“Statue of Liberty,” he announced. “Recognize her? You must’ve seen pictures of her.”
The passenger gazed at him. Again his face was expressionless, as void of emotion as a pharaonic mask.
“No,” he said.
Then he turned away and spat down at the dirty green water sliding along the hull.
The Dionysos’ horn shuddered the air. Shifting her course away from Manhattan’s beckoning skyscrapers, she swung east to the lowlying piers of Brooklyn, toward three long piers pushing out to sea on wooden piles, their surfaces darkened to the color of dried blood by seaweed and algae.
Two generations of GIs had sailed away from those decaying piers of the old Brooklyn Army Terminal, off to the trenches of Belleau Wood or the beaches of Normandy. Along the roof of the middle pier was a last reminder of the great crusades that had begun and ended here. The words painted there to greet millions of GIs returning from Europe had been a bright blue once, as bright and fresh as the hopes they had stirred. Now they were a lusterless gray, a fitting match to Brooklyn’s drab, decaying docks. The passenger strained to read them in the early light. “WELCOME HOME,” they said.
Shortly after the Dionysos had moored, an inspector of the U.S. Customs and an officer of the Immigration and Naturalization Service appeared at the top of her gangplank. The master escorted them to the ship’s small wardroom, where he signed before the Customs inspector four copies of one of the oldest and most traditional documents of the world’s sea lanes, a ship’s manifest.
“Report and Manifest of the cargo laden on board the S.S. Dionysos whereof Mr. Saltaferro is master, sailing from Piraeus and bound to New York,” it began. Below was listed and described every piece of cargo the Dionysos carried, the shipper and consignee, the port at which she had taken it on and the port for which it was destined. Because of the letters “N.R.”
entered next to her name in the port’s log the night before, her Customs inspection ended there with the master’s signature.
Meanwhile, the mate had mustered the crew before the INS officer. Each seaman presented his seaman’s book to the officer and was issued an I-95, a crewman’s landing permit, which would allow him to come and go freely while the ship was in port. The INS officer handed the crew list to the master for his signature.
“No passengers?” he asked.
The master laughed. He gestured at his ship’s tawdry wardroom, littered with old Greek newspapers, faded pinups, its wood panels reeking with the odor of rancid olive oil.
“Does she look like the QE2?”
The INS officer laughed, too.
The passenger watched the officials leaving the ship from the porthole of the master’s cabin. When they had left, he removed his belt and unzipped the zipper which ran along its interior. From the pocket inside he removed a pile of hundred-dollar bills. He counted out five and fitted the rest back into his money belt.
He stepped into the next room, the master’s office, and looked around. An old copy of Playboy lay on the master’s desk. He opened it to the centerfold, carefully inserted the money, then closed the magazine, went back to the cabin, shut the door and lay down on the bed.
Roughly thirty minutes later, there was a knock on the cabin’s main door.
“Who is it?” the man called out from the bedroom.
“I have something here for you. From Laila,” a voice answered from the office.
“Put it in the middle of the Playboy on the desk. There’s something there for you. Take it and go.”
A tall gangly youth, his head totally shaven in response to some bizarre urge, entered the office and picked up the Playboy.
The man in the bedroom waited a few seconds after bearing the door slam behind the departing messenger. Then he rushed to the office to open the envelope that had been left behind. It contained a Social Security card and a piece of paper with an address and a telephone number. Below them was scrawled one word: “Welcome.” The man smiled. This time, he thought, the word meant what it said. Suddenly he went taut. The door was opening behind him. The bald young messenger was back at the door. He stared for an instant at the passenger. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, “I forgot my hat.” He moved to pick it up and leave.
The man looked at him, his eyes as expressionless as they had been earlier on the bridge of the Dionysos. Then he relaxed.
“Hey,” he said, his voice soft and gentle. “Come in. Have a drink. I’ve got to celebrate my arrival with someone.”
An hour after sunset, his checked hat pulled tightly down over his ears, the collar of his leather jacket turned up against the cutting wind off the harbor, the passenger drifted out of the Brooklyn Ocean Terminal in the midst of a cluster of the Dionysos’ crewmen heading for a night’s drinking on the Brooklyn waterfront. No one made any effort to verify the identity of any of the seamen leaving the docks. He walked off alone down the ill-lit streets, past the burned-out tenements and barred windows of one of America’s worst slums, disappearing into the Brooklyn night.
The following morning, several hours after the Dionysos had sailed, a pair of bums cooking a fish-scrap stew by the Fulton Fish Market noticed a body bobbing in the East River. Fortyeight hours later, a DD13, missing — person or unidentified — DOA form, recorded the incident in the archives of the New York City Police Department. The deceased was described as a Caucasian male, six feet two inches tall, weighing 172
pounds, between twenty-seven and thirty years of age, with brown eyes and a shaved skull. Cause of death was listed, according to the coroner’s report, as a ruptured trachea provoked by a severe karatelike blow to the windpipe.
PART 1
The unseasonably cold December day drew to a close. Mounds of still-fresh snow, the heritage of the unexpected storm which had swept up the eastern seaboard seventy two hours before, lined the streets of the nation’s capital. That snow, and the freezing weather which had followed it, had kept most of the city’s 76,000 inhabitants indoors this Sunday afternoon, December 13.
The family dwelling behind the familiar faqade of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had left their living quarters only once, to walk through the streets around their dwelling, savouring as they did the surprise of the few countrymen they passed at finding their chief executive in their midst. Now the somber strains of Sibelius’ Finlandia filled the White House living quarters, a reminder of the pleasure the President of the United States found in the works of classical composers like Bach, Vivaldi and Wagner. In the dining-room fireplace a birch log fire cracked, giving the room a cozy, almost snug air. It also reminded the President of the place he preferred above all others, the sitting-room of his rambling ranch house with its huge stone fireplace. He could sit there before it for hours, thinking and dreaming.
Precisely at seven o’clock, the President and his family sat down to supper. On this December evening that family included his wife and two of their four children. Theirs could not have been a more informal group nor, appropriately enough, one more typical of a certain image of the two hundred and thirty million Americans over whom the man at the head of the table presided. Both he and his wife were wearing well-washed jeans. As she usually did on Sundays, she’d ordered the chef to prepare her husband’s favorite meal, gazpacho, chili and barbecued spareribs. The President invited his daughter to offer grace, and the four people joined hands around the table while she asked the Lord’s blessing on the simple meal they were about to eat. Then, with a smile for his wife, the President attacked his gazpacho.