Shafiq laid a tremulous hand on my arm. “Paul. It might be wisest if you just made the list? And we shall send for you when the boat is ready.”
“Why can’t I prepare the boat?” I asked. “I’m sailing it!”
“We shall prepare it,” Halil answered, flat and unyielding. “Make a list, Mr. Shanahan.”
So that night I slept on board Corsaire and next morning made the list. It was a huge one, encompassing not just the victuals needed to carry three men across the Atlantic, but also the safety equipment and chandlery that would complete Corsaire’s inventory. Halil came at sunset and glanced through my handwritten pages. Most of the items were obvious: food, water, fuel, sleeping bags and navigational equipment; but some of the items made him frown. “Glassfiber mats? Resin? White paint?”
“That’s how I hide the gold. By making a false floor under the cabin sole.”
“Water tanks? Three-inch flexible piping?”
“We’ll be hiding the gold where the present water tanks are placed, so we’ll need new ones specially shaped for their areas. You don’t want a customs agent wondering why we’ve got tube tanks in a square locker. And I need the tubing to run the water aft.”
“Lead weights?”
“We’re altering the boat’s trim, so she’ll need rebalancing.” I had mixed the lies with the truth so easily, but then I was as practiced at that game as il Hayaween, maybe more so. We all have our secrets, which is why trust is such a rare coin.
“It will all be ready,” he promised carelessly.
I slept on board Corsaire one more night. Next morning I again offered to stay and help prepare the boat, but Halil was adamant that my presence in Monastir would arouse suspicion. It would be better, he insisted, if I waited at my home in Belgium. “I shall send you a message when the shipment is ready.”
“How long will that be?”
“It might take a month to collect the coins. Maybe more, maybe less.” He spoke carelessly, yet I remembered Brendan Flynn assuring me that the gold was already safely collected, and Michael Herlihy enjoining haste on me so that the deadly Stinger missiles could be deployed in Ireland as an Easter present for the Brits. Halil’s offhand words only added more dissonance to the cacophony of strange noises that surrounded the Stingers.
Yet the nervous world was already full of discordant sounds. In Iraq and Saudi Arabia the sabers rattled, and on the West Bank and in Jordan the Palestinians ululated for their coming victory beneath the crescent flags of Islam, while in Northern Ireland the drab-green helicopters clattered through the wet gray skies. Everywhere, it seemed, the world was preparing for war. I flew home to Nieuwpoort.
ONCE BACK IN BELGIUM I SLEPT OFF THE JETLAG OF TWO Atlantic flights, then told Hannah that I was closing down Nordsee Yacht Delivery, Services and Surveying.
“You’re doing what?” Hannah asked.
“I’m tired of working, Hannah. I need a rest. I’ve decided I’ll buy a sailboat and become a sea-gypsy.”
“This is Sophie’s doing, yes?” Hannah had never approved of Sophie and clearly believed my ex-lover had left me with addled brains. “But what of the Rotterdam surveys?” The Flemish mind could hardly encompass such irresponsibility. To abandon work for pleasure!
“I’ll do the trawlers.” They were two boats in Rotterdam that I had agreed to survey, and I needed such work while I was waiting for Halil’s summons, but once that summons arrived I wanted to be ready to leave instantly.
“And what about that Mr. Shafiq?” Hannah asked suspiciously.
“If you mean will I do his delivery job? Yes.”
“You’ll want me to send him an estimate? Put dates in the diary?” She waited with pencil poised, though really her efficiency was a mask for curiosity. Hannah was dying to know who Shafiq was, and why I had flown halfway round the world for him, but I could explain none of it to Hannah. That old world of IRA men and Libyans and midnight boat deliveries and gunfire in dry valleys was something she knew nothing about, and I intended to keep it that way. I also intended to make my fortune in these next few weeks, but that too must stay secret from her. I really was retiring, I really was going out of business, but I could not tell Hannah any of it.
Instead I gave her custody of the cat, closed down my bank accounts and began searching for my boat. I was looking for something very specific, a forty-four-foot boat which was registered in America but for sale in Europe, and to find her I faxed messages to yacht brokers in half a dozen countries and searched the small advertisements in the back pages of every European yachting magazine. I dared not specify American ownership for fear of prompting an unwelcome curiosity about my motives, but by asking the boat’s hailing port I was able to weed out every nationality except the American vessels. I thought I had found what I wanted in the German port of Langeoog, but the boat, though owned by an American, lacked either a State Registration Certificate or any Coastguard documentation. “Does it really matter?” the broker, a stout Frisian, asked me. “Over here we’re not so particular.”
But I was being very particular, and so I went on searching until, just before Halloween, a brokerage in Cork, Ireland, sent me details of an American cutter moored in Ardgroom Harbour off the Kenmare River.
I gave Hannah my apartment keys and made her promise to check the fax and the telephone answering machine each day, then I flew to Cork where I hired a car and drove west to Ardgroom Harbour. I borrowed a fisherman’s dinghy and sculled myself out to the yacht.
She was called Rebel Lady and I almost dared not inspect her in case my first impression turned out to be false. My first impression was that she was perfect.
Rebel Lady was an American-built, American-owned, forty-four-foot cutter with a double-ended dark green hull that had been battered by rough seas and streaked with an ocean’s dirt. She had clearly been designed for long voyages for a windmill generator whirled at her stern beside an elaborate self-steering vane. Gulls had streaked her with their droppings and weed grew at her black-painted bootline, yet, despite her shabby condition, she looked almost brand new. A pathetic hand-lettered “For Sale” sign was attached to her starboard shrouds, while her hailing port, lettered like her defiant name in elegant black and gold, was Boston, Mass. Rebel Lady even had her Massachusetts registration number still painted on her bows, which meant that if her papers were intact then, for my purposes, she would be ideal.
I found her keys hidden in the locker where the broker had told me to look and let myself into her saloon, which smelt of stale air, sour clothes and salt. The boat appeared to have been momentarily deserted by her crew, for a kettle stood on the galley stove and two plastic plates had been abandoned in a sink half full of water. A sneaker lay on its side by the portside bunk while a sweatshirt advertising a restaurant in Scituate, Massachusetts, had been discarded on the cabin table. Arched across the coachroof’s main beam was a row of handsome brass instruments: a chronometer still ticking obediently away to Greenwich Mean Time, a barometer, a thermometer, and a hygrometer for measuring the air’s humidity as a gauge of the likelihood of fog. There was a depth sounder over the chart table, a VHF radio, a log, a wind-speed and direction indicator, a fluxgate compass and an expensive Loran receiver. Also above the chart table, among a row of books, I saw the traditional yellow jacket of Eldridge’s Tide and Pilot Book and the sight gave me an almost overwhelming pang of homesickness. I could not resist taking down the well-thumbed book and turning the familiar pages with their tables of high and low water at Boston, the current table for the Cape Cod Canal and the charts of the tidal currents in Buzzards Bay and Nantucket Sound. The book reminded me that I had been away from my home waters for much too long; seven years too long.