The Angels Will Not Care

by John Straley

  And she was gone.

  “Come on,” Jane Marie said to me. “I’ll help you.” The ship was rolling underneath us, her engines sounding like the air sucking out of a mine shaft. One of the birder ladies shrieked out, “Another one. Eagle! Eagle!” They started doing their myopic bird dance, shuffling their feet and keeping their binoculars still. Carol and Alicia danced in the center of the lounge with the paper cranes in their hair and their mother smiled contentedly out the window to the rain.

  The bridge ran the width of the upper deck with the helmsman’s station in the center. It was a smaller steering wheel than I had expected, more like the wheel you’d find on a sport utility vehicle than a twenty-three-thousand-ton vessel. The Westward was winding through the passageway of the islands, making way to the outside waters so as to come into Sitka from the west. All along the inland waters there is a US pilot who is in charge of the navigation of the ship. He does this by law and with the full cooperation of the captain. As we came on the bridge the pilot was giving headings to the Helmsman in a clear strong voice. The Helmsman was a short dark-skinned man in a white ship’s uniform. He stood erect at the wheel and studied the compass and the rudder indicator laid out in front of him. All the other eyes on the bridge scanned the horizon. The pilot was a tall athletic man dressed in a sports coat and a red tie. He could have been a basketball scout or a senior detective. There was nothing much nautical in his appearance.

  The captain was a short, stocky man in his sixties, perhaps. He wore a military-style sweater with gold braided epaulets and white pants and green rubber clogs. He had enormously bushy eyebrows, which gave him an owl-like countenance. When we entered the bridge all the men who’d been scanning the seas turned and stared at Jane Marie. They all smiled, and the captain stood up, taking her hand in both of his.

  “Yes. Yes,” he said in a thick eastern European accent. “This then is the new professor, our native guide. She is the famous Whale Woman who knows each of her precious animals by name. I am captain of the Westward. Captain Minosh. This is my first mate, Mr. Calbran . . .” He gestured grandly to the tall, very fit Panamanian standing by the Helmsman’s elbow. The first officer nodded solemnly to Jane Marie and lowered his eyes. The pilot pushed forward and shook her other hand with a cowboy’s vigor and said, “I’m Pete Smith. I’ve heard all about you.” And he pumped her hand like a well handle, while Jane Marie blushed crimson. I apparently wasn’t there.

  Finally, the captain turned, and without fully acknowledging me, gestured for me to step forward. “Come, come,” he muttered and I stood several steps behind Jane Marie as she looked over the chart the Mate had spread on a table near the back curtain of the communications room. Jane Marie pointed to areas on the map and spoke of sea lion rookeries and the seasonal distribution of humpback whales. The pilot scanned the course ahead and called a new heading, saying, “That will be left to two, eight, zero then, Captain,” and the captain would murmur his agreement and the Helmsman said, “Aye sir. Left. Two. Eight. Zero.” The ship then swung farther from the rocks breaking a quarter of a mile on the right.

  “How then is the fishing in Sitka this year?” the captain blared out in my direction.

  I shrugged because I really didn’t know. I had seen a lot of blood on the docks near the fish cleaning tables so I figured I could make a guess. “Great!” I answered.

  The captain, still looking ahead, nodded. “I’m going to catch a halibut, you know.” And he gestured with his arms as if he were pulling in a fish. “Halibut is the most perfect, you know. I will bring it here and there will be so much I will share it with all of you.” He swung his arms dramatically from his chest and everyone on the bridge burst into laughter. This was apparently a very old joke among the ship’s officers. But no one said a thing. The ship rolled on and Jane Marie now scanned the course and I picked the cuticle on my thumb.

  I broke the silence awkwardly. “Did we lose a passenger back in Ketchikan?”

  Now for the first time the captain turned and looked at me. His great brush of eyebrows rose above sparkling eyes. “Lose a passenger? Sir, this is not a Boy Scout troop. We do not lose passengers.” The first officer smiled just slightly as if a joke were percolating deep down in his memory.

  “Well, I was just asking because, you know, I met this woman last night, she was, well, you know, very attractive and now I don’t think she is on the ship. She was in Acapulco 800. I was just wondering if she had gotten off the ship.”

  The captain again stared out over the bow of his ship. On each side of the inlet, ragged gray rocks lay everywhere below the surface. His ship weighed twenty-three thousand tons and there was no slamming on the brakes.

  He turned to me and smiled again. “You are Mr. Younger from Sitka, yes?” The captain studied me for a moment and then flickered a look to his first mate. “Mr. Younger, on these trips you should remember, if you find yourself with a beautiful woman in your arms you must keep close watch of her, for the next morning she is likely to be in the arms of another.” He held my eyes with his until I looked away, and I realized he knew my name without having been introduced.

  “Well!” Captain Minosh clapped his hands together and walked past me to the cart table with Jane Marie. “Tell me then about these great rubbery friends of yours.” And he put his arm around her shoulder.

  7

  Freetown

  There are only a few expressions used by television private eyes that I have ever heard in real life. Al­though I’ve heard of going on a “surveillance,” I’ve never been paid for a “stakeout.” Guns are usually guns and never “gats” or “pieces.” Sometimes they are weapons and only occasionally are they very useful at all. But one term I have a fondness for is “being made.”

  “Being made” is to be recognized for what you really are. I once knew a private investigator in Fairbanks who was tall and very thin, wore a short leather jacket and had his hair in a ponytail. He even had a scar across his lower chin. This private eye would walk into a bar be­hind anyone he was supposed to be following and would stand in the entryway long enough to make sure that ev­eryone in the place saw his silhouette in the brightening light behind him. All heads would turn, all eyes would ap­praise the ponytail, the scar, the bulge in the black leather jacket. Heads would bow and go back to their drinks. Then he’d turn to me at his elbow and mutter, “Shit, we’ve been made.”

  Well, of course we’d been made. More people go to a college basketball game than live in the entire city of Fair­banks, Alaska, and the bar scene was a tiny village of close friends. Of course they recognized him, and of course they knew that he was working on a case and he knew they knew. Notoriety was the only perk he had. He liked being made. It was the whole point of the exercise.

  I, on the other hand, do not like being made. I suppose I have never really recognized myself for what I am, and par­ticularly don’t like to have others see it. Of course, surrepti­tious work in the small villages of Alaska is rather pointless. Most village people know what I’m doing in town before I step off the floats of the airplane. But on a tour ship I thought there was a possibility, however slight, that I might be able to slide around unmade. Stupid, I know.

  Being made usually comes with a glance. A look that tells you that someone is not buying whatever pose you are trying on. It is a look like no others. It jolts you like a hold on a wet power line. It says “I know the truth about you even more than you know about yourself.”

  This was the look Captain Minosh had given me. If Sonny Walters and his cruise company had hoped to keep my presence on the Westward a secret they were going to be bitterly disappointed.

  I walked out of the bridge and down past the Compass Room on the Horizon Deck. Jane Marie said she had to meet with some team captains. She turned to go, then turned back suddenly.

  “That Rosalind, she’s nice, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said as noncommittally as I could.


  “You have a crush on her?” Jane Marie asked, biting her lip.

  “Naw,” I countered. “Just blood in the water.”

  She looked quizzically at me. Then her mood changed. “How about that captain saying I was a native guide. What’s that all about, you think?”

  “Maybe he’s never laid eyes on a real Alaskan woman,” I joked.

  Jane Marie laughed and waved me off, then disappeared around the corner of the passageway. I had no idea where she was going and that left me with a slight panicky feeling.

  In the lounge, Toddy was trying to set up another group shot. This time the crowd was much larger. Rosalind was there, and Mr. Brenner. They were standing with others of Todd’s new friends, all crammed next to a bust of Captain Cook. Some in the crowd had drinks in their hands and held them high above the shoulders of the people next to them. They awkwardly tried to bend and push themselves closer to­gether. Todd balanced his camera on the ledge near a drink­ing fountain and clicked off a couple of frames as he tried to set the timer. Men shouted and women laughed. Todd kept fussing with the camera and as I stepped forward to help him, I ran into the chest of a very tall and solid black man.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said slowly and quietly and it was only then that I noticed he was holding a folding knife with a thumb latch next to a talon-curved blade.

  “Please, sir, step this way with me.” The tip of the knife blade had cut through the front of my sweater and I could feel it needling my skin. I stepped backward and then turned the corner. Along the wall of the companionway was a blue metal door with a white sign which read, authorized ship’s personnel only. My traveling companion reached over my shoulder, opened the door, and pushed me inside.

  The door shut and we were standing on a metal stair landing. The noise of the ship’s engines was louder here. So was the faint smell I had picked up on the first day. This smell was of boiled vegetables and sweat, cigarette smoke with a hint of disinfectant, and fresh paint. Doors clattered shut all around me. The shadows slanted away from dozens of bulbs inside glass domes. We had stepped into the industrial center of the ship. This was Freetown.

  I looked up into his face. He was shiny black and the whites of his eyes were bloodshot as if he had not slept in days. His expression was extreme and severe but there was a boyishness in his expression that meant that this act was more motivated by fear than from some kind of dull meanness.

  “Sir, you shouldn’t have gone to the captain now,” he said slowly. “You don’t know what you have done.”

  “This is true,” I agreed and I raised my left hand up to my belt, lowering my right slowly.

  The black man’s whole body trembled. The knife wob­bled in the air just under my sternum and felt as if it were working deeper into my skin. The man let out a long breath.

  “I need this job,” he said at last as if he were going to cry. “I need that money, too.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said and pushed up with my right hand as I jabbed with my left.

  I had meant to grab his forearm but ended up grab­bing the blade of the knife instead. The sharp blade slipped through my hands and cut down to the knuckles of my right palm. At first, I could not feel the cut and was confused by the splash of red that flowered on the black man’s tunic. My heart sank when I thought that I might have stabbed him by mistake. Then I looked at the bright flash of bone and we both listened to my blood drip on the metal stairwell.

  We were smiling at each other, thinking, I hoped, that this would end things and we could go on with some sort of reasoned explanation for the craziness that had just tran­spired. Then he lunged his knife at me and ripped across my chest and I tumbled down the tight circular stairwell. I yelled and rolled down the metal grating. I remember other voices and ringing footfalls on metal. I folded my hand under the sweatshirt and ran down one of the gray-painted metal halls. There were bare pipes and gauges. Red fire extin­guisher boxes, coiled hoses, and axes with sharp metal points. Brown men in coveralls with bandannas around their heads. Pointing and yelling. A poolroom, lots of cigarette smoke, and a dark lounge where men were playing cards. One bulb hung from the ceiling and some of the men had hand towels draped around their necks. Hot and loud voices yelling at me, and the engines were getting louder and the heat more intense.

  I opened the vault like door to a paint locker and tried to stuff myself inside. Hands worked the door and I blundered on, running to another tight spiral staircase, dark at the bot­tom, and I fell again, wrenching my back and my shoulders as I fell and tried to curl around my cut hand.

  I came to rest in a pile of sooty rags. I could see the flutter of flame reflecting on the surface of one of the large gauges. The footsteps came fast and the voices were like the flutter of cheering from a passing train. I rolled to my side, twisting to see the staircase. The man with the blood-spattered tunic came first, the knife still in his hand. He reached down and yanked at my hair, turning my throat up to the light. Behind him, the other men fell silent. I could hear his breathing above the gravelly throb of the ship’s engines. The knife, with my own blood on the blade, came down to my eye level and his torso blotted out the light.

  From over my right shoulder a pipe wrench came down hard on the blade. The knife clattered across the diamond-plated metal floor. Men started pushing back up the stairs. I heard someone move behind me and then the wrench was raised again.

  “Cyril, you must be out of your mind, man.” The voice that came from behind us was deep, with a rich Caribbean accent. “Have you lost all of your senses? First, you breeding the sheep up there, now what? You going to kill a sheep down here? What is this craziness, man? Do you really expect us to watch you do this thing?”

  Cyril sat down on the stairs. He looked sheepishly down at the blood on his shirt. He held his palms up wide to the man behind me as if beseeching the court.

  “But, Mr. Worthington, now. He’s no regular sheep, sir. He some kind of police. I hear them talking. He works for the companies, sir. He’s asking about the doctor.” As he said this last, Cyril made a gesture as if he were giving a shot with a hypodermic. “Asking about the doctor. You know, sir.”

  I rolled over and saw Mr. Worthington standing over me protectively with the head of the pipe wrench weighing in his left hand. He was an older man with a broad face and high cheekbones. He was very, very black and his eyes glittered a startling blue. He was covered from head to foot in soot. The white of his jumpsuit was smeared evenly in blackness. He had a yellow band around his forehead that was soaked clear through with sweat.

  “And what about the lady you were breeding up there in the hotel the other night?” Mr. Worthington asked Cyril. “You telling me she wasn’t a sheep then?”

  “Aw, Mr. Worthington,” Cyril protested. “You know, sir. She gave me money. She wanted it. You know how they are.”

  “I know exactly how they are, Cyril,” Mr. Worthington said crisply and with a tone of some self-satisfaction. “I know exactly how they are. And what were you going to do then when she gets embarrassed about being found out and says that you raped her, then?”

  “I know. I know,” Cyril moaned and hung his head.

  “No, you don’t know, Cyril. You are surely dumb, man. You appear to have lost all of whatever sense God gave you.”

  “What about him then, sir? He’s the only witness. He’s been to the captain. I can’t just let him run around now, es­pecially with this business about the hand and all, now can I?”

  I was actually rather pleased the subject was coming back around to me.

  “I will be taking care of all that,” Mr. Worthington said and that appeared to be final, for everyone began walk­ing back up the stairs, wiping their hands either on rags or against the sides of their pants as if they were well rid of our confrontation.

  Mr. Worthington rolled me over. He gently uncurled my palm where the sticky crust of blood wa
s turning into a rind around the cut. The new blood continued to spread like an oil slick down my bone-white skin.

  He shook his head. “Oh man, this is no good. You better come with me then, sir. I’ll take you to my quarters. There is no one who will mess with you there.” Mr. Worthington helped me to my feet. After the adrenaline stopped pumping I could feel the cuts on my scalp and the stiffness in my legs and shoulders. I was unsteady as I followed him down the narrow, howling passageway.

  We moved past walls of gauges and through tangled jungles of pipes. The engine sound was louder of course but also more distinct. I could sense the pulse of the ship now, the gradual chug-chugging of the shaft turning the huge propeller.

  Finally, we came to a sealed metal door and we walked into a quiet hall. The walls here were metal and painted white. There were four doors on either side and Mr. Worthington stepped into the second one. I had no idea where I was on the ship but I had a sense that I was well below the waterline.

  He took some books off of a straight-backed chair and motioned me to sit. The room was tight, with the bed and the chair and a dresser near the tiny closet. In the closet was a small refrigerator and on top of that stood a statue of the Virgin. Taped to the walls were photographs of children. Some wore school uniforms in formal portraits, but there was another showing the same children gamboling along a dusty red dirt road, squinting into the bright sun with a row of pastel wooden buildings behind them. As I sat on the chair I suddenly felt dizzy. I closed my eyes but the images of the children still clung there. Mr. Worthington held my hand lightly. I could feel his breath on my palm, as he lifted my injured hand for inspection.

  “Ayeeee! This is a bad cut, you know. I don’t know what I can do for you. But I do it anyway. Wash it off then.” He poured some bottled water and he scraped the rind of blood. The muzzy pain was strange enough, but what was worse was to see and feel how my hand now was two folds of sepa­rate skin that moved and wriggled at odds with each other. I gritted my teeth and looked again at his photos.