She nodded resignedly. He smiled at Louie and got up to start the engine. He read relief on the black face and a crazy urgent hope, and something else.

The kid knew how long he had waited for Jack-the-Rip-Off. To the day.

And they had better check the bilges for a stowaway when they left.

The quay was a huge tan slab of coral-concrete with jagged edges, set on barnacled pilings. It stood in the swirling currents just a little higher than the rails of Linda Lee. For twenty-four wild hours they clung to it, with a CQR anchor set in the channel forward to hold off the bow and two small Danforths off the port quarter. To keep them from grinding their planks to pulp they hung out bumpers and spare tires and finally dangled a massive two-by-six beam from two stanchions to fend them off abeam. Still, every turn of the tide was a Chinese fire drill as they shifted lines and fenders, and each was a one-man, one-woman job. The citizens were willing, and great boatmen in their outrigged pirogues, but no help at all with a yacht.

Mitch, when he had finally tied up, had taken one look at the copra warehouse at the foot of the dock, grabbed tin-snips, and begun to cut rat-guards for the mooring lines out of copper sheet. He should have had them ready sooner. While he snipped, the first of their two copra rats somehow scurried aboard unseen. It lodged with them for a week, until they caught it just short of Tahiti and executed it with a rolling pin in the galley.

Their first rat must have had invisible properties, for the odds were against him. There were sixty-seven pairs of human eyes in the village, and a certain percentage of them were watching Linda Lee from the moment she docked. They were reinforcements waiting for room to board her: the lucky ones were already aboard. There was not an instant in the twenty-four hours they were there that the boat was not being admired, serenaded, swum from, fished off, danced on, climbed on, drunk to, or used as a photo background for one of the sixty-seven Polaroid portraits that Mitch shot and gave away to a population of sixty-eight. Only the chief failed to show.

The instant they docked, Louie had taken charge, piping orders and waving his tiny arms. His moment of glory lasted only seconds, while half the village swarmed over the rail. A wiry girl with jutting breasts pushed him overboard and began to roll her hips for Mitch, to the throb of a wooden toere and the twang of shiny Yamaha guitars.