The Tropical Issue

by Dorothy Dunnett

  We were near enough now to see the captain’s white smile. ‘One tropical storm. Is nothing. We have one good engine.’

  Their ship had never been in trouble. Their distress call had been a hoax.

  I looked at Raymond, at Lenny, at Maggie. None of them looked at me. They all stared, as if silly, at the rifles.

  Johnson said, ‘Rita, keep still. You, sir. What do you want?’

  The captain was smiling again.

  ‘I think,’ said the captain, ‘we have no rum. You have rum a bordo? We come a bordo and you give to us your rum. You move, we shoot.’

  Ferdy said, ‘To hell with that.’

  He was a big man, with the feet of a footballer. He knew we were six against twelve. Being the sort of man he was, sheer blind fury at being assaulted by wogs was more than enough to make him forget it.

  He was also, of all of us, the one nearest the controls for the idling engine.

  As he spoke, he plunged forward. He kicked the big Mercedes-Benz into gear. He scooped up the sandwich-knife and, rising, hurled himself at the poop warp.

  It was one of two, and even if the knife had sawn through, Dolly would still have been held by the other, or for as long as it took to aim rifles.

  As it was, he didn’t even get the rope frayed. Somewhere in all the noise, a rifle popped. A lot of extra wet suddenly appeared on Ferdy’s smart hugger. He let go the knife and lost balance backwards, down the shallow steps into the saloon.

  I saw the honeycomb soles of his shoes, and his eyes, looking scared as he fell. I saw Maggie move to help him and stop, and so did I. The voice from the other ship said briefly, ‘Engine off. Or else.’

  Johnson put it off quietly and stood by the wheel, half blocking my view of the gunmen. The sea slapped and jumped between the two ships. They touched fenders, and shuddered, and heaved up and down.

  ‘We board on you,’ said the other captain.

  Since they didn’t mind how much the two ships battered together, they jumped from their rail to Dolly’s with no special trouble.

  Eight of them came aboard. They hadn’t come up against soap and water for a long time, and they were pretty funnily dressed, some of them, but they weren’t in want, to look at their rings and their watches.

  I had heard, right enough, of freelance enterprise in the Caribbean. Present-day pirates, high on hash, who cruised about the rich playgrounds, robbing the fancy yachts.

  I wondered what on earth a bunch of Spaniards could be hoping for, from a yacht like the Dolly.

  I supposed, with their distress signal as bait, they were out for anything they could grab. And there was plenty of gear on the Dolly, if they knew how to dismantle it.

  I thought it was a pity that they had shown us their faces, although, on the other hand, killing the six of us would be quite a risk.

  I realised, as the boats lurched and banged, that they didn’t even have to kill us, as Tropical Storm Chloe was approaching at fifteen m.p.h. to solve their problem for them. I am never sick at sea. I began to feel sick at sea.

  I had forgotten to think of rape, until the first two or three jumped on the side deck, and one of them took hold of Maggie, and ripped all her buttons off, down to her all-over tan.

  It was the worst thing that could have happened, because it made our men flip. Lenny forgot everything and went for Maggie’s attackers as if she had been a bloody virgin, and so did Raymond.

  The pirates didn’t shoot Lenny or Raymond. They just clubbed them with the end of their guns and left them, half in, half out of the cockpit. Then they lifted up Maggie and threw her on to the cockpit cushions while the captain jumped in and sat down beside her, with his rifle pointed at Johnson’s oilskin.

  The man who had spoken on the loud-hailer was quite young: not more than twenty-five, and his face was wide across the cheekbones and looked more Indian than Spanish. I put its colour at Max Factor Bronze Tone Latin Men. He had on frayed denim shorts and an expensive sweater shirt, with a necklet and a couple of rings that didn’t come out of Woolies.

  He looked at me, grinned, and looked back at Johnson. Behind him, Maggie was silently fighting off one of the explorers, who was interested in getting the rest of her clothes off. A number of men shoved past us all and down into the saloon where, finding Ferdy in the way, they slung him where I couldn’t see him, somewhere off the passage.

  I heard him grunt as they did it, and saw Johnson’s head turn as well.

  Ferdy was alive, then, but how badly hurt, you couldn’t tell. You couldn’t imagine the planter’s punch and the sandwiches all lying there, doing him no good. And the tongue staying inside his own mouth, that used to have such fun at the end of its leash.

  But you couldn’t have imagined Kim-Jim lying shot, either. You looked at people in mortuaries, but they didn’t belong to you.

  The captain was getting bumped by the struggle behind him with Maggie. He snapped something in Spanish, and then something else, and the guy she was fending off got up and then staggered back as she kicked him.

  The boat was rocking so much that if you didn’t hang on, you would spend your time rolling about the floor. The captain freed one hand from his gun and, turning round, slapped Maggie’s head hard.

  I heard her teeth jar, and saw her eyes roll up. She wasn’t quite out, but as near it as made no difference. The captain shouted in Spanish, raising his voice more this time, and a man appeared on the rail of his own ship, stuffing something into his pocket, and vaulted over, shouting something in reply.

  He came down into the cockpit, still talking, and I saw Johnson’s eyes hadn’t moved from him.

  I don’t understand Spanish. I hardly understand English. But I understood the word ‘Chloe’.

  Whatever else was said, it made the captain stop and think. Then he rapped out an order, and the guy who’d just come hauled some twine out of his pocket, and a knife, and tied Maggie’s hands and ankles together.

  Then he lurched over to the side deck, pulled down Lenny and Raymond, and did the same to them, leaving them on top of one another on the cockpit floor. After that, he went down below.

  I could hear his voice, talking to the others. I could hear the ship being searched: cupboards being wrenched open, dishes and glassware jolting out and breaking.

  Raymond was going to have a bruise on his face. I knew exactly how long it would take to develop, and all the colours it would go. I wondered what colour my face was. Johnson and I were the only two who hadn’t been touched.

  The captain looked at us both and said to Johnson, ‘Orange hair. This your piece?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnson. ‘What do you want? Money? There is a safe in the wall of the stateroom. Through there.’

  I had seen two men go through that door already, and heard the sound of breaking wood through all the other noise. We pitched and pitched. The captain had a grip of the edge of the cockpit with one hand, while the other held the gun trained on Johnson.

  Johnson said, ‘The key’s in my pocket, if you’ll let me get it. There’s nothing else on board. The ladies don’t carry jewellery.’

  I could see what colour Johnson was. He had looked fairly bleached when Raymond took the wheel from him, and he’d been thrown about like the rest of us ever since.

  I hoped he hadn’t seen the same films that I had. I hoped he wasn’t going to produce a gun from his pocket, because the captain would so enjoy shooting first.

  I hoped he wasn’t going to lure the captain into coming forward, and then try and grab him as hostage, because that needed the guy who used to go skiing, not the guy who had just left his wheelchair.

  On the other hand . . .

  The bulkhead was batting me backwards and forwards, and my teeth were jarring, like Maggie’s had. I said to the captain, ‘Don’t shoot. He’s kidding you. He gave the key to me.’

  I moved away from Johnson and gave a nervous smile. It was no trouble. I said, ‘Don’t shoot. It’s not my fault. I didn’t want to come anyway. I’ll giv
e you the key.’

  The captain smiled. He had rotten teeth. He would need wallies before he was thirty. He would need wallies, but he would be alive, and maybe I wouldn’t.

  Johnson said, ‘You silly bitch: you’ll get us all shot.’ He was shouting above the wind, and it sounded nearly natural. He was bloody quick. He said to the captain, ‘The key’s here. Tell one of your men to come and . . .’

  I didn’t have a key, but I had a nice silvery coin with a bird on it, in a little pocket too small for a gun.

  I said, ‘Catch!’ and tossed it to the captain, and dived, as his eyes flicked, for the gun.

  I didn’t get it.

  The gun fired itself into the deck. Behind me, Maggie yelled something to Johnson.

  Without his glasses, Johnson’s face could be seen sometimes to wear an expression.

  I saw it. It looked resigned.

  Then he flung himself on to the captain, and the three men who had been watching with interest from the side deck jumped down on to him. The captain laid down his rifle and said, ‘Hold him.’

  They held him against the edge of the cockpit seat, and the captain did the kicking.

  I saw the first blow sink into the odd, sunken places in Johnson’s side, and the second into his stomach, and the third into his ribs. Heavy sneakers aren’t the same as bovver boots; more like a rubber truncheon, slamming over and over in the same places.

  A baby’s bootees would have felt like bovver boots to someone as badly damaged already as Johnson. And they didn’t stop when he flaked out, either.

  It was my fault. The only weapon I had to hand was the thermos of coffee, but it was scalding. I got the captain straight in his Bronze Tone Latin face. I was trying to take the cap off the paella when the rest of them turned on me.

  It wasn’t like the Mercedes on Madeira. It was pretty rotten. It ended with a rabbit punch on the back of my neck. I joined the other three on the floorboards, and blacked out.

  Chapter 19

  I woke with a screaming headache, a stiff neck, and the impression that someone was tossing me in a wet blanket in the middle of a pipe band parade.

  Opening my eyes did nothing to correct it.

  The deafening wailing and rattling and thudding continued. It was pitch black, and I was rolling backwards and forwards among something that could have been heaps of soggy cushions. I felt dead sick. I felt dead.

  It was the problem of finding somewhere to be sick that made me keep my eyes open, and work out where I was.

  There wasn’t much trouble, once I put my mind to it. In the cockpit well of Dolly, sliding about with several unconscious people in total darkness, with no engine on, and no sail, and a storm going on around me.

  The thugs who had left us that way, and their ship, had all vanished.

  It didn’t accordingly seem to matter very much where I was sick, but I did stagger as considerately as I could to the side, and got there in time.

  I was aware, as the sandwiches and the paella and everything else disappeared into either the Atlantic or the Caribbean, that I was walking without twinges, which I was vaguely glad about, until I remembered how pleased my aunt would be as well.

  I remembered Maggie and, with equal vagueness, hoped she’d got off with it too.

  Then I remembered Ferdy. And Johnson.

  A voice at my feet said, ‘Rita?’ and gagged, and added, ‘Are they gone?’

  Raymond. I wondered why I couldn’t see him, and realised I really could see nothing. There were no lights on Dolly anywhere. None on her busy dials. None even on the binnacle.

  I said, ‘They’ve gone. And their boat.’

  I suppose people used to the sea always think of their yacht first.

  Raymond didn’t ask about people. He must have been lying, working out the way Dolly was rocking. He said, with a sort of bleary surprise, ‘They’ve left her hove-to.’

  It was Greek to me. But I understood him when he added, ‘There’s a knife in my pocket.’

  Of course. He’d been tied up. I knew how he felt.

  I groped my way to him, and found the pocket he directed me to, and sawed his feet free first, to let him get to the side. Then I undid his hands.

  I said, ‘Raymond. Chloe. What time do you think it is?’

  ‘There isn’t any bloody light,’ Raymond said. I could hear him clicking on switches in the bulkhead. He kept forgetting to hold on, and staggering. He wasn’t really awake yet.

  I said, ‘The storm. Is there a torch somewhere?’

  He was so slow, he must have been half-concussed. But he climbed down off the cockpit seat and tried to kneel and undo the locker underneath it. Then he realised what he was kneeling on and said, ‘Christ . . .?’ as he felt the humped cloth lying about him.

  We couldn’t do anything without the torch. Help Lenny, or Maggie, or Ferdy, or Johnson. Get the radio going. And the engine. I wondered, if the engine ran out of juice and everyone else was overboard or dead, if Raymond and I could sail Dolly into St Lucia.

  And find the bastards who’d done this to us.

  And kick them bloody to death.

  I shoved Raymond out of the way, and hauled open the locker he’d been fiddling at, and threw out everything in it until I found the torch. A big box torch with a power battery in it that lit Dolly’s cockpit like daylight.

  Lit up the back of Lenny’s head, with blood drying brown among the scanty hair, and his wrists lashed behind him against the neat blue jersey.

  Lit up the long cushionless bench with Maggie lying on it, in the shreds of her shirt, with the brown of her leg showing through her pants. She was bound exactly as she had been when I last saw her, but not awake any more.

  I kept the light on her until I saw her chest rise and fall, and then turned it to the man on the floorboards behind Raymond.

  Raymond hadn’t seen him yet. Awake at last, he knelt in the light and taking my knife, cut Lenny’s bonds and turned him gently over.

  Lenny snored. The crusty, salt-bitten face was unmarked, and as we watched, his mouth moved about, though his eyes were tight shut.

  Raymond’s own mouth slackened. He let Lenny’s head down, and got up and bent over Maggie. He said, ‘Chloroform, I think. Otherwise, we’d not be waking up together. And Maggie has hardly a mark on her.’

  ‘Ferdy was shot,’ I said. ‘They dragged him down below. I don’t know if he’s all right.’

  ‘Shot!’ exclaimed Raymond. He grabbed a rail, swung, and took a lurching step to the saloon stairs.

  I think he stopped because I didn’t move. And then he turned and looked where I was looking.

  He didn’t yell out again. He just said, ‘Jay,’ in the middle of an incoming breath, and went down on all fours beside Johnson.

  Jay. By itself, it was a nice name.

  I went a little nearer. My light lit up everything. Raymond, and the wheel, all tied up with rope, and the owner of Dolly lying pitched on his back underneath it.

  Because his yellow reefer was waterproof, the blood hadn’t been able to get through it, and just shone underneath in big lakes and smudges. Where the nylon ended it had streamed out, and then followed the roll of the boat like a weather chart.

  His face, carried up and down and from side to side by the bottom boards, was unmarked. He had a five o’clock shadow. It grows on dead men as well.

  Our boarders hadn’t touched his hands, or his limbs. Just his body.

  Raymond said, ‘Rita. Can you sling a hammock, really fast? And get sheets and the first aid box. The one in his own room has morphine. And call me.’

  Not another Kim-Jim. Or not yet. Raymond looked up at the noise my throat made, and said, ‘We’ll do it, soul. Don’t worry. Be quick, though.’

  I had to come back for the torch, because I couldn’t get into the saloon. Raymond was cutting off the streaming reefer, but he gave me the light. When I called him a moment later, he came without protesting. I suppose the sound of my voice had something to do with it.

>   I couldn’t get into the saloon because there wasn’t a saloon.

  It is something burglars do, when disappointed. They wreck, tear up and befoul.

  These particular burglars had done all of that. They had loaded everything that was moveable into the middle of the room: curtains, cushions and bedding, books and maps, cloths and napkins, every plate, every glass, every cup, even the table itself, and had methodically torn it all up and smashed it.

  They had also made very sure that it would never be used again. The smell was awful, even with the wind scouring round from the broken door.

  The silver had gone, and the liquor store, the T.V., the radio, the record player. So had the navigational equipment that I had been so pleased to notice: Dolly’s £70,000 worth of electronic aids, from echo-sounder to radar to radio-telephone. What could be pinched had been pinched. What couldn’t, had been smashed.

  We would never get that 6 a.m. storm bulletin from St Lucia Radio now. Or any other.

  The chart drawer had been emptied as well. The charts were confetti, and the drawers themselves smashed, every one. There was nothing left of the elegant saloon of the Martinique dinner party, with its orchids and crystal and candlelight.

  The galley was the same, and the bathrooms, and each of the cabins. We climbed through them, concerned now only with looking for Ferdy, and found him on the floor in the room Maggie and I had been meant to share.

  There was a bullet-hole right through Ferdy’s shoulder, and he showed no sign of waking. In the smaller space, the smell of chloroform was quite distinct. The raiders had decided to enjoy themselves without any interruptions from us.

  There were no useable sheets, just as there was no morphine. The first aid box had been given special attention. I gave Raymond the light to go back to Johnson with, and before he went, stripped off my cotton-knit shirt and slung it to him.

  It was better than nothing. He neither looked at me or away from me while I did it. It simply didn’t matter.

  I used my own handkerchiefs to stuff into Ferdy’s shoulder, by the dim light from the cockpit, and his own bigger one to bind it round with.

  There was no way of making him comfortable. I jammed him into the wreckage of the bed so that he didn’t roll with the movement, and shifted anything I could see that could hurt him. I didn’t even have brandy. The longer he was unconscious, the better.