“Do you know where he was sent?”
She shook her head. “No, except that it must have been a federal prison. This happened at sea, so I don’t think any state would have had jurisdiction.”
“How’d the old man get wise to him anyway?”
She set her drink on the coffee table and lighted a cigarette. “Your father could read code, and Kessler didn’t know it. You see, when he was a young man and still sailing as mate on Norwegian ships—”
“Yes, I know about that,” Romstead interrupted. “He used to have both licenses and doubled as radio operator sometimes. Winegaard told me about it.”
“That’s right. And I gather that reading code is something you never entirely forget. You may get a little rusty, but you can always do it, like swimming or riding a bicycle. But I’d better start at the beginning.
“It was in 1968, when I made the first trip as passenger on the Fairisle, that I got to know this kook. I guess from what everybody said he was close to being an authentic genius—in electronics, anyway—but he didn’t have an engineering degree for some reason; maybe he’d been too poor to go to college or he’d been kicked out or something. Otherwise, he’d probably have been drawing a big salary in one of those fur-brain outfits doing research and making Buck Rogers stuff for satellites and moon shots and so on. He was always inventing things and experimenting and lashing up nutty pieces of electronic spaghetti so he could stare into the screen of an oscilloscope like somebody watching a dirty movie, and the radio room looked like a mad scientist’s nightmare. There was no doubt he had a brilliant mind; but he could be pretty contemptuous and snotty, and he had a sadistic sense of humor. I didn’t much like him, though he could be charming when he wanted to be.
“Anyway, at the end of the next trip, when I met your father in San Francisco, he said he was going to be tied up part of the time making depositions and affidavits and so on, and it turns out it was about this screwball Kessler. He told me what had happened. Maybe I should have told you first that for two or three trips the Customs men had really been shaking down the Fairisle when she came in from the Far East, going over her with a fine-tooth comb as if they’d had a tip there was contraband aboard, but they never found anything.
“Well, this trip, about ten P.M. the last night out from San Francisco, your father was down in the passengers’ lounge playing bridge. There was a radio in the lounge, turned on and getting music from some station ashore, and all of a sudden the music began to be covered up with dots and dashes—code, that is. Your father explained to me why it was. It seems if a transmitter’s antenna and a receiver’s antenna are right close together, the way they’d be aboard a ship, the receiver would pick up what was being sent by the transmitter even though they might be tuned to different wavelengths. It sort of spills over into it or something.
“It was perfectly normal, of course, and happened every time Kessler was using the ship’s transnfitting apparatus, but your father began reading it just automatically while he went on playing bridge, and in a minute he realized there was something damned screwy about what Kessler was sending. It wasn’t any message he’d given him to send, in the first place, and he wasn’t using any of the standard procedure or the ship’s call letters or identification of any kind. But it was a sort of ETA—estimated time of arrivals—only it wasn’t seven A.M., when the Fairisle was due to arrive off the Golden Gate, but four A.M., when she’d still be over fifty miles at sea. So it had to be a rendezvous with a boat of some kind.
“Your father said nothing about it to the passengers, of course, and went ahead and finished the card game. When he went back up to his cabin, he phoned the bridge and left orders to be called at three A.M. He went up to the bridge at that time and switched on the radar. There were three or four ships showing on the screen, and in a few minutes he began to pick up another, much smaller target, which was probably a small boat. It was ahead of the Fairisle, more or less stationary, and he could see they were going to pass it less than a mile off.
“He went down and woke up the chief officer. He wanted a witness, for one thing, and the chief officer’s cabin was in the same passageway as Kessler’s. They watched with the door on a crack, and in a few minutes Kessler looked out of his cabin to be sure the coast was clear and then started down the passageway toward the deck, carrying what looked like just a bunch of junk he wanted to heave over the side.
“Your father stepped out and collared him. Kessler began cursing and trying to fight him off, so your father slugged him. He had a fist like a twelve pound frozen ham, so Kessler’d had all the fight knocked out of him by the time he was able to stand up again. Your father had him locked up, and he and the chief officer checked over this thing he’d been carrying. It was a big jagged piece of styrofoam that’d been stained brown so it’d look like an old chunk of wood. There was a thin wire sticking up through it and the thing was ballasted on the bottom so the wire would stay upright. Inside the styrofoam was a real tiny radio transmitter—it turned out to be when the narcs got hold of it—using the wire for an antenna. And attached to the bottom with stainless-steel wire was a watertight plastic container with nearly a half kilo of heroin in it.
“Well, Kessler never would identify the people on the boat, but he did cop out to the extent of explaining how it worked, which the narcs knew anyway. He’d built the little transmitter, of course, and on the boat there was a small radio direction-finder he’d also built. It was tuned to the same frequency as the transmitter, so all the boat people had to do was home in on the signal until they could pick up the float in their searchlight. They’d pulled it off twice before and got away with it.
“Your father had to take part of a trip off to testify at the trial, about ten months later, I think. He left the ship in San Francisco and rejoined it in Honolulu. Kessler was convicted, but I never did know what sentence he got.”
Paulette fell silent and took a sip of her drink.
“He didn’t make any threats of any kind against the old man?” Romstead asked.
She shook her head. “Not that I know of.”
Revenge could have been a motive, of course, along with the quarter million dollars, and he was thinking of that lactose poured in his father’s mouth, in conjunction with another thing she’d said.
“You said he had a sadistic sense of humor. How was that?”
“Oh, nutty practical jokes, things like that, with the electronics junk he was always experimenting with. Real tiny bugging devices almost as far out as the old gag about the bugged martini olive. Wiring a girl’s room in a cathouse was a big laugh. And then the creepy things he remote-controlled by radio—”
“Remote control?” Romstead interrupted. He frowned.
“Sure, you know. Like those model airplanes people fly with little transmitters that make ‘em bank and turn and loop-the-loop. Of course, he didn’t invent the idea; it’s been around for years, but he added his own touches. He was a little hipped on the whole subject, as a matter of fact, and used to brag he could radio-control anything if you paid him enough.
“For example, he bought a couple of battery-operated toy cars and tore them down and rebuilt them with radio controls for starting and stopping and turning. Then he paid a kid in Manila to kill him two of those big gruesome rats on the docks there—I mean, they’re something else. Any tomcat crazy enough to tackle one of ‘em, I’d give you the tomcat and eight points. He tanned the skins and built foam-rubber bodies for the cars and sewed the skins over them. Talk about freezing your blood, to see those two things coming at you in formation. He used to take them ashore with him; they say he could empty a whorehouse in ten seconds.”