‘Thank you,’ she said. He went back to his cabin and brought out the pitcher and another glass.
He poured her drink, and they sat down at one of the bridge tables. ‘There are certain biographical data,’ he said, ‘that we require here in the Central Bureau of Heroine Identification.’
‘It’s confidential, of course?’
‘Oh, absolutely. It’s processed by our computer complex buried under Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and purely benevolent in aim because it protects you from annoyances like privacy or forgetting to report all your income. Now, all I know about you is that you’re blonde, very attractive, probably of Scandinavian descent, you hate airplanes, and you have insomnia and twenty/ twenty vision. What kind of file is that?’
‘Flattering,’ she said. ‘And largely inaccurate. For one thing, I don’t hate airplanes.’
Oh, don’t be frightened, Mrs. Brooke,’ he assured her. ‘You can hate airplanes all you like, as long as you don’t start questioning the divinity of the automobile.’
She smiled. ‘But I really don’t. It’s just that I like ships better. Also, I work for a steamship company that is agent for the Hayworth Line in Lima. And my father was a shipmaster.’
‘American?’ he asked.
‘No, Danish,’ she said. She went on. Her father was lost at sea in World War II when his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. Her mother remarried when Karen was twelve. Her stepfather was an American businessman living in Europe, later transferred to Havana for several years and finally back to the States. Karen had gone to school in Berkeley, majoring in business administration, and until her marriage had worked for the San Francisco offices of her father’s old steamship company, the Copenhagen Pacific Line.
‘Danes keep in touch with each other,’ she continued, ‘even if they become citizens of another country, so after my husband died I asked the line if they had a job for me in South America. I speak Spanish, of course, from those years in Havana, so they gave me one in Lima. I was there for a year, and now I’m going to the Manila office. Copenhagen Pacific doesn’t have direct service there, so I booked passage on here.’
Thumbnail biography, he thought, is a good term. It’s impervious, and protects the raw nerve-ends beneath. And does nothing at all, of course, to explain why a pretty young widow would desert the action around the game preserves where she caught the first one and go wandering across the Pacific alone on a bucket of rivets like this.
A man appeared in the doorway then and looked in at them and then around the lounge as though searching for someone. Goddard hadn’t seen him before, but Barset’s term ‘weirdo’ came unbidden to his mind, and he knew it must be the passenger with the Polish name. There was no doubt he looked as though he had been ill, and for a long time, and in spite of his outlandish garb of white linen suit and open-throated purple sport shirt with a figured tie draped around it, there was something almost chillingly funereal and somber in his aspect. He gave the appearance of having once been a robust man who had shrunk to a rack of bones, for the suit hung from him in loose folds, as did the skin of his neck, and the gaunt face and the almost totally bald head were a glistening and unnatural white as though he hadn’t been out in sunlight in years.
‘Good morning, Mr. Krasicki,’ Karen said. ‘I’m glad to see you’re up and around today.’ She introduced Goddard, who stood up and shook hands.
‘You have been very—how do you say?—fortunate,’ Krasicki spoke with a strong accent. ‘You must excuse me. I have little English.’
‘You’re Polish?’ Goddard asked.
‘Yes. But since many years I live in Brazil.’
Probably a DP, Goddard thought, one of the homeless of World War II. Krasicki muttered something and turned abruptly and went out. A moment later Madeleine Lennox swept in, pausing dramatically just inside the doorway to chide Karen, ‘So! You’ve already grabbed off our celebrity.’
She proceeded to dominate the scene with an animation that Goddard appraised as falling somewhere between kittenish and hectic, and which after a while began to puzzle him as he became aware there was an alert and cultivated mind being sabotaged by all this determined girlishness. Normally you could ascribe it to the desperation tactics of fifty having to compete with thirty, but that would seem to make little sense here where there was no competition and nothing to compete for. They sat down at the table, Karen across from him and Madeleine Lennox on his right. She thanked him a little too effusively but would just have to pass up the martini. She limited herself to one a day, and always took that just before dinner. But he was going to give her a rain check, wasn’t he?
She did look younger than fifty, Goddard thought, particularly the figure, and he realized the one martini a day was part of it, along with a rigid diet and exercises to keep the waist in. Her face, while quite pretty, showed perhaps a few more lines than the face of an actress the same age, but the actress would have had a larger and more expensive staff at work on the project and plastic surgeons would have winched up on the halyards once or twice by this time. The ash-blonde hair, which was shoulder-length, had no doubt been carefully chosen as the easiest shade for hiding the gray, but she had fine eyes with the intelligence showing through at moments when she forgot to be captivating.
She’d seen Tin Can, and adored it. It was so authentic, dear, she cooed, turning to include Karen in the conversation; it was obvious Mr. Goddard was an old navy man himself. Wouldn’t it be the most fantastic thing if he’d known her late husband, who’d been in destroyers then himself? He was the executive officer of one in that same battle. Goddard said he was sorry, but he didn’t remember a Lieutenant Lennox, so they’d probably never been on the same ship. He was an enlisted man, anyway.
She knew a lot of people around Southern California, mostly in San Diego but some in Bel Air and Beverly Hills. It was while she was gaily tossing off these names, all unknown to Goddard, that her left leg first brushed against his under the table. He paid no attention then; it was an accident, of course. No woman could be that unsubtle. She launched into an explanation of why she was aboard the Leander. She’d been taking a cruise around South America on a freighter of the Moore McCormack line, intending to get off when she reached the Canal where she had a reservation to board a Lykes freighter bound for the Far East, but she’d become ill and had to go to a hospital in Lima. By the time she recovered it was too late to catch the Lykes ship, so she’d booked passage on the Leander. Her knee brushed lightly against Goddard’s again, came back, made a little stroking movement up and down, and remained. It didn’t take Mrs. Lennox forever to finish with the weather and move on to more significant topics; they’d known each other about ten minutes.
She couldn’t be that desperate, he thought; she’d be walking up the bulkhead. It was just that she was afraid of the younger woman and wanted to tie him up with an option. He wasn’t sure whether he was sorry for her, amused, or merely bored. It had been months since he’d slept with a woman, or even thought about it, and he’d assumed, with no particular interest, that he might be impotent.
Haggerty, during that marathon drunk when he discovered the underground skyway, had brought up the subject the night they’d shared the same room, and asked him whether he was gay. He’d said no, he was researching an article for Reader’s Digest; continence was the new hope for alcoholics with a time problem. Exactly, she’d said; something had to go, and she’d always advocated sexual freedom herself. People had a perfect right not to go to bed with each other; all it took was courage. And now that they’d made this bow in the direction of conformity, why didn’t he open the other bottle? He’d never known what particular hound was pursuing Haggerty down the nights and down the days, but he hoped she’d worked it out. She was nice.