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thirty-five-foot wooden sportfishing boat.
    La Guajaba was narrow, with a broad stern, a bridge, and three compartments. There were two Chrysler engines, each producing about ninety horsepower, giving the boat a top speed of about nine knots. And that was more or less everything I knew about her other than where I kept the brandy and the glasses. I’d won the boat in a game of backgammon from an American who owned the Bimini Bar on Obispo Street. With a full tank of fuel La Guajaba had a range of about five hundred miles, and it was less than half that to Port-au-Prince. I’d used the boat about three times in as many years, and what I didn’t know about boats would have filled several nautical almanacs, possibly all of them. But I knew how to use a compass, and I figured all I needed to do was point the bow east and then, according to the Thor Heyerdahl principle of navigation, keep going until we hit something. I couldn’t see how what we hit wouldn’t be the island of Hispaniola; after all, there were thirty thousand square miles of it to aim at.
    I handed Mendy a fistful of cash and my car keys and then climbed aboard. I’d thought about mentioning Omara and how it might have been better for me if he had kept his mouth shut, only there didn’t seem to be much point. It would have risked incurring some of the brutal candor for which Cubans are justly famous, and doubtless he would have told me that I was just another gringo with too much money and unworthy of the boat I owned, which would have been true: If you make yourself like sugar, the ants will eat you.
    As soon as we were under way, Melba went below and put on a two-piece swimsuit with a leopard-skin print that would have made a mackerel whistle. That’s the nice thing about boats and warm weather. They bring out the best in people. Beneath the battlements of Morro Castle, which stands on the summit of a two-hundred-foot-high rock promontory, the harbor entrance is almost as wide. A long flight of crumbling steps, hewn out of the rock, leads up from the water’s edge to the castle, and I almost made the boat try to climb them. Two hundred feet of open sea to aim at and I still managed to nearly put us on the rocks. So long as I was looking at Melba, it wasn’t looking good for our chances of hitting Haiti.
    “I wish you’d put some clothes on,” I said.
    “Don’t you like my bikini?”
    “I like it fine. But there’s a good reason Columbus didn’t take women with him on the Santa María . When they’re wearing bikinis they affect the ship’s steering. With you around, they’d probably have discovered Tasmania.”
    She lit a cigarette and ignored me, and I did my best to ignore her back. I checked the tachometer, the oil level, the ammeter, and the motor temperature. Then I glanced out of the wheelhouse window. Smith Key, a small island once held by the British, lay ahead of us. It was home to many of Santiago’s fishing folk and pilots, and its red-tiled houses and small ruined chapel made it look very picturesque. But it wasn’t much next to the scene in Melba’s bikini pants.
    The sea was calm until we reached the mouth of the harbor, where the water started to swell a bit. I pushed the throttle forward and held the boat on a steady east-southeast course until Santiago was no longer visible. Behind us the boat’s wake unzipped a great white scar in the ocean that was hundreds of feet long. Melba sat in the fisherman’s chair and squealed with excitement as our speed increased.
    “Can you believe it?” said Melba. “I live on an island and I’ve never been on a boat before.”
    “I’ll be glad when we’re off this tub,” I said, and fetched a bottle of rum from the chart drawer.
    After about three or four hours it got dark and I could see the lights of the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo, twinkling on our port side. It was like staring at the ancient stars of some near galaxy that was at the same time a vision of the future in which