The Boy Who Liked Monsters (Commander Shaw Book 19)

by Philip McCutchan

  I asked him a question in return. “Is the dinghy properly equipped, Perro?”

  He said it was. There were, he said, survival rations in the various pockets in the fabric, along with a boat’s compass, distress flares, a rubber-encased torch, water barricos and warm clothing. I checked around for myself: there were in fact not many flares, which was a serious omission, and there was no paddle or boat-hook. There was a baler, a couple of smoke floats, a daylight signalling mirror, waterproofed matches. No charts. I dug out the clothing: vests and long johns and thick seaboot stockings, well oiled; and lightweight water-repellent jackets and trousers, coloured yellow. Perro repeated his question: “What will happen to us?”

  I said, “We’ll stay afloat, and we’ll live while the rations last.” I had looked into the stocks; there was not a lot, enough maybe for two or three days with care. “In basis, we wait to be picked up by a passing ship, that’s what.”

  “We are well clear of the shipping lanes,” Perro said.

  I laughed harshly. “I know! You’re hoist with your own petard, Perro.”

  “It may be weeks before there is a ship – ”

  “It may be, yes.” I was about to add that it might well be never, but remembered the boy in time. So, instead, I said, “The drift’s north-east at the moment. We could even fetch upon the British coast somewhere. You’d like that, Perro.”

  He scowled at me. There was no fight in him now, he was just a half-drowned rat. In any case I didn’t expect attack from a man who needed me to save his life. I got James out of his wet clothing and wrapped him in one of the thermolactyl vests and a yellow nylon jacket, built for an adult. He looked lost, the small, dark-eyed face peering out beneath the curly black hair, but he also looked warm now and a shade happier. I told him he looked like a yellow monster and he grinned back at me but didn’t say anything. He was still scared stiff of Perro, I could see.

  I asked Perro, what about his plans now? “You seem to have had all that,” I said, and then, with a sense of horror, I remembered what had gone temporarily out of mind in the current crisis: the wired-up house near Montignac, all ready for the blow-up.

  He saw that I’d remembered. He managed an oily smile. He said, “Yes, the explosives. One day, they will go up. Nothing can prevent that now. But there is, of course, another thing: the house still has the capacity to communicate with Mackenzie. And the boy is still with us. So little has changed, Commander Shaw.”

  “Except that you’ve shot your own personal bolt, Perro.”

  He smiled again: he wasn’t without guts. “Perhaps, perhaps not. In any case the question is academic, is it not? Neither you nor I, my dear Commander Shaw, is in any position to alter what has been already put into effect. And there is not much time left. I think you must see that.”

  I did, all too clearly. The boy would still be missing as the time of signing in Washington drew near. Ross Mackenzie would still believe himself to be under threat of the boy’s death at Perro’s hands. It was true that in a sense nothing had changed, except that the boy was free, anyway so long as I could remain in control of him and the current situation, which I didn’t doubt I could. But unless I could communicate with the world outside the dinghy’s protective hood, that was of damn all use to the arms reduction negotiators or to Kulachev and his liberal policies of glasnost. The world could founder on the fragile rock of a rubber dinghy lost in the mid-Atlantic wastes.

  *

  Time passed and I didn’t know how slow or how fast: my wrist-watch had been removed back in the cellar ashore, Perro’s was waterlogged, its glass broken, the other crewman hadn’t one at all. James had had one, he said, with the hands of Mickey Mouse pointing the time, but it had been taken from him a long time ago, by the woman. Like his teddy.

  “A monster,” I said, in reference to Tanya.

  “Monsters are nice.” Monsters had returned to favour.

  “Yes, they are.” I made an effort to keep his mind occupied with niceness. “Which is your favourite monster, James?”

  “The one who lives in a tin of haggis,” he said at once. “I’ve made him a bed. He talks to me at night.”

  “Does he indeed? What does he say, James?”

  Suddenly he looked troubled, the bright eyes clouding over. “He doesn’t, really. He’s a brontosaurus. He won’t like it without me, Mr Shaw. I hope he’s all right.”

  “I’m sure he is. Don’t worry about him.”

  He burst into tears then and between sobs he talked again about his nanny. I didn’t know what to do, how to comfort him. I blamed myself for having brought up monsters, the companions of happy days now past, perhaps for all time. It’s difficult to know what to say to a child in moments of stress, and for James Jervolino the moments were very long ones. I racked my brains and I had an idea. I said, “What about a song, James? Do you like singing?”

  He said, indistinctly, that he did. I asked what sort of song, Scottish perhaps. American, he said, and I did what I could. I sang a few lines of a stoutly patriotic American song, a stirring one – ‘The Halls of Montezuma’, about the only one I knew, the battle song of the US Marine Corps: From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli …

  No one else joined in; I’d scarcely expected them to, but I got a surprise and was taken down a peg. James was looking restive and when I was about to start the second verse he said, “Mr Shaw … ”

  “Yes, James?”

  “Please don’t sing any more, Mr Shaw.”

  What, I asked, was the trouble? I had an idea I might have touched a raw spot, maybe his dead father had sung that song for all I knew, but it wasn’t that at all. I was out of tune.

  “Ah,” I said, and apologised. “You’ve an ear for music, young James?”

  “Sure,” he said, grinning. “I’m learning the piano from Mrs Rickenbacker. That’s my music teacher. She’s great.”

  I grinned back at him. “So sing it yourself,” I suggested, but he didn’t know the words. Instead he sang something taught him by Mrs Rickenbacker and he sang it quite well, forgetting for a while the buffeting of the wind and sea outside. I believe it helped him but of course the euphoria didn’t last. For one thing he was hungry. I had seen to it that he got the lion’s share of the meagre rations, which I handed out very strictly, but what was available wasn’t what he liked to eat even though hunger made him eat it. Ship’s biscuits, barley sugar, dried meat pellets, and dried malted milk, very solid slabs of cocoa, that sort of thing. It sustained life and that was all that mattered currently.

  No ships; not all the way so far. I maintained a lookout, sharing the watch with Perro and his crewman, standing uncomfortably with my head stuck out from the flap and the fabric drawn as tightly as possible round my neck to keep the sea out of the interior. On such watch, our faces were lashed by wind and sea and Perro took it badly but I kept him at it. It was as much in his interest as it was in ours, though possibly he didn’t see it quite that way. Once a ship was sighted, it would be all up with him. He would be in jail somewhere, and his Russian friends would be the last to help him. All in all, he could be preferring death at sea. Just in case he did, I made a point of checking on him, taking my own look around while he was on watch, looking out for an unreported vessel. But there weren’t any. Just the rolling, empty ocean, the gale dying away after a while but the swell and general disturbance being left behind.

  From time to time I catnapped; it was risky, but I was unable to keep my eyes open. I’d found a marline-spike in the dinghy’s equipment and this I’d nabbed, and I kept it beneath my body whenever I knew I was about to drop off. James too slept, for longer periods than I. I cradled him against my body, an arm around him, keeping him as warm as possible. His sleep was largely a disturbed one and during it he shifted restlessly, and from time to time talked, mostly the nonsense of nightmare, but once or twice about his grandfather and grandmother, with a plea for them to get him back home.

  At the mercy of wind and sea, we drifted. The bo
at’s compass, in a neat wooden box and in gimbals, had told me the drift had stayed north-easterly, at any rate for a long time, so far as I could judge time. After that there had been a shift of wind and we were taken due north. With no starting-point to go on, I couldn’t estimate a possible landing area supposing we lived that long and that far. I couldn’t even work anything out by dead reckoning; it had to be guesswork, very wild guesswork. We might cross the shipping routes, we might make a landfall on the south coast of England, anywhere from Land’s End to the Dover Strait and the Downs. Or we might not.

  In the meantime the sands were running out towards that signature in Washington, towards a decision on the part of Ross Mackenzie – or maybe the point had been passed already and the world was reacting with joy or intense anxiety depending on which path Mackenzie had chosen to take. But – and here I realised that my mental processes were not working as fast as usual, that I was becoming too dead tired even to think straight – I knew that point could not in fact have been reached: not yet.

  Not enough dawns and nightfalls had passed, always assuming I hadn’t been too dead-beat to count properly. We had a few days in hand yet, a very few perhaps.

  For what that was worth.

  I tried to project myself inside the minds of those both in the west and in the east who knew the score. What would the US administration be doing, what would Max in London be doing, how much tenseness was there among the friends and enemies of Comrade Kulachev? How would the Russian masses react to any failure of the talks and the resulting disgrace of Kulachev, with the then inevitable return to the old ways of total dictatorship, arrests in the night, committals to mental hospitals, exile to the Siberian labour camps?

  Just a lone, lost dinghy, just one small American boy. It didn’t take very much to sway a world’s future, to spell triumph for one set of people, disaster for another. I wondered if, should he survive, young James Jervolino would ever know just what had gone on around him in the councils of the world. The chances were that he wouldn’t until they had passed into history; and such thinking led me to another aspect: surely by now the media all over the world would have dug something up, and that something could bring all Perro’s dreams to an abrupt end. But it might not save the boy; and it certainly wouldn’t save Felicity Mandrake and Marcus Bright, not if matters went the way already promised by Perro.

  I had to get to the house near Montignac and I had to get there with Perro himself, plus the boy. Just thinking about that made me utter a laugh, a hollow one I dare say. It was a very tall order, from inside a wallowing, helpless rubber dinghy out at sea.

  Silently, I prayed for a miracle. I prayed for a ship, a pick-up, and the availability of that ship’s radio transmitter to tell Ross Mackenzie to sign his agreement, that the boy was safe.

  *

  I knew from the rigidity, the sudden tautening, of Perro’s backside that something had happened out in the open. I said, “What is it, Perro?”

  He knew I would look for myself. He said, “It is a ship.”

  I lurched to my feet and got a grip on Perro’s rump and pulled him backwards, away from the flap. I took his place and looked around. It was a ship right enough, but very distant. Right on the horizon to the north-west, still hull-down, just a mast and a funnel visible as yet. I watched and waited; the ship grew larger. She was closing on us, but wouldn’t have seen us yet. Night would soon be down upon us; we were beneath a canopy of brilliant colour, red and purple reaching across a pale green sky with more cloud building up in the south-west, though currently the fairer weather held. I dodged back down inside.

  “We’ll give her a little longer,” I said, “then we send up a flare.” I turned to the boy. “It’s a ship, James. We’re going to be picked up. Adventure nearly over!”

  His eyes were alight with hope. “Will the ship take us to America, Mr Shaw?”

  I shook my head. “Not directly – she’s going the wrong way. But you’ll be on your way in no time at all.”

  “Why don’t you light a flare now?”

  I said, “Because the conditions of light aren’t really suitable. God’s light in the sky … a flare just might not be seen, and we haven’t many. We’ll wait till it’s a little darker, then it’ll stand out. Got it?”

  “Got it,” he said, grinning. “I guess a monster would think like that, too.”

  “Sure he would,” I agreed. “Monsters are good seamen, aren’t they?”

  He laughed delightedly at that; the thought that monsters could be seamen really tickled him. I turned my attention to Perro and the other man. I said, “Remember I’ve got the marline-spike. I’ll use it if I have to. So no tricks, Perro. The same goes for your deckhand. All right?”

  Perro didn’t answer; he just shrugged. I didn’t see what in fact he could hope to do at this stage, but I wasn’t taking any chances. If suicide was in his mind I would prevent it. I had to; his presence, alive, was needed at the Montignac house to ensure a safe entry. Everything depended on that. I kept a close watch on the two men as I waited for a full nightfall. When I judged that the time had come, I laid a tight hold of Perro’s neck and forced him into the flap by my side. We looked out; the ship’s navigation lights were fully visible and she had closed on us further. I went back inside and took up a flare together with the box of boat’s weatherproofed matches. Back in the open, I touched a match to the flare and held it upwards and outwards. I watched the ship’s heading; I could see her bow wave standing out, and her wake. There seemed to be no reaction as the flare burned out. I lit another and there was still no apparent alteration of the ship’s course. Savagely I cursed the inattention of the officer of the watch and his lookouts, always supposing he had any, always supposing he was himself on the bridge and not down below in the warm, sozzled with gin. Flags of convenience, of which there were too many these days, were not good for efficiency and responsibility at sea. I would have bet my last cent this was a flag-of-convenience ship, with a weird crew mixture, the officers unqualified by British Department of Transport standards.

  But on the fourth flare there came an alteration; the ship turned towards us, came for us bows-on.

  I called down to the boy. “They’ve seen us, James. They’re coming for us now. It’s going to be all right.”

  The vessel closed further, easing her engines as she approached. She drifted up, a ship anonymous in the night’s darkness lit only by her steaming lights, red and green and white, a friendly monster from the sea wastes. A searchlight came on and was beamed straight at us, blinding me until it shifted a little to one side. I heard the telegraphs ring and heard the altered beat of the engines as the bridge signalled for the screw to go astern. She lay off, around a cable’s-length distant, and then I saw a seaboat being lowered on the falls, saw it being slipped and then pulled toward us.

  The boy’s head came through the flap beside me and Perro. He was trembling with impatience now, and excitement, and sheer relief. I felt his small hand slide into mine, gripping it tight, almost as though he half thought he might be left behind. I gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. The boat wasn’t far off now; nothing could go wrong. Just the same, I felt a sense of unease; I didn’t know why.

  Then the beam of the searchlight shifted again and in the backglow I saw the bridge and the officers on it. One, a figure of authority, was obese and bald and I recognised him instantly. It was Captain Kubat, and the vessel was the Zonguldak, late of Shoreham and Cherbourg.

  Thirteen

  We were taken aboard the seaboat and pulled across to the Zonguldak’s falls to be hooked on and hoisted. On the face of it there was no reason why I should be uneasy about the coincidence of being picked up by Captain Kubat; yet I was. The Zonguldak had been involved in murder and it had brought Neskuke’s fumed corpse to Britain from across the seas, from an as yet unknown point of embarkation. In the crew had been Louis Leclerc, the man who had sworn to kill me; and Alphonse Freyard, murderer of Mandy Askew via the horrific attentions of the conger-e
els, now dead himself.

  Still: Captain Kubat hadn’t been personally involved and he’d seemed a straightforward man. I told myself, as I took James’ hand again and walked for’ard along the cargo deck towards the bridge ladder, that I was worrying over nothing.

  We reached the bridge. Captain Kubat said, “Commander Shaw.”

  “You remember, then.”

  “Yes, I remember. I was much surprised to see you disembarking from my seaboat.” He looked at James and made a funny face, and James laughed. “Such a very little boy to be cast away at sea, Commander Shaw. I shall be most interested to hear the story of this.” Then I got a nasty shock: Kubat turned to Perro and gave a sort of bow, a bow of servility unexpected in the master of a ship. He said, “M’sieur Perro … you are so much welcome aboard my ship. I am so sorry for your distress and am so much surprised. Perhaps there will be explanations.”

  Perro said, “Yes, Captain Kubat. First a meal and some fresh clothing.”

  “But of course, of course! You will all come to my cabin, please. My chief officer will take the ship.”

  Frankly, I was flabbergasted. We followed Captain Kubat below and once again I entered his cabin and once again the fat lady was there, wearing a tight petticoat from which her ample body bulged in all directions. When she saw James she uttered cries of what was evidently compassion, got up from the settee and hefted herself across to him, taking him in her arms like a tiny baby. James was very good about it but began to struggle until he was set again on his feet; this happened when Captain Kubat, just as in Shoreham Docks, shooed his wife out of the cabin. He would tell her all in due course, he said. There was something of a squabble in Turkish, but the lady obeyed orders.

  On her departure Kubat produced his favourite drink of ouzo and discussions took place. In spite of my bewilderment at what appeared to be a Perro-Kubat relationship I stated my case in full, explaining the circumstances of James Jervolino’s presence in the Atlantic. For his part, Perro didn’t say a word at that stage, just sat with an enigmatic look on his face. As for Kubat, he was extremely agitated. It was fairly obvious that he was in some way beholden to Perro and had been caught between two stools.