Outerbridge Reach (27 page)

“It'll be our special after next year,” Browne said.

“Yeah,” Fowler said. “I know all about it. Well, you have the courage of your convictions, old shoe. Gonna stop and see Matty on the way around? Where is he? Down in Nassau, somewhere like that? Havana?”

Pamela made herself comfortable in Fowler's embrace. He was drinking champagne from a plastic glass, sunburned, unshaven, wearing a dirty, yellowed wool sweater. His eyes were sleepy and his speech slurred.

“Yeah, we got him tucked away, Fowler.” Browne walked over and extended his hand. “Anyway, good luck.”

Fowler shook his hand, avoiding his eye, pretending infatuation with Pamela.

“He's loaded, right?” Strickland said to Browne when they had left her in Fowler's keeping. “Is he going to sail around the world that way?”

Browne laughed. “He's probably been partying all week. He'll lay offshore somewhere and get himself together. Then he'll be out to win.”

With Strickland and Hersey following after him, Browne sought out each of his competitors in turn. Ian Dennis was in the cockpit of his gleaming aluminum cruiser with a young woman from his publisher's office. When he saw Browne he stood up quickly.

“Best of luck, Dennis,” Browne said.

“Cheers,” Dennis said. “You too, mate.”

The young woman, whom he did not introduce, gave Browne a thin smile.

Next he went to Kerouaille's boat, a teak-scented beauty in which the Frenchman had spent most of the past twenty years. He stopped to chat with Massimo Cefalu, an Italian naval commander who was sailing an Italian stock boat, and Martin Held, a builder from Saint Croix, who was setting out in a boat of his own creation. There was a Pole named Stanislaw Rolf, who kissed Browne on the cheek, a Dane, two Englishmen, four more Americans. If a man was not aboard his craft, Browne would seek him out in the galleries of the seaport. After a while, Hersey and Strickland stopped trailing him.

“He's really got to shake everybody's hand, doesn't he?” Hersey said. “What's his problem?”

“Maybe he's superstitious,” Strickland said. They set up on the plaza among the crowds to film the banners and signal flags that fluttered on halyards over the seaport's piers. Strickland kept thinking about Browne's progress among the contending sailors. Suddenly it struck him that there might be some dimension to the thing of which he was not altogether in charge.

Later he found himself on the float dock with Anne and Owen. Hersey was dozing in the van while the band played. Pamela, as far as anyone could tell, had gone off with Preston Fowler. Out in the East River, Captain Riggs-Bowen and a young assistant were puttering up and down in a little round-bottomed motor launch flying the Southchester Yacht Club's burgee. A procession of escort and tow boats was forming up between the seaport and the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Almost time,” Anne said.

“I should leave you two alone,” Strickland said.

“No need,” Browne said.

“It's all right,” said his wife.

They both demurred so earnestly that he suspected they were anxious at the prospect of finally finding themselves alone together.

Then Anne said, “Oh my God, the panels.”

Strickland looked at Browne. His face was set and pale.

“Never mind,” he said.

“But Christ!” Anne said. “My God! How could I have forgotten?”

“I had to let them go,” her husband told her. “They were ordered late.”

“But all this time I've been buying tapes and varnishing eggs. I should have seen to it.”

“It was my fault,” Browne said. “I'll make do with what I have.”

“I'll leave you,” Strickland said quickly. “Keep an eye on my equipment.”

In the plaza, he saw a man wearing a police press pass and accosted him.

“What t. . time do they go?”

He had stumbled over the words and the man looked at him with condescension.

“On the tide.” He glanced at his watch. “Less than two hours, I'd say.”

He went over to the van and woke up Hersey.

“They're saying their goodbyes. Let's go.”

Just before they locked up, Strickland paused.

“We ought to give them something,” he told Hersey.

“What do you mean?”

“Go buy a bottle of champagne,” he said suddenly. “So he can drink it at Christmas. Drive over to Chambers Street or somewhere and buy one.”

Hersey knew his rights.

“Bullshit! We'll lose our parking space. Anyway, it's Sunday.”

“I have to give him something,” Strickland said.

“Why?”

Ignoring Hersey, he rummaged through the back of the van. It was loaded with the detritus of old projects and locations: ruined stills, film cans, fast food containers, plastic bags of marijuana seeds, paint-spattered tarps. From under one of the last, he pulled out an oversized book of his Vietnam War photographs that had been published as a companion piece to
LZ Bravo.
The book was stained with coffee rings and its jacket photograph was faded but he decided to take it along for Browne.

“Let me tell you,” Hersey said helpfully, “you appear a little fucked up.”

Strickland ignored him.

When they got back to
Nona
's space, Strickland saw that Duffy and Harry Thorne had arrived. Everyone stood on the float admiring a pair of binoculars that Anne's father had sent Browne for
Nona
's journey.

“Too bad he couldn't come himself,” Harry said.

“All the same,” Browne told them all, “it's quite a gesture.”

Anne had the same tense, almost stricken look she had worn before.

Duffy announced that he had a plan.

“You'll love this, Ron,” he told Strickland.

According to Duffy's plan, Browne would spend his last minutes ashore in prayerful meditation in the chapel at the Seamen's Welfare Association farther down South Street.

“It's five minutes from here. The room is terrific—it's white wood, original glass. They have a big bell, a steering wheel, all shit like that. Has to be a great picture, as even I can tell you.”

“But it's bullshit,” Browne said amiably, “because I don't happen to be a churchgoing fella.”

“That's true, Owen,” Duffy said quickly. “It's bullshit but that's no reflection on you.” He turned to Strickland for support. “He'll bow his head in manly silence. They'll put it on calendars. What do you say?”

“Why not respect his beliefs?” Thorne asked.

“C'mon, Harry,” Duffy said. “Don't be so Jewish.”

“Let's do it,” Strickland said.

“Yes,” Anne said. The men on the float all looked at her.

“No,” Browne said. “Forget about it.”

Aboard
Nona,
Strickland gave Browne more videotape and his last instructions. He sat at the top of the companionway, watching the lone sailor burrowing among his gear to find the last fraction of space. Browne had jammed the camcorder and tape between two two-hundred-centimeter diving cylinders.

“You planning on diving?” Strickland asked.

“I might have some underway repairs. I thought about it and decided it was worth the space.”

“Right,” Strickland said.

“Well, I guess I'm set,” Browne said, looking up at Strickland with a smile. “It's been a long haul.”

Strickland found himself unable to speak, which in itself was not unusual. He felt a sudden desperate reluctance to let Browne go. Part of it was merely technical anxiety. How to supervise a documentary whose subject was seven thousand miles away? But he felt also the blade of some intense, elusive emotion. It might be pride, he thought, in the degree to which he had occupied Browne's space with his own observation.

“How's your leg?” he managed to say at last.

Browne shrugged without answering.

“Too bad about your solar panels.”

“Let me worry about that,” Browne said.

Strickland felt himself shudder. He began to speak but failed again, at first.

“Don't go,” he told Browne. “Don't.”

“How's that?”

“Just kidding,” Strickland said.

“Maybe I should not do it,” Browne said, “and say I did.”

Strickland scrawled his signature on the title page of the book of Vietnam photos he had brought from the van and tossed it on the navigation table.

“Good luck.”

As he got up and turned away, Browne was still smiling up at him.

On the dock, he joined Duffy and Thorne. Anne went aboard
Nona.

“Well,” Thorne said, “a new phase.”

“This guy is gonna burst on the scene,” Duffy said. “Mark my words.”

“They're deserving people,” Thorne said. He turned smoothly to Strickland. “They're the kind of people this society doesn't put forward. But it ought to recognize them, don't you think? It might learn something from them.”

“There's always something to be learned,” Strickland said, “from people.”

Thorne gave him a long and not altogether respectful look. He walked away and went to stand by himself. After twenty minutes, launches chartered by the Southchester club began towing the entries out into the East River and across the Upper Bay. Strickland had hired a lighter from which to film the departure as far as Fort Hamilton, the starting line. At the last minute he decided to let Hersey cover it alone.

“Make sure you get the city behind him,” he told Hersey.

Thorne, Hersey and Anne rode in the towing launch. Duffy went aboard the lighter. Strickland stood on the dock and watched
Nona,
under bare poles, hauled out on the tide. The musical tars performed “The Leaving of Liverpool.” Out in the roads, two Department of Marine and Aviation ferry tenders sounded their whistles. A city fireboat played its hose in salute. A layer of high gray cloud closed off the bright weather and the wind picked up.

As Strickland stood on the end of the pier and watched
Nona
head out, Pamela came up and stood beside him.

“Where were you?” he asked her. “I thought you were going around the world with that redneck.”

Pamela shook her head and gathered the collar of her leather jacket closer.

“I didn't like him,” she said. “He said lousy things about Owen.”

“Like what?”

“The usual shit guys like him say.”

“I understand,” Strickland said.

Shivering, she looked bleakly out at the harbor. Her eyes were red. She appeared worn out, rheumy and pale.

“My God, I hope he wins,” she said.

“Do you really?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Don't you really?”

“I haven't approached it in those terms,” Strickland said.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “It's a race, isn't it?”

It occurred to Strickland that he might want to use Pamela in the film after all, in spite of the confusion it might occasion the public.

“Indeed. Indeed it is,” he said, and laughed and put his arm around her.

W
HEN
A
NNE
was a little girl, her father's office had been in a nineteenth-century building on the corner of Broadway and Rector Street. Visits there had always been treats, often at Christmastime, so that she remembered his chambers as decorated and cheerfully lit against the gloom of late December afternoons. Outside, there had been holiday crowds and Trinity Church and a walk to Schrafft's across City Hall Park in the winter's first exciting flakes of snow.

At Schrafft's she would have a Broadway soda and her father would tease the Irish waitress and drink whiskey. His drinks had always appeared rich and festive, an elixir, the stuff of adult happiness.

During the early seventies, Campbell and Olson had moved its offices into the sky, occupying a suite on the ninety-first floor of the World Trade Center. Whereas the old offices had been filled with ship models, company pennants and brass nameplates, the new place, as Anne still thought of it, might have been a bank in some shopping mall in space. Clouds dissolved against its sealed windows. Impossibly far below, the new landscape—gentrified North River and sleek condominiums along the Jersey Palisades—spread out like a conceptual rendering of itself.

Yet, as ever, Antoinette Lamattina, who had been her father's secretary for thirty-five years, was waiting for her in the outer office. Antoinette was old times and good times personified, Anne's gift-giving fairy godmother.

“Annie, honey,” Antoinette cried. “It's been so long we haven't seen you!”

Looking into the secretary's shrewd, kind black eyes, Anne nearly choked up.

“Oh, Antoinette,” she said as they embraced. She had never called Antoinette Lamattina by her first name until she herself was out of college. “You look wonderful.”

So Antoinette did at nearly sixty, gray, slim and elegant, as though she thrived on chaste bereavement, frequent communion and the occasional excursion to Roseland Ballroom. She was a childless policeman's widow. Glowing, she led Anne toward her father's inner office.

“Captain! Look who's here.”

Watching her father rise to meet her, Anne was at once impressed with his quickness and apparent health. He was just under six feet tall, only an inch or so taller than she. All that remained of his notorious good looks were slimness and a smooth face. His handsomeness had been of the softer, youthful sort. His regular features and fair skin had grown a little roseate.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Have a look at you,” Jack Campbell said to his only daughter. Smiling Jack, they called him around the harbor. Bitterly.

She had been halfway toward embracing him when he stopped her for his inspection. Blushing and self-conscious, she stood her ground.

“You look fabulous,” he said. “Want a drink?”

“Absolutely.”

Jack had Antoinette summon one of the illegal Irish girls the firm employed. The colleen brought them a single-malt, as irregular as herself. It was tanked across the Atlantic in barrels and bottled, a few dozen measures at a time, in Halifax. This private stock was the last vestige of the family's rum-running days.