Home Fires (34 page)

Tooley said, “Do you remember the remark? It could be important.”

“Not precisely.” The white-bearded man paused. “It was something about his superior not understanding humans.”

“When the captain was here,” Skip told the white-bearded man, “he got me thinking about the actions, and the failures to act, that might be brought up in court. One of them was his failure to confine you. He must know that you killed Rick Johnson; Chelle says she told him.”

Chelle said, “He does. He also knows that Rick had kidnapped me and killed the doctor and his nurse. Mick saved this ship and everybody on it, but it was my dad who saved me.”

“Your ex-dad,” the white-bearded man muttered.

“Yeah. I divorced you. Don’t rub it in.”

Tooley stood up. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner. Skip and I will see each other in the office, but I wanted to say goodbye to you and now I have. You’ve got one hell of a woman there, Skip.”

He nodded and smiled. “I know.”

When Tooley had gone, Vanessa said, “There was something odd about that.”

“He’s a friend,” Chelle told her. “He just wanted to say goodbye.”

“He wanted something else, Chelle darling, and he got it. I’d love to know what it was.”

“He wasn’t even looking for us, Mother. Skip waved him over.”

“He was, but he hadn’t seen us. That was why Skip waved.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“We social directors know these things.” Vanessa smiled down from a height of years. “We must, and I do. I don’t suppose you’ve ever given a party. I’ve given … Oh, twenty.”

“Fifty,” the white-bearded man muttered.

“You’re counting small gatherings, Charles.”

Chelle’s good hand struck the table hard enough to make the plates jump. “Don’t look so damn smug!”

“I wasn’t, darling. Just because I’ve got my man and you’re losing yours? No indeed! I looked sympathetic.”

A handsome young man too informally dressed for Formal Night was approaching their table. Chelle turned, and as she did, her expression became one that Skip had never seen before. Her eyes were larger and seemed, somehow, darker; her mouth was tremulous. “D-Don? You’re Don, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

Chelle rose, taller than he. “You knew I was in here. How did you know, Don?”

“I loved you, sweet thing. You’re gone and I can’t see you again ’til it’s all over. I needed to tell you.”

Chelle made a soft little sound that might have meant anything or nothing.

Vanessa gasped.

And Chelle said, “Listen, we gotta keep in touch, all of us. You tell Joe and the sarge. Tell everybody.”

There was a soft sigh—perhaps from Don.

Chelle turned. “Hey, Skip, what’s our address?”

He gave it.

“What’s the apartment number? I forgot.”

“Penthouse,” he said. “Just tell them to write penthouse.”

She stared at him.

“We were renegotiating the penthouse lease. Before we left I told the manager to terminate the negotiations, that we’d move in when we got home.”

Don borrowed a pen and a used envelope from the white-bearded man and began scribbling rapidly.

“I don’t know about e-mail or any of that shit yet,” Chelle told him. “Only I’ll give you my phone number if you’ll hand over that pen.”

“Thanks!” Don said. “I’ll be calling you.”

“Sure.” When he had gone, Chelle sat down and took a sip of wine and a bite of fish. “You know, I donno why the fuck I stood up when he came. He’s not an officer.”

The white-bearded man told her, “All of us have forces within us, honey. Energies unseen by our conscious minds.”

“Isn’t he just amazing?” Vanessa looked from Skip to Chelle—then back to Skip, seeking confirmation. “Why did I void our contract, Charles? I’ve forgotten.”

“I treated you shamefully, showering you with money, then stealing it back when you were out shopping. When I stole the money other men had given you—”

“Why you big liar! No wonder I voided it!”

“And now you know.” The white-bearded man winked at Skip. “Which is what you wanted.”

“What I want to know,” Skip said, “is why you booked under an assumed name.”

“Did I?” The white-bearded man looked puzzled. “Really? I have forgotten.”

“I got a ship’s officer to call the purser’s office for me. He asked whether there were any passengers named Blue. The purser’s office, which would surely know, said there was one and only one. That was Mastergunner Chelle Sea Blue. No other Blues.”

“I see.”

“I’d like to see, too,” Skip said. “What name did you book under?”

“It hardly matters, does it? I could explain how I came to use my friend’s reservation, but you wouldn’t believe me—or at least you would ask confirmation, which I could not provide beyond a phone call.”

“You would give me your friend’s number?”

“Of course I will.” The white-bearded man smiled. “His name as well.”

“I’d like them both. Will you lend me that pen?”

He did, and Skip’s wallet provided a scrap of paper.

“The number is two, one, two, nine…” The white bearded man paused.

“I’ve got it.”

“Three, three, four, one, one, seven, seven, two, two. My friend is Cole Baum. Coleman A. Baum, if you wish to be precise.”

Skip wrote.

“I have a phone, if you’d like to borrow it.”

Skip shook his head. “I have one, too, and I’d like to eat before my food gets cold.”

“You should trust Charles,” Vanessa said.

“I’ll begin as soon as Charles trusts me.”

Although Skip was returning the paper to his wallet, he saw the white mustache twitch.

REFLECTION 17

Looking Over the Rail

Down there, four decks below me, five tugs prepare to bring us up to the wharf. They are long and rather narrow craft with fifty oars a side. One hundred and one men in each tug, including the tug’s captain. Five hundred and five men, five hundred of whom are certainly making the Union Employment Administration wage—forty-three noras a week, enough to support a couple with one child (no more than one child) in subsidized housing, if both parents work.

Forty-three noras a week keeps these strong men busy and tired, too tired to riot. Too tired to steal, at least in theory. Our seamen mock them, although it seems good-natured. What is it the seamen get? The captain told me. Seventy noras a week, so one thousand per hundred-day. With a thousand noras every hundred-day, plus food and a bed, they have a right to mock.

I wonder how much he makes? He looked grim at dinner last night, though a part of that may have been the thought of losing Virginia.

That dinner … It will haunt me for a long time, I’m afraid—our last dinner on the
Rani
. We’ll be going ashore in what? An hour? More like two, I imagine. We may get lunch before we go ashore.

But that dinner … What was it Mick wanted? He got it, Virginia said, whatever it was. Whatever information or confirmation he was after.

One possibility is that he wanted to find out whether I blamed him for bringing Rick. Another, and this one’s my favorite, is that he wanted to see how complete my recovery was. Certainly he seemed happy when he left. And then there’s the real reason, about which he was quite wrong.

Hooked up now, a suggestive phrase. The
Rani
moves slowly through the water, sidewise. The gulls wheel and shriek, the rowers strain at their oars, and we move—how fast? Two hundred meters per hour, perhaps. Certainly no more than that.

So much to think about, and so little to reason with. Coal is black and Mr. Blue was Mr. White. Chelle Sea Blue—Shell Sea Blue. He likes to play games with colors. He’s playing a deep game now, and I may be better off not knowing what it is. Someone had talked to Don while I was unconscious. Was it Charles? More probably, it was Chelle herself.

Someone paging me. She wants to go to lunch. She doesn’t want me to see her naked. Was it the same with Jerry? Is it the same with Mick?

18

NOT THE END

Formal Night over, Chelle dropped into a chair as soon as the door of their stateroom closed. “Sit down. I’ve got to talk to you.”

“Not yet,” Skip said. “I want to get out of this outfit.”

“Are you trying to tell me you talk better in your underwear?”

“I talk better in anything. I’d talk better in a diving suit.”

“You can’t unfasten that fake bow tie, can you?”

“Yes, I can; but I can’t see what I’m doing, so it may take a while.”

She rose, and in another second his tie was gone. “Now the collar stud.”

“Who the hell invented these clothes?”

“You really want to know?” She was grinning. “You won’t like it.”

“Lawyers?”

“Huh uh.” The collar stud gone, Chelle stepped away. “Guys who wore them every day, like Lord This-‘n’-that who always dressed for dinner. Band leaders and headwaiters. Guys like that.”

Taking out one last shirt stud, Skip grunted.

“While you’re doing that, how about unzipping me?”

A tug at the keeper at the back of Chelle’s neck opened the graceful blue gown she had chosen to match her eyes. It fell around her feet, and she stepped out of it, a blue chemise half concealing a blue bra and blue panties. “Think you’re going to get an eyeful? This is as far as I go until the lights are out.”

“Fine.”

She picked up her gown and hung it in the closet they shared, then returned to her chair, plainly waiting for him to speak. Silently, he stuffed his shirt, damp with sweat, into his dirty clothes bag.

She snorted. “You’re waiting for me to make the first move, damn you.”

“Or not. As you wish.” He was stepping out of his trousers.

“Okay, I will. Did you believe Charlie?”

“Hardly a word of it. Do you believe he was Charlie? Is that man in actual fact your biological father?”

“Yeah. You don’t think so?”

“I wasn’t sure. Are you?”

“Hell, yes. Can I prove it? No. But that’s him.”

“Did you tell him about the College Inn? Firing his secretary?”

“Of course not. I never saw him until he came in with Mom tonight. You were there. If I’d told him, you’d have heard it.”

“You saw him when you were being held in Lieutenant Brice’s stateroom.”

“Yeah. You’re right, I did. Only I didn’t know who he was then. He was just a nice old guy who was talking them out of shooting me.” Chelle’s deep sigh was followed by a wistful smile. “I loved him then. I could’ve kissed him, mustache and all. But I didn’t know it was Charlie.”

“They gave you deeptrance. I don’t suppose you know what you told them.”

“While I was under? All I know is they didn’t get what they wanted. They put me under four times, I think it was, and every time I came to, Rick was madder.”

“In that case, you might have told the man with the beard about dinner at the Old College Inn.”

“I suppose, if he’d asked the right questions.”

“I admit is isn’t likely,” Skip said. He leaned back in his chair. “It’s possible, however. He could also have planted the suggestion that you would recognize him as your father the first time you saw him with your mother. I’ll admit that neither of those are very plausible.”

“I’ll say! That’s Charlie. A lot older, but still Charlie. Did you buy that story about his just happening to go into the cabin looking for me?”

“Certainly not.” Skip paused. “He lied about having met Jerry Brice and half a dozen other things.”

Chelle nodded. “He said all he had to do was say he’d been sent by headquarters, and they bought it. It was damn hard not to laugh in his face.”

“Hard but wise.”

“Yeah. He came to save me, just like you did. Only he pulled it off.”

Skip nodded. “You don’t know how he established his bona fides?”

“I’m pretty sure I was under when he came in, but I know somebody who does.”

“Who might,” Skip said. “So do I, and I want to talk to her.”

“Will she tell you the truth?”

He shrugged. “Susan won’t lie to me intentionally. But she may not have understood what was said or what sort of ID was shown. She may have been busy doing something, most probably because Rick Johnson saw to it that she was.”

“Do you really think there would be papers? Something like a service card?”

Skip shrugged again. “Almost certainly not, but there may have been something else. A ring, a coin, a button. Maybe a gesture. A secret handshake sounds absurd, I know; but it might be good for just that reason. Or the repeated use of some particular phrase. Or something else—there’s always the chance it was something else.”

Chelle grinned. “You said ‘something else’ twice. I bet you thought I wouldn’t catch it.”

“I said it three times. Seriously now, it might be good for us to know what the ID was; but I doubt that we can get it from Susan because I doubt that she has it. I hoped you did.”