We toured the ship and I talked to several other crew members, including the technician who helped Tanaka maneuver the submersible. No one had anything to add. The general consensus was that there'd been a party, there was music, there were no women. So how much partying could anyone do? No one particularly remembered seeing Tanaka, drunk or otherwise. The doctor was, apparently, the type who kept to himself, not unfriendly but no party animal either.
Next, we did a turn around the stern deck. I couldn't see how Tanaka could possibly fall in unless he'd climbed up on the gunnel and lost his balance. I did note that, iced up, the decks were slippery as hell. I shuffled along, keeping my feet in contact with the ice, and came around behind a large red drum leaking rust. It was a spool of greased cable, part of the mechanism that launched the submersible sitting under the crane that dominated the ship's stern. I took a look over the ship's side. The black water was a long way down, flecked with light snow that melted moments after settling. Once over the side, getting back up on deck unaided would be tricky, if not impossible.
A cone of cigarette smoke suddenly appeared from behind the spool. Being an investigator, I investigated. I maneuvered carefully around the drum and found a large, bearded man in a red, oil-stained jacket, sucking hard on a cigarette. The man looked at me, swung his eyes back to the dock, and acknowledged my presence by taking another drag.
“You part of the crew?” I said.
“Who's asking?” he replied, blowing a mixture of condensation and tobacco smoke over the machinery.
“Santa Claus,” I responded.
“Don't think much of your sleigh,” he said with a nod to the police cruiser now blanketed in snow, parked on the wharf.
“So then you know who's asking,” I said. “Why don't you smoke inside? Gotta be more pleasant than standing out here in the cold.”
“‘Gainst the rules,” he said. “Damn peckerheads on this cruise won't allow it.” He coughed, a sound like a car changing gears without a clutch. Something came into his mouth, which he chewed once or twice. I was thinking lung. He spat overboard and a globule arced through the falling snow, plopped onto the water and spread. Something came up from beneath and pecked at it, just in case it was edible. It wasn't.
I noticed that tobacco butts collected over a considerable time had stained brown the ice and snow under his feet. “Anyone else on board smoke?”
“Nope.”
“I'm looking into the death of Dr. Tanaka for the U.S. government,” I said, officially clarifying my presence on board.
“Good for you,” he replied.
“Did you know the doctor?”
“Nope.”
“Were you at the party the night the doctor went missing?”
“Nope.”
“What were you doing at that time?”
“What I always do after dinner's done. I secured the kitchen.”
“So … you're the cook?”
“Yep.” The man drew on his cigarette so hard I thought he was going to turn the thing inside out. He took a pack of Chesterfields from his jacket pocket, shook one out, and lit it from the butt. Then he flicked the butt into the water and blew a vast cloud into the air.
“You got a name?” I asked.
“Cooke. That's with an e on the end.”
“Your name's Cooke and you're the cook?”
“That's right. Al Cooke. He got eat.”
“He got eat?”
“By the shark. It was waiting.”
“Did you see the doctor fall in?”
“Nope,” Cooke said, clapping his hands together. A wave of cooled tobacco smoke and old sweat rolled over me.
If he hadn't seen the doctor fall, then he wouldn't have seen him get mauled by the shark, either. I looked at the man. I was familiar with the type, the type that saw nothing and heard nothing, even if he did. “Thanks for your time,” I said. I handed him a card with my D.C. number on it, just as I had with every other crew member I'd talked to. “If anything occurs to you, give me a call.”
“Yeah,” he replied, stamping to warm his feet. I did the same and realized mine had gone numb. I could see Durban and Abrutto waiting for me over at the gangplank, breathing funnels of steam. I moved off to join them.
It was obvious that there was nothing else for me to do here. The defense of the U.S. had lost an important asset, eaten by a fish that could care less.
As Durban and I walked toward the police cruiser, I was thinking of Sean Boyle. The professor didn't seem terribly upset about losing a friend and colleague. I could see that the guy was utterly consumed by his work. Had it even dawned on him that Tanaka was gone forever? “What do you call an Irishman who bounces off walls?” I asked.
“Ric O'Shea,” Durban replied promptly. “Everyone knows that one.”
She was right — they do. I was off my game, distracted. Just around the corner was the plane trip home, and my stomach was already grappling with a cold, sour knot because of it.
SIX
It was after 2030 hours by the time the taxi pulled up outside my apartment in D.C. I'd moved back to the city after being released from the hospital. My new residence was a one-bedroom apartment in a four-story block over a couple of restaurants duking it out for survival — a Korean barbecue joint on one side, vegan on the other. After three months' residency, I was on a first-name basis with Kim, the proprietor of The 38th Parallel, but was barely on nodding terms with the people in Summer Love, Kim's tie-dyed competitors next door, which says a lot about my dietary preferences.
“Vin. Good to see you.” Kim looked up from his cash register as I walked in lopsided, struggling with my suitcase. “Where you been?”
“Disneyland.”
“Hah, Disneyland, always Disneyland. You wan' the usual?”
“You got jellyfish on the menu?”
He shook his head after a moment of consideration. “No, no, sorry…”
And to think I could have learned to hate it months ago. “Never mind,” I said. “I'll stick with the usual.”
“Yes, sure, sure. Good choice, good choice. One large serve of bulgogi coming up. You wan' rice?”
I nodded. The exchange with Kim was all very cheery. And, in fact, I was cheered to be home, even though there was nothing and nobody waiting upstairs for me, not even a potted plant.
Kim's toothy good humor changed to a scowl as he barked the order to his wife like he was a vicious dog going at an intruder. His old lady seemed impervious to it and simply trudged off into the back room to rustle up my order. Mr. Kim attended to several other take-out customers over the phone while I flicked through a couple of old People magazines on the counter. The covers featured the usual parade of Hollywood fuckups, people who had every reason to believe they'd won the lottery of life, but were instead hooked on a brand of narcissism that ensured they were unable to love anyone as much as their own manufactured self-image. Divorces, tantrums, dishonest trysts, clinics, bizarre surgery, drunken traffic accidents, affairs. If it wasn't pathetic, it'd be hilarious.
I sifted through the pile. On the bottom lay a three-day-old copy of the Post. According to the front page, since I'd been away, Pakistan had had a change of government. A couple of soldiers in the previous president's bodyguard had decided they didn't like his policy of being friendly toward the U.S. and so they'd peeled open his vehicle like an orange with a dozen or so pounds of Composition B while he was still inside it. Fundamentalist gangs were roaming through Karachi and Islamabad beating up anyone who looked like they were living in the twenty-first century. India was jumpy. America was nervous. After years of relative quiet, shots had already been exchanged over the long-disputed territory of Kashmir. Everyone's nightmare was no longer just a bad dream: we now had a bunch of religious dimwits sitting on top of an unknown number of fission-boosted atomic warheads and the missiles capable of delivering them. Another pressure cooker — just what the world needed.