The Rackham Files (4 page)

Meanwhile, a bulky yellow extraterrestrial climbed from one of those domes trailing smaller hoses, and made his way carefully down the service ladder. When he levered back his helmet and left it with its hoses on deck, I could see it was just a guy with hair sweat-plastered to his forehead, wearing a protective suit you couldn't miss on a moonless midnight. My luck was holding; he continued down the gangway to the nearest truck. Meanwhile I ambled back in his direction, stowing away my StudyGirl.

The space-suited guy, his suit smeared with fluid, was talking with the truck's console operator, both standing next to the chassis as they shared a cigarette. Even then smoking was illegal in public, but give a guy a break. . . .

They broke off their conversation as I drew near, and the console man nodded. "Help you?"

I shrugged pleasantly and remembered to talk high in my throat because guys my size are evidently less threatening as tenors. "Just sightseeing. Never see anything like this in Omaha." I grinned.

"Don't see much of this anywhere, thank God," said the sweaty one, and they laughed together. "Thirsty work. Not for the claustrophobe, either."

"Is this how you fill 'er up?" I hoped this was naive enough without being idiotic. I think I flunked because they laughed again. The sweaty one said, "Would I be smoking?" When I looked abashed, he relented. "We're scouring those stainless tanks. Got to be pharmaceutically free of a vegetable slurry before they pump in the next cargo."

"Those domes sitting on deck," I guessed.

"Hell, that's just the hemispherical closures," said the console man.

"The tanks go clear down into the hold," said his sweaty friend.

I blinked. "Twenty feet down?"

"More like forty," he said.

The console man glanced at his wristwatch, gave a meaningful look to his friend; took the cigarette back. "And we got a special eco-directive on flushing these after this phase. We have to double soak and agitate with filterable solvent, right to the brim, fifty-two thousand gallons apiece. Pain in the ass."

"Must take a lot of time," I said, thinking about Dana Martin's ability to make people jump through additional hoops on short notice, without showing her hand.

"Twice what we'd figured," said Consoleman. "I thought the charter-service rep would scream bloody murder, but he didn't even haggle. Offered a bonus for early completion, in fact. Speaking of which," he said, and fixed Sweatman with a wry smile.

"Yeah, yeah," said his colleague, and turned toward the
Ras Ormara.
"For us, time really is money. But that ten-minute break is in the standard contract. Anyhow, without my support hoses it's getting hot as hell in this outfit."

"Hold still, it's gonna dribble," I said. I found an old Kleenex in my pocket, and used it to wipe around the chin plate of Sweatman's suit, then put it back in my pocket.

"Guess I'm lucky to be in the wrought-iron biz," I said. With a smithy for a hobby, I could fake my way through that if necessary.

"My regards to Omaha," said Consoleman. "And by the way, you really shouldn't be here without authorization. Those guys are an antsy lot," he said, jerking his head toward the bridge. It was as nice a "buzz off, pal" request as I'd ever had.

I didn't look up. I'd seen faces staring down in our direction, some with their heads swathed in white. "Okay, thanks. Just seeing this has been an education," I said.

"If the skipper unlimbers his tongue on you, I hope your education isn't in languages," Consoleman joked.

I laughed, waved, and took my time walking back to the gate, stopping on the way to gaze at the much larger container ship as if my attention span played no favorites.

When I got back to my Toyota I rummaged in the glove box and found my stash of quart-sized evidence baggies. Then I carefully sealed that soggy old Kleenex inside one and scribbled the date and the specimen's provenance. I'd seen Sweatman climb out of a cargo tank of the
Ras Ormara
and that fluid had come out with him. Quent might not do handsprings, but the Feebs got off on stuff like that.

I took a brief cell call from Quent shortly before noon, while I was stoking up at one of the better restaurants off Jack London Square. The maître d' had sighed when he saw my tourist getup. Quent sighed, too, when I told him where I was. "Look, the Feds are paying, and I keep receipts," I reminded him.

He said he was striking out in Chinatown, just as he had in hospitals and clinics, but the Oakland side had its own ethnic neighborhoods. "I thought you might want to ride with me this afternoon," he said.

"Where do we meet? I have something off the ship you might want Dana to have analyzed," I said.

"You went aboard? Harve—oh well. Just eat slowly. It's not that far across the Bay Bridge," he replied.

"Gotcha. And I didn't go aboard, bossman, but I think I have a sample of what was actually in the
Ras Ormara
's tanks, whatever the records might say. You'll be proud of your humble apprentice, but right now my rack of lamb calls. Don't hurry," I said, and put away my phone.

Quent arrived in time for my coffee and ordered tea. I let him play back my StudyGirl video recording as far as it went, and took the evidence baggie from my shirt pocket as I reported the rest. "We have the name of the pressure-washing firm. No doubt they can tell some curious Fed what cleaning chemicals they use. What's left should be traces of what those tanks really carried," I said.

Quent said Dana's people had already analyzed samples of the stuff provided by Customs. "But they'll be glad to have it confirmed this way. Nice going." He pocketed the baggie and pretended not to notice that I made a proper notation on my lunch receipt. We walked out into what was rapidly becoming a furry overcast, and I took the passenger's seat in his Volvo.

Quent said we'd try an Oakland rooming house run by a Korean family. From the list we had, he knew a pair of the
Ras Ormara
's crew were staying there. "You, uh, might want to draft your report while I go in," he said as he turned off the Embarcadero. "Shouldn't be long."

"I thought you wanted me with you."

"I did. Then I saw how you're dressed."

"I'm a tourist!"

"You're a joke with pale shins. I can't do a serious interview with a foreign national if you're visible; how can I have his full attention when he's wondering whether Bluto is going to start juggling plates behind me?"

I saw his point and promised to bring a change of clothes next time. Quent found the place, in a row of transient quarters an Oakland beat cop would call flophouses. Without a place to park, he turned the Volvo over to me. "I'll call when I'm done," he said, and disappeared into the three-story stucco place.

I did find a parking spot eventually. My printer was at home, but I stored my morning's case report on StudyBint. Quent called not long afterward and, because he wore a frown only when puzzling things out, I hardly gave him time to take the wheel. "Something already?"

He thought about it a moment before replying. "Not on Park. Not directly, at any rate. But I'm starting to understand why our missing engineer was uneasy." When giving Park's name he had mentioned the ship to the rooming-house proprietor, who said she hadn't heard of Park but named the two crew members who were there. The Korean, Hong Chee, she described as taller than average, late thirties. The second man, one Ali Ghaffar, was older; perhaps Indian. Pretending surprise at this lucky accident, Quent asked to speak with them.

Hong Chee was out, but Quent found his roommate Ghaffar in the room, preternaturally quiet and alert. Ghaffar, a middle-aged Paki, was a studious-looking sort wearing one of those white cloth doodads wound around his head, who had evidently been reading one of two well-thumbed leather-bound books. Quent couldn't read even the titles though he got the impression they might be religious tomes.

Ghaffar spoke fair English. He showed some interest in the fact that an Asian speaking perfect American English was hoping to trace the movements of an engineer off the
Ras Ormara.
Quent explained that Park's family was concerned enough to hire private investigators, blah-blah, merely wanted assurance that Park hadn't met with foul play, et cetera.

Ghaffar said he had only a nodding acquaintance with Park. He couldn't, or more likely wouldn't, say whether Park had made any friends aboard ship, and had no idea whether Park had friends in the Bay Area. Ghaffar and Hong Chee had seen the engineer, he thought, the day before in some Richmond bar, and Park was looking fit, but they hadn't talked. That's when Quent noticed the wastebasket's contents. He began pacing around, stroking his chin, trying to scan everything in the room without being obvious while doing it.

Personal articles were aligned on lamp tables as if neatness counted, beds made, nothing out of place. Quent took his nail clippers out and began idly tossing them in one hand as he dreamed up more questions, and he just happened to drop his clippers into the wastebasket, apologizing as he fished them out with slow gropes of bogus clumsiness.

Quent realized that Ghaffar was waiting with endless calm for this ten-thumbed gumshoe to go away, volunteering little, responding carefully. Quent said he'd like to talk with Hong Chee sometime if possible and passed his cell-phone card to Ghaffar, who accepted it solemnly, and then Quent left and called me to be picked up.

"So I ask you," Quent said rhetorically: "What would a devout Moslem, who adheres to correct practices alone in his room, have been doing in a gin mill, with or without his buddy? Not likely. I don't think he saw Park, I think he wanted me to think Park was healthy. And you haven't asked me about the trash basket."

"Didn't want to interrupt. What'd you see?"

"Candy wrappers and an empty plastic pop bottle. Oh, yes," he added with studied neglect, "and an airline ticket. I didn't have time to read it closely, but I caught an Asian name—not Hong Chee's—Oakland International, and a departure date." He paused before he specified it.

"Christ, that's tomorrow," I said.

"I'm not through. Ghaffar is on the crew list as the ship's machinist. You ever see a machinist's hands?"

"Sure, like a blacksmith's. Like he force-feeds cactus to Rottweilers for kicks."

"Well, at the least they're callused and scarred. Not Ali Ghaffar. He may know how to use a lathe, but I'd bet against it."

"Then who's the real machinist? Ships have to have one."

"Do they? From what Medler and you tell me, and from what I saw on your video, the
Ras Ormara
might go a year without needing that kind of attention."

He checked some notes and drove silently across town like he knew where he was going. Presently he said, as if to himself: "So Hong Chee has dumped what looks like a perfectly good airline ticket for somebody out of Oakland. Wish I'd seen where to. More particularly, I wish I knew how he could afford to junk it. And why he knows to junk it the day before the flight."

"Me, teacher," I said, putting up a hand and waving it. "Call on me."

"Tell the class, Master Rackham," he said, going along with it.

"Somebody else is funding him better than most, and he's changed his departure plans because La Martin and company have put the brakes on whatever he had in mind."

"Take your seat, you've left the heart of my question untouched. Is he worried for the same reasons as Park?"

"Suppose we give him a chance to tell us," I said.

"Maybe we'll do that. But I'm not sure he's making plans for his own departure. Another Asian?"

"At a guess, I'd say the name is unimportant. How many sets of I.D. might he have, Quent?"

After a long pause, he exhaled for what seemed like forever. "Harve, you are definitely paranoid—I'm happy to say. Now you've torn the lid off this little box with a missing engineer in it, and I find a much bigger box inside, so to speak. And there wasn't a second ticket there—so Ghaffar may still intend to go back aboard. Or not. But I'll tell you this: Our machinist is no machinist, and he certainly isn't spending his time ashore as if he had the usual things in mind."

I couldn't fault his reasoning. "So where are we headed?"

"Korean social club. Maybe we'll find Hong Chee there."

"And not Park Soon?" All I got was a shrug and a glance, and I didn't like the glance. Quent found a slot for the Volvo in a neighborhood of shops with signs in English and the odd squiggles that weren't quite Chinese characters; Hangul has a script all its own. "You might try calling Dana while I'm inside," Quent said. "Let her know we've got a gooey Kleenex for her."

So I did, and was told she was in the field, and I tried her cell phone. She sounded like she was in a salt mine and none too pleased about it. She perked up slightly at my offer of the evidence. "I'll pick it up when we're through here," she said, and sneezed. "I thought the incoming cargo might be dirty, but the spectral analyzer says no. A few pallets are too heavy, though. My God, but wood dust is pervasive!"

"You're in a warehouse," I said, glad that she couldn't see me grinning. Climbing around on pallets of logs probably hadn't been high on her list of adventures when she joined up. "I haven't seen the stuff, but if it's that dusty maybe it's not plain logs. Probably rough-sawn, right?"

She said it was. "What would you know about it?"

"I've seen how balsa is used in high-tech panels. The stuff is graded by weight per cubic meter and it varies from featherweight, which is highly prized, to the density of pine. In other words, pallets could vary by a factor of three or so."

"Well, damn it to hell," she said. "Excuse me. Scratch one criterion. What's the significance of its being sawn?"

"Just that it may make it easier for you to see whether some of it's been cut lengthwise with a very fine kerf and glued back."

"What's a kerf?"

"The slot made by a saw. Balsa can be slitted with a very thin saw-blade. It occurs to me that it might be the lighter timbers you should be checking for hollowed interiors. Bags of white powder aren't that heavy, Dana."

I think she cussed again before she sneezed. She said, "Thanks," as if it were squeezed out of her.