All around the boats’ fittings tinkled and chimed, like chattering birds, and the floating dock pontoons shifted just slightly but disconcertingly beneath her feet. Remembering, suddenly, John’s fat-bellied boat in which they’d spent so much time the previous summer, Janet stared about her, looking for something like it. She took her time before giving up, resigned, unable to find anything even vaguely resembling it. But this was hardly John’s sort of place; this was designer deckwear and remembering the ice for the drinks before casting off and getting back in time for cocktails. Janet continued slowly up and down the docks, gradually discerning a pattern. The crafts were graded, the smaller boats assigned the area near the pier but increasing in size finally to the large, oceangoing vessels against the far edge of the marina, where the offices and chandlers appeared to be.
Janet hesitated, trying to encompass the entire area. She supposed the small boats to her right were capable of reaching the Lebanon, those with sails certainly, but it would be an uncertain crossing. From her limited sailing experience Janet guessed the middle pontoon, which she had not yet reached, was where the yachts began which could comfortably make the journey. She went to it and strolled casually seawards, head moving from side to side as she studied each mooring. The yachts seemed roughly divided equally, half open, either occupied or preparing to sail, half secured and battened. Near the pontoon’s end a yacht was open but with its sails reefed and its fenders out. Journey’s End, Janet read, from the stern markings: registered at Falmouth. In the stern a woman lay prostrate on an air-mattress, a bikini wisped over her nipples and crotch, twice as much material employed in the hardscarf protecting her blonde hair from bleaching further in the sun.
“Wonderful day,” said Janet.
The woman’s eyes opened, in apparent surprise. She remained lying as she was.
“Wonderful day,” repeated Janet.
The woman moved, but slowly, easing up on to her elbow and using her other hand to shield her eyes while she squinted up at the pontoon. “What?”
“You sail all the way here from England?” asked Janet, unwilling to repeat her fatuous opening for a third time.
“Two years ago,” said the sunbather. “We leave it here now. You have a boat here on the marina?”
Janet squatted to take the sun from the other woman’s eyes, shaking her head. “Just looking around and admiring,” she said. “How often do you get out?”
The woman shifted, bringing her legs up in front of her and wrapping her arms around them. “Not as much as we should, unfortunately.”
Janet hesitated, not knowing how to continue. “Ever get across there?” she said, clumsily, jerking her head seawards.
The woman actually looked beyond the marina and then back again, frowning. “Where?” she demanded.
“Lebanon,” said Janet. She was handling it all very badly, she thought. But how could she handle it!
The woman snorted a laugh, incredulous. “Are you serious?” she demanded.
“I just wondered,” said Janet, retreating.
“You’d have to be out of your mind to go anywhere near that coastline!” insisted the woman.
Maybe I am, thought Janet. She said: “Some people must.”
The woman cocked her head curiously to one side and did not respond immediately. When she did the words came slowly. “Mad people, like I said.”
Janet desperately searched for another way to phrase the question but could not find one. Directly she said: “Know any?”
The woman pulled herself tighter together on the mattress and stared at Janet. Janet guessed the woman was trying to memorize her features and thought, Oh shit! Abruptly the woman said: “What’s going on!”
“Nothing’s going on,” insisted Janet. “Just chatting.”
“Who are you?”
“English,” tried Janet
“That wasn’t what I asked. I can tell you’re English.”
“Stone,” she said, trapped. “Janet Stone.”
“Why so much interest in the Lebanon?”
“No reason,” shrugged Janet, deciding against telling the woman anything. “Just chatting, like I said.” She straightened, to relieve the cramp from her legs.
“I don’t know anyone who’s mad enough to sail to Beirut,” insisted the woman. “And if I did, I’d be suspicious of them, because there’s only one reason to go there and that’s to smuggle. And my husband and I are not smugglers.”
A defense against an unvoiced accusation? wondered Janet. Or did the woman suspect her of being an agent provocateur? It was immaterial, either way. She said: “It was nice talking to you.”
The woman did not reply but remained gazing at her intently.
Janet started to walk away, realizing at once she was going in the wrong direction, further along the pontoon towards the open sea. There appeared to be no more occupied boats-and if there had been Janet realized she could not have attempted another conversation of the sort she’d just had with the woman, whom she guessed would have hurried along immediately to inquire after she’d finished-and to retrace her steps meant passing directly in front of her. Janet guessed the woman would be staring at her and saw that she was, when she turned at the pontoon head to walk back.
At the yacht Janet hesitated and said: “Bye now.”
The woman nodded, but didn’t speak.
Janet continued on, tensed against a sensation going beyond helplessness, to hopelessness. Stop it! she demanded of herself. Stop it! stop it! stop it! She’d only just started… hadn’t started… so it was infantile to become depressed because the first person to whom she’d tried to speak (and spoken to like some mental defective, at that) hadn’t been the premier hostage-freeing tour operator of the Middle East. Worse than infantile: stupidly infantile. At the larger, linking pontoon Janet turned and looked back in the direction from which she’d just come: the bikini-clad woman on Journey’s End was standing now, gazing towards her. For her own satisfaction-and not even sure what that satisfaction was-Janet slightly raised her hand and jiggled her fingers in the smallest of farewell waves before going consciously out of sight towards-and behind-the larger boats.
It was right that she should not become depressed so soon but just as important not to continue in the gauche manner in which she had just behaved. One more episode like that, coupled with the sort of gossip Janet guessed to be the glue that kept a marina like this bonded together, and her next encounter with the disbelieving Chief Inspector Zarpas would probably be in a police cell.
But how! Janet halted at the next out-thrust leg towards the sea, looking up along the larger boats but not making towards them yet. Journey’s End, registered in Falmouth, she remembered: mistake upon mistake! It was always possible, of course, that an English-registered vessel with English-speaking occupants could have the sort of links she sought, but other registrations and other nationalities were far more likely. Such as? Cyprus, obviously. The Lebanon itself. Or Syrian. Or Greek. Turkish, too, although those would not be moored on this part of the island. Still too wide a spread, she thought, gazing generally over the marina: there had to be over a hundred yachts moored here at least. Janet tried to think of a way to narrow her search down to the most obvious choices, smiling when the idea came to her. Language, she decided. So what were the most likely languages? French had been the tongue of the Lebanon before the outbreak of the troubles, in the early 70s. But since then the country had been awash with Syrians and Iranians and Palestinians. Arabic, then, as a second choice: maybe no longer second, but equal. Janet felt a brief pop of encouraging relief: French and Arabic, and she spoke both of them.
Unwilling to be seen by the Englishwoman, Janet ignored the immediate pontoon, going on until the second before setting out along it behind the protective hedge of two sets of anchored and tethered vessels. As before she walked slowly, intent upon names and registrations. Up one side and down the other she walked, never once seeing a registration to fit her idea. Twice she heard French being spoken, both times from yachts identified from French ports, and Janet realized she had not reduced her search as effectively as she had imagined. Both vessels were crowded, with bathing-costumed groups already drunk, and she decided it was pointless attempting any sort of conversation.