The Black Tide (15 page)

‘Money,’ I said. ‘What else?’

‘There are other reasons – anger, frustration, politics. Have you thought about those?’

‘No.’

He gave a little shrug and after that he didn’t ask any more questions. It was a filthy drive, night falling and the traffic heavy after we had passed through Saumur. He seemed withdrawn then. A dusting of sleet gradually laid a white coating over everything. He had the radio on, the windscreen wipers clicking back and forth – my eyes closed, my mind drifting into reverie, no longer thinking about the girl, but about my meeting with Baldwick. It loomed closer every minute and I had no idea where it would take me, what I was letting myself in for. Suppose I was wrong? Suppose he hadn’t recruited Choffel? Then it would be to no purpose
and I could find myself involved in something so crooked that not even my letter of agreement with Forthright’s would protect me.

It was just on six when we pulled up at the entrance to my hotel. ‘I’m sorry you don’t get what you want,’ he said. ‘But the girl was frightened. You realize that.’ And he sat there, staring at me, waiting for me to say something. ‘You frightened her,’ he said again.

I started to open the door, thanking him for the trouble he had taken and for the lunch he had insisted on buying me, but his hand gripped my arm, holding me. ‘So! She is right. It was your wife. I had forgotten the name. I did not connect.’ He was leaning towards me, his face close, his eyes staring into mine. ‘
Mon Dieu
!’ he breathed. ‘And you have no proof, none at all.’

No?’ I laughed. The man was being stupid. ‘For God’s sake! The chief was sick, or so he says. Choffel was in charge, and for the secondary reduction gear to go right after an engine failure … that … that’s too much of a coincidence. He was quite close to it when it happened. He admitted that.’ And then I was reminding him that, at the first opportunity, the man had stolen a dinghy, got aboard a Breton fishing boat, then flown out to Bahrain to board a freighter bound for Karachi and had finally been picked up by a dhow in the Hormuz Straits. ‘His escape, everything, organized, even his name changed from Speridion back to Choffel. What more do you want?’

He sat back then with a little sigh, both hands on the wheel. ‘Maybe,’ he murmured. ‘But she’s a nice girl and she was scared.’

‘She knew I was right. She knew he was caught up in some crooked scheme—’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ But then he shrugged and left it at that. ‘
Alors
! If there is anything more I can do for you—’ He barely waited for me to get out before pulling away into the traffic.

There was a note for me at the desk. Baldwick was back and waiting for me in the hotel’s bar-restaurant. I went up to my room, had a wash in lukewarm water, then stood at the
window for a moment staring down at the shop-lit street below, where cars moved sluggishly in a glitter of tiny snowflakes. Now that the moment of my meeting with Baldwick had come, I was unsure of myself, disliking the man and the whole stinking mess of Arab corruption on which he battened. A gust of wind drove snowflakes hard like sugar against the window and I laughed, remembering the girl. If it were true what Barre had said, that she’d been frightened of me … well, now I knew what it felt like. I was scared of Baldwick, of thrusting my neck into his world, not knowing where it would lead. And the girl reminding me of Karen. God damn it! If I was scared now, how would it be when I was face to face with her father?

I turned abruptly from the window. It wasn’t murder. To kill a rat like that … Why else was I here, anyway? In Nantes. At the same hotel as Baldwick. And she’d known about Baldwick. I was certain of it, that gleam of recognition when I mentioned his name. She’d associated him with her father’s escape. And Baldwick in Sennen when that picture had been taken of the
Petros Jupiter
’s crew coming ashore. To recruit a man like Choffel meant he’d been told to find an engineer who was an experienced wrecker.

I shivered, the room cold, the future looming uncertain. Another gust rattled the window. I made an effort, pulled myself together and started down the stairs.

The bar-restaurant looked out on to the street, the windows edged with a dusting of ice crystals, the snow driving horizontally. The place was cold and almost empty. Baldwick was sitting at a table pulled as close as possible to a moveable gas fire. He had another man with him, a thin-faced man with a dark blue scarf wrapped round a scrawny neck and a few strands of hair slicked so carefully over the high bald dome of his head that they looked as though they were glued there. ‘Albert Varsac,’ Baldwick said.

The man rose, tall and gaunt. ‘Capitaine Varsac.’ He held out a bony hand.

‘First mate on a coaster’s as far as you ever got.’ Baldwick laughed, prodding him with a thick finger. ‘That’s raight, ain’t it? You never bin an effing captain in yer life.’ He waved
me to a seat opposite. ‘Got your message,’ he said. His eyes were glassy, his mood truculent. He shouted for a glass, and when it came, he sloshed red wine into it and pushed it across to me. ‘So you changed your mind, eh?’

I nodded, wondering how far I would have to commit myself in order to catch up with Choffel.

‘Why?’ He leaned forward, his big bullet head thrust towards me, the hard bright eyes staring me in the face. ‘You good as told me ter bugger off when I saw you down at that little rat hole of a cottage of yours. Get a’t, you said. I don’t want anything to do wi’ yer bloody proper-propositions. Raight?’ He wasn’t drunk, but he’d obviously had a skin full, the north country accent more pronounced, his voice a little slurred. ‘So why’re you here, eh? Why’ve you changed yer mind?’ His tone was hostile.

I hesitated, glancing at the Frenchman who was gazing at me with drunken concentration. ‘The reason doesn’t matter.’ My voice sounded nervous, fear of the man taking hold of me again.

‘I got ter be sure …’ He said it slowly, to himself, and I suddenly sensed a mood of uncertainty in him. In that moment, as he picked up the bottle and thrust it into Varsac’s hands, I glimpsed it from his point of view, engaging men he didn’t know for some crooked scheme he didn’t dare tell them about or perhaps didn’t even know himself. ‘You piss off,’ he told the Frenchman. ‘I wan’ ter talk to Rodin ’ere alone.’ He waved the man away, an impatient flick of a great paw, and when he’d gone, he called for another bottle. ‘Now’, he said. ‘Let’s ’ave it. Why’re you here?’ He was leaning forward again, the hard little eyes boring into me, and I sat there for what seemed an age, staring at him speechless, not knowing what to say, conscious only that it wasn’t going to be easy. The bastard was suspicious.

‘The book,’ I said finally, my voice no more than a whisper. ‘The publishers turned it down.’

‘The publishers?’ He stared at me blankly. Then, suddenly remembering, he opened his mouth and let out a great gust of laughter. ‘Turned it da’n, did they? That bleedin’
book of yours. An’ now you come runnin’ ter me.’ He sat back, belching and patting his stomach, a smug, self-satisfied gleam in his eye. ‘Wot makes yer think I still got a job for yer, eh?’

There was a sort of cunning in the way he said it, but his acceptance of my explanation gave me confidence. ‘The desk said you were booked out to Marseilles in the morning,’ I said. ‘If you’d got all the officers you needed, you’d be headed for Dubai, not Marseilles. And you didn’t get the master of the
Petros Jupiter
, only the engineer.’

I was taking a chance in saying that, but he only grinned at me. ‘Been makin’ enquiries, have yer?’

‘Where’s the ship?’ I asked. I thought he might be drunk enough to tell me. ‘Abu Dhabi, Dubai—’

The grin faded. ‘Yer don’t ask questions, mate. Not if yer wantin’ a job a’t o’ me. Got it?’ He leaned forward, the glassy eyes staring. ‘You’ve no idea, have you – no idea at all what a man like me ’as ter do ter turn an honest silver thaler.’ There was sweat on his forehead, his eyes glazing, and he was breathing deeply so that I thought for a moment he was going to pass out on me. ‘But this is different.’ He seemed to pull himself together. ‘The men I need – they got ter be …’ His voice trailed away and he was silent for a while, staring down at his glass as though thinking something out. Finally he lifted his head, looking straight at me as he said, ‘I got ter be careful, see.’ His eyes held mine for a long moment, then he refilled our glasses. ‘You sold that cottage of yours?’

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘I’ve told them not to put it on the market till the spring.’

He lifted his glass, swallowing half of it at a gulp as though it were beer. ‘Won’t fetch much, will it?’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smiling. ‘Yer wife dead and yer book in the dustbin, in a bit of a mess, ain’t yer?’ His eyes creased, smiling at me as though somebody in a bit of a mess was what life was all about. ‘Got anything tucked away?’

He said it casually, but I sensed that the question was important. ‘How do you mean?’

‘You got enough to get here …’ He sat there, waiting.

‘Just enough,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

‘No return ticket?’

I shook my head.

‘Christ, man! You took a chance.’ He nodded. ‘So you’re out o’ bread an’ no way of getting back to the U-kay, no prospect of finding work there anyway?’

I didn’t say anything and he grinned at
me. ‘Orl raight, so I still got a berth for a second mate.’ He leaned forward, peering into my face. ‘But wot makes you think you’re the man for the job?’

‘Depends what it is,’ I said. But he wouldn’t tell me that, or who the owners were, not even the name of the ship. It was double rates and an end of voyage bonus, so what was I worrying about? ‘You want the job or don’t you?’

I knew then that I had no alternative. To find Choffel I would have to commit myself. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You got any money at all, apart from what you’ll get from that cottage?’

‘Enough to pay the hotel bill, that’s all.’ I didn’t know whether he was fishing for a bribe or not.

‘No dole money, no redundancy?’

‘I don’t qualify.’

‘So you got nothing. An’ now yer wife’s gone …’ He thumped the table, gloating at me. ‘You got nothing at all, have you?’ He sat back, smiling and lifting his glass in his big fist. ‘Orl raight, Trevor – yer on. Nantes–Paris, then Paris–Dubai, an’ after that you wait until we’re ready for you, everything laid on – hotel, swimming, booze, girls, anything you want. Just one thing though—’ He reached out a big hand and gripped my arm. ‘No tricks. An’ remember – it’s ’cos of me you’re getting the job. Understand?’

I nodded. I hadn’t been in the Gulf all those years not to recognize the glint in his eyes. ‘How much?’ I asked.

‘Voyage money will be paid in advance. You hand me half of it, okay?’ And he added, ‘You’ll still be getting full second mate’s pay. And you keep the bonus.’ The bonus would be five hundred quid, he said – ‘So you don’t ask questions, see.’

And so it was agreed. For half my pay I put myself in his hands, committed to an unknown ship and an unknown destination. ‘I booked your flight, by the way.’ He grinned at me slyly. ‘Did that soon as I heard you’d checked into the hotel.’ He emptied the bottle into our glasses and when we had finished it, he got hold of Varsac and we had a meal together. There was more wine and cognac with the coffee. The talk turned to sex, interminable sordid stories of the Gulf. Varsac had been in Jibuti. He was very funny about the madame of a brothel who changed into a man. And Baldwick became morose. I mentioned the
Petros Jupiter
again, asking him whether he knew anything about the engineer he’d recruited, but he stared at me with such drunken hostility that I didn’t persist. He knew I had been getting at something, but he was confused and he wasn’t sure what. In the end I went to bed.

My room was close under the eaves. It was cold, the bed not aired and I couldn’t sleep. The window rattled in the gusts and I kept thinking of that girl, the horror in her eyes, the way she’d spat in my face. I lay there, listening to the gusts, remembering that night off Sennen, the fog exploding into flame. And the Lloyd’s agent trying to tell me I’d no proof. The girl, too. It’s not his fault, she had said – ‘She did it herself.’ But they hadn’t been there. They hadn’t seen it. And Choffel. What would he say when I finally caught up with him, when I got hold of the murderous little bastard, my hands at his throat, the flesh yielding …? The wind beat against the window, a cold draught on my face. God damn it! What sort of a monster had I become?

I was shivering then, my eyes wet with tears. God in Heaven! Why should I start on self-recrimination when I’d right on my side? It wasn’t vengeance. It was justice. Somebody had to see to it that he never wrecked another vessel. And then I was thinking about why he’d done it. Greed! Stupid, senseless greed! But that wasn’t peculiar to him. It was a curse affecting us all, the whole human race, harvesting the sea till there was nothing left but oceans and oceans of dead water, drilling for energy, tanking it round the world, feeding factories that poured toxic waste into the rivers, supplying farms with pesticides that poisoned the land, pumping heat and fumes into the life-giving atmosphere until it was a lethal hothouse. What was Choffel by
comparison? A nothing, just a symbol, a symptom of human rapacity, and myself a Quixote tilting at the windmill of man’s self-destructive urge.

It was an argument and a view of life that went round and round in my head as gusts rattled the door and the rafters crackled in the frost. And then I woke to complete stillness in a grey dawn that held everything in a grip of silence, the window panes frosted over and the rooftops opposite a glazed white. It was no longer freezing and by the time I was dressed there was a gleam of watery sunshine, the world outside beginning to thaw.

Baldwick was already there when I went into the bar-restaurant for breakfast, sitting at a table with a pot of coffee and a basketful of rolls in front of him. ‘Take a seat.’ He pulled out a chair for me, indicating the coffee. ‘Help yourself.’ He had his mouth full, chewing voraciously at a roll, his heavy cheeks glowing pink as though he had been for a brisk walk in the cold morning air, his big frame full of vigour. ‘Paris is no go, thick as a pig’s snout. If the fog don’t lift you could be here another night.’