Bear and His Daughter (17 page)

“I beg you to reconsider, Honoré,” Blessington said to Freycinet. He cleared his throat. “You’re making a mistake.”

Freycinet turned back to him with the same smile.

“Eh, Liam. You can leave, man. You know, there’s an Irish pub in Soufrière. It’s money from your friends in the IRA. You can go there, eh?”

Blessington had no connection whatsoever with the IRA, although he had allowed Freycinet and his friends to believe that, and they had chosen to.

“You can go get drunk there,” Freycinet told him and then turned again to look at the island.

He was standing near the bow with his bare toes caressing freeboard, gripping a stay. Blessington and Gillian exchanged looks. In the next instant she threw the wheel, the mainsail boom went crashing across the cabin roofs, the boat lurched to port and heeled hard. For a moment Freycinet was suspended over blank blue water. Blessington clambered up over the cockpit and stood swaying there, hesitating. Then he reached out for Freycinet. The Frenchman swung around the stay like a monkey and knocked him flat. The two of them went sprawling. Freycinet got to his feet in a karate stance, cursing.

“You shit,” he said, when his English returned. “Cunt! What?”

“I thought you were going over, Honoré. I thought I’d have to pull you back aboard.”

“That’s right, Honoré,” Gillian said from the cockpit. “You were like a goner. He saved your ass, man.”

Freycinet pursed his lips and nodded. “
Bien
” he said. He climbed down into the cockpit in a brisk, businesslike fashion and slapped Gillian across the face, backhand and forehand, turning her head around each time.

He gave Blessington the wheel, then he took Gillian under the arm and pulled her up out of the cockpit. “Get below! I don’t want to fucking see you.” He followed her below and Blessington heard him speak briefly to Marie. The young woman began to moan. The Pitons looked close enough to strike with a rock and a rich jungle smell came out on the wind. Freycinet, back on deck, looked as though he was sniffing out menace. A divi-divi bird landed on the boom for a moment and then fluttered away.

“I think I have a place,” Blessington said, “if you still insist. A reef.”

“A reef, eh?”

“A reef about four thousand meters offshore.”

“We could have a swim,
non?
”

“We could, yes.”

“But I don’t know if I want to swim with you, Liam. I think you try to push me overboard.”

“I think I saved your life,” Blessington said.

They motored on to the reef with Freycinet standing in the bow to check for bottom as Blessington watched the depth recorder. At ten meters of bottom, they were an arm’s length from the single float in view. Blessington cut the engine and came about and then went forward to cleat a line to the float. The float was painted red, yellow and green, Rasta colors like Gillian’s bracelet.

It was late afternoon and suddenly dead calm. The protection the Pitons offered from the wind was ideal and the bad current that ran over the reef to the south seemed to divide around these coral heads. A perfect dive site, Blessington thought, and he could not understand why even in June there were not more floats or more boats anchored there. It seemed a steady enough place even for an overnight anchorage, although the cruising guide advised against it because of the dangerous reefs on every side.

The big ketch lay motionless on unruffled water; the float line drifted slack. There was sandy beach and a palm-lined shore across the water. It was a lonely part of the coast, across a jungle mountain track from the island’s most remote resort. Through binoculars Blessington could make out a couple of boats hauled up on the strand but no one seemed ready to come out and hustle them. With luck it was too far from shore.

It might be also, he thought, that for metaphysical reasons the
Sans Regret
presented a forbidding aspect. But an aspect that deterred small predators might in time attract big ones.

Marie came up, pale and hollow-eyed, in her bikini. She gave Blessington a chastising look and lay down on the cushions on the afterdeck. Gillian came up behind her and took a seat on the gear locker behind Blessington.

“The fucker’s got no class,” she said softly. “See him hit me?”

“Of course. I was next to you.”

” Gonna let him get away with that ?”

“Well,” Blessington said, “for the moment it behooves us to let him feel in charge.”

“Behooves us?” she asked. “You say it
behooves
us?”

“That’s right.”

“Hey, what were you gonna do back there, Liam?” she asked. “Deep-six him?”

“I honestly don’t know. He might have fallen.”

“I was wondering,” she said. “He was wondering too.”

Blessington shrugged.

“He’s got the overstanding,” Gillian said. “We got the under.” She looked out at the water and said, “Boat boys.”

He looked where she was looking and saw the boat approaching, a speck against the shiny sand. It took a long time for it to cover the distance between the beach and the
Sans Regret.

There were two boat boys, and they were not boys but men in their thirties, lean and unsmiling. One wore a wool tam-o’- shanter in bright tie-dyed colors. The second looked like an East Indian. His black headband gave him a lascar look.

“You got to pay for dat anchorage, mon,” the man in the tam called to them. “Not open to de public widout charge.”

“We coming aboard,” said the lascar. “We take your papers and passports in for you. You got to clear.”

“How much for the use of the float?” Blessington asked.

Now Freycinet appeared in the companionway. He was carrying a big French MAS 3
6
sniper rifle, pointing it at the men in the boat, showing his pink-edged teeth.

“You get the fuck out of here,” he shouted at them. A smell of ganja and vomit seemed to follow him up from the cabin. “Understand?”

The two men did not seem unduly surprised at Freycinet’s behavior. Blessington wondered if they could smell the dope as distinctly as he could.

“Fuckin’ Frenchman,” the man in the tam said. “Think he some shit.”

“Why don’ you put the piece down, Frenchy?” the East Indian asked. “This ain’t no Frenchy island. You got to clear.”

“You drift on that reef, Frenchy,” the man in the tam said, “you be begging us to take you off.”

Freycinet was beside himself with rage. He hated
les nègres
more than any Frenchman Blessington had met in Martinique, which was saying a great deal. He had contained himself during the negotiations on Canouan but now he seemed out of control. Blessington began to wonder if he would shoot the pair of them.

“You fucking monkeys!” he shouted. “You stay away from me, eh? Chimpanzees! I kill you quick…
mon,
” he added with a sneer.

The men steered their boat carefully over the reef and sat with their outboard idling. They could not stay too long, Blessington thought. Their gas tank was small and it was a long way out against a current.

“Well,” he asked Gillian, “who’s got the overstanding now?”

“Not Honoré,” she said.

A haze of heat and doped lassitude settled over their mooring. Movement was labored, even speech seemed difficult. Blessington and Gillian nodded off on the gear locker. Marie seemed to have lured Freycinet belowdecks. Prior to dozing, Blessington heard her mimic the Frenchman’s angry voice and the two of them laughing down in the cabin. The next thing he saw clearly was Marie, in her bikini, standing on the cabin roof, screaming. A rifle blasted and echoed over the still water. Suddenly the slack breeze had a brisk cordite smell and it carried smoke.

Freycinet shouted, holding the hot shotgun.

The boat with the two islanders in it seemed to have managed to come up on them. Now it raced off, headed first out to sea to round the tip of the reef and then curving shoreward to take the inshore current at an angle.

“Everyone all right?” asked Blessington.

“Fucking monkeys!” Freycinet swore.

“Well,” Blessington said, watching the boat disappear “they’re gone for now. Maybe,” he suggested to Freycinet, “we can have our swim and go too.”

Freycinet looked at him blankly as though he had no idea what Blessington was talking about. He nodded vaguely.

After half an hour Marie rose and stood on the bulwark and prepared to dive, arms foremost. When she went, her dive was a good one, straight-backed and nearly splash-free. She performed a single stroke underwater and sped like a bright shaft between the coral heads below and the crystal surface. Then she appeared prettily in the light of day, blinking like a child, shaking her shining hair.

From his place in the bow, Freycinet watched Marie’s dive, her underwater career, her pert surfacing. His expression was not affectionate but taut and tight-lipped. The muscles in his neck stood out, his moves were twitchy like a street junkie’s. He looked exhausted and angry. The smell of cordite hovered around him.

“He’s a shithead and a loser,” Gillian said softly to Blessington. She looked not at Freycinet but toward the green mountains. “I thought he was cool. He was so fucking mean—I like respected that. Now we’re all gonna die. Well,” she said, “goes to show, right?”

“Don’t worry,” Blessington told her. “I won’t leave you.”

“Whoa,” said Gillian. “All right!” But her enthusiasm was not genuine. She was mocking him.

Blessington forgave her.

Freycinet pointed a finger at Gillian. “Swim!”

“What if I don’t wanna?” she asked, already standing up. When he began to swear at her in a hoarse voice she took her clothes off in front of them. Everything but the Rasta bracelet.

“I think I will if no one minds,” she said. “Where you want me to swim to, Honoré?”

“Swim to fucking
Amérique,
” he said. He laughed as though his mood had improved. “You want her Liam?”

“People are always asking me that,” Blessington said. “What do I have to do?”

“You swim to fucking
Amérique
with her.”

Blessington saw Gillian take a couple of pills from her cutoff pocket and swallow them dry.

“I can’t swim that far,” Blessington said.

“Go as far as you can,” said Freycinet.

“How about you?” Gillian said to the Frenchman. “You’re the one wanted to stop. So ain’t you gonna swim?”

“I don’t trust her,” Freycinet said to Blessington. “What do you think?”

“She’s a beauty,” Blessington said. “Don’t provoke her.”

Gillian measured her beauty against the blue water and dived over the side. A belly full of pills, Blessington thought. But her strokes when she surfaced were strong and defined. She did everything well, he thought. She was good around the boat. She had a pleasant voice for country music. He could imagine her riding, a cowgirl.

“Bimbo, eh?” Freycinet asked. “That’s it, eh?”

“Yes,” Blessington said. “Texas and all that.”

“
Oui,
” said Freycinet. “Texas.” He yawned. “
Bien.
Have your swim with her. If you want. “

Blessington went down into the stinking cabin and put his bathing suit on. Propriety to the last. The mixture of ganja, sick, roach spray and pine scent was asphyxiating. If he survived, he thought, he would never smoke hash again. Never drink rum, never do speed or cocaine, never sail or go where there were palm trees and too many stars overhead. A few fog-shrouded winter constellations would do.

“Tonight I’ll cook, eh?” Freycinet said when Blessington came back up. “You can assist me.”

“Good plan,” said Blessington.

Standing on the bulwark, he looked around the boat. There were no other vessels in sight. Marie was swimming backstroke, describing a safe circle about twenty-five yards out from the boat. Gillian appeared to be headed hard for the open sea. She had reached the edge of the current, where the wind raised small horsetails from the rushing water.

If Freycinet was planning to leave them in the water; Blessington wondered, would he leave Marie with them? It would all be a bad idea, because Freycinet was not a skilled sailor. And there was a possibility of their being picked up right here or even of their making it to shore, although that seemed most unlikely. On the other hand, he had discovered that Freycinet’s ideas were often impulses, usually bad ones. It was his recklessness that had made him appear so capably in charge, and that was as true in the kitchen as it was on the Raging Main. He had been a reckless cook.

Besides, there were a thousand dark possibilities on that awful ocean. That he had arranged to be met at sea off Martinique, that there had been some betrayal in the works throughout. Possibly involving Lavigerie or someone else in Fort-de-France.

“Yes,” said Blessington. “There’s time to unfreeze the grouper.”

He looked at the miles of ocean between the boat and the beach at the foot of the mountains. Far off to the right he could see white water, the current running swiftly over the top of a reef that extended southwesterly, at a 4 5-degree angle to the beach. Beyond the reef was a sandspit where the island tapered to its narrow southern end. On their left, the base of the mountains extended to the edge of the sea, forming a rock wall against which the waves broke. According to the charts, the wall plunged to a depth of ten fathoms, and the ocean concealed a network of submarine caves and grottoes in the volcanic rock of which the Pitons were composed. Across the towering ridge, completely out of sight, was the celebrated resort.