“I gon’ to make you a present, mon. Give you little pink piggy back. Goodness of my ha’art.”
So saying, Nigel had put his huge busted-knuckle hand against her pale hard face and she had looked down submissively, trembling a little, knowing not to smile. Afterward, she was very cool about it. Nigel had given her a Rasta bracelet, beads in the red, yellow and green colors of Ras Tafari.
“Think I’m a pink piggy, Liam?”
He had not been remotely amused and he had told her so.
So she had walked on ahead laughing and put her palms together and looked up to the sky and said, “Oh, my Lord!” And then glanced at him and wiped the smile off her face. Plainly she’d enjoyed it, all of it. She wore the bracelet constantly.
Now she leaned on her elbows against the chart table with her bare bum thrust out, turning the bracelet with the long, bony fingers of her right hand. Though often on deck, she seemed never to burn or tan. A pale child of night was Gillian.
“What island you say that was?” she asked.
“It’s St. Lucia,” Blessington told her. “The mountains are called the Pitons.”
“The Pee-tuns? Does that mean something cool in French?” She turned to Blessington, then to Freycinet. “Does it, Honoré?”
Freycinet made an unpleasant, ratty face. He was ugly as cat shit, Blessington thought, something Gillian doubtless appreciated. He had huge soulful brown eyes and a pointed nose like a puppet’s. His grim haircut showed the flattened shape of his skull.
“It means stakes,” Blessington said.
“Steaks? Like…”
“Sticks,” said Blessington. “Rods. Palings.”
“Oh,” she said, “stakes. Like Joan of Arc got burned at, right?”
Freycinet’s mouth fell open. Marie laughed loudly. Gillian looked slyly at Blessington.
“Honoré,” she said. “Tu es un dindon. You’re a dindon, man. I’m shitting you. I understand French fine.”
It had become amusing to watch her tease and confound Freycinet. Dangerous work and she did it cleverly, leaving the Frenchman to marvel at the depths of her stupidity until paranoia infected his own self-confidence. During the trip back, Blessington thought he might be starting to see the point of her.
“I mean, I worked the Paris openings for five years straight. I told you that.”
Drunk and stoned as the rest of them, Gillian eventually withdrew from the ascending spring sun. Marie went down after her. Freycinet’s pointed nose was out of joint.
“You hear what she say?” he asked Blessington. “That she speak French all the time? What the fuck? Because she said before, ‘No‹, I don’t speak it.’ Now she’s speaking it.”
“Ah, she’s drunk, Honoré. She’s just a bimbo.”
“I ‘ope so, eh?” said Freycinet. He looked at the afterdeck to be sure she was out of earshot. “Because … because what if she setting us up? All these time, eh? If she’s agent. Or she’s informer? A grass?”
Blessington pondered it deeply. Like the rest of them he had thought her no more than a fatuous, if perverse, American. Now, the way she laughed at them, he was not at all sure.
“I thought she came with you. Did she put money up?”
Freycinet puffed out his hollow cheeks and shrugged.
“She came to me from Lavigerie,” he said. The man who called himself Lavigerie was a French Israeli of North African origin, a hustler in Fort-de-France. “She put in money, oui. The same as everyone.”
They had all pooled their money for the boat and to pay the Vincentians. Blessington had invested twenty thousand dollars, partly his savings from the bistro, partly borrowed from his sister and her husband in Providence. He expected to make it back many times and pay them off with interest.
“Twenty thousand?”
“Yes. Twenty.”
“Well, even the Americans wouldn’t spend twenty thousand dollars to catch us,” he told Honoré. “We’re too small. And it isn’t how they work.”
“Now I think I don’t trust her, eh?” said Freycinet. He squinted into the sun. The Pitons, no closer, seemed to displease him now. “She’s a bitch, non?”
“I think she’s all right,” Blessington said. “I really do.”
And for the most part he did. In any case he had decided to, because an eruption of hard-core, coke-and-speed-headed paranoia could destroy them all. It had done so to many others. Missing boats sometimes turned up on the mangrove shore of some remote island, the hulls blistered with bullet holes, cabins attended by unimaginable swarms of flies. Inside, tableaux marts not to be forgotten by the unlucky discoverer. Strong-stomached photographers recorded the tableaux for the DEA’s files, where they were stamped NOT TO BE DESTROYED, HISTORIC INTEREST. The agency took a certain satisfaction. Blessington knew all this from his sister and her husband in Providence.
Now they were almost back to Martinique and Blessington wanted intensely not to die at sea. In the worst of times, he grew frightened to the point of utter despair. It had been, he realized at such times, a terrible mistake. He gave up on the money. He would settle for just living, for living even in prison in France or America. Or at least for not dying on that horrible bright blue ocean, aboard the Sans Regret.
“Yeah,” he told Freycinet. “Hell, I wouldn’t worry about her. Just a bimbo.”
All morning they tacked for the Pitons. Around noon, a great crown of puffy cloud settled around Gros Piton and they were close enough to distinguish the two peaks one from the other. Freycinet refused to go below. His presence was so unpleasant that Blessington felt like weeping, knocking him unconscious, throwing him overboard or jumping over himself. But the Frenchman remained in the cockpit though he never offered to spell Blessington at the wheel. The man drove Blessington to drink. He poured more Demerara and dipped his finger in the bag of crystal. A pulse fluttered under his collarbone, fear speed.
Eventually Freycinet went below. After half an hour Gillian came topside, clothed this time, in cutoffs and a halter. The sea had picked up and she nearly lost her balance on the ladder.
“Steady,” said Blessington.
“Want a roofie, Liam?”
He laughed. “A roofie? What’s that? Some kind of…”
Gillian finished the thought he had been too much of a prude to articulate.
“Some kind of blowjob? Some kind of sex technique? No, dear it’s a medication.”
“I’m on watch.”
She laughed at him. “You’re shitfaced is what you are.”
“You know,” Blessington said, “you ought not to tease Honoré. You’ll make him paranoid.”
“He’s a asshole. As we say back home.”
“That may be. But he’s a very mercurial fella. I used to work with him.”
“Mercurial? If you know he’s so mercurial how come you brought him?”
“I didn’t bring him,” Blessington said. “He brought me. For my vaunted seamanship. And I came for the money. How about you?”
“I came on account of having my brains in my ass,” she said, shaking her backside. “My talent too. Did you know I was a barrel racer? I play polo too. English or western, man, you name it.”
“English or western?” Blessington asked.
“Forget it,” she said. She frowned at him, smiled, frowned again. “You seem, well, scared.”
“Ah,” said Blessington, “scared? Yes, I am. Somewhat.”
“I don’t give a shit,” she said.
“You don’t?”
“You heard me,” she said. “I don’t care what happens. Why should I? Me with my talent in my ass. Where do I come in?”
“You shouldn’t talk that way,” Blessington said.