Chapter 3

David rinsed out his hair under the shower and put the shampoo back in the convenient little cabinet already chock full of Mickey’s cosmetics. Mickey, just thinking about her made him happy. What a lucky devil he was to have a wife to sail with. Other guys had to go away with each other because their wives wouldn’t put a foot aboard. He switched on the sump shower pump a little nervously, always alert to unfamiliar clickings and other signs of failure. It had stuck the first time he used it that year and probably needed a new impellor. David grinned with satisfaction. No, now it worked perfectly.

David towelled himself dry and thought once more about the big power boat looming above him, the owners so true to the traditional archetype of motor yacht users. Absolutely understood that no one in a big motor cruiser, ever showed the least little bit of curiousity regarding a sailboat� but couldn’t wait to show off their own expensive toys every chance they could.

So let them keep their gas-guzzling, environmentally unfriendly stinkpots, that’s what they were. Meanwhile he would step aboard ‘Our Good Thing’ (had a funny ring to it, that name� where had he heard it before?) and have a look. There was always the slim chance he might learn something new. He shaved, put on clean jeans and a blue shirt, should he lock up Caliban? No need, he was only going to be next door for a few minutes.

David stepped over the life rails and immediately one of the runty looking sailors moved over to question him, suspicious, perhaps not recognizing his now clean clothes, freshly washed hair.

"Signor Lazzari has invited me for a drink."

He nodded and David slid open the door and went inside the plush interior, naturally air conditioned throughout. (He had heard the hum click on this morning the moment the owners stepped aboard). There was the absolutely typical huge bouquet of cut flowers on the cocktail table. Why? What did a boat going to sea ever need with flowers? Well they all had them. Chances were this boat would never go beyond Capri or Ischia at the very farthest, maybe Porto Cervo and the Costa Smeralda.

He sat down alone in the big salon, sinking into a comfortable arm chair, his feet almost disappearing in the plush gold carpet. Music thundered from hidden speakers, flooding the whole room, something unrecognizable and Latin. It did not make him want to dance. It made him very nervous and want a drink. He supposed he was soon going to get a good look at the faces of the girls whose big breasts he had already seen.

The door to the salon opened and the fat Italian, Emilio Tondiglio, entered, and immediately behind him was Lazzari, and then the two girls introduced only as Gina and Ginevra, with an unpronounceable last name. They wore very short skirts and very high heels, were not particularly pretty, having overly tanned dog faces, heavy featured with long jangling earrings. Some very sexy bodies there and David allowed himself a long look at a good bit of cleavage (so much sexier than nudity). Tondiglio turned and pointed at him and they stopped short, a quick batting of thick mascara’ed eyes and a long flirtatious glance. They were either sisters—or twins.

"Ah, la piccola barca Americana. Quanto � carina!" lisped Ginevra with the blue silk scarf.

"Si, un gioello," from the red. Great clouds of perfume wafted from them and David felt like sneezing.

"They like your little boat," said Lazzari. "I guess you don’t speak Italian so I’ll translate. Girls! meet David Hutchings, he’s English."

"Incantata."

"Yeah they’re enchanted to meet you. Now for drinks, what’s your poison? I got Malt if you want it, or how ‘bout an Old Fashioned? You know what an Old Fashioned is? Bourbon with orange juice and bitters. I’ll make one for me and one for you, lots of ice. Emilio has a stomach problem, only drinks mineral water, poor bastard. That’s OK, he doesn’t understand a word of English. Girls take Compari and soda."

Lazzari busied himself behind the large well stocked bar. Tondiglio moved in front of a huge television set, switched on and watched motorcycles whizzing around a small dirt track. The girls, sitting next to each other, talked among themselves.

"So amico, I guess you’re like all the other kids today. You think the world’s your oyster, guess you want to sail around it in that little canoe of yours. You sure sounded like it this afternoon. Little young though to retire unless you’ve put away a lot of bread."

David, twenty nine years old, frowned, he did not consider himself a kid. "It has crossed my mind," he said.

"What’s the first step to circumnavigate, you go east or west?"

"Well it’s a bit more common to go east, not much in it either way. You head for Greece, visit Turkey, Cyprus, maybe Israel or Egypt depending on the politics at the time, through the Suez to the Red Sea and then you’re up and away. By the same token, you can go the other direction, to the Canaries and wait for the hurricane season to end and then travel with the Trades east to west. Nice trip that! I haven’t yet made my mind up which way to go."

"That’s all in the future I gather. So what about this summer? How much vacation do you actually have until you gotta go back to work?

"By saving up during the year, I stretch it out to just more than a month."

"A month! That’s one nice long holiday. In my first job they gave me one fuckin week which I was grateful to take down in Miami. You Europeans are all spoiled rotten. So when you’re not sailing you say you work as a lawyer?"

"In England we are solicitors or barristers."

"Hear that lawyers do pretty well in the U.K."

David sipped his drink, good, had a nice invisible kick in it when he swallowed. "Some do, I’m not complaining."

"That’s the best, Jack Daniels. Have a case of it on board. I’ll give you a coupla bottles—no, my pleasure," as David raised his hand to demur. "Wanna see the boat now?"

"Yes, why not?" They moved off together towards the well equipped pilot house. There they were surrounded with electronic machinery which could do justice to the cockpit of Concord. David was immediately envious looking at the GPS Navstar), the big and complicated VHF radio telephone, single and double sideband, Computerized weather machine, digital readout, a huge computer monitor turned on to a shoot em up game which nobody was playing, dinging away all by itself, in fact just about everything you could buy, with alarms enough to keep someone on full duty at the console 24 hours a day. There was every imaginable electronic gadget which he had seen at the Boatshow last January. And would these toys ever really be used?� Probably not. For an unknown reason the big radar was still turned on and made pretty little green blips across the screen.

"Nice, ain’t it?"

"Quite," said David.

"Quite! I love it. I get the feeling, tell me if I’m wrong, that you’re not satisfied with your life."

"Well, the law has its ups and downs."

"Like no job satisfaction, I can tell by your voice. That’s bad for a man. I have a big construction company back in Brooklyn, built it up myself, but like, I got it so it now runs itself with or without me. Maybe I should go into politics since I’ve got nothing but time. That’s what I’m thinkin, Politics is where it’s at these days. Like Clinton could use a little help, know what I mean?"

(David could not help sneering a little to himself. How like Americans to think that all they needed to enter government was the wish and the cash—and everything else would follow.)

"But let’s not talk about me, Dave, let’s talk about you." David was English enough to pull back a little at the use of his first name." It really bothers me," continued Lazzari, "that a young guy like yaself with the whole world before him feels that he’s missing out on something."

"That’s putting it a little strongly," said David. "Quite simply, it’s just a question of money. Like everybody else in this world I need more money."

"Yeah, to do what with?"

"I don’t know, circumnavigate, I guess."

"Round the world, right?"

"Well, one needs a certain cash reservoir."

Lazzari looked at him, weighing him thoughtfully, his head on one side. A long moment passed. "Maybe I can help you, not out of the goodness of my heart either. I got a business proposition in mind, call it—‘Cash and Carry.’ You got good storage space, below, on Caliban?"

"Oh yes, lots of room under the floorboards. Plenty of lockers, my wife and I could live for months on what we’ve got stored. Mostly cans and bottles. Sometimes bad weather keeps us on an anchorage and we have to live on what we keep aboard."

Lazzari suddenly turned towards David and lowering his voice, looked him straight in the eye. "I’m not goin’ to mess with you but go straight to the point. Howd’ya like to be able to go round the world right now, without waiting to save all the money you’ll need? Just answer yes—or no. Cause if you answer yes I’m going to level with you and then you’ll be with me, part of the deal even if you then decide not to go along with it. So think carefully. NO, and I’m to go get you those bottles of Bourbon whiskey and we part the ways. A little birdie though tells me you’re innarested? Am I wrong?"

David hesitated, but not much. "Wait a minute. I’m not a fool. I’m not going to say yes to something dangerous no matter how keen I am. You wouldn’t respect me if I did (now on his feet) I would want to know a lot more about it. No way am I ever going to get involved with dope so I’d just better leave right now."

"Dave, Dave, OK already." Lazzari draped an arm about his shoulder and pushed him gently down on the black leather pilot seat, sitting himself on a footstool. "Right, right, I couldn’t agree with you more. Guys who run dope deserve everything they get thrown at them. What else am I able to tell you now, other than dope it’s not? An illegal operation?—only slightly. There are a few dangers, very slight dangers the way I see it, but the reward is very high—for you. I’ve done this before, amico, and it works."

David squirmed. He knew instantly that he was going to be asked to transport something, something which wasn’t dope. What was it?

"I demand to know ahead of time exactly what you want to stick under my floorboards, I’m not stupid. Look, I don’t give a good god damn what your business is. I don’t even want to KNOW, but you’ve got to tell me something more—if you want me to say yes."

Lazzari smiled. "I think you’ve already said yes. Am I right or am right?"

Arms folded he looked at David who tipped his empty glass to his mouth and swallowed all of the ice which slid coldly down his throat.

"Well I don’t know," said David. "I’ll hear you out. If I don’t go along you can trust me to keep complete silence."

"No way, amico—yes or no? Make up your mind. There’s real dough involved, I promise you that, enough to solve every last one of your little financial problems."

"Very well—yes." The drink really had a big kick in it. The fellow was balmy thinking he had made a deal. Two days from now there was nothing to stop him from being half way to Greece. But he wouldn’t tell anyone, either way. There was something tough about the little American� better to keep him as a friend.

Lazzari now spoke in a calm business-like voice. "Your part of the job will earn you—two five kilo solid gold ingots, that’s our usual two percent transport charge, which are worth lemme see," he quickly calculated in his head—‘bout a hundert and thirty four thousand dollars, or in the queen’s currency give or take a buck or two, about eighty two thousand six hundered pounds, that grab you?"

The American had calculated out the whole thing is his head, perhaps earlier, which meant—David felt dizzy, brain spinning. He looked at Lazzari’s intelligent brown face, still tilted to one side. The reward had been designed well, But he wasn’t going to be a too easy mark

"My risk not yours. I want three of those bars, not two. Deal? Yes or no?"

"Kid, you’ve gotta future in this business. I like your attitude. OK, three but you’ve gotta follow orders right down the line."

And what is my part of this job? I gather it’s some sort of consignment."

"Instead of going East, I want you to go West, to a place—well we haven’t made our minds up yet but it looks like being Sardinia if things go good, maybe France later. Tomorrow night, tomorrow night I want you to unhook your boat and go quietly up the river ‘bout two miles to where there’s a dirt road goin’ to a little broken down pier you can tie onto. You can’t miss it. An old rusted gas pump at the end which says Agipgas on it. After midnight, 3.a.m. after midnight to be exact, a truck is going to stop and some of my guys are going to unload onto your boat a hundred of those 5 kilo gold bars, like I said three of which are going to be yours, buddy. So stick them under your floorboards or any other damn place you want to hide them. Be on time—and then you come back here for further instructions."

"It gets shallow up river and there’s a low bridge."

"Before the bridge and it’s not too shallow, not the first time we’ve used the place."

"My wife—"

"When is she comin’ aboard—two days from now, well that’s fine so we’ve got time then. Don’t tell your wife nothin’. Hide ‘em good and if she finds out, she’s in it too." He got to his feet. "I never work any other way, a shake of the hand is going to do it. I took a liking to you the first time I saw you, but since you mentioned my business, let’s say that the Italian government doesn’t like us to export certain kinds of capital out of the country, legitimate or otherwise, without their knowledge—they’re funny that way," said Lazzari, laughing, spreading his arms innocently and helplessly.

Was it laughable? David knew enough to smile. He too was thinking quickly. Five hundred kilos weighed in at about eleven hundred pounds, enough to considerably lower Caliban’s bow in the water, since the only place he could hide them was in the anchor hatch locker or maybe the lazarette on the stern, a place usually so crowded with gear, spare lines, extra life preservers, storm anchors, you could hardly see your way in. So seventy percent in the anchor hatch locker and thirty in the lazarette to correct trim. Even better, Mickey hardly ever looked into those places. In actual volume it wasn’t a big load, only very heavy. But one way or another, no matter what, sooner or later he would have to tell her.

There was a long silence while David stared at his empty glass.

"You’re trusting me with over six and a half million dollars worth of gold. That’s a lot of money. How do you know I won’t bolt?"

"In that tub of yours which doesn’t do ten miles an hour max? C’mon, I’m not a fool either. As it happens I’ve already checked you out and you’re kosher. There is very little downside for either one of us. Who’s goin’ to bother a small American sailboat leaving port? When we go out, the entire Italian Navy sometimes comes to have a peek."

"What do you mean, checked me out?"

"We got ways, Buddy. We just want to know that you’re who you say you are, nothing more. We know who you are, already! Just in case you get any ideas."

David stared at Lazzari’s smooth shaven cheeks and iron grey hair, inscrutable but knowing brown eyes. The American lowered his gaze and looked at his polished new boat shoes. He was entirely comfortable with himself and their deal. He looked up at David and smiled.

"So what about a handshake? In Texas they buy million dollar oil wells with just a handshake, papers are chicken shit." David stood up and shook Lazzari’s small dry hand and was clapped hard on the shoulder. "Let’s go down and join Emilio and the girls, you like lobster? My boys are fixing lobster for dinner."

There was a bit of chatter after the meal but the conversation was awkward, David not speaking Italian and Tondiglio looking bored enough to fall asleep. The two girls had disappeared below and David decided he didn’t want brandy when it was offered. Lazzari came with him to the side of Caliban and stood on the pier while David stepped aboard Caliban,

"Everything is understood, agreed. We’ll get final orders to you before you clear port. Once you make the delivery you can go anywhere you fuckin’ want to."

As David moved towards the aft cabin and took off his clothes, there was almost a ringing in his ears. How was he going to explain the change of plans to Micky? Apparantly it was going to be ‘Westward Ho’ and nothing eastwards. He would think about it later on. He climbed naked onto the berth but sleep failed to arrive and he stared numbly upwards. Towards morning he turned on the berthlight and thumbed through an old Yachting World where amazingly enough, he found an article on pirates in the Red Sea. Fantastic! He had absolutely the right gun aboard. He could handle a boat of pirates and then some. Time to check out the scuba gear as well.

On board ‘Our Good Thing,’ Tondiglio took his eyes off the television long enough to give Lazzari a long searching look.

"He went for it," said Lazzari to his business partner in his execrable American Italian, which always caused Tondiglio an inward groan. "Just like they always do. Reminds me of that Dutchman last year. They don’t admit it but underneath all the suckers are greedy, and everybody wants something for nothing." He laughed. "I kind of like this English guy though, cause he seems so stuffy and upperclass, like he’ll stick to the rules."

"I hate amateurs," said Tondiglio. "And I can’t figure out why you like to use them. One of these days you you will live to regret this."

"We always got Mimmo the Sardinian, to lend a hand like he did last year. Tell me one reason why I can’t use this expensive baby for a little business now and then, specially when it don’t cost you nothing’." (and Lazzari looked around at his large comfortable yacht, the tongue and grooved teak ceiling, the little imitation brass oil lamps swinging in their holders, the real oil paintings on the wall, thick impasto views of Vesuvio and Mount Etna."

The next night David set his watch alarm for two fifteen a.m. in case he fell asleep—but he didn’t since he was feeling far too jittery for that. He had wasted half a day getting Caliban ready for the shipment (that’s what he called it in his mind)—the shipment. He wasn’t too worried about the weight since the yacht already carried over four thousand pounds of lead in the keel. Another eleven hundred wouldn’t sink it though it would certainly ride lower in the water. He again forgot to telephone Mickey. Well, he already knew her arrival time the next day at Fiumicino and would taxi over to meet the plane.

At two-thirty a.m. he was standing on the aft of Caliban, ready to release his stern line doubled up as loop around a wood piling on shore. He had decided not to turn the engine on until he was well away from the dock. Then, when he released the the bow line and using his arms, pulled his way clear of the big Italian yacht in front of him, the current would push the boat out into the stream and it would drift a little, floating down river. Only then he would switch on the motor.

There was no point in calling attention to his night’s work, especially since it was going to be a little iffy. The watchman on shore had made a small tour at midnight, but the light in his shack was now out and he was probably safely asleep. Just in case, David had paid his total Marina account that day, saying he just might decide to leave during the night, so if the fellow did see him, he would think he was getting an early start and not running out on his bill. When he reappeared (after he took on board his cargo) it would still not be unusual since the harbour opening called ‘the focce’, always presented problems of arrival and departure if the wind wasn’t in the right direction. So first he he would go down the river, not far but a few hundred yards before turning around 180’—and then quietly make for the bridge upriver.

So far so good! David looked up and saw one of the two sailors watching him, standing on the deck of ‘Our Good Thing’, just the glint of eyes in the dark. Lazzari, that morning, had volunteered the help of one of these sailors, but seeing the way they coiled lines and generally barged about, making noise, David had refused. Too bad Mickey wasn’t along; they usually worked together as a perfect team and he could trust her with the engine while he took care of ropes and moorings. Alone, he just did things a little bit slower. In this instance, it would be well to keep Mickey in the dark as much as possible—if it could be managed.

The river was dead quiet as Caliban motored into the center of the current, just the ripple of water sliding down the hull. Since no one could call the Marina ‘well lit’ (a few bare electric bulbs hanging from wires)—his eyes were already accustomed to the dark. No fishing traffic at all, (the fishing boats were berthed in a man-made harbour a few miles away, the little town of Fiumicino, full of sea food restaurants and big trawlers). The river was strictly for yachts only and they lined the banks all the way to the sea. David had noticed that few people lived aboard and he supposed that if they did, they came from Rome an hour away; and used their boats on weekends over the whole year. Lucky them!

He turned the prow around sharply and headed upstream, passing ‘Our Good Thing’ again. He didn’t actually see anything but still knew he was being observed. Throttling down to about two and a half knots, keeping to the center of the stream, he darted down below to switch on the depth meter. The middle of the river seemed to have at least fifteen to twenty feet of bottom, but it didn’t pay to take chances and he had never been upstream before. Gradually depth began to run out. David began to get a little bit worried. Obviously the dredgers didn’t bother working this far up. He listened carefully for a possible scrape as his bottom touched.

How many yachts were moored on the Tiber river? At least a thousand, maybe more. A good place if you could stand the filth though it would hardly be healthy to fall in. With sewage pouring in somewhere upstream, one would need a trip to a hospital to be decontaminated. Reeds grew thickly on the banks each side of him. Moving slowly but steadily forward David strained his eyes to see the little pier with the gas pump. Suddenly a torch flashed in the dark, three blinks, and he drew closer, throttling down.

It did not flash again, wise to blinding him in the dark while he manoeuvred close in the shallowing water. He saw the old gas pump and two men standing on the end of the pier. Depths were now down to six feet. Not taking his eye off the gauge he cut the engine and ran out to the bow to throw his line. It was caught and made fast. Now the sternline to the other man, and slowly Caliban was pulled in.

"Ciaou," said one of them and David answered the same—"Ciaou."

Without a word the two of them disappeared in the dark toward the dim shape of a panel truck. They reappeared carrying small cardboard boxes which David helped unload, stacking them on the pier. They leaned over, pried them open, and the three of them began lifting out the contents. If they were gold bars they looked nothing like, having been freshly painted with a black pitch-like substance, some of which came off in his fingers. David groaned. They would probably mark his anchor locker and ropes forever. He lifted up four to carry aboard, but one of the men grabbed his shoulder.

"Ashpet!" in a deep growl.

Soon all the bars were stacked on the pier. five piles of twenty each.

"Count!" said one of the sailors. "Cento."

"Yes," said David counting, "one hundred."

"Scriva! Ecco la fattura."

He thrust a paper under his nose. David thought of signing Mickey Mouse or Joshua Slocum, or the name of the aunt who had given them Caliban. But the drivers glowering down at him seemed to know what to expect. So he signed his tutor’s name at college with an illegible flourish.

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