Windward Passage

Jim Nisbet

Description

Jim Nisbet is a cult favorite in Europe and it's easy to see why. He's "a lot more than just good . . . his style has overtones of Walker Percy's smooth southern satin, but his characters--losers, grifters, con men--hark back to the days of James M. Cain's twisted images of morality," writes the Toronto Globe-Mail. In the tradition of Jim Thompson and Damon Runyon, Jim Nisbet is too good to miss and Windward Passage is a masterpiece that raises the bar even for a master like Nisbet. In the parallel near-future, a ship named for a jellyfish sinks into the Caribbean with its captain chained to the mast. Left behind is a logbook missing ten pages, presidential DNA hidden in a brick of smuggled cocaine, and a nearly- completed novel. Tipsy, the dead sailor's sister, and Red Means, his erstwhile employer, travel from San Francisco to the Caribbean and back as they attempt to unravel a mystery that rapidly widens from death at sea to international conspiracy. With verve and humor to match the Illuminati Trilogy, Nisbet has fashioned an engaging facsimile of our modern world, albeit with snappier dialogue, amped-up technology, and even more clearly stated political prejudices. "Neither Norman Mailer nor Truman Capote has in their writing been able to produce such an intensity as Nisbet has achieved," writes Germany's Die Welt. Pick up Windward Passageand see why.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 29 avril 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781468302981
• Langue: English

Extrait

ALSO BY J IM N ISBET
-N OVELS -
The Gourmet
(aka The Damned Don t Die )
Ulysses Dog
Lethal Injection
Death Puppet
The Price of the Ticket
Prelude to a Scream
The Syracuse Codex
Dark Companion
The Octopus On My Head
-P OETRY -
Poems for a Lady
Gnachos for Bishop Berkeley
Morpho
( WITH A LASTAIR J OHNSTON )
Small Apt
( WITH PHOTOS BY S HELLY V OGEL )
Across the Tasman Sea
-N ONFICTION -
Laminating the Conic Frustum
-R ECORDINGS -
The Visitor
For more information, as well as MP3s of
The Visitor and The Golden Gate Bridge, visit
NoirConeVille.com
Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2010 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Copyright 2010 by Jim Nisbet
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-298-1
This one s for Riley, Peelhead, Joe Ellis
and Janwillem van de Wetering
Four stone originals.
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
The passage from The Story of a Life , by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated from the Russian by Julian Barnes, was transcribed from pp. 102-104 of the Pantheon edition of 1964. Copyright 1964 by Random House, Inc.
Passages cited from The Odyssey by Homer arrive via Robert Fitzgerald s translation, Anchor Books Edition, 1963, pp. 205-206.
The four lines by Thom Gunn are from Nights with the Speed Bros., which can be found on p. 32 of Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
The citation from Apollonaire s La Voyageur is to be found on p. 75 of Alcools , University of California Press, 1965, translation by yr hmbl srvnt.
A stolen remark and a citation come from Tom Raworth; the latter may be found in The Conscious of a Conservative, Tottering State , O Books, 2000, p. 105.
Twenty Small Sailboats to Take You Anywhere , John Vigor, Paradise Cay Publications, 1999.
Thanks to Gregg Gannon for his story about clocking the chief.
Thanks also to Brian Toss and The Rigger s Apprentice for the icicle hitch; Reeds Nautical Almanacs; Self-Steering for Sailing Craft by John S. Letcher, Jr.; and The American Heritage Dictionary ; to Klutch, for Rain Forest Crunch; to Dr. Scott Stryker for some provocative science; and to George Steiner for Tolstoy or Dostoevsky .
Please visit Colin Wilson s discussion of A.E. von Vogt s theory of the Right Man in the former s The Criminal History of Mankind , pp. 64-75.
The A.C. Swinburne poem via Jack London is From Too Much Love For Living.
The strophe by Mikhail Lermontov is to be found on page 167 of An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period , B.G. Gurney (ed. and trans.), Vintage Russian Library, 1960.
Readers! Do not pass up an opportunity to discover Leonard Clark s The Rivers Ran East , on pp. 64-66 of which is to be found the venomous snake citation herein.
Books and the sea, I discovered, had more
than a little in common; both were distilled
of silence and solitude.
-S TERLING H AYDEN , Wanderer .

jerky people on the street
i have not thought myself
one of you for a long time
-T OM R AWORTH
A conspiracy wipes out all the titles conferred by social caprice. In those conditions, a man springs at once to the rank which his manner of facing death assigns to him. The mind loses some of its authority.
-S TENDHAL
There is something in a treasure that fastens upon a man s mind. He will pray and blaspheme and still persevere, and will curse the day he ever heard of it, and will let his last hour come upon him unawares, and still believing that he missed it only by a foot. He will see it again every time he closes his eyes. He will never forget it till he is dead-and even then-Doctor, did you ever hear of the miserable gringos on Azuera, that cannot die? Ha! Ha! Sailors like myself. There is no getting away from a treasure that once fastens upon your mind.
-J OSEPH C ONRAD , Nostromo

Lonely and far a white sail soars .
Beneath the azure current churns,
Above the golden sunlight glows;
Yet for a storm the sail still yearns-
As though in stores one found repose .
-M IHAEL L ERMONTOV
There remained the sea, which is free to all, and particularly alluring to those who feel themselves at war with humanity.
-R AFAEL S ABATINI , Captain Blood.
C ONTENTS
C OPYRIGHT
ALSO BY J IM N ISBET
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
P ROLOGUE
I NCIDENT AT S EA
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
T HE W EEVIL OF H ABITUDE
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
P HANTOM C ARAVAN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
D EAD M EN S P OCKETS
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
T HE D ROIDS OF S
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
W INDWARD P ASSAGE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
A T THE E DGE OF THE P ROJECTION
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
E PILOGUE
PROLOGUE
W INNER ! D ING DING DING . S POTLIGHTS SWEPT THE ASSEMBLY . Second prize The first civilian tour of the shrine since completion of construction! Desultory cheers and applause. A lune of light swept over a projection of Officer Few s face and appeared to leave him temporarily blinded. Speakers blared the inane and popular anthem of Condor Silversteed, Mandate of Tripartism. It was too loud. It was in bad taste. Members on the floor cheered. Members in committee skyboxes, despite the double-glazing of their one-way picture windows, swiped down the volume. The first-place winner was about to be announced, but it was preordained, the fix was in, some things just cannot be left to chance. The audio discretely muted. In the skyboxes the loudest sounds to be heard were the popping of champagne corks, coarse laughter, the especial groan of an orgasm overwhelming a recalcitrant prostate, the smack of palms over a sealed deal. Attending homunculi, cued by the latter, barked like sea lions-not seals, but close enough-it is The True.
The winner was found eventually, her coccyx identichip scanned by ceiling snurfs. The Announcer could have asked the snurfbase to pinpoint her on the auditorium grid the moment her number was announced, but why deprive the suspense of its artificiality? There was an argument that she would have been just as surprised either way, but there was a counterargument to the effect that, the sensoria of audience members being so damped as it was, her reaction time might have been sufficiently slow to mitigate proceedings already protracted by ceremonial caparison. Though unasked for its analysis, the snurfbase readily produced an inverse Fourier transform comparing an average winner s reaction profile to a typical audience-damping effect. Though programmed from square one to encourage damping effects, management determined that this one went too far.
Red Means glared down along the steep angle between the convention floor and the skybox-the latter which, for some reason, the Decorator had lately lined with mohair. Long, coarse, orange mohair. Better it were kelp stranded by a unusually high tide, left to fester in the sun, reeking and hopping with sand fleas and flies, than synthetic mohair that reeked, ever so slightly, of formaldehyde.
No sign of Tipsy. They d arrived together; she d left him almost immediately and hadn t reappeared.
He listlessly sipped his Kaliq. When a man has let his life get to where his beer doesn t taste right, matters have proceeded a lagoon too far.
This ceremony had happened only once before, some fourteen years ago, and he knew that a great deal if not all of what he was seeing was animatronic-edited reruns with computer-generated fills. He didn t trust what he was seeing, and he d never trusted parades, pyrotechnics, conventions, and speeches, either.
So she was genuinely surprised. Not to worry. Her personal squirt patch micromanipulated her reaction, much as surrounding squirt patches coped their response. (In inverse proportion to the square of their distance away from her.) Her name was Melanie Hecatomb, she was seventeen years old, and she d lived all her life on the 74th floor of the Transbay Tower in downtown San Francisco. What a coincidence. As it happened the shrine package included three days and two nights at the Disney Pier at the foot of Bryant Street, right under the Bay Bridge. So what if, right under the Bay Bridge, there were only five or six tides per annum of sufficient height to permit even the second-largest ship in Disney s cruise line, Scrooge McPrincess , from tying up there; each visit rang the gong to the tune of some two million Euroshells. Pressured by the Vendor Consortium informally known as frijolistas , Corporateers were working 24/7 on a series of locks, but the Bay, hydraulic manifesto that it is, was proving recalcitrant. Anyway, what a coincidence it would be, as the announcer pointed out, if the atmosphere were to be conducive to such productivity on her day of days, as it often was, in days of yore, in San Francisco, and will be again, especially after the code for the Transbay Environmental Machine Works, formerly known as Yerba Buena Island, is debugged,