“I need to talk to Martin Bledsoe or John Bemis.”
He waved me in. It didn’t seem like much of a security system to me. I drove on around the potholes and pulled up into a gravel yard. A couple of boxcars were slowly moving along the rail siding and I stood for a minute to watch the hoist carry them up inside the elevator and dump their loads. Amazing process, really. I could understand why my cousin had gotten so intrigued by it.
I skirted around the elevator to the wharf where the Lucella lay. She was enormous, and a sense of mystery and dread filled me. The giant lay momentarily still, held down by steel cables three inches thick-a huge amphibious spider immobile in the coils of its own web. But when she started to move, what things would stir in the depths beneath that gigantic keel? I looked at the black water absorbing the hull and felt sick and slightly dizzy.
Little flecks of grain dust swirled through the air and reached me where I stood behind her. No one knew I was here. I began to see how Boom Boom could have fallen in unnoticed. I shivered and moved forward to the scene of the action.
An extension ladder was attached high up on the ship, with feet reaching the dock. It was sturdy and I forgot about the dark water underneath as I climbed up.
Except for a faint sound from the elevator and the chaff blowing in my eyes, I hadn’t noticed any activity down on the wharf. On deck was another story. It only takes twenty people or so to load a freighter but they were extremely busy.
Five giant chutes were poised over openings in the deck. Guided by three men pulling them around with ropes, they spilled grain into the holds in a series of vast waterfalls. I couldn’t see all the way down the thousand-foot deck-a cloud of grain dust billowed up and obscured the bow from view.
I stood at the edge of a giant machine which seemed to be a long conveyor belt on a swivel, rather like a tank turret, and watched. The area beyond was posted HARD HATS ONLY.
No one noticed me for a few minutes. Then a whitened figure in a blue boiler suit came over to me. He took off his hard hat and I recognized the first mate, Keith Winstein. His curly black hair was powdered white below a line made by his hat.
“Hi, Mr. Winstein. I’m V. I. Warshawski-we met the other day. I’m looking for Mr. Bledsoe.”
“Sure I remember you. Bledsoe’s up on the bridge with the captain. Want me to take you up? Or you want to watch some of this first?”
He dug out a battered hard hat for me from the supply room behind the tank turret-“self-unloader,” he explained. It was attached to a series of conveyor belts in the holds and could unload the entire ship in under twenty-four hours.
Winstein led me along the port side away from the main activity with the chutes. The holds were about half full, he said: they’d be through in another twelve hours or so.
“We’ll take this cargo to the entrance of the Welland Canal and unload it onto oceangoing ships there. We’re too big for the Welland-the longest ships through there are the 740-footers.”
The Lucella had five cargo holds underneath with some thirty-five hatches opening into them. The chutes moved among the hatches, distributing the load evenly. In addition to the men guiding the chutes, another man watched the flow of grain at each hold and directed those at the ropes among the various openings. Winstein went around and checked their work, then escorted me onto the bridge.
Bledsoe and the captain were standing at the front of the glass-enclosed room looking down at the deck. Bemis was leaning against the wheel, a piece of mahogany as tall as I am. Neither of them turned around until Winstein announced to the captain that he’d brought a visitor.
“Hello, Miss Warshawski.” The captain came over to me in a leisurely way. “Come to see what a freighter looks like in action?”
“It’s most impressive… I have a couple of questions for you, Mr. Bledsoe, if you have some time.”
Bledsoe’s right hand was swathed in bandages. I asked how it was doing. He assured me that it was healing well. “No tendons cut… What have you got for me?”
Bemis took Winstein off to one corner to inquire about progress below. Bledsoe and I sat at a couple of high wooden stools behind a large drafting table covered with navigation charts. I pulled the photocopies of the contract verification forms from my canvas bag, flicking off some pieces of chaff which had settled on them. Putting the papers on the drafting table, I leafed through them to find July 17, one of Boom Boom’s circled dates.
Bledsoe took the stack from me and fanned it. “These are Eudora Grain’s shipping contract records. How’d you come to have them?”
“One of the secretaries lent them to me. Captain Bemis told me you were the most knowledgeable person around on these sorts of deals. I can’t follow them-I was hoping you’d explain them to me.”
“Why not get Phillips to?”
“Oh, I wanted to go to the expert.”
The gray eyes were intelligent. He smiled ironically. “Well, there’s no great secret to them. You start off with a load at point A and you want to move it to point B. We shippers move any cargo, but Eudora Grain is concerned chiefly with grain-although they may have a bit of lumber and coal now. So we’re talking about grain. Now, on this one, the order was first placed on July 17, so that’s the initial transaction date.”
He studied the document for a few minutes. “We have three million bushels of soybeans in Peoria and we want to move them to Buffalo. Hansel Baltic is buying the shipment there and that’s where our responsibility ends. So Phillips’s sales reps start scurrying around trying to find someone to carry the load. GLSL. They start there-Great Lakes Shipping Line. They’re charging four dollars and thirty-two cents a ton to carry it from Chicago to Buffalo and they need five vessels. With that big a load you’d normally bid it out among several carriers-I guess the rep was just being a little lazy on this one. Phillips has to bring it from Peoria by rail by the twenty-fourth of July and they’ll get it to Buffalo on the thirty-first or earlier.
“Now, in our business, contracts are set up and canceled routinely. That’s what makes it so confusing-and why the difference of a few cents is so important. See, here, later on the seventeenth, we offer to carry the load for four twenty-nine a ton. That was before we had the Lucella-we can go way under our old prices now because these thousand-footers are so much cheaper to operate.
“Anyway, then Grafalk came in on the eighteenth at $4.30 a ton but a promise to get it there by the twenty-ninth. Cutting it pretty close, really-wonder if they made it.”
“So there’s nothing out of the ordinary about this?”
Bledsoe studied it intently. “Not as far as I can tell. What made you think there would be?”
The chief engineer came in at that point. “Oh, hi there. What do you have?”
“Hi, Sheridan. Miss Warshawski’s been going over Eudora’s shipping orders. She thought something might be wrong with them.”
“No, not that. I just needed help understanding them. I’ve been trying to figure out what my cousin might have known that he wanted to tell Captain Bemis. So I went through his papers yesterday over at Eudora Grain, and I learned he’d been particularly interested in these documents right before he died. I wondered if the fact that all these Pole Star contracts ended up with Grafalk was important.”
Bledsoe looked at the documents again. “Not especially. Either they underbid us or they were promising an earlier delivery date.”
“The other question I had was why Boom Boom was interested in certain dates this spring.”
“What dates this spring?” Bledsoe asked.
“One was the twenty-third of April. I don’t remember the others offhand.” I had the diary in my canvas bag but I didn’t want to show it to them.
Bledsoe and Sheridan looked at each other thoughtfully. Finally Bledsoe said, “The twenty-third was the date we were supposed to load up the Lucella.”
“You mean the day you found water in the holds?”
Sheridan nodded.
“Maybe the other dates also
were connected with shipping accidents. Is there a record of such things?”
Bledsoe’s face twisted in thought. He shook his head. “That’s a pretty tall order. There are so many steamship lines and so many ports. The Great Lakes Underwriter discusses them if they’ve got anything to do with hull or cargo damage. That’d be the best place to start. Recent dates, one of us might be able to help you out.”
I was getting tired of all the legwork that didn’t lead in any real direction. I supposed I could track down the Great Lakes Underwriter and look for accidents to ships, but what would that tell me? Had Boom Boom uncovered some criminal ring vandalizing freighters? Just knowing that accidents had occurred wouldn’t tell me that.
Winstein had gone back down to the deck and Captain Bemis wandered over to join our group. “No further accidents are going to strike this ship. I’ve arranged for a security patrol on deck when they finish loading for the day.”
Bledsoe nodded. “I’ve been thinking maybe I’ll sail out with you.” He grinned. “No aspersion on your management of the ship, John, but the Lucella’s precious to all of us. I want to see her get this load to St. Catharines.”
“No problem, Martin. I’ll have the head cook get the stateroom ready.”
“We don’t run to people like stewards on freighters,” Bledsoe explained to me. “The head cook takes responsibility for the captain’s and the guest quarters. Everyone else fends for himself… What time do you figure to sail, John?”
The captain looked at his watch. “We’ve got about eleven more hours of loading, and Tri-State doesn’t want to pay overtime unless it’s just an hour or two. So anytime after nineteen hundred hours tomorrow.”
Bledsoe offered to give me a tour of the ship, if Bemis didn’t object. The captain gave his permission with a tolerant smile. Sheridan followed us down the narrow wooden stairs. “I get to show off the engine room,” he explained.
The bridge was perched on top of the pilothouse. There were four levels above deck, each smaller than the one below it. The captain and the chief engineer had their quarters on the third story, directly below the bridge. Sheridan opened his door so I could take a quick look inside.
I was surprised. “I thought everyone slept in narrow bunk beds with a tiny sink.” The chief engineer had a three-room suite, with an outsize bed in the bedroom, and an office cluttered with paper and tools.
Bledsoe laughed. “That was true in Dana’s day, but times have changed. The crew sleep six to a room but they have a big recreational lounge. They even have a Ping-Pong table, which provides its amusing moments in a high sea.”
The other officers and the head cook shared the second floor with the stateroom. The galley and the dining rooms-the captain’s dining room and crew’s mess-were on the deck floor and the crew’s quarters on the first floor below deck.
“We should have put the officers’ quarters over the stern,” Sheridan told Bledsoe as we went down below the water level to the engine room. “Even up where John and I are the engines throb horribly all night long. I can’t think why we let them build the whole caboodle into the pilothouse.”
We climbed narrow steel rungs set into the wall down to the belly of the ship where the engines lay. Bledsoe disappeared for this part of the tour. “Once the chief gets started on engines he keeps going for a month or two. I’ll see you on deck before you leave.”
“Engine room” was really a misnomer. The engines themselves were in the bottom of the ship, each the size of a small building, say a garage. Moving parts were installed around them on three floors-drive shafts two feet in diameter, foot-wide piston heads, giant valves. Everything was controlled from a small room at the entrance to the holds. A panel some six feet wide and three feet deep was covered with switches and buttons. Transformers, sewage disposal, ballast, as well as the engines themselves, were all operated from there.
Sheridan showed me the controls that could be used for moving the ship. “Remember when the Leif Ericsson ran into the dock the other day? I was telling you about the controls in the engine room. This one is for the port engine, this for the starboard.” They were large metal sticks, easy to move, with clearly marked grooves-“Full ahead, Half ahead, Half astern, Full astern.”
He looked at his watch and laughed. It was after five. “Martin’s right-I’d stay down here all day. I keep forgetting not everyone shares my love of moving parts.”
I assured him I’d found it fascinating. It was hard to figure out on one visit, but interesting. The engines were laid out sort of like a giant car engine, with every piece exposed so it could be cared for quickly. If you were a Lilliputian you would climb up and down a car engine just this way. Every piece would be laid out neatly, easy to get at, just impossible to move.
I went back up to the bridge to pick up my papers. While we’d been down with the engines, the loading had stopped for the day. I watched while a couple of small deck cranes lifted covers over the hatches.
“We won’t bolt ’em down,” Bemis said. “It’s supposed to be clear tonight, for a miracle. I just don’t want to take any chances with four million dollars’ worth of barley.”
Bledsoe came up to us. “Oh, there you are… Look-I feel I owe you an apology for running lunch the other day. I wondered if I could persuade you to eat dinner with me. There’s a good French restaurant about twenty minutes from here in Crown Point, Indiana.”
I’d worn a black corduroy pantsuit that day and it was covered with fine particles of barley. Bledsoe saw me eye it doubtfully.
“It’s not that formal a place-and there’s some kind of clothesbrush in the stateroom, if you want to brush your suit. You look great, though.”
11 Grounded
Dinner at Louis Retaillou’s Bon Appetit was delightful. The restaurant took up the ground floor of an old Victorian house. The family, who all played a role in preparing and presenting the meal, lived upstairs. It was Thursday, a quiet night with only a few of the inlaid wooden tables filled, and Louis came out to talk to Bledsoe, who was a frequent guest. I had the best duckling I’ve ever eaten and we shared a respectable St. Estephe.
Bledsoe turned out to be an entertaining companion. Over champagne cocktails we became “Martin” and “Vic.” He regaled me with shipping stories, while I tried to pry discreetly into his past. I told him a bit about my childhood on Chicago’s South Side and some of Boom Boom’s and my adventures. He countered with stories of life on Cleveland’s waterfront. I talked about being an undergraduate during the turbulent Vietnam years and asked him about his education. He’d gone straight to work out of high school. With Grafalk Steamship? Yes, with Grafalk Steamship-which reminded him of the first time he’d been on a laker when a big storm came up. And so on.
It was ten-thirty when Bledsoe dropped me back at the Lucella to pick up my car. The guard nodded to Bledsoe without taking his eyes from a television set perched on a shelf above him.
“Good thing you have a patrol on the boat-anyone could get past this fellow,” I commented.
Bledsoe nodded in agreement, his square face in shadow. “Ship,” he said absently. “A boat is something you haul aboard a ship.”
He walked over with me to my car-he was going back on board the Lucella for one last look around. The elevator and the boat-ship-beyond loomed as giant shapes in the dimly lit yard. I shivered a bit in my corduroy jacket.
“Thanks for introducing me to a great new restaurant, Martin. I enjoyed it. Next time I’ll take you to an out-of-the-way Italian place on the West Side.”
“Thanks, Vic. I’d like to do that.” He squeezed my hand in the dark, started toward the ship, then leaned back into the car and kissed me. It was a good kiss, firm and not sloppy, and I gave it the attention it deserved. He mumbled something about calling when he got back to town and left.
I backed the Lynx out of the yard and onto 130th Street. Few cars were out and I had an easy time back to I-94. The traffic there was heavier but flowing smoothly-trailer trucks moving their loads at s
eventy miles an hour under cover of darkness, and the restless flow of people always out on nameless errands in a great city.
The night was clear, as the forecast had promised Bemis, but the air was unseasonably cool. I kept the car windows rolled up as I drove north, passing slag heaps and mobile homes huddled together under the shadow of expressway and steel mills. At 103rd Street the highway merged with the Dan Ryan. I was back in the city now, the Dan Ryan el on my left and a steep grassy bank on my right. Perched on top were tiny bungalows and liquor stores. A peaceful urban sight, but not a place to stop in the middle of the night. A lot of unwary tourists have been mugged close to the Dan Ryan.
I was nearing the University of Chicago exit when I heard a tearing in the engine, a noise like a giant can opener peeling a strip off the engine block. I slammed on the brakes. The car didn’t slow. The brakes didn’t respond. I pushed again. Still nothing. The brakes had failed. I turned the wheel to move toward the exit. It spun loose in my hand. No steering. No brakes. In the rearview mirror I could see the lights of a semi bearing down on me. Another truck was boxing me in on the right.
Sweat came out on my forehead and the bottom fell out of my stomach. I pumped gently on the brakes and felt a little response. Gently, gently. Switched on the hazard indicator, put the car in neutral, leaned on the horn. The Lynx was veering to the right and I couldn’t stop it. I held my breath. The truck to my right pulled out of my way but the one behind me was moving fast and blaring on his horn.
“Goddamn you, move!” I screamed at him. My speedometer needle had inched down to thirty; he was going at least seventy. I was still sliding toward the right lane.
At the last second the semi behind me swerved to the left. I heard a horrible shattering of glass and metal on metal. A car spun into the lane in front of me.
I pumped the brakes but there was nothing left in them. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t do anything. In the last seconds as the car in front of me flipped over I hunched down and crossed my hands in front of my face.
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