And the Deep Blue Sea (3 page)

She heard a door open and close, and then a murmur of voices, one of them male, just beyond the bulkhead in Cabin D. She winced. Oh, no, not again! Not tonight! You’d think that now with the ship stopped, in this complete silence without the throb of the engine and the vibration to lend at least an illusion of privacy to their lovemaking, they might be a little more discreet.

She felt trapped, embarrassed, and angry. The first time it happened, the night they sailed from Callao, in her revulsion at being a captive audience to the impassioned grapplings and ecstatic shrieks from beyond the bulkhead, she had buried her head under her pillow and suffered through it. Mrs. Lennox was aware that she occupied Cabin D, so it was obvious she just didn’t realize how sound-transparent that flimsy bulkhead really was. The next day, when she was sure the other woman was in her cabin, she had gone bustling around her own, singing fragments of song, dropping a book, creating other small sounds which should carry the message without being too obvious about it. It had done no good at all. The next night was a repetition of the first, and the following was even worse, with the result that by now she was afraid to make any sound in her cabin at all. Just once, it could be assumed without too much embarrassment on either side that she’d been asleep, but that was impossible now, after nearly a week of it. She wasn’t certain that even Mrs. Lennox herself was aware of some of the things she cried out in her transports, but any recognition between them now that they’d been overheard would be mutually humiliating to the point their one desire would be never to see each other again. Which would be somewhat awkward under the circumstances; the old freighter was a small ship, they were the only women on it, and it was a long way to Manila.

With the initial moan from the other cabin she sat up wearily and reached for her robe. The only escape was in flight, but she was damned if she’d get dressed again. Belting it around her, she dropped cigarettes and a lighter in the pockets, located her slippers in the darkness, and went out, softly closing the door behind her. Her hair was a mess, and she had on no makeup, but she was too angry to care. The worst of it was that by leaving her cabin she was committed to staying away until she was certain the man, whoever he was, would have left. It would be embarrassing in the extreme to meet him in the passageway coming out of Mrs. Lennox’ cabin at this hour of the morning.

She’d thought once or twice of asking the steward or captain if she could move to another cabin, but always ran into the unanswerable question of what excuse she could give. Besides, it would have to be a double cabin, and she’d paid only for a single. While there were only four passengers aboard and the
Leander
had accommodations for twelve in four double cabins and four singles, they were all people traveling alone, so only the doubles were unoccupied.

Her cabin was the last one aft in the starboard passageway. There was no one in sight. She turned into the thwartships passageway, went on past the entrance to the dining saloon on her left, and stepped out on deck on the port side. This level, referred to in the usual grandiose language of travel brochures as the promenade deck, contained the eight passenger cabins, the steward’s cabin, and the passenger dining and smoking saloons. On the next deck below were the crew’s quarters and messrooms, while the deck officers and engineers occupied the one directly above, along with their messroom and the wireless room. Passengers were encouraged to stay in their own area, except that they were allowed on the boat deck, the uppermost one, as long as they kept clear of the bridge.

She went around to the ladders at the after end of the midships house and mounted to the boat deck, which was in darkness except for the faint moonlight, since the bridge was at the forward end of it. Between the two wings of the bridge was the wheelhouse, the rest of the structure aft of it containing the chartroom and captain’s quarters. She walked forward and stood leaning against the rail between the davits of the two lifeboats on the starboard side, gazing out at the star-studded night and the dark, unmoving surface of the sea.

Three bells struck in the wheelhouse, repeated a few seconds later by the lookout on the fo’c’sle head. It was one thirty. The lookout reported the running lights, and was acknowledged by the second officer, whose shadowy figure she could see on the starboard wing of the bridge. For a moment she considered walking forward far enough to ask him why they were stopped, but decided against it. He was a dour and taciturn man she had seen only once or twice since she’d been aboard, and she wasn’t even sure he spoke much English. The chief mate was the only one of the officers she knew, since he sometimes ate in the passengers’ saloon, along with the captain.

From the engine room ventilators behind her issued the faint pulsing sounds of the generator and sanitary pump, but aside from these the ship was caught up in an almost total silence. There wasn’t the whisper of a breeze, and no movement at all. She could be standing on a pier, she thought, or a seawall. She looked down. When the ship was under way at night here in the tropics she loved to watch the glowing sheet of light along its skin, but it was absent now that there was no disturbance of the water, and there were only random pinpoints of phosphorescence winking on and off like fireflies in the darkness. She leaned on the rail and stared moodily out into the night. After a while she heard footsteps coming across the deck behind her, and turned. It was the chief mate.

Even in the darkness it was impossible to mistake that figure. He must be six feet four, she thought; at any rate he dwarfed everyone else aboard, not only tall but massive of shoulder, with powerful arms and a big, craggy head and wild mop of blond hair that seemed to fly outward as though charged by some endless source of energy within him. In spite of his size, he moved with the casual ease of the perfectly coordinated, and there was in all his mannerisms and in the rattier sardonic, ice-blue eyes a sort of total male confidence that no doubt innumerable women had found attractive. She wondered what he was doing up at this hour, since he didn’t go on watch until four. Maybe he was the man— She wrenched her mind away from this speculation with distaste.

He saw her between the boats and stopped. “Ready to abandon ship, Mrs. Brooke? Stick around; we can still beat the lifeboats.”

She smiled. “I was just out admiring the night. I woke up when the engines stopped.”

“Everybody does. Sudden silence is a noise.”

“Is it anything serious?”

“No, just a hot bearing. The galley slaves say we’ll be under way in a half hour or so.”

She took out a cigarette. “The who?”

He snapped the lighter for her, and grinned. “Engine room. The first marine engineer was a convict with an oar.”

He went on toward the bridge, and she resumed her silent contemplation of the night. He was an unusual man in a number of ways, she thought; he was obviously well educated, and she knew he spoke fluent French and German in addition to English. She didn’t know what his nationality was. The
Leander
was under Panamanian registry, but her crew was from everywhere. His name was Eric Lind, so he was probably of Scandinavian descent, as she was herself.

Then it was her own reaction—or utter lack of it—that she was thinking of. What woman, talking to a devilishly attractive man in the moonlight, even if she had no interest in him at all, would indifferently invite inspection in the revealing, close-up flame of a cigarette lighter when her hair looked like a fright wig and her face like something that had been stored for the winter in a coat of grease? You’re hopeless, she thought.

The ship loomed large and distinct ahead of him now, and he knew he was within a quarter mile. She was still lying motionless in the water, but had swung around by imperceptible degrees during the past hour until she was broadside to him, and he could see the green glow of her starboard running light as well as the overall silhouette and a few lighted portholes. She was a freighter, with well-decks forward and aft of the big midships house, and whatever her trouble was it must be in the engine room. There was no sign of fire, or activity of any kind on deck.

Sweat ran into his eyes. There was a sharp pain in his side, making every breath an agony, and his mouth was dry and full of the taste of copper. His hands were on the inflated rim of the raft, pushing it ahead of him as he swam. The dungarees and shirt were inside the raft, and he was naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. Normally, he had no particular fear of sharks, but he knew that what he was doing was tantamount to asking to be cut in two, threshing on the surface at night like something wounded and helpless. Well, if one took his legs off, it would be over in a few minutes at most; that beat the other program, the thirst.

Between the lash of urgency and the gray sea of fatigue that was engulfing him, he was conscious of random and disconnected thoughts that made him wonder again if he were entirely rational. There was a haunting impression of
déjà vu
about the whole thing that baffled him, since neither he nor anybody else in maritime history, as far as he knew, had ever been rescued by swimming over to a stationary ship in mid-ocean and asking for a lift.
Ahoy aboard the freighter! You going my way?
He giggled, and his fright at this was sufficient to clear his mind momentarily.

He knew then when he had done this before. It was at the hospital after the highway patrol had got Gerry out of the wreckage of the Porsche and called him at the studio, and he had sat in a small room in Emergency with his whole being concentrated like a laser beam into a single state of
wanting,
of trying to control with an effort of will something that was out of his hands. When the intern and resident had come out and told him she was dead, he had known he would never want anything again. It was all used up. But apparently there was always a little left somewhere, because this was the same thing again. Either the ship would remain there motionless in the water until he reached it, or it wouldn’t. They couldn’t see him in the darkness, and he had no way to signal it.

Three hundred yards. Two hundred. He could see the silhouette of the stowed booms now, and one of the lighted portholes winked off momentarily as though somebody had walked in front of it, but it was still too far and too dark to make out any movement on deck or on the bridge. He tried to increase the beat of his scissoring legs, but he was too near complete collapse. He sobbed for breath. Then, almost as clearly as though he were aboard, he heard the
ding, ding,
pause,
ding, ding
of four bells from the wheelhouse, repeated a moment later by the lookout on the fo’c’sle head. The lookout reported the running lights. I’ll make it, he thought. Just a few more minutes. Then there was another sound, the ringing of a telephone, and he felt the hackles lift on his neck. Engine room calling the bridge? He kicked ahead.

It was less than a hundred yards now. Then he heard the sound that struck terror in his heart, the jingle of the engine room telegraph. He tried to shout, but he had no breath. A great boil of water appeared under her counter, and he could hear the massive vibration set up by the engine going full ahead while she was still lying dead in the water. He clawed his way onto the raft and stood on his knees, fighting for breath so he could scream at them. They couldn’t hear him over the vibration. She began to move. He shouted, endlessly now, feeling himself engulfed in madness. She gathered way, beginning to swing to his right to get back on course, and her counter went past. Turbulence from the propeller spread outward, rocking the raft and spinning it around as she drew away from him in the night.

The captain was on the wing of the bridge along with the first and second mates when Karen Brooke heard the telephone ring in the wheelhouse. The three of them went inside, and in a minute she heard the engine room telegraph. The deck trembled under her feet, and there was a noisy shuddering of the whole midships structure as the ship began to move slowly ahead. Then, strangely, above this sound, she thought she heard a voice crying out somewhere in the night in front of her. She moved back to the railing between the boat davits and looked out into the darkness where the faint path of light from the moon began to come abeam as the ship gathered steerageway and started to turn. She thought she heard the strange cry again. Then she gasped as she saw something flat and dark on the surface of the sea less than a hundred yards away. Extending upward from it was the unmistakable silhouette of a man violently waving his arms. She stood frozen, knowing it was impossible, but with the ship still moving very slowly the figure was caught for several seconds in the path of light and there could be no doubt of what she saw. She wheeled and ran toward the bridge. The second mate was just emerging from the wheelhouse.

“A man!” she cried out, pointing. “There’s a man out there, on a raft or something.”

He stared blankly, startled by the suddenness of it, but then turned and looked in the direction she was pointing. She ran out onto the wing of the bridge, her arm still extended. “Right out there! I heard him shout! He was waving!” But the raft was out of the moon path now and lost in the darkness behind it. The captain emerged from the wheelhouse. She whirled to him.

“Captain! Stop! Back up!” She realized she must sound like an idiot; what was the nautical term?

“What is it, Mrs. Brooke?” he asked.

“She says she saw a man on a raft,” the second mate said.

She saw the exchanged glance.
Passengers!
The ship was gaining speed, the raft falling farther astern by the minute. She was frantic. Wasn’t there any way she could make them believe it? The captain had reached into a box below the bridge railing and lifted out a pair of binoculars. “Back there!” she cried out again, gesturing. “He was in the path of the moonlight! I heard him shout!”

The captain searched the area with the glasses. He lowered them and said, in the tone of one indulging a child, “It was probably a piece of dunnage, Mrs. Brooke. Or some weed.”