A Commodore of Errors (41 page)

Captain Tannenbaume did not need an answer from Mitzi. The answer was all over her face. She was looking at Sparks the way a teacher looks at a student who gets it for the first time.

Sparks poured his coffee and walked to the windowsill at the front of the bridge. That was it. A purposeful stride had replaced his usual stoop-shouldered shuffle. He put his coffee cup down on the sill, pulled his shoulders back, took a battered pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, and lit one. When he blew the smoke out of his mouth, he narrowed his eyes and looked off into the middle distance. To Captain Tannenbaume it looked as if he was thinking about something, and not only that, it looked as if he was sure, absolutely certain, of what he was thinking about.

“There's nothing like a good smoke with a cup of coffee,” Sparks said without turning around.

“I didn't know you smoked, Sparks,” Ski said.

Sparks held his middle-distance stare. “There's a lot you don't know about me, Ski.” Then he turned, slowly, and looked directly at Mitzi. “There's more to this radio officer than most people know.”

Captain Tannenbaume realized that Sparks had just made it through the three sentences without missing a beat. He—miraculously—had lost his stutter. Sparks was a new man.

What kind of woman was this Mitzi? What powers did she possess?
Captain Tannenbaume knew from the telexes the effect she had on her boyfriend Mogie. And now . . . the woman had cured Stuttering Sparks.

“Mitzi,” he said, reaching out to her, as if to take her in his arms.

Mitzi waved him off. “Oh, go on.”

Captain Tannenbaume caught himself. He noticed that Mitzi was blushing. He hoped he hadn't been too obvious. He saw her glance over at Sparks, and he spun around in time to catch Sparks grinning at her.
Shit, he
was
too obvious. What was his problem? What was it about Mitzi that made him act so damn obvious?

“Swifty!”

Swifty came running over.

“Here's your goddamn GPS.” Captain Tannenbaume shoved it into his chest. “Fire it up and put a proper fix on that chart.”

Swifty took the GPS from Captain Tannenbaume and handed it to Ski, so that Ski could plug it in for him.

“It'll be the first goddamn fix anybody's put down since the Indian Ocean,” Captain Tannenbaume muttered, before shouting over his shoulder, “and I want that chart table cleaned up!”

Captain Tannenbaume walked over to the bookshelf and stood before it, glowering at it. The bottles of nail polish on his old bookshelf were too numerous to count. It was a goddamn sacrilege to remove Bowditch's
Epitome of Navigation
from its rightful place to make room for nail polish. How in the hell did he let it all come to this?

He called Ski over. “Where are all my books?”

“I think your mother has them.”

“Get her up here. She's probably down in the mess having lunch.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Swifty!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Post a lookout.”

“But it—”

“Post a lookout!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ski.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Put her in hand steering.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sparks.”

Sparks did not say, “Yes, sir,” but Captain Tannenbaume did not let that deter him. “Send a noon slip to the office. Pronto.”

There. Now there was no doubt as to who was in charge. Captain Tannenbaume glanced over at Mitzi. If she was impressed, she was wasn't showing it.

He climbed up onto the captain's chair, the only person on the ship allowed that privilege—at least from this point on. When he adjusted the chair, the heat
gun fell from its mount, crashing to the floor. Mitzi turned her face away from Captain Tannenbaume. He wasn't sure if he saw anything when she turned her head. He couldn't be sure.

But when the aluminum paint tray came loose, making a soft, muted bang on the deck, he clearly heard her stifle a laugh.

Captain Tannenbaume waited for his mother to get to the bridge. In between dozing off in the captain's chair, he amused himself by reading his mother's night orders from the previous week. He had to admit she had good instincts. In order to make any kind of time at sea, a captain often had to act boldly—resist slowing the ship down in fog or heavy weather, allow closer CPAs, that kind of thing. If a captain took every precaution advised in books on seamanship and company safety regulations, he'd never keep a schedule. So when his mother arrived on the bridge, he had no hesitations about handing her the conn. Hell, her instincts were better than Swifty's. At this point in the voyage, Captain Tannenbaume just wanted to get home.

“Okay, Mother,” Captain Tannenbaume said after he got out of his chair and stretched his limbs. “She's all yours.”

Mrs. Tannenbaume looked at the chart. The GPS showed them off the coast of Morocco. They'd be in the Straits of Gibraltar in eight hours.

Captain Tannenbaume was already off the bridge, heading down the stairs when he heard, “Are we going to stop in Gibraltar for bunkers, sonny?”

He came back up. “Bunkers, Mother? Since when do you know about bunkers?”

“I've been talking to the engineers. I've taught them a thing or two about command, and they've taught me about their job.”

“What else do you know, Mother?”

“Well,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said, “I have been thinking about our fuel burn. It'll be close, but I think we can probably stretch the fuel. What with the value of the dollar, why buy bunkers with euros? Why not wait until we get across the Atlantic and buy with good old-fashioned green backs? Also, we don't have time to waste bunkering in Gibraltar. We've got a schedule to keep.”

Captain Tannenbaume could not believe his ears. His mother had been at this for a week and she was already talking about bunkers and fuel burn?

“Why don't you let me worry about that, Mother. You have enough on your hands, don't you think? The traffic'll be getting heavy as we approach the Straits.”

“I was just thinking is all,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said, appearing hurt.

Captain Tannenbaume turned to leave. “And lay off the whistle, Mother. Follow the Rules of the Road. You'll be better off, trust me.”

Captain Tannenbaume was halfway down the staircase and did not hear his mother mutter, “Rules, schmules,” as she stood at the windowsill and eyed a cruise ship, way off on the horizon on their starboard bow.

Captain Tannenbaume had not been at afternoon coffee time in longer than he could remember. As soon as he walked in the officer's lounge, he remembered why. The chief was in the middle of one of his monologues and the engineers were hanging on his every word.

“Really,” the chief said, “the GPS shouldn't be working now. Sparks shouldn't have initialized it. It's right there in the contract. Spells it out,”—air quotes—“'repair.' Says the radio officer shall make his best effort at ‘repairing' the electronics. Says nothing about initializing. That's the mates' bailiwick. Not that those dumb bastards could initialize an electric coffeepot if you asked them to. Dumb as a bag of hammers them mates. What'd I say about that third mate when he come aboard? What'd I say? A real”—air quotes—“'Swifty.' And look at him now. Can't even turn on a GPS.”

The electrician was the first one to spot Captain Tannenbaume. He immediately straightened up in his chair and cleared his throat. The others, the chief included, got the message that the captain had decided to join them. The chief made a show of staring at Captain Tannenbaume. Captain Tannenbaume knew why. The chief wanted the engineers to think coffee time was his show, that Captain Tannenbaume was a sort of interloper. Well, Captain Tannenbaume
could care less what the engineers, especially that little shit of an electrician, thought about him being there.

Then Captain Tannenbaume saw that Mitzi was there, tucked away on the davenport with a magazine, separate from the others. He guessed that the engineers were shunning her. He'd seen this before. It's what happened to every female crew member—the good-looking ones anyway. If she hooked up with one of the senior officers, either the chief or the captain, then even if they broke up, she was permanently off-limits to the rest of the crew. It was just an unwritten rule.

“Got tired of working on your desk, Cap?” The chief, as was his habit, looked at one of the other crew members when he said it.

Captain Tannenbaume would not take the bait. “As a mater of fact I have, Maggie.”

“Haven't seen you in a while,” the chief said.

Captain Tannenbaume pulled up a chair next to the chief. “Yeah, well, be that as it may, Maggie, I need to talk bunkers with you.”

“I was wondering when you were going to get around to that. We're stopping in Gibraltar I presume?”

“Well, that's what I want to talk about. I know we always stop in Gibraltar for fuel, but have you seen the price of the euro lately? I thought we might try to stretch the fuel. Wait ‘til we get to the States to take on bunkers. Pay with good old-fashioned green backs.”

“Look,” the chief said, looking directly at the electrician. “I don't know about foreign currencies and what makes the best sense money-wise. All I know is we need bunkers.”

“Well as captain I need to think about the dollars-and-cents of things, Maggie. I'm trying to do the smart thing here.”

Captain Tannenbaume made the slightest move of his head to see if Mitzi was listening. He saw that she had put down the magazine she was reading. He didn't dare try to get a better look.

“Look,” Captain Tannenbaume said, “we always stop in Gibraltar for bunkers, just because that's what we always do. But other company ships stop in Algeciras. So I thought that if we did take on bunkers now, that maybe we'd
stop in Algeciras and buy bunkers from the same outfit. You know, get a better price that way.”

The chief looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“It's called leverage, Maggie.”

“Leverage?”

“Yeah, leverage.”

“I don't know about all that business stuff,” the chief said. “I'm an engineer. I know fuel burn. And I know we burn twenty tons a day and at that rate we'll need to take on bunkers in Gibraltar like we always do.” The engineers all nodded their heads.

Captain Tannenbaume hitched his pant leg up and leaned forward in his chair. He dared a glance Mitzi's way. He saw that she had her ear cocked in their direction.

“But, on the other hand, what if we pulled her back five or ten RPMs? We'd burn less fuel. And that way we wouldn't have to take on bunkers until we got to New York. That way we'd really save money by buying in dollars instead of euros.”

The chief leaned back and folded his arms tightly across his chest. “All I know is we always stop in Gibraltar. I don't see why we'd get a better price in Algeciras. And I sure as hell don't get why we'd be better off buying back home.” The chief tightened the grip he had on himself. “I guess I just don't understand currencies.”