7
There are only a few expressions used by television private eyes that I have ever heard in real life. Although I’ve heard of going on a “surveillance,” I’ve never been paid for a “stakeout.” Guns are usually guns and never “gats” or “pieces.” Sometimes they are weapons and only occasionally are they very useful at all. But one term I have a fondness for is “being made.”
“Being made” is to be recognized for what you really are. I once knew a private investigator in Fairbanks who was tall and very thin, wore a short leather jacket and had his hair in a ponytail. He even had a scar across his lower chin. This private eye would walk into a bar behind anyone he was supposed to be following and would stand in the entryway long enough to make sure that everyone in the place saw his silhouette in the brightening light behind him. All heads would turn, all eyes would appraise the ponytail, the scar, the bulge in the black leather jacket. Heads would bow and go back to their drinks. Then he’d turn to me at his elbow and mutter, “Shit, we’ve been made.”
Well, of course we’d been made. More people go to a college basketball game than live in the entire city of Fairbanks, Alaska, and the bar scene was a tiny village of close friends. Of course they recognized him, and of course they knew that he was working on a case and he knew they knew. Notoriety was the only perk he had. He liked being made. It was the whole point of the exercise.
I, on the other hand, do not like being made. I suppose I have never really recognized myself for what I am, and particularly don’t like to have others see it. Of course, surreptitious work in the small villages of Alaska is rather pointless. Most village people know what I’m doing in town before I step off the floats of the airplane. But on a tour ship I thought there was a possibility, however slight, that I might be able to slide around unmade. Stupid, I know.
Being made usually comes with a glance. A look that tells you that someone is not buying whatever pose you are trying on. It is a look like no others. It jolts you like a hold on a wet power line. It says “I know the truth about you even more than you know about yourself.”
This was the look Captain Minosh had given me. If Sonny Walters and his cruise company had hoped to keep my presence on the Westward a secret they were going to be bitterly disappointed.
I walked out of the bridge and down past the Compass Room on the Horizon Deck. Jane Marie said she had to meet with some team captains. She turned to go, then turned back suddenly.
“That Rosalind, she’s nice, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said as noncommittally as I could.
“You have a crush on her?” Jane Marie asked, biting her lip.
“Naw,” I countered. “Just blood in the water.”
She looked quizzically at me. Then her mood changed. “How about that captain saying I was a native guide. What’s that all about, you think?”
“Maybe he’s never laid eyes on a real Alaskan woman,” I joked.
Jane Marie laughed and waved me off, then disappeared around the corner of the passageway. I had no idea where she was going and that left me with a slight panicky feeling.
In the lounge, Toddy was trying to set up another group shot. This time the crowd was much larger. Rosalind was there, and Mr. Brenner. They were standing with others of Todd’s new friends, all crammed next to a bust of Captain Cook. Some in the crowd had drinks in their hands and held them high above the shoulders of the people next to them. They awkwardly tried to bend and push themselves closer together. Todd balanced his camera on the ledge near a drinking fountain and clicked off a couple of frames as he tried to set the timer. Men shouted and women laughed. Todd kept fussing with the camera and as I stepped forward to help him, I ran into the chest of a very tall and solid black man.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said slowly and quietly and it was only then that I noticed he was holding a folding knife with a thumb latch next to a talon-curved blade.
“Please, sir, step this way with me.” The tip of the knife blade had cut through the front of my sweater and I could feel it needling my skin. I stepped backward and then turned the corner. Along the wall of the companionway was a blue metal door with a white sign which read, authorized ship’s personnel only. My traveling companion reached over my shoulder, opened the door, and pushed me inside.
The door shut and we were standing on a metal stair landing. The noise of the ship’s engines was louder here. So was the faint smell I had picked up on the first day. This smell was of boiled vegetables and sweat, cigarette smoke with a hint of disinfectant, and fresh paint. Doors clattered shut all around me. The shadows slanted away from dozens of bulbs inside glass domes. We had stepped into the industrial center of the ship. This was Freetown.
I looked up into his face. He was shiny black and the whites of his eyes were bloodshot as if he had not slept in days. His expression was extreme and severe but there was a boyishness in his expression that meant that this act was more motivated by fear than from some kind of dull meanness.
“Sir, you shouldn’t have gone to the captain now,” he said slowly. “You don’t know what you have done.”
“This is true,” I agreed and I raised my left hand up to my belt, lowering my right slowly.
The black man’s whole body trembled. The knife wobbled in the air just under my sternum and felt as if it were working deeper into my skin. The man let out a long breath.
“I need this job,” he said at last as if he were going to cry. “I need that money, too.”
“I’m sure you do,” I said and pushed up with my right hand as I jabbed with my left.
I had meant to grab his forearm but ended up grabbing the blade of the knife instead. The sharp blade slipped through my hands and cut down to the knuckles of my right palm. At first, I could not feel the cut and was confused by the splash of red that flowered on the black man’s tunic. My heart sank when I thought that I might have stabbed him by mistake. Then I looked at the bright flash of bone and we both listened to my blood drip on the metal stairwell.
We were smiling at each other, thinking, I hoped, that this would end things and we could go on with some sort of reasoned explanation for the craziness that had just transpired. Then he lunged his knife at me and ripped across my chest and I tumbled down the tight circular stairwell. I yelled and rolled down the metal grating. I remember other voices and ringing footfalls on metal. I folded my hand under the sweatshirt and ran down one of the gray-painted metal halls. There were bare pipes and gauges. Red fire extinguisher boxes, coiled hoses, and axes with sharp metal points. Brown men in coveralls with bandannas around their heads. Pointing and yelling. A poolroom, lots of cigarette smoke, and a dark lounge where men were playing cards. One bulb hung from the ceiling and some of the men had hand towels draped around their necks. Hot and loud voices yelling at me, and the engines were getting louder and the heat more intense.
I opened the vault like door to a paint locker and tried to stuff myself inside. Hands worked the door and I blundered on, running to another tight spiral staircase, dark at the bottom, and I fell again, wrenching my back and my shoulders as I fell and tried to curl around my cut hand.
I came to rest in a pile of sooty rags. I could see the flutter of flame reflecting on the surface of one of the large gauges. The footsteps came fast and the voices were like the flutter of cheering from a passing train. I rolled to my side, twisting to see the staircase. The man with the blood-spattered tunic came first, the knife still in his hand. He reached down and yanked at my hair, turning my throat up to the light. Behind him, the other men fell silent. I could hear his breathing above the gravelly throb of the ship’s engines. The knife, with my own blood on the blade, came down to my eye level and his torso blotted out the light.
From over my right shoulder a pipe wrench came down hard on the blade. The knife clattered across the diamond-plated metal floor. Men started pushing back up the stairs. I heard someone move behind me and then the wrench was raised again.
“Cyril, you must be out of your mind, man.” The voice that came from behind us was deep, with a rich Caribbean accent. “Have you lost all of your senses? First, you breeding the sheep up there, now what? You going to kill a sheep down here? What is this craziness, man? Do you really expect us to watch you do this thing?”
Cyril sat down on the stairs. He looked sheepishly down at the blood on his shirt. He held his palms up wide to the man behind me as if beseeching the court.
“But, Mr. Worthington, now. He’s no regular sheep, sir. He some kind of police. I hear them talking. He works for the companies, sir. He’s asking about the doctor.” As he said this last, Cyril made a gesture as if he were giving a shot with a hypodermic. “Asking about the doctor. You know, sir.”
I rolled over and saw Mr. Worthington standing over me protectively with the head of the pipe wrench weighing in his left hand. He was an older man with a broad face and high cheekbones. He was very, very black and his eyes glittered a startling blue. He was covered from head to foot in soot. The white of his jumpsuit was smeared evenly in blackness. He had a yellow band around his forehead that was soaked clear through with sweat.
“And what about the lady you were breeding up there in the hotel the other night?” Mr. Worthington asked Cyril. “You telling me she wasn’t a sheep then?”
“Aw, Mr. Worthington,” Cyril protested. “You know, sir. She gave me money. She wanted it. You know how they are.”
“I know exactly how they are, Cyril,” Mr. Worthington said crisply and with a tone of some self-satisfaction. “I know exactly how they are. And what were you going to do then when she gets embarrassed about being found out and says that you raped her, then?”
“I know. I know,” Cyril moaned and hung his head.
“No, you don’t know, Cyril. You are surely dumb, man. You appear to have lost all of whatever sense God gave you.”
“What about him then, sir? He’s the only witness. He’s been to the captain. I can’t just let him run around now, especially with this business about the hand and all, now can I?”
I was actually rather pleased the subject was coming back around to me.
“I will be taking care of all that,” Mr. Worthington said and that appeared to be final, for everyone began walking back up the stairs, wiping their hands either on rags or against the sides of their pants as if they were well rid of our confrontation.
Mr. Worthington rolled me over. He gently uncurled my palm where the sticky crust of blood was turning into a rind around the cut. The new blood continued to spread like an oil slick down my bone-white skin.
He shook his head. “Oh man, this is no good. You better come with me then, sir. I’ll take you to my quarters. There is no one who will mess with you there.” Mr. Worthington helped me to my feet. After the adrenaline stopped pumping I could feel the cuts on my scalp and the stiffness in my legs and shoulders. I was unsteady as I followed him down the narrow, howling passageway.
We moved past walls of gauges and through tangled jungles of pipes. The engine sound was louder of course but also more distinct. I could sense the pulse of the ship now, the gradual chug-chugging of the shaft turning the huge propeller.
Finally, we came to a sealed metal door and we walked into a quiet hall. The walls here were metal and painted white. There were four doors on either side and Mr. Worthington stepped into the second one. I had no idea where I was on the ship but I had a sense that I was well below the waterline.
He took some books off of a straight-backed chair and motioned me to sit. The room was tight, with the bed and the chair and a dresser near the tiny closet. In the closet was a small refrigerator and on top of that stood a statue of the Virgin. Taped to the walls were photographs of children. Some wore school uniforms in formal portraits, but there was another showing the same children gamboling along a dusty red dirt road, squinting into the bright sun with a row of pastel wooden buildings behind them. As I sat on the chair I suddenly felt dizzy. I closed my eyes but the images of the children still clung there. Mr. Worthington held my hand lightly. I could feel his breath on my palm, as he lifted my injured hand for inspection.
“Ayeeee! This is a bad cut, you know. I don’t know what I can do for you. But I do it anyway. Wash it off then.” He poured some bottled water and he scraped the rind of blood. The muzzy pain was strange enough, but what was worse was to see and feel how my hand now was two folds of separate skin that moved and wriggled at odds with each other. I gritted my teeth and looked again at his photos.
There was a tiny child laid out on a bright blanket. The child’s hair was pulled back and tied with a yellow ribbon. She was a big girl to be stretched out like an infant. Her expression was vacant.
“That is my angel child,” Mr. Worthington told me as he followed my eyes to the photograph. “That is Martha. The doctors told us she was to be born dead. But just at the last minute she came back to life. She is a miracle girl, you see, sir.”
Mr. Worthington could not stop the bleeding. The towel he had placed on my lap was now scarlet. He stopped trying to scrub away the blood and he reached into a trunk under his bed and took out what looked like a fruit jar of black goo. He took off the lid and knocked on the bottom of the jar, and then from seemingly nowhere he took a small propane torch, lit it with a sparker, and held the blue flame near the glass.
“Not too hot, you see, sir. Just enough to spread.” Then he took a large spoon and dolloped out some of this warm goo onto my palm. At first, the sensation was pleasant enough. Then the pain began to build, as if small fish were chewing off my hand. I tried to jerk my hand away but he held it in a viselike grip.
As I began to lose consciousness I could feel him fanning the torch over the numbed stump of where my hand had been.
I didn’t know what time it was when I woke up. I didn’t know what day it was or, in fact, what position of the sun the ship was enjoying. I did know that it was hot. I knew, too, that the room was moving and that my hand was being nibbled by a swarm of enraged fire ants.
There was a kindly looking white man sitting next to me on the bed. He was studying my hand. For some reason I was under the impression that this was a good man, maybe Santa Claus or God, although I’m not sure why. His beard was well trimmed and he was not particularly overweight. It might have had something to do with the fact that the last hornet that stuck me apparently was some kind of benevolent bee, his serum allowing my hand to go numb.
“What the devil did you put on his hand, Worthington?” the God-Santa demanded.
“Iodine and tar, sir,” said Mr. Worthington as he studied the white man’s work with the interest of a devotee.
“Well, to tell the truth, I think it did the trick. You stopped the bleeding all right, and I don’t think there is much worry of infection. But you surely made a mess of things. I doubt that even this acid solution will get it all off.”
I tried to sit up but neither the men on the bed nor the muscles in my body would let me. I recognized the God-Santa now as the man I had seen outside of the clinic. He turned and looked around to see my open but barely focusing eyes. Now, I could make out that he in fact didn’t have much of a beard but one of those fashionable several-week growths that men who were beginning to lose hair on their head seemed to be contemplating more and more. “Hold on now. If you stay still, I can get the last of it out. I’ve put in some temporary stitches and as soon as I get this hand cleaned up I’ll take them out and get something of a more permanent nature in there.” He turned back to his work. I said nothing but I think I heard him mutter, “Worthington, there is plenty of suffering in this world without you bringing me more. Don’t you think?” I didn’t hear if Mr. Worthington replied or not.
“I’m Dr. Edwards, by the way,” the bearded man said. “And you are Cecil Younger, the much talked-of private detective.”
Christ, I thought. Even unconscious down in the hold somewhere I had been made. This was not a good thing for my reputation.
“What was the Great Circle Company thinking? To hire a private detective, for crying out loud. What were they hoping to find?”
The doctor wiped his hands with a clean towel and nodded to Mr. Worthington to hand him the tray laid out on the dresser at the feet of the Virgin.
“They say you are killing some of the passengers. This, I suppose, is bad for business,” I replied as I lay staring up at the beautiful blank stare of the little girl taped to the wall. “What did you say her name was?” My voice broke up like a distant transmission.
“Martha.” Mr. Worthington smiled. The skin on his face was jet black but shivered with light.
“Martha,” I said. “The angel girl. Yes, that’s it.”
“Are you a little light-headed, Mr. Younger? I gave you a shot of Demerol and a local, too. I thought you probably had enough pain on this day.”
“Yes. Thank you,” I told the doctor. I was thinking of Rosalind and Martha the angel girl. Getting them mixed up in the slurry of my memory, I suppose. “So. Do you?” I blurted out.
“Do I what?” Dr. Edwards said softly, intent on his work.
“Do you kill your patients?”
“Am I killing you, Mr. Younger?” he said, never taking his eyes off his work.
“It doesn’t feel like it.” I dreamily took in a breath and felt a narcotic kiss in my brain.
“This is true. I am not killing you and you are not ready to die. These are two independent and true facts. I don’t want you to hurt, and, from the appearances of things, I show more concern about your bodily suffering than you do. How did you get in such a mess?” Dr. Edwards’s gray eyes looked sympathetic but tired. Behind him I could see Mr. Worthington looking grimly at me.
“It was a misunderstanding. A stupid accident. No real harm done,” I said lazily and Mr. Worthington looked down at his own hands.
The doctor cleared his throat and his voice took on more of an official tone. “I understand that you owe something special to Mr. Worthington. But you see, Mr. Worthington is a member of the ship’s crew. He reports to the chief engineer and to the captain. Nothing you can say about him would risk his status on this ship. You see, Mr. Younger, unlike you, we are not under the thumb of the Almighty Sonny Walters.” And the doctor smiled. Then just as suddenly he stopped smiling.
“Mr. Younger, someone mutilated a body while it was still under my care. I suppose you know about this?”
Here, I wobbled my head noncommittally. The doctor talked on.
“This could have been very, very bad, but I was able to at least partially rectify it. This is not a game, you see. Mr. Sonny Walters thinks it is. I imagine you do too. I have people in my care. These people have the most serious health concerns. I consider their proper care to be the most critical thing a doctor can do. I can allow nothing to interfere with my duties: no intrigue, no games, nothing. Do you understand that?” He was staring down at me with a gravity I can only recognize in looking back on it.
“Just an accident,” I repeated. The doctor took his needle and tweezers, asked Mr. Worthington to hold my fingers apart and then began to sew.
“What is it you do, Mr. Worthington, besides practice medicine?” I asked the black boatman, not wanting to engage the doctor while he sewed my hand.
“I am an oiler and the crew chief of the boiler men. I make this thing run.”
“That is literally true,” the doctor commented and he tucked and pulled on the threads.
“I’ve worked on ships for thirty-five years,” Mr. Worthington continued. “I worked on ships we fed coal into the furnace. I worked on ships with cotton sails and Manila rigging. I tell you, man. I know ships.”
“What of your family?” I stared up at the white ceiling.
“I see my family once, twice a year. I give them all my money. They build houses. They buy land. I’m a rich man, you see. You just don’t see it here.”
“And Martha the angel girl. Doesn’t she miss you?” I asked.
“Sure she does. I know she does. We save all of the spare money and someday we go to the clinic in Minnesota and we see all the doctors there. It is only such a small part of Martha’s brain that is hurt. I know that by now they can fix her. It is money, that is all.” Mr. Worthington dismissed the seriousness of his grief with a toss of his head, as if he were spitting away a drop of sweat that had worked its way to his lips.
The doctor finished up. He cleaned his hands and packed away his instruments into what looked like a gym bag. “You should let this breathe. Call me and I will look at that hand tomorrow. I do not want you anywhere near my clinic or near my patients. They have an absolute right to their privacy. I will not have you snooping around. Is that understood?”
He did not wait for an answer but turned to Mr. Worthington. “I’m glad you came for me. Thank you for that. I don’t know what I’m going to do about all of this . . . this spying. But as far as I’m concerned, the matter of how Mr. Younger received his wounds is closed as long as . . .” Here he paused and looked gravely at Mr. Worthington and at me. “. . . as long as nothing else happens to reopen the issue.”
I was not sure quite what was meant by that, but apparently I was being told to go and sin no more. I was about to thank him but the doctor was gone. Mr. Worthington stared down at me and smiled a great comical grin. “Cyril is a pure fool, man. But I don’t think he will try to hurt you anymore. I will put out the word if you will agree that this ends this thing.” Mr. Worthington made a gesture as if he were washing his hands and wringing them dry.
I struggled to my feet and tried to make myself steady. “There is nothing more between Cyril and myself as far as I am concerned,” I assured Mr. Worthington and held my hand out awkwardly to take his but withdrew it as soon as I looked at the bulging Frankenstein stitches across my palm. He patted me on the arm and led me out the door.
We could have been walking through the boiler room of any old school building in turn-of-the-century New York. The pipes clattered and the metal floor underneath us rattled. There was the ever-clinging smell of cigarette smoke, sweat, and cafeteria food. Mr. Worthington led me around a labyrinth of catwalks and corridors until we came to an elevator. When the car came he reached in the doors and punched the button. I stepped inside and he smiled at me, holding his great broad hand up in a wave. The doors closed as I tried to think of something to say.
The doors opened and I stepped out into the hallway next to the Compass Room. A harpist dressed in a silver lamé evening gown played a slow Irish air on a full-sized orchestral harp. Four people were playing cards, one frowning deeply and tossing her hand into the center of the table. The others were chuckling softly. Mr. Brenner dozed with an empty brandy snifter balanced loosely in his hands. Beyond the glare of the ship’s lights, I could see the lights of a town strung out like several small necklaces in the purple summer evening.