And the deep blue sea

‘Mate says it was a heart attack,’ he said. The captain seemed to be in less pain now and was breathing easier, under the oxygen tent Lind had improvised. Sparks was getting medical information from the U.S. Public Health Service through a California station and was in contact with a cruise ship that had a doctor aboard. The liner was three hundred miles away, but if necessary both ships could change course and rendezvous in less than ten hours. Mr. Goddard could come up if he’d like.

The perennial witness, Goddard thought, as he mounted to the boat deck. The third mate was on the starboard wing of the bridge. Goddard knocked at the open door and went in through the office.

Steen lay on the bunk in his stateroom, still fully clothed except for his shoes. His head and shoulders were covered with an improvised tent made of a shower curtain suspended from overhead. A length of rubber hose led in under the edge of it from an oxygen cylinder lashed to a leg of the bedside desk. The first-aid kit and sterilizer were on the desk, and Lind was standing beside the bunk withdrawing the needle of a hypodermic syringe from Steen’s arm. He set it aside and took the captain’s wrist as Goddard came in. He glanced up, but said nothing. Goddard waited.

In a moment Lind released the wrist and nodded with satisfaction. ‘Much steadier now.’ He indicated the shower curtain. ‘Instant oxygen tent. But Boats is making one out of canvas, with a window in it.’

Goddard thought of Madame Defarge, knitting shrouds. Before this passage was over maybe the bos’n would sew everybody on the ship into canvas in one way or another. Sparks entered behind them and handed Lind a message. ‘From the Public Health Service doctors,’ he said.

Lind scanned it quickly, muttering to himself, ‘Umh-umh... digitalis... oxygen...” He folded it and stuck it in his shirt pocket, and said to Goddard, ‘Just the things we’ve already done.’ He turned to Sparks. ‘Tell the skipper on the Kungsholm we’ll stay in touch, but unless there’s a change we won’t try to transfer him. There’s not much they can do for him we can’t do on here.’

Sparks nodded and went out. If I watch a few more of these performances, Goddard thought, I could qualify as a drama critic. He looked at Steen then, saw the slowly rising and falling chest of this man he was certain was doomed to die without ever waking again, and felt revulsion at this sleazy glibness. But it was only protective, he tried to tell himself; it was one way to keep from picking at the scab of his own impotence.

In the first place, he didn’t know. Maybe it was a heart attack, instead of some kind of poison, and maybe it was digitalis Lind had given him, and not morphine. There was no way to find out, or prove it, and even if he could there was no place to take the information that Lind, the ship’s doctor, was murdering a helpless man except to Lind, the ship’s acting master. At sea, the next step up the chain of command was God.

‘Let us know if there’s any change,’ he said. He went out. As he passed through the captain’s office his eyes, in spite of himself, were drawn to the framed photograph of the woman and the two young girls. He winced.

9

It was a half hour before he had a chance to speak to Madeleine Lennox alone. She joined him on the promenade deck at sunset. ‘Do you believe it was a heart attack?’ she asked.

'I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It could have been. But watch it.’

‘How? You mean I don’t even dare eat anything the rest of the trip?’

‘Not that. The only thing sure is that he’s too damned clever to repeat himself. And a heart attack in a woman’s not as plausible, anyway. But keep your door locked.’

‘Are you going to?’

‘You’re damned right I am.’

‘Seems a duplication of effort.’

‘What?’ he asked.

The smoke-gray eyes were wide and utterly innocent. ‘Bolting so many doors.’

Trying to warn her was futile, he could see that. ‘Then you don’t think it’s serious?’

‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘But don’t you remember how effective you were against lightning?’

Barset brought word shortly after ten that Captain Steen’s condition seemed a little better. His pulse was stronger, and less erratic, and he was sleeping. Lind was with him constantly.

Goddard heard six bells strike as he lay naked on his bunk in the sweltering dark. Almost immediately there was a light rap on the screen door. Not even bothering to pull on the shorts, he padded over and looked out through the louvers. It was Madeleine Lennox. He unlocked the door and pulled it open. She stepped inside quickly, and was in his arms while he was still trying to secure the door again. He had an impression of amusement mingled with the eagerness.

‘Your reputation’s ruined,’ she whispered against his ear. ‘I think Karen saw me.’

‘What about yours?’

‘Oh, I’m sure she has no illusions about me. Women never do.’ There was a little murmur of discovery and delight then. ‘Mmmmm. You must have been expecting me. Or somebody. Are you sure you weren’t in the coast guard, instead of the navy?’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘That motto of theirs I always adored. Semper paratus.’ She began throwing off the robe and pajamas.

She was much better company, he thought, after she’d caught the streetcar than while she was chasing it. She jettisoned all pretense along with her clothing, gave not the slightest damn whether she captivated him or not, and demanded nothing but the mechanics of sex. She reminded him of Wilde’s remark that England and America were two countries separated by the same language; the most intimate of all human relationships was the perfect barrier to any intimacy at all.

With Haggerty it had been speech. They’d been stoned together for five days up and down the coast from San Diego to Sea-Tac, talking constantly, once even spending the night in the same bedroom, and he didn’t know her first name, nor she his. Apparently there was some quality about people who lived in bubbles that enabled them to recognize each other from the first, because in the whole period only once had either of them asked a question to which he expected a serious answer.

He’d met her in the bar at the San Francisco airport. It was late in the afternoon on a weekend, so the place was overflowing, and the one double martini PSA allowed for the forty-minute flight up from Los Angeles International was wearing thin. There was no space at all at the bar, but he spotted a table occupied by a girl sitting alone, a slender, almost fragile-looking blonde with a mink coat thrown over the back of her chair. He went over.

‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ he asked.

‘Not at all.’ Her manner was as gravely gentle as that of a nun. ‘Actually, I’ve always wanted to see Buenos Aires.’

‘Oh, I’m off for the weekend,’ he said. 'I don’t take the job home with me.’ He ordered a double martini, and she asked for another Jack Daniels, which could be significant. She looked perfectly sober, but he’d seen more than one ethereal blonde still lifting them off the tray when strong men were asleep in corners.

‘Do you use chloral hydrate?’ she asked.

‘Oh, no. That went out with the crimps on the Barbary Coast. Our labs came up several years ago with a timed-release spansule; the opiate takes effect in about twenty minutes, and then an aphrodisiac eight hours later. Powdered rhinoceros horn.’

‘I always assumed that was a male aphrodisiac. Connotation, I suppose.’

‘Well, we add estrogen, of course, so there are no side effects, like facial hair. Actually, the world market is so depressed, now that Castro’s cleaned up Havana, we’re diversifying into pornography and textbooks, and phasing out the girl operation as fast as we can take care of key personnel.’

‘What’s your average net per unit laid down in, say, Saigon?’

‘It depends,’ he said. ‘Age, and so on. Are you a virgin?’