I turn to the bed. Ana Lucia is up, throwing off the covers.
“Her name is Patricia Foley,” Erica continues. “Would you like her number?”
Ana Lucia walks across the room and stands in front of me, totally naked, like she knows she’s offering a choice. But it’s not really a choice, when the other option doesn’t actually exist.
“That won’t be necessary,” I say to Erika.
I wake up the next morning to knocking. I squint at the sliding glass door. There’s Broodje, holding a bag, and putting a finger to his lips.
I crack open the door. Broodje pops in his head in and hands me the bag.
From the bed, Ana Lucia rubs her eyes, looking grumpy.
“Sorry to wake you,” he calls to Ana Lucia. “I need to steal him. We have a soccer match. Lapland forfeited so now we’re playing Wiesbaden.”
Lapland and Wiesbaden? Ana Lucia is ignorant about all things soccer, but this is pushing it. But her face registers no suspicion about the pairing, only sourness about Broodje’s untimely arrival.
In the bag is someone’s old soccer kit, jersey, shorts, cleats, and a thin tracksuit to wear on top. I look at Broodje. He gives me a look. “Better go change now,” he says.
“When will you be back?” she asks me when I return. The tracksuit is several centimeters too short for me. I can’t tell if she notices.
“Late,” Broodje answers. “It’s an away game. In France.” He turns to me. “In Deauville.”
Deauville? No. The search is over. But Broodje is halfway out the door and Ana Lucia already has her hands crossed over her chest. I’m already paying the price, so I may as well do the crime.
I go to give her a kiss good-bye. “Wish me luck,” I say, forgetting for a second that there is no game, no soccer game at least, and that she’s the last person who should be wishing me luck.
Anyway, she doesn’t. “I hope you lose,” she says.
Thirteen
Deauville
It’s off season in Deauville, and the seaside resort is buttoned up tight, a cold wind whipping in off the Channel. From a distance, I can see the marina, rows of sailboats in drydock, on their stands, their masts unstepped. As we get closer, the whole marina appears shut down, hibernating for the winter. Which seems about the right idea.
On the drive down in Lien’s car, which had smelled of lavender when we left and now smells of wet, dirty laundry somehow, the boys had been ebullient. W had located a barge called Viola late last night and had then decided we should take a road trip to France. “Wouldn’t it be easier to call?” I’d asked after the plan had been explained to me. But no. They seemed to think we should just go. Of course, they were properly dressed for it, and I was in nothing but a thin tracksuit. And they had nothing to lose, except a day’s worth of studies. Me, I had even less, but it felt like more somehow.
We drive around the labyrinthine marina, finally reaching the main office only to find it closed. Of course. It’s now four o’clock on a dark November day; anyone in their right mind is holed up somewhere warm.
“Well, we’ll just have to find it ourselves,” W says.
I look around. As far as I can see in every directions are masts. “I don’t see how.”
“Are marinas organized by type of vessel?” W asks.
I sigh. “Sometimes.”
“So there might be a section for barges?” he prompts.
I sigh again. “Possibly.”
“And you said this Jacques lives on his boat year-round so it wouldn’t be drydocked?”
“Probably not.” We had to pull our houseboat out of the water every four years for service overhauls. Drydocking for a vessel that size is a massive undertaking. “Probably anchored.”
“To what?” Henk asks.
“Probably to a pier.”