"Russell, you're crazy!" Errall.
"Mr. Quant, can you see him?" This from Flora.
I began by flailing about as the shock of what I'd done nearly overcame me. In my mind I heard one word echoing over and over again: Nightmare. Nightmare.
Nightmare!
"Russell!" they yelled in chorus.
"Are you okay?" Errall again.
"Be quiet!" I yelled back, at the same time spitting out a mouthful of brine. "Shhh!" I slowed my movements in the water, beginning to trust in my rudimentary but sufficient swimming skills (the dog paddle). "Maybe I can
hear
where he is." It was too dark to see where he'd gone, my only hope of finding him was by sound. I trained my ear into the general area behind our boat. The others complied and sat in silence on the boat. We listened.
And there it was. The unmistakable sound of someone swimming, then thrashing through the water, then, "Aiuto! Aiuto prego!
Aiuto, mister!"
Oh God! He was drowning and calling out for my help! It sounded as if he had somehow drifted quite far from the boat. I took a deep breath and plunged into the direction of his voice, utilizing swim strokes I seemed to be making up as I went. In my subconscious I was very aware of being cold and being scared, but at the forefront of my brain was the desire to save this boy's life. Even if he was a piss-poor tender captain.
"I'm coming!" I managed to call out. "Wait for me. I'll help you." The poor guy. I knew he couldn't understand a word I was saying, but hopefully the sound of my voice would calm him. Salvation was near.
"Aiuto!" he called out again, sending me a verbal beacon for where to find him.
At first it was a thud against my chest. What the hell? Then again. Someone was kicking me. He was panicking! Going under! This wasn't good. I reached out to grab onto him and managed to sink my fingers into his shirt. But it was empty, just a soaken rag in my hands.
Then, from the direction I'd just come, a sound that curdled every drop of blood in my veins.
Screaming.
It was Charity. Then the others.
The tender was under siege.
He hit me again. In the face. Hard. Then he began to yell at me. For a moment I was disoriented, not comprehending what was going on. Why was he fighting me?
I heard the sound of two or three Italian voices, all jabbering at high speed.
And then I knew.
Our captain hadn't fallen overboard.
He'd jumped.
A blinding glare assaulted my eyes as the beam of a powerful light came to life. It was coming from another vessel, not ours but a skiff, less than a dozen metres away from where the captain and I were now pitched in a watery battle, hands about each other's necks. For a moment we stopped and stared at one another, close enough to make out the whites of each other's eyes. He looked scared. I'm sure I did too. A man on the skiff yelled something to him. In a voice both anxious and threatening the captain yelled something at me. I didn't understand his language any more than he understood mine, but I knew exactly what he was telling me.
From somewhere in the opposite direction I could hear the alarmed calls of my shipmates and the excited voice of yet another Italian. Best I could tell, there were three of them: the captain, one on the skiff, and one attacking the tender. What was happening? What the hell was going on? All I could be sure of was that Charity, Dottie, Flora and Errall were in serious trouble.
The man on the skiff called out again to the captain who in turn screamed instructions to the third man who was attacking the women. The Italians seemed disorganized, unsure of what to do, as if something was not as they expected it to be. From the direction of the tender I could make out the sounds of a mighty skirmish: splashing and splattering, high-pitched yelps and calls for help. I had to do something. I released my hold on the captain's scrawny neck, wound back my right fist and ploughed it into his nose.
He looked startled. So I did it again. Blood began to flow. I wondered about sharks. The guy on the skiff was going crazy, catching all this in the ray of his boat light, saying stuff in Italian that couldn't have been nice. I didn't have time to wait for a translator. I brushed past the stunned captain and made for the tender with a strength and speed that belied my physical exhaustion. Good old adrenaline.
By the time I reached the tender, the air was alive with a squawking of such intensity that I might have been in a chicken coop right before Sunday dinner at Farmer Brown's. The squawking was both Italian and English so I had a hint that both sides were still in active combat. I spotted one figure (other than myself) in the water. It was very dark and my eyes were beginning to sting from the constant bathing they were getting in salty sea water. All I could make out was that he seemed to have one of the women in his grasp and was trying to pull her off the tender and into the water. The other three women were making this very difficult for him. I grabbed him from behind, getting an arm locked around his throat, and pressed. Who says music is the only language understood the world over? From behind me I could hear the other two goons calling out to him. I was hoping one of the words they were yelling was "Retreat!"
Under pressure from my persuasive forearm on his Adam's apple, the man let go of his intended captive, who turned out to be Charity, and in return I let him go. Without a backwards glance he swam away towards the light of the waiting skiff and his band of merry thugs. I bobbed in the water and watched until he was received into the arms of his comrades. As soon as he was on board they extinguished their light and I heard the unmistakable sound of oars in water heading, thankfully away.
I could feel the beginning of the hurt where I'd been hit in the face and throttled around the neck, and then the ache of exhaustion. But worst of all was the feeling when the reality of what had just happened became terrifyingly clear. This was no accident. The tender hadn't broken down. Someone broke it.
Intentionally. The flashlight hadn't been flickering because of a weak battery. It was a signal. Our captain was signalling his mates that he was about to abandon ship and for them to begin the planned attack.
While I was lured away to save the drowning captain, Charity would be pulled off the boat and more than likely killed. This had been one giant, elaborate set-up. The person who had been threatening Charity had made another move.
I felt several hands and arms reach out for me and hoist me aboard. I fell inside and collapsed against someone's waiting shoulder, wheezing and choking on a few last drops of seawater and trying to catch my breath. At first there was a bevy of questions, solicitude for my bravery and expressions of concern: Russell, are you okay? Russell, what happened? Russell, your face-are you bleeding? Russell, what happened out there? Russell, who were those men?
I answered as best I could. Once I ascertained that Charity was unharmed, I asked questions of my own. It was as I'd guessed. As soon as I was far enough away from the boat, thinking I was saving our captain, another Sicilian, waiting in the darkness, reached into the tender and tried to pull Charity overboard. The women fought him off, using their hands, knitting needles and whatever else they could find in the boat to stop the man, knocking him over the head repeatedly until I returned.
The exchange of information took several minutes.
And then, nothing.
Except for the slap of dirty waves against the side of our boat, an eerie silence descended upon us. It was clear that our duplicitous captain had been ferried away by his compatriots and that we were left very alone. In a way I was glad not to be able to see the faces of the others. I didn't want to bear witness to the terror that was no doubt etching its terrible lines there. Deserted in total darkness, we were sitting ducks, a bobbing piece of black on a sea of black, fair game for any passing craft to cruise right through, blasting us to smithereens, without even noticing. But my greatest worry was that this was not the end-game.
Whoever planned this wanted Charity out of the picture and would not settle for the unsuccessful results of the Italians' attack on us. Something more was going to happen; I could feel it in my bones. The flaw in Charity's logic became apparent to me. She'd wanted to keep us, her trusted circle, around her today in light of the most recent threatening note, thinking that this would somehow protect her. Instead, by setting us apart from the others, all she'd done was make herself, and us, her unwitting companions, easy targets.
"Can we swim for it?" Errall suggested after a long period of quiet.
I scanned the horizon for the comforting outline of The Dorothy. She was lit up like a birthday cake, her smokestack's ruby red slippers a glistening symbol that over the last several days had come to mean home.
But home was too far away.
"I can't swim."
My heart crunched. It was Dottie. Suddenly I felt silly for giving heed to my own phobias. Not only had this eighty-eight-year-old woman come on a cruise in the first place, but she had gamely sat in this treacherous tender, all without knowing how to swim. That was trust. Trust that things will work out the way they're supposed to. Trust that no one is going to set you adrift in the middle of a foreign harbour with no means of communicating your dilemma or hope of rescue. Me, I was a little more jaded.
"But you four go ahead," Dottie said, unruffled. "I'll wait here. I have my knitting with me."
I wanted to reach out and touch her arm in reassurance, but I only had a general sense of where her voice came from.
"We could give it a try," Flora spoke. "We'd come back for you."
I frowned at the black space where I guessed Flora was sitting. "We won't be leaving you, Dottie.
Besides, it's too far away. We'd never make it. Don't worry, we'll figure something out."
"What time is it?" Flora asked. "We're supposed to be back on The Dorothy by ten o'clock. Suppose we miss the boat?"
"Don't worry, dear," Charity said. And something about her voice told me that she knew, as well as I, that missing the boat's departure was the least of our immediate concerns.
"What's that?" an alarmed voice rang out in the dark. Flora again.
"What? What is it?" Dottie called out.
"I...I can feel...oh no, it's...I can feel...wet."
Wet.
"I...can...too," Errall said, the words coming out of her mouth half-speed as if slowed by the weight of dread. "Russell...?"
"I
can...I...oh my God!" Flora cried. "It's wet, it's getting wet. There's water in the boat!"
"Oh no."
"I can feel it too."
"Oh my God!"
The voices were indistinguishable, each tinged with a palpable terror that sent pinpricks into my heart.
The terror of knowing a horrible truth.
This was how they were going to put an end to us.
We were sinking, with only one life vest left on board.
It was like experiencing a power failure in an unfamiliar room. A room that is filling with water. A room that is moving up and down, backwards and forwards, side to side. A room you desperately want to escape. The next few minutes were a mess. I tried my hand at restarting the motor. Flora and Dottie, doing her best given her limited mobility, tried to locate the source of the leak, which I suspected was engineered by our captain before he bailed on us. Charity and Errall scrambled about in the darkness searching the boat for anything that might help us: flares, a communication device of some sort, containers to bail out the water that was filling the bottom of the craft. But there was nothing. Nothing by design.
Except, by some quirk of fate or ignorance on the part of the culprits who put us in this crisis, one remaining life vest (in addition to the one Flora had already tossed into the abyss in a kind but misguided effort to save our captain).
"Wait!" Errall called to me from somewhere near the front of the boat. "I found a tool of some sort. I think it's a wrench!"
"What am I supposed to do with that?" I yelled back, yanking on the motor's cord for about the millionth time.
"Fix the bloody engine! Fix the leak!"
"You're the lesbian, you fix it!"
"We're going to go down!" cried Flora, her voice several pitches higher than normal. "My God! This can't be happening! It isn't right! It’s all wrong!"
"I can't swim." Dottie again. This time her statement of fact was even more frightening. If the boat went down, so would she. At eighty-eight, increasingly frail, overweight and with a weak heart, Dottie would never make it and we could never hope to hold her afloat for long.
I could hear frantic attempts at bailing. They were using cupped hands. But I knew it was useless. I could feel the water inching up my calves at an alarming speed. It felt like molten lead, cold, thick, heavy, and hungry for me, wanting to swallow me whole.
"Don't you worry about a thing, Dottie Blocka," Charity said, sounding in full control of all that mattered. "Everything will be just fine."
"You must try to swim for The Dorothy," Dottie declared.
"Don't be ridiculous, dear. You just sit tight with your knitting and we'll figure something out, won't we Russell?"
Uh, sure. But, uh, can you feel the molten lead?
"Charity, I know what's happening," Dottie sounded resolute. "You can swim like a dolphin, as I'm sure these youngsters can. You must all try to save yourselves. And Flora! Oh Charity, you must save your granddaughter! Would you have her drown?"
"Dottie., no." I could feel the strain and raw emotion of Charity's words course through my own veins.
"I will not leave you."
"Russell," Errall said, "we have to do something. The boat is filling fast."
I shook my head, exasperated. "It's too heavy. There's too much weight in it."
"There's nothing to throw off," Flora said. "There's nothing in the boat..."
"Except us," I finished the sentence.
Charity jumped onto the idea excitedly. "If we all jump off the boat, hold on to its sides, the boat will stay afloat longer and Dottie can stay nice and dry, won't you, my lovely?"
"Dottie, put on the life jacket," I instructed, passing it down to Charity.
"Why me?" the old woman protested. "We should vote on who gets to wear the thing."
"You're the only one who can't swim," I said. "Charity, can you help her?"
I heard belts and clips and snaps as Charity helped her partner on with the life-preserving device, and then the first splash. Errall had gone overboard.
"Water's great," she reported between spits of salt water. "You should come in." Bless her heart.
I jumped next, followed by Flora and Charity.
And then, one more splash.
"Dottie! No!" cried Charity. "You crazy old woman, you're to stay on the boat! Russell, help me get her back in!"
"No!" Dottie sputtered back, gulping air and liquid saline at the same time. "If you're jumping off, so am I. If we're to go down, it will be together, my love."