose all the hallucinating and so on hadn’t happened. What would I be like now? I suppose I would be on the boat and maybe we’d be a thousand miles south of Hawaii, and everything would still be blah. It would be a big sack of absolutely nothing, because what threw me off the tracks was the way I was trying so hard to tell myself that it was all loverly. And it wasn’t. Oh, Trav, it just wasn’t! And c-c-couldn’t ever b-bb-b…”

“Blub?”

“Oh, God. And I put in so much time on my eyes. Look at me.”

“I am looking at you.”

“I don’t mean look at me the way you’re looking at me.”

“If it’s bothering you, go back out the door, take five and come in again and we’ll start over, Lou Ellen.”

“I’m in here now. It’s a lot of trouble.”

“You shouldn’t have done that eye-to-eye thing with me.”

“There’s a whole list of things I never should have done.”

“I’ve got a longer list.”

“Oh, what the hell, Travis. What the hell, darling.”

I remember that my mind, adrift and afloat amid our busy-ness, went all the way back to Biscayne Bay, to the time when I was toting her back to Daddy, when she sat huddled and miserable on the bow deck of the Busted Flush and I had felt a wistful lust when I looked at the shape of the lass in her white shorts. That and other memories of her were strangely merged with the sweet and immediate realities of her, the here-and-nowness of her, so that I seemed to live in the past and present all at once.

After a little while she cried out, and after that there was no room or time for memories. All the old nostalgia became the immediate and heated nimbleness, the present need. She was a temptation out of the past, served up on some kind of eternal lazy Susan so that it had come by once again, and this time we had taken it.

We sighed and murmured slowly back from all that lifting effort, made ourselves comfortable on tumbled bedding, shifted weights and pressures. “Umm,” she said. And, “Hey now.” And, “Umm,” again. She stretched and turned and kissed and sagged back again. Her eyes were very bright. “I was going to fake it anyway,” she said.

“Run that through again?”

“I mean I decided that it would be only fair you should have the idea it really got to me.”

“What do you mean, fair?”

“As long as I was using you.”

“Premeditation?”

“Damn right. Except it took me practically three hours to work up enough nerve. You never had a chance, McGee.”

“I didn’t?”

“Of course not! I know how I am. Now that we both know something funny was happening in my head, you’d go back to Florida and I would probably think about getting divorced from Howie, and I would see him and probably move back aboard the boat, and we’d keep on cruising and I’d go all weird again. It’s too scary. I can’t go through all that again. Not ever. So there’s just one thing that would keep me from going back to him. And we just finished that one thing, and it was really beautiful. I wanted to do it with you a thousand years ago and you wouldn’t. You were pretty stuffy about it.”

“I tend to get stuffy about statutory rape. It’s one of my character defects.”

I turned her, stroked the fine smooth curves of her, all warm damp with prior effort, and snuffed the natural perfume of her brown hair.

“Do you mind if I sort of used you?” she asked.

“I have a tendency to forgive you, lady.”

“I can’t go back to Howie after doing such a rotten thing to him.”

“I suppose.”

“You see, dear, I had to make absolutely sure I wouldn’t go back to him. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Hey. What are you doing?”

“Proving I understand.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that in a little while now, I am going to make you doubly sure.”

“Good thinking,” she said. “And you approve?”

“If I didn’t, would I be doing this?”

There may be better ways of spending the middle part of a Friday in Hawaii or anywhere else. If so, I find it very hard to think of any. It made a fine Friday. And Saturday. And Sunday.

On Monday I spent a half hour with Howie Brindle before Pidge drove me out to the airport.

The Trepid was looking a little better. He was transparently eager to have me notice the change and remark upon it. If he had had a tail, he would have wagged it.

I told him I had a long talk with Pidge, several long talks in fact, and we were now both convinced that she had been hallucinating due to emotional pressures.

“I didn’t give her any emotional strain,” he said, frowning.

“You did without meaning to.”

“I don’t believe that. How?”

“She was alone and she was lonely and you were there, and she married you. She doesn’t love you.”

“She certainly does!”

“No. That’s her problem, Howie. Listen and believe. She has been trying to be in love with you, but she can’t. She really can’t. And that gives her a sense of failure. That makes her depressed, and she gets confused.”

“But I love her! I really love her, Trav!”

“There’s no law that says it has to run both ways. If you love her, you’ll do what’s best for her.”

“Which is?”

“Let her go.”

“Maybe if she could understand that I understand the problem, then we could be together and it wouldn’t-”

“No. Won’t work.”

“No?”

“Absolutely never.”

He looked down. I thought it was a snort of sour laughter, and then realized it was half snuffle, half sob. I saw tears run down his round ruddy cheek. I felt like a co-conspirator in a very rotten plan. This was a very simple decent guy. So, like a coward, I tiptoed offstage.

At the airport, there was time for kisses. But they had the slightly sour flavor of betrayal. She beamed at me and said that when she came back to Lauderdale she would decide whether to marry me or merely keep me. I said I would be on tenterhooks until she gave me the word. She had always wondered what was a tenterhook. I told her that a tenter was the frame on which they used to stretch cloth when they made it, so it would dry evenly, and the bent nails around the frame were tenterhooks. She said it sounded uncomfortable to be on tenterhooks, and I said that it probably would be, so hurry home, girl.

I closed my eyes at takeoff and opened them in the night sky over Los Angeles. I had about thirteen minutes to catch my flight to Miami. If I’d checked luggage through, it never would have made it. I hoped to go right back to sleep aboard the National DC-10, but the stirring around the Los Angeles airplane station, and a National stewardess who wanted to give me more service than I needed, left me bulge-eyed awake. The jets were yanking me back into my habitual time pattern, and it was as if scrambled brains were coming unscrambled. I thought back to the terribly cute words of the parting lovers in Hawaii. Keep me or marry me. All in a dizzy, guilty, quiverous condition, all in a lust that had not been quenched despite all the trying. A kid! The teenager who’d stowed away and been taken back to Daddy.

The farther the airplane took me away from her, the more incredible it seemed. I knew that I was going to leave that whole affair out of the record when I talked to Meyer. She had come looking, but that didn’t mean she had to get what she sought.

I yawned until my jaw creaked. I fixed the pillow again. Five miles below me, sensible people were sleeping in beds. Take that young wife, McGee, and file her under TTF. Try to forget.

Six

I TUMBLED back into the strange pre-Christmas world of Fort Lauderdale and surrounding area. It is the same every year. The unaffiliated, unfamilied, uninvolved make the obligatory comments about Christmas being the Great Retailers’ Conspiracy. Buy now. You don’t owe a dime until February. The Postal Service gets their big chance to screw up the delivery of three billion cards. Urchins turn the stores into disaster areas. Counter clerks radiate an exhausted patience leavened with icy flashes of total hate. The energy crisis is accelerated by five billion little colored light bulbs, winking on and off in celebration. Amateur thieves join the swollen ranks of the professionals in ripping off parked cars loaded with presents, in picking pockets, prying sliding doors open, shoplifting and mugging the everpresent drunks. Bored Santas jingle their begging bells and the old hymns blur loudly through the low-fidelity speakers of department-store paging systems.

Unreality was compounded this year by a long stretch of unseasonably torrid weather, comingling sweat and jingle bells. And all the merchants and hotel managers and saloonkeepers immediately violated all the rules of business management by turning on all the giant compressors and pulling the interior temperatures down into the 65- to 68 degree range, never realizing they are the unknowing victims of a long-term conspiracy.

When a new structure is built, the air-conditioning experts are encouraged by the architect and the builder to overspecify the project. If they specify an $80,000 system instead of a $40,000 system, the architect and the contractor each, in most cases, pocket an extra $4000. Trade periodicals harp on how customer traffic flow is increased by keeping the thermostat low. In the densely urban areas, the heat output of all the overspecified systems so raises the ambient temperature that the big compressors have to kick in more often to keep the store at 67 degrees.

The knowledgeable general practitioner and the specialist in respiratory diseases will both tell you that it is a total idiocy to subject the human animal to abrupt temperature variations of more than 15 degrees. He gets sick. He has more virus infections. He takes more time off from work. He feels rotten.

Were there a Florida law stating that all thermostats would have to be blocked so as to prevent a lower interior temperature than 75 degrees in all public places, all stores, all homes, all hotels and motels, Florida Power and Light would be able to give up their huge smoking plans for new power plants. We would all be healthier. We would be able to dress more sensibly.

So it was a reversal of the Christmas temperatures of the remembered childhood in northern places. Lauderdale was steamy hot on the outside, achingly frigid on the inside. This invited to town the new flu mutation, which began dropping the folk right and left.

It was a curious and restless time. It seemed to me that I spent a lot of time getting in and out of automobiles, a lot of time traveling from places I did not care to be to places I didn’t want to go, accompanied by batches of noisy people I did not know very well and did not care to know better. I heard, too often, the sound of my own voice going on and on, talking without saying anything and talking loudly to be heard over all the din, for reasons I could not remember. And there was a lot of getting in and out of boats, in and out of pools, and, in a daze of booze and indifference, getting in and out of beds, even though I had long since discovered that it is a habit which degrades the receptivity to sensation, coarsens selectivity, implies obligation, and turns off most useful introspection.

In that silly random season I found myself thinking of Lou Ellen, not in an orderly, consecutive, narrative way, but in very quick and vivid takes which were swept away as quickly as they appeared. She was just beneath the surface of my mind and was revealed in those moments when the light was just right.

Some very curious attrition was going on. Ruthie Meehan, one of the long-time waitresses, began to act strange and remote, drowned in the sea while swimming at night, was brought in through the Inlet by the tide, and was found floating in the bay shallows by an early fisherman. Some said she’d gone on sopors. There were rumors she’d left a note. People said we ought to do something, but there wasn’t anything to do except go to the funeral, and nobody went because her sister in New Hampshire sent for the body.

Brud Silverman borrowed Lacey Davis’s Charger and drove it out Route 84, destination unknown, and hit a big pine on the canal bank about a mile and a half west of Fern Crest. Estimated speed, a hundred and twenty. No sign of skid marks. A perfect hit, absolutely square. The car bounced back about seven feet from the tree, compacted to half its showroom length, and fried Silverman down to a child-size cinder.

And Meyer keeled over.

He said he felt very strange. Far away. A nice fast walk on the beach, a swim, some exercises, a shower, a steak, and he’d be just fine, he said. But when we walked up the slope of the beach after swimming, he stopped and looked at me and said, “I think I…”

I waited for the rest of it. He smiled, rolled his eyes up, and pitched onto his face in the soiled sand above high tide. He is as broad as a bear and as hairy as a bear. You think of heart. You think of something going bad inside that big chest. I eased him over. He had sand in nose, mouth and eyes. I laid my right ear on his wet, hairy chest and heard the engine going. tuh-PUM, tuh-PUM, tuh-PUM. Too fast? But he’d been swimming hard. A fat, gentle woman filled a kid’s sand pail with fresh water and cleaned the sand off Meyer’s face while we waited for the ambulance. Ambulance service to the beach is very good. Four minutes this time. Resistance to my riding along, until I said I could tell the emergency room just how he had acted before he passed out and when he passed out.

Fast ride. Deft handling. Too damned cold in the emergency area. They got a blanket over him, steered me to the admissions desk, wheeled him away somewhere. I was a conspicuous figure, walking around in there in swim trunks. A tiny blond nurse, almost a midget, found me an XL robe before I froze. I upset several people in my search for Meyer by appearing in places I was not supposed to be. The medical industry is never ready for inquiry. They never used to like to answer questions. Now they have the excuse they could be sued. They overwork the excuse.

A saturnine, leathery doctor named Kwaliy was supervising the workup on Meyer. I answered the questions I thought he ought to be asking and had to assume he heard what I said.

He wrote something on a form and gave it to a gray-headed nurse. An orderly wheeled Meyer away, with the nurse keeping pace.

“Where is he going now?” I asked.

“What is your relationship to the patient?” Kwalty asked coldly.

“I’m his sister.”

Kwalty pursed his lips and stared up at me. “If you start trying to muscle the staff, fellow, you won’t find out one damn thing.”

“Would you like to put a little money on that, Doctor?”

He tilted his head. “Maybe not. Your friend has a temperature of almost one hundred and five degrees. And some fluid in the lungs already. It’s a virus infection. He goes to Intensive Care. When the lab puts a name on the bug, we’ll go the antibiotics with the best record against it. It can kill him, leave him in bad shape, or he can recover completely.”

I took a cab home to the Busted Flush and got clothes and money and drove back in my blue Rolls pickup and parked her five blocks from the hospital. That was as close as I could get and legally leave it there for a long period.

I did not mind hanging around. I had nothing pressing to do. I was sick of going to the places I had been going to. The hidden compartment in the hull of the Flush was stocked with enough cash to afford six or more months of very good living. So the hospital was fine. It was a project. Infiltrate. Ingratiate. Learn the kind of protective coloring that gets you past the places where they stop the civilians, and learn the kind of behavior which keeps the staff from using their authority to toss you the hell out.

There is no reason why a person cannot buy and wear a white, long-sleeved shirt-jacket. It does not look at all like a medical smock. A person can keep things in the pocket, pencil flashlight, several pens. A person can carry an aluminum clipboard. The pace is important-steady and mildly purposeful. Smile and nod at every familiar face because that is the way you become a familiar face. Do little favors. Look up the nice folk who took such good care of you the last time you were in. And the time before.

By the time they let Meyer out of Intensive Care, after four rough days and nights, I had goodies all lined up. I had a fine private room assigned to him, 455, on Four South, ten easy paces from the nurses’ station. And that was a most agreeable station indeed because, rarity of rarities, the nurses on all shifts were cheery, competent and funny, and half of them were pretty.

I had become friendly with Kwalty after our bad beginning. He said that if I wanted to throw away my money, a private nurse just for the span from eleven at night to seven in the morning might be helpful, as Meyer was still a sick and a weak man. The day-shift gals on Four South put their heads together and came up with Ella Marie Morse, RN, thirty-something, tall, dark, graceful, husky and highly skilled, a lady who had married a wealthy patient who had died in a plane crash on a business trip to Chicago, leaving her financially comfortable and bored.

They wheeled Meyer to 455 and eased him from bed to bed at four in the afternoon of the day after Christmas, Wednesday. I had looked in at him in Intensive Care several times. He looked worse at closer range. The infection had eaten him down. He looked shrunken in every dimension. His hair was dull, and his face looked amber and waxy. After they took pressure and temperature, and got his four o’clock medication into him, they left us alone. Meyer gave me a slow, thoughtful, heavy-lidded look.

“Christmas… is really gone?”

“So rumor has it.”

“The medication… fogs my brain. I can’t handle… word games.”

“Yesterday was Christmas.”

He kept his eyes closed for so long I thought he had gone to sleep. He opened his eyes. “How was it?”

“Christmas? Well… you know… it was Christmas.”

After he closed his eyes again, I gave him a chatty account of McGee’s Christmas, about decorating the tree in the nurses’ lounge on Christmas Eve, about bringing in a batch of presents for people on Christmas Day, about attending three different staff parties in the hospital Christmas afternoon and evening. When I was through I realized he was snoring softly, but I did not know when he had dropped off. I decided he had not missed anything of great moment.

Nurse Ella Morse arrived early, a little after ten. She was taller than I had pictured her, not quite as pretty as described, and had an unexpected-and attractive-flavor of shyness in her manner. It made her seem less mature than she obviously was. After she had checked her sleeping patient out and had greeted the girls on duty, she and I took coffee into the small visitors’ lounge at the end of the corridor. She asked about Meyer. A semiretired economist living alone aboard his dumpy little cabin cruiser over at Bahia Mar. That doesn’t cover it. Meyer is something else. She would find out. Meyer is a transcendent warmth, the listening ear of a total understanding and forgiveness, a humble wisdom.

I explained that Doctor Damon Kwalty had suggested that she be the judge of when Meyer could get along adequately without her help. With a trace of officiousness, she asked me how come I was able to remain in the hospital so long after visitors’ hours. I said they had given up asking me to leave, probably because I was handy to have around. Maybe it has a certain emotional importance, or significance, that all this was on the night before I got Pidge Brindle’s letter. Or perhaps I am straining at a gnat, or, once again looking for some way to make myself into a better person than I am.

At any rate I hung around until just before the shift change and then, following a lady’s detailed instructions, walked down the corridor and around the corner and shoved the stairwell door open and, without going through it, let it hiss shut to the point where a folded piece of cardboard kept it from closing all the way and latching. Just beyond the doorway, I slipped into the treatment room through another door and pushed it almost shut. I sat on the treatment table and waited. The reflected glow of streetlights came into the room, glinting and glimmering on the glass and stainless steel of the medical equipment.

I could not tell exactly how long it would take her, because if someone went down with her on the elevator, then, instead of getting off at three and walking to the stairwell and climbing one flight, she would ride all the way down, fake a trip to the rest room, and climb the three flights back up to four.

I waited about five minutes before Marian Lewandowski, RN, pushed the door open silently, slipped into the treatment room and carefully closed the door. The latch clicked and the bolt made a tiny grating sound. She was a slender white shape in the darkness, a whisper of professional fabrics coming toward me, a barely audible “Hi, darling” as she came into the clandestine embrace, to be held and kissed in the stolen darkness.

She had little body tremors of nervousness, and her whisper-voice had little edges of anxiety, and she had a talking jag. On the afternoon before Christmas, she had come to the lounge three times for a few minutes each time, to make sour jokes about being stuck on the three-to-eleven on that day Christmas day and the day after. Lots of nurses were sick with the bug. A woman with a lovely, lively body, tons of energy, a face more worn than the body, blond hair tied tightly back, blue eyes a sixteenth of an inch too close together, lips a millimeter too thin.

She kissed and trembled and said, “You know, I figure we were both kidding, talking a good game, neither of us going to show up, but all the time it was happening, you know, like getting carried along. It’s just kidding at first. Then it’s like a game. Like playing chicken.”

“I know.”

“Well, I talk a good game, but the way it is with me, Norman is on pipeline work in Iran, no place I would want to take my two babies, and so here I am living with Norman’s mother again, and I wouldn’t really have to work except it would drive me out of my tree trying to live in her house with her, and that rotten old woman is holding a stopwatch on me right now, you can bet your life on it, figuring I’m late because I took time on the way home to get laid. When somebody bugs you and bugs you and bugs you all the time about something you haven’t been doing, you end up doing it, right?”

“I guess you do.”

“I wouldn’t know about this being a good safe place except for Nita, she’s on vacation, my best friend practically-she sneaks in here with a cardiologist she thinks is some day going to get a divorce and marry her, but it never happens.”

“I guess it doesn’t.”

“Mostly what is wrong with me, McGee, it isn’t just that Norman is away for such a long time and the old lady bugs me so, and if I know Norman he’s set up a shack job for himself, what is wrong with me, I guess, is… somehow the work is different being a nurse now. There are so many old ones coming in, coming in and dying all the time. It makes you think about time going by you, like you’re on a train that never stops and you look out the window at things streaming by that you’ll never see except that way. Dying isn’t scary because they come in here and they are so confused and kind of dim they don’t really know what is happening, and then all of a sudden they’re in a coma and they got an IV going, and a catheter and a bag, and an oxygen clip on their nose, and they don’t know a damn thing about living or dying anymore. That’s going to be me and you sometime, bet on it.”

“But not yet.”

“Feel how I’m shaking? I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Nita says don’t try to use the table, it’s so high and narrow you could fall off and break somebody’s back, she said there’s a rollaway in here… there it is, I can just make it out, and the thing to do is open it a little ways and pull the mattress out and put it on the floor. Look, this is weird, the way I feel. I’m a nurse, damn it, and you know the reputation we got, and I like you a lot. I really like you, and I’ve been excited for hours thinking about you, but would it be a mean, rotten, dirty trick if-if I asked if we just skipped it? Would you get really sore?”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Maybe it’s his mother there waiting and waiting. Why should I make such a big thing? It isn’t a big thing anymore in the world. We’ve got the rights that only men used to have. Well, just hold me like this and kiss me like you did before, for a little while, and then I better be going, and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

And in about ten minutes we were on the mattress together. Her flesh was cool, and as pale in the darkness as the uniform had been. Her thick curls had trapped odors of medication and asepsis. I heard the muffled bong of the corridor call bell, a night shriek of city brakes, the thunder-roll of a jet, fast and high, and soon the more immediate bumpity-thud, bumpity-thud of Mrs. Norman Lewandowski’s pale, pretty and earnest hips against the compressed kapok of the thin, hard, rollaway mattress. Thus we exorcized our private ghosts, leaving old and dying far behind as sensation rushed forward in the rich, frictive celebration of life and living.

I dozed after she was gone and awoke with a start, chilled to the bone by the air conditioning, which had dried the sweats of effort while I slept. It was only 12:11 by the little red Pulsar digits. I buttoned my shirt wrong on the first try, and when I did it wrong again on the second try, I seriously considered sitting down on the floor and crying a little.

I drove stately old Miss Agnes home through the tropic night, sitting at the big wheel in one of the deepest, saddest, most dismal postcoital depressions I have ever known. I was an absolutely trivial, wasted,. no-good son of a bitch. I wanted to moan, tear my hair out and gnaw my hands raw. This had really been one great December. Point with pride, you dumb horny old scavenger. You zapped Pidge just because you missed her the first time around, and you’re trying to make a perfect score, right? And since you got back, there have been a halfdozen casual availables, and if you put your mind to it you can remember four out of six of their names and maybe three out of six of their faces. And now this lonely nurse person. Like shooting fish in a barrel. No. More like using a shotgun to kill a minnow in a teacup. What is wrong with you this year, fellow? Should you be married, for God’s sake? Should you look in the yellow pages for your friendly neighborhood monastery? Should you sign up for a double orchidectomy? You have to do something, because something is definitely wrong with a grown man who spends the idle hour ramming his rigid self into chance acquaintances, no matter how willing they might be, no matter how far away Norman is.

When have you been like this before?

I locked Miss Agnes and walked the empty dock to Slip F-18 and boarded the Flush. Tired as I was, I went through the motions of checking the little panel in the bulkhead to see if any uninvited visitors had been aboard in my absence. I cut the switch with the special key, let myself in and remembered to use the key again on the inside switch. That is where most security systems fail. Thieves wait for you to deactivate it on the outside, then jump from cover and make you take them inside. If you have a double switch on the alarm circuit, with a sixty-second delay, it can be wired so that if the inside one isn’t deactivated in time, you get sirens, bullhorns, calliope music, anything you might want to hear.

I remembered when I had been like this the last time. The last time it had been a defensive reaction. I had suspected a far deeper involvement with a lady than I had wanted. And so I had tried to cure it with warm poultices of other ladies, or at least to muffle it, blur it, diffuse it.

Pidge? Lou Ellen? Oh, no, McGee! She’s just a kid. Well, not quite. She used to be a kid, and not too long ago. She’s not at the bottom of all this cutrate Lothario routine. Couldn’t possibly be. Use the acid test on her. Okay. Would I, Travis McGee, bring thee, Linda Lewellen Brindle, aboard this houseboat to live herein and hereon, with me, happily, so long as we shall all remain afloat?

Hell, yes!

I went to bed then, dismayed, not knowing I would get her letter the next day.

Seven

DARLING

This feels like the tenth letter to you, and I have the strange feeling you know what was in the other nine I threw away, just like I picked up the phone all those times and didn’t call you. In all the letters I threw away I said I love you so many times you have to be used to hearing it from me by now. And you can’t hush me up the way you kept doing when we had that absolutely incredible weekend here together after I seduced you. That word looks funny written out I looked at it so long I had to go look it up to see if it was spelled right. I found out I can lie down and close my eyes and think about us, and remember exactly what it was like the different times and different ways, and after a little while I feel all hot and out of breath and dizzy. Do you think of me like that? Do men ever do that? Can you get big just by thinking about me? I hope you can. Because it was a lot more than just games, wasn’t it?

You are going to have me on your hands. I guess you know that by now. Or you’ve guessed it. I’m going to walk along the dock and walk aboard and find you and say Hello dear, here I am to spend a little time with you, like the rest of my life. Then what are you going to do? Nothing at all. It’s ordained. Way back when I stowed away, it was all settled for us even then. I am very rich and I can cook. What do you want anyway?

But don’t start looking for me tomorrow. I have this thing about neat. I want to wrap up this whole part of my life and seal it and put it away in a cupboard and never look at it again. When I’m with you I won’t ever get freaky again because I don’t have to think about things not being right, because they are right every minute, no matter what we are doing.

The Professor taught me that the worst thing you can do is run away from things, and it marked me. So I have things to settle first, and then I’ll be heading toward you as fast as they can fly those birds. Two days after you left, I went and had my first long talk with Howie. He was really awfully upset. He didn’t know how to take it. He just refused to believe me. I guess he’s really in love with me, the poor ox. When he wads his face up, he looks just like a baby about to start to cry. It took a lot of long talks to make him see that if he loves me, he has to let me go. Could I ever let you go? I don’t think I could, darling. I wouldn’t be strong enough. Thinking about us gives me the strength and patience to talk nicely to Howie.

Now he’s resigned to it. He’s very morose, at least he was, but now he seems a little better. I guess it’s because of the final cruise. You should see my poor hands! We’ve been working like maniacs to get the Trepid ready. Because it’s too much boat for one person to sail a long distance, we agreed to sell her here. Howie is a really good salesman. That’s what he should be doing, I guess. Anyway, there is a man named Dawson who is very interested in her. And the price is okay, I guess. $130,000. He is being transferred from here to Pago Pago in American Samoa. He works for a land development company and he seems young to be so successful. He says that he’ll be down there several years on a project, and that the Trepid is exactly what he wants. He says that he can get her surveyed there, and if she is as sound as she looks, he will be able to get a bank draft for the full purchase price, and we can fly home from there.

I am even sort of looking forward to the voyage, darling. I think Howie has the idea I’ll “come to my senses” or some fool idea like that. But I will be alone on the beautiful sea, thinking of us. I couldn’t stand him even kissing me. But I’ll feel better for making the cruise because it will let him know that I am completely serious about divorcing him, and it will prove to me that I am not some kind of flippy person going around hallucinating at the drop of a-of a what? A spook? Already all that is a bad dream, thanks to you, darling. I am the most stable girl in the world. I am in love. That helps a girl a lot.

So now the Trepid is lovely again, looking fresh and proud and new. Everything aboard her has been checked over and over again, and as you know my father was a nut about fail-safe backup things, so no need to worry. I came back here to the apartment to pick up the last of my things and wander around and think of you and smile secret satisfied smiles at myself in the mirror. Remember when you came up behind me and put your chin on top of my head and we were like a funny totem pole in the mirror, making horrible faces? And to finish this letter which I started yesterday.

We have been working on the charts and figuring out time and distance, dear. We’ll have about 3000 miles to go, and we are going to top off the tanks and really push it because even at standard cruise, there is still a tiny safety factor. With allowance for weather, the best we can do, running all the time, is a hair under two hundred miles a day, so sixteen days should just about do it. It is a shame to miss some lovely islands, but they would mean nothing to me unless I shared them with you. It is a shame not to use the wind when the wind is good. But the man wants the Trepid as quick as he can get her, and I want to be out of this marriage just as quick. And so it goes.

Darling, you took a fьppy girl with weird teeth, lumpy boobs, fat thighs and nothing-type hair and you’ve made her feel almost beautiful. I hope you’re satisfied. I mean I am going to make real sure you’re satisfied

So I will mail this on the way back to the boat and today is Christmas Eve, so God only knows how long it will take. We will be taking off early tomorrow morning, and I imagine we’ll be tying up at Pago Pago no later than Thursday, the tenth of next year, the first year we are going to spend most of together. All the dumb lines of the dumb old songs have become wonderful. We don’t have a son amp; yet! Kiss Meyer for me. Say hello to everybody. Tell everybody that Lou Ellen is coming home. They won’t know you mean me if you say that. You can use Pidge to outsiders, okay? But never to me between us alone. I am so damned incredibly happy! I loooooooooove you.

Lou Ellen McGee

PS: If you don’t remember proposing, that’s okay. You can always take care of the details later on.

Meyer’s fever was up again on Thursday. Not dangerously high. High enough to make Kwalty irritable. He changed some of the medication and ordered more fluids. I sat in his room and when he dozed I read my letter again. I didn’t overdo it. I don’t think I read it more than fifteen times. Did I feel the stirring then of some terrible premonition? No. I was clam happy, with goof grin and a little song to hum, a foot to tap. Life had suddenly revealed to me its long-concealed and exquisite design.

When Meyer would seem to want something, I would go get a nurse to take care. He was dim and grumpy. He seemed to bring some of the dozing dreams out into daylight and a mild delirium of fever. Once he sat halfway up, face twisting, and said harshly, “No! Don’t let him, Cable!”

I went to him and pushed him back. “Hey Meyer. You’re okay. All that happened a long time ago.” His eyes cleared and he looked up at me, then tried to smile. “Sorry. Sorry.”

I sat again, knowing that in the brain warped by fever, Meyer had gone back in time to the Cypress County jail when Deputy Lew Arnstead had beaten him cruelly while Deputy Billy Cable watched. When you have been beaten to helplessness and still the beating goes on and on until you wonder if you will live, that is when the marks go deep.

I went to lunch and came back in through one of my newly discovered private entrances where I did not have to con my way past the Gray Ladies with their file of visitor’s passes. Meyer was still on the no-visitor list, but Kwalty had given me verbal assurance that I was his exception. When I walked down the corridor of Four South I came upon Marian Lewandowski at the nurses’ station, checking through the patient records. She glanced at me and said hello and I watched the pink blush move up out of the collar of the white uniform and up her throat, suffusing her forehead last of all. She swallowed and moved ten feet down the corridor with me, glancing nervously back to see if we were clueing her peer group.

“Anybody see you leaving?” she asked, barely moving her lips.

“No. How’d you make out at home?”

She made a mouth. “The usual. Nobody could ever be good enough for Norman. When she accused me other times, I get so mad I yell at her. So I had to get mad last night too. Listen, it was crazy. I wasn’t going to do it, really. I did cheat before, but it was different. It was a big beach-picnic thing, blankets, everybody smashed, and Norm had gone off with a girl he used to go with, in her car, to get more beer, and he didn’t come back soon enough.”

“Marian!” somebody called from the station.

“I’ll come to four fifty-five, huh?” she said, and spun and went striding back. I watched her. An alert, heads-up pace, little white cap, teacup size with blue edging, riding squarely atop the clenched blond curls, white shoes with rubber ripple soles, toeing in, the long stride swinging the hips. It was a difficult, almost impossible feat to relate that brisk professional image to the night creature of the rollaway mattress, so quickly sensitized that she jerked, flexed, gasped at each caress until, in response to the body language of tugging and reaching, I had rolled her under.

And now I could not conceive of ever wanting to take her one more time. And suspected that she too would like to avoid a rerun. This is one of the new relationships in a transient society for which there is no word or phrase in common use. Marian and I were not friends, because friendship grows out of mutual concerns and out of being together at many times in many places. We were not lovers, because there was little or no continuity of desire. We were not completely casual libertines, dissolute and uncontrolled. Each of us had fed a great many bits into our personal computers, at breakneck speed. Is he-she physically attractive to me? Is he-she clean and healthy? Will he-she be circumspect and private about it? Is he-she seeking some kind of angle or advantage I don’t know about? Is he-she likely to be kinky in some kind of vulgar, unpleasant or even alarming way? Could he-she be hunting some kind of long-range emotional security and personal involvement I can’t afford? Are there so many shadow areas in the computer response to the questions that the anticipated pleasure is not worth the unknown risk?

For each of us the equation worked, but there was the element of risk, the element of the unknown that honed the edge of anticipated pleasure.

So it was too tense to be entirely casual.

The Great Magician had called us up from the audience. He had wanted a man and a woman. Marian and I had come from opposite sides of the packed theater, accepting the risk of volunteering, and had been locked together in the magic box by the Magician, feeling vibrant and short of breath. The trick had worked. We had disappeared completely and had materialized back in the real world, no better and no worse for the experience. We had fattened our memory banks with information which might be of use someday. And in a mortal world, in the midst of the dying, we had once again proven we were desirable, trustworthy and sexually competent.

Acquaintances perhaps? The encounter, though brief, struck too deep for that shallow word. Conspirators? There is no word for the relationship. It is a small, delicious and important risk which is being taken an uncountable number of times each day-two-person encounter groups making initial contact in the office, plant, supermarket, waiting room, banquet hall, country club, bus station, cocktail bar. Eye contact, speculation, appraisal. Run all the accessible data through the memory banks of experience and, after an hour, a week, or a month, set up the assignation. The more discriminating and fastidious the risk-taker, the rarer will be the taking of risk.

You can read all about it in the newspapers when the gamble goes really sour. Look under divorce decrees. Under hospital admissions. Under indictments for assault, rape, and homicide.

If it is a bad risk and there is just a small loss, it becomes a dreary episode, with petulance, regret and ugly words. The risk seems to turn bad when one of the players finds the partner is a compulsive player, a prowler, a collector of souvenirs of the hunt, a scorekeeper.

Ours had been an unexceptional event. Quite pleasant, leaving a residue of a mild and patronizing fondness. Good girl, there. Jolly good show, and all that. Nobody was a hunter. The contact had been accidental, the vibrations acceptable, the conclusion foregone.

She came to Meyer’s room at four o’clock. With the gentle deftness of the very good nurse, she took temperature, blood pressure, pulse, and made notes to transcribe the information to his chart at the nurses’ station. With a hesitant look and beckoning motion with her head, she drew me over to the window corner.

“So?” she said, half whisper.

Pride kept her away from any edge of commitment. I couldn’t read her eyes, or the shape of her mouth. I said, “What I want to say is same time, same place-question mark. You know that.”

“But you can’t?”

“Same place. I can ask that. But I have to be out of here by ten tonight. No way out of it.”

Face of disappointment, but genuine? “That’s too bad.”

“Earlier?” I asked, knowing well the answer.

“On shift? No way. Not even if we were quick as rabbits, and who needs it that way?”

I was beginning to be confident of my earlier guess, so I said, “It’ll have to be Friday then.”

“Wonderful, darlin‘! Oh, dear. No. I just remembered. I’m off from tonight until when I get a shift change and come in Sunday morning at seven. Look, we’re a girl short this shift, and we’re full to the brim. If your friend is still here Sunday and if… we both still feel the same way, maybe we can work something out, okay?”

“Okay.”

“And if we can’t, well, we’re still ahead of the game, McGee.”

“Way ahead.”

She grinned and leaned and gave me a quick kiss, a quick pat, and went swiftly to the door, hauled it open, and disappeared into the busy corridor. As the door slowly, slowly closed, I had a diminishing view of an old man with a walker going along the corridor. His head was canted way over so that his cheek was almost against his left shoulder. He would slide his left foot six inches forward and then lean forward, hands braced on the aluminum tubing of the walker until his weight was over the forward foot. Then he would lift his right shoulder and turn his body to slide and swing the right foot up even with the left. He would then shove the walker another six inches forward. I had watched him in the hallway. He had all the blind, dogged, stubborn determination of a half-smashed bug heading for the darkness under the sink. It was impossible to imagine what was going on inside his skull. The door snicked shut. I wondered how many Marians the old, old man had known. I wondered if he thought of any of them, or one of them, as he made his timeless journeys, each as valiant perhaps as the last five miles of the Boston Marathon.

“Got a new buddy?” Meyer said in so normal a tone I nearly jumped backward out the window.

I walked over to the bed. His eyes were bright. “The more I jolly up the nurse corps, the more nursing you get,” I told him.

He felt for the buttons on the side of the electric bed and wound his head and shoulders higher, and cranked his knees higher.

“I am happy,” he said, “that in my misery, in my torment, I have been able to provide you with a new little garden of posies, and a perfect rationalization for plucking one, if you feel the need.”

“You are cured!”

“And you have an infinite capacity for self-deceit, Travis.”

I sat on the foot of his bed. “What makes you think you can look at a whispered conversation about the condition of your health, Meyer, and come up with a diagnosis of my character flaws?”

“Fever sharpens the wits. And the hearing.”

“Oh.”

“Attractive woman. Good nurse. How long will I be here?”

I stared at him and shook my head in wonder. I had not really admitted to myself the chance that the Meyer I knew was gone forever. Too high a fever over too long can cook the little synapses in your skull. Were Meyer to become a very dull fellow, I would have seen to it that he had a pretty good life, considering. But it would have been a long gesture of thanks to the Meyer I had once known.

But this thing with the shrunken saffron face and the bright eyes was my friend, rising from the valley of the shadows. I went over and looked out the window to blink away, in quasi privacy, the stinging feeling in my eyes.

“You are a tough old bastard,” I told him.

“The way I feel now, there is nothing tough left. I don’t think I could survive a bad case of hangnail.”

“Terminal hangnail is one of the challenges modern medicine must face.” I moved toward Meyer and sat on a corner of the foot of his bed. “Let’s stop talking about your problems and talk about mine. Like my infinite capacity for self-deceit. I believe you mentioned it. I want to say something, but all the words come out of terrible song lyrics. There is now one lady I want for keeps.”

“That nurse?” he said. His expression was quizzical, unbelieving.

“No. Pidge.”

“Pidge!” He was definitely startled. “Was there… did you… when you went to…”

“Yes, yes, yes, dammit! One partridge in a pear tree, and on a low limb, in a good strong light, and me with an automatic shotgun and number seven shot, standing six feet away. Pow.”

He nodded and nodded.

I said, “What are you smiling at?”

“Me? Oh, it’s just that I don’t have to worry about you. I was worrying, you know, before I was struck down. You began to puzzle all your friends. You came back from Hawaii and began acting like a salesman at a convention. You were into Plymouth gin pretty heavy at all times, and you began hewing your way through the solid wall of doxies a determined man can find anywhere and especially in Lauderdale. I wasn’t keeping score or keeping track, as you know, but I could not help notice two tourist ladies, the new hostess at the Beef’n it, one stewardess, one schoolteacher, and, God save us and help us, one Avon Lady.”

“And a nurse,” I said in a very small voice. “And you say that now you don’t have to worry about me?”

“Oh, I can worry a little. I think you have been in too many beds, and you may have bounced your brains. loose. But I would suspect that the efforts you have gone to in fighting fire with fire indicate that you have a very hot fire to fight. You’ve overcompensated.”

“I’ve what?”

“You’re thrashing around, boiling the water, trying to throw the hook. And, in the process, being something of a damned fool.”

“Thrashing, eh? I’m through that phase. The nurse was the end of the line.”

“Thus accepting the inevitability of the shared life?”

“You could cheer a little. Or clap.”

He cocked his head. “Not quite yet. She’s really very young for you, Travis.”

“I keep telling myself that.”

“With an entirely different set of values.”

“I know.”

“And, of course, she’s still married.”

“But wants out and will get out.”

“And you have lived for a long time in a random pattern no woman could ever really accept. Can you change your pattern?”

“I keep thinking that other people have friends, and they talk about ball games and the weather and laugh a lot. What have I got? Ann Landers.”

He smiled and closed his eyes. Thirty seconds later he was in deep sleep, mending.

Eight

WHEN I got back to Bahia Mar from the hospital that Thursday night, there was a dark bulk snoring in the deck chair on the aft deck of the Busted Flush. I came quietly aboard and moved to where I could bend over and get a look at his face in the half light. I knew him so well that it surprised me that I had to grope for the name. Frank Hayes. Construction engineer, scuba expert, mechanical wizard. I hadn’t seen him since the diesel pump froze up, down in the Bay of La Paz.

“Frank?” I said softly.

The snore stopped. His eyes opened. He slanted his glance up at me, not moving his head. Two seconds of appraisal. Then he rolled up onto his, feet and said, “How’s Meyer making it?”

“He must be getting better. He turned mean.”

“I asked around about you two.”

I opened the doorway and hit the lights and ush ered him into the lounge. He carried a duffel bag and a bedroll. He wore safety shoes, faded twill work pants, a smudged white T-shirt and an old wool army shirt worn unbuttoned and outside the pants. He had a beard stubble that misted the heavy lines of his jowls.

“You’re looking healthy, Frank.”

He shrugged. “Less hair, more belly.”

“Too late to go looking for a place to stay. You’re welcome to stay aboard.”

“Thanks. Suits me.”

“Want to wash up?”

“If I go through here, I should come to the head?”

“Right. I can fix some eggs.”

“I ate already, thanks. A little bourbon and water, half and half, no ice.”

I fixed drinks. I wondered what was on his mind. I knew I couldn’t try to pry it out of him. Frank Hayes had to do everything his own way, in his own time.

When he came back into the lounge, he looked exactly the same as when he had left. He took the drink with a nod of thanks and settled into a big leather chair. He took the drink down by half, wiped his mouth on his hand, and looked around. “Nice,” he said. “The way you and Meyer described it, I thought it was maybe some kind of playpen. You hear what happened to Joe Delladio?”

“No.”

“Head on. In the mountains on the road from Puebla down to Oaxaca. A bus with busted brakes. Wiped him out, and his wife and two of their four kids.”

“Such a damned waste. Jesus!”

“I know. I didn’t hear until months later. Just like with Professor Ted. Thanks for sending me that card to that box number I give you when we broke up the team. I was out of the country.”

“Just you, me and Meyer left.”

“To all survivors,” he said, finished his drink and placidly held his glass out for a refill. “That Meyer. At first I didn’t think he could hack the kind of work we were doing on the bottom of that bay. Found that goddamn gold, right?”

I put the new drink in his hand. “Right.”

“The reason I came looking you up, I started wondering what happened to Professor Ted’s research notes. He called it his dream book. You remember that?”

“I remember it well. The afternoon he got killed, Meyer and I went aboard the Trepid and broke into it and searched it all night long. Nothing. And nothing in the safety deposit vault.”

“Strange.”

“I know, especially since he was gearing up to go hunting again. The daughter came down from the north. She didn’t have any information.”

“How did he leave her?”

“In good shape. Very good shape. Between eight and nine hundred thousand, plus the Trepid, plus liquid assets to pay estate taxes and expenses.”

“She around here?”

“In the South Pacific with her husband, aboard the Trepid, just the two of them. Fellow named Howie Brindle. They sailed out of here almost fourteen months ago.”

“Just the daughter? Nobody else to leave anything to?”

“Just Linda, known as Pidge.”

“Were you going along on the next hunting trip with Ted?”

“He hadn’t asked me. I don’t know if he was going to. He wasn’t exactly your ordinary neighborhood blabbermouth.”

“Know who his lawyer was?”

“Yes. I thought of that. I asked him. No, he was not keeping any books or records for Professor Theodore Lewellen. He had drawn up some trust agreements, handled some tax questions. Tom Collier. Fall, Collier, Haspline and Butts. Tom is coexecutor of the estate, along with the First Oceanside Bank and Trust.”

“Collier a good man?”

“Supposed to be. Old family. Early forties. Political connections. Rich practice and big landholdings. Why?”

Frank slowly and gently scratched a newly healed scar on the back of his left hand, a patch of smooth, pink, shiny skin over two inches long, over half an inch wide.

“How’d you get that?”

He looked at it as if seeing it for the first time. “This? Some silly bastard left a wrench on the deck, below, and I stepped on the edge of it and swung my arm out for balance and hit a live-steam line. It stung pretty good.”

“Frank!”

“Eh?”

“You just suddenly started wondering what happened to Ted Lewellen’s research notes? No more questions, my friend. Not until you answer the ones I ought to be asking.”

“A letter is sent a month ago from a Miami lawyer named Mansfield Hall, which sounds like a building on a college campus, to Seven Seas, Limited. A very careful letter. What it is saying is that Hall represents somebody who has come into the possession of some original research materials taken from original sources, indicating the possible location of sunken treasure on the ocean floor, along with geodetic survey maps, overlays, and aerial photography. This somebody wants to negotiate a deal with Seven Seas-whereby they set up a joint venture to go after the items, Seven Seas to finance the first recovery attempt, take back expenses, then split the balance down the middle. This somebody wants the right to have a representative along on the recovery operation. After the first recovery, the terms are to be renegotiated.”

“It does sound like the way Ted set things up. Very orderly, very complete.”

“I thought so too. I went to see this Mansfield Hall. I don’t think you could shake anything out of him because I don’t think he knows very much. I’m not even sure he knows exactly who he’s representing.”

“How did you get hold of the letter?” He stared at me.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve heard about Seven Seas. It’s an offshore corporation, and it was in the news a lot last year, locating and recovering that Air France jet that went down with the gold shipment near Aruba. Based in Jamaica?”

“Grand Cayman.”

“So how did you get hold-”

“Because it was sent to me, McGee. Jesus! I am Seven Seas. At least I own forty percent of the son of a bitch.”

I looked at the stubble, the Salvation Army ward robe. “Well, well, well. And I suppose you flew up in your very own Seven-oh-seven to see me?”

“No. We’ve got a piece of a Learjet, share it with two other outfits, split the costs based on percentage of use. Way back there in Mexico, I was looking to buy into Seven Seas, Limited. I’d worked for them. Mismanaged. I was looking for a big hit, and we missed it at the Bay of La Paz, but I made it the next try. Had to make it. I had an option on shares.”

“Frank I would never have believed it.”

“Try hard. It’ll come to you. Anyway Mister Mansfield Hall wants me to make a counter offer and he will take it to his client and so on, and I told him forget it, I deal nose to nose or not at all. Now I’m snuffing at it from the other end. Whoever is being so careful would have no way of knowing that I ever worked with Ted Lewellen. If this somebody was looking for exactly the right outfit skill, capitalization, equipment, and honesty-the name Seven Seas would probably come up almost anyplace he asked. It’s the kind of thing we want to do. But this approach smells. Can you figure why?”

It puzzled me for a few moments, trying to figure out what he meant. And then I saw it. “You’re saying that anybody with a legitimate ownership of Lewellen’s research and his salvage plans would be able to raise the money, hire the experts, equip an expedition and go after the goodies.”

“Right. They wouldn’t have to be so secret and careful, and they wouldn’t have to give away half the net.”

“So somebody ripped off the dream book.”

“Or he trusted the wrong person?”

“Hisp, at the bank? Tom Collier?”

“Who knows? We both know what can happen. Suppose there is a man you can trust with your life. Nothing he wouldn’t do for you. But all of a sudden you’re dead, and he sees an angle. Foolproof. The daughter? She’s got a bundle. No need to worry. So this fellow, this true and blue friend, there he is with all Professor Ted’s notes and analyses and studies. Basic research was in that journal, a book about so big. The backup research would fill a big suitcase. True-blue friend lays back and waits for heat. There is no heat at all. So finally, he makes his move, trying to set it up so there’s no risk at all.”

“I never heard you say so much before, all at one time.”

“Ted trusted you, you son of a bitch!”

Never before has my jaw fallen open in surprise. Here is what happens. There are nineteen different things you can say, and you open your mouth to say them all, and you can’t decide which one to say first. So you sit there like a stuffed guppy.

And then I was in midair, mouth still open. Total launch. The juvenile reaction. Honor offended and all that. He tried to tip his chair over to the side, but it didn’t tip fast enough. I made a midair adjustment of arm, shoulder, and back and popped him on the side of the head as he was toppling. It made a clear white whistling pain in my hand, reminding me that one almost never hits the hard parts of people with the naked hand. One hits the soft parts with the hand, and the hard parts with a utensil.

I sailed over him and tucked my shoulder under and rolled and came up. I pounced on him, grabbed two handfuls of garments and picked him up and slammed him back against the bulkhead, and drew back to put the next one into a soft part of him.

“Whoa!” he said in a fumbling voice. His eyes weren’t in good focus.

“Whoa your ass!”

“Uncle,” he said. That’s right. The old schoolyard word. It stopped me. It boggled me.

“Uncle?” I said.

“I wanted to know. I found out. So no more hitting.” His voice was clearer. He shook the mist out of his eyes. I stepped back, but I stayed ready.

“I lie a lot,” I said. “But I don’t steal from live friends or dead friends.”

“So I know that, now.” He worked his jaw, felt his face. “That was some tag. My head is still ringing. The last time I got hit that hard, a Greek came up behind me and laid me out on the deck with a fid. You know, I had the idea I could maybe take you if it ever came to that. Even if that was a lucky shot, I don’t think so.” He moved around me and stood his chair back up and sat in it, with a heavy sigh.

I kneaded my knuckles and worked them into the palm of the other hand, standing the pain in order to explore for any little grinding of bone chip, grating of fracture. I held the hand out, fingers straight, and looked at it. It was puffing so fast I already had a dimple wherever there used to be a knuckle.

“Usually I keep my cool better than that, Frank. It cost me a hand. I think I steamed because I really liked Ted. I miss him. Once upon a time he saved-I forgot. You know all about that.”

“Look at it from where I live, McGee. He died here. You and Meyer were close to him. Either of you could have the stuff. I knew it wouldn’t be Meyer.”

“Why not?”

“We played a lot of games of chess aboard that bucket. I know how his mind works. He conceals intent by making something look like something else. He doesn’t advertise the fact he’s being tricky. This isn’t his style.”

“So it has to be mine?”

“Let’s not go through the big tumbling act again. It has to be somebody else. Your hand doesn’t look so great.”

It took an effort to make a fist. Soon it wouldn’t be possible. “I feel like such a damned juvenile, Frank. I only hit people in self-defense. Usually.”

“I could stay over long enough to play some chess with Meyer in the morning, if I can get into the hospital, and if he’s up to it.”

“I’ll get you in, and unless he had a bad night, he’ll play.”

Friday morning I smuggled a guest and a magnetic chess set into room 455. Blaney, the boss nurse, was all set to run Frank Hayes out of her territory. He looked like the handyman at the local drunk farm. But he turned a considerable and unexpected charm in her direction, all very courtly, gracious, considerate, and almost overdone. The Russians say it is impossible to spoil porridge with too much butter. Blaney hesitated, then shrugged, then smiled, then laughed aloud, then gave him a girlish little slap on the arm and went out, giggling.

Meyer, who had brightened considerably at the appearance of Hayes and the chess set, looked marvelingly at Frank. “Who would ever have known!” he said.

Hayes opened his big fist and looked at the diminutive chess pawn. “You get white,” he said. “Shut up and open.”

They got into a long closed game, dull for the onlooker. I wandered out. When I returned at noon, they were talking, and the board had been pushed aside. Meyer had offered the draw and Hayes had accepted. Meyer looked weary. He yawned and said, “The decision of the Board is that you use your contacts and see what you can find out about Mansfield Hall.”

“Gentlemen, your faithful, loyal employee has just finished making a few phone calls, and begs to report on that very situation. Hall is a professional go-between. He has spent so much time sitting in a cell for contempt of court because he wouldn’t answer questions, people tend to trust him. He has had ulcers so bad he has about a third of a stomach left. He is reputed to be a poker player of formidable talent. Suppose you have five thousand acres of land over in Boondox County and you want to get it quietly rezoned so that the Devastation Minerals Company can set up a phosphate mining operation there and a chemical fertilizer plant, and will pay you fifteen hundred bucks an acre for it, if you can deliver it with the new zoning. Because that comes to seven point five mil, you are willing to lay out a hundred and fifty thousand cash to buy a favorable vote from three out of the five county commissioners of Boondox County. Mansfield Hall will find a legitimate investment for you. You put in three hundred thousand and, seven months later, you give up and cash in your chips and show a long term loss of two hundred thousand. In the mean time three commissioners have become richer by fifty thousand each, in some way they are perfectly willing to explain, if they are ever asked.”

“Does he do any laundry work?” Frank asked. “I mean on a straight basis. Turn it in and get it back all pretty?”

“I wouldn’t know. Maybe. It’s rumored he handled a big kidnap payoff. He has some kind of status with the Cuban community, for some sort of services rendered. He spends a lot of time on airplanes, domestic and foreign. Apparently he’s smart, sly, well-connected, and doesn’t cheat his clients.”

“Where would you say he’d pick up his clients?” Hayes asked.

Meyer yawned again. “From other attorneys,” he said.

They brought Meyer’s lunch tray and rousted us. A bland diet. Food that was beige, tan and buff and looked pre-chewed, with the tray brightened by the dietitian’s touch-a dollop of red gelatin on a very small green leaf, and a wedge of bright yellow lemon on the tea saucer.

Blaney brought it herself, saying, “Well! We should be hungry by now, shouldn’t we?”

Meyer looked at it and said, “We are. We are. You can be the one to eat it, my dear.”

“You’re a lot better,” she said. “Let him have a good long nap today, fellows.”

It was a good long nap. Frank’s gear was locked in my car. I drove him to the airport, over to the private sector and out to where his crew of two were sitting on camp chairs just inboard of the starboard wing tank of the white ship, in the noonday shade of the delicate-looking wing. Ted and Harry.

Harry was a bald ex-colonel with a boyish face. Ted was much younger, a Navy type who had gotten out after ‘Nam. Turn Arnold Palmer’s clock back to about twenty-eight, give him overlong reddish curls and a pair of eyes of a gray even paler than my own, paler than spit. They both wore odds and ends of uniform of several services from several wars.

Some signal must have been sent which I did not recognize, because when Frank said, “This here is McGee,” I got a far more than casual inspection.

After they went aboard to get on the air and order up the battery cart, Frank gave me Mansfield Hall’s card, complete with penciled unlisted special number on the back.

“Tell him you’re authorized to negotiate for me. Maybe you can push the door open far enough to see what’s beyond it. Probably not. Give it a try. It bothers me.”

“And how do I get to you if I learn anything?”

“That’s on this other card. What’s going to happen, I am going to take on one more project than I’ve got the troops to handle, and that’s when you’re coming aboard. I’ll work you down to a nub and make you very rich.”

“I’m employed. Self-employed.”

“Ted and Harry gave you good marks. I worked with you once, remember? Meyer has a high opinion.”

I had to laugh. “Good marks from the airplane people, huh? Oh, Jesus, Frank. Thanks a hell of a lot.”

“What’s so funny?”

“Having spent a certain amount of time up to my glottis in swamps, with about fifteen little ulcers per leg where the leech bites didn’t heal too good, and having spent some time trying very seriously to get all six foot four inches of McGee all the way inside one steel helmet, and having listened to the airplane people flying over, high and hard and fast, on their way home to officers’ clubs and steak and booze and movies and more clusters on their air medals, I am not all the way overwhelmed by getting any approval from any of them.”

He grinned as wide as I had ever seen him manage, and clamped my sore hand too hard and said, “When I really need you, I’m coming after you. Count on it.” That was when he let the authority show. It was heavy. While it was turned on, I could believe what he said.

And pretty soon I saw the distant little white toy come skimming down the runway and go on up and over, climbing with turbine scream through the low-altitude smutch of too many cars toward that fabled high blue yonder to level off and go arrowing across Castro-land, down to that tiny island of one hundred (100) bank$ tucked below the land mass of Cuba.

Nine

I PHONED Mr. Hall and used Frank’s name and Seven Seas, and he said he could see me at four. I rolled from Bahia Mar out past the Port and out to the Interstate and turned left to Miami. I put Miss Agnes up to seventy, and out of respect for her prior standards of performance, I eased her up slowly.

I felt that I had violated the integrity of the old Rolls by having her rebuilt to contemporary highway standards. Ever since I had dumped her into a drainage canal to avoid hitting a fleet-footed girl in the night, I had been upgrading all the hidden parts. Now she had the big engine lifted out of a 1972 Mark IV Continental that was totaled. Rebuilding the engine with both stock and custom power assists had meant a new gear train and a new rear end. Then she had more power than the suspension and the brakes could handle. So we installed a suspension out of the biggest Dodge pickup, along with power disc brakes all the way around. Of course I had to change to a twelve-volt system, and put in two heavy-duty batteries and a heavy-duty alternator. After several weird improvisations, we rigged a power steering system that worked well enough. There was enough extra horsepower to borrow some to run a really efficient air-conditioning system.

Any true aficionado of the Rolls would have taken one look inside the hood and run off to throw up. Sometimes I want to. Funny how, in this age of miracles, I had to give up so many nice little items Miss Agnes used to have. For example, on a cold morning I used to be able to flip a little switch on the dash that activated a battery-operated oil-circulation pump and a heating device. When the oil was up to the temperature recommended by the Works, a ruby light would glow and I would turn off the pump and heater and start her up. She used to have a calibrated dial on the side of the carburetor which could be turned manually to alter the mixture to achieve maximum performance at the indicated number of meters above sea level. She used to have a handle below the dash which could be used to change the degree of softness or rigidity of the springing, so that even while moving you could adjust her to ride at maximum comfort regardless of the roadbed.

And she had a clock that wound up with a key and kept time.

Detroit has never even caught up with the 1923 Rolls, to say nothing of the ones of Miss Agnes’s vintage.

But unless I had either got rid of her or upped her performance, the traffic was going to kill me. And I did not want to sacrifice all that height and leather and walnut and dignity and be trapped in semi-foetal position in some squatty little pastel capsule with my tailbone eight inches from the macadam. So she cost me what a couple of those space-age torpedoes would have cost, and I still feel like apologizing to her for the total organ transplant.

I must confess to getting a certain childish pleasure out of driving her when she is challenged. I was heading up I-75 well north of Gainesville one bright afternoon at the legal seventy, on an unusually empty hunk of highway, when three hulking youths in a yellow ‘Bird appeared in the rearview moving up fast. They slowed while passing and held even, looking at old Miss Agnes, a horrid blue, corrupted by the makeshift pickup bed. They seemed to be marveling that she could push that upright windshield through the air at seventy. They were crowing with idiot laughter. They made finger gestures and sped on, back up to ninety perhaps. I gave them a couple of miles, then floored Miss Agnes. The new needle was motionless against the stop when I blew by them at one forty plus. They made a try, but kept dropping back and back until they were gone. I nearly overshot my exit. I apologized to the old lady for the extra exertion. I wonder if they ever tell the story. Who would believe them?

Taking the short run down to Miami gave me a chance to sort out what Frank Hayes had told me. Professor Ted had had a batch of future projects. Without knowing exactly how I arrived at the figure, I had the feeling he had seven or eight more lined up. He knew that he was in a dangerous line of work. It takes skill and luck to stay out of trouble on the oceans with a small boat. Underwater work can go very bad very suddenly. And people have been killing other people for the sake of gold and jewels for a long, long time. So, as a considerate father, he had taken good care of his daughter’s future needs by setting up the substantial trust account at First Oceanside. Would he have not made just as careful an arrangement for the project documents? Obviously they were valuable. The total sum in trust was proof of how useful the earlier projects had been.

I remembered the time he had told me how he had researched the dream book. It seemed almost too easy. I asked why other people didn’t do the same thing he had done.

He had frowned, shaken his head slowly. “It’s one of the great mysteries of the human condition, Travis. Maybe we all think it is not worth doing merely because it is so obvious it must have been done already. Fantastic warehouses of knowledge rot away, untouched. The scholars seem to have no interest. The adventurers have no research skills. They’ve found ancient jewelry in tombs in the Middle East made of smelted platinum. It takes eighteen hundred degrees centigrade to melt it. Two thousand years ago, the Chinese made aluminum ornaments. Getting aluminum from bauxite is a sophisticated chemical-electrical procedure. In the Baghdad Museum you can see the parts of a dry battery which worked on the galvanic principle and generated electricity sixteen hundred years ago. More smelted platinum has been found in Peru, in the high country. Knowledge fades away, and some is rediscovered and some isn’t. We never seem to take the trouble to really find out until too late. For several years the public baths at Alexandria were heated by burning the old scrolls and documents carted over from the great library. Are we so arrogant we believe that there was nothing that was burned up that hasn’t been rediscovered? I dug back only four hundred years or so. That’s easy. Yet I found journals which had turned to solid blocks, as if all the pages had been glued together. I found old documents so fragile I could not touch them without turning them into dust, and others where the ink had faded until it was completely gone. Treasures are buried on those pages, never to be found again except by the rarest accident. It’s the… contemporary arrogance that bothers me. The idiot idea that we are the biggest, the greatest, the most powerful people who ever walked the earth. Know something? Think this over. I could take you to the high country of Peru, to a quarry area near Sacsahuaman, and show you where a particular block of stone was quarried and dressed, and I could show you that block of stone half a mile away. It was transported there during the time of the Incas. If, on the basis of national emergency, this nation were to be required to devote all its technological skills, all its wealth, and all its people to moving that block back to the quarry, we would try and we would fail, my friend. It weighs twenty thousand tons! Forty million pounds! The only time we ever move that much weight is when we let a vessel as big as the Monterey or the Mariposa slide down the ways at the shipyard, into the harbor. We have no cranes, no engines, no levers to budge that much mass. Do you think the Incas knew some thing mankind has since forgotten? Bet on it. Knowledge is the most priceless and most perishable substance on earth.”