Shadowplays

by W. D. Gagliani

  A cabin door opened behind us, and those who spun to gaze down the shadowy companionway found ourselves now facing the first mate, a Teutonic giant named Gunther, of course, locked in his best SS stance and gripping the black scorpion frame of a Schmeisser MP-40 machine pistol with left hand around the full magazine jutting from the bottom of the receiver.

  I heard muttering among the crewmen and smelled their fear, leaking almost visibly from their pores along with the precious sweat. A crossfire would finish us, and the rest of our mates in the bowels of the ship. All the slick faces turned to me, their fear set aside in order to grant me the honor of leadership. I was their spokesman, and I cursed the lot of them for their cowardice and uselessness. I cursed myself for having dared to lead a group of what news accounts would surely call mutineers, when all I wanted to accomplish was the equitable treatment of human beings reduced to a state of mental and physical deterioration by the stalking ego of one man, Captain Voss Harding.

  “Well, Second Officer Corelli,” said the Captain. “The men await your oratory.”

  He kept his lip from curling, but only barely.

  I summoned my voice.

  “Sir, we have been in this port forty-nine days. The loading will take at least three more weeks to finish at this pace. We are down to a cup of water per man per day. The local water is contaminated, or so we are told. Our alcohol rations are running low, as is our food supply. The men have been warned to avoid leaving the ship due to the cholera epidemic. We have dead men in the cold room, and we now number nearly a dozen cases of dysentery in the infirmary. I speak only facts, sir, and I must insist that you cut short our stay and allow us to head for a friendly port where we can recover from the disaster that has been this voyage since we first set out. With all due respect, sir, we implore your humanity.”

  My ears heard the words, but it was as if someone else had spoken them. They could not have come from my lips, parched as they were, or my brain, mired as it was in the molasses of fear. I awaited the hail of bullets that would greet the end of my speech.

  But there was no volley, no explosion of gunfire in that confined space.

  For a moment it seemed as if a cloud pregnant with rain were about to burst overhead. The lamps twitched as if tugged on a single chain pull. I felt the pressure of the heat build up in my head to the point where I thought my plugged ears would collapse outward and release some sort of bile stream and spew away my life. I could see similar thoughts in the grim faces of the others, and I sensed that if the moment lasted any longer our space would implode and suck us through some sort of cosmic netstrainer.

  And through it all, Captain Harding’s eyes, surveying the landscape of my soul.

  2

  Though a new coat of paint hid the majority of the rust staining the bow and hull, the S.S. Caritas was still an aging mid-size freighter which had changed hands a dozen times during its life. Now owned by the C Corporation, we officers and men were also made to welcome the new commanding officer, Voss Harding, who carried an American passport but spoke in an accent I decided was either Dutch or German. Perhaps Afrikaans. All of which might have explained the curt superiority with which he treated his crew. Before long we officers had mostly accepted the fact that he would rarely fraternize with us, taking his meals either alone or in the company of Gunther, a first mate also shipped from Corporation headquarters on Harding’s request. Our own first mate was removed when Harding found him drinking with the crew in their mess, amidst much cheering and singing. From then on we knew that our new captain would tolerate little by way of friendship and camaraderie, and we went about our business grimly and with only clear thoughts of the paychecks to motivate us.

  We were a veritable Foreign Legion of a crew, mostly legitimate career men but with a few questionable former criminals or thugs who kept to themselves as much for anonymity as for anti-social tendencies. We numbered a half dozen Americans, several Irishmen, a German or two, some Italians such as I, and a couple each of Frenchies, Russians, Greeks, and Egyptians. On any given day one could discern conversations in a dozen different tongues and dialects, but mostly everyone settled on English for orders and official communication. We spent two weeks getting to know each other and the ship, scraping off rust and slathering paint in its place, buffing floors and railings, smoothing iron and polishing fittings until the Caritas seemed almost presentable. Throughout, Captain Harding deigned to be seen in public only rarely, though the lights in his quarters shone at the most inconsistent times.

  The journey had begun as routine as so many before, though the route was new to us, leaving Southampton with small electronics and industrial goods for various stops in the Mediterranean, taking on textiles in Genoa, olive oil in Naples, then off-loading portions of all those goods in Alexandria - especially a large number of sealed containers we all knew hid some sort of contraband labeled MACHINE PARTS - and then wending our way through the Suez Canal, newly widened a year before in 1963, and into the Red Sea. After refueling at Aden, we took a straight course across the Arabian Sea to Goa, a tiny state in India not long ago before a Portuguese protectorate, where our holds would be emptied of all goods and loaded again with silver ore chipped from the mines a day’s drive inland. The ore would ride us low in the water throughout our return to Southampton, where the ship’s belly would be flushed of its precious cargo and pay the company very well indeed.

  This was a scenario well-known by every one of us aboard, officers and crew, that our paychecks depended upon the safe and timely completion of the cycle. The monkeywrench could have snagged the works anywhere on the route, but it had chosen the hot Indian west coast - trapped in the hottest summer on record - to lay itself between the gears that had brought us there so smoothly.

  Goa was a state of burgeoning importance, thanks to the iron and silver mines, but it had not yet begun to turn the riches into new facilities, and once at anchor in Panaji harbor, in view of the Old City, we learned that our empty holds were to be filled with silver not in crane-loads, but by a constant stream of hundreds of native porters filing onto the ship on foot, each carrying a huge wicker basket on his back and emptying its heavy contents into the yawning maws of the hold. When the process began after vigorous bargaining with the representatives of the mines, we watched in amazed silence. The waiting line of porters stretched as far as the eye could see on the crumbling stone quay, split in two as they came and went side by side, singing or chanting, weighed down by their awesome burdens in the heat of the Indian day and in the humid chill of the nights. It was a sight the likes of which we had never seen, and we spent the first few days gawking at the porters, as young as twelve and as old as my grandfather, who slowly snaked onto and off the deck as if they were the cogs of a living machine.

  Captain Harding watched too, with obvious disgust, from the railing around the bridge. His smirk turned to frowns and eventually to a continuously angry set of his thin lips, his eyes radiating hatred of the place and of the porters. And, we soon realized, of us.

  At night the ancient pier and the shoreline were dotted with hundreds of cooking fires as a portion of the porters squatted on their haunches and cooked fragrant curries in tin pots, dipping balls of rice into the rich broth with their fingers and swallowing their dinner amidst the low-voiced chattering of their companions. We learned to make the curries ourselves, our cook stretching the meats in our cold lockers by imitating the locals, whose diet consisted of mostly of the bulk rice spiced with the brown sauces made pungent by spice and flavored with various meats - some of which we chose to avoid thinking about. Later, the porters chanted long into the night. Eventually we would come to despise the sound of it.

  After a week or so, boredom had already set in.

  “Hey, Corelli, play with us.”

  Cards had become the pastime of choice as little remained for us to do while the never-ending line of porters slowly, achingly slowly filled the bottom of the hold with ore.

  Bentz, a German who boasted o
f moneyed relatives, sat in the saloon with Sullivan, the ex-IRA bomber with a price on his head, and with an American whose name I’ve since forgotten. They were playing some crazed version of poker I’d never seen, a dozen beer bottles already arranged in empty ranks between them.

  “I’ll pass,” I said. “I wouldn’t last two hands with you ruffians.” Then I lectured. “Slow down on the beer. For one thing the captain wouldn’t like to know you’re already drunk in the middle of the afternoon. For another thing, we’re going to run out of beer - and everything else - if you don’t slow down.”

  “What else is there to do, man?” said Sullivan. “This is the first time I been on a load and I weren’t needed.”

  The others nodded.

  “There’s gotta be a better harbor somewhere on this fuckin’ coast,” piped in the American. “Some place with cranes and modern equipment.”

  “Well, if there is we aren’t there,” I pointed out. “We’re lucky we were able to dock at all - it’s shallow here. Just remember what I said about the captain.”

  “He ain’t likely to visit us, is he?” Sullivan got a laugh for that.

  “No, but his goon Gunther might,” I said, and they shut up because they knew it was true.

  Out on deck, the procession of stooped, sun-wizened old men and brown little boys and strapping lads continued like a life cycle in the heat of the summer sun. And the silver pile at the bottom of the hold climbed slowly, ever so slowly upward.

  I opened the porthole in my airless closet of a cabin and wondered how much longer we would be here.

  3

  The third fight to break out in the month since we had first sighted the low-lying hills of inland Goa turned uglier than the others almost immediately. I was halfway through my afternoon’s sleep when the shouting awoke me and, rushing to the deck, I saw that a Greek and one of the Frenchmen were circling each other, slowly, and then rushing closer together in a feint or a thrust, and I saw that they each held knives. The Greek a long and slightly-curved blade right out of the Iliad, and the Frenchman some sort of Bowie knife most likely contributed by one of the encouraging Americans in the throng of sailors who watched, excited. Behind all this, the porters ignored us and continued their life’s work, adding ore to our hold in tiny increments.

  As I rushed back to my cabin to strap on a sidearm with which I could break up the fight, I caught a glimpse of Harding and Gunther, watching almost approvingly from the bridge. Gunther leaned in to say something to the captain, and they both laughed. I had no time to be sickened, for I heard the men’s shouts intensifying. I returned in time to see that blood had been drawn, as the Frenchman held his naked side and blood streamed over his fingers. But they continued to taunt and challenge each other like children, so I went for my revolver - a burly old .455 Webley - and squeezed a shot off in the air. The hammer fell on an empty chamber, however, and I squeezed again. Again a click, and a sickening feeling spread through my guts as I realized that someone had emptied the cylinder of cartridges.

  Suddenly there was one tortured scream and all the men went silent, and I looked up just in time to see the Frenchman on his knees, his belly gaping where the Greek’s cutlass had carved him open like a turkey. The skin and flesh were peeled back like sliced lard, and the grotesque mess of his intestines gushed out of him in a curtain of blood and bile. And then he fell forward on his face, landing in the pool his life made as it left him for good.

  I stood, weakly, the empty revolver in my hand. A symbol of the god of futility.

  Above us, on the bridge, I saw Gunther lean toward Harding. Paper money changed hands. Paper blood.

  4

  A month.

  The stagnant air stifles us, while the spotlight orb of the sun burns every metal surface to a constant sizzle.

  The porters continue to spill ore into the hold.

  The beer is gone. Alcohol in the form of British rum, a necessity in the tropics, is dangerously low. Citrus, that preventer of scurvy, is almost finished. Water is rationed. The curries, so delicious at first, now seem to have blocked our every pore, flavoring the insides of our mouths and nostrils with their sickeningly sweet stench, which pervades our lives - our urine and even our bowel movements seem to belch the curry out of our tired and gaunt frames. Feverish eyes follow wherever I go, as I attempt to keep the men on tasks for which they have lost all heart.

  Our cold locker now holds three corpses, the Frenchman killed in the fight, another - a Russian - throat slit while he slept, the result of some personal vendetta, and an Egyptian whose penis was severed under mysterious circumstances by an Englishman who refuses to answer questions, even after ten days in lock-up. There is no local police, and Harding would never allow them aboard if there was, so we watch over our own as they turn into criminals and murderers.

  I don’t know how I’ve managed to hold the rest together and kept them from killing each other. None of the officers can find cartridges for their weapons. Captain Harding says there will be no shooting aboard his ship. Apparently stabbing and mutilation are allowed, even encouraged. I already know what I will report when we return, but I am intelligent enough to wonder how many will, indeed, return. The radio shack is held by an armed Gunther, who has watched over us on those occasions when Harding has engaged a driver and guides to take him into the Old City. It seems he is negotiating with someone, for long sessions of harangue coming from his cabin have been heard by everyone. Sullivan and Bentz have become the only two I trust, my eyes and ears, while at least one - Idalgo, an asshole of a slimy Spaniard who’d play his mother against his grandmother for a cut of any profits - seems to keep the captain informed of our actions.

  This day takes Harding to the Old City - someone has said to the Cathedral, the Basilica Bom Jesu, where the dark-haired Sullivan tells me the remains of Saint Francis Xavier are kept, mummified in some sort of crypt.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I say, unbelieving.

  “Ye think me daft, eh?” Sullivan shakes his head. “It’s the God’s own truth. Francis Xavier came here a missionary in 15-somethin’ and was made some sort of local hero among the heathen, see? Then he gets sainted and whatnot, and his place of death is like a shrine.”

  “Where did you learn all this?”

  “I had me some book learnin’, you know! Okay, and I overheard Gunther talkin’ to the Spaniard during last night’s watch. They dint see me, lucky me, or maybe you’d be layin’ me out in the cold room.”

  “But what does all this have to do with Harding?”

  “I don’t know and fuck if I care,” says Sullivan, “but I think it ain’t no coincidence his captainship is out yakkin’ it up with some o’ those lowlives who’re takin’ him to the very cathedral where them bones are kept. Ya see?”

  “No,” I have to admit, “It can’t be any coincidence.”

  “Watch your back, Core,” he says. “You’re our only chance outta this hellhole. Now let me go get rid of dinner - the faster the better!” He waddles away, holding his stomach.

  By the end of the day, a Greek sailor is reported missing - a friend says he resolved to sneak ashore and find food and water despite our orders. Anything he carried will have made him a target for ambush. I add his name to the list and bide my time, but we never see him again.

  5

  In the last few weeks, Sullivan and Bentz and I had begun to keep a closer eye on the dealings of our captain and his henchmen (for that was how we thought of them). Harding would shut himself up in his cabin for days, seemingly, venturing out only to stand watch briefly over the loading, which now had reached a half-way point. Of the crew, only Gunther and Idalgo would ever be seen entering his quarters, and then they would stay inside for hours. Occasionally, I thought I heard a faint chanting or singing, but it could just as easily have come from the porters who still lined the harborfront and pier when not in line.

  One day, the locals who often piloted Harding to the Old City marched aboard with a woman. I watc
hed as they dragged her up the gangplank, past the weighed-down porters and across the deck to the companionway that would lead them to the bridge and the captain’s quarters. I was close enough to see her face, though half-veiled, her lovely eyes wide with fear. The veil fell away as she struggled, and I saw her lush, purple-stained lips and her straight, white teeth, a mouth and features as fetching as any woman I have ever seen in any of my travels, and I stepped up to intervene, but then Gunther was above me at the railing, a German handgun held loosely in his paw clanking on the metal of the rail, and my fear made me step back, to my undying shame. The woman disappeared into the captain’s quarters with the rest of them, and we saw no one until the next day. We told ourselves we heard no screaming, no sounds of flesh upon flesh, and fist upon bone, or blade upon skin, or blood upon deck. We told ourselves we had not heard these things, and we saw no woman leave, though the haughty locals did take the captain to the cathedral again that following day, from which he did not return until late and then his return was accompanied not only by the locals, but also a group of near-naked porters who struggled with a long crate in the darkness. They maneuvered the crate into the captain’s quarters, somehow, and I let the thoughts run unfettered through my imagination.

  It was six weeks, forty-two endless days of searing heat and nights of damp, humid cold that cut through to the bone, since we had sighted the jungle and far-off hills of Goa and dropped anchor in Panaji’s split, shallow harbor, and I knew that the men were at the end of their tether. A spate of less serious fights had occurred in the last few days, over a ladle-full of water or a bowlful of rice, but they’d ended in draws, the men too weakened by hunger and thirst to fight to the death, or even beyond a first landed fist. But where could you cool off men when the heat reached one hundred fifteen degrees Fahrenheit regularly, until the night dropped the mercury down to a frigid forty? We looked like castaways by then, as we had all taken to wearing ragged clothes, the fabric falling apart with the acid of our sweat and grease, and the lack of washing all catching up to us.