One morning Haggerty was simply gone. She’d checked out before he got up, and left no message. Then, two days later, the drunk had abruptly come to an end. He was aboard an afternoon flight from San Diego to San Francisco. The miniskirted stewardess had just served him a double martini when he looked down and saw the blue of the Pacific below them and wondered how he could have been so stupid that it had never occurred to him before. He’d been searching in the wrong place all the time. It was out there. He handed the drink back to her. “Tell the captain to have one on me.”
“You want him to lose his job?” she asked with mock severity.
“Give him a doggie bag. He can take it home.”
For the fifth time Karen Brooke tried to wrench her thoughts back to the book in her hands, but too many conflicting emotions were pulling at her. She was uneasy, and helpless, and illogically angry at herself. Captain Steen worried her, and she couldn’t make up her mind about Lind. He remained a complete enigma. One moment she trusted him, and then the next she was convinced he was a monster or madman.
And there was nobody she could talk to. Goddard? He was too self-sufficient and impervious to share any of her forebodings about this ship, and would only make her feel ridiculous. Further, in the past hour she had faced the fact, finally, that she didn’t like him, and it was the timing of this that had occasioned her self-anger. Why couldn’t she have arrived at the conclusion before she inadvertently saw Madeleine Lennox slipping into his cabin? This, she told herself hotly, had nothing to do with it, but the stupid fact remained there to taunt her.
She had found him attractive at first, with the homely male face, the assurance, and good manners, until she began to suspect this was all there was to him, that there was no warmth anywhere or capacity for feeling. She was sick to death of the hard, the smooth, and the impervious. They were too good at everything, and never seemed to have any doubts at all. Fear was alien to them because they were convinced they could, and nearly always did, walk away from the wreckage unscathed, while the involved, the less well-coordinated, and the earnest squares got their heads knocked off. And when, infrequently, one of the group did kill himself in the pursuit of kicks, the others bore it very lightly. Within a month after she’d watched in horror as Stacey fell from that sheer rock face in Yosemite, three of his very good, and very married, friends had made passes at her.
She was aware she was by no means unique in this; it probably happened to most widows and divorcees, but the callousness and the calm assumption they were doing her a favor had left her with what she felt was a permanent aversion to the breed. Too bad about old Stace, but they knew how rough it must be, and there was no sense in her wrecking her health. The fact that their marriage was already shaky and might have wound up in divorce hadn’t changed her reaction to these impervious but magnanimous studs who were willing to service her until she had made a permanent arrangement of some kind. And Goddard was another one, merely a few years older and hence a little smoother and more assured, and more immunized against the danger of ever feeling anything.
She dropped the book on the desk, and switched out the light. The fan droned on in its futile attempt to do anything about the heat. She felt very much alone and troubled, and it was a long time before she could get to sleep.
When Goddard awoke it was dawn and Madeleine Lennox was awake beside him, raised on one elbow to appraise the failure of her hand’s manipulation. Their eyes met. “O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low?” she asked. She smiled, kissed him softly on the cheek, and climbed naked from the bunk to gather up her pajamas.
When she went out, he stepped to the door and watched until she was inside her own cabin again. There was no one else in the passageway. He was just about to close the door when Barset appeared at the far end of it. He called out to ask how Captain Steen was.
Improving, Barset replied; resting much easier. Goddard closed the door and lit a cigarette, knowing Madeleine Lennox would have heard the good news too. Hell, there was nothing to worry about; it was all imagination.
X
IN THE PANTRY NEXT DOOR to the dining room Rafferty stirred the coffee again in the small pot to be sure the two tablets were dissolved. He glanced at his watch. It was seven twenty-five A.M.; ten minutes to go. He set the pot on a tray with the little pitcher of condensed milk and the sugar bowl, slipped on the white jacket with its exciting hard slab of weight in the right-hand pocket, and carried the tray down the passageway to Madeleine Lennox’ cabin. He knocked. “Coffee,” he said.
“Just a minute,” she called out. There was the sound of the door’s being unlatched. He went in. She was sitting on the side of her bunk in pajamas, lighting a cigarette. She smiled. “You’re a little early this morning. Thank you, Dominick.”
“Y’welcome,” he said. He set the tray on the desk beside the bunk, and as he turned he took the usual good look down the open collar of the pajamas. She never seemed to get wise. Not a bad-looking pair of knockers, either, for an old biddy, and several times he’d been tempted to reach down and cop a handful, but you never knew. She might squawk. Not that he was afraid of Barset, but he didn’t want that big cold-eyed son of a bitch looking down his throat; he’d seen some of his work.
If he’d moved in soon enough he might have got some of it, he thought, stepping into the bathroom as though checking the towel supply and soap. Barset had beat him to it, though; he was pretty sure the scrawny bastard had been dipping his wick in it ever since they left Callao, and now it looked like Goddardstein was having it delivered to his room. Out of sight, he whistled tunelessly, opened and closed the door of the medicine cabinet, and turned on a faucet momentarily. That Hollywood phony, who’d he think he was fooling, changing his name? The whole place was Jews and nigger-lovers, they ought to burn it down.
He came out. “I’ll bring you a couple fresh towels,” he said, looking around at her as he reached for the door.
“Thank you.” She tilted the pot to fill the cup again, and added some more sugar. He went out into the passageway. She hadn’t noticed a thing; that crappy condensed milk covered the taste of it all right. He stepped out on deck on the starboard side and looked forward. The bos’n and Otto and the other sailor were halfway down it now, coming this way as they washed down with the fire hose and brooms. Four minutes to go.
He stepped back into the passageway and went forward to the linen locker. He picked up two bath towels, came back, and knocked on the door of Madeleine Lennox’ cabin. Before he slipped in he shot a glance both ways along the passageway; nobody was in sight. She looked up and patted back a yawn. She smiled at him, with a puzzled shake of the head, and said, “I feel so sleepy.”
“It’s this heat,” he said. “I better close your porthole; they’re washing down.”
He stepped past her, brushing her knees as she sat on the bunk, and leaned over the desk to dog down the porthole. The coffeepot and cup were both empty; she’d drunk it all. He turned and went into the bathroom, still carrying the towels.
Madeleine Lennox gazed dreamily after him and yawned again. Why, he didn’t look down my pajamas that time, she thought in wonder. After a beautifully planned and executed maneuver like that—God, what’s the matter with me, didn’t we sleep at all last night?—after that perfect down-range turn to come in over target at the precise angle to see clear to my navel, he didn’t even look. Could I have aged that much in five minutes?
She was conscious of a roaring sound that puzzled her for a moment; then she recognized it as the stream from the fire hose beating on the bulkhead of Harry’s cabin next door. But she still seemed to be floating off into a rosy cloud, and it was hard to focus or keep her thoughts straight. What was she thinking about? Oh, yes, the twilight of the boob. Her declining box-office. Somewhere between age thirteen, when they started trying to see up your dress, down your dress, or through your dress, and age ninety, when the show had been warehoused for years, there had to be some precise instant of time like the exact balancing point of a teeter-totte
r when they simply stopped peeking, once and forever. Like that. Was it possible she had pinpointed this historic moment? Five minutes ago she could have sold advertising space on them, at least at sea—
There was a swishing sound of water along the deck outside, and then an even louder drumming as the stream from the fire hose beat on her own bulkhead and closed porthole. And coincident with this momentary din she saw Rafferty emerge from the bathroom. He had a towel in his right hand, and as he came toward her with his beefy grin he suddenly flipped the towel over into his left, and under it was a blue-black slab of metal which as the widow of a naval officer she could recognize as a sidearm even at the moment of dropping off to sleep like this. He raised it over her head, but there didn’t seem to be much she could do about it.
Rafferty slashed downward with the .45, catching her just above the hairline on the left side of her head, the brutal impact lost under the beating of water against the bulkhead. As she pitched forward he caught her and stretched her out on the bunk with the towel under her head. Dropping the gun back in his pocket, he began yanking at the legs of the pajamas. Damn it, there must be a zipper somewhere. He located it at her left hip, stripped off the garment, and hurriedly unbuttoned the pajama top. Being careful to keep her head on the towel, he turned her face down, and peeled this garment off to complete undressing her.
Stacked, for an old dame. He squeezed an appreciative handful of buttock, and wished he had time to tear off a quickie, but he didn’t like the way that big bastard had looked when he’d told him just what would happen if he didn’t get out of here on schedule. He was taking enough chances carrying this gun, instead of the sap he was supposed to use.
He carried her into the bathroom and stretched her out under the shower. A trickle of blood ran out of her hair onto the tile. He came out, carefully checking the deck between bathroom and bunk. The bos’n and his fire hose were drawing farther away now, and he had to hurry. There were two or three drops of blood. Grabbing the already stained towel off the bunk, he wiped them up, and rolled the towel inside another.
In the bathroom again, he turned on the shower, letting it beat down on her, and dropped a bar of soap on the streaming tile beside her body. He stepped back, surveying the scene and nagged by a feeling there was something he hadn’t done, but it looked all right. She was wet all over, and the soap was there where she’d stepped on it and fallen. He shrugged and went out.
With the rolled towels under his arm, he opened the screen door and peered out into the passageway. No one was in sight. He stepped out quickly and strolled back to the pantry. Karl was in the dining room, setting up for breakfast. He shoved the towels into the bottom of a garbage can he was supposed to have emptied last night, and carried it aft, across the well-deck. The stink was everywhere this morning, and one of the deck apes was gawking up at the ventilators where you could see the smoke coming out. He pointed.
“It’s burnin’ worse all the time.”
“Good man,” Rafferty said approvingly. “Give me a report every hour.” What a clown, you’d think it was his cotton. He went up onto the poop to the fantail and emptied the can. Lighting a cigarette, he stared boredly aft as the two towels and the flotsam of garbage dropped back in the white water of the wake and disappeared. It was going to be another hot day.
Goddard showered at a quarter of eight, and as he turned off the water he could hear the shower running on the other side of the bulkhead in Mrs. Lennox’ bathroom. He was putting a new blade in the razor to shave when he became aware that the smell of burning cotton had now penetrated clear in here. Clad only in slacks and slippers, he went out on deck and walked aft in the lifeless heat. A squall was making up far off on the horizon to starboard, but what little breeze there was here came from almost directly astern, so there was little movement of air along the superstructure of the ship. Smoke was curling from both ventilators of number three hold, no longer in intermittent wisps but in a steady outpouring that drifted straight up in the brassy sunlight of early morning. A sheen, or haze, seemed to hang over the well-deck itself, and the odor was strong enough to irritate the throat. The Leander was in trouble that was growing worse by the hour.
He’d come aboard the ship in a rubber raft, and he wondered now if he were going to leave it in a lifeboat. If it did come to that, he reflected, he wasn’t going to be in great demand as an occupant of either boat. “No, you take the hard-luck bastard in that one. We don’t want him in here.” Maybe you couldn’t blame them, at that; a murder, a suicide, a heart attack, and a fire, all in three days, might start a witch-hunt almost anywhere.
He went back and shaved. He had finished and was drying the razor when he became aware that Mrs. Lennox’ shower was still running. He grinned. She’d be a great asset on a small boat; she would have used up the Shoshone’s six weeks’ supply of water before breakfast the first morning. Well, it was one way to keep cool.
Karen Brooke was alone in the dining room when he went in a few minutes past eight. She was wearing a sleeveless summer dress of almost the same shade of blue as her eyes, which in combination with the swirl of honey-colored hair seemed to intensify her tan.
“You look very nice,” he said.
She smiled, but her manner was cool and impersonal. “Thank you, Mr. Goddard. I consider that a real compliment, in view of the priority.”
“How’s that?” he asked.
“Lots of men would have said the ship’s afire, and then you look nice.”
“Oh, there are clods like that.” He sobered. “How long have you known it?”
“Since yesterday. About the same time you asked me what the cargo was.”
“But there’s still no official recognition?”
“No. Mr. Lind hasn’t been down yet. But I suppose they’ve known it for the past few days. It might be what brought on Captain Steen’s heart attack, don’t you think?”
He nodded. “Anyway, he’s better this morning, according to Barset.”
“Yes, I know.”
Karl came in. Goddard asked for a poached egg and some coffee. Karl poured the coffee and went back to the pantry.
“Is all of number three loaded with cotton?” Goddard asked. “Tween-decks too?”
“No-o.” She frowned, trying to remember. “They were just finishing the loading when I came aboard, and it seems to me the tween-decks in that one is general cargo—cases of canned goods, leather, a lot of big carboys in crates, things like that.”
“You don’t know what’s in the carboys?”
She nodded. “Alcohol.”
He said nothing, but it was obvious from her expression she knew as well as he did the potentialities of that combination—alcohol-saturated cotton—if those carboys started breaking in the heat down there.
Lind came in. He greeted them abstractedly, and it struck Goddard he came as near to looking troubled as he had ever seen him. Well, it might be understandable under the circumstances. When Karen asked how Captain Steen was doing, he shook his head and frowned.
“I don’t know. I wish now I’d transferred him to the Kungsholm.”
“Has he had another attack?” Goddard asked.
“No, not that. He rested quietly all night, and his pulse was all right. But the past hour he’s had more trouble breathing. And there may be some pulmonary edema—fluid in the lungs.”
“Pneumonia?” Goddard asked.
“No. But it could be a symptom of congestive heart failure. Sparks is still in touch with the Public Health Service doctors, and we’ve got everything they recommend—but, I don’t know.”
“Well,” Karen said, “they wouldn’t have any more on the Kungsholm.”
“Just one thing,” Lind said bleakly. “A licensed doctor, instead of a ham-handed sailor.” He shrugged then, and managed a wry grin, with a return of some of the old exuberance and self-confidence. “Oh, before I forget. We’re afire in number three hold. Not supposed to reveal things like that to you fluttery and hysterical passengers, but it??
?s getting a little like trying to hide an eight-month pregnancy.”
“Is there anything you can do?” Goddard asked.
“We’re going to start throwing water in it as soon as we can get hoses down through the stuff in the tween-decks.”
“Is there any chance of telling where the burning bales are?”
“Not much. And if they’re very far down, it’ll be hard to get any water to them. But if we can wet enough of them on top maybe we can keep it under control.” Lind drained his cup of coffee and got up without ordering breakfast. “You don’t know anybody who’s got a chicken farm for sale?”
He went out. Here we go again, Goddard thought. Will the real Eric Lind stand up? Wasn’t there any way you could arrive at some answer, some definite and final conclusion that would remain valid for at least an hour? Steen was better, so it was all a pipe dream, but now we’re being prepared for the next bulletin that he’s dead. Or are we? He thought uneasily of Madeleine Lennox. No, she was all right. She was up; he’d heard her taking a shower.
Karen excused herself and left. He finished his poached egg and lit a cigarette while he drank another cup of coffee. When he went outside and walked aft, the bos’n and two sailors were knocking out the wedges that secured the tarpaulins on number three’s hatch cover. Smoke was filtering up here and there around the edges of it. Another man was unrolling a fire hose. He wondered if they had gas masks aboard; the smoke was going to be pretty bad down there.
He reached for a cigarette, but discovered the pack was empty. He tossed it over the side and went back to his cabin for another. As he was tearing the cellophane from it he was arrested by the faint sound issuing from the open door of his bathroom. He frowned, and stepped inside to be sure. The shower was still running in the one next door. After nearly forty-five minutes? He hurried out into the passageway.
Only the screen door was closed, and through it he could just hear the slight hissing of the water. He knocked. There was no answer, no sound of movement. Could she have gone off and forgotten it? He checked the dining room and the lounge and men the deck outside. She was nowhere around. Uneasy now, he came back and knocked again, and when there was still no response he stepped next door to Karen’s cabin and rapped. She looked out.