by Peter Tonkin
The whole range seemed to be on fire, every hotplate giving off its own column of dense black smoke. In perfect unison the two men went through the routine of readying the red cylinders and pointing the black nozzles, then the blazing remains of the crew’s breakfast was inundated under two roaring clouds of white foam.
9
The clock on the captain’s desk said it was eleven thirty and John had no reason to doubt it. His own watch, covered in foam, had stopped altogether, its digital display blank and silvery, like the back of a long-dead codfish. In half an hour Cesar would relieve Marco on the bridge. Were he Richard Mariner, in half an hour he would begin his noon broadcast. But he was not Richard Mariner; there would be no broadcast. It was not that he had nothing to say to those under his command—quite the reverse—but the chances of them actually understanding most of what he had to say seemed remote.
He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head and gave a deep sigh. At once he started to cough, a combination of the fumes coming off his ruined clothing and those already in his lungs. The coughing tore at the wound in his side and the acute pain filled his eyes with tears.
Savagely, he drove his fist down on to the desk top, making the captain’s clock dance. He had been aboard less than twelve hours and it had all gone from bad to worse. He didn’t like the cargo, especially that stuff below decks. Niccolo had explained that Captain Fittipaldi had undertaken the work on the hold doors at the suggestion of Enrico Cappaldi. The first officer had no idea why the late, unlamented Disposoco man had made the suggestion. The only thing the captain had understood about the cargo was the fact that it had scared him. And the more John thought about that, the less he liked it. The ship was a mess. The officers were slack, the crew a shambles and the safety routines a disgrace. All he had done so far was to discover one failing after another. And he hadn’t even said a proper good morning to his wife. And he hadn’t bloody well eaten, and quite possibly never would, now.
Still coughing, he heaved himself to his feet. The newspaper with which he had been protecting the seat fell gracefully on to the floor. He kicked it across the room.
There was a knock at the door. Niccolo entered.
John cleared his throat. ‘Report, please.’
Niccolo’s voice was as rough as his own. ‘Number One lifeboat secure. Fall replaced and block freed. Cook is in the infirmary under the care of Dr Higgins and she says he will make a swift recovery. Even his hands are not too bad. The fire is out, as you know. I have not yet sent the men back into the kitchen, neither engineers to assess damage nor stewards to clear up. I have brought you the list.’ He put a list on the table in front of John, who snatched it up eagerly. This was what he had been waiting for. Here was the beginning of control over the polyglot mess of Napoli’s complement.
The list was handwritten and it included the name of every person aboard Napoli. The names were not arranged according to responsibility, though against each one was a bracketed designation showing whether they were deck officers, engineering, crew, stewards, passengers, scientists. They were arranged in three columns as speakers of Italian, Spanish or French. John was relieved to note the absence of Greeks, Portuguese, Pakistanis. At the top of each list were names bearing asterisks,—at least one per group. These were the men and women who also spoke English. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
‘I want to speak to them all together. Everyone except the watch. Where is the best place?’
Had he been on his beloved Prometheus or any other of the Heritage Mariner tankers, he would have used the gym, or the ship’s cinema. On Napoli the only place large enough to hold the forty-five or so people was the crew’s dining room. They all packed in there, standing, with the tables pushed back hard against the walls and the stench of smoke coming through the black-rimmed kitchen door behind them, even though it was still closed tight.
John waited a moment outside the door before entering to allow Niccolo time to sort them out and when he entered it was to an apparent confusion of uniforms, overalls, shirts and jeans. El Jefe, the chief engineer, a bull of a man with a long back and short powerful legs, glared at the Spaniards from bright blue eyes deep-set between shaggy brows and a great spade of a beard which put John forcefully in mind of Professor Challenger contemplating the Lost World. Beside him stood Professor Etienne Faure, leader of the scientists, a tall. dapper, dust-grey man with gold-rimmed half-glasses over which he was peering at the French speakers. As John entered and paused, fighting to prevent the fumes starting up that tearing cough again, Niccolo stood forward, moving silently but with graceful assurance and swung round to face the Italians.
John just knew he was going to hate this. ‘Good morning,’ he began.
‘Buenas dias.’
‘Bonjour.’
‘Buon giorno.’
The tripartite running translation cramped his style. He had a burning desire to explain to them, one and all, that they were a pathetic excuse for a crew, who were a worrying danger to themselves, sailing around in a disgusting old rust bucket that they had maintained so badly that he himself would not have transported guano in it, let alone the lethal combination they had above and below decks. If what he had seen so far was anything to go by, they presented a terrifying danger to all the other shipping in the Mediterranean Sea and by God he was going to spend the next week pulling them into some kind of shape.
Stewards were going to scrub out the kitchen until it glowed like an advert on the television. The engineers were going to fix the hot plates and from here to Naples the cooks were going to salvage enough from the smoke-damaged stores to cook food that would impress Robert Carrier. The engineers were then going to fix the accommodation ladder and everything else aboard that didn’t work. The first officer was personally going to review the current state of all the lifeboats, davits, blocks and falls and the captain would take his afternoon watch in order to let him do so. Under the second and third officers, the deck hands were going to wash, strip, polish and chip every bit of deck, paint, brightwork and rust aboard. And the supernumeraries had until the end of this watch to decide which work gang they belonged to. And if that didn’t keep everybody out of mischief until they picked up the Naples pilot, then he would be very pleased to come up with one or two other little jobs which obviously needed doing aboard. And, just to keep them on their toes, there would be another lifeboat drill at 18.00 hours this evening and a third at 08.00 tomorrow, and there would be lifeboat drill twice a day until everybody got it bloody well right!
On Prometheus, had he ever had to give a speech like that, that’s what he would have said. That’s what he meant to say now, but somehow it didn’t come out like that. It lost something in translation, he supposed. Much of the venom seemed to go astray between his thoughts and his lips. And the rest of it vanished between English, Italian, French and Spanish.
But the message seemed to have got across: the minute the four of them finished speaking, everyone trooped out of the room with an impressive show of unity and purpose.
Feeling a little deflated, John went up on to the bridge just in time to see Marco being punctiliously relieved by Cesar and to linger for a self-indulgent moment watching Paphos fall away on the starboard with the Troodos mountains lost in thunderheads behind. Alexander the Great had built the little port, he remembered inconsequentially; and Antony had brought Cleopatra here, Richard the Lionheart had brought Berengaria, Othello had brought Desdemona…
*
She was in the ship’s infirmary. She had not been at the meeting, but she had featured on Niccolo’s list: Mrs Higgins (ship’s doctor).
‘Look at this, darling!’ She was bubbling with enthusiasm, almost dancing round the facility. The infirmaries on super-tankers tended to be small. There were ship’s doctors on the largest of Heritage Mariner’s supertankers, but the usual run of crewing the massive ships was that the first officer was in charge of medical matters using the books of advice and guidance supplied for treating
minor ailments at sea. Anything major resulted in a Pan Medic call on the radio and the almost immediate removal of the afflicted crewman by helicopter. Infirmaries were therefore unnecessary, and they tended to be poky, almost afterthoughts. Not so aboard Napoli. The infirmary here consisted of a surgery lined with lockable pharmacy shelves, fully stocked. Behind that lay a proper hospital ward of half a dozen beds, presently occupied by the chef, deep in a drug-induced sleep with his hands in white boxing gloves of bandage peeping over the green counterpane. Behind that again there was a fully equipped surgery complete with an operating table, bottles of anaesthetic gas, chilling arrays of instruments. Here Salah and Gina were seated on either side of Fatima whose face was looking worse than ever under the bright surgery lights, smeared with ointment. But she raised a smile for her brother-in-law.
‘And look!’ Asha’s voice still had that edge of excitement, but was hushed now almost with awe. Behind the operating table, built out from the wall was a great silver cabinet, almost like a giant’s filing cabinet. John understood what it was, the shock of the realisation driving the last thoughts of romance from his head. She pulled open the drawer. He looked down, riveted. He had expected to see a body lying there open to his gaze, as they were in films and on television. Instead, there was a white clouded plastic bag, like a suit protector. He had the vague impression of a shape beyond the plastic skin, of a head and shoulders and…
The main door from the corridor opened and Marco’s voice called through the surgery and the ward, ‘Capitano! Loro combattono!’
John’s gaze swung away from the corpse and his eyes met Asha’s. ‘I think someone’s having a fight,’ she said.
John nodded once. He caught Salah’s eye and gestured to his friend to sit still. ‘I’ll handle this,’ he said, and turned. ‘I may be bringing you more business,’ he flung over his shoulder on the way out.
‘If it’s big Bernadotte I don’t want to know,’ she called back. ‘Gina here says he’s bad trouble.’
Following Marco along the corridor and down the companionway, John felt irritation building in him again. Where was the first officer? Why wasn’t Niccolo sorting this out? This kind of thing was the mate’s job—and not just because he spoke the same language as the crew. The man was an enigma. He gave the impression of massive competence, and yet the ship was a shambles. He looked as though you could trust him with your life and yet he couldn’t organise a simple lifeboat practice.
The fight was outside the door into the storeroom that led to the ruined galley. There was a shouting mob of crewmen and stewards looking like some ill-disciplined rugby scrum surging to and fro on the deck, but it soon became clear that these were simply the spectators. With Marco at his side yelling his orders, John pushed through towards the heart of the melee. As soon as they realised the captain had arrived, the crowd split apart and began to slink away. At its heart stood the huge seaman who had nearly dropped the lifeboat on Gina Fittipaldi’s head.
His fists were clenched and his knuckles swollen and bloodied. They were the biggest fists John had ever seen. Lying in front of the enraged seaman were three stewards, out cold. From the state of their faces it was obvious that not all the blood on those massive knuckles was the seaman’s own.
Marco pushed a little further forward and shouted a string of orders. John understood nothing of what the third mate said, except one word: Bernadotte. The big man laughed and spat on the deck, staining the green paint with red spittle. His battered face, squashed between simian eye-ridge and lantern jaw wore a coldly threatening expression. He moved towards Marco and the boy simply melted away. John stepped forward, suddenly wishing he hadn’t told Salah to stay in the surgery. ‘Bernadotte, you will report to your quarters. Now!’
Bernadotte shook his bullet head and continued to move forward. John had never seen anything like the expression on that battered, pugilist’s face. Bernadotte was out for more than blood. He was going to kill someone.
‘Tua cabina! Subito!’ John bellowed. He had not been knocking all round the world for the last twenty years or more without picking up the basics. A different air entered the gathering on the deck. Disobeying boys was one thing. Failing to understand a captain’s orders spoken in a foreign language was little different. But failing to obey a direct, understandable command was something else. Bernadotte either didn’t care or was simply too far gone in his bloodlust. With a wild yell, he charged. Marco ran. Even the hard core of onlookers fell back. Only John stood his ground.
‘Ferma!’ he yelled, pleased to have remembered the Italian for Stop.
But it might as well have been Greek as far as Bernadotte was concerned. He swung a round-house punch at John that would have killed him if it had connected. John dipped under it and moved sideways just enough to let his opponent past. As the massive flank, like a side of beef in a string vest, passed, John hooked a left in under the short ribs which should have given the Italian pause for thought. The shock of the blow numbed John’s arm and for a moment he thought he had broken his wrist. But the pain was dulled by two other things. Firstly, horror at what he had done: his instinctive punch had opened him up to actions at law from everyone from the seaman’s union to the owners’ lawyers. Secondly, dismay that he had not done enough: Bernadotte swung round with no sign of discomfort and every sign of wanting to tear his captain’s head off.
John dropped his fists and stood, calculating rapidly. He had no doubt that he could move faster than the big man, but he couldn’t keep dodging for ever. And what was the long-term plan? There was no chance of out-boxing Bernadotte in a fair fight. Should he try to win at any price, using all the foul tricks at his command and hope that they would not be matched by more from Bernadotte? Should he run away like Marco Farnese? Die?
Bernadotte charged again. At the last minute, John dropped to the deck, jarring his knees, tearing his side and gathering himself into a ball. Moving too fast to dodge and too slow-witted to jump, Bernadotte tripped over him and fell head first on to the deck. His brows, nose and chin took full force: they all split open. Dazed, the massive seaman rolled on to his back and sat up. John pulled himself to his feet quickly, but the moment his weight came properly on to his legs, his joints warned him that he had sacrificed a great deal of speed in pulling that little trick. He hissed quietly and tried to dance.
Bernadotte was up; what little could be seen of his expression behind the mask of blood was murderous. He gathered himself to charge again, and again John waited. He had not risen empty-handed. Clutched in his fist was a wet rag which someone had dropped on the deck. This time when the sailor charged, John hurled the sodden material straight for the bleeding eyes. The cloth wrapped itself round Bernadotte’s head and John charged him, shoulder first, driving all the weight of his wiry body straight into the giant’s solar plexus as though it were a door he was trying to break down. And down it went, enfolding him as it did so. Twisting wildly, he managed a half-turn before they hit the deck, but even so he fell badly and had the wind knocked out of him. His scarred side felt as though the wound had been torn wide open by the fall.
Only the ominous stirring of his huge opponent gave him the strength to move. In a wrestling match he stood no chance at all. He twisted and broke the Italian’s grip not an instant too soon, for Bernadotte’s head had reared back to butt him in the face. As John slid out of the way, the solid forehead grazed past his ear and rang against the deck again. John pulled himself up, feeling old, unsupported, at risk, in danger. Not one man of the crew had offered any help at all. He got as far as his knees and gave up. But Bernadotte was beginning to pull himself up again, too.
This had gone far enough! Suddenly imbued with a rage nearly as murderous as his foe’s, John shuffled forward, so that as Bernadotte’s head came up and turned to look for him, there he was beside the Italian while the massive crewman was still on all fours. And swinging both his fists high, clenched together like a Wimbledon player’s double-handed backhand, he drove down a blow at Berna
dotte’s jaw just beneath his left ear. So powerful was the blow that his knees lifted off the deck. When it connected, it had all the force of his body behind it and a good deal of his weight as well. The impact folded Bernadotte’s arms and sent his head down to butt the deck for the third time. The observers must have felt the impact through the soles of their feet. John felt it reverberating through his bruised and battered knees. Bernadotte, apparently, didn’t feel it at all, for he rolled on to his side and lay quite still. John pulled himself up again and began to scramble awkwardly to his feet. Guiltily, the crew who had been witness to the struggle began to drift away.
‘Resta!’ bellowed John with the last of his breath. He didn’t really care whether it meant Stop! or Stay! He just wanted to get the name of every man here because he was going to log the sodding lot of them and dock them one day’s pay. He came erect, his knees protesting and his legs none too steady. They met his gaze and for a moment he thought they were all going to line up behind Bernadotte to come at him as well. ‘You two.’ He pointed at the nearest pair. ‘Pick up this man and take him to the infirmary.’ He pointed not at Bernadotte, but at the nearest of his victims. ‘You two.’ He turned, ready to direct the next couple in a similar fashion. But there was no need. There at last was Niccolo, his face a blank mask, directing the others silently, by curt gesture. John began to walk towards him.
