The Devil on Chardonnay

by Ed Baldwin

  “Primordial. Do you know the word?” Mikki asked. “It is primordium in Latin. The English word must be the same.”

  She turned to look at Spanish moss drooping from the limbs of a live oak, its massive trunk somehow supporting limbs larger in girth than a man and drooping to the ground only many feet from the trunk.

  “Primordial. Yes, that’s the word.”

  “You belong here. You seem …”

  “I fit in?” Boyd laughed. “I’m a primordial man?”

  “Not so bad in a troubled, dangerous world,” she said simply, and then walked, watching the others in silence as they walked through the trees.

  “My cousin has heirs and will own the bank when my grandfather dies. He is younger, but male. I am preparing to leave the bank at the end of this year.”

  She paused and leaned against the trunk of a fallen tree, her intense blue eyes focused on Boyd now. He felt the attraction.

  “It’s a fine island.”

  Boyd glanced into the eyes, still on him. In his mind, he replayed the grand entrance of Chardonnay into Charleston Harbor, the Yacht Club party, the hurriedly arranged meeting with Byxbe, and now the island and impending trip back to Europe. This wealthy sophisticate didn’t leave the playgrounds of the Riviera to buy Sand Island or to hear a pitch by Lymon Byxbe on a new vaccination process.

  “Do you own part of your bank?” she asked, shifting her buttocks further back onto the trunk of the fallen tree.

  “No. I’m just a hired man, a securities salesman.” Boyd smiled, looking away to the east.

  He felt her gaze, searching. This lady was smart. He tried to blank his mind. When he couldn’t, he tried to think salesman thoughts. Failing again, he imagined Mikki’s bare breasts, not too hard considering he’d had ample time to study them that morning. He didn’t know whether people could really know what another was thinking, but he knew he could spot a liar. Could Mikki?

  The troupe converged at the southern tip of the island and walked out onto a clean sand beach that stretched 200 yards farther south before disappearing in a point beneath the blue water. To the west, several miles away, lay the mainland and the beginning of salt grass and tidal creeks that went well inland. Bull Island, a large wooded island was just visible to the south. The expanse of the large bay their small island sat in gave them a sense of isolation. Chardonnay sparkled in the bright midday sun, riding high and proud at anchor a half-mile east.

  “It’s lunchtime,” Donn announced, lugging the cooler out onto the beach and opening it. They gathered, sorting through for their choice of French mineral water, beer or a bottle of Absolute vodka. Boyd took a beer, kicked his shoes off and walked alone to the spit of beach at the end, using the serenity to mull over his problem. At the end, he stood in ankle-deep water and looked back over the 200 yards of sand that separated him from his companions. He imagined the blotches on the dead farmers, saw Jacques sitting on the beach and heard the drums. Ebola was the adversary here, and a pattern was becoming evident.

  He recalled Joe Smith’s bad dreams while they’d been quarantined at Diego Garcia. Joe always thought of Ebola as a thing, a united force, not a zillion individual creatures. It broke out of the jungle by playing to the basest impulses in humans. The actual illness was secondary, just a means of reproduction. Ebola wasn’t going to be back in Charleston in a freezer controlled by a couple of businessmen desperate to unload worthless stock. Follow the pattern. Ebola had jumped to another vector. If he wanted Ebola now, he would need to be out there, on Chardonnay, bound for Europe.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  Skinny Dip

  Boyd pulled off his shirt as he walked back down the spit of land. With the shirt behind his back he pitted his triceps one against the other, then put his fists together in front of his chest and maximally contracted his pectorals, then twisted to each side and flexed his lats. In the two minutes it took to casually walk back to the group he had engorged his upper torso as effectively as if he’d done a dozen bench presses. He walked to where Mikki stood by the cooler and reached in for a beer, popping the top and gazing at the sky. As he posed, he let the whole bottle gurgle into his throat before casually dropping it to the sand.

  “It’s not like we have to be anywhere this afternoon,” Boyd said. “This is as pretty a section of beach as there is in America. I propose we enjoy having it all to ourselves.”

  The sound of the change in the pocket of Boyd’s shorts hitting the ground caused four heads, turned momentarily to look at the beach he’d just praised, to snap around. He stood there nude like Adonis, soaking up admiring glances, then took a quick step toward Pamela.

  “Come on Pammie! Let’s go swimming.”

  Boyd picked her up and accelerated into the surf, easily hoisting her weight onto his shoulder. The waves tripped him and he dived forward, throwing a loudly protesting Pamela, as they splashed into the sea.

  ************

  Holding the bow several points east of due south, Boyd steered Chardonnay, feeling her spirit in the wheel. The wind had shifted to the southwest, and they had to close-haul out to sea to get back to Charleston. Hitting a swell now, the spray blew back onto the deck with some regularity and was a refreshment when it did.

  “Mikki was a wee lass when I first shipped out on Chardonnay,” Neville said, returning to the deck from the doghouse where he’d gone to light his pipe. The sun was warm still, but low in the west. Boyd had chosen the fading sun and Chardonnay’s wheel to cocktails and laughter below. The others were having a grand time reliving the afternoon and tending to Pamela’s sunburn.

  “Her family big sailors?”

  “Chardonnay belongs to Mikki’s grandfather. He inherited her as a young man and sailed her long and fast. Quite a man.”

  “You the captain all that time?”

  “No. I was the mechanic. You had to have a full-time mechanic in those days. Diesels weren’t as reliable as they are now. We prefer to use pure sail, but get in a bad blow and you’d better have the diesel.”

  “You must have seen a lot,” Boyd said, looking around, alert for traffic now that Charleston Harbor was in sight.

  “Aye, that,” Neville said, puffing, looking east at the horizon.

  Several minutes passed.

  “Mikki seems spirited. Is that just from being rich?”

  “It’s in the blood.” Neville said, puffing again.

  Then, lowering his voice, he said, “Lad, they are a fierce clan.”

  “Fierce?”

  “Aye.”

  “Fierce?”

  Neville didn’t answer. He walked forward to stand alone on the bow, looking at the distant lights of Charleston.

  *********

  “I won’t go! That son of a bitch said I had a big butt!” Pamela exclaimed the next morning just after dawn, glowering at Donn.

  They had anchored Chardonnay at the Yacht Club just after 9 and stayed below listening to Neville tell sea stories. It had been exotic places, big blows and pirates. Donn joined in with stories of elk camp in Colorado and snake hunting in Oklahoma until after midnight.

  “I said she had a big sunburn,” Donn said, laughing. He’d spent the night in his own room and was already packed. Mikki had spent a lot of time sitting with Donn, and now Pam was jealous, hung over and badly sunburned.

  “Agent Prescott, you will go, and you will continue in your undercover role or see disciplinary action from your supervisor, which right now is me,” Boyd said, sounding too much like Ferguson.

  He’d spent an hour with Ferguson on the phone already this morning and heard the tale of jihadists in Sudan that Davann had gotten, and Raybon’s failure to find out any more from his Arab friend. The CIA was reaching out now to covert agents around the world. What was “the Wind of Allah?”

  “My butt hurts,” Pamela said, throwing her suitcase on the bed. She was clad in a chaste terrycloth robe provided by the hotel. On the beach, she’d pulled steadily on the Absolut, her inhibitions dropping away li
ke Salome’s veils, until finally she had traipsed nude down the spit of sand like a well-fed wood nymph. This time it was Wolf and Mikki whose eyes kept flicking back to the goodies. After lunch, Pam fell asleep, face down on the sand, her pale, muscular buttocks taking on a reddish glow.

  Sitting cross-legged on the bench beside Donn that night, Mikki had laughed to the point of tears after hearing of his pitch to the residents of Skunk Wells, Okla. Taking shares in his corporation instead of money for their town was the smart move, he’d told them, because soon scores of free-spending millionaires from Tulsa and Oklahoma City would buy second homes there to retreat to “the sylvan splendor” of their community on weekends. The citizens had wised up at the last minute, and several had actually worn guns into town the day they advised him to leave.

  “Pistols? Like the Old West?” She had laughed incredulously.

  “Matched Colt 44s! Another guy had a Winchester 94 model. I got the message all right,” Donn laughed, as Mikki sat close, her fragrance renewed after a quick shower.

  “We leave tomorrow for Europe. Will you come?” Mikki had finally asked. “It will take two weeks. I must leave at Lisbon and fly to Luxembourg. You may return from there or go on to Cannes. We will stop in Bermuda and the Azores.”

  Pamela, who’d brightened their afternoon with her so freely shared charms, was by the evening again glassy-eyed, having sobered up in the early evening to find the vodka and finish it. Donn basked in Mikki’s attention as he interspersed his stories with Neville’s.

  Boyd sat shirtless in the heat of the cabin. Wolf, shirtless also, had provided some kind of Swiss sunburn balm for Pamela to apply to her rosy breasts before covering them with a wet T-shirt to ease the pain. Now he sat next to her glowering at Donn and Mikki.

  “You will have to share the guest room. With three, it should be interesting. No?” Mikki said with a gay smile.

  “We can sleep in shifts,” Boyd had volunteered, delighted that their escapades had made them seem an essential part of the crossing back to Europe. Only passing entertainment for a rich girl tired of her musclebound lover, true, but on board for the next leg.

  Now that Pamela was packing, Donn returned to his room and found some Alka Seltzer, which he dropped into a hotel glass of water and offered it to her.

  “Thanks. I wish you guys would stop me when I get over the line like yesterday.” Pam said, coming out of the bathroom where she had hurriedly dressed. She gulped down the Alka Seltzer and made a face.

  “You did great,” Boyd said. “Wolf couldn’t keep his eyes off you all day. Did you find out anything?”

  Boyd swung her filled suitcase out onto the waiting bellman’s cart in the hall.

  “The two seamen are from an island called Faial in the Azores. Mikki said she plans to give them a couple of days there before going on. There’s a sailors bar there, Peter’s, supposedly quite the place for transatlantic sailors. She may be meeting someone there. She said she had to be there by the 20th.”

  “Very good, Pam. When did you get that?”

  “On the beach, while you three big men were playing in the waves like kids.”

  “Anything from your end?” Boyd asked Donn, pushing the cart toward the elevator.

  “She’s a stock manipulator. Said she’d just as soon let her cousin manage the real estate and banking business. She likes action.”

  “Well, she likes action of a nonfinancial nature, too,” Boyd said as they waited for the elevator. “Don’t get too caught up in the fun.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  The Atlantic

  “That’s the sea breeze, laddie. Wait 'til we get into the Atlantic. You’ll see. We’ll have the wind. She rides the wind!” Neville seemed glad to be gone from Charleston. They had hurriedly taken on more provisions with the addition of three guests to feed and entertain, and had set sail by 8.

  “We must be 10 miles from shore, I can’t see the land,” Boyd said, turning to look back at Charleston. As far as he was concerned, this was the open Atlantic. They were headed northeast, with the east wind crossing to starboard.

  “This is coastal water. See, it’s brown,” Neville said. “That breeze, it rushes from the sea, which is cool, toward land, which warms up early in the day and sends the air over it higher. In two hours, we’ll be in the open sea.”

  The captain walked forward into the doghouse to light his pipe and look at some charts.

  Boyd sipped his coffee and enjoyed the feel of Chardonnay through the wheel as he stayed on the course of zero six five, designated by the captain. One of the Portuguese seamen had begun sanding a teak railing nearby. Donn and Pamela were leaning out over the railing of the bow, laughing. Wolf and Mikki were below, checking inventory in the storeroom.

  “We’ve got a blow, lads. In the south,” Neville said, returning from the doghouse a half hour later, addressing Boyd and the Portuguese sailor.

  Candido Mendes stepped over to see the paper the captain held in his hand. He was a short man with narrow shoulders and hips, black hair and a bushy mustache. His deeply tanned skin was wrinkled and leathery, indicating years at sea.

  The paper was a weather fax of the southern North Atlantic. The East Coast of the United States was visible on the western edge of the map, with open ocean in the center. A spiral of clouds was evident west of the Cape Verde islands, off Africa on the eastern edge of the map.

  “Is that a hurricane?” Boyd asked, seeing the familiar pattern of the clouds.

  “No, the winds are only 50 knots or so. Not well organized enough to call a hurricane, but more than we want to be near,” Neville said, still looking at the FAX.

  “Not a place to be sailin’,” Mendes said in perfect, unaccented English.

  “You sound American,” Boyd said.

  “I am. I grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts,” the dark-skinned man answered.

  Everything about him looked European – the clothing, the hair, the mannerisms. He smiled at Boyd.

  “There are a lot of Azoreans in America. I left Faial when I was 10, when my father moved here to work on his brother’s fishing boat. When I got my seaman’s card, I worked tuna boats for a while.”

  Neville, running a pipe cleaner down the stem of his momentarily cold pipe, said, “The Portuguese, and especially the Azorean Portuguese, are consummate sailors. Candido and his cousin have been with Chardonnay for 20 years.”

  “So, do you live in Fall River?”

  “No. I moved back to Faial. My wife wasn’t happy. Her family is all on Faial and Pico, the next island. You’ll see it. It’s beautiful there.”

  As if suddenly realizing his reason for mixing with the guests was the fax, now examined, he smiled and moved away.

  “So, is this a problem? Looks like that storm is about 3,000 miles away,” Boyd said, returning to the fax.

  “The northeast trade winds blow to the west below 30 degrees latitude. This storm should track well south of us. We’ll be north, above 30 degrees to catch the prevailing westerlies back to Europe.”

  Neville tapped the map above Bermuda and well north of their present position.

  The wind died over the next hour, and noon found them wallowing in an oily smooth sea with minimal swells. Sensing the loss of power, Mikki came up from the doghouse, looking at the NavStar GPS printout of their position.

  “Are we far enough north for the westerlies?” she asked Neville from the doghouse.

  “Aye. Should pick it up here, may have to wait.”

  “We’ll give it two hours. Start the diesel then if we don’t get wind.” She turned and went down the stairs.

  There was no doubt who ran this ship.

  Before long, a wisp of breeze blew out of the west. Neville nodded to Candido, who needed no further instructions. He quickly rigged a jib from the mainmast to the tip of the bowsprit. Meanwhile, Neville allowed the mainsail and mizzen some slack as the wind from the southwest caught them, pushing them across the deck to the port side. Chardonnay’s sails tig
htened and she leaned to port and began to move northeast.

  *********

  Dawn lit the eastern horizon with a red glow as Wolf climbed the steps carrying a tray of hard rolls, liver sausage, white cheese, butter and jelly, and two steaming cups of coffee.

  “In Switzerland, we have a big breakfast,” he announced, obviously in a fine humor and looking forward to his eight hours of watch.

  Boyd had volunteered to pull the first night shift. Wolf had turned in early the night before to be ready for the morning relief. Chardonnay had scarcely needed the autopilot to keep her at zero eight zero course through the night. The steady west wind had been most dependable. Boyd had charted the course hourly, logging 109 miles during his shift.

  Freed by the autopilot from having to stay by the wheel, Boyd had spent the night walking the deck, watching the stars and doing some calisthenics. Though liver sausage wasn’t his idea of breakfast, he tried some in the spirit of Wolf’s good humor, later adding jelly to ease it down.

  “Neville wanted us to stay on zero eight zero, but looks like we’ll have to change a few degrees to the east or we’ll miss Bermuda,” Boyd said, showing Wolf his record of their course during the night.

  Wolf added two slices of cheese to the liver sausage on a generously buttered roll and looked over Boyd’s shoulder, nodding. He took a big bite, nodded some more, and stepped back onto the deck. He scanned the horizon in all directions while chewing his first bite.

  “Neville is eating. He’ll change the course when he comes up,” Wolf said, breathing deeply as he smelled his coffee, and then washed down the first bite with a big gulp.

  Boyd finished his coffee watching the sun rise out of the Atlantic and then went below.

  Mikki sat on the bench behind the table in the saloon, drinking coffee and looking at another weather fax. She nodded but didn’t speak.

  “Guess my compatriots are still in the rack,” Boyd said, looking toward the closed door to the guest stateroom. He was tired and wanted to sleep.

  “Take any bed,” Mikki said, sliding out and trotting up the steps. Halfway up she began to speak to Wolf in French.