Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  “You’re coming with us, sir?” Sam asked hopefully.

  “I’ve had my share and then some of such wild chases after witnesses,” the old man said. “I should only slow you up.”

  We took a cab to the Ship’s Bell, only to find that Houser wasn’t in. “’E don’t look ter be long, sorr,” the barmaid said. “’E said ’e was out of terbacco and knew sommers ter get it arter hours.”

  Sam was in a sweat as we ordered a pint and settled down to wait. When I finally suggested trying to find out what we wanted to know on the Medea tied up somewhere along the docks, he thought it best to stay where we were, but finally gave in.

  “All right, you go find the Medea if you can’t stand the waiting, but if you find the man, bring him back here.”

  By waving a pound note in the driver’s face, I got a ride on a dray going to the dock area. The narrow streets feeding into the docks were jammed even at this hour with wagons, and it took us the better part of an hour to find the Medea, looking smaller and bleached-out as she rode under the gas lights between two larger sailing packets. The volume of handcarts and wagons seemed to thin out as we came onto the actual wharves, but there was still plenty of activity and businesslike scurrying about. The Medea herself was silent and all but deserted, for not until her next trip’s passengers were boarding would there be much of a bustle and stir around her as supplies were laid in. I could see a dark figure leaning on her rail. I hailed him.

  “Watcher want, mate?” he called down, making no move to invite me on board.

  “I’m trying to find someone,” I yelled back, exasperated. “May I come aboard?”

  “Can’t letcher,” he said laconically. “I wus told not ter let nobody aboard less’n he wus crew er orficers. Come back termorra.”

  He turned away, leaving me fuming. I couldn’t help but wonder if Crowell had been smarter than I and thought of the possibility of a seaman within earshot. I could have kicked myself for being so dense. If Markham hadn’t been at me, I never in this world would have thought of it. I chewed a thumbnail and wondered what we would do now. If I wasn’t to be let aboard, then surely Sam wasn’t either. I wondered if Houser was still even considered a ship’s officer. I saw a cab coming hellbent down the dock and wasn’t too surprised to find that it contained Sam and Houser.

  “They won’t allow any strangers aboard,” I told them. “Can you help us, Mr. Houser?”

  “Call me George,” he said. “God knows we’ve been through enough together. No one’s given me notice, so I have to suppose I’m still chief engineer.”

  Instead of calling out, he mounted the gangplank as if he belonged there, and had a conversation with the man on deck. There were what seemed to be some hot words, after which Houser shrugged disgustedly and came back down to us.

  “He was specifically told not to allow me on board,” he said. “I told him I’d left some things in my cabin, and he said to come back tomorrow. I asked about Wickham, and he told me that Wickham and Tolliver had both been paid off the day before yesterday.”

  “One of those was the man who set off the rockets?”

  Houser nodded grimly. “Wickham. He could be anywhere right now.”

  Sam looked at me. “So what do we do now?”

  I shrugged.

  “We go to Ma Carey’s place,” Houser said.

  “Ma Carey’s? A sailors’ boardinghouse?”

  Houser gave a snort of laughter. “No, a brothel. If Wickham was paid off, he had money, and until his money ran low he would have headed for the best.”

  The best turned out to be a two-story building in Old Gravel Lane whose door was opened by a small wizened black man in formal footman’s attire. The scene inside was a lively one, for the black man’s clothes were the most formal thing about the place. The large front room looked pretty much like any bar, with wooden tables and chairs and a blue haze of smoke. A large blowsy blond woman in tights and a beaded blouse was playing an accordion, and at the various tables and the bar sat an astonishing variety of girls, black, yellow, and white, of all sizes, shapes, and ages. I winced when I saw two of them, one oriental and the other white, who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old. Houser peered around and then shook his head.

  “What can we do for you fellows?” a large black woman in a marvelous gold evening dress asked. She was taller than I by a head and had what appeared to be muscles to go with her height. I wondered if she was the bouncer. “We don’t encourage slummers, you know,” she added. “Miz Carey set up this place for sailors, and that’s what she wants in here. Lolly Stanton’s or Sally Greer’s would be best for folks like you.”

  “We’re looking for someone. If we find him, there’ll be a reward, and a handsome payment for him, too.”

  She began to look downright unfriendly. “Who you after?”

  “Burt Wickham, a sailor off the Medea. Big fair man with a scorpion tattooed on one arm.”

  She looked relieved. “He ain’t been here. I’d not be so sure, only the Medea don’t usually dock here. That’s one of the Medea boys over there.” She pointed. “He’s the only one’s come in.”

  “Tolliver,” Houser said disgustedly. “Wouldn’t you know?”

  “Why don’t we ask him?” Sam suggested. “He might know where Wickham is if they left together.”

  “How do you know that one’s the only Medea sailor to come in?” I persisted, hoping the woman didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “We make it our business to know,” she said grimly. “Sometimes that’s the only hold we have on these brutes. Miz Carey takes care of her girls, she does, and she don’t put up with no rough stuff or beatings or buggery or the like. You wouldn’t believe what some of them get a kick out of doing. They want that, they can go sommer else.”

  I thought of the. two little girls we had seen there and flinched inwardly. I was only beginning the education that I was to receive that night. Sam was already talking to Tolliver, a cheerful little man with a simian face and a lot of missing teeth. When Sam plunked down some bills, Tolliver grinned all over his face and came along with Sam to the doorway where I waited.

  “Like I wus telling the guv’nor here,” he said to me, “I ain’t laid eyes on Burt fer two days, but happen I kin tike yer sommers ’e moight be.” He peered at me. “Say, yer be the one what we lowered off the stern of the Medea, ain’tcher?”

  I had thought Ma Carey’s place was depraved, but I realized before long that I hadn’t realized what depravity was. Never before or since have I seen a fraction of the number of whores we questioned that night. There were fat ones and thin ones and old ones and young ones, some younger than the two at Ma Carey’s, and offers and suggestions that would make a donkey blush. Their dyed hair, their odor of cheap perfume overlying dirt and old sweat, their knowing eyes, their hard rouged mouths, all passed before us in a parade of tawdry, sad womanhood twisted grotesquely to meet the needs of men at sea for months, sometimes years, at a time.

  From one bar and one tavern and one whorehouse to another we went, farther and farther into the maze of slums behind the docks. Twice we tantalizingly picked up Wickham’s trail, only to lose it again. He had apparently found a companion who was not a seaman, but who was doing most of the buying. This was only last night, and our hopes rose for running him down. Someone thought they had gone to the Limehouse district along with a group of other men, and into those dark and noisesome streets we gingerly made our way. Tolliver wanted to quit, but Sam pressed more money on him, and he stuck with us.

  “I’ll tell you true,” he explained, “I don’t like this part of town. It’s bad enough when it’s yer own people, but ’ere it’s foreign ’eathen as are after yer body and yer soul ter boot. This is where the sellers of dreams live.”

  “The sellers of dreams?”

  “That’s wat they like ter call themselves, anyways, but they’re really sellers of opium, and them wat takes up with such, they never let go.”

  My father
had told me about the opium dens to be found in London as well as in the far Pacific, and as I looked around me at the awesome squalor of the narrow twisting lanes we trod, I began to see how much more of the world he had known at my age than I did. Signs on the closed and shuttered stores we passed now were printed in Chinese and other unfamiliar characters. The few people about on the streets here were men: orientals, lascars, the refuse left from a tide of foreign seamen taken by press gangs from the far parts of the world. Our footsteps echoed hollowly on the slimy cobblestones as we penetrated farther and farther into this evil labyrinth of sordid lost humanity.

  All along the way we were approached constantly by desperate men and boys trying to sell their sisters, their wives, their lovers, their daughters, even their mothers. And always came the inevitable invitation to visit a den of dreams, the purveyors of ghow. Tolliver kept asking them in a strange dialect made up part of cockney and part of oriental trading pidgin if they had seen his friend, and that there would be a reward for anyone who could help us.

  At the mention of money, of course they all said they had seen Wickham, and we were led into one dark incense-laden room after another, the dirt and the rats and the smell all disguised by the beaded curtains, the uncertain light, and the cloying smell of a burning joss stick, the girls and women made up to seem doll-like, large painted puppets that nodded and smiled and beckoned as though pulled by strings. Gradually we realized, however, that we were picking up a track of Wickham. He was with another big man, only this one had black hair and a thundering great scar down his cheek. We began to see that those who mentioned Wickham’s companion really had seen him, and the trail grew easier to follow. They had cut quite a swath, those two, and I suspected it was only their size that saved them from being mobbed and rolled for their money. That was the strange part, the money. I wondered where in God’s name they had come by it.

  We gathered that both of them had been thoroughly and good-naturedly drunk. I could tell by the women’s tone of voice and their giggles that the pair had made quite an impression on them; I could tell also by the way they appraised us in comparison, that faint air of humorous contempt. Houser was tall enough, but very thin and with rapidly thinning hair; Tolliver was a small skinny wharf rat; Sam was dapper but small; and while I looked very solid, I was hardly outsized. We none of us began to measure up to those happily drunken amiable giants who spent so freely.

  The last girls we talked to told us that the pair had decided to try an opium den. They had screwed themselves out, the liquor was only going to make them pass out finally, and they didn’t want their good time to end.

  We had with us a dark lantern that cast a single beam of light. When we were silently ushered into the dimly lit room that was drenched in a sweet-acrid smell of the drugged smoke, we turned the beam on the sluggish sleepers, most of whom were oriental, but far from all. We might have missed him even at that except that his eyes were wide open and glistening in the shaded light.

  Tolliver let out a startled oath. “God’s blood, ’e’s dead!”

  And so he was, very dead. His mane of yellow greasy hair lay on the foul straw ticking, and that breathless mouth would never again buss a laughing strumpet or touch the rim of a glass of good rum. It didn’t take long to find where a knife had passed from underneath his ribs up into his heart. I wondered meanly for a moment what all those admiring tarts would think could they see him now.

  “They carried ’im in from sommers else,” Tolliver said. He looked at us. “Wat did yer want wiv’im?’E can’t tell yer nuffin now.”

  Sam and I had been looking at each other in despair. Houser shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. It had to do with what Wickham might have heard Crowell say when the rockets went off.”

  Tolliver looked at us with a scowl on his shrewd simian face. “So that was it. Those murdering bastards paid ’im off so’s they could get at ’im.” He paused. “It moight have been me lyin’ there just as well,” which I thought was a rather overly dramatic statement at the time.

  “Well, it’s done and finished now,” Sam said. “Those murdering bastards, as you so aptly put it, have put paid to any hope of prying loose any money from them. Hand here risked his life to save their bloody ship, and they were too cheap to give him a penny for it. Now they say he didn’t even save it.”

  “You mean you was only looking for someone wat could tell wat the captain said then?” Tolliver asked incredulously.

  “That’s it.” Sam’s voice was dispirited.

  Tolliver laughed unexpectedly. “I can do that,” he said, “and I can name two others as can, too.”

  “You what?” I exclaimed while Sam just stood there with his mouth open.

  “I’ll be damned,” Houser said softly. “You mean to tell us that all this time you —”

  “You never said why you wanted Wickham, guv,” Tolliver reminded him reproachfully.

  We couldn’t rouse Cumings, but by seven-thirty we had gotten Wightman out of bed and were priming him. Tolliver we put down for an hour’s sleep, while Wightman came all over smiles when he realized what had been handed him. He rubbed his hands together delightedly.

  “By God, we’ll nail them after all,” he crowed in his high voice.

  “Uh, I don’t like to bring this up,” Houser interrupted unexpectedly, “but what’s Tolliver’s life going to be worth after he testifies?”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’ll be any problem,” Wightman replied. “We’ll see he gets on a ship, and I doubt anyone is going to seek him out. The money will already have changed hands, so to speak, so they’ll have everything to lose and nothing to gain by harming him. As he says, there are two others besides, though whether they would be willing to testify is another matter. I gather Tolliver is only doing it because he’s been upset by Wickham’s murder.”

  “That’s right,” I answered. “They were, as he said, mates, and it was only a fluke he wasn’t along.”

  Clay began the proceedings by moving that the hearing, in view of the conflicting testimony, consider itself adjourned. “To take the word of a jealous, aging engineer over that of the captain of the ship would be a travesty of justice. There are always those who, vulture-like, try to wrest pickings from the wealthy, but the fact remains that the ship did not sink and that it did not have to ask for aid from anyone.” He went on like that for a while, and then the floor was turned over to Wightman, who asked in a deceptively mild voice if he might call one more witness, a seaman present at the time of the captain’s disputed quotation about abandoning ship. Their lordships allowed it.

  Tolliver told his story well, which was a good thing, since Clay cross-examined him remorselessly. “Now then, Mr. Tolliver, the board would like to know how much Mr. Hand paid you.”

  “’e paid me five pounds, sir. ’Course that don’t take in the drinks and all.”

  Wightman threw me a horrified look, the whites of his eyes showing like those of a startled horse. Behind me Markham, who now knew all of the details of the night’s work, grunted as if he’d been kicked.

  Clay couldn’t leave it alone; he had to go in for the kill. “Five pounds is a lot of money for a seaman, is it not? I’m sure that no one would blame you for changing the truth a bit in the face of such enticement.”

  Tolliver couldn’t help it, he positively grinned. “Oh, I wasn’t given the five quid for telling wat went on and wat was said on the Medea, sir. The five quid was for helping the gentlemen find my mate Wickham.”

  “Indeed?” was all that Clay could manage weakly at first. Then he rallied. “Who, pray tell, is Wickham? Another suborned seaman?”

  Wightman danced about protesting, and Lord Oakley allowed the objection, although the damage was done.

  “Wickham it was wat set off the rockets. They was looking for him to get wat he remembered about it all.”

  “Since he isn’t here, I take it he either didn’t remember or wouldn’t be bought,” Clay said arrogantly. He had had a nasty scare but still thou
ght he could bring it off.

  “No sir,” Tolliver said quickly. “’e isn’t ’ere because ’e’s dead. Murdered. And if I’d been with ’im, I’d ’ave been murdered, too.”

  There was only a small audience at the hearing, but they made up for it now with the loudness of their buzz of startled conversation. Even the bigwigs on the board were muttering to each other.

  “Surely you’re not implying that Wickham’s unfortunate demise was a deliberate attempt at silencing him?” Clay asked with feigned astonishment, trying to retrieve something from the shambles of his beautifully constructed case.

  “You figure it out, mate,” Tolliver said contemptuously. “’e was knifed, probably by the bloke ‘e was with, when ’e was helpless as a babe, and the idiot wat did it was in such a rush ’e forgot to take ’is money. Now wat do you suppose ’e would’ve wanted ’im dead for if not for ’is money, eh? Tell me that!”

  “Poppycock!” Clay snapped. “That’s all pure conjecture on your part. M’lord, surely you’re not going to allow this witness to continue with such wild surmises. It’s nothing more nor less than slander.”

  “Confine yourself to the facts, Mr. Tolliver, if you please,” Oakley said promptly.

  “Well, sir, the facts is that I ’eard wat I told you, and I got these two mates still aboard the Medea wat ’eard it too. I ’opes they’ll remain in good health?” he asked with elaborate sarcasm.

  Crowell had gone dead white during this interchange, and I wondered if he had been told what was planned for Wickham. Cassell, the shipowner’s son, looked angry. Possibly, I thought with a grin, because his hired assassin had made such a balls-up of it.

  “I suppose Wickham’s money is in your pocket now?” Clay asked as a last resort.

  “Oh no, sir,” Tolliver said virtuously. “The perlice has it and the poor body too.”

  “I see.” Clay was now obviously at a loss. I could appreciate his quandary. He had been sold down the river by his own clients, who hadn’t admitted either what had really happened or what they had done to avoid having to pay for it. “M’lord, I wonder if this hearing could be adjourned until tomorrow morning. It seems that new information has come to light, and I wish to consult with my clients.”