Black Swan (5 page)

    The sun was just heralding its arrival with a dull glow above the treetops to the east. The security lights from the Harbor Club next door cast their own yellowy glow, though the Swan was totally blacked out, a white clapboard mass, tired but elegant, braced for another day.

    I was nearly through with the coffee when I saw a light flash at the back of the hotel. The wide French doors centered over the rear patio opened and Anika walked out. She wore a heavy, dark-colored bathrobe and slippers. She held what looked like a piece of paper in her mouth to free both hands to shut and secure the doors behind her. I watched her stride down the main dock toward our boat.

    When she got there, she stood up on her toes to look into the cockpit, a difficult task from where she stood. She held what I could now see was an envelope between her

fingers in a way that suggested she was about to flick it on to the boat.

    "Good morning," I said from the bow.

    She jumped and grasped her bathrobe at the throat.

    "Whoa! Freak me out."

    She walked down the dock and stood with her arms folded, the envelope hidden in the bunched-up fabric.

    "What's up?" I asked.

    She moved closer to the boat and leaned out over the water between the dock and the curved section of the hull. She gripped the gunwale to support herself as she tossed the envelope on the deck a few feet from where I sat.

    "It's a dinner invitation," she said. "Tonight."

    "Tonight? Good you got us early," I said.

    She stood back again, and refolded her arms.

    "It was my idea, but I wanted you to think it was my father's."

    "He might not like that."

    She used both hands to rake out her hair, stopping part way to scratch her scalp. The action released the top of her robe, exposing a deep, but gentle V.

    "He won't like it, but it won't show. He's Swiss," she added, as if that explained all.

    "I'm French-Canadian, with just enough Italian to explain the name."

    "Your girlfriend's Italian, too, isn't she."

    "With just enough Anglo-Saxon to qualify as an American mutt, which most of us are, once you dig into it."

    "I'm all Swiss. Born in Zurich."

    "Where's your mom?"

    "Dead."

    "Sorry," I said.

    "Don't be. I was too young to know her. She died having my brother. You'd think by now they'd have licked the deathby-childbirth thing."

"What's wrong with your brother?"

    I couldn't tell if she was annoyed or simply knocked off- balance. She had a busy face—lots of vivid expressions, bright eyes and a capricious smile, not always used to convey humor.

    "I didn't know you'd met."

    "We didn't. I saw him through the window. Didn't mean to. The shades were up," I pointed to the back of the restaurant. "You were eating dinner with him and your father. Once I realized what I was doing, I went below. Hard not to think of a lighted window as a TV set. Sorry."

    Anika walked down the dock to the boat's gate, the space opened up by unlatching a section of the lifelines, and hoisted herself up onto the deck. She walked to the bow and plopped down across from me, her legs stretched out. Her foot touched the side of mine and gave a subtle stroke. I moved mine away.

    "What's your story?" she said.

    "Nothing interesting."

    "People don't spy on other people, then admit to it, making the spied upon see them as honorable."

    "What's wrong with your brother?" I asked again.

    "What's wrong with you?" she asked back.

    "Chronic inappropriateness."

    Anika leaned back against a bulge in the cabin top that held the forward hatch, then sat up again, trying to get comfortable. I took another sip of my coffee.

    "Want some?" I asked.

    "Maybe. Have we met?"

    "I don't think so," I said.

    "My father's fifty-nine years old."

    "I'm fifty-seven. He wins."

    "Axel, my brother, can run
pi
out to ten thousand digits from memory. Then he gets bored and gives it up. I ask him why stop there, and he tells me, 'It's not that hard. What's the big deal?' "

    A wayward breeze snuck on to the dock and disturbed the silken black hair that lay scattered over her brow, causing one longer strand to slide over her mouth. She puffed it out of the way.

    "So Axel's the math whiz. What's your specialty?"

    "I'm an artist. A painter. I've got a studio in the attic. My bed's there, too, so I have something to do when I can't sleep. You should visit sometime so I can show you my latest work."

    She slid farther down on the deck and rested her head on the raised lip of the forward hatch. The maneuver caused her robe to ride up past her thigh, a situation she took her time correcting.

    "Who're the people in the Town Car?" I asked.

    "You are the nosiest person I ever met," she said.

    "I'm sure that's true, though I know people who are far nosier than me."

    "Friends of my dad. From his company. His old company. He sold out so he could retire and buy this place. And get off the bus to nowhere. You retired?"

    "No. Fired. Now I do finish carpentry. And boat deliveries, though this is likely my first and last."

    "That coffee is starting to sound really good," she said.

    I went below and made some more. While I was there I checked on Amanda, who was a static lump in the cozy quarter berth we'd chosen as our bedroom. I brushed the back of my hand as delicately as I could across her cheek and pulled the blanket up over an exposed shoulder. She responded with a little cough, more of a snort, then lapsed back into heavy breathing. So I left her alone and brought two mugs of fresh coffee to the bow, with a pocket full of fake sugar, as Anika had requested.

    She stirred in the stuff and blew over the top of the coffee mug as I settled back into my spot above the anchor

locker, braced inside the pulpit, at the far forward tip of the boat.

    "She
is
your girlfriend," said Anika, "not like your wife or anything."

    "She's my girlfriend, though also like my wife and everything."

    "Oh," she said. Then some time passed, until she said, "My dad hasn't done so well in the girlfriend department. I'd like to blame it on his kids, but the real problem is workaholia. Too busy stroking the keyboard to stroke anything else."

    "Computers?" I asked.

    "Oh, yeah. Co-founder of Subversive Technologies. He invented C-scale. And N-Spock. You wouldn't know, being, like, a carpenter."

    Oh yes I would, I thought, not wanting to share that I'd used N-Spock to drive a wall of daisy-chained, massively parallel main-frames in the multi-million-dollar oil and gas research and development lab I ran before they fired me for socking our chief corporate counsel in the nose. There's more to the story than that, but that's the gist.

    "So you're glad he's bagged it all and moved out here," I said.

    "Glad isn't exactly the word, but yes, I'm glad. He's still not a happy man, but now he could be. Why am I telling you all this?"

    "Because I'm nosy?"

    "I have to go make breakfast," she said, standing up. "Come to dinner if you can. At least I can promise the food'll be good. Axel is the cook. No ingredient goes unloved, I guarantee you that."

    She worked her way down the port side of the boat, using the shrouds—cables connecting the mast to the hull— to propel herself forward, her hips expressing a pleasant, loose roll, even under the cover of her thick bathrobe.

    "Hm," I said to myself.

I
spent the next day crammed inside the engine compartment of the
Carpe Mañana.
It wasn't the engine I was interested in, but the spider web of destroyed cable dangling from where it was supposed to be neatly strung between sturdy blocks and greased fittings. Being a new boat, it lacked that smelly, corroded quality I was used to, though that was faint consolation. None of the tangle made sense; nothing indicated why the cable snapped, scything off all the supporting apparatus, leaving behind little ragged plastic parts and limp threaded wire.

    I'd once been responsible for diagnosing multi-milliondollar process failures at petrochemical plants in places like Malaysia, Perth Amboy and Kuwait, but none were more perplexing than this.

    Maybe I'd been out of the business too long, I thought. Maybe all that vodka had finally caught up with me.

    "What time is it?" I yelled up to Amanda.

    "About two thirty," she yelled back.

    Too early for the first drink, goddamnit. I continued to stare at the ravaged steering mechanism. I closed my eyes and called up an image of what I thought should be a healthy

steering mechanism, following the pulleys and cables as they transferred dynamic forces through a series of intermediary stages from wheel to block to rudder. With a slight jolt, I recalled the thrust of the waves out in the stormy water, and how it felt to hold the wheel against the pressure of the hurtling seas. That's when I saw the mechanics at maximum stress, and felt with my own body the strengths and weaknesses of the system.

    I opened my eyes and looked back toward the transom, to where the cable curled down through twin blocks into a well that led to fittings—from that vantage point invisible— clamped to the rudder. I saw an ugly gash in the fiberglass directly above where the cable dove down into the well, which I lit up when I shot my flashlight in that direction.

    My first impulse was to call the designers who'd engineered the system a bunch of lazy boneheads, but seconds later I caught myself. I couldn't know all the constraints, restrictions and overruling the design team had to endure. Something had obviously gone wrong, but responsibility was likely shared across a diverse group of designers, mechanics and accountants. That was usually the case. Disasters are almost always the result of several malfunctions occurring simultaneously, which interact with each other, causing a cascade of unforeseen consequences leading inexorably to catastrophic systems failure.

    These combinations are later identified and corrected, and thus unlikely to be repeated, leaving the field clear for a new set of variables to entangle and collide.

    It's impossible to anticipate all possible permutations, which is why planes will continue to crash, albeit rarely, and oil platforms will blow up and steering mechanisms on sailboats will burst apart at the worst possible moment. It's emotionally gratifying for the ignorant to blame it all on human inadequacy, but that's usually only part of the story.

    Often things happen that shouldn't, but they do anyway
.
It was Juvenal who expressed it thus:
Rara avis in terris
nigroque simillima cygno.
Or as you'd say in English, more or less: "It can be a rare bird, like a black swan."

T
he new parts were certain to arrive soon, which was all I needed to fix the steering and get back underway. So I stopped trying to divine the root of the failure and spent the rest of the day upside-down ripping out the wreckage— clearing the work area in preparation for the new parts— and thereby casting aside further forensic study having no purpose but to satisfy my own perverse obsessions.

    True to her word, Amanda provided emotional and logistical support in the form of iced tea and turkey sandwiches. She'd also reconnoitered the island and discovered a way to jack into the World Wide Web, though refused to reveal how until she had my undivided attention.

    So I quit my work and squirmed back up into the cockpit where a tumbler of vodka, a platter of meat and cheese, and the sunset awaited.

    "We're in for a bad storm," she said, almost wrecking the mood.

    "That's what Burton said."

    "It's one of those nor'easters or sou'westers, or whatever, that might as well be hurricanes, if it does what they fear. Though we don't have a lot of trust in
them
."

    "When?"

    "Late tomorrow, if all goes according to plan."

    "Which it never does," I said.

    "That's what you keep telling me," she said. "I'm just a builder. A veritable landlubber. What do I know?"