I noticed that a light was burning in the cabin, and rolled over to the edge of the berth and looked down. Eric was sitting in the steel chair in front of the steel desk, his feet wide apart on the steel deck. He hadn’t undressed, and his sloping back looked immobile and infinitely tired, as if he had been sitting there all night.
But his voice was quite natural when he turned at the sound of my movement. “Go back to sleep, Sam, it’s pretty early. Does this light bother you?”
“No, but the idea of you sitting there bothers me. Why don’t you hit the sack?”
“I tried to but I couldn’t sleep.” He stood up and lit a cigarette quickly and steadily. His movements had the febrile vitality of confirmed and accepted insomnia. Watching him I had the feeling that sleep was a daily miracle, the fulfillment of a kind of faith given to idiots, children, and the blissfully drunk. And I knew that I couldn’t sleep any more either.
“Cuchulain the Hound of Ulster,” I said, “when tired out by wounds and battle, didn’t go and take a rest like ordinary people. He went off some place and exercised to beat the band.”
“Was it good for him?” Eric said. A smile shone strangely on his pale face.
“Eventually he went nuts.” I swung my legs over the edge of the berth and jumped down. Eric kicked the other chair in my direction and handed me a cigarette.
“If you’re concerned about me, you needn’t be,” he said. “I’m too goddamn selfish and practical to go nuts, or even be slightly indiscreet.”
“It strikes me you’ve achieved indiscretion at least. But if you think I battled my way out of the arms of Morpheus to discuss your personality, you’re wrong. I’d much rather tell you more about Cuchulain. Stevie Smith has a good verse about him–”
“Don’t digress. I was thinking about what happened to Sue.”
“All right,” I said. “We’ll talk about Sue Sholto. Then maybe in a couple of days or a couple of weeks we can get around to talking about your wife.”
“My wife has nothing to do with this,” he said monotonously, like a man repeating an incantation. “I hope to God she never hears of it.”
“She will, though. You’ll tell her yourself, Eric. You’re the kind of a guy who’ll go to her for comfort, and she’s the kind of a woman who’ll give it to you. That’s why you married her, and that’s why you’ll never leave her.”
“Won’t I?” He smiled mirthlessly. “If I had known Sue would do what she did–”
“So you’ve got it all figured out. She killed herself because she couldn’t have you. There may be a good deal of vanity behind your theory, you know. You’ve got a strong feeling of guilt about the affair, and your rationalization of the guilt leads you to the conclusion that Sue killed herself for you. You feel guilty, therefore you are.”
“I appreciate your intentions. They’re good enough to pave hell with. But you can’t change facts with words.”
“What facts? You don’t know that Sue committed suicide. She may have been murdered. Halford thinks she was.”
“Murdered? Who would want to murder Sue?”
“I don’t know. Detective Cram doesn’t know. Do you?”
“It’s an incredible idea.” He had nerved himself to live with the idea of her suicide, but the suggestion of murder attacked him from an unexpected quarter, struck him in a new and vulnerable place.
“Murder is always incredible,” I said. “That’s why it’s a crime and punishable with death. But it happens. Maybe it happened last night.”
“You’re not taken in by that story about Hector Land, are you? That was evil nonsense. Land’s a queer duck, but sexual crime isn’t in his line at all.”
“The crime wasn’t sexual. Savo proved that. A queer duck in what way?”
“I don’t know much about him actually. I intend to find out more. But he’s been insubordinate on one or two occasions, been up for Captain’s Mast and gotten extra duty, and so on. From some things he’s said, I suspect he’s pretty strong on racial feeling. Nothing revolutionary or subversive, I don’t suppose, but he’s not a very soothing influence on the other stewards. I have an idea, too, that he’s one of the leading spirits behind the gambling pools that the black boys have–”
“Not just the black boys. I haven’t met a Navy man yet that didn’t gamble. Or an Army man, or a Marine.”
“I know, but you have to watch it, or it gets too big. There are a lot of things you have to watch, even if you can’t hope to enforce Navy Regs to the letter. Navy Regs says no gambling on USN ships, which we interpret to mean not too much gambling, and in the proper places at the proper times. I’m going to check up on everything Hector Land has done since he came aboard this ship.”
There was the slap-slap of slippers in the passage, and a shadow moved across the grey fireproof curtain which hung in the hatchway. Water gurgled in the scuttlebutt outside, and then the curtain was thrust aside to admit a tousled sandy head and a naked tanned shoulder. The head had a square face and small humorous eyes.
“Hello, Eric,” the head said in a Texas drawl, wiping its wet mouth with the hairy back of a hand. “Get up early to nurse your hangover?”
“Walked the floor with it all night. You haven’t met Will, have you, Sam? He’s our Communications Officer. Ensign Drake, Lieutenant Wolson.”
“Glad to know you, Drake. Communications Officer, Chief Censor, Public Relations Officer, general handyman, and convenient scapegoat. And the rest of the wardroom bitches like hell because I don’t stand deck watches in my spare time. I didn’t even get to the party last night – the Captain wanted to get off a message. Now he wants to get off another message, not that it couldn’t wait until we get to Diego–”
“It’s definite, then, is it?” Eric said. “We’re going to have our availability in San Diego?”
“It sure looks like it, but you never can tell in the Navy. Don’t spread it around, or a lot of people may be disappointed.”
“You didn’t miss much last night,” I said to Wolson. “The party started out with a bang but it ended up with a whimper.”
“I heard about that. It was tough on Eric. What’s the word on that deal? I heard you mention Hector Land before I looked in.”
“I’ve got to check up on him,” Eric said. “He was seen coming out of the room where – where the thing happened. I was convinced it was suicide, but now I’m not so sure.”
“You knew the girl, didn’t you?” Curiosity bubbled behind Wolson’s narrow impassive stare.
“She was a friend,” Eric said coldly.
On shipboard even more than on shore, you can’t afford to be too interested in the other fellow’s business or you risk making enemies. Wolson changed the subject:
“While you’re checking up on Land, you might ask him where he gets all the money he’s been sending home. He must have mailed his wife five hundred dollars in the last couple of months–”
“He did?” Eric stood up. “Have you got a record of that?”
“Naturally. We log all enclosures in the letters we censor, more to protect ourselves than anything else.”
“I’d like to see your book. It would take Land at least a year to save five hundred dollars out of his pay.”
“How about now? I’m going up to the Comm Office as soon as I get dressed.”
A few minutes later we followed Wolson up three ladders to the Communications Office, where he handed us his clothbound logbook. “You’ll have to pick out the entries yourself,” he said to Eric. “The Captain’s been calling for me again.”