by Lou Cameron
Captain Gringo said, “That’s funny. I heard he was bending over for Fitzke, the Swiss. I forget who told me. Must have been a little birdie.”
Gaston said, “Fitzke and DuVal were both on deck when we fished that native girl from the sea. Perhaps it is someone else’s turn with our Socrates?”
Venezis frowned and said, “Enough is enough. The fool is supposed to be on duty, not fucking the entire passenger list!”
The soldiers of fortune followed the skipper down the companion way, bemused. Venezis came to DuVal’s door first and pounded it imperiously. The French engineer opened it, wearing his clothes and a curious look on his otherwise innocent face. The skipper demanded to know if Socrates was there. DuVal looked blank and replied, “Of course not. I have not ordered room service. As a matter of fact, now that you mention it, I have not seen the boy at all this morning. What is going on here?”
Venezis nodded curtly and marched on. Behind him, Gaston said something in French to DuVal, who gasped. “Mais non! C’est ridicule!” and so forth until he slammed his door in a huff as the skipper banged on Fitzke’s.
The Swiss looked more sleepy than perverse as he came to the door in his pajamas to ask what they wanted. Venezis stared beyond him at the empty bunk. There were two bunks in the stateroom. The top one was neatly made up. Captain Gringo asked, “Doesn’t Olsen share this stateroom with you, Fitzke?” and the Swiss nodded sleepily and said, “Of course. He’s been up for some time, if you’re looking for him. What’s going on?”
Captain Gringo said, “Go back to bed. False alarm,” as he hauled Venezis back and shut the door politely in Fitzke’s bewildered face.
Captain Gringo said, “We’d better have a powwow with your crew. Somebody has to be fibbing like hell. They forgot Fitzke was bunking with that big ugly Swede, and I think Gaston’s right about DuVal, too!”
They moved aft to the skipper’s quarters and Venezis called his men in one at a time. Captain Gringo and Gaston found it sort of tedious, as neither spoke Greek. But it seemed to work out that Tarsouli had been told by Parakis, who’d been told by Savalis, that Meletzis had told him Socrates was screwing both the Frenchman and the Swiss.
So the skipper had Meletzis come down from the crow’s nest. When confronted, young Meletzis confirmed, red faced, that he had indeed passed on the gossip. But when Venezis demanded to know who’d told him, Meletzis confided he’d gotten it from the horse’s mouth. Socrates himself had boasted of his conquests among the passengers. Meletzis was quick to add he’d still refused the mess boy’s offer to bend over for him as well.
Venezis sent him back aloft and told Captain Gringo, “There you have it. Some men boast of having had women they’ve never even kissed, too. Socrates seems to think he’s another little Ganymede. But by the beard of Zeus, I’ll show him what I think of troublemakers aboard my vessel. When I finish with his ass he’ll be in no condition to brag about it!”
Captain Gringo asked, “Don’t you have to find him first?”
Venezis snorted and said, “I’ll find him, the simpering little braggart. Where could he hide aboard such a small vessel?”
It was a good question. Venezis and some of the deck watch searched high and low for Socrates, without any luck. Captain Gringo went to the Keller stateroom, not wanting to tell tales out of school. But all he found there were Keller half-asleep and Herta half-undressed and in no mood for a long conversation just now. So that was that. Socrates wasn’t in any of the staterooms, on deck, or in the hold when Captain Gringo joined Venezis and Gaston down there. Antigone of course had taken the bedding from the empty crate back to her own quarters long before this time, but Gaston, damn him, was sniffing around and called out from the corner, “A-hah! Someone has been using this empty packing case as a love nest! My ancient and adorable nose never misses the scent of…” and then he caught Captain Gringo’s eye and finished lamely, “asshole.”
Venezis didn’t seem to care where Socrates may have been making love aboard the Peirene. He took the more logical view that it was more important that his swishy mess boy had obviously gone over the side sometime in the night!
He said, “This is too much! First Papadakis and now Socrates! Do you think we have a murderer on board?”
Captain Gringo shrugged and said, “Well, they were both a little strange, and you do have low rails for sure.”
“Dammit, they were both seamen, whatever other odd habits they may have had. Wait! Remember how we searched for the source of mysterious noises in this very hold not long ago?”
Captain Gringo remembered the skipper dismissing those footsteps as shifting cargo, tcto. But he nodded and said, “Yeah, it could have been Socrates and some, ah, friend down here. We never thought to look in that empty case. But I don’t see how he could have gone over the side from down here. Do you?”
Venezis said, “No. But what if he managed to seduce someone on board who later had second thoughts? We are all men of the world. You surely know how an idea that seemed quite reasonable with a raging erection may strike one as disgusting in the cold gray light of satisfaction, eh?”
Gaston said, “You would make a good policeman, Venezis. I confess I have often wanted to throw someone I woke up with on a Monday morning overboard. I might have really done so, had I ever come to my senses in the arms of an ugly man!”
Venezis nodded and said, “That must be the answer. Someone who’s been at sea too long gave in to the sodomite’s persistent flirting, realized he, too, had left himself open to the contempt of real men, and decided to get rid of the evidence by simply pushing Socrates over the side. But it could have been anyone and … Wait. We can easily eliminate the women on board, eh?”
Captain Gringo nodded, but he wasn’t all that sure. Herta Keller, for one, had had a pretty good motive, and she was one big dame. Aside from that, the killer could have had a less-obvious motive. A pansy who got around with his trays as well as his twitchy tail could have found out something he wasn’t supposed to know, and that worked even better.
*
They didn’t find out how Socrates had gone over the side. But since nobody else did in the next twenty-four hours, everyone aboard but the Black Carib girl calmed down, and even she had stopped raging and struggling with her bonds by the time the lookout spotted the palms of the Bahías on the horizon.
They brought the now fully restored native girl on deck, and she just growled like a caged animal when Captain Gringo pointed and tried to get her to tell them which way she wanted to go now. He said, “Well, we’re out beyond the countercurrents and she has to live some damned where around here. We’ll just put her back in her canoe with an oar and some provisions and let her figure it out.”
Venezis put two spare oars as well as enough food and water to last her a couple of days in her canoe as Captain Gringo untied her, ducked the beautiful right cross she threw at him, and let her figure out that she was supposed to drop over the taffrail into her dugout. She did, with a very bewildered look, and was trying to paddle away even before the crew untied the painter and cast loose. She paddled like hell until she was out of pistol range, then turned and shook her fist at them.
Captain Gringo laughed and waved bye-bye. This seemed to confuse her even more. But she grimly began to paddle away as if she knew where she was going.
The Jamaican, Forsythe, who’d been watching from a safe range at the rear of the crowd, laughed and said, “That fool girl’s going to get lost again. Ain’t no islands off the way she’s headed.”
Captain Gringo stared beyond the determined girl and her canoe and, sure enough, saw that she seemed to be headed for empty horizon to the northwest. He said, “She’s making a beeline and she knows these waters better than any of us, Jamaica. How do you know there’s nothing over there the way she’s headed?”
“If they is, they ain’t on no map, Mon.”
“Hmm, I don’t think Black Caribs read the same navigation charts as we do. Let’s give her a good head start, the
n sort of tag along.”
Forsythe protested, “The main Bahías is dead ahead, Mon!”
But Keller, who’d been listening, said, “Walker has a good point, you know. If that wreck lay along a mapped coast, the others searching for it should have found it by now.”
“How you know they hasn’t, Mon?” asked Forsythe. Then he grinned sheepishly and said, “Yeah, right, they wouldn’t be trying to stop us if the game was over!”
Venezis didn’t care if they found the wreck or not. So he didn’t argue when Captain Gringo told them to let the girl get them hull down behind her and follow dead slow with the lookout keeping her in sight.
The next few hours went dull as hell. Moving no faster than a paddled canoe, the sponge schooner wallowed like a dead whale and sweated like a pig under the hot tropic sun. Tar bubbled from between the deck planks and the sponges rotting in her rigging didn’t smell so great either. When someone was dumb enough to bitch about the trades being light today, Captain Gringo pointed out that they couldn’t have put the native girl over the side in fresh winds.
As it was, she should have been pooped by now. But as the lookout kept her just in sight she just kept paddling as if her life depended on it, and by late afternoon the lookout called down that there was land ahead after all.
Captain Gringo turned to the skipper and said, “Let’s heave to and let her make her home shore on her own.”
“Don’t you want to see where she lands on that unmapped island?”
“Why? We’re looking for a sunken submarine, not her. She may rate a welcoming committee and we don’t want to spook them by making it obvious we’ve followed her. The island is what we were looking for, and, if it’s inhabited by people half as wild as she was, I sure hope we can spot that wreck without having to make a landing!”
It was a pretty good plan. But then the lookout called down another vessel astern and added it was hull down and seemed to be staying there with its lookout looking at him, like a big-ass bird.
Venezis said, “Skata! Someone’s been following us as we followed that native canoe, the stupid sons of the bitch!”
Captain Gringo said, “Oh, I dunno. They’re at least as smart as we were. But let’s make ’em work at it. Now that we know where the island is, we’d better hoist sails and motor due east toward the main Bahías.”
“Why hoist canvas? Even if the trades were fresh we’d be sailing against them in that direction!”
“I want us nice and visible. If their lookout’s just poking his head over the southern horizon at ours, he can’t see the island from there. Do you really want him to see the island, Skipper?”
Venezis swore and started yelling in Greek as he caught on. So the Peirene was soon moving full speed to the east with the distant mystery ship ghosting east with them, just over the horizon. Captain Gringo said, “Don’t race them until the sun goes down. If we lose them they could circle to find us and stumble over that island they don’t have on their charts, see?”
Venezis growled, “I don’t think I can outrun the bastards. They don’t seem to be having any trouble keeping abeam with us. They must have a serious engine, too, eh?”
“Yeah. Hakim must not be the first guy who’s ever thought to disguise a speed boat as a tramp schooner. But what the hell, it’ll soon be getting dark and the moon’s not due to rise tonight until almost an hour after sunset.”
They plowed on and at least it was cool on deck now, thanks to their headway against such wind as there was. So everyone wound up on deck. Herta Keller looked as if she was trying to tell Captain Gringo something with her eyes as she passed them, circling the deck without her husband. But he didn’t follow. The sun behind his back was getting lower by the minute and this was no time to flirt with dames.
It got even more important to remain near the helm and rear machine gun when the lookout shouted down in Greek and the skipper said, moaning, “Oh, no, there’s a smoke plume dead ahead! There’s either a steamship or a gunboat dead ahead! What do we do now?”
Captain Gringo looked back over his shoulder and said, “Steady as she goes. It’ll be dark well before we meet whatever it is to our east.”
“Shouldn’t I at least slow down?”
“No. Let everyone guess we’re afraid of meeting patrol craft. We’re supposed to be an innocent sponger, dammit!”
“That other schooner off to the south knows we’re not.”
“So what? You want a patrol boat chasing us all night, too?”
For an erstwhile sponge fisherman, Venezis was a pretty quick student. He told his helmsman not to veer suspiciously as the lookout called down that he could see where the smoke was coming from now, and that it was for sure a patrol craft, albeit a battle cruiser, not a gunboat.
Aboard the souped-up schooner ghosting them, Oberst Jager was getting the same dismal news from his own lookout. He swore and muttered to his own skipper, “Zum Teufel! Why on earth would they be headed to meet that British cruiser? Can’t they see where they’re going?’’’
The German naval officer disguised as a merchant skipper said, “That Basil Hakim has connections at the British court, nicht wahr?”
Jager said, “Ja, but unless that treacherous Greystoke knows of our telephone tap…Ach, that’s it! The whole thing is another sneaky British trick! Damn them, they never play fair! Even when Der Kaiser was a little boy and went to visit his grandmother, Victoria, at Windsor Castle, he says the British children got nicer presents at Christmastime.”
The skipper had never met Der Kaiser. So he just asked, “Steady as she goes, Herr Oberst?”
Jager hesitated, then said, “Hein. I am not ready to tangle with a British cruiser until Der Tag arrives. We’d better sheer off for now and hopefully pick up Hakim’s schooner again in less-imposing company.”
And so a few minutes later, aboard HMS Malta, a bridge officer knocked politely but persistently on the door of his captain’s quarters until the old man woke and sputtered, “What? What? Come in, God damn your eyes!”
The bridge officer came in to find the captain propped up in his bunk, bleary-eyed. He wasn’t sick or drunk. He’d manned his bridge all the way from Kingston on some sort of fool’s errand for British intelligence and he was as worn out as his antique boilers. The younger officer who’d relieved him on the bridge said, “Lookout’s spotted two schooners against the sunset, sir.”
The captain sputtered, “What? What? Schooners you say? Of course there are schooners in these waters, Man! We’re just off the bloody Honduran coast! You mean to say you woke me up to tell me about perishing dago sailboats?”
“Just one, sir. One of them’s moving innocently enough our way, no doubt making for the main Bahia we just passed. The other veered off to the south, about the same time our lookout spotted it. I thought you should know.”
The cruiser captain rubbed his sleep-gummed eyes as he pondered the picture. Then he asked wearily, “Do we have a full head of steam yet?”
“Yessir. They fixed that trouble with the condenser about an hour ago.”
“Very well. Wake me up when you overtake the one who seems so shy. Probably just a bloody smuggler. But we were ordered to intercept some bloody schooner or other. What was that name again?”
“Peirene, sir. Greek registry, working for a British subject one gathers Whitehall would like to pin something on.”
The captain answered with a snore. The bridge officer shrugged and went back up to the bridge, now that he had his orders.
And so, as the sun set with a green tropic flash, Oberst Jager found himself running for his life with a British cruiser in hot pursuit while, to their north, the Peirene circled sedately around to return to the unmapped island in the dark.
*
The moon was high and the sea was calm as a millpond as they circled the mysterious island just outside the breakers. Keller didn’t like those breakers much. He explained and Venezis agreed that surf breaking against a rocky shore meant deep water farther out. It go
t worse when they stationed a man in the bows with a lead line. The bottom was rocky too, and twenty fathoms down at the shallowest. Venezis said, “If that Spanish vessel was driven ashore here, she went down like a rock. There’s no shelf big enough to hold a big tin cigar above the drop-off in any kind of seas!”
Keller said they might be able to spot the submerged wreck anyhow, come daybreak. But Captain Gringo said, “Let’s not break out the diving gear until we have a look at the lee side of the island.”
Keller said, “That makes no sense, Walker. If the Spaniards made it around to the sheltered side, the storm shouldn’t have sunk them at all!”
“How do we know it did? What if the storm popped some rivets and salt water getting into their batteries filled the hull with poison gas? We know one guy got out, with his lungs ruined. The others might not have been as tough. But they still could have run her into a cove or, hell , a beach would be better than nothing if you wanted to get off in a hurry, right?”
The others agreed it was worth a try, since the island was only six or seven miles long. But as they cruised its dark jungle-covered coast it didn’t look too friendly. There were no lights ashore, but someone among the trees was sure beating hell out of a big Carib drum. They couldn’t tell if the Black Caribs were giving a party because the missing girl had made it home or if they’d spotted the schooner in the moonlight and might be feeling hungry.
They left the drumbeats behind as they rounded the west point of the island and saw lights ahead along the shore. Venezis said, “That looks like a village. I see houses. Do Caribs live in houses?”
Captain Gringo called Forsythe aft for his opinion. The Jamaican was of the opinion that Black Caribs lived in trees, and pointed out, as they got closer, that some of the buildings on shore had corrugated metal roofing. Captain Gringo nodded and said, “Yeah, electric lights, too! I’d be sort of surprised if any Caribs, red or black, had ordered any Edison bulbs lately. Looks like someone more civilized must have moved out here from the mainland. Let’s put in and ask ’em why.”
