Kitabı oku: «The Golden Rendezvous»

I. Tuesday Noon–5 p.m.

My shirt was no longer a shirt but just a limp and sticky rag soaked with sweat. My feet ached from the fierce heat of the steel deck plates. My forehead, under the peaked white cap, ached from the ever-increasing constriction of the leather band that made scalping only a matter of time. My eyes ached from the steely glitter of reflected sunlight from metal, water and white-washed harbour buildings. And my throat ached, from pure thirst. I was acutely unhappy.

I was unhappy. The crew were unhappy. The passengers were unhappy. Captain Bullen was unhappy and this last made me doubly unhappy because when things went wrong with Captain Bullen he invariably took it out on his chief officer. I was his chief officer.

I was bending over the rail, listening to the creak of wire and wood and watching our after jumbo derrick take the strain as it lifted a particularly large crate from the quayside, when a hand touched my arm. Captain Bullen again, I thought drearily, and then I realised that whatever the captain’s caprices wearing Chanel No. 5 wasn’t one of them. This would be Miss Beresford.

And it was. In addition to the Chanel she was wearing a white silk dress and that quizzical half-amused smile that made most of the other officers turn mental cartwheels and handsprings but served only to irritate me. I have my weaknesses, but tall, cool, sophisticated and worldly young women with a slightly malicious sense of humour is not one of them.

“Good afternoon, Mr. First Officer,” she said sweetly. She had a soft musical voice with hardly a hint of superiority or condescension when talking to the lower orders like myself, “We’ve been wondering where you were. You are not usually an absentee at apéritif time.”

“I know, Miss Beresford. I’m sorry.” What she said was true enough: what she didn’t know was that I turned up for apéritifs with the passengers more or less at the point of a gun. Standing company orders stated that it was as much a part of the ship’s officers’ duties to entertain the passengers as to sail the ship, and as Captain Bullen loathed all passengers with a fierce and total loathing, he saw to it that most of the entertaining fell to me. I nodded at the big crate now hovering over the hatchway of number five hold, then at the piled-up crates on the quayside. “I’m afraid I have work to do. Four or five hours at least. Can’t even manage lunch today, far less an apéritif.”

“Not Miss Beresford. Susan.” It was as if she had heard only my first few words. “How often do I have to ask you?”

Until we reach New York, I said to myself, and even then it will be no use. Aloud I said, smiling: “You mustn’t make things difficult for me. Regulations require that we treat all passengers with courtesy, consideration and respect.”

“You’re hopeless,” she laughed. I was too tiny a pebble to cause even a ripple in her smiling pool of self-complacency. “And no lunch, you poor man. I thought you were looking pretty glum as I came along.” She glanced at the winch-driver then at the seamen manhandling the suspended crate into position on the floor of the hold. “Your men don’t seem too pleased at the prospect either. They are a morose-looking lot.”

I eyed them briefly. They were a morose-looking lot.

“Oh, they’ll be spelled for food all right. It’s just that they have their own private worries. It must be about a hundred and ten down in that hold there, and it’s an almost unwritten law that white crews should not work in the afternoons in the tropics. Besides, they’re all still brooding darkly over the losses they’ve suffered. Don’t forget that it’s less than seventy-two hours since they had that brush with the Customs down in Jamaica.”

“Brush,” I thought was good: in what might very accurately be described as one fell swoop the Customs had confiscated from about forty crew members no fewer than 25,000 cigarettes and over two hundred bottles of hard liquor that should have been placed on the ship’s bond before arrival in Jamaican waters. That the liquor had not been placed in bond was understandable enough as the crew were expressly forbidden to have any in their quarters in the first place: that not even the cigarettes had been placed in bond had been due to the crew’s intention of following their customary practice of smuggling both liquor and tobacco ashore and disposing of them at a handsome profit to Jamaicans more than willing to pay a high price for the luxury of duty-free Kentucky bourbon and American cigarettes. But then, the crew had not been told that, for the first time in its five years’ service on the West Indian run, the s.s. Campari was to be searched from stem to stern with a thorough ruthlessness that spared nothing that came in its path, a high and searching wind that swept the ship clean as a whistle. It had been a black day.

And so was this. Even as Miss Beresford was patting me consolingly on the arm and murmuring a few farewell words of sympathy which didn’t go any too well with the twinkle in her eyes, I caught sight of Captain Bullen perched on top of the companionway leading down from the main deck. “Glowering” would probably be the most apt term to describe the expression on his face. As he came down the companionway and passed Miss Beresford he made a heroic effort to twist his features into the semblance of a smile and managed to hold it for all of two seconds until he had passed her by, then got back to his glowering again. For a man who is dressed in gleaming whites from top to toe to give the impression of a black approaching thundercloud is no small feat, but Captain Bullen managed it without any trouble. He was a big man, six feet two and very heavily built, with sandy hair and eyebrows, a smooth red face that no amount of sun could ever tan and a clear blue eye that no amount of whisky could ever dim. He looked at the quayside, the hold and then at me, all with the same impartial disfavour.

“Well, Mister,” he said heavily. “How’s it going? Miss Beresford giving you a hand, eh?” When he was in a bad mood, it was invariably “Mister”: in a neutral mood, it was “First”: and when in a good temper—which, to be fair, was most of the time—it was always “Johnny-me-boy.” But today it was “Mister.” I took my guard accordingly and ignored the implied reproof of time-wasting. He would be gruffly apologetic the next day. He always was.

“Not too bad, sir. Bit slow on the dock-side.” I nodded to where a group of men were struggling to attach chain slings to a crate that must have been at least eighteen feet in length by six square. “I don’t think the Carracio stevedores are accustomed to handling such heavy lifts.”

He took a good look.

“They couldn’t handle a damned wheel-barrow,” he snapped eventually. “Can you manage it by six, Mister?” Six o’clock was an hour past the top of the tide and we had to clear the harbour entrance sandbar by then or wait another ten hours.

“I think so, sir,” and then, to take his mind off his troubles and also because I was curious, asked: “What are in those crates? Motor-cars?”

“Motor-cars? Are you mad?” His cold blue eyes swept over the white-washed jumble of the little town and the dark green of the steeply-rising forested hills behind. “This lot couldn’t build a rabbit-hutch for export, far less a motorcar. Machinery. So the Bills of Lading say. Dynamos, generators, refrigerating, air-conditioning and refining machinery. For New York.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” I said carefully, “that the generalissimo, having successfully completed the confiscation of all the American sugar-refining mills, is now dismantling them and selling the machinery back to the Americans? Bare-faced theft like that?”

“Petty larceny on the part of the individual is theft,” Captain Bullen said morosely. “When governments engage in grand larceny, it’s economics.”

“The generalissimo and his government must be pretty desperate for money?”

“What do you think?” Bullen growled. “No one knows how many were killed in the capital and a dozen other towns in Tuesday’s hunger riots. Jamaican authorities reckon the number is in the hundreds. Since they turfed out most foreigners and closed down or confiscated nearly all foreign businesses they haven’t been able to earn a penny abroad. The coffers of the revolution are as empty as a drum. Man’s completely desperate for money.”

He turned away and stood staring out over the harbour, big hands wide-spaced on the guard-rail, his back ramrod-stiff. I recognised the sign, after three years of sailing with him it would have been impossible not to. There was something he wanted to say, there was some steam he wanted to blow off and no better outlet than that tried and trusty relief valve, Chief Officer Carter. Only whenever he wished to blow off steam it was a matter of personal pride with him never to bring the matter up himself. It was no great trick to guess what was troubling him, so I obliged.

I said, conversationally: “The cables we sent to London, sir. Any reply to them yet?”

“Just ten minutes ago.” He turned round casually as if the matter had already slipped his memory, but the slight purpling tinge in the red face betrayed him, and there was nothing casual about his voice when he went on: “Slapped me down, Mister, that’s what they did. Slapped me down. My own company. And the Ministry of Transport. Both of them. Told me to forget about it, said my protests were completely out of order, warned me of the consequences of future lack of co-operation with the appropriate authorities, whatever the hell appropriate authorities might be. Me! My own company! Thirty-five years I’ve sailed with the Blue Mail Line and now—and now …” His fists clenched and his voice choked into fuming silence.

“So there was someone bringing very heavy pressure to bear after all,” I murmured.

“There was, Mister, there was.” The cold blue eyes were very cold indeed and the big hands opened wide then closed, tight, till the ivory showed. Bullen was a captain, but he was more than that: he was the commodore of the Blue Mail fleet and even the board of directors walk softly when the fleet commodore is around: at least, they don’t treat him like an office boy. He went on softly: “If ever I get my hands on Dr. Slingsby Caroline I’ll break his bloody neck.”

Captain Bullen would have loved to get his hands on the oddly named Dr. Slingsby Caroline. Tens of thousands of police, government agents and American servicemen engaged in the hunt for him would also have loved to get their hands on him. So would millions of ordinary citizens if for no other reason than the excellent one that there was a reward of 50,000 dollars for information leading to his capture. But the interest of Captain Bullen and the crew of the Campari was even more personal: the missing man was very much the root of all our troubles.

Dr. Slingsby Caroline had vanished, appropriately enough, in South Carolina. He had worked at a U.S. Government’s very hush-hush Weapons Research Establishment south of the town of Columbia, an establishment concerned with the evolving, as had only become known in the past week or so, of some sort of small fission weapon for use by either fighter-planes or mobile rocket-launchers in local tactical nuclear wars. As nuclear weapons went, it was the veriest bagatelle compared to the five megaton monsters already developed by both the United States and Russia, developing barely one-thousandth of the explosive power of those and hardly capable of devastating more than a square mile of territory. Still, with the explosive potential of 5,000 tons of T.N.T., it was no toy.

Then one day—night to be precise—Dr. Slingsby Caroline had vanished. As he was the director of the Research Establishment, this was serious enough, but what was even more dismaying was that he had taken the working prototype of the weapon with him. He had apparently been surprised by two of the night guards at the plant and had killed them both, presumably with a silenced weapon, since no one heard or suspected anything amiss. He had driven through the plant gates about ten o’clock at night at the wheel of his own blue Chevrolet station wagon: the guards at the gate recognising both the car and their own chief and knowing that he habitually worked until a late hour, had waved him on without a second glance. And that was the last anyone had ever seen of Dr. Caroline or the Twister, as the weapon, for some obscure reason, had been named. But it wasn’t the last that was seen of the blue Chevrolet. That had been discovered abandoned outside the port of Savannah, some nine hours after the crime had been committed but less than an hour after it had been discovered, which showed pretty smart police work on someone’s part.

And it had just been our evil luck that the s.s. Campari had called in at Savannah on the afternoon of the day the crime had been committed.

Within an hour of the discovery of the two dead guards in the research establishment an all inter-state and foreign air and sea traffic in the South-Eastern United States had been halted. As from seven o’clock in the morning, all planes were grounded until they had been rigorously searched: as from seven o’clock police stopped and examined every truck crossing a state border: and, of course, everything larger than a rowing-boat was forbidden to put out to sea. Unfortunately for the authorities in general and us in particular, the s.s. Campari had sailed from Savannah at six o’clock that morning. Automatically, the Campari became very, very “hot,” the number one suspect for the gateway.

The first radio call came through at 8.30 a.m. Would Captain Bullen return immediately to Savannah? The captain, no beater about the bush, asked why the hell he should. He was told that it was desperately urgent that he return at once. Not, replied the captain, unless they gave him a very compelling reason indeed. They refused to give him a reason and Captain Bullen refused to return. Deadlock. Then, because they hadn’t much option, the Federal Authorities, who had already taken over from the state, gave him the facts.

Captain Bullen asked for more facts. He asked for a description of the missing scientist and weapon, and he’d soon find out for himself whether or not they were on board. Followed a fifteen-minute delay, no doubt necessary to secure the release of top classified information, then the descriptions were reluctantly given.

There was a curious similarity between the two descriptions. Both the Twister and Dr. Caroline were exactly 75 inches in length. Both were very thin, the weapon being only eleven inches in diameter. The doctor weighed 180 pounds, the Twister 275. The Twister was covered in a one-piece sheath of polished anodised aluminium, the doctor in a two-piece grey gabardine. The Twister’s head was covered by a grey Pyroceram nose-cap, the doctor’s by black hair with a tell-tale lock of grey in the centre.

The orders for the doctor were to identify and apprehend: for the Twister to identify but do not repeat do not touch. The weapon should be completely stable and safe and normally it would take one of the only two experts who were as yet sufficiently acquainted with it at least ten minutes to arm it; but no one could guess what effect might have been had upon the Twister’s delicate mechanism by the jolting it might have suffered in transit.

Three hours later Captain Bullen was able to report with complete certainty that neither the missing scientist nor weapon was aboard. Intensive would be a poor word to describe that search, every square foot between the chain locker and steering compartment was searched and searched again. Captain Bullen had radioed the Federal Authorities and then forgotten about it.

And in Kingston the blow had fallen. We had no sooner arrived than the harbour authorities had come on board requesting that a search party from the American destroyer lying almost alongside be allowed to examine the Campari. The search party, about forty of them, were already lined up on the deck of the destroyer.

They were still there four hours later. Captain Bullen, in a few simple well-chosen words that had carried far and clear over the sunlit waters of Kingston harbour, had told the authorities that if the United States Navy proposed, in broad daylight, to board a British Mercantile Marine vessel in a British harbour, then they were welcome to try. They were also welcome, he had added, to suffer, apart from the injuries and the loss of blood they would incur in the process, the very heavy penalties which would be imposed by an international court of maritime law arising from charges ranging from assault, through piracy to an act of war: which maritime court, Captain Bullen had added pointedly, had its seat not in Washington, D.C., but in The Hague, Holland.

This stopped them cold. The authorities withdrew to consult with the Americans. Coded cables, as we learnt later, were exchanged with Washington and London. Captain Bullen remained adamant. Our passengers, 90 per cent. of them Americans, gave him their enthusiastic support. Messages were received from both the company head office and the Ministry of Transport requiring Captain Bullen to co-operate with the United States Navy. Pressure was being brought to bear. Bullen tore the messages up, seized the offer of the local Marconi agent to give the radio equipment an overdue check-up as a heaven-sent excuse to take the wireless officers off watch and told the quartermaster at the gangway to accept no more messages.

And so it had continued for all of thirty hours. And, because troubles never come singly, it was on the morning following our arrival that the Harrisons and Curtises, related families who occupied the for’ard two suites on “A” Deck, received cables with the shocking news that members of both families had been fatally involved in a car crash and left that afternoon. Black gloom hung heavy over the Campari.

Towards evening, the deadlock was broken by the skipper of the American destroyer, a diplomatic, courteous and thoroughly embarrassed commander by the name of Varsi. He had been allowed aboard the Campari, been gruffly asked into Bullen’s day-cabin, accepted a drink, been very apologetic and respectful and suggested a way out of the dilemma.

How would it be if the search were carried out not by his own men but by British Customs officials in the regular course of their duty, with his men present solely in the capacity of observers. Captain Bullen, after much outraged humming and hawing, had finally agreed. Not only did this suggestion save face and salvage honour to a certain degree, but he was in an impossible situation anyway, and he knew it. Until the search was completed, the Kingston authorities refused medical clearance, and until he had this clearance it would be impossible to unload the six hundred tons of food and machinery he had for delivery there. And the port officials could also make things very difficult indeed by refusing clearance papers to sail.

And so what seemed like every Customs official in Jamaica was routed out and the search began at 9 p.m. It lasted until 2 a.m. the following morning. Captain Bullen fumed as steadily and sulphurously as a volcano about to erupt. The passengers fumed, partly because of having to suffer the indignity of having their cabins so meticulously searched, partly because of their being kept out of their beds until the early hours of the morning. And, above all, the crew fumed because, on this occasion, even the normally tolerant Customs were forced to take note of the hundreds of bottles of liquor and thousands of cigarettes uncovered by their search.

Nothing else, of course, was found. Apologies were offered and ignored. Medical clearance was given and unloading began: we left Kingston late that night. For all of the following twenty-four hours Captain Bullen brooded over the recent happenings, then had sent off a couple of cablegrams, one to the head office in London, the other to the Ministry of Transport, telling them what he, Captain Bullen thought of them. And now, it seemed, they in turn had told Captain Bullen what they thought of him. I could understand his feelings about Dr. Slingsby Caroline, who was probably in China by this time.

A high-pitched shout of warning brought us both sharply back to the present and what was going on around us. One of the two chain slings round the big crate now poised exactly over the hatchway to number four hold had suddenly come adrift, one end of the crate dropping down through an angle of 60 degrees and bringing up with a jerking jolt that made even the big jumbo derrick shake and quiver with the strain. The chances were good that the crate would now slip through the remaining sling and crash down on to the floor of the hold far below, which is probably what would have happened if two of the crew holding on to a corner guiding rope hadn’t been quick-witted enough to throw all their weight on to it and so prevent the crate from tilting over at too steep an angle and sliding free. But even as it was it was still touch and go.

The crate swung back towards the side of the ship, the two men on the guide-rope still hanging on desperately. I caught a glimpse of the stevedores on the quayside below, their faces twisted into expressions of frozen panic: in the new people’s democracy where all men were free and equal, the penalty for this sort of carelessness was probably the firing squad: nothing else could have accounted for their otherwise inexplicably genuine terror. The crate began to swing back over the hold. I yelled to the men beneath to run clear and simultaneously gave the signal for emergency lowering. The winchman, fortunately, was as quick-witted as he was experienced, and as the wildly careering crate swung jerkily back to dead centre he lowered away at two or three times the normal speed, braking just seconds before the lowermost corner of the crate crunched and splintered against the floor of the hold. Moments later the entire length of the crate was resting on the bottom.

Captain Bullen fished a handkerchief from his drills, removed his gold-braided cap and slowly mopped his sandy hair and sweating brow. He appeared to be communing with himself.

“This,” he said finally, “is the bloody end. Captain Bullen in the dog-house. The crew sore as hell. The passengers hopping mad. Two days behind schedule. Searched by the Americans from truck to keelson like a contraband-runner. Now probably carrying contraband. No sign of our latest bunch of passengers. Got to clear the harbour bar by six. And now this band of madmen trying to send us to the bottom. A man can stand so much, First, just so much.” He replaced his cap. “Shakespeare had something to say about this, First.”

“A sea of troubles, sir?”

“No, something else. But apt enough.” He sighed. “Get the second officer to relieve you. Third’s checking stores. Get the fourth—no, not that blithering nincompoop—get the bo’sun, he talks Spanish like a native anyway, to take over on the shore side. Any objections and that’s the last piece of cargo we load. Then you and I are having lunch, First.”

“I told Miss Beresford that I wouldn’t——”

“If you think,” Captain Bullen interrupted heavily, “that I’m going to listen to that bunch jangling their money-bags and bemoaning their hard lot from hors d’œuvre right through to coffee, you must be out of your mind. We’ll have it in my cabin.”

And so we had it in his cabin. It was the usual Campari meal, something for even the most blasé epicure to dream about, and Captain Bullen, for once and understandably, made an exception to his rule that neither he nor his officers should drink with lunch. By the time the meal was over he was feeling almost human again and once went so far as to call me “Johhny-me-boy.” It wouldn’t last. But it was all pleasant enough, and it was with reluctance that I finally quit the air-conditioned coolness of the captain’s day-cabin for the blazing sunshine outside to relieve the second officer.

He smiled widely as I approached number four hold. Tommy Wilson was always smiling. He was a dark, wiry Welshman of middle height, with an infectious grin and an immense zest for life, no matter what came his way.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“You can see for yourself.” He waved a complacent hand towards the pile of stacked crates on the quayside, now diminished by a good third since I had seen it last. “Speed allied with efficiency. When Wilson is on the job let no man ever——”

“The bo’sun’s name is MacDonald, not Wilson,” I said.

“So it is.” He laughed, glanced down to where the bo’sun, a big, tough, infinitely competent Hebridean islander was haranguing the bearded stevedores, and shook his head admiringly. “I wish I could understand what he’s saying.”

“Translation would be superfluous,” I said dryly. “I’ll take over. Old man wants you to go ashore.”

“Ashore?” His face lit up, in two short years the second’s shoregoing exploits had already passed into the realms of legend. “Let no man ever say that Wilson ignored duty’s call. Twenty minutes for a shower, shave and shake out the number ones——”

“The agent’s offices are just beyond the dock gates,” I interrupted. “You can go as you are. Find out what’s happened to our latest passengers. Captain’s beginning to worry about them, if they’re not here by five o’clock he’s sailing without them.”

Wilson left. The sun started westering, but the heat stayed as it was. Thanks to MacDonald’s competence and uninhibited command of the Spanish language, the cargo on the quayside steadily and rapidly diminished. Wilson returned to report no sign of our passengers. The agent had been very nervous indeed. They were very important people, Señor, very, very important. One of them was the most important man in the whole province of Camafuegos. A jeep had already been dispatched westwards along the coast road to look for them. It sometimes happened, the señor understood, that a car spring would go or a shock absorber snap. When Wilson had innocently inquired if this was because the revolutionary government had no money left to pay for the filling in of the enormous potholes in the roads, the agent had become even more nervous and said indignantly that it was entirely the fault of the inferior metal those perfidious Americanos used in the construction of their vehicles. Wilson said he had left with the impression that Detroit had a special assembly line exclusively devoted to turning out deliberately inferior cars destined solely for this particular corner of the Caribbean.

Wilson went away. The cargo continued to move steadily into number four hold. About four o’clock in the afternoon I heard the sound of the clashing of gears and the asthmatic wheezing of what sounded like a very elderly engine indeed. This, I thought, would be the passengers at last, but no: what clanked into view round the corner of the dock gate was a dilapidated truck with hardly a shred of paint left on the bodywork, white canvas showing on the tyres and the engine hood removed to reveal what looked, from my elevation, like a solid block of rust. One of the special Detroit jobs, probably. On its cracked and splintered platform it carried three medium-sized crates, freshly boxed and metal-banded.