A moment later, Carsten caught the whiff, too. "You're right, Vic." He made a sour face. "That's fish, and it's been dead a long, long time."
Tilden Winters delivered his own verdict: "You ask me, one of the cooks got diarrhea again."
"If that joke ain't as old as the Navy, it's only on account of it's older," Sam said. The closer he got to the pots from which the horrible smell was coming, though, the more he wondered if it was a joke this time.
He took a tray with more reluctance than he'd ever known. As he came up to one of the cooks, the fellow ladled a dollop of stinking yellowish stuff onto the tray, then added some sauerkraut, a hard roll, and a cup of coffee. Sam pointed at the noxious puddle. "You got a sick cat, Johansen?"
"Funny man. Everybody thinks he's a cotton-picking funny man," the cook said. "It's herrings in mustard sauce, and I'll say 'I told you so' when you come back for seconds."
"Don't hold your breath," Sam told him, which, considering the stench, was a curse of no mean proportion. He took the tray over to a table, sat down, and looked dubious. "Hey, Vic, maybe the padre ought to give it the last rites."
Crosetti shook his head. "Way it smells up the galley, it's been dead a hell of a lot too long for that to do any good."
Ever so cautiously, Carsten scooped up a forkful and brought it to his mouth. "Jesus!" he exclaimed. "It tastes as lousy as it smells." He looked down at the tray with loathing that was almost admiration. "I didn't figure it could."
Tilden Winters made the taste test, too, then gulped down his coffee as if it were the only thing standing between him and an early grave. Seeing their reaction, Crosetti said, "I don't think I want any. Never was much for sauerkraut, but tonight-"
Most of the time, such grumbling would have got them in Dutch with the cooks. This evening, their complaints went unnoticed in the wider tide of revolted complaint echoing through the galley. "Do the officers eat this shit, too?" somebody shouted.
Carsten's eyes lit up. He knew he could trust Crosetti for what he had in mind, and Winters was a pretty square guy, too. "Listen," he said, "if they try and feed us this kind of slop, they oughta know what we think of it, right?"
"Sounds good to me," Winters said. "Sounds damn good to me." Crosetti nodded, too. Carsten gestured to both of them. They all put their heads together. After they were done laughing, they solemnly clasped hands to seal the bargain.
Tilden Winters got up first. He slammed his tray down on the stack, then started saying to the cooks what everybody else had been saying to one another. He had a talent for abuse, and certainly a fitting subject for it, too. A good many other sailors joined in his vehement griping. That brought several cooks over, both to defend their honor, such as it was, and to keep the men from getting any creative ideas like flinging the herrings around the galley.
Carsten, however, had already had a more creative idea than that. He and Crosetti took advantage of the confusion to slip behind the galley counter, grab one of the kettles full of the herring-and-mustard mixture-fortunately, one with a lid-and slip off before anyone noticed what they were doing. As soon as they were away, they looked like a couple of sailors on some assignment or other; the kettle wasn't that different from any of a number of containers aboard the Dakota.
No one paid them the least attention as they headed up into officer country. Again, looking as if you belonged was more important than actually belonging. In a prison-yard whisper, Crosetti said, "Only slippery part is gonna be if he's in there."
"Hey, come on," Carsten said. "If he is, we go, 'Sorry, sir, wrong cabin,' and we ditch the stuff instead of dumping it. Either way, we're jake."
The cabin door bore a neatly stenciled inscription: LIEUT.-CMDR. JONATHAN Y. HENRICKSON, CHIEF SHIP'S PURCHASING OFFICER. Sam knocked, his knuckles ringing off steel. Nobody answered. He turned the latch. The cabin door opened easily. He grinned again. He'd been wondering if Henrickson was the sort who locked his door. But no.
Inside, the cabin was as neat as a CPO's dreams of heaven, with everything in its place-exactly in its place-and a place for everything. Somehow, that only made what they were about to do the sweeter.
"Come on, let's get going," Crosetti said. "Our luck ain't gonna hold forever." That might have been cold feet, but it didn't sound as if it was-just a steady professional warning his comrade (no, his accomplice, Sam thought) of things that could go wrong.
They took the lid off the kettle. Instantly, the stink of the herrings filled the cabin. They proceeded to make sure the stink wasn't all that filled it: they methodically poured herrings and mustard sauce over everything they could, desk, bedding, clothes, deck, everything. As soon as they'd finished, they got the hell out of there.
An officer in the passage would have spelled disaster. Sam's shoulders sagged in relief when the long, gray-painted metal corridor proved bare. "Now all we got to do is look ordinary."
"You're too ugly to look ordinary," Crosetti retorted. But Carsten took not the slightest offense-they'd pulled it off. When they got back down to their proper part of the ship, Tilden Winters looked a question at them. They both nodded. So did he. That was all he did, too, before returning to the friendly argument about Honolulu whores in which he'd been involved before his partners in crime returned.
The hue and cry started about an hour later. Grim-faced petty officers started escorting cooks and galley helpers up to officer country near the bridge. When the first batch of them returned, rumor of what had happened started spreading through the sailors. The general reaction was delight.
"If I knew who done that," Hiram Kidde declared, although no one yet was quite sure of what that was, "the first thing I'd do is kick his ass." He was, after all, a CPO himself. But he'd suffered through the herrings in mustard sauce, too. "And after that, by Jesus, I'd pick him up and buy him a beer. Hell, I'd buy him all the beer he could drink." The gunner's mate roared laughter. "What I wouldn't give to see Henrickson's face."
None of the cooks knew anything. Carsten carefully didn't look at Crosetti. Somebody might have noticed them lifting the kettle. But it didn't seem as if anyone had. That didn't stop the officers from trying to get to the bottom of who had perpetrated the atrocity. They kept right on trying, all the way up until the Dakota docked in Honolulu.
Carsten went up before Lieutenant Commander Henrickson himself. "No, sir," he said. "I'm sorry, sir. All I know is ship's scuttlebutt."
"What did you think of the fish?" the purchasing officer demanded, his thin mouth set in a tight, bloodless line.
"Sir, beg your pardon, but I didn't like it worth a damn," Carsten told him.
He sighed. "I'm afraid everyone says that. I hoped the bastards who did this would sing songs about how good it was, to try to turn looks away from them. No such luck, though. Damn sailors are too damn sly." That last was an angry mutter. Carsten carefully did not smile.
Back when Scipio had been butler at Marshlands, he'd wondered how a man could ever get used to the racket of battle. Even single gunshots had been plenty to set his heart pounding. He was inclined to laugh at his former self nowadays. He hadn't known much back then.
He hadn't known much about a lot of things back then. As far as a lot of them went, he would gladly have remained ignorant, too. Much of what Cassius fondly thought of as revolutionary practice looked to Scipio an awful lot like what the whites of the Confederate States had been doing, only stood on its head.
Sometimes the strain of keeping his mouth shut was almost more than he could bear. But he'd turned his own experience in the days before the Congaree Socialist Republic to his advantage, too. Anne Colleton hadn't been able to see past the smooth butler's mask he wore, and neither could Cassius now.