Wildtrack

  "What happened?" I asked my new acquaintance.

  "Motorbike." The reply was laconic. "Too many bucks and not enough sense. What do you expect of rich kids?"

  Jill-Beth introduced me to the son a few moments later.

  Charles Kassouli's face was startlingly handsome, but his character was distant and churlish. I thought he might be doped into lethargy with painkillers, though he proved snappish enough when Jill-Beth told him I was a sailor.

  "Sailing sucks." The resentful face turned to see whether I would take offence. I took none. If anything I felt a chill pity, for here was a boy born to the pleasures of the richest society on earth, and who had thrown them away with one twist of a motorcycle's grip. At the same time I felt some scorn. I'd known scores of people in hospital who, denied the chance to walk, faced their lives with a courage that made me feel inadequate. Charles Kassouli, though, was clearly not cut from the same cloth.

  "You've never sailed?" I asked him.

  "I told you. Sailing sucks."

  "Charles owns a motor-cruiser," Jill-Beth said in an attempt to chivvy him into cheefulness.

  "Are you dancing, JB?" He threw away his cigarette and swivelled his chair away from me.

  "Sure, Charlie." She walked beside his electric wheelchair on to the dance floor and I watched how unself-consciously she gyrated in front of him. She grinned at me, but I turned away because a voice had spoken in my ear. "Captain Sandman?"

  The speaker was a tall and fair-haired man who had broad shoulders beneath his white and braided uniform coat. He offered me a slight bow of his head. "Captain Sandman?" he asked again. He had a Scandinavian accent.

  "Yes."

  "If you're ready, sir?" He gestured towards the big house.

  I looked for Jill-Beth, but she had disappeared with Kassouli's son, and so I followed the uniformed manservant into the great house that was more like a palace. We entered through a garden room hung with cool watercolour landscapes. A door led to a long air-conditioned hallway lined with the most superb ship models of the eighteenth century. Naval museums would have yearned for just one such model, but Kassouli owned a score of them. The walls were hung with pictures of ancient naval battles. An open door revealed a conservatory where a long indoor swimming pool rippled under palms.

  At the hallway's end the Scandinavian opened both leaves of a gilded door and bowed me into a library where he left me alone.

  It was a lovely room; windowless, but perfectly proportioned.

  It was lined with expensive leather-bound editions in English, French, Greek and Arabic. On rosewood tables in front of the library stacks were more ship models, but these were of Kassouli's modern fleet. There were supertankers and bulk carriers, all painted with the Kassouli Line's emblem of a striking kestrel. Each ship's name began and ended with a K. Kalik, Kerak, Kanik, Komek. In the trade it was called the Kayak Line; a slighting nickname for one of the world's great merchant fleets.

  And a fleet run, I thought, by a modern merchant prince; a Levantine who had drawn me across the globe. I was suddenly very nervous. I stared up at the paintings which hung above the bookshelves. They were not pictures calculated to reassure a nervous Briton; they showed the battles of Bunker Hill, Saratoga, Yorktown, and, from a later war, New Orleans. The canvases were dark with varnish; the patina of ancient wealth giving gloss to a new American's fortune.

  On a table in the room's centre there was a handsomely mounted family photograph. Yassir Kassouli, his plump face proud, sat next to his wife. She was a fair-haired, good-looking woman with amused eyes. Behind them stood Nadeznha and Charles; proud children, wholesome children, the finest products of the world's richest melting pot. I saw how their father's Mediterranean blood had dominated in their faces, but on Nadeznha I could see an echo of her mother's humorous eyes.

  "A photograph taken before the tragedies." The voice startled me.

  I turned to see a tall, thick-set and balding man standing in a doorway. It was Yassir Kassouli. His skin was very pale, as though he had seen little sunlight in the last few months. What was left of his hair was white. In the family photograph he had appeared as a man in his prime, but now he had the look of old age. Only his eyes, dark and suspicious, showed the immense and animal force of this immigrant who had made one of America's great fortunes. He was in evening dress and bowed a courteous greeting. "I have to thank you, Captain Sandman, for coming all this way to see me."

  I muttered some inanity about it being my pleasure.

  He crossed to the table and lifted the photograph. "Before the tragedies. You met my son?"

  "Indeed, sir." The 'sir' came quite naturally.

  "I raised my children according to Western tenets, Captain Sandman. To my daughter I gave freedom, and to my son pleasure. I do not think, on the whole, that I did well." He said the last words drily, then crossed to a liquor cabinet. "You drink Irish whisky, I believe."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Jameson or Bushmills?" He had a New England accent. If it had not been for his name, and for the very dark eyes, I'd have taken him for a Wasp broker or banker.

  "Either."

  He poured my whiskey, then helped himself to Scotch. As he finished pouring, the door opened and his son, escorted by Jill-Beth, wheeled himself into the room. Kassouli acknowledged their arrival by a gesture suggesting they helped themselves to liquor. "You don't mind, Captain, if my son joins us?"

  "Of course not, sir."

  He brought me my whisky that had been served without ice in a thick crystal glass. "Allow me to congratulate you on your Victoria Cross, Captain. I believe it is a very rare award these days?"

  "Thank you." I felt clumsy in the face of his suave courtesy.

  "Do you smoke, Captain Sandman?"

  "No, sir."

  "I'm glad. It's a filthy habit. Shall we sit?" He gestured at the sofas in front of the fireplace.

  We sat. Jill-Beth and Charles Kassouli positioned themselves at the back of the room, as if they knew they were present only to observe. The son's earlier and surly defiance had been muted to a respectful silence and I suspected that Charles Kassouli lived in some fear of his formidable father. He certainly did not light a cigarette in his father's presence.

  Yassir Kassouli thanked me for rescuing Jill-Beth. He thanked me again for coming to America. He spoke for a few minutes of his own history, of how he had purchased two tank-landing craft at the end of the Second World War and used them to found his present fortunes. "Most of that fortune," he said in self-deprecation, "was based on smuggling. A man could become very rich carrying cigarettes from Tangiers to Spain in the late forties. Naturally, when I became an American citizen, I gave up such a piratical existence."

  He asked after my father and expressed his regrets at what had happened. "I knew Tommy," he said, "not well, but I liked him. You will pass on my best wishes?" I promised I would. Kassouli then enquired what my future was, and smiled when I said that it depended on ocean currents and winds. "I've often wished I could be such an ocean gypsy myself," Kassouli said, "but alas."

  "Alas." I echoed him.

  The word served to make him look at his family portrait. I watched his profile, seeing the lineaments of the thin, savage face that had become fleshy with middle age. "In my possession," he said suddenly, "I have the weather charts and satellite photographs of the North Atlantic for the week in which my daughter was killed."

  "Ah." The suddenness with which he had introduced the subject of his daughter's death rather wrong-footed me.

  "Perhaps you would like to see them?" He clicked his fingers and Jill-Beth dutifully opened a bureau drawer and brought me a thick file of papers.

  I spilt the photographs and grey weatherfax charts on to my lap. Each one was marked with a red-ink cross to show where Nadeznha Bannister had died. I leafed through them as Kassouli watched me.

  "You've sailed a great deal, Captain Sandman?" he asked me.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Would you, from your wide experience, sa
y that the conditions revealed in those photographs were such that a large boat like Wildtrack might have been pooped?" Kassouli still spoke in his measured, grave voice, as though, instead of talking about his daughter's death, he spoke of politics or the Stock Market's vagaries.

  I insisted on looking through all the papers before I answered.

  The sequence of charts and photographs showed that Wildtrack had been pursued, then overtaken, by a small depression that had raced up from New England, crossed the Grand Banks, then clawed its way out into the open ocean. The cell of low pressure would have brought rain, a half gale, and fast sailing, but the isobars were not so closely packed as to suggest real storm conditions. I said as much, but added that heavy seas were not always revealed by air pressure.

  "Indeed not," Kassouli acknowledged, "but two other boats were within a hundred miles, and neither reported exceptional seas."

  I shuffled the photographs with their telltale whirl of dirty cloud. "Sometimes," I said lamely, "a rogue wave is caused by a ship's wake. A supertanker?"

  "Miss Kirov's researches have discovered no big ships in the vicinity that night." Kassouli had the disconcerting trick of keeping his eyes quite steadily on mine.

  "Even so," I insisted, "rogue waves do happen."

  Kassouli sighed, as though I was being deliberately perverse. "The best estimate of wave height, at that time and in that place, is fifteen feet. You wish to see the report I commissioned?" He clicked his fingers again, and Jill-Beth dutifully brought me a file that was stamped with the badge of one of America's most respected oceanographic institutes. I turned the typed pages with their charts of wave patterns, statistics and random sample analyses. I found what I wanted at the report's end: an appendix which insisted that rogue waves, perhaps two or three times the height of the surrounding seas, were not unknown.

  "You're insisting that such seas are frequent?" Kassouli challenged me.

  "Happily very infrequent." I closed the report and laid it on the sofa.

  "I do not believe," he spoke as though he summarized our discussion, "that Wildtrack was pooped."

  There was a pause. I was expected to comment, but I could only offer the bleak truth, instead of the agreement he wanted. "But you can't prove that she wasn't pooped?"

  His face flickered, as though I'd struck him, but his courteous tone did not falter. "The damage to Wildtrack's stern hardly supports Bannister's story of a pooping."

  I tried to remember the evidence given at the inquest. Wildtrack had lost her stern guardrails, and with them the ensign staff, danbuoys and lifebelts. That added up to superficial damage, but it would still have needed a great force to rip the stanchions loose. I shrugged. "Are you saying the damage was faked?"

  He did not answer. Instead he leaned back in his sofa and steepled his fingers. "Allow me to offer you some further thoughts, Captain. My daughter was a most excellent and highly experienced sailor. Do you think it likely that she would have been in even a medium sea without a safety harness?"

  I saw that Kassouli's son was leaning forward in his wheelchair, intent on catching every word. "Not unless she was re-anchoring the harness," I said, "no."

  "You are asking me to believe"—Kassouli's deep voice was scornful—"that a rogue wave just happened to hit Wildtrack in the two or three seconds that it took Nadeznha to unclip and move her harness?"

  It sounded lame, but sea accidents always sound unlikely when they are calmly recounted in a comfortable room. I shrugged.

  Kassouli still watched closely for my every reaction. "Have you seen the transcript of the inquest?" he asked.

  "Yes, sir."

  "It says that the South African, what was his name?" He clicked his fingers irritably, and Jill-Beth, speaking for the first time since she had come into the room, supplied the answer. "Mulder," Kassouli repeated the name. "The report says Mulder was on deck when my daughter died. Do you believe that?"

  "I don't know." I hesitated, and Kassouli let the silence stretch uncomfortably. "There's a rumour," I said weakly, "that Mulder lied to the inquest, but it's only pub gossip."

  "Which also says that Bannister was the man on deck." Kassouli, who had clearly known about the rumour all along, pounced hard on me as though he was nailing the truth at last. "Why, in the name of God, would they lie about that?"

  I was beginning to regret that I had come to America. It had seemed like a blithe adventure when Jimmy had delivered the ticket to Sycorax, but now the trip had turned into a very uncomfortable inquisition. "We don't know that it was a lie," I said.

  "You would let sleeping dogs dream," Kassouli said scathingly, "because you fear their bite."

  I feared Kassouli's bite more. He was not a sleeping dog, but a very wideawake wolf. "There is something else." Kassouli closed his eyes for a few seconds, as if his next statement was painful. "My daughter, I believe, was in love with another man."

  "Ah." It was an inadequate response, but my Army training was not up to any other reaction. I could discuss the sea with a fair equanimity, but I was discomforted by this new, embarrassing and personal strain in the conversation.

  Kassouli, oblivious to my embarrassment, turned to his son. "Tell him, Charles."

  Charles Kassouli shrugged. "She told me."

  "Told you what?" I asked.

  "There was another fellow." He was laconic, and his voice was very slightly slurred.

  "But she did not say who he was?" his father asked.

  "No. But she was kind of excited, you know?"

  I did know, but I kept from looking at Jill-Beth. "Isn't it odd," I said instead, "that she sailed with her husband if she was in love with someone else?"

  "Nadeznha was not a girl to lightly dismiss a marriage," Kassouli said. "She would have found divorce very painful. And, indeed, she shared her husband's ambition to win the St Pierre. It was a mistake, Captain. She sailed to her murder."

  He waited once more for me to chime in with an agreement that her death had been murder. I'd even been fetched clean across the Atlantic to provide that agreement, but I did not oblige.

  Kassouli gave the smallest shrug. "May I tell you about Nadeznha, Captain?"

  "Please." I was excruciatingly embarrassed.

  He stood and paced the rug. Sometimes, as he spoke, he would glance at the family photograph. "She was a most beautiful girl, Captain. You would expect a father to say that of his daughter, yet I can put my hand on my heart and tell you that she was, in all honesty, a most outstanding young lady. She was clever, modest, kind and accomplished. She had a great trust in the innate decency of all people. You might think that naivety, but to Nadeznha it was a sacred creed. She did not believe that evil truly existed." He stopped pacing and stared at me. "She was named after my mother"—he added the apparent irrelevance—"and you would have liked her."

  "I'm sure," I said lamely.

  "Nadeznha was a good person," Kassouli said very firmly as if I needed to understand that encomium before he proceeded. "I believe that I spoilt her as a child, yet she possessed a natural balance, Captain; a feel for what was right and true. She made but one mistake."

  "Bannister." I helped the conversation along.

  "Exactly. Anthony Bannister." The name came off Kassouli's tongue with an almost vicious intensity; astonishing from a man whose tones had been so measured until this moment. "She met him shortly after she had been disappointed in love, and she married him on what, I believe, is called the rebound. She was dazzled by him. He was a European, he was famous in his own country, and he was glamorous."

  "Indeed."

  "I warned her against a precipitate marriage, but the young can be very headstrong." Kassouli paused, and I noted this first betrayal of a crack in the perfect image he had presented of his daughter. He looked hard at me. "What do you think of Bannister?"

  "I really don't know him well."

  "He is a weak man, a despicable man, Captain. I take no pleasure in thus describing one of your countrymen, but it is true. He was unfait
hful to my daughter, he made her unhappy, and yet she persisted in offering him the love and loyalty which one would have expected from a girl of her sweet disposition."

  There was confusion here. A sweet girl? But headstrong and wilful too? There was no time to pursue the confusion, even if I had wanted to, for Kassouli turned on me with a direct challenge. "Do you believe my daughter was murdered, Captain Sandman?"

  I sensed Jill-Beth and the crippled son waiting expectantly for my answer. I knew what answer they wanted, but I was wedded to the truth and the truth was all I would offer. "I don't know how Nadeznha died."

  The truth was not enough. I saw Yassir Kassouli's right hand clenching in spasms and I wondered if I had angered him. The son made a hissing noise and Jill-Beth stiffened. I was among believers, and I had dared to express disbelief.

  Yet if Kassouli was angry, his voice did not betray it. "I only have two children, Captain Sandman. My son you see, my daughter you will never see."

  The grief was suddenly palpable. I hurt for this man, but I could not offer him what he wanted—agreement that his beloved daughter had been murdered. Perhaps she had been, but there was no proof. I was prepared to admit that it was unlikely that Nadeznha Bannister had been unharnessed in a stiff sea, I could even say that it was possible she had been pushed overboard, but such lukewarm support was of no use to Yassir Kassouli. I was in the presence of an enormous grief; the grief of a man who could buy half the world, but could not control the death of a child he had loved.

  "It was murder," Kassouli said to me now, "but it was the perfect murder. That means it cannot be proved."

  I opened my mouth to speak, found I had nothing to say, so closed it again.

  "But just because a murder is perfect," Kassouli said, "does not mean that it should go unavenged."

  I needed to move, for the sofa's rich comfort and the man's heavy gaze were becoming oppressive. I stood and limped to the room's far end where I pretended to stare at a model of a supertanker. She was called the Kerak. It struck me, as I stared at the striking kestrel on her single smokestack, that despite Kassouli's Mediterranean birth he had one very American trait; he believed in perfection. The Mayflower had brought that belief in her baggage, and the dream had never been lost. To Americans Utopia is always possible; it will only take a little more effort and a little more goodwill. But a large part of Yassir Kassouli's dream had died in the North Atlantic, in nearly two thousand fathoms of cold water. I turned. "You need proof," I said firmly.