Liner

by James Barlow

  Tornetta was stupefied by it. Where was the trick? When they had finished these ridiculous speeches what was going to happen?

  Nothing happened. The sallow, bent, rather military toast-master, even more mournful than the captain, pleaded suddenly, ‘Brothers, ladies, guests, charge your glasses. North, south, east, west, are they all charged? Hurry, please, this microphone is heavy. The final toast is, of course, ‘Hands, heart and pocket.’’ He touched his chest and pockets to demonstrate the ritual to the guests, and abruptly it was all over, people were chatting, on their feet, anxious to be elsewhere.

  And Tornetta knew in shock what was happening and what was intended.

  It was an artifice of considerable cunning. For these introductions and the dull dialogues overlaid with charm and hypocrisy were not for Tornetta’s benefit, but for Rossi’s. Of this he was sure. They were to establish his alibi. When Tornetta fell down twenty steel steps, or over the rail, or was drowned in the pool, or killed by an unfortunate electric shock, his friend, Mr. Rossi, would be distraught. He would weep, literally, and every consideration would be attended to. He would tirelessly collect coins from passengers for a wreath. Cables would be paid for. There would be a handsome wreath from the Masons aboard, perhaps even a memorial service. (‘He was not yet one of us, but in his heart and intentions he had surely joined us, was a Brother.’)

  It had all the subtlety of an intrigue by the other brotherhood, the Mafia, when that organization cared to indulge in sardonic artfulness. Tornetta sweated and trembled in very genuine terror of death. It still occupied his thoughts when he went to bed. His legs fluttered as he lay in his bunk, for this had a brutal probability; he had no doubt that this was the way it was intended.

  But they had, once again, given him a little time – a few days, perhaps as much as a fortnight. For the evidence would have to be conclusive, no doubts must arise: the tearful petition ‘He was my friend, my very dear friend’ had to be believed, must arouse other tears and whispers of consolation. How would it come? By scalding? Electricity? It had to have the appearance of accident, and, to be sure, the Areopagus must be full of places where hurt could be inflicted. But Tornetta couldn’t think of them or how it would be done. Was there safety in crowds?

  In two days they would arrive at Hong Kong. Would they kill him ashore? No. Not if he avoided Mr. Rossi and went off with Barbara. Even then he couldn’t be certain that he wouldn’t be fingered and the job carried out by someone now reading an apparently innocent cable. An accident which included Barbara wouldn’t matter to them; it might even be more convincing.

  But surely it would be at sea on the long haul from Hong Kong to Guam or the subsequent journey from Guam to San Francisco? A long way from the facilities of investigation. Ah, yes, this was probable.

  That gave him time to summon up courage and anger. Stay ashore at Hong Kong? No. That would be too obvious and there was nowhere to flee to, or, if there was, it would burn up the large sum he now had, and the most casual inquiries would establish his destination. He couldn’t book an overseas flight without his passport and so his correct name would be there on some agency’s list.

  He had boarded this liner because of his assumption that there would be minor corruption and carelessness. It didn’t exist in the way he had hoped. But suddenly now, stretching his nerves taut, but satisfying, final, he realized what he had to do. There was an area of confusion, and it existed whenever the Areopagus was in port.

  He would consider it for the next forty-eight hours, and decide upon details and alternatives, pursue them to perfection.

  There was one way to confuse them.

  He would kill Mr. Rossi in Hong Kong.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was embarrassing to witness the conceit of the man. Mike Burston sat waiting in the small hairdressing saloon on Metaxas Deck and flicked the pages of semi-pornographic Australian magazines, but had no option but to overhear the man in the chair.

  He was the worthless piano player whose vanity Mike had already observed a week before in the elevator. Now the man was hard to satisfy. The hairdresser was a thin youth from some English industrial city and he was obsequious now, snipping here, combing there.

  The piano player stood up and considered himself in the long mirror. He put his head on one side, touched his sideburns, borrowed a brush and whisked it to and fro. He was in no hurry, nor was he perturbed by, even if he was aware of, Mike’s condemnatory examination and the youth waiting for payment. The appearance of himself was obviously a matter to be scrutinized with the utmost care.

  At last he left, and after a long silence Mike couldn’t resist saying, ‘He likes the look of himself, that one.’

  The youth motioned Mike to the chair and considered him briefly. ‘Medium?’ he asked: a verdict in itself. If some were too conceited others were insufficiently considerate and to attend to these latter was a bore, but necessary because of money . . . He informed Mike: ‘He has to keep up appearances, I suppose.’

  ‘To play the piano?’

  ‘That, too.’

  ‘As well as what?’

  ‘You hadn’t noticed?’ inquired the youth, as if saying, ‘How unobservant you must be.’

  ‘No. Can’t say I have.’

  ‘He gets through the women. God knows why,’ complained the youth in what might have been envy. ‘He’s pretty old, every bit of thirty.’

  Mike was thirty-nine; he smiled and said, ‘Yes, that’s pretty ancient.’

  ‘They call him heartbreak,’ the youth told him, ‘but that’s not the organ he’s after.’

  He sniggered and Mike was silent. The youth sensed his disapproval and changed the subject. ‘You goin’ ashore at Hong Kong?’

  Mike went up to the Parade Deck, looking for Marion, but failed to find her. Despite the haircut he was very hot. He sat in a deck chair for a while, but wanted a drink. He again strolled the port and starboard sides of the deck to find his wife, but she was not on the deck at all. He gave up and went for a cold drink.

  He hadn’t been in the Forward Bar since the night when the first officer had reprimanded a steward on his behalf, and that had been the day after they’d left Adelaide. Marion had blamed him for not knowing that the Areopagus was to call at Adelaide. They’d travelled all the way to Melbourne, paying train fares, when they could have made the far shorter journey to Port Adelaide. Even the ship’s newspaper, with its announcement of the ‘bonus port,’ hadn’t quite satisfied Marion. ‘Stupid,’ she’d grumbled.

  The Forward Bar was almost empty in the middle of the afternoon but this did not stop the German girl cashier from ignoring Mike. She was, as usual, reading.

  He waited a minute, fulmination collecting, and then leaned as far forward as he could to ask, ‘A good novel?’

  She was unruffled.

  ‘Philosophy,’ she told him.

  ‘Why bother with philosophy when you have learned so well the technique of indifference?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘A large lemonade, if you please.’

  ‘Fifteen cents.’

  Mike gave her the money and moved to the right to catch the eye of a barman. He saw that it was the same queer as before whom he had to attract, but was committed to doing so unless he just walked away and lost fifteen cents.

  The steward, John, looked pale and tired. He had adhesive bandage across the left-hand corner of his mouth, stretching almost to his ear. Like the piano player, however, he considered his reflection worth lengthy inspection. He combed his hair and turned away from the mirror. He would have moved off altogether, but the German girl, penitent perhaps, called him: ‘John, a lemonade.’

  The steward put as much distaste as he could into the matter of serving Mike. He examined the ridiculous ticket. ‘The ink’s faint,’ he told the girl.

 
‘So what?’ she said tartly. ‘Is that your problem?’

  Mike said, ‘One large lemonade, when you’ve time.’

  The steward affected not to hear this. He turned to find a glass. It was dirty, so he swilled it briefly under a tap. Then he picked out ice cubes from a bowl, using his fingers, and added the fizzy lemonade.

  Mike was white-hot with irritation. He said, ‘Do it again and this time with the tongs. I don’t want the flavour of your dirty fingers.’

  Someone sitting a few yards away called out, ‘Hear, hear!’

  The steward claimed, ‘My hands are perfectly clean.’

  ‘They’ve touched your filthy hair.’

  Unexpectedly, the German girl supported Mike. ‘Why don’t you do as he asks? That’s the third time someone –’

  The steward lost control of himself and shouted, ‘Who the hell asked you to speak?’

  ‘Don’t you shout at me!’

  ‘A cheap trollop who can read!’

  Mike said loudly, ‘Take this damn drink away and do your job properly.’

  ‘I am not obliged to prove the ship’s equipment. My fingers are good enough for the likes of you.’

  Mike threw the contents of the glass into the man’s face. Only the width of the bar stopped him throwing punches.

  The steward was quick to retaliate, but with words, not action. He had great expertise in malice and animosity, and had the razor tongue of the queer who has been smiled at many times.

  ‘Such melodrama! What arrogance from the pure of heart! The puritan trots round the world, stares at the rest of us, and vulgar dirty folk, not like him! But what about your paragon daughter? How’s her virtue standing up to the voyage? Where is she this afternoon?’

  The assertiveness with which the steward hissed this scorn was equal to its malice, and Mike was shaken. The face of the steward was flushed and distorted now, but that he believed what he was saying was evident. It was a truth meant to hurt.

  It caught Mike by the nerve ends. The impetus of his anger stumbled. The man was nothing, could even be pitied – a lad who had to be a steward on a liner because fate had made him a homosexual – but the invective about ‘your paragon daughter’ frightened him instantly. Stella, his mind cried out in alarm. Does he mean Stella? How does this man know Stella and talk so confidently about her?

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded, and the alteration in his voice was noticeable, an application for information.

  The steward was now anxious to withdraw, end what could be a brawl. ‘Oh, well, it’s none of my business . . . ’

  ‘It can’t be my child. She’s only fifteen.’

  ‘You know what they’re like at fifteen these days,’ sneered John. ‘So healthy with all that milk and overfeeding . . . ’

  Mike turned and went out. He knew he’d obtain no information from him. The steward had seen him only once before, so how could he even know who were his children?

  Nevertheless, as if to reassure himself, he went looking for her.

  In the cabin Marion insisted, ‘Quiet! Bumble’s gone to sleep.’

  ‘Have you seen Stella?’

  ‘Not for an hour. Why? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then what’s the hurry?’ she asked, but already Mike had shut the cabin door.

  He searched through the lounges and went to the cinema, but there was no film showing. There was no logic in his pursuit, but his instincts prodded him. He was prepared even to look a fool.

  The usual fifteen or twenty youths and girls were stretched alongside the pool, frying themselves in the tropical sun.

  Diane was with two youths. They were horsing around lazily, as if in slow motion.

  Mike asked abruptly, ‘Have you seen Stella?’

  Her eyes flickered in expectation, and then became evasive. She knew, but wasn’t going to tell him.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Come on! It’s important.’

  ‘I just don’t know.’

  The youths stirred restlessly and smiled in superiority.

  Mike strode away, his mind still in turmoil. They were discussing it behind him. Perhaps they would move, and thus resolve the problem. But they let it go. Wherever Stella was, it was somewhere he wouldn’t learn about.

  He’d been everywhere that a passenger could legitimately move or enter. It was impossible to ask anyone and he went back to talk it over with Marion, and wait.

  Near the cabin their steward was leaning against a bulkhead, tired, his tuberculosis slowly killing him; cigarette ash dripped on to his jacket.

  ‘Ambros!’ said Mike hesitantly.

  They had had a cautious relationship, the hesitation on the steward’s side probably due to the manner in which Mike had shouted at the visitors in the cabin that first day in Melbourne. There had, on Mike’s side, never been any expectation of dependence. He pitied the little man, but wanted nothing from him beyond morning tea, a change of towels, and a smile. But now – if anyone knew what Mike wanted to find out, the steward would.

  ‘Mister!’

  ‘Ambros, you know my daughter? The big one.’

  ‘Ah, of course. Stella.’

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘Not for – an hour.’

  ‘I think she’s in trouble.’

  The steward stared at him anxiously.

  ‘What kind of trouble?’

  ‘Where do they go? Where’s the mickey run on the ship?’

  ‘Oh, mister, I am sure – ‘

  ‘I’m not. So where is it?’

  ‘There is a cabin at the stern end of B Deck, next to the laundry –’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Down a deck, in haste, because a lot of time had passed, so if it was true –

  Heat rolled along B Deck as if it had been pumped out of a bellows. Mike was hot and beginning to tire, but it didn’t matter . . . The smell of boiling laundry wafted out of an illuminated room, and men’s voices chattered in Greek, and laughed.

  He suddenly felt a fool. All these doors were numbered, and could be the cabins of passengers. If there’s nothing. I stop. All I have is the malice of that bastard. It’s probably somebody else’s daughter anyway.

  The room next to the laundry.

  He opened its door and stepped in. And it was his daughter, not someone else’s.

  She was on a bed. It had no linen. With her was the cheap piano player. He was by her side, but leaning over, in charge. Stella’s dress was unfastened all the way down to her waist and the big left hand which tapped out the music of sentiment had cupped her right breast, its fingers had aroused that nipple into an inflamed red spot. Nobody was saying anything, but the spectacle was a girl relaxed, without opposition; it proved previous experience.

  The man turned his head, shouted, ‘How dare you come into my cabin?’

  And in the same agitated seconds Stella was able to see beyond his head. She screamed and leaped off the bed, and ran past her father, sobbing – a curious lamentation, as if he had been guilty of the vulgarity, not she, he was to be despised, and there could be no reconciliation.

  Mike had been rushing around in pursuit of his own destruction for half the afternoon.

  It hurt unbearably. That this vain, cheap peacock, swollen with self-approbation, should touch her, should be able to talk her into anything at all, let alone this –

  He struck her as she fled, her dress unaccountably in order now, and the edge of a fingernail caught her, so that a line of blood crossed her face. She cried out with great bitterness, justification accumulating, and ran sobbing, as if all the sadness of the world had come to her.

  Mike went for the man. He was big, but Mike was as big, and behind Mike was
an accumulated fury, beginning a long time ago, given impetus by the contempt of the German cashier and the rancour of the steward. The man was also alarmed, aware of guilt, possible repercussion, complaints to the purser by this man. There’d be trouble. True, he hadn’t got the kid’s pants down. That would have merited five years in a Greek prison.

  ‘She agreed,’ he explained breathlessly. ‘It was foolish, but I had her acquiescence. No harm done, nothing at all.’

  But the girl’s father wasn’t interested in appreciating the finer points of evidence, the procession of inane dialogue and the appetites of a shallow lewdness. These could be proven: that the girl was a fool, like the rest, in search of love, self-gratification, preferably without pain, trouble or responsibility. And the most important thing for her had been to fool herself. She had not fooled him. They came and said they were different, that they had this and that condition; but this was mere fright and he smoothed it a little with soft irrational words, and then rubbed it away altogether with tactile exploration, so that they ended up like bitches in heat, senseless, heedless of what he did, aware of their predecessors but indifferent even to these. All this could be explained, given time. It could be proved conclusively that the kid – what was her name? – Stella – had been in search of him; every move had been hers; she had merely had to overcome herself . . .

  But the parent wasn’t going to extend time, discuss the matter. He was, like the kid, a moralist at heart. It was necessary for him to inflict pain.

  Mike smashed the man around the face until he went on his knees as if in supplication, covering his bloody nose and mouth with the same fingers that were his profession and his gratification.