And the Deep Blue Sea (4 page)

“Captain, I’m not an idiot, and I’m not drunk! It was a man! Wouldn’t he show on the radar?”

“Not on our radar.” It was the chief mate, who had emerged from the wheelhouse. He spoke to the captain. “Maybe she did see something. We’d better take a look.” Before the captain could reply, he stepped past them and lifted a life ring from its brackets on the rear railing of the bridge. It was attached to a canister. He ripped the canister loose from its supports and threw the whole thing over the side. Karen heard it splash in the water below them, and in a moment a torchlike flame appeared, lighting up the surface of the sea as it began to drop astern. The chief mate turned and called out to the helmsman inside the wheelhouse. “Hard left!”

“Mr. Lind!” the captain said angrily, drowning out the helmsman’s reply. It was obvious even to Karen that Lind had vastly exceeded his authority, since it wasn’t his watch and the captain was on the bridge besides, but the big man was completely at ease.

He winked at Karen. “Cap, it’ll cost us ten minutes to find out. If there’s nobody there, I’ll buy the company a new life ring, and Mrs. Brooke will give a cocktail party.”

The ship was already beginning to swing. The captain started to countermand the order, then shrugged and remained silent. Karen sighed with relief as she retreated from the bridge where she had no business. Lind, she thought, was something of a man.

And with a mocking and reckless sense of humor that could have wrecked it, she added to herself, thinking of the “cocktail party.” Captain Steen was a Baptist, a teetotaler, and a dedicated crusader against alcohol. She crossed to the port side of the boat deck where she could continue to watch the flare after they completed the turn, trying to sort out her reactions to the odd fact that she had probably saved a man’s life. What was that old Chinese belief? That if you saved somebody’s life you had meddled in his destiny and you were responsible for him from then on?

Goddard saw the flame blossom on the surface of the sea, and collapsed, shaking all over and too weak to do anything for a moment. He saw the ship begin to swing in her hard-over turn, circling to come back through the area, and when he had his breath back he slipped over the side again and began to push the raft toward the circle of light, some two hundred yards away. By the time he came up to it the ship had already reached the limit of her opposite course and was turning toward him again. He stopped in the edge of the illuminated area with the raft between the flare and the oncoming ship so he would be silhouetted against it, and climbed back aboard. He waved, knowing they would have their glasses on the light and would have seen him by now. Lying on his back, he fought his way into the soggy dungarees. He sat up, drank the last of the water in the bottle, and waited.

The ship came on. While still a quarter mile away they backed down briefly on the engine to take most of the way off her there, before they came abreast, so the wash from the propeller wouldn’t sweep him away from her. The engine stopped, and she began to drift slowly down on him, coming to rest at last not more than fifty yards away. He saw men working on the boat deck, and one of the starboard boats started to swing out in its davits. They didn’t know what kind of shape he might be in, or whether there could be somebody else lying in the bottom of the raft.

He cupped his hands. “Don’t lower a boat! Just a ladder!”

A voice came back from the darkness of the bridge. “You sure? How about the accommodation ladder?”

That would be stowed, and it would take twenty minutes to break it out and rig it. “Just a pilot ladder,” he shouted back. He took a quick look around to be sure there were no cruising dorsals attracted by the flare, slipped over the side, and began pushing the raft ahead of him. In a minute the beam of a flashlight probed downward from the after well-deck to give him a mark, and just before he reached the ship’s side there was the rattle and bumping of a pilot ladder being dropped over. The lower end of it was in the water under the beam of light. He pushed the raft aside and swam over to it. The end of a line dropped into the sea beside him.

“Make it fast around yourself,” a voice called down. They were determined to make a stretcher case out of him, he thought, but they might have a case, at that. He was pretty well used up. He treaded water while he passed the line around under his arms and made it fast. Grasping the chains at the ends of the ladder treads, he started up, while the men above took up the slack in his safety line. It was a long way up, and he found he was weaker than he’d thought. Hands grasped his arms and helped him over the bulwark and down on deck. He shook with fatigue while water dripped from his body, vaguely conscious of an excited buzzing of voices from a number of the crew gathered in the well-deck. One of the cargo lights was turned on. Somebody unbent the safety line while two men continued to support him, apparently trying to lead him over to a seat on a hatch cover. He shook his head.

“I’m all right,” he gasped.

The blond giant who had hold of his right arm let go, grinned at him, and said, “I guess you are, at that. And I thought I had a patient to practice on.” He indicated the open first-aid kit on the hatch cover. Beside it was a pitcher of water. He poured a glass half full. “Easy does it.”

Goddard drank it and returned the glass. “I had a little on the raft.”

The only man present with an officer’s cap stepped forward. “I’m Captain Steen. Are there any others?”

“No, just me.” Goddard grinned painfully, his sun-and-salt-ravaged face feeling as though it would crack. “I’m glad to meet you, Captain.” He held out his hand. “My name’s Goddard.”

They shook hands, Captain Steen somewhat stiffly, apparently a man with very little humor. Steen turned to one of the crew, and said, “Tell Mr. VanDoorn he can get under way.”

Goddard looked at the big man who had helped him aboard and given him the water. Though he was bareheaded and clad only in khaki trousers and a short-sleeved shirt with no insignia of any kind, he wore authority as casually as he did the bedroom slippers and the untamed shock of blond hair. “Mate?” Goddard asked.

The other nodded. “Lind.” They shook hands, and he asked, “Yacht, I suppose, with that Mickey Mouse life raft?”

“Yeah,” Goddard replied. “I was single-handing—” He stopped, overcome with another attack of weakness and shaking, and began to sway. Lind and another man caught him before he could fall. They led him toward the ladder to the deck above.

Karen Brooke had been watching from the corner of the promenade deck as Goddard made his way up the pilot ladder, marveling that a castaway would have the strength to do it. Apparently he hadn’t been aboard the raft very long. Just as they helped him over the bulwark, Mrs. Lennox came out of the passageway on the starboard side and joined her at the rail.

“Isn’t it exciting?” Mrs. Lennox asked. “A real rescue at sea. Who do you suppose he is?”

“He must be off a small boat of some kind,” Karen replied. “It was a tiny raft, one of the inflated kind, and I don’t think ships have them.”

“A yachtsman! And look how tall he is.” The older woman’s interest quickened. “Almost as big as Mr. Lind.”

Karen was amused, now that it appeared the man was neither ill nor dying of thirst and no longer an object of concern. He had cheated one species of maneater, and now was being marked down by another. Mrs. Lennox had all the healthy interest in men of any normal, red-blooded, fifty-year-old widow, and she went to no great lengths to conceal it. She was still quite attractive, with a trim and sexy figure, smoky gray eyes, and a cascade of ash-blond hair. She was wearing pajamas, slippers, and a nylon robe, but the hair was neatly combed and she had put on makeup.

Karen gazed musingly down into the well-deck where the man, surrounded by curious crew members, shook hands with the captain and then with Mr. Lind, and wondered if, in accordance with the old Chinese belief, she should try to summon up some feeling of responsibility for him. He really didn’t appear to need it. Even exhausted, barefoot, naked from the waist up, with water draining off him and his face covered with a week’s stubble of beard, he was an imposing figure and stamped with the competent look of a man who could take care of himself.

“Good show, Mrs. Brooke.” The two women turned. It was Mr. Egerton, coming down the ladder from the deck above to join them.

He was the passenger in Cabin G, a lean, erect man in his sixties with a gray moustache and gray hair, against which the black eye patch was undoubtedly dramatic but, to Karen, somehow vaguely theatrical, as though he had set out to contrive the effect. This was unfair, of course, and she realized that part of it was the clipped British accent, the occasional use of military terms, and expressions like that same “good show.” If you were a retired English army officer who had lost an eye somewhere, you could hardly be blamed if this were exactly the way a not very imaginative actor would play the part. He kept to his cabin a good deal of the time and seldom came to breakfast or lunch, so she didn’t know him very well, but he had beautiful manners and was an urbane and interesting dinner companion.

“The second officer informs me you were the heroine of the affair,” he went on. “Bit of good fortune for the chap that you were up and about, what?”

Karen caught the swift glance from Madeleine Lennox. The older woman recovered instantly, however, and exclaimed, “Darling, you mean you were the one who saw him? And you didn’t tell me?”

“It was just an accident,” Karen replied. “I woke up when the engine stopped and went up on the boat deck to look at the stars.” Does that do it, dear? She went on to tell how she sighted the raft at the moment it was in the path of moonlight. Down in the well-deck, Mr. Lind and a seaman were helping the man toward the ladder. “I wish somebody would come up and tell us
something
.”

There was a shuddering vibration of the deck then as the
Leander
engine went full ahead. She began to move. Karen glanced off to starboard where the flare was still burning in the darkness, starting to drift slowly astern now as they went off and left it in the vastness of the Pacific. She shivered, thinking of being out there alone on a raft and seeing the ship moving away.

Just as she started to turn back, she became aware of the figure standing at the corner of the deckhouse. It was Mr.—what was his name—Krasuscki? No, Krasicki, she corrected herself. He was the passenger in Cabin H, but she had seen him only two or three times because of the illness that had kept him confined nearly ever since their departure from Callao. He was wearing pajamas and a heavy flannel robe, and he did look ill, she thought, with the hollow, almost cadaverous face and the feverish brightness of the eyes. She started to speak to him, but paused, struck by the strangeness of his behavior. Stock still except for a nervous twitching at the corner of his mouth, he was staring past her at Walter Egerton.

Egerton turned then, and saw him. Krasicki continued to stare into his face with the same unwavering intensity for another two or three seconds, then wheeled and went back around the corner.

Egerton glanced at Karen, apparently puzzled. “I say, that must be our fellow-passenger. Does seem a spot feverish, doesn’t he?”

She nodded. It was odd, but entirely possible under the circumstances; they had been aboard the ship for six days now, but this was the first time they had seen each other. But why had Krasicki stared that way? It wasn’t simply ill-mannered, she thought; there’d been a trace of madness in it, or the horror of a man seeing a ghost.

I
T WAS CALLED THE
hospital but it was only a spare room on the lower deck that had originally housed the gun crew when the
Leander
was built and put into service toward the end of World War II. It contained four bunks, a washbasin, some metal lockers, and a small desk. Naked and still dripping, Goddard was seated on one of the lower bunks toweling himself after the ecstasy of a freshwater shower, knowing that any minute now the reaction would hit him and he’d collapse like a dropped soufflé. Lind had just come back from somewhere, and the passageway outside was still jammed with crew members peering in.

Word had already spread that he’d been sailing a small boat single-handed across the Pacific, and as they grinned and voiced their congratulations and the cheerful but inevitable opinion of working seamen that anybody who’d sail anything across the ——ing ocean just for the fun of it ought to have his ——ing head examined, they tossed in on the other lower bunk a barrage of spare gear including several pairs of shorts, some slides, a new toothbrush in a plastic tube, toothpaste, cigarettes, matches, and a pair of dungarees. A young Filipino in white trousers and a singlet pushed his way through the jam with a tray containing cold cuts, potato salad, bread, fruit, and a pitcher of milk. He set it on the desk.

Goddard let the towel drop and began a shaky-fingered attack on the cellophane of one of the packs of cigarettes. Lind held the lighter for him. With the first deep and luxurious inhalation he began to float away and wasn’t sure he’d last as far as the food.

Lind produced a pint bottle of whiskey from somewhere and twisted off the cap. “Better splice the main brace.”

Goddard lifted the bottle in a gesture that included all his rescuers, and said, “Cheers.” He took a small drink, felt it burn its way down his throat, and returned the bottle to Lind. One might prop him up for a few minutes, but two would drop him in his tracks. He looked around. Captain Steen was regarding him with pious disapproval from the doorway.

“You ought to be down on your knees thanking God,” he said, “instead of drinking that stuff.”

“Believe me, Captain, I was,” Goddard said. “When I saw your flare light off, it struck me that might be an appropriate spot for a little dialogue.”

It was obvious Steen regarded this as flippant, but he merely said, “Yes. Well, get some rest. Come up to my office tomorrow and we’ll get all the information for the log entries and reports.”

He disappeared, leaving grins and amused winks behind him. Somebody made a remark in a language Goddard didn’t understand; provoking laughter, and another said, “Who this guy better thank is that babe with the knockers. She was the one seen him.” This called forth a chorus of whistles, universal gestures, and cries of “
Mamma mia!
” and “
Sweet Jesus!
”