Scoundrel Page 10

  “Running a blower through the bilges to dry off the gelcoat we put on top of the gold.”

  “Very wise,” he said, as if he knew what I had been talking about, “very wise.”

  I put the boat under the command of the Autohelm, then went down to the saloon where I opened the lockers, pulled the hose through and introduced it into the boat’s bathroom where a shower tray had a water activated pump under its outflow. A grille in the bathroom door allowed fresh air to circulate from the saloon to keep mildew from growing too thickly in the shower stall, and the grille made the bathroom perfect for my purpose. I cut off the excess tubing which I carried back to the cockpit and tossed overboard to add to the Mediterranean’s pollution. “There,” I said comfortingly to Liam, “all done.”

  “Will it take the stink out of the boat?” he asked. “Because it focking stinks down there, it does.”

  “It’s the resin-hardener. It’ll pass.”

  “Smells like a whore’s armpit.”

  “You hire the wrong whores, Liam.”

  He looked sour at the implied criticism, then freshened as he remembered what rewards were waiting at our destination. “They say American girls are real nice.”

  “They’re clean!” I said encouragingly. “And they like their men to be clean too. They’re particular about that.”

  “I had a swill off before we left home!” he said indignantly.

  “You’ll slay the ladies,” I assured him. “Especially in Boston. They love their Irish heroes there. You’ll be the Grand Marshal of the St Patrick’s Day parade and Congressman O’Shaughnessy will want his picture taken with you. It won’t be like Dublin, I promise you.”

  “It’ll be grand, so it will.” Liam, his face pale as milk, watched in misery as I unfolded a chart. “Where the fock are we?” he asked.

  “There.” I pointed to a spot just off the Tunisian coast.

  He looked round the horizon, trying to spot land. “Can’t see a focking thing.”

  “We’re just out of sight of the coast,” I explained. In fact we were much farther north, but Liam did not really care. I could have sailed the Corsaire down the throat of hell and he would have been too sick to notice.

  My two guards ate sandwiches that night, washed down with sticky Tunisian cola and cheap instant coffee. I gave Liam four powerful sleeping pills to help his drowsiness overcome the stench of the hardener, then sent him to his bunk in the forecabin. Gerry sat with me in the cockpit for a while, but soon became bored with the darkness and the inactivity and so took his precious Uzi below. He loved the small gun. He caressed it and kept it always close. It gave him status. I watched him from the cockpit and saw him tracing the gun’s workings with his fingers. “I’m going to have to close the companionway,” I called down after a while.

  “I need the fresh air,” he whined.

  “The light’s wrecking my night vision. So either switch the damn lights off, or close the hatch.”

  He chose to shut the companionway. I waited till my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, then went to the foredeck where I tripped the catch on the half-open forehatch. As I softly closed the hatch I could hear Liam’s rhythmic snores. I went back to the cockpit and waited.

  I was beating north-west, taking Corsaire into the open waters between Sardinia and the Balearics. It was a chilly night, and dark. The heavy boat was sluggish, its extra weight making awfully hard work of the small seas, and the awkward, choppy motion seemed to reflect my mood. I was nervous. My heart felt raw and sick, an actual feeling in my chest which I suspected was the physical manifestation of conscience. I wondered if, over the years, I had become careless of death, and that sense of a skewed and wasted past made my whole future seem as bleak and dark as the seas ahead. The short waves thumped on Corsaire’s stem, smashing white over her bows and draining noisily from her scuppers. Just after ten o’clock I saw a container ship steaming eastwards, her stack of lights as bright and tall as an office block, but once she had sailed beneath the horizon we were again alone in the harsh darkness.

  At midnight, with my heart thumping like a flabby bladder, I turned on the engine. The starter whirred, caught, and the motor steadied into a regular and muffled beat. I left it out of gear as though I was merely running it to charge the batteries. The sails hauled us into the seas. I heard nothing from the saloon and suspected that Gerry, like the half-drugged Liam, was asleep. After a while the water-activated pump beneath the shower tray clicked on and spewed water outboard for a while. Still no one woke below.

  I let the motor run as Corsaire thumped and dipped into the Mediterranean night. Her bow wave shattered white against the dark waters, foamed briefly, then faded behind. The stars were shrouded by clouds and we were far from the powerful loom of the lighthouse on Cape Spartivento and so I steered by compass and kept a rough log, noting after each hour my estimate of miles run. Six, five and a half, six again, and each small increment of nautical miles carried Corsaire and her dying cargo north-west towards Europe. I was supposed to be racing along the Muslim North African coast to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from there south-east to the Canary Islands from where we were supposed to let the trade winds carry our cargo of gold across the Atlantic, but instead, in this choppy darkness, I was committing murder. I had routed the engine’s exhaust into the main cabin and now its fumes were filling the boat. The exhaust system’s cooling water was collecting in the shower tray and being expelled, but the poison gas was staying below.

  At four in the morning, while it was still dark, I shut off the engine. It suddenly seemed very quiet.

  I steeled myself to open the companionway and was greeted with a belch of foul, warm gaseous air. I gagged, coughed, and backed away. The smoky gas streamed and swirled out of the saloon to make a dissipating haze in the thin light. I could just see Gerry slumped on the table, his fingers curled either side of his cropped hair with its ridiculous pigtail. He was not moving.

  I took a deep breath of fresh air, then went down into the choking saloon and put a finger on Gerry’s neck. He was still warm. There was no pulse. I went into the forecabin where Liam lay on his back with his open eyes staring sightlessly at the closed hatch. His sleeping bag stank of urine. His pale, pimpled skin had been reddened by the effects of the carbon monoxide, while a trail of vomit had hardened on his cheek and pillow. I put a finger to his neck to find that, just like Gerry, he was quite dead. I pushed the forehatch open to let a gust of welcome chill air stream into the boat’s foetid interior.

  I tried to manhandle Liam back into the saloon, but his dead weight and the boat’s clumsy motion made the task impossible, so I spent an hour rigging a system of pulleys and lines with which I hoisted both dead men out of the boat’s reeking interior. I used the spare jib halyard to hang the twin corpses beside the mast where they hung like butcher’s meat, supported by cords I had looped under their armpits. Suspended like that it was a comparatively simple job to pull their sleeping bags up around their bodies. I worked by the light of the navigation lamps, ballasting the sleeping bags with the lead weights that il Hayaween had so thoughtfully provided, then I lashed the bags’ necks tight around the dead men’s throats. Liam’s aggrieved eyes reflected the green starboard light as I struggled to truss the cords tight. I wrapped yet more cord round and round the down-filled bags, expelling as much air as I could, then I lowered the halyard and draped the two bodies on the starboard rail. I untied the cords that had held the corpses, secured the halyard safely, then heaved the weighted sleeping bags overboard. There was a splash, a flurry of foam, then nothing. There was just enough wolfish grey light in the dawn sky to show that the two bodies sank instantly.

  I fetched their two guns and hurled them into the sea, then disconnected the flexible tubing and threw it overboard. Afterwards, exhausted, I made coffee and folded a slice of bread over a chunk of tinned ham. The breakfast made me feel sick.

  I reconnected the exhaust, then, with the sunlight streaming between a watery chasm of the dissi
pating clouds, I began to jettison the boat’s supplies. Three months’ rations went into the sea, and with them went the materials I had used to hide the gold; the rest of the resin, the hardener, the mats and the brushes. I kept two brushes and the unused can of white paint, but everything else went overboard. A trail of garbage followed Corsaire as gulls fought over the packets of bread and biscuits.

  I cleaned the filthy exhaust deposits from the shower tray, then searched the boat for every last trace of Gerry and Liam. I tossed overboard their tawdry plastic holdalls and their cheap changes of clothes and the brand-new toothbrushes that neither had ever used, and their pathetic hoard of Cadbury’s chocolate bars and the empty lager can Gerry had saved as a souvenir of his very first aeroplane flight. I jettisoned their brand-new Irish passports and their postcards of Monastir that neither man had bothered to send home, though Liam had got as far as writing half a misspelled message on the back of one card: ‘Dear Mam, its great crack so far. Foods terribel. Give my love to Donna and Gran.’

  I searched the pathetic relics before I threw them overboard, and found what I expected on a slip of cardboard that had been folded into the breast pocket of Gerry’s suit jacket. It was an Irish telephone number which Gerry had doubtless been told to call collect once he reached America. The number would probably belong to an IRA sympathiser whose home and telephone had never before been used by the Provos, thus minimising the danger that the Garda Siochána, the Irish police, would be tapping the line. I memorised the number, then added the cardboard scrap to the sea’s filth. Afterwards, with the boat rinsed clean, I stared behind and tried to frame a prayer to atone for my night’s work, but no prayer would come. I told myself that Liam and Gerry had died in the service of their new Ireland. It would never have occurred to either of them that an Ireland fashioned by their kind would not be an Ireland worth living in, but all they had ever known was an Ireland that they could not endure and so, crudely, they had tried to change it. Now their trussed bodies were on the ocean floor while I, with Saddam Hussein’s gold, sailed on.

  I had murdered two men. I had done it in cold blood, with much planning and forethought, and solely for my own gain. I had not killed them to stop the slaughter of the innocents which il Hayaween’s questions about airliners and ground-to-air missiles had implied, but instead I had killed Liam and Gerry for five million dollars. I did plan to stop il Hayaween’s slaughter, but I also planned to steal the coins, indeed I had intended to right from the moment in Miami when I had first heard about the gold. The problem was not stealing the gold, but living to spend it. My story would be simple; that the badly overloaded boat, wallowing in rough seas, had been pooped by a bad wave. That she had sunk. That I had tried to rescue Liam and Gerry, but failed. That the gold, with the boat, was lost. That I had survived in a liferaft, alone. When I reached America I would hide for a few weeks, then, when the IRA found me, I would brazen the story out. Liam and Gerry would have destroyed my lie and so I had murdered them.

  I tried to justify the murder by telling myself that they would have killed me if I had finished the voyage. Or if they were not to have been my killers, others would have killed all three of us. I told myself that if you sup with the devil you need a very long spoon, and that Gerry and Liam should have known what dinner table they were sitting at. I tried to justify their murder, but it remained murder and it was on my conscience as I sailed on to Barcelona. That too was part of the plan.

  It was a hellish journey. I was single-handed in a busy sea, so I dared not leave the cockpit. Instead I catnapped at the helm and snatched the odd hour of sleep whenever it seemed safe or whenever sheer fatigue overwhelmed me. One night I was startled awake to hear the throbbing crash of a steamer’s engines pounding not far off in the darkness and, when I turned in panic, I saw the lights of a vast ship thundering past not a hundred yards away.

  The next day, during a lull from the cold winter winds that were sweeping south from the French coast, I buckled on a lifeline and, with Corsaire safe under the control of her self-steering, I crouched on the swimming platform built into her sugar-scoop stern and, using the pot of white paint that I had listed as an essential part of the false floor’s disguise, I painted out the name Corsaire and the French hailing port, Port Vendres. I then took all Corsaire’s papers, shredded them, and committed them to the deep.

  On the following day, when the second coat of white paint was dry and the old lettering completely hidden, I unrolled the transfer names I had ordered by mail in Belgium. Carefully, all the while balancing myself against the sluggish pitch of the overloaded boat, I rubbed the new names on to the fresh paint. Thus Corsaire became Rebel Lady, and Port Vendres became Boston, Mass. Then, using an epoxy glue, I fastened the old Rebel Lady maker’s plate on to the side of Corsaire’s coachroof and, leaning dangerously out under the pulpit’s lower rail and using commercial stick-on letters and numbers I had bought in Nieuwpoort, I put Rebel Lady’s Massachusetts registration number on either bow. I finally replaced the French tricolour with the Stars and Stripes, and thus Corsaire ceased to exist and in her place was Dr O’Neill’s forty-four-foot boat, Rebel Lady, ready to go home.

  Two days later I delivered Rebel Lady to the commercial docks in Barcelona. I spent a busy day knocking down her topworks; taking off her sails, craning out her mast. Then, with her spars safely lashed to her decks, she was hoisted out of the water. The crane driver slid open a window of his cab and shouted something through the thin dirty rain. I shrugged to show I did not understand, but the foreman translated into French for me. “He says she weighs as much as a sixty-footer!”

  “I prefer heavy boats.”

  “Like women, eh?” he laughed and repeated the joke in Catalan to his crane driver who, with an exquisite skill, was lowering Rebel Lady into an open-topped container.

  Once she was safely cradled I borrowed an electric drill and, using templates I had brought from Nieuwpoort, I etched Rebel Lady’s Hull Identification Number on to her transom and, as American law required, in a concealed place below. I chose the new false floor for the hidden number, then, that last job completed, I locked her hatches, signed her over to the shipping company, paid the balance of my account in cash and walked out of the docks to find a taxi. In a day or so Rebel Lady would be loaded on to a container ship, then, as deck cargo and with her secret hidden deep in her dark belly, she would be carried west across the winter Atlantic, bound for America.

  And I too was going to America, but not across the Atlantic. Fear of il Hayaween made me circumspect and so I took a train to Nice, another to Paris, then took the metro to the airport. I telephoned Brussels again, told a lie, and caught a plane for Singapore. I was vanishing, going east about the world, but running, just like the newly christened Rebel Lady, for the refuge of home.

  I stayed one night in a hotel near Singapore’s Changi Airport, then, in a hot humid dawn and still groggy with sleeplessness and jetlag, I flew north to Hong Kong where I waited two hours before catching a plane to San Francisco. There, using my false American passport and carrying a stained sea-bag and my bright yellow oilskin jacket, I came home.

  My flight to Boston was delayed so I bought a clutch of newspapers. The Iraqis were still refusing to withdraw from Kuwait despite the mass of coalition troops assembling in Saudi Arabia, and Saddam Hussein was still promising his enemies the mother of all battles. He sounded confident enough to make me wonder whether perhaps il Hayaween’s plans were not so ramshackle after all. Perhaps there were saboteurs in place throughout the world, preparing to slaughter and maim and destroy in the names of Allah, Saddam and Palestine. I thought of fifty-three Stinger missiles and of a man with a maimed hand asking how easy it was to shoot down airliners, and I felt a tremor of fear at the thought of taking another plane, then told myself not to be so stupid. Whatever evil the Iraqis had planned would not be unleashed till after the shooting began in the desert.

  The Boston plane should have left San Francisco at half past one in the afternoon
, but it was nearer six in the evening before the aircraft at last climbed over the bay and headed east across the Sierra Nevada, which meant we did not land at Logan Airport till the small hours of the morning. It had been snowing and the temperature was way below zero. The last sleep I had enjoyed was somewhere over the western Pacific, and if I had been sensible I would have stayed the rest of that night in a Boston hotel, but by now the jetlag and adrenalin were combining to keep me awake and all I really wanted to do was reach my house on Cape Cod, so I rented a car and drove myself through the banked snow that lined the Massachusetts roads.

  The drive took just over two hours. I was aching with tiredness, but the thought of the waiting house filled me with a feverish expectancy and, like a hunted beast seeking a secret lair, I wanted to recuperate in the safety and reassurance of home. There was a risk, a very small risk, that my enemies might be watching the Cape Cod house, but I doubted it for I had not seen the place in seven years, and Shafiq and his friends did not even know the house existed. As I crossed the Cape Cod Canal the clouds slid apart to reveal a clean-edged moon cut sharp as a whistle in a sky of ice-bright stars. The moonlight revealed yellow ribbons tied to trees and mailboxes and fences. A big illuminated sign outside a hardware store asked God to bless our troops. The radio, even at four in the morning, was filled with the threats of war, then it played ‘God Bless America’ and I felt tears prick at my eyes. It had been so long since I had been home, so very long.

  It was ten past four in the star-bright morning when I turned on to the dirt road that led east towards the ocean and, as I breasted the pine-clad sand ridge that edged the marsh, I could suddenly see for miles and it seemed that every frost-edged blade of grass was needle sharp in the winter air. The far Atlantic was silver and black while the nearer waters of the bay glistened like a sheet of burnished steel. The snow had hardly settled on the salt marshes, but there was just enough to streak the dark shadows with bands of white. I braked the car to a stop on the ridge’s crest and, with the radio and lights turned off, I sat and stared at the view in which, dead-centre and ink-black under the scalpel moon, my waiting house lay silent. The house and the sweeping beams of the Cape’s lighthouses were the only new things in this view since the days when the Pilgrim Fathers had first stood on this ridge, or indeed, since the more ancient time when the wandering Indian tribes had dug for clams in the shoals of this sandy promontory that stuck so deep into the Atlantic.