“In three days we made eighty-five miles,” I said. “And the temperature down there in the cabin where his body was ran around ninety degrees.”
You couldn’t have gone into some port in Honduras?”
I gestured impatiently. “This has all been threshed out with the Coast Guard. I could have tried for some port on the mainland of Honduras or Nicaragua, or gone on to Georgetown, Grand Cayman, which was less than two hundred miles to the north of us—except that I wasn’t cleared for any of those places. Baxter was already dead, so it’s doubtful the port authorities would have considered it a legitimate emergency. And just to come plowing in unauthorized, with no bill of health or anything, carrying the body of a man who’d died at sea of some unspecified ailment—we’d have been slapped in quarantine and tied up in red tape till we had beards down to our knees. Besides being fined. The only thing to do was go back.”
“And you had nothing but bad luck, right from the beginning?”
“Look,” I said hotly, “we tried. We tried till we couldn’t stand it any longer. Believe me, I didn’t want the responsibility of burying him at sea. In the first place, it wasn’t going to be pleasant facing his family. And if we couldn’t bring the body ashore for an autopsy, there’d have to be a hearing of some kind to find out what he died of. There’s nothing new about burial at sea, of course, especially in the old days when ships were a lot slower than they are now, but a merchant or naval vessel with thirty to several hundred people aboard is—well, a form of community itself, with somebody in authority and dozens of witnesses. Three men alone in a small boat would be something else. When only two come back, you’re going to have to have a little better explanation than just saying Bill dropped dead and we threw him overboard. That’s the reason for all that detailed report on the symptoms of the attack. I wrote it out as soon as I saw we were probably going to have to do it.”
Soames nodded. “It’s quite thorough. Apparently the doctor who reviewed it had no difficulty in diagnosing the seizure as definitely some form of heart attack, and probably a coronary thrombosis. I wonder if you’d fill me in just briefly on what happened after you started back?”
“To begin with,” I said, “we tore the mains’l all to hell. The weather had turned unsettled that morning, even before Baxter had the attack. Just before dusk I could see a squall making up to the eastward. It looked a little dirty, but I didn’t want to shorten down any more than we had to considering the circumstances. So we left everything on and just turned in a couple of reefs in the main and mizzen. Or started to. We were finishing the main when it began to kick up a little and the rain hit us. I ran back to the wheel to keep her into the wind, while Keefer tied in the last few points and started to raise sail again. I suppose it’s my fault for not checking, but I’d glanced off toward the squall line and when I looked back at the mains’l it was too late. He had the halyard taut and was throwing it on the winch. I yelled for him to slack off, but with all the rain he didn’t hear me. What had happened was that he’d mixed up a pair of reef points—tied one from the second row to another on the opposite side in the third set. That pulls the sail out of shape and puts all the strain in one place. It was just a miracle it hadn’t let go already. I screamed at him again, and he finally heard me this time and looked around, but all he did was shake his head that he couldn’t understand what I was saying. Just as I jumped from behind the wheel and started to run forward he slipped the handle into the winch and took a turn, and that was the ball game. It split all the way across.
We didn’t have another one aboard. The previous owners had pretty well butched up the sail inventory on the way down to the Canal—blew out a mains’l and lost the genoa overboard. I managed to patch up this one after a fashion, using material out of an old stays’l, but it took two days. Maybe it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway, because the weather went completely sour—dead calm about half the time, with occasional light airs that hauled all around the compass. But with just that handkerchief of a mizzen, and stays’l and working jib, we might as well have been trying to row her to the Canal. We ran on the auxiliary till we used up all the gasoline aboard, and then when there was no wind we just drifted. Keefer kept moaning and griping for us to get rid of him; said he couldn’t sleep in the cabin with a dead man. And neither of us could face the thought of trying to prepare any food with him lying there just forward of the galley. We finally moved out on deck altogether.
“By Sunday morning—June eighth—I knew it had to be done. I sewed him in what was left of the old stays’l, with the sounding lead at his feet. It was probably an all-time low in funerals. I couldn’t think of more than a half dozen words of the sea-burial service, and there was no Bible aboard. We did shave and put on shirts, and that was about it. We buried him at one p.m. The position’s in the log, and I think it’s fairly accurate. The weather improved that night, and we came on here and arrived on the sixteenth. Along with the report, I turned his personal belongings over to the marshal’s office. But I don’t understand why they couldn’t locate some of his family; his address is right there—1426 Roland Avenue, San Francisco.”
“Unfortunately,” Soames replied, “there is no Roland Avenue in San Francisco.”
“Oh,” I said.
“So we hoped you might be able to help us.”
I frowned, feeling vaguely uneasy. For some reason I was standing at the rail again on that day of oily calm and blistering tropic sun, watching the body in its Orlon shroud as it sank beneath the surface and began its long slide into the abyss. “That’s just great,” I said. “I don’t know anything about him either.”
“In four days, he must have told you something about himself.”
“You could repeat it all in forty seconds. He told me he was an American citizen. His home was in California. He’d come down to the Canal Zone on some job that had folded up after a couple of months, and he’d like to save the plane fare back to the States by sailing up with me.”
“He didn’t mention the name of any firm, or government agency?”
“Not a word. I gathered it was a clerical or executive job of some kind, because he had the appearance. And his hands were soft.”
“He never said anything about a wife? Children? Brothers?”
“Nothing.”
“Did he say anything at all during the heart attack?”
“No. He seemed to be trying to, but he couldn’t get his breath. And the pain was pretty terrible until he finally lost consciousness.”
‘I see.” Soames’ blue eyes were thoughtful. “Would you describe him?”
I’d say he was around fifty. About my height, six-one. but very slender; I doubt he weighed over a hundred and seventy. Brown eyes, short brown hair with a good deal of gray in it, especially around the temples, but not thinning or receding to any extent. Thin face, rather high forehead, good nose and bone structure, very quiet, and soft-spoken—when he said anything at all. In a movie you’d cast him as a doctor or lawyer or the head of the English department. That’s the thing, you see; he wasn’t hard-nosed or rude about not talking about himself; he was just reserved. He minded his own business, and seemed to expect you to mind yours. And since he was apparently down on his luck, it seemed a little on the tasteless side to go prying into matters he didn’t want to talk about.”