And the Deep Blue Sea

by Charles Williams

  Somewhere in the depths of number three hold was a smoldering bale of cotton like a cancer cell, being consumed by slow combustion that inexorably spread outward to attack adjoining bales. It could have been burning inside when it came aboard, or some longshoreman’s stolen cigarette might have started it. The smoldering could go on for days or weeks without bursting into flame, eating away, charring, half-smothered, while the temperature inside the mass continued to rise, until it came out on the surface and some of the bales below began to collapse, exposing enough of it to the air to become a raging fire.

  Did Steen know about it? Probably, Goddard thought, but unless he had a fire-smothering system in the holds there wasn’t much he could do about it but hold his breath and pray. If the burning bales were far down or in the center of the hold, trying to get water to them through thousands of others was futile, short of flooding the entire hold.

  Sparks came down the ladder. He jerked his head curtly. “Captain says to come up to his office.”

  Goddard studied him with silent and calculated arrogance for thirty seconds, and then said, “It must have suffered in the translation.” He could get enough of this surly bastard; if he were convinced all Yanquis were overbearing pigs, why disappoint him?

  With no change of expression, Sparks repeated the message in Spanish, which Goddard knew well enough to follow. “Thank you,” he said. “But I wasn’t referring to the language. Just the manners.” He went up the ladder.

  Steen looked worried. “Sit down, Mr. Goddard,” he said with attempted casualness that didn’t quite go over. He was seated at his desk with a block of yellow paper in front of him. Goddard sat in one of the armchairs. Before Steen could speak, there was another knock outside the door. It was Mr. Pargoras, the chief engineer, a bald, swarthy man in khakis completely drowned with perspiration. He stepped inside and nodded to Goddard.

  “What is it, Chief?” Steen asked. “About finished?”

  “It’ll be another half hour.” The chief mopped his face with a sodden handkerchief. “We can’t work in that shaft alley more than a few minutes at a time. One man’s already passed out.”

  Goddard could imagine it, with the ship stopped and no air coming down the ventilators. The shaft alley was a steel tunnel running across the bottom of number three and four holds from the engine room amidships to the propeller.

  “What’s the temperature now?” Steen asked.

  “A hundred and twenty where we’re working.” There was a faint pause, and he added, “Under number three, you can’t hold your hand on the plates.”

  Goddard caught Steen’s slight nod and the exchanged glance. They wouldn’t have discussed it in front of him, except that they didn’t think he would know what they meant. It was those burning bales of cotton, above or around the shaft alley, which meant they were right at the bottom of the hold. So Steen did know it was afire. That probably accounted for the strain visible on his face. Or at least part of it, Goddard thought.

  The chief went out. Captain Steen cleared his throat, and said, “The reason I asked to see you, Mr. Goddard, is that I’m writing a report of the—ah—shooting. You understand, of course, there will be a very thorough investigation with a great deal of paperwork, depositions, testimony, eyewitness accounts—”

  Goddard was puzzled, as much by the captain’s uncertain manner as he was by this circuitous stalking of the obvious. Of course there’d be an investigation.

  Steen went on. “And there were one or two—ah—details I wanted to check with you.”

  “Sure,” Goddard said.

  “Now, you helped Mr. Lind carry Mayr into his cabin. You put him on the bunk, and Mr. Lind asked you to send somebody for the first-aid kit and sterilizer, is that right?”

  “No,” Goddard replied. “He asked me to get them. I’d been to his cabin, and knew where they were.” Lind had made sure of that, all right; he never missed a bet.

  “I see. And during the possibly two minutes you were gone, Mr. Lind was there alone. You came back, and it was probably a minute or two before I came to the doorway. You remarked that the hemorrhaging seemed dark for arterial blood, and Mr. Lind said it was probably from the pulmonary artery. Now, Mr. Lind is a former medical student and very expert at first aid, so he knows more about this, probably, than either of us, but since I’m the master of the ship, the responsibility is mine, and I have to be absolutely sure that we did everything we could to save the man. If one of the big arteries had been severed, of course, there was no chance at all. Mr. Lind had the shirt cut away and the chest exposed, but being outside the door I couldn’t see very well. You were right at the foot of the bunk, so you could. Would you say the blood was pumping from the entrance wounds?”

  Warning bells were beginning to ring everywhere. “That I couldn’t say for sure, Captain. All I know is there was a lot of it; enough to kill anybody.”

  “I see.” Steen frowned. “But you could see the wounds all right?”

  So we’ve finally got to the point, Goddard thought. He either suspects I didn’t see any, or he knows I didn’t see any, but that’s not what he’s after; he wants to know what I think. “No,” he said, “I’m not sure I did.”

  “You didn’t? But you right there by the bunk.”

  “Captain, the entrance wound of a nine millimeter slug is very small, sometimes no more than a dimple. Mayr had a thick mat of hair on his chest, and it was completely covered with blood, so his skin could have been punctured in six places without my seeing any of them. But I don’t understand what difference it makes, anyway. We know he was shot twice through the chest and died within five minutes, so any doctor will tell you nobody could have saved him.”

  Steen nodded. “Then you have no doubts at all it was just as Mr. Lind said?”

  “None whatever, Captain.” And you can quote me, if that’s the object of this. By all means quote me.

  Steen made a notation on his pad, still frowning and thoughtful, and said, “Well, I guess that’s all. Thank you for coming up, Mr. Goddard.”

  Goddard went back to the promenade deck, puzzled and even more uneasy. What was that for? The obvious answer, of course, was that Steen was a party to the plot and was probing, pretending to have doubts himself in order to trap him into an admission he was suspicious of it. But suppose Steen’s doubts were genuine? Where had they come from? And why now, with Krasicki dead? It was like sinking into quicksand, he thought; every time you think you’re back on solid ground it starts to give way under you again.

  With the Leander lying motionless in the water where there was no whisper of breeze, the smell of burning cotton was evident for minutes at a time near the after well-deck, and twice he saw heavy wisps of smoke issue from the ventilators of number three. They drifted straight up, thinned, and disappeared. He wasn’t going to be very popular with the superstitious members of the crew when they discovered it, he thought; he’d already caused the death of two men, and now he’d set their ship afire. In spite of his uneasiness, there was a certain ironic fascination in the thought that while he might be able to cope with the blazing intelligence and educated mind of the mate, against ignorance there was never any defense at all.

  He walked forward and stood at the rail watching the bos’n and four sailors fish-oiling the rusty deck plates of the forward well-deck. They were burned black, stripped to the waist, and dripping sweat under the malevolent glare of the sun. One looked up and saw him, and said something, and the others turned to stare for an instant. He wondered if it were merely the standard salute to a useless slob of a passenger who had nothing to do but live a life of ease, or whether it was more serious.

  Madeleine Lennox came out of the passageway and joined him. She was wearing near the irreducible minimum of clothing, only shorts, halter, and sandals, but her upper lip was moist with perspiration and damp tendrils of hair stuck to her neck. “It’s unbearable,” she said. “Inside or out. My cabin’s like a sauna.”

  “It’ll be a little better when we
get under way again,” Goddard said.

  She looked around and spoke in a lower tone. “You recall what we were talking about last night? I finally remembered the thing that kept bothering me.”

  He was instantly alert, but kept his face impassive. “About what?” he asked.

  “Mayr. And that blood that came out of his mouth. You remember, just before Krasicki came in and let out that scream, you were telling us a funny story. Everybody was laughing, and Mayr started to cough. He put his napkin up to his mouth, and I think he probably slipped something in it, a plastic capsule of some kind he could open by biting down on it. Don’t you think that’s possible?”

  Goddard felt a little chill between his shoulder blades and was aware he knew the answer to the question even before he asked it. “You haven’t told anybody else this?”

  “Just the captain,” she replied. “At breakfast this morning.”

  Maybe it was hopeless now, but he had to make one last effort. He smiled indulgently. “But isn’t there a flaw in your theory somewhere? If the thing was staged, why would Krasicki kill himself?”

  “How do we know he did? It could be another illusion.”

  “I hate to tear your script to pieces,” he said, “but he’s dead. I helped lift his body onto a bunk, and he was not only cold, but stiff.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, I guess that settles it.”

  She would probably shut up now, but it was too late. Well, he asked himself, aren’t you going to warn her at all? Take up the ladder, Mate, I’m aboard. He sighed. “If there’s a chance in a million you’re right, you’ve stuck your neck out. Stay away from the rail at night, and keep your door locked.”

  “But I only told the captain.”

  And the captain is a deeply religious man who couldn’t possibly be involved in anything like that, he thought. Read the label attached to his arm. It identifies him the same as all other members of the cast. Krasicki was a gentle, persecuted Polish Jew, and Lind’s a big, exuberant, fun-loving boy who likes to doctor people. He excused himself and went to his cabin. He’d done his best, hadn’t he? And maybe Steen wasn’t involved in it.

  If she figured out the mechanics of that dribble of blood from the corner of Mayr’s mouth, why hadn’t she been able to go one step further and grasp the self-evident fact that if the thing had been staged you no longer knew who anybody was? Of course, it was simple enough; so, also, was the blood on the shirt. It had been in a small balloon, or perhaps even another rubber article more likely to be found in the possession of seamen, attached to the inside of the shirt and punctured by the tiny awl Mayr’d had in his hand as he clutched his chest so dramatically after the second shot. Unfortunately, Mayr had dropped the awl in his cabin as they were lifting him onto the bunk, the only slip-up in the whole operation.

  Then he, Goddard, had accidentally stepped on it, and had looked down and pushed it over against the bulkhead. The chances were Lind, who was washing his hands at the basin, had seen this in the mirror. This, coupled with Goddard’s innocent remark that the hemorrhaging seemed dark for arterial blood, could be partly responsible for Krasicki’s death. The rest of the massive hemorrhage, of course, was easy. Lind had been alone in the cabin with Mayr for over ninety seconds while Goddard was running up to the next deck for the first-aid kit and sterilizer, and the blood was already there in some kind of container in the bedclothes. Obtaining it would have been no problem, not with three of them to donate, and Lind’s dispensary was equipped with hypodermic syringes and, no doubt, anticoagulants.

  The rest, of course, was simply consummate staging and acting. Krasicki’s scream was calculated to paralyze the witnesses for the length of time necessary for him to get off the first two shots, the blanks, into Mayr’s chest, with the appropriate shuddering reaction from Mayr. Then Lind came in on cue, caught his arm and swung it up, while Krasicki kept pulling the trigger, now shooting live ammunition and breaking glass all over the place to give it the final touch of verisimilitude.

  But all that was no longer important, he thought, as he lay in the sweltering stillness of his cabin. The question now was Steen. If he were involved, then Madeleine Lennox had told them the thing was never going to hold up; they had to eliminate her and anybody else they suspected she’d talked to. But even if the captain had had no part in it, there were still two very ominous possibilities. One was that he might now be suspicious enough, and naïve enough, to order a search of the ship, which could trigger the final explosion of violence if Lind’s forces were strong enough. The mate couldn’t back out now; he was committed. The other danger was that even if the captain had better sense than to force the issue while the ship was at sea, Lind might already know of that breakfast conversation. Who knew where his spies were? The dining room steward could have overheard them. So could Rafferty, or Barset.

  And what about the fire? The tween-decks of number three hold was the most likely place for Mayr to be hidden. It was directly below that cubicle where he’d been stitched into the burial sack, and when the switch had been made they wouldn’t have moved him any farther around the ship than they had to; the risk of detection was too great What happened if the heat and smoke drove him out?

  He swore irritably, and sat up to light a cigarette, trying to shake off the uneasiness. For God’s sake, he still didn’t know any of this, did he? The whole thing could be imagination. As though to corroborate this, the Leander began to vibrate then as the engine went full ahead and she got under way again. How could there be anything sinister about tins prosaic old rust-bucket slogging her way around the Pacific?

  The two fans droned monotonously in the dining room, stirring the muggy air. Krasicki’s death weighed on everybody’s spirits, as well as the enervating heat that apparently would never end. Captain Steen was more silent and withdrawn than ever, and even Lind was subdued. The state of their nerves was apparent when Karl dropped a dish as he was serving the jellied consommé. They all jumped, and had to restrain themselves from looking at him angrily. A sullen Rafferty came in to clean up the mess.

  Karen Brooke spoke to Steen. “This weather must make you long for the Norwegian fiords, Captain.”

  He nodded and managed a wan smile. “Yes. And it’s been nearly two years since I was home.”

  Lind said to her, “But it just takes one winter gale in the North Atlantic to make this look good again.”

  “I agree with you,” Madeleine Lennox said. She began an account of being on a freighter that had been hove to for three days in the Bay of Biscay and how eventually she’d been physically exhausted just from the endless holding onto something and trying to keep from being thrown from her bunk.

  Captain Steen interrupted her in a voice not much more than a whisper. “If you’ll excuse me.” Goddard looked around. Steen’s face had gone white and was stamped with anguish as he pushed himself to his feet. He started to collapse, but caught himself with a hand braced on the table.

  “Cap, what is it?” Lind asked quickly.

  He and Goddard were leaping up to help him when he swayed, crumpled forward against Karen Brooke’s shoulder, and fell to the deck. Both women cried out.

  Lind and Goddard pulled his twisting body from under the edge of the table and into the open. Barset came running in. “Good God, what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Lind snapped. “Get a stretcher!”

  Barset hurried out. Steen’s eyes were closed and he appeared to fight for breath as he continued to writhe in agony. Lind caught his wrist and tried to feel the pulse. Steen twitched spasmodically and he had to grab for it again. Goddard caught the arm with both hands and held it still. Lind jerked his head at Karl. “Find the chief. Tell him to get an oxygen bottle up to the skipper’s quarters.”

  To Goddard’s glance and the unasked question: heart attack? he replied, “I don’t know. But we’ll have it if we need it.”

  Barset ran in with the stretcher. They lifted Steen onto it, but he continued to double his body in pain and tw
ist from side to side. He would never stay on it going up the ladders. “We need some line!” Lind barked. “Wait! This’ll do.” With one explosive yank, he swept off the tablecloth, scattering dishes, food, water tumblers, and silverware across the deck. The big arms corded and there was a ripping sound as he tore it in two. He tossed one piece to Goddard, and they passed them under the stretcher and over the captain’s body at thighs and chest to lash him in place. One of the sailors hurried in.

  “Take him up,” Lind ordered. “I’ll get the kit and be up there.” He ran out. Goddard and the sailor picked up the stretcher, but at that moment the bos’n came in. “I’ll take it,” he said. Goddard surrendered it, and followed them down the passageway. They started up the ladder, the sailor going first; the bos’n, with the strength of those almost grotesque shoulders and arms, lifted his end of it straight overhead to keep it level. They mounted the second ladder and disappeared onto the boat deck.

  Several of the crew had gathered in the well-deck, looking up. Goddard was conscious of blank stares. “Jesus Christ, what next?” one asked. “Anybody got a rubber raft?” another said. “I’d bail out of this pot.”

  Karen Brooke and Mrs. Lennox came out of the passageway and joined him, both badly shaken. Mrs. Lennox said she thought it was a heart attack; it was very similar to the one that had stricken her late husband. It wasn’t necessarily fatal, she assured Karen; he’d had two, five years apart. As they stood waiting for some word, Goddard was conscious again of the odor of burning cotton. Ten minutes later Barset came down the ladder.

  “Mate says it was a heart attack,” he said. The captain seemed to be in less pain now and was breathing easier, under the oxygen tent Lind had improvised. Sparks was getting medical information from the U.S. Public Health Service through a California station and was in contact with a cruise ship that had a doctor aboard. The liner was three hundred miles away, but if necessary both ships could change course and rendezvous in less than ten hours. Mr. Goddard could come up if he’d like.