Scoundrel

My God, I thought when I got aboard Corsaire, but was this the best the Provisional IRA could drag up? It was no wonder that Shafiq had sounded so unenthusiastic about Liam and Gerry, for they were hardly the stuff of legends.

Liam was a skinny youth with a starved wan face, red hair and jug ears. He had timid, furtive eyes, suggesting that for all his short life Liam had been surrounded by stronger people who had left him pinched, resentful and ratlike.

The only ratlike thing about his companion was a small pigtail that decorated the nape of his thick neck. Gerry was a beefy, red-faced man whose cheap shirt strained across his plump back and bulging stomach. He had a massive chin, small eyes, and cropped black hair. He greeted me with a surly nod, as though trying to establish a pecking order at our very first meeting.

I chucked my sea-bag into the after cabin and ordered them to tell me about themselves. “We can’t be strangers and shipmates,” I said cheerfully, “so tell me your stories. How old are you for a start?”

They were both twenty-three, both born and raised in Belfast, and both now living in Dublin. They pretended to be battle-hardened veterans of the Irish Troubles, but their boasting was uncomfortable and unconvincing. They had the restricted vocabulary of deprivation, the fouled lungs of chain-smokers and the thin minds of ignorance. Liam and Gerry were the cannon-fodder of riots and revolution, the spawn of decaying industrial cities, and they were supposed to be my shipmates for the next three months. I asked if either had ever sailed before. Liam shook his head, though Gerry claimed to have spent some time aboard an uncle’s lobster boat. He was vague on the details, but bridled indignantly when I asked if he was competent to steer a simple course. “I can look after myself, mister!”

Liam was far more apprehensive. “We’re crossing the Atlantic in this wee boat?”

“Yes.”

“Fock me.” He went pale.

“It’ll do you good,” I told him. “Put some color in your cheeks. By the time you reach Miami you’ll be a competent seaman.”

“But I get focking seasick, mister!” Liam said.

“You what?” I asked in horror. Flynn had sent me seasick crew?

“I told Mr. Flynn that, but he said it didn’t matter! He said this would be like a focking cruise, so he did.”

“The airplane was real good,” Gerry said accusingly, as though Corsaire’s accommodation was a real disappointment after their charter flight from Dublin. For both boys it had been their very first airplane flight, but neither was looking forward to their maiden yachting voyage with quite the same excitement.

Shafiq, relieved that I had taken responsibility for Liam and Gerry, gave me Halil’s written instructions. They were simple enough. I was to take Corsaire to the north Tunisian port of Ghar-el-Melh where we should wait for the gold. Once the coins were concealed aboard Corsaire we were to sail for Miami. “And who the hell do I contact when I reach Miami?” I demanded of Shafiq. I could not believe I was simply supposed to call Michael Herlihy’s Boston office and risk being overheard by the FBI.

“They know who to contact.” Shafiq pointed to the two Irish lads.

“You do?” I challenged them.

“Yes, mister,” Gerry said.

“What a way to run a revolution,” I said unhappily. “So let’s get on with it.”

I stowed my few belongings, put my sextant in a drawer of the chart table, then rummaged through the supplies which il Hayaween had arranged to be put aboard. It took me two hours to check the boat, but everything seemed to be present, including thirty feet of flexible plastic tubing that I thrust out of sight in a deep cockpit locker, then, with nothing to hold us under the battlements of Monastir, I started Corsaire’s engine and singled up her mooring lines. The Palestinian influence had ensured that there were none of the time-consuming bureaucratic procedures that usually accompanied a Tunisian departure; instead, after bidding Shafiq farewell and shouting at Liam and Gerry to stay out of harm’s way, I cast off, reversed from the pontoon and motored toward the open sea.

At the very first surge of the waves Liam belched, gripped his belly and his cheeks turned a whitish green. I told him to stay on deck, for the last thing I wanted was to have the boat’s interior stinking of his vomit. He lay flat, groaning and unhappy, as we plugged head on into the persistent north wind. “Have you ever heard of Michael Herlihy?” I asked Liam, who shook his head miserably. “He’s much worse than you,” I said cheerfully. “He gets seasick just looking at a boat.”

“Oh, Jesus.” But he could not have been feeling too unwell, for he managed to light himself a cigarette. “How long till we get to wherever we’re going?” he said miserably.

“Two days to Ghar-el-Melh,” I said cheerfully, “then two or three months across the Atlantic.”

“Months?” He stared at me, saw I was not joking, so crossed himself. “Christ help me.”

The morning turned cold as we headed north into the Gulf of Hammamet. Liam’s seasickness got no better, yet he insisted on sharing Gerry’s enormous midday meal of eggs and bread fried in bacon fat and washed down with the sweet cola they had bought in Monastir. Liam fetched the meal back up in seconds. Gerry frowned at the bucket I had managed to thrust on to his friend’s lap. “Waste of good food, that.”

I asked them more about themselves and heard the all-too-familiar Belfast story of children born into bleak housing estates and growing up into the hopelessness of chronic unemployment. In another society they might have found menial jobs, but there were not even floors for them to sweep in Ulster, and the pointlessness of their lives had scraped their souls to a bedrock of hate that could only be appeased by the twin pleasures of drink and reducing other people to their own level of misery. Uneducated, unskilled and bitter, they were good for nothing except to be the foot-soldiers for Ireland’s Troubles, but even that calling had turned sour. Somehow, they were vague about just how it had happened, their names had been given to the security forces. Warrants for their arrest had been issued and so Liam and Gerry had been forced to flee south across the unguarded border with the Republic of Ireland and there, in what they called the Free State, they had found a refuge in a Dublin housing estate every bit as bleak as the Belfast ghetto from which they had fled.

“How do you like Dublin?” I asked Gerry. Liam was almost comatose, but Gerry seemed to be enjoying the afternoon. We were under sail, chopping north and east into a steep head sea that threw up great fountains of salty spray. I was sailing to save gasoline, and planned to tack back toward Gap Bon after nightfall. I was still not used to the boat which seemed clumsier than her lines had suggested. She was riding low in the water and making heavy work of seas that a boat of her length should have soared across. Her previous owner had over-ballasted her, perhaps out of nervousness, and doubtless he had made her into what he wanted: a safe docile boat that would have been comfortable enough on a fine summer day, but Corsaire was ill suited to this choppy and windy winter work and I dreaded to think how she would behave with an extra thousand pounds of weight in her belly. Still, short of beaching her and cutting a chunk of lead out of her keel, there was nothing I could do, and better a too heavy boat lumping across the waves than a lightweight bouncing across.

“Dublin’s focking terrible,” Gerry answered my question about how he liked living in Ireland’s capital, and Liam groaned agreement.

“Why is it terrible?” I asked.

“Because no one focking cares about us in focking Dublin,” Gerry explained indignantly. Like Liam, he used the word “fock” as a modifier, an intensifier, and as an all-purpose replacement for any other word that momentarily escaped his restricted vocabulary. “Dubliners don’t focking care!” he went on. “I mean, Jasus, we’ve been risking our focking lives for Ireland, so we have, and the focking Dubliners couldn’t give a monkey’s toss what we’ve done! The focking Garda came round, didn’t they just, and they said they knew who we was and why we was in Dublin and if we so much as lifted a little finger they’d take us inside and beat the focking Jasus out of us. It’s your focking Ireland I’m fighting for, I told the focking policeman, and you should be focking grateful to me, but was he shit? He told me to fock away off!”

“It’s tough,” I said with careless sympathy. In my own Dublin days I had seen how IRA activists fleeing from northern arrests had come south expecting to be treated as heroes, only to find an utter indifference and even a distaste for their actions. One Dubliner, after listening to a northerner for a whole evening, had wearily told me that Britain’s best revenge on Ireland would be to give Ulster back to the Irish.

It took the lumbering Corsaire three days to reach Ghar-el-Melh, which turned out to be a small harbor surrounded by ancient fortifications. The harbor entrance was silting up so that I was forced to