“You look like a model,” he said.

“Maybe I oughta call Cruising World.”

“Yeah, you look kinda gay,” he said.

“That’s a sailboat magazine, you dope,” she said, taking a mock swipe at him.

Kennett was waiting in the passenger seat of a double-parked Mazda Navaho, wearing comfortable old khakis and a SoHo Surplus T-shirt.

“Nice truck,” Lucas said to Lily as he crawled in back.

“Kennett’s. Four-wheel drive must help testosterone production,” Lily said, walking around to the driver’s side and climbing in. “You’ve got one, don’t you?”

“Not like this: this is sort of a Manhattan four-wheel drive,” he said, tongue in cheek. To Kennett he said, “I didn’t think you could drive.”

“Got it before the last attack,” Kennett said. “I think the price is what brought the attack on. And don’t give me any shit about Manhattan four-by-fours, this is a fuckin’ workhorse . . . .”

“Yeah, yeah . . .”

They left Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel, emerging in Jersey, took a right and then followed a bewildering zigzag path back to the waterfront. The marina was a modest affair, filling a dent in the riverbank, a few dozen boats separated from a parking lot by a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Most of the boats were in concrete slips, halyards clinking softly against the aluminum masts like a forest of one-note wind chimes; a few more boats were anchored just offshore.

“Look at this guy, putting up his ’chute,” Kennett said, climbing down from the truck. Lucas squeezed out behind him as Lily climbed out of the driver’s seat. Kennett pointed out toward the river, where two sailboats were tacking side-by-side down the Hudson, running in front of a steady northwest breeze, their sails tight with the wind. A man was standing on the foredeck of one of them, freeing a garish crimson-and-yellow sail. It filled like a parachute, and the boat leapt ahead.

“You ever sailed?” Kennett asked.

“A couple times, on Superior,” Lucas said, shading his eyes. “You feel like you’re on a runaway locomotive. It’s hard to believe they’re barely going as fast as a man can jog.”

“A man doesn’t weigh twenty thousand pounds like that thing,” Kennett said, watching the lead boat. “That is a locomotive . . . .”

They unloaded a cooler from the back of the truck and Lucas carried it across the parking lot, past a suntanned woman in a string bikini with a string of little girls behind her, like ducklings. The smallest of the kids, a tiny red-headed girl with a sandy butt and bare feet, squealed and danced on the hot tarmac while carrying a pair of flip-flops in her hands.

Lily led the way through a narrow gate in the chain-link fence, Lucas right behind her, Kennett taking it slow, down to the water. Here and there, people were working on their boats, listening to radios as they worked. Most of the radios were tuned to rock stations, but not the same ones, and an aural rock-’n’-roll fest played pleasantly through the marina. Few of the boats actually seemed ready to go out, and the work was slow and social.

“There she blows, so to speak,” Kennett said. The Lestrade was fat and graceful at the same time, like an overweight ballerina.

“Nice,” Lucas said, uncertainly. He knew open fishing boats, but almost nothing about sailboats.

“Island Packet 28—it is a nice boat,” Kennett said. “I got it instead of kids.”

“Not too late for kids,” Lucas said. “I just had one myself.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Lily laughed. “I should have a say in this.”

“Not necessarily,” Lucas said. He stepped carefully into the cockpit, balancing the cooler. “The goddamned town is overrun with nubile prospects. Find somebody with a nice set of knockers, you know, not too smart so you wouldn’t have to worry about the competition. Maybe with a fetish for housework . . .”

“Fuck the sailing, let’s go back into town,” Kennett said.

“God, I’m looking forward to this,” Lily said. “The flashing wit, the literary talk . . .”

Lily and Lucas rigged the sails, with Kennett impatiently supervising. When he was bringing the sails up, Lucas took a moment to look through the boat: a big berth at the bow, a tidy, efficient galley, a lot of obviously custom-built bookshelves jammed with books. Even a portable phone.

“You could live here,” Lucas said to Kennett.

“I do, a lot of the time,” Kennett said. “I probably spend a hundred nights a year on the boat. Even when I can’t sail it, I just come over here and sit and read and sleep. Sleep like a baby.”

Kennett took the boat out on the motor, his fine white hair standing up like a sail, his eyes shaded by dark oval sunglasses. A smile grew on his tanned face as he maneuvered out along the jetty, then swung into the open river. “Jesus, I love it,” he said.

“You gotta be careful,” Lily said anxiously, watching him.

“Yeah, yeah, this takes two fingers . . . .” To Lucas he said, “Don’t have a heart attack—it just unbelievably fucks you up. I can run the engine and steer, but I can’t do anything with the sails, or the anchor. I can’t go out alone.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, fuck it,” Kennett agreed.

“What does it feel like?” Lucas asked.

“You weren’t gonna talk about it,” Lily protested.

“It feels like a pro wrestler is trying to crush your chest. It hurts, but I don’t remember that so much. I just remember feeling like I was stuck in a car-crusher and my chest was caving in. And I was sweating, I remember being down on the ground, on the floor, sweating like a sonofabitch . . . .” He said it quietly, calmly enough, but with a measure of hate in his voice, like a man swearing revenge. After another second, he said, “Let’s get the sails up.”

“Yeah,” Lucas said, slightly shaken. “I gotta pull on a rope, right?”

Kennett looked at the sky. “God, if you heard the man, forgive him, the poor fucker’s from Minnesota or Missouri or Montana, some dry-ass place like that.”

Lucas got the mainsail up. The jib was on a roller, with the lines led back to the cockpit. Lily worked it from there, sometimes on her own, sometimes with prodding from Kennett.

“How long have you been sailing?” Lucas asked her.

“I did it when I was a kid, at summer camp. And then Dick’s been teaching me the big boat.”

“She learns quick,” Kennett said. “She’s got a natural sense for the wind.”

They slid lazily back and forth across the river, water rushing beneath the bow, wind in their faces. A hatch of flies was coming off the water, their lacy wings delicately floating around them. “Now what?” Lucas asked.

Kennett laughed. “Now we sail up and then we turn around, and sail back.”

“That’s what I thought,” Lucas said. “You’re not even trolling anything.”

“You’re obviously not into the great roundness of the universe,” Kennett said. “You need a beer.”

Kennett and Lily gave him a sailing lesson, taught him the names of the lines and the wire rigging, pointed out the buoys marking the channel.

“You’ve got a cabin on a lake, right? Don’t you have buoys?”

“On my lake? If I peed off the end of the dock, I’d hit the other side. If we put in a buoy, we wouldn’t have room for a boat.”

“I thought the great North Woods . . .” Kennett prompted, seriously.

“There’s some big water,” Lucas admitted. “Superior: Superior’ll show you things the Atlantic can’t . . . .”

“I seriously doubt that,” Lily said skeptically.

“Yeah? Well, once every few years it freezes over—and you look out there, a horizon like a knife and it’s ice all the way out. You can walk out to the horizon and never get there . . . .”

“All right,” she said.

They talked about ice-boating and para-skiing, and always came back to sailing. “I was planning to take a year off and single-hand around the world, maybe . . . unless I got stuck in the Islands,” Kennett said. “Maybe I would have got stuck, maybe not. I took Spanish lessons, took some French . . .”