And the deep blue sea

memory of their last meal here. ‘What’s your name, steward?’

‘Karl,’ the youth said. ‘Karl Berger.’

‘Well, I think all I want, Karl, is some coffee and a dish of the stewed apricots.’

The crew had done what it could to eradicate the traces. A new light fixture of a different type had been installed in the overhead, and the broken mirror removed. Where the bullet had entered the bulkhead behind the mirror, the hole had been drilled out and a plug installed, stained to approximate the shade of the paneling. Goddard finished the fruit, lighted a cigarette, and was sipping coffee when he was struck by the thought that it was curious that Krasicki should have had a gun aboard. No doubt it had been in that triple-locked steamer trunk Barset had spoken of, but unless the trunk had a Customs-proof secret compartment he was asking for trouble in wholesale lots. The authorities of all countries took a very dim view of tourists packing handguns. He shrugged. The man was unbalanced; he might have been carrying around a whole arsenal.

Goddard turned then and looked at the back of Egerton’s chair beside him. Apparently neither of the bullets had gone on through; the backrest was unmarked. Unless, he thought, they had passed under it, between it and the seat, in the space between the two upright members. He looked around at the bulkhead directly behind it, thinking this was a grisly pastime to accompany his morning coffee. There was no trace of a bullet hole in the paneling.

‘They didn’t go through, Sherlock,’ a voice said behind him. Goddard turned. Lind was smiling at him from the doorway, seeming to fill it with his height and great width of shoulder. He came on in and sat down.

‘I was just wondering about it,’ Goddard said. ‘What was the caliber of the gun?’

‘Nine millimeter,’ Lind said. ‘It was a Czech automatic. But it’s not the caliber that matters; it’s what it hits. You got a good grip on your breakfast?’

‘Sure,’ Goddard said.

‘I probed both of ‘em. One broke a rib going in, and as near as I could tell from the angle the second one hit one of the vertebrae. There was no exit wound at all, which is why there was so much hemorrhaging through the entrance wounds. Where they come out, you could drain a swimming pool.’

‘I know,’ Goddard said. Something about it still bothered him, but he wasn’t sure what it was; anyway, Lind knew more about it than he did. ‘Any word yet from Consuela Santos?’

‘Yeah.’ Lind lit a cigarette. ‘Skipper got a reply about one this morning. She says Egerton had no living relatives except a cousin he’d been out of touch with for years. She thought he was in Australia, but she doesn’t know where, and he could be dead himself by now.’

‘So you’ll bury him at sea?’

Lind nodded. ‘That’s all we can do, and turn his effects over to the British consul in Manila. It’ll be at four this afternoon, just at the change of watch. Have you ever seen one?’

‘No,’ Goddard said.

‘Not much to it.’ There was a nicker of amusement in the sardonic blue eyes. ‘Dress is optional. With your extensive wardrobe, I’d suggest a frock coat, black top hat, and a dark ascot.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got to check Krasicki again, see if I can get through to him. You want to come along?’

‘Sure.’ Goddard started to get up.

‘Finish your coffee. There’s plenty of time.’

‘Do you know anything about him at all?’ Goddard asked. ‘Family? Why he was going to Manila?’

Lind nodded. 'I talked to him quite a bit while I was trying to treat his fever. He doesn’t know whether he has any family or not; he was never able to find any of them after the war. He was in the Polish army and taken prisoner in 1939. He’s Jewish, of course, so he went the usual route, the concentration camps, cattle cars, labor battalions, medical experimentation, waiting for the gas chamber. Somewhere along the line I think he was castrated. Couple of times I’ve gone into his cabin and he’d have a hand in his crotch, crying—’

‘Oh, Christ.’ Goddard said.

‘Yeah. Anyway, after the war he was a DP, shuffled around from one country to another, but he finally made it to Brazil and they let him become a citizen. He’s a botanist, and before the war was an associate professor of silviculture at Cracow University. He became quite an expert on tropical hardwoods, and does surveys for timber exporters. He just finished one over in the montana of Peru, and was going to do the same thing in Mindanao and Luzon. Likes being out in the jungle; he’s afraid of people.’

‘You wonder why,’ Goddard said.

They went outside and down the ladder to the deck below. It was a brassy, stifling morning with no breeze at all except that set up by the forward progress of the ship itself. The bow wave spread outward and back in a long V toward the horizon, and far out a school of porpoises leaped and played in it, keeping pace with its steady march across the flat and unending prairie of the sea. Off to port, several miles away, was a piled dark mass of thunderheads shot through with the fitful play of lightning and trailing a purple veil of rain.

‘Going to have some squalls today,’ Lind said.

No sound issued from the padlocked door. Lind unsnapped the lock, and they went in. Krasicki, clad only in the wrinkled white linen trousers and no longer bound, lay on one of the lower bunks. His eyes were open, but he did not even turn his head as they entered, and gave no indication he was aware of them at all. Goddard watched carefully as Lind spoke to him in English, and then in German, but there was no expression of any kind in the eyes, simply blankness. Except for the faint rise and fall of the hairless and emaciated chest, and the motion of a hand as he brushed an imaginary fly from in front of his face, he might have been a corpse. University professor to vegetable, by easy stages, Goddard thought. The wreckage, Egerton had said; and then he’d been killed by it. ‘The lines are all down,’ he said.

Lind nodded. ‘Complete withdrawal. There may be a chance it’s only temporary; all we can do is wait.’

The Filipino boy entered with a bowl of fruit, some sandwiches, and water. Goddard noted that the bowl and pitcher were of soft plastic and the sandwiches were on a paper plate. Krasicki’s belt had been removed, and the garish tie was nowhere in the room. They were taking no chances of a suicide attempt. There was no head, but he had been given a sanitary pail; any attempt to lead him to a toilet might provoke another outburst.

They went out. As Lind was relocking the door, Goddard remarked, ‘It’s odd he’s so pale; I mean, with an outdoor job.’

‘Heliophobe,’ Lind said. ‘Can’t stand sunlight at all; his skin burns like a crisp, so he has to stay covered completely. And as a matter of fact, in the jungle there’s practically no sunlight anyway. He had kind of a lame botanical joke about it; said if he were a plant he’d be classified as negatively heliotropic. It means turning away from the sun.’ He broke off as they came to a companionway at the end of the passage. ‘Come on down. You can see how it’s done.’

‘Egerton?’ Goddard asked.

‘Yeah. Bos’n’s working on him now.’

They went down to the next deck. There was a dimly lighted passageway here outside the engine room casing which contained a number of locked storerooms and the steward’s big freezer and chill box. One of the doors was unlocked. Lind opened it and stuck his head in. ‘How you doing, Boats?’ He went in, followed by Goddard.

It was a bleak steel cubicle with a single overhead light, empty except for two wooden horses with a door lying across them. Egerton’s body was on the door, being sewn into the canvas burial sack by the bos’n and one of the sailors, a blond-bearded, heavily built man in his twenties whom Goddard had heard addressed as Otto. They looked up from their work and nodded, but said nothing. The sack was a single long strip of white canvas a yard wide, doubled under Egerton’s feet and stitched up the sides by the two men with sail needles and white twine. They were almost finished; only the head remained exposed. The gray hair was still neat, even in death, Goddard noted, and the slender face was pale as marble under the naked light.

‘It’s weighted at the foot,’ Lind said. ‘The engineers gave us the cap of an old bearing. Weighs about fifty pounds.’

Captain Steen came in, carrying a rolled flag. ‘Good morning, Mr. Goddard,’ he said, and turned to the mate. ‘Here’s the Union Jack, Mr. Lind.’

Lind took the flag. ‘After well-deck, port side; that all right?’

‘Yes. And I would appreciate it if everybody who can would change to shore clothes. That doesn’t include the black gang on watch, of course.’

Lind nodded. ‘I’ll pass the word. Incidentally, there are two British subjects in the crew; the eight-to-twelve fireman and the second cook. It might be a gesture of some kind if we asked them to bear a hand bringing the body out. And maybe Mr. Goddard would like to represent the passengers.’