Alistair MacLean
The Golden Rendezvous

Chapter 1

My shirt was no longer a shirt, but just a limp and sticky rag soaked with sweat. My feet ached from the fierce heat of the steel deck plates. My forehead, under the peaked white cap, ached from the ever-increasing constriction of the leather band that made scalping only a matter of time. My eyes ached from the steely glitter of reflected sunlight from metal, water, and whitewashed harbour buildings. And my throat ached, from pure thirst. I was acutely unhappy. I was unhappy. The crew was unhappy. The passengers were unhappy. Captain Bullen was unhappy and this last made me doubly unhappy, not because of any tenderness of feeling that, I entertained towards the captain, but because when things went wrong with Captain Bullen he invariably took it out of his Chief Officer. I was his Chief Officer. I was bending over the rail, listening to the creak of wire and wood and watching our after jumbo derrick take the strain as it lifted a particularly large crate from the quayside, when a hand touched my arm.

Captain Bullen again, I thought drearily; it had been at least half an hour since he’d been around last to talk to me about my shortcomings, and then I realised that, whatever the Captain’s caprices, wearing Chanel. No. He wasn’t one of them. This would be Miss Beresford. And it was. In addition to the Chanel, she was wearing a white silk dress and that quizzical, half-amused smile that made most of the other officers turn mental cartwheels and handsprings but served only to irritate me. I have my weaknesses, but tall, cool, sophisticated, and worldly young women with a slightly malicious sense of humour is not one of them.

“Good afternoon, Mr. First Officer,” she said sweetly. She had a soft, musical voice with hardly a hint of superiority or condescension when talking to the lower orders like myself, just enough to show that she had been to the best school and college in the east and I hadn’t. “We’ve been wondering where you were. You are not usually an absentee at aperitif time.”

“I know, Miss Beresford. I’m sorry.” What she said was true enough; what she didn’t know was that I turned up for aperitifs with the passengers more or less at the point of a gun. Standing company orders stated that it was as much a part of the ship’s officers’ duties to entertain the passengers as to sail the ship, and as Captain Bullen loathed all passengers with a fierce and total loathing, he saw to it that most of the entertaining fell to me. I nodded at the big crate now hovering over the hatchway of number four hold, then at the piled-up crates at the quayside. “I’m afraid I have work to do. Four or five hours at least. Can’t even manage lunch today, far less an aperitif.”

“Not Miss Beresford. Susan.” It was as if she had heard only my first few words. “How often do I have to ask you?”

Until we reach New York, I said to myself, and even then it will be no use. Aloud I said, smiling, “You mustn’t make things difficult for me. Regulations require that we treat all passengers with courtesy, consideration, and respect.” And self-respect made me resent the young and unmarried female passengers who regarded me as a source of idle amusement for their all too many idle hours; particularly was this true with rich young idle females — and it was common knowledge that Julius A. Beresford required the full-time services of a whole corps of accountants just to tot up his annual profits. “Especially with respect, Miss Beresford,” I finished.

“You’re hopeless.” She laughed. I was too tiny a pebble to cause even a ripple in her smiling pool of complacency. “And no lunch, you poor man. I thought you were looking pretty glum as I came along.” She glanced at the winch driver, then at the seamen manhandling the suspended crate into position on the floor of the hold. “Your men don’t seem too pleased at the prospect either. They are a morose looking lot.”

I eyed them briefly. They were a morose-looking lot. “Oh, they’ll be spelled for food all right. It’s just that they have their own private worries. It must be about a hundred and ten down in that hold there, and it’s an almost unwritten law that white crews should not work in the afternoons in the tropics. Besides, they’re all still brooding darkly over the losses they’ve suffered. Don’t forget that it’s less than seventy-two hours since they had that brush with the customs down in Jamaica.”

Brush, I thought, was good: in what might very accurately be described as one fell swoop the customs had confiscated from about forty crew members no fewer than twenty-five thousand cigarettes and over two hundred bottles of hard liquor that should have been placed on the ship’s bond before arrival in Jamaican waters. That the liquor had not been placed in bond was understandable enough as the crew were expressly forbidden to have any in their quarters in the first place; that not even the cigarettes had been placed in bond had been due to the crew’s intention of following their customary practice of smuggling both liquor and tobacco ashore and disposing of them at a handsome profit to Jamaicans more than willing to pay a high price for the luxury of duty-free Kentucky bourbon and American cigarettes. But then, the crew had not been to know that, for the first time in its five years’ service on the West Indian run, the S.S. Campari was to be searched from stem to stern with a thorough ruthlessness that spared nothing that came in its path, a high and searching wind that swept the ship clean as a whistle. It had been a black day. And so was this. Even as Miss Beresford was patting me consolingly on the arm and murmuring a few farewell words of sympathy which didn’t go any too well with the twinkle in her eyes, I caught sight of Captain Bullen perched on top of the companionway leading down from the main deck.

“Glowering” would probably be the most apt term to describe the expression on his face. As he came down the companionway and passed Miss Beresford he made a heroic effort to twist his features into the semblance of a smile and managed to hold it for all of two seconds until he had passed her by, then got back to his glowering again. For a man who is dressed in gleaming whites from top to toe to give the impression of a black approaching thundercloud is no small feat, but Captain Bullen managed it without any trouble. He was a big man, six feet two and very heavily built, with sandy hair and eyebrows, a smooth red face that no amount of sun could ever tan, and a clear blue eye that- no amount of whisky could ever dim. He looked at the quayside, the hold, and then at me, all with the same impartial disfavour. “Well, Mister,” he said heavily. “How’s it going? Miss Beresford giving you a hand, eh?” When he was in a bad mood, it was invariably “Mister”; in a neutral mood, it was “First”; and when in a good temper — which, to be fair, was most of the time it was always “Johnny-me-boy.” But today it was “Mister.”

I took my guard accordingly and ignored the implied reproof of time-wasting. He would be gruffly apologetic the next day. He always was. “Not too bad, sir. Bit slow on the dockside.” I nodded to where a group of men, some bearded, all wearing denim trousers and vaguely military-looking shirts, were struggling to attach chain slings to a crate that must have been at least eighteen feet in length by six square. “I don’t think the Carracio stevedores are accustomed to handling such heavy lifts.”

He took a good look. “They couldn’t handle a damned wheelbarrow,” he snapped eventually. “Never seen such fumble-handed incompetence in my blasted life. First time in this stinking flea-ridden hellhole — Carracio was actually one of the cleanest and most picturesquely beautiful ports in the Caribbean and I hope to heaven it’s the last. Can you manage it by six, Mister?”

Six o’clock was an hour past the top of the tide, and we had to clear the harbour-entrance sand bar by then or wait another ten hours. “I think so, sir,” and then, to take his mind off his troubles, and also because I was curious, I asked, “What are in those crates? Motorcars?”

“Motorcars? Are you mad?” His cold blue eye swept over the whitewashed jumble of the little town and the dark green of the steeply rising forested hills behind. “This lot couldn’t build a rabbit hutch for export, far less a motorcar. Machinery. So the bills of lading say. Dynamos, generators, refrigerating, air-conditioning, and refuelling machinery. For New York.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” I said, carefully, “That the Generalissimo, having successfully completed the confiscation of all the American sugar-refining mills, is now dismantling them and selling the machinery back to the Americans? Barefaced theft like that?”

“Jetty larceny on the part of the individual is theft,” Captain Bullen said morosely. “When governments engage in grand larceny, it’s economics. But, it’ll be all perfectly legal, I’ve no doubt, but it still doesn’t make me feel less of a contraband runner. But if we don’t do it, someone else will. And the freight rate’s double the normal.”

“Which makes the Generalissimo and his government pretty desperate for money?”

“What do you think?” Bullen growled. “No one knows how many were killed in the capital and a dozen other towns in Tuesday’s hunger riots. Jamaican authorities reckon the number in hundreds. Since they turned out most foreigners and closed down or confiscated nearly all foreign businesses they haven’t been able to earn a penny abroad. The coffers of the revolution are as empty as a drum. Ban’s completely desperate for money.” He turned away and stood staring over the harbour, big hands wide-spaced on the guardrail, his back ramrod-stiff. He seemed in no hurry to go-and aimless loitering was no part of Captain Bullen’s life. He was always in a hurry. I recognised the signs; after three years of sailing with him, it would have been impossible not to. There was something he wanted to say; there was some steam he wanted to blow off, and no better outlet than that tried and trusty relief valve, Chief Officer Carter. Only whenever he wished to blow off steam it was a matter of personal pride with him never to bring up the matter himself.

It was no great trick to guess what was troubling him, so I obliged. I said, conversationally, “The cables we sent to London, sir.” They had been sent by the captain himself, but the “we” would spread the load if things had gone wrong, as they almost certainly had. “Any reply to them yet?”

“Just ten minutes ago.” he turned round casually as if the matter had really slipped his memory, but the slight purpling tinge in the red face betrayed him, and there was nothing casual about his voice when he went on: “slapped me down, Mister, that’s what they did. Slapped me down. My own company. And the Ministry of Transport. Both of them. Told me to forget about it, said my protests were completely out of order, warned me of the consequences of future lack of cooperation with the appropriate authorities, whatever the hell appropriate authorities might be. Me my own company! Thirty-five years I’ve sailed with the Blue Mail Line and now… And now…” his fists clenched and his voice choked into fuming silence.

“So there was someone bringing very heavy pressure to bear, after all,” I murmured.

“There was, Mister, there was.” the cold blue eyes were very cold indeed and the big hands opened wide, then closed, tight, till the ivory showed. Bullen was a captain, but he was more than that: he was the Commodore of the Blue Mail Fleet, and even the board of directors walk softly when the fleet commodore is around; at least they don’t treat him like an office boy. He went on softly: “if ever I get my hands on Dr. Slingsby Caroline, I’ll break his bloody neck.” Captain Bullen would have loved to get his hands on the oddly named Dr. Slingsby Caroline. Tens of thousands of police, government agents, and American service men engaged in the hunt for him would also have loved to get their hands on him. So would millions of ordinary citizens if for no other reason than the excellent one that there was a reward of $50,000 for information leading to his capture.

But the interest of Captain Bullen and the crew of the Campari was even more personal: the missing man was very much the root of all our troubles. Dr. Slingsby Caroline had vanished, appropriately enough, in South Carolina. He had worked at a U. S. government’s very hush-hush weapons research establishment south of the town of Columbia, an establishment concerned with the evolving, as had only become known in the past week or so, of some sort of small fission weapon for use by either fighter planes or mobile rocket launchers in local tactical nuclear wars. As nuclear weapons went, it was the eeriest bagatelle compared to the five megaton monsters already developed by both the United States and Russia, developing barely one-thousandth of the explosive power of those and hardly capable of devastating more than a square mile of territory. Still, with the explosive potential of five thousand tons of T.N.T., it was no toy.

Then, one day night, to be precise, Dr. Slingsby Caroline had vanished. As he was the director of the research establishment, this was serious enough, but what was even more dismaying was that he had taken the working prototype with him. He had apparently been surprised by two of the night guards at the plant and had killed them both, presumably with a silenced weapon, since no one heard or suspected anything amiss. He had driven through the plant gates about ten o’clock at night at the wheel of his own blue Chevrolet station wagon; the guards at the gate, recognising both the car and their own chief and knowing that he habitually worked until a late hour, had waved him on without a second glance. And that was the last anyone had ever seen of Dr. Caroline or the Twister, as the weapon, for some obscure reason, had been named. But it wasn’t the last that was seen of the blue Chevrolet. That had been discovered abandoned outside the Port of Savannah, some nine hours after the crime had been committed, but less than an hour after it had been discovered, which showed pretty smart police work on someone’s part. And it had been just our evil luck that the S.S. Campari had called in at Savannah on the afternoon of the day the crime had been committed. Within an hour of the discovery of the two dead guards in the research establishment, all interstate and foreign air and sea traffic in the south-eastern United States had been halted. As from seven o’clock in the morning all planes were grounded until they had been rigorously searched; as from seven o’clock police stopped and examined every truck crossing a state border; and, of course, everything larger than a rowing boat was forbidden to put out to sea. Unfortunately for the authorities in general and us in particular, the S.S. Campari had sailed from Savannah at six o’clock that morning.

Automatically the Campari became very, very “hot,” the number one suspect for the getaway. The First radio call came through at 8.30 A.M. Would Captain Bullen return immediately to Savannah? The captain, no beater about the bush, asked why the hell he should. He was told that it was desperately urgent that he return at once. Not, replied the captain, unless they gave him a very compelling reason indeed. They refused to give him a reason and Captain Bullen refused to return. Deadlock. Then, because they hadn’t much option, the federal authorities, who had already taken over from the state, gave him the facts. Captain Bullen asked for more facts. He asked for a description of the missing scientist and weapon, and he’d soon find out for himself whether or not they were on board. Followed a fifteen-minute delay, no doubt necessary to secure the release of top classified information, then the descriptions were reluctantly given. There was a curious similarity between the two descriptions. Both the Twister and Dr. Caroline were exactly seventy-five inches in length. Both were very thin, the weapon being only eleven inches in diameter. The doctor weighed 180 pounds, the Twister 280. The Twister was covered in a one piece sheath of polished anodised aluminium, the Doctor in a two-piece grey gabardine. The Twister’s head was covered by a grey pyroceram nose cap, the doctor’s by black hair with a telltale lock of grey in the centre. The orders for the Doctor were to identify and apprehend, for the Twister to identify but do not, repeat, do not touch. The weapon should be completely stable and safe, and normally it would take one of the only two experts who were as yet sufficiently acquainted with it at least ten minutes to arm it; but no one could guess what effect might have been had upon the Twister’s delicate mechanism by the jolting it might have suffered in transit. Three hours later Captain Bullen was able to report with complete certainty that neither the missing scientist nor weapon was aboard. Intensive would be a poor word to describe that search; every square foot between the chain locker and steering compartment was searched and searched again. Captain Bullen had radioed the federal authorities and then forgotten about it, or would have forgotten about it were it not that twice in the following two nights our radarscope had shown a mysterious vessel, without navigation lights, closing up from astern, then vanishing before dawn. And then we arrived at our most southerly port of call, Kingston, in Jamaica. And in Kingston the blow had fallen. We had no sooner arrived than the harbour authorities had come on board requesting that a search party from the American destroyer lying almost alongside be allowed to examine the Campari. Our friend on the radarscope, without a doubt. The search party, about forty of them, was already lined up on the deck of the destroyer. They were still there four hours later. Captain Bullen, in a few simple, well-chosen words that had carried far and clear over the sunlit waters of Kingston harbour, had told the authorities that if the United States Navy proposed, in broad daylight, to board a British mercantile marine vessel in a British harbour, then they were welcome to try. They were also welcome, he had added, to suffer, apart from the injuries and the loss of blood they would incur in the process, the very heavy penalties which would be imposed by an international court of maritime law arising from charges ranging from assault, through piracy, to an act of war, which maritime court, Captain Bullen had added pointedly, had its seat, not in Washington, D.C., but in the Hague, Holland. This stopped them cold. The authorities withdrew to consult with the Americans. Coded cables, we learnt later, were exchanged with Washington and London. Captain Bullen remained adamant. Our passengers, 90 per cent of them Americans, gave him their enthusiastic support. Messages were received from both the company head office and the Ministry of Transport requiring Captain Bullen to co-operate with the United States Navy. Pressure was being brought to bear. Bullen tore the messages up, seized the offer of the local Marconi agent to give the radio equipment an overdue check-up as a heaven-sent excuse to take the wireless officers off watch, and told the quartermaster at the gangway to accept no more messages. And so it had continued for all of thirty hours. And, because troubles never come singly, it was on the morning following our arrival that the Harrisons and Curtises, related families who occupied the forward two suites on “a” deck, received cables with the shocking news that members of both families had been fatally involved in a car crash and left that afternoon. Black gloom hung heavy over the Campari.

Towards evening the deadlock was broken by the skipper of the American destroyer, a diplomatic, courteous, and thoroughly embarrassed commander by the name of Marsi. He had been allowed aboard the Campari, been gruffly asked into Bullen’s day cabin, accepted a drink, been very apologetic and respectful, and suggested a way out of the dilemma. He said he knew how intolerable it must be for a senior captain to have doubt thrown not only on his word but his ability to carry out a proper search; for his own part of it, he was thoroughly disgusted with the whole assignment. He had, Commander Marsi had pointed out almost despairingly, to carry out his orders, but how would it be if he and Captain Bullen put their own interpretation on those orders? How would it be if the search were carried out, not by his own men, but by British customs officials in the regular course of their duty, with his men present solely in the capacity of observers and under the strictest instructions not to touch anything? Captain Bullen, after much outraged humming and hawing, had finally agreed. Not only did this suggestion save face and salvage honour to a certain degree, but he was in an impossible position anyway, and he knew it. Until the search was completed, the Kingston authorities refused medical clearance, and until he had this clearance, it would be impossible to unload the six hundred tons of food and machinery he had for delivery there. And the port officials could also make things very difficult indeed by refusing clearance papers to sail. And so what seemed like every customs official in Jamaica was routed out and the search began at 9 P.M. It lasted until 2 A.M. The following morning. Captain Bullen fumed as steadily and sulphurously as a volcano about to erupt. The passengers fumed, partly because of having to suffer the indignity of having their cabins so meticulously searched, partly because of being kept out of their beds until the early hours of the morning. And, above all, the crew fumed because, on this occasion, even the normally tolerant customs were forced to take note of the hundreds of bottles of liquor and thousands of cigarettes uncovered by their search. Nothing else, of course, was found. Apologies were offered and ignored. Medical clearance was given and unloading began: we left Kingston late that night. For all of the following twenty-four hours Captain Bullen had brooded over the recent happenings, then had sent off a couple of cablegrams, one to the head office in London, the other to the Ministry of Transport, telling them what he, Captain Bullen, thought of them. I had seen the cables and they really had been something: not very wise, perhaps, but better than having the threatened apoplectic seizure. And now, it seemed, they in turn had told Captain Bullen what they thought of him. I could understand his feelings about Dr. Slingsby Caroline, who was probably in China by this time.

A high-pitched shout of warning brought us both sharply to the present and what was going on around us. One of the two chain slings round the big crate now poised exactly over the hatchway to number four hold had suddenly come adrift, one end of the crate dropping down through an angle of 60⁰ and bringing up with a jerking jolt that made even the big jumbo derrick shake and quiver with the strain. The chances were good that the crate would now slip through the remaining sling and crash down on to the floor of the hold far below, which is probably what would have happened if two of the crew holding on to a corner guiding rope hadn’t been quickwitted enough to throw all their weight on to it and so prevent the crane from tilting over at too steep an angle and sliding free. But even as it was it was still touch and go. The crate swung back towards the side of the ship, the two men on the guide rope still hanging on desperately. I caught a glimpse of the stevedores on the quayside below, their faces twisted into expressions of frozen panic: in the new people’s democracy, where all men were free and equal, the penalty for this sort of carelessness was probably the firing squad; nothing else could have accounted for their otherwise inexplicably genuine terror. The crate began to swing back over the hold. I yelled to the men beneath to run clear and simultaneously gave the signal for emergency lowering. The winchman, fortunately, was as quick-witted as he was experienced, and as the wildly careening crate swung jerkily back to dead centre he lowered away at two or three times the normal speed, braking just seconds before the lowermost corner of the crate crunched and splintered against the floor of the hold. Moments later the entire length of the crate was resting on the bottom.

Captain Bullen fished a handkerchief from his drills, removed his gold-braided cap, and slowly mopped his sandy hair and sweating brow. He appeared to be communing with himself. “This,” he said finally, “is the bloody end. Captain Bullen in the doghouse. The crew sore as hell. The passengers hopping mad. Two days behind schedule. Searched by the Americans from truck to keelson like a contraband runner. Now probably carrying contraband. No sign of the latest bunch of passengers. Got to clear the harbour bar by six. And now this band of madmen trying to send us to the bottom. A man can stand so much, First, just so much.” he replaced his cap. “Shakespeare had something to say about this, First.” “A sea of troubles, sir?”

“No, something else. But apt enough.” he sighed. “Get the Second Officer to relieve you. Third’s checking stores. Get the Fourth to, not that blithering nincompoop get the bo’sun — he talks Spanish like a native anyway to take over on the shore side. Any objections and that’s the last piece of cargo we load. Then you and I are having lunch, First.”

“I told Miss Beresford that I wouldn’t…”

“If you think,” Captain Bullen interrupted heavily, “that I’m going to listen to that bunch jangling their moneybags and bemoaning their hard lot from hors d’oeuvres right through to coffee, you must be out of your mind. We’ll have it in my cabin.” And so we had it in his cabin. It was the usual Campari meal, something for even the most blasé epicure to dream about, and Captain Bullen, for once and understandably, made an exception to his rule that neither he nor his officers should drink with lunch. By the time the meal was over he was feeling almost human again and once went so far as to call me “Johnny-me-boy.” it wouldn’t last.

But it was all pleasant enough, and it was with reluctance that I finally quit the air-conditioned coolness of the captain’s day cabin for the blazing sunshine outside to relieve the Second Officer. He smiled widely as I approached number four hold. Tommy Wilson was always smiling. He was a dark, wiry Welshman of middle height, with an infectious grin and an immense zest for life, no matter what came his way. Nothing was too much trouble for Tommy and nothing ever got him down. Nothing, that is, except mathematics: his weakness in that department had already cost him his master’s ticket. But he was that rare combination of an outstanding seaman and a tremendous social asset on a passenger ship, and it was for these reasons that Captain Bullen had insisted on having him aboard.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“You can see for yourself.” he waved a complacent hand towards the pile of stacked crates on the quayside, now diminished by a good third since I had seen it last. “Speed allied with efficiency. When Wilson is on the job let no man ever.”

The bo’sun’s name is Macdonald, not Wilson,” I said.

“So it is.” he laughed, glanced down to where the bo’sun, a big, tough, infinitely competent Hebridean islander was haranguing the bearded stevedores, and shook his head admiringly. “I wish I could understand what he’s saying.”

“Translation would be superfluous,” I said, drily. “I’ll take over. Old man wants you to go ashore.”

“Ashore?” his face lit up; in two short years the Second’s shore-going exploits had already passed into the realms of legend. “Let no man ever say that Wilson ignored duty’s call. Twenty minutes for a shower, shave and shake out the number ones.” “The agent’s offices are just beyond the dock gates,” I interrupted. “You can go as you are. Find out what’s happened to our latest passengers. Captain’s beginning to worry about them; if they’re not here by five o’clock he’s sailing without them. Way he’s feeling now, he’d just as soon do that. If the agent doesn’t know, tell him to find out. Fast.” Wilson left.

The sun started westering, but the heat stayed as it was. Thanks to Macdonald’s competence and uninhibited command of the Spanish language, the cargo on the quayside steadily and rapidly diminished.

Wilson returned to report no sign of our passengers. “Their baggage had arrived two days previously and, although only for five people, was enough”, Wilson said, “to fill a couple of railroad trucks.” About the passengers, the agent had been very nervous indeed. They were very important people, senor, very, very important. One of them was the most important man in the whole province of Camafuegos. A jeep had already been dispatched westwards along the coast road to look for them. It sometimes happened, the senor understood, that a car spring would go or a shock absorber snap. When Wilson had innocently inquired if this was because the revolutionary government had no money left to pay for the filling in of the enormous potholes in the roads, the agent had become even more nervous and said indignantly that it was entirely the fault of the inferior metal those perfidious Americanos used in the construction of their vehicles. Wilson said he had left with the impression that Detroit had a special assembly line exclusively devoted to turning out deliberately inferior cars destined solely for this particular corner of the Caribbean. Wilson went away.

The cargo continued to move steadily into number four hold. About four o’clock in the afternoon I heard the sound of the clashing of gears and the asthmatic wheezing of what sounded like a very elderly engine indeed. This, I thought, would be the passengers at last, but no; what clanked into view round the corner of the dock gate was a dilapidated truck with hardly a shred of paint left on the body work, white canvas showing on the tyres, and the engine hood removed to reveal what looked, from my elevation, like a solid block of rust. One of the special Detroit jobs probably. On its cracked and splintered platform it carried three medium-sized crates, freshly boxed and metal-banded. Wrapped in a blue haze from the staccato backfiring of its exhaust, vibrating like a broken tuning fork and rattling in every bolt in its superannuated chassis, the truck trundled heavily across the cobbles and pulled up not five paces from where Macdonald was standing.

A little man in white ducks and peaked cap jumped out through the space where the door ought to have been, stood still for a couple of seconds until he got the hang of terra firma again, and then scuttled off in the direction of our gangway. I recognised him as our Carracio agent, the one with the low opinion of Detroit, and wondered what fresh trouble he was bringing with him. I found out in three minutes flat when Captain Bullen appeared on deck, an anxious-looking agent scurrying along behind him. The captain’s blue eyes were snapping; the red complexion was overlaid with puce, but he had the safety valve screwed right down.

“Coffins, Mister,” he said tightly. “Coffins, no less.” I suppose there is a quick and clever answer to a conversational gambit like that, but I couldn’t find it, so I said politely, “coffins, sir?”

“Coffins, Mister. Not empty, either. For shipment to New York.” He flourished some papers. “Authorizations, shipping notes, everything in order. Including a sealed request signed by no less than the ambassador. Three of them. Two British, one American subject. Killed in the hunger riots.”

“The crew won’t like it, sir,” I said. “Especially the Goanese stewards. You know their superstitions and how…”

“It will be all right, senor,” the little man in white broke in hurriedly.

Wilson had been right about the nervousness, but there was more to it than that; there was a strange overlay of anxiety that came close to despair. “We have arranged…”

“Shut up!” Captain Bullen said shortly.

“No need for the crew to know, Mister. Or the passengers.”

You could see they were just a careless afterthought.

“Coffins are boxed that’s them on the truck there.”

“Yes, sir. Killed in the riots. Last week.”

I paused and went on delicately, “In this heat…”

“Lead-lined,” he says. “So they can go in the hold. Some separate corner, Mister. One of the — um — deceased is a relative of one of the passengers boarding here. Wouldn’t do to stack the coffins among the dynamos, I suppose.” he sighed heavily.

“On top of everything else, we’re now in the funeral-undertaking business. Life, First, can hold no more.”

“You are accepting this — ah — cargo, sir?”

“But of course, but of course,” the little man interrupted again.

“One of them is a cousin of senor Carreras, who sails with you. Senor Miguel Carreras. Senor Carreras, he is what you say, heartbroken. Senor Carreras is the most important man”

“Be quiet,” Captain Bullen said wearily. He made a gesture with the papers. “Yes, I’m accepting. Note from the ambassador. More pressure. I’ve had enough of cables flying across the Atlantic. Too much grief. Just an old beaten man, First, just an old beaten man.” He stood there for a moment, hands outspread on the guardrail, doing his best to look like an old beaten man and making a singularly unsuccessful job of it, then straightened abruptly as a procession of vehicles turned in through the dock gates and made for the Campari. “A pound to a penny, Mister, here comes still more grief.”

“Praise be to God,” the little agent murmured. The tone, no less than the words, was a prayer of thanksgiving. “Senor Carreras himself! Your passengers at last, captain.”

“That’s what I said,” Bullen growled. “More grief.” The little man looked at him in puzzlement, as well as might anyone who didn’t understand Bullen’s attitude towards the passengers, then turned and hurried off towards the gangway. My attention was diverted for a few moments by another crate swinging aboard, then I heard Captain Bullen saying softly and feelingly, “Like I said, Mister, more grief.”

The procession, two big, chauffeur-driven pre-war Packards, one towed by a jeep, had just pulled up by the gangway and the passengers were climbing out. Those who could, that was — or very obviously there was one who could not. One of the chauffeurs, dressed in green tropical drills and a bush hat, had opened the boot of his car, pulled out a collapsible hand-propelled wheel chair, and, with the smooth efficiency of experience, had it assembled in ten seconds flat, while the other chauffeur, with the aid of a tall, thin nurse clad in over-all white from her smartly starched cap to the skirt that reached close down to her ankles, tenderly lifted a bent old man from the back seat of the second Packard and set him gently in the wheel chair. The old boy — even at that distance I could see the face creased and trenched with the lines of age, the snowy whiteness of the still plentiful hair did his best to help them, but his best wasn’t very much.

Captain Bullen looked at me. I looked at Captain Bullen. There didn’t seem to be any reason to say anything. Nobody in a crew likes having permanent invalids aboard ship: they cause trouble to the ship’s doctor who has to look after their health, to the cabin stewards who have to clean their quarters, to the dining-room stewards who have to feed them, and to those members of the deck crew detailed for the duty of moving them around. And when the invalids are elderly and very infirm and if this one wasn’t — I sadly missed my guess — there was always the chance of a death at sea, the one thing sailors hate above all else. It was also very bad for the passenger trade. But as long as the illness was of neither a contagious nor infectious nature and that a certificate could be produced from the invalid’s own doctor to the effect that the invalid was fit for the proposed voyage, there was nothing that could be done about it.

“Well,” Captain Bullen said heavily, “I suppose I’d better go and welcome our latest guests aboard. Finish it off as quickly as possible, Mister.”

“I’ll do that, sir.” Bullen nodded and left. I watched the two chauffeurs slide a couple of poles under the seat of the invalid chair, straighten and carry the chair easily up the sparred foot planks of the gangway. They were followed by the tall angular nurse and she in turn by another nurse, dressed exactly like the First, but shorter and stockier. The old boy was bringing his own medical corps along with him, which meant that he had more money than was good for him or was a hypochondriac or very far through indeed or a combination of any or all of those; on the credit side was the fact that both had that indefinable competent no-nonsense look of the professional nurse which would make the lot of our ship’s surgeon, old Dr. Marston, who sometimes had to work a whole hour in one day, all that much easier. But I was more interested in the last two people to climb out of the Packards. The First was a man of about my own age and size, but the resemblance stopped there. He looked like a cross between Ramon Novarro and Rudolph Valentino, only handsomer. Tall, broad-shouldered, with deeply tanned, perfectly sculpted Latin features, he had the classical long, thin moustache, strong, even teeth with that in-built neon phosphorescence that seems to shine in any light from high noon till dark, and a darkly gleaming froth of tight black curls on his head; he would have been a lost man if you’d let him loose on the campus of any girls’ university.

For all that, he looked as far from being a sissy as any man I’d ever met: he had the strong chin, the balanced carriage, the light, springy boxer’s step of a man well aware that he can get through this world without any help from a nursemaid. If nothing else, I thought sourly, he would at least take Miss Beresford out of my hair. The other man was a slightly smaller edition of the First, same features, same teeth, same moustache and hair, only those were greying. He would be about fifty-five. He had about him that indefinable look of authority and assurance which can come from power, money, or a carefully cultivated phoneyness. This, I guessed, would be the Senor Miguel Carreras who inspired such fear in our local Carracio agent. I wondered why.

Ten minutes later the last of our cargo was aboard and all that remained were the three boxed coffins on the back of the old truck. I was watching the bo’sun readying a sling round the first of those when a well-detested voice said behind me: “This is Mr. Carreras, sir. Captain Bullen sent me.”

I turned round and gave Fourth Officer Dexter the look I specially reserved for Fourth Officer Dexter. Dexter was the exception to the rule that the Fleet Commodore always got the best available in the company as far as officers and men were concerned, but that was hardly the old man’s fault: there were some men that even a fleet commodore has to accept and Dexter was one of them. A personable enough youngster of twenty-one, with fair hair, slightly prominent blue eyes, an excruciatingly genuine public-school accent, and limited intelligence, Dexter was the son — and, unfortunately, heir of Lord Dexter, Chairman and Managing Director of the Blue Mail. Lord Dexter, who had inherited about ten millions at the age of fifteen and, understandably enough, had never looked back, had the quaint idea that his own son should start from the bottom up and had sent him to sea as a cadet some five years previously. Dexter took a poor view of this arrangement: every man in the ship, from Bullen downwards, took a poor view both of the arrangement and Dexter, but there was nothing we could do about it.

“How do you do, sir?” I accepted Carreras’ outstretched hand and took a good look at him. The steady dark eyes, the courteous smile couldn’t obscure the fact that there were many more lines about his eyes and mouth at two feet than at fifty; but it also couldn’t obscure the compensatory fact that the air of authority and command was now redoubled in force, and I put out of my mind any idea that this air originated in phoneyness; it was the genuine article, and that was that.

“Mr. Carter? My pleasure.” The hand was firm, the bow more than a perfunctory nod, the cultured English the product of some stateside Ivy League college. “I have some interest in the cargo being loaded, and if you would permit…” “But certainly, Senor Carreras.” Carter, that rough-hewn Anglo-Saxon diamond, not to be outdone in Latin courtesy. I waved towards the hatch. “If you would be so kind as to keep to the starboard — the right hand of the hatch.”

“‘Starboard’ will do, Mr. Carter.” He smiled. “I have commanded vessels of my own. It was not a life that ever appealed to me.” He stood there for a moment, watching Macdonald tightening the sling, while I turned to Dexter, who had made no move to go. Dexter was seldom in a hurry to do anything; he had a remarkably thick skin.

“What are you on now, Fourth?” I enquired.

“Assisting Mr.” That meant he was unemployed. Cummings, the purser, was an extraordinarily competent officer who never required help. He had only one fault, brought on by years of dealing with passengers — he was far too polite. Especially with Dexter. I said, “Those charts we picked up in Kingston. You might get on with the corrections, will you?” Which meant that he would probably land us on a reef off the great Bahamas in a couple of days’ time.

“But Mr. Cummings is expecting…”

“The charts, Dexter.” He looked at me for a long moment, his face slowly darkening, then spun on his heel and left. I let him go three paces, then said, not loudly, “Dexter.” he stopped, then turned slowly. “The charts, Dexter,” I repeated.

He stood there for may be five seconds, eyes locked on mine, then broke his gaze. “Aye, aye, sir.” the accent on the “sir” was faint but unmistakable. He turned again and walked away, and now the flush was round to the back of his neck, his back ramrod stiff. Little I cared; by the time he sat in the Chairman’s seat I’d have long since quit. I watched him go, then turned to see Carreras looking at me with a slow, still speculation in the steady eyes. He was putting chief officer Carter in the balance and weighing him, but whatever figures he came up with he kept to himself, for he turned away without any haste and made his way to the starboard side of number four hold.

As he turned, I noticed for the First time the very thin ribbon of black silk stitched across the left lapel of his grey tropical suit. It didn’t seem to go any too well with the white rose he wore in his buttonhole, but maybe the two of them together were recognised as a sign of mourning in those parts. And it seemed very likely, for he stood there perfectly straight, almost at attention, his hands loosely by his sides, as the three crated coffins were hoisted inboard. When the third crate came swinging in over the rail he removed his hat casually, as if to get the benefit of the light breeze that had just sprung up from the north, the direction of the open sea, and then, looking round him almost furtively, lifted his right hand under the cover of the hat held in his left hand and made a quick abbreviated sign of the cross. Even in that heat I could feel the cold cat’s-paw of a shiver brush lightly across my shoulders. I don’t know why; not even by the furthest stretch of imagination could I visualise that prosaic hatchway giving on number four hold as an open grave. One of my grandmothers was Scots; maybe I was psychic or had the second sight or whatever it was they called it up in the highlands, or maybe I had just lunched too well. Whatever might have upset me, it didn’t seem to have upset Senor Carreras. He replaced his hat as the last of the crates touched lightly on the floor of the hold, stared down at it for a few seconds, then turned and made his way forward, lifting his hat again and giving me a clear, untroubled smile as he came by. For want of anything better to do, I smiled back at him.

Five minutes later the ancient truck, the two Packards, the jeep, and the last of the stevedores were gone and Macdonald was busy supervising the placing of the battens on number four hold.

By five o’clock, a whole hour before deadline and exactly on the top of the tide, the S.S. Campari was steaming slowly over the bar to the north of the harbour, then northwest into the setting sun, carrying with it its cargo of crates and machinery and dead men, its fuming captain, disgruntled crew, and thoroughly outraged passengers. At five o’clock on that brilliant June evening it was not what one might have called a happy ship.