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Thomas went into the pilot house and started the engines while Dwyer and Pinky cast off from the dock and clambered forward to bring up the hook, Dwyer working the winch and cleaning off the harbor muck from the chain with the hose before it dropped into the well. They had a lot of chain out, for stability, and the Clothilde was almost in the middle of the harbor before Pinky gave the sign that they were clear and helped Dwyer bring the hook on board with the gaff.
By now Thomas was skilled at handling the ship and only when he was coming into a very crowded harbor, with a bad wind blowing, did he hand over the wheel to Dwyer. Today, he turned the bow toward the harbor entrance and, keeping the speed down until they were outside, chugged beyond the fishermen with their rods at the end of the rampart and around the buoy before he increased speed, turning toward the Cap d’Antibes, leaving the fortress of the Vieux Carré on its hill, behind them. He watched the gauges of both engines and was relieved to see that the port engine wasn’t heating up. Good old Pinky. Through the winter he must have saved them at least a thousand dollars. The ship he was on, the Vega, was so new and so pampered that there was almost nothing for him to do when they were in port. He was bored on it and delighted to be able to putter about in the Clothilde’s cluttered, hot engine room.
Kimball was a knotty Englishman whose freckled face never got tan, but remained a painful hot pink all summer. He had a problem with the drink, as he put it. When he drank he became pugnacious and challenged people in bars. He quarreled with his owners and rarely stayed on one ship more than a year, but he was so good at his job that he never had any trouble finding other berths quickly. He only worked on the very big yachts, because his skill would be wasted on smaller craft. He had been raised in Plymouth and had been on the water all his life. He was amazed that somebody like Thomas had wound up the owner-skipper of a ship like the Clothilde in Antibes harbor, and was making a go of it. “Yanks,” Kimball said, shaking his head. “They’re fucking well capable of anything. No wonder you own the world.”
He and Thomas had been friendly from the begi
“By God, Tommy,” Kimball said, “if I knew I could fight like that I would clean out every bar from Gib to Piraeus.”
“And get a knife between your ribs in the process,” Thomas said.
“No doubt you’re right,” Kimball agreed. “But man, the pleasure before!”
When he got very drunk and saw Thomas he would pound the bar and shout, “See that man? If he wasn’t a friend of mine, I’d drive him into the deck.” Then loop an affectionate tattooed arm around Thomas’s neck.
Their friendship had been cemented one night in a bar in Nice. They hadn’t gone to Nice together, but Dwyer and Thomas had wandered into the bar, near the port, by accident. There was a cleared space around the bar and Kimball was holding forth, loudly, to a group that included some French seamen and three or four flashily dressed but dangerous-looking young men of a type that Thomas had learned to recognize and avoid—small-time hoodlums and racketeers, doing odd jobs along the Côte for the chiefs of the milieu with headquarters in Marseilles. His instinct told him that they were probably armed, if not with guns, certainly with knives.
Pinky Kimball spoke a kind of French and Thomas couldn’t understand him, but he could tell from the tone of Kimball’s voice and the grim looks on the faces of the other patrons of the bar that Kimball was insulting them. Kimball had a low opinion of the French when he was drunk. When he was drunk in Italy, he had a low opinion of Italians. When he was drunk in Spain, he had a low opinion of the Spanish. Also, when he was drunk, he seemed to forget how to count and the fact that he was alone and outnumbered at least five to one only spurred him on to greater feats of scornful oratory.
“He’s going to get himself killed here tonight,” Dwyer whispered, understanding most of what Kimball was shouting. “And us, too, if they find out we’re his friends.”
Thomas grasped Dwyer’s arm firmly and took him with him to Kimball’s side, at the bar.
“Hi, Pinky,” he said cheerfully.
Pinky swung around, ready for new enemies. “Ah,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m telling these maquereaux a few home truths for their own good.”
“Knock it off, Pinky,” Thomas said. Then, to Dwyer. “I’m going to say a few words to these gentlemen. I want you to translate. Clearly and politely.” He smiled cordially at the other men in the bar, arranged now in an ominous semicircle. “As you see, gentlemen,” he said, “this Englishman is my friend.” He waited while Dwyer nervously translated. There was no change in the expression of the faces lined up around him. “He is also drunk,” Thomas said. “Naturally, a man does not like to see a friend damaged, drunk or sober. I will try to prevent him from making any more speeches here, but no matter what he says or has said, there will be no trouble here tonight. I am the policeman tonight in this bar and I am keeping the peace. Please translate,” he said to Dwyer.
As Dwyer was translating, haltingly, Pinky said, disgustedly, “Shit, mate, you’re lowering the flag.”
“What is further,” Thomas went on, “the next round of drinks is on me. Barman.” He was smiling as he spoke, but he could feel the muscles tightening in his arms and he was ready to spring on the biggest one of the lot, a heavy-jawed Corsican in a black leather jacket.
The men looked at each other uncertainly. But they hadn’t come into the bar to fight and while they grumbled a little among themselves they each came up to the bar and accepted the drinks that Thomas had bought for them.
“Some fighter,” Pinky sneered. “Every day is Armistice day with you, Yank.” But he allowed himself to be led safely out of the bar ten minutes later. When he came over to the Clothilde the next day, he brought a bottle of pastis with him and said, “Thanks, Tommy. They’d have kicked in my skull in the next two minutes if you hadn’t come along. I don’t know what it is comes over me when I have a few. And it’s not as though I ever win. I’ve got scars from head to toe in tribute to my courage.” He laughed.
“If you’ve got to fight,” Thomas said, remembering the days when he felt he had to fight, no matter whom and for no matter what reason, “fight sober. And pick on one man at a time. And don’t take me along. I’ve given all that up.”
“What would you have done, Tommy, boy,” Pinky said, “if they’d jumped me?”
“I’d have created a diversion,” Thomas said, “just long enough for Dwyer to get you out of the saloon, and then I’d have run for my life.”
“A diversion,” Pinky said. “I’d pay a couple of bob to have seen that diversion.”
Thomas didn’t know what it was in Pinky Kimball’s life that changed him from a friendly, amiable, if profane man, into a suicidal, fighting animal when he got a few drinks in him. Sometime, perhaps, he’d have it out with him.
Pinky came into the pilot house, looked at the gauges, listened critically to the throb of the Diesels. “You’re ready for the summer, lad,” he said. “On your own craft. And I envy you.”
“Not quite ready,” Thomas said. “We’re missing one in crew.”