After lunch, all the women went water-skiing. Jimmy, Guy and I played "cut throat," a variation on three handed bridge which Guy and Jimmy played at the Traveler's Club. In it, the three players bid for the fourth "dummy" hand of which 5 of its cards are exposed. Each player knows his own 13 cards plus these 5 (or about one-third the deck) and then deduces what other cards might be in the dummy from the bids made by other players.

Jimmy didn't even bother to separate his cards into suits, since he didn't want to give any clues as to his hand. He also bid with speed that was intended to destroy his competitors' confidence.

Of course, as I quickly learned from his superb bidding, Jimmy's true profession was gambling. Corporate raiding was a secondary pursuit, the collateral virtue of his ability to rapidly absorb information from diverse sources, intuit the intentions of others, calculate odds and through his speed dominate a game (whether bridge, backgammon, rock, scissor and paper or takeovers.)

When a bid was unsuccessful, we didn't shuffle, which gave better hands. Just as Jimmy was making his second grand slam of the afternoon, Natalie limped off the speedboat. She moaned that she had injured her lower back in a bad fall. Jimmy spoke to her in French (which I do not understand).

When we completed the game, Jimmy says "Natalie is waiting for you in her room. I told her you are a doctor and will give her a therapeutic massage."

I laugh as I haven't any idea how to give a massage. Jimmy answers "You had no idea of how the satellite phone worked, but you tried to fix it."
He completed his joke by reminding me I had a Ph.D.

Unable to refute his perverse logic, I tried to repair Natalie. She spoke better English than I thought, telling me her father was a Notary in Lyons, where she had won the Madamoiselle beauty contest a year earlier, which brought her to Paris. Like me, she had never been on a yacht before, so we had something in common.

Later that afternoon, I went snorkeling with my new friend around giant rocks. One advantage of snorkeling is that it is silent: I could just float in one spot and observe.

Jimmy and Laure joined us, then Jimmy, recoiling as if he had seen a predator shark, swam back to the boat in a panic. Laure says that he was disturbed by seeing our rubber fins. He has a pathological aversion to rubber. "If he sees a rubber band on a table, he leaves the room." OK, no more fins.

That evening we all went ashore to Fetiye. Jimmy, not a tourist by nature, rushed to find another phone booth. The rest of the party went to visit the ancient tombs. There were hundreds of them carved in the rocks just behind the city, shallow caves, with column and shattered walls, which, in the darkening twilight, looked like a ghost city.

We met Jimmy for a dinner at a seedy outdoor grill overlooking the port. He was beaming. He had learned from Joe Flom in New York that the Board of Crown Zellebach had "no stomach for a battle." He now controlled the company.