Dragonfly Read online

  The dream-scream was only a brutal pounding in his temples when he sat up naked on the edge of the wide double berth in the Dragonfly's master's cabin. He heard a scamper of bare feet along a side deck, and giggling. All of the portlights in the stateroom were open; he had slept without air-conditioning. He took several deep breaths, relishing the smell of the sea.

  Thirty-two days, almost five weeks, and he was still dreaming about her. Unusual. Once he left them they didn't stay in his memory for long, not so insistently as Clare had. He had learned long ago that memory was a skilled torturer, so he'd also become adept at scouring slates when a project was over. Clare hadn't been the best-looking or the richest or the best in bed of the women he had conned in a fifteen-year career, so why should she still be hanging around where he was most vulnerable, in his sleep? He had liked her, he liked them all, but he didn't miss her. He had the feeling that something wasn't finished, where Clare Malcolm was concerned. And that worried him.

  He passed a hand down the underside of the bolt-upright erection he always had on awakening, still unable to dismiss Clare from the morning round of his thoughts. She'd been the most difficult of all his lovers to seduce. Her introduction to sex, age nineteen, had been at the hands of a pathological character whose orgasms could only be achieved as the climax of a whipping. What the hell was she supposed to think? Subsequent liaisons with clumsy or incompetent lovers had turned her off completely. She decided that she was frigid, and it was a loathsome thing anyway. Who needed it?

  But she had needed Joe, not that she realized or acknowledged it right away. And needing was the key to wanting, without fear or disgust. Joe wasn't a psychiatrist. But he knew a lot about intimacy; he knew about listening and touching and just being there, a reassuring, undemanding presence. No matter what inhibitions preyed on her, a healthy and vital woman's reaction to those attentions was inevitable. It was like waiting under a tree for fruit to ripen in its season. The first time they made love her nipples were hard in he but her stomach muscles quivered whenever he kissed or drew his fingers across a line just above her pubic triangle. An hour, another, yet she couldn't, oh she couldn't. Three hours of repeated, gentle caresses. Opening her thighs, as if they were a heavy book with pages stuck together from years of neglect. When she came, at the moment of his nudging entrance, her spasms were as great as if he'd cut her throat.

  The memory made Joe smile, ruefully. His penis drooped. He wasn't interested in women or sex right now. What he wanted was coffee and a fresh baguette from Maman Arcelin's hole-in-the-wall bakery just off the harbor square. He heaved a sigh and went into the head, came out after relieving himself and brushing his teeth, looked for shorts and a T-shirt and sandals, then went topside.

  Four young heads turned as he emerged from the companionway. The kids were sitting in close order on the cockpit coaming with their bare feet dangling, all of them as blond as their Brittany forebears, tanned skins still beaded with drops of water from their swim out to his boat.

  "Kouman ou ye?" Joe said in his all-purpose Creole. He recognized three of the boys: Christophe, Illion, Providence. The fourth might have been a girl, seven or eight years old: someone's little sister. She had bright elliptical eyes that shone like mirrors from her excitement at being included with the guys. "Long time no see," he said in English. None of them understood him, but Illion, the oldest, repeated it with a snicker, and then they all laughed and tried saying "Long time no see."

  The kids, and many others who would show up eventually while he was in Les Saintes, were his local crew, and Bourg was as close to a permanent home as he'd come. He knew everyone on the island, and more people on the sister islands of Terre-de-Bas and Marie-Galante. Cousteau probably made more of a stir when the Calypso was in port, but still it was nice to have a welcome.

  Joe chatted with the kids for a few minutes, catching up on island gossip. They were off from school until after Fête des Saintes. His hundred-kilometer passage from Montserrat had been mostly against the wind at thirty knots, the skirts of a tropical disturbance that had stalled south of Hispaniola, and he'd taken some seas. There was a lot of cleanup to be done, and he put them all to work washing off the salt while he puttered ashore in the dinghy.

  Greetings came to him everywhere, from old men repairing piles of mauve or purple netting on the quay, to the curate of the ti' eglise enjoying his breakfast after the five-thirty mass and feeding his scruff' black dog at his usual table on the narrow terrace of Le Breton. There were a few mopeds on the streets now, young Europeans on holidays scattering from the hotels to the beaches at Pain du Sucre or Anse Rodrigue before the nine-to-noon ban on the noisy scooters went into effect. In a little while the day-trippers would be arriving from Guadeloupe on the JetKat ferry, but there were never hordes of tourists on Les Saintes at any time of the year. They had a small constabulary on what was virtually a crime-free island, but Customs wag nonexistent. He came and went as he pleased. He was one of them, and trusted. He played dominoes and drank with the Saintois, but never got drunk. He volunteered for community labor projects. In past years he had made generous contributions to the church and the committees of various festivals. To the small infirmary that served the island. When bacterial meningitis, spread by a sick tourist, threatened the lives of several children including Illion Acelin, he arranged for the most critically ill to be flown to a children's hospital in San Juan for treatment. He had no business arrangements in Bourg. He did not get serious with the young, marriageable women on any of Les Saintes. He knew what everybody was up to, their indiscretions, complaints and quarrels; but he was never questioned, and volunteered nothing about his own life. In fact, he had no life he could talk about. He was an actor, whose best work would be seen by only a few people. And seldom appreciated, after the fact, by any of them. In those loneliest of times when his gut hurt and he was desperate for a sense of peace that all the sun, sailing and accommodating women could not bring him, he felt shadowless, as insubstantial as a blue-water hallucination, the bugaboo of single-handed sailors on every ocean.

  Walking up the street to Maman Arcelin's, past white walls brimming with frangipani and bougainvillea, past the old street sweeper with the dented forehead named Hubert, he thought, You can stay this time. You don't have to do it anymore. He had brought back from Omaha six hundred eighty thousand in cash, from the money that Clare had arranged for the purchase of unavailable works of Western art and from the sale of her wedding gift to him, the Maserati that he unloaded six hours after leaving town, to a dealer in Kansas City. The proceeds from the dealer's cashier's check had by now washed through half a dozen offshore bank accounts. It could not be traced toJoe. The rest of the cash, in new hundred-dollar bills, had accompanied him to Puerto Rico, replacing the picture tube of a twenty-seven-inch Panasonic in its original shipping carton. His expenses for the Omaha project came to a little over twenty thousand dollars. After deducting the twenty-five-percent fee he'd paid for his false identity as Joe Tucker, he had cleared four hundred and ninety thousand dollars.

  So his current net worth, counting the eight hundred thousand he had in the Dragonfly and its array of electronics, was—Joe shook his head as he turned into Maman Arcelin's. His net worth, after three years of small pickings while he learned his trade, and ten years of ever-more-lucrative payoffs as the breadth and audacity of his cons developed, was comparable to that of rock stars his own age. Maybe better: he had no ex-wives to settle with. And there had never been any taxes to pay to corrupt and spendthrift governments.

  Money went, instead, to an orphanage in Honduras, to a public-health facility in Lagos, to a nonprofit manufacturer in Trinidad that employed the handicapped, to college scholarship funds in half a dozen countries. To books for school libraries, to church-sponsored missions for the indigent, and to those medical-research organizations he didn't feel were ripping off the public and private dollar. Employees he'd never met, in an office in Luxembourg—an office he never visited but which was devoted solely to
his business and philanthropies—handled all disbursements, based on information Joe provided in his ramblings.

  But he didn't have to look for projects anymore. There was enough money, suitably invested, to continue the outflow for the rest of his life. He felt a sense of good cheer at this prospect, and gave Maman Arcelin a hug that lifted her tiny frame from the floor. She had her back to him as she waited on a customer in the bakery, and she let out a whoop of indignation until she realized .who it had to be.

  She kissed him and scolded him in patois for being gone so long, then sat him down at a little table by the door to feed him.

  "Are you married yet?"

  "No, Maman."

  "Are you wasting your life on frivolous things?"

  "I don't think so, Maman."

  "This time you will stay forever. You will settle down and marry a beautiful Saintois like Yvonne, who was very sad to celebrate her seventeenth birthday without your company."

  "Yvonne must go to Paris and study hard and become a teacher, because Mme. LaRouche will keel over any day now, and then who will educate the children of Terre-de-Haut? When Yvonne comes back from Paris, that is another matter."

  "In the meantime you will be discreet with the tourist women, and not break her heart. I will cook wonderful little dinners for you on your boat. Like I cook for no one else since Jacques drowned."

  Her husband had been a fisherman, lost off Les Roches Percées in a before-dawn collision with what everyone assumed was a smuggler's boat from MarieGalante—large, powerful, showing no running lights. She was a widow seven years, with Illion, age twelve, her youngest child.

  "You should go to work for Yprés," Joe said, naming the proprietor of one of the best restaurants on an island noted for its cuisine. "To get up at three in the morning and bake bread is no life."

  "That rascal. Why should I waste my talent making someone as lazy as Yprés a rich man?"

  "With your head for business, you would own his restaurant in six months."

  He passed a pleasant hour at the bakery, and the rest of the day slipped by without effort. Only in the evening, as he sat alone under the Bimini awning in the stern of the Dragonfly listening to Achtung Baby on headphones and watched the sun torch the darkening clouds to the west, did the cold feeling steal back to him: the sensation that something other than clouds was gathering on his horizon.

  From their first meeting he had been wary of Donald Malcolm, a killer fruit with a mind as lethal as a spinning saw. Joe had no doubts that once he jilted Clare, Brud would come after him with everything he had. On leaving Omaha, he took extra precautions to cover his tracks. The beard came off in a Holiday Inn by the Kansas City airport; he cut his hair short and changed the color from sun-streaked brown to a reddish shade. Contact lenses darkened his normally bright blue eyes. He wore glasses with amber lenses, even at night, dressed like a European backpacker touring the States, and adopted a German accent. The documentation he'd cached months ago in a mailbox facility in KC identified him as Hans Shuler of Bremen.

  He shipped his Panasonic TV by Federal Express to Puerto Rico marked HOLD FOR PICKUP and, as Shuler, flew to Oklahoma City. There he paid cash for a ticket to Denver, where he left Shuler in a Dumpster and took an early-morning flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, via Atlanta. He got off in Atlanta and bought another ticket to San Juan.

  Joe changed the CD in his portable player and had another straight shot of the dark bronze rhum vieux he'd been too fond of recently. He was still thinking about his recent getaway. Maybe, if he'd been super-cautious, he could've hitched rides out of Atlanta, made his way south to Miami, and from there wangled a ride on a corporate jet to San Juan. But by then he was content with his precautions and bored with a game he couldn't be certain anyone else was playing. He wasn't sure just how many islands there were in the Caribbean: well over a thousand. And more secluded anchorages than he could visit in a lifetime of sailing. A good many people with something to hide had "retired" to a life of civilized comfort and privacy in the islarkls. He was safe in Terre-de-Haut, and he didn't have to leave again; he had made up his mind that he wouldn't.

  There were a few more ounces of rum left in the small cask, and it seemed like a good idea to finish it off. Which would give him an excuse to sail to Marie-Galante tomorrow and buy more casks of the sevenyear-old rum at she distillery. After drinking alone for two weeks, he might be in the mood for a party any day now. But the prospect of a bash aboard the Dragonfly didn't stir his blood; he still felt jaded and vaguely unhappy. He'd invested a lot of nervous energy in the Omaha project. He still woke up at odd hours with a pounding heart, not sure that he was alone on the boat. He checked and rechecked the primary and backup alarm systems.

  Always there were unattached young women staying at the small hotels and guesthouses; he could have bedded his choice of flight attendants and slightly overthe-hill runway models and footloose college kids with a minimum of effort and no expense. It was what they had saved their money and traveled south for: a single guy with a ready smile and a hell of a big boat. But none had tempted him; the idea of touching any of them prompted a chill of apathy, a tightness in his gut. He was not used to a homecoming like this one. After a project he always made some rapid rounds, burying the memory of one woman in the sun-warmed willing flesh of many others. Now he couldn't be bothered.

  His birthday passed, unannounced to anyone. He was thirty-seven.

  After a few days his malaise became noticeable, like a ghost that followed him doggedly to the beaches and cafés, to dinner at the homes of friends.

  Yvonne Saint-Sauveur was making preparations to leave for school in Paris; she was giddy from equal parts of anticipation and dread and may have interpreted his mood as sadness that she was going away. She had never traveled beyond the island of Guadeloupe. In Paris she would live with a family whose daughter was also enrolled at the Sorbonne. She would be cared for and protected. Joe had set everything up for her through a scholarship fund he maintained. The family knew nothing about his involvement, but they knew he had been to Paris, so they were full of questions about the City of Light.

  After dinner he danced with Yvonne to Zouk and Soca music on the paved patio that overlooked the rust-red roofs of the town and the harbor. She was childishly barefoot but pungently female, wearing perfume tonight, and hoop earrings. When the music from Yvonne's stereo stopped and he pretended to gasp for breath, they could hear the strains of disco from a medium-sized cruise ship anchored off the fortress headland north of Bourg.

  They sat together on a low wall, looking at the constellated lights of the ship. Yvonne toyed 'With the gold bangle-bracelet Joe had given her as a reward for her diligence and scholastic achievement. Hers was a tough-pretty face, with high cheekbones and slanted smoky eyes, which she had painted as boldly as the eyes of an Egyptian deity.

  "Will you come to Martinique to see me off?"

  "Sure I will."

  "Because you have a way to disappear, and not tell anyone." She pouted, then looked up at him with sharp speculation.

  "Have you ever wanted to kiss me, Joe?"

  "Sure," he said again, and planted one on her forehead.

  Yvonne glanced swiftly at the interior of the house, but her mother and father were talking, and her brothers were watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Gustave Saint-Sauveur was one of the more prosperous merchants in the lies des Saintes, and they owned a satellite dish.

  Yvonne grasped Joe and kissed him back, avidly, her lips apart. In spite of his desire to be cool and correctly distant, the sneaky tip of her tongue aroused and unnerved him.

  She sat back, but kept a hand on his wrist.

  "I am not leaving for three more days."

  "Some things are just not possible, Yvonne. I'm old enough to be your—"

  She went from sensual assurance to tears in moments.

  "Do you think that matters to me? I'm a woman. And I love you!"

  "I love you too, Yvonne, and I want to be ve
ry proud of you."

  She sniffled, examining the sugar-coated message. "What harm could it do? And we probably won't see each other again for a long time."

  "Well—you'll be home for the Christmas holidays. I'll be here. And I'm not leaving Terre-de-Haut again, ever."

  The message became confused. "Does that mean—?" He patted the back of her hand. "Shh. We'll talk about it later."

  In the moonlight her young face shone with the Purity of one unharmed by life. She made him feel rotten.

  "You'll wait for me? You won't go off for months and months, and not let me know where you are?"

  "That's a promise, Yvonne."

  Yvonne's friend Inez came by on her moped, distracting her. Joe escaped into the hoise and after a decent interval said his good nights. He walked down the hill to the harbor where he'd left his dinghy. The disco music from the small cruise ship annoyed him; so did the faint sounds of laughter that signaled good times aboard. On impulse he stripped to underwear briefs, leaving his other clothes in the dinghy, and dove in off the quay. He swam in a glum mood toward the Dragonfly. As he approached he reflected, dismally, on what it might be like to swim on by the sloop and out of the harbor, into the dark sea beyond. Swim until he was too depleted to lift his arm for another stroke.

  That mood passed quickly, but he felt shaken by the unrealized experience as he hauled himself up the stern ladder, crouched there wet and shivering in an offshore breeze.

  He had to get it back, somehow. His sense of wellbeing. 'Wonne, the adolescent temptress, had upset him badly. Blame it on the unexpectedly knowing kiss, but it had crossed his mind to bundle her into the double berth and give her a going-away present to remember. He was opportunistic, but always with women who had some experience with life, some mileage on them. He never thought of himself as callous. Could he really have been sincere, even for a few moments, about filling his nest with someone as tender and trusting as Yvonne? Just what the hell was the matter with him?