“Ah, she’s an engineer.” I excused her behavior to Erdem when I saw him looking at her, puzzled. Then, to Anna, I whispered, “What are you doing? This isn’t a building.”
“I’m looking for places to hide.”
“Hide what?” I flashed a beatific smile in Erdem’s direction.
“My body. To hide me. You’ve said it yourself, we’re going through the waters of countries where I’ll be illegal. I don’t want to get caught. Who knows what they will do to me?”
“What? You’re going to hide in a hole or under the floor and hope not to get caught?”
“How much room is there under the floor?”
“I don’t know. I’ll come up with a way to ask Erdem. Meantime don’t be so obvious. We’re coming across like smugglers. Oh and something else I know about from flying airplanes and clearing customs; they have dogs trained to sniff for more than drugs.”
“What are we going to do then?”
“For one, we’re going to stay as far away from countries as possible.”
Erdem looked more than a little concerned. We canned the furtive whispering and he transitioned smoothly back into boat broker mode. “The cabin layout and storage space this boat provides is truly the best in its class.”
“Yeah, great. A little more room would be nice. What about storing stuff below the floor, blankets, provisions, a bean-bag chair, that sort of thing?” I asked.
He didn’t see why not, and using embedded finger pulls, lifted a floor panel to reveal the space below it. Not much room, barely a crawlspace and it was divided by structural bulkheads. Provisions — maybe, a living human body — not a chance.
At Omar’s brokerage, Erdem and I presented an offer on the French built Beneteau. Considering the years of wear and tear in the charter circuit and the sorry state it was in, Erdem suggested an offer well below the astronomical asking price. Tea was served, phone calls were made, and the offer was not only rejected, but countered higher than the asking price. I was undeterred. It was still within the half million I could borrow against my house, and I wanted that Beneteau. Erdem tried to educate me on business — Turkish style, explaining how the seller’s honor had likely been bruised by the low-ball offer.
I wasn’t placated. “Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass about so called honor, and I want — no, I need — that boat, Erdem. If you knew the seller would be offended, why did you let me make the offer?”
Erdem called in his uncle Omar for reinforcement. Omar’s presence and imposing manner commanded complete control of any situation. He was one of those guys you just knew was in charge. Within minutes, Omar engineered a deal on a boat of his own, a French built Beneteau Oceanis called Shadow. Recently outfitted for a no-show charter season, he was happy to unload it.
“Oceanis… Anna, it’s an Oceanis!” I whispered when Omar stepped out to grab an incoming fax.
“Nu ee shto — so what?”
“Don’t you get it? A model called, ‘Oceanis,’ has just got to be for crossing oceans.”
“You know this model of yacht?”
I didn’t, but Omar returned, preempting my need to respond. His voice boomed, “You, my friends, are in luck!”
With peak oil pushing inflation, the financial collapse looming on the horizon, and political unrest heating up, the Eastern Mediterranean charter season was looking was dismal. The charter operator planning to buy that yacht, backed out at the last minute, leaving Omar stuck with it. It was a Beneteau, like the one on which I had placed the ill-fated offer, but this one was an Oceanis. The descriptive model name reeked of the high seas and ocean racing origins. Maybe the model started out on an ocean racer’s drawing board and if so, it was sure to get us home. I had decided on a boat in the forty-five to fifty foot range based on what I had read about the Vendee Globe yacht race. It also had something to do with what I could afford, or to be precise, was able to borrow.
Erdem provided me his phone to call my bank manager back in Vancouver. I needed to confirm the credit was available and find out how to wire that much money. The interrogation I got about insurance, licensing, planning and experience simply blew me mind. The manager, with whom I thought I’d developed rapport during my bungalow renovation, held nothing back when it came to how he felt about sailing a yacht home from Turkey. In the end, he told me the money would be available, insurance in place and that I was, “Nuts to even consider a venture that fool-hardily risky.”
Maybe it was our maniacal state of affairs, or perhaps Omar just wanted to make sure the deal went through, but he let us move aboard Shadow before the sale was complete. I was chuffed, and not just because staying at the apartment-hotel was running up the credit card, but because it smacked of adventure. Indeed, the first night aboard, drifting off to sleep, gently rocking at the dock in a real bed, as opposed to the wet sleeping bag over a flimsy foamy I was used to when backwoods camping, was heaven.
Anna moved into a cabin, making it her own with the few things she had left. She hung her coat in the closet, stuck a postcard of Marmaris on the wall and placed her scuffed boots by the bedside table. On her pillow she lay a small teddy bear her father had given her in better times. How it made it all the way to a sailboat cabin in Turkey is a mystery to me. Anna quite literally had nothing left, but there sat that cheap little teddy bear.
She loved having a room of her own and imagined it a first class cabin on the Orient Express. Paneled almost entirely in dark polished wood, the cabin just naturally invoked an air of luxury recalling 1930s steam transport. Or so Anna opined, every chance she got. Of course, in our present reality the train hadn’t left the station — or the yacht sailed, as the case may be. On deck in the blistering heat, Anna worked at familiarizing herself with the rigging and systems that would eventually make the boat go. She developed a rhythm of ship-board chores like, filling the water tanks, cleaning and oiling the teak decks, and studying manuals and information about sailing.
Buying a yacht is nothing like buying a car. With a car, you pay for the thing and drive it on home. But with a yacht, there are lawyers and conditions, registration, taxes, insurance; Erdem’s list went on and on.
“Next step is to remove conditions.” Erdem sat across from me at a patio table under an orange tree on the brokerage’s lawn.
I wasn’t really concentrating after having tried to eat one of the oranges. The tree was heavy with them and they looked delicious. But whoa, it tasted like some kind of insecticide. I thought I’d poisoned myself! I could swear my throat was swelling shut. Erdem had watched me peel a big juicy one and take a bite. When I started gasping and choking, all he did was raise an eyebrow and tell me they were only decorative, “Not for eating.” Then, unconcerned with the possibility of my imminent demise, he started in on those conditions.
“Whose conditions are they, and what do I do about them?” I wheezed.
“Well, they are standard conditions, in the contract for your protection and you need to remove them: a sea-trial and a survey. They ensure you will only buy the boat when you are satisfied with it.”
“I take it a survey is an inspection, right?”
“That’s right. The vessel must be surveyed by a professional surveyor to make sure there are no defects the seller didn’t know about or not tell about. Your survey report will help you decide if the boat is worth what you offered.” Erdem shuffled through papers in his leather folio.