And the Deep Blue Sea

by Charles Williams

  “Thank you.”

  “—unless you feel you’d rather, of course. The bos’n can always use an extra hand, and I am sure you wouldn’t want them to carry you for cigarettes and toilet articles you will need.”

  “But I understand you carry passengers.” Goddard’s voice was still quiet, but there was a hard edge to it. “And the cabins are not all sold. I’ll take one, at the full rate from Callao to Manila.”

  This earned him a pale but condescending smile. “Passage has to be paid in advance. And I’m afraid I have no authority to change the company rule.”

  “Is your wireless operator on duty now?”

  “He is subject to call at any time. Why?”

  “Would you ask him to come up and bring a message blank? I’d like to send a radiogram.” Goddard slipped off the watch and set it on the desk. He felt like the type of overbearing, exhibitionist jerk he detested above everything, but he was too angry to care. “Lock this in your safe as security for the message charges; it’s a Rolex chronometer that sells for around six hundred dollars in this type of case. If you’ll tell me the name of your agents in Los Angeles, my attorneys will deposit with them this afternoon the money to cover my passage and other expenses from here to Manila, the bond you will have to post, and my fare back to the United States if the Philippine authorities hold you responsible for it.”

  “Uh—yes. Of course.” Steen appeared to hesitate for a moment, and then calmly handed back the watch, immune to insult. “I guess it will be all right.” He stepped out into the wheelhouse and spoke into the telephone, and in a minute the wireless operator appeared, a young Latin with a slender, inscrutable face still bearing traces of some ancient bout with smallpox.

  “Sparks, this is Mr. Goddard. He wants to send a message,” Steen said.

  Goddard stood up and said, “How do you do.” Sparks nodded, neither volunteering his name nor offering to shake hands, and Goddard caught the little flicker of hatred in the jet depths of the eyes before they became impassive again. Yanqui go home. Could be Cuban, Goddard thought, or Panamanian. Or from anywhere south of San Diego, with our record.

  “You can get the States all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Sparks said, but it was Steen who volunteered the information they had shortwave. Sparks handed him the pad of blanks and went out into the wheelhouse to wait. Captain Steen looked in his files for the line’s agents in San Pedro, and said the fare from Callao to Manila was five hundred and thirty dollars.

  “Then two thousand should cover everything,” Goddard said. “Any balance, you can refund in Manila.” He wrote out the message, addressed to his attorneys in Beverly Hills.

  SHOSHONE DOWNWENT STOP PICKED UP BY SS LEANDER BOUND MANILA STOP PLEASE DEPOSIT TODAY WITH LINE’S AGENTS BARWICK AND KLINE SAN PEDRO TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS TO COVER PASSAGE, MANILA EXPENSES, AND RETURN FARE TO STATES STOP REQUEST AGENTS VERIFY RECEIPT SOONEST CAPTAIN STEEN LEANDER—

  GODDARD

  Sparks made the word count and computed the charges. “That will be eleven thirteen.” There was a barely perceptible pause, and he added, “In real money.”

  “You don’t have to lean on it,” Goddard said softly. “I heard you the first time.”

  Steen told the operator the company guaranteed payment, and the young Latin went out. “I’ll notify the steward,” Steen said to Goddard. “He will take care of you.”

  “Aren’t you going to wait for the verification?” Goddard asked. Steen indicated it wouldn’t be necessary. Maybe the watch had impressed him. Goddard went out, a little ashamed and regretting the whole thing; he didn’t care in the slightest where he was quartered, and working on deck would have been fun. He was surprised, too, that the sanctimonious fraud could have made him lose his cool; he’d thought he was impervious to the Steens of the world.

  Lind was just coming in. He was bareheaded, in khakis and moccasins, and apparently never wore shoulder boards. He grinned at Goddard. “Stick around a minute. I’ve got some things in my room you may be able to use.”

  “Sure,” Goddard said. “Thanks.” He went out and leaned on the rail on the starboard wing of the bridge. It would be a different ship, he thought, if Lind were master of it.

  IV

  “APPENDECTOMY?” LIND ASKED. “SPINAL TAP? Bothered with impacted teeth? Lover’s catarrh? I’m always looking for a live one.”

  Goddard grinned and indicated the skull jammed behind some books on the desk. “Not if that’s a former patient.”

  “Bought it from a Moro down in the Celebes,” Lind said. “You can still see where somebody got him with a bolo; probably the guy who sold it to me. Drink? Short one before lunch?”

  “Sure, if it’s that or surgery,” Goddard said.

  Lind yanked open a drawer and brought out a bottle of Canadian Club and two glasses. “Did you know that the references to wine in the New Testament really meant Welch’s grape juice? It was a faulty translation from the Greek.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that,” Goddard said. He looked around the cabin again. While at first glance it would appear it could only have been assembled by a pack rat, a madman, or the vortex of a tornado, a more subjective appraisal revealed the blazing and restless mind that complemented the vast male exuberance of its tenant. More outpatient clinic or dispensary than living quarters, it also bore some resemblance to a library after an earthquake, with traces here and there of a museum. Anchored to the desk was a sterilizer containing scalpels, tooth forceps, hemostats, and hypodermic syringes. Boxes and specially built shelves held the contents of a small pharmacy—bottles, vials, tubes, splints, packaged sutures, and rolls of gauze and tape. There were several ebony carvings and a bolo, and books were everywhere, in English, German, and French, two full shelves plus more piled on the settee and on the deck. Some were medical textbooks, in addition to the standard first-aid manuals. Cugle and Bowditch were sandwiched between Faulkner and Gide. Goddard ran his eye on down the rows—Goethe, African Genesis, Vance Packard, Also Sprach Zarathustra, L’Etre et le Néant. There was a combination, Nietzche and Sartre.

  Lind handed him the drink, and they clicked glasses. “Down the hatch.”

  “Skol,” Goddard said. “You were a medical student?”

  “Two years. And you used to be a merchant seaman?”

  “A few trips as ordinary when I was a kid. How’d you know?”

  “You asked me if I was the mate, remember? Not chief mate or first mate.” Lind opened a closet. “I’ve got some slacks here that might fit you. How big are you?”

  “Six feet one,” Goddard said. “One-ninety.”

  “Should be just about right then.” Lind handed him two pairs of light flannel slacks. “Some Chileno dry-cleaner shrunk ’em. And here’s another sport shirt, a drip-dry.” He added socks, belt, a pair of slippers, handkerchiefs, and a spare safety razor.

  “Thanks a million,” Goddard said.

  “I’ve got a weak stomach. Can’t eat with people who never change their clothes.” Lind tossed off the rest of his drink, and shook his head. “I don’t see why in hell you couldn’t have had scurvy, at least. Pick up a guy drifting around in a million square miles of ocean on some woman’s diaphragm, and he’s healthy as a horse.”

  Cabin B, in the starboard passageway of the promenade deck, contained two bunks on opposite sides of the room, a desk, closet, and small rug, and had its own shower. Lunch was served at twelve thirty, Barset said, and dinner at six. There was no bar, but he could buy anything he wanted from the bonded stores. Goddard looked over the list and ordered six bottles of Beefeaters gin, a bottle of vermouth, and three cartons of Camels.

  “And would you ask the cabin steward to bring me a pitcher and some ice?” he added.

  He showered, put on a pair of Lind’s slacks and a sport shirt and the slippers, and stowed the rest of his meager possessions. Closet space was going to be no problem. The cabin steward pushed open the door and came in without knocking. He was young and looked tough, with a me
aty face, green eyes in which there was no expression whatever, and shoulders that strained at the white jacket. Brutal hands with a number of broken knuckles held a tray containing ice and a pitcher. “Where you want it?” he asked.

  “On the desk,” Goddard said. “What’s your name?”

  “Rafferty.”

  “And where are you from, Rafferty?”

  “Oakland. Or maybe it was Pittsburgh.”

  It’s done to death, Goddard thought. If he were trying out for the young storm trooper or the motorcycle hoodlum I’d turn him down as a cliché. Rafferty put down the tray and asked, with just the right shade of insolence, “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Goddard said. “But in Oakland or maybe it was Pittsburgh, somebody probably told you about pushing open doors without knocking.”

  “I’ll try to remember that, Mr. Goddard, sir. I’ll try real hard.”

  “I would, Rafferty,” Goddard said pleasantly. “Inevitably in this vale of tears you’ll run across some mean son of a bitch who’ll dump you on your stupid ass the second time you do it.”

  There was the merest flicker of surprise at this unusual reaction from the square world; then the turntable started again and the needle dropped back into the groove. “How about that?” Rafferty said. He went out.

  Goddard mixed a pitcher of martinis, for the second time today a little disgusted with himself. But maybe he was simply becoming aware of people again and had a tendency to overreact, the way sensation is exaggerated in a part of the body that has been numb for a long time. He poured a drink over ice and went out into the passageway. He remembered the dining saloon was aft, next to Barset’s quarters, so the lounge should be forward. There was a thwartships passageway here with doors opening onto the deck, port and starboard, and a wide double door into the lounge. He looked in.

  There was a long settee across the forward end with portholes above it looking out over the forward well-deck, several armchairs, a couple of anchored bridge tables, and some bookshelves and a sideboard. A blond woman in a sleeveless print dress was standing with her back to him, one knee on the settee as she looked out an open porthole. She was bare-legged and wore gilt sandals, and her arms and legs were tanned.

  “Mrs. Brooke?” he asked.

  She turned. He was conscious of a slender, composed face with high cheekbones and just faintly slanted blue eyes. The sailors were right, of course; she was pretty, but it was the impression of poise that interested him more. She smiled at him, the eyes cool and supremely self-possessed, “Yes. How do you do, Mr. Goddard.”

  “Nobody ever saved my life before,” he said, “except possibly a few people with iron self-control who didn’t kill me, so I’m not sure of the protocol.”

  “Well, I didn’t really save your life. I just happened—”

  “Mrs. Brooke, there were witnesses, so there’s no way you can weasel out of it. Cop out, and throw yourself on the mercy of the court.” He indicated the glass. “Do you drink?”

  “We-e-ell, not to excess,” she said gravely. “But I do have a small one now and then with motion-picture producers I meet floating around on rafts.”

  “I’d say you still had it under control. So if that includes ex-motion-picture producers, how about a martini?”

  “Thank you,” she said. He went back to his cabin and brought out the pitcher and another glass.

  He poured her drink, and they sat down at one of the bridge tables. “There are certain biographical data,” he said, “that we require here in the Central Bureau of Heroine Identification.”

  “It’s confidential, of course?”

  “Oh, absolutely. It’s processed by our computer complex buried under Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and purely benevolent in aim because it protects you from annoyances like privacy or forgetting to report all your income. Now, all I know about you is that you’re blond, very attractive, probably of Scandinavian descent, you hate airplanes, and you have insomnia and twenty/ twenty vision. What kind of file is that?”

  “Flattering,” she said. “And largely inaccurate. For one thing, I don’t hate airplanes.”

  “Oh, don’t be frightened, Mrs. Brooke,” he assured her. “You can hate airplanes all you like, as long as you don’t start questioning the divinity of the automobile.”

  She smiled. “But I really don’t. It’s just that I like ships better. Also, I work for a steamship company that is agent for the Hayworth Line in Lima. And my father was a shipmaster.”

  “American?” he asked.

  “No, Danish,” she said. She went on. Her father was lost at sea in World War II when his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. Her mother remarried when Karen was twelve. Her stepfather was an American businessman living in Europe, later transferred to Havana for several years and finally back to the States. Karen had gone to school in Berkeley, majoring in business administration, and until her marriage had worked for the San Francisco offices of her father’s old steamship company, the Copenhagen Pacific Line.

  “Danes keep in touch with each other,” she continued, “even if they become citizens of another country, so after my husband died I asked the line if they had a job for me in South America. I speak Spanish, of course, from those years in Havana, so they gave me one in Lima. I was there for a year, and now I’m going to the Manila office. Copenhagen Pacific doesn’t have direct service there, so I booked passage on here.”

  Thumbnail biography, he thought, is a good term. It’s impervious, and protects the raw nerve-ends beneath. And does nothing at all, of course, to explain why a pretty young widow would desert the action around the game preserves where she caught the first one and go wandering across the Pacific alone on a bucket of rivets like this.

  A man appeared in the doorway then and looked in at them and then around the lounge as though searching for someone. Goddard hadn’t seen him before, but Barset’s term “weirdo” came unbidden to his mind, and he knew it must be the passenger with the Polish name. There was no doubt he looked as though he had been ill, and for a long time, and in spite of his outlandish garb of white linen suit and open-throated purple sport shirt with a figured tie draped around it, there was something almost chillingly funereal and somber in his aspect. He gave the appearance of having once been a robust man who had shrunk to a rack of bones, for the suit hung from him in loose folds, as did the skin of his neck, and the gaunt face and the almost totally bald head were a glistening and unnatural white as though he hadn’t been out in sunlight in years.

  “Good morning, Mr. Krasicki,” Karen said. “I’m glad to see you’re up and around today.” She introduced Goddard, who stood up and shook hands.

  “You have been very—how do you say?—fortunate,” Krasicki spoke with a strong accent. “You must excuse me. I have little English.”

  “You’re Polish?” Goddard asked.

  “Yes. But since many years I live in Brazil.”

  Probably a DP, Goddard thought, one of the homeless of World War II. Krasicki muttered something and turned abruptly and went out. A moment later Madeleine Lennox swept in, pausing dramatically just inside the doorway to chide Karen, “So! You’ve already grabbed off our celebrity.”

  She proceeded to dominate the scene with an animation that Goddard appraised as falling somewhere between kittenish and hectic, and which after a while began to puzzle him as he became aware there was an alert and cultivated mind being sabotaged by all this determined girlishness. Normally you could ascribe it to the desperation tactics of fifty having to compete with thirty, but that would seem to make little sense here where there was no competition and nothing to compete for. They sat down at the table, Karen across from him and Madeleine Lennox on his right. She thanked him a little too effusively but would just have to pass up the martini. She limited herself to one a day, and always took that just before dinner. But he was going to give her a rain check, wasn’t he?

  She did look younger than fifty, Goddard thought, particularly the figure, and he realized the one martini a day
was part of it, along with a rigid diet and exercises to keep the waist in. Her face, while quite pretty, showed perhaps a few more lines than the face of an actress the same age, but the actress would have had a larger and more expensive staff at work on the project and plastic surgeons would have winched up on the halyards once or twice by this time. The ash-blond hair, which was shoulder-length, had no doubt been carefully chosen as the easiest shade for hiding the gray, but she had fine eyes with the intelligence showing through at moments when she forgot to be captivating.

  She’d seen Tin Can, and adored it. It was so authentic, dear, she cooed, turning to include Karen in the conversation; it was obvious Mr. Goddard was an old navy man himself. Wouldn’t it be the most fantastic thing if he’d known her late husband, who’d been in destroyers then himself? He was the executive officer of one in that same battle. Goddard said he was sorry, but he didn’t remember a Lieutenant Lennox, so they’d probably never been on the same ship. He was an enlisted man, anyway.

  She knew a lot of people around Southern California, mostly in San Diego but some in Bel Air and Beverly Hills. It was while she was gaily tossing off these names, all unknown to Goddard, that her left leg first brushed against his under the table. He paid no attention then; it was an accident, of course. No woman could be that unsubtle. She launched into an explanation of why she was aboard the Leander. She’d been taking a cruise around South America on a freighter of the Moore McCormack line, intending to get off when she reached the Canal where she had a reservation to board a Lykes freighter bound for the Far East, but she’d become ill and had to go to a hospital in Lima. By the time she recovered it was too late to catch the Lykes ship, so she’d booked passage on the Leander. Her knee brushed lightly against Goddard’s again, came back, made a little stroking movement up and down, and remained. It didn’t take Mrs. Lennox forever to finish with the weather and move on to more significant topics; they’d known each other about ten minutes.