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 candour for which Cubans are justly famous; 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.