The Poseidon Adventure (28 page)

During a momentary hiatus in the ever alarming bubbling and clankings of the distant parts of the stricken vessel, Martin said, 'Do you know what will be funny about all this if we get out?'

Rogo said, heavily sarcastic, ' Funny!'

'We're nobody.'

From Muller's section, 'What do you mean we're nobody?'

'Who is nobody?' This was Manny Rosen.

'Us. All of us. Nobody important. Who are we, any of us? What would it matter if we didn't get out? What difference will it make?'

Miss Kinsale's voice was a sibilant and slightly outraged whisper. 'How can you, Mr Martin? Aren't we all God's children?'

'What about all His children down below, already knocked off wholesale?' Muller contributed.

'We aren't even a cross section of anything to stock a survival ark with,' Martin said, 'you know, "Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief, doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief."' His dry chuckle was heard. 'Unless you count James J. Martin, Proprietor of Elite Haberdashery, Evanston, Illinois, purveyor of men's furnishings and accessories, as the merchant. And that's a laugh. We sell caps to match those knitted covers for the heads of your wooden golf clubs . . . Big deal.'

Nobody laughed.

For an insignificant man who rarely spoke, Martin could open the floodgates of speech when he got going.

He was off now, partly to divert the people he had taken into his charge, partly because he had been thinking, and in the dark no one could see him. He was just a disembodied voice like the rest of them. 'I'll bet you don't know half who some of the people are we've had on board, outside of the Senator and that Harvard Professor and his family, because he got his name in the papers for discovering something, and that retired ham actor who used to be a matinée idol. I took the trouble to find out. I promised my wife that I'd keep a diary so that I could tell her everything about the trip. Hell!'

He fell silent for a moment while they waited. 'It's down in my cabin along with all the movie film I took to show her when I got back. Oh well.'

The sinking feeling, the hot flushes of guilt and shame were back at him again.

'So who were they?' Rosen asked. 'We met a lot of nice people.'

'Like in the rhyme, "Rich men, poor men . . . lawyers."' Martin had found his voice again, 'Stockbrokers, a band leader who had been a roller skating champion once, a half-dozen presidents or vice presidents of corporations, English and American and a big German paper manufacturer; there's a feller calls himself Master of Trinity Hall at Cambridge, I guess that's some kind of teacher, a couple of Sirs, a London taxi-driver and his wife, a saw-mill manager, a guy who runs a big hotel in Waukegan, another who manufactures surgical instruments; the chairman of a football club, or whatever they call it from Leeds, a couple of writers, an illustrator, a bank teller, a guy who owns a hair dryer factory, trained nurses, advertising executives, television producers, salesmen, you name 'em, we've had 'em.'

Martin had brought back something that had seemed to have happened eons ago, the cruise.

They had forgotten that the lazy shipboard days, dances and parties and the novel and exciting shore trips had ever existed, or the people who had participated in them as well as themselves. One couldn't know, meet or cultivate everyone on such a voyage; one formed friendships, little groups or cliques with common interests who went around together, sat in the smoking-room after dinner, played cards, or gossiped and made up their excursions in the same manner.

But it was these last, rather than the shipboard life that Martin was calling to mind, because they were always running into other groups formed in the same manner, bargaining in shops or street markets, sitting at sidewalk cafés, arguing with taxi-drivers, entering the same night clubs to drink bad whisky and see tatty shows, trying to make themselves understood by natives.

One had a bowing, or greeting acquaintance with all these, without ever knowing who they really were, or what they did. But each of the survivors retained snatches of memories of their shore trips: Rock apes in Gibraltar that snatched off the postiche of an animal-loving wife of one of the passengers; the souvenir shops, one next another, in Sierra Leone selling doubtful ivory curios; the very dark officials and policemen uniformed in dazzling white; the open market with Africans chattering like monkeys in the medina outside Dacca and the beautiful textiles and hand-embroidered shawls they had acquired in the Syrian quarters there, and the scrambling for fake African carvings in Monrovia.

They could recall the pounding of the samba and carioca rhythms that was Rio, the dinning of Trinidad's steel bands and the cheap thrill of walking through Recife's red light district with each house or crib showing a madonna or bleeding heart nailed over the door.

They had not got to know one another well but their shapes and sizes had become familiar particularly in that last rout of a shopping spree in Curaçao. The closest they had come to fraternizing was in the all-out Christmas party and dance when the various cliques had broken their perimeters. Now that Martin brought them and the days past to mind, they could remember hardly any of them wholly. They had become relegated to faceless characters, passers-by in the never-ending walkathon around the promenade deck.

Rogo asked, 'So what are you trying to say? Maybe the Professor was doing some good with that discovery, and the Senator was an important man. But who else?'

Martin replied, 'That's just it. Why should just we escape and hundreds of others die?'

Rosen laughed suddenly. 'You want to know why? Because we were all members of The Strong Stummick Club. Remember? We talked about it at lunch that day,' and he spoke and thought about "that day" as though it had been years ago and not just torn from the calendar a few hours before. 'We didn't get seasick and we didn't want to miss our dinners either. This is a reason we should be saved?'

Rogo's flat voice again: 'We ain't out of it yet.'

Miss Kinsale said, 'I think we are all very important.'

They heard Martin's dry chuckle again. 'Will the world stop wagging if we get bumped off? What do I want to get back for? I told you -- I want to prepare our new spring line for men. Men! That's a laugh! It's going more and more pansy every day. If I don't make it, I've got a married son in the dry goods line. He'll take over the business; my wife will be looked after and James J. Martin, haberdasher, will have disappeared without a ripple, except that the local undertaker who's got his eye on me will have been done out of a job and preacher Hosey denied the opportunity of telling a lot of lies about me. What about you, Shelby? How indispensable are you?'

Shelby answered, 'Well, I don't know. I was working on the design of a lightweight pick-up truck, using a new alloy, capable of doing the work of some of the heavy-weights at cheaper cost.'

'And if you shouldn't happen to be there to finish it?'

Shelby had to think just that much too long before he replied, and then his voice was almost as flat as Rogo's, 'I suppose somebody else will. There's a young kid in my department . . .'

Whose brains you were picking! Jane thought to herself, and was amazed at the still unplumbed depth of her contempt for her husband. Yet she remembered it had all seemed so normal in those times when her husband had come home from the plant in a good mood, saying, 'That Parkins is a bright boy. We've solved the axle problem that has been worrying me. They'll be tickled when I show them the print.' All reasonable, all right; business going well, clever husband, appreciative superiors, and only a faint, hardly perceived niggling, ' We've solved that axle problem.' Who solved it?

Martin called, 'Muller?'

There was no self-pity in the laugh that echoed through the shaft. Hubie said, 'None of you know me very well, or anything about me. But I can assure you that I am completely useless and unimportant except to myself. I toil not, neither do I spin. There isn't a single soul, outside of a handful of mommas who see a rich and eligible bachelor on the loose earmarked for their daughters, who gives a damn whether I live or die. Like Martin's undertaker chap, if I vanish, they'll consider I've played them a very dirty trick.'

'I care!' said Nonnie fiercely and loudly.

Martin asked, 'And you, Nonnie?'

She said after a moment's reflection, 'I'm a rotten dancer, or I'd have been a star by now, or something. But me mum and dad think the world of me. They'd miss me coming home for the hols. Me dad's a long distance lorry driver but he always manages to get back for Christmas. Mum's a dear. I've got a brother and a sister both working. We have a regular old beano when we get together.'

In the dark, Muller smiled at how easily Nonnie slipped into the speech of her town and class when she spoke of home, and wondered whether he would be able ever to cure her of it, or whether he even really wanted to do so.

Jane Shelby spoke out coldly and succinctly, 'I cannot justify myself. I have been true neither to myself nor to others; I have lived not my life but that of somebody else; I have nothing but disgust for myself . . .'

'Jane!' for once there was a true hurt and agony in Shelby's voice.

'Oh, Dick,' cried Jane Shelby in quite another tone. 'If we're to die I wouldn't want you to think I meant I'd ever been untrue to your bed or your dignity. It's just me I've let down.'

Martin said, 'Sorry. I wasn't meaning to open any cans of peas. For that matter maybe I haven't been that kind of a success either.' The eternally floating blonde hair; the sinking-in delight of the cushiony pink body; the duplicity that would have been needed for that weekly visit to her pad in Chicago . . .

Susan spoke up for herself. 'I'm a student. I was going to study art and perhaps become a designer. I don't suppose that matters any more, really.'

Her father protested, 'Oh yes it does. Of all of us, Sue, perhaps you're the most important. You should have your chance in life.'

The girl thought,
I wonder if you would be saying that if you knew.

'As for me,' Manny Rosen put in, 'I could go today, tomorrow, next week, next year. I'm retired. My son is running the business like his father did. Only the best on the market and everything fresh and tasty. So Rosen's Midnight Delicatessen goes on and my relatives don't get any more from me whether I live or die, so who cares? Isn't that right, Belle? We've had a good life.'

Belle said, 'Don't bother me with talk. I'm not feeling good.'

Martin asked, 'What about Kemal? What made him quit that other gang and come with us after he'd found out that the way was blocked?'

Rogo said, 'Yeah, where does he come in? A coupla times we wouldn'ta looked so hot without him.'

Muller mused, 'I can't answer what he is thinking or feeling, or how important he is to himself, but one thing I know; of all of us he's the one least concerned with dying, or afraid of it. But I can tell you the kind of village he comes from in Anatolia, because I've driven through them. A cluster of white-washed stone hovels with red tile roofs and a mosque so small the minaret is no bigger than a stovepipe, or so it seems. The muezzin has to climb up a ladder inside. . . . No electricity, running water, telephones or radios, but a good school and teacher. The women in the fields wear baggy cotton trousers and yellow scarves around their heads. He's probably longing to go back there. And he thinks the greatest man that ever lived was Kemal Ataturk.'

In the darkness the Turk moved and grunted, 'Ataturk hokay, hokay!'

Muller continued, 'The wonderful incongruity is that in his hovel, in this primitive village there will be a picture of Ataturk in full evening dress; opera cloak, silk hat and all, hanging on the wall. As for what made him join up with us, your guess is as good as mine, and mine is for the same reason we went with Scott. Scott may have had a little of Ataturk in him.'

Nonnie whispered, 'I could listen to you talk all day long and all night.'

Muller replied dryly, 'You may have to.'

Martin said, 'Come on, Rogo, it's your turn. Give!'

CHAPTER XXII

'We Were Intimate'

In the dark silence punctuated by some new kind of creaking in the ship, they wondered what would be forthcoming. The detective gave them quite a wait until Muller thought he was probably going to tell Martin what to do with himself, when he began in a curiously mild and explanatory tone:

'With me, see, it could have gone either way, like. I was a tough little East Side wop. My old man had a fruit-stand on the corner of First Avenue and 6th Street. I guess I gave him plenty of trouble, always fighting and stealing. Sure, I stole. We had a gang, the Dirty Walyos. That's another name for Eytalians. We used to fight the Irish on Second Avenue and grab stuff off shop counters and run. I was a real stinker. So there was this parish priest, Father Tamagno in our neighbourhood, and he saw me take on a kid twice my size, just with nothing but left jabs because I'd hurt my right hand. So he put me in the Golden Gloves. I won the 118-pound championship and made the team that went to Chicago to fight in the Inter-city. We beat them 9 to 7. I won by a knockout. They gave me a blue silk bathrobe with my name on the back in gold letters, "MIKE ROGO -- GOLDEN GLOVES CHAMPION," and put my picture in the paper. See, I was on the team. So after that I couldn't be a bum any more.'

He trailed off for a moment and Muller was wondering what it was that impelled him suddenly to talk as though in the confessional. He, himself, had been half listening to him and half to the groaning of the ship, and he was certain that he had felt movement in her again. When she went, would she upend and spill them all helter-skelter atop one another down the tunnel and into the horrors of the lake that contained Scott and Linda, and God knows how many others before finally extinguishing them? He was more sickened and afraid of that lake than he was of dying.

Rogo took up his narrative again. 'Father Tamagno wouldn't let me turn pro. Maybe I could have made a pile and ended up like the rest of them punch-drunk stumblebums hanging around The Garden. He made me study and got me into the Police School instead. See, but I coulda been just as easy on the other side. You get me? Just another young punk, pushing narcotics or shaking down pants' pressers and cleaners and dyers for protection for the mob. I've kicked the hell out of so many of them punks, they don't show their face in my district. Well, they got plenty more like me in the Sixteenth Precinct. Johnny Broderick, he's dead now, come from there. And Irish Paddy Mahan, Joe Klopfberger and Frank Myers, tough cops, all of them are still around. Okay, so I'm not there any more. Another jail break, another jewellery store stickup, a couple more junkies dead on the sidewalk. Some other cop gets the
Daily News
hero award. I'm just saying there's a lot of luck in it.'

He trailed off again and they thought that he had done, when he spoke again. 'But you know,' he said, 'you got Linda all wrong. She wasn't like she made out. She'd had a tough time of it from the word go. Anyone else would have gone under.'

'Oh yes,' broke in Jane Shelby, 'I thought so.'

'Yes, ma'am,' Rogo agreed, 'that's what you said. Her stage name was Linda Lane, but her right one was Cosasko. Her old man was a bum and a drunk and her mother worked both sides of the street. They come from Sandusky, Ohio. When she was eleven, her father broke her in. They never had a dime except for what the old woman made on her back. When she was fourteen, the kids on the block dragged her down behind the signboard on a vacant lot and took turns. At sixteen she was put on the street with the old lady pimping for her.' He added, 'You never heard no story like that before, I guess.'

No one said anything. They were thinking of the doll figure with the spear through her heart.

'But she had guts. She wasn't going to be like them. She ran away to L.A. and got a job as a car hop. She was getting real pretty by then. She had the figure and the legs in them short skirts. Some bum gave her the one about getting her in pictures, knocked her up and blew. She was lucky. She miscarried. Then she wasn't so lucky. She got in with a bad bunch around Hollywood and Vine. When they stole some big daddy's Caddie, she was in the car with the thief when they made the collar. She got eighteen months, with four off for good behaviour. When she came out she changed her name to Linda Lane, signed up with Central Casting and did some extra work. Then she got a break. Or maybe it wasn't. An assistant director picked her up out of the mob and set her up in an apartment in the Garden of Allah.'

They were remembering Linda now, the pouting lips, the china blue eyes, the ridiculous curls piled up on to her head and the bristling aggressiveness.

Rogo went on, but his voice was again becoming the flat monotone of the police officer giving a charge. 'So this assistant director becomes a director and he makes Linda a starlet, see? They've got all these kids on the lot they use for publicity, or dressing up a scene and they're supposed to become stars someday, but most of 'em wind up in the ash can. So then one day, drunk, driving home by himself to wifey, this director wraps his Thunderbird around a lamppost. Linda moves on to a nuts and bolts manufacturer who's had his eye on her. But now the publicity department has got her fixed up with a fake family and fake home town and Linda Lane is the girl next door. She might have made it maybe if she'd let it go at that, but she was crazy to go on the stage. They'd taught her to sing and dance a little. This nuts and bolts guy buys her into a musical that is being put on on Broadway, called
Hello Sailor
.
Hello Sailor
is the bomb of all time and the critics crucify Linda. The nuts and bolts guy is yellow and takes a powder back to L.A. I'm around to pick up the pieces.'

Manny Rosen corroborated, 'I remember your coming into the store and saying you were crazy about this kid.'

Muller asked, 'Did you know all this about her?'

Rogo's voice became even flatter. He replied, 'See, when somebody from out of town comes into our district, say like in show business, we check up a little on the background in case they got connections and there's any trouble later, or some hood tries to move in and we can put the fire out before it gets going. The L.A. Detective Bureau lets us have a look at the book.'

Martin said, 'Ouch!'

Nonnie said, 'I did hate her, but I wish she was back again with us now.'

Jane asserted, 'But you never let her know that you knew, did you?'

Rogo replied, 'What for? It made her happy to think I didn't. It wasn't easy for her at any time, always afraid she'd run into someone from the coast who'd know she'd been in stir. It puts a chip on your shoulder, don't it?'

The question remained hanging in the stifling air. Susan Shelby was reviewing in her mind: Incest, rape, whoring, thieving, failure and death. Was that what life was like outside the boundaries within which she had been sheltered? And how secure were these now, since her mother had opened the closet door? She saw Linda impaled again and thought that in a way, too, a spear had been driven through her own person. She still did not want to die.

It was growihg hotter. Drawing a full breath no longer seemed to satisfy the lungs. And from one of them there in the dark, breathing was audibly laboured. Martin turned on his lantern for an instant. It was Belle Rosen. Her husband was sitting with his back against the side of the tunnel with her head pillowed in his lap. Even by the yellowish rays of the fading battery he could see that her skin had turned the shade of clay. He thought she looked like one of those grotesque modern sculptures one kept seeing in the papers. He shut off the light and speculated upon how much time had passed since they had reached the top. He wondered, too, about the air supply. There was no way of knowing whether what they were breathing was part of the whole that was keeping the ship from sinking, or whether they were in a little pocket trapped in the stern, which was on the verge of giving out.

No one seemed disposed to further talk when Rogo had finished. Martin felt he ought to keep them going by distracting them down to the last moment. He began, 'You said you thought we were all very important, Miss Kinsale, what about you?'

They heard movement from the quarter where she had settled herself close to Jane Shelby. 'Oh,' came her reply, 'I meant all of you. I'm not at all important.' And after a moment's hesitation, 'Though actually, ours is a very good family. My mother's sister married a Brigadier on Alexander's staff. He was one of the famous Desert Rats in Cyprus, Brigadier Catesby. I'm sure you've heard of him. He was one of the Lincolnshire Catesbys.'

Muller thought to himself:
I hope Rogo is impressed
, and then wondered why she had placed the redoubtable Brigadier in Cyprus if he had been a Desert Rat, instead of with Montgomery at Alamein.

'But our side come from Norfolk,' Miss Kinsale continued, 'near Thetford. Such a beautiful property. I remember it from my childhood, the gardens and the servants and our old nanny. She must be almost eighty now. There were two iron stags on the gateposts, and our head gardener used to make up stories about them. Oh, and then the pheasants. So beautiful. The Earl of Waldringham, who lived near by, used to have permission to shoot over our property.'

'Oh,' said Muller, 'I know it. That must have been Telford House. Bumbles Waldringham was at Harvard with me and I went to stay with them at Greatgreys whenever I was in England. I remember the iron stags because I passed the place in the car on the way to Bumbles'.'

They could hear Miss Kinsale's long drawn out exhalation before she spoke again. 'I think Norfolk is such a beautiful county, though Lincolnshire is lovely too; the Brigadier would often ask us there. Dahlias were his hobby. . . .'

Something niggled at Muller's mind and he spoke before he thought, 'Why, then you must be a Cokington.'

Miss Kinsale said, 'A what?'

'One of the Cokingtons of Norfolk. Old family. Telford House was one of their places in the country.'

Then he wished he had never opened his mouth. What was a Cokington doing clerking in a bank in a suburb like Camberley? The wait for her reply seemed endless. He tried to think of some way to change the subject.

Miss Kinsale finally spoke, 'Well, you know,
relations
.' Then she added, 'Of course, things change so. Death duties, and things. But I'm quite happy in my little -- in our little property in Frimley and from my window I can see a corner of Sandhurst -- to keep my memory of Gerald alive. He was my fiancé.'

Muller had a compulsive feeling of déjŕ vu. With people like Miss Kinsale there was always that young dream fiancé killed in the war. It was either at the very beginning or just in the last days before peace was declared.

The lines followed almost as he might have imagined them:

'Gerald passed out from there. Graduated, I suppose you Americans would say, and was killed at Nijmegen. We used to go walking together down to Frimley and back in the evenings.'

Nonnie said, 'Oh dear, I'm so sorry.'

The spinster sighed, 'First Gerald and now Frank. It's almost too much to bear.'

It was only in Muller that the coupling of the two names set up a faint alarm bell. What on earth could she have meant by it? A Gerald was possible, but Frank Scott? And what was all that hocus-pocus about Telford House? Of course, she might have been one of those distant cousins who sometimes arrive for a few days' visit and then are never seen there again.

Rosen asked suddenly, 'What kind of a minister was this fellow anyway? First he prays and then he curses God, like in the New Testament Christ gives it to the fig tree.'

Martin said, 'Well, for one thing he believed in action.'

'But did he really believe in God?' Muller queried and then added, 'Does anybody? Actually?'

'Oh yes,' breathed Miss Kinsale, 'I do. With my heart and soul. There is God watching over us. He sent Dr Scott to give his life so that we might be saved.'

Muller thought he felt the ship quiver beneath him again and added to himself, 'Or so that He might amuse Himself playing cat and mouse until He got ready to swallow us.'

Rogo said bitterly, 'What did Linda give her life for? What kind of a life and death did she get?'

Miss Kinsale reprimanded, 'Oh, Mr Rogo! Aren't you a Catholic? Don't you go to Mass?'

'Yeah. I was brought up one. But it don't answer about Linda or what was done to her. What if Scott was sent to get her knocked off? If we hadn't followed him, she'd be alive still.'

'Or we'd all be dead,' Muller concluded.

Nonnie said, 'I don't know what I believe, but I say my prayers every night.'

Susan added, 'I do, too.' But her mother said, 'I haven't said mine in years.'

Muller declared, 'I'm an agnostic. You're a good Baptist, Martin, what exactly do you believe?'

Martin cleared his dry throat. He was glad that they had hit upon a subject that seemed to get them all going again. He replied, 'Not a good Baptist, just a scared one. All my old man and our preachers ever put into me was the fear of God. Now my son's never been to church in his life. I never made him and he never went. He's all right. I never scared him like my folks scared me.'

' You're a churchgoer, aren't you, Mrs Shelby?' said Miss Kinsale.

'Yes,' Jane replied, 'we go regularly when we're at home. But I'm afraid it's strictly social.'