Drumbeat Erica

by Stephen Marlowe

  THE Rotterdam leaves New York on a Friday, docks in Southampton and Le Havre a week later and in its home port of Rotterdam early the following Saturday morning.

  In a lot of ways this was a typical crossing. A young woman named Murchison was seasick every day. Her husband, a dentist from Topeka, Kansas, had an affair with a plump widow en route home to Utrecht. A St. Bernard named Hennessey escaped from the kennels and was cornered on Prom Deck by the assistant deck steward, two able-bodied seamen and three pounds of raw beef. Nobody got bitten. A starry-eyed pair of aging divorces who had met on embarkation day approached Mr. Fontein, vowed their eternal love and asked if the captain could marry them at sea. Fontein pretended to think for a while and then said the captain would be delighted to do so—for one night. A college dropout named Marcia Klein lost a drinking contest to two British Mod types, going broke in the process. Jack started a collection to give her pocket money, and she wound up with enough for three months in Paris, where she was heading. A sometime Welsh poet named Llewelyn drank two bottles of Dutch gin every day, sweating out his hangover in the steam room. A girl named Lombard won the Bishop’s Rock pool by placing her dough on the digit 3, earning a hundred-odd bucks and spending most of it calling the folks ship-to-shore back home in Rocky Mount, N.C. to tell them how much she’d won. Nobody fell overboard. Repeat. Nobody fell overboard.

  In a couple of ways the voyage was not typical. For the first time in his career, Ahmed Shiraz became a laughingstock. He spent a lot of time with the deck and engine officers because in his next picture he would play a young Dutch sea captain caught up unexpectedly in the toils of international intrigue. Before long, technical jargon that he half-understood came spilling from his lips. He told anybody who would listen all about the wheelhouse, chart-room and plotting room. His conversation was larded thickly with terms like magnetic reflector compass, Sperry Mark XIV gyrocompass with magnetic amplifier follow-up system and main steering console in the wheelhouse with both hand and automatic pilot controls. He spoke knowingly of the rudder-angle indicator, the engine-revolution counter, a dual Sperry Mark III radar installation and a true motion indicator in the plotting room, not to mention a Sperry loran installation and a Plath Radio Direction Finder. In case all this equipment failed, he said, which was about as likely as being struck by lightning in Carlsbad Caverns, eighteen sets of gravity davits were on hand to lower the lifeboats safely under all conditions including the unlikely eventuality of a 25-degree list.

  None of this phony expertise helped him. Sooner or later somebody would interrupt him and suggest, with an earnest nod followed by a big grin: “That’s all very interesting, Mr. Shiraz, but now won’t you tell us something about the ship’s gym?”

  Shiraz took to hanging out in tourist class, figuring fewer passengers there would have heard how Erica had bounced him off the mats like a superball. But protocol aboard Dutch ships doesn’t take class restrictions too seriously, and Shiraz couldn’t find a haven anywhere. After a couple of days he began to hit the bottle hard enough to give the Welshman Llewelyn competition.

  That was one reason why he almost got himself killed the day before we hit Southampton.

  The Rotterdam steamed past Bishop’s Rock late Thursday afternoon through very heavy seas.

  I stood forward on Upper Prom Deck in the enclosed promenade, watching giant waves smash at the ship’s bow. Sea and sky were the same leaden color. Despite its stabilizers, the ship pitched, rolled and yawed. I could feel the vibration underfoot every time the screws rose, shuddering, clear of the water. It was almost dusk. I braced myself by planting my legs wide apart and watched the spectacle. Every crossing ought to have one day like this, I thought. I was enjoying myself.

  The public rooms had been semi-deserted all afternoon. A lot of passengers, green in the face, were sticking pretty close to their berths.

  The largest wave yet roared in over the bow, sending spray as high as the deadlights just in front of my face.

  “Really something, huh?”

  I turned around. It was Shiraz, all bundled up in a black quilted nylon jacket with a collar up to his ears. He was pretty drunk. He lurched toward me, accommodating his own drunken walk to the sudden pitch of the deck underfoot. He clutched my arm.

  “Ought to take a stroll out there,” he said, jerking a thumb at the deadlight nearest us.

  Sure, I thought, and let the weather do what Littlejohn’s hired assassins haven’t been able to do so far. “You’d have to be nuts,” I said.

  He shrugged. “You play a part, you got to know what it feels like. How else you think Oscars get won?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I never won one.”

  That was a mistake. It made him bristle. “How come you don’t like me?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Been waiting for something like this all week. I’m going out there. Feel everything you do. Win Oscars that way.” He looked at me and said suddenly; “Scared.” At first I thought he meant me, but then he went on, “Scared and seasick. Pregnant. She’s a real reject, that’s what. Some people, they get born with the word reject stamped on their bottom. You know what I mean?” He leaned pugnaciously in my direction, wafting gin in my face.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why don’t you go to your cabin and keep her company?”

  “She wants to be alone. Greta Garbo.” He flashed a big smile. “Whatever happened to Greta Garbo? There’s one broad who I wish I’d been old enough when she was in circulation. Did you see Ninotchka?”

  “On the late, late show,” I said.

  “There’s one broad I get parched tonsils just thinking about her. Here comes a beauty.”

  Another wave smashed over the open deck below us. As the prow pitched into it the screws came out of the water. The ship seemed to shake itself like a wet puppy.

  “Jesus,” Shiraz said. “Be great out there. You coming?”

  “Relax,” I said. “Nobody’s watching you.”

  He leered. “Yellow?”

  I looked through the deadlight. If you stood close to the superstructure you might be all right. If you wandered across the deck toward the rail you’d run the risk of being washed overboard by the first big wave that came along.

  Shiraz produced a leather-covered flask, unscrewed the cap and took a long drink. “Want a swig?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He took another pull at the flask. It gurgled and he laughed and threw it at me. I plucked it out of the air with one hand.

  “I still think you’re scared,” he said.

  Three steps brought him to the heavy rectangular door that led outside. He had to hit it hard with a shoulder to open it. Wind and salt spray howled into the enclosed promenade.

  “Wait a minute, you goddam fool,” I shouted. But he stepped outside and the hatch slammed shut.

  I zipped my windbreaker, got a shoulder against the door and heaved. The wind hit me like a wall. There was a narrow walkway outside and a flight of metal steps going down. I couldn’t see Shiraz anywhere. When I reached the top of the steps, though, I saw him. He was halfway across the slippery deck below me. He looked up and back and shook both fists above his head like Tarzan. A wave roared in over the deck. He lost his footing, fell and climbed back to his feet. Leaning into the wind he began to plod forward.

  I started down the slippery steps, taking the last three sliding on my heels. By then Shiraz had almost reached the starboard rail. A hundred feet forward of him, the prow dipped under water. He was swept off his feet and back toward me. He got up and kept going. I started after him. A really bad wave now could wash us both overboard.

  Shiraz saw me behind him just as he reached the rail. He grasped it firmly with both hands and looked out at the wild sea. The water was almost black, backed up in row after row of waves topped with whipping white froth. In the cross winds here off the coast of England the waves seemed to be coming from every direction at once.

  The deck tilted underfoot and I went dow
n. Shiraz was still holding on, his body arched taut like a longbow. I got up. A figure in a trenchcoat suddenly appeared at the rail a few yards aft of Shiraz. He made his way forward. Shiraz saw him and removed one hand from the rail and waved. The man in the trenchcoat waved back. He would reach Shiraz before I did. I ducked my head and kept going. The wind tried to hurl me back.

  When I looked up again the man in the trenchcoat had reached Shiraz. It was too dark to see either of their faces. The wind buffeted them as the trenchcoated figure clung to Shiraz’s arm.

  Then a wave came and spray hid them for a moment. When I could see them again, the man in the trenchcoat was either keeping Shiraz from going over the rail or trying to force him over. Shiraz teetered there. The other man pivoted and crouched, hugging Shiraz’s knees and rising, trying to jack him off the deck. That settled it, and it would have settled Shiraz, except that the man in the trenchcoat, rising, with Shiraz clinging in drunken desperation to his shoulders, got his first look at me.

  He let go of Shiraz and ran for it. Shiraz dropped in a sodden but safe heap at the rail. I started after the trenchcoat, turning too fast. The wet deck rose and slammed into me. For a few seconds I couldn’t breathe. Then I got to hands and knees and all the way upright.

  The trenchcoat was gone.

  I maneuvered Shiraz away from the rail. He didn’t struggle as I led him up the stairs and inside.

  9

  CAPTAIN PIET Van Voorhees was a tall, rotund man in his late fifties. He had white hair and an unlined pink face and bland baby blue eyes. He listened without interruption to Shiraz’s story. We were in the captain’s sitting room, which is an integral part of the bridge. The red-haired purser Fontein was with us, stalking back and forth impatiently with a small model of a ship’s hull complete with Denny-Brown stabilizers in his hand. He kept extending and withdrawing the stabilizers.

  “Then Mr. Drum here scared him off,” Shiraz said. He had changed to dry clothing, as I had. He was reasonably sober. “I’d have been a dead duck otherwise, captain.”

  The ship pitched and almost sent Shiraz hurtling from his chair. Captain Van Voorhees stood over him, feet planted wide, unswaying, a pipe clamped between his teeth. Fontein and the Denny-Brown model wound up against the far wall. I was seated.

  Captain Van Voorhees looked at me. “That’s a reasonably accurate summary of what happened?”

  “The way I saw it,” I said.

  Fontein gave me a sharp and somewhat disappointed look. “In heavy seas, in a storm,” he said, “who can say whether a man is trying to force you overboard or rescue you, Mr. Shiraz?”

  “I can say,” Shiraz told him, “and if you don’t do something about it I’ll scream bloody murder when we reach Rotterdam. He tried to kill me, I tell you.”

  Captain Van Voorhees said: “Why?”

  That calmed Shiraz down. “I don’t know why.”

  Nobody asked me if I knew why. I was the innocent bystander.

  “What is it you want us to do?” Van Voorhees asked.

  “Muster the passengers. Muster the crew. I got a look at his face. I’d recognize the son of a bitch.”

  “Would you, Mr. Drum?” the captain asked.

  “No. I never got a look at him.”

  Van Voorhees relit his pipe. “Then even if you recognized him, Mr. Shiraz,” he said, “as matters stand it would simply be your word against his.”

  “As matters stand,” Shiraz said, “you’re too damned yellow to rock the boat.”

  Van Voorhees’ pink face darkened. He waited a full ten seconds before speaking. “May I assume,” he said finally in a soft voice, “that you had been drinking?”

  “I had a few. So what?”

  “A few being how many?”

  “I don’t know. Four or five.”

  “Beers?”

  “Martinis.”

  “Have you a hollow leg, Mr. Shiraz?”

  Shiraz glared at him. “Hey, what the hell is this?”

  “A suggestion that your judgment and interpretation of what happened may have been impaired by the quantity of alcohol consumed,” the captain said dryly. “A suggestion, further, that your venture out on deck, in light of the weather conditions, was foolish. A final suggestion that any wanderings on deck in bad weather, between now and the time we reach Rotterdam, are not done alone.”

  “A fat lot of help you are,” Shiraz said. “I’m telling you there’s a would-be murderer loose on your ship.”

  “And I’m telling you that with the evidence—or lack of evidence—you’ve given me, there is nothing I can do to help you.”

  “Thanks a lot, buddy,” Shiraz said with a sneer. “Is it okay with you if I see a couple of people when we land in Rotterdam?”

  “By all means,” said Van Voorhees. He removed the pipe from his mouth. “And now Mr. Fontein will conduct you wherever you wish to go.”

  “I can find my way.”

  “Mr. Fontein will conduct you.”

  Shiraz shrugged. “Let’s go, Drum. You’re probably as sick of the smell in here as I am.”

  “I believe Mr. Drum has other business with me,” Van Voorhees said smoothly.

  If I had other business with him it was news to me, but I stayed put while Shiraz and Fontein left the sitting room.

  “Café de la Paix in half an hour?” Shiraz called back over his shoulder.

  I said that suited me fine.

  Captain Van Voorhees stuffed his pipe with fresh tobacco from a brown Amphora pouch.

  “Perhaps you are wondering,” he asked with his back to me, “if I have been too hard on our prima donna?”

  “What you said makes sense, captain.”

  “Naturally it makes sense. Nevertheless you came here with Mr. Shiraz knowing, I assume, what the outcome would be. Can you tell me why?”

  “Because it happened the way he said it happened.”

  “That’s all?” Van Voorhees swung around. Those bland baby blue eyes looked at me.

  “That’s all I can say.”

  “Aboard this ship, as aboard every ocean line on every crossing, Mr. Drum, we keep a list of VIPs. It is necessary to know who requires special, shall we say, pampering. You are on that list.”

  “I am?”

  “You are a private detective with an international reputation. You are a friend and sometime colleague of Mr. Axel Spade, the international financier. You must be a very busy man.”

  “None of that ought to put me on your list,” I said, wondering what he was driving at.

  “I consider it unlikely that a man in your position would cross the Atlantic by ship. Are you afraid of flying?”

  “I’ve crossed on the Rotterdam three or four times before. I like it.”

  “Amos Littlejohn never paid your passage before. That, ultimately, is why you made the list. And Littlejohn, of course, is Ahmed Shiraz’s father-in-law. Would you allow me to draw my own conclusions?”

  I just shrugged.

  “Shiraz is in some trouble. His father-in-law hired you to help. Is that essentially correct? Off the record?”

  “Okay,” I said after a while.

  Captain Van Voorhees sighed. “A modern ocean liner is the safest means of travel ever devised by man, safer than crossing the lake in New York’s Central Park in a rowboat. You agree?”

  I agreed.

  “The odds against anything untoward occurring are enormous—with one exception. Should somebody come aboard determined to get rid of an enemy—”

  “The middle of the Atlantic,” I finished for him, “would be a great place to do it.”

  “Precisely. And our actor friend, I can tell you after a few days dining with him, is someone who would have made enemies. Are you aboard as his bodyguard—hired by Amos Littlejohn?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “Then off the record answer this,” Van Voorhees suggested with a grin. “Do you find my reasoning and my conclusions logical?”

  I grinned too. “Very,” I said.


  “Good, good. Then may I assure you that whatever the problem, Mr. Shiraz shall be quite safe for the duration of this voyage? One of my junior officers will be assigned to watching him at all times. And one other thing, Mr. Drum. This incident disturbs me. It is—untidy. Like most sailors I hate untidiness. I detest loose ends. You are remaining in the Netherlands for a time?”

  “As long as Shiraz does.”

  “The Rotterdam will be in port forty-eight hours before sailing westbound. Quite in an unofficial capacity our Mr. Fontein will be at your disposal. Jan Fontein has had a varied and interesting career. He was an officer with the Amsterdam municipal police before joining the line, and he hates untidiness as much as I do.” He scrawled something on a sheet of paper. “Fontein lives in Amsterdam. This is his phone number. Should the need arise I hope you will use it. Does that satisfy you?”

  “I ought to pay Holland-America a commission,” I said.

  We shook hands, the captain went to his bridge and I headed for the Cafe de la Paix, where Shiraz was waiting.

  The lights were subdued and the band played a medley of dance tunes to an empty dance floor. I lurched across it, the floor seeming to slip out from under me with every second step, giving me a weightless feeling like a man walking on the surface of the moon.

  Only a few customers sat at the bar, and most of the tables around the dance floor were empty. I waved at Jack, who stood with both hands braced on the bar, waiting for business. Shiraz held down a small table to the left of the bandstand. A couple of off-duty junior officers were seated at a nearby table.

  “What’re you drinking?” Shiraz asked.

  I said Scotch on the rocks would be fine, and a steward took the order.

  “Now let’s have it,” Shiraz said.

  “Let’s have what?” I asked innocently.

  “I get into a brawl in a Village bar and you’re there. I go outside and somebody gets shot dead and it could have been me because the poor slob threw himself in the line of fire, and you’re still there. I board ship and whose face do I see in the goddam radio room?”

  “I’m your guardian angel,” I said. The steward brought my drink.