The bare-chested negro in the peaked cap appeared, sweat rilling across his powerful muscles. He was about six feet in height, but the rolling breadth of his shoulders made him seem stocky and compact. His manner was deferential and observant, and Kerans wondered how Strangman managed to maintain his authority over the crew, and why they accepted his harsh, callous tone.
Strangman introduced the negro curtly. "This is the Admiral, my chief whip. If I'm not around when you want me, deal with him." He stood up, stepping down from the dais. "Before you leave, let me take you on a brief tour of my treasure ship." He extended an arm gallantly to Beatrice, who took it timorously, his eyes glinting and rapacious.
At one time, Kerans surmised, the depot ship had been a gambling steamer and floating vice den, moored beyond the five-mile limit outside Messina or Beirut, or in the shelter of some estuarine creek under the biander, more tolerant skies south of the equator. As they left the deck a squad of men were lowering an ancient ornamental gangway to the water's edge, its bannisters of peeling gilt shaded by a white clapboard marquee painted with gold tassels and drapery, creaking about on its pulleys like a funicular gazebo. The interior of the ship was decorated in a similar pastiche baroque. The bar, now dark and closed, at the forward end of the observation deck was like the stern castle of a ceremonial galleon, naked gilt carytids supporting its portico. Semi-columns of fake marble formed little loggias that led away to the private alcoves and dining rooms, while the divided central stairway was a bad film set of Versailles, an aerial riot of dusty cupids and candelabra, the grimy brass overlayed with mould and verdigris.
But the former roulette wheels and chemin de fer tables had gone, and the scarred parquet flooring was covered with a mass of crates and cartons, piled up against the wire mesh windows so that only a faint reflection of the light outside seeped through. Everything was well packed and sealed, but on an old mahogany chart table in one corner Kerans saw a collection of bronze and marble limbs and torsos, fragments of statuary waiting to be sorted.
Strangman paused at the bottom of the staircase, tearing off a strip of fading tempera from one of the murals. "The place is falling to bits. Hardly up to the standard of the Ritz, Doctor. I envy your good sense."
Kerans shrugged. "It's a low-rent area now." He waited as Strangman unlocked a door, and they entered the main storehold, a dim stifling cavern packed with large wooden crates, the floor strewn with sawdust. They were no longer in the refrigerated section of the ship, and the Admiral and another sailor followed them closely, continually hosing them with ice-cold air from a faucet on the wall. Strangman snapped his fingers and the Admiral quickly began to pull away the canvas wrappings draped between the crates.
In the thin light Kerans could just see the glimmering outline of a huge ornamented altarpiece at the far end of the hold, fitted with elaborate scroll-work and towering dolphin candelabra, topped by a neo-classical proscenium which would have covered a small house. Next to it stood a dozen pieces of statuary, mostly of the late Renaissance, stacks of heavy gilt frames propped against them. Beyond these were several smaller altarpieces and triptyches, an intact puipit in panelled gold, three large equestrian statues, a few strands of sea-weed still entwined in the horses' manes, several pairs of enormous cathedral doors, embossed in gold and silver, and a large tiered marble fountain. The metal shelves around the side of the hold were loaded with smaller bric a brac: votive urns, goblets, shields and salvers, pieces of decorative armour, ceremonial inkstands and the like.
Still holding Beatrice's arm, Strangman gestured expansively a few yards ahead. Kerans heard him say 'Sistine Chapel' and 'Medici Tomb' but Bodkin muttered: "Aesthetically, most of this is rubbish, picked for the gold content alone. Yet there's not much of that. What is the man up to?"
Kerans nodded, watching Strangman in his white suit, the barelegged Beatrice beside him. Suddenly he remembered the Delvaux painting, with its tuxedoed skeletons. Strangman's chalk-white face was like a skull, and he had something of the skeleton's jauntiness. For no reason he began to feel an intense distaste for the man, his hostility more generalised than personal.
"Well, Kerans, what do you think of them?" Strangman pivoted at one end of the aisle and swung back, barking at the Admiral to cover the exhibits again. "Impressed, Doctor?"
Kerans managed to take his eyes off Strangman's face and glanced at the looted relics.
"They're like bones," he said flatly.
Baffled, Strangman shook his head. "Bones? What on earth are you talking about? Kerans, you're insane! Bones, Good God!"
As he let out a martyred groan, the Admiral took up the refrain, first saying the word quietly to himself as if examining a strange object, then repeating it more and more rapidly in a sort of nervous release, his broad face gibbering with laughter. The other sailor joined in, and together they began to chant it out, convulsed over the fire hose like snake dancers.
"Bones! Yes, man, dem's all bones! Dem bones dem bones dem…!"
Strangman watched them angrily, the muscles of his face locking and unlocking like manacles. Disgusted with this display of rudeness and bad temper, Kerans turned to leave the hold. In annoyance Strangman rushed after him, pressed the palm of his hand in Kerans' back and propelled him along the aisle out of the hold.
Five minutes later, as they drove off in one of the scows, the Admiral and half a dozen other members of the crew lined the rail, still chanting and dancing. Strangman had regained his humour, and stood coolly in his white suit, detached from the others, Waving ironically.
CHAPTER 9 The Pool of Thanatos
During the next two weeks, as the southern horizon became increasingly darkened by the approaching rain-clouds, Kerans saw Strangman frequently. Usually he would be driving his hydroplane at speed around the lagoons, his white lounge suit exchanged for overalls and helmet, supervising the work of the salvage teams. One scow, with six men, was working in each of the three lagoons, the divers methodically exploring the sunken buildings. Occasionally the placid routines of descent and pump would be interrupted by the sounds of rifle fire as an alligator venturing too near the divers was despatched.
Sitting in the darkness in his hotel suite, Kerans was far away from the lagoon, content to let Strangman dive for his loot as long as he would soon leave. More and more the dreams had begun to encroach on his waking life, his conscious mind becoming increasingly drained and withdrawn. The single plane of time on which Strangman and his men existed seemed so transparent as to have a negligible claim to reality. Now and then, when Strangman came to call on him, he would emerge for a few minutes on to this tenuous plane, but the real centre of his consciousness was elsewhere.
Curiously, after his initial irritation, Strangman had developed a sneaking liking for Kerans. The biologist's quiet, angular mind was a perfect target for Strangman's dry humour. At times he would subtly mimic Kerans, earnestly taking his arm during one of their dialogues and saying in a pious voice: "You know, Kerans, leaving the sea two hundred million years ago may have been a deep trauma from which we've never recovered…"
On another occasion he sent two of his men over in a skiff to the lagoon; on one of the largest buildings on the opposite bank they painted in letters thirty feet high: TIME ZONE Kerans took this banter in good part, ignoring it when the divers' lack of success made it more severe. Sinking backwards through the past, he waited patiently for the coming of the rain.
It was after the diving party arranged by Strangman that Kerans first realised the true nature of his fear of the man.