Crackdown

  “Shut up,” Ellen said firmly.

  “I thought you wanted to go.”

  “I do, and I shall go. But I also want to enjoy the anticipation of going.”

  I smiled. “Just pray we don’t get a North Atlantic fog, because in those latitudes we could roll in the swells for days, with the moisture beading the shrouds and the air as cold as charity, and always being terrified that a super-tanker will barrel out of the muck at full speed to thump you under her bows without even knowing you were ever there.”

  Ellen borrowed the adjustable spanner that Mama Sipcott provided as a lobster-claw cracker. “Don’t come the Ancient Mariner with me, Nicholas Breakspear.” She opened a claw and pulled out a sliver of succulent flesh. “If we encounter fog over the North Atlantic we will turn on the radar, switch on the Satnav, and start the engines. These are the 1980s, not the twelfth century when your namesake was Pope. He wasn’t even a very good Pope.”

  “He was excellent!” I protested.

  “Authoritative, unimaginative, anti-Irish, and a lousy politician,” Ellen commented, then she smiled and pushed the lobster meat into my mouth. “God knows why I like you, Nicholas Breakspear.”

  “Because of my sexy legs,” I assured her.

  She laughed. Mama Sipcott’s butter sauce was gleaming on her chin and she looked very beautiful. Beauty, I thought, was something to do with the way a face betrayed character. She seemed oblivious to my scrutiny. “I suppose I like you,” she said after a moment’s thought, “because you lack guile. You remind me of a cocker spaniel I once owned.”

  “Oh, woof-woof. Thanks a million.”

  She made a face at me. “You’d prefer to be villainous?”

  I nodded. “I’ve always wanted to be mysterious and a little bit sinister and have girls swoon when they see me.” Like my father, I realised, and tried to reject the thought.

  To Ellen, my wish to be mysterious was a hoot. “Forget it. You have an open face, Nick, and you smile too easily, and you’re much too honest, and you really can’t resist helping people; and frankly, you’re about as subtle as a Mack truck. As a villain, Nick, you just don’t measure up.”

  I turned and looked at myself in the cracked Cutty Sark Whisky mirror behind Mama Sipcott’s bar. Hamlet, not Macbeth or Richard III, stared back. I turned again to Ellen, pretty freckled Ellen with her high cheekbones and clever green eyes and flaming hair and mocking smile, and I suddenly wondered whether McIllvanney had spoken to her again in the last week. “Did McIllvanney—” I began tentatively.

  “Oh, yes,” Ellen cut in smoothly, and without any disgust in her voice. “In fact he increased the fee to a thousand dollars.” She sounded perversely proud of her increased value, and again I thought it best not to inform her that a bubblehead like Donna could earn twice that fee in a single night. “I told him to go jump in a lake,” Ellen said very calmly, “and then I told him that just as soon as I’ve finished with the Crowninshield twins I shall be sailing away—” she clinked her glass on mine, “with you.”

  It was the first time she had actually said for certain that she would sail with me and I could not hide my joy, and Ellen, seeing that pleasure, laughed at it. “Of course I’m coming with you, Nick! I was always planning to sail with you! Do you think I’d pass up an adventure like that?”

  So who cared about having a too-honest face? I was lucky Nick and she was pretty Ellen, and so I ordered another bottle of the sticky white wine and we let our dreams take wings. For we were going to sea.

  Ellen and I lingered on in Mama Sipcott’s for another hour and a half; indulging in the sailor’s shorebound pastime of planning the perfect voyage. We decided that Masquerade would sail from the Bahamas to Panama, and thence to the Galapagos where we would find Darwin’s giant tortoises. Then we would sail south to Easter Island to explore the mysterious statues before going to the mutineers’ refuge on Pitcairn Island. After that we would go to Tahiti, and I saw the excitement grow in Ellen as she realised that these plans were so close to coming true. It was an excitement that matched my own, for I had never sailed the South Seas and I had long dreamed of that scatter of tiny, magically named islands strewn across one third of a globe. By the time we had drunk our third bottle of wine Ellen and I had long reached New Zealand and were already sailing north towards New Caledonia. We were happy.

  We caught the bus back to Ellen’s apartment and collected her clothes and notebooks. She was moving back on board Wavebreaker in preparation for the next day’s early departure. I carried her luggage to the yard, noting that even Ellen’s strident feminism evaporated in the face of two heavy bags and tropical heat.

  Once in the boatyard Ellen ran ahead of me, evidently eager to reach Wavebreaker’s air conditioning. Then, as she reached the dock’s edge, she suddenly checked. “What on earth is that? Oh, no!” She began to run again.

  When I reached the water’s edge I understood her dismay. A large sports-fishing boat was moored alongside Wavebreaker, but moored so crudely that whoever had brought the powerboat alongside the schooner had not bothered to put out fenders, but instead had gouged long ugly gashes in Wavebreaker’s white paint.

  Yet even the gashes were not so ugly as the expensive boat that had caused them. There was nothing wrong with the boat’s lines, which were sleekly functional, but her long powerful hull, her upperworks, and even the interior of her capacious working deck had all been painted with a wartime dazzle paint. The seemingly random and jagged-edged pattern of blue, black, silver, green and white had been designed to disguise a boat’s shape from the prying eyes of U-Boat captains, so it seemed somewhat fanciful to thus camouflage a pleasure boat in the Bahamas. This boat was called Dream Baby, and she was clearly an expensive infant for rods and whip-aerials and outriggers splayed from her upperworks like the antennae of some outlandish insect. She boasted a harpoon walkway, a flybridge, and, above the highest wheel-platform, an aluminium canopy which held a radar aerial. The fighting chair on her aft deck had thick white leather straps giving it the appearance of a padded electric chair, while the dazzle paint gave the boat an oddly military look that was completed by the number 666 that was painted on her bows in silver-edged black numerals like those warships use to display their commissioning numbers. The boat’s wraparound windscreens were made of black polarised glass which only added to Dream Baby’s ugly air of menace.

  Ellen, unencumbered with luggage, had already reached Wavebreaker and taken two plastic fenders from a locker. She swung lithely down to Dream Baby’s gaudily painted deck and cushioned the two hulls.

  “How bad is the damage?” I called down to her when I reached Wavebreaker.

  “It’s scraped back to bare metal!”

  “I’ll give it some paint.” Wavebreaker’s hull was made of steel and, while such hulls are marvellously strong and safe, they are soon weakened if their steel is exposed to salt air. I had to paint the gashes as soon as possible so that rust would not begin to bite into Wavebreaker’s long sleekness.

  Ellen looked around the oddly painted powerboat. “You’d think someone rich enough to own a rig like this could afford a pair of fenders.”

  “Who cares? Just cut the damn boat loose,” I said vengefully.

  Ellen ignored my advice while I, obedient to the rule that if a job needed doing then do it without delay, found a pot of white paint and dug through the locker for a clean brush. Then, from behind me, an unfamiliar voice sounded: “Oh, ring my bells.” It was a man’s voice; drawling and lazy.

  I twisted around and almost blinded myself by staring straight into the sun, but then, through the dizzying glare, I made out the long silhouette of a tall man who seemed, incongruously, to be dressed in a long, transparent dressing gown. He was emerging in stately fashion from Wavebreaker’s companionway and, though I could see he was tall and lanky and had a ponytail of hair, I could make out no details of his face. “Who the hell are you?” I demanded.

  The man ignored me, walking instead towards Ellen who, dr
essed only in shorts and T-shirt, was climbing long-legged over Wavebreaker’s rail. “Be still my restless heart,” the man had a strong, caressing voice and the slow luscious accent of America’s deep south. “Dear lady, dear lady, to think that I might have lived my whole life through and never seen you. Oh, lay me down, just lay me down.”

  Ellen, usually so quick with a scornful reply, just stood and stared at the elegant stranger who stopped one pace away from her, took her hand, then bowed above her fingers. He kissed the air a fastidiously polite inch above her knuckles, then closed his eyes. “Dear sweet Lord above, I do thank Thee for Thy kindness in showing me this lovely woman before I died.” To my astonishment and chagrin Ellen left her hand in his as he opened his eyes and smiled at her. “My name,” he stroked her with his voice, “is Jesse Isambard Sweetman. And who, dear creature, are you?”

  Ellen still said nothing. I had straightened up and moved aside so that the sun no longer dazzled me and I could see Sweetman properly, and what I saw I did not like. His face was old and young, sardonic and knowing, amused and handsome; the face of a man who has seen the world’s wickedness and knows how to match it with his own. His long black hair was tied into its ponytail with a velvet ribbon, his skin was parchment pale, and his eyes dark. I put his age at forty, but even among men twenty years younger he would have been accounted handsome, and he knew it, for his expression showed both confidence and amusement as he continued to hold Ellen’s hand, and he showed even more amusement when she suddenly realised just what liberty she was thus granting him and jerked her fingers swiftly away.

  Thus released, Jesse Sweetman turned to look at me. The dressing gown had proved to be a long, stylish, ankle-length duster coat which was loosely woven from a delicate white cotton. Beneath the filmy topcoat he wore a black shirt and black trousers that were tucked into tall black boots. It was a dramatic and impractical outfit of a kind I only expected to see on the male models who posed in the more outlandish fashion magazines that our rich clients brought aboard Wavebreaker, yet Jesse Isambard Sweetman managed to wear the elaborate style with an elegant insouciance. The only incongruous note was a cheap round badge, enamelled in red and yellow, that he wore on his shirt, which bore the legend ‘Just Say No!’. “You must be Nicholas Breakspear,” he said carelessly, as though he did not much care whether I was or not.

  “Is that gaudy piece of junk your boat?” I gestured to where Dream Baby’s aerials showed above Wavebreaker’s gunwale.

  Sweetman turned and pretended to notice the sports-fishing boat for the first time. “No,” he said helpfully, then bestowed a patronising smile on me. “You look so like your father. It’s really uncanny.”

  “Did you bring that boat here?” I persevered.

  “Oh, indeed I did,” he said brightly, as though he merely indulged a rather dim child’s curiosity. “Your mother was Malise Fielding, am I right? Or are you Lucy de Sills’ son?”

  “Why the hell didn’t you use fenders when you tied alongside?”

  He sighed, intimating what a bore I was being. “I did not use fenders, Breakspear, because I despise precautions. Precautions are the symptoms of small and fearful minds. Precautions will not conquer empires, they will not build great cities, they will not transmute dreams into gold or carry men across wide oceans, and precautions will not, emphatically not, win fair ladies,” and here he turned to Ellen and lasciviously dropped his gaze to her long bare legs. Ellen twisted away and Sweetman laughed at her obvious discomfiture, then, as coolly as though he owned Wavebreaker, he stepped down into the central cockpit where he first brushed at, then sat on, one of the white cushioned seats by the ship’s wheel. “I’ve had a look round the boat,” he said very coolly, “and I approve of her. So tell me the cost of a week’s charter.”

  “The man you want to see,” I said, “is called Matthew McIllvanney and his office is the pink building with the outside staircase. He’s not here this afternoon, but you can doubtless telephone him next week.”

  Sweetman took a pair of polarised sunglasses from his shirt pocket and put them on before inspecting me again. He did not seem to like what he saw. “You’re really not being noticeably helpful,” he said after a pause, “so let us try again shall we? Would you please tell me the high season price for one week?”

  “How many passengers?” Ellen asked before I could refuse to answer.

  Sweetman paused again, this time to light a long pale blue cigarette with a slim gold lighter. He shrugged. “Two, four, six passengers? Does it really matter?”

  “One week in high season costs ten thousand US dollars for two people, and every extra couple is another thousand bucks.” Ellen’s voice was cold, as though she disliked satisfying his curiosity. “And to those prices you have to add the boat’s running costs.”

  “Which are?” Sweetman asked carelessly.

  “A lot.” Ellen said flatly. “You’re talking fuel, food and liquor, plus any toys you might want aboard like scuba equipment, snorkels, jet-skis or sailboards.”

  Sweetman drew on his fancy cigarette, then blew a plume of smoke into Wavebreaker’s rigging before smiling lazily at Ellen. “And tell me, sweet creature, do you count as a toy? Or are you a part of the initial ten thousand dollars?”

  “Get off the boat,” I said.

  “Shut up.” He turned on me like a snake. “You’re nothing but a hired hand, Breakspear, so shut the fuck up.” He glanced at the paint pot and brush that I was still holding. “Go and paint something. Be useful.” He stared into my eyes, challenging me to defy him, and when I did not move he looked back to Ellen. “I asked you a question, dear heart. Please be so good as to answer.”

  “Get off this boat,” I told him, but my anger only amused Sweet-man who unfolded his long thin legs from the cushioned thwart.

  “Dick off,” he said to me.

  I was surprised that he so eagerly sought to confront me. I am not a small man, nor am I a weakling, yet the thin Sweetman seemed unconcerned as I jumped down into the cockpit. Then I saw why he was so confident. He put a hand into a pocket of his elegant duster coat and brought out a small .22 pistol that he pointed at my face. “A ladies’ gun,” he said, “but remarkably effective at close range.”

  “Nick!” Ellen called warningly, as though I might not have seen the gun.

  The gun’s threat had not stopped my advance. I was calling Sweetman’s bluff, confident he would not dare pull the trigger, and equally confident that my marine training would let me turn him into mincemeat. I was also half drunk, and thus filled with the Dutch courage offered by Mama Sipcott’s worst white wine.

  Sweetman stood. There was, at last, a look of alarm on his face, and I could see him wondering whether he really would have to pull the small trigger. He held the gun pointed at my eyes. I began to fear that he would fire, and a small sober part of my brain registered just how foolish this confrontation was; a contest caused solely by two male egos over a girl sworn to celibacy.

  “Stop it! Both of you! I mean it!” Ellen’s voice was suddenly a harsh scream, so harsh that we both looked towards her and saw that she was threatening both of us with one of Wave-breaker’s heavy-duty fire extinguishers that she had snatched from its rack at the head of the main companionway. The cylinder was filled with a compressed chemical that would have smothered both Sweetman and me in an avalanche of nauseating foam. “Step back, Nick!” Ellen said to me, her voice recovering its normal timbre.

  “But I’m only going to kill him,” I said reasonably.

  “It is neither wise nor manly to get into a pissing contest with a skunk,” Ellen said coldly, “so step back, Nick.” She menaced me with the extinguisher’s nozzle and, because I knew Ellen did not make idle threats, and because I knew she despised all displays of macho violence, I obediently stepped backwards and watched as she transferred the extinguisher’s aim to Sweetman. “Leave us.” she said.

  “Listen, sweet lady—”

  “I said leave us!”

  He gave h
er his most confidently patronising smile. “Dear lady, I merely wish...”

  Ellen squeezed the lever. There was a gulp from the extinguisher’s valve and a trickle of yellow-white liquid dribbled pathetically from its nozzle. Sweetman crowed with laughter, but too soon, for, just as it seemed as though Ellen’s gesture had indeed collapsed into an ignominious anti-climax, the extinguisher first coughed, then spat a vicious deluge of white muck that fanned from the flared nozzle to splatter spectacularly against Sweetman’s chest. He staggered back, half tripped on the cockpit coaming, scrambled up to the deck and then to the ship’s rail. Ellen, who was utterly delighted with her achievement, followed him to spray the churning mess over his hair, then down on to the decks of Dream Baby as Sweetman jumped panic-stricken from our gunwale. “Nick!” she called. “It won’t turn off!” Ellen was laughing as she tried to stop the gunk that still spewed from the cylinder. Sweetman, safe under Dream Baby’s canopy, was starting his motors. He risked a soaking of foam as he darted out to cut his mooring lines, then twisted Dream Baby’s wheel and thrust her throttles forward. Ellen was laughing like a child let loose in a sweet shop. “It won’t turn off!” she said again.

  “Throw it overboard!” I didn’t want to spend the rest of the afternoon cleaning foam from Wavebreaker’s decks.

  Ellen hurled the still discharging extinguisher over the side. The cylinder bounced hard on Dream Baby’s dazzle-painted transom, then sank in the clear water where, resting on the sea-bed, it continued to discharge its disgusting foam. Sweetman turned a furious smeared face at us, then drove his garish boat hard at Wavebreaker’s hull to gouge a long scratch down to the bare metal. I heard the screech of protesting steel, then the powerboat bounced off our hull and accelerated away so that, within seconds, its powerful drives were swirling the sea into twin sprays of white water.