I Am Pilgrim(259)

‘She’s for sale,’ a man’s voice said from behind, his English excellent for such a sleepy part of the world.

I turned and guessed it was the owner of the yard. He was in his thirties, with a ready smile, a man probably trying to make something out of the business and keep his village alive.

‘A wealthy Russian found her and brought her here,’ he said. ‘In her time she won the Fastnet, the Transpac, the Sydney to Hobart and most of the other blue-water classics.

‘When we got her she’d been rotting at a mooring in the Greek islands for years, so we started from the keel up.’

‘Then what happened?’ I asked.

‘The Russian stopped calling; more importantly, the bills weren’t paid – I guess he either went broke or another oligarch had him killed.’

Probably the latter, I thought: that was the way most business disputes were settled in Russia. The owner of the yard indicated an old ladder leaning against the side of the ketch. ‘Please,’ he said, and I climbed up and on to the broad teak deck.

I saw that the cabin was set well back, slung good and low, while the wheel sat high to give a commanding view of the sea. It was easy to see why the Russian had rescued her.

I wandered into the wheelhouse, went below and walked quietly through her galley and bedrooms. During the years when I was sailing, I had heard men say that, once in a lifetime, a boat would talk to a sailor, and I knew – for better or worse – that the ketch was meant to be mine.

The owner had followed me on board, and I emerged from a for’ard hatch and found him near a set of winches. ‘How long to paint her?’ I asked.

‘A week,’ he replied.

‘Getting a suit of sails would be a problem—’

‘We’ve still got the originals – they’re patched, but they’re okay. Come to the office and I can show you her records.’

Twenty minutes later, I had negotiated a price and added an extra twenty grand to update the navigation equipment and have her stocked with food, fuel and water. I borrowed the owner’s cellphone, went outside and called Finbar Hanrahan in New York to arrange to have the money transferred into the owner’s account.

The old attorney didn’t ask what it was for – on hearing that I was in Turkey, he probably assumed I was on government business and didn’t press me. Before hanging up, I asked him to also send thirty thousand to Dr Sydney to compensate him for everything he had done. I had already decided I wouldn’t be going back, I would sleep on the boat to supervise the work that needed to be done. I had my backpack and, inside, were the SIG and the letters – there was nothing else I needed. Anyway, I never liked goodbyes.

I returned to the office and remembered one thing I hadn’t inquired about. ‘What’s her name?’ I asked.

‘Nomad,’ said the owner.

I nodded. If I had had any doubt that the ketch was meant to be mine, the name dispelled it. I think I mentioned – in a very old use of the word, ‘Saracen’ means a wanderer, a nomad.





Chapter Fifty-one


I PUSHED OUT early on a Monday morning and, while the boat was really too big for one person, the skills I had learned from Bill came flooding back and I discovered that, as long as I wasn’t too ambitious I could handle her well enough.

She must have cut a strange sight, though, with her freshly painted hull, faded sails and a patched spinnaker, but it wasn’t worth worrying about: it was so late in the year and winter was coming on so strong that the only other craft I saw were always well off on the horizon.

As I grew in confidence and my seamanship returned, I found that Nomad still had a stunning turn of speed, and after three weeks I was beating fast towards the boot of Italy with the idea of heading up the Adriatic Sea towards Split in Croatia.

I pulled into a tiny outpost on the western shore of Greece – no more than a general store and a decrepit jetty – to top up my fuel and buy supplies. The elderly owner fuelled the boat’s diesel, put the fruit and milk I had purchased into cartons and threw in a pile of International Herald Tribunes that had gone unsold over the previous months.

‘You might as well have them; I’m just going to burn ’em.’

Two days later, sipping coffee in the late-afternoon sun, making my way along a deserted coast, I was down to the last few papers when I encountered an item at the back of one of them, almost lost next to the finance pages. It was nothing much, the sort of thing you might read all the time, simply a report that Greek police had found no suspicious circumstances concerning the death of a young American woman who fell from her luxury cruiser off the coast of the party island of Mykonos.