A nude toddler in the schooner’s cockpit waved at him. Her parents were probably asleep below. On the Columbia to starboard, a diminutive American, dressed in white shorts and holding a beaded can of beer, wandered topside. He offered his dinghy if they wanted to go ashore. He offered advice on holding: drop a second anchor. He offered the information that customs, as well as immigration, was the local gendarme. You rowed in yourself and found him. He offered a warning: the only bar in town, Henri’s, was overrun with Frog Navy. He offered everything but a can of the cold beer. Then he disappeared into his plastic cabin, which was no doubt somehow air-conditioned.

Mitch began to pump up their Avon raft. He felt as deflated as it looked.

They had just sailed 2,800 miles and arrived, apparently, at Avalon Harbor on Catalina Island. No one had even bothered to ask them how the trip had been.

Lindy sat on a plain chair in the white, airy Gendarmerie. She admired Mitch’s performance in French, found it titillating, as if she had sailed in with a stranger. She had to remind herself that his fluency was deceptive: he faked a lot. In Paris he had once got them to Napoleon’s Tomb when they wanted their little hotel on Rue Buonaparte.

The blond young gendarme, wearing starched white shorts and an open shirt, had the oval face of a saint. He stamped their passports cheerfully and stuffed them into a drawer.

His wife, petite, Parisian, and trim, emerged from the living quarters behind the office. Lindy glimpsed Sears’ modern in her apartment, and an immense carved dining table, apparently local. The gendarme’s wife murmured to her husband, softly: “Le vieil Australien...”

The gendarme winced. He spoke rapidly to Mitch, who looked surprised, shocked, and finally nodded. He told Lindy that the old Australian they had seen anchored alone had lost his friend, a retired New Zealand dentist. They were on their second circumnavigation of the world. The Australian was sixty-three, and the gendarme thought that his friend was even older. Three days short of Nuku Hiva, the New Zealander had fallen overboard. “Tossed him a life jacket,” Mitch translated, “and then couldn’t find him again.”

The old man shambled in and the gendarme arose politely, something he had not done for Lindy. The Australian’s face was gray and deeply lined. He nodded at Lindy and Mitch. “Saw you standing into the Bay. Very pretty, you were, sails against the cliffs, you know? Nice passage?”

His accent was more British than Australian: a retired professor or schoolmaster, she guessed. The gendarme began to fill out his report, questioning the Australian in broken English while his wife typed the answers in French. They quickly fell into a swamp of incomprehension and half-understood nuances. Mitch began to translate for them.