by Kim Ekemar
The hostess, Berenice, confirmed that she had been in her cabin working on the following day’s programme on Cape Horn and was wavering whether she had heard the gunshot or not. The ship’s doctor stated, in a steady voice, that he had been reading up on some medical reviews in his cabin. He had registered the shot as a distant noise and dismissed it as something that had to do with the powerful engines or some other essential workings of the vessel.
After sorting through the testimonies, Ricardo was able to reduce the thirty people present on the ship to nine suspects without an alibi.
*
Supported by the crutches, Ricardo again made his way to the captain’s cabin and was invited in.
“I’ve narrowed down my list of suspects”, he began. “I would like to once more interview those still under suspicion, this time with the objective of revealing further in-depth details. By necessity, I need to do this in a private setting –”
“You’re welcome to use my cabin, Inspector”, the captain interrupted him. “I don’t think there’s a more private space on board the ship.”
“That’s very kind of you, Captain. However, before I start, I need to pose some questions to you about the victim, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course not. Please go ahead.”
“How did Ari Cohen become employed on Stella Australis?”
“I don’t know the details”, the captain replied, “that’s something you’d need to ask our office in Puerto Montt where they made the final decision about hiring him. I was only requested to evaluate his seamanship. I took him with me on one of our cruises, and it immediately became clear to me that he was a very seasoned and skilled sailor. Afterwards, I reported my approval to our headquarters.”
“So, I gather from your answer that he was a professional with plenty of experience. What about his relationship with the rest of the crew?”
“Although both capable and intelligent, Cohen could at times be short-tempered and irascible”, Captain Abasolo responded after a pause, while he thought through his answer. “In particular, he seemed of late to have a grudge against Segundo, for which I reprimanded him twice.”
“How was his general character as a person?”
“If I sum it up, I would say it like this … professional when on duty; a teetotaller; respectful to his two superiors; secretive about his past; demanding, not to say harsh, when it came to his subordinates; and clearly not liked among the crew.”
“Did he ever explain to you how he had become such a good sailor as you have pointed out?”
“No, not really. I asked him on several occasions, but mostly got evasive answers that basically indicated that he’d worked on several commercial ships that move containers across the oceans. But now it’s your turn – tell me, what did you learn from your test?”
“The test and the preliminary interviews helped me narrow down the suspects to nine, although I still have no clue as to what motive any of them might have had. And, considering what I suspect was very sophisticated planning to execute Cohen’s murder, I can only assume that emotionally the motive was a very strong one.”
“Nine suspects? How did you come to that conclusion?”
“Well, I did go through the part of the statements where those on board stated in whose company they had been. For example, the three crew in the engine room. The four waiters who were playing bridge in one of their cabins also vouch for each other, even if the one called Patricio left for his own cabin when he at one point became dummy.”
“Patricio is a suspect?”
“No, at this point, I don’t believe he is. Although he was away when the shot rang out, the others corroborated that he returned to the game almost immediately afterwards. That wouldn’t have given him the necessary time to get from the bridge to the lower deck. The two housekeepers, who are giving one another an alibi, aren’t by far tall enough, or strong enough, to have placed the gun against Cohen’s forehead, who you know was quite muscular. The chef and his three assistants in the kitchen vouch for the presence of the others. The same goes for your three crew in the engine room, whose alibis are also strengthened by the fact that they had just weighed anchor and started the engine. The bartender and the French girl, Leila, give one another alibi that both were in the Darwin Lounge when the shot rang out, and putting that aside, Miguel met with Ernesto outside the bridge immediately after the shot. The four crew off duty were all sleeping in the cabin they share. All considered, this reduces the suspects to nine persons who lack a satisfactory alibi.”
“And they are?”
“Segundo, the assistant engine operator; Berenice, the hostess; Hugo Bautista, the ship’s doctor; Pierre Mohraki, the Frenchman; Ferah Tayran from Turkey, and her companion Antanias Murad from Lebanon; Brent Crenshaw, the Englishman; and Charles and Evelyn Bright, the American couple.”
“I’ve come to know Doctor Bautista quite well over the years that we’ve worked together on Stella Australis, and I assure you he would be incapable of committing murder – especially on board my ship!”
“Nevertheless”, Ricardo replied, “since he doesn’t have an alibi, I can’t strike him off my list. One by one, I will now interview those without an alibi, and we will see if I can’t find out the truth about what really happened.”
“I still have a hard time believing your hypothesis, Inspector”, the captain said with a sigh. “To me, Ari’s death still remains a suicide, despite there being some distracting circumstances to the contrary. After all, how could someone murder Ari and afterwards leave the bridge locked from within?”
Ricardo ignored the captain’s speculation about Ari Cohen’s death and instead changed the subject.
“I know from Berenice that you keep all the passports belonging to the passengers and the crew members in your safe. After we pick up those still stranded on the glacier, and once we get into Ushuaia, I don’t see any problem returning their passports. However, I request that you refrain from handing over the passports to the people whose names are on this list.”
He handed the captain a paper with ten handwritten names.
“In addition, I’d like to take a picture of each of these passports, and then ask for your help to transmit them to be checked by Interpol.”
CHAPTER 10
The Ship’s Doctor
With Captain Abasolo’s permission, Ricardo installed himself in the captain’s cabin to interview the suspects. The first one he called was the ship’s medic, Dr Bautista.
The doctor was in his late sixties, wearing a benign smile and thick glasses over a pair of intelligent eyes. He was in good shape for his age. Earlier, he had confirmed that he was six months away from the start of his retirement. Ricardo considered him to be at the bottom of his list of suspects, but because of his lack of an alibi, he was unwilling to eliminate Dr Bautista from it.
*
As far back as Hugo Bautista could remember, he always wanted to be a doctor. Perhaps this was a result of his sick mother’s cry for attention when he grew up, or his father’s factory accident that rendered him a cripple. Whatever the reason, Hugo became determined at a very young age to become a physician.
Pursuing his career choice, he was at 27 presented with the option to study his specialisation in London in the United Kingdom. There he met his future wife, a dark-eyed Iranian who studied the same branch of medicine as he did. Two years later they were married, and she persuaded him to go with her to Iran for five years. She did so against her promise to thereafter travel with him to Argentina, his country of birth, to practise for the following five years.
As it happened, the Shah of Iran was ousted a mere six months before their agreed first five years were up, and Ayatollah Khomeini came into power. In the inevitable political confusion that followed, Hugo pleaded with his wife to leave with him for Argentina. She refused, vehemently arguing that her well-to-do family would suffer the consequences if she did.
And consequences they did suffer, but not in the way she had pred
icted. Due to her father’s close relationship to the fugitive shah’s government, the condemnation of the newly installed theocratic leadership was damning and surprisingly swift. Her father was condemned to death by hanging, most of her siblings went to jail and one day Dr Bautista’s vociferous wife simply disappeared. Hours later, he was deported without explanations or any clue as to what had happened to his spouse.
Bewildered and beside himself, back in London Dr Bautista frantically tried to find answers about his wife’s destiny. After two years of research, he realised that she, too, had been killed. The final insight into her fate was delivered to him through a short and very much to the point phone call that he received late one night. “Don’t bother. Stop looking. If you refuse, you’re next”, the voice had informed him in broken English, before abruptly ending the call.
Confused, frightened and uncertain about what to do next in life, Dr Bautista lived and worked maintaining a low profile for the next three years. Then, when a proposal came his way to join the Médecins Sans Frontières organisation – or Doctors Without Borders, as it became known in English – he accepted. Because of his years of field practice in Iran, he was persuaded to work in another Middle Eastern country to pursue his vocation. In early 1986, Dr Bautista found himself in another theatre of war – at the centre of the Lebanese Civil War.
Whatever morsel of naivety he still had left abandoned him after his harrowing ordeal during the years in Lebanon, only to be replaced by a cynical understanding of how war worked. He was employed in that country until the civil war in Lebanon came to its official end in 1990. Dr Bautista then accepted a transfer to Somalia. Later, he worked in Libya, before ending up in Syria as the complex civil war in this country scaled up.
Despite his vast experience in different countries at war, Syria quickly became the foremost among his appalling experiences. The culminating incident for Dr Bautista, and the decisive factor for him in returning to a less stressful job in his home country, was the employment of internationally prohibited chemicals as weapons to kill civilians. It was at this time, as one of the top officials for the organisation in the region, that he learnt that the Syrian military command had instructed a naval officer by the name of Adnan Shadid to carry out the extermination of undesired opponents to the Syrian dictatorship.
In his limited way, and for the first time in his life, Dr Bautista decided to do something to protest against a governmental action that he found reprehensible. After having corroborated the name of Adnan Shadid as the main culprit executing the orders of the Bashar al-Assad regime, he weighed his years of experience in war zones against the importance of letting the world know that a war criminal could not get away scot-free from mass-murdering his fellow citizens.
Then, before he was able to put his plan in motion, and to the great surprise for everyone who knew and respected him, he was dismissed from the Doctors Without Borders organisation with immediate effect. The official reason for his dismissal was that he had facilitated the escape for a Syrian woman and her two children on a boat destined for Greece. In the eyes of the self-acclaimed non-political organisation, in doing so he had acted in a way that didn’t serve the larger purpose of Doctors Without Borders.
After this devastating rebuke, despite his many years working selflessly for the organisation, he returned to Argentina. Soon thereafter, he was accepted to become the ship’s doctor on Stella Australis. At this point in his career, it was an unchallenging employment he had accepted – in many ways a great relief to him compared to the work he had done in the Middle East. That is, until five seasons had gone by and he, in 2016, met with a newly employed officer whose real name he soon discovered was Adnan Shadid.
*
There wasn’t much the doctor could tell beyond what he had earlier testified, he told Ricardo. At the time of the gunshot, he had been in his cabin, alone, reading up on some medical reports.
“Did you know Ari Cohen well?” Ricardo continued his questioning. He observed how the doctor hesitated before replying.
“No, not really, not beyond both of us belonging to the crew on this ship during the previous season. I guess you could say that he was a private man … and in many ways, so am I. And since I have nothing to do with the manoeuvring of the ship, we rarely interacted.”
“I noticed that you doubted before answering, Doctor – why was that?”
“I … I wasn’t too sure what to tell you, to be honest. I usually don’t like to pass judgement on others, especially if they are deceased. But, if you need to know, on a personal level, I didn’t like him one bit.”
“Why is that?”
“I saw how he treated female staff with the tip of his shoe, and the superiority lacking decency that he showed those among the crew who reported to him”, the doctor, with a passion unusual for him, replied.
“Since you’re the doctor on board Stella Australis”, Ricardo pointed out, changing the subject, “I assume you made physical evaluations of the crew at one point or other?”
“Yes. According to the shipping company’s protocol, it’s done a few weeks before a new season starts. In the case of Cohen, he was an impressively fit man considering that he was in his early fifties. Every value was within the parameters, from cholesterol to blood pressure, along with everything else.”
“As a physician, and just for the record – please give me your medical evaluation regarding how he died.”
“Since it’s rather obvious given that you’ve seen the body, I’ll give it to you in layman’s terms: he put a large gun against his forehead and pulled the trigger. His brain was completely perforated by the bullet, which exited at the back of his head. Death was immediate.”
CHAPTER 11
The Intelligence Officer with a French Passport
After tapping the cabin door with his cane, Mohraki entered after Ricardo in a loud voice had told him to do so. Hunched over his cane, Ricardo noted that he kept leaning heavily on it to alleviate the stress on his left leg. At his invitation, Mohraki sat down and in a calm manner looked at Ricardo with the expectation that the interview would begin.
He was a mild-mannered man with intelligent eyes below a pair of prominent eyebrows that gave him the faint look of a movie star villain. Ricardo was struck by how Mohraki projected an image of being a man at peace with himself.
*
Pierre Mohraki was a man with a chequered past. Although his French passport listed his birthplace as a small village in Algeria, he had been born in Homs, Syria, in 1955. At the age of twenty, he was encouraged by an uncle, with crucial connections within the state department, to join the Syrian intelligence community. The work appeared to be tailor-made for him. A highly analytical man, he revelled in the gathering of intelligence and in a short time produced significant results. As a consequence, he quickly rose in the ranks.
Then, in March 2011, the civil war in Syria broke out. This meant two notable changes for him on a personal level: his work days became longer and secrecy less guarded. The Russians entered the war, as did the Americans and some countries within the European Union. Sometimes Pierre, whose real name was Majdi Asghar, despaired and openly complained about a proxy war being fought by the world powers in his country. He became increasingly critical about the governing regime’s handling of the war against the rebels on one side and the rapid expansion of the so-called Islamic State on the other.
When Pierre was approached by a French agent, he at first resisted any collaboration. As the war escalated, he changed his mind. In the hope that he would be able to help put an end to the war that was tearing his country to pieces, he provided the European Union with intelligence that he smuggled out of his office. Since his security clearance was high, he was able to give the Europeans invaluable intel about the Syrian army’s strategies and the Russian efforts to maintain Bashar al-Assad in power.
Then came the day his handler told him he had information that Asghar’s situation might be compromised, and that he’d better prepare him
self and his family to leave the country. Three weeks later, he found himself being debriefed by professionals in Paris, and after another month, retired with a French passport living in a humble flat in central Marseille.
He actively maintained his extensive contact net in the Middle East, because he was a determined man who wanted the slaughtering of his people and the gigantic mass migration to come to an end. It was Pierre’s wish to be one of the cogs in the efforts that would end the senseless, brutal civil war in his country.
*
After Mohraki had sat down across the captain’s desk, with his hands resting on top of the cane that he had placed between his legs, Ricardo noticed that he was being observed by him with the same scrutiny that he himself was studying Mohraki.
“You became sick – and in a severe way, Doctor Bautista told me – from food poisoning yesterday”, Ricardo began the conversation. “I sincerely hope that you have recovered since?”
“Although I’m still a bit weak, I feel much better now, I assure you”, Mohraki replied.”
"Did your unfortunate experience lead you to having to spend all day in your cabin, then?”
“I did, until we were all ordered by the captain to reunite in the Darwin Lounge.”
“What about the shot? Your cabin is on the same deck as the bridge. Did you hear it go off?”
For the first time, Mohraki hesitated slightly before replying.