Scoundrel

exhaust into the main cabin and now its fumes were filling the boat. The exhaust system’s cooling water was collecting in the shower tray and being expelled, but the poison gas was staying below.

At four in the morning, while it was still dark, I shut off the engine. It suddenly seemed very quiet.

I steeled myself to open the companionway and was greeted with a belch of foul, warm gaseous air. I gagged, coughed, and backed away. The smoky gas streamed and swirled out of the saloon to make a dissipating haze in the thin light. I could just see Gerry slumped on the table, his fingers curled either side of his cropped hair with its ridiculous pigtail. He was not moving.

I took a deep breath of fresh air, then went down into the choking saloon and put a finger on Gerry’s neck. He was still warm. There was no pulse. I went into the forecabin where Liam lay on his back with his open eyes staring sightlessly at the closed hatch. His sleeping bag stank of urine. His pale, pimpled skin had been reddened by the effects of the carbon monoxide, while a trail of vomit had hardened on his cheek and pillow. I put a finger to his neck to find that, just like Gerry, he was quite dead. I pushed the forehatch open to let a gust of welcome chill air stream into the boat’s fetid interior.

I tried to manhandle Liam back into the saloon, but his dead weight and the boat’s clumsy motion made the task impossible, so I spent an hour rigging a system of pulleys and lines with which I hoisted both dead men out of the boat’s reeking interior. I used the spare jib halyard to hang the twin corpses beside the mast where they hung like butcher’s meat, supported by cords I had looped under their armpits. Suspended like that it was a comparatively simple job to pull their sleeping bags up around their bodies. I worked by the light of the navigation lamps, ballasting the sleeping bags with the lead weights that il Hayaween had so thoughtfully provided, then I lashed the bags’ necks tight around the dead men’s throats. Liam’s aggrieved eyes reflected the green starboard light as I struggled to truss the cords tight. I wrapped yet more cord round and round the down-filled bags, expelling as much air as I could, then I lowered the halyard and draped the two bodies on the starboard rail. I untied the cords that had held the corpses, secured the halyard safely, then heaved the weighted sleeping bags overboard. There was a splash, a flurry of foam, then nothing. There was just enough wolfish gray light in the dawn sky to show that the two bodies sank instantly.

I fetched their two guns and hurled them into the sea, then disconnected the flexible tubing and threw it overboard. Afterward, exhausted, I made coffee and folded a slice of bread over a chunk of tinned ham. The breakfast made me feel sick.

I reconnected the exhaust, then, with the sunlight streaming between a watery chasm of the dissipating clouds, I began to jettison the boat’s supplies. Three months’ rations went into the sea, and with them went the materials I had used to hide the gold; the rest of the resin, the hardener, the mats and the brushes. I kept two brushes and the unused can of white paint, but everything else went overboard. A trail of garbage followed Corsaire as gulls fought over the packets of bread and biscuits.

I cleaned the filthy exhaust deposits from the shower tray, then searched the boat for every last trace of Gerry and Liam. I tossed overboard their tawdry plastic holdalls and their cheap changes of clothes and the brand- new tooth-brushes that neither had ever used, and their pathetic hoard of Cadbury’s chocolate bars and the empty lager can Gerry had saved as a souvenir of his very first airplane flight. I jettisoned their brand-new Irish passports and their postcards of Monastir that neither man had bothered to send home, though Liam had got as far as writing half a misspelled message on the back of one card: “Dear Mam, its great crack so far. Foods terribel. Give my love to Donna and Gran.”

I searched the pathetic relics before I threw them overboard, and found what I expected on a slip of cardboard that had been folded into the breast pocket of Gerry’s suit jacket. It was an Irish telephone number which Gerry had doubtless been told to call collect once he reached America. The number would probably belong to an IRA sympathizer whose home and telephone had never before been used by the Provos, thus minimizing the danger that the Garda Siochana, the Irish police, would be tapping the line. I memorized the number, then added the cardboard scrap to the sea’s filth. Afterward, with the boat rinsed clean, I stared behind and tried to frame a prayer to atone for my night’s work, but no prayer would come. I told myself that Liam and Gerry had died in the service of their new Ireland. It would never have occurred to either of them that an Ireland fashioned by their kind would not be an Ireland worth living in, but all they had ever known was an Ireland that they could not endure and so, crudely, they had tried to change it. Now their trussed bodies were on the ocean floor while I, with Saddam Hussein’s gold, sailed on.

I had murdered two men. I had done it in cold blood, with much planning and forethought, and solely for my own gain. I had not killed them to stop the slaughter of the innocents which il Hayaween’s questions about airliners and ground-to-air missiles had implied, but instead I had killed Liam and Gerry for five million dollars. I did plan to stop il Hayaween’s slaughter, but I also planned to steal the coins, indeed I had intended to right from the moment in Miami when I had first heard about the gold. The problem was not stealing the gold, but living to spend it. My story would be simple; that the badly overloaded boat, wallowing in rough seas, had been pooped by a bad wave. That she had sunk. That I had tried to rescue Liam and Gerry, but failed. That the gold, with the boat, was lost. That I had survived in a liferaft, alone. When I reached America I would hide for a few weeks, then, when the IRA found me, I would brazen the story out. Liam and Gerry would have destroyed my lie and so I had murdered them.

I tried to justify the murder by telling myself that they would have killed me if I had finished the voyage. Or if they were not to have been my killers, others would have killed all three of us. I told myself that if you sup with the devil you need a very long spoon, and that Gerry and Liam should have known what dinner table they were sitting at. I tried to justify their murder, but it remained murder and it was on my conscience as I sailed on to Barcelona. That too was part of the plan.

It was a hellish journey. I was single-handed in a busy sea, so I dared not leave the cockpit. Instead I catnapped at the helm and snatched the odd hour of sleep whenever it seemed safe or whenever sheer fatigue overwhelmed me. One night I was startled awake to hear the throbbing crash of a steamer’s engines pounding not far off in the darkness and, when I turned in panic, I saw the lights of a vast ship thundering past not a hundred yards away.

The next day, during a lull from the cold winter winds that were sweeping south from the French coast, I buckled on a lifeline and, with Corsaire safe under the control of her self-steering, I crouched on the swimming platform built into her sugar-scoop stern and, using the pot of white paint that I had listed as an essential part of the false floor’s disguise, I painted out the name Corsaire and the French hailing port, Port Vendres. I then took all Corsaire’s papers, shredded them, and committed them to the deep.

On the following day, when the second coat of white paint was dry and the old lettering completely hidden, I unrolled the transfer names I had ordered by mail in Belgium. Carefully, all the while balancing myself against the sluggish pitch of the overloaded boat, I rubbed the new names on to the fresh paint. Thus Corsaire became Rebel Lady, and Port Vendres became Boston, Mass. Then, using an epoxy glue, I fastened the old Rebel Lady maker’s plate on to the side of Corsaire’s coachroof and, leaning dangerously out under the pulpit’s lower rail and using commercial stick-on letters and numbers I had bought in Nieuwpoort, I put Rebel Lady’s Massachusetts registration number on either bow. I finally replaced the French tricolor with the Stars and Stripes, and thus Corsaire ceased to exist and in her place was Dr. O’Neill’s forty-four-foot boat, Rebel Lady, ready to go home.

Two days later I delivered Rebel Lady to the commercial docks in Barcelona. I spent a busy day knocking down her topworks; taking off her sails, craning out her mast. Then, with her spars safely lashed to her decks, she was hoisted out of the water. The crane driver slid open a window of his cab and shouted something through the thin dirty rain. I shrugged to show I did not understand, but the foreman translated into French for me. “He says she weighs as much as a sixty-footer!”

“I prefer heavy boats.”

“Like women, eh?” he laughed and repeated the joke in Catalan to his crane driver who, with an exquisite skill, was lowering Rebel Lady into an open-topped container.

Once she was safely cradled I borrowed an electric drill and, using templates I had brought from Nieuwpoort, I etched Rebel Lady’s Hull Identification Number on to her transom and, as American law required, in a concealed place below. I chose the new false floor for the hidden number, then, that last job completed, I locked her hatches, signed her over to the shipping company, paid the balance of my account in cash