The Golden Rendezvous

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 construction 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 wheel-chair 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 back 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——”

“But certainly, Señor Carreras.” Carter, that rough-hewn Anglo-Saxon diamond, not to be outdone in Latin courtesy. I waved towards the hatch. “If you would be so kind as to keep to the starboard—the right hand—of the hatch——”

“‘Starboard’ will do, Mr. Carter,” he smiled. “I have commanded vessels of my own. It was not a life that ever appealed to me.” He stood there for a moment, watching MacDonald tightening the sling, while I turned to Dexter, who had made no move to go. Dexter was seldom in a hurry to do anything: he had a remarkably thick skin.

“What are you on now, Fourth?” I inquired.

“Assisting Mr. Cummings.”

That meant he was unemployed. Cummings, the purser, was an extraordinarily competent officer who never required help. He had only one fault, brought on by years of dealing with passengers—he was far too polite. Especially to Dexter. I said: “Those charts we picked up in Kingston. You might get on with the corrections, will you?” Which meant that he would probably land us on a reef off the Great Bahamas in a couple of days’ time.

“But Mr. Cummings is expecting——”

“The charts, Dexter.”

He looked at me for a long moment, his face slowly darkening, then spun on his heel and left. I let him go three paces then said, not loudly: “Dexter.”

He stopped, then turned, slowly.

“The charts, Dexter,” I repeated. He stood there for maybe five seconds, eyes locked on mine, then broke his gaze.

“Aye, aye, sir.” The accent on the “sir” was faint but unmistakable. He turned again and walked away and now the flush was round the back of his neck, his back ramrod stiff. Little I cared, by the time he sat in the chairman’s seat I’d have long since quit. I watched him go, then turned to see Carreras looking at me with a slow, still speculation in the steady eyes. He was putting Chief Officer Carter in the balance and weighing him, but whatever figures he came up with he kept to himself, for he turned away without any haste and made his way across to the starboard side of number four hold. As I turned, I noticed for the first time the very thin ribbon of black silk stitched across the left lapel of his grey tropical suit. It didn’t seem to go any too well with the white rose he wore in his button-hole, but maybe the two of them together were recognised as a sign of mourning in those parts.

And it seemed very likely, for he stood there perfectly straight, almost at attention, his hands loosely by his sides as the three crated coffins were hoisted inboard. When the third crate came swinging in over the rail he removed his hat casually, as if to get the benefit of the light breeze that had just sprung up from the north, the direction of the open sea: and then, looking around him almost furtively, lifted his right hand under the cover of the hat held in his left and made a quick abbreviated sign of the cross. Even in that heat I could feel the cold cat’s paw of a shiver brush lightly across my shoulders, I don’t know why, not even by the furthest stretch of imagination could I visualise that prosaic hatchway giving on number four hold as an open grave. One of my grandmothers was Scots, maybe I was psychic or had the second sight or whatever it was they called it up in the Highlands: or maybe I had just lunched too well.

Whatever might have upset me, it didn’t seem to have upset Señor Carreras. He replaced his hat as the last of the crates touched lightly on the floor of the hold, stared down at it for a few seconds, then turned and made his way for’ard, lifting his hat again and giving me a clear untroubled smile as he came by. For want of anything better to do, I smiled back at him.

Five minutes later, the ancient truck, the two Packards, the jeep and the last of the stevedores were gone, and MacDonald was busy supervising the placing of the battens on number four hold. By five o’clock, a whole hour before deadline and exactly on the top of the tide, the s.s. Campari was steaming slowly over the bar to the north of the harbour, then west-north-west into the setting sun, carrying with it its cargo of crates and machinery and dead men, its fuming captain, disgruntled crew and thoroughly outraged passengers. At five o’clock on that brilliant June evening it was not what one might have called a happy ship.

II. Tuesday 8 p.m.–9.30 p.m.

By eight o’clock that night cargo, crates and coffins were, presumably, just as they had been at five o’clock: but among the living cargo, the change for the better, from deep discontent to something closely approaching light-hearted satisfaction, was marked and profound.

There were reasons for this, of course. In Captain Bullen’s case—he twice called me “Johnny-me-boy” as he sent me down for dinner—it was because he was clear of what he was pleased to regard as the pestiferous port of Carracio, because he was at sea again, because he was on his bridge again and because he had thought up an excellent reason for sending me below while he remained on the bridge, thus avoiding the social torture of having to dine with the passengers. In the crew’s case, it was because the captain had seen fit, partly out of a sense of justice and partly to repay the head office for the indignities they had heaped on him, to award them all many more hours’ overtime pay than they were actually entitled to for their off-duty labours in the past three days. And in the case of the officers and passengers it was simply because there are certain well-defined fundamental laws of human nature and one of them was that it was impossible to be miserable for long aboard the s.s. Campari.

As a vessel with no regular ports of call, with only very limited passenger accommodation and capacious cargo holds that were seldom far from full, the s.s. Campari could properly be classed as a tramp ship and indeed was so classed in the Blue Mail’s travel brochure’s. But—as the brochures pointed out with a properly delicate restraint in keeping with the presumably refined sensibilities of the extraordinarily well-heeled clientele it was addressing—the s.s. Campari was no ordinary tramp ship. Indeed, it was no ordinary ship in any sense at all. It was, as the brochure said simply, quietly, without any pretentiousness and in exactly those words, “a medium-sized cargo vessel offering the most luxurious accommodation and finest cuisine of any ship in the world today.”

The only thing that prevented all the great passenger shipping companies from the Cunard White Star downwards from suing the Blue Mail for this preposterous statement was the fact that it was perfectly true.

It was the chairman of the Blue Mail, Lord Dexter, who had obviously kept all his brains to himself and refrained from passing any on to his son, our current fourth officer, who had thought it up. It was, as all his competitors who were now exerting themselves strenuously to get into the act admitted, a stroke of pure genius. Lord Dexter concurred.

It had started off simply enough in the early fifties with an earlier Blue Mail vessel, the s.s. Brandywine. (For some strange whimsy, explicable only on a psycho-analysts’ couch, Lord Dexter himself a rabid teetotaller, had elected to name his various ships after divers wines and other spirituous liquors.) The Brandywine had been one of the two Blue Mail vessels engaged on a regular run between New York and various British possessions in the West Indies, and Lord Dexter, eyeing the luxury cruise liners which plied regularly between New York and the Caribbean and seeing no good reason why he shouldn’t elbow his way into this lucrative dollar-earning market, had some extra cabins fitted on the Brandywine and advertised them in a few very select American newspapers and magazines, making it quite plain that he was interested only in Top People. Among the attractions offered had been a complete absence of bands, dances, concerts, fancy-dress balls, swimming pools, tombola, deck games, sight-seeing and parties—only a genius could have made such desirable and splendidly resounding virtues out of things he didn’t have anyway. All he offered on the positive side was the mystery and romance of a tramp ship which sailed to unknown destinations—this didn’t make any alterations to regular schedules, all it meant was that the captain kept the names of the various ports of call to himself until shortly before he arrived there—and the resources and comfort of a telegraph lounge which remained in continuous touch with the New York, London and Paris stock exchanges.

The initial success of the scheme was fantastic. In stock exchange parlance, the issue was over-subscribed a hundred times. This was intolerable to Lord Dexter; he was obviously attracting far too many of the not quite Top People, aspiring wouldbe’s on the lower-middle rungs of the ladder who had not yet got past their first few million, people with whom Top People would not care to associate. He doubled his prices. It made no difference. He trebled them and in the process made the gratifying discovery that there were many people in the world who would pay literally almost anything not only to be different and exclusive but to be known to be different and exclusive. Lord Dexter held up the building of his latest ship, the Campari, had designed and built into her a dozen of the most luxurious cabin suites ever seen and sent her to New York, confident that she would soon recoup the outlay of a quarter of a million pounds extra cost incurred through the building of those cabins. As usual, his confidence was not misplaced.