The Leper Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Right. Where’s the captain’s cabin? Or, more to the point, after what I’ve been through during the last day and a half, where’s the captain’s drinks cabinet?’

  *

  Considering the obvious age of the ship, the captain’s quarters on C deck, just below the bridge, were surprisingly sumptuous, though they had clearly seen better days. A teak doorway opened into a small vestibule with an office on the left, a shower and toilet straight ahead, a day room on the right with sofas and easy chairs like a lounge. Here John found the bar, complete with an elderly little bar fridge. He poured himself a hefty Scotch, added chilled soda and a handful of ice, then sipped it, looking round. The door into the captain’s sleeping quarters stood far enough open to reveal the foot of a good-sized bed. John sipped his Scotch again and continued to look about in silence. The pictures on the pale walls were all of Italy, by the look of things. He recognised enough famous views and buildings, bays and harbours, to suspect that they were all pictures of the same place: Naples. Salah moved into view deliberately, blocking a vivid Vesuvius.

  ‘How much do you know?’ asked the Palestinian quietly.

  ‘Not much, but I can work out quite a bit.’

  John was used to arriving aboard ships in mid-voyage. For many years he had specialised in picking up the threads of crews caught partway to their destinations, their progress halted by accident or tragedy. He had worked for Crewfinders before it became part of Heritage Mariner, and had been routinely sent all over the world at a moment’s notice. He had stepped into the shoes of maimed officers, crippled mates and dead captains in every sea there was. He was adept at summing up a vessel, crew and situation at a glance. He had a routine which he would be starting with the first mate in a few minutes and continuing with a full inspection in the morning and an unexpected lifeboat drill the instant they set sail.

  ‘An old, battered, half-laden freighter, caught between the Lebanon and God knows where. A rust bucket with a polyglot crew probably picked up at a moment’s notice in the whorehouses of Piraeus. I know I’m in trouble. This ship has trouble written all over it. That I can work out. But what sort of trouble? What’s in those crates on deck? What filth is she carrying below?’

  Salah’s eyes widened with admiration. He had forgotten how easy it was to underestimate John Higgins. He drew breath to answer. There was a knock at the door. John glanced at his watch. Ten minutes to the second. That was better.

  ‘Come in, Niccolo,’ he called.

  In the light of the cabin Niccolo looked better than he had on deck. He was neat and tidy, hair slick, no longer ruffled by the wind. He was carefully shaved though grey-jawed. He looked almost as tired as John himself felt, but perhaps he was competent after all. To be fair, he had brought the ship here and had put her hook down in just the right place, even though he didn’t have the papers for full command. One small test lay to hand. ‘What’s the matter with the accommodation ladder?’ he asked.

  Niccolo nodded as though John himself had passed some test.

  ‘Is fucked,’ he said. ‘But I get the engineers to fix it tomorrow, now I am first mate again.’

  ‘Good enough,’ said John.

  The three of them were still in the captain’s office going through Napoli’s papers and sailing orders when John heard the main door open and close and the sisters moved through into the day room. Their quiet conversation proved a distraction to the tired men and John soon called a halt to their deliberations. There was nothing much else they could do tonight anyway and it would be an early start in the morning. He wanted to complete a full inspection before they got underway. ‘That’s all for tonight, then,’ he said. ‘I may take a look up on the bridge before I turn in, but that’s all I want you chaps for tonight. Please tell the chief steward I will take tea at six in the morning. We will up anchor at eight.’

  Niccolo glanced at his watch. ‘Tea in four hours. Anchor up in six hours…’

  John laughed. ‘We’ll have plenty of time to catch up on our sleep while we cruise across the Med.’

  Niccolo didn’t look convinced.

  Five minutes later Asha and John were alone. He freshened his whisky and gave her a Perrier. ‘We’d better get our heads down,’ he said. ‘I’ve ordered tea at six.’ Then he remembered the bruises on his sister-in-law’s face. ‘What on earth happened to poor Fatima? She looks as though she got hit by a speeding truck.’

  ‘She did.’ Asha began to explain what Fatima had told her about the Lebanese incident during her physical examination. Or, more to the point, what Fatima could remember about the incident, which was not all that much. There was enough memory loss to worry Asha and make her fear concussion. ‘In other circumstances, I’d be tempted to put out a Pan Medic call,’ she said, frowning with concern. ‘But that wouldn’t help now. Fatima would be put in prison first and hospital later if she entered any country near here. I’ll just have to treat her the best I can for the moment and let Gina Fittipaldi carry on nursing her whenever she feels giddy or sick. Rest will probably be the best thing for her in any case…’

  Talking about how the two invalids Fatima and Napoli should best be nursed along, they went through into the bedroom. The bed was as big as he had hoped: easily big enough for both of them. He pulled his shirt out of his trousers thoughtlessly and began to unbutton it. It was still a little damp. Asha moved around the little room opening and closing drawers and cupboards into which she and Fatima had packed the shopping from Limassol while the men wound up their meeting. Wearily, he chucked his damp shirt on to the nearest chair as though he was still a bachelor, and began to undo his belt. He turned his back on her and sat on the bed to untie his shoelaces. His mind was full of what he had learned of the ship and her situation. He was busily planning the morning, completely withdrawn from the present. Withdrawn from his fingers also, working at his laces. They too were wet and the double knots were slippery and difficult for his short nails to get a grip on. And the position was making his bad side cramp up again. He sighed. Then she said, ‘Here, let me.’ And before he could protest she was on her knees in front of him untying them herself. And he hadn’t even been aware that she was watching him. Her presence came as a kind of a shock though it shouldn’t have, this was their wedding night, after all. But that shock was as nothing compared with the impact of her undress. She wore the last piece of her going-away outfit, the only piece which had not been soaked, ruined, used for bandages or lost. It was a Teddy by Janet Reger, made of sheer black lycra trimmed at breast and gusset with lace. It had been purchased at a very exclusive lingerie shop and had cost a small fortune, but the effect it had upon him made it worth every single penny.

  He found himself looking down upon her statuesque red and gold body from above. His gaze moved from Titian hair to tanned shoulders. Here shoestring straps quivered with the gentle movement of her breasts as she untied his laces. From cleavage to hip it was as if she had been stencilled in a lacy pattern with black body-paint. The garment stretched over her athletic frame like another skin. It seemed to glow as it became transparent and the paleness of her flesh shone through. Below the waist, it was cut high above her square hips and plunged dizzyingly, to emphasise the depth of her pelvis and the length of her thighs.

  The instant his shoes were off she rose, as yet unconscious of the effect she was having on him, and stood immediately in front of him. The black silk dimple over her navel was level with his forehead and the taut thrust of her stomach immediately before his face. He found himself reaching round to gather her in his arms. He pressed his face into the warm, fragrant softness between her hip bones. She leaned forward tenderly to cradle his head. Somewhere deep within her an artery pulsed audibly, its steady beat matching the throb of Napoli’s generators.

  After a moment, John stood up, sliding his face and hands up her body as he rose. She stood half a head taller and leaned down slightly to kiss him. Without a pause in that long, hot kiss, he took the straps and pulled them off her shoulders. The
ir bodies hardly moved as the warm black film slid down between them. Then it was his turn to kneel for a moment and slip the wispy bundle down her legs until she could step out of it. They had not slept together before the wedding. It was actually the first time he had seen her like this.

  ‘I love you,’ he said, looking up.

  Then, smiling, she looked down at him. Her eyes were russet brown and seemed to hold the light like amber. There were flecks of gold in them. And something more; something irresistible.

  He did not visit the bridge after all.

  ‘So,’ she asked him later, just before they went to sleep, her voice a deep, contented purr. ‘Where are we taking the Napoli and her cargoes of mutilation and death?’

  He thought of the sailing orders in the office next door signed by Nero of Disposoco. He thought of the ship’s name and of the pictures in the dayroom. Vesuvius, the Castel dell’Ovo thrusting out into Naples Bay.

  ‘We have orders to take her home,’ he said.

  *

  In his dreams John reread the papers on the captain’s office desk, desperate to know his command as quickly as possible. She had been built at Gdansk in 1960 and heaven alone knew how she had arrived in Akrotiri Bay. The first few pages of her records were in Polish or Russian and it was impossible even to make out her original name. Her measurements had been written in English in the margin of the first page, however, beside the figures and the Cyrillic jumble of the original record. Her displacement was 20,000 deadweight tons. She was 543 feet long and 82 feet wide at the broadest point of her hull, though her bridge wings overhung her sides, he had noticed. She was 40 feet deep from deck to keel and her bridgehouse stood 40 feet high. Her single screw should push her forward at a service speed in the region of 15 knots. Somewhere along the way she had fallen out of Soviet hands and into Italian ones. During the great container boom she had had some money spent on her—a complete refit and the replacement of her coal-fired steam turbines with an oil-fired diesel motor. With her new engine had come the new name Napoli. Everything was repainted. Everything was replaced. That was almost a pity; now they would never know whether the legends were true that Gdansk ships arrived ready for sea even down to the complete canteens of silverware, the last cup and glass.

  The four practical cargo handling cranes had been left on her foredeck; and the brutal gantry behind the bridge. She wasn’t pretty, but she was self-sufficient, the original naval architects knowing too well that it would be a long time before the ports she was destined to visit around the Soviet coast were themselves mechanised to any great degree. The men who refitted her had clearly followed their logic and decided that the independence the cranes gave her would also serve their ends. And they had been right, for she had been destined to spend much of the next few years carrying cargoes to ports and harbours in the Third World, which were even less mechanised than those in sixties Russia.

  But the container boom had come and gone and no more money had been spent. She had passed from owner to owner until she became the property of CZP, a Cayman-registered transport company with branches in Zurich and Palermo. Never beautiful, she was now also old and unloved. The perfect vessel in which to transport chemical and nuclear waste. Perfect from the point of view of her current charterers, Disposoco, not from the point of view of the conservationists. What on earth would Greenpeace make of such a cargo in such a vessel?

  John began his inspection of her at half past six next morning. Showered and shaved, he felt quite restored by the three hours’ sleep he had had. Niccolo looked refreshed too and the view from the bridge, where the inspection started, was enough to energise a corpse. The storm had cleared during the night to be replaced by a bright dawn, washed and scoured clean by rain and wind. Napoli’s head was facing into Akrotiri Bay and the broad, rectangular windows looked over the piles of deck cargo, past the strong arms of the four cranes away across a vista of burning blue sea backed by bright beaches, low promontories and vivid hills. John strode across the bridge and threw open the door to the bridge wings. The air was sweet and surprisingly warm. He breathed it deeply and appreciatively. This is more like it, he thought. Wait till Asha sees this! But even as his mind was occupied with her, his eyes were busy. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It belongs to El Jefe. Is for star-gazing.’

  The item in question was standing in the shelter of the bridgehouse, leaning up against the blistered, peeling paint on the salt-grimed metal wall. It was a celestial telescope, its long tripod legs folded shut.

  ‘Who is El Jefe?’

  ‘The chief engineer. He is from Spain. Torremolinos. La Carihuela; the son of a fisherman. He will tell you all about himself. Unless you mention stars to him first. Or engines.’

  Everything on the bridge seemed fine. Old, but functional. And the same seemed to be true of the rest of the bridgehouse. John went through into the radio shack behind the port side of the bridge. No one was there at present, but the sets were on open emergency frequencies and all correctly disposed. Niccolo had clearly put the word about and the inspection caught no one unawares. Going on down, John looked in some of the cabins—just enough to establish the layout of the accommodation in his mind. He checked in the library, the mess rooms, bars. There was no cinema but a television stood in one comfortable lounge with a video player under it and a pile of videos beside it. Like the books in the library, the videos were in various languages, but they were films he recognised, for the most part, and the rest mostly seemed to be football matches played by the likes of Real Madrid and AC Milan. He found some officers and crew taking breakfast; they were still on harbour watch until they got underway in an hour’s time, and they watched him silently as he toured the dining rooms and galleys. The rest were still in bed, as were the engineers and the supernumeraries: the scientists who had brought the cargo aboard, the late Captain Fittipaldi’s daughter.

  The engineering areas were all in the same state as the bridge, though John’s expertise here was more limited. This was what was called a UMS system—unattended machinery space. No one was here yet, though he knew the engineers would be down soon to start warming up the diesel prior to getting underway at eight. He glanced around the control room, looked out over the three-deck-deep hole which contained the engine, patted the boiler and nodded knowingly at the alternator. He would be back when El Jefe was about. Certainly there were no obvious failures of maintenance, though the place could have been cleaner and tidier.

  Out on deck it was the same story. The lifeboats were properly stowed, but not quite what John would have called ‘shipshape’. The decks and exterior paintwork were dirty and the metalwork dull. The deck auxiliaries all looked ancient, but he had no intention of starting up winches and cranes just to check them now. The whole ship needed a refit she would never get and a paint job she would never have. Niccolo and El Jefe seemed to be doing the basic minimum, snowed under by the more immediate demands of keeping her afloat and moving forward.

  It was time to look at the cargo. He started with the deck cargo as it was the more accessible. There were fourteen piles of it, seven pairs, each pair astride one of the three main hatch covers, each pile consisting of nine containers three wide and three high. Each container was separated from the others by battens of wood so that it was possible to see between them. They looked well-secured and absolutely safe. Steel hawsers reached across at every level and at each end, securing them to the deck.

  ‘You have made a good job of this,’ said John appreciatively, taking the last hawser in his hand and shaking it. It remained as firm as an iron bar.

  ‘I was careful. I saw what that stuff can do.’

  That had been a part of the meeting last night. Salah’s story and Niccolo’s report. The logs and accident books were in Italian, so oral reports were all John had to go on. ‘The captain’s hands,’ he said.

  Niccolo grunted in reply.

  ‘I hope you were as careful below.’

  ‘I was more careful below. Down there it’s
atomic.’

  John glanced at his watch: 7.30. ‘Just time for a quick look.’

  Napoli had three holds. They were each thirty-five feet deep, seventy feet wide and one hundred feet long. Above each of them stood the raised rectangle of a McGregor single-pull weather deck hatch cover and above the three covers stood the four cranes. John and Niccolo walked back between the containers on the deck to the nearest hatch. This was the furthest forward, closest to the raised forepeak with its stubby communications mast. John reached down and opened the control panel, then pressed the release button and waited for the first segment of hatch cover to slide back. The resulting hole at their feet was absolutely black and seemed infinitely deep. John swung his foot in, sure of the position of the hold ladder, but stopped with his foot on the first rung as a thought struck him. ‘Is it safe? Is it radioactive down here?’

  ‘The scientists, they say it’s safe. There is a Geiger meter beside the torch there at the first rung. Take that to be sure. But Captain, with a torch and a Geiger meter, I think you’re more likely to die of falling off the ladder than of radioactivity.’

  John was inclined to agree with him. The torch and the Geiger counter were bulky and the ladder was narrow and difficult to climb. But he was glad of them both. The hold he was in was cavernous and cold. The bright morning light following him down from the deck didn’t make much impression on the darkness and he felt as though he were potholing until he got to the bottom and stepped off on to solid decking. He had been concentrating so hard that it wasn’t until he did this that it occurred to him to ask the obvious question. ‘Where’s the switch for the hold lights?’ he bellowed up to Niccolo.