The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  “You had no lookout,” said Hardin, pushing the hair from his brow. “You don’t know what happened.”

  Doubt flickered in Ogilvy’s eyes, then disappeared like a candle flame in sunlight. “LEVIATHAN ran no one down,” he said firmly.

  “You ran right over me, you son of a bitch. I saw your name all over the stern.”

  Ogilvy turned to the gaping men at the fire. “This young man is obviously in need of medical help. He’s been bandying about wild accusations at the Admiralty, ignored, rightfully. He seems to be searching for a villain on whom he can blame his wife’s death. I suspect he knows he was responsible for whatever accident he suffered and feels guilty.”

  Hardin hit him.

  Ogilvy cried out and stumbled backward, clutching his face. His friends sprang to his aid, shouting in dismay. Confused, as if he were unable to figure out a movie he had entered late, Hardin watched them cluster about the captain.

  Ogilvy’s face was wracked with pain; and the body staggering backward belonged to an old man. Blood poured through his cupped hands. It spattered his white shirt and enraged his friends. They helped him into a chair while the barman, a stocky two-hundred-pounder, came for Hardin, his fists raised expertly.

  He threw two quick, stinging jabs and a right cross that took Hardin high on the cheek and slammed him against the bar. Bobbing and weaving, he threw two more jabs, one of which opened Hardin’s lip, and went for the body.

  Hardin sidestepped. The body punch hit the bar. The barman, angered, charged wildly. Hardin laid him flat with a barstool. Then he sat down at a corner table with his back to the wall and his head in his hands and waited for the police.

  He was charged with public drunkenness and assault and battery, and put in a cell with several drunks who kept threatening to beat up a frightened Jamaican boy accused of housebreaking. He gave the hospital in Fowey as his address in England. The black wall came for him at dawn, pushing the comber before it. Carolyn tumbled on its crest, her arms and legs pinwheeling. He ran to help her and grabbed her hand, but the wave tore her away. He awakened to the sound of his shouting and the Jamaican shaking him and pleading, “Sair, sair, you’ve a dream, sair.”

  The police took him to magistrate’s court in the morning. Acutely aware of the disadvantage at which his dirty, disheveled appearance put him, Hardin intended to ask for a lawyer and a postponement and, if denied, would request help from the American Embassy.

  Before he could, an assured young man took charge of the unfamiliar court proceedings, and it took Hardin a while to realize he was not a prosecutor but his defense attorney. After the charges were read, a police constable described the scene he had found at the Lancers’ Arms. The magistrate’s face wrinkled with distaste at the mention of Ogilvy’s age. The situation became marginally clearer for Hardin when Dr. Akanke swept into the courtroom in a tailored blue suit and white turban, cast him a worried smile, and took the box to testify that she had treated Hardin for physical and mental trauma.

  The magistrate questioned her rather sharply. When he cast doubt on her qualifications, the well-dressed young man asked to speak with him privately. He was joined by several others, including two black men. The group conferred at the magistrate’s bench, the magistrate turning several times to his clerk for advice.

  “Bring the prisoner forward,” he snapped at a bailiff. Hardin was hustled to the bench. The magistrate looked perplexed.

  “Your presence in my court, Dr. Hardin, has attracted an especially qualified solicitor, a gentleman from the Foreign Office, and two Nigerian envoys, not to mention the American ambassador’s assistant chargé d’affaires lurking in my anteroom. Were these worthy personages here to attest to the character of a hooligan who struck a gentleman twenty years his senior, and assaulted a barman who came to the old man’s defense, I would ignore them and remand these serious charges to a higher court.

  “However, as they’ve journeyed to Hampstead to support the testimony of your doctor who contends you’re not entirely responsible for your actions, I am persuaded to release you in her care. But I place you under the strictest probation. If you ever go near Captain Ogilvy again, I will send you to prison. Is that clear?”

  Dr. Akanke drove Hardin to his hotel for his clothes, then headed toward Cornwall on the M3. He hunched against the far door of the Rover, thinking how when he had called Kline for help at the embassy, Kline had said, Come home.

  Come home to what? The streets they explored when it was too cold to sail? Their favorite restaurants? The subscription seats at Lincoln Center? Or would he find a place they’d never been and stare with filling eyes, knowing she’d have liked it too.

  He thought of Ogilvy and LEVIATHAN.

  When they passed Shaftesbury, he sat straight, and said, “Thank you. Where’d you get the big guns?”

  Dr. Akanke drove with both hands on the wooden wheel of the powerful car and her eyes stayed on the road as she answered.

  “Racialism has become a serious problem in England, particularly in the cities. I was afraid the court would disregard my testimony because of my color, so I asked my embassy for support.”

  “And they wheeled out two diplomats and a senior man from the British Foreign Office? That’s some embassy.”

  She threw him a quick smile. “It wouldn’t do to have me insulted. Many people believe that my father will be the next chief of staff of the Nigerian Army. Others assume I will marry the son of an important politician.”

  “Why did you come for me?” asked Hardin.

  “You’re my patient. You’ve obviously not recovered.”

  “I have now.”

  She frowned dubiously. “Are you suggesting that assaulting that man was some sort of catharsis?”

  Hardin smiled to put her at ease. “No,” he said. “It was a mistake.”

  “I’m glad you see that.”

  He saw it clearly. He had attacked the wrong enemy. No man, no captain bore such responsibility that hurting him would slake Hardin’s fury.

  While Ogilvy worked his Hampstead garden, while Dr. Akanke drove him through the ordered beauty of Dorset, the monster was out there—host to another captain who imagined he was in command—steaming back around Africa like the relentless arm of a deadly pendulum.

  5

  She had never met a medical man like him. He told her he hadn’t studied surgery, but he acted with the boldness and abrupt decisiveness of a top surgeon, and in that he reminded her of her father. But her father was a Yoruban Nigerian soldier, and this man was a white American widower, and something told her it was just as well that she was going home in a month.

  She was twenty-seven years old, just surfacing from the drudgery of medical training, and she found herself noticing the oddest things: his rare smiles broadened his wide mouth but didn’t show his teeth; the resonant sound of his voice; how he brushed his hair from his forehead when he bent over a page.

  His powers of concentration were enormous. She stood over him, her shadow on his book for several minutes, and he didn’t notice. He was lying on the grass in the hospital garden surrounded by books and magazines. Since they had returned from London he had spent most of his time reading about shipping and maritime affairs. Therapy, he had called it, when she had asked. Once a day they talked for an hour. He refused to speak with the staff psychiatrist, but he answered her questions openly and candidly and thanked her several times for helping him put things in perspective.

  He said he felt much better and she believed him. His anger seemed gone, vanished as if it had never existed. He no longer snapped at people, nor did he stare into space with the rage smoldering in his eyes the way he had.

  She made a shadow bird on his page and flapped its wings. He looked up. “Hi.”

  Ajaratu said, “Would you like to come to my office?”

  “Here’s fine. You could use the fresh air.”

  She thought he had started to say “sun” and caught himself. She knelt beside him, conscious of how light
his skin was even though it was tanned.

  “How’s the therapy coming?” she asked.

  “Fine.” He reached to straighten the stack of magazines, but they fell, fanning out like a bridge hand. Ajaratu riffled through the copies of Safety at Sea and Fairplay and reached for a glossy color magazine that had a picture of a soldier on the cover.

  He took it from her and stacked it with the others. “No dreams last night.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “At least none I can remember.”

  “How’s your knee?”

  “Stiff.”

  “Is it still locking?”

  “It wants to,” said Hardin. “I’m getting so I can anticipate it and move accordingly.”

  “Perhaps you won’t need surgery.”

  A nurse came into the garden and said there was an overseas call for Dr. Hardin. He apologized. He received one or two a day. “Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”

  He returned quickly. “Lawyer. Sorry.”

  “Important?” She wanted to see where his interest lay.

  He looked at the sea. “The insurance came through on the boat.”

  “Did your wife carry life insurance?”

  Like lightning, the anger flashed back in his eyes. Ajaratu waited. She had asked deliberately to gauge his reaction. “Yes,” he said quietly. “Any more charming questions?”

  “I’m sorry, Peter. That was thoughtless. You were going to tell me about your business.”

  “Not much to tell,” said Hardin. “I took in a partner to run it day to day and my lawyer watches him. I own the patents. It works.”

  “Then what do you do? Do you invent new instruments?”

  “Or go sailing.” He grew reflective for a moment. “It’s funny, but it’s hard for me to connect with the person I was when I built the temperature probe. It seems so long ago, even though it’s only a few years. In retrospect it happened so fast—I thought of it; I designed it in a morning; spent some time ironing out the bugs. Bill Kline did the wheeling and dealing. We had a mad scramble setting up a factory and then all of a sudden the money was rolling in. Sometimes I still can’t believe it happened.” He laughed. “I doubt I could do it again.”

  Ajaratu smiled. Before she had realized how quickly Hardin would recover, she had telephoned Kline to learn details of his life that might help her care for him. The lawyer’s version of the invention was less casual. “Twenty hours a day seven days a week for a year and a half. That’s how long it took him to put that thing in production. Incredible determination. Once he knew he had the right idea, you couldn’t stop him.”

  “That must have been difficult for his wife.”

  “Carolyn?” The lawyer paused. “Yes, it was hard. But she was back in med school then, busy as hell, and they worked it out, just like they worked everything out. She was an incredible woman . . . How’s he doing?”

  She had told him not to worry. Now, of course, he would know from talking to him that Hardin was quite well.

  She said to Hardin, “The director suggests you should be released.”

  He grinned at her. “I guess I have been using this place as a hotel. I’ll get a room in the village.”

  “Don’t rush,” she said. “We’ve got some extra beds.” She crossed her arms around her tucked-up knees and gazed down at the long, narrow harbor. “What do you intend to do?”

  Hardin nodded at the bright hulls riding their moorings.

  “I’m going to buy a boat.”

  The wealthy Londoners who owned the sailboats left them in the care of a scrawny old Cornishman with a sly face. His name, Culling, was emblazoned on the sheds and barns in his boatyard at the north end of the harbor on the Fowey side. He listened without comment while Hardin explained what sort of a voyage and boat he had in mind, then led him into a shabby wooden rowboat, yanked a cord on a Seagull outboard, and steered toward the middle of the harbor where his moored charges pointed the tide like sheep facing the dog.

  A fresh wind raised a chop on the water and snapped the yachts’ halyards musically against their aluminum masts. Hardin was impressed. These were deepwater cruising and racing boats. They droned past a spectacular white hull, a Sparkman and Stephens Nautor Swan built in Finland. Hardin gazed longingly at her powerful lines. It would be hard to imagine a finer single-handed cruising boat. They were rare in the States, but he had once seen one in Boston.

  Culling slowed the little engine and said, “There she is. A gentleman’s cruising boat.”

  Hardin whistled. There she was. A graceful, fast Hinckley Bermuda yawl. Another American design, Tripp, but much older, with a long overhang and pretty as a picture.

  “How did she get over here?” Hardin asked as the yardman veered alongside and backwatered expertly by spinning the Seagull on its mount.

  Culling shrugged. “She’s going very cheap. Needs some cleaning up, but a bargain.”

  Hardin climbed aboard and looked around. She hadn’t been cared for with much enthusiasm lately. Her chrome was pitted and the first winch he touched was frozen. Not that that necessarily mattered. The Hinckley was a solid, Maine-built boat and he was looking for more than a bright paint job.

  “I’ll need some time to look her over,” said Hardin.

  “Enjoy yourself.” Culling lay back in the rowboat and covered his eyes with his cotton hat and appeared for all intents and purposes to fall asleep.

  The companionway hatch slid open with great difficulty. He had to brace himself to shove it back enough to skip down into the cabin. She was dirty below and smelled damp. A rumpled blanket was mildewing on a forward bunk. He started at the bow and worked backward, checking out the lockers, sail bins, bilges, and cupboards, hunting her strengths and weaknesses, assessing what damage her previous owner had done her.

  He found half-empty liquor bottles, cocktail mixes, paper napkins, plastic cups and plates, and few spare parts and tools. Shackles, blocks, rope, twine, and tape were all in short supply. Whoever had sailed the yawl from the States had not been the last person aboard.

  He pulled the mainsail out of its bag. The cloth had deteriorated along the entire length of its foot. Dacron’s sole weakness was its chemical instability in sunlight, and the sail was ruined because it had not been covered when it was furled to the boom.

  He shone his penlight into the depths of a locker and discovered that the bulkhead between the main and forward cabins had separated slightly from the hull, but when he pulled up the floorboards in the stern, he found little water in the bilges, and the stuffing box around the engine box seemed tight.

  He went back up on deck, thinking that a good fiberglass boat, as the Hinckley was, could survive the sort of careless owner who had had this one much longer than could a boat built of wood or steel. Wood rotted and steel rusted, but fiberglass just waited for better times.

  The standing rigging, the wire stays and shrouds supporting the mast, looked all right, though some corroded fittings would have to be replaced. The running rigging, the halyards and sheets, was worn. At the bow, Hardin leaned against the forestay and gazed the length of the yawl. The stay felt very tight.

  Culling lifted his hat from his face and called from the rowboat, “Like her?”

  “Maybe.”

  Hardin walked the deck, testing the safety-line stanchions, finding several loose. The mainmast’s backstays and shrouds were as taut as the forestay. He stepped into the cockpit and checked again the tight sliding hatch cover. Not only were the tracks clean, but someone had chiseled them wider in an unsuccessful attempt to make the cover slide more easily. He reached down and fingered the top step of the companionway. It was loose. Recalling the crack between the cabin bulkhead and the hull, he leaned over the side of the boat and eyed its length. He stood abruptly and stepped across the yawl and into Culling’s rowboat.

  The yardman grinned. “Yes?”

  “She’s a banana.”

  “Banana?”

  Hardin slapped the hull. “She’s bulgi
ng amidships. Some damned fool’s been tuning the stays too tightly. The tension’s distorted the hull.”

  “You know your boats, sir.”

  “I know a crook, too,” Hardin shot back.

  Culling seemed undisturbed by the accusation. He wrapped his starting cord around the outboard’s flywheel. “There’s another I’ll show you.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Hardin. He sat in the bow of the boat, facing back.

  Culling yanked the cord and the motor buzzed like a jar of mosquitoes. “Won’t take a minute. It’s on the way to the quay.”

  Hardin nodded glumly. The old thief had a lock on every decent boat in the harbor. He watched the panorama of the towns and hills swing in a circle of soft peninsular colors. Of all the beautiful places he and Carolyn had visited, none had such pale, clear, revealing light as Cornwall.

  The view stopped swinging and when Culling slowed the little engine, Hardin turned around and saw the Nautor Swan, twenty yards ahead. Even moored it looked like a prowling shark.

  “That?”

  “That,” said Culling.

  The Swan had the short, sharp lines of a bayonet, powerful rather than pretty, with its bow not especially raked and its squarish stern chopped at a distinct forward angle. A sliver of cabin wedged barely a foot above the deck at its highest point.

  Hardin turned from the straight lines of the hull to Culling’s sly face. “What are you up to? She’s got to cost more than I have.”

  Culling’s gamin features softened. “Her owner is bankrupt and his creditors want their brass. She’s worth fifty-five thousand pounds, but they’ll take forty-five.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Hardin. Eighty-five or so thousand dollars was more than he intended to spend, but a bargain price for a used yacht that must have run a hundred and twenty thousand new.

  “She’s a treasure,” said Culling, “and as I’ve the job of selling her, I’ll decide who deserves her.”