‘Your money. The Dulanotov family fortune.’
‘Oh, that.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. But it’s like I told you. The money’s based on crime. There’s no family fortune. I’m a thief, Kate. I steal for a living. Like old Cary Grant.’
She shrugged. ‘OK. If you say so. Well then I haven’t ruled out becoming Grace. Not yet.’
Like hell she hasn’t, thought Dave, and went to take a shower.
Kate frowned. He really was serious about this test of his. Couldn’t he see she wasn’t remotely interested in his money? As soon as she heard the water running Kate started to search the room. It wasn’t that she shared Kent Bowen’s suspicions of him. That was just stupid jealousy. But Dave volunteered so little about himself and she wanted to know more than the crumbs she had gleaned from the few questions he had honored with straight answers. She didn’t think for a moment he was a thief. How many thieves knew Shakespeare and Pushkin? But there was something he wasn’t telling her, of that she was sure. Something that she needed to find out. At the FBI training academy she had learned to recognize when someone was hiding something. For a brief period in her early career she had entertained notions of joining the Behavioral Science Unit. But after The Silence of the Lambs came along it seemed that everyone wanted to be Jack Crawford or Clarice Starling, and she had ended up in General Investigations and Narcotics. Now, looking over the room, she had no idea what she was searching for. The large number of books only seemed to underline what she already knew — that Dave was widely read. Most of the clothes in his closet were predictably new and came from expensive shops, as she had expected. There was no cash lying around. Nor any travellers’ cheques, credit cards; not even a driver’s license. Most infuriating of all, she could not find Dave’s passport. The explanation was inside Dave’s walk-in closet. A combination wall safe. Just what any self-respecting millionaire would have had. You didn’t stay rich by leaving money lying around.
Kate came out of the closet and sat on the edge of the bed. If only she had taken the safe-cracking course instead of psychology. Absently she stared at Dave’s bookshelf. It was like a reading list for a summer school. Many of the titles were classics. Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Nabokov. Even a few published movie scripts. A nod to post modernism. Some philosophy too: Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Gilbert Ryle and George Steiner. But the more she stared at the books the more it started to seem that for all its apparent inclusiveness, there was something missing, like a piece from a cutlery set. Yes, that was it. And not just one piece. Maybe one whole item. Like a set of fish knives. Gradually she perceived what it was. There were no books on business. Not one. And this struck her as curious. Millionaires were interested in money, weren’t they? Especially if they worked in Miami’s Financial Center. Howard had been forever reading books about making money. Beating the Dow. One Up on Wall Street. The Midas Touch. The Three Minute Manager. He must have bought that one just around the time he was reading The Two Minute Lover.
Kate picked out Dave’s well-thumbed paperback edition of Crime and Punishment. She hadn’t read the novel since she’d been in Law School, when it really had seemed like one of those books that might change your life. Or, at the very least, the way you thought about criminals. Idly she was turning back the cover when something caught her eye. Something was printed there, on the inside cover, in bright blue ink.
Something was stamped on it.
She stared at it incredulously, as if she had been admiring some clever bookplate, reading the words printed inside the simple roundel with more care than if they had been a visa on the passport for which she had been searching.
But this was something much more revealing.
She whispered the words out loud, as if she needed to hear them spoken in order to absorb what was implied.
‘Property of the Miami Correctional Center at Homestead?’
Could it be that Dave really was a thief? And not just a thief, but an ex-con?
Hearing his shower end, she closed the book and returned it quickly to the shelf. Then, slipping into the spare dressing gown, she left the stateroom and went up to the galley. Maybe she could rustle up a relaxed, loving and laid-back sort of face along with some breakfast.
In the galley Kate put on the kettle to boil, and started to fry some ham and eggs, all the while considering the evidence that was before her: the new clothes; the bookshelf more typical of some jailhouse autodidact than a millionaire; and the five aces Cary Grant-style proposition he had made her. There seemed to be no other conclusion that she could form. Dave really was a thief, and a convicted one too. She realized that he had been perfectly serious, as indeed he had said he was.
Al, summoned upstairs to the galley by the smell of fresh coffee and frying sausage and ham, brought home to her this wasn’t a Cary Grant movie. Al was Luca Brazzi, Tony Montana and Jimmy Conway all squeezed into the one short-barrelled pump-action shotgun. Right down to the rifle sight, the hardwood stock attitude, and the blue metal jaw.
‘Time is it?’ he growled.
‘Just after six,’ she said, perky as an airline stewardess responding to a first-class passenger. You got all sorts going first class these days.
‘Six o’clock? Jesus, what are we doing, abandoning ship or something? Six o’clock.’
‘You want some breakfast?’
Al sighed uncomfortably and stooped to look out of the galley window, checking on the weather. He sniffed loudly, like he was hunched over a couple of lines of coke, and said, ‘I can’t make up my mind if it’s better to eat so that I got something to throw up or if it’s better not to eat so that I don’t throw up at all.’
Kate smiled sweetly, trying to overcome her nerves. Who were these guys? And what were they doing on the ship? Was it possible they had anything to do with Rocky Envigado?
‘Al?’ she said. ‘Have you heard the expression, the cook could use a hug? This particular cook only requires a "yes please" or a "no thank-you". The ultimate destination of this food I’m cooking, be it toilet bowl or ocean, is of absolutely no account to me.’
Al grunted biliously. Uncertainly he eyed the breakfast Kate was cooking. Rubbing his bare belly, for he was only wearing shorts, he said, ‘Maybe I’ll just have some Wheaties.’
‘Have you got a hangover or something?’
‘Naw. I’m feeling sick in anticipation of feeling sick, on account of the weather.’ Al poured out a bowlful of cereal, then some milk, and began to shovel the stuff into his mouth.
‘The weather? What about it?’
‘You don’t notice it, huh?’ he remarked with milk dribbling down his unshaven chin. ‘Must be another good sailor. Like the boss.’
Kate glanced out the window. What with making love and her shock discovery about Dave, she had hardly noticed the swell underneath the ship. Outside the sky was gray and threatening and a stiff breeze was whipping the flag on the stern of the Jade in front of them. It looked as if the storm was catching up to them after all.
‘Me, I ain’t much of a sailor,’ confessed Al. ‘I get sick looking at a glass of salt water.’
‘It does look kind of rough,’ Kate admitted.
Coming into the galley, Dave said, ‘Are you talking about Al, or the weather?’
Al sneered, dumped his empty bowl in the sink, and reached for the coffee jug. Kate stepped fastidiously out of his way as from a large and smelly dog.
Noticing her flinch from Al’s bare torso, Dave said, ‘Couldn’t you put a shirt or something on, Al? It’s like having a giant coconut rolling around in here.’
Al slurped some coffee and said, ‘Some women like hairy men.’