The Leper Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  Abruptly, there she was, skipping through the bridge wing door behind Niccolo. She was wearing a dayglow pink sweatshirt which fell loosely to her hips and beneath it a pair of black pedal-pushers as tight as a layer of paint, which ended just above her knees.

  ‘Come on, Asha,’ she said, bouncing on her Nike’d toes. ‘You promised to run round the deck with me twice before dinner.’

  John glanced at his wife then across at the first mate, just in time to see the tail end of an expression leaving Niccolo’s face. My God, he thought as the Neapolitan’s eyes flicked up to meet his own, their black pupils huge and irises so dark it was difficult to tell the difference between them. He fancies her himself. John schooled his face into bland innocence at once, and hoped he had done so quickly enough. The least invasion of the Italian’s privacy on that point could well have the most disastrous consequences. If he alienated Niccolo as well, running the ship would become well-nigh impossible.

  *

  ‘Of course he fancies her,’ said Asha half an hour later as she sat naked before the mirror in their bedroom, towelling the russet profusion of her hair. ‘In other circumstances he’d have made his move by now.’

  ‘That makes things even more difficult!’

  ‘Yes.’ She put the towel down and picked up the hairbrush they were sharing.

  That was one of the things he loved most about her: she understood so completely. She was the perfect wife for a man such as he was. She knew all about shipboard life; she was intelligent and sensitive enough to see how social—and sexual—tensions could destroy command structures in an instant, and wise enough to watch out for things she knew he would miss or notice too late, never labouring them, just there ready to discuss them when they came up. He remembered how well they had worked together when they had been trapped on board Prometheus, held captive by terrorists a scant three months ago.

  ‘How do you think he’ll react if things go any further?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘He’s kept quiet so far out of respect for her father’s memory, I think. But he’s under increasing pressure. The crew are getting really randy, I’m afraid. Some of their language is getting very pointed. If Bernadotte actually takes action along the lines he’s been discussing, then Niccolo will kill him.’ She put down the hairbrush with more care than was necessary, as though her hand were involved in her thinking processes.

  ‘Do any of them realise you speak Italian?’ he asked quietly, as though there might be eavesdroppers listening at the door.

  ‘Not yet. But they will soon, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Well, if I’m going to be here for another week, then I think I ought to be ship’s doctor in fact as well as on paper. As soon as she’s well enough, Fatima and I will be working properly in the infirmary and that means sick call twice a day as well as treating longer-term sick or injured. If they give me their symptoms in Italian, it will become obvious I understand them when I start to treat them.’

  ‘Well, there’s no real point in your eavesdropping anyway. It’s not the way I like to run a ship. I’ll rely on the officers and Lazar the bosun. But mostly I’ll rely on Niccolo.’

  ‘There must be a lot of personal pressure there, too, between Niccolo and Gina and the rest of them,’ she continued, rising and starting to climb into her underwear. ‘It’s not obvious, I know, but he is definitely Italian in that respect. Macho. The real thing. Machismo. The attitude of mind, not the sexist posturing.’

  ‘There’s a difference?’

  ‘I don’t know. If we stick around, we’re going to find out, though.’

  ‘Maybe the hard way?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She stepped into a summer frock and they were ready to go down to dinner.

  *

  John sat at the head of the long table in the officers’ dining salon with Gina on his right and El Jefe on his left. Asha sat at the opposite end, as though this were a dinner party, with off-watch officers, engineering officers and scientists ranged along the sides. Many captains, John knew, preferred to have the dining room arranged with small tables, allowing groups of three or four to eat in relative privacy. That, indeed, had been Captain Fittipaldi’s way. But John let only Salah and Fatima sit apart, for there was no way they would easily become part of this group. And the idea of the group was important; he was working hard to make a unit out of Napoli’s officers, in spite of the natural division between deck and engine room, the inevitable gulf between sailors and landsmen, and the language barrier. At least the food was superb. The chef could not hold a saucepan yet, but the best of his assistants had avoided Bernadotte’s revenge.

  John leaned across his Fegata alla carbonara and fixed El Jefe with a stare he hoped was not too anxious. ‘Jefe, can’t we go any faster than this?’

  The chief engineer looked up thoughtfully and stroked his beard. ‘What j’ou know abut RND-M Sultzer engine?’

  ‘It’s a single-acting, slow-speed, two-stroke, reversible diesel engine.’

  ‘Bueno! That is what we have. She is good engine. Simple. Powerful. Light. Direct drive to the shaft. Turns single, single-pitch screw at one hundred revolutions per minute.’

  ‘Right. Good. So?’

  ‘Is old.’

  ‘But it can’t be that old. This ship was only built thirty years ago and the original steam turbines were replaced with your diesel, what, ten years ago?’

  ‘J’es. But the diesel was old. Second-hand.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘J’es. Second-hand. Is now too old. Is…What does Niccolo say?’

  John closed his eyes. He had a shrewd suspicion exactly what Niccolo said: ‘Fucked.’

  ‘J’es. Auxiliary blower is fucked. Loop scavenging system especially is fucked. J’ou understand what this means?’

  ‘If the engine gets too hot, you’re looking at a scavenger fire.’

  ‘J’es. Engine catch fire. We stop. Engine cools. We inject firefighting foam. We wait for fire to die. We clean out foam. We heat up engine. We start. J’ou want this?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘Also, Starting Air System. Flame traps not trap much flame no more. Valves sticky. Fusible plugs fucked. J’ou know what this means?’

  ‘It could all blow up.’

  ‘ Muy bien! Is good to talk with captain who really understan’s engines.’

  ‘My pleasure, Jefe.’

  If the Spaniard understood irony, he gave no sign of it.

  *

  He was still sharing Asha with Gina and trying not to be petty about it, so when the two of them vanished into the Italian girl’s cabin for ‘girl talk’ after dinner, he decided to have a bit of a prowl around. He had a lot to think through. Marco, on the bridge, was in a talkative mood, practising his pidgin English and too insensitive to be quietened by anything other than outright rudeness. Jesus, in the radio room, was lost in a novel, his feet on the console and the FM radio tuned to a Spanish radio station which was playing haunting guitar music. It was quite dark now and there was little enough to see around them on the quiet sea except for the distant lights of passing ships and boats. Nothing was particularly likely to cut their path—unless they came across someone following an unlikely smuggling route from Benghazi to Kalamai.

  It was a clear night, with a dazzling array of stars hanging low in the blue-black sky, seemingly magnified by the clarity of the air. John knew he would bump into El Jefe as soon as he stepped out on to the bridge wing, but this time he reckoned he was safe from discussion of the engine. Sure enough, the bear-like engineer was crouching at an odd angle over the end of his telescope, but he was looking down across the end of it instead of up towards the sky. John paused, fascinated. After a moment, El Jefe straightened. ‘Capitan,’ he said, ‘J’ou know as much about stars as about engines?’

  “Fraid not, Chief. Well, I know about celestial navigation, not astronomy.’

  ‘AhHA! There is much difference. I explain! Look here…’

  Half an hour
later, with his hands deep in his pocket—most uncharacteristically—and fists bagging the thighs of his trousers, John wandered on down the exterior companionways outside the dark-curtained bridgehouse. He was lucky to have got away so soon, he decided, wandering on, deep in thought until he was on the main deck. The last warmth of the day still lingered. The faint spice of the desert was long gone beneath the salt smell of the sea and the sharpness of metal. He crossed to the deck rail and stood for a moment, his flat stomach resting against it, then turned sideways and stared past the black castellations of the containers down towards the forepeak.

  Napoli was by no means a small ship; he was looking down nearly three hundred feet of deck. Yet she felt small, he realised, almost with a shock. He was used to tankers many times her deadweight, if not her actual size. She was confining. Almost claustrophobic. And, of course, his big tankers carried small crews. Prometheus could get by easily with thirty aboard and here, on this much smaller vessel, were forty-five. The thirty on Prometheus, moreover, would be a team, all pulling together. This lot were all in small armed camps, suspicious of each other, pulling in different directions, dangerously close to tearing apart completely.

  He thought best when in motion, and felt like taking a stroll in any case, but the forepeak was too forbidding; those gallows cranes still made his blood run cold. He turned until his back was to the deck rail, and used it as a fulcrum to swing himself into motion. Slowly, thoughtfully, placing his feet with all the care of a child avoiding the cracks in a pavement, he began to walk across the deck. Halfway across, he drew level with the windows of the crew’s video room and walked into a beam of brightness—the curtains had not been properly pulled. Automatically, he approached the bridgehouse front, his hand raised to rap on the window and summon someone to close the curtain and douse the extra light, which could so easily confuse his own navigators—or those of any passing vessel. A raucous shout brought him up short, however. His first thought was that they were watching one of their videotaped football matches, for the shout was like that of a cheering crowd. But no. On the television screen, a plump brunette was taking off her clothes to the loud ecstasy of her audience on Napoli.

  When he knocked briskly on the door a moment later, Lazar answered. ‘What are you watching in there, Lazar? Is it a video?’ More than ten years ago, on board the first Prometheus, John had seen the damage done by hard-core pornographic videotapes. There the foul material had heightened tensions, brought out hidden antagonisms, and all-but split a well-trained, coherent crew apart. His voice, therefore, was much more abrupt than the picture on the set actually warranted.

  Lazar was surprised and his shaggy eyebrows rose. ‘No, Capitano. Is Italian TV programme. Is on live now. Live show.’

  Behind him, the roaring got louder.

  John walked in. Lazar stood back until his captain was past, then he followed as John crossed to the curtain and twitched it shut. The crew, silent now, watched him while behind them on the screen the amateur stripper, still safely in her underwear, was further covered by the title of the show and was then replaced by a far more graphic advert for lingerie.

  That night John had a nightmare and, waking in a sweat at four when the watch was changing, he remembered that he had had a nightmare the night before as well.

  *

  The next day was hot and surprisingly like summer. Napoli pushed slowly across a dead sea through a dead calm while the mercury in the ship’s thermometers climbed through the 20s Celsius. At noon the air conditioning broke and the atmosphere in certain areas of the bridgehouse became positively unpleasant. After a late, hot, lunch, the crew in their work gangs went out with Marco and Niccolo to work on the cranes down the middle of the deck.

  Gina, in spite of Asha’s gentle hints, went out to sunbathe on the forward hatch. She wore the briefest bikini, high-cut and clinging, seemingly transparent—especially after she had covered herself with oil. Work on the lower gantries of the forward cranes suddenly gained in popularity and the officers stood and fumed as the men worked lingeringly out over Gina’s unconsciously erotic body, slowly applying paint to metal and discussing the possibility of applying their basic attentions to the girl below.

  John watched the situation building up but knew that if he moved to confront it, he would do more damage than good by undermining his officers and offending his lovely passenger. He would be far better occupied in cooling things down in the bridgehouse. He went down to the engine room. ‘I know, I know,’ bellowed El Jefe from down by the alternator beside the main engine at floorplate level, three decks down. ‘The air conditioning. J’ou want it back. I cannot leave this work. It is the purifier extraction fan, she breaks all the time. J’ou know where this is, this fan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is good. J’ou take two boys and bring it to workshop. Is all right you do this, Capitan?’

  Not really, thought John, and nodded wearily. Off he went, trying to think of one other captain he knew who would even think of taking orders from a chief engineer. Still, needs must, he thought. He reached the offending piece of machinery, accompanied by two engineering assistants. ‘Get the extractor fan down and take it to the workshop, please.’

  They looked at each other, faces blank.

  ‘We must take the fan to the workshop.’ He enunciated each word very carefully.

  They looked at him.

  He pointed. ‘The fan.’

  Ah. They understood: the fan. They nodded. They smiled. ‘It’s not working. You must get it down and take it to the workshop to be fixed.’

  They understood: the fan. They nodded and smiled. They did not understand what to do, however.

  He took a deep breath. Tried to remember the Spanish for ‘broken’. Or the Italian. He failed.

  ‘The fan…’

  They understood, smiled.

  ‘…is broken.’

  They nodded at the fan.

  ‘It’s broken!’

  They smiled.

  ‘BROKEN!’ He had promised himself he wouldn’t shout.

  They did nothing.

  ‘It’s FUCKED!’

  It was down and in the workshop within fifteen minutes.

  *

  ‘I think there is some improvement in communication.’ John had just taken over Niccolo’s watch from Cesar and was taking the opportunity for a quiet word with Salah Malik. The two men had known each other for ten years and more but had seen little of each other for much of that time. They knew all about each other, as did most of the Heritage Mariner team, but they remained little more than strangers, though they had always got on well when their paths crossed. But that did not make the subject of Salah’s current position and immediate plans any easier to broach, especially as John really wanted the two ex-terrorists off his ship at the earliest possible moment. He was as aware as anyone how nervous they were making his already frightened crew. ‘I have some hopes of welding them into some kind of unit before we get to Naples. And, talking of Naples, what do you and Fatima reckon on doing when we get there? We’ll have to be careful, I think. Your presence aboard could be as explosive as that nuclear waste out there.’

  Salah nodded, his long, sculpted face dark and sad. ‘It is difficult,’ he said quietly. ‘My people in Beirut have had no chance to take any action to help us. They are not quite as magically powerful as many people think, you know.’ His voice was heavy with exhaustion. A kind of spiritual weariness John had never realised Salah could feel. The tall Palestinian was always so vibrant, so dominatingly active. ‘We left without papers. Even had we passports with us, we could hardly just show up at the Italian immigration counter.’

  John pursed his lips. ‘If I swung her well to the south while we were rounding Sicily at Cap Boeo,’ he said slowly, ‘we could just brush the exclusion zone and drop you off in a dinghy within twenty miles of Cap Bon. Would you be all right in Tunisia?’

  Salah was surprised. That could well be the answer. And here he had been thinking that John was w
rapped up in his own problems.

  ‘Come across to the chart,’ John continued. ‘I can show you what I mean.’

  They were halfway across the bridge when the scream came up the deck to them. John swung round, just in time to see the figure falling from the second furthest crane. He tensed himself automatically for the thump of it hitting the deck but it vanished through the green steel and he just had time to wonder whether this was some weird kind of mirage when the dead sound came after all—though the scream continued to linger after it.

  The pair of them hit the door out to the companionway side by side and it was not until they were halfway down the second flight that John remembered about his knees. But they seemed to be holding up. Once on the deck, they ran along the outside track beside the piles of containers. John suddenly realised how much they looked like giant coffins. Frantically he tried to remember whose team was working on the cranes. Was it Marco’s or Niccolo’s? Please God, let it not be Niccolo.

  Marco was standing at the top of the open hatch looking down into the night-black hold. He was white as a sheet and shaking. Beside him, Eduardo, one of the work crew, was supporting a near-fainting Gina.

  ‘Where is the first mate?’ gasped John, winded by his run. Marco looked at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Niccolo?’ snarled John.

  The third officer shook his head and pointed downwards past the hatch. John felt his stomach twist. The whole afternoon swam before his eyes. He walked forward and looked down.

  In a square of brightness on the floor of the hold, Niccolo was kneeling by a crewman. The body was spread out on the solid steel and a great splatter of blood reached out from it away into the shadows as though the body had exploded on impact.