‘Don’t bother none about her, Miguel,’ said Fifi with good humour. ‘She gets all thinky and stuff sometimes. Your girls, they’ll be fine. I will personally take apart any motherfucker who tries to interfere with them.’
‘You are kind, for one so fierce, Miss Fifi. But in the last extremes, I shall attend to my own family.’
‘Enough!’ barked Shah, clapping his hands together again with a thunderous report.
‘Yes,’ said Jules, ‘enough.’ She pushed herself up out of the chair with the momentum of the ship. ‘Try to get some sleep.’
Her rounds of the ship took nearly an hour – a slow, difficult progression through all decks, moving hand over hand along companionways that violently plunged and rolled and shifted as the storm tossed the super-yacht about. Most of the passengers were in their beds, many of them strapped in against the violence of the night. Down in the engine room her grease monkeys – a Sri Lankan and two Dutch merchant mariners she’d picked up in Costa Rica – were tending to the Rules’s gleaming white plant with the universally pissed-off look of all engineering crew. The Sri Lankan, Pankesh, had one hand bandaged, the legacy of a fall against a steam conduit in the difficult conditions. She checked his burn, which seemed quite ghastly, but he insisted on remaining at his station.
The main lounge looked very bare now, with most of the fittings stowed away. There she found one half of the trust-fund brats, Phoebe, sitting with one of the village children. They’d wedged themselves into one of the heavily padded loungers. Before Jules could ask them what the fuck they were doing out of their cabins, Phoebe spoke up.
‘Maya was scared,’ she said. ‘She got lost looking for the little girls’ room – didn’t you, sweetheart? – and wandered into my cabin. I said I’d sit with her a while.’
Julianne wondered if Maya was the only one who’d been scared, but she let it go. The last thing she needed now was hysterics over a lost child. ‘Thank you, Phoebe. Good show,’ she replied. ‘But make sure you get her back to her bunk soon. I need everyone rested.’
She had turned around and was about to claw her way back to her own sleeping quarters when Phoebe called after her: ‘Hey, Julianne?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’
There was a neediness in the girl’s eyes that answered Jules’s earlier, unspoken question. ‘What’s up, Phoebe?’
The little village girl, Maya, no more than five or six years old, snuggled in tight, burying her face in the young woman’s chest.
‘You used to be rich once, didn’t you?’
Jules couldn’t help but smirk. ‘So did you.’
‘No,’ said Phoebe, ‘that’s not what I mean. Before all of this, before the Disappearance, before you found this yacht. Before whatever it was you were doing with Fifi and that Chinese man. You used to be rich. Like me. I can tell from your voice and from the way you run your crew – like you were always meant to.’
The ship dipped and plunged again, unbalancing Jules and propelling her forward. She let herself fall into another lounger close to Phoebe, lest she get hurled out through the glass doors.
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘My family had money. Old money. And my father stole a lot more. But it was never enough to fund his extravagant tastes, or to pay the upkeep on our estates.’
‘I knew it,’ said Phoebe with a note of triumph. ‘So you, like, grew up in a castle?’
‘Something like that. It’s not nearly as much fun as it sounds. We had to throw the place open to the public every other weekend just to pay for heating.’
‘And how did you end up doing, you know, whatever?’
Jules’s smile was genuine now. ‘Smuggling, Phoebe. I was a smuggler – I still am, I suppose. It’s one the few jobs still paying these days.’ Jules gave a quick shrug and settled deep into the safety and comfort of the chair. ‘I loved my father, in spite of his faults. Because of them, in some ways. He was very different from the sort of people we mixed with. Or rather, he was just like them, but more honest about it.’
‘But you said he stole money’
Jules smiled again, fondly. ‘He did. He was a terrible crook, but he only ever stole from the rich – and believe me, Phoebe, if your family has been rich for nine hundred years, somewhere some of that loot was stolen. Most of it, even.’
Lightning and thunder flared and crashed so closely together that Jules was unaware of any lag between them. The flat, white light illuminated a ghastly vision outside of the whole ocean in turmoil, of living, waterborne mountain ranges boiling up around the ship.
‘You didn’t tell me how you became a smuggler,’ Phoebe continued, pressing for more.
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Jules, who pushed herself up out of the chair and headed for the nearest grab bar. ‘Don’t worry, Phoebe,’ she called back over her shoulder, ‘you’ll be fine. The only reason you’re on this boat is because you were quick enough and smart enough to react to the Disappearance. You got some of your old money out and turned it into new money, very quickly. Most people aren’t like that – they’ll sit and wait for the situation to bury them. You, you’re a survivor. Plus, a family like yours, it would’ve had investments all over the world, wouldn’t it? Not all of them would have tanked.’
The American said nothing to that and Jules smiled again. ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. You’ve paid for passage, I’m not going to ask for any more. But tomorrow, or the day after, when this storm clears and those Peruvians have a clear run at us, if we can’t outpace them, you’ll have to earn your passage. So get some rest.’
She pulled herself up the rising deck and out into the companion way. The journey to her own cabin, the former owner’s quarters, was a hand-over-hand trek that took another six or more minutes and came close to exhausting her.
‘Maya? Maya?’
A woman’s voice, Mexican, made her look up. Mariela Pieraro was clawing her way along the corridor towards Jules, a frantic look haunting her eyes.
‘It’s all right,’ Jules called out. ‘Maya’s in the big lounge. With Phoebe.’
The two women hauled themselves along, hand over hand, holding on to the safety rails that ran the length of the companionway. The look of animal fear disappeared from Mariela’s face, but a deep, abiding worry remained. The storm, Jules supposed. Your first big storm at sea was always terrifying. How much more so would it be for a woman who had spent her life on the edge of a desert?
‘Miss Julianne. I am… sorry… I… not to find her… I…’
The boat slipped sideways and Jules nearly lost her footing as she waved away the mother’s concerns. Mariela didn’t speak English with much confidence, although Jules didn’t know why. Her grasp of the language seemed fine, but after the scene at the Fairmont she and the other villagers had very much kept to themselves, doing everything asked of them but trying to remain as unobtrusive as possible.