by Farris, John
The rain and wind seemed to be slackening. Joe heard the diesel of the JetKat winding up as the ferry turned away from the side of the Dragonfly and headed toward shore.
"I figured that if you shipped the cash, it was to one of two places where the package wasn't likely to be inspected on arrival. Of course there's always ways you can fool the noses of those dogs trained to sniff out money. Okay, we'll say the money went to Puerto Rico or the. U.S. Virgin Islands, where it would be no trouble for you to stow it on a sailboat like this one and distribute it at your leisure to numbered accounts scattered all over the Caribbean. How am I doing so far?"
"I follow you, Brad."
"It was a given that where the money went, Joe would go. Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, maybe St. Croix. If you owned a boat and you sailed those waters, somebody around the marinas would know you. Right again. And the boat was the Dragonfly. Once we had that much knowledge, finding you was a matter of showing your photograph, with and without the beard, in a lot of ports. Our girl Josephine spotted you yesterday, living like a prince of a minor paradise. By now I don't suppose there's much of Clare's money left on board."
"I keep enough cash on hand for thirty days' expenses, that's all. You'd have to tear the Dragonfly down to the waterline to find that."
"Don't intend to go to all that trouble. I'll just take back what you've stashed in the bank, and we'll call us even, moneywise."
Joe looked up at him. "Here's the way it works, Brud. The account codes are changed every day, by either of two lawyers in the firm that represents me in Luxembourg. If I want to make a substantial withdrawal or shift some money around, I make a collect call to a number where my voice is compared by a computer to the voiceprint on record. When they're sure they know who they're talking to, they send a fax to a designated bank in the islands. It could be here, or in Martinique, or a dozen other places. Wherever it is, I'll be waiting. Alone. When my physical description is verified, the information in the fax is turned over to me. The fax contains account information that is only valid in conjunction with the daily code. Then, while I'm sitting in a private office in that bank, the transaction is completed with my bank in Luxembourg."
Brud winced. "Jesus, you must have a hell of a lot to protect,"
"That's right, I do, Brud."
"Well, then, I'm hoping you'll just do the honorable thing, and turn that money back to me voluntarily."
"We don't really have the time, do we? I mean, it's less than four hours to daylight. And I'm pretty sure you don't intend to let me live that long."
Brud glanced at the impassive faces of the black men, who didn't shift their attention away from Joe. None of them had any questions, but Brud acted chagrined.
"Now, I honestly don't know what you take me for, Joe. A murderer? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, hearing that from someone like you—an individual with no moral sense whatsoever. A common thief, a—"
"Save it, Brud. I don't steal money. They get what they want from me, I get what I want from them. They can afford it. And I earn every dollar."
"Listen to you!" His eyes had turned a deeper red, from more than fatigue; there was a vein acrawl in the hollow of one temple. "I wonder just how many women there were before Clare, innocent and unsuspecting—"
"I was what Clare had been wanting, and needing, all her life. You saw the change in her. Maybe that's what you resent most about me."
Brud trembled. "You tortured my sister! She—she tried to kill herself, Joe!"
Unexpectedly he began to cry, hunching his shoulders; his face flushed with the effort to control his grief. The black men glanced at him, and looked away stonily.
"I don't know why—you didn't have the decency—to stay and marry her. Whatever you got away with—you could've had more. Much more. All you had to do was—marry Clare, go on pretending you cared about her. But you—snuck away. You were so despicable. She couldn't—she just couldn't face anybody. God—how you must hate women!"
Joe drew an unsteady breath, still in shock from what he'd been told about Clare.
"Hate women? I love them."
Brud moved closer to Joe, close enough to touch him. He was still trembling, although the crying had stopped.
"I think you are the most pathetic, contemptible individual I have ever met in my life. It disgusts me to be in your presence. Now you hear me! Nobody—nobody who could do what you did to my sister has any love in him!"
Brud leaned over as if spellbound in his wrath, staring into Joe's eyes. Then Brud savagely kissed him on the mouth. Joe tensed but didn't resist, even when his lower lip was bitten.
When Brud had finished, as he was turning away, Joe said softly, "There were times when I wondered if I got engaged to the wrong Malcolm."
Brud spat on the cabin sole and said, "Tie his hands, but not his feet. You know what I want done. Take him in that stateroom back there. And shut the door."
"You don't want to watch, boss?" one of the black men said.
"No. Just make sure I hear him. I want it to last, and I want it good and God-damned loud."
Chapter Five
The brief storm bkw itsef out and the sea was calmer, although some clouds remained through which the horn of the moon and the closer planets burned mistily from time to time. Kneeling on her bed in front of a jalousied window, Yvonne Saint-Sauveur devoutly watched, through binoculars, the Dragonfly.
Since the sloop's return to Terre-de-Haut, her surveillance had been a nightly diversion, then a ruling passion after Joe's visit to her home. Yvonne had been nearly sleepless for the past two nights, sinking into a nervous doze when the emotional pangs of her vigil exhausted her. Awakening with a start, a dry mouth, a wet brow. Her short womanly nightgown, ordered before Christmas from the Victoria's Secret catalogue, sticking to her sensitive nipples. Bolting up to snatch the binoculars. Convinced by the pounding of her heart that he had at last come on deck in loneliness and desire to signal her in the dark.
Yvonne, I know you're watching I was mistaken. I want you now. I can't wait any longer.
She was familiar with the belowdecks layout of the Dragonfly; she knew every inch of the master's cabin in which he slept. A few years ago, before puberty, she had been a regular member of Joe's in-port crew. She knew which toothpaste he favored, his preference in aftershave. No one else in the juvenile crew had been allowed in his galley. And once—the memory was sacred, she had never told anyone but her best friend, Inez—Joe had allowed Yvonne to trim the unkempt beard he had returned with after a weeks-long cruise.
Despite her ravenous love for Joe, which at times she was helpless to deal with, Yvonne understood his reluctance to marry her—although by island standards she had been of marriageable age for at least three years. He had traveled the world. Joe wanted her to know as much about art and literature as he did, so they would always have interesting things to talk about. At seventeen she could cook nearly as well as her mother. There had been some close calls with boys her own age, but currently she was a virgin; in spite of that apparent handicap she had no doubts that she would make love to Joe better than any woman he had known. No other man would ever turn her head. In addition to her fanatical loyalty, she had brains. She would never disgrace him.
At the moment, although Yvonne had been keeping watch since before midnight, through all the rain that some obscured the lights aboard, Joe was nowhere in sight. The JetKat that had appeared in the harbor twenty minutes ago and tied up alongside the Dragonfly was now idling beside the quay. Yvonne had watched a woman disembark and hurry off by herself toward the small business district of Bourg. Maybe it was the woman he'd had dinner with. Yvonne had bitten her tongue in outrage when she saw the two of them at dusk on the foredeck of the Dragonfly. After seething for an hour, she rationalized the woman's presence there. She was a friend of Joe's from the States; or a relative, perhaps. She was not staying the night, a fact that lifted Yvonne's spirits even as she wondered about the appearance of the ferry from Guadeloupe at a late, unsche
duled hour.
After a few moments her thoughts returned obsessively to the plan she'd been contriving for days: her best opportunity to seduce Joe before her imminent departure for Paris. Because she was not going to step aboard the Air France jet without having first sealed their implied betrothal.
Yvonne had nerved herself to do it tonight, then had lost both nerve and heart upon seeing that he had a guest for dinner. But the woman was gone; Joe was, as far asYvonne knew, alone on the Dragonfly. It was two-thirty-five in the morning. Sunday morning. The fishermen of Bourg, including her older brother Abel, would not be setting out as usual at four o'clock to net the day's catch for the restaurants they supplied. Through the binoculars she saw a man in the small wheelhouse of the ferryboat that idled beside the quay, but no one else was around at this hour. Abel's twenty-foot Saintois fishing boat was available to her. She could row unnoticed to the Dragonfly and tie up at the stern. What would Joe say? He would be surprised. He might pretend to be annoyed—Yvonne smiled. She knew better.
She was not deserving of his love if she didn't have the courage to claim it.
Yvonne put the binoculars down. She felt lightheaded, feverish, but charged with energy. She stripped off the filmy nightgown and put on a turquoise-and-pink jumpsuit, took a little time for lip gloss and the right, jaunty costume earrings.
Night wind stirred the flamboyants along the street, cleared the sky and blew the stars to brilliance like embers on a hearth. Schwarzenegger, the family's black Labrador, appeared as she let herself through thej gate in front of the red-roofed house. Rather than risk having him bark at her if she tried to make him stay, Yvonne ignored the dog. Schwarzenegger trotted briskly beside her as she jogged down the hill to the cove where her brother's boat was beached at night.
There were twenty boats in the little cove south of the quay. Most of them were equipped with outboards, but none of the boats were chained to the palm trees a few feet away. Theft was rare on Terre-de-Haut. Communal nets were hung up to dry like big spiderwebs among the trees. Schwarzenegger went nose-down along the shoreline coursing after fiddler crabs, which were hard to catch; they disappeared into the wet packed sand like henchmen tunneling to a bank.
Still ignoring him, Yvonne pushed Abel's orangeand-blue boat-backward off the blocks and into shallow water. As she did so, she heard a change in the pitch of the JetKat's engine, and the ferry pulled slowly from the quay two hundred yards to the north, drifted abeam momentarily, then turned and headed toward the mouth of the harbor. Watching the ferry, she saw out of the corner of her eye that the Dragonfly was also under way, on its auxiliary engine. Joe was in the cockpit—or was it him? For a few moments she was unsure. But she had sharp eyes, and when she focused between cupped hands she saw that the man at the helm of the Dragonfly was broad and heavy, almost-fat; the shape of his head was wrong too.
For several seconds she stood barefoot in shallow water holding the boat in place with her hands on the bow gunwale, confused, then annoyed at seeing her plans for the rest of the night thwarted. And then with a change in her heartbeat came a stiffening of fear: it occurred to Yvonne that someone was stealing the Dragonfly.
Another moment, and her fear sharpened.
Where was Joe?
The wake from the two boats making for the open sea sloshed above her knees as she stood there, chilly at the nape of the neck, soul-paralyzed. What was happening? Piracy was the worst crime in all the islands. The Dragonfly, according to her father, was worth nearly a million dollars. But that didn't matter to Yvonne. She pictured Joe aboard, bludgeoned and bound, helpless. If they were taking his sloop, what would they do with him once they cleared the harbor?
Yvonne trembled; then she gave an all-out push and leaped into the fishing boat as it glided into deeper water. No thought of rowing stealthily to a rendezvous now. She scrambled back to the stern, skinning one shin on the edge of a seat in her haste. The pain made her hold her breath as she tipped the outboard engine upright and pushed the starter button. The thirty-horsepower motor caught with no hesitation.
Yvonne pointed the bow after the two larger boats that were now nearly side-by-side as they left the harbor. Running lights on the JetKat, but the Dragonfly was dark topside. Only the portlights illuminated the water creaming away from the hull as both boats picked up speed.
Flustered, but not knowing what else to do, Yvonne continued on a course that kept her well astern of the Dragonfly, far enough back so that the helmsman would not hear the muted Mercury outboard on the transom of the fishing boat. She had been going to sea in boats like this one since before she was able to walk. The dark swells beyond the harbor were moderate, occasionally capped, nothing she gave a thought to. The breeze was from the east, eight to ten knots.
When the lights of Bourg fell behind theft little flotilla and they cleared the half-mile-long chunk of rock called Cabrit offshore, the heading seemed to indicate they were bound for the much larger island of Guadeloupe, twenty minutes away to the north, where the nimbus of Basse-Terre was plainly visible. Three or four kilometers to port, a lighter was steaming south in the Windward shipping lanes. The wind whipped her hair across both cheeks; she had tears in her eyes. She was frightened now, crouched on the stern seat, all but frozen to the outboard's tiller.
Since the age of twelve she had attended the Catholic school in Basse-Terre, where there was a population of twenty thousand. In Paris there would be millions of people, all strangers. She would be lost there, lost without him. Didn't he realize that?
"Joe!" But she only whispered his name, afraid of being heard above the sounds of the diesel engines in the cat and the Dragonfly. There was no moon track on the water at this hour; her own humble boat would be difficult to make out as she followed in their wakes.
Then the two larger boats slowed, and the JetKat closed to starboard. Yvonne cut back the engine of the outboard to near-idle. The ferry and the sloop were dead in the water nearly a kilometer away, side by side. She wished she had her binoculars. By the running lights of the JetKat she saw men leaving the Dragonfly. Four in all, including the helmsman. She couldn't tell at the distance if Joe was among them. Intuition told her he was not.
Well, then, maybe it wasn't—
The JetKat pulled away, heading at full throttle for Basse-Terre. The Dragonfly seemed to wallow rather heavily in the ferry's wake. Yvonne stayed where she was, staring at the sloop. There were no sails showing, not even a jib. The Dragonfly acted rudderless, drifting slowly westward, heeling laboriously.
Once it was difficult to make out the receding lights of the ferry, Yvonne went full-throttle toward the Dragonfly, and caught up with it in a couple of minutes. The sloop was still wallowing, much lower in the water than it should have been. The slopping of the wake from her own small boat nearly spilled across the foredeck.
She bumped the port side aft and shipped the outboard, reached up desperately for a grabrail on the Dragonfly, hung on while she pulled herself forward and found the cleated tie rope on the bow of the fishing boat. She snubbed the rope to a cleat on the side deck of the Dragonfly and jumped aboard. She shouted for Joe through an open portlight of the cabin.
The sloop had settled a few more inches since her approach. With each roll of the decks, she took on seas. The cockpit pumps weren't working. The hatch doors stood open. She knew the Dragonfly was in danger of going down.
Yvonne scrambled down the companionway to the salon. The lights were on. Water sloshed across the teak sole. No way to tell where it was coming from. She screamed for Joe, hesitated, then made her way back through the galley to the master's cabin. As she passed through the galley she smelled propane but didn't stop to check the source. She was sickeningly aware that the boat had been thoroughly sabotaged. They had breached the hull somewhere. The men who had abandoned the Dragonfly wanted her to sink.
And they had left Joe aboard to sink along with the Dragonfly.
She threw open the door to the master's cabin. He wasn't inside.
<
br /> "Joe!"
A faint, human sound came from the head to her left. Yvonne leaned her slender body against the door, which budged only an inch. She tried to brace herself on the waterlogged sole, straining to open the door against whatever blocked it from the inside. She was wiry, strong for her size. The door yielded, and a hand caked with blood fell palm-up into view.
With one hip wedged against the door so it wouldn't close again, Yvonne knelt and grabbed his gory hand, pulling at him.
"Get up! We're sinking! Get up, Joe!"
She heard him groaning. His hand tightened on hers, loosened. He pulled it away. She heard his efforts to sit up inside. This time he stifled a scream. She was able to force the door open and look inside at his nodding head, at his face, or what was left of it. Joe was almost unrecognizable. Blood everywhere, in his hair, in the matting on his chest.
He was naked. Her heart seemed to stop for a couple of moments; then a leaden calm possessed her. She made herself reach into the water and feel his groin; but he was still intact there.
Then nothing else really mattered, except to get him off the doomed Dragonfly and into a hospital.
Yvonne wormed her way inside the head, got an arm around Joe, gripped one wrist, tried to lift him. His eyes were closed. Fresh blood bubbled on his lower lip. He was ice-cold, slippery as a gutted fish, and breathing badly, as if his lungs were shot through with rib bones, like the swords in a magician's cabinet.
"You have to help me," she said, still with the nerve and self-possession that had seen her through other crises: her father's heart attack, her friend David's moped accident when they were thirteen. "You must get up. Otherwise we will both drown, because I will never leave you."
Joe looked at her with the eye that would open, although it couldn't open all the way. Then, incredibly, he smiled, revealing blood-clotted and broken teeth. But his voice was a strangled whisper, the words in English. She knew some English, but could understand only one word of what he was trying to say.