Лесли Чартерис - Salvage for the Saint

Though Simon had exchanged the odd word with Tatenor within the ambit of this and previous races, he preferred to dislike him cordially at a distance. But Tatenor caught his eye now, and flicked a depreciatory finger at the Privateer’s scarlet hull.

“I do hope she holds up for you,” he called across.

“You’ll be able to follow her progress for yourself, and without turning your head,” replied the Saint with even politeness.

Tatenor laughed hollowly, exposing teeth of perfect porcelain translucence whose shade matched the white of his hair and contrasted with the deep tan of his handsome weather-beaten features.

“I suggest you might care to check the boiler in that thing before we start,” he brayed, flicking another dismissive finger in the Privateer’s direction and chuckling at his own remark.

“And you,” retorted the Saint good-humouredly, “had better lash down the Chippendale and be prepared to jettison a couple of footmen when the going gets tough.”

“Boiler!” Vic exploded softly to Simon as Tatenor turned away with a frozen smile on his large brown face. “We’ll show you somethin’, Mister lah-de-dah Tatenor!”

Simon felt vaguely uncomfortable himself with Tatenor’s speech, for some reason he couldn’t quite pin down. It was a discomfort that was something more than simple dislike of the parodied form of English articulation inflicted on the rest of us by certain representatives of the old-guard sporting gent brigade, of which Tatenor seemed to be almost a founder officer. It was decidedly something more than that; it was the kind of discomfort, the kind of nebulous puzzlement, which the Saint had felt before in all manner of circumstances when something was micrometrically off-key and his senses were busy delivering messages to his understanding which that partly instinct-driven system refused to accept as making a wholly convincing picture. When Simon Templar felt this way he could be sure there was something behind it which with luck and persistence he would presently ferret out from his subconscious. But that would happen in its own time, and for the moment he had the race to think about and no intention of actively worrying away at a nagging disquiet about Charles Tatenor’s speech.

But then something reached his ears which was all the more thought-provoking for being so wholly unexpected.

He heard Charles Tatenor speaking to Fournier in perfect French.

Even though the two had turned away before Tatenor spoke, the Saint’s acute hearing picked up the sentence clearly. He heard Tatenor translate, for Fournier’s benefit, the last flippant remark of his own about the Chippendale and the footmen.

Whether Fournier grasped the satirical point at once is doubtful — judging from the corrugations of puzzlement that appeared on his unprepossessing brow — but incidental. The noteworthy thing to Simon Templar, himself an exceptional linguist and fluent French speaker, was Tatenor’s perfect assurance in the language. His apparently effortless impromptu translation would have been hard to better, but so would his pronunciation, accent, and — the most difficult — intonation. To the Saint’s ear, which was assuredly no mean ear at all as ears for that sort of thing went, Tatenor’s French was as indistinguishable from the French of an educated Frenchman as his English was from the English of an educated Briton.

And that reflection provoked a line of thought to which the Saint was to come back again and again, during the race and after.

During and after. Especially after. Because the race ended, for Simon Templar, in an unexpected way, and for Charles Tatenor more surprisingly still...

It began, however, in the way that was usual for the times: with a rolling start. Powerboats are only semi-controllable at sub-planing speeds when a big group of them are frothing along in a turmoil of contending washes, and to let them spin and jockey for the best positions as at the start of a race for yachts would be asking for trouble. Discipline was therefore imposed on the scene in the form of a start boat with the function of pacing the competitors up to the line for a rolling start, so that they would all cross the line more or less together and at the same speed.

The Saint manoeuvred the Privateer into her drawn lane position towards the outside of the muster area, about a mile and a quarter behind the line, with the start boat on the extreme outside, farthest from the Cowes shore and the assembled thousands who had gathered to watch what little of the race a landbound spectator could hope to see. Four minutes before the off, with a final blip of motors, the start boat set off for the line, rapidly reaching the planned speed of just over fifteen knots. As a concession to traditionalists a starting-gun was fired from the start boat just as she crossed the line; but few of the competitors could have heard it above the noise of their engines. The trick was to keep fractionally astern of the start boat — any boat crossing the line ahead of it would be disqualified.

Simon Templar kept fractionally astern of it.

He heard the gun, faintly, as they crossed the line, and then he eased the throttle open to about two-thirds maximum to get the boat up on the plane, as the jargon has it. After a minute or so he opened the throttle a little wider to raise the speed experimentally as far as he dared in that decidedly assertive sea.

The Saint looked around, through the heavy spray the Privateer was throwing up.

He was lying second. Two or three boat lengths ahead, away on their port, was the Italian entry Bellissima. It seemed to be leaping from one wave crest to the next, its propellers sometimes rising right up out of the sea. Each time it took off, the ocean seemed to fall away vertiginously beneath it — and every time it landed it hit the water with a tremendous smack and was momentarily all but obscured from sight by the rising spume. And the Saint and Vic were only too well aware that exactly the same thing was happening to the Privateer, and that to an observer outside the boat the repeated impacts probably seemed equally likely to smash it to smithereens at any moment.

The equations of propulsion and drag in a high-speed motor boat are finely balanced; every day presents its own parameters of wave rhythm and current and wind resistance. The first rule of thumb you learnt was that the less the boat was in actual contact with the water the faster it would go. But all propulsion had to be achieved through the water: airscrews or rockets would disqualify the craft as a boat. So you were dependent on your propellers and it was important that they stayed under the water as much as possible to keep the propulsion going continuously. Too little up on the plane and you followed a switchback course over the peaks and down into the troughs of the waves, with a heavy drag of water resistance on the hull. Too much up on the plane to minimise that drag, and you risked losing more than you gained as your screws clawed frequently at empty air.

And that, to the Saint’s eyes, was what was happening now to the Italian boat. While it had pulled ahead of him in the first minutes, probably by getting more rapidly and less cautiously up to its optimum speed for the conditions, it had now overshot the mark and he was very slowly gaining on it. But his judgment told him that if anything the Privateer herself was maybe erring fractionally in the same direction, and now he slackened off the throttle an almost imperceptible notch.

Vic nodded approval and agreement, then touched the Saint’s arm and pointed astern, to their nearer port. Perhaps half a dozen lengths behind was the Candecour; and it was plain to them both that the big boat was gaining on them.