Scoundrel Read online

  BERNARD CORNWELL

  Scoundrel

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  SCOUNDREL

  Bernard Cornwell was born in London, raised in Essex, and now lives in the USA. He is the author of the Arthurian series, The Warlord Trilogy; The Starbuck Chronicles on the American Civil War; Stonehenge; The Grail Quest series, set during the Hundred Years War; over twenty Sharpe novels; and most recently The Saxon Stories, set during King Alfred’s defence of England against the Vikings. For more information about Bernard Cornwell and his books visit his website – www.bernardcornwell.net.

  Scoundrel is for

  Jackie and Jimmy Lynch

  PART ONE

  August 1, 1990 was my fortieth birthday. Sophie, my lover for the past three years, left me for a younger man, the cat fell sick, and the next morning Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

  Welcome to the best years of my life.

  Three weeks later Shafiq asked if I could deliver a boat from the Mediterranean to America. Hannah, my part-time secretary, had taken Shafiq’s telephone call and late that afternoon she came to the fishing harbour to give me the day’s news.

  “Who called?” At first I thought I must have misheard her. I was working in a trawler’s engine room with the motor going. “Who called?” I shouted up through the open hatch again.

  “Shafiq.” Hannah shrugged. “No other name, just Shafiq. He said you know him.”

  I knew him all right, knew him well enough to wonder just what the hell was coming next. Shafiq! For God’s sake! “He wanted what?”

  “He wants a boat delivered.”

  “When?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “From where in the Mediterranean? France? Spain? Italy? Cyprus? Greece?”

  “Just the Mediterranean. He said he couldn’t be more specific.”

  “And I’m to deliver it where?”

  Hannah smiled. “Just America.”

  I shut off the engine. I had been testing the trawler’s hydraulic pumps, making sure that some scumbag hadn’t lowered the pressure by half a ton to disguise a bad valve or a weak hose. I waited for the noise to die away, then looked up at Hannah. “What kind of boat?”

  “He doesn’t know.” She laughed. Hannah had a nice laugh, but since Sophie had taken off every woman seemed to have a nice laugh. “I shall tell him no,” she said, “yes?”

  “Tell him yes, yes.”

  “What?”

  “Tell him yes.”

  Hannah adopted the patient look she used when she was trying to save me from myself. “Yes?”

  “Yes, out, ja, si. That’s what we’re in business for.” Or at least that was what my letterhead said: Nordsee Yacht Delivery, Services and Surveying, Sole Proprietor, Paul Shanahan, Nieuwpoort, Belgium; though in the last few years the servicing and surveying had taken over from the delivery.

  “But, Paul! You don’t know when or how or what or where! How can I commit you to something so stupid!”

  “When he phones back, tell him the answer is yes.”

  Hannah uttered a very Flemish noise, a kind of glottal grunt which I had learned denoted a practical person’s scorn for an impractical fool. She turned a page in her notebook. “And a woman called Kathleen Donovan called. An American. She wants to see you. She sounds nice.”

  Oh, Christ, I thought, but what is this? A man turns forty and suddenly his past comes back to haunt him, and I had a swift filthy image of Roisin’s blood on the yellow stone, and I thought of betrayal and of unhappiness and of love, and I hoped to God that if Roisin’s sister was looking for me that she never, ever found me. “Tell her no,” I said.

  “But she says”

  “I don’t care what she says. I’ve never heard of her and I don’t want to see her.” I could not explain any of it to Hannah who was so very practical and so very married to her plump policeman. “And tell Shafiq I want to know why.”

  “You want to know why?” Hannah frowned at me. “Why what?”

  “Ask him why.”

  “But…”

  “Just why!”

  “OK! I’ll ask!” She threw up her hands, turned, and walked along the quay. “I think the cat has worms!” she called back.

  “Give it a pill!”

  “It’s your cat!”

  “Please give it a pill.”

  “OK!” She gave the ringer, not to me, but to one of the fishermen who had whistled at her. Then she waved to me and walked out of sight.

  I went back to work, surveying a trawler that was being sold across the North Sea to Scotland, but my mind was hardly on the boat’s hull or its engine or its hydraulics, instead I was wondering why, out of nowhere and on the very same day, the ghosts of danger past and love betrayed had come back to haunt me. And, if I was honest, to excite me too. Life had become dull, predictable, placid, but now the ghosts had stirred.

  I had waited four years for Shafiq to remember me, to summon me back to the darker paths. Four years. And I was ready.

  “It has been four years, Paul! Four years!” Shafiq, indolent, thin, kind, sly and middle-aged, sat on a deep, cushion-rich sofa. He had taken a suite in the Georges V in Paris and wanted me to admire his opulence. He was also in an ebullient mood, and no wonder, for Shafiq loved Paris, loved France, and the more the French hated the Arabs, the more Shafiq approved of Gallic good taste. Shafiq was a Palestinian who lived in Libya where he worked for Colonel Qaddafi’s Centre to Resist Imperialism, Racism, Backwardness and Fascism. At first I had refused to believe any such organisation existed, but it did, and Shafiq was on its staff, which was doubtless why he had such a taste for European decadence.

  “So what do you want?” I asked him sourly.

  “I have never known Paris so hot! Thank God for the invention of air-conditioning.” As usual we spoke in French. “Have a cake, please. The mille-feuille is exquisite.”

  “What do you want?”

  Shafiq ignored the question, instead opening a small, brightly enamelled tin of cachous and slipping one under his tongue. “I am pretending to be a Greek. I have a diplomatic passport even, look!”

  I ignored both the fake passport and Shafiq’s delight in possessing it. Shafiq’s contribution to resisting imperialism, racism, backwardness and fascism was to act as a messenger between Libya and whatever terrorist groups were the flavour of Colonel Qaddafi’s month. At first sight he seemed an unlikely secret agent for he was too childlike, too flamboyant and too likeable, but they were perhaps the very qualities that had let him survive so long, because it was impossible to imagine a man as risible as Shafiq being associated with the polluted wellsprings of political evil. “What do you want of me?” I asked him again. Whatever he wanted I would probably give him, but after four years I had to play a reluctant role.

  “You would like a Gauloise? Here! Take the pack, Paul.” He tossed the cigarettes to me.

  “I’ve given up. What the hell do you want?”

  “You’ve given up smoking! That’s wonderful, Paul, really wonderful! The doctors say I should give up, but what do they know? My brother-in-law is a doctor, did I ever tell you that? He smokes forty a day, sometimes fifty, and he’s fit as, what do you say? A fiddle! As a fiddle! You’d like some tea?”

  “What the hell do you want, Shafiq?”

  “I want you to deliver a boat to America, of course, just as I told your secretary. Is she beautiful?”

  “As a rose in morning dew, as a peach blossom, as a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader. What kind of a boat? From where? To where? When?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Oh, great! That’s really helpful, Shafiq.” I leaned back in my overstuffed
armchair. “It’s your boat?”

  “It is not mine, no.” He lit a cigarette, then waved it vaguely about as if to indicate that the notional boat belonged to someone else, anyone else, no one of importance. “How is your love life?”

  “It doesn’t exist. I’ve just been junked for a married French pharmacist. I got custody of the cat. Whose boat is it?”

  “You lost your girlfriend?” Shafiq was instantly concerned for me.

  “Whose boat is it, Shafiq?”

  “It belongs to friends.” Again he gestured with the cigarette to show that the ownership was unimportant. “How long will it take you?”

  “How long will what take me?”

  “To deliver the boat to America, of course.”

  “That depends on what kind of a boat it is and how far it’s going and at what time of year you want it delivered.”

  “A sailboat,” he said, “and soon, I think.”

  “How big a sailboat?”

  “With a big lead keel.” He smiled, as though that detail answered all my queries.

  “How big?” I insisted.

  He sucked on the cigarette, frowned. “I don’t know how big, so give me, what do you Americans call it? A ballpark guess? Give me a ballpark guess.”

  I cast a beseeching look towards the ceiling’s ornamental plasterwork. “Three months? Four? How the hell do I know? The bigger the boat, the quicker. Maybe.”

  “Three months? Four?” He sounded neither pleased nor displeased with my ballpark guess. “Is she blonde?”

  “Is what blonde?”

  “Your secretary.”

  “She’s got brown hair.”

  “All over?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ah.” He was sad for my ignorance. “Why did your lover leave you?”

  “Because I want to retire to America one day and she doesn’t, because she says I’m too secretive, because she finds life in Nieuwpoort dull, and because her Frenchman gave her a Mercedes.”

  “You want to live in America?” Shafiq asked in a tone of shock.

  “Yes. It’s home.”

  “No wonder you are unhappy.” Shafiq shook his head, I think because Sophie had walked out on me rather than because I was an American.

  “If I’m unhappy about anything,” I assured him, “it’s because of this meeting. For Christ’s sake, Shafiq, you ignore me for four years, then you drag me to Paris to tell me you want me to deliver a boat, and now you can’t give me a single Goddamn detail of the job.”

  “But it’s business!” he pleaded.

  “After four years?” I sounded hurt.

  He shrugged, tapped his cigarette ash into a crystal bowl, then shrugged again. “You know why, Paul, you know why.” He would not look at me.

  “You didn’t like my deodorant, Shafiq?” I mocked him.

  He raised his eyes to meet mine. He did not want to articulate the old accusation, but I was putting him through the wringer and he knew he would have to endure the ordeal. “They said you were CIA, Paul.”

  “Oh, shit.” I leaned back in the chair, disgust in my voice.

  “We know it isn’t true, of course.” Shafiq tried to reassure me.

  “It’s taken you four years to make up your minds?”

  “We can’t be too careful, you know that.” He sucked on the cigarette, making its tip glow bright. “Our business is like modern sex, isn’t it? Practise it safely or not at all, isn’t that right, Paul?” He laughed, inviting me to join in his amusement, but my face did not change and he shook his head sadly. “It wasn’t our side that accused you, Paul, it was the girl! Your girl! What was her name? Roisin?” He even pronounced it properly, Rosh-een, proving that he remembered her well enough. “She was your girl, Paul.”

  “My girl? She was the office bicycle, Shafiq. Anyone could ride her.”

  “That’s good, Paul, I like it! The office bicycle!” He chuckled, then made a dismissive gesture. “So you understand, eh? You see why we could not trust you? Not me, of course! I never believed you were CIA! I defended you! I told them it was a ridiculous notion! Cretinous! But they wanted to make sure. They said wait, wait and see if he runs home to America. I guess you didn’t run home, eh?” He smiled at me. “It’s good to see you again, Paul. It’s been too long.”

  “So this sailboat,” I asked coldly, “what kind of business is it?”

  “Just business.”

  “Is it to do with Iraq?”

  “Iraq?” Shafiq spread hands as big as oarblades in a gesture suggesting he had never heard of Iraq or its invasion of Kuwait.

  “Is this to do with Iraq?” I asked again.

  He gave me a smile of yellowed teeth. “It’s just business.”

  “The business of smuggling?” I asked.

  “Maybe?” He offered me a conspiratorial smile.

  “Then the answer is no.” It was not, of course it was not, but if I yielded too easily the price would be low, and I wanted the price for this job to be very high, so I laid on the objections. “I don’t smuggle things, Shafiq, unless I know what I’m smuggling, and how it’s hidden, and why it’s being smuggled, and where it’s going, and who it’s going to, and how much, and when, and who benefits, and who might be trying to stop it, and how much they propose paying me to get it past them.”

  “I told them you’d say that!” Shaftq sounded triumphant.

  “They?” I challenged him.

  “The people who want you to go to Miami tomorrow,” he answered coyly, hoping that the mention of Miami would sidetrack my question.

  “They?” I said again.

  “Your old friends,” he said, confirming what I had suspected.

  “They’re in Miami?” That did surprise me.

  “They want you there tomorrow.” He stuffed a slice of almond cake into his mouth, then mumbled, “They’re expecting you, and I have your ticket. First class even!” He made it sound like a treat, like a red carpet into the lion’s den. Not that I needed such an enticement. I had waited four years for someone to rescue me from hydraulic systems and fibreglass osmosis and rotted keel-bolts.

  So I telephoned Hannah at her Nieuwpoort home. It was a Sunday afternoon and she sounded sleepily warm and I wondered if I had interrupted the plump policeman’s revels. “Cancel this week’s appointments,” I told her.

  “But, Paul…”

  “Everything,” I insisted, “is cancelled.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m going to Miami,” I said, as though it was something I did every month and thus no occasion for her surprise.

  Hannah sighed. “Kathleen Donovan phoned again. She says she’s visiting Europe and she promises she doesn’t need much of your time, and I told her you would be –”

  “Hannah! Hannah! Hannah!” I interrupted her.

  “Paul?”

  “Make sure the cat takes its damn pills, will you?” I asked, then I put the telephone gently down and, next morning, flew to Miami.

  Little Marty Doyle was waiting for me at Miami International where, despite the heat, he was jumping up and down like an excited poodle. “It’s just great to see you, Paulie! Just great! It’s been years, hasn’t it? Years! I was saying as much to Michael last night. Years!”

  Marty is a nothing, a lickspittle, an errand boy. Officially he works for the Boston School Committee, while unofficially he gophers and chauffeurs for Michael Herlihy. Herlihy never learned to drive because he suffers from motion sickness and his mother always insisted he had to sit in the back of the family car, and ever since he’s ridden about like Lord Muck. These days Marty is his dogsbody and driver. “So what the hell are you doing in Miami?” I asked him.

  “Looking after Michael. He’s not happy because of the heat. He’s never liked the heat. Makes him itch. Is that all your luggage?” He gestured at my sea-bag.

  “How much do you want me to have?”

  “I’ll carry it for you.”

  I lifted the sea-bag out of his reach. “Just
shut up and lead on.”

  “It’s been years since I seen you, Paulie! Years! You don’t look any older, not a day! That beard suits you. I tried to grow a beard once, but it wouldn’t come. Made me look like that Chinaman in the movie. Fu-Manchu, know who I mean? So how are you, Paulie? The car’s this way. Have you heard the news?” He was skipping around me like an excited child.

  “The war has started?” I guessed.

  “War?” Marty seemed oblivious to the American-led build-up of forces in Saudi Arabia. “It’s about Larry,” he finally said, “they reckon it’s healed, see? He’ll be as good as new!”

  “What’s healed?”

  “His heel! He had surgery on it.” Marty giggled at a sudden dawning of wit. “His heel’s healed. Get it?”

  I stopped in the middle of the terminal and looked down at Marty’s bald head. I was tired, I was hot, and Marty was yapping at me like a poodle in heat. “Who the hell is Larry,” I asked, “and what the hell are you talking about?”

  “Larry Bird!” Marty was astonished at my obtuseness. “He missed the end of last season because of his heel. It had a growth on the bone, or something like that.”

  “Oh, Christ.” I started walking again. I might have known that the most important thing in Marty’s world would be the Boston Celtics. The Celts were a religion in Boston, but somehow, perhaps because I now lived in a small harbour town on the Belgian coast, my devotions to the old hometown religion had lapsed.

  Yet it felt good to be back on American soil, even in Florida’s unfamiliar tropical heat. I had been away seven years. I had never meant the time to stretch so, but somehow there had always been a reason not to fly the Atlantic. I had bought tickets once, only to have the lucrative chance of delivering a brand-new boat from Finland to Monaco change my plans. Nor did I have family reasons to go home for my parents were dead and my sister was married to a buffoon I could not stand, and so, these last years, I had worked in Nieuwpoort and nursed my dreams of one day going home and living a long, easy retirement in the Cape Cod cottage I had inherited from my father. I was saving up for that retirement, and that savings account had been another reason for not spending money on expensive transatlantic air fares. But I had still been away for too long.