The Golden Rendezvous (4 page)

Five minutes later the ancient truck, the two packards, the jeep, and the last of the stevedores were gone and macdonald was busy supervising the placing of the battens on number four hold. By five o'clock, a whole hour before deadline and exactly on the top of the tide, the S.S.

Campari was steaming slowly over the bar to the north of the harbour, then northwest into the setting sun, carrying with it its cargo of crates and machinery and dead men, its fuming captain, disgruntled crew, and thoroughly outraged passengers. At five o'clock on that brilliant june evening it was not what one might have called a happy ship.

Chapter 2

[Tuesday 8 p.m.-9.30 p.m.]

by eight o'clock that night cargo, crates, and coffins were, presumably, just as they had been at five o'clock; but among the living cargo the change for the better, from deep discontent to something closely approaching lighthearted satisfaction, was marked and profound.

There were reasons for this, of course. In captain Bullen's case-he twice called me "johnny-me-boy" as he sent me down for dinner-it was because he was clear of what he was pleased to regard as the pestiferous

port of carracio, because he was at sea again, because he was on his bridge again, and because he had thought up an excellent reason for sending me below while he remained on the bridge, thus avoiding the social torture of having to dine with the passengers. In the crew's case it was because the captain had seen fit, partly out of a sense of justice and partly to repay the head office for the indignities they had heaped on him, to award them all many more hours' overtime than they were actually entitled to for their off-duty labours in the past three days. And in the case of the officers and passengers it was simply because there are certain well-defined fundamental laws of human nature

and one of them was that it was impossible to be miserable for long aboard the s.s. campari. As a vessel with no regular ports of call, with only very limited passenger accommodation and capacious cargo holds

that were seldom far from full, the s.s. campari could properly be classed as a tramp ship and indeed was so classed in the blue mail's brochures. But-as the brochures pointed out with a properly delicate restraint in keeping with the presumably refined sensibilities of the extraordinarily wellheeled clientele it was addressing-the s.s. campari was no ordinary tramp ship. Indeed, it was no ordinary ship in any sense at all. It was, as the brochure said simply, without any pretentiousness and in exactly those words, "a medium-sized cargo vessel

offering the most luxurious accommodation and finest cuisine of any ship in the world to-day." it was the chairman of the blue mail, lord dexter, who had obviously kept all his brains to himself and refrained from passing any on to his son, our current fourth officer, who had thought it up. It was, as all his competitors who were now exerting themselves strenuously to get into the act admitted, a stroke of pure genius. Lord dexter concurred. It had started off simply enough in the early fifties with an earlier blue mail vessel, the s.s. brandywine.

(for some strange whimsy, explicable only on a psychoanalyst's couch, lord dexter, himself a rabid teetotaller, had elected to name his various ships after divers wines and other spirituous liquors.) the brandywine had been one of two blue mail vessels engaged on a regular run between new york and various british possessions in the west indies, and lord dexter, eying the luxury cruise liners which plied regularly between new york and the caribbean and seeing no good reason why he shouldn't elbow his way into this lucrative dollar-earning market, had some extra cabins fitted on the brandywine and advertised them in a few very select american newspapers and magazines, making it quite plain that he was interested only in top people. Among the attractions offered had been a complete absence of bands, dances, concerts, fancy-dress balls, swimming pools, tombola, deck games, sight-seeing and parties. A genius could have made such desirable and splendidly resounding virtues out of things he didn't have anyway. All he offered on the positive side was the mystery and romance of a tramp ship which sailed to unknown destinations-this didn't make any alterations to regular schedules; all it meant was that the captain kept the names of the various ports of call to himself until shortly before he arrived there and the resources and comfort of a telegraph lounge which remained

in continuous touch with the new york, london, and paris stock exchanges. The initial success of the scheme was fantastic. In stock exchange parlance, the issue was oversubscribed a hundred times. This was intolerable to lord dexter; he was obviously attracting far too many of the not quite top people, aspiring would-he's on the lower-middle rungs of the ladder who had not yet got past their first few million, people with whom top people would not care to associate. He doubled his prices. It made no difference. He trebled them and in the process made the gratifying discovery that there were many people in the world who would pay literally almost anything not only to be different and exclusive but to be known to be different and exclusive. Lord dexter held up the building of his latest ship, the campari, had designed and built into her a dozen of the most luxurious cabin suites ever seen, and sent her to new york, confident that she would soon recoup the outlay of a quarter of a million pounds extra cost incurred through the building of those cabins. As usual, his confidence was not misplaced. There were imitators, of course, but one might as well have tried to imitate buckingham palace, the grand canyon, or the cullinan diamond. Lord dexter left them all at the starting date. He had found his formula and he stuck to it unswervingly: comfort, convenience, quiet, good food, and good company. Where comfort was concerned, the fabulous luxury of the

staterooms had to be seen to be believed; convenience, as far as the vast majority of the male passengers was concerned, found its ultimate in the juxtaposition, in the campari's unique telegraph lounge, of the stock-exchange tickers and one of the most superbly stocked bars in the world. Quiet was achieved by an advanced degree of insulation both in cabin suites and engine room, by imitating the royal yacht britannia inasmuch as that no orders were ever shouted and the deck crew and stewards invariably wore rubber-soled sandals and by eliminating all the bands, parties, games, and dances which lesser cruise passengers believed essential for the enjoyment of shipboard life. The magnificent cuisine had been achieved by luring away, at vast cost and the expense of even more bad feeling, the chefs from one of the biggest embassies in london and one of the finest hotels in paris; those masters of the culinary world operated on alternate days, and the paradisical results of their efforts to outdo one another was the envious talk of the western ocean. Other ship owners might, perhaps, have succeeded in imitating some or all of those features, although almost certainly to a lesser degree. But lord dexter was no ordinary ship owner. He was, as said, a genius, and he showed it in his insistence, above all, on having the right people aboard. Never a single trip passed but the campari had a personage on its passenger list, a personage varying from notable to world-famous. A special suite was reserved for personages. Well-known politicians, cabinet ministers, top stars of the stage and screen, the odd famous writer or artist-if he was clean enough and used a razor-and the lower echelons of the english nobility travelled in this suite at vastly reduced prices; royalty, ex-presidents, ex-premiers, ranking dukes and above travelled free. It was said that if all the british peerage on the campari's waiting list could be accommodated simultaneously, the house of lords could close its doors. It need hardly be added that there was nothing philanthropic in lord dexter's offer of free hospitality: he merely jacked up his prices to the wealthy occupants of the other eleven suites, who would have paid the earth anyway for the privilege of voyaging in such close contact with such exalted company. After several years on this run our passengers consisted almost entirely of repeaters. Many came as often as three times a year, fair enough indication of the size of their bank roll. By now the passenger list on the campari had become the most exclusive club

in the world. Not to put too fine a point on it, lord dexter had distilled the aggregate elements of social and financial snobbery and found in its purest quintessence an inexhaustible supply of gold. I adjusted my napkin and looked over the current gold mine. Five hundred million dollars on the hoof on the dove-grey velvet of the armchair seats in that opulent and air-conditioned dining room; perhaps nearer a thousand million dollars, and old man beresford would account for a good third of it. Julius beresford, president and chief stockholder of the hart-mccormick mining federation, sat where he nearly always sat, not only now but on half a dozen previous cruises, at the top right-hand side of the captain's table, next to captain Bullen himself. He sat there, in the most coveted position in the ship, not because he insisted on it through sheer weight of wealth, but because captain Bullen himself insisted on it. There are exceptions to every rule, and julius beresford was the exception to Bullen's rule that he couldn't abide any passenger, period. Beresford, a tall, thin, relaxed man with tufted black eyebrows, a horseshoe ring of greying hair fringing the sunburnt baldness of his head, and lively hazel eyes twiligh in the lined brown leather of his face, came along only for the peace, comfort, and food: the company of the great left him cold, a fact vastly appreciated by captain Bullen, who shared his sentiments exactly. Beresford, sitting diagonally across from my table, caught my eye. "Evening, mr. carter."

unlike his daughter, he didn't make me feel that he was conferring an earldom upon me every time he spoke to me. "Splendid to be at sea again, isn't it? and where's our captain tonight?"

"Working, i'm afraid, mr. beresford. I have to present his apologies to his table. He couldn't leave the bridge."

"On the bridge?" mrs. beresford, seated opposite her husband, twisted round to look at me. "I thought you were usually on watch at this hour, mr. carter?"

"I am." I smiled at her. I kept a special sort of smile for mrs.

beresford in the same way that I kept a special sort of look for young dexter. Plump, bejewelled, overdressed, with dyed blonde hair, but still beautiful at fifty, mrs. beresford bubbled over with good humour and laughter and kindness, and to the sour remark that it is easy to be that way with 300 million dollars in the bank, I can only observe that, after several years on the millionaires' run, the misery quotient of our wealthy appeared to increase in direct proportion to the bullion in the bank; this was only her first trip, but mrs. beresford was already my favourite passenger. I went on: "but there are so many chains of islets, reefs, and coral keys hereabouts that captain Bullen prefers to see to the navigation himself." I didn't add, as I might have done, that had it been in the middle of the night and all the passengers safely in their beds captain Bullen would have been in his also, untroubled by any thoughts about his chief officer's competence. "But I thought a chief officer was fully qualified to run a ship?" miss beresford, needling me again, sweet-smiling, the momentarily innocent clear green eyes almost too big for the delicately tanned face. "In case anything went wrong with the captain, I mean. You must hold a master's certificate, mustn't you?"

"I do. I also hold a driver's licence, but you wouldn't catch me driving a bus in the rush hour in downtown manhattan." old man beresford grinned. His wife smiled. Miss beresford regarded me thoughtfully for a moment, then bent to examine her hors d'oeuvres, showing the gleaming auburn hair cut in a bouffant style that looked as if it had been achieved with a garden rake and a pair of secateurs but had probably cost a fortune. The man by her side wasn't going to let it go so easily, though. He laid down his fork, raised his thin dark head until he had me more or less sighted along his acquiline nose, and said in his clear high drawling voice, "oh, come now, chief officer. I don't think the comparison is very apt at all." the "chief officer" was to put me in my place. The duke of hartwell spent a great deal of his time aboard the campari in putting people in their places, which was pretty ungrateful of him, considering that he was getting it all for free. He had nothing against me personally; it was just that he was publicly lending miss beresford his support. Even the very considerable sums of money earned by inveigling the properly respectful lower classes into viewing his stately home at two and six a time were making only a slight dent on the crushing burden of death duties, whereas an alliance with miss beresford would solve his difficulties for ever and ever. Things were being complicated for the unfortunate duke by the fact that, though

his intellect was bent on miss beresford, his attentions and eyes were for the most part on the extravagantly opulent charms-and undeniable beauty of the platinum blonde and often-divorced cinema actress who flanked him on the other side. "I don't suppose it is, sir," I acknowledged. Captain Bullen refused to address him as "your grace,"

and i'd be damned if i'd do it either. "But the best I could think up on the spur of the moment." he nodded as though satisfied and returned to attack his hors d'oeuvre. Old beresford eyed him speculatively, mrs.

beresford half-smilingly, miss harcourtthe cinema actress -admiringly, while miss beresford herself just kept on treating us to an uninterrupted view of the auburn bouffant. There's little enough to do during off-duty hours at sea, and [1 watching developments at the captain's table would make a very entertaining pastime indeed. What promised to make it even more entertaining was the very considerable interest being taken in the captain's table by the young man seated at the foot of my own table. One of the passengers who had joined at caracio. Tony carreras-my guess that he was miguel carteras' son had been a correct and far from difficult on-was by any odds the most extraordinarily handsome man who'd ever passed through the dining-room

door of the campari. In one way this might not have signified much as it takes many years to amass sufficient cash to sail on the campari even for a weekend and young men were in a tiny minority at any time, but nevertheless there was no denying his impact. Even at close-up range there was none of that weakness, that almost effeminate regularity of feature so often found in the faces of many very good-looking men. He looked for all the world like a slightly latinate reincarnation of a younger errol flynn, but harder, tougher, more enduring. The only flaw, if one could call it flaw, lay in the eyes. There seemed to be something ever so slightly wrong with them, as if the pupils were slightly flattened, giving a hard, bright glitter. Maybe it was just the lighting at the table. But there was nothing wrong with them as eyes; he had twenty-twenty vision all right and was using it all to study the captain's table. Miss beresford or miss harcourt, I couldn't be sure which; he didn't look the kind of man who would waste his time studying any of the others at that table. The courses came and went.