The Poseidon Adventure (32 page)

Muller looked out across the water at the diminishing stern of the lifeboat, now several hundred yards away on its last trip back to the London Tower lying gleaming in the ever-mounting sun, and felt an ice pang at his bowels. Nonnie! His resolve to go to her! Absorbed with his thoughts of Scott, he had blindly and like a sheep followed them all on board and let the boat get away.

Involuntarily he raised his arm in a gesture, that was the beginning of a wave to try to summon them back, even as he realized its futility. They would neither see it nor, if he were to shout, hear.

He was aware suddenly of Rogo's cold eyes on him and the sneering orifice forming at the side of his mouth from which the words emerged, 'So you let her go.'

Muller did not reply. There was nothing he could say, for it was true.

But Rogo was not yet through. The flat monotone of his voice never changed as he said, 'I always knew you was a prick.' Nor was there anything that Muller could say to that evaluation either. And Rogo added finally, 'I'd say it was a break for the kid at that. Guys like you are poison for anybody with a heart.' And with this he turned his back upon Muller.

The doctor had joined the Commander and said, 'I think, sir, we had best get these people to rest and some treatment. They've been pretty badly shaken up,' when there was a stir that ran all through the men aboard the destroyer escort and sudden shouts and cries of, 'There she goes! She's going!'

There was a rush to the rail. The Commander, the doctor and the seven Americans remained fixed and staring, watching frozen as half a mile away, the bow of the gigantic black whale-back suddenly dipped beneath the glaze with which the sun had varnished the surface of the sea and inevitably began to slide forward.

There was another startled shout from the men on the frigate. The seaman at the bow of one of the German freighter's boats which had been attached to the hulk by a line, was not smart enough with his axe to cut loose, and in a split second before the line parted, the craft had been overturned, spilling the men into the sea. Aboard the Monroe, Mike Rogo threw back his head and laughed chillingly, 'Drown, you Kraut bastards!' he shouted.

The stern of the Poseidon, her quadruple screws looking like giant electric fans, lifted high into the air, and it seemed that she was about to go to eternity silently, when with a suddenness that made Muller jump, the three ships standing by tied down their whistle chords, sirens and hooters in a last mourning cry and salute to the one-time queen of the sea.

For a moment yet she hung there, and then with dignity and a grave despairing finality, slid beneath the surface. Where she had once been there was now nothing but a mass of oil slick and floating debris, through which the second lifeboat from the German freighter picked its way to the other members of its crew floundering in the water.

James Martin thought:
So I'm not to be let off scot free after all; there is to be punishment. Maybe old Hell-Fire Hosey had something.
Martin told himself that Rogo was a tough little monkey and a cop. He might not be above blackmail. And had Muller overheard as well? Martin knew that in the end when he got home, he would tell.

Emmanuel Rosen had slipped unnoticed from the group and had seated himself, head in his hands, by the wrapped figure on the hot steel deck.

When the shouting arose and the sirens roared, he looked up in time to see the last of the Poseidon and murmured, 'Mamma, Mamma, I wish I was on it still. I wish we both were.'

Jane and Richard Shelby were standing shoulder to shoulder, Susan by herself some little distance away. Shelby's mind was racing to the beginning of the catastrophe and he was asking himself, 'Ought I not have followed Scott? Was the man some kind of a lunatic? A screw loose from being hit on the head by football players? Were those taken off from the bow the people who had remained quietly in the dining-room, waiting for an officer to come and tell them what to do? And if he had done so, would his son still be alive? How could a man know? What could a man do? And now they would never know what had happened to the boy. But he thought to himself:
Jane has forgiven me whatever
, and slid his arm about her waist, and from somewhere she summoned the strength not to pull away from him.

It was a terrible moment for her to be hoping and praying that her son was already dead, that the piece of her flesh that was being torn from her side was no longer animate or conscious and that he need not suffer a second death, that what she was witnessing was only his burial.

She bore no grudges, blamed no one but herself and the lie she had lived for this tragedy. And she now bade a silent farewell not only to her son, but to that other self that had emerged for so brief a moment, too late and was now gone, to be buried as deeply and finally as the unhappy ship.

Susan Shelby was gripping the rail hard and letting the tears flow for all the losses she had sustained on this fatal voyage: her brother, her youth, her image of her father and of her home. . . . But there was yet for her another reason to weep.

The eyes from which the tears fell too had strained as the lifeboat from the London Tower carrying the rescued crew members had passed. She had been looking for a baby face, light-blue eyes and pink cheeks beneath sandy hair, a head that she had held close to her breast. It was not there. This boy, hardly older than herself, whose random encounter with her would for ever change her life, had been snuffed out like all the rest. She was unable in her mind to see him in his death, wherever it had overtaken him, but only knew that it was unfair for him not to have had his chance.

And then with a curious, surging desperation that rose from some depth inside her came the wish, the hope and thereafter even a prayer that she might be pregnant by him; that he had not died wholly, that a part of him had been left behind to live the life that he had lost. And she saw and felt that if it were so, the birth would be one of the most momentous joy for her.

It would be a child like himself, with the beautifully formed mouth, a button nose and rosy cheeks, and she would take it one day to -- where was it? Her mind reverted for an instant to that dark and terrifying moment, but it seemed dark and terrifying no longer, but only a happening. Hull, that was it! He had said he had come from Hull, and his mum and dad had a fish and chip shop there. It should not be so difficult to find the parents of a young sailor who had gone down in the Poseidon catastrophe and place the child in their arms and say, 'Herbert didn't die really, all of him. This is a part of him.' And at the picture she smiled to herself and whispered, 'Please, God, let it be so.'