He heard someone pounding on the hull. Gratefully, he slid from behind the typewriter and went topside. Jean-Paul was pulling himself from the dirty water onto Linda Lee’s deck. Xanadu was gone from her berth, winched out from the quay, in the faint afternoon breeze. He remembered that she was scheduled for a haul-out today at Ellicott’s yard, across the harbor. She had no engine and had been waiting all day for wind. She was fifty yards out from the line of yachts, with Taarii on the windlass. She was floating strangely, bow-down, stern-up.

“Goddamn?” breathed Mitch. “We fouled?”

Jean-Paul, his hairy body glistening, puffed his cheeks and nodded. He had a diving mask pushed up on his forehead. “Our anchors, they seem mated for life. Je regrette, Mitch.”

“My fault,” shrugged Mitch. He had anchored last, six months ago. He must have dropped directly over Jean-Paul’s chain. Neither had moved since.

Worse, his scuba tanks were empty. He’d been diving with the kids from Star of Peace outside the reef, and forgotten to have them refilled. So he’d have to skin it, in thirty feet of murky Papeete mud.

At least it beat tapping at the typewriter. He put on a mask and fins and got Lindy topside. She rowed them over their anchors in the rubber raft. He slipped into the water and followed the Frenchman down, through levels of translucent green, tan, opaque brown, until he lost sight of Jean-Paul’s orange bikini trunks in a morass of mud, chain, and anchor-flukes.

Jean-Paul, trying to work blind and alone on the bottom while Taarii winched from above, had somehow managed to dig their anchors free. Now Xanadu’s anchor seemed to be hanging a few feet above the soupy bottom. A fathom of Mitch’s chain hung twisted beneath it, under tension and disappearing into the limbo below. Jean-Paul’s hook was a seventy-pound Danforth and Mitch’s, hidden in the murk, was a thirty-five-pound CQR plow. Spiraling deeper, he found the Frenchman tunneling into the jumble, digging at Linda Lee’s anchor.

Mitch sank his fins into the mushy bottom and gave a few ineffectual heaves. His heart began to pound. He had a great set of lungs for poolside games. He had convinced Tony as a child that he had gills in his ears and could breathe underwater. But in Jean-Paul he had apparently met his match. Mitch quit and broke surface by the raft, a good fifteen seconds before the Frenchman.

“C’est inutile?” asked Jean-Paul. “I have it free from the mud, but perhaps we must get filled your tanks?”

“Shit, no,” panted Mitch. “We can do it.” He began to draw in mammoth breaths, hyperventilating.

“Mitch?” pleaded Lindy from the raft. “Let’s fill the tanks?”