by Arne Bue
Captain Sewell would wait until the search was over before calling Juneau. Perhaps there was no problem at all, no need for the call. Dick could have fallen asleep. However, he doubted that. Not Dick. He kept the hand-held radio on, waited, looking at the hookup to Juneau, waiting for Anna to let him know. It was as though he were once again locked into that same night, waiting for the ambulance to come get Joyce, dying in his arms, waiting for the doctors in the hospital to come to him and say the words, "I am so sorry." The ship heaved to the port and steadied herself. Captain Sewell clenched and unclenched his fists. He felt his heart pounding, heard it in his ears. He remembered the Procardia. He popped one into his mouth and chased the pill down with the remains of cold coffee in his cup.
"Captain," Anna finally said, her voice coming from the hand radio on the desk.
"Go ahead."
"So far nothing," she said. "The crew's looking everywhere. Looked in the solarium, men's and women's restrooms, the public showers on the boat deck, the showers on the sun deck, crew quarters, even between the rows of seats in the VCR theater."
"Have the chief steward go stateroom-by-stateroom," Captain Sewell said.
"I don t know what he'd be doing in a stateroom," Anna said.
"Get it done," Sewell said. He'd put a raw edge to his voice and immediately regretted it. Anna was doing the best she could. She was an excellent Chief Purser.
Captain Sewell eyed the satellite hookup to the Port Captain in Juneau. He pulled open a drawer, looked about for Dick's personnel file. Dick, a quiet sort. But one never really knew what was truly going on inside with him. He'd read somewhere that chemically, the brain is a noisy place. Maybe Dick's brain was noisy and no one ever noticed. Nerve cells chattered constantly to each other via hormones and neurotransmitters. In studying violence, Sewell had read biologists had concentrated on two messengers, serotonin and noradrenaline. Serotonin was the soft voice of reason, calming, controlling impulses, regulating against aggression. Noradrenaline was the primal scream, all reaction and action. The two neurotransmitters ebbed and flowed in the brain, almost in synchrony. A person with higher serotonin tended to be lower in noradrenaline. Or just the opposite. Dick was the serotonin type, in Captain Sewell's estimation. But then again you never really know. Do interviews and evaluations really reveal very much? He heard the hand-held radio click.
Anna said, "The chief steward and porter went stateroom-by-stateroom, Captain. No sign of him. Report came in from the engine room. They haven t seen him down there."
"Forward and aft decks, all the way. Did you check there, right at the bow, all the way out to the stern? He could've slipped, is out there hurt." The far reaches of the bow and stern were off limits to passengers.
"He might've gone out there to do some checking, Captain."
"Well get someone out there. I want eyes on every inch of this ship.
"Yes, Captain," Anna said.
Sewell took out the personnel file. He'd had a meeting with Dick not too long ago. Dick was a quiet man, serious. But he was never a depressed sort. Got along with everyone. A stickler on the Coast Guard regulations, quick to report irregularities. Always good evaluations. Years at sea. Read a lot of books, magazines and newspapers, but didn't much like movies. A bachelor. Had a brother and sister in Sitka. His parents had died long ago. Loved to be at sea. What could've gone wrong? The hand-held radio clicked.
"Dennis was talking to him," Anna said.
"Dennis. The oiler. You found Dick in the engine room, right?"
"No, no. Dennis was checking tie-downs on the car deck, and talked a little with Dick. Dick was doing his rounds. Nothing unusual."
"What did they talk about?"
"I asked Dennis that. Just how's it going, chit-chat, nothing unusual."
"And after that? Anyone see him after the car deck?" Captain Sewell asked.
"Not so far," Anna said.
"Get the crew on the car deck. Go through the vehicles. Look under them, inside," Captain Sewell said.
Sewell kept rubbing his tongue against the back of his teeth, looking at the satellite hookup to Juneau, his head still pounding. The blood pressure. He paced, hoping movement would settle him. But he again sank into the morose musings of the awfulness that had shattered his life. One shot in Northway Mall. Joyce gone. He turned off the picture with a fist brought down hard on his desk, a blow that made Dick's personnel file folder leap. Had the man gone overboard? Couldn't be. Not him. Sewell had done Dick's evaluation not two weeks ago.
Anna poked her head around into his office. She was out of breath. Her face had gone gray.
"Captain," Anna said. "I didn't want to chat on the hand-held radio about this. Crew's getting worried." She was gasping for breath. She grasped the side of Captain Sewell's desk as though she'd been struck. "One of the other oilers, Ray, found his clock. It'd rolled under a truck." There were tears in Anna's eyes. Her hands were shaking. She did not look businesslike and professional anymore. A shipmate had disappeared, a friend. The whole crew liked and respected Dick. Anna was holding out Dick's watchman clock. Each check station held a specially formed key. On rounds, watchmen insert station-keys into the watch clock. The key would make a record on special paper inside the clock, proof to the deck officers of when and where watchmen had done their rounds. Sewell caught himself up, and began the study of the watchman's record.
"Last place he keyed was the stores deck. Probably took the elevator down to the car deck from there, since Dennis spoke to him."
"Yes, Captain. He was there. That's where his clock was. Dennis saw him. Dick must have switched his route around. And the last place he punched in was stores."
Captain Sewell carefully considered this. Stores deck, food and supplies area right between the car deck and the promenade deck. Dick had changed his routine, the route of his night watchman duties, and now no one could find him.
"Crew checking vehicles, looking under them?"
"They did that. Nothing," Anna said.
"Do it again. Look closer, use flashlights, look for everything, anything. Look hard. Trucks, RVs. He's there. He's on the car deck. I know Dick. He's there."
"Yes, Captain." Anna dashed off into the passage.
Maybe Dick had an undetected health problem. Captain Sewell's father had an aneurysm no one suspected. His father's autopsy showed there'd been a bulging of the wall of a blood vessel, caused by hardening of the arteries and high blood pressure. The larger artery of the heart. And he died. How fragile life is. It's so easy to take life for granted, health for granted. Captain Sewell lit a cigarette and noticed he already had one burning in the tray. He put them both out.
Anna stepped into to the Masters Quarters. Her face had grown lines and her mouth was twisted and bent and there were tears in her eyes.
"I think Dennis found something," she said.
Dennis Krumm had a sharp eye, Sewell thought. Maybe Dick had slipped, hurt himself down there, and Dennis had found him and he was alright.
"We found what looks like little smears of blood on the back of a white Sentra," she said. Anna had some papers with her.
"That the manifest?"
"Yes," Anna said.
"Who's car?" Captain Sewell said.
"Belongs to a guy named Jeffrey Johnson," Anna said, reading.
"Jeffrey Johnson is the name of a man murdered in Sand Point recently."
"Yes. I read about that," Anna said.
"Who's driving Johnson's car?"
"This was one of those deals where the guy said someone would pick up the car in King Cove," Anna said.
"But you met him? Saw him?" Captain Sewell asked.
"New guy, never seen him before. But he could've been a Sand Point local."
"Well, you and Quinsen go get him, bring him to me," Captain Sewell said.
"He's not aboard. The guy said someone would pick up the car in King Cove." Anna was looking at the manifest, at the passenger list. "Captain," she said, "I think you might want to talk to
Billy Sullivan. He says he thought he saw Mr. Nakano coming up from the car deck."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The voyage from Sand Point to King Cove passed slowly, almost seven hours according to Mr. Nakano's watch. In a restless, turning sleep Mr. Nakano believed he heard Anna Knight's voice worming about as though coming to him far from the end of a long rocking passageway, probably an announcement from the ship-wide speaker. He did not understand what she was saying, for the Purser-woman had interrupted a dream, one that had moistened Mr. Nakano's chest. The dream held in his mind and begin to fade as he rolled from his bunk. His son Kano had wished to join Shige Nishimoto and his gang, and Kenso Nakano had been trying to extinguish such an idea by speaking at length to the boy at the shrine.
Kenso Nakano's neighborhood in Tokyo was near the harbor, and also not so very far from the shrine. The streets were as narrow today as they were when he was growing up. He and his friends stuck to a block leading down to the docks. The war had left Tokyo in disarray. Kenso Nakano's friends were ruffians, every one of them.
His favorite place to spend time with his son Kano was at the Shinto shrine. He thought of this place as he cleansed his body in the men's shower across the passageway, for at the shrine he first did indeed reveal his true life to son Kano, and he had probably dreamed of his conversations. Opening himself to his son had been difficult.
The shower steamed him. In this fog of steam he imagined that moment at the shrine. The edifice sat upon a slope a quarter-mile inland from his old neighborhood home. A gateway of granite shaped the entrance, and further in stood the torii, the Shinto portal topped by a curved lintel a few feet above a second crosspiece. He saw in his mind the narrow tree-lined walk stretching toward buildings set back from the street. A fence of stone posts bordered the walkway, which ended at steps also of stone. Moss had grown here and there on the steps, which lead to the inner shrine as well as the shade of massive old trees.
The neighborhood people had rebuilt the sanctuary in ferroconcrete in the style of traditional Shinto architecture, a copper-roofed main building, an outer hall for the ceremonies, an elevated inner sanctuary for the enshrined deity. The altar stood in an enclosed passageway. No one except the priest approached or entered the inner holy place.
By the main shrine stood a tiny old wooden shrine dedicated to O-Inari-sama, the deity of agriculture and commerce, who was attended and symbolized by the fox messengers. The two stone foxes guarded the Inari shrine, planted at the head of a short avenue overarched by vermilion wooden torii. Red pennants lined the avenue.
Quiet and peace pervaded the Shinto grounds along the promenade, but Mr. Nakano in his remembrance as he dressed himself saw small children playing hide-and-seek in the playground, as he once did. Here, he'd practiced writing his Chinese characters, tracing the stone inscriptions. Housewives, he recalled, walked their dogs, stopped to chat with friends. Teenagers, too, enjoyed the shrine's seclusion, and Mr. Nakano remembered discovering a young couple standing behind the Inari shrine, deep in private conversation, perhaps mild romance.
Though he was finished with the shower and now in his cabin, in his mind he was speaking to Kano about his life.
"We fought all the time," he was telling him. "I don't want you to be like that. But I did not fight always. I learned to keep from the fighting by using my wits. My father Etsuo told me, do not fight. Rather, he told me, think. And so I learned that when I showed little emotion, rarely did I end up in a fight. The others left me alone. Fear is lack of control. Fear brings the trouble."
Mr. Nakano braced himself against his bunk as the ship swayed. The winds must have gone higher than forty knots. Much higher.
His son was a good boy, looking up at him and listening.
"I'd always puzzled over the ships in our harbor. Where had these ships been? What was over the horizon? I saw men come down the gangway, big men from other countries," Kenso Nakano said to son Kano.
Mr. Nakano was getting his boots on, sitting upon the bunk in 208. He sliced open a packet. There, a Chinese-made rain coat of plastic with a translucent hood.
"I was not a leader of my neighborhood gang," he was saying to the boy. "We were teenagers with no direction. A leader among us emerged, and he became a member of a yakuza family. Shige Nishimoto made a great deal of money. A rare event then, to see so much money in our neighborhood.
"Shige Nishimoto talked to me. He knew we were poor. He knew your grandfather Etsuo coughed all the time and your grandmother Noriko was sickly and failing. So I began to run errands, easy, safe ones, to save my own mother and my own father, to get better food on the table, to buy their medicine and to wear nice clothes. I delivered betting slips and money around Tokyo. My control of my emotions, my appearance, made me popular with these people, and this made Shige Nishimoto look good, because he had brought me in. I was never thought of as a criminal by the regular people, by the neighbors, because of the way I looked."
Mr. Nakano was almost ready. He would go out into the weather of King Cove and do business of the type his son Kano must never do.
His son had walked quietly alongside that day. They passed the foxes, the messengers.
Kenso Nakano said to his son, "I always wanted to sail on the steamers and freighters, to ship out. In school my grades were quite good, though I did not study much. One day after graduation I applied for a job aboard a freighter. My father thought this might be a good omen for me, but my mother wept and went off to her sick bed. Shige Nishimoto found out what I was going to do, and he told the leader. Shige Nishimoto took me to a meeting with this old boss. The old one asked me to re-consider."
"I said to this man, `I have always wanted to see Alaska.'"
"The old man said, `There is a fishing fleet in Bristol Bay, hard-drinking, drug-using men and women.' He drew near me, quickly, like an insect. `Perhaps a profitable market?' he said into the air."
"The old one got me a job aboard an ocean-going fish processor. I operated the radio and loran sets and direction finders. I was an assistant to the navigator. Then I obtained papers. The written test I took was simple, especially after I'd been trained and done my studying."
"My real job was to deliver awakening drugs, shabu. A few years passed. And as gradually as moss grows, I developed a simple but hidden distribution system, the route into the communities. My first deliveries were to Japanese stern-trawlers. Then, through contacts, I met an American fisherman and I then met cannery workers in the Aleutian towns."
"These contacts bought my shabu, at first in small quantities. They sold the drugs and came to me for more."
"And you, my son Kano, must never follow after me. This is no life, for I have sacrificed my honor and the honor of my parents. I shamed them by becoming yakuza. Shamed them. I will never be honorable again. But you, my son Kano, you will be an honorable man."
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
King Cove, Alaska, was a community on a sand spit at the head of a bay fronting Deer Passage and Deer Island. Pan American Fisheries had built a salmon cannery there in 1911. People had been there ever since.
Mr. Nakano was ready, twenty minutes to five in the morning. George was the contact man. He had been a good one. The business relationship had been without problems, never a shortage, like the missing thousand dollars at Chignik, a shortage to be laid at the feet of the supervisor Mr. Nakano had appointed, the man known as Redbeard.
The shortage was unfortunate, for Mr. Nakano needed the money, needed all of it. From a remote place in his soul, a force not unlike a storm pushed through and began to twist at Mr. Nakano's thinking. Redbeard must explain. Although Mr. Nakano believed he had control over his emotions he nevertheless felt blooming inside a distrust of Redbeard. A gnawing need to correct the account grew. He must take revenge for this betrayal by Redbeard. Perhaps, he said, gripping himself, he'd been with the yakuza too long. Maybe a part of my spirit went black without me realizing. But a shortage of one thousand American dollars! My money!
&nbs
p; A man who chases after fame and wealth and love affairs is like a child who licks honey from the blade of a knife. While he is tasting the sweetness of honey, he has to risk hurting his tongue. He is like a man who carries a torch against a strong wind. The flame will surely burn his hands and face.
Mr. Nakano believed he heard the Chief Purser say the Tustumena would be docking in about half an hour, perhaps sooner. The seas had grown. Had not Mr. Nakano felt the ship lurching and rising and falling before the unfortunate but necessary killing of the night watchman?
He checked his watch calendar. Today was Friday, September 30. Mr. Nakano set out for the promenade deck. The rain poured straight down in the total darkness. A seaman stood near him at the rail.
"Feeling better? That leg of yours?" the man asked.
This man knows of my sore knee. Are they studying me? Never mind. I probably do not need to worry. The crew talks about everyone in the mess. They are worst than jabbering women, gossiping about their passengers.
The knee was not fine. Mr. Nakano had had trouble getting out of bed. The warm water in the shower had helped, as did the two Advil. But he could not reveal such a weakness to a common American seaman, a barbarian.
"Yes. It is fine," Mr. Nakano said. The man wasn't really so interested, the way he looked off at nothing and changed to another subject.
"See the dock coming up?" the seaman asked.
The lights of the dock broke over the piles and planking, pounded by tadpoles of rain.
"Yes," Mr. Nakano said.
"Only a couple years old." The seaman was half-interested, just making idle talk as he looked at his watch. Mr. Nakano looked at his. Ten minutes to five. Gusts sent wet fingers along the deck. Mr. Nakano did not wish to speak with this seaman anymore. He entered the foyer and climbed stiff-legged the two flights to the solarium.