Dead Men's Hearts

“Gideon!”‘

His eyes opened. The room was black and silent. Beneath him the bed vibrated with the steady throbbing of the ship’s engines. The tom-toms started again.

“Someone’s at the door,” Julie murmured beside him.

“Right,” Gideon said, more or less coming awake. “Door.”

“Gideon, wake up, will you?” It was Phil. “There’s been an accident. It’s Haddon.”

God. Not the kind of words to bring one gently from sleep. Gideon pressed his fingers to his eyes, rolled out of bed, and stumbled to the door, barking his shin on a corner of the refrigerator in the unfamiliar room. He edged the door open and squinted into the bright light of the corridor.

“Phil—what happened? What time is it?”

“It’s five-thirty. He fell overboard. Last night. He must have been wandering around by himself—”

“Last night! You don’t mean he’s—”

“As a doornail. They found his body half an hour ago, and Wahab’s tearing his hair out.”

“Wahab.”

“The boat manager. Come on, wake up. We’ve already called the police, but Wahab’s screaming for a doctor at the scene and you’re the closest thing we’ve got, so let’s get going.” He pushed the door open further. Oh, Lord, you don’t even have any clothes on. Get dressed, will you?“

“Okay, all right, I’ll be right out.” He closed the door, leaving Phil in the hallway, and flicked on the lights.

“You heard?” he said to Julie as he slipped quickly into a shirt and trousers.

She nodded thoughtfully, sitting up in bed under the covering sheet, her arms around her knees. “Gideon, you don’t suppose…” She stopped, looking hard at him.

He glanced up from tying the laces on his deck moccasins. “Suppose what?”

“You don’t suppose that… that someone…”

But he did suppose. Haddon had tracked down the “missing” head, or so he’d said. He’d made a public fuss about it, he’d offered to show it to one and all, he’d brayed about having “thoughts” on who had done it and why. That had all been less than twelve hours ago, and now he was dead. As a result of falling overboard. In the middle of the night. With no witnesses.

Wasn’t it just a little too convenient, too timely, too… tidy? Wasn’t it possible that he’d touched on something that someone wanted to keep secret so badly that—

No, this wasn’t even conjecture, not even surmise. It was no more than a mechanical reaction, a kind of conditioned paranoia. There were a thousand other possible explanations, why leap to this one? Damn it, this was what came of taking on more forensic cases than were good for him. He was starting to see murder behind every door, under every freshly spaded garden plot.

And now he even had Julie doing it. “No, I don’t suppose,” he said gruffly. “You know what? You think about murder too much.”

Her lips curved in the palest of smiles. “Gee, why do you suppose that is?”

Apparently, Haddon had fallen from a rear corner of the upper deck, Phil told him as they hurried down the corridor and went below by way of a musty, enclosed stairway that was ordinarily used only by the crew. He had not, as Gideon had supposed, fallen directly into the water, but had struck a one-by-two-foot wooden platform, or step, that projected from the side of the lower deck near the stern to make boarding easier for the men who delivered food and supplies in heavy sacks and boxes. He had evidently landed on his head, then toppled into the water, but one of the epaulets from his jacket had caught on a metal rod that was part of the platform’s support, and he had been dragged along beside the ship since a little after midnight.

“How do you know the time?” Gideon asked.

“One of the crewmen was taking soundings and he heard a thump in the rear, and then a splash. He had a look but didn’t see anything. But then he didn’t think to look straight down almost under the platform; he was looking behind the ship, in the wake. Then this morning one of the cooks saw him while he was dumping garbage overboard. They came and got me. I went and had a look and turned right around and came and got you.”

He pushed open a dented metal door. “Here we are, ground floor.”

The Menshiya was a sort of floating “Upstairs, Downstairs.” Above, on the passenger deck, all was comfortable chairs, lounges, picture-windowed staterooms, and sparkling cleanliness. It was like a roomy, floating palace, seemingly self-maintaining except for the pleasant, cordial Mr. Wahab, and an occasional silent, smartly groomed waiter to bring drinks or serve food. But here at water level, it was a different world, dingy, scuffed, smelly, and cramped. Passengers did not come down here. Crew members, except for the waiters and stewards, never left.

The space into which they emerged from the stairwell had sacks of rice, or beans, or flour stacked in one corner, clean towels and linens in open boxes in another, and some hammocks and bedclothes thrown carelessly into yet another. Other hammocks, still strung on hooks attached to walls and posts, were being pulled down by excited crew members. It was only with an effort that Gideon recognized one of the young men, in jeans and age- grayed white undershirt, as the smiling, white-jacketed boy who had played the xylophone at dinner.

Phil led him quickly from this dormitory-storage room with its single naked light bulb through a galley that stank of cooking oil and engine exhaust. There was a chef’s sink, two big food lockers on opposite walls, and an enormous 1930s cooking range in the center with all four legs in kerosene-filled tuna cans to keep the roaches at bay. An aproned old man sitting on a stool, apparently annoyed at having his work schedule disrupted, grumbled at them as they went by, a half-inch cigarette stub jiggling on his lip.

The back door of the galley led to a small deck at the stern, where there was a deeply worn butcher-block table at which the kitchen staff chopped everything from sides of beef to bunches of scallions. Here too was where food deliveries were made from shore, and where the crew came for their breaks, to sit on the deck, and talk, and smoke, their backs against the gunwale.