Improvisato

by David Crossman

  “That was beautiful, Albert.”

  As the last notes hushed one another to silence among the potted plants, family photos, and bric-a-brac, Albert stared at a painting of a sailboat on the wall. He didn’t need to look at the speaker. It was Angela.

  “I came looking for you. The colonel let me in.”

  That would account for her being there. “It’s what coffee sounds like,” he said, “and the Girl on the Beach.”

  There was a word on the stern of the boat in the painting which, he realized, he’d been staring at as he played. Verity.

  Boats had names.

  Turning on the stool, he faced her. “The ship she was on is called Venice.”

  “The Girl on the Beach?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think that’s what she was referring to when she said that, the name of the boat?”

  “Yes.”

  Angela was leaning against the doorframe, her arms still crossed in a listening attitude. “Makes as much sense as anything.” She said, nudging herself upright. She came and sat beside him. He lit a cigarette.

  “We should tell the police.” She ran her fingers through his hair. “Your hair’s a mess.”

  Sometime, somewhere, Albert had heard the phrase, “Don’t shoot me, I’m just the piano player.” Go ahead and shoot, he thought. Preferably before his body embarrassed him. Now would be a good time.

  Instinctively realizing she was not comforting him, quite the contrary, she withdrew her hand. “So, should I call?”

  “Someone to shoot me?” He hadn’t meant to say that. “You mean the police,” he said, before she could say whatever it was her mouth was shaping itself to say.

  “Yes. I think we should call the police and tell them you think that Venice is the name of the boat the girl had been on.” Clarity, she knew, was important when talking to Albert. “Do you want me to call?”

  The list of things he hated was short, mostly because there weren’t that many things he cared about enough to feel one way or the other. Four years ago, the list would have consisted of the orange-colored soup his mother used to make, postage stamps, unicycles, and, sometimes, his sister. Since then two items had worked their way to the top of the list: people who hurt people, and policemen. Not policemen in general, just those who wanted to ask him questions.

  He didn’t want her to call, but she should.

  She did.

  About two hours later, there was a knock on the door, followed by giggling in the hall, followed by Sergeant Jeffreys appearance at the sitting room door. He nodded first at Mr. Sweetman, who was dusting an aspidistra near the garden window, then at Jeremy Ash and Albert in turn, resolving finally upon Angela—by far the prettiest flower in the room.

  “Gentlemen. Miss. Pleasure to see you again.” He removed his hat and tucked it under his arm. “You want to see me?”

  “Actually,” said Angela, “we’d been expecting Sergeant Hawkes.”

  “Yes. Well, Senior Sergeant Hawke’s got a fair bit on his plate just now, so he asked if I might act in his stead—with his apologies, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Jeremy Ash.

  “It’s about the Girl on the Beach, I assume?”

  “Yes,” said Angela and Jeremy Ash at once, though she deferred to him in taking up the narrative.

  “We think she’d been on a boat called the Venice, or something like that.”

  A smile tugged at the corners of the sergeant’s mouth. “Yes. Well, we’ll look into that. Is there anything else?”

  “That’s it?” said Angela, rising from her chair. “You’ll ‘look into that?’ What does that even mean, anyway?”

  Jeffreys was startled. “Well, it means we’ll . . .”

  “What it means is Hawkes told you to tell us what you think we want to hear, and then ignore us.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t put it like that, Miss . . .”

  “But that’s what he meant. Am I right?”

  “Well. . .”

  Angela strode toward the unsuspecting officer purposefully. “I’ll tell you what you can tell the senior sergeant. Tell him he’s a pompous ass who couldn’t find a blister on his backside with both hands and a roomful of mirrors.”

  The scene between Angela and the sergeant brought to Albert’s recollection a picture he had seen of a palm tree bent backwards by a hurricane.

  The sergeant was the palm tree, and the hurricane was winning.

  “Honestly,” Jeffreys stammered. “I assure you. . .”

  “Repeat after me,” said Angela. “Here are the salient points: Pompous ass. Blister. Backside. Both hands. Roomful of mirrors.” With each statement she poked his chest.

  “I’m in love,” said Jeremy Ash under his breath, so only Albert could hear. Albert smiled.

  “Miss, please. This uniform is police property, and you’re denting it.” He tilted his head sheepishly, but not submissively. “I’m pretty sure there’s an ordinance against that.”

  Angela’s fury—prepared to rise swiftly through all four levels of the Beaufort Scale in the face of the slightest resistance—was not proof against charm. She deflated, and the palm tree stood erect, with its hat in its hand.

  “Perhaps if we just relax, sit down and have a cup of tea, and you can tell me why you think the girl fell from a ship called the Venice.”

  “She was pushed, or thrown,” said Jeremy Ash.

  “Or was pushed or thrown,” said the sergeant. “Yes. As you say.” He turned to Bindy, the maid, who was standing in the doorway with her hands behind her back, rocking on her heels and planning a bright future for herself, the sergeant, and their three children: Melody, Fraser, and Kaytlyn, with two “y”s. “Perhaps tea all ’round?”

  Bindy nearly tripped, even though she’d been standing still. “Beg pardon?”

  “Tea?” Jeffreys made a circular motion with his index finger. “All ’round?”

  “Tea?” she said, as if it was a term with which she was unfamiliar. “Oh. Tea?”

  “Yes. Tea.”

  The girl pirouetted neatly and followed her giggle down the hall.

  Jeffreys accompanied Angela back to the chair on the arm of which she’d been sitting when he came in. “Please,” he said, gesturing toward the chair, upon which she subsided compliantly, much to Jeremy Ash’s consternation.

  Jeffreys sat himself on the footstool. “Now, let’s hear it.”

  Angela appealed to Albert with a look and, since he seemed more interested in Mr. Sweetman’s progress with the aspidistra, brought the sergeant up-to-date with Albert’s suspicions. When she had finished, the sergeant took Albert in with a doubtful glance. “Is that right, Professor? You think that—because she said ‘Venice,’ or something like that—that she fell from a boat by that name?”

  “Yes.”

  Jeffreys quickly surveyed the room. “That’s what you all think?”

  “If that’s what A thinks,” said Jeremy Ash, “you can bet on it.”

  “‘A’?”

  Jeremy Ash jerked a thumb at Albert.

  “Right.” The sergeant stood up, dusted the knees of his trousers, and transferred his hat from his hand to his underarm. “Tell you what; I’ll check with the marine registry and see if I can turn up a boat by that name. Then, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I can’t say fairer than that.”

  Angela was on her feet again. “You’re not just saying that? You’ll really do it?”

  Jeffreys crossed his heart. “Promise.”

  “And you’ll let us know if you find out anything?”

  “You can bet on that.”

  Sergeant Andrew Jeffreys, not wishing to risk the ire of his superior—who had told him, in no uncertain terms, to keep those “damn Yanks” from “further meddling in our affairs”—just after signing out for the day at 4:00, dropped by the office of the New Zealand Register of Ships in the Department of Transport and, in a semi-official capacity, asked his sister-in-law, Edna, who worked there, to
check her records for a ship called Venice.

  “Don’t need to check,” she said. She thumbed through some papers in her out basket, and drew out three pages—one white, one yellow, and one pink—that were stapled together. She studied the page. “Right. Here it is. The Venice Regent, Panamanian-registered tramp steamer that struck a reef day before yesterday on its way out of Auckland to Perth and points west.”

  “You’re sure?” said Jeffreys who, truth be told, wasn’t expecting any result of his request, much less one so immediate.

  Edna spun the papers on the desk and tapped the line marked “name of vessel.” “Read it for yourself.”

  He read. “Venice Regent. Cargo: Potassium Nitrate. Fertilizer.”

  “Or rocket propellant, or explosive, or food preservative . . .”

  He looked up at her. “I took a course in chemistry at university,” she said. “Remember?”

  “So you did,” said Jeffreys. “Well, what do we do with that?”

  “With what?”

  He shook his head. “Never mind. Where did it run aground?”

  “Fitzgetty Reef. It’s just off . . .”

  “I know where it is. That’s way outside the shipping lane.”

  “Any further,” said Edna laconically, “they’d need wheels.”

  “Is she still there?”

  “Oh, no. She got afloat on the incoming tide, fortunately. No damage.”

  “Did the captain say how it had happened?”

  Edna spun the papers back toward her and read from a small box of tightly hand-written text at the bottom of the page. “According to this, the captain was sick in his cabin. The interview was with the first mate.”

  “And?”

  “He said she’d had rudder trouble. Ran aground before they could fix it.”

  “Rudder trouble? What’s that got to do with the price of rice?” Jeffreys, who had grown up around ships and the sea, was growing increasingly uneasy. He crossed to a large, laminated marine chart that nearly covered the cinder block wall. “If they’re where they’re supposed to be, in the shipping lane,” he slapped the chart with the palm of his hand, “and they have rudder trouble, they just drift outside the lanes and drop anchor until the engine crew can put things right.”

  He drew a finger across the map from the shipping lane to the Fitzgetty reef. “Ten miles,” he said. “Ten miles! If the captain’s that sick, he shouldn’t be in his cabin, he should be in the ER. Where it she now?”

  Edna shrugged. “Back on course, I should imagine.” She shuffled through a little nest of papers on her desk and found what she was looking for. She held it up. “Manifest has her hopscotching islands: New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga, and back here.”

  He leaned on Edna’s desk with both hands and, looking not at her but through her, said, “How do I break this to the old man?”

  Chapter Five

  Sergeant Jeffreys had not slept well that night. He knew Hawkes was not going to be happy that, far from dissuading the Yanks from their interference, as directed, he’d given their hypothesis a hearing and, worse still, followed up on it. Worst of all, had found it to hold water. Enough to float a boat.

  His imagination had not proven equal to Hawke’s ire. “You did what?” said the senior sergeant when Jeffreys had finished relating the facts. He couldn’t help but notice his superior’s eyes widening and face reddening as he told the tale, but resolved to trot out all his sins at once and take the full blast, rather than leach it out and be blown apart by fusillades of increasing intensity.

  “What they had to say made sense,” said Jeffrey, adding, “I thought.”

  “I want you to go to the personnel department, Jeffreys,” he said facetiously. “There you will find a woman named Wanda.”

  They both knew Wanda. She, too, was one of Jeffreys’ cousins. In fact, she was closer than a cousin, because her illegitimate father was his legal father, and they shared a great-grandfather on their mother’s side. “Ask her to get from her files the one outlining your duties and responsibilities. I’m sure . . . I’m very sure, that you will not find ‘thinking’ among them.”

  “No, sir.”

  “No?”

  “I mean, yes, sir.”

  “Make up your mind, Jeffreys. ‘Yes’, or ‘no’? You can’t have it both ways.”

  This was classic Hawkes’ modus operandi: rather than simply confronting a problem head-on and thrashing it out like a man, he’d wear you down, condescend, making you feel like an idiot. For the object of his scorn, poor sod—a role Jeffreys found himself playing all-to-often—no answer was the right answer.

  “As you say, Senior Sergeant,” said Jeffreys. “Sorry, Senior Sergeant.”

  “Now,” said Hawkes, taking his seat behind his desk, before which Jeffreys stood uncomfortably at attention. “This Girl on the Beach . . . you saw her yourself, did you not?”

  “Yes, Senior Sergeant.”

  “Got a good look at her, did you?”

  “Yes, Senior Sergeant.”

  “Oriental. Young. Not unattractive. You concur?”

  Jeffreys knew he was being set up, but the script was written, and all he could do was speak his lines. “Yes, Senior Sergeant.” He could almost hear his brain yelling at his tongue: ‘You traitor!’

  “How would you say she was dressed?”

  “Well dressed, Senior Sergeant.”

  “Well dressed,” Hawke’s echoed. “Yes. I would say well dressed. For a party or special occasion of some kind, would you say?”

  “Possibly, Senior Sergeant,” said Jeffreys squeezing through the tiny window of latitude presented by the way the question had been phrased.

  Hawkes continued. “Probably, I should think. Yes. Very probably. Perhaps even a wedding, would you say?”

  “Yes, Senior Sergeant. A wedding or party or some important function.”

  “My thoughts exactly!” said Hawkes, almost gleefully preparing to drop the other shoe. “Do you suppose there are many such occasions aboard a freighter?”

  Inside, Jeffreys hung his head and shed a solitary tear. Outside, he remained erect, resigned to his fate. “No, sir.”

  “No,” said Hawkes. “I agree with you, Sergeant. She was not dressed the way you would expect a young woman to be dressed having fallen, or been pushed, or jumped from a freighter—assuming, and the assumption stretches credulity—assuming that type of young lady, pretty well-to-do by all appearances, were to be found upon such a vessel rather than, say, a yacht or, at the very least, one of the more exclusive cruise ships.

  “So, you see, we agree. The Girl on the Beach could not have been on a freighter. Therefore, the fact that there was such a ship called the Venice something or other . . .”

  “Venice Regent,” said Jeffreys.

  “Yes. The fact that there was a ship by that name in the vicinity is—as your own logic demonstrates—entirely coincidental.”

  “But . . .”

  Hawkes held up his hand. “. . . As is the fact that the ship had engine trouble and ended up on the beach.”

  Jeffreys was about to remind his superior that the Venice Regent had struck a reef, not washed up on a beach—vastly different things—but decided to withhold comment.

  “Purely coincidental.”

  He opened a drawer in his desk and pretended to be looking for something. “Now, the last thing we need is any more excitement in the neighborhood of Parliament Row. I’m sure you appreciate that. You’re not to contact Those people in relation to this poor girl’s attempted suicide in any way, shape, or fashion. It would only serve to stir them up. Ignore them and they’ll lose interest and go away.

  “Trust me.” He slipped a white-lined note card from his desk and wrote something on it. “You may go.”

  Oddly enough, Jeffreys’ unease had not abated during the interview. Quite the opposite. Issues of clothing aside—and Hawkes did have a point there—the piano player’s hypothesis just made too much sense. The question, as he stood in the corrid
or outside the closed door of his senior sergeant’s office, was, what would he do about it?

  What could he do?

  He’d promised the Aggressive Female that he’d let her know the outcome of his meeting with the senior sergeant, a promise he’d made before being ordered not to have any contact with “Those People.”

  He rationalized: who, exactly, had the senior sergeant meant when he said “Those People?” The Piano Player, of course. Ditto the Aggressive Female, and the Legless Boy. What about Mr. Sweetman? Probably. But how about Bindy, the maid? Surely she couldn’t be lumped in with the Others.

  She did, however, work in that neighborhood—that cursed neighborhood—but did she live there?

  About four o’clock that afternoon, Jeffreys stationed himself in a cluster of arboreal shadows at the end of Parliament Row, and waited for Bindy to leave—which she did about thirty minutes later. He followed her at a distance. Her circuitous route took her to the post office, a greengrocer’s, a fishmonger’s, and a shop where women painted and plucked and pruned and primped. His sister spent untold hours in such places, and he was about to settle into a seat at a coffee shop across the street, when the maid emerged from the shop not two minutes later.

  He followed her for three or four blocks, to an intersection where she boarded a tram into which he swung himself as it left the curb. He flashed his badge at the conductor, then made his way up the aisle and took the seat beside Bindy.

  “Well, fancy meeting you here,” he said.

  She looked at him sideways, her brows unbending as soon as she saw who it was. “Oh, it’s you!”

  “Heading home?”

  “Yes. Gran’s. She and I live on Rose Road. You know Rose Road?”

  Jeffreys had heard of it. “I was a beat cop for the better part of five years,” he prevaricated. “Not many streets in town I don’t know.”