“Empathy,” he replied. “Sometimes you meet people you’re in full conversation with before a word has ever been said. It was that way when I first saw you. Oh, I don’t mean the sex thing—though God knows you have plenty of that.” Again his smile included her among the mature and the intelligent. He glanced into the compass and then back at her, leaning over the wheel. “I knew we’d like each other. I knew I could talk to you, and neither of us would need an interpreter. But I don’t even know your first name yet.”
“It’s Rae,” she said. It was starting out beautifully; he was doing it himself. There were cigarettes and a lighter in the right-hand pocket of the Bermuda shorts. She took them out and tried to light one. In the six-knot breeze of their passage, it didn’t take too much acting ability to fail three times in succession.
“Here, let me,” he offered.
He lit the cigarette for her and passed it back, and lit one for himself. Good, she thought; one conditioned response might lead to another, and then another… Then it occurred to her she could be oversimplifying just a little the labyrinthine complexities of modern psychiatry; if doctors spent lifetimes trying to find out why a mind went off the rails and how to get it back, there seemed a chance it wasn’t quite that easy. But at least she was doing something. Saracen heaved up and swayed, quartering the long groundswell. Sunlight shattered into golden points of fire in his hair, and the fine gray eyes were alight with interest as they continued to search her face. She tried not to remember the way they’d looked when he was strangling her.
“Thank you, Hughie,” she said simply. Don’t overdo it; don’t gush.
“Je vous en prie, madame.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.” She was about to add that John was teaching her Spanish, but didn’t. Probably it was best to keep John out of it until she had some kind of bridge across the gap.
“I detect just a trace of Southern accent, I think. From where?”
“Texas,” she replied.
“Oil?”
She shook her head. “Every area has its slum dwellers. There are Texans who don’t own oil wells.”
“See, I knew we’d like each other.” Then he added, “I’m from Mississippi. Or was originally.” He explained briefly he’d gone to school in Switzerland and spent most of his life in Europe.
“Are your parents still there?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “My mother’s dead. She died six years ago.”
“I’m sorry. But your father is still living?”
The change in him was startling, attuned as she was to every nuance of his expression. “No!” he said loudly. “I mean—I don’t know!” Agitation was evident in his eyes, and she could sense his desperate groping through the mists in back of them.
Then he appeared to regain control. “I mean, I haven’t seen him for years. He still lives in Mississippi, and we never write to each other.”
She breathed softly. That had been close. It was obvious she’d made a mistake, but she couldn’t understand where or how. Surely his father hadn’t been on the boat. Pretend you didn’t see it, she told herself, and change the subject, fast.
But he had already fully recovered, as though it had never happened. He smiled at her and said, “Never mind me; you still haven’t told me anything about yourself. Except that you’re from Texas, which you’ll admit yourself is trite. When they get to the moon, they’ll find out there’s not only a Texan there, but he’s already bought it, air-conditioned it, and organized a local chapter of the John Birch Society. I could tell you more than that about yourself, just for a start. The chances are you weren’t an only child; you had a very good orthodontist when you were young, or ancestors with exceptional teeth; you’re warmhearted, and you have a great deal of sympathy and understanding, but you’re impulsive; and status probably means little or nothing to you. All surface, of course, and some guesswork. So you take it. Tell me what the leopard was looking for on the slopes of Kilimanjaro.” His gesture included all the vast and empty Pacific. “Just a parking place, or did he hear music?”
And the leopard was dead, she thought. But more immediately, that lightning reversal of mood was ominous; even when he was like this, he was further from reality than she’d believed. Well, you still had to try.
“He heard music,” she said. “Perhaps not very good music, and maybe even sentimental, or trite. But he also saw something up there.”
“What?” he asked. “Samarkand? A trail disappearing into the mist? Not the edge of a map, because maps don’t have edges any more. They just say continued on E-12.”
“No,” she said. “What he saw was simply another leopard listening to the same thing. A rather handsome leopard in a furry and beat-up sort of way, with the same odd taste for Mickey Mouse music and listening to it in strange places. It was like this.”
She didn’t like doing it; revealing herself this way to a stranger was too much like filling out a Kinsey questionnaire or undressing in public, but, weighed against any possible chance of success, the cost was small. She took a puff on her cigarette and wondered where to begin. Anywhere, she thought, just so you make him see you.
“One night about a year ago a man came to the hotel where I was registered in Miami, Florida. He was a curt, rather hardbitten sort of man with too much arrogance and a slight limp, and I didn’t think I liked him. And apparently it was mutual; he didn’t seem to think too highly of me. I did believe he was honest, though, which was important in the particular circumstances. And the reason I thought he was honest was that anybody that disagreeable and that indifferent to the impression he made on other people almost had to be.
“The reason for our being there—for my being in Miami at all, and for his being in my hotel room—was a yacht, a big two-masted schooner named Dragoon. It was mine—or had been. It also had quite a bit to do with the lack of friendliness in the meeting. In the first place, there was probably a sensed difference of attitude as to what a sailing yacht really was. To me it was just a piece of property, like a parcel of land or a stock certificate, that I happened to own, mostly by accident, and which I’d been aboard only once in the two years I had owned it. To him a boat—a good one—represented something else. But besides this, and much more important, was the fact Dragoon had just been stolen, and he was suspected by the police of having helped to steal it. They’d picked him up and questioned him, and then released him because they didn’t have any actual proof, not enough to hold him. I gathered from the police they’d had a difficult time with him; he wasn’t a man who took kindly to being called a thief.
“But first maybe I’d better explain how I happened to own a two-masted sailing yacht in the first place, since I cared nothing at all about boats then. I was a widow, and not even a wealthy one—just a lonely one. I’d been married for a long time and very happily to a quiet and gentle man who was also one of the coldest-nerved and most fantastic gamblers I’ve ever known. His name was Chris Osborne, and I suppose you’d say he was in the real-estate business, though real-estate speculation would be more like it. By the time he was forty-five he’d already made and lost several fortunes. I’d been his secretary before we were married, but even with that edge I don’t think I was ever sure at any given moment whether we were very well off or in debt. Not that it mattered a great deal. Without any children—” She couldn’t bring herself to mention the son who’d died. To a boy as young as Warriner it would mean very little anyway, and there had to be a limit somewhere to the coin you were willing to spend to get his attention. “Without any children to leave it to, I could never see any point in piling up money you didn’t need. We were happy, which was the thing that counted. Except that of course he was away a lot. I wasn’t much good at the social routine, because I’d worked most of my life, and women from better backgrounds and expensive schools could always make me feel awkward and put me on the defensive—I mean the ones who wanted to. So I had a business of my own, just for something to do when he was away, a small sports-car agency. But none of that’s important.