XXXIII
32°W 10°S
‘Do you know who it is?’ says Guðmundur, breathing through a handkerchief and looking at the thing in the engineer’s cabin.
‘Yeah,’ says Satan absentmindedly as he looks round the squalid cabin. ‘That’s the fifth pirate. I asked him to throw the body in the sea but he must have kept that as a souvenir.’
Those empty eyes, that grotesque smile…
On the table sits the pirate’s skull, still with hair on the back of its head and jaw muscles and flesh between its teeth, surrounded by half-burnt black candles.
‘I don’t understand,’ says the captain, shaking his head.
‘You don’t need to understand anything. I’ll throw this in the sea in a minute,’ mutters Satan, walking over to the picture that hangs above the head of the bed. ‘That’s strange.’
‘What’s strange?’ says Guðmundur, looking at Satan, who is staring at the picture and the frame around it.
‘Nothing!’ says Satan with a shake of his head. ‘You just go on out. I’ll clear up in here.’
‘And are you going up to the bridge after?’
‘Yeah, I’ll go up to the bridge.’ Satan takes the picture down off the wall. ‘You guys let me know when you find the engineer. If you find him.’
‘Yeah, we’ll do that,’ says the captain and he hurries out of the smelly cabin.
Strange!
Satan turns the framed picture every which way but there’s no sign of its having been tampered with. All the joints are firm, the glass is in place and the back is covered with faded brown paper.
But, then, how can it be that the pencil drawing is gone from the frame? What used to be a drawing of an octopus man wearing a suit is now nothing at all. Nothing but a sheet of cream-coloured paper, framed in thick matting and a carved wooden frame.
31°W 11°S
‘We can’t find him anywhere,’ says Guðmundur when he comes up to the bridge to relieve Satan.
‘He has to be somewhere,’ says Satan, getting down from the captain’s chair.
‘Yeah. Is there hot coffee?’
‘There’s some sort of poison simmering there, yeah. Goodnight, old man.’
Satan makes his way down the stairs and into his cabin on D-deck. He turns on the light in the bathroom, opens the cupboard above the sink and checks his supplies.
Four packs of cigarettes and thirty-two paracetamol tablets.
Fuck it!
There’s nothing to do aboard this ship but drink coffee and smoke, and he’s had the devil of a headache ever since he got hit by those bullets.
Satan turns on the cold water and washes down four paracetamol. Then he closes the cupboard door and examines his reflection in the mirror.
The bandage is disgustingly dirty; his eyes are red from exhaustion and lack of sleep; his skin is suntanned and salt-burned, and his beard is getting pretty impressive after being neglected for two weeks.
‘Like a fucking pirate!’ Satan says with a leer but then his face starts twitching because he itches dreadfully under the sweaty bandage.
This can’t go on – he simply has to peel that horror off his head.
He takes off his shirt, finds scissors in a first aid kit and starts cutting the bandage away behind and in front of his left ear. Then he takes the whole bandage off his head, except for the bit that’s stuck to the wounds. His hair is not only stringy and dirty, it’s dark brown at the roots because the black dye is growing out. Satan cuts it all away, lock by lock and tangle by tangle, until there’s nothing left but a centimetre of hair in his natural colour.
Before he pulls the last bit of bandage off the wounds, he wets it with warm water that softens the dried blood and loosens the hard cotton. He carefully pulls at the strips, which split off the half-healed wounds and bloody hair. His heartbeat rises, the veins in his head swell and sweat runs into his eyes. As soon as the final strip is free Satan holds a cold washcloth against the bleeding wounds. They are horizontal, one about two centimetres above the other. Once the bleeding has slowed he cuts the rest of the long hair away, cleans the cuts with disinfectant and ties a red bandanna around his head – he has to hide the wounds with something: they’re open to the bone. He had found this fine bandanna in a drawer in the chief engineer’s cabin.
A red bandanna and a silver earring: he definitely resembles a pirate. A pirate in a Hollywood picture, that is.
‘Could be worse,’ he tells himself and lights a cigarette with shaking hands. The pain is as hellish as ever, but at least he’s rid of the itch.
Too bad not to have more cigarettes – the thought of maybe running out of tobacco is not a good one.
Those dead guys must have a few cartons hidden away, and Stoker must…
‘Stoker,’ mutters Satan, blowing out smoke through his nose. He’d forgotten about him, that he was lost. How can you get lost like that aboard a ship? Unless he fell in the sea? No – no way.
The ship’s big, no doubt about it, but somehow not big enough for men to just…
Suddenly he remembers one place nobody probably thought to look.
The hold!
He might have fallen into the hold. Far-fetched, yes, but he, himself, had fallen in through the door in the fucking corridor down there. Maybe such things didn’t happen to experienced sailors, but it would be stupid not to check it out.
Satan puts his blue-check shirt back on without buttoning it. He lopes down to A-deck, where he crosses to starboard, through the electrical workshop and left along the corridor leading to the red doors with the white sign on them.
HOLD
The corridor is cold and dim; his heavy steps echo between the iron walls and Satan feels the hairs rising on the back of his neck. He’s keeping his cigarette in his mouth and squinting to avoid the bitter smoke.
Ahead he can see the green light above the doors to the empty hold.
No.
The doors are locked, as he left them.
‘I guess I knew that,’ Satan says, grabbing the handle of one of the hasps – but it’s so stiff he can’t move it.
31°W 11°S
Guðmundur is sitting in the bridge staring out through one of the unbroken windowpanes.
It’s night-time and the waning moon resembles a sickle, hanging in the distance above the black sea.
The captain’s hands grip the chair’s arms, his eyes bulge and the lower part of his face – deathly pale and ghostly in the faint moonlight – twitches violently.
After drinking untold cups of black coffee, he has heartburn and a bitter taste in his nose and mouth. The captain calmly looks to the right, towards the doorway to the starboard bridge wing, where the shotgun no longer leans against the cupboard inside the door. He threw it in the sea, along with the pirates’ machine guns, after he started tasting gunpowder on the tip of his tongue.
The ship drifts south, drawing away from mainland South America at the rate of four to five kilometres an hour.
Nothing awaits them except…
Nothing awaits them.
The idea of sticking the cold gun barrel in his mouth is getting less and less unpalatable. The imagined taste of gunpowder is actually not all that different from boiled coffee. The taste of the barrel itself is metallic and cold, with a trace of soot and oil. His teeth slide along the barrel, his eyes close, his fingers touch the cocked trigger and the end of the barrel pushes against his palate –