The Golden Rendezvous Page 2

  Towards evening, the deadlock was broken by the skipper of the American destroyer, a diplomatic, courteous and thoroughly embarrassed commander by the name of Varsi. He had been allowed aboard the Campari, been gruffly asked into Bullen’s day-cabin, accepted a drink, been very apologetic and respectful and suggested a way out of the dilemma.

  How would it be if the search were carried out not by his own men but by British Customs officials in the regular course of their duty, with his men present solely in the capacity of observers. Captain Bullen, after much outraged humming and hawing, had finally agreed. Not only did this suggestion save face and salvage honour to a certain degree, but he was in an impossible situation anyway, and he knew it. Until the search was completed, the Kingston authorities refused medical clearance, and until he had this clearance it would be impossible to unload the six hundred tons of food and machinery he had for delivery there. And the port officials could also make things very difficult indeed by refusing clearance papers to sail.

  And so what seemed like every Customs official in Jamaica was routed out and the search began at 9 p.m. It lasted until 2 a.m. the following morning. Captain Bullen fumed as steadily and sulphurously as a volcano about to erupt. The passengers fumed, partly because of having to suffer the indignity of having their cabins so meticulously searched, partly because of their being kept out of their beds until the early hours of the morning. And, above all, the crew fumed because, on this occasion, even the normally tolerant Customs were forced to take note of the hundreds of bottles of liquor and thousands of cigarettes uncovered by their search.

  Nothing else, of course, was found. Apologies were offered and ignored. Medical clearance was given and unloading began: we left Kingston late that night. For all of the following twenty-four hours Captain Bullen brooded over the recent happenings, then had sent off a couple of cablegrams, one to the head office in London, the other to the Ministry of Transport, telling them what he, Captain Bullen thought of them. And now, it seemed, they in turn had told Captain Bullen what they thought of him. I could understand his feelings about Dr. Slingsby Caroline, who was probably in China by this time.

  A high-pitched shout of warning brought us both sharply back to the present and what was going on around us. One of the two chain slings round the big crate now poised exactly over the hatchway to number four hold had suddenly come adrift, one end of the crate dropping down through an angle of 60 degrees and bringing up with a jerking jolt that made even the big jumbo derrick shake and quiver with the strain. The chances were good that the crate would now slip through the remaining sling and crash down on to the floor of the hold far below, which is probably what would have happened if two of the crew holding on to a corner guiding rope hadn’t been quick-witted enough to throw all their weight on to it and so prevent the crate from tilting over at too steep an angle and sliding free. But even as it was it was still touch and go.

  The crate swung back towards the side of the ship, the two men on the guide-rope still hanging on desperately. I caught a glimpse of the stevedores on the quayside below, their faces twisted into expressions of frozen panic: in the new people’s democracy where all men were free and equal, the penalty for this sort of carelessness was probably the firing squad: nothing else could have accounted for their otherwise inexplicably genuine terror. The crate began to swing back over the hold. I yelled to the men beneath to run clear and simultaneously gave the signal for emergency lowering. The winchman, fortunately, was as quick-witted as he was experienced, and as the wildly careering crate swung jerkily back to dead centre he lowered away at two or three times the normal speed, braking just seconds before the lowermost corner of the crate crunched and splintered against the floor of the hold. Moments later the entire length of the crate was resting on the bottom.

  Captain Bullen fished a handkerchief from his drills, removed his gold-braided cap and slowly mopped his sandy hair and sweating brow. He appeared to be communing with himself.

  “This,” he said finally, “is the bloody end. Captain Bullen in the dog-house. The crew sore as hell. The passengers hopping mad. Two days behind schedule. Searched by the Americans from truck to keelson like a contraband-runner. Now probably carrying contraband. No sign of our latest bunch of passengers. Got to clear the harbour bar by six. And now this band of madmen trying to send us to the bottom. A man can stand so much, First, just so much.” He replaced his cap. “Shakespeare had something to say about this, First.”

  “A sea of troubles, sir?”

  “No, something else. But apt enough.” He sighed. “Get the second officer to relieve you. Third’s checking stores. Get the fourth —no, not that blithering nincompoop—get the bo’sun, he talks Spanish like a native anyway, to take over on the shore side. Any objections and that’s the last piece of cargo we load. Then you and I are having lunch, First.”

  “I told Miss Beresford that I wouldn’t——”

  “If you think,” Captain Bullen interrupted heavily, “that I’m going to listen to that bunch jangling their money-bags and bemoaning their hard lot from hors d’œuvre right through to coffee, you must be out of your mind. We’ll have it in my cabin.”

  And so we had it in his cabin. It was the usual Campari meal, something for even the most blasé epicure to dream about, and Captain Bullen, for once and understandably, made an exception to his rule that neither he nor his officers should drink with lunch. By the time the meal was over he was feeling almost human again and once went so far as to call me “Johhny-me-boy.” It wouldn’t last. But it was all pleasant enough, and it was with reluctance that I finally quit the air-conditioned coolness of the captain’s day-cabin for the blazing sunshine outside to relieve the second officer.

  He smiled widely as I approached number four hold. Tommy Wilson was always smiling. He was a dark, wiry Welshman of middle height, with an infectious grin and an immense zest for life, no matter what came his way.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “You can see for yourself.” He waved a complacent hand towards the pile of stacked crates on the quayside, now diminished by a good third since I had seen it last. “Speed allied with efficiency. When Wilson is on the job let no man ever——”

  “The bo’sun’s name is MacDonald, not Wilson,” I said.

  “So it is.” He laughed, glanced down to where the bo’sun, a big, tough, infinitely competent Hebridean islander was haranguing the bearded stevedores, and shook his head admiringly. “I wish I could understand what he’s saying.”

  “Translation would be superfluous,” I said dryly. “I’ll take over. Old man wants you to go ashore.”

  “Ashore?” His face lit up, in two short years the second’s shoregoing exploits had already passed into the realms of legend. “Let no man ever say that Wilson ignored duty’s call. Twenty minutes for a shower, shave and shake out the number ones——”

  “The agent’s offices are just beyond the dock gates,” I interrupted. “You can go as you are. Find out what’s happened to our latest passengers. Captain’s beginning to worry about them, if they’re not here by five o’clock he’s sailing without them.”

  Wilson left. The sun started westering, but the heat stayed as it was. Thanks to MacDonald’s competence and uninhibited command of the Spanish language, the cargo on the quayside steadily and rapidly diminished. Wilson returned to report no sign of our passengers. The agent had been very nervous indeed. They were very important people, Señor, very, very important. One of them was the most important man in the whole province of Camafuegos. A jeep had already been dispatched westwards along the coast road to look for them. It sometimes happened, the señor understood, that a car spring would go or a shock absorber snap. When Wilson had innocently inquired if this was because the revolutionary government had no money left to pay for the filling in of the enormous potholes in the roads, the agent had become even more nervous and said indignantly that it was entirely the fault of the inferior metal those perfidious Americanos used in the const
ruction of their vehicles. Wilson said he had left with the impression that Detroit had a special assembly line exclusively devoted to turning out deliberately inferior cars destined solely for this particular corner of the Caribbean.

  Wilson went away. The cargo continued to move steadily into number four hold. About four o’clock in the afternoon I heard the sound of the clashing of gears and the asthmatic wheezing of what sounded like a very elderly engine indeed. This, I thought, would be the passengers at last, but no: what clanked into view round the corner of the dock gate was a dilapidated truck with hardly a shred of paint left on the bodywork, white canvas showing on the tyres and the engine hood removed to reveal what looked, from my elevation, like a solid block of rust. One of the special Detroit jobs, probably. On its cracked and splintered platform it carried three medium-sized crates, freshly boxed and metal-banded.

  Wrapped in a blue haze from the staccato back-firing of its exhaust, vibrating like a broken tuning fork and rattling in every bolt in its superannuated chassis, the truck trundled heavily across the cobbles and pulled up not five paces from where MacDonald was standing. A little man in white ducks and peaked cap jumped out through the space where the door ought to have been, stood still for a couple of seconds until he got the hang of terra firma again and then scuttled off in the direction of our gangway. I recognised him as our Carracio agent, the one with the low opinion of Detroit, and wondered what fresh trouble he was bringing with him.

  I found out in three minutes flat when Captain Bullen appeared on deck, an anxious-looking agent scurrying along behind him. The captain’s blue eyes were snapping, the red complexion was overlaid with puce, but he had the safety valve screwed right down.

  “Coffins, Mister,” he said tightly. “Coffins, no less.”

  I suppose there is a quick and clever answer to a conversational gambit like that but I couldn’t find it so I said politely: “Coffins, sir?”

  “Coffins, Mister. Not empty, either. For shipment to New York.” He flourished some papers. “Authorisations, shipping notes, everything in order. Including a sealed request signed by no less than the ambassador. Three of them. Two British, one American subjects. Killed in the hunger riots.”

  “The crew won’t like it, sir,” I said. “Especially the Gôanese stewards. You know their superstitions and how——”

  “It will be all right, Señor,” the little man in white broke in hurriedly. Wilson had been right about the nervousness, but there was more to it than that, there was a strange over lay of anxiety that came close to despair. “We have arranged——”

  “Shut up!” Captain Bullen said shortly. “No need for the crew to know, Mister. Or the passengers.” You could see they were just a careless after-thought. “Coffins are boxed —that’s them on the truck there.”

  “Yes, sir. Killed in the riots. Last week.” I paused and went on delicately: “In this heat——”

  “Lead-lined, he says. So they can go in the hold. Some separate corner, Mister. One of the—um—deceased is a relative of one of the passengers boarding here. Wouldn’t do to stack the coffins among the dynamos, I suppose.” He sighed heavily. “On top of everything else, we’re now in the funeral undertaking business. Life, First, can hold no more.”

  “You are accepting this—ah—cargo, sir?”

  “But of course, but of course,” the little man interrupted again. “One of them is a cousin of Señor Carreras, who sails with you. Señor Miguel Carreras. Señor Carreras, he is what you say heartbroken. Señor Carreras is the most important man——”

  “Be quiet,” Captain Bullen said wearily. He made a gesture with the papers. “Yes, I’m accepting. Note from the Ambassador. More pressure. I’ve had enough of cables flying across the Atlantic. Too much grief. Just an old beaten man, First, just an old beaten man.” He stood there for a moment, hands outspread on the guard-rail, doing his best to look like an old beaten man and making a singularly unsuccessful job of it, then straightened abruptly as a procession of vehicles turned in through the dock gates and made for the Campari.

  “A pound to a penny, Mister, here comes still more grief.”

  “Praise be to God,” the little agent murmured. The tone, no less than the words, was a prayer of thanksgiving. “Señor Carreras himself! Your passengers, at last, Captain.”

  “That’s what I said,” Bullen growled. “More grief.”

  The procession, two big chauffeur-driven prewar Packards, one towed by a jeep, had just pulled up by the gangway and the passengers were climbing out. Those who could, that was—for very obviously there was one who could not. One of the chauffeurs, dressed in green tropical drills and a bush hat, had opened the boot of his car, pulled out a collapsible hand-propelled wheelchair and, with the smooth efficiency of experience, had it assembled in ten seconds flat while the other chauffeur, with the aid of a tall thin nurse clad in overall white from her smart, starched cap to the skirt that reached down to her ankles, tenderly lifted a bent old man from the back seat of the second Packard and set him gently in the wheel-chair. The old boy —even at that distance I could see the face creased and stretched with the lines of age, the snowy whiteness of the still plentiful hair—did his best to help them, but his best wasn’t very much.

  Captain Bullen looked at me. I looked at Captain Bullen. There didn’t seem to be any reason to say anything. Nobody in a crew likes having permanent invalids aboard ship: they cause trouble to the ship’s doctor, who has to look after their health, to the cabin stewards who have to clean their quarters, to the dining-room stewards who have to feed them, and to those members of the deck crew detailed for the duty of moving them around. And when the invalids are elderly, and often infirm—and if this one wasn’t, I sadly missed my guess—there was always the chance of a death at sea, the one thing sailors hate above all else. It was also very bad for the passenger trade.

  “Well,” Captain Bullen said heavily, “I suppose I’d better go and welcome our latest guests aboard. Finish it off as quickly as possible, Mister.”

  “I’ll do that, sir.”

  Bullen nodded and left. I watched the two chauffeurs slide a couple of long poles under the seat of the invalid chair, straighten and carry the chair easily up the sparred foot-planks of the gangway.

  They were followed by the tall angular nurse and she in turn by another nurse, dressed exactly like the first but shorter and stockier. The old boy was bringing his own medical corps along with him, which meant that he had more money than was good for him or was a hypochondriac or very far through indeed or a combination of any or all of those.

  But I was more interested in the last two people to climb out of the Packards.

  The first was a man of about my own age and size, but the resemblance stopped short there. He looked like a cross between Ramon Novarro and Rudolph Valentino, only handsomer. Tall, broad-shouldered, with deeply-tanned, perfectly-sculpted Latin features, he had the classical long thin moustache, strong even teeth with that in-built neon phosphorescence that seems to shine in any light from high noon till dark, and a darkly gleaming froth of tight black curls on his head: he would have been a lost man if you’d let him loose on the campus of any girls’ university. For all that, he looked as far from being a sissy as any man I’d ever met: He had a strong chin, the balanced carriage, the light springy boxer’s step of a man well aware that he can get through this world without any help from a nursemaid. If nothing else, I thought sourly, he would at least take Miss Beresford out of my hair.

  The other man was a slightly smaller edition of the first, same features, same teeth, same moustache and hair, only those were greying. He would be about fifty-five. He had about him that indefinable look of authority and assurance which can come from power, money or a carefully cultivated phoneyness. This, I guessed would be the Señor Miguel Carreras who inspired such fear in our local Carracio agent. I wondered why.

  Ten minutes later the last of our cargo was aboard and all that remained were the three boxed coffins on the b
ack of the old truck. I watched the bo’sun readying a sling round the first of those when a well-detested voice said behind me:

  “This is Mr. Carreras, sir. Captain Bullen sent me.”

  I turned round and gave Fourth Officer Dexter the look I specially reserved for Fourth Officer Dexter. Dexter was the exception to the rule that the fleet commodore always got the best available in the company as far as officers and men were concerned, but that was hardly the old man’s fault: there are some men that even a fleet commodore has to except and Dexter was one of them. A personable enough youngster of twenty-one, with fair hair, slightly prominent blue eyes, an excruciatingly genuine public school accent and limited intelligence, Dexter was the son—and, unfortunately, heir—of Lord Dexter, Chairman and Managing Director of the Blue Mail. Lord Dexter, who had inherited about ten millions at the age of fifteen and, understandably enough, had never looked back, had the quaint idea that his own son should start from the bottom up and had sent him to sea as a cadet some five years previously. Dexter took a poor view of this arrangement: every man in the ship, from Bullen downwards, took a poor view of the arrangement and Dexter: but there was nothing we could do about it.

  “How do you do, sir?” I accepted Carreras’s outstretched hand and took a good look at him. The steady dark eyes, the courteous smile couldn’t obscure the fact that there were many more lines about his eyes and mouth at two feet than at fifty: but it also couldn’t obscure the compensatory fact that the air of authority and command was now redoubled in force, and I put out of my mind any idea that this air originated in phoneyness: it was the genuine article and that was that.

  “Mr. Carter? My pleasure.” The hand was firm, the bow more than a perfunctory nod, the cultured English the product of some Stateside Ivy League college. “I have some interest in the cargo being loaded and if you would permit——”