by Rex Burns
“There’s nothing like that here. You got a copy of everything I have.”
Which was puzzling, because Braithwaite had given Julie photocopies of everything he’d sent Herberling, including that message. “But Herberling’s file contained that list of Aurora’s officers, right? As well as the one with Touchstone’s name?”
“No—actually I didn’t find those two papers in the file. They were in the vest pocket of his coat. He’d hung his coat on a hook, and his glasses case had pushed them down to the bottom of that pocket. The forensics team found them and gave them to me with the rest of his personal effects when they finished investigating the crime scene. I just figured they were part of the Golden Dawn file and included them with the papers I sent you.” Mack went on more slowly, “Apparently, Bert’s killer found Braithwaite’s note in the file and took it. But he missed the ones in Bert’s coat pocket.” Then he added, “And I was dumb enough to miss their importance.”
Julie was well aware that she made her share of mistakes, too, but what counted now was correcting them. “There has to be a link between the two ships, Mack. Maybe crew qualifications. Maybe Rossi had a false officer’s ticket, and that led Herberling to question the qualifications of the Golden Dawn’s officers. If any of them were unqualified, and if anyone in Hercules Maritime’s home office knew that—Wood, say—”
“Right, Julie! It would negate their claim on the Golden Dawn’s loss.”
“And suppose the officers of the Aurora Victorious became subject to subpoena? Suppose Rossi was called to testify that his papers were fake, or even that Hercules Maritime or Wood knew that when he signed on the Aurora?”
“Oh, yeah!”
Qualified maritime officers of junior rank, Julie had been told over and over, were hard to find, especially for tanker work. Yet insurance companies demanded that ships have fully certified crews in order to be covered. It was a motive. There were still big holes in the theory—the premeditation angle, for instance, and the murders of Pierce and his family. But a vague shape was emerging, and it reinforced a tie between the two ships. “What did you find out about Captain Boggs?”
“Like I said, only a little. His credit reports go back five years, to when he started with Hercules Maritime. If he had trouble before that, the records don’t show it. Nothing overdue in the past five years, no loan apps at all in the last three years. Savings and checking at Barclay’s, no overdrafts. House in Hampstead Heath bought three years ago and payments up to date. I don’t have the price, but my London agent says there are some very nice homes in that area, and Boggs’s payments are two thousand, fifty-three pounds a month. No tax liens. Plays the horses now and then at the neighborhood bookie’s. No police record; not even a drunk driving charge. Two children, both grown and gone. Lives alone with his wife. When he’s ashore, that is. Wife active in church. Has her own paid-up accounts at Fortnum & Mason, Clarke’s, Sainsbury’s, Harrow’s of Northgate, and a couple other places.”
“Not hurting for money, then.”
“Quite comfortable. According to his taxable pay from Hercules Maritime, his house payments push him to the edge of his income. But if he has a little extra from somewhere—luck on the ponies now and then, or if his wife has money—he’s not overextended.”
“I thought he had been out of work for a long time.”
“But no records from that time. If he was in debt, he’s paid off what he owed and had the files purged.”
“If I need more on Boggs, can I use your agent here?”
“Audrey Bennett. She’s expensive, though.”
“I’ll check with my client before I get in touch with her.”
Mack gave her Audrey Bennett’s London number, and Julie gave him her hotel’s telephone and fax numbers.
“Julie,” he urged her in a quiet voice, “don’t push things too hard, okay? We don’t want to make it—ah—imperative for somebody to get rid of your father. And remember: He’s a big lad. He can take care of himself.”
“I hope so.”
XVI
No one knew where the story began or how it passed from ear to ear, but within twenty-four hours the whole crew had heard of the fight between Raiford and the first mate. Pressler did not appear on the bridge for two days, the captain took over the mate’s twelve-to-four watch in tight-lipped silence, and all orders from the first mate were issued by messenger. The other officers’ attitudes toward Raiford shifted to cool distance. As near as he could figure, it wasn’t because they were sensitive to Pressler’s feelings; rather, it seemed a more general embarrassment at Raiford’s doing what simply was not done. Even Li, who had been the friendliest, was guarded. Any chore that required Raiford to communicate with the first mate was relayed through Shockley. Otherwise, he was shunned at meals, in the wardroom, and at the evening cinema.
The crew, too, said nothing about it. In the presence of the other officers, the Chinese stewards and sailors even avoided looking at Raiford. Sam, who had not been seen for a couple of days after the fight, was reassigned to chip paint. Raiford glimpsed him occasionally, far down the green deck or on a platform slung over the ship’s rail to dangle just above the heaving foam of the ocean.
His new assistant was Alfred, whose last name was not Wang, and he did not come from the same village where Sam and many of the crew had been recruited. In fact, Alfred’s height and bulk—taller and heavier than the Taiwanese—marked him as coming from northern China. Unsmiling, he kept himself apart from the rest of the crew. Though the man understood enough English to hand him the right tools, Raiford couldn’t guess how much more he spoke because he seldom said anything.
The entire ship’s complement—officers and men—apparently believed Raiford had earned some kind of punishment. Pressler may have deserved what he got, but Raiford had assaulted the rigid chain of command that supported the authority of every officer and petty officer, and which ran from captain to cabin boy. It meant, ironically, that in his remaining few days aboard, he would be even less effective in finding out what happened to Rossi. He’d allowed his temper to play into the hands of those who would keep information from him, and he had only himself to blame. But he would not stand by and watch Pressler kick a helpless man. And he knew that if Pressler tried to stomp another sailor into pulp, he and the mate were going to repeat that first discussion. Raiford hoped Pressler knew it too.
The sullen ship, logging about two hundred and eighty nautical miles every twenty-four hours, steamed into the empty reaches of the Indian Ocean. But the ocean’s larger waves did not make the ship roll any heavier. Rather, there was a kind of forward lurch far down in the quivering hull as if the shove of the following seas let the laboring engines rhythmically grab a breath before churning the screw once more against the sluggish weight of the cargo. Driven by a following wind, blue crests hissed close to the main deck and spilled swirls and blossoms of foam that shone glaring white against the clear cobalt depths. They raced along the hull from the stern, peaked high when they met the bow wave, broke off the blunt stem in a turbulent trough, and re-formed as a giant swell of dark and wind-chapped sea disappearing toward the wriggling line of the southern horizon.
A few days into the Indian Ocean, Raiford found himself beside Shockley on the main deck of the bridge’s open promenade, enjoying the welcome shade and fresh sea wind. For a long time, both men silently watched the waves heave past the wallowing ship.
“This is the northern monsoon I heard about, right? North wind carrying us down to the Cape?”
Shockley grunted affirmative but nothing else.
During lunch, the ship’s noon chit had been announced over the intercom—the knots sailed since noon yesterday, assignments to working parties and maintenance details for the afternoon, the name of the night’s cinema, any birthdays among the ship’s complement, and, for Muslims, the direction of Mecca. It had become the longest communication Raiford heard.
But now Shockley surprised him by clearing his throat. “First Mate wants you to run some programs this afternoon. Cargo projections. Says you’re to make damn sure the results are accurate.” The pudgy man no longer used Pressler’s name when he passed orders on to Raiford. “Mr. Pressler” had become “First Mate,” as if to emphasize Raiford’s purely functional existence. “Here’s the figures.” He handed Raiford two slips of Teletype paper.
Each had been torn from a longer message. The figures were for two programs, one off-loading, the other on-loading. Among the first set of figures, Raiford recognized some by-now familiar data: the mathematical description of the Aurora Victorious’s tank capacities and its current load of Halul and Saudi crudes. The second set he did not recognize. “Planning to take a little oil out of our tanks?”
“Don’t know. First Mate wants both programs tested by eight bells.” Shockley disappeared into the bridge.
“Sure,” said Raiford to the closing weather door. “Happy to.”
The tests involved running the figures through the Lodicator, which was programmed with the Aurora’s capacities, then feeding the result to the Sweding machine. Its results would project the proper trim for the ship, based on a particular unloading pattern. That output would be compared to that of the ISIS 300 on the bridge. The ISIS 300 would give the navigation bridge a monitoring plan for the unloading, and Raiford’s tests would indicate the range of limitations to be programmed into the ISIS alert system. The figures, complicated by dealing with two different weights of oil in adjoining holds, had been telexed from shore. Raiford guessed that someone in the home office, worried about the possibility of bad weather on either side of the Cape at this time of year, wanted to be certain the Aurora would unload the least amount of valuable cargo.
The home office had done the basic mathematics, and now it was up to the electronics officer to feed the new program accurately into the ship’s computers and to verify the outcome before actual off-loading. In this program, the amount to jettison came to little more than three percent of the total cargo, enough to raise the ship to its winter load line. The dollar cost of dumping that much crude wasn’t in the numbers Raiford had been given, but at, say seven to nine barrels a ton, and figuring for ease of arithmetic a value of, say, $100 to the barrel, the range was between $500,500 and $656,560. Compared to the value of the entire multimillion-dollar cargo, that didn’t sound like much. But it did add up to a couple days’ pay for a private eye, and the idea of just pumping that many dollars overboard made you swallow a time or two.
The second set of figures was for an entirely different cargo space. A penciled note in the paper’s margin said “SP.2,” which looked like a file’s call letters. Raiford settled in front of the loading control room’s terminal and tapped into the memory of the ship’s computer. Scanning down the alphabetized files, he found SP.2 and tried to open it. But access was coded and the only information he could find was the time of the file’s last use: May 13, 10:22 A.M. That would have been during the Aurora’s previous voyage, when Rossi was still aboard. And the programmer would have been the man he was replacing, Pierce.
A glance through the loading plan told him it was for a smaller tanker: the number of stress points to be monitored was almost two-thirds less than the Aurora’s. However, the cargo specifics matched the specific gravity of the Halul and Saudi oil now carried by the Aurora. Which, since Raiford was paid to think nasty thoughts, gave him an idea. But the idea that the Aurora would dump its excess into the smaller vessel was short-lived for a couple of reasons. While half a million dollars might be a lot of pocket change for Raiford, it would barely cover expenses for even a small tanker to cruise this far into the Indian Ocean in order to take on that oil. Second, according to the figures he had been given for loading the smaller vessel, the quantity of oil to be loaded was over three times the amount scheduled to be dumped—adding up to at least a million and a half dollars and a little change. There was no way the Aurora Victorious could become that light on tonnage without some very embarrassing questions from the oil company at the final delivery point. They would measure what was delivered against what the port inspector said was originally loaded. … Unless, of course, that inspector was part of whatever was going on. …
Those were some of the objections to the suspicions that had entered his mind, and they were good ones. Nonetheless, they didn’t answer why the Aurora’s computer had in its memory a loading plan for a smaller vessel. Or why that plan had to be updated to match the type of oil in the Aurora’s tanks.
Raiford spent the afternoon chatting with the Lodicator as he recalculated both plans. He put in the new data, answered questions the program raised when he tinkered with its basic figures, asked the program questions when the results needed more computation. Finally, he adjusted the binomial sequences of operating commands to stay within the parameters of the new loading plans. And—as Shockley had demanded—checked and double-checked the figures for accuracy before feeding the information to the Sweding machine for its projections. Shockley, who periodically hung over Raiford’s shoulder in silence, took a deep breath when the machine at last chattered its conclusions.
He studied the rows of data on the paper curling out of the printer. “Is this accurate?”
“According to the numbers you gave me. Why are we figuring the load for another ship?”
“Who says we are?”
“The program.” Raiford pointed at the printout. “Those numbers aren’t for the Aurora. They’re for a smaller ship.”
Shockley’s ears turned dark under their suntan and he blinked rapidly as he looked hard at the paper. Finally he said, “I don’t know. It was a request from shore. Probably one of the company’s ships that doesn’t have its own computers. A smaller ship, you say? That’s it, then—a lot of smaller tankers don’t have a computer of their own, so we do it for them.” He hurried out of the loading room, the printouts clutched tightly in his fist.
XVII
Julie once again tried the radiophone. She suspected that whoever had isolated her father would expect her to try. So she did, with the same empty result. The captain, should he bother to answer, could tell Julie that Raiford had left the ship, that he never arrived, that he fell down a ladder, and there was no way she could challenge the man’s statement. It was the same dead end Rossi’s parents had hit months ago. Julie, deeply worried despite Mack’s reassuring words, understood more sharply the frustration and anger that had finally driven the Rossis to hire someone to shake some kind of response out of the bland silence.
But she did know that something was going on beneath that silence, something important enough to cost the lives of four people, including a child, to protect it. And she knew that her father was targeted—unless she could stir up enough dust to draw their attention from him. And since a moving target would best attract that attention, she’d better get moving.
The after-work crowd filled Russell Square Station, queuing up at the turnstiles, squeezing onto the escalators, jamming the platforms to press toward the hissing doors of the incoming trains. Julie looked for anyone following her, but the hundreds of faces made that difficult. King’s Cross Station, where she wound through tunnels and up and down stairs to the Northern line, was even more congested. The jostling throngs were not helped by buskers who clogged the passageways and whose various instruments or straining voices echoed down the tiled walls to mingle in a constant noise. The packed car surged forward, pushing her against fellow passengers who clung to the chrome rails and dangling hand-bulbs and swayed with the racketing lurch of the train. She suffered the close rub of a man whose breath heated the side of her neck and who kept trying to catch her eye as he let the crowd press his body hotly against her curves. Then, with relief, she squeezed through the doors at the Hampstead stop. Following the tide of legs and scuffling shoes up the stairs, she exited into an early evening light that nonetheless made
her blink like a mole.
The taxi dropped her at the corner of Carlingsford and Worseley. As she strolled up the quiet street, she was able to keep a cautious eye behind. But no one seemed to follow. At the top of a small hill, she turned right toward Captain Boggs’s address. The homes, some brick, some half timber, many stucco, were three and four stories tall, the gardens walled with brick or fieldstone. Large enclosed verandahs were popular, as were expensive cars: Bentley, Mercedes, Jaguar, and the occasional Land Rover. Even the small convenience shops tucked away on street corners, picturesque in design and cozily understated in advertising, had the aroma of money.
Boggs Manor, a square brick building painted white and touched with Georgian motifs, rose three stories above a ground-level service floor. Each had a full-width glassed-in porch. Through the gathering twilight, the first-floor porch showed large green plants and comfortably placed wicker furniture. A carriage drive ran between the house and a high brick wall, also painted white, to the closed green doors of a two-story detached garage. The ceramic nameplate in the white brick gatepost said WILLOW HOUSE. Pale roses blown large and losing their petals to the coming winter bordered a manicured plot of grass. In the center of the garden, a large willow tree draped its soft branches in yellowing glory to justify the home’s name. Julie was reminded of some of the old-money neighborhoods in American cities of the eastern seaboard—Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston. Homes, safely anchored in neighborhoods whose wealth had defended them against decline or even change, homes that had been expensive when built and were even more expensive now. In fact, when a home like that came up for sale, it was rarely placed on the open market.
Yet Boggs had bought one of these very impressive homes. After working for Hercules Maritime for just half a dozen years, he put down a lot of money and was now keeping up with a mortgage that almost matched his pay.