Rocks, The (38 page)

He ran through the waves making splashing noises, varying his stride, trying to sound like four feet.
“Come on, darling!”
he yelled.
“Swim, darling! Make for the yacht!”
Then he dove in and swam as fast as he could, urging Lulu on, talking for both of them.

He heard them on the beach launching the rubber boat, splashing in the shallows. They wouldn’t be able to see that Lulu was not with him.
“Come on, darling! Almost there!”

Gerald swam in sustained panic, a tremendous amount of splashing. When he reached the boat, he climbed the rope ladder.
“Get below, darling! I’ll get us under way!”
he shouted. No time to lower the anchor light—good, they would see him moving away, and hopefully come after him. He hauled the mainsail and gaff aloft—they would see that too, the shape against the sky. No time to haul the anchor in, either: on the foredeck, he let the chain go, clattering noisily to let them know exactly what was happening, until it had all run out of the chain locker and he untied the knot that held the last link of the bitter end to the bitts below and it slipped overboard. He raised the jib and held it out to catch the faint breeze, the evening wind coming off the land, until the bow fell away and the long bowsprit pointed out to sea. Back in the cockpit he tightened sheets as the yacht gathered way. It had been no more than four minutes since he’d crawled aboard.

From the cockpit he looked astern: he could only make out the darker shape of the rubber boat against the satin dark water as it beetled toward the Guardia Costiera vessel.
Nereid
was moving well, her lines and spars creaking quietly, the water burbling along the hull into the wake. He’d be several miles offshore before they caught up with him—ample time for Lulu to get far away from the cave and go to ground—

Had she got away? He thought over what he had seen and heard: the slight figure running out of the cave with the sheep. The three men—he was sure—coming out of the cave behind him, shouting. They could not have come after him so fast dragging an unwilling Lulu—he’d have heard her too—or even an unconscious Lulu. Or was she lying bleeding on the floor of the cave? Lulled by the familiar sounds of the yacht under way, safe for the moment, he tried to clear his mind of fear and think clearly. He had seen her. She had got away, he was sure of it now, running out of the cave on the far side with the sheep. She had got away, that was all that mattered.

Gerald began to sob, a dry reflexive heaving that stopped the moment he looked back and saw the shape of the Guardia boat moving away from the shore.

Was he moving too fast? He didn’t want to lose them before he’d drawn them away—they weren’t sailors, but street thugs in a slow tub. He looked up and saw the anchor light swaying in the shrouds, the sails against the night sky. They could see that. They would follow him . . .

Then, of course, he wouldn’t be able to lose them. They’d catch him, and probably kill him, unless he could reach some sort of safety first. But the wind was off the land, blowing off the cooling shore beside the warmer sea, and it would blow like that until after dawn. He couldn’t make Trapani, which lay to windward. He would have to lure them out to sea. How far would they come, the lumpen city boys, before they grew afraid and turned back toward land?

Could he get them far enough?

•   •   •

A
n hour later—two?—
dawn filtered slowly through a humid haze, and Gerald found he’d lost them. Had they turned around? He hove to. He threw the lead and found hard bottom at six fathoms.

Long minutes later, the haze was burning off and he saw the pale shape of the Guardia boat less than a mile away on the beam. They saw him too: the vessel’s shape narrowed as it turned toward him. Gerald let the sails draw and the yacht moved ahead, steering itself, while he threw the lead line again and again. The soundings gave him a picture of the bottom contour in his head, shoaling irregularly but growing shallower as he advanced: six fathoms . . . four and a bit . . . five . . . three . . . seven . . . three—all of a sudden he saw the bottom: lighter, browner patches against the darker blue. He looked to the north and saw that the Guardia Costiera vessel was gaining on him—the wind that had blown lightly but steadily all night was dropping, his speed slowing, while their engine chugged on.

Three fathoms . . . four . . . three . . . three—a very light patch ahead, the sun picking out the weedy rock beneath the surface.

The distance between the two boats was closing fast. Gerald could see a man in the bow, peering intently toward him. Three hundred yards . . . two hundred . . . Another man joined the first on the bow—with a man at the helm, all three were aboard.

He heard them calling. The words undecipherable but the threat, the intent in the voice, clear. The boat was coming on at its full speed, barely five knots, but
Nereid
had slowed to no more than two. Gerald barely had maneuverability. Now the Guardia vessel angled away from him, then curved back until it was heading toward him once more, but on his beam: it was lining up to ram him amidships—to sink him. Its commercial build and displacement left no doubt about the result of such a collision. Gerald hardened the sheets and headed closer to windward, giving them more of a target but at the same time gaining a knot of speed, a little more maneuverability for the only move that could save him.

The Guardia boat was ten yards off, aiming straight for the midpoint in dainty
Nereid
’s hull, when Gerald pushed the tiller down. The light, swift little boat’s bow veered off sharply, suddenly, leaving him end on to the slowly charging boat. They would still collide, but it would be more of a glancing blow, he hoped. The Guardia’s curling bow wave pushed
Nereid
off just before the two hulls met. . . .

It was a solid sideswipe that Gerald felt all through his body—he heard a crack of the thin frames in
Nereid
’s hull beneath him.

“Pezzo di merda succhiacazzi!”
shouted from immediately above him. Other shouts. One of the men—they were close enough to touch hands—locking his eyes on Gerald’s, swung at him with a length of chain. Gerald stepped nimbly back and the chain wrapped around
Nereid
’s shrouds, shaking the whole rig, and was torn from the Italian’s hand as the Guardia boat swept on. The other man on deck was pointing at Gerald, jabbing his finger in his direction, staring at him like a madman. He shouted an incomprehensible insult. The boat turned away and arced across the water in a long, lazy, confident loop that would bring it back on a course toward
Nereid
—

Abruptly, the two men on deck were thrown to their knees and fell sprawling as the Guardia vessel bucked once, rose, slewed sideways, came to a shuddering stop. Its own stern wave overtook it, lifting the boat and settling it down again, rocking slightly, but otherwise immobile on the surface of the clear undisturbed sea around it. . . .

•   •   •

S
even years earlier,
in July 1941, Gerald had been aboard HMS
Furious
as it approached the Strait of Sicily on Operation Substance, a supply convoy from Gibraltar to Malta. Reports had been received of U-boat sightings off the Gulf of Tunis. The convoy hove to for thirty hours in the vicinity of Skerki Bank, whose shallow reefs were thought to bar the approach of submarines.

During the heat of the day, in no breeze at all, the ships wallowed in the slight swell, engines idling, generators thrumming, their steel plating turning to hot plates, burning men’s hands and feet. In the afternoon, the men were permitted to swim. They were lowered overside in boats, and taken a safe distance away from the ship and its idling propellers. The Mediterranean was warm and clear and blue. They could see the reefs of the bank beneath them as they swam.

“Oy!” shouted one of the swimmers. They looked: one of the sailors was standing upright in the water, hand on hip, one leg crooked in front of the other, the pose of a model on a runway. No land in sight, the horizon all round vanishing between sea and sky, while he stood in calf-deep water. He looked around his feet theatrically. “Seen any fucking U-boats, tosh?”

They swam toward him and clustered around the barely submerged top of the reef, jockeying for standing room, pushing one another off, waving and shouting at the ship. Someone said, “You fink them bloody navigators ’ave any bloody idea ’ow fucking shallow it is?”

Gerald was sure they didn’t. He’d seen the charts, and it showed no soundings indicating such a hazard, although parts of the contour of Skerki Bank were drawn with a dotted line indicating that chart data was incomplete. The ship was fortunate not to have run aground and been holed.

Other swimmers found shallows close enough beneath the surface to stand on. The effect, on a sea that was empty in every direction except for the idling convoy ships, was dreamlike, unreal.

The all-clear came just before midnight and the convoy steamed off into the strait toward Malta.

That day, Gerald marked the spot, as near as he could, on the chart he carried with him in his kit, with his copy of
The Odyssey
, all through the war. Later, in an Admiralty pilot of the Tyrrhenian Sea, he read:
“
. . .
in places, depths of less than six feet have been reported on Skerki Bank . . . the cause of the total loss in October 1804 of H.M.S.
Athenian,
sixty-four guns . . . Skerki Bank sits at the crossroad of three thousand years of east-west Mediterranean maritime commerce . . . countless vessels through the ages have also perished on these banks. . . .”

•   •   •

K
eeping an eye
on the color of the water ahead and beneath him, Gerald trimmed
Nereid
’s sheets and ghosted slowly toward the grounded Guardia Costiera vessel—not too close, they might have firearms aboard. The men were running up and down the deck at the rail like worried dogs, staring down into the water around their boat. Two of them were shouting at the third, the helmsman who had been steering. All three disappeared into the wheelhouse; the engine whined at an unnatural pitch; dense blue-black smoke rose from the exhaust stack behind the wheelhouse. Gerald could see froth at the stern. The vessel lurched, shuddered—would they get off?—but it did not break free. When the engine noise subsided, another shudder went through the boat—the bottom was grinding to pulp on the rocks—and it slid slowly backward, the stern settling deeper into the water until the rear deck was awash, the bow pointing unnaturally upward. The men on board, yelling frantically, converged on the rubber boat, which lay half deflated on the foredeck. One of them began pumping air into its collapsed chamber with a foot pump.

As Gerald sailed slowly round the Guardia vessel, about a hundred feet off, the men threw their rubber boat over the rail and jumped down into it. They began paddling toward
Nereid
. They glared at Gerald as they came closer.

He stepped down his companionway. When he reappeared on deck a moment later, the rubber boat was fifty feet away. He let them come on. At twenty-five feet he raised the large brass and wood Webley Very pistol and fired. The whooshing flare drove straight into the boat, the rocket propellant packed to carry it three hundred feet into the air continuing to throw flame around the bottom of the boat while the sulfur flare ignited, burning a large hole in the air chamber. The Italians leapt screaming into the water. At least two of them had been burned by propellant or sulfur. They abandoned the drooping remains of the rubber boat and swam back to the wrecked mother ship.

Gerald continued to sail slowly around the Guardia vessel as its three crewmen hauled themselves aboard by the swamped stern. As water filled it, and its frames and structure cracked and gave way with progressive breakage, the boat was perceptibly sliding off the reef. The men climbed to the foredeck, now the highest point above the water. They called to Gerald, pleading, demanding (he presumed, he didn’t understand them) his assistance. Slowly he sailed closer, pushing the conspicuous brass Very pistol into his belt, looking at the water—didn’t want to run aground himself and have the Italians board him.

When he was about forty feet away, he raised the Agfa Solinette and took several exposures.

Then he steered off. He went below to stow the camera, and when he returned to the deck, he steered east, eased sheets, and the yacht picked up speed. In a very short time, he could no longer hear the men’s screams. In half an hour he could see nothing astern but the lightly ruffled surface of the sea.

•   •   •

L
ulu! Lulu!?”

It was just past noon. In daylight, the cave was littered with rubbish, old tins, the remains of fires, the droppings of sheep. Otherwise quite empty.

“Lulu?
Lulu!
” he called.

He ran along the path up and down the shore north and south of the cave, yelling her name frantically. He climbed the rocky slopes above the cave, looking for hiding places among ledges and in the vegetation.

“Lulooooo . . . !”

He trotted along the beach below the cave and explored the rocks at either end of the cove. He grew panicked and irresolute.

She was alive, obviously, and she had gone. Gone where—naked? Some dwelling along the coast . . . Trapani?

Gradually, another concern crowded into his brain. Although it had been night, there had been a moon. He knew that if anyone had seen
Nereid
at anchor off the beach at the same time as the Guardia vessel, they might remember. If anyone saw him anchored here now, they might remember. He couldn’t go ashore and ask questions, talk with the police. If the Italians had been rescued, they might appear at any moment. At some point, Italian maritime authorities might alert ports around the Mediterranean to report any sighting of a small white-hulled sailing yacht flying the British red ensign. That might ultimately be connected with the death or disappearance of three Italian coastguardsmen.

He must leave.

Naked, hurt or not, Lulu had gone. Somehow, he knew, she would return to Tom and Milly in Mallorca.