“Did you retrieve the coffins?” Wilson said, but didn’t wait for a reply. A whiff of something indescribably foul from the port side tied a knot in his stomach. “Jesus, Captain, you’ve got two good engines ready to go. Can’t we motor out of here?”
The captain shook his head. “Ackerman says no. He has some cockeyed notion about sailing round the world. And that means we sail; we don’t use the engines except in emergencies.”
“What’s this?” Wilson said.
“This is waiting,” the captain said, and went back to his charts.
9
Three more days passed in motionless torpor. The sun rose high and yellow through the haze, and the clouds burned off, and the becalmed Compound Interest roasted in the dead heat. A few limp clouds sagged in the blazing white sky.
Just aft of the foremast was an open-air gas grill, covered by an aluminum cap when not in use. On the evening of the third day, at the invitation of the owner, the ship’s company assembled around this piece of hardware for an ocean barbecue. As the sun set over the Sargasso, Nguyen removed the cap, struck a match, and set ten sirloin steaks to sear in the yellow and blue gas fire. He brushed each steak carefully with marinade, turned the red meat into the flame with a professional flourish. Soon, the rancid air filled with the familiar backyard smell of grilling meat. This was a special occasion. The crew survived mostly on sea rations; real food was reserved for the billionaire.
Dwight Ackerman emerged blinking from the forward hatch, his nose in the air. The Sargasso, almost tolerable at this twilight hour, smelled like a big dog on a hot afternoon.
“Glad you folks could make it,” he called, then he stopped and blinked out at the endless expanse of muck and water, as if for a moment surprised to find himself at sea. He was a lean, timid fellow of about forty-five with a washed-out complexion and thick glasses that made his eyes big as the eyes of a bug in a cartoon. He wore a Lakers T-shirt and droopy Levi’s rolled halfway up his white shins. The fading sun cast rose half-moon shadows through the glasses on his cheeks. Wilson was deeply disappointed. The man seemed relentlessly normal. He did not look like the mysterious devourer of fifteen-course meals, nor did he bear any resemblance to the famous shark of the financial pages, the corporate raider worth one and a quarter billion dollars.
“I sure am hungry,” Ackerman said, and settled with a sheepish grin to the left of Nguyen. He crossed his legs, showing smooth, womanish ankles protruding from a pair of squeaky-clean baby-blue Converse low-tops. “Make yourselves comfortable.” He gestured at the food. “Enjoy.”
In addition to the meat, there was a watercress-walnut salad and rice pilaf and eggplant moussaka and garlic bread and a bottle of decent Chilean red. Wilson had helped with the preparations in the usual sweat and hysteria of the galley. But now he forgot about his unpleasant labors and thought of the last steak dinner at Bazzano’s. He tried to catch Cricket’s attention across the grill. Her face was shadowed, turned to the darkness on the eastern horizon.
Ackerman ate four of the ten steaks and nearly half the side dishes. He ate methodically, turning the plate around and sweeping the food before him like the hands of a clock. Wilson, amazed, watched him eat. It was probably some kind of accelerated metabolism problem. The shit that must come out of the man! No conversation interrupted this serious business of eating; there was only the scrape of silverware on china and the slop of seaweed against the hull. At last the billionaire belched and put his plate aside. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, blinked around at the assembled company, and raised his glass of wine in a toast.
“Well, crew! Let’s say, to, uh … the Azores. How about that? Our next destination, right, Captain? If we ever get any wind, that is.”
Captain Amundsen nodded imperceptibly.
“And I would like to point out that we have two new crewpersons with us. Welcome aboard! Would you like to tell us something about yourselves? I always like to know a few things about my employees.” He turned to Cricket first.
Cricket put down her wine and looked up, her eyes blank and innocent. “Nothing to tell, sir,” she said. “I’m a professional sailor. Always have been.”
“Well, where are you from? Tell us that.”
She shrugged. “The sea more than anyplace else.”
“I see.” He frowned and turned to Wilson. “Are you a professional sailor too?”
“Actually, before this voyage I worked in brokerage houses in the city,” Wilson said. “Straight and Straight, the Tea Exchange—”
Ackerman’s eyes widened behind his bug glasses. “You were a broker?” he said.
Wilson shook his head. “No, sir. I did support work in commodities.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing right now, commodities,” Ackerman said, excited. “Sort of a change of pace for me. Spent the week trading corn futures over the wire. Been a great week for corn, let me tell you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You come down to the office sometime—heck, why not tomorrow afternoon? I’ve got a personal telecommunications satellite following along about two miles up. I’m hooked up to every commodities market in the world! We’ll have a real nice chat.” He seemed sincere; the grin on his face made him look like a boy who had just found a new friend. “Really, I mean it. Heck, here’s an idea, why don’t you bring in my lunch from now on? I’m sure Nguyen’s got better things to do with his time. Wouldn’t be bad to have company. We could chat while I eat!”
“Yes, sir,” Wilson said.
They lingered around the grill for another half hour over the last of the wine. Ackerman and Nguyen discussed tomorrow’s menu; Captain Amundsen nursed his own thoughts in silence. The sudden blackness of the night, and the vastness of the sea lent itself to whispers. After a while Wilson felt Cricket beside him. She sat to his right and a little behind, half in shadow. He glanced over and saw the side of her face lit blue in the light of the grill. She wore a denim work shirt and a pair of ragged white shorts. Wilson had never seen her bare legs up close before; they were firm and muscular and sleek as the flank of a dolphin. The back of his neck began to prickle.
“Wilson”—Cricket’s voice came to him in a low hush—“I don’t want you to think I’m ignoring you.”
“That’s O.K., I’ve been busy.” When he turned to her, she shook her head.
“Don’t talk, just listen.”
Wilson turned back to the grill.
“Like I said, I want to play it safe at least till the Azores. Amundsen’s been showing me the ropes. This tub’s as complicated as the goddamned space shuttle, but …” Cricket paused for effect. “I have been thinking about you.”
“Swell,” Wilson said.
“But we’ve got to be patient. There’s nothing I can do about the situation right now. You bunk in the hold with the cook. I’m in a hammock in a utility closet within spitting distance of the captain’s cabin. It’s just too dangerous.” She was silent for a beat. Wilson felt her breath warm on his ear.
“Give me your hand,” she whispered.
Wilson leaned away from the light and reached back. She took his hand, ran it up the side of her leg, and closed it between her thighs. After a moment, he began to feel a warm dampness against his palm.
“Just be patient,” Cricket whispered. She squeezed him hard with her thigh muscles and let him go. Then she was back on the other side of the grill, her eyes unreadable in the darkness, a glass of black wine at her lips.
A little after midnight, a fresh wind swept the haze off the water and the stars looked like white points of frost in the empyrean. The beach umbrella sails filled with wind. The Compound Interest crossed the fortieth parallel at sixty degrees north on a dead run for the Azores.
Tossing in his narrow berth in the hold an hour later, Wilson felt a familiar ache for which there is only one remedy. He didn’t get to sleep till dawn showed its first light over the bow.
10
Ackerman’s office occupied a large cabin that
took up most of the forward hold. Except for the fact that all furniture stood bolted to the deck, the office would have looked at home in any corporate tower in any city in the world. There was a large glossy desk with a computer and printer, two fax machines and a telex, file cabinets, a video tele-conferencing setup, and a twenty-two-inch television monitor built in along the starboard bulkhead. Bookshelves held leather-bound ledgers and several hundred videotapes. Diplomas and photographs in cleverly curved frames hung from the port bulkhead above Ackerman’s desk. A large square porthole let in the sea light, but this didn’t make much difference: The moment Wilson stepped through the hatchway with Ackerman’s daily mound of food in hand, he recognized it immediately—the plastic closeness, the pale, powdery smell of offices.
Over the next few days, Wilson spent an hour each afternoon in there watching Ackerman stuff his face. Afterward, they talked about basketball and the commodities market and played games of tick-tack-toe or hangman on scraps of paper. Except for the occasional startling financial insight, it was exactly like visiting with a kid in the third grade. Behind the desk strewn with spreadsheets and faxes, Ackerman seemed truly himself, at ease as he was not on the deck of the ship. He liked to arm-wrestle, indulged in boyish bathroom humor, told moronic stories, crumpled paper balls, and shot them for the trash can. “Two points!” he would shout when he made a basket, and Wilson would cringe.
But despite the jokes and the horseplay, Wilson sensed something pathetic about the man, something desperate. And at the beginning of the fifth day of lunch duty he came forward into the office with his tray to find Ackerman slumped over the desk, head down on his arm. Wilson stood unnoticed for a few seconds, then cleared his throat.
“Sir? Are you hungry today?”
Ackerman raised his head slowly. “Not really, but I better eat something.” His eyes were puffy and bloodshot. He had been crying.
Wilson set the tray on the desk blotter and turned to the hatchway.
“No, it’s O.K.,” Ackerman sniffed miserably. “Sit down.”
Wilson sat in the stenographer’s chair beside the desk and watched while Ackerman ate. Today, for a rare change of pace, the meal was French. Nguyen had prepared a coq au vin, coquilles St. Jacques, boeuf bourgignon, escargots in garlic butter, a salade aux écrevisses, and duck à l’orange, followed by cheese and fruit and accompanied by a bottle of ’Neuf-du-Pape. Ackerman managed to down barely half this feast. Then he let out a long groan that was caught between a sigh and a belch and put down his spoon.
“You can have the rest if you want,” he said. It was the first time he had offered any of his lunch. Wilson was tempted—sea rations generally tasted like cardboard—but as a matter of principle, he refused. Ackerman groaned again and leaned back in his desk chair. His face was the color of ash.
“Is something bothering you, sir?” Wilson said at last.
Ackerman gave Wilson a puffy-faced glare. “Given the hierarchical nature of our relationship,” he said stiffly, “you being the employee and I the employer, I feel it is inappropriate to discuss deeply personal matters.”
“No problem,” Wilson said.
“But damn it!” Ackerman’s voice cracked suddenly. “I’ve got no one else to talk to on this boat!” He pushed away from the desk, stepped over to the porthole, and leaned his head against the thick glass. “You know I’ve made a bundle these last couple of weeks,” he said. “Twenty million dollars. And on the commodities market! I’m a fucking investment banker; I don’t know anything about the commodities market! And the other day I calculated that I’ve netted something like four and a half billion dollars in my lifetime. Sure, for tax purposes, I’m worth just over a billion, but there’s two billion more sitting in an unnumbered Swiss account that the IRS doesn’t know about—” Then he swung around crazily. “Go ahead, tell the bastards. Try and collect your ten percent! I don’t care anymore. Because I’ve finally realized the truth! Money can’t buy … it can’t buy—” He shook his head; he couldn’t finish. Tears drained down his cheeks, and he slumped back into the chair behind the desk.
“—happiness?” Wilson suggested.
The billionaire rubbed his knuckles into his eyes and nodded. “Claire married me for my money. I guess that’s obvious,” he said, sniffling. “At the time I thought she loved me. I guess I was wrong.”
“Claire?”
“My ex-wife. She’s the French actress, Claire Denoyer.” Ackerman brightened for a moment. “Maybe you’ve seen her movies—Elena’s Passion, Elena and the Bachelors—there’s a whole series of them.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Wilson said.
“Oh. Well, you probably wonder why I bought this boat, why I took this voyage in the first place. Around the world? I hate the sea! Did you notice I hardly ever come up on deck? But it seemed like the only way to forget about the woman. Sometimes, when the market is jumping, I can go through a whole day without thinking of her. But not today. Today I’ve got it bad.”
“What happened?” Wilson said gently.
Ackerman took a remote out of his desk. “This happened!”
The video monitor across the cabin flashed on, and Wilson almost fell out of his chair: On the screen a high-resolution, full-color image of a two naked people—a black man and a white woman—paused in mid fuck. They were doing it doggie style, the woman bent over the back of a flowered sofa, her face contorted in openmouthed slobbery ecstasy, the man looming above her, one eye closed, a snarl on his lips, both hands pressed flat against her tanned ass cheeks, which were as perfectly formed as the halves of a pear.
“Pretty picture, eh?” Ackerman said. He pressed play, and the lovers rocked into motion, with the usual grunts and moans and sweat of the primal act.
“O.K.,” Wilson said. “I get the pointy—”
But the billionaire didn’t seem to hear. “That’s Claire and her personal trainer. He was a washed-up pro football player who went by the name of Ironhead Jackson. I set up surveillance cameras all over our house in Santa Barbara and videotaped them for months. I also caught her on tape with two other men and with the maid, a seventeen-year-old girl from Venezuela—that’s a pretty hot scene, let me tell you.”
Ackerman clicked up the volume, and the sounds of videotaped lovemaking filled the cabin, and his eyes grew round and crazy as he watched his wife rise to orgasm on the television screen, screeching like a banshee. This din proved too much for Ironhead. He gave a loud grunt and pulled out, spattering across Claire’s backside. Then the two collapsed in a sticky, panting heap across the sofa.
Wilson was speechless.
Ackerman gave an odd smile and touched the remote. The screen went blank.
“I know,” he said. “It’s just like a cheap porn movie. Lord knows, she made enough of those! All you need is that cheesy seventies music in the background. And the coitus interruptus! Classic! It was the man’s preferred mode of birth control. I’ve got about three hundred tapes.” He gestured dolefully at the bookcase. “They did it about three times a day for six months. And during the whole time she was sleeping with me two or three times a week. We’d fuck—not perhaps as vigorously as that—but it wasn’t bad either. I don’t need to tell you the divorce was an open-and-shut case. Cut her off without a penny, and that’s not easy to do in California. I hear she’s a junkie now, living with some pimp in a cheap hotel on Sunset Boulevard in L.A.” Ackerman leaned back and put a hand over his eyes.
Wilson was quiet for a while, thinking.
“If you ask me, Mr. Ackerman, the video camera is an evil invention,” he said at last. “Memory is a soft, forgiving thing. The Greeks made memory a goddess and gave her a name, Mnemosyne. She blunts the worst of it over time, softens the painful edges for us. But video is unforgiving. On video it’s always there, the same sins over and over again. You can relive your most horrible moments frame by frame forever. Let me give you some free advice, sir. Get rid of the damn things. Let memory, as the Greeks might say, apply the healing bal
m of time. Cut your wife loose; drop every last tape into the drink!”
Ackerman blinked back new tears. “I can’t,” he said. “I still love her. These tapes are all I have left.” Then he put his head on the desk and wouldn’t look up.
After a while, Wilson exited quietly and mounted topside into the bright sunlight. He went forward to the bow cage and sat with the salt spray washing over him, the clean air filling his lungs. Up here in the wind, it was a bright Atlantic afternoon, sun falling back across the continent toward the western ocean, Africa somewhere up ahead, just off the starboard. But in the office below, in the powdery dimness, time stood still. There were no bright Atlantic afternoons, no stormy ocean midnights. Down there, as corn futures telexed in from around the world, it would always be the same raw half second before Ackerman’s wife, taken by another man, reached orgasm.
11
They sighted Corvo in the Azores on October 17. It rose from the gray sea, a gray, attenuated shape shrouded in clouds. After nearly three weeks out of sight of land, it was hard to believe in the existence of such a thing: solid, immovable rock. The Compound Interest sailed around Corvo in four hours—it is a tiny island, not five miles across—and the captain pointed out Rosario in the misty distance.
“That’s a town?” Wilson said. He studied Rosario through the captain’s powerful binoculars. He saw a half dozen white box houses strung in a line up the cliff of volcanic rock, a few fishing boats riding at anchor in the tiny harbor.
“Yes, it’s a town,” Captain Amundsen said. “And a very old one. Awhile back a storm blew over a great old oak in the square. In the roots they found a pot of Phoenician coins. Amazing when you think about it, what fearless sailors the ancients were. Coming all the way out here from the coast of North Africa in square-rigged galleys, nothing but big rowboats, really. Hell, Africa is more than a thousand miles away. Those poor bastards probably thought they were going to sail right off the edge of the earth.”
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