The skipper of the Rosaleen was a small and volatile Spaniard, with thick, oily black hair, and the face of an anxious priest. He paced the cabin of the ship, his rope-soled slippers twisting dryly on the glossy floor boards, and looked at Beecher and Ilse with an expression blended of compassion and irritation and pity. “I explained to him that this would be a difficult matter,” he said, shaking his head impatiently. His name was Diego Najera, he had told them, and he had been working with the Irishman for three years. He obviously admired him, but held a qualified opinion of his judgment. “This is not the time to be taking so much as one package of contraband cigarettes into open water,” Diego said. “Things are very tense. I explained this to him, and do you know what he told me?” Diego raised his hands and let them fall limply. “He says he trusts me. That is all. He trusts me. So what can I do?”
“I’m sorry,” Beecher said. “I didn’t think of the spot I’d be putting you in.”
“It is all right. We will try our best.” Diego took a jacket from a chair at the chart table and hung it around his thin shoulders like a cape. “We will leave in fifteen minutes.”
“There’s one thing,” Beecher said. He opened Ilse’s suitcase and removed Pusey’s wallet. It was a flat leather case cut to the size of an American passport, with compartments for travellers checks, and boat and plane tickets. Pusey’s paper assets and credentials were tidy and cautious: a cabin-class ticket on the Constitution; four hundred and twenty dollars in American Express travellers checks; a clean stiff passport with a snapshot of Pusey staring out in advance suspicion at any official who might ask to see it; and a deck of credit cards wrapped up in celluloid jackets. He was a member of Rotary and Kiwanis and the Lions. Beecher smiled at a card with a gold star stamped on it; Pusey was an honorary sheriff, Cook County. He explained to Diego how he happened to have the wallet, and asked him if he could arrange to have it sent over to the Bland Line offices.
“Yes, I will do that,” Diego said. “But may I ask why? After what you’ve told me, it doesn’t seem very logical. Why not pitch it overboard?”
“Maybe a good turn will save his soul,” Beecher said. “Who knows?”
Diego sighed. “You have lived with Spaniards too long. Give me the wallet. I will return it...”
Beecher and Ilse sat together on one of the two bunks. She picked up his hand and rubbed it lightly with her fingertips. “I’m not frightened anymore,” she said. “I’ll never be frightened again.”
“You flew out of your cage, didn’t you?”
“It was so easy to do,” she said. “I wanted to be free for you. Nothing else was important.” She seemed very simple and earnest then, holding his hand tightly and smiling into his eyes. “It was like coming to life.”
Beecher brushed a strand of hair away from her forehead. It was true, she wasn’t afraid anymore. She had chosen life over death. In the cab coming to the Rosaleen, she had acted as if they were children playing hide-and-seek in the shadows of a friendly garden. They had found Pinky at the Velasquez, and although he was expecting them, he had seemed to Beecher a slender support for their safety. Pinky was about sixteen, a smiling, dreaming youngster in a red fez and flowing blue jellabah. His eyes were bulging and glassy from an after-luncheon pipe of hashish, and he had found his way from the lobby to the street by trailing a finger tentatively along walls, and over the backs of furniture. They had driven to the dock in the cab which had taken them away from Pusey, and in a few minutes were pulling up beside the Rosaleen. She was a tidy thirty-footer, with the burgee of the Tangier yacht club at her bow, and the colors of France streaming from a stem shaft. The bright work was immaculate, mahogany and brass gleaming in the late sunlight. In addition to red and green running lights on her port and starboard sides, a large searchlight was mounted behind the yacht-club pennant. The afternoon winds were cool, and whitecaps danced across the blue water. Two British destroyers stood at anchor, outlined against the bulk of Gibraltar, as still and significant as bird dogs at point.
Pinky, in spite of his dreaming smiles and glassy eyes, had known his business; he told Beecher he would keep the cab engaged until after the Rosaleen was at sea. With that assurance he had driven off, his red fez disappearing from view as the first lurch of the cab sent him rolling over on his side.
Beecher looked around the cabin. There was a neat galley forward, and lockers were built against all open bulkheads. The chart table, with its overhanging lamp, was recessed into an area at the head of the other bunk.
Ilse said: “Why don’t you lie down and rest? I slept most of the day.”
“I’m not tired.”
“I wish you were,” she said smiling. “I would like to put covers over you and bring you coffee. Then, while you slept, I would sit and watch you.”
“I’d probably snore and spoil everything,” he said.
“No, not you,” she said quickly. She was very serious. “Never. I know.”
In this mood she reminded Beecher of a child drawing a picture; frowning and intent upon each stroke of the pencil, but seldom bothering to look at the object it was drawing. Children didn’t copy reality; they simply drew the picture that was already in their minds. This was what Ilse was doing, he knew; she wasn’t seeing him, she was seeing an image born of her hopes and dreams.
Diego returned in ten minutes wearing a blue blazer and a black wool muffler about his throat. He had brought a sack of sandwiches with him. “If we are lucky,” he said, “we will have something to eat about seven o’clock. There’s coffee in the galley.” Then he went above and they heard him shouting commands. The lines were cast off and the Rosaleen came to life, rocking eagerly with the twist of the currents. Within her slim hull the engines sounded like a strong heartbeat, and when the twin screws cut smoothly into the water, her bow soared with their power, thrusting for the open sea.
At seven o’clock Beecher took coffee and sandwiches up to Diego. The wind whipped his hair into his eyes, and raised a miniature storm in the mug of coffee. To his left the clean corrugations of the Spanish mountains stood sharply against the fading tones of the evening. The Rosaleen was running into a gathering darkness streaked with rays of orange and purple sunlight; the spray rising from the bow caught the brilliant colors and gleamed like strings of fantastically dyed crystal beads.
Beecher climbed down beside Diego. In the lee of the cowling it was warm and quiet.
“We have had luck,” Diego said. “There is Estepona off our port. Marbella, Fuengirola, then Mirimar, and you are home. Where shall I put you off?”
“There’s a pier at the Reina del Mar,” Beecher said.
“I know,” Diego said, frowning.
The Reina del Mar was the only chic and expensive restaurant in the fishing village of Mirimar. It had been designed as a beach club for the foreign colony, with a swimming pool and orchestra, flood-lit gardens and a dock for skin-diving and surf-boarding boats.
“How about it?” Beecher asked him.
Diego nodded and sipped his coffee. “We can try. It’s busy in the daytime, but it will be dark when we arrive. If I put you off at a beach you will get wet wading in, and I will risk tearing up my hull on the rocks. Getting repairs would be awkward.”
Ilse came on deck a few moments later, her dark streaming hair like a pennant in the wind. Beecher climbed out from the wheel pit and put an arm around her shoulders. “You’ll blow overboard,” he said, shouting into her ear.
“No, it’s wonderful!” She smiled up at him, the spray sparkling like happy tears on her eyelashes. “How soon are we there?”