Although this man had, presumably, initiated plans to kill Garth and me not too many hours before, he gave no sign of recognition as he stared at me. One of the crewmen said something to him, and then both turned and walked out of the cabin, closing the door behind them, leaving me alone with the balding, bloated, pasty-faced drunk. He kept staring at me, bleary-eyed and swaying back and forth, then spoke to me in a hopelessly slurred mumble. Not having brought along my jiffy Universal Translator, I suspected we were going to have some difficulties communicating. But then he repeated it, and I thought I got the general drift.
What the fuck are you?
What the fuck was I, indeed? I was damn cold was what I was, and without further ado I stripped off the shirt that was pasted to my skin, grabbed a blanket off the unmade bunk bed, and wrapped it around me. The blanket felt greasy, and smelled as foul as everything else in the room, but at least it would help to preserve my rapidly diminishing body heat. Captain Julian Jefferson didn't protest and was in no position to do anything about it if he did; I doubted he could stand. I pulled up a wobbly wooden chair and sat down across from him at the wobbly chart table cum bar. The other man's dark brown eyes were glassy and occasionally rolled in his head as he tried to fix his gaze on me. There seemed no easy way to slide into the topic I wished to discuss, so I decided to dispense with any talk about the wretched weather, get right to the subject at hand, and see what happened.
"My name's Frederickson," I said through chattering teeth. "I'm investigating the death of a man by the name of Tom Blaine, who got chopped up by some very big propeller blades not too many weeks ago. I believe it was this tanker that killed him. Uh, the state police and Coast Guard are following right behind me, but they don't like working in the rain. I want to know why you started up your engines while the ship was moored and you were washing out your holding tanks. Now, I know you're shipping-"
I stopped speaking when I saw his lips moving. He was mumbling something in his drunken slur, and I leaned forward, trying to decipher it. "What?" I asked.
He repeated it, or mumbled something else, and this time I thought I understood him.
He was saying that the guy who was killed should have minded his own business.
Well. For a moment I forgot about both my headache and the bone-deep cold that was racking my body as I stared at the man in stunned silence. It certainly sounded like a confession of sorts to me. I had hoped to initially shock him into at least a denial of the accusation, which I had then hoped to use to pressure him into saying something, anything, incriminating, which I had then hoped to use to goad him into saying something even more incriminating. But he had apparently been impatient for me to get on with my masterly interrogation, since he had interrupted my opening gambit to effectively admit he had known there was a diver under his ship when he'd activated the engines. Or so it seemed.
"You're saying you knew there was a diver under your tanker when you started those props spinning around?"
He drained off the bourbon in his glass, poured himself some more from a bottle of Wild Turkey, then mumbled something to the dark liquid in front of him.
Sure he'd known, the drink was informed. It wasn't the first time this troublemaker had visited them, diving around and under the ship. He'd started the first night they were moored, and he'd been nosing around the last time they came upriver. He was on to the company's trick of flushing out tanks in the river and taking on water, and he was getting ready to make big trouble for the captains of the tankers, and the company.
"You've been selling the water in the Middle East?"
Yes. Kuwait.
"Whose idea was it?"
Company policy. Wanted to increase profits.
"Were your orders in writing?"
He shook his head.
"Who gave you the orders?"
The devil.
"Fuck the devil," I said with disgust. "Jesus Christ, Captain, do you really think a tankerful of water is worth a man's life?"
He slowly, determinedly, shook his head back and forth, then again spoke to his tumbler of bourbon.
The devil made him do it.
At his first mention of the devil, I'd assumed that, in his stupor, he'd been trying to be funny. Now I wasn't so sure. There was certainly nothing funny about the look of horror and anguish in his eyes. The captain, it seemed, had not only imagination but a conscience as well. And all his drinking had failed to erase his visions of what happens to a man when he's sucked up into the whirling props of an oceangoing tanker.
"What devil, Captain? Who told the captains to start taking on river water? Who ordered you to turn on your engines while there was a diver under your ship?"
He said the name, enunciating it clearly, with no need for straining to understand. "Mr. Carver."
"Charles Carver?"
He nodded.
"Mr. Charles Carver ordered you to kill a man."
"Start up engines."
"It's the same goddamn thing. He was on board this ship the night that man was killed?"
The question elicited a response, but Julian Jefferson's speech had reverted to slurred mumbles. However, by now I'd gotten somewhat used to the alcoholic garble, and I didn't think I missed much.
In regard to the illegal water-hauling operation, Roger Wellington was the administrator all the captains reported to and received their orders from-but all communications to and from Roger Wellington went through Charles Carver, a man most of the shipping personnel considered very strange, and whom many feared. He was rumored to be the son of the founder and to have more power and influence in the company than his tide would suggest. A number of the captains had warned Mr. Carver that there was a man who seemed to be on to what they were doing and who was actually diving under their ships while they were flushing their tanks in order to gather evidence of pollution. They had been ordered to continue the practice, since the fines involved if they were ever brought to court were likely to be considerably less than the profits they were realizing from the operation. Then Mr. Carver had unexpectedly shown up one night, driving the company's black cigarette boat, and come aboard to wait for the diver to show up. The man had come and had made a dive under the ship as the tanks were being flushed out. Then Mr. Carver had ordered the captain to activate the main engines. At first the horrified captain had refused, but Mr. Carver had reminded him of his drinking problem and of the accidents in which he had been involved. The captain had been told that his family connections would not prevent him from being fired this time if he did not comply with the order to start up the engines. He had done so.
It had been Mr. Carver, followed by a crewman in one of the tanker's motorized dinghies, who had driven off the diver's boat and wrecked it, after throwing everything on board into the water.
Now the captain couldn't sleep, didn't want to sleep, because he was tormented by a vivid, recurring nightmare of how the diver under the boat must have felt in the cold and dark when he heard the engines come on, and the terror he must have experienced in the seconds before he was torn apart. Even awake, the captain couldn't stop thinking about it, seeing the images, and no amount of liquor seemed to help. He stayed in his cabin all the time now and let the crew handle the ship. He was terribly sorry for what he'd done, but felt he'd had no choice.
When the captain had finished, he drained off the tumbler of bourbon.