The Leper Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Il combatto, is the battle…’

  At the top of the list was the name Bernadotte. At the bottom, the words, ‘cause of incident: Burned breakfast.’

  ‘Niccolo write it.’

  As though summoned by the mention of his name, the first mate entered. ‘I have dismissed the deck gangs to dinner,’ he said.

  Marco stumbled out at this point, made clumsy by his hurry, his priorities clear. John crossed to sit in the watchkeeper’s chair. The digital chronometer above the helm clicked up to 19.00. Deep from the bowels of the bridgehouse below them, the percussion of a dinner gong was greeted by a ragged cheer. John’s stomach growled.

  ‘Captain, perhaps you had better go to dinner.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Niccolo. I relieved you for the whole watch.’

  ‘Yes, sir. But at twenty hundred hours I am due to be in the officers’ salon eating my dinner and Cesar is due to be up here. Everybody else is due to be listening to the captain reading Mass. Is domenica. Sunday.’ His eyes met John’s across the width of the bridge. Their corners crinkled; the points of his lips stirred into a speaking smile, the brother of his minute Neapolitan shrug. ‘And they will need something to take their minds off the fact that I have locked away all the alcohol aboard.’

  *

  At a quarter to nine, John closed the book. He looked down at it feeling very strange indeed. He was a devout Anglican and counted himself fortunate that Asha, educated at an English school though the daughter of an Arabian Muslim, shared his simple faith. Reading Mass seemed to him disturbingly close to heresy and his Irish blood stirred at the thought of it. He stroked the black leather of the service book and, for the first time in his life, he blessed those hours at King William’s College he had spent in the study of Latin. With the last ‘Amen’ still seeming to echo from the speakers, he reached over and switched off the intercom mike on the captain’s desk in front of him.

  No sooner had he done so than the phone beside it buzzed. He picked it up at once. ‘Captain speaking.’

  ‘Jesus, Capitan. I have a call incoming for you.’

  ‘Can you transfer it down here?’

  ‘Si.’

  The handset went dead and for a moment he thought the Spanish radio officer had cut him off, but then with a crisp crackle it came to life again and he was talking to the person he had most wanted to contact since Friday night.

  ‘Richard! It’s good to hear you.’

  ‘You too. You’d better fill me in on what’s been happening to you. Even Audrey at the Crewfinders office has been confused by it all.’

  John took a deep breath and began to explain.

  ‘Right,’ said Richard, sometime later. ‘Let’s try and get this into some kind of order. We’ve confirmed your command with both CZP the owners and Disposoco the charterers. Under the circumstances, they seem happy to have you and so they should be. Now, I can replace you myself if you want and see about getting you off on that honeymoon you’re missing.’

  ‘No. It’s Fatima, you see. Asha wouldn’t leave her now.’

  ‘Yes, I see that. What is their position?’

  ‘Salah’s been in contact with his people but there doesn’t seem to have been much progress on that front. The circumstances have thrown everyone into quite a bit of confusion, I’m afraid.’

  ‘So they’re both trapped aboard until someone sorts it all out?’

  ‘They’ve no papers or anything. I can’t put them ashore legally anywhere.’

  ‘And you can’t go back to where you picked them up, of course.’

  ‘From the sound of things, that would be the worst thing of all to do.’

  ‘You’d better leave the whole mess with me. I’ll see what I can do. You’re heading for Naples?’

  ‘Slowly.’

  ‘I see. And you’re happy to stay in command until you get there?’

  ‘I don’t see any alternative, not unless we can get Salah and Fatima off safely. And anyway, Asha and I aren’t due anywhere else for a week or two.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘If we change our minds, you’ll be the first to know.’

  ‘Right. Well, it’s just coming up to midnight here. There’s nothing I can do until tomorrow morning. I’ll get on to the Foreign Office then, unofficially, and see whether we can get Salah and Fatima sorted out in any way. In the meantime, is there anything I can do for you?’

  ‘It sounds a bit petty, but…’

  ‘Don’t worry. What?’

  ‘Well, our luggage all went missing on the way out to Cyprus…’

  *

  While John was talking to Richard, Salah was sitting silently by Fatima’s bed. He was pleased with the privacy her move out of the sick bay to the cabin next to his had brought her, for he knew she hated being fussed over. Now he watched over her as she tossed in restless sleep dressed incongruously in one of Gina Fittipaldi’s see-through nighties. And, in the quiet little room, he had time to think.

  The fact that they had had to borrow so much simply emphasised their isolation. They had come aboard almost destitute, possessing only the clothes they stood up in. And those had been dirty, stained with sweat and blood. Quite apart from their lack of identity papers and money, they lacked the most basic necessities. Toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, flannels, towels; underwear, night attire. Niccolo took Salah to the ship’s slop chest at the earliest opportunity but Fatima had had to rely on Gina, who fortunately was a generous friend as well as an attentive nurse. Salah had been fortunate to find a prayer mat in the slop chest under all the old clothes, but even the most careful search of the ship’s library had failed to reveal a Koran. Still, he prayed at the appointed times each day, using the freedom of his position aboard to check with the ship’s compass before each prayer so that he knew precisely the bearing to Mecca.

  At least Ramadan was finished now, so that there were no special dietary requirements or fasting times—at least they could eat the same food at the same time as everyone else aboard. On the one hand he had no desire to mingle with Napoli’s crew but on the other hand they seemed to be trapped aboard here and he didn’t want to see them more isolated than they already were. Repeated discussions over the radio with men he did not know in Beirut and Tunis had got him nowhere. Trying to reach Yasser Arafat had been out of the question, even for Salah. The only other man he could trust, Tewfik al Ashrawi, could not be reached. The PLO had other concerns at the moment. There was no one there to help them, no one to take responsibility, no one to care. He felt isolated aboard Napoli, but his sense of isolation from the PLO was even more absolute.

  Abruptly, he came back down to earth to find Fatima looking quizzically at him with her good right eye. He leant forward and gently swept a tangle of hair out of the black swelling of her left. The black locks were heavy with the greasy ointment that Asha had smeared liberally over her bruises. ‘What time is it?’ she asked, her voice slightly slurred by the thickening of her lips.

  ‘Nine o’clock. You just missed Mass. Do you want anything to eat or drink?’

  ‘No.’ She moved restlessly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I feel filthy. This stuff on my face, in my hair.’

  He was not surprised. During the months of their association he had been impressed by her cat-like ability to keep clean. In the dustiest, filthiest bombed-out ruin in Beirut she was inevitably dapper, neat and faintly redolent of soap. She would never rest as she was now. ‘You need a shower,’ he said. ‘Shall I call Asha or Gina to help you?’

  ‘No, it’s all right.’

  He leaned forward and pushed back her bedclothes, then he slid his hand beneath her shoulders and sat her up. Gina’s nightie fell transparently to her waist and there it stopped altogether. As though she were a child she lifted her arms—though it was hard to move the left one. As though he were her father he lifted the garment gently up over her head. When it was clear of her hair she fell back against her pillows as though exhausted.

 
The whole of her left side, from the point of her hipbone to the curve of her hairline, was black. The flesh was all swollen, though nowhere was quite as bad as her eye. The pock of the bullet-scar on the upper slope of her left breast, where she had been shot all-but through the heart, was as bright as fresh blood. He could certainly see why Asha feared concussion, sprains and hairline fractures. There was nothing at all erotic about the battered battle zone of her nudity.

  He helped her rise and walked her to the shower stall, then he stood ready to help her should she need it while she pampered herself at length with the overpoweringly scented soaps and unguents that Gina had been happy to give her. While he waited, his thoughts returned to their earlier mode and his sense of isolation closed in again.

  But Fatima had one more surprise in store for him. As she stepped fragrantly out of the cubicle into the towel he was holding for her, she looked deeply into his eyes and gave voice to his darkest, nagging worry: ‘Do you think someone sent you down to that village because they hoped you’d be murdered there?’

  *

  Weariness threatened to overcome John at last. Talking to Richard had relieved him of the nagging sense of isolation he had felt. It had assured him that Salah and Fatima were going to get some help. This and the simple fullness of his stomach seemed to have unleashed a bone-deep fatigue in him. It was not just the lack of sleep he had suffered during the last few nights—for if the truth be told, he had not slept well before his wedding day either—it was also a reaction to the frenetic activity and taxing danger he had faced. Asha must be shattered too, he supposed. He would tell her of the conversation as soon as she came up to bed.

  And the thought of her put something else into his mind. The one last chore he had to perform before he tried for a good night’s sleep. As she was nowhere to be seen, he went down to the infirmary himself and unlocked the door with his pass key. He switched on the lights and walked through to the surgery at the back. The cold cabinet was just as he remembered it: like a giant’s filing cabinet. He slid open Captain Fittipaldi’s drawer to the fullest extent. The corpse lay there, shrouded in white plastic. With his mouth dry and the back of his neck prickling, half expecting the corpse to move, John reached down and undid the zipper. The sides of the bag parted and fell back to reveal the dead captain’s livid face. John did no more than glance at that bleached countenance and yet it burned itself into his mind, brown-stained cap and bandage and all. But he had to look more carefully at the hands. Faure had said something about the hands; that they bore mute testimony to the potency of the contents of the drums in the containers on deck.

  But Faure had to be joking.

  Frowning with concentration, his fatigue slowing everything down as though he were a drunk, John looked again, peering closely at the dark-uniformed chest where the captain’s sleeves crossed.

  Of course Faure had been joking. Nothing else made sense. The sleeve cuffs were flat and empty; Captain Fittipaldi had no hands at all.

  11

  At eighteen hundred hours on Tuesday evening, on the third day of the voyage, John was on the starboard bridge wing looking moodily north towards Cape Krio—the Ram’s Forehead—where the south coast of Crete turned its mountainous cliff faces northwards. If Tim Severin was correct, they were crossing Ulysses’ sea-lanes now, ploughing all too slowly through the waters where he—and Menelaus and the rest—had been driven south by the prevailing winds to the land of the lotus eaters before beating north again to the coast John was watching through the binoculars, whose wild cliffs had been home to the Cyclops. It was a clear, calm evening with a slight south wind bringing north to his keen nostrils the faintest odour of the Sahara which swept down to the sea a hundred miles behind him. Evening was gathering, and the sea was gaining an indigo hue as shadows moved across the depths of water still reflecting on its surface the colour of the cerulean sky.

  Then among the jumbled scents of distant sand and immediate sea, he smelled something of Paris and Asha slid her arm across his shoulder. ‘Penny for them,’ she whispered, her voice almost lost beneath the calling of the officers on the deck, dismissing the afternoon day-work men to wash up for dinner.

  She snuggled up beside him. She was wearing a loose T-shirt and a baggy pair of shorts purchased in Limassol, and Gina Fittipaldi’s spare trainers. He hugged her in return, his thoughts still elsewhere. Should he tell her that they were at last crossing Ulysses’ wine-dark sea? The great Greek voyager’s galley probably moved more swiftly than this old tub currently averaging only ten knots. Should he tell her that the wily old captain’s ill-disciplined, short-tempered crew could hardly have been more darkly mutinous than the discontented Italians and Spaniards trapped aboard a ship they were growing to hate, with a cargo they absolutely feared? And with a dead captain mouldering away at an unnatural rate in the infirmary below.

  Even Niccolo, with his Neapolitan strengths of world-weary cynicism and wry humour, was getting restless; he had also the Neapolitan weakness of superstition. And the Frenchmen, the urbane, intelligent Faure’s scientific team, were growing apprehensive because the more intimately they checked their cargo to keep the crew’s minds at rest, the more nervous they themselves became. John knew that if he moved across to the front of the bridge wing now, he would see two teams of them walking down the deck to check the containers and the holds. To begin with they had carried out their twice-daily inspection in their normal clothes. Now, however, they went down kitted out in the full gear of white environmental protection suits and air tanks. The two groups of disturbing, unearthly creatures would be shouldering their way through the worried crewmen coming in from their work, he knew. He could almost hear the nervous muttering. He could certainly feel the tension cranking up.

  ‘Look,’ he said, by way of answer to Asha’s greeting. He handed her the binoculars and gestured north towards the horizon. She focused the glasses and caught her breath. He started to explain to her what he could remember of Severin’s The Ulysses Voyage, an explanation of Homer’s epic story based not on historical research but upon a voyage along the route in the bronze-age galley Argo; and which, in common with most mariners, John found absolutely convincing.

  They were interrupted a few minutes later by Niccolo. ‘That is the main deck finished for the time being. I think we had better start on the upper works soon.’

  ‘Particularly the cranes and cargo handling equipment. I want all that in tip-top order when we get to Naples. That’ll be in five more days at this speed.’

  ‘We will start on those first thing in the morning.’ The first officer paused. He was clearly unhappy about something but was hesitant about speaking. John wondered whether he should ask Asha to leave the bridge, but it was not her presence that was the trouble.

  ‘Captain, is there nothing you can do to stop the scientists wearing their protective gear when they check the holds? The morale of the crew is not high. They have many worries and grievances and they have no natural outlet for them. None of them are union men—not even communist sympathisers were allowed aboard when the owners were recruiting, so it is a miracle that we have any Italians at all.’

  ‘Except, of course, that they will have lied about that.’

  ‘True. But the union matter is more difficult. Under normal circumstances they would at least have someone to complain to, someone who would promise to sort out their difficulties at the end of the voyage if not before. And there is no one. And even if there was, even if someone had lied about being a union man to get a berth aboard, the minute he reveals himself and tries to meet their grievances, he will automatically face dismissal. So there is no…’ Niccolo searched for the word. ‘No safety valve.’

  ‘Lazar, the bosun?’

  ‘They see him as an officers’ man. A captain’s spy.’

  ‘And that divide exists so deeply? Between officers and crew?’ John felt more isolated than ever. This was not at all what he was used to.

  ‘Yes. Perhaps because there is no trusted system f
or grievances to be aired. Perhaps because Marco is seen as being useless and something of a coward. Because Cesar is so unapproachable. Because I…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Because of what I did to Bernadotte.’

  ‘I thought it would come back to Bernadotte.’ There was a pause which began to lengthen into a silence. ‘But we couldn’t just let the great ox slaughter every assistant cook he thought had left his breakfast to burn.’

  ‘Nevertheless, he is stirring trouble.’

  ‘Maybe more than you know,’ interjected Asha. ‘You should see the way he looks at Gina.’

  ‘He is not alone in that,’ said Niccolo quickly.

  John nodded. The unseasonal weather pushing up out of Africa, a boon in many ways, nevertheless had its negative side. With nothing else to do except mourn her father and worry about her future, Gina fought back against grief in the only way available to her. She spent every waking hour in some activity. Morning and evening she nursed Fatima. During the day she was everywhere about the deck, sometimes sunbathing, sometimes just sitting reading, often jogging or exercising, pausing always like a princess on ‘walkabout’ to talk to the men, apparently utterly unaware of the effect on them of her bathing costumes, tiny shorts or skin-tight, sweat-stained exercise outfits.

  Like Asha—like Fatima in many ways—she was a twentieth-century woman, well-educated and liberated. It never seemed to occur to her that she might be viewed, not as a complete person but as a collection of secondary sexual characteristics: a centrefold come to life. In her present situation, John suspected she would find the idea not only surprising but shocking. Sick. Nevertheless, it was a situation they might well have to deal with in one way or another. And soon.

  It was not the only bone of contention currently beyond his control either, he thought glumly; none of the crew liked having Salah and Fatima around. They were almost as nervous about the possibility that some terrorist—or anti-terrorist—organisation would come aboard, guns blazing, as they were about the possibility that their cargo would destroy the ship in some terrible way. Thank God, thought John grimly, that Fatima’s injuries at least kept her away from the men for the most part. If only Gina was less visible.