make you long for the Norwegian fiords, Captain.’
He nodded and managed a wan smile. ‘Yes. And it’s
been nearly two years since I was home.’
Lind said to her, ‘But it just takes one winter gale in
the North Atlantic to make this look good again.’
'I agree with you,’ Madeleine Lennox said. She began
an account of being on a freighter that had been hove
to for three days in the Bay of Biscay and how
eventually she’d been physically exhausted just from
And The Deep Blue Sea — 109
the endless holding onto something and trying to keep
from being thrown from her bunk.
Captain Steen interrupted her in a voice not much
more than a whisper. ‘If you’ll excuse me.’ Goddard
looked around. Steen’s face had gone white and was
stamped with anguish as he pushed himself to his feet.
He started to collapse, but caught himself with a hand
braced on the table.
‘Cap, what is it?’ Lind asked quickly.
He and Goddard were leaping up to help him when he
swayed, crumpled forward against Karen Brooke’s
shoulder, and fell to the deck. Both women cried out.
Lind and Goddard pulled his twisting body from
under the edge of the table and into the open. Barset
came running in. ‘Good God, what happened?’
'I don’t know,’ Lind snapped. ‘Get a stretcher!’
Barset hurried out. Steen’s eyes were closed and he
appeared to fight for breath as he continued to writhe
in agony. Lind caught his wrist and tried to feel the
pulse. Steen twitched spasmodically and he had to grab
for it again. Goddard caught the arm with both hands
and held it still. Lind jerked his head at Karl. ‘Find the
chief. Tell him to get an oxygen bottle up to the
skipper’s quarters.’
To Goddard’s glance and the unasked question: heart
attack? he replied, ‘I don’t know. But we’ll have it if we
need it.’
Barset ran in with the stretcher. They lifted Steen
onto it, but he continued to double his body in pain and
twist from side to side. He would never stay on it going
up the ladders. ‘We need some line!’ Lind barked.
‘Wait! This’ll do.’ With one explosive yank, he swept off
the tablecloth, scattering dishes, food, water tumblers,
and silverware across the deck. The big arms corded
and there was a ripping sound as he tore it in two. He
tossed one piece to Goddard, and they passed them
under the stretcher and over the captain’s body at
thighs and chest to lash him in place. One of the sailors
hurried in.
And The Deep Blue Sea — 110
‘Take him up,’ Lind ordered. ‘I’ll get the kit and be up
there.’ He ran out. Goddard and the sailor picked up
the stretcher, but at that moment the bos’n came in.
‘I’ll take it,’ he said. Goddard surrendered it, and
followed them down the passageway. They started up
the ladder, the sailor going first; the bos’n, with the
strength of those almost grotesque shoulders and arms,
lifted his end of it straight overhead to keep it level.
They mounted the second ladder and disappeared onto
the boat deck.
Several of the crew had gathered in the well-deck,
looking up. Goddard was conscious of blank stares.
‘Jesus Christ, what next?’ one asked. ‘Anybody got a
rubber raft?’ another said. ‘I’d bail out of this pot.’
Karen Brooke and Mrs. Lennox came out of the
passageway and joined them, both badly shaken. Mrs.
Lennox said she thought it was a heart attack; it was
very similar to the one that had stricken her late
husband. It wasn’t necessarily fatal, she assured Karen;
he’d had two, five years apart. As they stood waiting for
some word, Goddard was conscious again of the odor of
burning cotton. Ten minutes later Barset came down
the ladder.
‘Mate says it was a heart attack,’ he said. The captain
seemed to be in less pain now and was breathing
easier, under the oxygen tent Lind had improvised.
Sparks was getting medical information from the U.S.
Public Health Service through a California station and
was in contact with a cruise ship that had a doctor
aboard. The liner was three hundred miles away, but if
necessary both ships could change course and
rendezvous in less than ten hours. Mr. Goddard could
come up if he’d like.
The perennial witness, Goddard thought, as he
mounted to the boat deck. The third mate was on the
starboard wing of the bridge. Goddard knocked at the
open door and went in through the office.
Steen lay on the bunk in his stateroom, still fully
clothed except for his shoes. His head and shoulders
were covered with an improvised tent made of a shower
curtain suspended from overhead. A length of rubber
And The Deep Blue Sea — 111
hose led in under the edge of it from an oxygen cylinder
lashed to a leg of the bedside desk. The first-aid kit and
sterilizer were on the desk, and Lind was standing
beside the bunk withdrawing the needle of a
hypodermic syringe from Steen’s arm. He set it aside
and took the captain’s wrist as Goddard came in. He
glanced up, but said nothing. Goddard waited.
In a moment Lind released the wrist and nodded with
satisfaction. ‘Much steadier now.’ He indicated the
shower curtain. ‘Instant oxygen tent. But Boats is
making one out of canvas, with a window in it.’
Goddard thought of Madame Defarge, knitting
shrouds. Before this passage was over maybe the bos’n
would sew everybody on the ship into canvas in one
way or another. Sparks entered behind them and
handed Lind a message. ‘From the Public Health
Service doctors,’ he said.
Lind scanned it quickly, muttering to himself, ‘Umhumh...
digitalis... oxygen...” He folded it and stuck it in
his shirt pocket, and said to Goddard, ‘Just the things
we’ve already done.’ He turned to Sparks. ‘Tell the
skipper on the Kungsholm we’ll stay in touch, but
unless there’s a change we won’t try to transfer him.
There’s not much they can do for him we can’t do on
here.’
Sparks nodded and went out. If I watch a few more of
these performances, Goddard thought, I could qualify
as a drama critic. He looked at Steen then, saw the
slowly rising and falling chest of this man he was
certain was doomed to die without ever waking again,
and felt revulsion at this sleazy glibness. But it was only
protective, he tried to tell himself; it was one way to
keep from picking at the scab of his own impotence.
In the first place, he didn’t know. Maybe it was a
heart attack, instead of some kind of poison, and maybe
it was digitalis Lind had given him, and not morphine.
There was no way to find out, or prove it, and even if he
could there was no place to take the information that
Lind, the ship’s doctor, was murdering a helpless man
except to Lind, the ship’s acting master. At sea, the
next step up the chain of command was God.
And The Deep Blue Sea — 112
‘Let us know if there’s any change,’ he said. He went
out. As he passed through the captain’s office his eyes,
in spite of himself, were drawn to the framed
photograph of the woman and the two young girls. He
winced.
And The Deep Blue Sea — 113
9
It was a half hour before he had a chance to speak to
Madeleine Lennox alone. She joined him on the
promenade deck at sunset. ‘Do you believe it was a
heart attack?’ she asked.
'I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It could have been. But watch
it.’
‘How? You mean I don’t even dare eat anything the
rest of the trip?’
‘Not that. The only thing sure is that he’s too damned
clever to repeat himself. And a heart attack in a
woman’s not as plausible, anyway. But keep your door
locked.’
‘Are you going to?’
‘You’re damned right I am.’
‘Seems a duplication of effort.’
‘What?’ he asked.
The smoke-gray eyes were wide and utterly innocent.
‘Bolting so many doors.’
Trying to warn her was futile, he could see that.
‘Then you don’t think it’s serious?’
‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘But don’t you remember
how effective you were against lightning?’
And The Deep Blue Sea — 114
Barset brought word shortly after ten that Captain
Steen’s condition seemed a little better. His pulse was
stronger, and less erratic, and he was sleeping. Lind
was with him constantly.
Goddard heard six bells strike as he lay naked on his
bunk in the sweltering dark. Almost immediately there
was a light rap on the screen door. Not even bothering
to pull on the shorts, he padded over and looked out
through the louvers. It was Madeleine Lennox. He
unlocked the door and pulled it open. She stepped
inside quickly, and was in his arms while he was still
trying to secure the door again. He had an impression
of amusement mingled with the eagerness.
‘Your reputation’s ruined,’ she whispered against his
ear. ‘I think Karen saw me.’
‘What about yours?’
‘Oh, I’m sure she has no illusions about me. Women
never do.’ There was a little murmur of discovery and
delight then. ‘Mmmmm. You must have been expecting
me. Or somebody. Are you sure you weren’t in the coast
guard, instead of the navy?’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘That motto of theirs I always adored. Semper
paratus.’ She began throwing off the robe and pajamas.
She was much better company, he thought, after
she’d caught the streetcar than while she was chasing
it. She jettisoned all pretense along with her clothing,
gave not the slightest damn whether she captivated him
or not, and demanded nothing but the mechanics of
sex. She reminded him of Wilde’s remark that England
and America were two countries separated by the same
language; the most intimate of all human relationships
was the perfect barrier to any intimacy at all.
With Haggerty it had been speech. They’d been
stoned together for five days up and down the coast
from San Diego to Sea-Tac, talking constantly, once
even spending the night in the same bedroom, and he
didn’t know her first name, nor she his. Apparently
there was some quality about people who lived in
bubbles that enabled them to recognize each other
from the first, because in the whole period only once
And The Deep Blue Sea — 115
had either of them asked a question to which he
expected a serious answer.
He’d met her in the bar at the San Francisco airport.
It was late in the afternoon on a weekend, so the place
was overflowing, and the one double martini PSA
allowed for the forty-minute flight up from Los Angeles
International was wearing thin. There was no space at
all at the bar, but he spotted a table occupied by a girl
sitting alone, a slender, almost fragile-looking blonde
with a mink coat thrown over the back of her chair. He
went over.
‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ he asked.
‘Not at all.’ Her manner was as gravely gentle as that
of a nun. ‘Actually, I’ve always wanted to see Buenos
Aires.’
‘Oh, I’m off for the weekend,’ he said. 'I don’t take the
job home with me.’ He ordered a double martini, and
she asked for another Jack Daniels, which could be
significant. She looked perfectly sober, but he’d seen
more than one ethereal blonde still lifting them off the
tray when strong men were asleep in corners.
‘Do you use chloral hydrate?’ she asked.
‘Oh, no. That went out with the crimps on the
Barbary Coast. Our labs came up several years ago
with a timed-release spansule; the opiate takes effect in
about twenty minutes, and then an aphrodisiac eight
hours later. Powdered rhinoceros horn.’
‘I always assumed that was a male aphrodisiac.
Connotation, I suppose.’
‘Well, we add estrogen, of course, so there are no
side effects, like facial hair. Actually, the world market
is so depressed, now that Castro’s cleaned up Havana,
we’re diversifying into pornography and textbooks, and
phasing out the girl operation as fast as we can take
care of key personnel.’
‘What’s your average net per unit laid down in, say,
Saigon?’
‘It depends,’ he said. ‘Age, and so on. Are you a
virgin?’
And The Deep Blue Sea — 116
‘No, I’m sorry. I was violated in my teens by an
ectomorph.’
He shook his head. ‘Trying to police the whole damn
world, and a woman’s not even safe on the street.’
She introduced herself. She was Mrs. Haggerty, she
said, from New Bedford. Her husband was a whaler.
* * *
Madeleine Lennox gave a shivery little gasp and said
something, her lips moving against his. ‘What?’ he
asked.
‘You remembered right where they were. Oooooh!’
He was conscious of momentary wonder; he must be
programmed by punch cards. They lay nude in each
other’s arms in the darkness; he had a leg thrust
between her thighs while his fingertips softly brushed
the erogenous zones of her back. She jumped, and
shivered again.
He was away a lot, Haggerty went on, but it was a
good job challengewise, with the usual retirement,
stock options, country club membership, expense
account, and so on. Sparm, Inc., was one of the older
companies with a reputation for being a little on the
stodgy side, but it had been taken over by a
conglomerate, shaken up, and given a transfusion of
new blood, so it was a pretty gung-ho outfit and on the
move, with plenty of room on the top side for a man
who could carry the ball.
‘He’s just been picked to head up R and D,’ she said,
‘and I hardly see him from one month to the next. He’s
all wrapped up in a new white whale they’re just
getting off the drawing board and into hardware. The
oil’s much lower in cholesterol, and there’s a big
defense contract coming up as soon as they iron the
bugs out of the polyunsaturated napalm they’re
working on.’
He winced at the subliminal flash of the red Porsche
as it spun out and went through the guardrail at a
hundred miles an hour. Now and then in an unguarded
moment some random word would get to him, even
And The Deep Blue Sea — 117
through the bubble, and he’d see Gerry’s face as he’d
seen it that last time less than an hour before she was
killed, the view itself no more than a flash, two or three
seconds at most, as she looked at him and her
stepmother with loathing and disgust before she
wheeled and ran back through the house and they’d
heard the Porsche go snarling out the driveway. It
hadn’t burned; that wasn’t why the word ‘napalm’ had
triggered it. It was her sense of outrage at the use of it,
the bombing, the whole Vietnam war. She’d be proud of
him now, too, he thought, and then wondered which
now he meant, which manifestation of her father’s
talents, the nonstop drunk or the automated lover.
‘Did they come up with a revolutionary new
deodorant just recently?’ he asked Haggerty. ‘It seems
to me I read about it. The go-go funds discovered them,
and the stock went up thirty points in a week.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, that was Sparm, Inc. And another
spin-off from R and D and the white whale. But it
wasn’t a deodorant; it was a revolutionary new filter
that reduces tar and nicotine sixty-seven percent. It’s
made of the baleen, mixed with sintered yak wool. He
made a lot of money out of it by exercising his stock
options, but sometimes I get the impression he’s
married to that whale. And when he does get home—’
'I know, that damn wooden leg,’ Goddard said. ‘It
must be awkward.’
‘It’s not really wood,’ Haggerty said. ‘Except for a
Circassian walnut ferrule. Van Cleef and Arpels makes
it. It’s anodized titanium with inlays of jade and
Mexican opal, and the socket is lined with the belly fur
of an unborn agouti. On a special order you can have it
fitted with a jeweled clasp to carry your key to the
executive washroom.’
He told her about the underground skyway, and how
he had discovered this sanctuary, this peaceful
subculture existing within the larger, hostile culture of
the automobile dwellers. He was a writer, he said,
doing research for an article for Reader’s Digest, ‘New
Hope for the Living: Never Leave the Airport.’ And
while this was aimed at any sector of the populace
And The Deep Blue Sea — 118
which might have a cursory interest in survival, it
would be of particular interest to serious drinkers.
In all bars except those in airports, you were
marooned, he went on. You were safe enough as long
as you were inside because the natives were disarmed
at the doorway; this tradition had been established in
the Old West even before the invention of the
automobile, perhaps in anticipation of it, some
prescience or foreboding that the day would come
when there would be much more sophisticated weapons
abroad in the land than the primitive and relatively
harmless Peacemaker Colts and Frontier .45’s checked
at the door in that happy era. And a Californian,
forcibly shucked from his automobile and separated
from it for any length of time, while prey to the same
vague feelings of resentment and unease as an oyster
removed from its shell, will, like the oyster, seldom
attack. But, inevitably, bars close, or you have to leave
one and move to another to escape some bore, and
they’re out there by the hurtling millions, armed with
Fords and Chevrolets and, for only dollars a month
more, with Cadillacs. But from the airport bar you
simply stepped out back, boarded a jet, and went to the
one next door in San Diego, Portland, or Los Angeles, at
thirty thousand feet.
Of course, at that altitude you did miss some of the
beauties of the countryside, the beaneries, filling
stations, used-car lots, neon, asphalt, smog, billboards,
the proliferating acne of tract housing, and murmuring
sylvan streams freighted with condoms and empty beer
cans, but that was a small price to pay for being wafted
from one sanctuary to another across four hundred
miles of hostile territory whose populace was forever
torn between devout but conflicting desires to maim
you or sell you something. The ecology was simple; all
airports had bars, nearly all had hotels, and all you
needed was a drip-dry wardrobe and a few credit cards.
And there was just enough challenge to keep it
interesting; you had to look sober enough to get aboard
the airplane in the first place and to buy the two drinks
they allowed you during the flight, but still far enough
from it to obviate any possibility you might really dry
And The Deep Blue Sea — 119
out before you reached the next station on the
underground.
She agreed with him that something should be done
for serious drinkers, and offered to help with the study.
As a minority group, they’d been sadly neglected, and
with the oncoming generation turning increasingly to
pot and acid there was a very real danger they might
become extinct, their entire culture lost forever. Only
yesterday, in some bar, she’d heard a man order a
frozen daiquiri.
To simplify the logistics of the operation he changed
to bourbon too, and they carried a survival kit of three
bottles in her luggage for the late hours of the night,
morning horrors, and as insurance against election
days, civil uprisings, or any natural catastrophe which
might cause the bars to be closed. He had never known
anybody who could drink as much as Haggerty and
show as little effect of it except to talk, to talk
incessantly, amusingly, and forever, apparently as a
sort of perpetual exercise in the avoidance of all
thought or of ever, in an unguarded moment, saying
anything she meant. The night they’d shared the same
room he had awakened toward dawn to see her sitting
on the floor in pajamas, her cheek down on one arm
spread across the seat of a chair while the hand slowly
clenched and unclenched in agony.
‘I’m sorry, Haggerty,’ he said, for a moment
forgetting the rules. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘That,’ she said, ‘is the first stupid thing I ever heard
you say.’
She wasn’t entirely in accord with him, however, that
the automobile dwellers were hostile. This fallacy, she
believed, had grown out of the slipshod methods of
some of the early investigators intent only on a quick
doctorate and nailing down a grant to be off to Africa,
and was based on nothing sounder than the fact that so
many anthropologists had disappeared into the
Californian countryside never to be heard of again.
Subsequent studies had revealed that nearly all of them
were alive and well in Los Angeles.
And The Deep Blue Sea — 120
She explained this one night when they were
finishing off a last bottle of Jack Daniels in her room.
He’d forgotten which airport hotel it was, but it
overlooked a freeway, and they were watching the
endlessly hurtling projectiles curving past them.
‘All we can do,’ he said, ‘is pray that Slivovitz got
through to Fort Huaracha. Can you keep loading the
rifles while I deliver the baby?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘you’re falling into the same error, and
for the same reason, as Huysmann when he first
advanced the hypothesis that it was some sort of
primate equivalent of the lemming migration. He
wasted a whole seventy-thousand-dollar grant trying to
find where they were throwing themselves off the cliff,
and backtracking to discover where they were
springing out of the ground. He simply didn’t notice
they were going in both directions. That’s why I can’t
believe the intent of it is hostile at all. If they were
chasing something, all eight lanes would be going the
same way.’
Tieboldt did discover this, she went on, but he was
just as baffled by it as Huysmann had been by
overlooking it. It had already been established that they
were highly sexed, and that they were a bartering
people who subsisted by selling each other things they
called goods and services. His theory was that it was a
dance of some sort, a ritual evolved out of these aspects
of their tribal heritage, but he could never come up
with a satisfactory answer as to how either courtship or
commerce could be carried on while they were going
past each other in opposite directions at a combined
velocity of a hundred and forty miles an hour.
Later investigators had decided the only way to the
answer was to enter the dance and see where it led,
which accounted for nearly all the missing scientists. It
was estimated that at the present time there were still
twenty-seven anthropologists circling endlessly around
the Los Angeles freeways like spaceships in orbit,
unable to find a way off.
Frownfelter’s paper, ‘The Carapace People of the San
Fernando Valley,’ was by far the most reliable work on
And The Deep Blue Sea — 121
the subject, and the one that did the most to dispel the
myth that they were hostile. ‘He spent a whole winter
observing the members of a group near Van Nuys,’ she
went on, ‘gradually gaining their confidence and
allaying their fears that he intended any harm to the
carapaces until he was allowed to approach quite near
and study them at first hand. He found them quite
friendly and open, and even eager to point out the
advantages of their particular shells.
‘He was surprised to discover that they weren’t
physically attached to the carapace in any way, even by
an umbilicus, and that they could leave it at will,
though they were always reluctant to do so. Whether
this emotional attachment was sexual in nature or
quasi-religious, he was never able to determine, but he
inclined to the latter since it seemed to be shared
equally by both sexes. Is there anything left in the
bottle?’
One morning Haggerty was simply gone. She’d
checked out before he got up, and left no message.
Then, two days later, the drunk had abruptly come to
an end. He was aboard an afternoon flight from San
Diego to San Francisco. The miniskirted stewardess
had just served him a double martini when he looked
down and saw the blue of the Pacific below them and
wondered how he could have been so stupid that it had
never occurred to him before. He’d been searching in
the wrong place all the time. It was out there. He
handed the drink back to her. ‘Tell the captain to have
one on me.’
‘You want him to lose his job?’ she asked with mock
severity.
‘Give him a doggie bag. He can take it home.’
* * *
For the fifth time Karen Brooke tried to wrench her
thoughts back to the book in her hands, but too many
conflicting emotions were pulling at her. She was
uneasy, and helpless, and illogically angry at herself.
Captain Steen worried her, and she couldn’t make up
her mind about Lind. He remained a complete enigma.
And The Deep Blue Sea — 122
One moment she trusted him, and then the next she
was convinced he was a monster or madman.
And there was nobody she could talk to. Goddard? He
was too self-sufficient and impervious to share any of
her forebodings about this ship, and would only make
her feel ridiculous. Further, in the past hour she had
faced the fact, finally, that she didn’t like him, and it
was the timing of this that had occasioned her selfanger.
Why couldn’t she have arrived at the conclusion
before she inadvertently saw Madeleine Lennox
slipping into his cabin? This, she told herself hotly, had
nothing to do with it, but the stupid fact remained there
to taunt her.
She had found him attractive at first, with the homely
male face, the assurance, and good manners, until she
began to suspect this was all there was to him, that
there was no warmth anywhere or capacity for feeling.
She was sick to death of the hard, the smooth, and the
impervious. They were too good at everything, and
never seemed to have any doubts at all. Fear was alien
to them because they were convinced they could, and
nearly always did, walk away from the wreckage
unscathed, while the involved, the less wellcoordinated,
and the earnest squares got their heads
knocked off. And when, infrequently, one of the group
did kill himself in the pursuit of kicks, the others bore it
very lightly. Within a month after she’d watched in
horror as Stacey fell from that sheer rock face in
Yosemite, three of his very good, and very married,
friends had made passes at her.
She was aware she was by no means unique in this; it
probably happened to most widows and divorcees, but
the callousness and the calm assumption they were
doing her a favor had left her with what she felt was a
permanent aversion to the breed. Too bad about old
Stace, but they knew how rough it must be, and there
was no sense in her wrecking her health. The fact that
their marriage was already shaky and might have
wound up in divorce hadn’t changed her reaction to
these impervious but magnanimous studs who were
willing to service her until she had made a permanent
arrangement of some kind. And Goddard was another
And The Deep Blue Sea — 123
one, merely a few years older and hence a little
smoother and more assured, and more immunized
against the danger of ever feeling anything.
She dropped the book on the desk, and switched out
the light. The fan droned on in its futile attempt to do
anything about the heat. She felt very much alone and
troubled, and it was a long time before she could get to
sleep.
* * *
When Goddard awoke it was dawn and Madeleine
Lennox was awake beside him, raised on one elbow to
appraise the failure of her hand’s manipulation. Their
eyes met. ‘O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low?’ she
asked. She smiled, kissed him softly on the check, and
climbed naked from the bunk to gather up her pajamas.
When she went out, he stepped to the door and
watched until she was inside her own cabin again.
There was no one else in the passageway. He was just
about to close the door when Barset appeared at the far
end of it. He called out to ask how Captain Steen was.
Improving, Barset replied; resting much easier.
Goddard closed the door and lit a cigarette, knowing
Madeleine Lennox would have heard the good news
too. Hell, there was nothing to worry about; it was all
imagination.
And The Deep Blue Sea — 124
10
In the pantry next door to the dining room Rafferty
stirred the coffee again in the small pot to be sure the
two tablets were dissolved. He glanced at his watch. It
was seven twenty-five a.m.; ten minutes to go. He set
the pot on a tray with the little pitcher of condensed
milk and the sugar bowl, slipped on the white jacket
with its exciting hard slab of weight in the right-hand
pocket, and carried the tray down the passageway to
Madeleine Lennox’ cabin. He knocked. ‘Coffee,’ he said.
‘Just a minute,’ she called out. There was the sound of
the door’s being unlatched. He went in. She was sitting
on the side of the bunk in pajamas, lighting a cigarette.
She smiled. ‘You’re a little early this morning. Thank
you, Dominick.’
‘Y’welcome,’ he said. He set the tray on the desk
beside the bunk, and as he turned he took the usual
good look down the open collar of the pajamas. She
never seemed to get wise. Not a bad-looking pair of
knockers, either, for an old biddy, and several times
he’d been tempted to reach down and cop a handful,
but you never knew. She might squawk. Not that he
was afraid of Barset, but he didn’t want that big coldeyed
son of a bitch looking down his throat; he’d seen
some of his work.
And The Deep Blue Sea — 125
If he’d moved in soon enough he might have got some
of it, he thought, stepping into the bathroom as though
checking the towel supply and soap. Barset had beat
him to it, though; he was pretty sure the scrawny
bastard had been dipping his wick in it ever since they
left Callao, and now it looked like Goddard-stein was
having it delivered to his room. Out of sight, he
whistled tunelessly, opened and closed the door of the
medicine cabinet, and turned on a faucet momentarily.
That Hollywood phony, who’d he think he was fooling,
changing his name? The whole place was Jews and
nigger-lovers, they ought to burn it down.
He came out. ‘I’ll bring you a couple of fresh towels,’
he said, looking around at her as he reached for the
door.
‘Thank you.’ She tilted the pot to fill the cup again,
and added some more sugar. He went out into the
passageway. She hadn’t noticed a thing; that crappy
condensed milk covered the taste of it all right. He
stepped out on deck on the starboard side and looked
forward. The bos’n and Otto and the other sailor were
halfway down it now, coming this way as they washed
down with the fire hose and brooms. Four minutes to
go.
He stepped back into the passageway and went
forward to the linen locker. He picked up two bath
towels, came back, and knocked on the door of
Madeleine Lennox’ cabin. Before he slipped in he shot a
glance both ways along the passageway; nobody was in
sight. She looked up and patted back a yawn. She
smiled at him with a puzzled shake of the head, and
said, ‘I feel so sleepy.’
‘It’s this heat,’ he said. ‘I better close your porthole;
they’re washing down.’
He stepped past her, brushing her knees as she sat
on the bunk, and leaned over the desk to dog down the
porthole. The coffeepot and cup were both empty; she’d
drunk it all. He turned and went into the bathroom, still
carrying the towels.
Madeleine Lennox gazed dreamily after him and
yawned again. Why, he didn’t look down my pajamas
And The Deep Blue Sea — 126
that time, she thought in wonder. After a beautifully
planned and executed maneuver like that—God, what’s
the matter with me, didn’t we sleep at all last night?—
after that perfect down-range turn to come in over
target at the precise angle to see clear to my navel, he
didn’t even look. Could I have aged that much in five
minutes?
She was conscious of a roaring sound that puzzled
her for a moment; then she recognized it as the stream
from the fire hose beating on the bulkhead of Harry’s
cabin next door. But she still seemed to be floating off
into a rosy cloud, and it was hard to focus or keep her
thoughts straight. What was she thinking about? Oh,
yes, the twilight of the boob. Her declining box-office.
Somewhere between age thirteen, when they started
trying to see up your dress, down your dress, or
through your dress, and age ninety, when the show had
been warehoused for years, there had to be some
precise instant of time like the exact balancing point of
a teeter-totter when they simply stopped peeking, once
and forever. Like that. Was it possible she had pinpointed
this historic moment? Five minutes ago she
could have sold advertising space on them, at least at
sea—
There was a swishing sound of water along the deck
outside, and then an even louder drumming as the
stream from the fire hose beat on her own bulkhead
and closed porthole. And coincident with this
momentary din she saw Rafferty emerge from the
bathroom. He had a towel in his right hand, and as he
came toward her with his beefy grin he suddenly
flipped the towel over into his left, and under it was a
blue-black slab of metal which as the widow of a naval
officer she could recognize as a sidearm even at the
moment of dropping off to sleep like this. He raised it
over her head, but there didn’t seem to be much she
could do about it.
Rafferty slashed downward with the .45, catching her
just above the hairline on the left side of her head, the
brutal impact lost under the beating of water against
the bulkhead. As she pitched forward he caught her
and stretched her out on the bunk with the towel under
And The Deep Blue Sea — 127
her head. Dropping the gun back in his pocket, he
began yanking at the legs of the pajamas. Damn it,
there must be a zipper somewhere. He located it at her
left hip, stripped off the garment, and hurriedly
unbuttoned the pajama top. Being careful to keep her
head on the towel, he turned her face down, and peeled
this garment off to complete undressing her.
Stacked, for an old dame. He squeezed an
appreciative handful of buttock, and wished he had
time to tear off a quickie, but he didn’t like the way that
big bastard had looked when he’d told him just what
would happen if he didn’t get out of here on schedule.
He was taking enough chances carrying this gun,
instead of the sap he was supposed to use.
He carried her into the bathroom and stretched her
out under the shower. A trickle of blood ran out of her
hair onto the tile. He came out, carefully checking the
deck between bathroom and bunk. The bos’n and his
fire hose were drawing farther away now, and he had to
hurry. There were two or three drops of blood.
Grabbing the already stained towel off the bunk, he
wiped them up, and rolled the towel inside another.
In the bathroom again, he turned on the shower,
letting it beat down on her, and dropped a bar of soap
on the streaming tile beside her body. He stepped back,
surveying the scene and nagged by a feeling there was
something he hadn’t done, but it looked all right. She
was wet all over, and the soap was there where she’d
stepped on it and fallen. He shrugged and went out.
With the rolled towels under his arm, he opened the
screen door and peered out into the passageway. No
one was in sight. He stepped out quickly and strolled
back to the pantry. Karl was in the dining room, setting
up for breakfast. He shoved the towels into the bottom
of a garbage can he was supposed to have emptied last
night, and carried it aft, across the well-deck. The stink
was everywhere this morning, and one of the deck apes
was gawking up at the ventilators where you could see
the smoke coming out. He pointed.
‘It’s burnin’ worse all the time.’
And The Deep Blue Sea — 128
‘Good man,’ Rafferty said approvingly. ‘Give me a
report every hour.’ What a clown, you’d think it was his
cotton. He went up onto the poop to the fantail and
emptied the can. Lighting a cigarette, he stared boredly
aft as the two towels and the flotsam of garbage
dropped back in the white water of the wake and
disappeared. It was going to be another hot day.
* * *
Goddard showered at a quarter of eight, and as he
turned off the water he could hear the shower running
on the other side of the bulkhead in Mrs. Lennox’s
bathroom. He was putting a new blade in the razor to
shave when he became aware that the smell of burning
cotton had now penetrated clear in here. Clad only in
slacks and slippers, he went out on deck and walked aft
in the lifeless heat. A squall was making up far off on
the horizon to starboard, but what little breeze there
was here came from almost directly astern, so there
was little movement of air along the superstructure of
the ship. Smoke was curling from both ventilators of
number three hold, no longer in intermittent wisps but
in a steady outpouring that drifted straight up in the
brassy sunlight of early morning. A sheen, or haze,
seemed to hang over the well-deck itself, and the odor
was strong enough to irritate the throat. The Leander
was in trouble that was growing worse by the hour.
He’d come aboard the ship in a rubber raft, and he
wondered now if he were going to leave it in a lifeboat.
If it did come to that, he reflected, he wasn’t going to
be in great demand as an occupant of either boat. ‘No,
you take the hard-luck bastard in that one. We don’t
want him in here.’ Maybe you couldn’t blame them, at
that; a murder, a suicide, a heart attack, and a fire, all
in three days, might start a witch-hunt almost
anywhere.
He went back and shaved. He had finished and was
drying the razor when he became aware that Mrs.
Lennox’ shower was still running. He grinned. She’d be
a great asset on a small boat; she would have used up
the Shoshone’s six weeks’ supply of water before
And The Deep Blue Sea — 129
breakfast the first morning. Well, it was one way to
keep cool.
Karen Brooke was alone in the dining room when he
went in a few minutes past eight. She was wearing a
sleeveless summer dress of almost the same shade of
blue as her eyes, which in combination with the swirl of
honey-colored hair seemed to intensify her tan.
‘You look very nice,’ he said.
She smiled, but her manner was cool and impersonal.
‘Thank you, Mr. Goddard. I consider that a real
compliment, in view of the priority.’
‘How’s that?’ he asked.
‘Lots of men would have said the ship’s afire, and
then you look nice.’
‘Oh, there are clods like that.’ He sobered. ‘How long
have you known it?’
‘Since yesterday. About the same time you asked me
what the cargo was.’
‘But there’s still no official recognition?’
‘No. Mr. Lind hasn’t been down yet. But I suppose
they’ve known it for the past few days. It might be what
brought on Captain Steen’s heart attack, don’t you
think?’
He nodded. ‘Anyway, he’s better this morning,
according to Barset.’
‘Yes, I know.’
Karl came in. Goddard asked for a poached egg and
some coffee. Karl poured the coffee and went back to
the pantry. ‘Is all of number three loaded with cotton?’
Goddard asked. ‘Tween-decks too?’
‘No-o.’ She frowned, trying to remember. ‘They were
just finishing loading when I came aboard, and it seems
to me the tween-decks in that one is general cargo—
cases of canned goods, leather, a lot of big carboys in
crates, things like that.’
‘You don’t know what’s in the carboys?’
She nodded. ‘Alcohol.’
He said nothing, but it was obvious from her
expression she knew as well as he did the potentialities
And The Deep Blue Sea — 130
of that combination— alcohol-saturated cotton—if those
carboys started breaking in the heat down there.
Lind came in. He greeted them abstractedly, and it
struck Goddard he came as near to looking troubled as
he had ever seen him. Well, it might be understandable
under the circumstances. When Karen asked how
Captain Steen was doing, he shook his head and
frowned.
‘I don’t know. I wish now I’d transferred him to the
Kungsholm.’
‘Has he had another attack?’ Goddard asked.
‘No, not that. He rested quietly all night, and his
pulse was all right. But the past hour he’s had more
trouble breathing. And there may be some pulmonary
edema—fluid in the lungs.’
‘Pneumonia?’ Goddard asked.
‘No. But it could be a symptom of congestive heart
failure. Sparks is still in touch with the Public Health
Service doctors, and we’ve got everything they
recommend—but, I don’t know.’
‘Well,’ Karen said, ‘they wouldn’t have any more on
the Kungsholm.’
‘Just one thing,’ Lind said bleakly. ‘A licensed doctor,
instead of a ham-handed sailor.’ He shrugged then, and
managed a wry grin, with a return of some of the old
exuberance and self-confidence. ‘Oh, before I forget.
We’re afire in number three hold. Not supposed to
reveal things like that to you fluttery and hysterical
passengers, but it’s getting a little like trying to hide an
eight-month pregnancy.’
‘Is there anything you can do?’ Goddard asked.
‘We’re going to start throwing water in it as soon as
we can get hoses down through the stuff in the tweendecks.’
‘Is there any chance of telling where the burning
bales are?’
‘Not much. And if they’re very far down, it’ll be hard
to get any water to them. But if we can wet enough of
them on top maybe we can keep it under control.’ Lind
drained his cup of coffee and got up without ordering
And The Deep Blue Sea — 131
breakfast. ‘You don’t know anybody who’s got a chicken
farm for sale?’
He went out. Here we go again, Goddard thought.
Will the real Eric Lind stand up? Wasn’t there any way
you could arrive at some answer, some definite and
final conclusion that would remain valid for at least an
hour? Steen was better, so it was all a pipe dream, but
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