Crackdown by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page B

clothes.
    We were ready, even to the pitcher of orange juice, bucket of champagne and iced flask of vodka that waited on a table Ellen had carried up to the cockpit. The wind lifted the snow-white tablecloth and stirred the handsome red ensign at Wavebreaker’s stern. “She looks good,” I told my crew, “well done.”
    “But suppose Crowninshield won’t accept anyone but you as Wavebreaker’s captain?” Ellen, refusing to be sidetracked from her lost dollars, asked in a sulky and defiant voice.
    The question annoyed me. “I’m supposed to abandon Masquerade just to give his spoilt bloody kids a holiday?”
    “No, you’re supposed to abandon Masquerade just so I can earn a few thousand dollars.” Ellen smiled very sweetly at me. “And if I don’t earn those few thousand dollars then I am sure as hell not going to sail away with you. As the psalmist says, dear Nicholas,” and Ellen’s smile became even sweeter, “you can blow that dream right up your ass.”
    Thessy gasped at such blasphemy, while I scowled at Ellen’s blackmail. “You can earn your money with Sammy Meredith,” I insisted, “then sail away with me.”
    “I can’t if the senator demands you,” Ellen said stubbornly, then turned away as Cutwater’s courtesy taxi arrived from the airport in a salvo of backfires and black smoke. Thessy slid down the companionway, took the cassette from the rack, and waited by the boat’s sound system for my signal.
    The taxi doors opened. We knew very little about these last clients of the season except that they were two attorneys and a proctologist, all from Georgia and all vacationing with their wives, and we also knew that one of the wives was a vegetarian and that the proctologist hated pasta, but beyond that our guests were utter strangers and so we waited nervously to see what kind of people would be our companions and paymasters for the next week. Doubtless the arriving customers were just as anxious about us, and part of our job was to relax them quickly. “You have to remember,” Ellen liked to lecture Thessy and me, “just how absurdly wealthy they all are, and how desperately the wealthy want to be liked because they can’t help feeling guilty about being so rich, so we only have to be obsequious, give them loads of booze, and pretend to be impressed by their entirely predictable and usually jejune opinions, after which they’ll reward us with an outrageously large tip—which is, after all, the sole reason for being nice to the ghastly creatures in the first place.”
    The first man out of the Chevrolet was wearing blue and green Bermuda shorts, a pink and scarlet Hawaiian shirt and a blue tennis visor with the words ‘Go Dawgs’ inscribed on its peak. “He must be the proctologist,” Ellen said sweetly.
    “Vot’s a proctologist?” Thessy, ever eager to extend his education, asked from the foot of the companionway.
    “A proctologist is an asshole doctor, Thessy dear,” Ellen explained, then gave me a smile that would have frozen the heart out of a blast furnace. “Or in Nick’s case,” she added loudly, “a brain surgeon.”
    “Now!” I interrupted Thessy’s next earnest question, and he pushed the cassette into the tape deck and a steel band arrangement of ‘Yellow Bird’ thumped and jangled from the cockpit speakers to fill the marina with its bright and jaunty welcome. Bellybutton, a straw hat over his eyes, danced a few ludicrous steps on the deck of the workboat, thus looking for all the world like a simple Bahamian native welcoming the nice white folks from Georgia who now stood blinking in the bright sunlight beside a growing mound of their designer-label luggage. The man with the ‘Go Dawgs’ hat saw our rebel flag at the spreaders and let out an approving yell that sent two gulls squawking up from the garbage cans behind Mclllvanney’s office.
    “Asshole,” the Yankee Ellen said scathingly, then, joined by Thessy, we stepped forward to offer our practised