At that moment, Neil would have preferred almost anyone else’s company. An encyclopedia salesman’s. An Arab’s. Whatever their other foibles, his Arab mates never tried to convert him. Usually they just ignored him, though sometimes they actually became his friends — particularly when, during prayers, he helped them stay pointed toward Mecca while the ship made a turn. Neil always brought a magnetically-corrected compass to sea for expressly this purpose.
A pear-shaped woman with the demeanor of a fishwife waddled out of the office and headed for the board.
“Soup’s on!” the dispatcher cried as Neil and Zook scrambled back into the hall. She jerked two thumbtacks from her mouth as if they were loose teeth and pinned a job sheet to the cork.
•OFFSHORE SHIPPING JOBS
COMPANY: Lykes Brothers
SHIP: SS Argo Lykes
LOCATED: Pier 86
SAILS: 1500 Friday
RUN: West Coast South America
JOBS: Able Seaman: 2
TIME: 120-day rotary
RELIEVING: J. Pierce, F. Pellegrino
REASON: Time up
“All right,” said the dispatcher, “who’s got ’em?”
“Nobody here be beatin’ ten month plus fifteen day, eh?” said the Rastafarian.
“The other one’s mine,” said Daniel Rosenberg.
The dispatcher checked her watch. “Assuming no killer card shows up in the next six seconds” — she winked at the winners — “they’re all yours. Step into the office, fellas.”
Gradually the mob dispersed, forty disappointed men and women ambling morosely back to their seats. Eight sailors collected their cards and, conceding defeat, left. The dreamers and the desperate sat down to wait.
“The Lord will come through,” said Zook.
Neil slumped onto the nearest folding chair. Why didn’t he just admit it — he had no career, he was a failure. Somehow his grandfather had wrought an honorable and glamorous life from the sea. But that era was gone. The system was dying. Advising a young man to join the United States Merchant Marine was like advising him to go into vaudeville.
As a boy, Neil had never tired of hearing Grandfather Moshe recount his maritime adventures, wondrous tales of battling pirates on Ecuadorian rivers, transporting hippopotami to French zoos, playing cat-and-mouse with Nazi submarines in the North Atlantic, and, most impressive of all, helping to smuggle fifteen hundred displaced Jews past the British blockade and into Palestine on the Hatifyah, one of the dozen rogue freighters secretly leased by the Aliyah Bet. Four decades later, Chief Mate Moshe Weisinger had opened his mail to find a token of appreciation from the Israeli government: a bronze medal bearing the face of David Ben-Gurion in bas-relief. When Grandfather Moshe died, Neil inherited the medal. He always kept it in his right pants pocket, something to clutch in moments of stress.
The door to the hall swung open, and a wrinkled, lanky man wearing a black shirt and Roman collar entered, slapping a job sheet into the dispatcher’s palm.
“Call this right away.”
The dispatcher tacked up the priest’s sheet directly over the Argo Lyfes notice. “Okay, you packet rats,” she said, turning to the hopeful sailors, “we’ve got this tramp tanker over at Pier Eighty-eight, and it looks like they’re startin’ from scratch.”
•OFFSHORE SHIPPING JOBS•
COMPANY: Carpco Shipping
SHIP: SS Carpco Valparaíso
LOCATED: Pier 88
SAILS: 1700 Thursday
RUN: Svalbard, Arctic Ocean
JOBS: Able Seaman: 18
Ordinary Seaman: 12
Food Handler: 2
TIME: 90-day rotary
RELIEVING: Not applicable
REASON: Not applicable
Grunts of dismay resounded through the union hall. Rumors swarmed like sea gulls feasting on a landfill. The Valparaíso, the infamous Valparaíso, the tainted, broken, bedeviled Valparaíso. Hadn’t she been sold to the Japanese and converted into a toxic-waste carrier? Sunk in a Tomahawk missile test?
“Does this mean we’re all hired?” asked a blobby man with bad teeth and five o’clock shadow.
“Every one of you,” said the priest. “Not only that but you can figure on more overtime than you’ve ever pulled down in your lives. My name is Thomas Ockham, Society of Jesus, and we’ll be spending the next three months together.”
And then, as if he thought the U.S. Merchant Marine were a branch of the military, the priest saluted, made an abrupt about-face, and marched out of the room.
“I told you the Lord would come through,” said Zook, licking a mustache of perspiration from his upper lip.
An eerie silence descended, settling into the dust, clinging to the cigarette smoke. The Lord had come through, mused Neil. Either the Lord or Caribbean Petroleum. Neil wouldn’t be ferrying any Jews to Haifa or hippos to Le Havre this trip, he wouldn’t be dodging any Nazi subs, but at least he had a job.
“Jesus hasn’t let me down yet,” the Evangelical went on.
A job — and yet…
“Christ never lets anybody down.”
A ship like the Valparaíso should not be resurrected, Neil believed, and if she were resurrected, a smart AB would look elsewhere for work.
“You know, mates, this seems kinda creepy to me,” said a buxom Puerto Rican woman in a tight Menudo T-shirt. “Why’re we shippin’ out with a priest?”
“Yeah, and why on the fucking Titanic?” asked a leathery old sailor with I LOVE BRENDA tattooed on the back of his hand.
“I’ll tell you something else,” said the blobby man. “I been to Svalbard on a bulk carrier once, and I can say for an absolute fact you won’t find one solitary drop of crude up there. What’re we takin’ on, walrus piss?”
“Well, it’s great to have a ship,” said willowy An-mei Jong with forced enthusiasm.
“Oh, for sure,” said Brenda’s lover with artificial cheer.
Reaching into his right pants pocket, Neil squeezed his grandfather’s Ben-Gurion medal. “Let’s go sign up,” he said, when in fact his impulse was to bolt from the room, find some unemployed sailor roaming the Eleventh Avenue docks, and give the poor bastard his berth.
STORM
FOR THE AVERAGE sea captain, handing one’s ship over to a harbor pilot was a wrenching experience, an ordeal of displacement not unlike that endured by a husband finding an alien brand of condom in his wife’s purse. But Anthony Van Horne was not the average sea captain. Harbor pilots didn’t make the rules, he reasoned; the National Transportation Safety Board did. And so when a battered New York Port Authority launch tied up alongside the Carpco Valparaíso at 1735 hours on the evening of her scheduled departure, Anthony was quite prepared to be civil.
Then he recognized the pilot.
Frank Kolby. Unctuous old Frank Kolby, the idiot who’d laughed so uproariously on seeing Anthony’s father reenact the wreck of the Val in a gravy boat.
“Hello, Frank.”
“Hiya, Anthony.” The pilot stepped into the wheelhouse and pulled off his black waterproof leggings. “I heard it was you on the bridge.” He wore a blue three-piece suit, well tailored and neatly pressed, as if trying to pass himself off as other than what he was, a glorified parking-lot attendant. “They spliced the Val together real good, didn’t they?”
“I expect she’ll last another voyage,” said Anthony, slipping on his mirrorshades.
The tugboats tooted their readiness. Kolby dropped his leggings next to the compass binnacle, then reached toward the control console and snatched up the walkie-talkie. “Raise anchors!”
Groaning, gushing steam, the fo’c’sle windlasses rotated, slowly drawing two algae-coated chains from the river. On the forward TV monitor Anthony watched globs of dark silt slide from the starboard anchor like Jell-O from a fork and plop into the Hudson. For an instant he imagined he saw Raphael Azarias’s corpse wrapped around the flukes, but then he realized it was only an angel-shaped hunk of mud.
“Cast off!”