McIllvanney stared at me as though I was a complete idiot.
“Of course he’s focking involved. He’s up to his black eyeballs in the drug trade. He’s even got a house on Murder Cay, so he has, and he’s not the only one with his nose stuck in that particular trough, but it’s not your business, and you don’t mess with the man because he’s got friends who won’t think twice about feeding you to the sharks. I’ve got a job for you.”
I almost ignored his last words because I was still thinking about Billingsley’s dishonesty, but then I realised just what McIllvanney had said and I frowned. “A job? What kind of job?”
“What the hell sort of a job do you think it is? It’s an extra charter for Wavebreaker, of course.”
“I can’t do it, you know I can’t,” I said instantly and very firmly. McIllvanney did not respond, except to stare at me with his unblinking and reptilian eyes, and thus he forced me to add an unnecessary explanation. “I want to sail Masquerade south before the hurricane season, so I’m going to need all that’s left of this summer to repair her.” That was entirely true, but it sounded very limp as I said it and my voice just tailed away. “Of course I’d like to help you, but...”
“The job will pay extra,” McIllvanney said flatly. He was not looking at me any more, but was staring out to sea where a small tanker, her navigation lights glowing bright in the falling darkness, nudged gingerly towards the bunkering buoys. “A lot extra. And it’s legal.”
“If it wasn’t for Masquerade—” I began, but McIllvanney cut me off.
“The client’s offering 115 American dollars a day for the skipper, which makes the whole thing worth over ten thousand bucks to you. Ellen will clear eight thousand, so she will, and Thessalonians will make over three.”
I was doing some swift mental arithmetic, and the result was so crazy that I paused to rework the sums in my head. The car salesmen cheered from the darkness beneath as I stared into McIllvanney’s implacable eyes. “Three months?” I asked in disbelief. “The client wants the boat for three months! That’s impossible. I’ve got Masquerade to repair.”
“The client says he’s an admirer of yours.” McIllvanney managed to insert a sneer into the word admirer. “He wants you particularly, so he does. You remember Senator Crowninshield?”
“Of course I do.” I remembered George Crowninshield very well, for he and his wife had been my very first clients on board Wavebreaker and I had been nervous, not just at the prospect of a new job, but because of the client’s eminence. George Crowninshield was a US senator, one of the stars of that legislature, and these days it was impossible to see his name in a magazine or newspaper without the added speculation that he might soon become the President of the United States. He was not the clear favourite for the Oval Office, for there were other men whose achievements were more palpable than George Crowninshield’s, but he looked good, sounded better and no journalist had ever discovered him with his fingers in the till or his legs in the wrong bed. His enemies said that he was a politician without a cause, but if that was the worst they could say of him then he could indeed look towards the White House.
I had liked the senator. I had expected an American senator to be as pompous and flatulent as a British MP, but George Crowninshield had proved affable and friendly. He had been intrigued by my relationship with my father, and sympathetic to my rejection of the theatre. My father, Sir Tom, was the second most famous man of the British stage, of any stage for that matter; a towering and famous figure, one of the great actors of all time, who accepted the adulation as his due and who had expected me, like the rest of his children, to follow in his footsteps. Instead, in rebellion against the illusions of the stage and films, I had run away from home and joined the Marines. Not as an officer, but as a marine. Sir Tom had tried to get me out, had failed, and had then left me to my own devices. What hurt him was how much I looked like him. I, the only one of his children who had not gone on to the stage, had inherited the famous Breakspear eyes, the Breakspear height, the Breakspear cheekbones, the brooding Breakspear presence that my father had used to break the hearts of unnumbered women. I was often called Hamlet because I so resembled my father’s appearance in his most famous film, the ‘Coronation’ Hamlet, so named because it had been released in Coronation year. Yet I was not my father. I was an exmarine sergeant who was also a damned good sailor.
Senator Crowninshield had been sympathetic to the problems a child might have with a famous parent. The senator had a son and daughter of his own and, though he had never talked specifically of their problems, I sensed that in my life he was seeking an answer to his own family’s complexities. He and I had talked long into the tropical nights and I had enjoyed his company, and I would have liked to have spent more time with Senator Crowninshield, but three months? “Just how can a US senator take off from his job for three months?” I now asked McIllvanney in astonishment.
“The senator doesn’t want the boat for himself.” McIllvanney shook a cigarette out of a packet, then opened his briefcase that lay on the floor beside his chair. “He wants the boat for his two children. Except they’re hardly children any more; the wee bastards are twenty-four, so they are. Twins, you see, a boy and a girl.” He had found his lighter in the briefcase, as well as a letter that was embossed with a blue and gold eagle above the rubric ‘From the Washington Office of Senator George Crowninshield’. McIllvanney held the letter out to me as though it explained everything. “The girl’s called Robin-Anne, and the boy is Rickie. It’s a graduation present for her, so it is.”
I ignored the letter. “A graduation present?” I was accustomed to wealthy Americans treating their children to lavish rewards for completing extremely average educations, but three months’ charter aboard Wavebreaker seemed uncommonly generous, even to a man as famously wealthy as Senator Crowninshield.
“It’s his focking money,” McIllvanney justified the senator’s generosity.
“But it’s my time,” I said as I stood up, “and I can’t spare it. I’ve got a boat to repair.”
“Ellen will be disappointed,” McIllvanney said slyly, “she likes her money, so she does.”
He again managed to invest his words with a sneer. “She’s only saving her money,” I sprang to Ellen’s defence, “so she has something to live on while she writes her first novel.”
“She should shack up with a man, then, like the other women writers do,” McIllvanney said nastily and, when I did not respond, he jabbed a finger at me. “If she’s so keen to save a spot of money then she won’t thank you for cheating her of eight grand.”
“Find someone else to skipper the charter,” I said. “Why don’t you ask Sammy Meredith? He’d love to do it.” Sammy was another of Cutwater’s skippers, and a good one.
“Because the senator asked for you personally,” McIllvanney said. “He wants you, not Sammy or anyone else, and if you won’t do it, then you’re not just putting Ellen’s money at risk, but you’re putting my commission on the line too, and I might not like that.”
“Get lost.” I would not be threatened by McIllvanney. “Ask Sammy Meredith.”
“A hundred and twenty-five dollars a day?” McIllvanney offered.
It never occurred to me that something quite extraordinary must be implicated in the charter if George Crowninshield was willing to pay such an egregious price for an out-of-season charter. “The answer’s still no,” I said.
McIllvanney shrugged acceptance of my refusal, then held up a hand to stop me leaving. “Talking of Ellen,” he said casually, “is the silly bint still refusing to fock?”
“Jesus wept!” I was wondering if the world had gone mad. “You’re as bad as Billingsley!”
McIllvanney was quite unmoved by my anger. “Because if she can’t make money from the senator’s charter,” he went on, “I was thinking of offering her a job or two on my own behalf. I mean, she’s an attractive girl, so she is, despite her ideas, and she could make a pretty penny out of her looks. Know
what I mean?”
I knew exactly what he meant, and I felt a seething of anger at his suggestion. “Ask her yourself. I won’t bloody pimp for you.” I snatched his sliding door open and went back into the arctic cold where I punched the button to summon the lift. Donna was on the telephone. She smiled at me as the lift doors opened, then mouthed a silent farewell and fluttered her fingers at me till the lift doors closed.
I rode the bicycle back to the darkened and empty boatyard. Ellen had gone to her one-room apartment in town while Thessy was reading his Bible in the main-cabin, so I heated myself some baked beans in Wavebreaker’s microwave, spread them on buttered toast, soaked them in brown sauce, then ate a morose supper on deck until the bugs drove me to the screened sanctuary of the staterooms below. Thessy asked me what McIllvanney had wanted, but I said it had been nothing very much for I was too disgusted with the man to tell Thessy the truth. I felt dirtied by the corruption of pimps, yet I would soon be free of them for I had just one more job to do, and then I would be loosed to the consolations of Masquerade and to the joys of the South Pacific’s winds. Just one more job; then home to the sea.
Next morning the sky was clear, the wind steady, and the barometer high. The customers’ beds were made, the galley was stocked, and the black scorch marks of Deacon Billingsley’s matches had been scrubbed out of Wavebreaker’s pale decks. Her fuel tanks were filled with diesel, the last fresh water was aboard, there was sun-tan lotion and lip-salve in every cabin, and the rotted chicken heads were safe in the freezer. We were ready.
McIllvanney made his usual inspection. Wavebreaker was the flagship of Cutwater’s fleet and McIllvanney liked to see her sparkling before each charter. That morning, as usual, he found nothing to complain of, so instead he wheeled on me to demand whether the boat’s electronic instruments were functioning properly.
“Ask Ellen,” I replied laconically, for Ellen was the only person who truly understood all the fancy gadgets though, perversely, she had still not mastered a sextant. She confirmed to McIllvanney that the weather-fax machine and the Loran and the Satnav and the radar and all the other things that hummed and winked and glowed in the night were working properly.
McIllvanney flicked a non-existent scrap of dust from the varnished rail, then gave Thessy a sly glance. “I suppose His Holiness Pope Breakspear told you about the senator’s offer, eh, Thessalonians? And I dare say you’re disappointed about it, because it’s not every day that an out-island lad gets offered that sort of money, is it now? It’s even better money than you could earn in high season, so it is, but of course your father isn’t Sir Thomas Bloody Breakspear and as rich as a pig in shit, so you need the money, while his Holiness here doesn’t. And the senator was most particular in wanting Pope Breakspear. No one else, the senator said, just his Holiness.” McIllvanney favoured me with a jackal-like smile.
Thessy hesitated, torn between curiosity and his loyalty to me, but he finally shook his head. “I don’t know about the senator’s offer, sir.”
McIllvanney pretended astonishment. “Did I speak out of turn? That’s terrible, if I did. Forget I even spoke.” He shot a glance at Ellen, making sure that she had understood him as well as Thessy, then he looked at his watch and shouted for Bellybutton to start up one of the workboats. “I’ll see you in a week’s time, so I will.” He gave me an evil grin, knowing just what dissension he had sown in Wavebreaker’s crew, then he was gone.
“What offer?” Ellen asked icily when McIllvanney was out of earshot. “And what senator?”
So, just as McIllvanney had intended, I was forced to tell Ellen and Thessy about George Crowninshield’s offer, and how the senator was willing to pay above the odds if we would all abandon our summer plans and take his precious kids to sea for three months. I tried to make the prospect unattractive, but McIllvanney’s vision of money had dazzled both Ellen and Thessy.
“Why the hell did you say no?” Ellen demanded angrily.
“I didn’t say no. I just said I couldn’t go myself! But I told McIllvanney that Sammy Meredith could go instead of me.”
Ellen did not like that suggestion. Sammy was a competent skipper, but he could not keep his hands to himself when Ellen was close. Sammy was presently delivering one of our Nautor Swans to its Massachusetts owner; many of the charter yachts were privately owned and only leased into Cutwater’s care on condition that we delivered them back to their owners for the northern summer. I assumed McIllvanney had sent a message to Massachusetts asking Sammy to telephone as soon as he reached port, and I was certain that Sammy would jump at the chance of three months’ extra salary, and if he did then Ellen and Thessy would similarly earn their small fortunes.
“But Mr McIllvanney said the senator vants you, Nick,” Thessy said unhappily.
“He just wants someone to give his two spoilt brats a holiday. He doesn’t care who skippers the boat!”
“But maybe he does,” Thessy insisted sadly, and both he and Ellen stared reproachfully at me as though I was risking all their future prosperity.
“For God’s sake,” I said angrily, “you’ll both get your money. Sammy Meredith will jump at the chance of three months’ work. I can’t do it, OK? I’ve got a boat to mend.” The two of them still gazed at me with resentful misunderstanding. Damn McIllvanney, I thought, and damn his blackmail. I turned away from my crew to demonstrate that I would not discuss the Crowninshield charter any further. “Thessy? Put up the flags.”
The flags were our final welcoming touch. Wavebreaker was registered in the Channel Islands, and thus sailed under a defaced British red ensign with the Bahamian flag flying as a courtesy ensign from the main spreaders, but I always greeted arriving charter guests with their own country’s flag—though such a gesture was considered bad flag etiquette by nautical purists, it was good for our final tip—and so Thessy now hoisted the Stars and Stripes to the mainmast’s spreaders and a smaller Stars and Bars just beneath. The Confederate flag had been Ellen’s idea, to be unfurled whenever we had charterers from the deep South, and this week’s guests were three married couples from Georgia. I watched the two handsome flags uncurl to the warm wind, then went on my own tour of inspection. Wavebreaker looked good, and we, her crew, looked just as good in our matching blue and white clothes.
We were ready, even to the pitcher of orange juice, bucket of champagne and iced flask of vodka that waited on a table Ellen had carried up to the cockpit. The wind lifted the snow-white tablecloth and stirred the handsome red ensign at Wavebreaker’s stern. “She looks good,” I told my crew, “well done.”
“But suppose Crowninshield won’t accept anyone but you as Wavebreaker’s captain?” Ellen, refusing to be sidetracked from her lost dollars, asked in a sulky and defiant voice.
The question annoyed me. “I’m supposed to abandon Masquerade just to give his spoilt bloody kids a holiday?”
“No, you’re supposed to abandon Masquerade just so I can earn a few thousand dollars.” Ellen smiled very sweetly at me. “And if I don’t earn those few thousand dollars then I am sure as hell not going to sail away with you. As the psalmist says, dear Nicholas,” and Ellen’s smile became even sweeter, “you can blow that dream right up your ass.”
Thessy gasped at such blasphemy, while I scowled at Ellen’s blackmail. “You can earn your money with Sammy Meredith,” I insisted, “then sail away with me.”
“I can’t if the senator demands you,” Ellen said stubbornly, then turned away as Cutwater’s courtesy taxi arrived from the airport in a salvo of backfires and black smoke. Thessy slid down the companionway, took the cassette from the rack, and waited by the boat’s sound system for my signal.
The taxi doors opened. We knew very little about these last clients of the season except that they were two attorneys and a proctologist, all from Georgia and all vacationing with their wives, and we also knew that one of the wives was a vegetarian and that the proctologist hated pasta, but beyond that our guests were utter strangers and so we waited nervously
to see what kind of people would be our companions and paymasters for the next week. Doubtless the arriving customers were just as anxious about us, and part of our job was to relax them quickly. “You have to remember,” Ellen liked to lecture Thessy and me, “just how absurdly wealthy they all are, and how desperately the wealthy want to be liked because they can’t help feeling guilty about being so rich, so we only have to be obsequious, give them loads of booze, and pretend to be impressed by their entirely predictable and usually jejune opinions, after which they’ll reward us with an outrageously large tip—which is, after all, the sole reason for being nice to the ghastly creatures in the first place.”
The first man out of the Chevrolet was wearing blue and green Bermuda shorts, a pink and scarlet Hawaiian shirt and a blue tennis visor with the words ‘Go Dawgs’ inscribed on its peak. “He must be the proctologist,” Ellen said sweetly.
“Vot’s a proctologist?” Thessy, ever eager to extend his education, asked from the foot of the companionway.
“A proctologist is an asshole doctor, Thessy dear,” Ellen explained, then gave me a smile that would have frozen the heart out of a blast furnace. “Or in Nick’s case,” she added loudly, “a brain surgeon.”
“Now!” I interrupted Thessy’s next earnest question, and he pushed the cassette into the tape deck and a steel band arrangement of ‘Yellow Bird’ thumped and jangled from the cockpit speakers to fill the marina with its bright and jaunty welcome. Bellybutton, a straw hat over his eyes, danced a few ludicrous steps on the deck of the workboat, thus looking for all the world like a simple Bahamian native welcoming the nice white folks from Georgia who now stood blinking in the bright sunlight beside a growing mound of their designer-label luggage. The man with the ‘Go Dawgs’ hat saw our rebel flag at the spreaders and let out an approving yell that sent two gulls squawking up from the garbage cans behind Mclllvanney’s office.