"But is that really true?" asked Beresford, the apprentice, when he was told of the ban. He had not touched at a South African port before. "You mean, you can actually go to prison for sleeping with one?"
Blantyre, his informant, nodded. "Immorality Act, they call it. If they catch you, you both go to jail."
"But what are they afraid of?"
"They're afraid you might get to like it too much," said Fleming.
"Well, I wouldn't," declared Beresford stoutly. He came from a strict North of England home. "I think the whole idea's absolutely horrible. Good heavens, who wants to go to bed with one of those black birds?"
Fleming, a more worldly character, grinned cynically. "You'd be surprised. . . ." His face assumed the smooth, slightly crafty air which meant that he was initiating a leg-pull. "South Africa's a great country for birds," he said. "I mean, real birds. Vultures, flamingoes, great crested eagles. . . . There's one that I knowyou'd like. You see it everywhere."
"What's that?"
"The Rosy-Breasted Pushover."
"I never heard—" began Beresford, and then stopped, discomforted by the laughter. He was even blushing. "I knew you were fooling," he said lamely.
"This isn't fooling," said Fleming. "It's real."
"Then there's that other one," said Blantyre, joining in, "the one that watches television the whole time. The Hairy-Chested Nutscratcher."
There was not much for them to do except talk, on this or any other topic; the Alcestis, relieved of the necessity of being ready to sail for five or six days, was allowed to relax and run down. Pressure fell off the boilers; the bridge-house was locked and deserted; the radio operators took a holiday, for the first time in nearly two months. At meal times, the stewards looked out over a waste of unoccupied tables; at night, the empty cabins gave the long passageways a lonely, even desolate air. The only people who had not taken off for Johannesburg or the Garden Route were the lazy, who never went ashore anywhere; the bridge-players, who never even looked out of the portholes; and those with ulcers and dietetic problems, who preferred to be miserable in familiar surroundings. When every meal, three times a day, was limited to the softer parts, boiled, of certain bland fish, there was not much point in going ashore to eat it.
Of them all, the Captain had the most leisure. He knew no one in Cape Town and, being a predominantly solitary character, he did not want to know anyone. He spent his time reading—the books were mostly heavy historical novels borrowed from the Doctor's library—and in thinking about what he now called, in his private mind, the Gang.
He was aware that all of them, except Louis Scapelli, had remained on board; there was nothing surprising in this, except that it was a further hint, a small pointer towards their solidarity. All he could do, of course, was to wait; but he waited in confidence. If something important or critical were to happen, this was a good moment for it; when the ship was in harbour, people could be disciplined, people could even be sent home. ... In the meantime, he reviewed the evidence.
He had a little more to go on, since he had last talked to Foxy Cutler. Diane Loring had sent another casualty to the doctor, a secretive man called Hathaway who was resolute in his insistence that his complaint was a form of sweat-rash. Talking to Hartmann, one of the poker-players, and cross-checking with Burrell, another, the Captain had confirmed that Carl Wenstrom's poker winnings were indeed enormous, by any standards—something like twenty thousand dollars. No one was complaining about that, but it certainly had a professional touch to it. And there was ample evidence that for the past week, Scapelli and Mrs. van Dooren, that unlikely pair, had been breaking a number of records. It seemed possible that some of them were financial.
The Captain had gone so far as to interview Barkway, on this and some related topics. Barkway, still sulky and unhelpful, made it clear from the outset that he was not going to talk; but his manner made it equally clear that he could have talked plenty if he had chosen to.
"I do my job, sir," he had said at one point, with the air of a man appalled at the injustice of it all. "There's no call for me to go spying on the passengers."
"I'm not asking you to go spying," said the Captain hardly, "so you can cut out the injured innocence. I'm asking you if you've noticed anything out of the ordinary."
"No, sir."
"You haven't heard any talk?"
"No, sir."
"What about the Greenfield boy?"
"Sir?" said Barkway, elaborately mystified.
The Captain sighed. He was getting nowhere; it was just bad luck that, out of all the stewards, Barkway, the key one, was labouring under a sense of injustice and would never co-operate in the slightest degree. At a venture, seeking another avenue of approach, Harmer said, in a different tone:
"It's about time you forgot that pay I docked you, back in New York."
Barkway's wooden face became positively teak-like. "I don't understand you, sir."
At that, the Captain let him go, with a bad-tempered, rather unfair command to take that silly expression off his face. It had been a waste of time, as he had feared; he was no further along, in any direction. But presently, that very evening, he was given something else to work on.
It was the Second Purser, Wexford, in charge when Foxy Cutler was ashore, who brought him the story. As sometimes happened when the Alcestis was berthed alongside in a foreign port, there had been a minor outbreak of pilfering; it was difficult to keep track of the various messengers, dockside workers, porters, and delivery men who had to have access to the ship at all times, and the result was the disappearance of easily-pocketed articles such as cameras, flasks, and loose change. Short of a complicated search system on all the gangways, twenty-four hours a day, there was nothing to be done about it. But now, apparently, there was a chance that the latest rash of thefts was not an outside job at all.
"It's a funny story, sir," said Wexford, "and I'm not sure if I've got the rights of it." He was a young and simple character, not yet branded by a purser's ingrained cynicism; he still had some way to go before he automatically thought the worst of everybody. "But you know we've been having various things missing from the cabins on B-deck. A lot of them are empty. Well, this evening, Mrs. Youngdahl—she's in B44—went down to her cabin at dinnertime, about ten minutes after the gong had gone. She wanted a scarf, or something. But when she got there, she found someone inside her cabin, and she swears that he was opening one of the drawers in her dressing-table."
"Who was it?" asked Harmer.
"The old man—the one they call the Professor."
The Captain came instantly to the alert. This might be an important part of the puzzle. He was certainly not going to neglect any aspect of it.
"What happened?"
"Nothing much, sir. He apologized immediately, and said he must have gone to the wrong cabin by mistake." Wexford smiled hesitantly. "You know, heis a bit vague, even at the best of times. His cabin is actually B64, down the next alleyway. Apparently if was all quite friendly, and they joked about it, and then went in to dinner. But afterwards—this was about an hour ago—he came up to her, and said he was awfully sorry, he must have picked something up by mistake, and he gave it back to her."