The Xavier Affair

by Fish, Robert L. ;

  At the young officer’s side the assistant chief engineer, a Scot not much older than the deck officer, but ages older in experience. Fear of rules—together with most other fears—was something he had lost in His Majesty’s Navy, being in the water several times in the course of his service, once for six hours before being picked up. Not as far back as one might think; these things can happen when you go before the mast as oiler’s assistant at the age of fourteen, but still better than the Lochgelly coal mines. He had seen service in the ships of at least five nations since then, never staying too long on any one. He had volunteered to stay aboard tonight in favor of the Brazilian members of the engine-room staff going ashore; Carnival meant a lot to them.

  He glanced calmly at the young deck officer at his side, not too well acquainted with him, bit down on the thin black cigar he had become accustomed to when cigarettes were hard to come by at home, and squirted smoke past stained teeth, speaking around the edge of the Havana. It was not the best Havana, but it had been rolled in Cuba. Like me, once, he thought with a sour inward smile, and spoke up.

  “Ah, mon, let the buggers come up!” he said dispassionately. “What’s the odds? It’s Carnival—a big thing in these islands. Almost as big as it is down Rio way.” He removed the cigar, contemplated it a moment, licked a recalcitrant leaf back into place, checked his handiwork for relative permanence, and replaced it in his mouth. He clamped his teeth on it, prepared once again for speech. “They won’t steal the ruddy boilers on this tub,” he said sardonically, “and it wouldn’t hurt a hell of a lot if they did.”

  This was mostly rhetoric; the Porto Alegre was less than ten years out of the builder’s slip and had excellent boilers. In any event the deck officer understood only about half of his companion’s plea, but he did get the general drift.

  “Come on, Scotty. You know the rules.” He spoke in Portuguese.

  In the darkness below, the four waited quietly, bouncing on the choppy waves. One hand of the largest of the four was now gripping the rope that served as a fragile railing for the rolling dock at the foot of the angled ladder; his attitude was one of anticipation, sensing rather than actually hearing the discussion above, wisely allowing the white man to argue for them. Across the roadstead a rusted freighter swung at anchor; from the taffrail a man in a greasy apron watched the performance even as he dumped garbage into the sea.

  “I know the rules,” the engineer said, returning to English, and smiled grimly out into the darkness. “Too bloody well I know the rules. Made to be broke, the whole frigging lot.”

  “Eu não posso. I can’t not.”

  “Damn it, mon, of course you can do it. You’re the deck officer at the moment, aren’t you?” He snorted. “A couple of youngsters banging around the deck on some tin drums for a couple of minutes trying to pick up some change. What the bleedin’ hell! If they was provisioners from Cave, Shepherd, with a couple of cases of decent brandy for the old man,” he added significantly, “they’d be aboard fast enough. If we had to send a gang to carry them, drums and all!”

  The uniformed officer at his side grinned.

  “’Ta bom. All right, Scotty. Do not have an attack of the heart over it.” He moved to the section of railing that had been removed from the promenade deck, allowing access to the unstable gangway, leaning over, raising his voice, speaking slowly to clarify his enunciation. “All right, chicos. You can aboard.” He strengthened his voice, making it stern, trying to sound older than his years and fairly proud of his success. At his side the blue eyes of the Scotsman twinkled. “But no begging off from—I mean, no begging off—the passengers. Are you understood?”

  “Right, mon. We don’t beg.” It was the large man who had been in the prow of the rowboat, the spokesman, the obvious leader. The one with the deep voice whose intonations seemed to be calculated but never offensive. “No begging. Hear that, chaps? That’s a rule! Only music. Real island steel drum!”

  They scampered up the gangplank, released, the last one holding the dipping rowboat as his companions spurned it with easy grace in favor of the angled steps, and then casually tying the boat to a pipe stanchion of the heaving platform with enough slack to prevent their transportation from swamping in the wash of a passing vessel. The cook on the freighter across the roadstead shrugged, spat over the taffrail for luck, and went back inside to a companionway leading below. In the growing darkness the gulls screamed and dove for the refuse he had strewn.

  The four from the rowboat made it to the promenade deck, the first arrivals standing to one side to allow their leader to be the first to appear on deck and take charge. Their steel drums hung from their necks like forgotten albatrosses. The head man came up the steps silently and swiftly, stepping on deck; the others followed quietly, forming a small circle about him. The deck officer was surprised to see they weren’t as young or as small as they had appeared from the height of the towering deck. Actually, while they weren’t young, they weren’t very old either—in their early twenties, he supposed, not much younger than himself, and they looked much tougher. Heavy ropy muscles bulged the short legs of the tight pants that came halfway up the thick calves; open-throated shirts loose and colorful, billowing sleeves wrist-tight completed the scant costumes. Unlike many ashore they had eschewed the broad-brimmed seaman’s hat native to Barbados; they were bareheaded. Their large feet, also bare, slapped on the pegged planks of the deck, still warm from the heat of the afternoon. The deck officer had a brief moment of trepidation, a wonder if he had made a mistake, but this feeling disappeared once the four had pulled their wrapped mallets from their tight waistbands and begun to play.

  For they could play steel drums! How they could play! They could really play! And with their black faces as frozen as ice, large eyes wandering only from their instruments to the face of the big man, their leader. Slowly the music seemed to even relax them, to remove whatever tension they had been under; they began to bend to the sound of it, holding their drums closer as if to ingest the music from them, asking the drums to be kind, to be good, as if they were independent of the men playing them. Their bodies now began to move, to react, amazed at the sounds they themselves were producing, wrists loosening, fingers fluttering, wrapped sticks flashing from side to side as if without volition. It was surprising, incredible, the muted sweetness of the music they could draw from the crudely hammered cut-down oil drums. Intricate harmony complemented the various themes, threading through the vibrant thrumming, each player picking his proper range and part without any visible sign from another.

  They played the music of the islands, music of Carnival evoked ages before in distant lands for different purposes, added to, embellished in the islands—music to drink rum by, to kill by, to beat a woman by, or to make love to her by, music to forget or remember by—happier times, more exciting times, or sadder times, times when one would have been better off stepping in front of the perimetral bus or swimming out to meet a shark halfway—or facing a husband because it would have been worth it.

  The ship across the roadstead now bristled with men at the rail listening avidly; even the cook had returned and was watching, a cigarette between his lips, pasted there. On the Porto Alegre a voice called from the swimming pool area at the end of the promenade deck—an American accent, one of a group there who had either elected to stay aboard for the evening, or were planning on catching the lighter ashore after dinner, assuming it showed up on schedule, or at all.

  “You! Boy!”

  “Mon?”

  No pause in the pulsing beat of the music, merely a slight diminution in volume through which the raised voices could carry.

  “How about bringing that entertainment down this way, eh?”

  “Right, mon. Right now, sir. A pleasure.”

  Volume back up again, raised by all four equally and at the same time, again with no apparent sign from anyone in the group. Well trained as well as skillful. They bobbed their heads in unison at the deck officer and the engineer and started to m
ove down the deck.

  “Remember what I told,” the deck officer said in a low voice. “No begging. I am too serious.”

  “No begging, mon. I mean, sir. My word on it.”

  It was the large man, the leader, his white teeth flashing in the growing dimness of the evening. Colored lights suddenly sprang into being along the windowed saloon wall, hanging in loops, the bulbs like beads, casting blues and yellows and greens and reds over the deserted deckchairs. Beneath them the leader of the group seemed to loom even larger, his shadow leading the shadows of his companions down the deck toward the pool. He paused to turn, studying the deck officer, grinning almost childishly.

  “Maybe tips, though, sir? They force them to us, like, mon?”

  The deck officer turned to the engineer with a faint frown of nonunderstanding.

  “Tips?”

  “Gorjetas.” The engineer didn’t know too much Portuguese, but gorjetas was a word you learned quickly in Brazil or you didn’t eat, at least not in restaurants.

  The deck officer sighed helplessly in face of that wide hopeful grin. “No begging, but all right, I guess. Tips.” He watched the four move toward the swimming pool.

  “The old man won’t hang you,” the Scottish engineer said dryly, and removed his cigar to spit in the ocean. He was careful to direct it well away from the small craft rising and falling rhythmically at the end of the ship’s ladder.

  “You mean he won’t hang you,” said the deck officer in Portuguese, and grinned.

  The steel-drum band played their tantalizing music all around the promenade deck, pausing for the group at the pool, and later for another group of people on the lee side of the ship, staring somberly at the last fan-shaped shafts of light sent up by the dying sunset to fringe the low-lying clouds on the horizon with crimsons and purples. They were an elderly group, lying back in their deckchairs as if determined to avoid the pleasures of Carnival—or even the sight or sound of it ashore—at any cost. The Americans sitting about the pool had been noisy, but they had tipped generously. The group on the lee side of the ship had not tipped at all. The four steel-drum players honored their promise not to beg.

  They carried their soft throbbing beat through the main saloon, their bare toes sinking luxuriously into the thick, rich carpeting. They danced as they played now, short mincing steps first to one side, then to the other, their lithe bodies swaying in accompaniment, sleeves billowing, eyes rolling in ecstasy exaggerated or real. They played and danced past the surprised bartender idly shining glasses at the curved, deserted bar—normally crowded at this cocktail hour but empty this Carnival night—past the abandoned bandstand, piano closed and locked, bass fiddle tilted drunkenly against the wall as if sleeping standing up, with the polished parquet of the oval dance floor cool beneath their feet. They played past the door to the ship’s library, also locked, and the empty card room, back on carpet once again, then through the wide glass doors to the area before the ship’s shop, closed in port by law, their bare feet enjoying cold linoleum now. They twisted and pranced and quietly pounded their rippling rhythm down the broad staircase to the main deck and the purser’s square, empty except for an assistant purser sitting behind the desk, reading a novel in lieu of something more exciting to do. There are always martyrs among the crew when a ship is in port, at least one from the purser’s staff.

  He looked up at their sound and smiled happily as they came down the last few steps and spread themselves fan-shaped before his counter. He came to his feet, dog-earing the book, laying it aside, grinning. English he had to perfection; he was a descendant of one of those American families that had migrated to Brazil after the Civil War, completely bilingual, and happy with Carnival even if he could not participate in it tonight. The following day in Guadeloupe he would be off duty, although in all honesty the French really didn’t have a clue as to what Carnival was all about.

  “Hey, hey! Entertainment, eh?”

  “Entertainment, yessir, mon. Real island music.”

  “Very, very good.” The purser’s assistant grinned. “Very good. As good steel drum as I’ve ever heard.”

  “Thank you, sir, mon.”

  The leader smiled back at him widely, teeth brilliant, and stopped playing abruptly. He reached behind him with one fluid motion, tucking his wrapped mallet sticks down into his waistband at the small of his back. The other three drummers, however, continued their throbbing music, spreading out in almost military precision without missing a note, one remounting the carpeted steps to the bend in the staircase where he could observe anyone descending, each of the other two taking a stance at the discharge end of the lee and starboard corridors leading tiltingly to the staterooms of the main deck.

  The assistant purser suddenly didn’t like the look of things. He may have spoken English as if he had been born and bred in Savannah, but he was a Brazilian with five generations behind him, and he knew trouble when he saw it. And this was trouble. The fixed smile on the big black man’s face was too humorless; there was sudden tension in the other three, although no sign of it appeared in their music. The assistant purser studied them all a moment, his eyes moving from one to the other, his smile gone, wiped away by the circumstances; then he reached for the telephone on the counter beside him. His hand froze in midair as he found himself staring into the black circle of a revolver muzzle. Copper tips winked brightly in the light from the chambers visible on either side. Where the weapon had come from that suddenly the purser could not imagine. He attempted coolness, the shocked righteousness of the innocent bystander.

  “Hey! What is this?”

  “This? This is a gun, mon. You never seen a gun?”

  “You know what I mean. You can’t get away with pulling a gun. What’s this business all about?”

  “Entertainment, mon.” The big black man shrugged, his eyes flat. “Like we both agreed. Just entertainment. Only you providing it this time. And let’s keep our hands flat down on that countertop, like, eh, mon? Like you was holding down a couple of hole-cards in seven card stud poker, eh? That’s the ticket, mon. You gamble? Draw poker, stud poker? Good games.” The deep voice chilled convincingly. “Only don’t gamble now, mon. My word!”

  The steel drum was whisked from his neck in one smooth motion, the pistol never wavering from the purser’s startled face during the exercise. The big man bent slowly, his hand firm with the gun, his eyes steady on the other, tilting his drum against the counter almost lovingly. He straightened up.

  “Now let’s go visit the ship’s safe, eh, mon? What you say?”

  “The safe?”

  The young man swallowed, staring about the small square with its elevator doors closed and the pointer frozen someplace above, with its corridors covered and its stairway watched. The area echoed softly and insanely with a throbbing Carnival tune, expertly played by the silent three. The small square also echoed with loneliness and hopelessness. His eyes came back from their tour of desperation to the black face smiling at him through thick red lips, but the eyes facing him were not smiling. They were chips of black obsidian set in yellow topaz.

  “The safe, remember, mon? And don’t make me ask you again. My word!”

  The purser swallowed. A poor chance, but still he had to try. Otherwise it would be impossible to face the eventual inquiry. He wet his lips and shook his head, trying to sound confident.

  “The safe? You made a mistake. You’re in the wrong place. All we handle is the ship’s mail, and messages, and the keys to the cabins and things like that. The ship’s safe is in the captain’s quarters next to the bridge. Where you can’t—”

  “Mon! I said to you: don’t gamble!”

  The thick muscular hand with the revolver snaked forward; the pistol was raised and raked heavily across the suddenly ashen face on the other side of the desk. The front sight was edged, a poor job of tumble-finishing at the factory or filed sharp since, possibly just for this purpose. It left a sharp cut across one cheek, gouged a deeper groove where it struck
the bridge of the nose, skipped a bit of flesh, and then cut again. Blood began to well rapidly from the cuts, running down the purser’s face, gathering on his chin, dripping onto the countertop and his white summer uniform jacket. He started to reach for a handkerchief to staunch the flow but instead changed his mind, putting his hand back on the desk, letting it remain where it had been, pressing it tightly against the smooth formica top. He squeezed his eyes shut momentarily against the pain and then opened them, staring dully at the cold face and veiled eyes before him. The music played on without change in tempo or style, throbbing softly. The big man spoke, his velvet voice blending in with the music of the drums, almost taking its rhythm, its sing-song cadence from them.

  “Mon, mon!” The tone was chiding. “Your momma never teach you what happen to little boys don’t never tell the truth? I’m sure she must have. You just forget, eh, mon?”

  The young purser remained quiet, his eyes trapped. The cuts on his face hurt; the blood running down his thin cheeks itched. The white teeth of his assailant flashed.

  “Well, now, mon—you don’t want to tell me, then supposing I tell you? It isn’t in the room behind you, because that door leads to the head. And that gangway over to the side leads to your boss’ stateroom. And off that stateroom to larboard is his office. And in that office I truly figure we going to find that ship’s safe you just went and lost. And you know what, mon?” He paused as if truly waiting for an answer; the purser remained quiet. “I tell you. If that safe isn’t open—and I don’t really expect it is—then you are going to open that safe for us. Because if you don’t, I’m going to kill you, mon. My word! I mean it and you know I mean it. But I don’t aim to kill you quick. Oh, no! First I’m going to wipe this gun back and forth across your face until you wish I’d give it up and pull that trigger.” His soft voice became even softer, more chilling. “Now, we wouldn’t want nothing like that to happen, would we? Of course not!”