It was the same with everything on the ship. He loved to stroll from bow to stern and back again, touching the hand rails, pleased to see the lines curled into perfect spiral patterns on the calked, pale, teak deck, admiring the polished brass handles on the old-fashioned wheel in the deck house and the perfectly arranged charts in their slots and the signal flags tightly rolled in their pigeonholes. He, who had never washed a dish in his life, spent long hours in the galley scrubbing pans until they shone and making sure that the icebox was immaculate and fresh smelling, the range and oven scrubbed. When there was a charter on board he and Dwyer and whoever they signed on as a cook dressed in tan drill shorts and immaculate white cotton T-shirts with Clothilde printed across the chest in blue. In the evenings, or in cold weather, they wore identical heavy navy-blue sailor’s sweaters.
He had learned to mix all sorts of drinks and serve them frosty and cold in good glasses, and there was one party, Americans, who swore they only took the ship for his Bloody Marys. A pleasure craft on the Mediterranean, going between one country and another, could be a cheap holiday for a drunkard, because you could take on case after case of duty-free liquor and you could buy gin and whiskey for about a dollar and a half a bottle. He rarely drank anything himself, except for a little pastis and an occasional beer. When charters came aboard he wore a peaked captain’s cap, with the gilt anchor and chain. It made his clients’ holidays more seagoing, he felt.
He had learned a few words of French and Italian and Spanish, enough to go through harbor-master formalities and do the shopping, but too little to get into arguments. Dwyer picked up the languages quickly and could rattle away with anybody.
Thomas had sent a photograph of the Clothilde, spraying through a wave, to Gretchen and Gretchen had written back that she kept it on the mantelpiece of her living room. One day, she wrote, she would come over and take a trip with him. She was busy, she wrote, doing some sort of job at a movie studio. She said that she had kept her promise and had not told Rudolph where he was or what he was doing. Gretchen was his one link with America and the times when he felt lonely or missed the kid, he wrote to her. He had asked Dwyer to write his girl in Boston, whom Dwyer still said he was going to marry, to try to go down to the Aegean Hotel when she had the time and talk to Pappy, but the girl hadn’t replied yet.
Some year soon, no matter what, he was going to go to New York and try to find his kid.
He hadn’t had a single fight since Falconetti. He still dreamed about Falconetti. He wasn’t sentimental about him, but he was sorry Falconetti was dead and the passage of time hadn’t persuaded him that it wasn’t his fault that the man had thrown himself overboard.
He finished with the winch and stood up. The deck was promisingly warm under his bare feet. As he went aft, running his hands along the newly varnished mahogany-colored rails, the hammering below stopped and Kimball’s flaming red hair appeared, as he came out of the saloon and onto the deck. To get to the engine room, you had to pick up sections of the floor from the saloon. Dwyer appeared after Kimball. They were both wearing oil-stained green overalls, because there was no keeping clean in the confined space of the engine room. Kimball was wiping his hands on a piece of waste, which he threw overboard. “That ought to do it, mate,” Kimball said. “Why don’t we give it a spin?”
Thomas went into the pilot house and started the engines while Dwyer and Pinky cast off from the dock and clambered forward to bring up the hook, Dwyer working the winch and cleaning off the harbor muck from the chain with the hose before it dropped into the well. They had a lot of chain out, for stability, and the Clothilde was almost in the middle of the harbor before Pinky gave the sign that they were clear and helped Dwyer bring the hook on board with the gaff.
By now Thomas was skilled at handling the ship and only when he was coming into a very crowded harbor, with a bad wind blowing, did he hand over the wheel to Dwyer. Today, he turned the bow toward the harbor entrance and, keeping the speed down until they were outside, chugged beyond the fishermen with their rods at the end of the rampart and around the buoy before he increased speed, turning toward the Cap d’Antibes, leaving the fortress of the Vieux Carré on its hill, behind them. He watched the gauges of both engines and was relieved to see that the port engine wasn’t heating up. Good old Pinky. Through the winter he must have saved them at least a thousand dollars. The ship he was on, the Vega, was so new and so pampered that there was almost nothing for him to do when they were in port. He was bored on it and delighted to be able to putter about in the Clothilde’s cluttered, hot engine room.
Kimball was a knotty Englishman whose freckled face never got tan, but remained a painful hot pink all summer. He had a problem with the drink, as he put it. When he drank he became pugnacious and challenged people in bars. He quarreled with his owners and rarely stayed on one ship more than a year, but he was so good at his job that he never had any trouble finding other berths quickly. He only worked on the very big yachts, because his skill would be wasted on smaller craft. He had been raised in Plymouth and had been on the water all his life. He was amazed that somebody like Thomas had wound up the owner-skipper of a ship like the Clothilde in Antibes harbor, and was making a go of it. “Yanks,” Kimball said, shaking his head. “They’re fucking well capable of anything. No wonder you own the world.”
He and Thomas had been friendly from the beginning, greeting each other as they passed on the quay or buying each other beers in the little bar at the entrance to the port. Kimball had guessed that Thomas had been in the ring and Thomas had told him about some of his fights and what it was like and about the win in London and the later two dives he had had to take and even about the last fight in the hotel room with Quayles in Las Vegas, which had especially delighted Kimball’s belligerent heart. Thomas had not told him about Falconetti and Dwyer knew enough to keep quiet on that subject.
“By God, Tommy,” Kimball said, “if I knew I could fight like that I would clean out every bar from Gib to Piraeus.”
“And get a knife between your ribs in the process,” Thomas said.
“No doubt you’re right,” Kimball agreed. “But man, the pleasure before!”
When he got very drunk and saw Thomas he would pound the bar and shout, “See that man? If he wasn’t a friend of mine, I’d drive him into the deck.” Then loop an affectionate tattooed arm around Thomas’s neck.
Their friendship had been cemented one night in a bar in Nice. They hadn’t gone to Nice together, but Dwyer and Thomas had wandered into the bar, near the port, by accident. There was a cleared space around the bar and Kimball was holding forth, loudly, to a group that included some French seamen and three or four flashily dressed but dangerous-looking young men of a type that Thomas had learned to recognize and avoid—small-time hoodlums and racketeers, doing odd jobs along the Côte for the chiefs of the milieu with headquarters in Marseilles. His instinct told him that they were probably armed, if not with guns, certainly with knives.