Karen Brooke was walking the port side of the promenade deck. She always managed to look lovely and cool and completely self-possessed, he thought. She smiled. ‘Is there any change in Mr. Krasicki’s condition?’ At the same moment Captain Steen came hurrying down the ladder from the boat deck. He went on without speaking. She looked after him, puzzled.
‘Yes,’ Goddard answered. ‘He’s dead. He hanged himself.’ Or maybe I killed him, he added silently.
‘Oh, how awful!’ She shook her head, winking back the tears. ‘It’s not fair! His whole life was just one long tragedy.’
‘I know,’ Goddard said. Apparently she was prey to no doubts or suspicions, and he had no intention of raising any. He’d found himself beginning to like her, sensing in her some of the same loneliness that had marked his own life for the past five months, and he felt an urge to protect her if he could.
But from what, he asked himself after he had walked forward. Didn’t Krasicki’s death prove he’d been wrong? Didn’t it demonstrate once and for all that the whole affair had been just what it seemed to be? Of course it did—unless it had been designed to do just that.
The trouble was, he reflected, that his thought processes and Lind’s were too much alike, and they’d been on a collision course from the beginning. If Mayr’s death had been a hoax, for it to work at all there could be no doubt, now or ever. That, of course, was the reason for the elaborately staged shooting in front of five witnesses instead of something simple like a heart attack. So now, if Lind had sensed his suspicions of it, the mate was backed into a corner; Krasicki still had to disappear, but there was no longer any possibility of getting away with a second fake sea burial. If Goddard had suspected the first, he would already have forecast the second. So Krasicki had been expendable, and Lind had killed him to plug this hole in the dike.
But that wasn’t all, Goddard thought; the diabolical bastard ran a test on me at the same time, and I may have flunked it. If I had forecast the second fake and guessed how he’d carry it out, he knew exactly how I would react. I would realize I was there as a witness, but I would be very careful not to witness any more than I was supposed to. Then he threw the change-up pitch, and my reaction time may not have been fast enough. If I gave away the fact I didn’t really believe Krasicki was dead, then he was killed for nothing and we’re right back where we started—except that the deadly son of a bitch has really got me fingered now. I’m no longer a reliable witness, and he’s already measuring me for an accident.
His thoughts broke off then, and he frowned, conscious again of that odor of burning cloth. He was standing almost where he had been before, at the after end of the promenade deck. Maybe it was coming from one of the open portholes of the dining room. He looked in the nearest one, and sniffed again. No, it wasn’t from there. He turned and searched the after well-deck and the ventilators of number three and four holds, but could see nothing. But now it was gone.
Karen Brooke came back around the corner of the deckhouse. ‘Do you suppose poor Mr. Krasicki will be buried at sea also?’ she asked.
‘Probably,’ Goddard said. ‘I don’t think he had any family at all.’
She nodded somberly. ‘I love ships,’ she said. ‘But there’s something about this one that is beginning to scare me. I know it sounds silly—’
‘No, it’s normal enough,’ Goddard replied. ‘Deaths at sea affect people that way; to coin a phrase, they’re all in the same boat.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Do you know what our cargo is?’
‘Some copper ingots,’ she said, ‘and a little general cargo, but mostly cotton. Several thousand bales for the Japanese textile mills.’
He nodded. When she had gone on, continuing her walk, he stood looking somberly aft across the well-deck. Cotton. Great, he thought; that’s all we need now.
* * *
What little breeze there was died out by mid-morning, and the heat became an ordeal. An air of sullenness and unease lay over the whole ship; the second death in three days left its mark on everybody. Word was passed that the sea burial would take place the following afternoon at four. Tempers were on edge. A fight broke out on the deck below; Rafferty, the hoodlum room steward, beat up one of the oilers, and Lind had to be called to stitch up a cut face.
Shortly after eleven there was another breakdown in the engine room, and the Leander slowed and came to rest on a sea like burnished steel. A shaft bearing running hot again, Barset said; the chief hoped to be under way again in an hour, but the hour passed, and then two, while the Leander continued to lie motionless under the burning sun. No one appeared for lunch. Both women were apparently in their bunks, under the fans. Goddard continued to prowl the promenade 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.