“Yes.” She had died in the Lebanon where she had been attending the Hasbaiya terrorist training camp. It had been Roisin’s keenest ambition to have the IRA send her on that course, and her eagerness had been transmuted by suspicion into an accusation that she planned to betray Hasbaiya as well as Seamus. Thus, as a favour to their Irish allies as well as to themselves, the Palestinians had arranged her execution.
“You didn’t try to stop the killing?” Halil asked me.
“Why should I have done?” I even managed a small callous laugh.
“Because you loved her.”
“But she betrayed my friend,” I said, and I saw, in the sudden poisonous recurrence of memory, the split second when the vivid blood had spurted from Roisin’s punctured skull to splash among the yellow stones. I had been wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh which I had wrapped about my face because the hot wind was blowing gusts of powdery sand off the hill’s crest. The keffiyeh had prevented Roisin from recognising me, a small mercy. For a few moments, as the flies had gathered thick on the bloody margin of her death wound, I had suspected that I too was about to be shot for the heinous crime of being an American, but instead I had been curtly ordered to bury her. Afterwards the Palestinians had questioned me about Roisin, trying to determine how much she had known and how much she might have betrayed to her masters in Washington. I had given them what reassurances I could, and then, shriven of her accusations but still not wholly trusted, I was cast into the outer darkness and given nothing but trifling jobs.
Till now, when it was Halil’s turn to assay my guilt or innocence in the shadowy scales of an old suspicion and, as he stared at me, I wondered once again why a man of his reputation was caught up in such a small matter as the six occupied counties of Northern Ireland. The death of a few Brits in that wild damp island could hardly count for much in il Hayaween’s wider world, and certainly not at a time when the Arab world had found a new champion to flaunt Islam’s banner in the face of the hated Americans.
And perhaps Halil sensed his interest was raising an unhealthy curiosity in me for he suddenly waved a dismissive hand. “Look at the boat,” he said off-handedly, “and tell me your opinion.” It seemed my suggestion of using a powerboat had not met his approval and so, under the silent gaze of Shafiq, Halil and his two bodyguards, I clambered about Corsaire. I did not have nearly enough time to make a proper survey, but I decided she was a handy craft, well made and well maintained. Her mainsail was furled inside her aluminium mast, while her vast genoa was stored below to keep it from the ravages of sunlight. Her hull was fibreglass and her deck was teak. A sturdy inflatable dinghy was folded away in an aft locker, together with an electric-powered pump to inflate it. She was a sensibly designed boat, and the only feature I disliked was her engine which, though capable enough at sixty horsepower, was fuelled by gasoline, but at least the motor banged into healthy life as soon as I connected the batteries and turned the ignition key.
I poked and pried through the accommodations below. Many of the French owner’s belongings were still aboard; thus in the aft cabin I discovered a sweater, a half-bottle of brandy hidden behind the pilot books, a copy of Playboy, two tins of sardines, a can of sugar, a sleeping bag, the top half of a bikini and a broken pair of sunglasses. I lifted the main cabin sole to find the bilge filled with flexible water tanks between which was the decaying body of a rat; clearly the source of the boat’s foul stench. Rat poison lay in white chunks on top of the shiny keel-bolts. I lifted the stinking remains of the rat and, to Shafiq’s shuddering disgust, carried it topside where I chucked it into the harbour.
“You like the boat?” Halil asked me.
“I’d prefer a diesel engine.”
“Why?”
“Gasoline fumes explode. Diesel is safer. But she’ll do.” The engine compartment was well ventilated and equipped with an automatic fire-extinguisher slaved to a gas-alarm so that, even in the unlikely event of a fuel-fire, Corsaire would probably survive. “She’s not a bad boat.” I spoke unfairly for she was better than that; she was an elegant, nicely built craft and, judging from her broad beam and deep cabin, she would probably prove a stable sea boat. She had clearly been equipped for long voyages because she had a single sideband radio mounted with the expensive instruments above her chart table.
“You can take her to America?” Halil asked me. He was sitting in the centre cockpit, close to the big destroyer wheel.
“Sure,” I said cheerfully, “as long as she’s prepared properly.”
“Meaning what?” Halil was suspicious.
“For a start I need to get her out of the water and have her hull scrubbed down. She’ll want a couple of layers of good anti-fouling paint. Then she’s got to be equipped and stocked for a three-month voyage. I’m told there are two Irish lads going with me, so I’ll need food for them and –”
“Make a list,” Halil interrupted me.
“She needs a liferaft, charts…”
“Make a list,” he said impatiently.
“And there’s paperwork!” I warned him. “I’ll need a bill of sale, a Tunisian clearance permit, insurance papers –”
“Make a list!” he snapped at me again.
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. “Glassfibre 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 practised 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 sabres 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 grey 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 Hali’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 Hallowe’en, 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.
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 colour for, in Irish superstition, green was an unlucky colour 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 harbour where a sudden west wind was flicking whitecaps across the sheltered grey 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 whe
re, 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 fulfilment 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 harbours 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 towards 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.
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