I sat in the swivel chair of Rebel Lady’s chart table and thought how she would make a fine boat for Cape Cod; a good boat to sail down east to Maine or hard south to the Chesapeake Bay. I closed my eyes and heard the water splash and ripple down her flanks, and the sound somehow reminded me that this would also be a lonely boat. God damn Roisin, I thought, for all the dreams she had broken, because forty-four feet was too long a boat for a lonely man. All I needed was a small shoal-draft cat-boat to sail single-handed around Nantucket Sound, but Rebel Lady was the boat I would buy and Rebel Lady would one day be my retirement boat, my lonely home away from my Cape Cod house.
I called the broker from the public telephone of a bar in Ardgroom and learned that Rebel Lady belonged to an American doctor who, taking a summer’s sabbatical, had sailed with his three sons to search for their family’s Irish roots. Instead he had learned that the summer pastime of sailing in sun-drenched Boston Harbor did not easily translate into enduring a stinging force-nine gale in the mid-Atlantic. Seasick, shaking, terrified and with a broken wrist and a fractured rib, the good doctor had made his Irish landfall and sworn he would never again set foot on a small boat. He and his sons had flown home in the comfort of an Aer Lingus Boeing 747 and left the Rebel Lady swinging to a mooring in Ardgroom Harbour. “He’ll take whatever you’ve a mind to give,” the Cork broker told me with a refreshing honesty, “but it would be a criminal shame to give the man less than seventy-five thousand punt. She’s a fine boat, is she not? But it’s a pity she’s green.” He was lamenting her color for, in Irish superstition, green was an unlucky color for a boat.
I did not care about Irish superstition, only about American bureaucracy. “You’re sure you’ve got all her papers?”
“As I said before, I’ve got every last one of them. They certainly like their paperwork in America, do they not? I’ve even got the original bill of sale, so I have. The boat’s a mere two years old, and she’s only ever had the one owner.”
“What’s the owner’s name?”
“O’Neill. A Dr. James O’Neill. A grand man is the doctor, but a better physician than a sailor, I should think.” It was a delicate judgment, very Irish in its balancing of a criticism with a compliment.
“I’ll be paying you cash,” I said, “if that suits you.”
“I think it might,” he said cautiously. My God, of course it suited him. Tax evasion is Ireland’s national sport and I had just given him a championship year. “Say seventy thousand?” I said, just to spoil it a little.
He paused for just a second, then accepted. “It’s a bargain, Mr. Stanley.” I had given my name as Henry Stanley.
I drove back to the harbor where a sudden west wind was flicking whitecaps across the sheltered gray water and slanting a sharp rain off the ocean. I sculled myself back to Rebel Lady, chucked the pathetic “For Sale” sign overboard and, using my rigging knife, prised away the manufacturer’s plate from the side of her coachroof. I copied the hull identification number from her transom and the serial number from the engine, then, my oilskin drenched from the sudden cold rain, I drove back to Cork where, in a smoky bar, I treated the broker to a pint of stout and paid him seventy thousand Irish pounds for the boat. It was a steal, but undoubtedly Dr. James O’Neill would be well pleased to be rid of the cause of so much of his discomfort. It was an old story; men bought boats as a fulfillment of their dreams, only to have a single ocean passage turn the dreams into nightmare. Atlantic islands like the Azores or the Canaries were notorious for the bargains their harbors offered; yachts abandoned after just one leg of a long-planned voyage.
The broker, who was doubtless on a generous commission, counted the pile of notes happily. “You’ve bought yourself a good vessel, Mr. Stanley,” he said as he forced the folded pile of banknotes into a jacket pocket, then he watched hopefully as I counted another stack of punt bills on to the table. “And what would they be for, Mr. Stanley, if I might ask?”
“I’m paying you to look after her. I want the mast off her, and I’d like her brought ashore and scrubbed down. Then cover her with tarpaulins. I’ll send you word when I want her launched and rigged again, but it may not be till next summer.”
“No problems there.” The broker eyed the punt bills.
“And I want a new name painted on her stern,” I said.
“Changing a boat’s name?” He sipped his stout, then wiped the froth from his moustache with the back of his hand. “That means bad luck, Mr. Stanley.”
“Not where I come from.” I pulled a beer mat toward me and wrote the new name in big block capitals on its margin. “Roisin,” I said the name aloud, “and she needs a new hailing port, Stage Harbor. And no ‘u’ in harbor. You can do that? I want it in Gaelic script, black and gold.”
“It shouldn’t be a problem.” He thumbed the edge of the punt bills. “But if there is a snag with the work, then how can I reach you?”
“That money’s my guarantee that you won’t have any snags.”
“So it is, so it is.” The notes vanished into a pocket.
As I left the bar I scorned myself as a sentimental fool for painting a dead girl’s name on the backside of a green boat. I caught a glimpse of my bearded face in a hatstand’s mirror in the hallway of the bar and, for a change, I did not look quickly away. Instead I frowned at the reflection as though I was looking at a stranger. I did not like what I saw, I never had. The face was hag-ridden, redolent of too much bad conscience. I remembered Seamus Geoghegan sitting in a car with me on some wet dawn; after a long silence, he had sighed and said that thinking never made a man happy. He was right, and mirrors made me think of myself, which was why I owned so few of them. It was better not to think, not to remember, and not to wonder what I had made of a life in forty years.
That night I phoned Namur in Belgium and left a message for an old friend called Teodor, and the following morning, with Rebel Lady’s papers safe in my sea-bag, I flew to Barcelona. My business there took two days. I telephoned Hannah, as I had on every night of my trip, to discover if any summons had come from Tunisia, but there was no message. “Except that American girl is still trying to reach you,” Hannah said.
“Kathleen Donovan? I’ve told you I don’t want to meet her.”
Hannah sniffed her disapproval. “So when will you be back?”
“Late tomorrow. Real late. I’ll see you on Thursday.”
Next morning I flew north to Brussels, collected my car from the long-term car park, then drove to Namur where Teodor was waiting for me. He needed to take photographs; one for the false Massachusetts driving license and another, with different clothes and subtly different lighting, for the false American passport. Teodor was the finest counterfeiter in the Low Countries and had been supplying me with false papers for over ten years. He insisted he would only work for people he liked, which I took as a compliment. He was an old man now and, as he worked in his shirtsleeves under a bright magnifying lamp, I saw the concentration camp number tattooed on his forearm. He would talk about anything except that wartime experience, though once he had told me that he dreamed about the camp at least three times a week. “You’re going on a journey, Paul?” he asked me now.
“Yes.”
He reached for tweezers and a can of spray adhesive. “Why do I sense this is the last time I’ll see you?”