by Paul Gallico
The Dutchman moved across and touched his sleeve. Klaas said, “Well? Will I be disappointed?”
With no more effort than he would make to walk across the deck, Jason moved quickly up the line, legs stiff against the hull, hands working alternately. He was near the top when his answer carried down, “It’s a disappointing world, Captain Klaas.”
Klaas shrugged his shoulders at Coby. What was he to think? He had asked the man for some sort of promise, and been repaid with cynical flippancy. There was too much mystery here. He did not like mysteries. The whispering men in waterfront bars who wanted undisclosed consignments dropped off near the coast at night. Nameless passengers who wished to travel without the formalities of customs and passports. Klaas had turned his back on them all. His workworn freighter with its limping engine provided him with an honest, uncomplicated trade that matched his nature. Jason and his mysteries could only mean trouble.
“Please, papa.” Coby had followed his tumbling doubts. “He is a good man, I know it. Please?”
Klaas struggled with three emotions, his life-long instinct to avoid trouble, his love for his daughter, and a curious but irritating doubt that he might have misjudged the American. They looked up and saw Jason astride the propeller-shaft housing. “Hey, there. Come on up here, and bring the rope ladder and the lanterns with you. Or do you need a bosun’s chair?”
Klaas stuffed his pipe into his pocket, and tucked the ready-rolled rope ladder under his arm. “Who does he think I am—Rip Van Winkle?” Coby’s relieved laughter followed him up the rope. The possibility that there might still be people to be saved on board had tilted the balance in his mind. But, with every heave of his hands, he thought, Klaas van Zeevogel, you are becoming careless and stupid in your old age.
Coby had no such doubts. She loved her days on the Magt, she loved the sea, and she loved her father. But the excitement that boiled inside her came from the man with one name who had just sailed into her life. She felt the clean, unquestioning confidence in this shining new emotion that dies at the first lie, the first deceit, the first mistake. She knew, and that was more than enough. She wriggled up after them, and when Jason’s arm around her shoulder steadied her for a second all her shapeless fantasies merged into one face.
Klaas began to lower himself into the opening in the propeller-shaft housing. He said, “Now we shall see what hidden treasure lures survivors back to a sinking ship.”
Jason grunted agreement, but his eyes were on the Komarevo’s industrious approach in the distance. He was more concerned to know what hidden treasure there was aboard the Poseidon that would interest Captain Ilich Bela, and how many bodies he was prepared to step over this time to get to it.
MINDING THE STORE
4
The fear which had spurred them in their climb up the tangled mountain of wreckage when they were fleeing the ship had gone; now the three survivors struggled laboriously down to the ceiling which had become the floor of the inverted engine room. Without the adrenaline fired by that terror, they saw all too clearly the drop beneath them to the saw-edged wreckage of the gigantic machinery. Turbines, dynamos, reduction gearing, everything of any size and weight, torn away from its bolts, now lay in tangled turmoil below, and Martin whistled his shocked surprise when he realized what they had achieved. Manny saw nothing but the shadowed corner by the pool where he had left his wife’s body.
Rogo refused to look down to the silent pool where Linda and Scott had both died. He was the cop again, back on the job. “C’mon you guys, move it.” It was the first lesson learned in a street accident: keep ’em moving. Driven by his words, they edged out into the crazily distorted web of metal which had been their final ascent to salvation. The lighter metalwork of the room, the platforms and handrails and catwalks and steps, remained, but they had been smashed into an erratic lacework pattern that stretched from the curved, studded interior of the hull to the jungle of shattered machinery and weird pools that was now the floor. First James Martin, then Manny Rosen, and finally Rogo moved step by cautious step across and down the mutilated scaffolding. Manny, his eyes still searching for his wife’s body, lost his footing on a catwalk greased with the oil that coated almost every surface. For a moment he teetered on one leg, hands frantically scrambling in the air for a hold; the rock-solid arm of Rogo caught him.
Rogo thought, Cripples! A deal like this and what am I stuck with? A couple of goddamn cripples!
He repeated it to himself when a handrail which Martin was testing broke the half-shorn bolt that held it, and went spinning into the abyss. The sharp clang of its landing echoed through the cathedral-like vault.
It was only when they reached the bottom that Rogo took in the scene to which duty had recalled him. Belle Rosen’s body was slumped, lifelessly draped without dignity among the girders, at the spot where she had sacrificed her life to save theirs. Beside her was the small pool which filled the stairway leading to the rest of the ship. Beyond it lay the larger pool which had swallowed the Reverend Scott and Linda Rogo.
Rogo’s breath rasped from the climb down. The only other sound was the drip of oil and water, and the occasional creak of the deformed metalworks. It was a fearful sight, made more so by the similarity in space and sound to a church. Each drip chimed like a bell around the huge hollow of the boat’s stern. The smaller pool gave off a haunted glow from what little light penetrated the waters from the corridors beyond. The bigger pool, which led through a huge curved cylinder to the funnel, was still, and black, and evil smelling.
The air was not the wholesome chill of the sea, but a foul stench that came from the hideous melange created by the capsize. Rogo knew those ingredients only too well. Oil and water, food and drink, every substance from the captain’s unfinished martini to the contents of the washrooms had gone into that vile broth, together with the bodies of sixteen hundred people. They were standing in a waterlogged coffin, and the stench of death was everywhere. He understood how Manny felt. Rogo’s firsthand experience of death as a policeman had long since swept away any sentimentality he might have felt, but he could still comprehend Manny’s determination to rescue his wife’s body. It was Belle’s supreme act of courage that had enabled them to escape. Throughout their long climb up through the bowels of the wrecked ship she had been apologizing for her weight, her lack of agility, and the way she had slowed them down. She had even offered to stay behind. But then had come her moment. When Scott was trapped in the underwater dive that would lead them into the engine room, Belle Rosen, former swimming champion, had dived in to rescue him. It had been too much for her heart. They had been saved, and they had left her there. Even to Rogo that seemed unjust.
Rogo shook himself. He’d a job to do, and Mike Rogo didn’t leave business unfinished. Even so, his single-mindedness wavered when he looked at his two companions. Christ! A storekeeper who behaves like he’s at summer camp and a heartbroken old Jew. Rogo’s team! The New York Mets it ain’t, Rogo thought. Two guys in tuxedos and evening dress pants, caked in filth and oil and half-beat with exhaustion, looking as though they’re going to break into a dance and sing “We’re a Couple of Swells,” and himself in an undershirt and pants like an engineer’s rag. They wouldn’t serve them a beer in a trucker’s bar.
He stood on the surer ground of the girders and wide steel plates that surrounded the small pool and spread his arms out. “Welcome home, fellas!” he roared.
Manny was kneeling beside his dead wife. He had hurried to her as soon as they had completed the climb down. Tears painted white paths on his oil-dark face, and sobs came unhindered from his lips.
“Mamma, oh Mamma, oh Mamma.” Over and over again, he repeated it. “I came back for you, didn’t I? You knew I would. You knew your Manny wouldn’t leave you. When did I ever leave you, huh? That time you had the operation, who was it stayed with you and fixed the food and everything? So don’t worry, Mamma, everything’s going to be fine.”
He dropped his face into his hands and whimpere
d like a child. Then he fell silent, and lowered his hands and looked at her again. Their lives had been inextricably interwoven almost every minute for forty years. In the hardware shop they had served at the counter side by side. “Pass me those mops, will you, Belle?” “Hey, Manny, would you get me the knife-sharpeners down, the doctor says I mustn’t reach too high?” In the evenings they would sit together, or visit relatives together, or maybe go to a movie together. But always together. She called herself “a real home person” and was a little proud that, unlike some wives, she didn’t race around the coffee morning circuit or to card evenings. Manny had never been a man to go out for a beer with the boys, or even a walk around the block alone. That sort of mutual dependence never ends, not even with death.
Manny Rosen had known his wife was dead, but the irreversible finality of it had not reached him until now. She was dead. What he saw here was only a corpse and his beloved Mamma existed only in his memory. His hand went to the medallion she had won for swimming as Belle Zimmerman. She had asked him to deliver it to their little grandson in Israel. That was what he must do.
But first he must take Belle from this evil place and see her buried with honor and dignity. He rose slowly from his knees, for the first time conscious of his new role: widower.
“Mr. Rogo,” he said. The sobbing had left his voice now. “Mr. Rogo, I think I’d like to take Belle away from here now, if that’s okay with you.”
Rogo looked at the shambling figure, and it was only the clear sincerity in the bereaved man’s voice that checked his hair-trigger temper. Manny plainly knew what he must do, but in his confusion and distress he had not for a second begun to consider how it could be done.
“Yeah, just like that.” Rogo immediately regretted the hurtful irony in his tone. “Look, Manny,” he began to explain, “this ain’t New York. You can’t just whistle a goddamn cab or hop a subway. If we get a chance to get Belle outta here, then great.”
He became more serious, and threw a finger like a truncheon first at Manny, then at Martin. “But get this straight. You two guys jumped in on my deal. Nobody asked you along, right? You gotta stay to the end, and that’s when I say.”
Manny’s eyes had dropped. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rogo. I guess I’m not thinking straight. I’ll go along with what you say.” He looked around helplessly as he realized for the first time the illogicality of Rogo’s return. “But why did you come back? I don’t understand it.”
Martin cut in, “That’s right. If we’re going to help you, and we are a kind of a team by now, you’ve got to tell us what ball game we’re in.”
Rogo felt a leaden weariness in his limbs, and sat down slowly on one of the girders.
He said, “Okay fellas, okay.”
Rogo was not a man who was often assailed by doubts. He liked the old familiar problems, where his rudimentary sense of justice and bulldozing tactics were ideal. “I get a call to a bar mebbe. I go in. There’s a guy pulled a knife. I hit him with a chair and kick him in the nuts. That’s my job.” That was what he said when people asked him what he did. It was simple, it was effective, and in his eyes it seemed more or less fair. Here, it seemed, his whole world had been turned upside down with the ship. There was no identifiable enemy. There was no one to hit.
It had been his reward. “Straightforward security job,” they had told him. “One dollar, one hundred dollars, it’s the same. Sit on your ass and enjoy the sun, Mike.” That’s what they said. He should have stuck to barroom brawls.
He nodded his head across the dark vault of the room. Beyond the small pool, the pale light that crept through their escape opening was augmented by the two lanterns they had carried down, and it turned the snarled rails and pipes of the terrible debris into a delicate silver filigree through which they could see a high steel bulkhead.
He spoke in a passionless, flat voice. “There’s a special hold over there, like a goddamn big wall safe. Inside there’s half a billion dollars in gold bars. I’m here to keep the mice away.”
For a whole minute the only sound was the steady, distant dripping.
Then Martin’s excitement bubbled over into words, “That’s a lot of dough!”
Rogo’s face lifted. He replied, “You’d have to sell a helluva lot of socks in Anaheim for that.”
Manny asked quietly, “How’d it come about, one cop in charge of all that . . . gold?”
Rogo ran through it virtually verbatim from the endless briefings he had before the cruise. “Our honeymoon was a cover for the five of us. Moscowitz was a steward, Riley in the pantry, Ruffallo in the boiler room, Petersen played deckhand. I was the guy in the monkey suit amongst the passengers.”
He scraped up a morsel of hostility. “On account of my exquisite table manners.” He smiled at his own joke, then continued. “They’re all dead. That leaves me, and that’s why I couldn’t quit.”
Martin asked, “I don’t mean to sound rude, Mr. Rogo, but why would they have, well, y’know, ordinary cops on a job like this?”
“I guess I’ve been long enough on Broadway to smell a bribe. This stuff is packed in cases marked Toledo Wire and Bolt Company of which there ain’t none. Hush money, payoff money, setup money, it’s all the same. Nowadays you can square anybody with money and that goes for governments and big business too. All I know is someone in Athens was going to make the pickup and no announcements in the newspapers. So they asked a bunch of lame-brain cops. Ain’t you read the papers lately? The CIA is down the can, the FBI is busted up. They don’t trust the Treasury spooks no more. They reckoned they could find five honest cops on the New York force. If they’d wanted six they might’ve been in trouble.”
The sheer scale of the problem threw a depressed silence over the three men. Even so, Martin tried to spring back. “Well,” he said, “I guess we’ve got to sit it out.”
It was vague, but at least it was hopeful, and Rogo recovered a little of his spirit. “Yeah,” he agreed. “They gotta send someone soon. If this old scow can stay afloat a few hours longer, there’ll be a couple of destroyers alongside, and when they come they’ll find Rogo minding the store.”
The three were scrambling over the debris towards the hold when a lancing beam froze them like scarecrows in its piercing light. From the blackness behind it, high in the roof, a voice called down, “Get the coffee out, boys, you got company.” It was an American voice.
“What did I tell you?” Rogo whooped. “They’re here!”
Life rarely disturbed the composure of the elegant captain of the salvage vessel Komarevo, and when his first mate excitedly pointed out the activity around the upturned shell of the Poseidon, Captain Bela adjusted the cigar between teeth that would have done credit to a Hollywood dentist, and corrected the exposure of his cuffs. It was, by his standards, a display of considerable emotion. Indeed, those who had known Captain Bela for many years were hard pressed to recall anything that had ever shaken the equanimity of a man who had no difficulty in reconciling the most optimistic side of Marxism with the opportunism of Al Capone. Captain Bela delighted in his own contradictions. He was a Bulgarian, but the flag over the stern of his twenty-five-hundred-ton salvage vessel bore the convenient emblems of Panama. He was a committed Communist, but his six-figure savings were in a numbered account with a Swiss bank. He could talk of the triumph of the proletariat while complaining of any caviar other than beluga, and the shirts he ordered by the half-dozen from Paris were, he assured his more Party-conscious friends, merely sentimental souvenirs of the last days of capitalism. He had the manners of a duke, played a fine hand of bridge, and his skills equaled his very considerable charm. He was a bachelor, but Captain Ilich Bela spent few solitary nights.
He was also as deadly as a cobra.
Self-assurance shone from his lean, handsome features as he surveyed the scene from the bridge of the Komarevo. His cap, with its gold badge insignia, was set at a formally horizontal angle, and the four stripes on his sleeve confirmed an authority reflected in his every ac
tion.
The Komarevo plowed through still seas at a businesslike twelve knots towards the Poseidon, now a swiftly diminishing two miles distant. Through Zeiss binoculars that had once decorated the chest of a German U-boat commander, Captain Bela examined the inverted hull carefully, and then swung the glasses to look again at the Naiad, a little over a mile away, completing a rough triangle on the mirror surface of the sea. He hummed a note of mild interest as he watched the minuscule black figures swarm over the side.
Beside him the first mate wrinkled his gorilla features in incomprehension at the contented smile on his captain’s face.
“See, captain!” he cried. His arm, as thick as a tree, swept to include the freighter on the starboard side of the Poseidon and the yacht lazing in the sun. “People here before us. Not good, eh?”
Captain Bela’s look of gratified tranquility did not diminish. He moved to the wing of the bridge and examined the scene and, again touching one cuff, replied to his waiting lieutenant. “Not good, you think, Anton. No, not good. Excellent! One might almost say perfect.”
He stepped through the door from the bridge into the cabin, and picking up a magnifying glass confirmed their respective positions on the chart on the table. Anton’s bulk filled the doorway and threw a large shadow across the chart. His over two hundred pounds of muscle had many applications in his captain’s interest, but planning strategy was not amongst them. His small, ratlike eyes watched patiently from the fleshy face, and his thickly padded fingers drummed heavily on the door frame as he waited for the explanation.
Captain Bela put down the magnifying glass. “Ah, Anton, my dear fellow, I hardly know where I would be without you. But I have warned you before about the dangers of thinking too much.
“You are worried about what we have seen, right? Three men, we must assume survivors, have returned from the helicopter to the ship for God knows what reason. A broken-down coaster has put a line aboard her, presumably hoping to claim salvage rights. And a pleasure yacht crewed by amateur thieves has come to take a look. Oh yes, I know the Naiad all right. They are the pickpockets of the ocean. It is my business to know about such people.”