Scoundrel

because of the love we shared for that decried, battered and rain-sodden city.

Then came a day, or at least a long period, when I was awake and listening alternately to the sea and the central heating boiler and during which no one came to question me. The house, it seemed, was oddly silent. The cellar light was off.

I rolled off the cot and crouched on the floor. There was something unusual, something unsettling in the silence. I had become accustomed to the small sounds of the house; the squeak of a door, the scrape of a foot, the chink of metal against a plate, the distant noise of a toilet flushing; but now there was just a profound silence in which, with a horrid trepidation, I edged my way to the stairs and then climbed slowly upwards. I was naked and the small hairs on my arms and legs prickled. I had goose-bumps.

I reached the top step. I stopped there, listening, but there was nothing to be heard. I groped for the door lever, pressed it down and, to my astonishment, the door swung easily open.

Light flooded into the cellar. It was a dim light, like daylight enshrouded by curtains.

I stepped out of the door to find myself in a long, beautifully furnished and deeply carpeted hallway. A brass chandelier hung in the center of the hallway, while a balustraded staircase curved away to my left. There was a lovely oil painting of a barquentine on one wall and a nineteenth-century portrait of a man dressed in a high wing collar hanging on the opposite wall. The wallpaper was a Chinese design showing birds of paradise among leafy fronds. Beside the front door was a wind gauge that flickered as an anemometer on the house roof gusted in the breeze. The only incongruous feature of the elegant entrance hall was a stack of boxes and bikes piled against a washer and a dryer; all the things, I guessed, that had been taken from the cellar to make space for my bare prison.

To my right an open door led into a vast airy kitchen, tiled white, with a massive fridge humming in one corner. Copper pans hung from a steel rack. Two paper plates had been discarded on a work-top along with a pot of cold coffee. I went back into the hallway, selected a random door and found myself inside a lavishly appointed living room. The room was hung with delicate watercolors, the sofas were deep and soft while the occasional tables gleamed with the burnish of ancient polished wood. Old magazines lay discarded on the tables and, more incongruously, a pile of empty hamburger boxes was stacked in the marble fireplace, suggesting my kidnappers had sometimes eaten in this lavish room. The shuttered windows were framed by plush drapes of antique tapestry corded with red velvet. An old-fashioned brass-tubed spyglass stood on an elegant tripod before one of the windows. I crossed the deep-carpeted room and pulled back the wooden shutters.

“Christ!” I was suddenly, wonderfully dazzled by the reflection of a full winter sun streaming from a glittering winter sea. This house, so lavish and rich and huge, was built on a mound almost at the sea’s edge. The small waves flopped tiredly on to a private beach not twenty paces from my window. There was a tarpaulin-covered swimming pool to my left, a balustraded timber deck in front of me, and a boathouse and an ice-slicked private dock to my right. A yacht was berthed at the dock while out to sea there was a red buoy with a number 9 painted on its flank. I guessed I was in one of the big estates near Hyannisport or Centerville, or perhaps I was further west in one of the great beach-houses of Osterville.

Then I forgot all that speculation for I had suddenly noticed what name was painted on the sugar-scoop stern of the yacht berthed at the private dock.

I had last seen her in Barcelona, stowed safe in an open-topped container. Before that, in a lumbering winter sea, I had committed murder in her saloon. Now she was here, docile and tame, in the deep winter’s sun.

She was the Rebel Lady.

I stumbled upstairs, flinging open closet doors as I searched for clothes. In the master bedroom, where the rumpled sheets suggested at least one of my interrogators had slept, I found a walk-in wardrobe filled with summer clothes. There were checked trousers, and trousers embroidered with spouting whales, and trousers bright with golfing motifs, and three pairs of trousers printed with emerald shamrocks, but at the back of the closet I found a plain, undecorated pair of jeans which fitted me well enough. I pulled on a shirt decorated with a polo player, a white sweater that purported to be the livery of an English cricket club, and a pair of blue and white boat shoes. There was a slicker in the wardrobe. I grabbed it and ran downstairs.

Then, before going out to explore Rebel Lady, I spotted a telephone on the kitchen wall.

For a second I hesitated, torn between my desire to search the boat and my worries about Johnny, then I picked up the phone and punched in his number. I could scarcely believe that the phone worked, but suddenly it rang and Johnny himself answered and I felt a great wash of relief pour through me. “Oh, Christ,” I said, and slid down the wall to sit on the tiled kitchen floor.

“Paulie?” Johnny’s voice was tentative, worried.

I was crying with sheer relief. “Johnny? Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right. I’ve been trying to reach you for two weeks!”

“Two weeks?” I gazed around the kitchen. My mind was in slow gear, stumbling and lurching. “What day is it, Johnny?”

He paused. “Are you drunk, Paulie?”

“Tell me. Please.”

“Sunday.”

“Christ,” I said. “Who’s winning the war?”

“That finished days ago! It was a walkover.” Johnny paused. “What the hell’s happened to you, Paulie?”

“Did someone come for the boat papers?” I asked him.

“The girl, of course. You know? The pretty Chinese girl?” He chuckled. “You dog.”

I climbed to my feet and leaned my forehead on the cold window glass and stared out at the berthed yacht. “She told you that we were lovers?” I guessed that was what his chuckle meant.

“I can’t blame you. She’s real hot one.” Johnny must have sensed that something was wrong, for his tone suddenly changed. “Are you saying you didn’t send her?”

“In a way I did.” Not that it mattered now, I thought. The main thing was that the bastards had not snatched Johnny and given him the treatment in some raw cellar.

“Are you OK, Paulie?” Johnny asked.

“Not really.”

“So where the hell are you?”

“Big house, I’m guessing it’s somewhere on the Cape shore of Nantucket Sound. Does a red buoy with a number nine mean anything?”

“Not off the top of my head.”

“Hold on, Johnny.” I had spotted a pile of junk mail that someone must have collected from the mail-box and piled indiscriminately on a work surface.

I pulled the top piece toward me and saw it was addressed to “The Occupier.” I read the address to Johnny, who whistled. “You’re keeping rich company. Centerville, eh? That number nine buoy must mark the Spindle Rock. I’ll come and get you in the truck. Be there in forty-five minutes, OK?”

I put the phone down, pulled on the slicker, and tugged open the kitchen door. I saw that the alarm system which should have been triggered by the door’s opening had been ripped out. I pulled the thin slicker round my shoulders and stepped into the brisk and freezing wind. I shivered as I walked gingerly along the frozen path to the private dock which had pilings fringed with thick ruffs of ice left by the falling tide. A gull screamed a protest as I approached the dock, then flapped slowly away across the glittering sea. I paused beside the boathouse, scrubbed frost from a window pane, then peered inside to see a beautiful speedboat suspended on slings above the frozen water. The sleek boat’s name was painted clear down her flank in huge green letters, Quick Colleen. She had a pair of monstrous two-hundred-horsepower engines at her stern, making her into a pretty, overpowered toy for the summer; a fitting accessory to this pretty, overpriced summer home that my captors had used as their temporary base. I walked on to where Rebel Lady fretted at her lines.

Those docklines, like the yacht’s rigging, were thick with ice. The wind stirred Rebel Lady, jarring her against her frozen ropes and quivering her long hull. I stepped cautiously down into her cockpit and found that her companionway was unlocked. I pulled the boards free, slid back her main hatch, and