And the deep blue sea

deck, stopping every few minutes at the aft end of it to sniff the air and study the ventilators in the well-deck. It was just after one p.m., when he finally saw it, a wispy thread of smoke snaking upward from the starboard ventilator of number three hold. It thinned and disappeared, but there was no longer any doubt. The Leander’s cargo was afire.

Somewhere in the depths of number three hold was a smoldering bale of cotton like a cancer cell, being consumed by slow combustion that inexorably spread outward to attack adjoining bales. It could have been burning inside when it came aboard, or some longshoreman’s stolen cigarette might have started it. The smoldering could go on for days or weeks without bursting into flame, eating away, charring, half-smoldering, while the temperature inside the mass continued to rise, until it came out on the surface and some of the bales below began to collapse, exposing enough of it to the air to become a raging fire.

Did Steen know about it? Probably, Goddard thought, but unless he had a fire-smothering system in the holds there wasn’t much he could do about it but hold his breath and pray. If the burning bales were far down or in the center of the hold, trying to get water to them through thousands of others was futile, short of flooding the entire hold.

Sparks came down the ladder. He jerked his head curtly. ‘Captain says to come up to his office.’

Goddard studied him with silent and calculated arrogance for thirty seconds, and then said, ‘It must have suffered in the translation.’ He could get enough of this surly bastard; if he were convinced all Yanquis were overbearing pigs, why disappoint him?

With no change of expression, Sparks repeated the message in Spanish, which Goddard knew well enough to follow. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But I wasn’t referring to the language. Just the manners.’ He went up the ladder.

Steen looked worried. ‘Sit down, Mr. Goddard,’ he said with attempted casualness that didn’t quite go over. He was seated at his desk with a block of yellow paper in front of him. Goddard sat in one of the armchairs. Before Steen could speak, there was another knock outside the door. It was Mr. Pargoras, the chief engineer, a bald, swarthy man in khakis completely drowned with perspiration. He stepped inside and nodded to Goddard.

‘What is it, Chief?’ Steen asked. ‘About finished?’

‘It’ll be another half hour.’ The chief mopped his face with a sodden handkerchief. ‘We can’t work in that shaft alley more than a few minutes at a time. One man’s already passed out.’

Goddard could imagine it, with the ship stopped and no air coming down the ventilators. The shaft alley was a steel runnel running across the bottom of number three and four holds from the engine room amidships to the propeller.

‘What’s the temperature now?’ Steen asked.

‘A hundred and twenty where we’re working.’ There was a faint pause, and he added, ‘Under number three, you can’t hold your hand on the plates.’

Goddard caught Steen’s slight nod and the exchanged glance. They wouldn’t have discussed it in front of him, except that they didn’t think he would know what they meant. It was those burning bales of cotton, above or around the shaft alley, which meant they were right at the bottom of the hold. So Steen did know it was afire. That probably accounted for the strain visible on his face. Or at least part of it, Goddard thought.

The chief went out. Captain Steen cleared his throat, and said, ‘The reason I asked to see you, Mr. Goddard, is that I’m writing a report of the—ah—shooting. You understand, of course, there will be a very thorough investigation with a great deal of paperwork, depositions, testimony, eyewitness accounts—’

Goddard was puzzled, as much by the captain’s uncertain manner as he was by this circuitous stalking of the obvious. Of course there’d be an investigation.

Steen went on. ‘And there were one or two—ah—details I wanted to check with you.’

‘Sure,’ Goddard said.

‘Now, you helped Mr. Lind carry Mayr into his cabin. You put him on the bunk, and Mr. Lind asked you to send somebody for the first-aid kit and sterilizer, is that right?’

‘No,’ Goddard replied. ‘He asked me to get them. I’d been to his cabin, and knew where they were.’ Lind had made sure of that, all right; he never missed a bet.

‘I see. And during the possibly two minutes you were gone, Mr. Lind was there alone. You came back, and it was probably a minute or two before I came to the doorway. You remarked that the hemorrhaging seemed dark for arterial blood, and Mr. Lind said it was probably from the pulmonary artery. Now, Mr. Lind is a former medical student and very expert at first-aid, so he knows more about this, probably, than either of us, but since I’m the master of the ship, the responsibility is mine, and I have to be absolutely sure that we did everything we could to save the man. If one of the big arteries had been severed, of course, there was no chance at all. Mr. Lind had the shirt cut away and the chest exposed, but being outside the door I couldn’t see very well. You were right at the foot of the bunk, so you could. Would you say the blood was pumping from the entrance wounds?’

Warning bells were beginning to ring everywhere. ‘That I couldn’t say for sure, Captain. All I know is there was a lot of it; enough to kill anybody.’

‘I see.’ Steen frowned. ‘But you could see the wounds all right?’

So we’ve finally got to the point, Goddard thought. He either suspects I didn’t see any, or he knows I didn’t see any, but that’s not what he’s after; he wants to know what I think. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure I did.’

‘You didn’t? But you were right there by the bunk.’

‘Captain, the entrance wound of a nine millimeter slug is very small, sometimes no more than a dimple. Mayr had a thick mat of hair on his chest, and it was completely covered with blood, so his skin could have been punctured in six places without my seeing any of them. But I don’t understand what difference it makes, anyway. We know he was shot twice through the chest and died within five minutes, so any doctor will tell you nobody could have saved him.’

Steen nodded. ‘Then you have no doubts at all it was just as Mr. Lind said?’

‘None whatever, Captain.’ And you can quote me, if that’s the object of this. By all means quote me.

Steen made a notation on his pad, still frowning and thoughtful, and said, ‘Well, I guess that’s all. Thank you for coming up, Mr. Goddard.’

Goddard went back to the promenade deck, puzzled and even more uneasy. What was that for? The obvious answer, of course, was that Steen was a party to the plot and was probing, pretending to have doubts himself in order to trap him into an admission he was suspicious of it. But suppose Steen’s doubts were genuine. Where had they come from? And why now, with Krasicki dead? It was like sinking into quicksand, he thought; every time you think you’re back on solid ground it starts to give way under you again.

With the Leander lying motionless in the water where there was no whisper of breeze, the smell of burning cotton was evident for minutes at a time near the after well-deck, and twice he saw heavy wisps of smoke issue from the ventilators of number three. They drifted straight up, thinned, and disappeared. He wasn’t going to be very popular with the superstitious members of the crew when they discovered it, he thought; he’d already caused the death of two men, and now he’d set their ship afire. In spite of his uneasiness, there was a certain ironic fascination in the thought that while he might be able to cope with the blazing intelligence and educated mind of the mate, against ignorance there was never any defense at all.

He walked forward and stood at the rail watching the bos’n and four sailors fish-oiling the rusty deck plates of the forward well-deck. They were burned black, stripped to the waist, and dripping sweat under the malevolent glare of the sun. One looked up and saw him, and said something, and the others turned to stare for an instant. He wondered if it were merely the standard salute to a useless slob of a passenger who had nothing to do but live a life of ease, or whether it was more serious.

Madeleine Lennox came out of the passageway and joined him. She was wearing near the irreducible minimum of clothing, only shorts, halter, and sandals, but her upper lip was moist with perspiration and damp tendrils of hair stuck to her neck. ‘It’s unbearable,’ she said. ‘Inside or out. My cabin’s like a sauna.’

‘It’ll be a little better when we get under way again,’ Goddard said.

She looked around and spoke in a lower tone. ‘You recall what we were talking about last night? I finally remembered the thing that kept bothering me.’

He was instantly alert, but kept his face impassive. ‘About what?’ he asked.

‘Mayr. And that blood that came out of his mouth. You remember, just before Krasicki came in and let out that scream, you were telling us a funny story. Everybody was laughing, and Mayr started to cough. He put his napkin up to his mouth, and I think he probably slipped something in it, a plastic capsule of some kind he could open by biting down on it. Don’t you think that’s possible?’