“I guess there’s a law says you have to be a gob before you let somebody stick a needleful of indelible ink in your epidermis! Snap it up, Superman.”
Half an hour later Koski marched down the ramp at the Battery Basin. A big fire-boat with its line of gunlike nozzles lay on the other side of the Basin; compared to her the chunky black hull of the police-boat with its tiny pilot-house was a marine midget. But there was a sturdiness about the way the Vigilant strained at her lines in the backwash from a fast-moving lighter that said the smaller craft could take care of herself when the going was rough. Something told Koski the going might be rough, right about now.
He vaulted over the Vigilant’s rail. Mulcahey reclined against a pile of tarpaulin in the corner of the cockpit. His mouth was open; his eyes closed. The Lieutenant bent down, smeared his hand over the boiled-ham countenance.
“Up an’ at ’em, Irish.”
“Steve?” The Sergeant blinked resentfully. “I would call it a dog’s life, working with you. Only now and again, a pooch gets some chance to sleep.”
“If you’d lay off some of those dizzy dames you go out with, you might not be dead on your feet at eight pee-em. Come out of your coma. Twist her tail.”
“I hope,” Mulcahey thumbed the starter, throttled the motor down to a steady grumble, “we are not about to grapple for any more of this piecemeal cadaver?”
Koski made a neat coil of the bowline over left hand and elbow. “We’re about to locate the Seavett. Eighty-foot, bridge-deck, twin-screw job. Supposed to be over at Rodd’s, getting a propeller straightened.”
The Sergeant lifted the engine-box cover, tightened up the grease cup on the water pumps. “We could do with a short session at Randall’s Island for repairin’ the ravages of time an’ tide, ourselves.”
“A week from Tuesday. If not later. We got a job of work to do. It calls for overtime and hot-shot delivery, Joe.”
The hundred and eighty horses inside the engine-housing grumbled — began to roar. Koski switched on the running lights. The Vigilant thundered away from her berth. She shot out of the Basin, pitched violently in a ferry wash, angled over toward Buttermilk Channel. A gray silhouette with sharply raked funnels and hooded guns on the foredeck slid across the police-boat’s bow in the direction of the Navy Yard. Over by the tip of Governors Island, the red eye of a tug peered from beneath the black V of a derrick barge.
Mulcahey adjusted the timing lever; the motor raised its voice. The patrol-boat’s forefoot lifted slightly; her stern squatted in a white churning of froth. “Ordinarily I would not connect a piece of butcher-work like this mangled carcass with the kind of people who play around on a pleasure hull, Steve. It is more the Legs Diamond type treatment — the sort of bluggy operation Dutch Schultz might of thought up for one of his intimate pals.”
“Don’t go gangster-movie on me. We’re just checking. Captain of this Seavett notified Centre Street his engineer was A.W.O.L. Might not have any connection. No report of violence.”
“Who owns this rich man’s toy?”
“Lloyds says she was bought four years ago by Lawford Ovett.”
“Oh, oh! The shipping magnet? One who owns them banana boats?”
“Yair. I called up to see if the yacht was in commission. She is. But Ovett’s not aboard. Maid at his apartment says the old geezer’s just back from a meeting of the Shipping Council and has gone to bed and can’t be disturbed.” Koski fished a charred corn-cob from his pocket, fumbled with a red rubber pouch. “Trying to finagle some more vessels, probably. Tin fish have made quite a dent in the Ovett fleet. Their Santa Mercede was sunk only a couple weeks ago. Crew was just picked up off Charleston.”
“Twelve days in open lifeboats; I saw them in the newsreel. Like dead men, they looked.” Mulcahey slewed the Vigilant in toward the Brooklyn shore to avoid a hot-shot freight ferry.
“Some of them were dead, but those lads didn’t get their pictures taken. Not sixty fathoms down. One of the lifeboats didn’t show up.” Koski struck two matches, sucked their combined flame into the bowl of the corncob. “Wonder what you think about, waiting like that. You probably go nuts. Be the best thing.”
“I tell you something about them lugs who sail the seven seas, coach. I never give them much thought one way or the other before this fracas begins — except to fish a few of them out of the briny when they had too much of a load on. But you got to hand it to them for being the number one tough guys, now.”
“Yair. Takes guts.”
“Some of the lads been sunk six or seven times; keep going back for another dish of the same.”
“The odds are bad enough, bucking the swastikas, on the other side. But they’d be a hell of a lot worse if some heel on our side was stacking the cards against our own ships.” Koski smoked silently for a minute. “Run right up to the bulkhead if you don’t see the yacht. We’ll ask the watchman.”
The Vigilant skirted Red Hook, swung around the Erie Basin, nosed in toward the shipyard at the mouth of the Gowanus. Ranks of ships lay three-deep along the docks; rust-streaked freighters, mud-gray tankers, a knifelike subchaser, two snub-snouted minelayers. In the dry-dock a broken-down passenger liner was being converted into a transport. There was no sign of any yacht.
Mulcahey gave the clutch-lever a touch of reverse, braked the police-boat’s way. The black hull shouldered gently against the slimy-green planking between the piers.
“Hi!” Koski called up to a man with an electric lantern. “Seen anything of an eighty-footer? The Seavett?”
“Ain’t seen her since last night. She dropped hawsers along about suppertime.” The watchman spat down through the luminous green of the patrol-boat’s starboard running light. “She might as well of left. The Yard couldn’t get around to her for another six months, way work’s piling up around here.”
“Know where she headed?”
“City Island, think they said. She’s one them Cee Gee Volunteer Auxiliaries — doin’ patrol duty out on the Sound somewheres. What’s matter? Something wrong?”
“Looking for one of her crew. Much obliged.” For a long minute Koski stared across at a spark of light which showed from inside a tanker through a hole in the bent and twisted plates at its waterline. “Allez oop, Irish.”
Mulcahey grunted. “Course to City Island would take her right past the barge where the Gurlid kid was fishing. We might be getting hot, skipper.”
“Yair.” The spark flared up into a dazzling glare as an acetylene torch burst into action inside the damaged hull. “You mix up a short-wave crystal, a Coast Guard Auxiliary and a stiff like that — there could be something fricasseeing. The recipe calls for rapid stirring.”
III
The river was a dark tunnel under the shadowy span of bridges. The Vigilant got up to twenty knots, her bow uptilted like a runner’s head thrown back for air. Koski stood in the cockpit, bracing himself against the bulkhead, scanning the gloom ahead for lights which might signify an eighty-footer moving north.
As they surged past the tall stacks marking the Navy Yard, he caught a stealthy movement in the field of his binoculars. A black boat, low of freeboard and displaying no lights, was slipping in toward the Queens shore.
“Junkie.” He pointed her out to the Sergeant. “Probably got a load of manila off one of the supply scows.”