The Vulcan Disaster

“Yes,” I said. “I was going to ask you to go on a bit more about them.”

“Among them is a man whose original name, some time back, was Kurt Schindler...”

I whistled. Schindler? Alive? The highest-up man in the hierarchy of what Mr. Himmler called the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem — an even bigger wheel than Eichmann himself.

“Ah,” I said, after I’d thought about that a bit. “So you haven’t changed agencies after all. You’ve got a little personal stake in this too, just like me.”

“Worse,” Sonia said. She was standing by the window. “I want Schindler myself, as bad as you want Shimon. But Leon, he lives for this thing. He needs this... this holy cause of his the way a flower needs sunshine. He...”

“That’s very good,” Leon said. His face was drawn and pale, but there was a thin smile on it. “That’s it, my dear. It is a kind of tropism by now. Instinctive. I think Nick understands, though.”

“Yes,” I said, “I guess I...”

“Harry,” Sonia said from the window. “I... I mean Nick. Look.” She was pointing out across the suddenly visible bay. The rosy-fingered dawn was right on schedule, and the blue bay curled at the foot of pink mountains below us and to the west of us as her hand pointed down the coast toward Monaco and Italy. “It’s here,” she said. “It’s early. I...” The words trailed off. I stood and looked where she was pointing. Just inside the mole I could make out the classic lines of a great three-masted sailing ship. The Vulcan had arrived.

Chapter Twenty

“What are they doing now?” I said, watching the crew aloft, scampering from sail to sail. We seemed, for some reason, to have our nose pointed at a looming cliff, and for some even stranger reason we were not going that way at all. We were slowly moving sideways down the little river to its mouth.

“The action is called backing and filling,” Michel said in his flawless, accent-free English. He wasn’t exactly my kind of guy, but he’d have to do for company. Sonia — Vicki, dammit, I’d have to remember that — hadn’t turned up in three days. “Look,” he went on. “We filled the topsails to go this way. Notice the direction the wind is going? Well, once we’d held her in the fairway past the headland there, we backed the mainyard to stop her and make her drift broadside downstream. Now the motive power is the tide.”

“Don’t you have auxiliaries?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “but Monsieur Komaroff has a bit of tummy today and doesn’t like the feel of the diesels under him. Fortunately, the crew make short work of this sort of thing. And heavens, Harry, you’re in no hurry to go anywhere, are you? I mean, we’ve no place to be, dear boy. If it weren’t for the lovely party Alex is planning up in the Islands tomorrow night, it’d be a crushing bore. But I do adore those rough Greeks. So... what is the word...”

“Funky?” I said. I dug one of my tailormades out of its case — this time I’d brought some along without the “N.C.” in gold on the filters — and lit it, sending a blue trail of smoke in the breeze.

“Yes. Funky. Look, now we back all to make her take a stern board. In the middle of the channel we will point the yards into the wind and let the tide carry us again. As we approach the mouth of the river we will first fill the fore topsail, then fill all, and once we’ve trimmed them by the wind, making sail...”

“Clear as mud,” I said.

“...we’ll stand to sea under all sail on the starboard tack. Oh, Harry. You really should make some attempt to get into the spirit of things aboard the Vulcan. Otherwise you’ll find it such a bore here.”

“Sailboat talk is pretty weird,” I said. “How do we manage to go that way when the wind is going this way? Even with the sails all turned around...”

“There is a maneuver, Harry, for everything the wind can do... except, of course, when the wind dies altogether. If that should happen right now — if we were becalmed — we would have to seek new orders from Komaroff. We would either have to anchor and await a change in the wind or use the auxiliaries. Look: the wind is coming in from offshore. We set the sails, so; now the boat is what we call sailing on the wind.”

“How does that differ from before the wind or with the wind?”

“Easy. Let me show you...” But one of the boys in white came up — that spankingly clean, gold-piped livery everyone but us professional help (plus some hangers-on like Michel) wore aboard the Vulcan — and handed me a folded note on a silver salver. I looked at Michel, not opening it. He pursed his lips, made a thy-will-be-done gesture with his palms together, and moved away, a cynical little smile curling up the sides of his mouth. I said “Thanks” and the servant moved away too, leaving me standing by the windward rail, one foot irreverently resting on one of the antique brass cannons that decorated the bark.