He never did find out what a fuesal was exactly. He pointed to another boat.

"Give me that," he had said.

"That is not a powerboat, sir."

"Does it run?"

"Yes. On sail with an auxiliary motor."

"Sails I don't need. Does the motor run and does it have enough gas to get me to St. Maarten?"

"Yes. I imagine so."

"I want it," Remo said.

"You want the sloop," the man said.

"I want the thing that has enough gas to get me from here," said Remo, pointing to his feet, "to there." He pointed to the large volcanic island of St. Maarten, squatting under the Caribbean sun.

So instead of a powerboat a month earlier, a powerboat that the Malaise family would have coveted, he had a sloop and now he had only 24 hours to clean the island.

He made it to St. Martin easily in the unfamiliar boat because he did not have to turn too much.

He was a thin man and he slipped into the water of Bay Rouge without a wrinkle on a wave. No one on the beach noticed that his arms did not flail the water like most swimmers, but that that body moved by the exact and powerful thrusts of the spinal column, pushing it forward, more like a shark than a man.

The arms merely guided everything. There was hardly any wake behind the swimmer and then he went underwater so silently one could have watched

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him, and thought only, "Did I really see a man swimming out there?"

He moved up out of the water onto a rocky part of the shore with the speed of a chameleon, like man's first ascent from the sea. He was thin and without visible musculature. His clothes clung wet and sticky to his body but he allowed the heat to escape from his pores and as he walked in the evening air, the clothing became dry.

The first person he met, a little boy, knew where the Malaises lived. The boy spoke in the singsong of the West Indies.