by Guy Antibes
“The other man? So part of Hardblow’s story was true?” the purser said.
Sam nodded. He pointed to the shirt. “No knife marks. Perhaps Mr. Hardblow didn’t use a knife, and the one we found in his cabin was this man’s.”
Sam sorted through the pollen bandages but didn’t find anything, so he tossed them overboard. As new facts emerged, the scenario of Hardblow’s death and the fight changed. “Could this be a sailor’s shirt?”
Desmon looked it over. “Sure. Captain doesn’t make us wear uniforms, but this is something a seaman would wear. I’ve got a shirt similar enough to this one.”
Banna looked at Desmon, for a reason that Sam couldn’t fathom.
“At this point, it looks like Hardblow might have tried to strangle the other victim, who pulled a knife to defend himself. Hardblow must have used the shirt as a stopgap bandage and then wrapped pollen bandages around the shirt, so he wouldn’t create a bloody trail. When he got back to this cabin, he must have stowed it in his hiding place before he called for help,” Sam said.
“That seems reasonable,” Jordi said. “It explains the lack of blood anywhere but his room.”
“And the footprints were all his own,” Sam said. It looked like he might have solved Hardblow’s part of the crime, but where was the other victim? Overboard, like the assassin said?
~
Captain Darter didn’t look pleased as the ship coasted through the water. Men and passengers, lined up on the deck while the First Mate counted the officers and passengers and the Second Mate counted the sailors. Jordi followed the Second Mate around as a witness.
“Two people are missing from the lists. A sailor and a passenger,” the First Mate said to the impatient Captain Darter. “Mr. Hardblow is the passenger and Asul Kindra is the sailor. I talked to the other passenger from Trakata, but he boarded at Baskin and said he didn’t know Hardblow.”
“Looks like you were correct, Sam,” Darter said. “The sailor was tossed overboard.”
“Maybe not. He left clothes behind?” Sam asked.
“Probably,” the captain said. “Why?”
“We have a hound on board who might be able to sniff Asul Kindra out.”
“Have at it.” She shouted out the command to man the ship properly, and the sailors dispersed quickly. Passengers grumbled, but the officers joked about the diversion.
Desmon pulled at Sam’s coat. “Asul Kindra is a Wollian name. Not of my people, but of the nomads.”
“Nomads on Wollia. Is your country even big enough for nomads?”
Desmon smiled. “Big enough. They are small of stature…” He let his words sink in before he said, “They are taught to fight with knives at an early age. It is a sign of manhood to be proficient. I can take you to his bunk. It isn’t far from mine.”
Jordi and Sam took Emmy down into the bowels of the ship where the sailors slept. Asul’s sea chest was on a shelf to the side of his top bunk. Desmon took it down. When it opened, Sam smelled a spicy scent. He took a pair of shorts out of the trunk and put it under Emmy’s nose.
“Find this smell,” he said to Emmy’s bark.
The dog muscled her way past them and headed towards the front of the ship and pawed at a door, whimpering punctuated by short barks. Sam touched the lock. It was made out of pollen. He rammed his wand into the works and rowed it around until the lock opened.
Emmy ran through the door, and then barked and pawed at a wooden panel. Sam removed his spectacles and could see a shirtless Asul Kindra. It looked like he had been wrapped in an orange pollen shroud. He’d seen such a thing in Baskin before.
“There is the sailor. He is dead, of course,” Sam said.
“I don’t see anything,” Jordi said. “It’s a wall.”
Sam looked for a ward but didn’t see one. The wall had been stuck to the adjoining boards, but Sam quickly removed the panel. The wrapped body fell out of the tiny alcove. Mr. Hardblow’s stamina was impressive for him to have been wounded when he hid the evidence.
Jordi called from the next compartment. “They fought in here,” he said.
Desmon and Sam stepped inside to see the floor darkened with blood. “Hardblow must have lured Kindra in here, somehow. We will never know, will we?” Sam looked at Jordi, who shook his head. “Hardblow must have had his hands on Kindra’s neck when the Wollian sailor pulled his knife.”
“Just like you thought,” Jordi said.
“It is still supposition, but everything fits. An assassin attempt went awry. The orders that Banna Plunk and I found didn’t mention a reason, just an order to kill,” Sam said. “If we measure Kindra’s feet, they will be smaller than the footprints in Hardblow’s cabin, and the shirt will probably fit him, too.”
Chapter Five
~
“I must say I’m surprised about the outcome of your investigation,” Captain Darter said to Sam, as he sat in front of the captain’s desk, meeting alone with her.
“It is like a story unfolding in front of your eyes,” Sam said. “The problem is the story gets rewritten as you go.”
“Hawker couldn’t do what you did.”
Sam shook his head. “With a little training…”
Captain Darter raised her finger. “No. I know Jordi all too well. He doesn’t have the imagination that you do, and I think you need an imagination to be an effective snoop. You don’t have to investigate the murdered sailor,” the captain said. “I suppose he was an agent for some government or criminal gang. Sometimes those are the same things. You’ve done your part, more than your part, using that imagination.” She smiled.
Sam didn’t think Dickey Nail had much of an imagination, but he did have lots of experience and a very sharp mind. Harrison Dimple had imagination, and he wished the friend he met a year ago was with him. Harrison would know how to handle Captain Darter.
“If we have another mystery on board, you are The Twisted Wind’s snoop, reporting directly to me. Understand?”
“I couldn’t have done it without Banna Plunk,” Sam said.
“Use her if she agrees. She seemed to be amenable to assist since you used her dog.”
“Our dog,” Sam said.
“There is a story that you will share?”
Sam shook his head. “Not willingly. Banna Plunk and I share some secrets. I would appreciate it if you didn’t probe.”
“Is some of her cargo yours?”
Her question told him she knew about Banna’s very heavy crates. He wanted nothing to do with that.
“Not at all, Captain Darter. My cargo is what Antina Mulch put on board.”
Darter picked up a thin knife and began to clean her fingernails with it. Her nails didn’t look dirty, so Sam thought it was an affectation or a habit. “You seem to be a good boy. Am I correct in assuming that?”
“Good or naive,” Sam said. “I’ve been accused of both.”
She chuckled. “Bentwick said both, by the way. ‘A good boy thrown to the wolves prematurely.’ My only advice is to do what you think is right. I’ll leave you alone for now.” She pointed to the bookcase that ran along one wall of her cabin. “Feel free to borrow any of my books to read on the voyage.”
Sam rose. “Thank you. Perhaps you have a book on Polistia? I don’t know much about the continent.”
Captain Darter went to the bookcase. “Do you read Vaarekian?”
“I do,” Sam said.
She pulled a thick volume out. “This is the best I have. You can’t have it, but feel free to take notes.”
“Thank you,” Sam said.
The captain remained standing, so Sam took that as a dismissal, and returned to his cabin. He sat down on the single chair in the cabin and plopped the heavy volume on the desk. After flipping through some pages, Sam sighed and found the section on Trakata, where Hardblow might have come from.
He returned to the title page. The book was new, only five years old, and that meant the perspective wasn’t ancient. Sam spent the rest of the day learning qui
te a bit about the first Polistian port of call, but The Twisted Wind intended to bypass Pundia, a dangerous Trakatan port, and Bliksa, the capital and principal port of Ristaria.
Sam found a map of Trakata and casually looked at the cities, finding the port of Pundia, first. After locating the capital of Entaka, he traced the river between the capital and the port, finding a town named Romia in between. Sam had thought the man’s last words were addressed to a woman, but it was more likely that they were about the man’s hometown.
Hardblow must not have had any family. Sam was saddened that the man with few possessions and an unknown name had died in the middle of the sea by himself, leaving no memory behind but his body wrapped in a pollen shroud and dumped into the vast deeps of the ocean.
~
“Your mystery was solved, eh?” Desmon said.
Sam coiled the thick pollen lines with gloves on his hands. “Partially. I have to stop thinking about it. Don’t I, Emmy?”
Emmy, who reclined on the warm deck, barked, as usual.
He smiled. “I’ve done all I can on the ship. We thought the dead man might be Tomi Wrilk, a Vaarekian, but the dead man wasn’t Vaarekian, as you pointed out. Asul Kindra was definitely from Wollia. Nothing in his papers revealed why he joined the crew or why Hardblow targeted him for assassination.”
“He might have known too much,” Desmon said, “or belonged to the wrong group.”
“Knowledge that both men took to the bottom of the sea.” Sam still shuddered as he remembered the pollen-shrouded bodies slipping off planks and splashing into the water.
“I am impressed that you knew what to do.”
Sam shook his head. “It is just a process to be followed. Assemble the evidence, make sure everything follows a certain logic, and then, if one is lucky, you find the culprit. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes your logic is off, and sometimes the evidence that you need isn’t there.”
“But you can use guesswork,”
Sam shrugged. “Guesswork is useful, but a real snoop can’t rely on it. If everything isn’t supported with facts, then you run the risk of not completing an investigation, or it stalls, and the perpetrator escapes without an arrest because of a lack of evidence. That is what my partner, Dickey Nail, told me, and I read enough reports to know the reality is that not every case gets solved.”
“You must have packed a lot of experience into your year as a snoop,” Desmon said.
“I did.” Sam put down his rope and knelt by Emmy. “It had its ups and its downs. I’m on this ship because of a case.” Sam hadn’t told anyone his reason for heading to the southern hemisphere to visit Tolloy in Vaarek. He didn’t know if Jordi or Captain Darter knew, but he hadn’t even told Banna any of the details. There wasn’t a need to keep it a secret, but Sam stopped his story before it even got started.
“Was it a girl?” Desmon asked.
“What about a girl?”
“That got you on a ship heading to the other side of the world. Did you have a fight with your parents?”
Sam shook his head.
“Did you run afoul of the law?”
“Something closer to that, but I don’t want to talk about it,” Sam said.
Desmon raised both his hands, palms facing Sam. “I won’t pry, but if you ever feel you want to talk about it, I’m here.”
Sam definitely didn’t want to talk about it to someone who unexpectedly had begun prying, because that is what he felt Desmon was doing. They went back to work. Their conversation died after the exchange.
After a few minutes of focusing on their duties, Sam watched Jordi approach. “The captain would like a word,” he said to Sam.
After nodding to Desmon, Sam got to his feet. Emmy followed him all the way to Captain Darter’s cabin.
Jordi joined them. Emmy sat on her haunches next to Sam when he settled down on one of the captain’s chairs.
“You have become friends with Desmon Sandal?” Captain Darter said.
“We are acquaintances more than friends,” Sam said. He felt that way more than ever since Desmon’s attempted interrogation.
“Keep it that way,” Jordi said.
Sam turned to the purser. “Why? Is there a reason?”
Darter nodded her head. “There is. Banna Plunk told me Desmon used the term ‘seaman’ when he referred to Asul Kindra.”
“That is a problem?” Sam asked.
“In our world, a seaman is a naval rank in a national navy. Banna thinks it was a slip, and Jordi agrees.”
“Desmon is a spy?” Sam wouldn’t have believed it until today.
Jordi looked at the captain. She nodded and said, “Perhaps. We brought Sandal on board in Lirik. The world political situation is very unstable. Viktar Kreb, the dictator of Vaarek, has become very comfortable with his power, and Sandal might be a Wollian or Vaarekian spy. ”
Sam thought of Banna. Perhaps it was too late for her to do anything to help her homeland, even with the gold sitting below decks. “The murder couldn’t have been because of something happening in Vaarek,” Sam said, although he had learned to keep his mind open. “With assassins and spies, we can’t be certain of anyone, even Desmon Sandal.”
Captain Darter laughed. “Do you see hidden motives behind everything that a person does? Did your Dickey Nail try to find secrets as he solved crimes?”
“Not always,” Sam said. “Some crimes are straightforward, and others are less so.” He could have given her an account of his life for the past year to prove his point, but he kept his mouth shut. He put his hand on Emmy’s back and scratched. The dog looked at him and whimpered.
“What does she sense?” the captain asked, looking at Emmy.
“I am unsettled,” Sam said. “Desmon is my companion while I am out among the sailors. What do I do now?”
“Just keep your eyes and ears open,” Jordi said.
He turned to the captain. “I am to be your spy?”
The captain picked up her long, thin knife. “Not at all. Just observe. If your relationship with Desmon becomes uncomfortable, and you wish to have another companion, tell me. You are, above all, a passenger in my charge, not an employee, Sam Smith.”
~
Sam and Emmy returned to the deck. Desmon stood, finished with his task, and approached Sam.
“Your visit with Captain Darter?”
“She warned me that Viktar Kreb, the dictator of Vaarek, might be behind the assassination.”
Desmon pursed his lips. He took too long to answer in Sam’s estimation. “Perhaps. The world is becoming a more dangerous place,” Desmon said. “You must be careful during your travels. A boy such as yourself might get himself into situations that he doesn’t understand.”
“Like now?”
Desmon laughed, lightening the conversation. “Not now. The danger has passed away,” he said.
Sam caught the meaning of his words.
“Each port of call will bring danger, however. Hardblow intended to leave the ship at Carolank. Who knows what kind of mischief abounds in that city.”
Sam shrugged. “What do we do next?” he said, wanting to change the subject.
“I am assigned in the crow’s nest for a few bells. Remember that is a place you cannot come with me. Too dangerous, the Second Mate said.”
“I’ll see if Jordi has something for me to do after I return Emmy to Banna Plunk’s cabin. Enjoy the view,” Sam said.
Sam knocked on Banna Plunk’s cabin. The woman opened the door a crack before letting him in.
“Do you have a few minutes?”
“You mean hours, don’t you?” Banna said, drily.
She ran a brush through disheveled hair. Sam thought she must have been napping.
Emmy walked around in the tiny space and curled up in the middle of the floor.
“Take a chair,” Banna said, sitting on her rumpled bed. “What is it you have to say?”
Sam didn’t want to admit weakness, but he recounted the past hour or so, from Desmo
n’s comments, the meeting with the captain and the purser, and his subsequent discussion with his deck companion.
“I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to do,” Sam said.
“It wouldn’t surprise me that Viktar Kreb is behind every single crime committed in the world, but we both know better. I am very biased. My father’s letter decreed that fact. It is a mystery, is it not?”
Sam nodded. “But it isn’t one where I can search for clues.” He wondered why he was talking to this woman who had done such horrible acts. He shook his head. “It won’t be solved before we reach the next port. I know that.”
Banna narrowed her eyes. “Then don’t solve it. You are the snoop. What should a snoop do?”
“I once created a chart with observations. Maybe I need to do that.”
She lifted one eyebrow. “A chart full of notes?”
“Organized notes,” Sam said. “Maybe I need a bigger piece of paper, like a navigational chart to write everything down. If there is peril in every port, that means I can go ashore and ask around.” The more Sam thought of the idea, the more fun it sounded.
“Would you mind if I looked over your shoulder when you work on it? I need something to keep me from going crazy,” Banna said. “I thought I could sleep the voyage away, but it is much too long.”
Sam could hear the yearning in her voice to do something.
“You don’t go on deck. You could do more of that.”
She shook her head. “The sea bores me, too. I need to use my mind.”
Sam wondered how he could help her use her mind. His chart wouldn’t take that long.
“Why don’t we go over your father’s book? There is much I don’t understand about pollen,” Sam said.
Banna’s laugh took on a harsh tone. “I think you know more than most people. You have seen pollen art that few people have.” She made an inscrutable face. “I can do that. If you don’t know how to use pollen, you can still learn more about it than anyone in Toraltia,” she said.
Sam thought that would exclude Antina Mulch, but he didn’t mention the woman. “When can we get started?”
“Tomorrow. Find your chart and complete it up to the moment the passenger down the corridor was killed. We can work on the rest together.”
