by Irwin Shaw
From the engine room below there was the sound of hammering. Pinky Kimball was down there with Dwyer, working on a pump. The first charter of the year began tomorrow and the port engine had overheated on a trial run. Pinky, who was the engineer on the Vega, the biggest ship in the harbor, had volunteered to come over and take a look at it. Dwyer and Thomas could handle simple repairs themselves, but when it came to anything really complicated they had to ask for help. Luckily, Thomas had struck up a friendship with Kimball during the winter and Kimball had given them a hand on various things as they got the Clothilde into shape for the summer. Thomas had not explained to Dwyer why he had decided to call the ship the Clothilde when they changed it from the Penelope at Porto Santo Stefano. To himself, he had said, a ship had to be called by a woman’s name, why not Clothilde? He certainly wasn’t going to call it Teresa.
He was happy on the Clothilde, although even in his own eyes it wasn’t one of the smartest craft on the Mediterranean. He knew its superstructure was a little topheavy and presented too much surface to the wind and its top speed was only twelve knots, cruising speed ten knots, and it rolled alarmingly in. certain seas. But everything that two determined men, working month after month, could do to make a craft snug and seaworthy had been done to the peeling hulk they had bought at Porto Santo Stefano two and a half years before. They had had two good seasons, and while neither of them had gotten rich off the boat, they both had some money in the bank, in case of trouble. The season coming up looked as though it was going to be even better than the first two and Thomas felt a calm pleasure as he burnished the bronze spool and saw it reflect the sun from its surface. Before taking to sea he would never have thought that a simple, brainless act like polishing a piece of metal could give him pleasure.
It was the same with everything on the ship. He loved to stroll from bow to stern and back again, touching the hand rails, pleased to see the lines curled into perfect spiral patterns on the calked, pale, teak deck, admiring the polished brass handles on the old-fashioned wheel in the deck house and the perfectly arranged charts in their slots and the signal flags tightly rolled in their pigeonholes. He, who had never washed a dish in his life, spent long hours in the galley scrubbing pans until they shone and making sure that the icebox was immaculate and fresh smelling, the range and oven scrubbed. When there was a charter on board he and Dwyer and whoever they signed on as a cook dressed in tan drill shorts and immaculate white cotton T-shirts with Clothilde printed across the chest in blue. In the evenings, or in cold weather, they wore identical heavy navy-blue sailor’s sweaters.
He had learned to mix all sorts of drinks and serve them frosty and cold in good glasses, and there was one party, Americans, who swore they only took the ship for his Bloody Marys. A pleasure craft on the Mediterranean, going between one country and another, could be a cheap holiday for a drunkard, because you could take on case after case of duty-free liquor and you could buy gin and whiskey for about a dollar and a half a bottle. He rarely drank anything himself, except for a little pastis and an occasional beer. When charters came aboard he wore a peaked captain’s cap, with the gilt anchor and chain. It made his clients’ holidays more seagoing, he felt.
He had learned a few words of French and Italian and Spanish, enough to go through harbor-master formalities and do the shopping, but too little to get into arguments. Dwyer picked up the languages quickly and could rattle away with anybody.
Thomas had sent a photograph of the Clothilde, spraying through a wave, to Gretchen and Gretchen had written back that she kept it on the mantelpiece of her living room. One day, she wrote, she would come over and take a trip with him. She was busy, she wrote, doing some sort of job at a movie studio. She said that she had kept her promise and had not told Rudolph where he was or what he was doing. Gretchen was his one link with America and the times when he felt lonely or missed the kid, he wrote to her. He had asked Dwyer to write his girl in Boston, whom Dwyer still said he was going to marry, to try to go down to the Aegean Hotel when she had the time and talk to Pappy, but the girl hadn’t replied yet.
Some year soon, no matter what, he was going to go to New York and try to find his kid.
He hadn’t had a single fight since Falconetti. He still dreamed about Falconetti. He wasn’t sentimental about him, but he was sorry Falconetti was dead and the passage of time hadn’t persuaded him that it wasn’t his fault that the man had thrown himself overboard.
He finished with the winch and stood up. The deck was promisingly warm under his bare feet. As he went aft, running his hands along the newly varnished mahogany-colored rails, the hammering below stopped and Kimball’s flaming red hair appeared, as he came out of the saloon and onto the deck. To get to the engine room, you had to pick up sections of the floor from the saloon. Dwyer appeared after Kimball. They were both wearing oil-stained green overalls, because there was no keeping clean in the confined space of the engine room. Kimball was wiping his hands on a piece of waste, which he threw overboard. “That ought to do it, mate,” Kimball said. “Why don’t we give it a spin?”
Thomas went into the pilot house and started the engines while Dwyer and Pinky cast off from the dock and clambered forward to bring up the hook, Dwyer working the winch and cleaning off the harbor muck from the chain with the hose before it dropped into the well. They had a lot of chain out, for stability, and the Clothilde was almost in the middle of the harbor before Pinky gave the sign that they were clear and helped Dwyer bring the hook on board with the gaff.
By now Thomas was skilled at handling the ship and only when he was coming into a very crowded harbor, with a bad wind blowing, did he hand over the wheel to Dwyer. Today, he turned the bow toward the harbor entrance and, keeping the speed down until they were outside, chugged beyond the fishermen with their rods at the end of the rampart and around the buoy before he increased speed, turning toward the Cap d’Antibes, leaving the fortress of the Vieux Carré on its hill, behind them. He watched the gauges of both engines and was relieved to see that the port engine wasn’t heating up. Good old Pinky. Through the winter he must have saved them at least a thousand dollars. The ship he was on, the Vega, was so new and so pampered that there was almost nothing for him to do when they were in port. He was bored on it and delighted to be able to putter about in the Clothilde’s cluttered, hot engine room.
Kimball was a knotty Englishman whose freckled face never got tan, but remained a painful hot pink all summer. He had a problem with the drink, as he put it. When he drank he became pugnacious and challenged people in bars. He quarreled with his owners and rarely stayed on one ship more than a year, but he was so good at his job that he never had any trouble finding other berths quickly. He only worked on the very big yachts, because his skill would be wasted on smaller craft. He had been raised in Plymouth and had been on the water all his life. He was amazed that somebody like Thomas had wound up the owner-skipper of a ship like the Clothilde in Antibes harbor, and was making a go of it. “Yanks,” Kimball said, shaking his head. “They’re fucking well capable of anything. No wonder you own the world.”
He and Thomas had been friendly from the beginning, greeting each other as they passed on the quay or buying each other beers in the little bar at the entrance to the port. Kimball had guessed that Thomas had been in the ring and Thomas had told him about some of his fights and what it was like and about the win in London and the later two dives he had had to take and even about the last fight in the hotel room with Quayles in Las Vegas, which had especially delighted Kimball’s belligerent heart. Thomas had not told him about Falconetti and Dwyer knew enough to keep quiet on that subject.
“By God, Tommy,” Kimball said, “if I knew I could fight like that I would clean out every bar from Gib to Piraeus.”
“And get a knife between your ribs in the process,” Thomas said.
“No doubt you’re right,” Kimball agreed. “But man, the pleasure before!”
When he got very drunk and saw Thomas he would pound t
he bar and shout, “See that man? If he wasn’t a friend of mine, I’d drive him into the deck.” Then loop an affectionate tattooed arm around Thomas’s neck.
Their friendship had been cemented one night in a bar in Nice. They hadn’t gone to Nice together, but Dwyer and Thomas had wandered into the bar, near the port, by accident. There was a cleared space around the bar and Kimball was holding forth, loudly, to a group that included some French seamen and three or four flashily dressed but dangerous-looking young men of a type that Thomas had learned to recognize and avoid—small-time hoodlums and racketeers, doing odd jobs along the Côte for the chiefs of the milieu with headquarters in Marseilles. His instinct told him that they were probably armed, if not with guns, certainly with knives.
Pinky Kimball spoke a kind of French and Thomas couldn’t understand him, but he could tell from the tone of Kimball’s voice and the grim looks on the faces of the other patrons of the bar that Kimball was insulting them. Kimball had a low opinion of the French when he was drunk. When he was drunk in Italy, he had a low opinion of Italians. When he was drunk in Spain, he had a low opinion of the Spanish. Also, when he was drunk, he seemed to forget how to count and the fact that he was alone and outnumbered at least five to one only spurred him on to greater feats of scornful oratory.
“He’s going to get himself killed here tonight,” Dwyer whispered, understanding most of what Kimball was shouting. “And us, too, if they find out we’re his friends.”
Thomas grasped Dwyer’s arm firmly and took him with him to Kimball’s side, at the bar.
“Hi, Pinky,” he said cheerfully.
Pinky swung around, ready for new enemies. “Ah,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m telling these maquereaux a few home truths for their own good.”
“Knock it off, Pinky,” Thomas said. Then, to Dwyer. “I’m going to say a few words to these gentlemen. I want you to translate. Clearly and politely.” He smiled cordially at the other men in the bar, arranged now in an ominous semicircle. “As you see, gentlemen,” he said, “this Englishman is my friend.” He waited while Dwyer nervously translated. There was no change in the expression of the faces lined up around him. “He is also drunk,” Thomas said. “Naturally, a man does not like to see a friend damaged, drunk or sober. I will try to prevent him from making any more speeches here, but no matter what he says or has said, there will be no trouble here tonight. I am the policeman tonight in this bar and I am keeping the peace. Please translate,” he said to Dwyer.
As Dwyer was translating, haltingly, Pinky said, disgustedly, “Shit, mate, you’re lowering the flag.”
“What is further,” Thomas went on, “the next round of drinks is on me. Barman.” He was smiling as he spoke, but he could feel the muscles tightening in his arms and he was ready to spring on the biggest one of the lot, a heavy-jawed Corsican in a black leather jacket.
The men looked at each other uncertainly. But they hadn’t come into the bar to fight and while they grumbled a little among themselves they each came up to the bar and accepted the drinks that Thomas had bought for them.
“Some fighter,” Pinky sneered. “Every day is Armistice day with you, Yank.” But he allowed himself to be led safely out of the bar ten minutes later. When he came over to the Clothilde the next day, he brought a bottle of pastis with him and said, “Thanks, Tommy. They’d have kicked in my skull in the next two minutes if you hadn’t come along. I don’t know what it is comes over me when I have a few. And it’s not as though I ever win. I’ve got scars from head to toe in tribute to my courage.” He laughed.
“If you’ve got to fight,” Thomas said, remembering the days when he felt he had to fight, no matter whom and for no matter what reason, “fight sober. And pick on one man at a time. And don’t take me along. I’ve given all that up.”
“What would you have done, Tommy, boy,” Pinky said, “if they’d jumped me?”
“I’d have created a diversion,” Thomas said, “just long enough for Dwyer to get you out of the saloon, and then I’d have run for my life.”
“A diversion,” Pinky said. “I’d pay a couple of bob to have seen that diversion.”
Thomas didn’t know what it was in Pinky Kimball’s life that changed him from a friendly, amiable, if profane man, into a suicidal, fighting animal when he got a few drinks in him. Sometime, perhaps, he’d have it out with him.
Pinky came into the pilot house, looked at the gauges, listened critically to the throb of the Diesels. “You’re ready for the summer, lad,” he said. “On your own craft. And I envy you.”
“Not quite ready,” Thomas said. “We’re missing one in crew.”
“What?” Pinky asked. “Where’s that Spaniard you hired last week?”
The Spaniard had come well recommended as a cook and steward and he hadn’t asked for too much money. But one night, when he was leaving the ship to go ashore, Thomas had seen him putting a knife into his shoe, alongside his ankle, hidden by his pants.
“What’s that for?” Thomas had asked.
“To make respect,” the Spaniard said.
Thomas had fired him the next day. He didn’t want anybody aboard who had to keep a knife in his shoe to make respect. Now he was short-handed.
“I put him ashore,” Thomas said to Pinky, as they crossed outside the bay of La Garoupe. He explained why. “I still need a cook-steward. It doesn’t make much difference the next two weeks. My charter just wants the boat during the day and they bring their own food aboard. But I’ll need somebody for the summer.”
“Have you ever thought about hiring a woman?” Pinky asked.
Thomas grimaced. “There’s a lot of heavy work beside the cooking and stuff like that,” he said. “A strong woman,” Pinky said.
“Most of the trouble in my life,” Thomas said, “came because of women. Weak and strong.”
“How many days a summer do you lose,” Pinky asked, “with your charters grousing that they’re wasting their valuable time, waiting in some godforsaken port just to get their washing and ironing done?”
“It is a nuisance,” Thomas agreed. “You got somebody in mind?”
“Righto,” Pinky said. “She works as a stewardess on the Vega and she’s pissed off with her job. She’s crazy about the sea and all she sees all summer long is the inside of the laundry.”
“Okay,” Thomas said, reluctantly.
“I’ll talk to her. And tell her to leave her knives at home.”
He didn’t need a woman aboard as a woman. There were plenty of girls to be picked up around the ports. You had your fun with them, spent a few bucks on them for a dinner and maybe a night club and a couple of drinks and then you moved on to the next port, without complications. He didn’t know what Dwyer did for sex and thought it better not to ask.
He turned the Clothilde around, to go back to the harbor. She was ready. There was no sense in using up fuel. He was paying for his own fuel until tomorrow, when the first charter began.
At six o’clock he saw Pinky coming down the quay with a woman. The woman was short and a little thick in the body and wore her hair in two plaits on either side of her head. She had on a pair of denim pants, a blue sweater, and espadrilles. She kicked off her espadrilles before she came up the gangplank in the stern of the ship. In the Mediterranean harbors most of the time you tied up stern to the quay, unless there was room to come alongside, which there rarely was.
“This is Kate,” Pinky said. “I told her about you.”
“Hello, Kate.” Thomas put out his hand and she shook it. She had soft hands for a girl who worked in the laundry room and could do heavy work on deck. She was English, too, and came from Southampton and looked about twenty-five. She spoke in a low voice when she talked about herself. She could cook, as well as do laundry, she said, and she could make herself useful on deck, and she spoke French and Italian, “not mightily,” she said, with a smile, but she could understand the météo on the radio in both languages and could follow a charted course and stan
d watches, and drive a car if ever that was necessary. She would work for the same salary as the Spaniard with the knife. She wasn’t really pretty, but healthy and buxom in a small, brown way, with a direct manner of looking at the person she was talking to. In the winter, if she was laid off, she went back to London and got a job as a waitress. She wasn’t married, and she wasn’t engaged and she wanted to be treated like any member of the crew, no better and no worse.
“She’s a wild English rose,” Pinky said. “Aren’t you, Kate?”
“None of your jokes, Pinky,” the girl said. “I want this job. I’m tired of going from one end of the Med to the other all dressed up in a starched uniform with white cotton stockings, like a nurse, and being called Miss or Mademoiselle. I’ve been taking a glance at your ship, Tom, from time to time, as I’ve passed by, and it’s pleased me. Not so big to be hoity-toity and British Royal Yacht Club. It’s nice and clean and friendly looking. And it’s a dead sure thing there won’t be many ladies coming aboard that need to have their ballgowns pressed all one hot steaming afternoon in Monte Carlo harbor for a ball at the Palace that night.”
“Well,” Thomas said, defending the elegance of his clientele, “we don’t exactly cater to paupers.”
“You know what I mean,” the girl said. “I’ll tell you what. I don’t want you to take a pig in a poke. Have you had your dinner yet?”
“No.” Dwyer was down in the galley messing around desolately with some fish he’d bought that morning, but Thomas could tell by the sounds coming from the galley that nothing of any importance had as yet been done.
“I’ll cook you a dinner,” the girl said. “Right now. If you like it, you take me on, I’ll go back to the Vega and clear out my things tonight and come aboard. If you don’t like it, what have you lost? If you’re hungry the restaurants in town keep open late. And Pinky, you can stay and eat with us.”