The Ship

by Stefan Mani

  When the pirate finally appears behind the workshop, Stoker relaxes slightly. His chest eases, his eyes become narrow slits and his chapped lips close over his crooked teeth.

  Stoker takes two steps forwards and turns left. He is standing opposite the pirate, who opens his slanting eyes wide and stares in wonder, and some horror, at this ghost of a man who’s staring back from a distance of just one metre.

  Stoker takes care not to lose eye contact, and steps towards the man as he brings his right arm back, ready to stick the knife into the pirate’s abdomen.

  By the time the bewildered pirate has recovered sufficient wit to pull the trigger of his machine gun, Stoker has moved inside the line of fire.

  Ratatata!

  The bullets slam into the engine-room walls, the gun goes quiet and the pirate stiffens as the sharp steel tears into his stomach, cuts apart his entrails and finally penetrates to the pirate’s spine. His mouth opens; life slowly drains from his eyes; his legs weaken and give way under the weight of his body.

  ‘This is for John,’ says Stoker, drawing the knife out of the wound and pushing the pirate onto his back on the floor. Then he kneels on top of the man’s bloody body and sinks the knife into the flaccid flesh, again and again.

  00:07:17

  Satan throws himself down on his abdomen on the boat deck landing when the pirate turns around and fires his machine gun at him.

  Ratatatata!

  The bullets hit the metal all around Satan, who curls up, shielding his eyes from flying sparks. Behind him Skuggi circles and whines.

  The machine gun goes silent and Satan opens his eyes, rolls onto all fours, sticks the gun between the bars of the railing and sends three shots after the pirate, who runs to the stairs leading down to the weather deck on the starboard side.

  Bam, bam, bam!

  Shit! Missed!

  Satan opens his left hand. No shells! He’s lost them in all the commotion. Only two bullets left in the gun. Two.

  Fuck. Fuck.

  ‘FUCK!’ he screams as he grips the rail with his left hand and jumps over it without thinking. He lands on both feet in the stern and steadies himself with his left hand on the floor before he straightens up and runs after the pirate, who seems to be aiming to get back to the inflatable.

  Could he be the last? Hopefully he’s the last.

  When Satan reaches the metal stairs down to the weather deck the pirate is already on board the inflatable and has untied it from the railing.

  Fuck!

  Satan aims the shotgun at the boat but the ship rocks, and the boat is moving up and down. The pirate pulls the cord of the outboard motor and Satan tenses his muscles, holds his breath and pulls the trigger.

  Bam!

  He doesn’t even see where the bullet lands.

  ‘Fuck it!’ Satan mutters. He aims again, the pirate pulls the cord, the outboard motor starts up, his index finger clenches gently round the sensitive trigger and the last shot rips off.

  Bam!

  Nothing happens. The bullet lands in the sea. The pirate turns the boat and heads for the green light that’s covering the sea about 300 metres away.

  Skuggi comes trotting up and lies down on the deck to the left of Satan.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ says Satan, letting his gun drop as he turns his face to the sky.

  The emergency flare is about to burn up; it comes floating down out of the dark red dome and will land in the sea after just …

  Unless.

  Satan follows the flare with his eyes. It’s floating at an angle over the ship, then the wind catches it and steers it directly into the inflatable, which is speeding north. Nothing happens at first, and then there is an explosion in the boat. It fills with fire that surges up in an instant and then leaps as a fireball up into the dark night

  Everything goes black.

  ‘YAAAHHHOOOO!’ Satan screams over the ship’s rail, and then Skuggi howls beside him. ‘WHO’S THE KING? WHO’S THE KING? I SAID, WHO’S —’

  The green light goes out as the big machine gun starts to spew fire. A burst slams into the ship, which trembles from end to end, and a second later comes the hollow bark of the gun.

  Kra-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka!

  Satan throws himself on the iron floor – but not fast enough. Two bullets hit his head, like miniature cement trucks travelling at three times the speed of sound.

  XXIX

  Monday, 17 September

  It is almost four in the afternoon but it seems the world can’t be bothered to wake up today. The sky is grey as far as the eye can see; the ocean dark grey to the east and black to the west; the breeze smells of rotting ocean vegetation; it’s neither hot nor cold, and a muggy salt mist surrounds the ship, which drifts south across the heavy waves that seem like nothing so much as undulating mountains.

  The starboard side of the ship is covered with pockmarks, scratches and holes left from all the artillery salvos. The scratches have gone rusty; they collect damp that gradually condenses, forming reddish-brown drops that run down the cold steel.

  Guðmundur and Sæli stand in the stern of the ship, over the bodies of two of the pirates who are lying side by side across the stern with pillowcases over their heads. One of the pillowcases is soaked with black blood but the other is still white and reveals the outlines of the dead pirate’s face. Guðmundur and Sæli have been struggling with bodies all day long. These two are the last and they’re going to throw them overboard.

  First, though, they catch their breath.

  It took them more than two hours to get these bodies all the way from the bridge down to B-deck. They are soaked with sweat, their lungs are burning and their shoulders, arms and backs ache. It’s hard enough carrying heavy objects down the steep and narrow stairs even when those objects aren’t cold, stiff corpses.

  But it was a piece of cake manhandling these two compared to the emotional ordeal of carrying Ási, Rúnar and Methúsalem. The captain and the seaman had wrapped their comrades in white sheets from head to toe before they set off with them down the stairs. All the same, being in such close contact with their lifeless bodies was so overpowering that they were thrice rendered powerless on the way down from A-deck. Then they collapsed under the weight and burst into silent tears, each keeping to himself and not looking at the other.

  Guðmundur has not yet told the survivors about Methúsalem, how Methúsalem had somehow lost his mind and tried to murder the captain. He isn’t sure he should say anything about it. There was no reason to blacken the memory of a fine man, even though he had fallen apart at the very end.

  It was difficult to keep quiet about such a huge secret, though, and his silence about the first mate’s madness preyed on the captain and further increased the grief that filled his heart on that blue-grey Monday. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the distorted face of the chief mate …

  ‘Smoke?’ asks Sæli, offering the captain an open pack.

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ says Guðmundur and sticks one in his mouth.

  Sæli gives the captain a light, shielding the flame with the palm of his right hand, then lights up his own cigarette behind the lapel of his jacket.

  They pull life into the cigarettes, exhale smoke and look out to sea, as if thinking of something else. Pals taking a smoke break.

  ‘Did you see the game yesterday?’ asks Sæli without the faintest change of expression. He doesn’t know himself whether he is trying to be funny or just losing his mind.

  They look at other, washed out and exhausted in body and soul.

  ‘No,’ says the captain. He smiles wryly as he claps Sæli lightly on the back. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Sæli, shrugging his shoulders.

  They stop smiling; it is no longer funny.

  ‘Listen, are you sure it’s right to throw them overboard, these two?’ Sæli says after a short silence.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ says the captain without looking at the men. ‘But I don’t think I want to h
ave them on board.’

  ‘I see,’ murmurs Sæli and throws his burning cigarette into the sea. ‘Shall we?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Guðmundur takes a drag before he stubs out the cigarette and puts the stub in his pocket.

  The captain takes the shoulders of one of the men while Sæli takes the legs. They swing the body twice back and forth before releasing it and flinging it into the sea.

  The other pirate then goes the same way.

  ‘May God have pity on your souls on the day of judgement,’ says the captain, panting, and makes the sign of the cross with the fingers of his right hand, ‘because until then they will suffer in the fires of hell.’

  ‘Amen,’ says Sæli and he spits after the bodies, which drift away from the ship, rock back and forth and then slowly sink under the surface. Stiff fingers grasp at nothing and drag it with them into the darkness.

  ‘Come on, pal,’ says the captain and puts his arm around the seaman’s shoulders. ‘The day’s work is as good as finished. Let’s get a cup of coffee.’

  16:01

  Satan is lying on his back in the bed, masturbating while looking at the picture of the Danish girl that he stole from the engine room.

  Then he closes his eyes and tries to think of Lilja, but Lilja won’t stay still in his head; she rushes around and changes, little by little, into the Danish girl in the picture.

  ‘Shit,’ mutters Satan. He opens his eyes and looks at the picture he is holding in his left hand. But then his eyes mist over and the Danish girl looks like his baby daughter.

  17:21

  Captain Guðmundur knocks lightly on the door before he opens it into the sick bay, where he expects to find Satan lying asleep or half conscious under a sweat-soaked doona. They had pulled him, blood soaked and unconscious, into the control room after the gunfire stopped, bandaged his wounds and pumped him full of morphine. The bullets had torn off his scalp above the left ear, leaving deep gashes and fractures in his skull.

  ‘Hello?’ says the captain and turns on the light. ‘Are you awake?’

  No answer.

  There’s no-one in the bed.

  ‘What the hell!’ mutters the captain, turns off the light and closes the door.

  He looks into the mess and the galley, but finds no-one.

  ‘Are you looking for someone?’ asks Stoker on his way up the stairs from A-deck to B-deck. He is wearing clogs and filthy overalls, and wiping oil and soot off his fingers with a blackened rag.

  ‘Yes and no,’ says the captain, looking over Stoker’s shoulder and down to the floor of A-deck, where the engineer has put down a thick layer of sawdust over the spot where Big John breathed his last. ‘What’s the situation down in the engine?’

  ‘Okay – no change,’ says Stoker, sniffing. ‘I’m running the generators one at a time at full power and making sure there’s enough hot and cold water and stuff. As long as nobody fools with anything down there, life on board will go on as usual, for what it’s worth.’

  ‘Yes, right.’ The captain claps Stoker on the back. ‘Nobody will fool with anything, you can count on that!’

  ‘Nobody has any reason to go down there,’ says Stoker, scratching his beard with oily fingers. ‘Nobody but me.’

  ‘No – yes – you’re right,’ the captain says, nodding to the engineer. ‘I understand your point of view and trust you completely, Óli. Completely.’

  ‘That’s how it should be.’ Stoker strolls into the galley while the captain starts up the stairs.

  On C-deck the doors to Ási’s and Rúnar’s cabins are closed and locked. Behind the doors are bloody rugs, darkness and silence. Of these, the silence is the worst. You can clean the blood out of the rug; you can get rid of the darkness by opening the curtains or turning on the light, but no matter how much the survivors talk or how loudly they scream when no-one hears them, the silence their dead comrades leave behind will follow them for the rest of the voyage – even for the rest of their lives.

  Silence like a hole in their existence.

  The captain goes up to D-deck and opens the door of Satan’s cabin. Nobody there.

  Up on E-deck, Jónas and Methúsalem’s cabin doors are closed. Methúsalem is dead and nobody knows where Jónas is. It’s as if the earth has swallowed him – or the sea, more likely.

  Guðmundur walks up to F-deck, the captain’s deck. There his foot strikes something brass coloured that skitters like a pebble across the floor, bounces off the wall on the starboard side and spins in the middle of the corridor. Guðmundur leans over and picks up this small cylindrical object, and he thinks he knows who dropped it there. On the stairs up to the bridge deck is a white sheet covered with footprints; it hides the blood from the pirate Satan shot dead.

  The doorway into the bridge has no door in it. Inside, the floor is covered with white sheets from the threshold over to the controls. The sheets lie on top of each other but, even so, blood and brains have leaked through in a few places.

  ‘So here you are,’ says the captain as he enters the bridge, which still slants to starboard, as does the entire ship.

  Satan is sitting in the captain’s chair with a coffee mug in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other. He is dressed only in black jogging pants; he is barefoot and barechested. His head is wrapped in a bandage that covers his eyebrows and both ears, and which is bloody above the left ear. Dark hanks of hair hang from the top of his head and also, from under the bandage, down the back of his head and in front of his ears.

  At his feet lies the ship’s dog, which looks up and whines softly when the captain enters the bridge.

  ‘Yep,’ says Satan, without turning the chair or looking over this shoulder. He’s looking out of the broken window, lost in thought, as if he were keeping track of everything without being interested in anything – worldly wise but pretty tired of life, like a helmsman or captain who has spent a lifetime sailing the seven seas.

  The custom is for subordinates to get out of the captain’s chair when the captain enters the bridge – if not out of common courtesy, then out of unconditional respect for the man who alone is responsible for the ship and everyone on board, dead or alive. But Satan doesn’t show his superior even the minimum courtesy of looking in his direction, let alone greeting him like a civilised human being or offering him a seat in the chair that is intended for the highest-ranking man on board, or his stand-in on the bridge.

  The captain’s temper flares up, but dissipates so fast that his blood hardly has time to heat his face. This is perhaps neither the time nor the place to vent his rage on anyone – least of all on a landlubber who knows neither the written nor unwritten rules of the sea. And besides, this lad is a friend in need, to put it mildly.

  Guðmundur goes to the controls, lays his palms on the edge of the control board and pretends to be looking out the windows, but then turns his head casually to the left and surreptitiously examines the interloper.

  Savage is the first word that occurs to the captain. He remembers having seen, in an old travel book, a picture of the village chief in some small South Seas island, a fat and meaty native who sat on a bamboo throne and looked over his meagre domain with eyes revealing both naive simplicity and fathomless cruelty. An amoral savage who had many wives and diddled his children when he wasn’t worshipping idols and eating his enemies.

  For some reason, Satan reminds the captain of that native chieftain who, despite his foolish appearance, is so powerful and dangerous that no-one dares smile at him. Maybe that’s because of the way Satan sits in the chair : completely at ease, without seeming careless or open to attack, like a lion that sleeps with one eye open. Perhaps it’s the bare flesh: all that meat filling the chair, ready for love or attack. Or his eyes, those dim holes that –

  ‘Coffee’s hot,’ says Satan, rolling his head to the right and looking the captain straight in the eye. Guðmundur glances away, like a young girl at her confirmation who’s been caught staring at a virile boy.

  ‘Yeah, thanks, I gu
ess I’ll …’ The captain trails off and walks behind the chair, over to the port side of the bridge.

  ‘Get me a refill while you’re at it,’ says Satan, holding out his empty coffee mug.

  ‘Of course,’ says the captain, his face turning red with anger, but he grits his teeth as he takes the mug.

  Damn him!

  ‘Two sugars and a dash of milk,’ says Satan, leaning back more comfortably and pushing with his feet so the leather creaks.

  Guðmundur Berndsen is speechless at the rude and demanding manners of this street kid. Isn’t he meant to be a grown-up? The captain almost loses control of his temper, but with an effort he manages to swallow his rage and, with it, his pride. He sighs deeply, shakes his head and counts up to twenty in his head while he pours the coffee into the mugs.

  Not today. He’s not going to get angry today. Not the same day that four of his crew have been murdered and another one vanished. Not the same day that he murdered a man for the first time …

  The memory of the killing pours over the captain like cold tar. He grabs the edge of the sink with both hands, takes a deep breath, holds it, and then exhales calmly. He hasn’t slept a wink since he killed that man.

  ‘Are you getting that coffee?’

  Guðmundur opens his eyes and straightens his back. Spots dance before his eyes and hot winds whirl in his head.

  Could it be that he understands this, this underworld man? Could he have taken a life before? Could he maybe tell him how …

  ‘Coming,’ says the captain and he picks up the coffee mugs, carries them across to the middle of the bridge and hands one to Satan. ‘Here you go.’

  ‘I asked for milk and sugar,’ says Satan, looking into the black coffee and then at the captain, who takes a seat on the chair by the port side window.

  ‘I have something that belongs to you,’ says the captain as he pulls a white package from the side pocket of his jacket. It’s the handgun, loosely wrapped in a handkerchief.

  ‘It’s empty,’ says Satan, then blows some smoke rings.