Hungry as the Sea (39 page)

They found another shoal within the hour and Nicholas circled up on it, closing steadily at good trolling speed, helping the feeding tuna bunch the shoal of frenzied anchovy on the surface, until he could lock Tricky Dicky’s wheel hard down starboard and leave her to describe her own sedate circles around the shoal. Then he hurried out on to the deck.

The trapped and surrounded fish thrashed the surface until it boiled like a porridge of molten, flashing silver; through it drove the fast dark torpedoes of the hungry tuna. Within minutes Nick had his four fishermen working to the steady rhythm of throwing the lures into the frothing water, almost instantly striking back on the line as a tuna snatched the feathers, and then swinging hand over head, recovering and coiling line fast with minimum effort, swinging the fish out and up with both hands and then catching its streamlined body under the left armpit like a quarter back picking up a long pass, clamping it there firmly, although the cold firm silver bullet shape juddered and quivered and the tail beat in a blur of movement. Then he taught them to slip the hook from the jaw, careful not to damage the vulnerable gills, holding the fish firmly but gently while the assistant pressed the barbed dart into the thick muscle at the back of the dorsal fill. When the fish was dropped back over the side, there were so few after-affects that it almost immediately began feeding again on the packed masses of tiny anchovies.

Each plastic tag was numbered and imprinted with a request in five languages to mail it back to University of Miami with details of date and place of capture, providing a valuable trace of the movements of the shoals in their annual circumnavigation of the globe. From their spawning grounds somewhere in the Caribbean they worked the Gulf Stream north and cast across the Atlantic, then south down and around the Cape of Good Hope with an occasional foray down the length of the Mediterranean Sea although now the dangerous pollution of that landlocked water was changing their habits. From Good Hope east again south of Australia to take a gigantic swing up and around the Pacific, running the gauntlet of the Japanese long-liners and the California tunny men before ducking down under the terrible icy seas of the Horn and back to their spawning grounds in the Caribbean.

They sat up on the wheelhouse as the Dicky ran home in the sunset, drinking beer and talking. Nicholas studied them casually and saw that they possessed so many of the qualities he valued in his fellow humans; they were intelligent and motivated, they were dedicated and free of that particular avarice that mars so many others.

Tom Parker crumpled the empty beer can in a huge fist as easily as if it had been a paper packet, fished two more from the pack beside him and tossed one across to Nick. The gesture seemed to have some special significance and Nicholas saluted him with the can before he drank.

Samantha was snuggled down in luxurious weariness against his shoulder, and the sunset was a magnificence of purple and hot molten crimson. Nicholas thought idly how pleasant it would be to spend the rest of his life doing things like this with people like these.

Tom Parker’s office had shelves to the ceiling, and they were sagging with hundreds of bottled specimens and rows of scientific papers and publications.

He sat well back in his swivel chair with ankles crossed neatly in the centre of the cluttered desk. “I ran a check on you, Nicholas. Damned nerve, wasn’t it? You have my apology.”

“Was it an interesting exercise?” Nicholas asked mildly.

“It wasn’t difficult. You have left a trail behind you like a –” Tom sought for a comparison, “like a grizzly bear through a honey farm. Son of a gun, Nicholas, that’s a hell of a track record you’ve got yourself.”

“I’ve kept busy,” Nicholas admitted.

“Beer?” Tom crossed to the refrigerator in the corner that was labelled zoological Specimens. DO NOT OPEN.

“It’s too early for me.”

“Never too early,” said Tom and pulled the tag on a dewy can of Millers and then picked up Nicholas statement. “Yes, you have kept busy. Strange, isn’t it, that around some men things just happen.”

Nicholas did not reply, and Tom went on, “We need a man around here who can do. It’s all right thinking it out, then you need the catalyst to transform thought and intention into action.” Tom sucked at the can and then licked the froth off his mustache. “I know what you have done, I’ve heard you speak, I’ve seen you move, and those things count. But most important of all, I know you care. I’ve been watching you carefully, Nick, and you really care, down deep in your guts, the way we do.”

“It sounds as though you’re offering me a job, Tom.”

“I’m not going to horse around, Nick, I am offering you a job.” He waved a huge paw, like a bunch of broiled pork sausages. “Hell, I know you’re a busy man, but I’d like to romance you into an associate professorship. We’d want a little of your time when it came to hassling and negotiating up in Washington, we’d call for you when we needed real muscle to put our case, when we need the right contacts, somebody with a big reputation to open doors, when we need a man who knows the practical side of the oceans and the men that use them and abuse them.

“We need a man who is a hard-headed businessman, who knows the economics of sea trade, who has built and run tankers, who knows that human need is of paramount importance, but who can balance the human need for protein and fossil fuels against the greater danger of turning the oceans into watery deserts.”

Tom lubricated his throat with beer, watching shrewdly for some reaction from Nicholas, and when he received no encouragement, he went on more persuasively. “We are specialists, perhaps we have the specialist’s narrow view; God knows, they think of us as sentimentalists, the lunatic fringe of doom-sayers, long-haired intellectual hippies. What we need is a man with real clout in the establishment, – shit, Nicholas, if you walked into a Congressional committee they’d really jerk out of their geriatric trance and switch on their hearing-aids.”

Nicholas was silent still and Tom was becoming desperate. “What can we offer in return? I know you aren’t short of cash, and it would be a lousy twelve thousand a year, but an associate professorship is a nice title. We start out holding hands with that. Then we might start going steady, a full professorship – chair of applied oceanology, or some juicy title like that which we’d think up. I don’t know what else we can offer you, Nick, except perhaps the warm good feeling in your guts when you’re doing a tough job that has to be done.” He stopped again, running out of words, and he wagged his big shaggy head sadly.

“You aren’t interested, are you?” he asked.

Nick stirred himself. “When do I start?” he asked, and as Tom’s face split into a great beaming grin, Nick held out his hand. “I think I’ll take that beer now.”

Chapter 26

The water was cool enough to be invigorating. Nick and Samantha swam so far out that the land was almost lost in the lowering gloom of dusk, and then they turned and swam back side by side. The beach was deserted; in their mood, the lights of the nearest condominiums were no more intrusive than the stars, the faint sound of music and laughter no more intrusive than the cry of gulls.

It was the right time to tell her, and he did it in detail beginning with the offer by the Sheikhs to buy out Ocean Salvage and Towage.

“Will you sell,” she asked quietly. “You won’t will you?”

“For seven million dollars clear?” he asked. “Do you know how much money that is?”

“I can’t count that far,” she admitted. “But what would you do if you sold? I cannot imagine you playing bowls or golf for the rest of your life.”

“Part of the deal is that I run Ocean Salvage for them for two years, and then I’ve been offered a part-time assignment which will fill any spare time I’ve got left over.”

“What is it?”

“Associate Professor at Miami University.” She stopped dead and dragged him around to face her.

“You’re having me on!” she accused.

“That’s a start only,” he admitted. “In two years or so, when I’ve finished with Ocean Salvage, there may be a full chair of applied oceanology.”

“It’s not true!” she said, and took him by the arms, shaking him with surprising strength.

“Tom, wants me to ram-rod the applied aspects of the environmental research. I’ll trouble-shoot with legislators and the maritime conference, a sort of hired gun for the Green-Peacers.”

“Oh Nicholas, Nicholas!”

“Sweet Christ!” he accused. You’re crying again.

“I can’t help it.” She was in his arms still wet and cold and gritty with beach sand.

She clung to him, quivering with joy. “Do you know what this means, Nicholas? You don’t, do you? You just don’t realize what this means.”

“Tell me, he invited. “What does it mean?”

“What it means is that, in future, we can do everything together, not just munch food and go boom in bed – but everything, work and play and, and live together like a man and woman should!” She sounded stunned and frightened by the magnitude of the vision.

“The prospect daunts me not at all,” he murmured gently, and lifted her chin. They washed off the salt and the sand, crowding together into the thick, perfumed steam of the shower cubicle and afterwards they lay together on the patchwork quilt in the darkness with the sound of the sea as background music to the plans and dreams they wove together.

Every time they both descended to the very frontiers of sleep, one of them would think of something vitally important and prod the other awake to say it.

“I’ve got to be in London on Tuesday.”

“Don’t spoil it all, now,” she murmured sleepily.

“And then we’re launching Sea Witch on the 7th April.”

“I’m not listening,” she whispered. “I’ve got my fingers in my ears.”

“Will you launch her – I mean break the bottle of bubbly and bless her?”

“I’ve just taken my fingers out again.”

“Jules would love it.”

“Nicholas, I cannot spend my life commuting across the Atlantic, not even for you. I’ve got work to do.”

“Peter will be there, I’ll work that as a bribe.”

“That’s unfair pressure,” she protested.

“Will you come?”

“You know I will, you sexy bastard. I wouldn’t miss it for all the world.” She moved across the quilt and found his ear with her lips.

“I am honoured. Both of you are sea witches,” Nick told her.

“And you are my Warlock.”

“Sea witch and Warlock,” he chuckled. “Together we will work miracles.”

“Look, I know it’s terribly forward of me, but seeing that we are both wide awake, and it’s only two o’clock in the morning I would be super ultra-grateful if you could work one of your little miracles for me right now.”

“It will be a great pleasure,” Nick told her.

Chapter 27

Nicholas was early, he saw as he came out of the American Consulate and glanced at his Rolex, so he moderated his pace across the Place de la Concorde, despite the gentle misty rain that settled in minute droplets on the shoulders of his trench coat. Lazarus was at the rendezvous ahead of him, standing under one of the statues in the corner of the square closest to the French Naval headquarters.

He was heavily muffled against the cold, dressed all in sombre blue with a long cashmere scarf wound around his throat and a dark blue hat pulled down so low as to conceal the pale smooth bulge of his forehead.

“Let’s find a warm place,” Nick suggested, without greeting the little man.

“No,” said Lazarus, looking up at him through the thick distorting lenses of his spectacles. “Let us walk.” And he led the way through the underpass on to the promenade above the embankment of the Seine, and set off in the direction of the Petit Palais.

In the middle of such an inclement afternoon they were the only strollers, and they walked in silence three or four hundred yards while Lazarus satisfied himself absolutely of this, and while he adjusted his mincing little steps to Nick’s stride. It was like taking Toulouse-Lautrec for a stroll, Nick smiled to himself. Even when Lazarus began speaking, he kept glancing back over his shoulder, and once when two bearded Algerian students in combat jackets overtook them, he let them get well ahead before he went on.

“You know there will be nothing in writing?” he piped.

“I have a recorder in my pocket,” Nick assured him.

“Very well, you are entitled to that.”

“Thank you,” murmured Nick dryly.

Lazarus paused, it was almost as though a new reel was being fitted into the computer, and when he began talking again, his voice had a different timbre, a monotonous almost electronic tone, as though he was indeed an automaton.

First, there was a recital of share movements in the thirty-three companies which make up the Christy Marine complex, every movement in the previous eighteen months. The little man reeled them off steadily, as though he were actually reading from the share registers of the companies. He must have had access, Nicholas realized, to achieve such accuracy. He had the date, the number of the shares, the transferor and transferee, even the transfer of shares in Ocean Salvage and Towage to Nicholas himself, and the reciprocal transfer of Christy Marine stock, was faithfully detailed, confirming the accuracy of Lazarus’ other information. It was all an impressive exhibition of total knowledge and total recall, but much too complicated for Nicholas to make any sense of it. He would have to study it carefully. All that he would hazard was that somebody was putting up a smoke-screen.

Lazarus stopped on the corner of the Champs Elyses and the Rue de la Boetie. Nicholas glanced down at him and saw his shapeless blob of a nose was an unhealthy purplish pink in the cold, and that his breathing had coarsened and laboured with the exertion of walking. Nick realized suddenly that the little man was probably asthmatic, and as if to confirm this, he took a little silver and turquoise pill-box from his pocket and slipped a single pink capsule into his mouth before leading Nicholas into the foyer of a movie house and buying two tickets.