"The Golden Rendezvous" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLean Alistair)

Chapter 2

By eight o’clock that night cargo, crates, and coffins were, presumably, just as they had been at five o’clock; but among the living cargo the change for the better, from deep discontent to something closely approaching light-hearted satisfaction, was marked and profound.

There were reasons for this, of course. In Captain Bullen’s case — he twice called me “Johnny-me-boy” as he sent me down for dinner — it was because he was clear of what he was pleased to regard as the pestiferous port of Carracio, because he was at sea again, because he was on his bridge again, and because he had thought up an excellent reason for sending me below while he remained on the bridge, thus avoiding the social torture of having to dine with the passengers.

In the crew’s case it was because the captain had seen fit, partly out of a sense of justice and partly to repay the head office for the indignities they had heaped on him, to award them all many more hours’ overtime than they were actually entitled to for their off-duty labours in the past three days. And in the case of the officers and passengers it was simply because there are certain well-defined fundamental laws of human nature and one of them was that it was impossible to be miserable for long aboard the S.S. Campari.

As a vessel with no regular ports of call, with only very limited passenger accommodation and capacious cargo holds that were seldom far from full, the S.S. Campari could properly be classed as a tramp ship and indeed was so classed in the Blue Mail’s brochures. But — as the brochures pointed out with a properly delicate restraint in keeping with the presumably refined sensibilities of the extraordinarily well-heeled clientele it was addressing — the S.S. Campari was no ordinary tramp ship. Indeed, it was no ordinary ship in any sense at all. It was, as the brochure said simply, without any pretentiousness and in exactly those words, “A medium-sized cargo vessel offering the most luxurious accommodation and finest cuisine of any ship in the world to-day.”

It was the Chairman of the Blue Mail, Lord Dexter, who had obviously kept all his brains to himself and refrained from passing any on to his son, our current Fourth Officer, who had thought it up. It was, as all his competitors who were now exerting themselves strenuously to get into the act admitted, a stroke of pure genius. Lord Dexter concurred. It had started off simply enough in the early fifties with an earlier Blue Mail vessel, the S.S. Brandywine. (For some strange whimsy, explicable only on a psychoanalyst’s couch, Lord Dexter, himself a rabid teetotaller, had elected to name his various ships after divers wines and other spirituous liquors.)

The Brandywine had been one of two Blue Mail vessels engaged on a regular run between New York and various British possessions in the West Indies, and Lord Dexter, eying the luxury cruise liners which plied regularly between New York and the Caribbean and seeing no good reason why he shouldn’t elbow his way into this lucrative dollar-earning market, had some extra cabins fitted on the Brandywine and advertised them in a few very select American newspapers and magazines, making it quite plain that he was interested only in top people. Among the attractions offered had been a complete absence of bands, dances, concerts, fancy-dress balls, swimming pools, tombola, deck games, sight-seeing and parties. A genius could have made such desirable and splendidly resounding virtues out of things he didn’t have anyway. All he offered on the positive side was the mystery and romance of a tramp ship which sailed to unknown destinations — this didn’t make any alterations to regular schedules; all it meant was that the captain kept the names of the various ports of call to himself until shortly before he arrived there and the resources and comfort of a telegraph lounge which remained in continuous touch with the New York, London, and Paris stock exchanges.

The initial success of the scheme was fantastic. In stock exchange parlance, the issue was oversubscribed a hundred times. This was intolerable to Lord Dexter; he was obviously attracting far too many of the not quite top people, aspiring would-he’s on the lower-middle rungs of the ladder who had not yet got past their first few million, people with whom top people would not care to associate. He doubled his prices. It made no difference. He trebled them and in the process made the gratifying discovery that there were many people in the world who would pay literally almost anything not only to be different and exclusive but to be known to be different and exclusive. Lord Dexter held up the building of his latest ship, the Campari, had designed and built into her a dozen of the most luxurious cabin suites ever seen, and sent her to New York, confident that she would soon recoup the outlay of a quarter of a million pounds extra cost incurred through the building of those cabins. As usual, his confidence was not misplaced. There were imitators, of course, but one might as well have tried to imitate Buckingham palace, the Grand Canyon, or the Cullinan diamond. Lord Dexter left them all at the starting date. He had found his formula and he stuck to it unswervingly: comfort, convenience, quiet, good food, and good company. Where comfort was concerned, the fabulous luxury of the staterooms had to be seen to be believed; convenience, as far as the vast majority of the male passengers was concerned, found its ultimate in the juxtaposition, in the Campari’s unique telegraph lounge, of the stock-exchange tickers and one of the most superbly stocked bars in the world. Quiet was achieved by an advanced degree of insulation both in cabin suites and engine room, by imitating the royal yacht Britannia inasmuch as that no orders were ever shouted and the deck crew and stewards invariably wore rubber-soled sandals and by eliminating all the bands, parties, games, and dances which lesser cruise passengers believed essential for the enjoyment of shipboard life. The magnificent cuisine had been achieved by luring away, at vast cost and the expense of even more bad feeling, the chefs from one of the biggest embassies in London and one of the finest hotels in Paris; those masters of the culinary world operated on alternate days, and the paradisiacal results of their efforts to outdo one another was the envious talk of the western ocean.

Other ship owners might, perhaps, have succeeded in imitating some or all of those features, although almost certainly to a lesser degree. But Lord Dexter was no ordinary ship owner. He was, as said, a genius, and he showed it in his insistence, above all, on having the right people aboard. Never a single trip passed but the Campari had a personage on its passenger list, a personage varying from notable to world-famous. A special suite was reserved for personages. Well-known politicians, cabinet ministers, top stars of the stage and screen, the odd famous writer or artist — if he was clean enough and used a razor — and the lower echelons of the English nobility travelled in this suite at vastly reduced prices; royalty, ex-presidents, ex-premiers, ranking dukes and above travelled free. It was said that if all the British peerage on the Campari’s waiting list could be accommodated simultaneously, the House of Lords could close its doors. It need hardly be added that there was nothing philanthropic in Lord Dexter’s offer of free hospitality: he merely jacked up his prices to the wealthy occupants of the other eleven suites, who would have paid the earth anyway for the privilege of voyaging in such close contact with such exalted company. After several years on this run our passengers consisted almost entirely of repeaters. Many came as often as three times a year, fair enough indication of the size of their bank roll. By now the passenger list on the Campari had become the most exclusive club in the world. Not to put too fine a point on it, Lord Dexter had distilled the aggregate elements of social and financial snobbery and found in its purest quintessence an inexhaustible supply of gold.

I adjusted my napkin and looked over the current gold mine. Five hundred million dollars on the hoof on the dove-grey velvet of the armchair seats in that opulent and air-conditioned dining room; perhaps nearer a thousand million dollars, and old man Beresford would account for a good third of it. Julius Beresford, president and chief stockholder of the Hart-McCormick mining federation, sat where he nearly always sat, not only now but on half a dozen previous cruises, at the top right-hand side of the captain’s table, next to Captain Bullen himself. He sat there, in the most coveted position in the ship, not because he insisted on it through sheer weight of wealth, but because Captain Bullen himself insisted on it. There are exceptions to every rule, and Julius Beresford was the exception to Bullen’s rule that he couldn’t abide any passenger, period. Beresford, a tall, thin, relaxed man with tufted black eyebrows, a horseshoe ring of greying hair fringing the sunburnt baldness of his head, and lively hazel eyes twilight in the lined brown leather of his face, came along only for the peace, comfort, and food: the company of the great left him cold, a fact vastly appreciated by Captain Bullen, who shared his sentiments exactly. Beresford, sitting diagonally across from my table, caught my eye.

“Evening, Mr. Carter.” unlike his daughter, he didn’t make me feel that he was conferring an earldom upon me every time he spoke to me. “Splendid to be at sea again, isn’t it? And where’s our captain tonight?”

“Working, I’m afraid, Mr. Beresford. I have to present his apologies to his table. He couldn’t leave the bridge.”

“On the bridge?” Mrs. Beresford, seated opposite her husband, twisted round to look at me. “I thought you were usually on watch at this hour, Mr. Carter?”

“I am.” I smiled at her. I kept a special sort of smile for Mrs. Beresford in the same way that I kept a special sort of look for young Dexter. Plump, bejewelled, overdressed, with dyed blonde hair, but still beautiful at fifty, Mrs. Beresford bubbled over with good humour and laughter and kindness, and to the sour remark that it is easy to be that way with 300 million dollars in the bank, I can only observe that, after several years on the millionaires’ run, the misery quotient of our wealthy appeared to increase in direct proportion to the bullion in the bank; this was only her first trip, but Mrs. Beresford was already my favourite passenger. I went on: “But there are so many chains of islets, reefs, and coral keys hereabouts that Captain Bullen prefers to see to the navigation himself.” I didn’t add, as I might have done, that had it been in the middle of the night and all the passengers safely in their beds Captain Bullen would have been in his also, untroubled by any thoughts about his Chief Officer’s competence.

“But I thought a chief officer was fully qualified to run a ship?” Miss Beresford, needling me again, sweet-smiling, the momentarily innocent clear green eyes almost too big for the delicately tanned face. “In case anything went wrong with the captain, I mean. You must hold a master’s certificate, mustn’t you?”

“I do. I also hold a driver’s licence, but you wouldn’t catch me driving a bus in the rush hour in downtown Manhattan.”

Old man Beresford grinned. His wife smiled. Miss Beresford regarded me thoughtfully for a moment, then bent to examine her hors d’oeuvres, showing the gleaming auburn hair cut in a bouffant style that looked as if it had been achieved with a garden rake and a pair of secateurs but had probably cost a fortune.

The man by her side wasn’t going to let it go so easily, though. He laid down his fork, raised his thin dark head until he had me more or less sighted along his acquiline nose, and said in his clear high drawling voice, “Oh, come now, Chief Officer. I don’t think the comparison is very apt at all.” the “Chief Officer” was to put me in my place. The Duke of Hartwell spent a great deal of his time aboard the Campari in putting people in their places, which was pretty ungrateful of him, considering that he was getting it all for free. He had nothing against me personally; it was just that he was publicly lending Miss Beresford his support. Even the very considerable sums of money earned by inveigling the properly respectful lower classes into viewing his stately home at two and six a time were making only a slight dent on the crushing burden of death duties, whereas an alliance with Miss Beresford would solve his difficulties for ever and ever. Things were being complicated for the unfortunate Duke by the fact that, though his intellect was bent on Miss Beresford, his attentions and eyes were for the most part on the extravagantly opulent charms — and undeniable beauty of the platinum blonde and often-divorced cinema actress who flanked him on the other side.

“I don’t suppose it is, sir,” I acknowledged. Captain Bullen refused to address him as “Your Grace,” and I’d be damned if I’d do it either. “But the best I could think up on the spur of the moment.” He nodded as though satisfied and returned to attack his hors d’oeuvre. Old Beresford eyed him speculatively, Mrs. Beresford half-smilingly, Miss Harcourt the cinema actress — admiringly, while Miss Beresford herself just kept on treating us to an uninterrupted view of the auburn bouffant.

There’s little enough to do during off-duty hours at sea, and I watching developments at the captain’s table would make a very entertaining pastime indeed. What promised to make it even more entertaining was the very considerable interest being taken in the captain’s table by the young man seated at the foot of my own table.

One of the passengers who had joined at Carracio. Tony Carreras — my guess that he was Miguel Carreras’ son had been a correct and far from difficult one — was by any odds the most extraordinarily handsome man who’d ever passed through the dining-room door of the Campari. In one way this might not have signified much as it takes many years to amass sufficient cash to sail on the Campari even for a weekend and young men were in a tiny minority at any time, but nevertheless there was no denying his impact. Even at close-up range there was none of that weakness, that almost effeminate regularity of feature so often found in the faces of many very good-looking men. He looked for all the world like a slightly Latinate reincarnation of a younger Errol Flynn, but harder, tougher, more enduring. The only flaw, if one could call it flaw, lay in the eyes. There seemed to be something ever so slightly wrong with them, as if the pupils were slightly flattened, giving a hard, bright glitter. May be it was just the lighting at the table. But there was nothing wrong with them as eyes; he had twenty-twenty vision all right and was using it all to study the captain’s table. Miss Beresford or Miss Harcourt, I couldn’t be sure which; he didn’t look the kind of man who would waste his time studying any of the others at that table. The courses came and went. Antoine was on duty in the kitchen that night, and you could almost reach out and feel the blissful hush that descended on the company.

Velvet footed Goanese waiters moved soundlessly on the dark grey pile of the Persian carpet; food appeared and vanished as if in a dream; an arm always appeared at the precisely correct moment with the precisely correct wine. But never for me. I drank soda water. It was in my contract. The coffee appeared. This was the moment when I had to earn my money. When Antoine was on duty and on top of his form, conversation was a desecration and a hallowed hush of appreciation, an almost cathedral ecstasy, was the correct form. But about forty minutes of this rapturous silence was about par for the course. It couldn’t and never did go on. I never yet met a rich manor woman, for that matter of it who didn’t list talking, chiefly and preferably about themselves, as among their favourite occupations. And the prime target for their observations was invariably the officer who sat at the head of the table. I looked round ours and wondered who would set the ball rolling.

Miss Harrbride, her original Central-European name was unpronounceable — thin, scrawny, sixtyish, and tough as whalebone, who had made a fortune out of highly expensive and utterly worthless cosmetic preparations which she wisely refrained from using on herself? Mr. Greenstreet, her husband, a grey anonymity of a man with a grey sunken face, who had married her for heaven only knew what reason, for he was a very wealthy man in his own right? Tony Carreras? His father, Miguel Carreras? There should have been a sixth at my table, to replace the Curtis family of three who, along with the Harrisons, had been so hurriedly called home from Kingston, but the old man who had come aboard in his wheel chair was apparently to have his meals served in his cabin during the voyage, with his nurses in attendance. Four men and one woman; it made an ill-balanced table.

Senor Miguel Carreras spoke first. “The Campari’s prices, Mr. Carter, are quite atrocious,” he said calmly. He puffed appreciatively at his cigar. “Robbery on the high seas would be a very fitting description. On the other hand, the cuisine is as claimed. You have a chef of divine gifts. It is perhaps not too much to pay for a foretaste of a better world.”

This made Senor Carreras very wealthy indeed and was old hat to me. Wealthy men never mentioned money, lest they be thought not to have enough of it. Very wealthy men, on the other hand, to whom money as such no longer mattered, had no such inhibitions. The passengers on the Campari complained all the time about the prices. And they kept coming back.

“From all accounts, sir, ‘divine’ is just about right. Experienced travellers who have stayed in the best hotels on both sides of the Atlantic maintain that Antoine has no equal in either Europe or America. Except, perhaps, Henriques.”

“Henriques?”

“Our alternate chef. He’s on to-morrow.”

“Do I detect a certain immodesty, Mr. Carter, in advancing the claims of the Campari?” there was no offence meant, not with that smile. “I don’t think so, sir. But the next twenty-four hours will speak for themselves — and Henriques — better than I can.”

“Touche!” he smiled again and reached for the bottle of Remy Martin — the waiters vanished at coffee time. “And the prices?”

“They’re terrible,” I agreed. I told that to all the passengers and it seemed to please them. “We offer what no other ship in the world offers, but the prices are still scandalous. At least a dozen people in this room at this very moment have told me that — and most of them are here for at least their third trip.”

“You make your point, Mr. Carter.” It was Tony Carreras speaking and his voice was as one might have expected slow, controlled, with a deep resonant timbre. He looked at his father. “Remember the waiting list at the Blue Mail’s offices?”

“Indeed. We were pretty far down the list and what a list. Half the millionaires in Central and South America. I suppose we may consider ourselves fortunate, Mr. Carter, in that we were the only ones able to accept at such short notice after the sudden departure of our predecessors in Jamaica. But don’t forget that to catch the boat we had to make a hurried four-hundred-mile dash from the capital to Carracio by air and road. And what roads!” Senor Carreras obviously didn’t share the Carracio agent’s respectful terror of the revolutionary government.

I wondered how a man of Carreras’ obviously aristocratic background had been able to retain his obvious wealth in the face of the forces of change that had overcome and completely wiped out the old order — and why, if money was so desperately short on the island, he was allowed to convert very large sums of it into dollars to pay for this cruise, or how and why he had been able to leave the island at all. But I kept my wonderings to myself. Instead I said, “You’re still a long way off the record, Senor Carreras. Last trip we had a family from Santiago and two men from Beirut, both of whom had flown to New York specially for the round voyage.”

“And they can’t all be wrong, eh? Don’t worry, Mr. Carter, I intend to enjoy myself. Can you give us any idea of our itinerary?”

“That’s supposed to be one of the attractions, sir. No set itinerary. Our schedule largely depends on the availability and destination of cargoes. One thing certain, we’re going to New York. Most of our passengers boarded there and passengers like to be returned to where they came from.” He knew this anyway, knew that we had coffins consigned to New York. “We may stop off at Nassau. Depends how the captain feels — the company gives him a lot of leeway in adjusting local schedules to suit the best needs of the passengers — and the weather reports. This is the hurricane season, Mr. Carreras, or pretty close to it. If the reports are bad Captain Bullen will want all the sea room he can get and give Nassau a bye.” I smiled. “Among the other attractions of the S.S. Campari is that we do not make our passengers seasick unless it is absolutely essential.”

“Considerate, very considerate,” Carreras murmured. He looked at me speculatively. “But we’ll be making one or two calls on the east coast, I take it?”

“No idea, sir. Normally, yes. Again it’s up to the captain, and how the captain behaves depends on a certain Dr. Slingsby Caroline.”

“They haven’t caught him yet,” Miss Harrbride declared in her rough gravelly voice. She scowled with all the fierce patriotism of a first-generation American, looked round the table, and gave us all the impartial benefit of her scowl. “It’s incredible, frankly incredible. I still don’t believe it. A thirteenth-generation American!” I could imagine how unthinkably remote thirteen generations of American ancestors must be to Miss Harrbride; she’d have traded her million-dollar cosmetic empire for even a couple of them. “I was reading all about him in the Tribune two days ago. Did you know that the Slingsbys came to the Potomac in 1662, just five years after the Washingtons. Three hundred years! Imagine, American for three hundred years, and now a renegade! A traitor! Thirteen generations!”

“Don’t take it too hard, Miss Harrbride,” I said encouragingly.

“When it comes to skipping with the family silver, Dr. Caroline just doesn’t begin to be in the same class as my countrymen. The last Englishman who deflected to the communist world had an ancestor in the doomsday book. Thirty solid generations. Yet he took off and lit out at the drop of a hat.”

“Faugh!” said Miss Harrbride. “We heard about this character.”

Tony Carreras, like his father, had had his education in some Ivy League college; he was rather less formal in his attitude towards the English language. “Slingsby Caroline, I mean. Makes very little sense to me. What’s he going to do with this weapon — the twister, they call it, isn’t it? Even if he does get it out of the country? Who’s going to buy it? I mean, as nuclear devices go it could be ranked almost as a toy: it certainly isn’t going to change the balance of world power, no matter who gets his hands on it.”

“Tony’s right,” Miguel Carreras agreed. “Who is going to buy it? Besides, there’s nothing secret any more about the making of nuclear weapons. If a country has enough wealth and technical resources — so far, there are only four in the world — it can build a nuclear weapon any time. If it hasn’t, all the plans or working models in the world are useless to them.” “He’s going to have an interesting time in hawking the twister around,” Tony Carreras finished. “Especially since from all descriptions you can’t get the twister into a suitcase. But what’s this guy got to do with us, Mr. Carter?”

“As long as he is at large every cargo vessel leaving the eastern seaboard gets a pretty thorough going over to make sure that neither he nor the twister is aboard. Blows up the turn-round of cargo and passenger ships by 100 per cent, which means that the longshoremen are losing stevedoring money pretty fast. They’ve gone on strike — and the chances are, so many words have been said on both sides, that they’ll stay on strike when they do nab Dr. Caroline. If.”

“Traitor,” said Miss Harrbride. “Thirteen generations!”

“So we stay away from the east coast, eh?” Carreras senior asked.

“Meantime, anyway?”

“As long as possible, sir. But New York is a must. When, I don’t know. But if it’s still strike-bound, we might go up the St. Lawrence first. Depends.”

“Romance, mystery, and adventure.” Carreras smiled. “Just like your brochure said.” he glanced over my shoulder. “Looks like a visitor for you, Mr. Carter.”

I twisted in my seat. It was a visitor for me. Rusty Williams — Rusty, from his shock of flaming hair — was advancing towards me, whites immaculately pressed, uniform cap clasped stiffly under his left arm. Rusty was sixteen, our youngest cadet, desperately shy and very impressionable. Cadets were not normally allowed in the dining room and Rusty’s eyes were goggling as they took in the young ladies at the captain’s table, but he managed to haul them back to me as he halted by my side with a perceptible click of his heels.

“What is it, Rusty?” Age-old convention said that cadets should always be addressed by their surnames, but everyone called Rusty just that. It seemed impossible not to.

“The captain’s compliments, sir. Could he see you on the bridge, please, Mr. Carter?”

“I’ll be right up.” Rusty turned to leave and I caught the gleam in Susan Beresford’s eye, a gleam that generally heralded some crack at my expense. This one predictably would be about my indispensability, about the distraught captain sending for his trusty servant when all was lost, and although I didn’t think she was the sort of girl to say it in front of a cadet, I wouldn’t have wagered pennies on it, so I rose hastily to my feet, said, “Excuse me, Miss Harrbride, excuse me, gentlemen,” and followed Rusty quickly out of the door into the starboard alleyway. He was waiting for me. “The Captain is in his cabin, sir. He’d like to see you there.”

“What? You told me — "

“I know, sir. He told me to say that. Mr. Jamieson is on the bridge” -George Jamieson was our Third Officer- ”and Captain Bullen is in his cabin. With Mr. Cummings.” I nodded and left. I remembered now that Cummings hadn’t been at his accustomed table as I’d come out, although he’d certainly been there at the beginning of dinner. The captain’s quarters were immediately below the bridge and I was there in ten seconds. I knocked on the polished teak door, heard a gruff voice, and went in. The Blue Mail certainly did its commodore well. Even Captain Bullen, no admirer of the sybaritic life, had never been heard to complain of being pampered. He had a three room-and-bathroom suite, done in the best millionaire’s taste, and his day cabin, in which I now was, was a pretty fair guide to the rest — wine-red carpet that sunk beneath your feet, darkly crimson drapes, gleaming sycamore panelling, narrow oak beams overhead, oak and green leather for the chairs and settee. Captain Bullen looked up at me when I came in. He didn’t have any of the signs of a man enjoying the comforts of home.

“Something wrong, sir?” I asked.

“Sit down.” He waved to a chair and sighed. “There’s something wrong all right. Banana-legs Benson is missing. White reported it ten minutes ago.” Banana-legs Benson sounded like the name of a domesticated anthropoid or, at best, like a professional wrestler on the small-town circuits, but, in fact, it belonged to our very suave, polished, and highly accomplished head steward, Frederick Benson: Benson had the well-deserved reputation of being a very firm disciplinarian, and it was one of his disgruntled subordinates who, in the process of receiving a severe and merited dressing-down, had noticed the negligible clearance between Benson’s knees and rechristened him as soon as his back was turned. The name had stuck, chiefly because of its incongruity and utter unsuitability. White was the assistant chief steward.

I said nothing. Bullen didn’t appreciate anyone, especially his officers, indulging in double-takes, exclamations, or fatuous repetition. Instead I looked at the man seated across the table from the captain: Howard Cummings. Cummings, the purser, a small, plump, amiable, and infinitely shrewd Irishman was, next to Bullen, the most important man on the ship. No one questioned that, though Cummings himself gave no sign that this was so. On a passenger ship, a good purser is worth his weight in gold and Cummings was a pearl beyond any price. In his three years on the Campari, friction and trouble among — and complaints from — the passengers had been almost completely unknown.

Howard Cummings was a genius in mediation, compromise, the soothing of ruffled feelings, and the handling of people in general. Captain Bullen would as soon have thought of cutting off his right hand as of trying to send Cummings off the ship. I looked at Cummings for three reasons. He knew everything that went on on the Campari, from the secret takeover bids being planned in the telegraph lounge to the heart troubles of the youngest stoker in the boiler room. He was the man ultimately responsible for all the stewards aboard the ship. And, finally, he was a close personal friend of banana-legs: they had sailed together for ten years, as chief purser and chief steward, on one of the great transatlantic liners, and it had been one of the master strokes in the career of that arch-lurer, Lord Dexter, when he had lured both those men away from their ship and installed them aboard the Campari. Cummings caught my look and shook his dark head. “Sorry, Johnny, I’m as much in the dark as you. I saw him shortly before dinner, about ten to eight, it would have been, when I was having a noggin with the paying guests.” Cummings’ noggin came from a special whisky bottle filled only with ginger ale. “We’d white up here just now. He says he saw Benson in cabin suite six, fixing it for the night about eight-twenty — half an hour ago, no, nearer forty minutes now. He expected to see him shortly afterwards because for every night for the past couple of years, whenever the weather was good, Benson and White have had a cigarette together on deck when the passengers were at dinner.”

“Regular time?” I interrupted. “Very. Eight-thirty, near enough, never later than eight thirty-five. But not to-night. At eight-forty White went to look for him in his cabin. No sign of him there. Organized half a dozen stewards for a search and still nothing doing. He sent for me and I came to the captain.”

And the captain sent for me, I thought. Send for old trusty Carter when there’s dirty work on hand. I looked at Bullen. “A search, sir?”

“That’s it, mister. Damned nuisance, just one damned thing after another. Quietly, if you can.”

“Of course, sir. Can I have Wilson, the bo’sun, some stewards and A.B.S?”

“You can have Lord Dexter and his board of directors just so long as you find Benson,” Bullen grunted.

“Yes, sir.” I turned to Cummings. “Didn’t suffer from any ill-health, did he? Liable to dizziness, faintness, heart attacks, that sort of thing?”

“Flat feet was all.” Cummings smiled. He wasn’t feeling like smiling. “Had his annual check-up last month from Doe Marston. One hundred per cent. The flat feet are an occupational disease.”

I turned back to Captain Bullen. “Could I have twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour, for a quiet look round, sir, first? With Mr. Cummings. It’s a calm, windless night. There’s been no word of any shouts, any cries for help, and as there’s always a good few of the crew on the lower decks at night the chances are that any thing like that would have been heard. And he’s not likely to be ill. What I’m getting at is that it’s a hundred to one against his being in any trouble where he requires immediate help. If he did require it, he’s probably past all help by now. I can’t see there’s any harm in waiting another twenty minutes before raising the alarm.”

“No one’s going to raise any alarm, mister. This is the Campari.”

“Yes, sir. But whether it’s broadcast over the tannoy system or whispered in a dark corner, it’ll make no difference. If Benson is missing and is going to stay that way it will be all over the ship by midnight to-night. Or earlier.”

“Job’s comforter,” Bullen growled. “All right, Johnny, you, too, Howie, see what you can find.”

“Your authority to look anywhere, sir?” I asked.

“Within reason, of course.”

“Everywhere?” I insisted. “Or I’m wasting my time. You know that, sir.” “My god! And it’s only a couple of days since that Jamaican lot. Remember how our passengers reacted to the customs and American navy going through their cabins? The board of directors are going to love this.” He looked up wearily. “I suppose you are referring to the passengers’ quarters?”

“We’ll do it quietly, sir. They’re still at dinner. And Howie here can fix anything that comes up.”

“Twenty minutes then. You’ll find me on the bridge. Don’t tramp on any toes if you can help it.”

We left, dropped down to “A” deck, and made a right left turn into the hundred-foot central passageway between the cabin suites on “A” deck: there were only six of these suites, three on each side. White was about halfway down the passageway, nervously pacing up and down. I beckoned to him and he came walking quickly towards us, a thin, balding character with a permanently pained expression who suffered from the twin disabilities of chronic dyspepsia and over conscientiousness.

“Got all the passkeys, White?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Fine.” I nodded to the first main door on my right, number one suite on the port side. “Open it, will you?”

White looked at Cummings. It was an understood thing at sea that deck officers never, never went into the Campari’s passenger accommodation except by passenger invitation, and even then only by kind permission of the purser and head steward. But to burgle the passenger accommodation.

“You heard the Chief Officer.” I wondered when I’d previously heard a harsh note in Howie’s voice and decided never; he and banana-legs Benson were pretty good friends. “Open up.”

He opened up. I brushed past him, followed by the purser. There was no need to switch on the lights — they were already on; asking the Campari’s passengers, at the prices they were paying, to remember to turn off the lights would have been a waste of breath and an insult. There were no bunks in the Campari’s cabin suites. Four posters, and massive four posters at that, with concealed and mechanically operated sideboards which could be quickly raised in bad weather; such was the standard of modern weather reporting, the latitude allowed Captain Bullen in avoiding bad weather, and the efficiency of our Denny-Brown stabilisers that I don’t think those sideboards had ever been used. Seasickness was not allowed aboard the Campari. The suite was composed of a sleeping cabin, an adjacent lounge and bathroom, and beyond the lounge another cabin. All the plate-glass windows faced out over the port side. We went through the cabins in a minute, looking beneath beds, examining cupboards, wardrobes, behind drapes, everywhere. Nothing. We left. Out in the passageway again I nodded at the suite opposite. Number two. “This one now,” I said to White.

“Sorry, sir. Can’t do it. It’s the old man and his nurses, sir. They had three special trays sent up to them — when, now let me see; yes, sir, about six-fifteen to-night, and Mr. Carreras, the gentleman who came aboard to-day, he gave instructions that they were not to be disturbed till morning.” White was enjoying this. “Very strict instructions, sir.”

“Carreras?” I looked at the purser. “What’s he got to do with this, Mr. Cummings?”

“You haven’t heard? No, I don’t suppose so. Seems like Mr. Carreras — the father — is the senior partner in one of the biggest law firms in the country, Cerdan and Carreras. Mr. Cerdan, founder of the firm, is the old gentleman in the cabin here. Seems he’s been a semi-paralysed cripple — but a pretty tough old cripple — for the past eight years. His son and wife — Cerdan junior being the next senior partner to Carreras — have had him on their hands all that time, and I believe the old boy has been a handful and a half. I understand Carreras offered to take him along primarily to give Cerdan junior and his wife a break. Carreras, naturally, feels responsible for him, so I suppose that’s why he left his orders with Benson.”

“Doesn’t sound like a man at death’s door to me,” I said.

“Nobody’s wanting to kill him off, just to ask him a few questions. Or the nurses.” White opened his mouth to protest again, but I pushed roughly past him and knocked at the door. No answer. I waited all of thirty seconds and then knocked again, loudly. White, beside me, was stiff with outrage and disapproval. I ignored him and was lifting my hand to put some real weight on the wood when I heard a movement and suddenly the door opened inwards. It was the shorter of the two nurses, the plump one, who had answered the door. She had an old-fashioned pull-string linen cap over her head and was clutching with one hand a light woollen wrap that left only the toes of her mules showing. The cabin behind her was only dimly lit, but I could see it held a couple of beds, one of which was rumpled. The free hand with which she rubbed her eyes told the rest of the story. “My sincere apologies, miss,” I said.

“I had no idea you were in bed. I’m the Chief Officer of this ship and this is Mr. Cummings, the purser. Your chief steward is missing and we were wondering if you may have seen or heard anything that might help us.”

“Missing?” she clutched the wrap more tightly. “You mean -you mean he’s just disappeared?”

“Let’s say we can’t find him. Can you help us at all?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been asleep. You see,” she explained, “we take it in three-hour turns to be by old Mr. Cerdan’s bed. It is essential that he is watched all the time. I was trying to get in some sleep before my turn came to relieve Miss Werner.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “You can’t tell us anything then?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Perhaps your friend Miss Werner can?”

“Miss Werner?” she blinked at me. “But Mr. Cerdan is not to be…” “Please. This might be very serious. One of the crew is missing, and delay doesn’t increase his chances.”

“Very well.” like all competent nurses she knew how far she could go and when to make up her mind. “But I must ask you to be very quiet and not to disturb Mr. Cerdan in any way at all.” She didn’t say anything about the possibility of Mr. Cerdan disturbing us, but she might have warned us. As we passed through the open door of his cabin he was sitting up in bed, a book on the blankets before him, with a bright overhead bed light illuminating a crimson tasselled nightcap and throwing his face into deep shadow, but a shadow not quite deep enough to hide the hostile gleam under bar straight tufted eyebrows. The hostile gleam, it seemed to me, was as much a permanent feature of his face as the large beak of a nose that jutted out over a straggling white moustache. The nurse who led the way made to introduce us, but Cerdan waved her to silence with a peremptory hand. Imperious, I thought, was the word for the old boy, not to mention bad-tempered and downright ill-mannered.

“I hope you can explain this damnable outrage, sir.” His voice was glacial enough to make a polar bear shiver. “Bursting into my private stateroom without so much as by your leave.” He switched his gimlet eyes to Cummings. “You. You there. You had your orders, damn it. Strictest privacy, absolutely. Explain yourself, sir.”

“I cannot tell you how sorry I am, Mr. Cerdan,” Cummings said smoothly. “Only the most unusual circumstances…”

“Rubbish!” Whatever this old coot was living for, it couldn’t have been with the object of out live his friends; he’d lost his last friend before he’d left the nursery. “Amanda! Get the captain on the phone. At once!” The tall, thin nurse sitting on the high-backed chair by the bedside made to gather up her knitting — an all but finished pale-blue cardigan — lying on her knees, but I gestured to her to remain where she was.

“No need to tell the captain, Miss Werner. He knows all about it — he sent us here. We have only one small request to make of you and Mr. Cerdan.”

“And I have only one very small request to make of you, sir.” His voice cracked into a falsetto, excitement or anger or age or all three of them. “Get the hell out of here!”

I thought about taking a deep breath to calm myself, but even that two or three seconds delay would only have precipitated another explosion, so I said at once, “very good, sir. But first I would like to know if either yourself or Miss Werner here heard any strange or unusual sounds inside the past hour or saw anything that struck you as unusual. Our chief steward is missing. So far we have found nothing to explain his disappearance.”

“Missing, hah?” Cerdan snorted. “Probably drunk or asleep.” Then, as an afterthought: “Or both.”

“He is not that sort of man,” Cummings said quietly. “Can you help us?”

“I’m sorry, sir.” Miss Werner, the nurse, had a low, husky voice. “We heard and saw nothing. Nothing at all that might be of any help. But if there’s anything we can do…”

“There’s nothing for you to do,” Cerdan interrupted harshly, “Except your job. We can’t help you, gentlemen. Good evening.”

Once more outside in the passageway, I let go a long, deep breath that I seemed to have been holding for the past two minutes and turned to Cummings. “I don’t care how much that old battle-axe is paying for his stateroom,” I said bitterly. “He’s still being undercharged.”

“I can see why Mr. and Mrs. Cerdan junior were glad to have him off their hands for a bit,” Cummings conceded. Coming from the normally imperturbable and diplomatic purser, this was the uttermost limit in outright condemnation. He glanced at his watch. “Not getting anywhere, are we? And in another fifteen, twenty minutes the passengers will start drifting back to their cabins. How about if you finish off here while I go below with White?”

“Right. Ten minutes.” I took keys from White and started on the remaining four suites while Cummings left for the six on the deck below. Ten minutes later, having drawn a complete blank in three of the four remaining suites, I found myself in the last of them, the big one on the port side, aft, belonging to Julius Beresford and his family. I searched the cabin belonging to Beresford and his wife — and by this time I was really searching, not just only for Benson, but for any signs that he might have been there — but again a blank. The same in the lounge and bathroom. I moved into a second and smaller cabin the one belonging to Beresford’s daughter. Nothing behind the furniture, nothing behind the drapes, nothing under the four-poster. I moved to the aft bulkhead and slid back the roll doors that turned the entire side of the cabin into one huge wardrobe. Miss Susan Beresford, I reflected, certainly did herself well in the way of clothes. There must have been about sixty or seventy hangers in that wall cupboard, and if any one hanger was draped with anything that cost less than two or three hundred dollars, I sadly missed my guess. I ploughed my way through the Balenciagas, Diors, and Givenchys, looking behind and beneath. But nothing there. I closed the roll doors and moved across to a small wardrobe in a corner. It was full of furs, coats, capes, stoles; why anyone should haul that stuff along on a cruise to the Caribbean was completely beyond me. I laid my hand on a particularly fine full-length specimen and was moving it to one side to peer into the darkness behind when I heard a faint click, as of a handle being released, and a voice said: “It is rather a nice mink, isn’t it, Mr. Carter? That should be worth two years’ salary to you any day.”