Scoundrel

on me.

I was determined not to be impressed. “Halil is an expert on crossing the Atlantic?” I asked sarcastically.

“He is an expert on whatever he chooses to be,” Shafiq squashed me. “So come.”

We walked past the security men and down one of the long floating pontoons. Shafiq was so apprehensive that he scarcely spared a glance for the sun-tanned women in the cockpits of the moored boats. Instead he led me toward the pontoon’s far end where a handsome sloop was moored. “That’s the boat!” Shafiq had paused to light a cigarette. “You like her?”

“How can I tell?” I said irritably, yet in truth I did like the white-hulled Corsaire. The name was painted across the swimming platform of her sugar-scoop stern above her hailing port, Port Vendres, which was the French Mediterranean harbor nearest to the Spanish frontier. Corsaire looked a handsome boat, expensive and well equipped, effortlessly dominating the smaller and scruffier yachts further down the pontoon. She was not the product of any boatyard I knew, making me suspect that she had been custom designed and specially built for a wealthy owner who had his own particular ideas of what made a good cruising boat. This man had wanted a fractional rig, a center cockpit, and a long low free-board on a boat some forty-four feet long. The design, I grudgingly admitted to myself, did not look like a bad choice for a transatlantic voyage. So long as she was in good condition.

“Why is she for sale?” I asked Shafiq.

“Her owner left her here last winter. Tunisia’s winter rates are cheaper, you understand, than in France? But he’s since fallen ill and he needs to sell her.” Shafiq raised a hand in greeting to the two young men who sat in Corsaire’s cockpit beneath a white cotton awning that had been rigged over her boom. He spoke to them in Arabic, gesturing at me, and they grunted back brief replies. I had seen such men before: thugs plucked from the Palestinian refugee camps, trained to kill, then given guns, girls and the license to strut like heroes among their exiled people.

“Is one of them Halil?” I muttered.

“They’re his bodyguard.” Shafiq replied in a low voice, then smiled obsequiously as the two young men gestured us to climb aboard. Then, while one stood guard, the other ran quick hands across our bodies to make certain neither of us was armed. If any of the Western yacht crews saw the intrusive body search, they ignored it, for Tunisia, despite its Western trappings, was still a Muslim and Arab country and a man did well to leave its customs and barbarities unremarked. One of the bodyguards relieved me of my sea-bag, then pointed me toward the main companionway. “Be respectful, Paul!” Shafiq hissed at me. “Please!”

I ducked down the steep stairs. To my right was the chart table and instrument array, to my left the galley, while ahead was the spacious saloon with its comfortable sofas and fiddled shelves. The saloon seemed very dark after the bright sunlight, but I could just see a young man sprawled on the furthest sofa. At first glance he looked no more prepossessing than the two brutes in the cockpit, and I assumed he must be a third bodyguard protecting his master who would be in the forward sleeping cabin, but then the young man took off his sunglasses and leaned his elbows on the saloon table.

“I am Halil.”

“I’m Shanahan.”

“Sit.” It was a command rather than an invitation. Behind us the washboards were slammed into place and the hatch slid shut, imprisoning me in the Corsaire’s belly with the man called Halil. It was stuffy and humid in the boat, and something in the closed-up hull reeked of decay.

I sat on the starboard settle. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the gloom, yet I could still see nothing noteworthy about the man who raised such fears in Shafiq. Halil looked to be in his middle thirties and had a dark- skinned, unremarkable face. His black hair was thick and brushed straight back, and his only idiosyncrasy was a thin moustache like a 1940s bandleader. He was wearing a white shirt, no tie and a black suit. He looked strongly built, like a peasant, while his left hand, the only one visible, had short square fingers. A burning cigarette rested in an ashtray on the table and beside it was a packet of Camels and an expensive gold lighter. “The owner wants 650,000 French francs for this boat,” Halil said unceremoniously. “Is that a fair price?”

“If she’s in good condition,” I said, “she’s a bargain.”

“She is frivolous.” Halil brought his right hand into view to lift the cigarette. He sucked deep on the smoke, then restored the cigarette to the ashtray. His right hand, I noticed, had been shaking so that the cigarette smoke trembled.

“Frivolous?” I asked.

The dark eyes flicked toward me and I began to understand Shafiq’s nervousness, for there was something almost reptilian in the blankness of this man’s eyes. “Boats, Shanahan,” he lectured me, “should serve noble purposes. They can be used to bring fish from the sea, or to carry goods, or to be gun platforms for fighting, but only a frivolous people would build boats for pleasure.” He spoke English in a deep-toned voice that invested his words with authority. “You think such a frivolous boat is worth 650,000 francs?”

“I think she’s worth more.”

“I shall offer 600,000,” he said flatly. But why was he making the offer, I wondered, and not the Provisional IRA? Brendan Flynn had insisted that the Irish were responsible for transferring the gold, yet this dark-voiced man was quibbling over Corsaire’s price as though it would come from his budget and not the IRA’s.

“You’d best make no offer till I’ve inspected the boat,” I told him, “and I’ll want her hauled out of the water so I can see her hull.”

I could have been speaking to the wind for all the notice Halil took of me. “She has already been inspected,” he said, “and declared fit for your journey. She is thirteen and a half meters long, four and a quarter meters wide, and has an underwater depth of one and three-quarter meters. Her keel contains 3,500 kilos of lead. What more do you need to know?”

“A lot,” I said, noting how heavily Corsaire was ballasted, which suggested her builder had been a cautious man.

“There is no time to be particular.” Halil spoke very softly, but there was an unmistakable menace in his voice. I wanted to argue with him, but felt curiously inhibited by a sense that any opposition to this man could provoke an instant and overwhelming physical counterattack. He seemed so utterly sure of himself, so much so that, even though his vocabulary had proved he knew nothing of boats, he nevertheless had spoken of Corsaire’s sea-going qualities as though his opinion was final. Yet his next question showed how much he still needed my expertise. “How long will it take you to cross the Atlantic with her?”

“Leaving from here?”

He paused, as if unwilling to admit anything. “From near here.”

“Going where?”

Again the pause. “She will go to Miami.” Where, I thought, her delivery skipper would be murdered; one more anonymous body which would be ascribed to the drug trade’s carnage.

“When will the voyage be made?” I asked.

“That does not matter,” Halil said disparagingly, though in fact it mattered like hell. Any Atlantic passage undertaken before the trade winds had established themselves would take much longer than if I waited till the new year, but I sensed this man was not amenable to detail and so I made a crude guess.

“Three months.”

“That long?” He sounded horrified and, when I did not modify the answer, he frowned. “Why not use the engine? Can’t you put extra fuel on board and motor across?”

“A boat like this one will only go as fast as her waterline allows.” Again I spared him the detail, and instead offered him a helpful suggestion. “Why not buy a big motor-yacht? One of those will cross much faster.”

He made no reply, but just lifted the cigarette to his lips and this time I saw that the fingers of his right hand seemed crooked, as though the hand had been injured and never healed properly. The hand shook, so much so that he had difficulty in putting the cigarette between his lips. Water slapped at Corsaire’s hull and reflected the sunlight up through the portholes to make a rippling pattern on the saloon’s ceiling. I was soaked with sweat, though Halil seemed immune to the close humidity inside the boat. He lowered the trembling cigarette. I thought he was considering my suggestion of using a motor-yacht to transport the gold, but instead he suddenly changed the subject, asking me whether I believed America would fight to liberate Kuwait. It seemed an odd