Getaway

by John Harris

Joe scratched his head cheerfully. “Better ask-a Captain Mama,” he suggested gaily. “She run the show, not me.”

  He moved aft to the wheelhouse, a square structure so small that when he squeezed in there to fist the wheel, his stooping back was against the paint-thickened boards and his belly was jammed hard against the spokes whose constant movement had rubbed his shirt and trousers threadbare against the bulge of his stomach and put a polish on the woodwork that even his neglect had never dimmed.

  The vessel was purple against the western sky as they began to heave up the great sail, a billowing rectangle of canvas flapping and tugging at its fastenings. The water began to chatter and talk again under the forefoot and a slash of spray found its way across the bows. The creak of ropes sounded loud on the wind, which slanted obliquely across the land so that the roosting birds on the sandpits changed position to face it. As they headed towards the open sea, the canvas caught the last of the light like the underside of a seagull’s wing, and even Joe was moved enough by the sight of it to hum a half-forgotten Neapolitan air.

  Willie Smith stood in the bows, holding on to a rope whose function he didn’t understand, staring ahead of them in silence, impressed by the width of the sea and the immensity of this new life he had embarked on. Then he turned and went towards the engine room.

  “You forgot your jacket,” Rosa called after him.

  As she picked the garment up to offer it, there was a clatter and something fell from the pocket to the deck. They all stared at the object for a second, then Rosa kicked it quickly across the deck so that it slid into the scuppers and out over the side, dropping without a splash into the sea.

  Willie bounded for the rail and stared at the darkening water that streamed away astern in a bubbling wake, then he whirled round on her. “You lost my gun, you silly old cow,” he shouted, his young face going red and ugly. “It’s gone down! I lost it!”

  “We don’t need guns on board here,” Rosa said with an impressive dignity, while Joe gaped and Frankie hung out of the cabin hatch, her eyes goggling with surprise.

  “That gun cost me a lot of money,” Willie was shouting. “It was useful.”

  “So!” Rosa faced him, unmoved by his protests. “What were you going to shoot with it?”

  “Why–” Willie hesitated “–birds and animals and things.”

  “You don’t shoot birds and animals with guns like that.”

  “I’ve a damn’ good mind–”

  “Listen,” Rosa said quickly. “If you don’t like it, you better tell the police about it. We’ll put back and you can go and report it.”

  Frankie was still gaping, and from the wheel Joe watched the clash of wills, his eyes flicking from one to the other as they faced each other, his chubby hands gripping the spokes until his knuckles were white. Willie was staring at Rosa, a tall, bulky woman with unwinking black eyes, then he lit a cigarette quickly and uncomfortably. “It don’t matter,” he said as he turned away. “I guess I’ll manage without it.”

  Rosa watched him, her face expressionless. “What’s your proper name?” she asked suddenly.

  Willie turned on his heel. “I told you, didn’t I? Smith. Willie Smith.”

  “That’s not your proper name.” Rosa’s mouth had tightened and her eyes had grown sharp so that there was something intimidating about her that brought the truth out of Willie just as it always did out of Joe.

  “Keeley,” he said. “Willie Keeley.”

  “Whyn’t you tell us that before? No secret, is it?”

  “No, but–” Willie turned aft again “–it’s just a name I don’t go much on.”

  “I don’t go much on mine,” Joe said with a laugh that was falsetto with nervousness. “Salome Joe they call-a me in the ’Loo. That ain’t so good either.” He guffawed uneasily again, his white teeth flashing in the dusk, then his laughter died away abruptly as Willie disappeared into the engine room where they had given him a mattress.

  Rosa stared after him, then she saw Frankie’s wide eyes and bewildered expression.

  “OK,” she said. “Get below. It’s time supper was ready.”

  “Aw, Mama–”

  “Get below!”

  Rosa raised her voice for the first time and Frankie ducked out of sight, and a moment later they heard the cacophonic symphony from the galley as she rattled the pans to show she was working.

  Joe was still watching the dark square of the engine-room hatch with a gloomy fascination, then he turned and glanced quickly at Rosa.

  “Mama–” he looked small and shrivelled, his face dark against his greying hair “–that a funny bloke.”

  “He’ll do for us.” Rosa hitched her woollen coat closer and peered towards the sea. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  Joe was still staring at the hatchway, his brows twisted anxiously. “Mama, why’s he in such a hurry to get away from Sydney?”

  “Perhaps he’s in trouble?”

  “Trouble? The police, Mama?”

  Rosa nodded and Joe’s mouth dropped open.

  “You see how his eyes go?” she asked. “Like this. Always like this.” She wagged her finger from right to left horizontally. “Never up and down. Like he’s looking over his shoulder all the time.”

  “He’s a fine one to have aboard,” Joe muttered. “He touch my little Frankie, I kick the living daylight outa him.”

  “He won’t touch her,” Rosa assured him. “He’s not interested in girls. He’s too scared.”

  Joe grunted. “Once, a long time ago in Italy, I was a soldier. I was often scared. But I never stop being interested in girls. We only want a mad-a dog aboard now and anything can happen. I don’ like it. All-a time I do things I don’ like.”

  Rosa rounded on him angrily. “The booze you’ve drunk’s softened your backbone, I don’t like it either but we’ve got to put up with it.”

  “You think he pinch something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You think he’s all-a right?”

  “We need money and he’s got money, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes, but, Mama–”

  “We need two strong arms and he’s got two strong arms, hasn’t he?”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “Well, he’s all right.”

  Joe directed a final glance aft that was leaden with the suspicion in it. Then he lit a cigarette, looked hard at his wife’s determined face and edged out of the wheelhouse. “OK, Mama,” he said. “I go to look at Tommy’s atlas now. Take her over.”

  Half an hour later, the Tina S turned north, passing near the stern of a P & O liner beating down into the blow from Brisbane, and headed past North Head and North Point. Dover Heights, a mass of glowing lights, its glare hanging in the sky, was over their stern. The Tasman Sea and the route to New Zealand was on their starboard beam. Ahead of them, as they fled easily before the buster, was the Pacific, mile upon blue mile of it.

  Three

  One of the things that Rosa had failed to realize in the formation of her plan to hide the Tina S was that the world had become far too complicated and well-recorded a place for four people and a boat to disappear easily from its comprehension. Within five days, while the Tina S curtsied north beyond Brisbane with Rosa happily convinced that no one had noticed their departure, action was already being taken to stop them; and as they headed through the Great Barrier Reef at least two men were on the move into the Pacific across their path.

  Richard Flynn studied all the reports on the Salomios and their boat that were available to him, and made a few preliminary inquiries in Woolloomooloo and King’s Cross before packing a bag and taking a train north. He paused in Brisbane only long enough to get the first whiff of the islands from the poinsianas that looped and hung over old garden walls, and to discover from the wharves along the river curling through the city centre that the Tina had halted merely to draw fresh stores and leave another debt. It required wireless messages to find her track again and, having plotted it, Flynn took a plane eas
t. As the Tina S reached the edge of the Coral Sea and the haunts of Byron, Dampier and Cook, Flynn crossed the thousand-odd miles of sweeping Pacific swells to reach Viti Levu, the largest of the Fijian group of islands.

  Along the seafront at Suva, the capital, built like Venice on canals, ocean-going ships and island schooners were reflected in the quiet water as Flynn climbed out of his taxi by the docks and paid off his driver, conscious of the Indian’s implacable unfriendliness towards him and Europeans in general.

  The heavy air reeked with the smell of copra and Flynn’s shirt was sticking to his back by the time he found the ship which had been chartered from Brisbane for him, a sleek little schooner called the Teura To’oa. She was moored astern of a cargo ship taking on a load of coconut flesh, and Flynn waved away the flies that filled the air as he stepped over a pile of greasy copra sacks and climbed aboard.

  The owner met him as he dumped his bag on the deck, a shrivelled little man with a mean merry face full of crafty wisdom and lined with the wear and tear of sensuous pleasures. He had blue eyes and red hair going grey and a pink face that seemed never to have got used to the sun.

  “Mornin’, Major,” he said with an aggressive friendliness that startled Flynn. “Seagull’s the name. Captain Harry Seagull. Known in these parts as the Deep Sea Kid.”

  “I’m not a soldier,” Flynn explained.

  “You’re a policeman,” Seagull said, not in the least put out. “Both make life hard for honest guys. I’m a honest guy. Ain’t any honest guys left in the world. Ain’t even any honest dames. Not on your nelly, there ain’t. Put your bag in the saloon. The boys’ll look after it.”

  In an American accent that was so ripe it was patently phoney, he rattled off his conversation piece without appearing to stop for breath. He was whittling a piece of wood all the time he was talking, standing in front of Flynn in rumpled duck trousers, the top of his peaked nautical cap, like the toes of his rope-soled slippers, painted with silver paint.

  Flynn opened his mouth to ask where he was to sleep but before he could draw a breath, Seagull was off again. “Got a passenger,” he pointed out. “Don’t normally take passengers, only this trip since I got one, might as well have two. Oughta get on well, the two of you. Things to talk about. Like to have things to talk about. Keeps the world going round.”

  “I thought I hired this boat,” Flynn snapped, annoyed to discover the authorities in Brisbane had slipped up.

  Seagull looked slyly up at him with his small bright eyes and grinned so that his ragged grey-red moustache curled upwards into his cheeks. “Going the same way. No harm. Take yourself off if you don’t like it. I can always carry copra. Me, I’m independent. Plenty other boats about. None of ’em’ll fiddle around for a cop, though. Only me. I’m a patient man. I do anything. I’d slit your throat for fifty nicker. Grub’s at midday. Leave on the afternoon tide.”

  He wandered off, leaving Flynn breathless. Then one of the Fijian crew came up and took his bag and Flynn sat down on a cabin top, already a little exhausted. He had a feeling that in acquiring this little schooner for him someone had blundered badly. He couldn’t imagine enjoying Captain Seagull’s conversation very much after more than a day or two of it.

  He took off his hat and began to mop his face. As the sun climbed higher into the sky, the moist heat grew more intense, and Suva settled itself into its mid-morning languor. Flynn glanced across the lagoon towards the native canoes with their sails of plaited pandanus mats. Beyond them was another schooner at anchor and beyond her still a brand new phosphate ship from the Gilbert Islands.

  He hadn’t been waiting long when the other passenger appeared on deck, a lean-featured man with shaggy hair and a tired-looking linen suit.

  “You’ll be Flynn,” he said. “My name’s Voss. Fred Voss. I’m a journalist.”

  Flynn frowned. “Seems there’s been a bit of a mix-up somewhere,” he said. “I hadn’t expected to have newspapermen round me on this job.”

  “I didn’t expect to have detectives,” Voss grinned. “Somebody boobed. Seagull, I suspect.” He sighed. “Five minutes with him and you feel as though you’ve been hit on the head with a road-mender’s mallet.”

  Flynn said nothing and Voss lit a cigarette and offered the packet. “I’m sorry, old man,” he apologized. “It was no choice of mine.”

  “That’s all right,” Flynn said, aloof and unwilling to exchange confidences. “Perhaps I can get another boat.”

  “You’ll be lucky. There aren’t any. I’ve tried already. Apparently we’re getting too close to the hurricane season and they’re all trying to lay up. As it happens, it might be for the best.”

  Flynn turned quickly. “What do you mean?”

  Voss smiled again. “I’m sorry to appear as knowing as the Almighty,” he said. “But I know you’re a detective and why you’re here and what you’re doing. You’re after a man called William Keeley and he’s on a boat called the Tina S which you believe is heading out towards the Chesterfields and the New Hebrides and across to the Ellices. Right?”

  “That’s true enough,” Flynn agreed cautiously. “How did you know?”

  “Newspaper contacts back home and–” Voss grinned “–Seagull talks a bit, you know. There’s a reward. Right?”

  “Right,” Flynn said, beginning to admire the other’s efficiency. “Mr Keeley picked the wrong man. He picked someone with a powerful father. Strings were pulled and politics came into it. Five hundred pounds should talk big in the islands.”

  “True enough. In addition to half a million coca-cola bottles and a few babies, the Yanks left them with the idea that everything has a value. Someone on one of all the canoes, coasters and schooners in these islands ought to spot a two-by-four fishing boat with an unusual rig.”

  Flynn said nothing and Voss went on, looking vaguely apologetic as he spoke. “I’m after a human story–” he explained, “–these human stories, sometimes they make me want to puke – but this time it’s a couple of old people and a kid trying to dodge a debt in a boat because they can’t afford to pay. And, unknown to them, they have on board a young lout who’s wanted for murder.”

  “Keeley?” Flynn turned quickly. “Are you following the Tina S too?”

  Voss grinned. “That’s it exactly. You’re pretty quick. A big American magazine wants this story. There’s a lot of money in it and I suffer from a cabbalistic fantasy that money’s useful. And now, to improve on it, I discover Mr Keeley. I didn’t know about him when I set off. Surely, since we’re following the same trail, we can share the same boat in peace?”

  Flynn sat down again and considered the position. “I’m not sure I’m keen,” he said.

  Voss shrugged. “Maybe I can help you,” he suggested.

  “How?”

  “You’re on the wrong trail. They’re not running out to the Chesterfields and the New Hebs and the Ellices. They’re turning south to New Caledonia and they’re working north from there to the Loyalties and then the New Hebs.”

  Flynn looked at him. “How do you know? More contacts?”

  Voss grinned. “Mrs Salomio left a message for her daughter-in-law before she left Sydney, telling her where they were going. The daughter-in-law got scared and told a neighbour who saw the possibility of earning some money and took her to a newspaper – the one I work for. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Go on.” Flynn’s eyes were interested.

  “Mrs Salomio said she’d write whenever she got the chance. There might be news in those letters. There’ll certainly be postmarks. And Lucia – that’s the daughter-in-law – he’s going to take them straight along to the office when she gets ’em. She’s being paid to. The newspaper will cable me what’s in ’em. Between us, we ought to find the Salomios – for me – and in doing so – find friend Keeley – for you.”

  “Sounds fair enough,” Flynn said slowly. “It’s a bit unorthodox but let’s give it a go.”

  Voss smiled again, relieved. “What’s your part
in the plan?” he asked.

  “Liaison, chiefly,” Flynn said, beginning to feel happier. “I’ve alerted police and port officials by radio – at least at those places which are big enough to have port officials and a radio. This is a ‘must’ job. We’ve got to catch Keeley. There’s pressure on in the right places. There’s been a report already of a boat that might be the Salomios, in the Chesterfields. It’s my guess, they’ll make their landfall in the New Hebs somewhere like Malekula or Efaté and eventually move up and across to the Ellices.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I was born on Ocean Island,” Flynn said simply.

  “And I know the islands. That’s why they sent me. And I know what I’d do if I wanted to keep out of sight, and if I had an old boat I couldn’t trust to a long voyage.”

  Voss gave him a curious sidelong glance. “How are you proposing to get around?” He indicated the deck they were on. “This?”

  “This,” Flynn agreed ruefully. “I wanted police launches but they decided on this instead to save delay if we cross zones of government. Aeroplanes aren’t much good when there’s nowhere for them to land. Still, we’ve got the airlines keeping their eyes open and we’ve got radio. The Tina S hasn’t. That’s something. We know where they are. They don’t know where we are. And if our reports are correct, they’ve only got sail. What else do you know?”

  “Not much. Except one thing that makes this story big-time stuff. You know what they’re navigating with? – a kid’s atlas. A kid’s school atlas and a bundle of throwaways bummed from the shipping offices.”

  Four

  While the Teura To’oa with Richard Flynn and Voss aboard was heading out to sea between the twin islands of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, the Tina S was heading into the sun towards Efaté in the New Hebrides Condominium, a good five hundred miles to the west. Behind her lay the peaks of Eromanga.

  The sea was an oily calm, except for long deep swells running up from the south-east, slow rolling valleys that set the masthead circling across the sky. The wind had disappeared except for occasional gentle puffs, and the slack jib slapped against the halyards with a wet sound that kept the gulls at a distance. The mainsail, clewed down for the night and not yet hoisted, lay in untidy folds along the boom.