The Rackham Files (2 page)

Quent served me a "give me a break" look. "I don't have to tell you the metro force budget is petty cash, Harve. They're overloaded with domestic cases. The Feds know it, which is where we come in—if you want in."

"Got me over a barrel. You want the truth, I'm practically wearing the goddamn barrel. Any idea how long the case will last?"

Quent knew I was really asking how many days' pay it might involve. "It evaporates the day the
Ras Ormara
leaves port; perhaps a week. That doesn't give us as much time as I'd like, but every case sets its own pace."

That was another old Quentism, and I'd come to learn it was true. This would be a hot pace, so no wonder gimpy Quentin Kim was offering to share the workload. Instead of doping out his selfish motives, I should be thanking him, so I did. I added, "You don't know it, but you're offering me a bundle of chrome-moly racer frame tubing and a few rolls of cyclone fence. An offer I can't refuse, but I'd like to get a dossier on this Korean engineer right away."

"I can do better than that," said Quent, "and it'll come with a free supper tonight, courtesy of the Feds."

"They're buying? Now,
that
is impressive as hell."

"I have not begun to impress," Quent said, again with the shy smile. "Coast Guard Lieutenant Reuben Medler is fairly impressive, but the FBI liaison will strain your belief system."

"Never happen," I said. "They still look like IBM salesmen."

"Not this one. Trust me." Now Quent was grinning.

"You're wrong," I insisted.

"What do you think happened to the third of our classroom musketeers, Harve, and why do you think this case was dropped in my lap? The Feebie is Dana Martin," he said.

I kept my jaw from sagging with some effort. "You were right," I said.

Until the fight started, I assumed Quent had chosen Original Joe's in San Jose because we—Dana included—had downed many an abalone supreme there in earlier times. If some of the clientele were reputedly Connected with a capital C, that only kept folks polite. Quent and I met there and copped a booth, though our old habit had been to take seats at the counter where we could watch chefs with wrists of steel handle forty-centimeter skillets over three-alarm gas burners. I was halfway through a bottle of Anchor Steam when a well-built specimen in a crewneck sweater, trim Dockers, and tasseled loafers ushered his date in. He carried himself as if hiding a small flagpole in the back of his sweater. I looked away, denying my envy. How is it some guys never put on an ounce while guys like me outgrow our belts?

Then I did a double take. The guy had to be Lieutenant Medler because the small, tanned, sharp-eyed confection in mid-heels and severely tailored suit was Dana Martin, no longer an overconfident kid. I think I said "wow" silently as we stood up.

After the introductions Medler let us babble about how long it had been. For me, the measure of elapsed time was that little Miz Martin had developed a sense of reserve. Then while we decided what we wanted to eat, Medler explained why shoreline poachers had taken abalone off the Original Joe menu. Mindful of who was picking up the tab, I ordered the latest fad entree: Nebraska longhorn T-bone, lean as ostrich and just as spendy. Dana's lip pursed but she kept it buttoned, cordial, impersonal. I decided she'd bought into her career and its image. Damn, but I hated that . . .

Over the salads, Medler gave his story without editorializing, deferential to us, more so to Dana, in a soft baritone all the more masculine for discarding machismo. "The
Ras Ormara
is a C-1 motorship under Liberian registry," he said, "chartered by the Sonmiani Tramp Service of Karachi, Pakistan." He recited carefully, as if speaking for a recorder. Which he was, though I didn't say so. What the hell, people forget things.

"Some of these multinational vessels just beg for close inspection, the current foreign political situation being what it is," Medler went on. He didn't need to mention the nuke found by a French airport security team the previous month, on an Arab prince's Learjet at Charles De Gaulle terminal. "We did a walk-through. The vessel was out of Lima with a cargo of balsa logs and nontoxic plant extract slurry, bound for Richmond. Crew was the usual polyglot bunch, in this case chiefly Pakis and Koreans. They stay aboard in port unless they have the right papers."

At this point Medler abruptly began talking about how abalone poachers work, a second before the waitress arrived to serve our entrees. Quent nodded appreciatively and I toasted Medler's coolth with my beer.

Once we'd attacked our meals he resumed. Maybe the editorial came with the main course. "You know about Asian working-class people and eye contact—with apologies, Mr. Kim. But one young Korean in the crew was boring holes in my corneas. I decided to interview three men, one at a time, on the fo'c'sle deck. At random, naturally."

"Random as loaded dice." I winked.

"With their skipper right there? Affirmative, and I started with the ship's medic. When I escorted this young third engineer, Park Soon, on deck the poor guy was shaking. His English wasn't that fluent, and he didn't say much, even to direct questions, but he did say we had to talk ashore. 'Must talk,' was the phrase. He had his papers to go ashore.

"I gave him a time and place later that day, a coffeehouse in Berkeley every taxi driver knows. I thought he was going to cry with relief, but he went back to the
Ras Ormara
's bridge with his jaw set like he was marching toward a firing squad. I went belowdecks.

"A lot of tramps look pretty trampy, but it actually just means it's not a regularly scheduled vessel. This one was spitshine spotless, and I found no reason to doubt the manifest or squawk about conditions in the holds.

"Fast forward to roughly sixteen hundred hours. Park shows at the coffeehouse, jumpy as Kermit, but now he's full of dire warnings. He doesn't know exactly what's wrong about the
Ras Ormara
, but he knows he's aboard only for window dressing. The reason he shipped on at Lima was, Park had met the previous third engineer in Lima at a dockside bar, some Chinese who spoke enough English to say he was afraid to go back aboard. Park was on the beach, as they say, and he wangled the job for himself."

Quent stopped shoveling spicy sausage in, and asked, "The Chinese was afraid? Of what?"

"According to Park, the man's exact English words were 'Death ship.' Park thought he had misunderstood at first and put the Chinese engineer's fear down to superstition. But a day or so en route here, he began to get spooked."

"Every culture has its superstitions," Quent said. "And crew members must pass them on. I'm told an old ship can carry enough legends to sink it." When Medler frowned, Quent said, "Remember Joseph Conrad's story, 'The Brute'? The
Apse Family
was a death ship. Well, it was just a story," he said, seeing Dana's look of abused patience.

Medler again: "A classic. Who hasn't read it?" Dana gave a knowing nod. Pissed me off; I hadn't read it. "But I doubt anyone aboard told sea stories to Park. He implied they all seemed to be appreciating some vast, unspoken serious joke. No one would talk to him at all except for his duties. And he didn't have a lot to do because the ship was a dream, he said. She had been converted somewhere to cargo from a small fast transport, so the crew accommodations were nifty. She displaces maybe two thousand tons, twenty-four knots. Fast," he said again. "Originally she must've been someone's decommissioned D.E.—destroyer escort. Not at all like a lot of those rustbuckets in tramp service."

Quent toyed with his food. "It's fairly common, isn't it, for several conversions to be made over the life of a ship?"

"Exigencies of trade." Medler nodded. "Hard to say where it was done, but Pakistan has a shipbreaking industry and rerolling mills in Karachi." He shook his head and grinned. "I think they could cobble you up a new ship from the stuff they salvage. We've refused to allow some old buckets into the bay; they're rusted out so far, you step in the wrong place on deck and your foot will go right through. But not the
Ras Ormara
; I'd serve on her myself, if her bottom's anything like her topside."

"I thought you did an, uh, inspection," said Dana.

"Walk-through. We didn't do it as thoroughly as we might if we'd found anything abovedecks. She's so clean I understand why Park became nervous. Barring the military—one of our cutters, for instance—you just don't find that kind of sterile environment in maritime service. Not even a converted D.E."

"No," Dana insisted, and made a delicate twirl with her fork. "I meant afterward."

Medler blinked. "If you want to talk about it, go ahead. I can't. You know that."

Dana, whom I'd once thought of as a teen mascot, patted his forearm like a den mother. I didn't know which of them I wanted more to kick under the table. "I go way back with these two, Reuben, and they're under contract with confidentiality. But this may not be the place."

I was already under contract? Well, only if I were working under Quent's license, and if he'd told her so. Still, I was getting fed up with how little I knew. "For God's sake," I said, "just the short form, okay?"

"For twenty years we've had ways to search sea floors for aircraft flight recorders," Dana told me. "Don't you think the Coast Guard might have similar gadgets to look at a hull?"

"For what?"

"Whatever," Medler replied, uneasy about it. "I ordered it after the Park interview. When you know how Hughes built the CIA's
Glomar Explorer
, you know a ship can have a lot of purposes that aren't obvious at the waterline. Figure it out for yourself," he urged.

That spook ship Hughes's people built had been designed to be flooded and to float vertically, sticking up from the water like a fisherman's bobbin. Even the tabloids had exploited it. I thought about secret hatches for underwater demolition teams, torpedo tubes—"Got it," I said. "Any and every unfriendly use I can dream up. Can I ask what they found?"

"Not a blessed thing," said Reuben Medler. "If it weren't for D—Agent Martin here, I'd be writing reports on why I insisted."

"He insisted because the Bureau did," Dana put in. "We've had some vague tips about a major event, planned by nice folks with the same traditions as those who, uh, bugged Tel Aviv."

The Tel Aviv Bug had been anthrax. If the woman who'd smuggled it into Israel hadn't somehow flunked basic hygiene and collapsed with a skinful of the damned bacilli, it would've caused more deaths than it did. "So you found nothing, but you want a follow-up with this Park guy. He's probably catting around and will show up with a hangover when the ship's ready to sail," I said. "I thought crew members had to keep in touch with the charter service."

"They do," said Dana. "And with a full complement of two dozen, only a few of the crew went ashore. But Park has vanished. Sonmiani claims they'll have still another third engineer when the slurry tanks are cleaned and the new cargo's pumped aboard."

"And we'd prefer they didn't sail before we have another long talk with Park," Medler said. "I'm told the FBI has equipment like an unobtrusive lie detector."

"Voice-stress analyzer," Dana corrected. "Old hardware, new twists. But chiefly, we're on edge because Park has dropped out of sight."

Quent: "But I thought he told you why."

"He told me why he was worried," Medler agreed. "But he also said the
Ras Ormara
will be bound for Pusan with California-manufactured industrial chemicals, a nice tractable cargo, to his own homeport. He was determined to stay with it, worried or not. Of course it's possible he simply changed his mind."

"But we'd like to know," Dana said. "We want to know sufficiently that—well." She looked past us toward the ceiling as if an idea had just occurred to her. Suuure. "Sometimes things happen. Longshoremen's strike—" She saw my sudden glance, and she'd always been alert to nuance. "No, we haven't, but little unforeseen problems arise. Sonmiani is already dealing with a couple of them. Assuming they don't have the clout to build a fire under someone at the ambassador level, there could be one or two more if we find a solid reason. Or if you do."

"I take it Harve and I can move overtly on this," Quent said, "so long as we're not connected to government."

Medler looked at Dana, who said, "Exactly. Low-profile, showing your private investigator's I.D. if necessary. You're known well enough that anyone checking on you would be satisfied you're not us. Of course you've got to have a client of record, so we're furnishing one."

I noticed that Quent seemed interested in something across the room, but he refocused on Dana Martin. "As licensed privateers, we aren't required to name a client or divulge any other details of the case. Normally it would be shaving an ethical guideline."

"But you wouldn't be," Dana said. "You'd be giving up a few details of a cover story. Nothing very dramatic, just imply that our missing man is a prodigal son. Park Soon's father in Pusan would be unlikely to know he's put you on retainer."

Quent: "Because he can't afford us?"

Dana, with the shadow of a smile: "Because he's been deceased for years. I'll give you the details on that tomorrow, Quent. Uhm, Quent?"

But my pal, whose attention had been wandering again, was now leaning toward me with an unQuentish grin. "Harve," he said softly, "third counter stool from the front, late twenties, blond curls, Yamaha cycle jacket. Could be packing."

"Several guys in here probably are," I said.

"But I'm not carrying certified copies of their bail bonds, and I do have one for Robert Rooney, bail jumper. That's Bobby."

Dana and Medler both looked toward the counter, at me, and at Quent, but let their expressions complain.

"You wouldn't," I said.

"It's my bleeding job," said Quent. "Wait outside. I'll flush him out gently, and if gentle doesn't work, don't let him reach into that jacket."

I was already standing up. "Back shortly, folks. Don't forget my pie à la mode."

"I don't believe this," I heard Medler say as I moved toward the old-fashioned revolving door.