Read The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine for Free Online Page A

become presences nearly visible in the room at the moment she screamed in the ecstasy of release.
    “You dirty, dirty, dirty old man,” she said, laughing.
    A few years after that, Ballard overheard some Chinese bankers, clients of his firm for whom he had several times rendered his services, speaking in soft Mandarin about a yacht anchored in the Amazon basin; he needed no more.
    “I want to go off the boat for a couple of hours when we get to Manaus,” Sandrine said. “I feel like getting back in the world again, at least for a little while. This little private bubble of ours is completely cut off from everything else.”
    “Which is why—”
    “Which is why it works, and why we like it, I understand, but half the time I can’t stand it, either. I don’t live the way you do, always flying off to interesting places to perform miracles …”
    “Try spending a rainy afternoon in Zurich holding some terminally anxious banker’s hand.”
    “Not that it matters, especially, but you don’t mind, do you?”
    “Of course not. I need some recuperation time, anyhow. This was a little severe.” He held up one thickly bandaged hand. “Not that I’m complaining.”
    “You’d better not!”
    “I’ll only complain if you stay out too late—or spend too much of your father’s money!”
    “What could I buy in Manaus? And I’ll make sure to be back before dinner. Have you noticed? The food on this weird boat is getting better and better every day?”
    “I know, yes, but for now I seem to have lost my appetite,” Ballard said. He had a quick mental vision of a metal cage from which something hideous was struggling to escape. It struck an oddly familiar note, as of something half-remembered, but Ballard was made so uncomfortable by the image in his head that he refused to look at it any longer.
    “Will they just know that I want to dock at Manaus?”
    “Probably, but you could write them a note. Leave it on the bed. Or on the dining room table.”
    “I have a pen in my bag, but where can I find some paper?”
    “I’d say, look in any drawer. You’ll probably find all the paper you might need.”
    Sandrine went to the little table beside him, pulled open its one drawer, and found a single sheet of thick, cream-colored stationery headed
Sweet Delight
. An Omas roller-ball pen, much nicer than the Pilot she had liberated from their hotel in Rio, lay angled atop the sheet of stationery. In her formal, almost italic handwriting, Sandrine wrote,
Please dock at Manaus. I would like to spend two or three hours ashore
.
    “Should I sign it?”
    Ballard shrugged. “There’s just the two of us. Initial it.”
    She drew a graceful, looping S under her note and went into the dining room, where she squared it off in the middle of the table. When she returned to the sitting room, she asked, “And now I just wait? Is that how it works? Just because I found a piece of paper and a pen, I’m supposed to trust this crazy system?”
    “You know as much as I do, Sandrine. But I’d say yes, just wait a little while; yes, that’s how it works; and yes, you might as well trust it. There’s no reason to be bitchy.”
    “I have to stay in practice,” she said, and lurched sideways as the yacht bumped against something hard and came to an abrupt halt.
    “See what I mean?”
    When he put the book down in his lap, Sandrine saw that it was
Tono-Bungay
. She felt a hot, rapid flare of irritation that the book was not something like
The Women’s Room
, which could teach him things he needed to know—and hadn’t he already read
Tono-Bungay
?
    “Look outside; try to catch them tying us up and getting out that walkway thing.”
    “You think we’re in Manaus already?”
    “I’m sure we are.”
    “That’s ridiculous. We scraped against a barge or something.”
    “Nonetheless, we have come to a complete halt.”
    Sandrine strode briskly to the on-deck door, threw it open, gasped, then stepped outside. The yacht had already