WE SAILED INTO THE WINTER MEDITERRANEAN, A SEA OF short gray waves, spiteful winds, and busy sea lanes. I headed far north of the African coast, out beyond the busiest stretch of sea where the giant ships plunged blindly east and west between the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, but even in these less trafficked waters there was filth on every wave; mostly plastic bottles and bags. I remembered a friend claiming that it was possible to navigate the Mediterranean by understanding the sea’s currents and reading the town names from the plastic bags that floated out from every shore.

My two guards, realizing that their responsibilities involved wakefulness, had imposed a crude watch system on themselves which meant that on our first afternoon out from Tunisia Gerry was trying to sleep in the forecabin while the seasick Liam was slumped in the cockpit where, with an Uzi on his knee, he was trying not to show his abject misery. “If you ate less grease,” I told him, “you wouldn’t be so sick.”

“Fried food is good for you,” he said stubbornly. “It lines the belly, it does.”

“With what? Sump-oil? And you should give up smoking.”

“Oh, come on, mister! What do the focking doctors know?”

“You’re so eager to die young, Liam?”

“My grand-da, now, he smoked like a focking chimney, he did, and he had a proper fry-up every morning! Blood pudding, fried bread, bacon, eggs, ’taters, sausage, tomatoes, the works, and all of it fried in bacon fat, and he lived to be seventy-three!”

“That’s not old.”

“In this focking world it is.” Liam drew hard on his cigarette, then half choked as a spasm erupted in his gullet. He twisted round to vomit and the Uzi clattered on to the cockpit sole.

“I hope that gun’s safety catch is on,” I said when he’d finished retching.

“I’m not a focking amateur,” he moaned unhappily, then raised red tired eyes to the towering triangle of Corsaire’s mainsail. “I could murder someone for a piece of soda bread right now,” he said, and the thought of that Irish delicacy immediately sent another spasm of sickness bubbling up his throat and he gagged again, chucked away his cigarette and twisted over the gunwale to spew helplessly into the bubbling sea.

“I can cure your seasickness,” I said when the latest bout was over.

“How, for Christ’s sake?” He was crouching out of the wind to light a fresh cigarette.

“A bottle of cod liver oil and a bottle of whiskey, both drunk straight down, followed by thirty-six hours of absolute agony, but after that I promise you’ll never be seasick again.”

“Oh, my God. Oh fock.” He turned again. I had once made the same offer to Michael Herlihy, who had similarly turned it down. Michael and I had been teenagers and I had cruelly forced him into a small cat-boat and brought him ashore two hours later looking like a dead wet squirrel. I doubted he had ever forgiven me.

Liam flopped back on the thwart and watched as I opened the engine hatch and took a wrench to the boat’s exhaust system, disconnecting the outlet pipe from the muffler. We were under sail, so the engine was cold and quiet. Then I took the thirty feet of flexible tubing from the cockpit locker and connected it to the top of the muffler with a jubilee clip. I fed the pipe’s free end through the engine compartment’s forward bulkhead and thus into the starboard lockers of the saloon. Liam, recovering from his last spasm of sickness, frowned at the serpentine loops of tubing that filled the engine hatch and cockpit floor. “What are you doing?”

“Running a blower through the bilges to dry off the gelcoat we put on top of the gold.”

“Very wise,” he said, as if he knew what I had been talking about, “very wise.”

I put the boat under the command of the Autohelm, then went down to the saloon where I opened the lockers, pulled the hose through and introduced it into the boat’s bathroom where a shower tray had a water activated pump under its outflow. A grille in the bathroom door allowed fresh air to circulate from the saloon to keep mildew from growing too thickly in the shower stall, and the grille made the bathroom perfect for my purpose. I cut off the excess tubing which I carried back to the cockpit and tossed overboard to add to the Mediterranean’s pollution. “There,” I said comfortingly to Liam, “all done.”

“Will it take the stink out of the boat?” he asked. “Because it focking stinks down there, it does.”

“It’s the resin-hardener. It’ll pass.”

“Smells like a whore’s armpit.”

“You hire the wrong whores, Liam.”

He looked sour at the implied criticism, then freshened as he remembered what rewards were waiting at our destination. “They say American girls are real nice.”

“They’re clean!” I said encouragingly. “And they like their men to be clean too. They’re particular about that.”

“I had a swill off before we left home!” he said indignantly.

“You’ll slay the ladies,” I assured him. “Especially in Boston. They love their Irish heroes there. You’ll be the Grand Marshal of the St. Patrick’s Day parade and Congressman O’Shaughnessy will want his picture taken with you. It won’t be like Dublin, I promise you.”

“It’ll be grand, so it will.” Liam, his face pale as milk, watched in misery as I unfolded a chart. “Where the fock are we?” he asked.

“There.” I pointed to a spot just off the Tunisian coast.

He looked round the horizon, trying to spot land. “Can’t see a focking thing.”

“We’re just out of sight of the coast,” I explained. In fact we were much farther north, but Liam did not really care. I could have sailed the Corsaire down the throat of hell and he would have been too sick to notice.

My two guards ate sandwiches that night, washed down with sticky Tunisian cola and cheap instant coffee. I gave Liam four powerful sleeping pills to help his drowsiness overcome the stench of the hardener, then sent him to his bunk in the forecabin. Gerry sat with me in the cockpit for a while, but soon became bored with the darkness and the inactivity and so took his precious Uzi below. He loved the small gun. He caressed it and kept it always close. It gave him status. I watched him from the cockpit and saw him tracing the gun’s workings with his fingers. “I’m going to have to close the companionway,” I called down after a while.

“I need the fresh air,” he whined.

“The light’s wrecking my night vision. So either switch the damn lights off, or close the hatch.”

He chose to shut the companionway. I waited till my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, then went to the foredeck where I tripped the catch on the half-open forehatch. As I softly closed the hatch I could hear Liam’s rhythmic snores. I went back to the cockpit and waited.

I was beating north-west, taking Corsaire into the open waters between Sardinia and the Balearics. It was a chilly night, and dark. The heavy boat was sluggish, its extra weight making awfully hard work of the small seas, and the awkward, choppy motion seemed to reflect my mood. I was nervous. My heart felt raw and sick, an actual feeling in my chest which I suspected was the physical manifestation of conscience. I wondered if, over the years, I had become careless of death, and that sense of a skewed and wasted past made my whole future seem as bleak and dark as the seas ahead. The short waves thumped on Corsaire’s stem, smashing white over her bows and draining noisily from her scuppers. Just after ten o’clock I saw a container ship steaming eastwards, her stack of lights as bright and tall as an office block, but once she had sailed beneath the horizon we were again alone in the harsh darkness.

At midnight, with my heart thumping like a flabby bladder, I turned on the engine. The starter whirred, caught, and the motor steadied into a regular and muffled beat. I left it out of gear as though I was merely running it to charge the batteries. The sails hauled us into the seas. I heard nothing from the saloon and suspected that Gerry, like the half-drugged Liam, was asleep. After a while the water-activated pump beneath the shower tray clicked on and spewed water outboard for a while. Still no one woke below.

I let the motor run as Corsaire thumped and dipped into the Mediterranean night. Her bow wave shattered white against the dark waters, foamed briefly, then faded behind. The stars were shrouded by clouds and we were far from the powerful loom of the lighthouse on Cape Spartivento and so I steered by compass and kept a rough log, noting after each hour my estimate of miles run. Six, five and a half, six again, and each small increment of nautical miles carried Corsaire and her dying cargo north-west toward Europe. I was supposed to be racing along the Muslim North African coast to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from there south-east to the Canary Islands from where we were supposed to let the trade winds carry our cargo of gold across the Atlantic, but instead, in this choppy darkness, I was committing murder. I had routed the engine’s

Вы читаете Scoundrel
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату