‘Especially as Florence and Emma seem to think you’ll demand a range of inappropriate forfeits if they lose,’ observed Robin tartly.
‘Fear not, my love — you know you’re all the woman I can handle,’ said Richard piously.
‘Well, let’s just hope you’re man enough for me.’ As she spoke, something fell from the lowering sky and shattered on the sidewalk at their feet. It took them a moment to realize that it was a single raindrop. But it hit the dusty ground hard enough to make a sound as threatening as a silenced gunshot. And it left a mark on the dry pavement big enough to suggest that it must have been about the size of a baseball.
Richard looked down at the little puddle that had formed instantaneously at their feet, then up at the low, leaden, under-lit cloud cover. ‘And it’s maybe just as well,’ he added, his tone suddenly sober and serious, ‘that we’re currently staying in the only hotel in Long Beach that’s actually designed to float …’
ELEVEN
One hour later and a thousand miles further south, Carlos Santiago was wearily bringing his fishing boat, Pilar, into harbour. Carlos and Pilar were equally tired, battered and superannuated. It was coming up to fifty years since Pilar slipped into the water off Encinitas, California. She had been called Miss Ellie to begin with, and had set out on a hopeful career under the firm hand of James Hardy, the man who had commissioned her. Carlos had been celebrating his fifteenth birthday round about then, learning the art of fishing from his father. How the boat he named Pilar after his wife came to him he had no clear idea, for he could not read the American records that told her story and was happy to accept the assurance of the man who sold her that she was a strong and reliable lady. And so she had proved to be — even though the woman for whom she was named died in childbirth, forcing him to raise their beautiful daughter alone.
Now he and Pilar were old and the town in which he had grown up, buried his wife and raised his daughter and seen her married was strange to him nowadays; full of strange buildings, strange people, strange accents and languages, strange sights and smells. A new breakwater big enough to have hotels stood on the seaward side of it. A new six-lane highway reached over the juncture of the inner marina and the outer docks. It was a haven for tourists and pleasure boats. Billionaires and drug dealers. Less and less room for honest working fishermen like himself.
As Carlos Santiago helmed the worn-out old trawler towards this strange new land, feeling the Pacific rollers begin to gather under her keel as the ocean floor started the precipitous rise that extended on to the land and up through the coastal cliffs of the Sierra Madre Mountains, he swept his left hand down his sweat-slick face and scratched the dripping white stubble on his chin as he leaned forward over the helm, squinting upwards through moss-brown eyes. The sky was high and clear enough, in spite of a thin scud of overcast reaching down from the north, in spite of the heat-haze that threatened to warp the air as though it was unseasoned wood. The stars which had guided him in from the outer reaches of the Tres Marias Deep and across the Bahia Banderas so far were still clear enough to rely on — unlike the air conditioning on Pilar’s bridge. He nodded to himself and stood back, lowering his gaze to the blaze of light dead ahead. The trusty old Raymarine he had bought in La Paz in better days was becoming increasingly unreliable now, as indeed was Pilar herself and most of the equipment aboard, including the rusty old Cummins KPA 1100 diesel.
The crew of twelve who had filled her crew quarters and filled her freezer storage areas with blue-fin tuna, snapper and swordfish ten years ago had begun to depart with the onset of federal restrictions and the departure of the fish. Now Pilar was lucky to carry half-a-dozen desperate and starving men in search of sardines. Carlos took his sad and sorry vessel further and further out, trailed finer and finer seined nets, tried longer and longer lines — flirting with arrest and total ruin if he should be caught. But tonight, as usual, he was bringing his boat and his crew home empty, guiding them in by the stars because the equipment was faulty. They were coming towards the harbour silently because he could not rely on the ancient SEA222 HF transceiver any more. He was confused and more hesitant than he cared to admit, not only because of the cataracts darkening his vision which he could not afford to have treated, but also because the dazzle of all the new buildings along the Malecón beachfront disorientated him, as though he had looked up into the heavens and found half-a-dozen new galaxies suddenly appearing there.
But then he saw what he had been looking for. The white house. Dahlia Blanca. The one new addition to Puerto Banderas that earned his blessings instead of his curses. It sat high on the jungle-dark cliff face, a still white beacon under the beams of the three-quarter moon perched just above the starboard wing of Pilar’s flying bridge like a parrot on a pirate’s shoulder. The point of tranquil brightness was like a lighthouse to Carlos Santiago. It shone out above the glare of new buildings like la estrella pola; it cut through the fog of his cataracts; it guided him across the approaches to the commercial dock beside the oldest beach of the burgeoning tourist venue that was now swamping the fishing village which had been his childhood home. The heart of what had been from time immemorial a barrio mariner, visited only by those wishing to hunt the big blue-fin tuna, the sail-fish and the swordfish, and to watch the migrating whales that populated the bahia. And the men in the old days — los hombres machos, the Americanos like the writer Hemingway, the filmmaker Huston and the actors Weathers and Schwarzenegger. The one place the effete, small-minded, modern tourists, the realtors, the speculators and the drug dealers hardly ever came to — Los Muertos.
‘Hola, Capitan,’ said Miguel-Angel Guerrero, the ship’s boy, coming on to the bridge. ‘It is hot tonight! Verdad?’
‘Verdad, hijo,’ answered Carlos. ‘I have never known it so hot at this time of year in all my life.’
‘Nor I,’ agreed Miguel-Angel seriously.
Carlos smiled, but he did not laugh out loud. The boy was sixteen; a quarter of the age of his capitan. So of course he would never have experienced anything Carlos had not experienced. But Carlos was concerned that Miguel-Angel would be insulted if he laughed — even though he would be laughing at the situation, not at the lad, whom he treated as a son because the boy respected him like a father, though he always called him Capitan. Out of respect, of course, for his own father, who owned the dockside chandlery, and was, like Carlos, alone but for his child. Though, unlike Carlos, he had lost his woman not to childbirth but to the lure of California, north of the border. His woman and his elder son.
Lacking a son of his own, Carlos had been busily passing his knowledge of the coastal waters to Miguel-Angel. Earlier that night he had made the boy stand silently beside the open windows, listening to the voices of the Tres Marias Islands, each of whom sang her own song created as wind and water rushed through huge coastal caves which varied in size and depth. Together they had stood and listened to the northernmost voice, Isla Maria Madre, whose song was deep and unmistakable. Then, later, they had listened to the roaring of the waters as they rushed over the reefs beside Isla Saint Isabel, who, together with the Tres Marias, gave a measure of protection to the harbour at Puerto Banderas.